The Perfect Double Bill

There's not much not to like in this film, but not much to love, either. The terrific score by honorary son of New Orleans Randy Newman keeps things cooking, the hand-drawn animation is a thing of beauty, and every story beat is hit precisely. But overshadowing everything is the elegant sidestepping of everything relating to race and reality. One sly way the film does this is by turning the heroine into a frog, and keeping her that way for most of the movie. The handsome prince and love object of the lead characters, black and white, is some mocha blend of nationality not found in nature. And, of course, by setting the movie in pre-Katrina New Orleans, we are clearly in a fantasy world from frame one.

And, of course, no fantasy sidestepping of race in modern America can be complete without the regal presence of Oprah Winfrey, who here lends her wise and saintly voice to Tiana's wise and saintly mother.

The end result of all this craftsmanship and corporate second-guessing is as carefully calibrated as the hypothetical gumbo that Tiana plans on serving in her mythical restaurant. One can just sense the nervous calculation behind every line of dialogue and hint of cultural nuance. This flop sweat is as pervasive and stifling as the swamp where our lead characters find themselves.

But Disney has waded into this big muddy of animated racial politics before. And one can be certain that when they went out to make and market "Princess and the Frog" they tried to avoid the quicksand they encountered on their first journey.

Which brings us to our companion feature, "Song of the South," and the source of my promised frustration. In many ways, "The Princess and the Frog" is the "answer song" to this 1946 progenitor, and when one looks at the history surrounding the original, the flop sweat doesn't seem so sweaty.

How controversial is this film? Well, here is the corpo-speak statement by Disney chairman Bob Iger to his shareholders when the subject of "South's" rerelease came up in 2006. "Owing to the sensitivity that exists in our culture, balancing it with the desire to maybe increase our earnings a bit but never putting that in front of what we thought were our ethics and our integrity, we've made the decision not to rerelease it."

Imagine something so controversial that Disney actually puts "ethics and integrity" before profits, before shareholders.

Talk about a fantasy world.

Officially unavailable in any form since its last theatrical release in 1986, today copies of "Song of the South" can only be found lurking on eBay, or on brief clips on YouTube. The film has always had a samizdat quality for Disney aficionados, which of course makes its many pleasures great, but its perceived faults even greater. The closest consumers can officially get to the movie is by buying a ticket to the ride based on the film, Disneyland's Splash Mountain.

Let's just say that this experience does not do the original justice.

Set in the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction, "Song of the South" is loosely stitched together with live-action sequences framing a series of animated cartoons featuring Br'er Rabbit and the usual posse of cute animals and blundering villains. These animated sequences still work beautifully, and the first transition from film reality to animated dream, a transition that also heralds the premiere of the joyous "Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah," represents one of the most magical transformations in all of cinema.

This merging of disparate elements would not again be pulled off this successfully until "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," but "Song of the South" got there first. It was, in point of fact, this then-radical idea of blending cartoons with live action where the project ran into trouble, almost from the beginning.

Development began in 1939 when Walt Disney secured the story rights. From the start, the creative team was well aware of the briar patch they were about to enter. Based on the 19th-century manufactured folk tales of Joel Chandler Harris, an unreconstructed Southerner and serious product of his racist times, the material still seemed to lend itself to adaptation and ultimate Disneyfication.

The road to movie purgatory was paved with good intentions.

Though not overtly racist, Walt Disney was a product of his time, and transcripts of the story meetings contain references to the "pickanninies" that he might employ. But one potential cast member's consideration gives us a glimpse of an alternate universe -- and Disney's true intentions and sensitivities to charges of racism. Paul Robeson, soon to enter the gates of HUAC hell, was actually Walt's first choice to play Uncle Remus. Disney planned to work closely with Robeson to cleanse the script of scenes and situations that might offend the black audience. Sadly for both parties, Robeson dropped out, but the final choice for the role, James Baskett, was an example of Disney's instincts for perfect casting. From the day of the film's release, Baskett was accused of putting on a grinning mask for white people, but behind the mask he radiates dignified wisdom, and that heat has to come from somewhere within.

Walt Disney found it, and a great actor found the role of his lifetime.

The rest of the live action, starring Charles Crumb's boyhood obsession Bobby Driscoll as the typical towheaded Disney lad, is more hit-or-miss, especially when Baskett is off screen. Ruth Warrick, the first Mrs. Charles Foster Kane, plays Driscoll's overly genteel mother, and in a "Citizen Kane" mini-reunion, the brilliant Gregg Toland served as the cinematographer. The overwhelming bright primary colors that wash the screen contrast brilliantly with pastoral scenes of the rural South, which becomes another kind of cinematic Xanadu for Toland.

But it is the live-action scenes where the quease factor can rise for the viewer, depending on what the viewer is looking to find. Archetypal "mammy" Hattie McDaniel makes an appearance, and yes, Uncle Remus makes it clear that he knows his place, and that assumed place does provide some cringe-worthy moments. No history, revisionist or otherwise, can wish those moments away to some "laughing place." A rosy hue of nostalgia, even one lit by Gregg Toland, cannot erase the shadows that haunted the South's landscape after the Civil War. Premiering the film in Atlanta probably didn't help, and Walt Disney and the movie were widely criticized before and during the film's first release.

