Movies by Bowes

RACE IN CINEMA MONTH: POOR WORD CHOICE

2012-02-03T12:43:00.000-05:00

Oh, fuck. This thing . . . I just . . . wow.

RACE IN CINEMA MONTH: THE 5 ROLES ONLY WHITE ACTORS CAN PLAY

2012-02-01T14:14:00.001-05:00

This month we're going to do something a little different here at Movies By Bowes ™. February, which as you may or may not know is Black History Month in the United States, will mark the first ever themed month here at MBB ™, where for the whole month, each post will have something to do with race in cinema, culminating with the annual Oscar coverage, which this year is very much a related topic, with The Help having a Best Picture nom, as well as Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer being up for Best Actress and Best Supporting respectively. Noble attempt to elevate the discourse, or the dumbest fucking idea I've ever had? YOU BE THE JUDGE.

I'm not even going to blame this on RVCBard, even though she did threaten to revoke my “one of the good ones” status. The idea behind this first post came out of a discussion she and I had about the kinds of roles only white actors could play. Color-blind casting has been an institution for years in school plays because when the pool of potential actors is limited to the kids at the given school, sometimes there simply aren't enough actors (gender-blind casting is another common thing under these circumstances). At any level higher than maybe college, color-blind casting is a political decision no matter how much you want to whine about how difficult the casting process is. You know what else is difficult? Life. Nut up.

Anyway, I'm not talking about roles where the race isn't specified in the character description. Those are fair game. But that production of Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Motherfucker With The Hat where no effort was made to find Latin actors to play the specifically Latin characters in the play, and the cast was all white, or the thing more recently in Texas where some featherheads decided to do a production of the Hairspray stage musical with an all-white cast. Both these instances are bullshit, the former more so than the latter since if you can't find Latin people when you're an afternoon's drive from New York City it's because your head is up your own ass, whereas trying to find black people—let alone enough to cast Hairspray—in Plano, Texas is a slightly iffier proposition, but ya know, dudes, you could have done a different show. Especially when the one you want to do is fundamentally all about race.

But, as per the discussion I mentioned above, some roles absolutely have to be played by white people. Racial privilege being what it is, almost no one ever puts “white” in a character description, because that's the default assumption. Like any assumption, the Broken Clock Principle (to wit, it's right twice a day) dictates that occasionally the non-specified character does have to be white. Among them are these 5:

1—The Evil White Guy In A Suit

We'll get the obvious one out of the way first. I should correct something I said in one of my end-of-the-year wrap-ups for 2011, where I identified David Oyelowo in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Cate Blanchett in Hanna as being examples of an EWGIS not necessarily having to be white or a guy. Obviously I was mistaken, having failed to process a couple important bits of nuance. Namely, Oyelowo in Rise may not have been white, but he was English. And also, with Rise being about how Caesar needed to lead the Left against all of humanity, having what would ordinarily be the Evil White Guy In A Suit not be white underscores that point. Or, in other words, Rise was not an EWGIS picture. (Ed. Note: yet another reason why Rise was transcendentally awesome). And as for the Hanna example, well, that's just silly. Hanna was too weird to adhere to any rationally constructed video, as it was essentially a Chemical Brothers video about Saoirse Ronan killing people with an interlude about a bunch of English hippies on a road trip. Does that sound like a normal movie? No.

Look, it's really simple. Evil white guys in suits are plotting to kill every last one of us. They have all the money and power. They are the true 1%. Remember how in King Lear it was the Fool who knew what was up? Why else do you think it fell to Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 2 to reveal the great truism of our age? “Every big crime has a rich white man waitin' for his cut.” If you roll your eyes at that and go “Oh please, you expect me to take Chris Tucker seriously?” then YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO SEE THE EVIL WHITE GUYS IN SUITS COMING. You're as good as done.

2—Skinhead/KKK guy

Self-explanatory, of course, but a little explanation beyond the obvious about why it's such a powerful signifier is necessary. A white person with a shaved head has a lot more whiteness visible. More so than the insane bullshit rhetoric and Nazi salutes, that simple touch may be the reason for this being such a powerful signifier. As for the exclusivity of this, a simple example: a white guy with a shaved head saying the n-word is terrifying. A black guy with a shaved head saying the n-word is Samuel L. Jackson (unless he's wearing a rug that picture). And Samuel L. is only scary if you're the one who fucked up.

3—Landed gentry

A discrete category from the Evil White Guy In A Suit, because while there can be overlap, it isn't inherent. Old money landed gentry ancien regime types can be kind of all right sometimes, even if they rarely have any connection to modern reality and occasionally say offensive stuff because they just don't know any better.

But why, you may ask, does this character have to be a white guy? Surely there are rich dudes in Africa, Asia, and South America who've owned shitloads of land for generations? Well, the three c's—colonialism, capitalism, and cronyism—mean that even there a significant percentage of the super fuckin rich feudal lord types are still white guys. Or, in countries where skepticism about the free market pervades (which is to say, where commies and theocrats run shit), there simply aren't those super fuckin rich feudal lord types at all.

Basically, this character archetype was personified to perfection by James Fox in Remains of the Day (left). James Fox may very well be the whitest dude ever; nota bene his under-seen Evil White Guy In A Suit sans tie in The Mighty Quinn, where the whole purpose of his role is for him to get his ass handed to him by Denzel, but the argument could be made that Denzel movies exist for him to hand people their asses, be it verbally, sociopolitically, or (recently, especially) the old-fashioned way, with violence. That James Fox was a flat-assed straw man is just the way things go, but the profundity of his whiteness is infinite. If you need to picture this character archetype, picture James Fox.

4—The girl in the horror movie who just fucking has to open That Door.

We've all been there. Buncha pretty young people in a house where the slasher/monster/ghost is fixin' to fuck some shit up, and right after the first person (usually the one black person) randomly gets iced the rest of the pretty people start wanting to know what's going on. So, the chick with the nice tits (aka the second one who gets killed, provided she's the one who the second-to-last person was shtupping; the virgin makes it out alive, as per regulations) goes up the stairs as the music gets louder, and she finds a door that's bleeding green shit with “THIS IS THE ROOM THE SLASHER/MONSTER/GHOST IS IN! ENTER AND GET KILLED HORRIBLY!” written on it at eye level, and what does she do? Opens the door. RIP.

There are slight variations. Sometimes she doesn't get killed immediately, sometimes it's just that opening That Door unleashes the evil that kills the rest of the pretty people. Sometimes she's a guy; vide Daniel Craig in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo immediately pre-Enya. But you'll notice Daniel Craig isn't exactly walking around in a bowtie selling copies of The Final Call. And that's the important thing, more than gender, here. If you have a character who can't leave well enough alone, or who alternatively just ain't got no fuckin sense, and you want to really sell that point, accept no substitutes. Cast a white actor.

5—“Goin' native!”

By which I mean Kevvo in Dances With Wolves, Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, and most recently Sam Worthington in Avatar (side note: Sam Worthington is never going to fucking make it with that many syllables in his last name; he needs to change his name to Rock Barkley or something.) So here's the deal: white man is giant dick to non-white man. Dickery consists of oppression, genocide, dehumanization, the industry standard “we're assholes and you have land and/or other resources we want” package. For the movie, since the audience needs a POV character they don't have to feel ugly about identifying with, an anachronistically sensitive and progressive lead character appears!

While having the sensitive white dude get all gaga about the profundity of the culture with which he—somehow—assimilates is an easy way for the movie to get its “aren't they noble” message across, it's a horrible way to discuss things like the Native American genocide, the forced Westernization of Japan, or when we nuked the Smurfs. It's like “oh yeah, the ruling classes of my culture imposed their will on this other culture by force, but those oppressed peoples would like me! Fapfapfapfapfapfapfapfap.”

That's why the lead in these pictures needs to be white, because these movies are specifically about deflecting and assuaging oppressor's guilt, which is itself a uniquely Western thing. There aren't big, lush, massively budgeted movies in Japan where the lead is the one guy in all of Japan beating his chest and going “The Rape of Nanking was wrong! I was not in favor of it!” Does that hypothetical movie sound reductive, dumb, and wildly insensitive? Well, you win a prize. So is Dances With Wolves.

There may be others, but these are the five clearest-cut cases of roles only white actors can play. I'll entertain suggestions for others in the comments, and will be following up my month-long project of tap-dancing on the third rail with other meditations on race in cinema. I'm taking suggestions on other topics as well. And, well, we'll see how this all turns out.

"BRAD PITT, ACTOR"

2012-01-29T13:47:00.000-05:00

This essay by Isaac Butler is great, and should be read by anyone who has to write about film acting. The rest of you should read it, too.

"...THIS AWESOME FILM ABOUT NAZIS FROM THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON."

2012-01-25T14:38:00.001-05:00

Hmm. Okay. I'm going to need a plane ticket to Berlin, a new passport, and a hotel room with a fainting couch. Holy fucking shit. THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT NAZIS FROM THE FUCKING MOON.

NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM.....

2012-01-25T00:29:00.001-05:00

This is serious. This is science. Hi, Jennifer Lawrence!

Earlier, I wrote a thing for Hudak on Hollywood about the Oscar nominations. Then a little later I was listening to Sasha Stone and Jeff Wells talk about the nominations on their podcast and it really dawned on me: giving too much of a fuck about the Oscars is a one-way ticket to Miseryville, population you. Sure there's dumb shit about the nominations this year. There always is. It's not a meritocracy, it's Hollywood's annual stretch to see if its dick still fits in its mouth. Now, auto-fellatio is impressive, physically, just as Hollywood glamour is impressive, physically. It's something not everyone can do. But it's still kind of ridiculous and funny, and if you get too deep in it, you get funny white stuff up your nose. I shall now retire as the king of all metaphors.

Oh, and Oscar night I'm going to be drunk and making lots of jokes. This ain't nothing to be taking seriously, no way.

LINE!

2012-01-22T14:21:00.000-05:00

I really like this. As an (increasingly occasional) actor, I can relate.

ON GENDER SEMIOTICS, GENRE GENTRIFICATION, AND RAW, UNCUT OWNAGE: HAYWIRE

2012-01-18T00:24:00.001-05:00

Spoiler alert: when she catches the guy, she fucks his ass up.

Oh, Haywire. Where do we begin? With Gina Carano, the newest inductee into the Hall of Ownage? With Steven Soderbergh ticking off another genre conquered? With the utterly bizarre fact that Bill Paxton might give the best performance (and it's not that everybody else sucks, either, terrifyingly)? So much to discuss in a finite universe. The short version is it fucking rocks and you all should see it because it wasn't shot on film or digital video, it was filmed on pure fucking win.

Soderbergh reunited with the writer of The Limey (and opponent in one of the greatest “angry guy vs. passive aggressive wiseass” fights of all time on the DVD commentary track of same), Lem Dobbs, for Haywire, and the result is exactly the kind of cool, flashback-y, intelligent exercise in pure style that, in one's wildest dreams, one hopes for with a new episode of the Lem & Steve show. This one stars retired MMA fighter Gina Carano, whom we learn is an ex-Marine now kicking ass in the private sector, but before anyone even says a word, it's clear that she can (and will) fuck you up.

In a bizarre way, Haywire is of a piece with Soderbergh's Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience, discounting the obvious differences that it has twenty-five times the budget and features wall-to-wall ownage. All three are looks at different variations of being a woman who'd be doing fine if all the fuckin men would stop acting the fool for five seconds, with a protagonist who is not (yet) a professional actor (Sasha Grey got paid to be in movies, but . . . well, let's just say they were in a different genre). However, Gina Carano has a lot more support around her than Debbie Doebereiner (who didn't need any) and Sasha Grey (who could have used a bit more, though she was still better than most critics gave her credit for), as nearly the entire speaking cast are famous dudes, all of whom are terrific: Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, all guys we're used to being awesome . . . but then the oddity tier with French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz (who also acts occasionally), Bill Paxton (?), and Channing Tatum (???) . . . all of whom are also really good. Mathieu Kassovitz, that makes sense, he's French, that's how they do, but Bill Paxton and Channing Tatum putting in good performances—as Gina Carano's dad and maybe-in-a-parallel-universe-boyfriend type, respectively—that's just silly. And yet, it's true.

The story starts in media res, opening with Gina Carano, established as awesome in one camera move—say, why doesn't that Peter Andrews fellow work more?—tentatively heading into a diner in upstate New York for a cup of tea. Channing Tatum shows up and she's like “shit” (at this point, not knowing what her backstory was, I entertained the possibility she might be a film critic) and Channing Tatum Channing Tatums his way into the diner and a bit of cool oblique spy movie dialogue ensues until it becomes necessary for Gina Carano to unleash holy hell and beat the living shit out of him. He gets in some good shots before she puts him on his ass, at which point she shanghais civilian Michael Angarano, borrows his car, gets him to field dress her arm, and, for reasons that become clear later, tells him her story to date.

It's a humdinger, full of double-crosses, handsome men, copious ownage, and sweet David Holmes music. The kind of picture it is, we should probably leave the plot alone right here, because there are a few good surprises and things that you see coming a mile away where you're like “is this really this obvious or is there another level” and discovering whether they are or not is fun.

Also, as well-constructed as the plot is—and for a boilerplate “one-[wo]man ownage machine fends for [her]self against evil white guys in suits and attempts to restore [her] good name” plot it is well-constructed—the main attraction in Haywire is the execution, and the casual, almost offhand brilliance of the way it deals with gender. Soderbergh understands the genre on a fundamental level. He knows that if you throw in a bunch of windy, didactic dialogue and try to make your statements about gender and genre that way the audience for ownage pictures—not always the most progressive, sadly—is going to start fidgeting and grumbling what the fuck is this bullshit. No, Soderbergh knows the way. Ownage upfront. Gender commentary in the details through the deft use of signifiers.

This is not to say that Haywire isn't entirely about gender. It is. Gina Carano is the only woman in the picture, and being a Soderbergh joint, on a certain level the picture is about Gina Carano as a martial artist playing the lead in an action movie where she's the only woman who owns the bejesus out of all the men, and what that implies for cinema and gender. (Ed. Note: this is why Steven Soderbergh is the fucking best) When Ewan McGregor asks Gina Carano to pretend to be Michael Fassbender's wife for a job, her indignance on being the “eye candy” almost knocks Ewan McGregor through a wall, and she concludes by cracking “Maybe [Michael Fassbender] can wear the dress.”

Gina Carano is absolutely in charge. Channing Tatum? “Sure, I'll hit that.” Michael Fassbender? “Woooooooowwwwwwww, yeah, he's hot.” But always in a very in-control “sure he's hot but if he pulls anything I'll smash his face off something sharp and break every bone in his body and then if I think he's worth wasting a bullet on I'll light him the fuck up” kind of way. But still, as awesome and fully-versed in the fine arts of ownage as she is, the movie does acknowledge the issues inherent to kicking a larger opponent's ass. Some action pictures have 100 lb women punching pro football players in the face and crushing their skulls, which is cool and everything but nonetheless bullshit because physics. Gina Carano looking like a legit athlete (because she is) and being a women's middleweight—which is the same as a dudes' welterweight—eases the suspension of disbelief of something like Salt, with flyweight Angelina Jolie crushing skulls with her fists, slightly. But still, she has to compensate with technique, and this is where being a real martial artist comes in handy. Her moves employ leverage, getting the angle just right, and precision, and then using muscles. At one point, she out-Onatopps Famke Janssen in Goldeneye, asphyxiating [name of actor redacted] between her thighs, which is legendary for the several obvious reasons (ownage/hawwwwwt/Bond reference), but also because the continuity of the run in her tights that results from fighting with the guy is perfect.

And it's little details like that, and the awesome father-daughter relationship between her and Bill Paxton (who's like, “I love my little girl, but she could kung fu me in half without blinking . . . so proud! *wipes away tear*”) that lets Haywire have its cake and eat it too by simultaneously being exactly like the kind of picture Sly Stallone could have made in about 1986 (or Jean-Claude Van Damme in 1992) and yet something more. Cuz, I mean, sure, it's a gentrified Golan-Globus/Cannon Films picture . . . but fuckin a, man, it's a gentrified Golan-Globus/Cannon Films picture! This is why it's okay that Gina Carano's line readings are a bit monotone and her facial expression doesn't change that much. Dude, Sly Stallone went years at a time without changing his facial expression. Jean-Claude Van Damme his whole fucking career, practically. Action stars don't have to be “good” actors. They have to own.

And this is why Gina Carano is inducted into the Hall of Ownage, on the basis of one lead role only. Even if she does other pictures that suck, she'll always have this. Soderbergh and Dobbs set things up so she doesn't have to do any more acting than she has to, and what little she does have to works within the context of the movie. It also helps that she's got such a great supporting cast, in the truest sense of the term: good actors giving her just the right energy to work with, which is why the idea of a star vehicle starring the least famous person in the movie (another irony Soderbergh no doubt loves) works. It's all set up to make Gina Carano look good, and she does not squander it at all.

(Minor aside here: Michael Douglas is fucking rad as hell in this in the Evil White Guy In A Suit role, that with typical Soderbergh-ian subversiveness may or not be actually evil, but is totally an Evil White Guy In A Suit because Michael Douglas is awesome. In fact, he's playing the James Rebhorn role in this! Rebhorn taught him well. Give me a second to bask in the beauty of the interconnectedness of all things, then let's continue)

I mean, goddamn, Haywire's just about perfect. It's a marvelously tight ownage picture, with a rare compositional clarity and precision of structure that comes from having a really good director in charge. The fact that a director of Steven Soderbergh's stature and talents decided to make an ownage picture is just beautiful, and the fact that he pulled it off so perfectly is no mean feat. May this launch Gina Carano's movie career, and in a different direction than Out of Sight launched Jennifer Lopez, speaking of Steven Soderbergh. But none of that matters. What does is, Haywire is fucking great. Go see it, if you have any interest in things that own.

GOLDEN GLOBES LIVE-BLOG!

2012-01-15T16:23:00.019-05:00

I'm going to be updating this page over the course of the night with the winners of each meaningless bullshit award, to see if they match up to my predictions. Remember, if I'm wrong, it's because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association are inscrutable mercurial douchebags, but if I'm right it's because I'm a fucking genius. So, here are the predictions (originally appeared at Hudak on Hollywood last week) with winners in bold and fuckups (if any) struck through:

TV: don't know, don't care, long as Dinklage wins (which I think he will). (EDIT: He did. Fuck yeah.)

MOVIES:

Best Foreign Language Film: A Separation

Best Animated Feature Film: Tintin

Best Original Song: abstention; category is bullshit with no Muppets nominations.

Best Original Score: abstention; category is bullshit with no Attack The Block or Hanna nominations.

Best Screenplay: ~~Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon & Jim Rash,~~ ~~The Descendants~~ Woody Allen, Midnight In Paris (can't fuck with that AT ALL)

Best Director: ~~Alexander Payne,~~ The Descendants Martin Scorsese, Hugo. I mean, yeah, can't fuck with this one either)

Best Supporting Actress: ~~Bérénice Bejo,~~ ~~The Artist~~ Octavia Spencer, The Help. Whoa. Actually, more I think about this win I dig it, not for The Help but for her.

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Best Actress, Musical or Comedy: Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

Best Actor, Musical or Comedy: Jean Dujardin, The Artist

Best Actress, Drama: ~~Viola Davis,~~ ~~The Help~~ Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

Best Actor, Drama: ~~Brad Pitt,~~ Moneyball George Clooney, The Descendants. I was a fuckin dumbass, I shoulda had this, but I fucked around with that counter-intuition fuckshit.

Best Picture, Musical or Comedy: The Artist

Best Picture, Drama: The Descendants

Wow, my picks were decidedly mediocre. Damn you, inscrutable mercurial HFPA douchebags. Ricky Gervais' hosting was kinda whatever. Funny opener, later bits kinda meh. The whole thing was kinda meh. Live-blogging sucks. I'm getting a bottle of whiskey and a typist for the Oscars.

BOOK TO FILM TO STAGE: BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

2012-01-14T14:13:00.000-05:00

Ken Simon (L), Victoria Anne Miller (R), Bunny Lake Is Missing

So, last night I went to the theater. The reason why I have to write about it here on my own site is because otherwise it would be a massive conflict of interest, considering that it was at the Brick, where almost every play I've ever written and/or directed was staged, and where a very large chunk of my acting took place as well. Among the creative personnel of the play I saw, an adaptation of (mostly) the novel and (to a lesser extent) movie Bunny Lake Is Missing, are a number of good friends of mine, so it's up to you to decide whether I'm being objective. I mean, I am. (Ed. Note: blah blah blah “inasmuch as any human being is capable of objectivity at all” yeah yeah etc etc)

Anyway, a ways back when my friend Ken Simon told me he wanted to do a stage version of Bunny Lake Is Missing, I was like “AWESOME” because I'd seen the movie and could talk your ear off for days about Otto Preminger's cinema de je ne sais quoi, because oh man when Otto Preminger was behind a camera really good things happened, and his pictures were often greater than the sum of their parts and had an ineffable something extra. First of all, dude directed Laura, and Laura's one of the greatest goddamn movies of all time. All the awesome is right up front in that one, with Dana Andrews puttin' in work as a cop who gets a little in over his head investigating a case involving Gene Tierney (Gene Tierney bends the corners of the fucking universe in this movie), and there's Clifton Webb (!!!), and basically you either need to see Laura if you haven't yet or watch it again if you have because Laura's Laura.

A lot of people (including, in weaker moments, myself) would have just hung 'em up there and then, but Otto Preminger wasn't done being awesome. The next twenty-plus years saw a whole bunch of really well-composed shots, willingness to explore transgressive themes, and a whole bunch of “so and so was really good in that . . . like, better than normal even” performances. And then there was Bunny Lake Is Missing.

It's not one of his best movies, but a) the bar was fucking high and b) it influenced a lot of better movies; the bit with having the Zombies be in it doing a couple songs was one of the first instances of that “hey, let's have a band be in the movie doing a couple songs” trend like when Antonioni got the Yardbirds for Blow-Up, which trend Woody Allen made fun of getting the Lovin' Spoonful for What's Up Tiger Lily. Andrew Sarris thought Bunny Lake was good and Andrew Sarris liked lots of really good stuff. It has Laurence Olivier in paycheck mode (which weirdly probably worked better for the movie than Laurence Olivier in “I FUCKING MEAN IT” mode, and for all I know he might have made a conscious choice to play the role as if he was in paycheck mode for that reason. He was Laurence Olivier, after all.) Carol Lynley holds it down fairly effectively in the lead (and looking at her is never a chore), but it's Keir Dullea's creepy incesty performance that's most memorable; he quietly had a pretty good run there in the mid-60s playing weird guys, culminating with 2001. The picture gets a little goofy in places and departs a bit far from the realistic or even plausible, but it's stylishly executed. I mean, it's Otto Preminger. Goofy, unrealistic, and implausible is no match for him, Otto Preminger'll make you a good movie out of that.

The movie departs from the book in a number of ways, most notably the setting, transplanting the action from New York to London. And where it ends up being a kind of proto-Swinging London picture, the book, published in 1957, was very much a thing of Old New York. The play, taking more from the book than the movie, comes across as a film adaptation of the book the year of its release: while part of the initial period of classical noir, it feels like a hybrid between that and what they called “women's pictures” at the time, but like the kind of “women's picture” Douglas Sirk made, with lots of nice lighting and Technicolor but a prevailing self-conscious sense of the material's limitations and ridiculousness.

We open with Blanche Lake going to pick up her daughter Bunny from nursery school, only to be told (by a combination of unseen voices and a couple actual people; nota bene, the unseen voices are a lot more informative and certain than those of the actual on-stage actors. Just file that one away for future reference) that Bunny has never been a student at the school . . . and that there's no proof that she's ever existed. DUM DUM DUMMMMMM!!!!

One difference between the play and the previous iterations of this material—that all friendship and so forth aside I thought was pretty fucking brilliant—is that the design and performances actually do an excellent job of convincing the audience that Blanche Lake really is nuts. As Blanche, Victoria Anne Miller teeters right on the exact median between concerned young mother and delusional cuckoo, but it's mainly the choice to have so many of the people she goes around talking to about her (allegedly) missing daughter be invisible voices. Even though I'd read the book (a really long time ago) and seen the movie (not quite as long a time ago, but it was still a while back) this design choice—part of a brilliant goddamn sound design job by Chris Chappell—had me wondering whether the big reveal in the play was going to be that Blanche Lake was making the whole thing up. That's powerful stuff right there.

But—spoilers for those who haven't read the book or seen the movie or play—Bunny Lake really is missing. In what appeared in the moment to be an awkward bit of plotting, we step back from Blanche's POV and have a scene with two guys—shrink Ken Simon and flamboyant writer Walter Brandes—who are revealed to not be conspirators in the Bunny-napping as Blanche had thought but just a couple dudes on that “oh, you silly hysterical woman” trip. They swing into action to help Blanche, and everything turns out okay and she's reunited with her missing daughter. The climax is a bit sudden and way too neat, but a number of touches point to the writer, director, and cast being aware of how artificial the climax is, foremost among which is Justin Holcomb's “I seriously do not give a fuck” cop delivering the infodump of just how the hell they managed to find Bunny and just why the hell they didn't believe she even existed in three parts, having to be summoned back to finish expositing. Holcomb's vaudevillian tightness makes the scene, and the pulpy material, quite funny.

The play does a good job of simultaneously acknowledging that the material is kind of ridiculous without ever laughing at it, an important balance, because really. If you're going to do a show just to laugh at it, ya know, go fuck yourself. You're not above the material. But maintaining a bit of perspective on the artificiality of the thing while simultaneously reveling in it—Josephine Cashman's supporting turn as a martini-drinking hardass is a good example: she seems to be having a great deal of fun with the role while never talking down to it—makes for an entertainment that's self-aware without being cloyingly so, and keeps things light.

This Bunny Lake Is Missing is a fine piece of stage noir, with excellent design (as well as Chappell's terrific sound design, Amanda Woodward's lights suit the mood very well) and with the exception of the (unavoidably) cumbersome scene changes, it's a crisply directed—collaboratively by adapter Simon and Patrice Miller, who's rapidly building a body of work in indie theatre on which she can hang any variety of hats but most certainly her own—piece of work that will hopefully see a more extended run than its current (ending today) two-week run at the Brick. With the evolution of cinema and theatre, classic noir, with its long takes and shadowy visual aesthetic, almost plays better on stage now. Maybe I'm just saying that because this show was good, maybe I'm just saying that because I want to see more snappy dialogue and awesome costumes onstage, whatever. Bunny Lake Is Missing was a lot of fun.

GUNS GUNS GUNS!

2012-01-12T16:25:00.000-05:00

I present all in search of a time-killer with the Internet Movie Firearms Database. Because Robocop is one of the greatest things to ever exist, start with it. You're welcome.

UNLEARNING THE TOP 10 CONSERVATIVE LESSONS OF ROCKY IV

2012-01-11T02:36:00.002-05:00

Forget the politics, how are these two motherfuckers even in the same weight class?

I'm no stranger to banging the drums for weird, or even bad, movies. Two of the most enduringly popular posts in the history of this blog are the one consisting in large (and aesthetically central) part with advocating for Ocean's Twelve as the great unappreciated studio picture of our time, and the one where I discussed my lifelong love for the cinema of Chris Tucker. Tilting at windmills is shitloads of fun: Cervantes was on that hundreds of fucking years ago, and all he did was coin the phrase, not the concept. But the important thing to remember in all this is that down is not up, making an idiosyncratic critical argument requires a critical approach, and that assumptions are not facts. Not even that whole “come on, let's keep it real, we all know [x]” fallacy, where x = a simplistic generalization based on a cynical, pessimistic assumption masquerading as realism.

Also, we need to be careful to remember that movies are movies, not containers into which we can pour our political biases. This brings me to a post on the blog Big Hollywood, wherein the writer outlined the Top 10 Conservative Lessons of Rocky IV. It violates every single principle listed above. It posits that reality is something other than it is. It presents assumptions and opinions as facts, with plenty of “come on, we all know” bullshit. And nine of them are completely untrue.

Before breaking down the list, a bit of historical context is necessary. Rocky IV came out in 1985, the first year of Ronald Reagan's second term, which he won in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history. There was no way of knowing that in only a couple years, Communism would collapse, and so popular culture was consumed with the Cold War and the Soviet threat. Not only the fight against Communism but money and cocaine as well pushed Hollywood rightward, and the industry cranked out movies where American supermen prevailed over all odds. Sometimes they explicitly fought Commies, sometimes proxies. But Rocky IV fell squarely within that trend, with Sly appropriating Rocky to, like his Rambo franchise, fight Commies. Considering Sly's success at the box office, and the theme, this may have been the easiest green light in the history of Hollywood (and, given the climate, getting the studio to sign off on the line “Hey, we don't keep our people behind a wall with machine guns” was not even a thing that needed to be done, so if the writer ever gets to ask Sly how he pulled that off, she should expect a blank stare). It was not a rebellious island in a sea of craven liberal capitulation to the Soviet beast. It was a conservative movie in multiple senses of the term. That understood, let us proceed:

“1—Communism (let me be succinct and find the right word here) sucks.”

We can skip the assertion that the assertion that Rocky IV is the greatest movie of all time is not an opinion but fact, because as much as I could get all bent out of shape about logical fallacies and the difference between opinion and fact, the writer was kidding, to a certain extent. And this is the one lesson that doesn't have a rebuttal. Communism, in every practical application, did suck. As a philosophy, it's like running the wrong operating system on a computer. Even though it's possible to split hairs and point out (as countless college freshmen have) that all of the ostensibly Communist regimes in history have been top-down dictatorships where ultimately one dude was in charge, and that “pure” Communism has never been implemented, pure Communism is completely untenable outside small, completely homogenous groups, because it's one of those things that sounds cool in theory but is completely antithetical to human nature in practice. Which is why everyone who wanted to try it made a couple strategic edits to the philosophy, and brought guns.

Problem is, a lot of anti-Communists didn't know when to leave well enough alone, and attributed every perfidious act by every person in every Communist regime to Communism as a philosophy. The writer mentions the Russians cheating and shooting Dolph up with drugs, which Sly didn't just pull out of his ass. The Soviets and other Eastern Bloc countries did that shit all the time. But it had nothing to do with Marx. It had to do with people living in a system that was simultaneously fundamentally broken and obsessed with the glory of the state. That desperation backed people into corners where they had to make the choice between being unethical or facing pretty severe consequences. This isn't exactly a contradiction of the drugged-up Dolph point, it's more that when you imagine Dolph as existing in a real world, he's someone to be pitied rather than loathed. That said, the assumption that, in the 80s, he'd be on his way to a Siberian labor camp just for losing to Rocky is faulty. He might not have even been sent to Siberia for his outburst of cartoonish individualism—I mean, if he'd pulled that shit during the Stalin era someone would have shot him in the head in the ring, but then again, if it was the Stalin era, Rocky wouldn't have been allowed into Russia in the first place—either. Nothing terribly fun would have happened to him. Dolph's life would have sucked til Communism fell, but the likelihood of it sucking somewhere relatively near Moscow or Leningrad was better than you'd think.

One final point about lesson 1: the assumption of knowledge of Brigitte Nielsen's character's inner life is entirely without merit. You'd need to perform feats of rhetorical alchemy to convince me that her character had an inner life at all, let alone that her leaving Dolph was a fait accompli. Assumption, not fact.

“2—There are wealthy people who are also (gasp!) perfectly good people.”

