DC independent film festival

For the DC folks, I just learned via Chutry that the DC Independent Film Festival is going on now. Due to a variety of mitigating factors, I may not be able to make much of it, but there are certainly a couple of films on the list that look interesting. Also of interest to District area cinephiles is AFI's unfortunately named Law Enforcement Museum Film Festival. And though the moniker may be a bit of a mouthful, it ceases to matter when you see the list of movies. Thursday will see a screening of Friedkin's The French Connection, which is one of, if not the single best, gritty 70s cop thrillers out there. It's worth seeing for the spectacularly exhilarating car chase alone. Friday night they'll be screening David Fincher's gloomy serial killer masterpiece Se7en, one of my all time favorite movies. I too-rarely take advantage of AFI's great repertoire programs--I stupidly skipped all of the Cronenberg retrospective--but I'm hoping to make it out for both of these shows.

And on a final DC note, I can't reccomend the Dada exhibit at the National Gallery enough. I've been twice already, and I'll surely be there again this weekend. At some point I'll have some things to say about the various films they're showing as part of it, but until then, I implore you: Go! Go! Go!

Metropolitan

That’s me, always late to the party—and not fashionably, either. Somehow I managed to completely miss seeing Whit Stillman’s charming little indie flick, Metropolitan, until last weekend, which should probably be added to the list of intellectual sins that includes the fact that I just read my first Philip Roth book last week. But even though it’s clear that the beleaguered revelers are putting on their coats and the host is cleaning up the Yuengling bottles, I’ll take a shot at the film that caused a minor culture-blog hiccup recently after Austin Kelly’s strained Slate article on the movie’s possible lack of conservative sentiment.

Essentially, Metropolitan is Swingers for the high-society East Coast set. A regular gang of aimless youngsters get dressed up and hang out at parties, talking incessantly about dating and relationships while riffing endlessly on how their lives seem to consist of little more than . . . getting dressed up and hanging out at parties. And where Swingers had a lackadaisical, causally vulgar West Coast swagger that reflected the boozy, bawdy lives of its protagonists, Metropolitan has a delicate, refined sense to it—a trim and proper sheen that’s equally a mirror of its characters. The roving clans of friends in each film even share a common reference point—Frank Sinatra—who informs the bluster of the Swingers crew just as he projects the tailored veneer of Metropolitan’s East Coasters: the Sally Foster Rat Pack.

As for the much disputed point about whether or not Metropolitan is a particularly conservative film, well, I’m only marginally convinced. Certainly, the finale, in which stupidity, selfishness, and crudeness are rejected in favor of some sweet-natured (if amusingly misdirected and awkward) play at upholding virtue has a conservative tinge. But if any movie in which the sweet, smart kid overcomes his minor personal pettiness to save the girl from a preening, musclebound jock is conservative, then lots of right-leaning folks are going to have to rethink the whole Hollywood-is-a-bastion-of-liberalism mentality.

If I were really stretching, I might try to argue that the protagonist’s arc from young, foolish “committed socialist” to sweet, virtue-protecting bourgeois hero makes a good case for calling the film conservative. After all, Tom Townsend is the kid who begins the film by arguing against deb parties, taxis, and even reading literature (he prefers to simply read artsy fartsy progressive criticism), and in the end, he rescues the innocent girl by taking a $120 taxi ride to Southampton, and even admits to having—gasp!—started to read novels. But that’s not so much a defense of conservatism as it is a way of showing how Townsend used second-hand social critiques as a defense mechanism to justify why he wasn’t partying it up on the East side deb circuit. At best it’s a light criticism of liberal theory, but the film seems far too clever and sweet to be reduced to an argument about its politics. Everyone who says the film has a smattering of conservative values is right; but that doesn’t mean it’s a conservative movie—in the way that, for example, The Constant Gardener or Good Night, and Good Luck are liberal movies—nor are its virtuous leanings what make it particularly memorable.

No, conservatives shouldn’t celebrate Metropolitan primarily for its paeans to virtue and bourgeoisie mores, they should celebrate it because it’s a very fine, very smart film. The delicately portrayed characters, the disarmingly literate dialog, the underhanded, Woody Allen-esque way it delivers its punchlines by cutting away, letting the humor arrive in aftershocks—Ross Douthat may find it “rough around the edges,” but I think it’s delightful. Stillman gives the proceedings an airy, light touch, that allows the characters to reveal their inherent silliness without losing their nobility, and generally finds all sorts of ways to recycle boy-from-across-the-tracks tropes into something new.

So sure, this is a movie with a bit of a conservative slant, and Austin’s contrived Slate piece is a rather lame attempt to justify how he, one of those open-minded liberal who surely must be annoyed by all things conservative, could like a movie that finds solace in tradition and virtue. But to call it a “conservative movie” is too much. It’s simply a very good movie, and conservatives should defend it as such.

Popular moviemaking

Strangers on a Train, as I’ve already mentioned, is a fun (if somewhat silly) movie, and it's also quite derivative of the previous Farley Granger/Hitchcock matchup, Rope. And while they both mess around with some of the same motifs—the idea of a “perfect murder,” a homoerotic subtext between a pair of men, one passive, one dominant—Rope is clearly the superior film, both in its psychological complexity and technical experimentation. The Wikipedia article on Granger that I linked to says, though, that Strangers was a box office success while Rope was a bit of a flop, proving that, even fifty years ago, audiences preferred zany coincidences and ridiculous setpieces involving killer merry-go-rounds to brilliant but dour excavations of man’s capacity for evil. The silly and the contrived, it seems, will almost always play better with the masses.

And if you want to test this out by “working” your way into the heralded ranks of Hollywood directordom, all it takes, apparently, is cash: drop a half million dollars of family money on an NYU student film and you’re in. Don't have any interesting ideas or talent? Don't worry; as long as you can hire enough pros to essentially make the flick for you, you just have to show up and look good. Directing a movie and running for office seem more and more similar every day.

Runaway thrillers

Is it just me, or is the ending to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train completely preposterous? Maybe I’m too young to understand the brute power of an old-style runaway merry-go-round—have the newer models been tamed out of safety concerns? (which I suppose I should refer to as merry-go-round alarmism)—but is it even remotely believable that one could spin so dangerously out of control that Farley Granger’s feet would be flying straight outward, Looney Toons style, while he engaged in stagey fisticuffs with the spoiled psychopath played by Robert Walker? Not to say the movie isn’t devilishly entertaining; Raymond Chandler’s script boils with a nearly toxic level of black humor, unusual for a Hitchcock film. And Senator Morton’s response when Granger mentions that he met a professor—“Harvard?” he asks hopefully—captures perfectly the way urban upper-crusters seem to automatically translate “college” to “Ivy League.” But really, an out of control train, even an out of control horse and buggy, I can buy. But an unhinged merry-go-round? Not even Michael Bay would attempt to spin that past his audience.

UPDATE: Chandler, not Carver. No excuse, really.

A full blast of contemporary American culture

Michael writes:

Don't be the guy who . . . Thinks Wes Anderson films are "too precious" and overrated.

