Mythumentary

Last week I wrote that Zak Penn’s new movie The Grand is an interesting stab at mockumentary filmmaking that falls flat. Penn, a writer and producer, has one other directorial credit, 2004’s Incident at Loch Ness, and it is a daring success that perhaps explains his attachment to the format.

The initial premise is as simple as the final resolution is complex. A few filmmakers doing a movie about director Werner Herzog tag along as Herzog and producer Penn (playing themselves) go to Scotland to make a documentary about Loch Ness. Herzog is interested only in human perception of the natural world and the relationship between myth and truth, but obstacles both manmade and natural trouble the shoot.

The movie-in-a-movie-in-a-movie concept has been done before, but here it is brilliantly executed in a way that achieves genuinely varied layers of meaning. The basic level is the inherent comedy in the mockumentary situations; Herzog asks for an “obsessive but credible” cryptozoologist and gets one who demands critics show him the “non-evidence” to disprove Nessie. This builds into a more complex parody of Herzog’s reputation and history; Penn repeatedly disrupts filming to try to make the movie more like a archetypical flirting-with-disaster early Herzog production, even at one point directing Herzog while brandishing a flare gun, a reenactment of the story in which Herzog directed Klaus Kinski at gunpoint. Herzog says the Kinski story is a legend that has a life of its own, an idea that soon resonates with other themes in the film.

This parody then undergoes an unlikely transition into sincerity that epitomizes Herzog’s attitude toward film and truth, building to a resolution that feels proto-Grizzly Man in the conclusions that Herzog draws from his experiences. I will not divulge what occurs in the final third of the movie. Suffice to say only very rarely have I seen a film that blurs reality and surreality in such a subtle and succinct way.

While I could consequently call the average-at-best The Grand a failure compared to Incident, which I will unqualifiedly call a masterful film, I prefer to take the glass-half-full approach and presume that as a director, Penn will continue to take changes. Hopefully he can find time between penning superhero scripts to direct more films, mockumentary or otherwise.

Poker Improv

Audiences flopped a set this spring. Deal, a Burt Reynolds Color of Money-style vehicle, came out in April, followed in May by Turn the River, starring Famke Janssen, herself an alum of Rounders, the granddaddy of modern hold ‘em movies (although TtR may be more about billiards than poker). June brought the DVD release of the most promising of the three, The Grand, a comedy by Zak Penn, best known as a writer for an assortment of past and future superhero films.

Poker enthusiasts will find a mixed bag in The Grand. It certainly isn’t as sensational as the improbable view of Texas Hold ‘Em in movies like Casino Royale, but it isn’t a paragon of poker realism either. The film is flush with pro cameos (Doyle Brunson, Daniel Negreanu, Phil Helmuth) and the entire movie is something of a commercial for PartyPoker.com, which is aggressively referenced throughout. That’s a bit strange because in late 2006 – presumably after filming had begun – the site withdrew from the United States market for potential legal liability reasons, so it’s not even available to the film’s domestic audience.

This is a mockumentary, although it receives the mild, no-visible-crew, minimal-narration treatment, sticking to just cutaway interviewees answering implied questions (much like NBC’s The Office). The template is further diluted by diversions into mock-televised elements (information is superimposed on the screen in the style of televised poker tournaments, and mock commercial bumpers appear between scenes).

It Sounds Great, Just Great (on Paper, Anyway)

I didn’t pay much attention when I first heard that Harmony Korine had released a new film called Mister Lonely. The dark recesses of my brain had pretty much (rightly or wrongly) consigned the controversial writer/director to the ‘90s trivia bin for Kids and Gummo. But his new film ran the festival circuit last year and should be getting a limited release this year, and it has contributions from some attention-getting parties. Korine himself may in fact be the least interesting person involved. Just look at who else is tied to the project:

Marcel Zyskind;
A cinematographer and cameraman with several Michael Winterbottom films and the visually riveting 28 Days Later.

James Fox, Anita Pallenberg;
Actors from the legendarily bizarre Mick Jagger film Performance, with which Mister Lonely would presumably share a few themes (albeit with a very different tone).

Jason Pierce, Sun City Girls;
The former a member of Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, the latter an experimental rock band known for its idiosyncratic Arizonian psych weirdness.

…and Werner Fucking Herzog.
Anything with the soft-spoken documentarian is worth seeing. A Kevin James comedy about vomiting? A Jackie Chan vehicle in which he’s a ninja-turned-croquet-player? It would be worth it for Werner. In this movie, for some reason, Werner is in Central America getting nuns to jump out of a plane without parachutes. I’m sure he has his reasons.

And almost as an afterthought, the premise of Mister Lonely is pretty interesting too. A Marilyn Monroe imitator befriends a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris, where he is moonwalking on the banks of the Seine. Ruminate on that phrase for a moment – moonwalking on the banks of the Seine. Awesome. The two travel together to a commune in Scotland where like-minded people live the lives of their idols. The trailer is enticing and suggests a surprisingly earnest tone.