Upper Middle Brow

ACTA vs. Anonymous

2012-02-13T18:58:00.001-05:00

It's a little early, in mid-February, to talk about the year's big themes but you can make a strong case for one right now: opposition to various anti-piracy laws is vehement and mainstream.

Mainstreaming means influence, which breeds more influence.

This is The Economist on the international copyright agreement that's now engendering opposition all over Eastern Europe and beyond.

"It is potentially draconian. Infringers could be liable for the total loss of potential sales.... It applies to unintentional use of of copyright material. It puts the onus on website owners to ensure they comply with laws across several territories. It has been negotiated secretively and outside established international trade bodies."

Just like with SOPA, a case of serious overreach. ACTA is wrong, a power-grab.

The picture here, also in The Economist, is of a left-wing party in the Polish parliament. Poland has long been a place of lax attitudes to copyright. I remember trolling bootleg cassette stands in 1990, you name it they had it. It's culturally ingrained, and it's leading the rest of Europe.

It's a subject for another post, but the Guy Fawkes mask has spread way further than you might expect from the Wachowski brothers movie, which was big and loud and nothing special. That movie has a new lease on life. It's more or less redeemed.

Julianne Moore vs. Sarah Palin

2012-02-13T18:56:00.001-05:00

Julianne Moore is just stating the obvious when she says, in a political magazine, that Sarah Palin was not fit for national office.

More interesting is her empathetic, actorly comment that Palin's working class background made her appealing and relatable, something the Santorum and Romney teams probably wish they could emulate.

And there's this:

“I had no idea what really goes into making a candidate. I was actually shocked by how close it was to the way Hollywood markets an actor or film or any idea. It’s about a very careful kind of exposure, and putting candidates on with one anchor and another anchor, and limiting appearances and using everything very strategically.”

I think she's saying the Republicans trivialized the political process in 2008 by choosing Palin in the first place and then by shielding her from the sort of scrutiny any national candidate deserves. Maybe this point ties to the earlier one: we're sold concepts through carefully calibrated advertising, and one of those was idea of a personality in touch with plain, working class lives.

I find the idea that political campaigns are like movie campaigns kind of appealing, actually. They both trade in myths and images and fill the void between voter and candidate, or moviegoer and fan. Both lead toward a resolution: box office gross in one case, an election in the other. Moviegoing has long been a cycle of seduction and disappointment and I'd argue people are increasingly hip to that. They read the salesmanship more critically. Maybe something similar will happen with political marketing.

Nina Arianda vs. Janine Turner

2012-02-13T18:49:00.001-05:00

If performance is a form of seduction, Venus in Fur is the sexiest 90 minutes around.

The hype over Nina Arianda, including a long, adulatory profile in The New Yorker, was so loud that the play moved to Broadway to a bigger theater. I don't go to plays often and don't have a frame of reference, but the hype in this case seems well-deserved.

Arianda, who was the Polish girl in Tower Heist and had a tiny role in Midnight in Paris, plays an actress auditioning for a role, then the role itself, then another role within that, and before long what's real and what's performance blurs in delicious ways that involve sex, power, language, questions of authority and author-ity. It's like Inception for thespians. The play -- a word with a double meaning -- is fantastically written, first of all, full of wit and surprise and conflict that advances and recedes with unpredictable rhythm. It's about ~~ambivalent~~ ambiguous identities, and the pleasure of playing with them.

That's where great actors come in. Arianda and Hugh Dancy dance around each other like Bogart and Bacall, Clooney and Lopez. Twice in the play they play a scene in near-total silence and I was riveted. Is he seducing her? Is she seducing him? Who's playing? Who's actor and who's audience?

By coincide this weekend EW had a piece about shippers, fans whose devotion to TV shows comes from purported sexual tension between characters: Mulder and Scully, or Joel Fleischman and Maggie O'Connell. The shows withhold the big kiss or the big shag because that tension is a big part of their appeal.

A friend has seen the play twice even though there are few discount tickets around. It's got that kind of draw. I agree with him, and with the New Yorker, we may be seeing the start of a huge star. If Arianda picks a couple of strong movies, she could be the next Jessica Chastain. Like Chastain, she's just odd-looking enough to demand attention but flip the sexy switch at will.

If the ending didn't quite do it for me, maybe it's because the play raised too many ~~ambivalences~~ ambiguities to make a satisfying close possible.

Coriolanus vs. Apocalypse Now

2012-02-11T22:52:00.001-05:00

Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus bypasses ordinary measures of good or bad and heads straight for the bizarre.

It's a singularity.

I kept checking my watch at this one, wondering when it'd be over. I also felt in awe that somebody made a movie, in 2011, about the Yugoslav civil-war, using 500-year-old dialogue and not much younger actors to speak it. This is one movie that will never be replicated. It's just too goddamn weird.

Call it The Zardoz Effect. Like Sean Connery in the early 70s or Francis Ford Coppola later in the decade, Voldemort made a shitload of money and collected enough credibility and chutzpah and financing to fly to Belgrade and shoot an insane action epic that's all about politics and politicians and barely bothers with the action. It's one of the knock-on effects of a giant global success like the eight Harry Potter movies. Daniel Radcliffe in Equus, and then the How To Succeed in Business musical, was another. These things ripple out into the culture. Good or bad doesn't matter so much: the wide success exposes what the people behind it really care about, and what they really care about helps measure the fault lines between high-brow and middle-brow pop.

The Guardian on Coriolanus:

"It reaches back to the Yugoslavian conflict, and the point is not just to satirise nationalist bullies and butchers, but also the smoothly indifferent mandarin class of western Europe in that era. The film also resonates with the Arab spring, where democratic gains can be annulled by the military."

The Observer:

"For Corioles you might read the Falklands, Afghanistan, Iraq or Chechnya, and the battle is shot by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd with the dusty, dangerous documentary-style realism he has brought to movies by Ken Loach and Paul Greengrass, and to Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker."

I obviously copy and paste these quotes weeks before I see the movie because I let expectations get well ahead of reality. Few movies ever live up to the hype and, as I get older, I give less and less credence to mainstream critics.

I'm a total sucker: I went to see the movie purely based on the picture in Empire magazine with blood streaming down Fiennes' face. They know how to get to us gore-hounds. The movie is approximately 9 hours long with about 11 minutes of action, so the proportions are a little off in the context of the marketing. Coriolanus is tedious and long, first, but also well acted and ambitious. It's yet another movie that slips into the grey area of movies that deserve admiration without ever being enjoyable, a category too many movies are falling into.

There's a terrific scene where Fiennes is campaigning in an outdoor market and he has all the charisma of Mitt Romney, oozing contempt, a candidate who's lately stopped taking questions from voters. I also love the scenes featuring "Fidelis TV," the news channel whose sets resemble the BBC's. Talking heads argue politics in Shakespearean language, the anchors skip the fake-naturalism of modern speech and go whole-hog in the other direction, a neat way of ridiculing the the fakery of television political coverage.

Coriolanus is also the first movie in, like, twenty, where I thought Gerard Butler deserves to have a career.

Whitney Houston vs. Amy Winehouse

2012-02-11T22:47:00.004-05:00

Streams of The Bodyguard will be popular tonight.

There was a very brief moment in the late 1980s where Whitney Houston crossed over into mainstream consciousness, a sexy girl in a red dress with bony shoulders and crazy orange lipstick and a decent voice who stumbled onto a catchy song.

"How Will I Know" -- its video with the purply and pink and yellow doors, the song itself as generic as a GE dishwasher -- and "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" were when she caught the attention of people who otherwise don't care about R&B or Motown. A nice smile, a decent voice go a long way. These songs sound about as relevant now as "Boys of Summer," Yaz or A-Ha.

Her hair in the "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" clip looks like the cardboard packing material they stick in Amazon boxes. That's how old that video is.

She's exuberant and alive and hungry for mainstream acceptance. Maybe the orange lipstick looked halfway cool back then. Here's a lively, skinny girl with verve, willing to share her optimism. She just wanted to dance with somebody, or find out if somebody really loved her. It was a few years before she decided not to ever walk in anyone's shadow and children were our future, which is a bit like saying that oxygen is our fuel. Maybe that was the beginning of the end.

There was a period in American pop where you couldn't do your grocery shopping or go into Target or H&M, or wherever, without hearing her. She found her groove and stayed with it. There was a sweetness to her voice and a virtuosity, like the crazy flips gymnasts do at the Olympics, and nobody really bothered to complain about how shitty the songs themselves were. I wouldn't read too much into the lyrics. "Find your strength in love." Whitney Houston stuck to the same soft R&B sound for two decades. I've looked for a single rock song in her catalogue to no avail. There's something to be said for consistency, I guess.

Forty-eight is too early for anybody. Let the Amy Winehouse comparisons start now. Singers' reputations tend to be elevated by death with little regard for their actual accomplishments. That will happen again over the next few days.

Billy Crystal vs. Hannibal Lecter

2012-02-11T21:51:00.000-05:00

I emphatically don't like the new Oscar ad campaign that strips the color from iconic movie scenes and posters.

It's pretty, sure, but the way it desaturates familiar images is a signifier of high-brow culture -- "this is ours now!" -- that risks turning The Exorcist and The Silence of The Lambs into effete high-culture commodities rather than the mass-culture phenomena they were. These were popular movies that connected with a wide audience that Oscar voters haven't cared about since Titanic and Return of the King.

This ad campaign traffics in the sort of brazen nostalgia that makes you wonder whether the Academy is even aware of what a shitty mood the country is in.

None of this would be a problem, the Oscars playing the "classy" card, were it not for a basic division in the culture right now where classy is aligned with one side of the argument against the other. We need less class now, not more.

Commercial movies get it -- note the jobs protest in Safe House, the mockery of corporate energy interests in The Muppets, or the foreclosure subplot in War Horse -- have been eager to tie their stories back to what's going on in the real world. The high-brow stuff is all about how great things were in the 1920s. We're celebrating movies about the silent era and World War I.

Topical movies about the political mood ("America is broken") are hot in the independent world, judging by the stuff at Sundance.

The Observer:

"In Compliance, one of this year's most divisive films, a prank caller posing as a policeman forces underpaid employees at a fast-food restaurant to subject a female colleague to a series of degrading strip-searches. Audiences reacted strongly to its depiction of people obeying power without questioning the moral authority behind it, and the abuses carried out in the film recalled Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. In Arbitrage, an enormously wealthy venture capitalist (Richard Gere) tries to offload the toxic assets that made his fortune before someone finds him out. And in Benh Zeitlin's mesmerising debut feature Beasts of the Southern Wild, which won the grand jury prize, members of a dirt-poor community in Louisiana return to occupy their own homes illegally in the wake of a disastrous flood."

Right now it looks like the gap between the official red carpet culture and the small, elite independent movie culture, is getting wider. Whether either or them connects to actual mainstream audiences is an open question.

Joe Turner vs. Tobin Frost

2012-02-10T22:02:00.001-05:00

The spook on the run set-up is so old you half expect Robert Donat to show up.

They keep cranking these out with little tweaks to reflect the times, like the "We Need Jobs Now" placards ostentatiously displayed during a protest early in Safe House.

If Chronicle served as a counter-argument that January and February are a dumping ground for shit there's no room for anywhere else besides September, Red Tails and Safe House go a long way toward restoring that conventional wisdom. It's candy-colored junk. A movie with two car chases should at least be fun. This one is humorless, frustratingly bloodless for an R rated picture, and the chases themselves are a jamble of close-ups, CG glass shatter effects, some overhead shots barely sustained for half a second, and they barely show any interest in the setting. Cape Town could just as well be Mombasa or Milwaukee.

"Housekeeper" and "asset" may be well-established spook terms but they're new to me and they're kinda cool because they strip these men down into their roles, like pieces in a game. There's the barest hint of a joke in the way the word "traitor" sounds just like "trader," which is what Tobin Frost is doing in whatever idealistic Wikileaks enterprise he's involved in. That's balanced out by the weird way background characters pedantically pronounce years in their entirety, two thousand and eleven, some weird-ass tick that's supposed to indicate precision but just comes across like lame writing.

Steven Rea:

"There are some accomplished, quick-cut, white-knuckle chase sequences in Safe House: by foot, by car, by leaps across the tin roofs of Langa, a shantytown on the outskirts of the beautiful coastal city. Espinosa and his team have watched their Bourne movies, they know their stuff, deliver the jolts. Alas, like the Bourne movies, there are cutaways to the situation room at HQ, where, in this case, a worried Vera Farmiga stands, barking commands into the speaker phone. (Essentially the same thing she did in last year's Source Code.)"

It's not the cutaways that are the problem, though the CIA budget in this movie should raise alarms among the big-government crowd. The problem is that a movie whose whole purpose is to set up excuses for action botches the action. This is one of those movies where the music swells before some shit blows up. Here it comes, people ... Boom!

A moviegoer could be forgiven for thinking that if you're casting Brendan Gleeson and you cut to him every time somebody mentions treachery, you're cleverly misdirecting the audience. This isn't that movie. You're not being mis-directed. You're being badly directed. By another European making the leap to American action moviemaking. The trend is past its sell-by date.

