THE AWESOME SIX-MINUTE CLOUD ATLAS TRAILER YOU REALLY OUGHTTA WATCH

Hooooooooooly smokes. Thanks in advance for the birthday present, Wachowski/Tykwer/Wachowski. (It releases on my birthday, is what that means.) This looks like something we're all gonna get in massive fights about, but I gotta say based on this I want to see this fuckin thing six ways from Sunday. Time will tell if I ever actually get around to finishing this book: been trying for six goddamn years now.

(h/t The Playlist)

OUR HOUSE

Time-lapse photography from the International Space Station. The Sunshine score. Done. Awesome.

THE OBLIGATORY DARK KNIGHT RISES POST

It's about Bat-time for some Bat-links, y'all:

1) Here are my collected reviews of every Batman movie up to and including The Dark Knight at Tor.com.

2) My non-spoiler review of The Dark Knight Rises, which says pretty much all I've got to say; you want to fight about particular elements in it that “don't make sense,” I'm not your guy. Besides, I already ripped whiny bullshit fan reactions the other day.

3) My piece in The Atlantic about where both Christopher Nolan and Batman stand at present.

Happy Monday, kids!

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HARRY KNOWLES

The gentleman in question

(Like a lot of bloggers, unencumbered by the professional obligation to churn out immediate responses to the brutal mass murder in Colorado Friday midnight, I'm prefacing this post by saying this was supposed to go up Friday morning. When I woke up and turned on my computer, I saw, yeah, maybe this isn't the best time to rant about Harry Knowles. It was a time for contemplation for many, and for me a full day of sitting around stunned at what that malignant little fuck—I'm not giving him the satisfaction of saying his name; he has no name—did. Anyway, I don't really have anything to contribute to that discussion beyond the anger and sadness so many others share, intensified in this particular case because movie theaters are a place I've felt safe and free my whole life, especially in times when I felt in danger or trapped. I basically co-sign everything my good friend Filmi Girl says in the introduction to this post, so check that out, then come back, and watch the below video to transition back into our completely unrelated regularly scheduled programming.)



So, earlier this week, before anyone other than critics and a few lucky bloggers (and people like me who aren't quite as fancy as the former just yet but still a little fancier than the latter) had had a chance to see The Dark Knight Rises, Harry Knowles, founder of Ain't It Cool News, and for better or worse the ur-Internet movie blogger, spoiled the sweet living fuck out of it. While that's a little shitty, Mr. Knowles did admittedly preface everything with a spoiler alert, so it's not as bad as it could be. What is, and what makes this more notable than just internecine nerd grumping, is the way in which Knowles registers his “[p]rofound disappointment.” It's a stunningly lousy piece of criticism, fodder for everyone who would join Kevin Smith's recent crusade against not only critics themselves, but the entire form.

Whether or not Knowles' piece was meant as a “formal” review or not is a bit beside the point. Ain't It Cool is, by virtue of having been around the Internet practically since before civilians even knew what computers were, an institution. Its editorial perspective is right there on its sleeve, with its heart: ain't movies cool? I'm hardly in a position to disagree. In principle I'm right there with them. I love movies with a fierce intensity. Movies can be about anything and everything, so to love movies is to love life itself, at a certain point. On the other hand, loving cinema does not mean one loves all movies. Some are better than others.

I would submit that if the way in which your love of movies manifests itself is in the desire to write about them, you owe it to yourself and other movie lovers to at least try to get at what a movie is, rather than focusing on your own personal reaction to it to the exclusion of all other things. Criticism is not a simple matter of “I liked it” or “I didn't like it.” A big part of it is considering factors outside the self; while ultimately purely objective observation is always going to be impossible because the observer is part of the observation, it's incumbent on the observer to do the best s/he can. The best parts of oneself—knowledge, wisdom, and empathy—are the best tools of observation.

Where Knowles fucks up in that Dark Knight Rises piece, and the entire experience of watching the movie itself, from the sound of things, is in that inability to step even an inch outside himself and the Dark Knight Rises screenplay he'd already written in his head. (He's no stranger to reading the wrong script, if you'll recall his embarrassing adventures with that fake Prometheus script back in April.) Reading his reaction to the movie (since calling it a “review” is a bit much), everything that pissed him off relates to a choice Christopher (and brother Jonathan) Nolan made either in transposing characters from the comics into the very different realm of cinema, or in the effects of those characters' action in a world they, the Nolan brothers, not Harry Knowles, created.

Among those effects is something that relates to a larger discussion of fandom and sexism that's come to a bit of a boil this year. In the case of both this summer's previous mega-blockbuster superhero movies, The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man, women critics were subjected to shit like “Stick with rom-coms, bitch” for weighing in with anything other than adulation. In gaming there was the whole “getting the player to identify with Lara Croft by her getting almost-raped” crap and that woman's Kickstarter to fund a study of sexism in gaming that led to a deluge of threats of rape and a Flash game where the player could punch her in the face. Given this context, a discussion that has been unavoidable in fandom circles for months, it's a sign of great negligence that Knowles would register the following complaint (bolded emphasis mine, not his; shitty writing his, not mine):

“It is just at this stage that the film loses all sense of urgency. I mean, you have a city with a strange respirator men with an army of thugs and every hardened criminal in the city – and it doesn’t end up looking like Old Detroit from ROBOCOP? I mean – there’s 1000s armed bad guys and the city isn’t being raped and pillaged. Instead they set up courts to make people walk on ice?”

Yes, Harry, there are thousands of armed bad guys and the city isn't being raped and pillaged. Perhaps Christopher and Jonathan Nolan do not share your lazy conflation of rape and pillage with dramatic urgency. Perhaps they also share a frame of reference not entirely derived from other movies with no aesthetic, philosophical, or any other connection other than being movies. If anything, the absence of rape and pillage in this case could be interpreted as a) Bane not being an anarchist, because he's not an anarchist, and b) a sign to pay attention because (pardon the overly literal reading) something's happening, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Knowles?

I should clarify that accusing Harry Knowles of rape advocacy based on the above quote would be inaccurate. But it's indicative of a fundamental lack of taking a moment to think about other people and how they might think or feel, which is the same fundamental problem with his entire reaction. The near-mantra which the repetitions of “bullshit” become is derived almost entirely from the movie's interpretation of the comics being different from Knowles'. There is, I hate to break it to him, no one set-in-stone interpretation of the comics, which are, as a writer I rather like pointed out in The Atlantic recently, the product of many different authors and the different perspectives each brought to the material. Then, there are things such as Bane being “no longer South American,” which is an assumption based on the absence of it being spelled out, and not something there's any evidentiary basis to state as anything other than an assumption. And, even if he's not, not to be mean or anything, but who gives a fuck? If Knowles had liked the movie (on whatever squishy inarticulately-conveyed basis) he certainly wouldn't have.

While we're in an interrogative mood, another “who gives a fuck?” subject is Harry Knowles himself, as in “why should we give a fuck what he has to say?” His is not an a priori irrelevant voice. However irritating he's become both online and in Austin (and holy shit, if you want to hear invective, just wind Austin critic types up with a question about the guy and watch them go), and however many writers have come along who are better at doing what he does than he is (Ain't It Cool is home to some fine ones, as well as some not so fine), online movie and fandom discourse is what it is to a significant degree due to Harry Knowles' influence. And a lot of people still read Ain't It Cool. So when he hops on his computer the day before one of the biggest geek movies of the year and writes something this stupid, it's irritating.

It's also bad for criticism in general. I haven't had much to say about Kevin Smith's ridiculous and weird anti-critic tirades (in keeping with the “it's not always about me” theme here, Scott Weinberg basically nails the whole thing in this piece), but Smith and Harry Knowles are essentially on the same page on this subject. Their (apparent) weird mix of unquantifiable emotion, dogmatic certitude, and the utter refusal to address either is one of the most annoying things about movie geekery. Asking why something is “awesome” or “sucks,” or having to explain, does not in any way cheapen the experience of a movie, and in a lot of cases enriches it. Getting deeper on a movie you liked and discovering that, in fact, there are some things wrong with it doesn't mean the subjective, emotional experience of liking it is any less valid. All it means is that the movie in question did some things well and other things not so well. One can like a “bad” movie and not enjoy a “good” movie. No matter what the case, understanding is a net good.

