Fargo - "What's with You People?!"

Fargo is the second in a Coen trilogy that I don’t have much to say about, at first glance. With Hudsucker, the problem was I never fully connected with it but grew to appreciate it. With Fargo, I was at first a little disappointed (the Oscars and critical hype got to my twelve-year-old brain) but quickly came around to understanding it was one of their masterpieces. When dealing with such a film, I sometimes find it hard to come up with much to say beyond just gushing over shit I like in the movie, but with three viewings in the past week, I’ll roll the dice and see what happens.

As it turns out, the podcast that inspired this series provided my inspiration. In the Check Book newsletter for the Blank Check episode covering Fargo, they mention an interview the Coens did with Terry Gross for Fresh Air back in 2000. In it, Ethan commented on how he found Steve Buscemi’s character to be a protagonist of sorts as he was the only sane man in an insane world. Well, that’s all I needed to get a few paragraphs.

Steve Buscemi’s Carl is pretty much the only character lacking a unique accent. Stormare isn’t doing the Minnesota nice thing, but he’s not American, and he doesn’t talk much, anyway. In fact, Scotty probably talks the most normal out of all the locals, but I chalk that up to a child actor not being able to pull off some William H. Macy shit. This is why you can consider Carl the only “normal” character in the story. 

To be clear, Carl is a piece of shit, and aside from Jerry initiating the kidnapping, it could be argued that Carl is to blame for most of the tragedy. If he had simply put the temporary tags on, they wouldn’t have been stopped by the cop leading to the triple homicide, and if he wasn’t so insistent on getting laid, there wouldn’t be witnesses to tell the police about the “funny lookin’ fella.” Now, Gaear is still a stone cold psycho who was probably always going to kill Jean and Carl no matter what. But Carl’s bullshit caused a lot of unnecessary problems. 

That written, Carl (and even Gaear) does try to talk Jerry out of his plan because it makes no sense to them, and they think Jerry should just ask his father-in-law for me rather than go to all this trouble. It’s honestly one of the strangest scenes in the movie, but it gets forgotten since it’s the opener. The kidnappers try to talk themselves out of a job. But it’s probably more about them trying to understand the job.

But this isn’t about Carl being the hero or anything. It’s about him being a flummoxed outsider in the upper Midwest. As a Midwesterner (southern Indiana, to be specific), the “nice” reputation is a bit annoying. Sure, we don’t go around yelling all the time, and some of us hold doors open and say shit is fine even when it sucks, but trust me, there is no shortage of total pieces of shit in the Midwest, no matter how nice their manners are. Carl is annoyed by the folksiness he keeps encountering, and I get it. 

We all know deep down that the Midwest “niceness” is all an act, for the most part. You might think it would be pleasant to be around nice people, but after a while, you just feel like everyone is lying to you by being nice. Or maybe I’m just paranoid. Anyway, I can see why Carl, clearly not a Midwesterner, reacts to the niceness with animosity. 

Carl openly despises Jerry from the start, not just because of his cowardly kidnapping plot, but because of how he talks. This is most evident when Carl mockingly repeats Jerry’s “What do you mean?” later in the movie. Then there’s the parking attendant, aka “king clip-on tie,” that Carl eviscerates simply for following the $4 minimum policy of the parking lot. Yeah, the charge is annoying, but I think it’s the attendant’s smile that truly sets Carl off. 

It’s not just the Midwestern culture bothering Carl; he’s also teamed up with a near mute murderer in Gaear, a man who will partake of the local talent, but seems much more interested in pancakes and soap operas…and unguent. This psycho is an enigma that must’ve been a nightmare to share a car with. We only get little humorous glimpses culminating in Carl laughingly vowing “two can play at that game,” but imagine an hours-long drive with Gaear. 

Because of all these annoying indignities, Carl is already on edge, but his interaction with Shep sends him into a frenzy. So when Wade shows up instead of Jerry, he finally verbalizes what’s been bothering him: “What’s with you people?! You fucking imbeciles!” Carl just wanted to do a job and maybe enjoy himself a bit, but every element conspires against him. It’s not just the locals, but their seemingly insane behavior was definitely a factor in his final breakdown. Nice Midwesterners didn’t kill Carl, but their politeness didn’t do him any favors, either.

Random Thoughts

You can tell when Stan asks how Scotty is doing it's the first time Jerry has even considered how this whole scheme would affect his son. What a piece of shit.

Checking IMDb, I can't believe I'm just finding out that Scotty also played Track Suit Kid in Go.

“I'm not going to debate you, Jerry.”

