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Having received several quasi-favorable reviews–not high praise exactly, but admissions of funniness–from a couple of reliable sources, I went ahead over the weekend and went out to see The Hangover, to see what all the fuss was about. Given that the movie’s already been in theaters for three weeks, there’s not a whole lot I can say here that hasn’t already been said, but it was kind of funny. But it was also clear why the thing has been so popular, since it’s not not-funny either.

Maybe it’s an age thing, once again. I’m in the closing months of my mid-20s, soon to be embarking on my late-20s, and more and more I find this to be an awkward age. I probably sit at about the median age of my social circles, but that means that a fair number of people that I see socially on a regular basis are already in their 30s (mostly in their early-30s, but a few are in their mid-30s). I bring this up because of a certain logic that seems to exist in comedy movies, that movies about high school are written for a pre-teen audience (though the raunchy subset of high school movies finds a broader audience, I suppose), movies about college for a high school audience, movies about twentysomethings capering about (Saving Silverman, maybe?) for college students, and movies about thirtysomethings written for twentysomethings. So, by only several minutes into The Hangover, I found myself thinking “wow! I can’t wait ’til I’m in my mid-to-late thirties!”.

If this age-based thing seems too general, or off base, it’s also further complicated by The Hangover’s simultaneous existence as a caper comedy and as a Vegas movie at the same time. It may well, in fact, just be the fact that it takes place in Las Vegas that this movie is successful at all (how could a combination of Dude, Where’s My Car? and Very Bad Things succeed otherwise?). Given that some many of its jokes seem so familiar, the thing won’t age well, but then again, that’s not really the point, I suppose. Comedy-for-the-ages is a different beast than comedies-that-make-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars (or even of less immoderate success). Take, for instance, Something About Mary and Kingpin, from all the way back in the ’90s: Mary seemed like the ground-breaking movie at the time, as the culmination of the ’90s gross-out movement, and made more money (I’d imagine), but Kingpin was the movie built to last–Bill Murray’s comb-over alone will maintain this movie for centuries to come (not to mention possibly the best groin-hit (between Harrelson and the two baddies) of all time). I could rattle off a massive list of classic comedies but there’s no real point to it; I’m fairly confidant that the trends would point to aspects of quality rather than quantity of viewers.

Crank 2 was way funnier than The Hangover. Very different types of movies, admittedly, but the comparison can be made since The Hangover definitely went for the still-new “this is awesome” model of movie-making. Except that very little of its concepts were particularly awesome, and the thing was quite slackly-paced. The pacing issue probably has to do with it being a Vegas movie, where the director, one assumes, is compelled to lovingly film all those beautiful hotel rooms and hallways and scenic vistas blah blah blah. As usual, with popular things like this, part of me hopes that it leads some minority of its viewers towards actually good things, but that probably isn’t the case with this. Giggle! “So many crazy things happen in Las Vegas OMG!”

The only other point I want to bring up, dealing again with this movie’s placement in the canon of all comedies ever, has to do with Zach Galifinakis’s role. Dude’s been doing the awkward-comic thing for a while now, to decent effect (anyone else remember his turn in Out Cold? I sure do). Owes something to Andy Kaufmann, I’d assume. And he does pretty well steal most of the scenes he’s in–though, that’s not much of a feat when you’re competing against Ed Helms and some other douchebag. But awkward comedy is easy, especially for a mainstream audience, since it would seem much newer to them. Why? Because comedy is all about timing (for the best-timed joke in the history of movies, see the “It’s Enrico Pallazzo!” gag from the first Naked Gun movie), and awkward comedy is based in disrupting that timing. I can’t think of many things that I appreciate more than a well-timed joke (there were a couple decently timed gags in The Hangover but not many), and this can also appreciate blatant disregard for anti-timing, but in a movie where things more or less just move forward and jokes come and go, the awkward thing gets really boring.

And I guess that’s why I tried to warn myself off of writing about this movie, since it was doomed to boil down to “popular movies are boring,” which, while true, also leads to the similar aphorism that “elitists are annoying.”

Pete Can’t Believe He Hasn’t Read This By Now #4: William Faulkner’s Sartoris

I’m not sure by what this book should be hailed. It’s Faulkner’s third novel, and the first dealing with Yoknapatawpha County and its residents, but not first “major” novel overstates the case. The thing definitely shows signs of Faulkner having not quite his stride as a serious writer. But, given that it’s the first of the whole spate of amazing novels that defined and developed Faulkner’s primary literary universe, it’s an important work. I don’t know why I hadn’t read it by now; I guess because it isn’t as good as the sequence of amazing novels that followed it. In that regard, I tended to think of it as his first novel as I read it. Similar to reading Kundera’s The Joke last week, I’ve found it quite rewarding to go back and read the earliest novel of a writer whose later works I enjoy quite a bit.

Pretty much every summer, going back to my sophomore year of college, I’ve gotten this urge to read Faulkner. Something about the humidity maybe, draws me towards his descriptions of Mississippi. So it was only a matter of time before I got around to reading Sartoris. Reading one or two Faulkner novels a summer for eight summers in a row gets you there eventually. The plotting (really, the lack of plotting) in Sartoris once again matched the pace of my summer to this point, moving slowly, with not all that much happening. Given the amount of story that followed this book, though, its not surprising that its 300 pages take such a broad view and move so slowly, since Faulkner, here, is already trying to build so much of his imaginary world.

It’s interesting to me as well that, reading it after so many of the other Yoknapatawpha novels, this book didn’t feel like a “prequel” at all–that has something to do with the timelessness of Faulkner’s story-telling, and the sort of shifts in time that take place in those other works. Given that, what makes it seem earlier is really in the craft.

Particularly disconcerting is Faulkner’s treatment of African-American characters, often resorting unnecessarily to broad-strokes and racist stereotypes (an issue that he had corrected (at least to some extent) in his later works). I think most of us white middle-class readers are taught how to deal with this sort of stereotype-laden writing in Junior High, when we read Mark Twain, and are taught to ignore the “n-word” and consider it part of the social tapestry or whatever. But that’s not really satisfactory. Produces a lot of white liberal awkwardness, if nothing else. What’s strange here is that many of the black characters are well-developed, embark upon sub-plots and are treated fairly and humanely. Faulkner resorts to stereotype mostly in the background; in sentences that were either never written or edited out of later novels, or at the very least presented more complicatedly. Writing the novels about the South, especially during a timespan between the Civil War and The Great Depression, from the perspective that he had, Faulkner’s racism–or the racism in his characters–is generally present in all his works, but complicatedly so; in Sartoris its not complicated at all, but at least the reader can take to heart that it eventually will be (if never completely satisfyingly so).

For July 6th: Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth