Posts Tagged ‘movies’

getting the actors we deserve

Oct 11th, 09 / 0 Comments

In today’s New York Times, Dick Cavett introduces a video of his 1980 interview with Richard Burton, in which Burton talks about his struggles with alcoholism, overcoming both positive and negative reviews, and the differences between stage and screen acting. The interview starts and ends with brilliance, with Burton beginning with an articulate meditation on what it’s like to constantly struggle with addiction and ending with a delicate performance of a simple speech from Camelot.

Here’s what we get: Tom Cruise on scientology.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFBZ_uAbxS0&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

On the other hand, somehow we’ve earned Colin Farrell:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvqaiG7pT-E&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

And Will Smith, who sometimes sneaks in an opportunity to show his skill in between shooting aliens and beating up mutants:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmerFuzRNZ4&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

And some day, sowhere, some film director will start giving women some serious roles that aren’t pre-orchestrated for maximum pathos (cf. self-denigration, overcoming hardship, overcoming hardship), and we’ll start seeing female actors taking opportunities to rise up to their full heights. Here’s hoping somebody makes it happen before Dakota Fanning gets too old.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1coDV2lXSzQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

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fyi, I was wrong about district 9

Oct 9th, 09 / 6 Comments

Several weeks ago, I posted a negative review of the sci-fi alien-apartheid flick District 9. In brief, here was my take on this particular movie:

Maybe someone thought it would be a brilliant idea to combine a touching story of refugee camp residents with the excitement of an alien invasion. It turns out that whoever came up with that brilliant idea was wrong.

I’ll tell you what, you guys: I’m the one who was wrong.

I stood strong on my anti-District 9 stance despite rave reviews–both online and offline–from people whose opinions I deeply respect. (Click here and here, for example, to see reviews from media scholar Henry Jenkins.) Then I read this review (warning: spoilers) by Andries du Toit, which was followed up a week later by an even more insightful set of “further thoughts” on the film.

du Toit, in this post as well as in a follow-up, picks up on the very issues that made me dislike the film. Of course, he did so much more thoughtfully than I did. My biggest problem with the movie was apparent racism in its depiction of black Africans, made more frustrating when contextualized within a movie that ostensibly wanted to problematize that very issue. Here’s how du Toit, apparently a white South African living in Cape Town, explains it:


I do think that the representation of the ‘Nigerians’ is the one place in the film where the movie falters in its ability to unpick the workings of racist ideology. Because, for all of these interesting complexities, the reality is that the movie does not obviously withdraw or complicate its apparent endorsement of the African stereotypes. There are ironies and complexities – but they are evident only to a fairly sensitive and conscious viewer. In fact, the film actively pushes these complexities in side. The crucial flaw, in fact, lies lies precisely in this: it relies for its narrative drive, for its satisfaction of the ‘adventure’, on the antagonism against (and the extermination of) the ‘Nigerians’. So even though the real villains are all white, and even though the movie subtly mocks xenophobic discourse, many audiences will no doubt identify with this ‘othering’, and will cheer when Wikus’s alien exoskeleton kills them all so picturesquely.

With that one caveat, however, du Toit finds much to value in District 9. He calls it

the best movie I have yet seen about South Africa – and specifically, one of the most penetrating, disconcerting and subversive meditations on the nature of racism and repression in the post-colonial world. District 9 is fresh and transgressive, hilariously funny and absolutely horrifying: brutal, sly, streetwise and in your face. It’s not a voice from the ghetto – it is, completely and incontrovertibly, a white voice – but is a voice from the postcolonial periphery; a voice speaking harshly, grittily and urgently about the surrealism of racism and the confluence of violence and normality here at the edges of the West’s old empire.

du Toit has convinced me when nobody else could. Therefore, I strongly recommend you disregard my negative review and go see the movie. Wait until you get home to read du Toit’s review–it contains spoilers–but do read it. It’s perhaps the smartest recent film review I’ve seen anywhere, online or off.

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RIP Patrick Swayze

Sep 15th, 09 / 0 Comments

They just keep blinking out, don’t they?

“Pain don’t hurt,” he said, while reading Jim Harrison. Pain don’t hurt? What kind of a line is that? And that blond lady with the glasses–jesus.

