“Certainly most of those who see The Hurt Locker become enthusiastic advocates of the film,” notes Roger Ebert, “but apparently those younger viewers who have seen it haven’t had much of an influence on their peers. While the success of the film continues to grow as it steadily increases its number of theaters, the majority of younger filmgoers are missing this boat.

“Why is that? They don’t care about reviews, perhaps. They also resist a choice that is not in step with their peer group. Having joined the crowd at “Transformers,” they’re making their plans to see G. I. Joe. Some may have heard about The Hurt Locker but simply lack the nerve to suggest a movie choice that involves a departure from groupthink.

“Of course there are countless teenagers who seek and value good films. I hear from them all the time in the comment threads on this blog. They’re [also] frank about their contemporaries. If they express a nonconformist taste, they’re looked at as outsiders, weirdoes, nerds. Their dates have no interest in making unconventional movie choices. They’re looked at strangely if they express no desire to see that weekend’s box office blockbuster.

“Even some of their teachers, they write, are unfriendly to them ‘always bringing up movies nobody has ever heard of.” If you hang around on these threads, you know the readers I’m referring to, including ‘A Kid,’ who writes so well that if she hadn’t revealed her age (just turned 13) we would have taken her for a literate, articulate adult.

“If I mention the cliché ‘the dumbing-down of America,’ it’s only because there’s no way around it. And this dumbing-down seems more pronounced among younger Americans. It has nothing to do with higher educational or income levels. It proceeds from a lack of curiosity and, in many cases, a criminally useless system of primary and secondary education. Until a few decades ago, almost all high school graduates could read a daily newspaper. The issue today is not whether they read a daily paper, but whether they can.

“Some weeks ago I went so far as to suggest the gap between some critics and some moviegoers may be because the critics are more ‘evolved.’ Man, did the wrath hit the fan. I was clearly an elitist snob. But think about it. Wouldn’t you expect a critic to be more highly evolved in taste than a fanboy zealot? And what about ‘A Fan?’ Should she be shunned by her peers for having her own ideas?

“And what about another one of my readers, the 15-year-old who says he has viewed dozens of my ‘Great Movies?’ If you’re his friend, isn’t it worth wondering what he’s stumbled onto? And what about your date this Friday night? If he or she only wants to see the movie ‘everyone’ is going to see, is that person going to be much good for conversation?”

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a low-rent cafe on Melrose across from Fairfax High School. I was writing on the laptop and reading the L.A. Weekly when all of a sudden a bunch of kids came in. School had let out, I gathered. I began to feel quietly appalled very quickly. They were huge roly-poly apes, these guys. A lower life form, breathing heavily and wolfing down donuts and slurping down drinks, all wearing cutoffs and sandals, some of them sitting down on the counter seats with their dumb-ass expressions and stupid-ass butch haircuts and shaved heads and huge Abominable Snowman feet with absurdly large and unmanicured toes. All I wanted to do was leave. Which I did.

“I’m the bad guy for saying it’s a stupid country,” Bill Maher said during last Friday’s New Rules rant, “yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does.

“Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.

“Not here. Nearly half of Americans don’t know that states have two senators and more than half can’t name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only 30% got their wife’s name right on the first try.

“Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they’re not stupid. They’re interplanetary mavericks. A third of Republicans believe Barack Obama is not a citizen, and a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words ‘Bush’ and ‘knowledge.'”

There’s a letter describing the American yahoo brigade on Andrew Sullivan‘s Daily Dish. Here’s a portion:

“They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land’s original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn’t even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.

“These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town’s borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up until Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming. They make up much more of America then you would care to think.”

It’s been widely reported that Aaron Sorkin‘s screenplay of The Social Network (a.k.a., “the Facebook movie”) is going to be made into a film with David Fincher directing and Scott Rudin producing with I-don’t-know-who playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, founding CFO Eduardo Saverin and Napster founder Sean Parker.

