Cobb

Die, Fag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Top Black Sci-Fi Characters

top black characters in sci-fi

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


honorable mention

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

Now we debate.

Man's Inhumanity to Shrimp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except. 

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

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

Seven Pounds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valkyrie

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I give the movie 82%

Richard Burton the Schmoe

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

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

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

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

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

Eagle Eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm.

Terminator Salvation: A Terracentric Romp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fancy Fencing

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

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

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

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

The International

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

He's the Wiz and He Lives in Oz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So now I critiqued it.

Watchmen: Laughing Through the Pain

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

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

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

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

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

BUT.

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

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

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

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

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

Hulk Not Smash

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

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

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

Mr. Poppins

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

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

Magnificent Obsession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Americans don't confess. We obssess. 

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

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

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

Strange Days 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you seen it?

The Day The Earth Stood Still

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Deer Hunter

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

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

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

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

Claiming Mo Better Blues

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

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

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

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

Talk To Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lesson.

Burn After Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traitor

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

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

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

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

Six Great Car Chases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dark Knight

Last night I watched a portion of 'Clear and Present Danger', the movie with Harrison Ford. What is so extraordinary about this film is how accurately it portrays the Pre-Bush American president, as someone who is so strangulated by Congressional oversight and the spectre of Vietnam that international outlaws can operate with impunity. This film encapsulates for me the sclerotic essence of the post-Vietnam era which didn't take a setback until the victory of Desert Storm. One of the great questions of the future, which is probably where Rumsfeld is living in limbo, is how kinetic a small engagement can be between the Systems Administrative forces and the big American War Machine. Suffice it to say that you and I remember when it was Ross Perot's 'job' and now it's Blackwater's. It being the role of American heroic force - the force that has always been required to rid us of criminal madmen.

The latest Batman movie understands the criminal madman very well, and the late Heath Ledger's Joker is the right madman for the times. Oddly enough the other day as I was writing about the perfect criminal, it presaged his role. He doesn't care about the money, he just wants to see the Earth burn.

Boy says this is the best action movie he's ever seen. Then again, he hasn't seen Casino Royale, Heist or Apocalypse Now. But there's some 14 year old in every American that responds righteously to the themes of The Dark Knight, a very, very fitting sequel to the prior episode. If there was any question, let it be settled now. Christian Bale is the best Batman ever, and he has become even more complex and compelling than ever. This was, even at 3 in the afternoon, a clapping movie. Speaking of which, please allow me two quick asides:

• Watchmen is going to be made into a film, by the director of '300'. This is massive. Just massive. It makes up for the failure of Halo to be made into a movie. Really. Now I don't even care.
• Ridley Scott is making a spy movie with DiCaprio and Crowe. I predict it will rival Spy Game with Redford and Pitt.

The best piece about The Dark Knight is Bruce Wayne's cell-phone sonar mapper, the disposable distributed panopticon. Imagine you had the ability to build Carnivore in your cloud. You use it like a one-time pad. Build in secret, deploy once, destroy after. Solves a lot of deniability problems. Brilliant that.

The second best piece was the Joker's fumbling with the remote control as he's blowing up the hospital, partially. Of course, for a guy who believes in chaos and not in plans and rules, he certainly can hide a whole lot of explosives under people's noses. That's alright. I went with it.

Excellent arcs in the characters here. For an action flick you get a whole lot more than the average drama. Almost no corn whatsoever, and of course it was all held together by Bale, Bale, Ledger, Eckhart, and Gary Oldman(!) completely out of character and heroicly long-suffering. Anyway, this is *the* summer movie I have to say.

Once more lightly on heroic themes which are not as cleanly presented as might be expected here, but it gives the film some crunchy nuance and complexity. The Joker represents chaos, but also in tune with the hero, he represents the willingness to break rules. Lesson: The people will pretend to break rules but won't really. They'll only betray one another but never largely. They are served by their common decency, brilliantly illustrated in the two ships scenario, but are prone to be unprincipled to a petty degree when they are discomfited as represented by the betrayals of police. And so the people punt to superheroes in desparate times, but equally to supervillians. What's the difference so long as some order is maintained?

Hancock & Becky

If you haven't seen the new Will Smith movie Hancock, then you probably don't want to read this review, because as far as I'm concerned, this is the most surprising film of the year. It's a great surprise, especially for people who think they're too mature for Will Smith movies.

The surprise is that it's a love story, and a great deal more tender than anybody attracted by flying whales is ever likely to imagine. It's the kind of story that I think has all kinds of resonances in multiple dimensions. They're not blatantly blurted as one might think in such an entertainment, but the thoughtful moviegoer must be impressed wit.

Hancock asks the fundamental question, what do you do with extraordinary talent if you don't know your destiny? What if you were born to be a hero but make a hash of your heroics? What do you do with your life if you're not sure where you belong? You waste it of course. You wander stumblingly through society amidst the people you know deserve you, but you're not sure that they know it. Smith's abrasive alcoholic superhero is a walking existential crisis. He never hurts a soul, and only saves human lives, but gets on everybody's nerves and every insurers blacklist, a cursing human tornado. He works like a reverse neutron bomb who spares no property catastrophe and it's all over YouTube.

Why? Because he is alone, physically invulnerable, immortal even, and yet plagued by amnesia. He doesn't know who he is or why he is here, but then until the movie is halfway over, neither do we. And so, if it is possible for alcohol to send an otherwise superhuman into oblivion, that is where he spends his days, until..

He meets an idealist who wants to change the world by getting corporations to give products away for free. Smith saves his live in spectacularly reckless fashion, literally causing a train wreck in the process, the idealist takes him home for spaghetti and meatballs. There's something about his wife. She says she knows men like Hancock. He breaks things. There is a strange electricity going on and it's heating up things. We know this is part of the premise, Hancock is about to fall for this woman - another disaster waiting to happen. And then the surprise.

If I was what some pundits pejoratively think of the average American in a racial context, then I would think a bit more about what's about to happen when black Will Smith kisses blonde and blue Charlize Theron. It's surely not the kind of thing you see everyday in film, but of course it happens all the time. The question is, when it does happen in film or it's about to happen, what do we expect? OK. Black man kisses Becky, black man gets in trouble. Reasonable expectation, especially for this boozy brother who makes everybody uncomfortable with his advice about kicking bullies in the pisspump. By this time in the film, we can rest assured that Smith's Hancock has enough ball swagger to out-Mandingo Superman and George W. Bush put together. He has no compunction against smashing evil-doers. He is completely, totally red-eyed bull black man and Theron cannot resist a taste. They get real close in the kitchen while hubby is passed out upstairs. What do I expect? Well I sure the hell didn't expect that she would grab him by the wrist and throw him through the wall and 100 yards down the block. She tells him to get away and never come back and let her husband know or she will kill him. Huh? What?