Rest in peace, Swayze. Fifty-seven years got you installed as an icon. A brighter body, over a brighter firmament, none of us could hope for.

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the sleeping alone review of films: district 9

Aug 19th, 09 / 5 Comments

summary: don’t bother.

This afternoon, just before showtime for the alien-adventure flick District 9, I learned from my friend Emily that the United States engaged in a decades-long bombing campaign of Laos as part of the so-called “Secret War” in Indochina (which also included bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia). Apparently, <a href="
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2009-02/2009-02-02-voa34.cfm?CFID=273051174&CFTOKEN=70204267&jsessionid=88309b0f61d29464903a534375162b64421a” target=”_blank”>Laos is the most heavily-bombed nation per capita in the world.

District 9 is not about bombs, but it is about how we react to people whose way of life we don’t understand. In this case, the people are actually aliens, and we react to them the way we always have: by dumping them in tent cities and shooting them in the head.

Aside from a few unique features–a floating mothership hovering above not Manhattan, not Washington, D.C., but Johannesberg, South Africa; a physically vulnerable alien populace; and a weak, simpering hero–there’s nothing new or particularly interesting to see here. Well, there is one thing: a heinously cursory take on the nature of human compassion. “Go home!” the humans shout at the alien refugees; and the contractors hired to keep the aliens in line punch with the butts of their guns; and the aliens scrounge through trash heaps, dress themselves up in tattered human clothes, and demonstrate familial bonds by hugging their children close. It’s enough to make you shout at the screen: Okay, already. We get it.

The filmmakers appear conflicted: They wanted to make a touching movie about refugees, empathy, and humanity; but they also wanted a blockbuster with neat special effects and impressive, extraterrestrial explosions. Maybe someone thought it would be a brilliant idea to combine a touching story of refugee camp residents with the excitement of an alien invasion. It turns out that whoever came up with that brilliant idea was wrong.

District 9 is rated R. It contains serious gore of the sort that lands on and sticks to the camera lens, an extended gross-out metamorphosis scene, and a plot so lame it’s obscene.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHihFA8q8xI&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

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luddites hate jetskis

Jul 18th, 09 / 0 Comments

Today my sister and I almost missed the opening scene of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince because she misread her watch. I don’t wear a watch, see, and she wears an old-fashioned analog wristwatch so it was her job to keep track of time.

As our timekeepers get increasingly digital, it appears, we have a tendency toward being less capable of quickly interpreting analog time markers. So at 1:00, she thought her watch said noon. She caught her error five minutes before the show was scheduled to start and thanks to our ability to bustle when required and theaters’ tendency to start movies much later than scheduled, we got there with enough spare time for me to get my popcorn and for my sister to settle her smuggled-in candy on her lap before the previews started rolling.

The argument that relying on technologies makes us dumber is not a new one; Plato kinda started it by opposing writing because he believed that it would

introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have came to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

It was downhill from there, of course; and it may be that we hit bottom, at least in terms of networked technologies, with Nicholas Carr’s June/July 2008 Atlantic piece, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

In considering the changes to his own orientation toward text (he’s less able to read lengthy articles or books; he gets fidgety when he tries to focus on one text for an extended period of time), he writes:

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

In fact, in drafting this post I zipped along the surface of multiple different texts, from Plato’s Phaedrus to Carr’s piece on Google to Jamais Cascio’s response piece in this month’s Atlantic, “Get Smarter.” (It argues that technologies and pharmacology can help boost our intelligence.) I may not know what swims beneath the surface of any of these pieces, but I am familiar enough with all of them to use my spare cognitive energy and time to craft a blogpost that links the three. And I did it by typing (without watching the keys) at a rate of approximately 100 words per minute. I employed some basic html code, some of which I know by heart and some of which I keep on an electronic clipboard. I was able to publish it immediately, to the delight or dismay or general apathy of my intended reading public. I could (and, if you’re reading this, probably did) direct traffic to this post via Twitter, Facebook, or any number of other blogs.

God knows I could have spent the time reading Plato’s Phaedrus in its entirety, and I’m not disputing that I would have been enriched by the experience. But you can’t argue that what I did with my time instead (synthesizing, devising an argument, increasing familiarity with html basics, crafting the argument with an intended public in mind, then circulating it among that intended audience) was not an enriching experience.

