A Dragon, A Dwarf, an Ant-headed Humanoid

Jesse Walker's Superman article at Reason reminds us why Wikipedia is a treasure trove of geekiness and oddity-fetish:

As if the Super-Monkey wasn't odd enough, there were new forms of Kryptonite, with new effects. The most unpredictable was Red Kryptonite, whose various consequences are listed in that unimpeachable source, Wikipedia: "being turned into a dragon, a non-powered giant, a dwarf, an ant-headed humanoid, a lunatic, and an amnesiac; being made unable to see anything colored green; growing incredibly long hair, nails, and beard; being rendered totally powerless; gaining the ability to read thoughts; losing his invulnerability along the left side of his body; being split into an evil Superman and a good Clark Kent; being rendered unable to speak or write anything but Kryptonese, the language used on Krypton; growing an extra set of arms; becoming clumsy when trying to help out; swapping bodies with the person nearest him upon exposure to it; rapidly aging; and multiple personality changes."

I especially like the "being rendered unable to speak or write anything but Kyrptonese" bit. Maybe that's what all the speaking in tongues business is really about.

New Articles on Superheroes and Movie Critics

It's another day of double the Peter-article fun (think of it as the 2,000 word grand finale to a written fireworks show), with two new offerings for your reading pleasure (or grumbling displeasure, if you want to get technical about it). First up, I've got a piece in The Washington Times on the recent wave of superhero movies:

In some ways, the fantastic action set pieces on which the films stake their identity are like the flashy costumes worn by their heroes. Beneath their outsized exteriors, each of these films has a mild-mannered secret identity as a movie about ordinary problems and ordinary people. From the personal to the political to the pathological, each uses the backdrop of high-flying action to explore a different realm of everyday life. These costume-clad marvels are both icons and everymen.

And if you're still in need of something to mull over after you're through with that, I've got a review of Phillip Lopate's new anthology, American Movie Critics, over at National Review Online. Can't get enough of critic on critic inside baseball? This is the article for you.

Seen by some as a parasitic endeavor for obsessives and narcissists, Lopate introduces the book with an essay arguing that movie criticism is "a branch of American letters" that, in the last half century, has generated "more energy, passion, and analytical juice" than any other writing about the arts. Lopate's charming, straightforward essay makes a strong case, and the ensuing collection further bolsters the notion that film criticism is a distinct, vibrant art unto itself.

The Endless Cinema

Slate’s list of famous movie-people’s most-watched movies suggests rather quickly the difference between true blooded movie fans and people whose job it is to work around the movies. Not to say that there isn’t any crossover (there is), but it’s telling when a director or screenwriter has never seen any particular movie in double-digit repeats. Laura Ziskin, the Spider-Man producer who has such a cute relationship with her partner than he actually reads aloud to her every night (according to this month's Atlantic), has seen All the President’s Men “at least ten times.” Well get out the record books—ten times! I’ve probably seen it closer to twenty times, and it’s not even in my top 20 or so favorite films. Liv Schrieber has seen Citizen Kane six times. I’d estimate I watched Aliens, Die Hard and Face/Off six times each last year.

This strikes me as a sad thing for a movie director; there’s something immensely satisfying about having seen a movie so many times that it ceases to play in front of you, but instead plays inside of you. It has become internalized, a part of who you are, and thus, when you see it on the screen yet again, the experience is not just of watching a movie, but of seeing a part of yourself.

Those of us who fell in love with movies as children understand this. Children tend to watch the same things habitually, so repeat viewing seems natural. By the time I was ten I had seen the Star Wars films, most of the Star Trek movies, and Superman II and IV (they’re what we had on tape) in countless repetitions. Jake Kasdan, who the article says has seen Ghostbusters in triple digits, understands this; critic Michael Sragow, who saw The Wild Bunch six times in its opening week at the theater and 50 more since, also gets it. For these people, movies are not merely part of the job, they are part of life.

In some ways, it’s equivalent to the end of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, in which the book-loving refugees internalize their favorite works completely, even taking on the book titles as their names. We don’t just read books or watch movies; we become them.

Superman, Slate Movies, Shrinking Critics, Good Pirates

A few late night notices:

Jonathan Last at Galley Slaves points to some thoughts about how, in Superman Returns, Superman has been stripped of his American identity. I've already written an article about this (kids, that's what conservative film critics do, okay?), but it won't run for a few more days. It's not something everyone will pick up on in the film, but it's certainly there.

Slate's Summer Movies Week is continuing, and quite nicely. Make sure to read Dave Kehr's entry on geriatric film directors, which manages to offer both a sharp interpretation of 16 Blocks (!!!) and a nice look at the perils of getting old behind the camera. I think my favorite piece in the series so far, though, is Bryan Curtis' nimbly sneering takedown of AFI's list of the The 100 Sappiest, Most Sentimentalized, Saccharine Movies Ever Made That Your Girlfriend Will Love Anyway. Or maybe it was Most Inspirational. Same thing, really.

Former New York Daily News film critic Jami Bernard now has a blog named after her forthcoming book: The Incredible Shrinking Critic. She's a humorist as well as reviewer, and the blog will combine movies with, of all things, weight loss. I'm all for film and funny, and she looks to provide both. And seriously: watch this. "Between projects." Yeah.

And finally, Moriarty is infectiously enthusiastic about Pirates of the Caribbean 2. Ross Douthat wondered who will save our summer? Maybe Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski are the answer. Hey, it's almost a period movie.

How Long Can Any Studio Fight the Darkness?

So, to continue the guys-in-tights-with-powers theme a little more, here’s the ominous, and really excellent, teaser trailer for Spider-Man 3, because, as Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney are well aware, it’s never too early to start your advertising campaign. I’m glad to see Raimi finish what he started, though I wish that Bryan Singer had done the same. Thanks to Fox’s decision to rush X-Men 3 to theaters, thus causing Singer to jump ship for the big S, we ended up with two mediocre movies instead of one good one. But hey, it’s summer, and bored beachgoers will watch just about anything so long as it promises angsty yet attractive young freaks with weird abilities running around in spandex fretting about heartache.

Superman Returns review at NRO

Superman Returns kicks off the July 4th box-office bonanza today, and National Review Online has my review. Here's a bit of the high-flying action you'll find there:

Yet for all its devotion to the original Superman mythos, there are some significant departures, particularly in the character of Superman himself. Like Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in this summer’s Mission: Impossible sequel, Superman has been softened for our newly refined modern sensibility. Where he was once a confident, courageous hero who chose to play Clark Kent as awkward in order to conceal his identity, he’s been redefined as a tentative, emotionally confused young man. Much of the movie concerns Superman/Kent’s struggle to reconcile his lingering affection for Lois Lane. Just what is a superhero supposed to do with all those pent-up feelings? Those of us without secret identities might go for a walk or take a drive; Superman, on the other hand, tends to fly around aimlessly or hover dejectedly in space. Because it’s like, so empty, and he’s so lonely, dude.

Amusing side note: while writing the review, I actually typed the words "Man of Pink Fluffy Cushions." Don't know how that happened, really.

Summer + Movies + Slate

And yeah. Summer movies week at Slate. Someone out there (perhaps Ross Douthat?) is conspiring to keep me from sleeping.

