Smiley Face (Gregg Araki, 2007)

[patrick]

Gregg Araki's latest film Smiley Face is getting dumped on DVD today, after about a week in theaters. It's a good-natured stoner comedy, not exactly what I was expecting after Mysterious Skin, but it's gotten generally positive reviews. I watched it over the weekend and the first thing that I noticed was that the production values look "direct to DVD" low. It's probably worth a look for Araki fans, but I tend to disagree with the reviewers calling it "subversive" - the parts that are trying to be important and meaningful really fell flat with me, almost like a parody of "important" symbolic scenes in quasi-indies like Garden State...I suppose it's a bit hard to articulate.

[Len]

It had parts that were trying to be important?

To me the whole film felt like Araki just having some fun after Mysterious Skin, and as such, I liked Smiley Face quite a bit. I wouldn't call it subversive, but to me the whole film was worth the price of admission just for the scene where the main character goes all Marx on the bourgeoisie at the slaughterhouse.

[barrym71]

Gregg Araki's latest film Smiley Face is getting dumped on DVD today, after about a week in theaters. It's a good-natured stoner comedy, not exactly what I was expecting after Mysterious Skin, but it's gotten generally positive reviews. I watched it over the weekend and the first thing that I noticed was that the production values look "direct to DVD" low. It's probably worth a look for Araki fans, but I tend to disagree with the reviewers calling it "subversive" - the parts that are trying to be important and meaningful really fell flat with me, almost like a parody of "important" symbolic scenes in quasi-indies like Garden State...I suppose it's a bit hard to articulate.

I agree. I didn't find it particularly subversive. I thought that the first act was enjoyable, but everything wore thin after about forty minutes. Anna Faris is so great at this kind of comedy, but the movie didn't really seem to go anywhere.

[jorencain]

I'm with Len. I felt like it had no pretensions of being "important" or subversive; just a fun movie. And I thought most of it was hilarious. Anna Faris really is great, and the running time of 80 minutes or so is perfect. I was blown away by "Mysterious Skin", and this is some nice fluff after something so heavy.

[patrick]

I'm mostly speaking of the part where Anna Faris throws the Communist Manifesto into the air and the pages start flying towards all the people she interacted with during the movie.

I did think Faris was great, however.

[chaddoli]

I really dug this film. Not only was it very, very funny, but it contained a certain beauty of structure and even (maybe a few) moments of lyricism. It is indeed a fun movie, but that doesn't mean it isn't artful, and I disagree that it feels "direct-to-DVD." I saw it in a theater and it felt like it belonged in one.

Anna Faris delivers one hell of a performance too, appearing in every scene (stoned), and more often than not keeping it fresh, inventive, and funny.

[John Cope]

I actually have to agree with Nathan Lee who suggests that this is Araki's best since Nowhere. That may seem like a hard assertion to accept but I believe it's true because Splendor was ill conceived and Mysterious Skin despite its heft of import never completely gels; it always felt like a self-serious attempt on Araki's part to legitimize himself, rather than a balanced integration of his vision to Heim's excellent source material (something similar afflicts PTA's new one). This grasping attempt to prove himself was sad since it suggested that Araki didn't recognize that such an effort was unnecessary--he'd already accomplished it with the great Doom Generation. Critics, of course, backed up his misconception but then most of them never valued his earlier, radical achievements in style and sensibility anyway. "Filmed on location in hell" was never just teenage nihilist agitprop or a malcontent's petulance; it was also the declaration of a very genuine despair that never felt the need to commodify itself to anyone's idea of authentic or legitimate political cant. In other words, at that time Araki didn't feel the Hollywood induced need to justify his characters internal humanness like the eye roll inducing Juno of late. Obviously, Mysterious Skin is much more "edgy" and "adult" but for all its ostensible outre provocations it reveals itself as ultimately a pretty safe and conventional picture in which all the daring is superficial glaze. I get weary of films that feel the need to separate their characters from the lived quality of their identities, the inhabited aspect. The stuff I'm more attracted to (Michael Mann, Alan Rudolph, Zalman King) never seeks to do that but rather to acknowledge the impossibility and inauthenticity of attempting to do it, the false nature of emotional resolutions which emerge from that. Thankfully, at least someone like Everett Lewis has endured, never faltering in presenting an increasingly more personal, similarly tuned cinema of unapologetic angst and aesthetic refinement (even though I have to admit to preferring some of his earlier works better as well).

Though Smiley Face is not quite a return to Greg's grand "irresponsible" movies of the past and it's never as directly subversive or aggressive as Nowhere and Doom Generation, it really doesn't need to be. It's fashioned after a different model and the main thing is that it's funny as hell and Faris is a revelation. Beyond that, what subversive elements there are identify themselves more in the tone of the thing than any specific sequence or scene. Still, the ending, which acknowledges the absolute futility of all that has come before, is subversive enough in its own right I suppose. It certainly shakes things up as, though it's no moral judgement, the implications of our own mixed up sympathies are no design flaw.

[therewillbeblus]

I've seen this a number of times and it's still my favorite Araki. I think any subversion is dealer's choice here - one may choose not to see the film as having it in the first place, which is totally fair since this plays out like a classic stoner comedy carried by an all-timer comic performance from Anna Faris, who magically holds such a shaggy-dog and provocative movie together on her own. But the subversion seems to be related to her volitional rhetoric of beliefs around social politics, contrary to many stoner comedies unconcerned with larger issues and where characters just go along for the ride. This is that too, but there's more of a spotlight on the dissonance between comprehension and application in Faris' generation - to be smart and 'get' economics, for example, but have no willful control over her own finances; to understand Marxism but be unable to communicate anything valuable about it, not to mention to an audience that's willfully complacent. That seems to be the idea - here are a bunch of complacent individuals existing in a world that demands change, just not enough from their perspective, and so therefore maybe it's doesn't? At least as long as you're willing to bury your head in the sand. There's validation and comfort in that, and also a depressing juxtaposition when looking at Araki's oeuvre, chock full of individual anarchists demanding to take life and conform it to their terms. Here is a film about those who have given up to some extent. It's funny, but can also read as a slightly-melancholic postscript to his 90s work

[beamish14]

I adore Sally Cruikshank’s work and her opening credits for this. The Academy has restored and preserved many of her shorts, including Quasi at the Quackadero, which is in the National Film Registry, but none of her films are commercially available in HD.

She’s responsible for a slew of other great credits sequences, including Joan Micklin Silver’s Loverboy and forum favorite Ruthless People