So the Golden Globes are tonight and my wife and I are chomping at the bit to beat one another into a fine pulp. I have a slight advantage over Kate with the Globes, which are awards by the Foreign Press Association, and I am, or used to be, a member of the foreign press. She's better at the Oscars, because she has a native's radar for where the love is — who's been plugging away, who's due, etc etc. But we've both learned a lot from the other so neither win by that much: it's always a vote here, a vote there. And my votes are still entirely not locked down. Waltz and Monique for supporting, obviously. Meryl Streep for best comic actress. Best original song: The Weary Kind. Score: James Horner. Foreign film: The Prophet. Animated Feature: Up. Best screenplay: Up in the Air. Best comedy/musical: 500 Days of Summer. After that things get a bit murkier, starting with best comic actor: Damon, Day Lewis or Downey? Best actor: Bridges or Clooney? Best actress: Mulligan or Bullock? As for best film/director, does it go Avatar/Bigelow or Hurt Locker/Cameron? I've got four hours to figure it out. Kate is beetling about the apartment with great sense of purpose. I don't like it. I don't like it one bit.
"Someone sends me the links every time there's a new one. I think I've seen about 145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn't get a better compliment as a director" — Oliver Hirschbiegel, director of Downfall (2004).
The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle (Viking)
Solar by Ian McEwan (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese)
The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (Reagan Arthur Books/January)
Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America by Peter Biskind
The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis, Jonathan Cape (May 11)
Innocent by Scott Turow (Grand Central Publishing)
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar)
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte (Farrar/March)
Private Life by Jane Smiley (Knopf /May 4)
The Men Who Would Be King by Nicole LaPorte (Harcourt)
The Waterproof Bible by Andrew Kaufman (Random House/Feb)
Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel (Knopf Canada/April)
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf/Jun 5)
"As a boy in Chippawa, Ontario, James Cameron once sent some mice over the edge of Niagara Falls in a small submersible made from old mayonnaise jars, an Erector Set and a paint bucket. Another time, he made a hot-air balloon out of a dry-cleaning bag and some candles, floating it down the street until someone reported it as a U.F.O. and called the Fire Department. Together with the young Steven Spielberg’s experiments in civic alarum-raising — locking himself in the bathroom until the Phoenix Fire Department was summoned — Cameron’s excursions suggest two interlocking propositions: (1) If you want to know who is going to grow up to be a box-office titan, check out the records of your local Fire Department. And (2) nobody should be surprised if Balloon Boy grows up to be the proud auteur behind “Terminator Resurrection: This Time With Feeling.” — from my review of The Futurist: The Films of James Cameron by Rebecca Keegan for The New York Times
Laura Veirs lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches banjo. She started writing music while miserable in China, working as a translator with a geological expedition. Since her debut Laura Veirs in 1999, she has recorded six albums none of which I have heard, but will soon be reporting back on, since I like July Flame so much. It's consistently beautiful — my first favorite album of 2010.
Sade —Soldier of Love (Feb 9th)
M.G.M.T.—Congratulations (Spring)
Band of Horses — Night Rainbows (TBA)
The National — Untitled (TBA)
David Bryne & Fatboy Slim — Here Lies Love (Feb)
JJ — JJ no 3 (March)
Hot Chip — One Life Stand (Feb 9th)
Corinne Bailey Ray — The Sea
The Magnetic Fields — Realism (Jan 26th)
Spoon — Transference (Jan 19th)
Massive Attack — Heligoland (Feb 9th)
Arcade Fire — Untitled (May)
The Streets — Computers and Blues (Feb 23)
Gorillaz — Plastic Beach (Mar)
Peter Gabriel — Scratch My Back (Feb 15th)
Outkast — Untitled TBA
The New Pornographers — Untitled (TBA)
Amy Winehouse — Untitled (TBD)Goldfrapp — Head First (Mar 23rd)
Yeasayer — Odd Blood (TBA)
Elbow — Untitled (TBA)
Cat Power — Untitled (TBA)
Christina Aguilera — Bionic (March)
Do you ever look for a movie to go see, realise you've seen the same actor's name poppng up again and again but can't remember when or why they became a star? You just woke up one morning and they were everywhere, like mushrooms, or moss. I have that with Bradley Cooper. Where did he spring from? Who voted him King of the Prom? Last year he had Sandra Bullock chasing after him in All About Steve, this year he has Julia Roberts hitting on him in Valentine's Day. I know he was in The Hangover, but that was just last year too: what did he do to win his current position as Hollywood's luckiest tyke? When did we get to cast our vote? I'm beginning to suspect a big case of the Ben Afflecks, wherein some goodlooking bozo sneaks into the paddock and stays, not by virture of the bond that springs up between him and the audience, but because studio heads are too scared to say he doesn't belong. I've long suspected that the star system, so hard to permate in so many ways, has a singular design flaw that is the result of Hollywood's innate inertia. Think of certain stars as like the toes on your feet. Nobody needs toes. We don't use them to pick anything up like our monkey forefathers. Evolution has long since moved on. But they stick around — why? Because they are not doing any harm. If someone were to be born without toes they wouldn't have any particular advantage over the rest of his toed friends and family. He would live his life, fending off school-yard taunts, seeking out open-minded girlfriends, before settling down with one of them. Maybe they would have 2.3 kids and one of them would have toes and the other one wouldn't. The one without would not have any special advantages and the whole evolutionary experiment thing would die out in a generation. That's Bradley Cooper. No audience ever hand-selected him the way they hand-selected Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts. And here he is acting opposite them, neither delighting nor offending. He's not doing any harm. Nobody can think of any good reason to get rid of him. And so for a few years he flourishes until eventually someone thinks to put him in a movie to see if people will come and they don't and that's that. I feel much the same way about the British royal family.
