So how do you celebrate getting accepted to a film studies program that allows for only 15 new freshmen a year? A. Drinking heavily B. Dancing heavily C. Drinking and dancing heavily D. Writing a MASSIVE essay on the virtues of Burlesque. Correct answer? D. It is written.
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The 68th Annual Golden Globes (or, as the stars call it, "a free dinner") took place last week, and it was indeed a kick watching Melissa Leo get her long-deserved due (though Helena Bonham Carter apparently didn't think so), and witnessing the in-the-big-leagues-now stupefaction that poured forth from the makers of the night's cinematic Secretariat, The Social Network. But, when all was said and done, my mind was dominated by one thought;Burlesque and Black Swan went home with the same number of awards! Finally, Cher and Darren Aronofsky can be mentioned in the same breath! My life is complete. Such was my priggish attitude until a few days ago, when I journeyed to the Inwood with some brave friends to check out the...erm...less prestigious of the two aforementioned pictures. As the credits rolled, I began to realize that Burlesque and Black Swan are connected by a lot more than the collective goodwill of the Hollywood Foreign Press. Indeed, in examining the surprising abundance of common ground between the two movies, I've come to discover yet another failing of commercial Hollywood. I try (in vain) not to bitch and moan about the State of Big Movies Today, but, seeing as this particular strain of showbiz STD encourages filmmakers to take the parts of a potentially good movie and assemble it into something monstrous, I feel as if said ailment is worth discussion, and said bitchery is justified.
There are two kinds of bad movie; that kind that compels you to stay and watch the train wreck, and the kind that compels you to embark on a search for the nearest vomit receptacle. Burlesque is of the latter category; it sets off a faint charge of glitzy guilty-pleasurability in its opening minutes, but before long that charge dissipates completely, and you feel as if you're watching some crazed experiment where a movie tries to see how many corpses of older, better movies it can resurrect while simultaneously shooting itself in the foot. I'll get to what makes the picture unwatchable in a minute; but first, the pissed-off elitist in me can't resist taking a moment to list just a few things that make it flat-out bad:
1. I never thought I'd see the day when movies would have the gall to outright steal scenes from other movies, verbatim and with the tongue nowhere near the cheek. The creators of Burlesque are like that person who repeats old jokes in hopes of coaxing out new laughs. They show us a postcoital chat in the rain intercut with Christina Aguilera belting out a solo in a nightclub, and expect that we'll smile and cream our pants because it's so reminiscent of that classic moment in Cabaret where Bob Fosse showed us a postcoital chat in the rain intercut with Liza Minelli belting out a solo in a nightclub. We also get not one but two faux-Chicago numbers where everyone seems to be doing their best (correction: worst) Renee Zelleweger impersonation. But nothing beats one of the early dances, a modernized "Diamond's Are A Girl's Best Friend", featuring Aguilera center stage donning a top hat and covered in period bling. If this sounds like Moulin Rouge, it sure looks like it too, so much so that I think Baz Luhrman is perfectly within his rights to sue.
2. Methinks that, when everyone heard about this movie, we all expected it to be pretty damn mediocre, but we were united in our excitement for one thing; XTina would be singing jazz again, returning to the territory she conquered so brilliantly on her Back to Basics double album. The film misses out on even this glaringly obvious opportunity. Aguilera gets a whopping seven solos, but, with the exception of her admittedly incendiary cover of Etta James's "Something's Got a Hold on Me", they are all blah excursions into the field of fizzless R&B lite. The lyrics are laughably generic, and the simple, silly melodies cave in under the weight of the diva's famous vocal exertions. For my money, they might as well have had her sing the same song six times.
3. Honey, I shot the screenwriter. His name's Steve Antin (he also directs), and I don't doubt he's got talent, but he carefully conceals his abilities with his work here. Firstly, we get one of the great awful lines in the movies; "When you're putting on your makeup, it's like you're an artist. But instead of painting a canvas, you're painting your face." Wait, you put makeup on your face? Omgsh rlly? But Antin isn't content with so small a dose of infamy. He doesn't seem to understand the idea of structured subplots-he lets huge chunks of one story play out, then huge chunks of another. We get about 15 minutes of musical numbers and backstage ballyhooing, and then a half an hour of romantic dilly-dallying, and then ten minutes of "comic relief" that play like humorous oppression. Indeed, this movie is so poorly put together that, when Cher appears in the final act to wrap up her part of the story, I had legitimately forgotten the specifics of her character. When you're having to forcibly remind yourself that CHER is in the movie, perhaps something is wrong, yeah?
