Let The Wild Rumpus Begin

The Lives They Lived

Oscar Counterprogramming

Oscar, Oscar

The Crisis of the Middlebrow Movie, Cont.

The Crisis of the Middlebrow Movie

Hollywood's seasoned corporate moguls, such as Brad Grey, at Paramount, and Alan Horn, at Warner Bros., acknowledge that the movie business is splitting into two distinct sectors, which have little if anything to do with each other. The principal focus of the major studios is to manufacture tent-pole pictures, most of them based on comic books and video games, and to connect these projects to a maze of ancillary promotions - toys, cars, tie-ins, etc. There has been growing skepticism about the "tween" films - not movies aimed at pre-teens but films such as Body of Lies and The Women, which despite stars qualify as neither franchise films made for teen males nor as "art" films for adults. In the tent-pole business, the concept is the star. Heath Ledger helped The Dark Knight, just as Robert Downey, Jr. added pizzazz to Iron Man, but they weren't the franchise. Tobey Maguire was almost replaced twice as Spider-Man when his demands became too exotic.

This leaves the art-house business to those veteran players who can cope with hardscrabble budgets and understand how to beat the bushes for acquisitions ...

About That Pelham Remake ...

The Remaking of Pelham One Two Three

Good News For Narnia

While it looks like both the film's principle cast and director will be clearing some time on their calendars this summer to shoot the picture, some sacrifices had to be made on the budget front to make the project viable. According to the Los Angeles Times, Disney spent some $215 million producing Prince Caspian, and another $175 million on marketing it (the film ended up grossing roughly $419 million worldwide). So, in order to lessen the risk on Dawn Treader, Walden Media and Fox have decided to go halfsies on the third film's slated budget of $140 million.

The movie plays up ... every tension it finds in Lewis's novel, and invents several more, creating rivalries (between Peter and Caspian), generating romances (between Susan and Caspian), adding battles (particularly a long set piece in the movie's middle, in which the Old Narnians launch a raid on Miraz's castle), and doubling down on the political intrigue in the Telmarine court. For the most part, the additions serve their purpose, transmuting a somewhat slight children's adventure into a gripping medieval war picture: Braveheart with more magic, or Tolkien with talking squirrels.

But this achievement comes with a price-namely, the evisceration of Lewis's major theme. If The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a story about rebirth and renewal-Aslan resurrected, and spring cracking the ice of an enchanted winter-then Prince Caspian is fundamentally a story about re-enchantment, and the glorious return of the supernatural forces that the Telmarines have repressed. Little of this survives in Adamson's adaptation; it's been pruned away to make room for battles and arguments and longing glances and one-liners. The book's climax, in which the trees and rivers come to life and a wild pagan rout overruns the sterile secularism of Telmarine society, is reduced to a brief battlefield intervention that rips off not one but two scenes in Lord of the Rings. Aslan, too, is reduced to a walk-on role, sweeping in once the body count has climbed and the CGI budget been exhausted to roar a halt to the proceedings. He murmurs about faith, in the voice of Liam Neeson, but he feels less a Christ figure than a strikingly flimsy plot device: Leo ex machina.

The bad news for Narniaphiles is that this may be the only way that C. S. Lewis can plausibly be adapted, given the economics (and biases) of contemporary Hollywood-with the metaphysics downplayed and the Generic Epic elements accentuated, the better to justify the price tag that comes attached to any fantasy film ... But judging from Caspian's middling box-office showing to date, it might be worth considering something different for Voyage of the Dawn Treader and (one hopes) its sequels: half the budget, perhaps, and a little more fidelity to the elements of theme and plot that make Narnia something more than an entertaining but two-dimensional imitation of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Spending $140 million instead of $215 million isn't quite halving the budget, but it's pretty close. With luck, the result will be richer storytelling, instead of just lousier special effects.

The Auteur Theory

... what's particularly clear this season is that the Academy will reward excellence, no matter if it comes from a big studio or a small independent.

... This year's Top 5 were studio and indie, big and little, broad and very specific. The string that pulls them together is not where the films came from in terms of backing, but where they come from artistically. Each of the films selected for a best-picture nomination ... represents the auteur ideal, in which a director is bankrolled and left pretty much alone. It is no coincidence that these five films were created by directors who also received best-director nominations.

The Oscars (II)

The Oscars

... the [Christmas] rush is worse for critics than for viewers, since at least half the movies "released" in November and December won't trickle out to non-Manhattan multiplexes until January. (Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, which national publications had to review around its official December 12 release date, probably reached a theater near you some thirty-odd days later.) But I suspect that even filmgoers in Peoria partake of the overwhelm-ment that settles over cinephiles sometime around Christmas -- a time when critics who've devoted dozens of column inches to The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor during the movie industry's fallow months find themselves tackling what are supposed to be the year's best films at capsule length, and when serious moviegoers wander cineplexes in a daze, rambling about whether Mickey Rourke should win Best Actor for The Curious Reader of Revolutionary Doubt.

