but what she said

Oscar 2012: Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair

2012-01-24T21:21:00.011-06:00

I like—not just snarkily notice from on high but genuinely like—how everyone hates the Oscars in their own ways. Nobody can agree on what the good choices were, but we all know they were few. Me, I'm only rooting for The Tree of Life and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I got enough out of Hugo and Midnight in Paris to half-heartedly care about their fortunes, and I’m okay with The Descendants if hardly a fan. But Margin Call? Moneyball? Falderal, at least to me, but there are plenty of smart cinephiles for whom those are the bright spots.
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The American Way: The Middle & Product Placement

2012-01-20T10:52:00.006-06:00

Someday I’d like to understand why product placement is such a dealbreaker for so many television viewers. Are they just so worried about the artistic integrity of a medium supported by commercials that any appearance of brand-names—you know, like the ones we throw around in real life—automatically sullies what could be a good, pure auteurist vision? I doubt it, so let’s move to the terra firma of Linda Holmes’ take on "Hecking it Up," this week’s episode of The Middle for NPR’s Monkey See blog.
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The Lion King Vertigoed

2012-01-15T10:17:00.008-06:00

As rape scenes go, I find this one pretty easy to watch. For Press Play's contest to place Bernard Herrmann's "Scene D'Amour" from the Vertigo score over other film scenes a la The Artist, the first thing that came to mind was the opening of The Lion King. So I started the film and the song at the same time and could't believe the structural resonances. Thankfully, it's not a perfect overlap, but the video emphasizes certain parts of the score and vice versa in a playful give-and-take. The opening watercolors take on a concerned tone, the sun reflection and the rack focus become eerie omens, and the whole ritual on Pride Rock recalls Marie Antoinette, weighted with national burden, more than carefree baby Simba. I tried it again timing the big climax of the track with the end of the clip so that they fade out together, but it wasn't nearly as convincing.
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My Desert Island Movies

2012-01-09T04:00:00.009-06:00

I started this because I thought it would be fun, and it was, before it got existential. Am I alone for the rest of my life here? What am I going to want on a desert island? Pure escapist pleasure or challenging stuff to keep my mind sharp? Would tragedy have any use? Would I want to remember romance or would it be too painful? Wouldn’t nostalgia be that much worse alone forever? Should I find the ten films with the most survival potential? Or the ten longest films to provide the most distraction? Maybe the ten that would inspire me most to achieve whatever I could achieve on this island? So I guess that’s my state of mind, right now, but it can be partly blamed on a cold, partly blamed on cold medicine, and the rest chalked up to midnight.
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Best TV of 2010

2011-12-17T07:43:00.008-06:00

Guess what I forgot to do last year. I was probably too busy watching "The Suitcase" on a loop to go ahead and confirm your suspicions that I kinda sorta like that show about drunk guys hoisting themselves into history's dumpster. Lucky for absolutely no one, I've been ranking things like crazy lately, so before we reveal the AV Club's best TV of 2011 (along with my ballot, which I'll update and defend here) this week, I'll serve up this very hinty appetizer, the best television of 2010.
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Enlightened: Occupy America

2011-12-14T04:54:00.002-06:00

Now that the season’s over, Enlightened reminds me of a ‘50s Rossellini picture, with Laura Dern in the Ingrid Bergman role being driven crazy by the ugly truth of modernity. That process cutaway in “Comrades Unite!” is as haunting as Rossellini’s overpowering factories, Dern and Bergman playing silent witness to a train they couldn’t stop if they tried. Maybe that’s why Damon’s condescending “Let’s not get crazy” in the season finale “Burn it Down” filled me with more rage than Lowe's Hardware. Mike White’s writing, as always, finds the precise expression of a character’s personality, here letting Damon seem to be reasonable, try to assert some scenario wherein he’s the calm good guy, and condescend to his target with the perfect little callback to that other time she “got crazy” in front of all those Abaddonn execs. But it’s not just that little dagger that provokes, but the history of men marginalizing women and then calling them crazy for responding the way any rational person would. It’s a quick semantic hop from Damon’s shit-eating smirk to Ingrid Bergman staring out the sanitarium window. As Amy points out early in the season, she got demoted and he got nothing. What’s the difference between Amy’s selfishness and Damon’s? Hers has a smaller blast radius. And at least she sees room for growth.
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Enlightened: Plato's cubicle

2011-11-29T08:36:00.002-06:00

Speaking of problems with reviewing television episodically, when a work really capitalizes on the television form, serializing an exploration as long and deep as a good, um, presidential administration, while breaking that work into unified links in a chain, perfect little circles in themselves that nevertheless drive toward something bigger, immediate reaction is about as valuable as snarkily recapping Plato’s puppet show. Enlightened is certainly not the first form-breaker, but it took me at least four episodes to reach all the way around it and get a feel for what it is, and even that was just a first impression. That’s not least because it announces itself with the subtlety of true confidence and the premiere is something of a prologue, focusing on Amy Jellicoe’s relationship with the world’s most lifelike MacGuffin, a higher-up named Damon (played by The Office’s duplicitous Charles Esten, and if you think that’s an accident, Diane Ladd plays Laura Dern’s mother) instead of characters and relationships that would become much more significant to the overall story of the first season.
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Community: Gay Bash-ing, Homophobia, and TV Comedy

2011-11-08T08:13:00.014-06:00

I could not be more thrilled that the Internet realizes God’s gift to television is fallible, worth taking out of the glass case and looking at from other angles, but homophobia feels like a kneejerk charge. Near as I can tell—and please correct me because I’m not the closest observer of Community, though I did specifically rewatch the last few episodes for these purposes—the ~~concern trolls~~ foul-criers are upset because Pierce and Shirley spout homophobia that the rest of the group lets go, the same way they constantly do with Pierce’s racism. Or, for instance, Britta’s priorities: “I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty.” Yes, Shirley sort of confronts her position (“You can excuse racism?”), but the show flies past because we get it. It’s the perfect little jab at progressive politics, not a position paper for Dan Harmon’s presidential campaign.
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Notes on the Hostel series

2011-10-22T18:22:00.001-05:00

I suppose there’s some virtue in showing revolting acts as revolting, and if nothing else, Eli Roth nails that segment of his tragically overreaching statement on globalization, the Hostel diptych. As Roth depicts it, torture is dehumanizing and sadistic, as well it should be. What’s more, his crassness keeps him from taking the easy way out, really challenging—insofar as such a film can—notions of deserved violence. Because the entitled hero-victims of Hostel are the ugliest Americans (and one Icelander) imaginable, laughing off any cultural experience and even throwing their weight around at a club—“I’m an American, I have rights!”—Roth gives us decidedly unsympathetic protagonists and then tortures them. The position is clear. Even these guys don’t deserve what’s coming (not that they’re warlords or something, either). There’s a parallel in Hostel: Part II where the torturer is trying to extract information from her victim. It shouldn’t work, as studies show, but it does, and not out of irresponsibility. It works to show the extreme: even if torture were efficacious, is it worth it?
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One Day: The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie

2011-10-09T03:43:00.001-05:00

Come for the dispossessed accents and hairstyles, stay for the Nicholas Sparks dressed up as a Cannes competitor. To be honest, Anne Hathaway’s accent challenge has no bearing on the film—within reason, it’s covered under Suspension of Disbelief—and the hairstyles are genuinely entertaining pieces of a puzzle which, when assembled, is a picture of God smiting us down to teach us all to love life. Or something.
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Warrior: Bodies in Motion

2011-09-13T05:16:00.002-05:00

For a film about mixed martial arts, it would have been cool of Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior to demonstrate some mixed martial arts. But maybe I’m projecting my own priorities onto a film more interested in showing us, ad nauseam, how this great whatsit is provoking the audience. No matter how fly-on-the-wall the angles or how human the camera, this isn’t Friday Night Lights. That film and TV series is all about the community investing in the game, whereas Warrior is a stage piece with a spotlight just big enough to illuminate its hero-brothers and their father. All the cutting pretends this match means more than it does, desperately seeking entry into the Hall of Fame. I see the potential, but in practice it’s a deathless conceit that clarifies its own redundancy not only with twelve shots of the exact same person doing the exact same thing but also by mimicking the real life audience in every way except one: our furious cries to get the camera back to the ring!
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Apollo 18: The truth is out there

2011-09-06T16:55:00.002-05:00

Gonzalo López-Gallego's Apollo 18 isn’t just a fun potboiler but an unlabeled conspiracy tape hiding in the wrong VHS sleeve, a straight-faced, paranoid political thriller spawned by the unholy union of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wikileaks. Presented as a compilation of classified footage uploaded to a website, the film opens in the language of conspiracy docs and never lets go, building that ‘70s political thriller vibe through its jittery paranoia, invocation of Watergate, and the recurring symbol of the offscreen god-voice of a Defense Department deputy (not NASA) demanding blind obedience from his highly qualified dogs. The plot is naturally crawling with red herrings, but they’re not random surprises. Rather, the Cold War and the psychological tricks forcing us to wonder what’s real fuel the blood-red fire of Apollo 18’s mission: a seething assault on the political overclass. It has its didactic moments—call-signs Liberty and Freedom, a shredded American flag—but no conspiracy theory was ever fertilized with subtlety. And this particular street preacher has a message beyond fire and brimstone: Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.
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Colombiana Can't Stop

2011-08-30T00:05:00.003-05:00

As Conan the Barbarian represents the nadir of chaos cinema with its unfocused camerawork evoking nothing but a lazy director, Olivier Megaton’s Colombiana represents its potential, finding purpose in the rapid cutting and manic energy that defines the End of Cinema. From the opening in a Latin villa straight out of Walker, Texas Ranger, the film is pure pulp, all stock conventions and guns, and it only builds from there as we tour America’s seediest hotspots. As soon as the bad guys kill our heroine Cataleya’s parents—off-screen and without even a suggestion of the grisliness in this week’s Rolling Stone—we’re off on an adrenaline-fueled chase, fast, focused, and hyperaware. Split-second shots keep everything in mind at once, targeted close-ups distill the movement to its essential components, and the montage casts a team of professional gangsters in a thrilling cat-and-mouse with a comically awesome nine year-old girl. Geography and fluidity are exchanged for hypercontinuity through blazing Colombia, less a place than a legend, and it all announces an exaggerated crime pulp with no time for existential angst.
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The Help: Based on the Novel The Help by Uncle Remus

2011-08-16T23:45:00.006-05:00

To call The Help caricature insults Aunt Jemima, but it’s difficult to define precisely how this grotesque sideshow operates without associating it with camp, melodrama, slapstick, Southern Gothic, and other broadly emotional modes even though this Lifetime docudrama full of characters laughing hysterically at unfunny jokes is as aimless and formless as its facile, well-meaning politics. Director Tate Taylor’s progressive purpose is so Important that the running time reaches the glorious extent of two hours and seventeen minutes just so we don’t miss anything in this delicately assembled slideshow of lingering banal compositions and tear-streaked frames sublimating decades of white guilt. If anything’s on the cutting room floor, it’s the last-minute excision of a close-up of Emma Stone’s white hand clasped in the black palm of Viola Davis, a Symbol of how together they triumphed over racism forever!
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Rise of the Planet of the Apes: You say you want a revolution

2011-08-12T00:02:00.002-05:00

I’ve never felt cognitive dissonance like reading my Twitter feed this week—but maybe that was all the cold medicine—seeing nonstop (and counterintuitive) raves for Rupert Wyatt's blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the film about an abused underclass taking back the streets, er, trees for those of us without access to Attack the Block, side-by-side with condemnations of British kids doing exactly that. Yes, it’s a hell of a lot easier to cheer on superintelligent apes fighting for their rights in a very PG-13 revolution than it is English kids in baggy hoodies wielding bats at shopowners and stealing even from children. But that says more about Rupert Wyatt’s way-past-animal-rights film taking the easy way out, what with cuddly pal Caesar doing the Nolan Batman thing at the end: “I don’t have to kill you, but my negligence will result in your death and I’ll still feel like a superstar. Integrity!”
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Crazy, Stupid, Love.: He's all that

2011-08-03T15:53:00.001-05:00

Best title ever! Crazy, Stupid, Love. has the perfect, beautiful, boring, tone-deaf meaninglessness to encapsulate Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s moneyed adaptation of broadcast channel-surfing: Axe body spray, Smirnoff Ice, Modern Family, life insurance soporific over an old couple walking their golden retrievers on the beach. Emma Stone saves herself while such talents as Marisa Tomei, Steve Carell, and Julianne Moore drown hilariously in new age mumbo jumbo and hilarious situations to the laughter of an audience grown cynical by this deathless imitation cheese. Thank god for Lisa Cholodenko and Nicole Holofcener.

