LAMB Movie of the Month: Eurotrip (2004)

* * *
Director: Jeff Schaffer
Starring: Scott Mechlowicz, Jacob Pitts, Travis Wester, Michelle Trachtenberg

I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect to like Eurotrip. In fact, I might not even have seen it had I not stumbled across it on TV the other night and thought to myself, “Hey, that’s the LAMB's Movie of the Month, maybe I’ll give it a shot after all.” I remained wary for the first few minutes and then it happened: Matt Damon showed up and suddenly everything was okay.

Scott (Scott Mechlowicz), Cooper (Jacob Pitts), Jamie (Travis Wester) and Jenny (Michelle Trachtenberg) have just graduated from high school and Scott has been unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend. He has a German pen pal named Mieke, which Scott believes to be German for “Mike,” who sends condolences and asks if Scott wants to arrange a meeting. Drunk and thinking that maybe Cooper was right about Mieke being an online sexual predator, Scott tells the “German freak” to leave him alone. In the morning, however, he discovers that Mieke is actually pronounced “Mika” and that she’s the buxom blond girl rather than the tall, gangly guy in the photo sent to Scott. Since Mieke has now blocked him from sending her messages, Scott (with some prompting from Cooper) decides to go to Berlin and track her down.

So that’s the set-up which leads to the following: Scott and Cooper, low on funds, agree to courier something to London as a means of getting to Europe then wander into the wrong bar and end up being adopted by a gang of soccer hooligans. In Paris they run into Jamie and Jenny, who agree to accompany them to Berlin with a few stops (both planned and unplanned) along the way which leads to a lot of drinking, sex, and one very wrong kiss.

There are a few things which ultimately won me over:

1. Scotty doesn’t know
2. Robot fight (“You are not a robot!”)
3. Random Eastern European dog with a human hand in its mouth
4. Xena: Vundersexxx dominatrix
5. Scotty doesn’t know – I realize that I already said that but damn that song was catchy

Eurotrip is a very silly movie but it’s also pretty funny and a lot less offensive than most teen sex comedies. It’s refreshingly equal opportunity in terms of nudity, eagerly showcasing both naked women and naked men, though it should be noted that the women are of the young and nubile variety while the men are of the middle-aged and saggy variety. Progress occurs in small increments. Eurotrip isn’t a great movie but I don’t think it’s aspiring to be either; I think this is exactly the movie that it wants to be so it would be difficult to argue that it isn’t successful.

LAMB Movie of the Month: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

* * *
Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Once again I owe a debt to the LAMB's Movie of the Month for pushing me in a direction I've been meaning to go for a while but somehow never got around to before. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is my first experience with anime - not because I have any aversion to the genre, but more because I don't live in a place that really caters to that particular genre. While I didn't love Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, it's a nice introduction to a genre that I hope to experience more of.

Set in the future, after environmental disaster has ravaged the earth and made large sections of the planet uninhabitable, the film follows the adventures of Nausicaa, Princess of The Valley of the Wind. When the plane of a neighbouring kingdom crashes into the valley, followed shortly thereafter by a full-scale invasion of the war-like Tolmekians, the valley is drawn into a war that threatens to destroy mankind. Only Nausicaa, who has come to understand the delicate balance of the ecosystem, can save her people and all others.

On a purely visual level, the film is absolutely stunning. There are several sequences that are breathtakingly detailed – my favourite comes from the opening minutes, when Nausicaa is searching for materials that can be put to use in the valley, and watches as a shower of spores comes down around her like snow. The creatures that Nausicaa encounters, and the various places she finds herself, are also magnificently rendered, creating a world that is equal parts terrifying and beautiful.

The film is also interesting from a narrative standpoint. The story takes the form of a fable, with an overriding mythology contained at the heart of the central conflict and characters falling into classical archetypes (but also subverting those archetypes by making the hero female). In certain respects, the story is told in simplistic terms: Nausicaa is good and so are her people, the Tolmekians are bad – especially their deformed leader, Kushana – there is one right way, and not much room for shades of gray between black and white. This isn’t meant to be a criticism, as this simple and straight-forward way of relating the story is really effective in terms relaying its meaning. There is a firm message advocating pacifism and environmentalism – the two are definitively linked here, with war being framed as an offshoot of ecological destruction and vice versa – which is conveyed in a very direct way rather than expressed metaphorically or through codes.

The film does have its problems, however. There's a lot of over-narration and a lot of superfluous exposition. Granted, this may not be a problem with the film itself as originally conceived by Hayao Miyazaki, but rather a quality of the version I saw, the 2005 edition with voice-work by Patrick Stewart, Alison Lohman, Shia LeBeouf and Uma Thurman. There is also an issue with pacing. While the film managed to hold my attention for the most part, overall I think it has a problem with building and maintaining momentum. Some scenes go on too long, meander or are digressive. A few cuts would have improved the film, tightening the storytelling and allowing it to run at a clip appropriate to the urgency of the situation unfolding onscreen.

LAMB Movie of the Month: The Conversation (1974)

* * * *
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Gene Hackman

The Conversation has been on my list of movies to see for a long time so I was really happy that it was selected as the LAMB's Movie of the Month so that I would have some extra incentive to finally getting around to seeing it. In many ways this is a quiet and simple movie – not a lot happens – but it’s deeply layered and leaves a lasting impression. It’s a movie I’ve found myself thinking about a lot since seeing it.

