Tag Archives: Napoleon Dynamite

I Could Never Be Your Woman [2007)

We get older.  It’s hard.  Our lives didn’t turn out like fairytales.  And yet, we push on.  We live.  We work.  We study.  We survive.  Oh, how much it can mean…a kind word.  A moment extra taken to be gentle.  Humble.  Respectful.  Thankful.

I didn’t know what I was getting into when I threw on this film.  I’ve sought out Saoirse Ronan films because I have been so impressed with her acting in Hanna and The Grand Budapest Hotel.  Suffice it to say, some of her lesser-known films…I never would have watched otherwise.  But it’s good.  It’s good to exit the genres and areas with which we are most comfortable.

Some of these newer films…there is a trepidation which precedes the viewing.  I wonder if I can make it past the first 10 or 15 minutes.  Let me say quite plainly:  this is a pretty damn good film.

Credit director and writer Amy Heckerling with tapping into a vein of stories which need to be told.  Likewise, Michelle Pfeiffer was just the right choice to express the marginalized stories which come to the forefront in this film.  Paul Rudd is a shockingly-good support here.

You want marginalized?  Well, this film went straight to DVD in the U.S.  That’s an insult.  I don’t care what the market research said:  that was a mistake.  Film history will vindicate these pictures which were treated thusly.

Over the hill…  40.  Women have it hard.  And so do dudes like Adam Pearl (Paul Rudd).  Teenage girls have it particularly hard.  Saoirse really does a masterful job of delineating a tough role.

I will admit:  this film made me tearful on several occasions.  Jon Lovitz…yeah, that’s the ticket.  Fred Willard…spot on.  But no, neither of those two.  It’s that look on Pfeiffer’s face when Rudd first reads in an audition.  It’s the right look.  Taking pride in your craft as a dramatist…even if you’ve been reduced to producing prepubescent pablum.

I’ve been in that chair.  A lifetime’s work for one or two lines that might be remembered by history.  I’ve been on that date.  I live that life every day.  Age.  And I’ve been the nerd.  Whoa have I been the nerd!

I’ve never lied about my age, but I know the industries where that becomes commonplace.  No, I’ve never gotten that whole lying thing down very well.  Yeah…me and Napoleon Dynamite would be best friends.  I guess that makes me Pedro…

Ah, but belief…  You can hear it in Bob Dylan’s new album Shadows in the Night.  We never stop believing.  We can’t.  We’d better not.  And Tracey Ullman is in our ear with the bad news…

You are right to be paranoid.  In general, the world is set up to get you down.  Globalizing…hah!  Perhaps generalizing?  Past aggressive.  Passed aggressive.  We hear the phrase and we assimilate into our patois.  The phrases don’t come with user’s manuals.

It’s a set-up.  I hyphenate when I please–when I’m damned good and ready.

And so I cry that I was human.  But most of all we cry for ourselves.  When the bottom falls out of your little corner of the entertainment industry.  This isn’t Los Angeles.

Yeah, I can relate.  With all of it.  Trying on pants.  Damn it.

Some people think they have me all figured out.  But mostly, they don’t think.  About me:

I don’t have a demo.  I have finished films.  Call Harry Smith from beyond the grave.  He’ll vouch for me.

Beware of the fake.  I just want to put food on the table.  The only thing that can’t be faked nowadays is food on the table.

Fuck it.  Gimme GMO.  My high horse rode off long ago.  Soft kill the shit outta me.  You’ll never know the sadness of the streets.

And for that you are poorer.  Consider it like a fine wine…or a classic foreign film.  Oops, sorry:  no corkscrew and no subtitles.

The Fonz reads Sartre…laughing.  Eat your heart out David Lynch.

You should have given him another chance.  You’re so responsible.  You threw away a heroic love.

I stayed as true as I could.  And now nobody calls.  My emails go unanswered.

Yes, the time stamp gives it away.  The BBC was 20 minutes early.  WTC 7.

Suck away.  I have moved on.  No, I’m not happy.

When Hal Blaine hits the floor tom and snare after the intro…like the world comes to a violent halt:  “Wouldn’t it be nice…”

We get older.  Mother Nature calls it creative destruction…maybe.  When the shit hits the tiara.

-PD

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Cum mi-am petrecut sfârşitul lumii [2006)

I learned early on to care for the little guys.  Or:  this film destroys me.  How I spent the end of the world…  I remember seeing this in a dingy room spending my last five dollars to have it on demand.  It is as good as I remember.  If they ever send another one of those time capsules into space…you know, the ones with music by Bach and such…they should reconsider this film as one of the most touching pieces of art humanity has ever produced.

Sometimes the little guy is a long, lanky guy…and so it is in this movie.  Andrei (Cristian Văraru) is like a Romanian Napoleon Dynamite.  But this is no comedy.  Imagine living in a country where emigration is forbidden.  That’s a big way of saying, “you can’t leave.”  No exit.

