Why will print — or more specifically, magazines — never fully die, even in a digital age? It’s simple: because actresses won’t pose for racy online-only photos, like Jennifer Aniston’s cover shoot for this month’s GQ, below. Period. So print lives.
Hard to believe she’s related to Victor Kiriakis, I know…
Over on Huffington Post, Bonnie Fuller takes a rare dissenting feminine view in the ongoing Jennifer Aniston–Angelina Jolie shadow tabloid war, and nails why Aniston should just take a big gulp from a warm glass of shut the hell up. Fuller accuses Aniston of “perpetrating the most fantastic press dissathon” of recent memory (giving an interview for a Vogue cover story in which she says, “What Angelina did was uncool,” then whining to Entertainment Weekly for a separate, later cover story, “I was just surprised that Vogue would go so tabloid. I was bummed, but you almost expect it”), and basically makes the point that Aniston can’t stop running her yapper and wearing the victim’s hoodie, which wears on guys a lot quicker than females. Who knows whether this brand damage is long-lasting or irreperable, but I can tell you that male audiences will not stick with a female movie star that they perceive as a nag and endless re-hasher of the past, no matter how finely toned the legs. Personality does still matter, shockingly.
I hit the premiere of Punisher: War Zone in Hollywood last night, and those seeking a mash-up of the extreme, over-the-top violence of new millennium action-horror cinema with the sort of charmingly ham-fisted, blasé narrative incongruities of straight-to-video action flicks of years gone by can take a sort of depraved solace in the film, a ridiculous quasi-sequel to 2004’s big screen comic book adaptation, starring Thomas Jane as a Vietnam War veteran turned crusading vigilante. This time Ray Stevenson (HBO’s Rome) takes over the role of Frank Castle, still haunted by the murder of his family and still committed to taking out mafioso-types, including the especially nefarious Billy Russoti (Dominic West).
Battling over edits, director Lexi Alexander at one point reportedly considered taking her name off the project, and it’s not hard to feel sympathetic. From a storytelling point-of-view, everything about this movie feels cribbed and/or lazily reconstituted, and it certainly doesn’t help that the facially deformed Billy takes as a nickname Jigsaw, the moniker of another contemporary horror franchise puppetmaster. Still, faces are (literally) punched in, and bodies hit the ground at a prodigious clip. By its end, when the film has almost morphed into a surreal comedy, one realizes that this craptacular, so-bad-it’s-good mess is the modern-day, steroidal answer to classic-era Steven Seagal neck-punchers. All that’s missing is about a dozen lines of yelped ADR from expiring victims.
I caught Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road today, aka the non-waterlogged reunion of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and while I’ll have more thoughts soon, it bears pointing out that one thing the film definitively proves is that DiCaprio cannot convincingly swear; he’s the anti-Sam Jackson in this regard. It’s not that DiCaprio is patrician, per se, it’s just that whenever he spits out an epithet or obscenity, all the effort is revealed, the intellectual processing of the fact that a not-particularly-fit-for-polite-conversation word is about to be deployed, and always the weight of its intended effect. Sometimes this doesn’t matter, in the case of a character who is manipulative in just such a fashion. When it’s a lover’s quarrel, however, this marble-mouthed properness is a problem, since it runs counter to a lot of profanity. I don’t know if it means that he smokes weed (I tend to think not), but there’s just no verbal instinctuality or knee-jerk, hair-trigger impulsivity to DiCaprio.
It’s a happy 26th birthday to Canadian-born hockey enthusiast Elisha Cuthbert, who has survived a cougar on 24 and making House of Wax with Paris Hilton, and manages to stand a bit apart from her peer set, if chiefly because I have such fond memories of 2004’s The Girl Next Door, an exceptional, funny and well-colored high school flick that died an unfortunate box office death. Last summer’s Captivity was eye-gougingly terrible, but… well, not her fault. There’s more culpability with The Quiet, on which Cuthbert took an associate producer credit. Move fast, Elisha — the Maxim fanboy window closes pretty definitively in a couple years, after the 24 big screen treatment.
It’s also a 23rd birthday for Kaley Cuoco, who played the boy-crazy girl who drove TV dad John Ritter to distraction on 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, a show that always made me modestly uncomfortable for the barely concealed glee it seemed to take in brightly colored, flippant sexualization. Then again, maybe that was really the entire point. Something about that preening presentation and the half-hour laffer format don’t usually work for me, though.
