Is There a Better 80's Movie?

A few weeks ago I visited some college friends in NYC, got really wasted Friday night (shutting down like C-3PO around 2am, reviving for a while with some water, flying into a rage when a friend spilled beer on me, and passing out standing up), and spent the next day at my buddy's apartment watching TV.

Back to the Future came on, and for a few minutes I resigned myself to watching just because I was too damn hung over to watch anything else.

But then me and my buddy realized, Back to the Future is one hell of a good movie. It doesn't shoot for the stars, but the story is so solid and well constructed, all of the actors are above average, and the Spielberg/Zemeckis brand of sentimentality doesn't really matter so much partly because it's earned and partly because the tone of the movie is so light. Just a solid, solid movie.

Perhaps this is the consensus view and I'm late to the game, but I can't help but feel like the quality of the original was distilled somewhat by its two unnecessary sequels. In any case, it was good to rediscover it.

Barring movies that are good because of they are dated and/or unintentionally hilarious, or actual, real, serious "films"--is there a better 80's movie than Back to the Future? Weigh in, Barrelhousers!

P.S. Later that weekend I watched Klute, a 70s thriller starring Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda as a call girl (for which she won an Oscar). Boy, that movie stunk.

Is it just me...

...or is Saturday Night Live getting sort of funny again? A little bit? Maybe? I'm worried about this, because it could just be I'm getting dumber.

I remember Lorne Michaels taking a lot of flak about not bringing back some of the "bigger name" people for this season, in favor of relative unknowns, but, honestly, does anyone miss Horatio Sanz?

Also: is it weird that I find Kristen Wiig both really funny and kind of oddly hot?

And They Said It Couldn't Be Done

This American Life has accomplished the unthinkable:

This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence

Money Quote:

Though This American Life is now lauded as the definitive source for material about getting an autistic teenager admitted to Harvard, its early run was marked by painful trial-and-error, according to producer Alex Blumberg.

"At first, we were getting a lot of stories from recovered drug addicts and East African refugees living in the States, which had their compelling elements but came off a bit cloying," Blumberg said. "But then we realized that if we had overeducated
people with voices rather unsuitable for radio narrate the stories with clever analogies and accessible morals, the whole thing would come off far less depressing."

Blumberg said that the turning point came in 1997, when producers discovered a group of inner-city schoolchildren inadvertently teaching an important lesson to their attractive, suburban-raised teacher about what makes us human. Also aiding the study were the many contributors to This American Life, who took time from their best-selling essay-writing careers to donate personal anecdotes about dropping out of prestigious art schools, taking harrowing but poignant childhood vacations to the Grand Canyon, and the unique challenges of growing up in families supportive of their homosexuality.

My 2-Word Review of "Confederate States of America"

It sucks.

Okay, I can't limit myself to just those two words. But, seriously: I'm a Spike Lee fan, and I can't for the life of me figure out why he leant his name to this particular exercise in suckitude.

For those of you unfamiliar with the film, it's a "mockumentary" about what life would be like in these United States if the Confederates had won. Which could have been an interesting movie. Should have been an interesting movie. Except it was apparently made by third graders, because the nuanced and complicated conclusions reached by the film are:

1. We'd still have slaves.
2. People would say racist stuff in public.

How provocative! How tittilating!

I mean, even if we set aside for the moment the utter implausability that slavery, as an institution, would have survived the various social and economic upheavals that were inevitable in the 20th century, regardless of who won the War Between the States, the movie is just wrong-headed and idiotic about history.

Actually, I can sum up the movie's sucktacity with two examples:

1. Throughout the film, various governmental offices (the White House, Congress, etc.) are shown flying the Confederate flag. Only the flag they're flying is the infamous "Stars and Bars," which is not, in fact, the official Confederate flag, but the Confederate "battle flag," and thus not the flag most likely to be flown over the White House, Congress, etc. Perhaps this is a nitpicky point, but it's something that would have been uncovered with just a small amount of research into the Civil War, which, at least in my opinion, isn't too much to ask of filmmakers making a mockumentary about the Civil War.

2. In one of the film's fake commercials (think SNL skits, only less subtle, and less funny) a couple of down-home guys are working on their car in the garage, a car which looks exactly like the famous General Lee, complete with the good ol' Stars and Bars. But come on: if the Confederates had won the war, the General Lee wouldn't even be the General Lee, and the Stars and Bars would mean something completely different. The whole cache of the flag, of the Confederate image, has to do with the fact that they lost they fucking war. In a universe where the Confederates won, the General Lee would be called the General Grant, and the hood would be painted with a mural of Abraham Lincoln or Harriet Tubman. Or, hell, maybe the show wouldn't even exist, and instead it would be a show about two cartoon pigs in a van who drive around solving murders and sneaking slaves across the border to Canada. Who knows? The point is, all the conclusions reached by the filmmakers are just lazy and lame.

