Month: January 2011

I’m secure enough to admit that before this morning I’d never laid eyes on Thomas Hart Benton‘s “Hollywood,” which he painted in 1937. I’m fairly ignorant about the history of 20th Century art in this country. I’m a peon, really. The only thing I’ve read that’s really stayed in my head is Tom Wolfe‘s The Painted Word, a brilliant dissection of the modern art movement from the 1920s to roughly 1974.

From Benton’s Wiki page: “Benton taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1926 to 1935 and at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935 to 1941. His most famous student, Jackson Pollock, whom he mentored in the Art Students League, would go on to found the Abstract Expressionist movement — wildly different from Benton’s own style.

“Pollock often said that Benton’s traditional teachings gave him something to rebel against. However, art scholars have recognized the Pollock’s organizational principles continued to follow Benton’s teachings even after his move away from realism, with forms composed around a central vertical pole with each form counterbalanced by an equal and opposite form.

“Benton’s students in New York and Kansas City included many painters who would make significant contributions to American art. Benton also taught the photographer and filmmaker Dennis Hopper briefly at the Kansas City Art Institute.

“In 1941, Benton was dismissed from the Art Institute after calling the typical art museum ‘a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait’ with further disparaging references to, as he claimed, the excessive influence of homosexuals in the art world.”

There’s nothing “oh, wow”-ish about Criterion’s Broadcast News Bluray (1.25), and that’s perfectly fine. It makes James L. Brooks‘ 1987 classic look like it did in the best L.A. or N.Y. screening room prior to opening, or like a sharply focused, slightly grainy, scratch-free print. Needless to say it’s a far better rendering than the 1999 Fox Home Video DVD.

There’s just one problem. The effing firmware on my Sony Bluray player hasn’t been updated since I bought the damn thing in the fall of ’08, and so I can’t watch the Broadcast News Bluray at home. The Criterion public relations guy just told me about the firmware issue. So it’s not a Criterion problem. It’s me — a Jeffrey Wells-isn’t-smart-enough-to-figure-out-how-to-download-firmware thing.

I’ve received two Broadcast News Blurays from the Criterion guy, and both denied me access beyond the opening menu. No feature, no extras, no nothing. But when I popped one of the discs into a friend’s just-purchased Sony Bluray player, the feature and the extras came right on.

My Bluray player plays everything else, mind. Every damn Bluray and DVD that I own. Except for two others, that is. Blurays of Terminator 2 and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 that I’ve bought within the last six months also won’t play.

Firmware!

I have to admit I’m a little ticked off. When I bought the Bluray player two years ago the salesman didn’t say, “Now, don’t be alarmed but there’s a chance that a couple of years down the road certain Blurays won’t play unless you have the latest firmware update.” If he had I would have said, “Bluray players have wifi capabilities? They can go online and download stuff? News to me.”

Here it is two years later and it’s still an exotic concept. This is where my dumb-guy orientation really kicks in. I have great wifi in my apartment, but I’m not aware of any Bluray player having the capability to download diddly squat. Bluray manufacturer whippersnappers! I guess “update the firmware” is a euphemism for “guess who needs to shell out $150 for a new player?”

Im Sang-soo‘s The Housemaid (IFC Films, 1.21) is a remake of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 Korean original. The consensus about the newbie at last May’s Cannes Film Festival seemed to be that the older film is better. I’ve never seen the original so that left me out. Ki-young’s film is said to be more Bunuelian with the housemaid acting in a devious and manipulative fashion. She’s much more the victim in the version I saw.

In my 5.13 review I described Sang-soo’s version as “a sexual hothouse melodrama made in the spirit of Claude Chabrol and Brian DePalma. By this I mean that The Housemaid (a) is about dark currents in a perverse well-to-do family and (b) has been made with a highly polished, primary-color sensibility that underlines every plot point and mood pocket, and ends on a note of flamboyance if not insanity that’s more about the director being in love with how it looks than anything else.

“I wasn’t entirely floored, just as I’ve never been that wild about DePalma’s more excessive exercises. Some of what happens in the second half is broad and lurid, and then the stops are really pulled out in the second-to-last scene. But Sang-soo Im (The President’s Last Bang) is a formidable pro, and the cast — especially Do-yeon Jeon, the female lead — give assured high-style performances. That’s the brush this film was made with, and you can either roll with this type of thing or not. I was down with it for the most part. I didn’t fight it, I mean.”

I’m sure that a DVD version of the 1960 original is available somewhere, but I don’t see it on Amazon.

The new Housemaid opens on Friday, 1.21 in NYC. It expands nationwide beginning 1.28. It will also be available on demand beginning 1.26 via Comcast, Cox, Cablevision, Time Warner, Bright House, Charter and Insight.

