Not Everyone's a Critic, but Everyone Should Have an Opportunity to Try Out for the Job

Sorry, but I just don’t buy Richard Schickel’s notion that “not everybody’s a critic,” and that bloggers will never be able to fill in the gaps of professional critics. He paints the whole thing as a false dichotomy between enthusiastic know-nothing bloggers and elite aesthetes with eyes and minds of steel. And his intimation that, because most reviewing is just hackwork, and therefore the business is too open and democratic already, is either bizarre or nakedly self-serving. He envisions a world in which the only critics are the super-elites, the George Orwells and Edmund Wilsons, and other critics are marginalized or gone entirely. Well, that’s fine, I suppose, if you already have a gig at Time, but what he’s asking for—whether he knows it or not—is for there to be less criticism, less writing and response and discussion about books, movies, and other popular arts. He’s making the classic argument of the entrenched powers—that they and only they deserve to be at the top, and the bottom not only isn’t worthy, it shouldn’t be bothered with—maybe even shouldn’t exist—at all. Now, lord knows I’m all for qualifications and historical knowledge and carefully refined aesthetic judgments, but I don’t see how any honest lover of the popular arts (or of criticism, for that matter) could really want to limit the discussion to a few high-profile gigs held by the entrenched elite. More discussion is better, and out of the masses, voices worth listening to will arise. Schickel thinks the open critical landscape will turn criticism into a standards-less din; what it will really do is open up the application process for our critics, giving more voices a chance to be heard and read, making it even more—not less—likely that the best, the most knowledgeable, the most readable and entertaining, will come out at the top of the heap.

Sometimes, when I get tired and still have a thousand different thoughts swimming circles in my grey matter from earlier in the day, I find myself flipping between blogs I've already read while the TV is on but muted in the background, playing the news or some movie I've already seen, and then I realize that I've spent 20 minutes just sort of vacantly staring and thinking and (mostly) rethinking ideas from earlier in the day, as if my brain just needs to swirl them around for a while before dumping them, or like there's a traffic jam, rush hour style, and everyone's fighting to get off the island and back to the boroughs after work, but there are only so many bridges and tunnels, you know?

Orr on Apocalypto

About Apocalypto, Chris Orr says, "What remains is Gibson's never-more-evident technical mastery and his remarkable sense of motion, both narrative and cinematic." I think there's a little bit more to it than that, but Orr makes a powerful case for what I still think was the best, boldest, most satisfying cinematic experience of 2006.

Movies!

Over at NRO, I've got a review of a couple of movies I saw at the G.I. Film Fest this weekend. I've got about a zillion and a half (roughly) articles to write in the next week or so, but I promise I will shortly return to regular blogging/boring you to death with vapid posts about giant robots and long-winded discussions of George Lucas. Honest. I swear.

Addendum: I also have a slightly longer piece on surveillance technology in 24 and The Wire in the new issue of The New Atlantis, which is now online. Starters:

Two hit television dramas exhibit the complex human response to technological surveillance: 24 and The Wire. Both shows shed light on the growing societal awe of surveillance technology while also reflecting our fear and uncertainty about our ability to master it. Although surveillance technology dominates the worlds of both shows—24’s built-up city of Los Angeles and The Wire’s decaying Baltimore slums—the shows’ overarching attitudes towards surveillance differ greatly. Fox’s 24 bows in awe of the omnipotence and omnipresence of satellites and fiber optics, while HBO’s The Wire regards phone taps and recording devices suspiciously, as flawed tools that reveal the corrupt nature of bureaucracy and are, at best, necessary evils. Thus, the difference between the two shows is one of belief: one’s view of surveillance technology is based in faith, the other’s in doubt.

Ron Paul piece at NRO

I've got a piece on Ron Paul up at NRO today. Internet Paulites (is there a nickname for the die hard web Paul fans yet?) commence swarming... now.

Update: I see that I'm getting a lot of hits from Facebook, and that at least one person has written that I "actually want to be swarmed." Well, I mean, I know that's what I wrote, but I was at least a little bit kidding. From talking to some other journalists, I'd sort of been under the impression that anyone who wrote anything about Paul automatically got a dump truck full of email delivered 15 minutes after the piece went live. So I figured I'd just pull the starting gun myself.

