Second Best Quote of the Year

This morning, on Hot 97's best of the year retrospective, they featured clips from an interview with Kanye West. When the d. j. asked him what he was listening to, Kanye responded (and I paraphrase) "Mostly white music, you know, stuff that won't get played on 'urban' stations--System of a Down, White Stripes, Black Eyed Peas."


Preach on Kanye. And Happy New Years, folks.

The Last Temptation of Peter Jackson

King Kong (2005; d. Peter Jackson, s. Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrian Brody, and One Big Fuckin' Monkey) It's taken me a little while to write about this one--I saw it over two weeks ago. At first, I thought this was indication of another blase blase response to the film. But that didn't account for the way I giggled during the centerpiece T. Rex/Kong handicap wrestling match, or the suffocating dread with which I confronted the third act in New York.

Disclosure: A little suppressed emotion probably does account for the delay--I saw the movie on a second date, and fuck me if I was going to cry on said date over the loss of the monkey. Whether I wanted to or not.


Shut up.

Kong is the first movie that I can get on board with critic complaints that it's too long, mostly because I can actually specify the unnecessary parts. The early frames depicting the tent-towns in Central Park following the Market Crash gesture toward a Seabiscuitish abuse of Theme. Much as I love any appearance by Jamie Bell

there is again a lot of gesture toward Theme in his character, but absolutely no narrative payoff. Yes, I get it. Jack Black/Martin Sheen/Heart of Darkness. Show me, don't tell me. I suspect that Jackson is a great director. I fear that he's on the verge of pomposity, the pulp heart that drove Dead Alive and The Frighteners and even to some degree Heavenly Creatures, extracted from his chest by the sheer ambition of the LOTR flicks and the Oscar-driven desire to be Important.

Actually, that's not fair. There's plenty of evidence that the pulp heart is willing in Kong. See the aforementioned T. Rex/Kong fight scene (which also pays off beautifully in the XBox 360 game. Thanks Evan!). See the ice-skating monkey scene. See the sheer go-for-broke racist brilliance of the scenes with the savages--credit Jackson for the insight that "hey, it won't work unless we make it as Birth of a Nation as possible," even after the drumbeats of criticism (if you'll pardon a turn of phrase) following the accusations of racist iconography of the Orcs vs. the Aryans.

Or even moreso, the sheer go-for-broke love affair between Naomi Watts and the Monkey. All Haters, disembark here. Naomi has It, whether it's macking on Chad Everett in Mullholland Drive, working her tortured soul in 21 Grams, or just being luminous. She's stylish, vulnerable, and surprising. She's able to make left turns in character seem revelatory and complicating, rather than inconsistent. Unlike many people, I liked most of the first act (post-Theme montage), because it sets you up to understand how this woman comes to love this monkey--she's been betrayed and victimized her whole life, just when she is opening up to her dreams and most needs protection. Here comes the Ultimate Warrior, primed to give her that protection, and then what happens--she moves from victim to victimizer, becoming the unwitting agent of his betrayal. That's Shakespearean, bitches.

And Jackson feels it, plays the relationship on a sheer emotional chord, without worrying about Themes, or Importance, or other cloudy abstractions.

And thinking about how well the pulp primitivism worked in this film, and how poorly the gestures toward theme worked, got me into why I dug this film so much ultimately. King Kong is Peter Jackson's 8 1/2, or his Life Aquatic. It captures a filmmaker reflecting on himself, looking with both joy and dismay at both his showmanship heart and his belief that he has something else stirring, Something to Say. Or worse, requires Something to Say as penance for the desire to thrill/shock/awe us. It's the last temptation of Peter Jackson, to see if he feels he needs to justify his existence by moving from his Jaws and Indiana Jones phase into his Amistad/Color Purple phase. Or god forbid, his Beloved phase. Isn't it interesting how we see this happen over and over again to directors, even though we keep telling them that they had it right the first time?

This is a meditation for another time, however. King Kong is great, and underperforming slightly at the box office, because for whatever reasons movies about the directors tend to do that kind of thing (see Life Aquatic, Vertigo, etc.). I suspect it is a movie that will only be appreciated as more than a remake much later. We are watching a man put his dreams up on to the screen. Better yet, we are watching him at the phase in his life when he's just been given the keys to the Chocolate Factory, and confronting the question of 'what happened to the boy who got everything he ever wanted?'

