Last night I watched what will probably be the last episode of The Newsroom that I ever watch, unless some rather extreme circumstances arise. I was considering ranting about why, except this piece by Awards Daily's Sasha Stone both perfectly sums it up, and is from the perspective of someone with a more legit gripe.
On Saturday, Roger Ebert tweeted “Removing the word 'fanboy' from my vocabulary.” I know the feeling: last year I made this argument to retire the phrase 'chick flick' from the vernacular, and I've made a conscious effort to stop using words like “retard” and “fag” ironically, the former because if I can't find a better word than “retard” I'm, well, a retard (Ed. Note: this one's a work in progress, clearly), and the latter because even though I'd probably put out for Michael Fassbender or Hrithik Roshan, there's a difference between having a shortlist and being family. But this raises the question, with regards to the word “fanboy”: is it really on that same level? Actually, yes.
It's no n-word. That's still the big boy on the epithet block. The silver medalist is the c-word, which is only acceptable under extremely rare, extremely intimate conditions (or in the UK or Ireland). Then, to paraphrase Brad Pitt (speaking of the above-mentioned shortlist) in Moneyball, there's fifty layers of crap, and then there's the field, your retards and fags and, per the focus of this discussion, your fanboys. “Fanboy” is actually a matched pair with “hipster,” in that the hateful fuckface in question is always some other hateful fuckface, it's never you. But, where cracking on someone for being a hipster is essentially saying “That person is thin, dresses fashionably, lives on the first couple Brooklyn stops on the L train, and listens to music I very well may claim I always liked in five years,” because even though there's a lot to be annoyed by with that vague genus of urbanite, there is a sliver of class envy there. Sometimes.
The “fanboy,” though, everyone pictures roughly as being like this guy:
The Simpsons has been fucking with that guy—not specifically him; “that guy” in the cosmic sense—for decades. And it's not like “that guy” is always just benignly bitching about Bioware's avarice or confronting William Shatner about the fact that he was holding his phaser wrong on some episode or other of TOS. Sometimes shit gets ugly. The week or so leading up to the release of The Avengers when the reviews started coming out, there were a couple nasty incidents of guys telling female critics who committed the unpardonable sin of not fawning over the picture to “stick to rom-coms, bitch” and accusing them of having to check with their boyfriends because girls clearly know nothing about comics, don'tcha know.
Almost as bad was the return volley of sneering about “fanboys” after all that shit. Heaven forfuckingfend we get deep on the origins of this kind of stupid misogynistic bullshit. The problem was not “fanboys” taking comics too seriously, or even the way Samuel L. Jackson impulsively tossed a lit match onto the gassed-up mob mentality of Avengers movie fans (n.b., before anyone other than critics had actually seen it), siccing them on A.O. Scott for his lukewarm review in the New York Times. Fandom, much like the Chinaman (why not just get all the offensive nomenclature into this post, amirite) in The Big Lebowski, is not the issue here.
The problem with the condescension and hostility toward women critics is with a warped variety of hetero male privilege, and an inability to assume responsibility for personal inadequacies. It goes like this: sometime after the onset of puberty, boy meets girl, boy wants to make sex with girl, girl does not reciprocate but due to there being other things in the world besides coitus maintains polite interaction with boy, boy interprets girl's politeness as an indication that she wants to sex his penis, girl meets other boy to whom she actually is sexually attracted and becomes boyfriend-girlfriend with him, first boy interprets this as meaning that girl has been manipulating him and that second boy is ipso facto a douchebag for making sex to first boy's beloved, with said sexmaking being entirely assumed by first boy. The end result is an abiding belief that any time a girl does not make sex with one, the girl has “friend-zoned” one, and that all girls like douchebags, and that nice guys (because one always perceives oneself as being a nice guy) are prey for manipulative, scheming villainesses who will weaponize nice guys' niceness against them. One awesome side effect of this avalanche of paranoia is a bitterness toward women that makes it impossible for the guy in question to get laid. This feedback loop has other byproducts, such as regarding women as the enemy and ascribing all kinds of weird, occasionally baseless characteristics to them a la the commies in the Cold War. Meanwhile women—with their own massive array of shit to worry about—are sitting there going “what the fuck did I do?”
But, the next chapter in this story is not “Frustrated by sexlessness, boys turn to all-male fandoms and become that supervillain . . . THE FANBOY!” Fandom has nothing to do with gender or how often one gets laid, it has to do with consuming, uncritical enthusiasm. One will note, the term “fangirl” is usually self-applied, by girls who are fans of things, i.e. “I'm a huge Buffy fangirl,” and there isn't the pejorative, always-the-other-never-me taint of “fanboy.” That's because the shit that pisses people off about so-called “fanboys” has nothing to do with fandom, and everything to do with a lot of bullshit repressed dysfunction, and denial of privilege and agency. Fandom is fandom, though, and doesn't have to do with penises and vaginas (unless you're in a really fun fandom), it has to do with the heart. Y'know, in the gooshy sappy emotional sense.
Fandom and criticism exist on a polarity, since fandom is an a priori, uncritical state of being, and criticism is concerned with rationalism, observation, and leaving one's own tastes at the door. This is why people like Roger Ebert occasionally toss around the term “fanboy” derisively, because to a critic, someone who reacts as a fan actually is the other. Until now, though, as—while I obviously don't know what his actual motivation was for deciding to purge his vocabulary of the word “fanboy,” I'll take the risk of guessing—it would appear Ebert realized that “fanboy” is a reductive term at best and, to my eyes per the above, not even really a thing.
I'll take it a step farther and say that fans and critics could do well to consider the other, or at least not dismiss the other out of hand. There's something to be said both for an emotional, visceral, experiential approach to the arts, and for understanding what in the given work of art creates that reaction. And, at the very least, we all need to remember that the world is not an extension of the self. So fare thee well, fanboy. And for fuck's sake get laid.
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.
The above is an ad that's been running on TV a bit of late, and has—probably intentionally—provoked a bit of controversy. You may have noticed that I don't talk a whole lot about advertising here, even though it's an occasionally interesting form of cinema, mainly because there's baggage (politics, memetics, aesthetic morality, all kinds of complicated shit). This one, though, requires response, because otherwise I'm going to dent a wall slamming it with my fucking head.