This is where the lessons devolve into silliness. It's easier to count mainstream Hollywood movies without wealthy or well-off protagonists than it is ones with same. Just about the entire romantic comedy genre is either about rich women trying to find love or not necessarily rich women trying to find love with rich guys. The default state for protagonists, in any mainstream genre, unless the plot requires otherwise, is to be middle class. Sure, middle class people aren't rich, but they are privileged. Material success is portrayed in Hollywood as either matter of fact, or aspirational. To assert otherwise requires a lot of cherry-picking, carefully ignoring almost every movie released by a major studio.

I'm not going to touch the literal reading of this assertion, that there are wealthy people who are perfect at being good. That would be excessive shit-starting. Also, all evil white guys in suits jokes aside, it is theoretically possible that there is a wealthy person out there who is perfectly good. But I highly doubt s/he would vote Republican.

“3—Traditional family values are beautiful.”

They're also a myth. Concocted by Hollywood. The mythical 1950s-ish world to which conservatives want to “return” never existed. Getting married and being loyal to your spouse is good, but it is not the most important thing in the world. And there is no conflict whatsoever between straight people getting married to each other and gay people getting married to each other. Marriage is an affirmation of the strength of one's bond with one's partner. Note the absence of gender pronouns there.

Also, Rocky is a guy who punches people. The reason why he's the avatar of the American way in Rocky IV is because Sly wrote a script where Rocky is the avatar of the American way, and Sly did so because Sly was going to be directing Sly in the lead role. He has a wife because his relationship with Adrian generated audience sympathy in the first movie. The reason she's in the fourth movie is because she was in the first three. She does not help Rocky punch people.

“4—Patriotism.”

All fine and good. America's pretty rad, no argument there. But . . . wait a minute, what comes next?

“Three words: APOLLO 'effing CREED.”

Oh, boy. This is followed by a whole bunch of bullshit about how awesome it is that Apollo Creed loves his country and drives liberals crazy because he's wearing red, white, and blue. That didn't really bug me, but I'm not a “liberal,” which must explain that. What's telling is the writer going on and on about Apollo Creed being “[o]ne of cinematic history's greatest characters, period” because he doesn't care about racism, ignoring a couple important points, first that he's not a real person, and second, that he's a fictional character written by a white guy. Apollo Creed not feeling like he's the victim of racism is because a white guy doesn't feel like Apollo Creed is a victim of racism. This lessens the impact of Apollo's patriotism a bit, and makes the next lesson—

“5—Color-blind race relations are the way to go.”

—even more ridiculous, which is impressive considering how stupid the last one was. This whole “color-blind” fallacy is not unique to conservatives, but conservatives have massive boners for it. For a bunch of purportedly grounded realists, claiming that ignoring race is, ipso facto, eradicating racism is like sticking your fingers in your ears and going “LALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU RACISM LOOK I SHUT MY EYES TOO SO I CAN'T SEE YOU SO YOU AREN'T THERE LALALALALA.” The worst part is, none of the accompanying text with this lesson in any way refutes the existence of institutional racism. Apollo training Rocky to beat Clubber Lang doesn't refute shit. Clubber Lang was a fucking asshole. But was he a fucking asshole inherently, or was he made that way experientially by a country that hated him on principle from birth? Would Apollo Creed have still chosen to be a boxer if he'd known there were other options? Muhammad Ali became a boxer basically because he had to, and Muhammad Ali was the basis for Apollo Creed in the first movie, which was inspired by the 1975 fight in which Chuck Wepner took Ali 15 rounds. It should be noted that Muhammad Ali never subsequently trained Chuck Wepner, and until Parkinson's robbed him of his ability to speak as freely as he once did, he was as outspoken a critic of institutional racism as ever existed in American public life. Turning Muhammad Ali into Apollo Creed and writing him further and further into compliant, apolitical impotence as Sly did over the course of the Rocky series is borderline sinister (writing it off to intellectual laziness, which I do, is extremely generous), and then killing him off to get the audience on Rocky's side is sickeningly fucking gratuitous.

“6—There is no room for moral relativism.”

Well, sure. It's propaganda. Actually what I think the writer might mean is: “There is no room to disagree with what I'm saying.” But this is also clearly not the case. What have I been doing thus far?

“7—Faith in God is paramount.”

No, faith in God is Warner Bros. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh man am I the best or am I the best. Seriously, though, Rocky is a guy who punches people. God doesn't punch anyone in this movie. And the writer clearly hasn't seen Warrior if she thinks fighters praying before a fight would be edited out today. Wait, bad example, no one saw Warrior. But she mentions Tim Tebow, and all you need to know about Tim Tebow and atheists is, I started that fuckin guy on my fantasy team all the way to the playoff finals, when I second-guessed myself and started Mike Vick instead because I thought Tebow had a bad matchup. I mean, I still would have lost even if I'd started Tebow because my opponent had Aaron Rodgers, who is better at football than Tim Tebow, but I'm not burning copies of the Bible because I lost. These things happen when one guy is better at something than another guy.

The conclusion to this thought—“Judeo-Christian beliefs are as American as apple pie”—only requires a reminder that what originally united the various states of America was a philosophy based almost entirely in Enlightenment thinking. Some of the Founding Fathers identified as Christians. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, did not (he was a Deist, and famously owned a copy of the Bible with all references to the divinity of Jesus Christ excised). The government was specifically designed to be separate from any institutional religious influences. But then again, apple pie came from Europe, so the writer may be indulging in the pleasure of the non sequitur.

“8—Manliness personified.”

While I'm certainly not going to criticize the author for liking butch guys, being a man means having a dick. That's it.

“9—Think for yourself rather than going with the tides.”

On the surface, not a bad piece of advice at all, until the punchline, which makes it clear that supporting Barack Obama is being equated with not thinking for oneself, presented without any correlation and with a bit of a sneer. The last Rocky movie came out in 2006, which means Rocky has never existed in a world in which Barack Obama would have been on his radar (of course, assuming that any presidential candidate would ever be on Rocky's radar, which is a stretch.) Also, Rocky is a guy who punches people, not a politician or a pundit. Who he supports for president has nothing to do with anything.

“10—If you apply yourself and work hard, success is attainable i.e. the very essence of capitalism.”

The big finish! Though what capitalism has to do with Rocky is unclear, when at the beginning of the series of movies, Rocky is working hard and not getting anywhere until by an enormous coincidence he's selected at the whim of Apollo Creed to fight in what Apollo basically regards as an exhibition. Which is straight-up Horatio Alger: in Ragged Dick, the protagonist is hustling for his subsistence until a series of rich people all go “why, look at that lovable scamp, I'm going to rain opportunities and the luxuries of privilege on him.” That has nothing to do with applying yourself and working hard. That's people being handed success. I mean, shit, if you're going to advocate the importance of focused diligence, why not use the example of someone who actually succeeded due to focusing and being diligent?

It is true, though, that the American system affords victors a whole lotta fuckin' spoils. For all that's wrong with it, America does rock when you're in position to take advantage of what it has to offer. But, as in all things, there's a catch. It really, really helps to be a healthy white heterosexual male who belongs to a Protestant Christian denomination and whose family has money. With each qualifier removed, the likelihood of success diminishes, as each removed qualifier is replaced by institutional barriers. That is reality. That is the way things are on Earth. The reference to the Occupy movement is ridiculous, as no one in Zuccotti Park or any other Occupied space, is asking to be given anything. Ironically, what the Occupiers are after is a system in which applying oneself and working hard actually are rewarded proportional to the work done. Also, it bears mentioning yet again that Rocky's participation in the capitalist system is entirely to the extent that people pay him to punch people.

The author concludes by calling Rocky IV “the greatest unintentionally-conservative film ever made, and not coincidentally, a cultural masterpiece.” I'll leave the latter assertion alone for a minute, but Rocky IV is most certainly conservative absolutely on purpose. Even without all the shit the author projects onto the movie, it absolutely serves a conservative purpose: the Russians are BAD! The Americans are GOOD! Sly is the EMBODIMENT OF VIRTUE! Dolph is REIFIED PERFIDY! It's a morally black-and-white bit of “fuck the Commies” propaganda.

And yet, here's the thing. The Rocky movies are completely successful at doing what they do. As much as the unintentional (cutting Sly massive amounts of slack) racism bugs me, the first picture in particular and the sequels to diminishing degrees are marvels of cinematic button-pushing. Putting everything else aside, the primary criteria for judging whether a movie is good or bad are first determining what the movie is setting out to do, and second determining how well the movie succeeded in doing that thing. You don't compare Rocky to Citizen Kane. They're different pictures made for different purposes. Rocky set out to make American white people feel good. Rocky made a lot of American white people feel good. Thus, Rocky is a successful movie, and a successful franchise. This is born out in the massive amounts of money each picture made (even the Tommy Morrison one made lots of money). But let's cool it with the cultural masterpiece bullshit. The aesthetic goals of the Rocky series, especially by the time we get to Rocky IV, even though met are extremely modest, and one simply cannot walk in the room with the amount of racial politics swept under the rug. Rocky IV is a crystalline cultural artifact of its time, the preoccupations of that time, and it has a bitchin' montage, but give me a fucking break. And pick 10 things that actually have something to do with the movie next time.

A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO DAVID ROBERT JONES

2012-01-08T12:41:00.000-05:00

The following was originally written for Tor.com, who are kicking off a whole week of David Bowie love in honor of the great man's birthday. Unfortunately, due to me misinterpreting my instructions, I had written this whole thing before discovering that a couple other writers had basically covered all this and made it redundant, so it will not, alas, be part of the Bowie fawning (I gotta say, I love working for people who are even bigger Bowie fans than I am). But, rather than just let this gather virtual dust sitting on my hard drive, I figured, what the hell. Here, then, is a brief piece about David Bowie's music as relates to science fiction:

From the very beginning of his career, David Bowie's career has had close ties to science fiction. His first commercially successful single, “Space Oddity,” a sprawling, haunting tale of the doomed astronaut Major Tom (on the literal level, at least; there were heavily metaphorical undercurrents of drug addiction as well, but that's Bowie for you, he's rarely if ever only doing one thing.)

Bowie's penchant for both vivid visuals and science-fictional themes and allusions in his lyrics was at its most consistent in the first few years of his fame, spanning multiple stage personae. After Major Tom, and a few references here and there on The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bowie wrote two explicitly SF-inspired songs for his extraordinary album Hunky Dory: “Oh! You Pretty Things,” which looks forward to an apocalyptic shift from the human race as it currently exists to the next stage in evolution (while also simultaneously, and more overtly, being a middle finger to homophobes), and the epic drama “Life On Mars?”, another portrait of (general and sexual) otherness where Bowie first employed the metaphor of an alien world to illuminate the separation that kind of otherness causes with the rest of society.

He proceeded to extrapolate this metaphor, most obviously and famously in his Ziggy Stardust alter ego. His next album, The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, over the course of whose 12 songs—peppered with a number of oblique non sequiturs—tells the titular story. Whether or not Ziggy and the other spiders were literally from Mars was a bit beside the point; they were sufficiently not of this earth that only an SF metaphor would do do describe them. Much, it should be noted, like Bowie himself.

The strange and, in more ways than one, alien sexuality of Ziggy combined with perfect timing and the fact that the album was really good made Ziggy Stardust a massive success. It put Bowie in a position where he was forced to either stay Ziggy forever or evolve. He chose the latter, subtly at first. His follow-up album, Aladdin Sane, featured a logical continuation of many of Ziggy's musical ideas, but with the overt SF imagery confined almost exclusively to the title track; “Aladdin Sane” being a play on the phrase “a lad, insane.” Inspired by the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies, the characters in which Bowie saw as consumed by a meaningless, doomed lifestyle that was both caused by imminent global catastrophe and at the same time the cause thereof, “Aladdin Sane” looked forward to World War III both lyrically and in its spooky, furtively experimental music, that managed to evoke both Berlin cabarets and the apocalyptic future.

For his followup, Bowie—a bit addled by drug use and the pressures of the commercial music industry—wanted to write, and worked out a few rough sketches of songs for a stage musical of George Orwell's 1984, but was denied the rights by Orwell's estate. Then he planned a concept album set in and around a post-apocalyptic city. Upon completion, Diamond Dogs would be a combination of both ideas, featuring a good deal of SF in the lyrics and a couple killer singles.

Although he had not maintained his Ziggy persona throughout this initial period—which also featured covers album Pin-Ups—his shift to “blue-eyed soul” singer was a much more significant shift, and the first such that could be described as a reinvention. This period, consisting of the album Young Americans, didn't traffic in the same SF references as before, primarily because they'd always been a mark of Bowie's sense of his own otherness, and now he was trying to assimilate. That being said, the idea of Bowie co-writing songs with Luther Vandross was sufficiently (and awesomely) strange that it seemed like something out of parallel universe SF.

Bowie would not stray long from SF, as his very next studio album, Station to Station, originated in an attempt to write a song score for the SF movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie was playing the main character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton. A combination of preparing for his first lead role as an actor and his debilitating drug regimen led to Bowie's arguably most fascinating—and least sustainable—persona: that of The Thin White Duke. The Thin White Duke was from another planet much like Ziggy Stardust, but rather than the former's relatively benign mission of sex, drugs, and rock n roll, The Thin White Duke was up to something far more sinister and mysterious. The music on Station to Station was forward-thinking and packed with spooky (and spooked) futurism. Everything about this iteration was less explicit, more elusive, which oddly made Station to Station and the following period—Bowie's “Berlin trilogy,” over the course of which he gradually weaned himself off cocaine and returned to relative sanity—nearly perfect soundtracks for SF cinema, both real and hypothetical.

A sane, sober Bowie was not much for the science-fiction imagery, even going so far, in “Ashes to Ashes,” to turn his back on the entire period with the line “We know Major Tom's a junkie.” Still, he didn't abandon SFF completely, turning in a haunting, beautifully rendered performance as a dying vampire in The Hunger (a movie otherwise only notable for being the feature directing debut of Tony Scott and for the legendary sex scene between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon; something's wrong when David Bowie isn't involved in the sexy parts of a movie) and his indelible turn as goblin king Jareth in Labyrinth, for which he also wrote the songs.

Labyrinth is an extremely important movie for reasons I'm sure I don't need to explain to anyone still reading at this point, and its soundtrack has its ups and downs, though those ups are very, very up indeed. “Magic Dance” is one of the greatest things to ever exist. Bowie takes elements of every one of his previous personae for his character and—to a lesser extent—songs in Labyrinth, ending up with a result that somehow manages to carry undertones of his old dangerous sexuality and yet still be (kind of) suitable for a kids' movie.

Still, fairly or not, the period in Bowie's career in which he made Labyrinth was one of his critically least successful. Almost a decade later, he was at a point at which his own career and shifting popular tastes in music required a “comeback” album, for which he reunited with producer Brian Eno. In trying to recapture his 70s glory, the album—written entirely in the studio—was linked by the overarching theme, detailed by Bowie in a short SF story that he included as liner notes, of a dystopian near future, with songs told from the perspectives of several different characters.

While regarding Outside as a “comeback” album slightly devalues the work Bowie had been doing at the time—among which were the under-appreciated album Black Tie, White Noise and the excellent, adventurous soundtrack to the BBC adaptation of Hanef Kureishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia—it is nonetheless a return to Bowie's explicitly science-fictional lyrics. Being vastly more lucid than he was in the 70s (when he wasn't at all) makes Outside at once less thrilling an evocation of an SF universe than its predecessors and a far more coherent one. It's a big, long experience that evokes, far more clearly and consistently than any of Bowie's other concept albums, a science-fiction movie. The album isn't only the score but the script and cinematography as well.

Outside was Bowie's last grand statement in musical SF. His subsequent work has occasionally alluded to SF and related themes, but not to the extent Outside or his 70s period did. Still, Bowie's manifest, wondrous strangeness has led many a filmmaker, and specifically an SF filmmaker , to use one of his songs for the soundtrack, since there are certain situations where only David Bowie will do. Even in the non-SF comedy Zoolander, there was a point of debate about who was cooler than who, leading Bowie to step into frame and say “Perhaps I can be of assistance.” An expert consultant, if you will.

It was also a lovely touch in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, set so far in the future that humans have interstellar travel (and are united under one highly fascistic planetary government), that the band playing the high school prom before all the 30 year old high school students go off to war is covering Bowie's “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town.” It's at least a century in the future, and Bowie's still cool. It warms the heart.

And last but not least, one use of a Bowie song that I think speaks volumes of his supremacy not only as the last word in cool but his status as the rock star laureate of science fiction, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which absolutely beyond any doubt qualifies as alternate history SF, even if it isn't immediately apparent as such. The movie is Tarantino's typically feverish blend of literary and cinematic pastiche, lengthy dialogue scenes, and extreme violence, assembled meticulously and with intelligence. It does, at the climax, take a turn from historical fiction to alternate history, a turn that satisfies the savage wish-fulfillment aspects of the story. It still requires something to grease the wheels a bit, to mask how implausible the climactic action is, to set a tone of ultimate cool, of seductive danger, of otherworldly strangeness. It is thus that, at the perfect moment to do so, the soundtrack starts playing David Bowie's “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” featuring, at the exact moment a plot involving incinerating the entire German high command is nearing completion, the line “Putting out fire with gasoline.” Watching that scene, the movie's already been great up to that point, and at the exact moment the thought “Wait . . . that's David Bowie!” enters one's mind, it becomes clear that the rest is going to be even better. Which, at long last, brings us to the point: there is nothing that David Bowie cannot make better. Nothing. At. All.

A FOOLPROOF POSITIVE DRUG TEST

2012-01-05T16:12:00.004-05:00

Now, I'm not saying this like it's a bad thing or anything, but how fucking high is Harrison Ford in this?

(EDIT 1/5: Turns out this is a clever bit of editing, made from that clip a while ago of Harrison Ford, looking really high, playing Uncharted 3. So, the point stands that ol' Harrison looks baked as baked, but for clarification he's not actually watching the Indiana Jones movies for the first time. As you were.)

THE TOP 11 OF 2011

2011-12-31T16:28:00.000-05:00

Now that we've given out the Fuckos, it's time to get serious and unveil the top 11 movies of the year. SERIOUS. This was a pretty good movie year, as it shook out, a far cry from the dread at the beginning of the year about there being more sequels/remakes/reboots this year than any other year in history. Problem is, a lot of the better pictures weren't as widely seen, including at least two—both of which discussed below—tragically under-seen movies that are virtually certain to become a lot of people's all-time favorites once they hit DVD. Such is the way of the world, though.

Before we get to the list proper, I want to mention a couple also-rans that didn't make the final cut but that are good and things you should watch. These are pictures that had been in my top 11 before I caught up on all the year-end releases, and would have stayed there if the year-end stuff hadn't been so good (which it was.) Without any further ado, let us salute . . .

Source Code (dir. Duncan Jones)

A very solid SF thriller, with Jake Gyllenhaal puttin' in solid work as a guy who gradually realizes the reason he was the perfect candidate for the military's SF-nal goings-on is for kind of not-so-good reasons (put it this way, his previous career as an Air Force pilot is pretty much toast.) Michelle Monaghan continues her career as one of the most quietly solid leading ladies in the business, Vera Farmiga gets to wear a military uniform and be emotionally repressed (meeeoowwww . . .) and Jeffrey Wright smokes a pipe and wears bow-ties and stuff and was part of one of 2011's more interesting trends: Evil White Guys In Suits who are either not white or not guys (someone find Aisha Tyler and cast her in something as the main sinister executive in something so we can have our first EWGIS who is neither white nor male), which I think is an affirmation of the American way. Someday anyone, regardless of race, gender, or anything else will be able to put on a suit and be evil.

Anyway, Source Code's tight. Don't let anyone tell you the ending's stupid, it's awesome. It just leans on the fiction half of “science fiction” a bit. Duncan Jones is David Bowie's kid. He's SF royalty from birth. He gets to make the endings of his pictures as weird as he fucking likes.

Midnight In Paris (dir. Woody Allen)

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It was a wonderful experience. Everything about it was perfect except for Rachel McAdams being such a psychopath, and even that wasn't exactly a deal-breaker, it just meant this fell out of the top 11. I really love that Woody took the whole over-romanticized Left Bank Paris 20s thing and made it look and sound as awesome as he possibly could . . . but still remind us that it wasn't real. Owen Wilson was better than he'd been in forever, and his balance of wide-eyed innocence and enthusiasm with intelligence and believability as a screenwriter (since, if you'll remember the early Wes Anderson days, he was). And all the “real” people were awesome, with Hemingway leading the pack as he should, though my favorite scene in the whole picture is when Owen Wilson sits down with Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, and Man Ray and tells them he's a time traveler and they're all like “Absolutely” like it ain't no thing, like he told them he was an apothecary. Surrealists are good like that.

Warrior (dir. Gavin O'Connor)

An engrossing blend of old-fashioned sports movie and character study, it's got great performances top to bottom and outstanding fight scenes, with Tom Hardy particularly convincing as an MMA savant. It's a little long, though it doesn't feel particularly long, and it's so well done it's kind of a shock that it did such godawful business. Only kind of, because Tom Hardy isn't a star (yet), and Joel Edgerton isn't a star (yet), and the way the picture was marketed was like, “Come see Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton!” and civilians were like, “Who?” This is all about to change, though. Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton will be stars, they just made this movie five years too early. And once that happens, it sets up this conversation:

Civilian A: Holy shit, did you know Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton did a movie together before they were famous?
Civilian B: Really? What's it about?
Civilian A: Mixed martial arts. They beat the shit out of guys!
Civilian B: Whoa, fuck, how have I never heard of this? Let's watch it!

This is how Warrior is going to become a lot of people's favorite movie soon. By 2014, Bill Simmons will have written a column about this picture and lots of people like him who love Rocky and The Karate Kid and pictures like that are going to see this and be like “Wow, this is like that except the acting is better!” This only very recently fell out of my top 11, and I very well may start pretending that it didn't in a couple years once it develops its huge civilian cult following.

Hugo (dir. Martin Scorsese)

Almost. This one is almost one for the ages. If only it wasn't for that goddamn script . . . I mean, everything else is there, all the visual razzle-dazzle money can buy, Martin Scorsese directing his heart out, and by his heart I mean his whole heart, and yet . . . it's just short. And it's all the writing's fault. Literally everything else you can possibly ask for is all right there. Sigh.

Since cinema isn't just things screened in movie theaters, a couple other things warrant mentioning. HBO's Game of Thrones overcame a rocky start establishing tone and so forth to become a terrifically entertaining potboiler with a great cliffhanger ending. Very much looking forward to season 2. The long-awaited L.A. Noire was a little shaky, but I've played through the main story three times now, so clearly there's some there there. And then there was Sucker Punch, which although a movie wasn't really a movie, more like some strange and imperfect entity with its foot caught in the door between cinema and gaming, a tragically misunderstood attempt by Zack Snyder to make a pro-feminist statement, but whose ambition slightly exceeded his grasp as an artist, and whose good intentions were not helped by the feverish, hallucinatory action sequences. It deserved a bit more credit than most critics gave it, though I'll freely admit my initial review of the picture graded it on the curve for ambition.

Enough for the also-rans. Let's get to the list itself. The top 11 movies of 2011, as determined by the crack staff of one crackhead (rhetorical, not literal variety) here at Movies By Bowes™ are . . .

11—Rise of the Planet of the Apes: dir. Rupert Wyatt

Some of the above-listed also-rans were works of greater artistry than this, which had the distinction of being the best movie of the genus summer blockbuster this year. And there are certainly problems here and there: Freida Pinto's character is a bit flat (and not done any favors by Ms. Pinto's limited thesping skills) and Tom “Draco Malfoy” Felton is kind of ridiculous (though it's immensely satisfying when he gets owned.) But let's look at the last word in that parenthetical aside (parenthetical asides are a big part of what we do here at Movies By Bowes™): “owned.” This is a word I realize I've been throwing around a lot of late, and lest anyone get the idea that I'm just humping Zodiac Motherfucker's leg, the reason I conjugate the verb “to own” to describe decisive and violent victories physical, aesthetic, and moral is because the word has both a visually and aurally morphological perfection in describing what I'm trying to get at. The opening vowel rolls right into the consonant cluster quickly and smoothly, and the field of study, “ownage” has that extra soft crunch at the end that has a similar perfection of form. (Ed. Note: told y'all motherfuckers I was a serious intellectual. AND WHAT?)

That bit of unnecessary justification aside, the reason we're kicking this discussion off with this picture right here is that Rise was emblematic in a lot of ways of the year in cinema: a lot better than you thought it was going to be, and balancing thought-provoking content with wildly entertaining form. And if you've been following these pages since the summer, you know how I feel about Caesar, the leader of the revolution and the great fictional hero of the American Left. They should award Caesar a special Oscar and spend forty-five minutes of the fucking telecast having Cornel West interview Naomi Klein about how fucking rad Caesar is and have Rachel Maddow present the fucking thing in a bespoke tux. I'm serious.

10—Drive: dir. Nicolas (The Long And) Winding Refn

While we're on the subject of ownage in cinema, Drive was the year's most traditional contribution to the genre. I have very fond memories of the experience of seeing this, as this was the very movie that motivated me to figure out how to get invitations to press screenings (turned out they were delighted to have such a garrulously erudite gentleman such as my good self, but ya never know til ya try), and enabled me, hilariously, to pretend to be all cool and get the Self-Styled Siren in (she was very polite about my being such a n00b at the film writing game). I'll probably remember the screening longer than I will the movie, honestly.

That's not to say Drive isn't good. It's on this list, after all. The first hour and thirty five minutes of this picture contain some of the finest ownage yet lensed. The Long And Winding Refn knows how to direct a fucking movie, beyond any measure of doubt, and Baby Goose is goddamn tremendous in this. Christina Hendricks' ass stops clocks. Carey Mulligan was even good, even though her character doesn't have much to do, as her character is the archetypal noir “good girl in a bad situation” just like the rest of the movie, on paper, is boilerplate noir given life by the robust talents of the director, crew, and cast (Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman as mobster brothers? Genius, especially Brooks).

But, as you may recall if you saw it, the movie isn't an hour thirty-five. It's an hour forty. The ending of the picture is kind of a problem, in that it doesn't have one. That doesn't make the rest of the picture any less awesome. The Long And Winding Refn may value style over substance, but right up til the last couple minutes kind of fart Drive is proof that something that's been done before can be great if done really, really well. Style being good enough negates substantive shortcomings round these parts.

9—Moneyball: dir: Bennett Miller

Another example of an exercise in a well-worn genre—the sports movie—made great by terrific execution and the occasional novel twist. Michael Lewis' book about the 2002 Oakland A's pissed off every boring old fuck in Major League Baseball, as all revolutions do: it revealed that objective statistical analysis of what was actually going on in baseball games made all those boring old fucks look really, really dumb.

Of course, being right isn't enough. Being right with Brad Pitt playing the main character and giving one of the two best performances of his career (more on which in a bit), on the other hand, is. Jonah Hill is great as Brad Pitt's nerd-de-camp (peace to Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon), playing a composite of a couple guys who crunched a bunch of numbers and figured out that the most important determinants of a batter's success weren't what the old dudes thought. Armed with that knowledge (and, something the book and movie both obscure, three of the best starting pitchers in the league that year) the A's end up doing way better than everyone who wrote them off after losing two stars to richer teams ever dreamed.

But for real, though? It's a cool story and everything but the thing that really makes it fly is how awesome both Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are. That, and the fact that Bennett Miller's attention to detail keeps any alienating lapses in verisimilitude from fucking things up. Oh, and the way the usual second-act home-run montage in baseball movies is now a huge dramatic thing about David Justice drawing a walk is fucking hilarious for baseball fans. But Brad Pitt's star power and the truly magnificent supporting performance Jonah Hill delivers make this a picture even non-fans can get down with, as evidenced by the hundreds of people I've heard say “I don't even like baseball and I fuckin' loved that.”

8—The Artist: dir. Michel Hazanavicius

Some people are turning against it because it's going to sweep the Oscars this year (Ed. Note: it's going to), but fuck that. The Artist is great. It's a classic “you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll laugh again, you'll cheer, and then you'll cry tears of joy at the beautifully sad ending” picture. Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo (especially the latter) are enchanting, and even though Hazanavicius whiffs by about a decade and a half on the recreation of silent-era movies (it'd be a bulls-eye 1946) he still gets the feel right, and that's the important thing. This is a picture that's meant to be felt, and even though I'm very much up in my head experientially, maybe it's knowing intellectually that I was supposed to feel it made me rationally decide to feel it or something. Who fucking knows. Who fucking cares, more on point. All I know is I really liked this one and all of you people being hipsters about The Artist being sappy can eat a dick. You can also go back and dig up old reviews of Mary Pickford movies and look at all the old shitheads sniffing about how she was less than perfect, and be advised that those very shitheads who were wrong about Mary Pickford look an awful lot like you all do now. Just saying.

7—A Dangerous Method: dir. David Cronenberg

I've covered this one fairly extensively already, with a lot attention to its immaculate design and historical relevance, as well as the performance Keira Knightley turns in. One thing I haven't really talked about is how awesome Viggo is as Sigmund Freud. He disappears behind the beard and the cigar, transforming himself, managing to convey not only the intelligence but the eccentricity and (most impressively) insecurity of Freud. Weirdly, this movie seems to have slipped through the awards season cracks, which is really unfortunate, but the four of us who saw it all know how good it was. This is one, when the Blu-Ray comes out, you're going to want to get up on it quick, but make sure no one's around who's going to judge you for drooling over the cinematography and design.

6—Shame: dir. Steve McQueen

More Fassbender. A whole lot more Fassbender. Another one that I don't have much to add to what I've already written about it except to say I think the fine folks at the MPAA overreacted a bit giving this an NC-17. Sure, we see Fassbender's Penis, enough to both establish Fassbender's Penis as the new standard-bearer now that Ewan McGregor's Penis is retired. But all kidding aside, there have been R-rated movies with more dick shots. The female nudity is well within the territory of the R rating. The one scene where you might have a case for the NC-17 is the one where, after the impotence scene, Fassbender has that hooker up against the window. Maybe he had too many thrusts or something, but that scene's hardly meant to titillate; if anything, you feel bad for Fassbender that he has to frantically reassure himself that his many splendored penis still works. Especially the way the hooker is just like, “You sad bastard” afterward. Though, if it transpires that the reason it got the NC-17 is That One Bit Where Gay Stuff Happens I'm going to use curse words, because that would be really stupid.

In any case, the NC-17 was probably the best thing that could have happened to this picture, because if it had gone out as an R it would have just been this thought-provoking little art picture about sexuality, empathy, and self-reflection. And it still would have been this good, except this bit here would be about how obscure the picture was, because you all wouldn't know it as the Michael Fassbender's Penis picture. I mean, yes, that is a silly way to refer to this picture, but it is big.

5—Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: dir. Tomas Alfredson

This was awesome. There's a lot of movie here, but if you pay attention it all makes sense; after about the fourth time they mention “Karla” you know who they're talking about, and that fucking great monologue Gary Oldman has about Karla clarifies things nicely. The cast is great. Benedict Cumberbatch deals with being the least-famous person in the movie the way the least-famous person in the movie is supposed to, by being really good. This has two of my favorite shots of the year, the Gary Oldman/David Dencik plane-taxiing-to-a-halt-behind-them shot and that tremendous Julio Iglesias-scored one at the end, pushing in on the one English guy who comes out of the whole mess on top (identity redacted cuz it's a bit of a spoiler), timed perfectly with the applause from the recording. The latter is a bit more stylized than the rest of the picture, but it's so good I don't care.