Be the guy who . . . Owns at least one comedy with Owen Wilson on DVD. It will come in handy someday, I promise.

On the first count, I think I'm in pretty safe territory. I'm quite fond of Anderson's entire filmography, though I do find The Life Aquatic to be significantly less focused, funny and sharp than the rest. But here's my question: Can we count the Wes Anderson movies as "Owen Wilson comedies?" I mean, I thought Wedding Crashers was reasonably funny once, but it's not something I'd want to watch again, let alone buy. I like to think I keep my DVD collection stocked with only the best and the brightest (except that copy of Death Wish 2 my brother gave me). Dodgeball was pleasently absurd, but again, it's one of those movies that's funny once, or maybe once every few years. But while I certainly consider The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore to be "funny" movies, they're not comedies in the traditional sense, or at least not what I expect the average filmgoer (whomever this hypothetical $9.50 seat-occupying apathetic median audience member might be) would conjure up upon hearing the word.

And speaking of average movie goers and fussed-over media collections, one of the posters over at the delightfully elitist movie crit blog Reverse Shot (think of it as Ain’t It Cool for young Film Snobs, with obscure art film references and polysyllabic, academic ramblings replacing comic book allusions and ellipses) takes deadly aim at mass cinema, perfectly capturing what it feels like to stick your head out into the sunny air of fluff film after long periods spent in the stuffy caves of obscurantism:

My life is based around surrounding myself, inasmuch as I can, with things that I love or at least am pleasantly frustrated by; I limit my TV to professional sports and an occasional "Gilmore Girls," prune my CD rack regularly, and try to keep my movie-watching, outside of a sense of semi-professional obligation, honed toward my own conception of truth, grace, beauty, etc. So getting a full blast of what really constitutes contemporary American popular culture in the face can be a stunner—I often lose sight of the vast seas of shit that my little dinghy of individual obsessions is adrift in, and when it crashes through my porthole, as last night, it’s pretty debilitating. By the time I staggered onto the sidewalk I was prime recruitment fodder for Al Qaeda, a sworn enemy of the Western world that fostered such sickness.

This is a blistering, note-perfect take on how obsessive/critical impulses, much as they might drive people to seek out massive quantities of their chosen art fetish, can also insulate one from the real world viewing habits of the masses. Even irregular critics like myself see far more films than most of the folks in the multiplex on any given night, and we tend to immerse ourselves in film culture: the gossip sites, magazines, and the endless discussion amongst fellow cinephiles (and vehement blathering at patient non-cinephile friends). And the films we see tend not to be the formulaic filler that packs the multiplexes during the off seasons. There’s no way, for example, that I’ll waste time seeing Eight Below or The Pink Panther—number 2 and 3 at the box office this weekend, respectively—unless they're assigned to me. I could be at home catching up on my Hitchcock or Kurosawa, reading whatever book I’m currently working on, or any number of other far more productive activities. Like microwaving Hot Pockets. Or unfolding and refolding my socks.

And yet the obsessives and the elitists, the ones with comprehensive knowledge of David Lynch and not a clue about Desperate Housewives, are, as a general rule, the ones who get to be the critics. I’m not complaining, of course; there’s nothing wrong with the well-versed being given the opportunity to comment authoritatively on a subject, but it also falls to those of us blessed with the opportunity to comment on our favorite mediums—even occasionally—to remember that there’s an audience on the other end of the printing press (or server), and it’s likely that most of them did not spend last weekend catching up on their Antonioni.

The New Re-Punk-lic

The newest issue of The New Republic contains an article by David Hadju on the massive popularity of the music-based social networking site, MySpace. Not only is Hadju late to the game—The New York Times came to similar conclusions about the site’s unsupervised, virtual teen nightclub aura in a similar, much better story more than two months ago—and not only does he recycle the same fears of seedy internet-inspired meetups between naïve youngsters and 40 year old ex-con creeps posing as 16 year old boys that have popped up in net scare stories for years, he also makes a strange, barely anecdotally supported case that MySpace somehow breeds musicians with pitiful live skills. Here’s the relevant paragraph:

Through MySpace, some bands have built ardent followings so quickly that audiences know the words to their songs before the musicians know how to play them. Fall Out Boy headlined the Warped Tour of punk acts last summer, and I caught one of the shows in Milwaukee, during a vacation with my son, who is a senior at the University of Wisconsin. Fairly impressed by the group’s second CD, From Under the Cork Tree (an album with some good juvenile thrashing), I was looking forward to seeing the band and was surprised to find it utterly inept on stage—and I mean really inept, not inept in accordance with the anarchic conventions of punk. The singers (guitarist Joseph Trohman and bassist Peter Wentz) never used the microphone, and the band stopped and started in the middle of tunes, struggling nervously to find its place. (Not caring would have been punk. Struggling nervously was incompetent.) I heard most of the words, though, because the audience chanted the lyrics.

What Hadju, TNR’s music reporter, seems to be utterly unaware of is that Fall Out Boy is, plain and simple, a wretched, utterly talentless band of nth-wave, Green Day-imitating corporate-rock degenerates. The fact that they can’t play has little to do with their popularity on MySpace and everything to do with their total musical inability.

Hadju’s claim is based almost exclusively (the next paragraph offers an equally flaky description of a band who becomes popular without playing a show, but never discerns whether or not they’d actually be any good if they did) off his one experience with this one band, and yet he treats it as a serious conclusion. Maybe if he’d found some widespread pattern suggesting that bands who owe their popularity to MySpace are weak on stage, he’d have something. But all he offers is that Fall Out Boy sucks. That’s not a conclusion; it’s an obvious to any music-fan fact that has no real correlation to the web phenomenon he’s ostensibly writing about.

It’s interesting that Hadju takes pains to qualify his remarks by noting that their lackluster performance was not merely some punk affectation. In this, he is right, for Fall Out Boy, no matter how much faux-punk Hot Topic posing in which they engage, is about as punk as Creed is classic rock. For Hadju to compliment the band’s digitally polished excrement of an album as “good juvenile thrashing” shows he has absolutely no business commenting on anything in the vicinity of, or even pretending to approximate, the punk and indie rock genres. Fall Out Boy is suburban-safe, prepackaged mall punk, which is to the blistering, frenzied, DIY real thing—both its old school and new school variants—what tricycles are to Lamborghinis. Punk’s not dead, but The New Republic's clueless commentary isn't helping anything.

Sad but true

Harrison Ford: "Please stop casting me."

Revenge of the nerds

Via Chud, the first images of the black Spidey suit being used in Spider-Man 3 have surfaced. This is the living, alien suit that will eventually be revealed as the symbiote that will meld with angry newspaperman Eddie Brock to become Venom, one of the most fascinatingly twisted villains in the Spider-Man canon. Add this to what we’ve seen of Thomas Hayden Church as Sandman, and there’s every indication that this sequel could, yet again, one up its predecessor. Despite Chris Orr’s exceptionally good, and nearly convincing, argument for all sorts of problems with the second Spider-Man film, I think the sequel is far better than the original and, in general, a damn near perfect summer blockbuster. So what if some of the dialog is stilted? It’s a comic book movie! And, to my mind, one that captures the bemused, four-color fun of the source material’s paneled pages exceptionally well. Maybe the characters aren’t the stuff of a 70s Scorsese film, but they’re nicely developed, flawed, funny people, dealing with everyday problems—exactly what made the comic so wonderful to begin with.

