Down with Grups

I’m not entirely sure where to begin with New York Magazine’s cover story “Up With Grups.” Kudos, of course, for the hypergeeky Star Trek reference, but the 6300 word story, though amusing throughout, never really figures out what it wants to be. Is it a eulogy (in its words, an obituary) for the generation gap? Is it a frontlines report on the lifestyles of hip thirty-somethings? Or is it just a snarky article about consumer trends in the next generation of upper middle class urbanites?

The answer, of course, is a little bit of all of that, but mostly the latter. For all its insistence on being about something larger than who is buying and wearing what—it toys with the notion of connecting its subjects through something it vaguely describes as “passion”—it can’t help but being about, well, stuff. Author Adam Sternbergh even acknowledges this early on in his piece:

And because this phenomenon wears itself so clearly as the convergence of downtown cool and easy, abundant money, it is also, of course, about stuff—though that’s not all it’s about. It’s [about people who aren’t] interested in putting away childish things. They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their thirties and forties, and even fifties, clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies, content that they can enjoy all the good parts of being a grown-up (a real paycheck, a family, the warm touch of cashmere) with none of the bad parts (Dockers, management seminars, indentured servitude at the local Gymboree). It’s about a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up and whether being a grown-up still requires, you know, actually growing up.

But even in explaining how it’s not just about stuff, Sternbergh can’t help but namedrop Dockers and explain the group by pointing to their rakish fashion sense. He calls it “a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up,” but to read his article, the only conclusion he really makes about what that means is more expensive pre-ripped jeans, more extravagant extreme sports vacations, and a continued interest in hipster rock. As he writes:

Of course, when you’re 40, with a regular paycheck, yet still want to resemble a rock star who resembles a garage mechanic, well, what’s a guy to do? Status symbols still have their uses, especially in the world of clothes. And this is where the $200 ripped jeans come in. Or $450. Or $600. You want the tattered jeans, but you also want the world to know, I can afford the very best in tattered jeans.

And of course, this being New York Magazine, he takes a trend almost exclusively found in comfortably upper middle class blue staters—mostly from the ranks of creative professionals—and treats it as encompassing. The people he profiles are sitcom writers and music video directors and trendy jeans designers—not exactly a representative group.

The one place where he might have found some unique material to mine was in the way these Grups raise their kids. But although he takes pains to make his subjects seem like bleeding edge parents who look out for their children’s musical tastes, he ends up exposing the Earth-shattering revelations that… parents want to raise kids with similar values.

Thus, parents who value strong aesthetics, whether in music, fashion, or whatever, will make that an issue with their kids. If these parents are different than a previous generation, it’s only because so many Boomers sought to instill their relativistic, figure-it-out-yourself ethos in their kids by not teaching them anything.

That kids are treated as just another fashion accessory is an interesting thought, but Sternbergh never really develops it beyond being mildly concerned that a parent might actually—gasp!—give his kid instruction on how to live life. In this case it’s shallow aesthetic guidance (check out my Interpol CD, boy), but it amounts to the same thing. If anything, Sternbergh is just covering it from the Boomer perspective that says that parents shouldn’t try to teach kids anything (although Boomers typically focused on values, having been so wrongly shackled by their parents) because that would be an imposition on natural development and freedom. And, of course, he has to include a cheap shot at Republicans. Whatever.

Probably the most interesting section focuses on Grup jobs. He writes:

A human-resources executive told me recently that there’s a golden rule of HR: To motivate a baby boomer, offer him a bonus. To motivate a Generation-Xer, offer him a day off. The Grup, I think, would go for the day off, too.

Of course, here on K Street three blocks north of the White House, the way to motivate someone isn’t to give them a day off or a raise (high salaries and reasonable work hours being something of a rarity amongst the hordes of ladder-climbing DC entry levelers), but to give them more responsibility.

Still, the notion that what many people now value is freedom from the office is a strong one. Also, the poll he cites, in which 54% of respondents said they wouldn’t want their boss’s job regardless of pay, is interesting. But what these two ideas really suggest is that this group’s strongest trait is self-centeredness. An unwillingness to give up personal freedom and a strong distaste for being responsible for anyone other than themselves is exactly what we ought to expect from a societal segment who, even through adulthood, has rarely encountered that which they desire but cannot have. Even the thought of a daily routine makes them skittish, and so now they’re bailing on that responsibility too.

All this is displayed as if it’s unheard of and new, but really, is anyone truly surprised by the article? Affluent, creative urbanites are fashion-forward, musically trendy, and utterly self-obsessed. Thank you, New York Magazine, for keeping us all so up-to-date.

"As neutral as a football game in which one team gets to wear rocket boots."

My latest tech op-ed takes on the subject of Net neutrality, an issue that many have deemed egregiously complicated (though most of the complication is just obfuscation by those on the wrong side of the debate). My attempt to uncomplicate the issue is up now at CNS News. Free samples at the counter:

America has developed a proud paternal bond with the Internet. We've watched and cheered the net''s growth from its awkward, text-heavy infancy into the capable, hard-working information network it is now. But, like many beaming parents of prodigies, we''re so pleased with our creation's current brilliance that we're on the verge of stunting its development with overbearing restrictions. These restrictions, ushered in through innocent-sounding but insidious "net neutrality" legislation, threaten the net's maturation into the powerful technology it ought to be.

Kissing the action movie goodbye

It takes one to know one, the saying goes, and one natural extension of that idea is that internal criticism is often sharper than lambasting originating from the outside. And, sure, sometimes this is true: With his mid 90s smash, Scream Wes Craven both deconstructed and reinvented the horror movie genre he helped create. With Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood brought moral seriousness to the gritty, violent Westerns he helped popularize. Other times it's less successful, the most recent example being former First Things editor Damon Linker's unconvincing, overlong diatribe about Catholic scribe Richard John Neuhaus. Bruce Willis' attempts to skewer his own persona in The Kid and the Nine Yards films were pretty miserable as well. Same goes for De Niro’s comedic turns. I'm not even going to get into the David Brock/David Horowitz issues, nor will I touch Fukuyama. Point being, sometimes it works, but just because someone had a hand in creating something doesn't by default mean they're the ones to tear it down.

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, the little-seen action send up from writer/director Shane Black, falls somewhere in the middle. Black knows the buddy action comedy better than anyone. As a kid in his early 20s, he helped invent the genre with his Lethal Weapon screenplays as well as scripts for The Long Kiss Goodnight and The Last Boy Scout. But that doesn't seem to help him as much as one might hope. Sure, the film has a smirky, meta-sheen to it, but it plays like an elementary school Charlie Kaufman's early attempts at self-aware screenwriting. Mostly Black just follows the clichés he thinks he's skewering, forgetting to twist them or satirize them in the way the first act suggests and letting them simply play out like they would in any of the other bloody, glitzy buddy movies about cops, cars, and guns that have become a multiplex staple over the last 20 years. It's a movie about how action movies are silly and derivative that's, well, silly and derivative.

Robert Downey Jr.'s voice-over, which talks to the audience with full awareness that it's explaining a movie—even rewinding and saying things like, "I'm a bad narrator, I forgot to show you _______," is fun at first, but Black doesn't have the warped genius needed to make it really work. Instead of sending Downey's V.O. in for the kill and really lampooning the genre--cynically pointing out all of its crutches and absurdities--he just makes the narration kind of dopey. Worse, he seems to forget that the voice over exists about a third of the way through the film, only bringing it back as an easy way to wrap things up at the end. Where's Joss Whedon when you need him?

No, Black's talent isn't creative inversion of tropes, it's taking genre clichés to their ludicrous extreme. This time he stabs the guy with an icepick from behind his eye! Inside out style! Cool! Etc. So, of course, there's plenty of wanton, brutal—but inventive!—violence. Problematically, the casual attitude toward bloodletting, always a staple of Black's movies, doesn't mesh well with its cutesy comic undertones. It's one thing for two ornery cops to put holes in bad guys while bickering, but when your hero is supposed to be sweet, lovable and kind of out of his element, it's jarring to see him slaughter so carelessly.

