ADAM MEMBREY

Fare Thee Well: ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

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Inside

There’s a moment where I thought the film lost me. Driving on a long, empty road, with one-word-mumbling beat poet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund) steering beside him and jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman) in the back seat punctuating his tedious non sequiturs with short naps, our main character Llewyn struggles in and out of his sleep, unsure of just how long this damn trip will be. Each time the film cut to the road, it seemed to grow longer. It felt like no end was in sight, even if we knew the final destination.

No way the Coen Brothers would lose their pacing like this, I thought. Something is up. This must be a magic trick of sorts.

It’s not until we see Llewyn, playing a rather quietly intense version of “The Death of Queen Jane”, only to be told “I don’t see much money in this”, that we realize what they’re after. They’re allowing us to feel the struggle; the frustration of losing the cat people have trusted you with; the constant need for a couch or money or something to keep you going when your dream alone isn’t enough to sustain you. By the end of the film, Davis, growing weary, is ready to give up. And just as he leaves the nightclub, Bob Dylan is about to play. Folk music is about to have some money to it. He just had no way of knowing.

It’s often said about any Coen Brothers movie that even their minor characters suggest an inner life; they arrive on the scene so fully-formed that even when they don’t say a word, they surely make an impression. This film is no different. From Carey Mulligan’s sweet-voiced but quietly agitated Jean to Justin Timberlake’s happily aloof Jim to the aforementioned John Goodman’s Roland and Hedlund’s Johnny Five – all these characters pop on the screen and keep you smiling, even when the story isn’t exactly a bright spot of sunshine.

This film would make an interesting double feature with their 2009 gem A Serious Man: both films feature men who suffer throughout the film and are aghast at the forces that seem to conspire against them. The difference, however, is that A Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik is a good man while Davis is more than kind of an asshole. Gopnik does his best, providing for his family, being kind to others – even listening to angry parents who want their underachieving teenage students to be given a totally undeserved higher grade. He takes it all in, all these maladies he by no means deserves, and does his best to find answers. Davis, on the other hand, is shown time and time again to be oblivious to the concerns of others. He regularly finds new ways to ask for a couch to sleep on, only showing a slight twinge of guilt. He talks down to the people who try to help him, assuring them they just don’t get what this music is and why it’s important.

In the film, Davis runs into a military boy, Troy Nelson, who gets a music contract. He’s perfectly harmless military man. There’s no edge to him. He’s just a good, wholesome man who wants to play good music for others, another service for the people to partake in after his tour of duty. Davis has no patience for him. It’s people like him, he decides, that take folk away from what it can be. But in A Serious Man, Larry Gopnik doesn’t go blaming people. He goes to three different rabbis looking or answers, and when they ultimately prove unsatisfactory responses, he still does not blame anyone. This is the life he’s been given, he decides, and there’s not much more he can do about it.

So is this a film that celebrates sucking it up and making the best of everything? Of not being an asshole to others because your time may be around the corner? As always, the Coen Brothers don’t explain their films. They stitch these beautiful yarns together and then leave them on the floor, ready for viewing but not for sale. They keep the secrets inside, like the dust that gathers underneath.

 

A Walk Inside the Hive: Neil Berkeley’s ‘Harmontown’

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Harmontown

Dan Harmon is the reason I watched Community. His show, which I caught in fits and starts through its first season, didn’t grab at me at first. I left it alone until the A.V. Club hosted an epic Season Walkthrough in which Harmon talked about each and every episode they had made. It wasn’t the first time A.V. Club did a walkthrough and it certainly wasn’t the last; but something about the way Harmon talked about his own show and its various machinations grabbed me. His way of giving every character their own Joseph Campbell journey; his incredible ability to mix something really smart, something really crass, and something really heartfelt into an eye-popper of a few sentences.

But the thing that made Community such a great show is also the thing that almost completely derailed it: Harmon himself. He openly admits his faults, his violent bursts of anger and ability to say really hurtful things with little initial remorse. But they were fine at first – all powered by the same passion that made his show so special – until they weren’t fine anymore. Studio heads finally had enough of him. By the end of Community‘s third season, he was fired.