Captain America: The First Avenger: That's entertainment

2011-08-03T14:22:00.001-05:00

The only thing more tiresome than Marvel’s latest Shakespeare tragedy is the postmodern elevation of trash/pop/camp—a useful experiment, like shaving your head— so I won’t say Joe Johnston’s Captain America: World-Friendly Subtitle is a good film. Rather it’s a kids movie that isn’t aesthetically revolting, a world not of the 1940s but of a 1940s movie set (or Disneyland), saved by its pulp agility. Instead of fatalistically throwing old friends Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes into a deep Freudian chasm or down separate forks in a road like other Marvel relationships struggling mightily to evince some depth, writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely use pop shortcuts to invest while keeping things light: after scrawny Steve gets himself beat up for the seventh time, Bucky standing up for him, much less talking to him, makes him okay in our book. We’ve barely seen them together (or apart, in Bucky’s case), but their fraternity charges this ally-centric film, thanks as much to the screenplay as to the square-jawed performances by Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan. The worst you could say is that maybe Steve and Bucky are a wee bit “no homo” in their first act farewell, but the decidedly modern Evans and Stan may as well have cried in each other's arms for all their meaningful staring.
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Limitless: Money never sleeps

2011-07-28T15:45:00.002-05:00

Nothing nails the hyperconsciousness of Neil Burger's Limitless like its opening credits, a Google Street View constantly zooming ahead, not thinking about the next step but the next forty. Limitless casts Bradley Cooper as an Ozymandias figure—Watchmen, not Shelley—sitting in front of his 80 television screens as he sorts through all the information to make connections about what’s going on in the world, and Cooper makes a winning hero as he transforms from a self-hating schlub without any of the depression to a cocky genius begging to be taken down a peg to a paranoid addict who will drink anything for another hit. There are shades of “Be careful what you wish for” on top of the obvious addiction stuff (which offers a few chilling surprises), but it’s mostly an illustration of every man for himself, a vicious strain of capitalism taking increasing hold in America. It gets lost a bit in the middle, but Leslie Dixon’s screenplay nails not just the violence of selfishness but the hypocrisy: nobody gets ahead on their own.
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2: Childish things

2011-07-21T04:50:00.012-05:00

As half-films go, David Yates' Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Film 8: Abbott and Costello Meet Voldemort lurches from scene to setpiece like it’s Daniel Radcliffe’s awkwardly effortful performance. Every phrase of dialogue between Harry and Griphook the Goblin. No matter how connected. Is perforated by so much gravitas the whole thing collapses in on itself like an unpracticed spell. Luckily we’re almost immediately watching Helena Bonham Carter’s hilarious Hermione seek Nazi gold deep in some glorious vault of a Swiss bank housing all the danger and splendor of JK Rowling’s imagination, the fantasy elements dependably invigorating the film. There’s not much there, if you catch my meaning, but for a series that prides itself on hard-won morality tales (e.g. the Cedric Diggory lesson) despite its black/white morality, any complexity is a step forward, and the World War II overtones, however cheap, at least introduce some gray between the happy, decent good guys and the racist authoritarian bad guys.
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Meek's Cutoff: State of the union

2011-07-19T23:29:00.000-05:00

“Is he ignorant, or is he just plain evil?” Michelle Williams’ pioneer asks of hapless guide Stephen Meek as their wagon train of three loosely tied families winds up lost in the wasteland with depleting resources and a native prisoner in Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff. Constantly hidden between his cowboy hat and his macho man beard, the only thing Bruce Greenwood’s Meek does better than self-mythologize is insist he’s right in the face of facts that beg to differ. Soon Will Patton as Williams’ husband assumes de facto leadership, but his pragmatism is just as dangerously heartless as Meek’s stubbornness, and it’s too unwilling to break with tradition to straighten the course, Reichardt brilliantly framing the wagons as ever so slightly listing in their hazy panoramas. It’s up to Williams as the increasingly assertive godmother of liberal internationalism to save their society, and then only if the others haven’t caused enough damage. Reichardt doesn’t pretend to know if charity is enough, but she nails Bush, Obama, and their ideological guardians in this gripping, heartfelt state of the union address.
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2011 Dream Emmy Ballot: Drama

2011-07-14T01:58:00.001-05:00

In a few hours are the nominations for the Sedgwick Cryer Awards Charade, but for now we can still pretend like Terriers is an Emmy candidate with our dream ballots. There are two points to keep in mind: 1) I have as much interest in assessing probability as I do in watching Hot in Cleveland, which it turns out is a likely contender. These are just the nominees I would pick from the submissions were I hundreds of balding west coast liberals brainwashing your children. 2) A show cannot be chopped into pieces to be judged individually and arbitrarily. How good Denis Leary was in his arc can only be evaluated by how well his performance contributes to the whole of the show, which I think we can all agree is too drunk to realize we stopped listening hours ago.
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Conan O'Brien Can't Stop: I'm still here

2011-07-12T22:36:00.009-05:00

The great joke of the title Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop is that I was wondering the whole time when he was going to start. It take fifteen minutes for Rodman Flender’s topical documentary to find a funny scene, this one a staff meeting for the upcoming, taxonomically misfiled comedy tour, when after making his minions speak into a banana Conan O’Brien jokingly says, “I’m sick of people saying I’m drunk with power and I’ve lost perspective.” Thing is, the film presents a guy who’s just this side of a Lucasian moat of yes-men, constantly joke-punching his staff in a display of humor unmatched by anyone since Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and as for perspective, everyone signs off on Conan parodying Willie Nelson with the pity party hit of summer “My Own Show Again.” It’s that kind of scintillating wit you expect from the staid late night variety trust Conan O’Brien is perceived to have busted. “I’m the least entitled person you’ll meet in the world,” he says with brass ball humility. Speaking of people who no longer have television shows, Andy Richter may as well have an applause button because his sparing appearances are very funny, and somehow he never once frames himself as a recession-era victim.
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Midnight in Paris: L'Age d'Or

2011-07-05T07:18:00.004-05:00

Speaking of pseudointellectuals, I’ve never—not even at Shakespeare in Love—seen a movie with an audience more vigorously engaged in the signaling to everyone else that, yes, old sport, they got the reference, they’re very smart, they had The Exterminating Angel over for dinner the other night, and this spiderweb of nods to books they read in high school is the funniest thing since that blistering New Yorker piece about parents who don’t get their kids vaccinated. Needless to say, it’s all very Stuff White People Like, which you can tell by their secret handshake, pedantic laughing. The thing is, saying the name Gertrude Stein isn’t funny. It’s just a reference, and like X-Men: First Class winking at its characters’ well-established fates, Midnight in Paris mistakes allusion for comedy far too often. So some of the jokes and most of the non-jokes aren’t particularly funny, in spite of the incessant ovation, but it’s the special determination of Woody Allen that the seventh set-up for Michael Sheen to parade his expertise on some hovel of the humanities is lazier than the film around him yet the smash cut earns a laugh anyway.
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Our Beloved Month of August: Burden of dreams

2011-06-29T21:41:00.007-05:00

I’ve started and stopped this review so many times it’s like I’m practicing Kegels while peeing. Fitting, too, considering my subject, a fictionalized documentary (think Through the Olive Trees) about its own crew searching for inspiration to film the outright fiction of its last act after a dead financier imperils the project, all of us—me, director Miguel Gomes, the fictional characters played by a fire warden and a hockey player he finds in central Portugal—spinning our wheels until we discover how to adapt to our obstacles and get on with our lives, or art, which are so inextricable in Our Beloved Month of August that you wonder if Gomes’ creation myth is as fabricated as the naturalism he so carefully cultivates in the editing bay, like a homeless-looking actor’s spectacularly disheveled coif. Whatever the factual truth, the film’s as dry as sandstone and just as porous, sparking less in the regional portrait of its ostensible documentary or the 35 Shots of Rum-style family drama of its film-within-the-film than in the twilight between, a self-conscious odyssey into the frustrating transcendence of creating art.
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Super 8: Plan 9 from the Spielberg Home for Daddy Issues

2011-06-22T16:14:00.005-05:00

The problem with making an entire movie about the wonder and torment of lens flares is that the human eye is hardwired to detect artifice. You don’t have to be a middle school student with as much passion for filmmaking as you have for french fries to know that midnight scenes with no onscreen light sources don’t produce parallel neon blue lines obscuring the action. The only way that happens is to shoot much wider than you need and crop out the light source causing the flares (which still doesn’t explain the cave scene, where hero Joe Lamb goes spelunking into a Las Vegas rave). Well, that or CGI, a brilliantly simple way to simultaneously remind us we’re watching a film, envelop us in nostalgia, and keep us in the moment, or it would if all that weren’t a mere wave breaking against the bulwark of our graceful bullshit detector, the human eyeball. Instead it’s just JJ Abrams playing with his toys as the child director in his film just shakes his head and walks away to a better project.
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2011 Dream Emmy Ballot: Comedy

2011-06-20T14:35:00.011-05:00

The only thing I enjoy about picking Emmy candidates is finding pictures of my favorite performers. The rest is a bulldozer that flattens my critical personality—which found Breaking Bad offputtingly sloppy, Community rarely up to the tasks it sets itself, 30 Rock one of the great media satires, and Glee a shockingly transcendent vision—until it resembles People, all of us nominating the exact same shows. Sure I can set myself apart by snubbing Best Comedy Modern Family and holding off on Game of Thrones, however fun the ride, until it comes up with a more meaningful raison d'etre than a bunch of rich dudes fighting over who gets to tell whom to kill whom this week, but because I find Community breathtakingly ambitious and sometimes just breathtaking, I consider it one of the six best works of comedy on television despite feeling nothing so much as disappointment. Welcome to the leviathan.
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X-Men: First Class: I have a wet dream

2011-06-14T04:51:00.004-05:00

I guess X-Men: First Class was set in the ‘60s to better reflect Matthew Vaughn’s thoughtless patriarchal identification, because it damn sure wasn’t about civil rights, the Cold War, liberation, or the Holocaust, weighty abstracts whittled into icons, the better for Vaughn to pretend his film has some deep, world-historical meaning instead of actually doing the work of investing his social commentary, or his doomsday scenario, or his gay allegory, or his coming of age with genuine depth. The story thrills—Magneto hunting Nazis, Xavier assembling a team, our heroes saving the world—but the screenplay is a bag of bones, going from civilian to superhero with the whoosh of a montage, racing from scene to scene so we don't think about it too hard, and pivoting on several sudden betrayals by those sneaky racial minorities, a black wasp hooker and a blue-skinned, naked chameleon (which I think is taking pride a little too far). What’s more, the reversals are prompted by dialogue that couldn’t convince you January Jones has boobs, not that you could possibly miss the twin subjects of this adolescent fantasy, protesting its feminism while objectifying every curve in sight.
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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: Raiders of the lost ark

2011-06-10T03:31:00.001-05:00

It isn’t simply that I like Dead Man’s Chest better than Curse of the Black Pearl, that my sui generis brain chemistry arbitrarily prefers squid-pirates to skeletal specters and sexy rogues to straight-laced do-gooders, thought that’s certainly true. But, despite a few extra pounds that should have been a warning sign, Dead Man’s Chest is also the stronger film, a classical, swashbuckling tragedy across the Disney fantasyland where wood looks plasticky and water chlorinated. Curse of the Black Pearl is a terrific children’s entertainment, the best film adaptation of you and your friends playing pirate that ever existed, but Dead Man’s Chest boasts fewer “Try wearing a corset” clunkers, more boundary-pushing action thrills, and CGI that would make James Cameron drool if he were biologically human.
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Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides: King Solomon's wines

2011-05-29T16:16:00.002-05:00

While the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise started with a fun, fresh take on a notoriously stale brand of box office poison, eight years and two directors later, the plastic surgery is finally catching up to it. Like the unintended consequences of a genie’s wish, the children’s adventure serial has achieved immortality at the cost of its integrity, which I don’t mean spiritually—this whole shebang is based on a roller coaster, after all—so much as physically: On Stranger Tides is an unnaturally sagging, surgically distended mess. But beneath the aging collagen flab and melting silicone balloons is a fun next episode, and unlike most of today’s unfocused blockbusters, at least On Stranger Tides tries to have a point beyond keeping its studio in the black.
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Bridesmaids: Funny girl

