The Case Against Wall:E
No discussion of Pixar would be complete without a link to Noah Millman's contrarian take on the company's latest hit. (I wondered about EVE's trigger-happiness too ...)
Movies Archives
July 7, 2008
Pixar and the Goldman Aphorism
Peter Suderman, riffing on the issue of whether critics matter:
If movie reviewers are such good predictors of financial success, why hasn’t some studio caught on and put a bunch of them on the payroll? It’s not as if the studios aren’t actively pursuing every conceivable formula and strategy to predict what will and won’t work at the box office. As Malcolm Gladwell reported in The New Yorker a few years back, they’re all spending an awful lot of time and money searching for something like a guaranteed success, an answer to the movie industry’s longest standing problem, put famously by William Goldman: Nobody knows anything. (emphasis mine - RD)
Here's a Wall:E-related thought: How gaga you go over the Pixar oeuvre, I think, depends on how much stock you put in the Goldman take on hit-making. If you think making a really good, really popular film is a mysterious, alchemical process that nobody can consistently wrap their minds around, then each Pixar movie looks like nothing short of a miracle. But another way to look at it - the correct way, in my view - is that Pixar's track record of putting out one excellent, crowdpleasing movie after another (they're up to nine and counting, assuming you include the just-okay Cars and accept the critical consensus on Ratatouille) ought to at least partially disprove Goldman's aphorism. Like Jeffrey Katzenberg's run at Disney or the entire careers of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, the lesson of Pixar is that the formula for making hit movies is relatively simple: Find talented people with an instinct for high-quality middlebrow entertainment (i.e. John Lasseter, not David Lynch); let them do their thing without too much interference from people whose primary talent is rising to the top of a cutthroat corporate culture; sit back and enjoy the box-office bonanza.
Don't get me wrong: I love Pixar, and I mean this observation as no slight on what they've accomplished. I just think that their success shouldn't be treated as some sort of cosmic miracle that can't possibly be repeated elsewhere, but rather as a blueprint for how the movie industry as a whole could stop force-feeding bad movies to the public, and start making better ones.
July 3, 2008
What Prequels?
Matt pays a visit to the galaxy far, far away:
I was watching Star Wars IV: A New Hope last night on television, and somehow it occurred to me for the first time that a new generation who watches the six movie cycle starting with The Phantom Menace is going to wind up with a very different perception of the story than the original audience got. This is true in terms of a few big plot points, like that whole thing about Darth Vader being Luke's father, but also in terms of some broader atmospheric points. The beginning A New Hope is cloaked in a sense of mystery. For all we know old Ben Kenobi really is just a crazy old man and Han Solo's skepticism about "hokey religions" is justified. The audience rides along with Luke throughout the film, learning to trust in the power of the Force. New audiences won't have that experience, they'll already know much much more than Luke does about the Jedi, the Empire, the Skywalker clan, etc.
Maybe this will be true of the general public, but I can promise you this much: In the Douthat household, the prequels don't exist - not now, and certainly not in a future where I'm charged with introducing a new generation to the Skywalker universe. Indeed, I intend to carefully vet all of my children's friends to ensure that there's absolutely no risk of a playdate or sleepover bringing them in contact, even fleetingly, with Jar Jar Binks, Count Dooku, the midichlorians and Padme Amidala, Queen of frickin' Naboo.
The Art House As A Luxury Good
Continuing on the theme of highbrow movies and the box office, Steve Sailer has an interesting post about differential pricing and art-house flicks:
... movie tickets are more or less fixed in price. So, every filmmaker is competing in the same game. Julian Schnabel and Wong Kar-Wai are going head to head against Michael Bay, and they're all being measured by tickets sold ...
Is the single priced movie ticket eroding slowly? When I started writing this post, I figured there would be evidence that we are headed toward more stratified pricing. Yet, the more I think about it, the less evidence I see for it.
For example, for about five years now, the weekend evening movies at the Arclight on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood (the old Cinerama Dome location) have been $14. It sells reserved seats, which is a pretty stupid idea because you can stand in line to buy tickets for a half hour while the couples ahead of you debate over whether they'd prefer to sit on the left or right sides. Yet, the films shown at the Arclight are only vaguely more upscale than average. The movies it plays make it seem like more of a mass market Date Night destination than a place where the elite meet to seat themselves.
