I agree with all but one of the best shot films between ’98 and ’08 named in an American Cinematographerpoll. I concur with the celebrating of Amelie, Children of Men, Saving Private Ryan, There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, The Dark Knight, Road to Perdition, City of God and American Beauty…but I say “no” to Jeff Cronenweth‘s cinematography of David Fincher‘s Fight Club .
Sorry but I’ve always despised the somewhat murky, underlit look of that film — as if the negative had been soaked in a vat of cappucino mixed with guacamole and string beans. Throughout most of the film Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter‘s skin looks greenish-gray. The last time I watched it (on Bluray) it pissed me off and made me feel depressed all over again.
Replace Fight Club with Roger Deakins‘ capturing of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford or John Toland‘s work on The Thin Red Line or Harris Savides‘ shooting of Zodiac and we’re good to go.
I saw David Slade‘s Eclipse (Summit, 6.30) at last night”s Manhattan all-media screening. Whoo, boy. The first wave of Eclipse commenters who said it’s better than New Moon didn’t lie — it is. Somewhat. But it’s still not good enough to matter. It’s a slow, boring, unimaginative, tediously written slog and is not — repeat, not — better than the first Twilight film.
It’s not “organic” in the slightest, as Indiewire‘s Anne Thompsonrecently said. It’s about a bunch of young actors with bad wigs and conspicuous vampire makeup standing around trying to look captivating and speaking stiff soap-opera dialogue and going through the paces because they’ve been well paid to do so. It’s Fake-itude Incarnate. It doesn’t groove or flow or put the hook in even slightly. Okay, it does here and there. I’ll give it that.
Some young women in the rear of the balcony went “whoo-hoo!” when Taylor Lautner and/or Robert Pattinson did or said something sexy with Kristen Stewart. I didn’t understand why because this movie is in and out, at best. And mostly out.
I have to protect you, Bella. Here…hop on my motorcycle. I can protect you better than he can. We can deal with the The Newborns. All you werewolves need to meet us in the forest so we can train for the coming battle. I’m gonna die and become a vampire. Mom? Don’t count too much on having grandkids. Feel my warm heart beating inside my naked muscle-toned chest. Edward isn’t even alive. My feelings are hard to express but this is kinda how I’m feeling…I think. Isn’t that what finally matters? What we feel, who we love, and…like, you know, how much money this movie makes?
Why does Bella even hang with Jacob, knowing as she does that it just tortures Edward? What is this ‘torn between two lovers’ shit when she doesn’t really want Jacob in the first place? Why am I polluting my intellect by even thinking about this stuff?
I’ve had it with the faux-creepy milieu, those forests, Jacob’s torso, those werewolves, Edward’s glistening skin and red eyes, Bella’s anxious expressions and her dad’s idiotic urgings that she hang out with Jacob instead of Edward, and the whole teen angst vibe. Do these kids know how bad this dialoge sounds? Have they ever heard of Search for Tomorrow, General Hospital, The Secret Storm, etc.?
I sat next to a plump, big-haired Latina mom and her similarly proportioned daughter. As soon as they arrived and sat down the mom asked what her daughter wanted at the candy counter and said, “Okay, be right back.” She returned nine or ten minutes later with two family-sized Twizzlers, two medium-monster popcorns, two extra-large drinks and a hot dog. I tried not to listen to the sounds of their eating.
I think I’m done with war documentaries that make a point of not offering any sort of opinion about anything — no history or context, no political point of view, just “this is war, war is hell, taste it.” Well, I’m sick of that shit after seeing Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger‘s Restrepo, a bravely captured, technically first-rate documentary about a year under fire in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley, a.k.a., “the valley of death.”
There’s no question whatsover that this movie lies through omission about what’s really going on in Afghanistan in the broader, bigger-picture sense. I found myself becoming more and more angry about this after catching Restrepo two nights ago at the Walter Reade theatre, and especially after doing some homework.
Hetherington and Junger spent a little more than a year (May 2007 to July 2008) with several U.S. soldiers in that besieged neck of the woods. They focused mainly on the grunts’ hilltop camp called Restrepo (pronounced res-TREP-o and named for a medic in their unit who’d been killed). The film does a clean and competent job of portraying their endless firefights with Taliban forces and their community dealings with the locals, and it acquaints us with various members of the hilltop platoon — their faces, lives, impressions — in what seems like a frank and forthright manner.