It's bad for the moviegoers, and it's bad for the movies. Studio executives are a risk-averse lot in the best of times and, faced with the cruel Darwinism of the holiday season, they seem to have decided that the best way to hedge their bets is to green-light films within an ever narrower range. How else to explain this house-of-mirrors movie season: two Clint Eastwood movies released within 40 days of each other; a pair of Oscar-caliber Kate Winslet performances playing against each other in the local art house; and not one or two, but five films about the Holocaust and Nazis playing between mid-October and the New Year.

What does all this conformity and caution get you? It gets you Revolutionary Road. No film in this holiday season checks quite so many Oscar-season boxes: There are A-list stars (Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, together again a decade after they clutched at each other in Titanic), an Academy Award-winning director (Winslet's husband, Sam Mendes), a sterling supporting cast, a handsome mid-century aesthetic, and a semi-famous literary novel as the source material. And no holiday-season film better illustrates the way that such box-checking curdles art.

How To Make Political Movies

"Doubt," "The Reader," "Frost/Nixon," "Revolutionary Road" -- all of these transplants from stage or page are impeccably acted, exquisitely production-designed excursions into the recent past. And each one is a hermetically sealed melodrama of received thinking, feverishly advancing a set of themes that are the very opposite of provocative. The suburbs are hell on earth. Richard Nixon was a monster. Literature is good for you. Religious authority is bad. The Nazis too. Kate Winslet is hot.

Why argue? And, for all the shouting and finger pointing that goes on in these films, they exist to be admired, not argued about or with. The interesting movie debates of 2008 were incited by the populist entertainments of summertime, "Wall-E" and "The Dark Knight," contrasting allegories pitched at the anxieties of the moment. Curiously enough, the makers of "Wall-E" took it upon themselves to deny that the film was a parable of environmental devastation as well as a disarmingly sweet love story, while some who commented on "The Dark Knight" pushed the allegorical interpretation as far as it would go, reading the film as a cloaked apologia for -- unless it was a veiled critique of -- President Bush and his policies.

The Man in the Rubber Mask

Quantum of Solace

... I don't miss the fetishistic museum piece touches of the series at all. I don't miss Q branch. I don't miss the Moneypenny banter. I don't miss the breezy "let's have a chat" style M briefings. Honestly... there are 20-something Bond films in that style, and like most Bond films, I've seen every film more than once. Some of them, I've seen many times. That adds up. I think it's safe to say if you count individual viewings, I've seen something like 180 James Bond films in my lifetime. All with that same rhythm and style and the same cast sadly growing older while James Bond mysteriously hovers around the same age in one of the weirdest continuity choices in franchise history. Like I said, I don't miss the formula of it all. And frankly, if the Daniel Craig era never quite gets back to that, I'm perfectly happy. I wouldn't mind at all. They made those movies. Lots and lots and lots of those movies. When I look over at the shelf of my office where every single one of those 20-something other Bond films are, the last DVD release that was the tricked-out-but-still-not-HD transfer, it's this huge stack, all the same, all rigidly adhering to that formula.

The Mind of a B-List Actor

Time Passes

Watching Star Wars today is like watching It's a Wonderful Life (1946) in 1977 ...

Listening to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit today is equivalent to playing Terry Jack's Seasons In The Sun (1974) in 1991.

Watching The Godfather today is like watching Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) in 1972.

Star Trek Returns

It's a Wonderful Movie Reference

Rewatching The Sopranos

Thomson is most penetrating when he develops and enlarges his ideas and arguments over multiple entries, and when he's neither praising nor slamming but simultaneously giving and taking away: see his ambivalent analyses of Do the Right Thing; Tinker, Tailor; the often magnificent Heaven's Gate, the photography of which is exactly "heartbreaking"; and The Sopranos--expertly done, but "The Godfather plays every year; The Sopranos in reruns will bore you."

Waiting For The Barbarians

NY: Do you have a theory about why the culture keeps getting coarser?

WA: The country has, over the years, moved to the right. And it's possible that accompanying that move to the right, you also get a lessening of taste. But I don't know if what I'm saying is true, because I have shown some very good films--Bergman, Fellini--to kids from good schools like Yale. Bright kids. And they were not impressed. You know, it wasn't as though I picked out some kid from the Midwest who's a churchgoing barbarian. Those same kids that you see in the movie house doubled over with laughter over fraternity toilet jokes are very often kids from Columbia and Yale. We might also still be feeling the fallout from the sexual revolution, when everybody just ran amok talking dirty and doing things that were forbidden and it became the mark of drama and comedy to be simply outrageous. Not necessarily dramatically interesting or particularly comic, but just outrageous.

... I had a sudden vision of a group of Midwestern monks lovingly preserving the last surviving copies of Manhattan and Annie Hall through a long Dark Age, while wolves howl in Morningside Heights and owls nest in the ruins of Branford College.

I know, I know: Very Crunchy Con. I think I'll have a stiff drink.

Line Of The Day

If you transported Zucker back to 1978 and pitched him Animal House, he'd direct Niedermeyer: Man of Iron.

And Starring Ann Hathaway As Herself ...

