The Film Doctor

Notable film and media links--November 12, 2009--special apocalyptic peak oil edition

2009-11-12T09:10:00.010-05:00

---Icons of grunge. Where are they now?

---2012 by way of Raising Arizona (with thanks to The Cooler). Emmerich justifies his weltschmerz. NASA spoils the fun by debunking apocalyptic 2012 myths. Lastly, behind the scenes of 2012.

---For those who really want to dwell on upcoming doom, check out Collapse. As Matt Cardin points out,

"It’s probably difficult or impossible for somebody who hasn’t been following the peak oil story for the past several years to understand the depth of the “Holy crap” feeling that many of us are experiencing right now. A large part of that feeling comes simply from the fact that, as I’ve mentioned here before, lots of things appear to be playing out according to the long-forecasted “plan,” including, most prominently, the expected development in which oil-and-energy issues have moved to the forefront of public discourse. Of course that has nothing, or at least not much, to do with the question of whether peak oil is actually “real” — a word that raises the need to distinguish between peak oil, the geological phenomenon, and peak oil, the theory that ties oil’s fortunes to the very survival of growth-based economies and industrial-technological civilization. In our ever-intensifying age of 24/7 digital linkage and global conversation, it’s impossible to ferret out how much of what we’re collectively thinking and feeling comes from reality itself, as in, the reality outside the media web, and how much is simply a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

What’s incontrovertible is that we’re right now living through the giddiest age of apocalyptic cultural ferment that any of us have ever experienced. I think it’s safe to say that it tops the ones that accompanied the turn of the 20th century, and the advent of World Wars I and II, and the Depression era, and the social and cultural upheavals and meltdowns of the sixties and seventies, and the turn of the 21st century. It even tops 9/11, although in fact it incorporates the 9/11 feeling of an imminent breakdown in everything. Maybe the only thing that equals it is the nuclear terror of the Cold War era. Because now, as then, the fear isn’t just of a national or international breakdown or some such thing (although obviously that one is currently in play, too) but of a show-stopping calamity that would write “The End” on the last page of the book that is the human race, or at least on the book that is civilization as we have known for at least a century or two (since the full implementation of the Adam Smithian economic growth model and the rise of technocratic industrialism). The ecological term “die-off” has gained currency. The word “collapse” is on everybody’s minds and lips."

---Never fear, however, because now we have a dozen ways to avoid death.

---David Bordwell appreciates the visual pleasures of 1930s cinema.

---Behind the scenes of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance."

---The New York Times deeply considers the phenomenon known as Megan Fox.

---Good to see Richard Kelly getting some credit.

---Godard's intertitles. Also Godard largely doing nothing for three and a half minutes (not that I have anything against procrastination).

---Salon's Woody Harrelson interview:

"Then he got into bed. There wasn't an ounce of pretense about any of this, I swear. He was curious to get a look at that old apartment, and felt like telling me about it. He was tired, so he got into bed. When you meet Harrelson, you get a momentary glimpse of what a strange and exhausting job it must be to be famous. The job involves meeting an endless ocean of people you don't know and most likely will never see again. The obvious solution would be to retreat behind a well-rehearsed performance of your persona, to recycle a handful of gestures and mannerisms.

Harrelson, on the other hand, seems like a guy totally determined not to let the artificiality of these interactions impinge on his sense of who he is. Perversely, the fact that he is frank and thoughtful, and known to hold unorthodox political opinions he doesn't keep to himself, has only augmented his fame. You can't throw an empty Chardonnay bottle out your car window in west L.A. without hitting a Hollywood liberal, but Harrelson is something much rarer: a vegan, raw-foodist, antiwar, anti-capitalist, pro-marijuana, eco-funky, genuine radical who happens to be a beloved character actor with a good-ol'-boy demeanor."

---Lastly, the coolest movie ever adapted from a questionable book.

Pushing our buttons: a review of Richard Kelly's The Box

2009-11-07T09:16:00.033-05:00

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

--Arthur C. Clarke

1) I found Richard Kelly's The Box annoying in a direct ratio to my admiration of his Donnie Darko (2001). The former cult film combines apocalyptic vision, the delusions of insanity, and a loose story structure that invited multiple interpretations, and yet the film works. It left me wondering--why aren't more movies made in this fashion? The answer may be that some do, but instead of hinting at some semi-plausible cosmic convergence of sci-fi portals, time travel, and the manipulated dead, you can just as easily end up with a pretentious mess.

2) The Box carries multiple allusions to Donnie Darko, but the new one's plot came from a Twilight Zone episode called Button, Button, which makes Kelly's two hour film seem a simple conceit much inflated with portentous metaphysical hoorah. In the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, in 1976, someone leaves a box on the front door step of the Lewis residence. The box contains a "button unit" that gives Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) the opportunity to win a million dollars if they press the button. Unfortunately, someone on earth has to die at the same time they press the button, but that's for their conscience to deal with, and, as the mysterious Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) assures them, they won't know the person who dies. Arlington stops by a 5 pm that day to talk over the button unit's rules and restrictions with Norma. He has half of his face blown away by a lightning bolt (in case we didn't already get a sense of unease in all of this Faustian deal-making), but Arlington assures Norma that he's not a monster, and besides, the Lewis family could use the money.

3) As one might guess, after Norma impulsively presses the button, things go downhill for the Lewises. They do get the million dollars in a briefcase, but now they guilt consumes them. Their bland son Walter (Sam Oz Stone) wonders what's going on as dad hastens to lock the money in a safe down in the basement, and creepy things begin to occur. During a wedding rehearsal dinner, Arthur accidentally (?) receives a present much like the original box that contains a photo of Arlington Steward. The baby sitter asks Lewis "Is someone pushing your buttons?" before she suffers a nosebleed and passes out in his hotrod Corvette. The more the Lewises try to investigate Arlington, the more he notifies them that he knows exactly what's going on, and pretty soon we've reentered a David Lynchian Darko-enhanced metaphysical dreamworld.

4) Given the family resemblance to Donnie Darko, The Box should be a delight, but several things about it bothered me. I had a hard time getting caught up in the Lewis' contrived plight. Poor Cameron Diaz spends much of her time weeping and looking concerned and guilty with tacky blue eyeliner. Her career has had its highs and lows (Sofia Coppola's mockery of Cameron in Lost in Translation comes to mind), but Diaz deserves more for helping greenlight The Box by her agreement to star in it. Even though she presses the button, Norma seems more tricked than really guilty of anything, and her performance is 90% angst. At one point, just to add insult to injury, Norma's son points out that she's "old, kind of a geezer" in front of his friends at the bus stop.

5) And what of the 1970s period detail? I enjoyed the glimpses of Diff'rent Strokes and the crying Native American PSA on the television, but Richard Kelly admits in an interview that he was too young to remember the 1970s, so the details are not as organically included as the 1980s were in Darko. Much of the time, the decade touches just look tacky.

6) Underneath all of the metaphysical/scientific huggermuggery, all of the spooky people looming out of hotel rooms and library carrels, the No Exit by Sartre references, and the NASA preparations to land a robot on Mars, The Box frequently relies on cheap techniques to get its effects. We have seen the million dollars in a briefcase before (even though all of the hundred dollar bills left me wondering if a real million dollars would fit in a briefcase that small). As the film goes on (oblique spoiler alert), the mysterious Arlington Steward takes on the Dr. Evil trappings of a gigantic underground chamber in the Arlington Air Force base to look nefarious in. At times, I couldn't help to associate him with his performance as Nixon in Frost/Nixon, a role that I didn't find all that convincing, and his formal winter clothes and old-fashioned homburg left me thinking of Peter Sellers' Chance the Gardener in Being There. The Lewis son has no real role except to be menaced later, and the forced drama late in the film seems way too manipulative and convenient to logically fit into any cosmic master plan.

7) After getting burned by the bombing of Southland Tales (2006), Richard Kelly has decided to toe the line and adapt his visionary aesthetics to the studio system. I don't blame him for that, but I wonder how much his decision compromised The Box. Instead of creating something genuinely prophetic (as Darko foreshadowed 9/11), The Box keeps calling attention to its attempts to amaze us, thereby diminishing the effect. When someone says to Arlington at one point, "This is all so mysterious," he replies "Well, I like mystery. Don't you?"

Notable film and media links--November 6, 2009

2009-11-06T10:27:00.004-05:00

---How you can tell that Charles Bronson is a man.

---Recommended reading: Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Polito. In a review of the new book, Howard Hampton notes some surprising aspects of Farber's critical method:

"1) The notion of what movie to see and what to avoid is secondary to opening up new ways of looking at the familiar and the overlooked.

2) He steadfastly refuses hero worship: "To put Hitchcock either up or down isn't the point; the point is sticking to the material as it is, rather than drooling over behind-the-camera feats of engineering."

3) He has scant interest in narrative, either of plot-driven or symbolic/sociopolitical kinds, and is more taken with spatial dynamics than happy endings or movie martyrdoms.

4) He has a nonchalant way of rolling out a convoluted 20th century landscape in which Godard meets Dick Tracy, Anthony Mann carries more weight than John Ford, and the scummy cesspools of Don Siegel beckon like an old Esther Williams water ballet. Indeed, Farber had a special knack for creating a mental space where everything exists in the same eternal present tense, the 1932 "Scarface" and the 1970 acid gangster trip "Performance," Boris Karloff and Mick Jagger sounding like long-lost brothers-in-arms waving to each other across the Warner Bros. lot."

---50 iconic movie stills.

---An interview with Richard Kelly.

---The internet is killing storytelling and privacy, Twitter is killing blogging, but at least zombies are doing well.

---David Lynch's rabbits stole the show in Inland Empire.

---I miss grunge (and I'm wearing flannel as I write this).

---I really enjoyed Richard Brody's profile on Wes Anderson. Too bad there's no decent link yet. Here's a quote from it:

"As an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in philosophy, Anderson remained movie-obsessed, working part time as a projectionist. (His conversation is liberally seasoned with film references, from John Ford's 1935 comedy The Whole Town's Talking to Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, which, he argues, marked the beginning of the French New Wave.) In Austin, Anderson met Owen Wilson, an English major, in a playwriting class. Wilson noticed Anderson sitting by himself, away from the table where the other students gathered, wearing `L.L. Bean boots with long corduroy-type shorts.'"

---Single take titles.

---Beware of cute overload, or kangaroos for that matter.

---Marlene rules.

---Oops! Publishers Weekly forgot to include a female writer.

---Andrew O'Hehir notes the resurgence of the British indie-film industry.

---Lastly, when movies mention their titles.

