Comment of the Week

In response to last week's Salon Headline of the Day, which trumpeted a piece by Andrew O'Hehir ludicrously claiming that The Conjuring is anti-women and right-wing.

"'It features Vera Farmiga, an actress too strange and too powerful for mainstream Hollywood stardom.' What the fuck does that even mean? No, really. WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN? Is she a sorceress, feared and loathed by the Hollywood Illuminati?

-- TK"

Exactly. Thanks, TK. As usual, you've won a brand new Chrysler Cordoba and you can pick it up at Morty's office.

"Argo Fuck Yourself"

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at a really ridiculous trend in entertainment analysis and criticism, specifically when it comes to film.

Here's the opening shot:

"Quick: There’s a big-budget Hollywood movie that’s nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture this year, a drama about a real-life event from America’s history, that’s currently being raked over the coals by some very vocal critics for what they claim is its lack of factual accuracy. They say its creators’ decision to highlight certain questionable parts of the supposedly true story while leaving others safely out amounts to little more than potentially dangerous propaganda. They say the film does a disservice to audiences by essentially lying to them about what really happened. They disapprove — and they want to make sure the movie is denied the official endorsement of an Oscar. What film am I talking about?"

Read the Rest Here

Listening Post

Dark, menacing and sensual, this song is used to great effect in the movie End of Watch (which is excellent, by the way).

Here's Puscifer's Momma Sed.

Love Hurts

I'm not sure it was last week, but recently on the podcast I mentioned a movie that I was looking forward to because its trailer alone basically devastated me. Well, that film, a nice-sized success at Sundance, now has a March 1st release date.

It's called The End of Love and it was written and directed by and stars Mark Webber of one of my favorite movies pretty much ever, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. In the movie, Webber plays himself as a struggling actor and recent widower and he casts his real-life little boy as the son he's trying desperately to be a single father to. His real Hollywood friends also make appearances as themselves.

The emotion is raw, honest and moving in a way that makes me both want desperately to see the film and terrified of its effect on me. This is one I'm probably going to wind up seeing alone because, to be honest, I just don't think I want anyone witnessing my reaction to a lot of it.

Here's the new trailer for The End of Love.

Thirty Shades of Grey

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at the debate over torture and Zero Dark Thirty, which opens in wide release in two days.

Here's the opening shot:

"Just before the limited release of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' I wrote a column for this site that took to task those who hadn't seen the film yet but were already howling about its portrayal of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques -- torture by any other name -- and their effect on the manhunt for Osama bin Laden. The criticism ranged from those who believed that by taking no moral stance on torture and instead simply presenting it as a fact of the times, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal were in fact issuing tacit approval of torture, to those who couldn't fathom how any critic could detach him or herself from the content of the film and laud it despite knowing that it seems to falsely link torture to the capture of Bin Laden. My point at the time was simple: shut up until you actually see the movie and know what the hell you're talking about. I hadn't seen 'Zero Dark Thirty' and therefore knew I couldn't comment on it with any kind of intellectual honesty so I was willing to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt until such time as I had the chance to take in what I assumed would be a complex and potentially unsettling moviegoing experience for myself.

Well, yesterday I saw 'Zero Dark Thirty.'"

Read the Rest Here

Listening Post

I finally got around to seeing Cosmopolis last night and I have to give David Cronenberg credit -- he was willing to stay unmercifully faithful to the story's source material. I've already raved about Don DeLillo's 2003 novel that spawned the movie; I thought it was a prophetic near-masterwork the first time I read it and I still think so. Cronenberg kept intact most of DeLillo's powerful and poetic but at times frustratingly indecipherable dialog and the result is a movie that's definitely not for everyone.

One of my favorite things about the film was the decision to create a collaboration between long-time Cronenberg scorer Howard Shore and Metric for the soundtrack. Basically, Shore composed most of the music and Metric "translated" it into actual musical pieces. The outcome is something truly interesting and unexpected: subtle orchestration transformed into often eerie electronic and steely propulsions that befit the film's tale of technology descending into absolute nihilistic chaos.

Here's the movie's closing theme, which is the only really pronounced track used in the film that you can hear Metric frontwoman Emily Haines singing on.

This is Long To Live.

Master Piece

I'm a very big fan of Paul Thomas Anderson. I thought Boogie Nights was extraordinary, Magnolia is one of my all-time favorite films, and There Will Be Blood, in my opinion, was the best movie of the 2000s. (I still haven't gotten around to seeing The Master.)

Still, despite my fanboy appreciation, I can fully understand where Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman is coming from in his respectful and very well-written explanation of how and why he "fell out of love" with Anderson's films.

