Whiskey Fire

Patriotism at the Fillums

We discussed this yesterday, and so I hope today's entry helps to explain my overall point.

Which would be to do with this, from a Notional Review nitwit.

Lone Survivor is an excellent war movie: intense and fast-paced, if a bit too graphically violent for my tastes. But who am I to complain? War is hell, and a war movie that aims for authenticity probably ought to show a bit of hell, even if it makes us squirm.

"I grudgingly accept that war involves carnage, but what a drag."

It gets worse:

The movie’s title, of course, is its own kind of spoiler. If a story about four SEALs on a special-ops mission in Afghanistan is called Lone Survivor, I have a rough idea of what’s going to happen to three of them. But that’s not what disappointed me. The disappointment comes from the almost complete lack of triumph. The story is about an operation that suffers a random setback (goat herders literally stumble upon the American team), and then goes horrendously wrong. Three guys die in awful ways and a fourth barely survives. His survival is a kind of triumph, but only amid a backdrop of failure. If the film asks us to think about just one thing, it’s this: What the heck are we doing over there?

I didn't even need to watch the movie to ask that.

And you're "disppointed"?

I took my 16-year-old son to the theater. Our conversations occasionally turn to what he wants to do when he grows up, and I had thought that on the drive home, we might wind up discussing enlistment, ROTC, etc.–not necessarily the need to do any of these things, but more about how they work. You know: food for thought, material for a teenaged boy to chew on. Some war movies, after all, make us feel patriotic, and good about what soldiers do, even as we recognize the incredible sacrifices they may make. After Lone Survivor, however, there was no such talk. It’s hard to imagine anybody watching this movie and heading straight to a recruitment center. More likely, they think: Wow, I’m never going to do that.

Which is what I said yesterday.

Yeah. If you supported these late wars, you got people killed for nothing.

This version of "patriotism" is disgusting.

Maybe heroism in the service of incompetent bullshit is stll heroism, but it's an awful fucking waste.

Shorter Andrew Klavan

The Long Game

Three areas the Right should address, financially and intellectually

"As the brainwashed American public & the evil Hollywood producers who wash their brains have no interest in any of my art (For I am an artist.) please give me & my fellow conservative artists money, preferably in the form of a tax-free grant or award (For infrastructure!) so we'll be able to reverse liberal influence in the culture & restore the free market by making movies about what swell dudes businessmen are."

     — Mr. Klavan, in the Hudson Institute's City Journal.

As first transcribed here by M.B.

Was DuMaurier Right?

— Bouffe

Liam Neeson, I Fear for You

Liam Neeson is emotional and ungracious in a local TV interview about his upcoming wolf-punching movie. Watch it and cringe. If he's this upset now, what's going to happen when he has to do PR for Battleship?

 

Street Kings

by JB

Traditionally summer has been movie season for me, but due to the interference of real life I haven't been able to take in any of the summer blockbusters. But I did manage to catch Street Kings on HBO recently, and it was a worthy way to spend a little time.

If it sounds like I'm giving a positive review to a Keanu Reeves film, well, ya got me. He's fine in this role, even though it's got a little more meat to it than, say, his character in Speed. Fortunately, it's not a Keanu Reeves movie, exactly ... it's a James Ellroy movie.

I hadn't read any of Ellroy's novels before I saw L.A. Confidential, which is a fine film. And I'd read much of Ellroy's oeuvre before seeing The Black Dahlia, which I didn't love. In the middle of them was Dark Blue, which was pretty good. I must admit, however, that I automatically rate any film with Kurt Russell a star or two higher than it probably deserves. The same is true for Danny Trejo.

No, I don't mean that Danny Trejo likes Kurt Russell films. Keep up.

I mean, he might. But that's not--

Okay. The story's not exactly mysterious here ... there's nothing here we haven't seen before. But the acting is good--including the stars, the people you kind of recognize, and the ones you don't. I only wish Terry Crews had had a larger part ... he's a great character actor who could probably do more if he didn't snarl so damned well.

The dialogue is crisp and credible, the denouement satisfying. I didn't mind the violence--I accept it in the genre--but the gore itself was a little excessive, a little explicit, a little Grindhousey. It didn't distract more than once or twice, but it won't be to everyone's taste, as indeed it's not to mine.