And, in general, "arthouse" tends to be a synonym for worn-down theatre on its last legs before it becomes a revivalist church for an ambitious preacher. The Laemmle arthouse chain in LA charges between $8.50 and $10 per ticket for prime times, which isn't above average for their expensive neighborhoods ... Anyway, it's kind of neat that movies remain a democratic institution with a simple-minded pricing scheme in an otherwise increasingly tiered and marketing-modeled America.
It's my impression that the new breed of art-house theaters (here are two local examples) are rather more posh than the run-down art houses of the past, and that they do cater deliberately to a more elite, Bobo crowd - in their ambience and decor, in the movies they choose to run, and in the concessions they serve. Indeed, I suspect that to the extent that differential pricing shows up in American cinemas, it runs through concessions rather than through ticket prices - which makes sense, given that the concessions are where theaters make most of their money anyway. So a ticket to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is no pricier than a ticket to Hancock, but whereas the masses buy their popcorn and soda and candy, the elites at the E Street Cinema end up shelling out for microbrews and Whole Foods-style snacks and gourmet coffees.
July 2, 2008
Do Critics Matter?
I was all set to attend what sounded like a great discussion on "The Dumbing Down of American Culture: Fact or Fiction?," featuring our own Michael Hirschorn (he of "The Case for Reality TV") - but then it was cancelled. So as a poor substitute, I'll offer a link to this Slate piece, in which Erik Lundegaard argues that once you control for marketing budgets and theater saturation (big things to control for, obviously), well-reviewed movies tend to outgross their badly-reviewed competitors. Lundegaard goes on to suggest that this proves that "quality matters," and that this means in turn that movie critics matter as well. I'd like to think so, and I'm sure they matter on the margins - I know I've avoided films I was intending to see because a critic I respected panned them - but in the aggregate I think his model is slightly flawed: He looks at the relationship between good reviews and good box office across a movie's entire run, a period in which word-of-mouth presumably becomes a big factor in how the movie performs. On the assumption that what your friend tells you about a given film may matter way more than what a critic tells you, I'd like to see the same analysis re-run but confined entirely to opening weekends, when word-of-mouth presumably is close to a non-factor, and when the critics are a moviegoer's only guide to which films are worth seeing and which can be safely skipped.
June 30, 2008
James Bond Will Return
Only one thing could have made up for the news that Keira Knightley - who seems required by law to be cast as the female lead in any film that requires a costume and an accent - will ruin what otherwise sounds like it could be a kick-ass King Lear adaptation. And here it is:
June 25, 2008
The Way Things Ought To Be
Yes, it stars Shia LaBeouf. But that aside, Eagle Eye sounds and looks the kind of mindless-but-fun action movie that used to make me (and this guy) look forward to summer.
Naturally, it's being released in the fall. For the Fourth of July weekend, we're getting Will Smith as a drunken superhero instead.
The Follieri Follies
Everyone no doubt will have their favorite anecdote from the saga of Raffaello Follieri, who until recently was most famous for dating Anne Hathaway and being friends with Clinton pal Ron Burkle, but now seems likely to be remembered for bilking everyone foolish enough to invest in a scheme to use his (apparently nonexistent) Vatican connections "purchase Roman Catholic Church properties in the U.S. at low prices, flip them, and sell them" out of millions of dollars. Naturally, it's the Catholic details that caught my eye:
"According to several witnesses, Follieri kept various ceremonial robes, including robes of senior clergymen, at his office in New York, New York. One witness told [the FBI agent who wrote the complaint] that he/she had been traveling with him to change out of the monsignor's robes and put on the robe of a more senior clergyman in order to create the false impression that Follieri had close ties to the Vatican."
I also liked the bit about his "engineering reports," which supposedly cost $800,000 to produce: "When he eventually submitted them to investors, the reports were, they noted, each two to five pages long, written in Italian, and contained exactly no engineering information."
