Movie Doubles - 'The Road' & '2012'

Apocalypse How

Today's movie double is an attempt to draw together two films about the end of the world as we know it, and see what exactly it is that makes us want to watch this stuff. 'The Road' is based on  Cormac McCarthy book with some serious intention of exploring the human existence in extreme conditions, where society has simply ceased to be. The film is therefore somber and portentous with moments of genuine questioning about the human condition. It garnered much high praise and as such, belongs to the recent spate of depressing films I've watched.

'2012' on the other hand is a film about the end of the world co-written and directed by Roland Emmerich who brought us such trashy marvels as 'Independence Day', 'Star Gate' and 'The Day After Tomorrow'. Now, when I say trashy, I'm not putting down Emmerich's work for his choice of genre, but rather the lowbrow tone he brings to all of his work. The themes are always promising, but the execution always seems to go through the Hollywood lobotomy machine and comes out as the king unto the stupid.

With that out of the way, I also want to share with you that I am about to watch 'Until the End of the World' and 'The Quiet Earth' soon just because I picked them up recently and felt this rush of 'Oh wow! I remember these". If I seem to be writing a lot about the end of the world movies a lot, it's just coincidence of a commercial kind.

Apocalypse Why?

So... the world as we know it ends. what do you do? 'The Road' is situated in some kind of post-apocalyptic landscape where most people are dead, and those remaining have reduced themselves to the most desperate means of survival. The choice is between scavenging and cannibalism and in Cormac McCarthy's vision the strong choose survival, the weak choose suicide; good choose scavenging and the evil choose cannibalism. The reason why the world ends is never made entirely clear.

One of the more annoying things about 'the Road' is that if the end of civilization was indeed a nuclear holocaust, these survivors are getting off way too lightly. The whole film seems more like a rehash of the 'Mad Max' kind of junk culture sci-fi minus the glorious action by a powerful protagonist. Instead, the trip on the road is mostly a grueling trip through a devastated landscape trying to dodge bands of evil cannibals - but the underlying Mad-Max-ist vision is throbbing pretty hard. And by throbbing, I mean, the masochistic heart of this film is just joyous as it wallows in the wreck.

The problem I have with this vision is that it seems to be set up in a way that suits the survivalist NRA vision of a post-apocalypse more than anybody else. You can smell the gun-toting types yearning for a lawless human landscape where it might be permissible to abuse and shoot strangers on sight. Indeed, the whole scenario supports that vision in the same way that the whole of the Star Wars universe supports light saber duels. I mean, come on, if there were a serious exchange of nukes, you won't have this version of a post-apocalypse.

'2012' is a different kettle of fish. Where 'The Road' relishes in the masochistic journey of desperate survival, Emmerich celebrates the desperate escape against sadistic CGI forces unleashed by ILM. People die off screen a lot in 2012, mostly to prevent us from really getting a handle on the violence that is being presented in the narrative. I guess if the whole of California slides off into the bottom of the sea and the only people who get out are on airplanes, then you take it as read that it's tragic. Not so in this film. '2012' goes a fair way to excite the audience with the endless row of near-misses and near-death moments both implausible and absurd. People die comic book deaths or simply get left behind by the bounding narrative.

Neither film is terribly realistic in any scientific way, but '2012' makes no excuses about it. It just wants you to enjoy the apocalypse. 'The Road' wants you to share in the misery. Naturally 'The Road' gets more of a critical acclaim, but this is probably because it's the same critics who like the miserable films giving it the thumbs up. It has to be said, the director of 'The Road' John Hillcoat, is an Australian. While I commend his good fortune in directing this film, I tend to think it has all the hallmarks of an Australian movie. It's bleak, it's dull, it's sad, it's got long stretches of miserable tedium followed by a triumphant downer of an ending you see coming from halfway through. Naturally Charlize 'Monster' Theron agreed to be in this too. As movie experiences go, it has the worst of all worlds.

Casting As An Art Form

Casting stars is a dicey business. Sometimes it's just right - as with 'The Men Who Stare At Goats' - and other times it totally betrays the picture - as with 'Brooklyn's Finest'.

Seeing Charlize Theron looking pained and upset and suicidal was one of those, "oh that again" moments which was bad. Viggo Mortensen looking as pained as he does in 'The Road' only evoked moments from 'Lord of the Rings', but I liked him better in that. At least the pain had a pay off - he gets to be king.  Similarly, seeing Woody Harrelson play yet another human missing a few cards from a full deck made me think it was the latter in '2012'.

Big movies tend to suffer more because of the need to cast recognisable faces, who in turn ruin the film with their baggage from previous roles. Oliver Platt and Amanda Peet were completely miscast in '2012'. Which brings me to...

What Are You Doing, John Cusack?

The weirdest thing about '2012' might be the casting of John Cusack as Jackson Curtis. After a career of playing all sorts of writers, here he is again playing a novelist who has one published work, with 422 sold copies. He keeps playing writers which is nice because he's sort of credible playing writers because he's played so many, but was there really a big need for this character to be a writer? And if there was, did they really need to cast John Cusack to play this writer?

I dunno. I just think it's getting a bit too silly. Then again, he's in Hot Tub Time Machine, headed straight for 1986. Clearly he doesn't take himself too seriously, and that's a good thing for '2012' because the scenes where he meets Woody Harrelson's Charlie Frost, the conspiracy-theorist radio dude, are just plain stupid. The rest of the implausible-ness just keeps ballooning as the movie goes on. What are you doing in this movie, John Cusack?

The Biblical Landscape Of The Texts

The text most associated with the world ending has to be the Bible, so it's no surprise the motifs from the bible end up as the backbone of these texts. 'The Road' is a replay of Job, while '2012; is clearly working towards Noah's Ark. The Bible is full of this sort of stuff, from parting of the Red Sea to Armageddon in Revelations and even the central motif of crucifixion all forms the jumbled archetypal mess from whence these films draw their images. That being said, there's very little religiosity in either film - which is a blessing.

In its place though, are loaded insinuations that morality ought to be carried over into ethics in the case of '2012' or that morality should be defined from an inner intuition as is the case with 'The Road'. What is ethical gets short shrift in '2012' precisely because if the world is going to pot, ethical behaviour is going to be the hardest to sustain, the film makers know this and exploit the angle just to set up a love story. Meanwhile, 'The Road' brings up a discussion of what is good and and what is evil, and it all seems to hinge on not being or being cannibals.  "Are we the good guys?" asks the boy. Viggo Mortensen's character doesn't really have a framework to explain good or evil, let alone ethical positions such as utilitarianism.

In '2012', the ethical problem gets addressed in The Big Speech.

The Big Speech

Most films have a tub-thumping, ultra-loaded, highly motivated Big Speech. The Big Speech is the speech the main character gives in order to make sense of the paradigm by which the film is built. We like Big Speeches like the one Al Pacino gives in 'Any Given Sunday'. We hate the ones that say too much or not enough or don't get us over the emotional line. It's the moment in the film where some ideological package is being sold. We love the ones that lift our spirits, laugh at the ones that don't work. The Big Speech is the one you wished you said when you came to the big important fork in the road in your own life. It's the single, meaningful articulation of what a film's concern is about. Indeed, the Big Speech is the whole point of some of these movies. Even 'Andrei Rubylev' by Andrei Tarkovsky has a Big Speech. It might be as short as 'Use The Force Luke."; it might go for days like a filibuster. We are dying to deliver the Big Speech in our ordinary, imperfect, humdrum lives but can't; so we watch movies and watch these characters say for us what we cannot in our real lives.

The Big Speech in '2012' is about ethics of surviving while leaving behind others. It's a plea to help some people. It comes way too late in the film after the vast majority of the planet has died off, but it's a big speech intended to be rousing, heartfelt and convincing. It's not - but you get that.

There is no Big Speech moment in 'The Road'. It's very 'Australian' that way.

Painting The Disaster

T.S Eliot said... yes, a whimper. Lately Hollywood has been painting a picture whereby it won't even end when it ends, which reminds us of David St. Hubbins' Big Speech about 'The End' in 'This Is Spinal Tap' and whether we really know it is the end. Even as these films come to an end, they finish off with a new dawn for humanity - complete with the formation of family motifs shoved down the gullet like so much stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey. And in some weird way, that simile is exactly what we are getting in these films.

In the 1970s, disaster movies used to be about airplanes and airports or single buildings going up in a towering inferno. This side of 9/11 we seem to be a bit more obsessed with a high definition kind of special effects movie where the world gets wiped out. I sort of wonder about these more and more as the memory of 9/11 haunts even more with each passing year. I'm haunted by the memories of those people jumping out of the burning World Trade Center. Having a movie that exalts in that kind of disaster magnified to a million doesn't actually speak well of us as humans. I guess you could call these films a progressively guilty pleasure.

The image of the USS John F. Kennedy flipping over and on top of the black President played by Danny Glover was more than enough heavy-handed symbolism, I thought this was a strange kind of indulgence on the part of Roland Emmerich.

Even the notion of wandering around a post-nuclear holocaust landscape in 'The Road' seems like a misplaced kind of indulgent entertainment. How sick are we as an audience if we're enjoying this stuff? It's almost as if we want it to happen. The thing is, some people really do.

Defendor

Canadian 'Fight Back'

Canadians make great films. It's embarrassing how good their films can be when compared to Australian films. It's the flip side of Australia's cricket team thrashing their cricket team at the Commonwealth Games. When it comes to movie making, the Canadians just slay us.

There. I said it.

Nobody says it out loud, but Canada is the cultured, well-educated, bookish, serious  brother to the sporty, happy-go-lucky, pretentious Australia. Here's something for people to chew on: the film that kicked off the Australian film renaissance in 1970 was 'Wake in Fright', directed by Ted Kotcheff who is a Canadian.

Canada is the land of Glenn Gould and '32 Short Films About Glenn Gould'. Australia is the land of David Helfgott and 'Shine'. Their premier pianist defined the playing of Bach for generations to come. Our pianist is a guy who had a breakdown trying to play Rachmaninoff's third and went crazy. The movie about their guy is one of the most significant biopics of all time. Our biopic is an Oscar winner but really just another movie.

