One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

Tam,

Colorado trip did not happen. I still got to be a bit player in a wonderful story of impromptu rescue, as befitting the season. In short, life had suddenly turned nasty and risky for a family. A friend stepped in to orchestrate a rapid and effective turnaround of events. Within a matter of days things went from dire to secure. Many Jacksonites pitched in with eager cheer and generosity. I love Jackson Hole. 

There was time, then, for a little DVD catch-up, then. I gave Smart People a try. Tam, maybe you can help me here. These are not my people, these emotionally suffocated WASPs. How much truth is there to all these family sagas: Ordinary People, The Ice Storm, The Family Stone, The Squid and the Whale? Sure, life is tough all around. But doesn’t anyone ever crack a good-natured joke that everyone else enjoys, the way ordinary people do?

Smart People has its pleasures in its good actors acting well, gamely breathing traces of life into an obvious screenplay that has “heart” injected into it like so much Botox. Add Larry the Cable Guy to the cast and we have the perfect indie flick for Palin-Americans: academics are phonies; pure knowledge is inherently joyless; getting accidentally knocked up is totally awesome; only losers can teach us about real life. 

Appropriately, Thomas Haden Church plays the loser and he sparks every scene he’s in. 

There was an antidote in Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, Julien Temple’s vital, explosive film bio about a vital, explosive artist. Joe Strummer was an enigma.  His native intellect was vast. The punk ethos brought focus to Strummer’s fire; he turned punk against itself — which is really punk — to become an engaged, populist preacher and funny-bitter leftist . . . with guitars.

Strummer instinctively hated stardom on pure principle. So it was a bit of a conundrum for Strummer when he and The Clash became international stars. As rock stars go, Strummer’s arc is unusual; his dramas aren’t in weakness of the flesh but rather in an elusive intellectual hunger. Did he hate the fact that ultimately he made great beer-and-bong music? Post-Clash, he wandered the desert — figuratively then literally — and re-emerged victorious as The Mescaleros. The film’s final cut is “Get Down Moses,” as perfect a song as there is:

Once I got to the mountain top, tell you what I could see,
Prairie full of lost souls running from the priests of iniquity
Where the hell was Elijah?
What do you do when the prophecy game was through?

Temple finesses the social history surrounding Strummer’s era with a sometimes mesmerizing mashup of archival footage, old photos, and didactic political films. The rhythm is stream-of-consciousness, always vivid. (The Future is Unwritten will be quite useful in college history courses.)

Then there are the interviewees. Strummer got to hang with with coolest of the cool: John Cusack, Steve Buscemi, Johnny Depp . . . Brigitte Bardot!