June 23, 2008
The New Classics
Of course I have my problems with Entertainment Weekly's list of the Top 100 Movies since 1983 (yes to Shrek? no to Batman Returns?), but any list that has Titanic, Moulin Rouge, Die Hard and Lord of the Rings in its top ten, with American Beauty and Ferris Bueller's Day Off nowhere to be found, is okay in my book.
Speaking of books, though - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at number two? Cold Mountain, of all mediocre things, at number nine and Donna Tartt's The Secret History all the way down at number sixty-nine? EW, how could you?
June 17, 2008
Speaking Truth To Power
Mark Wahlberg, on why he passed on Ocean's Twelve:
“People tell George Clooney it's great, but we all know it sucked,” the Boogie Nights star said. “I made two bad movies instead — Planet of the Apes and The Truth About Charlie — but doing that was better than sitting with Brad (Pitt) and George, telling the press how great everybody is! ‘We were in Europe, George was funny, then we had some wine ...’ — that's not for me.”
Okay, it isn't quite the Clint Eastwood-Spike Lee throwdown, but I'll take all the bashing of Clooney's too-cool-for-school mystique (as opposed to Clooney's acting, which is often really good) that I can get.
June 16, 2008
Summer of the Superheroes
I'm not the only one who's had enough.
June 13, 2008
That's Entertainment!
I don't subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, but I usually manage to read at least every other issue cover-to-cover (I always buy it for plane reading), which is more than I can say for an awful lot of magazines. So I guess I'm basically in the same camp as Tyler Cowen and Seth Roberts, who discuss their EW-love at length here.
June 11, 2008
Britney and Mel
This is a story that seems to be crying out for more coverage. (Maybe under a joint Peter Boyer-David Samuels byline?)
June 2, 2008
Underestimating Sex
So I looked at the box office numbers this morning, saw that the unbearable (and unbearably long) Sex and the City movie had taken in $55 million, and thought to myself: Good - a deservedly below-expectations showing. They were probably hoping for $70-80 million.
And that, of course, is why I don't have a high-paying job in a Hollywood studio.
May 27, 2008
Sydney Pollack, RIP
By far the best way to honor him, as a director and an actor, would be to Netflix Tootsie immediately:
May 20, 2008
Revisiting Children of Men
Dayo Olopade, on the coming dystopia:
Mohan Munasinghe, reporting for Britain's intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), thinks reports of our civilization's demise have been greatly underexaggerated. According to the substance of a talk Munasinghe gave recently at Cambridge, we are headed for an ugly, dystopian future driven by resource shortages and overpopulation that will produce devastating competition and in all likelihood, more walls and more wars. "Climate change is, or could be, the additional factor which will exacerbate the existing problems of poverty, environmental degradation, social polarisation and terrorism and it could lead to a very chaotic situation," he says. (See the rawkin' Children of Men for more on how "chaotic" that could look.) [emphasese mine - RD]
This is a hobbyhorse of mine, but as my previous forays on the subject are either behind the NR subscriber wall or lost in TNR's vanished archives, let me try the patience of my readers by noting that Olopade has inadvertently put her finger on the problem with Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation. The film's hellish, quasi-totalitarian dystopia does indeed feel like a compelling vision of a future dominated by "resource shortages and overpopulation"; unfortunately, the whole frickin' point of the story is that it's set in a world where women stopped being able to have children about twenty years back. Cuaron's vision channels doomsayers like Mohan Munasinghe to impressive and riveting effect, but unlike the dystopian vision in the film's source material, it more or less wastes its supposed premise in the process.
May 19, 2008
Prince Caspian
I'm still sorting through my own thoughts before I buckle down to write my NR review, but after spending some time marinating in the Narniaphile reaction, I think that to the extent I liked the movie, it was largely for the same reasons as Frederica Mathewes-Greene: The filmmakers took what is easily the weakest of the Narnia novels, rejiggered the narrative and altered the plot, and produced an entertaining, swashbuckling medieval war movie set against a Narnian backdrop. To the extent that I disliked the movie, meanwhile, it was for the same reasons as Steven Greydanus: In the course of making a poorly-constructed book into an entertaining fantasy adventure, the filmmakers largely purged the original story of its most distinctive thematic elements, and the results owe more to Braveheart and Lord of the Rings, in certain ways, than they do to C.S. Lewis.