What makes the film interesting is not that it's about dirty cops, but that it really addresses the nature of evil. It's okay for cops to circumvent the law, but they can't "get greedy." In Ellroy the good guys aren't much better than the bad guys; what makes them good is that they don't embrace the evil. Everybody's corrupt, everybody's dirty, and naive rookies and civilians are going to pay the price. But some few corrupt, dirty individuals open their eyes and try to do better than they have any reason to try to do, even if it means passing up a big payoff.

That's probably about as good as it's going to get, honestly, in the movie world or out of it.

Star Trek '09

by JB

I don't consider myself a Star Trek fan, per se, but I doubt I'm the only man in the middle of the fifth decade of his life (that puts me in my forties--do the math) whose ideas about honor, courage, and ethics (did you catch that little Finnegans Wake nod there? totally intentional) came as much from Star Trek as from anywhere else.

And when I say Star Trek, yes, I'm talking about the original series, with all its shortcomings and its excesses. Because when I first saw the show, I saw it without the filter of a generation of parodies, easy Shatner impressions, and spinoffs.

I'm not going to argue original series vs. Next Generation with you: let it suffice to say that calling a meeting of the "leadership team" in the boardroom every time there's a crisis might be good management, but If I wanted to watch that, I'd stay awake at work. And anything that Deep Space 9 did Babylon 5 did better. In terms of character and story, anyhow. Don't talk to me about special effects. If you go to movies just to see how real they can make everything look, maybe you should just stick with looking at real stuff, because it will always look realer.

So without being a fan, I take Star Trek pretty seriously, because I understand what's good about it as well as what's bad. I don't know one-off character names, I don't know episode titles, and I haven't liked too many of the Star Trek movies. Everybody says Khan was the good one, and I can see why; I liked IV about as much. My point is that I didn't order my ticket in Klingon, and I didn't much care about the fine points of continuity with the rest of Star Trek universe.

When I say that I loved the new Star Trek movie, then, you'll understand what that means and doesn't mean. The main thing--and as far as I'm concerned, the only thing that matters--is this: the film respects the characters. It's evident that Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are playing Kirk and Spock, that they're not playing Shatner and Nimoy. Karl Urban as McCoy is a bit more of a stretch; I wouldn't have cast somebody with that much physical presence (sit through Pathfinder if you must), and I might have found somebody who felt comfortable with the mild southern drawl. Simon Pegg as Scott is a show-stealer; it's just as well his character is introduced fairly late. I found the presence of Scotty's little friend inexplicable and George Lucas-y, but everybody else in the theater was charmed, apparently.

I won't talk much about the plot, but: in the later incarnations of the show a lot of attention was always given to understanding the enemy's point of view. I seem to remember a lengthy debate on the Picard bridge about the morality of destroying a "crystalline entity" that's mindlessly destroying stuff whole worlds and stuff. I don't want to get political here, but this struck me as absurd--just as having an "empath" on the bridge who can tell us that the people who are shooting at us are angry at us. Thank you, Counselor Troi, you can put them away now.

In this film, the audience understands Nero's motives (nice name he has, by the way--hmm, is he supposed to be evil or something?). The Enterprise crew comes to understand them too; ultimately, though, he's wrong, he's the enemy, and he must be dealt with.

It's so easy in the movies.

I picked a Peckinpah

by JB

I consider myself a child of the 70s, largely because I was a child in the 70s. I still have trouble grasping the idea that the 70s are more distant to my kids than the 50s were to me. I guess I need to accept that Happy Days might have been no more accurate a representation of the decade of my dad's glory days than That 70s Show was of mine.

That said, photographic evidence bears witness to the fact that my dad looked damned cool in the 50s; the same cannot be said of me in the Jimmy Carter years.

When push comes to shove, the only good thing about That 70s Show was Red, who was even cooler there than he was in Robocop. I have crafted my parenting style after those two characters in equal measure. Can you fly, Bobby?

The point is, I love the 70s, and not in that bullshit VH1 "we all remember these cool pop culture artifacts in this totally unscripted yet coherent remeniscence" way. And yet ... and yet ... I'm not a tremendous Sam Peckinpah fan. Sacrilege, maybe, but it seems to me that his considerable talent and vision are never aimed as high as they could be.