The fact that James Baskett would have been barred from attending the Atlanta premiere had he (or any of the black cast) chosen to attend cancels out any sympathies one might have for the filmmakers' hurt feelings, but the artifact they created is fascinating. Everybody in the movie tiptoes around the Dumbo in the room, but -- unlike in "Princess and the Frog" -- the uneasy truce they negotiated gives the film its power, and gives Bob Iger his reasons to keep you from seeing it.

But I know what you want to know. Is "Song of the South" racist? Should it be banned?

The answers? Of course, and of course not.

No studio product made in the 1940s with any black character could shake the culture that contained it. "Song of the South" was caught between one tide going out and another one coming in, and was sucked into oblivion as a result. In spite of the film's disastrous reception, or perhaps because of it, Walt Disney lobbied hard for an honorary Academy Award for his star. Baskett deserved the award he eventually received, two years after "Song of the South" was released. Baskett died a few months later, the first black male performer ever to receive an Oscar.

Why do only the most dedicated of film nerds know this? Ask Bob Iger. Am I reading too much into a 1946 cartoon? Absolutely.

But we can't debate the post-racial nuances of Baskett's performance down in the comments section because we aren't allowed to see it.

"Princess and the Frog" tries to transcend this issue by turning the heroine Green, the hero mocha and the voiceover Oprah.

"Song of the South," mired in its own briar patch of history, racism and conveniently adopted "ethics and integrity" has no such easy way out.

Dreams don't always come true, even in a Disney cartoon.

One of the many things besides irony that faded in the few days after the attacks was a sense that assembly-line, ham-fisted, institutional movie violence of the kind so ably demonstrated by Bruckheimer's entire oeuvre was now behind us. A new era of a truly United States was ahead, and after the inevitable capture of Osama bin Laden, a new City on the Hill would rise, along with that magnificent Freedom Tower.

Well, as John Cusack says in "2012," ripping off Woody Allen in "Annie Hall," welcome back to Planet Earth.

This week marks the release of the above-mentioned blockbuster from that Auteur of Dumb, Roland Emmerich, a director who makes Irwin Allen seem like Michael Haneke, the man who puts the "nothing" in sound and fury signification. The most offensive thing about "2012" isn't that it is stupid, or about an hour too long, or full of bad science and worse dialog.

No, the truly offensive thing about "2012" is that it is impervious to my scorn, amassing such a critical mass of stupid that it is beyond anyone's ability to mock it. Stopping the tsunami of dumb of "2012" just can't be done, any more than stopping the apocalyptic events it delightedly depicts. And really, why bother to try? The entire thing is trailer for itself, with no actual movie attached. One thing I will say, "2012" has the courage of its lack of convictions. Any time the film was faced with making the drama human, or blowing up something iconic, the choice was made.

Boom.

Like some sort of spiritual Novocaine, "2012" numbs your face, and after the third "plane takes off as runway crumbles" scene, you actually find yourself wishing a nerve, somewhere, might inadvertently get hit.

One can imagine the story meetings for this idiocy. As in Daffy Duck's frenzied story pitch in the 1950 classic "The Scarlet Pumpernickel," absurd climax follows absurd climax, only lacking Daffy's cavalry charge and the $1,000 piece of kreplach. Perhaps that moment can be found in the DVD's extended scenes menu. I do know that like Daffy at the end of "Pumpernickel," after watching "2012," I too wanted to blow my brains out.

Now, there are some good things about this bloated epic. A friend of mine adept in CGI assures me that the effects are absolutely state of the art. Not only do the L.A. skyscrapers crumble, but you also see ant-sized people at their desks, falling to their deaths. Hmm, where have I seen that image before?

But to rage against the soulless machine that created, marketed and distributed this film is as much a waste of time, mine and yours, as sitting through this epic, so let's move on to a film that is all about those ants, "Miracle Mile."

Released in 1989, and starring a shockingly young Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham, "Miracle Mile" (the only movie ever made by writer-director Steve De Jarnatt) takes place during the countdown to doomsday, this time, a self-induced nuclear war. The movie starts with a meet-cute in Los Angeles' iconic Page Museum overlooking the La Brea Tar Pits, and the film and its protagonists never leave the 'hood. While waiting around at the still-extant Johnnie's Restaurant for a late night date with Winningham, Edwards intercepts a call at an outside phone booth. The voice at the other end hails from a North Dakota missile silo, and briefly confusing Edwards for his father, the terrified caller tells him that the war has begun. The missiles are incoming, and will obliterate Los Angeles and everything else in just an hour and 10 minutes.

The entire movie revolves around one simple question.

Now what?

The rest of "Miracle Mile" is set in real time, and we watch the tremendously likable Edwards as he tries to connect with the new love of his life, and, in a parallel plot development to "2012," just get the hell out of town. Or get anywhere rather than the world they are about to inhabit.

This ticking clock begins as Edwards tries to rally the late-night shift at the diner, where it seems "Eggs-O-Stential" must be on the menu, for dialogue, performance and archetypes are all a tad on the overwrought side. But, hey, the world's ending in a little over an hour, so all is forgiven. And as that hour progresses, the viewer forgives an awful lot -- even the '80s outfits and haircuts. Some of the plot beats in "Miracle Mile" are not very much more logical than those in "2012," but the shadow that falls on the characters in the first few minutes covers up those trespasses.