Black's other talent—his ability to come up with outrageous-yet-lyrical dialog, full of the sort of metaphor and aphorism only used by kooky film characters—is also readily apparent. And sure, it works, but I liked Inside Man's take better. Denzel utters the obligatory overly clever line, "Last time I had my johnson pulled like that it cost me five dollars," and Lee lets the camera sit for a minute, giving it time to sink in—and then Willem Dafoe, the grumbling tactical realist, looks confused and says… "Five dollars?" Nobody actually talks that way, and though Spike Lee couldn't avoid including the bit, he could call attention to the fact that such colloquialisms are actually really weird in normal conversation. Black, on the other hand, sprinkles his dialog with any number of such lines but isn't smart enough to do anything with them.

Black has been hinting at his dissatisfaction with the genre rules he helped enshrine since The Last Boy Scout. That film ended with Bruce Willis telling Damon Wayans something to the effect of “This is the 90s. You can’t just shoot a guy anymore. If you hit him with a surfboard, you have say ‘surf’s up.’” Later, he did some rewrite work on an arguably better (though thoroughly overlooked and underappreciated) spoof of the shoot-em-up genre, Last Action Hero. But it seems as if he can’t quite escape the over-the-top, frenetic, mindlessly violent, goofball home he’s built: The best moments in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang come not from making fun of action movie standbys, but in playing them to the hilt as only Shane Black can.

Waiting to Inhale at Human Events

I’ve briefly mentioned how much I enjoyed Thank You for Smoking already, but my complete take is available today at Human Events. The film, which is as much a satire of the argument industry—in both its DC and LA versions—as a look at the world of Big Tobacco, is one of the more enjoyable satires to come around in a while. Here’s a preview:

In many ways, "Thank You for Smoking" is an exploration of the culture and business of professional argument. Nick, who makes his living as a sort of linguistic contortionist, explains to young Joey that, "if you argue correctly, you’re never wrong," and finds himself spinning facts and figures in everyday conversations with his family. Nick and his lobbyist cohorts even have to stop themselves from fighting for bragging rights over whose industry causes the most deaths. Like Philip Roth's satirical novel "Our Gang" and the policy-rapping antics of Warren Beatty's "Bulworth," the movie exposes the fragility of language and the way words can be endlessly reconstituted to serve nearly any purpose.

But unlike "Our Gang" or other political satires of its ilk, "Thank You for Smoking" smartly avoids using the malleability of language as fuel for partisan rage. Instead, it suggests that free, individual choice, buffered by strong families and good education, should be the ideal. Reitman claims to believe that "freedom is tough, liberty is tough," and that he doesn’t like government control. His movie reflects this, allowing that there are some shady, cynical characters on the tobacco side of the fight, but reserving just as much venom for the pusillanimous arrogance of the regulation-addicted Senators and government busybodies who populate the halls of American bureaucracy.

Critical uncertainty at Slate

What's going on with Slate's movie coverage? David's gone. Dana just had a kid (congrats!). Metcalf hasn't written a film article since the middle of February. There's a revolving crew doing DVD extras. Grady Hendrix drops by every now and then, but he's still listed as "a writer living in New York." If anyone knows, feel free to drop me a line or leave a note in the comments section. Still, Hendrix's Inside Man piece is worth noting just for its closing graf:

Inside Man is nothing less than a Spike Lee joint, a well-mannered older brother to his uneven Clockers (1995). It sports the same trolley shots, a ghetto-crime video game (here called Kill That Nigga instead of Gangsta), and even a prominently displayed bottle of the Bomb, that movie's imaginary bomb-shaped malt liquor. More than anything, it makes the case for Lee as the pre-eminent chronicler of modern-day New York. The coolness and the crudity, the attitude and the alienation, he nails down every detail with a clear-eyed precision as if he's never seen a movie set in the city before. Suspects are interrogated at the corner deli, a vital clue hinges on breast size, cops halt the negotiations for a heated debate over Grand Central Station, and when Denzel needs to identify a foreign language he just walks out into the crowd of onlookers and asks: Does anyone speak this? Predictably, someone raises his hand.

It's not Edelstein, and Clockers was far better than "uneven," but still: not bad for a temp.

10 < 50

I don't even have anything to add to this except that I really, really love Seth Stevenson's ad critic column and that those hands are indeed "nauseatingly weird." Who knew what net-dating Kip could do with 15 seconds and a camera?

Yeah Yeah Yeahs review in The Washington Times

I’m in The Washington Times again today, this time with a review of “Show Your Bones" the new record by spunky New York rockers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Samples are always free:

In the image-obsessed world of rock, there's no such thing as too much attitude. New York rockers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are well aware of this, and their latest record, "Show Your Bones," arrives fully loaded with plenty of their signature hipster swagger. But this is no mere facade; the band packs far more than thrift-store threads and an arsenal of sneers.

On their sophomore album and major label debut, the band hurtles through 11 case studies in garage-band eloquence, mixing dive-bar grit with subtle studio trickery. Sometimes intimate, sometimes fiery, but always brazenly confident, "Show Your Bones" plants a bold, raucous indie flag in major-label territory.

Buy a copy of the paper or read the article online.

Critical scourging from the paper of record

Normally, the film critics at the New York Times--especially those on the lower rungs--play it pretty safe with their reviews. At 350-400 words a pop, the last-stringers (who are often quite brilliant critics in longer form) don't have much room for more than an intro, a summary, a judgement, and maybe one small observation. If you're lucky, you get a closing witticism. But occassionally, a film is so execreble that it calls for desperate measures. Witness the opening paragraph of Jeanette Catsoulis' review of Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector:

Unpleasant, uncouth and painfully unfunny, "Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector" attempts lowbrow humor with neither the wit of the Farrelly brothers nor the raunchy inventiveness of Keenen Ivory Wayans. Aiming at audiences for whom no comedy is complete without lower-intestinal distress and projectile vomiting, the movie pursues its unsanitary goals with a relentlessness that makes "Dumb and Dumber" seem the epitome of sophistication. Prepare to be overcome with an irresistible urge to wash your hands afterward.

And you thought The Passion was brutal.

Watching the Watchmen

This makes me very, very nervous.

I quit my comic book habit when I was about 13. Quit buying Amazing and Web of every month, quit caring if the Alicia Masters Skrull switcheroo had been planned all along or not. Even quit reading Wizard. I don’t think I made it to the Spider-Man clone scandal, and by the time the entire Marvel Universe started over (that happened, didn’t it? How stupid.), I was blissfully buried in the worlds of movies and indie rock, a relocation that has served me well to this day.

But sometimes you have to go visit your old stomping grounds. I did anyway. Mostly for one man: Alan Moore. To read V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but mostly for Watchmen.

Watchmen isn’t just the greatest comic book of all time. Oh, sure, it’s that. But it’s much more. It completely transcends comic books and enters into the realm of honest to God literature. It’s one of the most dazzlingly complicated, painfully human stories I’ve ever read, and it just happens to be about men and women who dress up in costumes and fight crime.

Now they’re going to make a movie out of it. It’s been in development since before I became a movie-gossip junkie. From Terry Gilliam’s planned 12-movie series to Darren Aronofsky’s flirtation (would there be hip-hop montages?) to the almost but not quite efforts of Paul Greengrass, the film has been through the Hollywood ringer.