Except 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?
Imagine a documentary about the day-to-day life of Steve Schmidt, John McCain‘s ’08 presidential campaign manager, that ignores how the campaign is going and instead focuses on Schmidt’s relationship with his family and his dentist and his kids’ homework and his visits to a local cafe and his dealings with the guy who mows the lawn once a week. What would you call that approach? Thorough? Honest?
Rest assured that if I was one of those Korangal troops I would ask a shit-load of questions about the general game plan, as in what the fuck are we doing there and how the hell do we ever get out? But nobody wants to go there, least of all Hetherington and Junger, and so Restrepo is just about cigarettes and weapons and wrestling matches and firefights and sandbags and a cow that got stuck in some barbed wire and had to be killed, and then had to be paid for in order to chill down the locals.
I’m of the view that the Afghanistan War is pure quicksand, and that we can’t help to prevail (i.e., defeat the Taliban or at least reduce them to insignificance) because we’re foreign invaders and sooner or later all invaders are out-lasted by the natives, and that natural organisms will infect and weaken them, and as a result they’ll eventually pack up and go home. Ask H.G. Wells or Ho Chi Minh.
We’re not stopping another 9/11 from happening by fighting there. We’re just fighting a series of skirmishes and offensives that will continue for years to come, perhaps even decades, and which can’t hope to lead to “victory.” It would be great if the Taliban could be finally defeated, sure, but it’s not going to happen and any military or intelligence person who claims otherwise is dreaming. The bottom line is that (a) we can’t win and (b) there’s no way out other than just quitting.
Quitting is un-American, you say? Shameful, unthinkable, cowardly? Well, two months ago U.S. forces up and quit the whole Korangal Valley offensive. That’s right — they shined it. The lives of 42 Americans who died fighting there over the last four years? Water under the bridge, U.S commanders decided. Better to cut bait than waste more lives.
(l.) Sebastian Junger, (r.) Tim Hetherington during filming.
In fact the general thinking (as expressed in this 4.16 N.Y. Times story) is that U.S. troops’ presence in the valley may have actually made matters worse by creating Taliban sympathies among once-neutral Korangalis.” Or so it says in the Times story as well as this Wikipedia summary.
This massive fact has been ignored by Restrepo — they could have easily added a tagline in the closing credits — and was not mentioned by Hetherington during the post-screening q & a.
I asked Hetherington if he could offer his civilian-observer, non-military perspective about whether he could foresee any circumstance that might allow U.S. commanders to decide, as they’ve done in the case of the Korangal Valley, that U.S. efforts to defeat the Taliban simply aren’t working and that it’s time to just pack it in. Hetherington got my drift, but he ignored it and blathered on about how the Afghanistan situation is different from Vietnam in the ’60s.
Hetherington has been a war photographer for years, and guys like him are basically action junkies — let’s face it. He seems almost invested in the Afghanistan conflict, perversely, because it provided him with a year’s worth of adrenaline rushes as well as the opportunity to create a noteworthy film and contribute great pics to Vanity Fair. In any case he’s apparently determined to follow the script set out by The Hurt Locker — i.e., our film isn’t preaching, not taking a stand, just showing how it is for the troops, etc.
(l.) Hetherington, Rachel Reid during Friday night’s q & a at Walter Reade theatre.
“What I’m asking,” I repeated, “is if there’s any way out of this conflict, or are we going to be there…you know, five or ten more years or indefinitely or what?” Rachel Reid, an Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch who was sitting next to Hetherington, said that U.S. allies were getting a little fidgety and that the U.S. economy was impacting the situation and other generic blah-blah stuff.
Restrepo doesn’t tell you what’s going on and Hetherington and Reid weren’t in the mood, so consider the following:
A 12.22.09 CNN story by Peter Bergen reported that “a December 22 briefing, prepared by the top U.S. intelligence official in Afghanistan and obtained by CNN, concludes that the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is increasingly effective.
“The briefing, which warns that the ‘situation is serious,’ was prepared by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn last month. His assessment is that the Taliban’s ‘organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding” and the group is capable of much greater frequency of attacks and varied locations of attacks.
