R.I.P. BERT SCHNEIDER

Bert Schneider, (c) Los Angeles Times

Bert Schneider died last night. He was an enormously important figure in Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s, contributing to what has variously been called the "New Hollywood" and the American New Wave, producing landmark pictures like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Picture Show. Due to the circumstances under which he found himself in the middle-late 60s, Schneider had to bet pretty much everything he had in the world on every picture he produced. That kind of thing is unsustainable because it's so draining, but it takes balls. And whatever else you can say about the cat, he had massive ones. So raise a glass, and salute one of the singular figures in the American cinema.

GOD SAVE FU MANCHU, MORIARTY, AND DRACULA

xkcd, reminding us that even goatse is going to get the fucking  "remember when" treatment

Any number of movie writers have already given forth their “2011 is the year of nostalgia” thinkpieces, so rather than either pile on or write one of those dumb attention whoring “those other movie writers are retards” posts I'm going to tell y'all why it's natural at this point in the great human experiment that the past be on people's minds, and why the three foremost examples in what is now fashionable in some circles to call the “nostalgia porn” genre aren't really nostalgic.

As to that first point, shit's changing. From the Arab Spring to the Occupied Autumn, the great lurching shift toward a fully 21st century reality is underway in many parts of the world, right on schedule. A hundred years ago it was Europe going bugfuck and going “YO IT'S TIME FOR WORLD WAR ONE, BYETCHES,” two hundred years ago it was Napoleon flexing his nuts and acting like such a dick everyone thought he was shorter than he was because overcompensation was the only possible explanation. Hopefully this time around we can avoid as many people getting killed. But, anyway, major shifts that change everything frequently happen right at the beginning of the second decade of the century. And, when Everything Changes Forever, it's only natural that people start looking back at the world that was, and because the future is uncertain and—to some—scary, a certain glow of fondness is going to illuminate those looks back.

These aren't the only times when people look to the past, of course, but times like these there's more in the noosphere than usual, to the point where it's the prevailing theme in American cinema this year. Three pictures come to mind along with the subject, all very well received, all factoring heavily in awards-season speculation. They are:


Midnight In Paris (dir. Woody Allen)

I absolutely loved this movie, in spite of the one—not insignificant—flaw of Rachel McAdams being such an asshole it's almost like she's a revenge character. All she does the whole picture is, along with her mother, bust Owen Wilson's balls without motivation and to operatic excess. While she's intended to be a function of Owen Wilson's dissatisfaction with the venal, ignorant modern world (and while she seems totally unrealistic, someone—a relative, though I won't say which one—actually did say something as shitty to me once as Rachel McAdams does when she shushes Owen Wilson because Michael Sheen is talking) Woody kind of overdoes it with her, to the point where you're like, “If she really thought Owen Wilson was such a choad, why'd she get engaged to him?” His motivation's a little easier to understand; weak and shallow though it makes dudes look, there's an awful lot of mean dumbness we'll accept from someone as good-looking as she is. Yeah, go ahead, roll your eyes. Truth is truth. Anyway, enough of that shit, let's get on with the 90% of Midnight In Paris that totally fucking rocks:

Owen Wilson plays a successful screenwriter who's trying to write a novel, and somehow manages to convince his asshole fiancee (Rachel McAdams, see above) to come to Paris with him while he works on it. She keeps dragging him around to tourist-y shit, often with her “friend” whom she's (a little too) obviously fucking (Michael Sheen, in the greatest portrayal of that guy who dominates every conversation with his copious and frequently inaccurate triviata on any given subject OF ALL TIME). So one night Owen Wilson's out walking the streets while Rachel McAdams is doing something to make the audience hate her, and he has a seat to catch his breath and have one of those “holy fuck I'm in Paris” moments when, as a clock strikes midnight, a 1920s car pulls up and F. Scott Fitzgerald offers him a ride. Fuck. Yes.

Woody does some of the best work he's ever done with the 20s sequences, capturing both the allure and the parts about it where you're like “uhhh . . . yeah, not so much” (i.e. keeping Zelda Fitzgerald from jumping into the Seine every five minutes.) Owen Wilson's open-minded, open-hearted, open-mouthed wanderings through this vividly rendered world rubs off after not much time at all, and it's tempting to just quote the whole thing, but if you haven't seen it yet that's not fair, and anyway, isn't the point. Nor is the fact that the guy who plays Hemingway is fucking amaaaaaaaaaaaazing (Corey Stoll. Remember that name.)

What is, is a scene right at the end of the second act, where Woody (skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen it yet) gets his Inception on and goes for a fantasy dreamworld within a dreamworld, taking Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard, with whom he's fallen in some pretty apparently genuine love, to her favorite time in history, La Belle Époque. By this point in the movie I was enjoying Woody's little fluffy ode to every college freshman's first time machine destination and admiring the craft behind it, but once Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard hit Belle Époque and kick it with Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, and Gauguin and the three of them start talking about how the Renaissance must have been the best time to be alive I went “ohhhhhh shit . . . bravo, Woody. Bravo.”

