"Convulsive dislocations in time and space"

The New York Times with a report on the new David Lynch film:

Like “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive,” the new movie is hard-wired into its protagonist’s disintegrating psyche, a condition that somehow prompts convulsive dislocations in time and space.

Laura Dern, who worked with Mr. Lynch on “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart,” plays an actress who lands a coveted role, only to learn that the movie, a remake, may be cursed: the original was aborted when both leads were murdered. Actor becomes character. Fiction infects reality. The various narrative strands — plagued by déjà vu, doppelgängers and the menacing ambient drone of Mr. Lynch’s sound design — start to unravel. Shuttling between California and Poland, the movie folds in a Baltic radio play, a Greek chorus of skimpily dressed young women and a ghostly sitcom featuring a rabbit-headed cast and an arbitrary laugh track.

I, for one, haven't a clue. But I'm dying to see it.

Parachute Pants

Reihan Salam with a great review of what looks to be a brilliant film:

Idiocracy challenges a central article of faith in American life, the notion that we are destined for moral, material, and intellectual progress. And what if things really are getting worse? What if, more to the point, we really are getting dumber? Recently there's been some troubling evidence that the arrow of intelligence is pointing downward. A British study found that the intelligence of British 11-year-olds has actually declined during the last 20 years. Data from the Danish draft board indicate that intelligence peaked in the late-1990s and has now fallen to levels not seen since 1991, when MC Hammer-inspired parachute pants were all the rage. If that's not enough to make you slit your wrists, I don't know what is.

I had to stop reading to quit laughing several times just from his description of the film.

Books

You know that hideous part of being sick where you’ve slept all you can, pumped yourself full of medicine, and half-dozed through what seems like multiple seasons of CSI and Law & Order, and yet, despite all those heinous crimes being handily solved, you’re just not feeling much better? Thanks to the blitz of drugs and midday naps (not to mention several hours of Bruckheimer-produced television), you’re sort of groggy and unfocused, and it doesn’t seem like a good time to do anything. Well that’s where I am this evening. Michael, however, has tagged me with the fast-spreading book meme, and I suppose this is as good a time as any to ponder the impact of various tomes on my existence. It’s either that or another 42 minutes of grisly murders, grim dialog, and convenient clues.

1. One book that changed your life?
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

2. One book that you have read more than once?
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
It’s probably cheating to say The Collected Works of [Beckett, Shakespeare, anyone else with an overstuffed “collected works”], so maybe David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest because, stuck on an island with nothing else to read, I wouldn’t feel guilty for neglecting other reading for several months to give it the close attention it requires.

4. One book that made you cry?
I don't think I've ever cried when reading a book. If I did I was a little kid. American Pastoral, though, maybe had a similar effect. I think the stock lit-nerd phrase for it would be, "it dredged up powerful emotions."

5. One book that made you laugh?
Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Yes, a generic choice, I know—but what can I say? It's funny.)

6. One book you wish had been written?
What an odd question. Maybe Incontrovertible Proof of God's Existence and Goodness, by The Being Universally Agreed Upon to be the Supreme Creator of Existence. That may be asking too much, but I didn't make up the question. My second choice would be Everything That Is Terrible in Steven Spielberg's A.I.: How I Would Have Made Something Brilliant, Not This Pretentious Piece of Crap by Stanley Kubrick. It's a step down from the first choice, I know.

Late Addition: I'd really like to see, All My Movies Explained in Plain English by David Lynch—not because I particularly want their creepy dream logic spoiled by explanation, but because, really, it'd have to be damn fascinating to find out what that guy thinks.

7. One book you wish had never been written?
Beloved, by Toni Morrison. Alright, Morrison clearly has a gift for densely layered fiction, but fercryinoutloud, somehow part of me thinks that the mountains of effort expended on this book by academics and lit-crit showoffs would be put to far better use somewhere else.

8. One book you are reading currently?
Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited by John Willett

9. One book you have been meaning to read?
Just one? That’s kind of stifling. I'm quite interested in Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, but seeing as I've read—just to take a small example of the gaping holes in my literary life—only two books each by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, maybe I should choose something a little less current and a little more relevant. I don't even know how to pick books to read anymore. It's like sorting through a truckload of crystals—without careful inspection, many look like diamonds, but it takes a lot of time to go through each one and decide.

10. Pass it on

Well, howbout it, Andy, Chuck, and Reihan?

I Actually AM a Cyborg

Over at Chud, Devin Faraci links to the trailer for Park Chanwook’s new film, I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK. Chanwook has become a bit of a controversial figure for his graphic, hyperstylized violence; the curmudgeon crowd thinks he’s slick-and-sick, just a shallow, vulgar showoff, while his defenders praise him as a pulp visionary. I suppose I think both groups are right, though if pressed, I’d defend him. I haven’t seen Lady Vengeance or JSA; I thought Oldboy was electric, but in the way of an underground no-holds barred fight—thrilling for sure, but perhaps a little too pleased with its smoldering, amoral heart. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance I just can’t get through. It’s a bit slow at the beginning, and every time I try to watch it, I get distracted. I’d love to see it in a theater, but it just doesn’t grab me on my medium-sized TV.

The new trailer, however, really makes the best case for Chanwook’s work--at least for those of us who don't speak Korean. There are no English subtitles, so you have to experience it entirely as sound and image. And from that perspective, it’s entrancing. For all my talk about movies as social indicators or barely-cloaked political texts, much of my interest in film developed out of a desire to be swept away by breathtaking imagery and enveloping soundtracks. Chanwook’s work, love it or hate it, is as powerfully stylish and engrossing as movies come.

And while I’m here, I want to point out one more thing. At the end of his post, Faraci writes:

I don’t know when the heck this will be hitting the US, but I am hoping that it plays at some film festival I attend so that I can see it long before the rest of you and spend months and months rubbing in how good it is, and maybe even put it on my Ten Best list a year before you can even seriously consider seeing it. Bow before me, puny mortals!

Cute, sure, but it indicates how miserable the distribution situation is for foreign films in the U.S. Yes, I know, the market blah blah blah—I’m not suggesting that these films ought to be displayed in huge cardboard cutouts at the entrances of Wal-Marts. It seems odd to me that even a director like Chanwook, whose work has been prominently discussed in The New York Times, Slate, and other mainstream publications, gets the shaft on U.S. distribution. How difficult would it be for Amazon or Netflix to stock region 1 versions of these DVDs reasonably soon after their foreign release? This is 2006, after all, the Web 2.0 future where niche markets are everything and the long tail rules. Yet the only way for most of us (read: people outside New York and L.A.) to see films like this, at least in anything approaching a timely fashion, is to take off of work and travel across the country. Where’s the home theater/DVD revolution when you need it?

The Stupid Superiority of Studio 60

Watching last night’s episode of Studio 60 was a frustrating experience . On one hand, as others have pointed out, it was much better than the pilot episode (which I generally liked): tighter plotting, quicker wit, sharper characters, a much better finish. Sorkin’s pilot had its rather stunning “cold open”—that Network-alluding rant about the state of television—but otherwise played more like an introduction to some characters and concepts than an actual self-contained bit of open-and-close drama.