Hancock is an anti-material film. Even in the hyperbolic chaos of the awesome superhero-type special effects, there is little satisfaction. Maybe that's because I was in a theater without the booming system, and yet (especially in the Spiderman-3 style knockoff construction site battle) there's something missing. The thing that is missing is purpose, and following Smith you never find it until Theron and he have it out. He comes back of course and they destroy half of Hollywood, including the building the idealist husband was pitching his old idea to newly found 'friends'. You see, the idealist has got some newfound fame now being the erudite handler of the beast-hero, who now with a newly remapped image has finally gotten some official goodguy status. But it's too late to save his marriage - he discovers, as we do, that Smith and Theron have a history. In fact an ancient history.

It is revealed that the two are essentially wonder-twins of a sort, sent from the Gods to guard over the earth, like Hercules and Athena. But there's a catch. Just like a dalmation couple in Howard Beach, they become extremely vulnerable when they are together. And so the scars on Smith's dark body are revealed to be testaments to the times when the enemies of goodness have used her as bait to get to him. That's a sweet twist for your garden variety summer blockbuster, and defies the terms of endearment and of revenge so typically the arcs of such predictable action flicks. Instead of one simpleminded set of baddies, we are faced with dirty-faced angels who have faced down the evil of the ages, with Jim Crow Florida being the latest and greatest challenge the duo faced, whose denoument left Smith's Hancock in the devolved state he finds himself in since the opening of the movie.

I don't need to tell you the allegorical richness of such an American hero, whose symbols of eagles and pyramids dig at archtypes deeply embedded in our own myths. John Hancock is elevated beyond his brooding and damaged past into heriosm for the benefit of all only when the ugliness of the past is finally revealed. Nothing short of that cures him. He is a hero nevertheless but has no reason to do anything more than the barest minimum, and his self-destruction is only metaphorical because his underlying invulnerability is always maintained. He is his own worst enemy and needs to be completed for anything to work. His completion is his self - his seeming opposite. It is a love which cannot be consummated for the benefit of the two, but only for the marriage of idealism, of pure altruism.

There's a lot of ways this story can spin off a number of analogies, but there it is. A new American hero, a purposeful masculine wedded to a wise and idealistic female half but complimentary halves which must be kept vital by distance. Omnipotent apart, vulnerable together. Each needing what the other brings.

Like I said, it's a surprising movie. It is a love story - an anti-material, altruistic selfless love story. One that must put faith in sacrifice and independent interdependence. A good story for this weekend.

 

Wanted

Wanted is a poor movie. It's Fight Club for people who dig wrestling. It's Chuck meets Office Space meets The Bourne Identity, IQ adjusted for the Grand Theft Auto demographic.

I happen to be in that demographic and I'm not going to pretend at this moment that I'm any better than anybody else. After all I did fork over the dollars for this improbable almost campy rompy stumblebum of an action flick. The interesting thing about it is that now that I've experienced it, I feel like I want to slap a bitch up. I was composing gay poetry in my mind and channeling some woman hating uber-butch. That's the kind of emotional vibe I got. It's not so disturbing to me, I mean, I inherited some fairly mean street wisdom in my life, but I realized that I was listening to NPR before and after the show. The intellectual type of bitch-slapping I usually feel, and felt before the show, was supplanted after the movie by a kind of perverse rage. It was accentuated by some snippets of This American Life in which a drunk dude wants to stay drunk, and it startles the goodie two shoes liberal babe with the sociology degree. I practically wanted to do some damage to her earholes through the radio.

Then Larry Mantle comes on and insinuates more insinuations about how stupid our political and military leadership has been upon the release of a new report from the Pentagon that's bound to be all people talk about this coming week.

The protagonist of Wanted is a nobody who recognizes that his life has left him emasculated.  To give Wanted credit, the film doesn't blame society. I do, like Fight Club did, and I have my reasons, but it occurs to me in this reviewing that a Libertarian is someone who has figured out that they're too smart to care. It seems to be the most arrogant of all politics, because it has no real reason to ask to lead. I cannot tell the difference between Mugabe and Libertarians. The point is that I perceive two political classes of Americans who have no interest in what this kind of movie has to say, liberals and conservatives. But the theatre was packed. This kind of movie has this to say: we are nobodies but we all fantasize about taking control of our lives and fulfilling some kind of destiny and that destiny is fantastically violent because everybody around us are such killer assholes and everything is a lie.

There is no truth in Wanted. There is only ugly fate and convoluted destiny. Finding one's future and one's self out is an ugly business that only involves betrayal. It is a film without hope that only seeks purpose for a violent period. I am waiting to see how many gozillions it makes, and what popular following is to follow. I can tell you that I had to wait in line to see it, and I know I should have seen WallE instead.

But being a conservative and not minding my own uptight business, venturing out into the stinking stew of the masses for this bloody entertainment, I have come face to face with some part of my own pscyhe and of America's as well. And I think it leaves me a touch more anarchist than I want to be - given the conceit that I'm actually learning something from this experience. I am struck by the incredible arrogance of philosophically consistent liberals and conservatives who would dare to call this their nation where such a film can become a blockbuster. I don't know whether to be ashamed or to run and hide.

Scarface

I didn't realize how much of what I have been saying was Scarface. I'm starting to think that if I had seen this movie before there would have been little room in my heart for New Jack City.

Like a number of icons of American popular culture, Scarface is one of those films that I've only seen glimpses of. Or perhaps I had digested it so long ago without having refreshed my memory that I've been hearing echoes of its truth without giving it props. Instead, I just watched it yesterday and today and I keep saying - Oh, I thought Flavor Flav invented that, and Oh, I thought Nas invented that.

"Say hello to my little friend." OK everybody knows that was Pacino is Scarface, but I didn't know "Who do I trust? Me!" was Pacino in Scarface. There seem to be eight or nine scenes from this film that have been copied in a dozen other films since. One in particular I remember is the - cruising the car in the evening with an oil refinery in the background to a small humble house on the edge of town. Set It Off did that. Fracture did that. I'm sure it was also done in Deep Cover and in One False Move as well. The quote page on IMDB is huge. Anyway...

Now I know.

The Bank Job

The Bank Job is an excellent meditation on information theory. Who knows what and when? As secrets come to light, who is affected and how do they react? Who knows the power of information and how do they use it? There is an excellent passage in this film where over the course of an hour (in film time) the blackmailed becomes the blackmailer. The difference is actual possession of information and understanding what it means.

Other than that, the pace and editing of this film was all off. As a complex film, it wasn't done nearly as well as Guy Ritchie might have, but it was a satisfying albeit somewhat more predictable film.

Statham plays something of a nice guy in the way he does. A ne'er do well with promise to keep to a pretty young girl. Not so much a fighting and action film here, and the intrigue is not handled with much more depth or aplomb than with the Oceans films. But adequate. A couple really good laughs, some decent suspense. I'd wait for the DVD or the downloads.

Flicks With Bullets

This weekend I saw a couple action flicks of a very different orientation, and as an action flick connoisseur, I was amply rewarded.

Vantage Point
Vantage Point as to be the most emotionally gripping action movie since, well there's got to be something since 'The Long Kiss Goodnight' aside from 'Mercury Rising' but I can't think of what it might be. While it's certainly not quite in the class of 'Unbreakable' it almost gets there. But maybe that's just because I'm a patriot and the emotional commitment of Secret Service agents kind of gets me right here.