Having registered this complaint, though, I can't help be disappointed over Caspian's disappointing box office. Precisely because I've had issues with both of the first two adaptations, I've been looking forward to seeing what a director untainted by the Shrek franchise can do with the later books of Narnia (especially my three favorites), and the worse Caspian does, the greater the chances that it'll be Dawn Treader and out for the franchise.
May 12, 2008
Reality Is a Special Effect
Dave Kehr on choosing reality over CGI:
... “The Fall” — an independent feature film from Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, a veteran music video and commercial director who uses Tarsem as his professional name — is full of sights that provoke genuine astonishment: an underwater shot of an elephant swimming gracefully overhead, a palace courtyard built out of interlocking staircases that might have been designed by M. C. Escher, a village clinging to a mountainside where all of the buildings seem to have been individually painted in subtly different shades of inky blue.
These images amaze precisely because they are quite evidently real, bursting with the life and detail that elude even the most advanced digital artist. “I decided it wasn’t going to be C.G.I.,” said Tarsem, using the industry shorthand for computer-generated imagery. Referring to his only previous feature, the psychological thriller “The Cell” (2000), Tarsem added: “I had enough of that in my first film, as much as I enjoyed it. I decided in this one that the art direction was going to be in the landscape and in the costume design and nothing else.”
There's a scene near the end of George Lucas's Revenge of the Sith when the characters find themselves in the same spacecraft where the first Star Wars kicked off. It's a shocking moment, but not for the reasons Lucas intended - not because of the shock of recognition, but because of the visual contrast between that one hallway and nearly every other space (interior or exterior) in the Star Wars prequels. More specifically, it's the contrast between a real place and a fake one - between an honest-to-God set and Lucas's computer-generated filmscapes, which were frequently beautiful but just as frequently looked, in Anthony Lane's words, like places where "illumination is provided not by daylight but by a dispiriting plastic sheen."
Obviously CGI isn't going anywhere, but moments like the blockade-runner scene in Sith are reminders of why its tyranny should be resisted, particularly by filmmakers working in genres (fantasy and sci-fi, adventure films and superhero movies) where it's usually the easiest and cheapest way to bring the script to life. Tarsem's The Fall sounds like at best an an interesting failure, but his choices deserve praise, and imitation.
May 7, 2008
Brideshead Revisited
Hmmm - this doesn't seem quite like the book I remember:
That said, as far as Waugh's more serious novels go, my loyalties lie with the Sword of Honour trilogy, so the prospect of seeing a tarted-up Brideshead doesn't really faze me. Indeed, a somewhat trashy adaptation might be exactly the right approach to a book that Waugh himself allowed to be overripe, overnostalgic and overwritten.
May 6, 2008
The Superhero Glut
Peter Suderman doesn't get my Iron Man-related disgruntlement:
I have to admit, I’m a little bit baffled by the ire Ross displays toward superhero movies. If he were a purebred cultural elitist, I’d get it, but not from a guy who’s admitted to going through a Star Trek phase and who championed the last James Bond movie, which, in addition to being one of the most delicious pop pleasures of the past decade, is more or less a superhero film without the spandex. How he can maintain the posture of being both an advocate of smart genre and be disdainful toward superhero films as a class is beyond me.
He goes on to make all sorts of sensible points in defense of Iron Man specifically and the superhero film more generally. Let me clarify, then: My problem is not with the existence of superhero movies, but with their proliferation, which the success - both artistic and commercial - of Iron Man is likely to further dramatically. I love genre films as much as the next cultural populist, but it's possible to have too much of a given genre even when the movies in question are good. And having Iron Man and The Dark Knight and The Incredible Hulk (did we really need another one so soon?) as summer tentpoles, with quasi-superhero movies like Hancock and Hellboy 2 thrown in, feels to me like the equivalent of having three James Bond movies coming out at more or less the same time. Or, more aptly - since superhero films are more dissimilar from one another than than Bond movies are - it's like having a Narnia movie and a Lord of the Rings movie and, say, an Ursula K. Le Guin adaptation all being released in the same movie season, with countless more adaptations of lesser fantasy works in the pipeline for the next few years. Which is to say, it feels like too much of a good thing even if all the movies turn out to be good (which they won't), and I'd like to see some of the talent involved turn their attention to other genres for a while.
