Glorious Miscellany 7/13/07: On Broadcast Brooks, Tuba Girl, and Japanese sexsploitation
(Each week, sanity dictates that I must indulge in a few positive pop-culture experiences to make up for the Norbits and Jeff Foxworthy-hosted game shows of the world. Every Friday, I offer a few of them.)
1. Albert Brooks’ big speech, Broadcast News. I have Albert Brooks on my shortlist of personal heroes. (In fact, my never-to-be-completed Masters thesis was on the—at that time—five films written and directed by Brooks.) One of the things I’ve always admired about Brooks, particularly his first three efforts (Real Life, Modern Romance, and Lost In America), is that unlike other comedians, he doesn’t care about ingratiating himself to the audience. The “Albert Brooks” character in those films is vain, prickly, desperate, and occasionally abusive to the ones he loves, whether he’s needling his too-pretty girlfriend about a series of late-night long-distance phone calls (Modern Romance) or dressing down his wife at the Hoover Dam for blowing their “nest egg” at the Desert Inn craps table. Though he’s lightened up considerably with age, Brooks’ on-screen persona was once more irascible than perhaps any comic actor before or since, which may explain why his films have never been terribly popular. He’s a tough bastard to like and until the disarming and wonderful Defending Your Life, he was determined not to make any easier for people.
Still, there’s a great integrity and soul to Brooks’ uncompromising nature and it took 1987’s Broadcast News to draw it out of him most completely. Writer-director James L. Brooks tailored the role of a brilliant but “uncharismatic” TV reporter specifically for him and Brooks responded with his most full-bodied performance to date and maybe his clearest declaration of principles. I’ve seen Broadcast News many times over the years and in the era of 24/7 cable news channels, its alarm over the decline of journalistic standards has seemed increasingly quaint. (Would anyone even bat an eye anymore over the big journalistic sin committed by William Hurt in the film? I’m guessing not.) Yet Brooks’ character is quixotically determined to maintain those standards anyway, and protect the news business from empty suits like Hurt’s anchorman, who’s all flash over substance. Brooks carries a torch for TV producer Holly Hunter, who’s equally brilliant and equally concerned about quality control, but she falls for Hurt against her better judgment. (On the phone with Hunter after her first exchange with Hurt, Brooks sizes up the situation perfect: “He must have been really good-looking.” “Why do you say that?” “Because nobody invites a bad-looking idiot to their room.”)
As Hunter draws closer to Hurt, Brooks’ bitterness over the job and his lost love dovetail in a speech that’s filled with professional rancor, heartbreak, and the sort of emotional cruelty that’s unique to Brooks. To punish Hunter for falling in love with a man who personifies everything she hates, Brooks “semi-seriously” refers to Hurt as the Devil:
What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. He’ll be attractive. He’ll be nice and helpful. He’ll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He’ll never do an evil thing. He’ll never deliberately hurt a living thing. He’ll just bit by little bit lower our standards where they’re important.
If Hurt were easier to hate and Brooks easier to like, that whole speech would come off as insufferably self-righteous, but it’s far more complicated than that. There’s no doubt Brooks doesn’t respect Hurt’s position in his business—though he certainly envies his smooth performance behind the anchor desk—but, at bottom, he’s going to great lengths to keep the woman he loves from going out to meet another man. And that’s not nearly so noble a motivation, much as his crushed feelings are palpable. When his speech actually does work to sabotage Hunter and Hurt’s relationship, at least for the time being, he turns to her with a catlike grin and says, “Well, thanks for stopping by.”
2. Jessica Campbell. Forging ahead in my Alan Sepinwall-inspired Freaks And Geeks marathon, I came across a couple of episodes that guest-starred Jessica Campbell, whose abbreviated career as an actress lasted only a few years and a handful of films. She hasn’t been on screen in five years and a “Where Are They Now” tag on the IMDb lists her as “studying anthropology in California,” so she appears to have left acting behind. So consider this entry my cry-in-the-wilderness plea for Campbell to abandon her no doubt fulfilling pursuits and return to the uncertain paydays and Darwinian mercilessness of life in front of the camera.
