Another Day in the Life of ...

This is a bit late, but after last week’s 24 season finale—a two hour blitzkrieg of unhinged Jack Bauer action—I think the most recent season is the best since season one. For the first time, we managed to go an entire season without major excursions into melodramatic subplots unrelated to the central threat. No Terry getting amnesia, no baby for Chloe to watch, no stupid mountain lion attacking Kim. Heck, not much Kim at all. The writers stuck almost exclusively to the primary threats: President Logan’s traitorous ways and the terrorist nerve gas attacks. Those threats drove the show, organizing the action and keeping the suspense levels, if maybe not the believability, jacked way, way up.

Even better was that, for the first time, each character acted consistently, exactly as you’d expect them to act, at every crucial point. Previous seasons have seen, especially in the supporting characters, contrary viewpoints argued solely for the sake of creating some time-wasting conflict, with characters taking on positions that simply don’t make sense. This season, the writers created a nearly perfect tangle of interpersonal frictions. No, the characters on 24 aren’t terribly complex; even Jack is basically just a justice and vengeance machine torn between duty to country and family. But this year, the squabbles seemed to be about something more than stalling for time while Jack drove the LA freeways.

The show’s biggest strengths are its pulse-pounding terrorist plots and its ferocious, unstoppable leading man. Making good TV out of 24 isn't hard: You throw Jack in a jam and watch him claw, shoot, and torture his way out, sometimes with the help of CTU, sometimes with CTU as the obstacle. Make the choices as painful as possible; keep the body count high (so long Edgar!), and when all else fails, bust out some snazzy techno-gimmickry to save the day. Though this season didn’t quite match the drawn out complexity of the first--the writers have clearly gone for a more self-contained, episodic approach--it managed to stick to its dual strengths and give us 24 of the best Jack Bauer power hours yet.

Mutant Mayhem: X-Men review at NRO

I'm in NRO today, writing about the latest ultra-grossing entry in everyone's favorite mutant superhero franchise, X-Men. Click on over to see why I call the film "an intriguing disappointment."

Vive la Army of Shadows!

A large poster at the E-Street theater advertises Army of Shadows as “the best reviewed movie of the year.” This is true, in a sense, though the movie was actually released in 1969. Metacritic places its average review score at a whopping 99; it’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a unanimous critical vote for perfection. I won’t rock the boat too much here. Army of Shadows is masterful, a patient, carefully paced tale of deception, murder, and hidden love during a time of war. The photography is rapturous, as gorgeous and painterly as anything in Citizen Kane—but in soft, elegant color. It is a grand film indeed.

But I wonder: Could it be that most movie critics, tired of slogging through the pre-summer mush that fills the theaters every May, are so enamored with this solemn, old, French film that they are lavishing praise on it simply because it is such a relief after all the obnoxious offerings of the American box office? Delicate, slow, refined, immaculately filmed--yet not above a good chase scene, harrowing escape or bloody murder--it is exactly the sort of classy genre picture that many critics love most. It seems to me that while the film is clearly excellent, part of why it is getting such unbelievable marks is because it panders perfectly to what critics pine for but rarely get to see: slow, old, foreign films with a dash of action.

Island Shell Game

Having torn through the first season in just over 48 hours (I started at 8 p.m. Friday night and finished at 11:30 p.m. Sunday night), part of me really likes Lost. It’s well acted; the photography and editing are fantastic; the score hits just the right paranoid, jittery mood; the scripts juggle multiple story elements with flair; the web of conflicts is endlessly fascinating.

But after 25 TV hours (which, at 42 minutes a show is only 17.5 real hours), Lost has explained a big whopping nothing about its central mysteries. There have been no revelations, only brand new questions piled on top of the old ones. The writers seem to think that a good hint is synonymous with “yet another inexplicable event.” Oh sure, they’ve thrown out a lot of spooks and scares, and they’ve kept the cast busy with infighting and basic survival trials, but when it comes to any actual development of the island’s secrets, well, their only trick is to tantalize us with the possibility of answers (We’ll capture the kidnapper!) and then knock us over the head and shove us back into the trunk (...and kill him before he can say anything!).

Let me put it like this: Having watched all of the first season, is there any way to make a supportable guess about what’s going on? If someone did make a guess, would you be able to argue with them based on any evidence? It could be space aliens, God, a dream, or the matrix for all we know. Part of the fun of long-form mystery shows is speculation. Serials will dole out little hints about what’s in store, and those hints ought to suggest something of some specificity, not just "Hey, that's really nuts." They ought to move us toward some revelation, not simply churn up the weirdness waves for the umpteenth time.

Lost has yet to provide any such thing. All we’ve received so far is one bit of inexplicable weirdness after another.

This might be less problematic if it didn’t bill itself, and play as if, it was all about the Big Questions. It's not my expectations that the show has failed to meet; it's its own bluster. As one of my favorite authors, Orson Scott Card, once wrote, “It’s important…[for writers] to reveal information that promises … an interesting story to come. Those promises must be honest ones that [the writer] intends to keep.” Lost predicated itself on the promise to explain what’s going on with that crazy island, but after the first season, it’s delivered nothing of substance on that front. It’s like watching a murder mystery in which, instead of finding clues, the detectives find only more bodies murdered in increasingly bizarre ways. Another strange happening doesn’t count as an answer.

So I’m not writing the show off, because as a survival adventure, it’s gripping and well-played. But J.J. Abrams and company made a good-faith commitment to dish some dirt on the secrets of the island, and after all of season one, those promises are empty.

Inside the Teapot

Without commenting on any of the salient policy questions, I’ll just say that "The Tempest," Joel Achenbach’s Washington Post magazine story on the foes of global warming alarmism— which includes a lengthy section on my employer, CEI—is not just a good, fun read (though it is). It also gets the madcap, digressive, contrarian intellectualism of my office just about right. I enjoy my workplace for many reasons, among them that it’s just a fun place to work. Really, name another think tank in which a senior fellow will dress up in a prison jumpsuit and do an impersonation of Hannibal Lecter as a bloodthirsty bureaucrat.

On the Island

I’m 11 episodes in to the first season of Lost, and I have to say, my suspicions were largely confirmed. I’m underwhelmed. In some ways, it’s a fairly well-made TV drama: the production values are high; the acting and dialog are strong; the pacing is effective. From a show-by-show perspective, it works reasonably well as a tale of hard-bitten survival in a vaguely mysterious locale—a sort of Castaway by way of David Lynch.

But as a serial, it’s extremely weak. Nearly halfway through the first season, the show has revealed exactly nothing of importance, given no indication whatsoever as to what the island is all about, solved none of its Big Questions in any way that actually tells us anything. For all practical purposes, the situation—at least in regards to the island’s secrets—has not changed one single bit. The central mysteries so far: the tree-rustling creature that killed the captain, the appearance of Jacks’ father, the healing of Locke’s legs; the French woman’s transmission, the French woman’s warning that there are “others,” the hatch, and the kidnapping of the pregnant girl by an outsider. Now, the origin of the transmission was revealed. But the French woman gave us exactly no solid information or indication as to What’s Really Going On except that the survivors are not alone—not exactly a major revelation.

It took 10 episodes to get it “confirmed” that there are indeed others on the island. The pregnant girl got kidnapped by an outsider, but again, this didn’t actually reveal anything of use. It didn’t even hint as to the direction, much less the specific nature, of the various Big Questions. All we know is that spooky shit is happening, and Boy is it spooky. Why it’s happening, how it's happening, and who is behind it don’t seem to be serious concerns. Why don’t we spend a little more time having Hurley set up a golf course or watching Jack get buried under some cave rubble?