His dreams threatened, Follieri made the most of a modest chance. One of his staffers had a friend named Aldo Civico, a Columbia University anthropologist who had been helping the Clinton Foundation reach donors in Italy. What Follieri did next was both nervy and brilliant. He took Civico to dinner at Cipriani uptown, his favorite haunt, a few blocks from Trump Tower. At some point he intimated he wanted to make a major donation to the Clinton Foundation. No numbers were mentioned, yet somehow Civico left with the impression that Follieri might give as much as half a million dollars.

Civico contacted the Clinton camp. Soon Follieri was talking with Doug Band, right-hand man and gatekeeper to the ex-president who had played a key role in developing the Clinton Foundation. By chance, Band was going to be meeting in New York one day soon with Ron Burkle, the former president's good friend and, since Clinton's departure from the White House, his business partner. Maybe the two could grant Follieri a brief audience: that would certainly nudge this young, wealthy Italian into writing a substantial check.

... At the time, the meeting seemed a great success. Follieri was charming and charismatic, his Italian accent especially winning as he spoke of his humble hopes to serve the church by buying hundreds of millions of dollars of Catholic Church properties. True, the church would insist that the properties be put to some "reverent" use by their buyers: no nightclubs. But with the real-estate market soaring the way it was, how could they lose? Follieri left his new associates with the impression that he might soon be writing two big checks--one to the Clinton Foundation and another to one of Burkle's equity funds. But the only check that would ultimately emerge from that meeting came from Burkle's Yucaipa Companies. "Dear Raffaello.... It has been a pleasure to get to know you over the past month or so," Burkle wrote to Follieri on May 6, 2005. Five weeks later, Burkle agreed to fund a joint venture called Follieri/Yucaipa Investments L.L.C., and to commit to it the astonishing sum of up to $105 million.

Alec Baldwin's Second Act

Turning back to me, he said of the film, which he was helping to produce, "This kind of stuff, it's so hard"--the tiny budget, the tight schedule, no more than two or three takes. "It's a domestic drama, and, as you might suppose, I've had my fill of that subject. This is the last time, in this movie, I assure you, you're ever going to see me arguing with a spouse." For a moment, he imagined life at the center of a big-budget drama, and remembered watching Leonardo DiCaprio at work in the lead role in Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator," in which Baldwin had a supporting part. "To be Leo!" he cried out. (Baldwin can be quite earnest, even as he keeps an ironic eye on his earnestness.) "To have a huge role like that! To play the role that is the fizz in the drink, you know what I mean? You are the movie! I wish I could play the lead role in one movie, one great movie." According to Baldwin, "The Insider" was the most recent "great opportunity" for an actor of his kind. "It was smart, it was relevant, it was topical," and the part went to Russell Crowe.

"Do you want to know the truth?" Baldwin said to me not long ago. "I don't think I really have a talent for movie acting. I'm not bad at it, but I don't think I really have a talent for it." He described the film actor's need to project strength and weakness simultaneously. "Nicholson's my idol this way. Pacino. There's a mix you have to have where the character is vulnerable, the character is up against it, but there's still a glimmer of resourcefulness in his eye--you look at him and the character is telegraphing to you this is not going to last very long. 'I'm down'--Randle McMurphy, Serpico, whatever it is--'but it's not going to last, I'm still going to figure my way out of this.' " In contrast, he referred to Orson Welles. "Welles was a powerful actor, but he wasn't always a great actor," Baldwin said, with, perhaps, a faint nod to his own career. "Even when Welles was lost, he was arrogant."

Gone Fishin'

In Defense of George Lucas

Similarly, the "Star Wars" space opera consistently demonstrated Lucas's limitations as a storyteller, even as it tapped into the mass audience's most fundamental hunger for archetype and myth. As refreshing as the initial 1977 installment was -- an escapist, retro thrill ride in the midst of a grittily realist era -- the "Star Wars" movies were more about plot than story, with Lucas far more interested in mechanics, spectacle and marketing than capturing the beat of the human heart. (Although the difference between plot and story may seem arcane, it's quite crucial: The plot is merely a sequence of events, whereas a story limns those events' deeper motivation and meaning. The plot gets characters from point A to point B; the story makes us care.)

One need only watch Hayden Christensen awkwardly declaim in Lucas's last directorial outing, "Revenge of the Sith," to be reminded of how important actors like Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness were to giving the famously leaden "Star Wars" dialogue even a shred of believability. Once "Star Wars" became a multi-billion-dollar economy unto itself, when the movies increasingly served not "the story" but the games and the sound systems and the effects business and the lunch boxes, Lucas's weakness became his greatest strength. Who needed story when the audience would be satisfied with spectacle? He got rich, and we got Jar Jar Binks.

