...with DiCaprio in the Ray Liotta role. But who is Jonah Hill, Paul Sorvino?



Are you nuts? Of course I'll go see it, and what better analogy to draw than bankers and organized crime? I only have one question: When did Matthew McConaughey turn into Young Harry Dean Stanton?

Labels: banksters, movies

What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.

What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.

At the same time, I am re-launching the new and improved Rogerebert.com and taking ownership of the site under a separate entity, Ebert Digital, run by me, my beloved wife, Chaz, and our brilliant friend, Josh Golden of Table XI. Stepping away from the day-to-day grind will enable me to continue as a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and roll out other projects under the Ebert brand in the coming year.

[snip]

So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies.

I'm quite certain it makes me a terrible person that I felt more gut-punched when I read yesterday about the death of Roger Ebert than I did when my sister called me at 2:30 in the morning last December to tell me that our mother had died. But if that makes me a terrible person, then so be it. I had known for some time that my mother's health had been deteriorating, but Ebert was just always there. Even when in recent years my local newspaper featured reviews by Stephen Whitty on Fridays instead of Ebert's review, he was always there, as I knew from reading his spectacularly-crafted journal.

We knew about the horrific cancer that robbed him of his chin, his ability to eat, and most tragically, his voice. We knew about the perpetual grin that disfiguring surgeries had put on the face of this most curmudgeonly of critics. We knew about the incredible voice synthesizer that was developed by a company in Scotland that painstakingly took many, many recordings of Ebert's televised reviews, cut them up into individual words, and created software that would assemble these bits into narrative in his former voice when he typed. We knew that no one goes through what he did and lives to a ripe old age. But he was always THERE. Every time a movie came out that I thought I might want to see; every time I watched a movie on TV that I enjoyed, or found one I'd never heard of that was great, I'd always go immediately afterward to rogerebert.com to see what Roger had to say about it. Despite everything he'd gone through, he was always there -- writing, hosting or attending Ebertfest every year. He embraced the technology that allowed him to continue to be important even as the newspapers for which he had written for over forty years had begun to fade. He embraced the young critics who started out on the Web, creating a new "balcony" show featuring some of those young critics. Ebert Digital, which unveiled just in the last few days, promises to continue that tradition.

"Siskel and Ebert" was a duo that became a single unit, like Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello. And indeed, in the later years of their partnership, Ebert and his equally cranky critic Gene Siskel seemed often to veer into self parody. I often expected Siskel to launch into full SNL-parody of the old "Point/Counterpoint" bit from 60 Minutes and say, "Roger, you ignorant slut!" Their interaction was so easily parodied, that it often was:





I chose the two reviews that head this post for a reason. The first one is because The Shawshank Redemption is arguably my favorite movie of all time. It's the only movie I've ever seen where I left the theatre just glad to be alive. Its theme of hope and "get busy living or get busy dying" so perfectly encapsulates how Roger Ebert lived his life right up until the end -- busy doing the things he loved to do. I posted the second review because after more than a decade after Titanic became something of a pop culture joke due to its sheer, dare I say it, SIZE as it steamed its way through the zeitgeist of the late 1990s, its worth remembering what it was like BEFORE everyone had seen the "flying" scene 157 times and before the multiple viewings made us realize just what an awful writer of dialogue James Cameron is for all that he's a master storyteller and technological craftsman. Because damn it, Siskel and Ebert liked it too!

That movie, laughed at today but called "epic" by Roger Ebert in 1997, is what started me writing movie reviews. Once I realized that what haunted me about the film was not the doomed romance or the ship sinking. I'd been reading about the Titanic since I read A Night to Remember in the sixth grade. No, it was that photo montage at the end; that story of a girl who "threw it all away" and took a literally life-threatening risk, and went on to live the kind of full, joy-filled life that Roger Ebert did. I started writing and before I knew it, I'd reviewed the movie. I posted it a Usenet movie newsgroup, and soon I received an e-mail inviting me to re-post it and continue to write for a site called Virtual Urth. Thus did my unpaid career as a movie critic begin. After a while, I was invited to join the Online Film Critics Society, started my own site, partnered up with Gabriel Shanks for yet another new site, and later on was a co-founder of Cinemarati.com, which alas is now a parked domain and no longer even available. I wrote reviews for seven years, always wanting to be the kind of critic that Roger Ebert was.

What made Ebert special is that he was never a film snob. Some critics frame every movie in the context of The Great Art of Cinema, and find everything else lacking. Ebert always looked at what a movie was trying to do and in what genre it was working. He would give Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle three stars because he got what it was trying to do and deemed it successful.

For all that I no longer review movies, except very, very rarely, I always felt that Roger Ebert would always be there. But now he's not. And so I'll just leave you with Chris Hayes and a group of critics remembering the man who inspired me and so many others.



Update: And what a guy.

Labels: movies, obituaries, Roger Ebert

This time of year always makes me nostalgic for those good old days when I spent half of every Saturday and often a good chunk of Sunday sitting in a darkened movie theatre with a small notepad, scribbling notes to refer to when writing a review later. I never had the sense back then that time was getting away from me, that I'd blink and the weekend was over. Of course I was younger then, and was working low-stress jobs where I either had nothing at all to do and could spend the day writing, or where I had enough to do to fill up a normal eight-hour day with only a 20-minute drive each way. Long about 2005, I decided I'd had enough and hung up my movie review had largely for good. Once a year, at Christmas time, I try to meet up with my old friend Gabriel for a "Critics over Coffee", just for old times sake and because I miss his company, for he is always modern and fabulous, just as his old blog says. But this year, despite the fact of the entire week off between Christmas and New Year's, Other Things of which you all are well aware got in the way. (I'm still waiting to hit a wall about that one, because I know that sometime, probably long about March, I'm going to find myself curled up in a fetal position in the corner as the end of fifty-seven years of Very Complex and Troubled Relationship really hits me with a two-by-four. She would want it that way.)

But tomorrow night is the first night of the Silly Season for movie fans and those for whom entertainment consists of snarking at people who have more money, often for less reason, than we or anyone we know will ever have. It's the NLCS of movie awards, or the NFC Championship series, or the Grand Prix of Figure Skating final in an Olympics year.

In the years since that group of starfuckers known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association learned their lesson from the Infamous Pia Zadora Fracas of 1981, the annual Golden Globe Awards show has become the Academy Awards' hipper younger sibling. I actually prefer watching the Globes, not only because the very name of the award -- "Golden Globes" -- evokes what pops out of the bodices of the lookalike trophy wives, girlfriends, and miscellaneous escorts of the women in attendance, but because the Globes just don't take themselves seriously as much other than an excuse for a bunch of Hollywood names to dress up, get plastered on national television, and perhaps make some connections with people more famous and popular than they are. You never know what could happen at the Globes, unlike the Oscars®, where it's inevitable that some actress who was a shoo-in from the very beginning will get on stage as if her award was a complete surprise that came out of the blue, cry uncontrollably (*cough* Halle Berry *cough*), and thank her agent before she even thanks her own spouse (*cough* Hilary Swank *cough*). You do get this at the Globes too (*cough* Kate Winslet *cough*), but at least then someone else will get up on stage and make fun of her, everyone will laugh, and no one will think that the little statue is somehow the Nobel Prize.

