268. Clerks

Song - Money For Nothing (Dire Straits)

Movie: Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994)

Towards the end, Dante (Brian O'Halloran) laments that he finds it really hard to change what's bothering him as he is "not the type of person who'll disrupt things just to shit comfortably." In a movie that almost entirely consists of entertaingly long-winded asides and digressions, that's one of the few lines of dialogue that expresses a concrete idea simply. I would have enjoyed Clerks a lot even without it, but it does add some depth to it, highlighting that Kevin Smith has actually been building towards something, with more thought and subtlety than he's let on. O'Halloran deserves some credit here too. He is obviously not some great actor, and hasn't done anything of note outside of Smith's orbit, but he does get Dante's vibe of half-arsed nonchalance exactly right. He hates his job as an inconvenience store clerk, and hates himself for feeling that way, resulting in many failed attempts to find the exact midpoint between having a professional demeanor and a cool indifference. 

Smith was still working in the store he shot Clerks in, an origin story that has helped him become successful enough to never have to worry about shitting comfortably, or about disrupting things. I hadn't seen Clerks before, but I was a fan of Chasing Amy and Dogma, and even found Jersey Girl quite charming. It's quite unfortunate that Smith has since become way too invested in essentially making fan fiction out of his own material, especially because it risks clouding his earlier work. His eagerness to be seen as the ultimate fanboy is at odds with his work on Clerks, which never feels like it's made by someone who has no reference points beyond geekdom. Aside from one scene that discusses Star Wars (and even then, the primarily discussion point is not the movie itself, but an absurd hypothetical dilemma involving independent contractors), there are barely any nods to popular culture here. Most of the jokes, dialogues and situations in the film are just (well thought out) comic exaggerations that would be recognisable to anyone who's ever been either a clerk (or has had any other shitty side job) or a somewhat lost 22-year old. And the opening scene (that has a brilliant punch line just when you think it has ended) made me laugh a lot. 

Now to bring up the elephant in the room, yes, Kevin Smith is obviously not the director with the greatest visual sense in the world. It is here sometimes fairly obvious that he has no idea what to do with a camera beyond turning it on and pointing in the general direction of someone speaking, preferably without moving around too much. There is a hockey scene that contains so many close ups of roller skates and hockey sticks it's unclear whether it was filmed like that to achieve an artsy look, or whether it was intended as a parody of artsy depictions of sports. It doesn't work as either and its visual incoherence is mostly just baffling.  Having said that, Smith has found lots of ways to make his visual limitations work in his favor. Apart from using cuts for comic effect really well, he also knows how to get the most out of static shots, probably most notably in the scene where Dante and his ex reunite, allowing us to see them work through their feelings in great detail. Another good example (that sets up the one scene of the film that's a bit tasteless and needlessly humiliating) comes when an older customer asks to use the staff bathroom, and once approved keeps reappearing into the frame with perfect timing and increasingly outreagous requests. 

For my money though, the best shot of the film features Randal (Jeff Anderson), Dante's neighbouring video store clerk (who has much less trouble walking around with an air of cool indifference) ridiculing a client who is asking for film advice. They are filmed from inside the video store; through its windows we see Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) hang around on the block as they usually do. When the disappointed client leaves, we see a confrontation between her and the two layabouts. As tbe camera remaisn still inside the store, we see it all happening from behind and with the sound muffed. It's the best example of how the corner on which our two clerks work is shown from many different perspectives and viewpoints, creating a nice sense of the overall atmosphere of the place, turning the movie into a snapshot of street life.  

267. 25th Hour

Song - Overcome (Live)

Movie: 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

"This life came so close to never happening..." Few contemporaries, in any field, have done as much to highlight America's racial and social injustices as Spike Lee, but what makes him such a great filmmaker is his understanding that societal structures can't entirely account for human folly. Do the Right Thing! leaves no doubt about how race and class shape its Brooklyn neighborhood and create power hierarchies and tension, but, without ever losing that context, Lee depicsts Raheem's death and the ensuing destruction of Sal's pizzeria as the result of a series of choices made by humans acting out of love, anger, desire, chagrin, playfulness, irrationality, and a sense of community. Lee has criticised audiences for failing to understand why Mookie threw the trash can into Sal's pizzeria, and even if you set aside political considerations, it's easy to see why such an audience response might irk Lee. Cause he does the work, and never forgets to consider Sal's feelings about that faithful night. It all came so close to not happening, and you can sense why Sal may feel that it never should have happened. 