It gives me supreme pleasure to see Sam Raimi pull off these wildly entertaining, charmingly uncynical, megabudget cinematic behemoths with such wit and grace. He doesn’t just get the comic book part right (as is the case with, say, the totally underrated Hellboy), he gets the movie part right too, and it shows at the box office. Who would’ve thought that the guy behind Evil Dead II would eventually end up making summer blockbusters that gross in excess of $400 million?

Factor in the giant-sized victory, both critical and commercial, of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and, to a lesser degree, the success of geek auteurs like Tarantino, Rodriguez, and the Wachowski Brothers, and there’s a strong case to be made that the fanboys and movie nerds were right all along: they really did know how to make better movies, and when they finally got the chance, they pretty much took over. It’s the most delightful irony in Hollywood that the guys who spent the early 90s making ultra low budget splatter films like Evil Dead and Bad Taste are now the toast of the industry. Gimme some sugar baby is right.

Crunchy cons and light bulbs

Rod Dreher posts my contribution to the raging, out of control Crunchy Con debate over at NRO. As might be expected from a young twit such as myself, my comments are entirely superfluous, literally a couple of dashed off light bulb jokes.

How many Cruncy Cons does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Only one, because any more than that would get bogged down in an argument over whether or not it was really better to get all light from the sun.

All of them, together (preferably in family units), because community is more important than efficiency.

Forget that. The real question is: did the light bulb come from Wal-Mart?

Anyway. I’ll save my substantive comments for later (though I recommend reading Michael’s thoughts in the meantime), and simply say that the most revealing thing about the Crunchy Con discussion is just how much we right-leaning pundit types love to theorize and pontificate. In two days, that book blog has amassed more than 18,000 words of heady (hence the need for light bulb jokes), nitpicky and generally entertaining—to self-styled surveyors of the cultural and political realms—Crunchy Conflict. All this from a snarky remark about produce.

Movie critic gossip bleg

Our dear beloved Co-chief Film Critic of Record, A.O. Scott, has recently had his lovely photo demoted to the third slot of the NYT movie page, leaving the perpetually photoless Manohla Dargis in the top spot. And instead of highlight a few of Scott’s current recommendations, the site cryptically states that “A.O. Scott is on book leave until May.” How mysterious! It’s almost Lynchian, really. Even the always well-informed first film prof of the internet, the Cinetrix, is at a loss for relevant book-related information, which is shocking in the way that finding out Wikipedia had no entry on Firefly would be. This has all the makings of a Franklin W. Dixon novel, and don’t even try to tell me that’s a psuedonymn. So, if anyone out there in internet film land works at the NSA and has the wiretapped goods on Scott’s forthcoming tome, step forth and chime in. Details, people!

Stephen Frears Presents

Mrs. Henderson Presents, the newest film from chameleon director Stephen Frears, suffers from a massive tonal confusion. It opens on a dry, awkward funeral sequence that plays as if it wants to be a little funny, but isn’t at all, proceeds to tapdance its way into a mostly-amusing, high-rhetorical slugfest between two great titans of acting, and then ducks into a thicket of dramatic complications that seem to sprout entirely out of nowhere. Despite some great performances from its two endlessly watchable leads, Bob Hoskins and Dame Judy Dench, the whole thing ends up a confusing muddle. As I recall, the first comment I made about the film as I left the theater was, “What the hell was that?”

Frears, who has previously directed such varied fare as High Fidelity and Dirty Pretty Things, here attempts to go the Coen brothers route, peddling sly, silly period wit with some fine actors and a tinge of absurdity. The picture is set in London’s Windmill Theater as it struggles to gain an audience in the moments preceding and immediately following the start of World War II. The second part concerns its further struggle to remain open—after rising to popularity with its vaguely prurient nude revues—in the face of regular bombing. Frears gives it a theatrical, low-budget touch, all rich hues and frilly costumes with lots of strident line readings and grandiose blocking. And while the film is generally pleasant to look at, Frears’ direction seems lost; he misses a number of comic beats, struggles occasionally to find rhythm, and has absolutely no sense of pacing.

My viewing companion claimed the movie was 40 minutes too long, which is fairly accurate, I suppose, if one’s desire is to more regularly pay $9.75 to see hour long movies on absurdly tiny, badly maintained screens at the DuPont Circle theater. The problem, I think, wasn’t quite so much that it was too long as it was that the filmmakers had two entirely different movies in mind which they smashed together into an unpleasant combination. Like cottage cheese mixed with peanut butter, it wasn’t that the mix was particularly poisonous as it was unexpected and, subsequently, less than delicious.

Of course, both of those ingredients can be quite tasty, at least I think, on their own, and the two sections of Henderson both have some merit. The first, and by far the best section, is a sublime, witty farce on burlesque theater. Dench, as a rich, snooty and recently widowed British aristocrat, and Hoskins, as a demanding, boisterous and somewhat short-tempered theater manager, make a delightful pair, and the script gives them each a fully stocked ammunitions closet of cleverly barbed banter with which to berate each other. The allegedly naughty bits, in which Dench decides her theater will feature nude girls, are anything but indecent. In fact, they're almost Puritanical in their tastefulness, and their silliness keep the first section zippy and zany.

But then, around the one hour mark, the film goes backstage for a quick change, only to emerge wearing a funeral veil. The light-footed pacing and snappy banter is gone, replaced by a string of totally unexpected downers. I, of course, have little problem with depressing material, but it’s generally appropriate to give your audience some warning. Perhaps a title card: Warning. Heavy drama to ensue. Alas, we get no such thing here.

Henderson delivers an hour of solid, if not exactly exemplary, chuckles, and then trots out the sackcloth and ashes for some teary nonsense that, even if it was particularly well done (it’s not), just doesn’t register because it flies in completely out of nowhere.

From this, a number of questions arise. What was Frears thinking? Why was this film—tame, unformulaic and lacking in young, nubile stars—made? What on Earth possessed so many critics to give it quite high marks? Did Bob Hoskins and Judy Dench have any idea what they were getting into? Is Rod Dreher really serious about this inexplicable Crunchy Con thing? These are important questions, people.

As for my initial query (“What the hell was that,” for those of you too lazy to glance up a few paragraphs), well; I still don’t know.

In a metal mood

Since writing this recent post on the recent Village Voice article, “Is Metal the New Indie Rock?”, I’ve been on something of a metal kick myself. My musical tastes have severely mellowed in recent years, to the point where I actually find myself occasionally thinking that something is too loud, too obnoxious, too much. This, from a guy who owns multiple albums, at least one on vinyl, by The Locust.