What "Miracle Mile" has that "2012" so disastrously lacks is a focus on the perspective of its characters. It is all about a reality transformed by the unthinkable. If the budget had been any bigger, it would not have been nearly so good, or nearly so haunting. The desperate quest as Edwards tries to escape his fate is reminiscent of Griffin Dunne's hallucinatory lower Manhattan imprisonment in another bit of '80s marginalia, Martin Scorsese's "After Hours."

But this time, the stakes are as high as they can possibly be.

The Age of Reagan inspired two other "Armageddon Out of Here" films, "The Day After" and "Testament," and while there is nothing in "Miracle Mile" that approaches the desperation and pathos of Jane Alexander's brilliant "Testament" performance, "Miracle Mile" still resonates. Watching it after its elephantine doppelganger is akin to sipping a glass of ice cold water after a bracing draught from those La Brea tar pits. There are a few times when "Miracle Mile" resembles the effects sequences from "2012" as essayed by the Max Fischer Players in "Rushmore," but, unlike in "2012," these sequences are not the entire point. Overshadowing everything is that damn, pulsing, insanely compelling concept.

What would you do if you knew you had a little over an hour to live?

"Miracle Mile" builds to an unexpected and absolutely wrenching climax, and stays in your head like some kind of brainpan hologram, while the well rendered pixels of "2012" fade from memory within 10 seconds of the beginning of the end. Not the end of humanity -- the end of its own credit roll.

The sad thing about "2012" isn't that it is so bad, it is that it actually could have been so much better if only the filmmaker exhibited any spark of soul, of humanity.

But, maybe -- well, definitely -- this is beside the point.

"Only the morally courageous are worthy of speaking to their fellow men for two hours in the dark," Frank Capra once wrote, "and only the artistically incorrupt will earn and keep the people's trust."

Emmerich's incredibly successful and critic-impermeable career invalidates the second part of that observation, but that is not his problem.

It is ours.

Now, if the preceding doesn't exactly inspire you to run out and rent "2012," there is another release this week that might restore your general faith in humanity. And that would be "Ponyo," yet another masterpiece from Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. And the fact that I can be so blasé about tossing around the "M" word should in no way suggest that I take Miyazaki for granted.

His artistic existence, incorrupt and otherwise, soothes the soul.

I can't wait to see what the Master has in store for us, in say, 2012.

But I mean that in a good way. One of the main reasons is the deadpan performance by co-screenwriter Michael Jai White as Mr. Dynamite. Of course he’s playing a parody of a joke of an archetype that was ludicrous to begin with, but don’t tell him that. He’ll rip your eyeballs out, Jim, as he convincingly demonstrates in the film’s insane semi-climax over on Kung Fu Island.

Confused? You should be.

The plot, such as it is, concerns the eponymous hero, fighting a dastardly scheme to hook little kids in the orphanage on smack. Combine that plot with another to spike Anaconda malt liquor with penis-shrinking drugs, and you get perhaps the ultimate Evil Plot -- that with impeccable logic and a solid grounding in modern American political history can only lead one place -- the White House of, yes, Richard M. Nixon.

Malevolent symbol of our national id, synthetic self-creation, and beloved punching bag, Richard Nixon was the White Whale to the Ahab of the '70s. Forty years later, we still haven’t quite managed to harpoon the bastard. Let’s see ... we’ve seen Nixon playing Nixon in De Antonio’s docudrama "Milhouse," Frank Langella’s Shakespearean turn in "Frost/Nixon," Rip Torn chewing all available scenery in "Blind Ambition," Philip Baker Hall’s tour de force in Robert Altman’s "Secret Honor," and, of course, Anthony Hopkins, in the definitive Oliver Stone movie, "Nixon." It was here that it all came together: Stone’s abilities as a filmmaker and a subject worthy -- and deserving -- of his paranoid worldview. Hopkins and Stone transformed the historical Nixon into something that many people didn’t want to contemplate -- an actual human being. "Even Richard Nixon has got soul," Neil Young once sang, and "Nixon" confirmed that tragic fact.

In "Black Dynamite," however, Richard Nixon is reduced to a simple role -- The Man. In perhaps the most surreal Oval Office encounter since the real deal met Elvis Presley, Black Dynamite and Tricky Dick exchange karate chops and nunchuck blows, and Pat Nixon gets pimp-slapped into a cabinet full of china. Now, the only things remotely black about Nixon were his dress socks, and the audacity of bringing these two '70s mythic figures together means that all rules of critical engagement must be suspended. "Black Dynamite" exuberantly allows many such trespasses, and invites the audience to roll with every extravagantly pulled punch. And by recognizing the mythic stature of Richard Nixon as one of America’s greatest unsung '70s movie stars, "Black Dynamite" makes a perfect double bill with another, equally forgotten surreal journey to the Nixon White House, "Dick."

Stated as loosely as this yarn deserves, "Dick" involves the adventures of two 15-year-old girls, played by Kirsten Dunst and "Dawson’s Creek" star Michelle Williams, who, in the process of mailing a love letter to Bobby Sherman, accidentally stumble upon G. Gordon Liddy in the process of breaking into the Watergate. As part of the sweaty coverup, the girls are bought off with a job as official White House dog-walkers. Among other previously undisclosed glimpses into the Nixon White House, we see Leonid Brezhnev crooning "Hello, Dolly!," a romantic Nixon riding a white horse to a sand-castle White House, and, perhaps most incredibly, an actually sympathetic, helpful Henry Kissinger, or, as our two heroines call him, "German Guy."

