Image

Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Daily Archives: May 14, 2008

Larry Miller Waxes Nostalgic

A specialized slinger of sardonic asides, and a multi-hyphenate talent in the truest sense, Larry Miller is one of “those guys” — a familiar face whom audiences recognize from other movies, and lean forward in pleasant anticipation of, yet might not be able to immediately place. Miller’s latest acting turn comes in the direct-to-DVD comedy Senior Skip Day, where he plays a principal with a near-sociopathic dedication to killing the buzz of his carefree students. The grateful and gracious Miller took some time recently to talk about that movie, as well as his other projects, and the conversation is excerpted below.

Brent Simon: Hi Larry, I appreciate your time. I know you’ve had a busy week.

Larry Miller: Well thank you, but don’t be silly, we’re in each other’s lives here. I’m lucky because I’ve had a couple jobs come in, and I work pretty steadily.

BS: I believe I first interviewed you for 1999’s Pros & Cons, which you wrote. Is that something you see yourself returning to, screenwriting? Because I think you have a distinctive comedic persona, and I imagine a lot of times you’re cast for that, but do you have the desire to strike out and create something new for yourself, all your own?

LM: Absolutely, that was the first thing I wrote! First of all, writing is a big part of my life. When I just got started I said I want to be a writer or an actor or a comic, and it’s unbelievable, that’s what I am. There are a thousand things you don’t get, but a bunch of things you do get. And as far as writing goes, I never left it. I have a book out now called Spoiled Rotten America, which is a bunch of essays, and I love that. I’ve written many, many scripts since, and some TV shows, and some get made and some don’t. And right now I’m doing more stand-up, so I have a chance to write more things for that and go back out on the road. It suddenly hit me after years that I’ve been very lucky as an actor and a writer, but I didn’t want to stop being a comic. And I mean that in the sense of not theaters or corporate jobs, but being a real comic, to me anyway, in two, three, 500-seat clubs, and really knocking it out there. So I’ve always been writing, and I couldn’t pick one over the other. If you asked me if it was more rewarding to write and sell a script, and see it get made… it’s not more rewarding where it counts, meaning in the head and the heart.

BS: That always struck me as among the laziest questions from a lot of journalists — what do you prefer, theater or movies, or TV or film, etcetera? Because the truth is, of course, if you’re a creative-minded person then you enjoy the variety of that kind of life.

LM: Boy, I tell you what, pal, exactly. I mean, come on, look at all these things. I can’t understand how people don’t get up everyday, if they have a chance to make something creative, not skipping around giggling. I know sometimes people like to have a bleak, empty attitude about life, but there’s a great quote of Emerson’s — “give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors insignificant.” And I think that’s fantastic. I mean, health and a day! Anyone who’s looking to beat that is I think missing life.

BS: As a quick interjection, I had a friend in college and we were doing peer critiques of things we’d written, and I’ll always remember that he read something I wrote and said, “You met some good writing that day,” which I thought was so striking and perfectly descriptive because when you’re writing that’s all you’re trying to do — you’re trying to do it to the best of your ability, to advance this thought or argument.

LM: Sure. And the phrase that day is very important. The world is brand new every single day! If I come home tonight and everyone’s well, and I can have a drink with my wife, what’s better than that? Would we be happier if we had a 50-room house? You’d have to be a lunatic to need that.

BS: Well, on to Senior Skip Day. Your character, Principal Dickwalder, is sort of an Ed Rooney-type character. He is driven to inflict misery, isn’t he?

LM: And in a way, aren’t we all? You know what was so much fun about that was that — very early in the process, with all these people I loved working with — I had an idea, and we just ran with it. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a great movie, and it’s going to be great for a long time. But I said, and this is what we wound up doing, that Ed Rooney gets weaker and is destroyed more as the movie goes on. Every bad thing that happens to him knocks his spirit apart until at the end he’s just sitting on that bus like, “I can’t take it, I just can’t take it.” He’s destroyed physically and emotionally. And I said, “Why don’t we take this guy and go the exact opposite direction with him? That every bad thing that happens to him makes him break out of this reptilian shell into some kind of dark criminal lord.” Each time he gets beaten up he gets stronger and more horrifying in a way. So when the guy beats him up on his lawn, I kill him. That was the idea, and it was really neat to put it in place and have everyone creatively say, “Yeah, let’s do that!” Even though it’s not a high-budget movie, and there’s certain shots you can’t get, to get there and create it and get as much of it as you can out there is pretty fun.