And once again, it looks like it just might happen. With… Zach Snyder? Now, I know that reports of his work on 300 have been strong, but even the sporadically brilliant Wachowskis couldn’t help V for Vendetta. If any of the Moore adaptations had a chance to be not just a decent movie (like Constantine), but also a strong adaptation, V was it. But the Wachowskis mangled it. So we’re supposed to accept on geek-gossip faith that Snyder, whose only finished work was the fun but terribly unrestrained Dawn of the Dead remake, is the man for one of the most epic stories ever to hit the big screen? Gimme a break. I’d be nervous if James Cameron took the helm. What’s next—Brett Ratner making a decent X-Men film? I sense difficult times ahead.

Spike Lee's Inside Scoop

It’s amazing how Spike Lee manages to take what is superficially just a nicely tangled heist film and use it as a wireframe around which to flesh out all of his major obsessions. The vagaries of racial conflict, the afro-centric view of New York, the post September 11^th tensions of his favorite city, cultural stereotyping and its influence on youth, racial sins of the past brought to bear on the present, the carnally sexual view of love—in Inside Man, it’s all there in brilliant Spike Lee form. And yet it never feels pushy or dogmatic in the way we’ve come to expect from anything labeled “A Spike Lee Joint.” No, Inside Man is smart, slick, patient, and unexpectedly clever—it’s the most genial hostage picture I’ve ever seen.

As with 25^th Hour, which has been sadly absent from major cultural discussion over the past few years, Lee has made a rare film that keeps in mind how September 11^th changed everything without actually making an overt “September 11^th movie.” Perhaps what both 25^th hour and Inisde Man show is that Lee works best when applying his particular obsessions to a more conventional framework. Instead of making his recurrent motifs his foundation, and thus having to laboriously weave them together into intriguing but generally awful dreck like She Hate Me, he is released of the burden of supporting his movie on his own ideas and thus is able to play with them in much lighter, more palatable fashion.

Of course, Lee is aided by a cast that, for once, deserves the critically overused adjective “stellar.” The leads, Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, and Jody Foster, are as brilliant as one might expect, especially Foster as a coolly vicious fixer—a steely, feminized version of Harvey Keitel’s Winston Wolf in Pulp Fiction. But the real strength is in the supporting cast: Willem Dafoe, playing a more serious version of the grumbling dimwit he gave us in The Life Aquatic; Christopher Plummer (remember him as Shakespeare-quoting Klingon general with a nailed-on eye patch in Star Trek VI?), whose regale, refined surface gives way to expose the fragility of power; Chiwetal Ejiofor, the one saving grace of Melinda and Melinda and a haunting conscience in Dirty Pretty Things, is endlessly watchable, one of the few actors who can stand out while playing second fiddle to Denzel Washington. Inside Man may be both a heist flick and a Spike Lee joint, but it’s the actors that steal the show.

With a sharp, often-funny script and a great cast, Lee is free to toy with his favorite filmmaking vices, especially color and sound. Although no scene approaches the grandeur of the best sequences of Malcolm X, or even the moments of orchestrated wonder that dotted He Got Game and 25^th Hour, Lee still makes time for to show off his beloved home city with vivid colors and moody music. Here, he employs a jaunty, jazz-inflected score (with shades of both Bernard Herrmann and Howard Shore) that balances between the playful tone of the detective banter with the more intense moments of hostage crisis.

Surprising, nimble, elegant and lively, Inside Man’s only real flaw might be being too smart for its own good. The resolution lacks the punch the buildup implies, and a few of the narrative turns don’t quite stand up to post-viewing scrutiny. But in a filmmaking environment where thrillers are typically little more than vehicles for sadism and Dolby-jolt scares, these are hardly major complaints. Who ever thought that Spike Lee would make a movie I could accurately describe as nifty?

Sweet as candy

Quickly quickly! Click over to Stereogum and download “The Flood in Your Old Town” by Tampa band Candy Bars. The band is well-named: It’s whispery sugar pop with a dark, melancholy undertone, like Black Heart Procession meets Death Cab for Cutie, or maybe like a more intimate Stars—but better. My home state of Florida, basically just a sticky, over-bright, open-air sauna, isn’t good for much, but, despite what Buddyhead says, the music scene is par excellence.

Anarchy in the D.C.

Anecdote: Taking a documentary film class in college, I once listened to a fellow student—the sort of kid who you have to describe by the size and location of his piercings and who takes deep interest in the politics of the local hardcore scene—describe his trip to D.C. to film an anarchist protest event.

“Shit was interminable. Everybody managed to meet up at the same place, somehow, but then they refused to make a plan, or agree on anything. Every time we’d get to a corner, there’d be a big debate about which way to go. Groups would split off. People would yell and bitch and try to convince everyone else. We ended up mostly walking around the back streets of D.C. looking for where we should be and fighting to keep the group together.”

This was from a sympathizer. I recall also that there was a lot of vulgarity and tangential anti-Bush grousing involved.*

Needless to say, this sort of anarchy isn’t about “personal responsibility” in any real sense. It’s a way of looking at the world that reduces everything to anti-authority attitudes: a sort of purist rebellion. It’s what the graphic novel character V would distinguish as post-authoritarian “chaos,” which, he explains, is often followed by an agreed-upon natural order, sans designated authority—a "true" state of anarchy.

Ross and Reihan, in their responses to my Fight Club post, throw out many, many excellent ideas—too many to really respond to—and Ross clarifies that when he was describing Fight Club as an “anarchist manifesto,” it wasn’t in the “shit was interminable” sense, but the V-graphic-novel sense. There’s a reasonable case to be made, I think, that the movie promotes that, at least implicitly. As he writes, “The only order it endorses comes from within,” and that’s certainly true. If one expands on that notion for a while, the result is certainly the internally-ordered state he talks about.

But I’m not so sure that’s really what the film is promoting. Seems to me that it’s agnostic on larger systems. It’s not saying that any of them (or their absence) are particularly terrible; it’s simply saying that we can’t rely on white collar jobs, support groups, television, image culture, shopping, or relationships with the opposite sex to provide meaning. At times in the movie, all of those things are variously blamed for Jack’s troubles. The movie isn’t suggesting we should do away with any of it; instead, it’s calling for people (especially young men) to avoid the victim culture that’s become so prevalent.

So, acknowledging that Ross didn’t fall into this trap (though by comparing it to what V could’ve been, he seemed to), I’ll just point out again that too many critics and viewers have embraced Fight Club as an anti-capitalist, pro-rebellion tract, with Tyler as the savior who shows Jack the way out and the final explosions symbols of victory. Roger Ebert, always influential but long since removed from being a trustworthy critic, called it “macho porn” and “cheerfully fascist.” Even the usually dead-on David Edelstein said that Tyler’s speechifying “seems meant to be intoning gospel.”

Despite some of the nervous critical reaction and total dismissal at awards and the like, I’m fully convinced that the next generation of film critics and academics will look back on Fight Club as one of the defining movies of the 90s and early 00s. It’s gaining in stature with the younger crowd, both those who’ve embraced it for its responsibility ethos and those who see it as a victory for rebellion, and at film fan sites like Chud and Ain’t It Cool, it’s one of the most oft-discussed movies. Writing in The New Republic last year, Robert Alter quoted Gershom Scholem as hailing Kafka’s work as canonical for its “endless interpretability.” In the last 15 years, I can think of no better film to meet that description than Fight Club.

*Kind of like The Wachowskis’ movie, actually.

Information Retrieval

I’ve already shared my disappointment with V for Vendetta, and today, my colleague Iain Murray has his take on the mangling of the original graphic novel at TCS Daily. Probably the best article I’ve read so far, though, on the problems with the film is Matt Feeney’s Slate essay on the profound differences between the best Britain-as-futuristic-fascist-state movie, director Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and the petty, self-important haranguing of Vendetta. Both films tackle similar material, but only Brazil truly understands the incompetence and suffocating grip of bureaucracy gone made. As Feeney says:

Whereas V for Vendetta adopts the highly movieish perspective of an avenging Übermensch who has himself escaped the tyranny that ensnares everyone else, Brazil observes the totalitarian order from within. It presents the subjective experience of administrative tyranny. And it presents this tyranny not as expressing the conscious design of an evil omnipotent dictator everyone can wholesomely hate, but as an inexorable process that slowly envelops the individual trying to navigate it.