OK, at this point, they have gone too far into impossible fantasy.

"All the President's Men" this is clearly not, but don’t worry, Woodward and Bernstein do make an appearance, not as crusading heroes, but as the journalistic equivalent of Martin and Lewis. Somehow, this depiction captures the "ecstatic truth" of the Watergate story in ways that the Pakula film did not. Will Ferrell’s clueless Woodward and Bruce McCulloch’s Bernstein present the dynamic duo as egomaniacal, self-aggrandizing bumblers, which make the mendaciousness of their post-Watergate career actually explainable.

As in so many comedies, the gears begin to grind up about an hour in. But there are many joys to be had, even in the final half-hour, not least of which is the always welcome Teri Garr, being, well, Teri Garr in the role of Michelle’s wayward single mom. As for the stars, both Dunst and Williams are perfect as the ditzy pair, capturing the secret telepathic language of girlhood, at the very same time that they get across the "Being There" dynamic of great emptiness motivating great events. Only in this case, complete stupidity leads to the unmaking of a president, not the election of one -- a vicious cycle we now seemed destined to repeat. 

As is so often the case, the smartness and basic assumption that the audience was in on at least some of the jokes doomed the film commercially, and "Dick" was dead on theatrical arrival. The pleasures of this film, and there are many, come from the same commitment and cockiness that drove "Black Dynamite" in (and, swiftly, out) of theaters.

The presumption that a contemporary audience would be conversant with all the twists, turns and trivia of the Watergate saga, would know what the 18-1/2 minute gap even was, let alone entertain a new theory as to how it was created, is breathtaking. Part of the fun in "Dick" is watching this parallel history snap into place. No detail is too small to escape detection, from the tape on the door jam at the scene of the Watergate break-in, to the invention of "Deep Throat" to the reason for John Dean’s historical attack of conscience.

But every Nixon movie rises and falls on the strength of the dark star at the center.

Any actor who tries to hunch into the dark suit, get the stubble thing going, and shake his jowls the way the babes in "Black Dynamite" shake their assorted moneymakers has some serious wingtips to fill. In "Dick," thankfully, Dan Hedaya fills them to perfection. Let’s face it, it is hard to pull off a Richard M. Nixon stoned on pot cookies, but Hedaya manages to make it seem true to character, and somehow, like so much in Nixon’s life, somewhat sad. Like so many great comic performances, Hedaya doesn’t play Nixon funny, he just plays Nixon, well, Nixon. The context and weight of our expectations do the rest.

The film’s ending, the emblematic scene of a discredited president flying from the White House, is choreographed to Carly Simon’s "You're So Vain" -- a fitting exit melody. The only better presidential exit was that of George W. Bush to that other golden oldie, "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye." It’s sad, really, watching "Dick," to see that the film was released in 1999 -- one year before the Nixon 2.0, and the reboot of his administration. And this time around we didn’t even have a cartoon version of Woodward and Bernstein around to inadvertently save us from ourselves.

We didn’t know "Dick" then, and we still really don’t know dick now.

Which brings us to this week's DVD release of "A Serious Man," the latest exercise in Coen Gothic, this time set in a Minneapolis suburb in 1967's so-called Summer of Love.

There is a Dickensian quality to the best of the Coens' films, where every character is just shy of caricature, but somehow their conviction and commitment makes it work. Every director's film needs its "non-submersible" units, in the words of another sublime craftsman, Stanley Kubrick, and the Coens can always be counted on to serve those units up, with relish, on the side.

The beating heart of "A Serious Man" is the travails of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a put-upon protagonist who just wants to detach himself from his nightmarish family life, and the deracinated culture that contains it. Larry's losing battle to just get through the small-town day recalls fellow misanthrope W.C Fields, another Dickensian figure, whose battles in classics such as "It's a Gift" and "The Bank Dick" complement the Coens' cynicism perfectly. It's no wonder Kubrick, whose dark worldview perfectly aligned with the Coens, listed "The Bank Dick" as one of his 10 favorite films. There's not a whole lot of love of humanity in the Coens' work, and Fields and Kubrick also knew that there was no profit, artistic or otherwise, in giving a sucker an even break.

And that might be one of the problems.

Also in 1967, rock critic Robert Christgau wrote that Paul Simon "writes about that all-American subject, the Alienation of Modern Man, in just those words." As with all great criticism, that's rather unfair, but accurate, and something that comes to mind when the Coens get a little too remote and precise in yet another chilly exercise in craft over content.

Now, issues of craft and content are somewhat irrelevant when it comes to the second half of our double bill. This film has the courage of its conviction, using cannibalism not so much as a metaphor for the dark side of suburban consumerism, but as a metaphor for, well, cannibalism.

"Parents" is a much less heralded American-gothic nightmare from 1989, a coal-black comedy that makes the Coens' darkest views of America seem positively Disneyesque. Although "Parents" has been dismissed as minor-league David Lynch, it is a transgressional minor masterpiece as well, and blurs the line between the black and the comedy in a way that still astounds, beginning where that last apocalyptic reel of the Coens' "Barton Fink" left off.

Directed by Bob Balaban, "Parents" stars Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt as the progenitors of an alienated child who has slightly more to worry about than a confiscated transistor radio.