That said, I encourage email, comments, etc. and certainly won't argue if anyone links to this site.

Me-blogging

I'm in DC this weekend to go to this and (mostly) to cover this. Monday night, if all goes well, I'll head over to the 9:30 Club for The Faint after the festival ends.

What are you doing?

Packing Meat

I went to a bar in the meatpacking district Friday. It is trendy, indeed--just as trendy, in fact, as Sex in the City and numerous gossipy blog references had led me to believe. It is the sort of trendy where bouncers in suits keep people waiting in roped-off areas, like black-velvet holding pens. It is staggering-assortment-of-beautiful-women, as-if-it-were-a-network-TV-series, trendy. It is $12-drinks trendy.

Hardened New Yorkers know all of this, I suppose, and right now are yawning to the sound of sirens while some kid sprays graffiti on the outside of their apartment. Good for all of you; really. But I'm new here, and I see no reason to become jaded and apathetic any earlier than is necessary.

New Travis Morrison

I've been updating the music post all day, but this deserves a full post. The long-awaited (well, by me, anyway) new Travis Morrison record, All Y'all, has a release date--July, once again on Barsuk--and there are two new songs on his MySpace page (only one of which will appear on the record). The album track is really good. Better, I think, than most anything on his first solo record. Stereogum has a fun interview with Morrison about his day job as a programmer at the Washington Post.

About a Vlog

Julian Sanchez begins to explore--quite successfully, I'll add--the real potential of political vlogging (still the worst bit of terminology to gain significant traction on this here web thing--even worse, I think, than "liberaltarian"). I've been playing with various prosumer and home-level digital video editing tools for 7 or 8 years now, and I've wondered when this sort of thing would take off. For a long time, it's been too technical, too time-consuming, and/or too expensive to do at the no-budget blogger level, and though it's still not exactly a snap (you can write a blog post in just a few minutes; a vlog like Julian's is bound to take at least a couple of hours), it's gotten to the point where it's doable, at least for full-time stay-at-home writers like Sanchez. Anyway, good show; it may be time for me to start trying something like this (after, of course, I finish the stack of books I'm supposed to read and numerous essays and articles I'm supposed to write over the next few weeks).

Saturday Music Blogging

Have you heard the leaked track from the new Interpol album? No? Well, now you have. Pretty great, eh? Our Love to Admire drops on July 10, the same day as other hipster icon Spoon's new disk, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Don't let the name trouble you, though. I've heard it, and the music is much better than the title--actually their best in years, I'd say.

Addendum: I completely forgot to mention this a few weeks ago, but the new Feist album, The Reminder, is sweet and coy and smart and altogether lovely--pretty much everything a boy could want, I'd say. It's a flirt of an album--equal parts frivolous and secretly melancholy. Pitchfork agrees, although if anything, they underrate it. You'll want to watch the video for single, too; it's not the album's best track (that would be "Sea Lion Woman"), but wow--take look at the choreography in this. I'm (musically) smitten.



Addendum, Again: Holy mid-90s guitar-geekery! The new Smashing Pumpkins song leaked! And man, it's a big fat timewarp to freshman year in high school. Oh lord, this is serious: I have a bizarre urge to drink Surge, watch MTV, and listen to Green Day. Fun fact! Billy Corgan used as many as 24 separate guitar tracks on some songs on Siamese Dream. That's what oh-so-many years of reading friends' subscriptions to Guitar World will get you.

Addendum, More!: Speaking of exuberant choreography and big fat timewarps (via Unfogged):

Easy. One Line of Dialog -- Thank God We Invented the...Whatever Device

From a Chud interview with Michael Bay:

Some of these characters have pretty silly names. How are you going to explain names like Jazz and Optimus Prime?

Well, I'm not going to tell you, but we do justify it. I mean, we have logic stuff in the script to explain why we say it.

The mind of Michael Bay, ladies and gents: "Logic stuff." People wonder who makes these movies. There you go. That said, the new Transformers trailer is completely over-the-top awesome in so many ways I can't even begin to describe it. GIANT. FRIKIN'. ROBOTS.