I also prefer the Globes because they are now way ahead of the curve in that they have always recognized television as well as movies. Given that shows like Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and others have not just shown that great work can be done on the smaller screen, but have also started to attract actors who at one time would never even have considered doing television. For my money, the really good stuff is happening in my living room, not at the local Clearview Cinema.

Then there's the thankless job of hosting. Ricky Gervais, a comic whose charms have always escaped me, had an interesting run, but this year the Globes are being hosted by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, which promises some interesting times and jokes that go over the head of most of the audience.

But the real jewel in the crown of Hollywood self-congratulation is still the Oscars, as it allows the film industry to think of itself as something other than the creators of Honest Stories of Working People As Told By Rich Hollywood Stars. The Oscar® broadcast has never seemed stodgier than last year, when a clearly "I'm So Done With This" Billy Chrystal labored through the two-hour show like an aged Borscht Belt comic with a heart condition, wondering why no one laughs at his jokes anymore. After the horrible James Franco/Anne Hathaway disaster of 2011, anything would have been an improvement. But this year the Academy did something amazing, surprising everyone with their jaw-dropping pick of Seth MacFarlane, the multi-talented creator of Family Guy and American Dad, music lyricist, Nelson Riddle-wannabe, crooner of obscure American standards and overall Rat Pack-channeler, to host the awards.

It's impossible to be on the fence about MacFarlane. Either you love him or you hate him. Either you think he's a ferociously talented, handsome if smarmy and lounge lizardish throwback to a sexist, misogynistic time who also has a wicked sense of humor that he doesn't always know how to control and a glorious singing voice that could open anyone's ears to the charm of American schmaltz music, or you think he's just a smarmy, lounge-lizardish throwback to a sexist, misogynistic time who has a sick sense of humor that isn't even funny and thinks he'a Frank Sinatra when at best he's Frank Sinatra, Jr. And that he's a hack to boot who doesn't write every word of his shows himself the way Trey Parker does. Here at Casa la Brilliant, we loves us some Seth MacFarlane, so if you fall into the latter category, you can stop reading now.

MacFarlane is a man both very much in his time and oddly out of it. The preposterous success of Family Guy, with its boorish alcoholic patriarch, savvy if ineffectual mother, hopelessly unpopular daughter, vaguely intellectually disabled son, at times variously homicidal and sexually confused infant, and a dog that is the only intelligent one in the family, often goes too far. It has a tendency to become not just unfunny but cruel, seeming to endorse what I think it intends to ridicule. The show relies too much on gimmicks like ending the show with a Conway Twitty clip only because the writers had no idea how to end it, and shock humor that often seems like Howard Stern circa 1987. But when the show hits its mark, it's hilarious, and there's always just enough sweetness to the hapless Griffins to redeem whatever shocking, outrageous things they do. They're the Simpsons in gargoyle form, and they get away with things that often leave me saying, "Did they just really do that?" Because MacFarlane and his writers are always pushing the Fox censors to see at what point they'll have to stop. These days there doesn't seem to be one, unlike a few years ago, when the censors prompted this number, which didn't even appear in television until recently:



It's also in numbers like this where that you see where MacFarlane's heart really lies -- in the music. The best part of Family Guy is the musical numbers, which MacFarlane writes along with composers Walter Murphy and Ron Jones. MacFarlane has a feel for the Big Showstopper Number and it is no doubt this talent, along with his now-immortal comeback from what in anyone else would be a jaw-dropping mistake at the Emmys, and what is perceived at least to be his appeal among "the kids" that made the Powers that Be tap him to host the Academy Awards. Because let's face it, after the Big Opening Number, what does the host really have to do?

On Thursday, MacFarlane, along with rapidly physically disappearing actress Emma Stone, announced the Academy Award nominees, which predictably resulted in a whole lot of pearl-clutching from those who think that an announcement that Silver Linings Playbook is nominated for Best Picture is akin to finding Shakespeare's Long Lost Plays. Yes, MacFarlane made the obligatory Controversial Hitler Joke^TM, but it sounded more like it was scripted by Bruce Vilanch (who writes most of the Academy Awards show gags) than by MacFarlane, whose outrageousness runs more towards jokes about S&M, menstruation, public drunkenness, flatulence, and other sophomoric topics. Someone needs to tell these people that it's mostly Jews who joke about Hitler (see also: Mel Brooks) anyway.

Anyone who thinks that the Academy Awards are about the Gravitas of the Great Art of Film is delusional anyway (A Beautiful Mind? Shakespeare In Love? Really? Rocky winning instead of Taxi Driver, Network, AND All the President's Men? Forrest Gump over The Shawshank Redemption? Crash rather than Brokeback Mountain? Seriously? Seriously?). I'm sure that MacFarlane is more than game to pop those balloons when they show up on Oscar® night. I think the outrage about MacFarlane is more a function of resentment at the increasing incursion of what the stodgier folks at the pretentiously-named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences think of as the inferior medium of television. Ted may have grossed a half a billion dollars worldwide, but as far as these folks are concerned, it's a gross-out movie about a talking teddybear done by a TV hack.

Consider this, though: Ordinarily Mr. Brilliant would watch Downton Abbey before he'd deign to watch the Oscars®, and he would rather have hot metal spikes shoved through his eyeballs than watch Downton Abeey. This year he can't wait for the Night of the Chick Superbowl. And THAT, my friends, may be the REAL reason why the Academy picked the voice of Peter, Brian, Stewie, and Quagmire.

And since I have no idea how to end this post, I'll just take a page from MacFarlane's book, but instead of Conway Twitty, here's Seth MacFarlane singing "Ain't That a Kick in the Head." and "Come Fly With Me".

Labels: Academy Awards, movies, music, Seth McFarlane

I'm sitting here this morning, rapidly succumbing to the Office Cold that's going around and has had everyone at work, even those not juggling three projects at once and dealing with teams with conflicting priorities who don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "deadline" and being told I have to "have patience", complaining of incapacitating, crushing fatigue. I was awake at 4:45 AM and will probably just go to work early today, not just to catch up on work but because, well, what the hell else would I do with an extra half-hour? And that's AFTER vacuuming up the cats' eating areas, which these days are all over the first floor, because I now have two old, sick cats and I'll get food into them wherever they'll eat it.

Maggie's had her methimazole transdermal gel dose (for hyperthyroid), which I hope gets her to eat, because if she doesn't start eating more she's going to have to go to the Hypurrcat clinic in the city, where for just shy of $2000, they will inject radioactive iodine into her, keep her there for 3-5 days, and assuming the treatment works and doesn't destroy so much healthy tissue that she ends up on meds for HYPOthyroid, should return her thyroid to normal state. This whole thing brings back too many memories of Certain Family Crises of 2000, which also involved old sick cats and separately, radioactive iodine treatment that did nothing for the person who had it and which I will always believe was administered erroneously because the cancer being treated wasn't really thyroid cancer. But that's just me.

I'm at a point where I don't even know what I like to do anymore. On weekends these days, I find myself leaving HGTV on all day while I'm sitting in front of a glowing screen working just to remind me of the home projects I want to do if I ever have a spare moment. Characters from my unfinished novel still live in my head, their stories still not fully told. And the less said about the cleanliness of my house, the better.

