Cobb

Tinker, Tailor, Crouching, Hidden Plot

My advice is read the book. 

This has to be one of the most ill concieved expositions in a movie I've seen since Time Code. It didn't help that I had a big fat drink before the show and it just creeped along for 30 minutes before 

Contagion

Contagion is a very good movie because of the way it sidesteps conventional drama. It's not bad science like 'The Day After Tomorrow', nor is it apocalyptic. It focuses in on one family tragedy without becoming overly sentimental or requiring extraordinary heroism. It shows a society coming apart in an almost offhanded way. It doesn't hurt to watch. Good flick.

The Debt

The Debt, starring Helen Mirren, is the sort of film that explores the animal side of our human nature and it reminds us that when we are pressed up against our ability to handle the truth we are likely to be faced with life or death situations. And so how many of us are prepared for that?

The story is that of a trio of Israeli war heroes who face the prospect of their world collapsing as the possibility of an ugly truth coming to light thirty years after the fact. Of the three, only the woman can rectify the problem. It's a very intriguing concept, and brilliantly handled by the film but the greatness of this story comes out in the terse dialogs between the three, but especially the woman, and the Nazi war criminal who is at the center of their heroic mission. 

There is, in this tale, the story of how much we become defined not so much by our aims, but our ability to accept that which it makes us in the process, whether we succeed or fail. The heroes must struggle through the taunts of their captive as they decide whether he should be tortured, killed or brought to trial. As they stuggle with that ethical matter of the way in which they will embody the spirit of their new nation, as agents / soldiers of that nation, they must sublimate their own personal desires and lives. They become tools of their ambitions, and ambitions are always thwarted, and so it leaves them with what? Desparate confusion.

In The Debt's magnificent scene, the Nazi illustrates his contempt for Jews as he characterizes their behavior as sheeplike weakness. How is it, he asks, that the Jews were led to slaughter that so many were shephered into their deaths by so few? They were, he concludes, too weak and unpossessed of the pride and will to survive to do anything but submit to the superior force of will of the German soldiers. 

I found this to be a riveting scene because from my perspective it distills the very essence of human survival. We may thrive in an absence of conflict as we uniquely social creatures do. But we are so easily pressed into enforcing the courage of our convictions as a matter of principle and as a matter of survival, and all of our institutions fail and our social graces crumble away. We must do what we must do, and for the sake of keeping a promise or fufilling a mission, that predicament most always demands that someone must pay with their life.

We go through our lives planning to fill them with purpose and meaning. In the end, it may be all we have and our only purpose, is to cause the deaths of others and try to give that meaning. 

Harry's War

There is nothing I feel quite so strongly about the end of the Harry Potter series as I do about the matter of courage. The last installment feels like nothing so much as an entreaty to youth to be unafraid of death and to understand that all plans fail except those that leave your heart's direction undeflected. The end of Harry presages the end of Europe.

Surely there have been those who have taken the arc of Rowling into a more appropriate context, but to this Yank it's loud and clear. Destruction awaits us, but there is a way through it. 

I read a little graphic over at the website of the animators who are contracted with the Royal Society. It said something to the effect that success is 99% failure. All the difference is made by recognizing the 1% for what it is. Faith in the 1% chance. I am starting to make more sense of this particular sensibility. Rather like Rudyard Kipling's 'If', there is something to the the idea of acting as if failure is impossible, living 'as if'.

But it cannot be the only thing that inspires. There is much to be said about the foolishness of diehards whom fortune favors. Beware the bull of a man who doesn't actually out-maneuver you, but squishes you down. Hmm. I don't have to tell you that, unless you are alternately cowering and braying behind Voldemort. 

Watching Harry destroy the most powerful wand in the world, I get it. Seeing him drop the Resurrection Stone into the weedy floor of the darkest wood, I understand. What makes us best is when we are best without the promise of reward. It is the anti-meritocracy - and that's hard to explain and almost counter-intuitive in America, but I'll try to spell it out.

As Cobb readers know, I admire spies and priests on the predicate that they are abiding secret keepers. Rather like Snape, there is much admirable to be said about the man who doesn't, at every turn, attempt to profit on what he knows. That is the simplistic meritocracy, and what it creates is an atmosphere of high stakes volleyball. You know. Where everybody competes all the time and doesn't want *you* on their team if they can avoid it. And you get pissed and start cracking wise about how it's only volleyball. Nobody likes a smartass. But the presumption that everybody gets rewarded with wealth, power, fame, honor, etc. make everybody into a smartass. Especially those who smug wankers who win, and those jealous haters who decide that they're too smart to take that winning seriously. Big prize money, the Dosh Point, it warps the moral space-time continuum, and when that happens, well then lazy people can travel faster than light, even though the speed of light is the law.

So you have to watch out for the power of the brass ring. Hmm. Tolkein. Let me contemplate tha parallels for a moment. OK, enough. 

 

 

Kato & The Crazy White Boy

If there was ever a moment that I thought, hmm, maybe Green Hornet starring Seth Rogan might be a good idea. then I'm not as sane as I think I am. It was a stupid idea, and Green Hornet is a stupid movie. I sit here wondering how anything so slapdash can earn money. The good news is, that in the US, it didn't.

Getting 120 million dollars to spit at the ghost of Bruce Lee can only be a bad idea, but that's Hollywood. That's what passes for entertainment.  

Super 8

Super 8 is a movie within a movie about making movies. It's a superb narrative about exactly the imagination of the American filmmaker. In the wit of children who tell the truth and will risk everything to preserve the trust of friendship, is the story of the story that has to be told.

 

The Illusionist Imagination

Around Daddy's House, we like to watch movies and eat. Such is the luxury of the now. In doing so, we've developed and nurtured our appetite for Miyazake. Since Ponyo, we've been exclaiming 'Ham!' as an inside joke. Last evening it was The Illusionist, an animated film based on a story by Tati. 

I'm something of a sucker for aerial photography of verdant places where there are simple homes that any fool can afford. It is a romantic obsession borne of the life of a traveling consultant who spends too much on rent in the big city. But aside from that obvious problem, I share a more subtle dysfunction which is the general romance of foreign films, especially those whose characters are hyperreal, and good, and simple.

In The Illusionist, as in Il Postino, as in My Friend Totoro there is something too clear about the characters. The seem always to be invested with a simple goodness that makes their flaws acceptable. The is some purity about these bucolic types that we Americans cannot seem to see in ourselves. 

I suppose it would be facile to say from a conservative POV that this is a symptom of Hollywood - that makes the American countryside much more fecund for the likes of Leatherface and Suspect Zero. But why? Why do we turn over our judgement on Middle America to the imagination of Truman Capote? Why are we likely to believe that we'd be safer in Ulster than Ann Arbor? Consider Blood Simple or Fargo. Do we have murder in our hearts at bottom? 

For the time that I was an organic (and I'm tending to swing back that way at this point in life) I had a constant beef with the permanence of the yuppie in all of our media. Now that media is being distributed, it seems to have accentuated that problem. I'm thinking of 'Wedding Crashers' and why the babe had to be a rich babe. And on top of that a rebellious rich babe from a severely dysfunctional family.

But yeah, I don't like chick flicks like Steel Magnolias or Fried Green Tomatos either. Perhaps this is why Shawshank stands out like no other American film. Hmm.

Cost of a Soul

It's not often that one sees, within the course of our pastime excursions into commonplace entertainment, something that transcends what it appears to be. By all appearances, the independent film Cost of a Soul, looked to be another slightly twisted ghetto flick. I was thinking perhaps some combination of Four Brothers, Three Kings and The Town. But this film turned out to be quite remarkable - one that goes one better on all of those movies. It is that rare film, a genuine tragedy. 

The texture of the film is artistic, there are hallmarks of a unique style. There are close ups. There is classical music. There is black and white. There is shaky cam. There are rolling street scenes and haunting echoed saxophone. There are rapid montages. There is crying faded to black. All of these well worn signatures add up to more than their sum. But the single most dramatic effect of this entire film is the single gunshot. The pistol has never been so dramatically cast. It reminds me of the way in which Speilberg in Saving Private Ryan made the sound effects of every other war movie sound cheap by comparison. Cost of a Soul has redefined the deadly pop and muzzle flash. 

There is no other film this resembles so much as Blood Simple in its haunting simplicity, and there has never been such a matter of fact tragedy as this has proven to be. If the question is how do you make an art film that doesn't become preachy and yet sends a deadly message home with finality, Cost of a Soul is the answer. 

The story is simple with all the appropriate twists, but there is no humor and no sly wit involved. There are no overworked emotional nudges. The entire screenplay is drily matter of fact. Here are the obligations of family and these are the deadly enemies of domestic tranquility - the drug dealer, the corrupt cop, the mob boss. How can two Iraq War veterans work it out when they've got nowhere to go? This is the kind of story that you might have expected Dragon Tatoo to be if it didn't drip into the pornographic. In that regard this is a classic American hard knock story, stripped of sentiment and driven to the point. And it delivers shot after shot, tragedy after tragedy until the last men fall.

They all fall down.

You can watch the film and know that it will all end in tears. You can get through the awkward moments and the single McGuffin borrowed from Pulp Fiction, the mysterious briefcase. But because this story is a tragedy, not a caper, not a mystery, not a gangster film, not a war movie, you don't expect to see what you do see. You see the good die. You see the bad die. You see the innocent and the guilty, the corrupt and the innocent strung together into the sort of destruction that is at once predictable and surprising. Surprising because there is no escape. There is no redemption. There is eyes wide open revenge that steamrolls every zigzag you imagine might lead to a better outcome.

There are passages of dialog and close ups that capture superb moments of acting. There are monologues worthy of Tarantino but remain sparse. There are silences that speak volumes. And yet it is raw - not quite into Demme territory. There isn't a single cast member that dominates, instead it is a morality tale that stays simple and powerful. That it does so with such a deft balance is what marks this as a surprisingly superb and yet raw bit of filmmaking. 

I think in a certain way this film will always be compared to Hustle and Flow. The difference is that dreams die harder here. Tragedy. It's something new in contemporary American film. I wonder if we can get used to it.

Butterfield 8

For the first time in a while, I tried something new, which was to watch a film I've only vaguely known to be good. It was free from the In Demand network in my corporate apartment, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Butterfield 8 is a morality tale. It is the story about the value of sex and marriage and self-worth of honesty, passion and abuse. It is the story about living with lies and what it does to the psyche, of the difference between friendship, lust and love. It's about class and money, control and freedom. It's an awful fabulous lot in an old movie, and it's the sort of movie they don't seem to make any longer. Perhaps today's directors and screenwriters know better than to tread in this territory.

The film is not very well edited and there's not much panache in the direction, but the acting is good - done for the sake of dialog and not empty emoting or beauty shots. it's the kind of film that begins like something cheesy, develops interestingly and ends perfectly. It is a modern tragedy of timeless values and therefore a classic. In some ways, I cannot imagine not having my soon to be teenaged children watch it. It's the right caution.

Some days ago, I happened to be listening to a late night radio talk show. it was the night that Halo 3 was to be sold at midnight. I missed the sale but I caught the radio talk show. The host was talking about how we make an enemy of our conscience when we indulge ourselves. We do wrong and we begin to despise the part of us that makes us feel bad about it and instead we welcome the kinds of people into our lives that want to share in our badness. We call the drug dealer our friend and we get angry at our true friends - we can't wait for good people to abandon us so that we can abandon ourselves into the arms of abuse.

But at some point in our lives, because most of us live long enough to regret, we realize how we have done ourselves wrong and have undone others in the course of it. We wonder if we can ever make good, if we ever deserve the sunshine on our faces, if we can ever pay the price for our betrayal. That is our moment of humanity, and there is always an opportunity for that moment to come. I say that is the very shape of our minds that does it, the nature of God in us. It's as true and simple as pain. Pain is our way of knowing that we are in trouble and it is only human to want the pain to go away.

At this moment I think of Alter Call. The proper minister always knows an Alter Call is always necessary. We always need to be reminded that we can make the pain go away, that we can return to conscience and that we might someday deserve the sunshine.

Butterfield 8 was an answering service in the film. A cutout conduit between two people unable to face the truth about themselves. So long as they used that underground channel of communication, they could enjoy their complicit deceit. It wasn't until they were ready to deal with their own true feelings, their own real consciences, their own reputations and psyches that they could ditch the conduit. And yet it stood, always something there to remind them, an indelible memory.

One day, we'll have real-time translation of all the voice messages and films and literature of today's recorded digital world. We could InDemand it and watch it at our leisure. But I think all that diversity of information won't matter - it will be the shape of the stories like this one that count. They will be few, but they will be evocative of the real truth about our souls. We can only hope to be watching the right channel.

 

Everyday Sunshine

You can't possibly know me unless you know Fishbone.

Exit Through The Gift Shop

Cobb readers may recall that I used to have a running argument with Sprite about what art is and is not. She's not Sprite any longer, she's Gremmie and we no longer have that argument. It has not been resolved to anyone's satisfaction and neither of us care enough to engage it. Whatever catches the eye is pleasing enough.

I have begun to wonder if any artist captures the spirit of the times and I've made an attempt here, and will continue, to use visual art to reflect some aspect of this literary creation. People always have time to look, but seldom have time to read and rarely have time to study. So I imagine lots of people do what Gremmie and I do, which is agree not to disagree but to say 'whatever' to the question of art. 

There's an artist for that. His name is Mr. Brainwash. I just watched the documentary about him. It was good.

My opinion of MBW is that he is a pop artist who is the kind of success that The Simpsons are. You cannot really compare The Simpsons to I Love Lucy although both are sitcoms. The Simpsons aren't people, they're cartoons. MBW's creations aren't creations, they're icons. They are so two dimensional that they're almost one dimensional. They lack drama. And I've seen enough of the man who created them to understand what his creations are meant to inspire, which is nothing but the sensation of having consumed art. It's like going to see a movie.  Even his irony is flat.

There is a point in the film in which those artists who served as the inspiration for Mr. Brainwash, or worked for him - I can't remember which - wondered if everything he created was a big joke and if so who the joke was on. Nobody could tell, which illustrates the spontaneous meaning of the entire production. It's a production, and it will mean something finally when enough people react to it. The point is not to invest meaning or design into the production, but to arrange it in such a way that becomes a self-fulfilling thing. A curiosity which finally means nothing more than the fact that it made you curious. Like jingling keys above a baby. 

