Raiders
07-20-2009, 03:57 AM
http://www.impossiblefunky.com/images/archives/issue_9/bigcrimewave_drjolly.jpg
If the cinema of Michael Bay has taught us nothing else, it is that the art of making a trailer is most assuredly separate from that of making a feature film. The images overlap, but the editing and the expectations of content are of course entirely separate. In his 1985 masterpiece, John Paizs has created a loving tribute to the movie trailer and in particular the movie trailer for 1950s B-movies. In his central character, Steven Penny (played by Paizs himself), the director has established a character who is great at writing beginnings and endings, but falters whenever filling out “the middle.” As such, the character is permanently rooted in Paizs’ own love and fascination with the classic film trailers which were fun and lovingly rendered to make their cheesy, oft-dull films look far more appealing. Penny is a character brilliantly designed specifically to churn out great premises but who lacks the ability to take them in any meaningful direction.
The style of the film is a hilarious amalgamation of a 1950s NFB production charting the efforts of Penny and his young friend Kim (who narrates much of the actual plot) to create the ultimate “colour crime film” and snippets of those great films Penny dreams up, given to us in hilariously deadpan enactments. If Penny lacks the imagination to fill out his films, Paizs has the opposite; enough wit and creativity to make essentially an entire “middle” film without much of a beginning or an end. The plot is impossible to guess as Paizs never settles on any one direction. There is very much a Lynchian vibe to the film, trading in the surfaces of suburbia and the dark underbelly of the creative mind. Two sequences in particular highlight the off-kilter, and uneasy, hilarity Paizs manages: first is a scene featuring Penny’s fractured psyche as he suffers writers block, laying in a room surrounded by all his imagined characters interacting, dancing, playing cards and ultimately fighting and arguing; second is a bizarre excursion into the US to meet a script doctor who just happens to also be a sex criminal who likes to wear a cowboy hat (I’ll leave it up to you to decide what Paizs’ thinks of the American cinema market circa-1985). The second of those ends with Steven getting his head trapped in a street lamp, which Paizs makes brilliantly literal by giving Penny a flash of inspiration and in another surreal moment has Penny travel around, his head a literal street lamp.
The frustrated artist genre has seen its fair share of takes, but none quite as furiously inventive as Paizs’ film. The film, more than anything else, functions as a sort of creative output. It feels literally as if Paizs is working through his own writers block and creative a fury of tangents to get to a conclusion that never really happens. Of course, Paizs is never anything less than in complete control. He uses the surface of the film to generate an understanding of the painstaking process but also to highlight the artificiality of the form and the almost insidious nature of effects and editing (highlighted beautifully by the literal on-screen instructional on the “persistence of vision” technique, ending with a long pause on a white screen cemented by a simple period). If anything, Paizs’ remarkable creativity here shames the very thing he is lovingly lampooning, showing how often a great premise or idea is squandered by lack of creativity and how the art of a trailer is to mask that deficiency. Ultimately it is the “middle” that counts the most, and Paizs knows it well.
If the cinema of Michael Bay has taught us nothing else, it is that the art of making a trailer is most assuredly separate from that of making a feature film. The images overlap, but the editing and the expectations of content are of course entirely separate. In his 1985 masterpiece, John Paizs has created a loving tribute to the movie trailer and in particular the movie trailer for 1950s B-movies. In his central character, Steven Penny (played by Paizs himself), the director has established a character who is great at writing beginnings and endings, but falters whenever filling out “the middle.” As such, the character is permanently rooted in Paizs’ own love and fascination with the classic film trailers which were fun and lovingly rendered to make their cheesy, oft-dull films look far more appealing. Penny is a character brilliantly designed specifically to churn out great premises but who lacks the ability to take them in any meaningful direction.
The style of the film is a hilarious amalgamation of a 1950s NFB production charting the efforts of Penny and his young friend Kim (who narrates much of the actual plot) to create the ultimate “colour crime film” and snippets of those great films Penny dreams up, given to us in hilariously deadpan enactments. If Penny lacks the imagination to fill out his films, Paizs has the opposite; enough wit and creativity to make essentially an entire “middle” film without much of a beginning or an end. The plot is impossible to guess as Paizs never settles on any one direction. There is very much a Lynchian vibe to the film, trading in the surfaces of suburbia and the dark underbelly of the creative mind. Two sequences in particular highlight the off-kilter, and uneasy, hilarity Paizs manages: first is a scene featuring Penny’s fractured psyche as he suffers writers block, laying in a room surrounded by all his imagined characters interacting, dancing, playing cards and ultimately fighting and arguing; second is a bizarre excursion into the US to meet a script doctor who just happens to also be a sex criminal who likes to wear a cowboy hat (I’ll leave it up to you to decide what Paizs’ thinks of the American cinema market circa-1985). The second of those ends with Steven getting his head trapped in a street lamp, which Paizs makes brilliantly literal by giving Penny a flash of inspiration and in another surreal moment has Penny travel around, his head a literal street lamp.
The frustrated artist genre has seen its fair share of takes, but none quite as furiously inventive as Paizs’ film. The film, more than anything else, functions as a sort of creative output. It feels literally as if Paizs is working through his own writers block and creative a fury of tangents to get to a conclusion that never really happens. Of course, Paizs is never anything less than in complete control. He uses the surface of the film to generate an understanding of the painstaking process but also to highlight the artificiality of the form and the almost insidious nature of effects and editing (highlighted beautifully by the literal on-screen instructional on the “persistence of vision” technique, ending with a long pause on a white screen cemented by a simple period). If anything, Paizs’ remarkable creativity here shames the very thing he is lovingly lampooning, showing how often a great premise or idea is squandered by lack of creativity and how the art of a trailer is to mask that deficiency. Ultimately it is the “middle” that counts the most, and Paizs knows it well.