Lynchtones

Here we go with David Lynch again: This may be the strangest, most unexpected thing ever produced by the internet -- David Lynch ringtones, people. Thanks to the Cinetrix. Personally, I think "Kill Deer" going off in the middle of a meeting would give you some serious bargaining power. I mean, that's just scary.

Look, Up in the Sky

The word is in on Superman, and it is decidedly mixed. The reviews lean toward the higher end of the scale, but the bottom end contains some heavyweights. It is not surprising that three of my favorite critics rated it no better than mediocre. Anthony Lane’s review is half taken up with silly, beside the point joking (though he manages to make a joke about Superman’s glasses that is still funny), but he gets the basic gist of the problem. Predictably, Manohla Dargis faults the film for its lugubrious self-importance, and then proceeds to ramble a bit about how Superman is the gay Jesus or something. She’s half right. And, to no one’s surprise (well, not mine anyway), David Edelstein gets closest to the heart of the film’s problems with this concise summary of the film's flaws:

The bigger problem is that Singer’s weighty rhythms are disastrous for Superman, and the movie actually gets heavier in its last half-hour. Spacey’s Luthor—until now less a supervillain than a clammy businessman—mutilates Superman with sociopathic relish: The sequence is so ugly that Luthor’s lame, jokey comeuppance feels monstrously inadequate. But by then the audience has moved far ahead of Singer. A scene in which Lois tries to persuade her fiancé to turn his plane around and help the disabled superhero could have been compressed into ten seconds instead of dragged out to a minute, and the final scenes would make Wagner check his watch. It’s not that the movie is 157 minutes; it’s that it feels like 157 minutes.

Yes. And yes.

My review will be out shortly (a few other Superman/superhero related pieces are on their way as well), and it takes a somewhat more positive (though still very mixed) spin, but bear in mind the above when heading out to the theater this weekend.

On David Fincher

I’m thoroughly convinced that David Fincher is one of if not the single most important directors working today. Oh sure, he’s easy to deride, especially after the less than epic Panic Room. And there are legions of geeks out there who hold him at least partly responsible for decimating the Alien series, leading us to the point where Paul “Mortal Kombat” Anderson can drag it down into the mudpits of cheesy genre crossovers and PG-13 classlessness. God help us when the Anderson produced sequel is the first film to actually deliver on Fincher’s Alien 3 promise of bringing aliens to Earth.

Still, if Fincher didn’t quite live up to his film’s teaser trailers, he gave us a far better entry than pretty much anyone—even Fincher himself—realizes. Brooding, somber and just as deconstructive of masculine stereotypes as Cameron’s celebrated Aliens, Alien 3 is a dark and dusty gem of moody genre filmmaking. Fanboys complain because it lacks the machine gun machismo of the previous film; critics complain because of the film’s relentlessly dour outlook and focus on slickly produced image; Fincher himself complains because he was locked out of the editing room, leaving us with a theatrical print that lost almost 25% of his original.

But looking at the extended cut of the film that was based on his notes, I suspect it’s only Fincher that would’ve been more pleased if he’d been allowed more control. The film is just as grim, just as hopeless, and just as lacking in the sort of warrior theatrics that Aliens proffered (if also subtly mocked). The main improvements come in the film’s structure and development of supporting characters, as the crew of ugly prisoner dwellers becomes more than just a chorus of shaved heads spouting crude epithets. With the addition of an extra major plot development (it doesn’t change the final outcome, just takes a different, longer route to get there) and the fleshing out of some of the prison planet’s scraggle-toothed uglies, we can finally see some narrative reasoning behind the actions of the prisoners. They’re not just crazy, cruel, or peculiar for the sake of being crazy, cruel, or peculiar; they’re given their personalities in ways that actually help develop the storyline. Fincher may be remembered most for his complicated, obsessively created images, but at his core, he’s first and foremost a storyteller.

For all his photographic wizardry, Fincher works best as a curious chronicler of human folly, a patient investigator into moral decrepitude and the apathy of modernism. You walk away from his movies thinking about his immaculately designed images and acrobatic camera work, but these experiments with image are never merely showing off—they’re always in service of character and story. The long, computer aided take in Panic Room that follows the movements of the intruders outside the house isn’t just there because it’s neat (though, no doubt, it is), it’s there because it shows us the real time arrival of the three invaders, their quickness, their thoroughness (or lack thereof), their purposefulness. The frantic camera in Fight Club reinforces the idea that this story is being told from inside the brain of the narrator; it cuts erratically, making spontaneous visual connections, showing locations with giant, showy swoops of motion. In other words, it moves the way he thinks. Thus, when the final twist is revealed, it makes perfect sense: after all, we were seeing everything from the vantage of a jittery, unfocused mind to begin with.

All this is to say that for all the accusations of flashy shallowness that have been lobbed at him, I’m convinced that he’s got plenty of depth in addition to show. And I’m elated to see these reports at AICN suggest that his next film, Chronicles, which takes on the Zodiac serial killer, looks to be equally interesting and intense. One reviewer compares it to The Wire in its methodical detailing of police procedure. The reviewer seems surprised, but people seem to forget that for all of Se7en’s artfully muddy imagery and hints of shocking violence, it was in many ways a slow, patient film that posited the character of the detective as a record keeper, a librarian, whose job it is to wait and see rather than act. It was about the way that life is boring, even for a detective on the trail of a serial killer, and finally, it was about what that boredom can cause the unhinged among us to do. Call Fincher a slick commercial hack if you want, but it takes a genius to make a movie that not only inverts the excitement paradigm of the detective/action-hero, but manages to make a movie that eloquently, hauntingly, captures boredom—and yet is nonetheless as intensely engaging as any movie I’ve seen.

Screens

Virginia Heffernan, a former Slate and New York Times TV critic, has a brand new blog on web-video over at NYT’s site. The plan, apparently, is to deal with everything from downloadable network TV shows to crazy amateur Macbook lightsaber fight videos on YouTube (you really want to click that link). There’s not much content yet, but this seems like an excellent idea—taking a smart old-media critic and letting her fly at an upstart, undeveloped, mass-art medium that still has the possibility to turn into just about anything.

Hating

I probably should read The Onion A.V. Club more often. Amelie Gillette’s column, The Hater, is sublime. Here she alerts us that Superman is a Methodist; being generally an adherent to Wesleyan-Arminian thought myself, I find this rather reasonable. He is, after all, a hero for all people, not just the elect. Remember though: He’s not Jesus. Here Ms. Gillette (no relationship to the company that gave us Five Blades) nearly sputters, as much as is possible in reasonably print-ready prose anyway, over the advent of America’s Got Talent (an ironic title if there ever was one).

1. Simon Cowell + Desire To Clog The Networks With Crap + David Hasselhoff = America's Got Talent

If you're one of the millions who watch American Idol, I'm blaming you for this. Collectively you've imbued Simon Cowell with so much power, that he can go to NBC and say, "What about a maddeningly non-specific talent show, with no criteria at all, and Brandy as a judge?" and they will give him an hour each week.

Did anyone see this? Honestly, the force of its stupidity is so powerful that it shoots straight through dumb, sails right past funny, and lands smack in the middle of anger-inducing. The first contestant on the first show was a "professional snappist" named Bobby Badfingers (pictured above). He was dressed like fat Elvis, sweated like he was on mescaline, and snapped his fingers furiously into a microphone for 5 minutes. The judges (Brandy, Hasselhoff, and some British guy) couldn't praise him enough. The British guy was especially moved, saying, "Bobby Badfingers, America's going to love you!"