Hit Me Baby One More Time

Tyler Cowen thinks that two more Star Wars films, even direct-to-TV cheapies, would be “better than nothing.” Ross Douthat isn’t so sure:

Is what's almost sure to be yet another bad Star Wars movie really "better" than no more Star Wars at all? How you answer this question, I think, depends on whether bad sequels actually reduce your enjoyment of an excellent original. If they don't - if your love for The Empire Strikes Back is unaffected by your loathing for Attack of the Clones - then "better than nothing" makes sense, because after all there's always the infintesimal chance that Lucas will surprise us and make something halfway decent. But if you're like me and find unhappy memories of, say, Matrix Revolutions creeping in when you're watching the original Matrix, then nothing is better than a something that has a ninety-five percent chance of being God-awful.

Ignoring that Lucas’ announcement that he’ll make these films is only slightly more reliable than Quentin Tarantino’s idea that he’ll wait 20 years and produce a sequel to Kill Bill about Vernita Green’s daughter (the one who watched her mom die at the beginning of Volume 1) taking revenge on The Bride, I think this is more or less accurate. I’m of the camp that doesn’t see much harm in bad sequels, except insofar as a bad sequel is a lost opportunity to expand a series in a positive way.

And that, I think, relates to the more important thing to consider when asking whether you want Lucas producing two more Star Wars movies—whether you think that’s a smart use of Lucas’ limited time. Do we really want as talented a visualist and storyteller—recent work not withstanding—as Lucas wasting his efforts on low-rent TV fare? I don’t, especially not when he’s stated an interest in going back to working on smaller, less commercially accessible films like those he started with.

Lucas’ finest picture, without question, is THX-1138. It’s really one of the best science fiction films of all time--literate, thoughtful, complex, visually inventive, politically aware--but because of those things, it’s also a fairly difficult movie, and it certainly lacks the easy appeal of his later work. Like a lot of his 1970s contemporaries, Lucas started out as a talented, quirky guy who didn’t care about pleasing audiences, but he quickly found that not only did refusing to care not pay the bills, but that, despite no particular interest in creating audience-friendly fluff, he was actually pretty talented at making films that audiences did love.

So he gave up on his dreams of defiance and independence, a perfectly reasonable thing to do considering the star-destroyer sized loads of cash he stood to make. He still had the opportunity to innovate technically, and he ripped off the old sci-fi serials enough that the story elements pretty much worked. That’s why, I think, the Star Wars prequels were so gutless: He never really cared for the property the way his fans did, and audience adoration has never been a particular goal of his (though he's been glad to take their money).

No, Lucas cares about moviemaking gizmos and mechanistic imagery packed so dense with detail that you can only really appreciate it on a giant screen with a DVD player and a quick-to-trigger pause-button finger. He cares about finding ways to put his camera into every position, to give it limitless scope and range of motion; he wants to awe his audiences, to impress them, maybe even to entrance them--but he’s far less concerned with involving them.

And that’s what I want to see him do: to go back to making movies he’s passionate about, regardless of whether or not anyone else is. Lord knows he’s got the money for it, and that’s even better. Lucas is the only person alive who could plausibly make $100 million science-fiction art films. Perhaps it’s all selfishness on my part, but I’ll gladly fork over eleven bucks—and then some—for that. The question isn't whether I want, as they say, more, more more--it's more of what. And I think it's pretty easy to agree that, in this case, Star Wars wore out its welcome a long time ago.

Dating Advice from the Paper of Record

So, single men who sign up for classes should have an easy time of it, right New York Times?

Great Moments

We are like 10 minutes away from never having to suffer through another Charlie flashback again.

And Bernard and Rose are back!

Update: I gave in and read the spoilers. Everyone has always gone bananas over the big season finales, and I've never, ever understood it. So the hatch opened. So we heard a noise and saw a big white light and a four toed statue. Nothing of significance was revealed; the stories weren't grounded or given any meaning. It was just more weird stuff, only a little bit higher level of weird. Well, this time, the buzz is... not accurate, once again.

Just when I was almost starting to like the show.

TV Leaks: More Fun than Dirt from the WH

Looks like the juicy bits from the season finale of Lost have been spoiled. I haven't read them yet (and I don't plan to), but I hear there's a pretty serious game-changer in there.