The final scenes have a transcendent mixture of hope and sadness. I’ve never seen anything like Mia’s final dance, or the leave-taking with her little sister that follows. In Fish Tank, nothing goes right, yet Mia’s fate never seems preordained. Her constant motion might or might not be her salvation, but it keeps you in suspense until the last frame—and beyond.
1. Aliens (Cameron, 1986)I was going to post the pic just for the hell of it (from Raras Fotos de Star Wars, worth checking out for the pic of Chewbacca copping a feel of Princess Leia), but since we're here, how about a list of the best sequels of all time? Every other blog seems to have one. The Empire Strikes Back, for sure, although I am not one to look lightly on that shoddy ending — I can remember being furious as a kid. Still: the snow battle at the beginning is one of the best openings to any sequel, with all our characters gradually coming together in an unfamiliar context. More sequels should begin in media res like this. The Godfather Part II, definitely, although not for the de Niro backstory, rather the Cuba stuff: the suits, the cars, the chalky light, Lee Strasberg. Toy Story 2 for its object lesson in the art of story development: all the familiar elements flowing organically into new contexts that seem inevitable after the fact. (The toy mortality theme really worked for me.) From Russia With Love for the simple reason that it established Bond in a genuinely foreign and memorable milieu (that wasn't a carribean island). I can still see the steam from that train in the penultimate scene. Regular readers of this blog will know what a fan I am of the bazooka ambush in Clear and Present Danger: I caught it again on TV the other day and loved the thrill of Ryan being invited into the Oval office and the queasiness when he speaks out of turn. Both Linklater's Before Sunset and Trufaut's Stolen Kisses allow real time into the equation, catching up with their heroes and heroines after several years have passed. It's astonishing how powerful this is, what a hole it punches through the illusion of eternal youth promised by the movies. Aliens played a similar trick, this time allowing whole decades to pass: Ripley loses a daughter. I've been writing too much about James Cameron recently but what can I say: both T2 and Aliens get the two contrary directions required of the form — building up, and winnowing down — exactly right. Sequels like soups basically: you throw even more into the pot, then reduce it to a concentrated jus.
2. The Godfather Part II (Coppola, 1974)
3. Toy Story 2 (Lasseter, 1999)
4. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991)
5. The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980)
6. From Russian With Love (Young, 1963)
7. Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004)
8. The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
9. Clear and Present Danger (Noyce, 1994)
10. Stolen Kisses (Truffaut, 1968)
From a longlist that includes: Back to the Future III, The Color of Money, Bride of Frankenstein, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Goldfinger, Casino Royale, Magnum Force, The Bourne Ultimatum, Superman II, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Dark Knight, For A Few Dollars More, The French Connection II
"Paramount is developing a sequel to its 2005 thriller "Four Brothers," bringing back many of the creative team for "Five Brothers." The 2005 movie, directed by John Singleton, revolved around four adopted brothers (Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson, Andre Benjamin and Garrett Hedlund) who come together to avenge their mother's death... Plot details are being kept under wraps, and it is not clear which of the other actors, if any, would return. Hedlund would appear to be out, as his character was killed in the first movie"— The Hollywood ReporterThis is the kind of Spinal-Tapish decision-making that makes me love Hollywood.
“You now have a — you now have a forum here at Fox News, OK, that you can immediately neutralize 60 Minutes... (SNAPS HIS FINGERS)… like that.... And again, any time you want to set the record straight, we're here” — Bill O’Reilly to Sarah Palin.