“According to the unclassified briefing, the insurgency can now sustain itself indefinitely because of three factors: (a) The increased availability of bomb-making technology and material; (b) The Taliban’s access to two major funding streams, one from the opium trade and the other from overseas donations from Muslim countries, which reach the Taliban by courier or through a system of informal banks known as ‘hawalas’ that operate across much of the Islamic world; and (c) the Taliban’s continuing ability to recruit foot soldiers based on the perception that they ‘retain the religious high-ground,’ and factors such as poverty and tribal friction.
This morning N.Y. Times columnist Frank Richreminded that Gen. Stanley McChrystal “is calling the much-heralded test case for administration counterinsurgency policy — the de-Talibanization and stabilization of the Marja district — ‘a bleeding ulcer.’ And that, relatively speaking, is the good news from this war.”
“U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, sat gazing at maps of Marjah as a Marine battalion commander asked him for more time to oust Taliban fighters from a longtime stronghold in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province.
“‘You’ve got to be patient,’ Lt. Col. Brian Christmas told McChrystal. ‘We’ve only been here 90 days.’
“‘How many days do you think we have before we run out of support by the international community?’ McChrystal replied.
A charged silence settled in the stuffy, crowded chapel tent at the Marine base in the Marjah district.
“‘I can’t tell you, sir,’ the tall, towheaded, Fort Bragg, N.C., native finally answered.
“‘I’m telling you,’ McChrystal said. ‘We don’t have as many days as we’d like.'”
The differences between Jennifer Lawrence‘s tough teenaged Ozark girl in Winter’s Bone (Roadside, 6.11) and the scampy sweaty thing she’s projecting in her Esquire spread are considerable.
She’s playing strong, determined and unafraid in the film — you feel admiration for her almost immediately. What you mainly get from the Esquire shoot is that she’s tall and leggy and ambitious.
I’m getting 10 or 12 minutes with her tomorrow morning so we’ll see where that goes.
Her Winter’s Bone character is 17 and named Ree Dolly. Her goal in the pic is to find her no-good ayehole dad who put the family’s backwood home up for his bail bond and then skipped. If he stays gone Ree and her family will be living under the stars. The film is basically about Ree asking questions of several grungy Ozarkians, smokers all. They lie, threaten, stare her down, evade and dance around the truth, but she hangs in and won’t back off.
Winter’s Bone is straight, sturdy, “real.” But my primary thought as I left my viewing is that I’m glad I wasn’t born to poor folk in the Ozarks, and that I’d be accepting if not grateful if the Emperor of the Universe told me I’ll never visit this region ever again for the rest of my life.
In recognition of MGM Video’s upcoming Bluray release of Paul Verhoeven‘s Showgirls, I’m reposting an August 2007 piece about a very special screening of this legendary howler at Robert Evans‘ Beverly Hills home in the early fall of ’95:
“It happened in Evans’ legendary rear bungalow, which lies behind his egg-shaped pool in the backyard of his French chateau-styled place on Woodland Avenue. With Jack Nicholson of all people, as well as Bryan Singer, Chris McQuarrie, Tom DeSanto and two or three others. And with everyone hating it but sitting through the damn thing anyway because Nicholson had dropped by to see it and nobody wanted to mess with the moment.
“All that ended when Nicholson, who was sitting right under the projection window against the rear wall, stretched his arms and put his two hands right in front of the lamp. The hand-silhouette on top of Elizabeth Berkeley and her grinding costars conveyed his opinion well enough, and suddenly everyone felt at liberty to talk and groan and make cracks and leave for cigarette breaks.
“Nicholson and Singer ducked out at one point, and I joined them. Their chat was all about Nicholson wanting to bond with Singer — my presence was totally superfluous — but it was worth the faint humiliation.
“I was Evans’ journalist pal that year (or part of it, at least). I had written a big piece about Hollywood Republicans earlier that year for Los Angeles magazine, and Evans had been a very helpful source. As a favor I’d arranged for him to meet some just-emerging GenX filmmakers — Owen Wilson, Don Murphy, Jane Hamsher, et. al. — so that maybe, just maybe, he could possibly talk about making films with them down the road.
