Termite Art

Matt Live Blogs THE BACHELOR Season 16, Episode 3

2012-01-16T19:58:00.073-05:00

10:00: And that's it for the liveblog for this week. See you next week in Park City. I will bring the tissues and the spiked booze that makes women instantly cry.

09:59: In the credits outtake Erica shows Ben her tattoo which is INSIDE HER FRIGGIN MOUTH. And because your mouth heals so fast SHE'S HAD THIS TATTOO DONE MULTIPLE TIMES. If they had shown this clip BEFORE the Rose Ceremony, there would not have been as much drama.

09:59: Next week, The Bachelor's going to Park City! SUNDANCE CROSS-PROMOTION, Y'ALL!

09:59: Shawntel's doing a great job of padding her reel for the next season of THE BACHELORETTE.

09:58: Even Shawntel is crying! She's only been there a few hours! Are they spiking the wine? Is there too much oxygen in the air conditioners? What is going on with these women?!?

09:57: Shawntel looks like she's really fighting the urge to say "Ben, you have some really crazy chicks in there, dude. Be careful."

09:56: She may not appear again for the rest of the season, but Shawntel's already the MVP of THE BACHELOR, Season 16. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for coming and driving all these women absolutely bonkers.

09:54: Ben does not give out the last rose. Ben you are ruining the illusion that love can be decided game show style, in an elimination format.

09:48: Erica faints. All the other women blame Shawntel. Stay classy, ladies.

09:46: Are they pumping LSD into the air of this hotel? What is happening to these women?!? They're all crying and freaking out about a man they've known for six and a half days!

09:45: Try to parse this line from Jaclyn: "On a scale of one to ten, I feel like I'm gonna throw up." I'd call that a ten.

09:44: That same contestant, Elise, also called Shawntel a "psychopath." Pot, kettle, you guys have a lot to talk about tonight.

09:43: "You don't even know her!" cries one contestant who has not gone out on a solo date with Ben about Shawntel. The lack of self-awareness is remarkable, isn't it?

09:37: One woman dismisses Shawntel as "Brad's leftovers." So now we have a new nickname for Ben: Ashley's Leftovers. #theydon'tseetheirony

09:36: What's the tagline for THE BACHELOR? If it's anything other than "THE BACHELOR: Women at their worst." it's the wrong tagline.

09:35: The cattiness of the women's reaction to Shawntel just broke my modem. For realz, I had to restart everything.

09:28: Best response to Shawntel's arrive, from Rachel: "SHUT THE FUCK UP."

09:23: Speaking of RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, this scene with Shawntel is reminding me of the scene where Caesar is dumped in the animal preserve and all the other apes freak the hell out.

09:22: "We could make cute babies," says Courtney, taking things to a really weird, weird place for her second sorta date with a guy she barely knows on a television show.

09:20: JFK used to bring Marilyn Monroe to this secret balcony, says Ben. Wait, is that definitely, absolutely true? Or is Ben speculatively defaming a dead President?

09:16: New contestant Shawntel says she's coming on THE BACHELOR because she really likes Ben and he's exactly what she wants in a guy. But she also says she fell in love with Brad. How could one woman like both of those two men? That's like having the hots for, like, Heidi Klum and Eleanor Roosevelt.

09:16: "No one knows I kissed you," says Jennifer. No one except the camera crew and the producers and all the millions of people watching at home. Other than that: no one knows. Your secret is safe.

09:14: 45 minutes left in the episode and we're already at the Rose Ceremony. The girls' toast to a "No Drama!" night does not look very promising.

09:08: Lindzi can't imagine anything ruining the night. Which is THE BACHELOR producer's cue to introduce a new contestant. NEVER GIVE THE BACHELOR PRODUCERS THE OPPORTUNITY TO IRONICALLY CUT AGAINST YOUR COMMENTS.

09:07: Ben describes Lindzi as "special" with the same tone I use to describe a good bag of potato chips. I don't forsee Lindzi making it to the finals.

09:05: You can see both of them sweating here. It has nothing to do with the date -- they're in a tiny room with probably six crew members and a ton of lights.

09:05: "She's open and honest," says Ben. FYI, "open and honest" is to THE BACHELOR as "DTF" is to JERSEY SHORE.

08:59: WIMPY CAVEMAN KISS COUNT: 7 (Lindzi)

08:58: "Where are we now?" asks Lindzi as they clearly enter Chinatown. "Chinatown," says Ben, with just a hint of exasperation.

08:56: Ben now claims he was on the fence about Brittney and he gave her the date card to figure things out. Suuuuure you did...

08:51: Wife, after Rachel says this is the best date's she's EVER been on: "Yes, the best date I've ever been on with nine other women." I mean it sounds like the best date of your life, right?

08:50: Rachel, the only girl who kissed Ben on the group date, got a rose. Coincidence? No, clearly not.

08:48: Brittney claims she doesn't deserve a chance with a guy as good as Ben. Translation: "I don't find you attractive."

08:47: Brittney says she has "invested so much into this process" which she is walking away from of her own volition after about three days and zero dates.

08:46: Brittney says these "circumstances are not for me." YOU ARE BREAKING GRANDMA SHERYL'S HEART BRITTNEY!

08:44: Ben has already kissed Kacie B. so the Kiss Count doesn't change here.

08:44: Ben has just about kissed 25% of the women on the show at this point.

08:43: WIMPY CAVEMAN KISS COUNT: 6 (Rachel)

08:43: Rachel knows she needs to "open up" to Ben to get a rose. Update to the Wimpy Caveman Kiss Count coming in 3...2...1...

08:35: Brittney, who came to the Bachelor Mansion with her grandmother, isn't excited to go on a date with Ben. If would give every dollar I have to watch this episode with her grandmother.

08:35: The out of context quote of the night on THE BACHELOR: "Butt-skiing backwards is on my leap list." -- Ben.

08:34: "This could be a dangerous date," says Ben. Well at least you made sure all the girls were properly dressed so they wouldn't get frostbite or anything! Oh. Oh wait...

08:33: For some reason they are all disrobing to ski. San Francisco, y'all.

08:32: Ben takes the group on a skiing date. BUT WHO WILL BE AFRAID OF SKIING?

08:26: "Wimpy Caveman make fire explode for Purple Dress."

08:25: Wife accurately predicts fireworks after Emily thinks nothing could be any better than the date so far. She is a steely BACHELOR veteran.

08:25: Ben has the decency not to send Emily packing after he almost made her crap herself.

08:24: "Let's cross something off our leap list," reads Ben's date card to a large group of women. Again, every one of these group dates sounds like an invitation to an orgy at the outset.

08:22: Wife: "PLEASE WIPE OFF THE LIP GLOSS."

08:21: Trying the world of online dating, Emily's matches included her older brother. THE BACHELOR producers are feverishly taking notes for Season 17.

08:21: Wife: "Ben's lip gloss looks amazing."

08:19: How the hell did they get back down?!? They glossed over that whole part of the date? What it as life-affirming as the first part? I bet it mostly involved profanity and near-death experiences.

08:15: "HOLY SHIT! IT'S JAMES FRANCO AND CAESAR AND THE SUPER-INTELLIGENT APES!" cries someone in my dream version of this BACHELOR episode.

08:14: WIMPY CAVEMAN KISS COUNT: 5 (Emily)

08:13: Meanwhile, back at the Bachelorette penthouse, Jennifer randomly finds them on the bridge via a telescope. If you buy that one I have some swamp land in Florida to sell you.

08:13: Emily's having a "romantic" panic attack as she "romantically" almost dies.

08:12: Having weird fantasies of a BACHELOR/X-MEN: THE LAST STAND crossover.

08:11: "Things like conquering your fears can only make a relationship stronger," says Ben, who's clearly drank THE BACHELOR Kool-Aid. NO IT DOESN'T. MAKING A WOMAN ENACT THE WAY SHE IS AFRAID OF DYING IS CRUEL, NOT ROMANTIC.

08:10: "I don't know how you deal with heights," lies Ben as he announces their date climb up the Bay Bridge.

08:09: Poor Emily gets dropped off a mile away from Ben and has to run to him. Why didn't they drop her off right next to him? That's not nice.

08:06: Emily worries she's going to pee her pants on her date. I'm sure I speak on behalf of everyone at ABC when I say we've got our fingers crossed for her.

08:02: Ben says he lives in San Francisco. But last week he lived in Sonoma. Truly, he is a man of the world.

08:01: Again, this is a show that's supposedly about romance. How romantic is it to take a woman on a date that exposes and exploits her deepest fears?

08:01:...aaaaand the woman he picked is afraid of heights. A BACHELOR SHOCKER!

08:00: Ben takes a date on a climb of the Bay Bridge. How much you want to bet he picks a woman afraid of heights to go on the date with him.

PREVIOUS BACHELOR LIVE BLOGS
Episode 2
Episode 1

Matt Live Blogs THE BACHELOR Season 16, Episode 2

2012-01-09T19:34:00.069-05:00

10:00: The credit outtakes are cops driving past Ben's date with Kacie B. They were out looking for all the missing people from Sonoma.

09:59: "Next week on THE BACHELOR (apparently) -- women street skiing in their underwear!"

09:57: Jenna's theory of where it went wrong? "These other girls distracted him!" Yes, distracted him with their ability to form complete sentences and not burst into tears for no reason whatsoever.

09:54: When Ben dramatically pauses during the Rose Ceremony, I always assume he's fumbling for a name.

09:51: Jenna is incapable of controlling her face. I'm going to miss her.

09:44: Wife: "You're right Blakeley, you didn't do this for attention. You didn't curl up in a ball in a corner and cry with the cameras around until Ben came to cheer you up for attention."

09:43: I love that this woman had the courage to wear a blue screen as a dress. That's one way to get remembered. Or to have a space field super-imposed on your torso.

09:42: Courtney looks like she's modeling a glass of red wine. Look at the way she poses with it whenever she's on camera.

09:40: Jenna is setting new BACHELOR records for most breakdowns per episode.

09:39: "I feel like I'm a guy," says Jenna. Nuff said.

09:38: Crazy Jenna has been a no-show this whole episode. Within three seconds of appearing, she's almost lit a blanket on fire. Thank God she's back.

09:30: Blakeley, who has a rose, steals Ben from Samantha, who does not. In the world of THE BACHELOR, this is an offense tantamount to child molestation.

09:29: We're trying to guess which girls are getting sent home based on the ugliness of their dresses.

09:28: "I haven't felt like this in a long time," is another variation of a popular BACHELORism.

09:28: Lindzi is deeply excited that Ben remembers her name. On THE BACHELOR, this is what qualifies as playing hard to get.

09:27: This Rose Ceremony was Brought to You By Pacific Sun Spray Tan.

09:21: Women in the room not at all surprised Ben's interested in Courtney. When else is he going to get a chance to date a model?

09:21: Courtney is staring at Ben's rose the way Kirby stares at a piece of duck jerky: "I don't care what you're saying. Just shut up and give it to me."

09:20: He's kissing Courtney again. For clarity's sake, the Kiss Count is just counting the number of women he makes out with, not individual kisses.

09:19: Why is Courtney still single? "She's picky," she says. She doesn't like guys that don't come with their own camera crew.

09:18: Ben talks about being open again. It's part of the journey.

09:17: Everything on THE BACHELOR is bathed in the same weird, orange light.

09:15: Wife intrigued by commercial for ABC show SHARK TANK until we explained it's not about people actually getting into a shark tank.

09:12: WIMPY CAVEMAN KISS COUNT: 4 (Courtney)

09:11: When your wife randomly says she needs to get her eyebrows done while you're watching TV, that means a woman on TV has really good eyebrows (Courtney, in this case).

09:11: Wife: "If you'd brought a dog on our first date, I would have said I love you much faster."

09:10: Courtney says she hasn't been on a date in a while. Why? "I was just doing me." Do I even need to make the joke here? I don't, right?

09:07: Date #3 of the night is in a wooded area. Kinda looks like the setting of THE EVIL DEAD. I'm really excited.

09:00: Ben picks Blakeley because they had a great conversation. By conversation he means dry hump session.

08:59: BREAKING: The CDC has issued an herpes outbreak alert for the city of Sonoma.

08:59: WIMPY SLUTTY CAVEMAN KISS COUNT: 3 (Blakeley)

08:56: WIMPY CAVEMAN KISS COUNT: 2 (Jennifer)

08:54: Blakeley's breasts appear to float above the water, as if made of some kind of buoyant material. The wife spotted that one.

08:50: Courtney receives the other solo date. Courtney describes herself as competitive and likes to win. The show should put John Carpenter's music from HALLOWEEN under everything she says.

08:49: These women waiting back at the Bachelor Mansion have been alone for less than a day and they're already losing their minds. That's really exciting.

08:48: "This process is really hard, and its taxing," says Jaclyn. No, it really isn't, Jaclyn.

08:46: Blakeley, the VIP Cocktail Waitress, really wants that rose. I recommend taking Ben to the champagne room.

08:40: Any THE BACHELOR drinking game would definitely need to involve shots any time the word "journey" is uttered by one of the contestants.

08:39: Ben the Sheep is now stripping in front a room full of children. "From executive producer Jerry Sandusky comes an all-new season of THE BACHELOR!"

08:38: Ben is now dressed like a sheep, which actually presents a really useful metaphor for the way these women blindly fall in love with him without actually getting to know him.

08:36: Is Ben's character named Prince Penis? Oh, Pinot. I guess that makes more sense.

08:32: Oh, so here's where everyone in town went. The Bachelor kidnapped everyone and sent them to this Community Theatre where they were forced to watch this terrible play.

08:30: If a man took you on a date with 9 other women, made you belittle yourself in front of children and dressed you up in infantile costumes, and there weren't cameras around, what would YOU do?

08:29: One of the girls says she's seen a whole other side of Ben on this date. She has spent maybe 4 minutes with him and said a total of eight words.

08:28: When a kid tells you to be a gingerbread man, you are totally in the right to tell that child to shut their goddamn mouths.

08:27: All the women are terrible actresses. I'm pretty sure the producers put this scene in to prove the show is not staged.

08:26: Ben says some of the roles in the play the women will be made to perform will be better than others. And so the degradation for his love begins.

08:25: Deep in the background of that shot, I saw one person in Sonoma. Phew. The zombies haven't eaten everyone yet.

08:21: WIMPY CAVEMAN KISS COUNT: 1 (Kacie B.)

08:19: Kacie B. keeps talking about opening Ben up. Again, it's really hard not to make orgy jokes here, guys.

08:18: Wimpy Caveman miss Dad.

08:18: Yeah this is just what I like to do on my first dates. Show my girl videos of my junk when I was a baby.

08:16: Next, Ben takes Kacie B. to an empty movie theater. Again, there are absolutely no signs of life anywhere in this town. If someone reading this right now lives in Sonoma, I'd appreciate an email just to let me know you guys are okay out there.

08:15: Ben wants to do THE BACHELOR again because it worked once for him. If it worked once, would he still be a bachelor?

08:14: "Come play with me," says Ben to ten women via a card. It is so hard for me not to make orgy jokes about this. I sincerely hope you all appreciate the effort I'm making here.

08:12: "I looking for someone who can be a part of this life," says Ben. So Kacie B. better have her own line producer, I guess.

08:08: Seriously: where is everyone? It's like a TWILIGHT ZONE episode in Sonoma.

08:06: Kacie B. says Ben puts her in touch with things she hasn't felt in a long time. Like, for example, her desire for reality television stardom.

08:05: The streets of Sonoma are completely deserted. This restaurant is empty. Don't you want to live here forever, Kacie B.?

08:04: Kacie B. gets the first date card. Not Casey. Kacie. You have to have a weirdly spelled name to be a Bachelorette.

08:02: 2 minutes in, Ben has already invoked the memory of his dead father. Exploit that pain, Ben!

07:36: A random observation before we begin, courtesy our guests for tonight's viewing of ~~BIG LOVE: THE REALITY SESRIES~~ THE BACHELOR: Season 16 Bachelor Ben Flajnik looks like "a wimpy caveman." Yes. Yes he does.

PREVIOUS BACHELOR LIVE BLOGS
Episode 1

Listgasm: 2011 Edition

2012-01-05T22:33:00.014-05:00

To please the tyrannical overlord at Tativille, Michael J. Anderson, I hereby include another top ten films o' the year list. To keep from rehashing most of the same titles, this one will be of worldwide premieres in 2011, not U.S releases (hence the difference from my epoch-shaking list for Indiewire). Then, due to overwhelming internet demand (specifically, this guy), I will not-so-humbly unfurl my favorite albums of the year. Finally, this impossibly erotic post will end with some quotes from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, because that's just what happens in these situations.

Films

1. The Tree of Life (Terence Malick)

2. This Is Not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmbasb and Jafar Panahi)

3. Words of Mercury (Jerome Hiler)

4. Dreileben (Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhausler)

5. House of Pleasures (aka L'Apollonide, Bertrand Bonello)

6. Hugo (Martin Scorsese)

7. Mildred Pierce (Todd Haynes)

8. The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne)

9. It's the Earth, Not the Moon (Goncalo Tocha)

10. The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr)

Honorable Mentions: The Three Musketeers, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Two Years At Sea

The Best Acting by Milla Jovovich Award: Milla Jovovich in The Three Musketeers

Albums

1. Craig Taborn - Avenging Angel

2. Hayes Carll - KMAG YOYO

3. tUnEyArDs - w h o k i l l

4. Dave King Trucking Company - Good Old Light

5. Don Trip and Starlito - Step Brothers

6. Pistol Annies - Hell on Heels

7. Krallice - Diotima

8. Merle Haggard - Working in Tennessee

9. Mastodon - The Hunter

10. Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Chapter One, Gens de Couleur Libres

Quotes From Pessoa's Book of Disquiet that made me nod in snobbish approval during 2011:

"Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror" -Chapter 49

"Civilization consists in giving something a name that doesn't belong to it and then dreaming over the result" - Chapter 66, "With a Shrug"

"I'm so isolated I can feel the distance between me and my suit" - Chapter 83

"Only landscapes that don't exist and books I'll never read aren't tedious." -Chapter 122

"Good deeds are impositions; that's why I categorically abhor them." -Chapter 208

"To belong is synonymous with banality." -Chapter 236

"To be a retired major seems to me ideal. Too bad it's not possible to have eternally been nothing but a retired major" - Chapter 244

Matt Live Blogs THE BACHELOR Season 16, Episode 1

2012-01-02T19:56:00.073-05:00

FINAL THOUGHTS: Well, the Bachelorettes are suitably unbalanced, but I worry that Ben is not. Brad Womack was a giant mimbo, but he had a weird quirky personality -- or maybe the weird quirky absence of a personality that comes with years of therapy and on camera coaching. Ben is a little too normal. Maybe he was nervous, maybe he's not a good conversationalist, but he just didn't look particularly comfortable, or even that happy, hanging out with the women. He made a good Bachelor contestant on THE BACHELORETTE because he was a nice guy, and a welcome change from the super-intense, super-macho dudes who made up the rest of the cast. But as *THE* Bachelor he needs more personality.

10:00: I love that they're teasing the possibility that Ben could propose to a woman and she will say no. The show is about finding love, guys! That's what it's about!

09:59: There's always one girl who is very different around Ben than she is around the girls. Always.

09:57: Repeated references to "claws coming out." THE DARK KNIGHT RISES should consider a cross-promotion.

09:57: Ben has kissed a lot of women in this montage already.

09:53: Holy shit, the episode is over at just 9:52? So the "This Season on THE BACHELOR" montage is going to be 4 minutes long?!?

09:52: The sun is coming up on Bachelor Mansion. Who doesn't love a 15 hour cocktail party with one member of the opposite sex?!?

09:50: Amber B. leaves with dignity and class. In other words, she has no place on this show.

09:50: Head tip, no talk, walkby girl did not get a rose. The Wife is pleased.

09:48: BOOM. Totally called it. Jenna gets the last rose. Ben looks nervous hugging her.

09:47: We're not halfway through the rose ceremony and Jenna's already choking back tears. I suspect the producers have talked Ben into giving her the final rose just to see what she does on Week 2 of the show.

09:46: GRANDMA SHERYL FTW!!!

09:45: The "VIP Cocktail Waitress" gets a rose. Good. I want to hear more about her job.

09:43: It's fun to watch the Rose Ceremony and look for women you haven't seen at all on the show. Those are the women he isn't going to pick.

09:42: Jenna: "I preach not looking back. That's what I say in my blog!" Are we sure she's not just on the show to drive traffic to whatever the heck her blog was called?

09:35: Lindsay gets the First Impression Rose. She got it by riding in to the Bachelor Mansion on the horse. I like that this sounds like a joke, but it is, in fact, what actually happened on the show.

09:34: When a Bachelorette goes and hides in the bathroom and breaks down in tears, I imagine the entire BACHELOR production staff high fiving and cheering in video village.

09:32: Jenna's face is doing weird EXORCIST-y things. It's making me uncomfortable.

09:30: Monica vs Jenna is like someone set up an experiment to see who would win: Drunk or Crazy. So far, Drunk's dominating.

09:29: She says no.

09:28: Jenna offers to share a tampon with Monica as a peace offering. I don't know much about the female anatomy, hold on, I'm going to ask The Wife if women actually do that.

09:27: Monica's smile makes Jenna "sick." I can't wait to see what happens if Monica laughs.

09:25: Wife: "How do they pick the crazy ones? Don't they have a screening process? Do they look in their medicine cabinets for bipolar medication or something?"

09:20: Wife says Monica is the big winner of this year's Guess Which Bachelorette is the Drunkest. Tell Monica what she's won, Chris Harrison!

09:19: Just blue skying here. What would happen if instead of the Bachelor Mansion, one season of THE BACHELOR was filmed in Alcatraz? And instead of roses, Ben gave out homemade shanks?

09:17: Courtney was really struck when Ben said "I'm available." As opposed to him saying "I'm unavailable," I guess. That would be not so cool. She's just your average Italian Scottish Native American model.

09:17: Emily's not just an epidemiologist. She's a RAPPING epidemiologist. Who raps about epidemiology. Ladies and gentlemen, the best show on television.

09:16: ...or maybe what she REALLY does for a living...