Reading Pat Jordan’s forthcoming profile piece for New York Times Magazine, sensible folks would seem to come to the conclusion that Mickey Rourke is at once an interesting guy and a fairly transparent, not-very-interesting guy, given that he’s used a puffed-up, tough-guy persona, both on the screen and in his real life, to try to expiate a sense of mostly manufactured shame. Both sensitive and blustery, he’s utterly sincere about these slurry, commingled questionable details, because he’s taken on biographical fabrications with the fervency that only a born-again zealot or brain trauma survivor can muster.
He’s only attached to star, and the search for a director isn’t yet complete, but somewhere on the horizon for Steve Carell might be The Beaver, a screwy treat written by 32-year-old Austinite and USC Film School grad Kyle Killen. I like what I hear from Vulture’s Dan Kois, who describes it as “Little Miss Sunshine meets Stranger Than Fiction.” The write-up makes me lean forward in appreciative anticipation even though I have problems with the former component of that mash-up. Carell doing something darker, or tinged with melancholy, is interesting, and almost certainly a good idea.
I touched on the ratings controversy surrounding Slumdog Millionaire at the end of my one-on-one interview with Danny Boyle, but I also recently exchanged a couple emails with friend and colleague Wade Major, who gave good voice to the ire and irritation surrounding the R rating with which the film is saddled. The capper of his response is excerpted below:
“I’ve been screaming about the racism factor in the decisions of CARA (Classification and Rating Administration) for years. It’s been unbelievably evident, time and time again. And in fairness, it has far less to do with racism than with cultural parochialism, as you could also make the case for Billy Elliott, as family-friendly a film as has ever been made. I’m sorry, but “Fuck” is about as offensive to people in Yorkshire as “Dang.” CARA doesn’t get that. Their primary motivation is not, as Jack Valenti always claimed, providing information for parents. Their goal is to keep government censors at bay, so they zero in on anything that a morality mandarin might flip out over… regardless of context or common sense. And more often than not, that ends up putting a lot of foreign films on unequal footing, particularly Asian films. They’ve never been able to wrap their heads around some of the stuff in Hong Kong movies, and the fact that someone running around with a hatchet in his back can, in context, be fun and/or funny. To them, it’s straight out of Friday the 13th. Fuckers.”
It’s a happy birthday to Anne Hathaway, who turns 26 today, and probably doesn’t celebrate by calling imprisoned ex-beau Raffaello Follieri. After two hit Disney flicks opposite Julie Andrews, plus turns in Ella Enchanted and Nicholas Nickleby, Hathaway began an earnest, concerted effort to shed her princess-y image with the 2005 one-two topless punch of Brokeback Mountain, for which she beat out Sienna Miller and dozens of other actresses, and Barbara Kopple’s Havoc (below). For many actresses, of course, that means playing hookers, stripper drug fiends, black widow femme fatales, or some combination thereof.
In savvy fashion, though, Hathaway has run an end-around on topless convention. Brokeback Mountain, of course, was a supporting role in an Oscar-bait project, but the fact that it was a movie about, you know, gay cowboys guaranteed that it would be remembered — or at least publicly discussed — chiefly for other reasons. While Havoc rather inexplicably went straight-to-video — something Hathaway couldn’t have counted on, nor wished — it was a gritty, class-clash suburban-teens-gone-wild picture, kind of like a more hardcore crazy/beautiful, spiced with barrio authenticity. Another legit film, in other words.
So basically Hathaway gets total cred with the drooling Maxim crowd, because the movies are Internet-searchable, yet she takes no hit with female audiences for tackling a sex bomb role, which often results in dramatically diminished same-sex appeal, as Angelina Jolie (among others) will attest. Now, in this fall’s Rachel Getting Married, Hathaway plays the (recovering) drug fiend… without getting naked, thank you very much.
It’s a happy 27th-ish birthday to Megan Hauserman, whose best assets are displayed below. Actually, that may not be completely true.
Hauserman, you see, parlayed an accounting degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago into an appearance on Ashton Kutcher’s Beauty and the Geek, which she then parlayed into a stint on the second season of Rock of Love, where she competed for the heart of ex-Poison rocker Bret Michaels, along with a future STD-positive test.