2011-05-24T21:27:00.000-05:00

I’m shocked—shocked!—to find the big, dirty bone of contention with Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids is the centerpiece gross-out scene, when whole mailing lists of people expecting a nice, polite feminist comedy were driven to conniptions because pretty, sweet Ellie Kemper vomited on Wendi McLendon-Covey and poor, put-upon Maya Rudolph was reduced to a curbside bowel movement. My stars! A thousand teeth-gnashers left early to write their headlines: How is toilet humor a win for feminism?
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Thor: Norwegian wood

2011-05-18T06:19:00.001-05:00

If you only see one small-town American story with an Oedipal skeleton enveloping space and time and prehistoric beasts this summer, please, for the love of all that is cinematically holy, make it Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, because Kenneth Branagh’s nominally Norse still-life Thor is so cosmically incompetent it features as its climax of pathos a single tear that provokes laughter more booming and powerful than all the thunder this antispectacle could muster. What is with the CGI, these days? Even if Branagh weren’t senselessly cutting from cloesup to closeup in action scenes less comprehensible than a Donald Trump press conference, we still wouldn’t know what’s going on because apparently $150 million of CGI only buys a dark and blurry playground in the Uncanny Valley. If my jaw dropped during Thor, it had nothing to do with the intended Lovecraftian beauty that I’m sure the production art and a nice matte painting would have provided and everything to do with the epic waste on display.
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Why I Still Love Glee

2011-05-17T08:30:00.001-05:00

Being the only person on the planet still excited about Glee has its advantages. For one, my “Trouty Mouth” ringtone is still underground hip. For another, less competition for Trouty Mouth himself. But I’m honestly perplexed—not for the first time when it comes to Glee’s audience—why so many camel’s backs are breaking now, during the show’s strongest run of episodes.
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Justified: A conscientious objection

2011-05-14T22:18:00.005-05:00

At a climactic second-act moment in the Justified finale, a few days after the extrajudicial punishment of Osama bin Laden for his confessed crimes, Timothy Olyphant’s trigger-happy Kentucky marshal Raylan Givens swaggers away from—let’s simplify—his defenseless enemy and his gun-toting friend saying, “I didn’t pull the trigger, but I’ll sleep like a baby knowing he will.” It’s a coincidence with uncanny resonance. The show is, in name anyway, about the justified use of physical force, particularly gun violence, but this scene, this moment, this line is the distilled expression of a nation’s unburdened catharsis. Dickie hurt our buddy Raylan, he was this close to killing him, and he’s only out of bars because of his greasy fur. Who could possibly object to the execution that’s coming one way or another?
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Golden Age of TV Drama: Why so serious?

2011-05-07T01:18:00.003-05:00

I can’t remember the last time I laughed watching a television drama. Retracing, there's this supermassive black hole and then Dawson crying. In the eleven years since, television drama got a little attention and suddenly needed to be the most important artform on the planet, throwing out everything except its black turtlenecks, showily toting around Franzen, and demanding to be taken seriously through sheer force of how seriously it was taking itself. It’s like it learned nothing from Hank Kingsley.
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Scream 4: All about Neve

2011-05-04T19:50:00.003-05:00

If you’re wondering what horror tropes are left for Wes Craven, Kevin Williamson, and blonde TV starlets to skewer with the resurrected corpse of the Scream franchise, Scream 4 isn’t much help. First there’s the old anything-goes rule that’s been trotted out for each sequel and politely put back in the cupboard by the unkillable Sidney, Dewey, and Gale who beg to differ. Next we have the central conceit of Scream 4, that VHS tapes and landlines have given way to iPhones and webcams, so a modern take on the Woodsboro murders would see the killer filming his crimes. Nevermind that Michael Powell was doing this fifty years ago. Finally we have the silliest rule: “Only surefire way to survive a modern horror, you pretty much have to be gay.” With no basis in American horror, it’s an obvious invention for the sole purpose of calling back to it later, art pretending to imitate life. Nothing gets murdered so thoroughly in Scream 4 as postmodernism.
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The Office: Michael Scott, we hardly knew ye

2011-05-02T14:50:00.004-05:00

I’m not surprised by the raves for Thursday’s misty farewell to television icon Michael Scott. (Though I do think we're missing the big picture, that Pam couldn't sit through The King's Speech.) “Goodbye, Michael” was full of powerful stuff: one last return to Michael’s paternal relationship with Erin (a still tolerable character played by a still great performance), one last connection between Michael and Pam (the show’s bedrock relationship), and one last look at the office before Michael is gone forever. What I am surprised by is everyone’s acceptance that the past seven years has brought us fluidly to a place of Michael Scott, self-aware man.
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Jane Eyre: Bride of Rochester

2011-04-26T04:30:00.002-05:00

For a film about a singular meeting of minds, Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre is kind of undistinguished. Now, the words remain delicious morsels straight from Charlotte Bronte’s novel, and the performances (Mia Wasikwoska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell, and Judi Dench) embody three-dimensions like James Cameron never dreamed of. But like Never Let Me Go, another painterly romance where the words preach transcendence and the style settles for ordinary, Jane Eyre is pretty in the usual ways—jewel tones, peat planetscapes, lived-in antiques—animating everything in Bronte’s story except its spirit.
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Rango: High-strung drifter

2011-04-18T04:28:00.003-05:00

Like all stranger-comes-to-town plots, only with a wink and a monologue, Gore Verbinski's Rango is literally about a protagonist in search of his story, an identity defined by a plot, so maybe it’s right that the chameleon stumbles across an Old West that isn’t quite content to stay camouflaged to dusty leather and tattered denim. The fantasy elements—not just the anthropomorphism that comes with the ticket but a rattlesnake’s biological machine gun—and the war film interlude—an old-fashioned western horseback chase complicated with Apocalypse Now helicopters—overcrowd an already rich spaghetti West, but it hardly diminishes the basic postmodern pastiche, and the surrealist dream sequences provide passages of such beauty, wit, and imagination that you follow Verbinski down whichever rabbit holes and dead ends he falls into.
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Hanna: Weapon XX

2011-04-17T04:20:00.000-05:00

I was along for the ride until it turned out we weren’t going anywhere. In fact, I was really grooving on the film, thanking Orson Welles in heaven above for granting us a mainstream action film this insanely weird! Joe Wright must have spent decades studying Run, Lola, Run to capture Tom Tykwer’s delicate formula (hyper camera + running), though, of course, Tykwer had a method and Wright just had madness, and he marries this with fairy tale imagery, again for no reason, other than, I guess, it’s what we read to little girls, not that either the Grimm tradition of scaring little kids into submission or the Disney tradition of providing them fantastical hope has anything to do with this particular little girl, and we’re treated to the off-kilter performances of a ferocious Saoirse Ronan and Southern-fried Cate Blanchett and Tom Hollander’s take on Peter Lorre with a spring in his step, and all the while blares Hanna’s true claim to fame, a delirious score by the Chemical Brothers that has you wishing you could spend the rest of your days in a wintry German cuckoo clock shop/performance art sex club.
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Source Code: Middle track

2011-04-17T04:19:00.000-05:00

Here’s a lesson in relativity: Just because Duncan Jones makes movies that are challenging by Hollywood standards doesn’t mean he makes challenging movies. Source Code is such a Rorschach that it averages to a flatline, my heart euthanized by its total lack of passion. Most telling is Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays the goofy idiot blockbusters demand, constantly veering between groaningly miscast and almost breathlessly perfect. The opening is a jolt of energy that’s completely generic—establishing shots with an electric Hitchcockian score—and the closing is a bridge too far with intriguing complications (though, it should be said, the film utterly ignores them; despite the rampant fan-wanking, there’s a fine line between not spoonfeeding and not addressing). The romance is passionless, the shots are undistinguished, and Rod Serling whispered the twist in my ear fifty years ago.
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Paul: Revenge of the nerds

2011-04-17T04:17:00.000-05:00

There are two things to say about Paul, a game of Spot the Reference that could have been a lot more exhausting than it turned out to be. The first is its raison d’etre, a puzzle compiled by graverobbers who made no attempt to cover their tracks: here’s the Gorn, there’s the cantina song, someone just said “Get away from her, you bitch!” to Sigourney Ripley Weaver herself! No wit, no satire, just quotes from rotting carcasses that amount to a pleasant, nostalgic diversion with no return value. It’s postmodern plagiarism.
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Mildred Pierce: A woman's picture

2011-04-16T17:30:00.002-05:00

I’m not surprised by the deafening drone of Mildred’s detractors, who were all too happy to give Boardwalk Empire the exact same breaks they withhold here—it dilly-dallies but it looks like it’s headed somewhere interesting, it’s indulgent but who am I to contain Martin Scorsese, it’s all style and no substance but maybe it’ll grow—but I am dismayed by the sheer refusal to engage with a woman’s picture as a woman’s picture. Chalk it up to whatever you want—cultural politics, the decline of the miniseries, the melodrama’s transfer into the men’s lockerroom—but Mildred Pierce is one of television’s only feminist works about feminism, set—where else?—in the Haynesian Hollywood Hills, cultural capital of tawdry scandal and constant performance. And just like its magnificent heroine, it thrives on underestimation.
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Certified Copy: Je ne sais quoi

2011-04-12T16:07:00.001-05:00

It might be imperial to claim Abbas Kiarostami’s best film is his first outside Iran, not in Farsi, and starring an international star—in other words, the one that’s most European—but I have no guilt, because in my universe it’s true: Certified Copy is the most intellectually and emotionally stirring film I’ve seen since Inland Empire, waking long dormant oxygen tanks and then exploding them like Apollo 13 before successfully landing this bird somewhere, somehow, in some plane of existence. It’s a distillation of his decades-long projects—investigating the camera as a medium of truth and society as a medium of men—and a sly expansion of them, bridging the gap between Koker and Marienbad without so much as a wink. I can’t imagine you’re waiting for my endorsement, but I had a powerful experience going into the film blind and I’d hate to steal that from you, so I won’t so much as tiptoe past the trailhead—with William Shimell as James Miller as Kiarostami surrogate and Juliette Binoche as the world’s worst audience member—but I have to examine some of the film’s profound meanings, and that demands some discussion.
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My Cinematic Alphabet: Diamonds of the night

2011-04-10T23:56:00.003-05:00

In the interests of totally pinko inclusiveness, I tried to exclude films I already flog to death (like Diamonds of the Night and Last Year at Marienbad), but there are some stalwarts that will not be moved out of mere politeness. My other goal was to limit directors to a maximum of two, which covered most of my favorites, but unfortunately, no Rossellini; Antonioni wins that fight every time. No Coen or Kiarostami either, and their stock is right where I left it, standing proudly atop the current heap, so don't think of this as a list of my favorites. This is just a list of words and pictures wielding for me the semantic power of a lively, black-and-white dance to "This Time Tomorrow."
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Red Riding Hood: Season of the witch

2011-04-05T08:04:00.001-05:00

2011 in general and the weekly viewing of films in particular have taught me a valuable lesson: there are many different kinds of terrible movies. The Eagle may be incompetently scripted, but it’s degrees of quality better than the immoral (The Lincoln Lawyer), the amoral (The Mechanic), and the thunderously boring (Battle: Los Angeles). There are interesting failures (The Adjustment Bureau), and there are hilarious trainwrecks (Country Strong), but there are also totally harmless low-hanging fruits like Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood. If bad were the necessary and sufficient condition for critical drubbing, we’d be here all night wailing on goofy pieces of trash that just want to be goofy pieces of trash. Red Riding Hood is a Hallmark channel TV movie in the vein of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, but it’s hardly trying to do more than give tween girls an empowering fairy tale. And it’s a damn sight better at that than Sucker Punch.
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Becoming Shameless: The changing face of TV's gay youth

2011-04-04T11:18:00.003-05:00

I survived Shameless and all I got was this lousy idea. I mean, it can be powerful when William H. Macy’s drunk, abusive father isn’t stealing the spotlight with his drunk, abusive antics—par for the course for Showtime’s asshole antiheroes we’re supposed to root for—especially because it’s these interludes where the show is actually about something, the way these people on the margins, the economic state of nature, pull themselves together to survive. But what most blows me away in the age of Kurt and Blaine and Victoria Jackson is Ian Gallagher, played by Cameron Monaghan as a gay kid who expresses his gayness not through fashion or decorating or beating up fags but through gayness itself. Fancy that.
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Top 25 Overlooked Female TV Characters