Next up was some guy who had horns strapped all over his body. He played them all furiously for five minutes——but the judges were not so impressed. The British guy leaned back and sneered, as if to say, "Horns? Pathetic. Come back when you learn how to snap."

Stock-conservative-intellectual-highbrow-concerned-citizen-
culture-writer-response: What is our society coming to? Etc, etc. Insert further railing about he decline of culture here, or just go read Siegel (who is, by the way, mostly wrong about Tony Scott).

Anyway, eventually David Lynch makes an appearance in Ms. Gillete’s post, which is not all that surprising considering we ended with a dude playing musical horns strapped to his body.

Making Fun of the Right

Some of you might be tempted to rubberneck the street brawl, Adam’s Morgan-style, between TNR and Daily Kos. I highly encourage this. Matt Yglesias is even keeping score. But for something a little more edifying from Marty Peretz’s young progressinerds, read Eve Fairbanks’ essay on her experience with conservative dating websites. Oh yes, you will scorn the right, and you will laugh. Also in the amusing stereotypes of southern conservatives department, read David Cross’ Open Letter to Larry the Cable Guy. Cross is cruel, crude, petty, elitist, hateful, unrepentantly vulgar--and one of the funniest stand up comics working today.

Principles and Outcomes

Reihan takes issue with my suggestion that some of the younger libertarian writers offer what what he desires from “disputatious” and “intellectually curious and un-partisan” critiques of the right:

Because the critics Suderman names are, as far as I can tell, broadly satisfied with Cato-style libertarianism as a political doctrine (they're not Rothbardians, that is), they're not exactly renegades. And that's not a bad thing. Still, I think Peter missed my admittedly obscure point.

It may be that I misunderstood Reihan’s (probably half rhetorical) question: “Can you think of many conservative opinionistas as open to persuasion and as intellectually curious and as un-partisan as my co-blogger [Ross Douthat]?” But I’m not one hundred percent sure that Reihan, whose thoughts move at speeds that make lightning jealous and who has more interesting ideas before Sunday brunch than I have in most weeks, knows exactly what he meant either. Considering his rather high ratio of ideas to minutes, this is perfectly understandable. But let me explain.

It’s certainly true that none of the writers I mentioned (Wilkinson, Sanchez, Balko) feel the need to part too much from the Cato-libertarian line. Seeing as all three either are or were employees there, this is to be expected. But to call their libertarian identification “partisan” in our two-party system is, I think, a bit of a misstep. The libertarian center may be a relatively sizable force (though I suspect that generalized small government ideals fade significantly the further one wades into the specific politics of many individuals with vague libertarian leanings), but it is hardly a stable or poll-significant party. For all the subdivisions on both sides, ours is still unequivocally a two party system, and as a general rule, more of the Cato-style libertarian intellectuals choose to side with the conservatives and Republicans. These gentleman may not be renegades from their subgroup, but they’re somewhat aligned with the right, and they offer a critique that meets his standards: "conservative opinionistas" who are certainly "disputatious," "intellectually curious and un-partisan,"--in other words, smart guys willing to take a stand and who're not slaves to the Republican party line.

Maybe what Reihan is asking for is someone who is a known conservative, is aligned, at least tacitly, with the Republicans, and yet is willing to differ for principle or outcome. But differ with who? There’s no shortage of notable conservatives fed up with Republican Party shenanigans; Bush and Congress have been given stern warnings or worse by any number of prominent writers on the right. Un-partisan, I would think, is largely about being ideology based rather than party based: Power Line is a Republican blog; National Review is a conservative magazine. Maybe Reihan wants a conservative who parts ways, at times, with other ideological conservatives in the name of conservative principle. But I doubt it. There are plenty of conservatives who argue about ideology and how it ought to be applied: witness John Derbyshire vs. Ramesh Ponnuru, just as the easy example. But Riehan knows this, and it doesn’t satisfy him.

It seems to me, then, that what he’s thinking of is someone who calls himself a conservative, has some goals that might be arguably conservative in nature, and is willing to depart from the standard conservative toolset to accomplish these goals—forgetting entirely that ideological conservatives are defined as much by how they want to accomplish things as what they want to accomplish. Arguing often for raising taxes and regulating markets, or whatever else he’s thinking of, even in service of allegedly conservative outcomes, would make someone, well, not a conservative, and therefore not really a “conservative opinionista”—at least not until someone manages to redefine conservatism so that it is a set of policy goals rather than broad governing principles. While conservatism may have flirted with this occasionally, being a conservative is still associated strongly with the process by which one accomplishes goals, not just the goals themselves. Of course, if I were betting on any pair of pointy-headed blogging tag-teamers to change this, my first pick would be Ross and Reihan.

Pixel Power

On this blog, I plead with people who have more time than I do to write smart video game criticism; at the office, I defend video games from stupid laws.

Bonus: I have it from multiple reliable sources (read: hardened video game nerds) that the new Half-Life 2 expansion is awesome.

Film Criticism, Indeed

I don’t have time to comment sufficiently, but go read James Parker’s Boston Globe piece on the last days of the old school film critics and the rise of the Harry Knowles-style reactionary blurbfests. It’s quite similar, in many respects, to the criticisms leveled by old media at the political blog world, where “heh” and “indeed” have allegedly replaced the elaborate, carefully worded considerations of old.

The populist style or nonstyle of film writing so deplored by [critic Dave] Kehr owes much to Knowles. Here he is, for example, on the above-mentioned ``M:I:3": ``Keri Russell is yummy. Michelle Monaghan is the one to marry. And Maggie Q? There's this red dress she wears that is easily drool inducing."

Well...it has energy. And that many people prefer it to the suites of burbling middlebrow that fill many broadsheet film sections is not entirely surprising. Knowles is an enthusiast: He loves to rave about blockbuster action pics, to which he doesn't so much respond as acquiesce in a fever of delighted passivity.

[snip]

In the Ain't It Cool world, the fact of a movie, just its presence on the screen, almost automatically annuls criticism-to quote Steve Martin in ``Dirty Rotten Scoundrels": ``Wow! Wow! All I can say is Wow!" The pulling-down of the critical ego and its pronouncements from on high is an attractive prospect, no doubt. But as the blurby, slangy, barely-considered Ain't It Cool style becomes the lingua franca of film criticism, we should cherish the last of our old-school film writers. The curmudgeon confronting the screen, perched hawkishly in his seat, his pen over his notepad like a cocked talon, represents a high principle: He expresses the vigilance of civilization against inanity.

Parker is right, of course, that lots of movie writing has changed its emphasis from literate critical consideration to blithering movie-geek sputter. But I suspect that Knowles is as much an outgrowth of this trend than a cause of it.

More important, I think, is that Parker paints the dichotomy between the old and new critics far too strongly. It is possible, I believe (I hope), to be both a giddy fan of film and a practitioner of serious criticism. There is no reason that one cannot entertain both the joyous, sensual delights of popular filmmaking and the more refined, intellectual approach of our revered critics. As I have tried to point out both here and elsewhere, the best of the newer critics (you know who I'm talking about) don’t make that distinction. One needn’t turn off their brain to be overwhelmed by the dizzy delirium of the big screen, nor should thoughtful responses automatically be incongruous with those that are passionate.

