Getting LOST

Series spoilers below if you haven’t yet watched LOST.

***
"Not until we are lost, do we begin to understand ourselves" -- H.D. Thoreau

When I decided the actual act of blogging was less odious than the word blogging or the concept of being a—shudder—blogger, I made a pact with myself: alright, I’ll do this…but no writing about LOST. Until, I amended off-the-bat, it’s all ending.

The end of LOST is here. I’ve spent many an hour boring my girlfriend with endless musings about the direction of the show (which she didn’t then watch and does—for the sake of our relationship—now). I’ve gotten more than five friends addicted to it, consuming the DVDs happily and hungrily as I muttered ‘I told you so’ from the sidelines. In the last three years I’ve been to Hawaii, somewhat accidentally and almost always regrettably, eleven times…and found myself tied into LOST in ways I wouldn’t have imagined. It’s probably most succinctly captured in an afternoon I spent hiking a volcano alone on a day-off. I was spacing out on my hike trying to wrap my head around the mysteries of the show -- basically what has been my "default mode" intellectual masturbation for the last five years. Suddenly, out of the ether that was a jungle trail on that overcast Hawaiian Saturday, Michael Emerson (who plays ‘Ben’) comes down the mountain, just hiking for the day with his wife. I’m thinking about Ben and then suddenly he’s there: just the three of us there on the trail. I conjured him into existence. My very own LOST moment; a bit of island magic.

LOST is and always was a show about BIG IDEAS, and so it’s notoriously hard to summarize or describe to nonbelievers. Sort of like Scientology. It’s a philosophical show that owes its existence to a far-flung range of material (e.g., the video game enigma MYST, the standards-setting TWIN PEAKS, the intellectual series THE PRISONER). But unlike these sources (with the exception of season one of TP, and of course THE X FILES) it’s achieved sometime more commercial. Romance, action-adventure, even soap-opera…these genres are invoked in LOST as much as its weirder sci-fi status. So it’s a show that can be watched by a wide range of folks, be they Susie Q. Forever 21 (Cheerleader in Wantagh), Bryan James Uniqlo (Disaffected in Greenpoint), or Martin Van Heusen (Middle-aged in Middlebury). It has that elusive and financially-desirable thing: POPULAR APPEAL.

These two sides to the LOST coin (big ideas/popular appeal) has created quite a unique and heady brew. I love that LOST wants viewers to ask important questions about themselves and their lives. That being said, I also love that LOST is fun, fast, and eminently-digestible. There are sexy men and women shaking their goods, running from bad-guys, blowing shit up, banging one another, laughing, loving, surviving, falling, dying, growing, running, sweating. It’s a show of gerunds – a DOING-SHOW if you will– and moreover, a doing-show that’s meticulously thoughtful. It’s its own species in many ways.

Yet I’m going to argue that in being so uniquely crafted, LOST sacrifices a bit of its intellectual cohesiveness and creative finesse. The show wears its influences and philosophical-leanings on its sleeve – its characters are named things like Hume and Locke and Rousseau. But it never directly extrapolates on the IDEAS of these philosophers. It’s more of a postmodern philosophical pastiche, concerned with the IDEA of philosophy more than the endeavor if it. It has epistemological auspices but fails to provide the systematic rigor of analysis or deconstruction. So it’s a “smart show” for sure but, unfortunately, not one that has much to say.

Yes, LOST seems to not have much to offer. It’s a hard thing for me to sort of arrive at, and I definitely wouldn’t have imagined this in seasons one or three, but in the end I think what’s most important about LOST was the fact that it made us think it was important. It Jacobed us. And by that I mean it enticed us with an interesting, personal, eye-to-eye intellectual connection that never really materialized. AND THAT’S FINE. We weren’t actually candidates at all, and yet we couldn’t help pushing the button for six seasons straight. Listen, the secret to life is probably not going to be hidden in a show starring that douche-y guy from PARTY OF FIVE and some hot born-again Canadian non-actress. The secret to life isn’t going to be written by the people who brought us NASH BRIDGES (Lindeloff), WALKER, TEXAS RANGER (Cuse) or ALIAS (Abrams) – no matter how good those shows actually were or were not. LOST is a rube, a hell of a good one. It isn’t about the answers, it never was. It’s about the questions, how deftly the writers shifted our focus from what was important to WHAT IS IMPORTANT NOW. There is no secret answer, no meaning for the island, no perfect concept that will unlock the show. It’s as ethereal and mercurial as mystery itself; it’s own smoke-monster; formless, inchoate, lost itself.

So the very nature of the show goes against the very idea of ending it. Towards these ends, I think we were bound to be a bit let down by the final season. Closure is never an easy thing for a series, especially one of this creative caliber. But here, thematically, closure is about the hardest thing it can do. LOST is about endless cycles, passing stewardship of the island to future generations, going back in time and giving yourself the compass you went back in time to give yourself. Mobius strips of infinite nuance. I really did not love this season, and all the parts I didn’t love were parts that seemed more like lucid offerings to the answer-starved audience at home. I don’t WANT Smokey’s origins meticulously described. I don’t WANT to know the “rules.” I don’t want to know who the skeletons in the freaken caves were. Who the hell cares? LOST, being a populist show, had to kowtow a bit to its fans…and so I think it lost a little of what made it unique: deflection, slight-of-hand, withholding. It isn’t a show that gives; it’s a show that demands attention to detail, careful analysis, the frustration of feeling lost. Yes, LOST is the most perfectly titled show I’ve ever seen.

It also, in providing some undergraduate philosophy about the duality of goodness and evil, the interchangeability of such terms, the relativistic argument, created quite the pickle for its writers. We don’t know whom to route for anymore – both Jacob and the ‘Man In Black’ alternate as the “good guy” and the “bad guy.” As much as its brash iconography of white and black suggests otherwise, LOST as a philosophical text is offering that there is no true ‘good’ or ‘evil’…there is only perception. An eye opening, the overused perseverative image of the show, means just that: we SEE and we EXPERIENCE and that is how we choose sides. There are no others; we are the others; the others are the others. Its fertile philosophical ground, for sure, but it makes it hard to write compelling stories on a script-by-script basis. We need to care about characters fates (which is a bit undone by the “multiple realities” of this season) and we need to know who to route for (I certain don’t anymore, do you?) – screenwriting 101. It may be a logical place for the story to have gone, and it may be executed as well as these capable writers can muster, but in the end it’s simply not as compelling TV as previous seasons. So LOST falters on both sides of its unique duality: too populist to be truly intellectual; too intellectual to work fully as popcorn TV.

Despite this, despite Matthew Fox’s "acting", despite Nikki and Paolo, despite Eko’s untimely demise, despite Ana Lucia’s bitching, despite the bad, LOST matters. It isn’t THE SOPRANOS. It isn’t THE WIRE. But it matters. It matters because human beings spent hours of their limited time on earth watching it, sharing it, discussing it with friends and family. It matters because of what it was, rather than what it had to say. It matters because as a show it was fun, often well-written, popcorn entertainment. It matters because it made me love TV. It matters because Jacob told us so. It matters because we enjoyed getting lost so very much: we wandered back to the trail, we looked again into the jungle, we heard something rumbling out there. We ran. We pushed the button. We gave ourselves the compass we gave ourselves.

IRON SINKS

Blog entries lambasting flaccid and disappointing sequels are a dime a dozen on the internet these days, so by all means stop reading now. Your time is probably better spent trying to get the plastic off a Polly-O string cheese (that you’re not even going to eat) while watching Jeff Francoeur strike out looking AGAIN against the freaken San Francisco Giants for the love of Christ. You're killing me Francoeur! Sorry that’s just what I was doing.

Still with me? Fools. Anyway, yes, I have to say I’m disappointed by IRON MAN 2, which falls into all the trappings of what can succinctly be dubbed ‘sequel-itis’. It’s bigger…it’s grander…it’s MORE EXPLOSIVE….and all at the mere cost of everything that made the original off-beat, exhilarating, and enjoyably simple. To the IRON MAN franchise, Robert Downey Jr. is the sexy salesman whose charm is indistinguishable from the product he’s selling. If the movie biz doesn’t quite pan-out, RDJ has a viable career hocking Rube Goldburg culinary apparatuses on late-night TV. Surely he and his ilk are the reason anyone in this great country owns something as head-scratching as the As-Seen-On-TV ‘Slap Chop.’ But after a couple of years shining your shoes they can appear a little over-buffed; and thus, as with any salesman, peddling the same act after a while ends up feeling a little sad. I’m not accusing RDJ of not having any fun with the role, I’m just musing on the idea that the role is so utterly fun that he sort of neglects there’s anything else he can be doing.