As you know, VP consists of an almost tiresome repetition of the scene of an extraordinary terrorist plot to assassinate the President of the United States at a world peace conference in Spain, all taken from different points of view. What you know depends upon what you've seen and what you're seeing next that you haven't seen. The film does a fairly good job of keeping all the actors, motives and actions hidden from view fairly far into the movie, even for fairly sophisticated mystery buffs like myself. There's a little bit of the old 'look at the expression in people's faces as they see something incredible but don't show it to the camera' trick, but this time it actually works to good effect.

The entire setup is a seriously done film with no throwaway stereotypes, neither good guys nor bad guys, and without being slyly political. The acting is very good, there are relatively few suspensions of disbelief necessary.

Shoot Em Up
This is, hands down, the second funniest action spoof ever. Right behind 'Kung Fu Shuffle', this is a real rib-splitter. The only way it could have been improved is if the Coen Brothers did it, even so, I doubt they could have pulled it off. I only read one review, and they said if you like Snatch or Crank, you'll love this. Hmm. Now that I think about it, we'll have to put this at number three behind Snatch. But still ahead of Hot Fuzz, Crank, In Bruges, and Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels on the hilarity scale. This one is played purely for cant. Not a bunch of sophisticated humor, but what perfect timing, what action farce.

You've got the most improbable gun battles imaginable captured on film. It's almost like Sin City meets Jackie Chan, except everything is with guns. In fact, there's even a gun battle inside a warehouse full of guns, and if you think old Western movies had the lock on humor about a guy with crazy gun skills, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Shoot Em Up opens with our improbable hero sitting on a bus stop in the cold heart of the heartless city and a pregnant woman runs by. Some dirtbag is chasing her, and the hero saves her, in a manner of speaking. But you have never, ever seen a gun battle happening when a woman is giving birth, which is basically your clue. If you're not laughing out loud by the kind of black humor that evokes, then you need to forget it now, because it only gets more twisted and absurd. The dialog is just right, and the running joke of the entire movie works the entire movie.

This is one that I rented, the first ever, from iTunes movie rentals. Definitely worth the four bucks. I downloaded and played it on my iPod. Just right.

In Bruges

'In Bruges' is rather like a Guy Ritchie film with half the cast, twice the heart, at half the pace. You'd think that would add up a bit short but you'd be wrong. That's because Guy Ritchie films are rather like Snickers bars. It's simply ridiculous to think about having one and never having another. Hell I've watched 'Snatch' at least a half dozen times, and that dog still cracks me up. But there is something about a high quality drama and 'In Bruges' is that with a twist, that makes a second watching something you'd rather avoid, like a second prix fixe meal at the same restaurant on another weekend. I can't imagine sitting through 'There Will Be Blood' again, and I have that same, very good and respectful feeling about this dark, dramatic comedy.

'In Bruges' has a very real sense of unreality to it. You're not likely to see gunfighting gangsters decide to take a battle outside because the pregnant proprietor of an inn tells them so. But it's just the kind of thing that happens in this charming film. It plays a lot less wanky than did 'Hot Fuzz' but its got some of the same vibe going for it - all sorts of improbable action happening in an ordinarily sleepy European town.

The acting is superb and there are plenty of close-ups and memorable dialog and the casting is great. The poof skinhead, the carousing midget, the cranky Canuck, and the fat Americans all make this a really hilarious film. Do see it.

Cloverfield

I won't be the first to say that the new horror flick 'Cloverfield' is a cross between Godzilla and The Blair Witch Project because that just about sums it up. It's an enormously interesting concept that works about as well as can be expected. It could have been a lot better. In fact, it should have been a lot better. Unfortunately they just used one camera.

I'm going to have to save my enthusiasm for a multi-perspective drama up for Vantage Point which looks much more like an adult drama. The twentysomethings in Coverfield are unbearably vapid and crippled to the point at which I'm considering whether or not J J Abrams himself has any real sense of transcendent courage beyond that which is motivated for people at arms reach. In his increasingly claustrophobic 'Lost' series, everything becomes more and more like a soap opera and less and less like any survival drama. Then again perhaps he has reached the limit at which survival drama remains interesting. Survival for what? Survival of what? Everything is all very highschool - nobody seems to get beyond their friends and their parents and their own philosophy of life. Isn't it odd that what has evolved on Lost's island never goes beyond the conspiracy? JJ Abrams people never strive to form a more perfect union, establish justice or insure domestic tranquility for posterity, only for themselves.

That is why it occurs to me that nobody in Cloverfield ever weeps for the city. That the protagonist of this flick only discovers that he is in love (because of what, a trip to Coney Island?) when buildings start collapsing. How could we ever expect such an empty suit to do anything but run and sweat and thoughtlessly drag his equally flummoxed pals through mortal danger for the possibility of a last kiss?

Somewhere in our literature there must be a devastating critique of the romantic fool who barely understands his own passions and mindlessly walks through a menagerie-life until he stubs his toe upon reality. Then facing that, dives directly with passion for the very first time into the full flame of his romantic fantasy. Until such time as that passage is discovered, you have Cloverfield and this review.

3:10 To Yuma

This movie brings back the trope of honor, of good vs evil, to the Western, and the Western back to contemporary audiences. What a lucky break for all of us.

Somebody smacked me about the fact that I enjoyed 'Transformers' this year, and I did so for a couple of reasons. The first was that from the perspective of a gamer and a patriot, I really dug how the infantry squad tactics were highlighted in the film. It's something that hasn't been done well since 'Blackhawk Down'. Whereas that was something of a downer of a film, this one was nicely heroic. Of course you can smack me for liking 'nice' heroes, but I never pretended that Transformers was a grownup movie. The other reason was for the various faces and exuberence of actor Shia Laboef. Sue me for spelling his name wrong but the dumbass should change it anyway. He wants to be a movie star doesn't he? Because he's not a kid. Nor is the little girl in Disney's "Game Plan". Their little smart-mouthed grownups, as contrasted to adults.

The kid in 3:10 is a kid, and you know it because he knows what he can and cannot say and he doesn't say much when it comes to adult situations, which is not only realistic but as it should be. A kid who runs away from space aliens that tranform themselves into hot cars demonstrates nothing about courage or character. The kid whose trembling hand holds a gun to the head of a man who holds a gun to the head of his father, that's a decidedly deep moment.

It's not much of a stretch to see how 3:10 works and might have happened. You have a bad man who has the jump on most everyone - who takes what he wants at all times, who lives by his wits and reputation and who keeps a motley crew of killers in tow. He's Ben Wade, and he thinks on his feet, swimming like a shark through the dusty old West preying on Pinkerton stages. He comes across an onery cuss who, motivated by the last shred of decency he has and a bit of desparation, joins a posse to deliver the killer to a prison train.

It's a father and son film and also about how men alone make law in their ethics out in the wilds. It serves to remind us how little moral thinking we are called to do in our conventions. I hear there's a new game show which will reveal that very shallowness called 'The Moment of Truth'. That's why we need more Westerns.

Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises is a dreary film about a depressing set of circumstances that befall a young female doctor when she delivers a baby from a 14 year old girl who dies on the operating table. The diary of the mother leads this doctor to a Russian crime family. The story takes place in London.

It is a Cronenberg film with eerie implications underlying many scenes. It is rather uniquely lit with many night scenes given a small touch of warmth in cold, damp surroundings. The actors do very good deadpan and all the joy in the film is strangely staged, as if every character, save the doctor, lives in well-adjusted fear of the truth. It comprises a cold calculation of modern society where few can afford to be innocent of life and death.

About halfway through, I thought, what a depressing movie. From the very beginning, I thought it was filmed in Prague. It's claustrophobic enough to make one think so for a time - very focused on the characters and not the times. Even as the plot worked its way into somewhat predictable twists, I couldn't think any goodness could come of it, nor much entertainment for me. And yet Eastern Promises inexorably delivered a bit of hope and concluded on that up note while the deception of the entire modern world continues.

It's a good movie to watch if you are drunk and wish to watch other drunks, or if you believe in pluck. There's a decent enough surprise in the middle as well as some very ugly knife fighting. Dark, sad, tragic with a baby's chance.

The Bucket List

It's hard not to be formulaic when it comes to dealing with the plot of Rob Reiner's latest film. Given that, The Bucket List does a pretty good job of riding the wave as far as it needs to go and then cutting into territory that is unusual enough to satisfy sophisticated moviegoers. Notice I said moviegoers. If you still call them movies, and not 'film' or 'cinema', then The Bucket List is for you.

It's a swell entertainment, but it's rather and underpowered script for two such massive actors. Oh sure there's good stuff, a couple belly laughs, several tears and a clever insight or two, but nothing earthshattering. It's rather a film for old folks.

But I liked it too. It's exactly what you expect it to be, and just a tad bit better.

Blazing Saddles

I tried but I couldn't do it.

I recorded Blazing Saddles on the Tivo this weekend and then sat down on the couch to watch it after I put the little Bowens down to bed last night. AMC bleeped 'nigger', 'shit' and 'asshole' but it was fairly obvious when they were being used. None of that could stop this movie from being horrendously insipid. It's one of those many 'classic' movies that I still have yet to see. (On the burner are 'The French Connection' and 'Serpico')

One part of me wants to take the opportunity to suggest how obvious it must be that the social standing of blackfolks has risen since the time when Blazing Saddles was made. But I even had a hard time managing the mental gymnastics of putting myself in the frame of mind of guessing what might have been or might not have been appropriate for the time. Some jokes, which dragged on forever were just horrid. OK two black guys are sent out to find quicksand in the railroad right of way. Finding them floating in the muck, the white bosses lasso the handcar out of the pit but not the black guys. Ha ha very funny, about 20 seconds worth of funny, not half of the opening.

I'm aware that Richard Pryor was one of the writers of the script, sharing the credit with three others for this Mel Brooks slapstick vehicle. They should have let him write the whole thing. I'm also aware that there was one scene, between Cleavon Little and some hooker in the dark, where the punchline is "That's my arm", but I simply couldn't hold out that long. The Hanging Ogre? Not funny. The scatterbrain Governor? Not funny. The plotting Attorney General? Not funny. Just stupid, stupid, stoopid.

Mel Brooks. What can I say? His taste for the absurd is really very seventies. It just doesn't work now, and I'm hard pressed to say that it ever did for anybody but a PG13 audience. Why is it that I always think of Blazing Saddles in the same breath as the Kentucky Fried Movie? We know that Zucker went on to make Airplane which became the progenitor of today's full-on movie parody movies. What are we up to now? Date Movie? Scary Movie 5? Meet the Spartans? 

Brooks seems to me the useful idiot of the movie industry, rather like Cindy Sheehan in politics. We need complete cut-ups like them to prove without a doubt that we do enjoy free speech. Except you just wish they would say something enduring. In the meanwhile, I'll stick with Monty Python.

In The Name of the King

What a hoot.

This has got to be one of the purest and simplest sword and sorcery movies I've ever seen. It's got a great balance of non-epic cheese, completely reasonable plot, unseriously fine acting and action, action, action. It's got ugly beastial hordes commanded by an evil wizard,  man-hating tree nymphs with amazonian skills, flaming arrows, a wise and dying king, a reluctant hero, a scheming prince, a headstrong daughter who can fight. It's even got ninjas.

Everything, everything everything you want in a feel-good, non-self-important movie you get in this one. Pure fun. Great casting. Just do it.

There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood is an extraordinary movie, more in the way it is acted and the way it sounds than anything else. That's probably not saying much to a director who probably wants to hear that it looks fabulous too. OK yeah well it does. But in a subtle way - almost too subtle to be noticed against the powerful drama of the story of the unforgettable character Daniel Plainview.

In some ways, this is the kind of story you might believe would be made about the head character of HBO's Deadwood. You know, the ugly corrupt owner of the brothel. But to be a brothel owner is something of a mediocrity, which is in the end, the failing of all of HBO's dramas despite their fascinating writing and compelling casts. Who cares about the self-doubts of a mafioso? Well, the answer quite plainly are those people at whose level of power he approaches in their own moral ambiguity - in other words Hollywood producers, actors and directors. The little millionaires. In some ways, this movie is on that same scale. Surely the producers of There Will Be Blood made promises and created their own town as moviemakers, just as Daniel Plainview did as an oilman.

This is the story of the hardest hard-scrabble rock picking prospector who figured out how to make money from digging under the man-killing earth. As he rises in success and fame, he is revealed by degrees to be a misanthrope, a man who takes great pains to conceal the fact that he has little concern for the mass of humanity and moves sharklike through them because they happen to greatly desire the one thing he knows better than anyone else - how to get oil out of the ground.

He is haunted by the fact that simple men who do not match his cunning or ruthlessness often block his path, and the story is about how he manages the precarious balance between hatred, greed, co-dependency, and social acceptability. He is a man who seduces and then exploits everyone but a precious few, those he needs most in order to keep the oily shark of his soul swimming forward.

I have not read Upton Sinclair, and I thank my lucky stars that I didn't or else I might have been irredeemably Leftist. I can recall asking on occasion what book did I need to read to understand America - the most important book of all. And I can remember hearing time and time again that it was Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". I was fortunate enough to read Howard Zinn as a full-grown man instead of an impressionable collegian. And so armed with that skepticism I approached this film knowing that it was based on one of Sinclair's books. But the film itself was so masterful that it was easy to sink all of the messages into the character of Plainview. In otherwords, this is not a metaphorical film. It didn't have to be historical. It was exactly what it needed to be: the story of a driven, fascinating, megalomaniac who was born of days when you could order goat's milk at a bar and when literacy came from the Holy Bible and nowhere else.

The music in this film was extraordinary. It just so happens that I watched Cool Hand Luke this week too. Very much the same way Lalo Schifrin raised tension with seemingly incongruously modernistic music against a rustic background, the score for There Will Be Blood has a stark, dramatic, relentless quality that overcomes the need for dialog.