But, as I predicted, Sorkin’s bashing of flyover-country conservative Christians continued. But this time, instead of aiming his sprightly dialog-salvos at some of those who might arguably deserve it—the FCC-lobbying media censors at groups like the PTC—Sorkin tried to conflate the Hollywood bashers with rapture nuts and then expand the influence of those groups to include a huge chunk of mainline Christianity.

The plot points in question start near the beginning when a reporter from the unbelievably-named Rapture Magazine stands up at a press conference and questions the NBS President about the planned sketch “Crazy Christians.” That magazine, which we’re told has a circulation of four times Vanity Fair (so, roughly 4.4 million), pushes for a boycott, and some red-state markets look ready to drop the show. The execs all get worried and confused and dumbfounded by the concept of the rapture and the reach of the magazine, leading to a short scene where one exec helpfully explains that the magazine’s readers (apparently all 4.4 million, as well, presumably, as anyone who happens to pick up a copy on the newsstand, find one lying in a bathroom, or visit the magazine’s website) are all sitting around in giddy anticipation of the rapture because it means the ascendance of good Christians to heaven and the rightful banishment of everyone else—especially those bad ol’ Hollywood liberals—to the pit o’ fire. Right.

Where to even begin with this? Yes, mainline Christianity (and, I should add, me) does believe that at some point Christ will return and that, through some process (there’s much theological disagreement over how it will play out), it will eventually lead to Christians all going to heaven and many others not. But to suggest, as Sorkin does, that there’s a huge flock of people running around obsessing gleefully over this and getting nearly aroused by the possibility that all those nasty leftists are going to hell is absurd. Christians, on the whole, are distraught by the idea of anyone not getting to heaven. The whole point of evangelizing, preaching, trying to convert people, etc… is, even if Sorkin can't fathom it, not a controlling exercise in moral domination and authority, but an attempt to save people out of love. I’m sure there are individual exceptions, but Sorkin’s idea that most Christians fetishize the endtimes is ridiculous.

Worse, this is from the guy who pushed for tolerance and understanding after September 11^th, giving us that hyper-didactic (even by Sorkin standards) play-episode of The West Wing, “Isaac and Ishmael,” which compared the reach and scope of terrorist-prone Islamic fundamentalism to the KKK, an argument that’s only accurate insofar as each group is equally deplorable. Even if you could make the argument that the “active” portions of terrorist Islam are about the size of the active portions of the KKK (not entirely sure you can), the recent demonstrations against the pope suggest that popular support for Islamic terrorism is far more open and widespread in the Middle East than similar support for the KKK here. And, as despicable and ugly as the KKK is, its current “active” members aren’t sending suicide bombers to kill people by the thousands. Sorkin, it seems, wants us to have tolerance and understanding for communities that might foster terrorism, but thinks we should be outraged by Christians that stage boycotts of high-quality television shows?

Addendum: I know, I know, he did include the prayer at the end, and I won't say I don't appreciate seeing that on TV (though I'd argue that Battlestar Galactica is much more respectful of the place of religion in society overall). But Sarah Paulson's character is pretty clearly going to be one of Sorkin's "good" Christians: meaning one that has the decency not to push anything he or she believes on anyone else (which, of course, Sorkin would never do). Sorkin's always okay with people of different political and religious stripes as long as their politics or religion don't--gasp!--actually lead them to do, say, or believe anything he dislikes.

Our House

Andrew Dignan’s 5000 word essay, “The Wire and the Art of the Credit Sequence,” at The House Next Door is really rather incredible—and not just because it’s a patient, subtle piece of criticism. Of course, it certainly is that: The knowledgeable, passionate, insightful crew Matt Zoller Seitz has assembled at the site is dedicated to keeping film criticism focused on cinema’s essence: sound, image, editing, camera movement—all those things that distinguish the medium. Dignan’s essay on The Wire’s four short opening credit sequences relies almost entirely on these filmic elements, teasing out a season’s worth of meaning from each 90 second montage. It’s great, smart criticism, plain and simple.

But even more remarkable, I think, is that it’s a thoughtful 5000 word essay that obviously took significant time and research… at a blog. And this isn’t Instapundit or DailyKos or any of the A-list blog mainstream. It’s at a site run by a New York Press film critic that gets, according to the Sitemeter, an average of just over 1,000 hits a day. Now, that’s not traffic to scoff at, and it’s a good deal more than this site gets, but it’s hardly a massive reach, and, even if the site ran ads, it’s certainly not enough to generate significant revenue. So Dignan is writing a well-researched 5,000 word essay for an audience of a few thousand people, and he’s writing it for free.

Maybe this has happened before: There have, after all, been zines and self-printed small-run publications circulating for a while. But it can’t have been all that common, and what’s changed is the breadth of audience these cheaply-run publications can reach, meaning that niches that never could have formed before are now possible. This sort of thing—smart, time-intensive, passionate, long-form criticism—is the promise of one-click web publishing (the blogosphere, whatever you want to call it), and the rebuttal to all of those who scorn the web as no more than teen diaries, vulgar political ranting, and illiterate, time-wasting filler.

Brotherly Love

As an antidote to the politics-free political movie, All the King’s Men, I’d suggest the new season of The Wire, with its major subplot about the Baltimore mayor’s race, or, even better, Showtime’s just-finished first season of Brotherhood. The show treads in what threatens to be overworked territory—the intersection of city politics, mob activity, community life, and family connections—but folds these familiar elements into a tough, knotty tale of conflicting loyalties in the twilight of a Northeastern blue-collar community. Where The Sopranos is, at its amoral heart, a gunpowder black comedy about the emptiness and vulgarity of upper-middle class family life, and The Wire is really about the hell of C-list city bureaucracy, Brotherhood, using similar elements as both those shows, aspires to capture the decay of working class communities, in their families, neighborhoods, businesses (legal and illegal), and politics.

The show follows two brothers—one a family man and rising city councilman, the other a local gangster—as they struggle to rise up their respective ladders and keep their struggling working-class community alive. Along the way, we meet a cast of cops, slimy mob bosses, self-interested local politicians, and scheming family members, all trying to thrive, or at least survive, the day-to-day toil of middle class life in Providence, Rhode Island. As might be expected of a fairly complex show that, so far, stretches over almost 11 hours of screen time, there’s a lot more to talk about than could be covered in a blog post, or even a 1000ish word article. But I’ll make a few observations.

The show makes the best case for economic protectionism I’ve seen in a while. Rose Caffee, the requisite scheming mother (you knew there had to be one) of the two titular brothers, loses her union job at a factory and reigns in her pride to take a low paying, no-benefit job at a Wal-Mart-esque superstore. The union reps tell her there’s nothing they can do to stop job hemorrhaging at her factory; the jobs are simply moving to foreign locales where labor is competitive. Smartly, the show doesn’t set this up as an object lesson in why we need to protect our workers, enact trade barriers, and all the rest of the protectionist playbook. Instead, it’s more about how cheap foreign labor is, no matter what anyone does about it, pulling apart working class communities. The days of organized labor are over, it says, and while that may bring great economic growth overall, there will most certainly be individuals and communities hurt in the process—especially those older workers who cannot easily adapt to the changing economy. It doesn’t for a minute convince me that we should enact legislative stops to any of this, but it does make the cost of such economic evolution a little more real.