In two F&G episodes, Campbell stars as “Tuba Girl,” a band member who wins the affections of cynical wiseacre Seth Rogan by giving as good as she gets. Rogan’s infatuation with Campbell surprises him more than anybody, because making snotty remarks about the band nerds is one of his favorite bleacher pastimes. Yet she’s pretty much the female (or semi-female, as he comes to discover) version of him, with a jaundiced, no-bullshit perspective on high school that’s Campbell’s stock-in-trade as an actress. She’s whip-smart, unconventionally pretty, and supremely self-possessed, yet also capable of showing a little vulnerability, too. When the revelation comes that she was born with “the potential to be a boy or a girl,” what might have been a Very Special Episode of Freaks And Geeks turns into a more complex take on the fluidity of sexual identity and ultimately the power of love to transcend such boundaries. And Campbell is a big reason why that episode works.
But that’s not all. Prior to F&G, Campbell had her most significant role in Election and nearly stole the movie from Reese Witherspoon. As her popular jock brother Chris Klein tries to challenge Witherspoon in the school election, the outcast Campbell does what she can to sabotage the whole process, including rallying the apathetic student body by running for President herself, under the promise that she’ll dismantle the Student Council if elected. Her campaign to undermine her brother’s candidacy speaks to the heart, too, because his manager is a former friend who rebuffed her lesbian advances. Here again, I love her strength and self-possession: When her schoolmates greet her with hissing and catcalls, she doesn’t turn into a shrinking violet. She wins them over.
Please come back, Ms. Campbell. We’ve got all the Mandy Moores we can handle right now. (Oh, and if you like that Tuba Girl image, you can download the iron-on PDF here.)
3. Sex & Fury (1973). Since Grindhouse came out a few months ago, I’ve been meaning to catch up on some of the outré fare that inspired the film and Quentin Tarantino’s career specifically. Whatever problems you may have with Tarantino as a filmmaker—and please know that I share precisely none of them—he’s got wonderfully eclectic taste as a cinephile and the surfacing of a lot of forgotten drive-in and cult gems on DVD has much to do with his influence. In any case, I finally saw Vanishing Point, the film much cited by the characters in Tarantino’s Death Proof, a couple months ago and liked it quite a bit. It has some of the arty existentialism of Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, but it’s much more intent on delivering the genre goods, which results in some breathtaking chase scenes, killer stunts, and one seriously kick-ass ending.
With appetite whetted, I moved on this week to Sex & Fury, a Japanese sexploitation flick from the director of School Of The Holy Beast, an irresistibly silly piece of softcore about depraved nuns with a sadomasochistic lesbian bent. What sets both films apart from the more rudimentary titillation is that they’re rendered in high style, with beautiful widescreen photography and a high degree of calculated outrageousness. A little bit of this stuff goes a long way, but Sex & Fury has plenty to recommend it: Samurai battles with geyser-like bloodspray; European spies who speak lines in English that sound like they’ve been translated and retranslated a dozen times; generous amounts of gratuitous nudity; and an absolutely brutal/arousing scene for S&M freaks, if that’s your thing.
But to me, one scene really stands out, and its influence on the final confrontation in Kill Bill’s “House Of Blue Leaves” sequence is more than a little apparent. The heroine, played by Reiko Ike, is on a quest to kill the three very powerful people who murdered her father when she was a little girl. One night, as she’s taking a bath, a small army of yakuza minions launch a sneak attack. So what does she do? Fights back, obviously, just not with her clothes on. Throughout this impressive battle, I was reminded of that Seinfeld episode in which Jerry’s latest girlfriend prances around his apartment naked, which can sometimes lead to some unflattering poses. “There’s good naked and there’s bad naked,” he says. Remarkably, this sequence, which moves to a gorgeous bed of fake snow, seems like it would be all “bad naked.” But trust me, it’s good naked.