09:15: Blakely has me wondering what exactly a "VIP Cocktail Waitress" does for a living.

09:07: Wife spots another popular BACHELORism: "I haven't felt this way in a long time," spoken by Sheryl's granddaughter.

09:06: Grandma Sheryl seems sweet now, but if she doesn't get a rose...

09:05: Grandma Sheryl is the next star of THE BACHELORETTE or I walk.

09:03: During this part of every BACHELOR premiere I like to play a little game. It's called Guess Which Bachelorette is The Drunkest. Feel free to play along.

09:02: The campfire budget on THE BACHELOR must be INSANE.

09:01: I never thought I'd say this in my life but: I miss Brad Womack.

08:54: Okay, now's when it gets good. 25 women drinking heavily and trying to one-up one another.

08:51: An alarming number of these women are struck speechless by Ben. Me: "He's not that good looking, right?" Wife: "He's cute!" :::awkward silence:::

08:51: Wife: "Oh no, she's got the head tip! Anna, I hate you."

08:48: Still mulling what I would say to impress The Bachelor. I know what would be the worst thing to say: his address, as you carefully caress a hunting knife.

08:46: Wife, on my last comment: "I flashed you pretty early on. I got a rose, didn't I?"

08:44: Always surprised none of the Bachelorettes flash the Bachelor. You're guaranteed a rose, right?

08:42: Brittany brought her grandmother Sheryl out to stack the deck in her favor, which provides us with the out-of-context quote of the night from Ben: "I love grandmas."

08:41: I believe that contestant called herself She-Ra. She made a wine joke. I would have gone with a Princess of Power reference.

08:38: Ooh, an epidemiologist. She gives Ben some Purell. Just what I'd want in a woman: she comes with her own hand sanitzer!

08:37: As a reminder, all 25 women are all here to date this one guy. THE BACHELOR would be a very different show if it was shot in Utah.

08:36: Every BACHELOR season has at least one or two crazies. Wife's calling Jenna as an early favorite for crazy. She's a blogger, so she's already halfway there.

08:34: Each Bachelorette has just a few seconds to say hello and make an impression. This woman just decided to use that time to compare herself to a)pork products and b)Canadian pork products. I don't envision big things for her.

08:34: Erica's dress was so bad, my wife just ordered her to get back in her limo and go home.

08:33: "Let the journey begin," says Chris Harrison. I was thinking more whatever they say to start the running of the bulls in Spain.

08:27: Phrase people only say on THE BACHELOR: "It opened me up." Other phrases inordinately popular on THE BACHELOR: "I feel like I'm finally ready for love again," and the ever-popular, "I'm not here to make friends."

08:26: Second time Chris Harrison has mentioned how hard it is to get down on one knee and propose. Way to keep twisting that knife, dude.

08:19: "The next time I get married," says Nicki, "It will be forever." Not if you have any hopes of winning THE BACHELOR, Nicki.

08:18: Shawn, the stockbroker, cares deeply about her work. And she wears low-cut blouses while caring deeply about her work. An early favorite.

08:17:Wife, on one of the Bachelorettes: "She looked prettier from farther away."

08:15: Jamie hasn't met Ben yet, but she's already fantasizing about having babies with him. The laid-back approach, I like it.

08:14: Bachelorette Courtney is introduced peeping at bathers on the Santa Monica Pier. Odd.

08:12: Bachelorette Amy is a shotgun enthusiast. For years, I've been saying a season of THE BACHELOR would end in bloodshed. So I'm very excited about Amy.

08:11:First Bachelorette is Lindzi. That's actually how it's spelled.

08:10: "It takes a lot for a man to get down on one knee and ask him to marry him," says BACHELOR host Chris Harrison. In fact, THE BACHELOR sort of proves the opposite.

08:06: The coming tonight clip teases lesbian Bachelorettes. Ah romance...

08:05: The wife observes that Ben has had his eyebrows manscaped. Can't be The Bachelor with unsightly facial hair.

08:04: Four minutes in, we get our first mention of a dead relative. Surely not the last. Probably not the last in the first ten minutes of the show.

08:03: The Bachelor is wearing a neon orange t-shirt. He's all yours, 25 crazy women.

08:01: Your new Bachelor is Ben, who proposed to a woman he hardly knew on last season of THE BACHELORETTE. She said no. Now he's THE BACHELOR. My gut says he's doing it primarily out of spite.

07:58: Here we go. If you're wondering why I'm doing this, read this piece about the best/worst show on television.

Now it's time to play: Travel Channel Show or Gay Porn?

2011-12-25T22:02:00.005-05:00

Sounds simple right? It is.

I'm going to give you a list of titles. You tell me whether it's the name of a show that airs this week on Travel Channel or it's the name of a gay porn I found in the alley behind the library. Ready? Then it's time to play:

Travel Channel Show or Gay Porno!
-Big Beef Paradise
-Man Vs. Food
-The Layover: Singapore
-No Reservations: Montana
-Off Limits: Arizona
-Vegas Exposed
-Vegas Insiders
-Las Vegas: Adults Only
-Las Vegas: Sucker Bets
-Extreme Alaskan Adventures
-Extreme Miami Hotspots
-Extreme Playtime
-Extreme Resorts
-Extreme Truck Stops
-Extreme Bathrooms

Could you spot the gay porn? No, you couldn't. That's because there was no gay porn. Those are all actual Travel Channel shows. Even Off Limits: Arizona.

Thanks for playing. Tell them what they've won Johnny!

Ranking All 52 of DC Comics' New #1s

2011-10-12T01:47:00.004-04:00

Last month, DC Comics embarked on an unprecedented experiment. They cancelled all their ongoing titles and restarted them all with new #1s. The "DCnU" -- as it's colloquially known -- consists of 52 brand new series. I've read them all. Here's how I rate them, starting at the top with my favorites (the books that everyone should read) and working my way down to my least favorites (the books that everyone should avoid like a techno-organic virus) Here we go:

1. All-Star Western
2. Swamp Thing
3. Batwoman
4. Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E.
5. Batman
6. Action Comics
7. Resurrection Man
8. Justice League Dark
9. Wonder Woman
10. Batwing
11. Nightwing
12. The Flash
13. Captain Atom
14. Aquaman
15. Teen Titans
16. OMAC
17. Green Arrow
18. Green Lantern
19. Voodoo
20. Birds of Prey
21. Animal Man
22. Justice League
23. Stormwatch
24. Batgirl
25. Green Lantern Corps
26. Justice League International
27. Batman & Robin
28. Blackhawks
29. Superman
30. Suicide Squad
31. Men of War
32. Superboy
33. Mister Terrific
34. Supergirl
35. Deathstroke
36. Static Shock
37. The Fury of Firestorm
38. The Savage Hawkman
39. Blue Beetle
40. Legion of Super-Heroes
41. Demon Knights
42. Red Lanterns
43. Batman: The Dark Knight
44. I, Vampire
45. Green Lantern: New Guardians
46. Detective Comics
47. DC Universe Presents
48. Grifter
49. Legion Lost
50. Catwoman
51. Hawk and Dove
52. Red Hood and the Outlaws

I kind of wish I had time to write more about these books because I've actually got a lot to say about some of them and about the entire line-wide reboot in general, but I just don't have the time. If you've got specific questions or thoughts about my list, leave a comment and I will definitely try to respond with more details. In the meantime, here are some "awards" for the #1s (and just the #1s -- the quality of the second issues could change the outlook for a lot of books):

Most Dramatic Reboot: Stormwatch
Least Dramatic Reboot: Legion of Super-Heroes
Smartest Reboot: Green Arrow
Dumbest Reboot: The Fury of Firestorm
Most Confusing Reboot: Red Hood and the Outlaws
Best Art on the Worst Book: DC Universe Presents
Worst Art on the Best Book: Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E.
Biggest Disappointment: Justice League
Most Pleasant Surprise: Justice League Dark
Most Overrated: Demon Knights
Most Underrated: Teen Titans
Best Costume Redesign: Nightwing
Worst Costume Redesign: Deathstroke
Sleepers To Keep Your Eye On: OMAC, Superboy, Voodoo

Discovery

2011-09-03T14:29:00.005-04:00

A portrait of a hack at a young age. Click repeatedly and angrily to enlarge.

My Darkest Secret

2011-08-09T15:36:00.006-04:00

Look closely at this excerpt from an episode of Nickelodeon's game show LEGENDS OF THE HIDDEN TEMPLE, and you will see me doing an incredible impression of The Nerdiest 12-Year-Old in the History of Western Civilization.

EDIT: I've added another, slightly sharper copy to help your investigations.

The Medal of Sir Edmund Hillary Part 1 by jpatterson22

FURTHER EDIT: Here's a hint. Four words: Crowd shot, fanny pack.

Did you find me? God I hope not. I should bury all existing footage of this thing in the Hidden Temple.

Never let an idiot like me play with stuff like this...

2011-07-16T12:55:00.006-04:00

...because this is what I wind up doing with it:

He doesn't care that you're happy to see him fail.

2011-06-13T00:50:00.000-04:00

LeBron's answer to the question "Does it bother you that so many people are happy to see you fail?"

"Absolutely not, cause at the end of the day all the people that was rooting on me to fail -- at the end of the day, they gotta wake up tomorrow, have the same life that they had before they woke up today. Same personal problems they had today. And I'm gonna continue to live the way I want to live, and continue to do the things that I want to do, with me and my family, and be happy with that. And they can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal but they gotta get back to the real world at some point."

An Invitation

2011-02-11T18:56:00.002-05:00

Dear People Who Have Eyeballs-

If you've enjoyed me talking about movies in the past, I'd like to extend an invitation to join me for an experiment in a new way (for me at least) of talking about movies.

Next Wednesday, February 16th at 10pm eastern, my Gymkommentary buddy, Chris Moreno, and I will hold a live movie chat on UStream. Our plan is to do an informal review and conversation about the new cave-diving movie SANCTUM and then to take phone calls over Skype from you, the people who have eyeballs, about any movie-related topic you may want to discuss. At this point, all this is is an experiment. This is not a "new podcast" or "new show" or anything like this. This is just me and Chris trying something out. But we really hope you'll join us -- and if it goes well? Who knows.

We'll give the details of our Skype call-in info during the actual show, but if you want to bookmark the page THIS IS THE LINK TO BOOKMARK. The name of the show means nothing. It is all my feeble brain could think of late Friday afternoon after a very long week.

Hope to see you next Wednesday night at 10pm eastern. Bring your eyeballs. And your earballs.

Wait, what?

Sincerely and with great optimism for the future of humanity,
Matt Singer

(NOTE: Because this is an experiment and because we have absolutely no idea what we're doing technologically speaking, Chris and I reserve the right for this all to go horribly, embarrassingly poorly. Come prepared with that knowledge. But also come knowing if it does go ass up, it'll probably be super funny to watch.)

2010

2011-01-04T02:49:00.003-05:00

For new releases with distribution in the U.S., I posted my ten best list at Indiewire here. However, I got to go hog wild with an 11-spot for Michael J. Anderson's site Ten Best Films. There I wasn't limited by distribution - it's just the eleven films I saw at festivals and/or regular screenings that stuck with me the longest. I should have posted that sure-to-be-legendary list here, but I was being reliably lazy and simply e-mailed it to him. So here we are, uncomfortably close to each other, baring our tastes and lacy undergarments. But I'm not done! Yes, I'm also going to copy Singer's "best older films" I saw this year as well, because I can (get excited! it's really about to happen!):

5. Kid Auto Race at Venice (1914), on the necessary for organic life CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE box set.

4. The Last Flight (1931), directed by William Dieterle, the cheeriest Lost Generation drunken escapade you'll ever deign to watch. On the Warner Archive, my lover and enemy.

3. The Strawberry Blonde (1941), directed by Raoul Walsh. James Cagney, justifying the invention of sound film. Also leveraged my Walsh interest into a full blown obsession.

2. Three Good Friends, (1930), directed by Wilhelm Thiele. I was walking on air after exiting the theater. Musical buddy comedies that break the fourth wall don't come any crazier or fizzier than this. Fell deeply in lust with Lilian Harvey with this one.

1. Cluny Brown (1946), directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Holy shit go see this movie somehow. It's on YouTube. Contains characters you want to kidnap and store in your jacket pocket. Also: confirms that foolishness is next to godliness.

God: How Green Was My Valley (1941), directed by John Ford. Wait, I hadn't seen this yet? What the fuck is wrong with me? Immortal. Like God. Hence the designation.

Singer's Best of 2010

2011-01-02T17:05:00.007-05:00

Published in conjuction with Tativille and Ten Best Films' Mini-Poll, here are my favorite films of 2010. My complete list, along with my thoughts on each film, is on IFC.com. In abridged, comment-free form, my picks are:

1)Alamar
2)Mother
3)Black Swan
4)Winter's Bone
5)Exit Through the Gift Shop
6)The Social Network
7)Sweetgrass
8)Blue Valentine
9)Dogtooth
10)I'm Still Here

Honorable mentions in alphabetical order: Catfish, Cyrus, Everyone Else, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, The King's Speech, NY Export: Opus Jazz, The Other Guys, Splice, Tiny Furniture

By my count, I saw 137 "new" movies in 2010, twelve less than I saw in 2009. I saw 255 older films, almost exactly as many as last year (when I saw 260). As always, here's a list of the best older films I saw for the first time in 2010:

5)Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971)
4)The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
3)The Duellists (Ridley Scott, 1977)
2)The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, 1962)
1)The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973)

And, last and certainly least, a hale and hearty salute to my favorite so-bad-they're-good discoveries of 2010:

3)Death Wish 3 (Michael Winner, 1985)
2)She (Avi Nesher, 1982)
1)L.A. Streetfighters (Richard Park, 1985)

Am I crazy...

2010-12-30T20:25:00.004-05:00

...or do Daniel Craig and Thor look like they just broke up?

30 Movies For My 30th Birthday

2010-12-23T13:46:00.002-05:00

Today is my 30th birthday. Out curiosity (and as a way to stave off deep existential angst), I posed myself a question: what are the thirty films released in my lifetime most important to me personally? In assembling this list, I tired to intellectualize it as little as possible: I paid no mind to whether a movie is widely beloved or hated, whether it was a box office success and a cultural touchstone or a financial flop and a forgotten cult object. I simply started typing. Here were the results, in alphabetical order:

"Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" (Adam McKay, 2004)
"Army of Darkness" (Sam Raimi, 1992)
"Back to the Future" (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
"Before Sunrise" (Richard Linklater, 1985)
"Blow Out" (Brian De Palma, 1981)
"Boogie Nights" (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)
"Clerks." (Kevin Smith, 1994)
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (Julian Schnabel, 2007)
"Finding Nemo" (Andrew Stanton, 2003)
"Ghostbusters" (Ivan Reitman, 1984)
"Goodfellas" (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
"Gymkata" (Robert Clouse, 1985)
"Hard Boiled" (John Woo, 1992)
"High Fidelity" (Stephen Frears, 2000)
"L.A. Confidential" (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
"Mulholland Dr." (David Lynch, 2001)
"My Winnipeg" (Guy Maddin, 2008)
"The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad" (David Zucker, 1988)
"No Country For Old Men" (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
"Pulp Fiction" (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
"The Room" (Tommy Wiseau, 2003)
"Spaceballs" (Mel Brooks, 1987)
"The Terminator" (John Cameron, 1984)
"There Will Be Blood" (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
"The Thing" (John Carpenter, 1982)
"This is Spinal Tap" (Rob Reiner, 1984)
"Total Recall" (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)
"Trainspotting" (Danny Boyle, 1996)
"Videodrome" (David Cronenberg, 1983)
"Zodiac" (David Fincher, 2007)

Once I assembled the list I looked at it closer. I was surprised how evenly the films were split between the decades of my life -- 11 from the 80s, 9 from the 90s, 10 from the 00s -- and by the mixture of high-brow art pictures and low-brow schlock.

Does this list have any value to anyone other than me? Rob Gordon from "High Fidelity," one of the films from my list, would say that what really matters in this world is what you like, not what you are like. In which case, those thirty films represent a pretty decent window into who I am on December 23, 2010.

All I'm saying is...

2010-11-10T15:59:00.002-05:00

...I think I have what it takes for that gig.

Matt on VYou

2010-11-09T20:19:00.001-05:00

From this cool new website VYou, ask me questions and watch my video responses.

Nine (2009)

2010-08-26T17:17:00.004-04:00

"Nine" is a musical about a movie director who's out of ideas. Its director is Rob Marshall and maybe he was out of ideas too, since he chose to film "Nine"'s musical numbers in an almost identical fashion to his last musical, 2002's "Chicago." Is Marshall's choice a commentary on the creative bankruptcy of his protagonist or just plain old creative bankruptcy? It's fun to argue the former but hard to believe it's anything but the latter.

As inspired by Fellini's masterpiece "8 1/2," "Nine" follows "Maestro" Guido Contini (Daniel Day Lewis) as he assembles his latest picture, which will be called "Italia" and star his muse Claudia Jenssen (Nicole Kidman). The only problem is, "Italia" is a production without a script, a problem that also plagues "Nine," a gorgeous collection of people and sets and costumes all beautifully photographed by Dion Beebe with very little to admire in the ways of story or dialogue (Again, metatextually, this movie is a near perfect blend of style and content). The women, appealing as they are, basically sit around singing about how much they love Guido, while Guido wanders around moping and whining. His story is supposed to be tragic, I guess, but it's hard to work up much sympathy for a wealthy, successful, popular filmmaker who spends all his time sleeping around with hot chicks just because he can't decide what to write about.

Instead of channeling Fellini or Marcello Mastroianni (who managed to make that "dilemma" genuinely sympathetic in "8 1/2"), Day Lewis appears to have prepared for his role by watching lots and lots of "CSI: Miami," studying the way David Caruso takes on and puts off his sunglasses for dramatic effect. I'm not sure why he decided to go with a Bela Lugosi accent, either. When he sings, it sounds like outtakes from Jason Segel's Dracula puppet musical from "Forgetting Sarah Marshall."

Kirby, Age 8.5 Months

2010-08-06T01:13:00.006-04:00

(Photos by Me, Melissa Singer, and Nikki Bramley)

Great Shots: The Lost Weekend

2010-07-09T22:34:00.005-04:00

Ray Milland is an alcoholic looking for a bottle he hid in his apartment while he was drunk. Now sober and frantic, he tosses his place looking for it. And where is it...?

Inside that light fixture framed into this shot. Awesome. The Lost Weekend is melodrama, but it is melodrama done RIGHT.

Something tells me this isn't an authorized use of Nicolas Cage's likeness.

2010-06-24T23:58:00.003-04:00

(Thanks to the great Robin Enrico for the screengrab.)

Kevin Costner vs. The Dirt Mound

2010-06-16T02:09:00.002-04:00

Kevin Costner's not just saving the Gulf from BP, ladies and gentlemen. He's saving all of us from the evil creatures of a dirt mound.

Look, they can't all be impressive. If you write this week's DTV column on IFC.com, they will come.

Have you seen The Eric Roberts Surprise Face?

2010-06-05T11:27:00.004-04:00

No? Well then you're not reading my new column, Disc Covering, on IFC.Com. Go there immediately. But just so you know I'm not making it up:

This is a real shot from a real movie (though calling the 72 minute direct-to-DVD train wreck Enemies Among Us a "real" movie may be too generous). I did not doctor it or edit it. And it's not out of context; Eric Roberts is not about to eat a giant ice cream sundae and didn't want to get any on his lips. He just made The Eric Roberts Surprise Face. He's a good actor.

Termite (Sequential) Art: Jack Kirby's The Losers

2010-05-15T01:43:00.010-04:00

Yeah, it's a film blog. Guess what: I like comics too.

Decades after World War II, legendary comics artist Jack Kirby -- best known as the co-creator of The Fanastic Four and The X-Men with Stan Lee - still had nightmares about it. A seemingly routine assignment to one of DC's war series in 1974 gave Kirby the forum to put those nightmares to paper and resulted in some of the most personal and powerful comics of his career. The book was Our Fighting Forces, home to The Losers, a platoon of misfit World War II soldiers created by writer Robert Kanigher in 1970 (their name would get repurposed in 2002 for an unrelated Veritgo comic which served as the source material for this year's action film of the same name).

At the time, Kirby was required under the terms of his exclusive contract to DC to write, draw, and edit fifteen pages of comics art a week, about as insane a deadline as you could possibly have (today, many extremely popular and successful comics artists struggle to draw -- and just draw -- fifteen pages a month). Most would crack under that kind of pressure; according to the introduction to the hardcover collection of Kirby's OMAC: One Man Army Corps, the pressure to keep up with Kirby was too great for his regular inker, Mike Royer, who quit to escape the endless grind. Kirby, though, channeled that stress, refracted it through his nightmares, to create one of the most urgent, anxiety-laden comics I've ever read.

The de facto mode of comics was, during Kirby's heyday, action and adventure. More than almost any artist in the medium's history, Kirby had a gift for using the language of comics -- pacing, panel size, sound effects -- to evoke excitement in the reader. But where most of Kirby's work is escapist -- and with his flair for elaborate mythologies, alien races, and grand, otherworldy vistas, it's often a literal escape -- Our Fighting Forces applies those skills to horrify readers instead of entertain them. Instead of granting us escape, it traps us in the sweaty frenzy of war. Consider this page from Kirby's best Losers story, "A Small Place in Hell," from Our Fighting Forces #152:

In the story, the Losers have wandered into a town they think the Allies have captured for a little R&R. Instead, the village is a Nazi stronghold where they're quickly surrounded and heavily outnumbered. Note the way Kirby pins that soldier to the corner of panel three with the exaggerated muzzle flash and the enormous sound effect (of his own scream), creating a sense of claustrophobia and tension. Also notice the absolute chaos of the last panel, which is choked with soldiers, and bullets. Every single centimeter of available space is covered, conveying the idea that The Losers have nowhere to run or hide.

