Watching the sun drape shadows across the floor: Clerks 2, Pirates 2, Scanner Darkly, Nacho Libre
“Clerks II” is an intensely amiable shambles of a movie from cinematic novelty act Kevin Smith (“Chasing Amy,” “Mallrats”). It knows how to waste time and show people wasting time but it’s a little lost when it comes to its sentimental notecard-sized plot. But the moment it clicked for me is when the two best friends (Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson) escape suburban malaise by riding go-carts. It’s set to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” and I realized the movie is a sweet little ode to never leaving your hometown, to dismal suburbs of repeating chain stores and restaurants, to the best years of your life being your early twenties. The Beatles sang about “out of college money spent/see no future pay no rent/...and oh that magic feeling/nowhere to go.”
The go-cart bit is also probably one of the two scenes in “Clerks II” that Smith actually directs with any pizzazz. The two dolts whip around corners with wind on their grinning faces. The other bit is a confrontation between the two friends in which Smith circles them again and again, between the shadows of the fastfood restaurant and the overexposed sky. Smith still really can’t do much besides simply frame a shot, which served him just fine in the original “Clerks.” With its security camera look, “Clerks” is a sentimental favorite of mine, although I’d have to watch it again to decide if it’s a masterpiece or merely a near-masterpiece. It’s still Smith’s best movie (and “Dogma” is his most adventurous), but we’ve sort of given up on Smith ever moving on to anything new. “Clerks II” seems to be his defense of that unwillingness to expand his repertoire. Everyone in “Clerks” spouts nonstop obscenities, which was funny because it was true, but with “Clerks 2” some of the obscenities feel as unnatural as the absence of obscenities in movies before “Clerks.”
“A Scanner Darkly” is another film about not getting things done. Like “The Big Lebowski,” there are plots and crimes afoot, but its protagonists are a little too zonked to really stay focused. It’s a flawed film but a fun one, equal parts sci-fi thriller and junkie comedy, with stoned housemates Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrellson, and Robert Downey Jr. in place of Walter, Donnie, and The Dude. In a way the hand-drawn look of the rotoscoping animation is so lovely that it’s self-justifying-I had so much fun looking at it that I don’t care if it serves any purpose-but its main purpose is to establish a tone of whimsy. Conspiracy, betrayals, double crosses, and brains may rot, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a good time. The animation puts the movie somewhere closer to “The Simpsons,” and like “The Simpsons,” “Scanner” is a light-hearted confection that’s never stupid. The animation also enhances the aura of paranoia the characters get from all the hallucinogens available in their fascist police state. There’s a brilliant interlude in which a malfunctioning car leads the three doped-out losers to think that their home is under siege.
“A Scanner Darkly” has lots of talking, but most of it is meant to be noisy, confusing jibberish. This, combined with the striking visuals and the labyrinthine logic Robert Downey Jr. applies to even the simplest situations, makes us feel like we’re the stoned ones who can’t quite focus on what’s happening. The animation also allows for exaggerated, more abstracted performances, especially from Downey. Yes, it’s acting through a filter, but last time I checked, Buster Keaton always acted through two “filters” (absence of sound and color) and frequently a third (extreme long shots). Based on a story by Philip K. Dick, the movie is written and directed by Austin slacker Richard Linklater (“Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset”), who, unlike Kevin Smith, is actually taking some steps outside his typical metier. As always, he specializes in showing the interaction of friends, and how we have “main” and “tertiary” friend groups; existing in that tertiary realm for our three heroes is the girlfriend (Winona Ryder) and a fun-fun-fun supporting performance from Rory Cochrane (“Love and a .45”) as the biggest stoner of them all.
Less successful, I thought, is “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.” I like what it wants to do and I wanted to like it, but it’s like a perpetual motion machine. Every maguffin just leads to three more maguffins, all of which need to be fought over and dropped and left somewhere precarious. Every character has a brother-sister-father-lover for whom he’ll sacrifice everything, everyone can doublecross everyone else, every escape leads to a recapture four minutes later. Guards are always being knocked out and someone’s always stowing away. “Pirates” is plotted like an old episode of “Dr. Who,” all endless running-screaming-noise-violence. I got frustrated after a while. Things are always happening but nothing is ever ACCOMPLISHED! “Did we kill the monster?” Of course not, because that might mean actually moving forward!
The production design is lovely, especially when it comes to the damned crew and its submersible galleon. Davy Jones’s sailors strike a mad bargain to live an extra hundred years by serving in his crew; as the years go by they gradually turn into barnacle-encrusted fish creatures indistinguishable from their barnacle-encrusted ship. Everything has the glossy CG fakeness that has permanently permeated the multiplex; you can never be sure any two people who aren’t kissing are actually being filmed on the same continent.