4. If the club Cher's character owns is about to go under, why is said club absolutely packed in every scene? Whoopsies.
Speaking of Cher, I suppose I should commend the so-called Goddess of Pop for what she does here. Marshaling her remaining vocal juices and seen-it-all gusto, she tears into her scenes like she's working a live crowd, exuding a get-offa-my-runway sort of fascination that stands above the detritus and allows her to emerge from this hot tranny mess relatively unscathed. She even makes her one big solo (?!) work. However, she can't make the movie function as a whole. No one could, because it makes one big, unforgivable mistake.
Cleopatra. Alien Vs. Predator. The Hangover. Showgirls. What do these movies all have in common? I love them. I honest-to-golly, 100% adore them, and will gladly commit to any one of them when they pop up during one of my channel surf-a-thons. Are they Truffaut? No. Are they filmic fugues or even enduring pieces of pop art? Time will tell, I guess. But I really admire what these movies do. They're so far-fetched, so utterly commercialized and silly, that they just can't stand for something. They will never be a metaphor for this or a dissemination on that. It won't produce a lasting emotional reaction. Hell, you might not even remember them the next morning. But they lift your spirits for two hours or so, get you drunk on the cheap but inarguable excitement of seeing a group of well-meaning artists aim low and hit their target spot-on. What makes a truly great popcorn film (and, make no mistake, popcorn films can be just as great as something by Bergman or Bunuel when done right) is a picture that, instead of attempting to turn outward and face the peculiarities of today's world, shields us from them by immersing itself in the specifics of its genre. In layman's terms, we go to a western for shoot-outs, witty banter, and ol' fashioned values. If you declare yourself a western, give us shoot-outs, witty banter, and ol' fashioned values.
I should take a minute and clarify the above paragraph, or I'm very much afraid I'll come off as a philistine. I'm not against innovation in film; I'm simply saying that, if you're going to build your movie on genre conventions, you'd better tweak the blueprint pretty carefully or the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. My issue is not with movies that mix genres, a la Ghost or No Country for Old Men. My problem comes when a movie sets out to entertain by delivering genre conventions, but then is too embarrassed to do it right.
Take Appaloosa. It's about two gruff gunslingers (is their any other kind?) played by Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris, who come riding into town to catch world-class criminal Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons). We get a lot of somewhat amusing back and forth between Mortensen and Harris. It's the kind of world-weary jocularity we miss from the old Singing Cowboy days, and our hearts leap up in ecstasy; that is, until Renee Zelleweger slinks onto the screen as a beautiful broad with a twisted, long-festering connection to Bragg. Now all of a sudden our heroes are immersed in serious moral quandaries, and the movie starts to ask us questions about the nature of justice that parallel our own troubled times. Question: if the movie's got such lofty material to explore, why are we wasting time with the jokes? And, if its a simple Western, why is there so much deep-dishing between the genre-based scenes?!?!?!
See what I mean? Ambition is great, but two ambitions running perpendicular to each other and shoehorned into the same concept just ruin everything. This leads me to the crux of this manifesto; modern movies are afraid to be "bad."
Now I don't mean bad in the traditional sense of the word. I mean "bad" as it is perceived in the minds of those bombastic braggarts who spend their days reading Kracauer and jerking off to David Lynch documentaries. These folks think that the cinema is good only for illuminating the truths of our human experience, and movies made for pure entertainment aren't worth the cost of the celluloid. That's bullshit. We need The Seventh Seal and Umberto D and the like, but we also need movies that, using a certain amount of craft and more than a little gumption, rub our faces in violence, sex, profanity, films that allow us to experience the cathartic shock and awe of watching the elaborate realization of fantasies we think too base or flat-out silly to acknowledge and appraise ourselves. We need the movies to go further than we would ever even attempt, so we don't have to.