I’m also fond of the show’s bleak-but-tough can-do attitude. It’s the same attitude taken by many of the show’s characters, the suggestion being that residents of these crumbling city communities will often have to make difficult choices with no right answer, but that they should simply make those choices, hope for best, and accept the consequences when necessary. even the best—Rep. Tom Caffee, for example—can only bail so much water out of the blue-collar ship; the fact, though, that it will eventually sink shouldn’t keep one from bailing as hard as possible.

Case in point: officer Declan’s drunken last-episode speech into the wedding camera, proclaiming that whatever the newlywed couple does, they should just lie to each other, repeatedly and unabashedly. And as we find out when the bride sobs out that, not only is she pregnant, she’s not sure if her husband’s the father, they’ve already begun. The final episode, in fact, suggests that everything in the town is built on a foundation of lies, and that those lies—terrible as they may be—are a significant part of what holds everything together. The show is not so gleefully cynical as to be glib with its declaration of the necessity of deceit, but it is honest enough to recognize that sometimes the myriad complexities, formalities, traditions and rules of etiquette that bind communities together require that the truth be discarded for the greater good.

The Post-Apocalypto Future is Coming

Harry Knowles has seen Mad Mel's Mayan epic, Apocalypto. And what does he think?

Is this the great film of the Maya Civilization? It is the most audacious and successful attempt at that period. Mainly due to the fact that the story is such an intimate experience.

[Snip]

What I saw today was a very rough jewel, when I see it again, the day before Butt-Numb-A-Thon – I trust I will see an immaculate jewel. This could very well be the best film Mel has made when he’s done with it. How commercial will it be? I haven’t a clue. The story is incredibly involving and constantly thrilling. However, too often I’ve seen films of this type lost on audiences today. That Mel would even attempt this movie is a triumph, that it is in and of itself a triumph is a blessing.

I’m now more curious than ever to see this film, and from everything that’s come out so far—trailers, articles, this early review—it seems as if the film plays to all of Gibson’s strengths: his ability to capture ancient period detail with startling accuracy, his mix of myth and realism, his combination of epic sweep and personal vision—even the choice to keep the dialog minimal and in an ancient tongue fits well with his bent toward broadly sketched, larger-than-life heroes and villains. No doubt there will be a towering, ghoulish Mayan king, witch doctor, or villain figure(s) of some sort filmed in the same over-the-top style as the Roman guards in The Passion. I suspect it will work much better here in this less-sensitive context serving a historical adventure story rather than a religious one with a great deal of contemporary relevance.

Calling All Experts on Southern Accents

I'm in NRO today with a review of the new Sean Penn/Jude Law/everyone else period political film (a handy euphemism for "Oscar bait"), All the King's Men. It paints some pretty pictures and stirs up a roaring tempest of righteous oratory, but it doesn't quite achieve greatness. Here's a sample:

The first act promises to explore the conflicts between power, personality, and the will of the people, but the subsequent two acts veer off course, never to return. As soon as Stark reaches office, the movie switches gears into a Law and Order style procedural tracking Burden's attempts to discredit a prominent judge and political opponent (Anthony Hopkins), then drops the investigative aspect entirely for a series of unearned twists and a final stab at grand tragedy. There are various zigs and zags in the story, including run-ins with an opponent's thug (James Gandolfini), a young, esteemed doctor (Mark Ruffalo), and the doctor's sister (Kate Winslet). With its heavyweight cast and immaculate photography by Pawel Edelman, some of the scenes can't help but crackle, but mostly the movie flounders under a narrative as gravelly and unnecessarily twisted as the old Louisiana roads throughout which Stark campaigns.

Read the whole thing at National Review Online.

Correction: I misspelled the director's name throughout the article. It is Steve Zaillian, not Steve Zallian.

Rating the Raters

Anyone still interested in the sometimes amusing but mostly infuriating documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated would do well to read Julian Sanchez's mixed write-up about the film as well as Mark Jenkins' critique of it. I don't necessarilly agree with everything Julian says, but he makes a good point about how the MPAA accurately reflects parental views by being inconsistent:

The second thing I found myself mulling had to do with one of the film's central complaints: That the MPAA has a skewed set of criteria that generates more restrictive ratings for sex than for graphic and gratuitous violence, and in particular that gay sexual situations are routinely judged to require more "parental guidance" than exactly parallel situations involving heterosexuals. This is, of course, irrational* and discriminatory. But I'm also pretty sure that the modal American parent is, in fact, irrationally and discriminatorily more concerned about discharges from a penis than a firearm, and more squeamish about explaining tops and bottoms than birds and bees. If the point of the ratings is to provide useful information to parents, then it seems as though it's got to reflect the actual concerns of most parents, however unenlightened—and I use the term here without shame or irony—those concerns may be.

As someone who grew up in a relatively conservative, restrictive community with fairly strict parents, I can certainly vouch for the inscrutability of what passes the acceptability test. You eventually get a feel for what a lot of these types of people will be okay with, but it's not always really rational or systematic.

I mostly defended the MPAA in my review, but I should probably make clear that I wouldn't call myself a fan of the organization. The group pushes regularly for problematic copyright laws like the DMCA and, though Not Yet Rated suggests otherwise, it could be argued that the existence of the ratings system is a result of an unofficial mandate; in other words, if the MPAA didn't put a ratings system in place, the government would have. I'm inclined to think there's some truth to that, but I'm also inclined to think that in a country that still has so much internal inconsistency and conflict regarding the morality of entertainment and speech, the market would've brought a ratings system--probably a different, more precise, less powerful one--into place with or without government intervention. And, as I wrote in my review, the documentary gives us plenty of examples why that would've likely been the case. What I'd like to make clear, though, is that I defended the group's right to exist and practice as they do without necessarilly always liking it.

The Sean Penn Threat

My review is forthcoming, so I'll hold off on lengthy pontification for now (thank me later), but David Edelstein's review of All the King's Men has one of the best paragraphs I've read in a piece of pop criticism this year:

Did we need a new All the King’s Men? There has been a lot of talk about dictatorship and demagoguery and a culture of corruption—and James Carville has lent his name to the remake (as an executive producer) to suggest the story has something urgent to say now. But damned if I know what that is, because Zaillian worries the life out of the thing. He lingers dewily over the banal romance while barely dramatizing the political machinations, so that Penn’s Stark doesn’t seem like a threat to much of anything except the Actor’s Studio.

It's not just clever, though, it's sadly true about the film.

Fighting Off the Barbarian Hordes

I am behind. Behind on blogging. Behind on movie watching (I haven’t even seen The Black Dahlia yet). Behind on new episodes of The Wire and Brotherhood. This is what happens when you go away on a blissful vacation—even a short one—and return to mounting stacks of media to consume, articles to read, articles to write, four-digits worth of emails to read, and, oh yeah, a full time job too.