She lost (and therefore won?), moving on to the debut of I Love Money, a challenge-based reality competition show composed of wash-outs former contestants from other VH-1 series like I Love New York, Flavor of Love and the aforementioned Michaels-centric show. There Hauserman hung around until the final three by mind-fucking her frequently saused fellow competitors in Machiavellian fashion. Now she’s apparently on yet another VH-1 show, Rock of Love: Charm School, which exhibits an uncanny skill at occupational avoidance/vine-swinging that most single college grads can only pull off for 12-18 months. I’m betting that Hauserman hasn’t bought a drink for herself in a long, long time. Yes, she’s crafty, in the style that the Beastie Boys once rapped about.
More broadly speaking (pun?), I’m fascinated by this new breed of demi-celebrity — MTV Real World alums and on-the-grift actresses who aren’t really actresses, at least in any traditional sense — and what it says about the changing nature of entertainment in America.
Oh, and also (and probably chiefly): boobs.
Why doesn’t Brazilian bombshell Izabel Goulart, who turns 24 today, get into acting, so that I might post more scantily clad pictures of her, like this one?
A Victoria’s Secret model, so far she has only single episodes of Entourage and Two and a Half Men to her credit, which means she’s almost certainly been hit on by Charlie Sheen, and perhaps had to submit to an audition where she talked to animals. Voice unheard, I’m recommending her for future Bond babe consideration…
I commented a few days back on the brilliant, evocative new trailer for Oliver Stone’s W., and it’s now up and running in chopped-and-diced form in 30-second television spots, including on MSNBC and CNN. There’s a new line not glimpsed in the theatrical/online long-form cut (“I don’t understand why you’re bringing this up at lunch,” says President Bush says to Vice President Cheney when the latter starts talking about the potential for an anthrax attack), but perhaps most fascinating is the inclusion of voiceover and text narration that sells the film as “based on the unbelievable true story of George W. Bush, and the trillion dollar mistake.”
Wait… which trillion dollars, again? I know it’s not the Iraq War (which currently sits at around $585 billion, but runs as high as $3 trillion when factoring in long-term costs). And it’s not the total federal deficit, which has ballooned to $10 trillion-plus under Bush. Oh, right… it’s that other $1 trillion or so ripped from taxpayers’ futures, in the form of the Congressional economic bail-out package. Put a saddle on this guy. I can’t recall any other agitated-entertainment promotional campaign — and this includes Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 — so openly, contemptuously bagging on a public figure, and incorporating up-to-minute material. Of course, I can’t really recall anyone else who has so brought it upon themselves and deserved it, either. Regardless, it’s the right campaign to run for W., really, stripping the bark off its own subject of focus. This push has me rethinking my previous assessment that Stone’s movie is financially doomed; talking to a few friends and colleagues recently opened my mind to at least the possibility that the filmgoing public could be receptive to a cathartic dismissive experience, something I hadn’t previously considered.
Scripted hour-long American television famously gives the impression that there are maybe two dozen occupations in the entire country, with doctors being investigated by forensic specialists, lawyers suing fashion magazine employees (and perhaps one another), and cops chasing crooked psychologists while desperate housewives sip on spiked coffee behind their picket fences.
Both independent film and their low-budget documentary brethren, however, often offer all sorts of opportunities to explore the great, untilled territory of more off-the-beaten-path jobs. In the past year and a half alone, there have been spotlights thrown on such atypical vocations as topiary gardening, commercial fishing, vacuum cleaner repair and library work, to name a few.
Debut feature director Wayne Price’s The Doorman (Gigantic Pictures, unrated, 73 minutes) spawns similar intrigue as to the make-up and routines of its subject subset. It was, after all, a doorman at the Beverly Hilton Hotel who recently helped rescue former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards from a bathroom and, at 2 a.m., escort him past tabloid reporters seeking corroborative photographic evidence of his presence at the hotel at the same time as his now-confirmed mistress, Rielle Hunter. At trendy clubs, bars and hotels alike, doormen are the first face of the establishment and the image it wants to project — demi-gods, and arbiters of cool who, in certain situations, decide who ends up gaining admittance and who is destined to spend an hour or more standing in line outside.