4—A Separation: dir. Asghar Farhadi

Say you mention a movie to someone (not always a civilian, though it will be most of the time) and they go “Oh, what's it about?” Some times you can describe it, with the odd interpolation of such and such an element being really cool, maybe a mention of a particularly memorable sequence, and the person you're talking to will be like “Oh, that sounds good, I'll check that out.” A Separation is the kind of picture you have to tell them “Just see it” because if you describe it it ends up sounding like one of those movies: it's almost all dialogue, which means it's almost all subtitles, and it's about the debilitating effects of totalitarianism on the family unit. I know, I can hear an orchestra of civilians snoring. That's why “Just see it” is the only way with this, because it's a knock-you-on-your-ass awesome movie with one of the most perfectly structured screenplays ever filmed and acting that's almost overwhelming it's so good (the director even managed to pull off nepotistic casting and get the best performance in the picture out of his own daughter, who plays the couple's daughter in the movie.)

Yeah, just see it.

3—The Descendants: dir. Alexander Payne

While we're talkin' about good screenplays, hooooooooly shit this one's good. I mean, the directing, acting, cinematography, and music are all great too but man there's some good writing in this picture. George Clooney's already been plenty good but this is the best performance of his career, playing a guy who's not cool, who's overwhelmed by the demands of suddenly being the only parent—in his own words, he was the “backup parent” to his now-comatose wife—as well as having the entire state of Hawaii waiting with bated breath on a decision he has to make about what's to be done with this massive bit of real estate his family owns and have a limited time to sell. The picture confronts a lot of difficult topics—mortality, race, family, masculinity—and doesn't take the easy way out with any of them. Just like this is Clooney's best performance, this might be Alexander Payne's best picture, and he's never directed a bad one.

2—The Tree of Life: dir. Terrence Malick

I still distrust a lot of people who toss Terrence Malick's named around, because there are a lot of people out there who want to seem smart, cultured, and serious, so they toss names of directors around when the topic of cinema comes up, and boom, mission accomplished. (On a related note, if I hear one more gratuitous reference to Rainer Werner Fassbinder I'm going to Hulk out and stomp a motherfucker.) As with most name-drop abuse, there's the unfortunate side effect of letting the frustration mislead one into forgetting that the reason why, when this game of name-drop telephone began, Terrence Malick's name was dropped so often is because he's a great filmmaker. The Tree of Life is a good reminder of that.

It's about the entire existence of everything everywhere, from the Big Bang, to the formation of the Earth to existentially-concerned dinosaurs who stare off pensively into the distance (I fucking love that even the dinosaurs stare pensively into the distance in this picture) to the lives of one Midwestern family in the 1950s, to apocalypse, to the Afterlife. It puts just about every other picture described as “ambitious” to shame. And it realizes those ambitions as much as any picture directed by a mortal filmmaker can.

The thing I like the most about The Tree of Life is that, for all its breathtaking ambition and exquisite artistry, the characters of the family still resonate as fully realized human beings. This is rare in experimental filmmaking, where the star is the director and it's all about whatever statement the director is making. A lesser filmmaker would have rendered Brad Pitt's character as Stern One-Dimensional 50's Guy, Malick shows how that sternness is motivated by insecurity, fear, and the regretful acquiescence to perceived obligation. The kid character, loosely based on Malick himself, is no polished, burnished angel hero character; he's kind of a prick. That recognition of the complexity of life makes this picture a really special achievement. It also really moves, for such a complicated, unconventional Film (and it certainly is a “film”; if all “films” were this good I wouldn't be as uneasy with that word.)

And yes, that means that my number one for the year is . . .

1—Attack The Block: dir. Joe Cornish

“Whagwan, fam? Is you fucking mad?” Well, sure, I'm nuts. I know putting this ahead of Tree Of Life and all the other stuff on this list looks like a troll move, and I certainly know a lot of people think people like me are over-hyping Attack The Block to the point of undercutting the advocacy. But listen. I'm not that guy pulling that “there's something wrong with you if you don't like this” bullshit that makes people hate film critics. I realize that ultimately one person's awe-inspiring exercise in genre multiplicity/simultaneity, dialogue stylized to the point of musicality, and wonderfully fresh variation on the classic hero's journey is another person's “I don't get it.” Such is the way of the world.

But holy fuck I love this movie. I love the warmth of the colors, the way the kids go from criminals to heroes, the music, “dem tings,” Nick Frost as the local weed dealer, Pest, Jodie Whittaker, the girls, Hi-Hatz's terrible fucking rap song, and Moses. Moses saved the planet. He's a hero. And he's why, if you ask me what the likelihood of Attack The Block becoming a cult classic in the years to come and making everyone forget no one went to see it when it first came out, the only possible response is “Allow it.”

That's my best of 2011. See y'all in 2012, my lovelies.

LET'S GIVE OUT SOME AWARDS! THE "BEST" OF 2011

2011-12-28T13:37:00.002-05:00

The more generic the better, that's our motto.

This year, inspired by the glut of awards-season stuff I've been reading for weeks on Twitter, I decided to give out my own awards. Mine are free of the capricious political bullshit (to say nothing of the sentimentality) that infects the Oscars. No, mine are more likely to result in my accidentally awarding Best Supporting Actor to Rajon Rondo because I'm getting distracted by the Celtics-Heat game on the TV as I type this. Which would be a neat little surrealist statement about how stupid movie awards are, but I'm going to stay on topic. EVEN IF IT KILLS ME.

As you'll notice, there are categories here that you won't find on the Oscars. These awards, not having been voted on by any kind of electoral body or bunch of critics or even my mom or her cat—and lemme tell ya, the cat was pissed at the over-representation of dogs this year, damn—just me and my lil ol' foul-mouthed lonesome. So these are all my usual blend of hyper-erudite genius, axe-grinding, and wildly overblown advocacy. And, of course, lots and lots of fucking cursing. Which is why the only possible nickname for the first annual Movies By Bowes ™ Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Scientology Awards is . . . The Fuckos. Let us now begin. Some spoilers, unavoidably, so be forewarned.

ACTING:

Best Performance By An Actor, male: George Clooney, The Descendants. It's an amazingly good performance, with so much done in the eyes. It helps that the movie's fucking great too, but a huge part of it being great is Clooney. This was a great year for lead performances by men; there are at least seven that I wouldn't mind seeing win the Oscar. For the Oscar, because it'd be awesome, I'm advocating Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor, but this here's “best” and that means Clooney this year. Though seriously, Brad Pitt in Tree of Life or Moneyball, Clooney, Gary Oldman, the dude from The Artist, Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes . . . loaded fuckin' year.

Best Performance By An Actor, female: Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method. When I first saw this, I couldn't quite figure out what it was about her performance that struck me as off. I thought it might have had something to do with Keira Knightley not having the formal training that Fassbender, Viggo, and everyone else had. But something I couldn't quite describe was telling me “Resist the knee-jerk reaction that she sucked. She didn't. Figure out why she didn't.” And the conclusion I came to was that her character (and characterization) was a challenge to the way men traditionally view women. She's very sexual but not in a way that's geared toward pleasing men. She's way the hell smart. And by the end of the picture, when she's figured out how to make her way in the world, she doesn't really need Fassbender (the POV character for dudes in the audience) anymore. So that's the character. As for the performance, Keira Knightley keeps throwing in these little darts to keep everyone off balance, so that no one, in the movie or out, quite knows what to make of her. She pulls all the focus to her, which sometimes works to the detriment of the movie at large but since A Dangerous Method is, more or less, all about her—she's the engine that drives the whole thing, including the Fassbender/Viggo Jung/Freud relationship—she did the job. And that's why Keira Knightley's performance in that picture deserves a little more love than she's been getting this award season.

Best Performance By A Movie Star, male: I know, I know: “What the fuck, George Clooney's not a movie star?” Yeah, he totally is, he just happened to also out-act all the AC-TORRRRRs this year. This here's about swagger, ownage, and charisma, the un-subtle arts. And this category was looooooooooaded this year. From Vincenzo Gasolina (not to mention the Rock, nor Paul Walker) in Fast Five, to Baby Goose in Drive, to Salman Khan in Bodyguard, to Shahrukh Khan's both-barrels bid to reassert his status as king in Ra.One and Don 2 (hey, what can I say, they grow good movie stars in India, about which more later in the acting categories), it's Shahrukh's American analogue who takes this one: Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Dude hung off the hundred and what the fuck floor of the fuckin Burj Khalifa (roughly “REALLY FUCKING TALL BUILDING” in Arabic) by himself and did all that wacky rappelling shit and propped himself up on the fucking building by basically telling the building “Building? I'm a fuckin movie star. I can just chill here, right?” and the building went, “Sure. You are Tom Cruise, after all.” It was real nice to see Tom Cruise be the Tom Cruise that made him Tom Cruise again. That movie was fucking dope. Good to have ya back, Tom.

Best Performance By A Movie Star, female: Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I still think the book is horseshit and that Lisbeth Salander is a creepy jerk-off fantasy. But holy God Rooney Mara swaggered in that. The script material undercut her but she was just like “Fuck this shit, I didn't get all these piercings for real and start smoking for real and get in shape for all those nude scenes I didn't really need to do but did anyway because I ain't no punk . . . I didn't do all this fuckin shit to let a fuckin script undercut me. Prepare to be owned.” Et voila.

Best Performance By A Dog: Another weirdly loaded category this year. I was about an inch and a half from giving this to that wonderfully taciturn long-faced dog in Hugo, especially because Marty being a wise-ass with the 3D really let us into that dog's trip, but I have to be a conventional asshole and give this one to Uggie in The Artist. It is “best” performance by a dog, after all.

Best Performance By A Cat: The Cat, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Before Stieg Shithead Larsson (spoiler alert) iced the cat in a sensationalist hysterical bid to get the audience to really hate the bad guy, there was enough business with the cat that Daniel Craig got to chill with him a bit and let David “Honey Badger” Fincher make the dumb joke “huh huh Blomkvist is a pussy, get it? Hahahahaha” because why not. I liked that cat. I didn't like him getting iced. (End spoiler)

Best Performance by a Dude Playing A Chimp: This whole category is just cuz of Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Caesar is truth. Caesar is revolution. Caesar Occupies your entire shit. Yeah a huge part of that was the VFX, but they just rendered what Serkis gave 'em. Don't forget this movie, and don't sleep on it. This was good stuff.

Raddest Old Guy: Amitabh Bachchan, Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap. He is the Big B. All hail. There were other cool things about this movie, like Sonu Sood and the adorable Charmy (oh, Charmy . . .) but it would have just been another “meh, whatever” picture without Amitabh holding it the fuck down in the lead. He's pushing 70 but still owned the living crap out of every bad guy in the whole picture without even smudging any of those crazy white suits of his.

Best Nudity: This is a total protest category about how all the goddamn time in movies filmmakers feel like they have to justify nudity or de-eroticize it and it all has to be for some kind of “purpose.” Fuck that shit. So, while 2011 featured a lot of very attractive actresses appearing full-frontally nude, the context was frequently such that the audience was being scolded not to find it hot. Emily Browning in Sleeping Beauty, lit and made up luminously, is being pawed by skeevy old dudes, who are saddened by the experience (also that movie is inert, miserable crap). Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, we already covered that. So I guess by default it's Carey Mulligan in Shame because at least, brother-sister weirdness aside when Fassbender finds her in the shower, she's just kinda kickin' it, and she does look good, and the purpose of the scene isn't to leer over her or make her into some bullshit fantasy character. Actually, my rationalization just convinced me to strike the “default” part of that. Carey Mulligan, Shame.

Best Dudity: Michael Fassbender, Shame. Of course it was him. It had to be him. Michael Fassbender has a very good chance of being the first actor in the history of the Oscars whose penis gets a nomination while he splits the vote between his performances in this, Jane Eyre, A Dangerous Method, and X-Men. Cue months of tabloid stories about the split in the partnership between Michael Fassbender's Penis and Michael Fassbender; Fassbender's penis will go off to LA and make big gaudy movies and wear gold chains and hang out with fast women and start doing coke, while Fassbender spends most of his time bereft, on airplanes, heading to do another play or art movie, missing his old friend, before a tearful reunion in the third act preceding a renewed and glorious collaboration as the music and credits swell. A final kiss will only be possible if Fassbender does some serious yoga in preparation.

DIRECTING:

Steven Spielberg, energized by War Horse and Tintin, plans to direct this many movies in 2012

Best Directing, Big Budget: Martin Scorsese, Hugo. I had problems with this picture but exactly none of them had anything to do with what Marty S. brought to the table. Marty had a big fuckin' vision, he got someone to give him $150 million and some 3D cameras and he went and got a DP and a design team that'll make ya change gods. Marty got performances out of the kids, he kept Sacha Baron Cohen from flipping out and taking over the movie, and he got Ben Kingsley and said, “Be Ben Kingsley.” And Ben Kingsley said, “Fuck that, I'm gonna be George Méliès.” And Marty said, “Works for me. See you on set.” This picture drove me bonkers while I was watching it because I wanted to go find the writers and kick them in the balls for not being able to keep up with Marty's brain, but the more I think about it, the more I'm like, goddamn, that Marty S. sure knows what the hell he's doing with this filmmaking racket. If he keeps it up he might make something of himself.

Best Directing, Small Budget: Joe Cornish, Attack The Block. Yeah, $13 million's a lot of money in regular people terms, but it's a fuck of a lot less than 150, and Attack The Block's a better movie than Hugo is, so the math is pretty much done. In ten years, people are going to be like, “Yeah, I saw Attack The Block in theaters” and people are going to be like “Whooooooa . . . cool!” Because in ten years Attack The Block is going to be a cult classic of near-Lebowski (chill the fuck out, I said “near”) proportions. This is absolute. Quote this back to me in ten years and I'll say, “Don't ever argue with the big dog, the big dog's always right.”

Best Directing of Actors: Alexander Payne, The Descendants. This would have been close if Woody hadn't fucked up Rachel McAdams' character in Midnight In Paris, but he did, so it's not. Payne got performances out of George Clooney, multiple different kids (the youngest we can credit to Payne and maybe even Nick Krause as Sid channeling a hetero Keanu, but to be fair, when Shailene Woodley decides it's time to move on from that life of the American teenager show or whatever it is, she's going to be just fine with or without Alexander Payne), Beau Bridges, and the less scary killer from Scream, who's now all growns up and stuff. They all feel like real people who are of that place; whether or not they actually resemble native Hawaiians is up to Hawaiians to say, but there's a great connection between the actors and the place, and it's a movie to a very large degree about place. And that's that.

Best Directing of Ownage Sequences: Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive. Could just as easily have been Justin Lin for Fast Five, Brad Bird in Mission Impossible: Motherfuckers I Shot Tom Cruise Hanging Off The Top Of The Fucking Burj Khalia: A Brad Bird Film Directed By Brad Bird's Testicles (the only reason he doesn't win this is because Tom Cruise owning Michael Nyqvist at the end wasn't as impressive as it might have been because, come on, Michael Nyqvist? Still a pretty cool sequence with all the moving parts, but definitely loses points because by that point Tom Cruise has demonstrated sufficient awesomeness that getting his ass kicked by the guy from the shitty Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seemed implausible.) No, The Long And Winding Refn takes this one because hammers, straight razors, and Clippers games. And for involving Albert Brooks in an enterprise where he owns someone somehow other than verbally (and then doing it again) and having the audience be like, “Daaaaaaaamn, Albert Brooks a bad motherfucker!” rather than “Really? Albert Brooks? Please.” That right there wins this category, no question.

Best Understated Yet Vividly Clear Political Statement: Asghar Farhadi, A Separation. This movie was so goddamn good you forget it's a foreign movie—shit, I forgot I was reading subtitles—because the people are so recognizably and universally people. Then you're like, why's she so dead set on amscraying the country with the daughter (who's amazing in this, by the way), and why are these random schlubs in shitty offices wielding omnipotent power over these people's . . . ohhhh, right. It's a totalitarian regime where religion and the state control everything. That didn't even hit me until the final scene, at which point it just popped up in high definition like, “oh yeah, none of this shit needed to happen.” (Ed. Note: the reason Rise of the Planet of the Apes didn't take this is, if you'll recall, the political message wasn't subtle. It was “FUCK THE STATE, WE DROP EVIL WHITE GUYS IN SUITS OFF OF BRIDGES IN FLAMING HELICOPTERS UP IN THIS. WHAT.”)

Most Unexpected Homage: Woody's fucking Inception trip in the Belle Époque sequence in Midnight In Paris. Okay, okay, I know it wasn't a straight-up homage to Inception. It just needs mentioning how great Midnight In Paris was a few dozen more times. And because the idea of Woody Allen directing Inception is really funny.

VISUALS & EDITING:

Raoul Coutard

Achievement in Camera Mastery: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree Of Life. Know why all the voice-overs in that were spoken in stunned fragmented whispers? They were watching the dailies while trying to talk. Those images were powerful, dude.

Most Immersive Production Design: The team that brought you Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I said in my Tor.com review, it felt like they had a time machine and shot on location in the 1970s. And, well, yeah. It felt like they had a time machine and shot on location in the 1970s.

Best Use of Visuals As an Expository Tool: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. They packed hundreds of pages of Stieg Larsson's bullshit into brisk, completely coherent minutes. That picture may have been two and a half hours but it was a fast two and a half, for sure.

Best Shot: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Gary Oldman + David Dencik + airplane slowly taxiing up behind them. Mmm mmm mmm that's some good stuff. Though, call me crazy, that one continuous shot in Hanna when Eric Bana walks through the airport, gets each baddie hiding behind each pillar to start following him, then lures them down into that underground walkway and owns all of them, concluding with throwing a knife through a dude's face (done without cutting away!) is a close second, and even better than Joe Wright's massive Dunkirk shot in Atonement, which was cool but it was also the only good thing about that movie. But there's something to be said for understated subtlety, which is why the Tinker Tailor airplane shot takes this one.

Uncanny Valley Memorial Achievement in VFX Verisimilitude: Rise. Dude Caesar was fucking real. (Resisted the urge to give this to the kid in Hugo, because otherworldly though he and those anime blue eyes were, he actually was a real person, I'm told.)

Best Editing, Action Movie: Drive. Cheating slightly because it's not an action movie, per se (as that batshit insane lawsuit plaintiff realized, much to her dismay) but the action sequences in this are put together fucking amaaaaaazingly. Patience goes well with action. Who knew?

Best Editing, Non-Action Movie: A Separation. Trust, that editing is crazy good. That movie isn't much more than people talking for an hour forty but damn is it ever intense. That's part writing and part performances, but the medium is montage. (Not in the Team America sense, wiseass, we talkin bout Eisenstein.)

Best Editing, “Damn, that picture didn't feel near that long” category: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Two and a half hours, and it barely felt half that. Runner-up, Fast Five, which—bizarrely—was two hours and twenty minutes long. It felt like the hour forty-five it should have been in any rational universe, which leads me to believe that Justin Lin might know the Jedi mind trick.

MUSIC:

Best Original Score: Attack The Block. Nothing else other than Hanna even need think about asking to be part of this category; while the Chemical Brothers did an excellent job with that, that movie wasn't propelled by the score to the same extent Attack The Block was. Attack The Block owns all. Not only does it work perfectly in the movie, it's the best goddamn writing music ever recorded.

Best Original Song: “Life's A Happy Song,” The Muppets. Though I'll hear arguments for several other songs from that movie. And the title song from Bodyguard, with the whistle-whistle, flex-flex, guitar-guitar hook. But “Life's A Happy Song” for the win.

Best Basically Original Song: “A Real Hero,” Drive. Everyone whined about it being in their heads for weeks/months afterward but you know why? Because it's a good song, that's why.

Best Use of a Previously Existing Song: the Soviet national anthem, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. That scene at the Circus' Christmas party before any of the bad shit happens, and they're all a little lit and start singing along . . . that's just awesome. It's a nerd joke, it's them kind of making a dark joke about the enemy, but also, all political implications aside, that's a really good fucking song; The Hunt For Red October would have won this category with the same song in 1990.

Best Song Cast As Pearls Before Swine In A Shitty Movie: “Shelter,” The xx, I Am Number Four. Terrible movie, and the song was used really badly, just because the xx were trendy when they were shooting the movie. But, even though no one cares about the xx anymore (nor do they care about I Am Number Four, thankfully), this song is still great and their album has a bunch of other good stuff on it.

Best Soundtrack: Midnight In Paris. Seriously. This might have been Woody's best soundtrack ever. “But what about the soundtrack to Drive?” What about the soundtrack to Drive? Woody's got Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker and Jacques fucking Offenbach on this fuckin thing. The soundtrack to The Descendants with all the Hawaiian stuff is right up there, but when Woody's awake and paying attention to detail, really good things happen.

SILLINESS:

All due respect to Melissa McCarthy, this was the year's breakout comedienne.

Best Joke: When Kumar goes to cop some weed off Patton Oswalt's mall Santa in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, and he's going through all the Christmas-themed kinds of weed and a couple Hanukah ones, Kumar mentions something being as good as the “Diwali Dank” Patton Oswalt had had in October. That was a damn good joke.

Funniest Movie: The Trip. Going by US release date, it totally counts. GENTLEMEN TO BED.

Achievement in Unintentional Comedy: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. Everything about this is funny, from the fact that they made a movie out of the most boring part of Atlas Shrugged, to the fact that the adaptation goes out of its way to make the material seem as dumb as possible. Not enough was made out of the fact that the director voted for Barack in '08; this movie seems like an out-and-out trollpiece, presenting Atlas Shrugged just straight enough that all the Randian dummies will get boners about there being an Atlas Shrugged movie, but engaging in a whole bunch of subtle acts of sabotage (and some not subtle ones, like directing the male and female lead, the latter of whom can be seen in the above photo, to act like robot tards) so that the end result just flat-out fucking sucks. I cannot wait for parts two and three. Can. Not. Wait. The only way to improve on the first one is by hiring Tommy Wiseau.

Best Deadpan: Corey Stoll as Hemingway in Midnight In Paris. That speech he gives Owen Wilson capped with “Think about it” was gold.

OWNAGE:

The concept, reified.

Best Car Chase: Oddly enough, I think I gotta go with Priyanka chasing Shahrukh in Don 2. All charges of n00b infatuation with Bollywood can be referred to my dick. The car chases in Fast Five, the seeming clear favorite, were great and everything, but they were just like the car chases in the other four movies. And Drive was Drive, but that was more “good filmmaking” than “dope car chases,” which aren't mutually exclusive or anything, but when I think car chases I think of the director turning to some Australian 2nd unit director with an incomplete complement of eyes and limbs and going “it's all yours,” to which the Australian replies “Lit's git ta fuckin wehhk, mate!” and next thing you know stunt drivers are nearly getting blown up driving Dodge Chargers through oil tankers and shit. (Ed. Note: Australians own.) Now, the car chase in Don 2 wasn't, on the surface, all that flashy. It was just a basic meat-and-potatoes car chase, but with an ineffable batshit insanity that made it fucking rad. Also, Shahrukh fucking destroys his car, and as we all learned from The Blues Brothers (in which is the greatest car chase of all time) at the end of the car chase the car has to just be like fuck it. I'll debate this one, but only to a certain point.

Best Fight: Vincenzo vs. The Rock in Fast Five. Just don't even step to this one. I don't care that Justin Lin gets trendy with the shaky cam. I don't care that it was relatively short. It's Vincenzo Gasolina fighting against The Fucking Rock.

Best violent death: In a year with many contenders, among them several grisly ownings in the bullshit historical epic Ironclad, the gorilla grabbing his nuts and going “sure, I can take on a helicopter with machine gun turrets with nothing but my bare hands” (not only did he win, the evil white guy in a suit—who was played by a black actor, proving that Evil White Guy In A Suit is an attainable state of mind that crosses racial barriers, just as Cate Blanchett proved in Hanna that it transcends gender barriers too—eats it in the ensuing crash) in Rise, and The Rock casually putting two in Joaquim de Almeida's dome without breaking stride to go be homoerotic with Vincenzo, the prize has to go to Albert Brooks owning Bryan Cranston with that straight razor in Drive. He slices his wrists open lengthwise, and then while Cranston bleeds out he's like reassuring him that the worst part is over and he'll be dead soon. I mean holy fucking shit. Albert Brooks. Good God.

Best shirt removal: This is only a category so I can say what's up to Salman Khan in Bodyguard. The way the water hose filled his shirt up with water til it exploded, revealing Salman's muscles really needs to be seen to be believed. It manages to simultaneously be hilarious, ridiculous, awesome, and frankly kind of inspiring. And each quality depends on the simultaneity with the other three. There really is only one Salman Khan.

Greatest “Go fuck yourself” moment: The above-mentioned bit with the Rock casually putting two in Joaquim de Almeida's dome without breaking stride to go be homoerotic with Vincenzo, in Fast Five. I mean, come on. It's a shame JDA couldn't have still been alive for a second to be like, “Wow, yeah, okay, I understand the magnitude to which I just got owned.”

Best explosion: Gotta be when John Boyega, as Moses, detonates his apartment to kill all of “dem tings” at the end of Attack The Block. Not only was it a cool explosion, it was also Moses. Moses saved the fucking planet. Trust.

Best revolution: Caesar. Rise.

Awesomest hero: Moses. Attack The Block. Which, by the way, for anyone wondering how the Badass World Cup turned out, an update: there was a huge scandal surrounding North American Group Stage, when due to the fact that none of the participants would concede, America ended up pulling some 1980 Moscow Olympics shit and decided to withdraw from the competition entirely. The rest of the world kind of shrugged and went, “Well, with Makmende, Mad Max, the guy from The Secret In Their Eyes, Moses, and Tequila and Tony, America wouldn't even be a top seed, and fuck you guys for not letting Canada and Mexico play.” The only thing is, with America out of the Cup, American media stopped treating the Cup as if it existed (same as it ever was) and the wildly entertaining knockout stages, resulting in Moses' eventual victory, were lost to posterity. (Ed. Note: rumors that the real explanation is that Movies By Bowes ™ simply got bored with the conceit and had to write about other shit to pay the bills are scurrilous fucking Communism.) The point is, Moses is a hero. He saved the planet from dem tings. You do not attack the block and not get owned.

And those, dear readers, are the first annual Fucko Awards! Tune in in a couple days for the Top 11 movies of 2011!

THE DIRECTOR WITH THE HONEY BADGER TATTOO

2011-12-25T00:58:00.004-05:00

David Fincher don't give a shit.

I have a long and complicated relationship with David Fincher's cinema. His movies look and sound amazing; his visual style is uniquely his own and he has a very strong understanding of the effectiveness of sound and music. I like that he likes fucking with people, even if that means I have to brace myself before watching one of his pictures, because it's good when artists fuck with people. Comfort is a slippery slope to unconsciousness, a lot of times. And as a fan of cinematic violence, I have to give it up: David Fincher does violence well, and violently. In the fine art of ownage, he has few peers, even fewer living.

In spite of the fact that I like his movies—yes, even Panic Room; it wasn't good but craft'll take a picture a long way when the talent level's this high—a lot of David Fincher's fans irritate me. I should say, a particular (and large) subset of his fans annoy me, namely young men who've seen Se7en and Fight Club 8000 times, refer to him by last name only, and act as if he's the only person who's ever directed a movie in the history of ever. He's not the only one (see the intro to this post for some discussion of some of the others) but it still irritates me when mouthbreathers who don't know shit from shinola start getting all huffy about cinema and acting like “FINCHER” farts rose petals and has never shot a single frame of film that was anything less than perfect. This is not the case. He has the same Achilles' heel as every single other director since the dawn of the medium who doesn't write his own scripts: he's at the mercy of his screenwriter, and by extension, the source material that screenwriter is working from. Which brings us, even though that isn't a problem here (I regret nothing about having misled you by making an irrelevant point), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

The Millenium trilogy, the Men Who Hate Women books (their literal title in Swedish), The Girl With/Who series (their English titles), whatever you want to call the late Stieg Larsson's fiction, are immensely popular. They concern the adventures of the dashingly handsome, politically progressive, staggeringly brilliant journalist Mikael Blomkvist (by whom every woman in the known universe wants to be sexed, and who bears a sneakily suspicious resemblance to one Herr S. Larsson) and the goth/punk/club-kidded out, anarchistically-inclined, off-the-charts genius computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, who is (of course) omnisexual and has the most raging case of Asperger's on record. And wants to fuck Blomkvist, of course.

I'm not a fan. The books, in varying states of completion when Larsson died, lack dramatic focus, are larded with reams of unnecessary detail, and despite endless lists of place names with 2.8 umlauts per syllable, not particularly tied to their setting; you could go in and replace all the proper nouns and voila, they're in Minneapolis instead of Stockholm and nothing of value has been changed whatsoever. Still, in spite of all this, there's the occasional good bit to be found. I wouldn't give a shit to the extent to be this irritated by them if they were totally worthless. Take Salander: she may be a total author fantasy character and have no resemblance to a real human being and her emotionless response to the horrors visited on her is a little creepy and weird if you think about it for too long, but she still fucks shit up like a legend, and while her cultural resonance is largely with people unfamiliar with cyberpunk character archetypes (from which she is drawn whole and intact with no alterations necessary), that resonance has nonetheless been massive. And, for better or worse, she's a character that's virtually crying out (in Swedish-accented English) to David Fincher: “Direct me!”

More than anything else, it's the realization of Salander that made it absolutely necessary for David Fincher to make a movie of this material. There were Swedish film versions of all three books, in which Noomi Rapace made a name for herself (and attracted the attention of Hollywood, in which she now has a burgeoning career, with Sherlock Holmes 2: Bigger and Blacker and next summer's eagerly anticipated Prometheus; she's doin' ok for herself these days, and her excellent performances in the Swedish movies were directly responsible). Problem is, aside from her, the movies weren't any good. They were cold, inert, and way too big, kind of like glaciers. But their level of reverence to the source material made them quite popular with people who already liked the books, since they left nary an umlaut behind in bringing every last page of the books to (relative) cinematic life. And, being that these movies already existed, there was a bit of rhetorical questioning as to why American versions needed to be made, and a bit of harrumphing about Hollywood's habit of backstroking nude through enormous piles of cash. The thing about that is, no shit. Hollywood likes money, and they think “scruples” are what happens when your septum collapses from doing too much cocaine. We already know this. Occasionally, in their quest to make further and larger fuckloads of money, they realize that occasionally smart business decisions and smart artistic decisions have overlap. As they do in the case of hiring David Fincher to direct The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

As a business decision, it's what people in the habit of using phrases like “a slam dunk” call a slam dunk. While I might poke holes in his feature film work, David Fincher is beyond any reasonable measure of debate the best commercial director who ever lived. His ability to create images that are (all at once) lushly gorgeous, shocking, and disturbing is peerless. This has translated to his becoming one of the greatest ever in the slightly longer and very similar form of the music video, and with a directly proportionate diminishing in stature and effectiveness to the length of the form, an interesting and thoroughly singular director of feature motion pictures. Please note that this is a testament to how good he is as a commercial director, rather than a slight on his features, the majority of which are quite good. He has an absolute and manifest understanding of branding, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is very much a brand. More than that, though, it's a brand with no small degree of abyss-gazing with regards to sex, violence, and the overlap between them. David Fincher is no stranger to violence, and while the sex in his pictures has almost exclusively been subtext (aside from the Tyler Durden/Marla Singer couplings in Fight Club) the brand of sex found in Larsson's novels is so often associated directly with violence that that's hardly a stretch for David Fincher, and even less of one for his branding superhero alter ego . . . FINCHER ™.