“Anyway, it was sometime in late September and Evans, myself, Singer, DeSanto and McQuarrie were having dinner in the back house, and Evans was doing a superb job of not asking the younger guys anything about themselves. He spoke only about his storied past, his lore, his legend. But the food was excellent and the vibe was cool and settled.
“Then out of the blue (or out of the black of night) a French door opened and Nicholson, wearing his trademark shades, popped his head in and announced to everyone without saying hello that ‘you guys should finish…don’t worry, don’t hurry or anything…we’ll just be in the house…take your time.’
“What? Singer, McQuarrie and DeSanto glanced at each other. Did that just happen? Evans told us that Nicholson was there to watch Showgirls, which they’d made arrangements for much earlier. He invited us stay and watch if we wanted. Nobody wanted to sit through Showgirls — the word was out on it — but missing out on Nicholson schmooze time was, of course, out of the question.
“There was some schmoozing after it ended. The general unspoken reaction, I sensed, was “well, that‘s over, thank God! I mean, imagine what it must feel like to pay to see this thing.” Nobody said this in so many words, of course.
A Cartoon Central rendering of Evans’ French-styled mansion. The Showgirls screening happened in the rear abode.
“McQuarrie, basking in the vibe, said something to Singer in shorthand that basically suggested that they’d clearly reached a certain plateau in their careers for something like this to happen, and wasn’t it cool? Again, the words weren’t spoken.
“I recall DeSanto (Apt Pupil, X-Men, X2, Transformers) introducing himself to Nicholson and the then-58-year-old star, who’d brought two women with him, saying, ‘And it’s very nice to meet you, Tom.’ Gesturing towards Girl #1, he then said to DeSanto, ‘And I’d like you to meet Cindy and…’ Lethal pause. Nicholson had forgotten the other woman’s name. He half-recovered by grinning and saying with his usual flourish, ‘Well, these are the girls!’ The woman he’d blanked on gave Nicholson a fuck-you look for the ages.
“We all said goodbye in the foyer of Evans’ main home. Nicholson’s mood was giddy, silly; he was laughing like a teenaged kid who’d just chugged two 16-ounce cans of beer and didn’t care about anything. I was thinking it must be fun to be able to pretty much follow whatever urge or mood comes to mind, knowing that you probably won’t be turned down or told ‘no’ as long as you use a little charm.”
If nothing else the LA Film Festival gives me an excuse to visit old friends and revisit old stomping grounds, so I was kind of looking forward to flying back for next month’s event, which happens from 6.17 to 6.27. But I’m not at all thrilled at the idea of seeing movies downtown, and today’s just-announced slate is underwhelming, to put it politely.
I saw Animal Kingdom, Cyrus and The Kids Are All Right at Sundance…very good, good and meh. I don’t care much about Despicable Me. I spit on Eclipse, the latest Twilight film. I haven’t seen Mahler, Waiting for Superman, The Couch or Revoluccion, but is it worth it fly out to LA, I’m asking myself, so I see them in some LA Live venue? I’ve never much liked downtown LA, although I worship Al’s Bar and Chinatown.
This is probably the classiest and most generally appealing one-sheet of the year so far, and it had better be that, given what it’s selling. Debra Granik‘s Winter’s Bone, which I caught at Sundance 2010, is a straight, earnest and well-honed backwoods tale…but occuring within a grim and scuzzy atmosphere. Joe Popcorn is going to take one look and say, “I work hard all week for insufficient pay at a place I don’t like, and then I’m supposed to watch this when I want to be entertained?”
Aside from Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a steel-backboned 17 year-old trying to fend for her family as he tries to locate her errant father, every setting and character in Winter’s Bone has that weathered, dog-eared Ozarkian quality. Everyone has bad teeth or grayish skin or ugly half-gray beards, and they’re all sucking on cigarettes and wearing grimy clothing. I sat there imagining what torture it would be to live my entire life with these toothless hee-haws, and how heroin addiction might seem like a pleasant thing under such circumstances. It’s a decently made film but not as compelling as Granik’s Down To The Bone. I knew I was watching a sturdy honest effort with good dialogue and always-believable performances, but it was all I could do to get through it.
Barry Levinson‘s You Don’t Know Jack, an HBO drama about the beliefs and travails of mercy-dispenser Jack Kevorkian, is easily Levinson’s best film since Wag The Dog — a straight-arrow, quietly powerful drama about a courageous if overly headstrong man of principle and compassion vs. the conservative let-them-suffer crowd.
