A screenwriter's own particular brand of self-disgust is combined with the germy self-hatred of the game-show creator and host Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, this week's Charlie Kaufman screenplay. The whole is less than the sum of its parts: the dueling Kaufman and Barris takes on self-flagellation don't exactly mesh. This film, a shape-shifting apologia-biopic as weird as Adaptation, is too cold for is own good.
George Clooney, though, in his directorial debut, does show an eye, and a head, for filmmaking. There's a casual irony in the details, with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (based on Barris' unreliable "unauthorized autobiography'' of the same name) making jokes of the lurid minutiae of the life of Barris, who in his day was accused of the destruction of television, Western civilization and the World as We Know It.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF PANDASIA
Barris' ambition led him to create The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game shows that during the 1960s were considered the same ungodly manifestations of a sick mind that Survivor, The Bachelor and Good Morning, Miami are thought to be today.
The film's Barris (Sam Rockwell) does a mambo in his head between geekdom and desperation, and Rockwell does a dazzling job of conveying the seething confusion beneath his character's dazed amiability. Rockwell gets this across partly by slightly parting his lips for much of the performance, a gesture that catches Barris in transition; it is the nexus between the state of shock at what's going on around him and the moment when his talent for saying the wrong thing gets him into trouble.
Barris finds himself attracted to Penny, a proto-hippie played by Drew Barrymore, who uses her cherubic flower-child eagerness well. Barrymore is more believable here than she has been in a movie for some time. She seems to have suddenly remembered that she could act instead of simply making herself adorable.
The movie focuses on how Barris' low-key scramble for
greatness -- Confessions of a Dangerous Mind even slips in the hero's motivation for creating the forgettable pop hit Palisades Park -- supposedly gets him recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency and one of its agents, Jim Byrd (Clooney, in a know-it-all deadpan that borders on cadaverous).
In one of the funniest marriages of cynicism and need since Otter used the obituaries to find dates in Animal House, the film presses Barris' claim that The Dating Game lent itself to his globe-trotting adventures as a CIA assassin. He could both chaperone the winning couple to whatever second-rate location they "won'' -- here, it's cold war wasteland instead of a Puerto Vallarta daydreamland -- and cram in some wetwork for the CIA.
Though the prologue and epilogue -- with a bearded, gone-to-seed Barris holed up in a hotel room of mountainous disarray -- are out of Apocalypse Now, to tell this story of the 1960s gone wrong Clooney uses as a partial model The Parallax View, a minor 1970s classic about America turning sour. He has put together an impressive team, including the production designer James Bissel and the cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel. Sigel filmed Clooney in one of the best pictures of the last decade, Three Kings.
Clooney is out to fashion a story blending politics, comedy and anger in the way Three Kings did so seamlessly. The anger and comedy surface here. As Barris' successes bubble up, and he finds himself in the midst of a CIA mission and succeeding as host of The Gong Show (imagine American Idol featuring contestants of no talent instead of, well, not much talent), these peaks rise into a moment of horror. Rockwell peaks here, too; watching the line between exploiter and exploited disappear makes him vertiginous. It's the through line that the movie carries over from the book, and it makes the movie less about spritzing and more about suffering.
The politics, unfortunately, get blurred, too. The slapsticky
assassination adventures seem like something out of another film about politics and pratfalls: The President's Analyst. And when Julia Roberts shows up as a slinky double agent in hats that Diana Vreeland might have chosen, Confessions slides dangerously close to Rocky and Bullwinkle.
The picture misses the opportunity to make sound points, like that the makin'-whoopee honesty of Newlywed Game contestants is preferable to the fake-ideal nuclear-family sitcoms the networks force fed the country. At least The Newlywed Game couples admitted to having only one bed, instead of the chaste twin-bed absurdity sold elsewhere. Rockwell's fusion of flaky and direct is dead-solid perfect when his Barris is host of The Gong Show and slides around the stage as if he were about to break into some doo-wop soft-shoe, clapping his hands to punctuate the silliness.
Rockwell is able to give the film weight, though it lacks shape. It suffers as much from ambition as the real-life Barris did; reading the book, with Barris shuffling off from CIA hit to television hit, you wonder how he was able to squeeze in The Gong Show Movie and why the CIA itself didn't put out a contract on his life for that one.
It's evident that Kaufman's scripts work better when directed simply; Spike Jonze leaves his overflowing magic bag behind when he films one of them. Clooney pops off ideas the way Barris bopped on the Gong Show stage and seems determined to find metaphors for Barris' trajectory of worm-ridden victory and emptiness. Still, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a good piece of work more often than not, and this is one of the few times an actor turned director has chosen to subvert the feel-good genre for his maiden voyage.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
Mongolian influencer Anudari Daarya looks effortlessly glamorous and carefree in her social media posts — but the classically trained pianist’s road to acceptance as a transgender artist has been anything but easy. She is one of a growing number of Mongolian LGBTQ youth challenging stereotypes and fighting for acceptance through media representation in the socially conservative country. LGBTQ Mongolians often hide their identities from their employers and colleagues for fear of discrimination, with a survey by the non-profit LGBT Centre Mongolia showing that only 20 percent of people felt comfortable coming out at work. Daarya, 25, said she has faced discrimination since she
RSS