If you’ve haven’t seen V yet, don’t bother. Do as Iain advises and read the comic instead, or just rent Gilliam’s masterpiece (available, I’ll add, in a luxurious 3-disk box set from Criterion).

Christmas in March

I’m in The Washington Times today with a review of the new French/international production of Joyeux Noel (“Merry Christmas”) an overly sentimental tale of the famed battlefield Christmas truce during World War I. Here’s a sample:

That war business is no good, no good at all. Watching Joyeux Noel ("Merry Christmas"), a movie about the famed Christmas truce during World War I, one can't help but be reminded of this idea -- and little else -- over and over again.

The movie is little more than an old-fashioned plea to stop the violence and just get along. It's a simplistic fantasy that ignores the larger complexities of war in favor of a belief in basic human goodness. Still, as far as fantasies go, it's an appealing one, and Joyeux Noel, despite being drenched in sentimentality, often delivers its naive ideas with a light touch. It's the feel-good war movie of the year.

Buy a copy of The Washington Times or read the article online.

I am Jack’s personal responsibility

Ross Douthat, in his otherwise excellent post on V for Vendetta, drops this line about a film with a special place on my DVD rack, Fight Club:

If you want to see an anarchist manifesto that actually has something somewhat interesting to say, in spite of the flaws and adolescent posturing, you might go Netflix Fight Club. It's kinda like V For Vendetta, except that it's not . . . what's the word I'm looking for . . . brain-dead.

Now, not to sound too Harry Knowles here, but I have a Fight Club poster here in my office. I wrote countless essays on Fight Club during my tenure in college (ah, the tough assignments of English-Film majors), and count the movie as one of my three favorite films. Ever.

Ross is right to say that it’s not brain-dead—it’s one of the smartest social commentaries of the last decade—but he makes an extremely common mistake in counting the movie as pro-anarchy propaganda. I’ve encountered this quite regularly from both fans and detractors, and even a number of smart film critics that liked the movie (Peter Traverse, for one), hold that it’s essentially an anarchist tract about striking back at the modern capitalist system.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. As far as I’m concerned, Fight Club is about the need for personal responsibility. It’s about the way young men have whined themselves into weakness and tried to blame everyone—women, bosses, social conventions—for what they’ve allowed themselves to become without being willing to accept any of the difficulty that comes with change. It’s an evisceration of Hollywood’s image culture and the way consumer-lust has replaced real meaning in too many lives. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s also probably the best cinematic satire of progressive groupthink ever to grace multiplex screens.

I’ll agree that the movie does present corporate cubicle farms as being capable of some serious soul-killing, but the caveat is that this occurs only if you let it. Jack (Norton) becomes a drone because he’s repressed himself and allowed himself to be used; Tyler (Pitt) is his subconscious’s reaction to the repression. And, as is often the case with unconscious reactions, the manifestation is unruly, violent, but incredibly seductive. It portrays itself as a natural impulse (and therefore presumably good), as freedom from corporate (or whatever other societal) tyranny.

Even more, the end result of Tyler’s escapades is an even worse form of slavery, a supersocialist groupthink that trades in any conception of the self in favor of top-down order. That’s Tyler’s way—terrorism, anarchy, juvenile rebellion magnified a hundred times—and to my eyes, the film makes it clear that his influence is immensely dangerous.

Look at the final scene. The pivotal moment is when Jack says “I take responsibility for all of it.” It’s his willingness to own up to his mistakes, to not blame corporate overlords, succumb to the lure of consumerism, or accept the violently stupid authoritarianism of anti-corporate groupthink, that gives him power.

From then on, he understands that the power is his own, here symbolized by the gun he realizes he’s holding, and he makes a decision to accept that real change will require pain, courage, and self-sacrifice. He turns the gun on himself—not because he’s suicidal, but to symbolize that he’s willing to accept the difficulty that comes with taking control of one’s decisions—and releases himself of his last excuse, his last false master.

The buildings exploding at the end aren’t a sign of victory against the corporate elite; they’re the mess he’s going to have to pick up, the destroyed life he’s going to have to rebuild. No one else may understand—a Project Mayhem member commends Jack for being "tough"—but Jack does, and that’s all that matters.

UPDATE: To preempt the inevitable follow up question, my other two favorite movies are Blade Runner and Taxi Driver. On at least one day of every week you might be able to get me to include The Incredibles in that list as well.

V for... incoherence?

I was all excited about V for Vendetta, but it turned out to be a severe letdown—childish, cartoony, full of itself and, most importantly, not very entertaining. National Review Online has my complete take today, in which I call the film “a mildly entertaining dystopian pulp adventure weighed down by some of the most muddled political messages to land on multiplex screens in a long time.”

Hump day

Where, you ask, is Peter? Well I’ll tell you: I’ve been paddling desperately to emerge from a vortex leading to deadline hell. I’ve been reading about pirate radio. I’ve blogged elsewhere (it’s only virtual infidelity). I’ve been working on secret projects that will blow your mind the way everyone seems to think V for Vendetta did. I’ve been trying to figure out how much I dislike that movie, and though distaste is a slippery, squealy pig sometimes, I think I can safely say this: somewhere in the neighborhood of a lot.

I’ve also been utterly immersed in the fourth season of The Sopranos. I lent a bit of cash (like ten bucks) to someone the other day and my first instinct was to remind him that I was charging two points and would break his legs if he didn’t make the payments. But don’t mind me; I’m not Tony. I’m not even Pauly or Silvio. I’m definitely Artie Bucho, though I haven’t lost all my hair. Let me put that on your tab.

People ask me about music all the time. Music is even more subjective than film, but I’ve been rocking the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs disk, Show Your Bones, pretty endlessly. Thought their first album was decent but not as good as folks said. This time out, Karen O. is definitely prom queen. Prom king even. More on this some other time.

The Blackheart Procession has a new album out too, called The Spell. These guys are the coolest goth kids you know. I think I once wrote a review of one of their albums that said they sounded like freaky circus clowns playing mourn-rock. Still pretty accurate. If it were Halloween and I wanted to get my Crow on, my first step would be to rock this record for a couple of days. Followed, of course, by tattered fishnets on my arms. That’s a classic. What I wouldn’t give to read Flannery O’Connor’s take on modern day suburban high school Goths.

Homemade trailer goodness

Advice to female fictional characters the world over: never marry Harrison Ford.

I'm a grindcore conservative

When I was in high school, before I became a full blown film fanatic, I was a music fan. So were most of my friends. One of our favorite pastimes was to categorize and sub-categorize and classify every single possible variation of the various blends of rock music we listened to. There’d be metal, grind metal, death metal, black metal, grindcore, hardcore, grungecore, metalcore, hair metal, operatic metal, doom metal, wank metal, even murdercore. (Don’t ask me what that is.) And those are just the metal variants (and truthfully, not even all of them). It was musical narcissism: we wanted to define and label, to the nth degree, every possible permutation of what we liked.

Little did I know that the conservative movement I’d join as a young adult would bear at least one major similarity to the extreme metal scene of my youth. Not only are there mainstream conservatives, paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, religious conservatives, libertarians, compassionate conservatives, the dreaded crunchy conservatives, and so forth, there are a slew of as of yet not fully developed conservative flavors that I refuse to even mention. Now Rich Lowry adds to the pile of subgroup nomenclature with this post over at the Corner:

Jed Babbin has a response to my “To Hell with Them” Hawks piece here. He says he's not a “To Hell with Them” Hawk, but an “Endgame Conservative.” Andy McCarthy also addresses the piece here--and he is not happy with the “To Hell with Them” Hawk label either. Derb, bless him, is perfectly happy to own up to the label (although he thinks it's too clunky), and will have a mighty blast at my piece up tomorrow. I will respond at some point after we finish the issue we are putting to bed right now. But while we're quibbling over labels, let me say that I'm not a “neo-Wilsonian,” as Babin says, but a “neo-realist” (Stanley Kurtz is the other one, in case you're keeping score at home).