What Abrams and company really seem to be doing is telling a series of mostly self-contained survival stories with an air of sci-fi intrigue. The best serials understand that the Big Questions need to be moved forward, not just with new questions, but with real, solid clues, every episode, if not most every scene. One of the things that made the most recent season of 24 so effective was that nearly every scene tied directly into the central threat. There were minimal excursions into the realms of soggy family soap opera, and the few times they did pop up (Lynn’s sister, Chloe’s ex), they eventually factored in to the primary terrorist/government conspiracy storyline. The Sopranos may take time out to deal with familial squabbles, but it never lets its mob storylines go for very long without some forward movement and complication, if not real resolution.

More importantly, The Sopranos and 24 don’t dangle Big Mysteries as their hooks and then placate us with nothing but non-answers and family infighting. By the time either of these shows, or The Wire or Battlestar Galactica, were 11 episodes in, they’d already given us numerous huge revelations that narrowed down and made specific our understanding of the true nature of the Big Mysteries. Lost hasn’t even begun to help us understand what the questions are, much less the answers.

And that’s my major problem with Lost. As an episodic drama about an island of crash survivors, the show works reasonably well. But it sells itself as something else, as something more grand. As of yet, however, it can’t back it up with anything other than yet another surrealist sighting. What does it all mean? The show has refused to give us the tiniest hint of a clue. At this point, Lost is all tease and no please.

Star Spangled to Death

I enjoyed Donnie Darko, mostly for the sharp-witted manner in which it captured and blended both the testiness of family life and the political atmosphere of the 88 election—in its own subtle way it’s a very time-specific period film—but I’ve never really found it as compelling as the indie-rock cult masses. Still, it was a surprisingly mature film for being from such a young director, and I’ve since looked forward to Richard Kelly’s sophomore outing, Southland Tales. J. Hoberman’s short write up on the movie's Cannes debut makes it look even better:

[T]he most audacious, polarizing, and to my mind, enjoyable movie in the competition thus far [was] Southland Tales.

Kelly's second feature is as talented as—and even more ambitious than—his debut, the cult hit Donnie Darko. A high-voltage farrago of unsynopsizable plots and counterplots, Southland Tales unfolds—mid–presidential campaign—in an alternate, pre- and post-apocalyptic universe where Texas was nuked on July 5, 2005, and a German multinational has figured out how to produce energy from ocean water. The mode is high-octane sci-fi social satire; the cast is large and antic (with wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as an anxious, amnesiac action hero and Sarah Michelle Gellar biting down hard on the role of socially conscious porn queen Krysta Now).

Essentially, Southland Tales is a big-budget, widescreen underground movie. ("Star-Spangled to Death," one colleague commented as we left the screening.) Filled with throwaway gags and trippy special effects, it's a comedy as well. Philip K. Dick is the presiding deity—the movie is thick with drugs, paranoia, and time-travel metaphysics—although Karl Marx (and his family) keep surfacing in various guises, including the last remnant of the Democratic Party. The film is a mishmash of literary citations, interpolated music videos, and movie references—most obviously to Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly—but it's even more concerned with evoking the ubiquitous media texture of contemporary American life.

At two hours and 40 minutes, Southland Tales flirts with the ineffable and also the unreleasable. There's no U.S. distributor; nor does the movie's humor, much of it predicated on a familiarity with American television, political rhetoric, and religious cant, seem designed to travel easily. Received with a lusty round of boos and a smattering of applause, Southland Tales provoked the festival's most negative press screening and hostile press conference since The Da Vinci Code. The first question suggested (incorrectly) that Kelly's movie had set a Cannes record for number of walkouts and asked the director how he felt.

Why was the Kelly Code too much to take? Sensory overload is certainly a factor, but unlike Da Vinci, Southland Tales actually is a visionary film about the end of times. There hasn't been anything comparable in American movies since Mulholland Drive.

Critic vs. Critic

Over at the NYT “Cannes Journal,” co-chief movie critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott file opposing reports (both essentially reviews) about Sophia Coppola’s upcoming Marie Antoinette. It’s a curious thing to see the paper of record letting their critics butt heads over a film, and it’s a format I’d like to see them employ more often. There is a prevailing myth within a large segment of the public, I think, that “the critics”—movie reviewers and essayists—are all part of some secret cabal that knows, beyond certainty, whether a film is definitively Good or Bad.

I get the question all the time. “Was that any good?” My usual response is to sputter, “Well, I, yes. I mean, I liked it [or didn’t]. I have no idea whether or not you will.” For this unhelpful response, I often receive looks of annoyance, as if it is quite clearly my business to be able to tell any random passerby whether or not he or she will like a film. Unfortunately, I skipped out on both the psychic skills development and voodoo mind reading courses in film school, and as a result, I cannot gift strangers with an accurate reading of their taste. Indeed, no one can. If there were such a critic, he or she would surely be in the employ of The New York Times. This display of competing viewpoints demonstrates that no such thing is possible, that even our foremost critics, working for the same publication under the same editorial guidance, can and do disagree.

Of course, this is not to say that I discount using accepted aesthetic standards to judge good and bad. I’m not one of those who crass preachers of pure subjectivity who believes that all opinions about art are equally valid. Though there can and will be disagreements, there are ways (inaccurate, sometimes, and debated, often) to determine artistic quality. The elegance of the cinematography, the complexity and coherence of the narrative, the development of the characters, etc… all of these are extremely important.

The problem is that, for many moviegoers, most of that stuff means nothing.

To a substantial number of viewers, a good film is simply one they liked. A good critic is merely one who accurately predicts which films they will and won’t like. What the Scott/Dargis exchange shows is that writing about film is more like dialog than judgment. It’s a conversation: with readers, with other critics, with movies from the past, with the film and filmmakers in question. Watching a movie is great experience all on its own, but the post-movie rundowns are often just as—sometimes more—memorable and fun. Seeing diverging viewpoints from the top critics at the New York Times brings the intellectual gamesmanship of dueling opinions to a wider audience.

Getting Lost

Over a long, post-festivity lunch today, feisty young free-market champ Jason Talley—known around the office as Crasher in Chief—finally convinced me to take a look a TV series I had been studiously avoiding, J.J. Abrams' island serial, Lost. I’ve now got the first season sitting on my desk, and I suppose I’ll find out soon whether the show lives up to the hype, or whether I was correct to think of it as merely hidden doors behind hidden doors, puzzles that resolve themselves only in more puzzles. Ross Douthat is a fan, but even he admits that the show’s biggest weakness is “offering extended teases that promise more information than they deliver”—exactly the sort of thing that had kept me away.

I’m a several episodes behind on The Sopranos, but a significant part of what makes that show great is its willingness to let things change, often drastically and permanently, and to explore how the same characters react under different circumstances. The old paradigm for TV was repetition: characters and situations that don’t change, don’t grow, where every conflict is resolved in a way so that it leaves absolutely no lasting impact. But the really interesting new stuff is all about making use of the medium to show change over time. Battlestar Galactica has done this in an incredibly bold way (to the consternation of some fans), and one of The Wire’s many miracles has been delivering three separate, self-contained, season-long stories that also feel like a single, epic story arc.

