Connecticut? An evil house possessed by evil spirits? You've got my attention. If you ask me, perhaps no other state of the union has spawned so much Luciferian madness as the Nutmeg State, at least on a per capital basis. So as I pulled up to the multiplex in Leominster this afternoon, I was at least looking forward to that part of the story.
So let's get the story paradigms for The Haunting in Connecticut out of the way:
1. As I said, an evil house is possessed by evil spirits, causing harm and mayem to mortal occupants inside.
2. A evil necromancer type who dabbles in the occult abuses a high-powered medium to channel evil spirits, and bad things happen, because of the evil spirits that are released.
3. A godly clergyman arrives in the darkness of night to help drive out demonic spirits through an exorcism.
4. An alcoholic and violently abusive father wreaks havoc on his family.
5. A teenage boy is dying of cancer, and during his treatment he is plagued by auditory and visual hallucinations of evil spirits.
Wait, what was that in number 5? It wasn't in the trailer, but the cancer-patient is the part of the movie that made this fresh. Almost everything else in the movie was assembled from parts of other horror movies, sort of Frankenstein style (found photographs of dead people---oh yeah, just like in The Others).
But it sorta worked, especially because of the aforementioned fresh part. If this had been an extraordinary movie then numbers 4 and 5 (especially 5) would have served as the springboard text on which the other three parts played off. If this had been a masterpiece, then the supernatural would have been sublimated to the level of "naturalistic cover," meaning that one could watch the movie while interpreting all the events as part of the natural world, if one chose.
But this wasn't a masterpiece, or even an extraordinary movie. The linkage between t 4 and 5 to the supernatural parts to create true subtext wasn't really established firmly. This was a ghost story, not a story about a cancer patient, and the movie veered off into the necromancer backstory. Too bad. With a better screenplay, the concept could have really soared.
But like I said, it still sort of worked. But something about it did bother me deeply (get ready for a rant): in the Postmodern era, one of the ironclad rules of movies is that all psychic mediums are real. It's the "Whoopi Goldberg Rule" from Ghost (1990). Even though she's a phony scammer, she really can communicate with spirits. In the classical era, mediums were phonies, because they are, well, phonies. In the Postmodern era, all fucking mediums are real. All of them.
Just a couple hours ago on the tube (ABC), I watched yet another example of this in Just Like Heaven (2005). I get really, really tired of this mediums-are-all-real rule. Can't we get a phony one from time to time? Why in movieland must every damn person who claims to be able to see ghosts actually turn out to be valid?
Another thing about the movie I didn't like: photographs of ectoplasm. Anytime I hear the word "ectoplasm" in a movie, I roll my eyes. If I were a Hollywood producer and someone gave me a script with the word "ectoplasm" in it, I'd throw it right out my window.
I'm not at all averse to a good scary ghost story on screen, but somehow this one just asked me to swallow a little too much crap along the way. A better route would have been to jettison the whole medium back story, and somehow tie in the cancer patient subtext more.
Some things I did like about the movie: the cinematography was appropriately eerie for a ghost movie. There were plenty of good creepy camera angles. The first half hour of the movie was probably the best, when they were building up the tension.
The performances were good too. Kyle Gallner in the lead was somewhat lackluster and shuffling, in a non-demanding sort of way, but Martin Donovan in a supporting role is always a good sign for any movie. Virginia Madsen was decently matronly, and I was delighted to see the gorgeous Amanda Crew again, having become a fan of hers from last year's Sex Drive. She gets one of my favorite scenes in the movie, a somewhat innovative use of a shower curtain for a horror movie (you thought you'd seen them all).
Like I said, had it not been for the top-heavy back story involving the seances, I might have really liked this movie. As such, I can only recommend it to horror movie completionists, and of course, to anyone interested in evil things in Connecticut.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Duplicity
A couple years ago, my baby sister tuned me into a theory of hers, namely that in every movie in which Julie Roberts appears, she always has a least one scene in which she does her patented open-mouthed toothy scream of delight. My sister was good at imitating it.
I thought about this on my way into the theater to Duplicity in Tyngsboro on Saturday morning. Because of a house showing, I was forced out of my sister's place early, and thus I had gotten to Tyngsboro in plenty of time for the pre-noon four dollar showing---me and all the retired folk of Nashua.
I also thought about the story, which from the previews, involved a double game of corporate deception by two former spies, one ex-CIA (Roberts), and the other ex-MI6 (Clive Owen). Unlike the last Owen movie I saw (The International), this was to be a light-hearted romantic drama-comedy about the two agents trying to rip off a pair of corporations in an elaborate sting---that is, a romantic caper. Owen looks much less haggard in this film.
Roberts is not one of my must-see-her actresses, but as I mentioned before, I'm a big Clive Owen fan, so I figured they would cancel each other out. Also I liked the premise, and after such a heavy week, I was in the mood for a little caper fun.
The thoughts crossing my mind as I walked down the hallway to the auditorium involved the plot twists that such a movie inevitably entails. Are the two spies really in love with each other? Can they trust each other? Who is going to back-stab whom? How many layers of deception will we encounter?
To my delightful surprise, I found that my anticipation of the particular genre of plot twists was way off the mark. I could explain in detail, but I liked the movie too much to spoil the plot for those who haven't seen it.
Suffice it to say that there are plenty of plot twists, just not the ones I expected. I love that kind of thing. I hate it when I can see the plot twists coming from a mile away, and in this case, I certainly didn't.
Moreover, I also hate fake tension in movies, such as when a character is in danger of getting caught "red handed" while in the midst of a caper, and the musical score drives up our nerves in anticipation of this exposure. That's the mark of an inferior story. Duplicity refreshingly used very little of this kind of "in the moment" tension. Instead, it happened in slow motion, like a chess game, and thus was much more complex and enjoyable.
The pacing was much more along the lines of director Tony Gilroy's first feature, Michael Clayton (2007). It was sort of a light-hearted version of that movie, but with the characters operating on the black side of the law (and honor), instead of the light side.
The movie is almost exactly two hours long, and by my watch, it had a perfect four-act structure, divided neatly into thirty minute segments.
We meet the couple in 2003 at an embassy party in Dubai, while they are both still spies. They sleep together, and Roberts' character winds up stinging Owen's character, and leaving him. We pick up the story five years later, in the present, with Owen's character in New York City, working for a private security firm. Eventually he is going to run into Roberts' character again.
It all seems perfectly normal until exactly the half hour mark, when we get a flash-back to a scene that happened several years ago, a twist that seems to be utterly incomprehensible in light of everything we have seen so far. I love those kinds of twists, provided I have the confidence that the story is going to sort them out for me in time, which this one did.
The second twist comes at exactly the hour mark, at the mid point, when suddenly we are placed in doubt again regarding the standing of the characters. Unlike the rest of the movie, the mid point takes place in the Bahamas. Mid points in movies typically play out in a "special location" that is reserved from the rest of the story, giving them an atmosphere of suspension compared to the rest of the plot.
The third twist comes at the 1:30 mark, on a street in New York City, once again shaking up our perceptions of the characters, and our expectations of how things are going to go.
We then get a seeming resolution to the caper crime, the one that, by that point, we are now expecting and hoping for. Seemingly everything is relaxed and over. But there are still twenty minutes left in the run time. Another shoe has to drop, and its a nice juicy big one.
Moreover, it is an awesomely classical one, in that it asserts the rules of justice and honor on a deep level, and denies the "something for nothing" dictum of the Postmodern era. I didn't see that coming at all.
Sorry for being vague about the details here, but like I said, you have to go see it. I don't want to spoil it for you.
But I will tell you about the existential awakening I had during the movie. Existential awakenings are my latest favorite tool in analyzing movies. Basically an existential awakening is when, partway through the story, you have a sudden clear realization of the universality of the characters' motivations and struggles, often in terms of a high-level supertext.
In this case, it occurred near the midpoint, when the two principals are on a patio in Miami, discussing whether or not to take various respective positions (in Cleveland or New York), to pull off their intended caper. At that moment, I suddenly saw them as a quintessential contemporary professional couple, a husband and wife struggling to navigate 2009 America, to pursue their respective careers while still remaining connected to each other.
As such, at times they are divergent in purpose, jaded with their lives together and apart, and their chemistry is not always perfect, but they know they are the only two people in the world who can understand each other. In some sense, they are stuck with each other, whether they like it or not---and they mostly like it.
The beauty of this scene is that, in retrospect, it turns out to be arguably the pivotal and fateful moment of the story, when the characters, having broached an agreement made with each other, choose one path over the other, and thus propel themselves inevitably towards the final result, that nice juicy classical one at the very end that left me with a smile on my face.
On the way home, it occurred to me that the movie is somewhat in the genre of Stanley Donen's Charade (1963), although one updated for the Postmodern era. Fans of Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti will both like this movie. Both had very fun supporting roles.
And yes, Roberts gets her open-mouth laugh, but not quite the girlish scream of her youth. It's been twenty years since Mystic Pizza (1988), and the woman has a couple kids now.
I thought about this on my way into the theater to Duplicity in Tyngsboro on Saturday morning. Because of a house showing, I was forced out of my sister's place early, and thus I had gotten to Tyngsboro in plenty of time for the pre-noon four dollar showing---me and all the retired folk of Nashua.
I also thought about the story, which from the previews, involved a double game of corporate deception by two former spies, one ex-CIA (Roberts), and the other ex-MI6 (Clive Owen). Unlike the last Owen movie I saw (The International), this was to be a light-hearted romantic drama-comedy about the two agents trying to rip off a pair of corporations in an elaborate sting---that is, a romantic caper. Owen looks much less haggard in this film.
Roberts is not one of my must-see-her actresses, but as I mentioned before, I'm a big Clive Owen fan, so I figured they would cancel each other out. Also I liked the premise, and after such a heavy week, I was in the mood for a little caper fun.
The thoughts crossing my mind as I walked down the hallway to the auditorium involved the plot twists that such a movie inevitably entails. Are the two spies really in love with each other? Can they trust each other? Who is going to back-stab whom? How many layers of deception will we encounter?
To my delightful surprise, I found that my anticipation of the particular genre of plot twists was way off the mark. I could explain in detail, but I liked the movie too much to spoil the plot for those who haven't seen it.
Suffice it to say that there are plenty of plot twists, just not the ones I expected. I love that kind of thing. I hate it when I can see the plot twists coming from a mile away, and in this case, I certainly didn't.
Moreover, I also hate fake tension in movies, such as when a character is in danger of getting caught "red handed" while in the midst of a caper, and the musical score drives up our nerves in anticipation of this exposure. That's the mark of an inferior story. Duplicity refreshingly used very little of this kind of "in the moment" tension. Instead, it happened in slow motion, like a chess game, and thus was much more complex and enjoyable.
The pacing was much more along the lines of director Tony Gilroy's first feature, Michael Clayton (2007). It was sort of a light-hearted version of that movie, but with the characters operating on the black side of the law (and honor), instead of the light side.
The movie is almost exactly two hours long, and by my watch, it had a perfect four-act structure, divided neatly into thirty minute segments.
We meet the couple in 2003 at an embassy party in Dubai, while they are both still spies. They sleep together, and Roberts' character winds up stinging Owen's character, and leaving him. We pick up the story five years later, in the present, with Owen's character in New York City, working for a private security firm. Eventually he is going to run into Roberts' character again.
It all seems perfectly normal until exactly the half hour mark, when we get a flash-back to a scene that happened several years ago, a twist that seems to be utterly incomprehensible in light of everything we have seen so far. I love those kinds of twists, provided I have the confidence that the story is going to sort them out for me in time, which this one did.
The second twist comes at exactly the hour mark, at the mid point, when suddenly we are placed in doubt again regarding the standing of the characters. Unlike the rest of the movie, the mid point takes place in the Bahamas. Mid points in movies typically play out in a "special location" that is reserved from the rest of the story, giving them an atmosphere of suspension compared to the rest of the plot.
The third twist comes at the 1:30 mark, on a street in New York City, once again shaking up our perceptions of the characters, and our expectations of how things are going to go.
We then get a seeming resolution to the caper crime, the one that, by that point, we are now expecting and hoping for. Seemingly everything is relaxed and over. But there are still twenty minutes left in the run time. Another shoe has to drop, and its a nice juicy big one.
Moreover, it is an awesomely classical one, in that it asserts the rules of justice and honor on a deep level, and denies the "something for nothing" dictum of the Postmodern era. I didn't see that coming at all.
Sorry for being vague about the details here, but like I said, you have to go see it. I don't want to spoil it for you.
But I will tell you about the existential awakening I had during the movie. Existential awakenings are my latest favorite tool in analyzing movies. Basically an existential awakening is when, partway through the story, you have a sudden clear realization of the universality of the characters' motivations and struggles, often in terms of a high-level supertext.