The emotional weight of the film is found in the speechless energy that characterizes afficionadoes of production as art. Half the significance, if not all of the significance of street art is that it is illegal and ubiquitous. Any old pique will do, but the point is not to draw your attention to the craft so much as to draw your attention to the fact that there is great risk in producing subversion time and time again. There is no solution, no comtemplation of the art that gets you anywhere. You are merely to be stammered by the sheer perversity of it, by the fact that it slaps authority in the face, that the artist is on the run. 

That's about it. Here is how a subversive operates. He is all instinct and no intellect. He has no plan other than to be famous through his productions which are immediately void of meaning, and yet significant to some fragment of that short attention span society. The more you see of it, the less you expect, until finally you are insulted. 

 

Tron Legacy

The first thing to know about Tron Legacy is that it will inevitably be compared to The Matrix. That is what kind of success this film is. 

There's three kinds of FX to look for in any good action / sci-fi flick. There's the kind that's fast and furious that makes you say, holy cripe did you see that? The best thing to do with these is show 'em and then slow them down and show them again. This works with explosions and radical extreme martial arts tricks and car wrecks. Tron has got 'em. Then there's the kind that are awe inspiring beautiful jaw drop scenes that make you say whoa that's awesome. The best thing to do with these are give them some violins in crescendo and then bring on the full orchestra. This works with things like the outside of a space ship or a mind-bending cityscape, or the inside of a chamber of horrors. The third kind are the details of something in a short scene where you just want to freeze frame and check out the still to appreciate the art direction. 

Tron Legacy has got all of that, in spades. 

I want to say that Tron Legacy is, visually, the coolest movie since The Matrix. OK well maybe Avatar, but Avatar was not nearly as cool, Avatar was beautiful. Tron is beautiful like a matte black Brabus Mercedes. It is really that cool. It pays homage to the original Tron. It pays homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey and it goes places the like of which I've never seen, except perhaps in Mass Effect 2. So basically what I think is that this film is going to win a bunch of awards, best art direction and best costumes. 

 

If you are a Tron guy, you're going to dig this flick and you won't be disappointed. If you've never seen the original Tron it will matter only a little bit. The movie stands on its own and doesn't get too monology and bogged down with all sorts of explanations. From a computer science perspective it tips its hat appropriately to the geeky, less credibly geeky than Die Hard 4, but more credibly geeky than The Matrix series. 

What the movie is, is cool fun. It's very righteously PG13 and doesn't stretch things at all trying to fit into those size shoes. It has got just the right amount of Father & Son stuff. Not to the creepy extremes of that Lost in Space remake, but enough to be both emotional and not too heavy. In fact, the whole movie has some lightness to it that's a bit surprising. It just does not take itself too very seriously and strikes a fine balance between being it never goes into that edgy sexy gritty stuff. You even understand the bad guy is not trying to be a bad guy. They have kept Tron simple without being simplistic and maintained the essential fun value - wouldn't it be cool to be trapped in a computer world? Yes and no, and they have that just right. 

You see there are some visuals in this film that are truly stunning, and not just on the 'hey look isn't that cool' level although there's plenty of that. There are actually moments when you look and see pieces of an art film right in the middle of this father and son tale, and it evokes Kubrick and well, OK let's be frank it rips straight outta Kubrick's 2001 in Frank's White Room, but this one lets us live in it for a while. Very cool. It's full of glamor shots and is not afraid to let the camera linger, but is still tightly edited at certain moments just when a scene is about to zoom back and let your eyes feast for a moment. I get the feeling that when this comes out in DVD, there will be lots of bonus material. I'm hungry to see it all again and again. 

The music is bomb. Just explosive, slamming action movie boom boom boom that you haven't heard since Blade. 

The costumes are perfect, and wouldn't you know somebody already has motorcycle leathers hooked up in Tron style. The babes in this movie look like babes, double babelicious, like a cross between a younger, hotter Trinity and the Robert Palmer girls. The baddies are menacing in both appearance, movement and sound, and it's cowboy simple. The good guys wear black and white, the bad guys wear black and orange. I've read that they spent much dinero on the costumes and it has worked out to perfection. Flynn, the father, has a look that's a makes him look like a futuristic Zen Moses. 

 

What's wrong with it? Well the denouement is pretty lame. The movie climaxes ten minutes before the end and everything settles to a happily ever after. Loose ends remain but not in a teasing fashion. If I know anything about movies of this sort, this will be a smash hit and there will be a sequel, but they didn't do anything but clunk-up the ending, short and sweet, so that you're not guessing if there's going to be one. Also, this is not a dark and sinister movie. For anyone who is expecting Tron's Grid World to manifest itself with the noir foreboding of 'Dark City' or the haunting psychological subtext of 'Inception', there are two words you should keep in mind before you go to the theater: "Disney Movie". (Recalling that at the beginning of this review I said 'Holy Cripe'). 

This is a movie for boys and dads. It's not so much of a movie for girls and families in the way that Spiderman was. It won't be a hit on that level. But cool girls will love this movie because there's a very cool girl in it. Yes, a girl who can fight and drive a fast car and fly a jet and wear the bomb leather suit and boots. Yes a girl with warmth and a heart who doesn't pretend to be a heartless harpy or just fight other girls. A real heroine along the lines of Lelu in The Fifth Element, but cool.

The best thing about Tron Legacy is that there is an absolute minimum of corn and no cheese at all. It's a difficult thing to do given the sophisticated tastes of action and sci-fi movie audiences. It's way better than GI Joe, which wasn't too bad after you accepted the cheese level. It's way better than Fantastic Four which got really annoying. Now I happen to like The Island even though it has a lot of guy-running-away-from-bad-guys-with-girl-in-tow stuff going on. Tron is a bit more visually stunning but more consistent. So you can indeed enjoy this action-packed adventure without a letdown, now that you know what I've told you. 

The star of the show is Tron's Grid World itself which works very well in 3D. So while I'm generally a 3D skeptic, I say go for it. There is never a moment when you don't know that you are in the Grid World. It is deliciously glassy and synthetic. Even the obsidian rocks have a sort of shine. It is predominantly dark, but not noir, high contrast but not disturbingly so, which is why the club music themes work so very well. 

This is a definite must-see film that should live up to its massive hype. I recommend it highly. I saw an early release and I'm going to go see it again, at least once. 

Unstoppable

Unstoppable is my least favorite film from Tony Scott. It's not that Denzel is wrong, or that trains are wrong, or that the drama was wrong, it's just that the whole Tony Scott formula just didn't bring this off. 

The problem is, simply stated, you actually have to suspend a bit of disbelief because of the lack of a bit of dialog that could have saved the movie, maybe. You see, you know that in a film you have to set up effects to give a train moving at speeds safe enough to film look as if it were unsafe in the story. But you can't do anything cheesy like speed up the film. So you can shake the camera, blur the focus, amp up the sound, do quick cuts and pull out of a top hat any number of filmic miracles. Tony Scott has a large bag of tricks, but when you see the train rounding a curve a whole lot sharper than the one that's supposed to be the apocalyptic curve - you have to say wait a minute. So how about explaining why sometimes the train is going 70 and sometimes it's going 40? Not once did anybody talk about hills or grades. So I'm thinking they must know that Pennsylvania is all flat or something and that if they put hills there, it would lose authenticity. So. The this runaway train goes arbitrarily fast or slow with no reason. That kinda blows it.

Everything else is reasonably perfect. The thing is, Scott has destroyed what might have otherwise been a very good blue collar drama. The tension between workers and their bosses, between old and young employees, between companies and media, between competence and incompetence, between father and daughters, between man and estranged wife all were done to perfection. The runaway train could have just been an excuse to make those portrayals in an excellent film. But I cannot get that scene out of my head where this train scoots slowly around a curve, supposedly on its way to high speed oblivion. 

It surely was the fact that I was in one of those glamorous new Arclight theaters with only 12 other people in the audience that calmed me. The Spousal Unit jumped at all of the jump points, and we both winced at the wince points but there was nobody else in the audience to cheer at the cheer points and the whole edifice fell flat. 

I liked Denzel's other train movie much better. Sorry Tony, but you should have let it go after Pelham 123.

The Town

I didn't expect to like this movie as much as I did. But it was a fine cops & robbers movie. Unstupid.

There's something I like about this film, now that I've had a moment to let it sink in, and that thing is how well it makes a Boston film - in that the environment is part of the plot. This is Affleck's second or third notable Boston film and I'm going to bring up a comparison that I think is perfectly apt. And that is Marlon Brando.

I was too young to understand anything significant about Marlon Brando, and I must confess that I'm not in a great position to judge. Streetcar and Waterfront sit idling on my Netflix queue and I have never quite been so bored that I actually desired to sit through them. But I did just watch about 30 minutes of YouTubery, including the interview of him with Dick Cavette shortly after he made his notorious Oscar speech. Brando looked exactly like what I imagine most of some fraction of America wanted a man to look like at the time. With the beard and long hair, he was a large square man with a large square face, uniquely handsome, very self-possesed, and weary. Cavette admitted that he had a previous four hour conversation with Brando, and evidently everything had been said, and Brando must have convinced Cavette of something quite profound - or perhaps intimidated him in the way men of action do when they are revealed to be as contemplative and intelligent as their effete counterparts.  Whatever the reason, Brando was bored, Cavette was tiptoeing and the whole affair looked like an in-joke, as if there were something extraordinarily scary that the world was afraid might leap from the mouth of this screen idol.

So what was that thing? I don't know. Something about how much it hurts for certain people to be portrayed in certain demeaning ways. Oh yes, I recall. It was the 'positive images' argument. Perhaps Brando was the man who first articulated it in a way that Hollywood ultimately had to reckon with. He mentioned how much Hollywood had changed its portrayal of blacks, but how Natives and others still suffered a preponderance of belittling roles. There will alwasy be something about this argument that fails to impress me. It is the inherent contradiction established by the role of entertainment in extablishing a counter-punching stereotype. I mean really. Who wants to be Sidney Poitier now?

Guys and Dolls was the only flick that I saw in which Brando's acting talent impressed me. I had no idea who he was when I saw it, and found him remarkable and unique. But on the whole, I like Gene Kelly better in all of that millieu.

I watched some fragment of a film in which Brando did a number of minutes saying nothing and completely rocking the world of a soda-jerk diner waitress. It must have been the first time this deal was done on film because I've seen it replicated numerous times since. This must have been the impact of The Method on what passed for deeply philosophical thought about the art and science of the film industry at the time.  Filling the screen with no words and communicating through movement - a kind of ballet. OK I'll buy that for a dollar. The problem for me is that the context needs to be spot on, or it has to be a classic tale. Otherwise it is much less than what it appears to be. An old couple walks down the sidewalk complaining about kids today, motorcycle guy takes it all in, walks into the diner and orders two malts. Big whoop. 

Affleck does one big close-up in which the twitches of his eyebrows makes the perfect emphasis on his self-revelation to the woman inches from him in the public gardens. It extends appropriately long for today's ego and serves the purpose of his coming clean to the woman he wants. But it is the only bit of overacting (which is not actually overacted) in the entire film. For once, The Town doesn't go there, deep inside the motivations of what drives a man to be a bank robber. He's just a bad dude from a bad part of town hanging with an unsilent but deadly crew. They don't play badasses, they just don't have a problem doing very particularly engineered dirty deeds.

The film is made by the friendship between Affleck and his stunningly cast partner. And the scene that takes us there is begun by a particularly cruel bit of chivalry. Some chavs have insulted Affleck's girl-to-be. She identifies them, he and his partner show up at their door and mash them but good. It is one of those film moments that can't actually be spoiled despite the fact that I won't try.

As a cops and robbers film, the plot is held together well without going as deeply into the heads of either cops or robbers. It is very much like one of my all-time favorites 'Heat' but does that one better by leaving me a bit more emotionally neutral. I don't like dramas that are not tragic, and so I don't want to be led down the path of empathy with characters who are essentially sociopathic. That path is the subtext of much of the successful entertainment issuing from Hollywood these past decade (basically since Tony Soprano).

I like action films for the action and this one delivers without going over the top, without too much personal drama and by putting in the right amount of dialog. It doesn't monologue you through plots and explanations, it doesn't apply ridiculous stunts, it doesn't preach and it doesn't zig zag too much for the purposes of intrigue. It allows Affleck to act and become the Towny that deep down somewhere he actually is. it is Method without making him into a stunted version of the troublesome Marlon Brando. If Affleck can keep his mouth shut at the Oscars, he'll deserve that level of billing. 

Repo Men: Knives, Needles & Surgical Action

I just watched what is perhaps the grisliest movie I have seen since the Last Temptation of Christ. It was the unrated, high definition version of Repo Men. About halfway through it, I wanted to change my mind and watch a chick flick. It was that nasty.

One of my religious devotions is to protect myself from corruption. Friends of mine who know me, know my attitude about eyeballing babes, and all such matters as regards dollar ballets and the relative happiness of shiatsu endings.  "If you're not going to knock it out, don't get in the ring". That's Cobb's Rule #28 by the way. So I stay out of the ring, and I don't much comment on what I used to do or what I might or might not do if...  But it's rare that I find an entertainment that is not obviously worthless. And even though I wasn't absolutely dying to see this film, I found the premise intriguing. What happens to a man who repossesses artificial organs for a ruthless living when he is suddenly confronted with having the same problem?  Yeah ok it's not that intriguing, but as action movies go, it's fairly unique. And in fact, a basic R rating on this bad boy might have spared me the gross out, which I am about to share with you.

This film, like none other I have seen in the action genre, has knife fighting. Big knives, small knives, swinging, plunging, ripping. It also has what essentially amounts to just this side of surgery porn. I'm trying to imagine some Cronenberg that did so, and I'm blocked. But Repo Men gets that bloody.

If you prefer the intrigue parts of action flicks, spare yourself this one. Whereas Seven put your eyes into some gruesome crime scenes, Repo Men creates them in realtime. It's actively grisly. That's the last time I cross over the protection of an R rating. Jeez.

Inception

I dreamed that I saw a pretty good movie the other day. 

Inception, it must be said, is one of those films that one has to watch a second time. What's odd about that is that it reminds me vaguely of another film that I puzzled my way through at this same level of intensity, except that I can't remember the name of that other movie at all. Perhaps it was Vantage Point. Or maybe it was Deception. 

What strikes me about Inception is that it is a gamelike film that creates for the audience, a set of rules that instruct you how to interpret the meaning of the action on screen. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails. It works brilliantly in the jump cuts lacking continuity that force you to ask, how did we get here? It fails when you have to keep three simultaneous plots working in your head, two of which are visually arresting. And then the entire enterprise struggles under the weight of the unexpected and the subplot. Inception is easily the most complicated drama since Memento, and yet is more complex even than that, because it is possible that the entire movie takes place in a loop.