Another Canadian, John Ralston Saul is a front line top of the heap intellectual. We don't have anybody who can go toe to toe with John Ralston Saul. Canada produced Northrop Frye. We don't have a single literary critic that can hold a candle to Northrop Frye, then or since.

So you see, when it comes to cultural stakes, the Canadians just leave us behind. 'Defendor' is just another fantastic film in a long line of fantastic films that just slays us.

What's Good About It

Script. Acting. Execution.

Okay, there's more. The music is fantastic. It's an incessant ominous rumble of heavy minor key tones that in other movies would keep you on the edge of your seats, but in this on, serves to highlight the farce. It's a great work in irony.

Considering the near-glut of the comic book super hero movies in recent years, it's nice to see a down to earth ironic view of such cultural influence. Especially because we now know there are real people going out there donning costumes to do good these days, it seems like it's appropriate to take a shot at the growing influence of comic book culture.

What's Bad About It

Woody Harrelson is great, but he's such a ham. There a re moments watching this film and you think, "oh come on Woody, that's so close to being "the Full Retard". He's been playing a few hammy lunatics lately and this one had moments of being on the nose.

Also, you worry about narratives that feature stock characters such as the hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold. Maybe it's worse in a film like, say, 'Pretty Woman'. The point though is that the film is at its best when it is ironic about these characters and not when these stock characters push the narrative on by dint of being a stock character.

That being said, it's not a film with a whole lot of faults. Even the narrative no-no of the flashback didn't bother me at all.

What's Interesting About It

There once was a film called 'Hero at Large' starring John Ritter, about an actor who dons the costume of a superhero for advertising purposes, and on the way home from work one day, he ends up fighting crime on the New York subway. So this idea that somebody ordinary would don a costume and fight crime isn't exactly new or fresh. What's fresh about this one is that the main character is so intellectually challenged that he has problems distinguishing between literal meaning and metaphors.

One of the metaphors he mistakes is who he thinks his nemesis is in Captain Industry. Of course, there is no super villain calling himself Captain Industry. It is a garbled misunderstanding that takes place inside the head of a not-very-bright lad called Arthur. What the whole setup of the film evokes is 'Don Quixote'' where oblivious to the real world, a character decides to tilt at windmills as monsters.

The structure of the irony is exactly the same as Cervantes' great work as Woody Harrelson's Arthur explores the ramifications of taking up a life of crime-fighting in costume. What at the start seems absurd slowly transforms within the text to key moments where Arthur's delusions matter so much. It is precisely the dynamic in Don Quixote.

The other text the film evokes is of course 'Le Morte D'Arthur' by Thomas Mallory simply because of the chivalrous quest of the main character Arthur, who by name alone evokes King Arthur, but also because the chivalry ends with a conflict that is at once material but also existential. One of the crucial problems for Woody Harrelson's Arthur is whether he can ever be defined by his actions, and he can only define himself by donning the costume of 'Defendor' to fight crime. To that end he must fight and so he fights to the end. The symmetry in meaning is actually managed quite well.

The film also parodies the recent Batman 'The Dark Knight' film where a motivated but low-powered vigilante by the name of Brian gets killed by Heath Ledger's Joker. Woody Harrelson's 'Defendor' is indeed that guy with the hockey pads, but the film goes to great pains to demonstrate his cause is no less noble than Batman's. It's a splendid riposte to the borderline fascism of 'The Dark Knight'. As such, the film is filled with a fundamentally humanist and democratic impulse.

All in all, this one is very much worth watching.

The New Hominin

Expanding The Human Family

This news completely took the world by surprise. They've identified a strand of humanity that is neither on the Neanderthal or the Cromagnon-modern man line.

The paper that describes the finding comes courtesy of the Max Planck Institute's Svante Pääbo, who has been actively pursuing the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. It seems likely that this particular bone fragment was targeted due to suspicions that it might also provide an additional Neanderthal sequence. The site, called Denisova, is in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, an area that has had hominins present as early as 125,000 years ago. The sample itself came from a layer of material that dates from between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. Neanderthal DNA was found in a sample from the same time period less than 100km away, while artifacts indicate that modern humans were also present in the region by 40,000 years ago.

So, there was no apparent reason to suspect that the bone would yield anything more than a familiar sequence. And in fact, most of the first half of the paper simply describes the methods used to construct a complete sequence of the mitochondrial DNA, including over 150-fold coverage of the genome, and an alignment program designed to account for the errors typical of ancient DNA sequences. About the only surprise here is that Pääbo's group has switched from using 454 sequencing machines to those made by Illumina.

Various checks indicate that the sequence the authors obtained contains damage that's typical of ancient DNA, and that it all comes from a single individual. So far, quite typical.

Things got quite unusual when they attempted to align the sequence to the mitochondrial DNA from the hominin species that were likely to be present at that time and place: human and Neanderthal. Instead of clustering with one or the other, the Denisova mitochondrial genome was a clear outlier, having about 385 differences with the typical human mitochondrial genome. In contrast, Neanderthals only differ from modern humans by an average of 202. The obvious interpretation is that the Denisova lineage split off before modern humans and Neanderthals did. If we accept that Neanderthals are a distinct species of hominin (and we do), then this sample clearly represents yet another one.

Building a tree with the chimpanzee genomes and assuming a divergence time of 6 million years, the data indicates that the Denisova lineage diverged about a million years ago. At that point, Homo Erectus was already a global species, but our human ancestors were still in Africa. That suggests that the Denisova variant probably originated in, or at least near, Africa as well, although there's no way to tell whether it was a distinct species before it started migrating, or whether it became an isolated population because of a migration.

And so the article goes. The most interesting thing about this population is how recently they were living. Keep in mind, 40,000 years ago places it about the time Homo Sapiens is moving into Australia. The Neanderthals don't disappear until 24,000 years ago. The hotly disputed Florensis hobbit population existed between 94,000 years ago through to about 12,000. What we seem to be getting a picture of is a variety of Hominin species cohabiting this planet. The conjecture would lead to the distinct possibility that our ancestors eradicated these populations to become the dominant ape.

Here's another link which suggests that the 'X-woman' aka the Denisova Hominin split off the common line of humanity about 1.04 million years ago.

Professor Stringer commented: "Another intriguing question is whether there might have been overlap and interaction between not only Neanderthals and early moderns in Asia, but also, now, between either of those lineages and this newly-recognised one.
"The distinctiveness of the mitochondrial DNA patterns so far suggests that there was little or no interbreeding, but more extensive data will be needed from other parts of the genome, or from the fossils, for definitive conclusions to be reached."

Experts have been wondering whether X-woman might have links with known fossil humans from Asia, which have controversial classifications.
"Certain enigmatic Asian fossils dated between 250,000-650,000 years ago such as Narmada (in India), and Yunxian, Dali and Jinniushan (in China) have been considered as possible Asian derivatives of Homo heidelbergensis, so they are also potential candidates for this mystery non-erectus lineage," said Prof Stringer.
"However, there are other and younger fragmentary fossils such as the Denisova ones themselves, and partial skulls from Salkhit in Mongolia and Maba in China, which have been difficult to classify, and perhaps they do signal a greater complexity than we have appreciated up to now."

All the same, the world of ancient humans got a whole lot more complicated as a result of this discovery.

Movie Doubles - 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' & 'The Blind Side'

The Family As Project


I got asked about the myth of the family after I posted my movie double on 'The Hurt Locker' and 'Revolutionary Road'. As in, I guess, "tell me of movie examples where this myth is operating!" A quick look through some stuff I've watched recently turned up 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' and last night I watched 'The Blind Side' which ultimately is nothing less than the myth of the family writ large.

The family is emphasised greatly in Hollywood cinema because affirming the family allows it to affirm other socially normative things, from heterosexuality to gender roles to social status and subsequent acceptable interactions. Quite often, Hollywood betrays the illusion that America is a class-less society when compared to the old world, only to write in the privileges of wealth.

Takeshi Kitano opined in one of his columns in Japan that America is a society that sells lottery tickets to its own citizens, and the name of the lottery ticket is 'The American Dream'. He suspected that American society might go on the brink of revolution when they found out how unlikely the said dream was. One could contend that the recent 'Tea Party' activism is a sign that this is already happening. The point of this is that the socially normative function of reaffirming the myth of the family is in effect a very important part of the American ideological control over its own population.

So, that's why it's important to see the con as it comes, so to speak. The con is always in the pitch, and what American films like to pitch is the formation of families.

What Kind Of Family Is That Anyway?

'Fantastic Mr. Fox' actually kicks off with the courtship of Mr. and Mrs. Fox, as voiced by George Clooney (this man is in everything good lately. How does he do that?) and Meryl Streep. The family expands when they have a son, and they take in Mr. Fox's nephew. Mr. Fox's partner in crime, Opossum is recruited into the family fabric. Once the conflict sets in with the human farmers, Mr. Fox's family expands to loosely include Badgers and field mice and other assorted creatures who have been flushed out of their habitat. By the end of the film, Mr. Fox is toasting quite a menagerie of animals as part of his family.In doing so, he and his wife accept everybody.

Similarly, 'The Blind Side' is a story of a white family who take in a black youth and make him a family member. Remarkably it is one of those 'True stories, loosely based on fact" numbers, but the source book happens to be written by none other than Michael Lewis. Sandra Bullock's character Leigh Anne Tuohy exerts a great deal of maternal influence to bring Michael Oher into her family and in turn Michael sublimates his Oedipal complex sufficiently to succeed in his new white-person environment.

In both cases, the family is heterogenous across species, and race. It's oddly couched in both films so as to obfuscate the dividing line, but the obfuscation itself brings attention to the act of obfuscation. That is to say, they make the point that the characters we are supposed to like are not species-segregationists or racists, but this bringing to our attention inadvertently points to fact that the text is about species or race.

