Fox News fearmongering strikes home

A segment on Fox News’ Fox and Friends this morning explored the issue of whether a swine flu pandemic could result in a declaration of martial law in America and a suspension of constitutional rights.

“If it becomes a pandemic, you could lose some simple rights - like going to the movies,” said host Steve Doocy, before introducing legal analyst Peter J. Johnson, Jr.

Amazing that was the first example that sprung to mind. Under martial law, we close down the theaters immediately. Art will be the first sacrifice.

When I started doing this last year, I told people that someday it might seem strange that strangers sat in darkened rooms watching movies together. I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity while it still existed.

The NWO hates people coming together without their sanction and permission. Anytime they can divide people, they will do it.

Fighting

Winter was darn cold this year in New England, according to the folks who have been around here a while. Spring crept in a few weeks ago, and then bang, today it is almost sweltering, as if summer had already arrived. Only two weeks ago, there were still mountains of snow left over behind the multiplex in Leominster. The daffodils had barely come up and now they are gasping in the heat.

My brother-in-law, sunning himself on an outdoor chair this afternoon, said, "We usually get about two weeks like this in August--that's it." Well, things even out. After January and February's repeated cold blasts, who can complain?

It seemed a shame to spend any of this glorious afternoon indoors, but I had sort of fallen behind in my movie watching. Besides, it was a nice excuse for a drive up along the winding backroads to Tyngsboro. On the way I started to get that summer feeling, of making plans for the months ahead.

Having just seen a pair of two-fisted movies back-to-back, it seemed like the right thing to do to make it a hat-trick. The star of Fighting, which just came out this week, is the young and strapping Channing Tatum, one of the brilliant supporting cast of last year's Stop-Loss, a movie I just can't stop raving about.

Tatum plays an Alabama college boy who, at the beginning of the movie, is trying to hustle a living selling fake Harry Potter books on the busy sidewalks of New York. Because of a street altercation, a hustle promoter named Harvey (Terrence Howard) notices him and convinces him to join the world of underground fighting.

Boxing movies are the oldest and most established genre of sports movies in Hollywood history, and so the trajectory of the main plot is not going to be that original. He's down and out and hungry. He wins some fights, impresses people. His manager wants to him to take a dive. He won't. He meets a girl. He chases her, and wins her. Then he finds out she has a secret, and feels betrayed by her. Like I said, the boxing genre is very well established.

But all it takes to make an interesting movie is to have characters you care about, and perhaps a fresh angle. This one had more than a few such novelties, including a subplot involving a rivalry between the protagonist and a high school teammate from Alabama who has already made it big in New York. Given the inevitability of the showdown between the two rivals, it seems unlikely that the protagonist came to New York with any other intention that getting involved in the world of fighting. That was an issue the film never addressed, but it is a forgivable oversight.

The real crux of the narrative is the love story, between the boxer and the Puerto Rican waitress he pursues. He tells her that it is "destiny" that they met. She tells him that it will be destiny if they indeed meet again. Like any good classical hero, he takes destiny in his own hands and arranges to meet her again. The classical paradigm is that this kind of patient persistence in pursuing one's true love is always rewarded. Their relationship is kept honorable by a zealous Puerto Rican grandmother who functions as a comic relief. She is one of the few people in the movie who can actually push around Tatum's character.

But that betrayal I mentioned will cause the rift in the love story that the narrative must heal, in order for the boxer to achieve his victory in the big fight, and thus escape the underground. How is it healed? The twist was fairly forseeable, but nevertheless felt perfect when it arrived, but it had been established exactly at it should have.

There is a wonderful New York subtext in the movie involving the dichotomy between the obscene world of Wall Street wealth and the ground-level world of the street vendors, bodegas, and the souvenir shops. The subway is used as a refuge for the character when he is at his "low point." At the climax we find ourselves fittingly on top of a building in the financial district, a few blocks from the famous statue of Charging Bull. This dichotomy breathed more than a little life into the movie, and is no small reason that I wound up liking it.

Watching this New York City movie, I couldn't help comparing it to Crank: High Voltage, which is set in Los Angeles. Both films offer a panoramic view of the multi-racial underground that seethes below the facade of the normal city.

Well in New York, it seems below the facade. In L.A., it is right on the surface. Something about the comparison comes out in New York's favor. Even in the midst of the a roomful of barely civilized characters, there is something more human about New York than California right now.

Will the movie have a happy ending? Will the young woman prove herself to the boxer, redeeming her breech of trust? Will he win the big fight against his high school rival, and thus earn the right to face his father back in Alabama again?

Oh, come on. You know the answer already. Did I mention what a beautiful day it was?

Crank: High Voltage

Speaking of classical leading men, it seemed appropriate to follow up a Vin Diesel movie with one starring one of my other favorite contemporary actors, Jason Statham.

Along the lines of the last post, Statham's bona fides as classical were on full view in last falls Transporter 3, where he refuses to be seduced by his passenger, a beautiful young Russian woman whom he has been hired to deliver to the other side of Europe.

As in the case of Diesel, we accept his behavior because we assume that he (or rather his characters) can have any woman they want. If, say, Matthew Perry had pushed the beautiful Russian woman away, audiences would be highly puzzled.

I suppose it is incorrect to call Diesel and Statham "classical heroes." Really they are antiheroes, of course, which serves to illustrate that in movies at least, to be classical is now to be an outcast and a renegade of some form. Gary Cooper would play bank robbers, if he were alive today.

