Entries Tagged 'movies' ↓

I had a poster of him on my wall all during high school.

And back when I was a diehard movie fan, I loved him in this period:

Honesty compels me to say that he was not a great actor. But he strived (and strived and strived) to be one, as documented in 1955 by Eve Arnold:

And he was uncommonly generous with the wealth he acquired through movie stardom, setting a great example for future generations of Hollywood stars with a conscience.

Apart from the mischievous look in his eye, what I liked most about him was his plain talk:

Paul Newman on acting:
“Study your craft and know who you are and what’s special about you. Find out what everyone does on a film set, ask questions and listen. Make sure you live life, which means don’t do things where you court celebrity, and give something positive back to our society.”

Paul Newman on marriage:
“I’ve repeatedly said that for people who have as little in common as Joanne and myself, we have an uncommonly good marriage. We are actors. We make pictures and that’s about all we have in common. Maybe that’s enough. Wives shouldn’t feel obligated to accompany their husbands to a ball game, husbands do look a bit silly attending morning coffee breaks with the neighborhood wives when most men are out at work. Husbands and wives should have separate interests, cultivate different sets of friends and not impose on the other. You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each other’s necks.”

Amen, brother. Thanks for the memories, and rest in peace.

Philip Kennicott reviews the movie Traitor, starring the fine actor Don Cheadle:

Once again there are terrorists in our midst, and once again they are Muslims, hiding in sleeper cells, posing as ordinary Americans, waiting to cause mayhem. Heroic action is needed.

To save us from the terrorists?

More pressingly, to save us from films such as “Traitor,” a long-winded thriller starring Don Cheadle as a conflicted Muslim who is either an undercover U.S. operative or a ruthless killer, or maybe both.

Wait. It gets worse—or, rather, better [e.a.]:

The film’s moral reasoning is all parenthetical: There are bad guys out there (but they’re not all irredeemably bad), and while we must fight them, we shouldn’t sink to their level (except when we have to). This doesn’t add up to real nuance. It just encourages people to break the rules and feel bad about it. The film, which borrows a line from Samir as its subtitle (”The Truth Is Complicated”), would be stronger if it thought more simplistically: Terrorism is always wrong, as is breaking the laws of civilized behavior to fight it.

How hard is it for the makers of American popular entertainment to get this? Terrorism is always wrong, and so is the uncivilized behavior sometimes used to fight it.

I haven’t seen The Dark Knight, but from what I’ve read, that movie fails the morality test, too.

The Dark Knight does not provoke profound debate about our methods and purposes. It spectacularly affirms them. “We don’t get the hero we need,” Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon says, with Niebuhrian wistfulness, “we get the hero we deserve.”

Memo to Hollywood: one, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war. Get us rewrite!

[updated with a link, and with a repeated sentence cut]

I’m beginning to see a future where we poor consumers of the entertainment nation will no longer be flooded with quite as much shit as we’re seeing now.

First, the NYT’s David Carr reports what we all know, because there are no goddamn movies that are worth seeing—namely, that indies are no longer king:

Why are there no independent movies worth seeing? As Yogi Berra might say, there are just too many of them.

At least, that’s the view of one veteran independent film executive, Mark Gill. In a speech he gave at the Los Angeles Film Festival a little over a week ago (a speech that set tongues to wagging after it was published by IndieWire, a Web site devoted to independent film), he pointed out that the number of films submitted to Sundance, the Valhalla of the indie film industry, has multiplied by 10 in the last 15 years to a total of 5,000. But that embarrassment of riches is really just an embarrassment.

“Most of the films are flat-out awful,” said Mr. Gill, the head of the independent company The Film Department. “Trust me, I have had to sit through tons of them over the years. Let me put it another way: the digital revolution is here,” he said, and boy, is it underwhelming.

Meanwhile, veteran publisher Jonathan Karp, fessing up that he has “sinned” too, notes that what’s coming out of book publishers’ warehouses is also mostly dreck:

Visit your neighborhood superstore, and you will be overwhelmed with ephemera: self-aggrandizing memoirs by recovering addicts; poignant portraits of heroic pets; hyperbolic ideological tracts by insufferable cable TV pundits; guides to staying wrinkle- and toxin-free; odes to Warren Buffett and Jesus Christ; manifestos for fixing America in 12 easy steps; manly accounts of the best athlete/season/team ever; and glittery novels about British royalty, love-starved shoppers, mournful cops and ingenious serial killers. (There are more novels about serial killers than there are actual serial killers.)

I can’t be sure, of course, but he may have been thinking of books like the one being celebrated here. Okay, cheap shot.

Karp digs deeper to analyze the phenomenon:

Popular formulas repeat themselves for a reason: They have visceral, even mythic, appeal. A talented author can bring new vision to the most tired subject, so there’s nothing wrong with trying. Nor is there anything new about the syndrome. But what does seem more pronounced today is the relentless, indiscriminate proliferation of these books — and the underlying cynicism of the people acquiring, publishing and selling them.

That’s when he cops to having sinned:

I am, of course, mindful that people who work in glass publishing houses should not throw stones. I too have sinned. In weaker moments, I’ve been seduced by tales of celebrity, money, gossip and scandal.

Then Karp gets to the heart of the matter [e.a.]:

Books of this ilk have always existed. But in the past, they’ve been balanced by substantive books, crafted by monomaniacal authors who devoted years to the work. I can’t prove it empirically, but when I talk to literary agents and fellow publishers, they acknowledge an unarticulated truth about our business: Fewer authors are devoting more than two years to their projects. The system demands more, faster. Conventional wisdom holds that popular novelists should deliver one or two books per year. Nonfiction authors often aren’t paid enough to work full-time on a book for more than a year or two.

