Safety Not Guaranteed is an excellent movie, sharp and funny and wrestling with stuff beyond just a goofy meme. It was a really pleasant surprise, made more surprising since I hadn’t seen any previews for it or heard much about it beyond some mild Sundance buzz.
One note, however: Jake Johnson is funny and cute, and a good comic presence if not much of an actor (honest question: what comedians right now are actually good actors?). In the still above, he’s making that Nick Miller-on-The New Girl smelled something bad face and if he keeps doing that, it’s gonna freeze. Mark Duplass, on the other hand, let it be known: he’s super hot. I’ve interviewed him, I’ve been impressed by how hot and charming and smart he is and it all comes out in schlub on screen, er, mostly in films I have little to no desire to see.
The other thing that was amusing was that in a lot of ways, Safety Not Guaranteed was like the really good version of Another Earth, the horrible sci-fi romance from last year. Despite the fact that Brit Marling is basically a star who looks like an ethereal Princess Buttercup and gives great interview (unlike Aubrey Plaza), Another Earth just took an interesting premise and patched it onto an inert story about grief, and it was padded-out-to-be-a-feature-length with gratuitous shots of Brit Marling walking and closeups of Brit Marling’s face.
But both Safety Not Guaranteed and Another Earth took young women wrestling with some sort of sadness, stuck them in the lives of these shabby, crazy men hiding out from the world, and they find a sort of romance blossoming with the question of time travel and regrets framing everything or the idea of another earth in space with another you. It’s an okay formula, very good for making a cheap film and aiming it at festivals, but Safety Not Guaranteed was really impeccably written in all aspects, and that made it a great movie, not just another piece of wonky indie stuff that serves as a calling card.
I'm Adam and I'm Adamant About Living Large
Adam Yauch’s death is a massive bummer. Partially because it was cancer, something that has been wreaking havoc on my life, month after month; and just hearing about his cancer diagnosis, it didn’t sound dire, it really didn’t. (My guess is that it was too close to the lymph nodes? But what do I know.) Cancer sucks. It’s not an automatic death sentence, but it definitely is a reminder of the absolute game of chance that rules everybody’s life. Cancer can strike, kill, or be dealt with and how your body responds to it… it’s just a roll of the dice. Which is really hard.
There’s a tendency to talk about disease like “oh, they did X and Y. This is how they sinned, they deserved it.” You talk about it that way because it’s comforting, because then you won’t get a disease. It’s a spell to protect you for the future, but when it comes to cancer, nothing rational applies. All the kale in the world may help, or it may not.
I think you could argue that the Beastie Boys was the undeniable band of my generation, and to know that they won’t be Beastie Grumpy Old Men hits me in the heart. MCA always seemed like the older brother, reminding me of my cousins who had the wisdom and slightly scary affect of age, who were undeniably men with scruff, men who had sex.
I spent three weeks in Stockholm as a teenager, and I made my parents tote a copy of Hello Nasty abroad with them when they met up with me in the last week. I used Yauch’s Buddhism as a lure - “Mom, he’s Buddhist like you and he raps about it! Don’t you want me to be listening to this music?” I had to hang out with an Swedish semi-relative of mine, and we got through that mutual teenage awkwardness when he taped a Beastie Boys interview for me, and we watched it together. The Beastie Boys all made fun of the Swedish interviewer. I laughed a little bit harder than Marcus.
When I interviewed Zoe Kazan for The Exploding Girl, I got to go to the Oscilloscope offices. It was thrilling. I saw some Beasties prizes, Moon Men and Grammys, I thought about when the Beasties used their gigantic platform to talk about respecting women and how exciting that recognition was. I saw an older, still super-cute Adam Horowitz, and he looked like my dude and I was like, sweet. (Ironically, Adam Horowitz and Kathleen Hanna got married for health insurance, which is a situation I understand.) Apparently my VHS of the best of the Beastie Boys videos imprinted on me at a young age.
