The Town: Can I date a witness?

Based on a novel by Chuck Hogan, Ben Affleck’s sophomore directorial effort falls in that middle-ground between better than his detractors would presume and worse than his defenders would hope. Among the virtues common to most good heist movies is economy, sticking closely to the mechanics of the scheme while characters develop quietly in the margins. The Town is most problematic when it lingers too long in those margins, especially the fairly preposterous love story between Affleck’s career robber and the bank manager, played by Rebecca Hall, who he and his crew just kidnapped. The crew wore masks so Hall doesn’t realize that Affleck was her kidnapper—this could have been a way more interesting movie if she did and dated him anyway—and enters into a romance with him that consists almost entirely of Dunkin Donuts dates or hanging out at her place and exchanging over-rehearsed monologues about their personal baggage. His obviously, are heavily censored.

None of the central characters feel worth investing in even after they’re ostensibly fleshed out. Jeremy Renner plays Affleck’s partner-in-crime, your token loose cannon—he thinks he’s James Cagney in White Heat, where Affleck thinks he’s James Cagney in Angels Have Dirty Faces—always sniffing around for an excuse to snuff somebody, another adrenaline junky on the heels of Renner’s acclaimed performance in The Hurt Locker, and a character blatantly constructed as a plot device. I was very excited to see Mad Men’s Jon Hamm in a meaty big screen role, but his g-man never gets to do much besides reiterate his cold determination to nail the crooks terrorizing Boston.

Which is arguably the fifth central character in The Town, named after the Charlestown district which the opening title card describes as a Petrie dish for bank robbers, working men dutifully following in their father’s footsteps, contributing whatever small innovations are needed to maintain the family trade over changing times. That makes bank robbing sound somewhat similar to genre filmmaking, but The Town only partially feels like a solid genre exercise. Affleck’s pretty good with the action bits and his camera work shows genuine affection and sensitivity to his fellow actors, but there’s a significant miscalculation as to how many narrative clichés any one movie can carry without buckling over, including the absurd recklessness shown from both the cops and the robbers during the final shoot-out. So take this as a conditional recommendation: The Town is disappointing for its flawed and flabby script, but there’s enough energy generated in the hold-ups, stake-outs and chases to keep you from feeling completely robbed.

Industrial strength: A talk with Mike Judge

The blue collar cousin to his 1999 cult film Office Space, Mike Judge’s Extract examines the ironies of hierarchies in the work place. Joel (Jason Bateman, perfectly cast) built his company from the ground up. His patented flavourings and the small company that produces them have helped Joel ease his way into a big suburban house, a big pool, a big car, and other middle-class comforts that are slowly transforming him into a depressive eunuch, unloved by his bored wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig), unappreciated by his resentful employees, left with nothing to do in his spare time except masturbate in one of his three bathrooms while Suzie watches Dancing with the Stars or get drunk with his New Age dope fiend barkeep buddy Dean (Ben Affleck, alarmingly convincing).

A thread of emasculation runs through Extract, whether it’s Joel’s dwindling sex life or the literal testicular injury suffered by staffer Step (Clifton Collins Jr.). The only sexually satisfied male character in the movie is a supremely dimwitted young stud-for-hire, and in his case that’s all he has going for him. Genuine empowerment is enjoyed only by Cindy (Mila Kunis), a small-time grifter hoping to make a big score by convincing Step to sue Joel and the ultra-manic bus stop ad lawyer played by Gene Simmons, groomed here to most closely resembles a rabid poodle. Joel will make numerous attempts to break out of his rut, including selling his company, having an affair, and smoking a bong the size of a lamppost. But in the end he may find his greatest consolation in Step, who for all his flaws is truly proud to consider himself “just a working man.”

