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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: poetry

Review: “Our Idiot Brother”

01 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

30 Rock, boulder, bum, comedy, crocs, dinner for shmucks, elizabeth banks, emily mortimer, family, film review, golden retriever, hippie, homewrecker, how do you know, lebowski, lisa kudrow, natalie portman, NBC, our idiot brother, poetry, pt anderson, punch drunk lover, purell, rashida jones, shirley knight, sisters, summer movie, the other woman, thespian, urkle, willie nelson, zooey deschanel

“Small in the Family”

Review: “Our Idiot Brother”

(for Christopher)

Grade: B (RENT IT)

IS HONESTY ALWAYS the best policy?

“Our Idiot Brother” answers that eternal question with a resounding YES though it stresses that truth is not without its casualties.  The engine of unflinching truth-telling is the film’s lovable and, yes, idiotic protagonist Ned Rockland (played by Paul Rudd in a Lebowski-like beard and hippie haircut).  When he walks in on his brother-in-law, Dylan (Steve Coogan), in the buff and cheating on his sister, he doesn’t beat the guy to a bloody pulp.  No, he sanitizes his hands with a squirt of Purell and goes about his merry way.  A more apt title would be “Our Naïve and Puerile Brother with No Conversational Filter,” but that wouldn’t exactly sell tickets now would it?

“Our Idiot Brother” is just the heartfelt comedy to break Rudd’s losing streak in a string of turkeys otherwise known as “Dinner for Shmucks” and “How Do You Know.”  As Ned, he brings a 90-minute smile to the face.  Watch as he joins Dylan, a smarmy filmmaker, on the set of a dance studio and, getting his plastic shoe wedged in the ballet bar, explains: “My Croc is stuck.”  Rather than playing the role with a meta-thespian’s wink to the audience, as if to say “How dumb is this guy?”, Rudd plays Ned with absolute earnestness and it’s the film’s recipe for un-self-conscious success.   See Ned bounce on a trampoline while sipping a juice box.  Hear Ned unsure of whether or not he has health insurance.  See Ned, working a farmers market at the film’s opening, give free fruit to children and accidentally sell pot to a uniformed policeman.   Oops.  The arrest means that Ned loses the farm – the organic farm – and sole custody of his golden retriever named Willie Nelson.  “Willie Nelson!” Ned exclaims as his pooch is packed into a copcar.  “It’s going to be okay Willie Nelson!”

Ned is the sort of lovable guy who, when angry, grumbles under his breath “Geez Louise!” and when really angry, exclaims: “Oh wow, I mean, wow!”  Rudd shows all the bygone tenderness required of him as Jennifer Aniston’s gay best friend in “The Object of My Affection” (1998) but not required of him in any of the Apatow raunch as of late (“Anchorman,” “The 40 Year Old Virgin,” et al).  Without Rudd, the comedy’s center cannot hold.

This is not to disparage the three actresses who play Rudd’s cosmopolitan sisters: a predictably half-awake Zooey Deschanel as the indie bisexual Natalie, Elizabeth Banks as the journalist Miranda, and Emily Mortimer as the panicky Manhattan mama Liz.  (Mortimer and the laser-eyed Banks have both taken hilarious turns as Alec Baldwin’s girlfriend on the NBC sitcom “30 Rock.”)   And there a few more strong women to keep Ned afloat, including Rashida Jones as Natalie’s girlfriend in Urkle glasses, not to mention Ned’s Chardonnay-swilling mother (Shirley Knight) and hippie ex-girlfriend Janet (Kathryn Hahn).  Not since P.T. Anderson’s “Punch Drunk Love” (2002) have we seen such an idiot savant – or maybe it’s just plain idiot? – surrounded by so many screaming sisters.  Why are such mighty matriarchies so seldom seen on screen?

The sisters in “Our Idiot Brother,” however, are clichés rather than characters.  Dylan’s wife, Liz, is as uptight as she is uptown and, worried that her son won’t be accepted into an elite elementary school, is covering familiar ground; Lisa Kudrow already nailed this social type in the underrated “The Other Woman” (2009) with Natalie Portman as a sympathetic homewrecker.  And speaking of homewreckers, Ned is something of one himself, but his systematic destruction of his sisters’ domestic bliss is more accidental than malicious.  As anyone with an idiotic sibling might sigh, they know not what they do.

