Retail Resistance

Just a Little Miss

I finally got around to watching Little Miss Sunshine.  I've been procrastinating this entire time because I was worried I wouldn't dislike the movie, thus ruinning my top 5 list.  With everyone loving this movie so much, and contrarian that I am, I thought I would have to come up with some dirt to justify not liking it.  Now having seen it, I realize I don't have to actively dislike it.  It's just a mediocre movie, and not worth the loathing. 

Pan's Labyrinth, on the other hand, is every bit the movie critics made it out to be, and then some.  It reminds me of a quotation from La Pasionaria, speaking of the Spanish Civil War, "They took the cities, but we had the better songs."  And that, is still the case.  Art is for the humane, and humane art, whether it is brutal, or vulgar, or graphic - and none of these are a contradiction in terms - will always be the province of people with whose dreams for humanity run the deepest.   

With Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro has made an anarchist fantasy, wrapped in a gothic film, within a horror movie, nestled in an anti-authoritarian fable.  And the movie succeeds in each attempt, and at every level.  Watching it is almost like the opposite of Dante descending realm by realm into the Inferno.  Instead of Dante's guide Virgil, del Toro gives us Ofelia, to guide us as we wend our way through the labyrinth of modern authoritarianism on our way to a more sublime world.  A world where the ideals of the red and black flag waving partisans of the Spanish Civil War emerge victorious; even if only at the end of the movie.   

McCain vs. McCain

John McCain. He's a straight talker on his Straight Talk Express talking about why he can use the word gook. He's a republican constantly staking out positions disagreeing with Bush, torture for instance, then coming back to the Republican fold with a vengeance against habeas corpus.

Up steps the hardest working man in documentary, Robert Greenwald, of anti Wal-Mart and Fox News fame with his The Real McCain project. I can't say I particularly care for either of the aforementioned documentaries. As agit-prop they're fine and I'm glad he makes them. As movies they're nothing special. Now an LA Times story describes how Greenwald is going after John McCain on YouTube:

instead of creating a full-length film, he is assembling clips of McCain for a series of two-minute Web videos. The idea is to turn McCain's own words against him, spreading the videos through e-mail, blogs and websites.

His first video strings together some McCain statements on Iraq, the Confederate flag, Christian conservatives and same-sex marriage — remarks contradictory enough to suggest that McCain falls short of delivering the "straight talk" that he made a trademark of his first campaign for president, in 2000.

As you may have guessed, I'm cool with this. Especially because he's doing it in non-feature length fashion.

Graceless

Producer Mike Ryan (Junebug, Fay Grim, 40 Shades of Blue) sent this letter to Filmmaker Magazine excoricating John Cusack's new film Grace Is Gone. A friend told me yesterday she saw the movie previewed before Pan's Labyrinth earlier this week and they couldn't wait to see it. According to Mike Ryan's letter, people of conscience might want to think twice. Not simply because the film is receiving mixed reviews at Sundance, but according to Ryan it is tantamount to war profiteering.

That's a hell of a claim. I missed my flight to Sundance so I haven't seen the film and can't comment on it's propaganda quotient. That said, I don't doubt Ryan's probably right. I often wonder how supposedly liberal actors make politically disastrous movies, i.e.., anything by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Truly intelligent and politically sophisticated actors and filmmakers are able to recognize and subvert the reactionary narratives of the movies they are involved in. A great example would be how Tilda Swinton negotiated her potentially reactionary role in Chronicles of Narnia. Of it, she said, "I love the idea of goose-stepping old Walt D making over $700m with the help of a Red Witch. He is more than welcome. At least we made her whiter than white, the ultimate white supremacist, and we managed to railroad the knee-jerk attempt to make her look like an Arab."

Enough about the genius of Tilda Swinton. Here's the letter about Cusack's movie:

Donald Rumsfeld and all pro-war Republicans will love the new John Cusack film, Grace is Gone. Others, some whom may be liberal, agree: it could be a crowd-pleaser able to reach beyond the indie ghetto. It was bought earlier this week for $4 million.

Rumsfeld will love how the film shows a family coping with the grief following the death of the family's soldier mom. There is no anger at the film's end; we are left feeling that this grief will be healed. The film offers a positive portrait of how a family can pull together in such sad circumstances.