2011-03-29T07:29:00.006-05:00

In honor of Women’s History Month, TVSquad have come up with a list of the top 100 female TV characters. It’s a list with the expected ranking quibbles and admirable scope—Mary Richards is the Citizen Kane of these lists by now, but it’s nice to see Jessica Fletcher, Jessica Tate, and Snoop from The Wire—but some of the selections obviously made the cut by sheer dint of name-recognition. The blurb for Chrissy Snow argues that she’s a stereotype, but the stereotypiest stereotype there is!, and then we have Bionic Woman and Jill Munroe who mistake masculine ass-kicking for complexity, and to add some color to the proceedings we had to go all the way to the bottom of the barrel to pluck out the tiresome Whitley from A Different World like our options were limited to whatever TBS aired reruns of for the past twenty years.
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The Lincoln Lawyer: In cold blood

2011-03-29T00:13:00.003-05:00

I felt dirtier walking out of Brad Furman’s The Lincoln Lawyer than its idol The Long Goodbye, and not just because all that hero worship makes us into peeping toms. When Phillip Marlowe starts walking the hard road back to civilization, he’s a changed man. When The Lincoln Lawyer reaches its franchise moment, Matthew McConaughey is playing to type, as slick and carefree as the Hollywood escapism around him. Only I was burdened with the angst the film doesn’t realize it stirred up. Only I felt the consequences.
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Of Gods and Men: Putting the static in ecstatic

2011-03-23T16:36:00.003-05:00

Can we please talk about the difference between contemplative and just slow? Of Gods and Men is the most recent César winner and France’s submission to the Oscars, beating Assayas' Carlos, Renais’ Wild Grass, and most conspicuously Denis’ White Material. Both White Material and Of Gods and Men are about white people in postcolonial Africa caught between the tidal forces of the established state military and rebel extremists told in an impressionistic montage of moments. But where Denis leaves us wanting more, her film bursting with ambiguities and false dichotomies and resonant geopolitical ideas, Beauvois leaves us wanting much less.
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Reference for Reference's Sake: Topicality and meaning

2011-03-17T14:54:00.011-05:00

I don’t buy that art has an expiration date, and I can prove it. I ate week-old chili yesterday and look at me now. The problem with pop culture references in sitcoms isn’t that they become dated when future consumers (THINK OF THE CHILDREN!) are so far removed from the era of reference and, less saliently, so confounded by the contemporary worship of hollow, self-serious pretension as greatness that they can’t recall what the War on Terror was in general or the invasion of Iraq in specific, much less Michael Moore, Mission Accomplished, free speech zones, Peanuts, or the Soup Nazi, so they watch Arrested Development with stony-faced revulsion at the America which once embraced and glorified incest, embarrassed that their great-grandparents actually thought this American Oedipus (and then some) was funny. That’s on them, and stepping in on their behalf is the most feckless of concern trolling. When has not understanding something ever given one license to denounce it? I’m not going to ask my grandma her opinion on Islam. I can turn on Glenn Beck for myself, thankyouverymuch.
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Heartbeats: Don't you want me, baby?

2011-03-15T12:27:00.002-05:00

Heartbeats is like Godard directing the kind of mad love music video the ‘80s were rife with (“Don’t You Want Me,” “Every Breath You Take,” “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” etc.) where the bouncy electronic pop doesn’t come close to obscuring the dark edge that underscores passionate love, and not just because the ‘80s revived ‘60s color blocking and Xavier Dolan rocks androgynous-to-feminine outfits and a sweet Vanilla Ice bouffant (on account of aiming for a James Dean look but without the side length required). I’d be more hesitant to invoke Godard, who saturates the picture like a film school idol, if Dolan weren’t so fully formed; the closest young voice I can think of is Lena Dunham, but Dolan has a much firmer grasp on what he’s doing, at least once the opening’s hyperactive zoom settles down—less pretension and empty experimentation than genuine voice.
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Unknown: The ultimate driving machine

2011-03-14T12:46:00.001-05:00

It’s a sign of the times that Jaume Collet-Serra’s Unknown is plucked from a sea of shallow, incompetent and/or misogynistic trash and held like a life-preserver as proof that mainstream cinema isn’t dead, just in hibernation. Unknown is hardly a film itself, more like a luxury car commercial demonstrating the versatility of the automobile as a killing machine. Which makes sense, considering the primary inspiration other than the better thrillers it constantly evokes is the BMW short film series, a set of nocturnal European action noirs that surely gave rise to Unknown’s incessant parade of car chases, though, I have to admit, after the seventeenth set-piece wore me out, the eighteenth was the perfect pick-me-up. Unknown hardly lives up to the example of the great pulp thrillers, action entertainments with depth like last winter’s Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer, but it does make, for the first hour and a half, anyway, a surprisingly effective ride.
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Country Strong: America hard

2011-03-14T11:18:00.006-05:00

Mediocre as cinema, melodrama, and camp spectacle, Country Strong is an offense to country music. Not just in the way Her Royal Gwyneth flashes her vag singing a song called “Shake That Thang” in her triumphant climax like she’s Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn’s idle Kardashian offspring trading on her parents’ name for a chance to further cheapen a perfectly good artform in the name of ephemeral popularity (to which we’re supposed to cheer), but in the way it devours country music history and shits out an artless pastiche composed mostly of contrived repetitions of history and empty name-dropping. Wearing country music mythology on its sleeve like a big, blinding, sequined Texas flag, Country Strong plays Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, slaughtering that which it covets and sewing it into a hideous parody that’s supposed to pass for homage.
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Battle: Los Angeles: Blood, sweat, and tears

2011-03-11T06:57:00.006-06:00

It’s not enough to say Battle: Los Angeles is derivative, born as it is from some unholy union of the Spielberg-Bay Family Camp for Heroes and Explosions and the Christopher Nolan School of Gritty Urban Realism Because Comically Absurd Sci-Fi Is Serious, Too, Dammit! Like a Greek monster—the head of Black Hawk Down, the ass of District 9, the rusty mechanical cock of Transformers—Battle: Los Angeles wastes the potential of its fantastical High Concept on a dull, lifeless flipbook of images, characters, and plot points ripped wholesale from other, better action blockbusters, which is saying something considering the sperm Roland Emmerich donated.
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The Adjustment Bureau: Patriarchy rules

2011-03-08T06:40:00.006-06:00

When will people learn? Mystery is greater than resolution. Curiosity lured us from hulking mouth-breathers into torture-rationalizers—but torture-rationalizers who went to the Moon! Answers just remind us that The Adjustment Bureau is a work of poorly planned screenwriting about half-forgotten ideas it picked up from that fascinating pamphlet on the philosophy of The Matrix.
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Justin Bieber: Never Say Never: Pinocchio

2011-03-01T22:40:00.004-06:00

I probably still would not have seen the best reviewed 2011 wide release if not for a cinematic lull coinciding with my first Justin Bieber song last week on Glee. But I had to see something, and it couldn't possibly be worse than The Eagle, so I donned my purple shirt and monochrome hoodie, prayed to someday complete the ensemble with a studded belt and low-slung skinny jeans, popped my head into one of those ‘50s hair salon bowls, and bought my ticket. In my life, I have been the only audience member for two movies. The first was Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass. The second, the better to fully give myself over to Biebermania, is Jon Chu’s Justin Bieber: Never Say Never.
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2011 Oscar Predictions

2011-02-20T16:35:00.009-06:00

As we all know, this is the most important Oscars since the Greek Academy snubbed Aeschylus in favor of The Underdogs of Sparta by Ridonculus. All the more reason to painstakingly detail my Outguess Ebert ballot, which, if my tech guy did his job correctly, will win me $100,000 whether or not I get all 24 predictions right.
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The Mechanic: Imitation of life

2011-02-19T11:27:00.004-06:00

The problem with Simon West’s The Mechanic isn’t that it’s amoral, exactly, but that it’s false, affected because it knows how to replicate the look of hit man movies—cool, aware, brooding—but can’t truly muster the inner life, the existential angst that catches up with even the most elusive. Jason Statham being Jason Statham doesn’t help, though his lightness saves the film from the pits of self-serious gravitas that sink many modern action thrillers, but the problem is much deeper than the stone-faced king of B-action.
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The Eagle: Love, honor, and obey

2011-02-17T12:19:00.007-06:00

You could blame the monumental waste of The Eagle on Centurion’s release last year, which preemptively renders its successor both outclassed and unnecessary, if the bulk of its ineptitude didn’t reside in the script. Yes, Jamie Bell heroically tries to balance an ensemble led by a statue and filled out with Donald Sutherland’s paycheck and a Roman frat boy, and yes, Kevin Macdonald does the film no favors submitting to the visual conventions of the genre right down to shoddy nocturnal action scenes and golden, sub-History Channel flashbacks, and yes, someone apparently instructed the cast to throw away what few jokes there are, except for the moment where we’re meant to laugh at the mistreatment of a slave because that’s hilarious, not to mention the wealth of accidental comedy up to and including the far-off screech of Colbert’s eagle, yes, the entire crew save Jamie Bell seem hellbent on sinking this vessel, but nothing is more suggestive of social promotion than the lazily structured, utterly undeveloped, and ultimately meaningless screenplay.
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Cold Weather: The Big Wake-Up

2011-02-15T02:40:00.003-06:00

Ironically, and here I’m talking about the artistic technique and not a pretend embrace of, say, Chuck Norris, Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather validates mumblecore by rejecting it. The first act is your standard mumblecore setup: a low-ambition young white male moves in with his sister, gets a routine job, meets an ex, all while making the physical act of speech seem like the strangest thing in the world or at least this flannel sanctuary known as Portland. But just when you’re ready to give up on the movement entire, Katz injects a fantastical premise—a noir detective story—that explodes the humdrum life we’ve been enduring. It’s like the film is so bored by its lead that it hatches a plan to save itself, and it works.
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Intolerable Cruelty & The Ladykillers: Bush league Coens

2011-02-09T03:05:00.001-06:00

Seven or eight years ago, about the time of our conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis, the Coen brothers made two films so bad they closed up shop to recharge. At least, that’s the story ‘round these parts. Facts put the lie to this earworm, The Ladykillers playing Cannes and Intolerable Cruelty opening to mostly positive reviews, but I guess that’s why they print the legend. Rumors of the films’ cow-patty stench worked for years like a scarecrow, but I finally pulled on my big boy britches and embarked on Coen completism. And you know what? They weren’t half bad. Sometimes there’s a film, well it’s the film for its time and place. I’d never say these movies are high in the running for the Films of Our Times ™, but both are unmistakably born of their time and place. Which goes some way to combating another rumor beloved by upturned noses everywhere that’s plagued the Coens since time immemorial. You ignore the politics of these films at your own risk.
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Top 10 Glee Songs from Fall 2010

2011-02-07T16:49:00.005-06:00

Third time's a charm? To be honest, this hasn't been my favorite semester of Glee, musically-speaking. But by the end I came to appreciate the rare moments when the show got off those crutches of straight-up reenactment and put its own stamp on music.
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Another Year: Seasonal affective disorder

2011-02-01T13:46:00.003-06:00

While The King's Speech loudly, laughably declared it has a voice this weekend, sweeping the guild awards and hoodwinking a lot of people who should know better into thinking it’s more than a shallow, concave, lumpy golddigger, Another Year quietly expanded, a genuinely humanist portrait of middle-aged British people discovering the therapeutic power of friendship, only without all that sap or easy uplift.
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2011 Oscar Nominations

2011-01-25T08:12:00.008-06:00

I don't care what you say: I love the Oscars. Their intrinsic worthlessness hardly diminishes my joy when justice is carried out, or when I get to see a Coen brother or Werner Herzog at a Hollywood party, or when A Serious Man gets a Best Picture nomination, or when I get to hear Alexandre Desplat's score for Fantastic Mr. Fox again, or when someone actually gives a great acceptance speech. So it's too bad this year's nominations have already short-circuited my excitement.
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Blue Valentine: Things fall apart

2011-01-18T03:13:00.003-06:00

Aiming for Cassavetes gets you Cassavetes, which would be outstanding if we didn’t already have Cassavetes. Which isn’t to say that Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is wholly derivative, but insofar as it’s an exploration of a crumbling relationship, it breaks no new ground and comes to no conclusions. This, thanks to its opening at a point where Ryan Gosling’s happy painter is blissfully unaware of how far down the road to separation his wife Michelle Williams already is. Talk about in media res. Opening here makes it abundantly clear that Blue Valentine has no interest in how or why relationships drain of eros. The goal, I suppose, is believable depiction—not interrogation, not reminiscence, just straight depiction—thereof, which is a pretty low bar admirably bounded by Williams with Gosling and Cianfrance on her coattails.
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Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl: That obscure object of desire

