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Tag Archive - Film Don’t Lie

Film Don’t Lie: The Dallas Mavericks and Being John Malkovich

May 26, 2011 in by with 3 Comments

Attempting to explain Being John Malkovich — like attempting to explain this year’s NBA playoffs — would be a farce. Anything resembling a plot summary would be a disservice to one of the strangest movies you’ll ever see. It’s dark — at times, positively horrific. Its most hilarious moments are some of its most twisted, and the most poignant would be downright silly in any other context. It’s constantly shifting, forcing the audience to keep up with right and wrong and every intersection between. It’s about portals and puppetry. It’s about learning who you are through someone else’s perspective. It’s about suspending everything you know about anything for 72 minutes and allowing yourself to embrace the absurdity of a reality far removed from your own — and coming away affected all the same.

Because let’s face it. We didn’t expect the Dallas Mavericks to make it this far. The unbearable monotony of the past three seasons only solidified our perception of the team’s stagnation. How were we to know that this team would be decimating its opponents with an unparalleled veteran savvy on both ends of the floor? We were never afforded the possibility. We applauded the introduction of Tyson Chandler, a defensive fulcrum, and the often beautiful offensive movement. But we are also creatures of habit, writing off a team that our eyes deemed dull and ordinary. Like Craig (played by John Cusack), a failing puppeteer, and Lotte (played by an almost unrecognizable Cameron Diaz), a pet shop owner, the Mavericks were unfortunately shrouded in a veil of anonymity, clouding the artistry and emotion of an unheralded collective.

Dallas’ shocking sweep of the Los Angeles Lakers in the second round was the first foray into John Malkovich, an actor that everyone in the movie seemed to recognize, yet none could pinpoint any specific movie roles. Still, for Craig, Lotte, and the lot of other nameless faces in a crowd that wanted 15 minutes away from their existence, Malkovich’s identity was a marked improvement over their own. For the first time since 2007, the Mavericks weren’t an afterthought. It was a moment of triumph, to be sure. But, of course, 15 minutes is never enough time.

The series against the Oklahoma City Thunder would prove to be a lesson in puppetry and mastery. In Dirk Nowitzki’s virtuosic performances throughout the series, we see Craig’s mastery of Malkovich’s body and mind, not only effectively creating the world’s greatest puppet, but also a conduit for the hopes and dreams that never materialized. With the exposure, Craig finds appreciation that wasn’t there before. Malkovich’s influence and celebrity meant the freedom to exhibit a skill that society had prior deemed to be a dying artform. Suddenly with a great playoff run, the labels that clung to Nowitzki’s career became archaic. It’s not that Craig reinvented puppetry, and it’s not that Dirk redefined being ‘soft’. But a larger audience, one without dismissive preconceived notions, helps restructure persona. But most importantly, through Malkovich — err, this Mavericks team, Nowitzki finds himself as close as he’s ever been to being a champion. It’s a dream that’s as close as it’ll ever be to reaching fruition. But he’s not the only one with dreams.

We learn in the movie that there are vessels of immortality. It’s been a long time coming, but the Mavericks vessel has ripened, and those on board know they won’t be long for this league. By mid-March, Dallas’ roster eerily resembled an All-Star team from the mid ’00s, except without the legs. We know the stories. Jason Kidd, Jason Terry, and Nowitzki have all tasted the NBA Finals before. Shawn Marion and Peja Stojakovic are relics of earlier offensive revolutions, both millimeters away from tasting the championship round. Significantly older this time around, it’s absolutely stunning that all of these men have played crucial roles in getting the team where it is now. Terry and Stojakovic were lights out in the dismantling of the Lakers, while Marion and Kidd were invaluable defenders against the endlessly athletic Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.  They all carry their own baggage when it comes to failed dreams, but they climb aboard this vessel as a unit in hopes of basketball immortality; in hopes that a championship will absolve a decade of struggle, and validate a lifetime of commitment to this wonderful sport.