But I’m suspicious about Lost, and not just because Mission: Impossible 3 made a mockery of satisfying story arcs, rich character development, and narrative resolution. As Ross showed, even its fans seem to agree that it doesn’t quite deliver on its setups. Admittedly, 24 also has this problem at times (though this season was much better than the last two). But 24 is far less about the resolution than it is about the ride. The question on that show is never: How will it end? Instead, it’s, How far will Jack (and the show’s writers) go? It’s about pushing the limits of the suspense format, and in that, it works remarkably well. If, as I suspect, Lost can't ante up on satisfying endings, it's going to have to find some other way to make watching it worth my while.

Frantic Monday

Blogging will be light for a few days as work kicks into overtime. But don’t think that means that I’m going to miss tonight’s two part 24 season-ender. I’m still convinced that even though season 3 was the weakest overall, it had the best ending. You just don’t get any more hardcore than having to hack your partner/daughter’s fiancé’s hand off with an axe because it’s been handcuffed to an explosive chemical weapon. Speaking of which, now that Kiefer Sutherland has signed on for about $52 billion to do another three seasons, I’m certain they’ll be able to work in my idea for Most Over The Top Plot Twist Ever: Jack Must Kill Kim. After that, though, they’d have to end the show. That’d be it. In 24 terms, you just couldn’t ratchet up the tension any further. It's the ultimate family vs. duty conflict (or, if you prefer, the "personal" vs. the "political"). Plus, as all 24 fans know, Kim is really annoying. It’d be awesome and satisfying.

Addendum—Your day will be at least 50 times better if you watch this. (Thanks, Chuck.)

Addendum, Redux—Reihan has the best bad taste in movies ever, but he is straight wrong about Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

Come, Let Us Break Code Together

The Da Vinci Code is boring. It’s not just boring, it’s painfully lifeless, a gaping black hole of excitement that can’t even muster up the energy to limp along. Instead, it just lies there, totally inert, somehow expecting that we, the viewers, will drag it dutifully forth for two and a half excruciating hours. This isn't a labor of love, it's a burden of boredom.

My approach to the book has always been to dismiss it—not for its heresy, but because it is artless fluff. I have not read it, and I don’t think I will. Between the fact that I generally find populist adventure fiction along the lines of Crichton and Grisham unreadable, and the continual invocations by smart people against the book’s prose, I can be fairly sure it isn’t worth my time.

I ought to have applied the same rubric to the film. Yes, it uses a lot of bad, conspiratorial nonsense to make an incompetent attack on Catholicism (and, by proxy, anything approaching conservative Christianity). And yes, I think it’s necessary for good people like Amy Welborn to debunk the junk history employed by Brown. There are people out there who might be fooled by this crap, and it’s good to have solid research available.

But mostly, we ought to reject this plodding, tedious bit of tepid religious conspiracy-mongering because, like the book is purported to be, it is heinously bad. Aside from Audrey Tautou and her cute accent, there is absolutely nothing to like about the movie. It plays like a theological CSI—complete with leaden, expository dialog, dumb puzzles, and even the same grainy flashbacks—except with none of that show’s glitzy, shallow thrills. The editing is clumsy, slowing both action and dialog down to a sleepy crawl. The acting is languid, lacking any urgency or passion. The cinematography is surprisingly poor; director Ron Howard clearly intended things to look moody, but many scenes appear merely dim. The story is convoluted and careless, never able to figure out whether it wants to be a history lesson, an action yarn, or a paranoid thriller. Far too much time is wasted on uninvolving puzzles that seem oddly disconnected from the main action.

Worst of all, it doesn’t know when to end. Akiva Goldsman's script (it's from the same megagenius who gave us Batman and Robin and Lost in Space—how’s that for a resume?) ties up the major threat and signals that all is resolved—and then continues to plod along for another tiring half an hour. Like Return of the King, it goes on to give us numerous false endings. Unlike Return of the King, it hasn’t earned any of them. At the theater I was in, more than a dozen people walked out early.

It would be one thing to complain about the movie’s spiritual affronts if it were entertaining or compelling in the least. After seeing this film, I can’t imagine most people giving two hoots about the cilice and the discipline—watching this film is punishment enough. Since when did heresy become so dull?

The Fork

Somehow I missed absurdly well-monikered Post music writer J. Freedom du Lac's write up on Pitchfork head honcho Ryan Schrieber when it ran last month. It's not the most revealing piece, but it does have a couple of solid quotes from my favorite musician of, well, probably ever, Travis Morrison, and a vague indication of how big a business Pitchfork actually is (it supports an office, six full time staffers, a couple of reporters, and an army of paid freelancers). I'm not always a fan of the Fork's reviews, and these days I skim their site more than read it, but for the last decade, they've done a better job than any other publication of bringing interesting, small-time bands to a much, much larger audience.

Promise Me This

The Promise is a mushy-brained cartoon head-rush of a film, all whirling color and wooshing action—but not much else. The most expensive film ever produced in China, it is suitably beautiful—at times entrancingly elegant—but the story is as thin and surface as a children’s tale. Martial arts junkies may be disappointed by the film’s somewhat modest setpieces; nothing here approaches the artful, kinetic violence of Crouching Tiger, Hero, or House of Flying Daggers. But those hankering for a candy-coated dose of period splendor will find much to enjoy in this exquisitely painted picturebook of a movie.

World Bland Center

Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center was never going to be an easy sell, as much because of the name Oliver Stone as anything actually in the film. Stone is hoping that his take on 9/11 will help him rise up from a streak of dreck that culminated with Alexander, one of the most bloated, flamboyantly self-obsessed, obtuse and shoddy bits of filmmaking in the last ten years. We know, of course, that Stone has (or once had, anyway) the ability to tell complicated, politically motivated stories. Despite being steeped in Stone’s particular brand of leftist paranoia, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street, and JFK are enthralling, compelling films from an expert cinematic craftsman. JFK, especially, may be the greatest example of recombining historical, recreated, and wholly fictional footage to recast history in an entirely different—and decidedly eccentric—light. Stone’s conclusions may be nutty, but his command of editing and narrative--especially historical--is difficult to dismiss.

But as of late, Stone’s ambitions have soared while his execution has sunk. U-Turn, Natural Born Killers and Alexander are virtually unwatchable, interesting only as exercises in hyperstylized lunacy. Where Stone’s early works actually benefited from his compellingly detailed conspiracy theories and the chilling presentation of his askew worldview, these later films suffer from an excess—and lack of control—of those same tendencies. Stone’s always packed an unsubtle wallop, and when it’s focused, as in his early works, it’s powerful stuff. Without precision control, though, it's ugly and messy.

Now, judging from the newly released trailer for World Trade Center, it looks like Stone is trying to get rid of those zany tendencies all together, and I can’t say it looks promising. Treacly, swelling orchestral mush, rehashed clichés galore, baldly manipulative sequences, regional and ethnic stereotypes, and Nic Cage looking dog-tired and droopy eyed while uttering grey-matter destroying lines like “We prepared for everything. But not this. There’s no plan.” How’s that for insight, folks? Next you’re going to be telling me that these fireman loved their wives. A lot. And that 9/11 was very, very sad too. Wait—I see the trailer’s already done that. How revelatory!

From the looks of this trailer, Oliver Stone has sidestepped making the feverish, paranoid 9/11 polemic that many (including me) worried he might make. But in doing so, it appears that he’s regressed into grade-D Spielbergian faux-sincerity, almost Spielberg parody—exactly the sort of thing many were so relieved to see Paul Greengrass avoid. I’m not at all sure that a JFK-style conspiracy tale is in any way needed or appropriate, but it at least would’ve proved more interesting. What’s the use of hiring a brilliantly entertaining madman if he’s forced to act like a somber, respectable gentleman?