Cuz if anyone's earned the right to be a little nostalgic, it's Woody. Between everybody busting his balls about how his movies aren't funny anymore (which they've been doing literally almost as long as I've been alive; he made that joke himself in Stardust Memories, which came out the month before I turned 2) and his well-documented and controversial marital habits—not to mention the fact that he's 76 now—you could hardly blame Woody for being like, “Man, remember the past? Wasn't it better, without all the ball-busting?” But no, he looks back, sees that it's awesome, and still comes firmly down on the side of “Live in the moment. Resist nostalgia. Now is all you really have.” I could hug Woody for that, if I wasn't worried that he'd break. The picture ends perfectly. If anything was going to be his highest grossing picture of all time, it should be one this good.

Sticking with New York filmmakers, next up:


Hugo (dir. Martin Scorsese)

I've documented my dislike of most 3D movies, and my position about it being more a commercial than artistic innovation, a number of times. That being said, I'd be a fucking idiot if I didn't trust that Martin Scorsese would do something worthwhile with it. Not everything he's directed has been good, but you know if you see his name on something, you know his burning passion for cinema is going to show through, and there's going to be at least one thing in the movie where you're like “damn, okay, I haven't seen that before.” Even something like The Color Of Money, which he admitted to making (fittingly enough) for the money, still has something (The Color Of Money itself, in the right mood, is awesome.)

Hugo, as one would hope from Marty S., has by far—it's really not even close—the greatest 3D visuals to date. (Speaking of things I've said a number of times but can't say enough, fuck Avatar right under its blue fucking tail.) Marty and production designers Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo create a magical storybook Paris through which DP Robert Richardson's camera zooms, swoops, and hides right on the other side of a wall or window peaking in. There are some of the most gorgeous blues I've ever seen. It's got every last bit of visual grandeur $150 million can buy, and a bunch extra that you can only get when your director fucking means it, and Marty S. fucking means it.

The story, adapted from the Caldecott-medal winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is, on one level, about a boy named Hugo who lives in a train station who gradually befriends an elderly man who turns out to be pioneering filmmaker George Méliès. On another level, it's about the transformative power of movies, and how they're the stuff dreams are made of. On a lower but no less important level, it's about trust, friendship, purpose, and love. All things I'm totally on board with.

Only problem is, Hugo's got about an hour and a half of story stretched out over about two hours and ten minutes. The distension of the running time is largely due to the fact that Hugo and Méliès go through the motions of being, respectively, a mute and an evil old bastard for about a half hour, when in fact Hugo has plenty to say (kid's a borderline genius) and Méliès is a really nice guy who's a little down on his luck. The problem with the beginning being so interminable is that at no point in any of it are we given any insight into why Hugo can't just talk to the old guy and why Méliès is such a prick to the kid. Then, all of a sudden, as if the first half hour of the movie didn't exist, boom, we have the actual story. From there, the story is . . . okay. I feel slightly like an asshole bitching about it because the movie's heart is in a very good place, and a certain amount of simplicity and heavy-handedness can be written off to Marty aiming the picture at kids. But withholding the reasons to care about the main character and the character who ends up being the picture's moral center for over a quarter of its running time keeps Hugo from being a complete success.

That said, Hugo's absolutely worth seeing, and worth seeing on a big screen in 3D, because you absolutely positively for real reals haven't ever seen nothing like this. Even if it fails as narrative it succeeds absolutely in being a lecture on cinematic epistemology with professor Scorsese. In making a picture in digital 3D about the very earliest silent movies, Marty telescopes the entire history of cinema into one movie, a linkage made all the more explicit with some shockingly brilliant post-converted footage from Méliès' own films, which simply and beautifully makes the point that one movie is every movie. Even if Marty doesn't make little kids want to run out and see a bunch of silent movies, he makes a pretty good case that the little fuckers are shitheads for not wanting to.

Even the fact that the writing drove me insane but I loved everything else ends up being a testament to the power of the director and crew of a movie. Also, if you told me that Marty S. had pulled you aside and said, “Look, if you repeat this I'll deny it but this whole fucking picture is a massive memetic experiment to program little kids so that they become devotees of the theory that the director, not the screenwriter, is the true author of a movie, and a number of things you as an adult don't get but that are going to be little semiotic time bombs for anyone under 12 that result inevitably with their ability to write 500 page exegeses of G.W. Pabst, F.W. Murnau, and D.W. Griffith by the time they're 15,” I'd slap my forehead and go, “IT ALL SEEMS SO CLEAR NOW.” Plenty of people I trust and respect were transported by Hugo. Something about it kept me at arm's length the whole night. I thought it was a little clunky, though I can't front on its sincerity. C'est la vie.

Speaking of French, our last picture:


The Artist (dir. Michel Hazanavicius)

Now, this, my friends, is what the fuck I'm talkin' about. It deals with a lot of the same themes as Hugo—silent cinema and the appreciation thereof, most prominently—and also has a scene-stealing dog (much like the two pictures themselves, I suspect one will either prefer the alternation between stoic contemplation and feverish, sloppy pursuit of the dog from Hugo or the zany mugging and pluckiness of the dog in The Artist; both dogs are microcosms of their respective movies.) And they're formal mirror images of each other: Hugo used all the modern technology money can buy to pay homage to the earliest movies, where The Artist uses the visual style and techniques of 20s and 30s cinema to tell the always-relevant (especially today) story about how time marches on, and marches past whoever can't keep up.

