Notable film and media links--November 12, 2009--special apocalyptic peak oil edition

---Icons of grunge. Where are they now?

---2012 by way of Raising Arizona (with thanks to The Cooler). Emmerich justifies his weltschmerz. NASA spoils the fun by debunking apocalyptic 2012 myths. Lastly, behind the scenes of 2012.

---For those who really want to dwell on upcoming doom, check out Collapse. As Matt Cardin points out,

"It’s probably difficult or impossible for somebody who hasn’t been following the peak oil story for the past several years to understand the depth of the “Holy crap” feeling that many of us are experiencing right now. A large part of that feeling comes simply from the fact that, as I’ve mentioned here before, lots of things appear to be playing out according to the long-forecasted “plan,” including, most prominently, the expected development in which oil-and-energy issues have moved to the forefront of public discourse. Of course that has nothing, or at least not much, to do with the question of whether peak oil is actually “real” — a word that raises the need to distinguish between peak oil, the geological phenomenon, and peak oil, the theory that ties oil’s fortunes to the very survival of growth-based economies and industrial-technological civilization. In our ever-intensifying age of 24/7 digital linkage and global conversation, it’s impossible to ferret out how much of what we’re collectively thinking and feeling comes from reality itself, as in, the reality outside the media web, and how much is simply a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

What’s incontrovertible is that we’re right now living through the giddiest age of apocalyptic cultural ferment that any of us have ever experienced. I think it’s safe to say that it tops the ones that accompanied the turn of the 20th century, and the advent of World Wars I and II, and the Depression era, and the social and cultural upheavals and meltdowns of the sixties and seventies, and the turn of the 21st century. It even tops 9/11, although in fact it incorporates the 9/11 feeling of an imminent breakdown in everything. Maybe the only thing that equals it is the nuclear terror of the Cold War era. Because now, as then, the fear isn’t just of a national or international breakdown or some such thing (although obviously that one is currently in play, too) but of a show-stopping calamity that would write “The End” on the last page of the book that is the human race, or at least on the book that is civilization as we have known for at least a century or two (since the full implementation of the Adam Smithian economic growth model and the rise of technocratic industrialism). The ecological term “die-off” has gained currency. The word “collapse” is on everybody’s minds and lips."

---Never fear, however, because now we have a dozen ways to avoid death.

---David Bordwell appreciates the visual pleasures of 1930s cinema.

---Behind the scenes of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance."

---The New York Times deeply considers the phenomenon known as Megan Fox.

---Good to see Richard Kelly getting some credit.

---Godard's intertitles. Also Godard largely doing nothing for three and a half minutes (not that I have anything against procrastination).

---Salon's Woody Harrelson interview:

"Then he got into bed. There wasn't an ounce of pretense about any of this, I swear. He was curious to get a look at that old apartment, and felt like telling me about it. He was tired, so he got into bed. When you meet Harrelson, you get a momentary glimpse of what a strange and exhausting job it must be to be famous. The job involves meeting an endless ocean of people you don't know and most likely will never see again. The obvious solution would be to retreat behind a well-rehearsed performance of your persona, to recycle a handful of gestures and mannerisms.

Harrelson, on the other hand, seems like a guy totally determined not to let the artificiality of these interactions impinge on his sense of who he is. Perversely, the fact that he is frank and thoughtful, and known to hold unorthodox political opinions he doesn't keep to himself, has only augmented his fame. You can't throw an empty Chardonnay bottle out your car window in west L.A. without hitting a Hollywood liberal, but Harrelson is something much rarer: a vegan, raw-foodist, antiwar, anti-capitalist, pro-marijuana, eco-funky, genuine radical who happens to be a beloved character actor with a good-ol'-boy demeanor."

---Lastly, the coolest movie ever adapted from a questionable book.