I really miss having time -- especially time to read. I have all five George R.R. Martin Song of Ice and Fire books sitting in a basket by the front door and I wonder if I'll ever have time to read them. I have a blogroll as long as my arm and rarely get a chance to read those, except when I skim them enough to put up a link post. But this morninig I decided, just for the heck of it, to pick a random blog to check out and ended up at the site of my old Cinemarati buddy, Vern. Well, actually that's one of TWO old Cinemarati buddies named Vern, but this is the one who's been doing movie reviews forever.

I've always suspected that Vern is someone like The Rude Pundit or the late, much-missed Jon Swift* -- a pseudonymous persona with varying degrees of resemblance to the actual person. But while Vern's specialty is reviewing tough-guy movies, he's also one of the best ranters around. And today's fortuitous random blog landing allowed me to read his response to the appearance of his hero di tutti heroes, Clint Eastwood, at the RNC this month. It's worth your time, not just because Vern is a hell of a writer, but for what it says about the dissonance between the people we see in the media and what they are in reality, how people will twist themselves into pretzels to avoid facing reality when their heroes turn out to have feet of clay, and how we try to work it all out.

A sample:

I’m not saying he did a good job, and I’m definitely not saying I agree with him. His main point, which is not unreasonable, was the idea that “when somebody does not do the job we gotta let them go.” I disagree with his conclusion that Obama hasn’t done the job, and even if he’d done worse I don’t see how that leads to wanting to put Romney in his place. The part that made me cringe the most was when he said “maybe it’s time for a businessman.” Not because of Clint’s aside making fun of Obama for being a lawyer, apparently forgetting that Romney is also a lawyer, but because he’s gotta remember that Bush was supposed to be the businessman, the guy that was gonna run the country like a business. You saw how that shit worked out, Clint! You’re mad at Obama for not fixing the economy well enough, but you want to repeat the thing that broke the economy in the first place?

It’s been pointed out that all of the Republicans who ran the country for the 8 years before Obama were carefully hidden away during the convention. Not like you would hide a laptop that you were leaving in your car, more like you would hide the bong when mom is visiting. They elected Bush and Cheney two times and they called us traitors for criticizing them and they hated us for disagreeing with their wars and now, well, you know what, let’s not have them speak or show them or mention that they exist.

So maybe they have buyer’s remorse, but then why are they not repudiating the Bush philosophy? They’re just saying the same shit – “maybe it’s time for a businessman.” They’re just not pretending it’s “compassionate conservatism” anymore. They dropped the compassionate.

In the speech Clint also says he doesn’t want to close Gitmo because it was expensive to build, and that the idea of trying terrorists as criminals (at least if it’s in downtown New York City) is “stupid.” He’s against wars but also against prosecuting it as a crime. But I’m not gonna argue with Dirty Harry on that one.

The whole premise of speaking to an empty chair, pretending that Obama is there and telling him to go fuck himself is too obvious of a symbol for the way they’ve been handling Obama from the beginning. They hate some guy they made up who’s a socialist and a Muslim and also an atheist and who cut work requirements for welfare and who closed an auto factory before he was in office and who’s so arrogant and looks down on them… I don’t know how they look at the actual guy and see all that, so they have to just pretend he’s sitting in a chair there.

Go. Read more.

Labels: bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day, chickenshit weasel Republicans, movies

Gregorio Borgia/AP


I don't know what it is about shipwrecks that we find so compelling. Our age is one of air travel, not sea travel. When planes crash, we are horrified, but the horror seems somehow mundane. Yes, we were all appalled when Air France Flight 447 crashed, and when EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed, and TWA Flight 800 crashed. But for those of us who didn't know anyone on those doomed flights, life returned to normal in a matter of days, and we stopped thinking about it.

Somehow I don't think that's going to be the case with the wreck of the Costa Concordia. And that's where James Cameron comes in.

The only thing that would have made this better for Cameron would be if this wreck had occurred next March, because his billion dollar shipwreck epic, Titanic, has been re-engineered for 3-D and re-released next April, just in time for the 100the anniversary of the most famous shipwreck in history.

The Concordia was no Titanic. No one made claims that it was the most luxurious cruise ship in the world, that it was some kind of quantum leap forward in technology. It didn't usher in a new age and mark the end of one. On the plus side, it didn't hide its lower-income passengers in the bowels of the ship, dining on lamb stew and rough bread while the toffs feast on aspic and quail. Today, steerage-type travel is reserved for air passengers.

Looking at photos of the Concordia in happier days, it was your pretty standard small city-at-sea, with pools, a glitzy lobby, and ornate dining rooms. And yet, the ghosts of the great White Star and Cunard liners pervade the design of all of these monuments to ongepotchket. Giant ships are now about vacationing, rather than getting from one place to another, but no one boards one of these behemoths without standing on deck thinking of all those passengers who came before them, and no one arrives in New York Harbor at seven in the morning, with the sun gleaming down on the Statue of Liberty as she beckons, "Come on in, there's plenty of room here" without thinking of the teeming hordes of people, some of them our own relatives, who saw that very same view a hundred years ago (give or take a few) and were filled with hope. Despite the relentless pop music and the 24-hour soft-serve and the neon lights and the open seating, there's still a sense of glamour about being on one of these giant ships.

Perhaps that's why when something like this happen, we can't tear ourselves away from it. And of course the granddaddy of all shipwrecks, the one the memory of which pervades everything, is still that giant White Star liner that hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage. The Titanic itself, but more vividly, and even more oddly, Cameron's film, hover over the Concordia wreck like an accusatory finger, invoked consistently by the survivors of the Concordia wreck.

Jonathan Paturi, a chef on the Concordia:

Looking back to that traumatic Friday evening, I wonder how much like the Titanic disaster it was. Just like the Titanic, the Costa Concordia was a luxury liner. We were hosting 4,200 holiday makers. And just like the Titanic, we were serving dinner to our guests when disaster struck. Only, the Titanic struck an iceberg and we ran into a reef.

It was 9.30 p.m. Friday evening. Friday, the 13th, I’m now told. Five of my mates -- chefs, all from Hyderabad -- and I were cooking dinner for the passengers. Suddenly we felt the ship tilt over. Such moments do occur on a ship, so we thought it was one of them. Then the crew-only alarm went off: Delta X-Ray. It meant the ship was taking in water. Then another alarm was sounded: India Victor. It meant there was a fire in the ship and that passengers had to be moved to safety.

The ship began to list even more, and I saw food sliding down the counter. Yes, just like in the Titanic movie. Then there was a complete blackout. I fought down the panic rising within me. I called my cousin and told him about the situation. He told me to be brave. I told him, “I’ll call you if I’m alive.” Tears welled up in my eyes as I felt that I might never see my loved ones again.

Photos taken of the evacuation and of huddled passengers on shore add to the eerie parallel effect, as do the reactions of passengers:

“We were having dinner aboard when we heard a loud noise, like that of the keel dragged over something. There were scenes of panic, glasses falling to the floor.” -- passenger Luciano Castro

We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side.