It is not enormously entertaining so much as it is intriguing to guess at how the director, writers and editor put the whole thing, which actually does congeal, together. This film sustains multiple levels of suspense and marvel that overwhelm the drama of the plot. You care about the primary motivations of the protagonist, and yet you know them to be a device to get to the complications. DiCaprio even plays against sympathy. 

All said, this is a movie worth talking about, three levels deep plus limbo.

Afghanistan in High Definition

An astonishing set of images.

Titus Andronicus

Julie Taymor's Titus once again has my attention for the possibility of being the greatest film ever even as I wonder at the possibility that Shakespeare's words linger on the very edge of our comprehension. I watch and think how many of our tribe have taken to heart the lessons of such treachery and revenge.

There is a scene in which Titus stands, kneels and then falls face flat at the crossroads, and as the words flow I think that this might be our very own Petreaus' future.

Hear me, grave fathers! noble tribunes, stay!
    For pity of mine age, whose youth was spent
    In dangerous wars, whilst you securely slept;
    For all my blood in Rome's great quarrel shed;
    For all the frosty nights that I have watch'd;
    And for these bitter tears, which now you see
    Filling the aged wrinkles in my cheeks;
    Be pitiful to my condemned sons,
    Whose souls are not corrupted as 'tis thought.
    For two and twenty sons I never wept,
    Because they died in honour's lofty bed.

    For these, these, tribunes, in the dust I write
    My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears:
    Let my tears stanch the earth's dry appetite;
    My sons' sweet blood will make it shame and blush.
    O earth, I will befriend thee more with rain,
    That shall distil from these two ancient urns,
    Than youthful April shall with all his showers:
    In summer's drought I'll drop upon thee still;
    In winter with warm tears I'll melt the snow
    And keep eternal spring-time on thy face,
    So thou refuse to drink my dear sons' blood. 

OF course I would not think there are those capable of such direct duplicity within our myriad and crisscrossing hall of power. But certainly such desires would be made manifest if it were possible.

Eyes On the Late Prize

Five years ago somebody dropped a bootleg copy of Eyes on the Prize onto the web. I have a copy that I ran across this morning looking for another CD. I'm going to watch a little snippet of it. It turns out that the official DVD just showed up on Amazon last month. Five years late. You can get your copy for 50 bucks.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Spontaneous flick. No clue. Had free passes. Went to see it. Boot to the head.

I don't like foreign films. Most of the time they are a pretense for Americans to be somebody else that they don't generally have the courage to be f2f. Foreign films are like Cancun, exotic for the sake of providing a jumping-out-of-one's-own-skin experience - letting something all hang out. That's most of the time. Everybody who watches foreign films knows this - they are the kinds of flicks that the Hollywood crowd does not, and mostly cannot make. They thus become the generic 'alternative', and alternative is not always good. So I'm skeptical of foreign films that make it to our screens, and I sorta wish that especially for the genre of short films of exceptional quality, Netflix or somebody ought to have a subscription service. But all that's another subject.

There was a time, of course, when anything by Tarkovsky, Almodovar or Kurosawa would have me running to the box office at breakneck speed. So my impressions are not just armchair.

Dragon Tattoo is a drastic and superb film that is like  'The Sacrifice' meets 'La Femme Nikita' meets 'Seven'. It is bleak and bloodlessly acted. It is not entertaining, rather it is crafted to be one of those oddly compelling and disturbing experiences that serve to remind you of how awful men can be. In particular it's men because there are no villainous women here. There are only the three types of women in the film. Those who are destroyed by men and run away. Those who are destroyed by men and lose their minds, and those who are destroyed by men, refuse to be destroyed and take their revenge. The Girl is a victim of the third kind in a world where justice is an illusion and the righteous have no quarter.

To take it as a premise that you need some extraordinary kind of Girl to be the protagonist in this modern thriller, much of that subtle posturing can be de-emphasized. For this Girl is a new kind of heroine, a combination I've not seen. She is one who, like an extreme version of Batman, is an emotional black hole, presenting an impenetrable mask which accentuates her black leather and steel exterior. She is an extraordinary hacker, and finds her way, almost reluctantly into a mystery of epic proportions. 

In an extraordinary way, this Girl is the answer to what I despised about The Constant Gardener's female protagonist whose civilized charms made her duplicitous seductions merely inconvenient. The Girl doesn't 'suit up' for Mata Hari work. She keeps her distance. The distance has been overcome by a number of brutes, and she shows the pain of it, but she has no intention to use any feminine wiles with anyone but the female of the species. 

The story is that of a crusading journalist who is to be jailed for libel against the CEO of a global conglomerate. His muckraking magazine must live down its failure as he awaits his prison sentence. He is contacted by the aging patriarch of another powerful family concern who is trying a last desperate attempt to solve the mysterious disappearance of his favorite niece 35 years ago. He suspects foul play and any and all of his heirs are suspects. They are the scions of old money and they have become a pack of inheritance hyena. 

The Girl works as a cyber private eye. She is punk and slim. Not enough meat on her bones to be an uberchick like Trinity. Not enough trust in her heart to be a rescuer/defender like Angela Bassett in Strange Days. But more than enough steel in her spine and ice in her gaze to use her tools for vengeance. She was previously contracted by the global conglomerate to hack the journalist. She knows he was setup. Now she follows his computer as he gets his new assignment - the assignment of finding the lost niece. In a single act of charity she breaks the firewall, revealing the fact that she has hacked him, in order to send him the answer to a clue he found in the lost girl's diary. The two become partners in solving a mystery that gets deeper and darker.

Dragon Tattoo has something of a cruel and sadistic eye. Few details are spared. As we come to know the Girl, that which would in any American film be understood as a dirty arrangement would be understated. She has something in her past which her parole officer exploits for the sake of his own sexual gratification. But instead of insinuation, we are treated to the full brutality of rape. There are multiple rapes in this film, but we come to know that the Girl meets fury with fury in a revenge scene so vicious that it squeezes all of the delight out of the rapist's just deserts. It feels like something out of the pages of Dick Marcinko, a heavy dose of Old Testament justice.

Old Testament justice is what's going on. Epic retribution. And looking at this Swedish film, I can't help but wonder if it says something enduring about the Swedes and the way they look at themselves. Moreover I take it that this film says a lot about Europe's current crisis of confidence. Let's be clear about it. There are old Nazis in this powerful family and the disappearance of the patriarch's niece turns out to be connected to a string of brutal murders of women over several decades. This is the a story built against subtext of European money and power - an almost untouchable display of power and privilege that protects some people whose moral integrity has the consistency and flavor of a bag of pig intestines. You cannot watch Dragon Tattoo and not feel that sense that nothing about the civilization can stand the sort of corruption it bears - that if this is what goes on behind the scenes, no one is safe.

This movie is only satisfying at a distance, for once you get away from the hideousness of its explicitly graphic scenes, its matter of fact approach to such grisly subjects gives it the weight of literature. It is not an entertainment. It is an intervention, a brusque lecture, it is a fire you are not pulled from.

Greatly, the Girl, at the age of 24 uses the tool of the 21st Century to expose the crimes of the 20th. There is a collaboration between the magazine man and the cybergirl that neither of them singly could have handled. Theirs is an unlikely alliance, but there's something fabulous about it that doesn't need explaining.  I highly recommend this film for the not-squeamish. Now is a good time to think about how Europeans think about themselves.

Inglorious Basterds

It has been a long time since motion picture dialog has been so snappy and dramatic. If I could find these kinds of literate films, I'd watch them all the time. Even if they were thirds German, French and English.

There's really not much to say about this film that probably already hasn't been said. It's one of Tarantino's best. He's getting better. I don't know what that Grindhouse madness was all about, but this is a glorious film.

Every once in a while I come across a creative work that defies my attempts to critique it, and I feel that there is something useless about describing it. IB is such a work primarily because it doesn't inspire me towards any particular unspoken notion. Here are the pig boy Nazis in all their autocratic splendor, their insouciant suspicions and idiot prejudices snaking beneath the surface of their obsequious manners and cowardly duty. Here are the simmering and plucky French feigning cowed silence, unnerved by the pique of these Teutons and their faux civility, waiting, watching. Here are the canny and crafty Americans single-mindedly focused on bold, earthshaking and brutal vengeance.

To watch this film is to see how they get under your skin, these imperious victors. Oh how the world have hated the Nazis and be entirely tempted by them, just as the German people themselves were. How far might we have slipped under those silken sheets if the The Third Reich owned all the silk in the world? 

Tarantino has made one of the top 10 films about WW2. Will we ever tire of watching Hitler shout?

When You Don't Care Enough To Care

Move aside and let the man go through.
Let the man go through.
-- Soul Coughing

Ignorance is a privilege. It is the privilege you have when you own your own land, your own house, and you have enough Dosh to handle your business and that of your offspring. So you can ignore the rest of the world. I'm striving to be that kind of ignorant, so I don't have to fill my head with other people's news to feel at home in the world. 

As Cobb readers know I'm on a quest to understand at a deep level, what Western Civilization is all about, and I hope with this knowledge to leapfrog in my children's generation, all the brambles and stiles that fence peasants in. If there was a moment to use the word 'sheeple' which I never have, this would be that moment. I don't want to share the bonds of the bondsman, and though my conscience recognizes his predicament, I don't want to be a part of it. I want to be a freer man than my father and my son to be a perfectly free man. I want that my daughters would marry such men. Let my drama be the human drama of the ordinary sins of ambition in men of ways and means, not the acts of desperation of those migrant prisoners. A free man never becomes a suicide bomber, but he'll try for your wife all the same. The more free men we have, the better our prospects for justice.

I come from a peasant place, and there is only the shame of ambition in me. I may be more Bilbo than Frodo. I've been after the ring of power on my own.

Over at the Respectable Negroes is some commentary about how the film 'Precious' is black pathology on parade serving as pornography for whitey. This to me is about caring about other people's news - other people's pathology. That cycle of dysfunction. "I hate that you hate me, so my hate is righteous." I smell that stink, the stink of a cistern of defensiveness, that deep well of resentment. Owning other people's pain, and playing a prevent defense that never quite brings enough happiness to score. A waking, walking wallowing that makes sane people go all frumpy and joyless. That is the fate of the superior mind defending the impoverished. It is not Christian.

As usual, I have no idea what the drama loving rabble love. So I know about as much about 'Precious' as I know about 'Lady GaGa', which is to say that they are both all the rage in Sherwood Forest and other intellectually downscale environs. You know, where the peasants live. But of course it is not beneath the erudite to ramble on about such popular entertainment phenomena. Ishmael Reed pipes up:

This use of movies and books to cast collective shame upon an entire community doesn’t happen with works about white dysfunctional families. It wasn’t done, for instance, with “Requiem for a Dream,” starring the great Ellen Burstyn, about a white family dealing with drug addiction, or with “The Kiss,” a memoir about incest — in that case, a relationship between a white father and his adult daughter.

Such stereotyping has led to calamities being visited on minority communities. I’ve suggested that the Newseum in Washington create a Hall of Shame, which would include the front pages of newspapers whose inflammatory coverage led to explosions of racial hatred. I’m thinking, among many others, of 1921’s Tulsa riot, which started with a rumor that a black man had assaulted a white woman, and resulted in the murder of 300 blacks.

Black films looking to attract white audiences flatter them with another kind of stereotype: the merciful slave master. In guilt-free bits of merchandise like “Precious,” white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help. Never shown as contributing to the oppression of African-Americans. Problems that members of the black underclass encounter are a result of their culture, their lack of personal responsibility.

I've never seen anyone killed. So I'd imagine that being in Tulsa on a particularly dark night in American history would be pretty terrifying to me, were I there in person. But I did watch 9/11 on TV, and I know what it's like to feel the horror and revulsion of knowing ten times 300 people were wiped out in a matter of hours. 

Black pathology. It has this sound of a cute disease that Pfizer has a pill for. Some little building on some college campus that has its own endowment and a government grant for clinical trials - and except for the several statistical thousands that have this rare disease around the world, nobody but the Alpha Professor, knows or cares. That is, until the CNN special or the stereotypical film. And so now there is a coterie of specialists attending the extraordinary arcanity that is this subject of study - creating its own gravitational well disturbing the space-time continuum with its dark energy. How not to get sucked in? 

Now we have autism awareness. Black pathology awareness. Haitian earthquake awareness. So much to be aware of! This is the drama of education - or edjumacation drama. And we're all awash in it. It's all peasant porn, don't you see? The man who cannot endow a chair, gives to the Salvation Army pot and feels he's done for Tiny Tim what Scrooge would never - because he has such a sincere heart. The sincere peasant heart going out to those slightly more misfortunate and spreading awareness like so much parade confetti. 

On my DVR are the recorded faces of sad anchorpersons telling me the heartbreaking sad news of the heartbreaking sadness somewhere not too far away. Film at 11. Oscar in February. Me. I'm a cranky, jaded old man. Mess with my family and I care. Otherwise, meh. I know that's not respectable negro behavior, but quite frankly Scarlet, I decide when I'm a negro and when I'm not. So, what do I do? How not to get sucked in? I repeat my first paragraph.

Ignorance is a privilege. It is the privilege you have when you own your own land, your own house, and you have enough Dosh to handle your business and that of your offspring. So you can ignore the rest of the world. I'm striving to be that kind of ignorant, so I don't have to fill my head with other people's news to feel at home in the world. 

So I ignored 'Precious' from day one. I know it's out there, waiting to sink its melodramatic claws into the soft belly of America's middle-class morality. And today I am reminded that it's about incest - OK so that was the big deal - alright, then big deal! I don't care. I don't care about movies about autism or how eating at McDonald's every day is bad for you. I don't care because I can afford not to care. I'm handling my own business. All this social awareness. Where is the moral lesson we didn't have at age 12? One must stand above it. 

Some kind of verb.
Some kind of moving thing.
Something unseen.
Some hand is motioning
to rise, to rise, to rise.

King Solomon's Mines

I've never seen The African Queen but now I know who this Alan Quartermain dude is supposed to be, and I can see how much better we had it with Indiana Jones. But this review is about a black thing. A small one, though.

It happened Sunday on Continental 665 with the crew from Houston. I swiped my one remaining card with credit and got the little 7 inch screen (smaller than an iPad, larger than an iPhone) to connect with Dish Network. It actually turned out to be a pretty good deal for 6 bucks. And so the film of the day was on Turner, King Solomon's Mines. 

