Americanus Ignoramus: RED STATE, BRIDESMAIDS

No one's ever accused Kevin Smith of being a closed-mouth man. He likes writing characters that like to talk, and talk, and talk in language so unlike actual human speech it wears out the actors unless they pace themselves. Either they go all red-faced and sleepy by the end, or we fall asleep halfway through. Smith doesn't care - camera still rolling away. RED STATE (2011)--his first venture into 'straight' action thriller--is marred by at least two lengthy monologues that stop the film so cold you may forget all about it and start playing cards, forgetting the TV is even on. The first is a long, unfocused ramble by Tarantino stock company regular Michael Parks as a crazed bible-thumping arms hoarder and leader of a 30-strong family that's a little bit Waco, a little bit Westboro Baptist.  Parks is great but he's not much of a preacher, barely talking above a mutter when he should be shaking the rafters with righteous hellfire.  The second big monologue is far, far worse --John Goodman-- unfocused, haggard, and a hundred pounds too thin--rambling out a lengthy, half-asleep metaphor and a lengthy, drop-dead dull explanation of a plot device spoiler alert decency excuses me from revealing. Goodman's usually energetic and fun, but here he takes the idea of a lumpen proletariat ATF man to a tedious extreme. You want to feed him some Twinkies just to raise his blood sugar.

The plot has the crazy Christians using the devil's tool (Craigslist) to lure a trio of fledgling high school buddy virgin douchebags way out into bumfuck country by promising them a menage a quatre with a local divorcee.  From there we get a little torture porn, a little Mexican stand-off, some tense 'won't someone think of the children' drama, and a small arsenal that most of the captured menage-hungry douchebags are too stupid to take advantage of. We get the feeling Kevin Smith had just seen the entire output of both QT and RR in one long weekend before writing the script but QT's dialogue always works in brilliant ways that Smith can't seem to grasp. Lengthiness does not equal greatness. At the film's end, as Goodman, long-winded and exhausted, attempts to tie up the loose ends a proper movie wouldn't have left dangling, what we learn is that Kevin Smith hates the bible belt lunatics and thinks shotgunning Jesus fish in their holy water barrel is some kind of righteous apocalyptic satire, but as I wrote awhile back in my take on TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL --a real auteur, a Nick Ray or Godard, harbors compassion for the damned and that's why their films endure. 

BRIDESMAIDS (2011) on the other hand, feels real and lived in and we can thank SNL and Groundlings for the breezy, lived-in rapport the two veterans of those sketch comedy ensembles, Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig, share in little termite scenes at coffee shops and during mundane errands. When they talk to each other in low-key natural speaking voices it's suddenly apparent just how fake and trite most rom-com friendships are. Theirs is a quick lived-in rapport that only occurs when both parties are brilliant on their own, truly love one another, have known each other for years, and have been rehearsing and improv-ing for weeks or months beforehand.

But they drift apart when Maya marries into a cabal of rich, bland, whitey lawyers. Adept comic actress Jessica St. Clair is Whitney, the materialist wife of Maya's future husband's boss who tries to jostle Wiig out of alpha BFF position. And since Maya's real-life dad is the legendary Quincy Jones it's a nice touch that her onscreen dad looks like Quincy, and can afford the super rich wedding this unbearable (but hella hot) chick Whitney dreams of...

However, this movie has douche chill moments galore. Annie (Wiig) starts out the film in free-fall after her small business dream of a quirky bakery has gone bankrupt and her hot guy lover (Jon Hamm) only wants her as a second tier booty call. Along the way she throws over the Canadian cop who really loves her because her esteem is low, and that's all quite believable and well-done but still douche chill cliche down to its rom-com core.

That said, BRIDESMAIDS earns huge props in its skewering of the rampant materialism and bourgeois oppression that's encouraged and indulged in the name of bringing 'magic' to a wedding. Snob consumer Whitney flaunts her knowledge of expensive couture and personal relationships with haughty bridal boutiques and MELANCHOLIA-size country estates. We all know this type of girl, so naturally we relish when Annie just attacks her head on. Even if her motives are self-centered and/or lifted from MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING, it's damn heroic.

