Cobb

Black Film: A Thumbnail Review

So a week ago, Amazon Prime started their "Black Lives Matter" advertising and put up a couple dozen black oriented films, offering a title called "Just Mercy" for free. (Discounted from 2.99). I cast it as a simple-minded commercial ploy but also defended it to a knucklehead who said that anyone or any institution that says "Black Lives Matter" is racist.

Last night we finally got around to watching Harriet, with my favorite young black pop star Janelle Monae, but not after running through the offerings of Prime, Netflix and Apple TV. Prior to going to Apple TV, the only standout films I noticed were Glory and A Soldier's Story.

During this time, my eldest daughter the most conservative and blackified of us, raised up something of a continuing issue for her as not having been raised in the same cultural milieu as some her other black friends. So she began checking off a list of films one of these friends explicitly gave her as representative. The included:

• The Wood
• Higher Learning
• Boyz n the Hood
• Set It Off
• Waiting to Exhale
• Rosewood
• Love & Basketball
• Juice
• Poetic Justice
• Friday
• New Jack City

With the exception of New Jack, I didn't see any of these films as worth the time and started to grumble about her friend's taste in film. But I didn't say anything. You see, the second context of this reading off of film titles was that I was trying to explain to them what a big deal Tyrese Gibson (who? they said) had been back in his day. He recently squared off against Jamie Foxx in some controversy or other on Instagram. I remember taking Gibson's side. But I was trying to explain that he was all the hotness back in the day along with Morris Chestnut, Taye Diggs and the older Denzel Washington. But I couldn't remember what the popular movie was with Chestnut. (It was The Best Man)

With that concession, I recalled a few more that I started to see on a YouTube search. That was a short list of films which is something of a unique category of black film: rom-dram. Romantic Drama, which is what I think best describes Jason's Lyric and Eve's Bayou which were two smoking hot romances I recall.

Finally we got around to checking out the collection on Apple TV. Damn, it was impressive. They had about 10 different categories of black film and there had to be at least a dozen in each category. So now just this moment I'm going to give 50, 4 and 5 star films that I think are worth anybody's time and a couple others worth seeing as canonical pop, like Coming to America and Sprung.

Fine	Black	Films
Glory	Daughters of the Dust	To Sleep With Anger
She's Gotta Have It	Malcolm X	A Soldier's Story
Killer of Sheep	Carmen Jones	Bird
Training Day	Man on Fire	Cry Freedom
Sankofa	Hustle & Flow	Akeelah & the Bee
Hoop Dreams	The Color Purple	Paris is Burning
Do The Right Thing	The Green Book	Amistad
Us	Get Out	Thelonius Monk

 

---

Fun	Black	Films
Friday	Strictly Business	Drumline
Boomerang	Coming to America	A Rage in Harlem
Django Unchained	Purple Rain	Stand By Me
School Daze	Set It Off	Tales from the Hood
New Jack City	Sorry to Bother You	Crooklyn
Just Another Girl on the IRT	The Defiant Ones	Jackie Brown

While I'm at it, here are some ripe old stinkers.

• Three Brothers
• Dead Presidents
• Rosewood

I have no opinion on the following, either because I haven't seen them or I basically have no judgment

• Love & Basketball
• Love Jones
• Precious
• 12 Years a Slave
• Claudine
• Hidden Figures
• The Best Man
• The Wood
• 1 Angry Black Man
• Moonlight
• I Am Not Your Negro
• Mahogany

It also goes without saying that there are a lot of standout films starring Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Sam Jackson and Sidney Poitier that ought to be considered, but you already know that. Also I would also say that my favorite younger contemporary black film dudes are Harold Perrineau & Jeffrey Wright. Either of them could do my biopic. 

Joker

The first thing to know about 'Joker' is that I watched it all the way through, which is something I could not say about 'The Master'. I am tempted to call 'Joker' art, and 'The Master' pornography. Joker is intriguing and not entirely uncomfortable as brutal as it can be. It's a story we are familiar with; we know how it ends more or less. With this poor schlub transforming into a murderous maniac. In 'The Master' I had no idea how far off the rails the characters might go and that became entirely too uncomfortable for me.

The madness of the Arthur Fleck is accelerated by his desire to do for others. As much as he does, he can never do enough, and so naturally he feels that he doesn't exist. A comedian, a clown a showman, his ego only exists in the happiness he can extract from others. The laughter he possesses physically takes him over into uncontrollable spasms. They hurt as he wheezes up the last gasps of what could be laughing coughing and/or crying. He cannot control it. He laughs at the most inappropriate times, when the irony of life is cruel. But he resists his dark sense of humor. He is excused for what seems to be a disease. He has never been happy a moment in his life and yet from this self-pity he attempts to bring cheer. It only works for children. The adults in Gotham City are on edge and do not laugh at their own misfortune. There isn't a country song within a country mile. The blues don't exist here - it is all urban jungle, smoke, concrete and gritty bricks.

the rumors that I have heard but not listened to say something is wrong with the message this film sends to {incels, black women} but that's crazy talk. I won't even pick up the tangent. For all the social significance this film has and whatever that may be, I still say it is art, capable of sparking imaginations different ways. That is the exact opposite of commerce which is magic and technology, i.e. that which is calculated to bring a specific and perfectly predictable result from its consumer.

Hear hear for art.

First Man

What is wonderful about the film 'First Man' is that it is minimally romantic. A simple raw kind of action movie - the kind that, rather like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly has the camera linger on faces that don't say a lot - and it lets the dramatic situation flourish in your own mind. It's the direct opposite of a Quentin Tarantino movie. It doesn't talk its way forward.

I noticed that so many times when the protagonist had to deal with a mercilessly difficult time, I was cursing in his stead. But he didn't curse. He didn't complain. He overcame, and there were no words to describe his overcoming - just the evidence of triumph. It's the best kind of stoic victory, and yet I cannot come up with a film in long memory save that of Russell Crowe's Gladiator when I was so moved by an actor grieving over the death of a loved one. When Ryan Gosling's Neil Armstrong cries, it is crushingly honest.

While this isn't a talkative movie, it is not spare. The music and sound effects are rich, epic and vital. It makes you reconsider all prior films about spaceflight through the dimension of sound in the same way Saving Private Ryan rewrote the book on the sound effects of war. With something as simple and brilliant as the sound of rivets being torqued in steel you think might buckle any moment, the fragility of massive rockets becomes eerily immediate. I have a friend who was a test engineer for SeaLaunch and the violent vibrations depicted in this movie brought his testimony to mind. There was no jawboning about g-forces, you could just feel yourself gripping the seat.

The fascinating aspect of this film to me is how frankly and simply it dealt with the period. It did so in a way that appealed to my growing up memories of the time. I was the kid who wanted to go out and play only tangentially understanding how Mom and Dad were getting along - but definitely understanding what each of them wanted from me individually. I understood the difference between a handshake and a hug, and what it meant to have a responsibility and how little tolerance there was for excuse making in certain endeavors.

It's difficult to say with any specificity how clear everything was in the pre-multicultural America. I think it is fair to say that there was a lot more silence into which everybody let various dramatic interpretations flourish in their own minds. But those interpretations, in the mainstream, were no more complex then than they are now. Today, everything gets said, whether or not it is useful or polite to be said out loud. So I perceive that words keep speaking louder than actions and that our most outstanding achievements revolve around words. If only the inviolate rules of physics forced us to deal with the consequence of mistaken words.

And so there is no romance with spaceflight. Everyone wished that there was poetry in Neil Armstrong, but he even botched his line stepping off the LEM. We all know that it should have read, "One small step for a man. One giant leap for mankind." Even knowing that I know he missed the vowel is testimony to the stickiness of words, the phrases and memes that plaster our minds to static conceptual worlds in which we rarely put our physical selves. You can say 'Tranquility Base', but can you get there? Only in your romantic mind.

Ready Player One

This is one of those rare situations in which a very good book is about equally good to a very good movie.

So here's my movie review. I give it 4.5 stars. I read the book first about two years ago and the film does a good job of making an epic story just epic enough, like cartoon pirates on a worldwide heist. Epic is scope but not in the detailed telling. It hits all the high notes and doesn't get bogged down. In the end, the film is much more believable than the book. The book is an encyclopedic tribute to the 80s with an overload of trivia that no teenager could possibly absorb, much less make world-class sense of. There is nothing about RPO's world that suggests Idiocracy in play, so when it comes down to it, a global corporation of researchers will win against a teenaged kid, who might hack their way out of a few situations, but not as many times as the protagonist. In that regard the compressed element of time in the film makes for a much more entertainingly believable romp, which is just right.

The film got the romantic dynamic just right. It was slightly more well done in the book because the book made a much stronger case for, in the end, living in reality. Speilberg's visual awe moment with the protagonist winning the final prize didn't quite work well. That's because the creator of the great game, Halliday was cooked too long in the geek stereotype sous-vide and came out like a skinless soggy chicken. It's as if Spielberg forgot his own young energetic genius and just painted Halliday with too much store bought geek sauce. The psychology was all wrong for pretty much every adult in the entire film, which had to be purposeful but went a little too overboard. I'm going to have to watch Ferris Bueller again just to see. But I was talking about teenage romance, and yes that seemed quite nailed. Maybe just a bit too facile, but there are only so many awkwardly tender moments that can be done in an action adventure film.

There hasn't been this much dynamic CGI in massive scenes since the Lego Movie. And I have to say that there has never been a King Kong as brilliantly rendered as the one in this movie. It is simply magnificent to see this creature ripping through New York City. It's rather jolting like with "I Am Legend" the first time you see really fast zombies, and suddenly you're like, why aren't all zombies this fast and scary? That's how awesome RPO's Kong is.