Now, look: Certainly the original Star Wars movies were not exactly masterpieces of storytelling on par with The Godfather and Chinatown. Certainly their dialogue was not up to the standard of, say, All About Eve. But as far as sci-fi blockbusters go, they were pretty damn good - I know that I cared about what happened to Han and Leia, and to Luke and his heavy-breathing father - and they were about, oh, seventy times better than Attack of the Clones and its companion pieces. Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness made a difference, sure, but Ewan MacGregor, Liam Neeson, Christopher Lee and yes, even Natalie Portman aren't exactly chopped liver, and they couldn't do anything with Lucas's craptastic prequel scripts. (And while the whinging Hayden Christensen was overmatched as Anakin Skywalker, the original trilogy had Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill in lead roles, and they were hardly master thespians.) It's fine to say that Lucas's weaknesses were present, in embryo, in the original trilogy - and especially in the mediocre, weakly-plotted Return of the Jedi, whose Ewoks anticipated some of the worst excesses of the prequels. But we shouldn't let the dreadfulness of the late Lucas obscure the fact that the early Lucas birthed a pop-culture classic: If we do, the Gungans will have won.

Why Paris Matters

Paris Hilton is clearly more articulate about energy than George W. Bush: she's a professional and a quick study. While Bush can barely manage in a suit at the Presidential desk, Hilton can hold forth -- or do something like a lifelike replica of holding forth -- on offshore drilling in a cutaway onesie and heels. If the marginal benefit of having a leader who's the brains of the operation keeps diminishing, why not go for the gold-plated bimbo? All she has to do is perform well, and Hollywood culls the weak.

Debating The Dark Knight

Let's be clear: The Dark Knight is in many ways a very good movie, but it's no masterpiece, and it's certainly not worth seeing five times in a weekend, or maybe even five times ever. It's not Godfather II, or Aliens, or even Terminator 2. It isn't a flawless movie -- not by a long shot -- and pretty much all of the complaints about its plot holes are reasonable and accurate. It's only Shakespearean in the sense that the entirety of the last few centuries of popular drama have been influenced by the Bard. What it is, though, is a compelling, comparatively thoughtful summer movie with tremendous scope, real moral complexity, beautifully moody cinematography, a handful of breathtaking action scenes, and one genuinely brilliant and powerful performance from Heath Ledger. Do the film's most slobbering boosters deserve ridicule? Probably. Does the film (or those who enjoyed it) deserve epic griping sessions from those who didn't care for it and are peeved that it made enough money to buy functional Bat-suits for everyone on the production? I think not. It's understandable that the film's combination of critical and financial success might create the impression of overkill. But just as the exuberance of the film's loudest supporters needs to be tempered, so does the grousing of the embittered minority who disliked it. It's not solid gold encrusted with perfectly cut diamonds, but it ain't peanut-ridden crap either.

The Limits of Batman

I don't want to start any fights with devout fans or besotted critics. I'm willing to grant that "The Dark Knight" is as good as a movie of its kind can be. But that may be damning with faint praise. There is no doubt that Batman, a staple of American popular culture for nearly 70 years, provided Mr. Nolan (and his brother and screenwriting partner Jonathan), with a platform for his artistic ambitions. You can't set out to make a psychological thriller, or even an urban crime melodrama, and expect to command anything like the $185 million budget Mr. Nolan had at his disposal in "The Dark Knight." And that money, in addition to paying for some dazzling set pieces and action sequences, allowed Mr. Nolan and his team to create a seamless and evocative visual atmosphere, a Gotham nightscape often experienced from the air.

But to paraphrase something the Joker says to Batman, "The Dark Knight" has rules, and they are the conventions that no movie of this kind can escape. The climax must be a fight with the villain, during which the symbiosis of good guy and bad guy, implicit throughout, must be articulated. The end must point forward to a sequel, and an aura of moral consequence must be sustained even as the killings, explosions and chases multiply. The allegorical stakes in a superhero are raised -- it's not just good guys fighting bad guys, but Righteousness against Evil, Order against Chaos -- precisely to authorize a more intense level of violence. Of course every movie genre is governed by conventions, and every decent genre movie explores the zones of freedom within those iron parameters ... "The Dark Knight" has some advantages from being the second movie in a series, with less need for exposition and basic character development, and its final act is less of a letdown.

Instead the disappointment comes from the way the picture spells out lofty, serious themes and then ... spells them out again. What kind of hero do we need? Where is the line between justice and vengeance? How much autonomy should we sacrifice in the name of security? Is the taking of innocent life ever justified? These are all fascinating, even urgent questions, but stating them, as nearly every character in "The Dark Knight" does, sooner of later, is not the same as exploring them.

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 ...)

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.

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.

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.

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:

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."

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?

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.

Summer of the Superheroes

I'm not the only one who's had enough.

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.

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?)

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.

Sydney Pollack, RIP

By far the best way to honor him, as a director and an actor, would be to Netflix Tootsie immediately:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dubya, The Movie

Who needs Oliver Stone when you've got Vulture?

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:

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.

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.

Oliver Stone's Bush

Defamer has the right idea: A script this lousy has to be an April Fool's joke, right?

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.

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.

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.

The Worst Iraq Movie In The World

Move over, Redacted:

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 ...

Continue reading "The Mist" »

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 ...