“We were standing in the corridors and they weren’t allowing us to get onto the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble.” -- passenger Mike van Dijk

"Have you seen 'Titanic'? That's exactly what it was," -- passenger Valeria Ananias (link)

Look hard enough, and you can find as many parallels as you want.

Of course there are differences. The class differences that made it perfectly acceptable for third-class passengers to have less access to lifeboats have largely been levelled, with inexpensive cabins now located on the same hallways as more expensive ones. And this time the villian role of Bruce Ismay, the White Star Line executive who hopped aboard a Titanic lifeboat in the midst of chaos is being played by Concordia captain himself, Francesco Schettino, who abandoned ship instead of standing nobly on the bridge as his ship sinks. The Concordia seems no have had no quasi-military men like Charles Lightoller, portrayed as brave and noble by Kenneth More in the 1956 film A Night to Remember and as a blithering idiot in Cameron's film. (Lightoller later recounted to family that a steering error by Quartermaster Robert Hitchins, similar to that which probably brought the Concordia aground, led to the Titanic's collision with the iceberg that took it to the bottom of the sea.) But the relentless comparisons to the wreck of the Titanic, despite the fortunately much smaller death toll, persist.

And all this just a little under three months before Titanic 3-D opens in theatres. You can't BUY that kind of publicity.

Labels: movies, pop culture

Another reason to go on living:

Sayeth Digby:

And I just can't buleeeve that Brad Pitt didn't fight for the role of a lifetime. Or anyone recognizable for that matter. What, Gary Sinese and Kelsey Grammer had scheduling difficulties? And I think Angie Harmon would have been fine as the toothsome Dagny if she could be spared from her obscure cable TV series. I guess the Hollywood liberal conspiracy runs so deep that they couldn't even hire the handful of quasi-famous C-list conservative celebrities for the most important wingnut movie of all time. Sad.

They were all too busy doing Total Gym commercials, I guess.

In today's rush-rush world, if you don't have time to actually read the book, everything you need to know about it is here.

I have, in fact, read the book. I had the misfortune in the years before Mr. Brilliant came along lo these nearly twenty-eight years ago to restore my sanity, to date a committed libertarian, who dragged me to Ed Clark speeches and insisted I read this claptrap. It was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now.

Labels: crap, movies, snark

Last month I posted about an e-mail I'd received from one Todd Bieber, the mastermind of UCB Comedy, who had found a roll of film in Prospect Park in Brooklyn and was looking for the owners. You can see the original post and video about his quest here.

Bieber hasn't yet found the owner of the film, but the video has gone viral with over a million viewers, and he's made a new video as an update:

Imagine a world united by a simple quest to return a lost item to its owner.

Labels: fun stuff, movies

John Barry Dies at 77; Composed for Bond Films

John Barry, whose bold, jazzy scores for “From Russia With Love,” “Goldfinger” and nine other James Bond films put a musical stamp on one of the most successful film franchises of all time, and who won five Academy Awards as a composer for “Born Free,” “Dances With Wolves” and other films, died on Sunday in New York. He was 77.

Wonderful, versatile film composer, came out of London's pre-Beatles pop scene. The Sixties were a great decade for Barry. Scored a number of hip British films in addition to James Bond. Won Academy Awards for song & score for Born Free, & for music for The Lion In Winter. Scored a Brando movie, The Chase; Midnight Cowboy; the underrated western, Monte Walsh. In 1971, Barry composed the music for three of my fav films: They Might Be Giants, with George C. Scott & Joanne Woodward, Murphy's War with Peter O'Toole, & Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout - two kids abandoned in the Australian outback.

Barry also won Oscars for Out of Africa & Dances With Wolves. Given his stature, I was surprised to learn he was nominated only two other times.

The Knack was the first Barry score I knew other than his Bond music. "The Good Times Are Coming" is from Monte Walsh, with lyrics by Hal David, sung on the soundtrack by Mama Cass Elliot. A minor hit for Cass, it should've been nominated for an Oscar (& lost to "Shaft.")

Labels: movies, music, obituary

Today I, along with probably thousands of other bloggers, received an e-mail from a guy named Todd Bieber (presumably no relation to Justin). After the December blizzard, Bieber went cross-country skiing in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. I'll let him tell his story:

Not sure if this is for real or not, because Todd Bieber isn't just some schmoe:

Todd writes and directs videos - mostly comedy and documentary, or some combination of the two. He is currently the guy in charge of UCB Comedy, the video arm of Upright Citizens Brigade. Previous to this he worked at the Onion News Networks as Footage Coordinator, Director of Photography, and Contributing Writer during their Peabody Award Winning year. His comedy work has been featured in a bunch of film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, and AFI. His various viral videos have been watched over 23 million times and have been featured on New York Times' website, Entertainment Weekly's website, Huffington Post, and his Mom's Facebook Wall.

But who cares? The video is beautifully done (as are the photos), and for its 3:05 running length, I was transported -- able to forget my workload, Sarah Palin, and Congressional Republicans.

I did, however, make him promise to keep me posted on whether he finds the owner of the roll of film.

Labels: fun stuff, movies

Editor's note: Newer readers of this blog may not know that from 1997 to 2005, I reviewed movies online. After starting with the now-defunct Virtual Urth, I started my own site in 2000 and then teamed up with then-fellow-Online Film Critics Society member Gabriel Shanks to form Mixed Reviews, the archive of which is still online here. Periodically we'd get together for a movie, then get together at the nearest diner or coffee bar to talk about the movie. These days this is at best a once-a-year event, and this week we took in The King's Speech at the Edgewater (NJ) Multiplex, followed by coffee, tea, and scones at Panera Bread.

************
JILL: It is Tuesday, December 28, and this is our first of what used to be Critics over Coffee (well, ONE of us having coffee) --

GABRIEL: Right. Now we're older, so only one of us is having coffee so now it's Critics Over Tea.

JILL: Old Farts over Tea.

GABRIEL: Do Brilliant at Breakfast readers know the history?

JILL: Do you want to give an intro?

GABRIEL: Well, before she was the Web's most vitriolic political blogger, Jill was a film reviewer...

JILL: Now I think of myself as a ranteuse.

GABRUEL: -- ...at Cozzi Fan Tutti and then at MixedReviews.net, where we started this series and it's actually old home week, because I don't know if your readers know, but we used to be part of a group called Cinemarati, which was a Web critics' alliance and it went out of business, but recently, someone formed a Facebook group, and so all these Web critics from ten years ago are finding each other again, and it's kind of Old Home Week. So now we have this Critics over Coffee where you and I would go see a movie and then complain about it bitterly, usually, and now after two years we've seen a movie together again. So we get to do this. And we've just seen The King's Speech, the incredibly Oscar®-baity film by Tom Hooper.

JILL: Whom I believe is a first-time movie director.

GABRIEL: It stars an entire rogue's gallery of Masterpiece Theatre for the 21st century.

JILL: Yes, everybody who isn't doing Harry Potter is in this movie.

GABRIEL: Except Michael Gambon, who seems to be in both. But it's got Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, Guy Pearce, that actress playing the mother who we both know but can't remember her name [LATER NOTE: Claire Bloom], and Timothy Spall, who is playing Churchill and holding his face in a very Churchillian way. So what did you think of it?

