Check Book: The Week We Got Into Saving Silverman

Plus, JJ's notes on Danny Boyle

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IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

The Spanish title of Saving Silverman is “Three Idiots And A Witch”

Up until last week, I had seen Saving Silverman zero times. Now I’ve seen it twice. Why, you may ask? I don’t know. I had heard rumblings of it being a misunderstood millennial classic, and then Griffin brought it up on mic, and THEN I had a few Yuzu hard seltzers at Littlefield during a comedy show on Wednesday and ordered some 10:30pm weeknight Taco Bell delivery and Saving Silverman on Tubi seemed like a REALLY GOOD IDEA.

It was.

To my surprise, I found myself completely charmed by this bizarre early aughts bro comedy, a movie that on its surface seems like a misogynistic nightmare. For those not familiar with the plot of Dennis Dugan’s Saving Silverman, here is a brief summary: a friend group of three loser dudes is fractured when one of them (Jason Biggs) starts dating a highly sophisticated (and sadistic) woman (Amanda Peet). The two single friends (Steve Zahn and Jack Black) plot to kidnap their friend’s girlfriend in order to “save” their p*ssywhipped bro from a life of eternal cuckdom. Much mayhem ensues. As I said, it SOUNDS like a misogynistic nightmare. But it is actually so much stranger. First of all, Amanda Peet is SO hot and smart and deliciously dry as the evil girlfriend that you can’t help but root for her. We’ve also got peak Steve Zahn and Jack Black - two doofuses who I would never identify as paragons of traditional masculinity - falling over themselves trying to outsmart her. Add to that an overarching Neil Diamond coverband subplot, R. Lee Ermey’s bare ass, and a shockingly not-that-problematic gay revelation, and you’ve got a pretty fun 93 minutes.

Will we cover Dennis Dugan on Blank Check one day? Who can say. But Griffin and I are definitely down to introduce a screening.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, why did I watch Saving Silverman TWICE in one week? I was hanging out with David Ehrlich on Friday and I put on the movie to watch the Subway (sandwich) moment that happens in the first 10 minutes of the film, and we ended up watching the whole thing.

David Sims still hasn’t seen it.

KING RALPH LIVE ON VOD!

Tickets and exclusive merch on sale now!

We will be livechatting with viewers during the initial premiere on 6/27 at 8:00pm, and then the video will be able for repeat viewing until the end of August.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIERS

In honor of the release of 28 Years Later, we’re dedicating this week’s dossier section to retelling three of the best stories from our previously covered Danny Boyle and Alex Garland movies.