Absolutely Guaranteed to Grow?

I got sea monkeys for my office. The idea is for them to be friends with the Chia Pet in the office next door. As lovers of cute animal photos the internet over are already aware, animals get double cute points when they’re nestled up against each other. This also works for zoo animals, unless they’re eating each other. By the rules of logic, then, one can only assume that similar rules apply to fake pets as well.

They arrived in the mail this morning. (Pets by mail! It’s really true: In New York, you can get anything delivered.) As I eagerly stripped open the packaging, I imagined my sea-monkey-filled future, a host of scenarios for our coming life together: me giving my sea monkeys a bath, me taking my seak monkeys to the zoo, me reading graphic novels to my sea monkeys, me trying to puzzle through 330 page GSE reform bills while my sea monkeys (who, because they come complete with a small, green-plastic tank to live in, have no interest in or particular skill in deciphering housing-finance law, though they do have strong, if sadly misinformed, opinions on overfishing). Surely, I thought, the sea monkeys and I have a beautiful future together.

And then I opened the box, read the instructions, and discovered, to my profound shock and horror, that the instructions said I shouldn’t even open the egg pouch for another day, and that I wouldn’t have full fledged sea monkeys to laugh and play with for another week! What kind of cruelty is this? My emptiness, like the depths of the sea from which those monkeys came, seems to know no end.

Movies I'm Not Watching

So I’m not really watching The Omen, but I can’t deny that, as I sit here, layered in blankets and sunken into the extra-wide cushions on my couch like a giant moss-covered boulder pushed into soft earth, The Omen, yes, that one with Liv Schrieber and Julia Stiles that was so almost-cleverly released on June 6, 2006, otherwise known as 6-6-6, is on. It’s not that I want to watch it, really, it’s just that when there’s a choice between bad shows, you tend to choose the one that’s in HD, as if somehow 1920 interlaced pixels of crap are better than 720. That’s the theory I’m working on anyway.

But now that I’m here I have a couple of questions. First, Damien? What self respecting snooty rich parent—even the type played by Liv Schrieber and (ha!) Julia Stiles—names their kid Damien? Haven’t these people ever seen a horror movie? Don’t they know they’re in one, fercryinoutloud, as if they couldn’t tell from all the spooky atmospherics and eerie strips of light and dank rooms and talk of god and demons and such. New rule: When David Thewlis is running around with a dog-eared, yellow highlighted Bible giving your lectures on Jewish prophesy, watch out! By the time the disfigured, one-eyed priest dramatically flips off his hood, you oughta have gotten the hint. I mean, it’s not like that sort of thing just happens.

Not to Julia Stiles, anyway.

And, fine, you name your kid Damien, tempt the horror movie gods, and that’s that. Rebellion! Fate! Bad screenwriting! Whatever. But do you have to give him such a creepy haircut, too? I mean, these are supposed to be moneyed twits with taste and such, the sort of folk who wear cocktail dresses and cuff-links to a Saturday in the park, right? And yet they give a fugly bowl haircut that would be laughed out of most trailer parks.

Honestly, there are some things I’ll just never understand.

Christopher Moltisanti, RIP

So. That was intense, yeah? More on The Sopranos soon.

Update: Well, ok. Not that soon. A few weeks?

I think the word is, "Represent!"

My neighborhood gets some some profile-love in the New York Times. If anything, the piece--which is quite generous--isn't nice enough to this tiny slice of Brooklyn.

Cowabunga, Dude

"I'm totally stoked about this movie."

Those are Michael Bay's first words about Transformers in this featurette at the totally-for-real-live actual Michael Bay blog. Jonathan Last, no doubt, is also totally stoked.

This is Unexpected

Not only do the fanboys like 28 Weeks Later, it seems to have been embraced pretty thoroughly by the mainstream critics. For the record, I thought the original was brilliant -- almost certainly the best horror film of the last decade -- and, while I thought that a sequel had a lot of potential, CW was that it was just be low-grade horror shlock, a quick cash-in on the horror craze and the notoriety of the original. But now we've got A.O. Scott writing that not only is it "brutal and almost exhaustingly terrifying," it's "also bracingly smart, both in its ideas and in its techniques." I'm sold.

