Department of snowflakes in hell, chances of

"One of the most respected Oscarologists on the planet, Jack Mathews — former film critic of the New York Daily News who now writes for Moviefone — believes that “Basterds” has a real shot to win: “A very good case can be made for its ability to pull off a ‘Shakespeare’-size upset. It received just one less nomination than ‘Avatar’ and ‘The Hurt Locker’ and it has received them in all of the pertinent categories — picture, directing, acting, screenplay and film editing." — Awards Daily

Not in a month of Godard-edited, out-of-sequence Sundays will Inglorious Basterds win Best Picture.

Quote of the day: Pope John Paul II

"There exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object... whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity... all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator.'"— Pope John Paul II's Enclyclical, Veritatis Splendor

My new love: men's figure skating

So I'm 42 and I just found out a new fact about myself: I really like Olympic figure skating.Who knew? In particular, I was just utterly wowed by the pirhouetting Swiss champion Stephane Lambiel (left), who reminded me of the featherweight boxer Prince Naseem Hamed in his dedication to what the old grumps in Strictly Ballroom call "crowd-pleasing moves." It was crazy, cocky, sprezzatura all the way: Rufus Wainwright flounces, Freddy Mercury struts, the double-jointedness of that master moonwalker in the sky, Michael Jackson. Lambiel seemed to my untrained eye to be competing in a different sport to his competors altogether, in much the same way that Prince Naseem used to be boxing in a different dimension. If you could do that — keep your arms down, dance around the ring, point to your chin, then knock out your opponent with a single snaking blow to his — then why didn't everyone do it? That's how I felt about Lambiel. If that's possible — tail-feather shimmies, full-bore spins, little airborne canters — then why would you want to watch anything else? One thing, though, about the ice-skating in general: all the competitors need to work hard to eliminate the bit of their routine where they fall flat on their arses. Seriously. You'd think at this level they'd have ironed out such beginner's lapses. I'd have thought it would all be about hair-splitting perfection, invisible to the naked eye stuff, outleaping the last guys leap by an inch, outspinning the next guy's spin by a 0.005mph. Instead it's easy to spot who's just loused up: its guy on his arse. The winner is the guy not on his arse. It's too simple. Who needs judges for that?

Song of the day: The Fear by Lilly Allen

Lili Allen at the Brit awards. Despite stiff competition from Florence Welch, frontwoman for Florence and the Machine, and newcomer Pixie Lott, she won the award for British female solo act. This makes us happy.

Quote of the day: Awards Daily

'Since Avatar’s script isn’t nominated for an Oscar, it would have to pull off a miracle to win there.' — Awards Daily

A miracle indeed.

Why I'm looking forward to 2010

I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the 2000s sucked. I'm loath to make such a sweeping generalisation, because sweeping generalisations are statistically uncool, as are nostalgics, elegists, heritage nuts and others singers of the cinematic blues. But all the evidence seems to point to a dull burnish of non-exceptionalism to the last ten years at the movies. First, the difficulty I had in coming up with Top Ten films of the Decade, then my realisation that the Oscars had a tough time of it too; throw in the slow soul-siphon of the Bush years and I am more than happy to throw the 2000s under the bus. By contrast, the nineties emerge as one of the great decades in filmmaking, worthy of placement alongside the seventies and the fifties, which in turn raises my hopes for the next decade. Cinematic goodness appears to come in bi-decade bursts, one up, one down. Come on, 2010s. Take me. I'm ready. Post haste with the following please:—

— Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, with Natalie Portman as a ballet dancer who may be imagining her nemesis
— David Fincher's The Social Network, from an Aaron Sorkin script with Justin Timberlake
— Anton Corbijn's The American, with George Clooney as a Local-Heroish assassin in small-town Italy
— Doug Liman's Fair Game, the Valerie Plame story with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts
— the Coen Brothers True Grit with Jeff Bridges in the Rooster Coburn role
— Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, with Steven Dorff and Elle Fanning
— James Mangold's Knight And Day with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz
— David Gordon Green's Your Highness, with James Franco, Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel
— Alexander Payne's The Descendents starring George Clooney as a lawyer on the road with his two daughters
— Chloe, Atom Egoyan's thriller with Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried
— Peter Weir's The Way Back, escape from a Siberian labor camp with Ed Harris and Colin Farrell
— Aaron Schneider's Get Low, with Robert Duvall and Bill Murray
— Steven Soderbergh's female martial-arts thriller Knockout
— Lisa Chodolenko's The Kids Are Alright with Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo, about same sex marriage
— Nicole Holofcener's Please Give with Amanda Peet and Rebecca Hall
— Debra Granik's Sundance winner Winter's Bone
— Departed writer Bill Monaghan's London Boulevard

Quote of the day: Nick Hornby

"There is, it turns out, a lot of paperwork associated with an Oscar nomination. Yesterday we had to sign a form promising that we wouldn’t sell our statuettes; we also had to fill out a questionnaire which asked us, among other things, which of our fellow nominees we would like to meet. My wife, after thinking about it for a good three seconds, replied “George Clooney.” She stuck an exclamation mark after his name. Somewhere in Los Angeles, an official of the Academy of Arts and Motion Pictures is putting all the requests to meet George Clooney in one mountainous pile."— Nick Hornby

I love the hint of career mortality implied in that request not to sell your Oscar. 'You may think you're king of the world now, pal, but don't rule out a pawn shop sometime in your future...'