Grunge Mutations from Outer Space: Alien: Resurrection starring Winona Ryder and Sigourney Weaver (1997)

2009-11-01T06:52:00.021-05:00

[The Film Doctor figures that if he just posts these last few time capsule reviews from 1997, then that will oblige him to return to the local Regal Stadium cineplex.]

Now into its fourth installment, the Alien series suffers from its success. Both Event Horizon and Mimic borrowed from its peekaboo horror/sci-fi technique this summer, and by now everyone knows what the alien looks like so there's no returning to the first movie's mysterious, very slow unfolding of a very Darwinian character (I can remember back in 1979 sitting in a crowded theater in Tennessee as everyone started whispering "Now it's going to pop out of his chest!"). That scene has already been lampooned in Mel Brook's Spaceballs when the baby alien pops out to dance a little soft shoe on the counter. The second Alien movie by James Cameron struck me as too Reagan-era militaristic, and hardly anyone saw the third one where Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) dies.

So what do you do now? Apparently you hire a young hip French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who made City of Lost Children) and Winona Ryder who gets to play against ingenue type. Then you bring back Sigourney Weaver (who also co-produces) through the magic of DNA cloning, add some crazy military scientists who want to breed "tamed" aliens for profit, throw them all into another large grungy spaceship, and see what happens. This time Ripley's DNA replicate gets her genes crossed with the aliens themselves, turning her in an "alien" mother (strictly C-section births here, through the chest). The twisted military scientists all act like bit players from a Star Trek convention, each with a moronic gleam in his eye as if space people suffered from some major intergalactic inbreeding since Ripley died two hundred years ago in the future. Their Frankensteinian silliness almost wrecks the beginning of the film.

Fortunately, Winona Ryder (who plays Annalee Call) and a lovable Han Solo-like trader crew of misfits show up in the smaller spaceship Betty with a secret cache of human bodies designed to aid in alien growth. This crew redefines futuristic grunge. They all have great grimy leather clothes, lewd attitudes (except for Annalee), and inventive weapons--one fellow has a jeeplike wheelchair with the parts of a gun in assorted positions around his legs; another Tom Waits-like guy named Johner (Ron Perlman) with flamboyant scars on his face carries a rocket launching device in a thermos. He walks up to Weaver as she plays basketball, and all of a sudden the movie clicks. When Ripley circles around him like an anaconda, half-grinning, full of tease and menace, you realize why the men are necessarily such fools.

By virtue of her alien blood, Ripley becomes a feminist hero par excellence. Since she can play both sides of the fence, so to speak, and go hang out with her alien children if she likes, she doesn't care so much about the danger. She doesn't even carry a weapon. Instead she just struts around bare armed and making wisecracks. Who's going to mess with her? And yet her machismo does contain elements of motherly compassion. In once scene, she finds the L-7 room full of abortive genetic creatures who led the way to her mutation, all of them female, some still alive. She walks up to one grotesquely malformed "woman" on a table who begs to be killed, and in response, Ripley torches the whole room.

Resurrection takes the Darwinian principle of the first Alien one step further by depicting the mutability of species. People and aliens metamorphose into each other repeatedly, allowing the filmmakers to explore the positive and negative side effects of adaptation. In this context, Ripley revolts against the male scientists who would treat feminine reproduction as a dehumanized genetic factory. Johner (the Tom Waits goon) takes one look at the room full of burnt female mutations and mutters "It must be a chick thing."

In turn very funny, very gory, and at other times derivative, Alien: Resurrection surprised me with how fun it was overall. It's basically a silly summer movie, but Ripley and Annalee add some gender-bending emotional complexity to all of the explosions. When Winona Ryder's character turns out to be an android, the others explaim over her particular make, and she looks pained and embarrassed. How awkward to come out robotic.

Murder as Photo Op: Scream 2 starring Neve Campbell and Jada Pinkett (1997)

2009-10-31T15:54:00.017-04:00

[Here's a time capsule review from one of my favorite horror franchises.]

I imagine Kevin Williamson had great fun writing screenplays for Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and now Scream 2. Instinctively aware of the fickle tastes of the young and media savvy, he can't or won't write down to his audience. While part of his job consists of imagining even more elaborate ways to have a death-reaper disguised villain leap from behind the unexpected door with a bloody knife in a large house, he also hit upon the winning method of constantly including knowing pop culture references, reflections, and commentary of the whole institution of horror films in his movies. In this way, he can create a pretty good but not great film like Scream 2 and neutralize all critical response in advance by including a scene where a film class debates the pros and cons of making sequels.

Williamson knows how to capitalize on the way all the different media outlets will exploit and cannibalize a murder story into hundreds of fictional or newsworthy or television talk show formats. The dissonance between the human horror of murder and the gleeful feeding frenzy of the press creates the ironic distance wherein these Scream movies can be made. Thus characters can scream, comment on their position within a horror convention, and light up at the possibility of appearing nationwide with Diane Sawyer simultaneously.

In the opening sequence, a young black couple enter a theater to watch the horror film Stab as they discuss how African Americans have traditionally been excluded from lily white horror films. As Jada Pinkett's character says, "I read my Entertainment Weekly. I know my shit!" Stab is a crude movie-within-a-movie recreation of the original Scream. The couple sit down to a parody of the now famous scene where Drew Barrymore gets attacked by an anonymous telephone caller, and guess who gets killed in the theater as every other audience member wears promotional reaper masks and slashes around with plastic green knives? When a murder victim stumbles up on stage to die during the movie, the audience members in the theater think it's a publicity stunt. Welcome to the postmodern hall of mirrors of Scream 2.

Does Scream 2 suffer from sequelitis? Yes. The original Scream included cries of "There's got to be a sequel!" Scream 2 takes place at the same small college where Sid (Neve Campbell) seeks to escape her memories of the former slashing. Now she's in drama class playing Cassandra, appropriately enough. After the opening murders, sensing a copycat sequence of killings coming up, the media descends on the campus in their electronic gewgaw-laden vans, among them Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), who has written a book about the original Scream slashings, and Dewey (David Arquette), the small town lovable deputy who shows up to warn Sid that she probably already knows the killers. Pretty soon we find Last Summer's Sarah Michelle Gellar alone in a large sorority house at night. Sid's erstwhile boyfriend keeps appearing at suspicious moments, but Randy (another friend) knowingly points out that since the other boyfriend in Scream turned out to be the killer, this one can't be him.

I wasn't as caught up in the mystery aspect of the movie this time, preferring the clever self-referential reflections built in the set-piece scenes. For instance, the murderer in this movie takes video footage of his victims before killing them, so we get to watch these versions of earlier scenes in a screening room just before the killer kicks in to attack the viewers. Tori Spelling plays a delightfully campy movie variation of Sid in the original Scream in a scene sampled on a talk show. While Sid remains a rather static epic heroine grimly determined to fight her way out of slasheedom, Courtney Cox and David Arquette actually develop as side characters with Courtney finding some unexpected compassion for her media victims.

During one of the last scenes in the movie, a survivor hands out his card to the press, telling them what he knows warrants a price, and saying the story will definitely make a good movie. I thought of Kevin Williamson at this point jacking up his fees for Scream 3 and I Know What You Did Last Summer 2 (already in production). In this age of big dumb studio blockbusters, knowing how not to condescend to your audience can pay very well indeed.

Notable film and media links--October 30, 2009

2009-10-30T08:08:00.015-04:00

---Facebook is so passe, but at least it acknowledges the dead. Wal-Mart now offers a discount for the dead. Also, let's not forget the media death spiral and the death of the book review.

---Bill Murray, screen demigod:

"The threat of sudden emotional violence is always lurking within. In his early movies, such as Meatballs and Caddyshack, he made this his shtick — witness his famously manic “It just doesn’t matter!” speech from the former movie, or the bursts of gopher-hatred in the latter. In later work, such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, though the performances are more restrained the threat is still there, simmering behind the impassive glare. Think of how he gleefully destroys schoolboy Jason Schwartzman’s bicycle inRushmore, or how he humiliates Robert De Niro’s tremulous cop in the opening of Mad Dog and Glory with a genuinely terrifying stare and the viciously spat, “F*** off!”

---Film in Focus honors the achievement of Joe Bowman of Fin de Cinema as part of their Behind the Blog series.

---Stephen Asma attempts to figure out the significance of our love of monsters:

"Believers in human progress, from the Enlightenment to the present, think that monsters are disappearing. Rationality will pour its light into the dark corners and reveal the monsters to be merely chimeric. A familiar upshot of the liberal interpretation of monsters is to suggest that when we properly embrace difference, the monsters will vanish. According to this view, the monster concept is no longer useful in the modern world. If it hangs on, it does so like an appendix—useful once but hazardous now.

I disagree. The monster concept is still extremely useful, and it's a permanent player in the moral imagination because human vulnerability is permanent. The monster is a beneficial foe, helping us to virtually represent the obstacles that real life will surely send our way. As long as there are real enemies in the world, there will be useful dramatic versions of them in our heads."

---Which is more accurate--the view of Baghdad from up in a helicopter, or down in the streets?

---Dennis Cozzalio points out where the dirty hipsters are.

---David Cairns examines a remake of one of my favorite films- Sternberg's Der blaue Engel.

---Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard consider Trouble Every Day in time for Halloween.

---David Thomson vents about pod actors and the idea of a remake of The Third Man.

---I confess that I've been enjoying William Mann's new biography of Elizabeth Taylor, in part because of his emphasis on her skill at being a celebrity. As Laura Miller points out:

"As a pioneer for the Madonnas and Lindsay Lohans of today, women whose personal lives occupy more of the public imagination than does their creative work, Taylor comes across as remarkably sympathetic and uncomplicated. For all her temperament, narcissism and hedonism, she was never driven or insecure. She didn't seek applause as a balm for deeper wounds, like Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe; her fame was forged by others rather than the object of her own ambition. She didn't much like making movies, though she'd occasionally pull out the stops when the project suited her whims. What she really wanted was to lounge around on yachts and in luxury hotels, chowing down on fried chicken with "lots of gravy" and waking up to a Tiffany's box on her pillow on a fairly regular basis. Acting, fame and a few of her marriages were little more than means to those ends."

---Sociological Images looks at the evolution of Disney princesses.

---The Fake AP Stylebook answers all of your style and usage questions.

---For those trying to figure out the internet, you can check it out its ten laws, decry its negative effect on the long-form narrative, consider how it spreads rumors, celebrate its 40th birthday, or imagine what it will be like in 5 years.

---Speaking of "Imagine," the upcoming John Lennon biopic looks intriguing, although I never cared much for "Hey Jude."

The Edge of Exasperation: David Mamet's The Edge starring Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins (1997)

2009-10-25T09:51:00.007-04:00

[Here's another time capsule review from 12 years ago.]