Pushing our buttons: a review of Richard Kelly's The Box

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

--Arthur C. Clarke

1) I found Richard Kelly's The Box annoying in a direct ratio to my admiration of his Donnie Darko (2001). The former cult film combines apocalyptic vision, the delusions of insanity, and a loose story structure that invited multiple interpretations, and yet the film works. It left me wondering--why aren't more movies made in this fashion? The answer may be that some do, but instead of hinting at some semi-plausible cosmic convergence of sci-fi portals, time travel, and the manipulated dead, you can just as easily end up with a pretentious mess.

2) The Box carries multiple allusions to Donnie Darko, but the new one's plot came from a Twilight Zone episode called Button, Button, which makes Kelly's two hour film seem a simple conceit much inflated with portentous metaphysical hoorah. In the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, in 1976, someone leaves a box on the front door step of the Lewis residence. The box contains a "button unit" that gives Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) the opportunity to win a million dollars if they press the button. Unfortunately, someone on earth has to die at the same time they press the button, but that's for their conscience to deal with, and, as the mysterious Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) assures them, they won't know the person who dies. Arlington stops by a 5 pm that day to talk over the button unit's rules and restrictions with Norma. He has half of his face blown away by a lightning bolt (in case we didn't already get a sense of unease in all of this Faustian deal-making), but Arlington assures Norma that he's not a monster, and besides, the Lewis family could use the money.

3) As one might guess, after Norma impulsively presses the button, things go downhill for the Lewises. They do get the million dollars in a briefcase, but now they guilt consumes them. Their bland son Walter (Sam Oz Stone) wonders what's going on as dad hastens to lock the money in a safe down in the basement, and creepy things begin to occur. During a wedding rehearsal dinner, Arthur accidentally (?) receives a present much like the original box that contains a photo of Arlington Steward. The baby sitter asks Lewis "Is someone pushing your buttons?" before she suffers a nosebleed and passes out in his hotrod Corvette. The more the Lewises try to investigate Arlington, the more he notifies them that he knows exactly what's going on, and pretty soon we've reentered a David Lynchian Darko-enhanced metaphysical dreamworld.

4) Given the family resemblance to Donnie Darko, The Box should be a delight, but several things about it bothered me. I had a hard time getting caught up in the Lewis' contrived plight. Poor Cameron Diaz spends much of her time weeping and looking concerned and guilty with tacky blue eyeliner. Her career has had its highs and lows (Sofia Coppola's mockery of Cameron in Lost in Translation comes to mind), but Diaz deserves more for helping greenlight The Box by her agreement to star in it. Even though she presses the button, Norma seems more tricked than really guilty of anything, and her performance is 90% angst. At one point, just to add insult to injury, Norma's son points out that she's "old, kind of a geezer" in front of his friends at the bus stop.

5) And what of the 1970s period detail? I enjoyed the glimpses of Diff'rent Strokes and the crying Native American PSA on the television, but Richard Kelly admits in an interview that he was too young to remember the 1970s, so the details are not as organically included as the 1980s were in Darko. Much of the time, the decade touches just look tacky.

6) Underneath all of the metaphysical/scientific huggermuggery, all of the spooky people looming out of hotel rooms and library carrels, the No Exit by Sartre references, and the NASA preparations to land a robot on Mars, The Box frequently relies on cheap techniques to get its effects. We have seen the million dollars in a briefcase before (even though all of the hundred dollar bills left me wondering if a real million dollars would fit in a briefcase that small). As the film goes on (oblique spoiler alert), the mysterious Arlington Steward takes on the Dr. Evil trappings of a gigantic underground chamber in the Arlington Air Force base to look nefarious in. At times, I couldn't help to associate him with his performance as Nixon in Frost/Nixon, a role that I didn't find all that convincing, and his formal winter clothes and old-fashioned homburg left me thinking of Peter Sellers' Chance the Gardener in Being There. The Lewis son has no real role except to be menaced later, and the forced drama late in the film seems way too manipulative and convenient to logically fit into any cosmic master plan.

7) After getting burned by the bombing of Southland Tales (2006), Richard Kelly has decided to toe the line and adapt his visionary aesthetics to the studio system. I don't blame him for that, but I wonder how much his decision compromised The Box. Instead of creating something genuinely prophetic (as Darko foreshadowed 9/11), The Box keeps calling attention to its attempts to amaze us, thereby diminishing the effect. When someone says to Arlington at one point, "This is all so mysterious," he replies "Well, I like mystery. Don't you?"