These days, you can’t just be a conservative. You have to preface the word with a book’s worth of prefixes, like titled-aristocracy, and then, if you’re so inclined, mention any slight differences you may have with your chosen tribe. There’s a certain pleasure in it, of course, for all of us who spend a large portion of our time parsing out tiny differences in ideology and approach to policy, but there’s also a danger here that we’ll spend so much time labeling and classifying what we believe that we won’t actually get anything done. I think this is most apparent in the Crunchy Con blog, a niche of the web so exhaustively nitpicky in its attempts to battle over every little theoretical in and out of their club I can barely read it. Perhaps more important though, is that it seems to me to be a sign of rising disunity on the right that we increasingly define ourselves by our divisions and differences than by what we share. Are we headed toward a left-styled interest-group coalition? This pro-life libertarian certainly hopes not.

'Star Trek' by way of beautiful teens and 'Top Gun'

Trek supernerds will need drool-catchers for this unbelievably comprehensive AICN post regarding the (praise Sybock!) aborted Starfleet Academy prequel. AICN’s new regular contributor Merrick, who has yet to prove himself as anything more than another codenamed Harry flack, doesn’t exactly make a great case for his ability as a judge of geek material. Although he admits that the thing reads like a “beautiful teens Top Gun” version of Star Trek (I'm waiting patiently for a Brokeback Star Trek parody) and quotes a couple of hideous, contrived, UPN-worthy bits of dialog, he gives the thing pretty strong praise. Here’s just one example he gives from the script:

STAR TREK: THE ACADEMY YEARS begins as TOS (movie) era McCoy addresses a Starfleet commencement. After his speech, several cadets corner the good doctor, who is standing alone, gazing into a reflecting pool. They nervously ask him about Kirk and Spock.

SECOND CADET: What were they like?

FIRST CADET: Were they friends?

McCOY: FRIENDS? I never met two less likely candidates for friendship in my entire life. That surprises you, doesn’t it? Well, it’s the gospel truth. They were as different as night and day. As Vulcan…and Iowa.

Pardon me, but any script that includes such blisteringly obvious, banal dialog doesn’t remotely deserve to be labeled “extremely involving,” “genuinely moving” or as having “a tremendously vibrant heart and soul.” Is it too much to ask for the gatekeepers of geekdom to actually be good geeks?

File under: libertarian pickup lines

You're so hot you make me care about global warming.

Happy Birthday to Surfeited

Now blow the candles out, my dear, and make your wish come true... a very merry un-birthday -- to you!

Two men enter, one man leaves

From the under-read to the over-read ... I'd love to spend heaps of time dissecting the discussion, nay, bitter argument going on about film criticism and The New World over at Dave Kehr's blog. I've written before about the passions surrounding that movie, and nowhere are they more apparent than in the exchange in the comments section between Kehr and TNW evangelist, Matt Zoller Seitz. For anyone fascinated by film criticism and those who practice it, this is like the back-alley, black-market version of Slate's movie club: two brilliant critics brawling over a film, the nature of film commentary, and, of course, the other's personal style, wielding 30 pound steel-spiked paragraphs that would scare Mel Gibson. Be warned, it gets rough:

How about this, Dave: instead of dismissing the praise for Malick as a filmmaker, and essentially writing off his followers as moonstruck simps who aren’t using their eyes, ears and brains, actually take a look at the positive reviews, address those portions which specifically deal with technique, and refute them with examples. Pull reviews by me, Armond White, Manohla Dargis, N.P. Thompson and others who have praised the movie, zero in on discussions of the filmmaking within the text of the piece, and tell us how full of crap we are. And try to use counter examples. Not, “This person is obviously a moonstruck child,” but actually make the effort to talk about the same shot, the same sequence, the same music cue as the critic who praises Malick, and interpret it differently, to prove your point. I believe that’s called real debate, and I have yet to see you practice it on this particular topic. Are you still capable of it?

Filmbrain, as always, has some useful thoughts on the exchange as well.

Who’s reading this stuff?

Looking through the official Sony Classics site for Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas), I noticed that most of the body text, especially in the History and Synopsis sections, looked to be rife with grammar errors--we're talking multiple mistakes per sentence. Now, I’m no grammatical wizard, especially not in my posts here, but you’d think that the official website for an Academy Award nominated film coming out under the Sony banner would’ve been checked a little more thoroughly. It's really pretty embarassing. Any editors looking for a job out there ought to bug Sony; they seem to need some help.

Very cool

Over at Artful Writer, Scary Movie 4 scribe Craig Mazin has a smart post on how screenwriters--especially those working on genre films--can use fanboy gossip sites like Ain't It Cool to gage the reaction amongst the con-going True Believer crowd. He offers some good insight in how to read the fan reviews and a dead-on description of the comment section, legendary home of the most creative, vulgar vitriol on the net, the Talkbacks:

Talkbacks are insular. They’re their own subculture that has turned back and around on itself. It’s not like you’re getting a hundred honest opinions. You’re getting a hundred statements that are partially honest opinion, partially competitive writing, partially intentional deception, partially delusion and partially deconstructive critical anarchism.

Competitive writing is just about perfect. Good stuff.

You know you have nerd issues when , , ,

They aren't even goose bumps. They're geek bumps. That's what I got reading this description of Superman Returns footage at ShoWest. Chills, I tell you. Chills of unadulterated nerddom:

Then we see the biggie. Superman trailing a plane with engines smoking. He rips off one of the plane's wings, sending it flying back. The plane goes into a nose dive and Supes charges after it, smoke trails surrounding him as he and the plane are both pointed towards the earth. The shot is the classic Superman shot, with Supes dead center and the camera looking as if it's placed on his back, showing his shoulders up. Keep in mind we're pointed down.

The other wing of the plane rips off and flies right at Superman, which is also us at this point. It rushes up and right as it hits Superman the screen cut to black. The fanfare still going, the title comes up.

'Wi-fi? Why not?' at TCSDaily

I’m in TCSDaily today, along with my colleague, CEI’s number one Canadian wunderkind (and my favorite Regulatory Policy Analyst in the office next door), Isaac Post. In “Wi-fi? Why not?” we discuss a recent decision by Canada’s Lakehead University to do away with Wi-fi and the perils of the precautionary principle. Wireless net lovers and maple leaf fans everywhere should check it out.

David Mamet does The Unit

Sonny Bunch’s short Weekly Standard essay on the new David Mamet-created military thriller, The Unit, is a nice, succinct take on the show. He seems to like it a little more than I did, but does a good job of disposing with the Post Express’ moronic write up, which calls the show “mindless flag-waving, fear-mongering and Arab-stereotyping,” as if terrorism doesn’t happen and it would be reasonable to go to Afghanistan and find, say, pharmaceutical executives in charge of multinational terror groups, rather than, um, Afghanis.

I especially like his point about Mamet’s recurring cynical views on the media.

Manipulating the media is a running theme of Mamet's; in his most recent film, Spartan, the death of the president's daughter is faked, but the public is told that a DNA test confirmed it was her. When the hero finds out the girl is still alive, he asks a secret service agent "How did they fake the DNA?" The agent responds "You don't fake DNA. You issue a press release." This manipulation continues at the end of The Unit's premiere episode, when the press accepts the president's description of the operation (where Haysbert threatened the FBI agents) as "a perfect example of coordinated, interagency cooperation."