I may be the wrong type of guy to write a review of The Edge. The writer of the movie, David Mamet, evidently believes you're not really a man until you have to use your wits to survive in the cold Alaskan wilderness. You have to build fires to keep drying off your damp clothes. You have to go for days without food and then maybe gnaw on half of a squirrel you catch in a little ingenious stick trap shaped like a box. If that isn't enough, you're not really a man until you kill a 500 lb grizzly bear by wedging a spear in a rock so the upraised howling, drooling bear impales itself on its own weight and falls on top of you.

The last film that followed this trial-by-torment ethic was G. I. Jane, which at least was trashily entertaining. The Edge takes its old fashioned Hemingwayesque Grizzly Adams/Jack London/Deliverance survival shtick seriously, which eventually makes it a dreary bore. Anthony Hopkins plays Charles, a billionaire genius who flies out to the frozen tundra with his much younger wife, Elle Macpherson, who supermodels faux Native American clothes for handsome fashion photographer Bob (Alec Baldwin), who is sleeping with her on the sly.

Out at the bear lodge, Charles quickly establishes himself as an overcivilized scaredy-cat when Bob frightens him with the head of a bear rug. I think we are meant to think of Alec Baldwin as a frivolous superficial photographer modern man, but he looks too strong and resourceful for the part. He decides he wants to hire a local bear-hunting Indian for a fashion shoot and so they fly north into a flock of birds that causes the plane to crash into the water, and away they go on their adventure.

For awhile Bob and Charles have another character played by Harold Perrineau walking along with them, but he proves to be early bear meat after he accidentally cuts his leg and attracts the bear with the smell of his blood. Compared to the shark in Jaws or the big snake in Anaconda, this grizzly looks kind of cute. I kept thinking the real circus or zoo-kept bear probably enjoyed his occasional jaunts out in the woods in front of a camera. We also get to see a computer animated bear and a man-in-a-bear-suit bear for the fancier stunts. This grizzly means business because he has a special preference for humans, and so he tracks Bob and Charles for half of the film. He has his own special bear music for his appearances, some sort of wonking trombone sound to go with the loud epic orchestral music.

Did I mention the breathtaking natural scenery? The many feats of courage, strength, and stamina? Charles knows that Bob wants to kill him to get his money and his supermodel wife, which adds a nice little plot wrinkle. Is Bob saving Charles' life just so he can kill him later? (Spoiler alert) After they kill the bear, they both wear bear pelt coats, hats, and bear claw necklaces so they really look like two Grizzly Adamses. We see their actions and faces take on a soulful dignity born of true manlihood.

Maybe Boy Scouts, hunters, and men suffering midlife crises might like and learn from this movie, but I didn't. I guess I'm not man enough.

Notable film and media links--October 23, 2009

2009-10-23T19:18:00.009-04:00

---X-Men Origins: Wolverine (in 30 seconds)

---Nathan Zeldez broods on ways to beat information overload:

"William Shockley knew the value of isolation. In 1948, shortly after his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented the point-contact transistor in Shockley's absence, he became so upset that he holed up in a hotel room. He knew he needed a quiet place to think. Some days later he emerged, having worked out the basic design for the far superior junction transistor that became the key to modern electronics.

Today few can afford the luxury of such isolation. While just about everybody agrees that electronic messaging is critical to modern business and that some interruptions are vital to workplace interactions, clearly they've become too much of a good thing. This glut affects Fortune 500 corporations, tiny companies, schools, government agencies, churches, and nonprofits. Just about everyone, in other words.

The irony of all this constant communication is that we're not communicating well at all. Consider the meeting where everyone's eyes are glued to their BlackBerries or laptops. They're sifting through e-mail or scanning reports or updating spreadsheets; nobody is paying attention to the business at hand."

---(500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb shoots a music video for Weezer.

---David Thomson discusses the genius and self-destruction of Orson Welles:

"It's easy to see how this flamboyant figure has influenced would-be directors in America from Bogdanovich (who knew Welles well) and Spielberg to Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh. But it's more than the flourish, the eloquence with which he let himself be interviewed, and the effortless seduction of the man himself. If ever our young directors feel fear, self-pity or failure in their lives – then surely they think of Welles again. For Welles is not just the boy wonder; he is Falstaff and Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil – gross hulks. At the root of Welles's fascination lies this question: how can anyone so creative be so self-destructive?"

---Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner recommends that you get away from the computer:

"When I look at digital, the dark side of it for me is the physicality that's being presented alongside the Internet. I think about that movie The Matrix, and about these bodies that are human batteries that support computers. I met this guy who was creating software where you could watch Mad Men and you could chat with your friend while you're watching it, and things would pop up, and facts would pop up, and I said, 'You're a human battery. Turn the . . . thing off! You're not allowed to watch the show anymore. You're missing the idea of sitting in a dark place and having an experience. Are you just like sitting with your phone and you're kissing your girlfriend and saying, "'I'm kissing my girlfriend! This is so great, we're having sex!'" EXPERIENCE THINGS!"

---Speaking of Mad Men, Michael Wilson traces Weiner's mania for period detail. January Jones attempts to evade the Betty Draper image. Also, Benjamin Schwartz examines the pros and cons of the show:

"Finally, there’s another factor, one that cuts both ways and thereby contributes to Mad Men’s inner tension: the peculiar emotional chord the show’s setting strikes with viewers over 30. Critics invariably discuss how the series echoes John Cheever’s stories, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (a novel Weiner says he hadn’t read when he created the show). But for every audience member familiar with gin-soaked Shady Hill, there are dozens whose notions of the glamour of adult life, of Manhattan, and of “creative” careers were shaped by endless reruns of three sitcoms with concrete ties to Mad Men’s particular milieu: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, and That Girl. The key to television success, Don Draper tosses off, is to offer “derivative with a twist.” Mad Men is those shows grown up, grown hard, and—in ways that flatter its writers’ and viewers’ images of themselves—grown wise."

---Pollution in China.

---A. O. Scott confesses that La Dolce Vita is one of his favs.

---Noam Chomsky looks at our meaningless propaganda: "the bewildered herd" needs distracting.

---I don't own a cellphone. How much longer can I hold out?

---42 essential third act twists.

---Race, prejudice, and Lee Daniels' Precious.

---The New Yorker profile of James Cameron.

---The decline of the cinema of outrage.

---Kristin Thompson defends the blockbuster.

Katie, Micah, and the scary demon: a pictorial primer for Paranormal Activity

2009-10-18T09:26:00.066-04:00

See the young couple Katie and Micah. Katie and Micah are scared to go to bed. Why are they scared to go to bed? Because a demon is after her. The demon goes BUMP and makes weird sounds in the night. The demon clearly has no manners at all.

Here is a demon image taken from an old woodcut. At one point in Paranormal Activity, Micah flips through a book of pictures much like this one to show what they are up against. Scary, scary demon that makes noises in the night.

See the cat. Our cat's name is Darcy. Darcy makes all of the loud noises at night in our household. Darcy is basically an evil punk who was raised in a feed bucket, but I digress.

See the scared filmgoers. The filmgoers are frightened because of the gradual way the demon goes after poor Katie and Micah. The filmgoers lined up to watch Paranormal Activity at midnight in sold out shows in select theaters across the US. Perhaps people scare easily when staying up that late. Paranormal Activity has been called "The most frightening film ever made!" Now that's savvy marketing.

Here is Oren Peli. Peli is the Israeli-born videogame designer who wrote, directed, and edited Paranormal Activity. He found Micah and Katie after a marathon casting session in Hollywood yielded about 150 applicants. Then, for a mere $15,000 he shot the film in a week in his suburban tract home. He didn't even change the names of the actors. Now that is what I call cheap.

See Micah with his fancy camera. The camera is the real star of Paranormal Activity. Like so many others, Micah and Katie are exhibitionists. As Warren Beatty said to Madonna in her Truth or Dare (1991) concert film, "Why say anything if it is not on camera?" Now everyone can be on camera all of the time. Micah often asks Katie if he can film their "extra-curricular activities." At times, the extra-curricular activities seem more important to Micah than the paranormal activities. And, ultimately, Katie gets annoyed and tells him "Turn off the f-ing camera!" As if being tormented by a demon wasn't bothersome enough.

Here is Linda Blair possessed by a demon in The Exorcist. Peli acknowledges the influence of The Exorcist when he has Micah play spooky music reminiscent of the 1973 horror film. In The Exorcist, Linda Blair's character curses, rages, and hurls abuse at her mother, in other words, a realistic portrayal of a teenage girl.

Here is Heather Donahue freaking out in The Blair Witch Project (1999), another dirt-cheap horror film with a clever marketing campaign. The Blair Witch Project is an obvious influence on Paranormal Activity, only the two directors of Blair Witch kept their actors awake at night in the woods at length, and didn't tell them what would happen next, and generally tormented them on video until they really were freaked out. Unfortunately, in Paranormal Activity, Peli relies on Katie's and Micah's acting.

Here are Katie and Micah acting. They are also sleep-deprived, but still unaccountably not leaving the house, after the demon torments them for days. Katie says things like "It's getting worse," and "I'm nervous," and "Something's wrong," and "I can feel it watching me right now." Katie is an English major planning on becoming a teacher someday. I kept hoping she would recite lines from The Mysteries of Udolpho, but no such luck.

Eventually, things start getting really bad for Micah and Katie. (Spoiler alert) The demon messes up Micah's Ouija board, demonic paw prints appear in the baby powder, and Katie has difficulty studying for her English test.

I made the mistake of seeing the movie on a Saturday afternoon with a restless audience. A little boy kept saying "Oh man, oh man, oh man," as his mother tried to shush him, and a girl kept hopping up and down the stairs by the seats. At the climax of the film, two women behind me laughed, and one said, (I'm not making this up): "The most frightening film ever made, my ass!"

Next time I'll watch Paranormal Activity with a sold out crowd at midnight.

Notable film and media links--October 16, 2009

2009-10-16T20:25:00.011-04:00

---Infernal landscapes.

---Our age of attention whores.

---Newsweek considers 2009 as possibly the most depressing year at the movies:

"Fall movie season is usually the time when the studios haul out their dark dramas for awards consideration, but this year's batch seems especially bleak. The themes they touch upon include incest, murder, AIDS, cancer, abuse, layoffs, and lots of unexpected, tragic deaths (and we're not even counting the dead vampires in the Twilight sequel). This probably isn't just coincidental. This fall's slate was written at the end of the Bush administration, when most of Hollywood—at least the predominantly liberal part—was under a cloud of gloom. Now, we're all feeling gloomy; the economy is in tatters, and the unemployment rate continues to soar. Does anybody really want to go to the movies this year to feel even more depressed?"