You Don’t Know Jack star Al Pacino, Dr. Jack Kevorkian on the Zeigfeld red carpet before last night’s screening.
And as a somewhat mousey-voiced, gray-haired, bespectacled and bent-over Kevorkian, Al Pacino gives one of his best performances ever, particularly in terms of seeming to truly slip into another man’s skin and with remarkable restraint at that — a feat that feels almost revelatory for a guy who’s been known for decades for his florid chops and shouty line-readings.
Danny Huston also scores as attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who successfully represented Kevorkian in several of his court battles. An audacious legal swordsman and swaggerer in a long-hair wig, Huston seems to really revel in Feigel’s exceptional brainpower and combative spirit — he’s a kind of contact high in this sense.
You Don’t Know Jack (a great title) is a ballsy, no-frills film about a moral-political-cultural issue — whether or not severely afflicted people have the right to die with dignity, and at the time of their own choosing — that pretty much anyone with any life experience has strong feelings about, and which everyone should try to see when it airs on HBO starting on 4.24.
I was particularly moved by real-life video footage (apparently shot by Kevorkian) of a very young sufferer from Lou Gehrig’s Disease — a slender good-looking guy in his early 30s. He’s been explaining to Kevorkian why he wants to end it, and at one point his sister says that she supports him in his effort to be “free.” The young guy is so moved that he begins to weep, and then leans his head over and rests it on her shoulder. Anyone who watches this footage and then turns around and says that what Jack Kevorkian tried to do is fiendish or against God’s will has some serious blockage going on.
British journalist Tom Teodorczuk speaking to You Don’t Know Jack director Barry Levinson. (Co-star John Goodman in b.g.)
And yet despite my beliefs I feel emotionally conflicted about inducing death, no matter how compassionate the circumstances. This is hard to explain because I can’t quite figure why I think one way and feel another, but here goes.
I had a Siamese cat named Zak who was born in ’85 and died in ’00 (or was it ’01)? He passed from pancreatic cancer. He began crying one day for no apparent reason, and then a few weeks later he began to lie on the living-room rug, staring wide-eyed at the fibers. He stopped eating toward the end, prompting me to put Gerber’s baby food on his nose so he would at least lick it off. He was finished and we both knew it. I finally took him to TLC Animal Hospital in West Hollywood for the Big Sendoff. They gave him a sedative, and then something that stopped his heart — and I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stay in the room. I couldn’t deal with having taken his life despite the fact that I was relieving him from agony.
I know that it’s inhumane to force people to live past a certain morbid point. Whether or not that point has been reached can only be determined by the suffererer, but if they’re truly in agony and are begging to be allowed to slip away only a monster would insist on keeping them around. And yet I couldn’t face the euthenizing of my cat so what does that say about me?
That I’m a wuss, I suppose. That I don’t have the steel to look tough issues in the face. Because I find the idea of dying horrific under any circumstance. Because I agree with Woody Allen, to wit: “I don’t want to live on through my work. I want to live on by not dying.”
You Don’t Know Jack after-party at the Four Season restaurant on East 52nd Street — 4.14, 11:15 pm.
So I loved Chloe Moretz in Kick-Ass and the audacity of having an 11 year-old midget-sized girl murder dozens of bad guys with pistols and knives and swords, and I was also able to half-enjoy, at times, the suspended idiocy and self-referential absurdity that director Matthew Vaughn uses to explain away all the stuff that wouldn’t otherwise work and in fact would choke a horse.
Warning: Kick-Ass spoilers lie ahead. Spoilers, I mean, for those who haven’t watched the recent trailers and don’t know what the shot is and haven’t been to any comic-book action films over the last decade or so.
The problem for me is that hard-bodied, highly trained little girls like Moretz might be able to hurt or dodge or out-kick older heavier guys, but little girls are utterly incapable of whipping older, muscular, bigger-guys’ asses, and you can totally forget about these same whippersnappers wiping out several guys in one crazy-ass, stabbing, kick-boxing, balletic shoot-em-up and slice-and-dice. Even if you stretch physics like turkish taffy in an exaggerated fantasy realm, it’s completely ridiculous.