There are a couple questionable choices -- I would love to know the thinking that went into the creation of The Losers' nemesis "Panama Fattie" -- but there are also more than half-a-dozen outstanding issues in Kirby's year-long run (now collected in a gorgeous hardcover) that reject the glamorous, consequence-free violence of most comics for the bleak realities of war. Interestingly, with the exception of one two-part storyline, there are no connections between any of Kirby's issues of Our Fighting Forces. One mission might be set in Europe, the next in the Pacific. As to how The Losers get from one place to the other, the book offers no explanation. Nightmares rarely do.

(The scan from OFF #152 is taken from this impressive analysis of the issue that is definitely worth the time of anyone looking for further reading on this subject.)

Put That Away Billy...

2010-05-14T09:58:00.000-04:00

Just finished a piece for IFC.com about movies set in the NBA. One of those movies is Forget Paris, a romantic comedy written, directed, and starring Billy Crystal as an NBA ref who falls for a woman he mets in Paris, played by Debra Winger. The NBA sequences are a lot of fun, but mostly the film is Crystal and Winger trying very hard to be Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Overall, it's a fairly forgettable affair. Forgettable, that is, except for one image that is now seared into my brain. Because Forget Paris features what may be -- what I certainly hope is -- the only Billy Crystal Lounging Topless Sex Scene.

FEAST YOUR EYES AND DESPAIR INTERNET!

Oh the horror. The unshapely, soft focus and silk pajamas horror. This scene -- and can I get a little thanks for restraining myself from posting the video? -- makes a very strong argument for the creation of a website that would function as the anti-Mr. Skin. Instead of telling you where you can find nude celebrities in films, it would alert you to scenes, like this one, that should be avoided at all cost.

YouTube Art: The Magic of Running Scared

2010-05-07T23:45:00.008-04:00

Quick, name the first two actors that come to mind when I say the phrase "badass buddy cops."

Who'd you think of?

Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal? Hey, me too!

Thank you, the 1980s, for being completely insane. Thank you also for the sequence where they go to Florida, fish topless, and then apply (AND GET APPROVED!) for a bank loan while wearing cutoffs and roller skates while Michael McDonald's "Sweet Freedom" plays in the background:

I can't even use the ATM in my bank with roller skates on. These guys take out a mortgage! Honestly, even after renting and watching this movie, I'm not entirely convinced it's real. It's just too good (or maybe just too endearingly homoerotic) to be true.

Kirby, Age 4.5 Months

2010-04-03T23:11:00.005-04:00

(Photos by me)

TCM: The Prowler (1951)

2010-03-25T10:27:00.006-04:00

This week on the mighty Movie Morlocks blog I futz with Joseph Losey's THE PROWLER (Read it here). It's a perv-y, suffocating vision of two dull class-climbers pursuing their version of the American dream. Made by Joseph Losey and Dalton Trumbo who were both soon blacklisted, it's a thoroughly disillusioned take on American institutions. Van Heflin dominates with his horny resentments against the upper classes. Evelyn Keyes falls for his dubious charms out of sheer boredom - and the couple leaves a body in their wake. Fun and games. Today's its last day at the Film Forum (who quoted my enthusiasm on their site, and added a necessary exclamation point!), so if you're in NYC, it's imperative to swing by.

But how to fill the rest of this space? Hm. Since all I've been thinking about is baseball recently (and Van Heflin), here's a photo of Arizona Diamondback relief pitcher Clay Zavada, winner of last year's Robert Goulet Memorial Mustached American of the year:

Oh, and there's this too:

Surrogates (2009)

2010-03-24T00:17:00.000-04:00

Surrogates feels like the least interesting film you could possibly make out of some very interesting material. It presents a world, adapted from the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, full of bold ideas and rich thematic possibilities, then ignores that world completely for an hour and a half to tell an off-the-shelf hard-boiled mystery story. This is one of those movies that makes you angry, not because of anything it does, but for all the things it doesn't do and could have if only it had taken some risks. If you're going to go to a casino, you might as well place some bets.

In the world of the film, advances in robotics now allow humanity to live their lives without ever getting out of bed. Instead of venturing outside and running the risk of bodily harm or illness, people remotely pilot these cyborgs called surrogates. These surrogates look better than regular humans, and have enhanced strength and durability, which is particularly handy should you find yourself in the middle of a rote movie chase scene and have to leap from car to car to escape Bruce Willis. Surrogates seem foolproof — harm inflicted upon them isn't passed along to their operator, sending violent crime rates plummeting downwards — until one winds up severely fried in an alley and its operator is discovered dead along with it. Enter Willis' FBI Agent Tom Greer to figure out how such a thing could happen and to ensure that nothing even remotely interesting is done with Surrogates' premise.

I mean, think about the possibilities here. Obviously, the idea of living vicariously through artificial creations or virtual reality helmets invites comparisons to video games. But surrogacy also works as a metaphor for voyeurism in general and for moviegoing specifically, for living vicariously through the eyes of another person for as long as the film runs. The surrogates drive a wedge between Greer and his miserable but gorgeous wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike); that could be used in the service of a story that explores the way people allow technology to mediate intimacy, and how it often offers the promise of freedom at the price of dependence. Director Jonathan Mostow visualizes the surrogates' physical perfection by airbrushing out the wrinkles and blemishes of the actors playing them; most of the surrogate extras look like underwear and swimsuit models, an invitation to some pointed commentary on the unrealistic body images presented in most Hollywood fare.

If any of these ideas were truly explored in Surrogates it would be a movie worth seeing, but really, these are just the things your mind wanders to when it becomes disengaged from what is an utterly mechanical tech-noir thriller. It is competently directed by Jonathan Mostow and well cast with watchable actors like Ving Rhames, Radha Mitchell, and James Cromwell, but it takes some really juicy ideas and and turns them into just another sausage from the Hollywood meat grinder. At just 88 minutes long, Surrogates doesn't even have enough time to properly tell its main story, much less explore the myriad possibilities of its setup. As Willis tracks one lead after another with the same blank stare on his face (appropriate when he's playing a robot, less so when he's walking around in the flesh), I kept hoping the camera would stop following him and just wander into any of the buildings he passes. What would a gym look like in a world of surrogates? Or a movie theater? Or an airport? Or a grocery store? Or a pro football game? All the movie cares to show us are laboratories, FBI offices, apartments, and laboratories.

With a much better script than the one by John Brancato and Michael Ferris (who wrote the last two Terminator films and apparently are the only people in Hollywood qualified to write movies about lifelike robots), Surrogates had the chance, I think, to be a truly great sci-fi movie. Instead, Surrogates almost becomes a surrogate itself, a blandly attractive surface designed to obscure the depth and complexity that exists underneath.

TCM-ing

2010-03-16T19:03:00.007-04:00

I'm going try and update my various maneuverings back here at Termite Art, which I've been painfully neglecting for months now. Perhaps decades. So unless it's too annoying, I'll be linking to my TCM posts every week back here, with valuable additional commentary. This week, I watch John Carpenter's Elvis (1979) on the new Shout Factory! DVD and admire quite a bit of it. Link......here.

The movie's worth it for Kurt Russell's athleticism and Carpenter's roving camera. The script is riddled with pop-psychology and bio-pic cliche (it is a TV-movie, after all), but its plastic beauties are formidable.

List of the week: Most Interesting Faces I've Seen This Year (TM)

1. John's craggy pockmarked visage in Sweetgrass

2. John Travolta: scrunched, goateed cue-ball in From Paris With Love

3. Anne-Laure Meury: inquisitive, radiant, edged with baby fat in The Aviator's Wife

4. Stephen Baldwin: a sagging potato-sack with a five o'clock shadow: Sharks in Venice

5. Dolph Lundgren: hatchet shaped-head, beady eyes, flesh stretched to breaking point: Command Performance

The Blues Brothers (1980)

2010-03-03T21:34:00.006-05:00

The Blues Brothers manages to be a great movie without being a very good movie. On a rational, critical level the film is difficult to defend. It's overstuffed with too many characters and too many subplots (Nazis? Nuns? Old blues man cameos? Car chases? Country bars? Concerts? Used musical instrument shops? Car chases? Gospel numbers? Car chases?). The two main characters, Jake and Elwood Blues have purpose — they're on a mission from God — but no personality. They're a big pile of coolness, musical chops, and little else. They don't even have eyes, or if they do we never see them, since they wear dark sunglasses constantly, even indoors, even at night, even to sleep. So you have characters you don't especially care about, in a story that makes little sense, in a movie that's too long. By any standard measure, that should make it a forgettable movie.

And yet, it is a great movie, a movie I have seen dozens of times, a movie I can quote from memory, a movie I am always pleasantly surprised by when I return to it after a few years away. It is too long, or at least at two hours and thirteen minutes it seems like it should be too long for a Saturday Night Live sketch blown up to feature length. Hell, calling it a sketch may be giving it too much credit; John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd never did comedy on SNL as The Blues Brothers, they played blues music as the "characters" (really just the costumes — black suit, white shirt, black tie, black hat, black sunglasses — and the goofy dancing) with Howard Shore and the show's house band. And yet somehow the movie isn't too long at two hours and thirteen minutes. It's too short. I've determined this via a highly scientific method. Here's how it works. Some home video releases contain an extended cut that runs fifteen more minutes, and if you let me choose which I would prefer to watch I'd pick the one with the extra footage every single time.

Characters would be nice, but that was the remarkable thing about John Belushi: he didn't need a character to be worth watching onscreen. Quick: describe Bluto from Animal House using words that don't also apply to Belushi? What was his life like before college? What are his goals? How'd he come to Delta House? Who's his favorite Delta? Why does he like wearing togas so much? The vagueness with which Bluto was drawn didn't stop him from becoming maybe the single most beloved college student in cinema history. The reason why is a single word, and it rhymes with "Smelushi." The same applies to Jake Blues. Here inscrutableness is written right into the character. But there's something so utterly charismatic about Belushi that he makes the character's lack of definition seem like intentional mystery rather than a screenplay deficiency. We may not know too much about Jake, but Belushi sure seems to.

The most famous line in the film, the one everyone on Earth knows, even people who've never seen the movie or know who the Blues Brothers are, is the one about how no one can stop them because they're on a mission from God. God, in this case, is named John Lee Hooker and Cab Calloway and Aretha Franklin and Sam and Dave and Ray Charles. For Jake and Elwood (and, I suspect, for Belushi and Dan Aykroyd), music is religion, a point made with perfect clarity when Jake has his evangelical epiphany in the middle of James Brown gospel tune. Though the narrative finds Jake and Elwood searching for $5,000 to save the orphanage they grew up in, their real task is to share the music they love with their film's audience. They're musical missionaries and their means of conversion is the series of exuberant numbers featuring many of the artists mentioned above. Music in this film has a power akin to demonic possession: people can't resist it, succumb to it, as when Ray Charles starts playing "Shake a Tail Feather" and passersby burst into a synchronized, choreographed dance.

The whole film operates that way. Passion outweighs precision. Energy trumps efficiency. The Blues Brothers have a complete and total disregard for rules and the film shares that spirit. It breaks just about every rule of "good" moviemaking. No screenwriting coach or studio executive or focus group could manufacture The Blues Brothers. It had to come from a couple guys who felt so strongly about this stuff that they were ready to proselytize for it any way they could. The film stands as a testament to their great success.

YouTubeHulu Art: Flags! Of! The World!

2010-03-02T01:17:00.004-05:00

Finally, flags have their own "We Didn't Start the Fire." Sweeney and I watched it twice on Saturday night. Top-notch stuff.

Briefly: Vanishing Point (1971)

2010-02-21T23:09:00.005-05:00

I'm not a big fan of the moment early in the film where Barry Newman's Kowalski drives past himself in a different car and disappears into thin air ("Holy crap! He just vanished! THAT MUST BE THE VANISHING POINT!") and in 2010 it's hard to consider Cleavon Little's telepathic disc jockey as anything other than a magical negro character. But otherwise, Vanishing Point is damn near perfect, an ideal blend of badass car chases and existential angst. Driving from Denver to San Francisco to deliver a 1970 Dodge Challenger under a self-imposed and completely impossible deadline, a bleary-eyed, reckless man known only as Kowalski pesters police, meets a girl who rides a motorcycle totally naked (ouch), receives advice through his radio from DJ Super Soul (Little), and flashes back to painful memories from a lifetime of disappointment. Like the film, which begins mere moments before the chronological end of the story and spends the rest of its runtime in flashback, Kowalski lives in the past. Time has only enhanced the film's elegiac tone. The film itself was already about mourning the end of the mythic American West and the death of idealism. Now it also seems to mark the passing of an era when car chase movies were allowed to be poetic as well as visceral and featured real cars doing real maneuvers instead of relying solely on computer-generated imagery. As exciting as Vanishing Point is, to watch the movie today is to become Kowalski, to look into the past, and grow sad about what you find there.

YouTube Art: Scarface: The TV Edit

2010-02-15T14:57:00.004-05:00

Oh man, do I loves me some bad dubbing. You know what I'm talking about; when a basic cable channel shows an R rated movie on their station but has to edit all of the profanity out to make the film TV-appropriate. For a fine example, see this excellent YouTube clip, which compares original snippets from Brian De Palma's Scarface with the hilarious, borderline avant-garde TV versions of the same scenes:

Funny, right? If you don't like it, lame brain, you can go eat a pineapple. Also, apparently I've never posted this on Termite Art, an oversight that demands immediate correction:

In Defense of The Color of Money (1986)

2010-02-12T00:42:00.001-05:00

The Color of Money features two kinds of trick shots: the ones on the pool table and the ones in the camera. "Fast" Eddie Felson puts on a clinic on shot selection on camera and Scorsese's puts on another off. It is not Martin Scorsese's best film, but it might be his best photographed. This is a movie that is never, not for a single second, dull. It's best known as the "inferior" sequel to the 1961 film The Hustler and as the film that finally won star Paul Newman his Oscar on the basis of his career rather than his performance. It's better than its reputation on both counts.

Obviously, the film looks great (kudos to cinematographer Michael Balhaus). But the question then becomes to what purpose? At what point does all that style transform into substance? From my perspective, The Color of Money's dynamic visual aesthetic speaks to the film's story and themes in at least three crucial ways (and I'm sure there are more -- these are just the ones that jumped out at me writing at 3:00 AM, still high on the buzz from the movie). Here they are, in no particular order:

1)As Visual Complement To Fast Eddie's Lessons About Hustling

If you've never seen The Color of Money, it is set twenty-five years after the events of The Hustler, at a point when its hero, "Fast" Eddie Felson (Paul Newman), has quit pool. Now he makes his living as a liquor salesman which fulfills his monetary needs but not his thrill-seeking ones. One day, he meets a young and immensely talented nine-ball player named Vince (Tom Cruise) and his girlfriend Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and decides to take them under his wing. Eddie figures they don't need lessons in pool playing but they could stand to learn a few tricks in pool hustling. He teaches them that a good hustler has to look like one thing and be another. He has to be able to see through other players' hustles, to look past the image people present on the surface to the truth that is underneath. And here is where the visual technique comes into play.

On the one hand, by making a movie that is seemingly all surfaces, by assaulting us with all these wild and unorthodox camera angles, Scorsese is essentially giving the audience the opportunity to put Eddie's lessons into use themselves. Can we look past the flash to find the themes that are really important? Can we be cool-headed and analytical in the midst of frenzy and excitement? Scorsese is testing the audience the same way Eddie is testing Vince.

2)As Reinforcement For The Idea That Time Has Passed Fast Eddie By

But just as Eddie is testing Vince, the world of nine-ball pool is testing Eddie. Broken by the events of The Hustler, Eddie has withdrawn from the world of pool. If we believe what he tells Vince, he hasn't touched a cue in decades. As his relationship with Vince draws him back into the game, Eddie begins to feel all those familiar feelings again. It's just like old times.

But times have changed. As part of their training, Eddie tries to take Vince and Carmen to some of the old haunts on the pool hall circuit. At the first joint, Eddie runs up the front stairs, giddy with excitement. But when they turn the corner, they discover the pool tables are gone; the place is now a furniture warehouse. The disconnect between Eddie's past and present is reinforced by Ballhaus' cutting-edge camera work and Thelma Schoonmaker's kinetic editing. They remind us this ain't your father's Hustler, and if Eddie's going to survive, he needs to realize that.

(Speaking of changing times, I'm convinced that The Color of Money doesn't get nearly as much credit as it deserves as an emblematic movie of the 1980s. People rave about Wall Street and overlook The Color of Money, which says many of the same things. The whole film is about Fast Eddie's misguided beliefs that greed is good and should be the single driving factor in pool playing and in life.)

3)As Means of Conveying The Speed And Excitement of Nine-Ball to the Audience

If you and I went to a pool hall and played a couple of games over some beers, the stakes would be low and the mood would be relaxed. For Vince and Fast Eddie, these nine-ball matches are like wars. Huge sums of money, not to mention pride, are on the line. Static angles and typical, television coverage style shot selection wouldn't convey just how intense these games are for the participants. Shots that put us right onto the felt, that let us see the splash of chalk off the cue and blows the balls up to gargantuan size, builds these games into almost mythic battles.

Also, before I go, a brief word on the whole Newman/Oscar thing. My whole life I've heard how Newman didn't deserve that Best Actor award, at least not for this role. Hooey.

His performance ranges from big moments like those to quiet ones he carries silently on sheer charisma. Did he deserve to win more for The Color of Money than Cool Hand Luke or The Sting or The Verdict? No. But he deserved the accolades for this performance, too. Take a look at who he beat and tell me who you'd pick over him.

The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988)

2010-02-04T11:26:00.005-05:00

No matter how dated its subjects look, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years never gets old. Glam metal isn't particularly relevant to popular culture in 2010, but its throng of money-hungry, talent-starved wannabes certainly is. Watching Penelope Spheeris' superb documentary shows us how much and how little the music industry has changed. Though her subjects assume an anti-authority posture, all they really want is to be rich and famous rock stars. If American Idol had been on television in 1988, they would have been the first ones in line.

The film isn't just interviews with unknowns — Spheeris also includes enlightening talks with Ozzy Osborne, Lemmy, Steven Tyler and other rock luminaries — but I find those conversations the most fascinating. Some are from forgotten bands like Odin or Seduce. Others are groupies or fans who desperately want to be in rock bands themselves but haven't quite gotten there yet. Their answers to Spheeris' questions are so similar sometimes it's like they're reading from cue cards. No, they don't think of what they'll be doing in ten years if they don't make, because they will make it. In twenty years, they'll all probably be dead. They're not in it for the money, they're in it for the music. And the women. Metal's image is all about non-conformity. The Metal Years shows how all these non-conformists are all starting to look and sound exactly alike.

Selling rock and roll is as much selling the lifestyle as the music. So even as these rockers quickly grow bitter and jaded, they have to keep up the appearance that everything is going awesome and they wouldn't have it any other way. They claim to be having a great time, but desperation hangs in the air like stage fog. Some of these folks are hungry in more than just the figurative sense. A few even admit to being so broke that they date women for meals (you or I might call this transaction prostitution).

Spheeris is a fabulous interviewer. Her questions are blunt and direct; in one a particularly mesmerizing sequence she talks to W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes while he's drunk out of his mind, wading in a swimming pool. His mother a few feet away, he brags about groupie orgies. A few minutes later, with Spheeris pressing him, he acknowledges he's a full-fledged alcoholic, and as he pours bottles of vodka down his throat he confesses that he doesn't like himself very much and wouldn't mind if he was less of a rock star. Holmes hadn't learned the lessons that so many of the hard rock stars who came before him had: that the drugs of "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" basically kill whatever joy you might derive from the other two. The juxtaposition of the rockers from various points on the timeline of pop music stardom creates this image of the music industry as a monster that needs to be fed: it chews up guys like Odin, then grinds on them until they look like Holmes. If they're lucky they get spit out and can clean up, and get on with things. If not, they get devoured.

If you've ever watched American Idol, that model should sound familiar. That show feasts on the dreams of young musicians who are exactly like the ones in The Metal Years in every way except for the size of their hairdos. As I'm writing this, my wife is watching the show in the other room as a whole raft of new young kids get swept up in the journey toward superstardom. Of course, along the way most of them will be tossed to the wayside and forgotten. If my kid ever came to me and told me they wanted to be on American Idol, I would sit them down in front of The Metal Years and make them watch. "It ain't all confetti, fireworks, and million dollar contracts, kiddo. Now go clean your room before you end up like this guy..."

Legion (2010)

2010-02-01T21:08:00.000-05:00

NOTE: This review contains minor SPOILERS. Reader discretion is advised.

God has had enough. Despite thousands of years of civilization, man is still committing atrocities against his fellow man: wars, environmental abuse, murder, and MTV reality shows about people who use the term Guido as a compliment. So God, in his infinite wisdom, calls for the full-fledged annihilation of the human race. A few survivors are eating lunch at the Paradise Falls Diner in East Nowheresville, USA when the apocalypse begins, and God sends his armies there to kill the woman pregnant with a baby who might be ~~Jesus~~ ~~John Connor~~ the future savior of humanity. Our only hope is the one angel and his bevy of high caliber ammunition who has chosen to reject God's orders and protect us. Thankfully, nobody in heaven reminded God that he was God and that if he wanted to he could have prevented the baby from ever being conceived. But whatever. God's a B-movie fan and he wanted to do things this way. Who are we to judge him?

Legion, which follows the group of oddballs and sad sacks through their last stand, is in the great tradition of siege films. We outlined this subgenre on a recent episode of the IFC podcast; basically you have a bunch of people — and, yes, typically they are a bunch of oddballs and sad sacks — who are trapped in an isolated location under attack from a huge number of assailants. They're cut off, nearly helpless, and in deep, deep doo-doo. Think movies like Night of the Living Dead or Assault on Precinct 13. Great siege films force us to place ourselves in the shoes of the outnumbered protagonists. They work best when they make us feel the characters' helplessness and desperation, and consider our own choices if we were stuck in their situation. While the idea of a machine gun toting angel defending the last vestiges of humanity from an angry God's army sounds like a damn solid idea for a B movie, it's not a great premise for a siege film. Its central construction is totally at odds with why we like these movies, watching ordinary people sweat their way out of extraordinary predicaments. But Paul Bettany's Michael never sweats. He never feels anything. So we don't feel anything either.