Not that the failure here is RDJ, he’s the best Tony Stark this mediocre script could have conjured forward. Justin Theroux, whose on-camera work I admire so much in David Lynch films, seemed an odd duck choice to pen this sequel – but, hell, I was game. Not sure Mr. Theroux was really up for the task, it seems, regurgitating up the same-old sequel tropes we desperately do not need to see another time. This is why Mickey Rourke is unremarkable here (I still thing he’s a fantastic in THE WRESTLER and definitely capable of more than we saw in this film). Avenging his father by killing the son of his nemesis is well-trodden terrain, fine, but the Vankos men are so unilaterally villainous here that there’s not anything in the way of dramatic tension – we know who are the good guys, we know who are the bad guys, we know what the outcome's gonna be, and that’s all fine and dandy.

I guess for some that’s as much as they can ask from a quote unquote comic book movie; some people happily divide their mashed potatoes from their beef Wellington on their plate, and won’t start on one until they’ve had the last bite of the other. But I’ve always enjoyed complicating it a bit – having villains who, even if ultimately beyond salvation, at least emerge into villainy from empathetic circumstances. Ivan Vankos senior turns out to never have been the one to create the arch-reactor; it was always Tony Stark Senior (a well-cast John Slattery) -- he's as brilliant and unimpeachably sanguine as we were always led to believe.

It’s boring. Give us a struggle where Tony has to cognate the idea that his all-mighty father may have been a fraud. In other words, give us human weakness. And then, from that lowest of low points, givs us human triumph. Of course this is what IRON MAN should be about, the fragility of the human beneath the iron. The inability of man to control these outsized weapons, because man himself is beyond control. Hence the real struggle in Tony Stark’s life should be what it is in the comic series—his very-real alcoholism—and not the preposterous construct of Polonium-sickness or whatever radiation poisoning Tony was fighting for three-fourths of the film. This is another scripting problem: what’s the point of giving Tony this disease when there’s no chance in hell there isn’t going to be some eleventh-hour cure, making everything right, saving the day. Had Tony’s problem been alcoholism, the struggle is at once more human but also more thoroughly insidious: Tony is the KIND OF PERSON who can lose control. And a gun in the hands of that kind of person…

Maybe I want too much, it’s just the original film had so many individual delights that I enthusiastically pre-purchased my Saturday night tickets for IRON MAN 2. It’s not a slap in the face it’s just boring in a flashy way. And I almost prefer genuine , quiet, library-boredom over tedious explosions and high-octane ennui. Thank goodness for the smarmy performance by Sam Rockwell as Stark’s chief industrial competitor, a definite highlight for me (Gwyneth, Don Cheadle, Scarlet Johannson are all fine…there’s just not much for any of them to do but sit around and wait for the sequel).

Perhaps IRON MAN 2’s failings are best illustrated by its uninspired handling of what can be called the “secret scene.” The secret scene, as a concept, is a gift to the Fanboys: a tacit contract between filmmaker and comic book nerd that promises that, just for a moment or two, we won’t pander you with back-story because we know you know. But when the wink-wink moments are reduced to such brash iconography—the toss-away appearance of Captain America’s shield, the final glimpse of Thor’s hammer—the loving enthusiasm is a bit harder to muster. I felt like I was being advertised to; hell, I was being advertised to. Surely you don’t need to be a frequenter of "Aint It Cool News" to at least have SOME awareness Hollywood is gearing up for the next round of Marvel superheroes; hell, they’ve been beating us over the head with The Avengers movie since the first IRON MAN. Listen, I get the point here, brand marketing and the appeal of the tie-in and whatnot, but I’m just a bit sick of the artifice. It most certainly aint cool. It’s business. Give us something surprising, not just a tag to the next in a succession of Marvel Studios films. I know CAPTAIN AMERICA is coming and I know THOR is right around the corner, the question is why should I go see these films. Because, if they’re taking their cues from this movie, I very well might not.

The other film I saw this weekend was the latest torture-porn touchstone THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE. For all the dramatic press and buzz among horror fans, the whole outing came off as rather a lame attempt to be shocking, but I guess that’s what you can expect when a film wears its conceit so unabashedly on its sleeve. In that way IRON MAN and THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (I’m sparing you all the details on that one by the way—google it if you really want to know) have more in common than I had expected. Both have severely limited ambitions to be nothing more than exactly what you’d expect.



And I'll leave you with that, to piece together.

SHINING ISLAND

SPOILER ALERT

If any other film director had made SHUTTER ISLAND  -- except maybe a couple, whom I will get to – I would have hated it. As is, it’s merely a joke on the audience, a Rembrandt’s version of “Dog’s Playing Poker,” masterfully-conceived crap, but crap nonetheless.

I didn’t hate this film, which has enough to admire by way of photography and directorial smirks that you wanna pull up a stool next to Scorsese and say convivially, ‘hey, look Marty, loved that shot, but the story’s a KLUNKER!’ Some particular moments stand out: the tracking shot behind the Nazi firing-squad victims is artful and dynamic – captures almost everything about INGLORIOUS BASTERDS in one snow-bright, grotesque shot. Or Michelle Williams, who is just so unbelievable beautiful it’s almost funny to think that she was “the one who looked like a manatee” on Dawson’s Creek while the world pined for Katie Holmes. But we so much younger then.

But even perfectly cooked stool is gonna taste like shit, and thus is the case with SHUTTER ISLAND – all the director’s touches in the world can’t seem to lift it above the schlocky source material. Can we blame Scorsese for this? At first I thought no, we couldn’t – maybe he wrung every single original idea out of this particular wet sponge – but the more I think about it the more I believe that, as in THE AVIATOR, our top-of-the-class director may be a bit too convinced of his own status as FILMMAKER, that the filmmaking tends to come second.

Actually, maybe not top-of-the-class, because Scorsese to me was always like the workhorse salutatorian in the high-school graduating class of important modern directors. Forever immersed and dedicated in his work, yet somehow never matching the natural brilliance, effortless arrogance, and total control of Stanley Kubrick as valedictorian. And surely SHUTTER ISLAND is as much of a love-letter to Kubrick as it is a cry of look at me, I can do that too – but, at least here, Scorsese proves he can’t. Kubrick took some of the worst source material in history (have you ever read “The Shining”? I wish I hadn’t) and made what I pretty comfortably can call my favorite movie of all time. SHUTTER, for all it’s well-lit dream sequences and tricky photography, is persistently ridiculous.



And worse—it’s boring. Look, we all knew what we were going into with this potboiler, it takes place at a G-D insane asylum after all, and we all saw the patently absurd trailer with its Trichotillomanic old crazy woman who lifts her finger to her lips for a gothic and hackneyed SHHHHH. I wasn’t expecting subtlety here. But I was expecting at least a plot twist beyond that Leo DiCaprio was crazy. NO FUCKING SHIT? I actually laughed out loud when the movie revealed this fact as if it was news to anyone. Every thing about this film not only suggests but beats you over the head with the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character (Teddy Daniels) is really the crazy one – and as far as the film’s own syllogism yes this makes sense. But without the deep characterization of the novel, and having to rely on individual visual moments to construct Leo’s character, we have here the same problem Leo had in THE BEACH – an incredibly dense character from the novel is sort of scrubbed away by the postures the filmic version has to adopt. He’s a fine actor, totally reliably good in all his films, but here the role is so dried up that he has no hope. No hope at all.