---Sadly, the world may not end in 2012, and besides, the Mayans are getting annoyed with all of the profitable misrepresentation of their legends.

---Dr. North of Spectacular Attractions compares the two versions of Michael Haneke's Funny Games:

"I’ve always been uncomfortable with the didactic nature of the film, but I admire its commitment to unsettling its viewer. It’s still possible, if so inclined, to enjoy it as another extreme thrill ride (I’m often amazed by the ability of horror fans to shrug off even the most gruelling of movies or to compartmentalise them as compendia of bodily destruction in all its variations), though you can see Haneke trying to thwart such attempts at complacency. Funny Games doesn’t play fair – the divisive moment where one of the killers uses a remote control to rewind the film to make it replay in his favour breaks a contract with the spectator that their involvement in the fiction can have an influence on it. We like to believe that because we’re on the side of the innocents, the filmmaker will at least reward us with some relief, some catharsis or vengeance, but there is no comfort here: in this place of carefully applied violence, dogs and children die first. Why? Because they’re not supposed to, and thus is highlighted the artifice of the conventions that usually govern film violence."

---Anne Helen Petersen examines the essential banality of the Vanity Fair celebrity profile of Penelope Cruz.

---Matt Zoller Seitz looks more closely at the political implications of Marlon Brando's On the Waterfront.

---Film Studies for Free treats us to an hour long interview with Alfred Hitchcock. Also, A. O. Scott enthuses over Vertigo.

---Buzz Machine analyzes how the old media executives are not getting "the collaboration economy":

"Add this to the other blind spots these old media powers have about the new economic reality: the imperatives of the link economy, the need and benefit of giving up control, the advantages of creating open platforms over closed systems, the value of networks, the post-scarcity economy and the art of exploiting abundance, the need to be searchable to be found, the deflation innovation brings, the value of free, the triumph of process over product…."

---Brando, Herzog, and Criterion: the first chapter of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City.

---87 cool things.

Follow the rules or die: notes on Trick 'r Treat

2009-10-12T18:32:00.026-04:00

In the EC horror comics vein, Michael Doughtery's Trick 'r Treat chops up one Halloween evening in Sheeps Meadow, Ohio and tells four interwoven tales in a rearranged manner reminiscent of Pulp Fiction. Critics have belatedly raved about this 2007 film that Warner Brothers mysteriously never got around to releasing in theaters (it just came out on DVD). While the various stories are ingeniously arranged, and the film has the glossy slick look of a Tim Burton horror film complete with children singing in the soundtrack, I was impressed by the technique but underwhelmed by Trick 'r Treat's shock tactics and ironic reversals. Here are some notes:

1) Where's the horror in a film where just about everyone is a villain? We no sooner meet Principal Steven Wilkins than we learn that he's a serial killer with the awkward task of burying bodies in the backyard as his annoying young son yells down to him from upstairs about carving the jack-o-lantern. (Spoiler alert) Wilkins is so proficient at multipurpose Halloween naughtiness, he moonlights as a costumed seducer/killer of young women at the local parade. If the characters weren't wicked already, most of the innocent turn evil quickly, as if screenwriter Dougherty was worried we may get bored otherwise.

2) And what is the major crime here? Not following the rules of Halloween. For instance, if you blow out a jack-o-lantern before the night is over, you deserve death. If you play an evil prank on someone that causes a bump on the head, then of course you should expire. If you neglect to give trick or treaters candy, then watch out. And if you happen to bust up pumpkins on the way home, forget about it. A persnickety holiday formalism underlies much of the mayhem of the movie.

3) Anna Paquin plays a virginal Little Red Riding Hood figure named Laurie who's in search of a boyfriend. In comparison to her lewd, more aggressive friends dressed as Snow White, Cinderella, etc., Laurie just wants a date, and Paquin briefly achieves some pathos before her story ends. Since you never really get to know characters, you have to take their costumes at face value (and Dougherty likes to ironically reverse the connotations of their costumes). Thus the angel is evil, the witch is good, and so on.

4) The most satisfying scene: from Principal Wilkins' point of view, we see a man in the neighboring house screaming for help through the window just before he gets attacked. Wilkins says "Screw you," and ignores him. I did like knowing that the involuted structure of the film would reveal what happened several scenes later.

5) The most engaging story involves a bus full of criminally insane, costumed children that plunges into a rock quarry because their parents get sick of dealing with them, but the film never really culminates in a coherent sense of evil. Be it werewolves, evil child spirits, sadistic teenagers, or just plain people who hate Halloween, Trick 'r Treat has plenty of menace to go around, but much of it cancels itself out in a salad bar of horror tropes. Ironically, Trick 'r Treat succeeds most in the calm moments between each bloody narrative. A girl in a witch's costume from one story pauses to acknowledge the demon of another as they pass in the night. Donnie Darko would be proud.

America, the weird: notes on The Hitchhiking Movie

2009-10-09T18:40:00.021-04:00

What would it be like to hitchhike across the country from New York City to Los Angeles in a week? In The Hitchhiking Movie, Philip Hullquist and Ryan Jeanes decided to find out in 2007. While I had my doubts about this low-budget documentary that Hullquist sent to me in DVD form, the results are compelling, in part because the two men decided to try not to spend any money in this Kerouac-esque venture, and because the resulting journey develops a deranged fascination. The film begins with various people in New York predicting that the two guys will be assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered. Ryan carries a backpack with basic supplies, and Hullquist (who mostly does not appear in the movie) carries his camera equipment, but otherwise they remain at the mercy of freeways, truck stops, and a steady stream of people in vehicles who usually prefer to not pick up hitchhikers. One woman who supplies a ride, for instance, says she figured that "the two guys were trustworthy because [she] saw one of them carrying a camera, unless, of course, they planned on filming her murder."

With its playful editing, crude cinematography, typed-in inserts consisting of data about states, murky night photography, thought-balloons, flash-forwards, problems with sound, and so on, the movie can get a little too eager to please, but Ryan humorously grouses about his frequent inability to get a ride. I was intrigued by the grim nature of their voyage much of the time. Ryan and Phillip are too much in a rush to dwell on much local scenery, and often the highways look the same. Instead of picking up the hitchhikers, people would frequently honk as they drove by, so Ryan speculates that perhaps this means that they would like to stop, but they won't, but they want to establish some rapport anyway. Ryan and Phillip endure extended visits to truck stops (usually late at night) where Ryan wanders around asking one trucker after another for a ride. 99% say no either because the company they work for will not allow it, or because the two travellers would add too much weight. At other times, the two fellows find themselves stranded in the heat for hours, pulled over by the police for illegally hitching on the highway, or obliged to sleep at a nearby park full of mosquitos. In the course of the week, they get precious little sleep.

Ryan and Phillip's travels yield a quirky supporting cast of random drivers. One part-native American trucker named Fred drives them from Pennsylvania to Kentucky with a peace pipe on his dashboard. Fred pontificates at length about life's choices, drug dealers who wanted to use his truck for smuggling, and the holocaust of Native Americans. One "psychiatrist," driving a convertible, bores the hitchhikers with his discussion about kidney function. Another woman named Sarah invites the guys to a farm near Owensboro, Kentucky, where they find themselves drinking out of beer bongs, eating mutton sandwiches, and avoiding donkeys that keep blocking the driveway. One young woman just broke up with her fiance after eating bad lobsters under a rotting giraffe. More than once, someone drives over to give the hitchhikers a second ride on their way, with Ryan using his charm to persuade them to buy McDonalds or Arby's food for the journey. At a bar in Missouri, the waitress treats the guys to free beers and the world's largest tacos when she isn't explaining that the place used to have a brothel upstairs. The bar has a large cocktail neon sign outside, and the cherry would light up when the the prostitutes were ready for their next customers (a red light district variation on Krispy Kreme doughnuts). If it's a guy who lost an eye in a bar fight, an African American couple who gives them pickles, or a Christian couple hauling around fancy trucks, most everyone proves engaging one way or another.

Even though Ryan and Phillip often think of quitting, or taking an easier route (like hopping a train), they persist even in the increasingly hot regions out west. Occasionally, the film occasionally dips into cutesiness and self-glorification, and sometimes the subtitles are misspelled. Still, The Hitchhiking Movie still struck me as a winning indie effort, in part due to Phillip and Ryan's adventurous chutzpah, but also due to the cross sampling of talkative drivers who provide a weird yet ultimately generous portrait of America.

Notable film and media links (mostly)--October 9, 2009

2009-10-08T18:41:00.013-04:00

---A history of blowing up national monuments on film.

---What book publishers think of the Amazon Kindle (with thanks to Office Space).

---Life in a tent city:

"The PR had previous experience in the ghettos, slums, and shantytowns of various Third World cities, including Jakarta, Nuevo Laredo, Peshawar, Bangkok, and Kathmandu. It was observed, however, that the PR was feeling more fear here in Fresno than he had felt in any of those foreign locales. Wild shouts could be heard; the air smelled of wood fire and dust; dogs roamed the Study Area; mysterious figures stared out from asymmetrical doorways; in the distance, under a highway overpass, a cramped, smoky, Stygian neighborhood seemed to exude menace."

---Christopher Hitchens considers Monty Python.

---The difficulties of adapting David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men for film.

---Tom Cruise fails to adapt to the new media:

"[Concerning Cruise's webpage] The template looks snazzy enough, and the video that’s freezeframed above is high quality streaming. But it’s a montage of Cruise clips — most of them culled from classic Cruise, with a few iconic looks from the likes of Collateral thrown in for good measure — and, get this, set to…..the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The only thing better would’ve been to set it to “Danger Zone.”) Obviously, the designers are attempting to communicate the epic character of Cruise’s star — the iconic roles he’s played spanning the decades — but it plays rather like an amateur YouTube vid. Indeed, exploring the entire site, it offers very, very little that a star homepage from, say, 1998 would. It loads faster and uses streaming video — but couldn’t I have found that anywhere? What would draw me to this particular site? How is this refining or repopularizing Cruise’s image in any way? (Especially since it relies so heavily on old movies, effectively reminding its audience of what a great star Cruise was. Nearly thirty years ago.)"

---The aquacalypse or the end of fish (with thanks to MetaFilter.com).

---T.S. of Screen Savour analyzes Buster Keaton's classic The General.

---You can now go to jail for Twittering, sell out Twittering, make art with Twitter, meform of inform on Twitter, and mine Twitter data for money.

---The politics of On the Waterfront.

---David Hudson of The Auteurs chooses the best film sites.

---A O Scott reviews Three Kings.

---Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing a short story. Also, Chuck Palahniuk has some writing tips.

---Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss Pixar (part of their Conversations series, and part of The House Next Door's Pixar week).