JILL: Well, aside from the fact that it's not a Renaissance-era costume picture, and that I'm not really an Anglophile of that particular period, I thought it was more engaging than I expected it to be.

GABRIEL: It's a crowd-pleaser, for sure.

JILL: I think the script is clever; I'm not sure it's quite as clever as it seems, or if Geoffrey Rush is just that good.

GABRIEL: I certainly felt that way. I felt that the screenplay was good, made better by the acting of the ensemble. It's pretty conventional, it's the triumph-over-adversity -- King George VI stutters and enlists a speech therapist to help him, and surprise, surprise -- he gets over the stutter.

JILL: And the speech therapist is very unorthodox and witty --

GABRIEL: I guess I should say "spoiler alert" before that, but really, if you're going to this movie --

JILL: The history is out there, and if you consult Teh Google, you'll know the story.

GABRIEL: Right.

JILL: So, there's elements of a lot of movies in this. It's very thematic, very conventional -- the troubled man and the loyal woman who stands next to him...and this is a nice change for Helena Bonham Carter, getting away from the Goth Grrl thing that she seems to be doing in her middle age. I think this movie will do very well because there isn't a woman in America that isn't madly in love with Colin Firth. And his Colin Firthiness is on full display in this movie in that he manages to do the tortured, brooding English male without being the archetypal scrawny, pathetic, brooding English male.

GABRIEL: Well, on the Colin Firth score, it's such a companion piece to A Single Man last year; both of which are kind of "tuxedo porn". Colin Firth wearing suits is better than most men naked. He wears incredibly tailored tuxes and suits in this, and he looks great. The movie looks great. The whole thing has a sort of blue vintage filter on the lens so it feels "important". It has all this Oscar-baity stuff that you wnat from a British costume drama, especially a British historical drama. It looks rich. It's a satisfying experience for a matinee. You're going to get a story. It's not a story that's going to throw you a lot of curve balls, you have a protagonist you can pull for, and it's not so rigid in its form, thanks to the acting ensemble, that you become completely irritated by the clichés. There's a lot of clichés in the filmmaking, but as opposed to something like The Fire where it's so derivative that it just reeks of cliché and convention, this has an acting ensemble that is surprising, that is continuing to keep you in the moment.

JILL: Well, it's very familiar. There are strong elements of My Fair Lady to this, only in reverse. You have this very conventional, rigid man and this unconventional therapist. And the unconventional therapist is a theme that repeats in movie after movie. The sports movie equivalent is obviously Rocky --

GABRIEL: The disability movie....

JILL: Right. But the other thing that makes this Oscar-baity for Colin Firth, is that -- and this is interesting that this time it's Geoffrey Rush playing the one without the disablity -- that if you want to win the Oscar®, and Colin Firth has done so much good work for so long, some of it in dreadful movies, that finally, it seems as if he said "Oh, the hell with it. Let's do the disability movie and get the damn statue already.

GABRIEL: Yeah. I think in terms of the Oscar race, it will be hard to fight the fact that he is good in this movie, and that he has a track record of being good in a lot of movies. He's very rarely bad, and I believe that Hollywood probably thinks he's due, in a way that James Franco, say, in 127 Hours, is not yet due.

JILL: And besides, Franco is hosting.

GABRIEL: You think about Jeff Bridges coming out of nowhere last year for Crazy Heart -- a lot of that was fueled by the sense that the Oscar has become something that is bestowed on a career, rather than an award for a particular performance. And in that regard I think that helps Colin Firth a lot, because he is probably one of the few -- five or six actors -- who have never won but probably should have by now.

JILL: What I liked about this movie almost more than anything else was -- and I'm not sure if this is just what is happening to Geoffrey Rush's face of if this is done with lenses, but they made him look like a cartoon character. Every line in his face seems to be deeper, and he's sort of bug-eyed, and he has that interesting marcel wave in his hair. But in every shot, he looks like a cartoon, and that helps to lighten the proceedings. Because otherwise it could be somewhat ponderous for all that it's interesting to see -- I guess today, with British royalty being more on the table in terms of what the family's neurosis is, but to see this man's serious issues with his father and his brother, all the issues in this family -- this is a side of this family that we have not seen before, in that we all know about the abdication, but I don't think many people are aware of just how much of a role of Designated Family Shithead this man had to bear, for all that at the end, and in the movie we find out, and the father says this, that he has more guts than any of the other brothers.

GABRIEL: Yes, And the parents are definitely hard on him in a way that they aren't hard on the other children. But it's a movie about people who have expectations and either meet them or don't. I think Guy Pearce's performance as Edward VIII is certainly interesting in that regard, ans so is Geoffrey Rush's, who has the expectations of an entire nation on his ability to do this particular job, and without giving away too many plot points, there are some interesting revelations about Geoffrey Rush's character that play into that. One of the things that the movie doesn't do very well, which I would have enjoyed, is having a discussion of class. Lionel Logue is not only not nobility, or landed gentry, he is working class and he's also Australian, both of which are Very Big Deals that the movie brushes past in the story. But certainly a commoner being invited into the inner circle of the king could be a fascinating story in itself. You get a great scene, with -- is it Jennifer Ehle playing his wife? I think it is; her hair threw me off, she usually has this HAIR and it's very compacted in this movie -- that great scene with her where she realizes who her husband's client is, and you get this brief brush of the way you treat royalty vs. the way you treat "regular people". And I would have enjoyed seeing more of the difficulties of that divide.

JILL: Unfortunately, that's a different movie that would have required more than the hour and a half that this movie runs. I'm not sure there's a lot to say about it. It's entertaining, it's well-cast, it's an engaging afternoon at the movie. Given the quality of many of the movies that have come out this year, I think it's about all you can ask. As we head into the end of the year, into Oscar® season -- it used to be a big deal for us, to me it's almost insignificant now -- because the only other movie I've seen in a theatre is The Social Network, which I thought was terrific, whether or not it's the true story of Facebook.

GABRIEL: I thought The Social Network was a good movie, I think it's a bit overpraised, just because it's so of the moment and au courant, that I think it has captured the zeitgeist in a way it doesn't deserve. But the performances are good. But I'm with you -- stepping away from blogging, not blogging for Modern Fabulousity anymore, not blogging for Mixed Reviews anymore...I think Oscar® has a more healthy place in my life than it used to have. I 'm not quite as furious this time of year to see all the releases and gauge them against one another. But I saw The Social Network last fall and I thought it was a good film, hoped it would be better, I have seen better. I think The King's Speech is award-worthy for some of its performances but I'm not sure I think it's award-worthy in the Best Picture category. But I do think there have been some films you should see this year. Luckily some of them are playing on instant Netflix and On-Demand right now, so we're in a good place for that.

It's been a good year for documentaries. I liked Exit Through the Gift Shop very much, I liked Client 9 very much, I enjoyed Restrepo very much. Even some films that aren't going to be nominated, like Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work was kind of fascinating in some way. But I see many fewer movies than I used to and I'm excitedly happy about that.

******************

Next up: Jill and Gabriel talk about some of the quality television that's out there right now, the future of film criticism in the context of social network, about blogging, and where in the political system is there a place for progressives to go.