There are visuals burned into memory from There Will Be Blood. There are no clippy montages. The film takes its time in ordinary action that would be cut from lesser films. We don't get to guess what happens off camera and make assumptions in our minds. The camera follows every moment. Horses walk through trees. A man runs after his boy into the dark and returns with him, panting. An oil derrick burns in the evening and black smoke drifts towards the western sunset. Grubby fingers write pencil marks onto graph paper and a design emerges. A body in a grave is face down in water and the digger kicks in the leg caught on the grave wall. A man facing away from the camera is snoring on the floor and another man tries to awaken him - the camera doesn't change angles. A man meets his son after an absence, the camera stays 50 yards away from the embrace. It is such an unusual movie to see that it makes most other movies seem somehow rushed and undone.

Daniel Day Lewis owns the film of course. His Plainview is unromantically honest, a man of little pretense. A man who simply is a force, whose economy with words allows for no flattery. He is unconcerned with his fate and drinks himself to sleep, yet will not abide the insinuation that he has mismanaged his personal life. Plainview has no personal life, his family doesn't exist, and yet it is the only value he honors outside of his business dealings. There is only his son, H.W. whose deafness robs Plainview of a confidante until a stranger comes claiming to be Plainview's half-brother. Plainview feels betrayed by both in the end, and betrays them back. He is the man without trust, he is the man who believes that God plays dice with the universe.

There Will Be Blood is another contemporary film that serves to entertain us by bringing us in close tactile proximity to the earth. It is perfectly designed for the majority of us urbanites with DVD players and jobs that rarely cost people their lives. It allows us to touch raw nature and raw lives and raw betrayal and raw ambition all born of the earth. It is a dusty, oily, gritty film in which fresh faces suffer hardships we rarely do. A girl is beaten for not praying. A baby's bottle nipple is sterilized with whiskey. A laborer is dragged from a drill hole having been crushed by falling machinery.  This is not, however, a costume drama. It is something of a slow motion psychological thriller. We watch a man consumed by ambition bulldog his way through life, a pugilistic king, a semi-gracious Machiavel, a man among men who cannot enjoy a moment's joy that doesn't serve his own purposes. Daniel Plainview is, in many ways, just as uncivil as the earth, just as oblivious to his own nature as nature is. He is as predictable as the tides, and as deadly and unforgiving as the deep. He is the very extension of earth, the God of Oil, and There Will Be Blood is his myth.

Denzel Does it for the Children

After having watched Denzel Washington's 'The Great Debaters', I think I'm going to have to review all of the Deep South danger movies. And of course I'm going to have to watch this one again. It ain't Mississippi Burning.

Part of the reason I need to watch it again is because of something Doc told me about the film that wasn't actually in it, but deeply implied in his interpretation. There were words coming out of his mouth that I expected to hear from DW but they never came. It's rather weird.

Doc's enthusiasm for the film is stratospheric. He came at me at 100 mph telling me that this should be mandatory viewing for every highshooler in America. That's rather odd because half of the film's import from my perspective was its demonstration of how much learning is explicitly book learning. But his real kicker was that he saw the great lesson was that this film showed how much education was not all about 'trying to be white' but saving one's own righteous mind. We've gone through the Acting White debate several times here and elsewhere. I seem to recall that there was broad consensus that acting white is a media hyped phenomenon sustained only by crackpots and idiot rappers. Doc wasn't part of those debates, and yet it's a bit surprising that would be his big takeaway.

This movie out-beed Akeelah for the same reason it was glib in many respects, playing fast and loose with history. It was a costume drama with words cranked up a notch for dramatic effect. And all of that became perfectly clear when Denzel's Tolson used the infamous Willie Lynch document as a device to keep his students out of his personal life and on the proper side of the student-teacher divide. Holy heavy-handed hammer of hyperbole, Batman! All the while he was saying this, I thought he might end it in tears speaking of his own father, which was the line of questioning that led to his soliloquy, but no such luck on that. The ability to get to the breathtaking descriptions of black humiliation and death at the hands of redneck townies and pig farmers is part of the Debater's bludgeon, but also the ability to convey some unmitigated family values crowds out the subtlety.

Me, I really liked the family values overflowing from this flick in retrospect. After all it is, without question, aimed directly at the hearts and minds of parents with kids in middle school and high school. At least I hope you all understand that going in. Because if you think it's going to be what the marketing of Denzel as Tolson and Forest Whitaker as James Farmer Sr. might suggest, you're in for a rude awakening. There is no great moment between the two - there are inklings of it, but it's nipped in the bud real quickly.  Going into the theatre I was almost expecting something on the level of A Soldier's Story. No such luck, and strike two.

So it's a good thing that I never finished reading (until now) Mark Anthony Neal's review and critique, because it might have soured me even more. DW is bound to make some bucks with this triumphant Negro flick, which he must. As James Farmer Sr says in the movie, much to my surprise and delight since it's exactly what I tell my son: You do what you must do, in order that you may do what you want to do.

Is it a good film? Oh yeah. The montage is actually pretty damned good. So a thumbs up for that. The juke joint and gutbucket blues authenticity is damned near perfect. I could only find one glaring slipup in that regard, which was that the ramshackle tents on the side of the road during the opening all had the same consistency of fabric. I'm trying to determine if there is any such mangrove swamp in Texas but I'll leave that alone. There was a scene in which the redneck sheriff whipped out his handkerchief and wiped his sweaty brow, but they thankfully cut that stereotypical shot to a half second.

This film is a weeper, and the climactic scene at Harvard is electric, spine-tingling and quite brilliant. I don't think I've ever seen any debate filmed better. I got Dead Poets Society for XMas and I'll get back to you on that. I got the distinct impression that they may have used the actual texts, or at least some substance of the arguments from the actual debates. I can't see how the estate of James Farmer would have it any other way, even though it wasn't actually done at Harvard.

One thing is clear is that this was an actor's movie. Denzel got some sterling performances out of his young charges. What rings so absolutely true about the film is how exactly their age and temperament these young actors seemed. That is what sets this film apart from any other of its sort. There were no gratuities in their characters. Better than any basketball, or football, or swimming movie, these were fully three dimensional young folks. I would say they were the best young black characters on film since...Sarafina! With two short stops for Finding Forrester and Antwone Fisher. These three young actors (Nate Parker, Denzel Whitaker (I kid you not) and Jurnee Smallett) have raised the bar.

I'm wondering if and when and how a more seriously intellectual film about serious intellectuals such as Tolson are going to get done. If Washington has decided that this is the level of filmmaking he will engage, then we're rather stuck aren't we? As I've said, he's got his own American manhood thing to do which seems to preclude him from doing more. Since we compare him to Russell Crowe, we should ask where is Denzel's equivalent "A Beautiful Mind"? But we also compare him to Bruce Willis, and so we have to say it ain't gonna happen.

All those are gripes from me as Cobb, not me as DaddyMan. DaddyMan is definitely going to take his kids to see this flick and I think it's going to hit them in the right place in their young minds. This film is for the kids. Thanks for that DW.

The Kingdom

My brothers and I had a discussion about who the best movie actors are in America. There was fairly wide consensus among us. Christian Bale, Denzel Washington, Johnny Depp, Russell Crowe. The conversation went sideways and we started talking about a number of others, but one name never came up. Jamie Foxx.