A sequence in the guts of a soccer stadium was clearly inspired by The Secret in Their Eyes.

The end is yet another triumph where secrets are delivered to the media, that great can-opener of rotten goods. It worked in Three Days of the Condor, its classic final scene on 43rd Street in front of the then-Times building. It just smells bad now. Anyway, $10 million for a list of names seems a little steep even in these inflationary times.

* * *

The New York Times says Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse "...displays Mr. Tarr’s uncompromising, atavistic commitment to darkness, difficulty and lapidary pictorial sublimity."

The fuck does that mean?

John Rambo vs. Aaron Cross

2012-02-10T21:56:00.000-05:00

If the mid-1980s through the early 1990s weren't the heyday period of American action moviemaking, they were certainly the most resonant.

The trailer for the GI Joe sequel (who asked for this shit?) has nothing going for it until The Rock calls for a friend's help and Bruce Willis shows up, spewing bullets from a machine gun in a Die Hard reference so blatant and so lame it's insulting.

Robert Patrick, who's been lost in a wilderness of straight-to-video junk and random TV shows for the best part of two decades, shows up for a memorable few minutes in Safe House, playing the sort of no-nonsense badass that used to populate Schwarzenegger vehicles. He ain't got time to bleed. Patrick has a presence and he's stayed in shape but he'd never show up in a prominent role in a mainstream action picture if it weren't for T2.

And look at the trailer for The Bourne Legacy, the one with the sliding bars of ... something. Bourne leaps onto a frail little evergreen in some snowy wasteland, the second jump onto a tree in a matter of weeks (the previous was The Grey).

The source material for both is First Blood, a movie that seems more and more like an action movie how-to with each passing year.

What the Bourne Legacy trailer, with its emphasis on elbow violence, lacks completely is any hint of vehicular mayhem, but that's not to say the movie will lack it. Manila papers are full of breathless accounts of star sightings and street closures, weeks' worth of traffic delays. Something big is going down.

Smash some fucking cars, people.

George Mallory vs. Fitzcarraldo

2012-02-10T21:49:00.001-05:00

The best parts of The Wildest Dream, the Everest documentary, are neither the archival footage shot by George Mallory's 1924 expedition nor the high-def stuff shot recently as Conrad Anker recreated Mallory's climb. The best parts are actually the swooping shots through a three-dimensional CG landscape that give you a sense of the mountain's scale.

"They're traveling by map, daddy," my boy rightly observed. He's wise to this stuff now, post-Muppets.

We travel by map through the Himalayan passes that lead to the base of Everest, the mountain is revealed -- somebody calls it a "white fang," which is genius -- and little numbers appear showing the camps: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. They're closer and closer to each other and when you realize each number represents several days' exhausting work, the scale of the enterprise registers in a way that it doesn't in the footage actually shot on the mountain. That's a letdown.

Mallory, with his boyish haircut and his Dumbo ears (he's second from left in the top row in the picture here), fits nicely in a long line of movie obsessives, from Fitzcarraldo to The Griswolds. He's a Werner Herzog character and you have to wonder what Herzog could have done with this material.

The modern scenes open up once in a while to show how tiny humans are against the rock and the ice but most of the drama comes from seeing two strong, tough guys looking really, really tired.

The idea that they're recreating Mallory's ascent using 1920s' gear appears to eventually go out the window. Anyway, the argument that Mallory summited nearly three decades before Sir Edmund Hillary is undercut by showing how two modern guys can barely replicate his achievement, panting their way up the ice. It makes intellectual sense, not dramatic sense.

There's another problem with climbing documentaries that no one can get around: you want to shoot people from the front, to show their exertion and the emotion in their faces, but whenever you do that, you force the viewer to suspend disbelief. The guy carrying the camera is already ahead of the climber, so how bad can it be? That just bugs the shit out of me every goddamn time.

* * *

I came across an amusing tidbit about the British Board of Film Classification and the changes censors demanded in Bond movies. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when Angela Scoular writes her room number on Lazenby's leg, his line was ‘I have a slight stiffness.’ Dubbing added, "...in my shoulder."

Red Tails vs. The Red Baron

2012-02-10T21:38:00.000-05:00

The pilot secures goggles over his eyes.

He's ready for battle.

He steers his craft skyward.

The clouds roll past gracefully.

Anti-aircraft flak explodes around him.

Bullet holes riddle his plane.

Somehow the metal protects flesh.

But not the engine.

The plane dips.

It falls faster and faster.

The brave pilot readies for death.

Glory awaits.

Red Tails?

No.

It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

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Chronicle vs. Archie's Final Project

2012-02-08T17:09:00.002-05:00

There's an essential pleasure to be had from commercial moviemaking that comes from seeing pieces fit together in a satisfying way. Call it classical storytelling, call it cliche, but it's a joy when it's done right. Things click into place.

If you agree with the above paragraph, Chronicle is one of the finest original scripts of the past few years. It hits its points like a screenwriting manual might tell you to, the gradual escalation every ten pages, the abrupt shift to mark the start of the second and then the third act, but the pieces snap together satisfyingly. Like Legos.

Chronicle's Lego scene makes the movie. The three guys with newfound superpowers are still at the point where they're feeling their way around, testing each other, looking to impress. One levitates two Lego pieces and fails to put them together. Another levitates a whole bunch of them, puts them in order, the pieces snap into place. Voila, a rocket. It's ET's Reese's Pieces levitation trick revisited for a snarky, self-aware media-saturated audience.

It's a small scene but it moves the story forward, teaches us something about the heroes, works on the level on spectacle, and taps into the familiar, tactile satisfaction of snapping Lego pieces together, that tiny feeling the pieces give when the pegs slide in. The combination of prosaic setting with fantastical special effects reminds me of another genre mash-up, Super 8, and of Limitless, another movie where special effects convey the (anti)hero's mindset.

A leads to B leads to C, which complicates D, which ties back to A, connections and strands that weave together into a plot that satisfies expectations in large measure because the writers know what the expectations are. There's a reason movies are sometimes called rides or rollercoasters. On a coaster, you see the path ahead of you and you know exactly what's coming, but you let yourself go with it, let the little dips or twists surprise you along the way, even though the surprises are themselves expected. Any series that's on its fourth or fifth movie would do well to study Chronicle.

I hadn't seen the rude teaser poster with the middle finger -- it's probably not meant for public spaces -- but it fits the movie's mood. You really can't have enough high school outcast movies, be it Heathers, Pump Up the Volume, Easy A or Archie's Final Project, a movie that was unfairly ignored but which fans of Chronicle should immediately look up. It's a much more apt comparison than Hitch, the other dickhead superhero movie that lazy reviewers immediately compare this to. That one was big and messy where this one is intimate and neat, making the most of very little.

Though the abusive dad trope is getting a bit tiresome after Super 8, Warrior and the exhausting Real Steel, here it's given a neat little twist that undercuts convention. The dad comes to his kid's bedside at the hospital and just when you expect him to pour out his apologies, he spits hatred and resentment instead.

I haven't felt this much joy from a movie since The Muppets and Red State a couple of months back.

Netflix vs. Warner Bros.

2012-02-07T21:39:00.000-05:00

If you don't mind being a bit reductive, you can choose to see the movie world as a Empire magazine landscape on the one hand, a Sight & Sound place on the other. I do. One puts festival-winning, largely obscure foreign movies on its cover; the other has Batman one month, the Avengers soon after.

There's great stuff on both sides but, also, the 90 percent rule applies on both sides: 90 percent of all creative output is crap, whether it's aimed at high-brow audiences or at the mainstream. Plenty of people feel passionate about the movies, or music, they champion, but you don't have to look very deeply to conclude that The Avengers or The Hunger Games elicit deeper feelings than The Artist or Martha Mary Maybeline Mary Sue, or We Need to Talk About Kevin, those last two arriving with deafening buzz, almost none of it deserved.

It's the Sight & Sound attitude -- this little gem is so precious! -- I detect whenever somebody tells me, what, you don't stream Netflix? No, I don't fucking stream Netflix. My computer and my TV don't talk to each other, they're in different rooms, and very few of the little gems people have discovered sound like something I want to see, much less must see. I'm an Empire magazine kind of guy.

It's nice to get some numbers to back up my instinctive reaction to all the high-brow claptrap that surrounds much of the conversation around the wonders of streaming.

As background, the big movie studios have protected their DVD and blu-ray businesses by limiting how soon their movies appear on Netflix to roughly a month, or two months in Warner Bros' case, after DVD, and some like Sony and Disney don't make their stuff available at all.

The LA Times:

"The results of that conflict are evident in the fact that of 2011's top 100 movies at theaters in the U.S. and Canada, only 18 will be available on Netflix's streaming service this year. The vast majority of the nearly 10,000 films available via Netflix streaming (a number compiled by the website InstantWatcher; Netflix does not release data on its inventory) are independently financed pictures such as Limitless and Drive or older pictures like The Hunt for Red October and On the Waterfront."

These are all worth seeing if you haven't seen them in the movie theater, where they belong, and Limitless and Drive are among the best 2011 had to offer. But they're not The Muppets or Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which were as good as movies can get, professional, panoramic entertainment with humor, movement, and a desire to please. Being able to show 18 out of the 100 movies that matter to most people suggests Netflix can only supplement, not supplant, moviegoing until some other streaming system comes along controlled by the big conglomerates. Whoever figures out how to get 80 or 90 out of those 100 movies to the audiences that want to see them will be real winner.

The Rig vs. The Keep

2012-02-04T13:36:00.002-05:00

The Rig wants to be The Thing or Alien on an offshore oil rig but it's a waste of 90 minutes.

There's a meanie who disembowels people. He looks like The Gimp with Nosferatu teeth, then later he seems to have ridged back like Godzilla. He jumps out at the actors whenever they're alone but it's never clear whether he's feeding or protecting his turf or what. And when he does kill, we barely get to see a thing.

I put on a bootleg of the movie hoping for some of the details and language of life on a rig, like Contraband showed us a container ship, and Unstoppable showed the world of the freight railroads. I wanted to get a sense of what it's like to work on an oil rig.

Mostly I got long shots of twenty-somethings walking down corridors with a lot of yellow pipes and bannisters. There is almost no gore. Just loud clanging, then some blood on the wall or the scaffolding.

Two women work on the rig, which means one of them gets to take her top off and that's fine. Also fine is William Forsythe, one of those great William character actors -- along with Smith and Sadler -- that make junk like this a little more tolerable. Unfortunately, he's the captain of said rig and the Gimp Nosferatu gets him early on.

The movie is shot on cheap, washed-out DV and its dubbing is atrocious. The music is far more exciting than anything on the screen. I'll say it again: there is no gore.

It's the kind of horror picture where the fire is a post-production effect done on somebody's iMac, and a character makes chicken noises to get someone to go where they don't want to go. In movies like this, inspiration through ridicule works every time.

Duane Reade vs. The New England Patriots

2012-02-03T17:20:00.000-05:00

There's something to be said for local retail.

Uggy vs. Cosmo

2012-02-03T17:16:00.002-05:00

If anyone needed a reminder that Oscar campaigning season gets a little bit silly, along comes Christopher Plummer, dissing a rival movie's dog.

Plummer says in The Hollywood Reporter:

"I think our dear little Cosmo was much warmer than Uggy! That was a circus dog -- he was so glib! Cosmo's a real dog."

Slam! Apparently he was being serious. It's not like there's a best animal category.

If there were an animal Oscar category, they would nominate the monkey from Hangover Part II and the Dolphin Tale dolphin, which has the advantage of being a biopic and a story of overcoming adversity; in any case, all of them should rightly lose out to Rango, to Snowy, or to Caesar from Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Anyone charmed by the dogs in Beginners and The Artist would do well to revisit My Dog Skip. It is, along with Lassie the standard-bearer for expressive dog acting.

Skip tilts his head when he understands something. He may be 16 inches tall but he's a rocket on the baseball diamond. Later, enhanced with some of cinema's finest old-dog make-up, Skip struggles to climb onto his old master's bed. The effect is every bit as good as Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button.

"Daddy, why are you crying?"

"That movie gets me every time, sweetie."

Luc Besson vs. The Burmese Junta, part 2

2012-02-03T17:07:00.000-05:00

You can't ask for a clearer, better example of how piracy can be a force for progress. Bootleg DVDs of Luc Besson's The Lady are a hot item on the streets of Yangon/Rangoon.

The Guardian:

"Film piracy is common in Burma, where the latest copies of Hollywood blockbusters and Korean soap operas are often found long before their cinematic release. But The Lady is a peculiar case, sold in a special DVD package alongside other banned films including 2008's Rambo IV, which pitted Sylvester Stallone against the then military junta; speeches from Aung San Suu Kyi; comedic performances from the recently released political prisoner Zarganar; and the 1995 film Beyond Rangoon, a largely forgotten action drama of the 1988 student uprising, which has become a cult classic among democracy activists."

Something similar happened with the honor killing movie The Stoning of Soraya M, copies of which circulated within Iran, much to the delight of the movie's makers.

