Being frank about Frank

-
We watched the movie Frank, starring Michael Fassbender, though unfortunately, he is not nude in this film as he was in Shame. In fact, you don't see his face until near the end of the film, because he's wearing a giant paper mache head for most of the time. The head is cartoonish, with big blue eyes and painted on brown hair and a red-lipped mouth. Kind of like the Big Boy character except without the Brillo cream whoosh to his hair. 

 The film is about this wanna-be redheaded keyboard playing musician who works in an office and lives with his parents. By an accident of fate, he ends up being asked to perform with this odd band passing through town and then joins them in the woods to make an album. Frank is the main dude in the band and the others are hostile misfits, including Maggie Gyllenhall at her frown-iest. She wears her hair in a page boy with bangs and walks around in a silky robes as if she's just stepped out of Joan Crawford's dressing room. She doesn't like the redhead (fondly nicknamed "gingerbread" by Frank) but neither do any of the band memos, at least two of whom met in a mental institute. 

 In the end, the band comes apart, partially because of the insistence of the redhead that they attend South by Southwest (he's been tweeting and adding YouTube videos of the band recording and running around the woods and they develop a small but intense following), and partially because Frank is unstable. And of course, like the main character, you spend much of the time wanting to know why Frank wears this fake head and what he looks like without it. My favorite scene involved the main character realizing that Frank was in the shower, seeing his head abandoned on the floor, and tip-toeing into the bathroom to catch a glimpse of him without the head, only to have Frank pull back the shower curtain suddenly and be wearing another of the heads, covered in plastic. 

 The film had artful, funny moments. Dan said it reminded him of This is Spinal Tap, the Christopher Guest mockumentary of a failing rock band, but for me, it wasn't so much a parody of the rock band documentary--it had whimsical, unexpected moments (Frank twirling on the front lawn with a stranger) and darkly funny moments (one of the band members hangs himself wearing a Frank head so that they first think it's Frank dangling from the tree), but I wasn't that interested in this kid's journey into the fantasy of belonging to a band and it seemed clear that they wouldn't make it. The last few moments were interesting--when you get to see who Frank really is and why he's opted to wear a fake head, but I am still not sure what it was about. 

 Finding your own group of people who are as messed up as you? Using your creative energy to stave off your internal demons? The folly of wanting to make it big? How art in some form can save you, especially if you express it in a supportive and equally screwed up community? Paper mache heads are fun? You watch it and tell me. It's on Netflix, which tends to have some really interesting films and you don't have to pay extra to watch them, like you do with On Demand. 

Comments

paddy said…
Frank Sidebottom was a real man. I remember him growing up. I think the keyboard guy might be based on Jon Ronson, who was in the band, and might have written it; now a regular on This American Life.
9:23 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Candyman: Race, Class, Sexuality, Gender, and Disability

-
Candyman hits on almost all of the sections we discussed over the last six weeks. Let's start from the most obvious and move from there.   Race: A large part of Candyman confronts the anger and rage of the Black community after years and years and years and years of systemic racism. Candyman is an embodiment of all of the men who have suffered at the hands of whites (white police man, the white community, white systems that have set them up to fail such as the housing projects of Cabrini-Green). The monster of Candyman is a tornado of retribution, a hive of bees swirling angrily and containing the men who have been lynched or tortured by whites, starting with the original death of a Black male painter who dared to fall in love with a white woman whose portrait he painted. This monster, like the original, can be summoned by anyone who dares to say his name out loud in front of a mirror five times. Until the very end, the only people who do this are white--and every one of them is
Read more

Short story by Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"

-
Image
You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton
Read more

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-
Image
It’s all about the recaps. It’s a show made of recaps from previous shows. I purposefully skipped the first 40 minutes. These guys are all a bunch of idiots. They are turning on one another. Wes has not shown up, because he will probably come in at the very end for some kind of surprise. They are all trying to humiliate Jake because he is too perfect and too sweet (however, he just referred to himself in the third person; kind of irritating). I don’t remember any of these guys, to be honest. Who are these women in the audience? Oh, okay time for a short break because the show has been on now for three minutes. You know what, I’m going to go ahead and time the difference between the commercials and the actual airtime of the show. >Show returns at: 8:47 p.m. Don’t forget the 20 minutes of clapping in between the scenes. I can’t tell you how much hair mousse has been used in the making of this show. Dave is the crazy dude who has decided to grow a beard for the recap Juan is being atta
Read more