My Name is Bruce (2006/2007/2008?)

At this point, I’m starting to believe that Bruce Campbell is a better writer than he is filmmaker. While My Name is Bruce is somewhat better than his first film, The Man with the Screaming Brain, it’s still a bit rough to sit through. Neither of his films captures that weird glee of the Evil Dead films, nor of the more obscure Detroit film crew efforts of Intruder or Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except…. Try as they may, they do not. Which is strange, because both of his books capture that feeling better than the two feature films he has directed.

My Name is Bruce is a comedy-horror take on the film of the same name from the 1970s starring Bruce Lee (yes, the comedy comes first in this one). Mr. Campbell plays a more exaggerated version of “himself” which is supposed to be a more exaggerated version of his most popular character, Ash from the Evil Dead series. He is a drunk, rude, obnoxious, selfish bastard and generally a jerk to his co-workers, and stereotypical fans. After a goofy looking goth kid/Bruce Campbell megafan unleashes an ancient Chinese demon onto his town of Gold Lick, Oregon, he kidnaps Mr. Campbell thinking that he is the only person who can save the town. Campbell, on the other hand, thinks this is all one weird surprise birthday set-up orchestrated by his agent Mills (Ted Raimi, in one of his three roles in the entire movie). When he is proven wrong, he reacts in a typical Ash-fashion.

Hearing about the movie for a couple of years before it came out, I thought the plotline of a fan or town confusing Campbell for Ash would be much more prominent than it actually was in the end result, perhaps as a commentary on how certain people or fans genuinely do confuse a character with the actor who plays them. The stronger plotline is Bruce trying to be the biggest jerk possible, and then trying to be slightly less jerky and heroic, which gets a tad boring after the first 30 minutes. The first 30 minutes are actually pretty funny and features the most skewering of Campbell. What brought the film to a distracting, crazy halt is when Ted Raimi is introduced into his third role as Gold Lick’s sole Chinese person, and the last town descendent of the people who brought about the demon in the cemetary. He gives a long expositiony speech in the middle of the movie, and I was so distracted by the fact that a white man was playing a Chinese man that I don’t even know what he said. I know this film was low-budget, and completely shot on Campbell’s ranch in Oregon (which that particular result is not as bad as it could have been – I guess Campbell has a pretty large ranch), but couldn’t he have found an actual Chinese-American to play the part? Since Raimi also plays the town’s sole Italian, I get the feeling that casting Raimi in roles that require ethnic stereotypes with bad accents is some sort of weird inside joke or is some product of a really old sense of humor, since he was also in The Man with the Screaming Brain playing a bumbling hip-hop obsessed Bulgarian man who dressed like a member of Kris Kross. It’s a sense of humor I don’t really understand. Campbell does this to an extent in his books as well. In Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, Richmond, VA is depicted as a total Southern stereotype where bumbling Bruce makes his way into a secret society of men who long for the old ways of the South, and who brutally beat him once they find out that he’s from Detroit. I don’t think people like that exist to that exaggeration around here anymore. Even the ones that do to a small extent now mostly live in the counties outside the city, not in it. I’ll forego a rant on the voting statistics on the city of Richmond. But honestly? I swear that I see more rebel flags when I drive slightly north to Maryland and Pennsylvania than I do in Central Virginia. I still recommend the book though, it’s a fun book. In the right hands, it would make a good, high-concept movie, actually. My Name is Bruce however, is probably only worth a peek if you really like Bruce Campbell and feel the need to support him. At this point, I’d say his best movie is the short documentary he made called Fanalysis, which was attached to the “Book of the Dead” DVD release of Evil Dead earlier this decade.

If anyone can clarify the exact year this film was released, let me know. IMDB says 2007, Netflix says 2006, and my memory of horror blogs posting about the film touring around the country says late 2008. I know it took a couple of years to come out.

Juno

I feel like I should have watched Waitress this past weekend and should also pull out the review I wrote of Knocked Up over the summer (I wrote it somewhere between before I decided to stop writing zines and starting this blog) so I can have the triumvirate of unexpected pregnancy comedies of 2007 to post about. I also caught some weird breeze of a Canadian/Lifetime TV movie Sunday while cleaning called Playing House, which was mostly funny cos the guy who did the impregnating was an experimental jazz musician, like my boyfriend. Just about everything was treated in montages and the woman’s bout of post-partum depression only consisted of 15 minutes of the movie. I also think she ruined two of her boyfriend’s band’s European tours, which according to the boyf, is where the money is for jazz musicians. It was a good thing that she was some sort of big-time editor for a magazine I guess.