---Too poor to bury the dead. In other cheerful news, Gore Vidal thinks the United States is doomed.

---Metropia: dystopic cartoon of the future.

---Internet addiction (and lots of reasons to justify that addiction).

---Life inside an avalanche.

The pleasures of massacring zombies: notes on Zombieland

2009-10-04T15:44:00.056-04:00

1) I think films like Zombieland appeal to us because modern life has become too cluttered and constrained, too full of words, people, laws, the past, schedules, property, corporations, household appliances, work, commutes, and traffic regulations. Wouldn't it be nice to imagine a 28 Days Later scenario when most fellow humans have been reduced to snarling, drooling infected zombies due to a disease stemming from tainted hamburger? Wouldn't it then be fun to stock up on guns and wander around the car-cluttered freeways, the detritus of old strip malls and grocery stores, and shoot zombies as needed? Aside from the obvious downsides, wouldn't such an apocalypse be tremendously liberating?

Thus does Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) seem to have fun as he struggles to survive. He lives by a list of rules, which includes:

1) Cardio (needed for running from zombies).

2) Doubletap (one bullet to the head may not suffice. Shoot twice for greater safety).

3) Beware of bathrooms (because you can be relatively defenseless on the john).

4) Seatbelts (in case you need to crash your vehicle to send a zombie through the windshield).

6) Cast iron skillet (one of several weapons including a banjo, a bowling ball, and hedge clippers that work well for zombie killing).

14) Limber up (for battle. Tallahasee (Woody Harrelson) does not think this rule is needed, by the way).

17) Don't be a hero.

31) Check the backseat.

32) Enjoy the little things (such as using one's car door to brain a zombie when driving by).

One day Columbus happens upon Tallahasee on the freeway. They contemplate shooting each other in a Mexican stand-off, but then Columbus sticks out his thumb, and Tallahasee reluctantly agrees to drive him to Columbus, Ohio (characters use place names in this movie to avoid getting too attached to each other). Since there are precious few uninfected humans around, Columbus and Tallahasee can drink whiskey and drive, not wear their seatbelts, let off steam by smashing vans, and hunt for the ever elusive Twinkie (the film's one massive product placement). Tallahasee specializes in zombie killing, but he has no desires for anything aside from a Twinkie--a good thing since there are no female love interests in the plot for him.

Instead, two confidence girls--Wichita (Emma Stone) and 12-year old Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) happen upon our heroes in a grocery store. As they all eventually band together and seek an amusement park out west, I kept being reminded of Breslin's break-out role in Little Miss Sunshine (2006), where she and her highly dysfunctional family seek a junior miss beauty pageant in a yellow VW bus. In Zombieland, the gang also drive a large yellow vehicle--this time a Hummer.

2) While watching the movie, you can enjoy the Van Halen music, the free-for-all pleasures of slaughtering zombies with impunity, and director Ruben Fleisher's slow motion zombie attack action scenes reminiscent of Timur Bekmambetov's work in Wanted (2oo8), but do not look for much plausibility. I found myself wondering about:

a) Why would a large grocery store have electricity? The zombie outbreak took place recently, within the past several months or weeks, but are some of the few remaining humans running the local power plant? Why does the amusement park have electricity? Could it be because the film would lack enough light without it?

b) How can our merry band of zombie killers drive from the Midwest to Los Angeles without being stopped by abandoned cars on the freeway? They seem to make the journey in one night.

c) For that matter, where is the gas for this road trip coming from?

d) Why is Emma Stone's character Wichita wearing eyeliner? The girls talk of desiring a shower, but no one ever appears to need one.

e) Later on, we learn that Tallahassee greatly misses his son, who died young. Tallahassee cries in front of the gang, and admits that he "hasn't cried like that since Titanic." Good thing he's such a cuddly, lovable killing machine.

3) The makers of Zombieland love to make allusions to other films, including Psycho (when Columbus tries to stop a female zombie with a shower curtain), Babe (when Tallahasee says "That'll do, pig"), and even Adventureland (which features Jesse Eisenberg once again trying to impress a woman in an amusement park). The film is loosely designed like so many summer blockbusters as a kind of carnival ride (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom comes to mind). The film (spoiler alert) ends at an actual carnival in Los Angeles called Pacific Playland, thus making the narrative arch oddly reminiscent of National Lampoon's Vacation (1983).

4) Aside from the film's wit, ultimately, I think, its chief pleasure resides in the viewer's ability to combine all of his or her concerns into one enemy--zombies--and then take pleasure in massacring them. As World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War author Max Brooks puts it:

"I think its been gathering steam throughout the [George W.] Bush years," he explained. "We live in some really uncertain times and I think people are being just bombarded with so many problems and so many fears and so many anxieties, it's kind of hard to keep track of them. And I think zombies, because they're so apocalyptic, are a great way for people to coalesce their anxieties into one threat."

Zombieland not only unites all of these threats, it supplies a violent solution that draws on the Western tradition of gunslinging vigilante justice (perhaps one reason why the film's characters turn around and drive west). In his dystopic out of print science fiction novel Stand on Zanzibar (1968), John Brunner imagined an over-populated future in which people frequently turned "mucker." Oppressed by everyone around them, muckers run amuck, killing everyone indiscriminately until someone murders them in turn. It may seem like a stretch to relate the playful comic horror of Zombieland with this extreme irrational violence, but they exist along the same axis, only zombies render massacres guilt-free and thereby suitable for mass entertainment.

Whatever the means, Zombieland satiates that desire to shake off the constraints of civilization, clear a space, and live happily in the ruins. As the trailer for the movie gloomily points out, we live with the threat of "epidemics, climate change, and dwindling resources." A mere zombie outbreak seems outright pleasant in comparison.

Return of the Snake Monster: Jennifer Lopez in Anaconda (1997)

2009-10-04T14:42:00.013-04:00

[Note: In 1997, a fledgling movie critic reviewed a cheesy large snake film called Anaconda. 12 years later, he wondered if he would ever have a reason to republish the old review, but then came a scene in Zombieland when scrappy zombie killer Wichita (Emma Stone) reminisces with Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) over her first R-rated film: Anaconda. Here's the time capsule review.]

There's a dirty rumor going around that most studio-produced movies are written by some fancy new computer software that triangulates other popular films into unoriginal but lucrative packages. This might explain Anaconda, a scrappily-made film with minimal characterization that swirls together Apocalypse Now, Jaws, Jurassic Park, and Swamp Thing.

Whether or not you find the film entertaining depends on what you come to the theater for. If you like bad guys who roll their eyes and sneer to affirm their bad-guy-icity, as Dennis Hopper does so well and Jon Voigt does in this film, then by all means go. If you like clever computer-animated effects combined with the most simplistic snake-o-vision-from-the-water camera angles, then buy your ticket now. If you enjoy a film that frequently cuts from violent acrobatic death scenes to scantily clad sweaty Jennifer Lopez with a concerned expression on her face, then this is the film for you.

The plot is simplicity itself. Eric Stoltz, looking angelic as usual, guides an eclectic crew of documentary filmmakers into the deepest part of the Amazon jungle to encounter Paul Sarone (Voigt), where, after a fashion, they all go snake hunting. The characterization is on par with a Hanna Barbera cartoon, with the foppish sophisticate, a sinister-looking druggy boat captain, two pretty California people (good snake food), and Jennifer Lopez roughly approximately Helen Hunt's role in Twister. In one clever twist, the filmmakers decided to include Ice Cube to show how Compton-style rapper street smarts fare in the Darwinian jungle (Ice does just fine).

In the tradition of horror films, you wonder which characters are expendable enough to get killed off first (there they go, one by one, with a few false alarms). In the tradition of Jaws, you learn not to go in the water. The anaconda himself, about the size of a large telephone pole, enjoys squeezing people until their heads or eyeballs pop out and then he bites their heads off afterwards. Cool! People die, the plots twists, and the audience gasps and screams. There were times when the sheer calisthenic ability of the computer-generated snake impressed me, but this movie sure didn't.

9 reasons why I like Stephan Elliot's Easy Virtue (and Noel Coward in general)

2009-09-28T21:14:00.022-04:00

1) Set in the late 1920s English countryside in a decaying estate, Easy Virtue is the ultimate anti-stuffy-Merchant and Ivory period piece film. You can tell because it features a jazzified version of "Car Wash" from the 1976 movie.

2) Easy Virtue concerns the arrival of the glamorous American blonde car racer Larita (Jessica Biel) at the stuffy and distinctively 19th century Whittaker household ruled by Mrs. Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas). Larita has just impulsively married Mrs. Whittaker's son John (Ben Barnes), and she tries to ingratiate herself with the eccentric family, but Mrs. Whittaker is intent upon getting rid of her. In effect, Easy Virtue juxtaposes flapper Modernism with the remnants of Edwardian England, and Modernism looks much more fun.

3) Australian director Stephan Elliot, who also directed The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), shot Easy Virtue with a minimal budget, only about five hours a day of English winter light, and no time for his actors to rehearse. In effect, as he explains in the DVD commentary, everyone winged it as best they could. At one point, Elliot pulled the actors outside for a tracking shot just because it was easier and faster (with Colin Firth complaining the whole time), yet the movie succeeds in part due to its improvisational charm.

4) Easy Virtue has oddball transitions that feature CGI special effects. How often do "period" films do that? I especially liked one trick shot of an old Cole Porter record "Let's Misbehave," a song that nicely summarizes the subversive spirit of the film, but Elliot also includes multiple dissolves and lots of playful reflections of characters in spoons, a serving dish, a billiard ball, etc.

5) Who knew that Jessica Biel could hold her own against a British cast that features not only Scott Thomas but also Colin Firth? The last time I saw her, Biel was demeaning herself in Adam Sandler's I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

6) In Easy Virtue, Colin Firth plays the moody, unshaven, and quietly sardonic anti-Darcy Mr. Whittaker. Director Stephan Elliot claims that the main reason that Firth agreed to act in the movie was for one scene: a tango he gets to dance with Larita that oddly echoes the climactic dance scene in Visconti's classic The Leopard. Firth did this in spite of the fact that he freely admits that he can't dance.

7) Meanwhile, Kristin Scott Thomas did not initially want to play the controlling matriarchal Mrs. Whittaker. Since I still associate her with her much more playful rebellious role in The English Patient, I don't blame her reluctance, but she ultimately makes her character sympathetic. The movie shifts gears when it reveals her vulnerability and dignity even amidst her attempts to undermine Larita.

8) Stephan Elliot adapted Easy Virtue from Noel Coward's 1928 play of the same name. Oddly enough, Alfred Hitchcock adapted the same melodrama as a 1928 silent film with the same name. Elliot returns the favor by using Hitchcockian push-in type shots.

