I've been thinking of doing this for a long time and now that time has come: a separate blog that will contain only observations and reviews of movies, the occasional doc-men-tar-y, animated work, & series. Beyond that, there are no rules, I'll do it at leisure and much of it will be my opinions on the state of the movie business. I haven't thought of a title yet, or even given it any thought, frankly, but I will in the next week. The standard American view is to assume that the industry is shielded from all of the problems we're all exposed to in mainstream economic life and somehow exists in its own space and time. It does not.
Making motion picutres has always been a raging battle against art & commerce. As with everything else, that battle is essentially over with capital winning. The old Hollywood studio system was a separate and organic industry at one time; that time is long gone & ended with the general collapse of the labor movement and the decline of the working class. It was always about spectacle, but now power expresses itself more fully, spectacle being all that's left now. There can be no doubt that the movies were always a pallative--an opiate to calm the masses from making the natural connections about their predicament & revolting--and they still are, indeed, more than ever. It's never been a pure thing, but there was a time when you could still make relatively subversive (to power) statements.
In the United States at least, most of that maverick spirit died with Sam Peckinpah, and by the late 1970s, nearly all the major studios were being bought up by conglomerates. That process was basically completed by the early 1990s with the death of Orion Pictures, the last genuine independent distributor left standing by that point. (One of their final releases was George Romero's The Dark Half.)
Don't get me wrong, the unions in the Hollywood system cut their own throats by a thousand cuts; but they're just as much victims. Right now, most of the computer animators are watching their own jobs evaporate to overseas labor pools. I'm sure that they never saw it coming. My question is, why?
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Monday, October 06, 2014
Additional cinema website coming
Saturday, August 09, 2014
Noah Isenberg's Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (2014) review
Professor Strowski: Now I am here, to bring you home.
Dr. Erich Vornoff: Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal! The jungle is my home. ...
-Bela Lugosi, from Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster, 1955
The American films (and even a few that weren't) of Edgar G. Ulmer are deeply rooted in the immigrant experience, that irresolvable tug between assimilation and preserving one's identity and traditions. Author Noah Isenberg has illuminated this and many other key elements that combined to create a unique voice in cinema in his biography Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (University of California Press, 2014) and drawn the best roadmap (with a few detours, pun intended) so far into the many mysteries of that voice. As anyone familiar with biographies knows, things have a way of keeping their secrets. But the author's extraordinary and unprecedented interrogation of Ulmer's vast body of work provides incredible insight and corroboration into his life, and he marshals his information from every conceivable direction in a way that would probably make his subject very proud if not a little bemused.
The essentially itinerant director's professional life began not too many years after becoming a refugee with the internal collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1916, beginning as it has for many talented emigres fleeing social and political chaos, a process that continues into today. Like so many, Ulmer came to America with great aspirations and a hopefulness that with retrospect now probably seems naive; his first stop was typical for so many immigrants, and where one might think: New York City, during the early 1920s, working on the design of a Max Reinhardt stage production, a first for almost everyone involved. It wasn't long before the young and bright-eyed Austrian had headed to Hollywood, where, like most of America and its many claims to exceptionalism, success is a coldly loaded word. What better, tragic frission could an artist steeped in German Expressionism with its play of light and shadow want? Not a lot of it was going to end on a happy note, and neither do most of films of this underappreciated king of Poverty Row filmmaking who created such classics as the Laemmle era Universal horror The Black Cat (1934), the Poverty row classics such as Blubeard (1944, starring John Carradine), the legendary noir Detour (1945), and the captivating & shimmering noirish moral parable of Ruthless (1948, co-starring the suave and inimitable Ulmer co-conspirator Louis Hayward).
This is all fine and well--but, who was Edgar G. Ulmer, really? It's like asking who Charles Foster Kane, Dr. Mabuse or Jesus of Nazareth was. Luckily, we have more clues on hand, albeit often, as in the rest of life, flawed ones...
Ulmer's a name which crops up constantly in writing on cinema, especially in cult and noir circles, but how many would know of his design and preparatory work for F.W. Murnau on the classic Sunrise (1927) and Tabu (1931)? I had only an inkling, if that, and had only read musings that the filmmaker had worked on a few Expressionist movies, but they were only vague allusions to the fact that he was one of the few keeping Murnau's memory and technique alive in the Hollywood system. He had popped back and forth between Hollywood and Europe as early as 1929 when he co-directed the proto-verite classic People on Sunday (or the German title: Menschen am Sonntag, 1930), along with Robert Siodmak, from a treatment that had been co-written by the great Austrian director Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann, all of whom would go on to direct noir classics in America...or at least that's how some of the stories go. Untangling the legends and myths from the facts took Isenberg over a decade; his subject was often the worst source of information, as it were. There are reasons for this that have a lot to do with filmmaking and the kind of people who become motion picture directors: they're storytellers as well as notorious bullshitters, which is often how they get their vision onto the screen in the first place, they lie to achieve it, they're tricksters.