It’s a content problem, for sure. But when Kubrick had a content problem with THE SHINING he mined his own psychological reaction to the source and expounded on his emotional world visually. That’s how we got the blood-deluge elevators, or the offbeat scene with the ghost party-goer giving head to the man in the disfigured bear costume (maybe Kubrick’s most crazy and brilliant contribution in any of his films). Sure some of the dream sequences here are striking and creative (I love the snow of ash), but Scorsese doesn’t seem to have the Freudian wit and dexterousness command of manifest/latent dream content that Kubrick does. It comes off as derivative. Not just of Kubrick but of DePalma (CAPE FEAR, a much better film, is a loving DePalma homage; SHUTTER reeks of something less deferent) and of course of the man himself, Alfred Hitchcock. The final lighthouse scene, with it vertiginous spiral staircase, drives the point home. Scorsese is one the few legendary directors, and we are lucky that he is making films in our lifetime, but two vitally important lessons are to be learned here. The first lesson is one I think Kubrick, back since GANGS OF NEW YORK, is still trying to work his way around: the act of reminding us of something’s greatness does not a great thing make. Secondly, if you are paying homage to a work of art in a work of art, you best be sure your work is worthy of the reference—is indeed better than the sum of it’s parts. Otherwise we’ll just be longing for the original. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

But I’ll give Scorsese his credit, do not get me wrong. After a preposterous segment with Daniels scaling cliffs and finding hallucinations/women in nightgowns living in caves – he climbs back up to the mainland to find a uniformed man (is he a Nazi ghost; is he an institutional guard?) in a jeep, ready to bring him back to the doctors in charge. They have a very stilted, very-Kubrickian conversation, the likes of which doesn’t really appear in the rest of the film. It’s about the nature of good versus evil, the dark heart of man, all that jazz. You don’t know me, Daniels insists. I’ve known you for centuries, the officer shoots back, almost illogically. CENTURIES. Not days (which, according to the surface narrative, is the case). Not years (which, according to the “reality” revealed later in the film, is how long DiCaprio has been locked up), but centuries. This of course is almost a direct homage to the brilliant scene in THE SHINING when Jack Nicholson is talking to the ghost of the groundskeeper who supposedly went crazy and killed his wife and daughters (“no sir, YOU are the caretaker. You have ALWAYS BEEN the caretaker.”) Centuries of evil co-existing with, often overcoming, good. I really liked this, I thought ‘ol Marty was ADDING SOMETHING here and not just shooting crap in the best possible lighting. I just wish SHUTTER ISLAND had more of this, more subtext, more breathless weirdness.

So I’m glad that this is starting out as an OLD HOLLYWOOD year (I ’m yet to see Polansky’s film but I have high hopes) because 2009 was a young Hollywood year and personally filmmakers like Ivan Reitman leave a bad taste in my mouth. And SHUTTER ISLAND, far from good, isn’t the abortion that some other classic directors have swept under the plush carpets of their career: Robert Altman’s POPEYE (I know some would argue otherwise) or Spielberg’s THE LOST WORLD (yes, check your imdb’s, he did in fact direct it). If I’m going to be bored by a film, there’s a lot worse than Marty’s well-shot, well-scored offering here. Faint praise maybe, but it is what it is.

what-I say-what in Avatarnation Don't I Get?

James Cameron’s AVATAR has a few problems. The first is that it’s fucking retarded.


JUST KIDDING! I know some think I’m contrarian or negative about everything. But, alas, just because a film takes 5 years to make, just because new technology had to be invented to make it, just because it’s in 3D, and just because it cost you eighteen dollars to see it doesn’t mean it’s a great film. Have more respect for your own intellect than to cave to such flimsy syllogism, for the love of Christ.

No, AVATAR is not great. AVATAR is not particularly good. But AVATAR is okay; it isn’t the abortion that it’s garish design and are-you-kidding-me trailers seemed to suggest it would be. I’m glad I saw it, I wouldn’t NOT recommend it to an action movie fan, but then again I wish I had seen THE HURT LOCKER in 2D instead. Sorry, various friends who think I hate every movie and who for some reason take it personally when I do: I ain’t buying what AVATAR is selling.


Which includes both Big Macs and a new frontier for movie-dom: a three dimension one. The 3D in AVATAR is the most advanced I’ve ever seen, but then again to me it didn’t feel so far beyond what I saw in UP last year or in NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS 3D three years ago. The problem with 3D is that it’s such a strange sensory phenomenon that it sorts of wrecks havoc on our objective sense – think of the thrill of the MAGIC EYE books when that image finally pops (“I see it!”); or think of how amazing the foreground knife-stabbing of FRIDAY the 13th Part 3-D must have seemed to its 1982 audience. It’s so utterly clever and here so cloyingly pretty that it’s as hard not to like as it is to love. I would never go as far as Ivan Reitman who bitterly declares “I hate 3D” (not merely because it’s denying what is an inevitable change for theatrical- and soon home-entertainment), but I resist the temptation to be awed by it simply because it’s so damn expensive. Then again, roused by Cameron’s use of space and clever diagonals, the 3D is mostly how I managed to stay awake during this three hour film. I’d say 3D saved AVATAR but just barely. I wonder how DVD sales will be; I can’t imagine ever seeing this film again.

Essentially it’s Pocahontas. This was Adam’s observation but the man is right, and James Cameron and umpteen thousand bloggers are saying the same (“Pocahontas in Space” or “Pocahontas with Blue People”…I’d go with “Pocahontas with Worse Music” which is saying something). The beats: a warrior infiltrates a native population, his specious attempt to “learn their ways” is really a cover for some militaristic operation to steal their valuable land. But, as these things tend to happen, he falls in love. That love redeems him, reprograms him, opens his eyes. (“I see you, Pocahontas”…”I see you, John Smith”). The agenda changes, the colonists are the villains; they are the ones who cannot See All The Colors of the Wind/Hear All the Voices of the Jungle! THEM! It’s all actually a pretty fertile and accessible framework for the story, and I don’t begrudge Cameron the cleverness to bring this classic story of colonization to the Space Age. But then I also recall that Pocahontas didn't make a very good movie – and the religious hokum seems as Disney-ified here as it did in the animated film. The environmental message may be more timely, but it also isn't very complex -- and taking almost three hours to croak out-- feels both reiterative and reductionist. Essentially, thematically, AVATAR is telling us the same thing that POCAHONTAS did; that WALL-E did; that FREE WILLY did; that HAPPY FEET did; that SOYLENT GREEN did; that AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH veraciously did: human greed blinds us towards the larger world and the connection between species as we all try to survive. Thematically, it’s dull. Which shouldn’t matter, because it’s a “popcorn movie” and just supposed to be just a lotta fun, right? Maybe that would be true if I suspected James Cameron didn’t take his own super-enlightenment so damn seriously.

I was surprised to find how essentially anti-human AVATAR manages to be, especially when TERMINATOR and TITANTIC were such thoroughly Humanist films. Maybe it’s a reflection of how long James Cameron has been in Hollywood or the growing cynicism that accompanies age: but AVATAR is not a film about mankind’s resistance in the face of disaster or tragedy, AVATAR is not about alien species learning to LIVE AND LET LIVE and appreciate difference, AVATAR is not about cooperation. In the end of AVATAR, Jake becomes Nav’i. He chooses them because them are not THEM – the colonists, the ones who can’t see. Colored with Cray-pas and posited as a Happy Ending, I think the reverberations of this ending and its real message never really play out for most of the audience who think popcorn movies should not be weighed on such mopey and over-serious theoretical grounds.

Which is probably why, while anyone with half a brain sees it and knows it’s there, the Iraq-connection (which is really what AVATAR is about) is kept pretty under the surface. It’s basically more of a tenet of the films premise than something that keeps harassing the films situational politics (although I think “we’ll fight terrorism with terrorism” is actually a line in the script). Smart of Cameron, because I wonder if the film’s Ohio audience would really be all that keen to set aside that cool, clean glass of Petroleum and reach for some frosty Pagan-Gods-in-a-glass if Cameron spelled out what “going Nav’i” really means. I don’t mean to pander, and I don’t accuse anyone of “not getting it,” but the truth is that Cameron tones down his politics and doesn’t ask us to equate the “Sky People” with Americans and the Nav’i with the Iraqi. But, like, we can if we want.

You know, it’s not a bad flick. Cameron is really brilliant as a film technician AND as a director (some of details – a soldier getting his hat blown off in the background, the whipping blades of grass when a Helicopter lands -- are awesome). He’s also a really capable and intelligent screenwriter, which is what I want to talk about here. Love it or hate it, The script of AVATAR is extremely succinct, well-wrought, internally cohesive. It makes sense as a script which may not really mean anything but it something that people in my line of employment say when a screenplay has that ineffable quality that makes it work. The characters are diverse, they arch, they change. Scenes double back on each other logically (I wondered for a second why they would waste all that screen time on Sigourney Weaver’s weird, tribal demise… then I quickly figured out it was to set up the film’s finale with Jake becoming Nav’i). Action sequences are organic to the plot, if a bit overlong. This screenplay is almost good.

