But for TV programmers, award shows are great. They take up a whole evening and they can still charge the same advertising rates, sometimes even higher if there’s any sort of rumour that there may be a tit-pop in the offing. It’s all so predictable and sad. Life in TV land holds no mystery anymore.

INTOLERABLE CRUELTY (ONE SPUD)

For the past 20 years or so the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, have been very much a part of the independent movie landscape. While it’s true that they bust their asses to create a different type of movie every time out of the gate (fear of stereotyping taken to the obsessive extreme), I find their efforts to be very uneven, ranging from brilliant to farcical to just downright off the radar. But I do admire their spunk and the way they have managed in integratiate themselves into the Hollywood community without managing to alienate their hard core fan base. The Coens are lucky bastards. They get to keep on doing their thing hitting and missing as they go and creating some interesting films along the way.

 

Intolerable Cruelty is their latest attempt to mimic some of the more sophisticated screwball comedies of the thirties. Unfortunately, they have done too good a job and have created a movie which looks and feels anachronistic. I think this is because screwball comedies are very much ‘of the era’ in which they were made and what I think the Coens did here was try and impose too much 30’s sensibility on a movie made some seventy years after the fact. The broadness which with the parts are played, and don’t get me wrong, they are extremely well played by both George Clooney and Catharine Zeta-Jones, seem out of place in modern day Los Angeles. Add to that a transparent plot and some fairly lifeless supporting characters and what you end up with is well, a dog’s breakfast of sorts, in this Spud’s opinion that is. And, of course, that invariably tends to make it predictable and a bit of a yawner, except that you have a couple of the prettiest people in Hollywood to look at for a couple of hours…but I digress into superficiality.

Now a couple of years ago the Coens made a movie called The Man Who Wasn’t There, with Billy Bob Thornton and for some reason, it was dead perfect. And because the genre of the picture was noir, it somehow seemed alright that they we’re mimicking some of the better films of the late 40s and early fifties like The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Man Who Know Too Much. There much more of a timelessness about those kinds of picture than there is regarding romantic comedy, screwball or otherwise.

Anyway, I’ll be the first to admit that I could be full of beans on Intolerable Cruelty, because I do admire the Coens and always wish them all the best.

THE BEST OF THE COENS

The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000))
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Fargo (1996)
Miller's Crossing (1990)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Blood Simple (1984)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO (TWO SPUDS)

You’ve got to hand it to Robert Rodrigues. He’s really keeping the old Sergio Leone spaghetti western tradition alive. Once Upon A time In Mexico is the third movie in a Rodrigues’ trilogy which started with El Mariachi in 1992 and was followed by Desperado In ’95. In between he went on to get discovered by Hollywood and made the very successful Spy Kids series, which also starred his good buddy Antonio Banderas.

The El Mariachi trilogy movies aren’t really about much of anything except sending up macho Mexican behaviour and parodying the classic Man With No Names films of the 1970s. I’ve seen all three and they’re really kind of neat to watch, mostly because of Bandaras’ deadpan anti-heroics, the great music tracks and the innovative choreography of all the violent scenes in the film. Once Upon A Time has the added benefit of Johnny Depp as an extremely crooked CIA agent who is out to create a revolution or die trying.

These films are all about atmosphere, great effects, posing and outstanding cinematography, all of which Rodrigues is very good a putting on film. Like John Sayles and a Kevin Smith, also great American auteurs, Rodrigues does just about everything except process the film. He writes and directs, of course. But he also produces, edits and contributes to the score and occasionally shows up on screen here and there. He’s what you call a multi-tasker. And the fact that he does all that stuff, really manages to show on screen. There’s a fluidity, almost a visual poetry to Rodrigues filmmaking that creates a wonderful narrative flow in his films. He really knows what the hell he’s doing out there. These are not big budget films by Hollywood standards. In fact, El Mariachi was actually made with the credit limit on Rodrigues’ Visa card. And it is probably the most brilliant of the three. Just goes to show you, although I’m not sure what.

SPELLBOUND (TWO SPUDS)

Since we now have the absolutely finest viewing setup we have ever had, The Wife and I have officially declared every second Friday night to be movie nights with friends. First up were Larry and Sue Sheppard, our across-the-street neighbours and friends from Spud Central 1. Larry builds sound studios and small theatres. Sue manages his life in much the same way as The Wife manages mine.