Another way of reading all this is that in the Hollywood vision of America, it's not what race you are that is important; it's how normative you are in respects to sexuality and gender that is more important.

The Oscar Goes To The Politically Correct

It's one of those odd things that occasionally a very limited sort of actor or actress gets the big gong. This year it was Sandra Bullock - who also won a Razzie for her film 'All About Steve', which makes it a rare double. While she might not be as bad as a Razzie suggests, she's not as good as 'Oscar Winner' suggests. She does an okay job in 'The Blind Side'. She clearly won it on the politically correct vote as well as the 'She'll never be in a position to win the Oscar ever again' vote. I'm inclined to think they're right.

The degree to which this 'PC' factor works can be seen in the frown as you read this and say, "but, but, but..." Look, if it looks politically incorrect to you that I point this out, then it must have been pretty politically correct for Sandra Bullock to win with this film. There is no way this is a historically great film, but it is a lot more watchable than some of the more feted films of recent years. I didn't suffer watching this the way I suffered watching some of the other films.

The Blind Eye To Class

I'm not a class warrior but some times I just have to drag the Marxist stuff out to make a point. There's nothing like a couple of films that proceed to brazenly hammer down bourgeois values that get my hackles up. So you'll have to bear with my momentary lapse into rabid Marxist critique for a moment. I guess I did get that from AFTRS, but in this case, believe you me, it's relevant.

One of the more pernicious projects in American cinema is how they essentially place  everybody as 'middle class' and this middle class seems to cover the whole vast tract of the demographic, unless it is specifically a story about coming from the wrong side of the tracks. That is to say, the ubiquitous white collar status is the zero-zero coordinate from which all values emanate, but it only addresses blue collar as the other - not the wealthy.

This gives rise to a really strange tension in 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' which is an adaptation of a text by Roald Dahl. Dahl actually is somewhat of a class-ist snob when he portrays the meanness of the 3 farmers, and the 3 farmers in the film are played by Englishmen with broad accents. In turn, there is a strange demarcation of consciousness that takes place in the text vis a vis, who has any consciousness. The Fox and Moles and Badgers have equivalent consciousnesses, but the chickens and turkeys that get eaten, do not. They die silently and are quickly consumed. The contradiction of this structure only goes to delineate Dahl's own class-consciousness and betrays a weird kind of elitism of the urban middle class. When voiced by Clooney and Streep, this elitism actually steps forth as a strange kind of demarcation of the American bourgeois sensibilities rather than a British quirk of the source text.

Similarly, in 'The Blind Side', we are shown a fantastically wealthy white family and are expected to absorb the wealth we see as just another middle class family. The bourgeois sensibility carried by Bullocks character is so powerful, it drives her to adopt Michael. Her kindness extends out of her Bourgeois ideals, and later in the film she reflects on whether she is good or not. The irony is clearly lost on the writers because it seems to me it's a story of a woman who has no self-reflection about her own bourgeois values.

Thus, the wrong side of the tracks where Michael comes from becomes the other that must be cut away from Michael. The film explores the notion by having Bullock's Leigh Anne visit the biological mother of Michael Oher, and exculpates the fact that she takes over from the biological mother through the force of her character. There's no crisis a la 'Revolutionary Road' in this bit of super-wealthy suburbia. Sandra Bullock's Leigh Anne joyously embraces the naked, lurid, materialism of her existence. For her, there is no hopeless emptiness that plagues Kate Winslet's April. I guess this sort of issue doesn't decide who wins an Oscar at all - which suggests the Academy in general actually holds suburbia in contempt.

As character studies go it is interesting, and in some ways could be an American version of a Madame Bovary. Except being an American film, it doesn't rush headlong into self-destruction, it rushes towards a super-affirmation of the bourgeois values inherent in her own milieu.All this happens hand in hand with affirming the new American family.

The Republican Soul

The strangeness of 'The Blind Side' is probably best characterised by the irony of its white characters. These white people are really nice. They're really good. They're nice and good because they have solid values; and the fact that Leigh Anne is a member of the NRA and packs a pistol in her purse are more character quirks than signs of a deranged social paranoia that is endemic in certain parts of America. The point of the film is, she's nice: She takes in a disadvantaged but talented boy and makes him family - in spite of his colour/race, which makes her extraordinary. The film doesn't let up that she is a good person and these are good deeds she is doing.

That's all okay with me... except she's a Republican. Presumably she is exactly the sort of person who joins the Tea Party and objects to the recent Health Bill getting passed by the Democrats. You sort of marvel at the contradictions that reside in the American political consciousness.

I mean, what is that?

The Family And Consumerism

The ultimate haven the Fox family find towards the end of the film is a supermarket where there is an abundance of food. In other words, heaven is participation in consumerism itself. The fact that the formation of the mega-family around Mr. Fox is celebrated this way is no accident. The formation of the family powers demand which is met by economic supply and capitalism finds its optimum expression where demand meets supply. The expansion of a family thus means expansion of the capitalist system itself.

The same dynamic is displayed in the Thanksgiving scene in 'The Blind Side'. When Michael sits at the dining table to eat on his own, this prompts the Toohey family to come together around the table with their abundance of food, discussing where things were bought, and then they celebrate a God that allows them this big consumerist feast.

Considering I sort of grabbed these 2 films as random examples of the formation of the family being a central myth to American cinema, it's pretty amazing how both these films have these scenes.

Sharing of food in American cinema possibly deserves a greater deal of analysis which I won't go into here, but I will point out that Woody Allen often uses Thanksgiving dinners as occasions to explore the family. He bookends 'Hannah and her Sisters' with Thanksgiving feasts with one in the middle, and the penultimate scene of 'Broadway Danny Rose' features a Thanksgiving dinner shared by Danny and his hapless acts. The discussions about food that takes place in each of these scenes are critiques of the family and consumption. The capacity to deliver a sizable feast on Thanksgiving affirms the providing power of the patriarch in each instance, and underscores the symbolic transfer from God to Capital to stomach.

Woods Envy

Moralism Sucks - Today's Edition

Do we really need to have some dufus moralising at the top of his moral tenor? Do we need it on the Herald? Are we better served as a community when we dish out gratuitous sanctimony when it seems it would be on moral firm ground to wind up and have a kick at a fallen idol? I tend to think not.

This one is pretty repugnant for its high moral tone delivered with the utmost self-righteousness.

Now I am as disgusted with Woods and his secret life as I have always been about his on-course behaviour, which runs the gamut of foul language, ugly fist pumps, the throwing of clubs (nearly decapitating a spectator at our Masters at Kingston Heath last November) and spitting. He was untouched by a fawning media that has since become increasingly feral.

About the only comments we should believe from his statement are that he has been ''selfish and foolish''. And, more tellingly, ''I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled.''

How very true that is: ''I felt I was entitled.'' ''Selfish.'' It sums up everything about Woods. He feels he is not only bigger than the game he has dominated but also beyond the bounds of all moral and social behaviour.

His colleagues, good unionists that they are, have all said they welcome him back. Of course they do. When Woods turned professional in 1996, the total prizemoney for the PGA Tour was $US70 million. This year it is around $US270 million ($295 million). In 1997, Woods's first full year as a professional, 18 players won more than $US1 million. Last year, 87 players earned $US1 million-plus. They've filled their pockets on the back of Woods.

Give me Ernie Els any time. He is everything that is great about the game of golf and the most engaging bloke to have a chat with over a cold one. He was world No.1 for a week in 1997 and for eight weeks, in brackets of four weeks, in 1998 but then Woods began his mesmerising march into the history books with very little left to achieve, save Jack Nicklaus's mark of 18 majors.

Well, fuck me dead. If I were Ernie Els, I'd be embarrassed to be endorsed in this way, by putting down Tiger Woods. This is not a man's work. This is not a decent human writing this column. So much envy for the success of one man, and now that he's been found out to be a bit of a philanderer, out come the objections to his character on moral grounds. All from people who couldn't hold a torch to Tiger Woods on the golf course; all of them weekend hackers to pros with some lesser record; all of whom know in their deepest hearts that even if they could duplicate Woods' dedication, they would still fall short of his talent.

Disgust, he says! Disgust? Isn't it more like a projection of Peter Stone's own self-loathing that he's been a good little human who hasn't gone philandering but God or Fortune or Lady Luck or whoever has denied him the greatness of Tiger Woods' talent? Isn't it the case that nobody in their right-proper mind would pick Peter Stone's life achievements over Tiger Woods? If morality is the only ledger that Stone is trying to claim superiority over Woods, then maybe morality isn't such a good yardstick with which to judge a man.

All this moralising is nothing but invidia. It's the same kind of crap they threw at early black players in the MLB, it's the same kind of crap the old guard at Wimbledon threw at John McEnroe, and it's the same kind of crap that they keep coming up with in order to shore up their own sorry fucked up lives of non-achievement. He's a super-charged, hyper-motivated athlete. It's not surprising he comes with a super-sized libido. everybody who has read Freud knows this and at this point in history most journalists an columnists ought to be familiar with this notion.

Seriously folks, we should grow out of this bullshit that holds athletes up to being role models and model citizens. The expectation itself is unrealistic and immature. Historically, it's never really mattered who fucked who unless it was Anthony and Cleopatra. In most instances, it's always been "what have you don for me lately?" Pretending it's otherwise is childish, and imprudent in the extreme.

They should all just back off and let the man do his thing. Woods may wow us all yet, and that would make us all feel better. Judging Woods' secret sex life doesn't make us feel one bit better. Peter Stone should just just the fuck up and put a bullet to his head and put us out of misery.

Brooklyn's Finest

This Is Decidedly Not It

Good God. If you've Never, Ever seen another movie, this movie might have a shot at impressing you. That's about all the hope this dog of a film has got going for it because this thing is terrible. I grumble about films like 'Revolutionary Road' and 'The Hurt Locker' but this thing is a travesty.