Gene Hackman stars as Harry Caul, one of the preeminent surveillance experts in the States. He’s been hired to record a conversation between a young couple in a park and toils to get the cleanest recording possible. Harry sees himself simply as a means of conveying information – he has nothing to do with the situation or what may arise out of his recording; he sees himself as existing outside the context of what he is observing. However, despite his protests and assertions about his place in the story, Harry begins to worry about what will happen to the couple once he hands the tapes over. He’s particularly haunted by the young man’s declaration that “he’d kill us if he had the chance.” There’s an event in Harry’s past, alluded to by a colleague, which resulted in the death of a family. Harry feels responsible and attempts to atone for it by preventing something from happening to the young couple.

The Conversation owes a lot to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, which is about a photographer who thinks he might have captured a murder in the background of a photo. His obsession with the photo is similar to Harry’s obsession with the recording, which he listens to over and over again. The context, though, is very different, with Antonioni’s film taking place against the backdrop of the Swinging London scene of the 60s, and Coppola’s film taking place amid Watergate-era American paranoia. Harry, certainly, is paranoid but, as it turns out, not nearly paranoid enough. He attends a conference for members of the surveillance industry and accepts a pen from a colleague which is later used to record a private conversation which causes him some embarrassment (of all people, shouldn’t he have known better than to accept a pen from a surveillance expert?) and later lets his guard down with the wrong person which results in the tapes he wants so desperately to protect being stolen.

As effective as this film is as a thriller, it’s most effective as a character study. Harry is someone who spends his days invading other people’s privacy and developing newer and better ways to do it. As a result, he’s fiercely protective of his own privacy but unsuccessful in his efforts. His apartment is equipped with several locks and an alarm, and yet his landlady is able to get in to leave him a present for his birthday; his attempts to be sneaky with his girlfriend (Teri Garr) are met with her cheerful declaration that she’s on to him; and there’s the aforementioned bug in the pen. Harry is hopeless in a lot of ways and there’s a kind of desperate acquiescence to the way that the film ends with him completely dismantling his life, destroying his apartment, his privacy and, symbolically, his faith.

The Conversation works because it depends on internal rather than external terror. The creepiest thing about it is not the minimal amount of violence that we glimpse through Harry’s imagination, but the psychological effect of realizing how fragile privacy can be. Given the way that the idea of privacy is eroded a little more every day by governmental policies designed to “protect” us, this is a film that seems only to grow in relevance.

LAMB Movie of the Month: The Big Lebowski (1998)

* * *
Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Starring: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore

A kidnapping gone awry, a bungled ransom drop, a cast of peculiar characters, and appearances by Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi – sound familiar? Not quite. The Big Lebowski is the polar opposite of Fargo, as light as the other is dark, as funny as the other is tragic. With a keen eye for absurdity, writers/directors Joel and Ethan Coen deliver a film that is truly one of a kind.

The Big Lebowski begins with Jeff Lebowski, known to all as The Dude (Jeff Bridges) being mistaken for a millionaire also named Lebowski, whose wife is in debt to a pornographer. Two guys show up at Lebowski’s abode, rough him up, and ruin a rug before realizing that they’ve got the wrong guy. After relating his tale to his friend, Walt (John Goodman), The Dude is convinced to go to the Big Lebowski and ask for compensation for the rug, which he receives by simply taking one of the rugs in Lebowski’s mansion. Shortly after their meeting, Mrs. Lebowski (Tara Reid) is kidnapped (or perhaps not) and The Dude is recruited to act as a courier to deliver the ransom. The money is lost when The Dude’s car is stolen, a toe is sent to Lebowski as a means of encouraging him to deliver the money, and people keep showing up at The Dude’s demanding answers. The plot of the film is kind of nonsensical and a little meandering, which would bother me were it not for the fact that I think the story is being told this way intentionally. I mean, if a stoner was trying to relate this story to you, including the subplots involving him getting Lebowski’s daughter, Maude (Julianne Moore) pregnant, and his bowling team’s quest to win the championship, you wouldn’t expect it to be entirely cohesive nor would you expect all the threads to tie up nicely.

There are a lot of quirky characters in the film – as there tend to be in all the Coens’ comedies – and a lot of truly bizarre moments (and I mean that in the best possible way). Walt is a Vietnam vet with anger issues who constantly steps in to help The Dude, but only manages to make things much, much worse each and every time; Maude is an artist with a penchant for flying over her canvas, flicking her brushes Jackson Pollack-style; the alleged kidnappers are a trio of German nihilists who don’t quite seem to understand why they shouldn’t get the ransom even if they don’t have Mrs. Lebowski – The Dude, himself, is actually the most normal of the bunch.

As The Dude, Bridges delivers a really well-realized characterization of a guy who always seems like he’s this close to expressing some great thought, but fails because his brain and his mouth are out of step with each other and because his ideas, once thought, drift away and can never again be recovered. Bridges isn’t an actor I’ve ever gone out of my way to see, but I’ve always found that movies he’s in are better for the fact that he’s in them. He’s a very naturalistic actor and slips so completely and easily into his roles, which is maybe why he’s never really been given as much credit as he deserves. The presence of Bridges, more than anything else, really grounds the film and keeps it from going too far over the top.