Rumsfeld will love how the film's one dissenting, anti-war perspective is mouthed by a clichéd liberal couch potato. Alessandro Nivola plays a 31-year-old bearded lay about. We see him in mid-afternoon on his mother's couch, dozing off in front of cartoons. This liberal also has unfocused opinions, no ambition, and is really only concerned with eating. And being unable to pay for his own meal, living in his mothers home, he is seen as mooching off the system.

Rumsfeld and most Republicans will agree with Cusack's response to his older daughter's questions about the war. To question the value of the war would lead one to a scary place, "we'd be lost," he says. Better to stay the course and trust that the government has our best interests in mind.

Cusack may think that by showing grief and the pain of a soldier's loss, he's made an anti-war film. He couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, he may have inadvertently made a pro-war, pro-Bush film. I think all Republicans will endorse Grace Is Gone; it does not question the war's purpose, instead it focuses on how the country will get through this difficult period.

Assuming the filmmakers are liberal -- and don't intend to come off as supporters of Bush or the war -- how do we explain these sloppy aesthetics? The filmmakers have said they want to reach the biggest audience possible; they feel the subject of their film is nonpartisan. Truth is, though, there is nothing nonpartisan about the war: you either support it or feel that it was a tragic mistake, one that has resulted in countless innocent Iraqi and American deaths.

The "nonpartisan" excuse is really just a cover-up for the fact that the goal of the film is to make as much money as possible. Profit drives its aesthetics, just like profit has driven this war. In this sense the film is the worst kind of exploitation film -- a film that profits off the unjust deaths of innocents is a heinous, odious thing. Like war profiteers Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and Bush, the filmmakers proceeded ahead without truly and fully thinking out their strategy and understanding the consequences of their choices. But as with Halliburton and Bechtel, their choices will very likely result in enormous profits for them and their clan.

Shame on all war profiteers. And please, let this be a warning to all liberally minded filmmakers: let's think out our choices carefully before proceeding with a war-themed film. We may end up doing more harm than good.-- Mike Ryan

Hollywood Babylon

I haven't weighed in with any of my not very considerable heft on anything Oscar related yet. Odds are I won't. I do, however, like this sentence or two from Dennis Cozzalio, and the sentiment it stands for:

So maybe it’s the fact that, in the dark shadow of the Directors Guild snubs of Clint Eastwood, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron, dear old, dotty Uncle Oscar looks poised to honor yet another contrived, good-for-you ensemble drama about man’s inability to communicate/connect with/tolerate his fellow man—after all, we’re all so much more tightly knit and understanding of each others’ foibles and prejudices as a nation of moviegoers after having been force-fed Crash; why not use the power of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to bring us all closer together as a bruised and battered humanity subject to the chronologically scrambled chaos theory of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel? (The models for these post-9/11 behavioral studies—the ensemble narratives of Robert Altman’s films—were never quite so morally tidy or relentlessly showy in their pessimism, and therefore routinely escaped Academy coronation.)

Porn Paradox

All the news that's fit to print...about porn. Leaving no implant unturned in its pursuit of journalistic excellence the New York Times did a ludicrous story, in the business section no less, about pornography's digital leap to High Def in a story headlined, "In the Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View to Real." Thankfully the NYT is still too high brow to use the word pornography in bold print. They reserve the use of that besmirching word for the less bold print of the article's body. Still, I think the headline, "In Sex World of Raw Movies," would have been better.

Basically, the crux of the story is - the more real the sex, the less real the people. Take Jesse Jane, evidently her breast implants look odd in HD. Solution - "I'm getting my breasts redone because of HD." According to actress, writer, and director Stormy Daniels the problem is more quotidian, "The biggest problem is razor burn." You would think an actress, writer, director could afford electrolysis.

The great thing about pornography, as we all well know, is that it frees the creative processes of those involved. I was beginning to despair that all the problems posed by technology's next great leap forward in verisimilitude were killing what makes the art form great. Despair not, there are still people who don't take synthetic recourse at the first hint of a superficial problem. Savanna Sampson, actor/director of "Any Way You Want Me", is still capable of solving the medium's new problems the real way.

During a scene in which she played a desperate housewife, she ran into a problem: the high-definition camera revealed she had a tiny ill-placed pimple. “We kept stopping and trying to hide it. We put on makeup and powder, but there was no way,” Ms. Samson said. Finally, they tried another approach: “We just changed positions,” she said.