A New York-set mockumentary about a smooth-talking, high-end gatekeeper, The Doorman follows a film crew who set out to make an insider’s guide to the legendary New York City club scene, using as their host and guide Trevor (Lucas Akoskin), an Argentinian who looks like a cross between Andy Samberg and Aaron Eckhart. Trevor has the power; he knows people. But more importantly (as Trevor frequently points out), he knows people who know him.
Or maybe not. As the film wears on, Trevor seems much less a player and more of a hanger-on. He mysteriously loses his job, struggles to keep up appearances in front of the camera, and gets caught in various lies that undermine his boastful self-presentation. Director Price (also playing himself on camera) becomes more and more exasperated, finally forcing the issue on Trevor, who admits to not being all that he seems.
Despite the fact that it features dozens of cameos by real-life boldface names — including Peter Bogdanovich, Thom Filicia, Denise Quinones, Amy Sacco, members of the band 311 and even lingering background footage of Paris Hilton — the film itself is a mess. If one takes honestly the notion that an outward face is super-important for glamorous, high-end nightclubs, then it makes no sense, I’m sorry, to have as your entrée into this world a smarmy braggart who pronounces Las Vegas as “Bay-gus.” Forgetting for a moment that the reality of Trevor’s grifter-type existence is completely at odds with all the interstitial talking head interviews that tout him as a global sensation (!), the satire here is simply nowhere near sharp enough. The concept is golden, worthy of a Borat-style treatment that skewers club owners and patrons in equal measure. The Doorman, though, comes off as a lazy execution of its distilled, single-sentence pitch line, in every way, shape and form.
Still, I left the movie intrigued. I wondered what kind of interesting glimpses into the lifestyles of privilege, and all the illicitness and rich-bitch fits that might theoretically entail, such occupational proximity would afford. So over the course of a couple weeks, I discreetly approached a couple real-life doormen at various Los Angeles hotels — people that I didn’t know by name, but a couple of whom I’d seen certainly dozens of times after more than a decade of conducting press junket interviews at such locations. Interesting stories about pre-“Brangelina” Brad Pitt and John Travolta ensued, as well as anecdotal bird’s-eye views of infidelity, something few other occupations offer. For the full, original piece, from FilmStew, click here.
So Deborah Kampmeier’s cornpone Southern gothic Hounddog — which rather outrageously has its wanly sketched Mystical Negro character advance the novel concept that, “It’s how people treat you that makes you a nigger!” — is banking on a rather unusual advertising strategy, after the whole Dakota-Fanning-rape-movie buzz didn’t really catch on the first go-round. Print ads this past weekend now feature an exhortation from no less than Gloria Steinem, reading, “Women especially should see this important, unforgettable film.”
Why, precisely? Because in its 98-minute running time there is a 20-second rape scene? Or because the writer-director is female? Hounddog is neither important nor unforgettable — except as the latter relates to David Morse’s portrayal of a drooling simpleton who cuts his own bangs after he gets struck by lightning. The fuzzy logic of this direct gender appeal is somewhat lost on me, but maybe it’s a post-Sarah Palin thing, I don’t know. It’d be interesting to know when it was hatched. And can the diehard P.U.M.A. folks really be pried off the Internet and cattle-rustled to arthouses?
Ever a fickle mistress, Los Angeles traffic today cost me about the first 15 minutes of Bill Maher’s Religulous, which I’ll now be seeing again later for review, but it’s an effective, persuasive argument-cum-documentary snapshot of organized religion as an instrument by which large numbers of people are funneled to destructive means.
Helmed by Borat director Larry Charles (above left), the film is a loose-limbed investigatory piece, with Maher traipsing around the globe to interview priests, politicians, theologians, converted Evangelical homosexuals, theme park crucifixion re-enacters and all other manner of faith-peddlers, as well as a few fellow skeptics. There’s some slight over-interjection of text/media asides of snarky commentary (I’m surprised, too, that they got the rights to some of these audiovisual clips, like from Universal’s Scarface, say), but the film is an engaging, alive thing, no doubt. Talking loudly, at they are wont to do, the religious right of the United States will of course get their panties in a wad over the perceived attack on their moral mooring, but Maher goes to decent lengths to separate ethical behavior (not killing, or raping) from organized religion, and besides, (modern) Christian fundamentalism gets off a bit (emphasis on that word) easier than Islam, whose most violent passages from the Koran are raised with Muslim scholars but never quite satisfyingly addressed. More soon on the film, which opens in limited release October 3 from Lionsgate.