Critical Conversations

Those with a ravenous craving for discussions (and occasionally, civil arguments) between critics on the art, purpose, and future of criticism may have met their match with Arts Journal’s Critical Edge blog. The limited-run blog—think of it as a miniseries—has run its three day course, but in that time, nearly every argument about modern criticism, from blogs vs. big media and the wane of criticism to whether or not artists should also be critics, gets covered, and cover, and covered. I still haven’t digested all of it myself (and my apologies for not linking while the debate was going on), but for those who somehow missed it, it’s worth going back and reading through. Despite being engaged in what is essentially a public dialog about the arts, it’s too rare a thing for critics to actually gather—whether physically or virtually—and directly respond to one another. Kudos to AJ for hosting this great discussion.

Joystick Critics, Again

Michael Brendan Dougherty, responding in the negative to my cry for culturally oriented video game criticism, says:

The people who want to read about video games are generally of rude learning and taste. The people who want video game criticism are few (some game programmers, Peter Suderman and three or for people at Ain't it Cool, perhaps?).

He points to a recent video game crassly exploiting the Columbine tragedy as evidence of this, but I don’t buy it. First of all, the fact that a no-budget novelty game is made available on the web is hardly evidence of a serious trend amongst gamers. If the game were given a price, generated high sales and much positive interest amongst the gaming community (press and fans), I might go along. Right now, though, it’s just a single, solitary example of bad taste.

Moreover, I think the comparison to movies is apt here. Film was initially thought to be a lowbrow, populist medium—a lesser, unworthy art. Film going in its early days, as Hollywood Economist fans know, was something people did as a matter of course. Whether or not they knew what was playing, they headed out to the movies each week. These idle viewers weren’t looking for revelation or deeper meaning, they just wanted to be entertained. The elites looked down on films as an art form, but that didn’t matter, and over the course of a couple of generations, film has become much more respected.

Video games haven’t been around as long as film, but they’re poised to be the next major arts and entertainment medium. Already, video game sales outflank Hollywood box office receipts by a significant margin, and more and more famous and influential figures are admitting to playing them.

Or, to take another example, look at sports. Sports, like video games, often bear connotations of thuggishness, aggression, and anti-intellectualism, but there is also thoughtful writing on the subject. And after all, aren't many video games really just virtual sports and puzzles?

And even if you dismiss both the fans and the games themselves, there is still the fact that gaming culture is widespread and going to continue to spread further. Should critics and other cultural surveyors ignore the medium just because some of it tends toward vulgarity, or because some of those involved are “rude?” If that's the logic we're to follow, then I have to ask: What are any of us doing commenting on politics?

Oh, Wes!

Wes Anderson’s sublime new AmEx ad is better than his last movie. As usual, Slate ad critic Seth Stevenson gets it right, while movie-crit fireball Armond White gets it brilliantly crazy. As Stevenson notes, the two minute mini-movie is perfectly suited to Anderson’s talents—his precocious, dry style, his exuberance for whimsy, his fetish for detail. As Stevenson writes:

The brief, bounded format of a commercial plays to Anderson's strengths and hides his weaknesses. No need to develop believable characters or to build organically motivated relationships between them (things Anderson has never managed to pull off in a film—though it may be he simply has no interest in them). Here he can just indulge his greatest talents: set pieces, art direction, whimsy, ironic bombast. There is no one more brilliantly entertaining than Wes Anderson when he's doing what he does best, and with a two-minute leash he hasn't time to do anything else.

Anderson’s last movie, The Life Aquatic, was an intermittently amusing effort with some great performances, but it was all deadpan wit and visual quirk, substituting melancholy tone for the cute, sad stories that made his first three films so loved. The AmEx ad solves all of The Life Aquatic’s problems by simply avoiding them. Fussed over images, wry dialog, and ironic distance can’t sustain a feature film, but they’re more than enough for a great commercial.

And then there is Armond White, a sometimes brilliant, always cantankerous, verbal showman with an almost wholly unpredictable aesthetic (though, as near as I can peg it, it’s got a tendency toward African-American Christian Socialist Traditionalist readings; make of that what you will). White’s article isn’t so much about Anderson as it is about a group of filmmakers he calls the "American Eccentrics" and that group's sluggishness in putting out new films. Strangely, he doesn’t put Quentin Tarantino in this category, and unironically claims that Tarantino “turn[s] out updated genre vehicles as if on schedule.” If by “on schedule,” White means 4 full length films (5 if you count Kill Bill as two movies) in 14 years, then ok; but somehow, I find any classification that lumps Tarantino’s clever, character-driven, pop-culture saturated odes to genre in with studio friendly explosion whores like Brett Ratner and Michael Bay somewhat dubious.

White tries to say that the studio system ought not be prohibitive to regular film production. But he doesn’t seem to notice that the filmmakers he lists as being predictably on schedule make films only every two years at best, and the examples he gives of directors working fast in the studio system are all from before 1960. It’s possible that he’s just pining for an earlier age (he does a lot of that) when films could be made on the cheap with less preparation, but surely White knows that the logistics and hula hoops of Hollywood prevent all but the most powerful directors from making a film more often than every year and a half, and even that time frame means speedy work.

As usual, White props himself up with namedropping whenever reason and insight won’t serve his ends, managing, in one paragraph, to reference Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg, Jacques Coustaeu, Robert Altman, and Ayn Rand. Later, White advises the too-slow filmmakers to work faster, arguing that they should imitate “Robert Altman’s casual approach to creativity and profundity [in order to hit] the cultural bull’s eye here and there”—which certainly seems to be White’s approach.

Because, of course, there are gems to be found in the piece. The next to last paragraph, which is mainly a straight reading and interpretation of Anderson’s commercial, is full of smart stuff. Obviously, White is capable of incisive cultural and intertextual interpretation, and he’s clearly got a mind stuffed full of film to reference. Too bad he’s usually too busy trying to earn his contrarian cred—loudly and obnoxiously—for any of that brilliance to really show.

Jack Bauer Conservatives

Not surprisingly, Christopher Orr’s TNR essay on 24 is clever, insightful, and well-written. Orr is an expert cultural critic and a keen observer of film, and in some respects, that doesn’t fail him here. His claim—that the show isn’t “conservative,” but is mostly impartial to political ideology—is generally correct. The show’s politics resemble what he calls “the contours of Bauer’s characters,” which “have far less to do with the demands of geopolitics than with the demands of genre.” 24 is subject first and foremost to the action and spy film tropes by which it is driven; ideology is always secondary. And it is true that the show rarely dabbles in explicitly partisan squabbling. If it is not quite a world “from which political belief has been banished altogether,” it is hardly the leftist fantasy universe of nothing but politics that is The West Wing. Where The West Wing is both explicitly liberal and explicitly Democratic, 24 is neither explicitly conservative nor explicitly Republican. But if it lacks partisanship or ideological policy positions, it reveals a distinctive, if low key, conservative slant in its cultural values.

As Orr explains, the show revolves around a constant interplay between family and work, and, as he also points out, it often prizes the decision to protect the home over the decision to protect the society. Orr sees this as emphasizing the personal over the political, but it seems to me that this plays out as an awareness of the tensions between individual families and society at large. Often, in fact, the two are conflated. The bad guys in season one don’t just attack the U.S., they attack Bauer’s family. It’s a significant revelation, in fact, when we discover that the threat to one is the threat to the other. And when the show sides with Bauer for protecting his family first, it’s recognizing that you can’t save society without first saving your family. Putting family first, and understanding that saving one’s family is they key to saving society, well, that sounds strikingly conservative to me.