All the best moments are in the trailer, including the one truly creepy setpiece where an old lady enters the diner, bears her fang-y teeth, and climbs like a spider onto the diner's ceiling. But any nervy energy building inside the Paradise Falls dissipates once Michael arrives. He just stands around, calmly dispensing advice and assault weapons, and his presence is so soothing that people become completely unconcerned with the Lord's hordes bearing down on them and start monologuing about their pre-apocalypse lives. Even though Michael insists they're not safe, that things are very bad, he never acts like he's particularly concerned. I know he's an angel, I know he's probably spent an eternity disconnected from human beings and watching them from a distance, so displaying emotion is something that's new to him. But he's the caring angel. That's his whole character. Shouldn't he show that at least once during the movie?

None of this would matter if the movie had lived up to the promise of its superb trailer. Credit first-time writer/director Scott Stewart with dreaming up a great action movie premise, and fault him for a weak execution. Why so much talking in a movie about gun-totin' angels? And why so few gun-totin' angels, for that matter? We've got Michael, and we've also got his nemesis Gabriel (Kevin Durand), who's still kicking ass for the Lord, and that's it. The army of darkness massing outside the Paradise Falls? Not angels; they're just a bunch of regular people who are "possessed" by angels. Angels like Gabriel have the ability to fly and to deflect bullets or slice people with their razor-sharp wings. The "possessed" people standing outside the diner have the ability to lumber around slowly and fall down and die when they get shot. Why send these stooges when you could send angels? The Lord's supposed to work in mysterious ways, not idiotic ones.

Then again, maybe that's the point of the movie. It doesn't end with God resolving his grudge with humanity, he just gets bored and gives up. Having sat through Legion I can't say I blame him too much. I was bored too. Let's just hope God's too busy helping athletes win the Super Bowl to watch this movie. If he does, it might be all the proof he needs that we're not worthy of our existence.

The Worst Haircut in (Non-Sci Fi) Movie History

2010-01-18T11:02:00.013-05:00

That's Teri Hatcher in The Big Picture (1989, Christopher Guest). You've heard of haircuts that look like someone stuck their finger in a light socket? To get this one you need to sit on a high tension wire.

Now because the film is directed by Christopher Guest from Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, movies that make fun of weirdos with funny habits and strange looks, you might think he's making fun of big 80s hair. He's not. SHE'S THE SEXY CHARACTER.

She looks like she skinned Chewbacca and made a hat out of him.

"Look lady, you're nice and all, but it's called The Big Picture not The Big Hair."

If you saw someone walking on the street with this haircut, you start fishing through your pockets for some spare change.

Ah the 1980s. The stupid, stupid 1980s.

Highlights From Another Twilight Zone Marathon

2010-01-10T18:15:00.006-05:00

Every New Year's Eve, SyFy Channel unlocks a door with the key of imagination. Beyond it lies another dimension, one of sight and sound and of mind. If you don't have New Year's plans, or you've got a big enough DVR box, you can enter a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. Every New Year's Eve, you can cross over into The Twilight Zone.

I'm an avowed The Twilight Zone fan — we've even done an IFC podcast on the series — and I particularly love watching the show in marathon form, dating back to my childhood when WPIX 11 in New York used to run them that way on holidays. Now the marathons are even better because you can save a whole bunch of episodes and pick and choose which ones you want to watch and in what order. Maybe you're in the mood to compare episodes where characters from various time periods interact. You can pair the enigmatic "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim," where a Western settler is mysteriously transported to the 1960s, with the haunting "A Stop at Willoughby," where a 1960s ad man on the verge of a nervous breakdown dreams of the simple small-town America of the 1880s). Or how about an evening of killer everyday objects? Batshit crazy aliens? A well-executed DVR marathon of The Twilight Zone is a lot like pimp Pierce Patchett's operation in L.A. Confidential: whatever you desire.

As I've done before, I've written up some of my thoughts on selections from this year's Twilight Zone marathon. I specifically avoided episodes I'd seen before, and wound up watching a dozen episodes, most of them solid to stellar. Here are my comments, in no particular order.

Name: Stopover in a Quiet Town
Episode Number: 150
Author: Earl Hamner, Jr.
Synopsis: A couple wakes from a night out partying to a bed they don't recognize, in a house they've never seen before, in a town that it totally deserted.
Theme(s): Don't Drink and Drive, Appearances Can Be Deceiving
Recurring Serling Motif: The fear of isolation. This episode is a variation on the plot from the very first Twilight Zone episode, "Where is Everybody?" in which an Air Force pilot finds himself alone in an empty town. In this case two people encounter the same scenario with essentially the same breakdown-inducing results. I've never read much on Serling himself, so I don't know if a fear of loneliness was something he dealt with but he and his staff certainly wrote about it in a profound way.
Best Bit: Bob and Millie Frasier (Barry Nelson and Nancy Malone) try to reassure themselves that they're not losing their minds by finding the one definitively real thing in the town: a good, solid tree. But when Bob knocks on it to prove its sturdiness, it topples over and reveals its flimsy, hollow base.
Why It Works: Though the episode is a retread of an idea done on the show earlier, and the acting by Nelson and Malone is nothing to write home about, this episode is bursting with chilling moments and clever social commentary. As the Frasiers desperately search for signs of life in the 'Quiet' town, they realize everything around them is a phony approximation of real life: plastic food in the refrigerator, cars with no motors under the hood. At one point they tear the false fronts off of some kitchen cabinets revealing the blank walls that lie underneath, a pithy critique of the emptiness beneath the sort of picture postcard surburban living portrayed in the episode. "Stopover"'s also one of those episodes that's fun to try to guess the twist of while you're watching it. The wife and I were batting our favorite theories back and forth throughout and the final revelation, which brilliantly explains the central conceit and the eerie child's laughter the Frasiers keep hearing around town but can't ever place to a source, wound up combining several of our favorite guesses into one clever solution.

Name: What's in the Box?
Episode Number: 144
Author: Martin Goldsmith
Synopsis: Joe, a grumpy taxi driver (William Demarest), watches in horror as his beloved television begins broadcasting scenes from his life.
Theme(s): The Scary Side of Mundane Objects, The Power of Fear
Recurring Serling Motif: Pitch black humor. This is about as dark a trip into the Twilight Zone as I've seen: husband and wife absolutely despise each other, fight, one kills the other, the end. And yet the entire episode is done completely tongue and cheek, and the mood is more jaunty than funereal. I love the escalating stakes as Joe keeps going back to the television, time and again, to see what's going to happen to his life. Now he's getting sentenced to death. Now he's getting strapped into the electric chair. We keep cutting back and forth from the images on the television to Demarest's terrified face, watching in sweaty, slack-jawed disbelief. Well, wouldn't you freak out?
Best Bit: Joe's television shows him scenes of a fight between him and his wife (Joan Blondell) that hasn't yet happened. As Joe looks on, his televisual self smashes a chair over his wife's back and then punches her right in the face, sending her careening out their apartment window and down to the pavement below.
Why It Works: You have to love Serling and writer Martin Goldswmith's willingness to eviscerate their own medium through the use of a story about a guy who is literally done in by his obsession with television. Joe turns on the television, sees images of himself on it, and freaks out. But instead of turning it off and leaving it off, he keeps turning it back on, to see what happens next. His addiction eventually leads him to see him murder his wife, and watching those events on television ultimately lead to him enacting them in real life. Note that the television doesn't order him to kill his wife. The addiction to the box is enough to make him do it on his own. If he'd just turned the television off, none of it would have happened.

Name: The After Hours
Episode Number: 34
Author: Rod Serling
Synopsis: A woman goes to a department store to buy a present for her mother and winds up on building's non-existent ninth floor.
Theme(s): Appearances Can Be Deceiving, The Scary Side of Mundane Objects
Recurring Serling Motif: "The After Hours" contains one of the most effective versions of a common Twilight Zone storyline: a sane person's swift descent into madness when no one around them believes something they feel with 100% certainty. Like William Shatner's character in "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" who can't convince anyone else on his airplane that there's a creature on the wing, Anne Francis' character knows she bought a gold thimble on the store's ninth floor. When she goes to the complaint department, they insist she's mistaken. And when the woman she claims sold her the thimble reappears in a different form, it's more than her fragile psyche can handle.
Best Bit: After desperately trying to convince the department store staff that she really did go to the ninth floor, Marsha (Francis) spots the woman who'd sold her the thimble from across the crowded room. The woman turns around, and she is! (dramatic pause) one of the department store's mannequins!
Why It Works: Serling had an uncanny knack for finding the sinister in the everyday: slot machines, fortune tellers, cameras, television sets (see above). In this episode, it's department store mannequins. Waking from a fainting spell after the store has closed, she finds herself alone with the store's mannequins, some of whom resemble people she'd seen earlier in the day. Her unsettling journey through the empty store gives way to a montage of the mannequins and their grotesquely painted faces. If the ultimate explanation of Marsha's confusion — she's actually a mannequin who'd forgotten that she was given her one month of a vacation away from the store — doesn't make a whole lot of sense (so mannequins can come to life? How? And why do they submit to being a frozen, wooden human statue 11 months of the year?) Serling's final monologue makes clear the subtext that's far more important than the narrative:

"A wooden lady with a painted face who, one month out of the year, takes on the characteristics of someone as normal and as flesh and blood as you and I. But it makes you wonder, doesn't it? Just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street?"

Name: The Grave
Episode Number: 72
Author: Montgomery Pittman
Synopsis: A hired gun visits the grave of the man he failed -- or was too afraid -- to kill.
Theme(s): The Power of Fear, The Morality of Killing, The Supernatural Existing as Function of Perception
Recurring Serling Motif: A lot of the pantheon Twilight Zone episodes feature clarifying twists, like the reveal in "The Eye of the Beholder" that the hideous face a woman has been trying to surgically alter is actually gorgeous, but a lot of the less well-known episodes, like this one, are far more enigmatic and sometimes, like this one, far more interesting. "The Grave"'s finale is less of an explanation than an insistence on ambiguity. But then this whole episode is about the nature of ambiguity: we can believe in the supernatural or we can believe it all a figment of an insane man's mind.
Best Bit: Conny Miller (Lee Marvin) plunges his knife into the grave of a dead man. He starts to stand up to leave when something unseen from below the frame pulls him back down.
Why It Works: Because of exceptional casting. This is a quiet, one-act play in a Western setting. The majority of its 22 minutes is a scene in a bar where Marvin's character is questioned by several townsfolk about his failure to kill an outlaw he'd been hired to hunt down. The outlaw claimed on his deathbed that the slower he ran the slower Miller chased, and the men in the bar who finally killed the outlaw when he returned to town wonder why they succeeded where a pro like Miller failed. Miller delivers stock denials, and grows enraged when he's accused of cowardice, but Lee Marvin's already exquisitely weathered face, his hunched, defeated posture, his excessive defensiveness, all hint at an unexplained truth that lies somewhere between the two poles.

Name: People Are Alike All Over
Episode Number: 25
Author: Rod Serling, based on a story by Paul W. Fairman
Synopsis: An astronaut travels to Mars, terrified of what life may be like on other planets.
Theme(s): The Power of Fear, Be Careful What You Wish For, If Aliens Exist, They Probably Are Just Gonna Kill Us All
Recurring Serling Motif: Sinister wordplay. Serling was as good as bringing twists to innocuous phrases as to stories. He had a knack for turning everyday language against its users, a trick that went hand-in-hand with another Serling hallmark: telling stories about the dangers of wish fulfillment. Think of "Time Enough at Last," where a nuclear holocaust gives poor Burgess Meredith time to enjoy all the books he desires just before his glasses break, robbing him of his ability to read. Here, astronaut Sam Conrad (Roddy McDowell) has a crippling fear of what alien life might be like. His co-pilot (Paul Comi) reassures him that whatever principles or powers have governed the evolution of man would be the same in every corner of the universe; thus, people are alike all over. This becomes Conrad's reassuring mantra. And when aliens who seemed so benevolent reveal their true, inhuman nature, the doomed Conrad realizes, with a pitiful sigh, that people are indeed alike all over.
Best Bit: The inhabitants of Mars welcome Conrad with open arms, even build an uncanny replica of an Earth house for him to live in. But after they leave him in it he realizes that all the doors are locked. And there are no windows. And then suddenly one wall panel splits and opens, revealing a gallery of onlookers standing behind a set of bars. Conrad realizes, as we do, that he has been put inside a zoo.
Why It Works: The Twilight Zone has a lot of episodes about aliens and the space race. Nearly all of them end badly for Earth. Serling seemingly had no use for the general excitement and curiosity about space travel at the time; on his show, these sorts of endeavors typically conclude with doom for the protagonists and for the whole of humanity. "People Are Alike All Over" is a very good episode, but its formula of paranoid visions of alien life and darkly comedic turns of phrase would be taken to even greater heights in the classic season three episode "To Serve Man." Not only are people alike all over, they enjoy a good human bisque.

Also watched, in order from phenomenal to feh: "A Stop at Willoughby," "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim," "Mr. Garrity and the Graves," "Black Leather Jackets," "Execution"

List Nausea: 2009

2010-01-02T07:45:00.005-05:00

Man. So many goddamn lists. And I've written about half of them, I'd say. Sorry about that. Anyhow, here's another batch. The first two are up at Indiewire with some minor variations back here at Termite Art, since I added some short films that didn't qualify for them. So now my monthly list total is up to 5,667. Approximately.

Ten Best Films 0f 2009 (released in the U.S.)

1. The Headless Woman, directed by Lucrecia Martel

2. You, the Living, directed by Roy Andersson

3. 35 Shots of Rum, directed by Claire Denis

4. Tokyo Sonata, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

5. Red Cliff (Parts 1 & 2, uncut version), directed by John Woo

6. The Informant!, directed by Steven Soderbergh

7. Still Raining, Still Dreaming, directed by Phil Solomon

8. The Sun, directed by Aleksandr Sokurov

9. Night and Day, directed by Hong Sang-soo

10. California Dreamin', directed by Cristian Nemescu

Honorable mentions: Orphan, Police Adjective, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Liverpool, Summer Hours, Armored, Gamer, Crank: High Voltage, Me and Orson Welles, The Limits of Control, Invictus, A Perfect Getaway, Up, Funny People

Best of the Decade

1. Mulholland Dr., directed by David Lynch

2. Platform, directed by Jia Zhangke

3. L'intrus, directed by Claire Denis

4. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, directed by Adam McKay

5. Goodbye, Dragon Inn, directed by Tsai Ming-liang

6. Yi Yi, directed by Edward Yang

7. Exiled, directed by Johnnie To

8. Rehearsals for Retirement, directed by Phil Solomon

9. In the Mood For Love, directed by Wong Kar-wai

10. Skagafjordur, directed by Peter Hutton

Honorable mentions: Crank, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Flight of the Red Balloon

Personal Discoveries of the Year

1. Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932)

2. The Nickel Ride (Robert Mulligan, 1974)

3. Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen, 1936)

3. Firefox (Clint Eastwood, 1982)

4. Nightfall (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)

5. My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine, 1955)

*Most revelatory retrospective: "American Auteurs: Robert Mulligan" at Lincoln Center

Best Albums of 2009

1. Brad Paisley - American Saturday Night

2. Henry Threadgill Zooid - This Brings Us To, Vol. 1

3. Mastodon - Crack the Skye

4. Darius Jones Trio - Man'ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing)

5. Nellie McKay - Normal as Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day

6. Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel - Willie and the Wheel

7. Vijay Iyer - Historicity

8. Miranda Lambert - Revolution

9. Ghostface Killah - Ghostdini Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City

10. Steve Lehman Octet - Travail, Transformation, and Flow

Honorable Mentions:

Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2

Matthew Shipp Trio - Harmonic Disorder

Rhett Miller - Rhett Miller

Lil Wayne - No Ceilings (mixtape)

The Thing - Bag It!

The Best of Ought-Nine by Singer

2010-01-01T10:53:00.001-05:00

As usual, a more detailed list and a brief summation of the year in film can be found at IFC.com. I also recommend you check out our two-part podcast where Alison Willmore and I hand out year-end awards in a variety of categories ranging from the Best Fight Sequence to Best Onscreen Chemistry to the Most Purely Pleasurable Movie of '09 to the Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition.

In the interest of Termite Art completism, I'm reproducing the list here:

1. Two Lovers
2. Summer Hours
3. Drag Me to Hell
4. Up
5. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
6. The Hurt Locker
7. The Headless Woman
8. In the Loop
9. The White Ribbon
10. Crank: High Voltage

Honorable Mention (in alphabetical order): Avatar, The Box, The House of the Devil, Humpday, The Limits of Control, Police, Adjective, A Serious Man, Star Trek, Still Walking, Up in the Air

Breaking down the raw numbers, I saw 149 films released theatrically in 2009, a slight dip from my 2008 figure, but I saw over 260 older films, for a grand total of 413 movies in 2009, which is 30 movies higher than my total in 2008. As in years past, here's a list of the best older films I saw for the first time in '09:

5. The Watcher in the Woods (1980, John Hough)
4. Misery (1990, Rob Reiner)
3. Near Dark (1987, Kathryn Bigelow)
2. The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
1. Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979, Werner Herzog)

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

2009-12-27T00:37:00.017-05:00

This is a bad time to be Sherlock Holmes. People go to blockbusters to shut off their mind for two hours. "I don't want to think when I go to the movies," is a common complaint I hear from some corners. How do you make a Sherlock Holmes story for this crowd? The Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes is the ultimate hero of the mind, a man who excels because he is always paying attention when everyone around him is not. Now we live in a time when unique minds aren't nearly as valued in our culture as unique six-pack abs. And so the new Sherlock Holmes by director Guy Ritchie gives us the Holmes we deserve: a man of unparalleled deductive powers with a torso so hard and grooved you could grate Parmesan cheese on it. As played by Robert Downey Jr., Holmes has a peerless body to match his peerless brain though we never once see him run or lift weights or exercise in any way that could give someone such a sculpted physique. In Holmesian lingo, we might call it The Mystery of The Rippling Musculature.

In truth, Downey's Holmes still does plenty of sleuthing, though I wish Ritchie and his screenwriters had used a bit more brains themselves while creating this overly elaborate film for him to star in. The old Basil Rathbone - Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films were economical entertainments: 70 lean minutes of mystery, atmosphere, and intrigue. Ritchie's version runs a bloated 128 minutes, with too many subplots involving female supporting characters who have clearly been added to make the film more women friendly (or, as one of my Twitter followers observed, to remove any potential accusations of homosexuality between Holmes and Watson). Downey's Holmes and Jude Law's Watson have a strong, chummy chemistry onscreen but the addition of Watson's new fiance Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly) doesn't so much add friction between the characters at it does distraction to the film. And Rachel McAdams as a former flame of and potential adversary to Holmes has neither the chemistry with Downey nor the importance to the central narrative to justify her presence.

Too bad, because the movie does have its charms, as does any recent film with Downey as its lead. A few hours before I saw the new Holmes, I caught one of the old Rathbone films on TCM and was struck by how much of a dick Holmes is. Yes, a certain amount of arrogance is built into the character -- he's smarter than everyone around him and he knows it -- but in 1944's The Pearl of Death, he's such a pompous douche we almost want to start rooting for his enemies. In one scene, he proves a theory about a crime by barging into a store, ordering Watson around like a servant, and damaging the shopkeeper's inventory without explanation or apology. Downey's Holmes is just as egotistic but far more charismatic. His secret, I think, is to play the character as a man out of control. This Holmes would be polite if he could but he is completely at the mercy of his own talents. Between cases, he sits in his study inventing silencers for pistols or new paralyzing enzymes, because he feels compelled to do it. His genius does not come with an off-switch or a filter.

The mystery's a good one, involving an occult leader (Mark Strong) who manages to survive his own execution with apparent supernatural powers the ever-rational Holmes is eager to disprove. And so he does, with a mixture of careful observation and carefully choreographed fist fights, including one in an underground bare-knuckling boxing match that he starts because...wait, why does he do that again? Right, because it's not enough for Holmes to be smart. In The Pearl of Death, Rathbone's Holmes is holding the pearl thief at gunpoint when the villain manages to lunge at him, grab his gun, and turn the tables on him. Not only would Downey's Holmes never lose a fight with a man like that, he'd be able to dodge the bullets if he did (something Downey does do in the new film, in an admittedly clever sequence). But then a man as smart as Sherlock Holmes knows he must adapt to the times he lives in.

Invictus (2009)

2009-12-11T00:48:00.017-05:00

The ads around New York City have already declared Clint Eastwood's Invictus "genuinely inspiring" with "a soul-stirring story." I do not disagree, but don't rush out to the theater just yet. Sure, Invictus is inspirational. But that's not enough. Given the stakes, the improbable outcome, and the excessive use of swelling string music, who wouldn't be inspired by this story? Well, yeah, racists, of course. But other than that?

Obviously, this is a well-intentioned film. It teaches valuable lessons about important issues. But the way in which it goes it about teaching them is so tedious. It's more like a very dry history lesson from a professor who's not particularly invested in the material. Even as your soul will be stirred your brain will be bored by this tale of newly elected President Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) and his brilliant use of the South Africa rugby team, a group previously associated with Afrikaner culture and the trauma of apartheid, to unite his divided nation. The major fault in the film lies with the characters. Mandela and the captain of the South Africa rugby team Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) are great men in real life but they're not great movie characters, at least not as conceived by screenwriter Anthony Peckham, who treats them as pure forces of good with little complexity or shading. Mandela is often viewed from the perspective of his bodyguards, who whisper about the enormous personal and professional challenges he's up against. "He's not a saint," one says. "He's just a man with a man's problems." Unfortunately, the Mandela of Invictus essentially is a saint; his family life is given almost no mention, and even the health problems it shows him encountering are completely glossed over (in one scene Mandela is ordered to undergo a period of bed rest after a serious collapse. In the next, he's back at work as if the incident never happened). Pienaar is equally frustrating. His rugby team is the engine that drives a change of perspective for an entire nation, but his own thoughts on the issues he's combating are left largely unsaid. What was his life like during apartheid? What were his feelings before he met Mandela? Who knows. All we really know about the man is what little we can glean from the many times he stands in front of windows and stares soulfully out into the distance.