Notable film and media links--November 6, 2009

---How you can tell that Charles Bronson is a man.

---Recommended reading: Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Polito. In a review of the new book, Howard Hampton notes some surprising aspects of Farber's critical method:

"1) The notion of what movie to see and what to avoid is secondary to opening up new ways of looking at the familiar and the overlooked.

2) He steadfastly refuses hero worship: "To put Hitchcock either up or down isn't the point; the point is sticking to the material as it is, rather than drooling over behind-the-camera feats of engineering."

3) He has scant interest in narrative, either of plot-driven or symbolic/sociopolitical kinds, and is more taken with spatial dynamics than happy endings or movie martyrdoms.

4) He has a nonchalant way of rolling out a convoluted 20th century landscape in which Godard meets Dick Tracy, Anthony Mann carries more weight than John Ford, and the scummy cesspools of Don Siegel beckon like an old Esther Williams water ballet. Indeed, Farber had a special knack for creating a mental space where everything exists in the same eternal present tense, the 1932 "Scarface" and the 1970 acid gangster trip "Performance," Boris Karloff and Mick Jagger sounding like long-lost brothers-in-arms waving to each other across the Warner Bros. lot."

---50 iconic movie stills.

---An interview with Richard Kelly.

---The internet is killing storytelling and privacy, Twitter is killing blogging, but at least zombies are doing well.

---David Lynch's rabbits stole the show in Inland Empire.

---I miss grunge (and I'm wearing flannel as I write this).

---I really enjoyed Richard Brody's profile on Wes Anderson. Too bad there's no decent link yet. Here's a quote from it:

"As an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in philosophy, Anderson remained movie-obsessed, working part time as a projectionist. (His conversation is liberally seasoned with film references, from John Ford's 1935 comedy The Whole Town's Talking to Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, which, he argues, marked the beginning of the French New Wave.) In Austin, Anderson met Owen Wilson, an English major, in a playwriting class. Wilson noticed Anderson sitting by himself, away from the table where the other students gathered, wearing `L.L. Bean boots with long corduroy-type shorts.'"

---Single take titles.

---Beware of cute overload, or kangaroos for that matter.

---Marlene rules.

---Oops! Publishers Weekly forgot to include a female writer.

---Andrew O'Hehir notes the resurgence of the British indie-film industry.

---Lastly, when movies mention their titles.

Grunge Mutations from Outer Space: Alien: Resurrection starring Winona Ryder and Sigourney Weaver (1997)

[The Film Doctor figures that if he just posts these last few time capsule reviews from 1997, then that will oblige him to return to the local Regal Stadium cineplex.]

Now into its fourth installment, the Alien series suffers from its success. Both Event Horizon and Mimic borrowed from its peekaboo horror/sci-fi technique this summer, and by now everyone knows what the alien looks like so there's no returning to the first movie's mysterious, very slow unfolding of a very Darwinian character (I can remember back in 1979 sitting in a crowded theater in Tennessee as everyone started whispering "Now it's going to pop out of his chest!"). That scene has already been lampooned in Mel Brook's Spaceballs when the baby alien pops out to dance a little soft shoe on the counter. The second Alien movie by James Cameron struck me as too Reagan-era militaristic, and hardly anyone saw the third one where Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) dies.

So what do you do now? Apparently you hire a young hip French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who made City of Lost Children) and Winona Ryder who gets to play against ingenue type. Then you bring back Sigourney Weaver (who also co-produces) through the magic of DNA cloning, add some crazy military scientists who want to breed "tamed" aliens for profit, throw them all into another large grungy spaceship, and see what happens. This time Ripley's DNA replicate gets her genes crossed with the aliens themselves, turning her in an "alien" mother (strictly C-section births here, through the chest). The twisted military scientists all act like bit players from a Star Trek convention, each with a moronic gleam in his eye as if space people suffered from some major intergalactic inbreeding since Ripley died two hundred years ago in the future. Their Frankensteinian silliness almost wrecks the beginning of the film.

