Perhaps it’s that films are sold to us now in packages of “pre-awareness” that we’ve mostly forgotten how to receive something wholly original. High stakes in film production now from the major studios in Hollywood require that “pre awareness” because it can mean the difference between $100 million and $200 million. Sequels, remakes and book adaptations of popular novels sell better than films cut from whole cloth.
All the same, it is always irritating when films that have just been seen get compared immediately to classics. Out of Toronto, the brilliant breakout hit Nightcrawler was being compared to Taxi Driver and Network – it is neither of those films, not even close and comparing them instantly diminishes the film. The other comparisons I’ve heard this year is that Interstellar is 2001 (yeah, no), Inherent Vice is The Big Lebowski, etc.
Nightcrawler is a film about a reedy, dark sociopath nothing like Travis Bickle. Bickle was a war vet with nothing to fight for who must then find someone he thinks needs protecting. What he does has a specific purpose and it isn’t necessarily for fame and glory, although that could be part of it. He thinks he’s doing something significant. Such is not the case with Nightcrawler, who merely slips into his job, does his best and thinks nothing of the consequences. He’s a flat-lined sociopath who doesn’t care about anything. He has no primary driving motivation to do what he does other than the thrill of doing it. The two films could not be more different and yet when you say it’s like Taxi Driver that sets people up to immediately dismiss it as the film that couldn’t live up. Not that Nightcrawler has been dismissed. Good word of mouth has generated buzz and people are paying to see it. Is it like Network? Only in so much that it depicts network news as being so greedy it loses its moral line. That is true about Nightcrawler but the film doesn’t really partner with such a strong message as Network does. The scary thing about Network and Nightcrawler is that they depict the life we’re living now. We see that stuff on the news and the internet every day. There is no moral line.
Interstellar is nothing like 2001 except the two films have to do with space. Comparing them greatly diminishes Interstellar because how could any film ever live up to Kubrick’s abstract masterpiece? Interstellar is laden with dialogue throughout – 2001 has none of it. Kubrick’s film is about mankind overall, a sweeping statement about our species, where Interstellar is more like Noah, a cautionary tale about where we’re headed because we refuse to look at climate change and GMO environmental disaster, which will lead to our ultimate destruction. These are vastly different ideals. The second you start thinking 2001 you start hating Interstellar because one is never going to be, nor should have been intended to be, the other. Therefore you can enjoy the three legged jokester monolith without having to be annoyed that it lampoons the monolith in 2001.
Finally, one of the best films of this year has to be Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant and perplexing Inherent Vice, which too many people out of the New York Film Festival wrote off as being like The Big Lebowski or even The Long Goodbye – I myself did that after seeing it, thinking he was channeling Robert Altman. If that’s what you’re looking for in this film you will miss everything that’s great about it and go looking for something that isn’t there. First off, The Big Lebowski has an easy to follow caper that has a clear through line. They pissed the dude’s rug, he wants it back. Two Lebowskis, a kidnapping, Bunny Lebowski. Though both films could be seen as kind of modern, abstract renderings of film noir cop films like The Big Sleep (which also makes no sense, by the way) or The Maltese Falcon. The joke being neither Jeff Lebowski or Doc Sportello are Bogart. I guess that’s where the comparison comes from.
But Inherent Vice goes so much deeper than The Big Lebowski, though if you’re on the film’s wavelength you will laugh just as much, particularly with Josh Brolin’s unbelievably funny performance as the cop. It is a film about longing, about emotional and sexual ache. It is a film about loss — a lamenting of the vanishing of the good stuff hippie culture brought to America. All the while, throughout Inherent Vice, there is that curious juxtaposition of very conservative California with wildly out of control California. If you’ve grown up here in LA during the 1960s, 1970s you will appreciate it all the more. He captures so much about life back then and the weird part is it feels just like America in 2014. The “silent majority” are out in force and have become the vocal minority – the shrieking Anita Bryants of the world are everywhere.
In a perfect world no film would ever been called an imitation of another unless that film was vastly inferior and truly a copy of another. But these films are originals.