The Beach

Long before our pal M. Night Shyamalan dreamed up a beach that makes you old, Boyle and Garland dreamed up a beach that almost killed Leonardo DiCaprio and legendary cinematographer Darius Khondji. For The Beach’s underwater and shark sequences, Boyle’s crew constructed a “huge pool at [an] old shoe factory.” One of those pool sequences was a love scene between DiCaprio and Virginie Ledoyen. While Boyle watched from the monitors, Khondji filmed DiCaprio and Ledoyen in the pool. At one point, a massive “light fixed onto a big crane way up in the sky” began to slowly descend directly towards the pool in what Boyle characterizes as an extremely close brush with potential tragedy: “Everybody could see it coming and they were all shouting, but they couldn’t get out of the water. The English gaffer — the guy who organises the electrics — had brought the circuit breaker and plugged it in before we started shooting. If he hadn’t plugged it in, everyone in the tank would have died: Darius, Leo and Virginie. The gaffer’s sleeve was torn off by the crane but that was all.”¹ The February 2002 issue of Premiere—along with the tabloid press—detailed another dangerous on-set incident, this one occurring on the actual sea. While shooting a sequence in which DiCaprio and Tilda Swinton’s characters leave the island to purchase rice, fast winds surprised the crew with eight-foot-tall waves. Soon, a thin 20-foot-long boat carrying the camera, its operator, and a safety diver capsized. Meanwhile, the 35-foot-long boat that counted Boyle, DiCaprio, Swinton, Khondji, and thirteen other crew members as its passengers began taking on water, forcing the captain to cut the motor and order those aboard to abandon ship. Though everyone was armed with a life jacket, the ensuing ten-to-fifteen minutes spent fighting against the increasingly choppy waters left the production extremely unnerved, per the director: “I can swim, and I was pretty frightened. You’re swimming in all this wreckage, which was your makeup boxes and your camera, and which now have become lethal weapons. When we got back to the shore, there were grown men crying, grips and gaffers, really heavy guys. We were lucky that nobody died. … Part of the culture of a film crew is to laugh it off, but they didn’t laugh that one off. Also, you know you’ve got to go back and film that scene again. That’s the brutal reality of it.”² And then there were the jellyfish—or, the chopped up jellyfish bits, really—that stung the film’s actors during some of the other shoots at sea: “These huge jellyfish get cut up by outboard motors and all the strands remain live. So you get stung by these shredded jellyfish bits. Although I was watching the actors swimming from the safety of a boat.”³ But that’s not all: one day, Boyle and a crew of Thai location scouts lost track of time while climbing a mountain, leaving them without enough light to climb back down comfortably: “All we had for light was a mobile phone. We rang the police and they basically told us to fuck off. We had to feel our way down the mountain using our hands and we were all terrified of snakes. We managed to get down eventually but it took hours. It was pretty scary.”⁴ Ultimately, it’s pretty easy to agree with the assessment of The Beach that Boyle offered to Kermode & Mayo in 2017: “I don’t think that I made the best job of it as a director.”⁵ But that’s okay: everyone ultimately survived, and (much) finer films would soon come from the Boyle and Garland partnership.

28 Days Later

In order to shoot on location in London without hordes of non-infected people and moving cars cluttering the background, Danny Boyle made use of the greatest special effect of all: time. As he told Time Out London in 2002, the easiest way to create a post-apocalyptic atmosphere is by showing out when no one else wants to: “[Y]ou get up very early in the morning, and you hold the traffic back. Simple! … You can’t close a street for filming in London, but you can ask people to wait for a minute or two.”⁶ In order to make the most of that precious minute or two, Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shot simultaneously on many compact digital video cameras: “We literally turned up and spent a couple of minutes filming in each place, but with ten cameras. And we’d choose the angles, set them up very carefully so we knew that when we cut them together it would make you feel like it was rolling on and that you were walking around the city with him and there was no one there.”⁷ But how—if a film of 28 Days Later’s miniscule size was not able to acquire official permission to shut down city streets—did Boyle and his crew convince passers-by to wait? Well, with young, poorly paid, and—frankly—weirdly deployed labor, of course! As Boyle revealed to the writer Amy Raphael for her incredible booklength interview Danny Boyle: Creating Wonder, the production “appointed our own marshals in jackets to ask drivers to stop; if there was a dispute, the police stepped in. The traffic marshals who came on the first day were students whom we paid a few quid.” But these weren’t ordinary marshals… No, these were lady marshals: “My daughter Grace, who was eighteen at the time, turned up with a few mates. They were all attractive girls. There was a heatwave, they weren’t wearing many clothes, and of course the drivers around at that time of the day were mostly men. If I asked them to stop, they’d tell me to fuck off; a beautiful girl leaning into the car did the trick. The next day we hired more girls, until we had a rather beautiful gang of traffic marshals. And the traffic stopped.”⁸ So the next time you watch Cillian Murphy make his haunting journey through the abandoned streets of England’s great city, know that just off camera resides an unseemly crowd of early risers making cartoon wolf eyes at a beautiful gang of traffic marshals. (Yuck, sorry.)