Making Out on Subways

Maybe it’s the onset of sun and warm weather, but I’m seeing an awful lot of this lately. I understand the appeal (obviously), but New York subways aren’t exactly the cleanest locations in the world. Fulton Street, for example, pretty much always smells like either urine, vomit, or a zesty combination of the two. Despite a much cleaner subway system, this never happens in D.C.—or at least I never saw it. What’s to blame? A slightly better developed sense of privacy owing to the lower population density? D.C.’s innate propriety, otherwise known as “I don’t want this to end up as a Roll Call item”-syndrome? Or is New York just better at finding and nurturing lovers? I know D.C. is all button-up and unfun and such, but it’s not like people don’t have sex there.

In other news, the super secretive New York all-girl email list that I am totally convinced exists (they probably have the sort of ID verification that Linden Labs could only dream of) apparently sent out notice that today was Officially Sun Dress Day. Honest to God. It was sunny yesterday, but there were still numerous coats and scarves and boots. And today, bam! Martha Stewart's memo played no part in this. I'm sure of it. No female will admit it, but there is an email list, or a secret message board where someone posts a codeword. Or something. I refuse to believe otherwise.

Dudes, on the other hand, have to resort to things like checking weather.com.

The Battle of the Sexes

Scenes from an all-girl rock (rawk?) show:

The whole all-girl thing—it was weird. Here, a girl steps on my toe, apologizes profusely. Elsewhere (like, say, Dan Deacon at the Silent Barn last Saturday), boy elbows me in the face, responds, "Oh well, I'm a douchebag" and turns back around. Here, people used the word "concert" and "club." Elsewhere, this was a "show" and a "gallery." Here, one girl beside me truly thought she was being clever by hollering, "Free Bird." Elsewhere, she would've gotten a beating—and I would've thought about delivering it.

The Rent is Too Damn High

Yes, it's May; summer is upon and school's letting out, which means that NYT runs the now-obligatory young-people-can't-afford-housing piece. The rents in this city are indeed ridiculous, but so is the story. Last year, the paper ran an almost identical story in which a kid slept in an overhang above a door (I can't find it, but determined Googlers should post it in the comments section). This year it's all about kids who sleep in offices. Look, the housing market in New York is frustrating and insane, but stick to the boroughs and don't get your undies in a bunch when forced to realize that you're not entitled to a 2,000 square foot penthouse with a view of the park. I know plenty of people--myself included--who've found reasonable-for-New-York housing with far less hassle than you'll ever read about in the woe-is-us pages of the New York Times.

Still, nothing I've written here should stop you from checking out the Rent is Too Damn High Party and its silky-smooth, ass-shakin' theme song.

Radar on New York

I enjoy a good magazine vs. magazine barfight as much as the next media scene gawker, and New York magazine (much as I enjoy it) would seem to be ripe for a nasty takedown. But John Cook's attempted hitpiece on the glossy in Radar is almost entirely unconvincing. Yes, the magazine might benefit from a bit more crassness; they've yet to find a Chris Hitchens or a James Wolcott to take cranky swipes at the passing world. (Their website seems a little more playful, though never anything you'd really call mean.) And sure, it's geared, in some ways, toward New York's moneyed elite. But even more than that, it's geared toward the middle and upper-middle class strivers who desperately want to be part of the true elite; those are the people who dominate and influence so much of New York in 2007, and I don't see why a city magazine can't be focused on their lives.

As for their so-called inability to tell a story, it's actually one of the things I like most about the magazine; if I want a recitation of facts--names, places, dates, numbers--I'll read the Wall Street Journal. New York's stories tend to be a little more thoughtful and a little bit juicier all at the same time. Sure, the insights are exactly what you'd expect from yuppies and indie yuppies and everyone in between, but that doesn't make them uninteresting.

New York scenes

I always liked Nighthawks, but I was also never terribly impressed--possibly because of the ubiquity of the image. But Slate's feature on Edward Hopper has converted me. When I strike it rich in... I don't know, whereever someone like me strikes it rich... I'm going to convert my house into a Hopper museum.