Another King’s Speech-supporting Guru has thrown in the towel and gone over to the Social Network side. I’m speaking of In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, who’s been predicting for weeks that Tom Hooper‘s historical relationship drama would take the Best Picture Oscar. What changed his mind? Guild nominations, I’m supposing. Not just the DGA, WGA and PGA noms, but those from the ADG (Art Director’s Guild) and particularly the CAS (Cinema Audio Society), which recently nominated TSN but not The King’s Speech.

With The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tim Appelo and EW‘s Anthony Breznican abstaining, the six King’s Speech GoG holdouts are HitFix‘s Gregg Ellwood, the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, EW‘s Dave Karger, L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen, MCN’s David Poland and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson.

I’ll say again that the final game-over indicators will be when and if Karger and Thompson cast their lots with TSN. Poland, the Lee J. Cobb of King’s Speech supporters, will never go over. He has too much invested in alternate scenarios (i.e., True Grit winning Best Picture, “The Social Network still isn’t going to win Best Picture from the Academy unless they are starting a media branch,” etc.). He has to be the Great Sage who knew the secret workings of the community all along and stuck to his guns despite what many thought would happen, or he has to go down to the sea in ships.

It’s conceivable, of course, that The King’s Speech could win the Best Picture Oscar and in so doing become this year’s Shakespeare in Love. If this happens a moderate impact-grenade sensation (similar to the response to Crash‘s 2006 win) will be felt throughout Los Angeles and New York, and in certain pockets of America there will be a great hue and cry. (People in other pockets, I realize, won’t react at all, or will say “why didn’t they give it to Black Swan?” or whatever.) Another result of a King’s Speech win is that people like myself and Sasha Stone and other Social Network pallies will have to fold our tents and run for the hills and hide out like Butch Cassidy‘s Hole-in-the-Wall gang until things blow over. Because the King’s Speech contingent will be roasting our asses from dawn to sundown for days on end.

Creating and maintaining an elaborate deception is always stressful. And since this is the main activity in Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma (Universal, 1.14), sitting through it makes you feel whipped and shagged. It’s a bear. And it’s not especially funny. Okay, some at my screening were chortling from time to time, but at no time did anyone let go with quaking convulsive laughter. Which obviously suggests something about the engine under the hood.

It suggests that the spectacle of Vince Vaughn continually lying to the two most important people in his life — i.e., his best friend and business partner (Steve James) and his live-in girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) whom he’s about to propose to — is not only unfunny but repulsive.

Allen Loeb‘s Dilemma script, which I’ve written about twice (earlier this month and last February ), is about Vaughn getting all sweaty and anxious about whether or not to share some devastating news with James about his wife (Winona Ryder ) boning some tattooed, not-terribly-bright stud muffin (Channing Tatum). Should Vaughn risk upsetting James, who’s not exactly a model of emotional stability and is under pressure to deliver a prototype of an electric muscle car, or forget about butting in and let sleeping dogs lie? He splits himself between the latter and former path, but mainly he lies. Mainly out of fear. (Which is to say an absence of character.) And then he decides to stonewall Connelly besides. Spread it around.

Like I said, a few were guffawing here and there. But why? What exactly is so funny about lying to people you care about? Laughter is usually about recognition and release of suppressed feeling, so those who laughed during my screening were presumably saying to themselves, “Hah! That’s the way it is, all right. And Vaughn is so good at exposing our sad foibles!” Which is basically a way of saying “that’s me, all right…lying my ass off and digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole and risk losing the trust of people I care about the most. I do this all the time….hilarious!”

I know all about the classic character arc known as the Three D’s — desire, deception, discovery. This is the basic underpinning of two classic Billy Wilder films, Some Like It Hot (’59) and The Apartment (’60). The main character wants something, decides that deception is necessary in order to attain it, and then realizes he/she can no longer lie due some fundamental recognition of the limits of his/her own moral behavior. It’s a classic and proven formula, but Howard and Loeb’s application doesn’t work. Because, I believe, Vaughn’s deception is truly pathetic and alienating. Only an asswipe would behave this way.

11 months ago I wrote that there’s only one thing to do in such a situation. Vaughn’s loyalty would be to James, not Ryder, and so one way or the other he’d have to share what he suspects. No right guy would have to think about this. He’d start out by stressing to his pal that he doesn’t really ‘know’ anything but that he’s seen something disturbing and that maybe something’s up and maybe not. And then he’d suggest that the friend might want to hire a shamus to learn the facts or whatever. But come what may you must share what you’ve seen and/or suspect.