During the big finale Moretz’s Hit Girl becomes Neo in The Matrix. She wipes out 17 or 18 guys, if not more, and at one point dodges a bullet. (I think.) All comic-book action is lunacy, of course, but Kick-Ass takes things to a new extreme. It’s another exaggerated, self-mocking piece of ludicrous action pulp, only this time it takes you over the waterfalls. It’s not happening in a cyber-realm but a comic-book realm, which means that absolutely anything can happen and nothing matters. And yet in the minds of Vaughn and the geeks who are having kittens over this film, this is a cool way to go.
All they care about is the fact that Hit Girl rules. Which she does. I get that. I love Moretz in this thing. But we’ve come to a point in which the comic-book sensibility that allows her to run wild is ruining action movies. It’s been doing this for years, of course, but I was really fuming about this last night. “Where does this crap end?,” I was asking myself. “What’s next — a five-year-old action hero? How about a cat — not a cartoon cat Felix but an actual Siamese or Abyssinian or Tabby who shoots Glocks and beats the shit out of human hitmen and drug-dealers who are ten times his size and outweigh him by over 200 pounds? Why not?”
It’s gotten to the point that I’d like to arrest and incarcerate every last geek-pandering filmmaker and every last pudgy-bodied, ComicCon-attending comic-book fan and truck them all out to re-education camps in the desert and make them do calisthenics in the morning and swear off junk food and straighten their heads out about the real value of great action movies, and how their stupid allegiance to comic-book values is poisoning the well.
I’m sorry but Kick-Ass pushed me over the edge. I know I’m mostly alone on this. I understand that 94% of the mostly male, action-savoring audience is going to be more or less down with Kick-Ass and calling me clueless, etc. John Anderson, a very sharp critic and no slouch, was sitting in the front row of my screening and seemed to be half-chuckling and enjoying himself as the lights came up. I spoke after the screening to a respected critic for a well-known weekly, and even he was giving it a pass. I know it’s over. The temple walls are cracking. I realize that.
I’ve come to truly despise comic-book action flicks, and particularly the metastisizing comic-book sensibility in mainstream movies, for a reason. By this I mean the total disregard by comic-book filmmakers for setting up the rules and the reality system in which amazing things might happen within the world of a film. Just telling the audience “hey, it’s a comic thing” doesn’t cut it.
I am ready and willing to buy anything when I sit down for a movie. I will accept any bullshit premise you throw at me (even the idea of opening a small door, crawling through a mud tunnel, becoming John Malkovich for five minutes and ending up on the New Jersey Turnpike) as long as you allow me to buy it. Set it up for me…please! All I ask is that you pour the cement and bolt down the beams before making the film.
All the comic-book guys ever seem to say is “look, man…it’s cool to watch and it’s funny and has great CG…isn’t that enough?”
The current Comic-Con sensibility is primarily a product of (a) the Asian martial arts boom of the early ’90s, (b) the Quentin Tarantino hipster handbook (everything is smirky-ironic, all action is derivative and self-referential, violence is a style fetish, aping or referencing the sensibility of ’70s exploitation is a holy calling) and (c) the Robert Rodriguez B-movie, shameless-wallow sensibility in which macho action cliches are seen as eternally cool. Plus the influence of Marvel and Ang Lee‘s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the sad willingness of the faithful to cream in their pants for pretty much any super-hero of any kind.
All these influences have grown into an attitude and a sensibility that is working like cancer upon the action genre. For it’s not just comic book movies but all action flicks that are covered with this sauce.
Every year there are more and more comic-book/fantasy movies and directors and writers who are not only opposed to but actively doing their best to undermine the concept of action you can believe in. By this I mean action sequences (including physical combat/martial-arts moves) taking place in a realm that the filmmakers have carefully prepared and guided and persuaded you to accept as semi-trustable and “real” as far as it goes.
I’ll always be cool with smart metaphor actioners like The Matrix, but I’m worried that we might be moving into a world in which there will be very little allegiance or respect for the kind of violence that really hurts and bruises and is scary to face. A world in which guns fire randomly or accidentally (remember that bit in Out of Sight when the guy fell on the stairs and shot himself?). And has foot chases that involve fatigue and heavy breathing. And beatings that bear at least a slight resemblance to schoolyard or back-alley beatings that you might have observed as a kid in which guys don’t get clobbered so hard and so often that they’d be dead in reality, or at least maimed for life.