But I don’t believe it quite gets there. It’s not the “stupid” lines people warned me about (“who’s bad?” -- a weird, intergalactic MJ reference) or even the fact that the space mineral is called Unobtainium that soured me. It’s more about how easily the pieces seem to fit together, how approachable Cameron makes the whole thing. From soup to nuts, AVATAR is an easy movie to sit through, to admire from afar, to enjoy. But easy doesn’t mean good. By rendering so many polygons, smoothing so many edges, making that screenplay click so completely, Cameron makes a movie that’s eminently digestible, that's easy to swallow. Fine. Good. But like so many gelatinous films before it, AVATAR reminds me that being easy to swallow often leaves something wanting for texture. And for a movie that's touted as bringing moviedom into the third dimension (and for a film with that color palate, and set on that terrain) being left wanting more texture feels like being left with blue balls.

I wish the story were a bit more complicated – not by a new and even bigger snarl-tooth beast, but by something nuanced and psychological. I would have loved to hear from (or even see) Earth, to ground us in Earth’s future reality, to hear the political discourse surrounding the Unobtainum issue. I would have loved a bit of a toned down “learning to fly” sequence, even though I guess I expected it given Cameron’s penchant for high-speed awe. I would have loved less anthropomorphic and more original habits and habitations from the Nav’i…apparently they kiss too; they live, mate, work, emote, fight, and mourn just like us. Finally, Cameron could have confronted his theoretical stance with the film, his repudiation of Jake’s humanity to be more like the Nav’i. When the evil corporal asks Jake what it feels like to betray his own species, Jake just snarls at him like the Nav’i do. It’s a succinct, even clever moment but it underscores AVATAR’s refusal to complicate its neat little plot with messy emotions, contradictions, open-ended quandaries. In short, I didn’t care about the characters, and so it didn’t work.

I wish I loved every movie I saw, I wish I could pay $18 and be assured every last dollar was worth it. But that’s not how I watch movies, and it’s not how I want to. It’s very hard to make films and nigh-impossible to make a good one, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate when a film gets it right or acknowledge when it gets it wrong. And I do like movies I see (this year, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, UP, THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX, A SERIOUS MAN) all the time...and I like them that much more for being rare and special...an Unobtainium worth the many dollars I waste on lesser films. I may not be able to paint with ALL the colors of the wind, but the ones with which I do are vivid enough to be, for me, enough.

JERSEY SHORE IS AWFUL, GROSS TELEVISION

A friend came over and made me dinner – lovely – but as if to tip the generosity scale back towards neutral he also somehow persuaded me to watch the pilot episode of MTV’s JERSEY SHORE, a veritable abortion of a television program, obelisk of worship to all things zeppole, Dep, and fakebake.

Though he did couch it in the following terms: here’s a show the Italian Anti-defamation League is all up in arms about. That’s kind of interesting, I thought naively.

In short, eight or so “Jersey Shore Types” meet up in a pimped-out summerhouse to show off their goods, drink out of Solo cups, and backtalk each other for their unanimously odious drunken behavior. Romance, catfights, the entire gamut of REAL WORLD-esque social dilemma will unfold for our tight-bodied heroes and heroines!!

Yet JERSEY SHORE as a production raises a couple of questions. One: why is this show so fucking Italian-themed. Sure, obviously, it’s Jersey and it’s the shore and a lot – Many! Most! – of the annual pilgrims Haji-ing there way on over for the sausage and peppers at Antonio’s Beach Shack are indeed Italian-American. But with every character calling themselves guido or—good god!—“guidette" and embodying the litany of abhorrent stereotype that would make the average Italian-American literally cringe in horror, the production decision to call this simply JERSEY SHORE and not DAT’S A SPICY-A JERSEY SHORE is, at best, deceptive.

Secondly, why now? Last night the weather finally turned December-appropriate, it could have even snowed. Antonio’s is boarded up and barren until next May, when the bikini-and-board shorts set reemerges from Passaic and environs. Why now are we watching the frolicking hedonism of Gotti wannabes in a consequence-free and physically repulsive environment? I’m sure it’s part of MTV’s roll out strategy – wish fulfillment on the chilliest of December nights – but something about the untimeliness of it’s premiere should raise a disingenuous flag or two.

Which brings me to my third major question: why the hell is every cast member so unattractive? At one point, when the first of the GUIDETTES arrived and the GUIDOS began splaying their proverbial feathers, my Australian roommate, quizzical and sincere, noted “oh look they find each other attractive.” It occurred to us that maybe, while we may find “fake bake” and filthy language and barren, idealess whore-mongering as unattractive (even repulsive) maybe we just weren’t the audience. Think of it as an ethnographic film, my friend said. That helped a little.

But of course these people don’t really exist, expect when they do, in which case they scarcely need a normalizing force as omnipotent as MTV to mirror their absurdity. Sure, people may indeed walk this earth who refer to themselves as “The Situation” (because “my abs are so ripped, it’s like a situation"), but for the love of god let them grow out of it and not make them minor, inglorious pop-celebrities. What is the message of JERSEY SHORE, if not: you can be as awful as you want to be – don’t let those skinny bitches tear you down! Is this really worth the 30 bucks or so that apparently went into the production of this show. I’d rather get a couple of pizzas.

But, you know, it’s MTV, and faith in MTV is misguided at best. So more of a criticism of this program I call SHENNANINGANS on anyone who tunes in to this terrible, bigoted, distasteful, retrograde hour. It should not only be cancelled but its executive producers should be strapped in a too-cold Jacuzzi and forced to listen to 400 consecutive hours of Bon Jovi while girls with whiny voices croon some hacked-up version of it’s already anathematic lyrics into their greedy, greasy little ears. Real Italian-Americans, New Jerseyians, MTV watchers, and human beings should recoil and just how loathsome primetime can get.

And people will watch it, because it's candy TV, and as long as we slap it with the "guilty pleasure" label it's okay. Right? Right?



RIGHT?
Va fongul!!!

The Men Who Stare at Dolts

Not too much to say about this tiny, ultimately flat Overture feature. Chalk it up as another casualty of the we need a star! mentality that gets Jim Carrey a cool thirty mil just for showing up to set to eat craft services – the entire budget of THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS’ was necessarily devoted to its stars (Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor)…and it shows.

For a movie that takes us all the way from small-town Michigan to secret military facilities deep within Iraq, there is shockingly little scope, grandeur, or visual interest. Even though some of the scripting was downright bad (Clooney kicks McGregor in the balls) the better jokes and offbeat moments could have been great if the filmmakers had the dough to widen the madcap universe of the film. So it’s not a script problem (and the source material, so I hear, is pretty great). Instead, director Grant Heslov is probably at fault for a film that never wants to take itself seriously – yet always demands that we do. It’s a ludicrous request, especially considering the plot which -- resembling THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE on a great deal more LSD – “climaxes” with dozens of goats being liberated from an Area 51-esque research facility while the entire military unit “trips balls.” Heslov and Clooney worked together on GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK to infinite more success, partly because the material had actual substance, partially because Clooney, who directed that film, had a surprisingly sharp aesthetic sense and terse visual language. I wish he had helmed GOATS as well and redistributed some of the film’s funds away from his co-stars and towards the film’s design and tech.

It’s all a shame because I love films that are tiny, throwaway, origami swans – pretty and intriguing even if, in the end, they are merely folded paper. BURN AFTER READING, a film GOATS aspires to be but never comes close, is exactly that way. Nothing’s wrong with popcorn movies—even stupid movies where every character we meet is a bit of a dolt and no one is relatable—but they have to be told well. This simply isn’t, and while watching I was really just impatiently waiting my chance to get the fuck out of there. And I wasn’t the only one, the entire audience I saw this film with sort of shuffled about the theatre with a blank goat-like disinterest, chewing their stale popcorn, already forgetting what happened just before. It's probably for the best.

This Year's CRASH...unfortunately

Sweet lord Jesus: NY Press’ Armond White is so on-the-money with his PRECIOUS review (http://www.nypress.com/article-20554-pride-precious.html) that I guess I don’t have all that much to add. Armond White is awesome!


Ok maybe a few things...

I totally agree that PRECIOUS reflects more of an affluent fear of human detritus – riddled with incest and violence and hopelessness – than any sort of urban reality. It runs on only one cylinder – the “shock value” of its premise (fat girl, twice pregnant by her father, escapes abusive mother through…math). Unfortunately for me, the last movie I saw was ANTICHRIST, so it’s gonna take a bit more than incest (even tacitly-condoned incest…the MOM and GRANDMA are just as guilty) to stir me up.