With a couple notable (and stunning) exceptions, The Artist is done totally straight as a late-period silent movie. Its protagonist, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), is a massive star in 1927 Hollywood, with charisma for days, and broad mugging for weeks. After the opening of his latest hit picture, George literally bumps into a young woman named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, whose beauty and radiance are beyond the scope of mortal language to describe), who, as it turns out, is an aspiring actress. And does quite well, seeing as how her beauty and radiance are beyond the scope of mortal language to describe. IT'S AS IF YOU'D NEED TO FILM HER TO GET THE POINT ACROSS.

Good thing The Artist is a movie, then, that's what I'm saying. The story gets going once sound is introduced, as muckety-muck John Goodman and a bunch of the standard evil white guys in suits you get hanging around any movie company (though John Goodman is, as his name implies when you bifurcate it, one of the good ones) inform George that it's either start talkin' or start walkin'. George, pissed, bankrolls his own epic silent melodrama, that ends up opening the same say as Peppy's latest. You know which one wins and which one goes down in flames. I ain't gotta spoil it.

The movie doesn't end there, though. It continues through a bunch of capital M Melodrama to an ending that's at once triumphant, wistful, and even a bit sad. But every second of it hums with a love of movies and an uncanny skill in recreating the cinema of early Hollywood. It succeeds in a way a picture like Far From Heaven (which I, by the way, really liked) doesn't in managing to make the recreation more than an academic exercise; The Artist actually is a “you'll laugh, you'll cry” movie exactly like the ones to which it pays homage. The dance sequences are killer, the leads are perfect in both look and demeanor, and the dog is just the best.

As much as it would appear, in a thousand different ways, like The Artist is the most nostalgic of the three, when Jean Dujardin's smiled his last smile, Bérénice Bejo is done being like “there isn't another actress alive who could have done this as perfectly as I just did. Bask” and the dog has pulled his last pratfall, The Artist is really a movie about the importance of adapting to changing times. The inability to do so nearly breaks George. It is, of course, still very much about respecting the past—Peppy's efforts to pay respect to those who've come before verge on saintly—but since the embodiment of the importance of that respect also fits flawlessly with the modern age, it's clear that the message is not to live in the past, merely to just remember, every now and then, how awesome it was.


Since I clearly have a lot of work to do founding this religion based on Bérénice Bejo (and since she's Hazanavicius' wife, keeping one step ahead of his jealous wrath if he thinks I'm crushing on her too hard) it would probably help to define nostalgia, and why none of these pictures succumb to the temptations thereof. There's a difference between looking back and being like, “Yeah, that was nice,” and yearning painfully to live in the past. Midnight In Paris looked like it was going to be the latter before Woody, at the perfect moment and in the perfect way, revealed nope. He even has Owen Wilson (did I mention he was terrific in that? I probably should: he was terrific in that) quote Faulkner's famous line “The past ain't dead. It ain't even past” in a context that suggests that the past not being past is a sign that it's always with us in our memories, but that life is lived in the world itself, not in our heads. Hugo isn't nostalgia, it's a history lesson about the primacy of film conversation. And The Artist, the sneakiest of the three, employs about as many nostalgia-inciting elements as there are stars in the sky to tell a story about changing with the times.

So, if in the Year of Nostalgia, none of the most “nostalgic” movies really are that thing, what are they? Three movies that came out the same year as each other; a year where people have been tending to reflect on the past a bit, to be sure, but a meditation on a thing is not the same as the thing itself, just as depiction is not endorsement. Even if my enjoyment was variable with the three movies under question, all deserve better than to be dismissed with one adjective, most especially if it doesn't apply.

PLAYING INTO THE HANDS OF CORPORATE AMERICA DOESN'T ALWAYS SUCK

Case in point, this wonderful site. Yeah, it's an Old Spice ad, but it's also a perfect summation of the aesthetic mission of this blog. So there's that.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

I was told by a creative writing professor in college that one should not write road novels, because she thought they betrayed the writer's inability to think of a proper plot. I was told by another creative writing professor that all good writing originates from a sense of place (though she implied that the only legitimate kind of writing was short autobiographical fiction by women in New Mexico about deceased parents and guilt about the Native American genocide, which is weird because she wasn't from New Mexico; as you might imagine, she and I got along so famously that she tried to have me expelled.) Although I disagreed with them on both these points (respectfully and disrespectfully, respectively) it's through having studied with both of them that I figured out how road narratives work when they work. It's when place contributes to the evocation of character, and the journey of the lead character(s) from A to B is the entire point of the narrative. Yes, 19 year old creative writing students deciding “I'm going to write a novel about a bunch of us in a car to California smoking weed” should be discouraged from actually writing that novel. But for stories involving an actual intellectual/emotional/other journey, of import to anyone other than the protagonist him/herself, literalizing that by having the character make a physical journey works just fine, and can be a nice lil ol metaphor there. Thus, today I'm going to write about The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Motorcycle Diaries, and The Trip. (Note: the following contains a few random spoilers here and there, but only for movies that are old enough to buy cigarettes.)