It became commonplace last summer to observe that the right have become the new left. Where once it was the left who tipped tea bags into Boston harbor to protest the stranglehold of big oil, now it is the right pinning teabags to their hats to protest the growth of big government. An angry mob on the streets used to indicate that Move.On or ACT-UP had been sowing their usual sedition; now it tells you that Glenn Beck is having a book signing. If further proof were needed, James Cameron’s Avatar has been greeted on the right with the kind of immediate snarling antagonism reserved for Oliver Stone pics. In an article entitled “Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy,” Big Hollywood’s John Nolte called it “Deathwish 5 for leftists.” No less an authority than MovieGuide, “the family guide to Christian movie reviews,” awarded the movie “four Marxes and an Obama” for its “abhorrent New Age, pagan, anti-capitalist worldview that promotes Goddess worship and the destruction of the human race”—an unfortunate formulation that also happens to clip most of my favorite Disney movies. But whatever. You get the idea. Drudge has been providing a daily drip-feed of joy-killing stories (“Vatican says no masterpiece,” “Audiences experience Avatar blues; depression and suicidal thoughts...”). In the words of one right-wing blogger: “This is cinema for the Hate America crowd.” Once you’ve gotten over your shock at seeing James Cameron pilloried as a typical Hollywood liberal—dude wrote Rambo for heaven’s sake!— the first response to this is: What took them so long? Ever since George Lucas revealed that the real model for his evil empire in the Star Wars movies was not Britain but America, it has been common practice for the makers of summer blockbusters to encode cryptic commentary of American foreign policy into their car chases and fireballs. Last year, The Dark Knight descended into a probing disquisition on the efficacy of torture. This summer, the makers of Star Trek conducted an equally spirited back-and-forth on the merits of diplomacy versus the phasers when dealing with obstreperous Romulans. None of those movies made a billion dollars in 21 days, however. Not only is Avatar the first time that the right has dipped its toe into the phosphorescent waters of allegorical science fiction, but the first time they’ve mobilized a hate-a-thon against a movie that stands to become extremely profitable. Normally when they come gunning for a movie, it’s meek, well-intentioned granola like Lions for Lambs, Rendition, or Good Night, and Good Luck—movies that can only perform a single one-armed push-up before collapsing face-down into the mud. When Michael Medved published his snit-fit broadside against Hollywood liberals, Hollywood Versus America, in 1993, he reserved the full force of his fury for such muscular Trotskyist tracts as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Total Recall, and The Prince of Tides. Thus proving that when it comes to threatening the very fabric of democracy, the only thing that rivals heretical sex and bone-cracking violence is a picture about therapy with Barbara Streisand. Or maybe I am misinterpreting Medved’s thesis. Maybe it was just: Barbara Streisand! A blockbuster like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, on the other hand, Medved wisely ignored, since it would have scrambled his narrative: liberal elites have forgotten how to make good old-fashioned movies for real America. Cameron’s Avatar therefore puts the right in a bind. Having for years cited the failure of movies like In the Valley of Elah and Lions for Lambs as proof that Hollywood is too liberal-elitist to connect with the real America, they’re now turning on a movie that has done just that. Writing in the London Daily Telegraph, Nile Gardner professed himself shocked—shocked I tell you—by “the roars of approval which greeted the on-screen killing of US military personnel were a shock to the system, especially at a time when the United States is engaged in a major war in Afghanistan....” concluding that Avatar was “ one of the most left-wing films in the history of modern American cinema, and perhaps the most commercially successful political movie of our time.” The last time I looked American cinemagoers were not well-disposed to reward pictures offering them a sprightly mixture of ecological censure and high treason. And indeed, those killed marines are no such thing, but members of a Blackwater-style mercenary operation. Audiences are not stupid. Neither is Cameron. Yes, he included a bunch of tone deaf references to the Iraq war in his movie—“shock and awe,” “fighting terror with terror” and so on, every one of which succeeds magnificently in yanking you out of the immersive spectacle as surely as a kick to the shins. But any desire to push the Avatar-is-liberal-propaganda argument further must be met by a principled push-back against the incursion of so grindingly and narrowly ideological a focus into so mercurial and prismatic a medium as motion pictures. In other words: it’s about a bunch of blue people. Seriously. I haven’t seen this kind of wild mangling of pop culture since the heady hey-day of cultural studies, when you couldn’t move for seminars attended by four people entitled “Totally Recalling Arnold: Sex and Violence in the New Bad Future.” When it comes to standing in front of the freight train of popular filmmaking in the hopes that your use of the word “meta-textual” will bring the whole thing whistling to a halt, the left are so much better than the right. Academics on the left have subjected D. W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation and Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind to years of interpretative waterboarding. More recently, Peter Biskind subjected the seventies to a righteous inferno of indignation over the