May 5, 2008
Aquaman IV, Here We Come
You can find my jaundiced take on what Iron Man's box office bonanza means for the movie industry over at the Current.
April 29, 2008
Farewell And Adieu
Sad news for film criticism, both online and in print, but perhaps good news for the movies: Matt Zoller Seitz, critic extraordinaire, is hanging up his keyboard to focus full time on filmmaking. Keith Uhlich, who's inheriting the editorship at The House Next Door, has the exit interview.
April 25, 2008
Dubya, The Movie
Who needs Oliver Stone when you've got Vulture?
April 24, 2008
Big Screen, Small Stars
Matt Feeney, on Forgetting Sarah Marshall:
It’s typical for these breakup movies for the guy to upgrade from the desiccated, WASPy blonde who dumped him to an earthy brunette, but the contrast in this movie is so glaring that I actually felt sorry for Kristen Bell, who plays Sarah Marshall. (This is going to sound harsh. I wouldn’t write it if I thought Kristen Bell were a TAS reader.) Her character is a sort of parody of a television actress, but the thing is that she looks like a parody of a television actress. Where Mila Kunis is a sort of Rousseauan ideal of natural beauty, all litheness and fitness and proportion, Bell has the tiny body and oversized head that actors are said to often have, so that even when her whole body is on screen, her head still looks like it’s supposed to have a television around it. A television actress herself, she was obviously cast because of how closely she resembles the thing her character is supposed to be a parody of. So, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall Kristen Bell gets to literally embody her own parody. That is not an identity that – having called attention to it in such a way – you can just climb out of for your next movie. Given the roll that Judd Apatow is currently on, Sarah Marshall must have seemed like a dream part for Bell, but, to be honest, I don’t see how her career will recover from it.
Harsh but basically true, though I would differ with his take on Kunis: While I agree that her character was vastly more physically fetching than Bell's Marshall, I thought her performance, too, had the smaller-than-life quality that usually results when a television star gets miscast in a feature film. (Though she turned in better work than Jason Segel, who had the smaller-than-life quality that you'd expect if you cast that pretty-funny guy you went to high school with in a feature film.)
Matt also wonders if by calling the movie a "something of a dud" I meant that it wasn't funny at all, to which I'd answer with a resounding no. Large swathes of the movie weren't nearly as funny as they should have been, and a few sections - particularly the running gag about the uptight newlyweds - were just painfully unfunny. But one of the leads was almost hilarious enough to almost make the whole thing worthwhile. To wit:
April 16, 2008
Jason Segel: The Funny Years
Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I review for the next NR, is something of a dud - it's a rare case where I agree with David Denby's assessment - and the mediocre work turned by Jason Segel, in particular, is a textbook example of why some supporting actors shouldn't be handed leading roles. (Or allowed to write their own movies, for that matter.) But Vulture's here to remind us that when Segel isn't trying to be something he isn't, he can bring the funny.
April 9, 2008
Alas, Von Stauffenberg
Thank you, Tom Cruise and Bryan Singer, for (apparently) mucking up what should have been one of the flat-out awesomest movies ever.
April 8, 2008
Oliver Stone's Bush
Defamer has the right idea: A script this lousy has to be an April Fool's joke, right?
April 6, 2008
Charlton Heston, RIP
I saw him in person once, when he came to Harvard to give his NRA spiel, and I can report that his physical presence was just as remarkable, if not more so, in the flesh as it was on screen. Here, via Dave Kehr and Richard Corliss, is the French critic Michel Mourlet's famous Cahiers du Cinema assessment of the Heston mystique:
Charlton Heston is an axiom. He constitutes a tragedy in himself, his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty. The pent-up violence expressed by the somber phosphorescence of his eyes, his eagle’s profile, the imperious arch of his eyebrows, the hard, bitter curve of his lips, the stupendous strength of his torso - this is what he has been given, and what not even the worst of directors can debase. It is in this sense that one can say that Charlton Heston, by his very existence and regardless of the film he is in, provides a more accurate definition of the cinema than films like “Hiroshima mon amour” or “Citizen Kane,” films whose aesthetic either ignores or repudiates Charlton Heston. Through him, mise en scène can confront the most intense of conflicts and settle them with the contempt of a god imprisoned, quivering with muted rage.