In this case, it occurred near the midpoint, when the two principals are on a patio in Miami, discussing whether or not to take various respective positions (in Cleveland or New York), to pull off their intended caper. At that moment, I suddenly saw them as a quintessential contemporary professional couple, a husband and wife struggling to navigate 2009 America, to pursue their respective careers while still remaining connected to each other.
As such, at times they are divergent in purpose, jaded with their lives together and apart, and their chemistry is not always perfect, but they know they are the only two people in the world who can understand each other. In some sense, they are stuck with each other, whether they like it or not---and they mostly like it.
The beauty of this scene is that, in retrospect, it turns out to be arguably the pivotal and fateful moment of the story, when the characters, having broached an agreement made with each other, choose one path over the other, and thus propel themselves inevitably towards the final result, that nice juicy classical one at the very end that left me with a smile on my face.
On the way home, it occurred to me that the movie is somewhat in the genre of Stanley Donen's Charade (1963), although one updated for the Postmodern era. Fans of Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti will both like this movie. Both had very fun supporting roles.
And yes, Roberts gets her open-mouth laugh, but not quite the girlish scream of her youth. It's been twenty years since Mystic Pizza (1988), and the woman has a couple kids now.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Knowing
This week had been tough. After the Fed announced the trillion-dollar heist, I mean quantitative easing, on Wednesday night, it was like a sledgehammer had come down on every one in the econo-blogosphere.
All of a sudden, it felt like we were all staring right into the jaws of the demon abyss. No one has words enough to describe the feeling. I've awoken every morning since then with a feeling of massive dread hanging over me, shrouded in a passive uncertainty about what to think, what to do, when it seems like there is nothing to be done.
At various times in my life, I've used movies as an escape from the pain of personal troubles. To disappear into a darkened theater for a few hours and lose oneself in a compelling narrative is, as almost every one knows, a nice way to stave off a lot of emotions.
But now it was different. Now I was heading to the theaters as a way to block out pain that was not personal but a massive global dread hanging over all are heads, and the horrifying inability to do anything about it but watch.
I spent a couple hours up in Nashua at the Barnes and Noble reading new release non-fiction books in the coffee shop before heading back across the state line into Tyngsboro for the late friday afternoon showing of Knowing.
As I watched the story unfold, I found it strangely compelling in an uncanny way:
A widowed Ph.D. astrophysicist (Nicholas Cage) living in rural Massachusetts outside Boston winds up in possession of a document unearthed from a time capsule containing a string of mysterious numbers. The document had been interred in September 1959 at an elementary school in Lexington, and the particular paper had been put there by a very disturbed little girl.
By decoding the numbers on the sheet, the astrophysicist learns that they have miraculously predicted a series of deadly disasters over the last fifty years, even including the number of people killed, and the geographical latitude and longitude.
One of the things I liked about this movie is that it didn't waste time having Dr. Koestler (Cage) ranting to his friends and family while not being believed by them. Instead, after a flush of initial skepticism, we move on with the story, leaving behind the "ranting lunatic" phase.
The horror of the story is not located in his inability to convince others of the remaining disasters predicted by the time capsule sheet, but rather by his seeming inability to change the outcome at all. This horror is magnified to extreme levels when Koestler learns the true nature and scope of the last disaster predicted---it's basically as bad as it possibly gets.
Along those lines, the story posits the philosophical question of whether or not there is a deterministic plan to the universe, or whether things are just random. Koestler poses this question to his astrophysics class at MIT at the beginning of the movie while passing around a model of the Sun (rather nice foreshadowing).
Unfortunately the screenwriter made me wince here. The question posed by Koestler to his students is about randomness versus determinism in a spiritual sense, rather than a scientific sense. That is, what Koestler is actually discussing is the issue of intelligent design in the Cosmos, rather than anything having to do with, say, chaos physics.
But I let that one go. I was really rooting for the movie. Halfway through I was already deciding that American horror wasn't dead after all, it had just gone really, really big in scale, as it should, as this is where our fears collectively reside right now.
But then, as happens so many times when I pre-judge a movie as being good, things started to come unglued in the Third Act and by the end I was just revolted by what I was seeing.
Plotwise it seemed OK, but then the movie piles on its seeming supernatural premise by pulling out all the stops, with aliens and/or angels appearing all over the place. It could have worked---in some sense the movie is a bookend to 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind---but the story never really answered the questions it had raised, except in the vaguest of terms.
Is there order in the universe according to some great cosmic mind, or is it random? I guess the movie comes down on the side of the former, but I kept wondering if that's so, what was the point of the prediction in the time capsule anyway?. Why was Koestler pulled into this scheme of the alien guardians if there was nothing he could do about it? Was it all about getting his son and the little girl to the safe place with all the smooth black rocks? Was that the whole point of the prediction-numbers? Couldn't he have gotten simpler instructions? Given how it ended, most of what happened in the movie with the string of disaster-predictions turned out to be absolutely pointless to the story.
And then there's the ending itself, "Close Encounters of the Last Kind," you might call it. Everyone knows Spielberg made a huge mistake by revising his movie to show what happens after Richard Dreyfuss goes on board the spaceship at Devil's Tower. Knowing follows exactly that error, and does it grandly, in stomach-churning fashion. If the movie wasn't ruined by that point, it was completely trashed by the last couple minutes.
I've read a few comments on blogs calling the ending a super-Christian Rapture fantasy. It could be seen as that, to be sure, but when I saw it, I read it more along the lines of a New World Order fantasy about cleansing the Earth of its surplus population.
As anyone knows who has studied the history of eugenics, the elite financiers of this death cult have long lusted for the ability to drastically reduce the population of the world, and to rebuild mankind in a perfect new order in which the citizens are completely swaddled by the control of a globalized world-state under the elite's control. They no longer call it "race hygiene" or "eugenics," as they once did, but now call it "population control" and "bioethics." It all sounds so perfectly rational, but it is basically the same death cult as the Nazis. They really don't even bother to hide it much. As you can see here, it is advocated by many of the same people now bringing about the Fedpocalypse of '09.
The ending of Knowing seemed almost a perfect eugenics fantasy. The Earth is cleansed. Two perfect white children scamper off in innocence to be raised by a race of superbeings who will mold their mind and souls to conform to the new ideal. Mankind is perfected. The bloodlines of the Calvinistic elite are saved. Everyone else dies. The end.
Too bad. The movie had so much promise while it stuck to the mysterious numbers thing. It felt so damn eerie too, since most of the action of the movie takes place in the very corner of Massachusetts where I now am (although it was shot in Australia). The solar observatory in Westford where the protagonist works is right along the route I drove to get to the theater on Friday.
And at one point, the characters decide to take shelter in an underground cave, located exactly in the town where my sister lives, and where I am writing this right now. They even mentioned the road through the middle of town, that I had just been driving on.
When I got back home, I had fun telling my sister about this. "Yeah, and at the very end, Cage goes to his sister's house so together they can watch Boston burn up to a crisp."
We both laughed. What a knee-slapper. My mood had surely cleared up a little. Good thing it was all just a wild fantasy.
All of a sudden, it felt like we were all staring right into the jaws of the demon abyss. No one has words enough to describe the feeling. I've awoken every morning since then with a feeling of massive dread hanging over me, shrouded in a passive uncertainty about what to think, what to do, when it seems like there is nothing to be done.
At various times in my life, I've used movies as an escape from the pain of personal troubles. To disappear into a darkened theater for a few hours and lose oneself in a compelling narrative is, as almost every one knows, a nice way to stave off a lot of emotions.
But now it was different. Now I was heading to the theaters as a way to block out pain that was not personal but a massive global dread hanging over all are heads, and the horrifying inability to do anything about it but watch.
I spent a couple hours up in Nashua at the Barnes and Noble reading new release non-fiction books in the coffee shop before heading back across the state line into Tyngsboro for the late friday afternoon showing of Knowing.
As I watched the story unfold, I found it strangely compelling in an uncanny way:
A widowed Ph.D. astrophysicist (Nicholas Cage) living in rural Massachusetts outside Boston winds up in possession of a document unearthed from a time capsule containing a string of mysterious numbers. The document had been interred in September 1959 at an elementary school in Lexington, and the particular paper had been put there by a very disturbed little girl.
By decoding the numbers on the sheet, the astrophysicist learns that they have miraculously predicted a series of deadly disasters over the last fifty years, even including the number of people killed, and the geographical latitude and longitude.
One of the things I liked about this movie is that it didn't waste time having Dr. Koestler (Cage) ranting to his friends and family while not being believed by them. Instead, after a flush of initial skepticism, we move on with the story, leaving behind the "ranting lunatic" phase.
The horror of the story is not located in his inability to convince others of the remaining disasters predicted by the time capsule sheet, but rather by his seeming inability to change the outcome at all. This horror is magnified to extreme levels when Koestler learns the true nature and scope of the last disaster predicted---it's basically as bad as it possibly gets.
Along those lines, the story posits the philosophical question of whether or not there is a deterministic plan to the universe, or whether things are just random. Koestler poses this question to his astrophysics class at MIT at the beginning of the movie while passing around a model of the Sun (rather nice foreshadowing).
Unfortunately the screenwriter made me wince here. The question posed by Koestler to his students is about randomness versus determinism in a spiritual sense, rather than a scientific sense. That is, what Koestler is actually discussing is the issue of intelligent design in the Cosmos, rather than anything having to do with, say, chaos physics.
But I let that one go. I was really rooting for the movie. Halfway through I was already deciding that American horror wasn't dead after all, it had just gone really, really big in scale, as it should, as this is where our fears collectively reside right now.
But then, as happens so many times when I pre-judge a movie as being good, things started to come unglued in the Third Act and by the end I was just revolted by what I was seeing.
Plotwise it seemed OK, but then the movie piles on its seeming supernatural premise by pulling out all the stops, with aliens and/or angels appearing all over the place. It could have worked---in some sense the movie is a bookend to 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind---but the story never really answered the questions it had raised, except in the vaguest of terms.
Is there order in the universe according to some great cosmic mind, or is it random? I guess the movie comes down on the side of the former, but I kept wondering if that's so, what was the point of the prediction in the time capsule anyway?. Why was Koestler pulled into this scheme of the alien guardians if there was nothing he could do about it? Was it all about getting his son and the little girl to the safe place with all the smooth black rocks? Was that the whole point of the prediction-numbers? Couldn't he have gotten simpler instructions? Given how it ended, most of what happened in the movie with the string of disaster-predictions turned out to be absolutely pointless to the story.
And then there's the ending itself, "Close Encounters of the Last Kind," you might call it. Everyone knows Spielberg made a huge mistake by revising his movie to show what happens after Richard Dreyfuss goes on board the spaceship at Devil's Tower. Knowing follows exactly that error, and does it grandly, in stomach-churning fashion. If the movie wasn't ruined by that point, it was completely trashed by the last couple minutes.
I've read a few comments on blogs calling the ending a super-Christian Rapture fantasy. It could be seen as that, to be sure, but when I saw it, I read it more along the lines of a New World Order fantasy about cleansing the Earth of its surplus population.
As anyone knows who has studied the history of eugenics, the elite financiers of this death cult have long lusted for the ability to drastically reduce the population of the world, and to rebuild mankind in a perfect new order in which the citizens are completely swaddled by the control of a globalized world-state under the elite's control. They no longer call it "race hygiene" or "eugenics," as they once did, but now call it "population control" and "bioethics." It all sounds so perfectly rational, but it is basically the same death cult as the Nazis. They really don't even bother to hide it much. As you can see here, it is advocated by many of the same people now bringing about the Fedpocalypse of '09.
The ending of Knowing seemed almost a perfect eugenics fantasy. The Earth is cleansed. Two perfect white children scamper off in innocence to be raised by a race of superbeings who will mold their mind and souls to conform to the new ideal. Mankind is perfected. The bloodlines of the Calvinistic elite are saved. Everyone else dies. The end.
Too bad. The movie had so much promise while it stuck to the mysterious numbers thing. It felt so damn eerie too, since most of the action of the movie takes place in the very corner of Massachusetts where I now am (although it was shot in Australia). The solar observatory in Westford where the protagonist works is right along the route I drove to get to the theater on Friday.
And at one point, the characters decide to take shelter in an underground cave, located exactly in the town where my sister lives, and where I am writing this right now. They even mentioned the road through the middle of town, that I had just been driving on.
When I got back home, I had fun telling my sister about this. "Yeah, and at the very end, Cage goes to his sister's house so together they can watch Boston burn up to a crisp."