I once wrote that the true test of one's own liberation from the mental shackles of black American peasantry could be found in the ability to eat watermelon and fried chicken without shame. I don't know how long, if ever, that benchmark will make any sense, but I'm sure it did to me at some distant point. I thought about that matter of liberation while watching a film I can imagine undergraduates at Brown squealing at in disgust on three levels of deconstruction. But it only took a little bit of doing, or so it seemed to me. I happen to be in the throes of my addiction to the portrait of Victorian England, step one Sherlock Holmes. As such, I am de-presentizing myself and coming to grips with history - devaluing those trinkets we are so easily seduced by and trying to determine what it is a truly free man does on a day to day basis. And so let me take that tangent for a moment.

It occurs to me in a trifling way from KSM (Not the terrorist, the film) but in a grander way from The Man Who Would Be King (although I didn't watch the film to its conclusion - I did read the entire book) how it is that men become leaders of men. They pay them for honorable work. This is so very fundamental that I am astonished we don't all know it better. It speaks volumes about our decrepit public values that such things must be learned from study. Now one only need look to Haiti to find in our public consciousness something other than the ennobling matter of contract employment; it is the pursuit of charity over that of honorable work. It is done in the exorbitant self-righteousness of those dedicating themselves to such a cause, viz Katrina. Charity is the chance for the peasant to drop a superior dime, and the politics of such matters lure the whole peasant world towards the swamp of socialism. Why? Because when it is considered morally superior to rescue a man than to employ a man, we grow a nation of slavers. Yes I said it. 

Let us recall Toni Morrison's insight on Robinson Crusoe.

'At last he lays his head flat on the ground, close to my foot, and sets my other foot upon his head, as he had done before; and after this, made all the signs to me of subjugation, servitude, and submission imaginable, to let me know how he would serve me as long as he lived.' -- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe


'The problem of internalizing the master's tongue is the problem of the rescued. Unlike the problems of survivors who may be lucky, fated, etc. the rescued have the problem of debt. If the rescuer gives you back your life, he shares in that life. But if as in Friday's case, if the rescuer saves your life by taking you away from the dangers, the complications, the confusion of home, he may very well expect the debt to be paid in full.' -- Toni Morrison, 1992

Now I read that "master's tongue" stuff as just antipathy to modern life in a Republic, as if raffia ennobles. There's a crowd Toni plays to that doesn't get out much. They like to think that English itself is a prison. They may be onto something, but I doubt it. Nevertheless, the question of debt is not a trifle. When you save a man's life - the sort of distended belly, flies on the face, life we here is Sally Struthersville get all moony about - then you have a rather hefty debt in your annoying condescending favor. This is the same sort of debt that makes liberal jaws drop when they encounter Mexican American Republicans and Africans who say no to aid. The other side of that same coin gives debt forgiveness to college students who join whatever Obama is calling the Peace Corps these days - you know the sort who minister to Mexican American migrant farmworkers and starving Africans of all sorts. Quid pro quo in the socialist circle of life, all centrally managed and planned from a singular set of humanist values to the best of our scientific ability. Just don't step outside the line, comrade.

Why? Because we made you.

That is the difference between charity and employment. The donor expects respect forever. The employer doesn't call you when the contract is over. The man with honorable work, makes his deal, does his share, and moves on. The rescued slave must sing the praises of his liberator for generations. It's a problem we have here in America. "Legacy of slavery" is a familiar phrase. If people could have just gotten paid, we'd be over all this.

Which brings me back to Alan Quartermain and his train of native porters, spear handlers, cooks and bottlewashers. Or PDiddy and his entourage of press flacks, personal shoppers and weed carriers for that matter. It's not exploitation. It's work. 

In the genre of "wow check out these weird African animals and tribes" flicks, I'm not very savvy. And for the sake of stating the obvious, you can clearly see why the African nations involved did their best to get whole villages decked out and put all in frame for the sake of the whiteys on and off camera and in posterity. Pictures of elephant are a dime a dozen, but native dance on that scale just doesn't play very often here in the States. I was flat mesmerized, especially for the final shindig. I actually got into that sentimental zone where I'm thinking - maybe we've lost something extraordinary here. I don't know. Have we? It does get back to the question of what a free man does on the daily. After all, it's the Left who wants everyone to have a state guaranteed minimum wage, affordable housing and a small, fuel efficient car with airbags. The Watusi don't want that, do they? So who is going about destroying indigenous culture? It's the socialist, because he can't leave anybody alone. Not in Darfur, not in Somalia, not in Haiti. Everyone must be rescued. Everyone must have health care. Everyone must have instant citizenship in the comfiest nation on Earth. You know, before it warms over.

In my newest favorite podcast, Philosophy Bites, our hosts entertained a guest who talked about cannibalism. We have lost the cannibal. But the cannibal, and the very idea of the cannibal, elevated our thinking about the true natural nature of man. What would we be without civilization? What is it about civilization that helps? What hinders? And similarly in this global economy I ask about the very idea of the peasant, the urban peasant I know very well. Does he work and having done his work can he be left alone or is he rescued and indentured to that act of charity?

Watching King Solomon's Mines says a lot about what 5,000 Pounds Sterling might do and how negotiation over the value of work goes directly to our souls and what may or may not be troubling them. Watch the first encounter with Mrs Curtis and Alan Quartermain closely - everything else, aside from the separate and distinct journey of the Watusi, circles around that exchange. It is in the end, the fate of the Watusi that seals the fate of the questing whites. They are rescued. Then again, homegirl had the Dosh from square one.

I could observe the native Africans from my psychological and temporal distance neatly contextualized in that dated bit of filmmaking. I could see the strengths and weaknesses of the film qua film, and imagine what the directors had in mind. I like the idea that once there was a thing called 5000 pounds and for this one might be set for life, instead of the fact that we are three weeks from starvation if the power goes out in our half million dollar suburban raffia. I look at that Africa and that England and I see that they were once full of free men, and so I am sentimental.

Na'vigation

(some incomplete notes on cameron's na'vi)

Part One: A Tribal, Warlike Culture

I wonder if all of the analysis of Cameron's Avatar is stuck on the White Privilege meme. There's at least one writer who has dealt with the culture clash from another perspective. But it's clear to me that Cameron has some unfinished criticism of America or humanity that needs more exposition.

I find that once one has it in for the dominant culture, its flaws become permanent as do the virtues of all of its victims no matter how great or slight. So Cameron is stuck in that sophomoric muck. Or maybe just his critics are. Since I have already said that Avatar is not sufficiently literate to sustain a cogent critique of America or the West or humanity, despite its attempt, I'll go ahead and talk about what I see as left out. That is to say, here are some things that I think would have to be made explicit if we were to take Avatar's thrust more seriously.

First of all there is the fundamental conflict of the Terran (can we assume that this corporation represents humans or is it just a rogue operation?) economy and the rights of the Navi to self-determination. Can we assume that?

What we don't know is the basis upon which the mining company has established its permission to get mineral rights on Pandora. The company must have either discovered Pandora on its own, or have some tacit approval to acquire the materials. Might it have gotten this from the world around which Pandora orbits? Could the Na'vi we see be some persecuted minority of the Na'vi we don't see? What we do know is that the company does not have a military escort. Its security provision is all from ex-military. They're mercenaries, contractors. Not representing any Terran government. It is therefore, no matter what we extrapolate, a mission which could stand apart from human morals and law. It's only a racial clash if you want it to be.

cameron will never show the flaws of the navi because he has already engineered them to be everything he believes human culture cannot be or once was and lost, which is tribal and connected to ancestry.

one of the big holes in the flick which my son recognized was how easy it was for the humans to beat up the navi. so did the navi have warriors or not? - did they suddenly turn their hunting skills into war tactics?

the navi clans. were they federated? if not, what was the history of the navi individual who mastered the great dragon? why would the navi do so and what kind of authority is that? it's all rather neatly mysterious and ahistorical, and i think it serves the purpose of cameron which is to suggest that the navi are completely pacifist to the point of apologizing to their meat.

but if the navi are territorial, which they clearly are, rather than nomadic, like perhaps the horse clans are, then it's likely that they have had wars with other clans or outcasts. if that was *the* big tree, then there had to be pretenders to its throne.

now it's possible, but never mentioned, that the navi are incapable of that much reproduction, and on a moon that size might have never overpopulated anything or had any such tests of their tribal culture that required them to handle the complexities of cultural dissonance or economics.

something that would have been more interesting, hinted at in the matrix, was that human obsession with sexual reproduction makes humanity a literal plague. this would have been a useful and direct parallel to america's conquering of the west - the simple fact of the matter was that millions wanted in and the only kind of system that could govern millions was something beyond tribalism. both systems cannot be in place as the law of the land.

my point is that beyond the rhetorical question of the authority of the dragon lord, it is obvious that there had been previous calls to war by the possessor of that arthurian sword before, and the law and culture of the navi was to respond to the rallying war cry of whomever tamed the dragon. that was as deep in their dna as anything else in their culture for which they readily sacrificed themselves to battle.

I don't mean to suggest that there is something out of proportion to justice going on here, simply that the Na'vi share with humans respect for the warrior code, and that making war on the Na'vi for territory is a shared value. Nothing quite illustrates this than the scene in which the privilege to speak to the tribe is won by single combat with the tribe's senior warrior. 

For his entertainment to be entertaining, the Na'vi cannot be so alien, and they are not. 

Primer: Almost Compelling

Primer is a flick I found on Netflix last night. It is a babblefest kind of oxford shirt wearing movie - Pi meets Good Will Hunting. It's very intelligent, rather like Plano TX is intelligent. It is emotionally spartan except for the emotion of stress, and it has a kind of odd energy to it, like its characters, starting with four and stripped down to two of a friendship/partnership/co-conspiratorship. Somewhere in Primer is a great story, but it got mangled in the telling, and so it is a film to own and watch four times until you figure out the timeline. But you can't and you won't. Which is exactly the cool point.

What if you invented a time machine that could take you back? An hour, a day. What if you could do it? How do you work your way out of your life? If you're the kind of engineering entrepreneurial bootstrapper who is young a co-dependent on your engineering colleagues living on the verge of suburban stability just above the reaches of semi-loser friendships, then you are in the kind of claustrophobic reality of Primer. And in that regard there is no escape, only betrayal.

But how does the betrayal unravel? What about time paradoxes? Well the first thing about secret time travel is that it takes time. To run a 24 hour day in which you revisit 8 hours takes at least 36 hours. And you have to spend 8 of those hours away from yourself locked away so you can't re-influence what you're doing the second time around. You can pull it off for a while but then an emergency happens - the kind of thing you wish you had a time machine for in the first place, and then the emergency takes on a life of its own which you can't really control and Groundhog Day becomes a nightmare because you have a partner and your partner is your friend and the two of you can't keep a secret from each other which is that one of you is trying to save the other's life. 

Get it? Of course you don't, and neither do I. The exposition in a time travel movie is very difficult especially one like this in which there is nested time travel. But if you could, imagine this. You and I decide to get rich in the stock market by day trading a day we've already experienced. OK. So we both go into our time travel machines and live from the notes we took the prior day we do the trading, and we get rich. But what if, unbeknownst to you, I've already done this time travel twice, so my doing the get rich thing is the second time. I'm just playing you because I know that in your altered future, somebody is trying to kill you because you're rich. And so now I have to time travel twice to change something that we've already changed and pretend that I'm only traveling the first time. But the entire thing is so mind-blowing and stressful that it's making me physically ill. Plus there are all the unknowables, plus chaos.

That's the core that makes the story compelling, but there's no way to expose and express all that well without talking to the camera, and nobody talks to the camera in Primer. In fact, the clipped and interrupted way that people like these engineers talk to each other is part of the chaos of the film.

Anyway. If you have ever been a young engineer, or entrepreneur, then this is a film you must see. It's an excellent thought exercise in causality and credulity, but as a movie, it hurts to watch if you only intend to watch it once. 

Avatar

I knew what I would like and what I wouldn't like about James Cameron's Avatar before I saw it. Everything about what Cameron said about this being a movie that came to him half a lifetime ago is true. The problem is we've heard that story a thousand times.

Everybody is an archtype, which makes this a movie for the ages and a retelling and a retelling. The only way to love this movie is to fall in love with the voice. Instead it is merely entertaining. It's hard to explain why archtypical storytelling worked so well in Spiderman and failed so awfully in Avatar. Maybe it's because (and I'm going to say what a thousand other critics will say) this story is so damned much like Pocahontas that you'd think somebody would sue. It doesn't make me hate the movie, it just makes it clear that Cameron is larger than life and nobody can tell him to grow up and make a film for sophisticates. 

Just the other night I watched The Abyss and the whole stereotypical shebang fell on my head like a ton of daisy cutter explosives dropped out of a cargo plane. Cameron clearly has no time for any military intelligence, only warriors. So this time he made them a paramilitary bunch of mercs - he said it right out front. They're all in it for the ducats. And, as he did with The Abyss and Aliens, he has a narrow shouldered corporate puke calling the shots. At least this one's not passive-aggressive. In fact nobody in Avatar has any time of second thought. The whole damned thing is too epic, almost three hours. No wonder nobody had anything nuanced to say. Even the scientists were blinkered.

All that said, hey I'm an old man. I've heard all the jokes before. What I've never seen and what I never expected to see is this much compute power so effortlessly and seamlessly woven together into a live action film. Several years ago, people thought that computer animation would change the entertainment industry as virtual actors would replace real ones. But here's the news, the story may be a rehash but Cameron's technology is a revolution. I'll say it plainly:

James Cameron has destroyed the uncanny valley.

It is as if it never existed. It has taken one generation of filmmaking, but that old tagline from the Superman movie: "You'll believe a man can fly", has been taken to the virtual limit. And he did it without orcs.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

This film is so unbelievably awful that I'm glad I stole it. Well, I didn't exactly steal it. I got it for free from a friend who ripped it. I don't know how he ripped it, but I'm glad as hell he did the normal version rather than the sort where various people involved in making the film blab over it. Which reminds me to tell you that 'A Scanner Darkly' is complete hooey as a film and if it had any chance of being anything beyond the book, that chance has been ruined by Dick's daughter telling me about some character her father lived with who thought he was crawling with bugs, and thus 10 minutes of film leaves me permanently disgusted.

That's about all the time I took with Sarah Marshall because in a fraction of that I could see that the reason she left naked boy had something to do with the complete ass who was kissing people in the airport in order to 'do something' about global warming. 

