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.

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.

RACE IN CINEMA MONTH: THE 5 ROLES ONLY WHITE ACTORS CAN PLAY

This month we're going to do something a little different here at Movies By Bowes ™. February, which as you may or may not know is Black History Month in the United States, will mark the first ever themed month here at MBB ™, where for the whole month, each post will have something to do with race in cinema, culminating with the annual Oscar coverage, which this year is very much a related topic, with The Help having a Best Picture nom, as well as Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer being up for Best Actress and Best Supporting respectively. Noble attempt to elevate the discourse, or the dumbest fucking idea I've ever had? YOU BE THE JUDGE.

I'm not even going to blame this on RVCBard, even though she did threaten to revoke my “one of the good ones” status. The idea behind this first post came out of a discussion she and I had about the kinds of roles only white actors could play. Color-blind casting has been an institution for years in school plays because when the pool of potential actors is limited to the kids at the given school, sometimes there simply aren't enough actors (gender-blind casting is another common thing under these circumstances). At any level higher than maybe college, color-blind casting is a political decision no matter how much you want to whine about how difficult the casting process is. You know what else is difficult? Life. Nut up.

Anyway, I'm not talking about roles where the race isn't specified in the character description. Those are fair game. But that production of Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Motherfucker With The Hat where no effort was made to find Latin actors to play the specifically Latin characters in the play, and the cast was all white, or the thing more recently in Texas where some featherheads decided to do a production of the Hairspray stage musical with an all-white cast. Both these instances are bullshit, the former more so than the latter since if you can't find Latin people when you're an afternoon's drive from New York City it's because your head is up your own ass, whereas trying to find black people—let alone enough to cast Hairspray—in Plano, Texas is a slightly iffier proposition, but ya know, dudes, you could have done a different show. Especially when the one you want to do is fundamentally all about race.

But, as per the discussion I mentioned above, some roles absolutely have to be played by white people. Racial privilege being what it is, almost no one ever puts “white” in a character description, because that's the default assumption. Like any assumption, the Broken Clock Principle (to wit, it's right twice a day) dictates that occasionally the non-specified character does have to be white. Among them are these 5:


1—The Evil White Guy In A Suit

We'll get the obvious one out of the way first. I should correct something I said in one of my end-of-the-year wrap-ups for 2011, where I identified David Oyelowo in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Cate Blanchett in Hanna as being examples of an EWGIS not necessarily having to be white or a guy. Obviously I was mistaken, having failed to process a couple important bits of nuance. Namely, Oyelowo in Rise may not have been white, but he was English. And also, with Rise being about how Caesar needed to lead the Left against all of humanity, having what would ordinarily be the Evil White Guy In A Suit not be white underscores that point. Or, in other words, Rise was not an EWGIS picture. (Ed. Note: yet another reason why Rise was transcendentally awesome). And as for the Hanna example, well, that's just silly. Hanna was too weird to adhere to any rational criteria, as it was essentially a Chemical Brothers video about Saoirse Ronan killing people with an interlude about a bunch of English hippies on a road trip. Does that sound like a normal movie? No.

Look, it's really simple. Evil white guys in suits are plotting to kill every last one of us. They have all the money and power. They are the true 1%. Remember how in King Lear it was the Fool who knew what was up? Why else do you think it fell to Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 2 to reveal the great truism of our age? “Every big crime has a rich white man waitin' for his cut.” If you roll your eyes at that and go “Oh please, you expect me to take Chris Tucker seriously?” then YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO SEE THE EVIL WHITE GUYS IN SUITS COMING. You're as good as done.


2—Skinhead/KKK guy

Self-explanatory, of course, but a little explanation beyond the obvious about why it's such a powerful signifier is necessary. A white person with a shaved head has a lot more whiteness visible. More so than the insane bullshit rhetoric and Nazi salutes, that simple touch may be the reason for this being such a powerful signifier. As for the exclusivity of this, a simple example: a white guy with a shaved head saying the n-word is terrifying. A black guy with a shaved head saying the n-word is Samuel L. Jackson (unless he's wearing a rug that picture). And Samuel L. is only scary if you're the one who fucked up.


3—Landed gentry

A discrete category from the Evil White Guy In A Suit, because while there can be overlap, it isn't inherent. Old money landed gentry ancien regime types can be kind of all right sometimes, even if they rarely have any connection to modern reality and occasionally say offensive stuff because they just don't know any better.

But why, you may ask, does this character have to be a white guy? Surely there are rich dudes in Africa, Asia, and South America who've owned shitloads of land for generations? Well, the three c's—colonialism, capitalism, and cronyism—mean that even there a significant percentage of the super fuckin rich feudal lord types are still white guys. Or, in countries where skepticism about the free market pervades (which is to say, where commies and theocrats run shit), there simply aren't those super fuckin rich feudal lord types at all.

Basically, this character archetype was personified to perfection by James Fox in Remains of the Day (left). James Fox may very well be the whitest dude ever; nota bene his under-seen Evil White Guy In A Suit sans tie in The Mighty Quinn, where the whole purpose of his role is for him to get his ass handed to him by Denzel, but the argument could be made that Denzel movies exist for him to hand people their asses, be it verbally, sociopolitically, or (recently, especially) the old-fashioned way, with violence. That James Fox was a flat-assed straw man is just the way things go, but the profundity of his whiteness is infinite. If you need to picture this character archetype, picture James Fox.


4—The girl in the horror movie who just fucking has to open That Door.

We've all been there. Buncha pretty young people in a house where the slasher/monster/ghost is fixin' to fuck some shit up, and right after the first person (usually the one black person) randomly gets iced the rest of the pretty people start wanting to know what's going on. So, the chick with the nice tits (aka the second one who gets killed, provided she's the one who the second-to-last person was shtupping; the virgin makes it out alive, as per regulations) goes up the stairs as the music gets louder, and she finds a door that's bleeding green shit with “THIS IS THE ROOM THE SLASHER/MONSTER/GHOST IS IN! ENTER AND GET KILLED HORRIBLY!” written on it at eye level, and what does she do? Opens the door. RIP.

There are slight variations. Sometimes she doesn't get killed immediately, sometimes it's just that opening That Door unleashes the evil that kills the rest of the pretty people. Sometimes she's a guy; vide Daniel Craig in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo immediately pre-Enya. But you'll notice Daniel Craig isn't exactly walking around in a bowtie selling copies of The Final Call. And that's the important thing, more than gender, here. If you have a character who can't leave well enough alone, or who alternatively just ain't got no fuckin sense, and you want to really sell that point, accept no substitutes. Cast a white actor.


5—“Goin' native!”

By which I mean Kevvo in Dances With Wolves, Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, and most recently Sam Worthington in Avatar (side note: Sam Worthington is never going to fucking make it with that many syllables in his last name; he needs to change his name to Rock Barkley or something.) So here's the deal: white man is giant dick to non-white man. Dickery consists of oppression, genocide, dehumanization, the industry standard “we're assholes and you have land and/or other resources we want” package. For the movie, since the audience needs a POV character they don't have to feel ugly about identifying with, an anachronistically sensitive and progressive lead character appears!

While having the sensitive white dude get all gaga about the profundity of the culture with which he—somehow—assimilates is an easy way for the movie to get its “aren't they noble” message across, it's a horrible way to discuss things like the Native American genocide, the forced Westernization of Japan, or when we nuked the Smurfs. It's like “oh yeah, the ruling classes of my culture imposed their will on this other culture by force, but those oppressed peoples would like me! Fapfapfapfapfapfapfapfap.”

That's why the lead in these pictures needs to be white, because these movies are specifically about deflecting and assuaging oppressor's guilt, which is itself a uniquely Western thing. There aren't big, lush, massively budgeted movies in Japan where the lead is the one guy in all of Japan beating his chest and going “The Rape of Nanking was wrong! I was not in favor of it!” Does that hypothetical movie sound reductive, dumb, and wildly insensitive? Well, you win a prize. So is Dances With Wolves.


There may be others, but these are the five clearest-cut cases of roles only white actors can play. I'll entertain suggestions for others in the comments, and will be following up my month-long project of tap-dancing on the third rail with other meditations on race in cinema. I'm taking suggestions on other topics as well. And, well, we'll see how this all turns out.

ON GENDER SEMIOTICS, GENRE GENTRIFICATION, AND RAW, UNCUT OWNAGE: HAYWIRE

Spoiler alert: when she catches the guy, she fucks his ass up.

Oh, Haywire. Where do we begin? With Gina Carano, the newest inductee into the Hall of Ownage? With Steven Soderbergh ticking off another genre conquered? With the utterly bizarre fact that Bill Paxton might give the best performance (and it's not that everybody else sucks, either, terrifyingly)? So much to discuss in a finite universe. The short version is it fucking rocks and you all should see it because it wasn't shot on film or digital video, it was filmed on pure fucking win.