That said, a few brief thoughts: I am intrigued by this trailer, especially after being extremely impressed with the new Yo La Tengo album. Zach Braff aside (I didn't even mention it in my review, but his handpicked soundtrack to The Last Kiss was incredibly irritating), indie rock soundtracks are where it’s at. Sufjan Stevens in Little Miss Sunshine. I shouldn't even have to go any further than that.

I suppose neither are technically indie rock, but the soundtrack to Code 46 made a mediocre movie worth watching, and it’s pretty much impossible to lavish too much praise on the Dust Brothers’ marvelous, trippy, wired score to Fight Club. Maybe it’s not even indie rock that does it, but soundtracks done by a single recording group rather than a traditional composer.

Other trailers that you should watch: The new trailer for The Prestige, which looks to be what The Illusionist should’ve been. Nicole Kidman’s creepy looking Fur. And, most curiously, Stephen Frears’ The Queen. I love High Fidelity (I think, though, that as a vaguely introspective music and movie obsessive with a permanent case of the collector’s bug, I’m sort of biologically predestined to like it), and I really liked Dirty Pretty Things, though I didn’t care too much for The Grifters or Mrs. Henderson Presents. So I’m curious, to say the least, especially considering how odd a thing it is to see movie about political figures and royals (pseudo political figures, I suppose) who’re not only still alive, but in power.

Running Away With the Story

This shouldn't surprise you one bit, but Christopher Orr, as usual, is absolutely right in his column about the rise of DVD and novelistic television.

Back in 1989, Tom Wolfe ... bemoaned the decline in America of the "big, realistic novel, with its broad social sweep," and wondered who would write novels of New York, "in the sense that Balzac and Zola had written novels of Paris and Dickens and Thackeray had written novels of London." The answer Tom Wolfe came up with was, unsurprisingly, Tom Wolfe. But, almost 20 years later, television is offering another possible answer. What is "The Wire," after all, if not a sprawling social novel of Baltimore? "The Sopranos," too, despite its more intimate focus on one profession and one family, is very much the kind of novelistic enterprise whose (exaggerated) absence Wolfe was mourning. The DVD format enables--even encourages--viewers to interact with these series as they would with novels, picking them up and putting them down when they wish.

I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it: Television may not yet be the new classic literature, but it is the new popular novel.

And to take it even further, if The Wire is a novel of Baltimore, then maybe Lonelygirl15 is sketching out the next generation medium of long-form narrative, the first truly postmodern narrative feature--a novel of sheltered teen existence, of the tell-all communications age, of the virtual place that is the internet.

Aaron Sorkin Returns!

The new TV season is upon us, and, even as someone still clinging (however tentatively) to a general disdain for television programming, I have to admit: This season looks pretty great, with new seasons of The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, the final few episodes of Brotherhood, and, in January, more 24 and the last few episodes of The Sopranos. A host of new shows are getting strong reviews, and producers seem to be finally recognizing the medium’s potential for long-form narrative. Among the shows I’m most excited about is West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin’s return to TV, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which debuts tonight. I’ve got a few remarks on the show’s pilot and the direction it looks to take over at Reason.

Addendum: And Lost! How could I forget Lost? It's the most infuriating show on television!

CHUD on Paul Haggis

The smartass fanboys over at CHUD can be pretty juvenile at times, and they definitely take a sophomoric, beer-swilling, midnight-movie approach to film--but they're honest-to-goodness cinema fans and often pretty funny to boot. Case in point, Devin Faraci's review of The Last Kiss, which includes this bitterly precise summation of the hackwork of Paul Haggis:

The problem is that The Last Kiss, which is based on an Italian film from a couple of years back, has a screenplay by Paul Haggis. You know, the guy who brought us Crash. So what that means is that The Last Kiss is filled with moments and revelations that are meant to be profound but are in fact completely banal. Everybody is racist! You have to work really hard to keep a relationship going! Next year, look for Haggis’ next Oscar movie, where he teaches us all the moving lesson that when you eat food it eventually turns into poop.

Needless to say, I agree.

The Weekend Cometh

I'm on a short vacation this weekend, so updates may be a little bit sparse, but in the meantime, I've got another two-fer Friday today with articles in both National Review Online and The Washington Times.

In The Washington Times, I take on "This Film is Not Yet Rated," an edgy (and, not surprisingly, unrated) documentary that targets the secrecy and inconsistencies of the ratings board. But I'm not convinced.

So just how does the ratings system work? That's the question that director Kirby Dick attempts to answer in his new documentary, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated." Purported to be a muckraking expose about the shadowy workings of the unduly secretive MPAA ratings board, it teases out a few inconsistencies and imperfections in the way films are rated, but it does not make nearly as powerful a case as its filmmakers think. And, quite unintentionally, it reminds viewers -- with its barrages of sexually explicit imagery -- why the major movie studios instituted a ratings system to begin with.

At NRO, I've got a piece on the latest Zach Braff romantic mope flick, The Last Kiss. It's not always a good movie, but it may have some interest to those (including me) in the urban, twentysomething demographic.

The Last Kiss is an occasionally interesting, often irritating dissection of the shallow, self-serving relationships of a group that has been labeled "indie yuppies": the blandly hip, mostly urban twenty-somethings who have wholly bought in to the ploy of finding individual identity in lifestyle consumerism. Shot with the blasé entitlement of a Volkswagon commercial, it's a movie about a generation that bought their pre-fab personalities at the mall and ordered their life goals from the Internet, yet still wonders why everything seems so dull and predictable. And it's about the frictions that occur when they discover that, unlike those trendy pre-faded jeans and earth-tone sweaters, human relations cannot be loved and worn for a season, then carelessly tossed away.

Bringing the What Back?

I finally gave in and let down my anti-pop, anti-TRL defenses for just long enough to listen to the new Justin Timberlake album, and, much as I hate to admit it, it’s really damn good (mostly due to the fact that Timbaland's spazzed-out beats and deftly layered productions are, I think the term is, "off the hook") . If this (or, for that matter, Beck) is the future of music, then I’m with Wired—the rest of the future can’t get here soon enough.

Blah-la Land

I don’t have a huge amount to say about the awkwardly-titled Hollywoodland that my fellow NRO reviewer Frederica Mathewes-Green didn’t already say: It’s lush and gorgeous, meticulous with its period detail. Allen Coulter’s direction is surprisingly adept. He simply knows how to shoot and stage a scene, even one with weak writing; several times throughout the film I was impressed by how a scene that, on paper, would’ve looked terribly bland, really worked. It’s got some strong, captivating performances and no truly weak links amongst the actors (Bob Hoskins is especially brilliant as studio chief Mannix, projecting a weird mix of caring, honorableness, seediness and despondency)…and yet its still only a middling film. It’s a classic example of why screenwriters and Hollywood producers are always yammering on about the importance of structure, because it’s got a fascinating story, but the inherent suspense and excitement in it is washed away by a poorly designed narrative structure.

Basically, the story follows two separate threads: One looks at Ben Affleck’s George Reeves and his topsy-turvy relationship with Toni Mannix, a studio mogul’s wife. We know from the beginning that Reeves dies, allegedly by his own hand, and that’s where the other story comes in. Private Detective Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) follows the investigation and comes to believe that Reeves may have been murdered. The movie flips back and forth between the time before and after Reeves’ death, giving us information more or less as Brody learns it.