success of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. “Star Wars swept all the chips off the table,” William Friedkin told Biskind. “What happened was like when McDonald’s got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared... everything has gone back toward a big sucking hole.” Beneath the racy gossip of Biskind’s book, it wasn’t hard to discern the familiar strictures of old-school Marxism, wherein all money is evil, all success underserved, and class struggle the only eternal verity. Others on the left have made their peace with the Hollywood money makers—in their own inimitable fashion. A film like Ridley Scott’s Alien, for instance, has attracted acres of critical commentary, some of it readable. In a paper entitled “Son Of A Bitch: Feminism Humanism and Science in Alien,” Judith Newton found the third-act survival of the two woman and one black character “especially promising,” but disapproved of the panties Sigourney Weaver strips down to in the film’s final sequence—“not standard gear for space duty,” she noted sternly. “Ripley, though in many ways a fine and thrilling hero, is robbed of radical thrust.” James Kavenagh, in “Feminism and Anxiety in Alien” (Science Fiction Studies, vol 7, no 3, 1980) dissented: “I would disagree with an ideological denunciation of the film as simply another exercise in conventional sexism on the basis of the scene in which Ripley removes her uniform to appear in T-shirt and panties. Such criticism would be hard-pressed to avoid repressive and self-defeating assumptions about what constitutes sexism, and irrelevant assumption about what constitutes the film and its ideological discourse.” A cunning move—the panties weren’t sexist; the accusation that the panties were sexist was sexist. “Much has been written about the final scene, in which Ripley undresses before the camera, on the grounds that its voyeurism undermines her role as successful heroine,” arbitrated Barbara Creed, proposing a solution designed to unite both pro-panties and anti-panties camps: What if the panties “signify an acceptable and in this context reassuring fetish object of the normal woman?” Then, “the final sequence works, not only to dispose of the alien, but also to repress the nightmare image of the monstrous-feminine with the text of patriarchal discourses.” Voila. Easy when you know how. Academics on the left have perfected a way of writing about the movies that suggest only passing aquaintance with actual movie theatres, or the things rumored to show inside of them.
"Now I yield to no one in my admiration for Rohmer. Yet his characters are among the most foolish and ineffectual milquetoasts ever to have graced a cinema screen; 90% of their celebrated talk is unadulterated twaddle. This is absolutely not a flaw: it is, rather, a species of trompe l'oeil (or trompe l'oreille). Rohmer jangles the small change of wit with such unfailing mastery that, just as his characters are persuaded they are making clever remarks, so most of the audience are persuaded they are hearing them... dialogue was crucial to Rohmer's (often surprisingly plotty) narratives."— Gilbert Adair on Eric RohmerI get the point: its not that the dialogue is twaddle, but the characters speak twaddle 90% of the time. That still means that for 90% of the time you are listening to characters spouting twaddle. There's no getting around it. Rohmer never gets fed up of the twaddle and goes off to find characters who aren't so pretentious. We're stuck with them, too. What I want to know is this: if even the fans of Rohmer admit the scripts are 90% twaddle and are still willing to acclaim him as a giant of cinema, then why can't James Cameron catch a similar break? Seriously. If Eric Rohmer films are great despite the fact that their scripts are pretentious crap, why not Avatar's script, which is at least unpretentious workmanlike crap?
Compiling my recent Best-Of-the-Decade lists — for the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s — I was struck by the number of debut films I'd included. Scorsese's Mean Streets, Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Godard's Breathless, Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, Terence Mallick's Badlands, Peter Bogdonavich's Last Picture Show, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Wes Anderson's Rushmore... To which others might add: Welles's Citizen Kane, Chaplin's The Kid, Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou, John Cassavetes' Shadows, John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, Jacques Demy's Lola, Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape and Eric Zonca's The Dreamlife of Angels. Zonca is, of course, in his mid-fifties but all these examples tend to support a long held-suspicion of mine that not only do debut films have a dewy glow all their own, but also: directing films is essentially a young man's game. Not all the time of course, but it's a rare filmmaker who's later work beats the stuff he did first out of the gate. I think in particular of Scorsese whose pictures have gotten technically better and better, at the expense of any overriding reason for their existence. Casino feels like weightier, more overwrought Goodfellas, and Goodfellas, for all its dazzle, feels like a hippo compared to the light-footed sprezzatura of Mean Streets. Mallick never made anything as perfect as Badlands. Truffaut's early work was his best. All these filmmakers have one more thing in common: they are all regularly exalted as the highest of cinematic artists, directors for whom the medium of film was as paintbrush and palette to a painter: a faithful registrar of their most delicate exhalations and featherlight changes of mood. It is the artisans and entertainers who often achieve true longevity in the movies — Spielberg, Hawks, Huston, Hitchcock — a fact that is often taken by