Labels: movies

It seems suddenly timely:

Labels: Christmas, movies

Today Matt Zoller Seitz over at Salon takes on one of Trash Culture Mutancy's favorite pointless activities -- recasting movies. It sort of reminds me of the early 1980's, when my friend Anni and I used to sit around Baumgart's, which in those days wasn't the bizarro yuppie Jersey chain of Asian restaurant/bruncheries/ice cream parlors that it is today, but was a single store in Englewood, New Jersey that hadn't been updated since 1942 -- the kind of place where you could have a bowl of soup or an egg salad sandwich and a ball of homemade ice cream, and mull over who we'd cast in The Stand. Of course a reasonably presentable version of Stephen King's magnum opus ended up being made for television, and if Jamey Sheridan wasn't quite the Randall Flagg we'd envisioned (we always figured on Frank Langella, then past his sexy pretty-boy days but not quite into the Creepy Old Manhood in which we see him today), he did a quite credible job.

This is the sort of pointless time-waster that people used to do before blogs and Facebook came along to eat our days. "Casting the movie", and its cousin "Recasting the movie" surface periodically. We're not quite at the point of people thinking about a remake of Titanic with Elle Fanning and Justin Bieber yet, but Leonardo DiCaprio is now playing embittered widowers and Kate Winslet is already in the Mildred Pierce years of her career in one of those weird Hollywood things in which an actress in her thirties plays mother and the actor/actress who plays her offspring is only twelve or thirteen years younger (like 38-year-old Gretchen Mol playing 29-year-old Michael Pitt's mother in Boardwalk Empire). So the Fanning/Bieber remake speculation can't be far off, now that James Cameron is planning to wring another few bucks out of his already billion-dollar movie with a 3-D version planned for release in 2012.

So it's kind of fun reading Seitz' ideas about recasting, even though I disagree with most of them (with the exception of Mark Wahlberg in Gangs of New York.

So what movie would YOU recast if you were doing a remake?

Labels: fun, movies

Need inspiration today? Forget for just a moment that Mel Gibson is a crazy-ass, abusive anti-Semite. Check out these 40 Inspirational Speeches in Two Minutes:

Now get out there and vote for sanity.

Labels: elections, movies

Ever want to be a producer? Now you can; not of a Broadway show, but of a documentary film about Alan Grayson:

Help the directors keep filming until the election here.

Labels: Alan Grayson, Democrats with balls, movies

I think I'm starting to understand how people felt when TITANIC came out and they just couldn't get what the fuss is about.

It isn't that I don't like vampire movies, and it isn't even that I don't like stories about brooding "olden days" vampires as protectors and love interests of contemporary young women. I am a devot&eeacute;e of True Blood after all. It isn't even that I don't like brooding, pale, scrawny English emo guys with cheekbones like mandolines. The first time I saw Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure I cried for three weeks straight.

So I really should be one of those Twilight women, shouldn't I? So what is it that when I tried to watch the first movie when it ran on one of the premium channels, instead of wanting to have sex with Robert Pattinson, or even cook soup for him (the latter of which which tends to be my age-appropriate response to such young men these days), all I wanted to do to Robert Pattinson was smack him across the face and say, "Snap out of it!" the way Cher does to Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck?

I'm surrounded by these women at work. And they aren't all young. These Bellawoods are young and old and black and white and all of them smart -- and they just LOVE Twilight. Maybe it's that I'm getting old and crabby and tired of the whole emo thing. MY favorite guy on True Blood is Sam Merlotte the Shapeshifter. After all, what could be better than a devoted, loyal guy who not only has his own successful business but can also turn into a really cute dog at will? Of course Sam is pretty emo too, but nowhere near the level of Courtly Bill Compton -- or the sheer whininess of Pasty McPattinson as Sir Edward the Chaste.

Perhaps that's it after all -- the chastity thing. It's no secret that Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon, and the Twilight books are an abstinence parable. But if you're going to talk about abstinence, why not set your novel during some long-ago time when courtliness and chastity-until-marriage were actual behaviors of the time? (Except they really weren't.) The most popular contemporary vampire stories have always been about the eroticism. As cartoonish as Bela Lugosi seems now in Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, the shot of him leaning over a swooning woman is still pretty hot. And what girl wouldn't fall for a guy who could turn tears into diamonds and turn wolves into really cute dogs and say things like "I have crossed oceans of time to find you", the way Gary Oldman does in Bram Stoker's Dracula. And as annoying as Bill Compton has become on True Blood, with snarky Eric Northman becoming a far more interesting character, you've gotta admit that the hot-sex-in-the-dirt scene in Season I had a lot more vamp appeal than the depressive chastity of the Twilight kids.

The vampire genre has always been about sex, and while part of me thinks the idea of turning that on its ear is delightfully counterintuitive, watching a bunch of women in their thirties and forties go nuts over this pasty-faced boy is just nuts.

At least in 1997, Leonardo DiCaprio was plucky and brave and cheerful, even if he did look fourteen.

Labels: movies, pop culture

A few weeks ago we had a neighborhood garage sale, which resulted in somewhat anemic sales for just about everyone involved. It occurred to me that much of the kind of crap people put out at garage sales -- cheap toys, old cookware, old glassware and sichses -- can now be purchased just as cheaply at the local dollar store. There are still the earlybirds who come around looking for treasures. But as tchotchkes and cultural effluvia of the first half of the twentieth century no longer have a place in our cultural memory, items from that time languish at garage sales, a casualty of the reality that during the heyday of "Antiques Roadshow", more Americans began to be savvy about just what they had. The days when I could go into a flew market for an animal shelter and get there just in time to see someone donating a supermarket bag FULL of vintage Steiff animals and buy the whole bag for twenty-five bucks are over.

A family friend once gave me a huge box of really old sheet music dating from about 1905 to 1918. Some of the covers are beautiful. I sold what I could on Ebay after she died, most of it generating about $1-$5 each, and donated the proceeds to breast cancer research. I've kept a few of the nicest remaining pieces, sold a couple at our LAST garage sale, Freecycled a few stacks of it, and still have about three dozen pieces. No one wants this stuff. Even an original Cab Calloway recording of "Blues in the Night" on the Okeh label can be had on Ebay for five bucks now.

So I guess no one but silent movie buffs and cinephiles will be interested in the treasure trove of previously "lost" silent films that were just found in New Zealand, of all places:

A late silent feature directed by John Ford, a short comedy directed by Mabel Normand, a period drama starring Clara Bow and a group of early one-reel westerns are among a trove of long-lost American films recently found in the New Zealand Film Archive.

Among the discoveries are several films that underline the major contribution made by women to early cinema. “The Girl Stage Driver” (1914) belongs to a large subgenre that Mr. Abel has identified as “cowboy girl” pictures; “The Woman Hater” (1910) is an early vehicle for the serial queen Pearl White; and “Won in a Cupboard” (1914) is the earliest surviving film directed by Normand, the leading female star of Mack Sennett’s Keystone comedies. The Clara Bow film “Maytime” (1923), presents the most famous flapper of the 1920s in an unusual costume role.