I'm a guy. I like beer. I like sports. I like movies where lots of shit blows up. I'm what you might call, if you felt so fancy, a bit gender normative in all these regards. None of these pleasures induce the slightest bit of guilt. Guilty pleasures are for people who need to loosen the fuck up. By that same token, I'm not one of those morality police-ass motherfuckers always running around telling people, “WAAAAA YOU CAN'T SAY THINK DO OR FEEL THAT BECAUSE OH MY GOD YOU NEED TO BE SENSITIVE WAAAAA” because those people are fucking assholes. When I was a little kid in Park Slope, I went to this mildly schmancy summer arts day camp, which was enlightening and kept me out of trouble when school was out. Being the Slope in the late 80s, it meant there were a whole lot of upper-middle-class junior progressives there, but most of them were okay. The camp people would hook us up with popsicles at the end of the day because it was the summer, and this one day one of the other scruffball troublemaker types I hung around with tossed his popsicle wrapper on the ground. A dick move, and a sign of poor breeding, to be sure, but nothing I was about to break his balls about. This other kid, though, swoops in and in his high-pitched little kid sanctimonious voice squeak-bellows, “YOU LITTERED! THAT'S WRONG! YOU HAVE TO PICK THAT UP AND NEVER DO THAT AGAIN! YOU LITTERED!” I mean, come on. There's politically correct and there's being the little fuck who gets all the extra credit questions right, and this kid was the kind the latter roll their eyes at and call dipshit. Scolding people for bullshit just deepens their resolve to do that kind of shit again.
Then again, right is right and wrong is wrong. Back to that ad for a second. The people who made that ad are operating under all kinds of upfucked assumptions. Let's unpack and dissect:
1—Only dudes like action movies. This right here's about as bullshit as bullshit gets. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I grew up with a dad who didn't really like typical dad stuff. He was indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, sports and the only way you could get him to sit through a violent movie is if it was SF. Thus, my entire responsibility for my early education in both sports and violent movies fell to my mom, who was more than capable of taking care of this, but still, it was all up to her. And it's not like she took this responsibility on because she was on some martyrdom trip, like “in the absence of a traditional male role model, I shall nobly resist and suppress my feminine nature in aid of what must be done for my child.” Fuck that shit, she wanted someone to watch Knicks games and car chase movies with. And as awesome and unconventional as she is, she's not the only woman in the world with these tastes by any means. I get most of my fantasy hockey advice (and not bad at all, either) from a woman friend, and I'm in two different fantasy football leagues with another woman friend, among many other examples. Action movies? Fuckin' forget it, it'd be easier for me to count the number of women I know who don't like violence than the ones that do. Don't even come at me with bullshit about small sample sizes and so forth. Even if you somehow managed to collect stats for the whole movie-watching world and came up with something like less than half women like violent movies, or even if you found out only a third did, you can take that “only dudes like action movies” hooey and jam it in your ass.
2—There is anything manly about drinking diet soda. There are two reasons to drink soda: sugar and caffeine. It is a terrible vehicle for either of these things. If you still need your caffeine fix and for dietary reasons you need to lay off the sugar or something, nut up and drink some fucking black coffee. Putting sugar in your coffee is weakness, and putting milk in it is racist. If you're in a tea-drinking country, tea's fine, just put like twelve bags in the kettle and get ready for fucking liftoff. Relying on soda for caffeine is like jerking off with the crook of your elbow.
3—This “no women allowed” thing. Now, this'd be a whole 'nother deal if Dr. Pepper was like, “you know what? With the number of states passing marriage equality votes, and with the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell finally allowing members of the military to come out, let's reach out and market our new diet soft drink to gay men.” Which would be just as dumb, because then you'd be shafting the lesbians, and their whole trip is that that's not their trip. There's no way this “no women allowed” shit isn't sexist. At all. There are nights you hang out with your dudes, or your chicks, and it's just dudes or just chicks, and that is what it is, but if you're some dude hanging with your dudes and you're saying (or, shit, thinking) “Fuck yeah, bro, I'm fuckin glad as fuck there aren't any fucking chicks around bro, fuck that shit, bros before hoes, bro, fuck yeah!” you need to broaden your horizons. You may even find a female friend who finds your double entendres about broadening your horizons by hanging out with broads funny. (Ed. Note: I'm living proof!)
Ad people are probably looking at all the people tweeting and blogging about how fucking stupid this is and going “Well, the spot did its job, people are talking.” Here's the problem with that assumption: all the people talking about this are pissed. They're not going to suddenly want to have makeup sex with this dumb diet soda. And, on the off chance, some dumbfuck bro types are sitting around going “Fuck yeah, bro,” those dummies aren't about to go drink this piss. They're barely going to remember what the fucking ad was for thirty seconds later. The net result is, you pissed a bunch of people off for nothing. All because you couldn't be fucking bothered to think about what human beings are like beyond a stereotypical level.
Rather than end on an angry note, let me raise a glass to all the women out there who like action movies. Let me raise another glass to the men who aren't so stunned by that affinity that they treat those women like unicorns, and instead do the sensible thing and kick it about action movies with them. Let's raise a glass to treating people like human fucking beings. And rest assured, what is in the glass I raise will not be Dr. Pepper.
Ah, Steven Soderbergh. You do genre pictures so gloriously well. And, let's not forget, he has a history with getting good performances out of non-professional actresses in lead roles. There was Debbie Doebereiner in Bubble, who was the manager of a KFC in West Virginia before they made the movie, and was fucking awesome in it (seriously, Bubble is terrific and you all should see it). There was Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience; a lot of people gave her shit for her flat line readings but she held the center of that movie and it was a lot better than most people gave it credit for (and really, a considerable amount of the scoffing was people's prejudice against porn stars in particular and sex workers in general). And, of course, there was Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich (BOOM HEADSHOT no but seriously Julia Roberts was really good in Erin Brockovich).
So, Gina Carano. She has IRL martial arts skills, which gives her a (quite shapely) leg up on Angelina Jolie. I have optimism. But also, I'm looking forward to seeing the performance Steven Soderbergh manages to coax out of Bill Paxton. Am I actually going to be forced to admit that Bill Paxton gave a good performance in something? I'll salute Soderbergh and writer Lem Dobbs because, damn, that'd be an achievement.