Reasons to Be Thankful You Don't Work in Hollywood

Leave it to the guys behind South Park to write The Most Amazing Hollywood Memo Ever (warning: not intended for those sensitive to casual vulgarity or industry-group stupidity).

At the First Things blog, Anthony Sacramone makes a few notes on movies and other things of cultural interest. A sample:

In case you don’t subscribe to Trailers on Demand from your local cable service, another Superman movie is set to be released this summer, for reasons that elude everyone. What’s of passing interest, though, is that some people think Superman is really about Jesus, which would have come as a great surprise to Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, Superman’s creators, both of whom were Jewish. I know there’s a long history of baptizing things not-Christian so that they can be embraced by Christians without fear of apostasy, blasphemy, idolatry, sorcery, and a whole host of other “-y” things. But before this gets completely out of hand: Iphigenia—not Jesus. Neo in The Matrix—not Jesus. Harry Potter—not Jesus. Garfield—not Jesus. Aslan of Narnia . . . All right, you got me on that one.

There will be more on Superman in this space, but for now I will simply say that I watched Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, X-Men 2, Batman Begins and half of X-Men on Sunday. Make of that what you will.

Shivers Delivers the Chills

For a low-budget Canadian splatter flick from the 70s, David Cronenberg’s Shivers is a remarkable accomplishment. Not only is it a chilly, twisted take on the birthing of a zombie holocaust, it is a startling, early indictment of the modern cult of materialism. Perhaps most interesting, though, is how precisely it foreshadows the rest of Cronenberg’s distinguished career as horror filmmaking’s most thoughtful and cold-blooded auteur.

Like many of Cronenberg’s films, including last year’s A History of Violence and his classic brainy gorefests Scanners and The Fly, Shivers parallels civil breakdown with physical and psychological deterioration. Taking place almost entirely within the confines of a gleaming new high-rise condominium, the movie follows the spread of a parasite that drives its hosts to commit violent sexual assaults (and thus further spread the virus). As the parasite spreads, more and more of the residents become sexually ravenous zombie attackers, alternately stalking the unaffected and engaging in manic orgies. As is the case in nearly every Cronenberg film, society is stripped of its cleanly scrubbed veneer to reveal its innermost animal nature; to no one's surprise, the results are not pretty.

Beginning with a slideshow sales-pitch for the apartment building’s modern wonders, Shivers quickly segues into a ghastly, blood curdling struggle between an older man and a younger woman. The sexual undertones are apparent; typically, Cronenberg’s movies conflate acts of sex and violence, displaying them with an odd blend of clinical iciness and repulsion. Here, though, the generic, shallow consumerism of urban moderns is added to the mix: shopping, living, screwing, and killing—for Cronenberg, there is little that distinguishes these activities.

Like most Cronenberg films, the acting and dialog feels eerily removed, affecting the flat manner of automatons performing a soap opera. The disaffected tone amps up the creep-factor; by keeping the emotional pitch relatively flat, he creates a tone both bland and otherworldly.

The film’s haunted finale makes the whole thing seem like a warm-up to both Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, both of which also play on the lifeless monotony of urban life, analogizing it to the zombified routines of consumerism. Later Cronenberg films would play down the consumerism motif (though it can still be seen in Dead Ringers and Crash), but further persue the imagery of psychosexual transformation and societal deterioration. In a strange way, Cronenberg acts as an underhanded proponent of original sin. We hear much these days about the necessity of allowing man to act according to his nature; in Cronenberg's ghoulish worldview, however, man's nature--selfish, violent, sexually domineering, shallow, petty--is scarier than any blood-stained gross out.

We Are the World (...Trade Center)

An AICN spy hits up an early screening of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, and the results are predictably feeble:

It's strictly TV-movie-of-the-week level, this one. A bunch of decent actors flail around trying to say lines that no one should ever have to try to say with a straight face, and Oliver Stone directs the whole [thing] with a sort of plodding determination NOT to be provocative.

As I've said before, I'm not at all certain we need a lunatic rant movie about 9/11, but at least it'd be, I don't know...interesting.

A Basketball Movie for Everyone

I'm not exactly what you'd call a sports fan—I took my last Phys. Ed course in 7^th grade and pay exactly no attention to televised sporting events. That in mind, you'd hardly think of me as the target audience for a documentary about girl's high school basketball. But if I don't know the icing rule from the infield fly rule, I like to think I know a little something about the rules of good storytelling, and in that respect, Heart of the Game scores big. Today, The Washington Times has my review. Here's a tease:

Hollywood has glutted theaters with formulaic, often schmaltzy, team sports films in recent years. Each follows a now-standard pattern: An inspirational coach with a big personality motivates a team of talented young athletes to overcome adversity and personal demons to succeed in both life and sport. "The Heart of the Game," a new documentary about a girls' high school basketball team, is just such a movie. Despite its adherence to formula, the film is fresh and energetic in every way that its trite fictional counterparts are not.

And Now, Politics

Reihan wonders:

The lesson of DeLay and Bush and the last six wasted years is that a united front comes at a steep price--the disputatiousness at a magazine like The New Republic under Andrew Sullivan and now Frank Foer is what a creative, thriving movement needs, not lockstep preaching-to-the-choir. The Weekly Standard gets this, certainly on domestic policy, but I worry that conservatives just don't have the right personnel, at least not yet.

Can you think of many conservative opinionistas as open to persuasion and as intellectually curious and as un-partisan as my co-blogger?

It seems to me that one of the reasons conservatism has done well (at least electorally) this decade is because conservatives have figured out how to allow disagreement, yet also contain it and keep it fairly congenial. The libertarian wings of the right are increasingly suspicious of this and are grumbling ever-more-loudly about going along with the Republicans. But, as a general rule, dominant conservatives subgroups tend not to be as harsh on other subgroups as liberal subgroups, such as Kos or TNR. There are disputes aplenty, but it's rare to see prominent conservatives go head to head with the vitriol that, say, Bienart and Tomasky displayed in their Slate debate this week. The right keeps private forums for that type of infighting. So while conservatives may be willing to offer up a dozen brands of conservatism, it doesn't usually make the nastier fights public. This means that the disputatiousness Reihan prizes in TNR and its writers (I like it too, even if I rarely agree with anything beyond their arts and books coverage) is a little less apparent on the right. Those “opinionistas” are out there, but they're not making their presence as known.

The upshot is that conservatives have been unfortunately yoked to Bush, who is, let’s just say… not always the best conservative, despite what the crew at TPM think. However, it's also what has allowed conservatives to keep their power. And, of course, conversely, the tendency of various liberal subgroups toward strongly-worded, public, internecine bickering has helped keep them out. Vocal dissent and uproar within a party may make for great reading, but it can play hell at the polls.

At this point, though, conservatives are realizing a need to vent some of the harsher criticism, and the trick will be to do it without splintering into angry, self-righteous subgroups.

Addendum: Back to the original question, I think—to no one’s surprise—that much of the best intellectually curious, non-partisan stuff on the right(ish) is coming from the libertarian writers; Wilkinson, Sanchez, Balko, etc, though the paleocons and religious traditionalists seem to be giving them a run for their (free-market loving) money.