Day Night Day Night

I've got a review of Day Night Day Night, the new low budget indie terror flick, up at NRO today.

Julia Loktev’s debut film, Day Night Day Night, about a female suicide bomber who sets out for Times Square, is the type that critics love to praise for “possessing an artful ambiguity” and “resisting easy answers.” And when they do, they’ll be right, except that Loktev’s film, for all its art-school bravado and post-modern elusiveness, never gets around to asking very tough or very interesting questions. Day Night is concerned only with terrorism at its most quotidian and banal, willing only to explore the personal at the total expense of the political. It may be the first movie about a terrorist that doesn’t care about terrorism.

David Mamet's Tale of Introverted Nerd-Empowerment

The completely brilliant and under-recognized Gene Healy speaks truth to David Mamet/Alec Baldwin power:

Alec Baldwin's now-infamous voicemail to his daughter reminds me of how much more I've liked him as an actor since he started playing to type: sloppy, angry, obnoxious and vicious. He's excellent at it, for much the same reason that Keanu Reeves is great at playing dumb guys. It reminds me also of one of the first movies I saw Baldwin play a bad guy in: 1997's "The Edge." But more than Baldwin, what I really liked about the Edge was the Anthony Hopkins character. He's an odd, bookish guy, and although he's filthy rich and married to a supermodel, you can tell he's taken grief his whole life from people who think you're weird if you'd rather read than talk. When he and Baldwin crash their plane in the Alaskan wilderness (long, implausible David Mamet story involving a scenic photoshoot for the Hopkins character's wife), and they have to fight for their lives against an enormous bear, Hopkins has the last laugh. It turns out all that book-learnin' was good for him, as he's picked up all sorts of survival skills from various things he's read. It ends up being a tale of introverted nerd-empowerment, an inspiration to bookish types everywhere. Of course, if this ever happened to me, I'd be left trying to fend off a bear with Raymond Chandler wisecracks and useless anecdotes about Warren Harding.

It Never Ends

Just now seeing this, but the Washington City Paper (which I really kinda miss) has a multimedia feature on last weekend's D-Plan show.

Surprise!

For whatever reason, I did not expect Frog Eyes to be good. But they are!

Meanwhile, Catherine points us to Le Loup, who is also quite good. Am I the last one to realize that there's a new Interpol album coming out?

Update: And this video for "Mistaken For Strangers" by The National is pretty good too, though I might be biased because it makes me feel a little more comfortable about my own thoroughly under-decorated Brooklyn apartment (the video was shot in the BRK pad of the director/singer's brother).

Sinking Fast

The more I think about Spider-Man 3, the less I like it. Anthony Lane's review didn't do much to keep me on the good side of the fence either.

Update: Chuck is right. Doesn't matter too much what anyone thinks of this sucker; we're now pretty much predetermined to get more. It broke all the single day records and opened with more than $59 million domestic and $104 million worldwide. Holy geeks in spandex, Batman. That's a lot of money.

Update 2: Thinking about it a little more, I've decided that there were two things that drew me in. The first was the screening itself--a massive affair in Times Square where, even with only press in attendance, it took 45 minutes to wade through all the lines and security to get in. It definitely drove home the point that Spider-Man 3 is a big deal in a way that the usual critics' screenings at small, private screening rooms hidden throughout the city's office buildings don't.

The second is that, despite the myriad script and plot issues, I still really, really like Raimi's basic approach to the material. He simply gets the boyish, morally simplistic, fun-loving, sprightly comic tone of classic Spider-Man right. Whether in the color schemes, the run-down expressionism of the middle-class New York housing, or the way the small, personal dilemmas are always paralleled in the larger hero plots--the Spider-Man movies all feel exactly like the best incarnations of the Spider-Man comic books. And so, in the same way that, as a kid, I used to love getting the newest issue of Amazing or Web of (did anyone actually read Spectacular?), and enjoyed reading each issue even if I also knew it was pretty mediocre, I still enjoy going to sit in a big, downtown movie theater and watching Spider-Man swing and wisecrack and have girl troubles on the big screen. Call it weakness, call it nostalgia, maybe even call it lack of critical distance--but whatever it is, Raimi captures the aura of his four-color source material so effortlessly that, when watching his Spider-Man films, I cease to be a jaded, cranky, critic judging a movie from a dispassionate distance and go back to being a 12 year old boy reading a comic book. And think my review is a pretty accurate impression of that.