God help us, if those dreams look too much like The Lovely Bones and not enough like Halo.

Next Time: Alone in the Dark

Reflections on Shopgirl

Shopgirl (2005; d. Anand Tucker; s. Steve Martin, Claire Danes, Jason Schwartzmann)

This movie may be ultimate proof of my grand unifying theory of human relationships: 1. Boys are stupid. 2. Girls are crazy. 3. It's all about Me.

I don't understand the deal with the half empty glasses in every scene. In a fairly well directed film, Tucker fetishizes objects over and over again. But there is minimal connection between the commerce and the relationships in the movie. Yes, Steve Martin in part buys the love of Claire Danes, but that is kinda secondary to the emotional arc of the movie, and undermined by the resolution.

Steve Martin, when he's funny, is still a little sad. When he's sad, he's depressing. I guess he is making his shot at being the L. A. Woody Allen. And this movie is his Interiors. That's not a good thing.

I'm sorry. I meant what was it about the half full glasses in every scene?

This movie would've been 40% improved by judicious editing of the Steve Martin makeout scenes.

Mandatory Recommended Dose of Blog Hyperbole: Jason Schwartzmann is a national treasure.

I liked this movie better when it was called Lost in Translation.

Next Time: Super Fuzz

Rhapsody in Newman

I was watching Slap Shot for maybe the billionth time the other day with Frank, Dan, and Irene. The occasion was supposed to be inauguration of Irene into the cult of the Hanson brothers. But for whatever reason--maybe it was the repetitive viewings, maybe it was the sluggishness brought on by the fatal combination of hangover and chicken and waffles, maybe it was just kismet--I found myself locked onto Paul Newman.

It's a tremendous performance. He is an absolute, go-for-broke asshole. He lies, he cheats, he manipulates, he seduces. He calls an 8- or 9-year-old kid one of the few things that Irene won't permit to be said under her roof. And he never loses a second of twinkling charm. Frank and Dan kept on voicing absolute astonishment that Newman would ever read this script and decide to do this movie.

That's when it struck me that during most of his career, Paul Newman absolutely quixotically crusaded against his image. He played assholes again and again and again. You can make the case that this was all the vogue in the 70s--to be the leading man who was also the character actor. And character actor tended to be code for complex, which was code for "frequently acts like an asshole."

But there is something special about Newman. He is not primarily remembered as an asshole. As Dan pointed out, Newman is kind of an awful human being in Hud. But you still kind of understand why the kid would want to emulate him. Cool Hand Luke? Awesomely cool. And...asshole. And on and on--The Hustler, The Sting, The Verdict...

And of course, not The Robe.

And I never experienced Newman as an asshole in Slap Shot. I rooted for him, I believed him, I never mistook him for anything but the hero of the movie. Even better, I remember my friend Aleta having a mad crush for Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and being caught somewhere between dumbstruck and angry with me when I laughed about how much she and Maggie were completely focused and deeply obsessed with Brick, yet completely unaware that he was obviously gay. Trust me, Aleta doesn't usually miss this kind of thing. Nor, I imagine, does Elizabeth Taylor.

In many ways, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a signature metaphor for Newman's career. Despite Brick's obvious ambivalency and failures as a person, Maggie and the family persist in seeing him as the thing they need him to be. Meanwhile, Brick rages against that image. Newman too seems to have that thing in him--that full attack on his image. Trouble is, the man is so damn handsome and charming, we persist in seeing him the way we need to see him. No matter how far out he pushes (for instance, to the edge of sexual assault), we hold onto him--for his character's potential if for nothing else. It's a thing that his partner-in-arms Redford never had; in his morally questionable parts, he still needed to be a good guy. Newman, even as the good guy, has to be the bad guy.

Perhaps adding to the realization has been Newman's parts in recent years. Although excellent, Nobody's Fool, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Road to Perdition don't have the iconic weight of the earlier movies, so it's easier to accept the heel turn. But, even though it's less of an uphill battle against his looks now, Newman still carries the heavy burden of his past. I still feel a rooting interest in Newman, even if I'm against the character.