So in some ways, it’s a procedural, with Brody following the leads and tracking down information. But the filmmakers were obviously hoping for more, and decided that Brody needed to be humanized—given a throughline of his own—with a slew of extraneous scenes involving another case and his tumultuous relationship with his estranged wife and son, a timid little kid who’s been ham-handedly forced into depression over the Reeves’ death (Superman can’t die, daddy, and all that). Most of that stuff is just filler, character development that doesn’t really change the rest of the story. And the two storylines just don’t congeal. It always feels like you’re watching two separate stories, each of which is gorgeously shot and almost interesting on its own, but doesn’t quite have the narrative oomph to grab your attention more than sporadically.

Unreality

Fakes! They're all fakes! The people impersonating you to get your phone records. The virtual medieval world you spend all your time in. And yes. Even Lonelygirl15.*

*(Doesn't she look eerily like Lindsay Lohan in that picture?)

Music to My Ears

I’ve mentioned before how difficult, and often rather terrible, music criticism can be—too often it descends into slang posing or discussions of lyrics that don’t actually say anything about the music (faults I’ve no doubt succumbed to from time to time myself). Anyway, good music criticism is worth noting when it comes along, and Rob Mitchum’s Pitchfork review of the new Rapture album, Pieces of the People We Love, is a model of the form. I think he underrates the album, which, to my ears, is many steps above their overrated debut—the VIP room of an exclusive club to their original pedestrian-riddled chain nightspot—but quibbles of opinion aside, his review is as sharp as they come.

The Idiot Box No More

Waiting for a screening to start this afternoon, a very well-read person told me (I suspect exaggerating somewhat) that he’s “given up books.” I can’t quite say the same—and even if it were true, I’d never admit it—but too often these days, it’s tempting. Even as someone who’s been blessed with the opportunity to spend a large portion of my day reading, there’s simply too much material being published every minute of every day to keep up. It’s not unusual for me to read eight or ten hours in a day; yet it’s also normal for me to know that I could’ve spent twice as much time just reading periodicals. By the time I get home and go through the day’s final waves of articles and blog posts, I’m often simply not interested in picking up a book.

This didn’t used to be the case. In high school, before the net became the all-purpose stop for periodicals, I read a novel or two a week and subscribed to several short story magazines. I was obsessive about fiction, regularly burning through long novels in two days, even, at times, in a day. In college, I read multiple books at a time, both for class and for pleasure. There was always a book on my nightstand and a stack of them on my desk. Now, though, I try to read a book every two weeks and end up reading a little more than a book a month. Time is an issue, but it’s also a matter of simple word-fatigue. Reading so much the rest of the time means that the novels I once devoured so ravenously no longer hold their appeal.

Increasingly, then, I find that the thing that satisfies my urge for complicated, plot-and-character-driven narrative that is both insightful and entertaining is something that a decade ago I never would have expected: television programming. As I recently wrote, this is due both to the increasingly smart nature of classy television and new technologies. Thanks to DVD and DVR, I can watch shows at my own pace and on my own schedule. The feeling of slipping away into another world with its own story and cast of characters is the same as the one I got from all those novels before. And, like those novels, I can either take the whole story in at once or dip in and out, show-by-show rather than chapter-by-chapter.

Terry Teachout, whose essay “The Myth of Classic TV” was part of what I was responding to when I wrote my original post on the novelistic aspects of television, responds today by pointing out that the shows I’m talking about—The Sopranos, The Wire, Brotherhood, to name a few—might be good, but they’re not really “classic” in the sense of Shakespeare or Citizen Kane. I should know better than to attempt to tangle with the likes of Terry Teachout, because, as usual, he’s almost certainly right (though on an especially bold day I still might suggest that it’s possible that The Sopranos will be looked at as the show that built the template for what “great” television could be). But if these shows aren’t timeless classics, they are, at the very least, deeply satisfying exercises in long-form narrative, and for my easily tired, text-weary eyes, that’s often enough.

Remembering September 11th on Film

I’ve been busy with deadlines and screenings and work (you know, all that real-life stuff that irritatingly takes time away from blogging--someone needs to do something about that) but I’d like to make a belated September 11^th entry regarding Daniel Mendelsohn’s New York Review of Books essay on this year’s September 11^th films.

I generally agree with his criticisms of World Trade Center. He points out that film’s sharp divergence from the always interesting, if not always excellent, Stone canon; he heaps praise on the movie’s most redeeming sequence, its subtle, quiet opening (Mendelsohn nicely calls it “the sense of ordinary life, spread across classes and boroughs, that was soon to be brutalized”); and finally, he disparages its small-screen-like predictability and conventionality.

But, like so many critics, Mendelsohn seems to miss out on what made this year's earlier 9/11 film—Paul Greengrass' United 93—work to such devastating effect. He spends a good portion of his essay dealing with the film’s decision to use real air traffic controllers and officials in the cast.

Using the real-life people in the movie is a showy but ultimately hollow gesture; it advertises a certain kind of solemnity, even piety, about "authenticity" that has great currency in an era in which, in so many popular entertainments, a great premium is placed on getting as close as possible to "reality"—although in such entertainments the reality, of course, is an artfully constructed one.

[snip]

There can, therefore, be no useful aesthetic value in the decision to use real people, only a symbolic and perhaps sentimental one: by emphasizing such authenticity and realism, the film reassures its audience—which may well be anxious about its motives for paying to see a film about real-life violence and horror—that what they're seeing is not, in fact, "drama" (and therefore presumably mere "entertainment"), but "real life," and hence in some way edifying.

What Mendelsohn sees as a false bid at authenticity, though, seems to me to be something else. In a sense, it's a blessing on the film given by 9/11's survivors and heroes, not to recreate some artificial reality, but to let audiences know that this is their story and they are taking ownership of this representation of the events. Greengrass chose to use them not strictly for their dramatic effect, but to let these real people share in authorship. Just as modern artists make statements by their choice of mediums and materials, Greengrass gave voice to those involved in 9/11 with his choice.

Mendelsohn also complains that United 93 is too unstructured and "messy" to have "larger meaning." But this is Greengrass’ point, and one of the film's strengths: The goal was not to sell audiences on a particular message, or to even-handedly dissect current notions about 9/11's ultimate meaning. Instead, the film captured the terrible helplessness, the sense of world-shaking chaos, the messiness and meaninglessness of that specific moment in time when, for a few hours, reality seemed to have exploded. Five years later, we’ve developed a slew of competing narratives and meanings for 9/11, and its significance is a matter of what seems like unending cultural and political squabbling. But on that day, during those ill-fated hours, there was only devastating fear, sadness, and confusion. Greengrass’ film doesn’t just remind us of what happened; it leaves us with a record of how it felt.