Anyone familiar with Fritz Lang's stories about his own life and career will be recognize Ulmer's propensity to lie about himself and to exaggerate his experiences and accomplishments (including participation in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & Metropolis). Lang himself simply made things up to tell a better story; so too did Ulmer, and so many other directors over the years. Not all of this was intentional and shows that for many of them the creative process is never over. This bleed of one's life and work shows so clearly in Ulmer's filmmaking. Additionally, directors are usually intuitive psychologists and master manipulators, again, for aforementioned reasons. It takes a lot of effort to put your signature to a movie effectively and for it to retain your vision and style. Therefore, to do it in less than a week of shooting time, which was typical for Ulmer due to economic restrictions--low budgets--and end up with something somewhat coherent and even memorable is something short of a miracle. Ulmer was able to repeat this miracle many times over. This also means that he produced a lot a bad work out of sheer necessity. Even in those circumstances, he was able to imprint most of his movies with memorable themes and moments that contained not only some of his greatest dreams and aspirations, but those of audiences of his era, and ours.
Long relegated to the margins, Ulmer's body of work has been championed by everyone from the Cahiers du Cinema crowd, the leading theorist-directors of the French New Wave, to contemporary hipster movie buffs, and of course, academia. Isenberg shows us the availability of many of these movies and draws us another path to them, again, with no discernible detours. Thanks in part to the Internet, and like such luminaries in other mediums like H. P. Lovecraft, Ulmer is probably more known and popular today than he was when he was alive. My own Ulmer collection has grown in leaps and bounds as of late and announcements of new restorations of his work have been growing periodically over the last few decades, often to great acclaim.
I first came upon Ulmer's work as the Hollywood cult director of Black Cat (because of its stars Bela Lugois & Boris Karloff and the fact that it was--loosely--"based on Poe"), which is maybe the most unique horror film in the horror canon, never mind Universal's. Isenberg notes ably that the movie went on to inspire The Rocky Horror Picture Show for its own high camp value, which is impossible to debate as the movie revels in its perversity, it's simply true--artistic truth. What first strikes the virginal viewer of Black Cat is the familiar use of Expressionist technique; this of course is obvious, but we shouldn't think this was done by someone who had fled a Hitlerean Europe. Ulmer, as stated earlier, was already installed in the American movie system. A fateful decision of running off with the married wife of a cousin of the Laemmles appears to be the deciding factor that relegated him to Poverty Row, he was blacklisted, even after the regime at Universal changed in 1936 to a man named Rogers after its bankruptcy. Not even hits like Black Cat & The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) could save the Laemmle-run studio from cost overruns during the Great Depression.
Well before the rise of NSDAP & Hitler, talent like Ulmer, Murnau, Joe May (née Mandle, another Austrian), the Hungarian Paul Fejos, Josef von Sternberg (a child of immigrants), even Bela Lugosi, were already working in Hollywood and were "refugees" after Nazi Germany became a reality. They were a different kind of emigre talent, some of whom never quite felt at home in America, or anywhere, and many of them had emerged from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the aftermath of WWI. Movies aren't made in a vacuum.
Again: who was Edgar G. Ulmer? We're never going to know entirely, but thanks to studies like this, we can get an idea. Without excessive sentimentality, Noah Isenberg has advanced our knowledge of this great, dark prince of the cinema through a study of his films that delivers to us many answers and many more questions about an often tortured life at the margins. Ulmer has finally come home.
Monday, September 21, 2009
"Okay, you lazy bitch": A 2001 letter from Hunter S. Thompson over production on the "Rum Diaries"
WWW--This was sent to me by a friend and reader, it's great. Thompson was getting the usual Hollywood treatment of being fucked around and got tired of it, so he dashed this fax off to the production executive at the time on the film. It sums-up what I always thought getting a movie made must be like, just a lot of bullshit, babysitting rich, spoiled assholes and their sycophants. Fuck that, nothing's worth that shit.
A doosie from the transcript:
...Fuck this. We have a good writer, we have the main parts casted & we have a very marketable movie that will not even be hard to make....
And all you are is a goddamn Bystander, making stupid suggestions & jabbering now & then like some half-bright Kid with No Money & No Energy & no focus except on yr. own tits.... I'm sick of hearing about Cuba & Japs & yr. Yo-yo partners who want to change the story because the violence makes them Queasy.
Shit on them. I'd much rather deal with a Live asshole than a Dead worm with No Light in his Eyes....
Couldn't have put it better myself. What a man, what a guy, so wonderfully honest. Get rid of middle-management, yesterday. Redundant. Development hell this, bitch.
Okay, you lazy bitch," Letters Of Note.com, 09.17.2009: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/09/okay-you-lazy-bitch.html?showComment=1253559817062#c701251295396282760
Sunday, August 23, 2009
AP: "Movie theaters cut print show times as Web gains"
WWW--You think they'll take ads for unrated movies now? I mean it, really. Who's laughing now? Me, and all the indie filmmakers the newspapers have screwed over the years. Good riddance, die already, will yah?
Kansas City-based AMC helped shine a spotlight on the trend last month when it pulled its listings from The Washington Post, prompting the newspaper's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, to deflect readers' ire in his blog."Most readers believe that it was the newspaper's decision," Alexander wrote, comparing it to The Post's recent move to cut back on the newspaper's television listings. "In fact, movie listings in the print product are paid advertising, and it was AMC's decision to stop paying."
The Post declined further comment, and Alexander wrote in his column that the newspaper wouldn't tell him either how much revenue the AMC ads provided.
AMC spokesman Justin Scott said daily movie listings are expensive and the theater chain believes that that money would be better spent promoting its value programs or other theater events.