Like with that movie, tt's almost beside the point whether the Burma movie, which hasn't opened here yet, is good or not. It gives Burmese a sense that international attention is on them and what happens in April's election, in which Aung San Suu Kyi is a candidate for parliament. That may embolden them to stand up, like the people of the Arab spring, if the results of the election are dishonest.

My initial post about this movie is here. It's from about a year ago. I was way more enthusiastic about this project before the European reviews started coming in.

It's a little sad, though, that all the movies the West has made about Burma in recent years can fit on one damn DVD, with room left over for Zarganar. Beyond Rangoon involved Patricia Arquette getting wet a lot, best I can recall.

A corrective to any sort of enthusiasm about movies' ability to change the world comes from Steve McQueen in The Observer:

"Art can't fix anything. It can just observe and portray. What's important is that it becomes an object, a thing you can see and talk about and refer to. A film is an object around which you can have a debate, more so than the incident itself. It's someone's view of an incident, an advanced starting point."

I'd like to think he's wrong.

NY vs. NJ

2012-02-03T16:49:00.000-05:00

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Shaft vs. Sheba, Baby

2012-02-01T17:32:00.000-05:00

Pam Grier in The Toronto Star, makes an interesting point about how categories, or genres, develop. Asked about blaxploitation, she says the term wasn't coined until women like her started starring in movies:

"There were several action and martial-arts films being done with African-American males -- Jim Kelly, Isaac Hayes, Fred Williamson, Jim Brown. They had all done pretty much the same formulaic films that I had done, but when they did those movies, they were just considered regular action films ... But when I did it as a woman, I was stepping on the toes of conservatives who don't want to see women be aggressive. And that's when the term was coined, because these movies were 'exploiting' women. No, women can be equally as strong - we're not victims. That term is almost a misnomer."

She's hitting a worthwhile point about genre. We lump movies together that don't necessarily belong. Fred Williamson kicking ass and Pam Grier doing so are different things.

Django and My Name Is Trinity are not the same, though they share a fairly narrow genre, neither are The Wicker Man and Don't Look Now, nor White Line Fever and Smokey and the Bandit, nor The Road Warrior and The Last Wave, Death Wish and The Exterminator.

It's like any library. If something is misfiled or mis-categorized, it's going to be harder to find, harder to remember, even. Lazy labeling makes it easy to dismiss something that may actually deserve a new look.

Clear yet flexible delineations of genre are a form of preservation.

* * *

Joel Rubinoff, also in The Toronto Star, notes that the latest Mission: Impossible is nearly as wordless as The Artist, because it's geared for global markets.

"To compare an exquisitely realized indie film like The Artist to a big-budget behemoth like Mission: Impossible is like comparing a Mercedes to a monster truck. But it's these adrenalized monoliths, with their fast cars, sexy stars and exotic locales, that keep the industry on its feet, making the millions that allow art house fare like Albert Nobbs and The Tree of Life to even exist. And when they're done right, as Mission: Impossible and Avatar are, they can attain the same visual artistry, the poetic transcendence."

Leonard Cohen vs. Kurt Cobain

2012-02-01T17:02:00.001-05:00

Leonard Cohen has been putting poetry to music for 40-some years, but as revered as he is by followers, he's never quite been Times Square billboard material. He is now. Leonard has never been bigger than in 2012, at age 77. Only John Cena and The Rock are bigger on 42nd Street today, between 7th and 8th.

I've only had Old Ideas, his first record since Dear Heather, for a few days, but I'm ready to place it just behind Songs of Love and Hate in a ranking of favorite Cohen records.

It's spare, subdued, the music won't feel dated in 10 years, like "Democracy" sounds now. It's witty and sexy ("You were young and it was summer / I just had to take a dive / Winning you was easy") and if Leonard decides to hang up his hat after this one, what a great way to go.

Greg Kot:

"For the last two decades his albums have sagged beneath the cheese applied by gratuitous synthesizers and keyboards. Intensive recent touring has served him well, however, and the singer has cleared out some of the production clutter on "Old Ideas." The sparer, more spacious arrangements allow Cohen to inject his deadpan baritone with a subtle theatricality.

The comment about how touring helped the music is pretty clever. Some of my favorite Cohen recordings are from his many live records, both official (Live Songs, Live in Concert, Live in London, Live on the Isle of Wight, Songs from the Road) and samizdat (his 1988 Reykjavik show is a good one to get; so is the radio recording from Goeteborg in 1993).

Concert recordings strip away the artifice, the gloss, and reduce the music to its core. Live albums get a bum rap but sometimes they're far more alive than the songs they're supposedly reproducing.

Kurt Cobain once imagined he would "sigh eternally" in a "Leonard Cohen afterworld." Old Ideas might be a glimpse of that world, though I hope Leonard sticks around . It's a nice place to live but I wouldn't want to visit there.

* * *

“Piracy is the new radio,” says Neil Young. “That’s how music gets around."

Miss Bala vs. Maria Full of Grace

2012-02-01T16:34:00.001-05:00

I was tricked by the trailer for Miss Bala into expecting a gritty crime picture, Traffic with some skin and a decent shootout. Instead I got a long, arty travelogue through Tijuana in the company of a pretty but almost completely blank young woman who's constantly in motion even though she's mostly passive.

It's a black comedy dressed up in thriller clothes, closer in spirit to, like an After Hours, than to the similar but far superior Maria Full of Grace. That movie felt real and lived-in, if it caught the vibe of the streets of Jackson Heights, where I live, one could extrapolate that it got Colombia mostly right, too. Miss Bala wants to be a European art-house movie: long takes where not much happens. People are blanks. The girl barely reacts when some pretty awful shit happens to her. They bark into their CG radios, they order each other around, but for all the awful things that happen, there's very little emotion. Maybe that's a point the moviemakers wanted to make about how far Mexico's corrupt narco-economy reaches into everyday lives, and that's fine. It just doesn't make a very interesting movie. "Gripping," "provocative," "explosive"? I don't think so.

There's so little room for foreign movies in our multiplexes. The AMC Empire typically has one screen for Chinese movies, one for Bollywood (these are often sold out on Friday nights, as Ra-One was), and the third can be European or Latin American or a South Korean actioner, on an inconsistently rotating basis.

The audience is rarely large. At Front Line, the Korean war movie, there were about a dozen of us, mainly African-American action fans (and me). At Viral Factor, which admittedly got zero advertising, there were five of us, curiosity seekers who may have expected more crunchy Hong Kong action than they got. If there is only room for two or three foreign movies a week in Times Square, when dozens are released weekly around the world, they should really be the cream of the crop.

* * *

This has nothing to do with anything but I'm kind of pleased to discover that the boy wizard is apparently an atheist.

Dan Radcliffe in The Globe and Mail:

"I don't believe in ghosts or an afterlife. If I can't see it, measure it, or feel it in some way, then it doesn't exist for me. Ghost stories are great, but I've never ever met anyone who didn't believe in ghosts, who has then seen one. The only people I've ever met who've seen a ghost are people who, prior to that, believed in them. So it's highly unlikely I will have a supernatural experience any time soon."

Kill List vs. The Mist, Part II

2012-01-31T23:37:00.000-05:00

Let me add a few more movies that probably influenced Kill List: Se7en, Oldboy, The Horseman, 8mm, A Serbian Film, Pulp Fiction. And note I titled this post Kill List vs. The Mist. That one sprang from the imagination of a popular horror author and its fuck-me ending also involves a father killing his son.

I won't claim I saw the twist coming in Kill List coming but we were primed for some sort of rug-pulling ending. The movie came out in the UK back in September. When the rug is duly pulled, what's underneath is is horrible and gross and turns the hero into a monster, but it's also cold, so clinical, it doesn't really register.

I like the movie. I appreciate its wilingness to mash-up one of those grimy-England our-economy-is-shit social drama, then marry that to a hitmen on stakeout movie whose closest cousin is Pulp Fiction.

Let me cut to the problem here: I see a young, somewhat cocky director who scoffs at movies that could, legitimately have been influences on Kill List. He doesn't own up to any one, except borrowing a shape from Blair Witch. The man doesn't appear to be a fan of the movies he's copying from, which is a shame.

Poster, truncated.

The last few years, the Europeans have given us baby rape, the force-feeding of shit, a redneck clan that fetishizes crucifixions, men being drawn and quartered, a girl chopping off her clit with scissors, and, in Baise Moi, execution with a gun barrel up a man's asshole. Hong Kong has served up an improvised c-section (in Dog Bite Dog), the Japanese are fond of slicing breasts, while the Koreans -- never to be outdone -- gave us a guy hoodwinked into incest, and worse.

Some of us will always seek out the outre, the movies that set out to offend, that test boundaries or push buttons. Breaking and reestablishing taboos is one of the functions of pop culture, and of the horror genre in particular, which draws on the pleasure of surprise. Trouble is, the law of diminishing returns is asserting itself. There are fewer button left to push. We need some new ones.

You can tell the movies that get under my skin by how long I write about them. This one must approach 3,ooo words. If I'd had time and the inclination, and wasn't writing with a Pinot noir in my hand, I'd write everything shorter. Take out every third word, see what happens.

Kill List vs. The Mist part 1

2012-01-31T23:28:00.000-05:00

The British director Ben Wheatley tonight struck me as kind of smug, too quick to sneer at everything from The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense to the Harry Potter and Twilight series -- anything popular, in other words.

His movie, Kill List, too, practically dares you to hate it. It's too cool for school. There were several walk-outs at the preview screening tonight at the IFC Center.

Kill List is a nasty piece of work. It's sick. It's pornographically violent and rivers of black humor run through its storyline -- one ill-fated character even chuckles at the absurdity of it all.

It's one of those movies where it's easy to be of two minds: I don't particularly like it, but I admire what it's going for.

((major spoilers))

All the movie's oomph comes from its last 90 seconds or so, when the hero discovers what he's done. A mask and a hood are removed to reveal his dead son and his dying wife, whom he's just stabbed over and over, thinking he was defending himself against a Satanic hunchback. (The movie has Tarantino'esque chapter titles, and that's one of them). I feel sorry for the contortions mainstream reviewers will put themselves through this week, writing about this mean little movie without giving away the ending. I'm not even gonna try.

Whether the movie works or not depends on those last couple of minutes. For me, it almost did, but not quite. Almost, because Wheatley and his wife, the co-writer, had taken time to set up the relationships and the world where this takes place. All the vulgar socio-realism of the first half-hour buys him the room to get unhinged later on, Wheatley said at the Q and A after the screening. I buy that.

The tension between spouses over money spent and money not earned is familiar to anyone who's not in the 1 percent. The folded-up exercise gear in the garage, the nostalgia for better days, even if they weren't, the small humiliation of a rejected credit card -- been there.

Once you buy into that world, maybe you can accept that a well-staffed and well-funded group of Satanists, older and wiser than the day when they faced down Lee Remick and Gregory Peck, has hand-picked a couple of deranged ex-commandos, one of whom appears to be a sort of Antichrist in training. He's convincingly a wounded husband, a doting dad, then a few minutes later an intense killer with cold, hard eyes. Eventually, the early scenes of horsing around with his boy in the backyard are played back in a nightmarish mirror-image.

Ben Wheatley, Director of "Kill List," at the IFC Center
in New York on Jan. 31 2012.

At the climax, we see the hero's realization of what he's done and goes to a freeze frame. But then it keeps going. You see him kind of stagger away from the scene of the slaughter with nary a feeling on his face. It's a letdown.

Wheatley has said he wanted to stick genre elements in a realistic setting, something Attack the Block also did..

Wheatley also said that since he started making his own movies, he's paying less attention to others', which is either ignorant or merely obnoxious. I suspect he's in the uncomfortable position of wanting to honor the movies that came before without coming off like a fanboy copycat.

I don't this movie is that, a copycat, but if I made a list of 100 movies than went into making Kill List, I bet I'd get a good 90 of them right.

Total Film:

"Kill List builds with nary a jar or jolt from naturalistic domestic drama to Grand Guignol horror movie via a succession of small-talk stakeouts culminating in grubbily violent hits. ... It's also a mystery movie, a road movie and a grotesque riff on Arthurian legend, and is influenced as much by John Cassavetes, Alan Clarke and Ken Loach as Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man and The Blood On Satan's Claw."

Chris McEneany has one of the smartest reviews:

"Kill List is not going to surprise many genuine horror fans who will see what's coming from a mile away. Everyone knows by now of the story's Wicker Man vibe, but occult-buffs will also be able to name-check many other diabolical entries too. We have nods to Jack Starrett's exciting 1975 occult-thriller Race With The Devil, Polanski's classic Rosemary's Baby and the incredibly gooey The Devil's Rain and even Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and there is more than a touch of Angel Heart thrown in to the bubbling cauldron of underworld inevitability, and then we have Hammer's recent Wake Wood, which employed a similar hidden society of taboo-breakers and doomed characters. Whilst all of this is extremely welcome, I found the sudden collision of the genres, despite all the clues that had been provided along the way, a little too jarring … and, like many people, I knew that it was going to happen. I suspect, also, that the filmmaking couple took note from a seriously vicious reveal in A Serbian Film to aid in their devastating conclusion. Thus, Kill List runs the risk of being title-ticking experience for some buffs. Though I strongly believe that the film is smart enough to surmount these covert similarities, and occasionally even blatant steals."