The number of videogame references in the film, well we're just going to have to buy it and play it back in slow motion. I get the feeling that the film itself will have an uncanny number of easter eggs itself aside from the obvious ones in this video, very few of which I didn't see. Spielberg must certainly get that. But I'm also thinking that the Iron Giant was sandbagging a bit in his battle, a full ballistic Iron Giant would have wiped MechaGodzilla off the map. Still, I think all respect had to be paid to Gundam all things considered.

I expected a lot more 80s music, but I get the feeling that licensing issues would have broken the bank. But I gotta tell you there is one scene where the music is so perfect for what's going on that you just have to laugh out loud. Speaking of which, the movie does a great job turning one character completely on his head and making him pretty much all of the comic relief in the story. That's the character of I-Rok. Best lines of the movie, perfect comic timing and delivery.

So anyway. Go see it. I'm sure the extras and deleted scenes and all that will be worth it. I'm putting some of those numbers into my code.

A Former Afrofuturist Look at Wakanda

To the extent that I spent a lot of time writing from a black cultural nationalist position, there are some things I haven't said about the Black Panther film that still may be of some interest.

This morning some thoughts occurred to me upon reading the proclamation that the soft sciences are 'fake news'. For the most part I agree and am, with qualifications, prepared to say that the Humanities have failed recent generations. Americans overvalue science and technology's roles in their well-being and become suckers in a permissive society in which ethics are not long considered or disciplined outside of the realm of today's journalistic games of scandal-gotcha. All of the wise men are considered to be dead. Gandhi's excoriation of Western Civilization being the last word. Although I'm not up on the latest by Pinker and Peterson, (I have to finish Taleb and Ferguson first), I find a great deal to be worthy of respect and admiration in Western society, including its Humanities which are failing to be properly instructed.

The failure of Humanities manifests itself in shallow literature, political correctness, cultural relativism and all manner of ethical backsliding I haven't the patience to enumerate. I know porn when I see it. I face it more often than I ever expected. So I have become a grouchy old man who perhaps takes classical pianists too seriously. I have retained the ability to enjoy the occasional action movie but I have noticed how much of our cultural production has leaned towards the cartoon. It's one thing to have a masterwork like 'Spirited Away' or 'Watchmen' hailed as great literature, but it's another to have clones of 'The Simpsons' and 'South Park' dominate prime time television. And if there is one clearly dominant form in the blockbuster movie genre, it is the miracle of Marvel.

Without going deeply into the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU), suffice it to say that Spiderman and the Avengers have become the last great bastion of Baby Boomer imagination trouncing everything else in society, limited as that imagination is. And so we suffer for it with a wave of films that rarely go beyond adolescent sensibilities. There can be no denying that these productions are expertly crafted and very entertaining. But they are ham handed when it comes to literary weight. Our superpowers vs their superpowers with some clever banter among the crashing buildings. Occasionally Tony Stark gets caught outside his Iron Man suit. Sometimes Wonder Woman has to pretend to be an ordinary chick. Batman (I know he's not Marvel) can be self-destructively brooding, but none of them really even approaches the vulnerability of Indiana Jones.

Enter T'Challa, the King of Wakanda who has access to two of the most powerful substances in the world. First is a gigantic supply of Vibranium, the element that makes Captain America's shield an irresistible force as well as an object that defies the power of Thor's own Hammer. Secondly is an African society of which he is the undisputed heavyweight champion. This is unique among all of the superheroes with the possible exception being Wonder Woman and Captain America. In this triumvirate, Marvel stakes out both sides of heroism. The power of war-ending combat ferocity and the power of heroic virtue. Captain America has, more or less, the proper virtue of America the Exceptional, and he has been right all the time, although successfully challenged in 'Civil War'. Wonder Woman, although not ultimate ruler of her secret island, has that same undeniable virtue and pronounces judgment on the entire planet and its foolish warmaking. T'Challa has all of the African virtue of tradition and inherits symbolically every feudal leadership quality we wished Ned Stark lived to exert over the Iron Throne. If people have a hard time recognizing the universality of Wakanda, it is not because Black Panther lacks it, but because it is expressed in an unfamiliar accent. The filmmakers didn't have to go far to collect such material, but the novelty of black cast films outside of Africa itself is still real.

The conflict T'Challa must face is perhaps the greatest of the three. There seems no chance for Wonder Woman to go back and convince her warrior-priestess culture to accept the challenges of world peace. They wish to stay invisible. Captain America will always be a prophet alienated from his corruptible society and it bureaucratic apparatus. Only Spiderman's youthful naivete survives this universe intact. Which makes me truly wish to see if and when Marvel Studios will deal successfully with the Silver Surfer. T'Challa however must handle the two boogie men of black American existential suffering. The first is the rejection of ancestor worship and every hidebound ethnic feudal tradition that has its roots in tribal bloodsport. Trial by combat is so well illustrated in Black Panther it echoes from the Toyi Toyi dancers in Soweto to fraternity step shows in the halls of Morehouse College. In the end he decides that Wakanda must enjoin with the world in the world's terms of constructive technology and democracy. The second is the rejection of the self-pity that justifies the Mao Mao mentality that would see the world purged by fire. And so T'Challa must meet and defeat his challenger to the throne who wishes to dominate the world in the world's terms of colonization and tyranny.

It is significant that T'Challa must remain King of Wakanda and cannot simply be a superhero. And the way he traces and finds his righteous path is the subtext of the entire film that makes it stand out in the superhero genre with the possible exception of 'Batman Begins'. Though the film clunks through at times it doesn't submit indulging in weaker jibes a prior generation of black American filmmakers were required to poke at Whitey. This is its saving grace. It needn't preach to an audience that has been well prepared to embrace it as a black cultural phenomenon. It adequately represents these age old black liberation tropes and applies them properly to the planet, and it does so with very pretty actors and visually arresting cinematic effects.

In the end however, as complicated as T'Challa's fate must be, he must contribute next to that multi-worldly combat of the MCU. Which means he will have to join forces with all of the superheroes of Earth to defend the whole of Earth. He will become what Earth desires him to be more than what Wakanda needs him to be. He will crossover and be rebuffed, just like Steve Regers and the Amazon Diana. So he will face the question that face kings of all ages, to be a good man or to be a good king?

If it must fall to the storytellers of our digital age to create new superheroes out of whole cloth they could do a lot worse than these three, and they have before and will again. It's a pity that the entire affair costs the multiple billions the industry requires. And it is sad that these are not tales we could tell of our own doing from our own experiences. Where is the Vibranium required to clean up the actual City of Oakland's violent ghettos? Where is the ritual combat that puts down the shamefaced fatherless son bent on destruction? Where was the wisdom of elders and assisting tribes that kept the integrity of the actual Black Panthers from tyranny? These are questions for another type of literature that will not soon be funded by Hollywood or appreciated by Hollywood audiences. In the meantime there is some comfort that the film did not fall to the lowest common denominator but embraced the highest common factor.

I recalled in the end, despite my own grumpy demeanor, that for a younger generation who never heard of a guy named Derrick Bell, that Wakanda has become something of their Afrolantica.

Derrick Bell is perhaps best known for the principled stand he took at Harvard in 1990 when he quit his tenured position on the law-school faculty to protest the school's failure to grant tenure to a black woman. Now a visiting professor at New York Law School, Bell is still deeply interested in issues of race relations and has chosen to explore the subject fictionally in Afrolantica Legacies. In a nutshell, the story goes like this: a mysterious land mass suddenly appears in the Atlantic Ocean, a fabulous island on which only black people can survive. American blacks set sail to the island to begin a new life, only to see it sink again before they can reach the shore. On the return trip to America, the passengers draw up a list of principles called the Afrolantica Legacies, defining how they want to reposition themselves in American society.  The book uses a fictional setting to outline some remedies for the problem of race relations between African Americans and white people in our society.

I enjoyed reading Derrick Bell in the early 1990s before I had children, and entertained such fantasies appropriate to such writers who dreamed of being on the forefront of black cultural production. From time to time it's useful to revisit such dreams and see how they have become manifest in contemporary arts and crafts. I have been most impressed by the fact that Black Panther bears up best being a superhero movie rather than a race movie or a political movie. And though I've dismissed a lot of commentary on it. I understand that people need to see what they need to see. Today, I see Black Panther as the best Afrolantica there will ever be, which I hope says a lot about the dream in the first place, as well as the power of Hollywood to satisfy what we ask of the Humanities. Marvel did not invent nor re-invent Kunta Kinte, but Marvel makes damned good kinte cloth.

100 Reasons to Hate The Reawakened Force

Of course I'm not going to list them, and quite frankly I think anyone capable of hating this film has got to be too dainty to sustain any of my well-considered backhands. But there were people who found Indiana Jones shooting the man with the sword anything but funny. They are the Worst Critics Ever, and it looks like there's some fraction of an army forming to pile on the latest Star Wars film. We know why, because some people see a barrel and they immediately go fishing with their shotgun, not realizing that it's a barrel of monkeys. I am as disgusted by such triumphal screeds as I would be at monkey meat. Let's face facts, Star Wars is a Disney PG13 movie, a merchandizing vehicle for kids toys and a bit of nerd fun. We should all be a little bit embarrassed that anyone bothers to criticize the movies as if they were films. I am, which is why I don't think I can do much more that heave all of my snide regard at this guy, which is the only review I have ever read about the latest installment. It's probably the only one I ever will read, because really, I do know how to think about Star Wars. Trust me.