"In an era when many moviegoers are using alternative resources to access show times, AMC has chosen to reallocate its show-time information methods," Scott said.
Scott wouldn't say where else AMC has cut its listings and how much it has saved. But he said "so far we've seen no impact on attendance."
Regal, based in Knoxville, Tenn., said its in-theater and online surveys found 60 percent to 80 percent of respondents saying they received their movie listings online. ("Movie theaters cut print show times as Web gains," AP, 08.22.2009)
And you, Hollywood: there's something called the Internet. You can't keep people from watching independent cinema like you used to, not anymore. People can and do watch movies on iPods, laptops, and their own home cinemas. Soon, very soon, most people will be able to download what they want to watch and bypass what they don't want to watch.
DVDs have opened-up most of the history of cinema to young people and many of them know where the movies have been and what's possible. When they look at the usual Hollywood fare, they're unimpressed, unmoved by it, because it generally sucks. The party's over, welcome to that brave new world you boors knew was always coming, a viewing public with considerably more savvy. Let's be honest: that was always the case, but you had a captive audience. That's over.
You used the newspapers to keep foreign film and indie cinema from competing at all; you got legislation passed that subsidized your bottom-line, shut-out the smaller distributors, and got you subsidized advertising in foreign markets. People are tired of most of your product, they want more. Eventually, you're going to have to deliver or go away, like the rest of the corporate monoliths that are toppling right now. With the rapid death of the newspapers, media conglomerates are going to keep taking major-hits. This can only be a good thing. Does consolidation sound so good now? All fall down.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Anticipating Rob Zombie's Halloween II
WWW--YES, I loved Rob Zombie's reimaging of John Carpenter's original Halloween, I thought it was extraordinary and worthwhile, almost a "what if" of filmmaking--think Peckinpah doing a slasher.
All the more reason to do a reimagining of the 1981 sequel, since it, well, sucked. Everything that the original Halloween was accused of--namely, being bloody and gratuitous--were writ large in the original Halloween II, it never justified its existence. Zombie's films justify themselves purely on their stylistic charms, but he does have point-of-view, something that's sorely lacking in most of today's cinema. Where are the great directors? Maybe Rob Zombie has yet to prove his mettle as a "great" director," but he's gradually convincing me, and I've been watching movies for at least 36 years.
Other than maybe Guillermo Del Toro, I'd have to say that Rob Zombie is one of the only noteworthy directors my generation has yet to produce. Whenever they make a new film, I'm as excited as I ever was or am when the new Terry Gilliam or David Cronenberg film becomes news.
Why? Zombie actually has something to say, and I thought his first remake in this series was a good anti-violence tract, it made me cringe the way a horror movie's supposed to, but it didn't allow me to like the carnage. This irritated a lot of the audience I saw it with a couple years ago, your typical Indiana goober crowd. Zombie went for the Kubrick approach from A Clockwork Orange or Peckinpah's masterstrokes in Straw Dogs and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: show violence and its consequences, show it for what it is, ugly and tragic. More of the same? Bring it on, I want more...
Why do we need Huffington Post at all: top stories today at Huffington Post...
WWW--Besides the fact that Arianna Huffington's incapable of making love to the Hollywood sign or George Clooney (she deserves both jabs, puns doubly-intended, double entendre), or exhibiting as much partisan loyalty towards the Democratic Party as she did the cuddly Republican Party, there is no real reason for Huffington Post to exist at all, it's hardly ever been substantially "progressive."
But it's gotten her lots of attention and new friends, and it's brought her a lot more power and influence. Sad, considering her parents were Greek Communist partisans in the aftermath of WWII...
If you look to-the-right (as Arianna's true self does) of each page, you'll a sidebar that says "Popular Stories on Huffpo," which is almost always a depressing statement on the state of things in American culture and politics.
Today--at this 2:27 PM EST writing--the top stories are:
1. Miss Universe Swimsuit Competition 2009: Who's Hottest? (PHOTOS, POLL)2. Short Skirts And High Heels: Brit, Miley, Leighton & More: Who Wore It Best? (PHOTOS, POLL)
3. Ashley Greene NUDE PHOTOS: Naked Pics Of Twilight Star 'Unlawfully Displayed
4. James Rucker GEICO Pulls Its Ads from Glenn Beck Show
5. Rufus Lusk Nowhere in Manhattan: Vote On These Unbelievable Photos
6. Howard Dean The Media's Treatment of Palin's Outrageous "Death Panel" Claims
7. Gabrielle Giffords Town Hall: Gun Left Behind
8. Jon Stewart Vs. Town Hall Crazies (VIDEO)
9. Levi Johnston And Kathy Griffin Hold Hands At Teen Choice Awards (PHOTOS. VIDEO)
10. Dr. Andrew Weil The Wrong Diagnosis
11. Olbermann Slams Palin For "Death Panel" Claim, Calls Her Dangerously Irresponsible (VIDEO)
12. GM: New Chevy Volt To Get 230 Miles Per Gallon
13. Target Of Obama-Era Rendition Alleges Torture
14. Women Walk In Fall 2009's Most Punishing Heels (VIDEO)
15. Obamas Visit National Parks: Send Us Photos Of Your Favorite National Park
A good friend pointed-out that (I'm paraphrasing them), "You can look at it two ways: either Huffington Post has assigned the list, or the readers have. Either way, it's pretty sad."