Woody Allen's Got the Scoop

In recent years, Woody Allen seems to have taken to pumping out movies like McDonald’s pumps out hamburgers. Unfortunately, most of his recent movies have also matched the dismally mediocrity of Golden Arches burgers. Still, Match Point was a big step up, benefiting immensely from the London setting, the decision not to cast himself (or a stand in), and a couple of great performances, especially from Scarlett Johansson.

Now he’s back, yet again, with Scoop, which returns him to more traditional madcap, witticism-ridden territory. Still, I think the trailer looks fun. Allen is clearly still energized by filming in London, and he’s finally developed the smarts not to cast himself as the romantic lead, but instead as the sputtering old quack who can’t get the girl. Hugh Jackman will get to play charming and debonair, a pleasant change from the gruffer roles he’s been stuck with in between battling leather-clad, super-powered mutants. And Johansson has dropped her feisty, emotionally-unstable sexpot digs in favor of a thick-rimmed, journo-geeky appeal. Even if the movie isn’t all that great, there’s still the promise of another blitzkrieg of Allen’s sharp-witted one liners, at least some of which are guaranteed to score.

Bueller?

Somehow, this Ben Stein essay in The New York Times’ Money section manages to be a sharp bit of economic analysis, a thoughtful bit of bit criticism, and a warm tribute to Stein’s father, and indeed, all fathers.

So Bad It's Good

Looks as if The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift will be as awesomely bad as it looks, though not, unfortunately, as awesomely bad as the original Vin Diesel, erm, vehicle. I have to confess an unrepentant love for these types of lowbrow guy soaps. Sure, they’re the epitome of awful, but they’ve often got a refreshing honesty to them. They arrive with the sole ambition of delivering the absurdly macho, action-heavy goods sans any artistic pretension, and for the most part, they succeed. Occasionally, as with some of the early John Carpenter films or recent Guillermo Del Toro movies, they actually transcend their humble origins and become, if not exactly art, at least damn fine popular moviemaking. Who’s up for back to back viewings of The Thing and Hellboy?

Excuses to Cease all Productive Activity

Don't expect to get any more work done for a while: This week's New York Press is titled, rather succinctly, The Film Issue. Must... avert... eyes...

Bang Bang You're Dead

Chris Orr has the dual talents of being both an accurate predictor of my cinematic taste and a fantastic writer. He’s always entertaining and insightful, and on the rare occasion in which I disagree with him, it’s usually for what he omits, not for something he gets outright wrong. He’s so persuasive, in fact, that when I do see him offer up an alternative view on a movie, I have to pause for a moment to recheck my original thoughts.

But when it comes to the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the action/crime spoof by Lethal Weapon creator Shane Black, it seems that Orr approves of just about everything I dislike. His primary argument—that the film is best taken as a collection of great scenes—is almost convincing. Taken individually, there are indeed some great scenes: the morose, drunken robot falling off the balcony; the poolside introductory sequence; pretty much any scene with Val Kilmer. But the problem is that these disparate elements just don’t work together. The contrasts of tone between grisly violence, semi-heartfelt cinematic emotionalism, and snarky ironic posturing are too jarring, and Black makes no attempt to weave them into a coherent whole. Orr, of course, sees this as a virtue:

Yet for all the wisecrackery and in-jokes, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is true enough to its hard-boiled origins that it never plays as mere spoof. The death of Harmony's sister, the way Harry's sexual gallantry is sometimes indiscernible from misogyny, the quiet suggestion that some people may have compromised themselves too much ever to be made whole again--all of these echo the pitiless tone of Chandler and his successors.

After this, he claims that star Robert Downey Jr. “seamlessly integrates the sweet and sour in Black’s script,” which is true in a sense. Downey’s performance is remarkably even, but even his charming, hyperactive slacker shtick can't tie the entire film together. Black’s ideas are interesting, but he has no knack for consistency, and thus, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang comes off as an uneven patchwork of too many ideas going in too many directions.

Voices Inside My Head

The interesting thing about reading a book by someone you know is that it very much feels as if you’re being told a long story, or have a long, very one-sided conversation with that particular individual. Typically, when I sit down to read a book or an essay, my brain fills in the author’s voice with one of the dozen generic mental “reading voices” I’ve developed over a couple decades of reading. I suspect this is fairly normal for most habitual readers. These voices can be shaped by what I know about the author: age, sex, etc. Authors whom I read regularly tend to “sound” the same each time I read them, though their voices can be modified if I discover that, say, the author is actually 23, not, I previously suspected, 40.

But when reading a long form, semi-casually written book (something that’s not academic) by someone whom I see and converse with regularly, I get the odd sensation of sitting in a room with that particular person and listening to them talk. This changes the whole way I read, inflicting the author’s personal speech patterns and tone of voice on the text. This becomes especially confusing when the portions of the writing don’t match up with my perception of how the author typically speaks.

This is not to say, of course, that it’s an experience I want to avoid; the world (or at least my small alcove of it) is a much better place any time someone I know and like publishes a book.

Booklove

I should’ve mentioned this several weeks ago, but Critical Mass is a most excellent book blog. Run by members of the National Book Critics Circle, the blog covers all parts of the book publishing industry, from sales numbers to newspaper review pages to actual fiction criticism, and it’s consistently wonderful. Recently, in response to the New York Times Book Review survey that unscientifically named Beloved best book of the last 25 years, they ran a feature allowing different voters in the survey to write about what they chose (or didn’t) and why. Recommended reading for all fans of that whole paper and ink business.

District B13: Elegant Brutality, French Style

District B13 is a far, far better movie than it has any right to be. An ingenious mash-up of Escape from New York and psycho-stunt martial arts pictures like Ong-Bak, it has all the chic-yet-bone-crunching action you expected from The Transporter, and all the genuine, street-savvy, hip-hop attitude The Fast and the Furious promised but failed to deliver. It’s the first Luc Besson produced film that actually feels like Luc Besson—raging, self-confident, gleefully violent, and distinctly French.

The obvious reason to go see this movie is that it contains some of the most superhuman stunts and action sequences you’re likely to see this year. What’s great about this stuff is that it’s not CGI-enabled wire-fu, it’ flesh and blood performers doing death-defying impossible trick after death-defying impossible trick. Like last year’s mesmerizing Ong-Bak, it’s at least as much stunt show as movie; also like that film, it never feels too carefully staged. No matter how tightly choreographed the action scenes, they retain their fluidity and spontaneity; each is a gritty, improvised street dance that’s part acrobatics and part bar brawl. Rarely does an action film deliver such elegant, energized brutality.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie, though, is its political subtext. This is a movie in which a goodhearted street hood and an undercover cop team up to diffuse a nuclear bomb held by a drug lord in a walled-off Paris ghetto. In a simpler film, the good and bad would break down along traditional lines: cops good, drug lord bad, well-meaning street thugs also good. But in this movie, the drug lord is a symptom of government callousness.

Of course, this being a French film, we’re not to understand that government is the enemy because it’s bad, inefficient, incompetent, or power-hungry—no, the government is the enemy because it’s too concerned about economic costs and, as a result, not doing enough. The take-home lesson is that anybody who talks about the economic costs of government providing for its citizens is cruel and uncaring; it’s the government’s responsibility to take care of its people, economic realities be damned. When the drug lord demands the French government pay him 20 million Euros to return the bomb, they refuse, and the movie sides squarely against the government. Only in a French film could a government end up portrayed as wimpy and ineffective for refusing to succomb to terrorist demands.