What's Good About It

Uuh... Not much. It has Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes in it. Which already makes it a kind of a parody rather than anything tangibly held to 'realism'. None of the cast ever look like they inhabit the world they're portraying. Ethan Hawke was rehashing his 'Training Day' looks and Richard Gere was sort of re-running his pained look from 'The Flock'. God knows what the rest of them thought they were doing.

At one point as we were watching this thing, anti-cineaste Rob Morgan said, "oh look, the background in that shot is beautiful." - If a film making novice is noticing  stuff like that, you get the idea how disengaging this film is.

So what is good about it? You don't know what's going on so it makes you keep watching in the hope that you find out. Then you're bitterly disappointed.

What's Bad About It

Where do you start with a pile of dog shit this high?

The whole film is like 17 cliche setups in search of a story. We've seen ALL of these elements before - some, in the case of Richard Gere, he only did it last year when he played another dude days from retirement, rescuing people from abuse. Ethan Hawke's cop struggling with money, playing poker with his cop buddies is like a bad re-make of Stallone's 'Copland', and Don Cheadle's undercover storyline is like a bad rendition of 'Donnie Brasco' except in a black neighbourhood, drug gang setting. By the time Ellen Barkin graces the screen, you're grimacing going, "what? this is Basher and the Cougar from "Ocean's 13!"

So many good actors cast so badly to play such boring, ordinary roles. It's a travesty this thing got made. Really, it's that bad.

Whatever they were aiming for, it wasn't working because everybody in it was carrying too much luggage from their previous body of work, none of them were particularly likeable and there's no real unifying story. It's like 'Babel'-In-Brooklyn. Or just more plain babble. It has nothing to say about human nature or existence or love or hate or ambition or betrayal or any of that, even though it talks about it and around it. It's pathetic. You'd think the writer decided to do the "full retard".

What's Interesting About It

I rarely say this, but this has nothing interesting about it. Avoid it like the plague. It's not even "so-bad-it's-funny-good". There is nothing redeeming about this picture and it's all the director's fault. This is the worst film I've seen in a very long time.

Okay, Wesley Snipes with cornrows kinda looked 'interesting', but he's still Wesley Snipes.

Toyota's Computers

What The Data Says
Well what do you know?

Federal safety regulators investigating the crash of a Toyota Prius in suburban New York said Thursday that the car’s computer showed no evidence of braking by the driver at the time of the crash.

The driver told police she had been unable to stop the car from speeding and crashing into a stone wall.

The computer indicated that the car’s throttle was “fully open,” according to a statement from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sent investigators to examine the car along with Toyota engineers.

The finding raises the possibility that the car, a 2005 Prius, accelerated because the driver, a 56-year-old housekeeper whose name has not been released, mistakenly pressed the accelerator instead of the brake. The driver was leaving her employer’s driveway in Harrison, N.Y., when the car sped up, crossed a street and hit a wall.

What is unclear is whether the woman depressed the brake after the car sped up and then took her foot off the brake just before the crash. The recorder on the Prius involved captured data only after the air bags deployed, Toyota said.

Last week, Toyota cast doubt on the account of a California man who said his 2008 Prius took him on a 30-mile ride at up to 94 miles an hour. Toyota said evidence obtained from the car did not match the man’s account and showed that the brakes, though severely worn, would have been capable of stopping the car.

Great. They even come with blackbox recorders of driver behaviour. The blackbox account is saying these people are more than playing loose with the truth; they're lying. Why in the world would these people lie about such a thing?

To answer that rhetorical question, oh look, there's this article here from bloody Fox News.

The man who became the face of the Toyota gas pedal scandal this week has a troubled financial past that is leading some to question whether he was wholly truthful in his story.

On Monday, James Sikes called 911 to report that he was behind the wheel of an out-of-control Toyota Prius going 94 mph on a freeway near San Diego. Twenty-three minutes later, a California Highway Patrol officer helped guide him to a stop, a rescue that was captured on videotape.

Since then, it's been learned that:

— Sikes filed for bankruptcy in San Diego in 2008. According to documents, he was more than $700,000 in debt and roughly five months behind in payments on his Prius;

— In 2001, Sikes filed a police report with the Merced County Sheriff's Department for $58,000 in stolen property, including jewelry, a digital video camera and equipment and $24,000 in cash;

— Sikes has hired a law firm, though it has indicated he has no plans to sue Toyota;

— Sikes won $55,000 on television's "The Big Spin" in 2006, Fox40.com reports, and the real estate agent has boasted of celebrity clients such as Constance Ramos of "Extreme Home Makeover."

While authorities say they don't doubt Sikes' account, several bloggers and a man who bought a home from Sikes in 2007 question whether the 61-year-old entrepreneur may have concocted the incident for publicity or for monetary gain.

A man who bought a house in the San Diego area from Sikes in 2007 told FoxNews.com he immediately questioned the circumstances surrounding Monday's incident.

"Immediately I thought this guy has an angle here," the man said on Friday. "But I don't know what the angle is here."

The man, who asked not to be identified, said the home he purchased from Sikes had undisclosed problems that eventually cost him $20,000. He tried to sue in civil court, but Sikes had filed for bankruptcy during the process.

"It got to the point where it wasn't worth me paying legal fees to go after a guy who was broke," he said. "I ate the 20,000 bucks."

The man said Sikes came off as a dishonest businessman who was difficult to work with during the transaction.

"It didn't surprise me," he said of Sikes' recent troubles with his Prius. "I thought this guy is trying to pull a scam here."

Toyota executives, who have talked extensively with Sikes, have said they're "mystified" by Sikes' account.

"It's tough for us to say if we're skeptical," Don Esmond, senior vice president of automotive operations for Toyota Motor Sales, said Thursday. "I'm mystified in how it could happen with the brake override system."

Which just about makes him guilty by suspicion in trial by media, does it not? :)

I guess they now have to drag Akio Toyoda in front of a Senate committee hearing and have him apologise for the stupidity of his customers.

Toyota is quibbling about a misleading shot that US ABC put in their News story on 22 Feb this year. They should be demanding a right to rebut these Senators who came at them with all these crappy claims as if they had any merit. Or pay lots of money to their opponents in the coming elections, regardless of party lines. Just shower money on their opponents gratuitously.

I mean, really.

And oh, look, just as I had predicted, Toyota is now closing plants in America.

The company is planning to shut down the assembly plant in Fremont, Calif., that makes Corollas and the Tacoma compact pickup. The plant closure will throw 4,700 experienced, highly skilled and dedicated employees onto the street during the worst job market since the Depression, and it will jeopardize nearly 20,000 other jobs around the state.

It is a cold and irresponsible act on Toyota’s part, a decision that was not necessary from a business standpoint and that completely disregards the wave of human misery it is setting in motion.

The New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant (generally referred to as NUMMI) began as a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors in 1984. G.M. abandoned the venture when it collapsed into bankruptcy proceedings last year. Toyota declared that the plant was no longer viable because of the absence of G.M. and announced that it would close at the end of this month.

What has not been made clear to the public is that for many years the plant has been used primarily to produce vehicles for Toyota, not General Motors. A report prepared for a state commission that has been seeking to avert the plant closure noted that “G.M. accounted for only 10 percent of the plant’s production last year and an average of 15.4 percent between 2001 and 2009.”

In fact, from Jan. 1 to Feb. 27 this year, with G.M. gone, Toyota produced 61,000 sparkling new vehicles at the plant. That was more than double the 27,000 that were produced in the same period in 2009, when G.M. was part of the operation.

The report, written by Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that “Toyota could easily fill its production lines at NUMMI by building a higher percentage of the Corollas it sells in the U.S.,” or by adding a new model to the plant — a hybrid, for example.

What we’re dealing with here is the kind of corporate treachery toward workers and their local communities that has ruined countless lives over the past several decades and completely undermined the long-term prospects of the economy.

Yeah, right. The last I remembered, the US government took its shots at Toyota, treating its CEO like some two-bit con man. If you start throwing punches, you've got to expect to take a few yourself. This crying over Corporate Greed and what Toyota should be giving back to the community is bovine-faecal-matter printed large.

But you know me, I saw that one coming.

Myth Making

More Claptrap From AFTRS

I know I get a little mean when it comes to my alma mater The Australian Film Television and Radio School. But this piece in ScreenHub today just got my goat.

I have proposed that we should resurrect the debate about our purpose and offered a challenge to our implied assumptions about genre, emotion and entertainment. I’ve also argued that we should not tell our own stories, we should make our myths, and that the difference between our own stories and our myths are scale, dynamics and ownership. I have sketched out some ideas about scale and dynamics, but I have not yet made a case about ownership, because this is where all of the ideas come together.

The notion of ownership is deeply embedded in the phrase ‘tell our own stories’ but the question of who the owner is needs to be confronted here. If the ‘owner’ of the ‘our own stories’ is the person or people with the money to make the movies or the filmmakers who raise the money, then we are ascribing ownership to a very small, and by our own admission, culturally proscribed group of people. Myth on the other hand is owned by everyone it speaks to, and it speaks to humans more broadly than within specific cultures or societies. In order to be a myth is has to be a story bigger than ‘our own’. This does not mean it has to be an American movie.

American movies are based in American myths, and these are not the same as Australian myths. I speak from personal experience here, American’s believe in manifest destiny and Australians do not. Americans are raised to behave as though they could become the president of the United States and Australians are not. American movies uphold the underlying myths of pursuing your destiny or dreams, and taking individual action in the world. So, dynamics and scale come easily to those myth makers, which is why it may seem as though to argue for scale and dynamics is to argue for Americanisms.

But I hope that this is not the case. As David Stratton writes in his review of Blessed in The Weekend Australian on September 12, 2009 “we don’t do Hollywood style movies very well.” However, he has also called 2009 an “annus mirabilis” for Australian film, using a mythically saturated word, miraculous, for a year that has seen some remarkable myth making by Australians. Robert Connolly has mythologised the Balibo five and awakened exactly the sort of energy to work towards ideals that myths are capable of doing. Warwick Thornton has create a mythically resonant tale of indigenous kids sniffing petrol - with an optimistic ending – are these heroes not ideals for all indigenous cultures and their colonisers to work with? Mao’s Last Dancer is classic myth making: the dynamics of a rags to riches/ repression to freedom/struggle to triumph story, with dancing on a spectacular scale. It not only has built in international ownership across the U.S., China and Australia, but it’s a story owned by anyone who strives.