Throwing stones at nerds, admittedly, will lead to a lot of shit getting broken in my glass house (which, because I'm a nerd, is a 1:1 scale replica of Dr. Manhattan's Martian palace in Watchmen). But, in terms of the discussion at hand, I find it particularly grating when unexamined feelings are presented as having any kind of relevance, and when the process of examination is dismissed as either boring or the occupation of sour-grapes killjoy assholes. I also think voices with large audiences of listeners should endeavor to say things of meaning and value.

Of, course, that might just be a by-product of my remembering that once upon a time, nerds were supposed to be smart.

LEAVING THE NEWSROOM

Last night I watched what will probably be the last episode of The Newsroom that I ever watch, unless some rather extreme circumstances arise. I was considering ranting about why, except this piece by Awards Daily's Sasha Stone both perfectly sums it up, and is from the perspective of someone with a more legit gripe.

Peace, Sork. Hope this is just a blip.

APROPOS OF NOTHING, ANYTHING GOES

Just because this is awesome. Y'know, Temple of Doom is fucking great until the plane takes off . . .

COMIC-CON AND 4 ALTERNATIVES

Slave Leia cosplayers: There can only be more than one.

As many of you may have noticed, Comic-Con is currently underway in San Diego, which, as film critic Scott Renshaw noted, is “a stupid place for an event where you're indoors the whole time.” (This documentary I reviewed over at Tor is an okay-ish primer.) It's the nerd Super Bowl, a massive event, a place where somebody detonated a claymore full of comic books, video games, science fiction, TV, board games, toys, fucked-up carpeting, and laminated badges. My only in-person Comic-Con experience is with the decidedly smaller and less crazy one in New York, and let me tell you, even that blew my fuckin mind. I got lost for half an hour trying to find the room where my roundtable interview with Joe Cornish was, then I got lost for another forty-five minutes trying to find someone to covertly hand my borrowed press credentials off to, eventually randomly stumbling across a colleague who was cosplaying with her girlfriend as the Eleventh Doctor and companion. Then I tried finding another friend's booth for another bewildering few minutes and eventually just had to check the fuck out from sensory overload and get in a goddamn cab.

The thing is, as fascinating as the whole thing is, and as much a nerd as I am, I still don't quite fit in at Comic-Con. While there isn't really a Con monoculture (much as it all may blur into one for outsiders), I don't really fit in with any of the tribes, either. I'm not a comic book guy (I like them, I just sometimes brainfart and think Steve Ditko coached the '85 Bears), I'm not really a hardcore gamer, for the same reason I don't really get down with swords and orcs and gelflings and questing and saying “thou” and shit, because it feels like all the big video games are The Quest of the Eldritch Dragon Lord, unless they're Tom Clancy's Call of Modern Warfare, and if I want to play that game I can watch Fox News while voguing with my PS3 controller. Movies, I do like (as you may have noticed), but I don't get automatic geek boners for superhero trailers (the squee-est I ever got over a trailer was for Bande a Part at Film Forum, because my superpower is being tweedy enough to fucking crush planets). Toys, hey, look. I don't want to be all “I'm in my fucking 30s” and stuff, but I'm in my fucking 30s. If you told me they were putting out an Alain Delon action figure from Le Samourai I'd be all up on that shit, but otherwise y'all can have 'em with no competition.

While Comic-Con is fine and dandy for the people who it's for—and I won't lie, even though I feel like I'm in a foreign country there, it's a reasonably hospitable foreign country—it's not for everyone. With that in mind, here are some alternate Cons (feel free to break with longstanding Movies By Bowes ™ tradition and actually use the comment section to propose Cons I might have overlooked):


Fritz-Con

The idea: This is something the Self-Styled Siren and I came up with a while back (I don't remember whose idea it was, and she doesn't even remember the conversation; such is the danger with goofy passing fancies): a whole Con based on Fritz Lang. Which would fucking rule. You got a solid forty years of awesome movies to choose from, even if you'd have to stick to the classics to appeal to civilians. Though, on second thought, the idea of any civilians voluntarily showing up to Fritz-Con is the funniest thing ever.

Cosplay opportunities: Many, and awesome. Dudes can cosplay as Dan Duryea in Scarlet Street and have everyone in a hundred-mile radius be like “Whattafuckindouchebag . . .”

Or fuck it, show up as Fritz himself if you want rule fucking balls:

For the ladies, you could cosplay as Thea von Harbou and get in a fight with one of the Fritz cosplayers, or if you're feeling less dramatic, you could be Sylvia Sidney in Fury—

—or Brigitte Helm—

—or Joan Bennett—

—I mean, you got tons of options here.

Must-see booths: You got your UFA booth, with a dude on stilts dressed as F.W. Murnau, that booth's got great lighting and is shaped so weird you wonder how it doesn't tip over. Then you got your noir booth, which is lit similarly but stuff looks more normal, though the booth babes have an unfortunate tendency to make men leave behind the lives they've known and unravel along Freudian psycho-sexual spirals, but hey, man, shit happens at Con, what can I say.

Potential for commercialism to swallow it whole: Nil, unless the Skrillex “In the Hall of the Mountain King” remix blows up.


Donkey-Con

The idea: A Con for the kind of people whose jokes are too complicated and “ironic.” The entire Con is spent explaining to people with increasing exasperation that the Con has nothing to do with Donkey Kong. No one really knows why it's called Donkey-Con, because the explanation is so long no one has ever managed to sit through the whole thing.

Cosplay opportunities: I was at a Halloween party a few years ago talking to a friend of mine and her roommate. My friend was wearing a big old ratty-looking beehive and smudged make-up, and her roommate was wearing nothing but a plastic bag, a white tube top and shorts, and a big straw sticking up out of her cleavage. They explained they were Amy Winehouse and her bag of cocaine. Which was awesome, because this is when Amy Winehouse was still alive. At Donkey-Con, the people would explain that they were cosplaying as my friend and her roommate . . . get it? (Ed. Note: Donkey-Con is fucking insufferable)

Must-see booths: There are a lot of them, but after the first one explains what it is to you, you leave and go to the bar.

Potential for commercialism to swallow it whole: Virtually guaranteed, because some evil white guy in a suit would be like “Hey, wouldn't it be ironic if we made a billion dollars off this bullshit?” And he'd proceed to do so, even while everyone at Donkey-Con would explain that that wasn't really ironic, but if a trip to Donkey-Con teaches you anything, it is that you do not listen to anything anyone at Donkey-Con says.


Con-Con

The idea: The world's finest con men and women “con”vene (ahh, being me fucking rules sometimes) to present the latest in flim-flam, misrepresentation for financial gain, and plain old bullshit. Paypal me a hundred bucks and I'll tell you what city it's in this year.

Cosplay opportunities: This one can be a little tough to pull off—

—which is why this one's the most popular among men:

For the ladies, there's always the classic Brigid O'Shaughnessy—

—or if you're feeling new school, Annette Bening in The Grifters (secretly one of the sexiest performances in cinema)—

—or you could go subtle and just try a variation on “eye-catching but relatively unassuming.” You know, because you want to build trust in your mark.

Must-see booths: Hard to say, but one thing's for sure, at least one of them's going to prey on your deepest unspoken desire.

Potential for commercialism to swallow it whole: Awesomely, all the corporate sponsors lose all their money, too, just like you. Though, I mean, it sucks that you got fleeced, but hey, the evil white guys in suits did too, fuck them, woo hooo!!!


Karma-Con

The idea: Fuck yeah, that's right. A racially insensitive, commercialized-to-the-gills Indian cinema Con aimed squarely at NRI/American fans. Boosh.

Cosplay opportunities: Dude. Fucking unlimited. You can be bland and go the Shahrukh Khan NRI melodrama route—



—or more traditional, which in this case is less boring (here's Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai in a still from Devdas)—

—or straight-up 70s WTF—



—I could go on all day. We're talking the greatest cosplay like, ever.

Must-see booths: All of them. Good luck getting into the SRK panel, though, it's fuckin gonna be jammed. He'll be the only one of the Three Khans there (otherwise they'd just call it Three-Con): Aamir will not be there because it's not serious enough, and Salman won't be there because the Con isn't being held in his backyard.