Green Lama vs. Willie the Sleeper

2012-01-29T19:41:00.001-05:00

Americans and other Westerners have long been interested in the Himalayas and Tibet but that interest was rarely more than skin deep: Tibet was the land of the Yeti, or of Shangri-La, or people with eyes in the middle of their foreheads.

The Rubin Museum of Art is taking a clever approach toward showing how Tibet was popularized in Western pop culture with a small, one-room exhibit of comic books set in Tibet: everything from Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse to Tintin. The exhibit is worth seeing for anyone curious about how mass-market junk helps shape people's perception of the world.

One of the stranger pieces of pop ephemera is Green Lama, a Shadow contemporary, who was the hero of a dozen or so pulp novels and a comic book series that roughly coincided with World War II. There was a radio serial later. Green Lama (as in Dalai Lama) spent much of the 1930s in Tibet, after graduating Harvard and inheriting millions, and he doesn't need a phone booth to change back into his alter ego, Jethro Dumont. He just chants a few words of Tibetan. He's likely the first practicing Buddhist superhero in American comics.

The character went some way toward introducing America to the traditions of real-world Buddhism, so the museum is treating him like a pretty big deal, commissioning theater and new music around the character. It's not mentioned anywhere, but it's possible the early part of Batman Begins, where Bruce Wayne is schooled in a monastery, was indirectly influenced by this character.

Bruce Wayne's dad and Jason Bourne's boss read along with the comic as part of a new music work called Sympho by Paul Haas, a composer credited in the program as playing the laptop, which he was. Linus Roache and Brian Cox read the pulpy stuff with gusto, like they were playing on an old-time radio program. Cox read the part of a not-too-intimidating gangster named Willie the Sleeper who has a narcotic gun and whose diabolical scheme involves holding write-in contests.

Seeing pulpy 40s comics dramatized on stage, actors reading the balloon dialogue, is midway between silly and kinda cool. It's certainly surreal. But the deeper point is that here are serious actors, serious musicians, and a serious museum taking pop culture seriously. A mostly forgotten comic book character had a small, tangential influence on the world that is being recognized years later. That's worth something. Maybe our time's equivalent of dime-store novels is influencing somebody, somewhere, in ways that will one day warrant a museum exhibit. I'd like to think so.

We were curious to see Cox in person, having just seen Rise of the Planet of the Apes again. I would have asked him whether Andy Serkis had been robbed of an Oscar this week, but I was too worried about Brian's hand.

He was in the museum cafe before the show, where he spilled scalding coffee on his hand and was very unhappy about it. Staff came out with napkins, water, eventually a ziploc bag of ice. If it were always this easy to vanquish bad guys, there'd be no need to hire great character actors like Cox. (see prior post).

Idris Elba vs. Andy Garcia

2012-01-28T12:54:00.001-05:00

Reliable character actors like Brian Cox keep getting work (he's in Coriolanus now) because they're consistent, they deliver, and because many of them add cachet to everything they're in. The list of guys like that is long: Liam Cunningham, William Sadler, John Hawkes, Melissa Leo, Karel Roden, Ric Young, Casey Affleck, Danny McBride, Joan Allen, Vincent Cassel, J.K. Simmons, Frank Grillo, Brendan Gleeson, Idris Elba, I could really go on and on, but the point is that these guys make even junk they're in a little better than it would be otherwise.

Sometimes they're so good it's natural to wonder why they're not stars. And the answer may that they don't want to be.

This is Brian Cox in The Daily Telegraph:

"I did a film in which Andy Garcia and Michael Keaton both played the leads, Desperate Measures, and interestingly enough it was their biggest payday. The film didn't do well, and it kind of marked their careers. They've done less since. It all changed. That was one of the first films I did in Hollywood, and I realised I never want to be in that position."

He's right Why take that risk? You can walk down the street unmolested, and you can earn decent money, work as much or as little as you want.

My hat's off to Mr. Cox for injecting some cold, hard reality into the publicity game. If I could sit down for a drink with any celebrity in the world, guys like this would be top of my list. What am I going to say to Tom Cruise, after all?

They're working guys. They take a job and do it well. They may have a nice house somewhere, or maybe not, but they're impossible to disrespect.

You get big enough, like Idris Elba here, you can sell drinks on the side of buildings, or maybe play a small recurring role in a superhero franchise.

Good work gets rewarded, one way or another.

The Grey vs. Deliverance

2012-01-28T11:00:00.000-05:00

After a two-movie fallow period, Joe Carnahan is back and he's delivered with the kind of action picture that we all hoped for after Narc. The Grey is the first thriller in a while that actually thrills.

I've seen several thousand action movies in my life and just the men in the wilderness genre adds up to 200 or 300 movies everything from circle-the-wagon westerns to Predator to Southern Comfort, Jaws, Open Water, Cliffhanger, Deliverance, The Edge and Herzog's Grizzly Man, which gets a shout-out in this movie. I live for this stuff, even when it's fairly formulaic or tone-deaf, or just lazy, as many are. So when a good one comes along, I celebrate.

I celebrate being surprised, for one. I didn't expect much from The Grey based on its trailers and its January release date and my expectations only sank lower after A.O. Scott raved about it. If the Times loves a mainstream movie, you automatically question their motivation. But the movie is surprising, again and again, even if you know the mechanics of the genre, the particulars are never obvious. Just about every World War II movie has a scene where a soldier comforts a dying companion, but I've never seen one manage be both blunt and humane like the one here, Neeson telling a man, "You're going to die ... who do love?" I loved it like I loved the scenes in Moneyball where Jonah Hill has to fire baseball players. They're professionals. They can take it. More action movies could tap into that sort of clear-eyed masculinity.

(Hill gets an Oscar nomination; stuff like this never does. It's not fair.)

Besides that scene, there were at least three times where the movie made me feel anxious. There's the plane crash, tense and claustrophobic, with moments of quiet calm that escalate the tension.

Steven Rea in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

"The crash is one of the more harrowing cinema reenactments of an aviation nightmare, from the eerie silence when the engines shut off and the windows fog up to the hard jolts of the fuselage breaking apart. The Grey isn't likely to be on any airline's in-flight entertainment menu."

The crash sequence isn't the big setpiece of Fearless or Castaway even though the moviemakers used one of those hydraulic rigs that tosses the entire set to and fro. It's intimate, focused on the men, and stronger for it.

Then there's the climbing scene late in the story, when the fourth man clambers over a makeshift line to a tree. It's at least the fourth movie in a matter of weeks to play on people's fear of heights (after Tower Heist, Mission Impossible and Man on a Ledge, plus the teaser sequence from The Dark Knight Rises), and it's a fine argument for seeing a movie in a theater. Dermot Mulroney's glasses slip off, he nearly loses his grip, eventually the rope snaps, and the movie earns every gasp.

The last death terrified me, maybe because it seems to mock the men's actions, as if everything they've gone through was for nought. A man drowns in a river, his mouth only inches below the surface. Fear of heights is one thing, but for me fear of drowning trumps all else. The scene is brutal. You see below the surface and above in the same shot, the desperate effort to save the man, Neeson blowing air into his lungs, the growing panic, the rush of the water, the eventual capitulation.

I don't know why Neeson has taken this turn in his 50s, and I'm not going to publicly speculate about his private mindset in choosing three action movies in a row that center on missing women, but I'm grateful he's making these movies. He's elevating the craft of action moviemaking, and if movies like this do well, other great actors will be drawn to them.

It's a movie worth seeing more than once, to appreciate the little moments: the camera holding for a few extra seconds on the silhouette of a dying man; a wolf's paw print in the snow filling with blood; the wolves' breaths forming little wisps of cloud against the moonlight.

I wouldn't read too much into it, but the movie is kind of profound as an exploration of self-reliance, a pretty resonant theme for these economic times. The oil workers are the dregs of society, ex-cons and dropouts like the residents of Bartertown in the third Mad Max. They're right to be cynical about expecting a search party. They're men of no value to the world.

"Fuck faith" isn't just an indictment of the false hope from religion. It's a reasonable reaction to the state of the world. You're on your own, here and now. Live or die on this day.

* * *

Mars Attacks! isn't any better coming back to it years later but there are a few pleasures to be had. Humans defeat the invaders with the detritus of our pop culture, which makes their heads explode. And Nicholson looks to be having a lot of fun in his dual roles, like a latter day Peter Sellers. Check out how much acting he does with his hands: meaty, expressive, they do a sort of ten-fingered dance in the President's scenes.

Wall Street vs. Lions Gate

2012-01-28T08:25:00.001-05:00

January has been good to Lions Gate shareholders. We've seen our stock jump to nearly $11 in just a few days. Wall Street likes their takeover of Summit and they're starting to recognize that The Hunger Games is going to be a pretty big deal.

The company is certainly treating it like an event. When I came across the Hunger Games countdown clock at the AMC Empire, I was giddy.

With two months to go, the advertising isn't yet at saturation levels, but at some point investors may wonder whether the company is spending too much to promote its big new franchise. It's a hard balance to strike.

Flowers of War vs. Ballad of a Soldier

2012-01-28T08:04:00.001-05:00

I've been following the conversation around the big-budget, state-funded The Flowers of War since it opened in the mainland a few weeks ago, Christian Bale using the glare of publicity to establish his affinity for dissidents and thumb his nose at his employers.

For what it's worth, this is my outsider's perspective. Yes, the Japanese have a right to be offended. They grin maniacally as they tear the clothes off the women. Even the supposedly cultured officer, who plays a gentle song of homesickness on a church organ, is soon revealed to be a monster of Amon Goeth proportions. Yes, it's offensive to the Japanese, some of whom still insist that the thousands who died in Nanking were the result of some bad apples, not official, state-sanctioned genocide. But why get offended about it now?

Chinese pop culture has been full of nameless, psychopathic Japanese villains for years, and The Flowers of War is already the third movie in a few years to cover much the same ground. John Rabe was a German co-production that dealt with the same period and also had a reluctant foreign hero who changes for the better over the course of the story. The City of Life and Death was more recent, more panoramic, in most ways superior, and tried to take it as much of the Nanking story as could fit within a normal running time. It smartly used a more documentary style, lots of hand held, and was shot in black and white.

The Flowers of War goes straight for melodrama. It's manipulative, and over-the-top and there are choices that are just wrong (how can John Miller be this blase when shit's blowing up around him? Then later, they did not just break into a dance number, did they? Yes, they did) but in the end it achieves what it sets out to do. The story of hookers who gave themselves up to protect a group of convent school girls has been told before, of course. You know what's coming. When one of the women is raped earlier in the story, her face is so swollen she's unrecognizable; her eyes can't stay open. It's prompted walk-outs and made audiences weep. The Flowers of War doesn't come back to those images; it's careful not to cross the line from melodrama to exploitation. Those images are enough. It creates a sense of dread, so the last hour everybody in the room is anticipating violence. It is a discomfiting experience. I was fidgety and nervous for these women, so the movie worked on me.

An aside: Bale is superb in this. He's in nearly every shot and has to play against far less experienced actors, and do it in a mix of languages and pantomime -- I love how he mimes reeling in a fish to show one woman's effect on him, or the tiny grin of pride he shows once the truck has made out of the city. If the movie was an experiment of sorts for how to internationalize Chinese movies, in this narrow sense the experiment works. You bring in people who know what they're doing, pay them what they're worth, and you have a better chance of reaching international audiences, the Chinese soft power Beijing seems so keen on.

But leaving the theater, I got to thinking why make this movie? Why devote tens of millions of dollars, fly in one of the most expensive movie stars in the world -- a man known for uncontrolled fury, who may later try to embarrass you -- to make a story about people waiting to get raped? Even if you have a good answer to that question, why make it three times? Is it to color Chinese public perception of Japan, and if so, to what end? This will just be my outsider's interpretation, again, but I think the point of a melodrama about shared sacrifices, done on this scale, with these national themes, is propagandistic.

I had a lump in my throat for much of the movie so I didn't take good notes, but one of the things I jotted down was Ballad of a Soldier, one of those Soviet melodramas that's easy to laugh at until you see it, because it leaves you drained. Mosfilm cranked these things out for decades. The trauma of the war lasted well past the end of the Soviet Union, even.

What these movies have in common, what they make you feel, is how much worse things used to be. We lived through hell. Some of us persevered or got lucky, others sacrificed themselves to help others. You think you have it bad now? Pollution, inequality, the harassment of Ai Wei-Wei, your local Apple factory installing netting to prevent suicides, inflation, corruption, restrictions on speech and assembly, tainted food and water, the suppression of Tibet, all these things people think are important now are really so petty compared to what our country has lived through. Suck it up, China.

Front Line vs. Hamburger Hill

2012-01-25T22:53:00.000-05:00

The Korean war epic Front Line is terrific. It's playing right now at the AMC Empire in Times Square and it deserves to be seen on a big screen.

Three or even four sequences stand out, both controlled and measured and willing to play with expectations -- done by moviemakers who understand whose shoes there's stepping in.