Obviously there have been other road movies. I've seen many of them, just as I've read many road novels (the enduring popularity of which can be blamed entirely on On The Road, which is the most important book in the world when you're 15 but is completely unique and impossible to emulate, even by its own author). There's Easy Rider, but Easy Rider was about Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda looking cool on motorcycles, not character development; Billy and Captain America don't change at all, unless you count when they get lit the fuck up by those dudes in the truck at the end (which sort of counts, death being a change). And there's Thelma & Louise, as Isaac Butler pointed out, which has character development, and does involve a road trip, but belongs to a separate genre, the “outlaws on the run” movie (see also Bonnie and Clyde, True Romance, Thieves Like Us, etc etc.) With those pictures, having The Man (in more ways than one, in Thelma & Louise's case) on one's ass means that the leisurely, unhurried pace necessary for characters to realize shit or mature or what have you on their own schedule is obviated, and that “take your time, we're in no rush” element is a very key element to the three movies I want to talk about.

The least of the three, in terms of heft and cinematic adventurousness, is The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert:

Which is not to say that it's not a delightful movie, because it is. It's also a movie that history has had a few drinks with, because now we can say that it stars Agent Smith, Leonard Shelby, and General Zod (Ed. Note: government names—Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp) as the most fabulous cabaret act in all of Sydney, Australia. Weaving and Pearce are industry-standard drag queens, though Stamp is a trans woman, as a wrinkle. The story is set in motion when an old friend of Weaving's offers them a gig out in Alice Springs (for those of y'all not up on your 'Strayan geography, Sydney's way in the east and is one of the world's cultural capitals and Alice Springs is a couple thousand clicks inland in the Northern Territory, which is basically Crocodile Dundee's turf) and the girls hop on a bus called Priscilla and go have themselves a road trip.

The journey inland clearly parallels Weaving's and Stamp's attempts to make sense of their respective pasts; Pearce's job is more to be comic relief, which he handles brilliantly, but his character isn't given as much depth as the other two. By the time they, and the story, reach(es) their/its destination (fuck you, pronouns) a lot of positive change has taken place, and life can move forward, in brainmeltingly awesome costumes. A large element in everything turning out okay is represented, symbolically, by our protagonists managing to transcend their otherness (which is manifest) and connect with their country and its people. Stamp plays a recent widow who—mild spoiler alert—meets a really nice small town guy who doesn't give two fucks what kinda genitals s/he was born with, he's just mad into Terence Stamp. Hugo Weaving—slightly spicier spoiler—reunites with his not-yet-divorced wife (the old friend who gives them the gig, no less) and young son, with whom he finally forms a father-son relationship amidst the central Australian countryside. One could even make the argument that given Alice Springs' geographical centrality, he journeyed to the heart of Australia, and in bringing his son back with him to Sydney at the end, he brings his rediscovered heart back with him. Oh, yeah, that's right, there's more to that movie than a bunch of ABBA, CeCe Peniston, and Alicia Bridges. Recognize.


Next, a radically different movie (that I stupidly left off my top 10 of the last decade, when it really should clock in at #2), The Motorcycle Diaries:

Get it? RADICAL? See, it's funny because it's Che Guevara.

The Motorcycle Diaries, of course, is the story of a very young, not-yet-Che (Gael Garcia Bernal, fucking awesome), who hops on a bike with his pal (Rodrigo de la Serna, just as fucking awesome) for a roundabout tour of South America on their way from Buenos Aires to a leper colony in Peru where they're volunteering and eventually to Caracas. Of course nothing goes the way they plan it, and by the time they get to the end of their journey, proto-Che is at the beginning of the journey that leads to becoming Che, and achieving dorm-room-wall immortality.

It's a story that underscores the principle that a story being happy or sad depends on when you call “cut.” Had it gone on—like Steven Soderbergh's two-part biopic—it would have gotten to the years when Che's good intentions confronted uncooperative realities (to be kind) and he started killing people and fucking shit up (to be less kind). The Motorcycle Diaries stops at a point when young Ernesto still has his whole life ahead of him, yet it's still a complete journey. Going from a liberal but sheltered medical student to a passionate advocate for social justice is quite a leap.

Like Priscilla (Ed. Note: I know this is the first time you ever saw anyone compare these two pictures. I know I'm awesome, you don't have to say it), the characters' journey in The Motorcycle Diaries is paralleled by the massive geographical distance traversed. In this case, the variety of geography is also vast, from snowcapped mountains to deserts to jungles. And, like the journey itself does, proto-Che connects all of these terrains, and the people who inhabit them, coming to regard South America as a continent rather than a group of discrete nation-states, and South Americans similarly as one people. From there, the obvious next step is that the world and all its people are as one.

Director Walter Salles and writer Jose Rivera do a good job in The Motorcycle Diaries of not judging proto-Che either way, instead letting the events unfold and simply pointing a camera at them. The way those events unfold make it seem inevitable, in the sense of the natural world to which the picture is so indelibly linked, that proto-Che would undergo the moral and intellectual journey he does. But, rather than the movie suggesting that anyone would have this reaction, it restricts itself to its observation on its particular characters. Proto-Che is proto-Che. You are you.


Fuckin' hell The Motorcycle Diaries was good. Anyway, moving on:

The Trip

This right here is a road picture as only Michael Winterbottom could make, and only in England. Edited down from a BAFTA-winning six-episode TV show about Steve Coogan (Steve Coogan), having been talked into a tour of restaurants in the North of England by his girlfriend (Margo Stilley), who's gone back to America because things aren't going so well, being “forced” to ask his friend Rob Brydon (Rob Brydon) to accompany him on the trip because he “can't do it alone.” And so they spend five days driving around England, eating in restaurants, and talking. And talking. And talking. And talking.