We both laughed. What a knee-slapper. My mood had surely cleared up a little. Good thing it was all just a wild fantasy.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Two Lovers
My movie-going had hit sort of a rough patch this past week. The seasonal slowdown in new Hollywood releases (probably because of Watchmen) had meant only one or two trips per week to the area multiplexes. But more importantly, I wasn't able to get to any of the new indie films in Boston.
The indies were showing up in the theater all right, but only in Cambridge, where they were playing for a single week and then disappearing into the void. Typically they might kick around from one arthouse to another for a couple weeks, giving me second and third chances, sometimes making it out to suburbs and even up to New Hampshire.
But not lately. Lately it was all one-week-and-done for most indies, and over the course of less than a month, due to illness and lack of gumption to schlep into the city, I'd had to pass up Donkey Punch, Fanboys, Waiting for Dublin, Shuttle,12, Crossing Over as well as a few more I can't remember right now. Sure, I'll catch them later on Netflix, but I like it to be my choice to wait for the DVD. Hopefully some of them will resurface later at other theaters.
Why this quick rotation of the schedule? The reason was because the holdover Oscar winners like Slumdog Millionaire and The Reader were still jamming up the slots in the arthouses. I can't really blame the theaters for this, because they don't get much revenue from most movies until after the first few weeks. Holdovers (as we used to call them back in the old days) can be lifelines, if not cash cows, and I'm always for anything that helps the folks make money who actually set up and run the projectors and tear my tickets.
Finally there was a little movement on the schedule in the last week. The Oscar ice-jam started to melt in Waltham, which is an easy driving target for me, and I had a chance on Thursday afternoon to see Two Lovers, the movie that Joaquin Phoenix was promoting when he went on David Letterman last month with a full beard and acted like a psycho. Who wouldn't look forward to that?
It was nice to be back in Waltham again, at the same parking garage next to the now-melting Charles River, across from the historic textile factory. The last time I had been there was in the dead of a cold New England winter, one that I thought would never pass.
Now as for the movie: back when I taught physics, I used to teach my students about the ubiquity of triangles in the physical world, and how to apply trigonometry to analyze vector forces. Triangles are everywhere, I would say.
The same applies in movies, where the love triangle is perhaps the most universal and repeated basic plot line. Just as in the physical world, the extensibility of the triangle in cinematic stories seems to be infinite. If it were possible to exhaust the variations of the triangle, it would have been done by now. As long as the human heart beats, there is always room for a new version.
This version is set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in an apartment building just a few blocks from the beach side Russian restaurants on Coney Island, the part called "Little Odessa" (in fact, James Gray, who directed this movie, previously made a film by that name).
In Two Lovers, Phoenix plays a depressed man who works for his family's dry cleaning business. In the opening sequence, he attempts to commit suicide by jumping from a pier into the waters of Sheepshead Bay.
It turns out it's not the first time he has tried to commit suicide. He's a very troubled man.
The opening shot of him in the water didn't give me a lot of hope for the movie, because it was an underwater sequence that showed Phoenix slumping down and sinking, until he changes his mind and swims back up for air.
This is at least the third time I have seen exactly this same sequence in the last since months. It was definitely in Max Payne, and I think it was in The Spirit too, if I remember correctly. It's right up there with the slow-motion person-being-hurled-through-plate-glass-of-a-tall-building sequence as the "signature" shots of 2008-2009. Every director wants these, for some reason, because they are cool.
But Two Lovers shows that even an overdone sequence like this can work if it advances the story correctly. This time it does. In particular, what it does is establish a "low point" for the character. A character in a movie who reaches the low point of trying to commit suicide, but then pulls back, is a character who is not going to commit suicide later on. They have already reached their point of ultimate lowness and survived. So when we see Phoenix's character at the water's edge later on, we know that he's not going to jump in. If that were his story-destiny, he would have done it in the first scene.
So back to the triangle part of the story. Phoenix's character, Leonard Kraditor, winds up having affairs with two different young women. One of them, Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), is the stable and sensible daughter of another Jewish dry cleaning family, one that is buying out the Kraditor business. Leonard's mother, played impeccably by Isabella Rossellini, loves Sandra and pushes her son to date her.
But much to his mother's consternation, Leonard has fallen for his upstairs neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who turns out to be a kept mistress of a high-powered banker who is married but won't leave his wife. Michelle is an emotional train wreck, even more unstable than Leonard. He gives her emotional support while becoming her "best friend." Of course, you can see where that is going to lead: no place good.
Michelle's oppositional placement to Sandra's stability is highlighted by the fact that Michelle is not Jewish. There's a beautiful little line in the screenplay that points this out. When Michelle first enters the Kraditor apartment, she looks on a shelf and says, "What's that thing called?" and Leonard replies "Oh, that's a dreidel". We never see the dreidel itself, and the line seems so innocuous, but for a young woman living in Little Odessa, this says volumes that she had to ask.
The triangle is fairly standard, but the kicker is that both affairs play out nearly simultaneously. That is, Leonard meets both women at almost exactly the same time, and the affairs play out side-by-side almost as a contrast to each other. Thus the novelty here, to some degree, is that the triangle is, well, an isosceles one (equal-legged). It's not boy-meets-girl, then boy-meet-another-girl. It's both-meets-two-girls.
In some ways, the two affairs are idealized versions of both a wretchedly painful affair with an emotionally unstable beauty, and a nice quiet decent courtship of a "good" girl who would make a solid wife for Leonard. The Michelle story at times seems like a riff on Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and indeed almost pays homage to that movie at times, punctuated by the use of Henry Mancini's "Lujon" for the soundtrack as the unsophisticated Leonard ventures into Manhattan to meet Holly's, I mean Michelle's, high-powered boyfriend.
Leonard's puppy-love adoration of Michelle is painful to watch at times. That's how I measure these kinds of stories. They must be painful for a man to watch another man make a fool of himself like that on screen. It must remind you of your own horrible youthful mistakes. If it isn't painful that way, then the movie didn't do its job. But this one did. Two Lovers is a tight, well-written simple story that seems to accomplish a lot without having to resort to a lot of gimmicks.
At some point in the movie, towards the end, as the two parallel love stories converge at New Year's Eve Party, I had an existential awakening about the movie. The existential awakening was this: the two idealized stories about the two women actually can be seen as representing, on a deep symbolic level, one story about one non-idealized woman, a complex real woman who is alternately both stable Sandra and erratic Michelle.
That's the power of movie storytelling, that it can fragment and dissect the complexities of human emotion and love into separate components, to see how each one of those components contributes to a unified whole, all while telling an entertaining story about interesting characters.
Components, yes. Just like triangles, and force vectors.
By the way, I must mention that in Waltham I finally made good on my vow to buy popcorn there, after having snuck in food at a previous time. I made sure to buy the largest size they had. Those theaters make a lot of money of that kind of stuff.
The indies were showing up in the theater all right, but only in Cambridge, where they were playing for a single week and then disappearing into the void. Typically they might kick around from one arthouse to another for a couple weeks, giving me second and third chances, sometimes making it out to suburbs and even up to New Hampshire.
But not lately. Lately it was all one-week-and-done for most indies, and over the course of less than a month, due to illness and lack of gumption to schlep into the city, I'd had to pass up Donkey Punch, Fanboys, Waiting for Dublin, Shuttle,12, Crossing Over as well as a few more I can't remember right now. Sure, I'll catch them later on Netflix, but I like it to be my choice to wait for the DVD. Hopefully some of them will resurface later at other theaters.
Why this quick rotation of the schedule? The reason was because the holdover Oscar winners like Slumdog Millionaire and The Reader were still jamming up the slots in the arthouses. I can't really blame the theaters for this, because they don't get much revenue from most movies until after the first few weeks. Holdovers (as we used to call them back in the old days) can be lifelines, if not cash cows, and I'm always for anything that helps the folks make money who actually set up and run the projectors and tear my tickets.
Finally there was a little movement on the schedule in the last week. The Oscar ice-jam started to melt in Waltham, which is an easy driving target for me, and I had a chance on Thursday afternoon to see Two Lovers, the movie that Joaquin Phoenix was promoting when he went on David Letterman last month with a full beard and acted like a psycho. Who wouldn't look forward to that?
It was nice to be back in Waltham again, at the same parking garage next to the now-melting Charles River, across from the historic textile factory. The last time I had been there was in the dead of a cold New England winter, one that I thought would never pass.
Now as for the movie: back when I taught physics, I used to teach my students about the ubiquity of triangles in the physical world, and how to apply trigonometry to analyze vector forces. Triangles are everywhere, I would say.
The same applies in movies, where the love triangle is perhaps the most universal and repeated basic plot line. Just as in the physical world, the extensibility of the triangle in cinematic stories seems to be infinite. If it were possible to exhaust the variations of the triangle, it would have been done by now. As long as the human heart beats, there is always room for a new version.
This version is set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in an apartment building just a few blocks from the beach side Russian restaurants on Coney Island, the part called "Little Odessa" (in fact, James Gray, who directed this movie, previously made a film by that name).
In Two Lovers, Phoenix plays a depressed man who works for his family's dry cleaning business. In the opening sequence, he attempts to commit suicide by jumping from a pier into the waters of Sheepshead Bay.
It turns out it's not the first time he has tried to commit suicide. He's a very troubled man.
The opening shot of him in the water didn't give me a lot of hope for the movie, because it was an underwater sequence that showed Phoenix slumping down and sinking, until he changes his mind and swims back up for air.
This is at least the third time I have seen exactly this same sequence in the last since months. It was definitely in Max Payne, and I think it was in The Spirit too, if I remember correctly. It's right up there with the slow-motion person-being-hurled-through-plate-glass-of-a-tall-building sequence as the "signature" shots of 2008-2009. Every director wants these, for some reason, because they are cool.
But Two Lovers shows that even an overdone sequence like this can work if it advances the story correctly. This time it does. In particular, what it does is establish a "low point" for the character. A character in a movie who reaches the low point of trying to commit suicide, but then pulls back, is a character who is not going to commit suicide later on. They have already reached their point of ultimate lowness and survived. So when we see Phoenix's character at the water's edge later on, we know that he's not going to jump in. If that were his story-destiny, he would have done it in the first scene.
So back to the triangle part of the story. Phoenix's character, Leonard Kraditor, winds up having affairs with two different young women. One of them, Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), is the stable and sensible daughter of another Jewish dry cleaning family, one that is buying out the Kraditor business. Leonard's mother, played impeccably by Isabella Rossellini, loves Sandra and pushes her son to date her.
But much to his mother's consternation, Leonard has fallen for his upstairs neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who turns out to be a kept mistress of a high-powered banker who is married but won't leave his wife. Michelle is an emotional train wreck, even more unstable than Leonard. He gives her emotional support while becoming her "best friend." Of course, you can see where that is going to lead: no place good.
Michelle's oppositional placement to Sandra's stability is highlighted by the fact that Michelle is not Jewish. There's a beautiful little line in the screenplay that points this out. When Michelle first enters the Kraditor apartment, she looks on a shelf and says, "What's that thing called?" and Leonard replies "Oh, that's a dreidel". We never see the dreidel itself, and the line seems so innocuous, but for a young woman living in Little Odessa, this says volumes that she had to ask.
The triangle is fairly standard, but the kicker is that both affairs play out nearly simultaneously. That is, Leonard meets both women at almost exactly the same time, and the affairs play out side-by-side almost as a contrast to each other. Thus the novelty here, to some degree, is that the triangle is, well, an isosceles one (equal-legged). It's not boy-meets-girl, then boy-meet-another-girl. It's both-meets-two-girls.
In some ways, the two affairs are idealized versions of both a wretchedly painful affair with an emotionally unstable beauty, and a nice quiet decent courtship of a "good" girl who would make a solid wife for Leonard. The Michelle story at times seems like a riff on Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and indeed almost pays homage to that movie at times, punctuated by the use of Henry Mancini's "Lujon" for the soundtrack as the unsophisticated Leonard ventures into Manhattan to meet Holly's, I mean Michelle's, high-powered boyfriend.
Leonard's puppy-love adoration of Michelle is painful to watch at times. That's how I measure these kinds of stories. They must be painful for a man to watch another man make a fool of himself like that on screen. It must remind you of your own horrible youthful mistakes. If it isn't painful that way, then the movie didn't do its job. But this one did. Two Lovers is a tight, well-written simple story that seems to accomplish a lot without having to resort to a lot of gimmicks.
At some point in the movie, towards the end, as the two parallel love stories converge at New Year's Eve Party, I had an existential awakening about the movie. The existential awakening was this: the two idealized stories about the two women actually can be seen as representing, on a deep symbolic level, one story about one non-idealized woman, a complex real woman who is alternately both stable Sandra and erratic Michelle.