Also worth a look: The tribute that Richard Dreyfuss (yes, that Richard Dreyfuss) penned for NRO (yes, that NRO) when Heston was diagnosed with Alzheimer's six years ago.
April 5, 2008
Paranoiacs And Their Enemies
In a lengthy, thoughtful commentary on my "paranoid style" essay, Noah Millman takes issue with my remarks about the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and specifically my contention that a better remake would have featured "a Cheney-like politician being manipulated by an al-Qaeda sleeper cell." He writes:
Well, that would have been an obvious way to update it . . . except that if there were (or are) al-Qaeda sleeper cells, nobody would believe that they were capable of manipulating the Vice President. I mean, try to spin the scenario ... The fact that Ross thinks it would be “obvious” to update The Manchurian Candidate by making Cheney a dupe of al-Qaeda mind control is interesting, because that reflects a paranoid – and not a rationally paranoid – concept of what al-Qaeda is and how it operates. The “paranoid style” movies he’s criticizing reflect a worldview that is off-the-shelf paranoid, and that is indeed a real weakness. But a movie about an al-Qaeda sleeper agent controlling the government would only be persuasive to an audience that actually held paranoid beliefs about the world, because it is so completely detached from the actual nature of the enemy we face.
I agree with a great deal of what Noah has to say elsewhere in the post, but I disagree emphatically with him on this. The wild implausibility of having an al-Qaeda sleeper cell manipulating Dick Cheney is precisely why the filmmakers should have gone down that route. By suggesting that they should have looked for a villain who made more real-world sense (he suggests Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia), Noah is falling into the same trap as the people responsible for Syriana or The Constant Gardener or (to lesser extent) Michael Clayton: He's asking that paranoid films be "rationally paranoid," that they conform closely to the world we actually inhabit, and offer convincing accounts of how a massive conspiracy actually might go down. But the best paranoid films succeed precisely because they jettison the demands of realism: Like science fiction and other forms of speculative storytelling, they show us ourselves through a glass darkly, building worlds that resemble our own but don't pretend to be identical to it, and that comment on real-life events without aspiring to be anything close to perfectly realistic.
This was certainly true of the original Manchurian Candidate, which was a fascinating commentary on the relationship between Communism and McCarthyism precisely because it played as a Cold War fantasia, rather than a plausible account of how the Comintern might actually infiltrate the West. It's been true of all the great paranoid-style television shows, from The Prisoner to The X-Files to the first two seasons of Lost; it's true of apolitical paranoid masterpieces like Rosemary's Baby; and it was true in spades of '70s gems like The Parallax View and The Conversation. It hasn't been true, though, of too many Iraq-era movies. A film like Syriana, for instance, wants to be as paranoid as the original Manchurian Candidate and as realistic as its predecessor, Traffic, and it founders on the contradiction between the two approaches.
April 3, 2008
Denby On Stop-Loss
As usual, he's wrong. Yes, Stop-Loss is somewhat better than the fall's run of anti-war films, but no, it isn't really any good, and Denby makes a series of increasingly implausible claims on its behalf: That it "won't be easy" for audiences to ignore (so far, they don't seem to having much trouble), that it "may become the central coming-home-from-the-war story of this period, just as The Best Years of Our Lives ... became central to the period after the Second World War" (I sincerely doubt it), and most implausibly, that its affection for its military characters "may make Stop-Loss popular with both liberals and conservatives."