The Past and Future of Art and Film

Back in the early years of film, poet and film critic Vachel Lindsey would argue for the virtues of film by comparing it to other, more traditional arts—Painting-In-Motion, Sculpture-In-Motion, Architecture-In-Motion, and so forth. I wonder what he might make of this invention from the MIT media lab, which might be characterized as painting with motion.

Author Mentoring

The Guardian has an excellent piece on the differences (gasp!) between male and female fiction reading habits. The authors are grudgingly forced to admit that men and women seem to look at fiction differently, with women using novels as emotional guides that often provide epiphanies and men (who, on the whole, read far less fiction) looking at books in a more concrete fashion, often focusing on loneliness and intellectual struggle. It also includes a mention of the concept of author “mentoring:”

Men also recalled a kind of "mentoring" by authors encountered as a teenager - the same word was used by a surprising number of those we interviewed. Having found an author who "spoke" to them, a man would have trusted them as a literary guide, reading all of their works, and also works quoted from or cited by them. Orwell, in particular, was cited frequently as having guided our male reader in his choices of author. This idea of mentoring had never cropped up in our survey of women's reading, though word-of-mouth recommendation by other readers regularly had (men mentioned word-of-mouth much less often).

I’ve never heard it referred to as “mentoring” before, but this hits pretty close to my experience. Starting around when I was eight or nine, I tended to dwell on certain authors—Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, Joe Haldeman, a few others—to the total exclusion of all others. I enjoyed their prose, found intellectual kinship in their ideas, and wanted to stick to material that felt close to my own experience. I still do this, even in the realm of non-fiction; I have my mental list of “trusted authors” whom I read regularly and tend to look toward for insight on certain issues. I do take word-of-mouth recommendations seriously, though, again, only from those for whom I have some intellectual respect. It seems to me that this is the obvious way to make sure that what little time one has for reading is spent wisely. There are dozens of books released every month; I can only read a few. No publication is consistently accurate enough to predict what will be worthwhile and what won’t, but there are some individual voices whose knowledge, intellect, and experience I respect. Taken in aggregate, those voices can and do provide a pretty good guide.

Addendum: I should note that an extremely intelligent, literate female friend—one of my trusted sources—claims that the article gets Jane Eyre wrong. She tells me that the book’s core message is that character, not love, triumphs over all. Having not read the book since I was probably 15 (and even then, to say that I actually read it probably would’ve been a stretch), I can’t say one way or the other, but I trust her views on this sort of thing implicitly.

Love Thy Sopranos as Thy Self

I don’t think I agree with Matt Yglesias that the end of Season 6A of The Sopranos was “criminally terrible,” especially since his post disregards that the season finale was not, in fact, a season finale, but rather a break point before the final eight episodes due next year. But Yglesias may have a point when he writes that the show’s writers “have just totally lost respect for their audience and their product and they’re basically just mocking us for watching at this point.” I wouldn’t go nearly that far, but I ‘d agree that this season has undoubtedly been the weakest, and not just for the rambling, half-baked dream sequence that sucked so much life out of the show’s first couple of episodes. Despite this, there are still a lot of fascinating things going on, the most prominent of which is that the writers have dropped any and all pretense of the show being about somewhat lovable, likable characters.

Maybe the greatest success of the first four seasons was that they managed to turn audience sympathy toward the show’s cast of thugs and goons not just in spite of their homicidal, lowbrow tendencies, but because of them. Unlike, say, The Silence of the Lambs, which reengineered a cannibal serial killer into a culturally refined, academic aesthete, The Sopranos doesn’t radically alter the essentially brutish nature of its gangster cast. But even still, it’s managed to humanize them, and in some not too subtle ways, suggest that their pathology-and-dysfunction-ridden suburban lives are a mildly exaggerated parallel to the combustive, petty existence of much of America. We could excuse the Sopranos’ selfishness, lies, outbursts and outrages because, in a sense, they were us.

This season, though, has torn down the façade of likeability and gleefully ripped into the characters, especially with regards to Tony’s immediate family. Carmella, A.J., and Meadow have all turned out to be self-pitying, miserable narcissists, as spoiled and unlikable as they come. So when Matt writes that the creators have “totally lost respect for their audience,” he’s almost right. The thing is, I’m not sure the writers ever had much respect for their mostly upper middle class, suburban audience. The writers, by cutting away all but their characters’ most shallow, petty characteristics, are mocking the audience—not, as Matt suggests, for “continuing to watch,” but for being the basically the same witless, self-involved, well-off, middle-American fools that populate their show.

Summer Reading List

Yesterday, I took a midday walk over to Borders on 18^th and L--the heart of the beast, as some call it--and picked up copies of both American Movie Critics and The Film Snob’s Dictionary. Earlier this week, I finally gave in and bought a copy of Brecht on Theatre (I own copies of several of his plays, but I had been relying on tattered, scribbled-on college handouts for his theoretical writings). As I write this, all three sit neatly on my desk, insisting on my attention. When I walk by, it's as if they're diners snapping their fingers for a visit. Make no mistake: I serve them, not the other way around. I now look forward to many satisfying hours buried in geeky, nerdy, goofy, abstract, engaging, snarky, snide, insightful, occasionally relevant, often wrong, and thoroughly enjoyable prose about the art and culture of twentieth century drama.

Summer Trailers, Summer Isle

Normally, I go ga-ga for Google, but their new movie trailer page deserves neither a hundred zeroes nor a single exclamation point. Despite my general antipathy toward the prettified computing of Steve Jobs and company, I have to continue to side with Apple’s well-organized, pristinely displayed collection of movie previews. The inequality (which, as a libertarian type, I’m okay with) is drawn into even sharper focus when you factor in Apple’s Quicktime HD video, which looks rather immaculate on my nifty new outsized widescreen monitor.

While on the subject of net film previews, I’m mildly intrigued by this trailer for the upcoming, Neil Labute-directed remake of The Wicker Man. Starring Nicholas Cage, who seems to enjoy playing with hell-spawned movie fire (he’s also starring in the upcoming flaming-skull biker/demon/superhero film, Ghost Rider), the movie will track a detective (Cage) searching for a missing girl on an island populated by oddly resistant cult members. Robin Hardy’s 1973 original is an intense, deeply disturbing portrait of true evil—a horror movie that relies on psychological dread, human weakness, and man’s capacity for spiritually motivated, unrepentant atrocity to create its chills. Hardy's picture is surprisingly devout, a rare film that seems to take the struggle between Christianity and violent, cultish paganism seriously. In many ways, it’s the antidote to The Da Vinci Code—a terrifying, finely-crafted film that is willing to peel away the serene veneer of the worst pagan cult rituals rather than celebrate them as liberating.

Despite the insertion of standard Hollywood bombast—loud thumps, fast cuts, and Dolby-powered jolts—Labute’s film looks like it will stick relatively closely to the original. I have little doubt that Labute, who never met a cruel human instinct he didn’t like, will keep the original’s audacious ending. I wonder, though, if he’ll also let the original’s respect for faith and Christian commitment shine through.

Growwwrrrr.