That's the power of movie storytelling, that it can fragment and dissect the complexities of human emotion and love into separate components, to see how each one of those components contributes to a unified whole, all while telling an entertaining story about interesting characters.
Components, yes. Just like triangles, and force vectors.
By the way, I must mention that in Waltham I finally made good on my vow to buy popcorn there, after having snuck in food at a previous time. I made sure to buy the largest size they had. Those theaters make a lot of money of that kind of stuff.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
The Last House on the Left
Because I go to so many movies at the same theaters, and because I prefer to get to them with plenty of time to spare, I inevitably wind up sitting through many of the same pre-movie advertisements over and over.
At the Entertainment Cinemas in Leominster, they rotate the slides from EOnline that feature "Do you know?" factoids about Hollywood stars.
Why yes, I do happen to know that Colin Farrel was once a line dancer in Ireland.
This afternoon as I was waiting for Last House on the Left in a nearly empty auditorium, I saw the now-familiar one quoting Reese Witherspoon, along the lines of: "Whenever something is frightening to me, I always think I should go ahead and do it."
"O.K., Reese," I said. "I'll take that to heart."
I wasn't really in the mood for a horror movie this afternoon. It was such a nice day. It seemed like a shame to spend the last few daylight hours cooped inside for two hours of tension and screaming. But the mission goes on. I didn't want to fall behind schedule in my movie-watching.
I've gone on record as saying that the American horror genre is dead. As I watched the factoids scroll, I meditated on why this was so, in a deep way. I think it is mainly because the movies that are supposedly in the horror genre no longer have any capacity to generate actual horror.
Sure, they can shock, frighten, and disgust us. But do they really cause the emotion of horror? To me, horror is something behind extreme fright. It is an existential condition in which one senses that the rules of goodness, truth, and even reality as one knows them have been violated, and that they might not ever be regained in the sense that one has known them.
True horror in a movie takes you to a place where you feel very, very far from home, where you glimpse a moral universe beyond your previous ability to process it. Done right, it allows you to see the arbitrariness or fragility of the normal world as you have previously perceived it. It is, as least fleetingly, very uncomfortable. If it isn't, it is not true horror.
And that's exactly what I don't think American horror movies do anymore. They don't take us to places beyond the rules of normality as we have known them, and force us to glimpse our little toy world from the outside as we gasp for oxygen to be let back inside the capsule. Instead they take us to well-worn and ironically "comfortable" places of fright and shock---what one might call "the titillation of fear." Horror has been reduced to the adrenal rush of a thrill ride.
Why they do that, well that's another story.
Anyway, given that, I indeed had a few hopes for today's matinee. Wes Craven produced, but did not direct, this remake of his earliest film, from 1972. It's an interesting project, and one that says a lot about the evolution of American cinema.
If you know the original, you know that it is an underground classic that is one of the most shockingly violent American movies ever made. It is not easy to watch, even if you've seen other horror movies.
Simply put, there is no way that the original could be remade today without many modifications. It simply could not be shown in theaters. Because of this, one can argue that this project differs from the recent remakes of Friday the 13th and My Bloody Valentine, in that whereas the remakes of the latter two movies seemed completely gratuitous, a form of box-office plundering, the remake of Craven's movie actually has a rationale: namely to provide a version that is viewable by today's audiences.
That means nothing to horror afficionados who liked the original, of course. This movie isn't for them. For example, don't make mistake of bringing up the 2006 remake of Craven's The Hills Have Eyes to Thor unless you're willing to discuss how it compares to the original.
In the case of The Last House on the Left, the story is nearly the same, although with some changes that make it more up-to-date. For example, in 1972 it was believable for the villains to pose as traveling salesmen in order to gain entrance to the house, but this is unfeasible in 2009. A different premise for their stay overnight in the secluded homestead was necessary, and even then they were believably exiled to a guest cottage.
Some of the changes serve to improve the narrative as a whole. You can see that Craven has learned how to tell a more fine-grained narrative in the last 37 years.
It's still a morality tale about two teenage girls who get into trouble when they go off to buy marijuana from a stranger, but there is some added depth to the characters that substitutes for much of the unceasing violence.
Among other things, we get a little bit of back story about both the good guys and the bad guys that is used to heighten the tension, and to draw out the introduction. The bad guy's teenage son gets a character upgrade and plays a more nuanced role this time around, making him a full-blooded character.
The villains are actually played as more restrained, less prone to Manson Family-style psychotic violence until specifically provoked. Contrary to what you'd think, this actually heightens the tension, but we almost see the rational humanity coming through at times.
The violence is compacted down into a few discrete but extremely graphic episodes. The rape scene is one that will indeed be horrifying to any woman in the audience, and was superbly acted by Sara Paxton. In fact, the acting was extremely good all around.
In narrative terms, one of the things I enjoyed while watching this movie was the quiet set up when the Collingwood family arrives at their house by the lake. As we follow the family around the grounds, we get introduced to the elements of the household, including the boathouse.
In a good horror movie, what is happening here is a "setting the stage" for action that will later on, in completely different (and more dire) circumstances. I always have fun, in situations like this, making mental notes while guessing what various locations will be used for, when they reappear. Sometimes I'm disappointed by the lack of "set up, pay off," but not in this case. The stage was set right.
After the movie was over, I indeed felt as if I had experienced enough horror to call this a horror movie. It was a light dose, however, like a quick puff on a reefer cigarette, just enough to get buzzed.
At the Entertainment Cinemas in Leominster, they rotate the slides from EOnline that feature "Do you know?" factoids about Hollywood stars.
Why yes, I do happen to know that Colin Farrel was once a line dancer in Ireland.
This afternoon as I was waiting for Last House on the Left in a nearly empty auditorium, I saw the now-familiar one quoting Reese Witherspoon, along the lines of: "Whenever something is frightening to me, I always think I should go ahead and do it."
"O.K., Reese," I said. "I'll take that to heart."
I wasn't really in the mood for a horror movie this afternoon. It was such a nice day. It seemed like a shame to spend the last few daylight hours cooped inside for two hours of tension and screaming. But the mission goes on. I didn't want to fall behind schedule in my movie-watching.
I've gone on record as saying that the American horror genre is dead. As I watched the factoids scroll, I meditated on why this was so, in a deep way. I think it is mainly because the movies that are supposedly in the horror genre no longer have any capacity to generate actual horror.
Sure, they can shock, frighten, and disgust us. But do they really cause the emotion of horror? To me, horror is something behind extreme fright. It is an existential condition in which one senses that the rules of goodness, truth, and even reality as one knows them have been violated, and that they might not ever be regained in the sense that one has known them.
True horror in a movie takes you to a place where you feel very, very far from home, where you glimpse a moral universe beyond your previous ability to process it. Done right, it allows you to see the arbitrariness or fragility of the normal world as you have previously perceived it. It is, as least fleetingly, very uncomfortable. If it isn't, it is not true horror.
And that's exactly what I don't think American horror movies do anymore. They don't take us to places beyond the rules of normality as we have known them, and force us to glimpse our little toy world from the outside as we gasp for oxygen to be let back inside the capsule. Instead they take us to well-worn and ironically "comfortable" places of fright and shock---what one might call "the titillation of fear." Horror has been reduced to the adrenal rush of a thrill ride.
Why they do that, well that's another story.
Anyway, given that, I indeed had a few hopes for today's matinee. Wes Craven produced, but did not direct, this remake of his earliest film, from 1972. It's an interesting project, and one that says a lot about the evolution of American cinema.
If you know the original, you know that it is an underground classic that is one of the most shockingly violent American movies ever made. It is not easy to watch, even if you've seen other horror movies.
Simply put, there is no way that the original could be remade today without many modifications. It simply could not be shown in theaters. Because of this, one can argue that this project differs from the recent remakes of Friday the 13th and My Bloody Valentine, in that whereas the remakes of the latter two movies seemed completely gratuitous, a form of box-office plundering, the remake of Craven's movie actually has a rationale: namely to provide a version that is viewable by today's audiences.
That means nothing to horror afficionados who liked the original, of course. This movie isn't for them. For example, don't make mistake of bringing up the 2006 remake of Craven's The Hills Have Eyes to Thor unless you're willing to discuss how it compares to the original.
In the case of The Last House on the Left, the story is nearly the same, although with some changes that make it more up-to-date. For example, in 1972 it was believable for the villains to pose as traveling salesmen in order to gain entrance to the house, but this is unfeasible in 2009. A different premise for their stay overnight in the secluded homestead was necessary, and even then they were believably exiled to a guest cottage.
Some of the changes serve to improve the narrative as a whole. You can see that Craven has learned how to tell a more fine-grained narrative in the last 37 years.
It's still a morality tale about two teenage girls who get into trouble when they go off to buy marijuana from a stranger, but there is some added depth to the characters that substitutes for much of the unceasing violence.
Among other things, we get a little bit of back story about both the good guys and the bad guys that is used to heighten the tension, and to draw out the introduction. The bad guy's teenage son gets a character upgrade and plays a more nuanced role this time around, making him a full-blooded character.
The villains are actually played as more restrained, less prone to Manson Family-style psychotic violence until specifically provoked. Contrary to what you'd think, this actually heightens the tension, but we almost see the rational humanity coming through at times.
The violence is compacted down into a few discrete but extremely graphic episodes. The rape scene is one that will indeed be horrifying to any woman in the audience, and was superbly acted by Sara Paxton. In fact, the acting was extremely good all around.
In narrative terms, one of the things I enjoyed while watching this movie was the quiet set up when the Collingwood family arrives at their house by the lake. As we follow the family around the grounds, we get introduced to the elements of the household, including the boathouse.
In a good horror movie, what is happening here is a "setting the stage" for action that will later on, in completely different (and more dire) circumstances. I always have fun, in situations like this, making mental notes while guessing what various locations will be used for, when they reappear. Sometimes I'm disappointed by the lack of "set up, pay off," but not in this case. The stage was set right.
After the movie was over, I indeed felt as if I had experienced enough horror to call this a horror movie. It was a light dose, however, like a quick puff on a reefer cigarette, just enough to get buzzed.
Counteraccusation
My recent Rorschach tirade made me realize I need a separate outlet to express certain opinions that are not related to the art of storytelling through cinema. In the that light, I started a spin-off blog to express my opinions on non-movie-related current events topics (Hey, Roger Ebert has one too).
The entries there will be quite different than here: shorter and mostly without the narrative of my life experiences. Mostly they will be quick analysis and reaction to other items on the Internet or in the news, such as links I would want to share with other people.
I plan to keep writing this blog exactly as before, as my narration of my experiences with art.
Ah, that felt good. OK, back to the cinema. There is so much out there to see right now...
I plan to keep writing this blog exactly as before, as my narration of my experiences with art.
Ah, that felt good. OK, back to the cinema. There is so much out there to see right now...
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Kings (NBC)
It has been a while since I saw the previews for an upcoming television series premiere and thought, "Wow, I have to see that." The last time was HBO's "Big Love," which I still follow, and I can't remember what came before that. For ABC's "Lost," it actually took me a month or two to get on board, and then I had to catch up.
But "Kings" was compelling right out of the gate, when the ads starting showing up during NBC's Sunday football broadcasts late last year. At first I was very much turned off by the concept, as somehow propaganda to prepare us for a religious monarchy in this country, but once I stood the alternate reality premise of it, I was pre-hooked on it. I was really hoping it wouldn't disappoint me.
The two-hour premiere was tonight. I settled in by the tube and watched it (without TiVo) with commercials and all. I was too eager to wait, and besides, there is something about having commercial breaks in network t.v. that still feels like it is the "correct" pacing.
But would it hold up to my expectations? Twenty minutes into it, I knew it was winner. After two hours, I knew it would join my tiny list of network shows that I still follow regularly.
The high concept of the story is absolutely superb. What appears to be present-day Manhattan is home to a religious kingdom that feels at once like Ancient Judea, present-day Israel, present-day Britain (including the police state aspects), and the present-day United States (including the secret assassinations part). It's the perfect concept cocktail to explore the dysfunctional projective shadow realm of the New World Order in the wake of the Bush-Cheney Revolution.
There is constant war, driven by corporations. There is too-centralized power contained in a bloodline. There is religion pervading all of public life. Best of all, there is a huge skyscraper that looks suspiciously like the Freedom Tower (the would-be replacement for the WTC in Manhattan) that lurks over it all. It just feels so damn creepy, and so damn good.
The part I liked most, I think, was the lack of independent press in the kingdom. Not only is there secret censorship of news items, but the news reporters slavishly follow the wishes of the royal family members in how they will report news. Gee, that sounds familiar.