The Trip contains more references to other Michael Winterbottom movies than anyone could possibly be expected to catch without an annotated edition. Catching them all, thankfully, isn't the point, but it does well to note that Michael Winterbottom is a total fucking wiseass, always fucking with audience expectations, throwing change-ups (googlies?), keeping us on our toes.

For this reason, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that a Michael Winterbottom road movie takes place in England, a country you can drive across in one day (provided you don't hit traffic). It's also a place that gives the sense of always having been there, and that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. The same goes, more or less, speaking very generally, for the people as well. While this may not be true in every case, it's still true that there's a prevailing sense of England and its people being this way.

So a road movie where Steve Coogan doesn't really go anywhere or do anything, beginning and ending with him alone moping in his apartment, just trucking along in an anhedonic funk, occasionally sniping at Rob Brydon to hide his secret jealousy of Brydon's relative happiness (and extremely loving marriage), is kind of the perfect English road movie.

I give Winterbottom, Coogan, and Brydon a lot of credit for making the fact that The Trip is almost casually perfect of secondary importance to it being one of the funniest and most quotable pictures in like ever. I'm not even going to embarrass myself trying to describe how awesome the jokes are, so I'm going to let the movie speak for itself. Also, bear in mind, when you watch a whole hour and forty-five minutes of this, the cumulative effect just makes it funnier and funnier:



This one I posted last November before I even knew what The Trip was:



Finally, maybe you have to be an actor to think this is the funniest thing in the fucking universe but I am so it is:



I mean holy shit this movie is so fucking good. The fact that it speaks that perfectly to what it's like being an actor AND has a deeply considered and holistically perfect sense of place AND is a mirror image of the classic road movie AND in so being ends up being one of the best extant examples thereof is . . . well, unlike Messrs. Coogan and Brydon, I have no words. (Also, footnote: Rob Brydon is amazing in this, and Rob Brydon the character is one of my favorites in any movie in years. And, second footnote: I love how Steve Coogan is so willing, in this, Tristram Shandy, 24 Hour Party People—kind of, as that was Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson as Steve Coogan—and Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, how Coogs is willing to the point of eagerness to portray himself as such a raging twat. He always gets it juuuust right before he alienates everyone. It's quite the balancing act.)

Okay, since it's getting to time to say QED and drop the mic, to recap: a successful road narrative in its given medium is dependent on the relationship between character and place, with the place being the progenitor of the character(s), and the change in place paralleling the change, and hopefully evolution, of character. It's not the subtlest metaphor in the world, but there are certain stories—like the three discussed above, and a number of others, I'm sure—that need to be told that way. That's right, motherfucker. Q. E. D.

[drops mic]

"MR. DANNY BOWES IS A BRAINLESS MORON...."

Now, as many of you may know and those who don't should, I write a weekly column for my old pal Dan Hudak's site Hudak On Hollywood. Hudak likes me to be the wild, ranty me you all know and love, as opposed to the less foul-mouthed Tor.com me (and soon-to-be Next Projection me, as of a couple days from now; this is in addition to, not in replacement of, my other rapidly-growing list of credits.)

What I'd like to do, besides plugging all the sites I write for, is direct your attention to this very funny bit of hate mail, in response to my piece about The Help this past summer. If nothing else, my mom should find the bit about washing my mouth out with soap hilarious. No . . . fucking hilarious. There we go.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY MAY OR MAY NOT BE MY FRIEND: RICK MOODY VS. FRANK MILLER

So I've been spending this Sunday morning reading provocative writing whose primary intent is pissing a given group of people off, a broad category of writing; along with porn, pictures of kittens, and viruses, it's one of the four pillars of the Internet. The anger and the coffee work symbiotically to get me awake to watch football, a literalized metaphor for Internet discourse. Most of the time, when I don't have anything of value to contribute on the subject under discussion, I keep my mouth shut (not always, though; I'm not holding myself up as a paragon of restraint by any means). When Frank Miller shot his mouth off about Occupy Wall Street, I rolled my eyes—though may have privately, and entirely justifiably, muttered something about Frank Miller being a retard, which is as much a revelation as the sun rising in the east every morning—and went about my business. This morning, though, I got around to Rick Moody's response to Miller's thing, and got pissed off.

It actually pisses me off that I got pissed off, because I'd far prefer that something in the Guardian, by a high-profile American writer, putting its rhetorical foot in the ass of a deeply stupid person writing offensive and misleading things about a political movement I support, be intelligent and not stray from the point, overreach, and ultimately undo weaken the point it tries to make. But that's what Moody does in his piece. He starts with a solid premise—Frank Miller being a shithead—and tries to spin it into the entire Hollywood film industry being sympathetic to Frank Miller's brain-dead politics. And there, he fails.