I've been falling down on the job as far as seeing all the "prequels" to current releases, and thus I hadn't seen Crank (2006). But they are both by the same writer/director pair (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor), so I can only assume that stylistically they must be very much the same.

That being said, I figured out the gag to Crank: High Voltage within a couple minutes. I had expected it to be a dark noir tale---the indestructible Chev Chelios (Statham) is dropped from a helicopter, kidnapped and has his heart removed and replaced by an artificial one, a device designed only to keep him alive until his other organs (including his penis) are harvested for transplant by a Chinese gangster. The (anti)hero has a very short time to relocate his original heart, to have it replaced in his body.

But this is not a dark noir story. One look at the poster, which shows Statham as Chelios hooking up a battery cable to his tongue, should give you an idea of what the movie is really about.

Rather it's a live-action cartoon---absurd, frenetic, fast, and furious (ooops, wrong movie again). At one point, the movie slips into an open parody of (or homage to) the Godzilla movies.

All of this made me like the movie a lot. About twenty minutes into it, I began to debate with myself whether or not this movie was a surrealist masterpiece in disguise.

What makes it so brilliant is that in its absurdity, it creates a contemporary Los Angeles that is the hyper-amplification of the Postmodern Gutter. Everyone in the movie, including the antihero, are grotesque caricatures of the sins and deformities of contemporary America. It is Californication on steroids. All the characters seem as if they taking are either too many drugs, or too few of their meds. They twitch, lurch, and roil uncontrollably at each other.

Perhaps the most indicative scene in the film is when Statham and his girlfriend, after having stolen a police cruiser, are mobbed on the street by a massive picket of porno actors, carrying signs that say "No Dough, No Blow," and such other humorous one-liners. In that moment, the film seemed to be almost the perfect movie of our time, capturing the essence of what America is about right now.

Later the movie rises to a crescendo in a scene at the Hollywood race track that is described by a newscaster within in the film (John De Lancie!) as "an open air porno."

Chelios is hypersexed, but he spends half the movie pushing a way a prostitute who keeps trying to jump his bones. But in the strip club shoot up scene, he indulges his blonde girlfriend with a kiss, and later shags her in front of thousands of people at the race track. Does this make him unclassical, because he diverts from mission for some nookie? Of course, not. She's his true love, you see. Besides, he needed the friction to recharge his heart battery.

This movie is certainly not in the taste of most people I know, but I have a suspicion that folks will be watching both Crank movies decades into the future as a camp window into the Gutter World of 2009, and how far the world spun off its axis during the Great Meltdown. Well, I hope they are still watching movies a couple decades from now.

Fast & Furious

I never got around to seeing the first movie in this series, the one from 2001 that has definitive articles but no ampersand in the title, but I'm sure I will, simply because of the fact that I'm a big Vin Diesel fan. I've liked every one of the movies I've seen him in, even last year's Babylon A.D., which was panned and even renounced by its director. I thought xXx (2002) was head and shoulders above both of the Daniel Craig Bond movies.

Diesel has a limited range as a actor, to be sure, but within that range, he is impeccable. In particular, he tends to play heroes that are extremely classical, even if the rest of the characters around him aren't.

There is a scene in Fast & Furious that really brings this to mind. Early on, while he is snooping around for bad guys, he comes around a vintage Ford Torino (oddly green, just like the one in the recent Clint Eastwood movie). One of the bad guy's sexy babes intercepts him and they engage in conversation. Clearly she is turned on by him, and attempts to seduce him, basically throwing herself at him.

But he will have none of it. He won't even let her kiss him on the lips. He's fixated on the car, and what it means in relation to his quest to find justice.

That is the essence of the classical hero---he is not swayed by the women who attempt to pull him off his mission. This is opposed to the postmodern man, who is presumed to value getting laid by hot babes above all other things in life. What harm would it be, just to boink the chick and go on with his task?. In classical terms, this gets you killed.

Driving in my own car today, thinking about this point, it occurred to me that we accept Diesel as classical in this regard because he is so damn sexy that we assume he could have any woman he wanted. Thus, according to this reasoning, he can afford to pass up hot babes.

Well, at least we still get to have classical characters. In the old days, every male hero would have been expected to pass this test.

One aspect of this movie I enjoyed was that the cybernetic technology was not superfantastic and all-seeing. It's almost standard in movies lately that the FBI has big brother surveillance on every one at all times. We've been trained to think that it's OK and normal for the Federal State to be so afraid of its citizens like this.

Instead, in this movie, even though the bad guys have ultrasophisticated voice-driven GPS to guide their street racers, the feds use technology that is slightly behind the times. The cameras at the Mexican border have gaps, we are told. Moreover, at a crucial moment in the story, the FBI winds up arresting the wrong guy because a fax machine is too slow in printing out a photograph. I loved it!

The story was fairly entertaining, with some innovative types of car chases for nice eye candy. The ending scene in the courtroom in surprisingly classical in the dispensing of justice.

I enjoyed nearly the entire movie, except for when two women snuck in during the middle of the movie and talked at full volume about six rows behind me. I had been the only one in the theater, and it was really distracting, even during the loud scenes. Finally I couldn't take it anymore, so I walked up slowly to them. I thought they were teenagers. Turns out they were at least in their late twenties, maybe thirties. I spoke in a low deep voice, politely asking them if they wouldn't mind talking a little less loud. Like chastised little girls, they said OK. I felt like a high school principal talking to some bratty tenth graders. Clearly some authority issues there.

