SpoutBlog on spout.com

I’ve been in New York for a grand total of about two weeks in the last month and a half, so I missed most of the press screenings for New Directors/New Films, the annual co-production of MoMA and the Film Society at Lincoln Center, which opened last night. We’ll be publishing a recap of the full festival from Brandon Harris tomorrow, but I wanted to drop some notes on the one film for which I did have a chance to attend a press screening, Harmony & Me.

Written and directed by Bob Byington (his RSO: Registered Sex Offender premiered at SXSW last year and then played around the country on the Range Life tour) and edited by Frank V. Ross (Hohokam, Present Company), the film was shot in Austin and features a number of faces that will be familiar to devotees of SXSW cinema and its descendants: Justin Rice as Harmony, a “loser” who we meet mid-heartbreak at the hands of a brunette succubus (Kristen Tucker); Alex Karpovsky as a friend whose verbal abuse of his sweetly nerdy wife is played for uncomfortable laughs — and serves as a reminder to Harmony that relationships are inevitably sad and cruel as often as they’re legitimately romantic; Pat Healy as the dickish boss at Harmony’s cubicle job; Allison Latta as an outlandishly outgoing neighbor who sets her sights, against his wishes, on our retiring hero.

Harmony is the only American film world premiering at New Directors this year, and it’s an unlikely candidate for a festival that otherwise mostly cherry-picks hits from Sundance, Berlin and other major international festivals. It’s shot on video and looks like it; its barebones aesthetic serves not another socially serious work of neo-neo, nor does it really have much in common with The Unofficial Genre that Starts With “M”, other than a shaky camera and a handful of actors. If the latter type of film earned the blessing/curse of being grouped together under a name mockingly invented by a sound engineer and inspired by their common tendency towards imprecise speech, whether improvised our written for a certain kind of naturalism, Harmony definitely doesn’t fit; the last thing this is is a film about people who don’t know how to express themselves. Harmony has even reduced his story of lost love into a spiel, one which he broken-record unloads throughout the film, using the same speech to express his pain to his best friend and to his Chinese herbalist.

The film is low on incidental action — Harmony takes piano lessons, goes to work, goes bowling, goes to his brother’s wedding, accidentally runs into his ex, overdoses on a gift from her that he’s allergic to on purpose ––  but each crumb dropped is essential. Harmony starts out in a bad way and only gets worse; Harmony & Me follows each step of a descent towards rock bottom that resolves in redemption, a retreat into solipsism that allows him to emerge with a song. Yes, it’s another movie where Justin Rice has romantic troubles and plays music, but it’s also a movie about how songs, or any discrete works of art, come to be, the process by which uniquely personal pain can be churned into something that gives other people pleasure. It’s an almost procedural description of the method by which an injury is turned into a gift.

All of which gives no indication of how funny much of the film is. The best way to describe Harmony & Me is as a comedy, one with as many jokes about pedophiles and stray ejaculate as moments of sad-sack bittersweetness. It’s unquestionably a film of its time, but it plays out in a key that’s less like something by Joe Swanberg than something, like, by Savage Steve Holland. And while there’s no question it lacks polish, its comic voice is fresh, surprisingly nuanced and full of surprises. If I were programming a festival called New Directors/New Films, this is the exact kind of film that I would select: raw and made mostly by friends for a song, but something like a living bookmark for talent to watch.

The Harmony & Me teaser is embedded above. Here’s the info on its screenings.

Under discussion:

1941  (1979)

Being There  (1979)

A Bridge Too Far  (1977)

Diamonds Are Forever  (1971)

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade  (1989)

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom  (1984)

Jaws  (1988)

Jaws 2  (1978)

Jaws: The Revenge  (1987)

Never Say Never Again  (1983)

Octopussy  (1983)

On Her Majesty's Secret Service  (1969)

The Pink Panther  (1964)

Raiders of the Lost Ark  (1981)

The Return of the Pink Panther  (1975)

A Shot in the Dark  (1964)

Starman  (1984)

Street Smart  (1987)

Superman II  (1980)

Inspector Clouseau  (1968)

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace  (1987)

Police Academy [Film Series]  Production Year

The Pacifier  (2005)

The Fast and the Furious [Film Series]  Production Year

Smokey and the Bandit [Film Series]  Production Year

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull  (2008)

Fast & Furious  (2009)

Next week, Vin Diesel returns (along with Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordanna Brewster) to the Fast and the Furious franchise, which he’d abandoned after the first movie (he did have a cameo in part 3). When news first hit that he’d be reprising the role of Dominic Toretto for the fourth installment, simply titled Fast & Furious, most of us saw the actor as returning under a veil of shame. Because he initially departed the series with an inflated ego — and with it unrealistic salary demands — it does seem obvious that Diesel is now only desperately crawling back because his career failed to take off the way he’d hoped it would.

This is quite sad considering not even Steve Guttenberg ever crawled back to the Police Academy movies, nor did Burt Reynolds ever get dragged back for a fourth Smokey and the Bandit. But there have been other shameful returns by stars to franchises they’d previously sat out of (whether the hiatus was of their own choosing or not). Only one of these may have been as desperate as Diesel now appears, but it’s worth looking at four additional actors and actresses who should be very embarrassed of their delayed reprisals.