I’m mentioning this because I realized last night there’s a certain resonance that feeds into the story’s underlying theme about greed and corruption — i.e., monster-sized paydays and huge potential pouring out of a dynamic business that ruins friendships and turns nice college-age obsessives into ruthless sharks. What hit me is that folks who know their movies may be comparing The Social Network (when it comes out in late 2010 or the following year) to John Huston‘s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (’48), regarded as perhaps the best greed-destroys flm ever made.

And that’s it, nothing more than that. Just saying. The only other thing is Jett’s muttered suspicion that The Social Network should have been come out sooner — ’06 or ’07, say — when Facebook was the essential/dynamic site to know, visit and connect with people through. Now it’s Twitter, of course. Not that Facebook is over (far from it) but it had a certain electric vitality two or three years ago that isn’t quite happening in the same way now.

Taking Woodstock director Ang Lee has said he chose the story of struggling motel operator Eliot Tiber (played by Demetri Martin) as a window into the Woodstock Music Festival phenomenon. Except Tiber’s story isn’t very interesting. It seems a little curious and beside the point, and Imelda Staunton‘s bizarre portrayal of Tiber’s paranoid Jewish-gunboat mom almost tips the film into the realm of grand guignol.

N.Y. Times reporter Bernard Collier; 1969 Woodstock Music Festival & Art Fair

What would have been a lot more dramatic and fascinating in a cultural-echo sort of way is the story of Barnard Collier, the N.Y. Times reporter who pitched his editors on the festival and was turned down, so he attended the festival sans assignment. He then persuaded the editors to run coverage after the crowds and traffic jams became news, and then fought with them tooth-and-nail about the importance of focusing on the event’s scope and cultural significance (along with the well-behaved-kids aspect) instead of emphasizing the rain/mud, sanitation, lack-of-food and drug-use issues.

Part of Collier’s story is recounted in a 8.7 N.Y. Times Arts Beat story by Joshua Brustein story called “Woodstock in Newsprint.”

“Festivalgoers have been known to say Woodstock changed their lives,” Brustein writes. “Some academics and journalism experts have noted that the way the media approached popular culture also shifted significantly with the coverage of the three-day festival.

Collier [has] “described a tension among his editors first about whether it should even cover Woodstock, then about what the story was. His original pitch to write about the festival was rejected. But his brothers, who worked in the music industry, told him that it was worth attending, so he went anyway. After the size of the crowds forced highway closings, he called his editors again, who relented.

“When he started his reporting, Mr. Collier quickly realized that it was not only the Times that had initially ignored the event. He walked into a trailer that the organizers had set up for the press and found it completely vacant. He wrote and contributed to several articles over the next few days, including the one with the explainer on recreational drug use.

“In retrospect it’s fascinating,” said Mr. Collier in an interview earlier this week. “Now everyone knows that stuff. Back then nobody knew.”

I wrote about Collier’s story last April, menioning in particular a paragraph from the festival’s Wikipedia page about the anti-youth-culture attitude of the N.Y. Times editors of the day, and their determination to paint the festival in negative terrms.

“As the only reporter at Woodstock for the first 36 hours or so, Barnard Collier of the New York Times was almost continually pressed by his editors in New York to make the story about the immense traffic jams, the less-than-sanitary conditions, the rampant drug use, the lack of ‘proper policing’, and the presumed dangerousness of so many young people congregating.

“Collier recalls: ‘Every major Times editor up to and including executive editor James Reston insisted that the tenor of the story must be a social catastrophe in the making. It was difficult to persuade them that the relative lack of serious mischief and the fascinating cooperation, caring and politeness among so many people was the significant point.

“‘I had to resort to refusing to write the story unless it reflected to a great extent my on-the-scene conviction that ‘peace’ and ‘love’ was the actual emphasis, not the preconceived opinions of Manhattan-bound editors.

“‘After many acrimonious telephone exchanges, the editors agreed to publish the story as I saw it, and although the nuts-and-bolts matters of gridlock and minor lawbreaking were put close to the lead of the stories, the real flavor of the gathering was permitted to get across. After the first day’s Times story appeared on page 1, the event was widely recognized for the amazing and beautiful accident it was.'”