Okay, yeah ... The Wild Bunch is a great film ... but I don't love it, even though Robert Ryan is in it, and Robert Ryan is always great. The opening sequence with the children playing with the scorpions and the ants is classic. And The Getaway is fun, if not as good as it's supposed to be. It's got the McQueen mystique. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid will always hold a special place in the hearts of those legions of fans of that great singer-songwriter, the incomparable Kris Kristofferson ... oh, yeah, and there's the other guy in there too.

So today it was Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a movie I'd heard so much about for so long that I can't imagine it could possibly have lived up to its reputation. It didn't, quite. On the plus side, it embodies Peckinpah's sense of "terrible beauty" (if you'll allow me to borrow a phrase from a pretty good poet), as you'll also see in the other films I've mentioned.

The post-western vibe might be a lot more interesting in The Wild Bunch than it is here, but this film does have its strengths. For one thing, I'd rather see a good character actor in a lead role, all other things being equal, than a "leading man." And Warren Oates is brilliant in this film. Yes, that's Sgt. Hulka behind those shades. The film is worth watching for his performance alone. Lighten up, Francis.

The problem with watching important and/or influential films from years past is the problem of retroactive triteness ... an innovative film will look derivative if you've seen too many films that were influenced by it. I can imagine watching a Peckinpah film and thinking, it's like John Woo but with less ballet, and some of the bullets actually hit people. BMtHoAG indulges in excesses, but it doesn't wallow in them. A young pregnant girl's dressed is violently ripped off her in the opening scenes, and Oates's girlfriend Elita spends a fair amount of time topless in good 70s fashion. Those 70s breasts stand out in the context of contemporary pop film. And the gunplay isn't play--it's frequent and brutal; slow-motion notwithstanding, it's more terrible than beautiful, and I guess that's part of the point.

Like most cult films, it's better having seen BMtHoAG than it is seeing it. But for a buddy movie about a guy and a severed head, it's relatively tasteful and edifying, all things considered.

I watched another movie: Gerry

Gerry may be the first film I've seen in which all of the named characters are named Gerry. It's a good film, but it's not for everybody … including, perhaps, me. The premise is pretty simple: two guys go for a hike in the desert without food or water and get lost. Reminds me of a student summary of Hemingway's masterpiece “Big Two-Hearted River”: “Nick goes fishing.”

Folks, Gerry moves slowly. Partway through it you'll be praying for Michael Berryman and company to show up and sort things out. Or maybe some giant radiated desert ants to tear open an Airstream trailer in search of sugar packets as in Them! (the exclamation point tells you the movie is exciting!). But if so, you're looking at Gerry the wrong way. Instead of reading the film as a “things go wrong in the desert” film, how about looking it in the context of the dramatically overrated Blair Witch Project … or maybe the equally overrated if marginally less annoying Open Water? Or, uh, Koyaanisqatsi without the kickass soundtrack. The last one's a stretch, but there are lots of lingering, unromantic shots of desert here that would have gone well with a Philip Glass soundtrack.

Matt Damon is good here, as he often is, but the real surprise was Frankie Muniz. Wait, what? Oh, uh, yeah, Casey Affleck. Not such a surprise, actually, if you saw Gone, Baby, Gone … because he was pretty great in that. The character stuff is pretty subtle, even more so because it seems like Gus Van Sant just turned Damon and Affleck loose and let them improvise. You never really notice how seldom people in movies seem to be listening to each other until you see a film like this, where the actors have to be listening to each other and have to decide how to respond. You can see the same things in Jim Jarmusch's best films as well. I'm not saying it's necessary; one of my favorite films of all time is His Girl Friday, and there's not a lot of listening going on there!

I've read some bizarre interpretations of this film that argue that there's only one Gerry, but I don't buy them. Do I get any bonus points for talking about Gus Van Sant without even attempting a Lynyrd Skynyrd joke?

I remembered a movie: Klaatu Bla bla bla nicto

By JB

Since I'm in Chicago this week for a conference of people who sort of but not really do what I do, feeling a bit like a stranger in a strange land, I thought I'd bring your attention to the original 1951 version of The Day The Earth Stood Still. I'm afaid that this classic is in danger of being painted by the broad brush of mediocrity alongside the reputedly tepid remake, which I'm not going to discuss because I haven't seen it.