BS: You’ve played principals and college deans a number of times. Do you think there’s something about you that lends itself to these authority figures?

LM: Hey, fine with me, I guess John Wayne didn’t just play one sheriff. You know what I mean. That’s obviously reaching pretty high, but you know what — CIA guy, head of a corporation… that’s part of what’s worked out for me, and that’s fine. I’m not necessarily going to be up for the remake of James Bond. You know when you see a movie as a kid you think you’d like to be the hero, but you never know in life. There’s a friend of mine, Richard Jenkins, who’s just the lead in a movie now (The Visitor) that’s getting a lot of attention, so you never know where your chance to really bring yourself out is really going to come from. But I have that stand-up too. And if I worked a ton more as an actor, and it was all in comedy, and it was all being a principal or an annoying or a corrupt this-or-that, I’d still have a chance to do these things I love.

BS: Was your own high school principal a memorable character in any way?
LM: No, like most folks, and like you and me too, by the way, he was just a decent enough man who’s trying to get by and figure out what life is all about. We had an attendance officer… what was his name? Oh, Mr. Sykes! It’s like a name out of Dickens. He was fearsome! And the weird thing was that at that point, in the 1970s, that was actually something kids were scared of. Today you wouldn’t be scared, because he never actually did anything to you. But just to get called into Mr. Sykes’ office was gigantic. Tough kids who were in fistfights a lot would sit there with their knees shaking.

BS: When did the performance or creative bug strike? Was it a love of comedy or film that you got into as a consumer of that stuff, or was it something early on that you remember very much more feeling like, “Oh, I want to do that for a living”?

LM: No, I think you hit it right on the head with the word consumer, and I think that’s a great word, by the way, because that’s what we are. I think we misuse the word entertainment a lot, because it’s a great and honorable word — even drama entertains, it’s not that things are high art or low art. And I think being a consumer is true. So when you’re 4 years old, and 7, 9, and then 14, and the first time you see Casablanca on TV and you think it’s first fantastic, to when cartoons really thrill you, and sitcoms are great, and then you start listening to music on the radio, you see a play — you absorb all this stuff in the world. I never thought about doing it when I was young, I just thought it’s great that this stuff is around. In college I was a music major, but I was still just being with my friends and drinking beer. And then, when I got out of college, I thought, “Well, I guess I’ll have to think of something.” And that was when I really first thought of being an actor and a writer and a comic. And look at this! It’s what I am. I feel like the luckiest guy on the face of the Earth. Though I think the last one to say that was Lou Gehrig.

BS: Right before he went, God bless him. How long was the shoot for Senior Skip Day?

LM: I think it was 25 days, which is not long. You’re chasing the day every day, but that’s fun in a way. That’s a kind of storytelling. Sometimes, gigantic movies have a ga-jillion dollars for their budget, and they’re off for seven months in Calgary, shooting this and that. But you know this too — sometimes those movies get over-shot, over-directed, over-acted and over-produced, over-wardrobed, over-everything. So with this, is it the smoothest, most fully shot thing in history? No, but we got a lot of good stuff in there. People can see this movie and say to themselves after an hour and a half, “You know what, I had a lot of laughs there.” And that’s not a small thing. I’m very pleased with this thing.

BS: So, before they get you out of here I wanted to ask you about Blonde Ambition, and specifically a line that caught my attention: “That horsey grin insults us both,” your character says at one point. “And what’s with those teeth? They’re too white,
like an artist’s rendering of teeth.” That’s all yours, right?

LM: That’s mine. That’s another one that didn’t get released, I think, but it was a good movie. And there are people I love in that… Penelope Ann Miller, Penny Marshall. And by the way, let me tell you something about Jessica Simpson — she was a good sport every day and a good pro. She was there every day, and she really dug Scot Marshall, the director. She was up for everything.

For more on Miller’s writings and comedy appearances, visit his web site by clicking here.

What’s Been Hollywood’s Response to the Iraq War?