Back to the jet ski metaphor: Comedian and philosopher Daniel Tosh argues that it’s impossible not to be unhappy on a jetski. “You ever seen a sad person on a waverunner? Have you? Seriously, have you?…Try to frown on a waverunner.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH-UHgluab0&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Watch the clip till the end. He talks about how people smile as they hit the pier–and they hit the pier because you’re supposed to hit the gas to turn–”it goes against natural instinct,” he says. Well, maybe at first, but once you get the hang of it, I imagine you learn how to use the gas in ways that keep you from hitting the pier. It’s just that most of us hit the pier once and once is enough: we stick to dry land, which is safer but far less fun.

Okay, I’ll confess: This entire post is really just a plug for Daniel Tosh’s amazing new show, Tosh.0. It airs Thursdays at 10:00 P.M. ET (9:00 Pacific) on Comedy Central, and it may be the funniest half-hour show I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Even so, it might get canceled because of low viewership. Please just give it a try. I guarantee you’ll laugh out loud at least once or your money back.

Tosh.0 Thurs, 10pm / 9c
Motorcycle Granny
www.comedycentral.com
Daniel Tosh Miss Teen South Carolina Demi Moore Picture

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the sleeping alone review of films*: the road

Jul 1st, 09 / 1 Comment

Summary: They’re gonna screw it up.

Here’s a trailer:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUw6bje19KM&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

As always, I want the movie to give me the same experience as the book did. In this case, I know that what I want is not deliverable by the filmmakers, for one main reason: the novel achieved its sparseness in large part because of McCarthy’s decision to eschew conventions of printed text, to avoid description, to avert his eyes from the details that might matter to us as voyeurs but wouldn’t matter to the characters that populate this post-apocalyptic ode to humanity’s innate survival drive.

Look at the following examples:

I should have been more careful, he said.
The boy didn’t answer.
You have to talk to me.
Okay.
You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Yes.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.
Yes. We’re still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.

He walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of an intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Films, visual and aural platforms that they are, hinge on the presumption that a thing worth the camera’s focus is worth showing to the audience in all its textured glory. While we judge a novel(or, for that matter, a screenplay or script) based on the writer’s ability to show us a scene instead of telling it to us, a movie–with some, but not much, variation–is restricted only to showing. You can show well, or you can show less well, but the delicate dance of showing without showing–McCarthy’s tactic throughout the road–is nigh on impossible on the screen.

Besides, when it comes to movie, story is king. we want movies whose narratives bend us over ourselves. We want to get a good look at the enemy, even if the enemy is scarcely described in the novel on which the film is based. We want all dimensions of the relationship between the boy and his father. We want to know the boy’s mother and understand why she did what she did.

Still, you know how I like post-apocalyptic zombie movies, and this movie basically fits the bill. It comes out Oct. 16, which means there’s still plenty of time for any number of interested parties to screw it up royally.

*that have not yet been released

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Ray Bradbury smacks down new media types

Jun 21st, 09 / 1 Comment

First, in case you weren’t aware of this, Ray Bradbury is alive and kicking at 89.

If Bradbury’s name doesn’t trigger instant recognition and a flood of memories of high school English classes, then it’s possible it’s simply too late for you to make any useful contribution for society. In case there’s still a chance, here’s why you should recognize Bradbury’s name: He penned Fahrenheit 451, a novel about a future in which critical thought is outlawed (451 degrees is the temperature at which books burn). Though this is his most famous work, Bradbury is a highly prolific writer and in addition to dozens of novels, short story collections, and novellas, he has also authored multiple teleplays and screenplays. His most famous is the 1956 version of Moby Dick, starring Gregory Peck, which became the canonical representation of the novel (despite certain liberties taken with Melville’s novel–most notably, a significant rewrite of the ending).

Bradbury is in the news lately because of a crusade to save public libraries in Ventura Country, CA. According to this New York Times article, the libraries there are under threat of closure because of a drop in property tax funds in the city. Property taxes make up the lion’s share of public funds to support libraries in Ventura.

When friends of the library went to Bradbury for help, he was apparently an easy sell. As the article explains:

Fiscal threats to libraries deeply unnerve Mr. Bradbury, who spends as much time as he can talking to children in libraries and encouraging them to read.