On one level Larry Cohen‘s Q (a.k.a., The Winged Serpent) is a ludicrous crap-level B movie about a prehistoric flying dinosaur wreaking havoc upon Manhattan from a perch atop the Chrysler building. On another level it’s one of the wittiest genre goofs ever made — a kind of loose hipster comedy that almost lampoons the monster-threat aspect — with an almost mystifying performance by Michael Moriarty as the ultimate doofus-dweeb protagonist.

There’s a legendary bit when Moriarty, a part-time scat-singing performer, spazzes out as he watches the serpent attack an unsympathetic victim, nearly frothing at the mouth as he yells “eat ‘um! eat ‘um!” (The way Moriarty yells this over and over is especially delicious, like he’s some hyper retarded child.) David Carradine plays it dryer and more low-key, but delivers hoots of his own.

This trailer is hilarious but it doesn’t begin to suggest the subversive sophistication in Q. By emphasizing the obvious and the ludicrous it makes it seem like one of the stupidest monster movies of all time. The crucial difference when you watch the film is that Cohen clearly knows this, and has decided to play with the absurdity the way a cat plays with a captured mouse while letting Moriarty pull out the geek stops.

It’s an almost certain fact that Q‘s producer Sam Arkoff was completely unaware of what Cohen was up to, and that he didn’t care.

Sample dialogue (all of it spoken by Moriarty): (a) “Maybe his head got loose and fell off”, (b) “I want a Nixon-type pardon!”, (c) “Eat ’em! Eat ’em! Crunch crunch!” (d) “Stick it in your brain. Your tiny little brain!”

I’ve just come out of a 4 pm public screening of Amy Rice and Alicia Sams‘ By The People: The Election of Barack Obama at Manhattan’s Sunshine Cinemas, and I’m sorry to say it’s a fairly bloodless portrait of one of the most fascinating, breathtaking, sometimes ugly, occasionally transcendent, up-and-down racial-tinderbox elections in our nation’s history. It’s up-close and somewhat intimate and sorta kinda dull at times. Not novacaine dull but glide-along, yeah-yeah dull.

You’d never really know what a heart-pumping ride Obama’s two-year campaign for the White House was by watching this nicely assembled but excessively mild-mannered doc.

Rice and Sams were given extraordinary close-up access to candidate Obama and his innermost circle (David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, etc.) as well as Michelle, Sasha and Malia. The co-directors caught some good stuff along the way (Obama tear-streaking when speaking about his recently-deceased grandmother, a ten year-old campaign worker patiently dealing with a contentious voter over the phone, etc.) but it almost seems as if Rice and Sams agreed to let Axelrod and Gibbs co-edit the film with an aim to de-balling and up-spinning the final version as much as possible.

This seems especially apparent given the overly-diplomatic and toothless portrait of Hillary Clinton‘s campaign. Her current position as President Obama’s Secretary of State obviously means it would have been very politically awkward for a documentary to bring up her frequently ugly, race-baiting campaign tactics and so — I don’t mean to sound over-cynical and pat-minded but how else am I to process this? — Rice and Sams have given her a near-total pass.

There’s no mention of Hilary’s incessantly playing rhetorical race cards, talking about how working white people support her, etc. There’s no footage or even a mention of Bill Clinton, and therefore no mention of his post-South Carolina primary remark that Obama’s victory in that state was somehow comparable to Jesse Jackson ‘s win there in the mid ’80s. There’s no mention of Hillary’s cynical campaign speech about how Obama “will bring us together and the heavens will part” speech, which she delivered, as I recall, during the Ohio-and-Texas primary campaign. There’s no mention of Hillary’s made-up Bosnia story about dodging bullets when she visited that country in the mid ’90s. There’s no mention of Samantha Power‘s “Hillary is a monster” comment. There’s no mention of Hillary’s bizarre refusal to concede when she should have (i.e., after Obama had his electoral-vote triumph sewn up) and how she had to be stern-talked into doing so by Congressional and Senatorial colleagues.