It is both contemporary and yet anachronistic, in both speech and content. This alternate world has cell phones, jet fighters, and the Internet, yet battles are waged as if it were still World War I. I didn't mind this time period mixing, since this is supposed to be an alternate universe. In fact, it makes it all the compelling, to understand how these pieces could fit together (hopefully the writers have it figured out).
The soap opera plot lines, involving sex, scandal, intrigue, power, romance, etc., were all laid down well amidst a strange modern-day version of the story of young King David. Goliath is an enemy tank. David's harp is now a piano.
Ian McShane is impeccably cast as King Silas. The weight of the series will fall mostly on him, and I can think of no one else who could be in this role. That's how good he was.
OK, I'm gushing. Sometimes t.v. series tank after a good beginning, but this one, like David himself, was quite auspicious at its opening.
One final thought: the alternate reality of "Kings" was, on the surface, nothing like the alternate reality of Watchmen, and yet both had discussions of similar topics and themes. By coincidence, the soundtrack for Watchmen includes a version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." And then of course, there's that huge pit in the ground in Manhattan at the end of Watchmen, with those company logos on it: evidently where they are going to build that aforementioned skyscraper in "Kings."
But "Kings" was compelling right out of the gate, when the ads starting showing up during NBC's Sunday football broadcasts late last year. At first I was very much turned off by the concept, as somehow propaganda to prepare us for a religious monarchy in this country, but once I stood the alternate reality premise of it, I was pre-hooked on it. I was really hoping it wouldn't disappoint me.
The two-hour premiere was tonight. I settled in by the tube and watched it (without TiVo) with commercials and all. I was too eager to wait, and besides, there is something about having commercial breaks in network t.v. that still feels like it is the "correct" pacing.
But would it hold up to my expectations? Twenty minutes into it, I knew it was winner. After two hours, I knew it would join my tiny list of network shows that I still follow regularly.
The high concept of the story is absolutely superb. What appears to be present-day Manhattan is home to a religious kingdom that feels at once like Ancient Judea, present-day Israel, present-day Britain (including the police state aspects), and the present-day United States (including the secret assassinations part). It's the perfect concept cocktail to explore the dysfunctional projective shadow realm of the New World Order in the wake of the Bush-Cheney Revolution.
There is constant war, driven by corporations. There is too-centralized power contained in a bloodline. There is religion pervading all of public life. Best of all, there is a huge skyscraper that looks suspiciously like the Freedom Tower (the would-be replacement for the WTC in Manhattan) that lurks over it all. It just feels so damn creepy, and so damn good.
The part I liked most, I think, was the lack of independent press in the kingdom. Not only is there secret censorship of news items, but the news reporters slavishly follow the wishes of the royal family members in how they will report news. Gee, that sounds familiar.
It is both contemporary and yet anachronistic, in both speech and content. This alternate world has cell phones, jet fighters, and the Internet, yet battles are waged as if it were still World War I. I didn't mind this time period mixing, since this is supposed to be an alternate universe. In fact, it makes it all the compelling, to understand how these pieces could fit together (hopefully the writers have it figured out).
The soap opera plot lines, involving sex, scandal, intrigue, power, romance, etc., were all laid down well amidst a strange modern-day version of the story of young King David. Goliath is an enemy tank. David's harp is now a piano.
Ian McShane is impeccably cast as King Silas. The weight of the series will fall mostly on him, and I can think of no one else who could be in this role. That's how good he was.
OK, I'm gushing. Sometimes t.v. series tank after a good beginning, but this one, like David himself, was quite auspicious at its opening.
One final thought: the alternate reality of "Kings" was, on the surface, nothing like the alternate reality of Watchmen, and yet both had discussions of similar topics and themes. By coincidence, the soundtrack for Watchmen includes a version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." And then of course, there's that huge pit in the ground in Manhattan at the end of Watchmen, with those company logos on it: evidently where they are going to build that aforementioned skyscraper in "Kings."
Miss March
By Sunday it had been nine full days since I had seen the inside of a movie theater. My flu-cold relapse had kept me inside for four straight days, and I was beginning to get a bit antsy to get out. Three new wide-release movies had rolled into theaters on Friday, and to let the entire weekend go by without seeing one seemed like the wrong thing to do.
So I set off to Leominster on a perfect sunny afternoon. Spring was pushing its way into New England. When I got to the multiplex, however, I found the parking lot still rimmed by giant mountain ranges of plowed snow, covered in grime and soot like I remembered from my Midwestern childhood. But the sun felt pleasantly warm, and instead of my hat and gloves, I was now wearing sunglasses.
With the sap rising in the trees, it felt like a perfect afternoon for a teen sex comedy, perhaps. That goat-footed balloonman impulse was rearing its horned head on the marquees. I bought a matinee-priced ticket for Miss March and found myself in a mostly empty auditorium with four or five young teen couples. Evidently this passed for a date movie.
Normally with this kind of movie, I would be braced for the worst, but I had come to learn better. I knew by now that raunchy sex comedies had become Hollywood's favorite stealth vehicle for delivering sweet romantic tales with sentimental happy endings.
My suspicions were right, so this time I wasn't fooled at all by the raunch. I could see the heart of gold in this movie right from the start.
The premise was surprisingly fresh. We meet two teenage boys who are friends in high school. One, as you would expect for this type of movie, is the sex-absorbed "tail-chaser," completely controlled by his baser impulses. He is an avid subscriber of Playboy magazine (sort of quaintly anachronistic in the Internet age, if you ask me), and takes liberties in posing female clients at his job as a department store photographer. So far, so good.
But the protagonist, it turns out, is a twist on the standard formula. He is hapless with women, as the formula demands, but he's not at all interested in getting laid. He's actually a prude, and is determined to remain a virgin until marriage. He and his busty girlfriend give enthusiastic chastity lectures to elementary school students, but it is she who secretly wants them to break down and consummate their relationship. He is the one putting up a sincere fight against her pressure to get dirty.
A prudish male character like this is usually potrayed in a supporting role as a villain, shown to be malformed in his soul because of his repression, but here we get a very sympathetic portrait of him. We know he is sincere. Of course we also know the life force is going to conquer his resistance eventually. His girlfriend is just too hot to resist for long.
So the premise, in case you haven't seen the trailer, is this: the virginal young man breaks down and accedes to the young lady's request to deflower her during a wild post-Prom house party, at which he is awkwardly out of place.
To calm the young man's nerves before he ascends to the premarital sin chamber, his randy sex-absorbed friend forces him to down multiple rounds of hard liquor, something that he of course has very little experience with. The hapless virgin, too drunk to notice where he is going, opens the wrong door, falls down a flight of stairs, and gets brained by a heavy object.
The next thing he knows, he is being awakened by a reckless blow from a baseball bat being wielded by this same companion. He is in a hospital bed. It turns out that four years have elapsed, during which time the young virgin has been in a coma.
He quickly learns that his friend has no idea what has happened to his one-time sweetheart. She long ago went away to college and disappeared, it seems. Then quickly they find out that, by a weird coincidence, the old sweetheart is the centerfold in this month's Playboy magazine.
With the aid of a subplot that serves to force the pace of the action and put obstacles in their way, they quickly take to the road on a cross-country quest to get to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in order to reunite the virginal man-boy with his old flame. He must see her again, at least to know why she has abandoned him.
At this point, the movie slips somewhat into the genre of the "sex road trip" flick, although in this case sex isn't the ostensible goal of the virgin protagonist, because of his nature. The subplot that forced the action-quickening serves to keep them in danger the entire time, as they elude cadres of supporting characters who seek to do them harm.
The main plot is framed perfectly classically in a geographic sense: the two young men start on the East Coast, reach Chicago at the exact mid-point of the movie, and then head to L.A. for Act Three and the climax. In Chicago they link up with a comic relief character who serves to give them more grief during the "sex odyssey."
It took me about twenty minutes to realize that the raunchy teen sex comedy layer of the movie is actually satire, perhaps too clever to be noticed by most of the people watching it. As such, the movie walks a fine line between being just perfectly or too much offensively raunchy (and scatological) at times. If you can laugh at a parody of a hip-hop artist chanting the line "Suck my dick while I fuck that ass," then you'll be in on the satire part just fine.
There were a few obvious cliches, of course, but in satire you need to have cliches. Perhaps the most obvious one was the busty sexy lesbian couple who come to the aid of the young men when they are lost in the desert. Like I said, I was fine with all this.
The story had a nice classical climax (no pun intended) inside the Playboy Mansion as both young men get to have separate private audiences that each serve as the respective endpoints of their quests. The virginal young man finally gets to meet his ex-girlfriend, and we get a delightful "aha" twist revelation about what has really been going on for the last four years, one that serves as sweet testimony to the existence of true love after all.
Classically, as a balance, the sex-absorbed friend must therefore get a private audience with an older man, in this case the real Hugh Hefner, his personal hero, who patiently explains to him to the wisdom of true love, and the real meaning of life. He is thus lifted out of his "base" self and into true manhood, at which time he can make repair his life and find his own true love ending (or at least a satirical form of it).
The screenplay showed nice low-level stitching at this point: the sex-crazed friend barges into a room to meet Hef, whereas the virginal protagonist is already in a room, seated, when the girlfriend comes in to find him. Touches like that make for a good script.
Hefner's presence marks his second acting gig in eight months, after The House Bunny. It seems that the "Playboy Mansion movie" has become a mini-genre. The use of Hef's classic pipe as a prop was somewhat novel and appropriate here.
Like I said, the movie comes in on the crude side, but I found most of it quite fresh. At only ninety minutes, it flew by, never dragging for a moment.
The movie was written and directed by the two male leads, Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, who created the television show "The Whitest Kids U Know," which I had never heard of, until researching this blog post. Personally I was quite impressed. Count me fan. At the very least, this is another entry in my 2009 Movies I Didn't Hate.
So I set off to Leominster on a perfect sunny afternoon. Spring was pushing its way into New England. When I got to the multiplex, however, I found the parking lot still rimmed by giant mountain ranges of plowed snow, covered in grime and soot like I remembered from my Midwestern childhood. But the sun felt pleasantly warm, and instead of my hat and gloves, I was now wearing sunglasses.
With the sap rising in the trees, it felt like a perfect afternoon for a teen sex comedy, perhaps. That goat-footed balloonman impulse was rearing its horned head on the marquees. I bought a matinee-priced ticket for Miss March and found myself in a mostly empty auditorium with four or five young teen couples. Evidently this passed for a date movie.
Normally with this kind of movie, I would be braced for the worst, but I had come to learn better. I knew by now that raunchy sex comedies had become Hollywood's favorite stealth vehicle for delivering sweet romantic tales with sentimental happy endings.
My suspicions were right, so this time I wasn't fooled at all by the raunch. I could see the heart of gold in this movie right from the start.
The premise was surprisingly fresh. We meet two teenage boys who are friends in high school. One, as you would expect for this type of movie, is the sex-absorbed "tail-chaser," completely controlled by his baser impulses. He is an avid subscriber of Playboy magazine (sort of quaintly anachronistic in the Internet age, if you ask me), and takes liberties in posing female clients at his job as a department store photographer. So far, so good.
But the protagonist, it turns out, is a twist on the standard formula. He is hapless with women, as the formula demands, but he's not at all interested in getting laid. He's actually a prude, and is determined to remain a virgin until marriage. He and his busty girlfriend give enthusiastic chastity lectures to elementary school students, but it is she who secretly wants them to break down and consummate their relationship. He is the one putting up a sincere fight against her pressure to get dirty.
A prudish male character like this is usually potrayed in a supporting role as a villain, shown to be malformed in his soul because of his repression, but here we get a very sympathetic portrait of him. We know he is sincere. Of course we also know the life force is going to conquer his resistance eventually. His girlfriend is just too hot to resist for long.
So the premise, in case you haven't seen the trailer, is this: the virginal young man breaks down and accedes to the young lady's request to deflower her during a wild post-Prom house party, at which he is awkwardly out of place.
To calm the young man's nerves before he ascends to the premarital sin chamber, his randy sex-absorbed friend forces him to down multiple rounds of hard liquor, something that he of course has very little experience with. The hapless virgin, too drunk to notice where he is going, opens the wrong door, falls down a flight of stairs, and gets brained by a heavy object.
The next thing he knows, he is being awakened by a reckless blow from a baseball bat being wielded by this same companion. He is in a hospital bed. It turns out that four years have elapsed, during which time the young virgin has been in a coma.
He quickly learns that his friend has no idea what has happened to his one-time sweetheart. She long ago went away to college and disappeared, it seems. Then quickly they find out that, by a weird coincidence, the old sweetheart is the centerfold in this month's Playboy magazine.
With the aid of a subplot that serves to force the pace of the action and put obstacles in their way, they quickly take to the road on a cross-country quest to get to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in order to reunite the virginal man-boy with his old flame. He must see her again, at least to know why she has abandoned him.