If Orr is right to say that calling Bauer an action hero stand-in for Bush is a whopper of a misunderstanding, he is too quick to dismiss Bauer’s man of action pose as little more than a genre demand. Orr claims:

Put simply, the heroes of action films, books, and TV shows are almost always decisive, aggressive, and disinclined to play by the rules. One does not find many of them obsessed with rumination and consensus-building for the same reason that one finds few impetuous he-men in drawing room comedies: It doesn't work dramatically. It is no coincidence that, when political meaning is imputed to iconic action stars--John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger--that meaning is nearly always "conservative."

It’s true, of course, that action heroes are usually the aggressive males he suggests. Drawing direct parallels between Bush's pro-war stance and Bauer's violent theatrics is probably a stretch. But action heroes serve another purpose, a cultural one: they help us to define male roles in society. In this sense, Bauer, a supremely honorable, self-sacrificing man of duty who is willing to take violent action to defend his family and country seems more conservative than not.

And of course, there is the show’s central understanding that America—its cities, its families, its political systems—is under attack, and that fending off that attack will require courage, sacrifice, strong wills, perseverance, and probably violence. Negotiation is not out of the playbook, but it is only one tactic amongst many to deal with threats. Violence is never good, but it is an unfortunate necessity.

Orr is correct to brush off claims that 24 is a right wing show in terms of partisan politics and explicit ideology. But at its core, 24 is a show that values those things that conservatives value: family, men of strength and duty, self-sacrifice, active defense against threats. And as we have heard over and over, values, not politics or policy, are what concern many voters on the right the most.

PS-Orr and I agree, of course, where it matters most. No matter what its political or cultural inclinations (or lack of them), 24 is loads of fun.

Immersion Culture

To follow up to my last post, I’m not a technophobe, and I’m certainly not willing to vilify pop culture, mass media, or passions for art and stories, no matter what medium in which they appear. There will always be lowbrow and highbrow, and portions of the elite will always rail about the gulf of lowbrow overtaking their precious institutions. I don’t doubt that pre-mass media cultures had their aesthetic divisions; the difference is that the media age has brought the low and middlebrow into better view.

Yet I still find myself concerned. Thanks to copyright law, economic expansion, and the rise of the leisure culture, we’ve seen an explosion of creative works in the last hundred years. Indeed, creative works have become integral to the fabric of our culture; from movies to commercials to billboards, they permeate our day to day lives. And in some ways, this is a wonderful thing, a way of providing flash and color to daily existence.

For some, as the story on media immersion pods illustrates, it’s also created a dependency. It’s too easy to retreat into the world of stories, of fabricated universes and preordained events. These mediums are so comforting, for some, because they allow the feeling of relational contact without any of the effort. Whether it’s magazines, books, video games, movies, television, or whatever other internet distractions you stumble upon, there’s an ease of access to these simulated relationships that makes them difficult to leave. American society revels in a that culture prizes individuality and individual experience, but what happens when the individual becomes divorced from society and addicted to the culture? Are we pushing ourselves toward a society so obsessed with individual experience that all experience comes to us as lonely individuals?

Modern Relationships

“How do you get so empty? What takes it out of you?” That’s what Montag, the distraught fireman in Fahrenheit 451, asks as he begins to understand the hollow, media-saturated future-America in which he lives. It’s a society under constant assault from banality, where giant television screens serve up best friends and no one ever talks about anything at all. Shallow, numbing media has become a drug, and social disconnection is the norm. It is, in fact, encouraged.

Now, clearly, in our age of reality TV and 102" plasma screens, this hits close to home. But a recent NYT story on the burgeoning Japanese trend of media immersion pods brings it even closer:

In Tokyo, though, the antidote to urban overload is more of the same. In the world's most media-saturated city, people take a break by checking themselves into media immersion pods: warrens cluttered with computers, TV's, video games and every other entertainment of the electronic age.

The Bagus Gran Cyber Cafés are Tokyo's grand temples of infomania. Situated well above retail level, on the odd floor number where in Manhattan you might find tarot readers or nail salons, these establishments contain row after row of anonymous cubicles. At first glance the spread looks officelike, but be warned: these places are drug dens for Internet addicts.
[snip]

Gran Cyber Cafés are enshrouded in the urgent, furtive atmosphere of a hot-sheet motel. Eyes averted, customers sign in, head to the library of entertainment options, and load up on fashion magazines, video games and DVD's of "24" as if stocking up on Jim Beam. Then they beetle-brow it to their solitary pods. What they do there is up to them. Some people channel-surf. Others trade stocks. You can download music, read novels, watch pornography, play video games, have sex, go to sleep.

If this seems to be a typical Japanese phenomenon, we have our American equivalents. Coffee shops with wi-fi provide a place to be by yourself in public. Power up a laptop and you can sit for hours at a time with a quad espresso mocha and a library’s worth of digital reading material—soon to be an actual library—just a few clicks a way. For those with an attachement to the printed word—or who lack the resources to buy a laptop—book megastores are open late (they too sell coffee, clearly the thoughtful loner’s drink of choice). Visit any of the major book chains at 10 p.m. on a Friday and you’re likely to see dozens of young men and women aimlessly strolling the aisles, alone, in public, unable to stray too far from the created, controlled worlds of managed words and images.

Perhaps an even more significant factor is that, in typical American fashion, we’re all encouraged to build media immersion pods of our own. Home theater systems that cost as much as luxury cars and expansive movie and music libraries are the new marks of the rich and well-cultured aesthetic elite as well as the fetish of collector-types everywhere. Where people used to aspire to have read a library’s worth of great books, now they aspire to own a Blockbuster’s worth of DVDs. Who needs a girlfriend or a wife when you can have a Playstation 3? The home is no longer the castle; it is the concert hall, virtual reality complex, and movie theater.

And no question: it’s empowering. Sitting on top of his mountain of DVDs in front an array of components, every man is Zeus, the remote control his thunder bolts. You can be god of your own little world—but at the expense of participating in anyone else’s. How do you get so empty? Maybe this is how.

Sequelitis

So. X3 looks to be a Rattnerfied bummer. That positive review was fanboy fakage, and now the word is dismal. Just this weekend, someone told me that he thought comic book movies may have reached a turning point, and that the halcyon days of high quality adaptations—at least on the major releases—were over. Hollywood may bill itself as the dream factory, but around this time of year, it’s more likely to dash my hopes than fulfill them.

A.O. Scott Tells All!

Well. Not really. But his latest piece -- a lengthy essay on the problems with choosing the greatest novel of the last 25 years -- includes this juicy, if sadistically skimpy, line about his till-now mysterious upcoming tome.

A. O. Scott is a film critic at The Times. He is writing a book on the American novel since World War II.

So that's what we lost three months of Scott-certified movie reviews to.

On French Movies

Here are some selected comments from an email thread I was privy to regarding the trailer for the upcoming movie District B13. The subject line is “Totally ridiculous, totally awesome.” Bullet points represent new emails.