Where the appropriation of the FINCHER ™ brand makes artistic sense is the fact that FINCHER ™ is not one to take orders. Tell him what to do, he tells you to go fuck yourself. Thus, in order to brand the American movies as an entity separate from the Swedish ones and assert the necessity of their existence, a director with some artistic cachet (i.e. FINCHER ™) is near essential, but the reason why the specific director for the job is FINCHER ™ is his subversive streak. This is a calculated gamble, because while there's always the danger someone could choose to subvert the material in some way that could totally fuck things up, someone with an understanding of branding is less likely to fuck with stuff too much. Or, in other words, the degree of subversion you're going to get is more in toying with subtext and streamlining rather than any kind of radical changes. And that's exactly what I liked about David Fincher's take on The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. (Note: hereafter be spoy-laaaaaaz)

This version eschews the book's digressions and zooms through the establishment of journo-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig)'s situation (hewroteathingaboutarichguywhofuckedhimoverandnowhisreputation'sinruins; that's about as easy to read as it is to follow in the movie) and wastes just as little time setting up Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) as a pierced, tattooed, eyebrow-less hacker dressed in all black who's at the mercy of bureaucrats due to her anti-social streak. Still, with all the streamlining in Steven Zaillian's adaptation, and the immense amount of exposition David Fincher and DP Jeff Cronenweth manage to convey visually, it still takes a while to introduce the main story, where elderly industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) hires Blomkvist to investigate the decades-old mystery of the disappearance (and almost-certain murder) of his niece Harriet. And, by necessity, the large and nasty Vanger family. It takes even longer for Blomkvist to hire Salander as his research assistant, but hey. Sometimes things take a while. (And sometimes they involve a whole massive creepy subplot involving Salander being sexually abused by her bureaucratic overseer that you'd think could be cut with no net loss other than one of the most fucked-up rape scenes ever filmed except, whoops, that sets up the whole plot of the second movie so it needs to be in there; I know it's part of what the book and the series at large is about, but it's still fucking fucked the fuck up.)

Blomkvist, with the help of an off-hand comment made by his daughter, catches on to a Biblical connection with Harriet's disappearance, and with Salander's help, discovers a related series of sex murders of women, though Salander notes Harriet seems to be an aberration within this whole thing. They find out a whole lot more about how the Vangers are fucked up and Nazis and really unpleasant shitheads and stuff, which eventually leads to the inevitable revelation that the big nasties in re: the sex murders have been perpetrated by Vangers. In particular (major major big-ass huge spoiler after pic, proceed no further 'less you already read/saw this) . . .

. . . Stellan Skarsgard. The problem with watching movies is that the second Stellan Skarsgard shows up in an American movie, you know he's up to no good. He's Stellan Skarsgard. Even if you don't remember from the book that Martin is the Vanger with the sex-killing hobby, you see Stellan Skarsgard and you're like “okay, the secret entrance to the sex-killing dungeon is probably behind the wine rack, it wouldn't be behind the bookcase, because that's where they're expecting us to think it is.” Cuz, c'mon y'all, for real: when Stellan Skarsgard shows up in a movie you know what the fuckin deal is.

So Stellan Skarsgard bushwacks Daniel Craig and ties him up in his sex-killing FINCHER ™ dungeon. Where there's a reel-to-reel tape recorder, because awesome. And the best David Fincher-y fuck you to everything ever (THAT I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING LOVED) . . . Stellan Skarsgard throws on Enya when it's time to sex-kill. Oh lordy lordy that's a fuckin brilliant touch. I . . . just . . . wow. Enya. Stellan Skarsgard. David Fincher, I hope when you're 90 and looking back on your life's feats, you start doing that old man laugh with the whole top half of your body and go “Heh heh heh, I had Stellan Skarsgard put on Enya . . . hehehehehe yep, I own.”

Anyway. In an extremely effective bit of cross-cutting, Salander gradually realizes that the sex murders were done by the late Gottfried Vanger and his son Martin, and just in the nick of time manages to save Blomkvist by barging into Martin's sex-killing dungeon and owning him in the face with a golf club, leading to a snazzy car chase, leading to Martin's car exploding without Salander having to do anything (even though she was totally prepared to light Martin up with his own gun, and in fact was juuuust about to when his car blew up).

After all the adrenaline wears off, it occurs to Blomkvist and Salander that they still don't have any evidence that Harriet Vanger was actually killed. In very brisk, blink-and-you'll-miss-the-extrapolations couple of minutes, our heroes figure out that Harriet is not dead, and is in fact living in London under her sister's (or cousin's? I'm not quite sure, but there's a pretty funny joke about Blomkvist not being able to keep all the Vangers straight early on that Daniel Craig plays perfectly, more on which in a bit) identity, a fact that was not exactly tipped in her brief appearance earlier, though the audience was given a heavy wink and nudge that Joely Richardson Knows Something About This Whole Mess that is paid off when the unmasked Harriet (Joely Richardson) knows everything about this whole mess, and reveals to Blomkvist that she faked her death to get away from evil rapist Martin after having earlier owned evil rapist Gottfried upside the head with an oar.

Blomkvist exhales, is exonerated, and then there's an extended denouement where Salander fucks over the guy who ruined Blomkvist's reputation at the beginning and loots his bank accounts to the tune of two billion Euros. She celebrates by buying Blomkvist a leather jacket for Christmas, only to go over to Blomkvist's and see him with his arm around his on-and-off married girlfriend. Having had a fair bit of fun fucking Blomkvist earlier and actually falling for him, Salander is pissed, tosses the jacket, and rides her famous motorcycle out of frame and the ending is gloriously bleak, the sound of FINCHER ™ astrally cackling reverberating over the closing titles.

As someone who, to put it mildly, was deeply impatient with many aspects of the book (and, by extension, the tirelessly faithful Swedish movie) I consider the Zaillian/FINCHER ™ take on the material to be a vast improvement, in that it trims a lot of the fat and makes the narrative not only walk a straight line, but sprint. The cinematography makes even the grimiest, ugliest, shadowiest parts of the movie look like polished jewels, and—definitely for the better—takes the edge off some of the jaw-dropping nastiness depicted. There is an argument that, since things like rape and mutilation (human and animal) exist in life, to shy away from depicting them is cowardice and a willful denial of their existence. Only thing is, in a locked-room mystery hinging crucially on multiple enormous fucking coincidences and a whooooole bunch of people not bothering to check certain things that people frequently check on (not to mention the entire story kind of rests on us simultaneously believing Henrik Wanger to be likeable, intelligent, competent, and yet not aware that despite the fact that he has untold thousands of pages of dirt on his entire family that Gottfried and Martin are multiple rapist/murderers, and Martin's fucking sex-killing Enya dungeon is in his own fucking house which is line of sight from Henrik's) we can't really be playing the reality card. Just, no.

As rifuckingdiculous as the story is, FINCHER ™ et al still tell it exceedingly well. It benefits from two terrific lead performances. Not that Daniel Craig should get a cookie for daring to play a flawed, passive man or anything, but it should be noted: homes is James Bond. And the way Steve Zaillian and David Fincher read Blomkvist, and the way Daniel Craig in turn plays him, is actually a far cry from the Stieg Larsson wish-fulfillment character he comes across as in the book. In this movie, he's the dumb girl character who opens the door in the haunted house with the monster behind it. Literally. He just wanders into Martin “Stellan Skarsgard” Vanger's house all derpy-derpty-doo like nothing could possibly happen to him, and if not for the “guy” (Salander) saving him, his pretty little blond ass would have been lutfisk. Peter Gutierrez wrote a great article about the gender reversals in this picture for Twitch, and he's absolutely right: Daniel Craig is the pretty blond in this picture. There's this very funny scene later that hammers it home when Blomkvist and Salander are fucking and he's saying something about the mystery and Salander makes him shut up while she comes. Craig, as Blomkvist, has this priceless look on his face like, “But . . . I'm the dude . . . right? Why is she . . . why am I . . . huh.” Craig plays it extremely well. He manufactures a number of beautifully real moments (like when he can't keep all the Vangers straight and just little things like stubbing his toe and cursing and stuff; he does all the little things so well that they add up to an enormously successful whole). Blomkvist is just kind of, for lack of a less reductive and potentially-argument-undoingly offensive term, a pussy.

Salander, on the other hand, gets to do all kinds of fun “dude” stuff, like riding motorcycles, tasering motherfuckers, ownage, even having sex with chicks. And the superior focus of this movie's script and direction (not to mention an absolutely fucking jaw-dropping, balls-clanking performance by Rooney Mara; fuck any sense that she's being overhyped, Rooney Mara is the fucking truth) go a long way toward making this point of Salander as superhero. Her badassness in the movie is sufficient that it doesn't even matter that she's an author fantasy character. In fact, the case for this character as an actual badass is made well enough in this movie that I'll concede that that was how she was originally intended. That intent is still undone a bit by the fact that the story has to go and have Salander raped, and simply not react to that rape in any kind of recognizably human way. I know thousands of fans of the books are throwing up their hands like “not this shit again,” but there is no objective defense possible of the whole Rapey McFuckface subplot in this story. Gottfried and Martin Vanger are more than enough to make the “evil that men do” point, without having to gratuitously undercut the (already flimsy) plausibility of Salander's whole character. If you have Rapey McFuckface the bureaucrat abusing someone else and have Salander's whole taser-hogtie-blackmail-tattoo business be in revenge of that act, you lose none of her badassness. You also don't have the absolute, irretrievable loss of any sense of the character of Salander as a human being. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, you need to suspend your disbelief already with Salander, and this disbelief is too heavy to bear that weight.

But I'm someone who used to be famous for assuring people things like “Dude, the first 200 pages of that book suck but the rest of it is awesome” and “The second lead gives one of the worst performances I've ever seen, but you gotta see that movie.” And thus, in spite of the source material being unforgivably lousy, I still very much enjoyed David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The greatest commercial director who ever lived sold me a product I strongly disliked. The male lead redeemed a character I wanted to kick in the balls by retracting those balls and outright playing the character as dithering, passive, and lucky rather than good. The female lead redeemed a character I'd dismissed as a creepy whack-off fantasy, and not even by being something other than that thing, but by being so goddamned good in the role that I'm forced to be like, “All right, you may be playing a creepy whack-off fantasy, Rooney Mara, but you got massive stones and you turned in a really fucking good performance.”

Basically what I'm saying is, David Fincher is as good a director as all his fans who annoy me think he is. The only counterargument I have is that other directors exist. But holy shit. David fucking Fincher sure is talented. If he doesn't come back, producer Scott Rudin may need to bring Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Sidney Lumet, and Alfred Hitchcock back from the dead and make a fuckin chimera out of those motherfuckers (provided the flimsy certainty of them even being the right motherfuckers) because the next book might be a bridge too far. That one's really bad. Guess we'll find out how good a necromancer Rudin (along with whatever writer and director he gets if Steve Z. and FINCHER ™ don't come back) is round about 2014 or so.

Til then . . . merry Christmas! Hahahahaha oh man I kind of feel bad for dropping this one today. But not really.

"BEST FIGHT SCENE OF ALL TIME" SUMS IT UP NICELY, IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING

2011-12-20T01:01:00.000-05:00

I think I sprained a kidney laughing at this clip. It's from a movie called Undefeatable, which I never want to see in order to preserve the experiential perfection of watching this clip and having no idea who these dipshits are.

GUY PEARCE SURE CAN TAKE A PUNCH

2011-12-20T00:49:00.001-05:00

A EuropaCorp SF movie starring Guy Pearce, Shannon from Lost, and Peter Stormare as the Evil White Guy In A Suit? FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YES.

5 DIRECTORS REMAKE BEVERLY HILLS COP

2011-12-19T01:01:00.001-05:00

The other day I was on the subway, in the midst of a longish journey, and serendipitously decided to listen to the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack on my iPod. Whence the serendipity? I'm glad you asked. As all reliable determinant metrics show, Beverly Hills Cop is the perfect pop movie. It has Eddie Murphy at the height of his powers, a great supporting cast, a script that balanced action and comedy better than any other, and (per the inspiration for this musing) one of the best soundtracks ever. It was enormously popular, and despite both sequels sucking polar bear dick its memory is un-fuck-with-able.

Still, with the apparent mission in Hollywood to remake every movie released in the 1980s, there remains a possibility, however slim, that Beverly Hills Cop might join the parade. This is something I would prefer not to happen. I mean, I'm not climbing the walls in existential dread and hissing jeremiads in Latin at passersby (that's Wednesday night) but it is a fear. In the interests of making the best of a bad situation, I propose that rather than try—and fail—to recapture the original's perfection as pop, that we go a different direction. As the good doctor said, “When the going gets tough, the tough get weird.” In that vein, here is Beverly Hills Cop as remade by five international directors of varying degrees of renown:

Catherine Breillat's Beverly Hills Cop (international title: Un baise cochon va a Californie), dir. Catherine Breillat

Rocco Siffredi stars as a Marseille gendarme who pursues the murderer of a criminal pal to Beverly Hills. He talks only with his dick, which is a metaphor for his gun, which is in turn reciprocally a metaphor for his dick. His pursuit of the villains, punctuated by frequent unsimulated sex, serves as a critique of the male gaze. All the Americans are played by French people doing American accents (a la Heavy Rain). Ends up having almost nothing to do with the original, but hey. Hire an auteur, get an auteur picture.

Beverly Hills Cop, dir. Lars von Trier

In a massive surprise, a shot-for-shot remake of the original with the same music, same script (with all Eddie's ad-libbing transcribed and created precisely down to the syllable), but with the one inexplicable choice of having Charlotte Gainsbourg play Axel Foley, with none of the gender pronouns changed. Lars will be Lars.

बेवर्ली हिल्स के एक पुलिस: हीट पर फिर से है. (trans. Beverly Hills Cop: The Heat Is On Again) dir. Farhan Akhtar

Having remade Don (and done a sequel of that remake), Shahrukh Khan goes “fuck this, if I can remake an Amitabh Bachchan movie, Eddie Murphy ain't a thing.” After deciding against (and thus deeply wounding) Karan Johar as director, Shahrukh hires Don: The Chase Begins Again helmer Farhan Akhtar to lend it that snazzy, pizazzy, slick Hollywood feel. Arjun Rampal is cast in the Steven Berkoff role because one of the little-known pieces of cinematic wisdom, in the West at any rate, is that any movie that climaxes with Shahrukh Khan and Arjun Rampal beating the shit out of each other is going to be good. In spite of the jokes about all Bollywood movies being three-plus hours long, this is not the longest remake of the five (more on that in a bit, and the Bollywood overlength jokes are dated anyway), though there are plenty of songs; in a massive coup, SRK lands Beyonce for an item song, which leads America as one to embrace Bollywood. SRK then promptly converts to Scientology and fucks everything up. But, in spite of that, we'll always have this movie, where he pulls off his usual “How the fuck is this guy going to own? Whoa . . . holy shit, he does kind of own. Damn, he actually really owns. Wonders never cease” three-act high-wire act.

Az élet egy amerikai rendőr (trans. The life of an American police officer) dir. Béla Tarr.

The longest of the bunch, consisting of one eight-hour single take of Axel Foley (played by Donald Glover, thus making Tarr, bizarrely, the only director who thought to make the picture with a 20-something black comedian) at his desk, doing paperwork and making phone calls, for a whole shift; when Axel gets up to take a piss or get a cup of coffee, Tarr's camera stays on his desk, speaking to the grim nature of day-to-day reality as a policeman. The business of the dead friend and the Beverly Hills police investigation of Victor Maitland is handled entirely over the phone, with Axel's side of the conversation the only one we get to observe. The film ends with Axel receiving one final call from BHPD from which one can either infer that they'll be investigating Maitland or that they're just humoring Axel. The credits roll in silence.

Laurel Canyon Cop, dir. Lisa Cholodenko

Still smarting from the eight or nine years it took her to get financing for her third feature, 2010's The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko accepts a massive goddamn pile of money from Paramount to direct a Beverly Hills Cop remake. After a careful series of negotiations that end with her getting final cut, Cholodenko raises the “fuck you” flag to full mast and casts Gina Gershon as Axel Foley, turning the original's gay subtext (a byproduct of the perfect storm of Eddie's “the lady doth protest too much”ism on The Gay and the fact that they had to cut the fuck scene between him and Jenny Summers because a black guy couldn't shtup a white lady in a move in 1984, one of the thousands of reasons you can blow 80s nostalgia out your fuckin ass) into text.

So, basically, what we're talking about here is a leisurely-paced (maybe a little too leisurely-paced, but hey, ya can't win 'em all) movie where Gina Gershon flies in from Detroit and swaggers around in a leather jacket owning bad guys and having sex with Jenny Summers (Carla Gugino). And, although everyone spends an hour laughing their asses off at how dumb it is, they keep in the line “I wish they all could be California girls,” uttered by Gina immediately before going to town on Carla Gugino. This picture ends up grossing a billion dollars, sweeping the Oscars, and ushering in an era of world peace.

The banana in the tailpipe scene is handled a little differently in this one.

I don't believe in jinxes, so if you see in Variety that they've announced a Beverly Hills Cop remake, don't blame me. Just repost the shit out of this so I can walk around with my zipper down fulminating about how fuckin prescient I am. Which I do anyway, but it's always nice to have supporting texts. Now let's all do the Neutron Dance.

WHY SHAME BOTH IS AND ISN'T EVERYTHING YOU'VE HEARD IT IS

2011-12-15T12:37:00.000-05:00

First unveiled at the Venice Film Festival and then at Toronto, where it was acquired for distribution by Fox Searchlight, Shame arrived in theaters this month the subject of a great deal of conversation. As the followup feature to British director Steve McQueen's Hunger, where Michael Fassbender—who also stars in Shame—turned in an eye-opening performance as Bobby Sands on his hunger strike, Shame had people going, “oh, yeah, far out, those guys, cool.” But mainly, the thing people were talking about was the sex.

Anytime anyone makes a picture with sex in it America freaks the fuck out. And Shame not only had nudity but dudity: Michael Fassbender's penis was apparently all over this motherfucker, and it was big, too. When McQueen sold the picture to Fox Searchlight, apparently one of the terms was they had to release it as an NC-17 if necessary, and Fox Searchlight, to their credit, not only did but did a bit of dick-swinging of their own about how they were going to wear the NC-17 as a badge of honor and fuck y'all and all kinds of nice, swaggery stuff. Of course, with all this talk about the NC-17, people who hadn't seen it yet started getting the sense that Michael Fassbender's 14-inch throbbing erect member was the entire subject of the movie, if all the talk was to be believed (Ed. Note: it's not 14 inches, nor is it throbbing or erect, and really isn't on display all that much). And, inevitably, despite the best attempts of many to maintain and not bug out about all the sex, Shame ended up becoming either the “Michael Fassbender's penis” movie or “the NC-17 movie.”

What I found, when I finally saw it yesterday, is that it actually is both of things. And isn't. McQueen and co-writer Abi Morgan present the audience with very few specific details, which would be maddening if it was an accident, but not very long into the picture I started getting the sense—reinforced by everything that happened for the rest of its running time—that what they were up to was creating something whose meaning would be provided by each audience member's individual interpretation of it, kind of a cinematic BYOB party. So, what follows may say more about me than it does the picture. Or not. If your interpretation of the picture is that everything is spelled out and so forth, then I'm wrong. (Ed. Note: I'm never wrong. Fucker.) (Further Ed. Note: past this point be mild spoilers, be thou warned.)

Michael Fassbender stars as Brandon, a really good-looking guy with a (surprisingly realistically) really nice (if a bit cold) apartment with some kind of unspecified yuppie day job that keeps him in reasonably though not ridiculously luxurious creature comforts. His boss, David (James Badge Dale, who's secretly becoming one of the best character actors alive), is married but tries incessantly (and ineptly) to fuck every attractive woman in sight; Brandon doesn't even try and all the women his boss tries to fuck approach him. But, because he's not terribly proactive, Brandon relies mostly on porn, hookers, and webcam girls for sexual gratification. Mostly on porn, though: dude's got a fucking ton of it.

Still, whatever, don't knock a dude's hustle (as I'm sure Gautama Buddha would have said). His life's going okay. He charms some random suits into doing some random deal that his non-specified company is up to (it doesn't matter what the company does, because it doesn't matter to Brandon, it's just his job). He may need to go to the office men's room to fap multiple times a day, but who among us is without our quirk(s)? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If fapping three times a day at work and getting picked up by women in Audis who have you fuck them against a pillar under the FDR drive and maintaining the porn library of Congress isn't getting in the way of your everyday existence, it's not a problem.

But then, his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) shows up. And literally everything that can go wrong does. I'll leave the story, such as it is, here, because the whole rest of it is Brandon's shame spiral anyway. His carefully ordered existence comes apart, and he's led to question whether any of it has meaning. You know, no biggie, just all that shit.

The main thing I think a lot of people missed with this picture is that Brandon's shame thing doesn't originate from sex. The way he relates to people (gender ambiguity intentional) sexually stems, as I read it, from his inability or unwillingness (or unwillingness that begets inability) to relate to other human beings besides himself. The initial sequence in the picture, a series of shots of Brandon either alone on the subway or alone at his apartment or at the office or out drinking with co-workers but at arm's length physically (and certainly emotionally) from them show us: this is what he wants. He's won. He has a spiffy high-rise apartment with his vinyl records and his porn-glutted computers and hookers to come over and shtup him (notably, the one non-hooker he connects sexually with in this sequence is driven, successful, and is aspiring to be all that Brandon outwardly is, naturally making her be like, “I want to fuck that guy.” While we're on the theme of projecting one's own interpretations onto blank slates and shit.)

Sissy's arrival throws this all into disarray precisely because what she represents is a connection and obligation to something other than Brandon's self. She's everything he's tried to leave behind: vulnerability, disorder, emotion. She makes out with and then fucks David, for whom Brandon feels contempt for his ineptitude with women, for his having “fallen victim” to marriage/kids, and yet somehow being the boss in spite of all this. So on top of everything else she's attracted to things Brandon loathes. And he envies her, as well, quietly: she's a singer, and while no Maria Callas or anything she does a slow, mournful cover of “New York, New York” that harmonizes with the movie's emotional tone and outsider's perspective on New York City quite nicely, as well as evoking the kind of unrehearsed emotional response from another human being that Brandon either can't or doesn't know how to. The end provides a (very) faint glimmer of hope that Brandon at least recognizes the cause of his anhedonia, and that having so recognized he may find some kind of fulfillment. But, again, that's what I read into it. It could have been an affirmation that he's fucking doomed.

As for the fucking, there is a bit. Michael Fassbender's penis makes an early and prominent appearance in the picture, and while big is nonetheless not noteworthy for anything other than being a penis, which about half humanity has. For the most part the sex is shot in a way that highlights the impersonality of the act for Brandon. Either all we can see is a tit or a belly button or the side of a hip or the back of a head or an ass, rather than a whole human being he's connecting to (with the one notable exception of the one encounter when he can't get off; in that instance it's not even necessarily that he can't get it up, because he doesn't really try, it's that he's afraid of what'll happen if he does: I mean, fuck, it could lead to a relationship and an emotional obligation.) Carey Mulligan's much-discussed—and, frankly, rather lovely, despite the awkwardness of the scene—nude scene is shot through a mirror; Sissy, as Brandon's sister, is verboten to him sexually, so there's that added level of remove, but she still does look good naked, so he doesn't leave right away either. It's all a giant goddamn fucking mess.

The movie itself is not. Steve McQueen knows what to do with a camera. On a budget of about $8 mil, he makes New York come alive. The geography makes sense except for when it deliberately doesn't (something only a New Yorker would give a shit about, but take my word for it, it's good.) The acting is all terrific in an ever-so-slightly-heightened naturalistic mode, which is the best thing about the movie as a whole: it's about a guy whose sex life is on a scale few civilians are even capable of contemplating and fucked up in a way that requires a bit of abyss-gazing experience to process without shutting down, and yet it never rings false. The movie is not, as many reviews have said, about sex addiction. Brandon's not an addict. It's not his compulsive pornography and one-night-stand habits that are at the root of his problem, it's that those habits come out of his inability to process anyone else's worth as equaling his. That is his shame: his complete, hermetically-sealed, absorption with self.

Being a picture whose apparent point is to challenge the audience to determine what is actually in the movie and what is their own projection onto it, and being that the notion of reciprocal projection takes a fairly bright synaptic spark to sort out, Shame is not a popcorn picture (Ed. Note: keep in mind, the dude telling you this happily noshes away and periodically goes “Ha ha! Fuck yeah Delphine Seyrig, get it girl” while watching Last Year at Marienbad) but that shouldn't be taken to mean that it's “too difficult” or intimidating or any of that horse pucky. Shame is a challenge, but it's a challenge well worth meeting. The fact that by the end of the movie, I was deeply empathetic toward a rich guy with a big dick who gets laid effortlessly and is a brutal asshole without cause to the one person who loves him should be taken as a sign that this is a very good movie indeed.

Carey Mulligan: the loveliest fifth business in the history of narrative

R.I.P. BERT SCHNEIDER

2011-12-14T12:10:00.000-05:00

Bert Schneider, (c) Los Angeles Times

Bert Schneider died last night. He was an enormously important figure in Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s, contributing to what has variously been called the "New Hollywood" and the American New Wave, producing landmark pictures like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Picture Show. Due to the circumstances under which he found himself in the middle-late 60s, Schneider had to bet pretty much everything he had in the world on every picture he produced. That kind of thing is unsustainable because it's so draining, but it takes balls. And whatever else you can say about the cat, he had massive ones. So raise a glass, and salute one of the singular figures in the American cinema.

GOD SAVE FU MANCHU, MORIARTY, AND DRACULA

2011-12-11T03:26:00.000-05:00

xkcd, reminding us that even goatse is going to get the fucking "remember when" treatment

Any number of movie writers have already given forth their “2011 is the year of nostalgia” thinkpieces, so rather than either pile on or write one of those dumb attention whoring “those other movie writers are retards” posts I'm going to tell y'all why it's natural at this point in the great human experiment that the past be on people's minds, and why the three foremost examples in what is now fashionable in some circles to call the “nostalgia porn” genre aren't really nostalgic.

As to that first point, shit's changing. From the Arab Spring to the Occupied Autumn, the great lurching shift toward a fully 21st century reality is underway in many parts of the world, right on schedule. A hundred years ago it was Europe going bugfuck and going “YO IT'S TIME FOR WORLD WAR ONE, BYETCHES,” two hundred years ago it was Napoleon flexing his nuts and acting like such a dick everyone thought he was shorter than he was because overcompensation was the only possible explanation. Hopefully this time around we can avoid as many people getting killed. But, anyway, major shifts that change everything frequently happen right at the beginning of the second decade of the century. And, when Everything Changes Forever, it's only natural that people start looking back at the world that was, and because the future is uncertain and—to some—scary, a certain glow of fondness is going to illuminate those looks back.

These aren't the only times when people look to the past, of course, but times like these there's more in the noosphere than usual, to the point where it's the prevailing theme in American cinema this year. Three pictures come to mind along with the subject, all very well received, all factoring heavily in awards-season speculation. They are:

Midnight In Paris (dir. Woody Allen)

I absolutely loved this movie, in spite of the one—not insignificant—flaw of Rachel McAdams being such an asshole it's almost like she's a revenge character. All she does the whole picture is, along with her mother, bust Owen Wilson's balls without motivation and to operatic excess. While she's intended to be a function of Owen Wilson's dissatisfaction with the venal, ignorant modern world (and while she seems totally unrealistic, someone—a relative, though I won't say which one—actually did say something as shitty to me once as Rachel McAdams does when she shushes Owen Wilson because Michael Sheen is talking) Woody kind of overdoes it with her, to the point where you're like, “If she really thought Owen Wilson was such a choad, why'd she get engaged to him?” His motivation's a little easier to understand; weak and shallow though it makes dudes look, there's an awful lot of mean dumbness we'll accept from someone as good-looking as she is. Yeah, go ahead, roll your eyes. Truth is truth. Anyway, enough of that shit, let's get on with the 90% of Midnight In Paris that totally fucking rocks:

Owen Wilson plays a successful screenwriter who's trying to write a novel, and somehow manages to convince his asshole fiancee (Rachel McAdams, see above) to come to Paris with him while he works on it. She keeps dragging him around to tourist-y shit, often with her “friend” whom she's (a little too) obviously fucking (Michael Sheen, in the greatest portrayal of that guy who dominates every conversation with his copious and frequently inaccurate triviata on any given subject OF ALL TIME). So one night Owen Wilson's out walking the streets while Rachel McAdams is doing something to make the audience hate her, and he has a seat to catch his breath and have one of those “holy fuck I'm in Paris” moments when, as a clock strikes midnight, a 1920s car pulls up and F. Scott Fitzgerald offers him a ride. Fuck. Yes.

Woody does some of the best work he's ever done with the 20s sequences, capturing both the allure and the parts about it where you're like “uhhh . . . yeah, not so much” (i.e. keeping Zelda Fitzgerald from jumping into the Seine every five minutes.) Owen Wilson's open-minded, open-hearted, open-mouthed wanderings through this vividly rendered world rubs off after not much time at all, and it's tempting to just quote the whole thing, but if you haven't seen it yet that's not fair, and anyway, isn't the point. Nor is the fact that the guy who plays Hemingway is fucking amaaaaaaaaaaaazing (Corey Stoll. Remember that name.)

What is, is a scene right at the end of the second act, where Woody (skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen it yet) gets his Inception on and goes for a fantasy dreamworld within a dreamworld, taking Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard, with whom he's fallen in some pretty apparently genuine love, to her favorite time in history, La Belle Époque. By this point in the movie I was enjoying Woody's little fluffy ode to every college freshman's first time machine destination and admiring the craft behind it, but once Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard hit Belle Époque and kick it with Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, and Gauguin and the three of them start talking about how the Renaissance must have been the best time to be alive I went “ohhhhhh shit . . . bravo, Woody. Bravo.”

Cuz if anyone's earned the right to be a little nostalgic, it's Woody. Between everybody busting his balls about how his movies aren't funny anymore (which they've been doing literally almost as long as I've been alive; he made that joke himself in Stardust Memories, which came out the month before I turned 2) and his well-documented and controversial marital habits—not to mention the fact that he's 76 now—you could hardly blame Woody for being like, “Man, remember the past? Wasn't it better, without all the ball-busting?” But no, he looks back, sees that it's awesome, and still comes firmly down on the side of “Live in the moment. Resist nostalgia. Now is all you really have.” I could hug Woody for that, if I wasn't worried that he'd break. The picture ends perfectly. If anything was going to be his highest grossing picture of all time, it should be one this good.

Sticking with New York filmmakers, next up:

Hugo (dir. Martin Scorsese)

I've documented my dislike of most 3D movies, and my position about it being more a commercial than artistic innovation, a number of times. That being said, I'd be a fucking idiot if I didn't trust that Martin Scorsese would do something worthwhile with it. Not everything he's directed has been good, but you know if you see his name on something, you know his burning passion for cinema is going to show through, and there's going to be at least one thing in the movie where you're like “damn, okay, I haven't seen that before.” Even something like The Color Of Money, which he admitted to making (fittingly enough) for the money, still has something (The Color Of Money itself, in the right mood, is awesome.)

Hugo, as one would hope from Marty S., has by far—it's really not even close—the greatest 3D visuals to date. (Speaking of things I've said a number of times but can't say enough, fuck Avatar right under its blue fucking tail.) Marty and production designers Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo create a magical storybook Paris through which DP Robert Richardson's camera zooms, swoops, and hides right on the other side of a wall or window peaking in. There are some of the most gorgeous blues I've ever seen. It's got every last bit of visual grandeur $150 million can buy, and a bunch extra that you can only get when your director fucking means it, and Marty S. fucking means it.

The story, adapted from the Caldecott-medal winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is, on one level, about a boy named Hugo who lives in a train station who gradually befriends an elderly man who turns out to be pioneering filmmaker George Méliès. On another level, it's about the transformative power of movies, and how they're the stuff dreams are made of. On a lower but no less important level, it's about trust, friendship, purpose, and love. All things I'm totally on board with.

