Austin Film Festival Monday
The importance of self-awareness versus self-indulgence
Happy Ending
Article Tools
Some filmmakers—your Quentin Tarantinos and your Wes Andersons, for instance—are able to combine a record store clerk's obsessive love of obscure music with a talent for identifying the precise moment that a given song would be most effective at creating maximum emotional impact.
Others, like Passenger Side director Matthew Bissonnette, have an impressive talent for assembling a soundtrack that resemble the mix tapes we made for girls before everything went all digital, but aren't really able to put together a script that capitalizes on the torrent of grief we're hoping to feel when, say, Leonard Cohen starts singing "Suzanne" near the climax of a movie. It's not that Passenger Side is bad, exactly, but it's a fine example of the sort of picture that feels like film festival filler. Its unfailingly eloquent characters banter indefinitely about topics both mundane (a game of "who would you rather bone?" with already-dated choices like "Dick Cheney or Harriet Miers") and profound (the usual "am I ever going to figure out what to do with my life?" nonsense) without ever approaching anything remotely recognizable as a genuine human moment. Its website proclaims that Passenger Side is "the thinking man's Judd Apatow flick," but it's really a Kevin Smith movie for guys who can think just slightly beyond their boners.
But of course, guys like talking about their boners just as much as they like laughing at farts and Dane Cook, which is why comedians such as Henry Phillips have such a tough row to hoe. As the star of the quasi-autobiographical Punching The Clown, Phillips plays a loosely fictionalized version of himself, a talented, Dan Fogelberg-ian folk singer who specializes in droll, cleverly satirical story-songs—comparing a romance to the relationship between a “host organism” and “unicellular dinoflagellate algae,” for example, or lamenting that a girl he knows was never abused by her father or mistreated by a lover, but turned out to be a “bitch anyway.” Needless to say he’s a tough sell: Even Phillips flounders when asked to describe exactly what it is he does, while his manager unsuccessfully tries branding him as “James Taylor on smack.” (“But James Taylor actually was on smack,” Phillips meekly retorts.) Framed against a late-night radio interview, Phillips tells an all-too-familiar story of struggling in L.A.—open mic coffeehouse gigs, empty promises from a label that just wants him to churn out wacky song parodies—that eventually spirals into an outlandish, Curb Your Enthusiasm-style series of misunderstandings that sees him chased out of town. But Punching isn’t about these big movements; like Phillips’ songs, it’s all about the slow, small changes, such as watching Phillips’ innocent query about where a label exec got his bagels turn into a shitstorm of corporate oppression as the request is handed down from flunky to flunky, or a brilliant party scene where a series of condescending brush-offs illustrates the way the Hollywood food chain eradicates all sincerity. And much the same way that the fictionalized Phillips can’t compete with a more successful comic who pulls goofy faces and sings weak spoofs like “I Totally Ripped A Big Fart,” Punching The Clown is probably too medium energy to garner the attention it deserves—but also like Phillips, it’s totally primed for a fervent cult following.
Despite the fact that it won’t fill stadiums or net you your own easily recognizable symbol, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a small yet devoted cult following, as Automorphosis demonstrates. The new quirk-umentary from Harrod Blank (son of the slightly more renowned documentarian Les Blank) is the sort of celebration of the individual creative spirit that too often serves as cover for sniggering at tasteless rubes—in this case, the “art car” enthusiasts who convert their personal transports into giant hamburgers or telephones as a way of expressing their innermost passions and desires. (i.e., “I really, really like hamburgers and/or telephones!”) But fortunately you can’t accuse Blank of such condescension, since he’s not only the director of Automorphosis but one of its more eccentric subjects. Clearly this is a labor of love—and not even Blank’s first on the subject (he previously directed Wild Wheels and Driving The Dream), which may help explain why some basic questions go frustratingly unanswered. (For example: Does one get pulled over by the cops very often when driving a station wagon decorated with bloody doll parts? How does one find a mechanic willing to work on a van with a 250-pound hood covered in brass knickknacks?) Still, Blank has marshaled an impressive fleet of ridiculous rides, including a hearse-turned-Gothic “car-thedral” complete with spires and gargoyles, and Blank’s own “camera van,” with which he takes candid snapshots of unwitting gawkers. Unfortunately, despite Blank’s obvious affections for his subject, it’s not always easy to convince ourselves that we’re laughing with the spoon man or the yacht-car captain and not at them.