Regardless of your opinion of Anderson and his work, it's an excellent read.

Entertainment Weekly: Why I Fell Out of Love with the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson/10.3.12

Tuesday Is Recycling Day

In honor of all the recent debate over the politics of The Dark Knight Rises.

"The Right Stuff" (Originally Published, 2.17.09)

Gotta thank Cesca for leading me to this little gem: the National Review Online's compilation of the supposed "25 Best Conservative Movies."

What exactly makes a movie "conservative" is apparently known only to the brain trust at NRO, which includes the decidedly un-brainy Rich Lowry -- editor of the National Review and the guy who essentially publicly admitted to masturbating during Sarah Palin's vice presidential debate performance (see column below). While the most interesting thing about the list in general is what it subtly says about the effort undertaken by the Review's conservative readers to avoid appearing stereotypically uncultured (obvious choices are avoided: Superman, Top Gun, Die Hard, Norris's The Octagon, the Rambo series, etc.), equally fascinating is what a few of the individual choices say about how conservatives view their role in relation to the U.S. power structure. Put simply, they still, even after the last eight years of oppressive abuses and astonishingly expansive spending by a Republican administration, see themselves as the rag-tag band of rebels fighting the evil empire of big government. How else to justify the appropriation of films like The Lives of Others, 300, or -- in the "also-rans" list and possibly most shocking -- my beloved Serenity.

While scanning the list, look for a couple of truly great "What the Fuck?" moments, like the fact that all three movies by hyper-WASP Whit Stillman are included, as well as The Dark Knight (still pitched as a paean to George W. Bush), United 93 (if you didn't see that one coming...) and, well, Team America (its inclusion proof that brilliant satire ultimately fools those it's targeting).

The National Review Online: The Best Conservative Movies/2.23.09 Issue

Now that I've perused NRO's choices a few times, I can't help but feel like there are quite a few movies that the magazine neglected to mention. Movies that I think should've made the list before, say, Ghostbusters.

How about:

Last Tango In Paris

Features a selfish white guy who delights in bending over complete strangers and screwing them in the ass.

Wall Street

A perfect movie right up until the last ten minutes.

Casablanca

A clever American outwits the Nazis and dumps his foreigner girlfriend.

The Transporter

A white guy in an expensive car lives by a strict code that includes doing what he's told while never asking questions and never bothering to look at what his job entails and whether it's hurting anyone.

Titanic

The uplifting story of an unstoppable white object that sinks a boat full of poor people while most of the rich manage to save themselves -- a fine allegory for either the U.S. government or Wall Street, depending on your perspective.

The Big Chill

Its main character is a dead hippie.

Signs

Mel Gibson defeats illegal aliens.

American Psycho

A Wall Street investment banker murders hookers, homeless people, and other undesirables.

Thelma and Louise

Ends with Susan Sarandon driving off a cliff.

Any more suggestions? Have at it.

Listening Post

I'm currently embroiled in yet another battle in my ongoing epic struggle with Time Warner Cable -- incidentally, the worst and most institutionally incompetent cable system in the universe, and I used to work for Time Warner -- so it's going to be sporadic today given that my internet service is out and I'm working off an air-card.

Either way, I'm a big fan of 70s film, so here's Paul Williams's Where Do I Go From Here from Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

Listening Post

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is one of those movies I hold dear to my heart. It's a criminally overlooked work of art that was both moving and stunningly beautiful to look at, thanks to director Andrew Dominik and some of the best work cinematographer Roger Deakins has ever done.

Adding to the almost ethereally mournful tone of the film was the score, composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

I listened to this quite a bit during my drive through the American west to reach California last winter.

Here's All Things Beautiful

Rock Bottom

My prayers to the gods of quality entertainment have been answered.

The Hollywood Reporter: "Rock of Ages" Falls Flat/6.16.12

I'd love to think that this will break the cultural curse that is Adam Shankman's career, but I doubt I'm that lucky or that Hollywood is that wise. Either way, maybe somebody somewhere will think twice the next time he or she gets the urge to green-light a movie that the director swears will be "a musical that guys will want to take their girls to!" or really anything that features Tom Cruise shirtless in leather pants, talking to a monkey and singing Glee-ified versions of shitty 80s rock songs.

Speaking of which, can we finally just admit that the 80s sucked and put to bed all that misguided nostalgia for it?

Take Two

Beware of Prometheus spoilers ahead.

Well, as promised I saw Prometheus again last night -- this time in IMAX.

Again, the visuals are so spectacular and immersive as to be worth the price of admission solely on their own. As for the story and the issues I had with it after seeing the movie the first time, many still remain, although I admittedly have a better feeling about the film overall having watched it carefully for a second time.