Potential for commercialism to swallow it whole: Considering that this entire thing is a rancidly cynical marketing thing that would piss hardcore North American Bolly fans off to the point of murder (which is why the list of stars attending is always going to be weirdly selective), having it be consumed by commercialism would be a bit like dividing by zero. But seriously, it'll still be worth it for the mind-bending cosplay.


That, of course, is just the tip of the Con iceberg. To each your own subculture. May it never outgrow you.

FORM, CONTENT, AND GENRE: THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY

Front: Bill Cooke (Sean Williams), his daughter Ronnie (Becky Byers). Back: "houseguest" Conor (Jason Howard)

Both my parents were (and Mom still is) ardent fans of genre fiction: crime for Mom, SF for my late Da. Mom never had much use for SF and Dad constantly snarked about crime fiction—this disagreement is kind of a tip-of-the-iceberg signifier of their eventual divorce—and while it sucks to have people you love fighting with each other and all that, the reason I bring this up is that, by accident, I ended up having a zillion conversations about the characteristics of two different genres with two very intelligent, knowledgeable people.

All these deep thoughts on the nature of genre have led to me founding and becoming a firm believer in the Cat/Biscuit Principle (“you can put a cat in the oven but that don't make it a biscuit”) of Genre: the presence of familiar genre elements do not necessarily place a given work within that genre. For example, Michael Bay's Transformers pictures are not science fiction in spite of having robots, aliens and Shia LeBeouf fucking his way through the Victoria's Secret catalog. (Let's not dwell too long about my theory that the Transformers movies transcend genre due to Michael Bay's auteurism overwhelming any attempts to categorize them as anything but his; his authorial signature may be the vague feeling that his work is the product of a pair of quasi-sapient testicles dipped in cocaine, but it is a signature nonetheless.)

There is also another level of achievement for genre pieces, once they pass my standard to be allowed to even exist—oh, trust me, the best part of creating your own aesthetic theories is getting to be a total fucking prick, don't let anyone tell you any different—which is: being good. This sounds simple, but if it really was that simple, nothing would suck, and lots of things suck, so, y'know, QED and shit. So, how does something become good? To use an example from film, let's not fuck around at all, let's look at Citizen Kane. One key reason why it's so great is because, as the story of a bold, innovative man, it used bold and innovative techniques. It's a movie about trying to unearth secrets, and makes masterful use of shadow. Also, everybody turning the whole “Rosebud was his sled” thing into a joke can stick their dick in a boat propeller; having the dying thoughts of A Great Man™ be of the last link to his childhood innocence before he was taken away and had greatness thrust upon him is true, simple, and profound, and it's a final not-so-subtle “fuck your expectations” finger wag at the audience.

So what does Citizen Kane have to do with three independent theatre pieces in Queens seventy years later? Aside from being awesome, the only tangible link is in melding form with content so that neither exists (or at the very least, is as strong) without the other. The Honeycomb trilogy, consisting of the plays Advance Man, Blast Radius, and Sovereign, sprang forth from the mind of playwright Mac Rogers, and was brought to life by Gideon Productions, which aside from Mac consists of Sean and Jordana Williams (the latter of whom directed all three plays), Sandy Yaklin, and most recently Shaun B. Wilson. In the interests of full disclosure, I need to mention that these people are all friends of mine, but we should be perfectly clear about one thing: this is not me praising my friends because they're my friends. I've already told them in person how much they rule, on many occasions, some of which I wasn't even drunk. But here's the thing: all three shows and the totality they comprise considered as a whole are something uniquely great and about a hair away from being perfect.

The Honeycomb trilogy is an alien invasion story, and one unlike any other I've ever seen or read. Your bog-standard alien invasion story has the aliens come to Earth, fuck some shit up, and eventually get defeated by the pluck of the spunky, outnumbered humans. While it may sound a little like hair-splitting, there's a difference between an alien invasion story and a story about aliens. The act of “invasion” reflexively gets most people's back up, and being people, we tend to side unambiguously with people. Fuck aliens, they come from other planets, that shit's fucked up. What Mac (sorry, it's weird to call him Rogers, and even weirder to call him Mr. Rogers, for obvious reasons) does with the Honeycomb plays that's so great is back up the moral nuance truck and just unload: the aliens—or, as they call themselves, “the people of the Honeycomb”—are a hivemind that remembers everything that has ever happened to any individual, where all are one and one is all. They are a peaceful race, enlightened in many ways humans are not, but they are not by any means perfect. Prior to the events of Advance Man, the Honeycomb finds itself stranded on Mars, its own planet long since fucked, where they're discovered by the first manned mission from Earth to Mars. Earth being pretty fucked up too, the astronauts let the Honeycomb talk them into coordinating a covert invasion, after which the re-vitalized Honeycomb will assume control of a “terraformed” Earth (or whatever the Latin is for the Honeycomb's home planet, since “terra” is Earth, making terraforming Earth sound a little like dividing by zero), with humans in a subordinate capacity. The trade-off for humanity, kind of a brutal one, is that we get to stave off ecological disaster . . . but a whole fuckload of us have to die. Considering that the Honeycomb, like any living entity, wants to stay alive at all costs, the existential quandary of having to kill a bunch of people is something they'll regret but will nonetheless totally do. Their human collaborators' existential quandary is similar: unless a bunch of pretty fundamental things change, humanity is going to fuck the Earth uninhabitable, so the only way for humanity to survive is for a bunch of us to die. Of course, not everyone's going to just happily accept that, which is why the astronauts have to plan the whole thing in secret.

This all happens before the first play, Advance Man, even starts. The play itself takes the form of a living-room drama, a staple of naturalist/realist theatre, and takes place entirely in the living room (natch) of the Cooke family. Bill, the patriarch, was the lead astronaut on the Mars mission and the covert invasion plans. Telling the story mostly from the perspective of Bill's teenage children, daughter Ronnie and son Abbie, and wife Amelia helps keep the parceling of information gradual and organic. Not to mention, having a range of characters provides a range of perspectives on the increasingly ominous behavior of Bill and his colleagues, especially the mentally damaged (or is he....?) Conor. The sensitive Abbie has a close bond with Conor and has been, unwittingly, drawing pictures that closely resemble the Honeycomb and its insectoid people for years. Ronnie is the stronger sibling, creating not only a neat reversal of typical gender expectations but someone to question the strange goings-on in the Cooke household, with that desire arising from character rather than simple plot expediency.

That, in a nutshell, is what makes the Honeycomb plays work as drama rather than an essay about the uneasy human relationship with The Other, be it terrestrial or extra-. It's also what lends such emotional weight to the climax of Advance Man where, the cat decidedly out of the bag (Ronnie's running around with a gun desperately trying to put a halt to the conspiracy), Abbie pushes The Button that's going to trigger the invasion just to see what happens. It's a moment that's true to the character as already established, and to the whimsical, stochastic nature of existence itself: the end of the world as we know it happens, in large part, because one guy said what the fuck.

Blast Radius picks up many years later, with the Honeycomb firmly in control of Earth, and humanity existing in a post-technological state in which a lot of people can barely remember The Time Before, Abbie is a big Vichy muckety-muck (and in a long-term romantic relationship with Conor, who as revealed in Advance Man is in fact a Honeycomb consciousness occupying Conor's human body; with the telekinetic link to the Honeycomb severed, “Conor” now finds himself developing a kind of hybrid consciousness deriving from the experience of the Honeycomb within the limitations of the human mind). Ronnie is a key figure in the human resistance, which is centered in houses devoted to caring for pregnant women, in part because the people of the Honeycomb—known colloquially by the epithet “bugs” by non-Vichy humans (note: the Vichy parallel is my own, not Mac's)—are icked out by human childbirth. The former Cooke household has become one such house, which is how Blast Radius is set in the same (albeit distressed by the apocalypse) room as Advance Man. And, in that room, we observe Ronnie and Abbie's conflict, Conor's increasing empathy for humanity, and even the resistance, which seizes on the discovery of a fatal Honeycomb weakness to launch a counter-attack. Of course, nothing being simple, that weakness consists of a chemical reaction whereby a Honeycomb byproduct the people call “bug water” (I'm not sure exactly what it is, though it doesn't matter; its semiotic value is the important thing, not exactly how it works), when ingested by a human being, causes that human being to explode. And so, Ronnie's counter-offensive consists of recruiting 51 human suicide bombers to blow up Honeycomb installations. In persuading them, she faces the obstacle of this being something she herself is not going to do (being pregnant), as she plans to lead the resistance in the aftermath. Of course, nothing being simple, the father of her unborn child ends up having to be one of the 51. As does Conor, leaving Abbie without the love of his life as well. Yeah, the end of Blast Radius is fucking intense.

