More Than Meets the Eye

Andy Horbal tirelessly continues to round up and occasionally comment on all the debate, discussion—and yes, criticism—about criticism. And if that doesn’t successfully singe your synapses into silly submission, I’ve got three words for you 80's nostalgia loving hipsters: Optimus. Prime. Picture.

Bloody Bad

In the never ending geek-saliva-bath ramble that continues with Harry Knowles' latest movie review, the Geek King drops this bit of wisdom about the upcoming prequel-to-a-remake, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.

The preserve the integrity of our dear Leatherface, with only one moment that made me go, “BULLSHIT” – but the pay off to that moment is so good, that while I still say the one thing is bullshit, it was definitely worth the bullshit for the follow through.

I suppose that this is what passes for balanced judgement over at AICN. Nice to know that dear Knowles is discerning and all that. In the previous paragraph, he describes his "glee" at seeing a pair of lovers separated by a butcher's table as one watches the other get "chainsaw'd and chopped up alive." "The 'kills' in this movie are outstanding," he writes. As much as I might appreciate, and even defend, the enthusiasms and niche interests of fan-based net criticism, well, there's still a limit, and when the blood starts to "rain down on the powerless lover beneath," I think I've hit it.

What Hath Foer Wrought?

Not being a sports fan in the slightest, I'm utterly baffled by this. Tennis? Richard Just tries to explain:

In the wake of my boss Frank Foer's successful stint as a World Cup blogger, we saw a chance for TNR to corner the market on political junkies talking about niche sports. Plus, I'm on record within the office as sympathetic to Jon Chait's grievances against soccer, which I regard as a pointless, boring game. Here was a chance for TNR to weigh in on an international sport that's actually worth watching.

Worth watching? Maybe in a played-hooky-and-nothing's-on-but-Law-and-Order sense, but come on, people. The outfits are cute and all, but it's just a couple of folks batting a fuzzy green ball back and forth over a net. Didn't you all see The Squid and the Whale?

Alone in the Dark

Over at About Last Night, Laura Demanski writes:

People seem to love going to the movies alone, but I really don't. In my life, I've seen one movie alone in the theater, a good one: California Split. That was five years ago, and not an uplifting experience.

Even though I spent hours and hours of my youth and adolescence in blissful isolation, captivated by VHS movies, I spent a long time resistant to the idea of going to a movie by myself. It seemed antisocial, somehow, as if part of the point of going to the movies was not just to see the movie, but to see the movie with someone, to make a shared connection over a film. For all the antisocial connotations of moviegoing—you sit alone in the dark and don't speak or look at those around you, after al—there is a definite social element to watching movies.

And though I still think the ideal way to watch movies is usually with company, it’s simply not always possible anymore, especially in workaholic Washington, and even more especially as a critic. My screening pass may invite both me and a guest, but who in downtown Washington can escape to catch a movie at 10:30 a.m. on a Monday? Even the evening screenings at local theaters can be difficult; if people aren’t working till 8 or 9 p.m. (as many in this town do), they’re at happy hours or networking parties or the gym or home washing laundry. Quite reasonably, movies, for many, are simply not a priority. The result is that, for good and for ill, I end up seeing a good many movies accompanied only by my notebook.

On one hand, this tends to increase my ability to focus on the film at hand. I spend less time noticing the reactions of the person next to me and more time scribbling notes, desperately trying to catch key quotations—the usual business. It feels, perhaps appropriately, less like a social occasion and more like a job, or at least an assigned task (which it is). I'm there for a reason, less distracted and more critically self-aware as a result of being unaccompanied.

Alternately, it means that I often miss the requisite post-movie discussion that comes when seeing films in a group. This discussion isn’t just important for helping me shape my own views, both by defending them and by hearing other responses to the film; it’s also a useful way to build a regular community around filmgoing, which helps me gain a broader perspective as a critic. In college, I had a pretty solid group of friends with whom I saw movies on a regular basis; as we saw more movies together, our tastes began both to merge and to differentiate—we became more alike from sharing and hashing out our views, but the differences in our individual tastes became clearer as well. It’s not something that could be repeated, of course. The requirements of the post collegiate, workplace environment don’t really allow this. Movies are not—indeed cannot—be a precedent for most people in this stage of life.

All this to say that, when it comes to watching movies, the experience matters—and not just where you see it and under what circumstances, but who you see it with and what your history (or lack thereof) is together. So pick your weekend viewing carefully, but also remember to choose your viewing companions—if you decide to have any—carefully as well.

No, It's Not Snakes on a Plane

... it's goats on a roof, which, according to Jeremy Lott "lift us out of our postmodern malaise." I'm actually kind of fond of my postmodern malaise, but if I were going to trade it for something, it would definitely be goats on a roof.

Classic TV

I’ve been watching the first season of Homicide: Life on the Street, the predecessor to the HBO’s marvelous Baltimore cop-drama, The Wire. Like The Wire, it’s a coarse, deeply cynical procedural about the hard-scrabble lives of Baltimore detectives fighting a two-front war against both petty, narcissistic city bureaucracy and a skeptical, resistant public. And though it doesn’t have the intricate, season-long story arcs or fiendishly obscure dialog of its pay-cable counterpart, in terms of density and difficulty, it seems to push the limits of network television about as far as they’ll go. Almost fifteen years after its initial network run, it’s still a chilling, savvy look at the grim business of playing the unloved, underpaid housemaid to a city's murderers. It’s not just compelling storytelling (though it certainly is that), it’s also a resonant cultural item—a diorama of death and urban decay set against the creaking machine of city bureaucracy.

And it seems to me that it’s this element of shows like Homicide, and now The Sopranos, The Wire, maybe even Battlestar Galactica, along with the rise of the DVD, that puts a bit of a crack into the “Myth of Classic TV” as proffered by critics like Terry Teachout and Mark Steyn. In his latest Atlantic column, Steyn references Teachout, and then writes:

Indeed, the more “classic” your show, the more ephemeral it is. Getting into Ovid or Gregorian chant is a piece of cake next to getting into thirtysomething fifteen years on. Conceivably, one might find oneself in a motel room unable to sleep at four in the morning and surfing the channels come across St. Elsewhere. But they made 137 episodes of multiple complex interrelated plotlines all looping back to Episode 1: if you’ve never seen it before and you stumble on Episode 43, who the hell are all these people and what are they on about? By comparison, if you happen to catch, say, an episode of Naked City from the late ’50s, you might not know who the detectives are or recognize Billy May’s wailing theme tune, and the whole monochrome thing might be a bit of a downer, but you can still pass a pleasant hour with a self-contained one-hour cop drama. The “better” television got at its art, the more transient it became. I doubt The Sopranos will be an exception to this rule. Ninety percent of all the people who’ll ever be into it are already into it.

Steyn is certainly correct to say that shows like Homicide don’t lend themselves to the trivialities of syndicated kitsch. The bland background hum required for good afternoon cable and late-night channel surfing isn’t really a good mix with the drawn-out ambiguities and complexities of these shows. And if cable reruns were all we had, then that would be that.