At this point, the movie slips somewhat into the genre of the "sex road trip" flick, although in this case sex isn't the ostensible goal of the virgin protagonist, because of his nature. The subplot that forced the action-quickening serves to keep them in danger the entire time, as they elude cadres of supporting characters who seek to do them harm.
The main plot is framed perfectly classically in a geographic sense: the two young men start on the East Coast, reach Chicago at the exact mid-point of the movie, and then head to L.A. for Act Three and the climax. In Chicago they link up with a comic relief character who serves to give them more grief during the "sex odyssey."
It took me about twenty minutes to realize that the raunchy teen sex comedy layer of the movie is actually satire, perhaps too clever to be noticed by most of the people watching it. As such, the movie walks a fine line between being just perfectly or too much offensively raunchy (and scatological) at times. If you can laugh at a parody of a hip-hop artist chanting the line "Suck my dick while I fuck that ass," then you'll be in on the satire part just fine.
There were a few obvious cliches, of course, but in satire you need to have cliches. Perhaps the most obvious one was the busty sexy lesbian couple who come to the aid of the young men when they are lost in the desert. Like I said, I was fine with all this.
The story had a nice classical climax (no pun intended) inside the Playboy Mansion as both young men get to have separate private audiences that each serve as the respective endpoints of their quests. The virginal young man finally gets to meet his ex-girlfriend, and we get a delightful "aha" twist revelation about what has really been going on for the last four years, one that serves as sweet testimony to the existence of true love after all.
Classically, as a balance, the sex-absorbed friend must therefore get a private audience with an older man, in this case the real Hugh Hefner, his personal hero, who patiently explains to him to the wisdom of true love, and the real meaning of life. He is thus lifted out of his "base" self and into true manhood, at which time he can make repair his life and find his own true love ending (or at least a satirical form of it).
The screenplay showed nice low-level stitching at this point: the sex-crazed friend barges into a room to meet Hef, whereas the virginal protagonist is already in a room, seated, when the girlfriend comes in to find him. Touches like that make for a good script.
Hefner's presence marks his second acting gig in eight months, after The House Bunny. It seems that the "Playboy Mansion movie" has become a mini-genre. The use of Hef's classic pipe as a prop was somewhat novel and appropriate here.
Like I said, the movie comes in on the crude side, but I found most of it quite fresh. At only ninety minutes, it flew by, never dragging for a moment.
The movie was written and directed by the two male leads, Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, who created the television show "The Whitest Kids U Know," which I had never heard of, until researching this blog post. Personally I was quite impressed. Count me fan. At the very least, this is another entry in my 2009 Movies I Didn't Hate.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
The Obama Deception
UPDATE: High-res full-length version available here.
Since I'm wearing that Rorschach mask, I might as well address this one...
What I'm about to write is surely going to royally piss off some of my Democratic liberal friends. But I must admit: I am a huge fan of Alex Jones.
Say what you want to about him---he's a bit pompous at times, to be sure---but the guy is one of the few people out there covering some of the most important issues of our time, things that are being completely ignored by the corporate puppet media, but which I believe will be obvious to future historians as being the critical issues of the early 21st Century.
From everything I can see, he actually does his homework, and contrary to what many people think, he is sufficiently skeptical and balanced to be a good filter for finding the truth. It weren't for him, we'd have virtual radio silence about some of the most important political and economic issues determining how we will live in the future.
Back in Austin in the 1990s, Jacques and I used to watch him on access cable. Jones was just out of high school and getting started on his long journey. Jacques was in film production and knew the same crowd, and we thought of him as part of the Austin fringe ecology that all of us, in way or another, were part of.
But now I'm an avid follower of Jones, having come independently, through long painstaking research, to many of the same conclusions about geopolitics as he has. In fact, I could probably tell him a thing or two that he doesn't even know yet, things that Thor and I found out that really blew our minds.
Now about The Obama Deception, Jones' new two-hour documentary which was just released this week, the latest of many such documentaries that Jones has made. First of all, although you can order a high quality version online, you can also watch it for free on Youtube split into twelve 10-minute segments (due to Youtube's limitations on length). You just have to tab/search for the next segment after each one is done.
You can also watch the whole two hours at once here at Google Video, but I'll continue to refer to the specific Youtube segments here.
I'd seen much of the material before, on Youtube and elsewhere, but it was excellent to see it compiled again, especially the 2008 Bilderberg Group summit. Jones's graphic description of the Bilderberg authority chain, along with Webster Griffin Tarpley's description of the actual mechanics of the financial elite in Part 4 was one of the best I have ever heard on the subject.
The history of the rise of the shadow banking system the Twentieth Century in Part 8 was also one of the most succinct and informative I have heard. You can tell that Jones has had a long time to polish his message and get his facts down pat.
I've personally verified much of what he has to say, at least as much as I can through factual historical background research. But here it's all so clear, it just makes me want to wretch all over again.
By the time you get to Part 9, about the plan for the Bank of the World, if you aren't sufficiently scared, then, well, I don't know what to say.
Webster Tarpley doesn't believe in man-made Global Warming (that's a heresy strong enough to close many minds I know), but whether or not you accept global warming as man-made doesn't really matter at all in this case, because the global financial elite are already openly planning to use the threat of global warming to control us in a big way through ubiquitous regulations and taxes imposed by supranational global organizations. Along with the "Greatest Depression" crisis now unfolding at their making, the belief that "anything must be done" to save us from Global Warming will become their greatest tool of control over us.
Just as Bush basically told us that "to save us from terror, we have to give up our freedoms," we will increasingly hear that that "to save us from global warming, we have to give up our freedoms." Of course they won't phrase it quite like that. It will be more in the form of having to cede national sovereignty to unelected global organizations. This has been their one overriding unrelenting drumbeat for almost a century, in one form or another. It is the solution they offer to every problem. In 2009, they are beginning to see that their goal is in sight, if they can just get us to go along with the final steps.
In the film, there's also the irrascible Jesse, whom I just love. There's a great quote from him about the U.S. political system being much like the theater of pro wrestling.
And of course, there's also my man Dennis K, to whom I gave money and for whom I flew the flag outside my apartment all last spring. On the day he dropped out of the race, I turned my yard sign inside out to all black, and kept it that way for a month in mourning.
By the way, this is a great stealth video (available on disk) to send to any of your fascist right-wing Republican friends who think Obama is a raving socialist. They will love the title, but then be suckered when they learn the truth about the Bush family being the greatest criminals of all time.
One thing I didn't like was Gerald Celente's parroting of the long debunked fake Lincoln quote supposedly warning about the day when "corporations have been enthroned." I usually like Celente, but the real Lincoln would never have said anything remotely close to that, since he was arguably the greatest advocate of centralized corporate rule in American history up to that point (Lincoln was a complex dude). That was the entire point of the Whig/Republican party (how little things really change).
It's not easy for me to admit that I was suckered by Obama. I spent most of the spring of 2008 cheering him on, while cursing at the media for being so flagrantly worshipful of Hillary Clinton. But the evidence in The Obama Deception (starting with all the already-broken promises and deceptions in Part 5) is pretty straightforward.
If you were an Obama supporter, it sure felt so damn good to see the Republicans get clobbered. I just loved seeing Sarah Palin go down in righteous flames. Who wouldn't? There was nothing like it ever.
But that was then. I wanted him to win so badly. But I think I was very wrong about him. I didn't want to see the truth about him. Now I'm ironically thankful that the absentee ballot screwup by my county registrar saved me from having to vote for him. How twisted is that?
My belief is now that the longer you stick with Obama, the more heartbreaking it is going to be, when the truth finally smacks you in the face. Believe me, I know your pain. I spent my life waiting for a guy like him to trounce the evildoers. To admit openly I've been conned so deeply is not easy. To make it worse, I probably knew better the whole damn time, but I kept telling myself that maybe I was wrong, that he wasn't a Judas Goat, and that he was just catering to the elite to deceive them until he got elected, but he would be "different" once he was in power.
Meanwhile they are going to keep talking about the scumbag fascist thug Rush Limbaugh at every chance they get. They know that you just hate Limbaugh, and since Limbaugh hates Obama, if you hate Obama, you must be pro-Limbaugh, right? Feels disgusting, doesn't it? That's the diabolical eddy that will keep you in darkness. That's how the right-left spectrum works to keep you enslaved. They know what your hopes are. They know what your hates are. They will promise you everything, and then enslave you.
Of course, you can chose not to watch this or believe it, if you want. You can tell me I'm full of crap and that Obama is everything beautiful that we thought he was going to be. I actually hope you're right, but from what I see, I don't think you are. That's your privilege and right to believe that. I won't argue with you, if you think I'm nuts.
But if you want to convince me otherwise, first watch Jones' whole documentary, and afterward, you better have your facts lined up if you want to change my mind. I'm sorry, but your feelings about Obama don't count in my book. That's exactly how the evangelical hatemongers felt about Bush. Remember how easy it was to see how deluded they were? Surely you're smarter than they are?
But hey, that is Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel on the video tape in Part 10 saying that if you're on the fascist and arbitrary no-fly list, you won't be allowed to buy a handgun in America because "your right to bear arms is cancelled." If you still think that's a good thing, than I have nothing much I can say to you.
And yes, I have indeed read Richard Hofstadter's excellent essay and agree with much of what he says.
It's comforting to believe the Obama Myth for the time being. Sure, Jones is just a raving lunatic, right? This has all been debunked, right? Right?
One thing I disagree with Jones about is that he loathed the movie Watchmen because he saw the ending as "in your face propaganda for the Illuminati." He cites Alan Moore's supposed Masonic-style satanism as proof of this. I see his point, but I took the ending as irony, like a Twilight Zone episode.
Moreover, as I've said, I don't think it matters. Art always subverts power. It subverts even when it is supposedly enslaved to it. It is the nature of the chaotic force within art, that even when it tries to buttress repression, it works against it. At least that's my view. That's why I keep going to Hollywood movies. So in a way, it doesn't matter what the "intention" of Watchmen was.
OK. Enough of being Rorschach for now. I apologize if I've offended, but I had to come out of the closet.
Anyway, after four days of a bad head cold, I think I'm ready to head out to movie theaters again to see regular movies. There's a new Hollywood release about space aliens that just came out...
Since I'm wearing that Rorschach mask, I might as well address this one...
What I'm about to write is surely going to royally piss off some of my Democratic liberal friends. But I must admit: I am a huge fan of Alex Jones.
Say what you want to about him---he's a bit pompous at times, to be sure---but the guy is one of the few people out there covering some of the most important issues of our time, things that are being completely ignored by the corporate puppet media, but which I believe will be obvious to future historians as being the critical issues of the early 21st Century.
From everything I can see, he actually does his homework, and contrary to what many people think, he is sufficiently skeptical and balanced to be a good filter for finding the truth. It weren't for him, we'd have virtual radio silence about some of the most important political and economic issues determining how we will live in the future.
Back in Austin in the 1990s, Jacques and I used to watch him on access cable. Jones was just out of high school and getting started on his long journey. Jacques was in film production and knew the same crowd, and we thought of him as part of the Austin fringe ecology that all of us, in way or another, were part of.
But now I'm an avid follower of Jones, having come independently, through long painstaking research, to many of the same conclusions about geopolitics as he has. In fact, I could probably tell him a thing or two that he doesn't even know yet, things that Thor and I found out that really blew our minds.
Now about The Obama Deception, Jones' new two-hour documentary which was just released this week, the latest of many such documentaries that Jones has made. First of all, although you can order a high quality version online, you can also watch it for free on Youtube split into twelve 10-minute segments (due to Youtube's limitations on length). You just have to tab/search for the next segment after each one is done.
You can also watch the whole two hours at once here at Google Video, but I'll continue to refer to the specific Youtube segments here.
I'd seen much of the material before, on Youtube and elsewhere, but it was excellent to see it compiled again, especially the 2008 Bilderberg Group summit. Jones's graphic description of the Bilderberg authority chain, along with Webster Griffin Tarpley's description of the actual mechanics of the financial elite in Part 4 was one of the best I have ever heard on the subject.
The history of the rise of the shadow banking system the Twentieth Century in Part 8 was also one of the most succinct and informative I have heard. You can tell that Jones has had a long time to polish his message and get his facts down pat.
I've personally verified much of what he has to say, at least as much as I can through factual historical background research. But here it's all so clear, it just makes me want to wretch all over again.
By the time you get to Part 9, about the plan for the Bank of the World, if you aren't sufficiently scared, then, well, I don't know what to say.
