The Lonely Island's Incredibad is that rare comedy album that's legitimately funny. Elsewhere, we sneak a peek at the most notable foreign films of the new year, including Three Monkeys.
Looking at the titles on this list, I’ve apparently been spending my free time lately laughing at Andy Samberg’s shtick and reading foreign-film subtitles. What can I say? I know how to have fun. The Lonely Island, Incredibad (Universal Republic) Where Flight of the Conchords’ yuks can suffer when they don’t have the visuals to complement their silly songs, only one track from Andy Samberg’s comedy troupe album desperately needs its Digital Short – the never-that-great “Natalie Rap” starring a disturbingly thugged-out Natalie Portman. Whether it’s a stand-up record or a songs-and-skits affair, comedy albums are always hopelessly loaded down with duff moments, so one learns to focus on the funny bits and never mind the rest. Thankfully, Incredibad has more than enough choice tracks – not just “Lazy Sunday” and the inexhaustible “Dick in a Box,” which you already know from Saturday Night Live, but also “We Like Sportz” (which is a fine mocking of the sports-fan lifestyle, done through the eyes of nerds), “Sax Man” (a one-joke idea that never gets old), and the title track (a hip-hop alien-sex anecdote that’s making an 11-year-old somewhere in the world giggle hysterically right now). Samberg’s Digital Shorts can sometimes be annoyingly, willfully bizarre, but Incredibad is almost all pleasure – the Lonely Island do white-boy hip-hop exceptionally well and aren’t too terrible with electronica or reggae. Now I just need someone to explain the Santana song to me.
Tokyo Sonata (Regent Releasing) Great first 90 minutes, terrible last 30 minutes. That was my pithy response to my wife’s question about what I thought of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film, which is a break from his typical genre, horror, for a family melodrama about a Tokyo family reeling from economic woes and existential crises. Like my much loved Yi Yi, Tokyo Sonata understands that to examine a family unit, you have to observe them on their own and as a group, and Kurosawa does that exceptionally well – the mother is like Marge Simpson, silently suffering but unfailingly the matriarchal rock, while the kids are completely recognizable versions of kids you know or maybe were yourself. As for the father, he’s played by Teruyuki Kagawa as a businessman without a job and, therefore, without a place in the world or a sense of identity. His slow devolution is touching and, then, surprising. This brings us to the last 30 minutes – they’re not really terrible, but it’s a disappointment nonetheless. Kurosawa takes some audacious risks in his third act, and while I get them on a thematic level, this is one of the rare cases where a movie’s final stretch steps so wrong so often that I have to actively remind myself what I loved so much earlier in the film. Still, I forgave Tokyo Sonata because it rights itself for a very lovely last moment that says a lot without seemingly saying anything.
Paris 36 (Sony Pictures Classics) It’s one of the oldest plotlines in the known universe – let’s put on a show to save the old theater! But like that other moth-eaten narrative – we need to win the big game! – part of its charm is its comfortable familiarity, which is why although Paris 36 may be hopeless fluff, it’s not completely objectionable fluff. In Paris between the wars, a group of stagehands, untalented comedians and other assorted riff-raff band together to resuscitate a once-great music hall, while at the same time dealing with love, fractured families, mobsters and the creeping plague of Nazism. Director Christopher Barratier keeps everything pleasant and goofy, stopping from time to time for sentimentality or ridiculously melodramatic plot twists. Paris 36 will play beautifully to audiences who just want pretty costumes, pretty set decoration, a slight air of artistic sophistication and some well-chosen songs prettily sung. The film is no deeper than that, and give Barratier credit for skillfully doing shallow well. But just as some albums are little more than paying-the-bills background music, Paris 36 doesn’t require any of your higher brain functions during its running time – it’s a girls-night movie for the art-house set.
The Song of Sparrows (Regent Releasing) Reza Naji, the star of The Song of Sparrows, gets close to achieving what Habib Boufares did in The Secret of the Grain – making a put-upon, beaten-down father seem positively heroic. The fact that he doesn’t quite get there shouldn’t detract from the skill of his performance. Equally, Iranian director Majid Majidi’s film takes so many correct steps that when it later moves into more conventional terrain, I was both disappointed and willing to live with it. Naji plays a rural ostrich farmer who, needing money to keep his family afloat, travels to Tehran on his motorcycle, only to be mistaken for one of the teeming city’s many two-wheeled taxis. The man is thrilled by his good fortune, but unintended consequences start to distort his modest worldview. I don’t want to say anymore since the enjoyment is in the telling – The Song of Sparrows is hardly revolutionary in its insights, but the gentle transformation of its main character needs to be kept secret so that the understated moments can slowly unfurl for the viewer.
Tokyo! (Liberation Entertainment) Even less literal an interpretation of its host city than 2007’s Paris, Je T’aime, Tokyo! consists of three short films, none of them dazzling, but as with Paris, a lot of the fun comes from watching what comes from renowned filmmakers when they’re working in a shorter timeframe with certain narrative restrictions put upon them. For instance, I wouldn’t have expected Michel Gondry to have come up with the best entry in the bunch, although I liked The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind more than most did. Gondry’s cutesy excesses, I assumed, would run amuck, but “Interior Design” is wonderfully wistful and restrained – he has a knack for portraying restless, drifting young souls, and the slivers of lives he documents in his short film are so memorable because we feel like we can fill in the gaps that he leaves open for us. Leos Carax’s “Merde” starts very promisingly before it descends into obvious metaphors and self-indulgence – still, his film has stayed with me because it refused to sit still and behave properly. Those who only know Bong Joon-ho from his excellent monster movie The Host will be sad to hear that “Shaking Tokyo” is just a love story. Even sadder is that I think, like “Merde,” it’s fairly obvious in its thematic points, although Bong’s short is simply too stylish and graceful to be boring. So, Tokyo! is more footnote than major statement, but I didn’t mind because the short-form’s freedom offers an adventurousness that’s exciting even if the execution isn’t always perfect. And, really, you should see the Gondry one.
Three Monkeys (Zeitgeist Films) Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan makes gorgeous movies that you want to soak in, luxuriating in their measured pace and simply stunning compositions. So why don’t I love them? I asked myself again while watching Three Monkeys, which is the most plot-driven of his three most recent efforts that have gained him acclaim at Cannes and elsewhere. It’s a story about an unhappy family, a politician with a dirty secret he’s trying to hide, and the moral and legal snags that occur when these folks get mixed up together. Ceylan and his cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki are doing astounding things with HD – their new movie has some gray-sky shots that are just as astounding as what they pulled off in Ceylan’s last film, Climates – and the director’s usual penchant for quiet observational moments works quite well this time around since he’s basically crafted a slow-speed thriller. But as hypnotic as his films are, they hint and suggest too much for my taste, sometimes making a virtue out of their silent ambiguity. Not that ambiguity is a bad thing, but like his beautiful gray skies, they only can do so much. That’s a quibble more than a major complaint, though – Distant, Climates and Three Monkeys are all necessary viewing, and he’s only getting more and more interesting with each film. My hunch is that when he makes a film that connects with me fully, I’m going to love it passionately.
Consumables is a regular overview of popular culture.