But television, especially of the HBO variety, is becoming more novel-like, and DVD box sets are allowing us to approach these shows in a way that preserves—even enhances—their novel-like aspects. Binge-watching these shows in commercial free, multi-episode gulps is a perfect way to experience the "multiple complex interrelated plotlines" that Steyn sees as a flaw in regular broadcast viewing. The rise of the DVD medium means that a show like Homicide, which, as with an excellent novel, provides both an accurate portrayal of a place in time and a gripping narrative populated by scads of well-crafted characters, is no longer consigned to the wastelands of syndication.

Even the physicality of the DVD medium lends it the sheen of a collector’s item, giving it roughly the same permanence, as well as personal significance, as a book on a shelf. A mid-afternoon rerun requires nothing of you; you can turn it off, flip the channel, fall asleep—you get no say as to when or whether it airs. But a DVD is yours; you chose to buy it, to put it on your shelf, and eventually to sit and watch it. In doing so, you bestow importance on it. You may not remember what aired at 9 p.m. on Thursdays a decade ago, but you’ll remember what’s on your shelf.

As our culture becomes more visual and more technology-dependent, we’re also seeing a muddying of the boundaries between imagery and text (witness the surge of video blogs on YouTube supplanting the text-blogs of MySpace and Blogger), meaning that film—yes, even television—is simply going to be less stigmatized as a “lower art.” Add all of this to the increasing migration of the long-form narrative from novel to television, and it seems to me that these shows will resonate—and yes, maybe even become "classic."

More Critics on Criticism

For those of you who pay attention to such things, Ross Douthat--who frequently serves as both book and film critic--adds to the cacaphony of discussion about the role of the critic. In the course of sharing those thoughts, he gives much love to Brick, a film I very much enjoyed, as well as some general praise to The Illusionist, a rather gorgeous looking movie that, against the critical grain, I found to be remarkably empty. For a far better (though still somewhat flawed) recent performance by Edward Norton, I'd urge everyone to check out Down in the Valley, a haunting, poisoned-dream of a movie that blends Taxi Driver with the myths of the classic Western.

Turning MySpace into TheirSpace

I finally made it big time: I’m in the tabloids! That’s right, if you live in the D.C. area you can find me (or at least an article by me) in everyone’s favorite free daily, The Washington Examiner, with an article on the problems with government attempts to regulate MySpace and other social networking websites. Will you be my net-friend?

Like a coffee shop or a mall, the Internet has evolved into a digital “third place,” a location we visit not only for business needs, but for entertainment and social interaction.

With the advent of social networking Web sites like MySpace, the Web is no longer just an extension of the office — it’s a vast virtual playground where individuals of all ages can meet up and chill out.

But recent calls for the government to place restrictions and requirements on sites like MySpace would march out the government hall monitors, forcing MySpace to become TheirSpace.

Pick up a copy of the paper or read the whole thing online.

Service Guarantees Citizenship!

Ross Douthat pauses from cleverly cataloging foreign-policy notions and stoops to banter a bit about vulgar science fiction movies:

Troopers, on the other hand, is an entirely ironic exercise, an attempt at a critique of fascist militarism that deliberately undercut its storyline (humans battle interstellar bugs) at every turn without providing enough actually-clever social commentary to justify this kind of self-sabotage. You can tell that Verhoeven thought he was being terribly clever, and lots of people agree: I've had any number of conversations in which I mention that I think Starship Troopers is dumb, and somebody complains that I just don't understand the subtext, which is that fascism is bad. "Get it? Get it?

[snip]

Yep, I get it. And it's still dumb - and much, much dumber than a straightforwardly silly humans-fight-aliens movie.

Fortunately, I will never argue that ST is subversive-smart or some such twisty nonsense; the reason I appreciate it is that, no matter what Verhoeven thought he was doing, the movie turned out to be a straight-up, dumb-as-rocks, fun-and-gun action flick that goes about the business of being ridiculous and shamelessly entertaining with gleeful aplomb. It's like an after school special with gore, nudity, and badass space marines. It's not clever at all, but it's got enough brute, jock simple-mindedness (not to mention gratuitous bug mayhem) that it doesn't have to be.

All My Children

I have to say, I really love this poster for Children of Men (how often do we see children in the womb outside of tacky abortion billboards and protest signs?), but I really dislike the sardonic, jokey tone of the teasers below it. They're the sort of thing you'd expect to see on a black comedy/social commentary like Fight Club. I'm a little disappointed that the film’s release was bumped from the end of September to Christmas, but I suppose if it gets this movie—a rare non-explosion heavy foray into thoughtful, socially aware science fiction—more attention it will be worth it. If you haven't read the coolly prophetic book, drop whatever you're reading and find a copy.

Silly Movies

In the same way that I have a thing for obnoxious grind metal (the new Mastodon album is really good), I also have a thing for amped-up, utterly ridiculous action movies. They are, I suppose, what you might call guilty pleasures. These are films that, though not necessarily high quality movies, do what they intend to do well. They work within the limits of genre, but they don't recognize traditional cinematic boundaries about how to approach genre—they're resolutely over the top and unashamed about it. In college, we referred to them rather simply as "silly movies," for that's exactly what they are. But that doesn't mean they're not also tremendously entertaining.

My favorite silly movies are probably the first two Blade films, the Paul Verhoeven sci-fi flicks (Robocop, Starship Troopers, Total Recall), and Predator. It's difficult to mount a defense of the real cinematic quality of any of these films, yet they're all hugely entertaining. Part of the trick is that while none of them take themselves really seriously, neither do they sink into self-parody. In each, the concept is ludicrous and therefore so is the execution. But at the same time, the films don't get all post-modern and start winking at you—they play out their absurd scenarios with relatively straight faces. Snakes on a Plane did this fairly well too, I'll add, leaving the obvious jokes to the audience (who're much more adept at making them anyway) rather than trying to make the movie too self-conscious.

Another thing that's important in all of these films is that they all make sense, at least in their own crazy kind of way. I mean, obviously, the idea that we're surrounded by ultra fashionable gangster vampires who engage in massive shootouts and sword fights with a hulking, armored guy who looks like Wesley Snipes is total nonsense. But once you get past the lunacy of the concept, the first two Blade films are relatively cogent, plotwise (the second one especially). Just as important is that all of these films make visual sense; Blade: Trinity doesn't make the list because not only is the story incomprehensible (viruses, Dracula, Nightstalkers, oh my!), the photography and action choreography are maddening. Julian Sanchez just posted a good bit on writing he describes as "a stupid person's idea of how a smart person sounds." Trinity's direction might be described as "a stupid person's idea of how a cool movie looks."

Some people want to include movies like the X-Men series or other higher-budget, more mainstream fare in the same class, but I don't think that it quite works. There's something fundamentally wacky, something lowbrow and somewhat out of control, about these movies that you don't see elsewhere. You might call it the Spirit of John Carpenter, whose early 80s schlock masterpieces Escape from New York and The Thing really set the tone for the mid to low budget silly movies of today.

I don’t really have any current connections to make, except to say that the modern television environment seems a prime place for such gleeful silliness. But for the most part, we get outright goofy stuff like Stargate SG1 or the awful new Blade series on Spike. The only thing that comes close is 24, which, in recent seasons, has taken its implausibility to even more outrageous levels—and, I’ll note, done rather well as a result.