Ordinarily, I would eat somebody alive for panning a movie they didn't sit all the way through. I'm getting around that by not talking about the movie itself, but rather the overall DVD experience. As it so often does, it starts with the trailers:
Did You Hear About The Morgans?
Let's clarify. This movie doesn't actually exist; it's actually a bleeding-edge multimedia art project/political statement about the stupidity of Hollywood. The proof is right in the trailer. There's no way this is actually a movie. It's too perfectly calculated a trailer—that opening bit with Hugh Grant and his bitch-boy is a joke with a narrative arc, beginning with a lame, contrived set-up, allowing Hugh to flash some sandpaper wit, all concluding with a reference to a “relationship.” Because OMG U GUISE ITS A ROEMANTIK COMEDEE LOL.
So let's see . . . somebody gets killed and Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica O'Horseface have to go into the witness protection program. In The Country! Sarah Jessica McFuckball makes a Sarah Palin joke (edgy!) And Hugh Grant and SJP fall back in love. It all gets very frantic and splintered by the end of the trailer, just like the third acts of the movies this avant-garde experiment is satirizing.
Here's the kicker, though. Because the movie itself is of so little importance in modern Hollywood, the centerpiece of the experiment was its original release date. Yes, that's right, DYHATM? was “released” the same day as Avatar. And sure, Avatar ended up being fucking terrible (Ed. Note: Avatar is really, really, really, really awful) but if there was one thing you could set your clock by in the industry, it was that anyone who went to a movie that weekend was going to see Avatar. It had been marketed just right, with just the right level of cultural saturation, and managed to convince people that they were excited.
And this is the final, clinching piece of evidence for Did You Hear About The Morgans? being an experiment commenting on bad marketing campaigns: everything about it fucking sucks. Has anyone given a flaming rat's ass about Hugh Grant in 15 years? No. Does anyone actually like Sarah Jessica Blah-Blah-Blah? Sure the show was a hit, but Kim Cattrall was the one everyone was actually interested in. The bit about giving away the entire plot in the trailer is but the capstone on the whole experiment; why would anyone want to spend two hours what they just saw in a minute and a half?
Ice Castles
Promising young skater gets injured, comes back triumphantly? I really can't tell. Drowning under mountains of goopy sentimentality, kinda pissed about this being another trailer that gives the whole movie away. But there is a place for a PG family movie with an unchallenging, diagrammatic structure about a nice girl “positive role model” type. That place just happens to be elsewhere than my DVD player.
Sleepless in Seattle
Okay, what the fuck? Bear in mind, at this point, I have literally forgotten what DVD I put in the player. It's late, I'm a little addled (actually just plain old exhaustion rather than booze or drugs), but still, it's a little alarming that I can't remember what movie's going to be coming on in 5 minutes. I also am at a a bit of a loss as to why a trailer for a movie that came out in 1993 is in front of the same movie as something that came out last December (and whenever the Ice Castles thing came out, it looks recent too).
Eventually, I get distracted by remembering how good Sleepless in Seattle was. Oh, that bygone era, when Tom Hanks had just become the massive movie star he always should have been, when Meg Ryan was Meg Ryan, and the romantic comedy formula had yet to devolve into the disturbing mess that it is today. Though, in a way, Sleepless in Seattle established the template for the “this isn't romantic, these people are actually out of their fucking minds” modern rom-com. Meg Ryan happens to hear Tom Hanks talking about his late wife on a talk radio show, falls in love with him, and kind of starts stalking him. Meg Ryan was only able to get away with this because she's Meg Ryan, but Sleepless in Seattle was a hit, so dozens more movies with lesser movie stars were made where the insanity of the heroine's actions wasn't offset by Meg Ryan's preternaturally adorable Meg Ryan-ness.
Actually, before the feature presentation even started, during the Sleepless in Seattle trailer, I started wondering about Nora Ephron. In When Harry Met Sally, she did a fairly decent job with her male characters, even though the scene where Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby are talking about Billy's divorce at a Giants game would never happen (dudes talk about chick shit during a game about as often as solar eclipses), though the fact that the dialogue rings true helps.
But Sleepless in Seattle sees Nora slip a little bit more. Rob Reiner, as Tom Hanks' buddy, is a character who simply does not exist. Dudes do not have girl talk with each other. The couple clips of Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner in the trailer consist entirely of them having girl talk. Now, in the movie itself, this actually works, as the movie is a very otherworldly, stylized thing, and is a lot more self-reflexively meta-cinematic than the average early 90s studio picture. But, in hindsight, it's a sign that Nora Ephron was slipping just a hair.
Guy writers frequently get criticized for not writing good women, or writing women who are little more than fantasy objects. Hey, I've consciously written women characters as fantasy objects before, I'm not saying I'm above such missteps. Women do it too, though. A woman writing a scene where two dudes talk articulately about their feelings and ask each other if their butt looks cute (admittedly, a pretty funny scene in SiS) is equally as fantastic as a man writing a scene where two femme chicks spontaneously start making out. Both have possibly happened at some point or other in real life. Possibly. However, as a writer, you should always be aware of how farfetched such a premise is.
Also, let's note another fuckup that doesn't really count because it was funny: dudes don't cry at the end of the Dirty Dozen, much as it worked as a joke in this. Dudes cry at the end of Field of Dreams, which is actually more limpdick, so props to Nora Ephron for letting us save testicular face.
(Ed. Note: all this negativity about Nora Ephron and Sleepless in Seattle is just foreshadowing—Sleepless in Seattle's pretty fuckin good)
Hanging Up
Huh. Another Nora Ephron movie? What the fuck is going on here? (Ed. Note: at this point, the author has still yet to remember what movie he just put in the DVD player). The only thing I really remember about this one was that it took that meta-cinematic feel Sleepless in Seattle had to a whole 'nother level, making the importance of the characters' resemblance to real people secondary to the importance of their resembling movie characters. Which, yeah, is interesting if you're high, and Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton, and Lisa Kudrow are all cool, I guess, but really, when I'm high I either want to be watching art pictures from the 60s or John Lithgow invading Earth with a fake Italian accent. Personal prejudice.