And when you realize that one of the handsomest actors in the history of Hollywood has a Fight Club mentality, leading him to get in the ring and try to beat the shit out of his image to feel alive in every great role he ever took, and then fail to even dent that image--well, it makes for a great tension when you're watching the greatest hockey movie ever made.

Next Time: Youngblood

The End of Liberalism

Syriana (2005; d. Stephen Gaghan, s. George Clooney, Jeffrey Wright, Amanda Peet, Matt Damon). Syriana is a throwback, The Parallax View as filmed by Robert Altman. Or, more glibly, it’s Traffic with oil. This is the kind of pull quote criticism I hate, but there it is. Like Traffic, Syriana employs a cascade of nonoverlapping storylines assembled in what initially feels like a chaotic jumble, until gradually the pieces assemble and culminate in the depiction of an implacable juggernaut of corruption that is destroying us all. It is worthy of note that Gaghan’s two styles of writing apparently vary between this:


And this:
But I digress.

What separates Traffic and Syriana from their 70s predecessors is a certain depressive inexorablity. They are deadly earnest liberal diatribes about the evil of the government/ corporation axis. However, the paranoid thrillers of the 70s, no matter how depressing their endings, carried a certain nervous enthusiasm about them…you at least had the illusion that the main characters might be able to change things, if one or two things had worked out differently. In Syriana, there is no hope. The most earnest of characters either must corrupt themselves and join the system, or die. Or both…the most liberating act of rage against the machine is a suicide bombing.

I wonder if this futility is reflective of the current state of liberal thought. There’s a depressive handwringing quality to much of what the left wing stands for right now. Syriana is built around the notion of a coolly effective conspiracy driving America’s Middle East policy, similar to the accusations leveled at the Bush presidency. As a result, change feels futile. The system cannot be stopped, because it is too multifaceted and too ingrained in the hearts and minds of men (all men, by the way) in power, all working toward the same goal. Why bother. The most you can aspire to is to be like Matt Damon’s character, sad, bereaved, and angrily criticizing from the sidelines, ideally in the most condescending way.

Matt Damon and Alexander Siddig have a pair of amazing exchanges in the film, where Matt Damon (in a strong performance, btw) comments bitterly on how backwards the emirate is in Siddig’s country, and Siddig fires back with gentle sarcasm, illustrating that (a) he already knows everything Damon is saying and (b) Damon’s own poisonous idealism is blinding him to aspects of the bigger picture. And the fact is, these exchanges are not rooted in conspiracy. They are about human weaknesses, like arrogance and greed, and considering these weaknesses tend to inhibit effective conspiracy building (see…any heist movie, ever), in these scenes Syriana puts the lie to itself. The conspiracy is merely dramatically interesting. When the characters spout off on the problems in the Middle East, and it becomes not a conspiracy, but instead a failure of personal accountability.

Liberalism needs the conspiracy to get the base churned up and raise the money, but what is sadly true is that recent liberalism is no more the victim of a right wing conspiracy than the Middle East is. Instead, liberalism is a victim of its own unwillingness to be accountable for its failure to engage in any honest policy debate over the last four years. Paraphrasing Lewis Black, American politics has become a choice between bad ideas, and no ideas.

I love Traffic, and I liked Syriana. The difference, I believe, is that Soderbergh likes leaving some messiness around the edges, whereas Gaghan grows so enamored of the cleverness of his structure and the elegance of his conspiracy, that he ignores the basic humanity of the characters and the ways in which our Middle Eastern policy is a function of that basic humanity. Interestingly, by allowing the story of the Pakistani teenagers to operate outside of the workings of the government and white men, he creates the most resonant tale of how human choices are rooted not only in the will to power, but also in the will to survive. Gaghan directs like Matt Damon’s character pontificates. He’s right, but he is still starving for a slice of humble pie and an eye for the bigger picture.

And considering Gaghan's gotten both Katie Holmes and Anne Hathaway to sex it up in what amounted to direct to video sex thrillers, he may be missing his true talents.

Next Time: On Deadly Ground