This is, of course, also prevalent in his wonderful moviemaking satire, State and Main (one of the best movies of the last few decades, comedy or otherwise, about filmmaking), where Hollywood is portrayed as the ultimate bullshit machine, even on an intimate, personal level. And more generally, it plays into his post-Pinter, post-Beckett view of language as obstruction; for Mamet and his predecessors, dialog is rarely a way for people to communicate or express themselves clearly. It's as if language is a problem that must be solved, with every line creates as much confusion as revelation. And although Mamet hasn’t gone the full Beckett route and given up on language altogether—Beckett eventually descended into writing odd bits of rhythmic, choreographed movement—he’s stuck with his insistence that clear language is never really clear.

It does irk me, though, that Bunch’s essay yet again refers to The Unit as being similar to 24, when I don’t see much of a parallel other than the obvious military unit versus terrorists angle. Bunch says, “The show [combines] the best of Fox's 24 and ABC's Desperate Housewives,” and I can maybe see the Desperate Housewives angle, though I’m not familiar enough with the show to judge, but as far as 24 goes, it lacks any of that show’s narrative drive. One of 24’s strengths is in creating long form tension, drawing out conflicts over many scenes, even many episodes. The Unit, so far, doesn’t come close.

Nor does The Unit seem to yet have a clear idea of what its characters are really like. The first episode was devoted almost entirely to explaining the "secret unit with wives who must keep their secret" setup, but it never really gave us any idea what sort of people were involved. The characters on 24 may be fairly basic—a few familiar conflicts that each one must continually choose between—but their personalities, thin as they are, are immediately obvious in every single scene, from the time we meet them to the time they die. We know, for example, that Jack will continually have to choose between family and duty, protocol and patriotism, desire for revenge and decency. Mamet has yet to establish such clear choices in his characters, and until he does, the show won’t be worthy of such Bauerific comparisons.

Spike Lee goes Inside

Via Jeffrey Overstreet, Emanuel Levy is calling the upcoming Spike Lee/Denzel Washington thriller, The Inside Man “nothing short of brilliant.”

As of March, it's the best film of 2006. It's also the best film Lee has made in his twenty-year career. I'll review the film at length next week, but for now, the best compliment I can pay Lee and Inside Man is to say that both the master of suspense Hitchcock and prince of New York City police dramas Sidney Lumet would be proud of his work.

Now, I’m a huge fan of Lumet (a director about whom I may have more to say about soon), so those are strong words to my ears. More importantly, I even really like Spike Lee, despite all his personal issues. Even when his films are bad—and there are quite a few that are—they’re always worth watching. When his films are good (I’m thinking Clockers and the wholly underrated 25^th Hour here), or even when short moments in his bad films are good (She Hate Me, awful as it was, had a few sequences of pure genius), they’re revelatory. So if Inside Man, which had a surprisingly taught trailer and sports a fantastic cast, surpasses the best of his work, then March 24 is a date to watch.

Thank You for Watching

I ventured North into the no-man’s land between Maryland and the District last night with several colleagues and a smattering of other libertarian and conservative movement members to catch a preview screening of Thank You for Smoking, the upcoming movie adaptation of Christopher Buckley’s highly amusing comic novel. I ought to have an article (you know, one of those things I actually spend a little time writing) forthcoming, but for now, I’ll just say that it’s a solid satire—witty, lively, and appropriately pointed—and that fans of Buckley’s book will have to work hard to be disappointed. There are some changes that you could quibble about, but for the most part, it’s true to the spirit and tone of the original, updating it where necessary and, surprisingly, adding some really sharp new scenes to the mix. Box Office Mojo reports that the movie will only open at 5 screens across the U.S. this weekend, but it’s sure to play well (especially in D.C.) and expand to the rest of the U.S. shortly. Make sure you see it; you’ll thank yourself.

Battlestar New Caprica?

Furthering the boob tube mania, let us now proceed to that other show I’ve been known to watch, the one with all the spaceships and killer robots that I recently claimed was “arguably the most potent, dramatically vibrant series on television.” Last weekend, Battlestar Galactica, at this point undoubtedly the best science fiction show in television history, and one of my favorite shows of all time, ended its second season with a whopper of a 90 minute episode, upending huge chunks of the show’s basic premise in a move that can only be called ballsy. The AICN talkbalk for the episode, always a good place to gauge the fanboy blood pressure, was split between angry detractors and happy supporters, with some on the negative side ready to claim the show had jumped the shark.

But as far as I’m concerned, the show is continuing right on track with all of its most basic, core elements. As I wrote in my NRO piece, the show is, at its most basic, an exploration of how civil society functions, how all the major pillars—church, state, military, science—interact and spark off of each other to shape the way humans live. And this new twist, in which the humans settle on a ragged planet they call New Caprica, will give Ron Moore an opportunity to develop those ideas even further. We’ve seen how the major institutions interact in crisis mode and its immediate follow up; now we’ll get to see how they behave on the ground, as they vie for supremacy in a situation that at least appears to be more permanent (though I have a strong suspicion that it won’t be).

And really, the change isn’t nearly as major as some are making it out to be: the Cylons have merely shifted their tactics (there’s that word again): Instead of attempting to menace the humans with brute force, they are coming in as ostensibly benevolent overlords—so long as there is no resistance. The show has pretty much always worked on three levels: personal understanding (each character attempting to redefine their understanding of the self and their interpersonal relationships), societal survival (avoiding destruction at the hands of, maybe even defeating, the Cylon enemy), and political stabilization (trying to restore and maintain order in the wake of total civil upheaval). All those elements will still clearly be at play in the New Caprica setup, so it doesn’t seem to me like the shift in locale will really make things all that drastically different.

And for those that want an official taste of what the next season brings, Ron Moore confirms, denies, and waxes vague about the future of the show over at Now Playing. The spoilers aren’t heavy, but they make clear a few points that some think are debatable.

Sopranos supreme

It’s the beginning of the end for The Sopranos, and all reports suggest the last season—12 episodes this year and a final 8 beginning in January 2007—will provide a fitting end for television’s most famous mob family. Even though the first episode of the 6^th season aired yesterday, I still have to say “all reports,” for I’m still working my way through the final episodes of the third season. For several years I was suspicious of the show’s hype, if at first only because of the fact that it was television, and it’s only been in the last 2 years that I’ve come to respect the medium. But after taking Salon’s repeated recommendations and working my way through the grisly, labyrinthine alleys of The Wire and being utterly blown away, I figured maybe it was time to give HBO a chance.

And what I found was one of the most deeply satisfying filmed dramas, on TV or the big screen, that I’ve ever seen.

While I wasn’t initially hooked on The Sopranos in that must see, addictive manner that 24 tends to grab people—the first season is extremely patient in the way it develops—I was intrigued enough to keep going. And I’m thankful I did, because the genius of The Sopranos isn’t in high tension cliffhangers or the screen equivalent of page-turner plotting, but in the depth and consistency of its characters.

Drama, as anyone who has taken a basic playwriting course or read a bit about screenwriting guru Robert McKee will tell you, is all about conflict. Especially on television, scenes typically consist of a disagreement between two, occassionally three or four, characters, each of whom is pushing for one thing and one thing only (often referred to as “motivation” or, the term I prefer, “goal.”).

The best example of this is 24. Watch an episode and it’s immediately apparent: Jack will argue that protocols don’t matter because the bomb’s going to go off in five minutes, while someone else will argue back that he has to wait for authorization to come. The President will want to disclose the truth about something, but his wife will argue that doing so will harm his family. A terrorist henchman will want to follow the initial orders from the top terrorist boss, but his field commander will argue that the situation has changed and a new plan must be followed. Every scene is an argument, essentially, with two, occasionally three, points of view and each character having one thing and one thing only that they want to get out of it—diffuse the bomb now, wait for authorization, etc. The fun is watching them resort to different tactics in order to achieve their goals. The President isn’t responding to Sherry’s gentle come ons? Watch her switch to a harsher, defensive tone that takes offense at his lack of care for their family. Bad guy unwilling to respond to Jack’s demand for info in exchange for being released? Threaten to kill his family! It’s not very complicated, but it keeps the tension way up.