As an angsty small-town teenager, I always swore that I’d stay true to my brutal, heavily-distorted, head-banging roots, but for the last few years, I’ve found myself drawn more and more to light, lyrical—but still complex and serious—stuff like Iron and Wine and further away from the sledgehammer onslaught of, say, Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Still, after downloading some of the Buried Inside tracks linked to in the Village Voice article, I was transported, for a moment, back to my power-chord worshipping 15 year old self, and I had the sudden desire to start slamming myself, straight edge style, into my bedroom wall. Which maybe speaks to my general desire to flail around like a coke-addicted banshee more than the music itself, but that’s fodder for another post.

And what, you ask, is the point? Maybe just that the reason I don’t recognize Mozart when I hear it is that I’m too busy filling my mind with drop-D tremolo picking and double-bass drumming. Maybe just that sometimes a little bit of violent musical madness can be a good thing. Or maybe that I look back at my younger self, jamming away to chugga-chugga hardcore CDs and drinking over-sugared Waffle House coffee and idolizing Surge soda and think, maybe my misspent youth wasn’t so misspent after all.

Count me in

This is, I kid you not, the best Onion story ever:

Hollywood Plans Big-Budget Remake Of Mr. & Mrs. Smith

LOS ANGELES—Studio executives at 20th Century Fox announced that production will begin next month on a big-budget, all-star remake of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the blockbuster action film of 2005 starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. "We're always looking for ideas, and moviegoers really responded to Mr. & Mrs. Smith," said Fox vice president of development Mtumne Ngumwebaum. "Buckle up, action fans! This time we're going to do it bigger and better, with twice the budget and even hotter stars." Said film critic Harry Knowles: "You shouldn't touch a classic like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but if you bring Eli Roth in as director, count me in!"

thedanwray

I went to school with this guy for a couple of years, and even if he is an uneducated, NASCAR-loving, Kentucky hick (I say that in total respect), he's a really, really funny one with a completely brilliant way of offhandedly stringing together an array of disparate, absurd events (as are prevalent in his home) into a narrative of sublime silliness.

Note: Apparently, my name sometimes appears in the "newsflash" section. I don't pretend to understand either.

Stranger than fiction

Via Galley Slaves, let me direct you to a recent Post story, "The Peekaboo Paradox," about a D.C. children's entertainer who calls himself The Great Zucchini. Not only is it a completely bizarre, top-level entry into the category of you-can't-make-this-stuff-up, it's also one of the most fascinating, affecting, superbly written pieces of long-form journalism I've read in a very long time.

Manderlay review in The Washington Times

I’m in The Washington Times today, reviewing Lars Von Trier’s latest cinematic affront, Manderlay. Here’s a quick preview:

Danish director Lars Von Trier's new digital video experiment "Manderlay" opens with a group of slaves being freed. Too bad the cruel, artless mess of a movie that ensues puts the audience in bondage instead.

Buy a copy of the print edition or read it online.

Ultimate Showdown

While we're waiting for Harry Knowles' vision of the ultimate megabudget horror bloodfest or the long rumored battle of the slasher-film titans, Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Ash, we can at least enjoy another of the net's glorious absurdities -- The Ultimate Showdown.

Cutting Jack some slack

The new issue of The New Yorker has a charming, surprisingly accurate article on the popular success of the terrorist-killin’ television bonanza, 24, a show that’s clearly very close to my heart. Writer Nancy Franklin delivers a zesty rundown of some of the show’s serious and seriously silly pleasures, with kind words for the great cast of character actors in the series' supporting roles as well as a pleasantly apolitical take on the show’s torture-lust and a near-perfect description of Kiefer Sutherland’s weary, grizzled performance as the show’s lead:

Kiefer Sutherland, who at thirty-nine looks both boyish and mature, is terrific in “24”; as he himself has said, it’s the role of a lifetime. Torn between duty to his country and duty to his family, he’s focussed and always on the move, trying to shake the cloud of existential doom that hangs over him. Like most of the actors in “24,” he does a lot with little dialogue. Having found some measure of happiness with a new woman after leaving the unit, he’s pulled back in because he’s needed: no one else gets the job done the way Jack does. You can actually see the moment when he realizes that his new relationship is going to fail because of his work; he’s just driving his car—nothing is said—and if you turn away for a second you miss the look on his face. It’s lonely and desolate, sort of the way Los Angeles itself is in the show.

Even better, she nails the way the show's fans obsess over not just that they watch, but how they watch:

People I know talk about this show more than any other, and they don’t just tell me that they watch it; they tell me how they watch it. One friend has seen every episode as it aired—which in the days of DVDs and video-ondemand and DVRs bespeaks an adherence to the old ways of viewing that is almost freakish. Some people didn’t watch it at all until they happened to rent the DVDs of the first season and found themselves watching the whole thing in one weekend. (In DVD form, the series could be called “17,” since that’s how many hours a season runs without commercials; still, that’s a lot of couch time for a weekend.) One friend’s next-door neighbor calls her the second the show is over to discuss it. Couples make dates to watch it together.

I’d never thought of this before, but, of course, it’s remarkably true. I rarely share my enthusiasm for the show to someone new without mentioning that I discovered it by browsing through a roommate’s DVD collection during a long break, popped in the first disk expecting to dismiss it, and suddenly found myself in Jack Bauer’s vigorously patriotic, stop-at-nothing, hacksaw-needing grip. I watched 9 episodes in a row before I finally tore myself away. The first season, especially, really is that good.

I mention the show’s early greatness, also, because the new season is a marked improvement over the last season’s nebulous, ever-changing threats and long forays into interminable, C-plot family traumas. The show always works best under two conditions: when the multitudinous plotlines are somehow related, and when the focus is firmly on Jack Bauer whomping terrorist ass. This season’s first six episodes were some of the best since season 2: no Kim, no annoying/psychotic/needy CTU employee family members, and a whole lot of Jack running, shooting, fighting, kicking, and threatening to gouge out the eyes of the President’s Chief of Staff. Sure, the moppy-haired trailer kid (one of my friends took to referring to him as “Nirvana”) was a bore, and the President’s unstable wife was a total joke, but at least both storylines tied directly to the central Jack action, which was expectedly awesome.

But the last two episodes have been a pretty severe letdown. CTU’s new Hobbit-boy director, sent down from that mysterious higher authority known only as “Division,” gets inexplicably mugged by his druggie sister’s man friend (annoying/needy relatives? check). The First Lady’s assistant whines and bitches in a way that’s utterly absurd even if you don’t know a bunch of mid-20s administration staffers (Disconcerting implausibility? check). Everyone is actively relieved when terrorists kill a only a dozen people in a mall, as if that’s just an average day in 24-world (OK, it is. But still.). And Jack has to act like a little bitch to hide from the terrorists; the best he can do is plant a good sweep kick when they try to kill a mall full of bystanders. This is not the death-defying, chop-the-arm-off-my-partner Jack that I know.