This is where Harmontown begins it’s journey. It’s not exactly a new thing for a fired creator to hit the road and pass through cities of adoring fans – Conan O’Brien had done it with Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop only a few years earlier – but that’s where the comparisons end. Every show is something different; there’s no set list; there’s no overall strategy. The only thing that’s consistent is that each Harmontown podcast involves the main players – Harmon himself, actor/M.C. Jeff B. Davis, and other guests – playing a live game of Dungeons and Dragons with the irreplaceable Dungeon Master himself, Spencer Crittenden. Each podcast feels like some kind of open therapy, like the room is an open wound of which may be picked on, soothed, or amateurishly stitched up.

But for as entertaining as this documentary is, it can’t seem to decide what to focus on. The result is a lot of interesting elements getting their time in the sun, but not nearly enough to give it the impact it desires. Seeing Dungeon Master Spencer simply volunteer himself at a local podcast and then find himself on a national tour, gaining fame for just how incredible a Dungeon Master he is – it’s a rather thrilling little story that gives Harmontown a nice punch of heart and gravitas. If nothing else, it’s a great highlight to see someone plucked from obscurity show such shout-worthy skill that even a guest celebrity like Jason Sudeikis stands there on stage, completely blown away.

Throughout the first half of Harmontown, Berkeley throws in interview snippets with some of the big time people Harmon had worked with coming up through the ranks – Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Sarah Silverman (who fired him from her own show) – all of which gives us a nice little glimpse into not just Harmon but what it’s like to actually work with him. I found it especially fascinating to hear what writer/director Rob Schrab – who was just recently tapped to direct The Lego Movie Sequel – had to say about working with his buddy Harmon, and how him staying sane while Harmon’s more difficult tendencies got in the way led to them having a break from each other.

There’s a lot to love in Harmontown – the candor, the random humor, the interviews with people you know and love. And while it’s not as well-organized as you would hope it to be, it does give you a pretty realistic look at what life with Harmon is like. It gives you a sense of what pushes him, as well as what keeps him from being as successful as he could and should be. He’s a puzzle that Hollywood has yet to really figure out. Thank goodness for the weird ones. 

NOTE: Dan Harmon was rehired after Community‘s off-balance 4th season. It’s 5th, Harmon-led season debuted on NBC last year and it’s 6th season is currently streaming on Yahoo Screen.

Building a Titan: Netflix’s “Print the Legend”

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printthelegend1I know that 3D printing is something incredible. I’ve heard a lot about it. But I can’t, for the life of me, figure out just how it works. So when I heard about this documentary sitting in the great red field of Netflix, I had to give it a go. I’m going to learn what this is all about, I thought. I’ll finally get it!

A short time into Print the Legend, they do a quick demonstration of how 3D printing works. And by quick, I mean I still don’t have a clue how this black magic happens. You design something on a computer, things move around in a machine, and before you know it – it’s there. But as the film went on, I realized it doesn’t matter if I understand how 3D printing works. This is not about 3D printing – this is about building a business that’s attempting to catch the wave of the future.

At the beginning, we’re informed that there have been two giants in 3D Printing since the 80’s – 3D Systems (1986) and Stratasys (1989) – but their primary focus has always been making 3D printers for industries that can afford and benefit from their super-expensive machines. We are then introduced to two companies intent on building the first personal 3D printers – Makerbot and Formlabs. You can see the importance of this race – the goal is not unlike that of the race to build the first personal computer. It’s an area of relatively new technology that has yet to mature – its potential is increasing by the day and the possibilities are out there for companies to capture and run with.