All was mostly fine, even after their three little daughters came scampering in the theater, about fifteen minutes later, probably fresh from Hannah Montana: the Movie, and just in time for some full frontal female nudity (in a painting on screen). I don't mind this sneaking in. I'm not there to police the theater or enforce morality. But if you're not going to pay for a ticket, at least shut the fuck up.

UPDATE: As if to prove my point of him being the classical man of our day, Diesel is directing and starring in the title role of an upcoming movie about Hannibal the Carthaginian general slated for release in 2011. I can hardly wait!

Sunshine Cleaning

This last weekend here in rural Massachusetts was the highpoint of the year for historical re-enactment---the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, when the fine, decent government soldiers came out to take the guns and ammo away from the colonial terrorists. Thanks to Al Qaeda member Paul Revere, the terrorists caught the government troops off guard, and we have Cecil Rhodes has been mourning the loss of our inclusion in the British Empire ever since.

My sister had printed out a web page containing a list of the commemorative festivities with intention of taking her son to one or more of them, as part of his homeschooling curriculum.

Looking over the list, I developed some vague plans, which eventually centered on attending the Sunday ceremony of the Oath Keepers, a cause I fully support.

But I wound up just tagging along my sis and her son to the re-enactment of Paul Revere's ride on Sunday night. It was actually very fun. We had to walk about a half mile to the Clarke-Hancock house. An actor portraying a Minuteman answered questions from the crowd beforehand. I could tell he had done his homework because he talked about the abuses by Parliament, not King George.

It was hard to hear some of the actors during the short outdoor play, but the ones playing John Hancock and Sam Adams really chewed up the scenery and spoke decently loud. I would have cast them in the same roles as well.

The high point was when the Sam Adams character boomed out how this was the hour to defend liberty. A cheer arose from the crowd, and for that moment, you could tell that everyone, including the actor, were talking as much about the present day than about 1775.

My sister said she got goose bumps when she heard the clop of horse hooves coming down the road as Revere rode up, yelling "the regulars are coming!" (as the narrator explained, everybody was British back then). It occurred to me that although the accents have changed in 200 years, the sound of horse hooves hasn't.

I made up for my abbreviated visit to Lexington by returning on Tuesday evening to go to the quaint little Lexington Flick theater on Main Street (photo) to see Sunshine Cleaning. Because of the fiasco last time, when I saw JCVD in November, I was fully prepared for the parking meter situation in Lexington, having brought sufficient quarters, as well as cash to buy the ticket. Still I fretted that the meters limited one's stay to two hours. How do they expect anybody to see a movie?

Since the Flick is an old indie theater, I made sure to buy a bag of popcorn to support its operation. Like last time, the movie was showing in the upstairs of the two theaters, which has a very low ceiling and a ramp between the seats and the screen, much like the Village East Cinema in Manhattan---the ramp is the roof of the first floor auditorium. Seeing a movie in a place like this is a nice change of pace from multiplexes.

Like last time, the movie started right on time, without any previews. It occurred to me that maybe this was because of the parking situation---to keep everything under two hours.

Sunshine Cleaning is by the same producers as Little Miss Sunshine, and it has some of the same themes, specifically involving death and corpses. The story is about a pair of down-and-out young sisters in New Mexico who lose their jobs and wind up starting a service to clean up crime scenes after murders and suicides (given the theme, the opening sequence didn't catch me off guard at all).

In this case, however following the Law of Variation, Alan Arkin plays a character who doesn't die. We don't need any of the main characters to die in this movie, because there are plenty of dead bodies to go around. The Law of Sacrifice is nevertheless upheld in that an important character is killed prior to the start of the narrative. We learn about it in flashback.

I'm a huge Amy Adams fan, so this was a treat to watch all around. Emily Blunt plays her sister, and two function well together---Adams as the responsible single mother, and Blunt as the screw-up younger sister who chafes at her older sister's advice and authority. Following the theme of Little Miss Sunshine, Adams' character's son (instead of daughter---variation at work again) is a "special" child who doesn't fit into the system very well.

The sisters' clean-up operation turns out to be wildly successful, and allows them to climb up out of desperate poverty. Since this is comedy, we know there must be complications, one that will put a monkey-wrench in their plans.

What will the complications be? It occurred to me at the mid-point of the movie that I had no idea what was coming. This was a nice feeling. Often in these kind of "rags to not-rags" stories, the comic downfall is all too easy to see.

As I've said before, I tend to judge this kind of story on the freshness of the plot complications. In this case, the movie almost let me down, in that the complication that screws up the cleaning business arises as self-sabotage.

But it was nicely set up, and Adams' character was actually given multiple "warnings" by fate that should have allowed her to avoid it, if she had been tuned into the signs the universe was giving her. That's the proper way to handle a self-sabotage element in a narrative, a way that augments the story, and flows out of the characters' natures directly, rather than just plummeting in from the gods above.

The comic downfall leaves the two sisters is a "black moment" that is very, well, black. They are far worse off than at the beginning of the story. It's a sign of good story when it can pull off this level of reversal.

How will they climb back out? Their resurrection must come in a way that is established by the story previous to the downfall, drawing on assets that were previously unseen by the characters, which will now shine forth. If you've seen Little Miss Sunshine, the character who steps forth to save the day should be rather obvious by the time you get to that point in the story.