But I got to talk to The Exploding Girl’s director, Bradley Rust Grey, in Adam Yauch’s office. There were mandalas on the walls. Tokens of the fact that he was a serious Buddhist. The energy in the room was a good place. I felt safe. It reminded me of my mom’s math classroom in high school, where she had put quotes by Rumi and about mindfulness on the walls.
The Beastie Boys defined cool for me when I was a teenager. When they liked something, it was probably worthy. I listened to Ben Lee because of them, and I liked it. They were good tastemakers, and I think part of the reason I veered towards cultural journalism was because I wanted to share that same thrill of discovery of something new, some great way of looking at the world through art or film or whatever. 
What Adam Yauch did with Oscilloscope wasn’t unexpected, considering what good taste the Beasties had. But he started a film company around 2008 - when jumping into the fray was pitting yourself as Joan of Arc against the armies - and did a good job of buying up great documentaries and challenging films (The Messenger is wonderful, Oren Moverman is a genius) and some of them even got Oscar nominations. Contextually, studios were killing their indie divisions at the same time and movies would play film festivals and just go off into oblivion. Oscilloscope was very necessary. It still is very necessary. It’s a barometer of a bunch of engaged people with fantastic taste, which is a very good part of Adam Yauch’s legacy.
“You began, spectacularly enough, with the excellent “Bottle Rocket”, a film we consider to be your finest work to date. No doubt others would agree that the striking originality of your premise and vision was most effective in this seminal work. Subsequent films - “Rushmore”, “The Royal Tenenbaums”, “The Life Aquatic” - have been good fun but somewhat disappointing - perhaps increasingly so. These follow-ups have all concerned themselves with the theme we like to call “the enervated family of origin"©, from which springs diverse subplots also largely concerned with the failure to fulfill early promise. Again, each film increasingly relies on eccentric visual detail, period wardrobe, idiosyncratic and overwrought set design, and music supervision that leans heavily on somewhat obscure 60’s "British Invasion” tracks a-jangle with twelve-string guitars, harpsichords and mandolins. The company of players, while excellent, retains pretty much the same tone and function from film to film. Indeed, you must be aware that your career as an auteur is mirrored in the lives of your beloved characters as they struggle in vain to duplicate early glories.”
Armando Iannucci is a comedy genius
I really don’t say that lightly. Peter Cook’s probably smiling down on him.
I made a list for GQ about 10 of the best insults to come out of Iannucci’s oeuvre, which includes The Thick Of It, In The Loop*, The Day Today, and I’m Alan Partridge. I didn’t know he had his own show on the BBC, too. He’s very Scottish!
*Inside baseball, but it’s a shame In The Loop was released by the teensy IFC. Stupid economy! If a Fox Searchlight had got their hands on it, it would’ve gotten the Oscar noms it deserved, not just a token Best Screenplay. Arguably one of the best political satires ever.
Click on this and laugh in the most not safe for work way possible.
Remember when Oscar nominee Melissa McCarthy had a plotline on an episode of Gilmore Girls that involved her character, Sookie St. James, getting super mad at Norman Mailer?
"I'm here to make a movie. I'm not here to make friends." - David Fincher on his career
[What killed this piece? The fact that the US-remake Dragon Tattoo trailer leaked that very weekend in the States. But I had a glorious 24 hours where I was one of the first people who saw the trailer! Note: Fincher superfans in Sweden all resembled Meatloaf in Fight Club, which was odd.]
David Fincher took a break from day 133 of shooting on his American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to make an appearance at the Stockholm Film Insitute’s “Actors Studio” at the Cinemateket on Friday, May 27th, where he talked about his directing career to an audience of scruffy Swedes with movie dreams. Showing flashes of self-deprecation and his famous steely reputation, he was funny and frank, whether talking about the failure of his debut feature, or his advice to today’s aspiring filmmakers (“write a script and make a film, this is an interesting enough generation with no excuses”), along with tantalizing hints about his upcoming version of Stieg Larsson’s best-seller. On directing: “It’s a circus, it takes 90 people at least. You have to understand what people are going to be best responsible for managing this entity, otherwise you’ll just be pissed off and irritated, which I am all the time anyways. I’m just now getting what storytelling is, the thing that you’re going there to catch, lightning in a bottle. It’s great to have a technical background and to know the physics so you can get to the thing that’s really important - the moment that people surprise you. I tell people, I’m selling immortality. If we do this and do it well, it will last forever.”