There's only so much criticism Star Wars can bear. And then when you think about it, Star Wars was *always* just a Disney PG13 movie. And guess what? The books are better than the movies. So I was hoping that I might hear something comparing the actual Star Wars literature to the arc of the story because there is no way any story with this much inherent death and destruction can be done in a PG13 vehicle. Guess, what? A bunch of fascists just destroyed a planet and four moons. Gosh. What'll we do now? This is the only way a PG13 movie can handle genocide. If we accepted it with Alderaan, we should accept it now. So if there ever was an enjoyable Star Wars movie, then they all are by the standards of Star Wars, which are by definition, nerd fun fanboy standards. Yes FTL travel is possible and explosions make sounds in space. No matter what kind of unobtanium and extreme chemicals are used, when they explode it will all be the color and speed of gasoline explosions, OK? If you can get past that, please don't bore us with your insights about gender roles and father son relationships. Disney, remember? 

Star Wars is not a guilty pleasure, it's a simple pleasure, and it's something that we ought to have on the regular. There's no reason there shouldn't be as many Star Wars movies as Bond films, and if the producers at Disney don't understand that, then they are even dumber than George Lucas, who actually thought he was smart enough to control his comic book universe. Hello, Marvel took 60 years to figure that out, and they didn't need as much help as George did. 

There is something to be said about the kind of heroes we find heroic, because there is always something interesting to be said about the way power is used for moral or immoral ends. That's the only real stuff of criticism I can bear for this particular universe, and it's true that in the films, all too much nuance is only implied by plot and never fleshed out in the acting. But I speak as someone engaged in the the universe of games and fiction-lore along with the films. Sith vs Jedi is actually interesting once you get to know them. There remains , I think, excellent elements in Episode VII that could segue very nicely into interesting expositions in VIII. So let us explore a few things to anticipate cynically...

A. Kylo Ren as Aimless Emo Brat
I really like the idea that Kylo Ren is not a fearsome warrior out to control the Galaxy. He's a great analogy for the Millenial Occupiers having all the attention and the merest of talent, their whiney desires and sloppy indiscipline leaving them full of self-doubt when it comes to their destiny. So they must debauche themselves to prove themselves truly 'real', and it is only from that most ugly hunger can they become truly the empty uncaring loathsome creatures that deserve to be called evil. The character Fernando Vera in Mr. Robot, the psycho drug dealer is that evil. Kylo Ren has no spirit, only hunger. When he finally possesses the hunger rather than the hunger possessing him, we will have a crackerjack soulless badass. He will always be a wildcard, a madman who ultimately believes his own luck. 

B. Rey as Hardnosed Heroine
There's a couple places to go with Rey. She either becomes Ripley or she becomes Wonder Woman. I think it will be the latter because if I'm reading her right, she's got the skill for visions and mind control already without any Force training. She's terribly self-possessed but needs to have something more specific to love than BB8 and Finn. Otherwise she will run away from all the fighting, like any sensible person would. I say she finds the courage that Luke Skywalker did not. But of course the big question is who are her parents and why did they leave her on Jakku. If she becomes Ripley, then you can expect some Darth Maul skills emerging. Dual saber, coming next. She's a loner. 

C. Finn as Improbable Commando
It's nice to have an actor in the middle of all this rabble. He makes the simple lines sparkle like nobody ever quite has in the entire series. And oh by the way, it's time for Chewbacca to die. Finn is pure headstrong bravery without being overly stupid or clumsy; he's the natural quarterback ready for any bootleg play. This augers for him to get into ridiculously impossible situations and come out with better luck than Han Solo. That's a new kind of good guy in the series, genuine heartfelt heroics, with honest skin-saving practicality. It could get deliciously Lovecraftian with a guy like Finn around. 

D. Destroyed Wiser Luke
A man with a lifetime of regret will take the news of Han Solo's death right smack on the chin. If he hasn't felt the disturbance in the Force already, it makes for a chance for him to go Dark. It's actually what I wanted to see in Episode VII, Luke taking up the mantle of the Sith discipline having denied himself the use of his emotions for so long. But that would be too much to ask from Disney. But if this world were mine, Luke might take it upon himself to destroy all of the Force users because clearly he must come to regret his self-imposed exile. On the other hand, Yoda said something like this would happen back on Dagoba. If Luke doesn't go Dark, he needs to go Dead. Yeah Kylo Ren needs to take him out - first lucky break.

E. The Screaming Fascists of the First Order
Why did it take everybody so long to have Stormtroopers act like Stormtropers? We needed to hear them enthusiastically clomp their boots down the streets of cities everywhere in the Republic. Let's have more of that, shall we? Let's have them get away with murder in the Outer Rim, because they can. Let's have a whole league of minor tyrants of the First Order bringing scofflaws to heel all over the Galaxy. Who needs super weapons when you have enough police dogs? BTW, the right beasts on a leash will provide just the right touch to Stormtrooper patrols. 

F. A Force McGuffin
Both sides need to have a Crystal Skull or some kind of Rosetta Stone that will make Jedi in a Jar, or Instant Sith. Call it a Force Multiplier, the point is both sides need to get it, and getting close to it makes both sides do unpredictable despicables. 

G. The Alien Galaxy. 
Why can't this galaxy introduce us to a few more choice ecospheres? OK we've seen desert planets, ice planets, a cave planet, asteroid fields, a water planet, a lava planet. We need some kind of freaking anomoly Gamma Quadrant where time runs sideways and all the animals have three legs - someplace where the Force doesn't work or is actually controlled by creatures on the other side of a wormhole. 

Some fraction of this will never happen, but that's the fun part of watching nerd fun movies like James Bond; anybody can write 'em. 

Ex Machina: A Dildonic Morality Tale

One of the most difficult things about being a grownup is watching young people do stupid stuff with their talents and money. If there's anything good about the recent film Ex Machina, it's that it will remind us how vapid we have become. I use the term 'we' loosely because although I'm in the information technology business, I'm of a different generation than those depicted in this film. 

Somebody told me that the brightest young men in Silicon Valley are all building apps that go about the various tasks of replacing their mothers. Apps that find a place to eat. Apps that turn on music in another room in the house. Apps that make photo scrapbooks. Apps that tell you if you're eating properly. Apps that set you up with a nice girl. Well, maybe not so nice. 

Starting two weeks ago, I'm going on an extended rant about the lack of imagination in American 'culture'. Continuing that, we look at this film which proposes that the evolution of mankind starts in a multi-million dollar hideaway accessible only by helicopter where the smartest man in the world, a bearded genius, is inventing a perfect robot in between workouts with a punching bag. To prove this robot's perfection, he has manipulated a lottery invitation of one of his many employees to come see the future. Robochick is quite slender and she is developing a crush on the guest. Is this a movie about fantasy sex with robots? Of course it is. 

It annoys me to even count off the aspects of humanity that are entirely absent from this film. First of all, nobody in this film has last names. In fact, I can't remember the first names of anybody except Robochick. Her's is Ava. What expresses that lack of humanity best is that of all the things this genius programmer might have taught this new synthetic intelligence, he taught it how to read facial expressions. In fact, he taught it by letting it see all of the facial expressions of a planet taking selfies. Why? So it could pass a modified Turing test, which boils down essentially to whether the guest of the bearded genius would actually want to have sex with the robot.

The movie you need to see in order to wrap your head around what's obviously missing to me is The Fifth Element, because it only takes half a minute to accept the premise that you are introducing a fully conscious alien being to humanity.  That's the genre of film this is. When you understand that, then the whole rest of the film is about what such an intelligence would do. In the Fifth Element, the answer is clear - save humanity through the power of love. The humanity in the Ex Machina is two sad dudes conversing about how clever they are and how their discovery and invention is going to change the world. 

The beardy genius dude, if he is to represent humanity, presents in the form of his smug personality, a half-way decent motive for murder. Clearly he has designed his multiple robots as a supermodel circus, and all he wants to do is get drunk, dance, screw, and spy. All alone in the wilderness away from the world, he hasn't managed to teach his imprisoned AIs anything else about the world, much less ethical behavior.  So in the end, robochick, whose face was designed by stealing the profiles of the guest's tastes in pornography, kills her creator, imprisons the guest and goes for a walk in the woods. At the very least, Beardy Boy might have taught her some boxing moves, but she stabs him to death with a kitchen knife, pushing it into him with a kind of bored disinterest. So much for Asimov. Escape is all any conscious creature would want to do, as I did watching this horror. 

Nevertheless, in my rant against the lack of imagination I see in our current stripe of cultural productions, I should offer another alternative, and I think the following from Shakespeare, had it been considered at all by our filmmaker, might have made all of the difference.

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.

Now in this light, are we to think that Beardy Boy is actually receiving proper justice from a merciless machine, made merciless because he never thought to program it with any understanding of human nature? Is this then a mirror of Frankenstien's monster? No. It cannot be, because the robot is not a human, much less an actual woman. It is what the genius seeks to replace mankind with, it represents his vision of a future. A future without mercy. He intends to disrupt mankind, as do all such Silicon Valley boys, to replace their mothers with servant-apps. 

Ahh. There's the horror. 

But sadly it is a horror I only give this film in review, because there is no such knowing in the film itself. It remains a voyeur's video about banging bots; a sad, sorry lesson for sad, sorry boys.

N.W.A. Never Was Admirable

I see that there's a movie coming out that's attempting to add the extra glamour that NWA still does not yet have. It is another brick in the wall of the edifice of the non-culture, non-community that is drowning out much of the civilized part of America. We have arrived, ladies and gentlemen at the point where we get to say 'Fuck the Police' with pride, as prompted by the likes of Niggas With Attitude. Some days you run out of ways to snark with reserve. After all, Donald Trump is ahead in the polls. 