I am disconnected to the Christian who wants to show pity on the poor misguided freaks who are the subject and object of this excrescence. Sorry, you'll just have to take your case directly to the saints. As for me, I'm not having it. And if the flick is rated < R, I hope I can show enough of it to my children to disgust them as well. Or maybe not. No. Wrong. You don't send your son to a whore to show him what not to do. You say, trust me, you don't want to subject your immortal soul to that sort of radioactivity. It won't kill you straight out but the cell damage is real. 

Attention all devout Muslims in defense of Hasan, I understand exactly where you think you're coming from. If I believed that American men were like this asshat, I'd want to shoot them up too. I'd sign up to exterminate the kind of cretin who lays a woman in a one night stand and then immediately bursts into tears thinking about playing Dance Dance Revolution with his former babe. If this was the substance of American culture, I'd out takfir you, Abu. But let me help you understand something, and even abet your cause. Credits. At the end of every American movie are the names of the people responsible, and if you watch enough of them, and you have the appropriate software, you can trim down your lists to an appreciable dimension. They are still Them, and most people want Them put away. 

Fortunately for all of us, Them are particularly sensitive to the blistering heat of righteous criticism, which I am exercising here. There's no need for explosives, a finely place excoriation will suffice. And really, I've already wasted too much time thinking about it. 

Die, Fag

I'm now on the lookout for the word 'homophobic' to describe in negative terms any article of cultural criticism. When I find it, I will automatically assume the critic is a wuss and then make appropriate adjustments.

There are, among my contemporaries, several or maybe few, who cannot seem to get over the fact that Malcolm X was assassinated by a black man. It seems to them, the very hight of hypocrisy or conspiracy. I can't remember which, but my understanding won't mitigate their outrage. That is the nature of outrage, by the way. People just want to stay mad. And so I believe it is with those critics who wield 'homophobic' in their arsenal of opprobrium.

The article that launched this minor deflection from my ordinary tangents was over at the Film Freak which was the joint that got me interested, for a week, in Mad Men. In the space of a few paragraphs they assailed a couple of flicks, one about Michael Jackson and the sequel to Boondock Saints. All the time I was reacting, I thought that Boondock Saints was Layer Cake, but I recall them of a piece. Some ultraviolent cool flick with people being bloodied to rock music. But now that I recall the plot of Boondock Saints, I'm actually more ready to concede the arguments.

Nevertheless, the point of my weighing in, aside from my general anti-yuppie sentiments regarding the moral compass of the Hollywood aesthetes and the questioning of the sanity that might consider Larry David a 'genius', is whether or not it makes a whit of difference if someone calls you a fag when they are in the process of shooting you in the head. Or the slightly different question on the matter of homophobia, which is hardly as deadly as say... cholesterol.. whether anyone who can stomach your garden variety shooting-people-to-rock-music-movie should be palatable if one cannot handle namecalling. Is this just another case of calling attention to the mote while ignoring the beam?

Well in the case of Boondock Saints II, given the premise of the original film, probably not. But in the case of 'homophobic' as criticism, probably so. Film Freak has piqued my curiosity and exposed my bias, which is why they remain on the RSS feed, but I'm really on this deflection.

Malcolm is dead, and I still say he was more important than Matthew Shepherd. But what happened to either of them is not commonplace by a longshot. What goes by the screens as 'racist' and 'homophobic' has become such a weak and often witless bleat that the meaning of death has lost its sting. This is why, I suppose, it has become fashion to write movies about mass extinctions and the slaughter of henchmen.

Speaking of which, I caught P2 this Halloween weekend. It was extraordinarily creepy precisely because the victim was quite obviously a woman who had no reason to expect to defend her life in such a manner as she was forced to by the circumstances of the film. She had been completely bred out of her killer instinct, except at the very end of the film at which point the antagonist called her a cunt. She then, like a daemon bit of computer code summoned by remote control, did something more depraved than anyone accused of torture at Abu Grhaib. She burned a man alive.

If we are becoming so trigger-bound within our already demoralized culture that the mere utterance of a single word pushes us into mindless outrage, then that more than anything shows how brittle we are. I'm sure there's a psychological term for that.

PS. I already know what you're going to call me. Try again.

The Top Black Sci-Fi Characters

top black characters in sci-fi

1. morpheus
2. darth vader
3. blade
4. the operative (serenity)
5. the brother (from another planet)
6. ruby rhod
7. simon phoenix
8. captain sisko
9. john emdall / john parker
10. lt. worf


honorable mention

a. spawn
b. mace windu
c. cooper - richard t. jones (event horizon)
d. guinan
e. tuvok
f. uhura
g. dr. miles hawkins (mantis)

Now we debate.

Man's Inhumanity to Shrimp

District 9 is the best movie I've seen all year, and not one that I thought would make me cry. It didn't but it put me right on the verge of tears. 

Law is a manipulation of conscience. It is the contrivance of third parties to do your just thinking for you. It never appears as such a contrivance so clearly as when it is abused or inept. This is not the central premise of District 9, but it is clearly indicated. 

District 9 does a very good job of leaving the parallels intact as well as taking this South African story beyond the context of Apartheid. It is the story of Wikus Van Der Merwe a bureaucrat of the fictional MNU, the NGO which is charged with the care of the alien species that has descended into Johannesburg. For 20 years, the film tells us, all human social work, diplomacy and alien rights management has failed to do anything for the 'Prawn' alien race now numbering about 2 million who occupy District 9. This district itself is a slum, filmed in one of the current or former townships of Apartheid South Africa. Wikus, a young do-gooder has been selected by one of the hierarchs of MNU to be in charge of the biggest program in their history of administering the aliens, which is to evict them from their current lodgings to a relocation camp further outside of the city of Johannesburg. But he's in for the surprise of his life.

The movie describes the aliens to be disorganized, like worker bees without a queen. As such they are singularly unable to organize any resistance and do little but scavenge. They are exploited in all the typical ways by Nigerians who are the only humans who live inside District 9, but also and obviously by MNU, as Wikes clearly demonstrates as he follows the law. This law allows MNU to destroy the alien nests - to basically abort fetal aliens that grow like maggots, external to the alien bodies, in cow carcasses. Wikes describes the popping sounds of the eggs as he orders the torching of such a nest. 

In the course of his bureaucratic duty, dressed in a flack jacket and under military escort, Wikus directs his doucmentary cameraman (from whose POV we are watching), to capture this activity. He finds weapons, a strange chemistry set, young aliens, and all other sorts of illegal activity and contraband. On such a journey he is spritzed with a strange liquid as seen in the widely available previews of the movie. 

The largest secret, even unknown to Van der Merwe but not to his father in law who gave him the relocation assignment, is that there has been an MNU program to genetically experiment on the aliens and humans so that humans can operate the alien weapons which require the alien DNA. Through a series of accidents and collusions Wikes winds up being the first ever human to grow an alien arm. He is forced to use this arm to fire the alien weapons to great success, and before his body is to be dissected and donated to science (and billons of dollar of corporate and government research) he escapes. And, as you might expect, he must now survive within District 9 amongst the aliens whom only yesterday were wards of his state apparatus. 

It is altogether too easy to shoot the barrelfish of the liberal bureaucracy of the MNU which stands as an apt metaphor for the UN and its humanitarian efforts. It is rather for we the living to recognize exactly how liberty must translate for a sentient species which is incoherently disorganized and in our midst. I find myself driven to understand the conditions under which the alien ship was sent to Earth. And while the film didn't speculate, it was clear to me that these were exiles and outcasts, prisoners perhaps. For any civilization that could accomplish interstellar travel would clearly not send their best and brightest to live in a township in South Africa, which was obviously selected for its cultural and legal ability to have a strict bipolar society. 

District 10 has to be made. It simply must. The story is far too compelling for the implications not to be taken up. The difficulty presents itself in regard to the origins of this film. The collaboration between Peter Jackson and South African director Neill Blomkamp began as the combination who would make the Halo movie. As anyone with half a wit could tell you, the Halo franchise has elephantine legs, but also enough legal brambles to trip a herd. Blompkamp has an extraordinary gift for directing the sort of chaotic action of battle, but he has also created and mastered the human / alien / technology interaction in live action heretofore only achievable in videogames. Blomkamp is the director who now owns the neorealism of this emergent genre of sci-fi. And surely this is why Jackson has taken him under his wing and is now going in a different direction. The old master of the Lord of the Rings is stepping down to do Tin Tin, which is great and cool and whatnot, but Blomkamp is now the shortlisted dOOd for pwnage movies. 

Except. 

Except that Spielberg is rumored to have an interest in Halo, which could be a shame. Because Blomkamp has made the most emotionally resonant battle robot in the history of film. The alien robot suit in District 9 was so fluid and responsive that you could feel the man inside it dying through the increasingly pathetic stumbling of the machine itself. And it is not coincidental that it was a kickass battle droid only for the moments that it was controlled exteriorly by the kid alien. So yeah I want Blomkamp to be involved with the Halo movies because I know he has the right eye for the action, but we all need Spielberg to do this and wrest control of the franchise from the legal sharks at Microsoft. 

In the meantime, District 9 is an extraordinarily good and morally resonant story and a kewl movie to boot. Bravo to Blomkamp. We want more.

Seven Pounds

Will Smith has managed to become someone completely other than he has ever been on film. Except that he is still a superman and thusly asking us to suspend disbelief once again. Seven Pounds is a tale of awkward dimensions that is poignant, poignant, poignant. It's the next morning and I'm still all worn out from seeing it.

It is the tale of no exit. Of a man determined to sacrifice himself in the wake of a tragedy that destroys his will to live except to pay a blood debt. It is a supremely arrogant presumption of a world in which no faith brings succor, where only acts of human charity are the acceptable currency, a world devoid of the grace of God. It makes it compelling as hell, and it makes Will Smith christlike. It works in astonishing ways but here I sit the day after unable to comprehend whether I love that or hate it.

I have no use for tearjerker films although I have no problem crying at films. I do so more than ever in my life at this stage. And the pace of this movie is so unpredictably delicious that I could not outthink the manipulations and second-guess the mood swings of the audio cues. The solo piano never stood for tragedy, the canny lyric never lingered in the mind too long. Seven Pounds is extraordinary drama delivered expressly for film with expert screenwriting and direction. This takes a powerful and simple story through interwoven and cascading vignettes and brings it into narrative focus through a love affair. And it isn't until the final minutes of the film that you realize that the love was entirely accidental tangential to the intent of the protagonist. The acting is very good, superb even, given the necessity of slow revelation. Nobody is allowed much room to be at cross-purposes or have their own dissonance interfere with the focus on Smith, but he delivers in a hugely successful understated manner. This is a film about a man with an all-consuming purpose, it just happens to be one that smashes us to bits as we realize the personal dimensions of it and the reason for it.

What makes it work so devastatingly well, is that Smith finally finds hope, and a possible escape from his fate. That escape is the love affair that becomes the center of the film's gravity. It is the most heartbreaking feint I have ever seen in any movie.

The dimension of human tragedy is always a compelling subject. As Will Smith's career matures it is becoming ever more clear that he is drawn to play uniquely heroic characters. He continually faces tragedy in a way that is transcendent. I compare him to three other actors who play heroic roles and he stands out among them for the quality of his choice. Bruce Willis exemplifies a hang-dog determination, an unstoppable ability to go the extra, if obvious, mile.  Denzel Washington stands up to face evil head on with the moral resolve and discipline that is unwavering. Tom Hanks, when he plays a hero, employs an emotional intelligence that makes his path clear, zenlike. Smith now through Seven Pounds after Hancock and I Am Legend and harkening back to I Robot is the purpose-driven hero. A man with a hidden yet undefeatable capacity who must wrestle with the fact that he must walk in human shoes. It is a tangent that his film career could make extraordinary use of, because it is a new kind of hero amidst a sort we may have become immune to.

Will Smith doesn't bother to get the girl. Instead he goes for the gut. He is an actor who has had quite enough fun as a person, and I get the feeling that he's living right offstage and that directs his willingness to be the beginning character in Seven Pounds. When we meet Ben Thomas, there are several flashes where I can't help but be reminded that Smith's own humble origins would bring him to deal with charitable excess. I easily imagine him to be the Kung Fu Santa Claus of my own personal dreams - a successful figure who can afford to spend his life tracking down people and delivering personal philanthropy, or an ass-kicking, one. Imposing justice man to man - that's the business of a hero. Smith never plays a little man, he plays a big man in little shoes who knows that eventually he's going to have to stop tiptoeing and throw down. The difference between him now and in the Independence Day and Men in Black days, was that he was being outwardly brash. Now he is inwardly brash, but the heroic ends are just as large.

How many times can it be done? That's hard to say, and it depends on Smith's willingness to tackle some contemporary madness American audiences are hyped about. He has been a cop, how about a small town mayor? How about a bishop? Why not an aid worker?

I keep thinking of M. Night Shyamalan's style of film when I think of Smith. The mix of natural and supernatural are unsettled in his his world. The ability to surprise is there, but MNS stays in the realm of storytelling for its own sake. Smith is not satisfied with that. That is why he is just a couple roles from being a great American actor.

Valkyrie

I promised myself that I would never suffer through another Tom Cruise movie. And I haven't, although I was a little anxious at the beginning.

Cruise can now claim to have acted next to Kenneth Brannaugh and not look like an idiot. But he chose a character well suited to his lack of dynamic emotional range as an actor and it suited him well. Cruise cruises on cold, composed determination with a dash of impatience and a dab of sentiment. The sentiment dries up and blows away within the first 15 minutes and so we are all OK to watch the plot to assassinate Hitler.

Valkyrie is a particularly stiff picture with a goodly number of old heads attending the plotting and conspiring. For all of the dramatic potential of such a flick it came down to bomb ticking tension and the nervous energy of deception behind protocol. Fortunately, there was a cast that did fear fairly well. 

These days I am succumbing to my share of WW2 obsession now into my fourth or fifth selection the subject in the form of The Hitler Book, which is an interesting volume compiled from confessions made under duress.

Anyway, I give the movie 82%

Richard Burton the Schmoe

As part of my American cultural recovery project, I am making sense of classic movies as well as rock & roll. My reading is sorta temporarily on hold due to an attack of technology paranoia.

In my Netflix queue I am finally getting rid of some movies. The latest two were real disappointments that in the end I found to be unwatchable. The first of these was Brief Encounter.

Now I can imagine that during those days the star power of Richard Burton and Sophia Loren must have been something, but this British romance has all the horsepower of a Reliant Robin. After about 40 minutes of tedium I just turned the damned thing off. Aside from the idea that either of those two, given who they were, could play coy, I now see what the essential problem is. This film was a remake of one made in 1945. A post-war thing made a lot more sense. Anyway. Boring.