Set in pretty much the same suburban petri dish of " A Serious Man," about 10 years earlier, "Parents" doesn't just dance around the horror of repressed American life. It lurches straight into a maelstrom of sex, violence, madness and frying kidneys, with some brilliant primary-colored art direction to boot. Perhaps the most convincing argument for vegetarianism ever put on celluloid, "Parents" makes "Food, Inc." look like an orientation video for a fry cook at KFC. They don't make 'em like "Parents" anymore, for probably some excellent reasons. Balaban's feature career never recovered from this release, though he did go on to direct scads of TV projects.

Our loss.

Unlike "A Serious Man," which dazzles with technique, filmmaking bravura and not a whole lot else, in "Parents" there's actually more than meets the eye, not less. William Cameron Menzies' "Invaders From Mars" is this film's only rival when it comes to evoking '50s paranoia as seen through the eyes of a child, and in this opus, there are no visible zippers on the monsters.

These monsters are much closer to home.

The plot of "Parents," such as it is, revolves around an only child, the wide-eyed witness to the shenanigans surrounding Quaid's job as an Agent of Orange for a company called Toxico. Quaid brings mysteriously wrapped packages of meat home nightly from the office's convenient morgue (don't ask), and serves them up in a "Calvin and Hobbes" fantasy of nightmarish dinners come to life -- exponentially multiplied.

And served blood-rare.

The child is imprisoned by both the text and subtext of his parents' bizarre dynamic, and his resulting strange behavior at school attracts the attention of one Miss Dew, played by the wonderful Sandy Dennis, a proto-earth mother social worker who learns a bit more about the parents than perhaps she bargained for.

Randy Quaid plays the traditional role of "Father Knows Best," if Dad were Jeffrey Dahmer. Pointing to his forehead, in one of the many spooky father-and-son chats that weave throughout the film's compressed 80 minutes, Quaid points out that the "real darkness is in here."

That would be an affirmative.

There has always been a vein of rich lunacy running just under the surface of both Quaid brothers. Dennis used that crazy to animate his brilliant portrayal of Jerry Lee Lewis, shocking those who thought he was just an all-American boy with "The Right Stuff," and Randy brought his crazy to his portrayal of another larger than life lunatic, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in a TV miniseries made a couple of years before "Parents."

Tragically, this "crazy" now seems to be eating Quaid from the inside out, and his current tabloid-haunted existence has taken that "art imitating life" thing just a little too far.

The rest of the family cast is terrific as well. Mary Beth Hurt, all tight and all control, brings a hysterical edge to the Perfect Mom, who shares a deep, dark secret from the world, and the family's 10-year-old son. Her pre-orgasmic ecstasy at Dad putting food on the table has to be seen to be appreciated, and one is reminded just how good Hurt can be when she brings her A game, even to B movies like this. After witnessing the haunted performance of Brian Madorsky, the viewer will not be surprised to learn that this was Madorsky's one and only film.

No actor could not go too much further than this, as the oceans of blood, real and imagined, in "Parents" make the elevator scene in "The Shining" look like one of Don Draper's staid Hilton commercials.

How a film like this could have gotten made, let alone marketed as a garden-variety horror film remains as much an enigma as the Body Procurement Services at the Toxico "Department of Human Testing."

But let's be clear. "Parents" is far from perfect. There is a fair amount of "Look, everybody, I'm a director, not an actor" wankery in many of the sequences. Even though the film's ending devolves into more traditional Grand Guignol horror country, those shocks quickly subside. The creepy, though, lingers on, in a way that many of the Coen brothers' lesser and even greater work does not.

As so often happens with the best B movies, "Parents" stays with you after a casual viewing, even though in this case, you dearly wish it wouldn't.

One last tiny thing.

Perhaps that Christgau quote has roused the rock historian within me, but one of the best running gags in " A Serious Man" involves harassing phone calls from a dedicated agent of a record club. Our put-upon hero is reminded he is way past due on a payment for Santana's "Abraxas" album, a fab waxing that was actually released in 1970, three years after the setting of "A Serious Man."

Just saying.

But then again, say what you will about the Coens, and people probably say way too much, they are nothing if not meticulous, and perhaps they are just playing another existential joke on cultural trainspotters like me, who look too hard for too much inside their work.

Maybe that is their most consistent joke.

Got another suburban-dread double bill for "A Serious Man"? "Welcome to the Dollhouse"? "Portnoy's Complaint"? The 1957 suburban fantasia "No Down Payment"? Get off that patio furniture and advise us!

"Zombieland" and "Road to Utopia" are fun-house mirrors of one another, two road pictures that sprawl across the American landscape, with antiheroes wisecracking their way through life-and-death situations, both shot through with comic surrealism, both featuring perhaps the coolest living human being of their respective times in a pivotal role.

More on that later.

Why, then, is the zombie such a cultural totem in the 21st century? Sure, this archetype came lurching out of George Romero's Pittsburgh in 1966, but now the undiluted horror has been anesthetized and become shambling shorthand -- but for what? Romero brilliantly and literally performed a shotgun wedding between his creation and a satiric depiction of soulless consumerism in his "Dawn of the Dead" in 1978, and since then, zombies have been hauled out in all manner of stumbling forms to provide plot engines for adrenaline-fueled thrillers ("28 Days Later" and its sequel), comedies ("Shaun of the Dead" and "Zombieland") and straight-out horror.