It’s a dark tunnel to the championship. It’s scary, and probably squishy. For Dallas, entering the mind of Malkovich means knowing what it means to be a champion. Nowitzki, his aging brethren, and the rest of the Mavericks are surely hoping that redemption can be achieved in the time it takes to be sucked in and spit out.

Film Don’t Lie: The Denver Nuggets and “Gattaca”

April 28, 2011 in by with 4 Comments

Teambuilding is merely an exercise in collective eugenics; a geneticist of sorts hand picks desired traits and abilities, and engineers a finished product to incorporate them. The logistical realities of operating with entire human beings rather than sequences of genetic code require more imprecise maneuvers, but the underlying goal is the same: perfection, in all of its pragmatic glory.

There are, however, those teams that come to exist as a matter of random chance rather than designed formula. Their point guards don’t have perfect vision. Their bigs don’t have the ideal height and hops. Their wings have imperfect jumpers. They consist of the same guanine, adenine, cytosine, and thymine that constitutes those perfectly engineered specimens, but the sequence is subtly different. In the world of Gattaca, they are the in-valids, those made — and made imperfect — by nature itself, in stark contrast to the orchestrated makeup of all that surround them.

The Denver Nuggets as we knew them — the wonderful, inspired, and deeply flawed team left in the wake of the Carmelo Anthony trade — were unquestionably in-valid. The limitations ingrained in their very code were supposed to keep them from ever entering Gattaca’s gates; without Anthony and without Chauncey Billups, the collection of supporting pieces in Denver was supposed be rebuffed at the playoff threshold altogether. No team can fully fake their way into a playoff-worthy record, and the players on the Nuggets roster were destined to be something inferior.

The Nuggets found their way in. There were tests of blood and vision and resolve, but none could turn away a capable team that knew it belonged. Obviously Denver would have been better off with a perfect profile, but chance’s creation was good enough to pass as legitimate perfection. They weren’t, however, good enough to win. The fact that the Thunder — a team of two stars, a deliberate model, and all the trappings of a valid contender — took the series and eliminated the Nuggets from the playoffs is no surprise, but then again, it’s also not the point. 

Vincent (voiceover): We used to swim as far out as we dared — it was about who would get scared and turn back first. Of course, it was always me. Anton was by far the stronger swimmer, and he had no excuse to fail.

It should have been expected that the “genetically superior” team would win out in any measure of competitive worth, but those rare exceptions beg for us to look at something beyond mere expectation. In the film, Vincent “always” lost to his biologically perfect brother in their battle of wills. The system was built for him to fail, and fail he did — many times, we’re led to believe.

Yet twice in the film, we see Vincent win in a race against his brother. First as a young adult:

Vincent (voiceover): It was the last time we swam together out into the open sea. Like always knowing each stroke to the horizon was one we’d have to make back to the shore. But something was very different about that day. Every time Anton tried to pull away, he found me right beside him. Until finally, the impossible happened. It was the one moment in our lives when my brother was not as strong as he believed, and I was not as weak. It was the moment that made everything else possible.

And finally, in the analogous representation of Vincent’s journey to the elusive “other side” of the world that had been denied him for so long on the basis of his makeup:

 

The Nuggets, in-valids though they were, haven’t yet won. They failed, just as so many other in-valid playoff teams have failed before them. Anton still swims harder and farther, leaving the Nuggets behind to face their own limitations.

Gattaca may be, in part, a story of the triumph of human spirit, but that resilience is hardly the lesson here. Sure, the Nuggets went hard and believed, but there’s no revelation in the fact that a playoff team trusts in its potential. Instead, it would do us all good to reflect on one of Gattaca‘s other themes: makeup can tell us all kinds of practical information, but internal sequence and structure alone don’t offer sufficient basis to discriminate. Denver didn’t follow the model of other championship contenders, but it wasn’t the oft-diagnosed lack of a star player that damned the Nuggets to their first round exit. It was their struggles to contain Kevin Durant, the failure to create shots against pressure, and the inability to utilize all of their available assets effectively.