The thing that sinks Moody's entire argument is the logical fallacy—one he shares with many of his and my ostensibly mutual political opponents—that his conclusions are facts. Because he doesn't like action movies, and because a cherry-picked selection of action movie stars are politically conservative (which, by the way, left off John Wayne, who would have helped make his point) he concludes that action movies themselves are inherently right-wing. Then, comic books (and Moody's contempt for them) are dragged into the argument, and equated with Stallonenegger (another assumed direct parallel presented as if inarguable) 80s explosionfests as if they're the same thing. We end up with a whole lot of lumping together, broad generalizations, and smugly self-satisfied wheel-spinning, that eventually returns to its initial, almost forgotten purpose, which is the very simple and well-established dipshittery of the venerable Mr. Miller.

One's enemies are not, by sole virtue of being one's enemies, engaged in a conspiracy. The simple nature of action movie narratives are not proof of their being propaganda. The assumption of top-down decision making (in this case, that because leading men in action movies are politically conservative and make movies that reflect, in varying degrees, their political beliefs, that Hollywood as an institution makes these movies to further a right-wing agenda) is a failure of the human mind to accept randomness and coincidence. To use an example of right-wingers doing the same thing, just so the wrong people don't read this and think I'm a toady, take the whole Communist scare: right-wingers thought the only reason leftists would say leftist stuff was because they were paid agents of Moscow; this led more than one leftist over the years to go “If only. . .” Simply because an action serves the agenda of another is not proof of direct proactive efforts by that other. And simply because an action movie may star a center-right actor and be about fucking shit up more than it is social justice, is not proof that Hollywood conspires to advance a political agenda.

Finally, Moody makes the mistake of assigning Frank Miller far too much importance within the Hollywood system. Until Robert Rodriguez and Zack Snyder, fans of Miller's work first, second, and forty-ninth as opposed to political bedfellows, made movies of his work (and the latter made a commercially successful one), Miller had been on the far periphery of Hollywood, and even now is rapidly receding back to that outsider status. His stature in the comics industry is a separate question, but he has no more relevance in Hollywood than anyone else who had one of his books adapted into a successful movie five years ago. He is (full disclosure: I am too) just some guy with a blog, on the Occupy Wall Street question.

Much like one's enemies not, by virtue of being one's enemies, all working together, the enemies of those enemies are not necessarily one's friends. Thus, while Rick Moody and I both agree that Frank Miller is a shithead, Rick Moody and I are not, alas, on the same side. Drawing a direct line between Frank Miller and a perceived collective agreement on the part of the American film industry to consciously perpetuate a right-wing political agenda would be the same as me drawing a direct line between Rick Moody's novel Purple America and a similar agreement within the publishing industry to make people who read books want to kill themselves. Both are based on nothing but the arguer's personal biases (Purple America made me want to kill myself, but lots of other people liked it); while Hollywood and the publishing industry both end up occasionally doing those things, neither Moody or I have any solid evidence that it's so.

But that's insane. Evidence? How would people write derpy “LOL ur retarded” blog posts on the Internet if they actually had to back shit up? If you take away our ability to rant about things we don't fully understand on the Internet, what the fuck is next? Taking away our pictures of kittens? I need to abandon this line of thinking and go watch some football before I fuck everything up.

SHE MATES, AND THEN SHE KILLS, AND THEN SOMEONE FILMS IT AND IT'S AWESOME: BLACK WIDOW

It's Black Friday, and you know what that means: I'm watching Black Widow. (Ed. Note: it meaning that is contingent on the author noticing that it's Black Friday, which is not an annual occurrence.) It's long been a favorite of mine for reasons not entirely related to its being a good movie. There are, after all, as I've indirectly alluded to in the past and will hereby define for posterity, four categories of movies:

1—Good movies that are fun to watch: Wherein you find pictures like (and as diverse as) The Maltese Falcon, The Godfather, David Lean epics, early Godard, German Expressionist silents, Sholay, etc etc etc. Self-explanatory.

2—Good movies that aren't so much fun to watch: The kind of thing that set off that “cultural vegetables” shitstorm. The thing that rubbed me wrong about that piece wasn't so much that it dared to insult master filmmakers who like their imagery oblique and their pace deliberate (like Tarkovsky, notably), but that calling difficult art “cultural vegetables” ignores how fucking rad spinach and broccoli and so forth are when you cook them right, and it's a little insulting to vegans (“what the fuck are we, chopped soy liver?”; I just had a good time kickin' it with my vegan cousin at Thanksgiving the other day, I don't want some nekulturny fuckball indirectly insulting her) but whatever, it was a cute phrase that succeeded in pissing a lot of people off. Not the point. What is, is that not every good movie is all that easy to watch. Some movies are challenging. Tarkovsky made a bunch like that, Lars von Trier made one or two, a lot of experimental and/or politically-motivated filmmakers do, some (like Lars) deliberately make their pictures upsetting to the audience to make a point. I throw a lot of tearjerkers into this category as well, because crying sucks under the wrong circumstances.

3—Bad movies that aren't fun to watch: What I like to call “movies that could have been good if they didn't suck,” which sounds like me being a retard, but is really just a colloquialism for a picture that was sunk by poor execution, factor into this category in a big way. Also, utterly venal pieces of shit like every movie Adam Sandler has made since about 2002, assembly-line rom-coms built around the premise that lying is the stuff of madcap comedy, and movies that mistake a “message” for an excuse to not make a good movie. However, not all bad movies fit under this category, as there plenty of . . .

