Cheesy melodrama is kind of my thing. I’ve been known to sit through entire movies on the LMN just for laughs, or annoying my roomate. But really, it’s not because I enjoy them, it’s because they are so utterly mind-numbing that they make great background noise for working on stuff on the couch.

So anyway, The Room, directed by Tommy Wiseau. This movie is awesome. The acting is terrible, the editing is atrocious and the film quality seems to be from a daytime-soap. While those things make a b-movie better, the real gem here is in the writing and the screenplay. Definitely check it out. It’s kind of a like a modern-day Plan 9, but way funnier.

After the movie, Tim and Eric showed up with a special guest-director show featuring Tommy Wiseau. Attempting to capture his brilliance didn’t work out quite as well, but it was a nice nod to his Ed Wood-ness.

The point being once all that was figured out, then you’d have the entire world in a purer form than film has ever been able to portray. People are now “actors” acting candidly. Extras now have their own stories, with real and honest motivation. There is no more staging, just what’s there and that all plays a part in the path the film takes. My initial vision for this would be a kind of hour-long streaming consciousness film. The audience cohabits the main character’s life during this time and perhaps getting dizzy in the process. It’s no blockbuster, but it’s a start to a new way of thinking about film. In an age with so much “reality” television, this seems like a natural progression into the “ultra-real”. Frankly though, I don’t think it’d be all that entertaining or enjoyable. But something inside me needs craves that experience. Perhaps I’m too much of a gamer, living out experience inside of a FPS polygon head.

So yea, this was 4 years ago. I occasionally muse at what it might be like, how ways to scale this immense techincal wall. But today on Slashdot, it looks like someone is getting started. Never thought to gouge my own eye out. ;)

WYNONA – “That was a quote by Emily Dickenson you silly! Only the greatest poet to ever live!”
GERE – “Ah, well I’m not familiar. Everyone has there thing. I’m a food guy, ask me about food.”
WYNONA – “Alright food guy, what’s so great about food?”
GERE – “Food. Is the only beautiful thing… that provides… sustenance.” [or some such nonsense]
WYNONA – “Is that a quote?”
GERE – “No.” [Long pause] “It’s me.”

She proceeds to swoon into his arms and Gere is now a golden god of romance. It’s one on those incredibly terrible moments in a movie where it takes a turn right into hilarity and all semblance of disbelief is null and void.

Yea. That’s right. I’m watching LMN. Deal with it.

If you like it, i highly recommend watching it at home in full res. Kind of like how you would watch Eraserhead. If you’re into that kind of thing…

Check it out here for free.

Prologue

First off let me get some things straight here. This movie is more than just a thumbs-up/thumbs-down for me. The Coen bros. are my favorite modern film directors/writers. They hold a spot in my heart that’s near the top, and that’s dangerous. Though I do recognize my own fanboy-itude, even it’s awareness is not enough to quell it from my expectations. So needless to say, going into the movie, I was hoping for a lot. The Big Lebowski is in my top three films of all time, and while I thoroughly enjoy the bros. dramas as well, their comedy greases my gears above all else.

About an hour and a half after meeting up with the usual suspects we suited up to the theater late Sunday. A good time to see a movie in my opinion. After about an hour of previews, the show started. Now this is when most reviewers, even the reputable ones, tend to take the reader through a synopsis of the movie. I say, “fuck that.” Instead I’ll replace that synopsis with my reactions.

I laughed at a good portion of the film, not just chuckles but some really inspired laughter. That was a good thing. This is a comedy, so points for laughter to the Coens. However throughout the movie, I couldn’t help falling into my usual trap of over-analysis. I couldn’t really figure out where this movie was headed, even though the storyline was pretty straightforward. I kept trying to peel it apart for some deeper goal, some “whoa” moment that would surely come. But of course, it never came. But the ending did. Abruptly.

Walking out, I felt abandoned by the movie, perhaps because I had put too much stock in the film’s merits, or I just wanted something to make sense. On the way home my two cohorts and I got in a bout over the movie. I wanted more from it, but they didn’t. I wanted some metaphor, something to glue all these random characters together to form one cohesive message. It’s why I enjoy creative expression, the messages, the meaning. I couldn’t accept it, I had to find a way to rationalize my feelings.

I scraped together some reviews that aligned with my ideas. The New York Times probably did the best job, but I still think it was missing something. And other reviews left me cold as well, either because they were out of touch, angry or just plain lost on the Coen’s voice. Tons of reviews referenced “No Country…” which is ridiculous if they were expecting anything from that movie to wander its way into “Burn” [even this review]. But the reviews calmed me down, the positive ones seemed all-too-eager to quickly race to identify with the film as a “well the others are too stupid to get it,” while the negative ones were just too tired to tolerate their irreverent experiment into film characters.

So I thought. I couldn’t stop. I tried reading a little out of Kitchen Confidential, but each paragraph was interrupted by a snippet of analysis from “Burn.” And now, after this hellride, like a schizophrenic, I’ve rationalized my ideas on the movie into something I can cope with. Here they are.