Not to stretch too far, but perhaps it is this "doesn't know that it is dead but still shambles on" vibe that connects the zombie with our pre-apocalyptic, end-of-empire, post-Bush American landscape, terrain explored in "Zombieland," which was released this week on DVD.

"Zombieland" is a shaggy exercise in nostalgia, fusing two modern genres, the stoner comedy and the ultraviolent zombie movie, into one amusing product. This road movie composed for a quartet follows a merry band of adventurers as they cross the zombified United States in search of the paradise that awaits them in Pacific Playland (don't ask).

All the familiar tropes of the genre are trotted out, and skewered with even more relish than the mangled supporting cast. Perhaps most wonderfully, the film honors the Golden Rule of Movie Comedy, which is thou shalt not be any longer than 90 minutes. In this case, a merciful 81.

There is an overwhelming good nature to this film, an affable, dare I say humanistic, quality often found missing in more cynical exercises, and the gags are numerous, bloody and surprisingly witty. But the road followed by "Zombieland" is closer to the Cormac McCarthy variety than the affable highway of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby "Road to" pictures, perhaps the defining pop-culture products from the Dawn of the American Empire.

This series gave us more than the first name of Jackson Browne, who once confessed he was named for the oft-uttered catchphrase in 1947's "Road to Rio": "Solid, Jackson." These films were defining moments of the 1940s, an era that seems impossibly remote today. The Greatest Generation is remembered for storming Omaha Beach, not laughing at jesters of the republic like Abbott and Costello or Fred Allen. It seems Preston Sturges is the only comedic film artist of that era who has made the jump to those fly-in-amber Criterion box sets.

If it's a culture crime that a decade of comedy has simply vanished from memory, a simultaneous witness for both the defense and the prosecution is Bob Hope. Here's an American comedic legend who quite simply was not funny -- at least publicly -- for 50 long years, a creative desert entered the day that principal photography was completed on Frank Tashlin's "Son of Paleface" in 1952, and left by Hope's death in 2003. This very public lack of discernible humor not only doomed Hope to critical oblivion, but may have impacted the reputations of many of his contemporaries as well.

But still.

At the absolute peak of his artistic reputation in the early '70s, Woody Allen stunned New York intellectuals by hosting a Hope tribute called "My Favorite Comedian" -- and considering how thoroughly Allen xeroxed Hope's mannerisms across his "early funny films," maybe Hope's comedic genius did live on during his 50 lost years.

The thing is, the unfunny cue-card-reading comic zombie who was justifiably reviled by those in the know during our lifetimes was actually, for a few years, one of the truly funniest men on the planet. Now, at the time of that ascension, Hope shared the planet with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. So, there is that. But still, Hope was the preeminent comic voice of the 1940s, and of his adopted country. And you know what?

He was really funny.

The golden age of Hope's work spanned seven years, from 1941's "Road to Zanzibar" to 1948's "The Paleface." In "Road to Utopia," one of the most perfect comedies of that decade -- oh hell, let's say of the last 75 years -- Hope and Crosby accomplished a rare thing, an ad-libbed, brilliantly performed surrealistic romp through the fourth wall of studio convention. Their comic timing has to be seen to be believed, and "Road to Utopia" is the place to go to be converted.

The plot, and such a thing is really no more relevant than "Zombieland's" wet-cocktail-napkin narrative, sends our boys up to a mining town in Gold Rush Alaska, sort of a high-gloss Paramount "Deadwood," with expletives deleted. There, of course, the team meet Dorothy Lamour, feud, play patty-cake with bad guys, and basically radiate the impression that there is a putting green just off camera that they're going to get right to, once they quip their way through this next take.

Which of course there was.

The 1940s "Road to" films exude that can-do spirit that whipped Tojo and Hitler, invented rock 'n' roll, put giant tail fins on a Caddy and hit a golf ball on the Moon, a spirit where everything is possible, everything is permitted, and if the permits aren't around, well, they can be easily forged.

It's a concept of America now being chased out of the Zeitgeist by zombies, but a spirit that animates "Road to Utopia," if you're willing to tolerate references to Bob Hope's radio sponsors and some occasionally lugubrious crooning from Crosby.

Why is this particular "Road" picture rated any higher than the other six? Well, it is perhaps the most surreal, has an absolutely perfect twist ending that "Lost" won't have a prayer of matching, and, oh yeah, features Robert Benchley. The same cultural amnesia that has relegated most of the popular culture of the '40s to grizzled collectors passing around samizdat cassettes of old Fred Allen radio shows has not been kind to Benchley or his reputation. But for 20 years, from the mid-1920s to, well, his appearance in "Utopia," he was one of America's most beloved public intellectuals, bringing the Algonquin Round Table's snap, crackle and pop into the lives of the masses. In "Utopia," Benchley provides the narration, annotating the credits, popping up in the corner of the screen to comment on the increasingly bewildering plot, and generally elevating the discourse with every portly appearance.

Benchley also lifted up another lost comedy masterpiece, 1945's "It's in the Bag," which showcased the Hall of Fame of lost '40s comedians, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Hope sidekick Jerry Colonna and just about every great character actor of the era in an astonishing brew of fourth- (and even fifth-) wall-breaking surrealism. Mel Brooks remade this as "The Twelve Chairs," but the original is worth seeking out if you can find it. In one of the film's best existential sequences, Fred and family are led up, up and up through the 12 levels of hell in a nightmarish movie palace, all in the unrealized hope of seeing tonight's movie, which just happens to be called "Zombies in the Attic."