But the film wisely poses the problem early on: it’s easy to start a company – it’s a lot harder to grow one. From the get-go, the film seems to be on Makerbot’s side. Not only are they developing their product with what looks like a great, friendly team, but they’re also led by Bre Pettis, who became something of a technology celebrity in the company’s growth process. Armed with some star power and lots of personality, Makerbot quickly gets investor money that allows them to expand into far roomier, far more expensive digs. Formlabs, meanwhile, has an incredible successful Kickstarter campaign that is almost completely derailed by manufacturing issues that leave them mailing out their printers over a year later than promised.

It becomes clear as the film goes along that Makerbot will persevere. Formlabs has too many communication issues and no clear leader like Makerbot has with Bre Pettis. But with great expectations comes great responsiblity, and as Makerbot adds more and more members to it’s fast-expanding team, the rules of the game begin to change. There is perhaps no better illustration of just how much a company can change than when Makerbot goes from an open source technology – in which the program is open to the public to help work on and improve it – to a closed source technology – where patents and copyright are put in place and the business side of things kicks in in a real way.

Amidst this fascinating tale of two rising companies, a wild card by the name of Cody Wilson is thrown in.  A former UT law student, I admit feeling a bit unnerved that this guy called Austin, TX his home. Wilson creates his own company, Defense Distributed, of which publishes open-source gun designs that anyone with a 3D printer can make a reality. It’s more than a little jarring to see Wilson brag about how he has created the first 3D printed shotgun, and then shows everyone in a Youtube video that he not only printed it, but that it totally works. Even more jarring? The video got over 3.7 million views in a week whereas a MakerBot video about making a prosthetic arm for a limbless child – a great story and use of 3D printing – couldn’t even crack 500,000 views in the same amount of time.

Wilson represents how the best of intentions can go wrong, and even more disturbing is how much he seems to relish the chaos he is creating. He’s smart enough to word any argument so that disagreeing with him is disagreeing against human nature. He’s a politician in disguise, armed with responses to each of the complaints flung against him. It’s no surprise Wired Magazine recently named him the 5th Most Dangerous Person on the Internet.

But for all of Wilson’s provocation, this is still a film about growing a business and what it does to a person. One of the former high-ranking sales people in Makerbot says that Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs did the start-up industry a real disservice because it seemed to justify to many that being an asshole was a totally okay way to get your business where it needed to go. There are two choices, he says: to run the company based on the values you want – the values of hard work, creativity, collaboration, or to run the company as a personal revenge service, firing people who disagree with you and leading with an iron fist and fiery mouth. It’s a pretty nifty trick the documentary pulls when you get pretty used to seeing the job titles of all the subjects interview…and then see “former” added to the front as the story starts wrapping up. A lot of amazing, talented people didn’t make it through this story. But who’s really to blame?

Which way these companies go is up for you to see. I found myself shocked at the directions these companies took, which is a great credit to Print the Legend for making such a compelling narrative out of such chaos. The future is coming. Know who you’re going to root for and who you’re not going to listen to. History is being printed as we speak.

Print the Legend is currently streaming on Netflix.

‘Paddington’ AKA ‘Utterly Delightful’

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Paddington

You could call this movie Utterly Delightful and my eyes would do the exact opposite of roll. This film, from start to finish, is a joyous, delightful, and incrementally heartwarming exercise in storytelling. There’s an increasingly welcome amount of gentle British humor. Paddington himself, a CGI creation, avoids the uncanny valley by having the kindest brown eyes ever. The characters are as charming as they are relatable. I thought I knew what I was getting with Paddington before it even started, and where I went wrong is where the film goes ever more right.

The most delightful thing to me, and which makes it as pure a moving picture book as I’ve ever seen, is how Paddington is received by the world. It’s rather odd seeing a 3-foot-6 bear walking around a train station. Even more so that he speaks rather perfect English. But there are no alarms. There is no Animal Control Center salivating at the scene. Paddington simply is who he is, an upright-walking, English-speaking bear looking for a home, and that’s that. In a culture that seems to want to explain everything away – ‘origin story’ and ‘prequel’ seem to be even bigger buzz words in Hollywood than ‘profit’ – it’s rather refreshing to see all the unusual business accepted for what it is.