The final installment of the trilogy is where we really get into unexplored (or extremely rarely explored) territory, in SF terms: what happens after the good guys win, not to mention the question of whether we, humans, are the good guys, and they, the aliens, are actually the bad guys. Sovereign picks up after the revolution, when humanity is back in control and the “bugs” almost completely eradicated. Ronnie is hard at work re-establishing a working government, and serving as regional governor, when her security forces capture Abbie, a wanted man for his service to the Honeycomb. With the bulk of the play consisting of Abbie's trial for whatever they can pin on him—as he points out, quite accurately, the stuff he did wasn't illegal until his side lost—Sovereign wraps up the trilogy by explicitly examining who was right and who was wrong, and because the whole trilogy has centered on Ronnie and Abbie (and Ronnie has appropriated the Cooke home as her headquarters and thus the action once again takes place in the same room, now featuring a memorial to “the 51” from Blast Radius), that question ends up boiling down to whether Ronnie and Abbie were/are right and/or wrong. Of course, nothing being simple, they're both right in some ways, and wrong in others and ultimately, there's no place for either of them in the world, and all they have is each other, bringing the trilogy which, for all the world-building and the dozens of other great characters that populate what we see of that world, has essentially been about them to the perfect emotional point of closure.

Taken as a whole, the Honeycomb trilogy is one of the finest and most singular works of science fiction that I've ever encountered. It's a story that can only be SF, and as currently constituted, a story that can only be told in the medium in which it was: the stage. Each play was written specifically as a particular kind of play: Advance Man, as above, was a living-room drama, Blast Radius quite Shakespearean in form if not language (which was colloquial modern), and Sovereign Greek in the same way. They each are in every way works of and celebrating the stage. It sounds redundant, but a work must be what it is before it can be great; by “be what it is” I mean it needs to be fundamentally of its medium. That's why Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made and that's why the Honeycomb trilogy is a—maybe the—masterpiece of science fiction theatre.

And it's one I don't really want to see turned into a movie or TV show. It'll cease to be what it is if it's “opened up” (a phrase describing a process that can be a mixed blessing for a play adapted to film; sometimes a play is too fundamentally a play to be “opened up”). This is not to say that I don't want to see Mac Rogers write for TV or film. I do. I think he'd be great at it, and eagerly look forward to the day when he does, and not even as a barnacle or anything, as a fan.

I know this piece has been primarily about the writing in the Honeycomb plays, and I don't want to slight any of the other artists whose work contributed to the productions. Here are the pages for Advance Man, Blast Radius, and Sovereign. Every single person listed on all three of those pages ruled at what they did. And they all should be damn proud. I know I get excited about stuff but nothing you've just read is an exaggeration.

Well, maybe the boat propeller thing.

2012 IN CINEMA: HALFTIME

The year is half over, and earlier on Twitter a bunch of film critics and other assorted riffraff were posting their lists of the best of the year so far. I'm a good little lemming, so I'll join in the fun, even though for a variety of reasons this enterprise is more just for fun than any kind of lasting meaning. Then again, what the fuck do best-of-year lists mean even with a complete year? Eh? Riddle me that. Now that everyone's in a nice warm and fuzzy “morbidly questioning the purpose of existence” type mood, let's proceed:


Top 10 Movies I Haven't Seen Yet:

Money's been tight, and even if not for that, there are only so many hours in a day. Thus, without comment—

1—The Avengers (yep, still)
2—Moonrise Kingdom
3—Rowdy Rathore
4—Damsels In Distress
5—The Deep Blue Sea (the Terence Davies one, wiseasses, not the shark one)
6—Goon
7—Take This Waltz
8—From Rome With Love (I don't care if everyone says it's meh, Woody's Woody)
9—Kahaani
10—Bernie

Perils of being exclusively on the SF beat for Tor.com, and only being able to get into whatever else I can randomly hustle a screening for. Then again, less than a year ago I couldn't get into any screenings at all, so I should just shaddap.


The Shit List:

Though this has been a pretty good year for movies so far, there have been some real stinkeroodies here and there as well. Like the following (from godawful to disappointing in ascending order):

1—The Divide—Hateful, misanthropic, nihilistic garbage, and it lasted fucking eons.

2—Jesus Henry Christ—This pile of shit, I saw at Tribeca in '11, but as it (for some unfathomable reason) got theatrical release this year, and because I never talked about how terrible it was last year, here goes: this movie fucking sucks. It's a soulless, cynical attempt at twee quirk, that simply alienates through its rote horseshit attempts to be hip. Still, Michael Sheen's good in it, because Michael Sheen is always good, but that's literally the only thing in this movie that doesn't suck. The director openly admitting in the Q&A that he only made this picture (based on a short he'd already made and didn't really feel like revisiting) because his agent told him he could make money made the whole joyless experience make sense. Better luck next time, homes. Try doing what you feel instead of chasing a greenback dollar.

3—The Raven—Brainless horseshit. Would have made Poe turn over in his grave if he wasn't still too smacked out to move.

4—Gone—Amanda Seyfried's great, and the movie's not bad until the climax, at which point it abruptly ceases to make logical sense and faceplants, leading to a retroactive feeling of nothing in the whole movie having had any point.

5—Safe House—Denzel's Denzel, and it's not like this is any dumber than any ten other action pictures I'll happily rewatch, but holy balls is the editing bad.

6—John Carter—Conditional; I actually want to watch this one again, but the first time through was a little rough.

7—Prometheus—Partially brilliant, partially whatever the diametric opposite of brilliant is. Eminently frustrating as a result.

And, now, with no further ado, counting down from 10, my favorites (as opposed strictly to best) of 2012 so far. Due to where my head has been at and the way release calendars tend to go, the following overwhelmingly favors ownage pictures, but a) does that surprise you at all and b) whaddaya want from me, 2012's been a good year for ownage:

10—(tie) Men In Black 3/The Hunger Games—Both pictures had their problems (The Hunger Games' all that wobblydeewobblydee handheld camera, Men Black 3's cringe-inducing Chinese “jokes”) but overall two blockbusters that did their damn job.

8—Haywire—Gina Carano fucking owns.

7—Eddie, The Sleepwalking Cannibal—Hasn't been released theatrically in the US yet, but when it does, look the fuck out. Canadian somnambucannibal horror comedy is going to be the new mumblecore, just you fucking watch.

6—Lockout—SPACE JAIL MOTHERFUCKERS SPACE JAIL SPACE JAIL SPACE JAIL!!!

5—The Raid: Redemption—Wall-to-wall fucking ownage, of highly inventive variety (weaponized refrigerators, fluorescent light bulbs to the jugular), but more than that, the single greatest action movie premise ever: “The bad guys are in a fucking building, and we need to go to that building and fucking kill every single one of them.” It's kinda like a bunch of dudes were sitting around Indonesia chewing qat and smoking angel dust while watching Die Hard and being like “Yeah, those guys're pussies.” This and Space Jail are the two movies on this list I'm most likely to buy on DVD and watch until they disintegrate.

4—The Grey—Less an ownage picture and more an existential meditation on the futility of testicles as survival tools, and less a big dumb thing about a bunch of dudes getting eaten by wolves than a really goddamn good movie. It's the best thing Joe Carnahan's ever done by quite a bit (Narc comes closest, but good as it was it was still nowhere near this), and neck-and-neck with Taken for “best late-period Liam Neeson ownage picture,” no mean feat these days now with Liam Neeson's ascension to godhood.

3—Magic Mike—On top of all the praise I rained on it like so many $1 bills, it's also a clear-eyed look at the precariousness of the American economy at present.