I don't really have it in for Jamie Foxx, no more than I do for Chris Tucker. I still haven't seen 'Ray' and so I still haven't seen Foxx act. I just did see The Kingdom. It was OK. The most memorable line in the film didn't come from any of the main chracters, it was from the FBI director. Anyway, I'm one of those movie guys who recognizes the lengths Hollywood goes to portray the FBI as pretty much the only federal agency worth spit. You'd be hard pressed to find a story where the nod goes to the CIA or the regular armed forces. The best ever in this regard, as far as I'm concerned is 'The Siege' with Denzel as the FBI guy, Bruce as the Army dude and Annette Benning as the CIA spy. It's probably the only one I can think of where the three tangle. And so with that in mind, half the plot of The Kingdom is managing to get FBI good guys on the ground in Saudi Arabia, so that they can then pursue your standard action flick.

The Kingdom is above average for pulling together some moderately decent performances from actual talented actors who have basically no rapport whatsoever. I don't know who directed this or how the picture came about, but it looked like all of the stars had somewhere else to be. Chris Cooper is in it. But he plays a loner best. Jennifer Garner is in it, she's best hogging the spotlight too. Jamie Foxx is in it, and he gets to hog the spotlight, but he is totally unconvincing as the leader of his crew. If you compare his big briefing in the wake of the calamity, with the similar scene in 'The Siege', you just know this whole movie is going to be a flop.

But it didn't flop. At least it was worth the 10 bucks for Spectravision on the wide screen in my hotel room on a Tuesday night. There's some honest to goodness drama and pathos in the flick. There's a decent buddy vibe going on between Foxx and his Saudi host, and there's a good scene where Foxx goes straight for the nuts of the prince at whose pleasure they remain in Saudi Arabia.

There are too many captions for the film to be a subtle look at the dynamic. It's basically a find the jihadi game of three mosque monte played in some very authentic looking locales. While at least one firefight looks like something out of an 80s Tom Clancy movie, there's some other pretty good shoot-em-up tactics that make it to the screen.

It's a good movie that doesn't insult my sensibilities, like that idiot one with Jake Gyllenhall. It's still not as good as Three Kings or even George Clooney's Syriana, but it's good enough to be mentioned in the same paragraph. Also, by the way, it's not as good as Rules of Engagement either.

I Am Legend

I Am Legend is the Omega Man, done better.

It's a special effects movie, a horror movie, an action movie and a sci-fi movie wrapped into a pretty decent package. Will Smith is nobody in the movie - just the guy you would expect him to be, which is you. "If it were me" drives some of the force of this film.

The film is basically held together by some extraordinarily cool scenes. You wouldn't think that chasing deer around might be something cool, but chasing deer in a Shelby Cobra with an automatic rifle, that's cool. Even though the zombies in this film are the fastest, strongest most fearsome zombies ever, there is little in Legend that's cheesy. There is one set of scenes that seems to borrow a bit from Speilberg's riverside evacuation in War of the Worlds, but that just goes to show how well done this movie is, for an action/horror flick.

As sci-fi coolness goes, Legend is rather spare. It makes for a very believable near future, and it makes one believe that this kind of thing could actually happen. I actually have some of the exact same Porsche Design external USB drives that Smith uses in his lab. Hmm. Echoes of The Wall. Legend doesn't need to get all of its science right, it's less techy than I Robot - I could see why Smith went this way. Yet somehow there is a different kind of emotional vibe, in one way less than you would expect from a movie with so much solo time by an actor.

We never get to see how Smith develops the discipline that he needs to survive in zombieland. We just come to see him, from the start of the film, as master of the domain. We know that his dog means everything, we are assured that he's not about to lose his mind - that he has made some peace with his solitude. He has his work. He has Bob Marley. He has his dog. He has his daily routine. And so in that way, the film is more flat than it should be. Smith's interior life is not like that of Heston's Omega Man who plays chess, drinks fine wine and has philosophical debates with himself. Smith's last man on earth wants to be where the blood is, he wants to singlehandedly be the man of action that turns that blood into serum. There is nothing for Smith - he is subdued to the task. Save humanity.

And so when Smith encounters a woman and a child, he only stops to explain his world and why it is the only world that matters. His mission has left him no way out. There is no love nor hope aside from that he controls, and he already had to kill his best friend.

Legend satisfies the thirst to see it. It is self-contained and doesn't attempt to be preachy. It says what we already know. Science can go wrong. That thing in which we place the greatest hope can suddenly and inexplicably turn against us. Fight for the light against the darkness. Life is survival. Survival is life.

No Country for Old Men

No Country For Old Men is a great small movie in large boxy clothes. It's a cross between Fargo and Kill Bill 2; the best I've seen in a long time.

It is a classic Coen Brothers film. There is death. There is greed. There is relentless connivance. There is mystery. It is a slow chase across Texas that begins in the aftermath of a drug deal gone horribly wrong and ends completely out of the plot.

NCFOM becomes a kind of reality film in that there is no clever plot that whips you around like a rollercoaster. Instead it actually goes off track and fulfills unexpected expectations, defying the convention that a movie controls the audience. Death is a mystery. Human brutality is a mystery. We know it when we see it, but we don't know why or exactly how. This film shows us deadly pursuit and its implicit brilliant survival. It shows the oddments of gumshoe reckoning. But all of it happens and none of it is resolved. It creates a pattern in that intellectually odd way of listening to the silence in between the notes of a symphony, of clocking trajectories of objects that never land, of making meaning of lives that end abruptly before they finish their purpose. In all these ways No Country becomes great, by not telling a story, but recounting the logic of an accelerated death.

Death in this film is played with chilling sangfroid by Javier Bardem. He is the killer who kills because it's Death's job to be deadly. It's what he promises to do. It's his trick. He has no other purpose, no sublime motivation. He uses a cattle ram. He uses a silenced shotgun. He uses mysterious weapons that come and go. He is only deliberate and devoid of mercy. He is the best symbolic bad guy ever played, because he ceases to be a bad guy with a character arc. He is merely the bringer of the ultimate, unforgiving pain. Everyone in the film keeps trying to figure him out - to find him, to thwart him, to survive him. Nobody does.

No Country promises to be a film to be rewatched. It promises to reward a second look, to offer connections to the prose which fails to be expository or prescient the first time around. It is not so much a story as it is a framework as big as Texas. It's a framework for wondering what evil looks like today.

Hustle and Flow

Like 'Black Snake Moan', Hustle & Flow was one of those films that I basically figured I knew from the trailer which was provocative enough for me to make up a good story in my head. So I didn't bother to see either one, expecting them to be disappointing. It just so happened that Hustle & Flow was on my tube last night. It was an extraordinary film, damned near great.

In one way, Hustle & Flow is the kind of film that people think could never get made, and they're probably right. It feels every bit like the high quality studio tape which is part of the central story. I may have missed the opening scene, which I'm going to have to catch another time, but everything about H&F takes me to a familiarly unsentimental America. In one of its pivotal scenes, the protagonist DJay writes the archaeologist's words for him. In the civilization that follows, one day they'll come digging for what the Memphis ghetto was, and they'll find this music and this film as the bittersweet testimony of the triumph of the human spirit that keeps getting gutshot, disrespected and cursed at.