The session ended with the red band teaser trailer for Dragon Tattoo on the big screen, the sounds of Led Zepplin’s “Immigrant Song,” with vocals by Karen O, booming, quick cuts of Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara as the leads - shots that were pointedly recognizable from the original, revealing nothing, and the tagline was wicked, classic Fincher: “The feel bad movie of Christmas.”
On Aliens 3: “I was lucky enough - my first movie stunk. For my second movie, I siezed control. You have to find the thing you will kill to make and make it a certain way. I’m here to make a movie. I’m not here to make friends. But you can’t say that the first time, because it’s kind of douchey.”
On Seven: “The violence of Seven is psychological, which is part of what I thought was powerful about the script. It was far more horrible because it exists in this Pandora’s Box of the imagination. You remember it differently from what you see.”
On Fight Club: “When I first read Chuck Palahniuk’s book, I couldn’t stop laughing. It was so sick and funny at the same time. I embraced it immediately.” While the failure of the film in the theaters was a matter of timing (too close to the Columbine shootings), “it sold 13 or 14 million DVDs. It paid for itself five times over on DVD.”
On The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: “Another movie about death. I loved the metaphor. If you could go in the other direction - beauty, vitality, youth - when you know what to do with it, chronological events conspire to bring you regret, to bring you loss.”
On Dragon Tattoo: “We found a place [on location] three weeks ago that was like ‘Yes, this is why we’re shooting in Stockholm. The cobblestone streets… [The Swedish original] is a really handsome thriller with a towering performance by the girl. Hard to follow.”
Let me program your movie house
We would watch so many great films!
Midnight: 1930s screwball perfection, written by your good friend Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond, starring Claudette Colbert and a hot young Don Ameche.
Breaking Away: Is it the best coming-of-age movie of all time? (And hellooo, 1970s Dennis Quaid!)
Whip It and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. Obviously a costume party theme.
Rushmore and All the Real Girls, because the difference between Wes Anderson when he had his man, Owen Wilson and David Gordon Green in the same sitch, with Paul Schneider (would switch Aziz Ansari out for you back on Parks and Recreation in a HEARTBEAT) makes me think that directors need their muses.
Mad Men week where we watch all the movies cited/that clearly have an influence on the series. The Best of Everything. The Apartment. The Swimmer. Etc. What would Don Draper watch?
Breaking Bad on the Big Screen, because it would be amazing. “One Minute,” in particular. And then with Coen Brothers movies and The Searchers and all sorts of stuff.
Bedazzled with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
Wim Wenders day with Paris, Texas, and Wings of Desire. My favorite theater in Cambridge used to do a semi-annual Wings of Desire showing around Christmastime and it was incredible.
In the Loop, Keane, New Waterford Girl, Reprise, Reality Bites, Something Wild, Blue Valentine, Blue Velvet, Medicine for Melancholy, Friday Night, Beau Travail, Amelie, Paul Robeson week, amazing stunts in movies week, let’s watch a documentary and talk about it and then take action week (small screen, generally, unless you make it pretty, documentarians!), etc. etc. etc., forever. Great movies about weddings and country houses week. So many potential themes.
[Related: Elvis Mitchell, the teflon man, remember when I used to see you on the Harvard campus all the time? Pretty sure you lived on my block. We would nod hello to each other. (Film Independent, keep this in mind, I would totally be his assistant. And I’m wildly reliable.)]
How much fun would we have? So much fun! Let’s build a film community!