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Get Smart

Good idea. Great cast. And not a single funny moment in the trailer:

The Oscars

The Good: Three of the Best Picture nominees deserved the nod (There Will Be Blood's disastrous final act notwithstanding), and I could find good things to say about Atonement and Michael Clayton, too, if pressed. It's nice that Viggo Mortensen was recognized for Eastern Promises, and that Keira Knightley wasn't for Atonement. And the presence of the critical fave Persepolis in the Best Animated Film category means there's a chance (okay, not much of one) that the vastly-overrated Ratatouille won't win.

The Bad: Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, obviously. Tom Wilkinson for Michael Clayton - another thick slice of ham from a fine actor who's serving too many of them these days. The absence of Josh Brolin from the Best Actor nominees. The absence of Zodiac (good call releasing it in the spring, Warner Brothers) from every category.

The Ugly: The smart money says that There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men will split the highbrow-Western vote, clearing the way for a dark horse to win Best Picture - maybe Atonement but more likely Michael Clayton, which cleaned up with a surprising seven nominations, and which will benefit from Hollywood's love affair with George Clooney, Conscience of the Nation. For an entertaining but ultimately ridiculous potboiler like Clayton to beat the masterful No Country might not be the biggest travesty in recent Oscar history (cough, Crash, cough), but it would be pretty damn annoying even so.

Cloverfield as Social Criticism

Tyler Cowen makes the strongest possible case for treating the movie as something more than an interesting gimmick:

I thought this was a remarkable cinematic event. But you need to know that the characters are supposed to be vacuous and annoying, and that the opening scene is supposed to be obnoxious and superficial. The heroism is supposed to be thin. (The whiney NYT review I read is, in retrospect, an embarrassment.) And that the movie is supposed to make you feel physically nauseated. You are in fact witnessing a disaster. Most of all this is a movie about how the young'uns have no tools for moral discourse and that all they can do is utter banalities and take endless pictures of each other and record their lives for no apparent purpose. I can't recall any other movie that so completely devastates its intended demographic.

My review, forthcoming in the next NR, takes a similar tack to that whiney NYT review Cowen mentions. I'd like to think that the filmmakers had the sort of Waugh-esque agenda in mind that he describes, but I don't think the film bears his reading out. (Mild spoilers follow.)

Continue reading "Cloverfield as Social Criticism" »

Tom Cruise And The Medal of Valor

You are watching all these clips, right? Tell me you're watching them ...

Does Hollywood Hate Arabs?

Over at TAPPED, Matthew Duss says yes, and has the video (and the commentary on Back to the Future's egregious Libyan-bashing) to prove it:

To support its claim that Arabs are "the most maligned group in the history of Hollywood," this five-minute film is forced to resort to clips from such blockbuster films as Cannonball Run II, Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, and Hell Squad. So far as I could tell, the most recent clips are from Aladdin and True Lies, both of which are fifteen years old. In the seven years since 9/11, with the nation embroiled in a global struggle in which America's most deadly and dedicated enemies tend to be, well, Arabic, Hollywood has turned out exactly one big-budget film featuring Arab villains: This fall's The Kingdom. If you want to expand the list to include art-house fare, you can throw in United 93, and if you count people trapped in a cycle of violence as "villains" you can tack on Steven Spielberg's Munich, in which audiences were invited to side with Israeli assassins against Palestinian terrorists but feel awfully conflicted about it. Meanwhile, even 24, ostensibly the most right-wing hour on television, features what Martha Bayles, writing in this season's Claremont Review of Books, terms a "timid selection of villains," including "vengeful Serbs, a bitchy German, red-handed Mexican drug lords, a turncoat British spy, a greedy oil executive, power-mad government officials (including one president), and—once in a blue moon, when the Council on American-Islamic Relations is looking the other way—violent jihadists."

But yes, there's no question but that the deeply insensitive portrayal of Libyan terrorists in 1985's Back to the Future - which belongs to an era nearly as distant from our own as the "Enchantment Under the Sea" Fifties were from Marty McFly's Eighties adolescence - continues to be a stumbling block to Arab-American advancement in the United States.

More Juno

Chris Orr offers an interesting addendum to our Juno-and-abortion debate (mild spoilers below):

Continue reading "More Juno" »

Bloggingheads At The Movies

I think Chris Orr and I may have rattled on about Juno and abortion a tad too long, but if that isn't your cup of tea maybe you'll enjoy our discussion of the dark, sexual magic of Michael Cera.

Update: And now, with embedding!

The Movie of the Year

Yes, it has arrived.

"Life ... has never been so exciting."

Will Smith, Reprogrammed

Over the holidays, an interview Will Smith gave to a Scottish newspaper became the scandal of the week - specifically, this passage:

Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good.

"Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today'," said Will. "I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming."

You'll note that Smith didn't actually say that everyone (Hitler included) is "basically good"; the reporter interpolated it. But even that interpolation was enough to bring the Jewish Defense League down around his head, complete with a ridiculous statement that Smith had "spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis. His disgusting words stick a knife in the backs of every veteran who fought (and sometimes died) to save the world from the intentions of Adolf Hitler."