His prescription? Publishers should leave timeliness and buzziness to the newsbiz and focus on quality and longevity and posterity.

In any event, Karp writes, with the barriers to entry in the publishing biz lowered to the point where anyone can join in, publishers soon won’t have much of a choice if they want to survive. So they should protect their natural preserve [e.a.]:

There are thousands of independent publishers and even more self-publishers. These players will soon have the same access to readers as major publishers do, once digital distribution and print-on-demand technology enter the mainstream. When that happens, publishers will lose their greatest competitive advantage: the ability to distribute books widely and effectively. Those who publish generic books for expedient purposes will face new competitors. Like the music companies, some of those publishers may shrink or die.

Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it’s hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.

Consequently, publishers will be forced to invest in works of quality to maintain their niche. These books will be the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else. Those same corporate executives who dictate annual returns may begin to proclaim the virtues of research and development, the great engine of growth for business. For publishers, R&D means giving authors the resources to write the best books — works that will last, because the lasting books will, ultimately, be where the money is.

This is an important essay—a warning—from an important New York City publisher, just as Mark Gill’s observations are an important warning from a veteran film producer.

We’ll see what happens. (For the record, I predict no earthquakes.)

Here’s a straw in the wind that I’ve been waiting for, and a possible indication that our pop culture may soon begin to catch up with 21st-century reality.

The Independent reports that the Brits’ love affair with memoirs about misery and wretchedness is over.

Depravity, drink, drug addiction and abuse are hardly the most uplifting subjects for a leisurely read. But for years, misery memoirs have been the toast of the book world, with stories of human suffering generating huge sales. But new figures suggest readers have reached their pain threshold and the mis lit boom may be over.

At its height, profits topped £24m a year and authors could be sure that the more they plumbed the depths of despair and depravity, the deeper publishers would reach into their pockets. But industry research firm Nielsen now estimates that sales for the top 10 best-selling misery memoirs will be down from £3.87m last year to £2.59m this year.

Regular readers know that I’ve been appalled at the poverty of imagination that’s been on display in the pop culture for a long time. The wretched-family-and-dysfunctional-child memoir has been one of the most prominent features of this trend. There is no more grappling with big ideas in the culture; instead there’s the obsessive focus on the minutiae of miserable everyday life and on the unique ways in which individuals suffer their particular wretchedness.

It’s a fucking bore! Leon Wieseltier agrees with me (sorta)!

The decline of The New York Times remains worthy of comment, as does the poverty of imagination in American theater and film.

I’m no expert, and there are plenty of people discussing the culture, in depth, all over the interwebs. What I am, though, is a very disappointed reader and movie-goer, because I’m not being presented with any big stories and big themes—books or music or movies or plays that address things that are way larger than individuals and larger even than the sum of individuals—that get my juices flowing.

Two decades ago Tom Wolfe called for more novelists to stalk what he called the “Billion-Footed Beast“ (subscription to Harper’s required). You can read all about it here, at the NYT blog Paper Cuts.

Wolfe has for decades complained that in about 1960 American novelists made the decision to turn inward, to take their work in abstruse directions and to reject realism. All this was a disaster, Wolfe has maintained, especially because the social changes in America during this period offered such rich material. With “Bonfire,” he set out to reclaim the ground once occupied by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell and the other Americans of the first half of the 20th century who wrote in the tradition of Balzac, Dickens and Zola.

About two years after “Bonfire” came out, Wolfe published a famous essay in Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” (subscription required) laying out his theory in detail, and what really struck me while reading it again was that he could have written it yesterday and hardly changed a thing. He has gained no followers.  [e.a.]

More’s the pity. There is one exception: Jonathan Franzen, whose novel The Corrections was in fact a correction to the obsessive inward-looking trend in writers—a sprawling social novel in the tradition that Tom Wolfe had talked about (albeit, one with postmodern touches as well)—as James Collins notes in Paper Cuts:

The only book I can think of that has reached for something like the same realistic density, sweep and accessibility is “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. But the core of that book is a bourgeois family drama, and so it is really more like a gargantuan short story than a novel of the type that Dickens or Balzac would recognize.

Franzen himself addressed the discouraging landscape of contemporary fiction in a 2002 essay titled “Mr. Difficult,” in the New Yorker. It’s not available online. It provoked a dispute between him and Ben Marcus a few years later; discussion here.

Though Marcus’ essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame. In particular, Marcus focuses on Franzen’s 2002 essay “Mr. Difficult,” in which Franzen chronicles his growing disenchantment with the novels of William Gaddis, and more generally with the modernist-inspired ideal of “difficult” literature—the belief that “the greatest novels were tricky in their methods, resisted casual reading, and merited sustained study.” Writers like Gaddis, Franzen argues, are “Status” authors, who see themselves (again, in the modernist mold) as obligated only to their art, and who for the most part ignore the interests and desires of the reader. With some reluctance, Franzen places himself in an opposing camp: “Contract” authors, who place a high value on the relationship between narrator and reader, who primarily see the novel as a device for social and cultural communication, and who take human life (rather than, say, language or ideas per se) as the ultimate subject of their fiction.

While I’m waiting for all these novelists to sort themselves out and to start to grapple with 21st-century realities—and there’s a new generation of writers who seem eager to engage—I enjoy dipping into old pop culture favorites.