2011-01-11T22:19:00.003-06:00

It’s right there in the title. No, not the “Blonde-Haired Girl” part, that object of beauty framed in her window like an untouchable museum piece. The detractors don’t seem to notice anything beyond this crumbling skeleton of a Victorian romance, inspired as it is by realist writer Eca de Queiroz, but Manoel de Oliveira’s 2009 film wouldn’t know realism if it spiraled into prostitution to support its family of invalid immigrants who just finished off the leftovers of their faithful dog. No, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl is a batty, bizarre little picture that parlays this ancient tale into a playful interrogation of freedom like Bunuelian graffiti on a church wall. This is a film that comes alive in the eccentricities.
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10 Television Offenses of 2010

2011-01-09T16:12:00.004-06:00

I had all but given up hope of ever completing, much less planning, my 2010 listravaganza until I saw Reverse Shot’s 11 Film Offenses of 2010, a confrontational alternative to the consensus that brought me back to life. To me, television, far more than film, settles into a blunt consensus, at least in the macro. Episode-by-episode commentary encourages opinion repetition and forced narrative and inhibits wider perspective. Obviously these are surmountable problems, but the proof is in the pudding. Alan Sepinwall and Dan Fienberg have 80 % overlap on their top ten shows of the year. For their Lost postmortem, the two hosts of TV on the Internet scrounged up five commentators, all profoundly subtle gradations of adoring. While individual episodes can provoke varied responses, the greater arcs are all too often the same. Glee is essential for being the only show still capable of provoking rainbowed reactions, even within individual critics—but good luck finding it on a top 10 list.
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Never Let Me Go: The greater good

2011-01-03T11:15:00.006-06:00

Clones, huh? Who do they think they are, people? The most haunting film I’ve seen this year, Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go is a lot more subversive than people give it credit for, because it presents and laments a world where the cost-benefit analysis of letting children die for society comes up “Totally Worth It.”
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Somewhere: Lifestyles of the rich and famous

2011-01-02T09:18:00.006-06:00

Still sucking up to the Italians, Sofia Coppola continues to explore the old bourgeois ennui picture—an increasingly pessimistic cycle from Europa ’51 to La dolce vita to La notte and beyond—in Somewhere, another film about existential angst where the cause, contra the Italians, is not the soul-crushing effects of modernism but celebrity itself. The bourgeoisie are discontented because they are bourgeoisie, hence the self-destructive dive into the abyss that cheerily marks a Sofia Coppola hero. We may have seen Somewhere before, but time hasn't dulled its impact.
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I Am Love: Joie de vivre

2011-01-02T05:11:00.002-06:00

Boy, the Milan Tourism Board sure got their money’s worth with I Am Love, Luca Guadagnino’s “Come to Fabulous Milan!” ad. It’s the first thing you notice: the credits fade in over alternating shots of a snowy, overcast day, and still the town is gorgeous, you know, in a tastefully restrained kind of way. Then we meet our heroes in their ostentatious mansion as they’re putting on their chic formalwear for a birthday celebration around the dinner table where sits, you guessed it, the most sumptuous foods ever committed to film. It’s a film in love with beauty—shots open on Milanese architecture or landscapes before honing in on our characters, rack focuses pull from mouthwatering dishes to gluttonous faces, and impressionistic montage transforms the countryside into heaven. How much are plane tickets?
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I Love You, Phillip Morris: Stranger than fiction

2011-01-01T07:50:00.002-06:00

What a crazy story! Jim Carrey plays a guy who tracks down his birth mother, gets in a car wreck, quits the police force, divorces his wife to shack up with some guy in Miami, cons his way into money, goes to jail, falls in love, and breaks out multiple times to be with his chosen. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s I Love You, Phillip Morris is absolutely packed with plot to no apparent end beyond shaking its head and chuckling, “What a crazy story!”
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All Done: My answers to the latest movie quiz

2010-12-31T03:07:00.006-06:00

Every so often, Dennis Cozzalio posts a new, fun, provocative, damnable, revelatory movie quiz, and last week came the latest. I highly recommend checking it out and posting your own answers. The best part about being done is getting to check out what everyone else said. So here are my answers. No cheating.
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Youth in Revolt: Arrested development

2010-12-30T09:50:00.002-06:00

Michael Cera finally got laid! It only took Dissociative Identity Disorder, the selfishness of adolescence, and a Hulklike resistance to any kind of message. At first Miguel Arteta's Youth in Revolt looked like a delicately offbeat Napoleon Dynamite-style romantic “comedy” that can’t decide if it prefers the characterization “quirky” or “twee,” set as it is in the hyperliterate, letter-writing sophisticate world of northern California, a magnificent land of all-French academies and nostalgic animation. I’m not sure what precisely made it bearable, but I was utterly won over by the end, my heart fluttering for the Tyler Durden-style Jean-Paul Belmondo wannabe alter ego who prances more than he runs, never as cool as he thinks he is, but then, that’s part of the joke. Every time the two Ceras appear together my face lit up, but even that fails to live up to the transcendent joy that is Jean Smart playing trailer mom. Someone get her a Showtime show and an Emmy, stat.
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Tiny Furniture: Not a girl, not yet a woman

2010-12-30T07:10:00.003-06:00

I kind of wish Lena Dunham had kept Tiny Furniture to herself. That way she could debut more fully realized. As a practice film, it’s great, often stylistically creative and usually funny enough to keep us from noticing its simplicity. Dunham makes a winning heroine, whiny and selfish and sad without entirely alienating us. I don't know exactly how autobiographical it is, but the problem with Dunham’s film is the problem with her character: she lacks focus.
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Please Give: Death and taxes

2010-12-29T09:12:00.001-06:00

I was wowed by Please Give primarily because I had been under the impression that Nicole Holofcener was a crafter of lady pictures (chick flicks that demand to be taken seriously) like the dreadful In Her Shoes or something. Instead I found a remarkably complicated story about class in 2010 that has nothing to do with heartbreak—unless you count that gut-searing disappointment only family can induce.
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The King's Speech: Radio silence

2010-12-29T06:28:00.004-06:00

Tom Hooper's The King’s Speech was really something there until it ascended to the throne and conformed to all kinds of expectation. Not that it was ever really out there, exactly. But until the inheritance debacle, The King’s Speech was this bizarrely freeform collection of scenes that loosely followed the track of King George VI through the ‘30s. There was a constant juxtaposition of the ancient royalty with the modern world and an obsession with new technologies and a bulbous cinematography (including wide-angle close-ups) and a fetish for that multicolored Factory wall at Geoffrey Rush’s apartment. Not to mention a spirited montage of singing, swearing, and dancing. I’m just saying it wasn’t The Queen, for a while there.
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Fair Game: A hill of beans

2010-12-29T00:49:00.004-06:00

The facts of the case are pretty damn compelling. So why do we have to care about Valerie Plame’s marriage? There is a world historical scandal here, and yes it pivots on this one woman, but Doug Liman fashions an emotional climax not out of the invasion of Iraq or even the conviction of Plame’s malefactors but the reunion between Plame and that human-shaped container of smug she married and their decision to Fight Back!
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The Fighter: White swan

2010-12-28T09:43:00.001-06:00

Not to damn with faint praise, but The Fighter is basically Black Swan for boys. In that it’s an awardsy picture about an athlete’s struggle with a little to say and a lot of style. Wahlberg hardly lives up to Portman, of course, who hardly lives up to her hype, but Christian Bale and Melissa Leo and Amy Adams and Jack McGee and Christian Bale more than pay for the price of admission. Finally Amy Adams isn’t playing the princess; girl can act! And Bale’s greatness lies not in his approximation of addiction and withdrawal nor his chameleon faculty with accents but in his humanity, his depth, a fullness that pops him right out of the movie and into the real world.
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True Grit: The rural juror

2010-12-28T07:42:00.005-06:00

Comparing the Coen Brothers’ latest western, the chase film True Grit, to its predecessor, the camp classic (double entendre alert!) that finally won John Wayne his Oscar, is a triflin’ quarrel. Never mind that the original True Grit is dated by its tomboys with Mia Farrow voice, comic mugging accompanied by jaunty woodwinds, and all the mis-en-scene of a Star Trek episode. The Coens aren’t following in Henry Hathaway’s footsteps. They’re tracking Anthony Mann.
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The Killer Inside Me: Blood simple and stupid

2010-12-27T08:04:00.003-06:00

I don’t see what all the fuss was about. Maybe it’s because cinema has desensitized me so much, warped my brain so permanently, that the moments of violence here failed to send me fleeing to the nearest psych ward. Or maybe the film just isn’t all that significant in the grand scheme.
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Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work: Year in the life

2010-12-27T07:37:00.001-06:00

After all that acclaim, it would have been nice if Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work were, you know, well made. It’s not as elliptical as, say, The Hills, but it’s not exactly comprehensive, and structurally it’s almost as inventive as An Inconvenient Truth. That said, Joan Rivers is a spicy subject, and those of us who know her primarily for belittling stars on the Red Carpet to their faces—which alone makes her a national treasure—will find a fascinating history of one of our comedy pioneers. Directors Ricki Stern and Anne Stundberg aren’t to blame for the mainstream press’ juvenile lack of perspective, and their humanistic behind-the-scenes peek at the Renaissance workaholic is one delicious piece of low-hanging fruit.

Rabbit Hole: Don't look now -- ordinary people in the bedroom on Reservation Road by Mystic River

2010-12-27T07:03:00.002-06:00

I’m not sure why people keep making this movie, but I only liked it the first time because I was cowed by the tempest. Ingrid Bergman, Mary Tyler Moore, and Sissy Spacek pulled it off; why not Nicole Kidman? But marriages surviving the death of a child is a subgenre that needs to stop. No offense to the cast and crew, none of whom should be ashamed, exactly, of their participation here: Nicole Kidman does indeed best her facework in order to change her expression a couple times, and Aaron Eckhart makes for an attractive grieving dad, and he has this one hot middle-aged friend, and the Rabbit Hole sequences are an interesting if obvious gimmick. But nobody has learned anything new about anything, least of all The Human Condition, from these pent-up marriage movies, and Rabbit Hole, despite exactly two moments of inspiration and no Tim Robbins monologues about vampires, doesn’t break any new ground, either.

Cyrus: A boy's best friend . . .

2010-12-27T06:54:00.002-06:00

If nothing else—and rarely have those words strained so much—Cyrus was pretty funny until that last act. It’s the latest by indie stalwarts Jay & Mark Duplass, and it stars Jonah Hill as an earnest adult child whose relationship to mom Marisa Tomei is a bit too Dogtooth for mom’s new boyfriend, self-sabotager John C. Reilly. Hill scores some laughs but never feels human, and Reilly, who should really go back to working with classical auteurs, is still playing the doofusy stock character he’s been perfecting (or whatever you call putting the finishing touches on something horrible) with Adam McKay, but Tomei—surprise!—pulls off another great performance, this one with a healthy and relatable sense of embarrassment.
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Dogtooth: Adventures in home-schooling

2010-12-23T23:23:00.003-06:00

The night after I got to see Yorgos Lanthimos’ bone-dry Greek family comedy Dogtooth at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, that same room saw the Houston Film Critics Society name The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo the best foreign language film of the year. In the year Houston hosted Carlos, White Material, Mother, A Prophet, The White Ribbon, and No One Knows About Persian Cats, that’s a great disappointment. In the year Houston hosted Dogtooth, it’s a great joke.

See, Dogtooth is about shelter and the sheltered, as a trio of twentysomething children in isolation on a compound are educated and socialized only by their parents, who have decided to sequester their children for as long as they can in order to keep them safe from The Real World. It’s like that home-schooling scene from Mean Girls caught a snippet of Jersey Shore and boarded up the house for good. Dogtooth makes for a fascinating anthropological study, as the adult children behave impetuously like some familiar but alien tribe complete with its own dances and rituals, until you stumble over a hole, like why the son gets to his mid-20s before needing sexual gratification and why he needs it at all since masturbation is, um, discovered more than learned behavior.