Half Nelson, Dialectics, and Inner City Success Movies

I’m sort of mystified by the glowing reviews given to Half Nelson. It’s not that it’s a terrible movie, but it is a strange, somewhat problematic one. It’s being praised (by Manhola Dargis, for example) for its forthright liberal social/political stance, but, as Jonathan Last has pointed out, making a boldly liberal film isn’t exactly the definition of bravery in the face of danger. Maybe its just the film’s bleak reimagining of the Rocky-in-the-classroom inspiring-white-teacher-in-an-urban-school formula that’s impressed so many critics. Whoever thought that formula, which seemed to have reached its pinnacle with Dangerous Minds (and that kitschy-awesome Coolio song that went along with it) could produce anything above the level of saccharine dreck like Take the Lead? (Brought to you by the director behind a bunch of Avril Lavigne music videos!)

The problem with Half Nelson is that it refuses to subscribe to traditional notions of character motivation, and in doing so, becomes as self-defeating as its protagonist. The film features Ryan Gosling as a young, white, inner city history teacher who lives in urban squalor (they might as well have put up a neon sign exclaiming pay our teachers more!) and also happens to be a crack addict. Gosling bucks the school system by replacing the Civil Rights history packet with off the cuff lectures on Marxian dialectics, teaching his kids about how social change occurs when warring opposites struggle for dominance.

The film’s animating idea is to apply this dialectic approach to social change to individuals. So Gosling’s character is driven on one hand to attempt to aid a promising young woman from his class by trying to keep her from getting involved with a drug dealer. On the other hand, Gosling spends a lot of time mired down in despairing drug binges. There’s no real goal involved in either activity, no reason given why he might do either, except for these two, abstract forces of good and evil that alternately win the battle for Gosling-control.

It’s a total rejection of the typical notion of character motivation, in which characters each have an overarching goal—a desire of some sort—that they work toward by negotiating their way through a web of other characters' goals to complete a string of smaller goals on the road to success. In Half Nelson, no one really does anything for any sort of reason; everyone is simply powered by two competing behavioral engines—one allegedly good and one allegedly bad. The individuals don’t even have any understanding of why they’re doing things; they’re merely compelled, like puppets whose strings are controlled by two separate masters working against each other.

This is tantamount to a total rejection of free will and individual choice, a pretty miserable, and I think, rather untenable view of existence. But more importantly, it's a view that doesn’t make for very compelling filmmaking: If characters can’t control their actions and don’t know or care why they’re doing anything, why should we in the audience care either?

Women and the Movies

Like Ross Douthat, I was immediately suspicious of The New York Times Magazine’s cover story on Vera Farmiga and the alleged decline of the female star. The piece tries to claim that Hollywood has abandoned strong roles for women, meaning that it’s no longer possible to have a career like Meryl Streep anymore. It’s probably worth pointing out, though, that it wasn’t ever easy to have a career like Streep’s, and that, in fact, she’s the only one in the last four decades or so to do so. (Nor, for that matter was it ever easy for a man to have a career like De Niro’s—take a look at Ed Norton, who, even though his performances still get good marks, has struggled to keep up his late 90s buzz.) Of course, if you want to increase your odds of having a vaunted career as a starlet-of-depth, there are worse ways to go about it than to have The New York Times Magazine write a fawning cover story about your talent and lack of opportunity.

So I would’ve dismissed the story completely, except that I happened to catch a third-run screening of My Super Ex-Girlfriend last weekend (I’ll see pretty much anything at a theater that serves beer), and, without wanting to channel too much feminist outrage, I was sort of shocked at the degrading, stereotypical manner in which it portrayed its heroine. Neurotic, bitchy, vindictive, petulant, incompetent—the movie makes her out as the perfect shallow man’s cliché of the mid 30s urban single woman. The wimpy, feckless protagonist played by Luke Wilson, on the other hand, is lauded when he dumps Thurman for a cute, perky, much-younger blonde (Anna Farris). By the end of the film, we’re supposed to side with Wilson when he patronizingly decides to aid her arch-nemesis in robbing Thurman of her powers so that she won’t be able to continually extract psychotic lover’s revenge. It’s a men-know-best view of women as either fresh young sex toys or neurotic, unstable bitches.

And to top it off, neither Thurman nor anything in the movie was entertaining in the least. It's one of the most unfunny "comedies" I've seen in years (and the superhero stuff is utterly lame as well). It’s one thing to play to terrible stereotypes if you can wring some humor out of them; My Super Ex-Girlfriend barely elicits a few random chuckles. Why in the world would the luminous, intelligent Uma Thurman take this demeaning role? Money, maybe, though Thurman is surely not lacking in that department, or maybe there’s some truth to the Farmiga story after all.

Addendum: Like I said, I'm inclined to be dismissive of the article's premise, but the MSEG example—even if it was just one film—was so perfectly aligned with the article’s thesis that it made me step back for a moment. In the comments section, Taleena suggests Julianne Moore. Maybe, but her recent material suggests a decline: Freedomland, The Forgotten are no great shakes, and even if Trust the Man was a “good” role, it wasn't exactly high profile, which is part of the article's point. I'd be more willing to accept Cate Blanchett (totally underrated in Talented Mr. Ripley), but as the article suggests is the case with women, she seems to struggle to find real lead roles that aren't just second fiddle to the men. I think maybe the underlying truth that the article ignores is that it’s just hard to be a movie star period, regardless of acting ability or quality of roles, and even harder to sustain a career as an ultra high-end star who garners both critical praise and continued box office success over a long period of time.

Coyne's Folly

In his review of Follies of the Wise, Jerry Coyne tries to make a logical case that science and religion are wholly incompatible:

Regardless of what they say to placate the faithful, most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world. Supernatural forces and events, essential aspects of most religions, play no role in science, not because we exclude them deliberately, but because they have never been a useful way to understand nature. Scientific “truths” are empirically supported observations agreed on by different observers. Religious “truths,” on the other hand, are personal, unverifiable and contested by those of different faiths. Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it.

But religion is not completely separable from science. Virtually all religions make improbable claims that are in principle empirically testable, and thus within the domain of science: Mary, in Catholic teaching, was bodily taken to heaven, while Muhammad rode up on a white horse; and Jesus (born of a virgin) came back from the dead. None of these claims has been corroborated, and while science would never accept them as true without evidence, religion does. A mind that accepts both science and religion is thus a mind in conflict.

Except that it isn’t. Coyne is implying that science maintains that only that which science has verified is true, and that, conversely, everything which science has not verified is definitively false. Coyne writes all of this with a sort of faux too-bad shoulder-shrugging “I can’t help the truth” demeanor, but no matter how much cold-hard-truth attitude he ladles on, this is just plainly wrong. Scientific truth, it’s true, only confirms what it has verified and only denies what it has proven impossible, but it does not deny what it has not yet verified. On many claims about which it has either insufficient evidence or no ability to test empirically, it remains agnostic. What Coyne tries to paint as outright dismissal is really just a refusal (or inability) to judge.

Moore Nonsense

It’s no secret at this point that Armond White takes the crazy-but-fascinating pompous blowhard thing to a level would make Lee Siegel sputter incoherently (and possibly anonymously). The critics are rather similar in many ways: the severe tone, the pose of moral and intellectual righteousness, the accusatory manner, the contrarian posturing--all of which lead to some rather odd and outrageous conclusions (see, for example, this week's bizarre rave of Crossover, which is on par with his legendary praise of Biker Boyz). However, as with Siegel, White’s adamant refusal to follow the mainstream occasionally leads him to get things right. His pan of This Film is Not Yet Rated is only semi-successful, but it includes at least one statement that seems to succeed at being self-evident (which is good, because White’s shtick is always to go long on assertions and short on evidence):

The contemporary documentary was ruined when Michael Moore encouraged the abrogation of credibility in favor of sarcasm.