Like this 1961 movie (based on—gasp!—a trilogy of books! in French! which inspired a Broadway musical!), which was featured on TCM last night:

Hollywood can’t get a break with its Iraq movies. Nikki Finke reports on the latest effort:

I’m told #7 Stop-Loss opened to only $1.6 million Friday from just 1,291 plays and should eke out $4+M. Although the drama from MTV Films was the best-reviewed movie opening this weekend, Paramount wasn’t expecting much because no Iraq war-themed movie has yet to perform at the box office. “It’s not looking good,” a studio source told me before the weekend. “No one wants to see Iraq war movies. No matter what we put out there in terms of great cast or trailers, people were completely turned off. It’s a function of the marketplace not being ready to address this conflict in a dramatic way because the war itself is something that’s unresolved yet. It’s a shame because it’s a good movie that’s just ahead of its time.”

And here I thought the movie had a chance. Tony Scott gave it a good review in the NYT, and specifically drew attention to the difference between this film and previous Iraq war movies:

Ms. Peirce’s movie, which she wrote with Mark Richard, is not only an earnest, issue-driven narrative, but also a feverish entertainment, a passionate, at times overwrought melodrama gaudy with violent actions and emotions. The sober, mournful piety that has characterized a lot of the other fictional features about Iraq — documentaries are another matter — is almost entirely missing from “Stop-Loss,” which is being distributed by Paramount’s youth-friendly label MTV Films. Not that the movie is unsentimental — far from it — but its messy, chaotic welter of feeling has a tang of authenticity. Instead of high-minded indignation or sorrow, it runs on earthier fuel: sweat, blood, beer, testosterone, loud music and an ideologically indeterminate, freewheeling sense of rage.

I was particularly encouraged by this bit, because it rings true:

[The young soldiers'] teasing is raucous and rude, and it is clear from the start that they are neither saints nor monsters, but rather the impure products of American pop culture. With exaggerated bravado, they sing “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” Toby Keith’s anthem of 9/11 payback, which threatens righteous whuppings for America’s enemies: “And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you.” [e.a.]

One of Nikki Finke’s sources gives his unvarnished battled-hardened showbiz opinion:

“No one wants to see Iraq war movies. No matter what we put out there in terms of great cast or trailers, people were completely turned off. It’s a function of the marketplace not being ready to address this conflict in a dramatic way because the war itself is something that’s unresolved yet. It’s a shame because it’s a good movie that’s just ahead of its time.”

Back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, it would be nice if Hollywood would entertain us.

David Harsanyi wonders where all the superheroes have gone:

In a world crawling with merciless terrorists, corrupt politicians and sociopath hedge-fund managers, we need a fictional hero to save us.

Or are we so unsure of ourselves, so morally conflicted, that we can’t even win in fantasy?

Well, not quite.

Back in 1941, Captain America, a purely political creation, was charged with a single task: to kick Nazi butt. The Captain, in fact, confronted the Germans before the United States did, in one issue punching Adolf Hitler’s lights out.

I think we’re a little confused. Also: it’s hard to make a comic book about kicking Terrorist butt. How do you draw “Terrorist”? Not to mention: how do you draw “Terrorist” without being accused of racism or something?

Or perhaps we simply exaggerated the threat.

On the other hand—to call some people “superheroes” means that you’re privileging them. Brad Bird made a really popular movie about that a while back.

I’ve been saying for a good long while that we’re living through a very fallow time culture-wise. Luckily we have such a rich and deep pop and high culture that we’ll have enough to satisfy our souls for a good long time in the unlikely event that nothing new and exciting catches fire culturally.

As for stories that tell us something about how we live now and who our heroes are … well, that’ll have to wait. People aren’t ready to tell those stories yet.

But “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” so maybe something will come of that.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Helen Mirren also stole a beautiful moment from an otherwise brisk, businesslike, and banal Oscar telecast.

As did Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova:

Watching the Oscars paid off!

I loved the movie Once!

And the song “Falling Slowly”

And I love Glen Hansard for saying: “Make art! Make art!”

And I love Jon Stewart for bringing Marketa Irglova back out onstage to get her moment to encourage artists everywhere!

Wooohooo!

Heath Ledger is dead, apparently of a drug overdose:

Heath Ledger, an Oscar nominated actor for the 2005 movie Brokeback Mountain, has died in his apartment, police officials said today.

Police said a housekeeper found Ledger’s body lying on his bed in an apartment at 421 Broome St. in SoHo at 3:35 p.m. surrounded by pills.

According to police, Ledger had scheduled a massage for that time, and the housekeeper had gone to wake him up for his appointment.

Ledger was 28 years old.

One Hollywood era just ended, that’s what.

A movie that is currently on offer at Sundance, titled What Just Happened?—a reductive, gag-dependent spoof of Hollywood—sounds like the final nail in the coffin.

If you’re a ravenous movie nerd like me, than there’s very little in Barry Levinson’s “inside baseball” Hollywood movie What Just Happened? If, on the other hand, you don’t know a whole lot about studio politics, the angst of test-market screenings, and the tricks that movie-makers (or, more specifically, movie-sellers) will pull just to get a festival screening and a huge opening weekend, then you’ll most likely get a whole bunch of chuckles out of the flick. To those who know about this stuff all too well, the comedy should still make for an interesting enough diversion — thanks mainly to a massive, colorful cast and a few solid jabs that hit Hollywood right in the kisser.

This is “indie” fare? I mean: Sundance is indie, right?

Wow. Remember when Sundance was all that mattered?  when Miramax—the quintessence of Sundance and of “indie”—had clout, as this “Matt and Ben”/ Good Will Hunting site attests?

That was only ten years ago. It feels like it was a century ago.

Rupert Everett unloads on Hollywood:

“De Niro, Redford, Keaton, Allen, Pacino … They’re all just tragic parodies of themselves,” he says. “Al Pacino looks like a mad old freak now. I say give it a rest, or go and do some serious stuff.” …

“The other day I saw a film called Because I Said So with Diane Keaton, and I thought, ‘here’s one of the women we loved most in 1970s cinema, debasing and humiliating herself in this load of trash’.