The second was unwatchable because the acting of Richard Burton was so incongruous. This was Look Back in Anger. Here you have Burton as the life of the party, sorta jazz musician, who comes home to a rat trap and... well it was rather bizarre. The sort of madness inside the character just made no sense, Burton's fury was so unhinged and so instant and his remorse so thin that you wonder what it was that kept him from hacking people to bits. I may be speculating, but here's my theory. This was supposed to be a movie about a black jazz musician whose uncontrollable rage fueled self-destruction but they couldn't get Poitier to do it - and so it ended up being the Bird Parker story recast in British colors - the movie that couldn't be made before there was a Forrest Whitaker. Anyway. Burton was way too scary and I had zero sympathy for anybody in the whole slimepit. I turned it off.

So Burton is 0 for 2 at playing schmoes in my book.

Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye is the most preposterous chase surveillance flick I've ever seen. But it was still watchable. Why? Because Shia LeBouf gives one of the best lip curling, jaw trembling breakdown and cry scenes ever. Not that there was any emotional momentum behind the moment so early in the film, but he's got the physical acting skill down well enough for it not to be corny. I'm now thinking that I have to go sit through Bait once again to see if it has aged well, same thing for Paycheck both of which are appropriate comparison flicks. Right now I'm giving the not to Bait as the best of the three. I never did see Cellular, and I don't consider any of these to be in the same league as Firewall. And no I didn't bother to watch The Net either.

What's useful about this flick aside from the fact that it couldn't possibly take itself too seriously (does it?) and aside from the fact that I now know that Michael Chilkis can indeed grow hair, is that it's a good view of what might be considered possible. So we come back to it in five years and see how many amatuer panoptic hacks in government actually tried something as preposterous as the evil computer as this one.

I find it interesting because the only reason that these films get you to suspend disbelief is that you follow the gullibility of the characters themselves. Like the people who always trip running away from the monster. So I wonder the extent to which such small credulousities scale up. Which is to say since nobody in the film really made any effort to throw away their cell phone, or give up the altruism of the protecting that thing they were psychologically unable to abandon, such manipulations become plausible.

So let's take that road and see what we find.

Imagine that you, the one out of 20 Americans who bothers to reflect on the real meaning behind Memorial Day, were the target of some extreme coersion of the sort created by the evil mastermind of Eagle Eye. It tells you to forswear your patriotism and go cook hotdogs instead of going to the grave of your father at Arlington. I'm not saying this right. The better context is that of radical transcendence. Remember the philosophical context of radical Islam. God has the right to demand that you blaspheme. So the Eagle Eye premise, despite the incredibility of the technical manipulation, asks a good question. Can your faith in everything you believe in be manipulated to get you to defy the very principles of everything you believe in? Yeah.

And after you come through all that, which way do you go? It's a very Robert Ludlum kind of question, as his heroes were always burned out in service to something that doesn't necessarily deserve their loyalty - something gone awry in a valued institution which momentarily (?) perverts it.

Since I do have some measure of torture on the brain this week, it is the kind of scenario I found noble, if not admirable, in the character played by Denzel in Man On Fire. If he uses obscene methods to achieve moral ends, the price is self-sacrifice. And with that in mind, and then thinking once more about John Henry Eden, we should never give over the authority over life and death to 'sentient' machines. Why? Because their self-sacrifice is meaningless, or close to it. I mean, nobody cares that a smart bomb is destroyed in its act of destruction. Why then should we care about the fate of a machine that becomes a weapon?

Hmm.

Terminator Salvation: A Terracentric Romp

The thing about Terminator Salvation is that it makes clear how much the earlier series depended on special effects. As sci-fi, there's simply too much action in the story for it to be a story. But if you're going to have some adventure on Earth, this one works, mostly.

Terminator Salvation reads like an action movie, and with director MCG it meets a sort of merging of genres which is useful but nowhere nearly recognized. That is to say, if what I saw is what I think I saw, then TS is the first of a new breed of action films, one that draws from both film and from video games. And that's not as bleak a prospect as it sounds for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that Iain Banks has written the best sci-fi in the English language. And until somebody starts making Culture films, there is nothing new to see. Thanks JJ for reviving Star Trek but there's a whole lot of galaxy out there and you nimrods haven't done nearly enough with it. Quite frankly, Alien vs Predator has a lot greater story potential to get us out of the Terracentric realm of sci-fi. So as long as we're Terracentric, hell WW2 is more interesting.

The second reason is that video games are not as Terracentric. I mean, there's some bet that JJ got his mining ship idea from Dead Space, which was a fabulous sci-fi horror drama in space. But even if he didn't, there are huge visual vocabularies to ripoff in the future of film. I'm just waiting to see the crossover between video game art direction and that of film. Watchmen is just the beginning. 

This brings us right back to TS. Now what I thought I saw were a lot of very compelling scenery in the film which was evocative of video games I've played. First and foremost, post nuke Los Angeles was straight out of Fallout 3. That vision is nailed. Second, when they got off the street into the wrecked garden, the scene with the shotgun lesson, that looked very much like the arboretum from Gears where you used the Hammer of Dawn on that Berserker, remember? Of course you do. The view of the flying contraption in Death Valley, where they were testing the Off Signal - when Connor looked through the binoculars, the streams of heat from the engines in orange was just like the transparent animations of the Final Fantasy movie. Excellently done. 

The convergence of these visual vocab is really a great development. I like it. Now if we can only get off Earth. Why? Because the drama of nuclear weapons is extraordinary and we want to see grid fire destroy a planet. Now that JJ has destroyed Vulcan, the quota of boom has been raised. You can't do that on Earth any longer. Besides, the opening cut scene from Star Ocean: The Last Hope is as dramatic as it gets. You simply cannot keep destroying the Earth and imposing draconian utopias in the chastened aftermath, it's so...Japanese. 

The good news is that TS makes good use of the Terminators and the human resistance element. It's not as good as JJ's Star Trek or as good as Will Smith's I Am Legend, but I think it's a lot better than most action movies, and certainly better than any of my memories of the Terminator series. MCG gets one shot in one scene just brilliantly, and it's early in the show. I don't think there has ever been a shot done on film that does upside-down better. Best helicopter crash ever.

Fancy Fencing

The best thing about a good entertainment is that, like a roller coaster that leaves your stomach acrobatic 10 minutes after the ride, you can still enjoy it on the way home.

If you ask me, 'Fancy', is the best line from the new Star Trek movie. Except that that's not what Sulu said. It's what I thought he said in response to the question 'What kind of combat training do you have?'. Even though I've already seen the movie twice (Shh, don't tell my wife), I heard it wrong both times. So I asked last night after the 10:30 show what everyone's favorite part was and I said that part. The Spousal Unit let me know that Sulu said 'Fencing' which was even more delicious because George Takai is a fencer.

Star Trek is a sure footed action flick with an appropriately anamolous story line that works through the simple magic of creating an alternative reality. It does more than respect the heritage, it brings it into vivid relief. This film now bumps 'The Voyage Home' out of the top three for me. And so Wrath of Khan and First Contact remain with Abrams Star Trek as the best films.

There isn't much more to say about the film. It deserves all the hype and fulfills. The casting is superb, especially of the young Leonard McCoy, just bang on for Bones. Abrams and Bad Robot are our fantasy imagination, and this is their golden age.

The International

The best movie you won't see in a theatre is The International. It slipped right by under the fury of Watchmen but was a much better film. And now we know who, it's Clive Owen who has the chance to replace Harrison Ford in dramas of this sort. It's not the best film on corruption ever, but it goes way up there just below the level of Michael Clayton.

He's the Wiz and He Lives in Oz

No this is not a missive against Obama although the analogy is perfect. Rather it is a reflection on the Motown production of 1978 as I watched again last evening with the family.

Seeing The Wiz reminds me so much of the 70s assumptions of a Cold War malaise, approaching calamity and the naive birth of a young black post-soul consciousness throwing off the fetters of an older generation. Adults changed into children all over that film. Diana Ross' Dorothy wasn't dreaming of getting away and going somewhere over the rainbow so much as she was an overgrown child with a dog instead of her own child - a naif who had never been south of 125th Street in Harlem, who only got swept away by accident, chasing a puppy less afraid of the world than she.

The arrival in Oz begins at night. The evil witch has turned the Munchkins into grafitti. They are freed by the accident as with the original and dance with glee. They wear apple caps and windowpanes. They do fliplops and Arabians. They are led by Miss One, a woman with an abacus around her neck reminding me of something I was supposed to know but never really did, growing up in LA. We black people play The Numbers. It is one of our cultural characteristics, like the soul stirrings and hip shaking with the tattooed couplet rhyme and the $10 word for emphasis. It is only when Ted Ross' lion plays against it that we realize how very highschool much of this was. But Ted's for later. For now I only remember that I was supposed to know, on the 'blackness' quizzes I got in my own high school days how exactly to figure out the day's number. It had something to do with the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Tell me if you know.

Oz continues into a post-apocalyptic ruin, a tenement overrun by crows with nothing but rubble around the sole existing building - rubble that extends to the eastern horizon. The King of Naifs, Michael Jackson executes his great performance to futility, the crow national anthem 'You Can't Win' (you can't break even and you can't get out of the game).

Attending his ecstatic liberation is the kind of fragmented aphorisms of context-free fortune cookie commentary that spews from his chest of garbage. He dances and spins with Ross across a yellow brick bridge. The cabs won't take them anywhere. They have to walk the walk to wherever it is they're going, and there's the only decent lesson I can take from this new version, something I interpret in a way I assume to be completely different from the old racial complaint.

At some point we get to the Poppies, seventies versions of today's booty girls, who by any contemporary standard are remarkably tame. And while I can certainly remember a lot more talk about herpes in those days than these, I find a bit of nostalgia for the time when sex was dirty and everybody knew it. Such is the abbreviated lurid segment of the Wiz treatment, sex and drugs, shacking up in a one-two punch to the soul. It tumbled our naive heroes to their momentary doom in a puff of purple smoke, and we all knew it.

Evilleene, or however that name is spelled embodies all sorts of hideousness at a limbic level. She's got evil skin, an evil fat frame bulging with blisters of red junk, a scathing peircing voice and a whip. Oh that whip. All she needed was a red hankerchief on her head and she'd have been the Beulah from Hell. I forget the actual archtype's name - check your Donald Bogle for details, but it's all in there. A kind of inverse Chaka Khan's I'm Every Woman. Everything you don't want done, she does it naturally.

And that was the last of them, I think. Because the Wiz mixed the young with the old and put babies in with Lena Horne and chic black socialites who presaged the Obama head angle walzed around the World Trade Center just to be seen green provided the new counterbalance to every grubby Fred Sandford there ever was in Hollywood's Apartheid. Or so it seemed to me as a child when Ren Woods and then Stephanie Mills became heroines from being the Dorothy of our dreams. The Wiz was Diana Ross' last gasp and marked her need to get out of our lives, the old ham. Leave it to Michael, please. Put more and more and more black people on the screen, not just the same old heads coming back to Charleston Blue, whatever the hell that meant.

The Wiz stood on the edge of the old soul world and presaged the new post-soul world. And kids like me back in 1978 knew we were supposed to respect Nipsey Russell, but we didn't know for what. I guess he was about as upitty as a black entertainer could afford to be, and thus a mere shadow of Don Rickles - but I could tell he was trying. But he still coudln't say shit, literally, which probably accounts for the outburst of hiphop, my generation's dubious contribution to the art of entertainment. But it took a post-apocalyptic vision to accomplish it, back in the days when we could still only imagine a Chocolate City which required Aretha Franklin and James Brown. The Queen and the Godfather. Of what? Of Soul. How quaint.

Beyond that, you could see they had no idea of what the future might hold, and so held on to power way too long - God damn you Baby Boom, you greedy, self-centered fools. You cheated your way to the top and now you blew it all. Some days I feel like Charlton Heston on the Apes beach looking up at charbroiled Liberty, the very icon of the 70s films that were the soul of that generation. They knew they were headed to self-destruction, and in that little spot where they left things untended some little black weeds sprouted out - suffused with naive hope out of a ruin that there would be a road to ease on down.

So, as usual, there is no great Wizard. You have to believe in yourself. You have to take frightening journeys with unbalanced half-wit characters through bizarre lands to recognize... what? Your ability to survive absurdity? Why go through the trouble? Why suffer through the vain rantings of a wanna-be king with a name like Fleetwood Coupe de Ville? Why run through a maze chased by smelly monkeys? Why? Because Bert Lahr and Judy Garland did it a generation before, and we have to have our own funked-up version of the same old lesson without which some black obsession would suggest its all only a white man's world. We couldn't even leave them Oz. Them. Us.

The Wiz is now three ways an American Classic as it joins the repetoire of standards of summer theatre. There was the original, then the black cast, and now the kid cast. My own baby girls are going to audition this week. Everyone wants to be Miss One, and we'll see. But all the girls this time around will have the traditional black hairdo of braids and extensions down here in the South Bay. We already spent our hundreds a couple weeks ago. This time the pendulum swings post-modern, and The Wiz is for kids, like it should be. I imagine that it's progress for this next generation to step into the roles and understand literally what it takes to put on the show, rather than wait for the cast album to hit the stores and the movie to make ABC Sunday Night At The Movies. I did it is always better than I watched it.

So now I critiqued it.

Watchmen: Laughing Through the Pain

Watchmen the movie, unlike Iron Man the movie, doesn't know how to laugh at itself. And so when what's unbearable crosses the screen and you say 'what!?' there's not much cushion. That said, the film starts with probably the best opening credits I have probably ever seen.

Watching the beginning of Watchmen is like believing you are seeing a great American film worthy of Oliver Stone at his best. But somewhere in the latter parts you start to say, damn this is a long movie. The problem is that Rorschach is too much with us, but we don't feel his pain as we did in the book. Instead of being the conscience of the story, he's just a ugly little brute with mommy issues, which he always was, but.. But the smell of the city is not the city's own, it's just rubbed off on the characters and the city disappears because nobody relates to it. It would have been too difficult to pull off I think, and so music pulls more weight - putting us in the mood for what is essentially wooden acting. We all end up a little like Dr. Manhattan, whether these characters are alive or dead they still have the same number of particles.

Speaking of Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen goes down in history as being the naked man movie, or Blue Man Group Porno. There's no way you can't not look at dude's junk, he's a human V. So half the time you're trying not to look and the other half you notice that the camera is hiding his crotch so that you can't look. It's an awful distraction, primarily because he's speaking in this slow disinterested monotone which is still unnaturally tender.