Only problem is, Hugo's got about an hour and a half of story stretched out over about two hours and ten minutes. The distension of the running time is largely due to the fact that Hugo and Méliès go through the motions of being, respectively, a mute and an evil old bastard for about a half hour, when in fact Hugo has plenty to say (kid's a borderline genius) and Méliès is a really nice guy who's a little down on his luck. The problem with the beginning being so interminable is that at no point in any of it are we given any insight into why Hugo can't just talk to the old guy and why Méliès is such a prick to the kid. Then, all of a sudden, as if the first half hour of the movie didn't exist, boom, we have the actual story. From there, the story is . . . okay. I feel slightly like an asshole bitching about it because the movie's heart is in a very good place, and a certain amount of simplicity and heavy-handedness can be written off to Marty aiming the picture at kids. But withholding the reasons to care about the main character and the character who ends up being the picture's moral center for over a quarter of its running time keeps Hugo from being a complete success.

That said, Hugo's absolutely worth seeing, and worth seeing on a big screen in 3D, because you absolutely positively for real reals haven't ever seen nothing like this. Even if it fails as narrative it succeeds absolutely in being a lecture on cinematic epistemology with professor Scorsese. In making a picture in digital 3D about the very earliest silent movies, Marty telescopes the entire history of cinema into one movie, a linkage made all the more explicit with some shockingly brilliant post-converted footage from Méliès' own films, which simply and beautifully makes the point that one movie is every movie. Even if Marty doesn't make little kids want to run out and see a bunch of silent movies, he makes a pretty good case that the little fuckers are shitheads for not wanting to.

Even the fact that the writing drove me insane but I loved everything else ends up being a testament to the power of the director and crew of a movie. Also, if you told me that Marty S. had pulled you aside and said, “Look, if you repeat this I'll deny it but this whole fucking picture is a massive memetic experiment to program little kids so that they become devotees of the theory that the director, not the screenwriter, is the true author of a movie, and a number of things you as an adult don't get but that are going to be little semiotic time bombs for anyone under 12 that result inevitably with their ability to write 500 page exegeses of G.W. Pabst, F.W. Murnau, and D.W. Griffith by the time they're 15,” I'd slap my forehead and go, “IT ALL SEEMS SO CLEAR NOW.” Plenty of people I trust and respect were transported by Hugo. Something about it kept me at arm's length the whole night. I thought it was a little clunky, though I can't front on its sincerity. C'est la vie.

Speaking of French, our last picture:

The Artist (dir. Michel Hazanavicius)

Now, this, my friends, is what the fuck I'm talkin' about. It deals with a lot of the same themes as Hugo—silent cinema and the appreciation thereof, most prominently—and also has a scene-stealing dog (much like the two pictures themselves, I suspect one will either prefer the alternation between stoic contemplation and feverish, sloppy pursuit of the dog from Hugo or the zany mugging and pluckiness of the dog in The Artist; both dogs are microcosms of their respective movies.) And they're formal mirror images of each other: Hugo used all the modern technology money can buy to pay homage to the earliest movies, where The Artist uses the visual style and techniques of 20s and 30s cinema to tell the always-relevant (especially today) story about how time marches on, and marches past whoever can't keep up.

With a couple notable (and stunning) exceptions, The Artist is done totally straight as a late-period silent movie. Its protagonist, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), is a massive star in 1927 Hollywood, with charisma for days, and broad mugging for weeks. After the opening of his latest hit picture, George literally bumps into a young woman named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, whose beauty and radiance are beyond the scope of mortal language to describe), who, as it turns out, is an aspiring actress. And does quite well, seeing as how her beauty and radiance are beyond the scope of mortal language to describe. IT'S AS IF YOU'D NEED TO FILM HER TO GET THE POINT ACROSS.

Good thing The Artist is a movie, then, that's what I'm saying. The story gets going once sound is introduced, as muckety-muck John Goodman and a bunch of the standard evil white guys in suits you get hanging around any movie company (though John Goodman is, as his name implies when you bifurcate it, one of the good ones) inform George that it's either start talkin' or start walkin'. George, pissed, bankrolls his own epic silent melodrama, that ends up opening the same say as Peppy's latest. You know which one wins and which one goes down in flames. I ain't gotta spoil it.

The movie doesn't end there, though. It continues through a bunch of capital M Melodrama to an ending that's at once triumphant, wistful, and even a bit sad. But every second of it hums with a love of movies and an uncanny skill in recreating the cinema of early Hollywood. It succeeds in a way a picture like Far From Heaven (which I, by the way, really liked) doesn't in managing to make the recreation more than an academic exercise; The Artist actually is a “you'll laugh, you'll cry” movie exactly like the ones to which it pays homage. The dance sequences are killer, the leads are perfect in both look and demeanor, and the dog is just the best.

As much as it would appear, in a thousand different ways, like The Artist is the most nostalgic of the three, when Jean Dujardin's smiled his last smile, Bérénice Bejo is done being like “there isn't another actress alive who could have done this as perfectly as I just did. Bask” and the dog has pulled his last pratfall, The Artist is really a movie about the importance of adapting to changing times. The inability to do so nearly breaks George. It is, of course, still very much about respecting the past—Peppy's efforts to pay respect to those who've come before verge on saintly—but since the embodiment of the importance of that respect also fits flawlessly with the modern age, it's clear that the message is not to live in the past, merely to just remember, every now and then, how awesome it was.

Since I clearly have a lot of work to do founding this religion based on Bérénice Bejo (and since she's Hazanavicius' wife, keeping one step ahead of his jealous wrath if he thinks I'm crushing on her too hard) it would probably help to define nostalgia, and why none of these pictures succumb to the temptations thereof. There's a difference between looking back and being like, “Yeah, that was nice,” and yearning painfully to live in the past. Midnight In Paris looked like it was going to be the latter before Woody, at the perfect moment and in the perfect way, revealed nope. He even has Owen Wilson (did I mention he was terrific in that? I probably should: he was terrific in that) quote Faulkner's famous line “The past ain't dead. It ain't even past” in a context that suggests that the past not being past is a sign that it's always with us in our memories, but that life is lived in the world itself, not in our heads. Hugo isn't nostalgia, it's a history lesson about the primacy of film conversation. And The Artist, the sneakiest of the three, employs about as many nostalgia-inciting elements as there are stars in the sky to tell a story about changing with the times.

So, if in the Year of Nostalgia, none of the most “nostalgic” movies really are that thing, what are they? Three movies that came out the same year as each other; a year where people have been tending to reflect on the past a bit, to be sure, but a meditation on a thing is not the same as the thing itself, just as depiction is not endorsement. Even if my enjoyment was variable with the three movies under question, all deserve better than to be dismissed with one adjective, most especially if it doesn't apply.

PLAYING INTO THE HANDS OF CORPORATE AMERICA DOESN'T ALWAYS SUCK

2011-12-10T11:17:00.000-05:00

Case in point, this wonderful site. Yeah, it's an Old Spice ad, but it's also a perfect summation of the aesthetic mission of this blog. So there's that.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

2011-12-04T21:43:00.001-05:00

I was told by a creative writing professor in college that one should not write road novels, because she thought they betrayed the writer's inability to think of a proper plot. I was told by another creative writing professor that all good writing originates from a sense of place (though she implied that the only legitimate kind of writing was short autobiographical fiction by women in New Mexico about deceased parents and guilt about the Native American genocide, which is weird because she wasn't from New Mexico; as you might imagine, she and I got along so famously that she tried to have me expelled.) Although I disagreed with them on both these points (respectfully and disrespectfully, respectively) it's through having studied with both of them that I figured out how road narratives work when they work. It's when place contributes to the evocation of character, and the journey of the lead character(s) from A to B is the entire point of the narrative. Yes, 19 year old creative writing students deciding “I'm going to write a novel about a bunch of us in a car to California smoking weed” should be discouraged from actually writing that novel. But for stories involving an actual intellectual/emotional/other journey, of import to anyone other than the protagonist him/herself, literalizing that by having the character make a physical journey works just fine, and can be a nice lil ol metaphor there. Thus, today I'm going to write about The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Motorcycle Diaries, and The Trip. (Note: the following contains a few random spoilers here and there, but only for movies that are old enough to buy cigarettes.)

Obviously there have been other road movies. I've seen many of them, just as I've read many road novels (the enduring popularity of which can be blamed entirely on On The Road, which is the most important book in the world when you're 15 but is completely unique and impossible to emulate, even by its own author). There's Easy Rider, but Easy Rider was about Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda looking cool on motorcycles, not character development; Billy and Captain America don't change at all, unless you count when they get lit the fuck up by those dudes in the truck at the end (which sort of counts, death being a change). And there's Thelma & Louise, as Isaac Butler pointed out, which has character development, and does involve a road trip, but belongs to a separate genre, the “outlaws on the run” movie (see also Bonnie and Clyde, True Romance, Thieves Like Us, etc etc.) With those pictures, having The Man (in more ways than one, in Thelma & Louise's case) on one's ass means that the leisurely, unhurried pace necessary for characters to realize shit or mature or what have you on their own schedule is obviated, and that “take your time, we're in no rush” element is a very key element to the three movies I want to talk about.

The least of the three, in terms of heft and cinematic adventurousness, is The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert:

Which is not to say that it's not a delightful movie, because it is. It's also a movie that history has had a few drinks with, because now we can say that it stars Agent Smith, Leonard Shelby, and General Zod (Ed. Note: government names—Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp) as the most fabulous cabaret act in all of Sydney, Australia. Weaving and Pearce are industry-standard drag queens, though Stamp is a trans woman, as a wrinkle. The story is set in motion when an old friend of Weaving's offers them a gig out in Alice Springs (for those of y'all not up on your 'Strayan geography, Sydney's way in the east and is one of the world's cultural capitals and Alice Springs is a couple thousand clicks inland in the Northern Territory, which is basically Crocodile Dundee's turf) and the girls hop on a bus called Priscilla and go have themselves a road trip.

The journey inland clearly parallels Weaving's and Stamp's attempts to make sense of their respective pasts; Pearce's job is more to be comic relief, which he handles brilliantly, but his character isn't given as much depth as the other two. By the time they, and the story, reach(es) their/its destination (fuck you, pronouns) a lot of positive change has taken place, and life can move forward, in brainmeltingly awesome costumes. A large element in everything turning out okay is represented, symbolically, by our protagonists managing to transcend their otherness (which is manifest) and connect with their country and its people. Stamp plays a recent widow who—mild spoiler alert—meets a really nice small town guy who doesn't give two fucks what kinda genitals s/he was born with, he's just mad into Terence Stamp. Hugo Weaving—slightly spicier spoiler—reunites with his not-yet-divorced wife (the old friend who gives them the gig, no less) and young son, with whom he finally forms a father-son relationship amidst the central Australian countryside. One could even make the argument that given Alice Springs' geographical centrality, he journeyed to the heart of Australia, and in bringing his son back with him to Sydney at the end, he brings his rediscovered heart back with him. Oh, yeah, that's right, there's more to that movie than a bunch of ABBA, CeCe Peniston, and Alicia Bridges. Recognize.

Next, a radically different movie (that I stupidly left off my top 10 of the last decade, when it really should clock in at #2), The Motorcycle Diaries:

Get it? RADICAL? See, it's funny because it's Che Guevara.

The Motorcycle Diaries, of course, is the story of a very young, not-yet-Che (Gael Garcia Bernal, fucking awesome), who hops on a bike with his pal (Rodrigo de la Serna, just as fucking awesome) for a roundabout tour of South America on their way from Buenos Aires to a leper colony in Peru where they're volunteering and eventually to Caracas. Of course nothing goes the way they plan it, and by the time they get to the end of their journey, proto-Che is at the beginning of the journey that leads to becoming Che, and achieving dorm-room-wall immortality.

It's a story that underscores the principle that a story being happy or sad depends on when you call “cut.” Had it gone on—like Steven Soderbergh's two-part biopic—it would have gotten to the years when Che's good intentions confronted uncooperative realities (to be kind) and he started killing people and fucking shit up (to be less kind). The Motorcycle Diaries stops at a point when young Ernesto still has his whole life ahead of him, yet it's still a complete journey. Going from a liberal but sheltered medical student to a passionate advocate for social justice is quite a leap.

Like Priscilla (Ed. Note: I know this is the first time you ever saw anyone compare these two pictures. I know I'm awesome, you don't have to say it), the characters' journey in The Motorcycle Diaries is paralleled by the massive geographical distance traversed. In this case, the variety of geography is also vast, from snowcapped mountains to deserts to jungles. And, like the journey itself does, proto-Che connects all of these terrains, and the people who inhabit them, coming to regard South America as a continent rather than a group of discrete nation-states, and South Americans similarly as one people. From there, the obvious next step is that the world and all its people are as one.

Director Walter Salles and writer Jose Rivera do a good job in The Motorcycle Diaries of not judging proto-Che either way, instead letting the events unfold and simply pointing a camera at them. The way those events unfold make it seem inevitable, in the sense of the natural world to which the picture is so indelibly linked, that proto-Che would undergo the moral and intellectual journey he does. But, rather than the movie suggesting that anyone would have this reaction, it restricts itself to its observation on its particular characters. Proto-Che is proto-Che. You are you.

Fuckin' hell The Motorcycle Diaries was good. Anyway, moving on:

The Trip

This right here is a road picture as only Michael Winterbottom could make, and only in England. Edited down from a BAFTA-winning six-episode TV show about Steve Coogan (Steve Coogan), having been talked into a tour of restaurants in the North of England by his girlfriend (Margo Stilley), who's gone back to America because things aren't going so well, being “forced” to ask his friend Rob Brydon (Rob Brydon) to accompany him on the trip because he “can't do it alone.” And so they spend five days driving around England, eating in restaurants, and talking. And talking. And talking. And talking.

The Trip contains more references to other Michael Winterbottom movies than anyone could possibly be expected to catch without an annotated edition. Catching them all, thankfully, isn't the point, but it does well to note that Michael Winterbottom is a total fucking wiseass, always fucking with audience expectations, throwing change-ups (googlies?), keeping us on our toes.

For this reason, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that a Michael Winterbottom road movie takes place in England, a country you can drive across in one day (provided you don't hit traffic). It's also a place that gives the sense of always having been there, and that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. The same goes, more or less, speaking very generally, for the people as well. While this may not be true in every case, it's still true that there's a prevailing sense of England and its people being this way.

So a road movie where Steve Coogan doesn't really go anywhere or do anything, beginning and ending with him alone moping in his apartment, just trucking along in an anhedonic funk, occasionally sniping at Rob Brydon to hide his secret jealousy of Brydon's relative happiness (and extremely loving marriage), is kind of the perfect English road movie.

I give Winterbottom, Coogan, and Brydon a lot of credit for making the fact that The Trip is almost casually perfect of secondary importance to it being one of the funniest and most quotable pictures in like ever. I'm not even going to embarrass myself trying to describe how awesome the jokes are, so I'm going to let the movie speak for itself. Also, bear in mind, when you watch a whole hour and forty-five minutes of this, the cumulative effect just makes it funnier and funnier:

This one I posted last November before I even knew what The Trip was:

Finally, maybe you have to be an actor to think this is the funniest thing in the fucking universe but I am so it is:

I mean holy shit this movie is so fucking good. The fact that it speaks that perfectly to what it's like being an actor AND has a deeply considered and holistically perfect sense of place AND is a mirror image of the classic road movie AND in so being ends up being one of the best extant examples thereof is . . . well, unlike Messrs. Coogan and Brydon, I have no words. (Also, footnote: Rob Brydon is amazing in this, and Rob Brydon the character is one of my favorites in any movie in years. And, second footnote: I love how Steve Coogan is so willing, in this, Tristram Shandy, 24 Hour Party People—kind of, as that was Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson as Steve Coogan—and Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, how Coogs is willing to the point of eagerness to portray himself as such a raging twat. He always gets it juuuust right before he alienates everyone. It's quite the balancing act.)

Okay, since it's getting to time to say QED and drop the mic, to recap: a successful road narrative in its given medium is dependent on the relationship between character and place, with the place being the progenitor of the character(s), and the change in place paralleling the change, and hopefully evolution, of character. It's not the subtlest metaphor in the world, but there are certain stories—like the three discussed above, and a number of others, I'm sure—that need to be told that way. That's right, motherfucker. Q. E. D.

[drops mic]

"MR. DANNY BOWES IS A BRAINLESS MORON...."

2011-11-30T22:36:00.000-05:00

Now, as many of you may know and those who don't should, I write a weekly column for my old pal Dan Hudak's site Hudak On Hollywood. Hudak likes me to be the wild, ranty me you all know and love, as opposed to the less foul-mouthed Tor.com me (and soon-to-be Next Projection me, as of a couple days from now; this is in addition to, not in replacement of, my other rapidly-growing list of credits.)

What I'd like to do, besides plugging all the sites I write for, is direct your attention to this very funny bit of hate mail, in response to my piece about The Help this past summer. If nothing else, my mom should find the bit about washing my mouth out with soap hilarious. No . . . fucking hilarious. There we go.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY MAY OR MAY NOT BE MY FRIEND: RICK MOODY VS. FRANK MILLER

2011-11-27T14:51:00.000-05:00

So I've been spending this Sunday morning reading provocative writing whose primary intent is pissing a given group of people off, a broad category of writing; along with porn, pictures of kittens, and viruses, it's one of the four pillars of the Internet. The anger and the coffee work symbiotically to get me awake to watch football, a literalized metaphor for Internet discourse. Most of the time, when I don't have anything of value to contribute on the subject under discussion, I keep my mouth shut (not always, though; I'm not holding myself up as a paragon of restraint by any means). When Frank Miller shot his mouth off about Occupy Wall Street, I rolled my eyes—though may have privately, and entirely justifiably, muttered something about Frank Miller being a retard, which is as much a revelation as the sun rising in the east every morning—and went about my business. This morning, though, I got around to Rick Moody's response to Miller's thing, and got pissed off.

It actually pisses me off that I got pissed off, because I'd far prefer that something in the Guardian, by a high-profile American writer, putting its rhetorical foot in the ass of a deeply stupid person writing offensive and misleading things about a political movement I support, be intelligent and not stray from the point, overreach, and ultimately undo weaken the point it tries to make. But that's what Moody does in his piece. He starts with a solid premise—Frank Miller being a shithead—and tries to spin it into the entire Hollywood film industry being sympathetic to Frank Miller's brain-dead politics. And there, he fails.

The thing that sinks Moody's entire argument is the logical fallacy—one he shares with many of his and my ostensibly mutual political opponents—that his conclusions are facts. Because he doesn't like action movies, and because a cherry-picked selection of action movie stars are politically conservative (which, by the way, left off John Wayne, who would have helped make his point) he concludes that action movies themselves are inherently right-wing. Then, comic books (and Moody's contempt for them) are dragged into the argument, and equated with Stallonenegger (another assumed direct parallel presented as if inarguable) 80s explosionfests as if they're the same thing. We end up with a whole lot of lumping together, broad generalizations, and smugly self-satisfied wheel-spinning, that eventually returns to its initial, almost forgotten purpose, which is the very simple and well-established dipshittery of the venerable Mr. Miller.

One's enemies are not, by sole virtue of being one's enemies, engaged in a conspiracy. The simple nature of action movie narratives are not proof of their being propaganda. The assumption of top-down decision making (in this case, that because leading men in action movies are politically conservative and make movies that reflect, in varying degrees, their political beliefs, that Hollywood as an institution makes these movies to further a right-wing agenda) is a failure of the human mind to accept randomness and coincidence. To use an example of right-wingers doing the same thing, just so the wrong people don't read this and think I'm a toady, take the whole Communist scare: right-wingers thought the only reason leftists would say leftist stuff was because they were paid agents of Moscow; this led more than one leftist over the years to go “If only. . .” Simply because an action serves the agenda of another is not proof of direct proactive efforts by that other. And simply because an action movie may star a center-right actor and be about fucking shit up more than it is social justice, is not proof that Hollywood conspires to advance a political agenda.

Finally, Moody makes the mistake of assigning Frank Miller far too much importance within the Hollywood system. Until Robert Rodriguez and Zack Snyder, fans of Miller's work first, second, and forty-ninth as opposed to political bedfellows, made movies of his work (and the latter made a commercially successful one), Miller had been on the far periphery of Hollywood, and even now is rapidly receding back to that outsider status. His stature in the comics industry is a separate question, but he has no more relevance in Hollywood than anyone else who had one of his books adapted into a successful movie five years ago. He is (full disclosure: I am too) just some guy with a blog, on the Occupy Wall Street question.

Much like one's enemies not, by virtue of being one's enemies, all working together, the enemies of those enemies are not necessarily one's friends. Thus, while Rick Moody and I both agree that Frank Miller is a shithead, Rick Moody and I are not, alas, on the same side. Drawing a direct line between Frank Miller and a perceived collective agreement on the part of the American film industry to consciously perpetuate a right-wing political agenda would be the same as me drawing a direct line between Rick Moody's novel Purple America and a similar agreement within the publishing industry to make people who read books want to kill themselves. Both are based on nothing but the arguer's personal biases (Purple America made me want to kill myself, but lots of other people liked it); while Hollywood and the publishing industry both end up occasionally doing those things, neither Moody or I have any solid evidence that it's so.

But that's insane. Evidence? How would people write derpy “LOL ur retarded” blog posts on the Internet if they actually had to back shit up? If you take away our ability to rant about things we don't fully understand on the Internet, what the fuck is next? Taking away our pictures of kittens? I need to abandon this line of thinking and go watch some football before I fuck everything up.

SHE MATES, AND THEN SHE KILLS, AND THEN SOMEONE FILMS IT AND IT'S AWESOME: BLACK WIDOW

2011-11-25T19:02:00.000-05:00

It's Black Friday, and you know what that means: I'm watching Black Widow. (Ed. Note: it meaning that is contingent on the author noticing that it's Black Friday, which is not an annual occurrence.) It's long been a favorite of mine for reasons not entirely related to its being a good movie. There are, after all, as I've indirectly alluded to in the past and will hereby define for posterity, four categories of movies:

1—Good movies that are fun to watch: Wherein you find pictures like (and as diverse as) The Maltese Falcon, The Godfather, David Lean epics, early Godard, German Expressionist silents, Sholay, etc etc etc. Self-explanatory.

2—Good movies that aren't so much fun to watch: The kind of thing that set off that “cultural vegetables” shitstorm. The thing that rubbed me wrong about that piece wasn't so much that it dared to insult master filmmakers who like their imagery oblique and their pace deliberate (like Tarkovsky, notably), but that calling difficult art “cultural vegetables” ignores how fucking rad spinach and broccoli and so forth are when you cook them right, and it's a little insulting to vegans (“what the fuck are we, chopped soy liver?”; I just had a good time kickin' it with my vegan cousin at Thanksgiving the other day, I don't want some nekulturny fuckball indirectly insulting her) but whatever, it was a cute phrase that succeeded in pissing a lot of people off. Not the point. What is, is that not every good movie is all that easy to watch. Some movies are challenging. Tarkovsky made a bunch like that, Lars von Trier made one or two, a lot of experimental and/or politically-motivated filmmakers do, some (like Lars) deliberately make their pictures upsetting to the audience to make a point. I throw a lot of tearjerkers into this category as well, because crying sucks under the wrong circumstances.

3—Bad movies that aren't fun to watch: What I like to call “movies that could have been good if they didn't suck,” which sounds like me being a retard, but is really just a colloquialism for a picture that was sunk by poor execution, factor into this category in a big way. Also, utterly venal pieces of shit like every movie Adam Sandler has made since about 2002, assembly-line rom-coms built around the premise that lying is the stuff of madcap comedy, and movies that mistake a “message” for an excuse to not make a good movie. However, not all bad movies fit under this category, as there plenty of . . .

4—Bad movies that are fun to watch: Now we're cookin' with gas. Low-budget genre pictures, spectacular failures by horribly misguided directors, and the ol' “let's make a mountain of cocaine the size of Kilimanjaro and then rail it all over the course of principal photography” romp, all of these and more fall under this category, which some—not me, though, I'm still partial to 1—regard as the most fun of all four. I do think that more movies fall under this category than any other, if only because I love movies to an extent that I enjoy a lot of things even if they're not “good” by most generally accepted metrics, and will often let the things I like about a movie outweigh the things I don't. Such is the case with Black Widow.

Black Widow isn't a bad movie, exactly, but it isn't what a lot of people would immediately think of as being good, either. For one thing, it's a preposterous scenario, with (essentially) unmotivated villainy, and a resolution with enough moving parts that if you stop to think about it for a second, you're like “wait a minute, get the fuck outta here . . .” And yet, Black Widow is awesome.

There's a whooooole lotta talent involved in Black Widow. It was about the third “comeback” picture for director Bob Rafelson, among whose credits as a director and producer in the late 60s and early 70s are a number of all-time classics, though he'd later meet with some bad luck, which was not entirely not his fault. The great Conrad Hall was the DP (and the picture, as one might expect, looks gorgeous). It was written by Ronald Bass, who would go on to become an Oscar winner. The supporting cast, in relatively small roles, has people like Dennis Hopper, Lois Smith, Diane Ladd, Terry O'Quinn, Nicol Williamson, James Hong, and Sami Frey. And its leads are the magnificent Debra Winger and Theresa Russell.

Theresa Russell (left), sexual tension (center), Debra Winger (right)

Its story (spoiler warning) is good trashy pulp fun: Theresa Russell (second spoiler warning) plays a woman who marries rich men, gets them to change their will so they leave her everything, whereupon she kills them. Debra Winger is a Justice Department investigator who becomes consumed with connecting the dots in the absence of any concrete evidence (Theresa Russell covers things up perfectly), and proving that Theresa Russell is a killer. Once Theresa Russell figures out what Debra Winger's up to, she starts scheming an elaborate frame-up to get Debra Winger off her (very shapely) ass, only to see Debra Winger's (third and final spoiler warning) even more elaborate scheme bring about her downfall.

The story is not what makes Black Widow so much fun: it's the players and the execution. Rafelson does a good job keeping things relatively light and not trying to sell the audience on the reality of what's going on (which would be disastrous). It's a movie about how everyone wants to have sex with Theresa Russell (which in 1987 was about as universal as truths came), up to and including Debra Winger, and because that one centrally important truth was so compelling, the rest of the movie falls into place.

Also, it helped having, as a counterpoint to Theresa Russell's perfectly executed, seductive, wildly implausible villainy, Debra Winger be a completely convincing, unglamorous, awkward, regular person. This is something Hollywood constantly fucks up at, resulting in “put glasses on the supermodel and now she's ugly”syndrome, but in Black Widow, it's not just that Debra Winger is dressed in baggy sweaters, long skirts, and flats, her physicality is (deliberately) awkward, her interactions with other people even more so, she doesn't wear makeup, and you actually buy her not having had a date in forever even though her right-hand man (D.W. Moffet) and boss (Terry O'Quinn) are both clearly crushing on her. This is not because Rafelson, Hall, and the costume and makeup designers succeeded in “uglifying” her. For one, that's not physically possible—this is, after all, Debra Winger we're talking about here; for my money she was even hotter than Theresa Russell at the time, but I'm weird—but for another, the one thing the movie does a pretty good and quite sympathetic job of doing is presenting her as a closet case.

Back in the bad old days, gay characters had to be closeted, or punished, or any number of stupid conventions, but Debra Winger's character in Black Widow is one case where it actually works for the movie's benefit. They're not exactly subtle about it: her name is Alex, an androgynous shortening of Alexandra, she evinces nervous befuddlement at her male co-workers' advances and an all-consuming obsession with a gorgeous woman, and even though this has nothing to do with the movie itself, every 80s lesbian was all about the Debra Winger, so there's a bit of pop-cultural osmosis, and for all we know casting her in the first place might have been a subtle signifier of the character's repressed sexuality. And having her be unconsciously attracted to her target adds an intriguing wrinkle, the sort of thing one didn't always see in crime movies, 80s movies, or really any movies for that matter.

It also adds another wrinkle to the part when, once Theresa Russell has realized that Debra Winger might be a cop, and she concocts her elaborate scheme to frame Debra Winger for boyfriend-and-later-fiance Sami Frey's murder, a key element of which is setting Debra Winger up to shtup Sami Frey. Sami Frey being a French guy made that element of the equation easy. French guys' default mode is “I make love to zee beautiful woo-man,” so when Theresa Russell is all like “I'm jetting back to the mainland [they're in Hawaii for the whole last hour of the movie, which accounts for some gorgeous and unusual scenery]” Sami Frey is like “But . . . I make love to zee beautiful woo-man” and his French guy programming starts going “syntax error” and he gets confused, which means Theresa Russell has to point him at Debra Winger (a beautful woman), at which point Sami Frey is like, “Ah, phew, all is right with the world . . . I make love to zee beautiful woo-man!” And so they shtup, even though Debra Winger would clearly rather be nailing Theresa Russell. But Sami Frey was in Bande à Part, and even aside from that deal-clincher, he's got that passionate French guy thing going on, and Debra Winger clearly enjoys the sex. Nailing Sami Frey doesn't make her straight, it just means she knows what's up. And anyway, when he tells her that he's decided to get married to Theresa Russell—and in such a dope French guy way, too: “[Theresa Russell] and I . . . have decided to marry.” Seriously, French people fucking rule—Debra Winger is less upset that the guy she shtupped is getting married to another woman than she is “this guy is going to get murdered unless I do something.” And she already went through the experience of meeting Nicol Williamson at the end of the movie's elongated first act, and was upset when Theresa Russell killed him, this was just one horny, exotic French bridge too far.

Being worried that Theresa Russell was going to kill him was a natural reaction, too, because she kills the shit out of everyone in this. That sense of inevitability was created by one really, really good bit of editing early on, where Dennis Hopper (dead husband #2) is looking for a non-empty bottle of booze, and Theresa Russell tells him there's one—that we've just seen her shooting bad stuff into with a syringe—and he goes “ah there it is” and then BAM we cut to his funeral. It's like, if you're a rich guy, Theresa Russell is going to kill you. When she moves on to Nicol Williamson, she's shown preparing to be his perfect woman in an incredibly calculating fashion, reading up on all the kind of obscure, esoteric shit that he likes. He takes one look at her and immediately realizes that she's full of shit, being smart enough to connect the dots like “something's wrong, no one would be this perfect, not only looking like Theresa Russell but also interested in the exact same stuff I am in the exact way I always wanted someone to be interested in it” and he openly calls her on it. That's when she's like, “well, time for plan B” and gets naked, and once he gets a look at Theresa Russell naked, Dickol Williamson goes, “Nuh uh, boss, there is nothing whatsoever to be worried about here, let me handle this one” and thus was the beginning of the end.

I mean, seriously, I've seen the movie like eight times and I'd still get in that pool....

As smart as Theresa Russell was, she does make a couple really dumb-ass mistakes, though these are well within the realm of possibility for someone crazy enough to pull that kind of serial husband-murdering/inheritance aggregating scheme. One, that she doesn't rectify until too late, was not staying in frequent enough contact with the in-laws she'd seduced along with her ex-husbands, because as Debra Winger points out to Lois Smith, “she just vanished,” and Lois Smith is like, “Damn it, she's right, something's up.” The other mistake, that only really manifests after Theresa Russell thinks her frame-up of Debra Winger in the third act worked, is over-confidence. When she goes to see Debra Winger in jail, thinking that her plan has succeeded and she's framed Debra Winger, she can't resist the temptation to gloat, at which point Debra Winger turns the tables and has the cops bring Lois Smith and the very much not dead Sami Frey into the room. The Hawaiian cops go “damn, that sure was easy for such a convoluted plan,” and Debra Winger takes her new tan and fancy tropical dress and fucks off right out of the police station and into the closing credits, leaving Theresa Russell to ponder just where she went wrong and the audience to be like, “Wait a minute . . . how the hell did Debra Winger get the money to stay in Hawaii for all those months? And isn't she going to be facing a review board or something when she gets back to DC? Will Terry O'Quinn pull strings for her because wants to nail her, or will he not bother because he's never going to because she's gay?”