Seriously: They really said this.

Still, I remember thinking at the time that there was something creepy about Smith's comments - not the totally banal speculation about Hitler's psychology, but the line about how "stuff like that just needs reprogramming." And now comes news that Smith may be a recent convert to his great pal Tom Cruise's Church of Scientology. So it all makes sense. (Though of course, as Noah Feldman would no doubt be quick to point out, I only find Scientology so creepy because it was founded relatively recently.)

Meanwhile, in related news, I'm really looking forward to that new unauthorized Cruise biography, assuming Scientology's legal team lets it see the light of day ...

The Politics of Juno

Now that I've seen the movie, I can safely agree with Ann Hulbert: Juno is a film about hot-button subjects (abortion, teen pregnancy, adoption, etc.) that succeeds artistically precisely because it complicates, rather than over-simplifies, every one of the thorny issues it raises. The only thing that's remarkable about this cinematic approach to controversy is how rare it is in Hollywood: Juno's shades-of-gray approach the culture wars ought to be required viewing for Brian De Palma, Paul Haggis, Robert Redford, and just about every other Hollywood filmmaker who's turned out a lousy movie about the Iraq War in the last year or so.

In my dual position as a movie obsessive and a pro-life scold, though, I have to take issue with Hulbert's characterization of the film's take on abortion:

The real flashpoint issue in the film, of course, could have been abortion. Here [Diablo] Cody's politics (presumably pro-choice) are at odds with her plot needs (a birth) and, who knows, maybe commercial dictates, too, if studios worry about antagonizing the evangelical audience. It's a tension the screenplay finesses deftly, undercutting both pro-life and pro-choice purism. Pregnant Juno at first reflexively embraces abortion as the obvious option, and her best friend is at the ready with phone numbers; she's helped other classmates through this. But just when pro-lifers might be about to denounce this display of secular humanist decadence, Juno stomps out of the clinic, unable to go through with it.

She isn't moved by thoughts of the embryo's hallowed rights, however, but by a sense of her own autonomy. And for her, that doesn't mean a right to privacy, or to protect her body ("a fat suit I can't take off," she calls it at one point). Juno is driven by the chance to make her own unconventional choice.

Well ... sort of. I would say that Juno goes further than Knocked Up in presenting abortion as a plausible choice for a girl in the heroine's position, and doesn't go nearly so far as Apatow's movie in making the advocates of abortion look like heartless creeps. And Hulburt's right that Juno McGuff's decision to bear her child to term is an act of personal autonomy that's of a piece with her broader nonconformity, and that deliberately sets her apart from the conformist (and judgmental) world of parents and teachers and too-chatty ultrasound technicians.

However, the crucial decision isn't cast as a Dead Poets Society-style validation of nonconformity for nonconformity's sake; it's cast as a case where being a nonconformist happens to be the right thing to be. And while Juno may not be moved by thoughts of her embryo's "hallowed rights," exactly, she certainly seems to be moved by the unremitting grossness of the abortion clinic (complete with a pathetic-seeming girl receptionist who tells her that they need to know about "every sore and every score") - and more importantly, by the declaration, from a pro-life Asian classmate keeping a lonely vigil outside the clinic, that her child-to-be "already has fingernails." (Careful viewers will note that while Juno sits in the clinic, filling out paperwork, the camera zooms in on the fingernails of the other people in the waiting room.) Just as the movie as a whole charms viewers (and particularly critics) with Juno's hyper-articulate tomboy cynicism, but ultimately asks us to admire the idealism at work under the cynical shell, so too does the scene at the abortion clinic invite the audience to giggle at the Asian girl's pro-life idealism ("all babies want to get borned," is her lisping chant), while simultaneously giving her the sincere line that makes all the difference in Juno's decision.

None of this means that movie is a brief for overturning Roe v. Wade; far from it. But like Knocked Up, it's decidedly a brief for not getting an abortion.

Doubts on The Hobbit

Of course it’s good news that Peter Jackson agreed to return to Middle-Earth, thereby ensuring that the story of Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield and the dragon Smaug wouldn’t end up in the hands of some studio hack. But I can’t say I’m as wild with geekcitement over the news as you might expect. For one thing, making The Hobbit after making Lord of the Rings is like serving a tasty appetizer after a rich-beyond-belief main course: It’s fine so far as it goes, but it can’t help summon up unflattering comparisons to the dish that preceded it. I love The Hobbit, obviously, and I'll be lining up to see what Jackson makes of it. But it’s a minor work compared with the books that follow, and as such the idea of seeing it adapted for the movies generates interest and curiosity, rather than the wild excitement I felt at having the chance to see The Lord of the Rings brought to life on screen.

Then there’s this:

Word is flying fast & furious: Team Jackson, New Line, and MGM have made nice and are gearing up to launch 2 HOBBIT movies ... One will be an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's THE HOBBIT. The second project is believed to be a bridge between THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy - culled from the titanic amount of periphery/ ancillary/ notated material found in Tolkien's works.