The vast majority of action films used to live by the realism creed. Now it’s pretty much the exception to the rule. Many if not most action films these days are committed to the willfully surreal if not absurd. They’re all angled towards aficionados of Asian sword-and-bullet ballet. We seem to be fast approaching a time in which the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix, Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire, Phillip Noyce‘s Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games, Wiliam Friedkin‘s The French Connection, Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker, Fernando Meirelles‘ City of God and Alfonso Cuaron‘s masterful Children of Men will be seen as icons of a bygone age.
Comic-book action filmmakers aren’t fit to shine Cuaron’s shoes. They aren’t fit to wipe up phlegm that he spits on the sidewalk when he has a cold. All they’re fit to do is follow the system that we have in place in which the director of the next comic-book movie feels obliged and is in fact eager to top the last director of the last comic book movie, but always without setting it up — they just do it, knowing that the ComicCon and South by Southwest faithful will lap it up and yell “Yeeaahhhh!”
A guy asked if I’m buying an iPad this weekend. Certainly not, I said. For the reasons listed last night/today by N.Y. Times tech correspondent David Pogue. Which I’ve pasted below. No camera, no mutitasking, no flash, no USB receptacles, etc.
The guy mentioned, however, that “under the glass of the units that are shipping this weekend is a hole built specifically for a camera to be fit into the current device. Between that and other postings on the rumor sites for camera tech jobs at Apple, there’s no question that there will be a camera built into the next version.
That’s fine, I told him, but I’m waiting for version 3.0, not 2.0. Nobody with a connected laptop and a 3G iPhone really needs this thing. Not until 2012, I’m thinking.
There are two iPad models — wifi-only and wifi plus 3G cellular service. The one that goes on sale this weekend is wifi-only, but the one with 3G data will start selling in about a month for an extra $130 a pop. If you get the wifi-only, there will be no “internet everywhere” ability that people have on their iPhones right now.
“The Apple iPad is basically a gigantic iPod Touch.
“It’s a half-inch-thick slab, all glass on top, aluminum on the back. Hardly any buttons at all — just a big Home button below the screen. It takes you to the Home screen full of apps, just as on an iPhone.
“One model gets online only in Wi-Fi hot spots ($500 to $700, for storage capacities from 16 to 64 gigabytes). The other model can get online either using Wi-Fi or, when you’re out and about, using AT&T’s cellular network; that feature adds $130 to each price.
“You operate the iPad by tapping and dragging on the glass with your fingers, just as on the iPhone. When the very glossy 9.7-inch screen is off, every fingerprint is grossly apparent.
“There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). The selection is puny (60,000 titles for now). You can’t read well in direct sunlight. At 1.5 pounds, the iPad gets heavy in your hand after awhile (the Kindle is 10 ounces). And you can’t read books from the Apple bookstore on any other machine — not even a Mac or iPhone.
“When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience; when the iPad is turned 90 degrees, the keyboard is just barely usable (because it’s bigger). A $70 keyboard dock will be available in April, but then you’re carting around two pieces.
“At least Apple had the decency to give the iPad a really fast processor. Things open fast, scroll fast, load fast. Surfing the Web is a heck of a lot better than on the tiny iPhone screen — first, because it’s so fast, and second, because you don’t have to do nearly as much zooming and panning.
“But as any Slashdot reader can tell you, the iPad can’t play Flash video. Apple has this thing against Flash, the Web’s most popular video format; says it’s buggy, it’s not secure and depletes the battery. Well, fine, but meanwhile, thousands of Web sites show up with empty white squares on the iPad — places where videos or animations are supposed to play.
“YouTube, Vimeo, TED.com, CBS.com and some other sites are converting their videos to iPad/iPhone/Touch-compatible formats. But all the news sites and game sites still use Flash. It will probably be years before the rest of the web’s videos become iPad-viewable.
“There’s no multitasking, either. It’s one app at a time, just like on the iPhone. Plus no U.S.B. jacks and no camera. Bye-bye, Skype video chats. You know Apple is just leaving stuff out for next year’s model.