“Why? Because we’re sheep, we just follow the herd … It’s just part of the huge amount of product that’s put out now that’s really bad. And it’s our fault. We’re all responsible for how the culture is.

Hollywood’s denizens responsible for the culture? What a thought! But never fear. The future looks rosy, Everett says:

Clooney the man? “He’s not the brightest spark on the boulevard. He’ll be president one day. Mark my words, if he’s straight, he’ll be president.”

As the Hollywood writers’ “strike” continues, various heavyweights have started to make power plays–um, I mean, separate deals. Like Letterman:

CBS’s late-night star, David Letterman, is pursuing an interim agreement with the Writers Guild that would allow him to return with his writers on Jan. 2. Mr. Letterman is in a position to make such a deal because his production company, Worldwide Pants, owns both his show and the one that follows on CBS, which features Craig Ferguson.

The fly in the ointment?

One representative of a late-night show said that some members of the guild leadership might have concerns about making a separate arrangement with Mr. Letterman, and that an agreement was far from a sure thing.

Ya think? Nah. I think that everyone will be making separate arrangements soon enough. The same NYT article notes that Conan and Leno are going back on the air in some way, shape, or form come the New Year. No word yet on Stewart and Colbert, but I’m sure they’ll feel the pressure soon enough from their network, too.

The way they will rationalize this breakdown of strikers’ discipline is also suggested in the Times piece. In contrast to Ellen DeGeneres and Carson Daly, who are already back on the air and to whom “the writers [which ones? --ed.]] “reacted with anger”:

the NBC hosts, along with Mr. Letterman, Mr. Kimmel and the Comedy Central hosts, have won praise from the writers for staying off the air so long and for paying their staffs.

So the game is over. Those who played by the rules and paid the proper respect won the moral high ground—the only ground that seems to count inside the Hollywood bubble. The only problem with this formulation is that this time, the game was played (and it’s not over yet) in full view of a nation that is already furious with Hollywood, bored by its products, and contemptuous of its residents, except as fodder for deliciously corrosive and often ruinous gossip.

If the point of this strike was for Hollywood writers to garner respect for themselves, it is to laugh. Instead, they have exposed themselves as beyond clueless about the technological revolution that is swallowing up not just their future but their present.

Via Mickey Kaus, I’m encouraged to find out that some folks have been trying to get through to Hollywood:

The video is funnier than most TV comedies. It reportedly got 400,000 hits–more than many cable shows. It was put up on the Web by unpaid performers seemingly just for the hell of it (and maybe the exposure). Doesn’t that sort of make Marc Andreesen and Rob Long’s point about the tenuous positon of both Hollywood and the Writers Guild? … It’s as if the Linotype operators went on strike and decided to publish their story in four color offset!…10:36 P.M.

Steve Boriss is a little more pointed in his analysis, and sees Hollywood (properly) as only part of a much larger picture:

By placing all forms of entertainment, including news, on the same medium, the Internet has launched a Darwinian struggle where the news, entertainment, and video game industries are now direct, head-to-head competitors for the distraction of audiences from their daily concerns. Crueler still, they must also now compete against mere amateurs, talent around the globe, blogs, porn, and also their former selves — their own archives of older articles, older movies, older programs, and older games never before available. That’s why audiences are plunging and pink slips are flying across all media – newspapers, TV, and Hollywood. The emerging, unified Internet entertainment, a.k.a. “InterTainment,” industry is now just one big happy family – but only if you happen to be a member of the audience

So why “worms” in the title of the post? Because, as Stephen Jay Gould reminded us in 1997, natural selection favors worms:

Darwin himself told us in his last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, that we should never underestimate the collective power of worms on the move. Our general culture also recognizes two primary metaphors, one inorganic and one organic, for the reversal of received opinion. Well may traditionalists fear the turning of these two objects: tables and worms. The inversion of the humble worm, especially when disturbed, may bring down empires. Shakespeare told us that “the smallest worm will turn being trodden on.” And Cervantes wrote in his author’s preface to Don Quixote that “even a worm when trod upon, will turn again.”

A new media world will rise. Hollywood will not be left behind in the dust. Trust me.

There’s lots of ink—virtual and dead-tree—being spilled about the problems of Hollywood.

Time’s Richard Corliss knows what’s wrong:

The winner, in the film, director, screenplay and supporting actor categories? The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, which three different people told me they’d been meaning to see. The runner-up, with wins for best actor and cinematographer? There Will Be Blood, an audience-punishing epic that doesn’t open for another two weeks. Best actress? Julie Christie, in Away from her, which earned less than $5 million in its North American release. …

By the time I’d got back to my office I had realized that we critics may give these awards to the winners, but we give them for ourselves. In fact, we’re essentially passing notes to one another, admiring our connoisseurship at the risk of ignoring the vast audience that sees movies and the smaller one that reads us.

So the reviewers are “connoisseurs,” and they’re reviewing the work of independent Hollywood spirits like, say, George Clooney, who are proud of being out of touch with the mainstream.

And then everyone wonders why the audience isn’t connecting with the movies on offer? How much “connoisseurship” does it take to recognize that I’m Not There, for example, is a dog? Not a lot! And yet reviewers fell all over themselves to declare it genius.

Blech.

Look out, Universal Studios–there’s a new kid in town. In Bulgaria, that is:

SOFIA, Bulgaria — The building site stands five miles south of central Sofia, but the facades of the new structures would fit in easily among the low-rises of SoHo, Chinatown, and Little Italy. Two cars sporting the New York City Police Department logo are parked on the street, and copies of several New York publications clutter the windows of a street-corner newsstand.