Problem is that beyond the “OH NO HE DIDN’T” of it all, it’s a fairly lame, uneventful, prosaic story. White suffered from seeing the film in the film festival petri dish (he calls it an "ordeal" which I can only imagine...consider the self-congratulation), but I saw it on 42nd street where me and my three friends were the only white people in the maximum-capacity crowd. And while I think the audience reaction-factor helped the film (scenes of domestic retaliation, sassy backtalk, and general abhorrence played as QUITE FUNNY to my discerning crowd), it also exposed one of the movie’s weakest traits. That is, by so carefully outlining who we are supposed to root for--who are the nasty rapists, who are the good little girls with big dreams—subtlety no longer plays the slightest part. Then again: for a film about the most abused, neglected, devalued of humans who goes by the name of PRECIOUS, I guess subtlety was never really in the picture.

And when my (white) friend leaned over to whisper "they're like a parody of themselves" (referring to the audience, with all their HOOTIN' and HOLLERING) I realized that he was simultaneously right and entirely missing the point. But that's actually a good description of the film in general.

I do disagree with White about Mo’Nique, whose performance I do think came close to reflecting “depths” within herself. Only in her final monologue, where she breaks down in front of Mariah Carey’s useless social worker, does the film try (and, yes, fail) to do something interesting – complicate the dynamic by giving us just a tad bit of sympathy for MOTHER. And in telling the story of her boyfriend's pattern of sexual abuse, in weeping out its details, Mo’Nique pulls off a neat trick – we hate her even more for her shameful silence through it all, but we respond to her suffering and misery on a purely human level. We feel bad for her, just for a second, and then remember that she is the villain. Mariah Carrey’s character is not even a fraction as nuanced (and her Fran Drescher accent absurd). Nor is her character really even necessary, as really just another iteration of the good, pure, light-skinned teacher—but I guess our celebrity team of crackpot (maybe crack-pipe is more appropriate here) producers thought we needed one more big name.

PRECIOUS’ worst sin, however, is not its flimsy plot, maudlin diatribes, weird racism (dark = bad) or downright crappy photography. Its biggest problem is that it’s just TOO DAMN MEDIOCRE. In a way, it would have been better if it were worse -- at least we wouldn't have to keep discussing it. I wish it was shocking or outsized or verite, instead it’s a contained, do-ragged fairy tale, simplistic and false, keen to see RACE where PERSON would be so much more complicated. PRECIOUS avoids complications, which makes it easy (for some people) to root for, but it isn’t nearly as brave as Oprah would have us think. And, as we’re sure to forget (we always do) when the next independent film flash-point putters to the Hollywood fore, not nearly as precious.

NOT EXACTLY ANTI, FAR FROM PRO

Okay, 48 hours have passed…I can begin to ease myself into life as a normal person again. I haven’t slept. After seeing ANTICHRIST and being total sapped of all enthusiasm, hope, and positivity – I am once again on the road to recovery, my heart beating normally, my mind not wandering to tableaus of still born deer, genital mutilation, blood…

Oh but we are getting ahead of ourselves. ANTICHRIST is of course Lars von Trier’s (THE IDIOTS, MANDERLAY, DANCER IN THE DARK) latest offering. And because I adore some of his films, and because the star power here is first rate (Willem Dafoe and -!- Charlotte Gainsbourg), and because I love horror movies and this seemed truly, genuinely, scary…well I was pretty damn excited.

To get this out of the way: I don’t understand the criticism of this film. And by CRITICISM I mean the critical reaction, positive and negative. There’s so much about how perverse, manipulative and over-the-top this film is. But I have to wonder who it is that is saying such wholly uninteresting things. There is nothing in this film that isn’t matched (or topped!) in J-Horror or K-Horror, nothing in fact really original at all about its metaphor-system or imagery or carnage. But this movie isn’t an egregious piece of trash either, and the hostility it’s gotten for being a dupe and a manipulative sham is undeserved. The reality is that it is too uninteresting to be anything so extreme.

So why my visceral reaction? Why the physical ailment that followed me around even two days after seeing this? The one thing I will give credit to ANTICHRIST for is its mood. About three minutes into ANTICHRIST things get a bit nutty involving a baby and a window sill, and thus begins the strange mood of the film. Sometimes this mood is exploited for horror movie purposes (MATCH CUT TO: shadows rolling over tree branches, the whip of wind) but I don’t think it’s wholly manipulative in like a personally affronting way. It’s well documented how Lars von Trier was fighting depression during the making of this movie, and I think there is evidence here of a real cathartic artistic process. But I wasn’t expecting that by exorcising his depression Lars was actually handing it off: and in this way was leaving the audience with their own bit of his foul outlook. So this may be manipulative but only in so far as von Trier made this movie for his own self, not for me or you or Michael Eisner, and I sort of wish more filmmakers approached their art with such solipsism.

Also, of course, I take issue with the criticism because what horror movie ISN’T manipulative. It’s almost an aesthetic criterion of the form, an attempt to handle or control an audience to produce a reaction. I guess where ANTICHRIST worked for me isn’t in my “reaction” to the film (frankly, I didn’t really like it) but in the feeling I got from it: namely, that things are terrible and everything is most certainly not going to be okay. Oddly enough, in the masochistic feedback loop of a horror fan, the cumulative experience is positive – even if the actual experience was literally awful.

Sounds like bullshit? Maybe, but we have to ask ourselves why anyone would go see a movie called ANTICHRIST without the tiniest desire to punish oneself. Anyway, the point is that the film was successfully atmospheric, so calling it “the worst piece of shit ever” (as one friend who saw it did) seems hyperbolic when plenty of movies come out that have neither plot NOR atmosphere. I'd take this film any day.

Of course that leaves plot, and this is where ANTICHRIST failed me, and this is where I think it fails in general – and why people can’t see past its abhorrent imagery and appreciate the brilliant cinematography and design. The plot of this movie is ridiculous. It starts out with a beautifully shot sequence of a husband and wife having sex to a swelling Handel aria…as their newborn in the other room climbs up onto a snowy window ledge and jumps to his death. Yes, this is awful, but it’s such a stock scenario right out of any given melodrama – what if…what if…we could have stopped him! It also ties in the film's psychological themes in the most straight-forward and uninteresting way; as if von Trier is announcing that sex is associated with violence and death, and if you don’t believe me watch this scene!

Unfortunately this film never evolves much further psychologically from this basic Freudian tenet. In addition to LIBIDO—the life force—Freud postulated THANTOS, our “death instinct.” Everyone is clamoring for a slice of NONLIFE, of UNBEING, of THE WOMB. For Freud, and for ANTICHRIST, Libido in tied to THANTOS in a Gordian Knot -- there is no solution for one that doesn’t involve the other. Listen, this is definitely not bad psychoanalytic terrain for a horror movie to mine; it’s just how does von Trier expect to find gold there when so many others have come before him?

But psychoanalysis aside, the plot’s biggest failing is more in another psychological realm – the whole Behaviorism/exposure therapy conceit is TRULY RIDICULOUS. It’s actually like insultingly bad. First and foremost, I cannot accept that Willem Dafoe is both Gainsbourg husband AND HER THERAPIST. I mean…why? Why couldn’t this movie just be about a man helping his wife through the stages of grief? Why does it have to be couched in prosaic, clinical psychological concepts? Because the truth is it goes against fundamental psychological treatises to have your therapist also be your lover. It actually sort of negates the entire therapeutic scenario. And while you may feel like this is a small thing, it actually is a huge problem in the film.

Actually, it would have been fine if the film took a different turn than where it eventually ended up. I figured they were setting up Willem Dafoe as “the evil one” because of this just totally ill-conceived therapeutic strategy (along the lines of: if he’s a bad therapist maybe he’s also…a bad person). But instead they fall back on what is probably the most uninteresting of all possible scenarios. Willem Dafoe is our hero…it’s the bitch who is crazy. It’s FEMALE SEXUALITY that’s the snake in the grass (the fox in the hole??...aha!). This is so insipid, so prosaic, so easy. I don’t even care about the argument IS LARS VON TRIER A MYSOGYNIST because the climax of this film is too uninteresting to really be taken seriously. Trier was building towards something pretty interesting – the sexual aggression that exists between a couple, before and after terrible personal tragedy. But by shifting it in the end to make one good (Dafoe) and one bad (Gainsbourg) it simplifies this to the point of nullity. How much better this film would have been if the two were just violently attacking each other on a truly two-way street…well I’m not sure it would be MUCH more appealing but at least the psychological perspective would be subtler. At least there would have been a point.