Sunshine

There’s been a lot of talk about the ending of 28 Years Later—or so it seems, I haven’t seen it yet, I’m avoiding spoilers!!!—but there’s never enough talk about the idea that Danny Boyle originally wanted to end Sunshine—his best film—with a damn Coldplay song: “We tried using that great Coldplay track ‘Fix You’ at the end, when the sun bursts through and Capa holds up his hand. It felt too cheesy in the end.” Nor do we talk enough about how much that damn song made him sob: “[B]oy did it make me cry. Oh my God. We used score instead but we probably should have gone cheesy. You’re not meant to like these songs, but they work. When ‘Fix You’ was at the end of Sunshine, I certainly felt like I’d been moved somewhere else.”⁹ A million thanks to Blankies Redditor u/reecemysocksoff, who had the guts to make the edit that Boyle didn’t. (Spoilers for the ending of Sunshine at that link, obviously.)

WHERE ELSE CAN YOU FIND TEAM BC THIS WEEK?

We were privileged to be able to speak with Alex Garland and Danny Boyle during the virtual press junket for 28 Years Later - check it out!

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Griffin Newman, Host: “For the first time ever the full TV versions of Michael Winterbottom’s THE TRIP series are streaming on The Criterion Channel! For those not in the know, what were released here as four feature films are actually cut downs of six episode TV seasons that were released in that format almost everywhere other than the US. I’ve spent years across countless ad reads telling people to seek them out on various overseas streaming services, but this is definitely the easiest it’s ever been to watch the full run in my completely normal, non-broken home country. If you’ve enjoyed the film versions these are just even more of a good thing!?”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “In addition to Saving Silverman, this week I will be recommending the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York. I haven’t been to Bath (I’m mostly a shower girl) so it was a treat to see a collection of her letters and personal documents. She feels like a real person to me now - complaining about her peers, hustling after freelance checks, thinking her problems could be solved with the addition of a new outfit…what a gal!”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “Kerbey Lane Cafe”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “This week I watched Alain Resnais’ 1968 film Je t’aime, Je t’aime and je l’adore, je l’adore! A collaboration between the Left Bank New Waver and the prolific science-fiction writer Jacques Sternberg, Je t’aime, Je t’aime centers on a suicidal man (Claude Rich) who gets roped into a time travel experiment soon after an unsuccessful attempt on his own life. Though he’s only meant to travel one year into the past for a single minute before returning to the present, the man ends up reliving much of the last decade of his life on shuffle, experiencing anew the beauty, difficulties, and horror of his tortured relationship with a depressed woman (Olga Georges-Picot). It’s peak Resnais memory/trauma shit—which is really saying something, given that Resnais’ whole early deal was memory/trauma shit—and a huge, extremely obvious influence on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I watched it on its gorgeous recent region-free Blu-ray release from the fine folks at Radiance.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I’ll recommend Scott Hawkins’s book The Library at Mount Char. It’s about a bunch of kids raised inside a magical library by this sadistic kind of wizard god character. He goes missing, and the kids (who have all grown into sort of wizards in their own right) have to figure out what happened to him. This book takes place in suburban Virginia in the 2010s, btw. The story involves lions and tentacle monsters and the Department of Homeland Security. It’s violent and sad and funny and, as it goes along, deeply strange. I read it for the first time maybe ten years ago, and I’ve thought about it a lot since then. I recently realized that it’s within my power to read it again, which I am doing now.”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

The crew assembles to discuss the newest release from Danny Boyle X Alex Garland, as well as, shall we call him “Anthony God Mantle” with those SHOTS!!!! — 28 Years Later.

And over on Patreon, we hit play immediately and MAYBE lose slinky privileges as we tackle Superman IV: The Quest For Peace.

COMING SOON:

1. Amy Raphel, Danny Boyle: Creating Wonder, 142-143.

2. Premiere, February 2002.

3. Raphael, Creating Wonder, 141.

4. Raphael, Creating Wonder, 143.

5. Kermode & Mayo’s Film Review, January 17, 2017.

6. Time Out London, October 30–November 6, 2002, in Danny Boyle Interviews, ed. Brent Dunham.

7. RES magazine, January 2003, in Danny Boyle Interviews, ed. Brent Dunham.

8. Raphael, Creating Wonder, 173.

9. Raphael, Creating Wonder, 238.