Fortunately, Winona Ryder (who plays Annalee Call) and a lovable Han Solo-like trader crew of misfits show up in the smaller spaceship Betty with a secret cache of human bodies designed to aid in alien growth. This crew redefines futuristic grunge. They all have great grimy leather clothes, lewd attitudes (except for Annalee), and inventive weapons--one fellow has a jeeplike wheelchair with the parts of a gun in assorted positions around his legs; another Tom Waits-like guy named Johner (Ron Perlman) with flamboyant scars on his face carries a rocket launching device in a thermos. He walks up to Weaver as she plays basketball, and all of a sudden the movie clicks. When Ripley circles around him like an anaconda, half-grinning, full of tease and menace, you realize why the men are necessarily such fools.

By virtue of her alien blood, Ripley becomes a feminist hero par excellence. Since she can play both sides of the fence, so to speak, and go hang out with her alien children if she likes, she doesn't care so much about the danger. She doesn't even carry a weapon. Instead she just struts around bare armed and making wisecracks. Who's going to mess with her? And yet her machismo does contain elements of motherly compassion. In once scene, she finds the L-7 room full of abortive genetic creatures who led the way to her mutation, all of them female, some still alive. She walks up to one grotesquely malformed "woman" on a table who begs to be killed, and in response, Ripley torches the whole room.

Resurrection takes the Darwinian principle of the first Alien one step further by depicting the mutability of species. People and aliens metamorphose into each other repeatedly, allowing the filmmakers to explore the positive and negative side effects of adaptation. In this context, Ripley revolts against the male scientists who would treat feminine reproduction as a dehumanized genetic factory. Johner (the Tom Waits goon) takes one look at the room full of burnt female mutations and mutters "It must be a chick thing."

In turn very funny, very gory, and at other times derivative, Alien: Resurrection surprised me with how fun it was overall. It's basically a silly summer movie, but Ripley and Annalee add some gender-bending emotional complexity to all of the explosions. When Winona Ryder's character turns out to be an android, the others explaim over her particular make, and she looks pained and embarrassed. How awkward to come out robotic.

Murder as Photo Op: Scream 2 starring Neve Campbell and Jada Pinkett (1997)

[Here's a time capsule review from one of my favorite horror franchises.]

I imagine Kevin Williamson had great fun writing screenplays for Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and now Scream 2. Instinctively aware of the fickle tastes of the young and media savvy, he can't or won't write down to his audience. While part of his job consists of imagining even more elaborate ways to have a death-reaper disguised villain leap from behind the unexpected door with a bloody knife in a large house, he also hit upon the winning method of constantly including knowing pop culture references, reflections, and commentary of the whole institution of horror films in his movies. In this way, he can create a pretty good but not great film like Scream 2 and neutralize all critical response in advance by including a scene where a film class debates the pros and cons of making sequels.

Williamson knows how to capitalize on the way all the different media outlets will exploit and cannibalize a murder story into hundreds of fictional or newsworthy or television talk show formats. The dissonance between the human horror of murder and the gleeful feeding frenzy of the press creates the ironic distance wherein these Scream movies can be made. Thus characters can scream, comment on their position within a horror convention, and light up at the possibility of appearing nationwide with Diane Sawyer simultaneously.

In the opening sequence, a young black couple enter a theater to watch the horror film Stab as they discuss how African Americans have traditionally been excluded from lily white horror films. As Jada Pinkett's character says, "I read my Entertainment Weekly. I know my shit!" Stab is a crude movie-within-a-movie recreation of the original Scream. The couple sit down to a parody of the now famous scene where Drew Barrymore gets attacked by an anonymous telephone caller, and guess who gets killed in the theater as every other audience member wears promotional reaper masks and slashes around with plastic green knives? When a murder victim stumbles up on stage to die during the movie, the audience members in the theater think it's a publicity stunt. Welcome to the postmodern hall of mirrors of Scream 2.