2—The Cabin In The Woods—So clever. So much fun.

1—Sleepless Night—And, my favorite of the year thus far. What, you thought I wasn't going to love a French gangster movie that inflects its essentially naturalistic presentation with surreal elements to create a dream-like effect and a sense of neither beginning nor ending but always existing? Child please.

So here we are at halftime. The second half of the year holds even more glories. Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Dark Knight Rises, Holy Motors, Ek Tha Tiger, Joker, Looper, Django Unchained, The Master, whatever the fuck Terry Malick's new picture is called, that David Russell picture that basically looks like I cast it while fapping, and a zillion other things I can't even think of at the moment. AND . . . Taken 2. As Robert Carradine said in Revenge of the Nerds, “It's gonna be a great year . . . HEHHHH HEHHH HEHHH!!!”

I SEE A LOTTA GENDER BINARY LAWBREAKERS OUT THERE: MAGIC MIKE

Box office predictions are not what I do best, largely because I don't really care beyond a vague desire to see good pictures make money and bad ones tank, largely because the predictive metric I use is extremely imprecise: the gut feeling. One's guts, to paraphrase John Cusack in High Fidelity, tend to have shit for brains. But I've been seeing signs that allow me to make the following prediction with a fair degree of confidence: Magic Mike is going to make an absolute fuckton of money.

It will do so by catering to the “people who like seeing good-looking naked dudes” demographic, large numbers of whom have been evincing distinct interest in this movie, and if anything, they're not as excited as they should be. Steven Soderbergh is too subtle a filmmaker to beat a dead horse with enormous stripper cock (though there are a couple, what's the word, memorable dick shots), instead crafting what ends up being a really interesting counterpoint to his January picture Haywire in terms of subversion of traditional notions of gender. Where in Haywire Soderbergh has Gina Carano swaggering around dispensing ownage (traditionally a male enterprise), in Magic Mike we're presented with men who rely on their looks to earn a living dancing naked for money, and the premature obsolescence inherent to that way of life. Much as Gina Carano, while an agent of the highest level of brutal ownage, is also a conventionally attractive, even feminine, woman, Magic Mike star Channing Tatum is in no overt way androgynous, and yet without contradicting his masculinity in any way manages to evince powerful sensuality and vulnerability. However (and sadly tellingly), while Gina Carano's likely career trajectory in movies is essentially “rich man's Cynthia Rothrock,” Channing Tatum's has no ceiling. I've been saying this for a couple years now, but y'all are just gonna have to deal with this shit: Channing Tatum is a good-god-almighty Movie Star.

And he's absolutely tremendous in Magic Mike, a semi-autobiographical tale based loosely on his own days as a male stripper prior to breaking into movies. By day, Tatum is a 30ish guy named Mike hustling a few bucks here and there doing construction and stuff, but by night . . . he's Magic Mike, male stripper extraordinaire. Life is good: he has threesomes with his omnisexual kind-of-sort-of girlfriend Joanna (Olivia Munn) and anonymous women whose names neither of them can remember. One day, Mike meets a younger dude (Alex Pettyfer) who's either shy or has a case of rectal-cranial inversion syndrome—maybe both, but definitely one or the other—and, impulsively, decides to invite him into the odd, hilarious, and wildly fun world of stripping.

Magic Mike's story is nothing especially novel, which in a way is kind of the point. The milieu is relatively novel, as is the fact that it's an examination of male beauty, but the main thrust (heh heh) of the narrative is “life moves on/all things must pass/looks fade/new replaces old.” As the movie goes on, it becomes increasingly clear to Mike that he's rapidly approaching his sell-by date in terms of being a stripper, and the question becomes how exactly he'll deal with this, if in fact he does. Given that this is, while a universal truth, not the most dramatic premise imaginable, Magic Mike is a little slow in places, before recovering for an immensely satisfying ending that vaguely recalls Ron Shelton's Bull Durham, with Channing Tatum as Crash Davis. Of all the things.

Speaking of Tatum, though, the real appeal here is the acting. Tatum is legitimately fucking spectacular, not just in comparison to his previous work, but actually fifth Best Actor nominee caliber. That is not an exaggeration. He hits every note perfectly, from the doofus moments to the puer aeternus moments, to the truly mind-boggling, seemingly physically impossible dance routines (the one he comes up with when Matthew McConaughey challenges him to come up with “something new” truly is something new; Soderbergh shoots it and Tatum performs it in stunning form). The other legitimately award-worthy performance is McConaughey's. His slightly older, semi-retired stripper-turned-majordomo is the absolute perfect Matthew McConaughey role, and not only because he's expressly prohibited from ever wearing a shirt. If anything, McConaughey almost makes it look too easy; the one scene where it's really apparent how much craft is on display is when he and Channing Tatum find themselves, for the first time, overtly at cross purposes. The turn from sexy, charismatic charmer to utterly cold-blooded bastard is immediate, absolute, and perfectly played.

Nearly everyone else is good too. Alex Pettyfer has a slightly tougher job as the inscrutable Kid, and handles himself acceptably. Stand-up comic Gabriel Iglesias represents my people (fat dudes, of course, not Latinos, of whom there are others and of whom despite speaking quite a bit of Spanish I am not) quite well, and hopefully this means he'll get more movie roles, because he's really funny and he does well here. The two main women—apart from the dozens of extras having an absolute goddamn blast during the strip club scenes—are a bit of a study in contrasts: Olivia Munn is fun (and gets the job done, boom bap ba boom ba boom bap) as the threesome-loving Joanna, and looms large in a fairly crucial plot point viz a vis the whole perpetual onward march of time business, though Cody Horn (representing another side of the same plot point) is a bit awkward as the Kid's sister, and makes a bit of a mess with her one big emotional scene. Still, she's not terrible, just not all that great.

The job Steven Soderbergh does with this material is really rather extraordinary. Great as he is, the words “loose” and “fun” are not generally the first that come to mind when his name is mentioned, and the fact that Magic Mike is loose and fun is a lot more surprising than “Peter Andrews” (SERIOUSLY WHY DOES HE ONLY SHOOT STEVEN SODERBERGH MOVIES YOU GUYS????) creating a perfectly Floridian sense of place with a color palate largely grounded in golden browns with the occasional dash of pink (which colors also bring to mind skin), because that's the kinda shit fancy-schmancy really fucking talented filmmakers are supposed to do. The soundtrack is excellent (and a lot more strip-clubby than the usual Soderbergh jazzy David Holmes or ambient Cliff Martinez either-or), and the club sequences are simply goddamn brilliant. American hetero male iconography all over the goddamn place, being made fun of. A shooting style that simultaneously captures the ridiculousness, hilarity, and wonderful guilelessness of the dance numbers. I mean, damn, for a guy who keeps moaning about how he wants to retire, it sure seems like the reason Soderbergh forewent handheld for tripods here is because he kept making the camera shake from giggling nonstop with glee. That authorial sense of fun pervades Magic Mike, and makes the darker parts toward the hour and a quarter mark feel darker. And even at the end, when the irony of the picture's title becomes increasingly manifest, that sense remains, part as a fond memory, part as an indication that what lies ahead may very well be fun, too.

So, yeah. Magic Mike's a real crowd-pleaser. It's on its way to becoming the least-surprising surprise hit in recent memory. Cuz I mean goddamn, for real: you have box-office god Channing Tatum (get used to it) getting very naked (cue straight ladies and gay dudes, “Oh, I can definitely get used to that”) and a lot of other very decorative dudes working without the ol' cis-gender-role safety net. That mix of the familiar and the novel is the stuff genuine blockbusters are made of. Oh, and also, for the lesbians and straight dudes: there are girl boobies, and fairly wonderful ones, too. Just saying, when Magic Mike turns into the biggest non-comic book hit of the summer, don't be shocked.

KEANU REEVES: MAN OF TAI CHI

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG Keanu is directing a movie called Man of Tai Chi fapfapfapfapfapfapfapfapfapfap *ascends bodily to Heaven*

THE BENEVOLENT WHITE GUYS IN SUITS THEORY: THE NEWSROOM

Jeff Daniels is not here to eat your brain, he's here to save it.