And, our feature presentation . . . Julie & Julia
Hey, don't look at me, I don't know why the fuck I Netflixed this. At the same time, they sent it to me, I hadn't seen it, I figured, why not? Maybe it'll be good. The Nora Ephron trailers suddenly made sense, and that odd parallel-universe feeling I'd been having eased somewhat.
But holy shit, this movie wasn't messing around when it decided to suck. From the word go, everything is completely stilted and artificial. Amy Adams' friends seem to have beamed in from some parallel universe where people declaim instead of conversing. Amy Adams, herself, does an excellent job, but she has a bit of trouble rolling the rock up the mountain with this fuckin' dialogue.
Meryl's great, and seeing her and Stanley Tucci so mad for each other is cool, but it can't shake how godawful the Amy Adams & co. bits are in the first half hour or so, which is all I made it through. It was too painful to watch something so completely divorced from reality, and the irony that it was based on a true story made me need a drink.
Now, of course, it's possible that the movie abruptly becomes awesome at some point after I turned it off. Even though I doubt that it does, that's neither here nor there because I didn't actually take the time to find out.
Still, that being said, it's unfortunate that Nora Ephron lost her fastball, because as stylized and non-naturalistic as When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle were, they were still really fucking funny. Of course, Julie & Julia isn't a laff-a-minute farce—its intention is to be a story with funny bits in it rather than a straight-up comedy—but even the stuff that's supposed to be funny is strained, and so far removed from actual human experience that it's like “Okay . . . I guess . . .” whereas When Harry Met Sally was like “Wow, I never thought of it that way before!”
The most interesting thing about experiencing the (incomplete) picture in this fashion was the narrative created by the trailers. We started with a great example of the modern romantic comedy—manic, joyless, insane, devoid of both romance and comedy—progress to a feel-good programmer (hey, civilians need shit to enjoy too), then the tripartite Nora Ephron show. All told, it was only an hour or so out of my life, so I don't feel like I totally wasted an evening or anything, but boy it was weird and inexplicably kind of disturbing to see that drift away from reality.
There are so many reasons why this shouldn't be funny. Jane Austen for one (it really is a shame she's associated with all these dumbass movies about women fainting in corsets, because her life and work were pretty interesting), the gajillionth Fight Club joke of the past decade, the two gajillionth use of Battle Without Honor or Humanity since Kill Bill, the apparent laziness of the "this thing + that thing = automatic joke" pop culture calculus . . . and yet this video is fucking funny. I almost want to say this being funny is more impressive for how dumb it potentially could have been. Either way, cheerio ladies!
This is Andrea Peyser. She writes for the New York Post, a publication that, through my having read it daily from about the third grade until about five years ago, has shaped me (for better or worse) as a writer. It also, through its proudly wiseass tone and shameless obsession with gossip, had an effect on me as a thinker. Without the New York Post, this blog probably wouldn't exist, or would be a lot tweedier and Times-ier. But, as mentioned above, I stopped reading the Post, largely due to Ms. Peyser becoming its dominant voice, and her propensity for columns like this one.
This is Lisa Cholodenko. She made a couple pictures a few years ago that I really liked, High Art and Laurel Canyon, both character studies in which at least some of the characters were queer women (which Ms. Cholodenko is). Her latest picture, The Kids Are All Right, is about a lesbian couple played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore who had kids via donated sperm. The kids want to meet the sperm donor, who turns out to be a what-me-worry scruffball played by Mark Ruffalo, who appalls Annette Bening, intrigues Julianne Moore, and drama ensues. Like Laurel Canyon and (to a lesser extent) High Art, the drama interweaves compellingly with comedy, and though the results are imperfect, they are singularly Ms. Cholodenko's own; she definitely counts as an auteur.
Now, Andrea Peyser is not a movie critic. She writes a column in the Post whose template is as follows: First, something happens (the New York Mets behaving like baseball players, a kid from California joining the Taliban, a mother making a modestly budgeted independent movie loosely based on her own experience). Andrea Peyser, based on no more information about said event than I used as an example, reacts angrily and unthinkingly, has four cups of coffee, screams into her word processor, and the next day the result is printed for the Post's readership to behold. She is not, by and large, someone you want to have angry at you, not because her powers of rhetoric are so powerful, but because the force of her ill-thought-out anger is so overwhelming.
Ultimately, as anyone who has ever tried arguing with an irrational person can attest, there is no winning an argument with someone who refuses to argue rationally, no matter how wrong they are. On the surface, taking all emotional and prejudicial elements out of the equation, Andrea Peyser and Lisa Cholodenko have some important things in common. They are both writers. They are both mothers. They are both roughly the same age, are both white female Americans, and for those two reasons alone one would think that they would be able to reach some sort of mutual understanding.
This, however, is giving Andrea Peyser far too much credit. Her approach to writing is very different than Lisa Cholodenko's, and the result she seeks to achieve so dissimilar as to exist in another universe. Lisa Cholodenko observes and reports; her scripts look at people as they are and attempt to come to some sort of emotional understanding of them. Her male characters are not as fully realized, at times, as the women, but even Christian Bale in Laurel Canyon (an unsympathetic philanderer) and Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are All Right (a "hey duuuude, fockin CaliFORnia brah" type) are allowed to be recognizable as human beings, if not terribly deep.
Andrea Peyser, however, reacts with irrational anger, and with the blunt, simple—but effective—rhetorical skills at her disposal, seeks to elicit the same irrational anger in her readers. She is a propagandist, and a very successful one, because she has the advantage of believing (to whatever shallow and fleeting degree) what she says.
Thus, her main critique of The Kids Are All Right—that it is pro-gay Hollywood propaganda—is especially ironic. People often see their own faults in others, or project their own faults onto others undeservedly. To call a naturalistic character study, that spends its running time rounding out its cast as human beings, propaganda is particularly rich. It would be intellectually dishonest if the accuser was operating intellectually, and morally bankrupt if the accuser had any conception of morality that was not repeated rote from millenia-old books. This claim should not be taken seriously in the slightest, especially when considered that Andrea Peyser might not really care about the movie, Lisa Cholodenko, or the issues at hand at all. The tone of her article is actually much less angry than she can be (calling for John Walker Lindh to be shot in the back of the head without trial being, and hopefully will continue to be, the definitive example) indicating that she might not really be all that moved by the issue.