As Mark Twain once observed, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

To focus on Hope and Benchley and Allen and not mention Bing Crosby would, of course, be like a discussion of "A Hard Day's Night" without name-checking Lennon, McCartney and those other two guys. Artie Shaw, another consummate '40s artist consumed by cultural amnesia, put it best in 1992: "The thing you have to understand about Bing Crosby is that he was the first hip white person born in the United States."

One could also argue Bing was the last hip white person born in the United States, but we'll save that for a different time. In "Road to Utopia," not-so-straight-man Crosby exudes cool from every pore. Here's a guy who managed not to sweat the details from the mid-1920s to his infamous 1977 Christmas duet with David Bowie, a 50-year run of cultural relevance and absolutely astonishing career focus. And he managed to get in quite a few rounds of golf as well.

In preparation for this little screed, I went through some of the original reviews for "Zombieland." An astonishing number of critics cheerfully gave up one of the best-hidden jokes in the film, without a spoiler warning. Why, in the name of God, why do they do that?

Consider yourself warned. Read to the last paragraph now, if you want to hold on to your plot virginity.

Gone? OK.

I thought they'd never leave.

Quite simply, Bill Murray is Bing Crosby. Both define Caucasian cool, both effortlessly sleepwalk through their most visible career triumphs, and of course, both not only radiate a vibe that says "I'd rather be golfing" -- they actually did so at every opportunity. They both seemed to be tuned into some kind of private celestial choir, and that they can make us sing along with it, without any outward effort, is an artistic gift that defies all rational explanation.

Bill Murray's appearance in "Zombieland" provides by far the film's best moment, and fusing his persona of out-of-body hipness with the zombie ethic is a true moment of cinematic greatness.

This double bill, "Zombieland" and "Road to Utopia," shows us how far we have come, but how little we have truly traveled across the rise and fall of the American Empire.

Bing, Bob, Fred and Robert have passed on, as has the entire concept of a "public intellectual." And as we contemplate our end of empire, our self-confidence is eroded, our golf courses overgrown with weeds and newly fallen heroes, but we can still find time to celebrate hip heroes and celestially inspired happy endings.

Who might be the new Hope and Crosby? We'll take a pass on "Ishtar's" not-so-dynamic duo of Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, but what currently popular actor/singer/whatevers might be teamed today to achieve the same comedic results? Don't kill yourself trying. Remember, the original cast of the first "Road" picture was supposed to be Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie.

But this one-sided Death Match between legend and life is what ultimately tied these men together. Elvis and Jackson brought an impermeable membrane of fame and self-delusion with them that kept the real world outside their experience. Both "This Is It" and "The Way It Is" shoot through that membrane, and those rare glimpses of the tortured soul inside are what give the films their real power.

This "splendid isolation," in the words of Warren Zevon, made the end of their careers a slow-motion bus wreck -- and we were all bozos on that same bus.

"To me," wrote Bruce Springsteen the week Elvis died, "he was as big as the whole country itself, as big as the whole dream. He just embodied the essence of it and he was in mortal combat with the thing."

From about that moment on, Springsteen consciously crafted that growth industry called his career on Elvis' shaky foundation. The lessons he has articulated over and over again in both song and interviews are his attempts to try to live outside that bubble of fame. But it isn't easy. In a recent small book by Big Man Clarence Clemons, the only truly insightful and honestly disillusioning images that emerge are Springsteen's private jets flying from concert to concert, and the alpha celebrity decorum of who sits just where along the way. And, oh yeah, a second jet for the wife and her entourage. And special planes dispatched for the likes of Brian Williams. But, as Clemons (actually, probably, his hack ghostwriter) points out, Springsteen does make a point of personally greeting everybody in all rows, on every flight, so, it's a start.

I guess.

Springsteen's talent has been very comprehensible, and his career arc tightly controlled. Bob Dylan's talent belongs more in the incomprehensible category, and he has somehow made it work for him. For the last 20 years, Dylan has conducted a bold experiment in hiding in plain sight, called the "Never Ending Tour." Night after night, Dylan appears in State Fairgrounds and minor league stadiums in minor league towns, and at night, according to at least one local police report, roams the streets in hooded sweatshirts, searching for Dylan knows what.

Nobody is more closely guarded than Dylan both on- and offstage, in all senses of that word, but somehow, he stays connected to his muse, and it, somehow, to him. If anything, one of his many particular geniuses has been turning the very act of retreating from legend into accelerant for its fire. It's only in the last 20 years where Dylan finally carries the burden he promised he would heft in the notes to his second album. "I don't carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin' Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they're older people."

Bob Dylan made that legend thing work for him, and only went a little crazy along the way. But as we all know, Elvis and Jackson went big-time crazy, and if you know where to look, you can see in these two films just where -- and maybe, why.

While Elvis was in mortal combat with some kind of dream of America, Michael Jackson became the poster boy for an even more devolved America, one where self-delusion, narcissism and grotesque materialism are somehow mistaken for canny career management. He even had the spectacular bankruptcy thing going for him, with the promise of an impending bailout, if he could pull off that one last desperate deal.

Which leads us to this week's release of "This Is It" -- a film swept off the cutting-room floor of Jackson's last hurrah, and last rehearsals.