My one act play on social mountaineer, Arianna Huffington (truly, a bourgeois hoot!): http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2009/01/arianna-satirical-play-by-matt-janovic_31.html
Monday, June 08, 2009
Hollywood must die (soon come!): "Dahmer vs. Gacy (2010)
Hollywoodland--In our new economy, you just have to roll with the punches, kicks-to-the-genitals, and all the other body-blows that the consolidated mainstream media are going to ignore, therefore, making it go away.
But this was a new one on me: there is a movie in production with the aforementioned title, Dahmer vs. Gacy, no B.S.
In our new "Big Top communities" (tent cities--GOP elephants too!), we'll all be able to watch (speak for yourself) bootlegged DVDs of this movie that will surely make Ed Wood smile from his little nook in Hell.
At first I considered that this was one of the famous and most recent rulings (like her great ruling in Freddy vs. Jason several years ago, along with Alien vs. Predator) by Supreme Court nominee, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor, believe me when I write this. After all, our justice system is telling us that they can detect a crime before it happens when someone's Middle Eastern, but that didn't fit...or did it?
Calling Dr. Alex Jones! And so, as we move ahead into uncharted history, these rulings will be crucial in determining whether we should have Sotomayor as a Supreme Court Justice--well, that and whether she's menstruating or being human in another way and tripping and fracturing her ankle. I know, a bourgeois hoot!
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Religulous (2008)
You know, Bill Maher is a smarmy, egomaniacal asshole, a complete jerk. I wasn't going to bother watching this movie when my brother called me about wanting to see it. We almost never see movies together, maybe every five-years-or-so. What did I have to lose?
So I went, and my brother showed-up about five-minutes-in claiming it took a flying saucer to get him there--something like that. Then he started shouting at the screen unintelligibly, throwing popcorn everywhere like a Hunter S. Thompson sidekick. Anyway, I would have been missing-out had I not taken him up on seeing this very provocative movie.
I can't say that I expected much: Maher's HBO shows like "Politically Incorrect" and "Real Time," are reasonably popular but also tend to showcase Maher's egocentricity and brand of reactionary assholism. The comedian frankly reminds me of his personal friend Dennis Miller whose long-lost career as a comedian caused him to go begging around at Fox News for a job at...being who he really was all-along, an arch-conservative, reactionary asshole. Maher strikes me as different, but with tendencies towards the same direction as his pal Miller. It's isn't that I don't agree with him much of the time; it's how he tends to come-off, which is as a cocksure materialist Hollywood asshole.
And yet, here in his film "Religulous," he's correct again and a much more restrained kind of asshole.
The film is a kind of documentary with more than a few nods to Michael Moore's style, interspersing the interviews with rapid-fire retorts from Maher and company in the form of excerpts from cruddy Hollywood biblical epics (think Cecil B. Demille), dorky religious "educational" films, and from news archives. It's a very effective style, especially when Maher goes as far as to have text-comments responses and observations on the screen when he's sparring with various religious idiots of various persuasions. This makes for a very funny approach that gets a lot of well-earned laughs for their wit and concision. At times, Maher competes with Lenny Bruce in how astute and unique his observations are, but like Lenny, he has similar limitations.
But how can you beat those Christian creationist-themed museums and amusement parks? One can imagine hipsters running-roughshod over each other to get into the places to experience them in an "elevated" state of consciousness...
One might call the film's approach to its subject unfair, but this is also entertainment, let's face it. It's hard to say how much input the oddly-attired director Larry Charles (Borat) had in all of this, though it appears that most of the time all he and Maher had to do was to concoct a few meetings and scenarios, write a few questions, and let their camcorders record what happened after that. This is a simple and economical way of film-making in many respects since the comedian has a decades of improvisational experience. Several reviews have stated that Maher picked straw-man opponents who were easy targets for a man who's done stand-up comedy and media appearances for 30 years, yet you don't tend to get this impression watching the film. That's a red herring argument. He approached believers, the main criterion. It's about faith, stupid.
Yes, sometimes one could say that Maher's "rude" and even "pointed" in his interrogations (sorry, couldn't pass on that one), that he's "unfair" and "biased" in his sense of "superiority," but they're simply missing-the-point. It's doubtful that very many religious thinkers and fundamentalists were going to talk to him at all, so he took a more "populist" approach and went out to talk to the rank-and-file, really the most important part of religion as a problematic part of human life and culture.
One specific interview with a UK Pakistani rapper Aki Nawaz (aka Propa-Gandhi) who extols religious intolerance and war makes a good argument for the renewal of Paki-bashing, though his his subject does a much better job at undermining his arguments than Maher does. Nawaz is clearly an idiot and a hypocrite, but you have to show these people for what they are. Some have written that Maher won't let the bizarre rapper get a word in edgewise, but when you see the lyrics to his raps on a split-screen, it's forgivable. It's one of the few times he does it in the entire film.
This is what's so impressive about the movie itself: Maher is generally known for being much more hyperbolic and confrontational than this, and he tends to let his subjects skewer themselves, often just posing a few reasonable questions and listening to the absurdities flowing from them. Granted, when he hits, he hits hard, but he's not being unfair here. The man has certainly grown and I'm impressed.