“We’re creating a new New York,” David Varod proclaims as he watches the 200-person construction crew at work.

Mr. Varod is chairman of Nu Boyana Film Studios, which is erecting a gigantic set designed to mimic the architectural style and layout of Lower Manhattan’s neighborhoods. When Nu Boyana’s “new New York” is ready for lights, camera, and action in April, moviemakers whose scripts are set in New York City will be able to shoot their films in this Balkan nation for a fraction of the cost.

It doesn’t look like New York at all. But that’s the magic of the movies—and globalization at work, too.

Hear the plaintive cry from director Brian De Palma:

De Palma also expressed his disappointment with the media’s coverage of recent war films, often with Monday morning stories of their box office woes and articles highlighting audience apathy like this, this, and this.

“They seem to relish it,” he says. “They are so excited that meaningful movies about our foreign policy are not doing well. They were made with extreme difficulty and financed in weird and creative ways. All made because a movie star decided to push for something he cared about.”

Boo hoo. Everyone with a worthy project needs to get in line, even including movie stars.

There are a lot of people in this country who are trying to get traction in the culture for the things they care about. It’s called a “free market” for a reason: consumers are free to ignore what you care about.

Norman Mailer was full of bons mots, as all the obits and remembrances make plain (more on that another day). Here’s one from 2000 that seems particularly relevant in light of the current strike:

Mr. Mailer acknowledged that few writers are ultimately satisfied with the way his or her work is portrayed on-screen, in television or film. Both are director’s mediums, he said. Mr. Mailer recalled a college symposium which said a screenwriter is “nothing but the towel boy in the whorehouse.”

“That remark still applies, as far as I’m concerned,” Mr. Mailer said.

[update: I added a missing link]

There’s a new crop of Iraq movies. Audiences are staying away in droves. Here’s one theory about why:

Despite spend several million dollars on advertising and marketing, ‘Lions for Lambs’ will flop–just like ‘Rendition’ & and ‘Valley of Elah.’

They will flop because the human psyche, especially the American variety, prefers real heroes–like the original hero of the Valley of Elah, a young shepherd named David who killed Goliath then cut off the giant’s head.

In the latest round of war movies the heroes are not the Soldiers and Marines who every day fight and defeat a vicious and barbaric enemy–the heroes are reporters, lawyers and activists.

And since every story requires a villain, the real enemy–Mohammedan Jihadists–are replaced by neo-cons, politicians, Soldiers and Marines.

This substitution of the traditional mono-myth away from a hero who faces physical danger and conquers an enemy is a result of cowardice of the modern story tellers.

What a crock.

The problem with the movies is, first of all, their relentless darkness and pessimism. To go to the movies today is to be assaulted with horror, danger, fear, chaos, and anxiety—and that’s just while you sit through the trailers.

Then there’s the fact that today’s movies offer no redemption. No one who isn’t on antidepressants wants to pay to see the bottomless suffering of human beings again and again. There are only so many gluttons for punishment in the American movie-going audience.

Finally, there’s the empty-headed prattle, devoid of anything approaching a new idea:

But Lions for Lambs is not merely a silly, shallow movie about the war: Its ambitions are broader and more scattered. Not content to stay focused on its central issue, it dabbles and babbles hither and yon, tossing off sophomore term-paper opinions on such topics as Americorps, consumerism, student loans, and corporate ownership of the media.

When Roth complains to her editor that the government hawks are engaged in “Vietnam-era thinking,” it rings truer as a self-critique; she is, after all, the one who keeps bringing up Vietnam and the 1960s. Indeed, if you tug on the emotional threads of the film, they all lead straight back to that crucible of generational consciousness: the fiftysomething journalists worry that they’ve been co-opted by the system that they started out fighting against; the liberal professor is disappointed that his students lack the passion and fervor of his own youth. It’s on this last point that Redford is at his most patronizing. When, repeatedly, the film criticizes today’s kids for being more interested in making money than in making a difference, one is tempted to reply: Yes, Mr. Redford, what a lucky thing it is for all of us that when you were young you eschewed fame and fortune.

Reviewing the movie Gone Baby Gone, Manohla Dargis writes:

I’m not sure exactly when Casey Affleck became such a good actor.

And then she goes on to name Affleck’s most recent appearances in the Ocean’s series, Gerry, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, unaccountably missing the performance that immediately marked him as an actor to watch:

Good Will Hunting. Duh!

Dargis should have been watching more carefully ten years ago. Yes, thanks to the Miramax publicity machine, that film became The Ben and Matt Show, but that doesn’t excuse her blindness to Casey’s obvious talent. Especially since, back then, he did the exact same thing she praises him for in his new film (directed this time by big bro Ben, who is a terrible actor):

[Casey Affleck] didn’t plead the character’s case or remind us of his own humanity; he just played the role.

Yep.

The NYT’s David Carr is much more polite and circumspect than I was when I wrote “one, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war,” but he is just as skeptical as I am about Hollywood’s prospects for success with its current crop of antiwar movies:

“In the Valley of Elah,” a mystery about a returning veteran who disappears, starring Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Paul Haggis, opened last Friday. It will be followed into theaters over the course of the fall and winter by “Grace Is Gone,” “Stop Loss,” “Nothing Is Private,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and “Redacted.” They all take as their central concern the price of America’s military and security activities since the attacks of Sept. 11. HBO, which has already waded into bloody waters with “Baghdad ER” and “Alive Day,” has commissioned “Generation Kill,” written by David Simon, creator of “The Wire.”

All of this is undoubtedly well intended, but will it be well attended?