Hustle & Flow has very much of the right thing HBO has been pimping for the past few years. It's the story of a bad guy who tries to make good in a world of harsh reality. DJay is the macher with no need for a shrink - who knows he exists on the margins of society but still aims to keep his heart as pure as possible, who tries to handle his business the best way he knows how, who tries to keep his head up against all odds, and within that, dreams a little dream. What separates H&F from the exploitative dreck elsewhere is the dream, and the lack of people who go along with the dumb plot line. There is no color for color's sake in H&F. There is no stock character - not even the screaming baby.

Aside from its brilliant location shooting, worlds that team with life among the crumbling city, dialog in dialect is the masterwork of this film. There is such nuance of power and intent, you can feel the articulation of every emotion even when the words get away from you. You get into the souls of people who don't show up as people on any mainstream writer's radar. What does it look like inside of a pimp's house? It's a scene that is never shown unless cops are involved, and so the squalor is always taken as an external view to internal chaos. But nowhere in any film has a simple plate of sandwiches or a lava lamp illuminated so much character. Nowhere have I seen the eyes of fear and love from a pregnant hooker so full. Nowhere in any film have I seen the earth spin over a scrambled cassette tape and heartbreak in a toilet stall. Only Trainspotting comes close.

Hustle and Flow is one of those films that, rather like Saving Private Ryan, ups the ante for the genre. All of the disappointment one can gin up for a sorry half-assed film like Four Brothers becomes immediately evident in comparison. This is the kind of film I had come to expect of Carl Franklin or Charles Burnett. Instead it came out of nowhere. Thank you Craig Brewer. I guess I'm going to go see Black Snake Moan after all.

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.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

30 minutes of patience is only 22 when you have Tivo. That's a good thing because this new disjointed FX comedy has gotten the last 22 minutes it is ever going to suck out of my life.

I know what Danny DeVito was trying to do here. He was trying to go madcap. I would love some madcap comedy. I would be so bold as to say we poor saps in America are deathly lacking in madcap. Before Steve Martin became an insufferably serious art collector, before Mork from Ork became the self-righteous prick that swallowed Robin Williams some nanoseconds after he shared the stage with Whoopie Goldberg for the first time at Comic Relief, we used to have authentic madcap comics. It has all gone to shit. We realized this when we made Chris Tucker a star, but of course its Rush Hour that has sucked all the air out of that. We're left with what? Owen Wilson trying to commit suicide?

Now I grant you that we do still have a little bit of madcap. The current master in residence is none other than Jumbulingham Chandrasekhar aka Broken Lizard, the guy that gave us Beerfest and Super Troopers. However that's more in the mode of the Kentucky Fried Movie rather than Airplane. The gags are raunchy which is the new gross-out funny. You know the speil.. it all ends up at Band Camp. But once upon a time, we had Throw Mama From the Train, and the great madcap black comedy Drowning Mona.

So it makes sense that DeVito would get involved in what this FX show is trying to be. But dammit it doesn't frickin' work! Please bring back Starved.

Pride

If I had grown up in the Philly ghetto, Pride, the film now out on DVD starring Terrence Howard and Bernie Mac, would have taken me way back. Instead it turned out to be one of those movies that make for a very palatable pseudo-experience appropriate for black middle class parents to watch with their tweens when they want to talk about 'back in the day', rated PG.

This movie reminds me so much of Roll Bounce that I don't know where to begin. So I won't and I'll end it right there.

Yes it's a good movie. Yes it's a predictable movie. Yes it has it's moment. But the formula is worn so thin that I'm not even sure that I should criticize it. What should I expect? Remember the Titans? Quite frankly, I hope every one of the sports integration / coming of age / ghetto vs suburb / based on a true story movie gets made. We got it for football with Titans. We got it for basketball in Glory Road. Every one of these has their twist. So once they're all done and all the Motown royalties are paid for the slow motion montages, we can sit down and truly ask ourselves what we have learned.

The twist and angle of Pride, which pretty much resides on a very direct plot with no interesting subplots whatsoever, is that sometimes it just doesn't work out at all. And that's just fine. 'It' being the ebony and ivory syrupy goodness. That's unusual for upbeat heartwarming stories. But that's what Pride gives us, a movie where the white guys are for the most part, bad guys.

In fact, I did deal with arrogant white preppies in 1974 on the swim team. They were my teammates. They got that vibe basically right, for what it's worth, but this is a pat zero-sum flick that works just with the basics, not the subtleties of interracial conflict and alliance.

Good film, but.

Megatron Vs Optimus Prime

It's true what they say about Shia LaBeouf. He's going to be the next great actor. Yes. He's a combination of Will Smith and Tom Hanks. He's that good, and I can see it all. His performance in Transformers is the most genuine teenage kid I've seen since the very first American Pie. The good news is that he's a bit more wholesome.

As for the movie, it's way better than the Fantastic Four by a longshot, and there are couple interesting surprises too.

First of all, this is one of the first action/monster flicks in a long time where the real humans have a chance at a human scale. Starting with Independence Day and Godzilla, we've been accustomed to seeing the entire human race made to look foolish and puny until some superhuman brain (usually the star) comes up with a one in a million shot to overcome the odds. During the course of such movies, you generally see gratuitous swipes at the US Armed Forces. You'll get the loudmouth stupid general, or the cowardly President, or the duplicitous intelligence agency. In Transformers you get some real serious squad-based action in which soldiers make a difference. It's so damned refreshing and new for Hollywood movies that half the audience will be thinking they are suspending disbelief when they see a platoon that actually fights and wins. In fact, in the Transformers movie, I'd say some of the best action is seeing how the Army coordinates attacks on the alien nasties. This is the first new Army movie in decades.

Secondly, and it bears repeating, Shia Labeouf is fantastic kid actor. He's funny. He runs like an action hero. He's expressive. He's smart and he's quirky and witty too. I've heard before I saw this movie that Spielberg sees a great future for the kid, I see it too. He's got the thing, and he brought all kinds of character to a movie that only had Bay's effects and action going for it.

As for the babeage, the female lead was horribly miscast for this movie. I can't see any reason at all to get a chick so juicy and delicious to play a high school chick other than to make LaBeouf look primed for romantic comedy flicks. From the POV of a middle schooler or highschool boy who might want to see this flick, I suppose the casting is right, as is the new Camaro which completes the fantasy. Still.

Oh yeah, Megatron & Optimus Prime. Uh.. They're cool robots? The fights between the robots are long and fast. It looks quite different from everything else we've seen. Some of it works, some of it doesn't. There isn't a lot of good baseline material for robotic fight choreography outside of I Robot which I think did a very fine job. So when the Autobots go at it with the Decepticons it's sometimes like watching Katamari Damacy on speed, there are often just two giant balls of junk going at each other and you never know when the equivalent of a kick to the groin has happened. I really think Bay should have stuck a bit more slo-mo simulcast action into some of the robot fight sequences. I think that will make the difference next time around.