Denver would have been better off with a star, but that privilege isn’t the only way to achieve success. Vincent, for example, was able to do brilliant work once given the opportunity, despite all of his flaws:

Director Josef: Godliness. I reviewed your flight plan. Not one error in a million keystrokes. Phenomenal. It’s right that someone like you is taking us to Titan.

It was somehow right that Vincent, with his likelihood for heart failure, his myopic vision, and his various other limitations, was to lead the human race to a brave new world. Just like someday, it will be right for a new breed of championship contender — not at all unlike these Nuggets — to bring home the title, and debunk a generation of critics who claimed that “no team could ever win a title by doing X.” Certain skills and production are mandatory for success in this game and this league, but the formation — the very makeup — of a team is fully flexible. Star power isn’t important, so long as that aforementioned production comes from somewhere on the roster in a reliable fashion.

The Nuggets don’t need one star, nor two; after all, every atom in our bodies was once part of a star, which makes the Nuggets already glow with their own star power. Moving forward, they need a composite fix to either address their team weaknesses or bolster their strengths. In this series, Denver simply failed to break through. That event, whether through these Nuggets or some other in-valid team either known or unknown to us now, is coming. Those teams will swim out together into the open sea time and time again, until finally, inevitably, they experience the kind of moment that makes everything else possible.

Film Don’t Lie: The Oklahoma City Thunder and “The Breakfast Club”

April 28, 2011 in by with 3 Comments

 

Of all the John Hughes films, Breakfast Club is the best. I don’t mean that in that it is the most critically acclaimed, nor the smartest, nor the funniest, nor even the most popular. It is simply that it manages to combine what makes the funniest movies funny (memorable lines and gags), with what makes the most iconic coming-of-age-movies iconic, relate-able feelings (“being a teenager suuuuuuu-uuuucks”),  and the most difficult element to replicate, simply being cool. Christmas Vacation, Uncle Buck, or The Great Outdoors are funnier (sorry, Judd Nelson, but you can’t really compete with Chase, Candy, or Aykroyd), Pretty in Pink, Home Alone, and Sixteen Candles more iconic, and Ferris Bueler’s Day Off way, way cooler. But none combine those elements the way Breakfast Club does. Everyone has a favorite moment from that film, and everyone has a favorite character (though Molly Ringwald’s is never it).

When you watch that movie as a teenager, you inevitably find yourself saying “Yeah, man.” If you don’t, congratulations, you’re somehow even more cynical than the false cynicism of the average teenager. The movie captures too much of the experience, emboldens you too much with the idealistic concepts of staying authentic to what should matter, to getting beyond those stereotypes that seem to weigh you down so much, the ones you realize are utterly useless and outdated the minute your high school days end, just as you realize that your parents’ damage to you is only relative to the damage done to them, and that of the world on you. But in that moment, where you’re first experiencing it, you form a nostalgia for it that carries over. This is what a film about high school should be about.

And the Thunder against the Nuggets, that’s what basketball should be about.

They make mistakes, the ill-temperance of youth tainting what needs to be flawless execution, but the drama shines through. The Nuggets don’t make a fair Mr. Vernon. Which is why Rob will be along shortly to deal with their own version of dystopia. No, what the Thunder were really fighting against was the idea they needed detention. That young teams aren’t ready, that they don’t win. Vernon was tradition, experience, the cynical idea that a team like that simply can’t make it to the next step, that it needs detention.

Even the way the five are brought together is vaguely reminiscent of the Thunder. After all, Westbrook was the star at UCLA. He was the point guard for a UCLA team, never supposed to play second fiddle. Harden was the role player, never supposed to be drafted third, and was the underwhelming gunner prospect who wound up as a vital cog that seems at once worth the pick and not. Ibaka, we don’t know what he is. Thabo, the cast off, the list goes on and on and on. And everything, as we learned in this series, just as we learned when the romance failed between Estevez and Ringwald, leads back to Judd Nelson as the unconquerable Bender, and Kevin Durant as the unfathomable hero.