But then, there's the faults in the film (though they're few): Maher does a strange thing and trots in Jewish Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta sect who's against the existence of the state of Israel (an "anti-Zionist") on theological-grounds. This is where Maher strays badly, as there's an inverse to the rabbi in the far-right Israeli and international Jewish community's--and strongly religious--reasoning of a sole Jewish stake in Palestine. This is just one example of the comedian's arch-conservatism inside and outside of the film. Indeed, Maher shows us how truly bizarre and wrong Judaism and most other major faiths are, but he makes an exception with the rabbi, exposing his own very slanted bias about the Palestinian question. This isn't to say that he's "wrong"--his very strong opinions for a Jewish state are valid after the Holocaust. They ring true, as Western history has amply illustrated. As a matter of fact, the core of his own reasoning here is more-than-valid, and Jews have good cause to aspire to statehood for logical security reasons. But he's making a very odd exception here that's troubling, and like most Jewish statists, he goes too far, just as Yisroel Dovid Weiss and his inverted opponents. When Maher walks-out on him, it's unsurprising, and I don't support his views here at all.
Yet, with 1 billion Muslims in the world, and 14 million Jews, his opinion is not unwarranted. What he misses, however, is that Israel is still being used a client state to control, destabilize, and divide the Middle East for geopolitical aims. Once it was the Romans, now it's the Americans and the rest of the West, hungry for cheap oil. In some ways, he misses his own point underscored at the end of the film. Whether his omissions are intentional or just a matter of running time, or just too many roads to go down, is the question. One could go on-and-on about the Palestinian question, and Maher probably saw a real quagmire in his section on Judaism and so just stuck to more superificial-aspects of how wacky the Orthodox version of the faith really is (trust me, it is). For the record, this writer believes that Israel has the right to exist, as does a Palestinian state and that it should be brokered diplomatically rather than through violence by all parties.
Even with its problems, Maher and Charles have made a very accessible argument for why religious belief is a "plague" (stated not by Maher, but by a Vatican astronomer) infecting humanity.
One of his finest-points is about Islam: like Christianity, it's undeniably a conquest faith that nowadays has very little tolerance for the beliefs of others on almost any level, and that's coming directly from the Koran. Judaism is essentially the same these days in its statist incarnation, but a quick look at the Torah (the "Old Testament" to Christians) offers-up numerous examples of conquest and even genocide by the tribes of Israel.
What's so interesting and enjoyable about Religulous are the gaggle of morons he interviews and just how obviously hypocritical (and possibly nuts) many of them are. His interview with Senator Mark Pryor, a faux-Democrat from Arkansas, must be seen to be believed. At one point, Pryor admits, "There's no I.Q. test to be a senator." No shit? There should be, even trumping election results if they don't pass. While we're at it, how about a mandatory psychological examination for office-holders as well? The audience I watched the film with all laughed very heartily over Pryor's statement, their chortles coming from the news of our current economic crisis and the last eight years of misgovernance. Hey, people still went to the movies when the Great Depression was on, so why can't we?
Perhaps the biggest hole in the film is the exclusion of other major religions, though they're tapped by the film by-implication. Surely, though, we could have seen how ridiculous many Eastern religions are, especially Hiduism with its castes and absurd rules and laws dictating behavior. There are so many other examples as to be dizzying, and that's part of the answer. Maher goes after the "worst offenders," the major world religions. He might have included Buddhism, though it really does struggle to match the absurd credulities required to be a follower of Islam and Christianity.
Maher's most successful accomplishment is in illustrating that religion has enslaved humanity to the few for millenia, and he deserves a great deal of credit for stating it where he states it. The majority of us know about the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the crusades and Islamic holy wars that spread the faiths across the globe, and violently more often than not. We all know this. Truisms don't need repeating. That's one of the main messages of the film itself--the toxic-effect religion has had on humanity is well-known from the historical record, and talking with biblical scholars isn't going to shed much more light either as they tend to agree generally with Maher on the oddness of literalism and fundamentalism in religion rather than a symbolical or allegorical reading of the "sacred texts." No film--even one five-hours-long--could adequately address all of this. Good job, and we "non-believers" have a lot of work to do.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Songs from the Site Meter: The SAIC Hollywood Trailer
Site Meter--[Cue Hollywood voiceover, a voice of authority--male, natch]
Announcer [black screen]: In a world where war-profiteers break their arms patting themselves on the back just miles from the graves of the victims of previous war-profiteers, there is SAIC. And where there is voter apathy, a dumbed-down consumer society, there stands...uh, a few hundred thousand who actually get it.
And in a country where a Black man can run for president as a Republican and be physically kicked-out of his own party's convention--let alone not implode up his own ass in a scene more camp than all previous others--anything is possible. [Cue announcer exhalation.]
Not content with accumulating a pile of petrochemical junk in-exchange for their souls, these heroes search the internet for corruptions, lies, and the scum who perpetuate it (politicians, the puppets of the Bawssmen). [Cue overemotional John Williams orchestral-sweep, then cut to a car filled with consumer items falling-off of a cliff, then exploding into flames. Cut to an image of sewers brimming with excrement.]
[Cut to black screen] Indefatigable in their well-honed wit, these heroes--just for one day--turn these vile forces back onto themselves, causing them to waste valuable time watching, monitoring, and reading these words you're reading right now. And if you stew cranberries like applesauce, they taste more like prunes than rhubarb does. Trust me.