Two of the major companies, Vivid and Digital Playground, have evidently been filming in HD for the last two years to build up their catalog. Very forward thinking, but I'm holding tight to my catalog of Abel Ferrara porn on VHS.

Little Patience...Little Minx

The idea was to try and see Pan's Labyrinth today. The line down the block and around the corner from the one screen in the entire city where the movie is playing changed my mind.

I did make it to the theater earlier this week to see Little Children. Porkie or not- and I think not - it's fair to say Kate Winslet has the greatest nipples. And it may be just one man's opinion, but I think she is a very good actress as well. The movie itself is more of a mixed bag. It's better than American Beauty - a comparison I make because they are both of the suburban/bourgeois ennui genre - but what isn't.

All of which isn't to say I didn't identify with and enjoy particular things about it besides Kate Winslet's performace, notwithstanding the strange and incogrous omniscient narration. But in the end it is of a piece with Babel and Marie Antoinette as movies by directors with undeniable talents whose philosophical reach far exceeds their intellectual grasp. (Or is that vice versa)?

The Excorcist of George Allen

It's debatable whether William Friedkin is a great director. Like Hal Ashby, who I think is a great director, he had a string of good movies (?) - The Excorcist, French Connection, The Scorcerer - with great commercial success. I came across this piece on Jim Webb by William Friedkin recently on Huffington Post. Now we can judge Friedkin's prose skills in addition to his moviemaking.

My wife Sherry and I have been invited to attend Jim Webb's swearing-in as the new Senator from Virginia, the result of an unexpected, come-from behind victory over the Republican incumbent -- and former potential presidential candidate -- George Allen. We've known Jim since 1999 when he wrote an original screenplay called Rules of Engagement, which I directed. We remained friends in spite of numerous "creative differences" -- often heated, sometimes bitter.

I came away from that experience feeling that Jim Webb is the most complex, principled man I've ever known. He came away feeling good about what I had done with the finished film -- though he still refers to me as the only man in the country with a temper worse than his. I accept this as a compliment.

Foreign Language Oscar

Here is the short list of movies that a have a chance to win this year's foreign language oscar.

Rachid Bouchareb's "Days of Glory," (Algeria),
Deepa Mehta's "Water" (Canada,
Susanne Bier's "After the Wedding" (Denmark),
Daniele Thompson's "Avenue Montaigne" (France),
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others" (Germany),
Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" (Mexico),
Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book" (The Netherlands),
Pedro Almodovar's "Volver" (Spain), and
Fredi M. Murer's "Vitus," (Switzerland).

IMDB's Your Daddy

IMDB has become a casuist of the first order.

"Adult titles cannot be located during a casual search. Only registered users can update their registration profile and activate/deactivate the option to include adult titles in searches and displays."

Now, try and look up Shortbus. I dare you.

Presidential Auterism

Here's a little exchange between Chris Matthews and Bush's spokesperson Tony Snow about the difference between movies and real world foreign policy. Matthews, evidently, is of the school who think politics and movies share the same mechanisms and can be seen through the same lense. Tony Snow is in the camp of people who believe movies that portray our government as operating in secrecy with no democratic accountability should be considered as fantasy so our government can operate secretly and with no democratic accountability.

"MATTHEWS: So he will seek congressional approval before any action against Iran?

"SNOW: You are talking about something we are not even discussing.

"MATTHEWS: Yeah, but you are, Tony, because look at this. 'I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.' Isn't that about Iran?

"SNOW: It, it -- yeah, it is, in part, and what it is is it's saying, look, we are going to make sure that anybody who tries to take aggressive action -- but when Bill Clinton sent a carrier task force into the South China Sea after the North Koreans fired a missile over Japan, that was not as a prelude to war against North Korea. You know how it works.

"MATTHEWS: No, I'm just concerned because, very much in the years, in the months building up to this war in Iraq, we heard a kind of a drumbeat of the dangers from Iraq and the nuclear weaponry and what we're going to do about it, and then gradually we went to war....

"My concern is we're gonna see a ginning up situation whereby we fall in hot pursuit any effort by the Iranians to interfere with Iraq. We take a couple shots at them, they react, then we bomb the hell out of them and hit their nuclear installations without any without any action by Congress. That's the scenario I fear, an extra-constitutional war is what I'm worried about.

"SNOW: Well, you have been watching too many old movies --

"MATTHEWS: No, I've been watching the war in Iraq, is what I've been watching."