Since this is the only thing anyone has written about The Newsroom on the entire Internet—wait, really? This is the eleventeenth kajillion zillionth? Ah shit; well, anyway—it is Aaron Sorkin's return to television after a few years writing for the movies (really well, too: the scripts for Charlie Wilson's War, The Social Network, and Moneyball, the last of which he co-wrote, were all fuckin great). And there is serious business at hand. Aaron Sorkin is going to save America.

I'm not being entirely sarcastic. He's smart, a good-bordering-on-legitimately-great writer, he loves America, and he's not afraid to be a giant goddamn cornball. That last might not seem all that impressive, but these days discourse is overrun with posturing and people shitting all over everything so no one sees them liking anything uncool that there's something refreshing about some guy being like “Fuck it, I'm a middle-aged square-ass and I believe in stuff.” While not the entire battle, hey, it's novel, at least. One of the things he believes is that an informed America is a stronger America, and that rather than being a pussy about pissing people off, ONE MAN has to sit behind a desk in a suit, look into a camera, and tell the American people the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that truth may be and no matter who it pisses off.

Others have already pointed out the ways in which The Newsroom is about Aaron Sorkin talking about how Aaron Sorkin has all the answers, and that the entire dramatic architecture of the show is built to shine glorious light on Aaron Sorkin and all the things Aaron Sorkin has to say about the way things oughtta be. And it's true that sizable stretches of the pilot episode of The Newsroom consist of Aaron Sorkin jerking off to himself. The two principal female characters we've had extended time with are ragingly competent yet go all gooey around The Great Man (one gets the feeling if Sork could have gotten away with going the full Lena Dunham/Louis C.K. route and played the Jeff Daniels role himself he totally would have). And yes, it is a little weird that the show is set in 2010 and that the big story they spend the second half of the episode breaking the living fuck out of is the BP oil spill.

On the other hand, being in love with yourself to the point of eroticism is not a condition unique to Aaron Sorkin. We notice it with him because he's totally upfront about it, which makes it a little less lame than it is in people who feign humility for show but behind closed doors turn into Mr. Hyde. The sexism thing is a bit more of a thing—having the male characters talk down to the female characters is practically an authorial trademark—but it's clearly not something he does on purpose (he's written some terrific female characters in the past who wouldn't stand for that kinda shit), not that that makes anyone any less pissed. The 2010 thing is actually kinda brilliant in a counter-intuitive way, as it makes all the “WTF is this shit?” jokes about Twitter and blogs marginally less fuddy-duddy.

While none of those things can quite be entirely papered over, The Newsroom's pilot does a hell of a job trying. Greg Mottola's direction is pretty great, trusting long takes and theatre actors to do the job many would panic and resort to extreme close-ups and hummingbird cutting. Sorkin sometimes leaves the actors with nothing to do but motor through declamatory text, but hey, he's Aaron Sorkin, for every line where you're like “There is literally no human way to play this text” there's a half-page speech where it's impossible to not look like you knock down buildings with your dick. (And yes, that goes for at least Emily Mortimer too in this show, so far.) The main building-knocker-downer guy so far is Sam Waterston. Sam Waterston swaggers through the whole pilot drunk as fuck being like “I'm in fuckin charge, you whippersnapper-ass punks” and at one point when one of the young people acts the fool, he's like “I'm going to kick your ass” and there's this great moment where Jeff Daniels' posture goes all “Haha Sam Waterston kicking this young guy's ass, that's funny . . . wait, shit, he probably can.” Jeff Daniels is rad, too, and it's not his fault that spontaneous ovation after the newscast is bullshit Sorkin onanism. But if the show just randomly decided to shift formats and be just Sam Waterston sitting in his office, fucking with his bow-tie, pounding scotch, and taking meetings, I would be juuuuuust fine with that.

I'm not in the habit of doing immediate react pieces to TV shows, as small sample sizes are no way to assess totality. Especially when the reaction that inspired the piece is “it's a mixed bag.” I'm on roughly the same side of the fence as Sorkin politically, but with enough differences that his speeches don't give me Saul/Damascus boners (part of the reason that even though I vote for them more often than not I can't ever really be a card-carrying Democrat). From all I can tell, reading, watching, and the (very) occasional first-hand anecdote, Sork's kind of an asshole. But fuckin' hell when his tuning fork is in key Aaron fuckin Sorkin can write the dead back to life. That's why even though the pilot of The Newsroom is far from perfect, and indeed has large stretches that kinda fucking suck, it has me up at one in the morning talking about it. Foibles (and ho boy are there foibles) aside, Aaron Sorkin does words real good. And that means something. If there's one thing all the cornball misty-eyed Americana and hero worship and shit we're all supposed to be too cool for in this modern age gets right, it's that certain things mean something. Truth, justice, and the American way ain't no joke. Maybe the America everyone's getting all weepy about here never actually existed, but in that one speech of Emily Mortimer's, she gets at what the real American way is: the belief that even if we never got it exactly right, we still can one day. So even if Sorkin's walking a crooked path toward that ideal and he keeps falling down because he's trying to suck his own dick, he's at least pointed in the right direction. That means something.

ONE LOVE

Happy Pride, y'all.

THE FCC WON'T LET ME BE

(c) Chicago Tribune

This morning the Supreme Court made up its mind about whether the FCC (Fuck-Censoring Cadre) should continue doing what it does, namely making sure no CHILDREN hear any foul language or see any tits on network and basic cable television BECAUSE THE CHILDREN MIGHT CHILDREN CHILDREN ON THE CHILDREN. And, considering that it was a unanimous decision, the Court certainly did make up its mind. Their verdict? Keep up the good work, boys. Justice Kennedy's decision wasn't as much an affirmation of the FCC's mandate as it was punting; from the look of things it was like “yeah, sure, the FCC's doing God's work CHILDRENING CHILDREN FROM CHILDREN CHILDREN, keep it up, now get out of here so we can make a stupid decision about Obama's healthcare plan.”

Now, look, it's not like Scalia and Thomas (and Roberts and Alito) were going to wake up one morning and be like “You know what? Let's not be right-wing shitheads.” Übermenschen like that wake up every morning and say “Hell of a day to be alive! Let's be right-wing shitheads all goddamn day and then wake up tomorrow and be right-wing shitheads some more.” And heaven forbid the alleged liberals on the Court remind people that the First Amendment exists. So it's not like the FCC was going to be dissolved or anything. The game is the game. But what is is one thing, what should be is another, and what the FCC should be is a memory. It's a violation of the constitutional prohibition against restricting free speech. It should not exist, and only does because WHAT IF CHILDREN HEAR SWEARCURSES AND SEE SATAN TITS????????

The stupidest thing is, the same people who engage in all that frantic pearl-clutching about protecting the (hypothetical) kids and the necessity of maintaining a governmental regulatory body to that end scream like, well, kids whenever anyone talks about regulating shit that has an actual effect on actual people. We cannot abide billionaires paying income tax at the same rate as their employees, but the thought of some imaginary angelic rosy-cheeked middle-American white kid hearing the word “fuck” for the first time at the age of 10 while watching CSI: Dubuque after finishing his Bible study, that we need a governmental agency for. This is more than just left-right “the other side has cooties” silliness. Billionaires, and the corporations many of them head, have enormous effects on every human being on Earth. They have massive amounts of the thing—money—that makes the world go 'round. It makes a certain degree of sense to keep an eye on the fuckers and make sure they're not pulling any funnies, which is not to say that we need to throw the Evil White Guys In Suits up against the wall or anything, but asking billionaires to actually pay income tax and not just whimsically destroy communities with massive layoffs just cuz what the fuck is not outrageous. If you live in the real world, you should play by the same rules as everyone else.

So why am I advocating shitcanning the entire FCC? Because those hypothetical kids everyone's always fucking moaning about don't exist. When I was a little kid, I heard people cursing all the time (even though I had “dick” and “butt” confused until I was about 5; this may explain my lifelong fondness for Bette Davis and Oscar Wilde). I knew the rules, though: don't ever curse around your grandparents OR ELSE, only curse around my dad if I was in the mood for an anguished lecture, and only curse around my mom if I was actually being funny. Obviously, specifics may vary kid to kid, but every kid knows you don't curse in certain situations OR ELSE. Just ask that kid in Hope And Glory, in re: “fuck”: “That word is special.” They know the word, that doesn't mean they use it all the time. As far as sexual content messing kids up, that's a giant pile of shit. Absent the hormones that produce sexual desire, movies and TV shows with naked people and/or sex scenes are boring. Were Sofia Vergara to have a nude scene with her tetas out on Modern Family, little kids would not give a fuck. If anything they'd be happy about the day off they got from school the next day when a national holiday was declared. But I digress.