Fun With Fundies

Daniel Larison drops a blog-bomb on me for being snide to the misguided young woman whom I referenced for her belief that, in general, it’s best for young, single women not to go to college. Larison chides me for allegedly not being willing to recognize her commitment and submission to her faith, trying to make it seem as if my argument was that she made a bad choice by deciding not to go to college. But that wasn’t my point at all: I wasn’t alarmed at Suzy Homemaker’s choice for herself; I was bothered that she seemed to take it as correct Christian doctrine that her decision was the best, most sound decision for the majority of Christian women. She was, to be blunt, making a fairly plain statement that, due to their faith, Christian women should generally avoid going to college. And, at the risk of being harsh, I would continue to characterize that as a backward, fundamentalist, lunatic notion.

Career Women and Marriage

“Don’t marry career women” is a pretty blunt title for an article, but Forbes runs with it, providing a fairly convincing list of reasons why marriages to career-minded women are statistically doomed to unhappiness. This is no doubt problematic for all those women who’ve been told that they can’t have happiness and empowerment without a degree and a job, but it’s also terrible news for guys like me who’re attracted to those educated, accomplished, motivated women who stalk the city streets in their heels and suits—much better looking intellectual sparring partners (who often seem to thrash us mercilessly in the ring).

Broken down, the story is essentially about the failure of marriage to meet the impossibly high expectations of recent generations. And while there are certainly many factors involved in the creation of these expectations, I would argue that media portrayals—especially those on film and television—are some of the most significant. Narrative arts are where modern society looks for instruction and modeling on human interaction; we’re raised so heavily on television sitcoms and commercials and supermarket tabloids that the fantasies created and sold by these mediums become integral to our understanding of real relationships. That means that when we talk about our model opposite-sex partners, we talk about them in terms of movie characters. We want Audrey Tautou from Amelie or Natalie Portman from Garden State, because in media-saturated modernity, movies and other pop culture images, as much (maybe more) than real life, are what form our ideas about how people live, love, and interact.

The results aren't just disaffected online daters, they're people like Jacqueline Passey who have stunningly exact, sky-high standards for their potential partners. Passey’s lofty requirements may be justified in some sense (she’s basing things on relatively stable information about the measurable qualities of potential partners rather than vague, fantasy notions about what her relationship might turn out to be emotionally), but they’re indicative of the rather absurd heights to which ideas about relationships have flown. It’s that longing for manic-depressive without the manic, a desire for a relationship that's pretty much impossible.

These standards, in turn, also lead to cultural shifts like what Ann Marlow calls “domesticity without family, or with family lite,” where single or childless professional women choose to take to housewifery out of some weird need for maternal release. There’s no need to have children anymore, so, rather absurdly, we’ve replaced them with… totally overblown kitchens. (Or, for men, hulking home theater systems with remotes that take five hours to program.)

It’s almost enough to make you give a somewhat serious reappraisal to otherwise obviously backward, fundamentalist loonies like this poor young lady, who writes:

In general I would not recommend college to other women. I think, in general, that young women would make better use of their time and spiritual development by pursuing studies on their own and serving their family and their church during their years of singleness.

Only "almost enough," of course, because there’s really no question that even if one were to grant some validity to sentiments like hers (I don't), it’s totally laughable (not to mention probably morally wrong from any reasonable perspective on gender equality) to think that we could effectively turn back the clock to recreate a society like what Suzy Homemaker wants.

Like many Christian conservative types, I’ve got a fairly strong pro-family, pro-marriage strain in me. I’m convinced that marriage and family have been very good for civilization and often good for individuals. They’re robust institutions that have served Western society well for a considerable period of time throughout a considerable amount of change. But more and more, I’m also convinced that marriage is a broken institution, or at the very least, one that, whether we like it or not, is going to continue to evolve into something we don’t entirely recognize. For good and for ill, we may be living in the traditional family’s last days. And while many on my side of the political and religious divide understandably want to fight to keep the family institution in stasis, I’m not sure it’s a battle that can really be won, at least not in the way so many want to. I can only hope, then, that whatever comes after it serves us as well as what we’ve had in the past.

Let's Get Crashin'

Capitalizing on the latest in advanced digital video interweb technology, the crazy libertarian kids over Bureaucrash help you get your YouTube fix:

Cursive -- "Happy Hollow" Review in The Washington Times

I'm in The Washington Times today with a short review of "Happy Hollow" the new album by Omaha's much-loved post-punk wunderkinds (and one of my all time favorite bands), Cursive.

Cursive, a band whose name references an early signpost on the long road to maturity, has always been animated by the anguish of young lives on the precipice of adulthood. From the decaying relationship of a young couple on the band's third album, "Domestica," to the struggling musicians of the band's last record, "The Ugly Organ," the fiery Omaha, Neb., rock band has treated each of its recent albums as a single, tightly focused story about the unstable lives of the young and modern. Now, with the release of "Happy Hollow," the band has expanded its outlook to map the emotional topography of a small, Midwestern town that is a hotbed of political and social tensions.

Buy a copy of the paper or read the whole thing online.

In Defense of Slate

Undoubtedly, N.P. Thompson will get some attention for this seething, bile-laced letter to Slate’s editors slamming the publication’s post-Edelstein film coverage, but his criticisms seem rather spurious to me. To begin with, most of the specific examples he points to are taken out of context. Metcalf’s Match Point review, for example, goes on to elaborate on what he means by “good solid movie,” making a case for the film’s sturdiness in the wake of multiple shaky films from Allen. It’s not a perfect review, but it doesn’t deserve such wrath. Dana Stevens’ New World review is an even sharper bit of work, and Stevens’ comment about Malick’s reticence to speak to the press was intended only as evidence for Malick’s mysterious personal tendencies—the same tendencies that very clearly weigh heavily on The New World.

More to the point, Thompson’s primary argument--that Slate is both unadventurous in content or clubby and New-York centric in who it chooses to publish with regards to its film coverage--is just flat wrong. The DVD Extras column regularly publishes any number of contributors from outside New York, and its editors have shown themselves willing to run all sorts of wonderfully eccentric material. If anything, Slate’s DVD column is one of the few places that curious, quirky essays on film can still get mainstream attention.

Thompson also calls for “much needed voices of dissent” on a slew of critical darlings, but doesn’t seem to consider that not only is it not necessarily Slate’s job to provide that dissent, but that to do so would rob the publication’s critics of their independence. It’s true, of course, that Slate’s reviews of theatrical films are written primarily by a small group of people (these days mostly by Stevens), but that’s to be expected. Most publications of note tend to stick with a small stable of regular critics. Not only does this maintain a consistent point of view, it frees critics from editorial interference by keeping editors from too much picking and choosing of reviews based on their viewpoint. Thompson may not like this, but if anything, it serves as a protective measure for critics.

I’ll be the first to admit that Edelstein isn’t served as well by the limitations of print as he was at Slate. His stuff is still fantastic, but the word limit, the less-timely publication schedule, and the more formal style all seem a bit of a burden in his recent reviews. But in the meantime, Slate has marched forward without him, proving itself to be one of the few publications still willing to pay serious attention both to film and smart writing about it.

A Cinematic Plague

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Hollywood decided that the Old Testament plagues would make a great concept for a horror flick (with, of course, disaster film overtones). Well, that film is now upon us, and it’s called The Reaping. Here’s the press-flack summary from Apple’s trailer page:

Hilary Swank plays a former Christian missionary who lost her faith after her family was tragically killed, and has since become a world renowned expert in disproving religious phenomena. But when she investigates a small Louisiana town that is suffering from what appear to be the Biblical plagues, she realizes that science cannot explain it.