As the tentacle-faced Davy Jones and the foppish Captain Jack, Bill Nighy and Johnny Depp are great-most everyone who needs to be good is-but eventually everyone gets lost amidst so much story. There are some nice Rube Goldberg/Buster Keaton moments that are amusing when they don’t feel forced. I won’t deny the ingenuity it takes to get a three-way swordfight on a rolling waterwheel. But you wish people other than red shirts would get killed just so that things would get simpler, just so we could get somewhere. But even that doesn’t help, because no who dies-and I mean no one-can stay dead. I suppose “Pirates 2” is very much like the theme park ride: a few good minutes after waiting too long in line. It’s another instance of TV invading the movies: if it’s okay for TV shows to end in the same place every week, proving nothing except that these characters are still exactly who we thought they were last week, or to spend forty-five minutes to get to the three-minute nugget of useful information, then why can’t a movie do the same thing?
Another movie that goes nowhere is “Nacho Libre,” director Jared Hess’s solidly okay follow-up to his surprise hit “Napoleon Dynamite.” Again, very little is accomplished, and not in the good art movie kind of way. There’s a setup-monastic brother/friar/father by day (the movie never makes up its mind), lucha libre wrestler by night-then we’re stuck in a loop: he fights, he loses, he tries something new, he fights, he loses, he tries something new. The movie combines the typical repetitive stand-up comic/“Saturday Night Live” movie structure (penned by “School of Rock’s” Mike White) with Hess’s very off-kilter, long-shot direction. Either it’s a bad fit or the structure of skits strung together just sucked to begin with.
If you remember “Zorro the Gay Blade,” “Nacho Libre” has some of the same fun poking fun at the Hollywood convention of having characters who would be speaking Spanish speaking English with outrageous accents and ridiculous mispronunciations. As our chubby man of the cloth, Jack Black gets in some good moments talking about shiny shoes and stretchy pants. The surprise baptism he gives to his mangled-tooth sidekick (Hecter Jimenez) is pretty funny (and canonically binding, I think). He lusts after Sister Encarnacion (Ana de la Reguera), who looks like Penelope Cruz with the rough edges smoothed out, and the love letter he writes her (and narrates for her) is a thing of beauty. “Nacho Libre” is surprisingly well-photographed and features an entertainingly goofy soundtrack by Beck Hanson and Danny Elfman. I admire that there’s an underlying sweetness to the entire affair: Black’s friar is going through it all to get money for the “childrens” at his orphanage.
The go-cart bit is also probably one of the two scenes in “Clerks II” that Smith actually directs with any pizzazz. The two dolts whip around corners with wind on their grinning faces. The other bit is a confrontation between the two friends in which Smith circles them again and again, between the shadows of the fastfood restaurant and the overexposed sky. Smith still really can’t do much besides simply frame a shot, which served him just fine in the original “Clerks.” With its security camera look, “Clerks” is a sentimental favorite of mine, although I’d have to watch it again to decide if it’s a masterpiece or merely a near-masterpiece. It’s still Smith’s best movie (and “Dogma” is his most adventurous), but we’ve sort of given up on Smith ever moving on to anything new. “Clerks II” seems to be his defense of that unwillingness to expand his repertoire. Everyone in “Clerks” spouts nonstop obscenities, which was funny because it was true, but with “Clerks 2” some of the obscenities feel as unnatural as the absence of obscenities in movies before “Clerks.”
“A Scanner Darkly” is another film about not getting things done. Like “The Big Lebowski,” there are plots and crimes afoot, but its protagonists are a little too zonked to really stay focused. It’s a flawed film but a fun one, equal parts sci-fi thriller and junkie comedy, with stoned housemates Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrellson, and Robert Downey Jr. in place of Walter, Donnie, and The Dude. In a way the hand-drawn look of the rotoscoping animation is so lovely that it’s self-justifying-I had so much fun looking at it that I don’t care if it serves any purpose-but its main purpose is to establish a tone of whimsy. Conspiracy, betrayals, double crosses, and brains may rot, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a good time. The animation puts the movie somewhere closer to “The Simpsons,” and like “The Simpsons,” “Scanner” is a light-hearted confection that’s never stupid. The animation also enhances the aura of paranoia the characters get from all the hallucinogens available in their fascist police state. There’s a brilliant interlude in which a malfunctioning car leads the three doped-out losers to think that their home is under siege.