In summation:

a. This movie sucks.
b. You should not see this movie.
c. This movie sucks.

What’s so British about Bond?: A Timely Review of Casino Royale

After realizing that good buddy TMC just put up a 955 word post, here's my 890 words on Casino Royale: (hey, it just came out on DVD!)

Casino Royale, featuring first-time Bondsman Daniel Craig, has been enthusiastically received on both sides of the Atlantic, by audiences and critics alike. It is a reinvigoration rather than reinstallment of the James Bond franchise, much along the lines of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. The movie is based on Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, published in 1953, and introduces not just a new Bond actor but also a new Bond—a novice MI6 agent just minted in his “double oh” status, that is, with a License to Do Ill.

Casino Royale explodes the myth of Bond as a British gentleman spy who can emerge from a lion cage with tuxedo unsullied and martini unspilled. In this, the movie succeeds, but perhaps too well. Because the question arises time after time: What is so British about this Bond?

Daniel Craig’s Bond looks good in a tux, but he is no gentleman. He is not subtle, nor does he appear to be that smart. His blundering attempts at spycraft would make George Smiley—John Le Carré’s portly paragon of British intelligence—roll over in his grave. In fact, strip away his accent and our poor James resembles nothing more than the stereotypical “Ugly American”: brash, loud, overconfident, impatient, and destructive.

Of course Casino Royale is a solid action yarn with thrilling, brutal set pieces, but the movie also works as a metaphor for American intervention since World War II—particularly the U.S.A.’s recent efforts to wage the War on Terror at home and abroad. To wit:

§ James Bond, pursuing a single villain, destroys a sprawling Third World development, causing significant collateral damage among the innocent workers. Not once does he ask, “Why do they hate us?”

§ During this same pursuit, James Bond egregiously, willfully, violates International Law.

§ Bond’s nemesis in the chase moves with fluid grace; obstacles become opportunities. Bond’s style of pursuit, however, is stilted and linear and creates more obstacles than existed previously.

§ Bond indulges in domestic surveillance and violates the privacy of his matronly boss, M, by accessing her computer in order to acquire information he believes is necessary to capture a terrorist.

§ Bond frequently blunders in his attempts at concealment and covert action, which are easily detected.

§ Bond’s clumsy attempts at cultivating intelligence sources end up getting someone killed.

§ Bond only has a vague plan to capture a suspected terrorist financier. This plan is also extremely expensive.

§ Bond purposely blows his own cover on this mission.

§ A typical Bond blunder requires him to make a big mess. Unfortunately, he does not follow the “You broke it you bought it” axiom and calls on others to clean it up for him.

§ Bond believes that he can look into his opponent’s eyes to determine his true intentions; however, his opponents are able to repeatedly deceive and outmaneuver him. Bond must rely on others to bail him out of these situations.

§ Bond survives a particularly harrowing ordeal through means we know he is unable to account for. When a close ally suggests that Bond try to figure out what happened and why, Bond has this ally imprisoned. Then, Bond goes on vacation.

§ Bond gets into a big fight and again causes significant collateral damage; in short, he “destroys a house in order to save it.”

§ Bond accepts his superior’s multiple, contradictory explanations of events without question. Then he insists on “staying the course” with regards to the indefinite imprisonment and interrogation of his former close ally.

Remember the British generals in Iraq who tsk-tsked the American soldiers for driving around in full body armor, hidden behind Ray Bans and blasting heavy metal music, itchy fingers massaging their machine gun triggers? They would have a field day with this Bond, who would stand out like, well, an American in Iraq among the smiling, beret-wearing, culturally sensitive British soldiers. In this movie, the roles are reversed to such a degree that a CIA agent is the voice of reason who dissuades Bond from starting a bloodbath. And let’s just be kind and say that Bond's approach to poker could benefit from a good listen to Kenny Rogers.

Perhaps Bond is only playing to the level of his competition, however—Baltimore street gangs in HBO’s The Wire have a more sophisticated approach to cell phones than international terrorist financiers, apparently. But that should not excuse his inability to pull off a decent one-liner:

M: I knew it was too early to promote you.
Bond: Well, I understand double-ohs have a very short life expectancy. So your mistake will be short-lived.