But in the end the film basically undoes the anti-bourgeois take-downs that have preceded it. After Wiig tells it like it is we're supposed to champion her ability to not wince at the mega-rich tackiness of the wedding at the climax - replete with lasers and fireworks and waterfalls and a surprise performance by Wilson Phillips.

The best scene prior to is when Whitney brings all the bridesmaids to pick out a dress at this ritzy all-white boutique and the fawning silken strong arm suffocation is so well done that the vomiting that ensues seems natural and deserved -- a performance art reaction ala Penny Arcade to the peer pressure-driven bridal business. Don't deny it deserves it! Bridal biz, you suck! Playing on female insecurity and competitiveness to choke what should be a special day near to death with table flower whimsy and lovely little ribboned bits of business is a friggin crime, so shit on it, sista!

More could have been done with Jill Clayburgh's AA mom--an actress and 12-step group both dear to my heart--and how much Wiig's meltdown, hitting bottom, and subsequent redemption, resembles an AA intervention. But at least it's in there. The 'normal guy' cute Canadian cop who just happens to have been a fan of Wiig's old bakery is actually not as douche chilly as I said earlier, but why are all the men in rom-coms either adorably scruffy blank slates or smug douches? Still, for all its concessions to the rom-com world, this is easily the best chick comedy I've seen since MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING. Of course BRIDESMAIDS could use a man like Rupert Everett again, a master who transcends all stereotypical gay best friend cliches the way Jesus transcends carpentry.

Carpentry... ah yeah, RED STATE could use a man like George Downes, too, and Kevin Smith could really use a dialogue editor and an understanding of how narrative works. If Smith had made DR. STRANGELOVE he probably would have re-written the ending to have a long-drawn out tribunal about how Major Kong's A-bomb was a dud, and Kong had a parachute, and the Russians questioned him for three days before releasing him. Only BRIDESMAIDS even approaches real satire, and dares to snap at the hand that feeds it. Ostensibly another materialist fantasy like MAMA MIA or EAT, PRAY, LOVE, BRIDESMAIDS turns around and trashes the empty-headed over-done prettiness of so many bourgeois weddings with great finesse.

Too bad in the end, waterfalls, moonbeams, Wilson Phillips, and fairy tales of composting hippies and two dogs fighting are all America has left. BRIDESMAIDS fights that truth for awhile, then surrenders to it. RED STATE just jeers both sides before apologizing like a shame-faced kid caught soaping cars. That might be your America, Kevin Smith, but it ain't mine, and it ain't the real America... the real America is heart, safety, and speed. It's gettin' where you need to go and fast. It's Ram. Built Ford Tough. This ad sponsored by Ram. Please ram responsibly. 

'Transgalactic Delta House Ebullience,' Comic Book Evolution, and Timothy Leary's Head - PAUL (2011)

Like most people I know who follow exo-politics, I thought PAUL (2011) looked grim from the outset. First off, this is supposed to be a brom-com about a surviving Roswell alien, and here his huge eyes aren't dark black. The black eye on grey aliens is, as we now know now, a kind of DNA-implanted contact lens, as if we humans decided we loved Raybans (tm) so much we had them surgically grafted. Without the dark eyes Paul looks just like a big E.T. / Close Encounters love doll - and it turns out he was the inspiration for both films (we learn this thanks to flashbacks of long chain-smoking phone calls he had with Spielberg in the 1970s) which makes perfect sense from a disinformation standpoint (if you see an alien on the street eating Reese's Pieces, you're a lot less likely to get taken seriously when you report it to the cops).