I caught a TV ad today for Nicolas Cage’s Bangkok Dangerous, and joltingly realized that it’s becoming more and more likely this movie actually exists. Since Lionsgate is again hewing to its seemingly standard policy of not screening the movie in advance (see Disaster Movie, The Midnight Meat Train), I had fallen into a half-belief that the film was a hallucination on my part — that the trailer was pieced together from National Treasure outtakes and maybe footage from a honeymoon vacation and the Asian swing of an international press tour Cage did with the aforementioned film.
Professionally, when a movie isn’t screening in advance, sometimes I’ll still nab a review on opening day (see above examples), but, on a more personal level, I find that mentally I start to write these films off, and just discount their very existence. Wonkish, profit-protecting studio number-crunchers would obviously disagree, but I tend to think that a sizeable portion of the film-going public actually thinks like this as well. Yes, they see the TV ads and billboards, but when the free-media onslaught includes absolutely no reviews, they smell an attempted put-on.
Community organizers were understandably irked by Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin‘s comments last night in her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, in which she mocked Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer thusly: “I guess a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer — except that you have actual responsibilities.” This being the digital age, they’ve quickly created an outlet for their push-back, via this web site.
It’s worth noting that this wasn’t just some off-the-reservation one-liner, either; it was part of a sustained line of scornful Republican attack, with former New York Governor George Pataki saying, “[Barack Obama] was a community organizer — what in God’s name is a community organizer? I don’t even know if that’s a job,” and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani playing to an eager crowd’s laughter, offering up, “[Obama] worked as a community organizer. What? I said, ‘OK, OK, maybe this is the first problem on the resume.'”
Even before the Internet, this is the sort of mass-agitable detail — wherein a campaign really steps in a big pile of it with a certain constituency, but seeks to move forward and drown out the clamor of disaffection by denying any attack and taking mock-offense at those who raise it as an issue — that even the best films about political campaigns have a hard time cramming in. Watch for it over the next 72 to 96 hours, in particular.
By all accounts the randy new teen comedy College should have been a solid late summer performer — the movie that kids either just back at school or gearing up to head back to class went to check out over the weekend, in order to get primed for some autumnal partying. Instead, the movie was stillborn at the box office, debuting to just $2.15 million in its first weekend — failing to crack the top 10 in the same slot that the party-hearty Accepted grossed eight figures en route to a total domestic haul of $36 million just two years ago.
As if designed by checklist, College has all the most essential ingredients of a low-budget teen comedy: an R rating, an eye-grabbing poster, a cost-efficient cast comprised of mostly new faces, cartoonish antagonists in the form of frat-boy jerks, and plenty of nudity. About the only thing College misses the mark on is the inclusion of a henpecking or ironically hip parental presence. (Fred Willard wasn’t available, apparently.)
And yet… it doesn’t gel. And a general audience screening on opening day afforded a unique opportunity to witness firsthand viewer dissatisfaction with College. At an afternoon show with 20-25 people, someone actually threw a drink at the screen — something I didn’t think really happened anymore, what with their $6-plus cost. The group later left, and not too quietly. Teen braggadocio, sure, but still… if your core constituency will effectively surrender as much money filing a flamboyant protest as to the quality of your movie as he did actually patronizing it, that’s probably not a good sign.
Somewhat belying the title, College centers mostly on three high school kids, and the weekend roadie they take to Fieldmont University in order to acquaint themselves with the institution and its academic and social climate. Having just been dumped by his girlfriend, buttoned-up Kevin Brewer (Superhero Movie‘s Drake Bell, above center) is inclined to loosen up a bit and start taking some risks, especially when he meets Kendall (Haley Bennett), a sorority gal who shares his interest in photography. Gangly, bespectacled Morris Hooper (Kevin Covais, above left) is even more bookish and tightly wound, which makes him the perfect punching bag (verbally and quite literally) for Carter Scott (Andrew Caldwell, above right), the requisite motor-mouthed fat oaf of the bunch. When the student at their assigned dorm housing seems too weird, the trio head to a nearby frat house, where Carter’s (never-met) cousin was once a member. There, the guys are put through hell for their room and board, with the threat of revelation of their “pre-freshmen” status always being used as an instrument of bullying and torture.