A true bon mot would set up a contrast: Well, I understand double-ohs don’t last long, so your mistake will be short-lived.

But for all of Bond’s blundering, he does get his man. More or less. Perhaps we can carry the analogy further: The U.S.A. is a young country; Bond is a young agent. We are new to the game and have a tendency to flail around the international stage like the proverbial bull in a china shop. But, just like Bond, we are learning hard lessons. It is implied that in subsequent movies Bond will harness his skills and use them more wisely. Here’s hoping that we Americans will follow his British lead.

"300" looks cool, and, well, that's about it

Because I'm a sucker for movies where one group of beings wielding swords runs at another group of sword-wielding creatures, I went to see 300 yesterday. I paid $14 to get in ( a transaction which happened so quickly and almost unconsciously that I didn't realize until I was in my seat how badly I'd been ripped off), and I mostly got what I was expecting-- lots of blood, frequent orchestral crescendos, and awful dialogue.

As action epics go, it's kind of boring, because there seems to be a conscious effort to avoid giving the characters any depth at all. If they could have crafted characters who were less than one-dimensional, they would have done it. These guys fight. They kill people, they want to kill people, and they want to die. That's it, and the film goes to great pains to remind you of this fact as often as possible. It's just hard to care about them at all. In fact, they're kind of unlikable in that they remind me of the kind of absurdly conservative, gung-ho, backwoods yahoos that Borat would interview.

So, it's kind of dull, and repetitive. And stupid in a really painful way. The word "Spartan" is used about every 25 seconds, and the narration seems to exist only to explain the film's obvious concepts to the 6 year olds in the audience. I know action epics aren't supposed to be the most nuanced, intelligent films in the world, but this one is honestly insulting to the audience's intelligence.

On a good note, Dominic West ( The Wire's Jimmy McNulty), is in the film, and I've spent so much time with that show that I kind of felt like I'd run into a long-lost brother. He plays a conniving villain type who would spend the whole movie twirling his mustache, if only he weren't clean-shaven.

Other things worth noting:

1. Iranians, as you may have heard, are pissed about the fact that, while the Spartans are all portrayed as respectable, honorable white men, the Persians are some of the worst, racist caricatures of Easterners that you'll ever see. Seriously- -half of them were animals. One guy had a donkey's head! Their king was some kind of Rupaul lookalike with a horribly dubbed deep, evil voice. Their soliders were all deformed, incompetent, and evil. It would be impossible to see ths film and not feel like it had been written by bigots. As Dana Stevens of Slate writes:

"If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war."

2. Of course, not every bad guy in the film is just an Asian, magical stereotype. As Stephens says:

Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the "bad" (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

3. The film goes out of its way to emphasize that the war is about Spartan freedom (a word repeated almost as incessantly as "Spartan") versus Eastern slavery and oppression. Minor historical inaccuracies, they're cool-- I don't care if the soldiers are wearing the wrong kinds of capes, or the geography isn't right, or the timeline is skewed a bit-- but I would like to know how the writers came up with the concept that Sparta (or Ancient Greece in general) was some kind of bastion of freedom. What the hell?

4. There's a character in here who looks like a mix of Sloth and Gollum. He's not nearly as entertaining as either of them, but twice as grotesque.

5. The film goes so far out of its way to assert its macho masculinity that it becomes like an uncomfortable, defensive epic designed just to remind us that everyone involved in the film totally digs chicks, man, and no way would we look at other dudes, 'cause that shit is gross. The testosterone leaked from the screen and pooled on the floors. I know these films are all about manly men being men, but there's a self-conscious, insistent aspect to the overt, extreme machismo here that it all just seems contrived and, ultimately unlikable.

6. Basically, the movie is an homage to a warlike, awful-sounding society (example: They seem to be praising the Spartans' master-race mentality that prompted them to kill newborns who were found to have physical flaws) that I couldn't imagine ever wanting to live in (although, as a white, land owning male, I'd at least wield some power), and the filmmakers act as if it's some idyllic place. And even in their efforts to idealize it, they make it look awful and unlivable.

So, I guess what I'm saying is this: there are better action epics out there. If you think too deeply about it (a habit I obviously have, and that my fiancee hates), you'll be offended and annoyed. If you don't think too much about it, you'll find yourself wondering why the narrator thinks you're retarded, or why you should ever give a damn about who wins in what is, ultimately, a battle between some awful people and a group of slightly more awful people (and donkey-people).