I suppose it’s possible that this is an incisive, morally complex inquiry into the conflicts between faith, fact, reason, and doubt, one that draws upon the current frictions in the public relationship between religion and science and provides a fair examination of the truths and follies on both sides. But somehow, I suspect that it’s more likely to be yet another stereotype-ridden, obtuse, Southern-Gothicesque, wannabe spookfest that coasts on misbegotten notions of rural Southern Christians as simple-brained spiritualists who rally around hellfire-beckoning, witch-doctor preachers—in other words, exactly the sort of hokey, small-minded claptrap you’d expect from the director of Lost in Space.

The Enervated Family of Origin

Steely Dan (yes, that Steely Dan) writes an open letter to Wes Anderson. Yea, it is awesome:

You began, spectacularly enough, with the excellent "Bottle Rocket", a film we consider to be your finest work to date. No doubt others would agree that the striking originality of your premise and vision was most effective in this seminal work. Subsequent films - "Rushmore", "The Royal Tenenbaums", "The Life Aquatic" - have been good fun but somewhat disappointing - perhaps increasingly so. These follow-ups have all concerned themselves with the theme we like to call "the enervated family of origin"©, from which springs diverse subplots also largely concerned with the failure to fulfill early promise. Again, each film increasingly relies on eccentric visual detail, period wardrobe, idiosyncratic and overwrought set design, and music supervision that leans heavily on somewhat obscure 60's "British Invasion" tracks a-jangle with twelve-string guitars, harpsichords and mandolins. The company of players, while excellent, retains pretty much the same tone and function from film to film. Indeed, you must be aware that your career as an auteur is mirrored in the lives of your beloved characters as they struggle in vain to duplicate early glories.

We Have to Put a Barrier Between Us and the Snakes

Snakes on a Plane, besides being Ned Lamont, is everything you want from a movie called Snakes on a Plane. There’s not really much to say about it except that it’s the greatest audience participation film of the modern era, that it is both exactly as awesome and as terrible as you hope it is, that is a surprisingly efficient exercise in lowbrow/high-concept genre, and that Samuel L. Jackson kicking hella snake ass is every bit as entertaining as you could imagine.

At this point, it's easier just to point to other critics who've dug their fangs into this ludicrous beast of a movie and gotten it right:

Hype meets bite in Snakes on a Plane, which arrived in theaters yesterday, borne aloft by a savvy publicity blitzkrieg and the enthusiasm of Internet film geeks who embraced its old-school exploitation title. The film was not screened in advance for critics, which makes sense not only because the entertainment media are always happy to push films sight unseen (even Jon Stewart shilled for it), but also because all anyone really needs to know about this amusingly crude, honestly satisfying artifact is snakes + plane + Samuel L. Jackson. (Manohla Dargis)

I saw one of the first showings of "Snakes on a Plane" on Thursday evening in a multiplex in Times Square (it wasn't screened for critics), and the only thing I truly loved about it was the excitement of the audience beforehand. We booed during a preview for some dumb-looking Denzel Washington thing; we cheered for the trailer of Craig Brewer's truly weird-looking "Black Snake Moan" (which, like "Snakes," stars Samuel L. Jackson). When we became restless after too many trailers, a soft hissing noise filled the theater, a boo that was actually a cheer. Time to bring on the motherfucking snakes! I'd urge anyone who's even remotely interested in "Snakes on a Plane" to see it this weekend, when the curiosity level will be at its highest, and with the biggest, rowdiest audience you can find. Because while "Snakes on a Plane" barely stands up as a movie, it definitely qualifies as an event. (Stephanie Zacharek)

[Samuel L. Jackson] holds off the snakes with his Taser and when he finds out they have been chemically encouraged, he says, "That's great news -- snakes on crack." You'll have to wait most of the movie before he finally delivers the mother#$%@ing line of the summer, but when he does, you'll be proud to be an American. (Kyle Smith)

But of course, when it comes to a movie like Snakes on a Plane, the must-read critic is Harry Knowles, who pretty much perfectly relates the experience of watching the movie with a crowd full of obnoxious, loudmouth, diehard geeks primed for the insanity (this is really quite accurate with regards to what happened at the D.C. theater in which I saw the movie):

On opening night, these were the freaks. The folks that have been DYING to see this film. The ones that upon the first screening of the film, screamed in perfect synchronicity with Samuel L Jackson the immortal, “I want these Mutherfucking Snakes off this Mutherfucking Plane!” while giving the line a standing ovation! This was an audience – where during the brief quiet moments on the plane after the snakes hit the fan… would collectively make snake sounds – so that it sounded like snakes were everywhere in the theater.

Basically – this was an audience that paid to see this film not because they wanted to see how bad the film was – but because they wanted to fucking see SNAKES ON A PLANE! And that’s what we got. It was bliss.

I was so happy. So happy.

You see – this is a ridiculous movie. But one that is there for one single reason – to entertain you at all costs. You will see snakes bite every body part you’ve ever wanted to see a snake bite. You will see bloated fucked up corpses and wounds. You will see wounds cut open and beautiful women suck upon them. (which is totally not the right thing to do, btw) But who cares – these aren’t snakesperts – they’re fucking returning vacationers from Hawaii… and nobody fucking expects SNAKES ON A PLANE!

Hell yes.

Snakes on a Plane II: Something Else on a Plane

Sam Jackson with a marvelous quote on the possibility of turning SoAP into a franchise:

This is so unique, because you can’t get off and there’s no place to go from these very dangerous snakes. We were talking last night trying to figure out what the next thing would be, and I guess because they found all those mice that were eating the wires on that plane, I guess we could do Rats on a Plane. And the tagline for that would be “Where the fuck’s a snake when you need one?”

I would go see that movie.

Lamonsters on a Plane

Snakes on a Plane is Ned Lamont. But hold that thought for a moment.

It used to be that being a serious film fan required considerable effort, in terms of accessing both the films and the gossip, news, and analysis that we now take for granted. The DVD and home video revolutions have solved access issues when it comes to movies themselves, but just as important is that the internet has solved access issues with regards to insider gossip and industry buzz that was previously confined to those in and around the business. Those who tended to be film nerds were of a more intellectual bent, spending their days in art houses watching foreign films and reading such dense fare as Film Comment.

With the mid 90s advent of home-brewed gossip sites like Ain’t It Cool News, the rabid, manic movie mania of indie video store geeks and midnight movie weirdos finally had a virtual community. And what they brought with them was a boisterous, often-vulgar, untrained-but-knowledgable enthusiasm for all types of movies—but especially some types of movies that the mainstream moviegoing public would consider extreme. It wasn’t a populist revolution—it was an enthusiast revolution.

Slightly more recently, the same thing happened between the web and politics. Sites like DailyKos spread a political knowledge once limited mainly to insiders and those close to them, creating a huge base of, once again, boisterous, often-vulgar, untrained-but-knowledgable enthusiasts.