This does not absolve her of responsibility for stoking the fires of anti-gay hatred, or for committing the cardinal sin of journalism, described by sportswriters as “writing the lead on the way to the ballpark,” and known to non-journalists as guiding the results of an experiment to conform to a previously formulated hypothesis. As a blogger who can be described as not exactly a critic but occasionally a critic of critics, this particularly gets on my nerves. No matter how much I'm looking forward to a movie (or, alternatively, dreading it) I always remain open, and will always acknowledge faults in something I'm predisposed to enjoy, and give credit to the successes of something I'm not. This holds true for political content as well. And never, ever, EVER, should a critic claim a thing is what it is not. Amateur, professional, immaterial. The act of criticism is dependent on reason. Reason is dependent on observation. Observation deals with what a thing is.
And one thing The Kids Are All Right is not is a Hollywood picture. It was independently financed and produced. It is being distributed by Focus Features, the “specialty” division of Universal. Pictures that are acquired and distributed by specialty divisions, in spite of the tacit endorsement of a major studio, are not shaped in any way by that studio. They are acquired for distribution for one reason only: to make money. To point out an obvious truth from the free market economics the Post so loudly supports, demand affects supply. A major corporation would not seek to profit from a product that no one wanted. Thus, the acquisition of The Kids Are All Right for distribution proves the point that—while it may not equal the size of the audience for something like Inception—a market exists that wishes to see movies about gay people.
This point was proven by a movie Ms. Peyser cites, carelessly, in her rant: Brokeback Mountain (also distributed by Focus). Brokeback Mountain grossed nine figures. This was not the result of propaganda on anyone's part. It made money because people liked it and thought it was a good movie. The Kids Are All Right is currently averaging something insane like $28,000 per screen in limited release, bringing it close to the top ten while being in a fraction the number of theaters as everything else. It is making money because people like it and think it's a good movie. People want to see it. People will go to see a good movie no matter what it's about. And, because attitudes like Ms. Peyser's notwithstanding, people are not as narrow-minded and hatefully reactionary as she is anymore. We are evolving, because that is what living creatures do.
It's Meryl Streep's birthday today. Meryl Streep, at this point, is such a force of nature that to be a fan or not a fan is completely beside the point. She IS, very profoundly; it's entirely possible that there has never been a more critically acclaimed actor in cinema—De Niro's critical peak was shorter and now distinctly historic, ditto Brando, and if you're comparing her to other women, for everyone who raved about Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis, there was someone else complaining about lockjaw New England accents and stiff bearing, or alternatively, baroque overkill.
It was a pleasant surprise when, in her 50s, Meryl Streep went from being the go-to actor for Serious Films that no one ever saw featuring Strong Women Dealing With Life-or-Death Crises (even though no one ever saw them, she always got Oscar nominations for them) to being an enormously successful box office attraction, headlining pictures like The Devil Wears Prada or Wore Prada or whatever the fuck it was called (it was well-made but all I remember about it was the scene where Anne Hathaway gets her hands on the as-yet-unpublished Harry Potter book) and Mamma Mia! and movies where she gets to nail Alec Baldwin.
Because I have always had and will always have better things to do than watch the twenty-five movies in a row where Meryl played a single mother with cancer in the Holocaust, I found myself extremely pleased when she gave making movies that didn't—like The Hours, for example—induce a deep longing for whiskey, Seconal, and razorblades a shot. Not because she'd never tried it before 2005, but because she had once, gloriously: 1990's Postcards From the Edge.
Postcards From the Edge was not Meryl's only attempt at something non-depressing, but the others (She-Devil, The River Wild) sucked. Postcards From the Edge does not suck. Au contraire, my friends, Postcards From the Edge is tremendous. It's based on Carrie Fisher's (semi-autobiographical at the very least) novel about an actress who, after some early success, gets fucked up on drugs, overdoses, and tries to put her life back together.
The novel jumps around between first and third person, and formally replicates the protagonist's frame of mind and pharmacological dependence: the prologue consists of glib, jittery, babbling postcards (from the edge), wherein heroine Suzanne is out of her mind on drugs.
Then she OD's, and part two, in rehab, is fatigued, reflective, self-critical, and alternates between Suzanne's point of view and that of a TV writer named Alex with a raging cocaine problem and nary a shred of self-awareness about it, juxtaposing the perspective of an addict who has hit bottom and realizes it (Suzanne) with a guy who “can do coke socially” (Alex). Eventually, Alex develops a crush on Suzanne that she remains unaware of until she laughs about “he would be the kind of guy I attract,” and he leaves rehab and goes nucking futs on coke, eventually checking himself back into rehab to get serious.
Part three follows a woman we eventually realize to be Suzanne in a brief affair with an endlessly talkative (just like her), infinitely horny movie producer through their conversations with each other and with their shrinks (because it was the 80s). They eventually break up, and part on reasonably good terms, though they'll probably never see each other again.
The remainder of the book is narrated in a more conventional third-person style, as Suzanne has re-gained control of her mind if not her professional and dating lives. A more conventional prose style does not infer boredom, though—Suzanne's dating and work adventures are engagingly told, and when she finds stable romance with a novelist by the end of the book, one feels genuinely happy (and relieved), even though because of the progression from ticking nuclear drug and drama bomb to stable mature adult IS, by nature, less interesting, the ultimate resolution of the book is more a pleased sigh than a fist-pumping “fuck yeah.” All in all, great fucking book, especially for a first novel.
It is, however, an apparently unfilmable one. So much of what makes the book interesting are the things about it that are specifically prose; Suzanne's actual narrative, an actress dealing with the dark side of fame, has been done before. This didn't stop Mike Nichols from having a go at it. Carrie Fisher adapted the novel herself, and by necessity ended up with a movie about something completely different from the book. Where the book charts Suzanne's journey to sanity, the movie follows her in her attempts to repair her relationship with her movie star mother.