The translations aren’t pure, and that’s what makes the elements in play so much more fulfilling. Bender’s needling of Vernon to the point where he sucker punches him is Westbrook’s own intemperance. The infamous dance sequence screams loudly of the Game 2 romp, the Thunder’s first real routing of an inferior team in the playoffs, high on their own play. The growling monologue of Bender relating his own disturbing relationship with his father reminds us of Perkins, that he was cast aside by the franchise he loved, the brothers he’d played with, prayed with, because of money and a doubt of his knees. Ally Sheedy’s deceptively shallow Allison (the girl every guy who watches the film falls in love with while hoping Ringwald vanishes) reminds us of Harden. Quirky, confusing, and bizarrely wise. There’s Brooks, trying to keep everyone together as the mild-mannered Brian. Westbrook can’t decide if he’s Bender or Andrew, constantly slipping between both. Durant shares this role in him. Milk and cookies and marijuana and beer, but just on the floor. The two can never sort out who’s in the lead or should be.

The sneak down the hall to get the joint has to be the escape in Game 3, where by all rational sense the jig should have been up, but they narrowly escape thanks to the key contributions. And Westbrook’s gunning in Game 4, right or wrong, speaks of Perkins’ lack of patience.

The movie isn’t really about triumph, you realize that as you get older, it’s about those brief moments in life where you feel like you’ve learned something. It doesn’t matter if you really have. It doesn’t matter that you likely face a superior Spurs team in the second round or barring that, a much superior Lakers team. Nor does it matter that all you’ve really done is win a first-round playoff seed as a favorite seed, which so many forgotten teams have done before. It’s big in your life, at that moment, and that’s what matters, that’s what you hold onto. There’s all the time in the world for you to come to grips with the fact that in many ways, high school is about those simplistic terms, those cliched definitions, because you’re not a real person yet. For the time, you can thrive in that knowledge that you’re different, and that the experiences you have matter. You can hold that defiant fist high as a great song plays to end the flick, and think of the letter.

 

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did *was* wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us… In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain…

 

 

 

…and an athlete…

 

 

…and a basket case…

 

 

…a princess…

 

 

…and a criminal…

 

 

Does that answer your question?… Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

 

Film Don’t Lie: The Sixers, The Heat, And “The Fast and the Furious”

April 28, 2011 in by with 1 Comment


 

Do you realize that during a five-minute sequence to really kick off the action in this film that there’s a solid minute-long sequence where the entire thing is nothing but two neon-colored sports cars racing in blurs? And it’s not facetious in the slightest? This actually happens, along with this quote, after Paul Walker’s character says “Dude, I almost had you.”

“Ask any racer, any real racer. It doesn’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile; winning’s winning.”

-Vin Diesel, “The Fast and the Furious.”

Now, this is a bad film. That line above should be proof enough. That line is the same kind of overly simplistic crap you’re going to find on shows where people yell each other or any halftime show not on TNT. It ignores context, relevant elements, and any sort of analysis beyond the results speaking for themselves. It’s also pretty true. Which is why it’s the story of Heat-Sixers. And why The Fast and the Furious (as opposed to 2 Fast, 2 Furious, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Fast & Furious, or Fast Five) fits so nicely with the series.

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In this, the most amazing of first rounds, there are going to be bad series. Every single one of them can’t be amazing. God knows the disaster that was Celtics-Knicks wasn’t. But Heat-Sixers was worst of them all. It was so very much the empty action film. Nothing but gunplay, high-speed chases, explosions, women wearing slutty clothes, and behaving sluttily (but some of them are tough so it’s not misogynistic, we promise!), and incredibly fast vehicles. You’re not walking out of this flick thinking about it, you’re not even really going to enjoy it on further watching. It’s just eye candy. It’s like cartoons for adults. Which isn’t to say that’s a bad thing.