No, it won’t. As Carr notes,

[H]istorically, audiences enter the theater in pursuit of counter-programming as an antidote to reality***

Yep. But Hollywood elites these days—like book and magazine publishing elites—make cultural products for themselves and for their own supposedly sophisticated crowd. That’s fine. They just shouldn’t expect to gain traction for them in the wider culture.

So it goes.

———-

*** The writer/director Billy Wilder, whom I’ve written about a lot, put it rather more plainly:

People don’t go to the movies to see the awful truth, which hurts.

That’s why Wilder snuck up on them with biting satires. Hollywood is both too stupid and too earnest for that these days. More’s the pity for those of us in the audience.

From a Slate review of Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah:

In the Valley of Elah (Warner Bros.), written and directed by Paul Haggis, wants to be the Deer Hunter or Coming Home of the Iraq war, even if it veers at times into the tawdry territory of The General’s Daughter. Because of two superb central performances from Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron—and because Haggis’ heavy-handed message about the war happens to be true—the film is vividly painful to watch. At times, it’s a police procedural, a lurid thriller, and a passionate anti-war manifesto. Needless to say, that’s a tough combination to fit together.

I’ll say. Here’s David Poland on the film’s fate so far:

In the Valley of Elah is the sad story of the weekend, drawing fewer than 100 people per screening of the film on Friday.

Memo to Hollywood:

one, two, three, four,

we don’t want your fucking war

I love Milos Forman. His best movies are breathtaking. And even his worst movies are a hundred times more interesting and entertaining than most of what passes for highbrow mainstream entertainment. That said, Goya’s Ghosts is a mess—didactic where it should be satirical, melodramatic where it should be dramatic, stingy where it should be generous. As I said: a big mess.

That’s a damn shame, because, as Cinematical notes, it’s got some really stirring moments on a subject of hot contemporary debate—

Javier Bardem embodies one of Forman’s favorite fool-archetypes here: the true believer who is double-blind in thinking that the system he loves loves him back and that his earnestness in upholding it will produce rewards down the road. Bardem plays Brother Lorenzo, a Catholic priest who argues passionately for the grisly torture of the Inquisition in the opening scene, as the other priests sit quietly and imbibe his passionate commitment to the cause instead of daring to debate any of his points. It’s only later, when an unlikely turn of events sees him having dinner in the home of a man suspected of being a “Judiazier” that he’s asked to give any kind of thoughtful defense to his beliefs. ‘How could there be any value in a confession given under extreme physical torture?,’ Brother Lorenzo is asked, to which he replies that God grants the innocent the ability to withstand the torture and not utter false statements, but allows the guilty to perjure themselves. A few minutes later, he’s singing a completely different tune.

And Time magazine puts it in perspective:

[T]he entire film is less an exercise in historicism (though the portrait of the painter is accurate enough, as is the depiction of historical events, the story is pure fiction) than it is an elaborate analogy with our own times. This is quite understandable — Forman lost his parents to the Nazi concentration camps and came of age in Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia, and he has long needed to address the issues that shaped his life in a movie. Goya’s Ghosts is not entirely successful in doing so. …

[I]t has about it a kind of messy passion that is quite fascinating. It obviously means a great deal to its auteur, and that passion grants the film a felt and wayward life not usually granted historical epics.

That judgment applies particularly to Bardem’s performance as the loathsome Lorenzo. In the beginning, as he volunteers to lead the newly revived Inquisition, he is all soft-voiced reason. He is polite to the point of obsequiousness, not only to his church superiors, but even to the people he torments. Creepy, well-met and utterly corrupt, and when the French invade he simply disappears — only to reappear later as, of all things, a Voltairian rationalist, married, with children, and growing rich as an enforcer for Spain’s occupiers. He is, in his way, also a perfect modernist, blowing blandly and prosperously with the winds of change. As long as there is power and status to be had, he does not care who he must serve to obtain those boons. By analogy, Goya’s Ghosts has much to say, largely through this character, about such current issues as torture, terror and the fact that some people can profit hugely by making up ideological justifications for the anarchy they loose upon the world.

The reviewier, Phil Bray, concludes his political takeaway thus:

If you find yourself thinking about, say, Abu Ghraib while you’re watching this movie, that’s OK with Forman and Carriere.

That’s true, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough, because the film isn’t about politics. It’s about human nature—about how even the apolitical among us (and most people are apoliticial) are ensnared, and potentially enslaved, by the pathologically political people who live among us: the seekers of power and privilege and those who serve and/or cozy up to them … regardless of their political persuasion. Right or left, it doesn’t matter. Potentially, power corrupts us all.

In the movie, “There shall be no liberty for the enemies of liberty!” is the cry of the secular republicans against those who would stand in the way of their revolution: monarchs, cardinals, clerks, lawyers, bankers, newspapermen, merchants—everyone with a stake in the system.

Goya’s Ghosts is a failed film, but its 75-year-old director has got something to say, if you’ve got the time and the curiosity to listen.

 Everybody in this small town in Romania wanted to be a revolutionary … after the tyrant Ceausescu fell—not before.

This is a great little film. All you New Yorkers can check it out at the Film Forum (through June 19).

Once upon a time, I was a huge Scorsese fan, so I don’t know why I was so surprised that The Departed turned out to be an excellent film. But I was.

By far the biggest surprise was Leo ***, who has grown into his talent. Nice.

Also: this was Matt Damon’s best performance since Good Will Hunting, which is a sentimental fave of mine. Damon and Affleck, born and raised in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, were familiar types for me—from the press reports, their families seemed like counterparts to my New York cohort. It was fun to watch them get famous. I saw Good Will Hunting at the Angelica, and the audience was full of Damon’s friends. They yelled: “Matty! Matty! Matty!” It was down home and sweet: local boys who made good.