That’s when you remember it’s fictional and there’s a point here about the authoritarian patriarchy. The son’s prostitute, brought to the house by Father, winds up planting the seeds for an open society, and in response Father finds her at her own home and smites her in a joke that uncomfortably (but unmistakably) places the US in the shoes of a closed society like China or Russia. This, by the way, is but one example of the film’s oil-black humor, which deftly mines culture clash, childishness, and sudden violence for a particularly unique mix of comedy that recalls a more painful Buñuel, a broader Kaurismäki, or a zanier Cristi Puiu. It amounts to an absurdist explosion defining authoritarianism as intolerable abuse while questioning the extent of freedom on both sides of the fence with one of the most perfect finales of the year. I don’t want to say the HFCS has some growing up to do, but one wonders whether they’ve ever ventured into the difficult territory outside and how they’d fare there if they did.

Black Swan: Hall of mirrors

2010-12-13T22:33:00.005-06:00

Just once I’d like to see a film about an artist who achieves his masterpiece by seeking greater control. The popular fantasy is that artists are sensitive feelers who must completely lose themselves and let the spirit of Obi-Wan or whatever guide them to glory, not practicing communicators who ought to pinpoint precisely what they’re saying in order to express themselves best. So it is with Black Swan, where Natalie Portman’s perfectionist ballerina and Darren Aronofsky’s mathematical auteur get lost in all the crazy, both to exaggerated applause.

It’s subtle, but see if you can spot the common thread. Black Swan is a story simultaneously on parallel tracks, both well-worn—one, where an artist is killing herself for greatness, and another where a girl is coming of age—in a world of obvious dichotomies, doppelganger figures, mirrors galore, and more mirrors besides. Get it? If you liked Aronofsky’s Pi, then you’ll love his Two! It doesn’t add up to much but it makes one hell of a drinking game.

Unfortunately, mirrors offer only the illusion of depth. Here’s another dichotomy: Black Swan is intellectually wanting but emotionally overwhelming. Like fellow critical darling Winter’s Bone, Black Swan isn’t a great film so much as a singular thriller, with a twisted sense of reality, haunted dollhouse art direction, a couple of lo-fi Lynch moments, and the best grotesque close-ups this side of Polanski. Expressionism contorts Vincent Cassel into a domineering master at just the right moments, and Barbara Hershey is always a modulated monster, her every action underwritten by the sins of envy and pride. Black Swan is paranoid, delusional, and scary—though when I cringe in response to body mutilation, I’m feeling cheap revulsion, not earned fear—and both Aronofsky and Portman stick the landing or whatever metaphor a seasoned balletomane might come up with to describe the mesmerizing climax and Sunset Blvd. finale. Black Swan is absolutely excellent for what it is, hobbled only by the meaninglessness of the nightmare.

Eyeballs and Cliches: The Walking Dead Season 1

2010-12-06T13:42:00.005-06:00

See? I told you The Walking Dead was Lost without the fun. Now we have to wait a whole year to watch more biped primates we’re meant to care about despite no development wind up in more threatening situations. Also, Lori’s pregnant. There, I saved you ten episodes. Look, I couldn’t be happier that AMC has their summer blockbuster so they can continue funding Zeitgeist Icon ™ Mad Men and Arthouse Indie ™ Rubicon, except they canceled Rubicon, so, you know, their next Rubicon, or whatever. But the only measures by which The Walking Dead surpasses those shows are eyeballs and clichés.

Take last night’s finale. This show has all the structure of a Girls Gone Wild star, but has there been anything remotely as contrived as the inexplicable wait-until-it’s-too-late sequence in the bunker? And then we’re spose ta get all misty over Black Chick suiciding despite the fact that the only thing she’s done since invoking her city planning skillz is silently contemplate the plight of black women on television while angling to get the next maid role on Mad Men. Poniewozik—an infinitely funnier and smarter writer than the rest of us—says the show has proven its commitment to high stakes, that anyone could go at any time. I, respectfully, call bullshit. I have no doubt that these people are safe: Love Actually, his wife and son, Laurie Holden, and Other Cop, and I’d put money down on Boondock Saints, too. That’s Boondock Saints, too, not Boondock Saints II. That shit’s even worse than The Walking Dead.

Other things that make no sense: Merle is still at large. Chekhov says he’ll come back, but if he doesn’t come back zombiefied, how does that not put so much strain on your credulity as to destroy it entirely? Oh, I’m well aware he’ll get a significant “The Other 48 Days” of his own, this being Lost and all, but that won’t make it any more believable. Not that they could write credible dialogue anyway. Did you notice that the only time anyone stopped to make an actually funny (ish) joke—as opposed to all that Hilarious Banter going on at dinner; did you catch all that laughing?!!! Hilarious, you guys—was when they were in an urgent life-threatening situation with the grenade and Shane “Pecs” McGee tells Lifetime her nail file won’t help. I know I’ve been asking for more comedy, since the End of the World won’t magically destroy our sense of humor, but Darabont, honey, that wasn't the time.

Last things last. The Walking Dead is the least cinematically interesting sci-fi show in history. They’re clearly not going for any heightened visual style, which is fine, if kind of a waste of a perfectly good apocalypse. But what are they doing? The look/editing/compositions are lazy as realism and weak as grit. I expect artistic unity from great drama, not to mention theme, but at this point, I’ll take panache if it’s all I can get. The Walking Dead can't even pull that off. Apparently zombies aren't the only ones content to be mindless.

Puff Piece: The Entertainers of 2010

2010-12-04T08:03:00.008-06:00

If Entertainment Weekly can declare some very earnest elf the entertainer of the year, then surely it’s time for someone to swoop in and completely rebuild their list of the year’s top entertainers, right? Duty calls.

I know I can be all “German expressionism this” and “state of nature that,” but I’ve taken my marching orders with the seriousness of Taylor Swift addressing Kanyegate. These are the entertainers of the year, the people that have delighted me with comfort over the past eleven months, not (necessarily) the visionaries responsible for the most creatively fulfilling or intellectually fascinating works. Translation: they're more Rowling than Tolkien.

Let the Reaganing begin:

1. They picked Taylor Swift, which is probably a very mean, very funny joke. So the pick to fill my arbitrary cover girl slot is:

Angelina Jolie – As Evelyn Salt, she pretty much singlehandedly saved summer cinema, and she absolutely sizzles in the trailer for The Tourist (publishing deadlines obviously preclude me from actually seeing the whole year’s entertainment before summarily declaring the entertainers of the year). As it stands, Salt is on my top ten for the year.

2. EW went with Jon Hamm, who was sporadically great in The Town and SNL and won television in this season of Mad Men. But me, I’m going with a middle-aged multimedia breakout with a slightly higher batting average this year:

Louis CK – Louie is a singular comedy that is among the most unified (i.e. perfect) series on television, and Hilarious is quite the aptly titled comedy special. (Also, I keep running into Shameless on HBO, which I have never yet been able to turn off before it’s over.)

3. Kanye West? The guy with the Twitter feed? I’ve got someone even crazier:

Julian Assange – What’s more entertaining than reading about Qaddafi’s buxom Ukrainian nurstitute or seeing the US and Afghanistan scramble to dispel any rumors that they aren’t total besties in light of so many documents that suggest otherwise? There was a fist-fight at a Latin American leadership conference, foreign contractors hired dancing boys in Afghanistan, and Berlusconi’s probably taking money from Putin. I couldn’t be more serious in my belief that there is a fantastic geopolitical real housewives-type show in here somewhere.

4. Of course EW would go with Christopher Nolan, the Stanley Kubrick of middlebrow bullshit. I’m gonna go with a mind-bending director who’s actually, um, good:

Banksy – Not only is Exit Through the Gift Shop really something to chew on, it’s hilarious, fleet, and absolutely thrilling. Then there’s Banksy’s credit sequence for The Simpsons, which many Very Serious TV Critics found unoriginal in its arguments, which in no way misses the point of film criticism. As I said then, Banksy, don’t ever change.

5. The kids of Modern Family are actually a great choice, excepting, of course, the unfunny dead weight of Lily. Talk about a diva. But I preferred the kids from another show:

The kids of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – They are too numerous and Canadian for me to list here, but I will highlight Mae Whitman, who rocked in her episode The Revenge of Annabell Veal, Alison Pill, who rocked In Treatment last season, and Kieran Culkin, who stole the show.

6. Another excellent choice: The cast of The Social Network. I could get behind that, but I’ll take the opportunity to instead praise another cast:

The cast of Cougar Town – 2010 has been the breakout year for the unfortunately marketed show about weird middle-aged friends and neighbors who just happen to be the best comedy cast currently on the air.

7. I like “Bad Romance” as much as the next guy, but I have to admit I have no idea what Lady Gaga did this year other than wear some meat. But, as provocateurs go, I can do you one better:

Chris Morris – Four Lions is almost nonstop hilarity and then nonstop deadly seriousness, an essential War on Terror satire and one of the funniest movies of the year.

8. EW went with James Franco, who I will echo the world’s media profilers in saying has perhaps the most fascinating career of any young Hollywood star. The only way I can beat it is by slightly cheating with a different Franco:

Francophone auteurs – Olivier Assayas’ Carlos and Claire Denis’ White Material are among the year’s best (and most entertaining, and not perhaps coincidentally the most penis-full) films, and while I haven’t had the opportunity to see Godard’s Film socialisme yet, the crotchety auteur has been plenty entertaining in his own right with his reaction to an honorary Oscar.

9. EW picked Katy Perry, so I’m forced to finally just ask: while I’m not especially plugged in to the pop music world, aren’t all these music choices kind of, you know, a couple years late? In that spirit, here’s my choice:

The Beatles – They joined iTunes to reach the coveted Beatles-unfamiliar music-buying fogey demographic, but they were also featured in some of the year’s hottest media including Mad Men, Glee, and The Social Network. Meanwhile Rolling Stone made a top 100 Beatles songs issue, and I finally settled into my position that if any Beatles song tops “A Day in the Life,” and I’m not saying it does, it’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

10. And now Stieg Larsson’s on the list, so I assume dead entertainers are fair game as long as they’re entertaining people in the year 2010. Hence my choice:

Vic Chesnutt – Having discovered the gorgeous, pastoral, bittersweet, sardonic Vic Chesnutt this spring, it’s been a long wait to get to listen to the perfect winter music: “Isadora Duncan” is the song of winter, melancholy category, and “Soggy Tongues” is the song of winter, serene category.

11. EW is on Team Glee, which I can understand, considering the episode “Dream On,” the performance of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and all the jokes. But I’d like to highlight a better television musical:

Team Treme – There’s more great music in an hour of Treme and more genuine love of music (e.g. long shots of the musicians, higher stakes) than whole seasons of Glee. And no autotune.

12. Boy they really liked The Town, eh? Sorry, but Ben Affleck is the end-all and be-all neither of be-abbed thirtysomethings onscreen this year nor muscular B-movie auteurs. Taking his place are two of my picks:

Michael Fassbender, or more specifically, Michael Fassbender’s body – Fish Tank came out here this year, and boy looks good in some low-hanging jeans and an Irish accent. But then there’s Centurion, and you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve seen Fassbender star in Neil Marshall’s Roman 300 with meaning.

Roman Polanski – But as B-movie directors go, Polanski remains the year’s king with The Ghost Writer, one of his best films and another essential War on Terror thriller.

13. They went with Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, and at last, I can but ratify:

Suzanne Collins – Franzen who? I keep forgetting to review Mockingjay, the best book in the series and an unapologetic look at not just contemporary America but government in general. The Hunger Games will be required reading for my progeny.

14. EW’s choice—the men of The Good Wife—sounds decent. But I think we can all agree there’s a much more scintillating arbitrarily gender-segregated portion of a drama cast on television this year:

The women of Mad Men – Elisabeth Moss consistently delivered the strongest lead performance on any show while the series’ scope expanded to make significant time for not just Joan and Betty but characters like Sally, Allison, Miss Blankenship, Dr. Faye, Megan, Joyce, and a pregnant Trudy, not to mention brief if powerful turns from old friends like Anna, Midge, Peggy’s mom, and at long last, Carla.

15. Last up, Jaden & Willow Smith. WTF? These are people? And they “entertained” this year? Ugh. My turn:

Adam Reed – In case you're not aware, and the ratings suggest you're not, Adam Reed created the year's funniest television series Archer, about the world's most belligerent idiot master spy, which returns at long last this January! Because how hard is it to poach a god-damn egg properly?!

So who are your entertainers of the year?

White Material: Stay the course

2010-12-02T06:57:00.000-06:00

Boy, there’s nothing like watching a Claire Denis film to make a guy feel thankful. Especially if that guy happens to (perhaps secretly) love Cold Mountain, as White Material has at least as much in common with Denis' cinematic cousin Olivier Assayas and regional relatives like Hotel Rwanda as it does with the Minghella story of a woman running a farm in Civil War country. Only this particular farm is a coffee plantation in unnamed, untimed Africa—the better to vault into myth—and the woman is no reluctant waif. She’s Isabelle Huppert, and she is hellbent on reaping one last harvest before she and her family are churned up by the coming storm and strewn about the African scrub like so much detritus.