One is an assault on the pathetic little hill whose name spells Korea backwards. It's a jumble of faces and limbs, disorienting and scary, but soon, the movie shifts to the perspective of a solid, ciivilized dolly track and the panorama of the battle opens up. As the heroes climb the god-forsaken hill, often at steep angles, the camera stays with them, solid and civilized, a glass of sherry waiting back in the office. It's a triumph of organization if nothing else: explosives in one part the frame, amputee extras nearby, some red squibs going off on soldier's ratty jackets. It's all jittery, hand-held camera work, small crises building up to a big one. As the panorama opens up, Front Line moves from being just another North vs. South skitmish set in the early 1950s to being arguably the standard, much as Hamburger Hill set the standard for boderline-nihilist Vietnam tales about missions to hell.

Front Line: the closing shot. A Hieronymous Bosch landscape.

The second comes later. The heroes are waiting for yet another counter-attack by the North to reclaim the muddy, corpse-strewn field they've come to know and not love, but it's a foggy night. They use flares. The strength of the opposition isn't clear. The flares illuminate a few moving bodies, then a few more, then hundreds of Chinese soldiers are revealed, supporting the North of course, and they fill the field like extras at the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead. Another, and the best, is a scene whose horror comes from how close the heroes are to each other,. One ventured away from camp. A distant sniper, "Two Seconds," took care of his leg, which is now shedding blood. What body part will be next. These moments of intense vulrenability sre some of the best in the novie, . THey try to tow the victim vack to sfert, but one byllet after anothet finds his sholufer, his side, a limb. Too briefly we get too see how the North Koreans endurd all this. They're in the sane places, but the management style is a llittle nore top-down. Sitting in midown New York City with Cherry Coke pushing at the gates of my soft Yankee bladder, I gave maybe 1/4 fuck about how the story turned out.It's like reaching levels in a video game.

The third has one of the privates, not ready for combat, pinned on the ridge of the hill. His comrades can't reach him, his friend isn't fast enough to find the hidden sniper off in the hills woh coolly picks off which organ or appendage goes bye-bye next. Soon we're in the same caves, but contours of power have shifted and have to be reconsitituted. This can inolve violence: everyone's personal wishes are clearly known, it's a question of holding them in check so the collective group can get something done. Maybe the movie's best sequence has advancing Chinese soldiers on their position. Through the rain and the lightning, the heroes see shrubs and some vague figures moving in the distance. A brighter light -- a flare, maybe -- reveals hundrers of Chinese, better-trained troops, some only a punch throw's away, like Romero'a zombies in a farm field.

Another is a series of short scenes in cramped quarters. Who holds the hill changes every few hours, so the soldiers leave stuff in a cavern so they don't have to keep schlepping shit back and forth. These scenes are the heart of the movie's humanism: The North leaves a bottle of rice wine, initially treated with suspicion but soon celebrated. The Commies also leave letters addressed to family in the South, and this becomes a meaningflul connetion between warring sides. The rice wine is suspect for a bit, but that doesn't last too long, and soon you realize that the camaraderie between the North and Side warriors is stronger than the one between soldiers and the ranking officers on their side. The sniper, Two Seconds, pulls a trigger and some schmuck's insides explode, from hundreds of yards away. when her turn comes (It's a chink sniper trope taken straight from Full Metal Jacket) all the horror of moment is concentrated on the angle, and depth, of a blade that is slicing into the killer's rip-cage.

The movie plays with shifts in perspective. A North Korean captures an object left there on purpose by the offending army. We see the NK command from her point of view, though it's clear the other side has been here mintes earlier and the pas-de-deux will change sides again soon.

Ain't no heroes on this damn hill.

One of the characters we are invited to identify with, a man with a military history and the respect of his comrades is so far gone he doesn't give a fuck anymore, so he send a bullet into his commanding officer's skull as the fat man is giving orders. Who dies when and how is the story's main preoccupation and if someone were to accuse the movie of being nihilist, they wouldn't be far off the mark. It's a little weird, sitting in New York City at an iMac in a comfortable apartment typing comments on a movie made easily a year ago and that covers events of 60 years ago, to comment about right and wrong, when no one is infallible, authority is mocked every few minutes, and the commanding officer gets a bullet in his temple, an emphatic way of shutting down a conversation.

Toronto Sun:

"Korean moviemaking these days is very much influenced by '70s Hollywood, both in its latitude for sex and violence and in its tropes. So it's no surprise that director Hun Jang shoots a violent war movie that looks very much like the kind of war movie most Westerners grew up with."

It's true, these movies have a rhythm and a vibe that wouldn't be out of place in a circle-the-wagons frontier story, the Cavalry and the Apache having little to discuss and much to fight over. So Fornt Line's finale is about a nihilistic as any war movie of the last 30 years. This one isn't ours, we've no skin in the game, but it's resolution, or lack of resolution, says nothing got fixed. We'll be shooting at each other again soon, enough. Slate:

"The Front Line is a film so bleak, cynical, and anti-authoritarian that it makes Oliver Stone look like Ron Howard. And get this: Koreans flocked to cinemas and made The Front Line one of last summer’s biggest hits."

I enjoyed the movie this afternoon, got sucked into its story and agreed with its essentially nihilist ending.
Korean cinema is more than guys punishing each other's bodies with an assortment of cutting weapons.

Nearly all of the Korean movies I've seen at the AMC Empire in Times Square were war or gangster stories, violent confrontations between men: the A Better Tomorrow remake, The Good The Bad The Weird, Oldboy, 71: Flags of Our Fathers, The Yellow Sea, Man From Nowhere, The Brotherhood of War, I Saw The Devil, the marvelous The Chaser, they were all about fairly narrow conflicts between two or three young and telegenic men, preferably with beards that help distinguish one from another. The view of Korean mainstream cinema, from my perch here in New York city, as a fan of Korean actioners and the Thai and Hong Kong movies that led the way, is a little bit reductive. I read blogs, i read trade papers, I see the release schedules for movies in every market in Asia. I'm always looking for the one performer or director who will shock an audience that's been softened with a few too many years of wanna-be crap.

But just this Lunar New Year weekend, the top grossing movie in Korea was a comedy, which meant it actualy had women in it. "Dancing Queen", a comedy starring Uhm Jung-hwa and Hwang Jeong-min, was shown in some 535 cinemas nationwide. It tells the story of the wife of a mayoral candidate who secretly prepares to join a girl group. The guy stuff dominates outside of Korea just as it does from Japan, even India -- when it's seen from outside their home markets. There's some kind of a filter getting lowered. The punchy, square-jaw, knife and handgun stuff gets filed in one category and shunted onto a container ship that will carry its ideas to the coat of California, for dstribution in the soft, plushy, 34-screen theaters that are the long-gone relative of the grindhouses where this tuff played with no fanfare,not too many fans, and a feeling that, for this night or more,nothing really mattered.

There's one other really great idea in Front Line that deserves to be explored: canned bourbon. A 12-pack of 6 ounce cans spells p-a-r-t-y, whether you're on the front lines or in your living room.

But there's something that bugs me. Where are the other Korean movies that don't involve tense stand-offs with gun barrels against temples.

* * *

If i never got the chance to sing the praises of Hambuger Hill, maybe the first of the early to mid-80's Vietnam agita pictures, it's relentless push up the hill and the painful, metallic realizations of who' s not coming back, makes this arguably the finest Vietnam novie of the era and a corrective to directors like Oliver Stone who seem to have said everything worthwhile. They hadn't.

Rango vs. Cars 2

2012-01-24T20:43:00.000-05:00

It's a little harder this year to get excited about the Oscars this year. OK, it's a lot harder to get excited about the Oscars this year.

No Harry Potter Best Picture Nomination? No Andy Serkis nomination? No Margin Call in any major categories outside of original script? No Ryan Gosling for anything? No Albert Brooks in Drive? Come on.

If nine movies got enough first-place votes to qualify, the field of contenders may be more competitive than The Artist's recent wins would suggest. That's a plus.

But at least three of the nine are nowhere near the best movies of the year and are included here because they're safe, boring choices. Period pieces and costume dramas and showcases for Acting with a capital A dominate just like they always did.

Dragon Tattoo should have been on the Best Picture and Best Director lists. Harry Potter should have been on the Picture and Adapted Script categories.

One choice worth applauding, though: Pixar's absence from the Best Animated Film field this year. Cars 2 was abysmal, an insult to fans and a violation of the good faith invested in the company. Rango is going to win that category.

Plus, how fun is it going to be see half of The Flight of the Conchords go up there to accept an Oscar statuette?

Jay Chou vs. Robbie Williams

2012-01-24T20:22:00.001-05:00

On the surface, the big budget Dante Lam movie Viral Factor has a lot going for it: attractive, relatively unfamiliar locations and stars, some close-quarters fight scenes including one in an upside-down SUV, a deep dedication to the demolition of vehicles, gorgeous high-contrast, high-saturation photography and a score that quietly steals from Speed, The Road Warrior and The Bourne Supremacy.

So why is it so fucking tedious? A few reasons.

The story stops every few minutes for long-winded exposition, either bad guys explaining what they're going to do, or good guys explaining what they've done, or cops shouting directions in triplicate. Alpha Team to Zone 4. Zone 3 is secure! Do you read me, Alpha Team? Confirm Zone 4! That sort of thing.

The pretty boy guys who are supposedly brothers and the pretty boy cop and gangster they're up against, are remarkably uninteresting. Imagine Point Break recast with Take That. They bleed but they do not die.

And worst of all is the endless pathos the movie tries to squeeze from its multiple subplots, from the death of a dad, to the guilty conscience of a wheelchair-bound mom who abandoned her family, to the awkward bromance between two brothers on opposite sides of the law. Yawn. The movie plays more like a Bollywood melodrama than a classic Hong Kong bullet ballet. These movies, like nearly all of the Bollywood and Tollywood movies I've seen, are not ready to chase after a global audience. Their rhythms and tones are all wrong.

The score has its homage moments, which are nice, but it's omnipresent. It's there for two goddamn hours without a break, constantly telling you how excited or maudlin you should feel at any given moment. Hong Kong music didn't used to be like this. That's a mainland influence, a tin ear for how a movie should sound. Put more here!

To be fair, the movie is redeemed to some extent by helicopter flying stunts in a chase scene about 25 minutes from the end. Two police choppers are chasing a stolen third, which dips below the level of the buildings, swinging wildly between high rises and over a pedestrian mall like Spider-Man. It's shot with long lenses to make the Kuala Lumpur buildings seem closer to the choppers than they really are, but I'll be damned if it's not real choppers against a real skyline. The sequence is only maybe 2 minutes of the movie, but it's worth getting the blu-ray just for that. It's up there with Blue Thunder, Birds of Prey and Terminator 2 among great chopper stunts.

There's also a terrific moment when a hero's bullet catches a bad guy on the shoulder at the moment he's launching an RPG. It shoots up, hits a building, chunks of which rain down on the characters. That's kinda cool but in the future, if I ever put this movie on again, I'll be sure to skip everything between the RPG and the chopper chase.

Kuala Lumpur + choppers stunts + Jackie Chan = action classic. The equation is different this time. Anybody interested in Kuala Lumpur-set action is far better off with KL Gangster, which I wrote about in this post.

The movie is idiotic crap but it may be interesting one day to look back on it as a stepping stone in China's global ambition: international locations, a Hong Kong director, much of the dialogue in Mandarin, Malay and English, and a Taiwanese pop star to boot. It came with a trailer for the Jason Statham movie, Safe, filled with Chinese and Russian characters -- and a Brit playing an NYPD cop! Globalization, indeed.

(Last year we had two action movies whose titles started with "Green." This year we have two starting with "Safe.")

* * *

The trailer for Wrath of the Titans, an unnecesary sequel to one of the worst franchise launches in the history of the movies, uses Marilyn Manson's cover of "Sweet Dreams," an out-of-nowhere choice that has nothing to do with anything and makes it seem like the movie might have some edge to it. It almost makes me want to see the movie. Almost. Anyway, what's next? Reprimand of the Titans?

Daniel Espinosa vs. Steven Soderbergh

2012-01-23T20:54:00.000-05:00

Steven Soderbergh in The Independent, forcefully questions the tens of millions spend on movie marketing:

"I've been trying to convince everyone who releases movies to analyse why this is costing so much. What did you get for between $23m and $30m on this spend exactly? Can you quantify what this last $7m got you? They can't. My attitude is, why are you doing it? 'Well everybody's doing it and if you want to open the movie you gotta spend $30m.' This is broken."

Safe House ads are suddenly everywhere. Cabs, buses, subway platforms are blanketed with ads for a movie that doesn't open until February 10. No one is safe.

"No One Is Safe" is kind of a weird message for a New York City audience, but OK, whatever.

This is another one of those directors who are European imports. Daniel Espinosa follows Nimrod Antal, Nicolas Winding Refn and Baltasar Kormákur, in a trend that's about to get tiresome.

The quality of the movies doesn't explain why everybody had the same damn idea within a matter of weeks, so maybe the passport restrictions imposed by European co-productions explain the phenomenon. At least this one has a bona fide star peering down from taxi rooftops. Denzel is smart to edge back toward Training Day territory, his last few hero movies have been duds, setting Unstoppable aside.