Jerry is short for Jerome (based on the phone call with the loan dude who needs the VINs). As the son of a Jerry short for Gerald, that surprised me. 

The parking lot attendant scene might be my favorite Buscemi moment. “Big fuckin’ man, huh?”

I can think of no better actor than Buscemi to play a guy who is “funny lookin’ in a general kind of way.”

First time I'm picking up on the No Country similarities. Marge is basically Ed Tom at the end, not understanding the world, though she handles it better. And Ed Tom pretty much describes the entire set up of Fargo as a “true story” when Carla Jean asks if a story he told her was true: “[I]t's certainly true that it is a story.”

This is one of those DVDs with a “trivia track,” which is essentially Pop Up Video for movies. It's funny because it gives specific trivia for the movie but also general nuggets like, “In 1987, 74 police officers were murdered in the United States.”

And Arby's trivia, dispelling the rumor that Arby's stands for RB as in roast beef, when it actually stands for Raffel Brothers, the founders.

And this meta trivia question: “Frances McDormand is married to what famous director of quirky independent films?”

In the Charlie Rose interview included in the DVD, he asks McDormand if she was a fan of their work before she married Joel. She points out she was in their first fucking movie. Charlie Rose was such a fuckhead.

Deakins drops a Barton Fink nugget during his commentary about an unused scene in which John Goodman kills the elevator operator and we see the severed head roll out into the corridor. Where the fuck was that in the deleted scenes on the DVD?

“Ya got Arby's all over me!”

Stormare shows more of a reaction to the pregnancy reveal on the Bruce Campbell soap opera he's watching than the sight of Buscemi with a facial gunshot wound. 

"Grown Ups"

Grown Ups - Directed by Dennis Dugan, written by Adam Sandler and Fred Wolf, starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Chris Rock - Rated PG-13

Grown Ups is simply boring and forgettable.

Adam Sandler has been a comedic favorite of mine since I was in grade school. I loved his comedy albums and his early movies like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. I guess you could say I grew up enjoying Adam Sandler’s comedy. It’s unfortunate, but now I think my sense of humor has grown up past Sandler’s. Or more accurately, his sense of humor has lost its edge.

On paper, Grown Ups sounds like a sure thing. It has Sandler, Chris Rock, Kevin James, Rob Schneider, David Spade, and a number of cameos. If all of these guys are in it, it has to be funny, right? Well…yes and no, mainly no.

Grown Ups can best be described as a family comedy (if the youngest child in your family is around 9-10, that is) and that was part of the problem for me. I’m not a family comedy kind of guy. I don’t recall enjoying the more innocent comedies even when I was young enough to be considered “innocent.” They’re just not my thing. If your idea of comedy involves playful (translation: bland) jabs between spouses and old friends, then you’ll probably like this one.

I call the jabs bland because it all seemed so forced. I thought, if anything, this film would realistically represent what a group of old friends could be like. For one thing, most of these guys actually are old friends in real life, but they couldn’t get that across onscreen, though. Instead, we get a group of guys playing it safe. What’s worse, they laugh at their own jokes, creating a strange kind of laugh track for the audience. There’s nothing worse for a comedy than a character laughing way too hard at a weak joke, trying to trick the audience into believing that they’ve just witnessed comedy. All that forced laughter just accentuates how unfunny it all is.

Grown Ups just isn’t all that funny. I want that to be clear before I point out a few positive comedic elements. Make no mistake, though, this film is a disappointment. It’s really hard not to laugh at least a few times during a comedy and this film did have a moment or two. The biggest laughs this film got out of me came from the supporting cast. I’m a sucker for a good cameo and this film has plenty of regulars from the Sandler movie universe. My personal favorite was Steve Buscemi. I don’t want to go into too many details because a good cameo is a bit of a surprise. Just know that if you watched SNL during Sandler’s time and you’ve seen his other films, a few familiar faces will crop up.

The fact that my favorite moments were cameos is a big problem. The main cast, who have all starred in their own comedies, should be the ones bringing the big laughs. The only one that I found consistently funny was Kevin James. This is strange because I’m not much of a Kevin James fan (the popularity of Paul Blart will forever confuse me). I enjoy a self-deprecating heavyset guy, though, and James is perfect for the part. He takes the fat jokes very well, and then he’s willing to dance around with an empty chicken bucket on his head.

Kevin James’ character is one note, just like the rest of the stars of the film, but his note was funny to me. It’s quite possible that someone may find Rock funny as the stay at home husband, or Spade as the single, aging ladies man, or Schneider as the new age idiot with the older wife. It all comes down to taste.