And that is where the movie shines. Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine both cut loose and kick ass all over the place in this movie. Then again, everyone does. One of the cool things about being Mike Nichols is that you can get whoever the fuck you want to be in your movie, so if he wants Gene Hackman to play the director of the movie Meryl almost sinks by OD'ing, he gets Gene Hackman. If he wants Dennis Quaid to play the (heavily altered) horndog producer character, he gets Dennis Quaid. And so on.
The movie opens with a long tracking shot from the movie-within-a-movie (shades of Day For Night), revealed to be such only when Meryl hilariously fucks up a line at the end. Gene Hackman is understanding, until Meryl goes into her trailer to do some blow, at which point he blows up (zing!) and threatens to fire her if she doesn't get her shit together.
Then she's in bed with Dennis Quaid. He wakes up and starts talking, til he realizes she needs to get to a hospital, where he takes her.
Dennis Quaid: I'm dropping someone off. Nurse: I'm sorry? Dennis Quaid: I'm DROPPING someone OFF. Nurse: I'm sorry, sir— Dennis Quaid: Is this the emergency room? Nurse: Well, yes— Dennis Quaid: WELL THIS IS AN EMERGENCY!!!
It loses something in translation; Dennis Quaid is brilliantly head-up-his-ass southern Californian in this scene, which makes all that that much funnier.
Which gets that plotline off to a flying start. Shirley MacLaine refuses to see Meryl as anything other than an extension of herself, and is constantly giving Meryl advice about her career that would lead to Meryl following directly in her (mother's) exact footsteps. Meryl, meanwhile, is faced with the paradox of yearning for normality (i.e. a life outside showbiz) and not knowing anything other than the bizarre bubble world of Hollywood she grew up in.
When Meryl gets out of rehab, she gets a movie gig, but because of her drug history, the producers will only let her be in the movie if she lives with a responsible adult: her mother. Meryl hits the fucking roof at this suggestion, but ultimately the desire to keep working wins out, and she sucks it up.
The movie shoot follows the corresponding sequence in the novel fairly closely: on the first day of a low-budget picture where she plays a lady cop, Meryl gets notes from the director and three of the producers that she's “not having fun” and “holding something back.” Meryl, understandably, is like, “Um, it's my first fucking day, dude, and I just got outta rehab, how about cutting me some slack so I don't end up back there.” The day climaxes with Meryl, in a rear-projection shot where it looks like she's hanging off a building, shrugging, in one of the funniest shots in the movie.
On her way home, she runs into Dennis Quaid, whom she doesn't remember at first. He, though, remembers her, and clearly still wants to have sexual intercourse with her (in the Biblical sense). Even he, though, plays into her mother issues by flirting back when she comes on like, “Hey, there, handsome, is that a drug problem and a solipsistic sense of entitlement in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” Dennis Quaid wins Meryl over two ways: one, by being hot (in the 80s, he was about as hot as it got, you'll recall) and two by oh so sincerely murmuring things to her about how much he likes her, interpolated with all kinds of poetic stuff. Meryl falls for it (probably mostly because he was hot) and they shtup epically.
The next day at work, though, Meryl's co-star (Michael Ontkean) makes a crack about another sexual partner of Dennis Quaid's, so Meryl goes to track her (Annette Bening) down. In girl-talking with her, Meryl learns that Dennis Quaid fucked her and Annette Bening on the same day. I mean, as a guy I wholeheartedly support the idea of sleeping with 40ish Meryl Streep and 30ish Annette Bening, but both of 'em in one day is just greedy.
Meryl, pissed, goes over to his place, and they have probably the most awesome couple fight ever:
Man, Meryl Streep fucking rules. I love that scene.
So, after that, Meryl goes home and Shirley MacLaine tells her her manager has absconded with all her money, and the two of them get into a massive fucking argument about Shirley MacLaine's alcoholism and the effect it had on Meryl's upbringing. Shirley MacLaine denies all wrongdoing, and Meryl storms out to go overdub her lines from the movie at the beginning of the movie, and angrily pounds some drugs, that she makes herself throw back up.
Meryl and Gene Hackman have a great scene after Meryl nails the line, where he tells her that now she's clean, he's got lots more work for her. Meryl leaves happy, only to find that her mother crashed her car into a tree driving drunk.
They reconcile in the hospital, where Meryl runs into the doctor (Richard Dreyfuss) who pumped her stomach. They flirt, and he asks her if she wants to go to a movie, and she suggests Valley of the Dolls (a good reference not only because of the whole starlets-on-drugs business but because it was one of Richard Dreyfuss' first roles) but tells him she's not quite ready just yet.
The closing sequence has Meryl, working on a new movie by Gene Hackman, where she sings this awesome Shel Silverstein song, backed by this tight country band. It's great because the song's so fuckin good, but holy shit . . . Meryl Streep can sing. The earlier scene where she warbles out “You Don't Know Me” was dwarfed by Shirley MacLaine immediately jumping in and doing “I'm Still Here,” which is partly because Sondheim beats rock, paper, or scissors, but also to highlight Meryl's being uncomfortable with the show tunes that made her mother a star. (Strong choice, Meryl, strong choice).
As an adaptation, Postcards From the Edge works for the same reason most book-to-movie adaptations do: the recognition that books and movies are two separate things, and the ability to then successfully translate the bookish things about the book into movieish movie equivalents. It also helps to have the best available talent, and the entire cast explodes in this. The first time, or the first couple times, you see Postcards From the Edge, you're like, wow Shirley MacLaine is awesome in this (at the time there was a ton of fuss about how it was her triumphant comeback, and it certainly did eradicate her 80s status as a punchline for her unfortunate public discussion of reincarnation and other flaky shit) and she is. No question. But once you get to that third time (and, like, me, the fourth through fifteenth or so times) you realize, fuck me Meryl Streep is great in this. Scroll back up and watch that scene with Dennis Quaid again. Now scroll back down here. That's good thesping, that. Yeah, the script is great, yeah Dennis Quaid is awesome, but Meryl holds it the fuck down in that scene.
Happy birthday, Meryl Streep. I know you'd probably think I was a nekulturny shithead if you were aware I existed, but I think you're just swell.