Observe and Report

"Wow that was dark," I thought to myself, bracing myself against my car in the parking lot of the Tyngsboro AMC on Saturday morning.

It's not often that I have to stand in the fresh air and clear my mind after seeing a movie. But this was one of those times.

Like many people, my reaction upon having seen the trailer to Observe and Report a couple months ago was what...the...hell? Did we just have a movie about a mall security guard who lives with his mother, dreams of being a police officer, drives to work in a strange vehicle, falls in love with an attractive blonde salesgirl, has an awkward alcohol-related encounter with her, and then attempts to impress her with his manly deeds in thwarting crime at the mall?

The phenomenon of closely-related pairs of movies coming out at the same time is actually well established (see here for an entertaining review of recent examples).

But who would have thought: two mall-cop movies?

But if you were worried that Observe and Report wasn't differentiated enough from Paul Blart: Mall Cop, you can relax. Despite surface similarities, they are quite different in tone, and take the story in very different directions by the end of the film.

The contrast between the two films is actually most readily seen in the two movies' love interests, the blonde damsels in distress. In Blart, the object of the hero's affection and attention, Amy (Jayman Mays) is rather sweet and charming, and receptive to Blart's awkward advances. We as the audience are meant to endorse the relationship, and we are on Blart's side as he strives to overcome his proto-boyhood stage to win her by honor and sacrifice.

In Observe and Report, the love interest of the (anti)hero (Ronnie, played by Seth Rogen) is Brandi, played by Anna Faris, who gets to play down to the bimbo stereotype that has been building around her in recent roles. Unlike Blart's Amy, Ronnie's Brandi is an unredeemed and narcissistic tramp. There is no where for the Ronnie-Brandi relationship to go but down, way down.

A similar comparison exists between the mother characters in the two movies. Blart's mother is supportive. Ronnie's mother is a drunk, in falling down way.

And that's where the story goes---down. Whereas Blart takes the hero on a victorious journey of honor, Observe and Report takes the protoganist on a journey of pain caused by his own delusions of grandeur.

The centerpiece of Ronnie's delusion is that he misses out completely on the woman who should be his true love interest, the hapless and tormented Nell (Collette Wolfe), who patiently endures Ronnie's noninterest in her, even as she shines forth to the audience as the woman he should be with. No analogous character exists in Blart, of course, because in narrative terms, Blart is on the correct path.

The "point-of-sanity" in Observe and Report is Detective Harrison, played by Ray Liotta. Whenever he is on the screen, it is like a breath of fresh air, a break in the clouds of the madness of everything else that is going on. But even has a slightly sadistic streak, one that almost gets Ronnie killed.

In my write-up of Blart, I said that is full of "lumpen" but lovable characters, and seemed to be a hopeful view of an America trying to emerge from the strata of crap that has been laid upon it for decades. Observe and Report, by comparison, looks at the same tableau and sees a suicide mission, one that can have a happy ending only after the endurance of extreme agony and humiliation (as well as the mind-numbing full frontal obese male nudity).

Which view is more accurate? We're going to find out in the coming months and years.

State of Play

"...with a twist you'll never see coming."

It was Thursday evening and I was watching the trailer for State of Play on television.

"Oh, really?" I said outloud. The statement was a big challenge. As I walked into the theater the next morning in Tyngsboro, bright and early for the pre-noon four dollar showing at the AMC, I began tallying up generic possibilities for the aforementioned "big twist." Among them are:

1. A character who appears to be benign turns out to be malevolent and powerful (the most common type of twist, found in many noir films, e.g. The Maltese Falcon (1941)).

2. A character who appears to be malevolent turns out to be benevolent and helpful (less common, but often entertaining when pulled off, e.g. in Charade (1963)).

3. Somebody unexpected gets killed (shocking when done right, the canonical example being Psycho (1960)).

There are other kinds, of course, but I figured the twist in State of Play would be one of the three types above. My self-assigned task, in response the challenge of the tv trailer, would be to identify the character in advance. It would be my little parlor game during the movie.

In the open minutes, I was full of hope. A man stumbles through an alley in the Georgetown section of D.C. An assassin appears. A woman is killed on the subway, in the midst of a crowd. Links appear to a Congressman involved in a critical investigation of the defense industry. The twists would surely be entertaining and juicy, given the set-up.

Without giving too much away, it turns out that the twist did indeed catch me by surprise, but only because it was so underwhelming. While I was on the lookout for really high-level mind-blowing twists, a blazing curveball, the story threw me a lousy change-up that crept by at forty miles an hour.

The story as a whole significantly underdelivered. The high concept of the narrative purports to be a conspiracy involving high-level corruption in the federal government in connection with a paramilitary contractor that is manifestly based on Blackwater Worldwide. It doesn't get much better, and more topical, than that. There are killings in a web of intrigue. There are signs pointing to very high levels.

And then it just sort of fizzles at the end.

It brings to mind something I've noticed about Hollywood. For all the collective imagination put into these stories, Hollywood is amazingly conventional and unimaginative when it comes to conspiracies. At one point, one of the characters openly scoffs at conspiracies in government, and the story actually upholds this. The conspiracy dissolves away, more or less leaving Blackwater and the federal government off the hook. Instead all the machinations turn out to be the result of a rogue player who really isn't that powerful. The conspiracy is microscopic and pitiful.