“Ruined” might be too harsh a word, but a part of me thinks he’s absolutely correct to point out the debilitating effect of Moore’s fact-allergic, cheap-shot ridden, jokey style on contemporary documentary. Of course, one could also argue (and I might be willing to accept) that Moore’s bumbling everyman persona and easy comedic populism opened up the documentary format to a far wider audience than ever before, and along the way, gave filmmaking a renewed social and political relevance, at least in the eyes of certain segment of the population. And to add to my waffle, I’m also not sure those ideas are mutually exclusive. How’s that for a hedge?

Get Some Action

I take far too much delight in the wanton absurdity of the modern action movie, so needless to say, I really like Empire’s list to Top 10 Crazy Action Sequences. Not all of their choices are perfect (I preferred the video-game style succession of increasingly more difficult, newly powered baddies in Ong-Bak’s fight house sequence to the flaming knees battle, and how Michael Bay’s awesomely over the top car-tossing on a Miami bridge sequence from Bay Boys II didn’t make the cut is utterly beyond me), but it also gets a lot quite right. I saw Terminator 2 again last week, and watching the mostly dialog free semi-vs-motorcycle sequence on a big screen with surround sound does indeed make you feel like you’re freebasing on undiluted cinemanliness. Thank the gods of Hollywood that James Cameron is coming back.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about action movies recently (well, okay—more than just recently), and as far as I’m concerned, the four best examples of the Hollywood action film are Die Hard, Aliens, Terminator 2, and The Matrix. I don’t count movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars, which are action heavy but are really better classified as adventure movies. Nor am I counting any of the really excellent Asian actioners—films like Hard Boiled and Ong Bak that are tremendously influential to American cinema and positively thrilling shoot-em-ups, but just don’t share the same brawny American action movie sensibility. One could probably argue that by this logic, The Matrix shouldn’t be included in my list, but part of what made that film so successful was the way the Wachowskis took Asian tropes and incorporated them into the traditional American action template so seamlessly. Watch the Wu Ping films (Twin Warriors, for example) that inspired The Matrix and you’ll notice an immediate difference, both in the way the action is stylized and in the way the story and characters are developed.

So what makes those four films stand out? For one thing, they all follow the standard action film model pretty closely: a few characters face down a seemingly unstoppable enemy in a succession of increasingly difficult, complex, and epic battles, along the way coming to a new understanding about their own life and its purpose. And they connect these two elements—the physical danger and the life lessons—in a way that feels organic. None of these movies veer off the path into the usual unrelated tangents or go-nowhere scenes shoehorned in to appeal to a some key target audience. The action and personal growth are one in the same.

Along those lines, each of these films give us characters with more depth and unique attributes than are typical in genre films. While few of the characters are exactly literary, they resist the broad, vague appeals-to-everyone (and thus no one) and instead give us specifics: the lonely foster kid with a tumultuous relationship with his mom; the gruff cop trying to deal with family pressure and a tech-savvy world that seems to be slipping away; the embittered ex-employee forced into a mission she doesn’t want by her clueless managers. These are people with clearly, specifically (if quickly) drawn lives.

What all this means, then, is that when the action kicks in, it matters, because the narrative has lived up to its initial promises, and the characters have acted like recognizable humans. And in these films, when the action kicks in, it also, well, kicks ass. This is due in part to the strong feel all of the filmmakers involved have for shooting action in a way that keeps up the energy without descending into incoherence, but it’s also due to the inventiveness with which the action scenes were conceived. Aliens, for example, was a relatively low-budget production, especially in comparison to the others, but its action scenes—especially the initial encounter in the hive and the final battle between the robosuit-clad Ripley and the ferocious Queen—were creepy and breathtaking in a way audiences hadn’t seen before. Die Hard’s action scenes may seem fairly conventional at first glance, but in part that’s because they’ve been so widely aped over the last two decades. The machine gun shootout with the broken glass; the exploding building; the initial entry into the building; forcing Willis to go through the movie without shoes—all of these were smart ways to build action scenes that weren’t merely guys with guns on one side trying to plug holes in guys with guns on the other. As for T2 and The Matrix, well, little needs to be said about their action scene innovations, many of which still awe today.

Other movies—Face/Off, True Lies, and War of the Worlds for sure, maybe Jurassic Park, maybe even The Rock—have come close to achieving the popcorn-perfection of these classics of TNT-laced pop cinema, but it’s tough to do, and it may be that the heyday of bombastic American action cinema is over. These days, I think the best hope for the action movie lies in atheletic low-budget wonders like Ong-Bak and District B13 and grimmer, more serious entrees like The Bourne Supremacy. Which is to say that I’m definitely going to be hitting up Tony Jaa’s awesome-looking The Protector this weekend, a movie that, incidentally, seems to be playing directly to the Daniel Larison/Pat Buchanan school of "blood and soil," at least from this summary:

His world shaped by ancient traditions, a young Thai fighter (Jaa) is called upon to defend his people and their honor after outsiders invade their home and destroy all that is sacred.

Because really, kids, when push comes to shove—or in this case, knee comes to face—who doesn’t love a paleocon-friendly Thai martial arts flick?

Watching TV: Geeking Out Edition

“Throw in some poetic crap about the struggle for liberty against the Cylon oppressors."

Three words, kiddies: Battlestar. Galactica. Webisodes. Oh how we loves the interwebs.

Siegel and Irwin

I suppose I should be more interested in the Lee Siegel fiasco, but I’m not. His work was hit and miss for me. His TV criticism was unreadable mush—the prose equivalent of cold mash potatoes. His art criticism at Slate was a little livelier, although it’s entirely possible that I was just reacting to the pictures (as I’m prone to do). As for his much maligned culture blog, well, I looked forward to reading it, but mostly for its sheer ludicrousness. When Siegel wasn’t aggressively boring, he was a pretentious poser of the first order, a preening, class-A snob whose best shtick was when he would drum up outrage over either some long-past-accepted inoffensive trend (baseball caps) or spew snooty, elitist bile about something with which he was inextricably linked (the internet). Rude? Self-important? Comically overwrought? Check, check, and check. But it was also pretty amusing. Still, it's not anything I'll miss.

On a different recent-news note, it’s worth holding a moment of blog silence for Steve Irwin. I’ve never been much for fad TV, but Irwin was delightfully mad—a larger-than-life adventurer and risk-taker for the post-risk era. He was goofy, lovable, and—unlike so many other trendy, irritating TV personages—pretty much impossible to dislike. And while his manic persona could’ve easily slipped into self-parody or brute obnoxiousness, he always skirted the obvious pitfalls of TV hosting, mostly by virtue of coming by his overwhelming enthusiasm honestly. No matter what, you always knew he really believed in the crazy stuff he said and did, and that he said it and did it not as part of some calculated scheme to get attention any way possible, but out of an true-blue compulsion for wild adventure and using thrills to educate the public—exactly the opposite, in fact, of Lee Siegel, who, even if he believed his puffery, always seemed more interested in provocation and curmudgeonly posing than anything else.