9) Noel Coward's plays specialize in cigarette smoking, cocktail drinking, tuxedo-wearing socialites who use wit as a form of self-defense against anyone and anything. In other words, his characters often embody icy intelligent cool. In the play Private Lives, lead character Elyot perhaps sums up Coward's aesthetic when he says "All of the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable . . . Laugh at them. Laugh at everything, all of their sacred shibboleths. Let's pity the poor philosophers." In the hands of Elliot, Easy Virtue captures the spirit of Coward's work with leisurely insouciance and aplomb.

Notable media and film links--special Surrogates edition

2009-09-27T09:12:00.019-04:00

---The war between the shot and the snatch.

---American civil liberties in action?

---Scott Schuman of the excellent Sartorialist gives tips on how to succeed.

---Disturbing tech videos ads.

---In apocalyptic news, predictions of the end that didn't pan out, Zombie CNN, and the enviropocalypse.

---Truth be told, Surrogates was a letdown, a good example of the new dystopian banal (so many apocalyptic movies, so little time), so I haven't written a post about it, but if I were to do so, I would mention how robots do not make good actors, how Ving Rhames looks silly as the pseudo-Rastafarian Prophet, how the film's big scene sadly evoked The Happening, and how the movie vaguely resembles an oddly earnest Pulp Fiction reunion. Then again, the film does reflect how social network use has tripled in the last year and how people increasingly spend 8 hours a day in front of some screen or another. According to Cinematical's interview with Surrogates director Jonathan Mostow,

"Cinematical: What is the point of the surrogates for the people in this film? How does it revolutionize their lives?

Jonathan Mostow: It's not so much that it revolutionizes their lives. It's just kind of like it's the extrapolation of where we're going, which is more and more we seem to be able to do stuff through our computer and online. Like right now, you can stay in touch with all of your friends via email or Facebook or Twitter; you can get all of the information in the world from AP.com or NewYorkTimes.com, whatever. So the only thing you need to leave the house for is to go to your job, and if you really wanted to socialize in person with somebody. What if there was a machine to enable that to happen as well? Where we're going with robotics and this whole new developing field of brain stuff, it feels like it doesn't take a lot of speculative science-fiction to imagine we could sort of get there. This movie isn't really asking the question, gee, if in the future this technology existed, what would actually happen?

Surrogates is really a metaphor for asking the question, today, right now, we live in a time where we are swamped with all of this technology; we love it and we're addicted to it, but we also can't let go of it. What's that doing to us as human beings? That's really kind of to me what this movie is fundamentally about, so the appeal to people of having a surrogate is extrapolating out where we're already at. We're all constantly seeking convenience and a better existence, so if you can live with a surrogate, you have no personal jeopardy, moral boundaries are conveniently erased, and you also just feel better. It's why video phones never took off; there have been several iterations of video phone technology, and they never took off because ultimately people didn't want to be shown to the person they're talking to. The internet gives you that anonymity – you could be anybody on the internet. So it's the same thing with surrogacy; it affords you that cloak of hiding your personal identity, and that's the other necessary requirement of any of these technologies succeeding."

---Other disturbing signs--Iggy Pop became a Lego, and Guitar Hero 5 resurrects Kurt Cobain.

---I find these UK film student offerings very compelling: 28 Days Later in one minute.

---The story of Leasse Williams in Ben Guest's 10 Dollars an Hour (with thanks to MetaFilter.com).

---Lady Gaga before she got famous (and harder to see).

---The importance of informational politics, a case study of our post-journalistic age, a bleak enough situation, and yet, people desire more news than ever.

---Catherine Grant's excellent list of film books available online.

---If you must execute, the advantages of a shot to the head.

---Could recent technological changes be good for literacy? Hogwarts, by the by, is not.

---The scourge of backstory rationing.

---A fun collection of scandalous magazine covers.

---Lastly, Eric Idle delightfully takes on the hating YouTube commenters.

"Hell is a teenage girl": the feminist psychodrama of Diablo Cody's Jennifer's Body

2009-09-20T09:00:00.049-04:00

"Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air."

The ending of Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" serves as good a gloss on Diablo Cody's Jennifer's Body as any. Critics have understandably had problems with the film's murky metaphysics, its uneven tone, and the occasional clumsiness of Karen Kusama's direction. As Rotten Tomatoes puts it: "Jennifer's Body features occasionally clever dialogue but the horror/comic premise fails to be funny or scary enough to satisfy." When watching the film, I noted many of the same elements, but I had also read Jill Soloway's interview with Cody in the Aug/Sept issue of Bust magazine, and that primed me to be more aware of the ways the film overturns the usual Sorority Row horror cliches. As with her previous film, Juno, Cody lends a radical feminist slant to her screenwriting, so I've been trying to view the film through that lens. How much does the negative critical reception of the film reflect a masculine bias? Some notes:

1) Diablo Cody has said multiple times that the inspiration for the film grew out of her teenage fantasies of breaking into an alpha female's house and attacking her because she (the alpha female) had stolen a man from her. Thus, much of the dramatic tension in the film comes from the sometimes jealous rivalry between head cheerleader teen queen Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) and the comparatively dorky Needy Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried wearing glasses). Their friendship goes way back to their early childhood, with the more needy Needy devoted to her more popular friend. Early in the movie, they head out to a redneck bar to see an indie band named Low Shoulder, but once the band starts to play, a fire erupts behind them and eventually engulfs the building in a scene reminiscent of the fiery climax of Carrie (1976). As plot devices go, the fire does not serve much purpose except to liven things up and create an excuse for Jennifer to go join the band in their van much as Needy tries to talk her out of it.

2) After that mysterious trip in the van, Jennifer transmutes into a bizarre grinning demonic creature with a tendency to vomit black gunk before she eats guys. At one point, Needy asks, "You're killing people?", and Jennifer responds "No, I'm killing boys." When Jennifer has to go for very long without man-blood, she visibly wilts, her hair looking less perfect, but after a good meal on a guy's innards, she cheers up immensely, and she feels like a God who needs human sacrificial victims (somewhat like a succubus). As she says to one victim, "I need you hopeless."

3) All of this man-eating serves as proper payback for the innumerable young women slashed in horror films going back to Psycho, but I was still bothered by the general wimpiness of all the men in the movie. In her Bust interview, Cody admits that she deliberately did not include any father figures in the film. As she says, "These girls are raised without positive male role models, and they're lost." All we get instead is the inevitable J. K. Simmons playing a science teacher with a curly hair-piece and a missing hand (Hasn't he shown up in every other movie recently? Aside from playing the dad in Juno, he's in Post Grad, Extract, Burn After Reading, etc.). Regardless, teenage guys put up precious little fight as, one by one, they each succumb to Megan Fox's charms. As agents of their own fate, men scarcely exist in this movie, but that may be Cody's point.

4) As in Juno, characters in Jennifer's Body's trade ironic hipster quips even in the midst of dramatic (or bloody) encounters. For example, (spoiler alert) when Jennifer gets stabbed in the stomach with a pole at one point, she notes how she could use a tampon. At another point, Needy speculates that the prom dance will supply Jennifer with an "all-you-can-eat buffet" of boys. At times, one feels like taking notes on all of this dialogue that sometimes sounds like some secret code. When Needy shows off her black-vomit-tinged fingernails to her friend, Jennifer replies: "You need a mani bad. You should find a Chinese chick to buff your situation."

5) By the by, how is Megan Fox's acting? There's a certain irony in watching her conquer all of the men in the film just as she continues to claim an inordinate amount of media attention otherwise (it's not unusual nowadays to find articles just about the media's reception of her, what Gawker calls "journalismism"). Fox does fine when she's playing the domineering demonic seductress, but she clearly has a difficult time looking vulnerable in any way. When she's trapped in a van alone with a bunch of male Satanic band members, a tear drips from her eye when she feels threatened, but obviously the Transformer series has ill-prepared her for looking weak.

6) I was specifically reminded of Twilight twice in the film. First, Needy goes off to research paranormal activity at the occult section of the school library (just as Bella uses the internet to decipher that Edward is a vampire).

Secondly, Jennifer leads a football player in the woods near the high school in a manner reminiscent of Bella confronting Edward in the forest. In Twilight, director Catherine Hardwicke used the occasion to show off a bunch of flamboyant camera moves as if to prepare the viewer for Edward's grand "I'm a vampire" confession, but in the Jennifer's Body scene, an impromptu menagerie of animals including a fox, a deer, a beaver, and some ravens show up just when Jennifer's about to seduce him. The football player finds this Disney-like display quite distracting, and I did too. Was Cody referencing something out of Snow White or Cinderella?

7) Two more concerns that Cody included in the film: eating disorders (hence the black vomit), and one female character who has pleasurable sex and lives (a no-no in most horror movies).

8) So do Cody's feminist inclusions make up for Jennifer's Body's flaws? No, but they do complicate one's reactions. Even the title Jennifer's Body hints at the extreme mind/body split that many teenage girls suffer from, not to mention how women are often associated with their bodies as men are with their spirits (to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir). As Bust magazine points out, Cody sneaks "in women's issues and thoughts into the mainstream, via movies, like a Trojan horse" with riot grrl urgency.

Notable film and media links--September 17, 2009

2009-09-17T20:33:00.015-04:00

---For Shadowplay, dcairns analyzes Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.

---"Did You Know 4.0" depicts the historic changes in media, and what does 2.0 mean anyway? Also, let's not forget Gov. 2.0

---Richard Dorment of Esquire tries his best to follow the advice of Gwyneth Paltrow's GOOP website. Should he buy that $1850 watch for his wife for Christmas?

---The glamorous life (or living death) of a film extra:

Extras are a significant part of the production budget, especially in Britain. Which is why a lot of filming is going to Eastern Europe, where extras charge only $20 a day. The cost of extras is one of the reasons why epics such as Ben Hur are largely a thing of the past. Gandhi was the last – the funeral sequence alone required 300,000 extras.

But nowadays, where possible, crowds are digitised in. In Gladiator, they used 2,000 live actors to create a digital crowd of about 35,000 people. But for some of the crowd scenes, in addition to the real-life extras and the digital ones, they also used cut-outs made of cardboard.In Hollywood, there are at least two companies that can supply inflatable extras. Digital extras can look fake, and cardboard extras can look, well, cardboard, particularly if the camera moves. But inflatable extras are more rounded. They can be deflated, stored – a crowd of 10,000 can fit into one 50ft truck – and reused."

---"the post-Gore wave of eco-docs."