For one, I like David's character much better now and kind of let myself simply go with the flow when it comes to his motivations throughout the course of the movie. I think the giveaway when it comes to how David thinks and behaves comes when Charlie tells him, just before being dosed with alien goo, "You're not a real boy." David is at all times behaving like a curious child, one who does things simply to see what the outcome is; I'm not sure his agenda is much more complicated than that.

I actually found the storyline to be even more frustrating when trying to apply the lengthy analysis offered up by that one blogger who's now found himself to be the Rosetta Stone among confused Prometheus viewers. The bottom line is that in spite of all the mythological and religious inferences he gleaned from the film, the whole thing still didn't really make a lick of sense. And that's where I think the main problem lies -- in trusting in the meaning behind the movie. I'll put it like this: I like films that ask big questions and that don't provide complete answers. I like being made to think and feel and to even ponder endlessly and futilely. But I have to believe that I'm not simply being played -- that the writers and filmmakers had some idea what they were doing and weren't just throwing a lot of tenuously connected shit at the wall in the hope that something would stick and it would therefore all come off as intelligent and deep. I can't help but think that Lindelof's track record puts him in the latter category; I think he just grabbed onto a lot of quasi-Christian references (Shaw's cross and faith, the fact that it's Christmas, the Engineers being dead for 2,000 years, David washing Weyland's feet, etc.), metaphysical mythology (the prevalence of self-sacrifice, the dying king refusing to give up power, etc.) and references to the original Alien canon (the xenomorph mural, the early facehugger, the alien at the end -- which was admittedly still a lot of fun to see even if it made no real sense) and sledgehammered the story with them in an effort to seem profound even though he really had no idea what the hell he was doing or where any real connections were.

Finally, yes, the characters were as dumb, listless and unlikable as they were the first time around. Although I did consider that these qualities may have answered the question of why the Engineers want us dead.

Either that or they're just pissed that we've gotten to the point where we make movies like Prometheus and pretend that they're high art.

In Space No One Can Hear You Snore

This piece is on Prometheus. Spoilers abound so beware.

There's a 1985 Tobe Hooper movie called Lifeforce, starring a very young and yet still oddly old-looking Patrick Stewart and a constantly topless Mathilda May, that's remained stuck in my mind throughout the years. The reason for this has nothing to do with it being any good -- on the contrary, it's an unmitigated piece of crap -- but more for the fact that for years after seeing it for the first time, I would find myself returning to it at regular intervals. The reason I'd continue to subject myself to something I obviously disliked intensely? Because I very much wanted to like it, and I always held onto hope that maybe at some point I'd hit on something I hadn't noticed before and the movie would click for me and fall into place. It was a great idea and I wanted it to be a great movie -- unfortunately, no matter how many times I saw it, it never became one. It just kept being the same piece of shit I remembered from the last time I saw the thing.

Ironically, the script for Lifeforce was written by Dan O'Bannon, the writer of my favorite movie of all-time, Alien, and that adds an interesting layer of synchronicity to my feelings about the nominal Alien prequel, Prometheus -- a film I've been waiting for in one form or another for 33 years.

I saw Prometheus on Friday night -- and I desperately wanted to like it; almost no other movie imaginable would receive the automatic benefit of the doubt from me as one that saw Ridley Scott returning to the Alien universe. And with that in mind, I gave the movie that benefit -- over and over again as I turned it over in my mind in the few hours after leaving the theater -- only to finally realize that if the movie hadn't been Ridley Scott's return to a beloved canon, I wouldn't even have bothered trying to rationalize my feelings about it and to assign deeper meaning where I simply wasn't finding any. I just would've come right out and admitted that the film wasn't all that great.

Make no mistake: Prometheus is a visual feast; it's worth seeing strictly for how lovely it is to look at and for how masterfully the 3D optics are used. I would recommend the movie to anyone based solely on that. Prometheus also has a couple of truly spectacular set pieces and one or two very nice nods to the original Alien beyond simply the revelation of who and what the "Space Jockey" is and where it might have come from. Beyond that, though, it's a mess. A beautiful mess -- but a mess nonetheless.

I'm just going to throw out the issues in a stream of consciousness fashion and let anyone who's seen the movie and who feels like it discuss whether they were bugged by the same things.