And both camps, feeling strength from numbers, started to demand things. On the movie side, they started to demand that movie studios stop making watered down genre films, to go for the gore and stay true to original characters. On the political side, they bitched and whined about watered down legislation, to go for the spending and stay true to progressive ideals. The movie fans complained when studios would attach hack directors to interesting projects instead of their quirkier, purer fan favorites. The Kossacks complained when middle of the road Democrats were nominated or elected to important positions instead of the Kossacks' less mainstream, purer favorites. Both groups argued that if the mainstream was ever really exposed to their allegedly radical ideas, it would respond energetically to their less watered down vision of what movies and politics ought to be, and used sometimes dubious historical examples to back themselves up. The movie fans railed against the drab, unimaginitive focus on “profitability;” the bloggers railed against a similar focus on “electability.”

And while both were often disparaged in the mainstream press for their vulgarity, their contentiousness, their untrained passions, both groups eventually gained some notice, if not much success at the polls or the multiplex. But now, in the last few weeks, we’ve seen a convergence, with both groups getting an important, notable success that suggests the power they have. Ned Lamont, favored son of true-blooded progressives everywhere, beat out the long time Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary, and Snakes on a Plane with Sam Jackson was reshot, recut, and reimagined—even renamed—based on an outpouring from the Ain’t It Cool crowd, building a huge momentum based on the ravings of post-drive-in movie fangeeks.

Ain’t it Cool News is Daily Kos. Ain’t it Cool talkbackers are Kossack bloggers. Harry Knowles is Markos Moulitsas. And Snakes on a Plane is Ned Lamont.

Addendum: Let me clarify a bit. My point isn't to compare the political positions of Lamont and Lieberman or argue that one is better than the other (I don't think that works very well as an analogy with SoAP). Instead, I'm suggesting that they're the same because their personas and their popularity have both been fueled by very similar net-enthusiast communities.

I'm a conservative, so I have political differences with both Lieberman and Lamont, but this wasn't intended as a slam against either candidate--just a recognition of the strange concurrence of Ned Lamont's blogosphere-powered success and Snakes on a Plane's netgeek-powered rise to nearly mainstream, insta-cult status.

The Illusionist Review in NRO

I’m in NRO this morning with a review of this week’s Edward Norton/Paul Giamatti magician-period thriller, The Illusionist. Here’s a little bit of sleight of hand to get you going:

The Illusionist has some charm to it, but it is the sort of charm usually reserved for the neighborhood eight-year-olds who dress up and put on magic shows at some indulgent parents’ home. It’s intermittently watchable, in its own clunky way, and certainly the participants are all trying very hard. It’s difficult, though, to be enthusiastic about such lackluster results when the players aren’t local kids, but seven-figure Hollywood talent who demand ten bucks plus parking and a sitter. Better to have watched the kids at the house down the street than shelled out for the movie — at least their dumb tricks have the virtue of being cute.

Read the whole thing at National Review Online.

Girl Power

Elspeth Reeve’s Ann Coulter defense in TNR (gotta admit—never saw that one coming) is undeniably clever and smartly written. But isn’t also pretty much just longwinded D.C. journo-speak for “you go girl”?

The Lives We Lead

Who can tell the difference between reality and Hollywood fantasy anymore? Like the vague separation between the political left and right, I’m not even sure it’s a distinction worth making anymore, certainly not amongst the media saturated urban young, the up and coming indie yuppies whose narcissism is only surpassed by their shallowness, aimlessness, and lack of purpose. In dating, MTV and meet-cute fantasy have already won:

“Guys all say they’re looking for the same woman. They’re looking for this whimsical, beautiful girl who’s really a geek inside,” said Ms. Serota. “They’re all looking for Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State, or at least that’s what they write. They’re looking for the quirky girl who’s going to save them from themselves. They’re looking for these girls that are, like, manic-depressive without the depressive.” (In Ms. Serota’s estimation, this syndrome is endemic to “basically anyone in an urban area who doesn’t dress like they work at Blockbuster Video.”)

Women, it seems, are conditioned to seeing vacuous, self-promoting “slabs of metrosexual meat,” while a generation of Maxim males that grew up Abercrombie are content with tuning in to the prettiest purveyor of the city girl squawk so long as they still have their designer duds and freewheeling lifestyles.

Even if you make it past the virtual meat market of online dating you still have to barrel through the wedding gauntlet, which we now view either as an extreme challenge game show—a sort of bridal “Double Dare” (careful not to get slimed)—or an ostentatious celebration of personal wealth. We’re all young, rich and beautiful now, and there’s nothing more romantic (or expensive, anyway) than televised self promotion.

It doesn’t change much from there on out: The screen-dream fantasy won’t be Garden State, but you’ll still be dressing like your college aged nieces and nephews. You probably won’t have kids, but if you do, you’ll raise them as accessories while spending all your time bitching about them on anonymous internet message boards, always status conscious, always inferior. And then someday, you’ll forget about them entirely as they sneak away to their own impossible, secretly depressing glamour fantasy in the neon sprawl of the city, hoping one day to star in a reality show of their own, and maybe date a Gen-Y yuppie who reminds them of someone from a movie.

The World is Either a Donut or a Rabbit

This New York Times story about a reclusive mathematician who appears to have solved a famous problem isn’t really helpful explaining the solution’s relevance to those of us who are, shall we say, less than up to speed with the latest in topology theory. Oh sure, it tries to explain why the problem matters, but it’s the sort of explanation you’re used to hearing from, say, a villain in a Renny Harlin movie:

The conjecture is fundamental to topology, the branch of math that deals with shapes, sometimes described as geometry without the details. To a topologist, a sphere, a cigar and a rabbit’s head are all the same because they can be deformed into one another. Likewise, a coffee mug and a doughnut are also the same because each has one hole, but they are not equivalent to a sphere.

How this is relevant to anything or anyone beyond the binary halls of nerddom I have no idea. Reading on to the end, though, I think we get a sense of what’s really going on:

Asked about Dr. Perelman’s pleasures, Dr. Anderson said that he talked a lot about hiking in the woods near St. Petersburg looking for mushrooms.

… which is exactly what all my hackey-sacking hippie friends would’ve said about all that time they spent traipsing through the woods, babbling on about how things were all connected, thinking they were solving the problems of the universe.

Unbearable

In Slate’s post-viewing podcast discussion of World Trade Center, critic Dana Stevens and Slate Senior Editor Bryan Curtis both seem confused about Oliver Stone’s movie. They both agree that it’s “effective,” but also agree that it has a very standardized, movie of the week feel to it. They note that the movie is “apolitical” in a somewhat similar fashion to Paul Greengrass’ earlier 9/11 film, United 93, but don’t seem to have a problem with Stone’s narrow viewpoint even though they found United 93's politcal evasions problematic. They seem aware of the way WTC focused on the most formulaic, Hollywoodesque moments of 9/11, and find this somewhat problematic, but then they go ahead and praise the film for its relatively happy ending. Curtis sums up his feelings about WTC by saying that, in comparison to United 93, Stone’s movie is simply more “bearable,” and that’s why he could recommend WTC but not United 93.

This strikes me as exactly wrong. That Stone’s movie is bearable is what is most problematic and most disturbing about it. The day that his movie depicts was unbearable, terrible, gut-wrenching—it’s a day that should never be made “bearable” by the tidy formulas of Hollywood. Greengrass’ movie, indeed, was unbearable, a horror to watch. I’m glad I saw it, but I never want to watch it again. But it was the dread that Greengrass conjured, the impossible, sickening futility of 9/11 that made the movie so effective, so powerful, and so utterly right. Stone’s movie, in its lame adherence to convention, trivializes a day that was not and never will be even remotely conventional. There are many words one might use to describe 9/11 or representations of it, but bearable should never be among them.