Does Scream 2 suffer from sequelitis? Yes. The original Scream included cries of "There's got to be a sequel!" Scream 2 takes place at the same small college where Sid (Neve Campbell) seeks to escape her memories of the former slashing. Now she's in drama class playing Cassandra, appropriately enough. After the opening murders, sensing a copycat sequence of killings coming up, the media descends on the campus in their electronic gewgaw-laden vans, among them Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), who has written a book about the original Scream slashings, and Dewey (David Arquette), the small town lovable deputy who shows up to warn Sid that she probably already knows the killers. Pretty soon we find Last Summer's Sarah Michelle Gellar alone in a large sorority house at night. Sid's erstwhile boyfriend keeps appearing at suspicious moments, but Randy (another friend) knowingly points out that since the other boyfriend in Scream turned out to be the killer, this one can't be him.

I wasn't as caught up in the mystery aspect of the movie this time, preferring the clever self-referential reflections built in the set-piece scenes. For instance, the murderer in this movie takes video footage of his victims before killing them, so we get to watch these versions of earlier scenes in a screening room just before the killer kicks in to attack the viewers. Tori Spelling plays a delightfully campy movie variation of Sid in the original Scream in a scene sampled on a talk show. While Sid remains a rather static epic heroine grimly determined to fight her way out of slasheedom, Courtney Cox and David Arquette actually develop as side characters with Courtney finding some unexpected compassion for her media victims.

During one of the last scenes in the movie, a survivor hands out his card to the press, telling them what he knows warrants a price, and saying the story will definitely make a good movie. I thought of Kevin Williamson at this point jacking up his fees for Scream 3 and I Know What You Did Last Summer 2 (already in production). In this age of big dumb studio blockbusters, knowing how not to condescend to your audience can pay very well indeed.

Notable film and media links--October 30, 2009

---Facebook is so passe, but at least it acknowledges the dead. Wal-Mart now offers a discount for the dead. Also, let's not forget the media death spiral and the death of the book review.

---Bill Murray, screen demigod:

"The threat of sudden emotional violence is always lurking within. In his early movies, such as Meatballs and Caddyshack, he made this his shtick — witness his famously manic “It just doesn’t matter!” speech from the former movie, or the bursts of gopher-hatred in the latter. In later work, such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, though the performances are more restrained the threat is still there, simmering behind the impassive glare. Think of how he gleefully destroys schoolboy Jason Schwartzman’s bicycle inRushmore, or how he humiliates Robert De Niro’s tremulous cop in the opening of Mad Dog and Glory with a genuinely terrifying stare and the viciously spat, “F*** off!”

---Film in Focus honors the achievement of Joe Bowman of Fin de Cinema as part of their Behind the Blog series.

---Stephen Asma attempts to figure out the significance of our love of monsters:

"Believers in human progress, from the Enlightenment to the present, think that monsters are disappearing. Rationality will pour its light into the dark corners and reveal the monsters to be merely chimeric. A familiar upshot of the liberal interpretation of monsters is to suggest that when we properly embrace difference, the monsters will vanish. According to this view, the monster concept is no longer useful in the modern world. If it hangs on, it does so like an appendix—useful once but hazardous now.

I disagree. The monster concept is still extremely useful, and it's a permanent player in the moral imagination because human vulnerability is permanent. The monster is a beneficial foe, helping us to virtually represent the obstacles that real life will surely send our way. As long as there are real enemies in the world, there will be useful dramatic versions of them in our heads."

---Which is more accurate--the view of Baghdad from up in a helicopter, or down in the streets?

---Dennis Cozzalio points out where the dirty hipsters are.

---David Cairns examines a remake of one of my favorite films- Sternberg's Der blaue Engel.

---Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard consider Trouble Every Day in time for Halloween.

---David Thomson vents about pod actors and the idea of a remake of The Third Man.