So it Goes

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut.



From Backwards City, a few quotes:

"Here's the news: I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But now I am eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats."
— Kurt Vonnegut

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke."
— Kurt Vonnegut

A Public Service Announcement

The O.C. -- starting today -- joins Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place as shows you can watch in perpetuity via SOAPnet. On the one hand, this entails tuning into a network whose staple is re-airing daily episodes of what your great aunt refers to as her "stories," trying to remind yourself that people used to consider The O.C. at least somewhat hip while enduring commercials for Craftmatic Adjustable Beds and Rascal Scooters and various prodtcts meant to make a person poop either more or less frequently.

On the other hand, that first season of The O.C. was pretty fucking awesome.

Season One starts airing today, 6:00 p.m. Set your Tivo's, bitches.

Funniest Thing Ever, As of Now

Not to go out too much on a limb here, but this skit on www.acceptable.tv is comedy gold. I swear it. You have to wait till the end for the comic apotheosis.

Acceptable TV, with executive production by Jack Black, features five short skits and voters choose the top 2, which are then serialized the following week with a second installment, where the voting takes place again. Alot of the skits are hit or miss, like "Oh Murder He Rapped" while some are inspired--"Cirque De Soleil crime scene investigation". Viewers are encoruaged to create their own skits too.

But the second installment of Operation Kitten Calendar takes the cake. I don't do Mondays, indeed!!

A Star is Born (aka See Tom make an ass of himself on TV!)

So, this seems like the perfect place to share this news: as Kistulentz and Mike already know, I moved into a new house in South Jersey over the summer and stumbled into a featured role on a terrible basic cable moving show called "Moving Up."

"Moving Up" features some prick named Doug Wilson who used to be on the eminently more successful "Trading Spaces," and whose prickishness cannot be emphasized enough, although the director certainly outdid him in terms of overall unlikability and smarminess.

The show reflects the combined forces of their awful personalities, and is loaded with all of the standard trappings of a crappy, family friendly moving show: fabricated fights, a cooky host, some awful banter, and at least one particularly contrived scene that the producers honestly thought was clever.

Anyway, here's the point: I'm on it, and it unexpectedly aired last weekend (and I received about 2 dozen phone calls/text messages within 3 minutes of the show's start). It re-airs Saturday night at 6 PM EST on TLC (an episode stupidly titled "Beige Be Gone" because that's the kind of name that will really draw in viewers). So, if you're a stranger who's been perusing the blog and thinking, "Man, I really like that guy who used to post all the time, then inexplicably didn't for a long time, but now posts a lot again. I'll bet he'd be a real scene-stealer if he were ever given a chance to shine on TV," then you're in luck.

Sometime, I plan to break down the process a little bit here, give some behind the scenes insight (star's commentary, and all that) on how this junk goes down. Most of it is predictable and confirms what we all know about reality TV. But it gives me something to talk about.

Okay, this is way too long. Here's how TLC describes the show:

Moving Up, a series hosted by noted and charismatic TLC personality Doug Wilson, returns for a second season. We follow a chain of new homeowners who move into one another's homes and begin the design and renovation process. They all have plenty to say about their new digs and the unappealing design demons the past owners left behind! They'll work tirelessly to make their new house their home with numerous design choices and big renovations to implement. After the renovations are complete, the old homeowners will get the rare chance to visit their once beloved homes and see all of the new changes. Will they happily approve of what they see or will they wish that they had never come back?

So, check out TLC to see me talk about the unappealing design demons left behind by the previous owners (who, on an unrelated note, intentionally severed all of the phone wires in the house before moving out, those fuckers).

My working theory is that with the small sum of money they gave us and the discount we got on our rugs, I can buy my dignity back any day now.

If That's What It Takes, Then I'm Satisfied

Apparenly Gawker has something against Chuck Klosterman, leading the way for a Klosterman backlash that was probably inevitable, him doing what he does and all. I don't know if I agree with it, but they do have a point with regards to an Esquire article he wrote last year bemoaning Snakes on a Plane phenomenen. Guess what, Chuck, the Interwebs are here to stay, and people will have their say!! And for most of us, Hurray!!

But I come here mainly to praise Snakes on a Plane, because I can't imagine but that it was due to the influence of the title of this film that the 4th movie in the John McClane saga is titled, "Live Free, Or Die Hard." AWESOME!