Sex and violence

Via Ross Douthat, NY Press film critic Matthew Zoller-Seitz’s blog talks about the hotly debated sex scene in Spielberg’s Munich. I still don’t know what to think of this movie, exactly. I’ve written positively about it here, with some hesitation, and I know I found it as chilling and overpowering as anything Spielberg has ever filmed. While its certainly on shaky ground as a message piece, I'm not sure it's really as reprehensible as some have suggested, but neither am I, at least at this point, ready to mount a full defense of it. There are strong points to be made either way.

I do know, though, that when I walked out of the film, the two things that stuck in my mind were the final shot of the Twin Towers and the sex scene. The sex, to me, was distracting, out of place, showy in that it was so over-the-top and timid in that it felt like Spielberg, now long married, was still a little bit embarrassed dealing with sex. But thinking about it, and knowing that this wasn’t just Spielberg, but also Kushner, it seemed to me that, while the scene may have been awkward during the film, it worked much better after the fact—it’s a scene designed to be understood primarily in retrospect.

Seitz gets a lot correct in what he writes:

I think the sex scene is the heart of the movie, the point where it (pardon the language) takes its clothes off and shows you what it really is. Avner truly loves his wife, truly loves having sex with his wife (an unironic expression of heterosexual domestic ardor, one that almost has a hearty peasant quality; only Spielberg would dare be so cornball, and so true to the feelings of men who married well). When he fucks his wife he feels safe. That this sacred moment would be invaded by images of Munich is at once appalling, sad, funny and true to the experience of anyone who has suffered violence or watched powerlessly as it was inflicted on someone else.

But there’s more to it than that. This is clearly a scene designed by the symbolically-obsessed Kushner, and it seems to me that it’s not just, as Seitz suggests, about the way the violence has interrupted and soiled the good things in his life, but about the generational legacy the film believes has erupted out of the Munich violence.

When Avner is having sex, he’s literally creating new life. What Kushner and Spielberg are saying is that the following generations of Israelis are literally born of that violence, that struggle, that it has been bred into them at a genetic level. Avner’s anguish—and subsequently the anguish of the Israeli people—isn’t just confined to his own mind, it’s being passed on to his children and, indeed, the children of all Israelis. By the time the final image of the Twin Towers oh-so-delicately broadsides you, the message they’re trying to send is utterly clear: The taint of violence (and its ensuing pain) is passed on, and it still lives with us today.

Rachel McAdams Shows Some Skin

Michael is going to be dissapointed. His one true celebrity love, Rachel McAdams, whom he praised so highly for her alleged refusal to pose nude on the cover of the newest Vanity Fair, apparently loses her shirt (thus baring what's underneath) in this pre-fame flick. But hey, when it comes to flesh-flaunting offenses, Ms. Gingham-Patterned Blouse doesn't have anything on Basic Instinct 2.

The Stevens & Stevenson club

We can be grateful to the internet for a great many things: email, QuickTime movie trailers, sarcastic pajama clad bloggers with bigger audiences than the New York Times, the thrilling explosion of Flash-animated fun known only as peanut-butter jelly time.

But of all the wonderful programs and content the net has blessed us with, I think what I enjoy the most are the Slate roundtables. This year kicked off with a typically lively Movie Club, followed up with a revealing discussion of the politics of abortion messaging, and now gives us the utter delight of ad critic Seth Stevenson and TV diarist Dana Stevens cracking wise on the Olympics.

Honestly, where else do you find a publication as recognizable as Slate that will publish lines like:

I do like Hackl's "speeding white sausage" moniker. I also like Shaun White's nickname "the flying tomato" (earned by dint of his flowing red mane). The 2006 Games are all about propulsive foods. From here out, Dana, you may refer to me as "the ballistic starfruit."

I'm far more likely to take shallow breaths while watching Apolo Anton Ohno, the brooding, goateed speed skater. Last night in the 1,500-meter semifinal, fatally attempting to recapture his 2002 glory as a controversial gold medalist and teen dreamboat, Apolo overreached and slipped in a pointless attempt to overtake the skater in first place, when the second-place spot he had (and lost) would already have qualified him for the finals. Maybe it's just his impossibly sexy name, [which] suggest[s] a mixed-race sun god who broke up the Beatles.

Dana and Apolo, sittin' in a tree, s-h-o-r-t-t-r-a-c-k-s-p-e-e-d-s-k-a-t-i-n-g ...

Remind me to outline my complex theory about facial hair and the keys to Olympic stardom.

I don't even watch the Olympics and I like this stuff. Someone give these people a job. Oh wait...

Spilled milk

When it comes to wasted talent, Steve Martin and Harrison Ford must be having some sort of secret competition. Edelstein sums up Martin's Pink Panther remake pretty effectively:

I counted two and a half solid laughs and one respectable fart joke.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

It would rule.

I have a longstanding love-hate relationship with Ain’t It Cool News and its founder and geek-extraordinaire, Harry Knowles. As a teenager, the site introduced me to an immersive, comprehensive world of pure cinematic geekdom, in which Star Wars and Aliens weren’t just fun movies, but something approaching holy writ, or at least milestones in someone’s young life. At 15, I was far more excited than I currently like to admit to find that I wasn’t the only person whose brain swelled with fantastical images generated by too many years reading comic books and Asimov novels, and at the same time find a site where folks wrote with the same rabid enthusiasm for film that I felt. They weren’t nuts for celebrity gossip—they were actually interested in the movies: storylines, neat sequences, special effects and the fights over creative control that so often were overlooked by the celebrity-driven Hollywood press. Plus, these guys—especially Harry—seemed to have seen everything; the wealth of references they dropped gave me mountains of new cinema to pursue.

After a while, my enthusiasm for the site (though obviously not for film) tempered. The writing, never good to begin with, grew progressively sloppier (losing Alexandra du Pont didn't help either), as Harry seemed to think that his random free-associative ramblings about nothing were as or more important than the actual movies he was covering. Quickly, the truly interesting news grew more infrequent as other sites began to compete for the newly discovered (and quickly growing) movie-nerd audience, and often offered it with more wit and flair.

But almost a decade later, I still skim the site most days of the week, and every once in a while I'll come upon a gem, maybe not of really interesting news, but of the sort of irrepressible geek glee that initially drew me in. Today is one of those days. Read Harry’s drooling, horror-fan wet dream of a $165 million Michael Bay directed Jason movie:

Hey folks, Harry here... in a better world, I would be reporting that Michael Bay was going to make a $165 million dollar FRIDAY THE 13TH film that was going to be Hard R and utterly fucking insane. I don't know why I would want a $165 million dollar FRIDAY THE 13th film by Michael Bay... but wait, I do know why. Because at that budget, he could pay to get Kate Beckinsale, Keira Knightley, Liv Tyler, Scarlet Johansson and at least a half dozen more of the hottest gals in Hollywood to not only get naked for Jason, but be meat for the grinder. It would have Ben Affleck as a camp counseler and Dakota Fanning as the spunky kid sister that gets beheaded on reel 2. It would also have Bruce Willis as the father of one of the girls that's been waiting out in the woods for Jason to return... to Crystal Lake... and that lake would have been the migratory hangout for Nessie, that was visiting the young Scottish girl all grown up, Keira Knightley... Jason would kill both of them in a sequence that would reveal 29,000 separate cuts and would completely cause 1/3rd of all audiences to develop epileptic fits. It would rule.