Spider-Man 3 Review

My review of Spider-Man 3 is up at NRO:

In Spider-Man 3, director and co-writer Sam Raimi seems to have taken the line from the franchise's old theme song — does whatever a spider can — to heart. He's got Spidey doing practically everything, mixed up in a massively tangled web of plots, subplots, and back-story revisionism that threatens to crash under its own weight. But like the Webslinger himself, Raimi's direction is nimble enough to dart through the mess he's created and end up, if not entirely unscathed, pretty well-off. Spider-Man 3 swings both high and low, and though it isn't always as graceful as its predecessors, it always stays up in the air.

To enter into the world of Spider-Man is to enter into a four-color fantasy realm culled from the pages of comic books. In it, every building in New York is a skyscraper, newspapermen are all gruff and pitiless cigar-chompers, criminals running from the police encounter chain-link fences with signs that read, "DANGER: Particle Physics Laboratory," and shy nerds can slip into brightly colored underwear and save the world. Females are strange and mysterious, parental figures have all the wisdom, and day-to-day existence is marked primarily by high-flying adventure and everyday troubles. It's adult life as simplified and romanticized by 14-year-old boys everywhere. Which means that, done right, it can be a lot of fun.

What's Right and Wrong with Spider-Man 3

My review of Spider-Man 3 comes out tomorrow. It's mixed, but more positive than not. I didn't go into all of the problems with the film (or all of the good things, either), but for an exhaustive, comic-fan review that almost perfectly catches all of my views on the particular elements of the film check out Quint's review at AICN.

Opening Lines

This is why I like David Edelstein: because he's not afraid to start a review of Spider-Man with a rambling 67 word sentence that name drops Luigi Pirandello and ends with the word "flabby."

Yippee Kayey Motherfudger

Die Hard 4 will be ... PG-13.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the movie was called LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. But from what Vanity Fair is saying here, it sounds more like LIVE FREE OR DIE-- WELL, LET'S NOT DIE TOO HARD, THERE ARE CHILDREN PRESENT. Which, in my opinion, is not as good of a title.

Please make it stop.

"Gaming the System" at NRO

I've got a piece on a proposal to regulate the video game industry's rating system over at NRO today. Not surprisingly, I'm skeptical:

Video gamers everywhere get a thrill out of manipulating imaginary characters with their game controllers. Sometimes, though, it seems as if politicians are just as thrilled to get their hands on the video-game industry’s regulatory controls. Since 1993, when the game Mortal Kombat was denounced in Congress by Joe Lieberman, the industry has been subject to repeated political attacks. In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, then, it’s hardly surprising that, as pundits and ideologues of all stripes shifted blame to their favorite targets in order to support their pet policy initiatives, video games made the list. On MSNBC’s Hardball recently, longtime video-game opponent Jack Thompson insisted that, despite roommates claiming never to have seen the killer playing games, the killings must have motivated by game playing.

But, like an in-game damage meter during a blistering video-game attack, the pressure was already building. Just a few days before the Virginia Tech rampage, the FTC released a report noting that the game industry’s rating system is increasingly effective, but still recommended a universal rating system and more prominent display of ratings information. And at least one congressman already had a bill dealing with game ratings in the works.

Earlier this spring, Rep. Fred Upton (R., Mich.) introduced the Video Game Decency Act, a law which would give the FTC the power to oversee privately run video-game ratings systems. The law would make it illegal for video-game companies to mislead private ratings boards — specifically the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), which currently rates most major video-game releases — in order to obtain a less restrictive rating. Anyone who’s ever seen a legislator put on his Serious Face and talk about video games before can guess that the underlying reasoning had something to with, yep, “For The Children.” The Children, of course, can’t vote, so “For The Children” usually means “For The Parents,” and in this case, Upton made that explicit. “Parents across the country will be able to breathe a sigh of relief,” he said in a statement, “as this legislation goes hand in hand with the mission of the industry’s own ratings system.”

Whole thing here.