The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

Readers of this blog know that I take my joy out of pummeling people who attack the internet as “meaningless” or “not real.” In this case, though, I’m going to let Bradbury off easy, and not just because I’m easily dazzled by literary stars. Bradbury gets a free pass because he points to a key problem inherent in the social revolution: That the demise of print newspapers, public libraries, and books in general means that kids who either can’t or choose not to engage with participatory media will get left behind. This means that the most disadvantaged learners will, once again, live at the mercy of the educated class.

The NYTimes article explains why libraries matter so much to Bradbury:

His most famous novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” which concerns book burning, was written on a pay typewriter in the basement of the University of California, Los Angeles, library; his novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes” contains a seminal library scene.

…“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Look, I know it’s not a revolution if nobody loses. But if the same groups of people who have always lost–the poor, the undereducated, the underclass–lose this time, too, then what kind of revolution are we hosting over here?

I will admit, though, that it’s kind of confusing that one of the most innovative, creative, and future-oriented writers of 20th Century America is displaying such a resistance to a technology that appears to feel just a little too futuristic to him. It’s not real? It’s in the air? Isn’t that the premise of the vast majority of Bradbury’s body of work?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5NxG_rr5aU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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Actually, “Snakes on a Plane” wasn’t that bad… jk jk jk

Jun 8th, 09 / 1 Comment

Coming late to the game, I finally watched that Samuel L. Jackson vehicle, Snakes on a Plane, this weekend on cable. It was–turns out the critics were right on this–the worst kind of bad movie: schlocky without wanting to admit it, seemingly unaware of how to spin absurd lines like “we have to put a barrier between us and the snakes.”

Back in 2006, paying ticketholders could at least endure by holding out the hope–indeed, the certainty–that they would get one crystalline moment of Jacksonesque indulgence when they would hear that immortal one-liner uttered by Jackson himself. My version of the line, as viewed through the dubbers of basic cable, was this:

Actually, I think I got the better end of the deal. Pre-release publicity efforts spread the original, unedited version of Jackson’s line across the entire interwebz, and the only uncertainty left for moviegoers was when Jackson would say the line. I got the extra layer of anticipation in wondering–since I knew the language wouldn’t pass cable censors–how they would dub the line, since they certainly couldn’t just edit it out entirely.

The dubbed line was one of two bright spots in what was otherwise a thorough waste of time. We–basic cable subscribers–get the joy of knowing what Jackson really says, even if we hadn’t had access to the pre-release hype. We also get the added layer of pleasure in knowing that the dubbers, knowing we know what Jackson actually says, decided to get a little playful. I expected Jackson to say “motherfreaking” or “motherfragging” or something of that ilk; “monkeyfighting” and “Monday to Friday” were such a surprise that I felt something that may have come close to the kind of joy the filmmakers were hoping for in writing the line–and, indeed, the entire movie–in the first place.

The second bright spot comes just after Samuel L. Jackson has had enough of the monkeyfighting snakes. (I don’t remember the name of the ‘character’ he ostensibly ‘plays’ in this film, and really there’s no point in pretending it’s worth my time to find out.) It turns out the plane is lacking a pilot and the surviving passengers need to find the most qualified person to try to lane the plane.

It also turns out the most qualified person is a young man named Troy, a bodyguard for the rapper 3Gs. As 3Gs points out, Troy has logged thousands of hours of flight time–though admittedly, it was all on a flight simulator program for PlayStation2. It doesn’t matter, though, because by the time this fact is revealed Troy’s already at the controls–and his command of the language of air control is nothing short of pure beauty. See, because it would be one thing if he had only enough competence to manipulate the controls, but his embodiment of the language, the body movements, the mindset of a pilot demonstrates near-mastery. It’s just…so well played.

Here’s the unedited version of the final minutes of the film. If you want to skip ahead to Troy’s landing, it’s at 5:25.

While you’re watching, do NOT question why Samuel L. Jackson thinks it’s a good idea to shoot the windows out of an unsteady airplane. Do NOT question why the flight attendants choose not to strap themselves in before the windows get shot out. And actually, don’t worry too much about why there might be monkeyfighting snakes on a Monday to Friday plane. It really doesn’t matter.

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