There’s a bit in The Anatomy of Melancholy about the “madness” common to critics, artists, and philosophers, and by extension anyone who remains so lost in thought or creative action that they’re rarely actually fully present in life. “Is not he mad that draws lines with Archimedes, whilst his house is ransacked and his city besieged, when the whole world is in combustion, or we whilst our souls are in danger … to spend our time in toys, idle questions, and things of no worth?” And then author Robert Burton jumps straight into describing a similar sort of madness: “That lovers are mad, I think no man will deny. To love and be wise, Jupiter himself cannot intend both at once.”
Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, is impeccably acted, inventively designed, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and often devastatingly sad. It was also still such a mystery to me after two viewings that I found it hard to trust my own vocabulary to describe what the experience of watching it is actually like. But Burton, rambling on 400 years before the fact, seems to nail it, or at least part of it: a life where the madness of creativity and the madness of love/lust are constantly exchanged for one another, to the point where pleasure from either is unattainable. But it’s also about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life’s work, “It’s about everything.”
Happy St. Patty’s Day! Screenhead has a decent but disappointingly short list of the Best and Worst Irish Accents in Cinema. I can’t really disagree with any of the three choices on either side of the fence (despite my devotion to Samantha Morton’s acting talents, bad accent or not), but I must gang up with the commenters in addressing some major exclusions in the worst category. Certainly Tom Cruise in Far and Away, yes Richard Gere in The Jackal, definitely the unmentioned Brad Pitt in The Devil’s Own.
But I most agree with comment #7 that Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai, which I just saw for the first time a few weeks ago, has given us the worst fake Irish accent of all time. Maybe it’s not the most inaccurate, though it is surely the most annoying. It’s so awful it’s driving me to drink just thinking about it. Take a listen to the narration in the video above to hear it for yourself. By the way, it might go down a bit easier with the clip I’ve chosen, as it features some really bad colorization that mutes Charles Lawton’s otherwise stunning cinematography. Watched as the film should be watched, though, Welles’ voice is more distinct, intrusive and offensive. It really makes a should-be-great film unwatchable save for in an academic setting.
Anyway, now that I’ve possibly ruined your holiday, let me ask this: are Irish accents the most faked in cinema? I figure a general British accent is actually more faked. So what is it about the Irish accent that gets more attention when faked? Is it more difficult? Is it more obvious to the ear when done badly? Is it just so notable because every March 17 we have to suffer some co-worker or friend attempting one for laughs?
Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, about a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and follows her to a commune full of celebrity impersonators based out of a Scottish castle, would make an incredible double-feature paired with Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness. Both films deal with people who have fled to the Highlands in denial of real-world mundaneity and in exploration of an escapist fiction. Korine’s long-awaited comeback feature may be a bit more on the nose about the desperate things we do in the name of absolving our lonely fates, but like Build a Ship, it rides the line between pure shtick and genuine emotion to a degree of success that, when it works, can be truly thrilling. Both are patchworky and imperfect, but both are among my favorite films I’ve seen this year.
Korine has always been a filmmaker who plugs story in the gaps around visual one-liners, and while Mister Lonely is a more traditional shot-reverse shot narrative than anything he has done before, from the opening shot the director confirms that, in some sense, he’s up to his old tricks. Luna’s Michael Jackson, decked out in familiar sunglasses, black armband, and standard issue surgical face mask, rides through the streets of Paris on a kiddie motorcycle with a toy monkey tied to the rear. Shot in slow motion, set to Bobby Vinton’s rendition of the title song, this opening scene is both punchline and four-dimensional painting. Lonely is wall-to-wall full of comparable sequences which, though maybe only a step or two away or above the kinds of cultural regurgitations that litter YouTube––Marilyn Monroe, her hair in curlers, comes to Michael Jackson’s room and seduces him by feeding him a strawberry; Abe Lincoln, lit only by strobe light, recites the Gettysburg Address whilst spinning a basketball on his finger––together add up to surprisingly poignant portrait of the willful abandonment of reality in favor of pop cultural oblivion.
Via Filmmaker Magazine, The House Next Door, and a typically bratty excoriation from Reverse Shot (”America\’s favorite dunderkind is back. And this time financed, inexplicably, by fashion magnate Agn
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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