When I saw this flick in 2001, it was the summer after my freshman year of college, and I was home at my folks. My friends and I saw the movie, walked out, and without saying anything, drove out to an abandoned strip of road in the backwoods of Arkansas and raced our crappy sedans and beat-up used pickups. That’s what The Fast and the Furious did to you. It made you want to do ridiculously unnecessary things that borderlined on dangerous and flirted with reckless in your own life. The Heat? That’s the ultimate sin they commit. They make you want to watch, by flirting with something that somehow goes beyond Showtime. Don’t get confused. They’re not. Showtime was function through form. The Heat are form trying to be function. And most of the time it makes you shake your head and wonder, “How in God did someone greenlight this?” But there are those moments, like the Race Wars scene in the desert, or when Wade literally just throws the ball as high as he can and James just goes up and gets it, that you want to do that, you want to see that, you want to be a part of it. It’s just f*cking cool.

It dials into some sort of primal, Neanderthal-based instinct to simply exert as much testosterone as possible. That may be the biggest difference. If the Celtics are strength through fury, and Showtimes was art through balance, then the Heat are simply basketball testosterone. It’s indulgence at the highest level. Anyone who’s studied will tell you that real strength is discipline. What the Heat express is not that. It’s just speed, and style, taken to its most ridiculous form. It’s like a Bruckenheimer flick if you took out all the creative energy and just poured in visceral physics.

The Sixers are Paul Walker here, clearly. The cop trying to be the hood, the traditional borderline playoff team trying to be the point-forward driven stretch of positional revolution. The incomplete team trying to be the athletic powerhouse, and finding themselves more and more drawn to playing the Heat’s game. In Game 5, the Sixers actually spent much of the first quarter winning, and then, for reasons unknown, tried to be the Heat. Behind the back passes, alley-oops, the works. They could have simply played their game and maybe it would have worked, maybe it wouldn’t have. But there they were, racing their sedans on a deserted Arkansas backroad, and surprised when the real machine flies by them on the highway.

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The sad reality is that the Heat are just like Vin Diesel. Unable to see what, in any situation that isn’t a testosterone-fueled fantasy, they’ll wind up in jail. My father always said, “You can outrun a cop. You can’t outrun the radio.” The Celtics, naturally, are the radio, in this position. In the second round, the Heat have to somehow prove that blurring lights, car chases, and gunplay can constitute something real, can actually show some sort of insight.

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Do you realize how many shoves are in this flick? Rewatching it, I was just sort of stunned. The level of violence in a movie about dreamboats racing cars is stunning. It’s unnecessary and has no real point to it. It’s just shoving. And the racing? In reality the racing’s just a, pardon this, vehicle. When you look at it, the Asian mob, the heist, the cops, the double-cross, that’s all the real plot. The cars are really just dressing. And in Heat-Sixers, the highlights were really just dressing. The entire thing was about defense. Meeks holding Wade down for two games before Wade adjusted and overcame because, well, he’s Dwyane Wade. The Heat cutting off driving lanes, forcing the jumpers, running off threes, clamping down on positions. That’s the only saving grace of the Heat, that they recognize that it’s defense that can separate them. They’re at their best unleashed, washing over the barriers of the defense in an athletic tidal wave collapsing down on the huts that line the beaches. But what drives them is the ability to garrison the walls, to hold the line and to force teams into strangling themselves. They’ve learned from the Celtics, even if they can’t imitate them.

But at the same point, it’s about the cars. I mean, it’s a movie about car racing.  In the ridiculous monologue Diesel gives Walker when he shows him the Dodge Charger, he says “For those 10 seconds, I feel free.”  That’s the exact same way the Heat are on the break, in those ridiculous highlights. When they get to preen for the crowd after a ridiculous play, they’re doing what they came together to do. The function doesn’t matter, the defense doesn’t matter, the criticism, any of it. They’re alive, and that’s all that matters.

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Walker eventually succumbs to the temptation and becomes just like them, just like the Sixers succumbed and gave into the series. Collins has so much to be proud of for what they’ve accomplished, but the result is that there’s not much to learn from this series. You walk out the same way, with nothing learned nothing experienced. You just want to go race your car into the night.

 

 

Credit to Daniel Rouse on Twitter for this FDL suggestion.