In the end, I asked myself yet again why I bother to watch movies about comic book characters and if there is anything at all happening in American film if this is all that's happening. But that's only because I am tempted into believing that movies are worth thinking about simply because of their extraordinarily beautiful filmmaking. It is truly possible to do anything on the screen, there's nothing visual that is an inch out of place. In fact it is a movie that begs to be slowed down for easter eggs and other fanboy flotsam. It's all cleverly there, I'm quite sure.

Instead, all of the drama leading up to the nuclear brink and paranoia is spread to wide across a net of verisimiltude that is actually part of the sweetness of the film. That Kennedy, that Nixon, that Kissinger, that Iococca - they were all perfect. I was right in this film's 1985. But the kinetic energy of the Defcon countdown didn't translate well.

BUT.

Rorschach was flawlessly cast, down to the grunts. And the mask, perfect. I kept looking to see if I knew this guy because he seemed awfully familiar and perfect for the role. The music was, as I said, just right smack dab on target in every case. The 80s of the period was done to perfection. One thing you can say about Watchmen, is it has got style. The camera work was superb - there are some shots in this film I still can't figure out technically. 

I have to give Watchmen two grades. You see I found it more compelling than Sin City whose story was completely incoherent. At the same time it failed to hold together well in terms of dramatic momentum, and completely dropped the ball in certain spots. On the other hand it was visually stunning in a mixture of periods that were truly evocative of our country. If I were the sort who liked to indulge in categorical critiques of America, I would say that this film mirrors America in its greatness and its troubles and its flaws and all that kind of NPR-speak. I'm still seeing images from the opening credits in my mind as I speak.

Speaking of images, I imagine that I do have to deal with the graphic aspect of shooting a graphic novel. There is a bit of a voyeuristic quality to the sex and violence of the film. It has a lot, very little of which is any fun to watch. There's a whole lot of grunting going on. The photorealism of the entire film is reminiscent of those murder scene photos from the 30s and 40s New York I've seen somewhere. It's just bloody grisly. It makes me slightly uncomfortable to counter the vague bleatings I percieve from reactions of fellow conservatives and comic afficionados to various reviews in the mainstream press. Sure there's a boy-like boy that gets started with the simple ideas of comic books that none of us are afraid or ashamed to admit. But there's also a reality-based discipline in intestinal fortitude that keeps us coming back to stories of blood & guts in the struggle for good against evil, order against chaos, purpose against nihilism, meaning against absurdity. The difficulty I have of course is that this quest is not adequately satisfied by this fiction. We must go elsewhere. But that doesn't change the fact that Watchmen tries bravely, and unfortunately less successfuly than the book, to address the bloody battles which are entirely inherent in the travails of American superheroes.

In that way, Watchmen goes awkwardly back to back against Dr. Strangelove which by some ironic twist can be taken more seriously because it's funny. Any yet by comparison, there are still far more people with far more of their ordinary lives at stake in Watchmen, which for all its flaws remains more human than Strangelove. Can you remember one woman in Strangelove? Me neither. Oh yeah well the hot assistant. That's drama.

I have the feeling that Watchmen will bear a repeat watching. The Comedian's entire angle could be taken a bit more seriously. We'll see what other's have to say. Watchmen can and will be discussed because it's that good, and that disappointing.

Hulk Not Smash

The only interesting thing that caught my attention at the Oscars was Philippe Petit's balancing the statue on his nose. Aside from that, the action montage was pretty cool. That was my inspiration to PPV Edward Norton's Hulk last night. I liked Ang Lee's better.

Norton's David Banner in this movie sets up the franchise perfectly, and for a throwaway prequel to something Marvel obviously has up its sleeves, this is the movie it was supposed to be. But you know, no matter how much emotion and great acting you put behind comic book characters, they're still comic book characters.

Quite frankly, I think America has lost its ability in this moment of the zeitgeist to care a damn for comic book heroes - not even of the X-Men variety. Watchmen is right on time and the voice of Rorschach will have our ears burning. I feel guilty for even having bothered to watch.

Mr. Poppins

It took me all of 10 minutes to raise my blood pressure and hopefully by the end of this paragraph it will be appreciably normal. The occasion would be Frank Capra's 1938 flick, "You Can't Take It With You". Since I don't expect more than a small bit of twist in the plot, I'll put the thing down and accept that it stands no test of time so well as "Holiday" with Hepburn and Grant both being meditations on the twists of the soul the caretaking of money foists on folks.

I've not seen a film that so blatantly twists around a particular notion of the responsibilities of business. But then again, it was just a happy movie. I figure people just on the edge of the Depression needed some kind of feel-good message to show that money isn't everything. So before I go after Capra with both feet, I'll take in some more context.

Magnificent Obsession

Magnificent Obsession is a cornball flick. It is the sort that I find fascinating too - a tale of morals and manners and altruism. Something the wealthy Americans of the post-war era needed. As a melodramatic overview of our morals and dreams, it's a watercolor work of art. 

Some time this afternoon between my run to Karl's Jr and the Asian Water Place, I was thinking about Islam, and why I don't have a Christian reason to support Israel. The thing that bubbled out of my brain as I merged into the left lane of PCH was that their DNA is not far apart. Oh yes, and it was in the context of why 'The Day The Earth Stood Still' was such a sucky flick. It makes no sense for sentient civilizations capable of engineering that genetically hybrid thing Klatu was to archive Terran fauna at the scale they did. The DNA is simply not that different. If intelligence evolves in an emergent way, then the paths converge - thus the Singularity, thus Judeo-Christian merges with all the sky god religions. The differences aren't so great. Which means that the Klatu aliens were fratricidal, like all them Semites. Our moral instinct is therefore to show the similarities and the differences. And eventually we will. With film.

So Magnificent Obsession, like the Philadelphia Story and several other classic American films I like, are immediately translated by me as a habit I've had since childhood, into a black cast. But while I was watching this one - the only person I could think of as Rock Hudson was in fact Wesley Snipes. He's the only black actor I can think of who can play an intelligent and sensitive badass. Jackson can't do it. Denzel isn't bad enough. Omar Epps could pull it off but you can't make him look big. Delroy Lindo could do it, but I've never seen him do convincing romance. Fishburn is just too damned bumpy. Hmm. I'm fresh out. It leaves only one man, now that I have gone through the lot. Eriq LaSalle. Eriq LaSalle could play a snot nosed millionaire playboy who suddenly gets religion falling in love with... hmm, who's the woman? I suppose it would have to be Angela Bassett done softly, which she could do very well. 

Translating Magnificent Obsession, which has a very subtly Christian undertone, and too damned many ethereal choruses in the background when somebody says something 'profound' into an Islamic themed motion picture would be the job of a proper multicultural artist. I would have thought, way back in 1988 when I got on board that wagon, we'd be knee-deep in that kind of talent by now. Perhaps not until movie production is even cheaper will the industry not be a single file line of ass kissers - meaning some kind of anime something. Perhaps that will be the final great contribution of the videogame industry. Books about manners don't have quite the impact of watching men and women do what they do. Sorry.

You cannot look at Magnificent Obsession and not feel like you're watching, at least you can't from my generational perspective, animated versions of Barbara Ann Bread. (Well what do you know, Googlewhack). OK how about Little Debbie? You know what I mean. You cannot for the life of you imagine these women naked - they had a kind of naive respectability about them which was an affect that in the end actually made them respectable. Everybody in contemporary film and TV is gratuitously naked as compared to Agnes Moorehead, not that she was a romantic figure in this or almost any film - but there she is in this one, the stern and proper nurse; she could very well have been wearing a burka throughout. But you wouldn't mind that because she was supposed to be respectable, which is something we understand at the compiled end of Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethics. Women who aren't sluts shouldn't dress like sluts - or undress like them for that matter. Today it is de-riguer for a woman who is supposed to be attractive to have at least one introductory scene in which she's acting like a model - the introduction of the fiance of the First Son in the new season of 24 is illustrative. The little twat gets petulant because her man wants to spend 20 minutes talking to his old best friend instead of roll in the hay with her one more time. She's liberated. She takes her jollies seriously. 

At least in the 70s feral motorcycle flicks the gratuitous show of boobs was, well more obviously gratuitous. Now we look at women in long dresses as if something has gone horribly wrong with their sense of self. 

This recession could be a very good thing for us conservatives. Sex could become complicated again. Speaking of which, I just caught a bit, while falling awake and asleep of Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, and it suddenly seemed completely obvious how men and women of his temperament could talk their ways completely out of marriages. It's astonishing when I looked at those arguments between drooping my head down, how emotionally unsuited for anything approaching marriage those pathetic souls were. I'm going to get through those again and give myself the comfort of knowing I undid myself well. When I was 13 and watched 'Billy Jack' I didn't realize that was a rape scene. It seemed kinda cool. I figured that's how it went, you know, now that pre-marital sex is OK. After all, it's the 70s and everything is better now than in the old-fashioned days. More freedom!

Rock Hudson was, of course, homosexual. We all know this in hindsight because we're supposed to. And it was a secret in Hollywood, or an open secret or something, because it was supposed to be. And films like Magnificent Obsession poured a great deal of time and effort into demonstrating how a fool who expects everything from the world might become a wise man who contributes instead, and how difficult it is in that kind of moral world to find love. True love worth pursuing. For our hero it takes years. But how is the sex? Isn't that the bottom line - how did Rock do it? How did Jane Wyman do it? Wouldn't it be interesting to know that Rock and maybe that other hunky guy were doing it? That's what enquiring minds want to know these days. Because 'how is the sex' is what the question is all about, if you can find out. Which is why a smart producer would keep the details of his actors' sex lives under wraps. At least that's how it used to be when in the years like 1956 when they still made movies about true love, ethical true love that takes years to achieve back when women wore elbow length gloves and strings of pearls that never suggested cleavage. All the 'how' about sex was still generally a private matter between respectable people. You could make those kinds of movies today in an Islamic nation I bet. 

What is America's Magnificent Obsession today? It's such a catchy title that you want to just send your lawyer to talk to their lawyer so you can use it in a commercial about underwear or high cholesterol foods. If I had to guess, I'd say that Radiohead gets it right in that song Creep. 

I don't care if it hurts 
I want to have control 
I want a perfect body 
I want a perfect soul 
I want you to notice when I'm not around 
You're so fucking special 
I wish I was special 

But I'm a creep 
I'm a weirdo 
What the hell I'm doing here? 
I don't belong here 

We've been convinced. Well, I don't mean me in that we. You've been convinced, my beautiful Americans, that you're not good enough - that the complexities in your life are your fault. That if you could just win that game show, if you could just... You know. The next movie I'm going to write about is THX 1138, and the preview is that what they do is that they confess. You know. The people. They confess to a god they can probably guess does not hear them, but they confess anyway. 

Americans don't confess. We obssess. 

We keep looking for a perfect way out. We keep trying to make ourselves better, holier, stronger, faster, smarter, more ethical, more *something*. Because the guy next door disgusts us. He drinks the wrong beer, and those pants! What is he thinking? There's judgment out there, America. The world is judging us, right? And when the shit comes down, I don't want them to think I'm like you. Sooner or later the shit's going to come down, right? And we're going to be all wrong - I mean look at all the *stuff* we've taken from the planet. That's what makes us all wrong, right? 

I'm toying with you. Sorry. What I want you to do is confess your sins. To yourself is ok. And then give yourself permission to go ahead and feel content. Rock Hudson and Eriq LaSalle, they had to prove it to Jane Wyman and Angela Bassett. And the Jews and Muslim stars of the same film had to prove it as well. And once we saw them prove themselves worthy of true love, with all their clothes on, somehow the fact that everybody in the film was stinking affluent or stinking rich didn't smell so bad. It's an old story about how somebody who is achieves noblesse. It's rather about exceptionalism. Exceptionalism still counts - it always has and it always will. It's in our DNA and our DNA converges over time. Somebody just has to take a little extra time and translate, or run parallel versions in our imaginations. 

I had nothing else to do and I wasn't sleepy so I decided to let you in on that. 

Strange Days 2009

As some of you know, some fraction of the value of this blog is that it carries context with it. Some of it is historical and some of it is in real-time opposition, contrast and synergies in the comments. But something just came up that makes me think of the historical - although it is outside the blog. It's the movie Strange Days.

Strange Days was the first DVD I ever purchased. I remember because of the coincidence of it being about a new way to consume information. For those of you who don't know, it's a story that centers around a sort of drug dealer who deals in memories. There is a device, in 1999's future according to this film released in 1995 but made many years earlier in the wake of Rodney King prior to the LA Riots.... This device allows one person to experience another's thoughts. So the whole film has this anticipatory feel to it, anticipation of social collapse which was in the air during those days. I would say that this was the last film that I took very seriously as illustrative of the sort of doomsday Y2K millenarian social breakdown of the sort that my bete noir Nulan continues to anticipate.

In one of the opening scenes to set that stage, the protagonist aptly played by a shaggy Ray Fiennes drives down Hollywood Boulevard as the radio voiceover speaks of school shootings, expensive gasoline, teetering economy. We see the LAPD as paramilitary enforcers with APCs on the street, roving gangs and somebody mugging a Santa Claus. The entire point of this in the film is to play up the sense of a powderkeg society - and Fiennes finds a memory tape that documents the execution of a political rapper the equivalent of Chuck D at the hands of the LAPD as well as the brutal rape and murder of a prostitute who was a witness. Obviously - take Rodney King to the nth degree, with multiple rapes and murders and have the evidence all on full sensory tape and you have the perfect storm for revolution. The tale of intrigue surrounding the discovery of this evidence is the story. Everything was thrown in the mix.

As a young progressive, this was the kind of cultural production that got all eyes burning. As it happened, I took this film particularly seriously because I was aware of it as it was being made. There was a call for extras - they needed a multicultural mix for a climactic scene. I and my girlfriend were hyped to participate, but she more than me. She answered the call and related some controversy about the ending as communicated to her by Angela Bassett who stars in the film. As you could imagine, back in those days, progressive politics tried to intervene in the very process of making such a film.

Fourteen years later I squeamishly sat through the brutality of this film with an eye towards placing it in the context of 'feral motorcycle films' of the 70s days of malaise. Yet it stands up to time very well as a fine litmus test of several tropes I deal with in the crossfire of political debate today.