---Spike Lee and Stew discuss Passing Strange:

"AVC: One of the things that the play, and the movie, deals with is that the Youth is, to put it crudely, forced to choose between being an artist and being black. There’s no way to be bohemian in the middle-class neighborhood where he grows up, but in the largely white environments he escapes to, he’s equally an outsider. When white teenagers rebel, there’s a script laid out for them, but the Youth doesn’t have that option.

S: What I’ve said before about Passing Strange is that black teen angst isn’t really documented enough. We’ve got a lot of white teen angst—been doing it since the James Dean movies.

AVC: Rebel Without A Cause.

S: Exactly, right? But it’s like black teenagers, if I may say, we’re not just rebelling against what our parents are dealing with. We’re rebelling against our very place in society. See, James Dean was white. You know what I mean? He might have not liked Thurston Howell, or his dad, whoever, but James Dean was still white. When he wanted to leave home, he could go get a job. Right? A black teenager who wants to be punk-rock, he’s in a double bind. Because he’s pissed off his family, but now I’m black and punk-rock? You know what I mean? Where you gonna go? So it’s like this double bind.

Black teenagers have it a little bit rougher. I’m sorry to say, but they just do. I’m hoping there’s a world at some point where it’ll be a little bit easier, but right now… Imagine how crazy people must have thought [Spike] was when he said, “I’m going to be a filmmaker.” If he’d said, “I want to be a baller,” they would have been like, “Well, at least we know 8 million ballers.” They must have said, “What are you talking about, man?” And they looked at me the same crazy way. Being a musician was like saying you wanted to be a bum, you want to be a drug addict, you want to die like Jimi Hendrix. Because that’s what musicians do, don’t they? Or, “Ooh, you’re a jazz musician? That means you want to be on heroin.” You know what I mean?"

---"Consuming Kids"--the cynical commercialization of childhood.

---Another reason to dislike Facebook: nostalgic retrosexuals.

---In Twitter news, it can be fun to have a million Twitter followers, even though most users hardly tweet at all, and some say Twitter only succeeds because it is stupider than TV. When not detecting Twitter imposters, you can always read The Twitter Times when you aren't flipping through Google Fast Flip.

---The rise of films within films, or how about 27 films about filmmaking?

---The growing success of the professional blogger.

---Russian trailers also give too much away.

---The 10 most iconic opening scenes in film history (Children of Men!)

---Some imagine that Jennifer's Body will bring on a Diablo Cody critical backlash. I wonder how much critical reception of the film will depend on each reviewer's receptivity to the film's feminist agenda. Then again, Sarah Ball begs to differ.

---The top 100 film studies blogs (with thanks to Chuck Tryon).

---Lastly, the torments of easy listening jazz.

Stripmining reality as we amuse ourselves to death: 9 and Gamer

2009-09-13T09:11:00.028-04:00

9 struck me as scarcely a movie at all, more a brief collection of scenes where sketched-in doll-characters with incongruous movie star voices endlessly fend off evil machines in a generic post-apocalyptic landscape. At first, I kept falling asleep, but then I roused myself enough to wonder what I was supposed to feel about all this. Was I supposed to care that the young heroic 9 cares enough to go save other characters while the slightly Asian-looking older curmudgeon 1 doesn't think he should? 7, I believe, wears a skull to show some chutzpah and she has the voice of Jennifer Connolly, so I liked her the best. But why on earth should I give a tinker's damn about a bunch of barely-differentiated dolls?

The film evokes Edward Scissorhands in the way the dolls' inventors die before their inventions kick into action, but at least Edward had Winona Ryder as a love interest and a cartoon suburbia to slice his way into. 9 has the odd effect of rendering the apocalypse moot. You see the occasional human corpse lying around, but what does humanity's fate matter if only miniature animated burlap bag lives are at stake? I found myself much more moved by the defunct Columbia SC mall full of dead stores where I saw the film than anything in 9's rusty metallic steampunk universe.

Among recent futuristic films, Gamer was much more thought-provoking. I liked Entertainment Weekly's dismissive summary put-down of the movie:

"In the fractious future, video games have `gone human,' with real live blood-sport warriors controlled by geeks with joysticks. The sickest of these games is Slayers, in which death-row inmates kill each other off in a noisy orgy of skip-stutter editing and dirty-ash-spattered explosions. It's The Dirty Dozen meets Tron, updated for the age of action incoherence. As the brutish Kable, Gerard Butler must find out who's pulling his strings, but it's the audience whose chain gets yanked by this head-ache inducing techno-violent mishmash. D" --Owen Glieberman

Well, yes, but . . . . in its jaded way, Gamer makes surprisingly cogent points about our sickly relationship to the media. As the film depicts grotesquely fat people in grey apartments living fantasy lives through their cartoonishly attractive avatars, I found myself brooding on how much of our identities get shaped by our identification with figures in video games, movies, etc. If one watches enough movies, then what happens to one's everyday identity? As people amuse themselves with their toys in air-conditioned comfort, doesn't the external world get increasingly stripmined in the process? As William Saleten points out in this 2006 Slate article,

"The hotter it gets, the more energy we burn. In 1981, only one in three American households with central air used it all summer long. By 1997, more than half did. Countries once cooled by outdoor air now cool themselves. In Britain, 75 percent of new cars have air conditioning. In Canada, energy consumption for residential cooling has doubled in 10 years, and half the homes now have central or window units. Kuujjuaq, an Eskimo village 1,000 miles north of Montreal, just bought 10 air conditioners. According to the mayor, it's been getting hot lately.

Instead of fixing the outdoors, we're trying to escape it. On every street in my neighborhood, people have torn down ordinary homes and put up giant air-conditioned boxes that extend as far as possible toward the property line. They've lost yards and windows, but that's the whole idea. Outdoor space is too hard to control, so we're replacing it with indoor space. From 1991 to 2005, the median lot size of single-family homes sold in the United States shrank by 9 percent, but the median indoor square footage increased by 18 percent. If you can't stand the heat, go hide in your kitchen."

Do people have genuine adventures anymore if they always live them through the media? And what does it mean if real live people become avatars? Haven't we just seen poor Kurt Cobain reduced to a Guitar Hero avatar?

Are real-life soldiers fighting in Afghanistan functioning as avatars for the increasingly older game-playing American public? Gamer shows how the artificially pleasure-filled fantasy world of the screen already dominates the polluted, paved-over, species-deprived, globally warming, and frankly less-fun world outside. In the words of Neil Postman, we are "amusing ourselves to death" with the druglike soma of entertainment, but Gamer goes further to suggest how media fantasies shape our reality in increasingly surreal ways.

As a side note, here's a great quote from Postman: "When we begin relying on the Internet for all of our news and information we will turn into a nation of zombies."

Notable film and media links--September 8, 2009

2009-09-08T19:48:00.012-04:00

---The difficulties of marketing Ellen Page.

---The avant-guarde art(?) of YouTube.

---Libraries no longer need books:

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

---Instead of reading books, we can revel in our fully augmented new reality even as print desperately tries to defend itself from the ever-encroaching internet.

---Some somehow manage to outgrow Facebook while others cannot stop seeking:

"But to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. Those self-stimulating rats, and later those humans, did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The animals, he writes in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, were "excessively excited, even crazed." The rats were in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects described feeling sexually aroused but didn't experience climax. Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, "where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy" (and Panksepp wasn't referring to Bing).

It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, "Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits "promote states of eagerness and directed purpose," Panksepp writes. It's a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it."

---A. O. Scott contemplates the authentic woman in Almodovar's All About My Mother.

---Big city alienation and U2's video for "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight."

---Truman Capote explains Holly Golightly.

---Recession-worthy living: Sean Dunne's Man in Van.

---TimeOut London compiles the "50 greatest directorial debuts of all time."

---Charlize Theron tries to laugh off rude Zach.

---The scrap metal aesthetics of Shane Acker's 9.

---The Guardian exhibits Paul Newman as The Times shares some playful Charlie Chaplin/Alistair Cooke footage.

---Lastly, Fox of Tractor Facts considers the Godardian colors of Gamer as Richard Brody unveils a scene with Godard at play.

Teenaged Bait: Kevin Williamson's I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

2009-09-07T17:38:00.006-04:00

How much does the upcoming Sorority Row steal from the 1997 horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer? Here's my time capsule review from 12 years ago:

Here's the hook: after a romantic visit to the beach, two teenage couples are driving home on a winding two lane highway. The drunken quarterback (Ryan Phillipe) stands up in the sun roof and accidentally drops his bottle of Cutty Sark on top of the driver just before they hit something, sending the car into a tail spin. They get out to find a dead man lying in a ditch, his face covered with blood.

What to do? Why not drop the body off the edge of a pier so that crabs and squids, maybe even an obliging shark will chew it up for weeks before it is found? With much debate and soul-searching, they try this, only to have the man wake up just before they shove him off the dock. They then swear to "carry their secret to their graves."

Cut to one year later. One of the girls, played by Party of Five's Jennifer Love Hewitt, mopes around college much like Winona Ryder did back in Beetlejuice, all brunette bangs and morbid guilt-ridden sulk. She returns home to her concerned Ma just to find a mysterious letter saying, you guessed it, "I know what you did last summer."

So begins Halloween's highly pedigreed screamfest of the week. The writer Kevin Williamson seems to have rattled off this screenplay just after the deliciously self-referential and very successful Scream and just before Scream 2, due out in December. Scream skillfully resuscitated the tired horror genre by ironically pointing out every rule and convention of the form even as it dished up creative blood and gore: one girl dies by garage door opener; another man screams at Jamie Lee Curtis to look behind her on video just as the real murderer comes up behind him. Scream was full of mirror-like scenes like this, immersing the viewer in a whole tradition of scary movies and parodically commenting on all of them.

In contrast, Last Summer sticks more to the basic formula, but I could still appreciate the movie's knowing manipulation of one's expectations. The fisherman killer and note writer, immediately iconographic in his slicker, rain hat, and carrying a large hook, takes pleasure in simply messing with the two couples. The quarterback gets rammed into a warehouse by his own car, breaking his arm. Hewitt's character finds a former friend of hers, Max, dead in his car trunk with a bunch of crabs chewing on his corpse. The local North Carolina fishing town beauty queen of the group (Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle Gellar) wakes up one morning to find her previous blond locks cut up like "cole slaw." That bastard fisherman! As in Scream, there's one young man (Freddie Prinze Jr.) who could easily be the killer himself.

We learn of different ways to kill someone quickly with a meat hook: impale under the chin? Strike up through the rib cage? One older sister gets stabbed and then dragged like so much meat across the floor of a darkened women's clothing store.