That's all part of why Black Widow is in that fourth category at the beginning of the post. It doesn't close all its circles, and does have a couple pretty serious narrative problems, one being that Theresa Russell is given no other motivation than “she's just evil” which is unfortunate, because all the empathy that went toward portraying Debra Winger's character as a normal person meant that the writers could have taken a second to give Theresa Russell a more realistic motivation for needing all that money (“you're never quite rich enough” being a little weak). The other is that the premise takes so long to set up that the first act is forty five minutes long and the whole rest of the movie is less than an hour, giving short shrift to the whole “Sami Frey walking around going 'I make love to zee beautiful woo-man' in Hawaii” part of the story, which means that James Hong only gets to be in a couple scenes as the sleaziest PI in the history of cinema (Ed. Note: all movies need more James Hong, even if he's not in them) and we miss out on the opportunity to develop the character of the Hawaiian cop a little more, because he's awesome but he only gets to be awesome for like thirty seconds, which is a shame. Then again, if you elongate the Hawaiian section, you lose out on one fantastic twenty minute Nicol Williamson performance, because holy shit. Even when he's playing a doomed husband in a trashy 80s thriller, that motherfucker puts on a master class. The way he futzes with his cuff when trying to figure out why Theresa Russell is coming on so strong manages to convey nervousness, uncontrollable sexual desire, and existential terror in one gesture. Is that talent? Yeah, that's talent.

So, even though its good qualities make Black Widow a little more than just a standard trashy 80s thriller, its bad qualities make it little more than a standard trashy 80s thriller. (Ed. Note: not a typo, read it again). And that, sadly, means it's not a “good” movie. But holy fuck is it fun. The sexual tension between Theresa Russell and Debra Winger alone could power Honolulu for a month. Sami Frey does the “I make love to zee beautiful woo-man” routine with panache. Nicol fucking Williamson. A Dennis Hopper cameo that's short enough that he doesn't wear out his welcome. Fuck yeah, Black Widow. Fuck yeah.

OH, ARNOLD, NEVER EVER CHANGE . . .

2011-11-20T18:57:00.000-05:00

Via Gizmodo, a reminder that this exists . . . to call this a commentary track is just a touch prosaic. Those who've followed Arnold's career over the years know that whenever you let him talk for more than a couple seconds without a script, some seriously, seriously goofy shit is going to come out of his mouth. Divinely goofy shit.

Though, far be it from me to criticize the fine folks at Gizmodo, but they totally buried the fuckin' lede here: Arnold and Paul Verhoeven did a fucking commentary track for fucking Total Recall. Together. This is a massively important piece of information. Each, crazier than the other. Each's accent goofier. For an hour and forty-five minutes. Kurt Russell and John Carpenter (to say nothing of Method Man and Redman) can rest easy, but still. Arnold and Paul Verhoeven. Eursocrazy . . .

STAGE TO FILM: CARNAGE & A DANGEROUS METHOD

2011-11-17T18:29:00.001-05:00

I recently had the opportunity to see two movies awaiting release, both by acclaimed, veteran filmmakers, both based on plays: Carnage, adapted (from Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage) and directed by Roman Polanski, and A Dangerous Method, adapted by Christopher Hampton from his play The Talking Cure and directed by David Cronenberg. Aside from being based on plays, these movies have little in common, but having watched them within a few days of each other I started thinking a bit about theater, film, the fundamental differences between them as media, and the challenges presented by adapting a work from one to the other.

This is something that's gotten harder over the years. For a period of several decades defined roughly as between the advent of sound and Technicolor (somewhere within which, or overspilling by a few years or so, is Hollywood's first Golden Age) the predominant style of filmmaking in Hollywood—and in the many world cinemas that take their cues from it—was such that adapting a play for the big screen entailed, to modern eyes, not much more than adding a couple establishing shots and closeups of movie stars. There was, clearly, more to it than that, but until about the beginning of the 1960s, adaptations of plays made up a large enough percentage of total movies that they stood out no more than adaptations of novels or any other pre-existing source material.

As cinema began to evolve into an increasingly distinct medium, with shorter takes, more fragmentation through editing, and the resultant effects of both on narrative style, it became harder to adapt plays for the screen without heavy alterations (a process often referred to in the reductive but not entirely inaccurate phrase “opening it up”). Also, theater has changed both in form and cultural cachet in the ensuing decades as well, reaching the point, today, where mainstream theater and mainstream film are thoroughly different beasts. Most theater pieces with sufficient brand recognition to catch Hollywood's attention are musicals, and every couple years or so, a studio will make one, though of this limited number an even more exclusive group truly work as cinema (though the way he edited the musical numbers drove a lot of people batshit, and he's no Bob Fosse, I still like Rob Marshall's Chicago; on the other hand, Rob Marshall's Nine was godawful, so maybe it's the old “broken clock is right twice a day” thing. . . .)

Despite movie musicals being far rarer than movies about people sitting in rooms talking, adapting plays about people sitting in rooms talking is far harder than it is a musical, in terms of making the end result “feel like a movie.” Something like David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross feels like a play that someone filmed rather than a movie, consisting as it does of a series of long dialogue scenes taking place in a limited number of locations. It's an extremely rare adaptation of a play that escapes this dynamic, though it does happen. The movie of Six Degrees of Separation, also adapted by its playwright, John Guare, is a fairly decent example. (Though now that I think about it, both those pictures are almost 20 years old . . .)

Sometimes, a filmmaker will embrace the staginess and theatricality when adapting a play, as Roman Polanski does with Carnage. The play, God of Carnage, is a piece for four actors, on one set, and “opening it up” would turn it into, essentially, an original screenplay about the same themes. Being confined to the apartment is fundamentally important to the piece being what it is. Roman Polanski, whatever else can be said about him, is not dumb, and his adaptation is not only set entirely in one apartment, but a not terribly large one.

After a dispute between two kids that results in one (the son of Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) knocking a couple of the other (the son of Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly)'s teeth out, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz go over to Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly's place to try and sort things out. The next hour and twenty minutes consists of them failing miserably.

Carnage is soooooo close to being really good. The four actors are all very much brand names—Reilly is the only one yet to win an Oscar, though he's been nominated and also is John C. Reilly, which is Gaelic for “dude can fucking act”—and the writing is sharp, and intelligent, with the two couples' shifting allegiances and the gradual revelation of each character's core self providing some interest. The only problem is, Carnage gets so much right that the things it doesn't stand out more. All four actors practically sweat blood (particularly Jodie Foster in a role that she's ever so slightly not right for for reasons that are a little beyond my ability to explain), acting up a storm, but this more serves to obfuscate how thin each character is on paper. They come across as four thumbnail sketches of different upper-middle-class archetypes than people, and try (and, credit where credit's due, mostly succeed) as the actors do, there are isolated tiny moments throughout where both the thinness and mundanity of the characters shine through.

Though, in spite of the fact that it kind of sounds like I'm saying it sucks, and in spite of the fact that it just ends without anything really being resolved (which may be, and probably is, the point), Carnage is still well worth a look for the sheer talent on display both behind and in front of the camera. Its concerns are personal rather than global, and thus within a very small frame of reference, but hey. So are a lot of things in life. And Christoph Waltz is great in it.

Much different—and I have to say, much more to my liking—was David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, which tells the story of how, in the years prior to World War I, Sabina Spielrein is brought to Carl Jung, who uses Sigmund Freud's “talking cure” to treat her “hysteria,” after which she becomes a major part of his life and work, and Freud's as well. She'd go on to become one of the first women psychoanalysts, treating such luminaries as Jean Piaget, but the movie leaves off well before then, focusing on her years with Jung and Freud.

The picture is being marketed as if it's a big steamy love triangle, and it has its steamy and kinky moments, though what it really is is the story of three incredibly smart academics who are in various degrees of denial about how fucked up they are. And, as such, it's a lot more compelling than some dumb quotidian sex story, and actually makes the sexy bits that much sexier.

After Jung (Michael Fassbender) determines that part of what's making Spielrein (Keira Knightley) freaked out and twitchy is that she's into BDSM (at a time when being a young woman who's into BDSM means your dad sends you to Switzerland if he's progressive), he decides—for reasons that have a lot more to do with his boner than science—to help her explore.

This is where it helps that this impeccably designed and gorgeously shot movie is directed by David Cronenberg, because once Spielrein and Jung get going, A Dangerous Method delivers on some good kink, boy, believe you me. It's just tame enough to not scare the squares, while still being vivid enough to be like “Damn . . .” It's rare that a (relatively) mainstream movie shows a woman having an orgasm, and Spielrein has a massive one, at the hands (literally) of Jung, who responds half afraid at the forbidden nature of what he and his (kind of sort of former) patient are up to and half thinking to himself “I made some good life choices.”

Most of A Dangerous Method is given over to the collaboration and eventual split between Jung and Freud (Viggo Mortenson), and the role Jung's young patient has in that split. The movie looks gorgeous, and avoids the “let's play dress up” tone that pervades many period pieces; it feels quite contemporary, which is largely due to the lack of affect (for the most part) to the writing and performances, both of which are abetted by Cronenberg's terrific direction.

Just about the only thing in the whole picture that keeps it from being completely seamless is Keira Knightley's performance as Spielrein. Fassbender and Mortenson are jaw-dropping good as Jung and Freud, particularly Viggo, he's fucking astonishing in this, and almost completely unrecognizable. Vincent Cassel shows up for a couple minutes as the mischievous fifth business character who convinces Fassbender's suffocatingly buttoned-up Jung to undo a couple buttons (specifically on his trousers), and he's great, even if he's mostly playing “Vincent Cassel” (it should be noted that there is nothing at fucking all wrong with Vincent Cassel playing “Vincent Cassel”). And Sarah Gadon—of whom I'd never heard before this, but for whom my eyes shall ever be peeled henceforth—is heartbreaking as Jung's wife, bound by society and tradition in ways Spielrein is decidedly not, trapped being a mother and having to turn a blind eye to her husband's infidelity and always coming second to his work.

All of the major cast, in other words, give tightly managed, sharp performances that hit all the necessary beats (and not mechanically at all, with considerable flair) except Keira Knightley. For a very large part of the first act, she's twitching insanely all over the place, until Jung's therapy chills her out, and after that, whenever she gets agitated, a lot of the twitching and odd vocal rhythms come back. In just about every scene, you see her trying to fit in and get on the other actors' rhythm but never consistently staying there. A lot of this has to do with the character of Sabina Spielrein going through the exact same thing—she's convinced that she's nuts, and she's not entirely off-base—and, at certain points in the movie, Keira Knightley absolutely nails that balance, but there are other points where she juuuuuuust misses with it. A lot of those misses, being just a hair flat or sharp on a given note, are due to her lacking the formal acting training that a lot of her co-stars have, but the thing is, the raw power of the moments when she's on-key are too. Most crucially, though, Spielrein's intelligence is something we're shown rather than told about. This is something that's true of Fassbender, Viggo, and Vincent Cassel too, lest one think I'm being condescending and going “Awww, lookit the girl, she's so smart, ain't that cute.” It's more that all the other smart people in the movie are more even-keeled and organized, so you never stop to think “Are they smart?” and she's so over-the-top crazy at first that it takes a while to sink in that she actually is really smart, not really hitting home until about the third act when she's talking about her thesis with Freud. That scene clinched it for me: she may not always hit it exactly, but Keira Knightley is quite good in the movie, and her being a little nuts and distracting at times fits with her character's role in the story. Also, the fact that she's awkward and not conventionally va-va-voom sexy (which is not to say that there aren't a couple heart-stopping shots of her, because there are) adds to the sense of Spielrein as a troubled nerd, which, considering that this is a world very much of nerds (their early 20th century variety, at any rate), fits. Finally, it's fitting in terms of form and content that a character who is so much the dramatic focus of the narrative be the focus of so much of a review of that movie.

A Dangerous Method is particularly timely, being set at much the same part of the 20th century as we are, today, in the 21st. Old ways of thinking are giving way to new, and much like Fassbender's Carl Jung, we're experiencing the dual feeling of fear and excitement at the unknown and unknowable future ahead. The movie balances a feeling of the old and the contemporary that speaks a lot more directly to the modern age than Carnage, set in the present, does.

But the two are different enough movies that comparisons aren't exactly fair, and with A Dangerous Method being released in the US on the 23rd and Carnage not until December 16th, enough time will have passed for viewers of both that any juxtapositions not for the purpose of looking at two different ways to adapt a play for the screen can be avoided. Both are well worth seeing, and will certainly be in the year-end discussion for acting (and in A Dangerous Method's case, design) awards, though Fassbender's performance in A Dangerous Method will almost surely be swept aside in his penis' quest to win an Oscar for Shame. Such are the vagaries of award season.

A NIGHT AT BASTARDPIECE THEATER: THE SEVENTH CURSE

2011-11-13T00:15:00.000-05:00

The plot of The Seventh Curse, summarized in one still.

It's titties and B movies time again! My dear friend Bastard Keith, in his tireless quest to share disreputable cinema with the world, has taken his act to Under St. Marks. This past Thursday marked the second installment of Bastardpiece Theater (the first, where we suffered through Herschell Gordon Lewis' The Gore Gore Girls, passed without comment on these pages just because godfuckingdammit that movie was terrible), with go-go dancing by the lovely and talented Madame Rosebud (not to mention the vegan brownies she baked), and commentary by BK, Rosebud, and burlesque luminary Miss Astrid to the Hong Kong horror picture The Seventh Curse.

Now, some movies don't necessarily lend themselves to this format—which also includes drinking games—but The Seventh Curse is enhanced greatly by it. An earlyish effort by prolific Hong Kong writer-producer Wong Jing (whose 1992 Naked Killer I wrote about a few months ago, screened at another one of BK's debauches), The Seventh Curse is in his typically out-of-its-fucking-mind style of exploitation, featuring a cameo as a dorky dude in a badly-fitting suit surrounded by attractive women (I'm told by the Bastard, a far greater Wong Jing authority than I, that just about every Wong Jing cameo features him as a dorky dude in a badly-fitting suit surrounded by attractive women). The cast features Chow Yun-Fat and Maggie Cheung, but note that said “features” rather than stars, as Chow Yun-Fat is a supporting character and Maggie Cheung apparently was in this before she went to acting school (though to be fair, her character would be annoying no matter what).

The lead is Chin Siu-ho, who played the limpdick who takes over the martial arts school in Fist of Legend after the Japanese kill Master Huo, and who is no more tumescent in The Seventh Curse. He's either a doctor or a cop or a cop/doctor (the movie doesn't seem to give a fuck, why should we?) and doesn't do much except run around being less charismatic than Chow Yun-Fat, who pops up every twenty minutes or so smoking a pipe and being awesome and, more often than not, explaining the bizarre shit that happened since his previous appearance. One wonders why he couldn't have just been the lead, until one realizes that Chow Yun-Fat would never have been a big enough yutz to end up getting the “blood curse” in the first place, thus rendering the whole movie about how he's going to cure it moot.

Things kick off with the author of the book the movie's based on sitting around a well-appointed drawing room with Chow Yun-Fat and Chin Siu-Ho, asking them to tell him a story over some (presumably excellent) brandy. And what a fuckin story they tell. It starts with a random, 80s Hong Kong cop movie sequence involving a hostage situation, that for some reason Chin Siu-Ho is in the middle of. Maggie Cheung shows up shrieking about being a reporter except no one gives a fuck, so she (possibly) murks a cop with a brick; I mean goddamn, she crunches the lady cop/nurse (cop nurse?) pretty goddamn hard. But never mind that shit, there's business to attend to. Random kung fu (which is pretty well staged and edited) and explosions (which are hilarious and nearly always completely unmotivated) ensue, and Maggie Cheung almost gets everybody killed, and machine guns a guy. (Talk about taking the Hunter S. Thompson “place yourself in the middle of the story” school of journalism too far . . .)

After everything stops blowing up, Chin Siu-Ho goes home, and there's a wicked-hot mid-80s vintage permed white (Jewish, according to Bastard Keith, an authority on that subject as well) chick there who wants the sex. Chin Siu-Ho thinks this is a good idea but first he has to do some more kung fu with some dude. I think this is where the Black Dragon (who is fucking AWESOME) shows up and tells him never to fuck because the “blood curse” will kick in if he ever fucks. But he's unable to resist his lady friend's sexhortations (she was hot, and calculated risk is the life of kings) and, mid-shtup, some nasty thing on his leg explodes.

Chin Siu-Ho does the logical thing and goes to Chow Yun-Fat at this point, telling him what happened. Chow Yun-Fat—who swaggers through this whole picture like he's just getting blown constantly—rattles off some suavely incoherent talk about blood curses, which leads to a flashback to how Chin Siu-Ho came down with the blood curse. He goes to Thailand to research a cure for AIDS (“Going to Thailand to find a cure for AIDS?” --an incredulous Bastard Keith) with some guy who looks like a cross between late-period Amitabh Bachchan and shuffling-around-his-vineyards-period Francis Coppola, and ends up wandering off into the jungle and meeting a native girl named Betsy (who's Chinese too, just because why not fully embrace the implausibility) who because of a shitty subtitling job at one point, we all ended up calling “Besty” for the whole picture, which was especially apt because she was infinitely preferable to Maggie “I swear to fuck in like 15 years I'm going to be one of the greatest movie stars who ever lived, I just haven't gotten there yet” Cheung. She also, after Chin Siu-Ho comes down with the blood curse by doing something really fucking stupid, takes off her clothes to reveal a specfuckingtacular pair of tits that the audience is only allowed to bask in for like a second before she hacks open her left tit and feeds Chin Siu-Ho a golf-ball sized tumor. (Dude, seriously, don't ask.) Also, they can't fuck because she's the Black Dragon's girlfriend.

In the middle of all this, there's this cult living in the jungle that worship worms and practice human sacrifice and have skeletons who can do kung fu, whose fabulously dressed and made-up leader (Elvis Tsui) makes Freddie Mercury look like John Wayne. It turns out the only way Chin Siu-Ho can cure his blood curse is by stealing the eyes of the tribe's Buddha statue and eating them. Why exactly he goes back to Hong Kong and tries to ignore the fact that the blood curse is going to kill him is unclear, but Chow Yun-Fat swiftly rectifies this the second the unbelievably long flashback in which Chin Siu-Ho relates this story is over, and they head back to Thailand.

Maggie Cheung comes along because she's still in the movie for some reason, and sneaks into Chin Siu-Ho's hotel room and leaves a gigantic fucking pile of AK-47s there. Torn between the knee-jerk “wow, that is fucking rad” reaction at seeing so many guns sitting there on the piano and the more rational “why the fuck can't Maggie Cheung hurry up and meet Wong Kar Wai” response, Chin Siu-Ho engages Maggie Cheung in conversation and she starts monologuing in this really unhinged fashion that leaves some doubt as to whether she's even really a journalist, and in order to shut her up he agrees to bring her into the jungle with him and the Black Dragon (I know I mentioned him a couple times without explaining who he is, but that's because the movie doesn't really explain who he is, he just shows up and is awesome, even though we only get an extremely faint idea of who he is).

Turns out something nasty as shit happened to Besty's face (which I missed because I was tweeting some non sequitur about Steve Reeves as Hercules; it was that kind of night), which is one of a few thousand good reasons why the Black Dragon, Chow Yun-Fat, and several other competent people have to go along with Chin Siu-Ho and Maggie Cheung and make sure they don't accidentally use grenades as suppositories. Maggie Cheung falls down a trap door in the jungle and for some stupid reason—the whole panel was telling them “Fuck it. LEAVE HER.”—Chin Siu-Ho insists on going back to save her, which means more kung-fu skeletons and flying fetus demons, except now the flying fetus demon is the good guy (this was the part of the movie I was just gaping openmouthed at the screen in utter confusion, also known as about 90% of the movie), and the kung fu skeleton goes all H.R. Giger (h/t to Rosebud for that analogy) on a motherfucker and something happens and the derpiest bunch of monks to ever worship Buddha show up and there's another fun kung fu battle, after which Chin Siu-Ho eats the Buddha's eyes and doesn't leave any for Besty, who remains deformed and is the subject of an epically twatty condescending monologue by Maggie Cheung (who I bet breaks people's kneecaps if they ever mention this movie in her presence). And it all wraps up back in the novelist's brandy and leather armchairs party, with Chin Siu-Ho and Chow Yun-Fat having a good manly chortle and setting up a potential sequel.

The Seventh Curse, while an engagingly insane good time on its own merits, was nonetheless enhanced by the Bastard's brutally hilarious lisping imitation of the cult leader, Rosebud's incisive, effervescent enthusiasm, and Miss Astrid's strategic atomic bon mots. The commentary greatly enhanced the experience, which I must admit, if I were watching the movie by myself, would have consisted almost entirely of me going “what the fuck . . .?” and “When is Chow Yun-Fat going to come back?” A little repetitive, but hey. I leave certain things to the experts.

I'm hardly an unbiased observer, but Bastardpiece Theater is not just fun because these are my friends and Rosebud's vegan brownies are so ridonkulously fucking good. It's fun because the movies are terrible in an entertaining way, there's plenty of beer, and genuinely funny people are cracking jokes out of love, and in a shared sense of “Yeah, we're all watching The Seventh Curse voluntarily, no one here is superior.” Also, next month they're showing a Filipino midgetsploitation movie starring the legendary Weng Weng as Agent 00 entitled For Y'ur Height Only. The whole trailer is Weng Weng fucking tall people's shit up and jumping off tall buildings and using umbrellas as parachutes. It looks amazing.

IT'S OSCAR SEASON! (NO, IT'S WABBIT SEASON!)

2011-11-11T22:05:00.000-05:00

L. DiCaprio (J. Edgar Parody) - watch more funny videos

Friend of the blog Samantha Mason (follow her, she rules) sent me this, and goddamn if it isn't great. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was actually Leo's inner monologue these days. It's funny cuz it's true, after all.

KUBRICK WEEK AT TOR.COM!

2011-11-08T22:11:00.000-05:00

Image (c) Tor.com

Hey y'all! My rewatch of all of Stanley Kubrick's SF (and related) movies is done and all week, the reviews will be posted. So mosey on over to that fine place and check 'em out!

IF YOU WANT TO MAKE THE MAJOR LEAGUES, HIRE AN EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKER

2011-11-08T01:28:00.000-05:00

Of all the places one expects to find avant-garde filmmaking, Deadspin? That itself is as strange as this video, which is just wonderfully odd. Everything about it hums with eccentricity, from the music to the camera angles to the text (not to mention the political subtext of him being a Cuban defector) to the graphics. According to the stats they provide, the guy's OPS is about 1.000 (which, for the uninitiated, would roughly be Jason Statham's OPS if action movies were baseball), so apparently he hits the crap out of the ball. But if he makes the majors, will he hit in slo-mo, like in this clip? I sure hope so.

REHEARSING IS FOR PROFESSIONALS: A MESSAGE TO THE PUER AETERNUS BRETT RATNER

2011-11-07T15:51:00.001-05:00

Well, well, well. Brett Ratner, you think rehearsing is for fags, do you? Say, Brett, you know what

1) casually and caddishly tossing off references to actresses you've banged,

2) parlaying a gift for schmoozing powerful people into a directing career,

3) using that directing career to repeat the same minor successes so often they become stale and retroactively damage the memory of the couple half decent pictures you were fortunate enough to make,

4) and then publicly declaring your completely lack of interest in the creative process with a homophobic cherry on top

is for?

Shitheads.

Get your head out of your ass and never forget that being born on third does not mean you hit a triple. And fucking grow up. You're forty-two fucking years old. Be an adult and start giving a shit about your work and how your words are perceived, instead of shooting your mouth off and then giving a ball-less apology.

GTA V TRAILER RELEASED

2011-11-02T12:04:00.003-04:00

Ho. Lee. Fuck.

HAPPY JOHN CARPENTER DAY!

2011-10-31T22:07:00.000-04:00

Because nothing beats the master in his own words, here's an interview from 1999.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Long live John Carpenter!

WHEREIN I TEMPORARILY SUSPEND MY POLICY OF NOT FIRING ON CIVILIANS: REPUBLICANS AND THEIR FAVORITE MOVIES

2011-10-29T21:52:00.000-04:00

Couple disclaimers before we begin: one, this is not a serious work of political commentary, as should be obvious, but you can never be too careful on the Internet, and two, if this was a bunch of Democrats the movies would probably be just as dumb and maybe even the same ones. But fortunately our current president, whose job all these dummies want, likes The Wire, which trumps all and leaves said dummies open to blatant vituperative ridicule for their inferior taste. See how easy that was? Okay, now let's get to the important business of shit-talking the GOP candidates:

This recent piece in the Washington Times takes a good shot at humanizing the Republican candidates for president in one of those “hey, they're just like regular folks” kinda ways, but what it really reveals is the deep-seated and harrowing psychological problems of each candidate polled. The intent of this piece, mine that is, is to reveal in what way each choice reveals the chooser to be a shithead and/or retard. How definitive is this? Not at all. What greater purpose does unscientifically shit-talking a bunch of non-cineastes about their favorite movies serve? None. Why am I wasting your time and mine with this bullshit, then? Because it fucking snowed in New York today. In fucking October. For this, members of a political party that denies climate change must get my dick in their eye.

And so, without further ado, the Movies By Bowes ™ Institute of Psycho Analysis (yes, it's two words for a reason, keep your stupid comments in your pocket) is open for business:

Candidate: Herman Cain
Favorite Movie: The Godfather
Diagnosis: Troll

There is a vast body of evidence to support this diagnosis. First, the obvious: Mr. Cain made his fortune as the head of Godfather's Pizza. L to the O to the L. Good one, Herb. The plot of the movie has an interesting parallel to Cain's campaign (moar like cam-Cain amirite?) if you posit Vito Corleone as Reagan, Rick Perry as Sonny, and Michelle Bachmann as Fredo—trust me, this is gold—and Cain as Michael. In The Godfather, they're all like, “Eyy, Mikey, Mr. Ivy League, you couldn't be Don,” and everyone following the campaign is like “Herman Cain? I thought his name was Alan Keyes” only to be bushwhacked when suddenly, this goofy fuck who puts out ads where his campaign manager who looks like he's dying of alcohol poisoning is smoking cigarettes and Cain slowly rotates toward the camera smiling all slow like, “Wait, you motherfuckers thought I was serious? Oh boy have you ever been trolled” just like Michael Corleone lulling the heads of the Five Families into submission with his lisp and phony indecisiveness before BAM they're all dead. Seriously, Herman Cain's face at the end of that ad is the new Trollface. Mark it eight, dude.

Candidate: Newt Gingrich
Favorite Movie: Casablanca
Diagnosis: Conservative in all things, even movies

Unlike just about every other left-of-center type in America, I don't particularly have a beef with Newt Gingrich. He does and says revolting, atrocious things, sure, but that's all in the game. I see him as a pure politician, whose personal beliefs just happen to be what a lot of other people think on a given subject. Casablanca, while a great movie to be sure, and one of my own personal favorites, is a very popular one, and a lot of people list it as their favorite. Also, there's no ambiguity about the political content. It's Humphrey Bogart (unambiguous good) against the Nazis (unambiguous bad). There's also Ingrid Bergman (unambiguous sex) and Claude Rains (unambiguous awesome). The movie itself is in black-and-white, reflecting the black-and-white prevailing nature of Republican political discourse. Really, this is just about the only thing Newt could have possibly picked. And another in a long line of little things that make me half-ass like the guy in spite of all the awful shit about him.

Candidate: Michelle Bachmann
Favorite Movie: Braveheart, maybe Saving Private Ryan
Diagnosis: Shithead

I will never get the spell Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan cast over civilians. Like The Shawshank Redemption, another 90s picture civilians go ga-ga over, they're kind of good but way too long and I personally never had the urge to revisit any of them more than once. Back when I used to read the New York Post before I just couldn't take it anymore (I grew up with it, and it's never like it was any beacon of journalism or anything but it just fell of a cliff after 9/11) I used to read the thing in the sports section where they'd ask athletes things like their favorite movie, and without fail every time it was some guy you could tell just didn't give a fuck about the question would just go “Braveheart” or “Saving Private Ryan.” And almost without fail those dudes would all be Jesus shitheads. Thus, one can infer that Michelle, a Jesus shithead, didn't really give a fuck about the question and her mind was clearly on other things, like how fluoridated water turns Christian children into homosexuals or privatizing the military by replacing them with unicorns or re-instituting slavery “except nicer!”or whatever it is she wants to do. When I saw her on Meet The Press I was too busy watching her eyeballs vibrate to pay attention to what she was saying, and David Gregory was whimpering with his tail between his legs until his producer gave him his chew toy at the commercial break.

Candidate: Rick Santorum
Favorite Movie: “There's a lot,” then when pressed for an answer, Field of Dreams [he was in Iowa]
Diagnosis: Not Good At The Whole Politics Thing-itis

Rick, Rick, Rick. I know being named after anal sex is embarrassing (Ed. Note: huh huh huh huh “ass” huh huh huh huh) but you really need to work on this shit (bahahahahahaha ok I'll stop). Let me walk you through it, homes. You're in Iowa, you're getting curbstomped in every single poll—seriously, Rick's trailing Osama Bin Laden in a couple of the fuckers—and you want to pander. Good thinking, Rick! Pandering is good. You know how you do that? Think of something the fucking night before. Don't get up there like “oh, this is beneath me” because nothing is beneath you when you're losing as bad as you are. Get out there and ho' it up a bit. You're in Iowa and someone asks you about your favorite movie? Start talking about John Wayne, you limpdick. He's from there. Get one of your interns to find the most right-wing John Wayne movie they can find, and you fucking say one of the Duke's most right-wing lines in that fucking thing. Then, ya know what? Iowans are like, “That Anal Sex guy is fucking right-wing. I like that guy.” I fucking hate the guy and think he's a horrible, bigoted person who may very well be personally responsible for inciting people to anti-gay hate crimes and I still can't help but give him advice because he's so terrible at his actual job. Even the guy who wrote the Washington Times piece was cracking on him like, “No word on what his favorite movie's going to be in New Hampshire.” Stop the dithering, stupid motherfucker.

Candidate: Ron Paul
Favorite Movie: “I don't watch many movies.”
Diagnosis: Wiseass

Let's be clear: the only reason why Ron Paul is “the reasonable one” in this race is because the rest of them are so fucked up. Ron Paul is insane. But, credit where credit's due, he is smart. And he knows that by letting everyone else fuck themselves in the ass left and right and just laying in the cut and quietly saying smart stuff like “I don't watch many movies” rather than say something just to say something and have it be dumb or nakedly pandering, he looks like a reasonable guy. Sneaky. But remember, he's the guy who believes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is an instrument of totalitarianism. He's not your friend.

Candidate: Gary Johnson
Favorite Movie: Doctor Zhivago
Diagnosis: Good taste, no real shit to talk here

I mean, the only thing I know about the guy is that he's even more libertarian than Ron Paul, which is pretty impressive in its way, but I gotta hand it to him. One-loving David Lean is a sign the guy knows his movies, cares enough about them to have a good one as his favorite, and could probably explain why he likes it in a cogent fashion that actually makes sense. Why can't he be the frontrunner? He'd still lose to Barack but we'd have to sit through less fuckfacedness first, and when Johnson quotes Pauline Kael's review of Ryan's Daughter at Barack to attack his jobs bill or whatever it'll be a fun debate moment.