Quentin Tarantino's war: t'was ever thus

Interviewing Quentin Tarantino on her show last night, Rachel Maddow made the point that Inglourious Basterds “is not just a revenge fantasy about World War II; it’s a torture and terrorism fantasy.” She pointed out that the Basterds' methods are terroristic — their aim is not to so much dead Germans as it is to sow fear in the hearts of the living. I wish she'd taken it further. One of those most unsettling things about Inglorious Basterds was its retooling of the second world war as bloody Bush-era revenge fantasy. This may not be what Tarantino had in mind when he made it, but it is almost certainly what has made it a hit. The torture of Nazis soothes the conscience of Abu-Ghraib-era America: don't worry, it says, our standards haven't slipped, we've always tortured our POWs. We've always fought this lawlessly. Nothing was ever any different.

REVIEW: LA Roux live at Webster Hall

En route to the La Roux concert at Webster Hall last night, Kate tried to convince me that she had once stage-dived.

"You actually stage dived."
"Queen of the mosh pit."
"But you actually stage dived."
"Maybe not stage-dived per se but I came pretty close."
"You can't come close. It's an either / or kind of thing, you either did it or you didn't."
"Okay I didn't."

Once there, I regaled her with the accumulated musical wisdom culled from a childhood spent listening entirely to Depeche Mode records, with occasional breaks for the Yellow Magic Orchstra and Kraftwerk. When a huge set of Simmons drums were wheel on stage, I pointed them out, delivering a potted history of the Simmons drum in pop music, explaining how the drum worked (drooping sine wave + white noise), where Kate might have heard them (Thomas Dolby's She Blinded Me With Science, Naked Eye's cover of Always Something There to Remind me) and was just about to deliver my pitch perfect rendition of what a Simmons drum actually sounded like when Elly Jackson walked on stage and the place went gaga. The concert was great, much better than I expected, just an hour long, and each song only three or four minutes tops. They sounded brighter and punchier live than they do on record (which wouldn't be hard: the production values of the records are very My-Brother-And-His-TR808.) Best of all was Jackson herself, a tiny little thing in slacks and a gold lame jacket, her quiff piled extra high for the occasion, lit from behind by banks of LED lights, she looked like a cross between David Bowie and an Anime cartoon character, with these cute little rockabilly dance moves that look they've only just left the bedroom. She's got a gift for iconic stagecraft, frequently posing in side-angle bent over her microphone, an elfin Elvis silhouetted by a thousand points of light. Dazzling.

My interview with Elly Jackson in New York magazine here

When and why polls mean nothing

'In Canada, 45 percent of service members said they would not work with gay colleagues, and a majority of British soldiers and sailors rejected the idea. There were warnings that hordes of military personnel would quit and promising youngsters would refuse to enlist. But when the new day arrived, it turned out to be a big, fat non-event.' — Reason

People consistently misread polls that are inexpertly worded. Clearly many servicemen answering the question "Would you work with gay colleagues?" took the question to mean "Do you think you'd be happy working with gay colleagues?" and responded accordingly. They took the opportunity to make themselves sound tougher than they are. As an actual index of their willingness to work with gay colleagues, however, it is next to worthless. It's a letting off steam question, like "Is Obama a foreign spy?"

My dream about president Obama

I had a dream last night that I'd found Obama the 60th vote he needs in the Senate to pass his healthcare reform bill. Seriously. That was my dream. It was some old guy who everyone had forgotten about. He wandered into the senate, looking a bit dazed. He was sick and he wasn't too sold on the healthcare package in all its particulars, but somehow I just knew that if I could get him to Obama in one piece, he'd step up to the plate and cast that 60th vote. The rest of the dream was about us racing around the senate building, trying to find Obama. I woke up before I could find him, but already had it planned out what I was going to say.

TOM [nonchalantly]: Mr President, I hear you've got a healtbcare bill you want passed.
OBAMA [grave]: Well, Tom, I'm certainly trying my utmost.
TOM: I hear you're lacking the crucial 60th vote.
OBAMA: You heard that right.
TOM: What would it mean to you if a person came to you and said they have that vote.
OBAMA (puzzled): It sure would mean a lot.
TOM: Would it mean enough to suspend that person's income tax for the rest of his life?
OBAMA (narrowing his eyes): I think I would have to see if what that person said panned out or not.
TOM (choking up): Mr, President, I came here to tell you: I have your sixtieth vote

(I give him his vote, he agrees to suspend my income tax in perpetuity, etc etc)

This man is why the internet was invented

If this kid was American or English I would be compelled to hate him, or at least to say I hated him while secretly liking his songs. He's Norwegian, and came to fame in his home country through Norway's answer to American Idol, but ended up losing to bloody Didrik Solli-Tangen of all people. You see? If any of this had happened in a country where I live, or used to live, or ever had any intention of living, I'd have to hate this song, which I would have heard played week after week on TV and radio until I could bear it no more. And I'd almost certainly be sick of that face too, with its stupid grin and silly baseball cap. But the fact is I've never seen his face before and without the cap he's probably a sweet kid. I've never heard his song before and it's absolutely terrific, worthy of Aha, the sort of thing destined to be number one for 7 weeks until everyone would rather eat their own arm than hear it again. Except those of us who can just drop in, via the internet, and appreciate it for what it is, which is a cool little pop song. You can even glean some extra cred for being interested in the music of another country. Even Britney Spears appears intriguingly exotic to someone, somewhere in the world. It's like dropping into an alternative universe where cultural boredom doesn't exist and nobody can ever judge you for liking the music you like. Just the way the real world is supposed to be but isn't. Isn't the internet great?

Bjørn Johan Muri - Yes Man by alienhits

The military take on The Hurt Locker

'As a former Marine infantryman I can say that I found "The Hurt Locker" to be generally accurate in terms of military culture, all the way down to stupid drunken wrestling matches in the middle of the night. More, I know some people (US Army) who are in Iraq right now, and they love the movie, considering it the most accurate depiction of what it's like over there. Yes, there are things in the movie that don't make sense in terms of actual practice (e.g. the guys never call for backup or close air support - the scene at the desert bunker would have been the perfect opportunity for that). Yes, the lead character is a loose cannon who you imagine being busted, NJP'd (non judicial punishment), and reassigned. But just because these things are improbable doesn't mean they are impossible.' — The Daily Dish

I'm agnostic on this kind of thing. Nobody forced American soldiers to play Russian roulette in Vietnam war, either, but that doesn't mean I think any less of The Deerhunter. Still, it's good to know.