See this film. It's good. It's interesting. Don't hold the special effects against it. They're not terrible, but they're a product of their time. More interesting and more worthwhile is the fact that the film's allegories are kind of in conflict with each other. Yes, Mr. Carpenter, initials JC, has come down from the sky, dies to save mankind, and subsequently rises from the dead, sitteth at the right hand of Gort the Robot Almighty, from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead ... etc. There is that.

And there's also the nuclear proliferation thing, which is at once very obvious and very complicated. We're being threatened by the aliens because we're developing rockets and nuclear technology that could potentially threaten them. Is this a warning against war technology and an appeal to join hands and love one another (works a lot better in Independence Day, when we have a common enemy to annihilate)? Or is it a justification for the dismantling of formerly threatening states and a western imperial agenda of peace and stability through the threat of total destruction?

Well, it's both. With the Jesus stuff thrown in. And that's what makes it so interesting.
We could talk also about the kickass Bernard Hermann score, the brilliant use of shadow, the mise en scene, but ultimately it's the clash of themes that makes the film provocative. That, and Aunt Bea is in it.

I went to a movie

by JB

"Show us your tits!" That's what I yelled to the annoying young women who were posing for each other's cell phones a few rows in front of me at the local cineplex last night. Flash photos. After the film had started. Not even during the previews, but during the feature.

They didn't, alas; nor did they immediately stop photographing themselves making pouty Miley Cyrus faces at each other. You can put lipstick on a pig, but that doesn't bridge the semantic chasm between "jowls" and "cheekbones." I went and asked the theater employee kid whether it was legal to use cell phones to record the movie--yes, I'm the guy who spent eight dollars on a ticket, dammit, and I'm gonna watch this movie in peace!--and he went down the aisle to glower at the budding guerilla (I spell that generously) documentarians.

I went to the movies last night intending to see one of the two Academy Award nominees for Best Motion Picture that were showing, but it didn't happen. Frankly I'd rather chew my own face off than pay retail to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Number one, with the exception of The Curious Case of Dr. Hummp, there are no good movies with titles like that. Number two, this. Number three, I saw a commercial for CCBB and thought it looked stupid. Anyhow, I only like Brad Pitt when he's unintelligible. If you need a Jason Statham voiceover to clarify your point, you're facking unintelligible, mate. Is this movie at all like Jack? Because I hated Jack.

The other Oscar option was Slumdog Millionaire, which was not going to happen because Mrs. B refuses to see any movie in which the dog dies, and something about the title put her on her guard. I told her I didn't even think there was a dog in the film, and she reminded me that I said the same thing about Amores Perros. Touche. This after talking her into seeing City of God by telling her it would probably be something like The Bells of St. Mary's. She is not a trusting woman.

So the inevitable compromise choice was Underworld 3: Rise of the Lycans. It's a prequel, and it's dramatically better than Underworld 2, which is admittedly faint praise. Its subtitle (or post-colonial as I like to call it) underscores the stupidest thing about this whole silly franchise: if you're imagining a terrifying and yet sympathetic race of werewolves, naming them after a fungus-algae symbiont is a lot less badass than you might think. Wouldn't you expect somebody named Kevin Grevioux to know a cool name when he hears one? To be absolutely clear: I am not making fun of Kevin Grevioux. I swear. Nor am I looking forward to Underworld 4: Lycan Sclerosis.

So, yeah. Romeo and Juliet with werewolves--uh, Lycans--and vampires. Or maybe Spartacus--with Lycans and vampires. Bill Nighy can't be blamed for all of the stupid things his character says, but I think it's fair to blame him for saying the better lines indifferently and the stupidest lines emphatically and with absurd enunciation. Let's ascribe it to self-loathing.

And I guess we have eight years of nucular proliferation to thank for the repeated use of the non-word "pestulence." Pestulence? Is that a petulant pestilence that causes pustules?

If you see this movie, you've probably already decided to like it, and that may get you through it. You probably also spend your whole paycheck at Hot Topic every week. Underworld 3 is in equal parts Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire, and that's saying something. Pestilence or pustule? You make the call.