Webster Tarpley doesn't believe in man-made Global Warming (that's a heresy strong enough to close many minds I know), but whether or not you accept global warming as man-made doesn't really matter at all in this case, because the global financial elite are already openly planning to use the threat of global warming to control us in a big way through ubiquitous regulations and taxes imposed by supranational global organizations. Along with the "Greatest Depression" crisis now unfolding at their making, the belief that "anything must be done" to save us from Global Warming will become their greatest tool of control over us.
Just as Bush basically told us that "to save us from terror, we have to give up our freedoms," we will increasingly hear that that "to save us from global warming, we have to give up our freedoms." Of course they won't phrase it quite like that. It will be more in the form of having to cede national sovereignty to unelected global organizations. This has been their one overriding unrelenting drumbeat for almost a century, in one form or another. It is the solution they offer to every problem. In 2009, they are beginning to see that their goal is in sight, if they can just get us to go along with the final steps.
In the film, there's also the irrascible Jesse, whom I just love. There's a great quote from him about the U.S. political system being much like the theater of pro wrestling.
And of course, there's also my man Dennis K, to whom I gave money and for whom I flew the flag outside my apartment all last spring. On the day he dropped out of the race, I turned my yard sign inside out to all black, and kept it that way for a month in mourning.
By the way, this is a great stealth video (available on disk) to send to any of your fascist right-wing Republican friends who think Obama is a raving socialist. They will love the title, but then be suckered when they learn the truth about the Bush family being the greatest criminals of all time.
One thing I didn't like was Gerald Celente's parroting of the long debunked fake Lincoln quote supposedly warning about the day when "corporations have been enthroned." I usually like Celente, but the real Lincoln would never have said anything remotely close to that, since he was arguably the greatest advocate of centralized corporate rule in American history up to that point (Lincoln was a complex dude). That was the entire point of the Whig/Republican party (how little things really change).
It's not easy for me to admit that I was suckered by Obama. I spent most of the spring of 2008 cheering him on, while cursing at the media for being so flagrantly worshipful of Hillary Clinton. But the evidence in The Obama Deception (starting with all the already-broken promises and deceptions in Part 5) is pretty straightforward.
If you were an Obama supporter, it sure felt so damn good to see the Republicans get clobbered. I just loved seeing Sarah Palin go down in righteous flames. Who wouldn't? There was nothing like it ever.
But that was then. I wanted him to win so badly. But I think I was very wrong about him. I didn't want to see the truth about him. Now I'm ironically thankful that the absentee ballot screwup by my county registrar saved me from having to vote for him. How twisted is that?
My belief is now that the longer you stick with Obama, the more heartbreaking it is going to be, when the truth finally smacks you in the face. Believe me, I know your pain. I spent my life waiting for a guy like him to trounce the evildoers. To admit openly I've been conned so deeply is not easy. To make it worse, I probably knew better the whole damn time, but I kept telling myself that maybe I was wrong, that he wasn't a Judas Goat, and that he was just catering to the elite to deceive them until he got elected, but he would be "different" once he was in power.
Meanwhile they are going to keep talking about the scumbag fascist thug Rush Limbaugh at every chance they get. They know that you just hate Limbaugh, and since Limbaugh hates Obama, if you hate Obama, you must be pro-Limbaugh, right? Feels disgusting, doesn't it? That's the diabolical eddy that will keep you in darkness. That's how the right-left spectrum works to keep you enslaved. They know what your hopes are. They know what your hates are. They will promise you everything, and then enslave you.
Of course, you can chose not to watch this or believe it, if you want. You can tell me I'm full of crap and that Obama is everything beautiful that we thought he was going to be. I actually hope you're right, but from what I see, I don't think you are. That's your privilege and right to believe that. I won't argue with you, if you think I'm nuts.
But if you want to convince me otherwise, first watch Jones' whole documentary, and afterward, you better have your facts lined up if you want to change my mind. I'm sorry, but your feelings about Obama don't count in my book. That's exactly how the evangelical hatemongers felt about Bush. Remember how easy it was to see how deluded they were? Surely you're smarter than they are?
But hey, that is Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel on the video tape in Part 10 saying that if you're on the fascist and arbitrary no-fly list, you won't be allowed to buy a handgun in America because "your right to bear arms is cancelled." If you still think that's a good thing, than I have nothing much I can say to you.
And yes, I have indeed read Richard Hofstadter's excellent essay and agree with much of what he says.
It's comforting to believe the Obama Myth for the time being. Sure, Jones is just a raving lunatic, right? This has all been debunked, right? Right?
One thing I disagree with Jones about is that he loathed the movie Watchmen because he saw the ending as "in your face propaganda for the Illuminati." He cites Alan Moore's supposed Masonic-style satanism as proof of this. I see his point, but I took the ending as irony, like a Twilight Zone episode.
Moreover, as I've said, I don't think it matters. Art always subverts power. It subverts even when it is supposedly enslaved to it. It is the nature of the chaotic force within art, that even when it tries to buttress repression, it works against it. At least that's my view. That's why I keep going to Hollywood movies. So in a way, it doesn't matter what the "intention" of Watchmen was.
OK. Enough of being Rorschach for now. I apologize if I've offended, but I had to come out of the closet.
Anyway, after four days of a bad head cold, I think I'm ready to head out to movie theaters again to see regular movies. There's a new Hollywood release about space aliens that just came out...
Monday, March 9, 2009
Watchmen (continued)
One of the many things I liked about Watchmen was its portrayal of the physicist character, Dr. Manhattan. When I read Moore's graphic novel, I thought he got it quite right, and Snyder's movie was a smooth adaptation of this to the screen.
To put it bluntly, most of the physicist characters in popular movies and televison are just flat out wrong. They don't correspond to the really physicists I have known. The problem, I think, is a quintessentially Postmodern one: most physicist characters are not written based on real physicists known by the writer/director/actor, but on other stereotypes they have known. Thus the physicist characters are fourth-generation copies of falsehoods, but ones with the weight of Postmodern "reality" in the minds of those creating and watching them.
Understanding this was actually one of the most important mental breakthroughs I had in understanding Postmodernity as a whole: the concept that the simulacrum has become more real than the underlying reality.
The most jarring "real" aspect of the Dr. Manhattan character is how he becomes, over time, increasingly detached from concerns about humanity. This is exactly how I came to feel over many years in graduate school, assembling a thesis that was very close to the sci-fi material in the movie, namely tachyons and time synchronization issues in the relativistic realm.
Specifically I came to regard the social sciences as somewhat quaint and meaningless. The idea of trying to elicit "truth" out of the study of human nature seemed increasingly like a parlor game unworthy of serious academic study.
Moreover, the idea of studying such banal things as the Stock Market and international finance seemed like the greatest waste of time of all. They seemed so evanescent, so transitory, that any mental effort devoted to them was tantamount to the work of insects, not human intellect.
But everything changes. What seemed so clear to me ten years ago when I was writing about relativistic phenomena has now become so blurred. A decade of exposure to the world outside physics has made me much less like Dr. Manhattan and much more like the Rorschach character, mumbling in the streets about the Communist conspiracy to destroy America.
The Dr. Manhattan vs. Rorschach dichotomy is actually the final showdown in both Moore's book and in the movie. I feel like I've lived both sides of it now, which is perhaps one reason why I connected so strongly to the movie.
To put it bluntly, most of the physicist characters in popular movies and televison are just flat out wrong. They don't correspond to the really physicists I have known. The problem, I think, is a quintessentially Postmodern one: most physicist characters are not written based on real physicists known by the writer/director/actor, but on other stereotypes they have known. Thus the physicist characters are fourth-generation copies of falsehoods, but ones with the weight of Postmodern "reality" in the minds of those creating and watching them.
Understanding this was actually one of the most important mental breakthroughs I had in understanding Postmodernity as a whole: the concept that the simulacrum has become more real than the underlying reality.
The most jarring "real" aspect of the Dr. Manhattan character is how he becomes, over time, increasingly detached from concerns about humanity. This is exactly how I came to feel over many years in graduate school, assembling a thesis that was very close to the sci-fi material in the movie, namely tachyons and time synchronization issues in the relativistic realm.
Specifically I came to regard the social sciences as somewhat quaint and meaningless. The idea of trying to elicit "truth" out of the study of human nature seemed increasingly like a parlor game unworthy of serious academic study.
Moreover, the idea of studying such banal things as the Stock Market and international finance seemed like the greatest waste of time of all. They seemed so evanescent, so transitory, that any mental effort devoted to them was tantamount to the work of insects, not human intellect.
But everything changes. What seemed so clear to me ten years ago when I was writing about relativistic phenomena has now become so blurred. A decade of exposure to the world outside physics has made me much less like Dr. Manhattan and much more like the Rorschach character, mumbling in the streets about the Communist conspiracy to destroy America.
The Dr. Manhattan vs. Rorschach dichotomy is actually the final showdown in both Moore's book and in the movie. I feel like I've lived both sides of it now, which is perhaps one reason why I connected so strongly to the movie.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Watchmen
Just got back from the matinee in Leominster about fifteen minutes ago. All I can say is...wow.
There is so much I could write about this, and if I try to write about it now, it will be pointless, because I will want to write more later.
For now, I can say that I think this is not only a masterpiece, but is probably the most important landmark in Hollywood cinematic storytelling since The Matrix, which came out almost exactly ten years ago.
I had certain problems with The Dark Knight, despite the awesome performance by Heath Ledger. But Watchmen was totally different. The two movies are not even in the same league.
I had read Alan Moore's graphic novel during several sittings in the coffee shop of the Barnes and Noble in Nashua, New Hampshire last month. I agree with everyone saying this was a magnificiently faithful rendition of the Moore's work.
More later, but that's my initial impression. This will be the movie of 2009.
There is so much I could write about this, and if I try to write about it now, it will be pointless, because I will want to write more later.
For now, I can say that I think this is not only a masterpiece, but is probably the most important landmark in Hollywood cinematic storytelling since The Matrix, which came out almost exactly ten years ago.
I had certain problems with The Dark Knight, despite the awesome performance by Heath Ledger. But Watchmen was totally different. The two movies are not even in the same league.
I had read Alan Moore's graphic novel during several sittings in the coffee shop of the Barnes and Noble in Nashua, New Hampshire last month. I agree with everyone saying this was a magnificiently faithful rendition of the Moore's work.
More later, but that's my initial impression. This will be the movie of 2009.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Echelon Conspiracy
Sunday morning my sister had a showing of their house for sale, and I took the opportunity to scurry up to Tyngsboro during the early flakes of a snowstorm Nor'easter to catch the four-buck early showing of Echelon Conspiracy, a new Friday release that has gotten almost no publicity.
I had seen the trailer once, and was a bit suspicious, but it turned out to be a decent thriller that didn't insult me with War on Terror bullshit. Anytime you make the NSA the bad guy, you've gotten my sympathy vote! This definitely goes on my 2009 list of Movies I Sorta Liked.
While I was watching it, I started to formulate it in my new favorite way, through what I call story paradigms. Basically it is the idea that most Hollywood movies are made up of various lines of narrative that are recycled from other movies. Of course this is very old idea, but there is nothing like building this method from the ground by yourself, without outside help.
The point is not to reduce the entire movie to a single well-used narrative. Each movie is, in fact, original in some way, or else it wouldn't be done. A movie contains multiple story paradigms that are happening at once, creating the "genetic sequence" of the story that makes it different from other movies in the same genre. The core idea is to identify the essential story ideas, i.e., the ones that the story actually depends upon.
My first take on the story paradigms of Echelon Conspiracy:
1. Through fate, an innocent average Joe gets tangled up in what turns out to be a huge web of intrigue, pitting forces of good versus evil on scales he could hardly have imagined at the start of the story. His life is put in danger, and he hardly ever knows whom to trust, but eventually he emerges as the key to victory of good over evil.
2. Dark and corrupt forces within the United States federal government seek to undermine the liberties of the American people and impose tyranny. They are eventually brought down and exposed, with the help of ordinary citizens and good guys within the government itself.
3. Computer-driven surveillance technology runs amok, turning the lives of ordinary citizens into an Orwellian nightware. Eventually the technology is defeated.
4. Americans are overwhelmed by evil within their own government, but wise Russians, accustomed this kind of skullduggery, help them overcome it.
For a story paradigm to be valid, it must be one that appears in multiple movies over time. Some paradigms are very long lasting. Others are very topical and are short-lived, reflecting current trends.
Story paradigm numbers one and three above are also found in last year's Eagle Eye, a movie that seems like the antecedent to Echelon Conspiracy. But I liked Echelon Conspiracy a lot more because it was less campy about the technology, and it took story paradigm number two a lot more seriously without any "Global War on Terror" distraction.
Story paradigm number one seemed somewhat fresh in this case, partly because it had a Chaucerian spin, in which Average Joe gets seduced into the intrigue plot by his own weaknesses.