Given how dumb it is to censor some kinds of TV and not others, the existence of the FCC as currently constituted doesn't really make a ton of sense. Its regulatory priorities are based on outmoded and/or imaginary ideas of what offends people and plays into the fallacy that prohibition is the only alternative to chaos. Not only is that not the case, but prohibition creates allure, completely aside from the fact that it doesn't work. When booze was illegal, everyone was like oooh and sneaking around to speakeasies. Weed being illegal won't bring back my memories of anything that happened between 1995 and whenever the hell I stopped blazing, if I even did . . . anyway, you get the point, and it's highly doubtful that weed would occupy the pop cultural niche it did if you could go to the bodega and buy a pack of joints. Not having nudity on TV doesn't mean there's no sexual content. Sex is all over the goddamn place on TV, to the point where letting a matter-of-fact nipple or dick slip through would barely even be noticed, and if it did it'd take the feverish mystery out of all the innuendo. And not letting the hallowed Seven Words be broadcast over the airwaves doesn't mean people don't curse on TV, they just use stupid curse substitutes that call more attention toward the fact that the character is cursing than it would if they just said fuck and shit. Yeah. The FCC is making things worse.

The good news about the Supreme Court punting rather than setting some “thus it ever shall be” shit in stone is that at some point, maybe after Barack gets to appoint a couple justices in his second term, another Court might be like “Ya know what? This is silly. Go get real jobs, guys.” Because it is silly. Either eliminating—or, more realistically, redefining the purpose of—the FCC is not going to lead to hardcore pornography being broadcast at dinnertime. In all likelihood, cursing and titties hour wouldn't start til at least 10pm even in the absence of some bluenose regulatory body saying so. Networks will realize that the notoriety (FCC or no FCC, Christian groups will shit a brick if someone says “shit a brick” in prime time) of being naughty is not a solid long-term investment. Because when you don't treat people like children, they act like adults.

RIP ANDREW SARRIS

Disagree on particulars or even fundamentals, the undeniable truth is that Andrew Sarris is the most influential American film critic there has ever been. It all comes back to him eventually. I would be speaking a different language if not for Sarris. And so, a salute to all he was and continues to be.

OM, SHANTI, KEANU

So a couple weeks ago, one afternoon when neither of us had anything better to do, my friend Bastard Keith and I were Facebook chatting about whatever, and after a brief discussion of Johnny Mnemonic (which BK had just recently beheld), the following (unedited) conversation took place:

Me: ....and at the center of it all, the inimitable keanu

Bastard Keith: He really is a law unto himself.
Sometimes utterly right as the center of a film, sometimes almost glaringly not.

Me: never unmemorable, though

Bastard Keith: NEVER

Me: which is odd considering everyone always talks about how blank he is
and i think sells him short

Bastard Keith: I think he's kind of a monolithic presence.

Me: but he IS a presence

Bastard Keith: That's my point.

Me: unlike people like sam worthington
whose name i had to take a second to remember while typing

Bastard Keith: Worthington is almost astonishingly unmemorable.

Me: exactly
everything about him, down to his last name being too long, is anti-memorable
you always remember keanu

Bastard Keith: There's an essay in that.

Me: even this shitty serial-killer movie [name of ex-girlfriend redacted] made me watch once, there's this indelible moment where keanu's dancing around like a jagoff

Bastard Keith: Doesn't it feel like he's always been with us?

Me: THE ETERNAL KEANU: AN ACTOR WITH NEITHER BEGINNING NOR END

Bastard Keith: He's a room you enter and never leave, perhaps without realizing it.

Me: he is the cinematic image of one hand clapping

Bastard Keith: He is Om.

Me: heh there we go, i'll call the essay om shanti keanu

Bastard Keith: NICE

Me: this actually has to be done

Bastard Keith: I struggle to think of an actor with a career as indestructible.

Me: oh yeah

Bastard Keith: ANY other actor, ANNNNNNNNNNY other actor who'd given some of those performances would be on the outs.
And yet his iconic roles are so perfect, so RIGHT.

Me: but keanu, he bombs in something and then a quiet few months later there's a thing in the trades about keanu being in talks for something new that sounds kinda cool
and frequently is

Bastard Keith: I have this image of, like, studio heads talking in a conference room and Keanu just sort of walking and sitting down quietly and they all slowly realize he's there.

Me: actually on further reflection the fact that when he goes down, he goes down SO HARD is actually kind of admirable
yes! meetings with keanu must be the GREATEST FUCKING THING EVER

Bastard Keith: And they ask what's up, and he just sort of calmly talks about what he'll be doing next.
And they're like, “So...so that's....we're making that?”

Me: “yeah.”

Bastard Keith: And he's like, “Yes, this is what I saw happening.”

Me: “i was riding my motorcycle along the pacific coast highway, and the film came to me in an instant”

Bastard Keith: No threat, just this ineffable sense of zen inevitabllity.

Me: yeah, in a totally even, slightly ethereal tone of voice

Bastard Keith: And the studio heads are just so beguiled by him.
So the movies get made.
Like, can you say no to the tide?
To the phases of the moon?

Me: nor to the wind

Bastard Keith: Basically, I'm saying he's the closest thing to a shaman that modern film has to offer.

Me: oh absolutely

Bastard Keith:
I'm loving this conversation, by the way.

Me: and it makes hugo weaving's speech about inevitability to him in the matrix an extremely meta moment
i am too

Bastard Keith: OH GOD YES.

Me: i'm writing this essay

And for the last couple weeks when I've had a spare moment I've been trying to gather my thoughts about the essay I repeatedly said I was going to write. For the most part, I've been failing miserably. Keanu “the reification of one hand clapping” Reeves is one hard motherfucker to pin down. He's had an amazingly durable career, and long, too. Make sure you're sitting down before you read this next bit: the year after next Keanu is going to be fifty fucking years old. Isn't that kind of fucked up? But, more to the point, isn't that kind of fucked up because you don't think of Keanu as being any age at all? One of the reasons I excerpted that chat with Bastard Keith is that Herr Bastard raises the excellent point that “Doesn't it feel like he's always been with us?” I know it feels that way to me. Bill & Ted dropped when I was 9 or 10, and Keanu was very much a fact of life in it. He's continued to be that way ever since, showing up in a variety of pictures of variable quality. In each, though, at its center, was Keanu.

I get a little defensive when the topic of acting comes up for discussion, until the other party's credentials come up for discussion, because I spent a lot of years studying acting in a variety of different disciplines, with almost a decade as a working theater artist. Which, yeah, whatever, I don't want a gold star or a fuckin lifetime achievement Obie or anything, but even the most cursory glance at these pages or at my other critical writing will show you that I think the deep thoughts about stuff. Acting is one of the handful of subjects on which I can discourse with confidence, erudition, and insight, joining movies (obviously), basketball, and the ways and means of bringing a woman to orgasm. Having spent all those years trying to figure acting out, it thus pains me how people who've never done it and barely even know what it is hold forth about acting as experts. (For a longer and more eloquent kvetch on this same topic, Uta Hagen's Respect For Acting is a surprisingly fun read.) I bring this up because it's largely these armchair experts who will, with ruthless brevity, dismiss Keanu's acting as “shitty.” Most often because his performances aren't naturalistic. Sometimes because, yes, he actually isn't very good. But this misses the larger truth of Keanu, his Om, if you will. He is as he is. To try and mold him into something he isn't is folly. Also, it means something that Bertolucci cast him as the Buddha. Sure, that was no Last Tango In Paris and it sure wasn't The Conformist but Bertolucci's not some schmuck off the street, and he could have had any number of actors, but he chose Keanu.