I recently saw a short film called Jacob, made by Dena Curtis, an Indigenous Australian woman. This film was not expensive to make, it is a genre piece, a period film, and its story, which only involves four characters, is on a mythic scale. It tells of a black man who comes home from months of working on the far reaches of the property expecting to see his newborn son for the first time only to find his son has come out white.

This story is much bigger than its protagonist. It is global on the subject of racial injustice. It could have been told about slaves in America, about Korean women after WW2 and on and on. Its dramatic question implies an action – will he accept the baby? Forgive the wife? Kill the landowner? And it has stakes – life and death stakes for the baby, justice and pride stakes for the parents. Inexpensive. Australian. And, because this story could be owned by so many, at any time, in any country and in all of the cultures and ethnicities that make up this country, it is mythic.

Myth making does not mean movies have to be happy or sad, smart or dumb, expensive or cheap, real or surreal. They must have scale, dynamics, and ownership by more than just their makers. Don’t tell our own stories, make our myths.

...And I thought, "Oh come on!" The games we can play with semantics are never-ending but the facts are,  we don't make enough films to know what our myths are. All this theorising and conjecture and is just that. We can begin to talk about Australian myths when we have 1000 films and 10,000 novels worth watching and reading. We're not there yet. Anything short of that is just speculation.

But I guess if you're the head of Screen Studies at AFTRS you have to write *something*. So that's why you have this claptrap parading as theory. This is the same school that when I was there, dared to say "'Science Fiction' is an American Genre" and proceeded to block my science fiction project. It's good to see nothing much has changed. What a colossal waste of government money.

Movie Doubles - 'Monster' & 'The Wrestler'

The Depression Double

Why is it that worthy movies have to be so unrelentingly sad? 'Monster' delivered an Oscar to the beautiful Charlize Theron who made herself immensely unbeautiful with shaved eyebrows, extra weight, prosthetic teeth and monster make up. 'The Wrestler' also delivered a nomination - but not the prize - and a big come back for Mickey Rourke who already only uses a special effects makeup dude who specialises in monster makeup. I'm not complaining about the unbeautifulness of the stars, but merely setting the tone of what you can expect to see when you watch these films.  I'm teaming them up in this Movie Double entry because it occurred to me that they have something in common: unrelenting sadness that culminates in a depressing end and got resounding reviews. After considering the faux-profundity ascribed to 'The Hurt Locker' and 'Revolution Road', I thought that maybe it was worth trying to decode just what it is that critics get out of films like this.

Frankly, I found these films to be so distressing to watch, I got angry at the people who thought they were great and worthy of so much praise. I mean, really. I'd much rather watch 'Avatar'.

Working Against The Beauty Bias

Okay, I know I keep bringing up the beauty bias from time to time to explain how cinema works to convince us of something through our sensitivity to aesthetics. We're more likely to believe or be persuaded by somebody who is better looking. This is why models and actors are used in advertising. We're more likely to like somebody who is better looking. We're more likely to like watching Amy Adams playing Julie Powell than an actress who is a Julie Powell look-alike.

So it is of great interest when a star puts on uglification makeup to play somebody who is a repugnant main character. It underscores the production's desire for the audience not to be persuaded by the main character. That Charlize Theron worked incredibly hard to look as bad as she does in 'Monster' is all on record. Watching the film then is an interesting experience of partial disbelief and partial disgust at the character she plays, but always wondering how much of this is brought upon by just how ugly what we are watching happens to be. It is a tremendous performance. Doubtless she deserved her Oscar for this more than say, Nicole Kidman who won hers with a fake nose. In some ways this transformation is far more frightening and challenging.

Mickey Rourke too comes at his role of Randy with the ugly dial on full. He used to be a leading man, but years of abuse and bad care and plastic surgery has turned him into a very strange looking dude. In this film, he seems to be extending the freak show aspects of his looks to the max. In this case we're dragged through the journey of a man who is so alone an down and out, he almost has no choice but to die in the ring. The process of the film where we discover just how alone he is - his daughter hates him and renounces him and his best bet at a connection is a single mum who is a stripper - is just so awful you wonder if they come up with this stuff just to depress you. They probably do.

A Picture Of Unhappiness

This all got me to be thinking that perhaps this is a grand sort of flattery where the film makers say to the critics, "hey, you think your life is shit? Check this out. See? Your life is GREAT!" And the critics buy it and so they give it 5 stars for being so *worthy* but in the end these films just don't get much back at the box office. I mean, come on, I picked up these flicks on DVD for $10. There were boxes of them at J&B Hi-Fi, waiting to be sold off for a song.

But all this gos to an interesting question about tragedies. Let's say you're going to watch 'King Lear'; you know what's going to happen; you might even know the play intimately, line for line; all the same the process is pretty grueling and unforgiving and then thing s fall apart and King Lear dies. It's really one of the most pathetic story lines in Shakespeare's canon, but there you have it. Why do we put ourselves through this? The leading theory is that it's cathartic to do so. It's something that got taught to me back at High School (and I disagreed with it back then) and I'm not preaching that every film have a happy ending; but why do some of these tragedies have to be so darn miserable, and then they all die? Somebody argued that it as about the sublime, but I never saw what was so sublime about 'King Lear'. I can take 'Hamlet', or 'Othello' or 'Macbeth', but I just never got 'King Lear'.

And this is what these two films remind me of.

Is there anything one is to learn from all this? Is there anything to be learnt about life from a prostitute serial killer who went lesbian that applies to most people's lives? Is there anything that is applicable to your life in a story about a down and out and over the hill pro-wrestler? What I'm arguing I guess, is that if you take Andrei Tarkovsky's dictum that art is the eternal yearning for beauty, then why is it that we can be watching films that can only be described as the eternal yearning for unrelenting ugliness?

Voyeurism Of the Damned

The thing that hit me while watching both these films was the burning question, "Why the hell am I watching this?" I could only put it down to critical acclaim - and had it not been for the critical acclaim, I would have stopped watching in the first 20minutes. It's about as long as I lasted watching 'The Tooth Fairy', and that wasn't even unrelentingly tragic or anything - except for the fact that it got made.

So you watch, hoping to see something pleasurable but it never really materialises. Take Marisa Tomei's character in 'The Wrestler'. She's the stripper/single mom/love interest. She has 4-5 scenes where she is skimpily clad and is doing some pole dancing and what have you. When she was in her 20s, this might have been sexy. She's still good looking, but there's something tired about her character's 'act'. It's certainly not anything to make you think "wow, that's Marisa Tomei doing some pole-dancing". It's more like feeling incredibly sorry for somebody you might have gone through school with and you discover them doing this stuff for a living. You want to avert your gaze but if you did, you're not exactly watching the screen are you?

The whole thing with her character makes you feel like you're being pressed into watching something you don't really want to know about.

Brazen Homosexuality Bad, Repressed Homoerotica Good?

One of the negatives piled up against Charlize Theorn's character Aileen Wuornos apart from the trailer-trash background and the homeless vagabond life and the utter lack of education is her easily swayed course into a lesbian relationship with Selby Wall. The film is pretty judgmental in many ways but it is perhaps meanest on Aileen Wuornos on account of her being unable to keep her sexuality normative. But then her encounters with men as a prostitute are so bruising and painful and hateful that you are forced to understand why a lesbian relationship might offer Wuornos an 'out' from her hellish sexuality. Yet at the same time you get the feeling that she is equally guilty of her crimes as she is in her homosexual relationship with Selby.

In 'The Wrestler', there's something homoerotic going on with the naked men slamming into one another for the sake of spectacle. Of course this is so repressed that the audience is never made to feel uncomfortable about the homoeorticism inherent in the activity. The repression inherent in the ritualisation in pro wrestling allows the homoeroticism to sneak in, but it takes on the guise of something incredibly retarded. It is as if the sexuality is not allowed to grow into adulthood, it's forced to stay in a really stunted state.

In both cases, the gender politics that lurks in both films adds levels of discomfort to the viewing.

How Dramatic Is That Anyway?

I have one additional thing to write about on 'The Wrestler'.

One of the ironic things about 'The Wrestler' is that the actual conflict in wrestling is faked. The guys aren't really slamming the crap out of one another, they're mimicking the act. So is it actually competitive sport? Is it really an accomplishment to 'win' in wrestling? What do any of these things mean in a fake-sport that is actually all theatre?

Which gives rise to the question, where is the drama in all of this? If the film is about an aging boxer making a come back, then there's a drama of will he/won't he win? The conflict in the ring is real. yet, if the conflict in the ring is not real, and all the blood and sweat is for show, what exactly is the great accomplishment or great moment? How different is it from a choreographed piece of dancing?

It might actually be one of the biggest aesthetic ironies mounted in cinema. There's nothing actually at stake in the final ring action in 'The Wrestler'. He's meant to 'win'; they agreed to the result before going in, and nobody's changed the script. He may even die, but he's meant to 'win' no matter what. In that sense, it's not even 'Rocky IV' Why the hell are we watching this?

Movie Doubles - 'The Hurt Locker' & 'Revolutionary Road'

Too Much Of A Good Thing

I touched upon the theme of the formation of the family as an enduring American theme in movies when I wrote about 'Up in the Air' and 'Couples Retreat'. Sometimes a film comes along and dissects such themes and garners critical acclaim, like 'American Beauty'. Thus it is kind of interesting to see 'The Hurt Locker' walk away with Best Director and Best Picture at the Oscars this year with a film that is decidedly about a guy who can't do the family thing. At the same time I picked up 'Revolutionary Road' by Sam Mendes which is also a film about people who end up destroying their own family much like 'American Beauty' but much nastier.