Getting the films, which were printed on the unstable, highly inflammable nitrate stock used until the early 1950s, to the United States hasn’t been easy. “There’s no Federal Express for nitrate out of New Zealand,” said Annette Melville, the director of the foundation. “We’re having to ship in U.N.-approved steel barrels, a little bit at a time. So far we’ve got about one third of the films, and preservation work has already begun on four titles.”

As the films arrive, they are placed in cold storage to slow further degeneration. “We’re triaging the films,” Ms. Melville said, “so we can get to the worst case ones first. About a quarter of the films are in advanced nitrate decay, and the rest have good image quality, though they are badly shrunken.”

As funds permit, the repatriated films will be distributed among the five major nitrate preservation facilities in the United States — the Library of Congress, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, George Eastman House, the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive and the Museum of Modern Art — where the painstaking work of reclaiming images from material slowly turning to muck will be performed.

Sony, the corporation that currently owns the Columbia library, has assumed the costs for “Mary of the Movies,” a 1923 comedy that is now the earliest Columbia feature known to survive. And 20th Century Fox, a descendant of the studio that made “Upstream,” has taken responsibility for preservation of that title. If all goes well, the restored “Upstream” will be receive its repremiere at the Academy in September.

Labels: history, movies

Ebert is livetweeting the Academy Awards. And I finally understand the awesomeness that is Mo'nique.

Labels: Academy Awards, movies, Roger Ebert

Now you don't even have to fall behind on your mortgage in order to have the bank take your house. In fact, you don't even have to have a mortgage:

Charlie and Maria Cardoso are among the millions of Americans who have experienced the misery and embarrassment that come with home foreclosure.

Just one problem: The Massachusetts couple paid for their future retirement home in Spring Hill with cash in 2005, five years before agents for Bank of America seized the house, removed belongings and changed the locks on the doors, according to a lawsuit the couple have filed in federal court.

Early last month, Charlie Cardoso had to drive to Florida to get his home back, the complaint filed in Massachusetts on Jan. 20 states.

The bank had an incorrect address on foreclosure documents — the house it meant to seize is across the street and about 10 doors down — but the Cardosos and a Realtor employed by Bank of America were unable to convince the company that it had the wrong house, the suit states.
[snip]

According to the complaint, here is what happened:

Last July, the couple's tenant called the Cardosos in a panic. The single mother of two teenagers accused the couple of lying when they told her she could rent the house as long she wanted. Three men were there to clean out the house and change the locks, she told them.

Charlie Cardoso talked to a real estate agent for Bank of America, who said he would inform the company that it had the wrong house. The couple thought that was the end of the ordeal.

It wasn't. A landscaper Bank of America hired in August to mow the grass on the property broke a fence to bring in his equipment. The tenant got spooked and moved out just before Christmas.

On Jan. 5, a friend of the Cardosos who was helping the tenant pick up belongings found men putting a lock box on the front door. The workers said the house belonged to Bank of America. The friend called the Cardosos.

When Charlie Cardoso called the bank, a representative told him there was a mistake, the problem would be fixed, and he would get a return call. The call never came. The lock box remained.

Four days later, Cardoso and his son drove to Florida, missing the homecoming of another son who was returning from Iraq for a two-week leave.

Cardoso had to prove to police that he owned the house. The next day he broke in through a back door and used bolt cutters to remove the lock box. The water and electricity had been turned off, and pipes had frozen.

The couple filed suit 10 days later.

"Unclear"? I'd put twenty bucks on the table right now that if the Cardosos look at their credit score, it will have dropped a few hundred points.

Now cue the Usual Suspects screaming about "frivolous lawsuits" and "tort reform." If you aren't entitled to damages when a bank can take your house on which they don't even have a mortgage, get rid of all your belongings, and wreck your reputation and credit rating, then I don't know when the hell you are.

Life in this country is every day becoming more of a Terry Gilliam nightmare:

Funny how the Information minister looks a lot like Dick Cheney.

Labels: bank bailout, greed, movies, scumbaggery

It hardly seems like twelve years since James Cameron last dropped an multi-thousand-ton movie on the Christmas season. Last time, he had the audacity to not just depart from the science fiction/adventure genre that had been his movie home, but to take a well-known historical event about a sinking ship, practically rebuild the damn vessel from scratch, put a love story in front of it, and create a phenomenon.

Titanic was the first movie I reviewed, which started me on an eight-year path of online movie reviewing, a regular discipline of writing that I'd always wanted to do, but had never found what I wanted to write about until then.

It's perhaps a bit easier to understand the hoopla, and the backlash, that accompanied Titanic back then, now that the pasty-faced, brooding Robert Pattinson in the Twilight franchise is the tween dreamboat of choice. But for years, those of us who were caught up in the story that Cameron, even with all his clunky screenwriting, put on screen, found ourselves thinking, "What the hell was THAT all about?" I can't speak for the screaming teens back then, many of whom are now quite possibly Twilight moms now, but for some of us, appalled by the number of teen girls who decided to take fingers to keyboard and write about how the heroine of Titanic pined for her lost cutie forever (thereby completely missing the obvious point of the patented Cameronian Sledgehammer), it was about telling the story of that woman in the photo montage at the end. And I was fortunate enough to meet up online with an extraordinary group of women, all of whom wanted to tell that story, if for no other reason than to teach something to all those teenage girls. For at least three years, or until jobs,kids, divorces, and other demands at life required our attention, we both separately and together immersed ourself in American social history in order to tell the story of the fictional rich girl who survived the sinking of the Titanic and how she went on to live a perfectly contented life. We were from New Jersey, from Massachusetts, from Michigan, from Chicago, and even from Slovenia, and daily we sent flurries of e-mails around with links to articles online about the bohemian scene in New York City in the mid-nineteen-teens, about the early film industry in Fort Lee, New Jersey, about clothes and money and employment and all the things they don't teach you in school about history because they're too busy teaching you about politics and war.

And then Your Humble Blogger, who had never understood how people can create characters out of whole cloth, found herself coming up with her own characters. They'd come to me while gardening or doing housework. My mind would wander, and it would reach out, and there would be a character, clamoring for his or her story to be told. These characters became so vivid to me that I thought of them as unincarnated souls that came to me and begged me to put their stories on paper. But the result is one unfinished family epic of my own creation and two more that have been in my head for nearly a decade.

So for all its flaws, the biggest one being that James Cameron can't write dialogue for shit, Titanic had a huge influence on my life and my creative processes. Cameron isn't really a genius, but he does have a way of tapping cultural architypes that would make Joseph Campbell proud, and with his ability to innovate technology to serve his moviemaking, there was no way I was going to go see Avatar in any way other than the whole enchilada -- IMAX 3-D.

Avatar is at once the most exhilaratingly original, and the most hackneyed film in recent memory. Cameron may only put out a movie every five to ten years, but when he does, it's always an experience rather than just a movie. He's a director who's clearly in love with his whiz-bang, but also deadly serious about the technology behind the whiz-bang, and in his own clunky, limited way, about the storytelling that accompanies the whiz-bang. He may not be a cinematic innovator, but he's sure an innovator in the tools he used to create his cinema, and if he'd only recognize his limitations in screenwriting, he could be the genius he believes he already is.