Extract is unusual among mainstream comedies in that Judge conveys affection for his characters while at the same time refraining from sentimentalizing them. In the case of one of the film’s most memorable supporting bits, amusingly embodied by Beth Grant, he doesn’t shy away from making her a flat-out racist. When I spoke with Judge he recalled how a friend once described to him the real-life model for Grant’s character, listing all her external traits. Judge (see below) felt like without having met the woman in question he absolutely knew her as a type. And perhaps herein lies some of the problems with the characters in Extract. So many of them feel much more like types than people. There are times you can’t help but wonder if it would all come off better as a cartoon, like Judge’s greatest successes, his television shows Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill. To be sure, there are a lot of funny scenes in Extract, but some of them are so broad and familiar it’s hard to feel completely invested in them.

Mike Judge

I can’t say the same for my experience of meeting Judge. His demeanor was somber, yet his responses to my questions were never less than playful, bouncing improbably from his admiration for both Badlands and The Big Lebowski—“the kind of comedy you can meditate on”—to the unlikely kinship between Bob Newhart and crime novelist Jim Thompson.

JB : When you have an idea do you know right away if it’s a television show or a movie?

Mike Judge: There were moments when I was working on Office Space where I thought maybe it should’ve been a TV show. I’d be doing scenes with Gary Cole and Ron Livingston, or Gary Cole and Stephen Root, and thinking how fun it would be to just keep writing stuff for these guys and see where it goes. But for the most part the stuff I’ve made were things that always knew what they wanted to be from the beginning.

Office Space

JB: It must be tempting to turn any idea into television because then, in theory at least, you have an opportunity to build an audience.

MJ: At one point Fox did want to make a TV show out of Office Space. This was before the British version of The Office came out much less the American one. Now I feel like we’ve had two great shows about offices and we don’t need another one.

JB: Has your idea of what makes good TV or good movies changed since you started out, given that the industry has changed so much?

MJ: I think it’s the same. I always think in terms of classic TV. I haven’t really watched prime time TV since I started in this business. I watch a lot of TV but mostly late at night, so I tend to see reruns of old shows. And reality shows. I was actually hooked on American Idol for several seasons. I think in a way that’s a sort of classic. It could have been on in the 1950s.

The Bob Newhart Show

JB: Are there shows that were on when you were coming up that still feed you creatively when you see them now?

MJ: Oh yeah. I saw an old Bob Newhart episode about a year ago and it was just brilliant. That character Carlin, his whole thing was genius. It was that episode where Carlin ends up buying the building that Bob Newhart lives in, so during his therapy session Bob has to explain to his patient about the heater not working and so on, trying to tell the guy he’s a tightwad and a bad landlord. You know there’s this Jim Thompson novel called The Alcoholics. Seeing that episode of Bob Newhart made me think that The Alcoholics could make a good movie.

JB: Really?

MJ: It’s about a guy a guy who runs a treatment centre. He’s kind of a Bob Newhart-like character.

JB: Huh. I know the book. I never thought of it that way.

MJ: That book’s actually kinda funny. You keep thinking someone’s going to get shot or something. Thompson must have been in an alcoholic treatment place when he wrote that.

King of the Hill

JB: What about animation? Do you know when something is going to be live-action or animation? Do economics come into account?

MJ: Yeah. That or my limited drawing abilities. With animation I do best when it starts with something that I drew. What’s harder is writing something and then figuring out how to draw it after the fact. King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead both started as drawings. King of the Hill was initially a panel cartoon of four guys with their beers with three of them saying “Yep,” and then I had Boomhauer thinking “Yep” in a thought balloon. But if it’s something that starts out as a script it’s usually going to be live-action.

JB: Did the script for Extract develop out of the milieu? The characters?