Candidate: Rick Perry
Favorite Movie: Immortal Beloved
Diagnosis: Lost a bet

Less clinical than my other diagnoses, so follow me on this: Rick's chillin with his evil white guy buddies at their hunting lodge. One of 'em says “Hey, Rick, I betcha ah cain't hit that there hummingbird in th' ass with his here raffle.” Rick goes, “Son, you couldn't hit water if you fell outta fuckin boat,” and everybody's like “ohh shit,” so the other guy takes aim and shoots the hummingbird dead in the ass. And everybody's like “ohhhhhhh shit” and Rick's all pissed because he knows they're going to make him do something fratty and embarrassing. Now, as evil as they are, they know they can't make their buddy say “I'm gay” on national TV, because then how are they going to get appointed ambassador to China when their huntin' and drinkin' buddy gets elected Commander in Chizzief. So they go the next best route: they pick some random movie one of their wives made them sit through on HBO in 1997 and tell Rick if someone asks him his favorite movie ever he's gotta say Immortal Beloved. Rick's like, “Aww, man, you guys're asssssssholes,” while they all cackle and get ready to kill some more shit. Occam's Razor.

Candidate: Mitt Romney
Favorite Movie: O, Brother Where Art Thou?
Diagnosis: We're all gonna die

Sure, it's possible Mitt Romney's a Coen brothers fan. After all, you do have to put them in the “greatest living American filmmakers” discussion. And O, Brother was one of their best, and more of a crowd-pleaser than the ones it's not as good as. I'd go ahead and call this a solid civilian pick except for the fact that there's totally something wrong and sinister about Mitt Romney. It's like, okay. His hair. It's impossible to look at his hair and not get an erection. Call it Newton's 69th law of physics or whatever. But that fucking hair is just entirely too perfect to be anything other than a distraction. Every time you're like “Hey, but you're in a cult that didn't acknowledge that black people were human beings until 1978, under great duress, and you were already an adult at the time,” his hair is like, “These are not the droids you're looking for.” During that debate when he put hands on Rick Perry, there was this slight whiff of “If you don't shut the fuck up I'm going to Vulcan nerve pinch you, you peckerwood cocksucker” to the gesture, which is probably why Perry's nuts turtled and he didn't do shit about it. Romney might snap and kill somebody. And by might I mean will. Look at the color of his skin. Look at the suit. DO THE MATH, PEOPLE.

What's this have to do with O, Brother Where Art Thou? Just that Romney picked the wrong Coen brothers movie. On purpose. He really meant Barton Fink. You know, where John Goodman's all nice and friendly and shit at first, even if he's a little weird and creepy? And then at the end of the picture he's chasing John Turturro up the flaming hallway bellowing “I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!” twelve octaves below the surface of the Earth and Turturro basically shits his ass and only survives by accident? That's Romney next year when someone fucks with him at the convention. It's all gonna burn. And the only survivors are going to be Mitt Romney chasing Grover Norquist with a shotgun hollering “HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW, MOTHERFUCKER? THIS SHIT REAGANESQUE ENOUGH FOR YOU PORCUPINE FUCKERS?” At which point the National Guard comes in, and, well, you've seen Godzilla.

Anyway. That's my year's worth of politics. It's back to the movies themselves after this. Unless, of course, these motherfuckers keep acting the fool and another response becomes necessary. I'll sign off now. Occupy Everything. Peace.

I YIELD THE FLOOR TO THE GENTLEMAN FROM FILMDRUNK

2011-10-28T11:42:00.000-04:00

I saw the Mission Impossible 4 trailer the other day, and was considering writing it up until this post on FilmDrunk made that completely unnecessary. Goddamn that's funny.

THE PERILS OF STEPPING TO PAULINE

2011-10-26T22:15:00.000-04:00

I count myself as very unfortunate to be just a hair too young to have been around for the prime of Pauline Kael. There are several new books about her, which I have not yet read. Instead, I'll turn over explication to two women I greatly respect, the first of whom I have the great pleasure of knowing personally:

The Self-Styled Siren on Pauline Kael.

Camille Paglia on same.

Two very different perspectives, but there was no easy and consistent way to sum up Pauline Kael. Even though if she knew me she'd probably think I was a fatuous, pretentious jerkoff, I still think she's just swell and I encourage all of you who are not yet acquainted with her work to get up on her body of critical work. Even in death, she'd probably be able to win an argument (the perils of stepping to Pauline in life were dire).

And remember this very important lesson: you do not always have to agree with someone to know they're smart.

WORDS FAIL ME

2011-10-25T11:26:00.000-04:00

Wait, what?

GRAND THEFT AUTO AND THE MOVIES

2011-10-22T00:23:00.001-04:00

Today is the 10th anniversary of the release of Grand Theft Auto III, and I'd like to observe this momentous date by talking a bit about the Grand Theft Auto series' contributions to film criticism. Not exclusively, of course; talking about GTA III without touching on gaming would (obviously) be amiss, and its impact on the culture at large was not insignificant either. But one cannot talk about GTA III, or any of the subsequent games in the franchise without talking about movies (at some point).

This was what initially drew me to it. I had topped out with the original NES, being annoyed that the SNES had no way of playing the old games—and not having any money to get a whole new system and a whole array of new games—and spent the majority of my teenage years immersed in art cinema and centuries-old novels. But my tweediness had limits; I still liked loud music, sports, and both movies and books where shit blows up and people get killed. And so it was that I read an article about GTA III when it came out for the PC and thought, “That sounds awesome.”

I'd first encountered the original Grand Theft Auto when I was in college and decidedly not playing video games. A friend of mine with a computer fancy enough to actually do stuff (not the given in the late 90s that it is today) showed me the game while I packed a bowl and gave a very excited, only partially embarrassed account of the game's wonders, involving the ability to run people over with cars and fuck them up with no lasting consequences. This was all fine, and I was interested, but we had limited time for some reason that now escapes me, and had to smoke that bowl else Western civilization collapse, so that was it for the GTA talk. But the memory of my friend's total geek-out over the game came back to me as I read the review of the new game, where the writer repeatedly assured anyone who might be worried that one could jump in with GTA III without missing anything. I was sold. Bought the game, installed it on my PC, let 'er rip, and haven't looked back since. I bought a PS2 with my '03 tax refund for the express purpose of buying GTA: Vice City. I ran all over lower Manhattan looking for a store that had GTA: San Andreas on the morning of my 26th birthday (the day the game was released, by happy coincidence), eventually finding one. And, once again, when GTA IV came out, I bought a PS3 for the sole (initial) purpose of playing it. To a very real extent, my playing other video games arose more from a feeling of “damn, I dropped a couple/few hundred bucks on this fucking game system, I should probably take advantage of that by playing some other games instead of just gluing GTA into the fucker.”

It was like games had caught up to what I wanted them to be. While I loved Super Mario Brothers back in the day, I could never beat it. I could beat Zelda, but swords and magic and shit was never my thing. My dad, an enthusiastic if not terribly good PC gamer, got one of the Police Quest games and we played through it together on the weekends I'd be over at his place, but still, there was something missing. “I want to design a game called Criminal Quest,” I said, causing my dad great emotional anguish (so easy to do, so much fun), “where you're the guy selling drugs, stealing shit, fucking shit up.” Dad grudgingly admitted that that might be fun given sufficient narrative quality that it wasn't just a bunch of nihilistic bullshit. And lo and fucking behold, Grand Theft Auto III: that very thing.

While it permitted the player freedom to screw around and do whatever s/he chose, the story of GTA III was a total quest narrative. Your guy who you control (not named in the game, but later confirmed by both fan communities and GTA: San Andreas to be named Claude) doesn't speak, and never changes out of his dark earth-toned clothes the whole game, because he has other priorities, to wit killing the living shit out of anything and everything he sees. Most of this is done in cars, hence the title.

The most attention-grabbing aspects of GTA III were things like the fact that you could kill as many cops as you like until they get their shit together and kill you, that one of the easiest ways to replenish your health meter was by picking up a prostitute, driving her to a quiet locale, and fucking her, and perhaps most notoriously that when the deed was done you could kill the prostitute and get your money back. Because of these elements, the GTA games have long been the target of moral watchdog groups up in arms over the desensitization of modern youth to sex, violence, and sexual violence—not to mention cop killing—and even the games' fans will say things like “it's indefensible,” even though they like and play them.

I never bought into this. For one thing, I maintain the best use for the kind of people who want to ban video games or music (or any art) is at the bottom of an oubliette serving as the appetizer course for hungry alligators before the main course of religious demagogues and evil white guys in suits (oh, how I do long for that day. . . .) For another, these moral objections ignore the fact that it's possible to play through the entire game without killing one cop or prostitute, or even patronizing prostitutes. And finally, even if one counters the previous objection with, “Well, the writers and designers put that in the game, so they're still sick fucks,” the nature of the medium is such that the game only exists in the way a given player plays that game. Ergo, if a player spends his/her (I'm not being PC, I knew a girl who absolutely adored killing cops and hookers in GTA III; she was out of her fucking mind, clearly, but she was awesome) time killing cops and hookers in GTA III, it's on the player for doing so. Quod erat demonstrandum.

(Caution: the discussion of the plot of GTA III contains spoilers)

The story of GTA III owes a fair bit to gangster pictures like Goodfellas and Scarface—one radio station is entirely devoted to songs from the Scarface soundtrack; the rest establishes the reputation the GTA games would continue to earn in spades for having outstanding soundtracks—as well as to a myriad other cops-and-robbers movies and TV shows. In an opening expository sequence Claude is shot and left for dead by his treacherous girlfriend Catalina during a bank heist, and is subsequently sprung from police custody along with a fellow criminal, bomb specialist 8-Ball, by means of a bomb that temporarily destroys the only bridge off the island on which the game's lengthy first act takes place. Confined to one third of Liberty City, a fictional American east coast metropolis that resembles each and all to varying degrees, Claude is introduced by 8-Ball to a low-level local Mafioso and begins to work his way up the ladder with his useful driving and murder skills. Over the course of this upward mobility, Claude meets the Don and the Don's younger girlfriend Maria, who takes a shine to Claude and even goes as far as to tell the Don that she's fucking him. (All this without his ever having said a word to her. . . .) The Don, pissed, puts a hit on Claude, but Maria hustles Claude off the island by boat, unlocking Liberty City's second island, roughly analogous to Manhattan.

This was the first point where the game threw me for a loop. I'd assumed the whole game would be Claude working for the Mafia, maybe working his way up to a position of power within the organization. Then, once he was on the run from the Mafia, I assumed the whole rest of the game would be Claude on the run from and in opposition to the Mafia. But just about the first thing he does for his new friend, Maria's S&M lesbian Yakuza girlfriend (doesn't everyone have one of those?) is go back to the Mafia neighborhood on the first island and whack the Don.

From there, Claude becomes the Yakuza's main gaijin, and gets involved with an array of rich and powerful scumbags, including media titan—and proof of the GTA games' firm grasp of the Evil White Guys In Suits Theory—Donald Love, who has Claude start a gang war between the Yakuza and the Colombian cartel (an organization of which Claude's treacherous ex-girlfriend is not only the president, but also a member), among other nasties, notably a bunch of Jamaicans like the kind Steven Seagal fucks up in Marked For Death except more competent.

Things come to a head, after the third and final island has been unlocked and a whole lot more crazy shit happens, when the Cartel kidnaps Maria and Claude has to go rescue her and ice his ex. This is something I've never been able to do on the PS2 version without cheat codes (there are a few other missions I found similarly impossible), but when you kill everyone and save the day, after all that shit Maria jabbers your ear off over the closing credits and the last thing you hear is a gunshot, signifying, one is left to assume, the last nerve of the almost comically taciturn Claude.

Everything that happens in GTA III does so in a manner that can only be described paradoxically as both utterly convincing and yet complete bullshit. Liberty City is so meticulously and skillfully rendered that I spent hours upon hours just getting in one of the faster, more luxurious cars among the dozens the game offers and driving around the city listening to the in-game radio, and it felt very much like driving around a real city. Of course there are differences, Liberty City being a place so thoroughly designed for violence that it has department-store sized gun stores called Ammu-Nation where you can tool up and go wreak havoc. And, most impressively, Liberty City has such astonishingly good healthcare that you can get shot with a bazooka that obliterates your car and the four others closest, and the only thing that happens is you wake up in the hospital a few hours later and a few thousand dollars light in the pocket. Seriously, GTAcare is the most amazing shit in this or any universe.

If the design of the city and the nature of so many of the game's missions—drive here, kill that guy, outrun the cops, etc—weren't enough to make GTA III feel like a playable action movie, the voice cast sealed the deal. The Mafia Don in the early part of the game was voiced by Billy Bats from Goodfellas. His lieutenants were Michael Madsen, Joe Pantoliano, and Michael Rapaport. When you get to the Manhattanish island, necrophiliac media baron Donald Love is Kyle MacLachlan (fucking great casting: if you need an evil white guy in a suit who fucks dead people and yet is still kind of charming, accept no substitutes). The crazy undercover cop you get a bunch of crazy missions from is Robert Loggia, and ho boy does he ever put in some awesome voice work (it's the greatest Robert Loggia part Robert Loggia never quite got the chance to play). And of course the hip-hop nerd in me loved that Guru from Gangstarr voiced 8-Ball.

The GTA series has taken many radical, ambitious steps forward since then. Vice City made the Scarface/Miami Vice 80s come alive (and has the greatest soundtrack in the history of soundtracks), San Andreas was a staggeringly vast narrative, using the early 90s “hood” movies like Boyz N The Hood and Menace II Society as a jumping-off point to explore the entirety of the American experience (even incorporating science fiction without breaking the spell). And GTA IV—Vice City and San Andreas were extended narratives that overlapped partially with the GTA III storyline, all set in the same universe, all built for the PS2, and thus not GTAs IV and V; the game called GTA IV was set in a separate universe, indicative of its having been designed for the next-gen PS3 console—is as special to me as GTA III once was, set in an only-slightly paraphrased New York City, a new Liberty City, that's just as fascinating to me now to drive around in as GTA III's Liberty City once was.

I started to mention at the beginning that the GTA games were, in a sense, elaborate exercises in film criticism, and after itemizing all the other countless glories contained within, it's time to address that. Each game takes its cinematic influences and manages to simultaneously pay deeply respectful homage while still deconstructing and satirizing. The method of the deconstruction is a particularly ingenious one, leaving it entirely up to the player to do all the heavy lifting, as it's the player's choices that ultimately make the game what it is. If all you do in a GTA game is drive around killing cops until you get your ass handed to you, that's the sum of the value that player creates. Someone like me who repeatedly and almost exclusively plays through the story mode of each game is clearly more interested in pulp narrative. And a player primarily concerned with creating video clips of them doing all kinds of cool, unique car stunts is concerned with the visuals and the cinematic aspect of each game, and by extension the movies from which the games draw.

It may seem like a stretch to ascribe this level of depth to the GTA games, and maybe it is, but I can say that GTA III made me look at gangster movies differently, with a more critical eye. Vice City gave me an entirely new and more vivid love for Scarface, as well as defining how I watched Miami Vice (a show I was too young to watch in its initial run, but managed to catch up with thanks to reruns, DVD, and online streaming). San Andreas gave me more of an appreciation for the “hood” movies upon further reflection—I could barely watch John Singleton's Boyz N The Hood after playing San Andreas, though it made me love Menace II Society all the more—as well as spurring all kinds of unexpected thoughts about race, ethnic and social isolation, and the importance of remembering one's roots even if ultimately one doesn't stay in the same physical or social place. I swear, I'm not doin' it wrong and reading too much into these games, this shit's all there. (Along with just about every conceivable dick joke the human mind can concoct . . . except that one. Con-cocked? You're welcome).

That, I submit, is the greatest legacy of the Grand Theft Auto games, all of which started with the massive and ambitious step forward that was GTA III: a massively sophisticated deconstruction of the violent impulses of the American people as wrought not only by games, but by gangster and action cinema. Actually, the greatest legacy of the GTA games is that they managed to do all that and still create ridiculously awesome and fun video games. That's my favorite kind of popular entertainment: as stimulating intellectually as it is viscerally. Happy 10th anniversary, GTA III.

A SALUTE TO JAMES REBHORN

2011-10-17T19:18:00.003-04:00

I love me some character actors. From my very early years as a cineaste, when I realized that the reason the guy Arnold just shot twenty-five times showed up in another movie because none of this was really happening, I liked tracking people's careers from movie to movie and TV show to TV show. It got to the point, after a while, where certain actors' mere appearance were signifiers of the narrative to come. For instance:

Pre-Paul Thomas Anderson Luis Guzman—probably not a very good movie, and Luis is going to die.

John Mahoney—everybody else will have less moral rectitude (because John Mahoney fucking owns).

Art Evans—an unreliable signifier, because the movie might or might not be any good, but Art was guaranteed to fucking rock, even if it's only one scene. Also, any good aesthete has to love a guy whose name is Art.

James Rebhorn—chances are about two in three he's going to the evil white guy in a suit.

Now, this shit is fucking important, because it is the duty of all morally and politically responsible art to remind the audience that evil white guys in suits are conspiring to destroy the Earth at all times. And, the thing about white guys is that there are echelons; in short, white people have their own white people (take the famous observation about the Irish, that they make fine soldiers as long as they have white officers), and right up at the top of the pyramid (the Freemason one with the eye. Trust) are WASPs from the Northeast United States, and James Rebhorn is from Philly. Consider also, he has the perfect build to wear a really, really conservative suit, and once his hair started going gray the fact that he's a fucking great actor meant we had the perfect storm: the Evilest White Guy In a Suit to ever reflect every last goddamn bit of light back from the silver screen.

Trying to go through every single James Rebhorn performance and talk sufficiently about how awesome it is would take about a goddamn year, because for the entire 1990s he probably took about one coffee break off from being in every TV show and movie the 24 hour day allowed him to grace with his presence. He was in so much stuff even civilians will not only go, “oh, yeah, that guy” but follow it up with “That guy was great in [pick one of about ninety things].”

So, given that, a select list of Mr. Rebhorn's finest work:

Basic Instinct (1992)

While the first things one thinks about when one thinks about Basic Instinct are all the sex and violence and casually rancid biphobia, not to mention George Dzundza telling an array of pussy jokes unmatched outside of Shane Black in Predator, James Rebhorn was most definitely in this as well, about two-thirds of the way through.

After Michael Douglas has been walking around making Michael Douglas Face (the technical term for the overlap in the Venn diagram of middle-aged white guy, poorly-controlled sexual impulses, and jaw-dropping amounts of booze and drugs) for almost the whole movie, with the resultant skyrocketing in the price of Jack Daniel's stock and mortal sexual panic of everyone in his path, the San Francisco PD sends him to see a shrink he isn't fucking (casting aspersions at your professional ethics there, Jeanne Tripplehorn), namely James Rebhorn (some other dude is there too, but his presence is negated by Rebhorn's).

Rebhorn only has like one line, and it's some awesome cliché pseudo-Freudian “tell me about your mother” horseshit, but that one line, and the beautifully honed snootiness with which Rebhorn delivers it, leads to one of the most marvelously douchey Michael Douglas monologues ever. And that, my friends, is the mark of a good character actor. Like a midfielder setting up a perfect pass for the glory-boy striker with the nice hair to fire into goal, a good character actor is defined oft-times by how awesome he manages to make the hero look. James Rebhorn's a fucking team player, people.

Real Steel (2011)

This is actually the role that inspired this tribute to the great man and his work. Real Steel kind of sucks—it was directed by the guy responsible the Night At The Museum fuckarounds, so I wasn't expecting Citizen Kane, but it was still really artificial and fucking terribly written—but Rebhorn shows up and delivers an unfuckingbelievably nuanced little performance in his customary tiny amount of screen time.

The deal is, Hugh Jackman is an irresponsible fuckstick who doesn't want custody of the precocious little moppet who's basically the violin bow the movie uses to play the audience's heartstrings, and Rebhorn is the new husband of the relative Jackman's trying to pawn the kid off on. Only problem is, Rebhorn's looking at this rationally: he's rich as hell (his wristwatch has the approximate mass of the Earth's moon) and he wants to go to Tuscany with younger wife Hope Davis (the relative in question) and be fucking like all summer, because to James Rebhorn go the spoils of victory. So he and Huge Jacked Man cook up a bargain wherein Huge gets a big thick envelope of cash and James Rebhorn gets to spend the whole second act off screen fucking Hope Davis' brains out. Everybody wins.

What seems like a nothing role—or worse, an Evil Stepfather—is just brilliantly and subtly worked by Rebhorn to the point where he manages to play A Guy Who Hates Little Kids and not only not seem like an asshole, he doesn't even come off as a bad person. I maintain, you put a lesser actor in this role, you get a stereotypical meanie Evil Stepfather, and the movie's shittier for it. Rebhorn just walks up like, “I'm a reasonable man,” and the audience is like, “You know what? He kind of is.” That shit right there is like the Stella Adler Jedi mind trick, is what that is.

Independence Day (1996)

Maybe Rebhorn's highest-profile role (his role in the profitable but fucking terrible Meet the Parents was less key, ditto Scent Of A Woman, and I can't discuss the final episode of Seinfeld without overturning cars and starting simultaneous riots in at least five major cities), and certainly his most unambiguously villainous. Playing President Bill Pullman's trigger-happy Secretary of Defense, Rebhorn basically spends the whole movie being the guy who's like, “Wir haben das Reich zu schützen, mein Führer,” and Bill Pullman's like “What the fuck is this shit, I thought I was a Democrat.”

Interestingly, in spite of him being a total WASP, and Rebhorn admitting to totally basing the character on Ollie North (showing Rebhorn is totally fucking aware of the Evil White Guys In Suits theory) his name in the movie is Nimzicki, which is about as far from WASPy as shit gets. But, director Roland Emmerich said the character was named after the MGM executive who fucked up the ad campaign for Stargate, so it was just a good, old-fashioned bit of axe-grinding; if not for that surely Rebhorn would have had a WASP name. And anyway, Rebhorn's mere presence is a signifier of WASPy WASP WASPness.

Speaking of setting things up for the other actor, let us not forget the bit near the end when the aliens are about to fuck shit up, and Judd Hirsch busts out the Torah for the prayer circle as Rebhorn's sitting down. “But . . . I'm not Jewish,” says the great man. Hirsch appraises him with one of the great “No fuckin shit bitch” glances in cinema and says, “Nobody's perfect,” a line that wins style points for one-loving Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot. Say it again: Rebhorn's in for the team.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Playing yet another super-rich dude, here Rebhorn is Jude Law's dad, who hires Tom “Matt Damon” Ripley to go to Italy be responsible, which ends up being a stupid move, but falling for Tom Ripley's bullshit is nothing to be ashamed of, as anyone who's read much Patricia Highsmith or knows anything about Alain Delon or John Malkovich can tell you.

The thing that's so dope about Rebhorn in this is just how perfectly he captures the quiet, understated, patrician WASP thing here. It's like every white person in the history of white people donated DNA to a super-white person designed by the world's greatest geneticist and polished off by a goddamn artist. Rebhorn is, simply, the whitest rich dude like ever in this. Say what you want about The Talented Mr. Ripley, it didn't half-ass anything. It wanted be a beautifully shot movie with gorgeous Italian locations? Done. It wanted to be about twenty minutes too long with a false climax and too many subplots? It was thirty minutes too long with two false climaxes and way the fuck too many subplots. I do really like the movie, but it values surface over depth. The surface is perfect, though, which is why when it needed a guy to be a rich WASP as Jude Law's dad, it got the rich WASP: James fuckin' Rebhorn.

The Game (1997)

The sine qua non of awesome James Rebhorn performances. David Fincher's typically stylish, much-better-than-it-has-any-fucking-right-to-be third feature gives Rebhorn a bit more room to stretch than most other pictures he's been in, and Rebhorn responds with a fucking powerhouse, multi-layered, meta mindfuck. And, of course, to bring this discussion full circle, he spends the whole movie fucking with Michael Douglas, a noble pursuit.

When Douglas' little brother (Sean Penn) gives him a “game” as his birthday present (pitched as a massively intricate ARG), Douglas, his existence barren, gray, and emotionless, deliberates a bit and goes “what the fuck.” He heads on in to start playing the game, and the dude he talks to at the game company is James Rebhorn. Now, because The Game is one twisty fuckin narrative and a damn fine cinematic experience the first time through (it holds up to multiple viewings, but that's more a how did we get from Tinker to Evers to Chance kinda thing), I'll stop right there in terms of specifics. But suffice to say, James Rebhorn is goddamn astonishing in this. He adopts like five or six different personae depending on what the best way to fuck with Michael Douglas' head is under the circumstances in question, and each time you totally buy it as what's really going on.

Now, sure, there's other stuff going on in The Game. Michael Douglas is a rock (he gets us on his side even though he's a fairly Evil White Guy in this, with many expensive Suits, which you cannot do unless you put in a solid performance), Sean Penn is a bit overcaffeinated but still good, and Deborah Kara Unger was putting in another installment in her brief mid-90s run as the thinking man's kinky Canadian sex symbol, but Rebhorn walks away with this movie. Just walks right the fuck away with it. Every beat and line reading is just like “holy shit, this dude is a fucking BOSS.” And it was the point at which, after having seen him in like a half dozen thing in which he absolutely ruled, I made a point of checking the credits and going “Who the fuck is that guy . . .? Ah, James Rebhorn. Okay, duly noted.” Crossing the Rubicon from “That Guy” to having your own name and everything is a big step. It happens a little earlier for me than most, because I'm a goddamn nerd and I'm obsessed with character actors, but still, when you have your “That Guy” graduation, you've won the character actor game.

James Rebhorn, I salute you and all your contributions to the cinema, not the least of which is the fact that every time I see an evil white guy in a suit in a movie, I have to go, “Is he Rebhorn caliber?” It's not every actor who can lay claim to having defined a character archetype, but James Rebhorn most certainly can. Here's to you, sir.

IN THE RACE FOR STUPIDEST TRAILER OF ALL TIME....A CHALLENGER APPEARS....

2011-10-13T18:44:00.001-04:00

The great Charlie Jane Anders said, "Wow. This could actually be the worst movie of McG's career." I would donate a testicle to see that be a pull quote on this poster. I mean . . . holy shit. We might have to pull the plug on Western civilization. Anything that makes one long for the halcyon days of Terminator: Salvation's lucidity and intelligence is just . . . wow . . .

THE DOCTOR IS OUT OF TOUCH

2011-10-13T02:17:00.000-04:00

The above is an ad that's been running on TV a bit of late, and has—probably intentionally—provoked a bit of controversy. You may have noticed that I don't talk a whole lot about advertising here, even though it's an occasionally interesting form of cinema, mainly because there's baggage (politics, memetics, aesthetic morality, all kinds of complicated shit). This one, though, requires response, because otherwise I'm going to dent a wall slamming it with my fucking head.

I'm a guy. I like beer. I like sports. I like movies where lots of shit blows up. I'm what you might call, if you felt so fancy, a bit gender normative in all these regards. None of these pleasures induce the slightest bit of guilt. Guilty pleasures are for people who need to loosen the fuck up. By that same token, I'm not one of those morality police-ass motherfuckers always running around telling people, “WAAAAA YOU CAN'T SAY THINK DO OR FEEL THAT BECAUSE OH MY GOD YOU NEED TO BE SENSITIVE WAAAAA” because those people are fucking assholes. When I was a little kid in Park Slope, I went to this mildly schmancy summer arts day camp, which was enlightening and kept me out of trouble when school was out. Being the Slope in the late 80s, it meant there were a whole lot of upper-middle-class junior progressives there, but most of them were okay. The camp people would hook us up with popsicles at the end of the day because it was the summer, and this one day one of the other scruffball troublemaker types I hung around with tossed his popsicle wrapper on the ground. A dick move, and a sign of poor breeding, to be sure, but nothing I was about to break his balls about. This other kid, though, swoops in and in his high-pitched little kid sanctimonious voice squeak-bellows, “YOU LITTERED! THAT'S WRONG! YOU HAVE TO PICK THAT UP AND NEVER DO THAT AGAIN! YOU LITTERED!” I mean, come on. There's politically correct and there's being the little fuck who gets all the extra credit questions right, and this kid was the kind the latter roll their eyes at and call dipshit. Scolding people for bullshit just deepens their resolve to do that kind of shit again.

Then again, right is right and wrong is wrong. Back to that ad for a second. The people who made that ad are operating under all kinds of upfucked assumptions. Let's unpack and dissect:

1—Only dudes like action movies. This right here's about as bullshit as bullshit gets. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I grew up with a dad who didn't really like typical dad stuff. He was indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, sports and the only way you could get him to sit through a violent movie is if it was SF. Thus, my entire responsibility for my early education in both sports and violent movies fell to my mom, who was more than capable of taking care of this, but still, it was all up to her. And it's not like she took this responsibility on because she was on some martyrdom trip, like “in the absence of a traditional male role model, I shall nobly resist and suppress my feminine nature in aid of what must be done for my child.” Fuck that shit, she wanted someone to watch Knicks games and car chase movies with. And as awesome and unconventional as she is, she's not the only woman in the world with these tastes by any means. I get most of my fantasy hockey advice (and not bad at all, either) from a woman friend, and I'm in two different fantasy football leagues with another woman friend, among many other examples. Action movies? Fuckin' forget it, it'd be easier for me to count the number of women I know who don't like violence than the ones that do. Don't even come at me with bullshit about small sample sizes and so forth. Even if you somehow managed to collect stats for the whole movie-watching world and came up with something like less than half women like violent movies, or even if you found out only a third did, you can take that “only dudes like action movies” hooey and jam it in your ass.

2—There is anything manly about drinking diet soda. There are two reasons to drink soda: sugar and caffeine. It is a terrible vehicle for either of these things. If you still need your caffeine fix and for dietary reasons you need to lay off the sugar or something, nut up and drink some fucking black coffee. Putting sugar in your coffee is weakness, and putting milk in it is racist. If you're in a tea-drinking country, tea's fine, just put like twelve bags in the kettle and get ready for fucking liftoff. Relying on soda for caffeine is like jerking off with the crook of your elbow.

3—This “no women allowed” thing. Now, this'd be a whole 'nother deal if Dr. Pepper was like, “you know what? With the number of states passing marriage equality votes, and with the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell finally allowing members of the military to come out, let's reach out and market our new diet soft drink to gay men.” Which would be just as dumb, because then you'd be shafting the lesbians, and their whole trip is that that's not their trip. There's no way this “no women allowed” shit isn't sexist. At all. There are nights you hang out with your dudes, or your chicks, and it's just dudes or just chicks, and that is what it is, but if you're some dude hanging with your dudes and you're saying (or, shit, thinking) “Fuck yeah, bro, I'm fuckin glad as fuck there aren't any fucking chicks around bro, fuck that shit, bros before hoes, bro, fuck yeah!” you need to broaden your horizons. You may even find a female friend who finds your double entendres about broadening your horizons by hanging out with broads funny. (Ed. Note: I'm living proof!)

Ad people are probably looking at all the people tweeting and blogging about how fucking stupid this is and going “Well, the spot did its job, people are talking.” Here's the problem with that assumption: all the people talking about this are pissed. They're not going to suddenly want to have makeup sex with this dumb diet soda. And, on the off chance, some dumbfuck bro types are sitting around going “Fuck yeah, bro,” those dummies aren't about to go drink this piss. They're barely going to remember what the fucking ad was for thirty seconds later. The net result is, you pissed a bunch of people off for nothing. All because you couldn't be fucking bothered to think about what human beings are like beyond a stereotypical level.