If it took Snakes on a Plane to get to Live Free or Die Hard (and hopefully a reprise of the other two sequels--Live Free and Die Harder and Live Free and Die Harder With a Vengeance), then kudos SOAP, Kudos.

And the journey is a short one to the following:

Riggs and Murtaugh V: "I'm Too Old for This Lethal Weapon"
Rambo V: "Rock and Rambo" (co-starring Dwayne Johnson)
Terminator 4: "I, For One, Salute Our New Robot Overlords"
Omen V: "Oh, Man!"
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Prequel to the Beginning: "Tastes Like Chicken"
Star Trek VIII: "To Boldly Go Where No Sequel Has Gone Before"
Child's Play VII: "Keep Out of Reach of Children"
Ocean's 14: "Untitled George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh Vanity Project"

But then again, I'm not the Internet.

Chicks with Balls

I finally watched the Dixie Chicks documentary, "Shut Up and Sing," and all I have to say is: holy shit, does Natalie Maines have balls. It's really a pretty great movie, especially given how things have gone and are still going in Iraq. Remember back when it seemed like it would be a short little miniseries war? When the President's approval rating was through the roof, when the Mission was officially Accomplished, and Colin Powell was providing facts, not suspicions, that there were WMDs in Iraq? Wow, was that a long time ago. So long ago that this kind of thing could get you in a whole shitload of trouble: "we're ashamed that the President is from Texas."

That's all she said. And it was a tossed-off thing, the kind of thing you turn to your fiddle player and giggle at after you say it (I know, because I do this all the time -- giggle at my fiddle player, that is). And the next thing you know, people are burning CDs, running them over with monster trucks, boycotting radio stations, protesting at concerts, blabbing on Fox News, the whole thing. It's really unbelievable that the whole thing was started by this stupid joke, especially in hindsight, when even the people who were protesting the Dixie Chicks Dallas show (By the way, protesting a concert? Dude, you really need to make some changes) are probably feeling a whole lot different nowadays.

On one level, the movie is just a fascinating look back at that period of time, when something like that could snowball in such a scary way. It's nice to see all the typical assholes and realize how incredibly wrong they are, of course, but it's also interesting to see how sure everybody is about this whole Iraq thing. Scary.

Even if you don't like country music, it's a worthwhile movie. If you do like that kind of music (and the other thing about the Chicks is that they really are musicians, not Barbies getting yanked around by Timbaland or something), there's also a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes songwriting and recording, complete with Rick Rubin doing his buddha grizzly bear thing, sitting around in his jammies listening to tracks from the album.

Through the whole thing, you can see the Chicks trying to get their feet under them, worrying over how this will affect their lives and careers, and making little decisions that will have big consequences. And the Chicks have balls. There are countless times when one of them could have bailed out or given in. They're all mothers, with little babies walking around. That changes how you look at things like your own safety (especially, I could guess, if you've got a gajillion dollars in the bank from your first three albums). There are countless decisions they could have made differently, things that would have made perfect sense, and made more money, but didn't feel right. Also, countless times that one of the sisters, or both, could have just said, you know, I have two little kids at home, and you shot off your mouth, and now rednecks are fucking burning our CDs in the streets, running them over with their retard trucks. But if anything, the whole thing seems to have brought them all closer together.

Oh yeah, and on top of the commercial stuff, there were also death threats. Pretty serious ones. And when Natalie Maines is shown the picture of the guy who wrote "Natalie Maines will die in Dallas Texas on September 27, 2003," she says...."he's kind of good looking."

It's an interesting portrayal of what normal people do when they get thrown into the fire like that. Despite the fact that they're rich and secure, the Chicks really do seem pretty normal. The sisters seem more like soccer moms who somehow got into this predicament, who didn't ask for a fight but, almost by instinct more than anything else, decide to stick by their friend. Maines is no genius, but she's stubborn, and, like I said, she's got the balls to stick with her convictions. And it also helps that she is massively right about this one, as history has been proving for the past four years. Did I mention that she's got balls? When everybody around her is worrying over how to get back on country radio, she basically says, lets not be on country radio. When everybody wants her to take back what she said, she won't. When a nice, safe alternative to rolling the dice with their own money is brought up, -- a group that wants to basically underwrite the tour, paying a lump sum to the Chicks and taking the risk, but also the reward, on how the public will embrace them, post-comments -- she turns it down because it doesn't feel right. When Bush says that they shouldn't be upset if people are buying their album, she says, "oh he is such a fucking asshole," and then, just in case there was any question, she turns to the camera and says "you're a fucking asshole."