Ross Douthat (“Doubt That?”) assays the film industry’s response to the Iraq War, in a piece for The Atlantic entitled “The Return of the Paranoid Style.” There’s a lot of labyrinthine, sludgy generational horse-trading to go along with the illuminating bits of back story (remembrances of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s famous remark that the events of Sept. 11 had
slain irony, and conservative columnist Peggy
Noonan’s prediction that the attacks would resurrect the spirit of John
Wayne). All in all, though, I wouldn’t call this modern, conflicted style an exercise in paranoia; I’d dub it an exploration of heartier shades of grey. Much more interesting than most of the piece is the mostly unstated-until-the-end assertion that the response of the Bush Administration to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 has likely colored a certain brand of mainstream Hollywood genre cinema far more greatly and deeply than terrorism in general, or the war in Iraq. This is the real hypothesis worth exploring, and subjecting to scientific method.

Strange Wilderness

To say that Strange Wilderness offers up no laughs whatsoever is an overstatement, of course. But not much of one. Part road movie, part stoner comedy, part gross-out set-piece collection of loosely strung-together and half-reasoned sketch ideas, the movie by and large wastes the talents of a game ensemble, and stands ready to slip into lasting cinematic anonymity except as the answer to the following trivia question: In what film does Steve Zahn find his member latched onto by a giant, angry, animatronic turkey?

Zahn stars as Peter Gaulke, the somewhat dimwitted host of a PBS nature show that he inherited from from his now deceased father. Faced with cancellation and desperate to stay on the air, Peter hatches a plan to purchase a map purporting to show the location of Bigfoot from Bill Calhoun (Joe Don Baker), a friend of his dad’s, and squeeze out several whatever-we-find-along-the-way episodes of his show en route to South America. Peter’s crew of misfits includes serious stoner Junior (Justin Long), tubby nutjob Cooker (Jonah Hill), idiotic soundman Fred (Allen Covert), newly hired animal trainer Whitaker (Kevin Heffernan), map master Cheryl (Ashley Scott) and driver Danny (Peter Dante).

Along the way, Peter and his crew discover themselves in a race with rival TV animal show personality Sky Pierson (Harry Hamlin), so they enlist the assistance of expert tracker Gus Hayden (Robert Patrick), a friend of Bill’s. Nutty misadventures ensue, involving shark attacks, angry gang-bangers with low-riders, stolen nitrous oxide, killer pygmies and guys named Dick. Jeff Garlin and Ernest Borgnine also figure into the proceedings.

The penile humor factor here is high; a bit involving Patrick’s mangled junk joins the aforementioned turkey bit, which may be the surreal high of the movie. There are also increasingly tedious voiceover narrations of nature footage, seemingly designed to pad out the movie’s already slim 84-minute running time. So things are pitched at a lowbrow degree — that’s fine. A big part of
the problem, though, is that the movie never decides on a fixed, firm point-of-view for the character of Peter; sometimes he’s smarter than his charges, other times he recedes into the background, letting their stupid antics or decisions decide the course of events.

Strange Wilderness (which for a while had the brilliant spec title of of The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang) is actually scripted by Peter Gaulke (yes, the name of Zahn’s character) and director Fred Wolf (Without a Paddle, Joe Dirt), who waste a decent enough concept (or at least backdrop for a comedic story) on jokes and set-ups that are dispiritingly obvious. Wolf, meanwhile, doesn’t elicit any consistent tone; sometimes his actors wildly overact (Hill affects a nutty accent, to wearying effect), sometimes they play a scene fairly straightforward. That the movie just ends by letting its last scene unwind into a giggly blooper says everything one needs to know about the care and thought put into this flick. “Stupid” is quite fine in comedy, as long as it’s thought through, and presented consistently, establishing the parameters of a silly world (as in, say, Billy Madison). Strange Wilderness doesn’t do that, though. It’s dumb and lazy, a tiring combination, especially since there’s enough talent here to make the movie a much, much better thing.