Why do the families fail in these films, and how do such films garner so much critical acclaim? It seemed like worth looking at them in a tandem to pick out some things.

The Myth Of Talent

The more central myth in American cinema over the family may actually be the myth of talent. What both of these films do is to try and place the issues of talent at conflict with the issues of family and proceed to affirm talent. 'The Hurt Locker' is a 2hour long journey into the world of a war zone bomb squad. The long and short of it is that the main character Sergeant Will James is not only good at his job, he's addicted to the rush of doing his job. It seems unlikely, but it is his sheer talent that allows him to diffuse bomb after bomb. At the end of his tour, he goes home to his family, only to choose going out to the field of battle once again. The film is celebrating the unlikely talents of an unlikely man in an extreme situation.

In turn, 'Revolutionary Road' is about a couple, ostensibly in search of talent. Kate Winslet's April wanted to be an actress but failed. Leo DiCaprio's Frank can't figure out what his talent is, until he actually stumbles upon his gift in the language of advertising copy. The film turns on April's strong desire for Frank to discover his true calling, but their situation devolves into a very nasty domestic situation of betrayal and resentment. It makes for torturous viewing.

When you think about it, 'talent' might be single-most praised commodity in American cinema. Pick a film - any film - and the point of the main character would be that they had talent. Not faith or pedigree or education or context or god forbid luck, but talent. From Luke Skywalker down to the cheesiest action hero played by Steven Seagal, the film narrative is predicated upon the idea that the main character is in fact in possession of talent. You'd be surprised at how few stories would or could function without it.

The point about talent in a film like 'The Hurt Locker' is that it goes to affirm the film maker the most. Because the talent that is on display in the film is in fact the silent cipher for the film making community - and the film making community likes to think of itself as being talented in one way shape or form. That it is talent that separates it from all the people with boring office jobs with boring family lives with their boring domestic arguments and boring divorce tragedies - and oh look, we can turn that into a movie... You can see how it might go.

As such, what makes 'Revolutionary Road' so interesting is that it shoves Frank's talent to the back of the concern and dwells on April's deep concern over her lack of talent. The deep concern overwhelms the family and leads to her death. In other words, 'Revolutionary Road' isn't about people without talent, it's actually a tragedy about not having talent. In that sense, it negatively reinforces the predominant discourse about talent in American cinema.

The tragedy it seems might apply to all of us in the real world, so it's hardly a comfort.

Conceit As Charm

I don't know if it is fair to single out these two films in particular to talk about this, but seeing that we've touched upon talent as a theme and issue, it seems pertinent to talk about conceit. Both films present characters that function in relation to talent in a way that can only be described as conceit. Will James is reckless and a loose cannon because he knows he is good and his value as a bomb tech makes him so valuable that he can break a few rules and get away with it. The film celebrates Will James as a rugged individualist hero in a hot combat zone, but in some ways it's a celebration of smug conceit.

Both Frank and April in 'Revolutionary Road' are equally difficult because Frank has the conceit of the talented person without knowing what it might be or care to find out, while April has the conceit of the talented and not the talent to back it up. The truly beautiful moment that unites them in the film is when they decide to embark on a move to Paris and they break the news to people around them an watch the devastating effect their words have. It's fun to share in their conspiratorial moment of their joint conceit. It's a tragedy because they never find a way to back up their words.

What makes 'Revolutionary Road' a cut above the average movie then, is how it introduces the character of John, the insane son of the local realty lady who seems so socially inept he cannot hold back describing things the way he sees it. I guess John has the tragic talent for saying the truth. Frank and April's marriage breaks down essentially because John has the ability to read Frank's change in position and thus John's inevitable ensuing castigation. If anything, John is the most savable character in a movie filled with damnation.

Both films do make one consider the deeper ramifications of conceit  because it seems both the films are arguing that it is conceit that makes people charming, but the conceit has to be backed up by talent.

As a side note, one of the most awful thing about meeting your heroes that are famous people is the pungent conceit they have of you having bothered to go see them; to have consumed their work; and have paid for their house; then they complain about having to face the public as famous people. It's a special kind of awfulness, all of its own, because it's the kind of conceit you wouldn't take from your friends or mates or fellow humans dating back to the school yard. but nobody makes a film about that.

Is This All There Is In Cinema?

Both of these films were highly acclaimed. They're both real drags to watch. I can think of any number of cheerful films I'd rather be watching on any given Saturday. Both films present ordinary life as some kind of evil to be avoided when in fact that is exactly where most of us live; and they offer no particular solutions. They're not interested in engaging us with their theme, they're interested in insulting our intelligences or trying to make us squirm in our ordinary existence. The dripping condescention in both films is a bit much.

It's curious that such films get such high praise from critics. but we'll leave that aside for a moment. What these films tell us about the world we live in is actually much less, and much smaller than we feel when we watch them.

As critically acclaimed films go, they're quite disappointing precisely because they still play with the same old themes that seem to win over the critics. If you're going to denounce the consumerist world, don't you kind of have to go towards 'Fight Club' and denounce everything including talent and conceit? But you didn't see them heaping Oscars and praise on that movie.

War In American Cinema

While 'The Hurt Locker' is overtly about war, 'Revolutionary Road' also touches upon war when on several occasions when Frank talks about the war, and recounts it as the time in his life when he felt most alive. Indeed this sentiment is also the backbone of 'The Hurt Locker' so it seems pertinent to ask what the hell war is to America, at least in its cinema.

Neither film posits any kind of theory of war. They're not there for ideology or a cause. It seems war prevails upon the American citizen and they're obliged to go, only to find out it's actually liberating and fun. I don't know about you but I actually find this a little more than rah-rah bullshit and not particularly insightful.

'The Hurt Locker' is particularly bad because the film isn't terribly anti-war. If anything it's firmly in the corner of condoning war, with perhaps the most surprising thing about is that it's coming from a woman director who presumably hasn't gone to war. The only tragic tone in the film is when American soldiers are killed or hurt. It's not even tragic when the allied British guys get killed - just an obstacle and challenge to be surmounted. As fot the Iraqis who die by the dozens, the film just isn't interested in that. It's a far cry from the First Earth Battalion of  trying to win the hearts and minds of the people.

The bit where wild goats roam the Iraqi streets immediately brought to mind 'The Men Who Stare A Goats'. 'The Hurt Locker' is nowhere near as good. Where 'The Men Who Stare At Goats' ventures to ask questions about war and how we fight them, 'The Hurt Locker' never rises to ask a single existential question about the war itself. The silence on the issue is most telling.

The war - World War II - as it figures in 'Revolutionary Road' is even worse. If ever there was a war that America could lay claim to legitimacy,World War II must have been it, except Frank's experience of it is to relate a contemptible little anecdote about how the First division sang Happy Birthday to him as they marched through Belgium. And it's an anecdote he repeats telling to his neighbors. No accounts of combat. It's as if the Germans just rolled over and died for Frank, and in turn it is as if World War II wasn't even a minor tragedy next to the tragedy of not having talent.

What may be more telling is that World War II is box office death. Perhaps it is because there have been so many more wars since; and as Quentin Tarrantino showed with 'Inglorious Basterds', war depictions in cinema itself is laughably stupid.

I'm not saying all this because I'm a knee-jerk anti-war kind of guy. I'm saying that the rush to praise these films is a little short-sighted. These films are not anywhere near as good as critically acclaimed when it comes to discussing why we fight wars.

Nomar Retires A Red Sox

Saying Goodbye Is Hard

The holy trinity of Shortstops from the late 1990s was something to behold. In the early part of 2000s, Miguel Tejada worked his name into the lofty company of shortstops who seemed to hit OPS120+. Then, A-Rod moved to 3B to play for the Yankees when Aaron Boone (he of that magic homer in 2003) busted his knee in a pick-up game and the Rangers dumped salary on the Yankees, and the next thing you knew, Nomar was traded away for Orlando Cabrera and moved off short for 3B that was that.

Now Nomar's retiring.

Epstein, who grew up in the Boston area, knew the risk he was taking by trading away the shortstop who had been the most popular player on the team.

“We’ve been fortunate over the years to maintain a relationship after the trade,” Epstein said. “I think both of us understood at the time that it wasn’t about Nomar and it wasn’t about me. It was just baseball trades that happen. They’re about what’s going on with the team at the time and certain things that had to happen. But, it didn’t change what Nomar meant to the Red Sox.”

Terry Francona, who led the team to a World Series title in his rookie season as Red Sox manager, saw just the last few months of Garciaparra’s time at Fenway Park.

“His last part in Boston was tough,” Francona said. “He was kind of Boston-ed out. It had kind of wore on him for whatever reasons. Sometimes it’s time to move on. That doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. I think the fact he’s come back kind of shows that.”

Garciaparra’s teammates—the beneficiaries of his acrobatic defense and clutch hitting—found it appropriate that he retired in a Boston uniform.

“He was a Red Sox for a long time and I think he’ll always be remembered as a Red Sox,” said pitcher Tim Wakefield(notes), who was Garciaparra’s teammate for the shortstop’s entire stay in Boston. “For the organization to sign him to a one-day deal and have him retire as a Red Sox is pretty special. I’m really happy for him. I wish he was still playing but sometimes our careers take different paths.”

Garciaparra threw out the ceremonial first pitch before Wednesday’s game against the Tampa Bay Rays, with former Red Sox and Georgia Tech teammate Jason Varitek(notes) catching.

“Nomar will always hold a special place in Red Sox history and in the hearts of Red Sox Nation,” owner John Henry said. “His accomplishments on the field and in the community place him among the greatest players to wear a Red Sox uniform. We are very appreciative that Nomar is ending his career where it began.”

Garciaparra spent the past five seasons with the Cubs, Dodgers and A’s. He had a .313 career average with 229 home runs and 936 RBIs.

Garciaparra was in the thick of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry but always earned the respect of his opponents in New York.

“I always enjoyed playing against Boston because of Nomar,” Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter(notes) said. “I used to enjoy being mentioned with him.”