The trailer for Safe House looked good. Somebody committed serious money to smashing cars to shit. It looks worse every time I see one of these ads. When marketing guys get nervous, they saturate the city to squeeze out every last penny from the opening weekend audience.

Key & Peele vs. The Racists

2012-01-23T18:06:00.000-05:00

We New Yorkers are bombarded by some 3,000 marketing messages a day, everything from brand logos on people's clothing and electronics, to the fronts and sides of buses, crap in our email, overheard advertising, you name it.

Those of us who work in Times Square are, if anything, inured to it. The whole area is awash in advertising, some of it several stories tall. The Times Square subway station is plastered with the stuff. For followers of pop cultural trends, it's like a glimpse into the sleepless nights of marketing guys.

So it's rare for an ad in the station to make me stop and chuckle, much less pull out my camera. This one did. This is the funniest TV show pitch I can remember, up there with some of the subway poster campaigns for Dexter and Weeds.

I've never heard of these two guys but based purely on this pitch I'm going to check them out. In-your-face humor that plays off taboos, whether it's Ricky Gervais or Sarah Silverman, is exactly up my alley. Genius.

The Artist vs. Harry Potter

2012-01-23T17:52:00.000-05:00

I'll be watching for two themes in tomorrow morning's Oscar nominations.

One is the globalization of Hollywood, with acting, directing and Best Picture nominees who are neither Americans nor Brits, The Artist presumably leading that pack.

The other is intricately linked with the first, since the Hollywood movies that do well overseas aren't necessarily the yappy prestige pictures that hog awards season. The second thing to look for is any hint that the Academy is loosening up a little, nominating movies that aren't either period dramas, biographies of famous people, or people overcoming disease.

Patrick Goldstein in The LA Times:

"Many genres are almost entirely shut out of best picture consideration, from action, family-oriented animation and superhero adventures to horror, teen comedy and spy thrillers. Oscar voters seem to subconsciously disqualify films that aren't weighty dramas, biopics or character-driven stories based on novels. In the 1930s and '40s, the academy awarded best picture statuettes to lighthearted crowd-pleasers such as It Happened One Night and Going My Way, which would be unthinkable today.

When historians look back at the run of sparklingly inventive Pixar films, from Toy Story through The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Wall-E, they will find it difficult to believe that none came close to winning best picture. Scorsese is probably our greatest living filmmaker, but he didn't win a best picture Oscar until he was a senior citizen, largely because most of his films were gritty crime thrillers."

If you're a serious movie fan or an outright obsessive, it's hard not to feel emotionally vested in the Oscar race even if you intellectually understand that it's just a few thousand 60-somethings voting for their friends or people they've worked with, and who are all at some level trying to justify their wealth by emphasizing art over commerce. Award shows have so diluted their value in recent years -- by celebrating mediocrity,by the emptiness of their spectacle, by giving out too many damn awards -- that the Oscars are really the only show that still feels like it matters.

But that relevance is going to start to fade the longer the Academy continues to ignore superb work in commercial movies. Tomorrow, I want to see the last Harry Potter movie nominated for Best Picture, at the very least. Something like Tree of Life, impressive as it is, should cede ground to the most popular movie of the year. Millions of people loved Deathly Hallows Part II. It fulfilled expectations, it closed out a long--running series, it just plain satisfied people. If that's not a measure of artistic achievement, I'm in the wrong line of work.

And the nomination I most want to see tomorrow, the one that would secure my eyeballs for the next ten Oscar shows, is in the supporting actor category. Ignore Andy Serkis, Academy voters, and we'll ignore you.

Old Shatterhand vs. Luke Skywalker

2012-01-23T17:37:00.003-05:00

I've spent a pleasant three days rereading a book I first read some 30+ years ago, the first volume of Karl May's Winnetou.

Karl May's westerns, like Tintin comics and too many European rock bands to name, are one of the blindspots in American pop culture. The rest of the world loves them. Americans have never even heard the name. For a long time, few of May's books (three Winnetou novels, some short stories, as well as two volumes of Old Surehand) have even been available in English.

Try Googling "Winnetou." You have to type practically the entire word before a matching suggestion comes up. The algorithm thinks it's irrelevant. The blogger software wants to correct the spelling of Winnetou eight times on this page alone.

That's why I am grateful to Marlies Bugmann for the valuable service she's performed by translating a shelf's worth of May books. Bugmann is a native German speaker who now lives in Australia and she's achieved something extraordinary, turning essentially a fan project (she did this cover art, too) into something that helps turn on new readers. I bought the book initially for my son and even if he can't handle the stiff declamatory language for a while, he'll associate this book for years as something that sucked up dad's entire weekend. Thank you.

I was leery initially since the books appear to be self-published, but spending a few days in Old Shatterhand's company has laid those worries to rest. The translation is just fine. The language feels right to someone who's never read the original German. It sounds like the book I read way back when. Aside from a few minor editing glitches, the books are as professional as you'd expect from a major publisher.

The English-language edition jolts memories from childhood. I've long since forgotten the German movies shot in Yugoslavia -- there are clips on YouTube for anybody's who's curious -- but bits from the books have stayed with me: Old Shatterhand, the German named Karl (or "Sharley") who travels to the Wild West and proves himself time and again, outsmarting and overpowering villains, is like an old friend. I remember being impressed how he shoots from the knee, his uncanny ability as a tracker, his deep admiration for the Apache.

The books are fantastical. Nobody is that smart, that quick, and the number of people who pierced a bear's heart with a knife and lived to tell about it is likely close to zero, and if I could learn languages as easily as Old Shatterhand I'd be U.N. Secretary General by now.

Like many readers, I discovered May as a kid, reading him in translation -- Polish in my case, circa 1979. The books seemed exotic: the titles were in English, for one thing, and though the books took place in the same deserts and prairies as John Wayne and Gary Cooper, the narrator was explicitly a European, an outsider. There were no illustrations, just roman numerals on the spine -- in gold, if memory serves. Winnetou I, Winnetou II, Winnetou III. I still remember how proud I was finishing all three while my grandmother added up the pages in the corner of a grocery list. 1,000-something, likely more in the large font favored by the state children's publisher.

Reading them was a commitment, like tackling a Harry Potter book or a Stieg Larsson. The movies haven't stuck in the collective European male memory to nearly the same extent, though I was deeply amused to read that their pan-European casting helped smooth reconciliation between France and Germany in the 1960s.

Like those epics, or Star Wars or Lord Greystoke, or Tolkien for that matter, May created a mythology that resonates with boys. I felt like a boy reading them, flush with confidence and possibility, no trouble too deep to dig out of, no adversary that can't be outsmarted if you think ahead. May's Wild West is populated by squares and blowhards on the side of the good and the righteous (I love when the narrator declines to describe a scene out of fear of causing offense). opportunists and drunkards are tossed in their path every few pages. It could all be just sanctimonious drivel but there's a core value of discovery and adventure that makes the bullshit go down easy.

The May translations are no longer available on Amazon, but you can get them on Lulu.com, where the handsomely-printed paperbacks are roughly $18. There's a handy 10 percent off coupon code right now: JANBOOKS12. (Probably FEBBOOKS12 will work just as well in a few days.)

May is not much of a stylist, his characters speak in long and roundabout soliloquies, and he has little sense of what the West was really like in the 1880s, but none of that matters. He created a world that you want to spend time in. For all of America's pop cultural dominance, this is one of those things Americans have simply missed out on.

Panera Bread vs. Bella Swan

2012-01-23T17:16:00.002-05:00

This picture illustrates something about markets. Let me think out loud about exactly what.

The people who run this Panera Bread store in Astoria, Queens, think the teenagers pouring out of the school on the next block are a less valuable customer base than the unemployed or semi-employed grown-ups who come in to Skype with their friends, and the relatively few people who look like they're professionals who work in the field.

This Panera Bread is 50 feet from a United Artists multiplex in one direction and from The Museum of the Moving Image in another. There may be a worthwhile extrapolation about what kind of audiences businesses care about, at least right now, at least right there.

One of the lessons of this past summer has been that teen audience mattter less than they used to, because they can't afford to go out and because they have alternative ways of consuming pop culture. The old, established delivery methods don't work for them, and the new ones are in their infancy.

The question is whether this audience is migrating somewhere else and whether it's worthwhile to try to draw it back. If teenagers unlearn the habit of going to the movies, eventually we'll have the world of that David Cronenberg short made for the Cannes Film Festival, in which the last Jew prepares to commit suicide in the bathroom of the last movie theater before it's torn down.

Many of us would be more likely to spend time at a restaurant, or any venue really, if we knew there would be no teenagers there: we value diminished noise, fewer floppy arms, less unidentifiable gunk on the tables. Could Panera Bread be at the vanguard of a new cultural movement to reject teenage culture, maybe not forever but long enough for it to stop sucking?

No, probably not. Lions Gate is releasing a teen-themed movie on Facebook on the same day as DVD. They've just spent $400 million to cozy up even closer with teenage audiences, putting the Twilight and Hunger Games series under one roof. Movie exhibitors, frustrated by the loss of that teenage audience, are already floating the idea of showtimes set aside for kids who text.

Between the hours of 3pm and 5pm, in other words, anyone over 18 should have their heads examined.

David Cronenberg vs. Guillermo del Toro

2012-01-21T22:54:00.001-05:00

The question I wanted to answer by going to see David Cronenberg in person was, how does the human being compare with the movies? Where are the overlaps?

When you don't have a chance to get to know someone intimately, you latch onto moments, impressions. I've been a fan of Cronenberg since I was 12, seeing Videodrome opening weekend at the College Mall cinemas in Bloomington, Indiana. That movie blew my mind, maybe set the parameters for a lifetime's relationship to a medium. I had to go see him in person.

The man is more erudite, more literary in person than anyone might expect. Cronenberg speaks in full, well-formed paragraphs. All that hair is there as a shield, a form of protection for one hell of a brain.

Cronenberg spoke for a couple of hours today at The Museum of the Moving Image. He struck me as a man completely devoid of pretense, confident and almost indifferent to his audience. He says he never makes a movie while thinking of another movie, of a trajectory, and I almost believe him. If there's a connection to be drawn between the person and the movies, it's that Cronenberg in person is assertive and measured, controlled, objective, like some of his own movies. Seeing the man in the flesh makes me love the movies a little more.

Some of the notes from this afternoon's Q&A:

Cronenberg poked fun at the Republican field, hours before Gingrich humiliated Romney in South Carolina. "Clarity is maligned" in American culture, he said, so guys like Gingrich can get away with saying outrageous shit, he implied, if they say it in the right way.

He confirmed what's already plain as day in the movies: his moviemaking is about the human body. "I'm an atheist. This is it," he said.

A Dangerous Method didn't come out of left field. He'd been interested in psychoanalysis as early as Transfer, one of his earliest movies.

Twice he came back to casting as a crucial director's skill. Bad casting can ruin a movie. The right casting can make it, yet no one understands its rules. It's a black art.

A script for the sequel to The Fly exists but 20th Century Fox, which owns the rights to the characters, wasn't interested. "At the moment, it's a dead project ... it would be a sci-fi movie."

I didn't get a chance to ask about the imminent Cronenberg video game, set to debut in time for the Toronto Film Festival in the fall.

Maybe the most illuminating part of the conversation with the museum's chief had to do with Cronenberg's willingness to adapt books or plays, which started with The Dead Zone and continued with Spider, M. Butterfly, Naked Lunch, Cosmopolis, A Dangerous Method and Crash. He had thought, as an experimental filmmaker, that writing and directing went hand-in-hand, but they really don't. A director and a writer both bring in ideas, so collaboration is like sex. "There's no necessary connection between being a good director and a good writer," he said.

The fans queued up for almost an hour before the Q&A. See the picture below, It was like the East Village had invaded Astoria for an afternoon. One guy on line had driven down from New Hampshire. In front of me was a guy with a curly mustache that belonged in the 19th century, nearby was a girl with tattoos on her goddamn face. Man.

I'm thrilled the museum is doing well.

Oh, and to explain the post title... Cronenberg laughed off the idea that his early movies, like Scanners, Rabid and Videodrome, were somehow better or more vibrant. But he acknowledged a long career in moviemaking tends to shove directors into fairly narrow categories, like horror, and stepping out of them is a reputational risk. Even Cronenberg's friend Guilermo del Toro told him, "'I like the early shit better.'"

Kate Beckinsale vs. Gina Carano, part 2

2012-01-20T19:34:00.002-05:00

It's a funny coincidence, or not, that Highwire opened the same day as the fourth Underworld movie. The movies are both about ass-kicking babes with sweet moves but they really couldn't be further apart in terms of mood or approach.

The poster, poorly reproduced here, couldn't be less interested in whether Carano is sexy or not. Her back is to the camera.

Unlike the Underworld movies, or the Milla Jovovich Resident Evil series, Highwire doesn't sexualize its violence.

One of its unforgettable moments has Michael Fassbender's face between the heroine's thighs. He's being strangled. He's in agony. There's nothing sexy about it.