I also had credibility issues with the idea of two whale-sized guys hooked up with ladies who look like they eat nothing but apples and tangerines. Yes, this happens in real life, but relatively rarely. The birds-of-a-feather syndrome. And make no mistake — Vaughn these days looks like like Keith Olbermann after a three-month cheeseburger and milk-shake diet, and James looks like he’s on the verge of a heart attack. I’m trying to show restraint in my argument, but my experience is that only the wealthiest and funniest fat men on the planet have super-slim girlfriends or wives, and even when this happens the wife-girlfriend will usually gain weight as a bonding/sympathy gesture. (Guys do this also when their wives get pregnant.)

So yes, I realize this is a hang-up of mine, but I kept saying “fat, fat, fat, fat, fat…look at those guys!” all through it. James is apparently a lost cause but what’s Vaughn’s issue? He was rail thin when he starred in Swingers 14 years ago, and now he looks like a wrestler.

“Wednesday night’s event seemed less about Mr. Obama’s presidency and more about the state of this country,” N.Y. Times reporter Adam Nagourney wrote a couple of hours ago. “His calls during the campaign for an end to brutal partisanship appeared to carry little weight these past two years in Washington. There is no way to know if his similar call on Wednesday, under tragic circumstances, will have more traction.”

“If I had one wish

One dream I knew would come true

I’d want to speak to all the people of the world

I’d get up there, I’d get up there on that platform

First I’d sing a song or two you know I would

Then I’ll tell you what I’d do

I’d talk to the people and I’d say

‘It’s a rough rough world, it’s a tough tough world

Well, you know

And things don’t always, things don’t always go the way we plan

But there’s one thing, one thing we all have in common

And it’s something everyone can understand

All over the world sing along

“‘I just want you to hurt like I do

I just want you to hurt like I do

I just want you to hurt like I do

Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do'”

Last week Scott Feinberg caught up with Greenberg star (as well as No Strings Attached, Arthur and Damsels in Distress costar/star/whatever) Greta Gerwig, whom I spoke to last month in a small Lower East Side restaurant. Feinberg did a real “interview”; I conducted more of a loose-shoe whatever-happens chit-chat pass-the-salt “hey, I like Phil Spector too” type of encounter.

Lynn Hirschberg‘s exclusive W story about David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has several photos of Rooney Mara in Lisbeth Salander mode. Clearly Fincher wanted his Lisbeth to look significantly different than Noomi Rapace‘s version. So he went with short, severe-looking bangs and bleached eyebrows. A little bit of an early ’80s Klaus Nomi look.

Honestly? I’m not entirely sure how I feel about these differences. I liked Rapace’s look, but I recognize that it would have seemed weird if Fincher had given Rooney an exact copycat appearance. Maybe I just need some time to get used to it. But right now I’m getting a little tiny bit of an Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein vibe. Just a slight one. Not the Lanchester look, obviously, but the otherness.

HE is taking exception to the Directors Guild of America having included Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington‘s Restrepo among its 2010 nominees, but not Amir Bar Lev‘s far superior The Tillman Story. The DGA also nominated Last Train Home, Inside Job, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Waiting for Superman.

I wrote the following about Restrepo last June in a piece called “Afghanistan Bananastan“:

“The kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism’s sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts — ‘get it done,’ ‘fill up more sandbags,’ ‘ours not to reason why’ and so on. In so doing it misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating. Is there any other way to describe a decision to keep viewers ignorant about any broader considerations — anything factual or looming in a political/tactical/situational sense — that might impact the fate of the subjects, or their mission?”

In a video message released this morning, the most despicable woman in this country’s political realm said that “journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn.” A believer in American “exceptionalism,” Palin knows perfectly well that she’s been inciting the reactionary ire of under-educated, lower-income rurals for over two years, and has done plenty to feed the hate fires.

“Caution is not part of Ms. Palin’s political repertory,” writes N.Y. Times blogger Michael D. Shear. “She starts the video with the standard expressions of condolences to the victims of the shootings. But her demeanor quickly shifts into a more aggressive posture.

“The video is laden with references that will appeal to her potential supporters. In addition to talking about the country’s ‘foundational freedoms’ and the intentions of the nation’s founders, and referring to Reagan, she twice calls the United States ‘exceptional,’ a dig at Mr. Obama, whom conservatives accuse of not believing in the concept of’ ‘American exceptionalism’ because of his answer to a reporter’s question early in his presidency.

“‘Public discourse and debate isn’t a sign of crisis, but of our enduring strength,’ she says. “It is part of why America is exceptional.'”

“Whether it was her intention or not today, she is feeding the beast of what has really been a pretty nasty ideological finger-pointing fight that we have been watching on Twitter and the Internet and on some forms of cable television,” NBC News’ Chuck Todd reportedly said on MSNBC.

“There was some sympathy for Palin over being tied to shooting, [and] she chose to go inflammatory,” The Daily Beast‘s Howard Kurtz wrote via Twitter.