Quote of the day: the Mad Hatter

"I think, kind of tougher to, um, put our arms around, but allowing America's spirit to rise again by not being afraid to kind of go back to some of our roots as a God fearing nation where we're not afraid to say, especially in times of potential trouble in the future here, where we're not afraid to say, you know, we don't have all the answers" — Sarah Palin, key note speaker at the National Tea Party Convention

It's not quite as good as her best. Maybe it lacks the imagistic thrill of "Putin rearing his head in our airspace", or the sheer creativity of "your Department of Law there in the White House". But it's a good effort. Lewis Carroll would be proud. Marc Ambinder reports that everything she says and does right now is consistent with a run for the white house in 2012. Excellent news.

Come back home to us, Quentin, come home

'He is discoursing and commenting on and jumping off from past cinema. With Inglourious Basterds, masterfully, with care and affection, he dreams up a new universe that has more to do with World War II movies than the real thing.... you watch it from a distance, appreciating the references and the masterful mise-en-scene, inspired by Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, the French New Wave and The Guns of Navarone, among other things

... In that sense, he’s very much like French New Wave critic-turned-filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who commented in his films on other movies as well as pop culture.'— Anne Thompson

When I think about the reasons and ways in which Tarantino has gome unstuck, this seems as good a place to start as any: the way critics keep reducing everything in his work to a list of movie references. I get why they do it. They're film critics. That's what they do. Compare movies to other movies in a way which suggest someone casually flipping through the massive rolodex inside their head. But the Frankenstein's monster they've constructed — Tarantino as patchwork man made up from the tissue of a thousand other movies — is false. Worse: critics have repeated it for so long that Tarantino has come to believe it himself. You go back to Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction today and it's amazing how rooted they feel in time and place — specifically Los Angeles in the early nineties. Pulp Fiction one of the great movies about Los Angeles — a low-fi, acrylic version of Chinatown. Its spiraling, corkscrewing plot could take place in no other city. For all his movie-ness, Tarantino's great innovation, it seems to me, was to take movie situations — a heist, a hold-up, a hit job — and then freak them out by hurling a big chunk of reality into their laps. He took movie set-ups and filled them with stoners and slackers and burger pigs and video clerks and then sat back to see what would sparks flew. Imagine a hit man discoursing on a burger. Say a boxer ran into a crime kingpin on the street, just ran into him, like you do when you're down the Beverly centre... The further Tarantino strays from this reality — the far east in Kill Bill, occupied Rance in Inglorious Basterds — the worse his movies have gotten. The solution is simple enough: he needs to stop globe-trotting and return home.

The debt the Republicans owe Rahm Emmanuel

'The article is essential reading for those who want to understand why the Holder Justice Department has shut down all efforts to secure accountability for serious crimes committed during the war on terror, potentially including homicides. Mayer gives us a step-by-step explanation of the process and the roles played by each. It leaves little doubt that the man in charge is Rahm Emanuel.' — Scott Horton, praising Jane Mayer's article on Eric Holder and the KSM trial

Reversible Opinion #03

'I said that the battle between Up in the Air and Avatar would be the most symbolic Oscar race since Forrest Gump vs. Pulp Fiction back in 1994/1995…Okay, Up in the Air, while a respectable hit, didn’t forge quite the emotional connection with a lot of the audience that I’d wanted it to. But even if I did have the wrong movie, I think I had the right point: With The Hurt Locker now having all but vacuumed up the year’s critical acclaim, and with Avatar having just this week become the top-grossing domestic movie of all time, Avatar vs. The Hurt Locker is an awesomely symbolic race (and not just because James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow were once married). It’s a clash of size, values, popularity — of essential notions of What Movie Art Is in the 21st century.' — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

This is an occasional post devoted to statements that are not just wrong but exact inversions of the truth, such that were you to reverse them you would end up with something reasonable. Here, the writer in question has spared us the effort and reversed himself.

Reversible Opinion #02 here

Reversible Opinion #01 here

Opening up his crazy heart

'The sixth floor of the Casa del Mar hotel, in Santa Monica, is crammed with movie stars. Tall, willowy Maggie Gyllenhaal strides down the corridor in slingbacks and blue eye shadow, discussing schedules with her publicist. Halfway down the corridor, seated in a chair, is Robert Duvall, barrel-chested, wizened, hearty, the Ancient Mariner of the American screen, telling his assistant about the best hamburger he ever ate. “It was 100% beef, just beautiful,” he says. “Have you been there?” The assistant shakes his head as the door to one of the hotel suites swings open and out walks Jeff Bridges, finished with his interview. He sees Duvall and his face lights up.

“Here he is,” Bridges says. “Hey, you coming to my birthday party tomorrow night?” Duvall frowns, smiles, spreads his hands.

“You didn’t get the invite?” Bridges asks.

Duvall shakes his head.

Bridges’s people stare at Duvall’s people. Duvall’s people stare at Bridges’s people. We are at a celebrity-etiquette Mexican standoff. Nobody moves except for Bridges, who is already down on his knees, his arms laid atop Duvall’s thighs. “Man, I need you there,” he says, proceeding to explain exactly why he needs Duvall to be there. Bridges is a big man — 6ft 2in, or 6ft 3in in cowboy boots — but his body language is intimate, direct, respectful, warm, a cub talking to papa lion.