The two teenaged girls try investigating the killer by visiting Anne Heche out in her spooky, dusty house in the sticks. For her few moments of screen time, Heche delivers a delightfully disturbed vision of semi-distracted white trash grief. Hewitt and Gellar spend their time together speaking in rapid-fire wispy voices, trying in their Valley Girl prom queen way to find the killer before he kills them. Meanwhile, the killer quickly moves beyond simple revenge to slashing everyone in sight, thereby diluting the somewhat original storyline into a more typical slasher bloodbath, but I don't think the young audience of this movie will care. Kevin Williamson serves up his Psycho cliches like a delectable shrimp cocktail, well-chilled in a meat locker.

Notable film and media links--September 3, 2009

2009-09-03T08:18:00.008-04:00

---Our legislators hard at work.

---I don't know what this New Liberal Arts pdf thing is, but it looks intriguing:

"In this age we are surrounded by stimuli, messages in our environment clamoring for a little piece of our awareness. Advertisements are designed and sold with the simple premise of stealing one small mote of your attention. Your technological devices, designed to assist you in your life and work, beep incessantly with updates, alerts, and alarms. Cars become more and more like the cockpits of fighter planes with their heads-up displays and data readouts. Even our relationships take more maintenance; lovers separated by such a small obstacle as a day at the office stay in constant contact through email, instant messaging, and social networks. In our new digital world we’ve finally started to run out of one of our most precious resources: Our own attention.

In the distant past, educated people worked for decades to train their brains to retain information. Greek bards had to be able to recall the story and rhythm of, if not the exact words of, either of Homer’s epics at the drop of an Athenian dime. Monastery-confined monks would construct vast “memory palaces” in their minds to store and recall data in photographic detail. Starting with paper and pen, technological advances began to make that sort of rigorous mental dexterity obsolete. But in our rush to modernity, have we gone too far? Have we given over too much of our brain power to the devices built to boost our productivity? Are our brains now just tasty mush for our zombie progency?"

---David Bordwell expl0res one forking path future of Archie comics.

---A. O. Scott contemplates the heart of The Big Lebowski.

---To be honest, I'm getting a bit burned out on Basterds as it threatens to become the Dark Knight of the season, but still Ed Howard and Jason Bellamy's Conversations are always illuminating, and I liked Scarecrow's compilation of cinematic allusions and Cozzalio's compression of the entire film down to one Steig cartoon.

---My favorite Tweeter. My second favorite (not genuine, sadly). Otherwise, the Twitter revolution continues with God tweeting, classes being taught about Twitter, and Heather Armstrong wielding her Twitter power.

---In Facebook news, some decide that the social media site is more repressive than North Korea, others use Facebook to brag about themselves, and others never develop the ability to talk face to face thanks to social media.

---Anne Thompson looks at "The Age of Dystopian Cinema."

---Lorrie Moore and the essential rudeness of artists.

---The Atlantic views the excellent videos of Outkast.

---idsgn traces the evolution of film titles.

---Who better to sell movies than filmmakers?

---Lastly, do you suppose that viewers will recognize that Gamer is a "warning" about "amoral trash culture"?

Decadence in the early '80s--notes on The Informers and The Last Days of Disco

2009-08-30T10:53:00.022-04:00

I didn't realize that the two DVDs I set aside to watch this weekend would make for such a matching pair--both The Informers (2009) and The Last Days of Disco (1988) attempt to encapsulate the youth culture of the early 1980s, but their point of view and their approaches are radically different, and the contrast between the two is thought-provoking. Some notes:

1) Oddly, given that it came out this year, Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers has aged more, in part because the 1995 book that inspired the movie was comprised of brief sketches that Ellis wrote on the side when he was composing Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987). With Less Than Zero, Ellis established himself as the successful chronicler of decadently nihilistic LA youth culture, a world where boredom, Wayfarer sunglasses, and early music videos formed a kind of rock star glamour for jaded and yet handsome-and-rich-enough-to-envy disaffected teens.

Later, Ellis switched his locus to New York and ironically mixed the "greed is good" yuppie ethos of the early '90s with serial killing in American Psycho (1991). Yet the problem with all of Ellis' depictions of youthful narcissism and Play It As It Lays-Joan Didion-esque "deep" posturing (with everyone endlessly lighting cigarettes and gazing with apathy off into the distance) lies in his difficulty in making anyone care about these characters who certainly do not care about each other. Moreover, this aesthetic based on youth does not age well. Ellis' recent novel Lunar Park (2005) was an embarrassing metafictional rip-off of Stephen King, and one can only wonder about his upcoming sequel to Less Than Zero to be released soon.

2) So, while I enjoyed the re-creation of Ellis' world in The Informers, the weaknesses in the writing accumulate as the film goes on. While many writers of short fiction build their stories to some realization or epiphany that adds depth to the characterization, the vignettes of The Informers do not. Instead, what you see is largely what you get--a man kidnapping a child for profit, a very jaded rock star who beats his groupies, the spoiled disaffected children of a studio mogul who fools around on his pill-popping wife--and so on. The fundamental emptiness of these people may be Ellis' existential point, but beyond the glamor and the bored posturing in their underwear, the characters have little room to grow or change. Late in the movie, one coked up young fellow named Graham (Jon Foster) wonders why no one has bothered to explain right and wrong to him, but Ellis is having too much fun shocking his middle-American prudish audience with all of this decadence to adequately to convey things like morality and consequences. When that happens, such as when one fellow gets hit by a car, or another contracts AIDS, the film is both too heavy-handed in its sense of fate, and the characters too apathetic and rich for the viewer to get involved. The Informers suffers from the same problem that Robert Altman's Short Cuts did (which was also cobbled together from several stories): in the attempt to bring all of these mini-narratives together, both films sell out on their original premises.

3) In a side note, I disliked director Gregor Jordan's treatment of Winona Ryder. As a newscasting neurotic love interest for Billy Bob Thornton's philandering film mogul, she deserves far better (I also found it awkward to see her in such a small role). Also, Chris Isaak seems poorly cast as a fraudulent lush dad on a trip to Hawaii. Many of the "name" actors in The Informers appear stranded in underwritten parts. One can understand why Mickey Rourke treats the movie as a warm-up exercise for The Wrestler.

4) In contrast, and with the new Criterion DVD release, The Last Days of Disco (1998) returns with the alienated majesty of a film we did not properly appreciate the first time around. As the third in Whit Stillman's trilogy that began with the excellent Metropolitan (1990), and the more forgettable Barcelona (1994), Disco now looks way better to me than it did in the theater 11 years ago. Disco includes Chloe Sevigny in perhaps her best film, and Kate Beckinsale holding her own as a bitchy American (quite a contrast to her campier work in the Underworld series). Many of the guys can also be found in Stillman's earlier films, especially Chris Eigeman whose character Des helps run a Studio 54-like disco. As far as I can tell, Stillman was in love with Eigeman, since he dominates the entire trilogy. Even when (spoiler alert) Des threatens to leave the country late in the film, Stillman brings him right back for the last scene. Whereas Ellis rains down judgment on his characters, Stillman has too much affection for his to allow much to happen to them even when they catch a venereal disease or break the law.

5) But the chief thing I admired about The Last Days of Disco is the cultivated, urbane, witty dialogue and the subtle Woody Allen-in-his-prime sense of moviemaking craft on display in the story-structure, the acting, the costuming, and the period mise-en-scene. Stillman cheats a bit with the disco music. He plays it at such a low volume that one can hear every bit of the conversation, whereas in real life, the characters would have had to yell at one another incoherently over the disco beat. Regardless, The Last Days of Disco views like the last sophisticated film depicting that time period, a cultural rarity by today's standards, and therefore a delight. Even as he chronicles the end of an era many people might want to forget, Stillman conveys more hope for America's decadent youth than The Informers would care to acknowledge.

Notable film and media links--August 27, 2009

2009-08-26T21:52:00.009-04:00

---Interview with R. J. Cutler, director of The September Issue:

I was sitting there thinking, "The handful of people in that room are deciding what's going to be sold throughout the fall season."

"Right there, they're deciding what people will wear. That's what they do. You know, when the minister of finance for Louis XIV convinced him that France should become a major exporter of fashion, that it should be one of the leading industries, he appointed a minister of fashion. And that minister of fashion would decide where the hemlines were and what the fashion in the court would be, every year. That decision affected the world's fashion because it was exported from France to the rest of the world. This is what Anna is doing! She's sitting there as minister of fashion of the world, with her associates, and declaring what we shall wear." Also, behind the scenes of The September Issue.

---The original short film by Shane Acker that inspired 9.

---Imomus defines the 00s decade:

"Other things that looked dead or dying this decade: I personally stopped going to the cinema. Why sit behind someone's head in a fleapit when you can download all you need to see and project it at home? Copyright effectively died, overtaken, de facto, by events on the internet. Magazines and newspapers ended the decade looking very unhealthy indeed, although books seemed strong. Young people got a lot less interested in cars, leading some to label Japan a post-car society. Detroit pretty much collapsed. The polar ice caps melted rapidly; climate change is a fact. Banks -- having invented what they thought were clever ways to spread risk around, and play with planet-sized sums of entirely fictional money -- looked pretty shaky. As a result of the financial crisis, some declared the thirty-year neo-liberal project to privatize, incentivize and globalize over. Nicolas Bourriaud declared postmodernism dead, replaced by something he called the Altermodern. Attacks in the British press helped to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy."

---Mediaweek imagines 2014--the future of media:

"The internet will become the glue that holds all the other media channels together.

Ed Stivala, managing director at N3W Media, says: "Over the next five years, the internet will become a utility in our lives, in the same way that you purchase water and power."

Stivala imagines a future where your alarm clock will wake you according to how congested the roads are for your commute to work, and your car automatically maps out fuel stops. He adds: "Your virtual diary will keep track of your shopping list and whether you are planning to watch any cookery TV programming that week. You will no longer need to think about when you need to visit the supermarket, because your virtual diary will schedule it."

The internet will also become a moveable feast, increasingly accessed on the go. Google's Howe believes this means voice search will become "significantly more prevalent". He says: "We're testing it now. You search via voice into a smartphone and you get the results by voice, text or image. Users will be able to ask a question into their mobile and we will provide the most relevant answer, depending on what the algorithm says."

---Tama Leaver considers the future of journalism.

---Michael Erard's "Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention"

---"Best science visualization videos of 2009"

---A thought-provoking video about the social media revolution (with thanks to The Chutry Experiment).

---Edward Cone's "Blogger's Lament": "As David Weinberger, the author, blogger and philosopher of the Internet age, has said, on the Web everyone will be famous for 15 people."

---I like the way zombies are being considered by scientists and specialists in international politics. Why not be a zombie as a good career move?

---VW explains why it is time to follow the dude.

---Lastly, Stephen Marche wonders--"Why are you working so hard?" Why indeed?