Instead Lars von Trier gives us a beautiful-looking film that has no point, and it’s a sad thing. In some ways I feel he must have known this, because he makes reference to almost every horror movie under the sun. It taps into BLAIR WITCH and THE EVIL DEAD’s cabin-in-the-woods; it has a SAW moment involving a rusty grindstone; it channels Takashi Miike’s AUDITION (among others) with its gore and body fluids; it has a Hitchcockian blackbird and a tell-tale heart and a million other horror movie tropes. I didn’t mind this stuff because it at least looked good, but I was hoping that all that homage was being used to better present what is ORIGINAL. Then I realized there isn’t much that’s original, and I went home, and I didn’t sleep for two nights.

So who knows? Maybe that in itself is a measure of the film’s success, or maybe I just need Ambien?

The Sorrow and the Pity 2 : Electric Bugaloo

I’m a serious Coen Bros. fan so it was only a matter of time before I got my jew-y self over to the multiplex for the jewtastic and jexrageous (and did I mention Jewish-themed) A SERIOUS MAN. Like their last film BURN AFTER READING the Coen’s have provided a challenging little nugget – hard to love, unabashedly quirky, yet (in my opinion) eminently defensible as a movie that offers something wholly unlike what we’ve seen before.

Which may seem like filmy jibberish, after all a good movie is a good movie, right? We can watch the masterpiece that is FARGO and say, unequivocally: this is a good film. We all saw NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and joined in the chorus of praise and awards – no reservations there. But when BURN AFTER READING came out, the Coens’ train came to a sudden and deafening halt. Suddenly it seemed that, for a creative team responsible for so many quote unquote important movies, what happened that they would produce a movie so…so…frivolous.

Of course, for me, BURN’s frivolousness, its joyous insignificance, its rejection of the very concept of oeuvre, is what it made it such a success. Very few people liked this film, but I did…although I would be hard pressed to say I loved it. It’s literally a film that gives you a few funny characters and zany situations and then self-destructs. I remember almost no plot details, I don’t have any real desire to return to it, I thought Brad Pitt was kind of annoying…yet for everything it wasn’t, BURN was exactly what the Coen’s wanted it to be: frivolous, disposable, violent popcorn. And this coming on the heels of No Country’s Academy Award deluge…this my friends is not at accident.

For there are no accidents in the Coens’ world, especially not in A SERIOUS MAN – where every step or misstep is the explicit work of HASHEM. We may not understand why things happen the way they do, but Judaism and the Coen’s own perversity remind us that cause and effect is a celestial process. Ours is not to ask why, after all.

Every time I watch a Coens film, I feel like the filmmakers are testing themselves and their capabilities, and it’s a challenge that is always pleasurable to behold. If the Coens were seeing just how unserious a movie they could make with BURN AFTER READING, in A SERIOUS MAN I get the sense that they are playing with the very idea of causality. As in life, in A SERIOUS MAN there is no accounting for what will happen. Just when we think Sy Ablemen is our antagonist, Sy Ableman dies. Just when a moral choice is explored, a doctor’s phone call renders the choice unimportant. When we are finally able to repay a debt, a tornado appears to wipe everyone’s slate clean. An escape is a dream sequence; a dream is a fantasy. Irreconcilable differences become reconcilable, or at least begin to seem so, watching ones stoned child read from the Torah on his Bar Mitzvah. And if these seem like a random list of unconnected events, that’s because it is. And if it seems a bit easy to pile erratic plot happenings onto one giant, chaotic heap of a film: that’s because it is.

But even if the plot is “easy” in the sense that it doesn’t burden itself with excessive structural demands, this doesn’t mean that it is unintelligent. And it doesn’t mean that this film as a whole is anything less than an important Coen Bros. offering. There are a few missteps: the Yiddish-language prologue doesn't really have a clear conneciton with the rest of the film (besides it jewiness) and the structural device of breaking the chapters up according to rabbis, while it helps to drive forward the plodding action, is indeed a bit obvious. But even if it isn't perfect, I am pretty sure it’s seriously good.

Where the Wild Things Are just sort of, you know, ADHD

I’m sort of lost in the wilderness with this movie, so I’m hoping writing out my thoughts helps me work through some of my unresolved issues with this film – which for the life of me I do not get. Worse off, I can’t understand how people can sit through that film and come out with the idea that what they saw was successful on any sort of filmic or narrative level; that is worked; that it edified in any appreciable way. I don’t get why people liked this film, which is a big problem, because part of my job is knowing why people like certain films. (Although, to be honest, while dear Manohla all but went down on Jonze’s adaptation of Sendak’s children’s classic, the overall critic response has been, at least, divided.)

Lance Acord (Jonze’s right hand cinematographer) is a brilliant professional who has made a huge impact with his camera work. The general plucky intellect he brings to his vision perfectly matches Jonze’s own whimsical indulgences, and what we get is rare and perfect for a film like this. But here’s my gripe – Max rows his way on over to the Land of No Noons -- that is, as one photophile friend pointed out, a place where it’s always “magic hour,” always sunrise or sunset, always an orange and amber explosion drenching everything with meaning and metaphor and brilliance. This makes everything look fucking beautiful, do not misunderstand, but isn’t some of what’s going on in Max’s messed up brain NOT beautiful. Isn’t there room of drab decay, not only to vary our color palette, but as part of the metaphor system at work here – which is an exploration of the full gamut of a child’s psyche, the raging forces of his id? I fear that drenching the movie in so much light is bound to backfire, as it did in (the truly awful)) American Beauty – its sort of glorious to behold until you look back on it later and think: huh, that is sort of easy and manipulative and really…not that good.


Then again they could have gone the King Kong route and make everything absolutely horribly surreal (see the empire state building scene for one of the worst cinematic sunsets ever). But, like King Kong did, this movie really raised another question in my own mind (and, I’ll point out again, the minds of many highly-regarded professional critics) – where did the money go? Although movie budgets are kept notoriously close to the studio vest, it’s pretty commonly held that this is a movie that cost Warner Bros. one hundred million dollars. Sure, a hunk of that goes to Gandolfini-–and god bless the big lug—but seriously man! This is essentially an independent film, plodding and slow and deliberate: why do we need such extravagance? The monsters looked GREAT but the film in general didn’t deserve such brilliant design, didn’t deserve a budget that is ten times the GDP of the nation of Tuvalu. I suppose this is the old we’re-in-a-recession-yet-films-like-Beverly-Hills-Chicuachua-still-come-out debate, but I guess my caveat to the whole thing is that I don’t care if movies cost one hundred million bucks or Tuvaluan dollars or for that matter the actual island of Tuvalu itself – as long as they’re worth it.

And I just can’t help but feel this wasn’t. Beautiful opening as Max chases his family dog (though I sort of felt bad for dog?) and great unshowy work from Catherine Keener. But when Max gets to the island there just doesn’t seem to be much to do. The monsters should each represent an individual strand of Max’s inchoate urges –he feels no one is listening (Alexander); he longs for direction (Carol); he, uh, loves owls!(KW) – yet to me they come off as interchangeably whiny, babyish, neutered. From wild to mild in one, brilliantly lit, fell swoop.

There was so much talk about this being an ADULT movie, about how this isn’t meant for kids, about how it’ll be sad and scary and dark. Was it though? Nothing was scary – not for Max and not for the audience. We just march right in as Carol destroy those giant…um…tumbleweeds, jump into the action, become king, never look back. Darkness is an almost laughable notion in this film, for even the nighttime on Magic Hour Island cradles a big, bright, sleepy moon. And I mean that tonally-speaking as well; what is dark about Max destroying his sister’s room or hirsute muppets blithely deforesting an island? A dark children’s movie is The Neverending Story or, like, Bambi. What has been toted here as dark played out, for me, simply as boring (which by the way is what I heard most of out the mouths of the children who populated the theater I saw this in– not, I’m scared but I’m bored.)