It’s the first thing I learn about Bridges: he’s extremely tactile. He loves hugs and high-fives, and makes fleeting contact with you during conversation — your elbow, your knee — to bring you closer in. For the press junket of The Big Lebowski, he arranged for all the journalists to have massages, to get them in the same chill zone as the Dude, the Venice Beach slacker he immortalised in the movie. It did so-so at the American box office, got a second wind in Europe and is now at the heart of a large, thriving cult, with scores of Lebowski festivals taking place every year. Bridges visited one recently, performing music in front of an audience of bathrobe-attired Dudes sipping white russians. “I had my Beatles moment,” he recalls. “‘Ladies and gentlemen, I can’t believe I get to say this, but here is... the DUUUDE!’ ROOOOARR. It was surreal. Like performing to a sea of bowling pins and booze. Weird. Oh, God. The fact that there are these people keeping that movie alive.”

— from my interview with Jeff Bridges for the Sunday Times

New York City in the rear view mirror

I just caught The French Connection on TV again and found myself drinking in all those long hand-held takes out the car window of Manhattan Bridge, China town, Little Italy. The tenements look amazingly sooty, the advertising hoardings barely legible, everything suffused in that bleary 6am blue light that makes you feel tired in your bones. One of the strange things about seeing New York on film, though, is not how much has changed, but how little: everything scrubs up nicely on the surface but the underlying structures are instantly recognisable. Seeing New York on film always fills me with a sense of just passing through — taking the city over from the last generation before handing it over to the next, but never really taking possession of the place. No other city makes me feel that way. London's landmarks don't instill such mortal pangs, and nor do Paris's, even though those cities are a lot older. Maybe that's just it: New York is the only city that seems to get younger, not older, and the movies are there to prove it, a vanity mirror recording everything in reverse, like Dorian Grey's portrait.

Subterranean homesick alien

I'm feeling a little homesick this afternoon. I'm not sure what brought it on — all this supremacist talk from the Republicans, the sight of old photos on facebook, my inability to fly at the moment — but I'm feeling very ET-phone-home all of a sudden. I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often, to be honest. To deal with this (or maybe just to sink into it further) I just went to Myers of Keswick and bought the following: two packets of twiglets, one packet of hobknobs, some Heinz spaghetti, a Cornish pasty, two packets of Walkers crisps and a bulk-buy of Caramel bars. All I need to do is find Shadowlands on TV and I'll be all set.

New favorite band from Texas: Midlake

Their excellent new album, The Courage of Others, led me back to 2006's The Trials of Van Occupanther, which is even better. Let no-one accuse me of leading the way here; I'm just happy to play catch up, but for those in the same boat they're from Denton Texas; they met at university and first started recording in 1999, and first got their big break in Europe (their first album was mastered at Abbey Road). They sound like a cross between Radiohead and The Mommas and the Pappas — or do I mean Fairport Convention? One of those psychedlic folk bands with lots of harmonies, anyway. I'm smitten.

The Sun and the fine art of making stuff up

I'd almost forgotten the sound of Sun-speak. But then The Huffington Post linked to a Sun interview with Linda Hamilton, in which she is claimed to have said the following:—

* "Titanic was the mistress he left me for. He was the kind of man who really would rather be at work with the mistress than at home with the wife."

* "The woman he can't get is always his dream girl. Work and women go hand in hand for Jimbo, and I should know."

* "Then he told the crew that he'd made me work up that rage to get a better performance from me. Bull! So the apology didn't mean a thing. I thought: 'You creep!'"

* "He used to say to me: 'Anybody can be a father or a husband. There are only five people in the world who can do what I do, and I'm going for that.'"

Of these, only the last feels like it was uttered by an actual live human being. "Titanic was the mistress he left me for"? Who speaks in headlines like that? And then helpfully continues the metaphor "the kind of man who would rather be at work with the mistress". Nobody does. Its pure fabrication. As is "work and women go hand in hand for Jimbo, and I should know." It's the redundant over-emphasis ("And I should know") that's the give away her, as is the helpful bit of explanation in the next quote ("so the apology didn't mean a thing") to help out the Sun's dimwitted readers with the point of the story. Ah, England, I do miss her so. Fish and chips. Marmite on toast. Tabloid newspapers filled with made-up twaddle.

Song of the day: David by The Radio Department

Four years in the making, The Radio Department's third album, the follow-up to 2006's Pet Grief will finally see the light of day on March April 20th in North America via Labrador. David first appeared do a 4-track EP in June of last year.

"Watching Josh Rouse strum his guitar on a hidden-away Barcelona sidestreet while I ate a Cara Cara orange for breakfast (I accidentally grabbed this variety at the market; it’s rosy pink inside and tastes like sunrises) made today feel like a decadent moment of defiance in wintry February."— Heather Browne, I Am Fuel You Are Friends

Guilty until proven innocent (if you're a foreigner)

'If I had the power to have one statement of fact be universally recognized in our political discussions, it would be this one: "The fact that the Government labels Person X a "Terrorist" is not proof that Person X is, in fact, a Terrorist." That proposition should be intrinsically understood by any American who completed sixth grade civics and was thus taught that a central prong of our political system is that government officials often abuse their power and/or err and therefore must prove accusations to be true (with tested evidence) before they're assumed to be true and the person punished accordingly. In particular, the fact that the U.S. Government, over and over, has falsely accused numerous people of being Terrorists -- only for it to turn out that they did nothing wrong -- by itself should compel a recognition of this truth'— Glenn Greenwald

It is consistently amazing to me that you hear this from people who in every other area, profess deep and abiding scepticism about the role and influence of government. They are totally sceptical of governments' ability to run schools or hospitals or employ the jobless, but somehow when it comes to accusing people of being terrorists, they fondly imagine a 100% success rate, magically! The government has said it, therefore it must be so! (In fact, as far as Gitmo is concerned, their success rate is closer to 7%). I don't think I'd notice this so much if it weren't for the fact that these rules only seem to apply to non-Americans. By some method that I have yet to figure out, the GOP have managed to convince the vast majority of Americans that only Americans are protected by the constitution. In fact it doesn't apply even to them. It applies to the Federal government.

Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Any state. Any person.

Evangelical Christians like Arnie movies, too!

Those nice people at Movieguide (the one’s who award Avatar "four marxes and an Obama" on the basis of perceived pantheistic ills) have released the nominations for their “Best 2009 Movies for Mature Audiences” awards. For those of you unfamiliar with this illustrious ceremony, which takes place at a Bervely Hills gala, the awards were created to honor “moral and spiritual principles” as decided by a Christian nonprofit organization “dedicated to redeeming the values of the entertainment industry by influencing industry executives and by informing and equipping the public about the influence of the entertainment media.” Sounds like they have their hands full! Their shortlist comprises:

The Blind Side
Confessions of a Shopaholic
Invictus
Julie & Julia
Knowing
Star Trek
The Stoning of Soraya M
Taken
Terminator Salvation
The Young Victoria

The Blind Side's Christian bona fides are self evident. (Southern, since you ask, and republican-voting, with a gun tucked into its purse for good luck). Confessions of a Shopaholic is a sweet little parable about the virtues of conspicuous consumption — maybe not a subject on which Jesus had all that much, or even anything to say, but then he never got to witness the greater glories of the American mall. I am guessing that Star Trek squeezes in because it provides such timely mockery of Obama-era diplomacy (hopelessly naive against antagonistic Romulans). Knowing I had to look up, but it's that piece of apocaylptic garbage starring Nicolas Cage which teaches us that when God destroys the earth at the End of Days he will clearly be taking lessons from Industrial Light and Magic. The Stoning of Soray M teaches us how perfectly horrible it is to live in the middle east. Taken is that b-movie knuckle-duster about Liam Neeson castrating his daughter's kidnappers. The Young Victoria was charming piffle about English royalty. The really confusing one for me was Terminator Salvation. Anyone like to hazard a guess as to which "moral and spiritual principles" these people think they've uncovered in a McG movie? The moral efficacy of skidding motorbikes? The Jesuitical blush of blooming mushroom clouds? Or did they just dig the redemptive appearance of that Republican governor at the end? Please tell me it wasn't just because it had the word "salvation" in the title.

Loving the uncool: An Officer and a Gentleman

"It is much easier to proclaim dislike for a popular movie than to admit to liking an uncool movie," blogged the Self-Styled Siren the other day, issuing a challenge for people to fess up to their uncoolest tastes. She laid down some ground rules:—

"By uncool, the Siren doesn't mean "slightly offbeat" or "quirky" or "underrated." She means "courting hoots of derision from critical colleagues." Picking a lesser work of a widely admired auteur doesn't cut it, because after all, even late Hawks is still Hawks. And picking a film that was once lambasted, but is no longer, is also not exactly what the Siren had in mind. When the estimable Girish Shambu called for one of the first blogathons, and designed it around Showgirls--now that's what I'm talking about. Larry Aydlette on the great Burt Reynolds, Dennis Cozzalio resurrecting 1941; these kinds of judgments take some nerve. Others like Glenn Kenny speaking up for the reviled Ishtar also count."

Most of the Siren's pics are too old to count (how can you feel shut out of any consensus on Susan Hayward? I would be hard pressed to find amongst my friends anyone with an opinion of Susan Hayward, good or bad), and while I can't quite echo her bravery with regard to Merchant Ivory movies, I did catch Room With A View the other day and was taken aback by its infectious high spirits (also taken aback by the number of bare English arses it contained. Seriously. Have you seen it recently? It's probably got more bare English arses than any movie, ever). But off the top of my head, I came up with the following films, their uncoolness not a camp indulgence, but a weary badge of (sort of) honour.

— Footloose. One number in particular: 'Let's Hear it For The Boy'. What can I say? The theme song every sulky, alienated teenage boy dreams of hearing.

— The Bridges of Madison County. The only film that has ever made me honk like a sealion. Also the only film I can think of recently where they were genuinely in love and genuinely had to leave one another. It's making me sad just to think about it.

— Titanic. My wife still looks at me funny when this one comes up.

— Avatar, too, for that matter. A lifetime of mockery awaits me. It's okay. I am strong.

— Rocky. The scene in the pet shop. Back when Stallone was a contender. (I also liked the flashes of old glory in the most recent Rocky.)

— In Her Shoes. Liked it a lot. Didn't even think it was too long. Another hour and I'd still have been there, hand in my popcorn.

— Kevin Costner in Tin Cup. Kevin Costner generally, in fact. I love him best with women that are smarter than him. Not sure what that says.

— Terms of Endearment. I am a big fan of James L Brooks and even dragged a friend along to see Spanglish. By which standards Endearment does not look too bad at all. In fact, I will go to bat for this film. Any time. Any where. Any hoo.

— Anything with Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn

Any others, people?

Why do Republicans insist I'm secretly gay?

Hearing all the Republican senators speaking direly about the consequences of letting "those who commit homosexual acts" into the military has reminded me of just how funny the right-wing theory of homosexuality is. It's that "homosexual acts" that cracks me up. Triangulated by their own belief that gayness is a choice, rather than a persuasion, they are forced to posit a world where we are all, potentially, gay. It's a rare instance of a prejudice being levelled at a group different only by degree, not kind. Normally, it's kind, so as to put as much distance as possible between you and the person you are judging. They're just different, wholly other, and nothing to do with you or I. But the right-wing's accounts of homosexuality puts it is tantalisingly within reach of everyone: we all of us wish have temptations to have sex with our own gender. I wish to bugger. You wish to teabag. That woman at the coffee shop wishes to go down on the policewoman. The only thing stopping us is personal resolve, or moral fibre, poor impulse control. It's an interesting theory, as they say. But speaking for myself, the impulse has never so much as crossed my mind.