Sandler’s character is the only one that didn’t seem one note to me. He’s a successful (agent, producer, I couldn’t really tell) Hollywood man who has lapsed in the parenting department, leaving the job to a nanny. (His explanation for having a nanny around all the guys provided a few laughs for me.) He tries to set things right by forcing his kids to abandon technology for some old fashioned outdoor fun and this is where the film works. When Sandler looks around and sees what is happening to his family and friends, the film shows a pulse. It’s just a shame that the film didn’t focus more on that. If this film had been a comedy that took life and how things change over time a bit more seriously, then I am sure the laughs would be genuine and the movie itself would have had a lasting effect on me.

As it stands, though, this film focused more on some really clichéd and goofy comedic elements like a bad toupee, a farting grandma, a muscleman with a high pitched voice, etc. There was so much potential here, though. It’s a shame they went goofy and lame with it. But then again, I have a darker, more cynical sense of humor. If you like your humor extremely light (so light it’s almost nonexistent at times), then you may enjoy this one.

My Bloody Valentine 3-D / Living in Oblivion

Okay, obviously The Wrestler did not make its way to my area. In fact, I probably will not get a chance to see it until Feb. 13. So, I decided to watch some trash this past weekend. But I'm adding a more respectable independent film that I recently watched on DVD to try and church up this review lest I end up reviewing nothing but slasher flicks and Jason Statham movies. But first: the trash...

My Bloody Valentine has a plot, I think. Something is going on where a guy kills a lot of people with a pickaxe. Let's face it, anyone who wants to see this knows exactly what it is. There is bad acting by a cast of TV actors, there are ridiculous plot twists that aren't even worth pondering, there's gratuitous nudity (a naked woman even picks up her clothes, only to discard them to grab a gun from her purse as if to say, "I could put my clothes back on before I go outside, but what's the fun in that?"), etc. I knew about all of these aspects and that is exactly what I was wanting to see. I laughed quite often during this film, which I can only imagine was part of the point of it all. But the bigger aspect to this film is obviously the 3-D.

This is not that crappy 3-D you see on TV every now and then that calls for those blue and red glasses. These glasses are pretty much clear, using some technology I don't care to look into. All I know is that they are well on their way to perfecting the use of 3-D in film. It was certainly problematic; some things move too quickly and it gets blurry at times, plus it can get downright disorienting at first. Apart from that, the bigger 3-D setups are great. The pickaxe is the perfect weapon for this. There are countless moments when a pickaxe is swung at the screen and it all honestly looked like it was right in my face. I didn't duck out of the way or anything like in the preview for the film, but it was still very impressive. Overall, the 3-D turned what would have been a mediocre slasher flick into a mediocre slasher flick with a great visual gimmick. It was mindless fun.

Enough with the mindless fun, now on to some slightly intellectual fun. Living in Oblivion is director Tom Dicillo's 1995 film about what can happen when you try to make an independent film. Apparently this is mainly based on his experiences when he made Johnny Suede (with Brad Pitt), but I have not seen that yet, so I'm not sure how well it ties in. I do know that James LeGros' character, an up and coming pretty boy actor, is based on Pitt. LeGros is only a supporting player, though; the star is Steve Buscemi and he is at his best in this. It is basically a three part film (it was orginally a 30 minute short film, that was turned into a three part 90 minute film) that shows a mix of nightmare and reality on the set of an independent film. So things go wrong on set: LeGros wants to change shots around, a smoke machine doesn't put out smoke, a little person refuses to laugh, a senile mother shows up on set, relationships are made and broken, etc. People end up breaking down and it leads to some hilarious moments. One particular gag involving a DP and his eye patch is quite funny. This is not laugh out loud material, but anyone into behind the scenes stuff, self deprecating humor, or Steve Buscemi in general will have fun with this. One warning, though: there are multiple times where Buscemi is trying to get a scene and you are forced to watch a fake scene played out over and over and that can be a bit boring after awhile. But that is only a small issue. This is definitely worth a look if not for Buscemi alone, but Dermot Mulroney is suprisingly good as the DP, and Catherine Keener is decent (though I am personally not a fan of hers).

I don't know much when it comes to transfer quality on DVDs and stuff so I'll stick to special features when I write about them. I skipped the Director's commentary and watched an interview with Dicillo and Buscemi from 2002. I strongly suggest you check this out if you rent this as it fills in a lot of information about supporting cast members and how it all came about. It's quite funny, also.

Finally, thanks to the Bradley family for all the comments. Good to know someone's reading this already. And yes, I could've gone on and on about Nixon, but I was able to restrain myself. I don't know, though...I might have to do a DVD review of the Oliver Stone Nixon film...that might be interesting.