It is exactly parallel to the situation involving horror movies: Hollywood is brain-dead, afraid and unable to actually look into the dark corners of our collective psyche. Instead it has become a mechanism for turning our attention away from these dark corners. That is why our horror movies suck (and why they have to be imported), and this is also why many thrillers suck as well.

State of Play wasn't a total disaster. A complete rewrite of Act Three could have turned this into a decent, and even superior, story. There was a mildly interesting (but rather surface) theme involving old line newspapers vs. the blogosphere. The acting was decent all around (fans of Jason Bateman will appreciate his offbeat supporting role).

There was also a rather strong but subtle component of the narrative involving the oft-seen theme of intergenerational relationships. Specifically there are two such relationships, between a middle-aged man and a younger woman, shown in contrast with each other, unhealthy vs. healthy. The unhealthy "dark" one was a married Congressman (Ben Affleck) involved in a secret sexual liaison with his young aide. The secrecy of the relationship is actually the toxicity that drives the intrigue of the story.

The healthy relationship is the out-in-the-open, non-sexual (but erotically-tinged) mentorship by a veteran unmarried investigative reporter (Russell Crowe) of a fresh-faced news blogger (Rachel McAdams).

The contrast between the two relationships is the part of the movie that actually worked very well, through many subtle touches and plot-stitching of comparisons. Just as the destruction of the toxic relationship drove the intrigue, the building of the unhealthy journalistic relationship is what solved it. That's good storytelling. I could have written this entire blog entry about the way the two relationships were constructed in opposition to each other. It probably should have been promoted to the main theme of the movie.

Adventureland

I will never be your stepping stone...

If I know the names of this year's Grammy nominees, it is surely because of the time I have spent listening the pre-trailer material in movie theaters this spring. I've become a Duffy fan just while waiting for movies to start over the last couple months.

My faith in movies having been re-ignited by Miley Cyrus, I was back in full enjoyment mode when I took a seat in a nearly empty and tiny auditorium in Leominster on Monday evening to see Adventureland. It was a rare non-matinee visit for me, since I'm such a cheapskate when it comes to my movie habits. When you see as many as I do, it really adds up. But in Leominster, it's only 8.50 for the evening shows. Who can complain really?

There was something about listening to Duffy that evening that made me close my eyes and let the music sink in. For that moment, I felt like it was 1975 again and I was at the Mall Theaters in Ames, Iowa waiting for a movie to start, with that primeval anticipation of the cinematic experience that awaited me, that Kirchnerian magic lantern experience that promises to transform your soul.

The movie itself furthered my journey into the past. It is a period piece, from the summer of 1987, about a young man just graduated from college. Well, hell, that's the summer I was originally supposed to graduate from college too. Like him, I was stymied for a job. I wound up in Alaska measuring aerosol particles. The protagonist of the movie, James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) winds up at an amusement park in his hometown of Pittsburgh, consigned to handing out stuffed animals at the ring toss game. Like him, that summer I found myself in the unlikely possession of a quantity of weed.

There was something about Adventureland that felt a little anachronistic to me, however. Most of the movie felt more like the late 1970s than the High 80's that I remembered. The cognitive dissonance really hit me when the soundtrack featured songs like "Don't Dream It's Over", which had burned into my spirit from that time. Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup.

To me, the visual astethic had the more feeling of, say, Linklater's Dazed and Confused. But maybe my 1987 experience was just different from the writer/director, Greg Mottola, who was born the same year as I was. So this really isn't a criticism, just an observation.

Criticizing this movie is the last thing I'd want to do, because for an hour and half, I was able to let down my guard completely and almost capture that magic lantern feeling that I had glimpsed before the movie. It's rare when a movie can really disarm me like that, when I care about the characters and stop caring what the story will do, worrying that it's going to lead me down the path of well-worn cliches.

No, I didn't care about those kinds of quibbling. I just relaxed and went with the flow. It felt good.

I knew I was going to like this movie about fifteen minutes in. During the set-up, Brennan (the protagonist) is told by his boss that under no circumstances is he to let anyone ever win a "giant ass panda" from the concessions. Immediately my narrative radar tells me that this will be a central tension of the movie---trying to keep customers from winning a giant panda, and that eventually he is going to fail at this, probably in Act Three.

But I was wrong. Five minutes later, a customer walks off with a giant panda. The foreshadowed tension is resolved as quickly as it was set-up, leaving me in unknown territory. Suddenly I no longer know what the essential tension of the story is going to be about. I absolutely love it when a movie does this, when the story accelerates the trajectory of the narrative to thwart our anticipations of where it will go. I've always thought it was one reasons why The Simpsons worked so well on television, that it is always accelerating the narrative, to create fresh new ones.

From that point on, I was just along for the ride. I didn't care what happened in the movie. I wasn't waiting for some inevitable shoe to drop. I was simply curious about the characters, in the same way I was when I was ten years old, and movies were all fresh and new to me.

It's a quiet little film, having debuted in Sundance this year. I could almost see why the theater was nearly deserted after a week of release, and that it was consigned to a small auditorium, sharing space with Race to Witch Mountain. But it's a shame that it was. This is one of the best movies I have seen this year, but it is not a Hollywood movie. The characters and story lines are too nuanced.

The story kept thwarting my other-shoe-drop concerns right up to the end. "Oh, yeah," I tell myself, "this is how the love story is going to resolve, by the cliche act of sabotage that seems to be coming." But the sabotage I expected in the story didn't come. It wasn't going to take that easy out.