The Miramax magic is no more, however. The Weinstein brothers no longer have their finger on the pulse of America. Or, rather, the America they once catered to (Clinton’s America, and Tina Brown’s New York-L.A. corridor of sizzle and buzz) is gone and buried. Tina herself says that London is now the center of the universe and the capital of cool. New York, she claims, hasn’t gotten its mojo back since 9/11.

Ya think?

——–

In his Titanic days, when he was trying to escape the media mob and work off some steam, Leo used to hang around in the West Village with his friend Vince looking for pickup basketball games. I know because my son played basketball with them.

Leo was very low-key, my unimpressed 17-year-old son said. When my daughter heard about it, she burst into tears. She was 12. That’s okay. I read that even Susan Sarandon turned into a slobbering mom on behalf of her daughter, Eva, who was also in love with Leo back then. (Our daughters took gymnastics together, when they were three, at the Sutton gym. Susan was quite the stage mom. Tim was a doll. Boy, that seems like it was a long time ago … )

Sci fi author Neal Stephenson explains the mystery behind the poor critical reception for the movie 300: the critics don’t get today’s audience.

Though it opened on a relatively small number of screens, “300” made money far beyond the most optimistic projections of its producers, racking up the third-best opening weekend ever for an R-rated movie.

The critics, however, were mostly hostile, and frequently venomous. Many reviews made the same points:

• “300” is not sufficiently ironic. It takes its themes (duty, loyalty, sacrifice, the preservation of Western civilization against enormous odds) too seriously to, well, be taken seriously.

• “300” is campy — meaning that many things about it can be read as sexual double entendres — yet the filmmakers don’t show sufficient awareness of this.

• All of the good guys are white people and many of the bad guys are brown. (How this could have been avoided in a film about Spartans versus Persians is never explained; the distinctly non-Greek viewers at my showing seemed to have no trouble placing themselves in the sandals of ancient Spartans.)

But such criticisms aren’t really worth arguing with, because they are not serious in the first place — and that is their whole point. Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it.

This movie—with no stars, no locations, and a massive dose of violence took in another $31 million at the box office this weekend, for a total of more than $125 million in 10 days.

I have a feeling that, soon enough, Hollywood will go to war. If the suits haven’t woken up to the fact of the actual war we’re involved in, they will have by now woken up to the … dough.

I think Neal Gabler declared the end of movie magic too soon (though I have a lot more to say about his piece. Another time.).

The reportedly gory movie 300, which has been proclaimed as overly “martial” by the usual suspects—i.e., most critics, who were turned off by the subject matter: brave Spartans fighting off a Persian horde way back when—took in $70 milliion at the box office. On a regular old weekend in March.

300 was anything but spartan, reaping an estimated $70 million on around 4,800 screens at 3,103 theaters in its opening weekend. That eclipses all previous ancient battle pictures by a wide margin, including Troy and Gladiator, and ranks fifth among comic book adaptations.

Nikki Finke reports on who was in the audience—pretty much everyone:

So who was seeing 300? I’m told that the audience was about 60/40 male-female and about evenly split younger/older, with playability exceeding the norms on all quadrants in terms of both ‘definite recommends’ and the top two recommend boxes.

As for me, I haven’t even had a chance to see The Lives of Others yet. Too damn busy.

Blogging will be sporadic this week, too.

Has there ever been a worse show? We’re only half an hour in and I am bored to death.
I am so over the movies.

The Society for Ethnomusicology has come out strongly against the use of music as torture and specifically calls out the government.

The Society for Ethnomusicology condemns the use of torture in any form. … The SEM is committed to the ethical uses of music to further human understanding and to uphold the highest standards of human rights. The Society is equally committed to drawing critical attention to the abuse of such standards through the unethical uses of music to harm individuals and the societies in which they live. The U.S. government and its military and diplomatic agencies has used music as an instrument of abuse since 2001, particularly through the implementation of programs of torture in both covert and overt detention centers as part of the war on terror.

I hate the idea of torture. Really. But can’t help it. The first thing I thought of was Billy Wilder’s outrageous 1961 capitalists vs. commies satire One, Two, Three, which was shot on location in Berlin as the Wall was being erected. (In the 1920s, Wilder spent his youth in Berlin, and fled after the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.)

In the movie, Horst Buchholz plays a dedicated East German who falls in love with a spoiled American girl and is tormented by his political convictions. But that’s not all. He’s tortured too—in a memorable scene in which “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” blares over and over again in his ears.

Remember: this is a comedy. Billy Wilder-style, of course, which means it is savage. (I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again. I’m wild about Billy. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to go back to my Wilder festival.)

Someone posted the torture scene on YouTube, but it was taken down. I saved the cached version of the thumbnail:

(You are viewing the published version of this document.)

Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini
02:24

Billy Wilder’s ONE, TWO, THREE - the East German secret police torture Otto (Horst Buchholz) by forcing him to listen to “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”

Tags:

Billy Wilder Movie Comedy Torture ’60s Pop

Added: 2 months ago in Category: Comedy
From: giebergoldfarb3
Views: 1,150

3 ratings

Where are the promising filmmakers of the 1990s? Sharon Waxman wants to know:

Mr. Aronofsky, the director of “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream,” released his latest film, “The Fountain,” in November after working on it for seven years. It quickly sank from sight. Mr. Russell, widely admired for his original mix of comedy and seriousness in “Flirting With Disaster” and “Three Kings,” has dropped from view since his disastrous “I Heart Huckabees” in 2004, and is not close to making a new film. The delightfully absurdist Mr. Jonze, of “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” fame, has spent the last several years making music videos and finally settled on a feature film based on the Maurice Sendak book “Where the Wild Things Are,” planned for release in 2008.