These heroes days are spent researching and belittling that which begs to be ridiculed, slammed, and exposed for what it is: walking, shambling, pus-inflated deathclowns with a permagrin. [Cut to images of various Republican and Democratic politicians over the last 60-years, many of them laughing. Next, cut to an explosion without any context whatsoever for postmodernist academics and movie critics. Cut back to black screen.]
Their goal: attrition-humor directed at corrupt government contractors, while understanding at the same time that freaks like SAIC could only function on earmarks culled from the taxpayer and expedited through the canoodling (look it up goddammit) of numerous public officials who should have been aborted before birth. [Cue sound of Model-T horn]
Can they save human society from its own pathetic self-inflicted wounds? Who gives-a-shit? Any given Apocalypse has entertainment value galore.
Now: if only we could find a way to sell the rights after we're all dead... [mumbling]
[End]
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Saturday, August 16, 2008
Tropic Thunder (2008) review
Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder is everything its critics have said it is: it's offensive, it walks a fine line on race...oh yeah, and then there's the "tard scandal" hyped by people looking for something--anything--to protest. It's just incredibly an offensive movie, and that's what makes it great. We should demand to be scandalized, but humorless turds are humorless turds.
Like Yasuzo Masumura's "Giants and Toys" (1958), or Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), Tropic Thunder is social satire at its best and criticizes all war movies.
That doesn't mean it isn't entertaining or too high brow. It isn't, and anyone who inhabits this era in the developed world is going to understand the many social and cultural observations in this film. Audiences will also find it very easy to understand exactly who and what are being criticized (the current incarnation of Hollywood and spoiled movie stars).
But Stiller and co-writers Justin Theroux (who's also the executive producer and a great English actor) and Ethan Cohen make a whole lot of gleefully brutal comments on our mass culture, our peculiar attitudes, and our unquenchable appetite for spectacle and ultraviolence....wrapped in a movie that's supposed to be "antiwar."
Hollywood and movie production companies tend to overstate their sincerity when tackling "issues" like war, poverty, and all the rest. They don't generally tend to care at all, it's a business move. Tropic Thunder makes this case well throughout.
This was pointed-out by Lenny Bruce in the late-1950s and by many other social critics over the years, and it's not a uniquely American viewpoint. Movies are made to make money--a lot of money--and that's about it. The rest is garnish, with a little sincerity here-and-there in some productions. Fine.
Without giving too much away, we're treated to a troubled Hollywood production stuck in Vietnam, making one of those "horrors of war" films we all love to watch to feel better about ourselves, while doing nothing to prevent the phenomena of meaningless conflict. Hollywood isn't the only one playing the insincerity game, after all. But the writers stick with hitting Hollywood over the head, and as a result, they even accuse themselves of hypocrisy. This is a very brave moral and career position to take, and it's likely to add to the film's popularity for the chances it takes.
Too often, Hollywood creates spectacles that claim some higher moral ground, yet simultaneously cater to the bloodlust of audiences in their stylizations of violence (if they get that far). This is something even "Wild Bunch" (1969) director Sam Peckinpah was guilty of at times, though it's debatable whether it was conscious or not in every case.
Tropic Thunder is where entertainment also becomes art, though this could be one of the funniest and most entertaining comedies I've seen since my first viewing of Animal House. You're in for quite a ride if you have a sense of humor about yourself and life.
The three main characters are the spoiled movie stars, played by Stiller, the inimitable Jack Black, and one of the greatest actors of this era, Robert Downey Jr. Stiller's washed-up Tugg Speedman is eerily similar to Sylvester Stallone or even a Vin Diesel, while Black's Jeff Portnoy might be a heroin-addicted Luke Perry mixed with an Eddie Murphy. But it's Downey's Russell Crowe-like Kirk Lazarus who virtually steals the show as an Australian actor who takes "method" acting too far: he gets plastic surgery to look African-American, and he never breaks character. In short, he's a little nuts, as some actors are, and gets on the nerves of a Black cast member who constantly calls him out.
This alone is incredibly edgy for a contemporary movie, offering many possibilities to fall over the side and lose the audience, but Stiller, Theroux and Cohen (and Downey) pull-it-off and achieve a kind of comic ecstasy only seen in Kubrick's Strangelove and few other films in cinema history. There are times when Downey's Lazarus is photographically and phonographically convincing as a Black soldier, and it must be seen and heard to be believed. But there's even more...
Almost entirely unannounced is Tom Cruise's brilliantly comedic performance as the Weinstein-like Les Grossman, a corporate movie executive whose vulgarity and crassness knows no bounds. It goes beyond spouting the word "fuck," and Cruise has once again made the right move in taking-on the role of such an unlikable (yet oddly likable!) character. The Grossman character understands that he's a fucknut and a tyrannical asshole, and all of the inherent comedy of this fact. In a way, he actually "gets" it all--that the movie business is complete bullshit, a game.
That's not to say that the Grossman character isn't evil, but he's really something to watch in Cruise's expert-hands. Tom Cruise almost owns Tropic Thunder and deserves some serious credit for his performance, possibly even that little gold guy. He's Dr. Strangelove and General Buck Turgetson combined, and he's given us a performance that would have done Peter Sellers proud.
