What…another Dark Knight reviewer doing cartwheels over Heath Ledger‘s Joker? Is this getting tedious or just repetitive? We get it already. Brilliant demonic channeling. The guy’s going to win a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Warner Bros. will almost certainly run a full-on Oscar campaign on his behalf. Now can we talk about something else, please? I feel like I’m getting beaten over the head here.

Ledger “presents himself as The Joker in a role that defines a career,” writes Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet. “It is unimaginable it would come to the point that a film based on a comic-book character could actually have such an impact on one person. On a generation. Ledger’s decent into what is, and has become, The Joker makes Jack Nicholson’s interpretation look like nothing more than a simple clown.
“‘Wait’ll they get a load of me,’ Jack said 19 years ago. Wait until you get a load of Heath!
“The Dark Knight presents a character so destructive and without a care for those landing in his path of decimation that you are left to your own devices. Love him. Hate him. Hate to love him or love to hate him, director Christopher Nolan has guided an actor into a dark realm not often realized. The Joker finds his place alongside villains that go by the name of Hannibal, Scarface and John Doe himself. A nameless, unrecognizable entity you won’t be willing to or able to admit is Ledger until the credits roll.”

“Curmudgeonly, cantankerous, cigar-chomping Hellboy is a cross between a ’40s noir detective and a burning fireplace,” writes Variety‘s John Anderson, “but he’s also cool enough to make Hellboy II: The Golden Army the hipster’s hit of the summer. It’s certainly a more deliberately (and successfully) funny movie, thanks largely to Ron Perlman, who returns with the rest of the cast, and without whom an onscreen Hellboy would have been almost unthinkable.

“Yes, Catholic imagery has always run rampant through helmer Guillermo del Toro‘s movies, including Pan’s Labyrinth, which he made in between the two Hellboy entries, but he’s really an evangelist of fanboy excess: Given the right push by Universal, he’ll be making fantasy-horror acolytes out of the heretofore unconverted.”
“In a previous life, del Toro might have been a maker of clocks — clocks inhabited by gargoyles instead of cuckoos, and which exploded on the hour. But there’s a precision to the visual ornateness of Hellboy II that exceeds even that of its predecessor.”

Eight or nine days ago the New York Observer‘s Sarah Vilkomerson wrote one of the funniest observation-and-reporting articles I’ve read in ages called “You’ve Got Mail (You Never Open).” And I only happened upon it last night over dinner. Funny because it’s true, because it’s my life — because the urban under-45 onliners, one gathers, have become a nation of mail denialists.

“I don’t have a fundamental fear or anxiety that makes me avoid the mail,” Mark McMaster, a 29-year-old senior account manager at Google, tells Vilkomerson. “It just seems relatively uninteresting, and probably most importantly, doesn’t arrive when it’s relevant. I don’t want a bill to tell me it’s time now to pay by showing up at my door. I just got home from work, asshole!
“At Google, we wax philosophical about `the cloud,’ a metaphor for all the data that’s kept in a server farm that could be in Oklahoma or Beijing but you can instantly access from any computer or phone or BlackBerry that’s connected to the internet. I put as much of my life in the cloud as possible.”
As Vilkomerson summarizes, “The internet, with its neat-o technology, has made it so that, for the most part, not opening your mail doesn’t really matter.”
Update: It’s one thing for people to not use mail that much or as much — that’s been a growing reality for eight or ten years or whatever. Or for the usefulness of the U.S. postal service to matter less and less in terms of personal letters, bills, credit card come-ons and junk mail. But a growing subculture of web-savvy urban dwellers falling into the habit of not even opening their mail — that’s significant. And so far, no one reading this site seems to be appreciating this sea-change, or even chuckling about it. Flatliners. Asleep at the wheel.

A convincing report of stepped-up secret covert actions against Iran by the Bushies, as written by New Yorker‘s Seymour Hersh in a piece called “Preparing the Battlefield.” The neocons have only a few months left to try and hurt I’m-a-dinner-jacket. It’s a kind of prelude or warm-up, some believe, to the big Israeli bombing of Iran that will happen (if it happens) sometime after the Democratic and Republican conventions. One imagines that $4.40 a gallon will seem like a fond memory if and when such hostilities commence.

The obvious movie analogy to the “my middle name is Hussein!” movement (good citizens symbolically showing support for Barack Obama and flipping off the righties who’ve tried to use the exotic Middle-Eastern sound of this name to stir fear among rural dumb-asses) is, of course, the “I’m Spartacus” scene in Spartacus (1960). Moving then, moving today.

To emphasize the analogy I tried to find a good-quality letterboxed clip of this third-act moment in Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick‘s film. Then I was distracted by this beautiful Pepsi ad that ran on the Oscar show four or five years ago and forgot all about the Obama aspect. I love the moment when the Roman centurion offering to return the lunch-bag Pepsi shrugs and says “I’m Spartacus,” and then pops open the can and downs it.