I tend to have problems with very hyped “indie” or quasi-indie comedies. I think it started with Secretary years ago – the post-riot grrrl zine community and the feminist community was all abuzz about it, although for different reasons. I found it more boring than anything else, and with a problematic ending. Then there was Napoleon Dynamite, which by the time I saw it, I had endured about 9 months of people at parties and work quoting and acting out scenes. I pretty much only found one scene funny because everything else was ruined for me. I’ve yet to see Little Miss Sunshine, although I don’t have people acting it out or quoting it for me. So these past few months while I’ve caught snippets from blogs about Juno, I haven’t read anything in-depth about it and have actively scrolled past any posts about it for the past few weeks. I also tend to avoid these sorts of movies cos the preciousness of all the quirky characters kind of grates on my nerves a bit and nothing ever seems to be as clever as the makers want you to believe. But with Juno, I think the siren song of a possible Jason Bateman-Michael Cera Arrested Development reunion was too much for me to avoid.

Well, in short, Juno is about a teenage girl (Ellen Page, a.k.a. Linda Cardellini 2.0) who gets impregnated by her best friend Paulie (Michael Cera – adorable and awkward, or, every character he’s played in the past 4 or 5 years). She ends up deciding to give up the baby for adoption to a young yuppie couple named Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) after she gets kind of freaked out at the abortion clinic. It’s not really a complicated plot, and it’s more character driven.

It took me about 10 minutes to get used to the dialogue, cos much of it was spoken in slang. Sometimes it seemed as if there was more slang than Clueless, which may actually be true. If you like movies with straight-forward language, and don’t like spending 5 seconds after every line spoken by any teenage characters or Rainn Wilson’s cameo trying to silently interpret, this probably isn’t the movie for you. In some ways this movie was like a weird ode to the mid-1990s. I don’t remember seeing any cell phones, since Juno and her friends all spoke on regular telephones (okay, burger phones – eat the quirk, homies!), Juno wore flannel, but not baggy flannel (although this took place in Minnesota), and she and her friends were in a band together. Mark was formerly in a semi-popular band in the early 1990s that opened up for The Melvins and toured Japan, and he sings a few bars of “Doll Parts” by Hole. However, he is now a jingle writer, which pays for the large house in the suburbs that he lives in. And there are a lot of torn up grunge t-shirts between Mark and Vanessa, which I kind of find endearing since I currently dye my hair in my old Sonic Youth t-shirt from when I was 15, although I guess I’m 10 years younger than the couple, and 10 years older than the teenagers in the movie. Between this couple and Mr. Humphrey on Gossip Girl, it’s going to take some time before I’m used to fictional former grunge rock stars being adults with mortgages.* I also don’t know if it’s a testament to my age or old taste that I found the adult characters in this movie funnier than the teenagers. Juno’s father and stepmom are played by J.K. Simmons and Alison Janney, who are always funny when they’re actually in comedies or are allowed to be funny (Simmons in the Spider-Man films, for example). Jason Bateman gets a few amusing bits in, but oddly enough, Jennifer Garner isn’t really allowed to be funny at all. She’s very much the straight, sincere, and sympathetic character of the film. I dunno, I have a soft spot for 13 Going on 30 and think she does have a decent amount of adeptness for comedy, especially physical comedy since she’s kind of gawky-looking.

I guess I’m supposed to do my feminist duty and add my commentary about how Juno decided to not abort the baby, right? Her reason, while admittedly partially caused by a single pro-life protestor outside the clinic, seemed realistic enough I guess. The movie hovers over the topic enough, a good 15 minutes or so longer than Knocked Up did, enough to display that hey, pro-choice does mean having a choice. If you haven’t heard, this movie is written by a woman, so it makes sense that there is focus on Juno having a choice with what to do with her pregnancy. I honestly don’t expect American films to tackle a movie about abortion anytime soon – two films about abortion released last year were a documentary made by British director Tony Kaye, and the Palm D’Or winner at Cannes last year, a Romanian film called 4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile / 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, a drama about what happens to a pair of friends after one of them has a back-alley abortion. The Kaye documentary had limited release in the US in 2007, and as far as I know, the Romanian film has not made its way here yet (or if it has, I haven’t read much about it and it will probably never come to Richmond before it’s released on DVD).

For a movie that seems somewhat of an ode to the mid-1990s, and whose title character is into ’77 punk rock, Juno’s soundtrack is all acoustic twee pop music. Kimya Dawson partially did the soundtrack. I guess people that are into the more acoustic cutesy stuff that Plan-It-X Records and their ilk/followers puts out sometimes will be happy. I like some Belle and Sebastian songs, but cutesy acoustic twee isn’t really my thing.

Juno wasn’t particularly as funny as I expected it to be, but it does have a lot of likable characters and a good heart. The single thing that kind of creeped me out about this movie would be considered a spoiler, so I’ll save it for another time. And I’m sure if anyone starts quoting this movie at parties or at work, I will have long forgotten all the lines and slang by then.

* Not that I’m in denial about real (former or not) grunge and indie rock stars being adults with mortgages, spouses, and kids. Although I guess the only one I still pay some attention to is Stephen Malkmus, and at least he put the spouse and kid part off until the middle of this decade. Fun fact: he’s also the singing voice of Cate Blanchett’s version of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.

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