The movie-within-a-movie approach is very sound here, especially at the beginning of the film. What we see are some of the realities of a movie production: all the waste, the backbiting, the egos, the compromises forced on directors by spoiled "stars," the tainted motives for making a "message picture," the addictions, the troubled actors, and the nightmare of shooting outside of a soundstage. The comparisons to other troubled war movie productions are going to be obvious to most, like Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" and Oliver Stone's "Platoon." There are others, as there was a whole spate of Vietnam war films over the 33 years, many-of-which could be referred to not only as "insincere," but simply bad. The majority of war movies are.
On the "retard" scandal: this is the most overblown part of the release of this film. For the curious, I am acquainted with people who have mentally-impaired children. I wasn't offended by this at all, and the repetition of variations of the word "retarded" simply became funny for its own sake and had little to do with mentally-retarded children or adults. Downey's Kirk Lazarus and Stiller's Tugg Speedman have an exchange over the career-merits of playing the "retarded" over the simply "impaired":
Lazarus: "Full-on retarded--no one ever comes back from that."Lazarus character mentions a number of films--like "Rainman"--where the characters only appeared to be "retarded," but actually had some other form of impairment. In Rainman, it was autism, and the crazy Lazarus notes that nobody ever won an award from the Motion Picture Academy when they played a "full-on retard," or the "dumbest motherfucker in the world."
Tropic Thunder, then, suggests that what's really offensive is exploiting the impaired to advance one's career and to line one's wallet by making "message" movies about them. The reactions of critics couldn't be more wrong-headed, and should be met with contempt. There are few better antidotes to antidemocratic tendencies cloaked in niceties than unrelenting belittlement and humor. Bravo.
There was no comment being directed towards the mentally-retarded or impaired that was hateful--just the opposite, the attacks were aimed squarely at the hypocrisy of Hollywood in exploiting impaired people for ticket sales, and for actors to win awards. I can say with all honesty that I've never laughed so hard at a scene of dialog in my entire life. There's nothing wrong with referring to someone as "mentally-retarded," it's medically accurate, it's the intent and the tone that count. I leave it at that. Tropic Thunder is a must-see for all the right reasons, and it's what movies are supposed to be. Ben Stiller has topped himself, and so have his collaborators. Good show.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Canadian Film Tax Credit Legislation Stalled, Evangelist Charles McVety Laments
"It's not about Charles McVety. Who am I? I'm nobody. I am irrelevant in this process. But I have been someone--this evangelical that people can take a shot at...because of my faith and because of the religion that I belong to." --Rev. Charles McVety doing a very bad job playing the role of a religious minority and a victim this week. (The Globe and Mail, 04.17.2008)
Ottawa, Canada--It's unsurprising that evangelist activist Charles McVety--president of the Canada Family Action Coalition (CFAC)--is unhappy about the current version of legislation that would revamp Canada's Telefilm tax credit fund and how it's going to be distributed in the future. The vast majority of Canadian media are against the current version of the bill that would grant unprecedented powers to the federal Heritage Minister (an appointed position), allowing them wide-berth in defining what films violate "public policy," and deny tax credits to those productions. This could occur even after Telefilm approval of tax credits for a movie or television project, and banks could get cold feet over future domestic productions thanks to these provisions of the legislation.
McVety wants another version of the bill that would go drastically further in curtailing which films get made, and which ones won't. Yet he won't define what is and isn't a violation of public policy in Canadian media. Fortunately, his recent outbursts might be a sign he and his allies have been told that they won't be making any of those decisions as political appointments in the future. According to McVety, he's "not a lobbyist," yet he certainly acts a lot like one. McVety had likely spoken too soon on the legislation back in February, having taken credit (not a tax one) for the very existence of the current bill being debated in the Canadian Senate's banking committee. Now, he's flatly denying it.
Naturally, the Tories are still bullish on the idea of this bill passing, but with the recent RCMP raids on their national offices, it could get the backseat. The entire banking and commerce committee don't appear to like Mr. McVety or his dubious agenda of blanket censorship:
Dr. McVety did not appear to have supporters of any stripe around the committee table.The politicians on the liberal and conservative sides don't appear to want to have any impression that there is an association between themselves and "Dr." McVety, and the subject himself is trying to backpedal on his claims of virtual authorship of the current tax credit bill. Why is that? Because it's bad political theater.
The Conservatives were cordial, but seemed preoccupied with refuting allegations that government lobbying on the part of Dr. McVety had prompted the legislation.
The Globe and Mail reported in February that Dr. McVety had claimed credit for the proposal after discussions with Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson.
Dr. McVety backed away from that yesterday.
"We had no discussions about this legislation [Ed.-Called "C-10."] period. We didn't even know it existed. We didn't know it until The Globe and Mail called us the day after they had put this provision on the front page of their newspaper. We had zero knowledge of it. We had no specific meetings on this," Dr. McVety said. ("Film tax credit proposal falls short, evangelists says," The Globe and Mail, 04.17.2008)
Should we take Charles McVety at his word this week? Of course not. That's asking to believe much of anything he has to say outside of his circle of believers--believers in yet another false social prophet-cum-influence peddler. McVety sounds more like a Father Coughlin than a Jesus Christ. This week, almost all he could talk about was a controversial film that has yet-to-be-released in Canada: "Young People Fucking," and like many, it was funded partly through Telefilm and the Canadian tax credit. The reverend appears to be a little too obsessed with young people fucking, frankly. Like it or not, this is what Canada's media is great at.