Everybody's got a secret. Some grubby little factoid hiding under their carefully outfitted veneer that just doesn't quite fit their crafted idiom. Mine is that, in addition to having very normal white guy nerd rock taste in music (Death Cab, etc.), I like metal. Not just metal of the late 80s Metallica variety (though I heard a track off of Ride the Lightning Friday night at a bar and remembered how badass those dudes used to be before they cut their hair and sold out). But really, really grueling, violent, chaotic noise metal with vocals that sound like banshee shrieks and demon growls. Like the soundtrack to the world ending by a tidal wave of fire and glass shards.

What this means, of course, is that I was really happy to see an article on Sunn O))) in the NYT Sunday Magazine (although I really don't get the appeal of Boris). They have a very decent song available for download at their record label's website (the label is named, appropriately enough, Southern Lord). I am also impressed with Becoming the Archetype (who you can hear at PureVolume). I had thought that all the enjoyably brutal Christian metal bands disbanded several years ago, but these guys thrash pretty well, and they've got some great chops. Am I scaring you yet? I'll say it again: chops. Also, like Mr. Byrom at Pitchfork, I think the new Wolves in the Throne Room album is pretty good, and I highly recommend that all fans of ferocious, grating, aural blasts of rock-band noise check it out.

Evil Movies

Today’s date is, well. You know. And appropriately enough, Fox is releasing its remake of The Omen, which, by all accounts, doesn’t even rank with an all-expense paid trip to purgatory. Still, it gives us Julia Stiles as a sign of the devil, which fits quite nicely into Hollywood’s longstanding pattern of flattering its actresses.

Lostified

I was planning on waiting till I actually finished the second season to write this, but, with just four episodes (including the double-length finale) to go, I think now will work.

I still think there are shows that work better, but I'm beginning to appreciate Lost's elegant sleight of hand. I stand by my criticisms of the first season—all tease and empty promises—but I think the second season improved on nearly every front. (It’s worth pointing out that one could easily understand season 2 by watching the season 1 finale and that episode’s 3 minute recap, which just goes to show how little actual development there was in the first season). In season 2, there is, if not much actual progress toward a Grand Design, at least the feeling of some groaning movement. The multiple hatches, the button, the film reel, the captured Other, the unblocked memories of Ethan and the medical room—it seems to suggest something that all fits together. A savvy viewer could make a vague guess about what’s going on, and while there’s certainly nothing approaching definitive, the range of possibility has been narrowed. Foggy as it may be, a shape appears to be forming in the distance.

Along those lines, one of the things I was thinking about this weekend was what that shape might look like. And if the island doesn’t provide too many clues, the show’s narrative patterns might. All along we’ve been made to think of the Others as sinister, and we’re constantly led to assume that the island’s spooks represent some sort of threat. But one of the show’s hallmarks has been introducing characters and elements that initially seem malicious, only to be softened and humanized by the revelation of a backstory. Jin, at first, seemed cruel and controlling—but we were eventually made to care for him. Shannon appeared to be a selfish and petulant—but her exit episode sent her out with sympathy. Ana Lucia and Mr. Eko (indeed, the whole plane-tail crew) were made out to be scary, but again, they were just misunderstood. The show’s constant refrain is that mystery is frightening—a threat that causes panicked reactions. But when one stops to get to know the story behind that mystery, it's no longer so scary.

What if the island and its myriad threats follow this same pattern? It seems possible, and it’s even been setup to some extent: In the flashbacks, Ethan seemed to be a reasonable guy out to help Claire (we don’t know that Alex’s warnings were true); the Greenpeace traitor in the second group said that the list is made up of “good people,” and that the taken were actually better off. And the island itself seems to possess good properties; it heals people and delivers them food by way of parachute. In a show that strives for strangeness, for wholly unexpected twists, and yet also for a proud, respectful view of human ability, it seems at least possible that the seemingly malicious island is, in fact, not the threat it appears to be.

As for Ross Douthat’s criticism about the lack of organized society in the second season, well, I actually found that far more annoying in the first few episodes of the first season. The immediate aftermath of a major collective trauma is the time when people tend to come together and work for a singular purpose. But, as we’ve seen in our post 9/11 country, that unity quickly fades. I’d have liked to see a bit more togetherness early on, but at this point, the show has pretty well established that a mostly libertarian, every-man-for-himself ethos is simply going to rule; there are too many obstinate folks and self-certain power centers working at cross purposes to do otherwise. In fact, one underlying motif to which the show often returns is a critique of such a selfish, free-market system*—something that Ross ought to appreciate.

*The best example of this was from early on in the first season when Jack needed some medicine from Sawyer, who glibly responded with something to the effect of, “I don’t know what kind of commie joint you’re running over there but possession is nine tenths of the law and a man’s got a right to protect his property.” Also, whichever writer supplies Sawyer’s unending supply of quips deserves some sort of special award for snarky brilliance.

Lost vs. Battlestar Galactica

LOST	BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
Small band of survivors unexpectedly left marooned on a remote island	Small band of survivors unexpectedly left marooned in the remote reaches of space
Violent struggles for leadership after the breakdown of civil order	Violent struggles for leadership after the breakdown of civil order
Clashes over use and management of resources	Clashes over use and management of resources
Survivors face a mysterious enemy force, known as The Others, with superior numbers and technology, who attack at random, have strange religious beliefs, and a long-term secret plan involving the survivors’ children	Survivors face a mysterious enemy force, known as the Cylons, with superior numbers and technology, who attack at random, have strange religious beliefs, and a long-term secret plan involving the survivors’ children
Survivors build a raft out of wreckage and junk parts	Survivors build a fighter out of wreckage and junk parts
Strong, attractive female lead (Kate) with a tough, tomboy outlook who has romances with both the good male lead (Jack) and the long-haired bad boy (Sawyer)	Strong, attractive female lead (Starbuck) with a tough, tomboy outlook who has romances with both the good male lead (Lee Adama) and the long-haired bad boy (Balthar)
The Others disguise themselves as part of the group to infiltrate and disrupt the survivors’ operations	The Cylons disguise themselves as part of the group to infiltrate and disrupt the survivors’ operations
Sometimes distantmale lead with father issues	Sometimes distant male lead with father issues
Rose cured of cancer through miraculous island energy	Roslin cured of cancer through miraculous Cylon technology

In Defense of Theory

Yet another review of Philip Lopate’s American Movie Critics popped up this weekend, this time in the NYT book review. Clive James approaches the book with the question of whether or not it’s better to have “a theory,” a la Sarris, and comes out definitively in the negative. James writes:

It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already knew that your friend who's so funny about the "Star Wars" tradition of frightful hairstyles for women (in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel, Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism. This book proves that history is with you: perceptions aren't just more entertaining than formal schemes of explanation, they're also more explanatory.

Interesting, although not entirely convincing (the best critics are both pithy and academic). James even agrees that this might just be personal preference:

[I]t could be that I just don't like it when a critic's hulking voice gets in the way of the projector beam and tries to convince me that what I am looking at makes its real sense only as part of a bigger pattern of thought, that pattern being available from the critic's mind at the price of decoding his prose.

In a sense, James is attempting to apply a theory to criticism. His article tries to fit everything into a bigger picture of theory and non-theory based, and claims that, overall, theory-based is better. But if his dichotomy—between structured, patterned reviewing that churns a single idea over many films and fragmented, observational essays aimed at capturing a single film without an ongoing context—is somewhat useful, his assessment of perception-based reviews as being better is perhaps not.