4—Bad movies that are fun to watch: Now we're cookin' with gas. Low-budget genre pictures, spectacular failures by horribly misguided directors, and the ol' “let's make a mountain of cocaine the size of Kilimanjaro and then rail it all over the course of principal photography” romp, all of these and more fall under this category, which some—not me, though, I'm still partial to 1—regard as the most fun of all four. I do think that more movies fall under this category than any other, if only because I love movies to an extent that I enjoy a lot of things even if they're not “good” by most generally accepted metrics, and will often let the things I like about a movie outweigh the things I don't. Such is the case with Black Widow.

Black Widow isn't a bad movie, exactly, but it isn't what a lot of people would immediately think of as being good, either. For one thing, it's a preposterous scenario, with (essentially) unmotivated villainy, and a resolution with enough moving parts that if you stop to think about it for a second, you're like “wait a minute, get the fuck outta here . . .” And yet, Black Widow is awesome.

There's a whooooole lotta talent involved in Black Widow. It was about the third “comeback” picture for director Bob Rafelson, among whose credits as a director and producer in the late 60s and early 70s are a number of all-time classics, though he'd later meet with some bad luck, which was not entirely not his fault. The great Conrad Hall was the DP (and the picture, as one might expect, looks gorgeous). It was written by Ronald Bass, who would go on to become an Oscar winner. The supporting cast, in relatively small roles, has people like Dennis Hopper, Lois Smith, Diane Ladd, Terry O'Quinn, Nicol Williamson, James Hong, and Sami Frey. And its leads are the magnificent Debra Winger and Theresa Russell.

Theresa Russell (left), sexual tension (center), Debra Winger (right)

Its story (spoiler warning) is good trashy pulp fun: Theresa Russell (second spoiler warning) plays a woman who marries rich men, gets them to change their will so they leave her everything, whereupon she kills them. Debra Winger is a Justice Department investigator who becomes consumed with connecting the dots in the absence of any concrete evidence (Theresa Russell covers things up perfectly), and proving that Theresa Russell is a killer. Once Theresa Russell figures out what Debra Winger's up to, she starts scheming an elaborate frame-up to get Debra Winger off her (very shapely) ass, only to see Debra Winger's (third and final spoiler warning) even more elaborate scheme bring about her downfall.

The story is not what makes Black Widow so much fun: it's the players and the execution. Rafelson does a good job keeping things relatively light and not trying to sell the audience on the reality of what's going on (which would be disastrous). It's a movie about how everyone wants to have sex with Theresa Russell (which in 1987 was about as universal as truths came), up to and including Debra Winger, and because that one centrally important truth was so compelling, the rest of the movie falls into place.

Also, it helped having, as a counterpoint to Theresa Russell's perfectly executed, seductive, wildly implausible villainy, Debra Winger be a completely convincing, unglamorous, awkward, regular person. This is something Hollywood constantly fucks up at, resulting in “put glasses on the supermodel and now she's ugly”syndrome, but in Black Widow, it's not just that Debra Winger is dressed in baggy sweaters, long skirts, and flats, her physicality is (deliberately) awkward, her interactions with other people even more so, she doesn't wear makeup, and you actually buy her not having had a date in forever even though her right-hand man (D.W. Moffet) and boss (Terry O'Quinn) are both clearly crushing on her. This is not because Rafelson, Hall, and the costume and makeup designers succeeded in “uglifying” her. For one, that's not physically possible—this is, after all, Debra Winger we're talking about here; for my money she was even hotter than Theresa Russell at the time, but I'm weird—but for another, the one thing the movie does a pretty good and quite sympathetic job of doing is presenting her as a closet case.

Back in the bad old days, gay characters had to be closeted, or punished, or any number of stupid conventions, but Debra Winger's character in Black Widow is one case where it actually works for the movie's benefit. They're not exactly subtle about it: her name is Alex, an androgynous shortening of Alexandra, she evinces nervous befuddlement at her male co-workers' advances and an all-consuming obsession with a gorgeous woman, and even though this has nothing to do with the movie itself, every 80s lesbian was all about the Debra Winger, so there's a bit of pop-cultural osmosis, and for all we know casting her in the first place might have been a subtle signifier of the character's repressed sexuality. And having her be unconsciously attracted to her target adds an intriguing wrinkle, the sort of thing one didn't always see in crime movies, 80s movies, or really any movies for that matter.

It also adds another wrinkle to the part when, once Theresa Russell has realized that Debra Winger might be a cop, and she concocts her elaborate scheme to frame Debra Winger for boyfriend-and-later-fiance Sami Frey's murder, a key element of which is setting Debra Winger up to shtup Sami Frey. Sami Frey being a French guy made that element of the equation easy. French guys' default mode is “I make love to zee beautiful woo-man,” so when Theresa Russell is all like “I'm jetting back to the mainland [they're in Hawaii for the whole last hour of the movie, which accounts for some gorgeous and unusual scenery]” Sami Frey is like “But . . . I make love to zee beautiful woo-man” and his French guy programming starts going “syntax error” and he gets confused, which means Theresa Russell has to point him at Debra Winger (a beautful woman), at which point Sami Frey is like, “Ah, phew, all is right with the world . . . I make love to zee beautiful woo-man!” And so they shtup, even though Debra Winger would clearly rather be nailing Theresa Russell. But Sami Frey was in Bande à Part, and even aside from that deal-clincher, he's got that passionate French guy thing going on, and Debra Winger clearly enjoys the sex. Nailing Sami Frey doesn't make her straight, it just means she knows what's up. And anyway, when he tells her that he's decided to get married to Theresa Russell—and in such a dope French guy way, too: “[Theresa Russell] and I . . . have decided to marry.” Seriously, French people fucking rule—Debra Winger is less upset that the guy she shtupped is getting married to another woman than she is “this guy is going to get murdered unless I do something.” And she already went through the experience of meeting Nicol Williamson at the end of the movie's elongated first act, and was upset when Theresa Russell killed him, this was just one horny, exotic French bridge too far.