1. Okay, a trillion-dollar expedition into space with the aim of discovering the origin of man, the most important mission mankind has ever undertaken, and the 17 people hand-picked for it are the dumbest and most unlikable people planet Earth has to offer. Scientists don't behave like scientists. The captain of the ship seems strangely disinterested in his crew's peril. Characters do unbelievably stupid things seemingly without reason and thoroughly against what we know of their personalities through the meager amount of set-up we're given. (The two terrified crew-members who suddenly decide to play with the pretty alien worm; the two jokey co-pilots who instantly and complacently volunteer to martyr themselves at the ass end of space because a woman they don't even know says somebody's going to have to.) Jesus, I cared more about the kids getting picked off by Jason in Friday the 13th VII than I did about anybody -- anybody -- aboard the Prometheus. And what's worse, I really get the impression that the writers and director didn't care about the characters either.

2. Maybe Noomi Rapace can carry an American movie -- but she didn't carry this one. Again, I didn't give a damn about her.

3. While the C-section scene is admittedly excellent, the fact that Shaw then immediately -- after pulling an alien squid the size of a football out of her -- runs, jumps, gets the shit knocked out of her and isn't doubled over in excruciating pain the entire time required a suspension of disbelief I kind of couldn't muster. Also, why did no one seem to notice that she'd just hacked herself open and why didn't she bother to tell anyone, "Oh, by the way, there's an alien squid in the med-pod bay -- might wanna go check on that," instead of pretending it never happened?

4. While David was absolutely the most interesting character in the movie -- and Fassbender's performance was a lot of fun -- can anybody explain to me the motivation for 80% of the crap he does? Why poison Charlie? Why revel in the fact that Shaw is pregnant with an alien? Why then reach out to her at the end? DXM regular Votar has a good theory, which is that David isn't actually taking orders from Weyland and has instead been programmed by someone else and that his mission is actually, keeping with Alien tradition, to bring back a specimen for bio-weapons. This is the only possibility that makes any sense.

5. If Captain Janek is supposed to be the audience surrogate -- or the closest thing there is to one among the characters -- and if he's indeed right that the planet they discover is nothing more than a weapons facility, then why the hell did the Engineers tell humans about it? Why try to entice them to come for a visit? On that note, if what the crew of Prometheus finds is indeed the remnants of an accident in which the Engineers' bio-weapon got loose and killed a bunch of them, that means this is the second time at least that this has happened, since the Space Jockey in Alien was obviously the victim of his own cargo. That makes the Engineers the most incompetent alien race to seed our planet imaginable. Although admittedly I appreciate it if that's the point -- that we're a bunch of assholes who aren't the product of God or an enlightened species of space men but were instead created by beings that are as angry, petty and stupid as we are.

6. In reference to all of these questions, I blame and kind of hate Damon Lindelof. Despite its popularity, Lost was annoying metaphysical tripe that masqueraded as intellectualism -- and Lindelof seems to have brought the same ethos to Prometheus. No, churning out a script in which you can almost hear your own voice saying to the audience, "Ah? See? Interesting, isn't it? That's a big question, right? Bet that'll give you something to discuss!" while smirking smugly doesn't make you a genius or your work high-minded. It's cheap and easy to ask questions you don't even try to answer and create chaos just for the hell of it.

7. There are vast stretches of the movie that are just boring as hell.

Again, it took me about an hour or so after seeing Prometheus to admit to myself that the only reason I was trying to give it a pass on the issues I had with it was that it was ostensibly an Alien movie. Upon any kind of close inspection -- really any inspection at all -- the whole damn thing falls apart, and that obviously disappoints me greatly.

I should say, by the way, that I'm going to see it again -- mostly to see it in IMAX and truly immerse myself in its visual splendor, but also because, as with Lifeforce all those years ago, I really want to like it. I want to find something I didn't catch the first time that will make it all come together for me. I'm not sure that's going to happen, though.

Flick You

Remember what I said yesterday about Miami?

I rest my case:

CBS Miami: Miami-Dade County Honors Director with "Michael Bay Day"/6.5.12

Because, of course.

In honor of "Michael Bay Day," all Miami-Dade residents are expected to detonate explosives in the streets, say something embarrassingly stupid and not at all clever and, if you're a woman, to oil yourself up and rub your bikini-clad boobs together at a camera that you're pretending is personally following you around. In other words, behave like it's any other Tuesday.

Save the Date

This is clever, but when the date between Travis and Betsy at the porn theater in Taxi Driver didn't even make the list, is it really worth giving any consideration to?

Moviefone: Worst On-Screen Dates/4.16.12

Act a Fool

I was waiting to see how long it would take for someone on the left to publicly express concern over the new movie Act of Valor and the supposedly ominous precedent it may be setting when it comes to U.S. military cheerleading. I should've known it would be David Sirota to stop wringing his hands long enough to grab that flag with both of them and run it up the hill.