————————————————————————————-

Speaking of siblings, here’s a poem I wrote for my own idiot brother:

Give a Bum a Beer: A Drinking Rhyme

Give that guy a beer, said he

Lowering my window without me

Asking.

Give that bum a beer? I asked

Without a glass?  Into a flask? He’s

Coming.

Yeah, just toss that guy a can

Good beer is like a lending hand for

Drinking.

Our radio rang “People are strange”

The man said:  Can you spare some change? I’m

Roasting.

How ‘bout a beer? my brother said

Right on, he grinned.  Better drunk than fed when

Struggling.

Thanks for helping a brother out

Instead of blind-eyein’ and drivin’ about, you’re

Sharing.

–          Boulder, Summer 2011

Poem: The Padlocks of Paris

13 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by colincarman in Poems and Plogs (Poem-Blogs)

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

eiffel tower, marriage, paris, poetry, seine river, tucson

Nine nights into their European vacation

And she still felt superimposed on the place

This was Sheila’s idea of her first trip outside the States –

That she and Sam weren’t really part of Paris yet

But pasted onto photos she loved as a high schooler

At Langley, where Monsieur Wallace would insist

En francais, Mademoiselle! Though it was in plain English

That he told her, from the driver’s seat, in the rain:

“Look, Sheila, I have a wife, a family, I could go to jail for this.”

Around that time she began saving to leave Jersey, to get out,

To walk London and Paris, with a husband, which she finally did,

Thanks to Atlantic City and the death of Sam’s aunt.

Along the Pont des Arts, which the book told them

Was the first metal bridge across the Seine,

Sheila noticed the scores of padlocks and remembered when

Sam’s bicycle was locked to hers behind Langley

That’s how it began: by accident, already entangled

The new boy from Tucson who hadn’t heard about her,

About Wallace, about her father in the teachers parking lot,

Smashing windows with his nine-iron, shouting something,

Something about Sheila, “my baby girl,” and broken noses.

She probably loved him then, even before he came to unlock his bike

The red Schwinn that he weirdly resembled: tall, geometric, rickety even

Whatever Sam heard from teammates, he simply ignored

Looking forward, never back, to their first kiss (which wasn’t French),

To the wedding, to children (a trio of sons), to retirement, to Vegas

Where she wore a blue dress and looked longingly at the  miniature Eiffel.

On a dare, she ate escargot in Rue Jacob

Sheila called them “a delicacy”; Sam called them “snails”

But an empty stomach since produced dizziness

And downright elation at the bridge’s center

Where they watched a young couple, almost ritualistically,

Lock, kiss, and throw away the key

And all around them, love’s graffiti,

The urban equivalent, she thought, of trees

With lovers’ initials etched in branches and boughs –

Four strokes of a switchblade and you have a heart –

She thought also of Langley and her disgrace

Though Sam was smiling and had in his open hand

A lock from his luggage, a lock too tiny to protect anything,

Which they fastened to the railing in the rain.

– Breckenridge, CO (7/2011)

 

Poem: Sonnet for Lady GaGa

10 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by colincarman in Poems and Plogs (Poem-Blogs)

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

gay, lady gaga, madonna, medusa, ode, poetry, pop, pop music, rilke, sex, vogue, warhol

And I thought I’d have to grow old and gay

with Madonna alone! Mother

of masks, of reinvention, who likes to say:

“Just thinking about sex is sex” and whose lovers

Wilt in the shade of her gilded vanity

Until you came alone, well-versed

in Warhol and Rilke and the cold depravity

of life without dance, daring, fashion, who burst

Like some pop Pegasus, some demented diva,

The chastity belt that is America, every bit the Muse

She once was, singing “Vogue” and “You give me fevah,”

Still your own Medusa, affirming “Never lose –

Never compromise.” Yet I’m a guilty fan

Feeling every bit like I’m seeing another woman.

May 2011.

See my “Latest in Gaga” from the _G&LR_ (2010):

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+latest+in+Gaga.-a0232889565

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