Even the conclusion seemed inevitable---it was the one I expected---it nevertheless felt fresh. A love story between two people in their early twenties really shouldn't have a "happily ever after ending," even as a comedy. The characters are too young for that. So how do you end it, without pulling something like The Graduate? It's always a problem for a serious film. But here it was done in the perfect way, that's all I say. Go see it for yourself.

And watch Kristen Stewart in this movie, if you skipped Twilight. She can act. She's just getting started. She's going to be around a long time, and will win an Academy Award in 2022, when she's got a few wrinkles beside her eyes, and her youth is a memory like mine is now.

Hannah Montana: the Movie

OK, I said to myself. I can do this.

I was outside the glass doors of the Leominster multiplex, looking inward. It was early Saturday afternoon and the sun was shining brightly and warm. I took a deep breath and went inside.

Step one had been buying the ticket at the outdoor window. Step two had been going in the theater. Step three was presenting to the young woman at the velvet rope who tore my ticket in half and nonchalantly told me, "theater number three on the left."

As if I needed directions at this point!

Was I dreading seeing this movie? Of course not. I was very much looking forward to seeing Hannah Montana: the Movie. I'd already heard good things about it.

What I was dreading was the circumstances. The movie had only been out only a day, and here I was, showing up for the the first weekend matinee. It was going to be packed. Ordinarily I would go right into the auditorium and find a seat, but this time I lingered in the lobby until showtime, having decided perhaps to slip in after the trailers started.

It's not that I wanted to be inconspicuous. Rather I knew that if I found an empty row, inevitably a large group would come in and sit around me, or next to me, right at the last minute. I wanted to avoid that.

Why? While lingering in the lobby, I eavesdropped at the girl at the velvet rope and she tore tickets. Everyone was all going into the same auditorium as I was. And all of them, all of them, were either preteen girls or adults chaperoning preteen girls.

All I wanted to do was see the movie. Of course I knew in advance it would be this way. Partly I was doing this as a test of mettle, as a dare to myself. I could have come to weekday matinee, with the theater empty. But what fun would that be?

With a few minutes to showtime, I found an isolated seat in the fourth row, smack in the last row of the front section. There were large groups on either end of the row. It seemed like the perfect place.

The row in front of me was open, and of course, right as the trailers kicked in, a huge group showed up to occupy it---nine girls about seven or eight years old, chaperoned by a mother in her forties. They filled up all the seats in front of me. Now I truly felt like I was at Hannah Montana movie.

But once the show started, I almost completely forgot about the audience, except in the moments when they erupted in laughter or sometimes singing along. The movie was just so damn good.

Yeah, you heard me. The movie was awesome. Like I've said, Disney is the ace studio of Hollywood moviemaking right now, and this was one of their finest offerings in a long time. For what it tried to do (and this is always how I judge movies), Hannah Montana: the Movie hit a grand-slam homerun.

Using the character of Hannah Montana from the television show, the story is a fairly standard "abasement of the princess" narrative, specifically the "city girl in the sticks" variation, as we just saw in New in Town a couple months back.

As you undoubtedly know, the idea is that Miley Cyrus plays Miley Stewart, who is also Hannah Montana, a fact unknown to everyone but her close family and friends. The television show has chronicled the fictional Miley's escapades as she tries to live the life of a normal teenager in Southern California while also pursuing a career as a famous popstar. The fictional Miley is managed by Miley Cyrus' real-life father, Billy Ray Cyrus. But you knew all this already, of course.

On a day in which Miley (Stewart) ruins her best friend's sweet sixteen party on the Santa Monica pier, her father decides that she has gotten too involved in her popstar persona, and is starting to act spoiled. So he preemptively hijacks his daughter for a two-week stay at her grandmother's farm in rural Tennessee. Miley father tells her that for now, her career as Hannah is over, and that maybe she can be Hannah again, if the stay in the farm goes well.

So here you have the primary tension that a script needs. The protagonist has everything at stake: either she gets to be a popstar, or she loses it all. While this is going on, a scheming tabloid reporter is out to get some secret dirt on Hannah, and has been tipped off to the town in Tennessee where Hannah has gone. Thus we have another element of tension: whether or not the tabloid reporter will discover Hannah's true identity as Miley Stewart (and thus ruin her "normal" life at high school). For Miley/Hannah, everything is at stake. There is also another subplot involving a scheming real estate developer who is trying to ruin the quaint town by building a shopping mall on a piece of land that everyone loves, but for which the taxes are amazingly high.

The land is the cause celebre of the grandmother. Will Miley/Hannah get over her brattiness and help her grandmother? Of course she will.

But the real action is in the love story. Miley meets a young cowboy who works at the farm, and without revealing her identity to him, begins to fall in love with him. Likewise the widowed father falls in love with a woman of his own age.

The story clicks so well because it ties both of the love stories back into the central issue of Miley's identity. Has "Hannah" really consumed her completely, or is she still genuine as Miley?

The classical rules of cinema demand that lovers cannot hide their identities from each other. They must be honest. Thus both of the love stories are poisoned by the secret that Miley is hiding from everyone around her. Eventually this will cause an impasse in both the teenage and adult love stories, one that can be resolved only by some admission of the truth.

But what form will this admission take? Through some nice twists, Hannah (Miley) gets committed to staging a concert to help her grandmother pay the taxes on the land she cherishes. Meanwhile the evil tabloid reporter has caught the scent of a big secret about to come out. Meanwhile both romances are on the rocks because of the deception impasse.