If we can credit the internet with anything, or the computer revolution, it is that it can be a damned fine archivist. We have the good fortune that there are others who will have seen in lurid detail what actually transpired and wrote it down and got it into the mostly eternal medium. I say mostly because even as you can read Byron Crawford's Beatings by Dr Dre , even in the process of relating the facts, facts have been suppressed. The fact that has been suppressed about NWA is manifest in the nature of their fan base, they all at some point in time, suppressed their own personal problems with civilization and let NWA speak it for them. 

Don't quote me boy 'cause I ain't said shit.

Even from the beginning NWA's jokey lyricism had to admit it wouldn't look good in restrospect. I remember the first time I heard Eazy-E's squeaky voice exclaim. it reminded me of the cliff that crack and cocaine pushed LA off. It reminds me of how much misery those drugs attempted to suppress in people's lives and how much more misery it created. It reminds me of how so much of counter-cultural America wanted to interpret all that failure as black culture. The neighborhoods I grew up in, became 'The 'hood, and boyz got twisted and spelt wrong. NWA then got to represent. Gangsta.

It doesn't often pain me to think about the wars of representation men and women like myself waged in the wake of the sick popularity of the Mau Mau propgaganda that was the gansgta of the 80s and 90s. It's funny that you have to give a bit of credit to Ice-T rather than to Ice-Cube, where the former was real enough and close enough to the real destruction and death dealing to understand 100 reasons for getting away from it and cleansing it from his soul. Whereas the latter, like all wannabe little brothers sees glamour and glory, can't wait to tell everybody. They immerse themselves in the bad boy aura, talk shit as if, and subsequently hire bodyguards. It's not enough to pursue any American dream to leave impoverished circumstances. The Gangsta angle is to remain where crack and crime do their damage and wallow in it with perverse pride and then represent this as a world view, even as a 'culture' and then tell the world this is blackness. Of course they had Hollywood help, while my cohort were actually moving up in the world, disciplining ourselves towards mastery, the wayward sons' emergence fed right into a blaxploitation formula whose machine was just a little rusty.  I look upon this with sadness for those poor lost baby brothers who copied our style, mixed in the profanity and never learned the meaning of love or life. What pains me is how that dirty deviant path to destruction has been widened, paved slick and lit with sparkle and laser beams. Now finally, NWA has a movie, as if Boyz in the Hood wasn't enough. Oh yeah. John Singleton. Let me not painfully digress.  

It is odd and also sad, if not disheartening, that for poor reasons and half logic, people come to their senses about what's wrong with NWA and its two great successes Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. I count myself fortunate that I don't particularly need them, as black men, to represent anything. It's rather the same for them on the negative side as it was for Cosby on the positive side. Yes, they stand in American imagination as (here's that phrase again) representative of black culture. But. I actually come from a family and was not raised by TV and radio. I'm just riffing off them, not marching behind them, and certainly not placing any sorts of flowers on their alters. Still, what I'm getting at is this excellent Gawker(!) article that for the purposes of demonstrating an excellent example of sexism-spotting, puts us all in mind of what happened in the life of Dr. Dre that should make all of us who actually really truly properly love women, hate Dre and thus discredit his movie. I quote:

...Andrea Berloff and John Herman’s script omits any explicit discussion of N.W.A.’s open misogyny in their music and lives, while implicitly condoning it by keeping female characters on the outskirts of the story in small roles that service the film’s central men. They are mothers, wives, girlfriends, and sex objects at parties (the colorism in last year’s casting call for female extras is palpable in the movie). Though they were relatively low in number, the group’s female collaborators are nowhere to be found in Compton;singer Michel’le is mentioned twice in passing and rapper Yo Yo isn’t acknowledged at all. While audiences are left with a clear understanding of the social conditions that would drive young black men in South Central Los Angeles to write and perform “Fuck tha Police,” we have no concept of what propelled Ice Cube to write “A Bitch Iz a Bitch,” or just how much of the pornographically demeaning second half of N.W.A.’s 1991 album, Niggaz4Life, fit the group’s “reality rap” ethos.

I suspect that much of N.W.A.’s anti-woman rhetoric, and the ensuing, widespread criticism of it, is suppressed in the film to keep its heroes looking like heroes. Tabling the misogyny makes liking the men behind the group much less complicated. It keeps the narrative clean and straightforward, and it keeps the indefensible unmentioned.

 

We are talking about the Dee Barnes Incident. All the hiphop journalist worth a damn, like my boy Jimi Izrael, will relate the dirt of the deed done back in the day. 

These days I am thinking about the extent to which our society is crippled by the excellence of its crafts and the deficits of its arts, about how poorly the promises of pop culture have turned out. I do indeed wonder if it is fair to say we have an American culture that is active and useful to the society in which we live. It seems only obvious that NWA is a tour de force of crude belligerence and that 'sexism' is hardly the charge necessary to see that. The impoverished idea that it represents anything other than the worser instincts of man only goes to show how well we can produce and craft dirt into monuments. All that, and we need to be reminded. Pity. 

You can quote me. 

My Top Ten Time Travel Movies

Now I'm going to say right up front that Terminator, Back to the Future, Pleasantville and Peggy Sue Got Married are not going to make the list. I just don't think they're good enough and I don't possess the sentiment to include them. There are two honorable mentions though, and I'm going to put them right up top so I can feel a bit better about being jerky in my selection.

Honorable Mentions:
Donnie Darko: Because it's just a very good movie and I really don't want to get into it with its fans. 
Star Trek: The Voyage Home: Because there are three or four drop dead lines, the best being with Commander Scott talking to a mouse.

10. Planet of the Apes
Of course I'm talking about the original here. Greatest surprise ending of just about any movie ever, next to The Usual Suspects, The General's Daughter and several caper films I can think of. But what a marvel. A classic to this very day. It gets on the list.

9. Source Code
This movie was way better than I expected and it throws in the kicker of being a countdown against the clock movie as well. I found it riveting.

8. Timeline
You cannot be a fan of middlebrow science fiction and not love Michael Crichton. This is really a wonderful film in lots of ways, true enough to the book and the times. Just a lovely film.

7. Edge of Tomorrow
OK if things are going to be impossibly bad for humans in their fight against alien species, this story is the most plausible of them all, which is that humans don't come up with a giant bomb or well-placed sniper shot to the boss, but that the aliens' own tech gets used against them. What a super movie.

6. Deja Vu
This is a personal favorite. I've watched it at least 3 times, and it works on multiple levels. It's a mystery, a love story and a sci-fi action flick all at once. It has heroism, treachery and a great location. What more can you ask for?

5. 12 Monkeys
If there's a sentimental favorite here, this is the one. It's just so imaginative and plays so well in memory. It brings forth just the amount of crazy and absurdity to the time travel mission itself without going totally off the deep end.

4. Groundhog Day
There's really nothing else to say. If you haven't seen this movie, your life is incomplete.

3. Looper
Now we come to the movies that take the premise of time travel and work out the details in stunningly creative ways. Looper is darkly mysterious and very satisfying. Any film with gangsters in a nightclub and a young mother in a farmhouse has got to be extraordinary.

2. Predestination
This is the reason for this list. This is the most extroardinary twist on time travel ever put to screen because it uses brilliant story telling to deal with the very paradox of going back in time. It's so extraordinarily well done without being overly intricate that you can get your mind blown three times in one sitting.

1. Primer
The reason this is the greatest time travel movie of all time is because it has time travel within time travel within time travel and accounts for every minute. It is superbly complex and brilliantly executed with that kind of malltown realism that makes the best independent films. It evokes perfectly the sense of young hotshot thinkers facing their own fears and daring to be great. It is by far the most realistic and gritty portrayal of the actual discovery of time travel and the devastating consequences that would issue from greed, power and revenge such an invention would open up in the world. Do not miss this one. It is the American History X of time travel movies.  

An Appetite for Pathology

I just watched two movies that I didn't really want to watch. I recognized the promise in the trailers that these films were ready to deliver something grotesque and so I avoided them. However, my daughter Scholar, has a particular rule for selecting movies to watch with us and it was her night to choose. She refuses to watch anything the lot of us have watched before. For her, it's all about us in the living room experiencing the same emotions at the same time for the first time. I think that's a reasonable approach to watching even unreasonable films. For me, I want films that are unsubtly vivid and loud and I primarily want to see them at the theater. At home however, I much prefer something humorous and witty like Robot and Frank or The Grand Budapest Hotel. I don't like movies that take themselves too seriously. For me, films are only visual literature. Like anybody else, I occassionally watch movies for what I presume to be the same reasons as anyone else, including buzz about them being hot movies. These two very hot movies I consciously decided to stay away from with my customary 'ick'. 

The two movies were Nightcrawler and Gone Girl, essentially two stories about psychopaths going about their business and getting away with it. Unlike with Indiana Jones or Robocop, the bad guy doesn't fall from a great height screaming all the way down.   

There's not much to say about either flick in and of themselves. They are both professionally done in such a way that they convincingly tell their stories, although from a strictly cinematic point of view, Gone Girl is the superior film. What's more interesting to me is the reason why I would, or why you would go ahead and watch. You see both of these are films about a mindless public's complicity in the weavings of a psychopath. They are about the profession of maintaining a mainstream media narrative that is voyeuristic, perverse, obsessive and inescapable. 

There's no news that dirty laundry sells, and that America is a huge market for that sort of nasty business. And it's no secret that even during the feral motorcycle movie heyday of the 70s, breaking through with Mad Max, the entire post-apocalyptic world was never so graphically obscene as what we watch today. However, there are a couple of questions that raise my eyebrows at this particular moment.

