There's Been an Accident

At least one commenter expressed confusion at my complete hatred of Crash and asked for a little more detail. To detail the film's myriad problems would require more time and energy than I have right now, but thank goodness for Matt Zoller Seitz, who gave the film a proper berating here.

Yes, I admit, the movie’s more primally exciting than, say, “American Beauty” or “A Beautiful Mind” or “The English Patient,” and more superficially “edgy.” But it’s also dumber and meaner and uglier, an Importance Machine that rolls over you like a tank. And it’s lazy and simplistically cynical about its central subject, race, in that it promulgates a false idea of how Americans express racial attitudes in public.

...[D]eep down [Haggis] doesn’t actually want to say something useful about the modern state of race relations. He just wants to be able to play with racially charged material and be acclaimed for his bravery. The up-to-the-minute realities of American racism are too subtle and elusive for Haggis and his cowriter to grasp, and require too much care to dramatize.

It's worth (re)reading the whole thing.

Fido Review at NRO

I've got a review of Fido at NRO today. I know fanboy love is with this one, but I wasn't impressed.

...Like Edward Scissorhands, Fido sees itself as suburban social satire. But who, outside the mansion-lined streets of ritzy Hollywood communities, really wants yet another movie decrying the soul-crushing conformity of suburbia? Yes, the Sopranos had an original take on the topic, but for the most part, it’s a genre that, like the residents of Willard, deserves to stay dead. Fido, though, rolls out every suburban-hell cliché in the community owner’s guide: the homes all look alike, strivers and social climbers derive status from acts of ostentatious conformity, and everyone pretends to be happy to hide frustration and dissatisfaction. Can I get a big, undead grooaaaan? Curry has simply given us a brightly colored, zombiefied American Beauty; wake me when David Lynch decides to make Blue Velvet II.

Are You or Someone You Know Inolved in Dangerous Pod Racing?

See George Lucas? See what you've done to us? We can't shake you from our lives!

According to the authors [of a study arguing that Anakin Skywalker has borderline personality disorder], who reported their findings at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in San Diego, Skywalker meets the criteria for the condition: He has difficulty controlling anger, stress-related breaks with reality (after women in his life die or leave), impulsivity (dangerous pod racing), obsession with abandonment (those women again) and a "pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of ideation and devaluation" (hello, Obi-Wan).

The diagnosis came to Bui, a Star Wars fan, as he watched the series. "I thought to myself, 'That guy is crazy.' But he's not crazy. He's borderline."

Everybody's in therapy, yeah? I look forward to the Woody Allen-directed sequel/prequel/spinoff that features Vader at the shrink's. Lucas is supposed to be developing a Star Wars TV show, right? Well, maybe he can do it Sopranos-style, and have "Annie" spill his feelings in weekly therapy sessions. It worked for gangsters, why not for Sith Lords?

Reduction

I'd just like to note how goofy, awesome, and helpful IMDB's plot keyward are. For example, I'm watching Extreme Measures on HBO. I look it up and find:

Male Rear Nudity / Male Frontal Nudity / Death / Corpse / Bum

I'm totally watching the rest now.

Fender Bender

I am fairly certain that Crash is the most pretentious, irritating, contrived, piece-of-crap movie I've ever seen.

Movies from 2005

Sometimes I miss movies when they hit the theaters, and because my video-rental habits tend toward films released a decade or more ago, I don’t tend to catch up quickly. So it is that I only just now managed to see both Junebug and The Forty Year Old Virgin.

They’re both wonderful, clever movies, in their own ways—Virgin, a loving send-up of raucous, ridiculous guy culture, with all of its odd obsessions and insecurities, Junebug, an eerie, minor-key story about family and the South.

As far as I’m concerned, Virgin is a sweeter, more mainstream update of Swingers, albeit in a slightly nerdier milieu. They’re both movies about the perpetual male drive for female conquest set against the raunchy, alcohol-infused, pop-culture obsessed world of male friendships. And they’re both essentially romantic comedies made from a guy’s perspective. In fact, most of the gross-out romantic comedy genre that we’ve seen evolve from There’s Something About Mary to The Wedding Crashers can be described this way. Virgin and Swingers are far more subtle than the rest, but they’re all more or less Julia Roberts movies—or, on the lower end, Jennifer Lopez movies—made for the ESPN set. Last summer’s The Break-Up tried to split the difference between the genders, and didn’t fall entirely on its face, but didn’t exactly succeed either.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, but it’s interesting that these guy-centric romantic comedies tend to have (or are at least perceived to have) more of a crossover audience and are generally thought to be much better movies, just in terms of cinematic quality, than their female-centric counterparts. With very few exceptions, the Julia Roberts movies and their many imitators have been largely yawned at by critics—not always trashed, but rarely much praised. Whereas even a film like Wedding Crashers—which was crudely funny and genial, but hardly great—gets a lot of fairly strong reviews.