On the other hand, the human vs robot fighting is done very well, most especially the desert standoffs and the hogtie scene in the LA River. Speaking of which, the location continuity on this film sucked big time. It could have been done better, but for kids, who cares. For action film guys like me, it was a problem.

The film did fill out its 2 and a half hour shell fairly nicely but I don't think it will stand up well to a second viewing. I give this one 83%.

Does Whatever A Spider-Pig Does

The Simpsons Movie is the first movie I can remember since "There's Something About Mary" where I have to go back to hear a third of the jokes because the audience is still laughing at the last joke. It's that funny.

Not only that, it is the only movie where a dozen jokes you already saw in the trailers are still funny in the movie. Furthermore, the audience is telling the joke as it comes on the screen and it's still funny. Everybody (and we were sitting in the fifth row, it was that crowded) was singing 'Spider-Pig'. The Simpsons is America, and this is America's movie. It made me laugh, it made me cry. It made me cheer. It made me sorry that I'd criticized the Simpsons before.

Homer Simpson is the dumb American that proves America doesn't have to be the land of the yuppies, so long as it remains the land of the free.

On our way to the theatre, we knocked off about 25 Simpsons characters that we could name. Of course there were more, but here's what I can remember off the top of my head:

Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, Santa's Little Helper, Flanders, Todd, Willie, Barney, Moe, Carl, Lenny, Smithers, Burns, Apu, Milhouse, Selma, Patty, Otto, Skinner, Wiggum...ahh you get the picture. Everybody is in the film.  I love the Simpsons and the movie is that good.

Daddy's Little Girls

I will never get used to the aw shucks goodness of Father's Day. It's the one season of the year when television commercials actually grow up for a moment. This year was no exception. The Spousal Unit, Boy, Scholar and F10 all did a bang up job. They gave me just the right balance of slavish attention and peaceful solitude. So I went and bought myself a tie.

This evening, they brought back the Tyler Perry flick, 'Daddy's Little Girls'. I wasn't really in a mood to see it, but I figure most anything is better than the alternative given, a Bernie Mac film. I am sick of his mug. Anyway, this was a neat little package that had all of the trimmings of the kind of movies we wanted Spike Lee to make 20 years ago, where the good guys won, the bad guys lost and everything was dipped in the dialect. No loose ends in this bad boy.

I''m a stranger to the Perry oeuvre. From this deally alone his work seems likable. I wouldn't expect to find the likes of Forrest Whittaker in a Perry film. That's too bad, but not all bad. I grew up before this genre got going. I suspect that the Spousal Unit has seen her share of Morris Chestnut and Gabrielle Union films, but I think I've seen just two. This was one that took itself seriously without being too ham-handed although there were clumsy moments. I think it dealt with class in a bit of an in-your-face manner, but it wasn't particularly overwrought.

Good story, nice work. Rough around the edges. Worth a look.

Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was almost very satisfying, instead it was merely satisfying. Here we finally have a brooding Potter moping all over the screen, and because we know his character so very well, we put up with dozens of stultifying boring non-verbal time wasting scenes. What we really want to see, and do get a glimpse of, is a bunch of heavy duty magic battles.

The magnificence of the Order of the Phoenix itself is completely sublimated to the inner conflict of Harry himself. The word 'auror' isn't even mentioned, and so we get no real introduction to Tonks or Shacklebolt or any of the others in the Order.

Where the film shines is in its portrayal of the much loathed Dolores Umbridge, Arbiter of the Nanny State. Her syrupy cruelty is realized so very well by actress Imelda Staunton that you're ready to hate her as soon as she speaks. Of course author Rowling was fully aware of the political implications of her characterizations. I'm interested to see how Left critics might interpret the willingness of the youth of Hogwarts to fight the enemy whose very existence and agenda is denied at the highest levels of government.

The film, in the end, felt rather rushed and the visual effects really did not help it as much as it might have, which only goes to show how good a novel Order of the Phoenix actually was.

Live Free or Die Hard

I've got a thing for computer bling. So I want to know who are the number one people who do set design for the uber-slick computer command centers. It has been a dream of mine since I was a teenager to have my own data center. Although I hardly expected it, Bruce Willis' latest movie is a cyberthriller that sports the coolest, most action packed interiors as well as exteriors.

There are several films in the action genre that come to mind when it comes to super high tech electronics headquarters. 24's CTU sets the standard most of the time because of its relative realism. Swordfish rocks hard in this regard. Deja Vu had some mind-bogglingly cool stuff. Nothing quite matches the retro-chaos of the deck of the Nebechanezzar from the Matrix Trilogy. Even 'Bait' which was a pathetic movie had some excellent set design. Standouts in my mind are the now classic 'Minority Report' and the awesome desk of the director of the clone facility in 'The Island'. As you might imagine, I own all of these DVDs. I can't wait to get this Die Hard, which rather like the latest James Bond film, is the best yet. They have about five different computer sets, each with its own particular kind of cool, from the FBI's setup, to the bad guy's mobile setup, to the basement command center of Warlock and various other joints. Great, great stuff.

There remains some suspension of disbelief in all action flicks, but the thing you gotta love about John McClane is that he never gets away unbloodied. I keep thinking how awesome the makeup guys are to keep his face precisely scarred and his arms properly bloodied throughout the entire film. That would ordinarily be a nightmare of continuity, but they pulled it off. Not so effortless were the attempts to make downtown LA look like downtown DC, but that's just because I know my town too well. They did do a nice job of putting a digitized Capitol Building over the Grand Avenue overpass. As well, no photographer can seem to resist the old Union 76 headquarters in downtown LA which is now owned by one of the film companies. That stood in for the FBI, and it's also police headquarters for the TV series Numbers.

Speaking of the FBI, I'm just a little bit amused at how often in movies they are consistently portrayed as the only federal agency worth trusting. The CIA and NSA always get screwed, and now Homeland Security gets its whacks in this Die Hard. What would make for an interesting action thriller would be a domestic version of The Unit that has the ability to do what the FBI really doesn't, which is trail all the suspects until an entire cell is wrapped up. The FBI has to stop when they get prosecutable crimes, busting up conspiracies is not their forte. On the politically serious side of that, consider what Posner has to say on CT and justice.

Die Hard now takes the honors for the coolest use of a jet plane in a chase scene, now burying the long standing record of True Lies. They also have made it official. Street climbing stunts are the next evolution in action staples. Thank you Jackie Chan, your legacy will now live on. There are two or three absolutely mind-bogglingly quick street climbing stunts in this flick that will make you snap your neck. I don't know who this 'spider boy' dude was in the movie, but he was freaking awesome.

Also, Bruce Willis fights dirty, and that is a novel and cool thing to do in today's action flicks. He doesn't indulge in all that kung fu stuff. I mean I really dig the close combat that Matt Damon is doing in his Bourne flix, and Jason Statham and Jet Li are both excellent. But Bruce.. damn. He just grabs you by the arm and throws you down the stairs, HARD.

This is the best Die Hard to date, no question. Don't miss it.