Hmmm. Well, yes, there are interesting tales to be told in the bridge years between the Battle of Five Armies and the Long-Expected Party. For that matter, there are interesting stories to be told about every epoch of Middle-Earth’s history, and they’re all helpfully written down in Tolkien’s copious appendices and histories and sagas. But none of them comprise readily filmable narratives in the way of Lord of the Rings; all of them would require not only heavy editing and reshaping, but also significant invention on the part of the screenwriter. And while I trust Jackson and Company more than I would trust anyone else in Hollywood where Tolkien is concerned, I can’t say that I was entirely wowed by the portions of Lord of the Rings where they veered dramatically from the original text. Which means the prospect of having them essentially manufacture a prequel – and if it does well at the box office, you know there will be others – leaves me a little cold, and a lot worried. It's not that part of me doesn't want to see a hundred Tolkien adaptations bloom (forget 3:10 to Yuma: how about Russell Crowe as Castamir the Usurper, paired with Christian Bale as Eldacar, in 3:10 to Pelargir?). It's just that I suspect that opening the doors to "prequels" open the door to exploitation and commercialization, and a downward spiral that has the Lord of the Rings: The Phantom Menace and Jar Jar Balrog at the bottom of it. Better, I think, for Jackson to make The Hobbit, and then quit while he's – and we’re – ahead.

Update: Peter Suderman offers a more serious reason to doubt - that Peter Jackson is only signed to produce, rather than direct, the new Tolkien adaptations.

Stuck in a Moment

Via the House Next Door, here's a provocative compendium of memorable "images, lines, gestures and moods" from the year in movies.

The Golden Compass

You should read Hanna Rosin's piece on the making of the movie, and her review of the finished product; you can find my own (none-too-favorable) review in the next National Review. But to understand what went wrong with Chris Weitz' adaptation, look no further than this:

Mr. Weitz says that if he gets to film the rest of the trilogy, he will begin right where the current movie leaves off. “I mean to protect the integrity of those remaining chapters,” he explained. “The aim is to put in the elements we need to make this movie a hit, so that we can be much less compromising in how the second and third books are shot.”

Translation: "I know I made a mediocre movie, but hopefully people will go see it anyway and the studio will give me a chance to make the sequels the way I want to make them." Sadly, with a $26 million opening weekend, The Golden Compass has a long way to go to make that bet pay off. (And Compass was the best of the books anyway ...)

More in this vein here.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

I finally saw it last weekend, and it’s easy to see why it has the critics in raptures. There's the great cast, dominated but never overshadowed by Philip Seymour Hoffman's riveting scenery-chewing: Ethan Hawke continues to demonstrate that nothing becomes a too-handsome actor like the gradual loss of his looks, and Marisa Tomei continues to prove (in small, little-seen films, alas) that the Academy didn't actually make a mistake back in 1993. There's a rancidly-clever script, complete with a rare screwing-with-the-timeline gimmick that doesn't feel like warmed-over Tarantino. And there's the added frisson of knowing that the whole thing was put together by an aging lion of American cinema, rounding into form for his twilight years.

Yet something about it left me cold. Recently, Jonah Goldberg wondered why no one was drawing comparisons between No Country For Old Men and Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a snowbound noir that was unjustly neglected, I think, because it came out just two years after everyone went gaga for the similarly-snowbound, similarly noir-ish Fargo. I see what he’s getting at: Both are about working-class guys who stumble on bags of money deep in the American hinterland, and both follow their protagonists down to their inevitable undoing. But I think the better comparison is actually between Raimi's movie and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead - the two films could have swapped titles pretty easily - and I don’t think the comparison redounds to the latter’s benefit.

No Country For Old Men opens outward from its money-swiping hero into a broader canvas; it’s a sociological and metaphysical tragedy as well as a personal one. Sidney Lumet’s film, by contrast, is a constricted story, an essentially domestic tragedy that’s concerned with the damnation individuals visit on themselves, rather than the suffering that change and fate and God visit on society as a whole. And in this regard, I found its doomed characters far less persuasive, and thus far less interesting, than the unhappy Midwesterners conjured up by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda and Brent Briscoe in A Simple Plan. In Raimi’s movie, I believed that the characters existed apart from the plot, that they had lives before the money came into their world, trailing destruction in its wake. Whereas as fine as Lumet’s cast was, I didn’t believe that their characters existed except in the context of the film: I didn’t believe that Hoffman’s character was married to Tomei’s character, or that she was having an affair with Hawke’s character, and so on and so forth, except insofar as I needed to believe it for the (very clever) schematics of the plot to make sense. The players felt more like pieces in a clockwork system than human beings trapped in a web of their own making, and as a result the movie was thrilling without being wrenching. I cared about what happened, but I didn’t care about the people it was happening to.

No Oscar For Old Tom

Of No Country, Jonathan Last writes:

Tommy Lee Jones deserves an Oscar for his performance. Or maybe a Grammy for "spoken word," because what he does in No Country he does almost entirely with his voice. That may not sound like much, but he's given terse, old-timey Texas words and he delivers them like poetry, only believably. It's kind of amazing. (In particular, Jones is saddled with the movie's opening voice-over narration. It's so hard to keep this device from looking like a device, and the script he's working off of here would sound really precious coming out of anyone else's mouth. He delivers it perfectly.