The movie features a few of the themes Eastwood likes to explore, particularly the way in which men struggle to move beyond the sins of their dark pasts, but it's also an odd fit for the director in some ways. He's never been one for sports movies before, either behind or in front of the camera, and he doesn't have a good handle on the rugby scenes, which are both repetitive and unclear (if you don't know the rules of rugby before the film, don't expect to understand them afterwards either). He's obviously far more interested in the inner-workings of a different team, that of Mandela's personal security detail, a group comprised of blacks and Afrikaners. Eastwood framers their initial struggles and eventual cohesion into a single police force as a microcosm of the "rainbow nation" Mandela creates in South Africa. By repeatedly cutting back and forth between Mandela and his security and Pienaar and his rugby players, Invictus resembles a mash-up of two superior films, Remember the Titans and In the Line of Fire, which starred Eastwood as an American Secret Service agent.

I don't doubt that if you see the film you will feel a chill down your spine when Mandela takes the field before the World Cup of Rugby wearing the uniform that had for so long stood for everything he fought against. I felt it too. But I also felt like that moment was unearned, supported as it was, by the sweeping music and CGI crane shots of people cheering and chanting and waving the new South African flag. It didn't represent the way the rest of the film, in true biopic fashion, refuses to dig beneath the surface of its story or characters. The story is inspirational. The film is uninspired.

Briefly: An Education (2009)

2009-11-30T21:09:00.000-05:00

Television is ruining the movies. In a world where cable has tapped into the potential of smart, thoughtful long-form dramatic television, movies can look awfully small. A cop movie would need to be awfully good to compare with The Wire. Cinematic gangsters will never be the same after The Sopranos. And a coming-of-age drama about a woman's place in the changing society of the 1960s like An Education, handsomely made and uniformly well-acted as it is, can't really rate with a show like Mad Men, which is about the very same topic during very same time period. There's only so much you can do with one story and 95 minutes; Mad Men's already produced thirty-plus hours on the subject. Nearly any film's going to look slight in comparison, though An Education does itself no favors by confining most of its running time to the rather predictable relationship between 16-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) and thirtysomething David (Peter Saarsgard) and epiloguing most of its messy (and, thus, far more interesting) aftershocks. The film's cinematography is as rich as mahogany and the jazzy soundtrack evokes the time and place of London just prior to its swingin' days. But unfair as it may be, as I was watching it, I couldn't stop comparing An Education to Mad Men. One is like the British Cliffs Notes version of the other. Mulligan's gotten a ton of buzz for her performance, and she is convincing (if a bit too old looking) as Jenny, but I was even more enamored with Alfred Molina as her well-meaning but out-of-touch father. His nuanced performance is full of genuine humor and pathos; despite his limited screentime, he creates a complete character. It's like someone you'd see on television.

Briefly: Whatever Works (2009)

2009-11-04T11:27:00.001-05:00

The message of Woody Allen's Whatever Works couldn't be clearer. The film's main character, Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), comes right out and says it directly to camera at the film's conclusion:

"Whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. And don't kid yourself. Because it's by no means up to your own human ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck, than you'd like to admit.

Boris' philosophy might be a sublime approach to life but it is a dreadful one for filmmaking. As human beings, we should all live and let live, do unto others, and count our blessings. But film directors need to do more than shrug their shoulders, be polite, and leave the ultimate quality of their work to luck. Supposedly based on a screenplay Allen originally wrote back in the 1970s for Zero Mostel, Whatever Works tells the story of how the curmudgeonly Boris learns to live and love again after a bad divorce and a suicide attempt, in large part because of his relationship with a young runaway from the South named Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood). Thematically, Allen's back in Annie Hall territory, with another story of a naive country girl and her instructive relationship with a "sophisticated" Manhattanite. But Annie Hall had a real affection for Annie; Boris, and by extension the movie, treats Melodie with open contempt, calling her, and really anyone who isn't from New York City (including her stereotypical rube parents, Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr.), cretins, imbeciles, and morons. David plays himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm with a similar air of superiority, but there he's the butt of the jokes at least as often as the rest of humanity is. In other words, Curb often sides with the viewer; Whatever Works always sides with Boris. Maybe Boris' theory is correct. Maybe Whatever Works doesn't work because of simple bad luck. Or maybe Woody Allen just took an old screenplay out of a drawer, one that wasn't good enough to make back when he wrote it, and hoped some very fine actors would elevate the material.

This Is It (2009)

2009-11-02T13:04:00.001-05:00

Before the Clearview Chelsea's 5:30 PM screening of This Is It, the theater ran a coming attraction for 2012 I'd never seen before. The footage was familiar — an assortment of the world's recognizable landmarks obliterated by an assortment of the world's most recognizable natural disasters — but the background music was not. Instead of a traditional musical score, the editors inserted a pop ballad by former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert entitled "Time For Miracles." (To watch this trailer, go here). You or I might take the complete destruction of human society as a great tragedy; with the aid of Lambert's ode to undying love, the trailer treats the cataclysm as an exuberant celebration of the human spirit. Yes, the Mayan apocalypse has brought about the end of the world. But look on the bright side: John Cusack ain't giving up on love.

Jarring as the 2012 trailer was, it proved a fitting warm-up for This Is It, a documentary that fashions footage from rehearsals for Michael Jackson's 50 night stand at London's O2 Arena into a approximation of what the final concert would have looked like had Jackson not died following a cardiac arrest on June 25th. The film pauses for intermittent glimpses into the King of Pop's creative process, but it's predominantly a series of musical performances noticeably enhanced by extensive cutting and overdubbing. We might see Jackson and his band on stage performing Thriller, but we hear what sounds like a combination of live performance and studio tracks, maybe even original master recordings in some cases. In finished form, they present an image of Jackson as a tireless, consummate performer. But would our reaction be the same to less polished footage? How much does our interpretation of the sound affect our interpretation of the visual? If a carefully crafted pop melody can make images of global destruction uplifting, can a few carefully crafted audio tracks make an unhealthy man look well?

I don't know. I do know that at times I felt like the movie was trying to convince me Jackson was in better shape that he really was. Certainly he's far skinnier than any of the dancers he's sharing the stage with. Even under a mountain of layers, even in jackets with huge, ridiculous shoulder pads, he looks tiny (as Roger Ebert notes in his review, he's also the only person on stage who's always wearing long sleeves). Near the end of the film, he gives the assembled production a pep talk that is heartfelt but also kind of weirdly rambling; one moment he says they are there to deliver great escapism to the fans and the next he's warning them they all have three years to reverse global warming or the earth will be doomed (Someone call Adam Lambert!).

It's easy to say that Michael Jackson was crazy or sick. But look at what his work asked of him, and consider how you would react in his situation. The This Is It show included a Jackson 5 tribute medley, where Michael would be called upon to sing and dance as he did when he was ten years old. Imagine if you had to sing in public and sound exactly as you did at that age? Jackson is required not just to perform forty year old songs, but to perform them with perfect fidelity; he can't just sing "Thriller," he's got to sing with the signature "Thriller" dance moves and people made up as zombies. We wonder why Jackson stopped making hits, why he creatively stalled out in the mid-90s. How could he move into new artistic areas when he's required to perpetually recreate his past? That sort of pressure to look and sound forever young could drive anyone insane.

Not that director Kenny Ortega pauses for even a second to contemplate the perversity and absurd excesses of the Jackson stage show, and why would he; as the director of the This Is It concert series, he helped invent it. There might have been a truly revealing portrait of Michael Jackson in the raw footage he used to form This Is It, but I imagine the lawyers who ultimately control this material (at least one of whom receives a producer credit on the film) would never allow that to happen. Certainly there are a few tantalizing moments — a few untouched a capella lines here, a cracked joke there — but not many. Jackson is typically seen in wide shots, and often framed from head to toe. That choice ensures we're able to scrutinize his fluid dance steps; it also reflects the way the film always views its subject from a safe distance. The audience never gets too close for his (or his estate's) comfort.

And so we're left to watch and guess. In some ways, that makes the film more interesting; you hang on Jackson's every word and gesture, searching for clues to his true personality, his state of mind, his health, and above all, what his reaction would have been to a project like this documentary? I suspect a perfectionist like Jackson, who we see obsessing over the smallest details in musical arrangements and dance steps, would have hated the idea of giving the public unfettered access to imperfect footage. The fact that This Is It observes Jackson from such a remove, and forces us to consider his performance through a filter of carefully sculpted sound, makes the film both less honest and, paradoxically, truer to Michael's vision. This isn't how it looked and sounded on the stage of the Staples Center in Los Angeles. But this is probably pretty close to how it looked and sounded inside Michael Jackson's very troubled mind.

NOTE: On IFC.com, Vadim Rizov writes about a fascinating companion piece to the 2012 trailer, an Adam Lambert music video that features the musician singing while people all around him run for their lives.

David Spade Would Like To Remind You...

2009-11-02T00:50:00.001-05:00

...that he was not in Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol.

Yes, there is a guy in the movie who does kind of look like him. But it's not him. No, it's just a random guy who looks exactly like him and whose wardrobe is entirely dayglo.

Yes a random guy who looks exactly like him and whose wardrobe is entirely dayglo and who rides a skateboard as if he's never done it before in his entire life.

Oh and Sharon Stone wants you to know that's not her making out with Steve Guttenberg, either.

And now, it's time for another installment of: Bad Product Placement Theater!

2009-10-30T12:16:00.000-04:00

On tonight's episode: Leonard Part 6 Starring Bill Cosby, Joe Don Baker, and Coca-Cola as "Coke."

So much care for the product placement; so little care for the screenplay. And now if you'll excuse me, I need to go get some soft drinks and spandex.

Briefly: The Wages of Fear (1953)

2009-10-26T01:19:00.004-04:00

Just how intense is The Wages of Fear? This movie didn't just make my palms sweat; it made the soles of my feet sweat too. Either I've got a glandular problem or this is one suspenseful movie. Four desperate Europeans living in South America agree to a suicide mission hauling containers of highly combustible nitroglycerin along 300 miles of unpaved road. If they survive the perilous journey of roads that resemble corrugated metal, hairpin mountain passes, decaying bridges, and lakes of oil, they'll each receive $2,000. In 2008 money, two grand inflates to a little under sixteen thousand, not exactly exorbitant pay for a job that can quite literally blow up in your face. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot's message couldn't be clearer: life is precious, short, and depressingly cheap. Not that you'll have much time to ponder the emptiness of human existence once the men begin their journey, as Clouzot throws one obstacle after another at the drivers, which means one harrowing sequence after another for the audience. The trek to the deliver the nitro runs the final 90 breathless minutes of the two-and-a-half hour film. It's some of the most exquisitely sweaty time you'll ever spend at the movies. Make sure you bring your extra-absorbent footwear.

Fast & Furious (2009)

2009-10-23T01:26:00.002-04:00

Fast & Furious may be dumb — no, you know what? Fast & Furious is dumb. But it's entertainingly dumb, like a cat who thinks it can stop a laser pointer if it pounces quickly enough. Some might take a movie to task for being this breathtakingly stupid, but let's give credit where credit's due: it cannot be easy to make something entertaining out of material this thoroughly brainless. This is a movie about two men, one cop and one criminal, who put aside a long-standing grudge to take down a drug trafficker through a strict regimen of street racing and looking very intensely at one another. That we invest at all in such a silly narrative is a credit to director Justin Lin, who compensates for his story's stupidity by treating the movie's title like a filmmaking mantra. Keep things moving fast and furious, so the audience doesn't have time to think about anything else.

The tactic works more often than not, and when it doesn't, it's sort of fun to watch it fail. For instance, in one scene, our heroes join the drug traffickers for a high-speed border crossing, sneaking into the United States via an elaborate series of tunnels hidden beneath the fence dividing Mexico and the U.S. Much is made of the fact that the drivers need to sneak into the tunnel's mouth before the are detected by security cameras. But how did someone build an elaborate, snaking, road race ready system of tunnels beneath said border and said fence and said security cameras without anyone noticing?

Maybe it's just me, but I think there's a certain pleasure to be had in a movie this absurd, where a man might leap across rooftops, dive through a window, and tackle a guy off a building and through the hood of a car just to ask him a question. And that there's even more pleasure to be had in the fact that said individual seems completely uninjured and unfazed by his several story fall onto the hood of a car. If you fell from a great height through the windshield of a Geo Metro wouldn't you need, I don't know, at least three or four seconds to collect yourself? And if you did manage to pull of such a ridiculous stunt without injuring yourself, wouldn't take a minute just to observe how absolutely ridiculous it is that you didn't?

FBI Agent Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) wouldn't. That's because he's a cop on the edge. He's a loose cannon! He eats ridiculous leaps off of buildings onto cars for breakfast! A few years earlier, O'Conner went undercover in the Los Angeles street racing scene but, like every undercover cop in every movie about undercover cops, he started to forget which side he was really on. Most of his moral confusion stemmed from his man-crush on the gang's leader, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), a gear-slash-meathead who charmed O'Conner with his large muscles, intense scowl, and penchant for saying things that sound profound but aren't (i.e. "I live my life a quarter mile at a time"). O'Conner couldn't bear to cage such a free spirit, so he let him flee at the end of the first film rather than arrest him. For this fourth Fast & Furious, the first sequel to featuring both Walker and Diesel, bromance fills the air once again when Toretto returns to town to settle a score that conveniently dovetails with O'Conner's latest case.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you Paul Walker and Vin Diesel are good actors because, frankly, that would even more ridiculous an argument than Fast & Furious is a movie. But I will sit here and tell you that something about these two marginal screen presences makes them work well together. I can't really recommend anything either has done separately (unless you count The Iron Giant where Diesel put his robotic delivery to good use playing, what else, a robot) but the two have an undeniable buddy action movie chemistry. Maybe it's the fact that they're both pretty crummy; it isn't a case of one terrific actor blowing away one mediocre one and throwing the power dynamics in scenes out of whack. Walker and Diesel both work at the same level of dudely gruffness, and even if the story's silly, they never play it that way. Neither one ever acts like they're too good or too smart for the material, and given the material that's saying something. If it were up to me, I'd make Diesel and Walker an regular onscreen duo like Martin and Lewis or Hepburn and Tracy. Every three years, they have to make an action movie together. Given their box office track records apart, I don't think they'd put much of a fight.

You could argue that Fast & Furious is a blatant rehash of the first film, and I suspect Lin and his collaborators would agree. After two inferior sequels that tried to spice up the franchise's formula with new locations and new characters, they quite intentionally went back to their roots. But they did more than just recycle the characters and basic storyline, they managed to credibly recreate the dopey charm of the original, which, let's remember, wasn't exactly the most cerebral action movie to begin with. Theater fans welcome a revival of a popular Broadway show. Why can't we look at Fast & Furious the same way? It's the show we previously enjoyed spruced up with some new arrangements and cutting-edge stagecraft that wasn't available to the original. Entertaining, dumb, fast, and furious.

Pandorum (2009)

2009-09-28T12:37:00.009-04:00

As a follow-up to my Paul W.S. Anderson article, I ventured out to see Pandorum, the latest film to be released under his Impact Pictures shingle. Anderson is the producer with his long-time partner Jeremy Bolt, with the directorial duties handed off to German newcomer Christian Alvart. In many ways the film plays like a remake of Event Horizon, as a skeleton crew investigates mysterious doings on an abandoned spacecraft. With a demonstrably smaller budget, Pandorum is more cloistered, far darker, and quite possibly superior to its model.

Offering the requisite suffocating spaces of an Anderson production, it opens with Cpl. Bower (Ben Foster) waking up in a locked hyper-sleep chamber (see above). He's seen in an overhead close-up, his head peering skyward as he frantically tears out the tubes joining him to the wall. It is the first of a series of cramped spaces that Bower must navigate while suffering from amnesia. Alvart utlilizes the overhead close-up later on in an intestinal, tube-filled air vent, emphasizing the repetitive, almost circular nature of his progress. Every time Bower successfully navigates a space, there is another, more elaborately daunting one to take its place. It's a film of frustrated progress, where Bower's goals keep narrowing along with the setting.

Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid, with a fine beard) keeps him grounded at the start. Waking up hours after Bower, he takes the role of communicator, manning the control room to direct Bower's path through the bowels of the ship to the reactor which has to be reset. With his holographic maps and comm devices, Payton is the anchor to a concrete reality, one in which Bower is slowly losing grip on as he goes further down the (mutated) rabbit hole.

Both men suffer from memory loss, and the script doles out their back-story in a slow expository drip. As their minds return to them, the space madness sets in (Pandorum!), their pasts not something either man wish to revisit. It's a clever structure, and Alvart keeps the ooze flowing in between revelations. Foster and Quaid offer up solid turns of wounded nobility and crusty professionalism, respectively, until the nihilistic plot twists threaten to turn their rugged determinism into hysterical self-destruction. It's a sleek, nasty, and highly effective piece of work.

W.S.

2009-09-25T09:54:00.004-04:00

As Singer puts us all to shame with his prodigious output, I can only shake my head at my Termite absence. I've yearned to shower praise on my favorite Hollywood film of the year, Orphan, as well as the multifarious pleasures of the flawed Gamer. But alas, writing a column a week for TCM has my eyes turned backward in time for the most part.

I'm still planning on contributing a little something on both of those worthy films (as well as on whatever I manage to catch at the NYFF), but for now, I'll just direct you to my defense of Paul W.S. Anderson over at IFC. Looking at his work as a whole, it shows a remarkable coherence, maintaining a visual focus on claustrophobic spaces that are often characters in their own right. The production design is the villain in his films, creating booby-trapped spaces that his genre archetype heroes navigate with aplomb. Also, Resident Evil as blood-soaked love-letter to Milla Jovovich. I think the guy is good. Feel free to disagree.

Also! October 1st! Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber from the Library of America! Buy buy buy!

Tara Reid Tries to Talk into the Phone She Just Hung Up

2009-09-24T10:20:00.002-04:00

We pick things up with Tara Reid's character on the phone with another character. They get disconnected. Tara Reid looks confused.

Now we cut to a wide shot. And I promise you, all the next screengrabs are taken in succession from one unbroken take. Tara Reid still "acting" confused:

Then looking at the phone like she's never used one before and isn't aware of the concept of calls getting disconnected:

Then reaching over to hang it up:

Now, watch. Immediately after putting the phone down, her hand goes right back to her head:

And for a split second she holds it there, open as if there should be a phone in it:

Then she quickly brings it down and the scene continues:

These stills are taken from Uwe Boll's magical 2002 film Alone in the Dark. I urge you to see it. It will change your life. It will change the way you see the world. And phones.

Coming Soon: IFC's Tease the Season!

2009-09-23T23:19:00.005-04:00

A half-hour Holiday Movie Guide airing on IFC in November. It'll look something like this, only moving:

Briefly: Angels & Demons (2009)

2009-09-17T01:46:00.001-04:00

Catholic groups spoke out against Angels & Demons just as they did in 2006 for director Ron Howard's previous Dan Brown adaptation, The Da Vinci Code, but the film is no more offensive to organized religion in general and the Catholic church in particular than it is to particle physics, logic, or good haircare. This time out, peculiarly coiffed symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is in Rome, searching for some kidnapped Cardinals and a stolen canister of antimatter which, conveniently for the plot and inconveniently for the populace of Vatican City, will explode when its battery powered containment field runs out of juice at exactly (EXACTLY!) midnight. There's something interesting about a Hollywood blockbuster anchored by a character who solves problems with his brain instead of his fists. But this isn't really that film: Angels & Demons is less about true puzzle solving than about a guy who won't shut up about art history caught in the middle of a variety of firefights and foot chases. Hanks is miscast too. He's at his best playing the witty, intrinsically decent everyman; think Forrest Gump, think Saving Private Ryan, think Big, etc. A humorless know-it-all like Langdon takes advantage of exactly none of his gifts as an actor. This isn't the worst movie of the summer — Howard's faithful to Brown's famously breathless pacing, plus the priest who also happens to be an experienced (EXPERIENCED!) helicopter pilot is good for a chuckle — but it's pretty forgettable. Hanks should divorce himself from this franchise (and his hairdresser) as soon as possible.

Briefly: The Soloist (2009)

2009-09-08T00:42:00.000-04:00

The Soloist's version of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) is divorced. The real Steve Lopez is happily married. The film, it would seem, has as tenuous a grip on reality as its schizophrenic subject. That man would be Nathanial Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a Julliard trained cellist who succumbs to mental illness and winds up living on the streets of Los Angeles, where he gets discovered and nurtured by Lopez. Contrary to its title, The Soloist is more duet than solo, with Downey and Foxx equally but uncomfortably sharing the film. It isn't that either gives a bad performances as they strike dissonant rather than consonant notes; Downey works a very stripped-down minimalist angle that clashes with Foxx's more demonstrative, heavy-handed approach. Both could work; they just don't work together. The film is handsome and well-intentioned and quite good at evoking the anxiety-ridden world of the deadline writer. But the characters, who never mesh all that well to begin with, are ultimately drowned out by preachy messages about homelessness, messages that are somewhat hard to swallow given the film's unnecessarily lavish budget, reportedly in the neighborhood of $60 million. The film's final title card informs us that 90,000 people live homeless in Los Angeles. Why not just give the $60 million to them?

Super Mario Bros: The First Draft

2009-09-03T12:41:00.002-04:00

Make your own at Thank You Mario!.

Matt's Camera (2005-2009)

2009-08-31T11:13:00.008-04:00

Lost my camera a few weeks ago. In its memory, here are a few of my favorite pictures I took with it in the last year.

Cruising (1980)

2009-08-17T02:37:00.002-04:00

"No! No one EVER built them like this! The architect was either an authentic genius or a certified whacko."

William Friedkin's Cruising is a bit like the apartment building in Ghostbusters. You look at it and wonder just what the hell the man who made it was thinking at the time. Friedkin, quoted in Time Out New York, asserts to this day that he was interested in the world of underground gay clubs purely "as a background for a murder mystery" but the finished film tells a different story. The detective character, played by Al Pacino, doesn't so much look into things as he looks at things, while all manner of lascivious activity swirls around him in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. And if the movie is truly just a "murder mystery," it's a pretty unconventional one, lacking a clear-cut solution or well-defined heroes and villains. Who was Friedkin designing this movie for? What are we supposed to take away from it? I will say this about it: Cruising looks and feels like few other movies in Hollywood history. I can't think of too many other Hollywood movies where there are more speaking parts for men dressed as women than for actual women.