Newbie Max Records seemed to work against himself in the film – he seemed so determined to be a good actor (and by many accounts he was) that he wasn’t exactly a realistic child. Best illustrated in the film’s final moment – which just kills me– Spike Jonze’s direction just rises to the surface and is spot on the nose in all the wrong ways. Seeing Catherine Kenner fall asleep while he slurps down Chef Boyardee, Max scowls in a moment of narcissistic annoyance. But then his sneers fades…he remembers what he has learned…he smiles at his sleepy mom. A moment so singularly prosaic, so cultivated, that I could just imagine the before-the-cameras-roll rehearsal, as Spike makes angry faces for Records to mimic playfully, than mellows out for a smile that will end the film. It’ll be my finest work thinks Jonze, as his child-actor beams at him through the lens.

But it isn’t his finest, not by a long shot. Like music-video-cum-moviedom’s other man-child Michel Gondry, without the structural discipline of Charlie Kaufman’s genius scripts, Jonze seems a bit lost-at-sea. A friend of mine who liked the film quite a bit told me I was ‘primed for disappointment” going in with such high expectations, which is really a comment that I keep returning to. Isn’t that why we go to films at all, because we respect the creative team? And especially here – delivered by the man who gave us Malkovich and Adaptation, and penned by Eggers, a writer who (even if he’s not as important as we thought in, say, 2000) is at least intelligent. Why should I have had anything BUT high expectations? I don’t judge a movie based on my expectations, rather by the actual experience of paying $6.75 for junior mints, and then sitting in a tiny chair while trying not to fall asleep. And for Wild Things that was a bit more of a struggle than it should have been. If expectations rule the day, I would have hated Inglorious Basterds (which I loved) and I would have issued a jihad against the makers of District 9 (which I liked quite a bit). This summer may not have been “great” or even “good” for movies, but it definitely had some wild rides. Eggers and Jonzes’ was just flat out tepid.

As a somewhat-aside, am I also the only one that sees a bit of a calculated, impure something underneath Jonze’s work? His childishness, somehow unlike Gondry’s, seems a bit more barbed – as if he saying: well I’m going to make it like this and to anyone who doesn’t like it I say I’M GONNA EAT YOU UP. It’s the old enfant terrible song-and-dance. Gondry is a child because he seemingly really is that way, really thinks that way. Yet to me Jonze is different -- he seems to recognize he’s found a niche – and he exploits it well. There seems to be a whole lot of young people out there that have found that their daily dose of intellectual self-congratulation is much easier swallowed with a cool glass of jouissance, one that reminds them how good it feels to be a child and not have to be so cerebral all the time. God bless Jonze for making movies for these people – I suppose I’m one – but I see now that his less-perfect offerings (I maintain the Kaufman-penned Jonze flicks are as good as it gets for film) expose his artifice a bit more than his art.

Oh well, bring on ANTICHRIST! Out this weekend!! Now there's a "dark" children's movie.

Watchedmen

In as much as a comic…err…graphic novel…can, Watchman is a story that kicks the living shit out of you. It claws at your brain with the persistence and innocence of a faucet-drip, innocuous in its individual moments, disastrous when allowed to run its course. Seething with rage both political and aesthetic, the story grips you like the best of novels, it expounds upon its own alphabet of symbols and iconic moments with some unimaginably fresh characters, and it leaves you breathless—if, let’s face it, a bit depressed. The testament to its true craft, however, is how utterly enjoyable it makes the experience of going through the ringer. But whether or not you’ve read this genre-defining classic, you probably have some inkling of the scope of this movie’s pedigree, it’s built-in fandom, and—because of all this—its cinematic expectation. But whose expectation? And what does it matter? No, Watchmen the film is not Watchmen the graphic novel. But more than the sad failing that moviemakers see “successful intellectual property” and think “great film,” however, is the resounding fact that one hundred and sixty-seven minute movie simply isn’t that much fun.

Let's start with the good. Jackie Earle Haley is perfect as Rorschach, a fact made even more impressive considering that Rorschach is the character I was most certain director Zach Synder would get disastrously wrong. Also, to my surprise, I enjoyed the handling of Dr. Manhatten – the ghostly de facto god and the only conventionally superpowered hero in the film. To be honest I never quite imagined him that way but it worked almost entirely (I could have done with a bit less flaccid-blue-penis, perhaps): he was surreal, transcendently powerful, and still so stubbornly human. Although I didn’t appreciate Nite Owl’s boy scout-schtick, I understand the compromises they made to his character (who really wants to go to the movies and see a middle aged, flabby, impotent guy in tights?) One character I couldn’t accept or swallow was the Silk Spectre, who stalked around town ridiculously and yodeled so woodenly that her performance almost single-handedly exhumes and then mercilessly rapes the peaceful corpse of Konstantine Stanislavky himself. On the other hand, The Comedian, what we see of him, is fine, played with a certain gritty depth (the “Wolverine” of this particular pack) that makes sense there. Overall, although there isn’t enough of any of them (particularly Rorschach) I do admit that at least the characters approach the general vicinity of the corresponding comic-book namesakes in a vaguely authentic way.

But, otherwise, the greatness of the comic is never quite captured. Like its saucy characterization of Richard Nixon, the filmed Watchman shares certain gross geometric properties with the real deal—here, for sure, entire panels are ripped from the graphic novel for weird, filmic tableaus. But, lo and behold, something doesn’t quite click. The graphic novel (I want to call it comic so badly, it just seems like lying) holds together with its own murky sense of doom; the possibility of death lurks not merely in the story’s apocalyptic finale but in its paroxysms of intense violence, like when Rorschach breaks a man’s fingers, or a Vietnamese farmer explodes into tachyons, or half of New York City is destroyed. But what made the story great is that these moments float like icebergs in seas of political theorizing, narrative tangent, unrushed exposition, and regurgitated Nietzsche. These were not boring sections, for sure, but heady ones where nigh a punch is thrown. Here, the violence is maintained (often, outright copied), and so is the headiness that deepens the story’s so-called “literary value.” But instead of delivering these moments of violence and intensity with the craft of irony or suspense or restraint, Synder’s bad-assery is thrown in our faces with the jolt of Dolby’s most cacophonous atonalities: the whip-of-wind around a thrown punch (WHOOOOOOASSSSH!) or the hollow crispness of a “back” being “broken” ( CRUNNNNCH!). This sort of onomotopeona actually does well to describe Watchman as a whole, a movie that sort-of sounds like the real thing but is synaesthetically within the wrong medium, celluloid when it should be paper, the written THWACK when the thwack of the actual thrown punch stings all the more. In the end, for all its huff and puff and THWACKS, the filmed Watchmen simply doesn’t kick your ass enough.

goodbye Bush

Goodbye Bush

I’m not a political person, whatever that means, but I feel compelled to rant a bit about George W. Bush – a hardly atavistic biological calling in my family (My parents and Grandparents being perhaps the biggest Bush bashers of them all), and something I’m not fond of doing simply because the Stewarts and Colberts and Lettermans out there have the territory covered. So this isn’t a look-at-that-gaffe type of critique, or a watch-the-monkey-fruitlessly-yank-the-locked door excoriation, but instead merely a sort of frustrated exhale of breath. Frustrated because, even for all the criticism and downright antipathy Bush has received from the Bumper Sticker-Set, there still doesn’t seem to be an appropriate level of worry or true disdain for—wait for it—us. Bush, whether or not we like it, was elected twice (so I guess we, the greater We, like it very much). There are many people in the country, otherwise intelligent people, who think statements like: America is safer now and Seven years without a terrorist attack on our soil are not only true but are resounding echoes of a presidency well-executed. “His job is hard,” I heard so many of the Republican call-ins declare on the C-SPAN talk show following Bush’s farewell address that I was listlessly watching last night.

No shit, he’s the God-damn president. The commander-in-chief. The Chief Executive. He wears more hats then the Italian dude in Caps for Sale. There seems to be this great Apologia out there in defense of Bush and Cheney’s political machine. It’s best summarized by a statement Bush made in his farewell address that goes as follows: "You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made, but I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions."

While I wouldn’t begrudge a leader the fine quality of a willingness to be wrong, this quasi-specious statement is the sort of sleight of hand that Bush has offered for eight years. Let’s not look at facts over here, let’s look at rhetoric over there. Freedom!!!…justice!!!…is that the American Way tucked behind your ear? It doesn’t matter if decisions were awful and life-ending and economy-crushing: look at the brazen fluency with which they were made! Bush thereby turns what should be a criticism to any logical, empirical mind into some Cowboy Myth about being the Decider, about confidently tossing ones lasso and pulling in whatever we happen to snag.