The Green Hornet (Sony, 1.14) is a blend of superhero sludge and a buddy action comedy. Except the action has no juice — you’ve seen the same duke-out, shoot-out, car-chase, demolition-derby stuff hundreds of times — and it’s not the least bit funny, largely because it won’t stop hitting you with the same old routines. What you get is unimaginative, routinely-staged action. The appalling use of decades-old cliches. Boring and/or tediously-drawn characters. Painful GenX-wanker dialogue that feels half-trite and half-improvised. And not even faint amusement.

It’s a co-creation of actor-producer-screenwriter Seth Rogen, co-writer Evan Goldberg, director Michel Gondry, and everyone else who tried to make this into a film, going back to the ’90s.

This is one of those big movies that make you feel as if you’re being poisoned. You sit in your seat feeling like Alexander Litvinenko succumbing to radioactive polonium-210. This is what corporate entertainment has become in the 21st Century — a kind of death-trip experience. Most of the time you sit and think about “the end” and what that’ll be like, and the rest of the time you sit up and pay attention to the dialogue in order to follow the plot.

What a shock that Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Human Nature, The Science of Sleep), a signature director with a recognizable aesthetic, decided to whore out with this thing.

The irony, of course, is that The Green Hornet is as old as fish fossils. The basic bones — irresponsible newspaper heir Britt Reid (Rogen) and trusted chauffeur Kato (Jay Chou) becoming an urban crime-fighting team — were originally created for a 1930s radio serial. So it’s the last classic superhero tale to reach the big screen, it took forever to get made, and it’s basically a big 3D shit sandwich.

Some of the geek critics are calling it “one of the better superhero flicks of recent years,” “sly, silly, thrilling,” and “a surprisingly funny and ingeniously clever take,” etc. If you want to believe that, go right ahead.

I went into this thing believing that Rogen is a cool actor-writer with good humor instincts, and I came out of it wondering what’s happened to the poor guy, and how could he have been part of something like this? I know that poor Christoph Waltz, last year’s Best Supporting Actor winner for Inglourious Basterds, has diminished his rep by playing a drug-dealing bad guy in the usual “My God, I’m so evil I can’t help but joke about it” deadpan-shrug sort of way. (Why does the winning of Oscars always seem to lead to stupid paycheck roles, and the eventual ruining of careers when the actor/actress accepts too many of them?) I don’t know why Cameron Diaz is in this thing, but she is, playing a peripheral sex-tease character.

One of the reasons The Green Hornet cost $130 million is that “the production modified 29 Chrysler Imperials from model years 1964 to 1966 to portray the Green Hornet’s luxurious supercar, the Black Beauty,” according to a May 2010 N.Y. Times story. They couldn’t have made do with ten?

Chou’s Kato is an unquestionably cooler dude than Rogen’s Reid. Even in his stoner modes Rogen has always played reasonably bright fellows, but he seems borderline retarded in this outing. Reid has trouble thinking or saying anything above the level of “this coffee sucks.” On top of which he’s a spoiled, immature blowhard. He’s genuinely annoying. But Chou is cool and contained and the brains of the partnership. I liked him, and didn’t care for big-mouth Rogen dismissing or putting him down. I muttered, “You should take orders from Kato, bitch!”

I mentioned yesterday that I cooked up a metaphor in my theatre seat about Chou representing the more dynamic and forward-moving Asian economies of 2010 and Rogen representing the smug, flatulent and coasting-on-past-glories U.S. economy.

I’ve said time and again that outside of the Chris Nolan realm, the comic-book superhero genre is a plague and a pox upon our cinematic house. And I’ve explained the reasons until blue in the face. It’s gone way beyond the milking-to-death of the empowerment-through-transformation fantasy (lonely, morose compromised guy finds potency through costumed crime-fighting alter-ego). You might as well call the constant re-packaging and re-selling of this sad little dream by corporate-funded movie studios a malevolent Orwellian scheme. You have no power, suckers, and we want it kept that way so here’s some more heroin to distract you from the facts.

To me there’s nothing sadder than the eagerness of the ComicCon culture to pay to see the same thing (okay, with slight variations in terms of identities, costumes, villains, CG and the usual crash-boom-bang) in film after film, year after year. They have no shame, and there’s no talking to them about this. Their comic-book and gamer appetites, instilled during their late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s childhoods, are like serum in their souls. To me the relentlessness of superhero films has become a kind of mass poison.

In his review of this Michel Gondry film, Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny writes that it “seems like filmgoers don’t mind [the oppressive sameness] because they continually go see [these] films without major complaint.” Exactly. This is why I’ve floated the idea of F14 Tomcats strafing the ComicCon faithful outside the San Diego Convention Center. They have their fantasies; I have mine.