Monday Books

At lunch today, I skipped out of the office, as I sometimes do, and headed for the Borders at 19^th and L, a noisy port of printed words and information-hungry Washingtonians with a stony façade along one wall that always seems an odd mix with the rather bland downtown D.C. buildings that surround it. I had finished a novel last night, a rather smart one at that, and I needed something new to occupy my time. Now, unlike Joanna, I’m not really a new fiction reader. Last year, I read Mark Haddon’s book, The Curious Incident of the Clever, Gimmicky Novel About Autism, and wasn’t all that impressed. During my time as a misanthropic youth, I kept up with Chuck Palahniuk’s work, but I quit after Diary, a novel to which Laura Miller was perhaps too kind when she said that it “traffics in the half-baked nihilism of a stoned high school student who has just discovered Nietzsche and Nine Inch Nails.”

No, despite a few forays into the world of recent fiction, I mostly stick to books I like to think of as Stuff I Should’ve Read Already. Despite having graduated with a degree in English (albeit with an emphasis on modern drama), I didn’t read any Roth, Bellow, or Updike—just to name a few notable absences—in school. And not having taken any philosophy or economics classes, I missed out on too many of the rather obvious books that make the classic cases for much of what spend my days defending. These days I tend to spend my reading hours playing catch up.

But sometimes I’m just a sucker for a book review—especially one in the New York Times—and that’s what happened today. It’s a dangerous thing to finish a novel without having any idea of what you’ll read next, but that’s exactly what I did. Thus, I found myself strolling away from 19^th and L with a copy of the newest debut novel written by a buzzworthy New York whiz kid: Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. How could I resist a novel about a cinema-loving outsider with a quirky professor father? Yes, Marisha’s jacket photo is rather fetching, but so is her prose. Only twenty pages in, I’ve already felt that delirious surge that comes with reading particularly grand sentences, those radiant collections of words that seem, somehow, to not only transmit energy, but actively create it, strutting showoffishly past the wowed face of thermodynamics. Let’s face it, this girl’s hot in all sorts of ways.

Radio Peter

Oh ye of nothing to do on a weekday evening, I will be appearing on CHQR Calgary's The World Tonight tomorrow night at 10:00 p.m. to talk about Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. I understand that I may even be taking questions from callers, so if you wish to pester me about that movie, this is your chance.

UPDATE: This has been cancelled, due to the usual vagaries of live daily broadcasts. If'd you'd like to pester me with questions, there's always the comments section. The good news is that now it looks like I'll be able to see Rocky at Screen on the Green.

The Year is Half Empty

The midpoint for a year is at the beginning of July, but the midpoint for the cinematic year is somewhere toward the middle or end of August. Over the past decade, the segmentation of the movie-release calendar has become increasingly rigid. You might say the year starts in Spring, and it’s during this time that we get what are essentially warm-ups to the summer blockbuster season. Movies like Hellboy, The Matrix or Sahara that have the surface of a blockbuster but aren’t expected to have the same truly massive appeal get released here (sometimes, in cases like the The Matrix, with surprising success), as do a few (usually middling) comedies hoping to cash in on the spring break crowds. Often, you'll also see some rather terrible "family" movies on the level of The Pacifier.

From the beginning of May through the first or second week of August, the summer movie season kicks in with high octane, high budget films designed primarily to entertain as well as a few A-list star comedies. Superhero films, sequels, large-budget animated films, broad comedies starring Julia Roberts, Reese Witherspoon or any of the new gay mafia all get slotted into these months. You can usually tell the end of the season by the release of some sort of trashy, gleefully awful action/horror genre film: Aliens vs. Predator, Freddy vs. Jason, Event Horizon, and this year, Snakes on a Plane.

Early fall through Thanksgiving sees medium sized films with a quirkier, ostensibly more intelligent pedigree: This year we’ll see The Children of Men, The Departed, The Fountain, The Science of Sleep, and The Prestige, among others. Previous years have seen movies like Fight Club, Being John Malkovitch, The Squid and the Whale, and History of Violence, to name a few.

Around Thanksgiving, you’ll start to see winter blockbusters, which tend to be somewhat more serious than their summer counterparts, or at least try to appear that way. These days, due primarily to the success of the Lord of the Rings movies, this is the slot for epic fantasy pictures. If you live in a major metro area, you’ll also start to see prestige pictures vying for Oscar glory, serious movies that declare themselves important and noteworthy, whether or not they really are.

And then, finally, during the post-Christmas Oscar season, Hollywood pretty much gives up on new films in preparation for the Academy Awards. They dump their worst pictures into movie theaters during January and February while spending most of their time managing Oscar campaigns and dealing with expanding the theater counts of their limited-release prestige pictures. This can be an interesting time if you don’t live in a city with a strong film scene, as you'll finally see a lot of the buzz pictures that opened in larger areas during the end of the Christmas season (living in Florida, for example, I didn't see Million Dollar Baby till mid-February), but otherwise, it’s the dregs.

That said, this being about the midpoint of the cinematic year, I figured I’d post my favorite films from 2006 so far. I’ve seen most of the movies I’ve been interested in, though I did manage to miss Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Cars, Lady in the Water, Wordplay, and Shadowboxer, as well as a few others that I’m probably forgetting right now. I can pretty much guarantee this list will change, especially since the movie that I’d probably put at the top of the list won’t be out in theaters for another month, and therefore doesn’t quite fit. And, of course, the rankings here are subject to change at any time. I suspect, in fact, that very few of these films will make my year end list, seeing as how bottom heavy the 2006 movie calendar is. Still, for what it’s worth, here's the list (roughly arranged by preference):

1. Little Miss Sunshine

2. The Descent

3. Inside Man

4. Down in the Valley

5. Miami Vice

6. A Scanner Darkly

7. District B13

8. Brick

9. Cache

10. Night Watch

11. Thank You for Smoking

12. Mission: Impossible 3

"Why this farce, day after day?"

Samuel Brustein’s Chronicle Book Review essay on Beckett is excellent—a great companion to the Beckett pieces I previously mentioned by Benjamin Kunkel and Tim Parks. There are many notable ideas in the essay—especially notable are Brustein’s observation on Beckett’s finicky, controlling attitude toward productions of his work—but what most interested me was a single line: “That this most solitary and unengaged of writers should have chosen the most social of the arts as his favored medium is also anomalous.”

Brustein’s point is that for someone so prone to solitude it’s somewhat surprising that he should choose an art so dependent on social interaction and collaboration. This might follow in some sense, but I think there’s another way to look at it. Individuals who are smart, verbal, and curious about the human condition but not especially gifted with social interaction often turn to narrative in general and drama in specific because it allows them to experience, or even create and experiment with, social interaction in a controlled environment. Drama, whether reading it, writing it, or performing in it, acts as a safe place for solitary individuals to explore how people interact without having to actually blunder through the sometimes-painful process of actually interacting.