While on this subject, I should point out that When Harry Met Sally, despite sometimes being perceived as a chick-flick, is without a doubt the best romantic comedy ever, and in no small part because it so perfectly balances the male and the female viewpoints. (And please do not try to tell me that Annie Hall should get the top spot; it’s a better movie, but it’s a different genre, a relationship comedy rather than a romantic comedy. Romantic comedies are all about the couple getting either together or back together; relationship comedies are about the entirety, or a large swath of, the relationship experience.)

But on to Junebug, which is, well… I’m not quite certain, actually, except that, as a kid who grew up in the South who has both a fondness and a distaste for the region, several of the scenes struck me as intensely accurate—and thus intensely creepy, or at least squirm-inducing. I think the most surprising thing was how well the film managed to present the South both as a strange and unsettling place, almost a foreign country within the U.S., and also a warm, generous, and perfectly normal place, one where, if you're from there, you could never think of life being any other way.

And it's that tension, between the the strange and unknown and the traditional and familiar--that pushes the film, built on so much uncertainty, forward. It’s really a lovely picture, quiet, clever in a way that isn’t designed to draw attention to itself, yet it’s also frustrating, both in what it tells us and what it refuses to tell. Why, aside from the obvious physical attraction, are Madeleine and George together? Why does Madeleine put up with George’s family—and why, for that matter, does George? How did George, who inherited much of his father’s slowness and shyness with words, make it out of the small, Southern town to begin with? The film takes pains to humanize its Southern characters, but it also doesn’t paint them as any less difficult, ornery, or just plain messed-up as they really are. David Edelstein’s Slate review is the one to read here, and he’s nearly as perplexed as I am—but he, just as I do, thinks it’s something kind of wonderful anyway.

Flock of...

I've got a piece on the much-acclaimed, long-held-from-release Killer of Sheep in The Washington Times. I probably lose all sorts of film crit and geek cred for this, but I just wasn't all that awed. I saw it twice, and though I liked it better the second time, both viewings I kept on thinking, "Well, I suppose I could come up with all sorts of lofty-sounding pablum for why this is some sort of masterpiece -- hailing it for its realism, its resistance to narrative convention, its documentary grit, its debt to the Italian neorealists -- but that's just not what I'm actually seeing." I sort of wonder if there were other critics who saw it and made the other choice.

"I'm Not Saying They're in Pre-Production, But WE. DON'T. KNOW."

Nothing to say, really, except that this may be the best thing I've ever seen. Ever.


In The Know: America Braces For New Wayans Brothers Movie



I'm not so keen on recovery prospects myself. And obviously the real threat is that we don't even know how many of them there are. Ten? A dozen? Ignoring them could easily breed more.

Giant Robot Battles

Yeah, did you just see that?

Holy frak.

I am so new-movie deprived right now, I may as well be a sheltered evangelical kid from the rural South. I haven't seen 28 Weeks Later, Pirates, or Knocked-Up. My Netflix que is getting longer, but I'm not getting anything watched. I haven't even watched the last 3 episodes of 24! You know things are hectic when you can't even make room for TV. I did see a very old Hitchcock film at MoMA this weekend: Blackmail, from 1929, the original silent version complete with live musical accompaniment. Interesting to see how, even in his earliest films, Hitchcock's signatures were as clear as in his more famous later films: the tense wrong-man scenarios, the double-crossing and psychological intrigue, the uncertainties over identity, the grand chase-scene finales atop big, monument sets. Guess there was something to that whole auteur business after all.

Me on the G.I. Film Festival

Because you really wanted to read more articles by me this week (this is four now that I've posted, I think)... I've got a piece on my Memorial Day weekend trip to the G.I. Film Festival in D.C. Here's the opening:

“Support the troops!” It was an exclamation you couldn’t miss this weekend at the first-ever G.I. Film Festival. It was everywhere: on bumper stickers, in conversations, on stage, and on screen.

It became the weekend’s all-purpose response, like saying “Jesus” at vacation Bible school. What are you here to do? Support the troops! Are you enjoying the festival so far? Yes. It supports the troops! What’d you eat for breakfast this morning? Bacon and eggs. Did I mention I support the troops? Eventually I simply started writing “STT!” in my notes every time it came up. There were variations, of course: giving back to those who serve, respecting the men and women in uniform, and, from the festival’s official statement of purpose, celebrating “the successes and sacrifices of the American military through the medium of film.” In fact, festival cofounder Brandon Millett told me that the idea for the weekend came as a reaction to an Los Angeles Times column in which Joel Stein wrote, “I don’t support the troops.”

This, then, was an appropriately powerful, American-military-style response: Joel Stein wrote a single line in a single column; he got a 22-film, three-and-a-half day festival in return. How’s that for U.S.-military might? From Friday evening through Monday night at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in downtown Washington, D.C., the troops were supported — and supported and supported and supported. And whether you were watching movies, singing songs, or meeting the many “special guests” it was, at all times, earnest, sincere, and proudly patriotic, whether in the screening room or outside of it.

Whole thing here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.