Debut feature filmmaker Deb Hagan injects a lot of energy into the proceedings, but College‘s main failings are twofold. First, the story requires that Kevin and his pals constantly re-engage and keep on some level trusting the jackass fraternity members who take all their money and generally make their lives hell for a couple days. By the time the revenge element of the screenplay kicks in, during its last 10 minutes, you’ve ceased looking at these guys as anything but doormats, collectively and individually.
Second, and there’s not particularly a polite way to put this, College just doesn’t pass its personality exam. Seminal teen flick American Pie launched and/or solidified a couple careers, including that of Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Alyson Hannigan and Shannon Elizabeth. It even secured steady work for Chris Klein and Chris Owen, for Pete’s sake. This October’s Sex Drive, by point of further comparison, has a cast that elevates the material in delightful ways. Its three leads — Josh Zuckerman, Amanda Crew and Clark Duke — all make hay, delivering not only the laughs in the script, but also comedic moments of their own devising.
While College has the minor-chord titillation of seeing former American Idol contestant Covais drop a couple F-bombs and eventually roll around in some mud-caked tighty-whiteys, there just isn’t ever any pop here on the screen — a feeling that something special is happening, or a star maybe being born. The best teen sex comedies feel at some point dangerous and reckless, as if one or more characters might just do anything, but the wackiness and outrage in College feels never less than manufactured. Caldwell merely comes across as the guy cast when Jonah Hill quickly passed without reading, and Bell, a huge Nickelodeon star courtesy of Drake & Josh, is a milquetoast lead. I wouldn’t waste a $6 drink, but I understand that teen’s irritation. (MGM, R, 94 minutes)
I’ve previously touched upon the predominance of mixed-ethnic relationships in this summer’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, and in Mirrors, Paula Patton and Kiefer Sutherland play a married couple, with nary a word about their relationship.
This goes beyond any sort of stunt casting, obviously, and it’s no lazy, shrugging toss-off, either, since the pairing then necessitates the casting of two two mixed-race kids, shared by the actors’ characters. I don’t know if this can be called a bonafide trend, really, but there’s something interesting in it — especially in a genre picture like Mirrors, which conceivably could face commercial prospect blow-back from the uncultured slice of the horror base. It’s not like that’s a multi-million dollar difference in gross or anything, but you can bet it flipped a switch or two at the executive level, because these are the types of things that get discussed when studio movies are green-lit. Regardless, the winds they are a-changin’, that’s for sure; younger generations both see and care (which is to say, less) about race in radically different ways than their parents. Heck, this helps explain a large part of Barack Obama‘s appeal to young voters, ages 18 to 30.
There’s a special shame that any truly thinking, feeling person feels when one contributes to the theatrical gross of an utterly brain-dead movie, I mean a true piece of crap — even if it’s for purely professional reasons, with a reimbursement eventually coming. Some films go so far beyond the pall of mere uninspired, lowest-common-denominator entertainment that they feel like an affront to humankind, an insult to all creative types everywhere, all the way down to rural Kentucky public access talk show hosts.
A general first impression of the Democratic National Convention: I’d forgotten just how much political conventions really are a collection of a people coming together to wear pins and ill-fitting hats, and dance poorly. Movies always get that right, even if they don’t mean to.
Victoria Jackson, the ditz who in the 1980s made a career on Saturday Night Live out of playing a ditz, is the latest celebrity to drop a poorly written broadside against Barack Obama.
On her eponymous blog, right under a click-through ad for her latest album, Ukulele Ditties for Itty Bitty Kiddies, Jackson lets loose a rambling, semi-coherent rant that derides Obama as a relativist and humanist, and cites as evidence the fact that the Bible passages he quotes are too willfully obscure, and thus selected to overtly court Evangelicals. (Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.) In addition to scattering commas like pitched dice, confusing the word “attribute” with “contribute,” and labeling Obama a communist, racist and liar, Jackson asserts that, “Obama bears traits that resemble
the anti-Christ, and I’m scared to death that un-educated [sic] people will
ignorantly vote him into office.” Yes, she actually types those words, acknowledging that, “I know my stance might keep me from L.A. jobs, since (almost) the whole
town is liberal but… [sometimes] one must stand for what they believe in, and put
truth before popularity.”