I remember well at the age of around 15-16, gazing at my surly, bald, bespectacled comic book store owner (Quality Comics in Somerville, NJ, if you were there, you know him) and thinking: 1. I'll never stop being into comics no matter that they say people grow out of them, and 2. I hope I don't end up looking and acting like this surly bald bastard. Back then 16 seemed suspiciously old to still be into comics, even if you were into the sophisticated stuff like Frank Miller's Daredevil. And now... these clowns.

In other words, seeing what I'd look like if I stayed friends with my Frost-ish pal and never discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll is kind of crushingly weird and terrifying. And Yet -  they actually grow as characters as the film goes on, how emotionally un-arrested of them! And Kristen Wiig is adorable, as the NY Post's Paul Smith noted: 

There may come a day when I tire of Seth Rogen’s shtick but I hope it doesn’t come soon. (Yes, I loved “The Green Hornet”). His sarcastic insults and Transgalactic Delta House ebullience keep things rolling along (even if the gay jokes are a little stale) as the boys pick up more enemies and a kindly one-eyed fundamentalist Christian (the indispensable Kristen Wiig) who says of Paul, “He’s not evil. He’s just a bit rude.”
  (Read more)

"Transgalactic Delta House ebullience" - I think we can all aspire to that, both as writers and as people. The ultimate message of this cosmic trip then becomes this: stoners are the smartest of all humans. Paul's very advanced, yet he acts just like a stoner slacker crossed with a less spastic Kermit the Frog. What does that tell you if it's not that stoners rule?!! That's what got me out of being a comic book nerd, I can tell you - drugs and alcohol were my socializing and talking to hot girls without blushing and stammering spinach. And as drugs, bass, and babes became the major force in my life, all the other comics stopped for me except Love and Rockets, Dan Clowes' Eightball (below), Pete Bagge's Hate, and old Zap! reprints. I yelled excitedly when I saw this guy (below) on one of Pegg's awesome T-shirts. That's a Clowes!

It would have been cool in Paul to see examples of other aliens or humans working inside the alien vessels to further advance the notions of a global elite conspiracy but it's great the way the CGI alien interacts with the humans so flawlessly--on the level of Andy Serkis' Kong and Golum, rather than the stilted dread knots of Jar Jar Binks and SyFy channel stuff. It works so that you forget altogether he's just a CGI hallucination. So see PAUL with a bunch of friends late night after the young person's AA meeting, or while getting hammered and it will treat you right. There's a subtext in there that any dope fiend or former dope fiend will take to heart, and it's traceable back to--what else?--a comic book:

The one big genre-buster comic I know of that deals with the issues of life after death and the universe and aliens, the only truth that sets one free, is Timothy Leary's Neurocomics (Last Gasp, 1979) which describes the circular DNA arc of life with the following being indicative of where our Paul is on the evolutionary scale:

In this strata, the hippie stoner is a whole evolutionary cycle above the family man preacher (below) who is the end game on the highest level of 'terrestrial circuits' while the stoner is the lowbrow level of post-terrestrial, so a whole DNA sequence higher on the celestial step ladder.

 

(Read the full comic  here or download here)

This should be good news to the moms of stoners and trippers everywhere, and explains why the religious right considers psychedelic drugs such a threat. It's because the 17 year-old mushroom dealer is a whole circuit higher on the DNA chain than freakin' Jerry Falwell or Michelle Bachman, or even Osama Bin Barack, or whatever his post-Bohemian Grove mind control reptilian takeover name is. And that's enough that those comic book geeks Pegg and Frost should really grow up and start doing some drugs. Paul's got a great magic power where he can send you all the cosmic truths in a big rush of DMT that will take the dogma crust off any cutie pie conservative, and it makes a good point for arguing that the bible belt might come around and be less closed-off if they got a nice dose of LSD in their morning cup of joe. If you want to 'see' the truth, you know who to trust, and it's not those Bohemian Grove owl-worshiping conservatives and their masochist leatherboy slave Antichrist, but the real deal, Tim Leary! LEARYCON, now that's a comic convention worth believing in. Vote Leary's frozen head for president in 2012!