The story begins when severed limbs start bobbing to the surface in the waters off of New York City. The NYPD suspects the killer is choosing his targets while cruising downtown S&M clubs so Pacino's Steve Burns, a uniformed cop who matches the victims' physical profile, is chosen to go undercover as bait in the West Village to lure out the murderer. While he's waiting to get picked up by the right guy, Pacino learns the codes of New York's gay leather underground: what it means, for instance, if you've got a red hanky in your left pocket versus a blue one in your right. Burns is supposedly searching for a killer, but he doesn't seem particularly motivated. He starts to lose himself in his role, maybe even enjoy it.

Friedkin gets lost too; he might have set out to make a murder mystery, just as Pacino's character might have set out to solve one, but they both get sidetracked by the lure of voyeurism. And there is plenty to see; the movie, and the people in it, are not shy about the details, even if Friedkin had to make extensive trims to these sequences in order to receive an R rating from the MPAA. The nuts and bolts of Burns' investigation get a lot less screentime than the people in these bars. They, rather than the ambiguous, incomplete murder mystery, is the true focus of the film.

Cruising was and still is best known for the controversy that swirled around its production. Gay protesters objected to the material and repeatedly disrupted the shoot. Generally I remain at least a little skeptical of anyone who protests a movie they haven't seen. But while I don't think anyone involved in the movie set out to make anything hateful, it's true that what they wound up with isn't particularly flattering either. At times, the movie seems a little embarrassed by itself, and even goes so far as to preemptively apologize for its representation of gay life by having Paul Sorvino's character tell Pacino's early in the film that the subculture he is about to enter is not in the homosexual "mainstream."

If nothing else, the protesters did have one interesting impact on the film: their extremely vocal protests on location succeeded in spoiling most of Cruising's natural sound, which meant a lot of its dialogue had to be rerecorded in post-production. The effect on the finished film is an interesting one. Intensely naturalistic scenes on the streets of New York City are conducted between men whose voices surrealistically float above the rest of the sound mix. The killer's voice is ADR-ed too — either as a result of the protests or to preserve the mystery of his identity or maybe both. The result is dreamlike and unsettling, and greatly enhances the film's nightmarish qualities.

The thing that does seem to be missing from Cruising that probably would have alleviated both protesters' and audiences' complaints is an interest in its subjects that extends beyond watching them at their most sexual moments. The movie is voyeuristic, but it's not especially curious: it observes, but it doesn't necessarily teach us much about the world in which it is set or the character that it follows. What does Pacino's character want? What does he care about? We know that he's a cop his interests include laying in bed with his girlfriend and talking to his boss. Compare the Pacino character to the one played by James Stewart in Vertigo, another film about a detective who becomes consumed with desire for the thing he's supposed to be observing. Think of all the things you know about that man, who he is, what he's lost, what he wants and feels. Steve Burns is a complete blank slate. The choices he makes at the end of the film — not to mention the actions Friedkin hints he may have taken — are not motivated by his character because he essentially has no character.

Friedkin is no dummy, and I'm inclined to believe all of this was by design, perhaps as a way to encourage straight audiences to relate to Pacino's character and to see this world through his eyes. But this decision, like many others he makes about the film (including the explicitness of the violence, which exceeds even the explicitness of the sexuality) makes Cruising even more audience un-friendly. Friedkin provokes and confounds, pushing the viewer away, and pulling a little of what J. Hoberman of The Village Voice likes to call "kamikaze auteurism," gleefully and recklessly pursuing passion, marketability be damned. But most of Hoberman's kamikaze auteurs, guys like Darren Aronofsky (on The Fountain) or Richard Kelly (on Southland Tales), were directors of small, arthouse cult hits. Friedkin, on the other hand, was the director of The Exorcist and The French Connection two New Hollywood entertainments that managed to combine originality with accessibility. His leap into kamikaze auteurism is a full-on dive bomb, the work of an authentic genius or a certified whacko.

YouTube Art: Dirty Dozen Making Of Film

2009-08-14T08:40:00.004-04:00

"This is Lee Marvin. An action guy, at work or at play. Today, it's work."

I love The Dirty Dozen but this funky, stylish, silly press film is almost more entertaining than the actual movie it's promoting. This is exactly how I like to pretend moviemaking used to work.

Briefly: Deliver Us From Evil (2006)

2009-08-05T13:48:00.000-04:00

Deliver Us From Evil is a documentary, but it could be filed in the video store under the horror section. Few fictional bogeymen in the history of movies can hold a candle to a real-life monster like Oliver O'Grady, a former Catholic priest and serial child molester. Director Amy Berg finds him living quietly in Ireland, defrocked and deported, but free to roam and interact with more children. O'Grady's aware of his crimes yet eerily oblivious to their impact, and even hopes at one point that his former victims will come visit him, absolve him, and shake his hand (or give him what he really wants, a hug. Um, ew). Still, as shocking as O'Grady's nonchalant recollections might be, they're nothing compared to the revelations contained in the legal depositions of his former church supervisors, who covered up his earliest crimes and facilitated his later ones by moving him from parish to parish rather than addressing the problem. Their squirmy, evasive testimony gives new meaning to the idea of religious confession. The movie's not perfect, particularly during a third act that flails about desperately for some sort of uplifting ending. Then again, these flaws only make Deliver Us From Evil scarier, by reinforcing how, in cases like this, true closure is impossible.

The Hurt Locker (2009): A Dissent

2009-08-02T16:29:00.002-04:00

So, there's this movie The Hurt Locker that everyone seems to be enjoying. I mean, really enjoying. I don't get it. From my admittedly myopic perspective, Kathryin Bigelow's latest is a thuddingly conventional war movie with a tiresome visual scheme. The cliches start early on, with Bigelow helpfully stating the theme in the epigraph, "...war is a drug." The rest of the film pummels this threadbare idea into the ground.

The characters are unelaborated stock types, allowed one characteristic each. The lead is Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), a reckless Southerner who runs on adrenaline (he's a cowboy!). And that's it. He ignores protocol, punches his underlings, and sneaks off base on a personal whim. He's never disciplined, even when he shuts off his radio and leaves his team exposed to snipers. Or there's the time he leads his Explosives Ordnance Team on a mission into town without orders, and allows his team member Specialist Eldridge to get kidnapped. Whoops! He's never disciplined or even questioned for his idiotic actions. Needless to say, he would have been demoted many times over in the real Army, as Captain Robert Busseau told the Army News Service.

Renner is essentially playing Patrick Swayze's role in the infinitely superior Point Break, self-destructively looking for the next high. But what made sense in the overheated action operatics of Point Break looks even more ridiculous in a sober war film (the low point is when Eldridge yells, "you're an adernaline junkie!"to James. You know, in case we didn't get it yet). Within the limits of the character, though, Renner excels, imbuing James with a buzzing intensity that almost lifts him out of cliche. But not quite.

Anthony Mackie plays James' no-nonsense Sergeant JT Sanborn. He's the gritty veteran who twists his face into a scowl a lot at the antics of his superior. Think James Whitmore in Battleground, except with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is the callow, cowardly youth, and nothing more. He consults an unbelievably caricatured combat trauma counselor for his stress. The Ivy League counselor with his obsequious manner hasn't seen combat, you see, and will thus be blown up. Tom Ricks, who has written the definitive history of the Iraq War thus far, also takes exception to this, along with numerous other inaccuracies. Both Ricks and the soldiers interviewed by the Army News Service said they enjoyed it as entertainment, but that it in no way reflects the reality of the war.

Unfortunately, I can't even hand The Hurt Locker that backhanded compliment. For its style is just as bland as its characters. Opting for multiple handheld cameras for the kind of shorthand intimacy so de rigeur these days, Bigelow goes for maximum coverage, which she cuisinarts in the editing process. The DP Barry Ackryod told American Cinematographer that "we had up to four cameras running on a single scene..." This is the same style popularized by Paul Greengrass, who Ackroyd was the DP for on United 93 and the upcoming Green Zone. So it's in the Greengrass style that intensifies "intensified continuity", but with more combat photography zooms, a more measured pace, and a few gratuitous bits of slow motion (the shells dropping at the end of the sniper sequence was especially unnecessary). It's a visual mess for the sake of "realism", but as Sam Fuller once said (I'm paraphasing), the only way to get realism in a war movie is to have somebody shoot a gun over the audience's head. So what are we left with? A factually inaccurate war movie, riddled with cliches, and shot in a tired visual style. Bring on the Oscars!

Doings

2009-07-31T11:34:00.005-04:00

There's this show called Eastbound & Down. It amuses me. I wrote an article about it for Moving Image Source. You can choose to read it or not. I'm just putting it out there.

I also wrote a review of Funny People (for The Rumpus), another cultural product that tickled my particular fancy.

I've made a promise to myself to write a dissenting view of The Hurt Locker this weekend. I'm only putting it here to force me to write it. Otherwise I'd just watch baseball and massage my belly. So this paragraph is important.

Is everyone starting to compile their best-of-decade lists? Well, you should. Just expect a Tativille and Termite Art free-for-all that will have Termite Artisan Matt and Tati-villain Michael J. Anderson sniping at each other for a week or two (at least: catch their fabulous back and forth on Michael Mann here). I will calmly sit on the outside and contemplate how high Anchorman should be on the list. Something to look forward to.

Briefly: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

2009-07-29T13:01:00.000-04:00

The character in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that best exemplifies the movie itself is Devastator: an enormous monster, clumsily assembled from half a dozen disparate parts that's only good at lumbering around and striking badass poses. T:RotF is an action movie, a war movie, an alien invasion movie, a cartoon, a sex comedy, a moving Maxim pictorial, but it's not particularly effective as any of them. Mostly it just sits up there on the screen, looking like a million bucks (or maybe a couple hundred million bucks) but sounding like shit. That's because Michael Bay clearly doesn't care about anything except his low-angle, slo-mo, hyperstylish visuals; if he did, he probably would have addressed how characters walk out of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. into an airplane graveyard somewhere in the Mountain West. Someday, scholars will someday study the film for its representation of America's early 21st century sexual and military power fantasies. For now, it is a lifeless husk of a blockbuster, loud, flashy, and utterly robotic.

(Suggested Transformers 2 drinking game: take a sip anytime one character screams another character's name at the top of his or her lungs.)

Briefly: Not Quite Hollywood (2009)

2009-07-28T02:53:00.002-04:00

If, as Quentin Tarantino believes, the real core of exploitation cinema is found in images so crazy you cannot believe your eyes, then the new film about the history of Australian exploitation “Not Quite Hollywood” not only documents its subject, it embodies it as well. For 100 lightning-paced minutes, director Mark Hartley takes you inside the era of “Ozsploitation,” when restrictive censorship laws were lifted and the first true Australian film industry -- and a slew of nudie, horror, and action pictures -- were born. Hartley's approach is in the great exploitation tradition, with lots of flashy editing and plenty of titillation. The result, by design, is light on serious critical or cultural analysis and heavy on batshit insane film clips (like the one where George Lazenby engages in a karate fight while his back is completely covered in flames), cheeky interviews (one is conducted in a working strip club) and hilarious on-set anecdotes (the one about the girl with the machete and the director yelling “Cut!” is worth the price of admission all by itself). It's not the most comprehensive history lesson, but it is a highly entertaining one, and the final product is bawdy, vulgar, and thrilling enough to make its subjects proud. And if you're a fan of genre cinema, you're guaranteed to find plenty of fodder for your Netflix queue.

YouTube Art: Sylvester Stallone: DRINKENSTEIN

2009-07-19T23:20:00.004-04:00

This clip is also posted on YouTube under the alternate title "The Moment Sylvester Stallone Decided to Fire His Agent."

Brüno (2009)

2009-07-15T21:06:00.004-04:00

Prank comedians are their own worst enemies. For traditional movie comedians, success opens doors: access to greater budgets, less studio meddling, finer actors to select a cast from. But a prank comedian lives and dies by his anonymity and, in Baron Cohen's particular case, his ability to convince ordinary people to let their guard down and reveal their innate prejudices and idiocies. His Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan grossed over $125 million dollars in the United States, in one fell swoop turning its title character into a household name and destroying his viability as a social commentator and trickster.

Which is to say it must not have been easy for Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles to make another movie after Borat. Their follow-up film, Brüno, certainly doesn't look like it was easy to make. Hell, at times it looks down right hazardous. How hazardous? Put it this way: the scene where Baron Cohen suggests to an apparently legitimate terrorist that Osama bin Laden should shave his beard because he looks like a "dirty wizard" is only the third most dangerous situation the actor puts himself in in service of his art. There's one moment where I wagered "Brüno" stood a damn good chance of getting shot in the woods, and another where an unruly, drunken mob nearly takes his head off with a chair. As a provocateur, Baron Cohen is beyond fearless.

Yet as a filmmaker, he's surprisingly timid. The narrative of Brüno is little more than a Mad Lib of Borat with the new lead character's name inserted into all the Proper Noun blanks and "homophobia" in exchange for "anti-Semitism." In both films, Baron Cohen's bumbling, nudity-prone protagonist journeys across America with a dimwitted assistant, crossing paths with low-level celebrities and ignorant Southerners. Whatever differences existed between the Brüno and Borat characters from their shared tenure on television's Da Ali G Show have basically vanished, right down to Brüno's mockery of the cruelty and stupidity of the fashion world, all of which is essentially scuttled after a terrific early setpiece where Brüno, wearing a suit made entirely out of Velcro, causes havoc at a Milan runway show.

Instead, the film becomes a vehicle for an exploration of modern American attitudes toward homosexuality, both onscreen and off. Some find Baron Cohen's characterization of Brüno offensive; in an article on Salon, David Rakoff calls him "a gay minstrel." After opening his review by calling Brüno "one of the worst films of the year," At the Movies' Ben Mankiewicz said "He's demonstrating these people's homophobia but in the process he's behaving in the exact way these people think about gay men." Isn't that the point? All of Baron Cohen's characters are outlandish stereotypes deployed to expose American ignorance and prejudice. Where was all this outrage when the (glorious) nation of Kazakhstan took umbrage at Baron Cohen's less-than-positive depiction of their populace? From my perspective, the best stuff in Brüno is the material about homophobia. The first half is uneven; mostly uninspired satires of celebrity culture, like a disappointing sequence where the character plays an extra on a TV courtroom drama and another featuring an almost certainly staged encounter with Paula Abdul. The closest the film gets to achieving the old Ali G Show magic are the sequences that set the hero loose on gay "converters" or a surprisingly uptight swingers party, and Baron Cohen can skewer their self-righteousness, bigotry, and hypocrisy.

I have no inside knowledge of Brüno's production, but if I had to guess, I'd bet that Baron Cohen and writing partners Anthony Hines, Dan Mazer, Jeff Schaffer, and Peter Baynham schemed up the jokes first and then wrote a narrative around them that could be added in post-production via voiceover (I'd also wager Baron Cohen got recognized a lot more this time around, scuttling some planned skits that had to be replaced with less thematically appropriate material). But Baron Cohen's contemporaries, the Jackass crew, never bothered to gussy up their art for the silver screen by trying to string their gags together with a story. They just threw together they best jokes they could: all killer, no filler style. If Baron Cohen couldn't do more than recycle his last film's story, he would have been wise to follow their lead, a lesson he should have learned after his mostly narrative (and mostly disastrous) first feature, Ali G Indahouse. Instead, Brüno feels like a standard Hollywood sequel — a rehash of the first movie with bigger setpieces and more sex and violence — from an artist we've come to expect unique and original things from. If you want more than that from Brüno, I'm afraid the joke's on you.

Briefly: Stripes (1981)

2009-07-03T13:22:00.000-04:00

Few movies deserve an "Extended Cut" but I can think of few that deserve one less than Stripes, which was already twenty minutes longer than necessary in its original theatrical edition. Rather than expanding the film to a bloated 126 minutes, Sony should have created the first "Abridged Cut": 80 tightened minutes of the best basic training high jinks and Bill Murray improvisations. Thankfully, the DVD does also provide the theatrical cut, which limits the damage caused by Stripes' regrettable fourth act behind enemy lines in Czechoslovakia. Made with the inexplicable logistical support of the U.S. Army, the film up to that point follows two thirtyish goofballs, Murray and Harold Ramis, who join the Army to get their lives in order. The movie wouldn't work at all without Murray as jocose enlistee John Winger, and all of Stripes’ best moments belong to him: an unorthodox seduction scene (he promises a woman “the Aunt Jemima treatment” then prods her with a spatula), a droll-but-impassioned piece of patriotism ("We're American soldiers! We've been kicking ass for 200 years! We're 10 and 1!") and the famous razzle-dazzle drill routine. But the movie should have ended right there. Don’t give us a show-stopping musical number and then refuse to stop the show.

NYAFF, Part 3: Breathless

2009-07-02T11:00:00.003-04:00

The two highlights of the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival (so far), have been Yang Ik-June's feel-bad domestic violence yarn Breathless (2009) and Lee Kyeong-Mi's obsessive farce Crush and Blush (2008) [more on the latter later]. Both are disturbing psychological freak-outs from South Korea, with the former opting for tragedy, the latter comedy.

Breathless is very nearly a one-man show. Yang Ik-June wrote it, stars in it, and co-directed the film with Lee Hwan. According to the NYAFF programmers, he sold his house and maxed out his credit cards to get this outrageously vulgar film made. It's nothing if not a passion project. The language is what immediately registers (and I can only imagine the difficulties for the translator), a peppery melange of "cunts", "bitches", and "motherfuckers". They're used as punctuations, terms of endearment, and imminent threats. Yang is the primary linguist here as Song-Hoon, a morose shakedown artist working for a fatherly moon-faced loan shark.

Song-Hoon's violence emerges immediately in the opening scene, as he and his team of thugs break up a student protest. His rage is uncontrollable, as he ends up debilitating anything in his way, even his fellow baton-wielding brothers. He is a savage, and early on Yang plays these bestial traits for laughs, pivoting his uncouth attitude around the uncomprehending locals around him. The uneasy tone is established early on, as he saunters down an alleyway, and spits over his shoulder. The spittle lands on a high-school girl, Yeon-Hee (a devilish Kim Gol-Bi), who tuns out to be just as nihilistic as he is. They exchange blows, and a tentative truce is built up for the rest of the film's running time.

As their backstories are filled in (abusive and deceased parents, intense emotional scarring), the tone tints darker and darker. The plot follows a fairly traditional arc, as Sang-Hoon seeks closure for his bereft youth and attempts to master his rage to fit into (however uncomfortably) the wider society. These are beats hit by every rebellious teen film ever made, but Breathless enlivens them with its mordant wit, fearless performances, and the ragged intensity of its HD compositions.

The final screening of Breathless takes place today, July 2nd, at 2PM at the IFC Center.

NYAFF, Part 2: Tactical Unit: Comrades in Arms (2009)

2009-07-01T10:25:00.004-04:00

Law Wing-Cheong has paid his dues at Milkyway Image. Working as an assistant director and editor since 1995, he was the AD on Running Out of Time, The Mission, and PTU, among others. Milkway seems to work on the habits of the old studio system, where one apprenticed in technical positions before rising to the director's chair. Law has gotten his feet wet on a few sequels, with his first gig on Running Out of Time 2, up to his two sequels to PTU: Tactical Unit: The Code (2008, for TV), and Tactical Unit: Comrades in Arms (2009, theatrical). The latter film recently screened at the NYAFF, and was another example of Milkyway's well-oiled genre machinery (also see Tativille's take on their Eye in the Sky).

All the characters from Johnnie To's original return, including Simon Yam's ramrod straight cop Sam, his careerist competitor May (Maggie Siu), and the lazy, demoted curmudgeon, Fat Lo (Milkyway axiom Lam Suet). Sam's unit is competing with May's unit for promotion, and this not-so-friendly rivalry starts the film off on a Keystone Kops vibe. Filmed with slapstick vigor, the two teams chase down a petty thief, down opposite sides of the street, eventually combining into a morass of tangling feet, dangling handcuffs, and bruised morale. May's boys win out, and eventually are bumped upstairs.

The day before the promotions are to take place, though, a major bank heist takes place, and the perps disappear into a forest. Thus the two bickering units are forced to work together to take them down. This is where the main body of the film begins, and Law shows a distinctly light touch in this darkly scripted tale. His deft use of cross-cutting shows the various bumblings of the teams, as they all variously get lost in the bowels of the night, not unlike an old dark house comedy-horror film like The Cat and the Canary (1927).

As funny as it is, Law doesn't skimp on tension, wrapping things up with a tightly choreographed shootout in a quaint rural church. Esssentially it has everything one could desire in a quick and dirty crime film. Definitely worth seeking out, especially if you're a fan of PTU.

There are no more screenings, but it's readily available on HK DVD at the usual vendors (YesAsia, HKFlix, etc.)

Briefly: Suspiria (1977)

2009-06-30T18:27:00.008-04:00

It boggles my mind that Dario Argento directed a movie called Deep Red and it is not this picture. How is that possible? How could any movie not set entirely in a darkroom be more about the color red than this one? On one of those classic horror film dark-and-stormy-nights an American girl (Jessica Harper) arrives at a German dance academy. By day, the place seems harmless enough. By night it's transformed into a house of horrors, lit entirely by ominous splashes of blue, green, and especially red. Argento's film is soaked in fluids: it opens in a drenching rain, features a key scene in a pool, finds menace in a glass of syrupy wine, and covers its victims in liters of blood. And there's no denying the amount of imagination behind the inventively grisly slasher scenes; it would not surprise me in the slightest if the barbed wire room made an appearance in my dreams in the near future. Still, points off for the score (which I've heard others praise, but sounded to me like an giddy asthmatic with an old Casio keyboard) and for the crummy transfer on the bargain basement DVD Netflix sent me instead of the remastered Anchor Bay disc.