You'll remember that last May, Sirota penned an almost laugh-out-loud silly piece decrying the Pentagon's involvement in getting itself tied into the promotion of X-Men: First Class, ostensibly to America's impressionable youth. As if anyone other than a blithering idiot would believe that strapping on the gear of a United States soldier turns him into Magneto. Well, in today's Salon, Sirota returns to the subject of his well-documented night terrors over the "Military Entertainment Complex," the rise of which would seem to be demonstrated by any form of popular media at all that people enjoy and which doesn't flat out preach pacifism and demonize our military.

If you haven't seen the commercials for it, Act of Valor is a film which purports to star active duty Navy SEALs, certainly making it a first-of-its-kind endeavor and one that's undeniably intended to be two-hours of pro-troops propaganda. Controversy arises only if you think that glorifying a group of people who put their lives on the line in the defense of this country is something disturbingly sinister. I haven't seen the movie; it may be terrible from a filmmaking and storyline standpoint. I don't, however, think the overall "message" of a movie like this is necessarily a negative one. Obviously and not at all surprisingly, Sirota disagrees.

As with every time I bring up David Sirota, this is where I take a second to remind everyone that he wrote an entire book positing that our current political climate can be traced back to movies like Ghostbusters and Die Hard. Oliver Willis hits it pretty squarely on the head when he calls him "serially stupid."

Look, I hate to get all Colonel Nathan Jessup here, but we have an all-volunteer military in this country and somebody needs to step up and do the very difficult job that Sirota would never in a million years even be able to do, much less undertake voluntarily. I don't always back the people making the decisions to send our men and women into battle, but I almost always back the men and women themselves and I see nothing wrong with showing them some respect and with honoring their actions, by and large, by making them seem noble, heroic and larger-than-life in popular culture.

Likewise, while it's tough to fully trust an establishment entity like the Pentagon -- which admittedly has a history of treachery and malfeasance, as all military and political institutions do -- it's not beyond comprehension that it would want to make itself and its mission appear to the masses in the best light possible and to, yes, advertise. A certain segment -- though absolutely not all -- of Hollywood gets on board for the same reason that the entertainment industry has, for decades, glorified cops, firefighters and servicemen-and-women: because their jobs are dangerous and the life-and-death decisions and situations they can face every day are something completely alien to most people.

People go see Act of Valor or play Modern Warfare because it's exciting. Again, only an idiot doesn't understand what real warfare is like -- particularly given the number of media resources readily available today -- and rarely do movies, television and even video games completely gloss over the horrors of armed conflict. But Sirota, who's the modern standard-bearer of the self-appointed Liberal Protective Class, believes that we're all easy dupes for whatever supposed propaganda is aimed in our direction and therefore must be safeguarded from it at all costs.

I apparently don't know enough to be able to separate fact from fiction from hype when I see a movie like Act of Valor. Thank God for guys like David Sirota who can enlighten and coddle me from on high while comically shaking a fist at the bad people trying to have their way with me.

Smashing Dawn

What with the latest installment in the terminally awful cultural affliction known as the Twilight series assaulting the theater-going public tomorrow, I figured I'd pass along something truly special to you nice people.

If you've got a spare 45 minutes or so -- and really, that's about how long it'll take to get through this thing -- I highly recommend reading the gramatically challenging but shockingly insightful take down of the entire Twilight phenomenon penned by -- well, the Hulk.

Really, for the most part this is a dead-on peeling apart of what makes the books and the movies so insidious -- not to mention shitty entertainment.

Bad-Ass Digest: Film Crit Hulk Smash: Hulk vs. Twilight/11.17.11

Tattoo You

For those who haven't seen this yet -- the new trailer for David Fincher's adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Not-So-Spectacular Bid

The answer: She doesn't.

Rotten Tomatoes: 18%: Sarah Jessica Parker's I Don't Know How She Does It Takes in Dismal $4.5 Million at the Box Office

Oh, wait -- you mean "continue to get work in movies." Yeah, that I don't know.

Immunity Challenge

I'm fascinated (read: terrified) by stories depicting viral outbreaks that threaten to kill millions. I have been since I first read The Hot Zone.

I'm also a very big fan of Steven Soderbergh.

So you can imagine how interested I am in seeing Contagion, Soderbergh's upcoming hyper-realistic film that attempts to document what the complete breakdown of global society would look like if a virus suddenly burned through humanity like wildfire.

First the trailer, for those who haven't seen it:



And a really interesting interview with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns about what went into putting the story together:

In Contention: Contagion Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns/8.31.11

Make no mistake: This is going to be the scariest movie of the year.