The Films of Alexander Payne - C/D

might want a few "xposts" there Morbs

If any NYers are burning to see Nebraska tomw night, my scheduled guest can't go...

meh, a real mixed bag. Good performances (Stacy Keach!); better than About Schmidt, at least.

People are going overboard w/ the "condescending" stuff tho; I'm sure there's human waste like this on display on the Great Plains. And in Jersey.

I don't bet the naysayers would disagree. It's just: do they belong in movies?

Of course they do. I don't think Payne hates Nebraskans more than Altman hates Nasvillians.

Not to mention a crtic I respect writing that Dern's character has Alzheimers when um, he is explicitly described as not having it.

"He believes what people tell him" has metaphorical heft too, I think.

Oh for sure I'm going into this with reasonably high hopes that this will finally be the Payne movie that brings him back to his '90s greatness. But any comparisons to that piece of shit About Schmidt, even favorable against it, don't bode well.

Election is as smarmy in its own way as anything he's done since.

As usual there isn't a Payne film the NYT won't love or compare to Sturges.

btw Will Forte resembles a less glam gr8080

Election is the good kind of smarmy tho; straight satire without pretense to sympathy.

God, that movie is genuinely merciless.

the novel is less so, and better for it.

This ought to be a teaching moment, but no, we'll settle for

http://www.gurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/west-wing-wrong.gif

for a movie in 1999 starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick it's as mean as I want it to be.

Labuza is right that the digital B&W in Nebraska looks wonky... rumors of postproduction conversion from color?

well Eric, you'll just hafta tell me if June Squibb is representative of any sour old Midwestern ladies.

The woman (amateur actor) who plays the owner of the town newspaper is ace btw.

I'm sure I'll have met and am related to women like Squibb. Hell, I probably am a woman like Squibb.

I started out liking her cemetery monologue, then thought it went too far, then felt it went just fine.

I've had poops like that.

you ARE a dirty grandma.

Byron couldn't have said it more graciously.

Like a nylon lemon poop.

the It's his best! It's his worst! roundup:

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-nyff-2013-alexander-paynes-nebraska

Flitted btwn finding this touching and condescending/over-egged, so I guess I land somewhere in the middle. June Squibb steals the movie, no question.

It was handed to her.

i thought this worked, it's not great but i didnt get condescending @ all. payne is good at tone generally imo & framing p base truths w/o harping on them too strongly as to ruin them

boy this was crap.

this starts incredibly poorly; closely resembles 1990s 16mm student experimentation; is somehow mainly trained on the guy who presumably fills in paul rudd's like ice age 3 voicework while rudd is busy; & yeah is non-stop condescending to the very thing that seems to motivate payne to make films. but i think it overcomes a lot of this, & by the end is i guess fine, failing at what it maybe most aimed to be but succeeding as a kind of '90s Jarmuschian road trip flick. Dern's performance isn't tidy enough to comment about, but there are some very nuanced, kind of masterly moments, like his disengagement at the graveyard. others, like the restaurant applause, rub our face a lil too closely into what could've been affecting. it mystifies me how payne, now, can get so close to the raw material of a good film & fuck it up (the performances are mainly bad, including squibb for the first twenty minutes, & then intermittently good), & even only really tend to his muse in such a boring way - romantic, rolling landscape shots, a bank the only momentarily convincing punctum reminding us of contemporary life. but for the last half i wasn't concentrating on these things, & aesthetic objections shouldn't get too upfront, here, if the thing underneath was penetrating enough.

I don't think I've ever used the cliche "Anybody can play this part." Well, here now I will. Stacy Keach could have played Woody Grant. Will Forte will play him in twenty years; maybe he'll get Oscar notice too.

and god it's so condescending to film A MOVIE ABOUT NEBRASKA in B&W.

otm. did you read the new yorker profile? iirc he splits his time between somewhere midwestern & maybe l.a., & i am struggling not to imagine him perched at some glossy sidewalk café in california writing broad-brush caricature porn about midwesterners & their dumb conversations. i ought to watch that sweet short he made again, to compare, but i feel like he's so excluded himself from the handful of directors, leigh, cassavetes, van sant, who can confer any humanity or complexity on their working-class subjects. a lot of the characters reminded me of the like "dumb kid" in the descendants - bad performances riding stereotypes with minimal evident purpose.

i liked the gag where the camera pans a little to the right and stacey keach is singing "In The Ghetto"

shittily-sung kareoke as the How Folks Spend Their Time scene felt like the the condescension ne plus ultra here

discreet shot of Tricuits in aunt's kitchen is the ne plus buttra

oh it was cheap... but still funny. nice details in the set design too, like will forte's apartment's fridge having a jimmy john's - we deliver! magnet on it

conspicuously large tombstone in graveyard had PAYNE on it. would like to know how much of himself + his family is in this

no that's true & how they gave bruce dern a hat at the end that said CAPITALISM on it & the cartoonist from the onion comic strip popped up in the bottom right to wink

nice.

this wasnt as good as a kelly comic, i'll admit

just read that cranston auditioned for forte's role and apparently "I don't think he's right for the part," Payne said, "but he's an astonishing actor, that guy." yeah ok homie

thought odenkirk was v good

he and Forte match up as bros, and Odenkirk's "Breaking Bad" mannerisms suit him here.

can we agree that woman who ran the newspaper was great?

Yes -- best performance.

whoever does paynes casting should be lauded imo

A review.

uh, Jon Voight is the paraplegic in Coming Home

Dern's signature '70s parts are Smile and Black Sunday imho.

yeah corrected.

I haven't seen Smile in yeeeears and am not confident enough to about my judgment then.

Saw Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte just last week, which all centers around his early exit. He's been around a long time.

he is killed in a flashback in Marnie

Takes maybe half-an-hour to find its footing, but in the end I liked Nebraska fine. I think the obvious complaint against it would be that it was conceived before it was felt; Alexander Payne has seen The Straight Story and Paris, Texas and Harry and Tonto, and he wanted to make a film like that. (He tried once already, right? I forgot About Schmidt the minute it ended--this attempt's much better, I think.) That aside--and maybe the too-ordinary performance by Will Forte; funny people sometimes rein themselves in till there's nothing left--many moments I'll take away from this. High on the list: the last five minutes, the newspaper lady, Dern's wife giving the rest of the family what for. Liked the soundtrack a lot.