Not every movie has to be like this, but some of them should. They fill some small but pressing psychological need we have as a species. Showgirls takes us behind the scenes of a strip club without ever forcing us into a real one. The Hangover lets us watch the consequences of debauchery from the outside. And so on and so forth. From the eye-for-an-eye ideals of the western to the soaked-sheets curiosities of in-the-bedroom potboilers and beyond, the pulpy pleasure of these movies is that they rub our faces in their genre material, giving us what we want to see without forcing us to produce it ourselves. These films are often called guilty pleasures, but, to paraphrase Barbra, they got nothin' to be guilty of, a fact which brings us back around to what's wrong with Burlesque.
Done right, Burlesque should've been rated R. It should've reveled in the drama that takes place in a venue that features half-naked girls shaking their stuff to raunchy le jazz hot. But instead of seizing the chance for a bawdy melodrama, the picture is embarrassed of its dirty roots and tries to be about something. We get alot of Xtina crying, drinking, and shouting herself into oblivion as she finds herself torn between a strapping young bartender (Cam Gigandet) and a monied patron (Eric Dane). See, it's really about a woman trying to choose between consumerism and the beauty of true-blue, torn-curtain showbiz. It's about selling out vs. selling yourself short. It's about...fuck it, what would've been so bad if it were just about catfights, star turns, and scantily clad broads of beauty?! The actual dance scenes are so sanitized that they make Penelope Cruz's rope dance in Nine look like Jenna Jameson material by comparison; all boobs, butts, and even bare legs are carefully covered. It's a burlesque movie without the burlesque. Why not set the damn thing in a concert hall and call it a day? Here's a movie that should've been gleefully overdone, a 90-minute-or-so trashfest. Hell, the trailers market it as one. But it winds up as something PG-13wholesome. Gross. The film wants to smell like a Big Mac but taste like steak, so ultimately it tastes like shit. I was offended that it gave me nothing to be offended about.
FINALLY, Black Swan comes into play. Here's a movie trying to do the same thing Burlesque does, and I don't care what you say. But there's a key difference; like its lead character, this one actually gives in to its darker inclinations. It struggles with pretension and makes a few half-hearted stabs at "meaning", but by the end its simply an exceedingly well-done horror film, which is exactly what it should be. This is how genre film is done. It takes solid technique and crackling energy, and uses those assets to put us inside the mind of a woman on the edge without us having to stand on that precipice ourselves.
The worst moments of the movie come early on, when director Darren Aronofsky tries to force meaning, tries to pound home the dichotomy of his two main characters with all the subtlety of Glenn Beck. But once he lets Natalie Portman's Nina really take a grand plie on the wild side, we do too. From that infamous sex scene onward, Black Swan is a deluge lurid, luscious, unstintingly graphic imagery that causes our eyes to bulge in shock even as our minds register childlike astonishment. The film figures out new ways to present the old horror movie tricks-jump scenes, stabbings, "it's alive!" discoveries, and, in its final moments, it hits a home run as Natalie Portman succumbs to perfection, and her pipe dreams come crashing down to earth in a deluge of blood, feathers, and shattered glass. Those final five minutes approach the summit of the best Frankensteinian transformation scenes, no small feat for any motion picture. Black Swan dives headfirst into the depths of time-honored convention, and fearlessly accepts its genre conventions as its only meaning. It's been misinterpreted (or rather, over-interpreted) by those showering it with golden statues, but I'm certainly not denying that its an achievement. Buoyed by Portman's galvanizingly gutsy work, it sets out to do something deceptively simple, and does it pretty well. Burlesque, by comparison, claims it has the spells but doesn't even try to cast that ol' black magic.
I feel perhaps a little too strongly about this subject, a fact that really hits home when I consider that I intended this article to be roughly a page long. But, as I think of the number of films this applies to, the mind boggles; look at the forced political analogies in Revenge of the Sith, the ridiculous allusions to 9/11 in Remember Me, and on and on. These movies are opportunities for us to willfully submerge ourselves in the absurd, but Hollywood would have us watch these fantasy worlds through a glass case of topicality instead of letting us play around in them. Break taboos, Hollywood. Live a little. Sometimes, people go to the cinema to indulge some of their simpler instincts. Don't shoot for the moon when you know you can really do wonders with a star. Stop sneaking "relevance" into our escapism and assuming that one rotten ingredient couldn't possibly ruin the entire recipe. Don't sanitize what you sell as raunchy. Grow up by dumbing down a little every now and then. Einstein once said "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one", and, while the movies are all about smoke and mirrors, I think reality is one illusion that the genre picture can do without.
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