Soderbergh reunited with the writer of The Limey (and opponent in one of the greatest “angry guy vs. passive aggressive wiseass” fights of all time on the DVD commentary track of same), Lem Dobbs, for Haywire, and the result is exactly the kind of cool, flashback-y, intelligent exercise in pure style that, in one's wildest dreams, one hopes for with a new episode of the Lem & Steve show. This one stars retired MMA fighter Gina Carano, whom we learn is an ex-Marine now kicking ass in the private sector, but before anyone even says a word, it's clear that she can (and will) fuck you up.

In a bizarre way, Haywire is of a piece with Soderbergh's Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience, discounting the obvious differences that it has twenty-five times the budget and features wall-to-wall ownage. All three are looks at different variations of being a woman who'd be doing fine if all the fuckin men would stop acting the fool for five seconds, with a protagonist who is not (yet) a professional actor (Sasha Grey got paid to be in movies, but . . . well, let's just say they were in a different genre). However, Gina Carano has a lot more support around her than Debbie Doebereiner (who didn't need any) and Sasha Grey (who could have used a bit more, though she was still better than most critics gave her credit for), as nearly the entire speaking cast are famous dudes, all of whom are terrific: Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, all guys we're used to being awesome . . . but then the oddity tier with French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz (who also acts occasionally), Bill Paxton (?), and Channing Tatum (???) . . . all of whom are also really good. Mathieu Kassovitz, that makes sense, he's French, that's how they do, but Bill Paxton and Channing Tatum putting in good performances—as Gina Carano's dad and maybe-in-a-parallel-universe-boyfriend type, respectively—that's just silly. And yet, it's true.

The story starts in media res, opening with Gina Carano, established as awesome in one camera move—say, why doesn't that Peter Andrews fellow work more?—tentatively heading into a diner in upstate New York for a cup of tea. Channing Tatum shows up and she's like “shit” (at this point, not knowing what her backstory was, I entertained the possibility she might be a film critic) and Channing Tatum Channing Tatums his way into the diner and a bit of cool oblique spy movie dialogue ensues until it becomes necessary for Gina Carano to unleash holy hell and beat the living shit out of him. He gets in some good shots before she puts him on his ass, at which point she shanghais civilian Michael Angarano, borrows his car, gets him to field dress her arm, and, for reasons that become clear later, tells him her story to date.

It's a humdinger, full of double-crosses, handsome men, copious ownage, and sweet David Holmes music. The kind of picture it is, we should probably leave the plot alone right here, because there are a few good surprises and things that you see coming a mile away where you're like “is this really this obvious or is there another level” and discovering whether they are or not is fun.

Also, as well-constructed as the plot is—and for a boilerplate “one-[wo]man ownage machine fends for [her]self against evil white guys in suits and attempts to restore [her] good name” plot it is well-constructed—the main attraction in Haywire is the execution, and the casual, almost offhand brilliance of the way it deals with gender. Soderbergh understands the genre on a fundamental level. He knows that if you throw in a bunch of windy, didactic dialogue and try to make your statements about gender and genre that way the audience for ownage pictures—not always the most progressive, sadly—is going to start fidgeting and grumbling what the fuck is this bullshit. No, Soderbergh knows the way. Ownage upfront. Gender commentary in the details through the deft use of signifiers.

This is not to say that Haywire isn't entirely about gender. It is. Gina Carano is the only woman in the picture, and being a Soderbergh joint, on a certain level the picture is about Gina Carano as a martial artist playing the lead in an action movie where she's the only woman who owns the bejesus out of all the men, and what that implies for cinema and gender. (Ed. Note: this is why Steven Soderbergh is the fucking best) When Ewan McGregor asks Gina Carano to pretend to be Michael Fassbender's wife for a job, her indignance on being the “eye candy” almost knocks Ewan McGregor through a wall, and she concludes by cracking “Maybe [Michael Fassbender] can wear the dress.”

Gina Carano is absolutely in charge. Channing Tatum? “Sure, I'll hit that.” Michael Fassbender? “Woooooooowwwwwwww, yeah, he's hot.” But always in a very in-control “sure he's hot but if he pulls anything I'll smash his face off something sharp and break every bone in his body and then if I think he's worth wasting a bullet on I'll light him the fuck up” kind of way. But still, as awesome and fully-versed in the fine arts of ownage as she is, the movie does acknowledge the issues inherent to kicking a larger opponent's ass. Some action pictures have 100 lb women punching pro football players in the face and crushing their skulls, which is cool and everything but nonetheless bullshit because physics. Gina Carano looking like a legit athlete (because she is) and being a women's middleweight—which is the same as a dudes' welterweight—eases the suspension of disbelief of something like Salt, with flyweight Angelina Jolie crushing skulls with her fists, slightly. But still, she has to compensate with technique, and this is where being a real martial artist comes in handy. Her moves employ leverage, getting the angle just right, and precision, and then using muscles. At one point, she out-Onatopps Famke Janssen in Goldeneye, asphyxiating [name of actor redacted] between her thighs, which is legendary for the several obvious reasons (ownage/hawwwwwt/Bond reference), but also because the continuity of the run in her tights that results from fighting with the guy is perfect.

And it's little details like that, and the awesome father-daughter relationship between her and Bill Paxton (who's like, “I love my little girl, but she could kung fu me in half without blinking . . . so proud! *wipes away tear*”) that lets Haywire have its cake and eat it too by simultaneously being exactly like the kind of picture Sly Stallone could have made in about 1986 (or Jean-Claude Van Damme in 1992) and yet something more. Cuz, I mean, sure, it's a gentrified Golan-Globus/Cannon Films picture . . . but fuckin a, man, it's a gentrified Golan-Globus/Cannon Films picture! This is why it's okay that Gina Carano's line readings are a bit monotone and her facial expression doesn't change that much. Dude, Sly Stallone went years at a time without changing his facial expression. Jean-Claude Van Damme his whole fucking career, practically. Action stars don't have to be “good” actors. They have to own.

And this is why Gina Carano is inducted into the Hall of Ownage, on the basis of one lead role only. Even if she does other pictures that suck, she'll always have this. Soderbergh and Dobbs set things up so she doesn't have to do any more acting than she has to, and what little she does have to works within the context of the movie. It also helps that she's got such a great supporting cast, in the truest sense of the term: good actors giving her just the right energy to work with, which is why the idea of a star vehicle starring the least famous person in the movie (another irony Soderbergh no doubt loves) works. It's all set up to make Gina Carano look good, and she does not squander it at all.

(Minor aside here: Michael Douglas is fucking rad as hell in this in the Evil White Guy In A Suit role, that with typical Soderbergh-ian subversiveness may or not be actually evil, but is totally an Evil White Guy In A Suit because Michael Douglas is awesome. In fact, he's playing the James Rebhorn role in this! Rebhorn taught him well. Give me a second to bask in the beauty of the interconnectedness of all things, then let's continue)

I mean, goddamn, Haywire's just about perfect. It's a marvelously tight ownage picture, with a rare compositional clarity and precision of structure that comes from having a really good director in charge. The fact that a director of Steven Soderbergh's stature and talents decided to make an ownage picture is just beautiful, and the fact that he pulled it off so perfectly is no mean feat. May this launch Gina Carano's movie career, and in a different direction than Out of Sight launched Jennifer Lopez, speaking of Steven Soderbergh. But none of that matters. What does is, Haywire is fucking great. Go see it, if you have any interest in things that own.

LET'S GIVE OUT SOME AWARDS! THE "BEST" OF 2011

The more generic the better, that's our motto.

This year, inspired by the glut of awards-season stuff I've been reading for weeks on Twitter, I decided to give out my own awards. Mine are free of the capricious political bullshit (to say nothing of the sentimentality) that infects the Oscars. No, mine are more likely to result in my accidentally awarding Best Supporting Actor to Rajon Rondo because I'm getting distracted by the Celtics-Heat game on the TV as I type this. Which would be a neat little surrealist statement about how stupid movie awards are, but I'm going to stay on topic. EVEN IF IT KILLS ME.

As you'll notice, there are categories here that you won't find on the Oscars. These awards, not having been voted on by any kind of electoral body or bunch of critics or even my mom or her cat—and lemme tell ya, the cat was pissed at the over-representation of dogs this year, damn—just me and my lil ol' foul-mouthed lonesome. So these are all my usual blend of hyper-erudite genius, axe-grinding, and wildly overblown advocacy. And, of course, lots and lots of fucking cursing. Which is why the only possible nickname for the first annual Movies By Bowes ™ Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Scientology Awards is . . . The Fuckos. Let us now begin. Some spoilers, unavoidably, so be forewarned.


ACTING:

Best Performance By An Actor, male: George Clooney, The Descendants. It's an amazingly good performance, with so much done in the eyes. It helps that the movie's fucking great too, but a huge part of it being great is Clooney. This was a great year for lead performances by men; there are at least seven that I wouldn't mind seeing win the Oscar. For the Oscar, because it'd be awesome, I'm advocating Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor, but this here's “best” and that means Clooney this year. Though seriously, Brad Pitt in Tree of Life or Moneyball, Clooney, Gary Oldman, the dude from The Artist, Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes . . . loaded fuckin' year.