It would rule is right.

And speaking of films that appear likely to satisfy the deeper parts of genre fan cool-lust, check out the trailer for the upcoming Russian vampire film, Night Watch.

Blah blah blogging

Sure to be the snark-of-the-town in the blogosphere this week, New York Magazine has a cover story on the increasingly star-driven world of blogs. It’s well-written, well-researched, and seems, at least initially, to rise above the traditional MSM Covers The Blog World With Confusion, Derision and Dread story that we’ve seen so many times. But in the end, it really doesn’t have all that much to say. The blogosphere is like Hollywood: a few stars get all the attention, and not necessarily because of any extraordinary talent. It offers the same well-duh conclusion of this recent article on the “science” of pop music popularity: faced with too many choices, people tend to make decisions based on what others (especially peers) have already chosen. In other words: the more popular a song is, the more popular it is. Thanks guys.

"Come spirit. Help us sing the story of our land."

The New World is the sort of lush, lucid, utterly enveloping film that could only originate from the hermit/auteur Terrence Malick, a man who, for all practical purposes, disappeared for about 20 years. It’s a film that sends the phrase “epic lyricism” into retirement. It’s not a movie that you watch so much as one that drifts past and finally washes over you—it's liquid celluloid.

Like Malick's last film, The Thin Red Line, which despite a half dozen or so attempts I’ve never actually been able to finish*, The New World is a lava-wall of molten imagery that creeps and bubbles forward slowly, decimating traditional notions of narrative and dramatic structure. And yet it’s hypnotic, almost eerily so. This may not have been what Artaud was really thinking of when he asked for a theater that worked as if in a dream, but this passage from his essay, “On the Balinese Theater,” seems relevant, if (as is typical of Artaud) somewhat cryptic:

There is something that has this character of a magic operation in this intense liberation of signs, restrained at first and then suddenly thrown in the air. A chaotic boiling, full of recognizable particles and at moments strangely orderly, crackles in this effervescence of painted rhythms in which the many fermatas unceasingly make their entrance like a well-calculated silence.

Malick’s movie is full of well-calculated silences, moments of longing and uncertainty and indefinable beauty, but many of those silences are both helped and harmed by James Horner’s alternately wonderful and irritating score. The score to the opening, which is repeated during Rebecca’s final moments in England, is a minor miracle: it’s the sound of a symphony orchestra warming up, all chaos but full of potential, readying itself for the performance and eventually coming together in a grand aural spectacle. But annoyingly, Horner cribs quite of a few of his motifs from Apollo 13 and repurposes them. Not only is it distracting, but the cues are wrong for the film, all too standard indicators of important moments in a movie that otherwise resists such traditional film devices.

One fairly traditional device (you might it call that) that does work, though, is the leading man, Colin Farrell. Where Farrell’s angsty, juvenile trepidation only added further weight to Oliver Stone’s bloated, pre-sunk disaster Alexander, the actor’s lovestruck sullenness actually works for the film here. He’s not supposed to be a legendary leader here, so his natural self-centeredness makes the very personal drama more potent. Still, true to roguish form, Farrell arrives to pose petulantly at a British royal guesthouse baring unkempt locks and an unshaven beard, wearing fashionable clothing artfully torn and dirtied—ever the 16^th century bad boy.

Most interesting, I think, is the film’s uncynical approach to old-fashioned romantic commitment. When John Rolfe (a stunning, graceful Christian Bale, all careful repression and old-world formal elegance) asks Rebecca to marry him and she balks, he says something quite unusual: “You do not love me now. Someday you will.” This sort of marriage of choice and commitment is unlikely enough to see in a film, and when it is shown (almost always in a historical context), it tends to be seeped in disdain for those quaint ancients who’ve yet to realize that love, as all true moderns surely know, is about individual satisfaction in the current moment. But Malick doesn’t give in to that easy, formulaic temptation.

In fact, the entire film resists traditional formula, easy narrative or any of the modern Hollywood hooey that infiltrates so many period films. By sticking to the truth of the old, Malick has created a truly new world indeed.

*My college roommate and I finally gave up trying to sit through the movie and simply decided that the thing was actively unwatchable. Somehow, Malick had engineered the picture to either induce sleep, send viewers into distracting conversations, or just make them fidget and leave the room in boredom. I’ve seen enough of it to get the gist, but how anyone actually made it through that movie is beyond me.

Imperfect 'Match'

I finally made it out to see Match Point last weekend, and while I think that Ross Douthat is right to call it a cross between The Talented Mr. Ripley and Crimes & Misdemeanors (both of which are better films), I didn’t find it overly schematized. Ross isn’t alone in complaining that the movie’s deadly finale comes out of left field, and while it’s not exactly telegraphed with the sort of obvious flag-waving that plagues the narratives of most movies, Allen sets up his characters with just enough hints—look at what Chris says about the nature of both hard work and luck in the early dinner scene, and also remember that he’s clearly quite good at managing the complexities of his job—that when the last scenes do roll out, they feel like a revelation the deepest parts of character, not a trick designed to push a theme.

But what really interests me is how Allen has managed to make a movie that is so firmly and clearly not a Woody Allen movie—no stuttering Jewish neurotics here, and yet, when you remove its engraved leather British slip cover, is so very patently just another examination of the same themes and character types that he’s been giving us for thirty years.

There is, of course, the love triangle. The same love triangle that menaces every Allen film, in which characters, typically male, fight over women and kvetch about their own insufferable bouts of indecisiveness. But more importantly, it’s the emotionally fueled love triangle, in which love, as Allen always sees it, is this irresistible force, like a disease or a strong wind.

Allen’s characters are enslaved by their juvenile notion of love as some glittery, oft-fleeting feeling that comes and goes with no real explanation. Melinda and Melinda was far worse in this regard, and as good as Manhattan is, it too is afflicted by this idiotic notion that love just descends from the heavens and then leaves whenever it mysteriously sees fit. Allen, almost certainly in part to rationalize his own weaknesses and unfortunate choices, simply refuses to recognize that love—the real love that keeps marriages together and that builds lasting, positive relationships—is a choice. Not a fuzzy feeling, not a self-serving way to please some momentary whim, but a choice that one makes every day to stay with someone, to serve them and to do it even when it’s difficult or unpleasant. Contrary to Allen’s cosmopolitan view of humans in helpless thrall to love's narcissistic whims, love is a choice to sacrifice the self.

This isn’t just a philosophical point, either. Every time he gives us another preening New York whiner talking about “falling out of love,” he completely hemorrhages any of the dramatic weight in a scene—characters are interesting because of the choices they make in difficult situations, not because of how cleverly they whine.