King of the world, plus one fictional moon

"Cameron knows he is hated: every time he opened his mouth at the Golden Globes, the air was sucked from the room as surely as oxygen from the lungs of those on Pandora, where the atmosphere is so noxious as to put you down in on minute and stop your heart in three. He didn’t need to conjur up a new world to let us know he was God. We already knew that. Listen to him when he picks up his Oscar and you will hear a man who’s pulse doesn’t flicker above 80 even while addressing a billion people worldwide. Why should he be scared? Just another filmmaker having a chat with his audience." — from my article about Avatar for The Daily Telegraph

Inside the mind of Sam Rockwell

What's it like inside the mind of Sam Rockwell? It's an object of some conjecture, after Rockwell has taken us three times to the brink of lunacy and back, in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Snow Angels and Moon. Here he is talking to me about his dual performances in Moon.

“The guy who's been there 3 years is like a Castaway, Robinson Crusoe guy, like the guy in Silent Running. Hes a little spacey. He's mellowed, but gone a little wacky. The new guy is a more type A. We talked him having a little anger management problem in his past. I watched Ray Winstone in Nil By Mouth, Clint Eastwood, Sam Shephard in The Right Stuff. More stoic, more explosive... like a lead. The other guy is more a character actor."

For the scene where Sam B looks after Sam A, who is sick, Rockwell drew inspiration from a scene in Midnight Cowboy.

"There a scene where Ratso has the flu he's leaning on Jo Buck and Jo Buck is combing his hair. I said 'can we do this?' The idea of one guy taking care of the sick guy. There’s a scene where the two clones touch. Every time we have the clones its very tricky. It took a lot of planning but we did it.”

He also watched Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor, Michael Keaton in Multiplicity, and Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers. ("Jeremy Irons was the most helpful.") What's it like inside the mind of Sam Rockwell? It turns out to bear a suspicious similarity of the basement of Blockbuster video, or Kim's.

Obviously you have to draw from real people, too. But it's good to watch movies. Not to copy. Its good just for inspiration. And also to set a standard. They don't make movies like that any more. Alien. Blade Runner. You’re never gonna can never reach but you might as well aim for it. Reach for the stars.”

Certain favorites recur. For his role as Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he went back to The Nutty Professor again. "And Beetlejuice. I watched that for The Green Mile too. That’s a great performance.” Finally we talked about my favorite performance of Rockwell's, in Snow Angels.

"We definitely tried to get the book but there was some anti hero prototypes we were drawing from. David [Gordon Green] and I talked about Star 80, Taxi Driver, Inside Moves with Jon Savage. You know that last scene in Star 80 where he invites her over before he kills her? That scene was very helpful for Snow Angels. He’s very nervous around her. That's a great scene. The way they build it.... I like to watch documentaries too. Not to name drop but Brad Pit also lent me this documentary about the guys who kill abortionists. The christian guys. They all had beards so I grew a beard. And I've been watching Grizzly Man for this play [The Behanding of Spokane]. That and Taxi Driver."

It's interesting if only because there is nothing remotely studied about Rockwell's performances. They are marvels of fluidity. He's out there in a way that very actors can be without losing control. He's comfortable with levels of disorder that would have most of them sealing up with technique. Which means that even at his darkest pitch — in Snow Angels, say — there's a vulnerablity to him: no matter how frightening he gets you can see he's scared himself half to death. "You think you're a tough guy?" he taunts his wife's new boyfriend, before punching his fist into a tree until his knuckles are a bloody mess. "Can you do this?" He's giddy with the juiced-up power that self-destructive impulses grant you — the element of surprise you have over your fellow human beings. It's this I most love about his performances: the crackle of anarchy behind his eyes, the racing intelligence and aching heart of men so far from home that they can only laugh. You don't get that from a trip to Blockbuster.

Full interview to come in New York Magazine

Song for the Day: Marchin In by Lo-Fi-Fnk

Thoughts on this year's Oscar nominations: meh

— Pleased to see Hurt Locker and Avatar get nine nominations a piece, like Ripley-in-the-powerloader squaring off against the alien Queen. How fitting that Cameron will lose Best Director to one of his own heroines, so to speak.

— Saddened to see beautiful Bright Star fall through the cracks. Pearls before swine.

— Still mystified by the Tarantino gold rush but then post-Jackie-Brown Tarantino is a peculiarly American taste. (The stuff set abroad, basically. It's like Bertolucci's non-Italian movies. What's the point?)

— Pleased for Jeremy Renner, Carey Mulligan and Alexandre Desplat.

— Thrilled for my inner nine-year-old to see Star Trek, Avatar and District 9 do so well. If I'd known that a movie like Avatar would one day win best picture, as opposed to Chariots of Fire or Ghandi, my little heart would have been a-pitter-patterin' like a rabbit's.

— Very pleased for my friends Nick Hornby and Amanda Posey and their Education nominations. I've never personally known someone nominated for an Oscar before. Now I know two. Cool.

— Bored by how over this race feels. Avatar, Bigelow, Bridges, Bullock, Monique, Waltz, Reitman, Boal... I feel like these are last year's winners already. Where are the potential upsets? Wes Anderson nabs animated feature? The entirety of my hopes and dreams rest on Up's Michael Giacchino winning for best score and Janet Patterson for her Bright Star costumes.