The two major categories he sets up aren’t bad. Clearly, some critics write intending to filter all their observations through a larger idea (or a few). Others simply string together clever, disconnected thoughts, some throwaways, some with more heft. But the division between the two isn’t quite as clear as James might like. If not all critics have a theory to back them up, many have a particular aesthetic or recurring idea. David Edelstein is a sensualist with a knack for pop-culture allusions. Dave Kehr is a hardened formalist with an encyclopedic knowledge of film history. Manohla Dargis pines over wild visuals, often preferring charged cinematic stylization over content. These are not explicit theories, per se, but they’re ongoing ideas that shape a critic’s viewpoint and connect his or her observations to some larger pattern.

Perhaps the bigger problem is that though theory may be less explanatory, as James claims, that is only true about individual films. Entertaining or no, it is still useful, both for accessing broad swaths of cinema and larger cultural patterns. Theory is what ties film trends together; it notates and explains repetition. It can help us see what ideas are dominant in the filmmaking community, and it can offer up explanations as to why. Theory is also useful for tracking that which lies beyond the frame. As our most dominant narrative medium, cinema plays a pivotal role in representing (and, some would argue, shaping) culture. But this is rarely done one film at a time. Theory helps us see these ongoing patterns, helps up put them together into a single, coherent idea. Yes, it is imperfect. There are uncertainties. There are pieces that don't quite fit. Sometimes theory is imprecise. But then, that’s why it's called a theory.

Pop Goes the Music Critic

Pop music criticism can be a tough gig. After all, there’s rarely a story to relate. Few albums have characters to talk about. And in our increasingly iTunes-saturated world, where singles rule and custom playlists are the norm, it’s growing increasingly rare for an album to be made as a unified work. Even more problematic is the difficulty of writing about sounds out of the context of daily life. It’s easy to describe a strange sound heard on the street downtown; it’s not nearly so easy to come up with ways to describe the increasingly synthetic, unnatural sounds that populate pop albums. The vocabulary just isn’t there to describe the sounds, certainly not in the way that vocabulary exists to describe common elements of books or movies or plays.

So, lacking easy ways to talk about the music itself, much pop music criticism makes due with distractions: the artists themselves, their “scenes,” and music culture. This material, much of which is just padding, is regularly delivered with a sassy rhetorical veneer, ostensibly to capture the faddish, fashion-obsessed texture of pop music. Far too often, this results in articles that aren't much more than barely coherent strings of high-slang gibberish. Pitchfork gets knocked for this regularly, and justly so. But The Village Voice is often just as bad. For example, this short piece by Debbie Maron on a Gnarls Barkley show:

The emcee punk'd us, stating that regrettably, Gnarls couldn't make it, and proffered up a cover band named Brushfire instead. The devastating news was met by nary a clap until—voilà!—the stars themselves appeared in hair-metal regalia: DJ-producer Danger Mouse had the boa, enigmatic hip-hop crooner Cee-Lo had the cloak, and each flaunted a gargantuan mullet wig. Oy. Was this posturing for the scenester nation? An ironic homage to Axl Rose, perhaps? Nope: The metal accoutrement was less about shock value and more about teaching kids some musical unity using anachronism.

Heaps of supporting musicians strode onstage as well, but Cee-Lo took the forefront as a new kind of sex symbol with a new kind of liturgy. He had Aretha in the urethra, belly quivering over spandex tights in plain defiance of skeletal-hipster vanity, while svelte Danger Mouse modestly took a scratcher's backseat, the Mary Magdalene to Cee-Lo's Jesus. But those spoonfuls of sugar do help soul's medicine go down—surely a suicide anthem was never met with such lively sing-along as "Just a Thought?" And hell, if Gnarls's patented threesome of metal, soul, and goofy dance-offs makes the masses swallow, so be it.

Oh sure, it’s got a sneering, street-savvy rhythm to it. “He had Aretha in the urethra” sounds fun indeed, and maybe the band members really meant to "[teach] kids some musical unity using anachronism" (though I doubt it). But fluff essays like this are the verbal equivalent of Tony Scott films, all tripped-out flashy excess meant to hide an inherent shallowness. Saying nothing with style is still saying nothing.

Leggo My Fight Club Plot Diagram

This is totally insane in the most wonderful way possible. Via A. Horbal, someone (a film-obsessed college student, natch) built a three dimensional model of the plot of Fight Club… out of Legos. The Rapture of the Nerds is supposedly when we all get to upload our consciousnesses into computers and become posthuman virtual beings (I’m in, of course, although I’d settle for an iPod… in my mind). For now, though, I think this qualifies.

This Is Your Life, and It's Ending One Minute At a Time

I’ve gone over this before, so I won’t belabor it, but Matt Yglesias is flat wrong about Fight Club when he writes:

What's interesting about [Fight Club] is that it's a rare explicitly anti-individualist work. "Self-improvement is masturbation," remarks Tyler after looking at a Calvin Klein ad (quotes here), while Jack earlier observes that he "had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct." The general idea of this is that "individualism" is a marketing ploy, designed to convince people to buy things like "the clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green ying and an orange yang" in order to express and create their identities.

[snip]

Rather then exhorting people to abjure fake, commercialized individuality in favor of a higher, truer individualism it exhorts people to abandon individualism. While doing something or other, the members of Project Mayhem are told: "You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake." Rather, "You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else."

Yglesias is right that the film satirizes the notion that individuality can be bought from lines of mass produced furniture and overpriced clothes—the film is relentless in its jabs at the emptiness of all-encompassing consumerism (though I don’t think it’s nearly as tough on capitalism as he seems to imagine). But Yglesias seems to miss that the film doesn’t actually present Project Mayhem as any better a solution than what it replaces. In fact, Project Mayhem is, if anything, far worse. It spirals out of control into a cascade of destruction in a way that the inwardly focused consumer culture never does. No, Fight Club isn’t just a merciless attack on consumerism, it’s a brutal satire of progressive groupthink in which Tyler's mindless, communo-terrorist enclave is portrayed as a dangerous, destructive group of insipid followers led by a power-hungry illusion of male perfection. Project Mayhem's members have been brainwashed and robbed of their humanity, all in service of their master and his lies.

The film isn’t anti-individualism; it’s ardently pro-individual, a call to take responsibility and not blame outside influences—whether they're radical political groups, parents, women, television, or corporate culture—for one’s own actions.

Can the Master Repair What He Has Made?

On the other hand, I will glad-heartedly fork over big-government level percentages of my wages to Ridley Scott any time he wants to put out a new version of Blade Runner. And, after years of rumors and gossip and vitriol and crappy sequel novels, it looks like we’re actually going to get the For Real Final No Kidding This Time This Is Totally It I’m Serial version of the best science fiction movie ever. Even better, the article says there will be a brief theatrical re-release, which is for me what the White House is for Hillary Clinton. I've been jonesing to see that movie on the big screen since I was but a punk rock loving preteen. No matter how much cash you pour into your home theater, it will never quite match the experience of seeing a movie in a dark room full of strangers. And then, after that, you’ll be able to take it home with you and proudly display a cardboard box with a couple of plastic disks that you paid $75 for.