It’s not zero productivity, perhaps, but it is a far cry from the deluge of creative output from young directors in the 1970s, when Hal Ashby fired off seven movies in nine years, including “Shampoo” in 1975, “Bound for Glory” in 1976 and “Coming Home” in 1978. Robert Altman made six films in five years, including “MASH” and “Brewster McCloud” in 1970 and “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” in 1971. And Francis Ford Coppola had a similarly fertile run, with “The Godfather” in 1972, along with “The Conversation” and “The Godfather: Part II” in 1974.

Well, that’s an unfair comparison. But still, she’s got a point. And she floats some possible explanations:

Mr. di Bonaventura suggested that this diminished output had something to do with the extreme scrutiny the filmmakers’ every step receives. … Some mentioned money in discussing the drought: successful writer-directors can make huge fees rewriting other people’s scripts, …

But it is possible that the self-indulgent American culture that shaped these filmmakers and made them so successful in the 1990s has left them ill equipped to take on the weightier questions facing society in the new millennium.

That last one gets my vote.

On the other hand, Manohla Dargis, also writing in the New York Times—in the “Weekend in Review,” which is supposed to give her movie critics’ words more weight or something—writes about the kinds of films (fictional and documentary) that are taking on big quesions and finds them—or us, the audience—wanting.

Most American films about Africa mean well, at least those without Bruce Willis, and even openly commercial studio fare like “Blood Diamond” wears its bleeding, thudding heart on its sleeve. But what, exactly, are we meant to do with all their images, I wonder? Like “The Constant Gardener” and “Catch a Fire,” two other thrillers set in Africa, “Blood Diamond” was designed to make money, not instigate change. Watching Leonardo DiCaprio share the screen with genuine handless black Africans or Ralph Fiennes’s gardener learn a lesson in postcolonial realpolitik while I munch my popcorn doesn’t rouse me to action; it stirs horror, pity, sometimes repulsion, sentiments that linger uneasily until the action starts up again to sweep away that empathy with another explosion, gunfight or rousing chase.

It is exhausting having your conscience pricked so regularly. It may also be counterproductive to the stated aims of the people who make these films. It’s an article of faith that social-issue movies are worthwhile, important, even brave, as people in Hollywood like to insist. But it is naïve to think that these films, including a fair share of the documentaries, are being made on behalf of Africa and its people; they are made for us. They provide us a night’s entertainment and perhaps, for a couple of hours, they may make us think outside the multiplex box. They serve as balm for our media-saturated, fatigued hearts and minds. Like one of those Gap (Product) RED cashmere sweaters, they temporarily wrap us in their fuzzy goodness, shielding us from the chilling world outside.

Well, yes. If they were good films, perhaps we’d feel differently. But good films are rare. And as Cameron Crowe says, there’s no feeling of community:

Hollywood veterans cite the absence of the kind of creative ferment that coursed through the Hollywood of the 1970s, the challenge that one cinematic triumph posed to other artists.

At least that’s what Cameron Crowe, the writer and director of “Jerry Maguire,” “Almost Famous” and the more recent critical disaster “Elizabethtown” suggested, as he was leaving a recent tribute to his hero, Billy Wilder.

“There’s no community,” he said. “We need to encourage one another.” He cited the rivalry between the Beach Boys and the Beatles in the ’60s, when one group’s innovative album spurred the other to do it one better. “It’s like ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper’s,’ ” Mr. Crowe said. “It becomes a cycle that feeds on itself. One great work leads to another.”

It’s all part of a post-9/11 and post-Internet-bubble-bursting and post-Clinton cultural correction. Or, alternatively, we could just blame it on Bush. But I think it’s the former.

(update: added a missing link)

What do you do when you’re humiliated by international support (to the tune of $7 billion) for your political opposition?

Well, if you’re Hezbollah’s would-be rock star Hassan Nasrallah, you soften your tone, admit to mistakes, cop to your own international support, clarify your opponents’ failures and your own heroism. Oh yes, and you project your 40-foot-high image on the wall of a government building so that no Lebanese need miss your TV interview.

Hizbullah supporters gathered near the government house watch on a giant screen Nasrallah speaking during an interview on Hizbullah’s Al-Manar television, in Beirut, Lebanon.
Photo: AP

Not exactly Cinema Paradiso, eh?

 

 

 

 

 

I want to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press. And I just want to say that this movie was a life-changing experience. I saw some amazing, beautiful, invigorating parts of America. But I saw some dark parts of America, an ugly side of America. A side of America that rarely sees the light of day.

I refer, of course, to the anus and testicles of my co-star, Ken Davitian. (Aud laughs as the camera finds Davitian shrugging and raising a wine glass to Cohen.) Ken, when I was in that scene and I stared down and saw your two wrinkled golden globes on my chin, I thought to myself, ‘I better win a bloody award for this.’

And then when my 300-pound co-star decided to sit on my face and squeeze the oxygen from my lungs, I was faced with a choice: Death or to breathe in the air that had been trapped in a small pocket between his buttocks for 30 years.

Kenneth, if it was not for that rancid bubble, I would not be here today.

(Music starts as Cohen holds up Globe gesturing to Davitian. He starts rushing through the rest.)

Thank you to Larry Charles, thank you to Jay Roach, thank you to Isla Fisher, my fiancee. Thank you to Peter Baynham, Anthony Hines and Dan Mazer; thank you to Ari Emanuel; Matt Labov; Erran Baron Cohen, my brother who did the music; and to Jason Alper and (unintelligible due to swelling music). And thank you to every American who has not sued me so far. Thank you.”

No. Thank you, Sacha Baron Cohen.