Putting an awful lot of lipstick on this pig, the DVD release of Strange Wilderness comes with a solid slate of bonus material, at least quantitatively. Housed in a regular Amray case with snap-shut hinges, the DVD is presented in 16×9 widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of the movie’s original theatrical presentation. Audio comes in Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound tracks in both English and Spanish, with optional subtitles in each of those languages, as well as French. A featurette billed as “Cooker’s Song” is actually five-minute-45-second extended take of a musical sequence with Hill and Long, including long lead-in before filming begins. A seven-minute bit on the movie’s turkey sequence starts out with a look at the effects work involved, but then just spends its last four minutes or so loitering between takes, with Hill and Long goofing around. There’s also a 21-minute “Reel Comedy” episode with Zahn, hosted by Lisa Arch. The high point probably lies in some of the movie’s 13 deleted scenes, running 22 minutes in total; many of these feature improvisations that are much funnier than what’s in the movie, and there’s even a scene where Long (who gets his eyelids tattooed in one bit in the movie, doted on in a six-minute featurette/extended rehearsal sequence) reveals fake boob tattoos as well — an attempt to woo back his girlfriend after she left him for another woman, he explains. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B- (Disc)

President Bush Gives Up Golf for Troops?

In a White House interview with Politico and Yahoo News — a president’s first for an online audience — George Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: he has given up golf. “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the
commander in chief playing golf,” the president said. “I feel I owe it to the
families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think
playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” So… umm, yeah. There’s that. I guess he must have seen the clip of him from Fahrenheit 9/11, also lampooned in Fun with Dick and Jane. Or maybe he read about those in a briefing.

Secrets of the Parthenon

For more than 2,500 years, the Parthenon has been shot at and set on fire by marauders, looted for its sculptures, rocked
by earthquakes, weathered by wind and disfigured by misguided
attempts at restoration. Now, a team of architects and engineers is investigating
the many mysteries of this icon of Western civilization: How did the
ancient Greeks design and build their masterpiece so quickly — in a
span of just eight years? And how did they achieve such precision and
perfection without modern tools and architectural aids that we take for
granted today, such as comprehensive plans or drawings?

An hour-long NOVA special directed and produced by Gary Glassman, Secrets of the Parthenon delves into the 20-ton marble jewel of the Acropolis, a 70,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with virtually no right angles or straight lines. With unprecedented access to the Greek government’s decades-long, $100 million restoration project, this documentary aims to take viewers back in time and inside the minds of the ancient Greeks as they created their most enduring architectural miracle, a publicly endorsed monument to democracy, the goddess Athena and Greek glory in general. While the 46-column Parthenon may be “just” a building, it has inspired the architecture of dozens of state and government structures around the world, from the French Parliament to the United States’ Supreme Court, and it’s almost as much for this reason as its subtle, illusory lines that it’s notable.

As with many academic short-form titles, Secrets of the Parthenon feels it necessary to repeat its central query and thesis over and over, but it eventually gets to the point. Using interviews with Charalambos Bouras, the restoration project’s president, as well as University of Florida professor Barbara Barletta and University of Oregon professor Jeffrey Hurwit, the movie shows Greek master craftsmen struggling with 10-ton blocks of marble (think of some of their work as carefully constructing a huge cap for your back molar) and striving to rediscover the lost tools and techniques of their ancestors. It also elucidates the aesthetic considerations that informed the structure’s construction, during the reign of Pericles. Secrets of the Parthenon is perhaps most interesting, however, in its last third, when it delves into the competing systems of measurements (Doric, Common and Ionic) that had to be juggled while using masonists from all over different parts of Greece. It’s math, sure, and wonkish at that, but still pretty fascinating.

Housed in a regular Amray case, the hour-long Secrets of the Parthenon is presented in 16×9 anamorphic widescreen, and comes with scene selection, closed captions for the hearing impaired and video descriptions for the visually impaired. Apart from downloadable materials for educators, though, there are no supplemental special features, which is a major bummer for the average consumer perhaps looking for a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, DVD diversion for their kids. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) D (Disc)

Co-Directors Talk About Meeting Resistance

Meeting Resistance, a documentary releasing May 20 from First Run Features, reveals a wholly different narrative about the Iraq War than the one portrayed by many in the mainstream news. In the only-slightly-redacted first-person-plural statement below, co-directors Molly Bingham and Steve Connors talk about their movie, which will be reviewed later in the month:

Meeting Resistance is about the people and make-up of the Iraqi resistance. Since it was released in theaters last fall, we have shown the film in more than 80 U.S. cities, as well as to several key military audiences. We’ve made more than 200 appearances with the film to talk about our understanding of the conflict in Iraq and take questions from the audience. When the lights come up, we are greeted with the kind of silence associated with people trying to reconcile what they thought they knew with what they now understand. We’ve come to realize that our film is delivering a paradigm shift about the Iraq conflict — one audience at a time.