Too many contemporary filmmakers wanting to dip their toes in social criticism fail to give their individual characters the humanity Spike Lee provides, resulting in films that are angry about the system without showing how that system actually affects real recognisable people, making their characters merely artificial symbols of a struggle.  It wouldn't hurt either to put in an effort to see political/social adversaries as actual people with feelings, ideas and hopes worth exploring, which finally brings us to 25th Hour, a film that makes you care deeply about the inner lives and personal struggles of two douchebags (you can easily imagine Barry Pepper's character play a racist cop in another Spike Lee movie) and a cowardly privileged professor who would love to be able to fall in love with his student, without feeling guilt over it. 

The main douchebag is Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), a semi-professional crack dealer who got caught and is now spending his last 24 hours as a free man with his two best childhood friends, Wall Street trader Frank (Barry Pepper) and high school professor Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his dad (Brian Cox) and his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson).  Each of these people approach the day with a huge lump in their troath that they can't quite express, partly because it's hard to put into words such a monumental change that will forever alter their lives, partly becuase they all have their own individual hangups. Luckily, there is Terence Blanchard, whose score plays as if its composed by that lump in their throats, expressing their confused sadness and apprehension of the incomprehensible magnitude of the coming void in ther lives. The score adds an almost mythical dimension to the film, that's even further progressed by Lee setting it in the direct aftermath of 9/11 with Pepper's apartment even looking directly at the site where the Twin Towers used to be. 

If I would be forced to choose, I'd say that this is my favorite original film music, but 25th Hour also contains two scenes of similar greatness The first one comes early when after seeing 'Fuck You' scribbled on a bathroom mirror, Monty responds by disparaging just about every single meaningful ethnic and social group in New York, with each of them appearing in a montage that works as a love letter to the diversity and resilience of the city following the terrorist attacks. An additional nice Spike Lee touch is that he adds a small dash of surrealism to the scene by having Norton's reflection come off as much angrier than the actual Monty standing in more quiet resignation in front of the mirror, knowing that he can't really blame 'the Bensonhurst Italians with their pomaded hair" or the "uptown brothers who don't pass the ball, never play defense and take five steps on every lay-up" for all his troubles. Some of these people we'll see again in the film's ending scene, when his dad drives him to prison and tempts him with an alternate life. He could take the wrong turn, drive out of New York, all the way into the west where in some faraway desert town Monty could build a new life. It's a scene of great melodramatic magnificence that (admittedly featuring some absolutely godawful make-up work) culminates with the words that open this piece, so effective because they are equally devastating in the context of both the alternate reality imagined for Monty and his actual reality. They serve also as a wonderfull expresion of the feelings of anger, love and disappointment Cox has towards his son. And again the scene works as a love letter, in this case to the vastness and the possibility of America, making it only more tragic that out of all the choices Monty's had, he decided to be a mediocre crack dealer barely ever traversing beyond the familiarity of his neighborhood. 

It's notable though that it's mostly the others who dwell on what could have been. Norton regrets getting caught, and is pissed off about it, but he doesn't exactly regret his life choices. Though outwardly he presents himself as wanting to make amends, his final night of freedom is mostly about living the kind of life he did when all went well. He enjoys being able to get a private room with his friends and lover in a big nightclub where he can say cleverly sounding stupid things like "Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends", and succesfully pretend that he understands the ethical misgivings of his friend who's in love with a student, while secretly judging him for being a weakling who can't act. What makes Lee great is that he is never (explicitly) judgemental about all this. He understands the allure of this life, and he sympathises with Monty's regret that he has to abandon it. The film looks at the situation from the closured view of Monty and his friends, and finds itself on their same confused emotional wavelength. Lee makes sure to film even the most meaningless, dumb or nonsenical act in a way that feels almost epical and eternal. In the process, the film also becomes a great dramatic depiction of the kind of friendship that was comically presented in The Big Lebowski, with Hofman's Jacob in the role of Donny.