Being worried that Theresa Russell was going to kill him was a natural reaction, too, because she kills the shit out of everyone in this. That sense of inevitability was created by one really, really good bit of editing early on, where Dennis Hopper (dead husband #2) is looking for a non-empty bottle of booze, and Theresa Russell tells him there's one—that we've just seen her shooting bad stuff into with a syringe—and he goes “ah there it is” and then BAM we cut to his funeral. It's like, if you're a rich guy, Theresa Russell is going to kill you. When she moves on to Nicol Williamson, she's shown preparing to be his perfect woman in an incredibly calculating fashion, reading up on all the kind of obscure, esoteric shit that he likes. He takes one look at her and immediately realizes that she's full of shit, being smart enough to connect the dots like “something's wrong, no one would be this perfect, not only looking like Theresa Russell but also interested in the exact same stuff I am in the exact way I always wanted someone to be interested in it” and he openly calls her on it. That's when she's like, “well, time for plan B” and gets naked, and once he gets a look at Theresa Russell naked, Dickol Williamson goes, “Nuh uh, boss, there is nothing whatsoever to be worried about here, let me handle this one” and thus was the beginning of the end.

I mean, seriously, I've seen the movie like eight times and I'd still get in that pool....

As smart as Theresa Russell was, she does make a couple really dumb-ass mistakes, though these are well within the realm of possibility for someone crazy enough to pull that kind of serial husband-murdering/inheritance aggregating scheme. One, that she doesn't rectify until too late, was not staying in frequent enough contact with the in-laws she'd seduced along with her ex-husbands, because as Debra Winger points out to Lois Smith, “she just vanished,” and Lois Smith is like, “Damn it, she's right, something's up.” The other mistake, that only really manifests after Theresa Russell thinks her frame-up of Debra Winger in the third act worked, is over-confidence. When she goes to see Debra Winger in jail, thinking that her plan has succeeded and she's framed Debra Winger, she can't resist the temptation to gloat, at which point Debra Winger turns the tables and has the cops bring Lois Smith and the very much not dead Sami Frey into the room. The Hawaiian cops go “damn, that sure was easy for such a convoluted plan,” and Debra Winger takes her new tan and fancy tropical dress and fucks off right out of the police station and into the closing credits, leaving Theresa Russell to ponder just where she went wrong and the audience to be like, “Wait a minute . . . how the hell did Debra Winger get the money to stay in Hawaii for all those months? And isn't she going to be facing a review board or something when she gets back to DC? Will Terry O'Quinn pull strings for her because wants to nail her, or will he not bother because he's never going to because she's gay?”

That's all part of why Black Widow is in that fourth category at the beginning of the post. It doesn't close all its circles, and does have a couple pretty serious narrative problems, one being that Theresa Russell is given no other motivation than “she's just evil” which is unfortunate, because all the empathy that went toward portraying Debra Winger's character as a normal person meant that the writers could have taken a second to give Theresa Russell a more realistic motivation for needing all that money (“you're never quite rich enough” being a little weak). The other is that the premise takes so long to set up that the first act is forty five minutes long and the whole rest of the movie is less than an hour, giving short shrift to the whole “Sami Frey walking around going 'I make love to zee beautiful woo-man' in Hawaii” part of the story, which means that James Hong only gets to be in a couple scenes as the sleaziest PI in the history of cinema (Ed. Note: all movies need more James Hong, even if he's not in them) and we miss out on the opportunity to develop the character of the Hawaiian cop a little more, because he's awesome but he only gets to be awesome for like thirty seconds, which is a shame. Then again, if you elongate the Hawaiian section, you lose out on one fantastic twenty minute Nicol Williamson performance, because holy shit. Even when he's playing a doomed husband in a trashy 80s thriller, that motherfucker puts on a master class. The way he futzes with his cuff when trying to figure out why Theresa Russell is coming on so strong manages to convey nervousness, uncontrollable sexual desire, and existential terror in one gesture. Is that talent? Yeah, that's talent.

So, even though its good qualities make Black Widow a little more than just a standard trashy 80s thriller, its bad qualities make it little more than a standard trashy 80s thriller. (Ed. Note: not a typo, read it again). And that, sadly, means it's not a “good” movie. But holy fuck is it fun. The sexual tension between Theresa Russell and Debra Winger alone could power Honolulu for a month. Sami Frey does the “I make love to zee beautiful woo-man” routine with panache. Nicol fucking Williamson. A Dennis Hopper cameo that's short enough that he doesn't wear out his welcome. Fuck yeah, Black Widow. Fuck yeah.