The Sorrow and the Poopie
by Chris Dashiell

Like an avalanche of putrid sludge the summer movie season has descended upon us. With clenched teeth I await the onslaught of mind-numbing action, special effects at the service of bad writing and infantile characters, idiotic animated Disney spawn, bogus comic book effluvia aimed at the sensibility of autistic ten-year-olds, mindless romantic drivel featuring the latest People magazine celebrity-lobotomy idols, the inevitable rip-offs of last year's I-see-dead-people movie, yet another mediocre Wes Craven gore bucket, dozens of comedies in which teenagers discover that anything having to do with sex is just so damn funny, and all the slow-mo shots of Tom Cruise's hair we will ever, ever need.

Then I hear that the owner of my town's only art house has decided to sell after thirty years. He would prefer the buyer keep it as a movie house, but there are no guarantees. Maybe it will turn into a Wendy's or a Radio Shack. Anyone got 1.5 mil they'd like to lend me?

As I contemplate having to move, I seek solace in the usual place - the margins. Maybe in the cracked vision of a weird indie film I can find comfort. Perhaps there is hope in the cool confines of the empty midnight movie theater, far from the fevered flop sweat, the stale sickening stench of the pod people's popular megaplex.

Well, no, not really....

Anyway, Jim Jarmusch's GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI is a strange mishmash of urban alienation drama and Mafia parody. Forest Whitaker plays the title character - a hit man who thinks he's a samurai warrior. Because a gangster once saved his life, he now does hits for the mob, only communicating by carrier pigeon. When the mob decides to get rid of him, he quietly goes about whacking them first.

Jarmusch's lone warrior is a sad take-off on the Clint Eastwood archetype. Throughout the film, Ghost Dog quotes laconically from a Zen-like samurai manual. His code is lonely and severe, but he actually lives in a modern city where his code means nothing, and his bosses are cheap goons. The whole picture is a riff on this contrast between the fantasy ideal and the sordid truth. The gangsters are the film's funniest aspect - Henry Silva is a crazed zombie of a don, and Cliff Gorman is every Italian-American stereotype rolled into one crass, garish figure of fun. Jarmusch admires the madness of the sublime samurai, but the film says the ridiculous will always win out in the end.

There is much to like here. Robby Muller turns in his usual fine work as cinematographer. The music by RZA is great - especially the recurring Ghost Dog theme. Whitaker is strangely touching - he has some nice moments with a little girl who shares his love of books, and with a French-speaking ice cream vendor who understands him without knowing the language.

But I must say, reluctantly, that the sum total of all this is not enough. Jarmusch has his one wry, melancholy comic idea - and he simply repeats it in different forms. For example, all the gangsters have the habit of watching the most antiquated cartoons on TV. The first time I saw a mobster watching Betty Boop, it was hilarious. The next time I saw one watching Felix the Cat, it was still funny. After four or five times, I thought,
"Okay, Jim, I get it. And that's symptomatic of the whole film for me. Whitaker ambles through the picture in his noble delusion, the gangsters go through their manic paces, and the separate bits, however funny or interesting some of them may be, do not create the sense of a whole.

I don't know - I guess I have trouble with Jarmusch's approach. I was one of the few who wrote a mixed review of Dead Man - labelling it an interesting failure and sticking to my opinion even now. But that was a much more accomplished film than Ghost Dog. I like Jim Jarmusch - I like the willingness to try really different things and play around with genre and avoid the tried and not-so-true devices. But I suppose I'm waiting for him to let loose and do something bigger than the kind of parody collages he has specialized in up until now. Maybe this isn't reasonable, but I have to go with how I feel. His films don't seem thought-
out enough.

A less challenging disappointment is encountered in JOE GOULD'S SECRET. The story, a true one, is promising. Writer Joseph Mitchell encountered a voluble Greenwich Village street person named Joe Gould who claimed to have written a massive oral history of the world. Gould became the subject of a New Yorker piece by Mitchell, which secured some minor fame for the bohemian along with financial support from an anonymous female benefactor. But it also won Mitchell an unwanted friend, as the flighty and irascible Gould persistently intruded on Mitchell's time.

The themes of exaggerated literary ambition, the created turning on the creator, and the gulf between the imagined and the achieved, are potent ones. And the movie does have one big thing going for it: Ian Holm pulls out all the stops in the title role. He's a thoroughly convincing and alarming Gould. The film also boasts excellent art direction - Manhattan in the 1940s is beautifully evoked. The trouble is that Joe Gould's Secret is directed by Stanley Tucci, who also plays Joseph Mitchell. Tucci's style is bland and uninventive. He fails to establish a rhythm, comic or otherwise. He makes the mistake of using a voice-over to explain everything, which distances us from the story instead of involving us. As Mitchell, he is all surface mannerism with no depth, an unconvincing Southern accent in a hat. It's been a bit of drop for Tucci since Big Night, which showed a certain flair and attitude. To make the Joe Gould story resonate, he needed a killer instinct, a merciless satiric sense that could set us up in Mitchell's world and then knock us down by showing us that world through Gould's eyes. But Tucci's style is too tame to pull it off.

Oh, but I must end, just like a summer movie, on a hopeful note.

I hate missing the boat. I like to think I'm on top of everything, and only skip the movies that don't matter. So it's not easy for me to admit that one of the best movies of 1999 didn't make my year-end list. Because I didn't go to it. The ad campaign and the reviews scared me off. But through some good luck I caught it on video, and now I'm making amends.

The flick I'm referring to is David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB. In the previews it looked like some dumb macho concept film, an excuse to watch Brad Pitt beat people up. Well, forget that. I hereby order all of you to rent Fight Club. It is a comedy - a very smart, very funny, dark satiric romp through the American nightmare.

The story, if you must have one, concerns an unhappy corporate drone and antisocial insomniac played by Edward Norton, who starts attending support groups for people with deadly diseases, just so he can cry, which then helps him to sleep. His little scheme is interrupted by the intrusion of a woman named Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) who is also pretending to be sick. Norton flees from her, only to encounter a charismatic mischief maker named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) who takes him under his wing and with whom he creates Fight Club, the ultimate support group in which men dissatisfied with their conformist lives get together to beat the crap out of each other. But just when you think you know what ax the movie is going to grind, the ax instead comes down on your expectations and the film spirals into ever more sophisticated satiric heights. Well, the rest, as Hamlet might say, is Spoiler. I will only say that Fight Club, with a fiendishly clever script by Jim Uhls, based on a Chuck Palahniuk novel, has more verbal intricacy and wit than ten ordinary movies. Nothing is spelled out for you, everything is concisely symbolic, and the whole thing fits together like a Chinese puzzle box with a bomb inside of it. Issues of power, gender, group think, and the perilous fissures of the male psyche (among others) are dealt with in a breathtakingly assured fashion, along with a self-reflexive take on its own nature as film narrative.

But most of all, it's just very funny. SEE IT!

CineScene, 2000