“A Scanner Darkly” has lots of talking, but most of it is meant to be noisy, confusing jibberish. This, combined with the striking visuals and the labyrinthine logic Robert Downey Jr. applies to even the simplest situations, makes us feel like we’re the stoned ones who can’t quite focus on what’s happening. The animation also allows for exaggerated, more abstracted performances, especially from Downey. Yes, it’s acting through a filter, but last time I checked, Buster Keaton always acted through two “filters” (absence of sound and color) and frequently a third (extreme long shots). Based on a story by Philip K. Dick, the movie is written and directed by Austin slacker Richard Linklater (“Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset”), who, unlike Kevin Smith, is actually taking some steps outside his typical metier. As always, he specializes in showing the interaction of friends, and how we have “main” and “tertiary” friend groups; existing in that tertiary realm for our three heroes is the girlfriend (Winona Ryder) and a fun-fun-fun supporting performance from Rory Cochrane (“Love and a .45”) as the biggest stoner of them all.
Less successful, I thought, is “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.” I like what it wants to do and I wanted to like it, but it’s like a perpetual motion machine. Every maguffin just leads to three more maguffins, all of which need to be fought over and dropped and left somewhere precarious. Every character has a brother-sister-father-lover for whom he’ll sacrifice everything, everyone can doublecross everyone else, every escape leads to a recapture four minutes later. Guards are always being knocked out and someone’s always stowing away. “Pirates” is plotted like an old episode of “Dr. Who,” all endless running-screaming-noise-violence. I got frustrated after a while. Things are always happening but nothing is ever ACCOMPLISHED! “Did we kill the monster?” Of course not, because that might mean actually moving forward!
The production design is lovely, especially when it comes to the damned crew and its submersible galleon. Davy Jones’s sailors strike a mad bargain to live an extra hundred years by serving in his crew; as the years go by they gradually turn into barnacle-encrusted fish creatures indistinguishable from their barnacle-encrusted ship. Everything has the glossy CG fakeness that has permanently permeated the multiplex; you can never be sure any two people who aren’t kissing are actually being filmed on the same continent.
As the tentacle-faced Davy Jones and the foppish Captain Jack, Bill Nighy and Johnny Depp are great-most everyone who needs to be good is-but eventually everyone gets lost amidst so much story. There are some nice Rube Goldberg/Buster Keaton moments that are amusing when they don’t feel forced. I won’t deny the ingenuity it takes to get a three-way swordfight on a rolling waterwheel. But you wish people other than red shirts would get killed just so that things would get simpler, just so we could get somewhere. But even that doesn’t help, because no who dies-and I mean no one-can stay dead. I suppose “Pirates 2” is very much like the theme park ride: a few good minutes after waiting too long in line. It’s another instance of TV invading the movies: if it’s okay for TV shows to end in the same place every week, proving nothing except that these characters are still exactly who we thought they were last week, or to spend forty-five minutes to get to the three-minute nugget of useful information, then why can’t a movie do the same thing?
Another movie that goes nowhere is “Nacho Libre,” director Jared Hess’s solidly okay follow-up to his surprise hit “Napoleon Dynamite.” Again, very little is accomplished, and not in the good art movie kind of way. There’s a setup-monastic brother/friar/father by day (the movie never makes up its mind), lucha libre wrestler by night-then we’re stuck in a loop: he fights, he loses, he tries something new, he fights, he loses, he tries something new. The movie combines the typical repetitive stand-up comic/“Saturday Night Live” movie structure (penned by “School of Rock’s” Mike White) with Hess’s very off-kilter, long-shot direction. Either it’s a bad fit or the structure of skits strung together just sucked to begin with.
If you remember “Zorro the Gay Blade,” “Nacho Libre” has some of the same fun poking fun at the Hollywood convention of having characters who would be speaking Spanish speaking English with outrageous accents and ridiculous mispronunciations. As our chubby man of the cloth, Jack Black gets in some good moments talking about shiny shoes and stretchy pants. The surprise baptism he gives to his mangled-tooth sidekick (Hecter Jimenez) is pretty funny (and canonically binding, I think). He lusts after Sister Encarnacion (Ana de la Reguera), who looks like Penelope Cruz with the rough edges smoothed out, and the love letter he writes her (and narrates for her) is a thing of beauty. “Nacho Libre” is surprisingly well-photographed and features an entertainingly goofy soundtrack by Beck Hanson and Danny Elfman. I admire that there’s an underlying sweetness to the entire affair: Black’s friar is going through it all to get money for the “childrens” at his orphanage.