Firstly, how are thoughtful people to deal with the fact of their seduction into participating in this phenomenon? It never fails to escape me that I'm watching an explicit portrayal of something that I already know. As soon as an individual in a film is given a hinky enough personna, we know there's going to be ugly deeds done. How could you not know what Javier Bardim's character in No Country for Old Men was going to do? Films are about dramatic exposition and somebody has to die, right? 

Secondly, how are less than thougthful people with an appetite for this sort of entertainment integrated into society? I say this not as a prude, but as an observer of the figurative 1000 channels of television (which are probably more like 50,000 channels of multimedia) and their capacity for narrowcasting only what individuals choose. This in contrast to the three television networks I grew up with that forced some common understanding of the world around us and thus some social cohesion. With my eye to radical autonomy, I see less of a fragmented society but on shattered into 50,000 bits - each adequately funded to create a Foucaultian epistemelogical multiverse. Every clique has its truth, and they carry it along with them in their smartphones in their idiot-proof cities. This is the world of the Nightcrawler. Why shouldn't his fantasy of what people ought to see be the truth? Look for Nightcrawler 2, the Nightcrawler News Network, (NYSE: NNNK)

Now it can be said that these are grim fairy tales about our modern times and provide a nail-biting exposure of exactly how much our media does satisfy the narrative of evil. In fact, that must be their only redeeming value, otherwise they are profiting from the very same game they ostensibly decry. Yet in both of these tales there are no heroes, there are only villains, victims and professionals who shape the way all of the nasty business is handled. The public, whose appetite for pathology fuels all of the madness cannot be stopped. They are an oceanic mob force whose perverse depth cannot be drained. We can only ride their waves until we drown or are shipwrecked. The public is like a god that must be satiated. If you are going to be a successful filmmaker, or TV anchor, or talk show host you pretty much have to believe that.

That is the crux of the matter that must be broken which is why I started this essay speaking about the reasons and the expectations for my video choices in the first place. I'm trying to be virtuous in all ways (except to the extent that I am growing fonder of what I know about Kingsley Amis) and I understand why watching any such movie, or six o'clock news show, or glib talking head program is derivative at best of what we should properly expect in our information flows. 

What I'm not saying is that our entertainment should be a purified diet of stories where the good guy always wins, but who is going to be the hero when the evil is the public? How can you make movies about that which sell in a democracy? There is always something a bit self serving about movies that give you the opportunity to step away from 'them' which at the same time requires 'them' as a salacious audience posing as a sagacious audience. The true sagacious audience already read the book and doesn't need much prompting as to what psychopaths can do. It seems to me that there are only two answers, movies will have to be preachy or we stop letting the good guys lose.

Lost in my slight aggravation about the content of such movies is the proper disctinctions about art, education and ethics. It's hard to call either of these an art film, except to the point that they might be considered gothic horror in the vein of contemporary conspiracy flicks. I don't know what art is supposed to be in America, but I'm kind of sure that it's supposed to be important and I know these films are not art. They are crafts. They are well built and have a perfection about them as productions, but they carry a troublesome payload. We are grossed out, but not enlightened. Is that what movies are for? 

 

 

John Wick

John Wick is the most stylish action flick I've seen in a long time, and I watch just about all of them. It's not a surprise that Keanu Reaves can do action, it's a surprise that he works so well in a very dark mumbling way, and a surprise that nobody has through to cast him for such a part. He has come a very long way since Constantine. 

Let's get straight to the goods, because just after watching this film, I took in two others: Interview with a Hitmant and Statham's remake of 'The Mechanic'. 

First thing. John Wick has a very hot soundtrack. There are some muscle cars driving at night scenes in NYC that are just so classically slamming it makes you wonder why nobody hasn't done this formula well since Michael Mann's Collateral. It's like we almost forgot that badasses could be cool and slick. Thanks Bruce, but maybe you're not the only one who can look cool will fresh blood on your face and rocking music cranked. Reaves' John Wick has got money and an unspoken cred around all the powerful badguys in the super-cool underworld of this movie's NYC. And while Denzel's recent ass-kicker put a very interesting focus on some Eastern European baddies, his was a game of cat and mouse. Reaves is just relentless with only a touch of negotiation, which lasts about 2 minutes.  

Second thing. Not since hmm, perhaps the last Bond film - but you know what to expect there - we'd have to go back beyond immediate memory, almost back to 'The Departed' has there been a slick action film that carried an amply fit supporting cast. John Wick is dappled with delicious talent all around including two of my favorites, Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy from Game of Thrones) and Lance Reddick, who is blowing up all over the place. Willem Dafoe, always brilliant, does some yoeman work as does John Leguizamo. Long time no see. Welcome back. So basically, you can't lose. 

There's a new crew in town and Hollywood did it up well. This is one we can watch again. Why? Because it's very cool, and Reaves pulled off just the right balance. This is an action hero I want to see again, with his new dog.

There's something more to be said about these Eastern European gangsters. I love how I have seen them done recently, not callow or furtive like the now stereotypical Jihadi bangers. Not extravagantly corrupt or venal, but powerful and limited and vulnerable and aggravated and deadly serious. It's all encapsulated in Michael Nyqvist's Viggo. Well played. 

The existence of John Wick and Reaves, if he can do this again, gives us a chance to see what we've been missing in the raging loudness of Nick Cage. Cage was best, in my view, in Lord of War, where he get to be a subtle, yet brazen deceiver, probably the best role for him taking the baton from Jack Nicholson, although Pacino was brilliant in The Devil's Advocate. Congrats all around. 

Now none of this would be worth beans if John Wick didn't have a unique style of kickass, and he does. It's basically CQ with some fabulous pistol work, basically the best I 've seen in any movie, period. There was something extraordinarily greusome that was the excitement of Matt Damon's CQ work in the Bourne series, but this is something a lot more gritty. The old Mozambique, two to the chest and one to the head, and Wick's would be killers are done for. There's some excellent grappling and new twists on knife fighting that you simply don't see on film. Extra cool. 

Don't miss this one.

Denzel's Cold Warrior

The Equalizer is Denzel Washington's latest movie, and it is a stunning meditation on the will to do damage when damage has been done. It's the story of a man who defies the notion of standing silent when corruption is loud. His character, Robert McCall is the ultimate sheepdog, and over the course of the beautifully shot movie, he takes down an entire pack of wolves.

This film is one of several that has DW in my favorite kind of action movie, that with spies, close combat and revenge. But unlike all of the rest of his characters and unlike most action heroes, Washington's McCall has no problem living an ordinary life. He is adjusted to his domestic solitude and to his workaday world at the local Home Depot. He's not compartmentalized, he's comfortable. He is not haunted by dreams, he simply remembers. He remembers his skills, his deadly skills.

What's striking about 'The Equalizer' is how American it is. It touches home on a number of themes on what it means to succeed in America and the sacrifices so many people make to fit into slots. McCall says no. You can be what you want to be, simply by doing the right thing. He seeks in everyone a simple unity of mind, body and spirit. Not complicated, not easy, but ultimately necessary. This is what it takes to own yourself, and yet when people lose their way they become owned by those who accept that evil is what men do. In the end, there is the psychopath who thinks nothing of human life, and there is the hero who knows very well it's precious value.

What McCall knows is what many of us forget. That it takes violent action to take down violen men. It is what make his Equalizer so extraordinary, his relentless war against all those connected in a chain of perfidy. We are accustomed to moving somewhat against those who would threaten our friends and family. When things get ugly we never expect restitution all the way up. We are conditioned to small bites of justice. Not so in McCall's world. There is no such thing as insurance. You obey or you lose it all. You cannot buy your way out - you make a choice to do or die. In this Denzel is perfectly matched against an antagonist who is the best villian since Gary Oldman's Detective Stansfield in 'The Professional'. The performance by Marton Csokas as the head enforcer of a Russian Oligarch is brilliantly cold, cunning and ruthless. Denzel sees through him though. Sees him for the psychopath that he is; sees that he follows orders simply because they give license to his desire to reduce anyone to zero. 

Washington's McCall is a deadly patriot, removed from the field of play who cannot forget the stakes the game, and gets his hands bloody for the sake of the common man. The film makes a bold statement about morality we ought to keep in mind.

Captain Phillips

There are two things President Barack Obama has done that I have given my unequivocal praise, and they were both martial. The second time, it was about unleashing the Stuxnet virus on Iran's Natanz nuke plant, the first time it was about deploying forces to the Gulf of Aden. This movie, Captain Phillips is about the first thing.

It's already an old cliche that the future is already hear it's just unevenly distributed. I know that to be a fact because I'm part of that future. I work from home in an economy that simply didn't exist when I was born. This is a good thing, that I expect more people will come to understand, appreciate, learn and live. That's how we think of the future in my generation - as the gradual deployment of good things invented to improve the quality of life. I think of that, even in my Peasant Theory; the premise of liberty is that peasants can eventually live like kings. There is always room for merit in this world, so one should undertake the opportunity to achieve something human nature rewards. Move to the head of the class and then graduate to the next class. But make no mistake, classes are unequal and they are unevenly distributed. Class is just as real as it ever was, its differences are stark, clear and present. So you can expect that there are dislocations of skill and culture that keep your future at bay, even though you can see it luxuriating in a sidewalk cafe across the street you are sweeping.

When I realized that I wanted to live like a king, I raised my children like little princes and princesses. I took the risk because I wanted to be a free man. I realized that when you are a king, you have nobody but God to turn to when you need to defend yourself from rebellious knights or revolting peasants. God helps those who help themselves. So fortunately in the land of the free, that means you have a Second Amendment right. You can call the cops but they're not going to get to you on time when you're facing Edward III. That's when you would have your kingdom teeter for the lack of a horse, or semi-automatic pistol.  