Added Rodriguez: “I love Nomar. He’s a great player and a friend.”

At last he got his weish and retired a Red Sox. Let the Hall of Fame discussions begin. Good peak, not enough duration. I can just see it now.

It's a shame, really. I would have preferred an alternative universe where Nomar stayed on with the Red Sox and the Red Sox never won the World Series... but I'm a Yankees fan, what do you expect?

Now that he's gone, it's feeling really quite empty. It's hard to get worked up about Dustin Pedroia versus Robinson Cano. Dice-K versus Kei Igawa was a no contest and there's really not much to the rest of it. Time just keeps flowing, I guess.

Julie & Julia

The Foodie Movie

A movie all about cooking. I don't know why I watched it except it had good people in it, so you think there must be a reason they're in it.

What's Good About It

The acting. Meryl Streep is a little over the top as Julia child, but the rest of the cast is really good. It would be hard for Meryl Streep at this point of her glorious career to find a way of doing something that doesn't come over as mannered - but she *is* Meryl Streep so you never forget just who it is doing the acting on screen. Stanley Tucci turns in another remarkable performance and it's nice to see Amy Adams do something a bit more light-hearted and not so scowling and distressed as she was in 'Doubt'. Maybe Amy Adams is too cute for the role, but that's like complaining that icing on a cake might be too sweet.

The writing is good and and brisk. Some of it has echoes of Ephron's other work, such as 'Sleepless in Seattle' wherein it is assumed the world of women is totally inexplicable to the world of men and vice versa. It might be true, it might be even slightly or greatly exaggerated, but it is noticeable Ephron. Familiarity is not such a bad thing.

There are a lot of good shots of food being prepared and cooked, and the period scenes in Paris are quite nicely done.

What's Bad About It

Call me a grumpy old man but I sort of wonder if there's enough substance in the story of a girl who cooks and eats her way through a mighty tome of cooking, intercut with how the mighty tome was penned. I constantly felt hungry, but wondered if there was ever going to be more about the nature of food than we like eating delicious stuff.

The film actually goes nowhere near a consideration of what drives us to seek more interesting combinations for our culinary delight. It just prosaically examines aspects of Julia Child's struggle to get training or Julie learning to poach an egg properly.

I mean, there's got to be more to all of this than taste itself, right?

One more thing. There's a scene featuring a McCarthy-ist inquisition that appears briefly. It's nowhere near menacing enough. The whole film is so gentle you never feel anybody is in any kind of real jeopardy. I'm not sure if this works.

What's Interesting About It

I'm still thinking. Wait a minute... nup... it's gone. This one is way too light. But it's pleasant.

Blogging, Writing, Ecriture

Wait, I thought of something. Under the guise of it being about cooking, the film actually might be a meditation on writing. The central undertaking portrayed in this film appears to b about cooking, but easily missed are the arduous task of writing the cookbook that Julia Child undertook with Simone Beck, and the sustained effort of blogging undertaken by Julie Powell.

As such, it might have a cinematic parallel to something like 'Capote' or 'Barton Fink' or 'Throw Momma From The Train'. Perhaps it is the first time blogging featured as a plot device in a feature film - it's hard to say.

Here's the original Blog. A sample of Julie Powell's writing goes (randomly selected off the page):

The less fun bit about being old crazy and worn out is the worn out bit.  I am one creaky, achey sunnofabitch these days.  Of course it didn’t help that after driving down to DC in our rental car, and getting a wee bit bent out of shape trying to negotiate its fucking frenchie streets, and having a very late dinner (the duck confit and mmmmmmm potatoes with bacon, in a French bistro that could have been Dallas.  In fact everything in DC seems like Dallas, or maybe the whole United States seems like Dallas after New York – all the huge cavernous restaurants with the kitschy themes, and the people in them smoking, and the silly kids lined up in front of silly nightclubs – one of the great things about living in New York is that even if you never go out clubbing once in your entire life, you can still feel superior snubbing every other place’s nightlife as bush-league), while we were walking back to the hotel, I managed to smash full on into a street light.  The reason I managed to do this was that I was looking back over my shoulder at something called a “Buddy-cam” in a shop window – it appeared to be video from a camera strapped to a dog, but I doubted its veracity.  This was lucky, because if I’d run into it full-on, my face would now be bisected by the jagged edge of the street sign affixed to the lamp pole.  As it is, only the back of my skull is bisected.  And I’ve got this enormous knot on my thigh, which hurts like a sonofabitch.  Of course this leaves out that one presumes if I was not walking while looking backward, I would not have run into the pole at all.  And isn’t this what husbands are for, to keep you from doing stupid shit like that?

Anyway, I spent the rest of the weekend pathetically achey and creaky and old and worn out and maybe just a little bit crazy.  We went to the Smithsonian for a performance of “Bon Appetit,” an operetta based on an episode of “The French Chef.”  The mezzo playing Julia was just fabulous, and game as all hell – she sang, and beat egg whites by hand, while being rolled across the stage in an office chair because she’d broken her ankle, and coughing between arias, because she had a terrible cold.  See, to me, that’s what it’s all about.  Brava, say I.  And Rayna, the lovely woman from the Smithsonian who curated the Julia Child exhibit there, had seats reserved in the front row for Eric and me, which was a little embarrassing, but pretty damn neat too.  And after there was coffee and chocolate cake, and I was recognized for the first time (I imagine because of the reserved seats.)  The woman also known in blog comments as Reba was incredibly gracious and sweet and what she said by way of her feelings about the blog meant a lot to me, so I have to apologize, Reba, because I was not particularly sparkling or wise or even cogent.  It was my first time, so I was a little flummoxed.  Plus, of course, the old crazy and worn out thing.

So a great time was had by all in DC – though we didn’t get to the International Spy Museum, which was sort of our whole reason for coming.  You wouldn’t believe the lines.  Lines, when you are old, seem just too much to deal with.

She sure has a lot of gusto for the writing bit. It's admirable - and I sort of wish the film dwelt a little bit more on that part. There actually is a lot of thought about life experiences on her blog that's really quite insightful and you can see why she would draw the kind of interest that led to book deals. It's a shame not much of that made the movie.

Movie Doubles - 'Up In The Air' & 'Couples Retreat'

Paens To Emotional Retardation

I haven't done a movie double for a while so I thought I might tackle one here, just for the heck of it. I am sort of being chased back into thinking about cinema a bit more these days because basically, having won it all in 2009, the Yankees are oddly unexciting to me this year.I've hardly followed the Spring Training narrative this year and feel oddly detached from that part of my blog-life.

It's occurred to me perhaps that the problems of my own life stem from the fact that I have an enduring love for things, that I acquired in my childhood and teenage years, that I still don't relinquish - and that perhaps this is symptomatic of my own emotional retardation. I don't know how much stock people can put into the notion of emotional retardation any more than they can put stock in Emotional Intelligence, but I thought I'd throw that out there just for a thought.

One of the big myths in psychology is the mid-life crisis which manifests itself in Hollywood plot-lines with regularity and indiscriminate stereotyping of people who undergo this phenomenon where their marriages break down out of ennui and the next thing you know they're doing something radically different. How feasible is this in the real world? How often can such apparently random transformations be supported in our lives?

Which brings me to two recent films that can only be described as paens to emotional retardation.

How Emotionally Retarded Is This, Exactly?

'Up In The Air' is that rare American film that does not end with the formation of a family. Not even as a surrogate. In that sense it is already a film that busts out of the box of American cinema, even with George Clooney playing the main character who seems suave and impervious to the threats of his own lifestyle. He has a moment of reconsideration which sits in diametrical opposition to the Natalie character who persuades him to consider a more mundane existence. And yet, through no choice of his own, he sets off again on an endless voyage through the turnstiles of airports and interiors of airplanes.

The picture the film paints of a life of a traveling professional is at once bleak and inviting. It's true that when you're on the road for work, you become strangely detached from the world and the distance allows you to coolly dismiss values and cohesion with a wider society. It's no secret that a lot of us would choose to be such travelers, even if it meant we were sacking people across a big country, feeding off their tragedies. The interesting thing about 'Up In The Air' is just how beautiful a case it makes for such detachment. It is exactly the sublime and the dharma on the road that Kerouac writes about. It is an outward journey, if built on some mundane means.

In contrast to the endless vagabond road in 'Up In The Air', 'Couples Retreat' single-mindedly converges on an island resort in the tropics where couples undergo therapy that would scare most couples, just to find out how screwed up their relationships are. The search for meaning in their relationships reveal the comic boredom of married life in Suburban America, and the only thing that seems capable of redeeming them is their abreaction to European accents.

'Couples Retreat' is in strong contrast to 'Up In The Air', a very homeward bound journey. All the characters are actually on the road to affirm and re-affirm the values of their homes and hearths. The comedy arises from the essential disconnect between how much value is placed on the ideal and the cheesiness of the lives of the people who set out on the quest.

American Vernacular

Dialogue and the misdirection that ensues from the mis-communication forms a great deal of the interest in 'Up In The Air'. Most films have dialogue to express non-visual abstractions; because if it's visible, then it's film-able and that solves most issues. When a film is as emotionally abstracted (and not in the Sharon-Stone-Emotionally-Cubist, sense I might add) the net effect of characters conversing on screen becomes very abstruse and obscure.

American vernacular is at once the language of Pax Americana but also the repository of the most obnoxious and vicious corporatese and cliches. Americans invent vernacular with gay abandon as if the English language is infinitely elastic in meaning. So Clooney's character slides and elides through all the tough conversations of sacking people - on behalf of the linguistically challenged. He then meets a woman who is equally dissociated from the words she is using.

What makes Clooney's character interesting to watch is the amount of self-awareness he displays about the dys-functionality of sacking people gently.