Soderbergh is again playing with convention. He's made a killer chick movie in the tradition of Ms. 45 and Foxy Brown and The Matrix and Terminator 2: Judgment Day without allowing viewers the pleasure of of ogling the girl, making the violence sexy. It's a buzzkill, but it's also the mark of a moviemaker who's well aware of his source material.

Miami Herald:

"Soderbergh, who is capable of making even the driest subject matter fascinating, isn’t interested in the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Haywire is more about the fight scenes than the stuff that comes in between them, which makes it no different than your typical Jean Claude Van Damme picture: It’s simply more stylish and better made."

The movie could easily be a Van Damme straight-to-DVD picture, except it's not. Don't think of her as a woman, one character warns at a late point in the story. Part of the fun of a Soderbergh movie is seeing how he toys with expectations established over decades of moviegoing.

Soderbergh in The Times (UK):

"I'm feeling hemmed in by the language you have to adhere to if you're going to make a movie that's going to be seen by more than ten people ... I don't want to abandon narrative, I'm just frustrated at the restrictions around structure, casting, exposition and payoffs."

The girl stuff will be important to some future gender studies PhD if they still have that shit, but it's only part of what's going on here. This little movie, dumped in the hinterlands of January, is also poking fun at action movies overall, especially how their fight sequences are shot. Haywire shoots its fights with just a handful of camera set-ups, to better showcase Mallory Kane's talents. She has a low center of gravity (see earlier point) and moves like a live-action Road Runner or Puss In Boots (whose comeuppance is promised in the final scene). The action is more lifelike or 'realistic,' whatever that means, without necessarily being better. The ideal must lie somewhere in between, great stuntwork combined with a smart script, credible acting, and a respect for the physical space where the action takes place.

I'd like the movie better if it were less chilly, less inert. There's no point in the entire 90 minutes where you forget you're watching a Soderbergh movie. With the Bourne movies, or even the Resident Evil ones, you're invested: how will the hero get out of this predicament? Here, everything's abstract and academic and I just didn't give a shit what happened next or who fucked over whom. On to the next fight.

They dropped Carano's voice in post-production, which undercuts much of the argument. You're doing less fakery, except to sell the action scenes you're doing more fakery?

Betsy Sharkey:

"The humor ... is classic Soderbergh -- dry, bone dry, 0% humidity dry. Mallory's plight is close to parody as the director plays with the espionage genre this time out (I can't wait till he gets around to horror). But Haywire never quite gels into anything tense, and this is theoretically a thriller."

He did get around to horror the last time out: Contagion.

I love the script's inventions of spook speak: "Watch your 6" for "look behind you," and "LEO" for "law enforcement officer." Just ridiculous enough to believe.

The Hunger Games vs. The Running Man

2012-01-20T18:07:00.002-05:00

In my email today, I got an invitation to pre-order tickets to The Hunger Games, which doesn't open for another two months.

The social media campaign is ramping up (Lions Gate has the same people working on it who did Twilight, apparently), and last week's purchase of the company behind Twilight is one of those rare cases where fan and business interests appear to align. S&P said it could raise Lions Gate's credit rating because of the way it did the deal.

This is one of those major movies where the build-up is half the fun. The teaser posters went up a couple of months ago, introducing the characters, now new ones are popping up to emphasize the scale of the enterprise. "The world will be watching." Let's hope so. (I'm an LGF shareholder).

Part of that marketing campaign are some new comment Director Gary Ross made in The LA Times:

"I thought the idea that the way we amuse ourselves could devolve into this hideous spectacle was really fascinating ... Plus it has all the things I love in the movies: technical challenges, size, spectacle, amazing narrative drive. And it has a lot on its mind about where we are and where we may be headed as a culture."

Ross seems to be staking out a position that the movie matters as political commentary, which may be complete horseshit, but, hey, at least they're ambitious. What it shows, above all, is that they're willing to go after the biggest possible audience. It's not just a movie for teens or people who read the book.

Ross already has begun working with Suzanne Collins and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) on the sequel based on Collins' Catching Fire, the same article says.

Anonymous vs. Christopher Dodd

2012-01-20T17:52:00.000-05:00

MPAA chief Chris Dodd's website was one of the targets of Anonymous in their reprisal for the attack on Megaupload.com.

Now one of the more sober pieces on what's become an all-out war calls Dodd's handling of the campaign for the Stop Online Piract Act, or SOPA, a flop.

The MPAA completely misjudged the power of their lobby when confronted with the power of millions of internet users. It didn't hurt that, in this case, corporate interests were kept in check by conflicting corporate interests from up the road, but at least part of the resistance to SOPA came from ordinary people, those of us who use the internet, create content for it, or who are just fans.

Politico quotes Dean Garfield, CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council and a former MPAA official.

"'The force of the campaign waged by the tech industry and its allies “took everyone by surprise,” Garfield said. 'I think the content sector took for granted that this would be your normal policy debate and that not only other sectors wouldn’t matter, but that the public wouldn’t care.'”

The sense I get in talking with likeminded bloggers and the like is that much of the reaction to the anti-piracy legislation wasn't simply a disagreement over the reach or nuances of the proposed legislation.

At least some of the anger comes from people who feel that copyright rules are already too restrictive. Very little of the discussion, in any case, goes beyond talking about how to respond to criminality, without ever questioning the assumptions.

Neither the legislation nor the commentary around it take into account the positive aspects of piracy/file-sharing/copying/whateveryoucallit, which at least to some extent balance out the supposed losses, which are in case grossly inflated.

Unauthorized copying of copyrighted material, for lack of a better term:

* creates new markets.

* leads to the creation of new content, whether remix or commentary.

* limits the influence of huge corporations in controlling speech.

* narrows differences in living standards both in the United States and abroad.

* supports fan culture and commentary.

* acts as a form of satire.

* creates jobs among people who could really use them.

* is a form of preservation, helping keep obscure titles available.

* suppresses inflation.

* is an indicator of brand value, a form of audience testing and a measure of popularity.

* is a way of sidestepping government control, e.g. in Iran.

* can be a form of soft diplomacy.

Any discussion of how to protect copyrights should include a point of view on what we give up by obsessing about how to adhere to existing law.

Paparazzi vs. The Room

2012-01-20T17:42:00.002-05:00

ThinkGeek.com may have already beaten me to it, but the creation of IronicActionFigures.com to serve a niche but aspirational online retail audience strikes me as a viable business plan.

Between this one and the Johnny from The Room one, I've got the initial inventory, or at least know where to find it.

The Good Rats vs. Roadie

2012-01-17T17:21:00.003-05:00

The tiny, intimate indie Roadie doesn't look like much but it's actually kind of revelatory in its own low-key way.

One revelation is the Long Island 1970s band The Good Rats, one of whose songs features prominently in the movie. It's a band I Googled within minutes of coming home.

Another is Ron Eldard, who's in practically every shot. He's one of those familiar faces that shows up in small supporting roles (he's the drunk dad in Super 8) who turns out to be exquisite when given a starring part. Great character actors make every movie they're in incrementally better, but they're too often unsung heroes. (I'd like to see a leading role for William Fichtner, or Olivia Williams, for example).

And the third revelation is the best reason to see this movie, which belongs in any 40-something's Netflix queue. It shows people in their mid-40s in awe of rock music, and it presents them without judgment or condescension. True, the hero never really grew up -- he's shocked to learn his friends have teenage kids -- but he's hardly the only grown-up who has to reset his expectations lower. The job may be gone (it was fun while it lasted) but the song remains the same. The music isn't just some teenage memory, it's still relevant now.

Jimmy, the roadie of the title, comes back to his mom's house in the uncool part of Forest Hills after years away and finds his room has been preserved just as it was a quarter century ago. The turntable still works. His friend calls it a rock museum, but instead of laughing at the LPs and the posters of guitar gods on the walls, she revels in it. The rock is a way of making a connection between people and it's a pleasure in and of itself. Jimmy closes his eyes and sings along to a track loud enough to be heard in the backyard. A life of frustration and loss is redeemed for a few minutes. He seems happy and alive when the music is on, never more animated and well-spoken than when he's defending a beloved band.

All the story's turning points, the key moments, hang on the hero's relationship to music.

I'm in my mid-40s, too, and the times when I'm invited to defend my tastes in movies and movies are becoming more and more frequent. People my age should have more grown-up interests, supposedly. We should have discovered classical music by now. Well, no. Classical is nice, inoffensive, but I just don't give a shit. It's hard for me to see what people see in it beyond the chance to dress up and act sophisticated. Surely, it's all a put-on?

Rock is what it's all about. Rock makes me feel alive. This movie captures some of that feeling. I'm recommending it to anyone who embraces good old-fashioned American rock and roll. Like The Good Rats, the movie is off the radar but well worth celebrating.

The final revelation may be that this movie, which looks like it cost about $1.60 to make and another $0 to market, can play for a couple of weeks in a New York theater. For all the talk of studio superhero-franchise hegemony, there's still some room for the upstarts.

John Cena vs. The Rock

2012-01-16T21:30:00.000-05:00

There's a business aspect to this beefcake face-off that both fascinates me and confuses me.

I'm an upper middle brow New Yorker who's never seen more than five minutes of professional wrestling and mainly associate the brand with Latino teenagers on the train and cheap-ass movies that play for, like, a week with minimal advertising.

Apparently the WWE is not just a flyover-state subculture, but a pretty big deal.

I understand John Cena coming back to the wrestling ring. All his movies have been very low-budget WWE productions, from the decent and nasty The Marine to the repetitive and incoherent 12 Rounds. It's likely in his contract that he has to come home to roost whenever the bosses ring him up.

The Rock is a more complicated story. He's taken pains in the last few years to rebrand himself in the mainstream using his given name, Dwayne Johnson, and has at least one kiddie movie like Race to Witch Mountain to his credit for every Fast Five or Faster where he beats motherfuckers to a pulp and gives them the evil eye, besides. He's looked for a while like someone desperate to shed his wrestler image. So what the fuck is he doing on a giant-ass WWE billboard in Times Square?

If the money was irresistible, then that speaks to the size of World Wrestling Entertainment and its ability to program whatever match-ups it wants to. A big enough check will get Hulk Hogan in there, if need be, maybe Mickey Rourke and Jesse Ventura, too. They got time to bleed.

Another possibility is simply that Johnson's two-track movie career has stalled. You might think the offers aren't coming in after one too many Tooth Fairy, but that doesn't seem to be the case: he's got six movies in the pipeline, not counting the Journey to the Center of the Earth sequel but counting Fast Six, which was probably inevitable.

The most interesting possibility is that the movie career comes with strings attached. You help us, we'll help you. Mr. Johnson may be sitting at home hoping to get this over with so as few people as possible notice he was doing it in the first place, like stars doing commercials in other countries for Santory whisky. This makes sense because Johnson has been appearing on WWE shows regularly for years and the Cena face-off was telegraphed almost a year in advance. The wrestling portion of his wikipedia page is five times as long as the movie portion.

The hope here would be that, if this WWE thing is successful, it could nudge Johnson back toward the sort of action movies that put him on my radar. Kind of like Sears going back to pushing appliances instead of pretending to be about fashion, or John Grisham going back to writing legal thrillers.

The picture here of a giant billboard over 42nd Street is crap but I wasn't gonna wait for the sun to move to get a better one. That billboard is four stories tall. The light on Johnson's face is the width of a building.

Angelina Jolie vs. Andrzej Wajda

2012-01-16T20:00:00.000-05:00

Enchanted by her neon lipstick at the Golden Globes, I thought I'd pay Angelina Jolie the compliment of seeing her movie, In The Land of Blood and Honey.

I'd bet Jolie has seen Wajda's Katyn more than once. Her movie has a similar way of seeing the political dimension through a personal prism, a way of dramatizing moral outrage. Both manage big, period production value from modest resources. Wajda had to be careful. A movie about Polish-Russian relations, made by a Polish demigod, approaches the level of foreign policy. His movie is nuanced toward the Russians (some in Poland thought it was too nuanced). Jolie has the benefit of being an outsider. Her Muslims are largely innocent and the Serbs are monsters. The hero only finds redemption by admitting he's a war criminal. The history serves the melodrama more than the other way around.

This is an earnest, grown-up attempt by a pop artist to show she is not just a dilletante in global affairs. For that, it should be applauded. It's a liberal, Sean Penn sort of movie that will play to liberal, Sean Penn sort of audiences, and if it's overlooked during awards season we'll never hear about it again. I'm glad, though, movies like this get made, because they show the usefulness of star power, which itself is granted by mass audiences. If this one isn't all the way there, maybe the next one will be.

The movie shows landscapes that are familiar to anybody who spent a lot of time watching CNN International in the early to mid-90s. The place looks like a Soviet satellite country right after the end of the Cold War. Sad thing is, the town where they filmed probably didn't need a lot of dressing up aside from some burned out cars. The look is right but the story isn't. There's no shortage of exposition about the toothless United Nations, or the centuries of shared history that have led to the slaughter. But the conflict is boiled down to a crossed-lovers romance with some weird kinky undercurrents (he ties her to a bed with his belt at one point) that's hard to buy for two reasons. One, we see the lovers' pre-war life for all of 30 seconds before a bomb blows their cabaret to smithereens. Two, because the actors in the main roles have as much lust for each other as Ann Coulter and Bill Marer.