the Sight & Sound brigade as evidence of their cash-registrar souls. A man like Welles was "better" than the business in which he found himself and that is why he was cut down so ruthlessly. Coppola is more of a genius for having gone bankrupt. There is no question that to sustain a long career in the movies requires a special kind of resilience — leathery, stubborn, rhino-like — but I've often wondered whether its the films that get worse or the audience that get bored of the filmmakers tricks. As far as David Lynch is concerned, maybe Wild at Heart felt as fresh to him as Blue Velvet. It was just from the outside that it felt a little like self-parody, one for the fans, playing to the gallery, just like Pulp Fiction a few years later, and The Royal Tenenbaums a few years after that. Those three filmmakers couldn't be more different and yet if you slice them chronologically, they all tell the same story. Blue Velvet is to Wild At Heart as Reservoir Dogs is to Pulp Fiction as Rushmore is to The Royal Tenenbaums. The first film has the self-announcing assurance of a young man with nothing to declare but his talent; the second showing him beginning to preen in the mirror. I wonder, too, if films don't offer so close an illusion of lifelikeness, that we are drawn to the same virtues and vices which we, as human beings, are biologically predisposed to identify ine life itself: the vibrancy of youth, the shiver of old age, etc. When describing any decent-sized film career I often find yourself reaching for biological metaphors: after the insouciance of youth, the oeuvre acquires weight, solidity, thematic mass, but also self-consciousness, the awareness that comes from having fans and critics point out to you what your "trademarks" are. You may react against this, struggle. There will be the temptation for a quick revivifying affair with low-budget filmmaking. It will not last. You will eventually return to centre, coast atrophy, feel the beginnings of middle-aged spread. Before finally: forgetfulness, repetition, lifetime achievement awards, butt sag.
"Each year, the Festival awards $200,000 in cash prizes and presents its Crystal Heart Awards to the top-judged submissions. Heartland has awarded more than $2.2 million to support filmmakers during the last 18 years. The organization’s Truly Moving Picture Award was created to honor films released theatrically that align with Heartland’s mission. By bestowing a watermark to honored films, the award allows studios and distributors to inform audiences of a film’s uplifting message and appeal."Heartland Truly Moving Pictures, a non-profit organization which "seeks to recognize and honor filmmakers whose work explores the human journey by expressing hope and emphasizing the best of the human spirit" has released it's top ten of the year. It's an instructive list, for two reasons: 1) this year I came closest to realising just how much I need moving pictures to actually move me. 2) I hated all but two of the films on their list. In fact, their praise for The Blind Side "showing what it means for a family to unite in order to help someone that is less fortunate than themselves" neatly reminded me of the thing I most disliked about the film: the absurd unity displayed by Bullock's family, even little bro and sis, both of whom accept the 200 lb black dude sitting at the breakfast table without protest or demur. Balls. Their number 2, Invictus, I get: as bad as the movie was it would have had to have been ten times worse to lose its impact. Mandela plus sports underdog movie: that's like an icecream sundae plus bacon bits. I regret to say that I haven't seen their number 3), something called The Horse Boy: "an intensely personal yet epic spiritual journey, [which] follows a couple and their autistic son through a courageous trek on horseback through outer Mongolia in a desperate attempt to treat his condition with shamanic healing." I am delighted, however, that someone has decided to make an expose of such odious charlatanism. 4) was Disney's Up. Fair enough. I choked up in the first ten minutes of that movie, although the description they provide of it here — "Up proves that even at age 78, there are lessons to be learned and shows viewers the true meaning of commitment" — proves that those good folks at Truly Moving Pictures turn out to have an special gift for making even good movies sound as appetising as 3-day old baboon vomit. Their number 5), for instance, was The Cove " a provocative mix of investigative journalism, eco-adventure and arresting imagery that adds up to an urgent plea for hope and a call for redemption and justice" a precis which makes me want to go out and order a tuna sandwich. A drum roll please for number 6) Herb & Dorothy, "a documentary of a couple’s commitment to and love for art that inspired them to build one of the most important, contemporary art collections in history with very modest means, only to then give it all away without taking a profit." That the filmmakers did nothing to halt this Alzheimer-induced idiocy raises interesting questions about the moral obligations of the documentary form. I cannot wait to see it. The number 7 slot went to last years bit of mental illness porn, The Soloist, the "incredible" true story of a disenchanted journalist’s "transformative odyssey" and "the redemptive power of music". (Why is everything a journey, or an odyssey, to these people? Don't people in their movies ever just hang out, watch TV or suck on a soda?). Number 8 was The Boys Are Back for evoking "the fragility and wonders of family life." Number 9 was My Sister's Keeper: healing, chemo, love, baldness, etc. Last but not least was Amreeka at number 0, another journey, "universal" this time, into the lives of a family of immigrants and first-generation teenagers "while they search for a place to call home." Big hairy balls.