“The bottom line is that you can get a laptop for much less money — with a full keyboard, DVD drive, U.S.B. jacks, camera-card slot, camera, the works. Besides: If you’ve already got a laptop and a smartphone, who’s going to carry around a third machine?”
To begin his New Yorkerreview of Leaves of Grass, David Denby has written a diagnosis of what he believes has been wrong with the choices made star-producer Edward Norton. Not a question of talent but judgment, he’s saying. And yet he’s basically saying “move it or lose it.”
“Edward Norton is a good actor and a busy man — a citizen who concerns himself with solar energy, affordable housing, the Maasai wilderness, peace in the Middle East, the High Line, the fate of the Mets’ outfield, and heaven knows what else,” he writes. “But he’s not quite a movie star, or the actor he could be.
“Early on, after a fast, Oscar-nominated start as an altar boy accused of murdering a priest in Primal Fear (1996), Norton played cunning lowlifes in tough little pictures. He was brilliant as Lester (Worm) Murphy, a reckless gambler and nihilist, in Rounders (1998), and then, muscling up, he turned Derek Vinyard, the swastikaed skinhead in American History X (also 1998), into a horrifyingly intelligent native fascist.
“Norton has blue eyes, a long, narrow chin, and an ironic smile that can suddenly turn intimate. He can be retiring and nearly bodiless, falling back from confrontation like a ghost; he can also be menacing and cold, hardening his baritone into a snarl. Like James Woods in films thirty years ago, he appears to think that he’s the smartest person in the room, and, like Woods, he uses that arrogance as a way of exposing the madness of egotistical characters.
“At the moment, movies could use more men like Norton — actors who can spread a little acid or a little light. If such high-domed performers develop an ingratiating way with women, they become stars, like George Clooney; if not, they usually subside into character roles, like Woods or Alec Baldwin. It’s not easy to be the smartest guy in the room.
“Norton, I think, has the charm, the courage, and the dimensions to take on great parts, but his career has wandered around in roles that have been off center without being good. He stood up to Brad Pitt‘s bullying in the nutty cult classic Fight Club (1999). He was the scientist with anger-management issues in The Incredible Hulk (2008), the kind of popping-veins extravaganza every actor should gratefully leave to Jim Carrey.
“Norton was then swanky in cravats, high collars, and an Anglo-Austrian accent in that thick wedge of Hapsburg cheesecake The Illusionist (2006). The accent got even more pinched and refined when he played a British doctor suppressing his personal sorrows and martyring himself to Chinese epidemics in The Painted Veil (2006), a frightfully noble picture that could have been made by MGM in 1940.
“These are not the best choices for an actor with an instinct for contemporary life. Action is apparently not to Norton’s taste, but he’s a natural for calculating power types and intellectuals — gangsters, lawyers, politicians, journalists, corporate and financial operators. He needs to find writers who will create roles for him as intelligent, troubled men, as Clooney has.”
“It would be a mixture of At The Movies and the Dean Martin variety hour that ran in the mid ’60s to mid ’70s,” I wrote. “Martin always pretended to be slightly bombed on that show, and I don’t think viewers cared if he actually was or not. The point is that the show was loose and friendly and convivial, and there’s obviously one way to usher in that kind of vibe.
“I don’t know what substance would work better, alcohol or marijuana. But if there was a weekly movie-reviewing show featuring fizzy-headed or moderately stoned critics, people would watch it like they watched Howard Beale in Network. Because they’d know going in that the critics wouldn’t be dispensing the usual-usual. It’s a catchy gimmick — you have to admit that.
“Nobody wants to see respected critics make fools of themselves, so the trio we’re speaking of would need to be very careful with the intake. But they’d be just irreverent enough to loosen up and say what they really think about this or that film due to reduced inhibitions and being slightly more prone to using colorful language and…you know, not seeming overly poised and regimented, which is what every movie-critic show tends to feel like.
“Cold-sober people obviously have stirring discussions every day, but the liveliest ones — admit it — do seem to happen in the evening among friends after a drink or two. Or after passing a joint around.
“I realize there are laws prohibiting on-camera imbibing, so such a show would have to be launched online. But you’d probably want your critics doing the show while sitting at a bar on stools. And the show would have to be lighted semi-darkly, like Charlie Rose.”