• Trust me, you want to watch this trailer. It just keeps getting more silly and more awesome until you can't stand it.
• That is ridiculous. Two things: It's set in Paris, for God sakes. Nuclear warheads typically do not have a timer for a detonator. They usually use an accelerometer. That's just one of my pet peeves.
• Clearly, the weapon in the trailer was a MIRV. With an BIGASS digital counter on the side.
• I didn't watch the trailer.
• I'm just sayin': it's freakin' awesome, and you have to respect that.
• Nothing from France is "freakin' awesome."
• I disagree, the food is pretty freakin' awesome
• if you like raw horsemeat
• Well, you may have a point. I thoroughly enjoyed my lobster fricassee whilst on an evening cruise of the River Seine. The people are still messed up, though.
• Yes, but did you see the freaking jump kicks that guy was doing?
• Ok, I watched it. First it reminds me of Escape from NY/LA. Second the action looks like French karate or something, third so like in order for anyone to do anything cool in this movie the apparently must first take off their shirt.
• See? Totally ridiculous, totally awesome.

Adamantium Strength

I'm a sucker. No, I admit it. Years of summer movies promising epic awesomeness and delivering formulaic crap, and yet every spring I see trailers and test screening reviews and think Maybe this could be it. It's a ritual. So this strong review of X-Men 3 makes the small part of me that hasn't been blackened by years of Hollywood letdown just giddy. It's so good, in fact, that even AICN site contributor Moriarity drops a comment titled, rather simply: Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease. Ditto.

Shattered

Shattered Glass is a drastically different movie when viewed from the perspective of a struggling Florida college student rather than a peripheral onlooker into the Washington journalism/pundit/think tank complex. Just as All the President’s Men shifts from being a needly, taut political thriller to quietly self-righteous tale of journalistic heroism once you start to dig into that whole Watergate business, Shattered Glass becomes a different movie when the world it presents is somewhat familiar.

In some sense, the movie seems eerily accurate: the unglamorous offices staffed by bright young writers; the bland desks heaped with papers; the perfunctory business dress; the talky house parties where overeducated urbanites snark and bark over political magazine minutiae; the surprising youth of influential voices; the heady, semi-academic style of pretty much everything. As I’ve commented to people before, it seems to be the one town where being passionate about interesting ideas can actually be socially beneficial. Or, as a rather well-placed staffer once put it to me, “It’s like Disneyland for nerds”—a formulation I much prefer to Hollywood for ugly people.

On the other hand, the film is curiously lacking in the obvious: discussion of politics and policy. Aside from a few mentions of ethanol subsidies (which you can and should read Tim Carney’s thoughts on here), no one seems interested in the substantive meat of the District. As Chuck Lane said in an interview about the film:

[The filmmakers] don't give you any sense that of the fact that at the New Republic [we] were always talking about politics. Politics and public policy were such a big part of what we do. And I think that is not very salient in the movie. And in fairness, the point would be that Steve wrote frothy stuff. Steve wrote about Monicondoms. He wrote about the wacky and the bizarre. It was just sort of tangentially related to politics. And so in a movie that's focused on him, you may get the impression that the New Republic, for some reason, was kind of running frothy stuff and that's it.

I was also somewhat suspicious of the film’s depiction of the editing process. Now, I don’t know anyone at TNR and have absolutely no way of truly knowing how conversations between authors and senior editors actually go, but the film seemed to portray them as condescending and childish—when the girl strangely based on Jon Chiat tries writing something “frothy,” she’s talked to with the same smarmy empathy you might expect from a high school guidance counselor. And Glass’s comments on one of his coworkers stories were about stuff that would barely phase most quality high school scribes, much less the savvy wordsmiths at The New Republic. It’s certainly not like any editing process I’ve been privy to.

So it’s not quite The Great D.C. Movie of Prophesy, but it’s close enough to make you blink. And in the post-Domenech era, it’s a little scary to see a young pundit self-destruct like that—even from the safe remove of big screen retelling.

Rockist Culpa

I think I’m a rockist. And I’m OK with that. Also: the very first night I was in D.C., not more than two days out of college, I ended up at a bar bantering with someone who expressed a clear disdain for cheap thrill shill, Sasha Frere-Jones. I think I defended him. Clearly, I was young and stupid. Thank goodness that’s over.

Super Mario Critics

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now: Why is no one writing good, strong cultural criticism about video games? Most video game magazine reviews are redundant and narrow-minded, rehashes of a litany of familiar technical questions about controls, graphics, difficulty, code glitches, and some mysterious factor generally referred to as “gameplay”--otherwise known as "fun." These checklist-style essays might as well be a series of fill in the blanks covering all the usual technical categories and adding an overall entertainment grade. They’re “reviews” in the strictest sense of the word.

Outside of the video game magazines, cultural criticism of gaming is generally limited to outrage from incensed moralists and frilly predictions from dopey futurists. The moralists restrict themselves to writing about how game X’s bloody, violent play is a sign of our culture’s decline and how we’ve become desensitized to graphic violence and why aren’t there laws to prevent such blah, blah, blah. The futurists don’t consider the cultural implications of the games so much as of the various technologies on display. “In the future,” they start (naturally, being futurists and all), and then they go on to tell us how everything from appliances to grocery stores will be more like video games someday after they’re dead and can’t be called to account.

But video games are a massive, booming industry—around $18 billion last year—and they’re quickly gaining on Hollywood as our cultural diversion of choice. Many young men spend more time with games than with movies or television. And yet, with a few minor exceptions in Wired, I can’t recall the last time I read a smart, culturally attuned bit of video game criticism.

In part, it’s because gaming is the domain of linear-minded, technical folks: computer nerds, to be precise. And, though I count many in this tribe as friends, they’re not nearly as concerned with cultural significance as the artsy literary types writing criticism. Also, the literary cultural elites, even their younger ranks, tend to look down on video games—admittedly not a difficult thing to do. There’s an attitude, not entirely incorrect, that games are lower forms of entertainment for the vulgar masses. Even if they’re fun, they’re not true cultural artifacts worth dissecting like movies and music and books. But for a while, that’s how movies and pop music were viewed as well; look how important those mediums have since become.

No, despite the fact that I’m not a heavy gamer—I don’t own any of the major consoles, though I do occassionally play a few computer games—I’m convinced that society will eventually choose video games over film as our dominant narrative medium. Not only do sales figures suggest this, but the growing obsession with personalization and interactivity indicates a shift toward fluid, branching narratives with players at the center. Postmodern culture places individual experience before all else, and that’s exactly the sort of story-style at which video games excel. Yes, gaming is predominantly the realm of younger men, but that’s slowly changing—and those young men will get older.

Maybe this is the place for blog critics to take the fore, or maybe established publications just need to wise up. Let’s see some snazzy writing on the social taxonomy of The Sims, on gender roles in Lara Croft, on the Catholic influence on demon-infested Mars bases in Doom 3. Let’s look at unfettered virtual economies in massively multiplayer games with an eye toward proving or disproving externalities in an unregulated market. Let’s ponder a created virtual world where books lead to new realities created by in-game characters in Myst. Hell, let’s take on racial stereotypes and urban decay in Grand Theft Auto III. The material is there. Now we just need to get some critics to power up.

Surely if The New York Times can pay Manohla Dargis to wax giddy over Colin Farrell's shirtless bod, it can find a critic to start pontificating on the cultural and political significance of blasting demons with a rocket launcher.