That’s what the title refers to, actually, all those relics of western white society that the turning tides toward black empowerment are roiling. So we linger on a lighter, that mass-marketed Promethean bringer of fire, that powerful destructive force we keep in our pockets with our spare change; a wayward flip-flop, the shoe of someone with no motivation; a dress, a necklace, and lipstick, the accoutrements of Huppert’s managerial presence rendered somewhat lower on Baudrillard’s object-value system by the end of the film.

If I’m being evasive, it’s no more than the film itself. As is Denis’ wont, White Material is typically elliptical, but the gist follows Huppert’s complicated family—and here Denis follows Desplechin in taking a cue or two from Bergman—on the plantation as the civil war between the state and a rebel army largely comprised of child soldiers comes increasingly close to home. Foreign nationals have been urged to evacuate, her workers have already quit, and her ex-husband is preparing to sell the plantation. Why won’t she do the smart thing and leave? Well, that’s the question. The film provides two answers, and the more likely is the one not supplied by Huppert herself, but it’s really the heart of the film, and like Huppert, Denis refuses to give it away so easily.

Like Denis’ greatest hits—Herman Melville update Beau travail and last year’s pinnacle, which is the yin to White Material’s yang, 35 Shots of Rum—White Material is a marvel of multivalence: it operates effortlessly and simultaneously as thrilling entertainment, intimate fable, grand myth, objet d’art, and geopolitical essay. And like those films, you could unpack it for days. Most clearly the film illustrates the white reaction to third wave democratization, relative demographic decline, and economic overthrow: Huppert is Ahab, so monomaniacally bent on her mission that she becomes inexorably consigned to her fate, and her son (read: the next generation) is so lost and powerless in the face of such mighty forces as to be the Ishmael floating away. Neither will be especially victorious in the coming years, but Denis isn’t weeping for the end of white power. She’s relieved.

Fall 2010: The Walking Dead and the end of the golden age

2010-11-29T22:34:00.002-06:00

What Shakespeare meant figuratively, I mean literally: Now is the fall of our discontent, at least when it comes to television. The golden age is over, the empire is crumbling, and the huns at the gate look conspicuously like zombies.

Yes, that is a shot at the bag of clichés known as The Walking Dead. Frank Darabont’s name didn’t scare me away, but boy, do I wonder why I keep coming back to a less fun Lost. It’s so lifeless, you see, because it’s on the very serious prestige network once home to Rubicon, an infinitely smarter show about epistemology, and still home to the drama of our times Mad Men. But Dead is empty as art, boring as thriller, and obvious as horror. What I appreciate about The Walking Dead has nothing to do with this particular incarnation as cinema. The best parts are conceptual, though it’s some kind of triumph that Darabont and company crafted a zombie story without sociopolitical commentary.

Now, I’m behind on several shows, like Friday Night Lights and In Treatment, that may well be the remedy I’m looking for, and plenty of greats are on hiatus right now, like Mad Men, Archer, Parks and Recreation, and Treme. I’m also behind on a few that, from what I’ve seen so far, are pretentious hype monsters. It’s hard to build up the caffeine level required to catch up on Sons of Anarchy and Boardwalk Empire.

So I admit that I'm probably overstating. That said, there are precisely three good comedies on the air. Well, two, now that Bored to Death has completed its fantastic second season. You already know what I’m going to say: 30 Rock, in something of a resurgence that further separates it from the pack, and Cougar Town, an endlessly inventive show that’s all the more so for being set in the real world unlike other obvious contenders.

But since you brought it up, are you really digging Community this season? Despite remaining one of the most promising comedies on the air (and despite airing the phenomenal bottle episode), the space parody was unfocused, the zombie parody spare, and much of the rest depends upon unbelievable characterization. It’s not The Office, which has one virtue and her name is Mindy Kaling, but it’s not living up to its potential, either, and your mom and I are just worried about you, that’s all.

What else you got? Modern Family? Even the mainstream critics are starting to admit it’s the latest incarnation of Full House. How I Met Your Mother? The good episodes are hollow victories, and I can’t even watch old seasons any more. Glee? As scattershot as ever, though it’s certainly capable of scoring higher highs than most of this mediocrity. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Is anyone seriously going to hold up this season next to its first couple? Weeds? Okay, Weeds actually had a fantastic season, but only relative to itself, not television entire.

Even Conan is only excellent sporadically, good if unsurprising news for Jon Stewart. There is one bright spot, the excellent documentary series Moguls and Movie Stars on TCM (which airs the ‘40s episode tonight along with Casablanca), struggling like Atlas to carry the rest of this dead weight. It’s always tough to make an end-of-year top 10 list. This year it’ll be even harder, and sadder.

127 Hours: The final film in Danny Boyle's Hallmark Trilogy

2010-11-29T04:00:00.005-06:00

As I sit here on my laptop at 4 AM post-jog on my holiday of plenty celebrating my citizenry of this obnoxiously wealthy superpower, I’m having trouble taking Danny Boyle’s latest lesson, however emotionally overwhelming, to heart. Of course I take things for granted. If I appreciated every benefit of company and civilization all the time, I’d be ejaculating on my laptop right now instead of writing on it. Which (see if you can spot the segue) would feel great but have no lasting impact, just like—waddyaknow!—Danny Boyle's recent works. Our entrenched ideological divergences aside, 127 Hours is phenomenal for a Hallmark card.

It opens with this eye-rolling montage of crowds. It’s not until you’re pinned by a boulder in a Utah slot canyon that you realize why. Danny Boyle’s kineticism is a perfect match to Aron Ralston’s constant adrenaline fix, and James Franco may not set the standard for acting forevermore, but he does a damn good job putting us in the head of our perhaps overstatedly (or underarguedly) selfish adventurer. The arm-chopping scene wasn’t faintworthy thanks to something like observation bias, but it was just gory enough to live up to expectations. If the loud cracks don’t get you, surely the tendon will.

Still and all, despite being better than Slumdog Millionaire by virtue of being competent, 127 Hours is hardly a Great Work. It’s pretty, and handsome, and maybe a little sexy, but essentially it’s your basic motivational poster with a wagging finger to appreciate what you have before it’s gone or whatever. It’s the best version of this story someone could make without invoking Prometheus, but at the end of the day, it’s a well-made picture of almost no significance. So, good for Danny Boyle and James Franco, but I’ve already forgotten what film I’m talking about.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One: Down-sizing

2010-11-27T03:04:00.002-06:00

While the Harry Potter series is capable of some tight plotting—Alfonso Cuarón managed two climaxes in as many hours—Deathly Hallows Part One, which is, of course, half a movie (for the price of a whole one!), sees our heroes flying by the seat of their pants because apparently only Dumbledore really had any clue what was going on, but nowadays he’s getting his jollies leaving cryptic clues from the beyond for reasons that have nothing to do with writerly notions of irony. So the entire plot is built on a tenuous mountain of guesswork, yet still we feel let down by the slog. I know we’re in lean times, but the destruction of a single horcrux does not a plot make.

There are fataler flaws: Daniel Radcliffe goes through the motions of every line like an alien trying to mimic human behavior; Rowling’s debt to Tolkien grows ever clearer, and Deathly Hallows 1: Rising Action even features a necklace that feeds on negative thoughts; Harry and friends are so lost that you’re constantly thinking how much more competent you’d be in their shoes, and this on top of the teen soap. (I feel compelled here to note that Rupert Grint admirably sells the histrionics, overcoming the dreadful dialogue in a genuinely electric performance.) Not to mention the film’s dangling Alan Rickman, Michael Gambon, and David Thewlis in our faces. Worst of all, none of its cutesy feints toward political commentary hold water because it’s all so simple: Freedom is good and right and triumphant, and racism is bad and poorly dressed.

For all his moments of inspiration, which peak here in a spellbinding animated sequence, David Yates’ Harry Potter reign has been one of reliable competence attended by overwhelming praise (relief?) and diminishing returns in the screenplay department. Setting aside the essential question—say it with me: what’s it all about?—the dialogue is utterly lifeless. In case you were wondering, seventeen year-old British boarding school boys, no matter how twee, and wizarding is certainly that, are far too creative with their epithets to be content with a “Hey, losers.” Splinch-dick, on the other hand,

End of Part One of this review. Pay again next year for the rest.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Still the one

2010-11-24T00:19:00.001-06:00

I’m not going to inspire any fainting spells by saying Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the best film in the franchise. I might when I say that the other six are barely watchable. Why is the Alfonso Cuarón entry so much better? Glad you asked.

It starts with the source material. JK Rowling’s artistic command peaks in the lean, mean Prisoner of Azkaban (the third book, in which an escaped murderer is after Harry), before entropy drives the series to senility and beyond: Goblet of Fire is equally elegant but infinitely longer, Order of the Phoenix is an ambitious mess, Half Blood Prince is bipolar, and Deathly Hallows ties together all the loose ends into one obnoxious friendship bracelet.

But narrative isn’t everything. What Cuarón does with it is. In Azkaban he builds a fantastical universe of colorful characters (Aunt Marge, Stan Shunpike), comical details (the ravenous textbook, the seasonal changes), and an overarching spell of doom (complete with overcast weather). With his playful eye and expressionistic style, Cuarón has made not just a great Harry Potter adaptation but a genuinely unified film.

It’s all about Harry’s haunting—the Halloween iconography, the Macbeth song, the motifs of time and prophecy, the gliding shots, the dark mystery. Everyone is a threat to us, or so it seems, not least the good guys, and something about being an escaped murderer whose victims left behind body parts makes Sirius Black a more palpable danger than the ethereal zap-master Voldemort. Azkaban demands several new characters, but for the first and last time in the series, everyone has a substantial part to play, from Emma Thompson’s batty prophecy prof to David Thewlis’ ragged, suspicious defense teacher, which is to say Azkaban has exactly as many characters as it needs. This is not a film where they pay Michael Gambon to play dead or shoot Miranda Richardson strictly for B-roll footage, and Cuarón certainly doesn’t waste the series’ most interesting character and greatest performance in the hilarious Alan Rickman, who can't even sit in the background without stealing the scene.

Similarly, every element of the mystery is introduced in the first act, often in innocuous ways. By the same token, what we learn in class actually helps us crack the case for the last time in the series, which would be less odd if the series weren't set at a school, revolving around the school year. This is also Harry’s last unadulterated victory—is there a more exhilarating moment in the series than when he rushes out of the grove shouting, “Expecto Patronum!”—since, for the last time, the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and nobody dies. And still Azkaban is more morally complicated than the later films which swarm with villains, all of whom are black-to-the-core, autocratic racial purists who couldn’t even spell “nuance” if it were a brand of eyeliner at Hot Topic.

I've heard the complaints. The show-don't-tell camp wanted something more like the Deathly Hallows animation than the Chamber of Exposition we get, and the three-act anal-retents started dry-heaving as soon as they could make out the double-climax. Sorry, but the only rule in art is to be true to yourself, and this ghostly film clearly befits a snake-eating-its-tail structure.

The Harry Potter franchise is not without its cinematic joys. David Yates mesmerizes with his bleeding of the wizarding world into muggle Britain, Christopher Columbus successfully constructed a kid-friendly fairy tale, and Mike Newell fearlessly plunged the series into the black. It's just that Cuarón did all these things and better, and in just over two hours.

Four Lions: Boom goes the dynamite

2010-11-16T16:42:00.001-06:00

I admit I was a mite concerned by the concept of Four Lions—a self-proclaimed “jihad comedy” about bumbling terrorists—though less for any faintworthy controversy than for the unshakable image of a Benny Hill type running around London trying and failing to blow things up, Wile E. Coyote-style. I should have known better. Chris Morris (aka the original Jon Stewart) is a master of whipsmart absurdism, and if his directorial style isn’t likely to prompt any revolutions, his indiscriminate satire explosion more than earns him those 72 virgins in heaven.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Morris unfunny. He’s probably best known nowadays for his performance on The IT Crowd, a show whose sensibility is so broad there’s no room for laughing, and they do it for you, anyway. But in the ‘90s he co-created, wrote, produced, starred in, and fluffed a string of magnificent fake news shows, The Day Today which attacked the obnoxiousness of the news and Brass Eye which targeted media-fueled hysteria. His co-creator on The Day Today? Armando Iannucci, he of The Thick of It and In the Loop fame, which I bring up partly because Four Lions shares many of the same writers as 2009’s sharpest satire but mostly because Iannucci and Morris are our foremost political satirists.