The Sopranos, good drama that it is, follows a similar pattern of scene-by-scene conflict, but instead of hanging its arguments on the wireframe, single-issue characters that populate most shows, it fleshes out each of its characters’ competing impulses with the sort of detail usually reserved for great novels. So Tony, for example, is constantly acting to preserve his mob rep, to honor his family, to satisfy his sexual urges, to pacify his wife, to keep control (though not too much) of his kids, to preserve interpersonal harmony in his “business,” and a host of other influences too numerous to list. He wants all those things, to some degree, in the same way that most of the time, we in the real world are acting under an uncountable number of desires, both obvious and hidden. The pleasure is in seeing Tony and the rest of the cast work through all those different strands of desire to figure out how in the world to make the best choices and live a decent, balanced life—albeit one where murder, extortion and drug dealing are reasonable options.

The con of being "crunchy"

I was planning on eventually writing up a response to the Crunchtastic blog on NRO about Rod Dreher's newly labeled Crunchy Con movement. However, some insanely brilliant parodist has really taken initiative and created a free-wheeling Crunchy Con parody blog which pretty much accurately--and hysterically--reveals the utter absurdity of the whole thing. Here are just a few bits from the post "Simple Rules for Crunchy Living:"

I've received some mail from readers concerned because they want to live their life in a more Crunchy fashion, but are confused by what seem like an arbitrary set of rules. In order to illustrate these more clearly, I've put together a bunch of examples which I hope will serve to clarify matters:

Food: This one is very simple. You should buy organic, but it's OK to complain about the quality and prices. Spending a lot of money on food is bad, but if you're eating with friends, it's acceptable. Caviar is OK so long as you actually enjoy it, and are not just doing it to act all sophistimacated. Wine, especially a bottle or two over poulet in Paree is OK, though dandelion wine is a safer, more convivial choice. And you should always buy locally, except when the guy in NYC has better coffee at a good price.

[snip]

In terms of recreation, video games are really bad, bad, bad, and you should forget the fact that demand for games produces a huge industry full of high-paying jobs for creative people and that the production and consumption of video games has very little bad impact on the environment. But just because video games destroy the fabric of our civilization, using puppies for target practice is not an acceptable substitute. Try making some dandelion wine instead.

As for the Internet, we should keep in mind that it's a shallow, fake community and vastly inferior to the varied and rich choices that were offered by most small rural towns in the 19th century. The fact that Frederica met Rod on an AOL chatroom proves how great a sacrifice these two pioneers were willing to make to help the rest of us avoid the seductive sirens of cyberspace. How they managed to avoid having their souls shredded to ribbons in the process is really a tribute to their crunchiness.

And for some equally apt criticism with a little more researched, factual substance (for those of you who might appreciate such things), I reccomend this list of posts by my esteemed colleague, Iain Murray.

Follow the money

Slate’s Hollywood Economist not delivering your Tinseltown financial fix? Box Office Mojo lose its mojo? Have I got a story for you. Via Chutry, The Smoking Gun, in yet another documents coup, has scored the budget papers chronicling just exactly how Shamalamadingdong and Co. spent their $71 million budget for The Village, as well as financial records for three of the twist-ending king’s other films. Here’s a fun tidbit from budget for The Sixth Sense:

Records show that while Bruce Willis made $14 million for "The Sixth Sense," the film's other star, 10-year-old Haley Joel Osment, was a major bargain. Osment played "Cole Sear," a boy who saw dead people and was the psychological drama's emotional core. And one that only cost $150,000. By comparison, Willis's private jet tab alone was $450,000 and an unspecified "other allowance" for him was budgeted at $339,492. Actress Toni Collette, who played Osment's mother, earned $1 million. For a small role, actress Mischa Barton (later of the Fox TV hit "The O.C.") was paid $26,050, records show.

Essay love

Read Louis Wittig's excellent NRO essay on HBO's new hour long drama, Big Love, about Bill Paxton as a suburban man trying to deal with social and home-life pressures of, well, a big family--the kind with three wives. You'll be glad you did.

Pimp my Academy

The best thing about Three 6 Mafia winning an Oscar for Best Song is the likelihood of "pimp" losing its luster of hipness.

That’s the opening line to Jabari Asim’s column in yesterday’s Post, and it’s absolutely right. But Asim shows he’s not quite hip to the lingo himself when he goes on to say that,

While the prospect of previously oblivious whites adopting the word is a nauseating probability, the mainstreaming of "pimp" should reduce its popularity in the black communities where it first shucked its cobwebs and regained its currency. Its anticipated lapse in popularity creates an opportunity to suggest new lingo to my fellow African-American city dwellers, who often originate the nation's catchiest slang.

Seeing as how I’m now blissfully removed from those honored institutions of beer helmets and Abercrombie shorts in which so much party slang is developed and discarded each year (we ought to find some way to recycle old slang, by the way--think of all the waste!), I’m not entirely sure whether it’s still in current use. However, for an annoyingly long time the word “pimp” was the beach-volleyball sets favored replacement for “cool.” Generally it was used to describe items or ideas:

The party last night was totally pimp.

His new swimming pool was mad pimp.

The grill we cooked our burgers on was pimped out.

Etc. Slang isn’t a creature that bends to anyone’s will (except maybe Mike Myers, who, between Austin Powers and Wayne’s World, seems to have a virtual lock on funny but grossly overused catchphrases), but this always seemed to me to be one of the more heinous linguistic developments to come out of those perpetual verbal experimenters living in frat and sorority houses everywhere.

The word’s use has probably died off some, though the popularity of rapper XZibit’s mildly amusing ghetto-fantasy car makeover show “Pimp My Ride” (on, where else, MTV) hasn’t helped it to wither, but slang, which is essentially rhetorical fashion, has a tendency to lose its luster when commercialized and popularized. Really, there’s not much that’s less, er, “pimp,” than winning an Oscar.

“Bureacrats with Fangs” at National Review Online

NRO is running my review of Night Watch, the blazingly silly and wildly entertaining new Russian vampire movie that’s gotten so much hype from the geek quarters of the net. It may not be the most coherent film I’ve ever seen, but it sure is fun, and it dabbles with ideas about regulation and bureaucratic overreach in ways that coincide nicely with other parts of my life. Here's a sample:

The novel setup, in which rival agencies representing Light and Dark mythic creatures known as Others — mostly vampires, but also shape shifters, seers, and other pulp creations — is particularly apt, considering the film's country of origin. What nation better than post-Communist Russia to posit a world in which even warring factions of ghouls must develop regulatory oversight boards? And you thought the PCAOB was a problem.

ATTENTION, CONSERVATIVE MEN: conservative women here.

After starting the day with some exciting CEI-Wonkette crossover action, I’ll finish it with even more colleague-related news. For those who qualify as District-area denizens (even those living in the remote Farlington), AFF, a great group of young conservative professionals that I occasionally write for, is hosting one of their regular roundtables, this time on the certain-to-be divisive topic of “What Do Conservative Women Want.” Incidentally, this was the original name of the popular Mel Gibson movie which later, as we all know, was changed to The Passion of the Christ. Blogger, writer and newest CEI policy star Brooke Oberwetter will be moderating, and fellow CEI communications staffer Richard Morrison will provide the lone—and sure to be ridiculed—voice of male, libertarian sentiment to the evening’s festivities. So for all those confused, right-leaning, liberty-loving, male policy wonks out there, trying desperately to figure out what it is their Ann Taylor clad female counterparts want, this could be the answer! Or it could be a night of controversy, pontificating, and hilarity. Either way, there’s alcohol and conservative punditry, which, as Wonkette knows, is always a good time.