Beckett, clearly, was hyperaware of both his own longings to communicate and the difficulty and artificiality of doing so. Sensitivity such as his often leads to a painful understanding—and confusion with—the repetitive, dull customs of interaction that dominate so much conversation. Much of what made his work so consistently fascinating was the way he stripped away the artifice of everyday chatter to reveal its terrible emptiness.

His obsession with controlling every aspect of the performances of his works speaks to this as well. Beckett’s awareness led him to understand the flaws and frailties in human interaction, but writing plays allowed him both to expose that and to control it as he could not in real life. As such, performance had to be highly controlled as well. The stage, then, was a place where this “solitary and unengaged writer” could escape from his solitude and disengagement, but only insofar as the performances did not reflect anything his solitary, disengaged mind could not have generated on its own.

Wait a minute...

I just know I've seen this before somewhere.

William Castle is Expecting Royalties

Speaking of bad movies, how excited am I about Night of the Living Dead 3D? That's so obvious I won't even answer it. That's right, kids—THREE DIMENSIONS OF HORROR. Or whatever the tagline is going to be. Bad horror flick bonus: It’s got Sid Haig in it, who not only played a psychotic on a killing spree in The Devil’s Rejects, but also appeared as a psychotic clown-cannibal in House of 1000 Corpses and as some other sort of undoubtedly psychotic character in the made for TV movie about (natch) killer psychotics, House of the Dead 2. Oh to be a bald, struggling D-list subgenre movie star favored so much by indie celebrities and former future-metal musical wackos turned third wave psuedo-grind-horror mavens that you can make a livelihood off of playing cannibal clowns who wear undersized U.S. flag hats. How awesome is America?

Eat My Shorts

CNET News reports on Rockstar's upcoming game release:

Rockstar, the maker of best-selling video game series "Grant Theft Auto," said on Wednesday it would launch in October "Bully," a game with themes of school fighting that has antiviolence critics up in arms. The game's main character is 15-year-old Jimmy Hopkins, who must defend himself against school bullies at a fictional U.S. boarding school called Bullworth Academy, while dealing with characters ranging from nerds and jocks to authoritarian prefects. Weapons included baseball bats that break after several blows, stink bombs and bags of marbles that when strategically thrown will lay flat most pursuers.

If this doesn't cry out for intellectually serious (though, of course, not too serious) video game criticism, then I don't know what does.

More on WTC

It looks like, as is often the case, New York Magazine's David Edelstein is the critic who comes closest to my views about WTC.

I was disturbed by this sudden shift in the movie’s scale, and not just because these scenes are so soap-opera manipulative. It was because my thoughts kept drifting to the tens of thousands of others (spouses, children, parents) who feared the worst and would hear the worst—or nothing at all, because the bodies of their loved ones would never be recovered. A true story of courage and survival, yes. But viewing the destruction of the World Trade Center—in a film called World Trade Center—through this kind of prism represents a distinctly Hollywood brand of tunnel vision.

And here's The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern--never one to shy from harsh rhetoric--with an even more scathing review.

In between the prelude and the coda, though, the action, such as it is, consists of a patchwork narrative to which the filmmaker and his colleagues have brought the sensibility of an old-fashioned Hollywood disaster movie, and a mediocre one at that. The narrative is illuminated, from time to time, by flashes of genuine emotion. How could it not be, since its basis was the true, all but miraculous story of two Port Authority cops who found themselves trapped 20 feet below the rubble field and came out alive? Yet Mr. Stone's stolid direction and Andrea Berloff's tone-deaf script manage to give truth the ring of hackneyed fiction. What was meant to be inspirational is conventional at best, manipulative at worst and, quite incredibly, repetitive to the point of tedium in the long passages during which the anguished heroes await rescue or death.

World Trade Center review in NRO

I'm in NRO this morning with a somewhat contrarian review of Oliver Stone's 9/11 film (doesn't that phrase just sort of make you shudder?), World Trade Center. Unlike many conservatives whom I have the utmost respect for (as well, it appears, as most general critics), I wasn't entirely thrilled with the film.

Just shy of five years past 9/11, it would be impossible to completely disentangle the film from the previous political outbursts of its director or our all-too fresh memories of the tragic events it portrays. For even the most distant observers, the emotional wounds created by 9/11 are still tender, and any viewing of this film will necessarily be tinted by personal feeling. The question, then, becomes how much to let these dredged up emotions color one’s view of the movie. For World Trade Center is an unastounding film about our most astounding day, and how one reacts to it will depend on whether one sees it as cinema or as tribute.

Read the whole thing at National Review Online.

Me-O-Meter

For all three of my fans I have two messages: 1. Your checks are in the mail. 2. Tonight at 7:45 Eastern, I'll be on BBC World Service (I think that's the one) talking about Oliver Stone's World Trade Center.

Mrs. Doubtfire for President

Ross Douthat offers up Robin Williams’ Man of the Year—a comedy about a fake newscaster who accidentally wins the Presidency—as the leading contender for worst movie of the year. And thoughI find that assessment a bit of a stretch (What about this? Or, gag me already, this?), I think the trailer is fascinating. Williams’ character, it seems, is a bawdy populist Democrat who wows voters and sledgehammer stodgy opponents with his mix of straight talk and oh-so-hilarious comebacks. After Williams wins, the movie looks as if it will shift into a combination of juvenile political horseplay and juvenile power fantasy—the barely grown up version of the film about the kid who gets to run the toy factory for a day. And, being a Williams film, it’s likely that it ends with his character learning some life lessons and delivering a big speech that uses come-together populism to disguise liberal talking points.

I always find it telling that big-screen elections are won by socking it to ‘em at debates. Certainly, it’s the easiest way for a film to dramatize political difference, but it also points to the fact that Hollywood, first and foremost, loves a performer; their vision of a good politician is one who can entertain. And with Man of the Year the filmmakers seem to be projecting that view out onto the public—we’re tired of all this heavy talk-talk, let’s elect a rip-roarin’ riotous comedian! The insulated vanity of Hollywood, of course, has convinced Tinseltown that the public loves its pampered stars so much that we would rather have one of their shrill clowns as President than someone who knew what he or she was talking about. I pulled the lever for Mork!, their buttons read, and they aren’t kidding either.

The Problem With Safety Nets

Let me clarify a little bit for Mr. Larison, who I’d like to see do martial arts just so I could call him Larry-Sahn, but my point was simply that we don’t live in what could reasonably be called a small state—certainly our government is not a “libertarian” one. So what Francis and others who live the libertine lifestyle are doing is taking advantage of the way our society has headed toward the part of libertarianism that prizes freedom of in terms of entertainment and sexual expression but then pads out the consequences of engaging in those behaviors. Moreover, thanks to the size of the state, we’ve become an increasingly secular society, meaning that it has become harder and harder to attach stigma to such behaviors. Big government made him do it? No, but a society that artificially protects against the risk and consequence of such terrible behavior as well as dilutes the influence of competing organizations—in other words, one that wants to have Francis’ lifestyle without its cost—is what lets him keep it up.