---I confess that I've been enjoying William Mann's new biography of Elizabeth Taylor, in part because of his emphasis on her skill at being a celebrity. As Laura Miller points out:

"As a pioneer for the Madonnas and Lindsay Lohans of today, women whose personal lives occupy more of the public imagination than does their creative work, Taylor comes across as remarkably sympathetic and uncomplicated. For all her temperament, narcissism and hedonism, she was never driven or insecure. She didn't seek applause as a balm for deeper wounds, like Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe; her fame was forged by others rather than the object of her own ambition. She didn't much like making movies, though she'd occasionally pull out the stops when the project suited her whims. What she really wanted was to lounge around on yachts and in luxury hotels, chowing down on fried chicken with "lots of gravy" and waking up to a Tiffany's box on her pillow on a fairly regular basis. Acting, fame and a few of her marriages were little more than means to those ends."

---Sociological Images looks at the evolution of Disney princesses.

---The Fake AP Stylebook answers all of your style and usage questions.

---For those trying to figure out the internet, you can check it out its ten laws, decry its negative effect on the long-form narrative, consider how it spreads rumors, celebrate its 40th birthday, or imagine what it will be like in 5 years.

---Speaking of "Imagine," the upcoming John Lennon biopic looks intriguing, although I never cared much for "Hey Jude."

The Edge of Exasperation: David Mamet's The Edge starring Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins (1997)

[Here's another time capsule review from 12 years ago.]

I may be the wrong type of guy to write a review of The Edge. The writer of the movie, David Mamet, evidently believes you're not really a man until you have to use your wits to survive in the cold Alaskan wilderness. You have to build fires to keep drying off your damp clothes. You have to go for days without food and then maybe gnaw on half of a squirrel you catch in a little ingenious stick trap shaped like a box. If that isn't enough, you're not really a man until you kill a 500 lb grizzly bear by wedging a spear in a rock so the upraised howling, drooling bear impales itself on its own weight and falls on top of you.

The last film that followed this trial-by-torment ethic was G. I. Jane, which at least was trashily entertaining. The Edge takes its old fashioned Hemingwayesque Grizzly Adams/Jack London/Deliverance survival shtick seriously, which eventually makes it a dreary bore. Anthony Hopkins plays Charles, a billionaire genius who flies out to the frozen tundra with his much younger wife, Elle Macpherson, who supermodels faux Native American clothes for handsome fashion photographer Bob (Alec Baldwin), who is sleeping with her on the sly.

Out at the bear lodge, Charles quickly establishes himself as an overcivilized scaredy-cat when Bob frightens him with the head of a bear rug. I think we are meant to think of Alec Baldwin as a frivolous superficial photographer modern man, but he looks too strong and resourceful for the part. He decides he wants to hire a local bear-hunting Indian for a fashion shoot and so they fly north into a flock of birds that causes the plane to crash into the water, and away they go on their adventure.

For awhile Bob and Charles have another character played by Harold Perrineau walking along with them, but he proves to be early bear meat after he accidentally cuts his leg and attracts the bear with the smell of his blood. Compared to the shark in Jaws or the big snake in Anaconda, this grizzly looks kind of cute. I kept thinking the real circus or zoo-kept bear probably enjoyed his occasional jaunts out in the woods in front of a camera. We also get to see a computer animated bear and a man-in-a-bear-suit bear for the fancier stunts. This grizzly means business because he has a special preference for humans, and so he tracks Bob and Charles for half of the film. He has his own special bear music for his appearances, some sort of wonking trombone sound to go with the loud epic orchestral music.

Did I mention the breathtaking natural scenery? The many feats of courage, strength, and stamina? Charles knows that Bob wants to kill him to get his money and his supermodel wife, which adds a nice little plot wrinkle. Is Bob saving Charles' life just so he can kill him later? (Spoiler alert) After they kill the bear, they both wear bear pelt coats, hats, and bear claw necklaces so they really look like two Grizzly Adamses. We see their actions and faces take on a soulful dignity born of true manlihood.

Maybe Boy Scouts, hunters, and men suffering midlife crises might like and learn from this movie, but I didn't. I guess I'm not man enough.