Reversible Opinion #02

'If Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man fails to land a Best Picture nomination tomorrow morning (which is somewhere between a likely and more-than-likely scenario) but Todd Phillip's The Hangover does, there will be "so great a cry throughout the land," as Charlton Heston once put in Ben-Hur. It will be a lamentation for 21st Century movie culture, for the provincial thinking of the Academy types who failed to value the humor in the Coens' misanthropy, for those who constantly fail to consider the Movie Godz perspective, for the failure to understand the difference between a generally pleasing film and an exceptionally worthy one, etc. It'll be a terrible thing.' — Jeffrey Wells

This is an occasional post devoted to statements that are not just wrong but exact inversions of the truth, such that were you to reverse them you would end up with something reasonable. Thus: If the Academy can reward The Hangover and not A Serious Man, it will be a victory for 21st century movie culture and a blow against the provincial thinking that would prize the crabby misanthropy of the Coens over a movie which wants you to enjoy yourself.

Reversible Opinion #01 here.

Tracking shots: can we find something else to like?

"The extended take or long take is the first time I noticed a filmmaker articulating cinematic space and pushing his/her desire for notions of auteurism" says Mike Le who has compiled his 20 favorite tracking shots over at Geekweek. It's the usual suspects: Rope, The Shining, Weekend, Boogie Nights, The Player, Children of Men, Touch of Evil, Goodfellas, etc etc. I know that a liking for these things is virtually compulsory in any aspiring film geek ("the audacity of Cuaron's vision is never in question," runs a typical commentary from Le, "This scene is the strongest conceptually from beginning to end") but can someone explain to me why, if these things are supposed to be such a filigree mark of their auteur's singular vision, every single filmmaker uses them? How singular is that? Who's vision is being expressed exactly? The history of the tracking shot is one of ignominious decline. Scorsese's Goodfellas marked the last good one; but Anderson had to put his at the beginning of Boogie Nights, before we got too involved in the story; by the time of Atonement, it was merely a wannabe auterist tic. For many film geeks of course, wannabe auterists tics are the whole point of the exercise. They're so easy to spot! Not me. When I watch a film, I want to get lost. Can we find something else to admire?

Salinger's real crime: not using his God-given gifts

"J D Salinger's long silence, and his withdrawal from the world, attracted more than the usual degree of gossip and resentment — as thought we readers were somehow owed more than his words, were somehow owed his personal, talk-show presence too." — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

No. That is not right. I do find myself resentful of Salinger, but is not that he didn't appear on chat shows. There are plenty of writers I love, like Anne Tyler, who shy from the usual round of interviews and public appearances. The reason I resent Salinger is that he stopped writing. A lot of the obits are being willfully stupid about this, dressing up Salinger's retreat from publishing in mythic terms when all we were witnessing was yet another writer's unbending course towards self-annihilation — as depressing and stupid and avoidable in its own way as an alcoholic's. The ]raw emotions he leaves behind (see Bret Easton Ellis's "Ive been waiting for this day for-fucking-ever") are like those experienced by the relatives of a suicide. It was profoundly selfish, his withdrawal from the world, his refusal use those gifts. They were not his to decide what to do with. Sorry to sound so momsy and sensible about it but there it is. All this silence-as-a-higher-plane-of-existence stuff is tosh. Writers write. Salinger didn't. That's the heartbreak.

Bleepy, bouncy synths + belting voice = La Roux

“Honestly, mate, you wouldn’t believe the fucking questions I’ve been asked,” says British singer Elly Jackson of the tabloid attention she’s been getting back home. “Are you gay? Have you ever had sex with a girl? Are you in a relationship? Who’s your boyfriend? Who are your ex-boyfriends?”

— my interview with La Roux's Elly Jackson in New York magazine

So is Avatar no.1 at the all-time box office or not?

So is Avatar the all time champ at the box office or not? Last week, the New York Times, along with the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times, led with the story that James Cameron's epic-in-blue had bested Titanic's record to become "history's highest grossing film" — number one in a top ten that looked something like this:—

1. Avatar — $1,878m
2. Titanic — $1,842m
3. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King — $1,119m
4. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest — $1,066m
5. The Dark Knight — $1,001m
6. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone — $974m
7. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End — $961m
8. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — $938.2m
9. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince — $934.0m
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers — $925.3m

No sooner had the champagne corks been popped, however, than Forbes asked “Is Avatar Really King Of The Box Office?” pointing to Box Office Mojo’s list box office winners adjusted for inflation, which Gone With the Wind at number one.

1. Gone With The Wind — $1,485m
2. Star Wars — $1,309m
3. The Sound of Music — $1,046m
4. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial — $1,042m
5. The Ten Commandments — $962m
6. Titanic — $943m
7. Jaws — $941m
8. Doctor Zhivago — $912m
9. The Exorcist — $812m
10. Snow White And the Seven Dwarves — $801m