It’s even more bizarre that the racial resistance factor among white voters — surely the central hurdle of Obama’s campaign — is only faintly acknowledged. We’re shown a clip of a couple of younger Bubbas stating that Obama’s ancestry is a problem, but that’s just about it in terms of Rice and Sams catching the backwater attitudes that were brought up by reporters and the political talk-show crowd nearly every damn day during the primaries and the general election,

The Reverend Wright issue is raised (how could it not be?) along with Obama’s historic Philadelphia speech about racial relations. But there’s no mention of Michelle taking heat for saying that the positive response to her husband’s campaign was cause for her feeling proud of the U.S for the first time in a long time. There’s no mention of that idiotic terrorist fist bump flap. No YouTube clip of that West Virginia cracker lady on the back of that motorcycle expressing cultural shock at the sound of Obama’s name. There’s no mention whatsover of the fear of the Bradley Effect, a now-discounted concern that white voters might change their minds about voting for a black candidate in the privacy of the voting booth due to latent racism. And Obama’s decision to finally cut all ties with Reverend Wright is completely ignored also.

And there’s very little mention of the general campaign against John McCain and Sarah Palin. It accounts for maybe ten minutes out of the film, which runs somewhere close to two hours. (I should have timed it but didn’t.) No right-wing stirring of the racial pot, no mention of McCain’s “The One” ad (and no clip of David Gergen explaining that the racial coding of that ad was clear to anyone who grew up in the South), no expressions of bone-dumb ignorance (“He’s…I think he’s an Arab”) and/or racial hatred at McCain and Palin rallies (“Kill him!”),

There’s some good B-roll footage of Obama playing basketball with friends, but the best photo-op basketball moment of the entire campaign — i.e., the moment when Obama made a near-perfect shot from outside the penalty circle in front of an audience of troops in Iraq — is missing. It leads you to suspect/presume that Rice and Sams didn’t cover last summer’s Middle East/European tour, and to ask why.

In sum, For The People comes pretty close to being a political chick flick. Which is to say it emphasizes emotionality and intimacy at the expense of the fierce melodrama and primal intensity that were fundamental aspects of the story. I could be mean and call it a puff piece and….you know something? It’s not being mean to say that because it more or less is that.

Because of these factors By The People is not likely to be seen as a contender for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar. Gentleness and a lack of edge don’t tend to stir people. You can’t be in bed with your subject when you’re portraying him/her in some journalistic form. I’m not saying that Rice and Sams were in fact emotionally entwined with the Obama campaign, but the doc makes it seem as if they were. And that’s a no-no. You have to step back and disengage and be merciless, if necessary.

There are several little things in the film that are pleasing or revealing in this or that minor way. But the fact is that most of the film is not focused on Obama himself as much as his campaign staff, and much of this footage feels like B roll. The narrative emphasis in the doc is somewhat akin to the kind of backstory you might pass along to your grandmother as you show her your family photo album and explain this and that. It’s too kindly and considerate and smoothed over..

It’s been pointed out by a friend of Rice and Sams that “the filmmakers made the film they wanted to make…it’s called By The People. And they captured the emotion of the campaign.” On this last point I respectfully disagree.

John Flynn‘s The Outfit, which screened last night at Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives, played well to a full house. It’s the best kind of ’70s relic — a modest and unpretentious character piece that happens to be about guns, crime and payback. But the AFA’s projection was godawful. The projection lamp was so dim that half the images, which Flynn composed with low light and indoor shadows, were pure murk.

The trailer for Oliver Parker‘s Dorian Gray, slated to play next month’s Toronto Film Festival, indicates that the film may be mildly reprehensible. Oscar Wilde‘s tale of moral decrepitude among 19th Century London elite has apparently been coarsened into a semi-blatant sex-and-horror pic in hopes of reaching young horror hormonals. Wilde’s rotted corpse, lying inside a stone tomb at Pere Lachaise, is waiting for TIFF reactions before deciding what to do.

Today is the day to see By The People: The Election of Barack Obama at the Sunshine. Amy Rice and Alicia Sims’ doc opened yesterday without hoopla to qualify for the Best Feature Doc Oscar. The official breakout happens on HBO in November.