Websites started kicking “nuke the fridge” around roughly three weeks ago, and Newsweek‘s Periscope columnist Sarah Ball has just had a go at it. It refers to Harrison Ford hiding in that refrigerator in Indy 4 to escape the effects of a nuclear blast, etc. The main reason the term hasn’t seemed all that vital to get into from this end is that it doesn’t seem all that different or distinct from “jump the shark.”

Sean Connery’s fridge moment in Thunderball.

The latter, of course, refers to suddenly being old news — having lost one’s place (position, toe-hold, whatever) in the media-culture firmament — due to some sudden, what-just-happened? tectonic shift in the state of things. The former is a cinematic term referring to some ludicrous, over-the-top piece of business that destroys the audience’s faith or sense of belief in the reality of an iconic character. Different, but not too far apart.
On top of which nuke-fridging has been around for since the mid ’60s, when a wave of pop absurdist movies (spy spoofs like Casino Royale, anarchic comedies like What’s New Pussycat?, social upheaval farces like The President’s Analyst) used deliberate and repeated nuke-fridgings as the basis of their comic attitudes.
On top of which the very first superhero fridge-nuke moment happened 42 and 1/2 years ago, so it’s not exactly a fresh concept.
The date was December 17, 1965, when Thunderball, the fourth James Bond film, opened in the U.S. Fans who’d relished Sean Connery‘s brawny machismo in Dr. No and From Russia With Love, and who had felt moderately brought down by the de-balling emphasis on high-tech gadgetry in Goldfinger, completely gave up the faith when Connery strapped on a flying backpack device during Thunderball‘s pre-credit sequence, and went whooosssshhhh….over the buildings!

The problem wasn’t just the jet pack, although that was pretty bad in and of itself. The problem was Connery wearing that idiotic crash helmet. Ian Fleming‘s James Bond wasn’t a scrupulous rule-follower. He was a bit reckless at times, liked to do things his own way. Wearing a crash helmet while flying a couple of hundred feet in the air might have been the prudent thing to do, but it looked wimpy and ridiculous and — let’s be blunt — clownish. It was the end of an era.

It’s been a long while — two or three months, at least — since I’ve seen Alex Gibney‘s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson (Magnolia/HDNet, 7.4), which I mostly enjoyed and fully respected. David Carr‘s story about it in the 6.29 N.Y. Times has jarred my memory somewhat. And yet mainly I’m reminded that my primary impression of Thompson’s life can be summed up in four words: “Wow, what a waste.”

Hunter S. Thompson sometime in the mid to late ’60s, to judge by his hairline.

The “wow” part — Thompson’s productive years from the mid ’60s to mid ’70s — is what 90% of Gibney’s film is about. The largely non-productive downturn phase — the last 28 or so years of his life from ’77 until his suicide in ’05 — occupies, no exaggeration, maybe 10 or 12 minutes of screen time, if that. It’s understood, of course, that ruination from booze and drugs is not interesting because there’s absolutely nothing say about it except “and then, lacking the courage to kill himself quickly, he decided to slowly commit suicide on a snort-by-snort, bottle-by-bottle basis.”
And yet Carr’s sentence about Thompson’s coke-and-tequila poisoning carries a certain poignancy: “By the time most of America knew who Thompson was, he was pretty much washed up, having gradually been overtaken by his own legend, with steady assists from the bottle, the drugs and his coven of enablers.” Gibney’s handling of it, by contrast, is a little on the hurried and perfunctory side.
The only big problem I had with Gonzo is the pop-tunes soundtrack. Gibney has used cut after cut of the music that was big in the late ’60s to mid ’70s, but listening to these songs, trust me, will drive you up the wall.
What prevented Gibney, an extremely smart guy, from realizing that it’s virtually impossible for a person watching a doc about the social upheavals of the ’60s to listen the Youngbloods singing “Let’s Get Together” without wanting to fire a bullet into his or her right temple? There is no other reaction to that song at this stage of the game. You hear those fucking lyrics — “C’mon, people now, smile on your brother, try to love one another right now” — and you want to die as soon as possible.
I felt this over and over as Don MacLean‘s “American Pie,” Jimi Hendrix‘s “Hey Joe” and Janis Joplin‘s “Piece of My Heart” and I don’t how many other ’60s standards were heard. These songs, of course, are part of the 245-song repertoire that every classic-rock radio station has been playing for the last 35 years and torturing everyone to death with. Has Gibney ever heard of B sides? Of ’60s bands and tracks that don’t make people want to jump off the top of 30-story office buildings? Apparently not.