"Sony have now committed to the idea of a complete reboot, returning the character to his high-school days, from an already-completed script from James Vanderbilt, the writer of "Zodiac," and one of the early drafts of the script for the fourth movie. So clearly, the movie's going to skew a little younger... The franchise is returning to its hormonal high school roots" — The PlaylistHuh. The interesting thing about the Spiderman movies is how young they skewed the character — they already returned the franchise to its hormonal high-school roots. We've actually seen him in High School. How much more High School can you get?
"‘Skynet Symphonic’ is my tribute to one of the greatest action features of all time! Each section is composed entirely of sounds from a major scene in the film. For example, the Terminator pounding on the fire escape door is used as a kick drum. Bones breaking play the role of a snare. Electrical disturbance acts as a crash cymbal. Turn up your cones and enjoy" — Pogo
"In responding to the attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day, Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced the feelings of many when she said that to prevent such situations, "I'd rather overreact than underreact." This appears to be the consensus view in Washington, but it is quite wrong. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well." — Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post
"There's a big double standard here. What’s interesting here, is when Democrats get caught saying racist things, an apology is enough. If that had been Mitch McConnell saying that about an African-American candidate for president of the president of the United States, trust me, this chairman and the DNC would be screaming for his head” — Michael Steele, Politico
The New York Times has an infographic telling you which zip codes rented what movies in 12 cities. Above, The Wrestler. I looked up our postcode, NY10014, and found the top movies to be: Rachel Getting Married, Milk, Doubt, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Benjamin Button, the Wrestler, Burn After Reading, Revolutionary Road, Mad Men Season 1, and Slumdog Millionaire, which makes me feel very socio-economically average, since I have seen every one, and except for the low ranking for the Wrestler, and the fact that Milk isn't top of the list, have no disagreements with the order.
“Nothing that’s shitty is going to make $100 million.” — Jennifer Lopez, ElleI agree with the sentiment — there are few examples of wholly meretricious box office success — but disagree with the threshold. To get to the good stuff you either have to head over $200 million (Star Trek, Avatar, Up, The Hangover) or under $50 million (Up In The Air, Funny People, The Hurt Locker, 500 Days of Summer). Its the stuff in the middle, that makes around $100 million (Watchmen, The Ugly Truth, Hannah Montana, Terminator Salvation) that makes up the dreck zone. Unfortunately, Jay-lo has zeroed in on the one box-office bandwidth that does reliably indicate shit.
1. Fearless
Filthy: Welcome, Jimmy. You're still wearing Aunt Filthy's sweater?TFC's website is well worth a browse. Here's his review of The Road:—
Jimmy: Maktu.
Filthy: What?
Jimmy: Maktu Mendo.
Filthy: What the hell is that?
Jimmy: I will explain this once and only once. I speak Na'vi, the language of the indigenous people in Avatar, out of respect for their ancient culture. Anything I have to say will only be heard by people who understand Na'vi. Nikto Filt'y.
Filthy: Well, that's going to make for a shitty review.
Jimmy: Benta.
Filthy: Okay, I'll get this started. Avatar is a major crapload.
Jimmy: Jik jik jik!
Filthy: It is! It looks great, like a truckload of diamonds for sure. But, good lord, the story is a trite, patronizing pile of Hollywood arrogance. The new agey theme and cornball dialog nearly drowns out any goodwill earned by the movie's fancy-ass creation of a fantastic new world.
Jimmy: Jik jik jik!
Filthy: Jimmy says he agrees with me.
Jimmy: Oen ontu teya lu
Filthy: Get your hands off me. Jesus, you smell like a gay brothel in a sweat sock. Avatar's plot is virtually identical to Ferngully, a shit-for-brains, message-heavy kids' cartoon about pixies who must stop loggers from destroying their rainforest. One human pretends to be a pixie and falls in love with the pixies and discovers how precious their world is. That is the plot of Avatar, except this new mega-production isn't handled as maturely as the kiddie movie, and it has a shitload more carnage.
Jimmy: Rapa Nui!
Filthy: I don't understand a word you're saying.
— The Filthy Critic
Every year about this time Hollywood comes out with one of those comedies about two people who have to get home in time for the holidays. You know, the cute, hee-hee flicks with an odd couple on a road trip and encountering all sorts of amusing complications. At a time like this, when the economy is buried under your breakfast remains in the crapper, we're waging a bunch of wars and everybody's blaming everyone else for everything, a movie like that's a welcome diversion. I love something warm, lighthearted, fun and that reminds us how wonderful our lives really are. The Road isn't that movie.His review of A Serious Man, meanwhile, shows him to be in possession of some of the most acute critical faculties in the business: —
A Serious Man is really fucking unpleasant to spend time with in the same way as a meth-head trannie. It's pretty to look at and you want to like it, but it has almost nothing to say and it's pretty Goddamn loud and incessant in saying it. This movie is like some sort of dare by the Coen Brothers to see how far they can push a single note before an audience's teeth bleed.More please.