Or maybe I'm just reacting to the cliche of these historical atrocity melodramas, tropes established even before World War II POW movies, then continued to Little Big Man and Soldier Blue, The Killing Fields, Platoon, Come and See, Salvador, City of Life and Death, John Rabe, Flowers of War, Ararat, Hotel Rwanda, you name it, and all the way to dystopian nightmares like The Matrix and Terminator: Salvation, or bourgeois fantasias like Red Dawn and Tomorrow When the War Began.

At least there's no heroic journalist to guide us through the moral swamp in this one. I've seen enough of those. In fact, there are no heroes at all, really; Jolie was clearly sensitive to charges of Hollywood'izing the whole thing. That's good. So is the emphasis on women's point of view.

There's a thin line in political movies between nuanced and muddled and if I'm not sure where this one falls it's not because I wasn't paying attention. If the point is that the international response to Serbian genocide was too little too late, then, like the ubiquitous AT&T ads say during the playoffs, that's so 20 years ago. If the point is that international law and the institutions that enforce it need to have more backbone, then that's a conversation worth having.

Kenner vs. C3PO

2012-01-16T00:28:00.001-05:00

Of all the Star Wars action figures on display at the Museum of the Moving Image, easily my favorite is the disassembled C3PO from Empire. It's an inaction figure, tossed in a basket like some dirty laundry. The toy people made one for the geeks. Thank you, toy people.

Now, where do I get one?

Gregory Peck vs. Patrick Stewart

2012-01-16T00:14:00.000-05:00

Call me underwhelmed. The 1950s' version of Moby Dick comes with an extraordinary pedigree: Ray Bradbury and John Huston wrote it, Huston directed, and Atticus Finch himself plays Captain Ahab. The box practically screams prestige, with the Times calling the movie one of the great motion pictures of our time.

It's basically unwatchable to a modern audience. Except for the guy playing Starbuck, who approximates what we these days would call naturalism, everybody seems to have gone through the Nic Cage school of shouty acting though that was still some years in the future.

Some whales were apparently filmed in the wild but whenever humans show up the scale models take over and, later, a large prop that Peck can sink his real leg into. The attacks on the whales, in which the Pequod crew toss harpoons, are surprisingly bloody, though the DVD makes the blood look orange.

These scenes break up the endless speeches of the "Hear ye, hear ye" variety. Captain Ahab, who gets grayer as the story progresses, plays every moment as if the script were all in capital letters. Thar, this blows.

Orson Welles, as a preacher, climbs a rope ladder to a pulpit built out of a ship's bow in the movie's single best idea. His beard is shaped like a snow shovel. He blathers on about biblical whales in one of those scenes it's impossible to pay attention to when you're waiting to see some damn ships take on some damn whales.

The single best reason to see the movie comes around the 27 minute mark as the Pequod is casting off on its whaling voyage. All the town's women are on the dock, many thinking they'll never see their shouty men again. One is a woman of maybe 70 with a neatly trimmed goatee that wouldn't look out of place on Ricky Gervais or Ethan Hawke (who was Starbuck in another version of Moby Dick). She's an extra in a crowd shot but Huston gives her a long, lingering close-up a minute later: thick, coarse, gray hairs are all around her mouth; she's positively bristling with emotion. If that's what these men have to come back to, maybe they're better off on the bottom of the sea.

As a portrait of mariners' cameraderie, Master and Commander is far more interesting. As a portrait of the economics of fishing, a movie that owes its closing images to Moby Dick, The Perfect Storm is more satisfying on a simple dramatic level.

Lots of movies don't age well and the 1950s are especially fishy these days. The styles that feel so natural in one period as to be invisible, like the music in this movie, are painful 50 years later. I sometimes think if all 1950s' movie scores just dropped off the face the earth, the medium would be better for it. Movies we think are pretty great now are going to seem corny and badly paced and just plain irrelevant before long. It's a dynamic medium.

You gotta wonder if this movie is popular in Japan.

Morgan Freeman vs. Ricky Gervais

2012-01-15T23:30:00.001-05:00

Morgan Freeman is a fine actor. He's made half a dozen great movies in between some forgettable ones. He's become shorthand for seriousness and earnestness, gravitas personified. He's dignified and has a beautiful baritone that all but insists, 'Slow down, enjoy the view.'

Ricky Gervais has made one great TV show, bits and pieces of a few others, a movie that was mainly remarkable for being an attack on theism backed by a major studio, an occasionally funny stand-up special, and one shocking hosting gig a year ago.

Gervais was the reason much of the country tuned in to the Golden Globes tonight, not Morgan Freeman, yet it was Freeman who got the lion's share of the running time.

Gervais felt corsetted tonight. There was more talk about his shocking humor on the red carpet and among nervous presenters than there was actual shock, Jodie Foster's Beaver aside. His opening spiel was all of 6 minutes, then you'd get like half-hour gaps before he'd show up again. The show was as stiff and awkward as the cheeks of many of the attendees, the wins and congratulations meaningless. I kept hoping for Gervais to cut through the bullshit, and he never got the chance.

I think Gervais was paid to shut up. His name brought ratings and the promise of controversy but he never had the room to deliver on the promise.

The camera spent an awful lot of time on Harvey Weinstein and otherwise the show served to confirm the front-runner status of The Artist and The Descendants. The most shocking things in the entire three hours were Angelina Jolie's lipstick, Madonna's asymmetrical musculature and automaton face, and Leonardo DiCaprio's visible frustration at losing an award that means nothing in the first place.

Michel Hazanavicius vs. Mitt Romney

2012-01-14T19:56:00.002-05:00

Bank of China tower, Hong Kong.

Doug Smith and Steven Zeitchik of the Los Angeles Times have compiled an Oscars heat index based on other award shows, and they compare The Artist and The Descendants, which have become clear front-runners for Oscars, to Mitt Romney.

Michel Hazanavicius is well ahead of Scorsese in terms of expectations for Best Director.

The Artist, Midnight in Paris and Hugo may have an edge come awards time because Hollywood loves movies about itself, or more broadly about creativity. Shakespeare in Love, 8 1/2, Day for Night and Cinema Paradiso are past Oscar winners.

Patrick Goldstein writes in The LA Times,

"Harvey Weinstein, who understands Oscar voters better than anyone else alive, recently pointed out that Hollywood loves films about the creative process almost as much as films about showbiz. If you study Oscar history, you see that it's a shrewd observation (and not just because Weinstein's new film, My Week With Marilyn, another inside showbiz tale, will probably earn Michelle Williams a lead actress nomination). Oscar voters are fascinated with creative process films, whether they are stories about a troubled math genius (A Beautiful Mind), the Bard at work on a masterpiece (Shakespeare in Love), a musician whose gift helps him avoid certain death (The Pianist), a writer whose work ripples through generations (The Hours) or a brainy iconoclast whose college-dorm invention changes the way we relate to each other (The Social Network)."

It's all a nice way of saying that moviemakers can be a bit solipsistic.

The Artist is about Hollywood and even if it's not of Hollywood it was made there, with loving attention to period detail, props and locations. It's a fan letter to a time and a place. The time has changed but the place might like to think it hasn't. It's also one of those rare awards-season pictures that is simultaneously artistic and high-brow while also aiming to please. It feels good.

The comparison to Mitt Romney, though, is a bit snide, because it implies that we're settling for something we don't really want, like the Romney lawn sign in a cartoon that says, "Yeah, OK. I Guess" as the slogan. If I were an Academy voter and I wanted to reward something artistic, high-brow and that also feels good, I might tick the box for Allen or Scorsese. They're both ours, after all.

A win for The Artist in either of the big categories would help illustrate Hollywood's new'ish global identity, one of the themes of this blog. Europeans direct our action movies (see prior post), Dubai and Moscow host premieres to launch the latest chapter in huge franchises, one which sets the first third of its running time in Russia and the middle third in the UAE, before jumping to Mumbai.

We're even moving away from blowing up American landmarks. In the new trailer for Battleship that plays before Contraband, it's the turn of the IM Pei-designed Bank of China building in Hong Kong's Central to get blown up. It slices in half like a performer bowing to applause. CG glass shatters every which way.

* * *

Lest anyone take the Oscars too seriously, there is Charles Saatchi's full list of more than 100 films that should have been nominated for an Oscar for best film. It appears at guardian.co.uk/commentisfree. Even casual movie fans have seen easily 80 of these.

Contraband vs. Armored

2012-01-14T00:09:00.001-05:00

I absolutely love Mark Wahlberg.

Like Jeremy Renner, he plays guys who speak softly. The power of their quiet persuation comes from the threat of physical force.

They're guys who seem like they're consciously dialing it down, keeping anger or condescension in check. I admire these actors for some of the same reasons. No wonder Wahlberg is a fan of Jimmy Cagney.

Wahlberg has the one great action movie in him and I keep getting my hopes up. He's come close a bunch of times: Shooter, We Own the Night, bits of Four Brothers. He keeps gravitating to the genre because he probably suspects he's made for it. It's just a question of the right script and the right director. Wahlberg works his ass off. He's got the charisma. He can play in both worlds -- the awards world of The Fighter or Dirk Diggler, the the B-movie world of cranked-up, bloody January releases like last Year's The Mechanic or the prior year's Taken, a Lima Neeson movie that changed people perception of middle age virility, helped by the near- simultanuous star turn in Chloe. Or Take The Matrix or Speed or Point Break, three masterpieces of well-told, well-acted, well-shot, movies that are all fucking genius for different reason, and all have a major star in common. Walhberg could have that streak one day soon.

The high-water mark remains The Departed. (Wahlberg produced Contraband and that helps explain the blink-and-you-miss-them references to The Perfect Storm and The Departed.)

The movie has the 24 problem of endless scenes of people on cellphones, though it manages to keep things straight even if you can tell that Panama City is really the backstreets of New Orleans. They were pinching pennies on this one.

There are a couple of small details that make this better than it might be: a K9 Customs dog getting airlifted onto a shipping boat; the duct tape mask that looked silly in the trailer but might make sense in real life because they don't slip to obstruct your vision; the off-hand way Giovanni Ribisi dismisses any feeling for his dead brother, or the look on Wahlberg's face when Kate Beckinsale tells her dipshit brother, "They're not gonna kill you." They sure as fuck are.

I especially like the glimpse of a professional world you'd never otherwise get to see, like the way the ship management worries about staying too long in port because of fines, or the system of informers that play all sides, like it's a game.

Betsy Sharkey:

"What makes the action sequences so mesmerizing is the sheer size of the boats and all those containers stacked like tinker toys. That is the perfect staging ground for mayhem, with such good, clean lines for the lens to frame."

Yes, sounds great. That's not quite the movie I saw. Maybe I sat too close. Maybe it was the extreme telephoto lenses that squish everything together like meat in a sandwich. Or the the jumpy camera that might have made sense in Libya during the last moments of Qaddafi's life, but not in a $35 million production that's probably closer to $50 when you count tax credits.

So far, looking at this and Drive, hiring Europeans to direct our action movies is nicely balanced, since the good stuff has to weighed against everything directed by Nimrod Antal, who's 0 for 3. They should bring over Neil Marshall to direct a big mainstream action picture. But we should be exporting, too. Let's at least make it reciprocative. Hire our guys to direct your next French cheating husband talkathon.

Jameson vs. Maker's Mark

2012-01-13T22:35:00.001-05:00

It's too much to be a coincidence.

Half a dozen movies in the past few weeks have featured major characters drinking whiskey: Carnage, where it drives the last half-hour descent into Lord of the Flies territory; Young Adult, where Charlize Theron orders by brand name; The Adventures of Tintin, where the whiskey is both a character trait and a weapon; and Contraband, where Ben Foster marks his reversal from good guy to villain by going off the wagon.

The drink also shows up in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Shame, and, if I remember correctly, both We Need to Talk About Kevin and Tinker, Tailor.

The drink, in terms of its pop cultural perception, is in a sort of cocoon stage. It's sometimes a signifier of villainy and alcoholism and other times it means sophistication, often simultaneously. That's progress, because it used to mean a bad guy in a saloon getting ready to fight or a drunken old codger who can barely keep his balance.

Increasingly, whisky, or whiskey, or Scotch, is shorthand for being rich or refined, and in this I see the hand of a lobby group. Somebody at the whisky/whiskey trade group has been successful in getting product placement in major year-end movies. It's a no brainer, really. Lots of these scripts had bars or restaurants as settings and it's not too hard to change a scene if part of your budget is being offset or the crew gets a case of the good stuff at the end of a long week.

Ugo Tognazzi vs. The MTA

2012-01-12T20:24:00.000-05:00

The vintage train cars in the New York Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn are fun enough by themselves, but for grown-ups into American media culture the period ads are one of the main draws.

Movie posters on subway platforms are ubiquitous. They account for every third or fourth ad at the stations I frequent. It's been years since they had movie ads on the inside of trains.

I love how the font for Ugo Tognazzi is as big as the one for Jane Fonda. Clearly, subway riders were just more sophisticated back in 1968.