In addition to story paradigms, I also look for the cliches, which are sometimes simply story paradigms or story devices that have outlived their usefulness. In Echelon Conspiracy, I noted:
1. A beautiful woman befriends and seduces the average Joe hero. It turns out she has a hidden agenda, but he winds up winning her heart anyway.
2. The hero stops the omniscient self-aware computer-run-amok by reasoning with it, forcing it to logically admit that its impending "doomsday task" is at odds with its prime programming directive.
Number one was fresh when it appeared in North By Northwest (1959), but it feels way overdone at the present time. We all know that no beautiful woman sleeps with Average Joe unless she wants something for the uberboss she's working for.
Number two was fresh when it appeared in the "The Return of the Archons" (1967) and in War Games (1983).
In this case, the cliches were acceptable and didn't mar the movie too much. The twist ending involving the Kremlin was sort of cool. Leave it to the Russians to come up with a fresh take on American psychoses.
I had seen the trailer once, and was a bit suspicious, but it turned out to be a decent thriller that didn't insult me with War on Terror bullshit. Anytime you make the NSA the bad guy, you've gotten my sympathy vote! This definitely goes on my 2009 list of Movies I Sorta Liked.
While I was watching it, I started to formulate it in my new favorite way, through what I call story paradigms. Basically it is the idea that most Hollywood movies are made up of various lines of narrative that are recycled from other movies. Of course this is very old idea, but there is nothing like building this method from the ground by yourself, without outside help.
The point is not to reduce the entire movie to a single well-used narrative. Each movie is, in fact, original in some way, or else it wouldn't be done. A movie contains multiple story paradigms that are happening at once, creating the "genetic sequence" of the story that makes it different from other movies in the same genre. The core idea is to identify the essential story ideas, i.e., the ones that the story actually depends upon.
My first take on the story paradigms of Echelon Conspiracy:
1. Through fate, an innocent average Joe gets tangled up in what turns out to be a huge web of intrigue, pitting forces of good versus evil on scales he could hardly have imagined at the start of the story. His life is put in danger, and he hardly ever knows whom to trust, but eventually he emerges as the key to victory of good over evil.
2. Dark and corrupt forces within the United States federal government seek to undermine the liberties of the American people and impose tyranny. They are eventually brought down and exposed, with the help of ordinary citizens and good guys within the government itself.
3. Computer-driven surveillance technology runs amok, turning the lives of ordinary citizens into an Orwellian nightware. Eventually the technology is defeated.
4. Americans are overwhelmed by evil within their own government, but wise Russians, accustomed this kind of skullduggery, help them overcome it.
For a story paradigm to be valid, it must be one that appears in multiple movies over time. Some paradigms are very long lasting. Others are very topical and are short-lived, reflecting current trends.
Story paradigm numbers one and three above are also found in last year's Eagle Eye, a movie that seems like the antecedent to Echelon Conspiracy. But I liked Echelon Conspiracy a lot more because it was less campy about the technology, and it took story paradigm number two a lot more seriously without any "Global War on Terror" distraction.
Story paradigm number one seemed somewhat fresh in this case, partly because it had a Chaucerian spin, in which Average Joe gets seduced into the intrigue plot by his own weaknesses.
In addition to story paradigms, I also look for the cliches, which are sometimes simply story paradigms or story devices that have outlived their usefulness. In Echelon Conspiracy, I noted:
1. A beautiful woman befriends and seduces the average Joe hero. It turns out she has a hidden agenda, but he winds up winning her heart anyway.
2. The hero stops the omniscient self-aware computer-run-amok by reasoning with it, forcing it to logically admit that its impending "doomsday task" is at odds with its prime programming directive.
Number one was fresh when it appeared in North By Northwest (1959), but it feels way overdone at the present time. We all know that no beautiful woman sleeps with Average Joe unless she wants something for the uberboss she's working for.
Number two was fresh when it appeared in the "The Return of the Archons" (1967) and in War Games (1983).
In this case, the cliches were acceptable and didn't mar the movie too much. The twist ending involving the Kremlin was sort of cool. Leave it to the Russians to come up with a fresh take on American psychoses.
Street Figther: the Legend of Chun-Li
It's not every day I see a movie without ever having seen a single trailer for it. Moreover, even though it had been out only two days, Street Fighter: the Legend of Chun Li had been panned into oblivion by the time I got to the Regal Solomon Pond on Saturday after to catch this. Somehow it wasn't booked in Leominster or Tyngsboro. I guess they figured they didn't want to waste auditorium space on it.
Kristin Kreuk---well, I used to be a Smallville fan of sorts, so I wanted to give her a break. At first it was excruciating to watch her, in particular whenever she did a voice over.
But the movie settled into a rhythm and I began to enjoy it. Neal McDonough always makes a fine villain, but tell me, if his parents abadoned him in the Bangkok slums when he was an infant, how did he still wind up with a thick Irish brogue?
The movie was at its worst when it was trying to be an adaptation of the video game upon which it is based. The girl gets an ancient Chinese scroll as an anonymous gift. She takes it to a dealer in the alleyways of Hong Kong, who reads two lines of it and says, "You must go to Bangkok."
Really? That's it? It took an ancient scroll to say that? But no doubt this particular MacGuffin is something that the game players have seen before, so it must make its appearance. In movie terms, it was just silly.
But like I said, I actually began to like it a little, even with the bad acting and slopping direction. The martial arts scenes were actually a bit watchable, and the whole episode in which the heroine "goes under" (untergehen, in the Nietzschean sense) by living hand-to-mouth on the streets of Bangkok was somehow compelling, even though it was rather unnecessary to the story.
Let me summarize the story paradigms (since this is what I spent most of the movie doing anyway):
1. A young girl witnesses a horrible crime perpetrated against her father by dark forces. When she grows up, she hunts down the evil mastermind and gets revenge.
2. She is martial artist, but her talent is raw. After suffering setbacks, she meets a master who shows her how to hone her skills (by releasing her anger, of course) until she is ready for the showdown.
3. A male and female cop develop an erotic attachment to each other while chasing the bad guys.
4. An evil globalized corporation terrorizes the slum dwellers of a Third World metropolis, using a private security force to kill those who get in its way. The police are overwhelmed at first, but through determination and luck, they get the upper hand.
Number four in the above list was actually quite fresh, very 2009, and was the reason this movie was somewhat entertaining. I can forgive a lot of things about a movie when it has these kinds of themes.
Now for the cliche list. Besides the aforementioned martial arts-related stuff, the most obvious ones were:
1. A busty and leggy female cop hunts down the bad guys while wearing leather and riding a motorcycle.
2. All other things being equal, the protagonist is also an accomplished concert musician who solos on stage with a symphony orchestra.
Number one is plausible and almost necessary, given the story paradigms. But number two just made me groan when I saw it. There should be a ban on this one.
Like I said, the globalization thing won me over. The cinematography of Bangkok was surprisingly interesting for this kind of movie. Perhaps the most disappointing thing was the climax, when the heroine finally kills the bad guy. Following the recent trends, she executes him while he is helpless, preferring to pass judgment on him even though the cops are right around the corner.
As I've said, we no longer trust the State to provide justice to us. There is too much corruption, even when one of the big bad guys goes down.
Kristin Kreuk---well, I used to be a Smallville fan of sorts, so I wanted to give her a break. At first it was excruciating to watch her, in particular whenever she did a voice over.
But the movie settled into a rhythm and I began to enjoy it. Neal McDonough always makes a fine villain, but tell me, if his parents abadoned him in the Bangkok slums when he was an infant, how did he still wind up with a thick Irish brogue?
The movie was at its worst when it was trying to be an adaptation of the video game upon which it is based. The girl gets an ancient Chinese scroll as an anonymous gift. She takes it to a dealer in the alleyways of Hong Kong, who reads two lines of it and says, "You must go to Bangkok."
Really? That's it? It took an ancient scroll to say that? But no doubt this particular MacGuffin is something that the game players have seen before, so it must make its appearance. In movie terms, it was just silly.
But like I said, I actually began to like it a little, even with the bad acting and slopping direction. The martial arts scenes were actually a bit watchable, and the whole episode in which the heroine "goes under" (untergehen, in the Nietzschean sense) by living hand-to-mouth on the streets of Bangkok was somehow compelling, even though it was rather unnecessary to the story.
Let me summarize the story paradigms (since this is what I spent most of the movie doing anyway):
1. A young girl witnesses a horrible crime perpetrated against her father by dark forces. When she grows up, she hunts down the evil mastermind and gets revenge.
2. She is martial artist, but her talent is raw. After suffering setbacks, she meets a master who shows her how to hone her skills (by releasing her anger, of course) until she is ready for the showdown.
3. A male and female cop develop an erotic attachment to each other while chasing the bad guys.
4. An evil globalized corporation terrorizes the slum dwellers of a Third World metropolis, using a private security force to kill those who get in its way. The police are overwhelmed at first, but through determination and luck, they get the upper hand.
Number four in the above list was actually quite fresh, very 2009, and was the reason this movie was somewhat entertaining. I can forgive a lot of things about a movie when it has these kinds of themes.
Now for the cliche list. Besides the aforementioned martial arts-related stuff, the most obvious ones were:
1. A busty and leggy female cop hunts down the bad guys while wearing leather and riding a motorcycle.
2. All other things being equal, the protagonist is also an accomplished concert musician who solos on stage with a symphony orchestra.
Number one is plausible and almost necessary, given the story paradigms. But number two just made me groan when I saw it. There should be a ban on this one.
Like I said, the globalization thing won me over. The cinematography of Bangkok was surprisingly interesting for this kind of movie. Perhaps the most disappointing thing was the climax, when the heroine finally kills the bad guy. Following the recent trends, she executes him while he is helpless, preferring to pass judgment on him even though the cops are right around the corner.
As I've said, we no longer trust the State to provide justice to us. There is too much corruption, even when one of the big bad guys goes down.
Jonas Brothers: the 3-D Concert Experience
You would think I could catch a break on this. After driving all the way to Methuen to buy a ticket to the very first matinee show on the day of release, I walk into the auditorium five minutes before showtime and find that the place is packed. Judging by what I saw, there were a lot of absences of pre-teen and early teenage girls in schools on Friday.
Is there a narrative to a concert show? I suppose so. In the intro, which starts at the Trump International Hotel in New York City, we follow the three brothers as they make their way through Manhattan to their show. Along the way they get mobbed by screaming girl fans and have to escape by helicopter---very Hard Day's Night.
But the real narrative to Jonas Brothers: the 3-D Concert Experience is the show itself, at Madison Square Garden. You don't need 3-D glasses to imagine the sound of twenty-five thousand girls screaming in glee at once. The story is the arrangement of the numbers, and the choreography A couple fast ones, then a slow ballad, then back to fast. Slip in a couple guest appearances, including one by Taylor Swift, who is skinnier than I would have imagined.
It flew by fast, the whole thing. I never got bored. Disney knows how to produce and package these shows. Was it just me, or was hosing down the entire audience with confetti a little, uh, suggestive? I guess I have a dirty mind.
A year ago these guys were nobodies, but they got a guest shot in Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: the Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour. A year can make a big difference is the life of teenagers. I suppose next year it will be Demi Lovato's turn.
My toe was tapping a couple times. The numbers weren't bad. It was well-staged, but very very sanitized. Afterward I got home and couldn't remember any of the lyrics to any of the songs. But along the way, they had gotten my fifteen bucks in Methuen.
Is there a narrative to a concert show? I suppose so. In the intro, which starts at the Trump International Hotel in New York City, we follow the three brothers as they make their way through Manhattan to their show. Along the way they get mobbed by screaming girl fans and have to escape by helicopter---very Hard Day's Night.
But the real narrative to Jonas Brothers: the 3-D Concert Experience is the show itself, at Madison Square Garden. You don't need 3-D glasses to imagine the sound of twenty-five thousand girls screaming in glee at once. The story is the arrangement of the numbers, and the choreography A couple fast ones, then a slow ballad, then back to fast. Slip in a couple guest appearances, including one by Taylor Swift, who is skinnier than I would have imagined.
It flew by fast, the whole thing. I never got bored. Disney knows how to produce and package these shows. Was it just me, or was hosing down the entire audience with confetti a little, uh, suggestive? I guess I have a dirty mind.
A year ago these guys were nobodies, but they got a guest shot in Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: the Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour. A year can make a big difference is the life of teenagers. I suppose next year it will be Demi Lovato's turn.
My toe was tapping a couple times. The numbers weren't bad. It was well-staged, but very very sanitized. Afterward I got home and couldn't remember any of the lyrics to any of the songs. But along the way, they had gotten my fifteen bucks in Methuen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)