The Wire

I was going to post a note mentioning how thrilled I am to see the return of The For Real Best Show In the History of Television (Yes, Even Better Than Lost), The Wire, but why bother when, once again, one of the young writers at The American Prospect has gone ahead and done it already. I knew those crazy liberal kids were good for something. Matt Yglesias says:

DVDs of Season Three of The Wire will be shipping tomorrow and Season Four should premiere on September 10. If you haven't seen the show, you should. And I would seriously suggest that you start at the beginning and watch Season One on DVD rather than just trying to plunge in, though personally I started by watching Season Three on air and then backtracked. It is, simply put, the best show in the history of television.

[Snip]

At its core the show is about police and drug dealers battling for control over the streets of Baltimore, though it also expands to cover elements of the local political scene, union corruption, the FBI's shifting post-9/11 priorities, and a variety of other things. It's an extremely demanding show offering no flashbacks and very little exposition despite a sprawling cast of characters and very complicated, years-long plot arcs but the rewards to people who watch closely and pay attention are incredibly large. I don't know anybody who's sat down to watch it and not been incredibly impressed.

Someday I’ll attempt to write a non-gushing, non-hyperbolic, measured article about this show, but I’ll probably fail. Till then, just watch it.

They Do Not Move.

I should be polishing an essay right now, or maybe boozing under the D.C. police radar with fellow libertarians at screen on the green. Just because it’s state-sponsored doesn’t mean we won’t go; we’re paying for it anyway, so might as well (and if we can break some bad laws or commit victimless crimes while we’re at it, all the better).

But I’m here at home, scrolling through Lee Siegel posts and reports about Israel and wondering how quickly my neocon sympathies will dissipate, because that is what young nerds in D.C. do after work. It’s also more or less what we do at work, though at the office I wear slacks and can wander through the hallways and in an and out of offices bugging my coworkers saying things like, “So, what do you think the difference is between Randians and libertarians?” or “Did you see The Descent?” Both questions will inevitably end up in some sort of discussion of ideology, and all involved will conclude that the state can’t solve anything, and who needs another cup of coffee? I always need more coffee. Because I am an addict (a victimless crime if there ever was one).

Monday mornings at the office everyone always says how was your weekend and we share tidbits on what movies we saw, concerts we attended, books we read, parties we went to or skipped, drinks we tried, members of the opposite sex we chatted up, editorials we read in the Post, ideas for books and essays we had that maybe someday we should pitch to such and such and do you know anyone at--? No, but you should talk to _______, who does. Did you see that there’s chocolate cake in the break room? Better eat it quick before the nanny state bans sugar and all other forms of pleasure. Oh, that's funny (and maybe true?).

More to the point, Dougherty says that Joe Francis' unhinged lewd behavior makes his brain play the word libertarian on repeat—it’s not my favorite track, it just got stuck, he protests—and so maybe, sure, this is what anarchic freedom gets you in a secular, pluralistic, sexually “free” society like we have today. But I don’t need to remind Dougherty that Francis’ crudeness isn’t a result of a dominant libertarianism in government, because that’s not something we’ve had. Maybe this is just my ideology talking (now I fear the wrath of Larison!), but it seems to me that lifestyle libertarianism is apt to be more dominant in a society with a powerful state; the more power you give to a monopolistic secular authority like the government, the more secular your society will become. Francis may represents libertarianism’s ugliest tendencies, but his cultural eminence has only risen under a powerful, secular state (what theocracy?). Like I said, all conversations eventually devolve into talk of ideology. In my college playwriting class, we would’ve talked about this in terms of a character’s “core beliefs,” as he or she attempts to “resolve tensions” within their belief system. I haven’t even posted this yet and Larison has already typed 2,300 words in response.

Of course I’m not naïve enough to believe that a libertarian society would be one that good Catholic boys like Dougherty and Douthat necessarily consider “virtuous.” But it would be one in which events of consequence would actually have consequences, and in which events that genuinely were of no consequence—or of little enough consequence that they were worth the cost and/or risk—would flourish. It’s called a market, kids. It’s called ideology, which means it’s always someone else’s fault. I’m getting another cup of coffee.

The Pin

Chud has a good interview with Rian Johnson, the writer and director of Brick, a movie I quite enjoyed. But mostly what I want you to see is this picture of the The Pin, film's basement-living baddie, a pretentious drug lord who still lives with his mom and looks and acts disturbingly similar to Julian Sanchez. Granted, Julian does not carry a duck cane. But he would.

Girls Gone Wild... Gone Wild

I would have written a note about how Claire Hoffman's L.A. Times story on Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis is one of the most riveting, shocking, unexpected, and utterly damning pieces of journalism you're likely to read all year, but Ezra Klein beat me to it.

If I tell you that Claire Hoffman's profile of Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis is one of the most chilling and explosive pieces of journalism I've ever read, will you believe me? Would I have to also say that the article begins with Francis literally assaulting Hoffman, to the degree that his bodyguard pulls him off and a sheriff advises that she press charges? Or that the piece recounts, through a first person interview, what sounds like Francis raping a loaded 18-year-old? Or that to get Francis off of her, the reporter wheels and delivers a close-fisted punch to his jaw? Or that Francis calls her editor and tries to argue that Hoffman was hitting on him, and he was worried she'd be unable to retain a respectful, professional distance?

So read the whole thing, not just for the sociological, what-is-our-civilization-coming-to angle (though you shouldn't ignore that either), but for the fact that it's that increasingly rare journalistic treasure: a damn fine, emminently readable story.

Down Into the Darkness

The most remarkable thing about The Descent—and there is much that is remarkable in this bloody, terrifying film—is its patience. Most monster/horror films start quickly and try to push themselves continually faster, meaning that by the time the movie is half way though there’s no where left to go. The Descent, though, is willing to wait you out; you don’t see a shadow or hear a sound from the creature till more than an hour in. This is not to say that the first half of the film is slow, but by pretending everything is normal for so long, it lulls you into a sense of relative security. Everything is okay here, right?

If only.

When The Descent starts to move, get ready, because at just the point when you’re actually starting to wonder when things will start happening, the film takes its gradual climb and buries you under a rockslide of fright. For an hour or so, you’re going along, engaged with the characters and growing mildly worried as the situation slowly declines, and then it just drops the floor out from underneath you. The final forty minutes are nerve-rattling, one of the most sustained efforts in cinematic terror I’ve ever seen. This is not a serious movie, but it takes itself seriously enough, and it’s determined to flip off the lights and drag you through the rock-wall haunted house chambers it has built. It's a cliche to say it, but it will scare the hell out of you. And if you're like me, you'll love it.

It’s a much better film than UK director Neil Marshall’s debut flick, Dog Soldiers, which was actually a surprisingly good horror/actioner about a military unit taking on a pack of werewolves. Marshall has clearly studied Alien and Aliens extensively, and he’s got the low budget action setpiece down like no one since early James Cameron. He never shows us too much, and he makes the most of his spooky settings. The cramped corridors of the unexplored cave in which the film takes place are scary and claustrophobic all on their own. Add some intestine-devouring cave monsters and Marshall's expertise at shooting jumpy scare shots, and you've got yourself a vicious bit of horror.

Marshall isn't afraid to bust out the blood and guts either. A little gore goes a long way, he knows, but sometimes a lot of gore goes further. By the end of The Descent, the heroine is spattered with dirt and blood, like war paint—proof of her ferocity and killer instinct. The Descent takes this nice, sweater-wearing Scottish girl, and drags her down through the bloody bowels of hell. Fortunately enough for those of us who like to be scared witless, we get to join her.