Miley's recklessness in trying to be both Hannah and herself nearly cause a meltdown of the entire operation. As it should in a cinematic story, the status quo cannot continue. Everything is at an impact, and everything is in jeopardy. Storywise, everything was perfectly suited for a beautiful climax.

Somewhat reluctantly, Miley, as Hannah, comes out to give her pop concert to save the cherished piece of town land. How is she going to fix everything? How can she still be pop star while salvaging the relationship with the cowboy? She has to make a choice, as every protagonist must, at the climax of a good story.

What followed in the next several minutes was a piece of cinema that really just blew me away. In the span of about five minutes on the screen, I witnessed a generational revolution, as I saw Miley Cyrus emerge as a full fledged human being out from the chrysalis of both her Hannah Montana and Miley Stewart personae.

The song was specifically called "The Climb", and as Cyrus sang it, some of the little girls in front of her were swaying their arms to it, and I heard Miley Cyrus as a real voice. Not only was she real, but for that moment, she was the voice of her entire generation, breaking out from the phony coccoon that has swaddled them during their entire existences, becoming real just at the moment that the hyperkinetic consumer-driven America was coming apart at the seems.

It was a beautiful moment. It felt like the triumph of the life force, the youthful energy of love that rebukes the fake and evil falsehoods that have come before it.

This is why I go to movies, I thought to myself.

The music, as a whole, really stunned me. A year ago, after watching the DVD of the Hannah Montana tour movie, I commented that I had enjoyed the songs but couldn't remember any of them afterward. That was the old Miley Cyrus. The new one has the beginnings of a lyric maturity that will sustain her as a pop singer for many years to come, a real singer with something real to say. The duet she performs with her father, "Butterfly Fly Away," which says everything not only about the theme of the movie, but about Cyrus herself, was exquisite. Count me a fan.

Both she and her dad can't act their way out of a paper bag, but ten and twenty years from now, Cyrus is going to be winning Grammies and CMA awards.

I certainly wasn't the only one who liked this movie. The girls in the audience sang and danced as they left the theater. As they say, a good time was had by all.

In the parking lot, I just sat in my car for several minutes. I had planning to see a second movie that day, but it was just too powerful a movie not to let it sink in for a while.

12 Rounds

This was a movie I was really dreading to see. When I went into Leominster last Thursday, it felt like a trip to the dentist. Two hours of mindless tension seemed to await me.

It would have better if I had never seen the trailer for 12 Rounds. It was to be the ole' "ticking clock." Every screenwriter knows the idea---at the climax of a thriller, a bomb is a set to go off. We as the audience know exactly how much time is left for the protagonist to disarm the bomb, or perform some equivalent action, to save the day. Perhaps the most famous such ticking clock was at the end of Goldfinger (1964).

Sometimes the "ticking clock" is one established by an authority figure---a time limit given to the protagonist to solve the problem. "You've got 24 hours to find the killer," yells the police captain to the hot-shot detective. "And then I'm pulling you off the case!"

Sometimes the entire movie is a ticking clock, like 48 Hours (1982).

But 12 Rounds would attempt to outdo all these previous attempts. There is a 24-hour ticking clock (the time given for a New Orleans police officer to rescue his wife from a crazed homicidal terrorist) that is overlain by twelve separate ticking sub-clocks (like defusing a bomb in an impossibly short amount of time).

What a thrill ride of tension awaited me. A half hour into the movie, as the tension-filled part kicked into gear, I wondered how I was going to make it through the whole thing.

But about the mid-point, just as I thought I couldn't take anymore rounds of it, the movie slowed down a tad, and threw a few wrinkles into the story to keep it from being a droning exercise in faux-tension manipulation of our emotions. Eventually I even cared about the characters a little bit.

The story is silly, to be sure, and stretches the ability to believe it, but if you let your imagination run with it, it was fun enough to justify sitting through it.

There were plenty of cliches to keep my tabulating them throughout. Perhaps the most annoying one arrived in one of the early "rounds." When the police officer discovers that his wife is in danger on a ferry boat, he does what every cop in a movie does: he runs to the nearest innocent motorist, then commands him (by the power that police have been granted these days) to surrender his car so that the police officer can then proceed to use it. As every cop does in the circumstance (because it is not his car), he drives in such a way so as to smash up not only the borrowed car, but also about six dozen other cars along the way.

If you and I did that, for whatever reason, we'd go to jail for several decades, but when the loved one of a cop is in danger, the 97th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution allows a cop to smash up entire cities. They ratified it last week.

Later on the same cop borrows a firetruck and proceeds to smash up about six dozen other cars. Actually that part was sort of cool, since it was sort of original and didn't irk me by endorsing the idea that cops have free license to seize our property at will. This last issue is particular thorny in New Orleans, of all places.

Another cliche was the viscious white-faced terrorist (Irish, no less). More war on terror bullshit. I'm so tired of it.

In the Third Act, we finally get a plot twist that made me perk up a little bit, one that forces you reinterpret all the previous "rounds" of the game that the terrorist has been playing. It was nicely foreshadowed at the beginning in several ways, including a scene involving a plumbing leak in the cop's house.

But unfortunately the story really didn't run with this plot twist. It just fizzled out, and the story flopped back into a high-action that involved nothing less than a helicopter explosion (e.g., see this).