It should be no surprise, then, that once Four Lions gets going, like another picture out this week, it’s an unstoppable train of laughs. After all, this is the story of five British Muslims seeking eternal paradise through the not-at-all arbitrary or verifiable conduit of suicide bombing. Hilarious! For real, once you get into its rhythms, Four Lions is a delicious confection of physical comedy and obvious idiocy atop some serious meat: smorgasbord piety, a feckless police force, aloof friends and neighbors, vague jihad, and, naturally, more cognitive dissonance than a foreign policy meeting. Serious irony undercuts the thoroughly western jihadists, turn-on-a-dime shocks keep us constantly mindful of the life-and-death stakes, and genuine pathos floods the final act, thanks in no small part to one of the year’s best performances, lead Riz Ahmed as the only intelligent character in the film, the would-be terrorist who can see the logical fallacies but can’t quite rethink his premises.

You could talk about the implications of Four Lions for days, but it would require a whole lot of spoiling of a whole lot of funny. Suffice it to say it’s the yin to Carlos’ yang; where Olivier Assayas finds some modicum of ideological justification on all sides, Chris Morris sees only ignorance. He’s cheery that way. Most of all, after an acclimation period, it’s a masterclass on tone. Morris precisely modulates the dials for maximum impact right through to the end credits, a montage of absurdities in the political game called the War on Terror that would be funny if they weren’t so chilling.

Megamind: Dark city

2010-11-12T11:22:00.003-06:00

The rumors are true. Megamind is just The Incredibles crossed with Despicable Me and squeezed into Superman’s spanx. In the end, those extremes, i.e. a hilarious drama that uses superherodom to critique society and a morally repugnant, idiot cartoon, balance out in Megamind, a sort of funny, sort of interesting take on the supervillain mythos that rides Dumbledore’s life lessons about choices and goodness right into a violent showdown.

The only thing really remarkable about Megamind is its weird civic identification. It’s a bizarre conflation of morality (goodness, evil) and civic responsibility (promoting city institutions) that’s basically no worse than the patriotic propaganda we all learn in elementary school. But seeing that indoctrination fleshed out—Megamind is evil because he crash landed in a prison and was raised Bret Harte-style by convicts who teach him that evil is good, because all inmates are just miswired sociopaths and all cops are virtuous heroes; Metro Man is a city institution, without whom nobody stands up to evil; evil is apparently wrecking infrastructure, but Megamind’s reign of terror results in zero deaths or injuries—is uncomfortably statist.

It's not The Wire, and the year's great civics film remains The Other Guys, but morality does not flow forth from government, thank you very much. It’s quite enough that we make children pledge allegiance every morning without knowing what it means (see Salt). There’s no reason to subject them to Megamind, too.

Carlos: Almost legal

2010-11-10T02:42:00.004-06:00

Is there a better symbol for our historical moment than a tabloid terrorist? I don’t mean trash-mag doodler Perez Hilton; I mean a bona fide violent terrorist whose persona is more celebrity than revolutionary, whose exploits and impact are approached with bemused spectatorship in place of active engagement. Pop history has had years to streamline a narrative for the Cold War, but the new world order—talk about a term for the history books, coined, truly, for the self-conscious era—resisted easy alignment until the dawn of the Age of Terror, or whatever we’re calling the bigger-than-Bush struggle between Islamic terrorism and the imperialist West. What Olivier Assayas’ rise-and-fall rock star/geopolitical epic Carlos illustrates, in words and images that call back to World War II and reach ahead to our brave new world of war criminal punditry, is the obvious. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Carlos opens in 1973 with a character—the European honcho for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—whose assassination produces a vacuum that sucks our charismatic young rebel into power positions that vastly exceed his intellect if not rhetoric. Over the next five and a half hours, Edgar Ramirez as Carlos transforms from active young militant to bloated narcissist in a story—indeed, the story—that takes us from European capitals to the empty deserts of Yemen to the shores, or at least air strips, of Tripoli, and back again. Ramirez’ evolution is incredible, and casting Carlos as a rock star—he actually signs autographs and enjoys a paparazzi moment after his most ostentatious performance—subtly belies his incoherence. The New Wave soundtrack, centered on Carlos’ self-mythologizing New Order anthem “Dreams Never End,” isn’t just there for period; it lends grandiosity to the punk rebels.

It will be no surprise to Assayas acolytes that Carlos is an authentic, obsessive portrait of globalization. It’s a struggle between an interconnected network of global terrorist cells and an interconnected network of “legitimate” governmental bureaucracies, and Assayas speaks to the game’s complexity by limiting exposition to chirons (which, granted, come fast and loose in this constantly traveling film). Between the rich sequences of exciting, funny, or cool action come even more invigorating battles of ideology, including a running thread connecting modern police methods with terrorism practiced on individuals. The film covers more territory than James Bond (and speaks more languages, besides), but the talk expands the net to include Pinochet’s US-backed Chilean coup and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam and Ceausescu’s Romania and Hitler’s Germany. Because this Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous episode is really a trenchant look at the relationship between states and terrorism.

What it boils down to is the chilling reminder that terrorism is only illegal when performed by individuals. Carlos gets away with his many and thrilling acts of violence—which he justifies as “the minimum military requirement of any political struggle”—because he’s working for state governments. States, even ostensibly democratic ones, can do whatever they want, as anyone paying attention to President Bush’s celebrity book tour (specifically his assertions that waterboarding need no justification but here’s one anyway) can attest. Assayas peppers Carlos with shots of airplanes for obvious reasons, and some of the most powerful moments are the cuts from the inside of a DC-9 holding the kidnapped ministers of OPEC (the world’s most agreeable cartel) and Carlos’ terrorist gang to a silent exterior of the plane.

Just before the where-are-they-now montage, Carlos lands the terrorism/plane motif in a confrontational closing argument. It’s 1994, the world now in the hegemonic shadow of a single state, and terrorism is still an active, if off-the-grid recourse for the world’s anti-imperialists. We’re on an airplane in the midst of a crime, only this time, the perpetrators are the Sudanese government embarking on an under-the-table extradition deal with the French. It’s vengeance dressed as justice executed by the state. The low angle of the state official looking down at us says it all. As one of the governed (as in the mythical catchphrase "consent of the governed"), I don't feel any safer knowing Carlos is behind bars and the state has usurped his methods. Do you?

1902: "Barbe-bleue"

2010-11-06T03:33:00.000-05:00

The Best Years of Our Lives #14.

Oh, Méliès. Much as I adore the early comedy shorts, I have been dying to get to the era of (the previously seen and therefore ineligible) Porter’s "The Great Train Robbery" and Méliès’ "A Trip to the Moon," an era of shorts with story, spectacle, cinema. Georges Méliès’ "Bluebeard" is as expert as you’d expect. There’s elaborate art direction, actual plot, a dissolve or two, and special effects out the wazoo. “Barbe-bleue” est un film vrai.

You may have discerned that this is the story of Bluebeard, that old Perrault lord who killed so many of his wives. When he goes away, his current wife discovers his crimes and is haunted by the ghosts. Upon his return, he freaks the geek out and nearly kills her, but the other aristocrats and the spirits of the wives join forces to defeat him. And they all lived happily ever after. Or something.

At nine minutes, this is nearly as long as all the other shorts put together, but I couldn’t believe it was over already. Let’s just say a lot happens at a quick clip—smoke here, acrobatics there, phantoms here, a fight there—and Méliès fills our screen with such spectacle that it flies by. The discovery of the dungeon is an eerie delight, as is the revelation of the spirit of the key, but every scene is brimming with joys, including our introduction to the volatile Bluebeard and his court of admirers. More filmmakers could use Méliès’ economy. Welcome to cinéma.

1901: "The Big Swallow"

2010-11-06T02:36:00.003-05:00

The Best Years of Our Lives #13.

Out of the gutter, children. “The Big Swallow” happens to be the story of a man who spots another man watching him, approaches him, opens his mouth, disappears, and swallows him. I don’t see what’s so funny.

But really, “The Big Swallow” is a delight. For the first half, this chatterbox is just getting progressively closer, swinging his cane every once in a while for emphasis. I guess he doesn’t take kindly to being filmed, because eventually, he’s so close that when he opens his mouth, the frame exists completely inside his lips, although we can only see black. Cut (seamlessly) to a long shot of the ostensible cameraman. First the camera falls into the black gullet, and then, try as he might, the cameraman falls in too. What seems like a zoom out but is actually the subject walking backward reveals him to be chewing his meal and preparing to swallow before giving us one last, triumphant laugh.

In a way, it’s just another comedy based on the magic of editing, like “Explosion of a Motor Car” and “Santa Claus.” But the simplicity, the unclutteredness unifies the mis-en-scene—it’s just one joke and we’re out—and the zoomlike effects and closeup place “The Big Swallow” (and director James Williamson) a cut above most trick-photography.

1900: "Explosion of a Motor Car"

2010-11-06T02:28:00.002-05:00

The Best Years of Our Lives #12.

Cecil Hepworth's “Explosion of a Motor Car” is a nice prototype for the silent comedies, a bit that could become a full scene under Keaton’s supervision. As it stands, it's just a chuckle.

The gist is: a car comes barreling up the street toward us until POOF! It’s gone, replaced by a crumpled pile of tires and general car detritus. By the time the policeman comes to investigate, foreign objects propelled skyward by the explosion are falling back down to earth, comically one at a time.

Basically, it’s just more editing magic that anticipates the great silent comedians, but the light-hearted humor makes it worth a minute of your time.

The Best Years of Our Lives: Now back to your regularly scheduled program

2010-11-06T02:23:00.002-05:00

As you’ve no doubt noticed, I took an impromptu gentleman’s intermission from my Best Year of Our Lives project, which is against the rules, but come on, I was only twelve movies in and hadn’t yet broached the 20th century. I promise it shan’t happen a-gain. My break was forced by Halloween aka annual horror movie ketchup time, but it turns out to have been a smart move.

See, TCM has annexed the remainder of the year to tell the story of Hollywood. Every Monday, Turner’s airing an hour of its documentary series Moguls and Movie Stars alongside a few films from the era under discussion, winding from the invention of the camera on up to the ‘70s, when the first generation of moguls (and the first great era of Hollywood) passed on.

This week, Moguls and Movie Stars began with Edison in 1888 and drove all the way until 1907. Which is to say, Turner learned me some context for all those old shorts I watched and babbled about. Armed with the facts, I’m ready to dive back in and behold the early works of Griffith, Chaplin, and Keaton. In fact, I’m more excited now than I was a mere month ago. 1900, here I come!

The Gay Vote: Not just a '30s musical any more

2010-11-05T04:37:00.007-05:00

Case you haven’t heard, the gays jumped aboard the Republican ship disproportionately more than other demographics this year. Granted the sample size is about 110 voters and exit polling is less reliable than a California voter, but that hasn’t stopped the sky from falling in liberal circles. Like I said, this election changes everything!

What is the meaning of this phenomenon?! Election analysis can be so hard, sometimes, you guys! (Once more with feeling: people vote solely based on their perceptions of their own financial liquidity.) I have no idea why gays abandoned the Democratic Party. Maybe there was a better one with cuter guys across the street?

Or maybe because the Log Cabin Republicans are fighting for their rights. Maybe because the Obama Administration is defending the status quo. Maybe because Clinton signed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell into law and finished us off with the Defense of Marriage Act (a lowly Congressional bill with the nerve to illegally reverse a Constitutionally enshrined mandate known as the Full Faith and Credit clause). Maybe because Schwarzenegger wouldn’t even fight to uphold his state’s gay rights infringement, and gay marriage is significantly less popular in California than DADT repeal is nationally. Maybe because people are dying, and his highness thought a Youtube video would suffice. Maybe because the Democrats in power up to and including President Obama would sooner bomb Iran than simply proclaim support for gay marriage, which is not only actively anti-gay but tacitly complicit in the sham that gay rights are up for debate. I don’t know, that’s just off the top of my head.

So how are Democrats different from Republicans again? Oh, right, the Republicans aren’t asking for my vote with one hand while they sell me up the river with the other. The Democratic party is not my friend, but I have no reason to expect a Republican House of Representatives to be any more favorable to human rights. Boehner weeps only for himself. The point is we have two parties inasmuch as Eggshell and Ivory differ on how exactly white should look.