Give him a Grammy, but don't give him the Oscar. He'll get it, I'm sure: He's earning all kinds of Oscar buzz, and he'll probably get votes from people who want to reward him for In the Valley of Elah, too. But it'll be unfair - as such things always are - if he takes home a statue, given that his performance is only the third-best (or fourth of fifth-best, if you count some of the fantastic supporting roles) in his own movie, let alone in the year as a whole. Not that Jones' work isn't impressive; it is. But he took the character who was there on the printed page and brought him to life almost exactly the way I anticipated he would, whereas Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem both showed me something I didn't expect to see. And yes, monologues and voice-overs can be hard, but I think what Brolin, in particular, had to do - conjuring a character out of a few words and a lot of physical movement - was harder still, and therefore more impressive.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Movies

In my film criticism, such as it is, I spend very little time talking about the technical aspects of the movies I'm reviewing. In part, this is because I don't have any formal training in the study of film, and the language of cinematic technique remains somewhat foreign to me. But in part its because it's just damnably hard to describe a particular shot or cut or composition without being able to have the reader actually see it.

This has always been a difficulty for critics of the visual arts, but I'm increasingly struck by how the internet - with its endless space for stills and even embedded video alongside the text of a review - offers at least a partial solution to the dilemma. A case in point is Jim Emerson's analysis of No Country For Old Men, which starts with the critical commonplace that the film is beautiful or technically "perfect," and then tries to tease out what those words actually mean in the context of specific scenes, images, and snatches of dialogue. At each point in his analysis, Emerson doesn't just tell you what he means; he shows you, with eighteen well-chosen shots from the movie. If you liked the film as much as I did (you can find my rave in the forthcoming NR), or if its technical proficiency left you cold, you should check out what he has to say - and show.

Chuck Norris and the Culture War

Is there a contradiction between Mike Huckabee's cultural conservatism and his trumpeting of endorsements from icons of, well, trash culture like Chuck Norris, Ric Flair and Ted Nugent? Adam Thierer makes a strong case, but Reihan isn't so sure.

The Moral Vision of the Coen Brothers

Matt Zoller Seitz, on No Country For Old Men:

Though they are habitually described as snotty formalists with nothing on their minds but cinematic gamesmanship, the Coens' body of work is one of the most sneakily moralistic in recent American cinema.

This is very smart, and very true. The Coen brothers have made their share of duds, but the people who accuse them of being winking, technically proficient nihilists have it exactly backward, I think. If you don't mind spoilers, read the whole thing.

Brooks vs. Krugman, Round Two

Via Esquire and Peter Suderman, I've found video of that Krugman-Brooks showdown everyone wants to see:

I assume the red-haired woman who shows up at the end is Maureen Dowd ...

Can't They Revoke His License?

Returning to one of my pet peeves: Forget term limits for columnists - how about term limits for no-talent directors? More specifically, how the hell does Edward Burns, whose hackishness as a screenwriter-director is exceeded only by his smug incompetence as a thespian, get to keep making movies with real actors? His films tend to either vanish at the box office or go straight to video, and what's more, they're basically all the same movie. Yet they keep coming - stocked with B-List talent, sure, but with talent all the same. What's his secret? Do all these actors really just love to work with him? Or is there some idiot agent in Hollywood who keeps telling Selma Blair - or Debra Messing or Patrick Wilson or Brittany Murphy or whomever - that what they really need, to showcase their acting chops and take their career to the next level, is a part in the next Edward Burns movie?

The Derision It Deserves

It's rare that you encounter a bad movie whose badness deserves no analysis, no interpretation, no exculpatory comments - nothing but pure, unadulterated derision. Lions for Lambs, however, is such a movie. Indeed, I fear that mere words can't begin to convey its unmitigated awfulness. I give it my best shot in the next NR, and I've been impressed by the efforts turned in by Chris Orr, Dana Stevens, and the Onion A/V Club. But I think John Podhoretz has really hit the sweet spot. I tried quoting the movie's dialogue in an effort to establish the film's utter risibility, but I think he's hit on a better method: Deadpan plot summary. Consider the following passage (spoilers below):

Continue reading "The Derision It Deserves" »

The Tragedy of Tom Cruise

Just before watching Tom Cruise play a hotshot GOP senator in Lions for Lambs last night (my review will be in the next NR; it will not be favorable), I caught the trailer for Valkyrie, in which Tom Cruise plays Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the famous plot to kill Hitler. I would say that it looks a lot like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, with Cruise taking over the Kevin Costner, "woefully miscast American" role, except that Prince of Thieves was a dreadful movie in myriad other ways as well, whereas Valkyrie looks like it could have been pretty awesome ... if they'd found somebody else to play the lead, that is. To be fair, Cruise does look a little bit like the heroic colonel. But if the trailer is any guide, he'll be about as convincing in the role as - well, as you'd expect:

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