This Is How We Do It

Despite its almost flagrant emptiness, MI3 has stayed with me, at least in some respects, and one thing that sticks out in my mind is how much it relies on well-established genre tropes to do pretty much all the narrative heavy lifting. In the best genre films, the ones that are real classics, genre is a shell wrapped around some larger idea, some deeper story, some emotional underpinning--something that has some significance. Most of the time, genre is merely used to dress up familiar tales of action and reaction. But in MI3, the genre shell is sturdy and thick, which is good, because it’s wrapped around absolutely nothing at all.

Try, for example, to figure out why any of the characters chooses to do anything. In nearly every case, you can’t. Tom Cruise returns to active duty not because of any event that pushed him toward that decision, but because that’s simply what the action here must do. Laurence Fishbourne plays domineering, gruff boss solely because of the demands placed on action film agency bosses. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s nasty has no stated motivation, no real goals—he simply is the bad guy, with all the slick cruelty that necessarily entails. The film even tacitly acknowledges this lack of motivation when Cruise thanks his team for being there for him at the end. Ving Rhames looks back and says, as if trying to answer why people keep on living, “Of course we are. That’s what we do.” And that’s all there is to it. That’s what action movie backup teams do. No more explanation necessary.

Even the traitor’s final explanation is almost a joke on the film’s utter lack of depth. He handily explains that he wanted to start war in the Middle East with utter flippancy, and no one bothers to deal with the ramifications of his pro-war, pro-nation building scheme because, as dramatic logic goes, it’s entirely irrelevant. He turned traitor entirely because the genre demanded that he do so.

The only time something resembling motivation shows up is when Cruise decides to grab the rabbit’s foot to save his kidnapped bride. But even this is hardly a dilemma. Cruise agrees immediately, without any sort of debate, because ultimately his character must agree. That’s what a hero does. The film knows this, and the film knows that we, as experienced genre viewers, know this. Why bother with pretending there’s anything really going on?

The Hot Months Are Coming

“The premise is… pretty much summed up by the title. There’s…a lot of snakes, and they get on a plane.” Pauses thoughtfully. “And it sounds pretty interesting.”

That’s The New York Times' co-chief film critic, A.O. Scott, one of the leading critical voices on film in the nation, waxing eloquent on Samuel L. Jackson’s upcoming guaranteed masterpiece (provided you’re drunk and surrounded by rowdy, testosterone-addled loudmouths), Snakes on a Plane.

I won’t lie to you. I am excited about this movie. It has me slobbering like a 12 year old boy in a comic book store staffed by models. Thank goodness that someone in Hollywood still has the guts to make unabashedly low-brow genre trash without trying to pass it off as anything else.

Meanwhile, Lord, er, Manohla Dargis gushes schoolgirl-style over a director I quite like, saying that “from the sleazy, sexy look that Colin Farrell is sporting, you know this is going to be a kind indulgence in violence and action and underdressed women, and that Michael Mann will be bringing all his great, masculine energy to bear—I can’t wait to see it.” Yes Manohla, you will get to see Farrell’s greasy, swinging mane and his rock hard manpecs. You can calm down now.

Always nice to know that our paper of record’s lofty film critics are such a thoughtful, respectable lot.

Addendum. It's nice to see Scott back, but we still don't know what his book is about. This is the internet, people. Fount of all knowledge and all that. Cough up the details.

Scrub That Brain

If I can toot the burgeoning conservative writer horn a little bit, this week’s Brainwash is not to be missed. Tim Lee, one of the best writers on tech and tech law out there, takes on the desperate idiocy of net neutrality (a topic about which I vent pretty regularly over at the office blog). My colleague Tim Carney weighs in with yet another sad tale of free market tragedy in a world dominated by rent-seeking, regulation-mongering businesses, and proto metrocon Michael Brendan Dougherty dusts off his religious conservative hat for a whack at John Meacham’s latest “insipid, dishonest, and ugly” ploy at faux religious moderation. It’s good company to be in, if I do say so myself.

Double Your Movie Watching Fun With Host Peter Suderman

It's a two-course Peter day, with full portions served up at both NRO and Brainwash.

First up is my review of Mission: Impossible 3 at NRO, the latest action packed offering from tabloid megastar, Tom Cruise. Under the direction of Alias creator J.J. Abrams, the world's most famous Scientologist takes on that creepy porn movie assistant from Boogie Nights and the results are, well, shallow, incoherent, and pretty damn enjoyable. As a bonus, I use the review as a springboard to talk about modern ideals of manliness, because, hey, what's political film criticism without a little off the cuff cultural bigthink?

Near the end of Mission: Impossible 3, Tom Cruise, once again portraying globetrotting superspy Ethan Hunt, looks at his wife and exclaims, with a full dosage of megastar bluster: "I could die if you don't kill me." The line makes only slightly more sense in context. For make no mistake, Tom Cruise and company have no time for such niceties as reason and coherence. There are bad guys to kill, vehicles to crash, lives to save, and villainous plots to thwart—all of which are to be done with a maximum of gunfire and explosions. Yes, the summer movie season has arrived in all its fiery excess, and this year's first contestant is a haywire pastiche of movie star glamour and dizzy pyrotechnic wizardry—a $100 million buffet of Tom Cruise and fireballs.

Secondly (you're still here, right?), my official review of United 93 is up at everyone's favorite young conservative virtual rag, Brainwash. Yes, it's probably somewhat backwards to publish a reply to other critics before a review of your own, but what can I say? I'm a conservative from the South. Backwards is how we do it.

In a sense, United 93 works as an exercise in long form fatalism. Movies, of course, are always fatalistic in some sense--the ending is already determined, the final reel already shot. But there is a feeling that the events playing out on screen are not yet determined, and it is that inherent possibility that grips us. United 93 twists this feeling. We know that the plane will go down and the passengers will die, but the movie medium manipulates the uncertain hope we feel when watching a conventional film. The movie cannot help but dredge up hope, but like September 11 itself, we find ourselves powerless, fated only to watch and weep.

And He's Got a Cool Name Too

The New York Times Magazine on the perils of being a hotshot actor on the cusp of the New Hollywood revival:

[Rip] Torn's most famous career turn occurred in 1967, when he had dinner with the writer Terry Southern and his wife and the actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper to discuss the possibility of his appearing in a film they were pulling together called "Easy Rider." Of course, the role eventually went to Jack Nicholson, and years later Hopper maintained that Torn lost the role after he pulled a knife on Hopper at the dinner. Torn recalls the event differently: it was Hopper who pulled the knife on him, and Torn merely disarmed him. At that point, Torn told me, "Dennis jumped back and knocked Peter on the floor, and I said, 'There goes the job."'

The article paints an interesting picture of life as a mild screen-acting success—often in demand, but never above the title. It’s a nice antidote to the continual array of Hollywood success stories, in which the young performer dreams of making it big and does, as well as to the all too familiar tales of struggling, starving actors who circulate through the highly connected worlds of hemorrhoid commercial acting and chain restaurant table waiting. As for Rip, well, I have to say that I’m glad things turned out the way they did, because, let’s face it, we need all the crotchety, wheelchair-bound codgers throwing wrenches at Vince Vaughn that we can get.

Not Exactly the 95 Theses ...

It wasn't enough, apparently, to take down Catholicism. (To which I can imagine my Catholic aquaintances perking up and saying, "Take down? Take down? If you think we're in sad shape, explain Joel Osteen!" Anyway.) Now Mr. Luther has gone after the cinema.

Join me, Doctor Martin Luther, as I do to contemporary cinema what I did to the Whore of Babylon. Unless I am convinced that a moving picture does not emit a stench to choke a sow, my conscience is captive to my impeccable taste. Here I sit, in a comfy Loews stadium-seating theatre, replete with Nacho bar and adjustable arm rests! I can do no other!