1. The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939)The films I most prize are the ones that look normal, and sound normal, and feel normal, but unfurl with the sinuous, sneaky logic of a dream. Movies that cast a spell. I don't mean surrealism — not a fan. I mean a big-budget studio picture that despite the involvement of hundreds of people, from money-grubbing producers to eagle-eyed costumiers, seems to have bloomed from the unconscious of a drowsy Keats. Birth is such a picture. So is Heat. And Blue Velvet. And Night of the Hunter. But the stepmother of them all is The Wizard of Oz. I recently had a spirited debate with my friend Nat about my theory that one cannot know and enjoy a picture made before you were born with quite the same casual intimacy of a film made in your lifetime. That older film can be 100 times better but it still doesn't breathe the same air you do in the same way that even a cruddy picture produced yesterday can. He brought up he example of a child watching the Wizard of Oz: doesnt it cast just as powerful a spell over child as anything produced last year. He had a point, but it had more to do with childhood, I think, than film's power to transcend period. Childhood is the one time of our lives where true communion with the past is possible. Surveying the films of the thirties — from King Kong to Snow White to The Wizard of Oz — is like taking a walking tour of my childhood. Not even a hundred Christmas viewings can dispel Oz's sheer oddity — its winged monkeys, flying cattle and evaporating witches — and yet the whole thing is dealt straight: I love the way Dorothy sets down in Oz and almost immediately starts dispensing good solid mid-western advice. Any film that gets both Michael Jackson and Salman Rushdie in its corner is doing something right.
2. It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934)
3. La Regle du Jeu (Renoir, 1939)
4. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney, 1937)
5. The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock, 1938)
6. King Kong (Cooper, 1933)
7. Gone With The Wind (Fleming, 1939)
8. Holiday (Cukor, 1938)
9. Top Hat (Sandrich, 1935)
10. Duck Soup (McCarey, 1933)
From a long-list that includes:—The Awful Truth, The 39 Steps, Bringing Up Baby, Scarface, Horse Feathers, Modern Times, M, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, L'Atalante, Nosferatu, Trouble in Paradise, The Blue Angel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Morocco, Gunga Din, Only Angels Have Wings, Stagecoach, City Lights, Angels Have Dirty Faces, Freaks, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Wuthering Heights, Camille, A Farewell to Arms, Frankenstein, La Grande Illusion, You Can't Take it With You, A Night at the Opera, 42nd Street, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, The Public Enemy
1. Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946)
2. The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940)
3. Meet Me in St Louis (Minelli, 1944)
4. His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940)
5. The Third Man (Reed, 1949)
6. The Lady Eve (Sturges, 1941)
7. Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)8. Cat People (Tourneur, 1942)
9. The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch, 1940)
10. La belle et la bete (Cocteau, 1946)
From a long-list that includes:— Citizen Kane, The Lady From Shanghai, Key Largo, My Favorite Wife, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Big Sleep, It's A Wonderful Life, Adam's Rib, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Double Indemnity, Bambi, Now Voyager, Dumbo, To Have and Have Not, Double Indemnity, The Grapes of Wrath, Sullivan's Travels, Les Enfants du Paradis, Pinocchio, The Grapes of Wrath, Arsenic and Old Lace, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Brief Encounter, My Darling Clementine, Out of the Past, On The Town, The Bicycle Thief, Shadow of a Doubt, Unfaithfully Yours
'When he was five, he saw the United States invade Vietnam, and was 21 by the time the US removed itself, which means that he spent his teenage years watching his giant of a next-door neighbour take the beating of its life. His politics are a strange admixture — the leanings of a liberal trapped within the titanium exoskeleton of a hawk — with an almost forensic fascination for How The Mighty Fall. Look at the enemy he concocted for Arnie in T2. Almost any other director would have come up with a Terminator that was bigger than him — heftier, more hi-tech — but Cameron went completely the other direction, devising a slim, sinuous shape-shifter — a Porsche” to Arnie’s Panzer tank, mercury to his might. What makes T2 such eerie viewing now is seeing how accurately that T-1000 prefigures the very real threat America would face on 9/11: a hydra-headed demon who uses the weight of its aggressors against them, absorbing every punch, its molecules scattering before regrouping again. Cameron is our foremost director of asymmetric combat, with an unerring feel for the way that small forces defeat larger ones, for the pivots and turning points by which overwhelming military strength is turned against itself. It’s what gives his fantasies their vicelike grip on the national consciousness, and what makes him a very useful director to have around right now. If I were on the right, I’d be kissing and making up fairly soon, celebrating the director for the keen-eyed, conservative critique he offers of Wilsonian foreign adventurism. Although do you want to know what I really learnt from Avatar? I learnt that the best way to catch a really big dragon is to come at him from above. “Tarouk is the baddest boy in the sky. He never gets attacked,” says our hero, Jake Sully. “Why look up?”' — my thoughts on the Avatar brouhaha here
My article on James Cameron and the politics of the blockbuster, for Slate, here
For no other reason but that this is Thomas Dolby's most beautiful song and I don't think people really know that he writes beautiful songs. Trevor Horn once told him that if only 'Airwaves' had been about a girl rather than a transistor radio it would have been number one. I wonder how frustrating it must have been to hear that, knowing deep down that what he really wanted to do was write a song about the development of sonar, or wind socks. Sigh. You have to love a man like this, with so little idea of what is good for him.