On The New World, some middle ground

When it comes to The New World, I seem to be the exception. Yes, I found it quite good—lush, hypnotic, wrapping over you in the way of a remembered dream—but I certainly wouldn’t put it in the top five films of the year or, as Matt Zoller Seitz did, declare it my “religion.” So when Village Voice film crit legend J. Hoberman writes that “Not everyone adores The New World, but those cineastes who like it, really, really like it,” I know who he’s talking about (that’s you, Ross, and you too, Jeffrey), but I don’t share the sentiment. In a way, it seems to me that its strengths are also its weaknesses: the gentle, vaguely surreal drift of the film washes over you with enormous power—it’s transporting in a way that’s rare for relatively big-release movies—but once you enter Malick’s world, there’s little to do other than marvel at its effortless lucidity. It’s like finding yourself in a dream where you suddenly have the power to fly, only to realize your subconscious didn’t bother to provide much to look at while you drift through the clouds.

Thumbs down for Baehr

Over at the Looking Closer Journal, Jeffrey Overstreet—one of the few great Christian film critics—posts Movieguide theocrat Ted Baehr’s most recent idiotic, puritan rant about the allegedly illicit culture of Hollywood, and then proceeds to demolish it line by line. In the course of his response, Overstreet nails everything that’s wrong with the way far too many Christians approach contemporary culture, especially film. He singles out Baehr for being homophobic, demeaning, and just plain cruel to anyone who doesn’t subscribe to his absurdly limited view of what qualifies as “wholesome” entertainment, finishing by making the most important point of all: not only is Baehr’s misconception of what art and entertainment ought to be wrong, it gives the secular world nearly unlimited ammunition for both rejecting and ridiculing Christians. Baehr, and the perpetually outraged mobs that follow him, don’t just perform a disservice to the Christian world—they actively hinder Christianity's wider acceptance.

Now, I’m no Hollywood shill (that ought to be obvious), and there is plenty to rail about with regards to the dominant political and social leanings of most film luminaries. I think it’s quite likely that the film industry will see a resurgence of left-leaning, politically invigorated movies in the next few years, some of which will be quite good (even if advocating problematic social or political ideas), and some of which will be execrable without taking politics or cultural views into account. But to reduce the validity of a film to lists of objectionable content, to demand that it act as a blockbuster Sunday School lesson, and then to heap scorn on the film industry as some sort of pitchfork-waving celluloid Satan simply because it shows people engaging in behaviors you disagree with only serves to set Christians further apart from contemporary culture’s dominant medium for delivering narrative. From this critic, Baehr gets zero stars.

Liberty, drinks and net freedom for all

The new and, I hesitate to say improved, but different anyway, Wonkette has a photo-filled recap of last night’s regulation-hating Reason/TCS Daily event on Glenn Reynold’s new book, An Army of Davids. Though I didn’t make it to the small-government soiree (preferring the wonkish quiet of think tanks at lunchtime, I went to the more reserved, daytime panel at Cato on Monday), several of my esteemed CEI coworkers showed up, and a few even made it into the photo gallery. Everyone raise your glasses and say “onerous regulation!”

On the grift

I’m not entirely sure what to make of The Grifters, Stephen Frears’ 1990 con film with John Cusack, Angelica Huston and Annette Benning. On one hand, the film is replete with great scenes, great acting and a tremendous, Hitchcockian score by Bernstein. The framing and lighting, always meticulously designed to reveal precisely the most important bits of information, are a near-perfect update of the shadowy noir compositions to which they pay tribute. There are wide variety of wry, novelistic supporting players, including the always excellent Xander Berkely and J.T. Walsh. All of the leads, especially Huston and Benning, are devilishly watchable.

But Jim Thompson’s script is paced all wrong. It never properly lays out the stakes, and it packs too much new information into the final half. The resolution doesn’t feel like much of an ending at all, just an archetypal noir shoulder-shrug, as if Thompson couldn’t be troubled to actually provide closure to any of the themes he tossed off in the body of the script. So many disparate motifs are hinted at, raised, dropped and never returned to that I couldn’t keep track. Frears manages great control over individual sequences, but doesn’t seem to have any idea what the film as a whole is about.

It’s the same problem, in many ways, that plagued Frears’ most recent film, Mrs. Henderson Presents. From moment to moment, Frears is in control, but when it comes to a larger structure, his focus is muddled. Despite similar structural problems to Henderson, the Frears film (of the few I’ve seen) that Grifters most resembles is Dirty Pretty Things, a much better movie with a similarly twisted look at what desperation will make people willing to do, especially in an underworld setting. I like the way he’s willing to take a stern look at how smart individuals in impossible situations will make do with their limited options, but I wish he could hone in a little more on some of the essential structural issues that arise when developing a full length feature.

The non-lefty lefty movie that's not nuetral but is unbiased.

The New York Times has a tortured account of the newest bit of sure-to-be documentary agitprop from Robert “Wal-Mart Makes Me C-R-A-Z-Y” Greenwald. Greenwald is releasing the film under his lefty Brave New Films imprint, but it was made by two independent documentarians named Birnbaum and Schermbeck from Texas. The problems arise when the Times tries to parse out the inevitable issue of bias.

Mr. Birnbaum and Mr. Schermbeck insist that Mr. Earle had shared no secrets with them, and that they acted and were treated no differently from any journalists covering the case.

[snip]Now, of course, the two Texans' supposedly balanced movie is being distributed by the man behind "Outfoxed," a stalwart of the partisan left. Yet they say the net effect will be negligible.

"With Tom DeLay you're either in his camp or you're not," Mr. Schermbeck said. "It wouldn't matter what distributor we chose. You could broadcast this on 'Masterpiece Theater,' and we'd still be Satan's messengers to Tom DeLay and his friends."

Mr. Schermbeck insisted the documentary was fair to Mr. DeLay; it includes comments by three of the congressman's lawyers and some of Mr. DeLay's Republican allies, for example. But he made clear he had no pretensions to neutrality.

Like Austin Kelly's utterly inexplicable case both for and against the conservatism of Metropolitan, no one seems to be able to really figure out what's going on. Or what anyone means at all.

Let me see if I can make anything of it: The filmmakers treated Delay like “journalists covering a case,” which we can presume to be intended to suggest “unbiased.” (Whether it does or not is not an open question today.) Then the directors are claiming to be not biased (though later they, um, admit to bias). And though it's true that they’re shacking up on Greenwald’s openly partisan Brave New Films, the Times then tries mitigate this by saying they claim the effect of the leftwing distributor will be negligible. To provide evidence of the negligible effect, they quote a director… attacking Delay? And admitting “no pretensions to neutrality”? Excuse me—what? Was this penned by the writing staff of 24?

Isn’t that a lot like writing “Peter Suderman is suspicious of the free market,” and then following it up with a quote from me saying “The free market rules, man! Yeah!” Which I would totally say, by the way. To a New York Times reporter.

Really, though—what’s going on here? The article, along with the film’s directors, tries to explain how the film is unbiased. But not. Or it’s not, but the film’s creators are, and they want you to know. While watching the film. Which isn’t biased. Suddenly I feel like I’m in a David Mamet movie—everyone speaks in opaque pronouncements weighed down by uncertainty and contradiction. Maybe it’s just an outtake from Twin Peaks. I think Greenwald is the freaky midget. Maybe now I know how Greenwald feels about Wal-Mart; this article sure makes me C-R-A-Z-Y.

Insta on the Oscar

Just got back from a Cato-sponsored Glenn Reynolds book event. As expected, it was quite interesting, full of wit and fun facts and web- and policy-geek in jokes. But the best thing Glenn had to say? "I didn't watch the Oscars last night. It wouldn't have been worth the pain."