Match Point also follows up on Allen’s now-familiar, juvenile, utterly nasty view of women. There are, as far as he’s concerned, only three types: the loudmouthed domineering bitch, the cute and vaguely clueless airhead, and the irrational-but-gorgeous emotional wreck—the female devil. Those stereotypes are out in full force in Match Point, and as usual, his male characters are held captive by one or all of them. His movies all exist in an underhandedly matriarchal world in which the men are all impish and indignant, yet continue to let their obsession with the other sex (and sex in general) drive them to self-destructive acts.

To watch his oeuvre (about half of which I’ve seen), you’d think he’d never met a woman who was sweet and fascinatingly intelligent, able to make good decisions and also kindly supportive. Occasionally, he’ll mix it up and give us a domineering female devil, or an irrational, stupid airhead, but generally, his outlook on the fairer species is brutal and sophomoric.

Three Burials review in The Washington Times

I'm in The Washington Times today, reviewing Tommy Lee Jones' new bleakly comic existential Western, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Buy a copy of the print edition or read it online.

Currently irrelevant

In answer to the question the headline to this piece on Al Gore’s new cable channel, Current TV, asks, No, no one is watching. The article is a pretty basic bit of ho-hum reporting: Al Gore and company (literally) are having trouble getting people to pay attention to their fledgling TV network, and, as such, they’re revving up their hybrid engines and taking initiative. Sort of.

In a typical manner for the fashionably liberal, Gore is blaming cable corporations for not subjecting the cable-watching U.S. public to his idea of What’s Good For America. From the article:

In speeches around the country, Gore has lit into cable executives for not putting on programs "that are in the best interest of the American people." In what industry insiders refer to as "guerrilla lobbying," Gore, who is said to spend about a week a month in San Francisco as the channel's marquee executive, delivered a speech last October at an outdoor rally (and Current-sponsored rock concert) in Philadelphia that was literally within earshot of Comcast's corporate headquarters. The Gore offensive "tells me that frustration has set in" that Current hasn't been warmly received by cable companies, says John Higgins, deputy editor of Broadcasting & Cable magazine.

Gimme a break. Since when are cable companies responsible for providing anything other than whatever will attract the most eyeballs (and, subsequently, the most advertising dollars)? If Gore and Mr. Diane Fienstein want to blow $70 million on their blowhard liberal network, screaming and shrieking truth to power or whatever it is they think they’re doing, that’s great. But then blaming everyone else when no one wants to watch his underproduced collection of volunteer-made home videos is the political journalism equivalent of horn-rimmed record geeks blaming corporate radio for the fact that the new Flying Luttenbachers album isn’t getting popular attention, only orders of magnitude more smug (if you believe that's possible).

This is the same problem that undercut so much of Good Night, and Good Luck—a pretty interesting, immaculately filmed movie that just couldn’t resist rallying the progressive troops in favor of, er, more didactic liberal journalism. Which, you know, there is clearly a dearth of in this country. Really, it's true: all us poor, stupid everyfolks wouldn’t know what’s good for us without George Clooney and Al Gore to fill us in.

Gore wants broadcasters to focus on programming that is in “the best interest of the American people.” Nevermind the laughably elitist, arrogant, naïve idea that the best interests of the American people might be easily determined—when it comes to television, as countless sophomoric sitcoms prove, the American people just aren't interested in their best interests.

PS: What he really needs, clearly, is to give his network some depth—literally. As James Cameron gleefully reminds us, "Everything's better in 3D!"

Bolt Thrower and music nerd laziness

I've been slowly moving away from Total Indie Music Obsessiveness over the past few years, as work and movies (which, pleasently, are sometimes the same thing) and life sort of ate away at the time it took to be an all encompassing music fanatic. Movies may take more effort, in some ways -- you have to travel to the theater and devote two or three solid, uninterrupted hours to the experience -- but if you see two or three movies a week, you can keep up pretty easily.

Music on the other hand, is simply insane. Some of this is due to Pitchfork, which, at 25 reviews a week (plus track reviews and other articles), has solidified the necessity of gluttony in music consumption for any true fan. Their obliterating musical overload is the gold standard in comprehensive listening, and it's totally impossible for anyone except Forkers and scooter driving trust-funders to match.

Even my own haunt Skyscraper will publish a couple hundred record reviews an issue. At my high point, I was doing about 20 an issue for them, which is a lot, but it doesn't even really do much more than skim the surface. It's just impossible to give thoughtful listens to the totally obscene number of albums that come out each week, let alone actually purchase that many.

And along with my somewhat declining music intake (comparatively, for a former music junkie), I quit reading music criticism as regularly, opting instead just to browse the Fork each day and leaf through the pages of Skyscraper when the quarterly issues arrive. What used to be a daily hunt for news and reviews turned into an apathetic unwillingness to even make an effort when headlines popped up on my screen.

But this Village Voice article - "Is Metal the New Indie Rock?" - is really good. It does exactly what good criticism should do: Not only does it tell me what's good and what's bad, or even why that's the case, but it writes compellingly and entertainingly enough that I actually believe the author and am motivated to download the tracks (handily provided) and find out for myself.

Decibel is either the Murder Dog or the Wax Poetics of metal, maybe both. The magazine treats its subject ("extreme music") with respect but not reverence; it's fully immersed within its own world, but it isn't afraid to poke fun at itself. Most music magazines these days are written for teenagers; they don't assume their readers will have any knowledge-base about the music they cover. The writers and editors at Decibel are entirely willing to make neophyte readers feel like idiots; they presuppose that we'll already have a working understanding of the importance of Bolt Thrower and that we have some idea what the fuck "Swedish guitars" sound like. I might've never read Decibel if my roommate didn't sometimes write for it, but it might be the best music magazine around right now. It does exactly what a music magazine should: it makes you want to know more about the stuff it covers.

Although, seeing as I actually know what a Swedish guitar sounds like and have at least listened to Bolt Thrower on multiple occassions, I might be a little too "inside" to really judge.

3D -- on ice!

This is how James Cameron's brain works:

I can't think of anything that I see on a screen these days without thinking how much better it'd look in 3-D! If I see a movie I really like... Like, I'm watching KING KONG I think, "Man! That'd be great in 3-D!" Everything's better in 3-D! Everything! A scene in the snow with two people talking... in 3-D... It's amazing! You're in the snow! You feel the snow.

The death of you

On the way to work this morning I spotted a passing Metro Bus with an ad for Final Destination 3. Without delving into the near-certainty that the movie will plumb new depths of stupidity, the ad is festooned with the tagline "This ride will be the death of you." Now, far be it for me to ever call for more regulation, but is that really the sort of message you want to be plastering on the sides of public transportation in Washington, D.C.?

Information, yes -- informative, no.

The other day, I praised Stephanie Zacharek’s film criticism at Salon.com for being “delightfully comprehensive and slightly scattered,” but today I want to quickly draw attention to a passage of hers that is a model of perspicuity. Here’s the introduction to her review of the miniseries Bleak House:

Skimming is the new reading. As newspapers scramble to hold onto their dwindling audience, magazines shrink the size of their articles down to caption size (or replace them altogether with "charticles") and bloggers compete to capture whatever shards remain of our already fragmented attention, one thing is clear: The act of reading -- of hunkering down and focusing on one piece of writing at a time, all the way through -- is quickly becoming a luxury we can't afford, at least not if we're pretending to fight that losing -- and increasingly pointless -- battle known as "keeping up."