Briefly: The Proposal (2009)

2009-06-28T00:42:00.004-04:00

The title The Proposal has two meanings; it refers to the improvised marriage between shrew boss Margaret (Sandra Bullock) and exasperated assistant Andrew (Ryan Reynolds) devised to stave off her deportation, as well as to their jobs in the world of book publishing. But another possible title, The Sham, works equally well, not only to describe their romantic hoax but also the contrived, counterfeit nature of this entire cinematic enterprise. Set in Alaska (but shot in Massachusetts), The Proposal tries to form an unholy union of its own between Meet the Parents-style homecoming shenanigans and the workplace screwball comedy of previous Bullock vehicle Two Weeks Notice. And while the stars mug and flail with commendably shameless abandon, the movie's about as romantic as a fifth season episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8. That's what happens when you give two people who've hated each other for three years three wacky misadventure-filled days to fall in love. When do you think it hit Margaret that what she really wanted all along was Andrew and his rippling rectus abdominis? I'm guessing the light bulb moment came at some point between when the male stripper shoved his junk in her face and dancing a Native American tribal ritual with Betty White.

New York Asian Film Festival, Part I: Written By (2009) and The Longest Nite (1998)

2009-06-26T16:27:00.004-04:00

As integral to summer in NYC as panicked Mets fans proposing ridiculous trades on WFAN (Jon Niese for Matt Holliday, maybe?), the New York Asian Film Festival is quickly becoming the most entertaining film series in the city. It has the plums to program genre actioners along with the art films that tend to solely populate regional surveys here. The breadth of the NYAFF is its great strength, as was evidenced early on.

The opening night film was Wai Ka-Fai's Written By (2009), a narratively dense family drama. Ka-Fai has been Johnnie To's right hand man for over a decade at Milkyway Productions, writing, directing, producing, and polishing the eccentric company's output. He's known mostly for his co-writing and co-directing duties with To on Fulltime Killer (2001), Running on Karma (2003), and Mad Detective (2007), but he's also helmed idiosyncratic projects of his own, including the 2006 comedy The Shopaholics. His latest solo jaunt is an ambitious but strangely flat exercise in experimental narrative. It's structured like a Russian Doll, stories within stories within stories.

Lau Ching-Wan (a Wai regular since their TVB days) plays a lawyer who dies in a car accident, leaving his daughter Melody blind and his wife and son devastated. Trying to rekindle happy memories, Melody starts writing a story where her father survived (although also blinded) while the rest of the family died. The film then follows this second story, as Lau and his Filipino maid aimlessly putter about their large home. Lonely and desperate, this invented Lau starts to write his own story, a more fantastical tale where the ghosts of his family return to aid him through his depression. These story layers remain discrete until the final act, when characters begin crossing between stories and tragedies beget tragedies.

For all of its conceptual complexity, Written By never takes off dramatically. The characters are ciphers, thinly drawn receptacles of grief that serve as pawns in Wai's narrative game-playing, not unlike Charlie Kaufman's embalmed Synecdoche, New York. As Wai draws his deterministic web, Melody flails without a discernible inner life. Her attempt to exorcize her memories through her imagination is a potent device, but it stagnates on the screen. Wai never finds a consistent style to visualize her plight, and his use of subpar special effects lends the piece a Saturday morning cartoon insubstantiality. It ends up a tantalizing disappointment.

There was no lack of inspired Wai, though, for there was also a rare screening of 1998's The Longest Nite, a rescue job he performed with Johnnie To. Credited director Patrick Yau was fired after he had completed five scenes, and the duo built an entirely new story around this feeble skeleton. It turned out to be a punishingly dark yakuza tale, as Tony Leung and Lau Ching-Wan's mobsters tumble into an abyss of violence and swapped identities.

The film is literally dark, using very little artificial light and framing the bald, glowering Lau as a black angel of the apocalypse. Leung, a twitchy crooked cop, is soon framed-up for a fall, and his only way out is to assume Lau's identity. Only one can survive, so they devour each other for the use of it, in a mirror-smashing finale redolent of Welles' Lady from Shanghai. In the Q&A that followed (available online), Wai admits this final battle was hatched on the spot, as they needed 10 minutes to fill and had little money. So they rented an empty warehouse, shaved Leung's head, and had them beat the shit out of each other. It's a miraculous bit of improvisation, and the film is a testament to Wai and To's adaptive creativity.

More to come...

Briefly: Salesman (1968)

2009-06-26T01:59:00.004-04:00

This picture about traveling Bible salesmen had me thanking God I didn't go into retail. At least not the kind in Salesmen: you're separated from your family, working out of shared hotel rooms, trying to convince poor Catholics they need to own a $50 (or, inflation adjusted, $300) Bible. Filmmakers Albert and David Maysles offer little gloss or commentary on the proceedings while capturing this day-to-day, door-to-door existence. They follow four salesmen, but return most frequently to one of the older members of the brigade, Paul "The Badger" Brennan, who goes about his job humming "If I Were A Rich Man." If only; at this late stage of his career, unable to move his merchandise, Brennan is like a trapeze artist working without the benefit of a net whose hands have started to cramp on him. What Brennan does is undeniably unsavory – and to some degree the fact that the Maysles stood by and watched him do it is too – but his situation is so dire and the odds he faces so long that we can't help but sympathize. There's no joy in this hustle, only the desperation of a dead-ended American dream. For added value, watch back-to-back with an episode of the TV series Mad Men.

Briefly: The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

2009-06-24T15:18:00.006-04:00

Tony Scott's remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 opens with a credits sequence set to Jay-Z's "99 Problems." The film itself has nearly that many. John Travolta and Denzel Washington, as a man who hijacks a 6 train and the MTA worker who receives his demands respectively, are no improvement over the earlier combination of Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw. Neither is Brian Helgeland's modern take on the original 1973 novel; switching the hero from cop to MTA dispatcher adds an agreeable fish-out-of-water element but also makes the finale, in which Washington straps on a gun and saves the day, totally out of character. Prepare to be incredibly frustrated as you watch allegedly clever criminals make obviously dumb mistakes: how does Travolta, who's monitoring the hostage situation on the Internet, not notice as the national news grabs a webcamera feed from inside his train? Scott's glossier take on Joseph Sargent's grimy imagery has an undeniable panache, and there's no question he makes a story about two dudes talking on the phone an impressively lively visual experience. But his flashy editing and stutter-shutter effects slow down a movie that is supposed to be about speed, and he winds up obscuring the film's thrills rather than enhancing them.

Terminator Salvation (2009)

2009-06-04T15:42:00.002-04:00

In order to enjoy Terminator Salvation, you need to approach it as if it were pornography. Ignore all the people talking, the story, the characters, the dialogue, focus in on the big set pieces, and enjoy the explosions. Nothing but the action in Terminator Salvation matters, which is good because the film makes absolutely no sense, even by the already low standards established by the three previous logic-challenged Terminators.

For instance, a young man by the name of Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) factors heavily into the plot. The machines, you see, have put out a new Terminator's Most Wanted list, and his name is right at the top. Why? Because in the first Terminator (directed by James Cameron), Reese (played then as an older man by Michael Biehn) travels back in time to destroy the T-800 trying to kill Sarah Connor and inadvertently fathers humanity's eventual leader John Connor (Christian Bale) in the process. If the machines can kill Reese before he goes back in time, they can ensure Connor was never born and wipe out their biggest enemy. Which begs the question: how do they know Kyle Reese is the guy from the future who becomes Connor's father? My guess: these machines are cutting-edge. They have the Terminator Blu-Ray and they took notes.

The story spirals downward from there. Connor actually shares the spotlight with a new character, Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), who we see put to death by lethal injection over the opening credits yet find miraculously alive after the machines have beaten the holy hell out of civilization. Slowly he comes to learn what anyone who has seen the Terminator Salvation trailer knows before they walk in the door: Wright's second life comes at a terrible, mechanical cost. He provides the narrative connection between Reese and Connor as well as the closest thing Salvation has to any thematic resonance with Terminator 2 and its examination of the unquantifiable things that separate a human and a robot. Worthington is Australian, and to hide his accent he speaks in the same gravelly whisper as Bale, which makes the pair's dramatic confrontation unintentionally hilarious. Bale keeps leaning closer and closer as he speaks to Worthington, until the two are inches apart, whispering at each other (see the picture above). Y'know if either of these guys could speak at normal volume, they wouldn't have to stand so close together to hear what they're saying.

Terminator Salvation's plot is like a house of cards built on a pit of quicksand. Really the last thing you want to do when you're sitting watching this movie is ask questions, because that could ruin the entire experience for you. It's best not to consider why, for example, if the machines have yet to invent time travel (Salvation takes place in the year 2018, some time before Connor becomes the outright leader of the Resistance and before the off-camera events that prompt the first three Terminators) they don't simply travel back in time from the point they have invented it and provide themselves with the necessary technology or information needed to create it ahead of schedule. Or why they don't just send Terminator after Terminator to kill Sarah Connor back in 1984, or John Connor back in his Edward Furlong days. In the very first Terminator, Kyle Reese claimed that the Resistance destroyed the time portal after he and the first T-800 went through to ensure that no one else would follow. Of course, if the Resistance destroyed the time machine after Reese went through it, how could Reese know that they actually did it? Maybe they didn't after all because seven years later we got the temporal shenanigans of the Cameron-helmed Terminator 2: Judgment Day and twelve years after that, Jonathan Mostow's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, each with their own pair of time travelers. By 2009's Terminator Salvation I guess anything goes (again, like porn).

I'm giving the movie a hard time, but I do want to give credit to director McG for putting together at least three truly outstanding action sequences, including a horrifying helicopter crash done in Children of Men-style long takes, a grisly gas station siege that culminates in a crackerjack motorcycle and truck chase, and finally a full-on battle royal between Connor and a familiar looking Terminator. Kudos also to cinematographer Shane Hurlbut and the various FX teams for creating as seemless and convincing a blend of old-school practical effects and modern digital ones as I've seen in a film. Plus the widely spoiled CGI Arnold Schwarzenegger cameo is surprisingly convincing; infinitely superior to the similar gag in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and so good that a colleague of mine assumed he was watching Schwarzenegger beneath a heavy amount of makeup when he first saw it. It's an honest mistake; the guy did say he'd be back.

When Salvation goes into action mode, it can stand shoulder-to-shoulder beside this summer's best blockbuster, Star Trek. Like Star Trek, Terminator Salvation's villains' time traveling plans don't make a whole lot of sense, but at least J.J. Abrams' film had a clearly defined enemy, something it shares with all the previous Terminators and their big, imposing singular bad guys. In Terminator Salvation John Connor and the rest of his intrepid crew are up against an endless parade of indistinct machines with no personality and no goals beyond their ongoing attempts to eliminate every bit of organic matter on the planet. If the machines were to kill Reese, kill Connor, kill all of what's left of civilization, what would they do next? Scaring the hell out of the vestiges of humanity is all they seem to know how to do. My guess is if they ever succeeded in wiping out mankind they'd immediately travel back in time and stop themselves from killing us all, just so they could do it all over again.

YouTube Art: A Fan's Reaction to the New Moon Trailer

2009-06-02T23:36:00.003-04:00

From Salon as found by someone on Twitter.

Question: have you ever been this excited about ANYTHING in your entire life? Follow-up question: has ANYONE ever been this excited about ANYTHING IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD?

Cannes not

2009-05-24T01:37:00.003-04:00

You'll find my completely uninformed Cannes Film Festival coverage below. I have never been to Cannes nor have I seen any of the films mentioned. Enjoy.

*Boy, these lines are long.

*Badges, huh? Jeez.

*Lars von Trier's Antichrist: Holy shit!

*I can't believe I heard {famous critic} say that to {less famous critic}!

*Johnnie To's Vengeance: Suits arranged in geometric patterns explode into redness.

*Gaspar Noe is a geniuasshole.

*Alain Resnais' Wild Grass: It's floating away. Sublime!

*This croissant is tasty.

*Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective: Romania, yay! Bureaucracy, boo!

*I'm so tired I'm hallucinating that the main competition is superior to Un Certain Regard. Zing!

*Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon: Rigor, mortality.

*My weight gain is affecting my sex drive. You know, because of the economy.

*Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds: The Expendables will be better.

*The award will go to that guy who did that thing.

Thoughts on Antichrist (2009)

2009-05-17T20:24:00.015-04:00

I took notes during the first Cannes press screening of Lars von Trier's new film Antichrist but I don't have them in front of me right now. I don't need them. This movie is many things: shocking, troubling, angry, maybe even a little funny (though I'm still not sure whether the laughs are intentional or not). But it is not forgettable. Is it a success? Is it a train wreck? Who knows. Maybe it's a successful train wreck, caused by a conductor who saw a car stalled on the tracks in front of him and willfully chose not to hit the brakes.

To some degree, to read about this movie before you see it is to ruin it. Make no mistake: the imagery and content of this film would be shocking in any context. It is a movie about insanity that is itself batshit insane. But part of its reception here sprung from the way in which the movie completely blindsided people. Already Antichrist is becoming a part of Cannes legend — I heard two different stories today about people fainting at screenings — which means no one will ever get to see this movie the way that first audience got to see it. And once you know a film is quote-unquote shocking, and watch it with that expectation, you've changed the viewing experience. It's the difference between walking into an ambush and walking to the gallows.

But you want to know more anyway, I take it. The story involves an unnamed married couple, first met having sex in a scene that feels like a cross between a porn film and a cologne ad: hardcore money shots mingle in a sea of black-and-white slo-motion, snow falling, water droplets flying, bodies humping. With their baby monitor on mute, the pair — played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg — don't hear their infant sneaking out of his crib, or climbing onto the windowsill where he slips and plummets to his death. Sometime later, Dafoe, a therapist by trade, decides to ween Gainsbourg off the medication her doctor has prescribed for her grief. Despite Dafoe's constant, slightly prickish counseling, her condition worsens and she begins to experience wild panic attacks that he eventually attributes to a fear of "nature." That leads the couple to their remote cabin in the woods, where Dafoe plans to make Gainsbourg confront her anxieties. Though they call their secluded second home "Eden," the place is ludicrously ominous even before Dafoe encounters a wounded fox snacking on its own innards and growling "Chaos reigns!" From there, as the press notes put it, "things go from bad to worse." And worse would involve a variety of graphic sex and violence, and eventually a gruesome fusion of the two to mirror the tragic opening.

Though the film's first hour contained some of the most disturbingly powerful images of anything I'd seen this year at the festival, everything is prologue for the brutally gory ending, one that I heard fellow critics liken after the screening to everything from I Spit on Your Grave to Un Chien Andalou. Both comparisons seem apt; if you like your experimental art films with just a wee bit of sexual horror, look no further. Maybe von Trier thought the only way to approximate the pain suffered by the characters on screen was to assault the audience with some of the most graphically unsettling images imaginable. Or maybe he just thought making 2300 stuffy rich people in tuxedos all gasp at the same time would be a great laugh.

And I'll be honest here: I really don't know. Based on my conversations with others here in Cannes, it seems nobody really does. Maybe von Trier doesn't either: in the press notes, he basically says as much, confessing scenes "were added for no reason. Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking," (though he does add "I am very happy about this film and the images in it. They come out of an inspiration that's real to me. I've shown honesty in this project."). As for his expectations about the festival? The director says, "The audience in Cannes is usually pretty open. What isn't done? Fucking?" I don't think it's the fucking people objected to; so much as being fucked with. The audience won't forget that anytime soon, either.

Scenes from Cannes 2009

2009-05-15T01:20:00.000-04:00

The view from my bedroom in our apartment here in Cannes:

A typically extravagant Cannes promotion; a giant mock-up of the UP house & balloons filled with dozens of real balloons:

As usual, the Carlton Hotel is covered in movie ads. I like the ones from Inglourious Basterds best. I doubt we'll see this catch phrase on the American advertising.

JCVD must have had a bigger impact in Europe than it did in the states; Van Damme billboards are everywhere this year. This one has the tagline of the century. Oh and in answer to your question, tagline: YES.

Finally, either this menu is mistranslated, or that is the dirtiest sandwich in history:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

2009-05-07T13:39:00.008-04:00

Turns out Wolverine's not so indestructible after all. Oh sure, he's impervious to bullets or knives or claws, but against up against foes like unsure directors and careless screenwriters, the popular X-Man is just as mortal as any other movie character. He may walk away victorious at the end of X-Men Origins: Wolverine but he's clearly lost the more important battle against listless big budget filmmaking. Like Wolverine's own mutant powers, the film devoted to his story (or more accurately his backstory) is more curse than gift.

Allegedly, the movie serves to explain just how the man known only as Logan (Hugh Jackman) arrived at the X-Men's doorstep before the franchise's first film. A brief prologue, culled from the pages of Marvel Comics' Origin series, shows him as a sickly young Canadian boy discovering his claws in the mid-nineteenth century. Another, slightly longer prologue picks up the thread as he's fighting in a series of twentieth century American wars beside his bloodthirsty brother Victor (Liev Schreiber). Yet another still longer prologue finds Logan and Victor recruited into a secret government program where they perform black ops for Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston, playing the younger version of Brian Cox's character from X2) before Wolverine quits and retreats to the Canadian wilderness where lives the quiet life of lumberjack and paper towel spokesman for six years until Styker and Victor claw their way back into his life and the film proper begins.

When it does, it is all what and no why. It's like the screenwriters went grocery shopping at the tortured hero store: bloody past, lost love, Oedipus complex, rides a motorcycle, etc. Those early sequences hope to cast Wolverine as a man tormented by the death he's seen and the pain he's caused, but trying to express that in an excessively stylized opening titles sequence is easier said than done, and the result is a lead character that looks more confused than conflicted; one moment, he's a dedicated soldier and the next, he's the voice of moral restraint. In its rush to cram as much as it can into its brief runtime, X-Men Origins often raises as many questions as it answers. What, for example, are the actual details of Wolverine's family tree? How did Logan meet his beloved girlfriend Kayla (Lynn Collins)? Why did he even pick the name Logan, since he's initially referred to as James? How did Victor a.k.a. Sabretooth transmogrify from sardonic and sleek Liev Schreiber to silent and shaggy Tyler Mane in the first X-Men? Meanwhile, most of Wolverine's actual revelations are irrelevant minutia dressed up as shocking discoveries, like the lengthy scene about how Wolverine acquired his jacket. Spoiler alert: he got it from some kindly Canadian farmers!

Despite spending most of the film's second half as a roiling cauldron of rage, Jackman's lost the charismatic spark that made his Wolverine such a fundamental component of the X-Men films' success and his own rise to stardom. Where the Wolverine from the first X-Men trilogy brooded, this Wolverine sulks; most of his badass attitude and winds up instead in Schreiber's enjoyable performance as Sabretooth. Jackman's actually upstaged a few times, with various characters like Ryan Reynolds' wisecracking mercenary Deadpool and Taylor Kitsch's playing card throwing Gambit nudging him to the edges of the frame as they vie for their own spin-offs. With so many hard-bodied dudes vying for the testosterone crown, maybe Jackman felt threatened. Then again, it's hard to play the tough guy when your character's so damn gullible – cool people don't get duped, played, gamed, and tricked as frequently as Jackman's Wolverine does in X-Men Origins. If this guy was angry in the X-Men movies about losing his memory, he's going to be really peeved when he gets it back and realizes how idiotically he used to act. And make no mistake: nothing we, the audience, learn in Wolverine has any impact on the character in the present; there's no framing story set in the modern day with Logan searching for the truth about his past. There are no stakes and nothing gained, only pointless things done and then forgotten.

Marvel Comics' produced their Origin comic book series about Wolverine in 2001 out of fear that the movies' X-Men franchise would beat them to the punch and screw it up. On the basis of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, their fears were very well founded. Director Gavin Hood, with his background in character-driven indies like the award-winning Tsotsi, may have been the right choice on paper to capture Wolverine's wounded psyche, but he doesn't draw any emotional weight out of the material and his action sequences and special effects are several steps down from the series' past highlights (Wolverine's claws looked more convincing in the first X-Men nine years ago). Spinning the ever-popular Wolverine off from the rest of the X-Men may have been a no-brainer business decision. Too bad the movie itself is a no-brainer too.

Termite Television: The Rise and Fall of Danity Kane

2009-05-03T13:20:00.016-04:00

I was trying to fashion a tweet about Making the Band: The Rise and Fall of Danity Kane but there's no way to talk about all that is fascinating (yet incredibly boring) about this hour of television in just 140 characters. This recap of numerous seasons of the long-running television series purports to pull back the curtain on the pop group's recent breakup but all it really reveals are the limitations of "reality" television.

Deriding the lack of reality surrounding so-called reality television is nothing new. At this point, it's pretty obvious reality television is, at best, carefully production managed and scrupulously edited and, at worst, thinly veiled scripted fiction. Still, regardless of the circumstances of its production (one I attest to knowing nothing about), there were some things about Making the Band that were incontestably real: this group assembled and svengali'd by Sean "Diddy" Combs released two albums, played concerts, had several hit singles; my wife and I danced to one of them in a bar just last night.

Making the Band is a strange relic, a lumbering beast from the paleozoic era of reality TV; so old, in fact, that in its initial conception it was designed to put together the next big boy band back when the phrase "boy band" was still a big deal. The series outlived a switch from broadcast to cable and even the band it had made (That'd be the now defunct O-Town). When the show's reins were passed along to Diddy, he invented his own group, Da Band. When it crumbled after three seasons, he hit upon the idea of inventing yet another group, this time an all-girl concoction. This fivesome would eventually become known as Danity Kane, and this hourlong special, The Rise and Fall of Danity Kane, charts the group's early successes and eventual dissolution. The story itself is almost entirely without interest, but as a referendum on reality TV's shortcomings, it's absolutely riveting.

Here's what I mean. The show is called Making the Band, and if it's doing its job right, it should show you what it's like inside the inner circle of this up-and-coming band. And yet not even Making the Band knows exactly why the group broke up! Though cameras were present for a scene where Diddy fires two of band's five members, the show's narrator professes that it's still not clear what broke up the group. The show ends with its narrator asking questions like "Was it Aubrey desire to create her own image that broke them apart?" "Or was it the dissolution between the friendship between Aubrey and Aundrea?" Why are you asking ME, TV voice? YOU were there! Shouldn't you have some idea?