You know what else is willing to make the tough decisions: the Magic 8-Ball I had as a ten year old. Although every once in a while it sputters out the vacillating and tenebrous “Ask Again Later,” I’d say 7 out of 8 times we are given some firm, no-buts-about-it advice. You may not agree that this child’s toy has the diplomatic skills; international finesse; broad-based background in micro, macro, and integrated economic theory; and spotless personal and professional biography to be a good President, but look at how easily it makes decisions!

How far can we take this tautological, asinine reasoning? Let’s not be too hasty in the next primary season, after all Slinky has made a surprisingly good Senator. I mean, look at how it just keeps going despite the varying distances between steps, despite the exhausting toil of the journey – Nope! Slinky keeps slinking down those steps, taking them one by one, as any good leader should, but it just keeps going, you know? You gotta admire that tenacity.

Maybe being able to speak without actually saying anything is in fact a quality we need in a leader. But if lack of substance is a barometer of our times, I think it’s scary times. We voted Bush in, and then again, and—while Republicans may have momentarily fallen before the mass liberal-rallying of Generation O—I still don’t feel like I’m part of my own country. Proposition 8, the continual defense of Guantanamo, the sluggish religious rhetoric around Stem-Cell Research: these aren’t signs that say YES WE CAN. Maybe we can, and, yes, given enough time, maybe even yes we will, but—at least in the immediate future—many people are working to ensure that it all doesn’t happen too quickly.

I’m happy Bush is leaving office and that someone I respect, President Obama, is coming in. But Obama too has his meaningless and spurious bombast: and while his buzzwords and slogans may ring less fearful and reactionary than those of George W. we still need to keep it all in perspective. I’m afraid that unless the American people start looking at content instead of the far-more-easily-digested-but-ultimately-meaningless ring of political rhetoric, we are aren’t going to see the change that Obama promises anytime soon. What does the 8-Ball say?

Ask Again Later.

"We Tried Our Best"Buy

This is an unembellished saga detailing the worst customer service experience of my life. Not only will I not shop at Best Buy anymore, I no longer will wear blue polo shits – out of private, unheard protest.

Years ago my dad gave me a Gateway laptop to take abroad with me – it served it purposes, and as it was my first computer with a DVD drive, lulled me to sleep several nights with the incessant whirring of it’s built-in fan as I watched my only DVD—The Royal Tennenbaums—again and again.

Fast forward a few years to about a month ago, when I returned home from work and entered my room to hear—not the white noise of a computer fan—but the most grating and discordant chord audible to the human ear. If I can describe it to you, I’d say it was as if, to cover-up the noise of a lobster being boiled alive, 4 or 5 terrible Borat impressionists joined in a chorus of “I like sex!.” That, but condensed into just one sustained, whirring, egregious note. And a black screen repeatedly saying "MEDIA TEST FAILED" and "NO OPERATING SYSTEM FOUND." Anyway: as I long suspected, time for a new computer!

So, the good news is I got a Mac and I love it, and I’m never going back to PC. But that’s another story.

I decided to take my old computer to BEST BUY – a store I have long admired for its reasonably priced CDs, abundant selection, and relative acceptance of people who want to play Nintendo Wii but clearly have no intention of buying anything. They have a service there through their endemic service/repair company, the self-abnegatingly titled GEEK SQUAD, where they will attempt to back-up your computer’s files. The cost of such service: $60 dollars for them to even take a look at the computer, and if they can access the files, another $100 dollars for them to back everything up.

Well, I’m not in the Financial Straits these days to willy-nillily spend $160 dollars, but as that computer has some of my only copies of beloved photographs and documents I’ve gleaned over the last three years, I thought it was worth it. I signed a contract, was assured I’d receive a call regarding my files in 2-3 days, and happily swiped my credit card.

This transpired on Saturday, January 26th. I figured I’d have my computer back by the 28th or 29th. Certainly by February. Certainly at some point in the future...

Five days pass, and, eager to know if I’ll ever be able to see the photos I took in India again, I call them. It takes some time to get through to the GEEK SQUAD, their phones just keep ringing, so when I settle for a “customer service representative” I am told the Geek Squad’s phones are broken. Shouldn’t the geek’s squads tech issues be relatively easy to address, given the presumptive knowledge of their personnel? This perhaps should have been my first clue something was awry, but in any case, I asked to get someone on the phone.

When I did I was told their were still “five projects before mine,” so even though it had now been twice the time they told me it would take, I still needed to wait another day. “No problem” I chimed, amicably.

Another five days, now it is Wednesday February 6th. Still no word from the Geeks. I call them when I get out of work, finally able to get through, but am asked to hold. Fine. (still amicable, but a quiver of “here we go again”). Twenty minutes of Debussy’s Clair de Lune later (with period interludes to hear about Best Buy Employment Opportunities and Special Product Offers) a rep comes on the line:

“This is Antonio”
“Hi Antonio. I’ve been waiting to speak with someone about my computer. Are you from the Geek Squad?”
“Uhh…yeah. “
“You don’t’ sound so sure. Anyway -- – I dropped it off about eleven days ago to get backed up, and haven’t heard anything.. Is it ready?”
“Yeah hold on.”

Back on hold for five minutes.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s all done and ready. You can come pick it up.”
Surprised, because good news surprises me, “Great! I’ll be there tonight. How late are you open?”
“We close at nine. Thank you for calling Best Buy.”

No Best Buy, thank you. You may take a long time to repair things, but at least you provide affordable CDs.

I schlep up to Columbus Circle’s Best Buy. “I’m here for my Geek Squad job”

I’m asked to wait by a manicured girl whom Josh Kesner succinctly described as a “G.E.D. Candidate” when I told him this story. Ten minutes later: “It’s not here, but may be in the storage room. Let me go check.”

May be?

Thirty minutes pass. I try to play a little Wii but am too anxious. I pace a little; look at Bravia TVs (they are nice). Where’s my geek squad rep?

Finally I track down a manager and explain my story – displaying the equanimity of Mother fucking Theresa amidst the leprous hordes. “Let me go see where your computer is, sir. Give me two minutes”

More like twenty. I can’t even believe it. When I go look for her, back downstairs, she is talking to another customer about speakers.

What’s going on, miss? Where’s my computer?

“Oh we are just doing another check: there was some confusion.”

Now it’s about 90 minutes+ since I first entered Best Buy. Finally another sales rep comes and finds me, and brings me up to the manager I had spoken with. Then they tell me the, by then obvious, truth:

“Sorry sir. We can’t find your computer. We tried our best.”

We-Tried-Our-Best-Buy: your Best isn’t good enough.

Obviously I’m upset; “this is ridiculous”; “the worst customer service experience I’ve ever had” and “considerably more of a Kafkaesque experience than my usual Best Buy shopping trip” are some of the phrases I used.

They refund my money, and tell me they’ll call me by the end of the day today to let me know if they are able to find it. “Maybe it was filed wrong”

This isn’t a document. It’s silicon. It’s circuitry. It doesn’t fit in your typical hanging file. This is totally absurd: you can’t provide a repair service and just “lose” what you are repairing. When you get your car parked, the valet can’t be like: whoops sorry, forgot where I parked! Or to use a more extreme example, when you bring your kids to day care, they can’t just misplace what you drop off. “Oh sorry—they aren’t here anymore” That’s not how it works.

Just what I need.

Chicago > Dreamgirls > ________

Do yourself and the free world a favor and turn the volume up loud, click this link, and watch this utterly fabulous movie trailer:

http://movies.aol.com/movie/mamma-mia/25931/video/trailer-no-1/2038819


Experience a creepy Meryl Streep bringing gratuitous class to cinematic schmegma!!!...
Experience Pierce Brosnan, gayer than you've ever seen him!!!(gayer than in "The Matador")....
Experience ONE WOMAN, THREE FATHERS, FIFTEEN FABULOUS SONGS, and ONE TRUE LOVE!!!...
Experience the music of ABBA, musicdom's most mutated palindromic daemonspawn...
Experience..MAMA MIA!!


Experience the trailer that Josh Kesner so aptly described as a "quick rape" when we saw it in the theater before SWEENEY TODD. For a moment, the whole theater was silent -- then Josh and I started cracking up, and then the whole theater began laughing. It's for those glorious communal moments where I really understand how special the movie-theater going experience is, and how no home or mobile media will ever truly replace it. So that's what David Lynch is saying in this truly hilarious Apple video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0


Truly, truly, horrifically funny. It's come to this.