To be clear, this film was originally conceived of as a home movie, financed by Jackson personally. Had things gone differently, an abbreviated version might have appeared as a supplement on some future holo-hagiographic 3-D monolith box set commemorating Jackson's 10th year onstage at the Luxor in Vegas. And like so many DVD supplements, there is a cheap, offhand quality to the production.

But what keeps this "This Is It" from being a shameless exercise in commercial necrophilia is the sheer joy of watching a performer, if not at the top of his game, in the bullpen warming up. Based on the performances here, Jackson had it until the end. Just what "it" was remains open to debate, and this movie does not help the discussion.

Throughout the two hours, Jackson stands alone, surrounded by indifferent technicians, a puppet being put through his paces by the Geppetto of his own ego. Many of the production numbers look as if they were choreographed by Albert Speer, and the fascist architecture of the proceedings don't shed much light on their creator.

It helps that much of Jackson's dialogue is subtitled, for he seems to be speaking a private language. "I'm trying to adjust to the inner ears," whispers Jackson at one point, "with the love -- L.O.V.E. It's not easy, though."

Tell me about it.

Director Kenny Ortega cajoles Jackson like a toddler being coaxed to eat his broccoli. Jackson is clearly phoning it in, but one is often reminded, what a phone.

One such moment occurs at the end of "I Just Can't Stop Loving You," where Jackson takes off at the end of a duet with an anonymous background singer. This sequence is intimate, sexy, and we see Jackson momentarily possessed by the music and his muse. But then, the song ends, and Jackson crashes back to Earth, clearly angry at being led to this kind of self-revelation. You see for an aching moment the raw talent that Jackson had all the way to the end, and then, the door slamming shut on it.

Which brings us to our second feature.

"Elvis: That's the Way It Is (Special Edition)" was shot in the summer of 1970 and reworked by TCM for this 2001 rerelease. It is perhaps the best surreal evocation of the '70s since "Zodiac," except, of course, this is a documentary. Shot by the great Lucian Ballard, it brings you as close to the real Elvis as you want to go.

The film begins with some more tantalizing rehearsals. The musicians look at Elvis like the borderline hysteric family looked at demon child Billy Mumy in that great "Twilight Zone" episode. It feels like everyone always laughs a millisecond too late at his jokes, and you can feel his entourage praying that they too don't get wished into that cornfield. Why is it not at all surprising that Rod Serling's opening narration from this "Twilight Zone" episode was sampled in 2001 for a song called "Threatened" -- by Michael Jackson? In one particularly gruesome sequence, Elvis has an onstage water fight with members of the Memphis Mafia. When Elvis, in a flash of feigned anger, picks up a mike stand, as if to impale them with it, you get the idea that this, in fact, could happen.

It is clear that Elvis just had nowhere to go, no one to talk to about the hellhounds on his trail. Every conversation is a transaction, and Elvis knows it. The striking thing is how little is different backstage from onstage. Same jokey nervousness, same nonchalant diffidence to his musical gifts. Elvis was always on, and could just never get off. In all of the footage, he can't stop moving, looking for distraction from the Sisyphean task of just being himself. One can see his genius emerging like the chest buster from "Alien," and at times, Elvis looks as shocked at the results.

At least Bruce Springsteen can get it off his chest with Brian Williams.

But there are compensating musical treasures. Where Elvis is all looseness and evasiveness, lead guitarist James Burton is all paisley precision, spitting out chicken-licking' licks and anchoring the proceedings like the Country Gentlemen he is. "Play it, James," Elvis regally commands, and Burton does just that, brilliantly. When they swing into an impromptu medley of "Little Sister" sliding into "Get Back," one wishes that the Beatles, instead of breaking up that same summer, had dropped by this rehearsal studio instead.

They might have changed their minds.

When we move to Las Vegas for the pre-show rehearsals, you can feel the dingy surroundings and smell the fossilized cigarette smoke in the carpets of the "International Hotel" where the show had to go on.

Shot across six nights, the performance footage is a Groundhog Day's nightmare of the same songs, same fans, same jokes. Here we stand by helplessly as Elvis, as described in some other lyrics of Zevon, throws it all away for that "porcelain monkey," and his face on Velveteen. There is a viscous quality in the film, like you are trapped in the amber with Elvis, and after about an hour, you just want to get out of there. At one juncture, during "Love Me Tender," as Elvis leaves the stage and walks deep in the ballroom it feels like nothing so much as watching grainy footage of a Bigfoot sighting.

Watching him kiss one bouffant fan after another, on the lips, you truly get a feeling of what hell must be like. At one point, one hysterical, crying fan almost swallows Elvis alive. He pulls back in shock and discomfort, but then, moves to yet another predatory encounter. And another.

Six nights, and then, 600 more nights, until it all ran down.

It is clear from both of these films that Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley were getting everything they wanted, and nothing they truly needed.

As William Carlos Williams so famously wrote, "The purest products of America go crazy."

That was the lecture.

These films would be the lab.

Got any fly-on-the-wall-of-musical-train-wreck "Double Bill" ideas for "This Is It"? That Wilco film, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart?" "Don't Look Back," or better, a bootleg of Dylan's 1966 surreal masterpiece, "Eat The Document"? Kirk Douglas IS a chin-dimpled Bix Biederbecke in "Young Man With a Horn"? Do tell!