Best Performance By An Actor, female: Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method. When I first saw this, I couldn't quite figure out what it was about her performance that struck me as off. I thought it might have had something to do with Keira Knightley not having the formal training that Fassbender, Viggo, and everyone else had. But something I couldn't quite describe was telling me “Resist the knee-jerk reaction that she sucked. She didn't. Figure out why she didn't.” And the conclusion I came to was that her character (and characterization) was a challenge to the way men traditionally view women. She's very sexual but not in a way that's geared toward pleasing men. She's way the hell smart. And by the end of the picture, when she's figured out how to make her way in the world, she doesn't really need Fassbender (the POV character for dudes in the audience) anymore. So that's the character. As for the performance, Keira Knightley keeps throwing in these little darts to keep everyone off balance, so that no one, in the movie or out, quite knows what to make of her. She pulls all the focus to her, which sometimes works to the detriment of the movie at large but since A Dangerous Method is, more or less, all about her—she's the engine that drives the whole thing, including the Fassbender/Viggo Jung/Freud relationship—she did the job. And that's why Keira Knightley's performance in that picture deserves a little more love than she's been getting this award season. (6/1/12 EDIT: The preceding paragraph was written before I saw Young Adult. Charlize Theron was better. Sorry, Keira; I still stand by the above assessment of your performance, you have to share the trophy though.)

Best Performance By A Movie Star, male: I know, I know: “What the fuck, George Clooney's not a movie star?” Yeah, he totally is, he just happened to also out-act all the AC-TORRRRRs this year. This here's about swagger, ownage, and charisma, the un-subtle arts. And this category was looooooooooaded this year. From Vincenzo Gasolina (not to mention the Rock, nor Paul Walker) in Fast Five, to Baby Goose in Drive, to Salman Khan in Bodyguard, to Shahrukh Khan's both-barrels bid to reassert his status as king in Ra.One and Don 2 (hey, what can I say, they grow good movie stars in India, about which more later in the acting categories), it's Shahrukh's American analogue who takes this one: Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Dude hung off the hundred and what the fuck floor of the fuckin Burj Khalifa (roughly “REALLY FUCKING TALL BUILDING” in Arabic) by himself and did all that wacky rappelling shit and propped himself up on the fucking building by basically telling the building “Building? I'm a fuckin movie star. I can just chill here, right?” and the building went, “Sure. You are Tom Cruise, after all.” It was real nice to see Tom Cruise be the Tom Cruise that made him Tom Cruise again. That movie was fucking dope. Good to have ya back, Tom.

Best Performance By A Movie Star, female: Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I still think the book is horseshit and that Lisbeth Salander is a creepy jerk-off fantasy. But holy God Rooney Mara swaggered in that. The script material undercut her but she was just like “Fuck this shit, I didn't get all these piercings for real and start smoking for real and get in shape for all those nude scenes I didn't really need to do but did anyway because I ain't no punk . . . I didn't do all this fuckin shit to let a fuckin script undercut me. Prepare to be owned.” Et voila.

Best Performance By A Dog: Another weirdly loaded category this year. I was about an inch and a half from giving this to that wonderfully taciturn long-faced dog in Hugo, especially because Marty being a wise-ass with the 3D really let us into that dog's trip, but I have to be a conventional asshole and give this one to Uggie in The Artist. It is “best” performance by a dog, after all.

Best Performance By A Cat: The Cat, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Before Stieg Shithead Larsson (spoiler alert) iced the cat in a sensationalist hysterical bid to get the audience to really hate the bad guy, there was enough business with the cat that Daniel Craig got to chill with him a bit and let David “Honey Badger” Fincher make the dumb joke “huh huh Blomkvist is a pussy, get it? Hahahahaha” because why not. I liked that cat. I didn't like him getting iced. (End spoiler)

Best Performance by a Dude Playing A Chimp: This whole category is just cuz of Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Caesar is truth. Caesar is revolution. Caesar Occupies your entire shit. Yeah a huge part of that was the VFX, but they just rendered what Serkis gave 'em. Don't forget this movie, and don't sleep on it. This was good stuff.

Raddest Old Guy: Amitabh Bachchan, Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap. He is the Big B. All hail. There were other cool things about this movie, like Sonu Sood and the adorable Charmy (oh, Charmy . . .) but it would have just been another “meh, whatever” picture without Amitabh holding it the fuck down in the lead. He's pushing 70 but still owned the living crap out of every bad guy in the whole picture without even smudging any of those crazy white suits of his.

Best Nudity: This is a total protest category about how all the goddamn time in movies filmmakers feel like they have to justify nudity or de-eroticize it and it all has to be for some kind of “purpose.” Fuck that shit. So, while 2011 featured a lot of very attractive actresses appearing full-frontally nude, the context was frequently such that the audience was being scolded not to find it hot. Emily Browning in Sleeping Beauty, lit and made up luminously, is being pawed by skeevy old dudes, who are saddened by the experience (also that movie is inert, miserable crap). Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, we already covered that. So I guess by default it's Carey Mulligan in Shame because at least, brother-sister weirdness aside when Fassbender finds her in the shower, she's just kinda kickin' it, and she does look good, and the purpose of the scene isn't to leer over her or make her into some bullshit fantasy character. Actually, my rationalization just convinced me to strike the “default” part of that. Carey Mulligan, Shame.

Best Dudity: Michael Fassbender, Shame. Of course it was him. It had to be him. Michael Fassbender has a very good chance of being the first actor in the history of the Oscars whose penis gets a nomination while he splits the vote between his performances in this, Jane Eyre, A Dangerous Method, and X-Men. Cue months of tabloid stories about the split in the partnership between Michael Fassbender's Penis and Michael Fassbender; Fassbender's penis will go off to LA and make big gaudy movies and wear gold chains and hang out with fast women and start doing coke, while Fassbender spends most of his time bereft, on airplanes, heading to do another play or art movie, missing his old friend, before a tearful reunion in the third act preceding a renewed and glorious collaboration as the music and credits swell. A final kiss will only be possible if Fassbender does some serious yoga in preparation.


DIRECTING:

Steven Spielberg, energized by War Horse and Tintin, plans to direct this many movies in 2012

Best Directing, Big Budget: Martin Scorsese, Hugo. I had problems with this picture but exactly none of them had anything to do with what Marty S. brought to the table. Marty had a big fuckin' vision, he got someone to give him $150 million and some 3D cameras and he went and got a DP and a design team that'll make ya change gods. Marty got performances out of the kids, he kept Sacha Baron Cohen from flipping out and taking over the movie, and he got Ben Kingsley and said, “Be Ben Kingsley.” And Ben Kingsley said, “Fuck that, I'm gonna be George Méliès.” And Marty said, “Works for me. See you on set.” This picture drove me bonkers while I was watching it because I wanted to go find the writers and kick them in the balls for not being able to keep up with Marty's brain, but the more I think about it, the more I'm like, goddamn, that Marty S. sure knows what the hell he's doing with this filmmaking racket. If he keeps it up he might make something of himself.

Best Directing, Small Budget: Joe Cornish, Attack The Block. Yeah, $13 million's a lot of money in regular people terms, but it's a fuck of a lot less than 150, and Attack The Block's a better movie than Hugo is, so the math is pretty much done. In ten years, people are going to be like, “Yeah, I saw Attack The Block in theaters” and people are going to be like “Whooooooa . . . cool!” Because in ten years Attack The Block is going to be a cult classic of near-Lebowski (chill the fuck out, I said “near”) proportions. This is absolute. Quote this back to me in ten years and I'll say, “Don't ever argue with the big dog, the big dog's always right.”

Best Directing of Actors: Alexander Payne, The Descendants. This would have been close if Woody hadn't fucked up Rachel McAdams' character in Midnight In Paris, but he did, so it's not. Payne got performances out of George Clooney, multiple different kids (the youngest we can credit to Payne and maybe even Nick Krause as Sid channeling a hetero Keanu, but to be fair, when Shailene Woodley decides it's time to move on from that life of the American teenager show or whatever it is, she's going to be just fine with or without Alexander Payne), Beau Bridges, and the less scary killer from Scream, who's now all growns up and stuff. They all feel like real people who are of that place; whether or not they actually resemble native Hawaiians is up to Hawaiians to say, but there's a great connection between the actors and the place, and it's a movie to a very large degree about place. And that's that.

Best Directing of Ownage Sequences: Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive. Could just as easily have been Justin Lin for Fast Five, Brad Bird in Mission Impossible: Motherfuckers I Shot Tom Cruise Hanging Off The Top Of The Fucking Burj Khalia: A Brad Bird Film Directed By Brad Bird's Testicles (the only reason he doesn't win this is because Tom Cruise owning Michael Nyqvist at the end wasn't as impressive as it might have been because, come on, Michael Nyqvist? Still a pretty cool sequence with all the moving parts, but definitely loses points because by that point Tom Cruise has demonstrated sufficient awesomeness that getting his ass kicked by the guy from the shitty Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seemed implausible.) No, The Long And Winding Refn takes this one because hammers, straight razors, and Clippers games. And for involving Albert Brooks in an enterprise where he owns someone somehow other than verbally (and then doing it again) and having the audience be like, “Daaaaaaaamn, Albert Brooks a bad motherfucker!” rather than “Really? Albert Brooks? Please.” That right there wins this category, no question.

Best Understated Yet Vividly Clear Political Statement: Asghar Farhadi, A Separation. This movie was so goddamn good you forget it's a foreign movie—shit, I forgot I was reading subtitles—because the people are so recognizably and universally people. Then you're like, why's she so dead set on amscraying the country with the daughter (who's amazing in this, by the way), and why are these random schlubs in shitty offices wielding omnipotent power over these people's . . . ohhhh, right. It's a totalitarian regime where religion and the state control everything. That didn't even hit me until the final scene, at which point it just popped up in high definition like, “oh yeah, none of this shit needed to happen.” (Ed. Note: the reason Rise of the Planet of the Apes didn't take this is, if you'll recall, the political message wasn't subtle. It was “FUCK THE STATE, WE DROP EVIL WHITE GUYS IN SUITS OFF OF BRIDGES IN FLAMING HELICOPTERS UP IN THIS. WHAT.”)

Most Unexpected Homage: Woody's fucking Inception trip in the Belle Époque sequence in Midnight In Paris. Okay, okay, I know it wasn't a straight-up homage to Inception. It just needs mentioning how great Midnight In Paris was a few dozen more times. And because the idea of Woody Allen directing Inception is really funny.


VISUALS & EDITING:

Raoul Coutard

Achievement in Camera Mastery: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree Of Life. Know why all the voice-overs in that were spoken in stunned fragmented whispers? They were watching the dailies while trying to talk. Those images were powerful, dude.

Most Immersive Production Design: The team that brought you Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I said in my Tor.com review, it felt like they had a time machine and shot on location in the 1970s. And, well, yeah. It felt like they had a time machine and shot on location in the 1970s.

Best Use of Visuals As an Expository Tool: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. They packed hundreds of pages of Stieg Larsson's bullshit into brisk, completely coherent minutes. That picture may have been two and a half hours but it was a fast two and a half, for sure.

Best Shot: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Gary Oldman + David Dencik + airplane slowly taxiing up behind them. Mmm mmm mmm that's some good stuff. Though, call me crazy, that one continuous shot in Hanna when Eric Bana walks through the airport, gets each baddie hiding behind each pillar to start following him, then lures them down into that underground walkway and owns all of them, concluding with throwing a knife through a dude's face (done without cutting away!) is a close second, and even better than Joe Wright's massive Dunkirk shot in Atonement, which was cool but it was also the only good thing about that movie. But there's something to be said for understated subtlety, which is why the Tinker Tailor airplane shot takes this one.

Uncanny Valley Memorial Achievement in VFX Verisimilitude: Rise. Dude Caesar was fucking real. (Resisted the urge to give this to the kid in Hugo, because otherworldly though he and those anime blue eyes were, he actually was a real person, I'm told.)

Best Editing, Action Movie: Drive. Cheating slightly because it's not an action movie, per se (as that batshit insane lawsuit plaintiff realized, much to her dismay) but the action sequences in this are put together fucking amaaaaaazingly. Patience goes well with action. Who knew?

Best Editing, Non-Action Movie: A Separation. Trust, that editing is crazy good. That movie isn't much more than people talking for an hour forty but damn is it ever intense. That's part writing and part performances, but the medium is montage. (Not in the Team America sense, wiseass, we talkin bout Eisenstein.)

Best Editing, “Damn, that picture didn't feel near that long” category: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Two and a half hours, and it barely felt half that. Runner-up, Fast Five, which—bizarrely—was two hours and twenty minutes long. It felt like the hour forty-five it should have been in any rational universe, which leads me to believe that Justin Lin might know the Jedi mind trick.


MUSIC:

Best Original Score: Attack The Block. Nothing else other than Hanna even need think about asking to be part of this category; while the Chemical Brothers did an excellent job with that, that movie wasn't propelled by the score to the same extent Attack The Block was. Attack The Block owns all. Not only does it work perfectly in the movie, it's the best goddamn writing music ever recorded.

Best Original Song: “Life's A Happy Song,” The Muppets. Though I'll hear arguments for several other songs from that movie. And the title song from Bodyguard, with the whistle-whistle, flex-flex, guitar-guitar hook. But “Life's A Happy Song” for the win.

Best Basically Original Song: “A Real Hero,” Drive. Everyone whined about it being in their heads for weeks/months afterward but you know why? Because it's a good song, that's why.

Best Use of a Previously Existing Song: the Soviet national anthem, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. That scene at the Circus' Christmas party before any of the bad shit happens, and they're all a little lit and start singing along . . . that's just awesome. It's a nerd joke, it's them kind of making a dark joke about the enemy, but also, all political implications aside, that's a really good fucking song; The Hunt For Red October would have won this category with the same song in 1990.

Best Song Cast As Pearls Before Swine In A Shitty Movie: “Shelter,” The xx, I Am Number Four. Terrible movie, and the song was used really badly, just because the xx were trendy when they were shooting the movie. But, even though no one cares about the xx anymore (nor do they care about I Am Number Four, thankfully), this song is still great and their album has a bunch of other good stuff on it.

Best Soundtrack: Midnight In Paris. Seriously. This might have been Woody's best soundtrack ever. “But what about the soundtrack to Drive?” What about the soundtrack to Drive? Woody's got Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker and Jacques fucking Offenbach on this fuckin thing. The soundtrack to The Descendants with all the Hawaiian stuff is right up there, but when Woody's awake and paying attention to detail, really good things happen.


SILLINESS:

All due respect to Melissa McCarthy, this was the year's breakout comedienne.

Best Joke: When Kumar goes to cop some weed off Patton Oswalt's mall Santa in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, and he's going through all the Christmas-themed kinds of weed and a couple Hanukah ones, Kumar mentions something being as good as the “Diwali Dank” Patton Oswalt had had in October. That was a damn good joke.

Funniest Movie: The Trip. Going by US release date, it totally counts. GENTLEMEN TO BED.

Achievement in Unintentional Comedy: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. Everything about this is funny, from the fact that they made a movie out of the most boring part of Atlas Shrugged, to the fact that the adaptation goes out of its way to make the material seem as dumb as possible. Not enough was made out of the fact that the director voted for Barack in '08; this movie seems like an out-and-out trollpiece, presenting Atlas Shrugged just straight enough that all the Randian dummies will get boners about there being an Atlas Shrugged movie, but engaging in a whole bunch of subtle acts of sabotage (and some not subtle ones, like directing the male and female lead, the latter of whom can be seen in the above photo, to act like robot tards) so that the end result just flat-out fucking sucks. I cannot wait for parts two and three. Can. Not. Wait. The only way to improve on the first one is by hiring Tommy Wiseau.

Best Deadpan: Corey Stoll as Hemingway in Midnight In Paris. That speech he gives Owen Wilson capped with “Think about it” was gold.


OWNAGE:

The concept, reified.

Best Car Chase: Oddly enough, I think I gotta go with Priyanka chasing Shahrukh in Don 2. All charges of n00b infatuation with Bollywood can be referred to my dick. The car chases in Fast Five, the seeming clear favorite, were great and everything, but they were just like the car chases in the other four movies. And Drive was Drive, but that was more “good filmmaking” than “dope car chases,” which aren't mutually exclusive or anything, but when I think car chases I think of the director turning to some Australian 2nd unit director with an incomplete complement of eyes and limbs and going “it's all yours,” to which the Australian replies “Lit's git ta fuckin wehhk, mate!” and next thing you know stunt drivers are nearly getting blown up driving Dodge Chargers through oil tankers and shit. (Ed. Note: Australians own.) Now, the car chase in Don 2 wasn't, on the surface, all that flashy. It was just a basic meat-and-potatoes car chase, but with an ineffable batshit insanity that made it fucking rad. Also, Shahrukh fucking destroys his car, and as we all learned from The Blues Brothers (in which is the greatest car chase of all time) at the end of the car chase the car has to just be like fuck it. I'll debate this one, but only to a certain point.

Best Fight: Vincenzo vs. The Rock in Fast Five. Just don't even step to this one. I don't care that Justin Lin gets trendy with the shaky cam. I don't care that it was relatively short. It's Vincenzo Gasolina fighting against The Fucking Rock.

Best violent death: In a year with many contenders, among them several grisly ownings in the bullshit historical epic Ironclad, the gorilla grabbing his nuts and going “sure, I can take on a helicopter with machine gun turrets with nothing but my bare hands” (not only did he win, the evil white guy in a suit—who was played by a black actor, proving that Evil White Guy In A Suit is an attainable state of mind that crosses racial barriers, just as Cate Blanchett proved in Hanna that it transcends gender barriers too—eats it in the ensuing crash) in Rise, and The Rock casually putting two in Joaquim de Almeida's dome without breaking stride to go be homoerotic with Vincenzo, the prize has to go to Albert Brooks owning Bryan Cranston with that straight razor in Drive. He slices his wrists open lengthwise, and then while Cranston bleeds out he's like reassuring him that the worst part is over and he'll be dead soon. I mean holy fucking shit. Albert Brooks. Good God.

Best shirt removal: This is only a category so I can say what's up to Salman Khan in Bodyguard. The way the water hose filled his shirt up with water til it exploded, revealing Salman's muscles really needs to be seen to be believed. It manages to simultaneously be hilarious, ridiculous, awesome, and frankly kind of inspiring. And each quality depends on the simultaneity with the other three. There really is only one Salman Khan.

Greatest “Go fuck yourself” moment: The above-mentioned bit with the Rock casually putting two in Joaquim de Almeida's dome without breaking stride to go be homoerotic with Vincenzo, in Fast Five. I mean, come on. It's a shame JDA couldn't have still been alive for a second to be like, “Wow, yeah, okay, I understand the magnitude to which I just got owned.”

Best explosion: Gotta be when John Boyega, as Moses, detonates his apartment to kill all of “dem tings” at the end of Attack The Block. Not only was it a cool explosion, it was also Moses. Moses saved the fucking planet. Trust.

Best revolution: Caesar. Rise.

Awesomest hero: Moses. Attack The Block. Which, by the way, for anyone wondering how the Badass World Cup turned out, an update: there was a huge scandal surrounding North American Group Stage, when due to the fact that none of the participants would concede, America ended up pulling some 1980 Moscow Olympics shit and decided to withdraw from the competition entirely. The rest of the world kind of shrugged and went, “Well, with Makmende, Mad Max, the guy from The Secret In Their Eyes, Moses, and Tequila and Tony, America wouldn't even be a top seed, and fuck you guys for not letting Canada and Mexico play.” The only thing is, with America out of the Cup, American media stopped treating the Cup as if it existed (same as it ever was) and the wildly entertaining knockout stages, resulting in Moses' eventual victory, were lost to posterity. (Ed. Note: rumors that the real explanation is that Movies By Bowes ™ simply got bored with the conceit and had to write about other shit to pay the bills are scurrilous fucking Communism.) The point is, Moses is a hero. He saved the planet from dem tings. You do not attack the block and not get owned.


And those, dear readers, are the first annual Fucko Awards! Tune in in a couple days for the Top 11 movies of 2011!

GUY PEARCE SURE CAN TAKE A PUNCH

A EuropaCorp SF movie starring Guy Pearce, Shannon from Lost, and Peter Stormare as the Evil White Guy In A Suit? FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YES.

WHEREIN I TEMPORARILY SUSPEND MY POLICY OF NOT FIRING ON CIVILIANS: REPUBLICANS AND THEIR FAVORITE MOVIES

Couple disclaimers before we begin: one, this is not a serious work of political commentary, as should be obvious, but you can never be too careful on the Internet, and two, if this was a bunch of Democrats the movies would probably be just as dumb and maybe even the same ones. But fortunately our current president, whose job all these dummies want, likes The Wire, which trumps all and leaves said dummies open to blatant vituperative ridicule for their inferior taste. See how easy that was? Okay, now let's get to the important business of shit-talking the GOP candidates:

This recent piece in the Washington Times takes a good shot at humanizing the Republican candidates for president in one of those “hey, they're just like regular folks” kinda ways, but what it really reveals is the deep-seated and harrowing psychological problems of each candidate polled. The intent of this piece, mine that is, is to reveal in what way each choice reveals the chooser to be a shithead and/or retard. How definitive is this? Not at all. What greater purpose does unscientifically shit-talking a bunch of non-cineastes about their favorite movies serve? None. Why am I wasting your time and mine with this bullshit, then? Because it fucking snowed in New York today. In fucking October. For this, members of a political party that denies climate change must get my dick in their eye.

And so, without further ado, the Movies By Bowes ™ Institute of Psycho Analysis (yes, it's two words for a reason, keep your stupid comments in your pocket) is open for business:


Candidate: Herman Cain
Favorite Movie: The Godfather
Diagnosis: Troll

There is a vast body of evidence to support this diagnosis. First, the obvious: Mr. Cain made his fortune as the head of Godfather's Pizza. L to the O to the L. Good one, Herb. The plot of the movie has an interesting parallel to Cain's campaign (moar like cam-Cain amirite?) if you posit Vito Corleone as Reagan, Rick Perry as Sonny, and Michelle Bachmann as Fredo—trust me, this is gold—and Cain as Michael. In The Godfather, they're all like, “Eyy, Mikey, Mr. Ivy League, you couldn't be Don,” and everyone following the campaign is like “Herman Cain? I thought his name was Alan Keyes” only to be bushwhacked when suddenly, this goofy fuck who puts out ads where his campaign manager who looks like he's dying of alcohol poisoning is smoking cigarettes and Cain slowly rotates toward the camera smiling all slow like, “Wait, you motherfuckers thought I was serious? Oh boy have you ever been trolled” just like Michael Corleone lulling the heads of the Five Families into submission with his lisp and phony indecisiveness before BAM they're all dead. Seriously, Herman Cain's face at the end of that ad is the new Trollface. Mark it eight, dude.


Candidate: Newt Gingrich
Favorite Movie: Casablanca
Diagnosis: Conservative in all things, even movies

Unlike just about every other left-of-center type in America, I don't particularly have a beef with Newt Gingrich. He does and says revolting, atrocious things, sure, but that's all in the game. I see him as a pure politician, whose personal beliefs just happen to be what a lot of other people think on a given subject. Casablanca, while a great movie to be sure, and one of my own personal favorites, is a very popular one, and a lot of people list it as their favorite. Also, there's no ambiguity about the political content. It's Humphrey Bogart (unambiguous good) against the Nazis (unambiguous bad). There's also Ingrid Bergman (unambiguous sex) and Claude Rains (unambiguous awesome). The movie itself is in black-and-white, reflecting the black-and-white prevailing nature of Republican political discourse. Really, this is just about the only thing Newt could have possibly picked. And another in a long line of little things that make me half-ass like the guy in spite of all the awful shit about him.


Candidate: Michelle Bachmann
Favorite Movie: Braveheart, maybe Saving Private Ryan
Diagnosis: Shithead

I will never get the spell Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan cast over civilians. Like The Shawshank Redemption, another 90s picture civilians go ga-ga over, they're kind of good but way too long and I personally never had the urge to revisit any of them more than once. Back when I used to read the New York Post before I just couldn't take it anymore (I grew up with it, and it's never like it was any beacon of journalism or anything but it just fell of a cliff after 9/11) I used to read the thing in the sports section where they'd ask athletes things like their favorite movie, and without fail every time it was some guy you could tell just didn't give a fuck about the question would just go “Braveheart” or “Saving Private Ryan.” And almost without fail those dudes would all be Jesus shitheads. Thus, one can infer that Michelle, a Jesus shithead, didn't really give a fuck about the question and her mind was clearly on other things, like how fluoridated water turns Christian children into homosexuals or privatizing the military by replacing them with unicorns or re-instituting slavery “except nicer!”or whatever it is she wants to do. When I saw her on Meet The Press I was too busy watching her eyeballs vibrate to pay attention to what she was saying, and David Gregory was whimpering with his tail between his legs until his producer gave him his chew toy at the commercial break.


Candidate: Rick Santorum
Favorite Movie: “There's a lot,” then when pressed for an answer, Field of Dreams [he was in Iowa]
Diagnosis: Not Good At The Whole Politics Thing-itis

Rick, Rick, Rick. I know being named after anal sex is embarrassing (Ed. Note: huh huh huh huh “ass” huh huh huh huh) but you really need to work on this shit (bahahahahahaha ok I'll stop). Let me walk you through it, homes. You're in Iowa, you're getting curbstomped in every single poll—seriously, Rick's trailing Osama Bin Laden in a couple of the fuckers—and you want to pander. Good thinking, Rick! Pandering is good. You know how you do that? Think of something the fucking night before. Don't get up there like “oh, this is beneath me” because nothing is beneath you when you're losing as bad as you are. Get out there and ho' it up a bit. You're in Iowa and someone asks you about your favorite movie? Start talking about John Wayne, you limpdick. He's from there. Get one of your interns to find the most right-wing John Wayne movie they can find, and you fucking say one of the Duke's most right-wing lines in that fucking thing. Then, ya know what? Iowans are like, “That Anal Sex guy is fucking right-wing. I like that guy.” I fucking hate the guy and think he's a horrible, bigoted person who may very well be personally responsible for inciting people to anti-gay hate crimes and I still can't help but give him advice because he's so terrible at his actual job. Even the guy who wrote the Washington Times piece was cracking on him like, “No word on what his favorite movie's going to be in New Hampshire.” Stop the dithering, stupid motherfucker.


Candidate: Ron Paul
Favorite Movie: “I don't watch many movies.”
Diagnosis: Wiseass

Let's be clear: the only reason why Ron Paul is “the reasonable one” in this race is because the rest of them are so fucked up. Ron Paul is insane. But, credit where credit's due, he is smart. And he knows that by letting everyone else fuck themselves in the ass left and right and just laying in the cut and quietly saying smart stuff like “I don't watch many movies” rather than say something just to say something and have it be dumb or nakedly pandering, he looks like a reasonable guy. Sneaky. But remember, he's the guy who believes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is an instrument of totalitarianism. He's not your friend.


Candidate: Gary Johnson
Favorite Movie: Doctor Zhivago
Diagnosis: Good taste, no real shit to talk here

I mean, the only thing I know about the guy is that he's even more libertarian than Ron Paul, which is pretty impressive in its way, but I gotta hand it to him. One-loving David Lean is a sign the guy knows his movies, cares enough about them to have a good one as his favorite, and could probably explain why he likes it in a cogent fashion that actually makes sense. Why can't he be the frontrunner? He'd still lose to Barack but we'd have to sit through less fuckfacedness first, and when Johnson quotes Pauline Kael's review of Ryan's Daughter at Barack to attack his jobs bill or whatever it'll be a fun debate moment.


Candidate: Rick Perry
Favorite Movie: Immortal Beloved
Diagnosis: Lost a bet

Less clinical than my other diagnoses, so follow me on this: Rick's chillin with his evil white guy buddies at their hunting lodge. One of 'em says “Hey, Rick, I betcha ah cain't hit that there hummingbird in th' ass with his here raffle.” Rick goes, “Son, you couldn't hit water if you fell outta fuckin boat,” and everybody's like “ohh shit,” so the other guy takes aim and shoots the hummingbird dead in the ass. And everybody's like “ohhhhhhh shit” and Rick's all pissed because he knows they're going to make him do something fratty and embarrassing. Now, as evil as they are, they know they can't make their buddy say “I'm gay” on national TV, because then how are they going to get appointed ambassador to China when their huntin' and drinkin' buddy gets elected Commander in Chizzief. So they go the next best route: they pick some random movie one of their wives made them sit through on HBO in 1997 and tell Rick if someone asks him his favorite movie ever he's gotta say Immortal Beloved. Rick's like, “Aww, man, you guys're asssssssholes,” while they all cackle and get ready to kill some more shit. Occam's Razor.


Candidate: Mitt Romney
Favorite Movie: O, Brother Where Art Thou?
Diagnosis: We're all gonna die

Sure, it's possible Mitt Romney's a Coen brothers fan. After all, you do have to put them in the “greatest living American filmmakers” discussion. And O, Brother was one of their best, and more of a crowd-pleaser than the ones it's not as good as. I'd go ahead and call this a solid civilian pick except for the fact that there's totally something wrong and sinister about Mitt Romney. It's like, okay. His hair. It's impossible to look at his hair and not get an erection. Call it Newton's 69th law of physics or whatever. But that fucking hair is just entirely too perfect to be anything other than a distraction. Every time you're like “Hey, but you're in a cult that didn't acknowledge that black people were human beings until 1978, under great duress, and you were already an adult at the time,” his hair is like, “These are not the droids you're looking for.” During that debate when he put hands on Rick Perry, there was this slight whiff of “If you don't shut the fuck up I'm going to Vulcan nerve pinch you, you peckerwood cocksucker” to the gesture, which is probably why Perry's nuts turtled and he didn't do shit about it. Romney might snap and kill somebody. And by might I mean will. Look at the color of his skin. Look at the suit. DO THE MATH, PEOPLE.

What's this have to do with O, Brother Where Art Thou? Just that Romney picked the wrong Coen brothers movie. On purpose. He really meant Barton Fink. You know, where John Goodman's all nice and friendly and shit at first, even if he's a little weird and creepy? And then at the end of the picture he's chasing John Turturro up the flaming hallway bellowing “I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!” twelve octaves below the surface of the Earth and Turturro basically shits his ass and only survives by accident? That's Romney next year when someone fucks with him at the convention. It's all gonna burn. And the only survivors are going to be Mitt Romney chasing Grover Norquist with a shotgun hollering “HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW, MOTHERFUCKER? THIS SHIT REAGANESQUE ENOUGH FOR YOU PORCUPINE FUCKERS?” At which point the National Guard comes in, and, well, you've seen Godzilla.


Anyway. That's my year's worth of politics. It's back to the movies themselves after this. Unless, of course, these motherfuckers keep acting the fool and another response becomes necessary. I'll sign off now. Occupy Everything. Peace.

A SALUTE TO JAMES REBHORN

I love me some character actors. From my very early years as a cineaste, when I realized that the reason the guy Arnold just shot twenty-five times showed up in another movie because none of this was really happening, I liked tracking people's careers from movie to movie and TV show to TV show. It got to the point, after a while, where certain actors' mere appearance were signifiers of the narrative to come. For instance:

Pre-Paul Thomas Anderson Luis Guzman—probably not a very good movie, and Luis is going to die.

John Mahoney—everybody else will have less moral rectitude (because John Mahoney fucking owns).

Art Evans—an unreliable signifier, because the movie might or might not be any good, but Art was guaranteed to fucking rock, even if it's only one scene. Also, any good aesthete has to love a guy whose name is Art.

James Rebhorn—chances are about two in three he's going to the evil white guy in a suit.

Now, this shit is fucking important, because it is the duty of all morally and politically responsible art to remind the audience that evil white guys in suits are conspiring to destroy the Earth at all times. And, the thing about white guys is that there are echelons; in short, white people have their own white people (take the famous observation about the Irish, that they make fine soldiers as long as they have white officers), and right up at the top of the pyramid (the Freemason one with the eye. Trust) are WASPs from the Northeast United States, and James Rebhorn is from Philly. Consider also, he has the perfect build to wear a really, really conservative suit, and once his hair started going gray the fact that he's a fucking great actor meant we had the perfect storm: the Evilest White Guy In a Suit to ever reflect every last goddamn bit of light back from the silver screen.

Trying to go through every single James Rebhorn performance and talk sufficiently about how awesome it is would take about a goddamn year, because for the entire 1990s he probably took about one coffee break off from being in every TV show and movie the 24 hour day allowed him to grace with his presence. He was in so much stuff even civilians will not only go, “oh, yeah, that guy” but follow it up with “That guy was great in [pick one of about ninety things].”

So, given that, a select list of Mr. Rebhorn's finest work:


Basic Instinct (1992)

While the first things one thinks about when one thinks about Basic Instinct are all the sex and violence and casually rancid biphobia, not to mention George Dzundza telling an array of pussy jokes unmatched outside of Shane Black in Predator, James Rebhorn was most definitely in this as well, about two-thirds of the way through.

After Michael Douglas has been walking around making Michael Douglas Face (the technical term for the overlap in the Venn diagram of middle-aged white guy, poorly-controlled sexual impulses, and jaw-dropping amounts of booze and drugs) for almost the whole movie, with the resultant skyrocketing in the price of Jack Daniel's stock and mortal sexual panic of everyone in his path, the San Francisco PD sends him to see a shrink he isn't fucking (casting aspersions at your professional ethics there, Jeanne Tripplehorn), namely James Rebhorn (some other dude is there too, but his presence is negated by Rebhorn's).

Rebhorn only has like one line, and it's some awesome cliché pseudo-Freudian “tell me about your mother” horseshit, but that one line, and the beautifully honed snootiness with which Rebhorn delivers it, leads to one of the most marvelously douchey Michael Douglas monologues ever. And that, my friends, is the mark of a good character actor. Like a midfielder setting up a perfect pass for the glory-boy striker with the nice hair to fire into goal, a good character actor is defined oft-times by how awesome he manages to make the hero look. James Rebhorn's a fucking team player, people.


Real Steel (2011)

This is actually the role that inspired this tribute to the great man and his work. Real Steel kind of sucks—it was directed by the guy responsible the Night At The Museum fuckarounds, so I wasn't expecting Citizen Kane, but it was still really artificial and fucking terribly written—but Rebhorn shows up and delivers an unfuckingbelievably nuanced little performance in his customary tiny amount of screen time.

The deal is, Hugh Jackman is an irresponsible fuckstick who doesn't want custody of the precocious little moppet who's basically the violin bow the movie uses to play the audience's heartstrings, and Rebhorn is the new husband of the relative Jackman's trying to pawn the kid off on. Only problem is, Rebhorn's looking at this rationally: he's rich as hell (his wristwatch has the approximate mass of the Earth's moon) and he wants to go to Tuscany with younger wife Hope Davis (the relative in question) and be fucking like all summer, because to James Rebhorn go the spoils of victory. So he and Huge Jacked Man cook up a bargain wherein Huge gets a big thick envelope of cash and James Rebhorn gets to spend the whole second act off screen fucking Hope Davis' brains out. Everybody wins.

What seems like a nothing role—or worse, an Evil Stepfather—is just brilliantly and subtly worked by Rebhorn to the point where he manages to play A Guy Who Hates Little Kids and not only not seem like an asshole, he doesn't even come off as a bad person. I maintain, you put a lesser actor in this role, you get a stereotypical meanie Evil Stepfather, and the movie's shittier for it. Rebhorn just walks up like, “I'm a reasonable man,” and the audience is like, “You know what? He kind of is.” That shit right there is like the Stella Adler Jedi mind trick, is what that is.


Independence Day (1996)

Maybe Rebhorn's highest-profile role (his role in the profitable but fucking terrible Meet the Parents was less key, ditto Scent Of A Woman, and I can't discuss the final episode of Seinfeld without overturning cars and starting simultaneous riots in at least five major cities), and certainly his most unambiguously villainous. Playing President Bill Pullman's trigger-happy Secretary of Defense, Rebhorn basically spends the whole movie being the guy who's like, “Wir haben das Reich zu schützen, mein Führer,” and Bill Pullman's like “What the fuck is this shit, I thought I was a Democrat.”

Interestingly, in spite of him being a total WASP, and Rebhorn admitting to totally basing the character on Ollie North (showing Rebhorn is totally fucking aware of the Evil White Guys In Suits theory) his name in the movie is Nimzicki, which is about as far from WASPy as shit gets. But, director Roland Emmerich said the character was named after the MGM executive who fucked up the ad campaign for Stargate, so it was just a good, old-fashioned bit of axe-grinding; if not for that surely Rebhorn would have had a WASP name. And anyway, Rebhorn's mere presence is a signifier of WASPy WASP WASPness.

Speaking of setting things up for the other actor, let us not forget the bit near the end when the aliens are about to fuck shit up, and Judd Hirsch busts out the Torah for the prayer circle as Rebhorn's sitting down. “But . . . I'm not Jewish,” says the great man. Hirsch appraises him with one of the great “No fuckin shit bitch” glances in cinema and says, “Nobody's perfect,” a line that wins style points for one-loving Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot. Say it again: Rebhorn's in for the team.


The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Playing yet another super-rich dude, here Rebhorn is Jude Law's dad, who hires Tom “Matt Damon” Ripley to go to Italy be responsible, which ends up being a stupid move, but falling for Tom Ripley's bullshit is nothing to be ashamed of, as anyone who's read much Patricia Highsmith or knows anything about Alain Delon or John Malkovich can tell you.

The thing that's so dope about Rebhorn in this is just how perfectly he captures the quiet, understated, patrician WASP thing here. It's like every white person in the history of white people donated DNA to a super-white person designed by the world's greatest geneticist and polished off by a goddamn artist. Rebhorn is, simply, the whitest rich dude like ever in this. Say what you want about The Talented Mr. Ripley, it didn't half-ass anything. It wanted be a beautifully shot movie with gorgeous Italian locations? Done. It wanted to be about twenty minutes too long with a false climax and too many subplots? It was thirty minutes too long with two false climaxes and way the fuck too many subplots. I do really like the movie, but it values surface over depth. The surface is perfect, though, which is why when it needed a guy to be a rich WASP as Jude Law's dad, it got the rich WASP: James fuckin' Rebhorn.


The Game (1997)

The sine qua non of awesome James Rebhorn performances. David Fincher's typically stylish, much-better-than-it-has-any-fucking-right-to-be third feature gives Rebhorn a bit more room to stretch than most other pictures he's been in, and Rebhorn responds with a fucking powerhouse, multi-layered, meta mindfuck. And, of course, to bring this discussion full circle, he spends the whole movie fucking with Michael Douglas, a noble pursuit.

When Douglas' little brother (Sean Penn) gives him a “game” as his birthday present (pitched as a massively intricate ARG), Douglas, his existence barren, gray, and emotionless, deliberates a bit and goes “what the fuck.” He heads on in to start playing the game, and the dude he talks to at the game company is James Rebhorn. Now, because The Game is one twisty fuckin narrative and a damn fine cinematic experience the first time through (it holds up to multiple viewings, but that's more a how did we get from Tinker to Evers to Chance kinda thing), I'll stop right there in terms of specifics. But suffice to say, James Rebhorn is goddamn astonishing in this. He adopts like five or six different personae depending on what the best way to fuck with Michael Douglas' head is under the circumstances in question, and each time you totally buy it as what's really going on.

Now, sure, there's other stuff going on in The Game. Michael Douglas is a rock (he gets us on his side even though he's a fairly Evil White Guy in this, with many expensive Suits, which you cannot do unless you put in a solid performance), Sean Penn is a bit overcaffeinated but still good, and Deborah Kara Unger was putting in another installment in her brief mid-90s run as the thinking man's kinky Canadian sex symbol, but Rebhorn walks away with this movie. Just walks right the fuck away with it. Every beat and line reading is just like “holy shit, this dude is a fucking BOSS.” And it was the point at which, after having seen him in like a half dozen thing in which he absolutely ruled, I made a point of checking the credits and going “Who the fuck is that guy . . .? Ah, James Rebhorn. Okay, duly noted.” Crossing the Rubicon from “That Guy” to having your own name and everything is a big step. It happens a little earlier for me than most, because I'm a goddamn nerd and I'm obsessed with character actors, but still, when you have your “That Guy” graduation, you've won the character actor game.

James Rebhorn, I salute you and all your contributions to the cinema, not the least of which is the fact that every time I see an evil white guy in a suit in a movie, I have to go, “Is he Rebhorn caliber?” It's not every actor who can lay claim to having defined a character archetype, but James Rebhorn most certainly can. Here's to you, sir.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU BE SAYIN': A LOOK AT THE CAREER OF CHRIS TUCKER

Why Chris Tucker, you might ask? Well, I might answer: why not? Not only, thanks to Rebecca Black, is Chris Tucker's now the good Friday (Ed. Note: fuck you, that was funny) he's responsible for one of my all-time favorite one-scene performances (in Jackie Brown), maybe two-thirds of the dumb shit I used to say when I was stoned (Friday), and one of the single most gloriously strange, gender-ambiguous pieces of magnificently irritating performance art ever filmed (The Fifth Element). My fandom goes back even further than that, though.

I first heard of Chris Tucker back when my dad and I would watch hours and hours of stand-up comedy on TV every weekend, that being one of the only compromises we could strike because he hated movies with explosions and I hated 18-hour PBS documentaries about soybean farming. It was the middle of the early 90s stand-up comedy boom, when you could catch stand-up on TV just about any hour of the day and night. We caught a lot of great comics and had many mutual favorites (Bill Hicks, Robin Harris, Richard Pryor, Marc Maron, Richard Belzer, and early Bill Maher, the one who was funny, not the one who became convinced he was the weed-smoking Walter Cronkite). I was more partial to women comedians than he was—Laura Kightlinger and Janeane Garofalo will always have special places in my heart—and he was more partial to middle-aged guys from Boston, because he was a middle-aged guy from Boston. But for the most part, we liked the same stuff, especially if Dad had had a bit to smoke.

One show we never missed, in its first couple seasons, was HBO's Def Comedy Jam. This was back in my Dad's hilariously disingenuous period where he'd retire to the other room and come back all giggly and think he was hiding the fact that he was high. Timing was such that he'd usually do this right around the time Def Comedy Jam was about to come on TV, which worked out nicely, as the general tenor of the show was perfect for a dorky 13 year old or a bombed-out-of-his-nards 43 year old. And so we discovered a great many mediocre comics, but just as many if not more who were really fucking funny. We had formed a secular religion based around Bernie Mac in about 1993. My dad came dangerously close to comparing Martin Lawrence to Steve Allen one night before I caught him in time. And, of course, with the subject of this post being what it is, there was Chris Tucker.



He was neither the best stand-up to appear on that show, nor the most original, but he made my dad and me laugh our asses off to the point where it took us two hours to find them again afterwards. One man's mile-a-minute non-sequitur shrieking is another man's hilarity, what can I say. I dislike analyzing comedy, because analyzing comedy isn't funny, so I'll keep this brief: there are many different types of comedians, from the great sage preacher types like Bill Hicks, the raw nerves like Pryor where you're like “holy fuck, did he just say that?”, the observational types, the quipsters, so forth. There is a shortage of straight up wiseasses who are actually funny, and I'd put Chris Tucker in that category. He's no beacon of enlightenment, doesn't mine any apparent demons for cathartic laughs, doesn't do a whole lot of “ya ever notice” and his jokes can be kinda corny. What sold it for me, with him when he was young, was his “I'm just that little wiseass motormouth hyperactive skinny dude”—ness. Sometimes it could be a bit much, but sometimes it really hit the spot.

Like a lot of comedians, when Chris Tucker started doing movies, he'd basically be doing his bits instead of playing a character, but for Friday, that was what was necessary. Ice Cube—no slouch in his ability to read the public's pop cultural appetite—wrote himself a more light-hearted “hood” movie than the ones with which he'd made his initial foray into movies, which were, while groundbreaking at the time of their release, a bit grim for widespread commercial appeal. While Cube could be quite funny at times, he'd yet to attempt outright comedy, and made the wise decision to cast himself as the straight man and Chris Tucker as the funny one. The result, one of the better weed-smoking movies ever made, more consistently funny than most, with great chemistry between Chris and Cube.

As an actor, with one notable exception which we'll get to in a bit, Friday established the template Chris Tucker performance, with slight variations: the endlessly talkative goofball, frequently either high or talking about Michael Jackson, never terrribly intelligent, but never so stupid that he can't pull it together to save the day, although ultimately very very silly. Some killjoys might extrapolate this lack of variation in his screen persona to imply that Chris Tucker is a shitty actor, to which I would say: whoa, whoa, whoa. Back the fuck up. First of all, the guy isn't playing fucking Hamlet. Second of all, lest we infer from that “first of all” that comedy is somehow easy, let's just remember that dude who played Hamlet who, overhearing on his deathbed someone talking about how hard it must be to be shufflin' off the ol' mortal coil, riposted “Dying? That's easy. Comedy? That's hard.” Sure that story's apocryphal, but the reason no one gives a shit that it's apocryphal is that it's fucking true. Maybe Chris Tucker isn't the guy you turn to when you're casting a John Osborne play, but Chris Tucker can do a bit about Michael Jackson as a pimp with Tito as his assistant pimp, and he can be really fucking funny in so doing. Call Nicol Williamson for the Osborne play, I'll stick with Chris for the MJ.

After establishing what would be an ongoing relationship with director Brett Ratner on Money Talks, a commercially successful if unmemorable thing co-starring Emilio Estevez's brother, Chris Tucker broke into movie megastardom with Rush Hour, which was heralded as Jackie Chan's breakthrough role with American audiences, but I noticed a couple things in the theater waiting for it to start: one, as was not unusual in my moviegoing history, me and my mom were the only two white people in the packed theater, and two, everyone in earshot was excitedly talking about the new Chris Tucker movie. Jackie Chan was a fun but secondary element.

But since then, able to command a $20 milion fee—which he's good for, if he ever came out with a new movie that looked even remotely un-fucktarded, it'd make back that $20 mil and more the first weekend—Chris Tucker has only appeared in the Rush Hour sequels, which are what they are, even though Rush Hour 3 is only a movie if you really give it the benefit of the doubt. Still, he made $45 million in salary from those two sequels, plus he had points, and as unmemorable as they were those pictures made a lot of fucking money, so you gotta figure those points made him even richer, so it's not like Chris Tucker has to work or anything. If he's happy, that's all that really matters.

The details of his personal life are, besides being none of our business, not terribly interesting in any tabloid-y kind of way. He's a big God guy and managed to turn his lifelong massive Michael Jackson fandom into a genuine friendship; that in itself is an interesting narrative to chart, watching Chris go from gently but respectfully poking fun at MJ to actually becoming friends with him, to the point where Chris was called, deeply upset, to testify in the last kid-fucking lawsuit. That might make an interesting movie: the dialogue scenes alone between Chris Tucker and Michael Jackson would be some shit out of David Lynch.

As for Chris Tucker's movies that actually do exist, here goes (Ed. Note: this is an incomplete list):


Friday/Money Talks/Rush Hour series



You can kind of lump these all in together and have it only be a slight oversimplification, as pretty much what Chris does in all these is a variation on his stand-up riffs, playing the annoying-yet-somewhat-charming wiseass fuckup. Friday doesn't require any kind of deep analysis; it's a movie you smoke a joint to, with a handful of classic lines, to wit “You get killed with somebody else,” in re: not passing a joint fast enough, and “You just got knocked the FUCK out!” to fallen villain Tiny Lister. Money Talks is dumb but I didn't change the channel that time I caught it on cable.

The Rush Hour series, though, I rather enjoy in spite of its escalating stupidity and the uncanny ability of director Brett Ratner's to make every picture he directs feel physically small (pardon the critical synesthesia, I don't know how else to describe it, his movies feel like crowded studio apartments). My favorite line in the whole series is not, surprisingly, one of Chris' or Jackie's, it's Philip Baker Hall talking to Chris after a horrendous Chris fuckup—casting Chris as a fuckup cop with Walter Mitty Harry Callahan fantasies is pretty much perfect, by the way—but Chris' response is what sells the line:

Philip Baker Hall (a police captain, nota bene): Every now and then we have to let the general public know we still know how to blow shit up.
Chris Tucker (a cop, nota bene praeter): You're goddamn right!

This has always been my philosophy toward cinéma policiers: I don't necessarily want my movie cops to resemble real cops—cuz who the fuck wants to sit through two hours of civil servants struggling to pay their bills and drinking beer watching Yankee games, really—and I certainly like movie cops to know how to blow shit up. Rush Hour, the first one anyway, is a terrifically enjoyable action comedy—easily the best thing Brett Ratner's ever done—and is so largely because of the terrific chemistry between Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. It's also nice to have cats like Philip Baker Hall, Tzi Ma, and Ken Leung show up, and Ken Leung is quite good as the villain. The sequels exist, I've seen them, they're fine, whatever. As cable movies, time-fillers/background noise/what have you, the Rush Hour series has few peers. They're dumb, sure, but they're entertaining, even the third one in Paris.

Taking a step back chronologically, 1997 ultimately was a bit of a turning point for Chris Tucker's career. His three releases each represented a possible career trajectory: there was Money Talks, Chris' first team-up with the above-mentioned Brett Ratner, which could have lead to a sequel called Bullshit Walks (not a bad alternate title for Rush Hour 3, come to think of it), and represented the safe, unambitious, commercial route. This, of course, is the one Chris ultimately took.

What could be called “the middle road” was represented by Jackie Brown. A really good movie, by an actual director, with Chris giving something recognizable as an actual performance, as the doomed underling whom Samuel L. Jackson verbally manipulates into the trunk of his car with an empty shotgun only to be cranially ventilated by bullets from Samuel L.'s gun. It's basically Chris Tucker's standard boilerplate Chris Tucker performance—a weedtarded high-pitched voice wisecracking dude who talks really fast and loud when he gets pissed off—but with good dialogue and actual beats to hit, proving that when called on, Chris actually could thesp respectably. Only problem with this path is that it would have required, simultaneously, the ambition necessary to carve out a career as an actor in good movies and the attendant patience to content one's self with playing supporting roles for a few years. And it also presupposes that that's something Chris himself gave a fuck about, which certainly doesn't appear so from his subsequent career choices.

Last, and certainly not least, is The Fifth Element.



Oh, where do we begin with this one . . . The production design and special effects are seamlessly gorgeous. Speaking of which there's also Milla Jovovich, who makes quite an impression. Bruce Willis Bruce Willises his way through the whole thing without batting an eyelash, which sucks in bad movies but is awesome in good ones, Tiny Lister is the President of the Galaxy (as he motherfucking well should be), Gary Oldman gives what would be the strangest performance in any other actor's career but for him it's merely in a ten-way deathmatch with nine other duckfuckingly insane roles . . . and then there's Chris Tucker.

Chris Tucker's performance in The Fifth Element is like if you gave a drag queen LSD and, knowing exactly when she was going to peak, had her huff a balloon of nitrous oxide. It says something that in a movie where everyone's wearing Jean-Paul Gaultier, Chris Tucker's the one who looks weird, and this is in a movie with a whole marauding army of ass-faced aliens and Milla Jovovich running around wearing gaff tape.

There's no diplomatic way to say this, so I'll say it in the least-diplomatic way possible: you could be on first name basis with the staff at Marie's Crisis, have a dick in your ass and your mouth and one in each hand and be a Republican Congressman and not be as gay as Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element. He's not just gay in this, he's Little Richard Gay. This is kind of like the difference between being a pop singer and being Michael Jackson, for an analogy in Chris Tucker-ese.

Now, I'm not saying this like it's a bad thing at all. Chris Tucker flies the freak flag like it's fuckin Fort McHenry up in this joint. At his most sedate, Chris has a tendency to talk a little fast and chirp a bit, but in The Fifth Element—fittingly for a movie with lots of aliens in it—he talks so fast and in so high a pitch it's like he's speaking an alien language. If you ever want to make a civilian cry, watch The Fifth Element with the sound way up: Chris' voice fucking tortures civilians in this movie. Every thirtieth word or so is intelligible. It's fucking awesome.

Bruce Willis is supposed to find Chris Tucker irritating, and since Bruce Willis is the hero, he's kind of the audience's eyes and ears, but as an actor, the cat isn't exactly Daniel Day-Lewis in terms of staying in character. At several points over the course of the movie you can see Bruce Willis start to crack because Chris Tucker's balls-out batshit insanity is so funny at times that he can't help but struggle a bit.

It has been said that a few of Chris Tucker's lines in The Fifth Element are audible only to dogs. Anyone who's able to interview a dog to find out, let me know, but in the meantime let us be content with the extant evidence, which is that this is one of the truly strange performances ever in cinema. While I love it, I'm a little strange myself and understand it not being people's cup of tea. But oh fuck is it ever mine.

Knowing that he's capable of such off-the-map bizarre brilliance, though, makes it a little disappointing that Chris Tucker is content to restrict his acting to Rush Hour sequels once every five or six years. But hey, it's his career. It'd just be nice if he really tried to be Michael Jackson; while he's not exactly Tito, he's in danger of becoming Jermaine. In so doing, he's in danger of no longer being germane.

For that last joke, you are quite welcome.