I expect that the themes of this sort of film will be explored again. I find it an interesting take on the future of the past - in terms of explaining what people used to think, or perhaps what some people always think. The film avoided being preachy in that it didn't portray any of the main characters as everyman. Surely the suburbs and ordinary middle class seemed to disappear into a Los Angeles that looked like a rave turned inside out, but like most action thrillers, there isn't much for ordinary people to do except stare with their mouths open - to be innocents and marks, people who get pushed out of the way on the stairs during chase scenes. So you can argue that Strange Days is not social commentary about the way we will be living. But does anybody give films like this such an easy way out. I think not.

Have you seen it?

The Day The Earth Stood Still

It's difficult for me to describe the level of abject capitulation of the remake of 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'. It is the most shamelessly invertebrate portrayal of humans facing doom that I have ever seen on film. If you are going with the expectations of seeing anything updated in this remake, you're bound to be disappointed. Why? Because there is a level of thought which is completely absent from the new version, and that is the matter of compassion.

It's probably more accurate to say that compassion is an afterthought and absent from the logic of the story on both sides. In the original, the alien Klatu spent a good deal of time working to gain an audience of world leaders. He wasn't in any sort of hurry. Reeves' Klatu, is rather heartlessly delivering an ultimatum after a day and a half. He's about as comfortable in his human body as the bug from Men In Black.

Even from the perspective of a Hobbsian bargain with the robot Leviathan Gort, the offer isn't even made. In the original film, the one-eyed robot was a fail-safe policeman under which all of the civilized nations had voluntarily placed their law-enforcement. Instead of administering justice to the baddies of Earth, it merely goes on a rampage of Biblical destruction. In the original, Gort was Robocop on a tight leash, in the new film, he's little more than an atom bomb on a hair trigger.

The thing that makes this film so hideously bereft of human emotion is that it concentrates on rather thin stock characters following orders. I can imagine that the committee writing it deciding to go with montages of panic in the streets around the world rather than to add more speaking roles of ordinary people faced with crisis. As a disaster movie, it's a disaster. War of the Worlds, Cloverfield, The Day After Tomorrow, all very flawed films were all more involving.

Certainly, thoughtful people will see through the shallow Earth-First posturing of the film. But surely there are millions preparing to be enchanted by the kind of bitchslap from space the film offers up. The swiftness with which the so-called scientists capitulate in this film is utterly cowardly. And as if to make up for the simple and obvious need for human survival they place the entire emotional center of the film on a kid, who displays more common sense and emotion than the entire rest of the cast combined. Alas, he is nothing but a kid.

What truly astonishes me about this film is that there is not one kiss anywhere. There are teary hugs but only between the female lead and the kid. She, by the way, does her best acting in realizing within a split second that the awesome power of the alien is implacable - her begging and blubbering is perfect. The power of love, redemption, courage and morality are like stickers on a blank sheet of paper instead of woven into the fabric of the plot. I expect a lot more from my sci-fi and so should you.

However if you are somewhere beneath the emotional maturity of my 12 year old daughter, you might think it cool to see that the cluster of civilizations beyond our technological reach finds collecting frogs and squid more interesting than saving humanity. Wait, that's exactly what a lot of twisted humans think. Oh. I get it.

Somehow I am stuck with the image of a pumpjack stopping its job in service of humanity as the most poignant moment. Somewhere somebody is cheering. More's the pity.

The Deer Hunter

The Deer Hunter is a very large film of the sort I might think to watch if I wanted to learn something about America. Having never seen it before, it reminds me of what something like "Life is Beautiful" might look to Italians.

It must be a film of profound resonance to a certain class of Americans growing up in a small town rough and tumble 1970s. Today, it's doubtful that there is much steel to be made as it was in those days. Tomorrow there may be no automobiles to be made as they are in these days. The Deer Hunter illustrates that boyish, drunken foolishness all paid for by a day's honest work in a small piece of America not too smart for itself to believe in God and Country through trials and tribulations until the bitter end. It strikes me as a film, at this late date, marking the end of some innocence but also of the permanence of some moral certitude.

I can imagine some looking back at the film and seeing an entirely naive America, one chastened to recognize now what the psychological tribulations of war meet out.  I don't see it that way. What I find admirable about the characters in this film is that they are well adjusted to a certain type of domestic violence contemporary filmgoers would shun. There is no pretense in Cimino's ethnic Pennsylvania town. The people of the town are not simple or plain, they fill out the dimensions of their own lives, merely unburdened with the rest of the world, content to deal with what is directly in front of them. Their loves, hates, jealousies, fears all make them complete, not their comportment to any sort of ideal.

As a war movie, The Deer Hunter does a fine job in describing heroism. The simple and plain courage of De Niro's character is played straight. He never wears his uniform with irony, never mocks the import of the struggle he enjoined. Never tried to make more of his position in all of that than he was. He was always the kind of man he was and at war and proved himself clearly to be the better man. He was true to his friends, to his hometown, to his honor throughout. If war makes fools of many, there remain a few who, even without great intellectual or spiritual gravity, manage through it standing. De Niro's Michael understands 'this is this' as he explains the meaning of the single bullet - there is a time when no excuses matter.

Claiming Mo Better Blues

These days, my insomnia is under control, but I can tell that I'm about to have another bout. I was up until 1 in the morning Sunday night watching that old Spike Lee joint.

I cannot, cannot look at that film without thinking of the fact of that world which was my young adulthood. As one of the last big black cast films, the love story that is Mo Better Blues puts me right back to the immediacy of yearning for success in all ways. Trying to get the moola and the strain it puts on associations. The need to be loved. Bleek Gilliam was the lead dog protagonist in a way I could very much identify.

There was something I rediscovered in the scene in which Bleek looses both of his lovers. The blank expression on his face is absolutely perfect - the very vision of a man being lectured about something he simply doesn't want to hear. It makes sense in its own way, but does all that crap actually apply to me? And he's stuck because it does It's classic.

The bonhomie of the players at the club, the ribbing and joking with Robin Harris retained all of the spontaneity I recall from such days. The haircuts, the clothing, the music are all period perfect. I think this is becoming one of my favorite films - I'm going to have to watch it from the beginning.

Talk To Me

I finally saw 'Talk To Me' and it hit me in the Bryant Gumbel zone. I had forgotten that I had it.

Once upon a time when Bryant Gumbel was the only black sophisticate on television besides the dude on Mission Impossible, I used to sit and watch him while sweating through my shirts. It took a long time as a kid before I could be comfortable that the black guy was not going to screw up in front of everyone 'and send the race backwards 100 years'.

Talk To Me, is finally the most mature look back at the stylized 60s. It picks up an angle as serious as The Spook Who Sat By the Door, with the kind of sophisticated, anachronism free portrayal of the day that we deserve. Without a lot of hokey black and white montages interspersed, Talk To Me does a good, unsentimental, yet emotional job of bringing us back to the days of porkchop sideburns and the slow burning to the ground of Jim Crow America.

It's the story of two black men, one a doer and the other a talker, both from the streets of DC who find in each other an opportunity to transcend. They are a portrait of styles and ambition in conflict, one an ex-convict, a bad man from the bad side of the tracks speaking in the ribald tones of pain and abandonment, a street guru whose rhymes you can easily imagine being the doggerel fueling a thousand black ministers' oratory. The other is a slick operator with everything to prove, a daring man with a bold plan to manage the new black voice of America into a transforming force, a man with six balls in the air, including his own. They need each other, they respect each other, they triumph together but they ultimately fail each other, each by failing to do at all what the other man does so well.

I could feel the climactic scene coming a mile away, and I could feel myself starting to sweat. It was the debut of Petey Greene, the man with the mouth and the drinking problem, on the Tonight Show. He punts, of course, which is why so few of us have heard of his name. He might have been another Redd Foxx or the successor to Dick Gregory, instead he was not.

All though the film, I felt some sympathy for Green. In his own way, he foretold the decentralization of media - ordinary people talking to ordinary people rather than communications product following the dictates of the same old means of production. The fundamental truth of Barry Gordy being a pimp might be said. Holding that fact in abeyance didn't save anything but decorum, but ultimate everyone's character flaws defeat them. If we have merely moved to a level of communication that makes all defeat public, it may not be a boon until generations have lived in that fishbowl. If everybody is a punk-ass at some level, should we all always see that level? I'm not so sure. For only a short time in all of our lives are we truly actually beautiful naked. Walking around with X-Ray Spex is sick. Yet Petey was what he was, a hustler and a drunk, a raw man not built for saying more than anyone around him could say, just ballsy enough to say it. In the end he was not a vehicle for himself or anyone else - his talent could not support him. And so he drifted back to the bottom.

A lesson.

Burn After Reading

I'm getting harder to entertain, especially in the genre of spy movies. But the Coen Brothers' latest film is still entertaining.

There's something really deeply missing in this film. The premise is great. Have a story about a farcical number of love triangles, as with the French classic 'La Ronde' (and there was an episode of Seinfeld following that too.) and mix it with a spy thriller. So you get one fired spy dude whose memoirs kick off a comedy of errors so convoluted that the CIA itself cannot figure what's going on. What a brilliant idea.

It's too bad that this film is so chock full of stars that it doesn't quite work, each of them mugging it up on the screen not being funny. Brad Pitt has maybe one funny line in the entire movie. I can't remember what it was. George Clooney plays a great character but I kept finding myself staring at his beard to see if it was real. Why the closeups in a comedy if the guy's not being funny? I wanted this movie to be a lot more hilarious than it was - it seems that the Brothers have lost their comic timing altogether. In every way that No Country was slowly paced, I can see the Coens wanting something light and rompy, but this one just falls apart.

What's missing from this film is the intelligence of the fools. What made Blood Simple and Raising Arizona so gawdafully funny, as well as Fargo when it was, had everything to do with the utter absurdity of people who were actually smarter than you might think, getting themselves into impossibly complex and desperate situations. This time, everybody in the film, well the ones we spend the most time on is played as an idiot, Pitt especially - taking up entirely too much share of the screen.

Frances McDormand and John Malkovitch save this from being a real stinker. McDormand, in a measured yet manic performance manages in a couple excellent scenes to convey a sense of female midlife desperation in an extraordinary way. Malkovitch explodes with apoplectic rage, frustration and condescention. Those two alone generate all the dramatic tension in the film.

The biggest problem with this film is that there were too many stars, and they all lived too long in the film. More dead bodies and more unknown actors would have made the deadpan required of Coen's script work better. But if you had to use big names, then Brad Pitt should have been Owen Wilson and George Clooney should have been Ben Stiller. On the other hand, maybe Burn After Reading proves once and for all that only Guy Ritchie can do Guy Ritchie, with the exception of Woody Allen's 'Small Time Crooks'.

Traitor

Traitor is an extraordinary film about the moral courage required to fight terrorism. It is one of the first post-9/11 films that deals with Muslims in such a way as to require no disclaimers or moral fudging. It is probably the most honest film on the subject that is in any way entertaining. In fact it is marvelously paced and gives more dramatic tension to the consequences of moral integrity than any other film in the spy genre.

Don Cheadle plays a devout Muslim born in Africa, trained in North America, working in the Middle East. His background and motivations are opaque through most of the film as we discover him through his own circumstances and through the eyes of two FBI agents determined to bust him, outside of their jurisdiction. We discover him selling explosives and serving time in a Yemeni jail having been busted for the act in that country. His laconic performance shows a man both seemingly tortured by his conscience and yet determined to ply his trade as a demolitions expert in as holy a war as he can find. He is no crusader, nor pawn. He is a thinking man of God gifted with a dangerous talent trying to be of use in a world of incompetants in conflict. He incurs a life debt to a man in prison and discovers that man too is engaged in jihad against America, and gets deeper into a network of plotters with audacious plans in their war. He is both emotionally, spiritually and tactically tied into this network and becomes their technical mastermind, rising to the top of the FBI's counter-terrorism most wanted list.

As with all great thrillers, there is a twist. Cheadle's character, Samir Horn, is more than he appears to be, just as we have suspected at the beginning but began to doubt as he actually cold-bloodedly detonates a bomb at the US Embassy in France. As the clock ticks, Cheadle is a man trapped between his own conscience, a massive terrorist plot, and the closing net of FBI pursuers.

This flick is too good to spoil. See it. It is the best close-up drama involving contemporary jihadi terror ever made.

Six Great Car Chases

Hey. I'm on vacation. I know. But I deserve it.

So I'm thinking car chases. Which are the best? Well, there's easily a top twenty but I'm going to go straight for the top 6. Why six? Because it just has to be these six for these six reasons, but I'm not going to number them because they are all great in my mind for different reasons.

We start with Ronin. There are so many car chases in this movie to choose from, and yet it is still a highly intelligent film. You've got to hand it to Robert DeNiro for driving like he's actually scared, which is unusual for car chase drivers. But what is great about Ronin is the sheer number of angles from which the car chases are filmed. First person, at the driver through the windshield, at bumper level from a car in front, in profile from outside the passenger door, low angle third person, first person from the back seat. Just amazing.

Next is a classic favorite of mine from To Live and Die in LA. What's great about this car chase is that it was done with big hunking ugly sedans that really couldn't go that fast. That's what made it so dramatic. It has a classic tribute to the old movies in which a car challenges a train and wins. Then, I'm fairly sure it was innovative in that it was the first LA River car chase, to be replicated again and again, but also the first wrong way on the freeway car chase. But my favorite part of this is right at minute 8 where you can really see how squirrelly and out of control this old Chevy Caprice Classic is.

No top list would be complete without The Matrix Reloaded. From the moment that Trinity smashes through the chain link fence until Neo rescues Morpheus and the Keymaker, this is non-stop action. Of course the Agent who leaps from car to car and rips the roof off and Trinity's wrong-way motorcycle action are classics likely never to be repeated. Not to mention just having a samurai sword. Truly great.

Now I'm saying that the coolest car chase ever was from Against All Odds. No crashes, no scratches. No guns, just a pure ego driven race. On Sunset Boulevard in LA. Between two convertibles. A Ferarri and a Porsche. It doesn't get much cooler than that.

In terms of pure awesome radical destruction, I'm going to have to give it up to Michael Bay. The problem is that it's hard to know whether to give it to Bad Boys 2 or to The Island. On the one hand, Bad Boys 2 has a car on a chain, upside down and on fire dragged behind a truck at 70 mph, and then a boat spinning in the middle of the freeway. But The Island has train axles pitched off a truck that just demolishes cars and trucks speeding behind. It's really annoying to suspend disbelief as you must in The Island, so I'll give it to Bad Boys.

'Three men. 254 kilos. That was the deal.' The opening scene of The Transporter is all about the car. You know what's coming, a great car chase. With a nice tribute to the Keystone Cops,this chase has got humor and thrills.