1. The Graduate (Nichols, 1967)
2. The Apartment (Wilder, 1960)
3. The Misfits (Huston, 1961)
4. A bout de souffle (Godard, 1963)
5. 101 Dalmations (Disney, 1961)
6. The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969)
7. Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962)
8. Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962)
9. Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969)
10. Dr Strangelove (Kubrick, 1962)
From a long list that includes:— Rosemary's Baby, Point Blank, Alfie, Darling, Charade, Billy Liar, Bullitt, Where Eagles Dare, Knife in the Water, The Odd Couple, Yojimbo, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Playtime, Doctor Zhivago, Lolita, Cape Fear, That Touch of Mink, Bonnie and Clyde, The Birds, The Pink Panther, A Hard Day's Night, Cool Hand Luke, Hud, A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Great Escape, Dr No, The Guns of Navarone, Pierrot le fou, Psycho, The Hustler, Knife in the Water, La Dolce Vita, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Repulsion, Lolita, Goldfinger, The Magnificent Seven, Splendor in the Grass, The Birds, 8 1/2, The Manchurian Candidate
1. Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990)The nineties looke pretty good from here: all the busy commerce of the eighties but also a steady procession of what feel like classic movies. I would put it up there with the fifties as one of my favorite film decades. Quentin Tarantino seized all the headlines but Michael Mann released two magnificent films, The Last of the Mohicans and Heat, that made it Mann's decade. Some of the films I fell in love with at the time — The English Patient, Leaving Las Vegas, Saving Private Ryan — have slipped a little, or I've worn them out. Others have only got better and better, like my number one, Goodfellas: a comet, burning up in its own heat. Before Sunrise was a terrific collaboration between a director and his actors. Rushmore was it's own creature, pulling off that rarest of feats: an entirely new tone, although Bogdonavich and Scorsese can line up for a little credit. I had a real challence which Eastwood pic to favor — Unforgiven or The Bridges of Madison County, which laid me flat for a week — but Jack Green's framing of William Munnie beneath a glowering sky, together with that awful line in Bridges ("Great stuff Yeats") swung it Unforgiven's way.
2. The Last of the Mohicans (Mann, 1992)
3. Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995)
4. Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)
5. The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski, 1991)
6. The English Patient (Minghella, 1996)
7. Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992)
8. Fargo (dir. Coens, 1996)
9. Rushmore (dir. Anderson, 1999)
10. My Own Private Idaho (dir. Van Sant, 1991)
An online row has erupted over the depiction of smokers in movies, and in particular Sigourney Weaver’s smoking in Avatar. “This is like someone just put a bunch of plutonium in the water supply,” argued an anti-smoking activist in the New York Times. The Times' chief movie critic, A. O. Scott, in a blog post entitled “Movies and Vices: Made for Each Other,” defended the decision to light up:
As long as there have been movies, there have been scolds who condemn the movies for glamorizing vice. And the scolds have generally been right: one of the great pleasures of movie watching is that it allows us to witness and vicariously take part in all kinds of behavior we wouldn’t dream of (or would only dream of) undertaking in our daily lives.In New York Magazine, David Edelstein surprisingly, came down against Scott's argument as “a savvy piece of hipsterism,” arguing, “for our kids’ sake, let’s treat the addiction to deadly chemicals as a vice and not as a normal, healthy part of everyday life.” Only to be rebutted by Richard Brody in The New Yorker:
I’d argue that, for our kids’ sake, we shouldn’t lie to them: we, and movie-makers, ought to be able to make clear that vices are, in fact, pleasures, even if, ultimately, destructive ones—because, if they weren’t pleasures, nobody would bother with them in the first place.Fine and dandy, as far as these things go. Nobody addressed my concern about Sigourney Weaver's smoking in Avatar: she was just so bad at it. She held the thing like she's just been told what it did, no attempt to inhale, just holding the smoke in her mouth and then letting it drift out. I've witnessed sturdier exhalations from a sparrow. In this day and age, there's no excuse. Cameron went to all the trouble of simulating Kate Winslet's freezing breath in Titanic. You're telling me that with half a quarter of a billion to spend on special effects he couldn't rustle up a decent smoke ring?
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