If you know anything about Canadian cinema's success, it's that it's edgier than boorish American fare--it has its own niche, and it takes more creative-risks. As far as North America's concerned, it's the freest form of cinema left in an ocean of Hollywood conglomeration and meaninglessness-of-content. Interestingly, C-10 doesn't punish foreign movie and other media productions from receiving the same funds, irregardless of whether they violate "public policy."
Only Canadian productions fall under this provision of C-10, and it isn't hard to understand why this is so: monied American productions don't want to be affected, and the biggest ones don't want any Canadian competition. Enter creatures like Charles McVety, a Trojan horse if ever there was one. The Liberal Party's senators weren't buying what McVety was selling, and were practically belittling his testimony before them on Wednesday. This is how things are supposed to work, and it's obvious Canadian government is a little healthier than her American counterpart. But not much.
Charles McVety isn't just obsessed by "young people fucking," however, but by homosexuals: another film called "Breakfast with Scot" was another object of attention by the evangelist during his testimony before the suffering Senate banking and commerce committee. This shouldn't be a surprising tactic on-the-part of the evangelist and the shadowy interests he presumably represents, and was used to dramatic effect in the 2004 elections here in the United States. It's the politics of division and minority-baiting. McVety on "Breakfast with Scot":
Breakfast with Scot, released last fall, is about a gay ex-hockey player and his partner caring for a young orphan who displays less-than-masculine tendencies.Like all would-be censors, Charles McVety wants us to believe that he knows best, and that he knows smut when he sees it within his own mind. Indeed he does, and he's far-and-away more obsessed by so-called "smut" and "pornography" than the rest of us here in North America. But are any of these films genuine "pornography"? No. This isn't the case, and these reactionary elements know this. Statutes already exist under Canadian law that bar public funding of pornographic productions."(It) is about an 11-year-old boy who is being raised by a homosexual Toronto Maple Leaf to be a homosexual," said McVety. "... This is not something that the government should be (funding)."
Toronto-based filmmaker Laurie Lynd said he was "appalled" by McVety's description of his movie.
"The film is a gentle family comedy about self-acceptance and loving your child for whoever he or she is," Lynd said in an interview. He added that losing public financing just before production "could have killed the film completely."
McVety would not say how he would define entertainment that is "against public policy," instead listing titles such as The Masturbators and Young People F------.
("Activist decries tax break for gay comedy," The Toronto Star, 04.17.2008)
McVety's congregational rank-and-file likely don't know this, and it's even money that they've all been told not to ever watch the aforementioned films. A Canadian-blog named "Slap Upside the Head" adds some pertinent insight into the McVety take on "Breakfast with Scot":
McVety—who previously claimed responsibility for Bill C-10, but has since backpeddled—summarized Breakfast With Scot as a film about “an 11-year-old boy who is being raised by a homosexual Toronto Maple Leaf to be a homosexual.”
Ignoring, for a moment, that the notion that someone can be raised to be homosexual is rejected completely by the psychological, medical, and academic community, I’m amazed by this misclassification. Either McVety has never seen the film, or he is lying about what he saw. ("Lobbyist: No Tax Credits for Adorable Gay Comedy," Slap Upside the Head, 04.18.2008)
Well-connected activists like McVety appear to have very robust sexual imaginations, but have they even seen these movies? Why do they have such easy-access to politicians? These kinds of acts of political theater are familiar to Americans looking across-the-border at the Canadian versions. They fall-short, and the strings are showing. It's likely that they extend from the corporate boardrooms, Hollywood, right-wing think tanks, and the evangelists congregations of America. Canadian autonomy is being assaulted on all fronts.
Fat, smug demagogues like the Rev. Charles McVety are the avatars of this push, and they and their unfortunate supporters should be resisted aggressively .
"Activist decries tax break for gay comedy," The Toronto Star, 04.17.2008: http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/415391
"Film tax credit proposal falls short, evangelists says," The Globe and Mail, 04.17.2008: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/freeheadlines/LAC/20080417/FILM17/national/National
"Lobbyist: No Tax Credits for Adorable Gay Comedy," Slap Upside the Head, 04.18.2008: http://www.slapupsidethehead.com/2008/04/no-credits-for-gay-comedy/
Friday, August 31, 2007
THERE IS NO CONNECTION WHATSOEVER BETWEEN THE OUTING OF GOP SENATOR LARRY E. CRAIG AND FRED THOMPSON'S DECISION TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2008
Washington D.C.--As the saying goes: "Washington D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people." Words were never truer when applied to Fred Thompson, former GOP mole on the Watergate committee, and lousy actor, as well as philanderer. No, there's no-connection at all, none.
It appears Tim Griffin is busy-at-work with his boss/mentor, Karl Rove, working to get the long-shot candidate elected.
Question: will they be able to steal the elections again by barring Black Americans from the polls? If not, they're not going to be winning. Journalists and other researchers had better start looking-into what SAIC's contributions to the Thompson campaign might be--one could expect very questionable donations, but since the FEC is controlled by the Bush administration, they have a good-shot. A shame that the oath of office means nothing anymore (if it ever did). Why would the GOP do this? They've never done this before, have they?
Two-words: John McCain (who's part of the game this time!). Perverse doesn't even cover it.
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