This passage almost makes me shudder, for even as I write this, I’m keeping up with a steady flow of emails, vaguely scanning news headlines, and working on multiple design projects.

I pointed out to a friend the other day that the work many of us now do in a day—researching and writing an essay or a section of a book, in his case—would’ve seemed like a gargantuan task not too long ago in college. We’re so used to processing dump trucks full of information that the big assignment for a semester is now just an item on an afternoon’s Post-It note to-do list, a short block of time initiated by a reminder from a PDA.

And of course, the constant stimulation of even a fairly relaxed workplace makes things even more hyper. It’s not unusual for me to receive more several hundred worth-reading emails a day, and the constant ping of Outlook alerting me to new messages means my attention span is shot completely to hell. I don’t think about one thing for three minutes, let alone three hours or—heaven forbid— three days. Pretty soon we'll all be Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic, hollowing out our childhood memories from our brains to make room for more information storage (although in Reeves' case, carving away brains probably wasn't all that much of an impediment).

Perhaps that’s part of the appeal, for me, of going to the movies—getting to sit in a darkened theater with no emails or phone calls or scrolling headlines for two hours and simply concentrate on one story, one set of circumstances. In the darkness of the screening room, there's no worrying about the 237 (at least) other things I’m supposed to be thinking about at any given time.

What Zacharek has caught onto and captured so precisely, I think, is the ever-increasing insistency of the information-driven life. For those of us working in and around industries that deal primarily with analyzing or delivering information, both the speed and amount of information available has increased immensely in the last few years. Even for those of us with terminally hyperactive minds geared toward gorging on new words and ideas, it can become a bit much. Back in 1985, before things began to really accelerate with the wide adoption of the internet, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil got it exactly right: the movie’s Ministry of Information Retrieval was a soulless filing cabinet for young up-and-comers where the pipes literally burst open with countless pages of mind-numbing information.

UPDATE: Apparently, the infoglut is bad enough that it warrants a panel on how if affects dating and relationships. It'll be good to finally get settled, though, the issue of whether or not you still have to call if you sent her a half dozen emails during the day.

Bubblicious

Today I tackle Steven Soderbergh’s newest movie, Bubble, an ultra-low budget experiment in digital filmmaking that, while not exactly entertaining in the traditional Hollywood sense, presents an unexpected case for the power of human choice in shaping our lives. Head on over to National Review Online for the article.

Economic silliness quote for the day -- via Slate:

There must be something I'm missing that makes popcorn essentially different from Internet access.

David, David, David

Your favorite glitzy journal of delicious East Coast snobbery, New York Magazine, has a slick new website, but the best new feature isn’t the design. No, it’s the not one, not two, but three dazzling new stories by the magazine’s newly anointed film critic (and Slate defector), David Edelstein.

His short entry on the Film Forum’s Boris Karloff retrospective is, in classic Edelstein fashion, wickedly (heh) adverb heavy:

The retrospective includes two early rarities, Graft and The Guilty Generation, as well as Karloff’s gleefully macabre Fu Manchu in the floridly racist The Mask of Fu Manchu. Only in John Ford’s The Lost Patrol do you catch him madly overacting as a religious zealot, although this bleak portrait of British soldiers picked off one by one in the desert is remarkably prescient and ripe for rediscovery

Sometimes, while composing my own articles, I wonder if it’s possible to love those busy little modifiers a little too much (though, admittedly, that rarely stops me), but then Edelstein shows up on the doorstep with another flighty rhetorical bouquet, and I’m reminded of how it’s really done.

And of course, there are two spirited new reviews, one of Tristram Shandy, the other of Manderlay. Both bubble over with the delightful little verbal flourishes and handy allusions that make his work so much fun. Really, what other big name movie critic could (or would) get away with writing the line “dig that freaky symbolism”? Other highlights include:

Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story is a hall of mirrors that doesn’t tease the brain (it’s easier to watch than to read about) so much as goose it into submission. There is room in this conceit for almost any in-joke imaginable: barbed banter between “Coogan” and “Brydon” (“This is a co-lead.” “We’ll see after the edit”); psychosexual anxiety dreams; and impish parodies of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, its Baroque symmetries diminished in these threadbare surroundings. Winterbottom goes in for Altman-esque hubbub and keeps the visual textures slapdash.

And less kind words for Manderlay…

Although it’s a listless affair, Manderlay is less noxiously reductionist than Dogville, if only because Von Trier regards African- Americans as both pathetically weak, conniving nonentities and victims. But no matter where he begins, his dramatic compass drifts toward the same pole: the sexual humiliation of his heroine (How could Daddy let you do this, Bryce?), Fascistic mob rule, and David Bowie warbling “Young Americans”—this time over photos of blacks being lynched. But it’s hard to get too worked up over racial injustice when a director has the temperament of a Klansman.

But the real treat (probably not the best word, but...) is his article on what he calls “torture porn.” Edelstein, one of the great defenders of stylized celluloid bloodshed, takes on our nation’s cinematic sadistic streak, applying his giddy jokester’s prose to a topic of real seriousness. As a critic, Edelstein has always understood the fine distinctions in cinematic violence—the careful lines that separate raw barbarity, caricatured bloodshed and graphic images with real moral weight. Here, that nuanced understanding continues: The notable thing about the article is that it neither attempts to excuse big-screen bloodletting nor simply dismiss it as some great, pure evil, another banal symptom of societal vulgarity and decay. And in the end, it even goes on to indict itself—there’s a self-reflexive understanding of the power and complexity of violent imagery that’s truly rare in cultural commentary.

I think, from a communications standpoint, the President did an excellent job delivering his speech last night, though I would have preferred if, like another “wildly silly” bit of over-the-top entertainment of the same name, the event had starred a pissed-off, sulky Ice Cube. (Now that was some terrorist ass-kicking --though it was no match for the explosive apathy of the box office.)

And if the grab-and-grope happy political theater of Presidential speechifyin’ isn’t your bag, there’s always more to be said about the other coast’s annual gathering of the pompous and ostensibly socially concerned—the Oscars. It occurs to me that this old Slate Franklin Foer article accusing The Weekly Standard of a “Stalinist” back of the book might just as well apply to yesterday’s Academy Award nominations. As Foer wrote:

It is impossible to parse out whether they dislike something because it is bad art or bad politics. And they spend so much time immersed in the political arguments that they often omit aesthetic judgments altogether.

With the Academy, it’s impossible to tell whether they like something because they think it’s good art or good politics, and subsequently, we get a host of nominees that make, at best, middling stabs toward both and end up failing either. The result is a ceremony that’s nothing but a bloviated muddle in which the iconic statues they award become the gold standard in self-serving mediocrity.

UPDATE: I should add that I'm not agreeing with Foer's criticism of TWS, just pointing out that what he complained about at TWS is clearly evident at the Academy.