Oscar season is upon us. I’m trying to give a shit, but it’s a little harder than in past years. I’m trying to gradually see as many of the nominated pictures as I can, but I’m usually either too broke or busy to make it out to the theater. My younger selves would have been shocked to hear that, as long as it’s been that I’ve been on my “hiatus,” there has only really been one movie that it really drove me nuts I couldn’t see: The Hurt Locker.
There were multiple reasons, some of them kind of obvious—the deliriously good press it got, the fact that someone apparently finally made a good Iraq movie, the prospect of seeing stuff blow up—but the main reason is this: ever since the middle of my adolescence I’ve been half in love with Kathryn Bigelow.
In many ways, she’s absolutely perfect (and not just for the reasons clearly on display in the photo to the left). A woman who directs action movies (including the legendary Point Break)? Command me, mistress. As an action director who is a woman, it’s tempting, and almost reflexive, to say that she’s a woman in a man’s game, only the fact of her bringing a woman’s perspective to typically male material makes her unique. Even though I love action movies dearly, I will admit under duress that most action directors are kind of interchangeable—anyone who claims they can tell the difference between, say, Simon West and Stephen Sommers without looking at the credits is probably full of shit. But no one else out there right now could make a Kathryn Bigelow picture. Even Mimi Leder, making pictures like The Peacemaker and Deep Impact, comes off a little “girlier,” to use the first word that comes to mind and that kind of misses the point. Kathryn Bigelow pictures, with only two exceptions I can think of, have male protagonists and deal with “male” issues in a very adrenalized, terse way.
An overview of her career, with more spoilers than a motherfucker because it’s a holiday and I ain’t got time to euphemize:
The Set-Up (1978)
Getting the ol’ career off to a flying start: 20 minutes of Gary Busey and some other dude beating the shit out of each other while two semioticians comment on the action. Did I mention I’m in love with this woman?
The Loveless (1982? 1984?)
Haven’t seen this one, but it’s a biker picture with Willem Dafoe, about incest, apparently. I nominate that last line for worst pun of the year.
Near Dark (1987)
A beautifully shot, original take on vampire movies. Adrian Pasdar meets a cute, pale girl who bites him on the neck both physically and emotionally. Cute pale girl introduces him to Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen. Adrian Pasdar, poor bastard, is a bit too genteel for their company, or for Jenette Goldstein or that creepy kid vampire either, but shit doesn’t really get raw until the vampires decide they want to kill Adrian Pasdar’s paw and sis.
So stylish, so brilliantly paced, so few extraneous touches that’s almost a shame that the ultimate resolution is so dishonest. Vampirism isn’t supposed to have a cure. Oh, well. You go see a subversive genre picture, you shouldn’t complain when conventions get subverted. That’s the only one that lands badly, though.
Blue Steel (1990)
Slightly better than the average “cop vs. psycho” picture, mainly due to the signature visual style. Jamie Lee Curtis (?) plays an NYPD rookie who puts a few well-placed holes in a convenience store robber, only to have psycho yuppie Ron Silver—a convenience store patron—make off with the robber’s gun, landing Jamie Lee in all kinds of trouble way beyond being miscast. Ron Silver starts shooting women, attempting to romance Jamie Lee, and eventually drawing the ire of Clancy Brown (another cop, in one terrific wig), who also romances Jamie Lee. It feels a bit dated now, since formula pictures don’t tend to age well, but the almost sexual fascination with guns is interesting, making this less than torturous for anyone looking to do the whole Bigelow oeuvre, at least if you’re not squeamish about violence and the instruments thereof.
Point Break (1991)
I have never been able to maintain a straight face while talking about this movie, and I don’t intend to start now. The story of blue flamer quarterback punk Johnny Utah (Keanu) of the Federal Bureau of Inarticulation and his quest to win the heart of . . . ahem, arrest, right, arrest . . . bank-robbing surf guru Bodhi (Swayze). He attempts to win the heart of lesbian surfer Lori Petty . . . wait, she’s supposed to be straight in this? What the fuck . . .?
Anyway. There’s enough quotably retarded dialogue in Point Break to fill several happy lifetimes:
“That’s Bodhi, they call him Bodhisattva.”
“Bodhi, this is your fucking wake-up call, man . . . I . . . am an F . . . B . . . I . . . agent!” “I know, isn’t it wild?”
“I caught my first tube today. Sir.”
“Listen you snot-nose little shit, I was takin' shrapnel in Khe Sanh when you were crappin' in your hands and rubbin' it on your face!” Later: “Let me tell you something, Harp. I was in this bureau while you were still popping zits on your funny face and jacking off to the lingerie section of the Sears catalog.”
“Utah . . . get me two.” Then: “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass end out of a dead rhino, I shoulda had you get me three of these things.”
“Back off, Warchild, seriously.”
Et cetera. Ad infinitum.
Also notable for being one of the earlier signs that Gary Busey was duckfucking out of his mind rather than just one of those guys who gets typecast.
Prefigures The Hurt Locker in a few weird ways: a) a character study about adrenaline junkies, b) a slightly detached, amused, and pretty accurate look at male friendships, c) cool handheld camerawork in an alley chase scene.
Very few movies consistently make me as purely happy as Point Break does, even if I’m two parts laughing at it to eight parts laughing with it. Most of the stupid shit is the writers’ fault and the fact that the two leads aren’t exactly De Niro and Pacino, although I’ll stop short of saying that Keanu and Swayze are shitty actors. The many weird choices they respectively make in this are part of its warped charm. The director has to take a lot of credit here for realizing she wasn’t making a serious Method-actor movie and just letting the goofballs run with it. (Speaking of goofballs, the amount of coffee John C. McGinley must have drunk in this rivals the amount of coke they did making Scarface).
Strange Days (1995)
Written by her (already) ex-husband James Cameron—who has apparently directed a couple of pictures, according to my sources—this is kind of a cultural artifact, part of the mid-90s post-cyberpunk hiccup in SF. Taking place in the buildup to New Year’s Eve 1999, the story’s about a black market dealer in virtual reality clips (Ralph Fiennes), who gets caught up in an LAPD cover-up of the murder of an influential rapper, which a prostitute recorded. As with most cyberpunk proper, there’s a heavy noir influence, down to the twisty plot, treacherous friends, and femme(s) fatale.