Despite hundreds of hours of footage and dozens of cameras, the series didn't capture the actual reality surrounding its "reality" show. It is the televisual equivalent of a guy who thinks his relationship with a woman is going perfectly well, is shocked when she dumps him, looks back over his memories of their time together and sees no evidence of trouble the has to be told by his best friend that she was cheating on him all along. Either the people making Making the Band were inobservant or the people they were following were willfully hiding crucial information from the cameras. Either is a fatal flaw.

The most interesting figure in the entire show is Aubrey O'Day, one of the first girls fired from the group by Diddy. In the picture above, she's the one to the far left styled like she could become the next cast member of another MTV reality show, The Hills. What little footage of unrest within Danity Kane exists comes via the numerous battles O'Day had with Diddy over her appearance, her attitude, her feelings, her dance moves, her whatever. Diddy doesn't like that O'Day puts herself before the group, but based on the evidence in this show, it was a wise move; though the show may be titled The Rise and Fall of Danity Kane but it might as well be subtitled The Aubrey O'Day Story. She's the member with the most screentime, the most on-camera interviews, and the most glamour shots (particularly useful in charting O'Day's eerie transformation from a normal, pretty looking girl into a full-size Pussycat Doll Barbie). Even if the controversy got her fired from the band, it also got her the most attention, and created a feedback loop whereby now she's the character around which all DK stories center. Then again, this may have less to do with telling the "true story" of the group and more about setting O'Day up for her solo reality show, which is supposedly in the offing later this year.

That's what you're left with, really, the use of a reality show as a carefully disguised PR device. When Diddy fired O'Day and D. Woods on camera, he did it in a showroom for his clothing line. When Danity Kane or their sibling group Day26 release an album, it's typically timed to coincide with Making the Band's season finale. There's lots of undiscovered musical talent out there; Diddy could presumably find lots more people to sign and develop (and yell at, and control, and critique) without resorting to a television series to do it. But the show acts as the perfect way to promote the artists, and its a canny way of propping up record sales at a time when the whole industry is struggling. It's all brilliant advertising for a real fiction.

Spaceballs: The Blog Post

2009-05-02T01:06:00.001-04:00

On my parents' first date in 1968, they went to see Mel Brooks' The Producers. They've harbored a soft spot for Brooks and his spoofs ever since; probably a big reason why I was permitted to see Spaceballs at the tender age of 6 or 7. And maybe that's why I've harbored a soft spot for Mel and his spoofs my whole life. I watched Spaceballs religiously as child, over and over again until I wore out the family VHS tape that we'd copied off HBO. Looking at the film now, its appeal is not hard to understand. When you're a goofy little kid with a strange sense of humor, a Star Wars movie is great. But a Star Wars with jokes? Well that's just about heaven right there.

The movie holds up pretty well, better than some of the other cinematic obsessions of my childhood (G.I. Joe: The Movie, anyone?). Now, of course, I can recognize that Brooks' best work came in the 1970s during the era of Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, but Spaceballs still owns a special piece of real estate in my heart as one of the first movies that I out-and-out loved. On the basis of the laughs that still spilled out of my mouth as I rewatched the film tonight for the first time in years, I see no reason to change that.

It's true that children are pretty forgiving of special effects, but I think it's worth mentioning just how good Spaceballs looks for a spoof. As a kid, I really did think of the movie as a "Star Wars with jokes" -- it wasn't just funny, it was exciting too. And as silly as the concept of a Winnebago-as-a-starship is, the ship itself moves gracefully and fluidly through the space (kudos to production designer Terence Marsh). The mixture between comedy and adventure in the movie is perfectly managed, and an underrated part of the film's success. Take the final showdown between Lone Star (Bill Pullman) and the Spaceballs, for example, which features the unbeatable combination of thrilling lightsaberish swordfights and guys getting hit in the balls. The scene also contains one of the all-time great bad guy to good guy putdowns in movie history, courtesy of Rick Moranis' delightfully mean Dark Helmet: "So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."

Most of the humor is dumb, but wittily dumb. And twenty-plus years later, the movie's best sequence, Brooks' send-up of Hollywood's thirst for "moy-chan-dizing!" ("Spaceballs: The Lunch Box! Spaceballs: The Breakfast Cereal! Spaceballs: The Flame Thrower!") hasn't aged a day. I also remain a deep admirer of the movie's surreal texture, and the way characters keep breaking the fourth wall to point out each of the cliches Brooks demolishes. A particularly memorable example comes when the Spaceballs, wondering to where to search for Pricess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga), find her by watching the next scene in Spaceballs, via the already-released home video edition. The plan works, but not before the fiends accidentally find their way to the exact point of the movie that we're watching, leading to a rat-a-tat exchange that would have pleased Abbott and Costello:

Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
Colonel Sandurz: Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.
Dark Helmet: What happened to then?
Colonel Sandurz: We passed it.
Dark Helmet: When?
Colonel Sandurz: Just now. We're at now now.
Dark Helmet: Go back to then.
Colonel Sandurz: When?
Dark Helmet: Now.
Colonel Sandurz: Now?
Dark Helmet: Now.
Colonel Sandurz: I can't.
Dark Helmet: Why?
Colonel Sandurz: We missed it.
Dark Helmet: When?
Colonel Sandurz: Just now.
Dark Helmet: When will then be now?
Colonel Sandurz: Soon.

Watching a beloved childhood favorite as an adult, you do see things you never saw before. Curiously, this Star Wars knock-off doesn't even have a Luke Skywalker character. You'd think a character that annoyingly earnest would provide plenty of material for parody. Certainly the Kafka joke didn't mean much to me at age 6 (to be honest, it doesn't mean a whole lot more at age 28). Also, one incredibly disturbing fact that completely eluded until this very viewing: Bill Pullman keeps his eyes open for the entirety of his movie-ending smooch with Zuniga. I'm not making this up:

I have no idea what's going on there. Besides that, I remain a Spaceballs devotee. But maybe given my familial history, I'm just genetically predisposed to like Mel Brooks movies.

Crank: High Voltage (2009)

2009-04-27T17:25:00.006-04:00

Beneath the crudity and sexism of the Crank film series lies a metaphorical elegance most viewers miss. In the first film, gangsters poison Jason Statham's Chev Chelios. To keep his body alive, he needs to keep giving himself boosts of adrenaline. Many recognized the debt the first Crank owed to violent video games but they failed to notice how Chelios' ailment and his resultant compulsion for excitement perfectly mirrors the dynamic between fanatic and filmmaker within the world of exploitation action films. In a B-movie, boredom is the ultimate enemy and in Crank creators Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor invented a hero for whom boredom literally equals death. If Chelios doesn't entertain us, he's a goner.

With Crank: High Voltage, Chelios is very much alive and well. But while Neveldine/Taylor (as they're credited onscreen) have seemingly created a simple carbon copy of their first film's story – Jason Statham runs wild through the grimy backstreets and seedy underworld of Los Angeles –their entire mission statement, not to mention that ingenious gimmick, has changed significantly. This time around, gangsters steal Chelios' heart and to keep his artificial replacement pumping, he needs to keep giving himself shocks of electricity. Appropriately, then, if Crank was all about keeping its audience excited, High Voltage is all about keeping its audience shocked.

This means the movie is as much an entertainment as a full-on assault: on the audience’s expectations, on cinematic convention, on traditional moviemaking technique, and especially political correctness. There are a lot of jokes in bad tastes, and a few racial and sexual epithets that I certainly don’t approve of. And that’s the point. In a way, that old lady you've seen Statham dry hump in the trailer (in order to create some static electricity and keep himself juiced) and her horrified reaction to his lewd behavior (“He treated me like his hot little whore!”) is the onscreen representation of the voice (hopefully) inside all of us telling us what we’re are witnessing is wrong, wrong, wrong. If you’re horrified by what you’re witnessing, then High Voltage has accomplished its mission.

But even if you don’t care for Neveldine/Taylor’s crude sense of humor, the film’s worth a look for their audacious directorial style. The pair – who are their own camera operators – shot the film on consumer grade digital cameras, freeing them up to experiment with outlandish angles and and rigs (they even developed one that works along the same principle as The Matrix’s Bullet Time contraption, except it only weighs about 50 pounds and Statham can run in it). Because their camera of choice is so cheap to replace, they’re not afraid to imperil it– like, say, by dangling it off the back of a speeding motorcycle – which leads to delightfully unhinged stunt photography.

Their impressive camerawork, which applies a skater video mentality to chase sequences, is blended together with split-screens, still-frames, animation, even a spoof of a Godzilla movie. It looks, sounds, and moves like nothing else in movie theaters and it's bursting with unpredictability. Even though I'd seen the first Crank, thought I knew what to expect from round 2, I was continually surprised by High Voltage. How many sequels can you say that about? How many movies period?

High Voltage may be one giant revelry of juvenilia, crudity, and smut but it is one made free of compromise. It is goofy and silly, exhilarating and glorious. And, most importantly, it's totally shocking.

JLG IN USA

2009-04-21T21:17:00.004-04:00

A shirtless and sun-hatted Jean-Luc Godard urges you to read my latest foray into TCM land, a reaction to the great DVD bundled with the March/April issue of The Believer (which also contains some of my twaddle). He's urging you to click. How could you resist those pecs?

***

And I realize that I've used this august space more for linkage than the hard-hidding original content you're used to. There's nothing to be done. Although I'll be sure to post a hyperbolic response to Crank: High Voltage in the coming week. It is my movie event of the year, and all.

TCM Time

2009-04-15T23:03:00.004-04:00

Check out the dangerous Movie Morlocks blog for my daring and dangerous post about TCM's 15th anniversary. I show the courage to discuss verboten stories involving my father and Fritz Lang. It crosses mulitple lines of respectability and good taste. Scandalous!

Oh, and don't ask me about my fantasy basball teams. I will just respond with bromides about how long the season is and regression to the mean. In short, I'm a miserable failure.

Art

2009-04-13T08:37:00.007-04:00

A provocative image from the set of Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables. Eric Roberts and Stone Cold Steve Austin leap manfully in front of a giant fireball. 2010 can't come soon enough.

The image comes from Ethelmae's Blog, written by an enigmatic someone working on the film. (And for goodness sake click to enlarge). Have another taste:

"Today I was attacked by Jason Statham (Lee Christmas) firing a machine gun from a dive-bombing fighter plane, nearly burned alive by napalm and had to leap into the freezing Bay of Mangaratiba to save my ass. And how was your day???"

Jason Statham's character is named Lee Christmas. Let that roll around on your tongue for a bit. It feels right. Admit it.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (2009)

2009-04-10T00:46:00.001-04:00

Even though Rawson Marshall Thurber's film The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is based on a Michael Chabon novel of the same name, its title is misleading. Given that title, shouldn't the film contain at least a little mystery? And shouldn't it bear at least some of the character and charm – or, if the filmmaker were so inclined, the grit and ennui – of the Steel City? Though Chabon's novel is very specifically set in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, the film contains so little of the particulars of that time and place that it could have been set anywhere, even anywhen. If co-star Sienna Miller hadn't famously called the town "Shitsburgh" in an interview with Rolling Stone, you could have told me the movie was shot in Vancouver, or Toronto, or on Los Angeles soundstages, and I would have believed you.

I haven't read Chabon's novel, but if you told me the movie significantly changes the source material, I would believe that too. In Thurber's version, the hero is Art Bechstein (Jon Foster), a recent college graduate preparing for the exam he needs to become the stock broker his mob boss father (Nick Nolte) wants him to be. Entering into what Art calls the last summer of his life, he decides to take a job with as little responsibility as possible, and winds up as a clerk at a used bookstore, where he goes about his tasks with the same lack of enthusiasm with which he screws his ditzy boss Phlox (Mena Suvari, whose hair and outfits are the most egregiously modern in a film filled with bad period detail). At a party, he meets the boozy-but-sexy Jane (Miller) and through Jane he meets her boozy-but-cool boyfriend Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard). They open Art's eyes to the wonders of listening to punk music, drinking excessively, and sitting around talking about things so inconsequential I cannot remember a single topic of note just hours after watching the film.

Herein lies a crucial problem: Art becomes obsessed with Jane and Cleveland but the movie doesn't show us anything worth getting obsessed over. They're not intriguing; they're vapid. They don't have aspirations, dreams, goals, concerns, or even fundamental thoughts. Their entire lives consists drinking, screwing, smoking and looking very attractive; as Art burrows deeper into their world, there isn't more to discover about the pair, there's less.

Even though he's ten years too old for his part, Sarsgaard was likely cast because he's the only actor working today willing to explore the emotional and sexual places the character demands. It's too bad the screenplay doesn't bring half as much complexity to the Cleveland as Sarsgaard does with simple things like exhausted sighs and world-weary looks. Thurber tries to disguise the characters' innate dullness by swaddling the frame in warm, nostalgic hues and the soundtrack in warm, nostalgic songs, but that only serves to illuminate the vast divide between the magical movie he hoped for and the rote movie he made.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh would play as weak sauce in any context, but it's especially disappointing coming to theaters on the heels of the similarly themed but superiorly made Adventureland by Greg Mottola and because Thurber's first film, Dodgeball, was such a precisely-made piece of low-brow comedy. Here, I think, he was going something more whimsical and emotional, though there is no evidence within the text to support that claim. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is too leaden, and so is Foster as its lead. He moves through the film – and narrates his own adventures – with such a palpable air of indifference, that it begs the question: if he's so disinterested in his own life, why should we care about it? Art, and really the film as a whole, has no sense of curiosity. And certainly no sense of mystery.

The Warner Archive

2009-04-08T19:53:00.005-04:00

Head on over to TCM's Movie Morlocks blog to get my take on the three Warner Archive films I bought: Leo McCarey's 1942 propaganda-comedy Once Upon a Honeymoon (see above), Jacques Tourneur’s 1955 ‘Scope Western Wichita, and Budd Boetticher’s 1958 Westbound.

TerMET Art: Deeper into Baseball Land

2009-04-06T20:50:00.009-04:00

The 7 Express train rumbled into Flushing, to a stop listed inside on the MTA map as "Willets Point - Shea Stadium." But as anyone on the 7 familiar with William A. Shea Municipal Stadium could plainly see, the striking blue horseshoe with its distinctive neon silhouettes had vanished without a trace, a small fenced-in patched of dirt in the center of a freshly asphalted parking lot the only hint of what had, until recently, stood proudly at 123-01 Roosevelt Avenue. In its place, a new ballpark for the New York Mets, Citi Field. I initially went to call Citi a new home for the Mets but something stopped me. It's not home. Not yet.

If you squint hard enough, Citi Field does look like home, or rather, the home of another team, Ebbets Field of ye old Brooklyn Dodgers. Before Ebbets fell to the wrecking ball in 1960, it housed generations of loyal fans of Dem Bums, including current Mets owner Fred Wilpon. He commissioned Citi Field as a sort of living memorial to Ebbets, and to that franchise's -- and maybe all of baseball's -- most important player, Jackie Robinson. Citi's distinctive, Ebbets-resembling entrance is the Jackie Robinson Rotunda, a beautiful memorial to baseball's color barrier smasher, including photographs, quotations and, most attractively, an enormous statue of Jackie's number 42, shining brightly in Dodger blue.

Though the Mets' existence is due in large part to the Dodgers' emigration westward in the late 1950s, and despite the appealingly classical feel of Citi Field's earthy exterior, there is something odd about using a ballpark to pay homage to a team's legacy, and having it be a team wholly distinct from the one who plays its games there. Another corner of Citi Field does feature large pictures of great Mets in their glory, but they feel a bit like false idols in their own house of worship.

Citi's interior largely abandons the turn-of-the-century design concept; that is, unless I'm mistaken and 1910s Brooklyn ballparks often featured accomodations like BBQ and seafood counters (and such diverse food offerings as pulled pork sandwiches and fried calimari), a sit-down restaurant nestled into the left field corner, an enormous two-floor team store near the Rotunda, and a 22,500 square foot "restaurant-cafe-bar-lounge complex" behind home plate. To be sure, Citi Field offers some significant advantages over its predecessor. Gone are the concrete walls that supported the Shea grandstands and obstructed the view of people strolling for hot dogs and beer; Citi Field's lower concourses provides marvelous vantage points of the playing field from just about every angle. And speaking of every angle, as someone who grew up at Shea, where the stands ended just beyond both foul poles, there's something exciting about a park with 360 degree walkways around the playing surface, and the dramatic vista from the bridge in right center field. As a fan of barbecue in general, and New York 'cue institution Blue Smoke in particular, I greatly approve of the admirably decadent notion of combining a beloved team with beloved food. And even without indulging in a bit of slow cooked pork, my first meal at the park was truly outstanding: a perfectly cooked burger and fries from another NYC restaurant transplant, Shake Shack.

The feelings a Met fan feels in this context are conflicted and confusing. On the one hand, Citi Field is an enormous technical upgrade from Shea Stadium in every possible way. Make no mistake: Shea Stadium was a dump. But for Mets fans, it was our dump. As I wrote last fall on the occasion of Shea's goodbye:

"Every inch of the concrete is cracked and dirty and no matter how long it's been since the last storm, puddles seem to accumulate everywhere. The food options, particularly in the upper deck where I spend most of my time, are laughably limited: if you're not into overcooked encased meats you're gonna be awfully hungry by the seventh inning stretch. Huge patches of seats in right field offer stunning views of the left field stands and absolutely horrendous sightlines to home. If you've got a Loge or Mezzanine seat more than ten or twelve rows back, I've got good news and bad news: the good news is if it starts to rain you'll stay bone dry; the bad news is that's because you're sitting under an overhang so severe you'll think you're watching the game through a slit cut in the bottom of a cardboard box."

At that time, I said I'd rather have Shea than Citi Field and, for now, my view remains unchanged. Of all our national sports, baseball is the one whose present is the most inextricably entwined with its history. And that's why even a dump like Shea Stadium can achieve such a vaulted place in the hearts of the people who go there. It doesn't matter whether the seats were uncomfortable or if the bathrooms were small. For every long-time Mets fan, our own personal histories of the team were played out in those crummy seats and cramped facilities. In his seminal baseball book The Summer Game, Roger Angell, writing about the demolition of the Polo Grounds, the Mets' first home, spoke about the almost alchemical hold these lost places have on our psyches and their "small landscape of distinctive and reassuring familiarity. Demolition and alteration are a painful city commonplace, but as our surroundings become more undistinguished and indistinguishable, we sense, at last, that we may not possess the scorecards and record books to help us remember who we are what we have seen and loved."

Ironically, the Polo Grounds' replacement was Shea Stadium, and Angell was not a fan. "On my first visit, the new ballyard," he wrote, "with its cyclotron profile, its orange and blue exterior spangles, and its jelly-bean interior looked remarkably like an extension of the [World's] Fair - an exhibit named 'Baseball Land.'" Angell found Shea modern, cavernous and cold. By the time I found it, it had aged into a lovably old-fashioned hovel and now I find his words echoing my own thoughts about Citi Field. Its blend of classical aesthetic and modern amenity is, of course, de rigueur for the current generation of "new ballyards" and has been ever since the runaway success of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in the early 1990s. After decades of cookie cutter multipurpose facilities (like, yes, Shea Stadium), the modern major league baseball field must give itself over to idiosyncracy. And Citi Field has them: three full decks in left field but only two in right to go along with its unpredictably zig-zagging fence. Of course, with so many "unique" parks littering the majors they're all beginning to look a little less innovative, "undistinguished and indistinguishable" as Angell so eloquently put it. This may have been one major contributor to the overwhelming feeling I had while walking to my seat in Citi Field that I was watching the Mets play a game on the road, instead of at home.

I am sure that will change with time. But for the moment, I still miss Shea. Citi Field is where the Mets play now, but Shea, paved into oblivion, still feels like home. Home is where the heart is, not where the best concession stands are. Despite the excited atmosphere at Citi Field, I knew I wasn't alone when, upon heading back to the 7 train, I spotted the following sign:

A little reminder that the Mets are still the primary draw for some people out here in Flushing. And some day Citi Field will earn its spot on this sign and in our collective hearts. It is exciting to have a shiny new stadium. But I'd be lying if I didn't say I missed Shea more than a little bit.

It Happened to Jane (1959)

2009-04-04T14:26:00.009-04:00

Through my religious devotion to Dave Kehr's comments section, I've discovered a lot of undervalued films. First it was the work of Robert Mulligan, whose Kent Jones-curated retrospective at the Film Society at Lincoln Center is one of my film year's major highlights (The Nickel Ride is a beautifully modulated L.A. noir, The Stalking Moon a gestural, existential western, and re-viewing To Kill a Mockingbird was equally revelatory). The fact that Mr. Jones has left the Film Society is a bummer, as he was the driving force behind the "American Auteurs" series of which the Mulligan series was the first. It's unclear if others will follow, but according to my sources, a Richard Quine series was in the pipeline, another favorite with Kehr's commenters. This might be a casualty of Jones' departure, but that's no reason to watch more Quine!

After being thoroughly charmed by the musical My Sister Eileen (1955) earlier this year on TCM, I recorded his 1959 Doris Day vehicle, It Happened to Jane. Let's just say he's 2 for 2. Set in a small Maine town, Day plays a widow starting up in the lobster business. Jack Lemmon is her pal from childhood, a mild-mannered lawyer who keeps losing the race for city Selectman. It's a colorful, exuberant farce. Day sues the train company after it is late with a delivery, killing all of the crustaceans on board. This small suit rapidly escalates into front page news after the train prez (a sublimely cantankerous Ernie Kovacs doing his best Harry Cohn impression) and Doris refuse to settle. She gets the court to seize the train, and soon she's on TV pleading her case.

Quine has a great feel for small-town life, using locals for town hall scenes, and sketching loving portraits of everyone from the railroad agent to the incompetent incumbent Selectman. Combined with his flair for caricature and elegantly framed compositions (he generates a wonderful sense of community from crane shots as well), the film is consistently surprising and engaging. TCM has been showing his films pretty regularly, so I'll be quick on the DVR trigger from now on, and hope that the Film Society slots him into their schedule.

***

My last two posts at TCM:

*On Sam Fuller's Thieves After Dark
*On William Wellman's Other Men's Women