Karen Allen
Returned to: Indiana Jones franchise with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Karen Allen’s absence from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade after playing the female lead in Raiders of the Lost Ark was not because she believed herself above those sequels. Her character, Marion Ravenwood, simply wasn’t written into them. And her return to the series was surely not because her career needed a boost. Her relative disappearance from films after 1990 was actually for personal reasons (she wanted to devote time to raising her son), not necessarily because she could no longer garner significant roles. So why is she on this list? Because even though it must have been quite tempting to again work with Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford, especially in a role that is beloved by fans, she should have had a little more reserve, because she ended up looking like an easily employed, easily exploited actress. At least she didn’t have to swing through trees, and at least she didn’t receive the brunt of criticism with the film, but the latter fortune is also mostly because she’s given so little to do in the movie. Her participation in the film is largely forgettable, yet her association with the film is not. Instead of bothering with this very disappointing sequel, Allen should have held out for the more necessary Starman follow-up (continuing from where the TV series left off, of course).

Sean Connery
Returned to: James Bond franchise with Never Say Never Again (1983)

Officially, it wasn’t exactly the James Bond franchise, because Never Say Never Again wasn’t made by EON Productions, though this clarification makes Sean Connery’s return to the role of 007 even more shameful. After Diamonds Are Forever, which had already marked his first delayed return as Bond (after the quick interruption of George Lazenby in the part with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), the actor claimed he’d never return to the role he’d originated onscreen (this led to the film’s title), but obviously he was offered enough money to not only reprise the character but also to slap EON’s Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman in the face by agreeing to appear in an unofficial installment initially meant to directly compete head to head with EON’s own Octopussy, which starred Roger Moore as Bond. In agreeing to the film, Connery cemented his reputation for questionable career choices, most clearly influenced by big paychecks. Though he’d previously been enticed by huge offers, including the astonishing $2 million he demanded to come back to Bond for Diamonds, this time he showed a great lack of concern for fans of the Bond franchise through his apparent greediness. Given his love for big money, it’s surprising that he never sold himself out of retirement for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Maybe his asking price has just gotten so out of hand that even Lucas and Spielberg couldn’t afford him.

Lorraine Gary
Returned to: Jaws franchise with Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

She hadn’t been onscreen in eight years, but Lorraine Gary’s absence from films following her appearance in Spielberg’s 1941 was reportedly her choice. Certainly with a husband as powerful as Sid Sheinberg (President of MCA, Inc. for more than 30 years), she didn’t really need to work, and yet for some odd reason she came out of retirement to reprise her role as Ellen Brody for the dreadful fourth installment of Jaws. According to a press release for the movie, Gary claims she was drawn to the script because of how well it explored her character, which deserved more development than Jaws and Jaws II had allowed for. Gary has also admitted that she was partly lured back with the appeal of playing opposite Michael Caine, romantically. But again, with a husband as powerful as Sheinberg, she probably could have been given a better film with which to come back and with which to make out with Caine. Now, she’s unfortunately more memorable for having starred in Jaws: The Revenge than for originating the role in the first film.

Gene Hackman
Returned to: Superman franchise with Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)

Somewhat like Connery (his A Bridge Too Far costar), Gene Hackman ended up returning to a character thanks to a change in producers. He abandoned the Superman franchise after the first film — though he’d shot some scenes for Superman II, so he does appear in the sequel — because Alexander and Ilya Salkind fired Richard Donner as the director of the second installment. So, when new producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus took over the series, Hackman was fine with reprising his portrayal of Lex Luthor. Surely there was a big paycheck involved in addition to the appeal of new management, but with an ultimate budget of only $17 million (slashed from the planned $40 million), he couldn’t have gotten away with much. At least Christopher Reeve, in his deal to return to the series, was given the opportunity to star in a pet project, Street Smart. All Hackman ended up with was an embarrassing addition to his resume, one that displayed a lack of concern for Superman fans and a disappointing preference for pay over prestige.

Peter Sellers
Returned to: Pink Panther franchise with The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)

Following The Pink Panther and its sequel, A Shot in the Dark, Peter Sellers declined to return to the series, and Alan Arkin took over the role for part 3, Inspector Clouseau. It made sense at the time, as Sellers was still doing quite well through the late 1960s. But after a number of flops in the early ‘70s, Sellers was wooed back to the franchise, obviously with the promise of a lot of money. And another two installments came about with reportedly increased paychecks. In fact, he was set to play Inspector Clouseau in another installment (the series’ seventh, his sixth), but he died before it went into production. Fortunately for his legacy, he also made the wonderful Being There before his death, so he didn’t go out completely on a desperation downturn. Like Sellers’ last few Pink Panther movies, the new Fast and the Furious installment will be a huge hit, but there is a cost of reputation and an increase of shame that comes with the returned wealth and popularity. Then again, Diesel probably isn’t sinking any lower than he did for The Pacifier, right?