You could almost hear the wilting of light sabers across the land. Avatar, meanwhile, was to be found languishing at number 26, just below Grease and the Lion King. “The whole Gone with the Wind analogy is a red herring,” protested Jade, at MTV.com. “I mean how many times did Gone With the Wind need to be re-released over the years for it to make what it did? Avatar did it within how many days?” Over at EW, the protests grew more strenuous: “Scarlett O’Hara is the biggest sociopathic brat I have ever seen and I don’t get why other women like her” posted one. “Who cares about the past?” suggested another. “Are you for real? WHO CARES ABOUT THE PAST????? Are you sane???? The past is a VITAL PART of what we are, who we are.” Then the discussion turned to the demerits of of slavery, as these things do, and all hope of a consensus was lost. The two lists seem written by different people — the first by an amnesiac nine-year-old, the second by your grandmother — and neither feels quite right. The first ignores inflation, thus favoring the present, but the second ignores overseas revenues, thus favoring the past. “The last two decades have seen the biggest growth in overseas revenues in Hollywood’s history,” says Box Office Mojo’s Brandon Graham, who is happy to concede that “Counting box office revenues is an imperfect science.” The reason Box Office Mojo ignores international figures is because they are hard to find for any move predating 1970, and nor did it matter. Back in the 20s and thirties, Hollywood’s overseas revenues hovered somewhere between 10% and 20%. In the aftermath of the Second World war, they took a boost, with the sole exception of the musical, which turned out to be one of the truly indigenous American art forms: whenever the people up on screen burst into song, Johnny Foreigner took the opportunity to take a leak. Things began to change with Jaws and Star Wars, summer blockbusters that gobbled up 40% of their revenue overseas, but it wasn’t until after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the opening up of Asia, that thing began to pick up speed. Jurassic Park made over 60% of its money overseas, and in 1994, Hollywood’s overseas revenues outstripped its domestic ones. James Cameron may not have yet mastered the art of the graceful acceptance speech — taking his two opportunities at the Golden Globes to update us on the state of his bladder — but he said one true thing that night: “What we do is we make entertainment for a global audience.” Avatar made an astonishing 70% of its money abroad. You don’t have to be the kind of person who paints their face a delicate shade of Slushee-Grape blue to know that that’s an unignorable statistic. But how unify the two lists? In a perfect world we would wait until somebody discovered the lost treasure chest containing the overseas revenues of The Sound of Music and The Ten Commandments, but even if we highball the number — 36%, let’s say, the same as Raiders of the Lost Ark — the actual list of all-time box office champs, both adjusted for inflation and including overseas revenues would look something like this:—

1. Gone With The Wind — $2,984m
2. Titanic — $2,896m
3. Star Wars — $2,199m
4. Avatar — $2,039m
5. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial— $1,897m
6. Jaws — 1,703m
7. The Sound of Music — $1,651m
8. Jurassic Park — 1,622m
9. Ten Commandments — $1,544m
10: Doctor Zhivago — 1,463m

Finally: balance in the Force. Past and present in something like equipoise. And James Cameron’s Avatar at number four, book-ended by Lucas and Spielberg. That seems about right.

— my article about Avatar's box office for New York magazine

Another blast on the horn from Manohla Blahnik!

Readers of the New York Times have barely recovered from Manohla Blahnik's last enthusiastic bout of futurology — courtesy of Avatar? 3D? Digital cameras? I can't quite remember now, such was the prismatic dance she enacted — when she hits us with another. This one is entitled "Talking about Revolution (For Digital Age)" and concerns the "seismic changes" currently rocking the independent film industry — bigger even than the seismic changes of 1993 (?) apparently and worthy of comparison with the biggie of 1960, when the New American Cinema Group advised, “It is time to blow the whole thing up!” Can't wait. Viva la revolution! So what's up, Manolo?

Novice filmmakers and longtime independent insiders have begun experimenting, and finding some success, with new approaches to releasing movies, including self-distribution. The D.I.Y. world isn’t new, but what is novel is how filmmakers and other industry insiders are sharing their nuts-and-bolts experiences and blue-sky ideas both in person and online, creating a virtual infrastructure.

Translation: they're using Facebook. That's it. That's the story. Before you can snipe that this is just another journalist using social networking to jazz up a vaporous think-piece, think again.

Filmmakers who use Facebook to sell their movies aren’t simply partaking in a social-networking fad; they are trying to create a more complex, interactive and personalized relationship between them and their audiences.

Pour example?

Independent filmmakers now show up at some of their screenings in person. Last August, for instance, the young filmmaker Andrew Bujalski appeared at the decidedly low-key Los Angeles premiere of his latest, “Beeswax,” at the Nuart Theater, one of that city’s single-screen art-house theaters. Before the movie began, he chatted amiably with filmgoers in the theater lobby, not far from the concession stand. Along with his producers, he also introduced the movie and, when it was over, stayed to take questions from an audience that now had a sense of the man to go along with his director’s credit.

You've got. To be. Kidding me. Please tell me that Blanolik hasn't summoned a Cassandra-like prognostication of industry-wide revolution from a story about an audience Q & A at a single-screen cinema in downtown LA? How futuristic is that? Some bloke showed up at a cinema to talk about his movie? That happens all the time. That's called turning up — the opposite of Facebook. I thought the interwebs were supposed to signify terrifying chrome reflections of our own anomie and alienation in an impersonal digitised age. But let's not be too hasty. Apparently, at the Sundance Film Festival this year, some cinema owners got together to discuss their “hair problem” — meaning, an aging clientele that’s either gray or going bald.

the producer Ted Hope, whose recent titles include “Adventureland,” wrote that it “is really surprising how few true indie films speak to a youth audience.” He continued, “In this country we’ve had Kevin Smith and ‘Napoleon Dynamite,’ but nothing that was youth and also truly on the art spectrum like ‘Run Lola Run’ or the French New Wave (‘Paranormal Activity’ not withstanding...),” adding: “Are we incapable of making the spirited yet formal work that defines a lot of alternative rock and roll? And if so, why is that?”

All blood flow to the head now firmly blocked, this story is losing consciousness by the second. Far from amassing evidence of a new spirit of revolution surging through the land, Blahblahnik has, incredibly, amassed evidence of the exact opposite: the non-existence of any such thing. Still, never mind.

Younger audiences might not be more active moviegoers than their grandparents (watching a film is never a passive experience), but they live in an interactive, media-saturated world.

Exciting! Anything else?

This year’s Sundance was abuzz about entries that were available for rental on YouTube or through video on demand during the festival, as filmmakers try out new ways to make an impact. These small-screen efforts have met with skepticism even while reaping the expected publicity, because it’s unclear how they might affect a movie’s distribution chances post-festival. Now, as the independent cinema nurses its Hollywood hangover, the future remains unclear even as one message is getting louder: It is time to blow the whole thing up.

As a piece of horseshit, meaning all things to all men and nothing to anyone, that last sentence is unimprovable.