Review

I left my seat feeling empty, and I think that was the whole intention. Even if it wasn’t the intention, it was most certainly the result. And it makes sense. “No Country…” left the audience cold, with a chaos that only Reality can muster. I loved it then. I immediately saw it for what it was mostly because it was the outlier. The one that was different from the rest. That way, people could pick it out, and then eat it. But “Burn” is much more ambitious. Instead of leaving the audience with a little snippet of reality, they are force-fed throughout their entire experience, getting full on the bullshit that makes this world churn, hoping that something will turn it around, give this comedy its rightful happy ending, but no. Instead of purging us, we’re forced to swallow. And swallow we do. In many ways, at least in my own little head, it reminds me of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The audience rebelled against this new form of music, discordant and fragmented. It was not pleasant to their ears. Decades later it would be hailed as the single most important piece of music in the 20th century.

Will we hail this the same way? No. Probably not. But why the long face audience? What really is it that makes this movie so cold and unmerciful? It’s a comedy for christ sake. It can’t be that gloomy. And that’s just it, it really isn’t all that gloomy. The plot is alike any other mischievous intertwined who-dunnit, but it’s the characters that really forced me into the queasiness. Because the characters are completely 100% 1-dimensional. None of them have any redeeming qualities. And for some reason, to me, this seems like a revolutionary concept in this context because most movies use this very same approach. They create hero and villain archetypes to pit 1-dimensional motives against one another, but in “Burn” the good guy doesn’t win. In fact, nobody does. The archetypes are tragic, but their context is comedic. Even the lovable archetypes [of which there are few] are 1-dimensional in their pursuit.

So often in ensemble casts such as this, characters have some conflicting qualities that tend to take them down interesting paths. Even the villains can be identified with. At least that’s the kind of dimension I have come to expect of the better film makers. But leave it to the Coen’s to turn that idea on its head in an effort to expose the inner workings of story through character development in film as if to say “This is what happens when people don’t change. When they become conditioned by society and all its bright lights. When people refuse to grow or move on. We’re stuck in cyclical hell, doomed.”

I don’t know if I like this movie. I may like it after watching it a couple more times. But nonetheless I think it’s an important movie. An experiment in what’s possible, even today when film and story seem fully matured. As a postscript, I’d just add, that I can’t help but feel somewhat like an over-analytical rube trying to find meaning in the meaningless. Like a water aficionado, tasting the same tap water with different labels, convincing himself that it tastes of minerals that don’t exist.

And here to start off the entire reading

Brad Neely is a stone-faced comic genius. I can’t say much more than that.

I had a lot of fun at this flick, Ben Stein’s cold-hard facts vs. the stupid Darwinian’s fascist policies really brought the whole issue into an objective light.*

* denotes sarcasm. Although I did have a lot of fun. Laughing aloud and all. The gross use of stock footage from propaganda films, extreme editing and ridiculous claims that Darwin caused the Holocaust [yes, that's an actual line of reasoning from the film] make this film hard to take seriously. The whole time, I was wondering. What really are the claims about Intelligent Design? But they never brought those to the table, not point by point. In the end, a documentary about Intelligent Design should probably make some statements [with evidence] about why ID should be a viable hypothesis in the scientific community, so the scientific community doesn’t consider it to be mere heresay. But instead, it’s probably a better idea to just whine about how science is against them and pander to the heart-strings of people and paint science as a big bully with a closed mind.*

Science doesn’t have a mind. It has a process. If you don’t meet the requirements for passing the steps in that process, you get rejected. ID was finished the momenth it couldn’t provide any evidence to backup any of its claims. I don’t care how many black-and-white stock footage clips you throw at us in a vain attempt to equate the expelled IDers with the millions of persecuted and silenced voices throughout our history. They do have a voice, that voice’s basis belongs in philosophy, not science. And that is that.

Even Richard Dawkins entertained the possibility that Intelligent Design may be true, but it also may be true that every living thing is actually posing as something else, and in actuality they are all blue yaks hiding from me and this is just one big dream world thought up by a pink carnation flower. Yes, that is a possibility. Now hold your breath while I gather evidence to support that hypothesis.

www.drhorrible.com

To all five of you who read this [5 may be a gross over-calculation] Dr. Horrible is getting taken off the Internet after today. Make sure to go watch it, or you’ll have to pay for it when it comes out on DVD. Which, actually you should do anyway, since Joss Whedon is the kind of artistic perspective we need to support. I also find this whole marketing scheme of releasing a limited time freebie on the web interesting. It certainly has drummed up a bunch of press on the interwebs, and should carry through to their DVD release. Good show on all fronts team Whedon.

Dr. Horrible is immediately recognizable as Joss Whedon’s work, and he had the help of some brothers? Or relatives?

Either way, Dr. Horrible is really funny, and worth a lunch-break to take it all in. After watching about half of the 1st act [two released so far] I decided to cut my inane planned ramblings about the construction of sandwiches and their effect on differing tastes to bring you this much more entertaining and pertinent link. The evil genius parody may just become cliché someday, but I’m glad Joss & friends got in on the early train to funny-ville [sorry] as did Mr. Show.

I also peeked through a bit of the Dr. Horrible history books and found the Captain Hammer [nemesis to Dr. Horrible] webcomic. Also… way awesome! [only 3 pages in so far] Check it out here. It’s on myspace I know, but they did a decent job with the styling. Also. If you’ve gone this far without knowing who Joss Whedon is, or thinking that Firefly is an entomological [is that the one for bugs, or word origin?] documentary on luminescent bugs, digest these links. Begin the healing process, find your way to serenity.

ps. A shout out to all the writers. The writing in these works is incredible. No small accomplishment.