Rather than end on an angry note, let me raise a glass to all the women out there who like action movies. Let me raise another glass to the men who aren't so stunned by that affinity that they treat those women like unicorns, and instead do the sensible thing and kick it about action movies with them. Let's raise a glass to treating people like human fucking beings. And rest assured, what is in the glass I raise will not be Dr. Pepper.

AN AFTERNOON DIALOGUE

2011-10-11T12:55:00.000-04:00

The following is a Gchat transcript of a conversation between myself (me) and Chicago-based musician, actor, and cineaste Steve Gilpin (Steven).

Steven: personally I didn't like Brick a whole lot
it was ok
but I REALLY fuckin' liked The Brothers Bloom
(in William Hurt voice) A HELLUVA LOT!!
sorry that was my pathetic excuse for a history of violence reference

me: brick was awesome

Steven: i didn't like it that much

me: you have cooties if you don't like brick

Steven: heh
then i guess i have cooties
i didn't hate it
just felt so self-conscious and didn't add up to much for me

me: sigh

Steven: interesting style, sure.
what?
sorry!

me: no reaching the kids these days i see

Steven: see i WANTED to like Brick
but i would be lying if i said i really dug it
does that make sense?

me: NO
IF IT IS WAR YOU WANT THAN IT IS WAR YOU SHALL HAVE

Steven: the movie's charms just eluded me, dude.
sorry for not partying with brick

me: I SHALL BOMB YOUR DRESDEN
I SHALL SEND YOUR LEADERS INTO HIDING

Steven: sigh
i mean i guess i could watch it again

me: NO
YOU WILL NOT WATCH IT AGAIN
YOU WILL BE BOMBED

Steven: heh
ok

me: YOUR FIELDS SHALL BE PLOWED WITH SALT
AND YOU WILL NOT BE ALLWOED TO WATCH
BECAUSE YOU WILL BE DEAD
TOO DEAD TO BUST MY BALLS ABOUT TYPOS
anyway
taste is subjective

Steven: heh
nice
CLAM THE FUCK DOWN BITCH

me: i am clam
starring sean fuckin penn in a shell, motherfucker

Steven: bwahahahaha
i am clam
nice
so i have a confession

me: HEROES IN THE HALF-SHELL TURTLE POWER

Steven: i never thought i would say this ever

me: YES?
PROCEED

Steven: i actually wanna see the Footloose remake

me: WELL IT'S FUNNY YOU SHOULD MENTION THAT, STEVEN

Steven: you are punchy today

me: THE DIRECTOR OF THAT FILM HAS DEMONSTRATED, IN HIS OTHER WORK, AN AUTEURIST SENSITIVITY AND A GENUINE FEELING FOR THE MILIEU IN WHICH THE ORIGINAL FOOTLOOSE WAS SET
HIS INTERESTS IN MUSIC AND CINEMA ARE OFT-DEMONSTRATED AND THE ADDED MEDIUM OF DANCE COMPLETES THE TRIAD IN A KIND OF AESTHETIC SYMMETRY THAT COULD LEAD TO A HIGHLY INTRIGUING FILM
WHICH IS TO SAY, YOUR INTEREST IN THIS FILM IS WARRANTED, DEFENSIBLE, AND INDICATIVE NOT OF AN AESTHETIC FAILING, BUT INDEED OF THE RARIFIED LEVEL OF TASTE THAT YOU'VE FREQUENTLY DEMONSTRATED OVER THE DECADE AND CHANGE THAT WE'VE BEEN FRIENDS
how's that for punchy

YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT, ESPECIALLY IF WHAT YOU WANT IS FREEDOM FROM CONSEQUENCES

2011-10-08T16:36:00.000-04:00

The American experiment has hit a couple potholes here and there in its 100 mph, top-down, hair in the breeze weekend jaunt through the annals of human history. Perhaps most frustrating is the fact that we're always one or two simple steps away from getting it right—to extend the opening metaphor, we could, if we so chose, ask the hooker to sit in the passenger seat and do some of the righteous blow s/he brought and not suck our dick as we take that hairpin mountainside turn—but, well, we just insist on getting blown at all times and so, occasionally, a fiery flaming wreck results. That's America in a nutshell, always thinking with its dick.

All is not lost, though. The evil white guys in suits are getting a degree of comeuppance from the awesome folks engaged in the 99% protests, the Occupy Wall Street/various and sundry other EWGIS hangouts demonstrations. The evil white guys in suits are not taking this resistance terribly well and have been acting out in fairly piggish fashion, which is both lulzy as fuck and ultimately damaging to their hegemony, so these days there's a rare sliver of optimism that the good guys might actually wrinkle some motherfuckers' Brooks Brothers. Which is nice.

But, then, some dumbass comes along and fucks everything up and restores that creeping, chilly “we're all fucked” feeling. One such is a woman in Michigan who's filed an actual for-real, official and everything lawsuit against the distributors of Drive, claiming that the trailers misrepresented the movie as being Faster and a bit more Furious than it ended up being. Obviously, it's not like people aren't allowed to not like Drive. I did, a lot of other people did. A lot of others were lukewarm or outright hostile. Not everybody likes the same stuff; there are even reports of apostate joyless fucktards who don't like Big Trouble In Little China (Ed. Note: shun these fucks).

Be that as it may, suing a distributor because you're too fucking stupid to realize that a trailer is not a movie . . . well, that's just special. Not only is it a waste of time the criminal justice system could better use to acquit good-looking white chicks of murder, it sets an extremely dangerous precedent. Let's break the “thought” process down into its elements:

1—Lady sees Fast & the Furious
1a—Lady likes Fast & the Furious (a logical conclusion)
2—Lady sees trailer for Drive
2a—Drive trailer contains cars
2b—Moreover, said cars are being driven
3—Lady transitively infers that Drive = Fast & the Furious

I'm well aware that not everyone reads the amount of film criticism I do (some read more, most read less) and thus not everyone had been reading stuff about Drive from when it screened at Cannes until its US release four months later. But even so, have another look at the trailer for Drive:

Again, you can not like it because it turned out not to be the Fast & the Furious. I may find your reasoning specious, but hey. It's America. The level of stupidity it takes to actually sue Drive's distributor over this, though, is one where it's practically an art form. And that's before we even get to the part that because Drive has Jewish characters, it's anti-Semitic. That, actually, is kind of comforting: the plaintiff might just be crazy, not apocalyptically fucking stupid. Small comfort, but still.

I know the second a responsible judge gets a hold of this ruling, s/he'll toss it and probably even openly chastise the plaintiff for wasting the court's time, but on the off chance that doesn't happen, it sets a dangerous precedent. It means if I see a trailer for a Scarlett Johansson movie, and she doesn't take her clothes off, I can sue because I saw those hacked cellphone pics. If I go see RDJ's next Sherlock Holmes movie and he doesn't turn to Jude Law and go “The game's afoot, Watson!” I can sue Warner Bros, RDJ, Jude Law, Guy Ritchie, and the cult center where Guy Ritchie left his filmmaking ability ten years ago.

Per that last, it is once again safe to make unkind jokes about celebrities on the Internet. The recent reality show H8R, where éminence grise Mario Lopez provided the likes of Snooki, Kim Kardashian, and the creator of Girls Gone Wild the opportunity to shame people who'd said things about them on the Internet. Now, as Daniel Fienberg points out in this brilliant evisceration, it would be one thing if Snickers was rolling up on Perez Hilton or something, but this was a case of people who had unequivocally beaten the system, gotten ludicrously rich (or, in Kardashian's case, started out ludicrously rich and then become more so) for doing nothing more strenuous than existing. And, when someone on the Internet expresses anything other than the most obsequious fawning, Mario Lopez is there to sit in his limo and watch them waddle up to some random person who makes in a year what the victimized celebrity makes in a half-hour and say shit like “You don't even know, okay?”

That something like H8R even existed in the first place is a sign that America is deeply, deeply damaged, even if the fact that it was canceled after four episodes is a sign that we're not quite past beyond the point of saving. And, as mentioned at the top, there are many in whom the desire to change this broken country for the better has been awakened. But fuck, man. There was, for four whole episodes, a TV show where incredibly rich people went out of their way to embarrass incredibly not-rich people they'd never met before who dared to criticize them. And, as Fienberg pointed out, the nature of the critiques was mild, if not merely stating fact.

But, again, H8R is now fortunately a thing of the past, soon to be joined by the dumb Drive lawsuit. Hopefully the misconception that the right to have one's cake and eat it too is guaranteed in the Bill of the Rights will pass. But it is one that's shared by many in America. Occasionally, things are going to happen that we don't like. It's how we deal with that that determines our character. I'm not perfect in any sense of the word (except sex and the crafting of analogies, of course) but I can say unequivocally, if your reaction to not liking a movie is to sue, or if you get so bent out of shape about someone Tweeting that you're imperfect that Mario Lopez and a limo become involved, your character is a bit wanting.

(As a treat for putting up with social commentary on a movie blog, here's a link to my review of Real Steel. Oh, shit, that didn't help, did it? Sigh....)

THIS YEAR'S BIG OSCAR SLEEPER

2011-09-27T09:12:00.000-04:00

This right here's called The Artist. When it comes out here in the US people are going to lose their fucking shit over this movie. Rightly so, this trailer is forty shades of awesome, and apparently it's a pale shadow of the movie itself. You heard it here first (unless you were at Cannes or something).

BADASS WORLD CUP GROUP STAGE: ASIA

2011-09-23T16:47:00.001-04:00

Won Bin in The Man From Nowhere, who didn't even make the cut, this list is so loaded with badasses

The incredibly serious business that is the Badass World Cup continues, with a biggie. If we're going to be real about ownage cinema, there are two continents where the vast majority of the greatest classics are made: North America (which I'm saving for last, and not out of dick-waving patriotism or anything either, just cuz facts is facts, people), and Asia. To indulge in one of the soccer metaphors I've been trying to keep to a minimum throughout the group stage coverage, in the same way that Australia was the underrated, dope Netherlands, Asia is Brazil. Aw yeah. Style. Grace. Joga Bonito. Is it a coincidence that Pele and Bruce Lee were born the same year? Fuck. No. They're within days of being the same astrological sign.

But yeah, Asia has a vast history of massively awesome violent movies, with some of the raddest motherfuckers ever to take their shirts off. The movie industries of Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mumbai, and more recently Seoul are not fucking around. This is a continent where you could stock a team of eleven starters and seven reserves that would fuck the whole shit of any other in the world up, and still not need to field the winner or the first couple also-rans. The point I'm trying to make is that Asia knows ownage.

This leads into a very important point, because I need to have a convenient argument shutter-downer in case someone's pissed off that I “forgot” something: there's a reason I've been sticking with the central soccer metaphor in this particular Cup. Even though the notion that, on any given Sunday, any team is capable of beating any other team originated in American football, it's true in association football too. I mean, unless you're playing Barcelona, in which case you're fucked. But the point is, whatever worthy I may have “forgotten” could just have run up against an ill-timed own goal in a qualifying match. And that's the story I'm sticking to.

So, without any further ado, let us to the runners-up:

9—Bolo, Enter The Dragon, China

Just as easily could have gone to Bolo's work as the baddies in Bloodsport or Double Impact, whose names escape me for the simple reason that when this motherfucker walks on screen, his name is Bolo. Those muscles, my friends, are large. The malevolence is at once universal in scope and extremely localized in focus, which is a fancy way of saying that when he puts his foot in your ass, he does so with the force of all the stars in a galaxy. And that's you fucked. Even though this was an American movie, tribute must be paid.

Bolo in Enter The Dragon is one of the rare instances of an actor being so badass that the only way he could be sufficiently scary is by naming his character after himself. Sure, he gets eliminated for being a bad guy and for getting killed—by John Saxon, no less; that's some shameful shit—but dude. Fuck thou not about. He's Bolo. Genuflect.

8—Kuwabatake Sanjuro, Yojimbo, Japan

Dude, it's Toshiro Mifune starring in The Glass Key. No more need be said.

7—Sivaji, Sivaji, India

No list of Asian badassery would be complete without Rajinikanth. He's so fucking great that when cinemas showing his movies have technical difficulties, audiences denied the ability to behold ownage riot. That's not an exaggeration, and that's the kind of shit that gives you the right to bill yourself as Superstar, as Rajni does at the top of Sivaji (another instance of character being named after actor, that's Superstar's born name).

Why Sivaji? This is why:

I do hope we don't have any arguments after watching that clip, because that would just be foolish. This low finishing position should not be construed as a slight against himself, it should be a sign that you should be fucking excited about what's to come.

6—Oh Dae-su, Oldboy, South Korea

Another instance where words fail me. Behold:

Just don't say anything. Bask.

5—(tie) Rajveer Shekhawat, Wanted / Sanjay Singhania, Ghajini, both India

The thing about Khans is that you can't pick just one. Here we have Salman and Aamir, respectively (Ed. Note: I'm not being twatty about Shahrukh, it's just that his particular brand of being awesome doesn't involve a whole lot of ownage in conventional terms). These two fairly recent displays of asskickery by two of the world's biggest movie stars are radically different in tone, levels of levity, just about every measurable metric. So it's apples and oranges, or Salmans and Aamirs, basically, but they both need to be shouted out.

Salman in Wanted has several moments of staggering ownage. He's so awesome that when the bad guy is about to kill his dad (Vinod Khanna, no stranger to ownage his own self), Pops out Dennis Hoppers Dennis Hopper in True Romance, giving an operatic pre-death speech about how MY SON, SALMAN KHAN, IS GOING TO FUCK YOU UP. When you own so hard that you can own someone when you're not even in the room, you own. Then, factor in Salman's earth-shattering swag when he rolls up to the final fight, and the way the fucking camera vibrates right before the final brutal bad guy death (Salman is so awesome the goddamn camera is nervous), well, that's enough evidence.

Aamir spends less time, by percentage, owning bad guys in Ghajini, but he's no less fearsome, in a completely different way. After the bad guys brain him, he has Guy-Pearce-in-Memento-itis and has to carry around all kinds of reminders about who the baddies are and why they have to die, but when he finally gets down to it at the climax, looking like a malignant Tony Parker with incomplete Vulcan makeup on, he cold fucks motherfuckers up. All while growling and keening bestially. Fucking with this guy ain't no multiple-choice question, unless “no” and “fuck no” count as different answers.

Again, the order of these is even more arbitrary than it usually is, because holy god is there an array of ownage on display on this list.

4—Ip Man, Ip Man 1 & 2, China

Oh, Donnie Yen. You wear elegant righteousness so well. In the first Ip Man movie, Donnie employs the “if you own the first nine guys first, the tenth one is a snap” method of owning ten guys at once with his bare hands, which is a really efficient one. I guess it's part of the esoterica in Wing Chun, because he's the only cat I've ever seen who managed to pull that one off.

There isn't really much more to say about Ip Man except oh, Donnie Yen. There's something to be said for a really well-filmed martial arts movie where the leading man is a genuinely great actor and yet also just breathtakingly graceful in his disbursal of ownage.

3—Jaidev, Sholay, India

Amitabh Bachchan. See, the thing about Sholay is, if you haven't seen it you literally do not have the language to describe how awesome it is—even if you know what कितने आदमी थे means, you don't know what it means til you see Sholay—and if you have seen it, all you can really do is sit around saying कितने आदमी थे to other people who've seen it with smoke coming out your ears.

Sholay's so fuckin good Amitabh isn't even the one who says that and he's still the baddest motherfucker alive. He's the lone exception to the “if you die, you disqualify” clause in the Badass World Cup regulations, because he dies so awesomely and for the cause of protecting true love and with unparalleled drama. Also, any lists about badasses in Asia without Amitabh Bachchan on it is just incomplete.

2—Cheng Chao-An, The Big Boss, China

Gets the nod over all other Bruce roles because, when Bruce finds out the bad guy and his fuckface son killed Hsu Chien and the whole house full of cousins (including the fat guy and the kid), he goes apeshit and fucking fucks people up. Bruce unleashing holy hell was always a sight to behold, but he spared no expense here, knifing bad guys, just generally wrecking their entire shit.

Also, Bruce fucks around too much in Way of the Dragon (and you can take the whole “but he kills Chuck Norris” argument and cram it in your ass, the cult of Chuck Norris enables too much stupid right-wing horseshit to even work on an ironic level), and gets killed in Fist of Fury, and Enter The Dragon is an American movie, so it'd be The Big Boss by default even if Bruce didn't rule ass six ways from Sunday in that joint.

1—Chen Zhen, Fist of Legend, China

JET LI OVER BRUCE??? ARE YOU MAD??? Naw, I ain't mad, I'm in a good-ass mood. Also, this is like the eighth time on these very pages that I've proclaimed Jet's superiority in Fist Of Legend to Bruce, so it's getting less controversial. All's I'm saying is, the Fujita fight. That's why Jet's the first runner-up in the most crowded bracket in the whole sumbitchin' Cup. Fujita's like a foot taller than Jet. He's immune to pain. He has superhuman strength. And Jet won. That's all y'all need to know.

And now, the top two. Oh, that's right. Asia sends two to the elimination round. As will North America in the final group stage. Why? Because, that's why. And so the winners are . . . drumroll . . .

Tequila & Tony, Hard-Boiled, China

Sure, they have guns, and almost nobody else on the list does, and it'd be tempting to say a guy who fucks shit up with his bare hands—or, like Jet, who can decapitate a guy with his belt—is more badass because he doesn't need the help, but let me refute that:

In a nutshell, Hard-Boiled has the best gun fights to ever be filmed. Most of that is John Woo walking around swinging his dick like a watch chain, but the thing that makes it more than just craft is the fact that Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung (the one who's the best actor in the world, not the one who might have actually fucked Jane March on camera) are so awesome in this. I mean, Chow Yun-Fat's Tequila (take note and keep going) is a cop who's a jazz musician, for shit's sake. Tony Leung makes a paper crane every time he kills someone, and his houseboat (take note and keep going) is full of hundreds of the fuckers.

The climax involves our heroes teaming up to defeat a villain so evil he looks like a white guy even though he's Chinese (the legendary half-British all-awesome Anthony Wong) by killing hundreds of bad guys who've taken over a hospital. It is, bar none, the greatest action climax ever. And that is why Tequila and Tony, despite all of the above-mentioned worthies. Easily the most fun of all the group stages in in the Cup so far.

Next up—whenever the hell I get around to it—the final group stage . . . North Afuckingmerica. Boo ya.

FILM WITH A CAPITAL F, BUT, YOU KNOW, IN A GOOD WAY

2011-09-22T15:14:00.000-04:00

Writer-director Cam Archer's new film Shit Year is the kind of thing that makes me nervous. My entire formal education in film was aimed toward training me to make films like this (no, I haven't fallen off the wagon or anything, the only word for this type of work is “film”): non-linear impressionistic black-and-white aggressively non-commercial and frequently intentionally irritating “films.” The thing about this kind of work is that, when done right, it's exhilarating and opens the viewer's mind to the possibilities of the medium and all that cool shit, but when done badly nothing in the fucking universe sucks as fucking much as a “film” made by a talentless dipshit. I mean it's torture. Note, earlier in my adjectival barrage about the art film that informed my early college years, the word “pretentious” was not included. That's because the good shit in art cinema isn't pretending to be awesome, it just is. The bad stuff is the reason the word “pretentious” is such a slur. Shit that sucks pretending to be something amazing, where if you “don't get it” (read: ooh and ahh insufficiently or fail to hail the filmmaker as the next Stan Brakhage/Bruce Conner/Maya Deren) you get called a philistine retard incapable of getting anything deeper than Big Momma's House, well, I haven't any use for that. And because of the enormous divide between good and bad at play here, I get extremely apprehensive about going to see avant-garde/experimental/art cinema, and thus don't see as much of it as I arguably should.

With that in mind, the fact that Shit Year took me back to my sophomore year of college is at once a sign of the lacunae in my knowledge of contemporary art cinema, a “you had to have been there” perfect descriptor of its form and tone, and a wistful rumination on how I might have ridden it out as a film student if the stuff we were watching and everyone else around me was making was this interesting. At the same time that it's better than all the stuff I was forced to watch back then, Shit Year nonetheless is completely of that frustrating brand of cinema: first, its title is just godawful. It's not that I don't get it—it's not a reference to excrement, and it actually describes the subject of the film perfectly, to wit a less-than-ideal year in the life of its lead character—it just reeks of “look at me being edgy” on the filmmaker's part. Second, the sound design, by Cam and Nate Archer, is at several points so intolerably irritating that I was tempted to leave, and it is so absolutely on purpose. Like, I get that you're in it for the love of cinema rather than wanting to go all Hollywood and shit, but there's a fair expanse of gray area between having an uninterrupted recording of a car horn on your soundtrack for a full minute with the fader pushed up to the top so that it's the loudest thing in the whole movie and being The Help. Just saying, Cam, you coulda cut that shit after ten seconds and still made your point, homes.

That being said, everything else about this film kinda fucking rocks. The black & white photography is gorgeous, the surreal set pieces are counterbalanced (a problematic word since they might be the same thing expressed differently, I don't know) with beautifully observed human moments between people, and the lead performance is a stunner. Ellen Barkin plays a recently retired actress who moves to the country to be alone and wear baggy pants and untied shoes and tell people to fuck off (my personal ideal retirement scenario), while reflecting on a relationship she had with a much younger actor who may or may not exist. She's visited by her guileless neighbor and wiseass brother, and an unfortunate array of extremely loud noises. That's basically it in terms of story, but that's non-narrative cinema for you, the “there” that's there is elsewhere.

In this case, that's primarily Ellen Barkin's tremendous performance as a character that, by her own admission, is very close to her heart. The character, Colleen West, is an actress approximately Barkin's age, providing her the opportunity to explore in a variety of ways just what that means. Her physicality is that of a much younger woman, at times even like a child. She dresses however the fuck she feels like—in ensembles the costume designer pulled from Barkin's own closet—and it's refreshing to see a “portrait of alienation” (phrase in quotes because it so often describes a gloomy, self-serious bum trip) where the subject is so at home in her own skin. Her face glows, and what lines are visible seem natural, rather than harsh. Archer is content to just look at Ellen Barkin for an hour or so, and I can't say as I blame the cat, especially when this is how she looks to him.

The rest of the cast are more just kind of there, which isn't necessarily a problem, considering the film is all about Barkin. Theresa Randle has an engagingly strange and spooky bit as a science-fiction character who's trying to help replicate the memory of the young guy Barkin fucked during her last play. As said young guy Harvey West (no relation), Luke Grimes mainly has to just sit there looking pretty, and since it's not really clear whether he actually exists or not, that's ok, you can just high-five Ellen Barkin and tell her “get it, girl” while dude splashes around in the swimming pool and strums and acoustic guitar and so forth. Melora Walters does a good job not being annoying as the neighbor who goes out of her way to be friendly to Barkin's character, which given that she makes “apple dolls” and jogs and drops by unannounced, is a fair achievement.

The one supporting cast member who manages to rise above that “kind of just there” level is Bob Einstein, as Barkin's brother. Dude's been stealing scenes for decades now, from his initial rise to fame as live-action Wile E. Coyote Super Dave to his current level of godhood as Curb Your Enthusiasm's Thumpin' Lumpen himself, Funkhouser. He's pretty much got “normal guy with a really loud voice” on lock, and his chemistry with Barkin is stellar.

But, with all that said, Shit Year and everything in it comes back to Barkin, and her titular fucked-up 365 days. It's not a film that's going to break box office records, for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that it's a Film with a capital f, but that's not the point at all. But there was something very satisfying to the way, in the Q&A session that followed the screening I attended, Barkin responded to this one dude's long-ass question about Ingmar Bergman and what directors she and Archer studied when making the film. She was basically like, “We didn't go about it that way, we just put in the work.” And that, in a slightly vague nutshell that I can't really elaborate on further, is why Shit Year works as a Film. It may be non-linear, it may be in black and white, it may deliberately use the tools of the medium to disorient and even irritate in places, but it's not beholden to some other, older director's work. It's an entity unto itself, and—especially since it's only like an hour long—is worth seeing. Fortunately, much as I don't like it, the title totally prepares the audience for what it's getting itself into: you can't print it in the paper, it's kind of off-putting initially, but ultimately it couldn't be any other way.

FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE

2011-09-19T13:22:00.000-04:00

You gotta check out this interview with Dave Kehr. That's all. I'll be back soon, but that should tide y'all over.

I DON'T CARRY A GUN....I DRIVE

2011-09-13T17:55:00.001-04:00

All right, ladies and gents, time to get down to the serious business of discussing Drive. Its director, Nicolas “The Long And” Winding Refn, won Best Director at Cannes this year, and pretty much ever since every critic who's seen it ends up getting the first sentence of their review—usually “holy shit that was awesome” or some variant—before tipping over due to their massive boner. Now, I'm a skeptical fucker, but I'm also a total sucker for sparse, crisply directed noir-influenced pictures with taciturn heroes and skillfully executed, surprising scenes of violence. So I was torn. This morning, I finally saw Drive after months of anticipation, and am no longer torn. Drive fucking owns, and needs to be seen by absolutely every last sentient being on Planet Earth.

Well, okay, not everyone. People who don't like violence should sit this one out, because there are at least five scenes that would give them nightmares. I totally respect where they come from; my aunt Susie and uncle Mike, for example, totally rule and they're good progressives and all and they love movies, but I couldn't recommend this to them. The ownage scenes in Drive are so intense I cringed. And you had best believe that is a powerful testament to how fucking good said ownage scenes are, because lemme tell ya. I done seen some shit in my day. But I never seen someone get the top of their head turned into a slow-motion brain cloud by a shotgun, or get killed by having someone razor blade the artery in their forearm lengthwise from elbow to wrist, that much I can tell you, and those scenes are not soft-pedaled at all. The more standard people-getting-shot stuff is also done really powerfully, with EXTREMELY loud sound mixing (the sound is fantastic in this). Basically, I'll leave it at this: people who don't like violence are advised to see something else this weekend, but those who do, or even those who are neutral, ya gotta fuckin see this, dude.

Second disclaimer before proceeding further: don't mistake the breathless critical response (including, admittedly, my own) for an implication that Drive is somehow perfect, or the cinematic embodiment of the Christ or any shit like that. It's just a really well-directed and acted noir story with really good action scenes. But, that being said, it's a really, really well-directed and acted noir story with fucking off-the-chain ludicrously dope action scenes. And now, on with the review:

Drive is the story of a movie stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a wheelman for entrepreneurial sorts who need to evade cops. We open with an extremely tense sequence where two knuckleheads knocking off a warehouse somewhere in Los Angeles hire Gosling, and in a display of both top-notch driving and extreme intelligence—the details have to stay vague, but if you pay attention to the sound, the resolution of this sequence is just breathtaking—Gosling pulls it off. Roll opening titles, with dope synth-pop song.

(That's another thing: not only is the soundtrack fucking awesome, it's incredibly of the current cultural moment. You can't swing a stick in 2011 without hitting some group putting records out that sound like the Miami Vice soundtrack. This, in case there is any confusion, is a very very good thing, not in the least because there's no Phil Collins to get all conflicted about “arrrrrgh why the fuck do I like this????” and shit.)

So, Gosling, in spite of being an incredibly buttoned-up and closed-off dude, falls head over heels for next-door-neighbor Carey Mulligan. Which makes perfect sense, if anyone's a Girl Next Door it's Carey Mulligan. She's got a young son who bonds almost instantly with Gosling. She's got a husband in prison. She's got eyes for Gosling.

Gosling works at a garage, for Bryan Cranston (in a terrific performance as the classic noir sad sack wiseass), who has ambitions to start a stock car team with Gosling driving. In order to do so, he needs to borrow some money from the kind of people who it's not good to borrow money from. You know, badass gangsters. Like Ron Perlman; shit, he was Hellboy, he fuckin runs SAMCRO, fer fuck's sake, you don't fuck with Ron Perlman. And Albert Fuckin Brooks, motherfucker, you don't fuck with—wait, Albert Brooks?

Yeah, that Albert Brooks. He plays the more reasonable and personable of the two gangsters (Perlman would be the muscle no matter who the fuck the other dude was, believe), which gives him plenty of opportunity to say funny Albert Brooks-esque stuff. And, I don't want to say too much, but because you will never see it coming in a million fuckin years let it suffice to say Albert Brooks owns a couple of dudes worse than just about anybody has ever owned anyone in any movie. Ever. The fact that it's fucking Albert Brooks doing it makes it all the more awesome. Mark him down for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. In ink. Call it the Christoph Waltz slot.

So, anyway. We know nothing good is going to come of Bryan Cranston getting in bed with Albert Brooks, and that eventually Ryan Gosling is going to end up getting caught up in something. Only thing is, those two end up (kind of) being separate, because before anything else, Gosling has to deal with Carey Mulligan's husband (Oscar Isaac, who by the way is majorly blowing up, he's been in everything the last couple years) getting out of prison. Because he may be out of prison, but he's not free. If ya know what I mean.

I'll leave the plot there, not just because when Christina Hendricks shows up as Oscar Isaac's stripper criminal associate there's a shot of her ass that almost made me lose consciousness, but because that's when things start getting twisty. Also, this is not a movie where the plot is anything revolutionary. All the above description of the narrative is standard-issue noir. Part of the fun in Drive is cataloguing all the “this reminds me of that” moments, which when you look at the list afterward you see some seriously fun shit on the list: Walter Hill's The Driver (from back when he was Walter “Motherfucking” Hill), To Live And Die In L.A. (in a good way), early-mid-80s Michael Mann like Thief and Manhunter (and Miami Vice, with which Michael Mann was closely involved), and, confirmed by the director himself when asked, Steve McQueen's Bullitt.

Of course, it's what he does with those influences that's the important thing. And Drive sees a very skilled director with a terrific eye for detail in full stride. Nicolas Winding Refn tells in a pair of shots what most contemporary directors take twenty-five minutes of endless stupid dialogue scenes to convey. That economy and a terrific, stylish sense of what's cool make Drive one of the best action movies in years, one that puts most contemporary American action movies—besotted with their shakycam and having forsaken choreography for the clusterfuck—to shame.

That might be part of what's caused the ecstatic critical reaction: it's the kind of movie that for some reason doesn't get made as often anymore. While, even in their heyday, low-key noir-ish thrillers weren't often as well-directed as Drive, there nonetheless was a time, twenty-some years ago, stretching back to around the release of Bullitt, when there were enough of them so that when one came out, critics were like, “hey, not a bad little thriller.” Whereas now, with the American action movie going through a prolonged decadent phase, something like Drive drops and people flip the fuck out. Make no mistake: Drive's fucking great and I loved it and even if it had more contemporary action pictures on a similar scale for comparison, it'd still be right up near the top. But part of the reason it seems this good is because circumstances have rendered it almost unique.

Let's not end on a low or even equivocal note, though. Let's end with a parental advisory: Drive is rated R for scenes of intense and fucking awesome ownage, as well as a scene where a bunch of extremely stoic strippers watch Ryan Gosling wreak fucking havoc. It's a movie so fucking good it turned Albert Brooks into a badass (enough of one to almost qualify for the crowded North American group stage of the Badass World Cup, no less). Go see Drive this weekend. Do it for great justice. And also so we can talk about the ownage scenes I can't spoil here, because holy shit do I want to talk about how awesome they are with you.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JASON STATHAM!

2011-09-12T14:50:00.000-04:00

Rule numba one: Jason Statham owns. Rule numba two: refer to rule numba one.