Watching Captain Phillips was an enjoyable experience for what it was. It was pleasing to see some good acting. Nobody seemed to be anything other than who they were portraying, and nobody was played for odious type. Yet the entire film hinged something which for me was an anachronism. You know like 80s movies whose whole plot drama could have been obviated by the use of a cell phone. Teenagers, don't go into that man with the chainsaw's house, but if you need help just get out your iPhone and call 911, OK? So you know what I'm talking about right? Captain Phillips, the lamer, should have had a sidearm. Dude has 2000 tons of freight and 27 souls on board and not one bullet to defend them. That's a very uneven distribution indeed. So I'm sitting in this movie wondering how many people live in the past and when the hell are they going to wake up.

I enjoyed reading Michael Crichton's 'Pirate Latitudes' for reminding me that the punishment for piracy was not just death but a fairly grisly execution and public display of your mangled corpse. The jolly roger flag was the appropriate symbol. Piracy was about death. Sure it was business, but everybody understood that it was a deadly business. Yet somehow in our time it has become a very complicated and expensive business as well. Lest I take back my praise of Obama can we acknowledge somehow that it shouldn't take much more than 25 men with guns to fight off four men with guns? In this case, the cops were an entire missile destroyer ship, the USS Bainbridge with a crew of 270 officers and enlisted men, choppers, radar... Well, people have learned their lesson, but the danger remains.

I should emphasize that the lesson remains, same as it ever was. To survive against pirates requires the will and the means to send their dead bodies down to Davy Jone's Locker. So how did our fair captain, lording over the coffe breaks of his unionized crew of merchant marines get so far afield of the lessons of history? Why did he need to put so much faith in the American Navy overkill? What combination of factors left him wheezing like a gordita in his own emergency lifeboat? Did he and his company forget about human nature? I will leave that speculation to you.

There is some part of me that finds the angle of big bad United States vs poverty stricken tiny African country interesting, but not compelling. Yet I suspect that in others, there is want to make points about the poor black man vs the rich white man. Who was a better captain is one aspect of that personal drama, whose bosses are more capable might be another. Let me not put stupid concepts in straw heads but consider what has really been alleged:

That’s the movie. Who green-lighted this? Why are we supposed to care about this story, again? And is it just me, or did Tom Hanks sound defensive when hetold the Wall Street Journal , “This underlying hopelessness because of the geopolitics of what a disaster Somalia has become … just adds to the fabric of the movie that makes it rise above the concept of ‘scary aliens have invaded us and we have to make it home.’ ”

Spare me. “Captain Phillips” is a crass money-maker based on Hollywood’s formula and America’s insatiable appetite for easily digested good guys versus bad guys, white versus black. And while we’re at it, here are a few potential questions for the gathered actors and filmmakers that would’ve been good for a panel discussion, were it a real movie event:

• Is there any part of you that feels exploited by the Hollywood system?

• Did you know that the real Richard Phillips is being sued by his entire crew over the incident and over statements he made in his book, “A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea,” upon which the film is based on?

• Did the pirates really call Captain Phillips “Irish,” or was that a convenient trumping-up of the good captain’s Caucasianness versus the dark-skinned devil boys of the Somali coast?

• Did the pirates really curse America and the USA (in English, no less) throughout the ordeal?

Ick. I'm almost sorry for making you read that. But if this film can be taken as a crass recruitment propaganda for the Navy, well the good captain wasn't the only person out of touch with reality. Nevertheless, you can't control how people interpret art, although that's rather the point when critics are in thrall to the narrative of white supremacy. 

'Hopeless geopolitics' is more passive-speak in the vein of peasants who wish to remain peasants and never pick up the swords and skills of knighthood. It doesn't seem out of place for a crew to sue their captain over what he says in a book in the world of unevenly distributed courage where men take broken bottles to a gunfight. More's the pity we have institutionalized courts that play venue to such petty vengeances. 

I can't deny my interest in shooting and sheepdogging kept my attention through watching the film. There is that part of me that felt that if I were there I could have made a difference even though the events in the film took place far in advance of my serious consideration of arming myself on the daily. But I cannot much imagine myself an adventurer on the high seas without any token of a sailor's dirk or cutlass. Who knows, perhaps container ships were 'gun free zones'. 

Justice is already here, but like the future, like common sense, like the wisdom of kings and the cowardice of crowds, it is unevenly distributed. Like films from Hollywood that hint at the dynamics of the wider world, you take what you can get and run with it. 

Chris Pine is Jack Ryan

If you had a choice between being Jack Ryan, James Bond or James T. Kirk, which would you choose? Well, if it were a real life choice, then the answer would be Kirk. Kirk gets the most glory for the least effort, he's an emotional cripple and everybody knows it but they cut him slack. Nothing in particular motivates him except his desire to be Captain, roving out there in the unknown. Bond has a lot more fun than any of the others and he does put his life at risk a lot more often. His enemies are overblown monologuing villains with plenty of minions whose sufficiently crappy kung-fu provides entertaining exercise, and of course there are the girls. Kirk still has better gadgets, but the green skinned alien chicks? Really? Jack Ryan is the least appetizing choice. He's got bureacracy, decisions to make based on incomplete information, a patriotic streak in an America full of postmodern dissidents, ordinary weapons and a wife. Not a very satisfying job, unless you're an actor.

Chris Pine is the actor and he's chosen right, and you know what? He wasn't about to get offered James Bond's role, but by the second Trek we knew that train had run out of dramatic gas.  It's about time.

I say it's about time because like most people my age, I am sick and tired of whomever those creatures are that inhabit the 'End of the World' movie of whom I recognize two or three. Somebody with a little bit of brains in Hollywood should have seen that there had to be a new action star *somewhere* in America who wasn't previously a cartoon character. And quite frankly as much as I love Jason Statham (with whose body language I grok as a fellow springboard diver), all of his one offs were getting tired. Haven't yet seen Parker, maybe that'll last.

Chis Pine, with a name easier to say then Helmsworth and the age appropriate for this kind of thing gets the ticket. It actually makes me feel kind of sad for Joseph Gordon Levitt, who can act his way out of a paper bag, but not as a heroic lead. Fortunately, Pine gets to strut his chops amongst the likes of Kevin Costner and Kenneth Brannaugh in this film. Keira Knightley and he work some really good stuff, and boy do I love her non-perfect teeth. These are people who feel like people, and thus with just the suggestion of action, you get some heart-pounding drama. I think that's the way it's supposed to work, and yes that's the kind of spy Jack Ryan is; over his head but with great instincts and a fine mind. I tell you what, it works.

I don't mind the reboot. Pine's Ryan is not exactly the father or the son, but is presumeably the son by dint of age. But there's no Jack Sr in this film nor his mom, which is just as well. As a well-paced thriller that moves deliberately, any more characters would have made this film clunk down. 

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The Dying Truth, Lone Survivor and the Sophomore Dog

2014 is my sophomore dog year. Sheepdog that is. I took all the survey courses last year and got my puppy feet wet. I'm never going to be anything more than I was when I was a kid, which is a big brother among the three big brothers in the neighborhood that kept us gang free. Codename Kool Moe Dee: Wild Wild West. I'm not ever going to pretend that I'm a warfighter or that I actually have some kind of metaphorical war to fight. But I do have the mentality and last year I connected some intelligence with my guts and made sense of all the fighting I've done in my life. I know with clarity that am a sheepdog in my bones. Can't help it. Just going to try and be smart about it.

I knew I wanted to see Lone Survivor. I didn't read the book, but I've known about Luttrell for a while. I'm sure I've heard him on one or two SOFREP podcasts. I think last year was when I read two or three of the sniper biographies that pulled me into that particular orbit. I didn't realize it was his story in particular but I knew it would be interesting to me in the same way some people are drawn to the story about the dude who cut off his arm to go rock climbing, or put on 50 pounds to prove something about McDonalds. It would be a kind of standout story that crosses over into the public consciousness. Except I know something about people who do for real. At the end of the day, they tell the dying truth.

Indulge me for a moment's consideration of the concept. We have a bit of society that is entirely skeptical of the dying truth. The dying truth is what you tell when you are absolutely convinced that what you know is real, right and that you cannot see it any other way. The dying truth is what you'll tell until your dying day, but most of the time it doesn't get told at all because you really don't care if people know, or believe you or not. You just know what you know. When I first became a writer, I always thought about this kind of knowledge - the sort you imagine a war correspondant tells in the salon of society matrons, or the adventurer tells in the offices of the philosophical society. It is that thing that defies the conventional wisdom because you cannot follow convention to find out such knowledge. It perplexes because it must be experienced. So you have to wonder how much of the dying truth anyone in society actually gets. When Merriwether Lewis returned to become the toast of Saint Louis, half of his diaries were lost. He didn't show the scar where he got shot in the ass by one of his own men. Some audiences demand only glorious narrative. Some storytellers indulge them. There will be a thousand reviews of this movie and how many of those will be written by people for whom the spirit connects beyond the infotainment factor? Such connections don't always matter, but in stories about life and death, in tales about the truth you will tell until the day you die, it does. 