MJ: I remember writing the scene where Cindy steals this guitar. Sometimes I just write scenes. I wrote that not knowing where to go with it. At some point I know I wanted to write a script about a girl that’s really good-looking but kind of a sociopath—I’ve known a couple like that—and just the way that super-hot girls seem to live by different rules than the rest of us. I thought about doing something in the blue collar world, or something in the factory setting but from the boss’ point of view. This friend of mine had been a musician most of his life and had to quit going on the road, so in his late 40s he got a job in this parts warehouse. He started calling me to tell me about the people working there. I’ve worked in factories myself. He said there’s this woman, she sits on a stool, arms folded, shaking her head at everybody. She’s got a Tweedy-bird T-shirt on. She’s like 65, fanny-pack. I thought oh my god, I’ve never met this particular woman he’s talking about but I’ve seen her a hundred times. He had this one line of hers that he’d repeat. “I’m just gonna sit here.” So I just started imagining all these characters that are unique to factories, the same way there are characters unique to cubicles.


JB: And the Jason Bateman character? Did he come with this whole package you were envisioning?

MJ: That came more directly from my personal experience. At one point in my life I went from having nobody work for me to suddenly having 30 to 90 people working for me. I remember thinking, these people are driving me crazy, they don’t appreciate anything. I try to be nice and they take advantage of me. Then I realized, oh yeah, I’m the boss, and I was probably like that to my bosses. See, middle-management types like in Office Space tend to thrive on that stuff I think, the power trip, telling people what to do. I don’t enjoy telling people what to do. But I do enjoy steering the ship and making something on a big scale. That’s satisfying work.

Hollywoodland: an uneven dance with Californian gloom, going nowhere memorably

The suicide of George Reeves might not have pulled many flags down to half-mast at Hollywood’s film studios back in 1959, but it probably unleashed some kind of rampant emotional trauma among the millions of American kids who worshipped Reeves from his starring role on TV’s Adventures of Superman. Though he began promisingly with a part in Gone With The Wind, Reeves’ career never lived up to his aspirations and never lived down the role of the underwear-clad alien superhero that audiences came to identity him with completely. Despondent and without prospects, Reeves shot himself in the head in his Benedict Canyon home at the age of 45. Or so it seemed…

The lingering ambiguity surrounding Reeves’ death is the engine behind Hollywoodland, the feature debuts of director Allen Coulter and writer Paul Bernbaum. Framed by an investigation pursued by private detective Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), Hollywoodland’s a dark bit of Tinsletown self-reflection, an indictment of the circuitry of corruption linking the Hollywood studios with the LAPD, and an ordinary story of one more lost soul chewed up and spit out by the movies.

Brody’s bruised and amused as a cynical opportunist, Jake Gittes with a broken family and without a real career. Ben Affleck convinces as Reeves by contrasting a self-conscious phoney actor’s charm with striking glimpses of inner despair, reminding us that he was actually pretty good as the guilt-ridden lover in the underrated Bounce. Diane Lane, playing Toni, a Warner mogul’s wife and Reeves’ not-so-secret sugar mama, sympathetically embodies middle-age desperation in a town where a woman’s looks count for almost everything. It’s a shame her character’s gradually abandoned to a sort of generalized, theatrical gloom, muttering in a darkened room.

This is the stuff that terrifically lurid movies are made of, but Bernbaum’s approach, in tandem with Coulter’s, sabotages the richer, more resonant aspects of the material by focusing on the attempt to expose a possible cover-up –which goes nowhere– rather than on the conditions that brought about Reeves’ demise. It’s especially disappointing considering the talent in front of the camera. (At the same time, the nowhereness of the film is what's stuck with me the most since seeing it....)

Hollywoodland looks like it got stuck searching for a solid narrative when its sense of atmosphere and emotional texture could have been its strong suit. It’s interesting however that this failed narrative was trying to emulate the wonderfully perverse dynamics of Sunset Blvd: the older woman supporting the washed up talent while actually doing nothing for his career, that unforgettable claustrophobic love affair referenced right down to the message Toni has inscribed into Reeves’ watch: ‘Mad About the Boy!’ It’s an admirable sort of homage, even if it only makes Hollywoodland look even paler by comparison.