Meanwhile, we find 'Couples Retreat' is also filled with corporatese cliches that drive 4 couples on to the plot device of going to a resort island for therapy. One of the couples resorts to presenting the idea with a Power Point presentation to convince their friends and the pathos that comes out of it is awful, which I figure is where the black laughs come in. It's a little hard to talk about substantial issues of the heart when the language itself is infested with these half-digested, re-regurgitated shards of American advertising floating around the conversation.

The impenetrable vulgarity of the language is therefore where so much of the irony resides in both films, and that can only be put down to the triumph and decay of the American vernacular. I only wanted to point this out with these two films because they actually show this problem more than many films in recent memory.

The Anxiety Over Boredom

Both films are coming at a very similar problem and it is boredom in life. No matter how passionate the initial feelings, a passionate love always is under threat from receding into boredom. The couples in 'Couples Retreat' are struggling with this issue as every bit as George Clooney's Ryan Bingham and his siblings and friends.

The creeping ennui in couplehood and matrimony drives the 4 couples to a strange retreat which so happens to be on a tropic paradise but is more threatening than a trip to that orgy night in Kurbick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'. All the characters are struggling with the anxiety of boredom in a palpable way. Ryan Bingham in 'Up in the Air' hooks up with a woman Alex who seems like the ideal woman for him, only to find out she too is looking for some way to overcome the anxiety of boredom in her 'real' life back home in Chicago.

The extremes these characters go to in both films is exactly what connects these films thematically. We live in fear of the boredom when it is actually within us to be so boring to others.

Tangential to this issue is the inability to separate stimulation from interest. If you play guitar, that's interest. If you play Guitar Hero, that's mere stimulation. Yet, one of the important plot lines revolves around Vince Vaughn's characters being able to better play 'Guitar Hero' than the concierge of the retreat.

Ryan Bingham has made traveling itself an end in order to not face the boredom - replacing it with another. The seeming mystery of passing through airport check-ins and body scans and luggage pickups (and we all know there has to be a skill in that) all serves to create a whole bunch of business for him not to face the boredom of his life. It's really strange to watch 2 films back-to-back that are centered around this same anxiety.

Minimalism and Consumerism

The solution to the Anxiety of Boredom presented in both films then is interesting. Bingham's choice in 'Up In The Air' is to stoically pare back his own life to the point of minimalism and utter lack of connections. We can't tell whether the ambivalence stems from a desire to embrace the minimal or a desire to flee the complex. The texture of that minimalism isn't actually all that inviting in the film. If he didn't wash and iron his suits, he's next door to being homeless and without any taste whatsoever.

By contrast, the 'Couples Retreat' solution seems to be an embrace of consumerism in the hopes that something you will purchase along the way, whether it is an object or an experience, will make you feel better. It's a little more than an excuse to keep playing the game, but play the game they do. This is a decidedly un-philosophical, un-thinking un-reflective movie when it comes to the underlying assumptions of contemporary society. Consider this: if it was possible to buy the experience of wind-surfing or jet-skiing at a resort where next week somebody else will purchase tho experiences, what actually makes that experience particularly uniquely your own? Isn't this the problem with tourism rather than traveling?

At least Bingham is traveling. He's just not looking; mostly because he might see something that captures him. The couples in 'Couples Retreat' are trying to spend their way to Nirvana.

Assumptions About The Inner Spirit

Maybe it's better to understand both these films as yearning for spirituality. 'Up In The Air' makes a case for detachment a la Buddhism, only to falter and pick up again. 'Couples Retreat' seems to make a case for New Age-ism, but a closer inspection reveals the consumerist never quite dies in the American quest for Spiritualism. It's like that Woody Allen joke where he says his goal is to forge in the fiery smithy of his inner soul the zeitgeist of his generation, then mass produce it as a sell-through high volume product.

'Up In The Air' actually makes a reasonable case for detachment and discarding connections. It's just that the connection between the asceticism and the hedonism are never fully extinguished, which makes for drama. The most telling moment might be when Bingham flies to Chicago to find commitment to the world, only to find that Alex has connections of her own already. Therein lies the drama an betrayal, but it's also oddly discomforting. It's a good, memorable moment - one of the best in Clooney's career.

'Couples Retreat' says it's looking for the inner animal spirit, but once again, if you can just buy it off a shelf from a guru, what exactly is the point in that purchase. Maybe I'm being a little harsh on what is at best a lowbrow comedy, but it strikes one as pretty bad pretension to raise the issue and then just not deal with it except as forms and bullshit. It's not like we as the audience brought up this stuff.

It's interesting that both these films proceed on the assumption there is the spiritual and make various gestures towards it and the metaphysical, and then proceed on a largely materialist journey. I love America, but sometimes the bleak, barren-ness of the American cultural psyche scares the living daylights out of me.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

More Than A Feeling

You can watch a lot of movies before somebody makes a film that delivers everything you personally need in a movie. It's hard to say what that is for most people. I know a guy who swears by 'Equilibrium' as the high point of science fiction cinema - a view I don't share, but the film hits all the marks he's looking for in a film. As somebody who works in fiction, I'm actually hard to satisfy because I'm often watching somebody's handiwork with their fingerprints all over the material.

So it sometimes comes as a surprise when a film is not only good, but good in exactly the right way. This is that film for me this year; and believe it or not I think I like it much more than 'Avatar 3D'. Yes, 'Avatar' is a great movie, but 'The Men Who Stare At Goats' hits upon so many things about life that it leaves me agog in wonderment.

Will it be that good for you? I don't know. But it's pretty darn good for me.

What's Good About It

There are so many good things about the film but for me it actually begins with casting. The casting of Ewan McGregor as Bob, Jeff Bridges as Bill, and George Clooney as Lyn are inspired and reach out so far beyond the text on the screen. Ewan McGregor carries into this film the baggage of having played the younger Obi-Wan Kenobi, right into the heart of dialogue where Jedi Warriors are discussed. Jeff Bridges brings with him the considerable cult status legacy of having played The Dude in 'The Big Lebowski', and pretty much extends the Dude persona out through the US Army. And to complete the Coen Brothers echoes, George Clooney plays a character with the same kind of manic self-obsession and focus that he played for the Coen Brothers in 'O Brother Where Art Thou?' and 'Intolerable Cruelty'.

The casting is so good, the material plays like the proverbial "It writes itself".

Also good is the weaving of the irony of the casting against the apparent seriousness of the back story. The story is based on a book that looked at the US Army's attempts at extreme projects, while the film playfully explores those projects as an extension of the Big Lebowski Dude's exploration. It is a little like the revenge of the Hippie Ethos, coming back to rescue us from the spiritual malaise of living during a War on Terror. And boy do we need it badly.

What's Bad About It

Technical faults in the direction. I hate movies that "cross the imaginary line". The director's job is to not cross that line. I hate eye lines that don't match Left & Right. It's the most basic part of the director's job not to screw this up. I mean, if you can't get this stuff right, you're not a director.

The film is great in spite of the director is all I can conclude from watching this film twice now.

What's Interesting About It

First there is the parodic dimension to the road movie into Iraq at the height of the Iraq war. His home destroyed by a man with a mechanical arm - surely a Darth Vader reference - Bob goes to war, only to find it's not what he expected. Instead he hooks up with Lyn Cassidy who comes to him allegedly full of ESP powers from along gone unit - clearly Lyn's Obi Wan, and Bob is Luke. It's Star Wars. So off they go, wandering over the desert which may as well be Tatooine, until they land in the secret base - the Death Star anybody? - where they rescue goats and Iraqi prisoners. While the story isn't beat for beat Star Wars, the plot elements conspire to bring forth the mirth and the farce is indeed strong in this one.

How good can a parody really be? This film shows that if you don't do it by every story beat, but through characters and situations, then it can be quite fruitful. All the critics who thought the references were heavy-handed probably are Star Wars geeks themselves. All the critics saying they didn't get the Star Wars references need to get their heads checked. In any case, this is a wonderful re-writing of that text. This film is to 'Star Wars' what 'Son of Rambow' is to 'First Blood'.

Young At Heart

Secondly, there is the actual irreverence towards ESP and the paranormal. When I read an excerpt of the book years ago, I found the notion of the US Army investing in such projects as the 'First Earth Battalion' to be creepy more than anything else. Mixed in with reference to projects such as MK-Ultra which involved LSD and Majik 12, you have the picture of creepiness that gives rise to an uneasy conspiracy theory set, which is also quite queasy-making when you look into it. The film manages to turn it all round and treat it with such irreverence that you never actually feel sick about it. Instead the film invites the audience to laugh at the idiocy of the US Army trying to harness the Psi factor for warfare, which somehow banishes the creepiness right out of the picture. Except if you watch closely, you come to realise the film is saying that the Lyn Cassidy character is right, the cynics are wrong.

Where The Mind Goes

Thirdly, the film is actually an appeal to one's inner irrationalist. Not everything in life is rational or calculated. Your intuition can lead you to wonderful and magnificent things, the film seems to argue. The whole section explaining Bill's journey through the various kooky ideas from the 60s and 70s is priceless.

Sometimes I wonder where all that intellectual energy went. All that free love and reaching out to other living beings and expanding consciousness and compassion and "using the right side of your brain" and all that. I guess it's all coalesced in the Adyar bookshop or something and so can be safely ignored. The prosaic, materialist, arch-conservative, AIDS-riddled, 'Greed is Good' 1980s sure as hell sucked. Don't get nostalgic about that decade boys and girls, it's bad for your soul.

Some Thoughts About That Song

Don't laugh, but I've always associated the Boston song 'More Than A Feeling' with something deeply nostalgic. The song was already nostalgic when it hit the air waves and its been nothing but gaining even more glowing nostalgia since. Yet of all the nostalgic things I can think about this song, perhaps my favorite will be George Clooney's Lyn Cassidy doing 'remote viewing' with a beer in hand. It's a splendidly appropriate song to have picked.

Look, go see it if you loved Star Wars. Go see it if you didn't. It's a good movie that means so well. It tells us deep down, we can all be members of the First Earth Army. We are all born to be Jedis if we want to be. George Lucas would be spinning in his grave, if only he were dead.