Now That's Brave

Jonathan Last is a genius.

The Me-O-Meter, Special Smoking Edition

I’m in AFF Brainwash this week with an expanded version of my post on classic television, and sharp-eyed, sharp-eared viewers will also be able to spot me in Bureaucrash’s latest internet-video wonder, the third Vodcrash.

Creative-Industrial-Complex Angst and Studio 60

In the New York Times, Michael Tolkin, author of the biting Hollywood satire The Player and its recent sequel, claims that, “The movies haven’t been very good the last three or four years, they really haven’t… Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what they were will never return.” The Times calls his statement an expression of “creative-industrial-complex angst,”—a pithy little soundbyte, and a pretty accurate one. While I’m certainly open to arguments about the decline of cinema, I think his statement is a little bit over the top, either because he believes it or because it will help generate interest in his book (or maybe both). No matter what, it’s part of a recent upsurge in rhetoric in Hollywood’s never ending clash between art and commerce.

Elsewhere, Kirby Dick’s unrated documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated purports to expose the ultra secretive MPAA ratings board, trying to persuade viewers that the business association’s ratings system is inconsistent and, worse, stifling to artistic freedom. It’s somewhat successful, but not nearly as much as it—or many of its critics—seem to think it is. But more on that in the future (the film doesn’t open in D.C. till the 15^th, so I’m mostly mum until then).

Perhaps the most interesting, and most persuasive, entry is Aaron Sorkin’s much anticipated new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. In the first ten minutes of the show, Sorkin makes an obvious allusion to Network (later referenced specifically as “a Paddy Cheyefsky film,” which seems odd given its more notable director), and all but proclaims his intention to wage small-screen holy war on the moralist censors in religious interest groups, the government panderers at the FCC, and the crude culture of commerce he sees as having ruined Hollywood in general and television in specific.

From the looks of the pilot, the show is going to do for Hollywood and television what The West Wing did for government and the presidency: make an impassioned plea for the renewed relevance of (what he sees as) a declining institution by vigorously arguing that the institution should stop pandering to a backward, lowest common-denominator public and embrace the mores, tastes, and predilections of the cultured intellectual class. In other words, Sorkin has appointed himself official spokesperson for the interests of the coastal elite. Insert snarky latte joke here.

And to be honest, the stereotypical coastal elite couldn’t have asked for a better representative. Sorkin’s shows don’t just whine about the problems they perceive; they present almost-convincing models for how their chosen institutions could succeed with the sort of wit and class he desperately wishes they had. In The West Wing, Sorkin presented an alternative-universe Washington, just slightly different from the real one, in which brilliant, dedicated, well-intentioned progressives could keep their integrity and use a combination of wits and hard work to design good government and keep it working. In Sorkin’s Washington, it was actually possible to win public sentiment and elections by making smart, complex arguments in a debate and following them up with equally complicated, but effective, policy. In Sorkin’s Hollywood, no doubt, it will be possible to earn massive ratings, win battles with moral scolds, and create truly inspired, classic television simply by virtue of smarts, talent, dedication and good intentions. His is a liberal dream world, in which, despite rampant institutional failings, right overpowers might and a few good people can actually solve society’s biggest problems. In other words, it’s Michael Tolkin’s worldview of a failed system, but with a determinedly optimistic outlook.

What made Sorkin-era West Wing work so well, and what looks likely to be the case with Studio 60, is that the shows appear to actually work on their own premises: They’re the determined product of a couple of very dedicated, very smart people’s good intentions—and more often than not, they’re pretty damn good. Sorkin doesn't just argue for good television; he shows us how it can be done. In some ways, then, his shows serve as a rebuttal to Tolkin’s pessimism: For some of the best material being produced in Hollywood today, maybe he should stop looking to the big screen and flip on the (slightly) smaller one in his den instead.

MPAA Ratings Explained

Sometimes, you don't even need the New York Times' movie reviews--the rating explanation at the end makes it all clear. Take, for example, A.O. Scott's review of The Wicker Man:

“The Wicker Man” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Scary ladies! Bees!

For those considering reading the whole review, don't bother. Having seen the film at noon on Friday and having to get his piece in for Saturday's edition, Scott was clearly on a tight deadline, so he spends most of his wordcount relating the experience of buying the ticket and seeing the movie in a theater with a regular , paying audience. Everything of note shows up in the last graf:

I’m trying to imagine how this movie was pitched. There’s this island, see, and it’s ruled by women. Goddesses! Most of them are blond, and a lot of them are twins, and they have all this honey, and these wild costumes. Porno? What are you talking about? It’s a horror movie. Don’t you get it?

Christian Rock: The New Punk

I'm not sure if I entirely agree with the logic of it all, but Pitchfork's Zach Baron makes an interesting point about Christian rock (a phrase that makes me shudder, even though I spent years listening to the stuff) in this short track review:

Why is Christian Rock the new punk rock? Because those bands care about what they're selling-- care a lot-- and they make a culture out of it: a weird, fucked, mortal-enemy-to-what-we-hold-dear culture, but there it is.

If pop culture art with Christian ideas succeeds, it may well be because of what Baron is describing.

Mew Sick

It’s a glum grey morning here in D.C., raining just enough that it’s annoying but not hard enough to count as a serious downpour—a sort of apathetic rainfall, just going through the motions, which is maybe appropriate for a Friday before a holiday weekend. Approaching a long weekend (and the sort unofficial end of summer) this sort of gloomy weather might irritate some people, but I’m of the opinion that this is pretty much perfect weather for staying inside and watching movies and listening to music. Speaking of which, let me make a couple of recommendations for the musically minded.

Dance punk is back (though you have to ask: did it ever really leave?). Supersystem and The Rapture both have new albums out or about to come out, and they’re both pretty much full-on hipster disco assaults (and I mean that in the best possible way). The thing about Supersystem is that somehow, they channel the whole D.C.-Fugazi-Dischord aura—zany, angular, quirk-punk with off kilter grooves—and at the same time they maintain a total electro-beat danceability; there’s even a freaking slow dance ballad. This is class-A prom-material; grab your indie rock sweetheart and hold her tight.

If Supersystem manages a perfect distillation of both the D.C. sound and the how-is-this-still-happening dance punk craze, The Rapture does the same trick for the New York scene. It’s new-wave eyeliner punk for coke-addled 1979 club kids, all swagger, bell bottoms and scraggly chest hair. The band's not quite as discombobulated as Supersystem, and not quite as manic either, but they make up for it in smooth moody cool. This is the kind of album that ought to come with bottle service and a table for your posse.

Speaking of posses, I have to admit: this is pretty silly, but it’s also pretty amusing at times, and some of my esteemed (and, yeah, totally double-T hott) coworkers made the Hottest Policy Types voting list. Still. A think-tank blog. Honestly, people. Much to the chagrin of the Eggers crew, I do believe snark has won.