There are two wars in Iraq, and Meeting Resistance explores the first war — the popularly supported resistance to occupation, which contains the majority of the organized violence that is happening in Iraq. Using primary source material, critical analysis and cross-referencing, we crafted a film that tells the story of that conflict. The second war is the civil war — an internal political struggle being waged over competing visions of Iraq’s future, of which the country’s sectarian violence is a symptom, not a cause. Meeting Resistance is a journalistic documentary, not an advocacy or polemic film. Although we did not set out to challenge the narrative of the Iraq conflict — the one that has been constructed in Washington — our reporting eventually led us to do so.

U.S. military briefings in the Green Zone during 2003 and 2004 told journalists that the violence against American troops came from “dead-enders” and “Ba’athi die-hards,” from common criminals, religious extremists, foreign fighters, and al-Qaeda — characterized as “fringe elements.” While some might fit some of these descriptions, the vast majority of those involved are citizens from the core of Iraqi society. In time, we came to see the U.S. military’s misnaming of the “enemy” as an intentional act — as a key part of their objective to control the “information battle space.” They aspire to control the perception of the enemy’s identity, and through the news media persuade the American public that these “fringe elements” of Iraqi society are the only ones who oppose the U.S. presence in Iraq. A military push (or surge) to isolate and eliminate them would accomplish a perceived “victory.”

The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq delivered to the White House in October 2003 was leaked in February 2006 by Robert Hutchings, the 2003-2005 chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Speaking in interviews, Hutchings revealed that the report said that it is composed of nationalists fighting for their country with deep roots in the society and that the U.S. military, if it remains in Iraq, will be fighting a counterinsurgency war for years to come, a conclusion that echoed what we had found in our on-the-ground reporting for Meeting Resistance.

This spring, a front-page investigation by the New York Times revealed the Pentagon’s well-oiled “briefing” system for retired military analysts who are working for TV outlets and writing op-eds in ways that reflect and amplify the U.S. government’s narrative. The reporting done by the Times underscores the critical importance the Pentagon ascribes to its efforts to control the “message,” including how it defines the enemy.

If the predominant narrative about the Iraq conflict was truly based in reality, it would involve pointing out that the majority of Iraqis want a withdrawal of all foreign forces, and that the Department of Defense’s quarterly reports to Congress, on average, show that from April 2004 to December 2007, 74 percent of significant attacks initiated by Iraqis targeted American-led coalition forces. Americans would also find out that half of registered marriages in Baghdad in 2002 were mixed marriages between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, Christian and Muslim, and many of the tribes and clans and families are, in fact, mixed between Sunni and Shia. Also, nearly all of the Arab Iraqis polled oppose dividing the country along ethnic and sectarian lines, and the vast majority demands that Iraq have a strong central government, not the decentralized powerlessness imposed by the American-influenced constitution.

It is not that these points have never been reported, but the booming voice of “disinformation” — from which the Pentagon wants the American public to view the conflict — drowns much of this information out. Ultimately, our film has helped reveal the success of the Pentagon’s strategy to obscure the real nature of the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, too many in the news media have been willing to allow that to happen. Throughout the world’s history, there have been occupations — and resistance to those occupations. Why then do Americans have such a difficult time grasping that our troops are unwelcome by the vast majority of the Iraqi population? And why has reporting by our mainstream news media generally failed to recognize and draw our attention to this central, core aspect of the violence?

For the movie’s trailer, click here. For an interview with documentarian Errol Morris, meanwhile, click here.

West Virginia Voter Doesn’t Let Truth Derail Her Prejudice

So Hillary Clinton is already — and unsurprisingly — being awarded a primary victory in West Virginia, and it’s due in no small part to voters like this, I’m sad to say: “He’s a Muslim and, you know, that has a lot to do with it. I just rather have, you know, Hillary.” Ugh. In a certain way, her ilk are worse than those who promulgate this stuff, because she chooses to believe in a vast conspiracy that reinforces her prejudice.

Twitter