And there’s a lot of delightful unusual business in this film: an incredibly charming backstory (this is an origin I can get excited by) regarding an overprotective father; a bizarre, but well-meaning neighbor in Peter Capaldi; Jim Broadbent’s white shock of hair; a grandmother who judges the weather based on how her knees feel. The list goes on. In fact, the most usual, standard bit of business in the film – a villain played by Nicole Kidman – almost seems at odds with the rest of the story’s whimsical nature. They sanded just enough edges off of Kidman’s character and ultimate plans to keep it from letting the darker parts overwhelm the lighter parts of the story, and by the end it all works out.

Speaking of the ending: Devin Faraci referenced this during his own screening of Paddington, and it’s a very real thing here. There is a moment where you really do fear for Paddington’s well-being. You know there’s no way he will die, but like the furnace scene from Toy Story 3, there is an element of danger that is pushed about as far as it can go.

When The Game Plays You: Zak Penn’s ‘Atari: Game Over’

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ET!Imagine you’re one of the best video game designers in the world. You work for Atari in 1982, when the company’s 2600 console has an over 80% share of the video game market.  You’re given a project that normally takes 6 months and asked to do it in 5 weeks. It’s going to be released worldwide. Steven Spielberg, hot off the success of his new movie E.T. is going to help sell it. It’s expected to be a bestseller, and there’s a lot of money riding on the fact that it will be. Five weeks sounds like an insane amount of time, but hey – you’re the best. You can do, right?

So you install some of the necessary equipment in your own home so you can, as you know you should, work unrealistic hours. You work to the point where the hours blur and day and night lose all meaning. You come out of your foxhole with his game, confident you pulled it off.

But then the game doesn’t sell. It doesn’t meet the outsized expectations. Atari’s stock drops like a diver, the splash violent and unmissable. From that point on, everyone will blame your 5-week mistake. The remaining copies of the game will be buried in a landfill in New Mexico. You’re out of a job – the best one you ever had – and slowly this urban myth takes on a life of its own: that your game was so bad it ended an entire juggernaut of a company in Atari. It’s so bad, they will say, the the only way to remove the stain is to bury it.

You’re Howard Scott Warshaw, and your game designer career is over. The one thing you could do better than anybody is now the worst thing you ever did.

But let’s back up: Zak Penn’s Atari: Game Over is a pretty entertaining and incredibly fascinating documentary about a central question: where exactly were all those Atari E.T. games buried? Could they possibly be dug up? But pulling on those questions reveals strands that even Penn didn’t anticipate. While part of the documentary goes to New Mexico to meet with a variety of people about where exactly this burial may have taken place, the far more interesting part is about why this urban myth needs to be answered. There are many interviews with a variety of people who know and love video games, including the co-designer of the original Microsoft X-Box, Seamus Blackley, and Earnest Cline, the writer of the best-selling and soon-to-be-adapted-into-a-movie novel Ready Player One.

The documentary takes the idea that E.T. is a game so bad it could kill the unstoppable Atari, and removes the hyperbole from the facts. No, the game didn’t kill the company. Atari ate itself with far more costly decisions than any one game. But in following the history of Atari and how it came to be so dominant (the film paints the picture: imagine X-Box and Playstation combined – that’s how big Atari was), we get to meet some of the people who built this wave in the first place. And one of the most interesting characters in all of this is Howard Scott Warshaw. It’s pretty clear this guy is incredibly talented – he’s only designed some of the best and best-selling Atari games, after all – which makes his martyrdom for the E.T. game all the more heartbreaking.

And here’s the beauty of this story: you will find yourself rooting for HSW. You might even find yourself a little choked up when HSW arrives in New Mexico, and is able to get back some of the credit he never got 33 years ago. The fans know how much of a legend he is. It gives HSW a chance to relive his glory days, reveal the dark period that followed, and then experience a beautiful, bittersweet kind of redemption when that landfill is finally opened and the truth is revealed.

Atari: Game Over is now showing on Netflix.