I wish I could help it, but every time a woman (or a group of women) registers astonishment at something another woman has said by saying “oh…my…god!” I feel hugely repelled. In real life, in a TV series, in a film…anywhere. Chalk on a blackboard times ten. So I’m naturally concerned about a moment in the Mamma Mia trailer in which Amanda Seyfried tells her friends she has three possible dads coming to her wedding and she doesn’t know which is the actual sire, and…you know the rest. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Fingers crossed. It opens on 7.18.

That carefully lit silhouette shot of the old flower woman outside of Stanley and Stella’s place gets me every time. That and Alex North‘s haunting, half-eerie music, especially towards the end when “maybe you wouldn’t be so bad to interfere with” comes up.

Three thoughts came to mind on Thursday when I read various accounts about some passionate mucky-muck involving CBS News Baghdad correspondent Lara Logan, a married US State Department contractor named Joe Burkett and CNN international correspondent Michael Ware.

The first two thoughts were (a) this is private material and nobody’s business so why don’t they leave her alone? and (b) passion is as passion does, and is no big deal.
Logan has been a feisty and outspoken reporter about the war and probably has a serious fire going in the furnace whatever the subject or concern. On top of which there’s always something strangely erotic in the air when there’s a lot of random death and danger floating about, and hence a sense of impermanence. The more ghastly or threatening the surroundings, the more likely it is that like-minded professionals of a certain age are going to get down in the heat of the moment. Remember the “terror fucking” phenomenon that happened in Manhattan in the days following 9/11?
The third thought is that Logan’s story since she’s been on the Baghdad beat would make for a good filmed drama. The considerate way to go about it would be to use the facts (romantic Baghdad triangle, emotions at a fever pitch, divorce proceeding, bullets whizzing past lovers’ heads, IEDs exploding) but with made-up names and perhaps a slightly fictionalized story line just to blur things up. Roger Donaldson‘s Under Fire, which used actual events that happened in Nicaragua, had some of this element, as I recall.
That said, it seemed disingenuous that Brian Stelter‘s 6.26 N.Y. Times story reported that CBS News has just decided to base Logan in Washington, D.C., with a new title — chief foreign affairs correspondent — rather than in London, without at least briefly acknowledging the Baghdad mess. I mean, c’mon…it happened and some of the facts made the tabloids and now she’s getting reassigned. People’s private business is their private business, but once the snake is out of the box you can’t pretend it’s not there.

We’re a few days away from a full six months having passed in the year 2008, and so it’s time to briefly assess the best, worst and in-betweens. It’s understood I’ll be leaving a few off that I should (and will) be adding to this or that category once the outraged responses come in, but these are the films that popped out when I sorted them all through. I’ve only mentioned 63 films here. There have been at least nine, I believe, that deserve to be called creme de la creme, but maybe I’m forgetting one or two.
Best So Far (in order of excellence): A tie between WALL*E and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (the latter technically being an ’07 film even though it opened on January 23), The Bank Job, The Visitor, Shine a Light, Iron Man, Young @ Heart, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Son of Rambow. (9)
Decent, Solid, Respectable: In Bruges, Stop-Loss, The Band’s Visit, Cassandra’s Dream, Cloverfield, War, Inc., The Incredible Hulk, Taxi to the Dark Side, Chicago 10, The Counterfeiters, Then She Found Me, Standard Operating Procedure, Battle for Haditha, Speed Racer (more for its ambitious and mostly unique visual design than for what it actually was), Surfwise, Encounters at the End of the World, OSS117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, The Edge of Heaven, Mongol, Irina Palm. (20)
Best Ridiculous-Machismo Action Movie of the year: Rambo. (1)
Flawed Film, Genuinely Creepy Vibe, Righteous Theme: The Happening (1)
Best Stupid-Ass Adam Sandler Attitude Comedy In Years: You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. (1)
Loathsome but Respectable: Funny Games. (1)
Not Bad but Also Bothersome, Irritating: The Tracey Fragments, The Babysitters. (I need to add to this list.) (2)
Passable but Mostly Negligible (in order of preference): Be Kind Rewind, Semi-Pro, The Other Boleyn Girl, Leatherheads, Nim’s Island, Forgetting Sarah Marshall (galumph aesthetic, penis shots), 21, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (fastest fading movie of the year, death-button upon second viewing), Kung Fu Panda, Get Smart, Street Kings. (11)
Worst So Far (in order of awfulness): Wanted, Sex and the City, 10,000 B.C., Vantage Point, Mad Money, 88 Minutes, My Blueberry Nights, The Hottie and the Nottie, Chapter 27, The Love Guru, Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns, Deception, Drilllbit Taylor, College Road Trip, Smart People, What Happens in Vegas, Reprise. (17)
Didn’t See ‘Em: City of Men, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, Married Life, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Redbelt, The Fall, The Foot Fist Way.