At the time it came out, Strange Days got a lot of really good reviews but tanked at the box office. Sometimes when that happens it’s because either the critics or the public fucked up, sometimes it’s both, which is the case here. The critics were a little too quick to praise Cameron’s script (when he, as was his wont, covered a lot of the same territory William Gibson and Neal Stephenson already had not too long before, but with shittier dialogue and more reductive morality; JC’s considerable strengths lay elsewhere).
One of the most interesting things about Strange Days to me has always been the fact that one of the first things guys want to do with the virtual reality is experience what it’s like to be a woman, kind of a mirror image of what Kathryn Bigelow does so often as a director: put herself inside the male mind. Also, Angela Bassett’s character in a movie by a guy director would have been a lot more likely to be eye candy and implausible at ass-kicking time (though, to J. Cameron’s credit, he does write strong women).
This still doesn’t explain Juliette Lewis being a shrill retard and it being impossible to figure out why Ralph Fiennes is so tragically in love with her. Or, now that you mention it, what the fuck Ralph Fiennes, of all people, is doing in this movie. It’s not fair that the guy should have to play upright Brits all the time just because he is one, but he doesn’t play a convincing sleazeball (and anyway, he gets to play Voldemort, he isn't allowed to complain anymore). This was a part crying out for Gary Oldman, if you needed a Brit in the lead.
Minor quibbles aside: this movie was the start of my crush on Kathryn Bigelow. The 16 year old me was quite taken with the fact that a woman directed this movie. Then I saw a picture of her, and all bets were off. What the hell, let’s have another.
The Weight of Water (2000)
Didn’t see. Didn’t even realize my girl directed this until I was looking at her imdb page while writing this post. Due to having worked in bookstores, and my resultant problem with Oprah Book Club books, I’ll probably give this one a miss.
K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
Meh.
The Hurt Locker (2009)
The first good non-documentary about the Iraq war, precisely because it’s not trying to be political, it’s about characters, specifically, the guys who try to keep bombs from blowing up. Oddly, it’s fairly suspenseful. It’s suspenseful to the point that I chewed through one of my bedsheets, watching it on DVD. I kept mumbling shit to the characters, i.e. “watch it!” “What the fuck are you doing?” “Oh no . . . oh no . . . oh man, that’s not good . . .” (the situation they were in, not the movie, the movie is very good).
I say, what the hell, let’s nominate this for a shitload of Oscars. Let’s give Jeremy Renner the Richard Jenkins Memorial “none of the fuckers who vote for the Oscars knows who the guy is, but he was awesome and probably better than all four of the other guys put together” nomination (even though Richard Jenkins isn’t dead, the point is, none of the shitheads who didn’t vote for him in The Visitor because they didn’t see it knows that). Lets give Kathryn a nomination because then I’ll get to see her on TV a whole lot and that’ll make me happy. Let’s give that English guy a nomination for cinematography. Let’s throw Anthony Mackie a Best Supporting Actor nom, cuz he was fuckin’ great too. And hell, while we’re at it, let’s give Guy Pearce a Lifetime Achievement Award for finally being presentably butch.
The one thing The Hurt Locker has against it, as far as actually winning all these Oscars I want it nominated for, is that it’s pretty fuckin’ dark. The main character is kind of an asshole. The explosions aren’t fun, they’re really disturbing. When Guy Pearce dies in the beginning, you see him jumping out of the way of the explosion like guys always do in action movies, and they get up a second later, dust themselves off, say something wry, and continue in pursuit of the bad guy. Only Guy Pearce doesn’t get up. That’s the first sign: you’re on your own, moviegoer. More than any theatrical feature I’ve seen in fuck knows how long, The Hurt Locker makes you feel like you’re there. And Iraq is not one of the most fun theres to be.
The thing The Hurt Locker has going for it is that it’s fucking incredible. I’ll admit, as an imperfectly progressive guy, that a large part of my long-standing crush on Kathryn Bigelow has always been due to her being hot. But when she comes through like this—“Hi, guys, I’m back . . . oh, by the way, have fun trying to make a better movie about war ever again, motherfuckers”—it lends a certain moral credibility. Talent is sexy. By that standard alone we should all bow down. And give her the fucking Oscar.
This is Lisa Cholodenko. She made a couple pictures a few years ago that I really liked, High Art and Laurel Canyon, both character studies in which at least some of the characters were queer women (which Ms. Cholodenko is). Her latest picture, The Kids Are All Right, is about a lesbian couple played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore who had kids via donated sperm. The kids want to meet the sperm donor, who turns out to be a what-me-worry scruffball played by Mark Ruffalo, who appalls Annette Bening, intrigues Julianne Moore, and drama ensues. Like Laurel Canyon and (to a lesser extent) High Art, the drama interweaves compellingly with comedy, and though the results are imperfect, they are singularly Ms. Cholodenko's own; she definitely counts as an auteur.
It's Meryl Streep's birthday today. Meryl Streep, at this point, is such a force of nature that to be a fan or not a fan is completely beside the point. She IS, very profoundly; it's entirely possible that there has never been a more critically acclaimed actor in cinema—De Niro's critical peak was shorter and now distinctly historic, ditto Brando, and if you're comparing her to other women, for everyone who raved about Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis, there was someone else complaining about lockjaw New England accents and stiff bearing, or alternatively, baroque overkill.
In many ways, she’s absolutely perfect (and not just for the reasons clearly on display in the photo to the left). A woman who directs action movies (including the legendary Point Break)? Command me, mistress. As an action director who is a woman, it’s tempting, and almost reflexive, to say that she’s a woman in a man’s game, only the fact of her bringing a woman’s perspective to typically male material makes her unique. Even though I love action movies dearly, I will admit under duress that most action directors are kind of interchangeable—anyone who claims they can tell the difference between, say, Simon West and Stephen Sommers without looking at the credits is probably full of shit. But no one else out there right now could make a Kathryn Bigelow picture. Even Mimi Leder, making pictures like The Peacemaker and Deep Impact, comes off a little “girlier,” to use the first word that comes to mind and that kind of misses the point. Kathryn Bigelow pictures, with only two exceptions I can think of, have male protagonists and deal with “male” issues in a very adrenalized, terse way.