Văraru is so good in this that it is unreal.  Imagine the dorkiest kid you ever went to school with…picked on, beaten, made fun of…  Well, Andrei is determined to get out of Romania.  This is communist Romania…in the year(s) leading up to the fall of Ceaușescu.  Andrei is the new kid in town as well.  He shows up with a police escort.  The military police dump his family’s stuff onto the unpaved, rainy road and he starts life anew as the neighbor of Eva (Dorotheea Petre). 

[At this point I must pause and catch my breath, because Petre’s acting is one of the most remarkable phenomena I have ever seen.  Thank you.]

Dorotheea starts off as an average girl…in fact, literally the girl next door…soon enough.  She has a sort of jock, soldier boyfriend.  They go to the communist school.  The idiot guy sneaks her out of class like a luckless James Dean.  As they are halfway making out, he kicks over a statue (bust) of Ceaușescu .  Dorotheea ends up taking the blame.  She doesn’t squeal, but the dude is a cop’s son.

And thus life changes for Dorotheea.  She is removed from the communist youth party by her comrades; her colleagues.  Keep in mind, there is no choice in the matter as far as being a member or not.  As she won’t admit to a crime she didn’t commit, she is moved to a school for rejects and losers…a little reeducation.

There she meets her new neighbor Andrei.  He’s not like the other dudes.  He’s thin as a rail and has gigantic lips.  He’s weird.

They become friends and she learns that Andrei is planning to escape from Romania.  He is going to cross the Danube.  There’s no waltzes of Viennese blue in these waters…this is the icy Danube of totalitarian government.  He agrees to take Dorotheea along.  They train.  In perhaps the most touching (and certainly the most visceral) scene, the two practice acclimating to freezing waters by immersing themselves in an old bathtub filled with floating ice.  Andrei even rigs up flotation vests using old coffee cans.

And so one night the militia (secret service) show up at Andrei’s house.  He’s one step ahead.  He will have to leave now if he’s going to leave at all.  The two set off and hop a train.  It is an amazing story of the desire to be free.  They finally arrive at the crossing point.  Armed guards watch the river with automatic weapons…ready to shoot any who try to escape from this utopia.

As they are halfway across the river, Dorotheea turns back.  Fear?  No.  She remembers her adorable little brother…one of the ones too young to have this chance.

Timotei Duma plays Lalalilu (Lilu for short).  It is for him that Dorotheea returns to the grey monotony of Eastern European socialism.  Andrei makes it to Italy and sends pictures, a denim jacket and Toblerone.  I’ve never seen a girl look so sad while eating chocolate in all my life.  As you might notice, I’m not too worried about dangling modifiers at this point either.

And so Dorotheea soldiers on.  She even gets back together (somewhat) with the cop’s son because he is supplying medicine for her sick little brother.  Poor kid is always getting fevers…  But the sadness is in her eyes…and her first sexual experience turns out to be just a momentary diversion from her horribly drab, drab life.

And then it happens.  It happens in more than a few Romanian New Wave films…because it is the moment:  the fall of communism.  Dorotheea and Lilu and the parents hug and dance around like a Matisse painting while verbalizing the moment…”we’re free!!!”

This is darn near a perfect film.  This is a film for the little guys.  This is a film for the forgotten corners of the world.  This is a film for people with drab, drab lives who feel like prisoners–who have no dream other than the hope of managing a smile once in a while.  Cătălin Mitulescu made a piece of art to be cherished and hidden and shared and preserved.  This is why I love cinema.

 

-PD

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The Party [1968)

This is the holy grail of awkward.  For all us misfits, all us loners, all us wallflowers:  this is the glory of being a loser.  Sellers may have been better in Being There, but this is his most perfect film.

The name Hrundi V. Bakshi is to outcasts what Humbert Humbert is to perverts.  Sellers plays Bakshi in such a painfully ill-at-ease way that we just wanna give the guy a hug.  If you are looking for the fount from which sprang Napoleon Dynamite, this is it.

Hrundi says the wrong thing…at the wrong time…always.  Except for this one night when a beautiful starlet (ill-suited to such a vacuous profession) sees in him the spark which makes life worth living.

Bakshi may be a man of impeccable manners, but he is honest to the core.  However, he is prodigious when it comes to “stepping in it.”  From the very outset of the party, he must extricate himself from the first of many delicate situations.  It’s not easy being Hrundi.

Yes, Mr. Bakshi just wasn’t meant for this world.  He is like the dodo bird.  His heart is too pure and he is green in all but the Hindustani language.  Some might yell “racism” at Sellers in brown face, but it is really a very respectable portrait of an Indian man with great humility through and through.

There are few movies I enjoy watching more than this one.  Samuel Beckett never concocted a situation equal to the artful absurdity which Blake Edwards here captured on screen.

And so three cheers for Hrundi…and may all of us Bakshis find our Claudine Longets.  Birdie num num!

 

-PD

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