To understand what makes this last claim implausible, it's helpful to look at another Denby statement about the movie: "Surely," he writes, "no male director has gone further into the hair-trigger anger and pathos of the American warrior caste." I can think of a few male directors who might argue the case, but even if he's right the line still gets at why Stop-Loss, despite its affection for its military characters, won't win many fans who don't already share Kimberly Peirce's biases and politics. Her film conceives of the American military caste almost exclusively in the terms that Denby describes, depicting its protagonists as prisoners of their "hair-trigger anger and pathos"; it loves its soldiers, but it ultimately condescends to them as well, approaching them with a mix of pity and protectiveness rather than respect. As Reihan put it, Peirce "seems to think of her subjects as overgrown children, complicated and tragic, yes, but not ready to withstand the rigors of adult decision-making." This is obviously better than thinking of them as crazed killers running amok, or plaster saints martyred for the folly of Senator Tom Cruise. But it's still something well short of three-dimensionality, and the truth.
April 2, 2008
The Worst Iraq Movie In The World
Move over, Redacted:
March 31, 2008
The Mist
I just saw Frank Darabont's latest Stephen King adaptation, about small-town Mainers trapped in a supermarket while a monster-riddled mist - accidentally unleashed when a military experiment opens a portal to a Lovecraftian dimension - rolls over the world. The movie is basically a glorified Twilight Zone episode, but in an era when the horror genre is dominated by torture-porn one-upsmanship, there's something refreshing about a monster movie that traffics in Rod Serling-style social commentary, even if it runs toward heavy-handedness at times. (With the Twilight Zone comparison in mind, I'd be very curious to see Darabont's black-and-white version; if nothing else, the film's low-budget special effects might look a lot cooler than they did in color.)
That said, whether you give the film a thumbs-up or thumbs-down probably depends on what you think of the brutal twist ending, which departs significantly from the King novella. Spoilers follow ...
March 28, 2008
Reviewing The Trailer
Manohla Dargis attempts a novel gimmick, writing her review of the new blackjack flick 21 based on the trailer, rather than the actual movie.
Oh, wait - sorry, it was Chris Orr whose review did that. Hard to tell the difference ...
March 27, 2008
The Return of the Seventies (II)
Peter Suderman has kind words for my essay on Hollywood in the shadow of Iraq, but he also writes:
[The piece] gives short shrift to one point: lame-brained politics or no, the crusading, politically-infused films of the 1970’s were simply better films–and that goes for the prestige pics as well as the B-movies ... It’s essential to note that today’s crop–at least in its most explicitly political incarnations–is by any standard rife with unambiguously rotten material. Lions for Lambs, Redacted, and In the Valley of Elah were painful to sit through. Even the better stuff, like the 2005 Clooney duo of Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck were merely average–decent productions that fail to rise to the level of most cable television series. The only recent productions in this vein that stand out at all are the three Bourne films, which tend to use their political framework as a background and succeed mostly on the strength of their dazzling action setpieces.
Contrast this with the films of the 1970’s. There’s little comparison. Apocalypse Now may have little to do with the real-life experience of Vietnam, but it’s a hypnotic, singular vision from an accomplished cinematic artist working at the peak of his powers. All the President’s Men remains one of film’s best detective stories, and probably the best movie about Washington or journalism ever made. Middlebrow fare like The Parallax View ... sparkled in a way that today’s mainstream thrillers rarely accomplish. And even low-budget films like Death Race 2000 and The Warriors crackled with a sense of outrage, awareness, and energy. Movies like these, as well as the early works of directors like John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, indulged in exploitation flick shenanigans. But they also had a tremendous amount of fun, and maybe even managed to say something about the state of the world, too.
Heaven knows the politics of Hollywood in 1970’s were off the wall, perhaps even wackier and more radical than today’s. But somehow, they still managed to turn out movies that were far less irritating than the artless, self-satisfied liberal consciousness-raisers we seem to be stuck with now.