Now since this was the first of these movie nights, I gave myself a couple of objectives—to wit –to try and find, a) something I was fairly sure that nobody had seen and b) something I thought everybody would like, although there’s no such thing as a lead pipe cinch in that department. During this process I discovered two things. 1. It takes a long time to achieve the aforementioned objectives, and 2. When you do something like this it’s best to have a backup, just in case your first choice should happen to suck.

My choices were Spellbound, which we actually ended up watching and Mystery Alaska, which the Wife and have seen a number of times but never seem to get tired of. Spellbound is a documentary feature that was nominated for best documentary at the 2002 Academy Awards. It was essentially a profile of eight of the young kids who competed in the 1999 National Spelling Bee in Washington.

 

As documentaries go this one was pretty OK. We get to know each of the eight kids the filmmakers are following. We get to see a bit of what their lives are like, how different they are from eachother and a lot of the stuff they have in common. A couple things I noticed about these kids was that in addition to being killer spellers, they were all pretty good at math, nerdy, not athletic and kind of floating in their own viscous fluids, a bit apart from the rest of the world. The parents ranged from supportive but helpless to a bit overbearing to hard core coaches, but you never got any sort of feeling of resentment on the parts of the kids. They were all willing participants, bound for nerdish glory.

Spellbound was nowhere near as exciting as the cover text and glowing thumbs up from Roger Ebert would indicate but it was interesting. Larry had remembered seeing one of the broadcasts of the Spelling Bee finals and was able to provide a certain amount of colour commentary. We talked quite a bit through this movie, because the sound wasn’t all that great and it was hard to hear the kids whenever there was a lot of background noise.

Like most documentaries about life in America, we get the impression that just about everything that happens in America is packaged up like a sporting event. For most of the kids the big prize wasn’t winning, because none of them ever thought they would. The big prize was making it to the ESPN broadcast and doing their thing on national TV. Not that it’s really any different here in Canada or in any country that has this sort of stuff going on.

RADIO (ONE SPUD)

Sooner or later everybody who is anybody in Hollywood ends up in a Disney film. This time it’s Cuba Gooding Jr. (who I never really got) and Ed Harris. Cuba plays this learning challenged kid in this small town in Carolina. Ed plays the coach of the local high school football team who, for reasons which actually are revealed in the movie, takes Cuba under his wing, so to speak and brings him out of his shell.

Now Cuba has obviously spent hours watching “Bill” and “Rain Main” and he has a whole routine of nuances, along with some funky buck teeth to give him that genuine learning challenged personna. It all works very well. Ed has funky sideburns and San-A-Belt slacks cause it’s like the early sixties or something. It all looks pretty authentic.

Of course, because Cuba is learning challenged, he’s set upon by the school jocks. And because he’s black and learning challenged, he’s set upon by the father of the star football player, who sees Cuba as a distraction, and, obviously we’re all supposed to take the big double meaning out of that.

Anyway, it’s all very pleasant and inspiring and heartwarming yadda, yadda. Unfortunately, at no time during the proceedings does it ever erupt into a real movie. And that’s kind of strange because, Disney was also responsible for another similar film from a few years back called “Remember the Titans”, in which brother Denzel played a black football coach trying to overcome racial hatred in Carolina. This was an outstanding film because it was about something. Radio, on the other hand, is a very pleasant film that is not really about much of anything. A lot of this has to do with that fact that Cuba’s condition was never really defined, so as he becomes more and more articulate we don’t know if it’s the kindness that Ed is showing him or what or just his character overcoming some sort of extreme shyness. I’m a simple Spud. I need to know these things so that I can compute them while I’m watching and therefore enhance my viewing pleasure.

Anyway, this isn’t a bad film. But it’s not a great one. If you want to see a great one in the same genre, try Hoosiers, Remember The Titans, Rudy or The Replacements. Well that’s about it for this installment. Just want to thank you all for your loyalty and the referrals. I’ve pretty much lost track of how many people get this column, but it’s always gratifying for a writer to know that he’s being read.

See you next time.