Very amusing indeed.

May The Force (of New Star Wars DVDs) Be With You

The nerd community may as well just give in and agree to the institution of a George Lucas Tax, which would fund slightly altered editions of Star Wars from now until Grover Norquist puts his foot down. As a free-marketer, I oppose this, but since I'm going to be forking over another $60 on original trilogy Star Wars DVDs anyway, I may as well follow Ross and Reihan's lead and submit to the ways of the empire, er, big government.

Captain America vs. George Bush

Sometimes I read stories like this one, about a miniseries in which Marvel heroes square off over whether or not to support the U.S. government, and think maybe I ought to shave off a few minutes a month from my Slate reading and pick up a comic book, something that, with a few exceptions, I haven't really done since I was 13. I don't even know the stories any more (didn't Marvel start completely over or something?), much less the fanboy protocols: is it permissable for a guy in his mid-20s to read comic books these days? Do they have to have the Vertigo imprint or be graphic novels? What the hell happened to Image? Do people still read Wizard? Does Rob Liefeld still have issues drawing feet? Of course, I suppose that everything will be okay as long as Archie Comics are still cool.

Explaining United 93

Everyone’s favorite semi-paleoconservative style guru Michael Brendan Dougherty returns with a suitably elegant looking redesign and a jab at yours truly. He’s not so sure about my response to the critics of United 93—or at least to Matt Zoller Seitz. He writes:

While I won't speak for the other United 93 critics I believe this actually misses Seitz's essential point which may have been expressed poorly, or slightly obscured to Peter by Seitz' little jabs at Darryl Worely. United 93 while succeeding as a film experience, fails as storytelling. 9/11 is not, as it was in Fahrenheit 9/11 a result of Republican foreign policy, nor is it the result of America's decadence as in the telling of some religious leaders and other conservatives, nor is it even an act of terrorism with political objectives, it simply IS. It's not just a lack of political point of view, but a lack of any view. I think this is a failing in one regard but I cannot say that I necessarily would have liked a movie that succeeded in having a point of view - perhaps the enjoyment of the film is entirely visceral and cathartic.

He’s right when he says that the film exists in a sort of political void, at least as far as policy specifics. Greengrass gives no hint of partisan bias, takes no stands on any of the post-9/11 war on terror politics. And from a storytelling perspective, there’s very little in the way of a traditional narrative arc. There’s no real cause and effect, no protagonist, no handy resolutions, and certainly no happy ending. What Seitz and the other critics complained about was a lack of context, but it is that lack of context which gives the film its emotional power as well as its particular worldview.

The film works because it doesn’t try to pin down the causes of 9/11, because it doesn’t indict the Bush or the Clinton administrations or offer anything like the cogent, contained narratives we’re used to in popular storytelling. Like the bombing of the general store in American Pastoral, 9/11 was an act of terrorism that refuses simple explanation. We’re used to stories in which everything fits together, nice and neat, but life isn’t a self-contained puzzle that one can ever really complete, and days like September 11^th will forever defy easy compartmentalization. Greengrass' film rejects a teleological understanding of existence, forcing its viewers to release themselves of the desire to control 9/11’s awful events through the false security of understanding. We cannot control existence, the film says. We cannot reason with it. Things simply happen, and sometimes those things are terrible beyond all understanding. United 93's gut-twisting force comes not only from its jarring depiction of too-painful events, but from its unwillingness to comfort us by explaining them.

And what of the movie critic?

In a recent essay, The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern brushed off reports that critics, especially movie critics, are losing their influence. Meanwhile, Entertainment Weekly founder and blog-touting web theorist Jeff Jarvis isn’t so sure.

This sounds awfully familiar. A few years ago, Variety Editor Peter Bart launched a cranky tirade against critics and was pretty firmly put down by Salon’s Charles Taylor. But Morgenstern can’t quite mount as convincing a defense as Taylor did, and Jarvis’ focus on the impact of the web makes increasingly good sense.

Essentially, Morgenstern’s argument comes down two points: 1) Professional critics offer better quality, presumably in both writing ability and film expertise, and 2) Professional critics, by virtue of being able (and required) to see lots and lots of movies, serve as filters for the vast swaths of barely-seen cinema circulating on festival circuits and by hand-delivered screeners.

Neither of these arguments, however, is entirely convincing. Oh sure, critics writing for major publications offer a guarantee of some basic competence with words and a generally decent knowledge of the film industry. But a noted publication does not a great critic make. Also, as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a disturbing tendency amongst editors to confuse feature writing, reporting, and criticism, giving us a dispiriting number of "critics" who’re really just reporters assigned to the film review beat. Big publications promise a functional minimum and not much else.

Blogs, on the other hand, vary wildly in their quality; there’s great stuff out there and, no doubt, lots of not so great stuff. But the mediocre stuff is easily avoided, and the great stuff is usually pretty easy to spot once you’ve found it. Really, anyone who thinks that blogs can’t produce great criticism just need to spend a few weeks read The Cinetrix or Filmbrain, to name just a few.

What’s more, blog critics are unhindered by style sheets and editorial guidelines, uninfluenced by ad departments and board room higher-ups pushing, even if subtly, for more marketable opinions and accessible writing. Blog articles can be long, short, erudite, crass, personal or any combination of the above. Bloggers can use links and other multimedia, can update their pieces and continue the conversations they start with other writers. Look at the dust up over The New World between Kehr and Seitz. That never could’ve happened in the expensive, carefully screened pages of a major print publication. Bloggers, by virtue of being produced at essentially no cost, are free to experiment in a way that mainstream writers are not.

And as for critics being a filter, I’m still not convinced. The swarming, mass-nature of the net pretty much takes care of that. Call it the Glenn Reynolds effect, but a hundred part time film bloggers will probably be as effective, maybe more so, than a few full time critics—and the net has the advantage of consensus that a single critic just can’t produce.

So what will become of criticism? Well, I think that Jarvis is right, that the biggest metro areas will keep their critics while most smaller locales will syndicate the big guys. But does that mean, as Charles Taylor suggested, that criticism will be streamlined, made "corporate"? Not at all. It means that, because of the net, criticism will become more diffuse. There will be more peoplewriting it, and, because it will be done for fun in a low-risk environment, it may flourish in ways we could never imagine in the print world, especially with regards to interplay between critics. Slate’s best feature, as all movie fans know, is the yearly Movie Club roundtable, where film critics spend a week bantering and trading barbs about the previous year’s best and worst pictures. On the net, that doesn’t have to be a once a year feature. The fracas can continue all year round, and everyone can join in.

Will we still need professional critics? Of course. Our culture demands arbiters of taste in every field, and for a certain segment of society, only a branded critic will do. But that’s a relatively small group, the urban cultural elite. Most folks are fine just looking at a star rating or skimming a headline.

Critics often explain their work as a conversation—in this article, Morgenstern calls his writing “a dialog with [his] readers.” But for years, it’s been more like a lecture than a chat, with readers as attentive students listening in. The web may prune a large number of regional critics from the professional ranks, but my guess is that in the end, the net will prove fertile ground for those who have long engaged in what Dana Stevens once called “the great urban sport of movie conversation.” And even if if that sport turns out to be, as Goeff Pevere wrote, “essentially… the one-way transmission of intransigent opinions to other film critics, who are not interested in others' opinions,” I still say game on!