I largely agree, and tried to suggest as much in the original essay, though Peter may be right that I should have made the point more explicitly. I do think that our neo-Seventies moment has produced movies and (especially) television shows that rival the best work done in that decade - not only highbrow work like The Wire and The Sopranos, Zodiac and No Country For Old Men, but thrillers like the Bourne films (the first two, especially) and B-movies like 28 Days Later. (I think Danny Boyle's zombie film is a vast improvement on the work of George Romero, in fact, though that's a minority opinion.) But it's certainly true that the more explicitly politically-infused material is considerably weaker this time around, often to the point of embarrassment. One problem, as Chris Orr among others has suggested, is the lack of distance on the Iraq War: Films like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now came out years after we had departed Vietnam, and as a result they didn't come across as attempts to grab the viewer by the lapels and convince them to END THE WAR NOW!!!!, which was what movies like Lions For Lambs and In the Valley of Elah often seemed intent on doing. The other problem, I think, is the one I tried to get it in my post on Michael Clayton: The best paranoid movies - The Parallax View, say, or The Conversation - wear well precisely because they're willing to "stop just short of realism, to build rotten, conspiracy-ridden worlds that overlap with our own but aren’t necessarily identical to it." Whereas films like Clayton or Syriana or The Constant Gardener are too real-world for their own good, and as a result their byzantine conspiracy theories feel like agitprop rather than art.
March 21, 2008
The Return of the Seventies
Blogging will be light for the duration of the Triduum. If you're starved for reading material, the latest issue of the Atlantic is now online; it's thick with good stuff as usual, and it even includes an essay by yours truly, on pop culture in the shadow of the Iraq War.
And if reading the piece isn't exciting enough, you can watch me talk about it here:
March 19, 2008
Clarke and Minghella, RIP
Over on the Current, Reihan ponders the science-fiction giant's views on religion, and I lavish praise on the late director's adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
February 21, 2008
Night Falls On Shyamalan
Having been foolish enough to pen an extended defense of M. Night Shyamalan's oeuvre just before the release of Lady in the Water, a film calculated to vindicate all the haters and discredit all his defenders, I was hoping that Night would bounce back in a big way from that debacle. Unfortunately, this doesn't exactly instill confidence:
If The Happening turns out like Lady in the Water, somebody close to Shyamalan should tell him very firmly to take a new direction - by, say, directing somebody else's script for a change.
February 18, 2008
The Moral Vision of the Coen Brothers (II)
I linked to this Matt Zoller Seitz essay on No Country For Old Men when it first appeared, but it seems worth doing so again, because I think Seitz is exactly right about the Coen Brothers and David Denby, who has a long piece in the latest New Yorker sounding the familiar complaint that the Coens are "masters of chaos" who are guilty of "rooting for it rather than against it," is exactly wrong.
January 30, 2008
Hope For The Hobbit
I'm still skeptical about the whole thing, but if Peter Jackson isn't directing, the choice of Guillermo Del Toro makes me cautiously optimistic. Not because I've loved everything he's done, but because his best work suggests that like Jackson, he has precisely the sort of flair for the tactile, the organic, and the grotesque that you need to make a fantasy world like Middle-Earth feel physically real. This is a place where a great many recent fantasy films fall short: The magic of the digital age lets filmmakers summon up fantastic landscapes at will, but too often - I'm thinking of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Golden Compass, and the Star Wars prequels, among others - the results have a glossy, unrealistic sheen to them, with too little of the gritty, bloody, fleshly reality that the best supernatural tales have always partaken of, whether on the screen or on the page. This was something that Jackson, with his background in gross-out horror, always seemed to understand, and the LOTR trilogy was vastly better for it; based on Del Toro's work to date - and the fact that he'll be warming up for his foray in Tolkien with an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation - I'd expect The Hobbit to do Jackson one better on this count, at least.
January 26, 2008
Rambo and Iraq
Matt Zoller Seitz, fantastic as ever, on the politics of the latest Rambo:
Like its three predecessors, Rambo strikes a nerve, and it's not a nerve that America's left-leaning critical establishment wants struck. Cowritten and directed by Stallone, the fourth Rambo movie is a bracingly political picture -- as much an argument in movie form as No End In Sight; a pro-interventionist rebuttal to all the 2007 documentaries and dramas about America losing bits of its soul in Iraq. The I-word is never spoken in Rambo, yet in its coded way, the film makes a case for why we are in Iraq and should stay there until the job is done, whenever that may be.
Read it all. (Seitz's argument certainly puts this exchange in an interesting light.)
January 25, 2008
Get Smart
Good idea. Great cast. And not a single funny moment in the trailer: