NEITHER GOOD NOR IMPORTANT

You gotta hand it to Armond White. He may hate comic books, but he still knows that with great power comes great responsibility, and that when one of the year's most anticipated movies is imminent, it is time to let loose. Behold this review of The Avengers, and bask.

UNLEARNING THE TOP 10 CONSERVATIVE LESSONS OF ROCKY IV

Forget the politics, how are these two motherfuckers even in the same weight class?

I'm no stranger to banging the drums for weird, or even bad, movies. Two of the most enduringly popular posts in the history of this blog are the one consisting in large (and aesthetically central) part with advocating for Ocean's Twelve as the great unappreciated studio picture of our time, and the one where I discussed my lifelong love for the cinema of Chris Tucker. Tilting at windmills is shitloads of fun: Cervantes was on that hundreds of fucking years ago, and all he did was coin the phrase, not the concept. But the important thing to remember in all this is that down is not up, making an idiosyncratic critical argument requires a critical approach, and that assumptions are not facts. Not even that whole “come on, let's keep it real, we all know [x]” fallacy, where x = a simplistic generalization based on a cynical, pessimistic assumption masquerading as realism.

Also, we need to be careful to remember that movies are movies, not containers into which we can pour our political biases. This brings me to a post on the blog Big Hollywood, wherein the writer outlined the Top 10 Conservative Lessons of Rocky IV. It violates every single principle listed above. It posits that reality is something other than it is. It presents assumptions and opinions as facts, with plenty of “come on, we all know” bullshit. And nine of them are completely untrue.

Before breaking down the list, a bit of historical context is necessary. Rocky IV came out in 1985, the first year of Ronald Reagan's second term, which he won in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history. There was no way of knowing that in only a couple years, Communism would collapse, and so popular culture was consumed with the Cold War and the Soviet threat. Not only the fight against Communism but money and cocaine as well pushed Hollywood rightward, and the industry cranked out movies where American supermen prevailed over all odds. Sometimes they explicitly fought Commies, sometimes proxies. But Rocky IV fell squarely within that trend, with Sly appropriating Rocky to, like his Rambo franchise, fight Commies. Considering Sly's success at the box office, and the theme, this may have been the easiest green light in the history of Hollywood (and, given the climate, getting the studio to sign off on the line “Hey, we don't keep our people behind a wall with machine guns” was not even a thing that needed to be done, so if the writer ever gets to ask Sly how he pulled that off, she should expect a blank stare). It was not a rebellious island in a sea of craven liberal capitulation to the Soviet beast. It was a conservative movie in multiple senses of the term. That understood, let us proceed:


“1—Communism (let me be succinct and find the right word here) sucks.”

We can skip the assertion that the assertion that Rocky IV is the greatest movie of all time is not an opinion but fact, because as much as I could get all bent out of shape about logical fallacies and the difference between opinion and fact, the writer was kidding, to a certain extent. And this is the one lesson that doesn't have a rebuttal. Communism, in every practical application, did suck. As a philosophy, it's like running the wrong operating system on a computer. Even though it's possible to split hairs and point out (as countless college freshmen have) that all of the ostensibly Communist regimes in history have been top-down dictatorships where ultimately one dude was in charge, and that “pure” Communism has never been implemented, pure Communism is completely untenable outside small, completely homogenous groups, because it's one of those things that sounds cool in theory but is completely antithetical to human nature in practice. Which is why everyone who wanted to try it made a couple strategic edits to the philosophy, and brought guns.

Problem is, a lot of anti-Communists didn't know when to leave well enough alone, and attributed every perfidious act by every person in every Communist regime to Communism as a philosophy. The writer mentions the Russians cheating and shooting Dolph up with drugs, which Sly didn't just pull out of his ass. The Soviets and other Eastern Bloc countries did that shit all the time. But it had nothing to do with Marx. It had to do with people living in a system that was simultaneously fundamentally broken and obsessed with the glory of the state. That desperation backed people into corners where they had to make the choice between being unethical or facing pretty severe consequences. This isn't exactly a contradiction of the drugged-up Dolph point, it's more that when you imagine Dolph as existing in a real world, he's someone to be pitied rather than loathed. That said, the assumption that, in the 80s, he'd be on his way to a Siberian labor camp just for losing to Rocky is faulty. He might not have even been sent to Siberia for his outburst of cartoonish individualism—I mean, if he'd pulled that shit during the Stalin era someone would have shot him in the head in the ring, but then again, if it was the Stalin era, Rocky wouldn't have been allowed into Russia in the first place—either. Nothing terribly fun would have happened to him. Dolph's life would have sucked til Communism fell, but the likelihood of it sucking somewhere relatively near Moscow or Leningrad was better than you'd think.

One final point about lesson 1: the assumption of knowledge of Brigitte Nielsen's character's inner life is entirely without merit. You'd need to perform feats of rhetorical alchemy to convince me that her character had an inner life at all, let alone that her leaving Dolph was a fait accompli. Assumption, not fact.


“2—There are wealthy people who are also (gasp!) perfectly good people.”

This is where the lessons devolve into silliness. It's easier to count mainstream Hollywood movies without wealthy or well-off protagonists than it is ones with same. Just about the entire romantic comedy genre is either about rich women trying to find love or not necessarily rich women trying to find love with rich guys. The default state for protagonists, in any mainstream genre, unless the plot requires otherwise, is to be middle class. Sure, middle class people aren't rich, but they are privileged. Material success is portrayed in Hollywood as either matter of fact, or aspirational. To assert otherwise requires a lot of cherry-picking, carefully ignoring almost every movie released by a major studio.

I'm not going to touch the literal reading of this assertion, that there are wealthy people who are perfect at being good. That would be excessive shit-starting. Also, all evil white guys in suits jokes aside, it is theoretically possible that there is a wealthy person out there who is perfectly good. But I highly doubt s/he would vote Republican.


“3—Traditional family values are beautiful.”

They're also a myth. Concocted by Hollywood. The mythical 1950s-ish world to which conservatives want to “return” never existed. Getting married and being loyal to your spouse is good, but it is not the most important thing in the world. And there is no conflict whatsoever between straight people getting married to each other and gay people getting married to each other. Marriage is an affirmation of the strength of one's bond with one's partner. Note the absence of gender pronouns there.

Also, Rocky is a guy who punches people. The reason why he's the avatar of the American way in Rocky IV is because Sly wrote a script where Rocky is the avatar of the American way, and Sly did so because Sly was going to be directing Sly in the lead role. He has a wife because his relationship with Adrian generated audience sympathy in the first movie. The reason she's in the fourth movie is because she was in the first three. She does not help Rocky punch people.


“4—Patriotism.”

All fine and good. America's pretty rad, no argument there. But . . . wait a minute, what comes next?

“Three words: APOLLO 'effing CREED.”

Oh, boy. This is followed by a whole bunch of bullshit about how awesome it is that Apollo Creed loves his country and drives liberals crazy because he's wearing red, white, and blue. That didn't really bug me, but I'm not a “liberal,” which must explain that. What's telling is the writer going on and on about Apollo Creed being “[o]ne of cinematic history's greatest characters, period” because he doesn't care about racism, ignoring a couple important points, first that he's not a real person, and second, that he's a fictional character written by a white guy. Apollo Creed not feeling like he's the victim of racism is because a white guy doesn't feel like Apollo Creed is a victim of racism. This lessens the impact of Apollo's patriotism a bit, and makes the next lesson—


“5—Color-blind race relations are the way to go.”

—even more ridiculous, which is impressive considering how stupid the last one was. This whole “color-blind” fallacy is not unique to conservatives, but conservatives have massive boners for it. For a bunch of purportedly grounded realists, claiming that ignoring race is, ipso facto, eradicating racism is like sticking your fingers in your ears and going “LALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU RACISM LOOK I SHUT MY EYES TOO SO I CAN'T SEE YOU SO YOU AREN'T THERE LALALALALA.” The worst part is, none of the accompanying text with this lesson in any way refutes the existence of institutional racism. Apollo training Rocky to beat Clubber Lang doesn't refute shit. Clubber Lang was a fucking asshole. But was he a fucking asshole inherently, or was he made that way experientially by a country that hated him on principle from birth? Would Apollo Creed have still chosen to be a boxer if he'd known there were other options? Muhammad Ali became a boxer basically because he had to, and Muhammad Ali was the basis for Apollo Creed in the first movie, which was inspired by the 1975 fight in which Chuck Wepner took Ali 15 rounds. It should be noted that Muhammad Ali never subsequently trained Chuck Wepner, and until Parkinson's robbed him of his ability to speak as freely as he once did, he was as outspoken a critic of institutional racism as ever existed in American public life. Turning Muhammad Ali into Apollo Creed and writing him further and further into compliant, apolitical impotence as Sly did over the course of the Rocky series is borderline sinister (writing it off to intellectual laziness, which I do, is extremely generous), and then killing him off to get the audience on Rocky's side is sickeningly fucking gratuitous.


“6—There is no room for moral relativism.”

Well, sure. It's propaganda. Actually what I think the writer might mean is: “There is no room to disagree with what I'm saying.” But this is also clearly not the case. What have I been doing thus far?


“7—Faith in God is paramount.”

No, faith in God is Warner Bros. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh man am I the best or am I the best. Seriously, though, Rocky is a guy who punches people. God doesn't punch anyone in this movie. And the writer clearly hasn't seen Warrior if she thinks fighters praying before a fight would be edited out today. Wait, bad example, no one saw Warrior. But she mentions Tim Tebow, and all you need to know about Tim Tebow and atheists is, I started that fuckin guy on my fantasy team all the way to the playoff finals, when I second-guessed myself and started Mike Vick instead because I thought Tebow had a bad matchup. I mean, I still would have lost even if I'd started Tebow because my opponent had Aaron Rodgers, who is better at football than Tim Tebow, but I'm not burning copies of the Bible because I lost. These things happen when one guy is better at something than another guy.

The conclusion to this thought—“Judeo-Christian beliefs are as American as apple pie”—only requires a reminder that what originally united the various states of America was a philosophy based almost entirely in Enlightenment thinking. Some of the Founding Fathers identified as Christians. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, did not (he was a Deist, and famously owned a copy of the Bible with all references to the divinity of Jesus Christ excised). The government was specifically designed to be separate from any institutional religious influences. But then again, apple pie came from Europe, so the writer may be indulging in the pleasure of the non sequitur.


“8—Manliness personified.”

While I'm certainly not going to criticize the author for liking butch guys, being a man means having a dick. That's it.


“9—Think for yourself rather than going with the tides.”

On the surface, not a bad piece of advice at all, until the punchline, which makes it clear that supporting Barack Obama is being equated with not thinking for oneself, presented without any correlation and with a bit of a sneer. The last Rocky movie came out in 2006, which means Rocky has never existed in a world in which Barack Obama would have been on his radar (of course, assuming that any presidential candidate would ever be on Rocky's radar, which is a stretch.) Also, Rocky is a guy who punches people, not a politician or a pundit. Who he supports for president has nothing to do with anything.


“10—If you apply yourself and work hard, success is attainable i.e. the very essence of capitalism.”

The big finish! Though what capitalism has to do with Rocky is unclear, when at the beginning of the series of movies, Rocky is working hard and not getting anywhere until by an enormous coincidence he's selected at the whim of Apollo Creed to fight in what Apollo basically regards as an exhibition. Which is straight-up Horatio Alger: in Ragged Dick, the protagonist is hustling for his subsistence until a series of rich people all go “why, look at that lovable scamp, I'm going to rain opportunities and the luxuries of privilege on him.” That has nothing to do with applying yourself and working hard. That's people being handed success. I mean, shit, if you're going to advocate the importance of focused diligence, why not use the example of someone who actually succeeded due to focusing and being diligent?

It is true, though, that the American system affords victors a whole lotta fuckin' spoils. For all that's wrong with it, America does rock when you're in position to take advantage of what it has to offer. But, as in all things, there's a catch. It really, really helps to be a healthy white heterosexual male who belongs to a Protestant Christian denomination and whose family has money. With each qualifier removed, the likelihood of success diminishes, as each removed qualifier is replaced by institutional barriers. That is reality. That is the way things are on Earth. The reference to the Occupy movement is ridiculous, as no one in Zuccotti Park or any other Occupied space, is asking to be given anything. Ironically, what the Occupiers are after is a system in which applying oneself and working hard actually are rewarded proportional to the work done. Also, it bears mentioning yet again that Rocky's participation in the capitalist system is entirely to the extent that people pay him to punch people.


The author concludes by calling Rocky IV “the greatest unintentionally-conservative film ever made, and not coincidentally, a cultural masterpiece.” I'll leave the latter assertion alone for a minute, but Rocky IV is most certainly conservative absolutely on purpose. Even without all the shit the author projects onto the movie, it absolutely serves a conservative purpose: the Russians are BAD! The Americans are GOOD! Sly is the EMBODIMENT OF VIRTUE! Dolph is REIFIED PERFIDY! It's a morally black-and-white bit of “fuck the Commies” propaganda.

And yet, here's the thing. The Rocky movies are completely successful at doing what they do. As much as the unintentional (cutting Sly massive amounts of slack) racism bugs me, the first picture in particular and the sequels to diminishing degrees are marvels of cinematic button-pushing. Putting everything else aside, the primary criteria for judging whether a movie is good or bad are first determining what the movie is setting out to do, and second determining how well the movie succeeded in doing that thing. You don't compare Rocky to Citizen Kane. They're different pictures made for different purposes. Rocky set out to make American white people feel good. Rocky made a lot of American white people feel good. Thus, Rocky is a successful movie, and a successful franchise. This is born out in the massive amounts of money each picture made (even the Tommy Morrison one made lots of money). But let's cool it with the cultural masterpiece bullshit. The aesthetic goals of the Rocky series, especially by the time we get to Rocky IV, even though met are extremely modest, and one simply cannot walk in the room with the amount of racial politics swept under the rug. Rocky IV is a crystalline cultural artifact of its time, the preoccupations of that time, and it has a bitchin' montage, but give me a fucking break. And pick 10 things that actually have something to do with the movie next time.

THE DIRECTOR WITH THE HONEY BADGER TATTOO

David Fincher don't give a shit.

I have a long and complicated relationship with David Fincher's cinema. His movies look and sound amazing; his visual style is uniquely his own and he has a very strong understanding of the effectiveness of sound and music. I like that he likes fucking with people, even if that means I have to brace myself before watching one of his pictures, because it's good when artists fuck with people. Comfort is a slippery slope to unconsciousness, a lot of times. And as a fan of cinematic violence, I have to give it up: David Fincher does violence well, and violently. In the fine art of ownage, he has few peers, even fewer living.

In spite of the fact that I like his movies—yes, even Panic Room; it wasn't good but craft'll take a picture a long way when the talent level's this high—a lot of David Fincher's fans irritate me. I should say, a particular (and large) subset of his fans annoy me, namely young men who've seen Se7en and Fight Club 8000 times, refer to him by last name only, and act as if he's the only person who's ever directed a movie in the history of ever. He's not the only one (see the intro to this post for some discussion of some of the others) but it still irritates me when mouthbreathers who don't know shit from shinola start getting all huffy about cinema and acting like “FINCHER” farts rose petals and has never shot a single frame of film that was anything less than perfect. This is not the case. He has the same Achilles' heel as every single other director since the dawn of the medium who doesn't write his own scripts: he's at the mercy of his screenwriter, and by extension, the source material that screenwriter is working from. Which brings us, even though that isn't a problem here (I regret nothing about having misled you by making an irrelevant point), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

The Millenium trilogy, the Men Who Hate Women books (their literal title in Swedish), The Girl With/Who series (their English titles), whatever you want to call the late Stieg Larsson's fiction, are immensely popular. They concern the adventures of the dashingly handsome, politically progressive, staggeringly brilliant journalist Mikael Blomkvist (by whom every woman in the known universe wants to be sexed, and who bears a sneakily suspicious resemblance to one Herr S. Larsson) and the goth/punk/club-kidded out, anarchistically-inclined, off-the-charts genius computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, who is (of course) omnisexual and has the most raging case of Asperger's on record. And wants to fuck Blomkvist, of course.

I'm not a fan. The books, in varying states of completion when Larsson died, lack dramatic focus, are larded with reams of unnecessary detail, and despite endless lists of place names with 2.8 umlauts per syllable, not particularly tied to their setting; you could go in and replace all the proper nouns and voila, they're in Minneapolis instead of Stockholm and nothing of value has been changed whatsoever. Still, in spite of all this, there's the occasional good bit to be found. I wouldn't give a shit to the extent to be this irritated by them if they were totally worthless. Take Salander: she may be a total author fantasy character and have no resemblance to a real human being and her emotionless response to the horrors visited on her is a little creepy and weird if you think about it for too long, but she still fucks shit up like a legend, and while her cultural resonance is largely with people unfamiliar with cyberpunk character archetypes (from which she is drawn whole and intact with no alterations necessary), that resonance has nonetheless been massive. And, for better or worse, she's a character that's virtually crying out (in Swedish-accented English) to David Fincher: “Direct me!”

More than anything else, it's the realization of Salander that made it absolutely necessary for David Fincher to make a movie of this material. There were Swedish film versions of all three books, in which Noomi Rapace made a name for herself (and attracted the attention of Hollywood, in which she now has a burgeoning career, with Sherlock Holmes 2: Bigger and Blacker and next summer's eagerly anticipated Prometheus; she's doin' ok for herself these days, and her excellent performances in the Swedish movies were directly responsible). Problem is, aside from her, the movies weren't any good. They were cold, inert, and way too big, kind of like glaciers. But their level of reverence to the source material made them quite popular with people who already liked the books, since they left nary an umlaut behind in bringing every last page of the books to (relative) cinematic life. And, being that these movies already existed, there was a bit of rhetorical questioning as to why American versions needed to be made, and a bit of harrumphing about Hollywood's habit of backstroking nude through enormous piles of cash. The thing about that is, no shit. Hollywood likes money, and they think “scruples” are what happens when your septum collapses from doing too much cocaine. We already know this. Occasionally, in their quest to make further and larger fuckloads of money, they realize that occasionally smart business decisions and smart artistic decisions have overlap. As they do in the case of hiring David Fincher to direct The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

As a business decision, it's what people in the habit of using phrases like “a slam dunk” call a slam dunk. While I might poke holes in his feature film work, David Fincher is beyond any reasonable measure of debate the best commercial director who ever lived. His ability to create images that are (all at once) lushly gorgeous, shocking, and disturbing is peerless. This has translated to his becoming one of the greatest ever in the slightly longer and very similar form of the music video, and with a directly proportionate diminishing in stature and effectiveness to the length of the form, an interesting and thoroughly singular director of feature motion pictures. Please note that this is a testament to how good he is as a commercial director, rather than a slight on his features, the majority of which are quite good. He has an absolute and manifest understanding of branding, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is very much a brand. More than that, though, it's a brand with no small degree of abyss-gazing with regards to sex, violence, and the overlap between them. David Fincher is no stranger to violence, and while the sex in his pictures has almost exclusively been subtext (aside from the Tyler Durden/Marla Singer couplings in Fight Club) the brand of sex found in Larsson's novels is so often associated directly with violence that that's hardly a stretch for David Fincher, and even less of one for his branding superhero alter ego . . . FINCHER ™.

Where the appropriation of the FINCHER ™ brand makes artistic sense is the fact that FINCHER ™ is not one to take orders. Tell him what to do, he tells you to go fuck yourself. Thus, in order to brand the American movies as an entity separate from the Swedish ones and assert the necessity of their existence, a director with some artistic cachet (i.e. FINCHER ™) is near essential, but the reason why the specific director for the job is FINCHER ™ is his subversive streak. This is a calculated gamble, because while there's always the danger someone could choose to subvert the material in some way that could totally fuck things up, someone with an understanding of branding is less likely to fuck with stuff too much. Or, in other words, the degree of subversion you're going to get is more in toying with subtext and streamlining rather than any kind of radical changes. And that's exactly what I liked about David Fincher's take on The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. (Note: hereafter be spoy-laaaaaaz)

This version eschews the book's digressions and zooms through the establishment of journo-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig)'s situation (hewroteathingaboutarichguywhofuckedhimoverandnowhisreputation'sinruins; that's about as easy to read as it is to follow in the movie) and wastes just as little time setting up Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) as a pierced, tattooed, eyebrow-less hacker dressed in all black who's at the mercy of bureaucrats due to her anti-social streak. Still, with all the streamlining in Steven Zaillian's adaptation, and the immense amount of exposition David Fincher and DP Jeff Cronenweth manage to convey visually, it still takes a while to introduce the main story, where elderly industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) hires Blomkvist to investigate the decades-old mystery of the disappearance (and almost-certain murder) of his niece Harriet. And, by necessity, the large and nasty Vanger family. It takes even longer for Blomkvist to hire Salander as his research assistant, but hey. Sometimes things take a while. (And sometimes they involve a whole massive creepy subplot involving Salander being sexually abused by her bureaucratic overseer that you'd think could be cut with no net loss other than one of the most fucked-up rape scenes ever filmed except, whoops, that sets up the whole plot of the second movie so it needs to be in there; I know it's part of what the book and the series at large is about, but it's still fucking fucked the fuck up.)

Blomkvist, with the help of an off-hand comment made by his daughter, catches on to a Biblical connection with Harriet's disappearance, and with Salander's help, discovers a related series of sex murders of women, though Salander notes Harriet seems to be an aberration within this whole thing. They find out a whole lot more about how the Vangers are fucked up and Nazis and really unpleasant shitheads and stuff, which eventually leads to the inevitable revelation that the big nasties in re: the sex murders have been perpetrated by Vangers. In particular (major major big-ass huge spoiler after pic, proceed no further 'less you already read/saw this) . . .

. . . Stellan Skarsgard. The problem with watching movies is that the second Stellan Skarsgard shows up in an American movie, you know he's up to no good. He's Stellan Skarsgard. Even if you don't remember from the book that Martin is the Vanger with the sex-killing hobby, you see Stellan Skarsgard and you're like “okay, the secret entrance to the sex-killing dungeon is probably behind the wine rack, it wouldn't be behind the bookcase, because that's where they're expecting us to think it is.” Cuz, c'mon y'all, for real: when Stellan Skarsgard shows up in a movie you know what the fuckin deal is.

So Stellan Skarsgard bushwacks Daniel Craig and ties him up in his sex-killing FINCHER ™ dungeon. Where there's a reel-to-reel tape recorder, because awesome. And the best David Fincher-y fuck you to everything ever (THAT I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING LOVED) . . . Stellan Skarsgard throws on Enya when it's time to sex-kill. Oh lordy lordy that's a fuckin brilliant touch. I . . . just . . . wow. Enya. Stellan Skarsgard. David Fincher, I hope when you're 90 and looking back on your life's feats, you start doing that old man laugh with the whole top half of your body and go “Heh heh heh, I had Stellan Skarsgard put on Enya . . . hehehehehe yep, I own.”

Anyway. In an extremely effective bit of cross-cutting, Salander gradually realizes that the sex murders were done by the late Gottfried Vanger and his son Martin, and just in the nick of time manages to save Blomkvist by barging into Martin's sex-killing dungeon and owning him in the face with a golf club, leading to a snazzy car chase, leading to Martin's car exploding without Salander having to do anything (even though she was totally prepared to light Martin up with his own gun, and in fact was juuuust about to when his car blew up).

After all the adrenaline wears off, it occurs to Blomkvist and Salander that they still don't have any evidence that Harriet Vanger was actually killed. In very brisk, blink-and-you'll-miss-the-extrapolations couple of minutes, our heroes figure out that Harriet is not dead, and is in fact living in London under her sister's (or cousin's? I'm not quite sure, but there's a pretty funny joke about Blomkvist not being able to keep all the Vangers straight early on that Daniel Craig plays perfectly, more on which in a bit) identity, a fact that was not exactly tipped in her brief appearance earlier, though the audience was given a heavy wink and nudge that Joely Richardson Knows Something About This Whole Mess that is paid off when the unmasked Harriet (Joely Richardson) knows everything about this whole mess, and reveals to Blomkvist that she faked her death to get away from evil rapist Martin after having earlier owned evil rapist Gottfried upside the head with an oar.

Blomkvist exhales, is exonerated, and then there's an extended denouement where Salander fucks over the guy who ruined Blomkvist's reputation at the beginning and loots his bank accounts to the tune of two billion Euros. She celebrates by buying Blomkvist a leather jacket for Christmas, only to go over to Blomkvist's and see him with his arm around his on-and-off married girlfriend. Having had a fair bit of fun fucking Blomkvist earlier and actually falling for him, Salander is pissed, tosses the jacket, and rides her famous motorcycle out of frame and the ending is gloriously bleak, the sound of FINCHER ™ astrally cackling reverberating over the closing titles.

As someone who, to put it mildly, was deeply impatient with many aspects of the book (and, by extension, the tirelessly faithful Swedish movie) I consider the Zaillian/FINCHER ™ take on the material to be a vast improvement, in that it trims a lot of the fat and makes the narrative not only walk a straight line, but sprint. The cinematography makes even the grimiest, ugliest, shadowiest parts of the movie look like polished jewels, and—definitely for the better—takes the edge off some of the jaw-dropping nastiness depicted. There is an argument that, since things like rape and mutilation (human and animal) exist in life, to shy away from depicting them is cowardice and a willful denial of their existence. Only thing is, in a locked-room mystery hinging crucially on multiple enormous fucking coincidences and a whooooole bunch of people not bothering to check certain things that people frequently check on (not to mention the entire story kind of rests on us simultaneously believing Henrik Wanger to be likeable, intelligent, competent, and yet not aware that despite the fact that he has untold thousands of pages of dirt on his entire family that Gottfried and Martin are multiple rapist/murderers, and Martin's fucking sex-killing Enya dungeon is in his own fucking house which is line of sight from Henrik's) we can't really be playing the reality card. Just, no.

As rifuckingdiculous as the story is, FINCHER ™ et al still tell it exceedingly well. It benefits from two terrific lead performances. Not that Daniel Craig should get a cookie for daring to play a flawed, passive man or anything, but it should be noted: homes is James Bond. And the way Steve Zaillian and David Fincher read Blomkvist, and the way Daniel Craig in turn plays him, is actually a far cry from the Stieg Larsson wish-fulfillment character he comes across as in the book. In this movie, he's the dumb girl character who opens the door in the haunted house with the monster behind it. Literally. He just wanders into Martin “Stellan Skarsgard” Vanger's house all derpy-derpty-doo like nothing could possibly happen to him, and if not for the “guy” (Salander) saving him, his pretty little blond ass would have been lutfisk. Peter Gutierrez wrote a great article about the gender reversals in this picture for Twitch, and he's absolutely right: Daniel Craig is the pretty blond in this picture. There's this very funny scene later that hammers it home when Blomkvist and Salander are fucking and he's saying something about the mystery and Salander makes him shut up while she comes. Craig, as Blomkvist, has this priceless look on his face like, “But . . . I'm the dude . . . right? Why is she . . . why am I . . . huh.” Craig plays it extremely well. He manufactures a number of beautifully real moments (like when he can't keep all the Vangers straight and just little things like stubbing his toe and cursing and stuff; he does all the little things so well that they add up to an enormously successful whole). Blomkvist is just kind of, for lack of a less reductive and potentially-argument-undoingly offensive term, a pussy.

Salander, on the other hand, gets to do all kinds of fun “dude” stuff, like riding motorcycles, tasering motherfuckers, ownage, even having sex with chicks. And the superior focus of this movie's script and direction (not to mention an absolutely fucking jaw-dropping, balls-clanking performance by Rooney Mara; fuck any sense that she's being overhyped, Rooney Mara is the fucking truth) go a long way toward making this point of Salander as superhero. Her badassness in the movie is sufficient that it doesn't even matter that she's an author fantasy character. In fact, the case for this character as an actual badass is made well enough in this movie that I'll concede that that was how she was originally intended. That intent is still undone a bit by the fact that the story has to go and have Salander raped, and simply not react to that rape in any kind of recognizably human way. I know thousands of fans of the books are throwing up their hands like “not this shit again,” but there is no objective defense possible of the whole Rapey McFuckface subplot in this story. Gottfried and Martin Vanger are more than enough to make the “evil that men do” point, without having to gratuitously undercut the (already flimsy) plausibility of Salander's whole character. If you have Rapey McFuckface the bureaucrat abusing someone else and have Salander's whole taser-hogtie-blackmail-tattoo business be in revenge of that act, you lose none of her badassness. You also don't have the absolute, irretrievable loss of any sense of the character of Salander as a human being. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, you need to suspend your disbelief already with Salander, and this disbelief is too heavy to bear that weight.

But I'm someone who used to be famous for assuring people things like “Dude, the first 200 pages of that book suck but the rest of it is awesome” and “The second lead gives one of the worst performances I've ever seen, but you gotta see that movie.” And thus, in spite of the source material being unforgivably lousy, I still very much enjoyed David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The greatest commercial director who ever lived sold me a product I strongly disliked. The male lead redeemed a character I wanted to kick in the balls by retracting those balls and outright playing the character as dithering, passive, and lucky rather than good. The female lead redeemed a character I'd dismissed as a creepy whack-off fantasy, and not even by being something other than that thing, but by being so goddamned good in the role that I'm forced to be like, “All right, you may be playing a creepy whack-off fantasy, Rooney Mara, but you got massive stones and you turned in a really fucking good performance.”

Basically what I'm saying is, David Fincher is as good a director as all his fans who annoy me think he is. The only counterargument I have is that other directors exist. But holy shit. David fucking Fincher sure is talented. If he doesn't come back, producer Scott Rudin may need to bring Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Sidney Lumet, and Alfred Hitchcock back from the dead and make a fuckin chimera out of those motherfuckers (provided the flimsy certainty of them even being the right motherfuckers) because the next book might be a bridge too far. That one's really bad. Guess we'll find out how good a necromancer Rudin (along with whatever writer and director he gets if Steve Z. and FINCHER ™ don't come back) is round about 2014 or so.

Til then . . . merry Christmas! Hahahahaha oh man I kind of feel bad for dropping this one today. But not really.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, ONE AND ALL

2010 years ago (give or take a few months or years), a baby named Yeshua was born. He would grow up to be a very popular reform rabbi. He was really cool (if a bit of a hippie), and said we should be nice to each other, which meant he had to get the ever-living shit killed out of him by the Romans. One thing led to another and now me and my fellow goys trip our balls off (not literally; well, not necessarily literally) every December when Rabbi Yeshua's official (but not real, he was born in July like Harry Potter) birthday comes around. Which is funny, for reasons I'm not prepared to explain.

With Christmas being the massive thing that it is, different types of people react differently to Christmas. In fact, in spite of Christmas tradition being as seemingly a monolithic thing as it is, there are as many ways to get through Christmas as there are people. With that in mind, the crack staff (of one crackhead) here at Movies By Bowes ™ has compiled a helpful list of Christmas movies, tailored to different types of moods. You're quite welcome.

First, a perfunctory nod to tradition:


Traditional 1.0: It's A Wonderful Life
It's certainly not a wonderful movie. It's A Wonderful Life is clunky, oppressively maudlin, not particularly deep, and about four years long. But, until fairly recently, people all insisted that it was awesome and tried like hell to pretend that they enjoyed it, and who knows? Some of them might not have been pretending. But I personally can't stand Frank Capra movies. They're all way too long, all full of gushy sentimentality and fuzzy religious shit, and they give me diabetes. His true calling, during World War II, was making propaganda movies, which were pretty effective, but his “non” propaganda work was just as specifically, manipulatively tailored toward producing specific emotions in the audience. It's a shame, because Frank Capra was a really interesting guy in real life and he genuinely loved what he did . . . I just can't get on board with the cat. It might be my fault, it might be his, it might be nobody's. But I'm not the only person who feels this way, and I'm certainly not the only person who was forced, by some asshole, to sit through It's A Wonderful Life “because it's Christmas.” You know what? I have a calendar. I know what day it is. I want to watch something else. Like . . .


Traditional 2.0: A Christmas Story
This is more like it. I'm very happy that people who run TV stations are apparently now under 90 and not assholes, because if something is going to be on loop all day, it might as well be this picture, with Bob Clark's neo-classical direction, Jean Shepherd's infectiously good-natured Americana narration, and a great cast who all totally mean it. Sure, it seems like it upholds all the materialistic shit about Christmas that's mildly lame in the wrong hands, but these are the right hands, and little Ralphie whipping himself into a frenzy over the BB gun that he wants somehow isn't annoying, which in and of itself is a sign of this movie's four-star, unqualified classic status. The end, where getting the thing isn't as perfect as he thought it was going to be, is handled well, and not cynically, but gently, reassuringly. This picture, if you observe Christmas (which I kind of do by proxy), gets the balance just right: it's something to be enjoyed. The fact that it's also a great movie, and really funny (“Fra-JEE-lay . . . it's Italian!”) is the star on top of the tree.


But what's that, you say? An iconoclast, are you? Looking for non-traditional fare? All right, you communistic heathen son of a bitch (or, in other words, my friend), just this once, you shall be indulged:


“It's Christmas and I want to see shit blow up”: Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Die Hard 2
Hey, look, I feel you. I like watching things explode, too. But if you're going to take your action movie rum in a traditional glass of Christmas egg nog, do so with these three fine motion pictures, all set in Christmas season. As a bonus touch, if you're not feeling terribly Christmas-y, the first two are set in Southern California, one of the least Christmas-y places on the planet. Die Hard 2 has the traditional snow that gives “White Christmas” its name, but it's about the fakest fake snow ever committed to celluloid. Die Hard 2 also has the definitive Fred Dalton Thompson performance: as Trudeau, the southern-accented pillar of strength who runs the air traffic control tower, the former Senator Thompson joined the exalted ranks of actors who were so fucking great in a role that I only ever call them that ever again, alongside such luminaries as Mas (Takakura Ken in Black Rain), Eddie Sakamura (Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa in Rising Sun), O'Reilly (Dean Winters on OZ), and everybody on The Wire except Method Man. Trudeau reassures me. He's a benevolent presence. Kind, but firm. Kinda like a clean-shaven, Southern Santa Claus.


“I want to see shit blow up but I don't want to watch a good movie”: The Long Kiss Goodnight
Anyone else notice that everything Shane Black ever wrote takes place at Christmas? Not complaining or anything, just, you know. Everything Shane Black ever wrote takes place at Christmas. For the explosion aficionado who doesn't have the time to deal with a good movie, The Long Kiss Goodnight fits the bill. Don't get me wrong, I fucking love it, but it is a Renny Harlin picture, it does go full retard once Geena Davis gets her memory back, and the action shit at the end makes comic books look like Ken Loach pictures. Being a Shane Black script, there's plenty of wonderful, quotable dialogue, but not all of it makes a ton of sense, and once the action picks up, the wit disappears. But shit blows up, and for certain Christmas moods, that's very important.


“I'm hung over from too much egg nog and can't handle explosions; what do I do?”: Trading PlacesWell, as long as you're not so hung over that laughing hurts, because Trading Places is one of the funnier movies ever made. It's got Eddie at the peak of his powers, Dan Aykroyd playing a rich twit, the maestro John Landis conducting, a great supporting cast, and a fairly wonderful couple seconds of Jamie Lee Curtis' tits. It's a nice blend of old-fashioned comedic premise and modern-day execution (wait shit, it was 27 years ago? Fuck, where's that fucking egg nog . . .) making a kind of neo-classical form, that because it was 27 years ago already (grrrrrrrrr) establishes it as a classic in its own right. And also, for Christmas, a movie where the good guys win and the bad guys lose is kind of key. We can go back to being cynical on the 26th.


“I have a massive joint. Get it? I'm blazing trees on Christmas! Huh huh huh . . .”: Scrooged
Of all the movie versions of A Christmas Carol, this one tops them all, because it has Bill Murray. To further establish dominance, it was co-written by the legendary Michael O'Donoghue, one of my gods. Michael O'Donoghue is the author of the book How To Write Good, which is where I learned how to write good. In it are such wonderful pieces of advice as, if you're at a loss as to how to end your story, have everyone get run over by a truck (if your story is set in England, remember to have them get run over by a lorry). Also, to teach the art of exposition, O'Donoghue recommends heavy use of the phrases “As you know” and “Of course you remember” (the latter as in a man saying to a woman, while pointing to a child, “Of course you remember our son” as a means of identifying the child).

Scrooged is a giant mess that lurches around from hilarious comedy to genuinely dark to truly scary, but fuck it, not everything has to be all neat and tidy, and Scrooged is awesome, which invalidates all of your petty accusations of uneven tone. If you're not feeling as cynical as you think you are, Scrooged is a great Christmas movie, even if the end can be a bit much (though trying to figure out what Bill Murray is on for the last ten minutes of the movie is some of the deepest thinking a cineaste can do).


“Fuck you”: Bad Santa
Cuz sometimes there ain't nothin like some good old-fashioned nastiness. Dig the high concept: Billy Bob Thornton plays a mall Santa who, in association with a wiseass midget (Tony Cox), pulls heists. Who's on board? Me, that's who. Over the course of the movie, Billy Bob and Tony Cox run afoul of Bernie Mac (man, I miss Bernie Mac) and John Ritter (yeah, I kinda miss him too) and Billy Bob manages to teach a mildly retarded kid how to be a man, while the kid helps Billy Bob become a better man. Without, in the slightest, being remotely sappy or any of that fuckin bullshit.

Bad Santa radiates “fuck you” from the bottom of its cinematic heart. It's not for every Christmas mood; if you're already in a good mood, you should stay away, but if you're a little grumbly or lonely or if that bottle of Jim Beam is telling you “Hey, I ain't gonna drink myself,” pop it in. By weird nihilistic cynical alchemy, it's a real feel-good movie. But only if you were growling at the universe in general and telling it to fuck off first.


There are a few other worthies, I'm sure, but these should get you through most Christmas scenarios imaginable. Unless there are kids around. In which case, you're stuck watching Bambi and Thumper Save Santa Claus or whatever those short, noisy little fuckers are watching nowadays. But really, Christmas is for them, not you anyway. Just so long as you don't make them watch It's A Wonderful Life. They will hate you forever, and if they don't, you should hate them. On that note, Merry Christmas!

DANNY GOT TROLLED

Careful readers of this blog may have detected, here and there, a sense of humor. From other subtle hints I've dropped you may also have surmised that I get a kick of out of fucking with people. Yes, I once mixed a friend a drink called a Fire Island Iced Tea, so called because it would fuck his mind in the ass. (Ed. Note: it did). It is important, if you're going to behave in this way, that you accept the possibility that people will fuck with you right back. And thus, when this Matt Damon/Randy Travis lookin' ass motherfucker lent me Freddy Got Fingered on DVD, I had the sneaking suspicion that I was being trolled. Yes, Mr. Yustin assured me that it was legitimately hilarious, but I've been down this road before (“sure, that second pill won't make you freak out, you'll be fine”) and, remembering the singularly passionate negative critical response the movie got upon its release, I approached watching it with great trepidation.

Turns out, ya know what? It's a pretty funny movie. Tom Green, who co-wrote, directed, and starred, is the kind of comedian one either gets and thinks is hilarious, or does not get and thinks is the Antichrist. His style of humor is he doesn't give a fuck. Observe this classic bit, a collaboration with the similarly divisive Andy Dick:

Bonus Bob Odenkirk: the pause that refreshes. Anyway, Tom Green's popularity itself was considered an act of trolling at his peak. Most critics had no idea what the fuck to make of him and subsequently wrote him off as a talentless hack who just mugged a lot and trashed shit. I freely confess to total confusion myself. I would, if someone asked me, “Are you a Tom Green fan?” say something like “Dear God, no. Heavens! Thinkst thou me hoi polloi?” without really having more than an out-of-context bit here and there or a trailer, and then see him show up in something like Charlie's Angels or Road Trip and be like “Whoa, that guy with the goatee is funny.” This is what happens when you let critical consensus do your thinking for you, kids.

Freddy Got Fingered, in truth, falls between the two polarities of Roger Ebert's “This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels . . . The day may come when Freddy Got Fingered is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny” and A.O. Scott calling it “conceptual performance art”and Nathan Rabin declaring it a “borderline Dadaist provocation.” The truth is, Freddy Got Fingered is a movie by a guy trying to be funny, and whether he succeeds or not depends entirely on the audience's sense of decorum or tolerance for non sequiturs and immaturity. A) Just because something doesn't make any sense doesn't mean it's postmodern or Dada or whatever the fuck and B) far as I'm concerned, a chef should have taste, a comedian doesn't have to. That covers that.

The movie has a number of truly inspired and strange sequences. The opening with Tom Green skateboarding through a shopping mall for no apparent reason had me going “What the fuck? There're actually a couple sweet Steadicam shots. Is this . . . a real movie . . .?” The cinematics, the rest of the movie, aren't quite as flashy, but they're still surprisingly solid considering a laundry list of critics called this one of the worst movies ever made.

As for the cast, Tom Green is Tom Green, doing what he does. There's a point with him where you either have to turn the fuckin movie off or surrender to his insanity, because if you don't find him funny, you're not suddenly going to half an hour in. One thing Tom Green the director does that's very wise is make sure that Tom Green the leading man doesn't overwhelm everything; the supporting cast features any number of really solid performances. Harland Williams is pretty funny getting his ass kicked as Tom Green's buddy, and Julie Hagerty is good in the first thing I've seen her in in about 20 years, as Tom Green's mom (who takes Tom Green's advice that she go out and "have sex with basketball players" to heart and ends up shtupping Shaq, in a funny cameo by himself). Anthony Michael Hall is funny as a Hollywood douchebag (it's always fun for actors to play executives and producers, they get out all kinds of long-simmering resentments). Marisa Coughlan plays the love interest who, of course, is a wheelchair-bound amateur rocket scientist with a fetish for being caned on her paralyzed legs who loves giving head; this, of course, is proof that Marisa Coughlan either has a really solid sense of humor or really needed to pay the fuckin rent.

But above all else, Rip Torn is fucking amazeballs off the fucking reservation in this movie. He plays Tom Green's dad, which explains everything. Rip Torn could kick ass in anything, no matter how bad (and has devoted most of his career to proving this point), and when given some snappy text like in Men in Black or The Larry Sanders Show, he makes being awesome seem utterly effortless. Some examples:

Tom Green: Wow . . . it's a LeBaron!
Rip Torn: You bet your boots it's a LeBaron. Fine car. Convertible.

Rip Torn (about Tom Green): Miserable dead beat punk. Paid for his damn college. Sits around all day wacking off. Proud? My ass.

And of course, the scene when he comes in, shitfaced, and starts casually ripping up Tom Green's drawings. Tom Green nuts up and says “Fuck you.” Rip Torn pulls down his pants and starts waving his ass in Tom Green's face and goes, “Fuck me? Sure, go ahead! Fuck me!” This was some of the funniest shit I've seen in years, and if that means I never get to be grown-up pretentious movie critic like the cool kids, so be it.

What makes Rip Torn's performance so great is that he knows exactly what kind of movie he's in. He knows that, enjoyable though it may be in the right mood, you get what you paid for when you watch a picture called Freddy Got Fingered. We are not in hoity-toity land. We're in a movie where you get fucked up on Wild Turkey and wave your ass in Tom Green's face.

As much I enjoyed the movie, and as unapologetic as I am about so doing, there were large chunks I didn't find particularly funny. The notorious scene where Tom Green swings the newborn baby around the room by the umbilical cord? Not all that funny, though it's not offensive either, amazingly. The two women randomly banging tambourines the whole time make it wonderfully bizarre, like a reflection of something that makes sense in a parallel universe.

The role of animals in the movie is a strange one. Tom Green randomly pulls over to the side of the road to jerk off a horse at one point, because, hey, sometimes you have to randomly pull over to jerk off a horse. Then, following Anthony Michael Hall's advice to “get inside the animals” (Tom Green's initial pitch for his cartoon show lacks character depth), Tom Green finds a dead deer in the road and proceeds to gut it and wear its skin while running around Tom Greening. A bunch of other woodland animals serve as the audience surrogate, looking at Tom Green like “What the . . . fuck . . .?”

Overall, Freddy Got Fingered is kind of like a movie a Martian would make if he came to Earth, went to film school somewhere in upstate Ontario, and fell in with heavy acidheads. It follows the basic linear progression of a “normal” movie, except everything in it is as weird as weird gets. Strangely, though, at the end when Tom Green shows up in a helicopter with a bag of jewels and professes his love to Marisa Coughlan on the roof of her building (over the sound of the helicopter; she has to ask him to repeat himself a lot) and she says to him “I don't care about jewels. I just want to suck your cock” it's both pretty funny and oddly endearing. There's a whole bunch of business earlier about how all she ever wants to do is suck his dick, but Tom Green wants to go out on dates and stuff, so that's as close to “I love you” as you're going to get in a picture like this.

In a weird way, even though I rather enjoyed it, I understand why the critics all had to line up and pan the shit out of Freddy Got Fingered. It's indefensible, which is why I haven't been bothering to defend liking it. Real critics, though, have to defend their opinions; “fuck you, I liked it” works here at Movies By Bowes™ but I imagine the Chicago Sun-Times says “okay, lose the 'fuck' and extrapolate a little, wise guy.” I'm not, by any means, getting up in Roger Ebert's shit for not liking this movie; my mom took me to see Breakin' on his advice, for fuck's sake. Roger Ebert's cool. But his sense of humor, like most people's, has lines past which you ain't getting a laugh. The casual violence and the fact that the title is a reference to Tom Green falsely accusing Rip Torn of molesting Tom Green's brother flipped Rog's fuck no switch. I understand that. The evolution of popular culture has created a separation between an act and the idea of that act that's largely dependent on context. Molestation isn't funny. But Tom Green trying to “win” a therapy session by accusing his dad of molesting his brother is. Or, more to the point, it is when Tom Green throws a marble bust out the window for no reason and then jumps out after it.

I do not, the title of this post notwithstanding, feel like I actually got trolled (just as Freddy never actually got fingered). But do I ever want to see Freddy Got Fingered again? Probably not. Unless, of course, the time is right to mix someone else a Fire Island Ice Tea, itself probably the perfect mixological equivalent to this movie: a deeply irresponsible, mind-altering, and entertaining good time that actual mixologists (or cineastes) would find utterly appalling. But, ya know, sometimes you gotta pull over to jerk off a horse. And there's really no resisting inevitability.

REQUISITE "REAL OR FAKE?" THEORY RE: I'M STILL HERE

Short version: I don't give a fuck.

Long version: I really don't give a fuck.

MORE FUN WITH ARMOND WHITE

Our Beloved Armond is at it again, this time declaring that no one under 30 should be a film critic (Ya missed me, bitch! 1978 FTMFW!) and that current national treasure Roger Ebert is responsible for the death of film criticism for liking too many movies. Oh, Armond, you crotchety old scalawag, you give such good soundbites . . .

I don't want to repeat myself by bitching about Armond too much---and most of what I have to say about him is said for me in that /Film piece---but boy is he using the wrong dictionary if he thinks "criticism" automatically means being negative in the vast majority of one's critiques. Criticism is analysis, not declaring the entirety of cinema not made by either Jason Statham, Michael Bay, or Steven Spielberg to be worthless. I mean, hell, I'm with Armond on Statham and Spielberg, but no one who liked Transformers 2 more than Inception should be drawing a paycheck for his thoughts on cinema, unless he's on drugs (which I'm fine with) or a troll (which I'm even finer with), except Armond is sober and sincere, which is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious.

Anyway. Keep it coming, Armond, baby. The world is a darker place without you.

(EDIT: Bonus Armond! Courtesy, as is the first link, of devoted Armond chronicler Ken Simon).

FUN WITH CURMUDGEONRY

(Ed. Note: Today's grouchiness brought to you by the NYPD, who kicked in the front door of the author's building this morning!)

The passing of Ronnie James Dio led to a bit of cogitation. I've never really liked metal—the closest I get is Zeppelin (who weren't really metal) or Guns 'n' Roses (who weren't either)—but it's always seemed like everyone else in the world does. This is why I'm reluctant to say “metal sucks” even though I think and feel it all the time.

Metal is not the only thing I don't get (by any means). Horror movies, wrestling, salad dressing, the nobility of the underdog . . . the world is full of things that make me scratch my head, which subsequently causes other people to scratch their heads at me (“Why the fuck don't you put dressing on your salad? Why the fuck do you root for the Yankees? What the fuck do you mean you think of Roddy Piper as the guy from They Live? Are you fucking kidding me, you never saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre until you were 31?”)

This prologue should cushion the shock that will result from the admission that there are a few movies out there that everyone loves that I not only don't get but occasionally kind of despise. If you're a fan of any of the following, I ask only this: do not leave comments asking me to watch any of these fucking movies again.

Every movie Christopher Guest has made since The Princess Bride

One of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my life, outstripping even my failure to realize that hot Filipina chick in high school wanted me to ask her out, was watching Waiting For Guffman. Holy fucking shit that movie is mean-spirited, unfunny, and truly ugly in its judgment of ordinary, guileless dreamers. Someone once argued that my take on Waiting For Guffman was flawed because Christopher Guest's character comes off like a dipshit too, but he's being judged just as unfairly, with just as much unearned superiority, as any of the suburbanites. These poor fuckers are guilty only of wanting to put on a play. Oh, you mean they're not brilliant actors? SCANDAL! (The My Dinner With Andre lunchbox, an admittedly genius touch, cannot save this monstrosity.)

Ever since, Christopher Guest and his repertory company have been remaking the same movie: a mockumentary—with emphasis on the “mock”—about some subgenre of people Guest finds ridiculous, be it dog show owners, folk singers, Oscar aspirants. None of them are funny. They've gotten a little less mean-spirited over time (not difficult to do, Guffman was fucking hateful) but no funnier. How the hell was this guy responsible for Spinal Tap?

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) dir. Frank Darabont

This one I don't hate. I just don't love it. I have a theory that people who've never seen any prison movies see Shawshank and go “wow, that was fucking great, I've never seen anything like that before!” and that this is responsible for its bizarre reputation as one of the best American movies of the 1990s. Morgan Freeman is great in this because he's Morgan Freeman, but there's nothing at all to his character except the archetype of the wizened old lifer. Tim Robbins has his moments in this, but his character is so inscrutably aloof that it's hard to see why anyone gives a shit about him.

Bob Gunton is awesome as the warden, but the thing about having seen a lot of prison movies is that you come to realize after a while that the warden is always awesome in a prison movie (no further proof needed than Joan Allen being so terrific in the Death Race remake; when you can put the words “terrific” and “Death Race remake” in the same sentence, larger metaphysical forces are at work), if it's any good at all. The warden is a big scenery-chewing part, because he's always the bad guy. This is not to slight Bob Gunton. Bob Gunton fucking rules, and he fucking rules very very hard. But I still like him better in Demolition Man and on Greg The Bunny and 24.

The Shawshank Redemption is a well-executed by-the-numbers prison movie, but when it wasn't even one of the five best movies (and barely even one of the ten best) of 1994, let's ease up a bit on the all-time classic foolishness.

Moulin Rouge! (2001) dir. Baz Luhrmann

I have a theory about how Baz Luhrmann came to exist: it involves eugenics, the Necronomicon, and an attempt to plant Andrew Lloyd Webber's brain in Michael Bay's body gone horribly awry. As to why he exists, I couldn't tell you. He's yet to make a watchable movie, and the way he carried on in the press is insufferable at best.

Moulin Rouge! doesn't really belong on this list, since a lot of people don't like it. But the fact that anyone does is an outrage, especially any of those people have ever claimed to actually like movies or music.

Casino (1995) dir. Martin Scorsese

This one hurts. I love Mr. Scorsese. His best pictures are some of the most exciting, deliriously alive works in the history of cinema. But when he fucks up, he fucks up big. Casino might be his biggest fuckup, even more so than the endlessly frustrating Gangs of New York or the wrist-slasher that was New York, New York. Let me count the ways:

(1) A three-hour running time infers a story that takes three hours to tell. Casino is basically a three-character chamber drama about Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone. That warrants literally half the running time.
(2) The amount of rote repetition of not only been-there-done-that move Vegas cliches but also whole scenes concerning the dissolution of De Niro and Sharon Stone's relationship is staggering. A good hour could have been trimmed off the picture just by losing the third through twelfth times Sharon Stone threatens to leave De Niro.
(3) NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS FOR THE ENTIRE FUCKING MOVIE.
(4) Everybody in the movie seems to have been given about a pound of coke and the acting note “Go as over-the-top as you can.” This is disastrous in a movie with James Woods in it.
(5) When we're shown that Robert De Niro's car blowing up didn't actually kill him, it's a horrible disappointment. If it's not Cape Fear or Bang The Drum Slowly, you should not be rooting for Robert De Niro to die. Something has gone very wrong if you are.

Fortunately, De Niro was in a good three-hour crime movie that came out in 1995. And Scorsese has since redeemed himself. But I swear, I never want to hear one more fucking person claim that Casino is one of Scorsese's best movies.

John Hughes' Shermer, IL cycle

I'll be kind, in light of Mr. Hughes' premature passing last year. He did write the
script to one of my favorite comedies, National Lampoon's Vacation. I liked Uncle Buck. I liked the first Home Alone. But I have major moral issues with his teen angst pictures. These issues often don't hold up to arguments with John Hughes fans, so I won't embarrass myself again by cataloging them. But even if I'm a lousy rhetorician sometimes, I still cannot endorse picking Andrew McCarthy over Jon Cryer, Anthony Michael Hall getting stuck writing the essay while everyone else goes off to make out, or Alan Ruck destroying his father's car instead of just going to his room, fapping to Mia Sara, and taking a nap. (Though if #4 on this list was actually the case, I would do a 180 and wholeheartedly support Ferris Bueller as one of the best movies ever made).

Eraserhead (1978) dir. David Lynch

And last, but not least, the one that's probably going to piss more of you off than any of the previous ones put together. Yes, that's right, Eraserhead can eat a dick. Granted, David Lynch comes from such a different place than me aesthetically, philosophically, and intellectually that we might as well be two different species, so of course I'm not going to get him 100%, but I like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr. However, I could not find any way to get into Eraserhead. I don't know why it's not a short. I have no idea why it (and not, say, Dark Star) is the ur-Cult Movie. I suppose I never will. Hell, when I saw Eraserhead the first time and was so stoned that I slept through about an hour of it, when I woke up, a devoted fan of the movie told me I didn't miss anything. I rest my case.

Happy Monday folks! Leave hate mail and/or your own things you hate that everyone
else loves in the comments!

I SENSE A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE

Starting at roughly the age of 15, I began to have friends. This—some might say Jurassic—period in my development as a social animal did not go terribly well. These friends treated me badly and took advantage of me etc etc sob story sob story emo memoir bullshit, but when I got to college I tasted the novelty of having friends I actually liked who actually liked me, who I had shit in common with besides the homo sapiens ID card. This led to my present day situation, where I have an ever-widening circle of friends I love deeply and whose presence in my life I cherish with a ferocity that would alarm most of them if my natural emotional intensity wasn't part of what they like about me.

But, as George Harrison informed us with a vehemence that required three fucking records to make the point, all things must pass. This period of having friends, yeah, I had a good run, but it's time to dynamite a very large percentage, maybe all, of those friendships. Oh well. Here goes.

Star Wars sucks.

I have a lot of (extremely) subjective reasons for feeling this way. Not all of them have to do with the movies themselves, but with the paradigm shift in the history of cinema they caused, which isn't really fair to the movies themselves, but if the fucking names of everything weren't so goddamn retarded (Tattooine? Grand Moff Tarkin? Jar Jar Binks? Count Dooku?), if Mark Hamill wasn't the shittiest fucking actor ever going back to fucking Aristophanes, if any of the six movies had been less than 10 minutes overlong . . . sigh . . .

All right, let me get off on a slightly different foot. Part of this weirdly angry reaction to Star Wars has to do with the fact that everyone else fucking loves it, and things that everyone else seems to get but that confuse me are a source of frustration. So, as level-headed as I can be without ranting about George Lucas' goo goo ga ga nomenclature, the catastrophically bad acting, and clunky pacing, here are my problems with the Star Wars sextet:

---I never organically gave a fuck about Luke Skywalker. I felt like I was being told to care about him. And I always thought he was a whiny dipshit, until Mark Hamill walked into frame in Jedi looking like he just snorted Ecuador and had somehow aged 20 years since Empire, at which point I almost started liking him until he started talking.

---Even though everyone always calls Star Wars science fiction, it doesn't feel like SF to me. SF, to me, has always been about world building to the end of crafting an analogy for a philosophical concept, sociological state of being, or historical observation. Or, more accurately, that's what I like about SF. I'm not saying Star Wars isn't SF, but I feel like it taking place in space is more about production design than it is about the story. Star Wars feels, to me, like a sword-and-sorcery thing like Lord of the Rings, or the whole Joseph Campbell hero's journey thing that everyone faps to, but with spaceships and laser guns and shit because, hey, that hadn't been done before. (And that is something I do need to give Star Wars credit for: as time-honored as its narrative and basic philosophy are, the setting really is novel).

---George Lucas can't fucking direct. THX is good when you're stoned, but American Graffiti is one of the shittiest-paced movies I've ever seen, ridiculously overlong, with one of the laziest fucking soundtracks ever (and don't give me that “it was the first needle-drop soundtrack” bullshit either: Marty Scorsese was doing Mean Streets at the same time, and somehow managed to actually have a good soundtrack). Old people tell me “oh, you had to have been there” but guess what? I'll talk loud so your hearing aid'll pick it up: cinema is supposed to transport you to another place! If it was a good movie, people who weren't there would give a shit. I wasn't in a POW camp in WWII, but Stalag 17 still rules. It can be done, George. I mean, I'm happy that Charles Martin Smith and Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford all got careers, but Jesus Christ, man.

Okay, so the four-sixths of the Star Wars series that George Lucas directed? The fact that was the shittiest four-sixths is not a coincidence. Stilted compositions, indifference to the performances, pacing that goes beyond inert to fucking dead. Seriously, how many goddamn climaxes did the first one have? And each one stopped the narrative dead. And seriously, you couldn't have found someone better looking with more talent than Mark Hamill? He is, after all, the fucking main character, George. Goddammit, I need to shut up before George Lucas has me killed. Fortunately he has better things to do than read this blog.

---The fact that The Empire Strikes Back actually is awesome and an all-time classic just pisses me off more. Cuz, ya know, the rest of the sextet could have been this good too, with actual writers doing the writing, actual directors doing the directing, and George Lucas' role limited to walking around making sure everyone knows how to pronounce the stupid names of the planets. I mean, look, it's his baby, I get it, he should be in charge, but I think the ultimate failure of the series to elicit any other reactions than rage or frustration for me is due to George Lucas' inability to delegate or collaborate. Not everyone is an auteur.

---Okay, Darth Vader. You win, he's fucking badass. And his arc over the first trilogy is great: even his ultimate redemption, paying with his life for his drift to the Dark Side, sure, that rules. No argument here. I could listen to James Earl Jones recap Sex and the City episodes, and I'd be happy. So when George is like, “ok, the prequel trilogy is going to be all about Darth Vader became Darth Vader” I was actually kind of excited. The fact that young Obi-Wan was going to be around, sure, he was great, even if most of why he was great was because he was Alec Guinness, but sure, Ewan McGregor, why not.

Let's pause for a second: someone who never liked Star Wars was willing to grant that this concept had potential. We all good? All right . . . then why in the sweet name of fuck was that prequel trilogy so motherfucking boring? God DAMN it, man, the only fucking cool thing that happened in like eight hours of prequel was the fucking light saber fight between Yoda and Christopher Lee. Samuel L. Jackson wasn't even cool. Instead we had Liam Neeson mumbling about something called midochlorians (George, we were okay with the Force being magic. That was what we liked about it, shithead) and Ewan McGregor not showing his cock (Ewan McGregor shows his cock. That's what he does) and a bunch of minstrel show aliens and the mysterious, inscrutable Boba Fett—easily one of the coolest things about the first movies—being given this plodding, retarded backstory. Natalie Portman risked her life wearing that neck-breaking headgear for nothing.