Film Don’t Lie: The Boston Celtics, the New York Knicks, and Cube

April 25, 2011 in by with 0 Comments

Film Don’t Lie looks at the playoff series in retrospect and a movie. The movies are often bad, but they really only serve as an expository device. Plus, you’re reading a basketball blog. Come on.  -Ed.

See, because Boston-New York was a horror film, get it?

“AND THE BARTENDER SAID WHY THE LONG FACE, AND IT WAS A HORSE!”

Anyway, Cube‘s actually about how humans will inevitably fail themselves. Even if they are able to outwit their own devices, they’ll fall victim to their own neurotic impulses. You can get out of the physical boundaries we build for ourselves, but you can’t get out of the spiritual, mental, and emotional traps we’ve designed to destroy ourselves.

The Cube, obviously, is the Celtics. The Knicks, obviously, are the poor dead bastards trying to get through the maze.

So much of the film is spent trying to decipher what the Cube is, where it came from, why the victims are within it, how it works, how you do prime factorization on the spot when you’re worried gigantic laser spikes are going to pierce you in the face. That’s pretty much what the Knicks spent this series trying to do. Trying to understand who the Celtics were, how you beat them. The Celtics, even after all this time, are unpredictable. They have guidelines, principles, kinks in the chains, but you have to spend so much time figuring them out that by the time you’ve discovered the secret, your time is up and you’re dead.

Rondo’s return to World Destroyer mode is the closest thing we’ve got to the overall aesthetic design of the Cube. Look at it. It’s smooth, detailed, sharp, clean, and solely focused. It also doesn’t react. It’s not affected by your frustration or successes, your victories or failures. It just rotates and executes. And that weird ball-fake non-whip pass he’s got going on? Well, the excessive violence in Cube can border on the irrational. You’re waiting for spikes with lazer tips that actually transmit poison. It’s completely over the top, which reveals the biggest secret about this movie.

It’s bad. It’s really pretty bad. The characters are caricatures but not in any sort of revealing or funny way, there’s no overt symbolism or subtle comparisons for sociological discussion, it’s just a bunch of dead over-exaggerations of traditional archetypes right on down to the mentally challenged wunderkind (who becomes more or less interesting if you watch Cube 2: Hypercube and Cube: Zero like I have, depending on how drunk you are when you watch them). And this series? There was a lot to consider, a lot to think was going on, but in reality, it was just a team without depth facing a robotic construct that didn’t happen to press the right rooms in the first two games, still took its fatalities, then cleaned up when the game really got going.

But if you want what’s interesting about the whole thing? The way the characters fail themselves. Not just Quentin’s psychopathic paranoia, but the lack of trust in one another. Which is frustrating until you understand, of course they weren’t going to survive. They couldn’t trust one another. They didn’t even know one another. It was entirely possible one of them was a spy. It was possible one was going to slow them up. After Game 2, Melo talked about how he made the right play, and he expected Jared Jeffries to make the layup. That’s removing yourself from the responsibility model. It’s the same as not making a decision in the Cube because you don’t want to be wrong. But Toney Douglas was like the opening victim. Far too impulsive, far too reckless with his decisions, and yet timid and meek at the worst times, too. The decisions have to be clear if you want to survive. The Knicks as a group are doomed by the same thing that doomed the poor folks in the Cube. Someone else pulled the strings and stuck them in the box together. Dolan’s incessant meddling with the negotiations process was only going to have one result from the beginning: the team surrendering too much for a player at a position which is in no way vital to D’Antoni’s system. The Depth afforded them by the other players, and more importantly, the versatility, was considerably more important. But hey, whatever, let’s get put in a box and try to fight our way out of it.

You can believe that Kazan is able to escape the Cube at the end, but that’s unlikely. It’s a government operated facility (we find out later) and there will be people waiting. But getting beyond the select group of participants the film focuses on, there’s really no escape. The Cube has the advantage in the percentages, and keeps on rotating.

All that’s left is to see if people can change, and if they’re smart enough to realize they have to.

by onkel_wart on Flickr