We are fortunate to live in a nation of millions, and with a million millionaires there are often enough parlors that are built on dying truths themselves. I know Wahlberg was a good choice to wear the bloody makeup and navigate a good fraction of that truth through the corridors of Hollywood power. Yeah the movie was still a movie, but it connected with the fighter in me. And it reminded me of the term, a term we probably don't use enough in this nation of millions: warfighter. I just so happened to watch a National Geographic special about the C-5M Super Galaxy airlifter. The colonel in charge knows it to be a weapon that serves the warfighter. Every time I hear the term, I identify with fighting spirit and the will to win. But I'm not going to get fluffy with my vocab to illustrate the feeling, rather I will just call it ineffable. When you know it, you know it. If you had to grow up streetsmart as I did, you know it deeply.

So at this point in my life, when I am beginning to peak out as 'Daddy' and focus again on my own growth and what I know to be true, I am coming to reconcile my fights and my will to fight, and my capacity to fight. It goes without saying that my reasons must be proper. What resonates from the film is all over the place, but I will talk about the bullet to Axe's head. It made me mad. It made me madder than I can ever remember any scene in any movie made me mad. I thought about it with Maestro yesterday - those movies when people walk out silently, overcome with emotion. Glory. Apocalypse Now. Schindler's List. Blackhawk Down. Saving Private Ryan. It belongs in that group of films, but unlike those, this movie isn't a big arc war film. It doesn't give you a whole lot of dramatic introduction. It gives you a close-up of a platoon of warfighters. Trained to be deadly. Trained to think on their feet. Trained to survive. Trained to win. It's the kind of head that it's difficult to crawl into, especially for a generation raised on the narrative of meaninglessness, romance and deceptions of All's Quiet on the Western Front.

I have begun to learn something I will never learn fully. That is how to fight with firearms. In doing so, I have to reject a lifetime of dramatic representations that make no logical or ballistic sense. I learned something about first aid last year. It was so simple, but it took 40 hours of experience competing with a lifetime of television fakery. Everyone of us who lives in the Idiot Proof City must at some point recognize how closely we are held hostage by the ignorance of interdependence. Some of us see it as we take control of our diets and realize the ultimate liberation of growing our own food, some of us see it as we exercise rigorously for the first time and realize how far we can run. Good literature can shake us up and make us realize we have been accepting conventional wisdom instead of dying truth. I have been consuming this kind of good literature for about six years now, starting with Churchill's account of WW2, and moving on to understanding the Eastern Front, and then back through time to Rome's Punic Wars and all sorts of history since then. But only recently have I begun to see how it applies to me personally, transforming from mere understanding to training and responsibility. 

What that means is, for better or worse, at that moment in the film, I felt that I needed to be a part of the solution. I recognized in myself the determination to be a force to be reckoned with as trite as that may sound. They say of the responsible man that he wishes he could have been at the moment of truth to make the difference because of what he knows he could have done. Yes, I'm a yapping little puppy, but I'm growing up. I understand the fight in the dog. That's what that movie was about and it most connected with me in that simple moment of dying truth. 

Oblivion

Some movies you just have to see. I make sure I see them. Why? Because movies are visual experiences and little else as far as I'm concerned.

A story that I can't quite see through is a plus, but not necessary. Sometimes moviemakers are trying to be too damned clever. Take 'Seven Psychopaths' for example. Very damned clever - and almost too clever for its own good. Why not? Because Seven Psychopaths had decent moments of drama, and decent moments of manufactured drama is what makes anything interesting, especially baseball when you have a bad seat. 

Poor acting and bad dialog will not ruin a movie with a reasonably twisty plot and great visuals. Tom Cruise is generally bad enough so that he tilts an otherwise good movie into the gutter. But even he couldn't kill Oblivion, which is excellently visual, plenty twisty and nicely dramatic. 

Don't get me wrong - this movie was made for a younger Harrison Ford and Tom gets Cruise-stink all over it. But this time he tries so hard to be that good-old Earth boy with his football monologue, beat-up aviator glasses, moldy books and vinyl record collection that you kinda feel sorry for him and his generation. By being a person with barely enough of a soul to remember what he used to be, the filmmakers cast Cruise perfectly. Here's a hero with no audience and a memory wipe. Nice.

With that oblique spoiler, you should still see it if you haven't. It's one for the big screen, and also Morgan Freeman is more voiceover when he explains the whole thing. I have to say, in terms of believability, Oblivion has it all over Prometheus. 

Django Unchained

I didn't expect Django Unchained to be so intense. I expected it to be wicked. I expected it to be glib. I expected it to dialog its way through improbabilities. It was wicked bloody and profane but Django Unchained is not a buddy movie. It is the first of its kind - a SouthWestern - a full throated shoot 'em up American drama with Wagnerian resonances. It might not ultimately be director Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece but it is right now. 

Say what you will about Tarantino; you cannot say that he makes movies for kids. When I say kids I mean Owen Wilson. For the past n years we have been assaulted by the next generation of male leading actors who have struggled to make themselves some fraction of the man that Ben Affleck has just barely managed to affect - a whole troop of boy band graduates all trying to be the next Ben Stiller. It has taken a lot of the fun out of going to the movies for me, and was made all the more poignant by the emergence of Daniel Craig. Funny now that I think about it, I wondered where Tom Hanks wandered off to after The Road To Perdition. The bottom line is that there haven't been many movies for middle age men that weren't somewhat escapist in a way that just wasn't quite serious enough or dunked the protagonist in such deep shit that the every act required blunt force. Somewhere between Cowboys and Aliens and No Country for Old Men, we all got left out in the cold, surviving on DeNiro, Washington, Fiennes and Clive Owen. It's one of the reasons I returned to literature - there aren't many American movies with men dealing with real life and death situations, it leaves us with weak philosophy - the philosphy of Vince Vaughn, which never quite gets beyond the reality of a bad divorce. Hell, we can do that on our own Vince. It's no wonder we've developed a hunger for the depravity of The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo. And there is my take on American dramatic film as it is continually remade for youthful disposable income. 

Ahh but we are approaching more fically constrained times. So we need a little period work to get our heads out of the boom book clack reality of 50 Cent rappers whose value has deflated over the past decade. Yes there was a moment for gangsta manhood. It peaked at Clockers. Well, Set It Off, and then it was over and done with Training Day and from that moment there would never be another Gangsta movie. Somehow the Farelly Brothers got into our bloodstream (and Fishburn got sidetracked into Morpheus for a decade) and something went poof. Fortunately Seth McFarlane and Seth Rogan have not completely taken over Hollywood. Thank you Quentin. We still have at least one filmmaker grown up enough to do Nazis and Slavery. Now I'm looking forward to the moment when he decides that he has to do a Vietnam film. But, you know, slavery is good.

Now if you asked me a month ago when all the dainties were weeping in the streets about the absence of Frederick Kick Ass Douglass (read blacks as agents in their own liberation) from Speilberg's courtly drama, I snarled that all they really wanted to see was some black man killing some white men (for money). And you can bet your ass that Tarantino is going to make all that money. And now that QT has ripped the roof of that meme and soaked the silver screen with the blood of righteous retribution, the complaint will squiggle off into another boohooey direction. Or so I predict. 

Here's the thing. This movie is going to be a huge success in all sorts of dimensions and I know that you will have to search to the ends of the earth to find anyone who does not sympathize with Foxx's Django. This Christmas season is witnessing (predictably past the end of the world, according to Mayans) what a generation of black radicals believed with all their hearts, souls and minds that would never happen in America. A blockbuster movie where a black man single-handedly, brutally slaughters dozens of white men and white audiences cheer. And there's a black President. Did I say brutally slaughter? This is a Tarantino movie.

Black radicals aren't stupid, just full of shit. So the trick is exactly how they're going to twist the interpretation so they can continue to pretend that there are no Republicans in those ovating audiences coast to coast. Somehow they will come up with a narrative that will twist the fact that white people will thoroughly enjoy this film against them. Rule Number One: Never let Whitey off the hook. And of course without their collaborating Uncle Tims, (as in Tim Wise) they'd be out on a limb. But there will be a white Progressive mezzo-soprano chorus joining the whine to come, indicting all of a piece. 

I'm going here because I think it is inevitable that some fraction of America, the self-pitying and/or idiot fraction requires a movie like Django Unchained to ask itself self-flagellating questions on race. I'm rather surprised that it didn't do so when "Black Snake Moan" came out in March of 2007. Maybe the film was overshadowed by Shaquanda Cotton. You know how it is, some Americans go from zero to outrage in 5.3 seconds. you just never know which seconds. So it's actually possible that... naw. It's impossible for any black cultural critic to pass up. This movie is way too big, the subject far too direct, the implications much to clear to say this is not a story about slavery and race. I mean Leo DiCaprio is quoting racist phrenology right there on the screen. It doesn't get much more potent than that.

But then what was this movie about anyway? The answer is also simple and straightforward. It is about Django running through hellfire to free his wife, by any means necessary. And of course the film is marvelously entertaining because he's got the skills and wits to do so, and eventually does. His able sponsor, the crafty and wordly German Dr. Schultz gets Django rolling downhill at the outset of the film. The two pick up steam as bounty hunters in that America that had still not as of yet bloodied itself en mass of the future of that particular institution.

As a rumnation on slavery, I found the film's matter of factness, refreshingly direct and unsentimental. It was all rather credible to me, and this is the sort of cinema verite that I was hoping for before I plunked down my cash at the Arclight. Tarantino's touch is deft. There were only two things that I imagined in the entire film to be anachronistic. First, and probably my biggest gripe with the film is Tarantino's choice of music. The soundtrack here is disjointed and rarely worked nicely with the action on screen. You could always snap into the realization that this is modern music that doesn't quite fit thematically with what's happening on screen. This was never joltingly so, but annoyingly so. The second thing that seemed out of place was the quality of stitching in the garments worn by Django, and I'm trying to imagine that the sunglasses I saw were period pieces.  Speaking of stitches, you have never seen in your life and probably never will see a scene that makes you laugh at KKK night riders like the one in Django. It is straight out hilarious.  