So this is an inarguable truth in her mind? That he is the anti-Christ, or merely “bears traits that resemble” him? I guess I’m confused. I’m all for political expression on all sides, really, but I confess I’m both shocked and depressed by the levels of batshit-crazy present in opinion pieces like this — and the much commented upon op-ed from Jon Voight, whose prose reads like his train of thought skipped the rails and plunged off a cliff. Let me bottom-line it: you sound like ignorant rubes, anyone who peddles the most repugnant of this material.
When I hear/read stuff like this, it always comes off as desperate, needy invective from emotional hoarders — people who so feed on others’ insecurities and reactions that they need to try to exercise reverse mind control. It’s never about an intellectual, reasoned response; it’s always about attacking the strength of a feeling, and how this shouldn’t be trusted. Wasn’t that at the heart of Footloose, too?
Particularly with respect to the anti-Christ stuff, if you’re more invested in finding links between outlying scripture and current events to support your worldview, rather than living in the moment and confronting problems in something at least resembling head-on fashion, you’re not living as a Christian concerned with Christian works, with doing good and making the world a better place. You’re living merely to jump-circle defend the status quo, because any advancement in science, technology, social custom or anything else is another brick in the path toward the Great Reckoning. You might as well be living in a cave, honestly, and guarding the tribal flame.
None of this would matter, I guarantee you, if Barack Obama’s name was Barry Johnson. I’m not saying that all of the whackjob-fringe criticism of him falls purely along racial lines, but this isn’t about Obama, this is about people projecting their own uncertainties about the state of this country onto a man they have never met, because they fear the sea changes — racially, culturally, geographically — that this country will undergo in the next two generations. So the guy with the funny name is the easy, most immediate, front-and-center target. And after eight years of bewildering inarticulateness, “speaking well” becomes elitist, and appealing to a sense of hope and optimism becomes a reason to play the great Revelations card. It’s enough to make one mull the benefits of forced sterilization, really.
On the heels of the release of Brad Anderson’s Transsiberian, it’s worth noting that my Mom and Dad returned from a trip to the then-Soviet Union with exactly the same sort of Russian nesting dolls that Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega’s characters use to smuggle heroin in the movie, raising the distinct possibility that my parents were drug mules, and I was an unwitting, in utero accomplice. Though, in their defense, I don’t have any specific recollections of them screaming at me as a toddler not to lick the dolls…
Over on FilmStew, Richard Horgan has a fairly polite take-down of the forthcoming Anaconda 3 (which has apparently already debuted on Sci-Fi Channel, and hits DVD in October) and, more generally, the pipeline-product mindset that in particular Sony has employed in mining “franchise opportunities” (see Starship Troopers 3, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, a couple Wild Things sequels, etcetera). As outside venture capital dries up and film companies seek to further mitigate risk, look for this trend to spread. There will be a day, in the not-too-distant future, when two-thirds to three-quarters of all studio films will spawn these sorts of spin-offs, and the hushed, shameful release campaigns that accompany them.
Vulture takes issue with the generally promulgated notion that Tom Cruise’s cameo turn in the forthcoming Tropic Thunder is funny, but they’re on the wrong side of the fence on this one. Their main beef seems to be with the fact that Cruise — playing a foul-mouthed studio boss prone to breaking out a hip-hop hit to help underscore a point — is “yet another middle-aged actor milking yuks out of how white guys don’t know how to shake their flabby white rumps.” Yet that’s entirely not the point of his rump-shaking.
His character, Les Grossman, can dance; he does. Yes, it’s jarring, but it’s meant to be — it’s a visual counterpoint to the obscenity that he spews and crushed spirits he leaves in his wake. The subtext: here’s a guy who’s in control about being out of control. And it works. It makes him more calculated, shades and completes the portrait of shrewdness.
For Cruise, it’s also a career game-changer. Just as John Travolta, who decades earlier had memorably catapulted to fame on the strength of his Saturday Night Fever moves, reconnected with audiences in Pulp Fiction (partly) via dance, so too does Tropic Thunder help take audiences back to a time of unburdened affection for the guy — when he was just that sock-clad kid sliding across a bare wooden floor singing along to “Old Time Rock and Roll.” It’s more wild supporting turns like this one, and Magnolia, that will eventually yield Cruise his Best Supporting Actor Oscar, not any square-jawed dramatic leads in the vein of The Last Samurai.