Just as filmmakers and writers can be stylists, not conforming strictly to a rote transcription of the world “as it is” to give some illusory sense of “real” life, actors can be too. In fact, most movie stars give off a sense of being larger than life, of being above such mortal concerns as reality. John Wayne did John Wayne. Bogart did Bogart. Clint did (and may at some point again do) Clint. This may even be the very thing that does make them great, that they are stylists. I don't know whether Keanu qualifies under this category, because it's not entirely certain he's doing it on purpose. This sounds like I'm saying he's some kind of holy fool, but that's not it. It's basically like we were saying in the chat: he's a force of nature, like wind, or the sea. He is as he is.

And, even though I know he won't, it feels as though he ever shall be. The genuine joy I've felt watching him act is more like the joy of a summer breeze or the ocean gently brushing my bare feet on a beach than it is watching an actor. The inflection in his voice on “whoa.” (Specificially the “whoa” after watching Morpheus jump in The Matrix, though at least one of his Ted “whoa”s qualify as well.) The triumph of “Yeah? Well I'm taller” is every triumph. The genuine awe of confronting the mysteries of the universe contained in “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” It's part of the great beauty of the work of Keanu Reeves that this piece is at once kind of kidding, a little ridiculous, and absolutely sincere at the same time. At a certain point, pondering the mysteries of the universe is pointless, because the universe is us and we are it. That's the great thing about Keanu. He is. His apparent comfort in simply being radiates off the screen. Sometimes it means he isn't very good in the given movie (and a lot of times the given movie's a piece of shit, too) but for those moments of absolute perfection when everything clicks together, he's one of the finest mediums there is.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 10: FIND ME GUILTY

Vincenzo Gasolina and Tyrion Lannister. Boosh.

With a handful of notable exceptions, Sidney Lumet's career as a director was characterized by his tendency to make very good movies that it never occurred to anyone to watch. This, to be clear, was never Mr. Lumet's fault. (Well, almost never: Q&A was terrible.) It was merely a function of his valuing character and story over all else, his refusal to (intentionally) lean on melodrama for cheap effect, and—maybe most important—the humility with which he carried himself personally. If you want people running around sucking your dick about what a genius you are, you need to plant the seeds by acting like one. Of course, this can backfire if you aren't one. But Sidney Lumet never seemed to care about that, always talked up the importance of the work above all else and the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process, and as a result he never won a competitive Oscar (he was given an honorary one when he was old, and his speech was pure elegance and class; Sidney Lumet was a men among men, believe) and even among the list of all-time classics he directed, all are associated primarily with their leading actors. His careful preparation, empathy, and humble commitment to the work above his own personal glory (and a number of other things associated with being awesome, surely) led to a vast array of actors giving either the best or one of the best performances of their careers working under Lumet's watch, among them Henry Fonda, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Paul Newman, River Phoenix, and many many others. So too, in the second-to-last movie Sidney Lumet would ever direct, did Vin Diesel, in Find Me Guilty.

That's right, Vincenzo Gasolina himself. And it's not like “oh, sure, wow, he turned in a better performance than The Fast and the Furious, xXx, and The fuckin' Pacifier, big whoop.” Vincenzo's amaaaaazing in Find Me Guilty. He's out of his mind good in this. There's a grand total of one moment the entire picture when he's not perfect, and that moment is like two seconds in the Annabella Sciorra scene an hour or so in, even then it's just a moment of his composure cracking because he doesn't know what to do with his hands, and even then it's something you can rationalize as “well, maybe it's not that Vin doesn't know what to do with his hands, maybe it's Jackie” except, sorry, it is Vin. But that's okay. The whole rest of the picture Vincenzo's in this fucking wig looking like Jerry Orbach except radiating Movie Star, and it's like “Holy shit, Vincenzo has star power even when he's not flexing his guns driving two hundred miles an hour doing sex with Asia Argento?” If ever there was a moment for Sidney Lumet to pop his collar and be like “Oh yes that's right, y'all,” it's this. Making Robert Duvall look good is one thing. Making Vincenzo Gasolina look like something other than a guy who throws grenades by flexing his biceps is another matter entirely. It's not that Lumet waved a magic wand and turned Vincenzo into a good actor, it's that he knew enough about what acting actually is and was forward-thinking enough to say “I'm going to make a picture with Vin Diesel playing the lead where nothing blows up and he never drives a car.” And he did. And it's a massive amount of fun.

Based on a true story (and purporting to consist to great degree of actual court transcriptions), Find Me Guilty is the story of Jackie DiNorscio (Vincenzo), a wiseguy from the Dirty Jerz whose fuckhead cousin tries to clip him, unsuccessfully. Once he recovers, Jackie's luck takes another turn for the shitty when he gets pinched trying to buy a suitcase full of coke from an undercover cop. Not to mention, he has racketeering charges hanging over him. The US Attorney's office (represented by oily Linus Roache, who did an NY/NJ area accent so well I had to check who he was, only to be like “Holy balls, that's Linus Roache?”) swoops in and offers Jackie a deal if he rolls over on The Boys, only Jackie's a stand-up guy and won't hold with such rubbish. He tells the US Attorney, “Hey, you got a brother? Fuck him, too.” And thus Jackie and practically everybody he knows and has worked with go on trial.

The trial, a massive clusterfuck (it would go on to be the longest criminal trial in American history), is the bulk of the movie. Judge Sidney Finestein (Ron Silver, who is pick-your-jaw-up-off-the-fuckin-floor great in this, in a reminder of how great he could be when not simply noshing on scenery in an exploitation movie for a paycheck) does his best to keep all twenty-something defendants and their respective lawyers (the de facto leader of whom is played by the mighty Peter Dinklage, who rules beyond the capacity of the English language to describe) in line. And he'd have done so perfectly if not for the monkey wrench of Jackie deciding to defend himself. Jackie's wildly inappropriate, blithely ignorant of proper procedure, yet charming debut as defense counsel completely overwhelms the entire trial.

Storywise, that's all there is to Find Me Guilty. The narrative has occasional telling-rather-than-showing problems with conveying the massive amount of time over which the trial took place, and despite being based on a true story elements of it are really, really farfetched. It's the kind of material that in the hands of anyone other than an absolute master—and I really think it's time we start putting Lumet in with the all-time greats, if we aren't already—would be ridiculous nonsense. But in Lumet's hands, it's a delightful bit of entertainment.

Beyond the performances, which are simply tremendous, with countless beautiful little human moments, Lumet's direction is pristine classicism, with meticulous framing, long takes, actual medium and long shots that aren't either establishing shots or panoramic landscapes, and invisible edits. In spite of this it never feels conservative, or an example of a relic of a bygone era clinging to an outmoded way of working because it's all he knows. I feel like kicking myself in the balls for even suggesting such a thing. No, this is a director who trusts his actors to be all the flash and dash the picture needs. That trust derives from careful preparation, years of experience, and the confidence those combine to create. Maybe the result only seems so good because no one makes classical American cinema anymore, but it's still a wonderful little movie.

It's a movie that's been done wrong by history, too. Due to one of the absolute worst marketing campaigns in the history of human endeavor—like, “Kilgore Trout's SF appearing in porno magazines” level bad marketing—Find Me Guilty was gone from theaters before anyone knew it had come out, and was a non-factor in 2006's Oscar race, which I mean yeah I know, “Oscars? blow me,” but imagine if Harvey Weinstein is running the picture's campaign. Suddenly we've got Sidney Lumet going up against Marty Scorsese for Best Director, with both of them trying for their first. You've got Vincenzo getting a nom against Forest Whitaker; I mean, Forest Whitaker still would have won, but then we get the Fast and Furious trailer hailing “ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE VIN DIESEL.....and paul walker” a couple years later, which would have been considerably lulzier than Vincenzo returning to the franchise having failed elsewhere.

Anyway. Fuck the business. Find Me Guilty still exists, and can be watched. And I'm here to say, with all the authority given a random asshole on the internet with Proustian Tourette's that it goddamn well should be. So there. At the very least, people fiending for a Game of Thrones fix should watch this to get a hit of some Dinklage. Or if you feel like winning a bet with a friend of yours who refuses to believe that Vin Diesel could ever look like Jerry Orbach. Or, if you just want to plain want to see a good movie. Sidney Lumet was the truth, ladies and gentlemen. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.