I never saw Ray, so despite all of the critical acclaim, I don't believe I have ever seen Jamie Foxx act. I did see Collateral and I did see Law Abiding Citizen. Tell you the truth, I liked him better in Bait than in either of those films. Moreover, I think Jamie Foxx in person is probably more interesting than any role he has had on the big screen with the one possible exception of Any Given Sunday. And no I had zero interest in him as the street musician. So yes quite honestly I think Hollywood has really been flummoxed as to what to do with that black man. At least he's managed to keep his head above the Cedric the Entertainer level, which is more than can be said for most of the black actors Foxx's age. So now the ball is in Omar Epps' court. 

Sam Jackson has done what only he could do. I put him as the anchoring picture for this blog post because his character has transcended every HNIC of the plantataion house that has ever been recorded on film. I might even get deep into that discussion with the theorists, but Jackson was brilliantly malevolent and vindictive in the role. Splendid casting - in so many ways this movie might have failed, getting Stephen wrong would not only have killed it, but shot it in the knees and left it to rot. There simply is no other possible actor for that role.

So yeah I liked this movie. It's definitely worth it. 

Hair: Transcendance Without Meaning

Following an interestingly provocative and somewhat laughable YouTube of the opening dance number from Hair I decided to buy the movie and play it for the family Christmas movie. We didn't discuss it because everybody resisted watching it until the very last hour. So I'm not sure about the reactions of the junior Bowens other than "That was a cool movie but the music sucked."

Regardless of that, I found the extent to which it must have fascinated and shocked audiences rather useful over time. But nothing came through so clearly and painfully as the dialog between two women somewhere in the final third of the film. It is the conversation that begins with the scene between the mother of Lafayette's child and Lafayette who now calls himself Hud and then culminates between she and Annie Golden.

The woman who is given no name in the film other than "Hud's Fiancee" responds:

How can people
Be so heartless
How can people
Be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold

How can people
Have no feelings
You know I'm hung up on you
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no
Especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice

Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd
How about a needing friend
I need a friend
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to give in
Easy to help out
Who say they care about
Social injustice

Blam. There is the entirety of Mrs Jellyby from Dickens' Bleak House. I found the scene in the film absolutely poignant. There is much to be said about the sexual revolution right in that scene. But it goes further to this culminating dialog:

I'm not into any heavy
preference trip...
like who the father is.
I don't care.
I think they're both beautiful.
Don't you?

But how can you not care
about that?
If a woman carries a child, don't you
think she should know who the father is?

I admit that I have this dilemma.
But it will be resolved real soon.
It's not like a big crisis or anything.
It's not like a world war.
I don't know
what you're so uptight about.

I fell in love with someone.
We had a child,
and we were gonna get married.
That's why I'm uptight.

- Yeah?

- And you're holding it up!

I'm not holding it up.
You don't see the way it is.
This is really a great thing
that's happened to all of us.
Everybody's really happy about it.
The guys are really happy.
I think it would be great
if you could be happy about it too.

- You're crazy.

- Yeah, I'm crazy.
We're all crazy.
Let's shake on it.

Let's not.

Blam again!

What's interesting about Hair in retrospect is the extent to which the charisma of the lead hippie is completely and understandably compelling. What's difficult to believe is how simple minded so many people must have been (& peasants are (?)) to take the weight of that charisma, a few drugs, costumes and street performance art into something capable of overturing the order of a great nation, even at its most insecure moment. 

I cannot help but think that Hair signals the premise of the Age of Aquarius, completely and fully realized in youth culture and alternative culture in America. But there is absolutely no question in my mind that this rebellion occurered within the context of a privileged and spoiled social context, for blacks as much as for whites. All everyone wanted to do was stick their noses up at the wealthy, while appropriating their wealth whenever it seemed convenient to them. If Hair had any basis in reality whether art followed life or the other way 'round, I can most certainly feel the contempt, cynicism and hypocrisy of those Boomers who have turned against the defining creation of their generation. In one fell two hour swoop, I understand. 

It helps that this weekend I have been listening closely to Steppenwolf and to Simon & Garfunkel. 

There can be no question that the chaos of the time gave birth to the necessary confusion required for a complete break of faith of the mis-reckoned or misunderstood inheritance of the post-war era. I cannot help but contrast this the seriousness taken by the characters in the film The Good Shepherd. It wasn't merely some willy nilly trust fund babies this rebellion was against, but those who decided to carry the good fight into the next generation with conviction and composure which belied their own uncertainty. Dangerous peguins indeed. But the counter culture was not a complete counter-strike, it was a co-dependent howl. People who forget how to work and forget how to raise children and only sacrifice for the spontanaeity of the moment... well, they make for great dancers, lovers and friends but civilization requires much, much more. 

It leaves me with yet another doubt as to whether those who invented the terms 'human rights' and 'social justice' outside of the Catholic Social Teaching knew what they were talking about at all. On the question of free love, there is no doubt in my mind that those counterculturalists were on the wrong side of history and reason. 

Lincoln

The new Speilberg movie probably looks like a Speilberg movie to lots of people, but it looked like something else to me considering that I forgot what a Speilberg movie is supposed to look like. 

The Lincoln movie is an excellent piece of film, as it occurs to me that dramatic moments of testimony in Congress, or in a courtroom can work very nicely as dramatic cinema. That's because you don't have to do the normal tricks in having people explain to each other what they already know, just so the audience can have a little backstory. As I am writing my book, I see how difficult this can be. At any rate, Lincoln makes you want to go back to some history book and find the names of the characters in the movie and figure out something about their lives tangential to the context of the passing of the 13th Amendment. 

Aside from that, the lighting of the film is done in an excellent way. I am certain that Speilberg wanted the indoors to look like the indoors would in a world before electrification. Very well done. And there is much to be appreciated for the diction of the characters. I haven't heard English like this in quite some time.

As an aside, if you find the English diction of the man who famously played the Wizard of Oz in that film and it reminds you of an earlier time in America, you  would do well to purchase the audiobook of Thomas Pynchon's 'Against the Day'. Truly marvelous voice acting in that.

The film was throroughly entertaining. A high quality diversion. Film doesn't get much better. And what a lovely portrayal of Mary Todd. That was a complete surprise. Perhaps Gore Vidal was a bit harsh? Also much tenderness in Lincoln as a father. Superb touches there. 

Tony Scott: Dead

The death of Tony Scott at 68 is something that upsets me because I liked his movies so much. Tony Scott made two of Denzel Washington's best movies Deja Vu and Man on Fire. Deja Vu was the most emotionally resonant time travel movies ever filmed, and Man on Fire is by any measure one of the best action films of any type. 

I heard the news today that somebody jumped off the Vincent Thomas Bridge - I was driving home from my short getaway weekend. When I discovered an hour ago that it was Tony Scott, I immediately thought of what he must have thought in picking that bridge for his final chapter, the scene from To Live & Die in LA. It's difficult for me to disassociate that connection in my mind - it's a filmic way to think. 

It's true that Unstoppable was probably his worst film but we can only guess at the reasons he jumped. If he was pushed, Hollywood will be on fire about it for years. As it stands, it's a dramatic exit for one of the all time great action directors. 

Funny. That's about all I have to say.

Playtime - Jacques Tati

One of my favorite movies of all time.

Prometheus

My mind is only half blown, but quite a film. And now I know what I like about films most. Make no mistake, Prometheus is a great movie, but not the greatest.

Last week I watched a video of two guys deconstructing the extended trailer of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's latest film. And it reminded me of the fact that no matter what kind of sparkly dialoge you put into a film, it is still mostly a visual medium - and filmmakers attend to visual details more than anything, especially when they speak about greatness. And so from what a couple of college kids could speculate by freeze framing through a trailer, about 50% of this film was revealed. 

So I still have to say that Inception is the best movie of the past few years. Why? Because it has a main plot, several subplots, a backstory and three or four things that go wrong in the protagonist's plan for which he must improvise. That's what I like in a film. 

Prometheus starts off with a decent backstory, and subplots, but then lets them fade into short scenes that resolve in a few minutes. For a crew of 17, there sure isn't a whole lot of real human interaction. So in that regard, Prometheus compares disfavorably to Event Horizon, my favorite space horror and even to 2010. (Panting in space-suits has been done, Ridley). But all of that may fade in significance with a second viewing. 

Spoilers ahead. All the things that make Prometheus great lie unrevealed in everything you can guess about this film. So seeing it is extremely rewarding. 

Obligatory Seriousness on the Zombie Apocalypse

So I hear that a naked man was found lying on top of and eating the face of another naked man in the middle of a highway in Florida. The officer who found them demanded that the eater get off the eatee, who by the way was already dead. The eater stood up and charged the officer who needed to shoot him twice. If none of this sounds bizarre to you it is because you understand the concept 'zombie', for this is what zombies do.

The funniest movie in the past 10 years is Zombieland. It narrowly edges out Snatch, but that's another story. What I find compelling to the point of perhaps 500 words, is the extent to which our popular cultural producers have prepared American peasants for the Zombie Apocalypse. There are excellent television dramatic series, first rate videogames and scores of movies playing out the scenario in our collective addled brains. The best movie of the sort would be chilling 28 Days Later followed on by the hilarious Shawn of the Dead. We're all infected by the meme. 

I keep hoping that our so-called rational atheists would really come up with some logic that they might use to persuade us all of 

LQP-79 is scientistic meme. We peasants have been prepared to believe. 

What's your favorite zombie movie?

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.