And ya know. We haven't even gotten to proto-Vader yet. Because we have to save the best for last. So we already covered how he was kinda like the whole fucking point to the fucking prequels. That being understood, anybody out there mind explaining to me why the fuck you cast a 10 yr old retard and an anorexic emo fuckbucket who can barely speak English (despite being from Canada where they speak it better than we do) as THE CENTRAL FUCKING CHARACTER? Man, George Lucas' casting Achilles heel is Colossus of Rhodes-sized. For all the props he deserves for getting someone who rules as hard as Harrison Ford to play Han Solo (and Han Solo, I concede, is as cool as everyone else thinks he is, to the point where I wish the first three movies had been about him, even though that could never happened because this is the story of a man named Skywalker) George really needs to be taken to task for fucking up nearly every other role where he didn't just throw a paycheck at someone like Alec Guinness.

---Finally, Ewoks. I can think of a couple good uses for Ewoks: firewood being one, dwarf tossing being another, because if you put a shitload of velcro on the wall the furry little fuckers would stick nicely. But yeah, that's about it. Jedi started off fucking great—the whole action stuff leading up to Jabba being killed was awesome—and then crash-landed in Ewokia. The only cool thing that happened in the movie after they landed on that shithole planet was the race through the woods. Any bunch of furry aliens dumb enough to worship C3PO as a god deserve to be nuked by the new Death Star.

Now, I realize the tone of a lot of the above is a little vituperative and unfair. If I really was trolling—and, in full disclosure, I love trolling Star Wars fans—I wouldn't feel the need to equivocate a little bit here. Saying Star Wars sucks is hyperbole. None of the movies is utterly without merit. With the exception of Episode II, I can legitimately say that I enjoyed a significant enough percentage of each that the frustrations I've vented are more due to me wanting them to be better. I see the joy Star Wars fans get from Star Wars and I want to feel it too.

So, in the interests of fairness, here's a (by my standards) concise look at each entry in the sextet and exactly what it is that pisses me off about each, as well as what I like.


Star Wars (1977)

(Ed. Note: go fuck yourself, George, I'm not calling it Episode IV: A New Hope. I hope you like my movie Episode Cock: A New Blowjob, because it's your turn in the barrel, motherfucker)

What Pisses Me Off About It:

(1) It's too fucking long. The fact that this movie is a second over an hour forty-five is stupid.
(2) It literally has about three different climaxes—the trash compactor thing, the death of Obi-Wan, the interminable, repetitive Death Star finale—and the first two stop the movie dead.
(3) No reason to give a shit about Luke. Fuck Mark Hamill in the ear with a lightsaber.
(4) I get that the Triumph of the Will business in the last scene is a joke, but it's not funny, and the fact that morality is so binary in this goddamn movie gives you no latitude to make your good guys look like Nazis.
(5) George clearly hadn't decided that Luke and Leia were brother and sister yet, which makes Luke's crush on her kind of icky.

What I Like About It:

(1) Han Solo fucking owning that little dipshit whatshisname in the bar. The reissue, with Han reacting instead of just whipping out his cock and shooting a laser from it, pisses me off just as much as the most devoted fan.
(2) Qui Nguyen used “going to Tosche station to pick up some power convertors” as a euphemism for masturbation once, which redeemed one of Mark Hamill's whiniest moments for me and gave me something new to giggle about. Thanks, sir.
(3) Alec Guinness rules
(4) James Earl Vader ibid
(5) The jump to hyperspace was shit-hot. Actually, most of the FX were pretty dope (George Lucas was smart enough to basically hire Stanley Kubrick's guys from 2001) and hold up well to this day.


The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

What Pisses Me Off About It:

(1) It ends.
(2) That's basically about it, except for being a little long.

What I Like About It:

(1) The part between the opening and closing credits.
(2) Yoda. Two feet tall, wrinkly, fucked up syntax, can make shit levitate: totally the kind of cat you'd want to smoke some space weed with.
(3) Lando Calrissian is the first actually morally ambiguous character we meet in the Star Wars universe. Han's just cranky and self-centered, Lando actually aligns himself with the bad guys. AND YET . . . he turns out okay! Come on, how can you not love Billy Dee Williams.
(4) The legendary revelation that Vader is Luke's father manages to come completely out of fucking nowhere AND still make total sense.
(5) The action scenes are all so goddamn good. (checks director credit) Oh, that's why!


Return of the Jedi (1983)

What Pisses Me Off About It:

(1) Fuck an Ewok.
(2) The Emperor sucks Wookie taint. Why the sweet fuck would someone as powerful and vital as Vader take orders from this fucking choad?
(3) The ending is ricockulous. And that music sucks. How come the alien jazz band in a shithole bar in the first movie is so good but the fucking Ewoks can't even book a good band to celebrate the salvation of the fucking universe?

What I Like About It:

(1) The first twenty or so minutes are awesome.
(2) Carrie Fisher does alien bondage well. Too bad she had to do all that blow to fit into the costume.
(3) Yeah, everybody has cocaine coming out of their fucking pores in this movie. The Jedi drinking game should be, every time Mark Hamill looks like it took more than three grams to get him out of his trailer, you have to drink. But make sure you have a lot of booze before playing that game.
(4) The ultimate redemption of Vader, even if it took him fucking long enough to finally dump the Emperor down an abyssal.


Episode I (1999)

What Pisses Me Off About It:

(1) The fucking kid.
(2) The Force being scientifically explainable. IT WAS A FUCKING METAPHOR, GEORGE! IT WAS A FUCKING METAPHOR! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!
(3) “Well gee, massa Obi-Wan, let me flop my tentacles in yo' way! Even though you gotta universe to save, let me git in yo' way constantly! No, I'm not a racist stereotype. Nooooo. Who could think that?”
(4) Natalie Portman confuses me, and her bits with the fucking kid are creepy.
(5) $100 million budget, and we couldn't find something to counteract Liam Neeson's Valium?

What I Like About It:

(1) Darth Maul was fun. Killing him off was fucking stupid.
(2) Ewan McGregor proving he can act without having his penis out. Which is not to say his more penile work isn't more fun . . .
(3) Not half-bad CG effects.


Episode II (2002)

What Pisses Me Off About It:

(1) Everything except the lightsaber duel between Yoda and Christopher Lee

What I Like About It:

(1) Nothing except the lightsaber duel between Yoda and Christopher Lee.


Episode III (2005)

What Pisses Me Off About It:

(1) Hayden Christensen conveying his great moral dilemma about going over to the Dark Side by holding a shit for the length of principal photography
(2) The frantic dash by George Lucas to bring the prequel narrative to a close after spending five hours fucking around in the first two movies, the second of which being a two-and-a-half hour reenactment of ONE FUCKING LINE Mark Hamill has in the first movie (the one from 1977, not Episode I).
(3) Although this is a problem for the entire prequel trilogy, this one makes intimate, encyclopedic knowledge of the entire series an absolute prerequisite for understanding anything. Granted, this is my own problem for not being intimately, encyclopedically knowledgeable of the entire series, but note this section is called “what pisses me off about it” not “flaws.”

What I Like About It:

(1) The dark tone. There are real stakes in that duel between Annakin Fuckface and Ewan McGregor at the end, even though you know they both live.
(2) Seems like it's an hour shorter than the second one even though it's almost exactly the same length.
(3) Finally, Natalie Portman has a reason to exist! Welcome aboard.
(4) Once it ends . . . no more Star Wars! Just kidding. It actually ties in to the beginning of the first trilogy pretty neatly, once George Lucas sweated blood to get it there.


Despite how it might sound, I don't hate Star Wars so much as I don't get it. Really, my main problem with the movies has nothing to do with the movies themselves. The Hollywood studio system used Star Wars as a Trojan horse to get inside the gates and reconquer the movies for its own nefarious, commercial-minded purposes, which is kind of ironic, considering that George Lucas had near-total creative control on the first one and absolute control over the next five, which he produced independently and maintained control over at the very least 75 points on each.

George Lucas, in that sense, is the embodiment of the 70s dream, the Hollywood New Wave ideal, the director as god. But his freedom came at the expense of everyone else's. The only director since who's enjoyed as much control over his own pictures is James Cameron, and that's only because he made so goddamn much money that the only way to stop him would be at gunpoint.

Yet, that same freedom the Star Wars box office receipts granted George Lucas also crystallized, forever, his fate as The Star Wars Guy. No matter how good anything else he ever directs is—a dubious proposition considering how uneven THX and how fucking bad American Graffiti is—and no matter how different, audiences will forever associate him inexorably with Star Wars. I mean, yeah, the billion dollars he made off Star Wars makes it a minimum security golf prison in Malibu, but Star Wars is still a prison. And that's really too bad.

Sorry about all the mean shit I said about you, George. Think you can you spot me a $20 to next week?