Recently I watched a 60 Minutes segment on Bob Ballard, the Woods Hole oceanographer who first discovered the Titanic wreck in 1986. He was showing Lara Logan footage of not just the Titanic wreck, but other wrecks he's found since, and I realized that behind the spectacularly clear footage of a sea world miles below the surface were cameras developed by James Cameron's brother for the movie at which everyone now pokes fun. That the man who discovered the Titanic wreck has found his work helped and made even more impressive by technology created by and for the man who slapped a hokey love story on top of an actual tragedy just shows the kind of -- dare I say it -- focus that Cameron has. This is a director who doesn't screw around, and every innovation, every gewgaw his feverish mind came up with (and every dollar it cost to implement them) is right there on the screen.

There's no reason to go see Avatar for the story, because you've seen it before, in every movie in which a white guy experiences an indigenous culture and decides he likes it better than in his world. Whether it's Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, Colin Farrell in The New World, Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai or even Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, you've seen Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, in the Bill Paxton role) a million times before. What you haven't seen before is a fully-realized indigenous culture on the planet of Pandora that exists nowhere in the world we inhabit.

I'm not even going to go into what the avatar concept is; I'll leave that up to the many fanboys and girls who are writing about this movie, for it requires a level of suspension of disbelief that I'm not sure I have. But whether you buy the idea of existing on two planes of reality at once or not, that's almost incidental to the spectacular and dangerous world occupied by the Na'vi, those ten-foot-tall blue striped ectomorphs who swing through the trees, leap catlike through their gorgeous tropical world, or ride hallucinogenic dragonlike creatures over waterfalls and seemingly bottomless canyons. Who wouldn't want to be Na'vi, with their lithe, slim bodies, their grace, their unfailing marksmanship, their long braids that literally mind-meld with other creatures and the spirits of their ancestors, their abs and buns of steel, their cheekbones so high and prominent you could grate cheese on them? Not to mention that their culture seems to be a matriarchal one, populated with Cameron's trademark kickass chicks and worshipping an obviously female deity. Combine that with their respect for ancestral homelands and their almost literal tree-hugging, and it's no wonder the wingnuts are having fits about this movie. Its too bad they can't see the recurring theme of bonding-for-life in Na'vi culture -- you bond for eternity with your ancestors and descendants. You bond for life with your flying dragon. You bond for life with your mate. Of course it's having sex which makes that mate-bond, not some hocus-pocus said over you by an authority figure, but you can't have everything. The Na'vi are a very family-values culture despite their paganism, and that's perhaps what drives people like the idiotic Ross Douthat to decide that Avatar is Cameron's apologia for pantheism, which he brands "Hollywood's religion of choice."

And that's even before we get to all the tough-guy cigar-chomping Evil Military and Corporate Guys. Nowhere does Cameron explicitly state that the military-industrial complex that seeks to plunder Pandora is American, but its squirrelly, greedy corporatista (a weaselly Giovanni Ribisi) and its R. Lee Ermey clone Military Guy™ (Stephen Lang, whose scenery-chewing could plunder Pandora all by itself) are right out of the American adventure movie genre. Yes, the bad guys are all white (and presumably Fox News viewers), but part of the archetype of the Noble Savage story, and Avatar doesn't stray from this, is that these beings who have lived here for thousands of years need a white guy who's only just learned their ways to lead them to battle. What could be more wingnutty than that? Afghanistan, anyone? Ex-Marine Cameron is clearly more comfortable writing dialogue for the toughies than he is for the softer Na'vi, and perhaps that's why Jake Sully as a character seems to live and breathe far more when he's making his video diaries than he does in a world that sometimes seems populated by descendants of Tinkerbell. It may in fact be Cameron's fatal flaw as a screenwriter that he has this manly-guy sensibility, but is plagued by also having this soft, gooey center that he's unable to express without making his romantic male leads sound like a HAL 9000 playing Heathcliff.

So much of the pleasure of Avatar is in the element of visual surprise -- the spiral flowers that collapse when touched, the swooping vistas and waterfalls, the cocoon hammocks in which the Na'vi sleep, the hallucinogenic beauty of the flying dragons. The visuals are so spectacular, and so perfectly wrought, that the 3-D almost seems superfluous. Avatar does more with 3-D than any other movie in history, and I may have kept wanting to brush away the little puffballs that so teasingly seem to fly right in front of your face, but the reality is that it's mostly in the "real world" parts of the movie where the 3-D has its biggest effect. The Na'vi world that has sprung from Cameron's imagination is so beautiful and so surprising that it doesn't even need 3-D to take your breath away. And that's why I'm not sure that Avatar is going to become the worldwide phenomenon that Titanic was, for all its female sensibility. That Titanic had an actual historical event as its backdrop and a female character whose real story took place, as Cameron showed us, AFTER the movie ended, helped ground it in reality and make the story relatable in the real world. We may all want to be Neytiri of Pandora, but we also know that she, and the world she inhabits, doesn't really exist, and so we NEED the element of surprise, the whiz-bang, the colors and sounds and the sheer beauty of this world. But like the Eden that Pandora represents, once you leave it, you can never really return.

Update: Other takes from some non-film-critic types (no disrespect to my erstwhile Cinemarati peeps, but I'm not really on your ranks anymore either)...

Skippy
Dennis Hartley

Labels: movies

When you look at the names on the petition suggesting that 30 years in European "exile" is sufficient punishment for a guy who raped a thirteen-year-old, it's almost enough to make you sign on with the wingnuts decrying Hollywood liberals for their advocacy of immorality. I'm quite lefty, I reviewed movies for eight years, and I even gave a glowing review to The Pianist. But even I can wrap my mind around the idea that however masterful a director Roman Polanski may be, and however horrific it was that his wife was murdered by Susan Atkins, that doesn't excuse raping a thirteen-year-old.

We're living in a time in which we're being told that the lies and death perpetrated by the previous administration are something we should just look past and get over and move on. By this logic, a bank robber (or child rapist, for that matter) can say five seconds after the crime, "Oh, well, that's in the past. Let's move on and forget about it." And to see respected arthouse and mainstream A-listers like Pedro Almodovar, Wes Anderson, Natalie Portman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Darren Aronofsky, Julian Schnabel. Martin Scorsese (!!!), Tilda Swinton,Penelope Cruz, Harrison Ford, Jeremy Irons, Stephen Soderbergh, John Landis, and Wong Kar-Wai unable to wrap their heads around the idea of separating the work from the man is pretty damn disheartening. I'm told the Roman emperor Nero was a pretty fair violinist, too. So what?

As that OTHER Jill points out at Feministe, this isn't about Hollywood Liberals vs. Real Christian Americans™. It's about right and wrong, and you don't have to believe in a great white alpha male in the sky to recognize that drugging a kid barely into puberty and then raping every orifice of her body is not the act of a misunderstood Holocaust survivor, but a sick, sick crime. To excuse this crime by invoking the Holocaust is an insult to every other survivor of the Nazi camps.

Perhaps, as Jill says, you'll never work in this town again if you speak out against Polanski and that's why it's up to those whose job it seems to be to poke Hollywood and other examples of American hypocrisy with a stick to speak out...people like Chris Rock:

Labels: inability to handle more than one idea at a time, movies