In narrative terms, the failure of the story at the end of the movie was because the hero never got the upperhand on the villain. Throughout the entire movie, the hero reacts to moves made by the villain. The aforementioned plot twist could and should have resulted in the hero finally getting the jump on the villain. But he doesn't. Up until the very climax, the hero does nothing but react. This is the mark of an inferior story, but one that could have been fixed.

Did I say the story failed? Yes it did, but not as bad as I thought, and the tension was actually less manipulative than I feared. For a film made by a wrestling entertainment company, it actually wasn't so wretched.

Race to Witch Mountain

In the previous post, I mentioned that I had slowed down a bit in movie watching. I forgot to mention that another reason is that I was sort of in a holding pattern, waiting until I had a chance to see Race to Witch Mountain, which came out in mid-March.

The reason was that I had promised my sister that I would see it with her. This was more than a passing pledge, as it harkened past to our childhood, when, in 1975, we went to see Escape to Witch Mountain together. We later had the story LP (this one, I think), and I remember my sister playing it in her room, and the sound of the story narration. It seemed impossible to imagine seeing the new movie, which is billed as a variation and a sequel on the original story, without her.

But for the first couple weeks after the movie's release, the timing was not right for us to see it. There was always something else going on. Mostly we were waiting for things to settle down while my sister made the transition to pulling her 10-year-old son out of public school and starting his homeschooling.

It was a step I completely endorsed and supported. Last Monday was to be "D-Day." My sister was understandably nervous about the whole thing.

She had prepared herself by reading a great deal of material about how to approach this step, and the best advice seemed to be to take things in a relaxed manner at first, and not to try to make a hard transition to a new fixed regime of instruction.

She thought that taking her son to the movies might be a fun first step, to celebrate the new era. On Sunday, partly in preparation, she bought the DVD to the original 1975 Disney release, and on Monday evening she played it, forcing her children to watch it.

They were so riled up after dinner, that they had trouble sitting through it, but I find myself completely absorbed in it, and enjoying seeing it for the first time in over three decades. There were many familiar scenes and lines that came back from my childhood. I was particularly happy to see Ray Miland, one of my all-time favorite actors, in the role of Aristotle Bolt, the millionaire villain. In case you're wondering, Escape to Witch Mountain happens to be the answer to the trivia question: "In which film does one find Miland in a helicopter looking through a pair of binoculars at a black bear in the passenger seat of a car?"

The next day, with the other kids all in school, the three of us were in Lowell at the beautiful Showcase multiplex (Leominster is too shabby for this kind of outing), in a nearly empty parking lot to catch the 11:30 matinee, which was only six bucks a person.

We were the only ones in the theater, a fact that my nephew found to be quite amusing. With this mother's permission, he went to the very top row of the stadium seating, but continued to run back down to us at regular intervals to ask questions about the movie.

As I watched it, I inevitably found myself comparing it to the original I had seen the night before. I was pre-inclined to approve of it, based on several criteria: (1) I'm a fan of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, (2) the original child actors appear in this version, and (most importantly) (3) Race was not a remake, but rather a "new story" that could be seen as a sequel (although it doesn't really function as a sequel).

This last point is worth discussing, because it could have been so easy to call this movie Escape to Witch Mountain, like the original. That would have plundered the title and would have really pissed off anyone who enjoyed the 1975 version. It's amazing how little it takes to defer to this kind of sentiment---a change of one single word in the title. Compare this to the recent remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which earned the scorn of many thousands of possible fans even before its release. It could easily have been called The Night the Earth Stood Still (probably more appropriate, given the actual story), and have earned just as much money, while being viewed more appropriately as an homage that was not trying to plunder the title of the 1951 classic.

But I digress. Race to Witch Mountain turned out to be worth the wait, and solidified my growing opinion of Disney as currently the most reliable source of well-told cinematic tales. The movie was very well-written, and did everything it should have done to tell a contemporary version of the original while paying homage to it for middle-aged folk like me.

Certain Johnson is limited as an actor, and he delivered a few horribly clunky lines and facial expressions, but he seems well aware of his own limitations, as anyone knows who has watched him in his hilarious appearances hosting Saturday Night Live.

Afterward, the three of us drove back toward home and lunched at McDonalds. While my nephew climbed on the indoor playground equipment, my sister and I discussed the movie, specifically its differences with the original.

We both agreed that it had a lot more action: it dove right into the action sequences almost immediately. The original had a slow revelation of the nature of the children as aliens (they have to discover it themselves), whereas in this version, the children (who are older teenagers) are fully conscious of their natures from the beginning.

There is more at stake in the version. In the original, the dramatic tension centers on the fate of the children alone. In this version, the entire future of the earth is at stake. I was pleased to see, however, the movie did not descend into the trite and trendy themes torn from the latest headlines about global warming. Instead it seemed to use fear over climate change in a way that could satisfy anyone of any political persuasion, and the way I read it, it seemed to warn as much about the danger of societal overreaction to climate threats as much as anything else.

I told my sister that what really stuck out to me, in comparison with the original, was the raising of the level of the villainous human pursuers. In the 1975 original, Aristotle Bolt is a private multimillionaire who pursues the children through his control of the California State Police (who are somewhat innocent in the manipulation), as well as through a bumbling and corrupt county-level sheriff and hick townsfolk (who are downright nasty and evil).

In the 2009, version, it is now a corrupt and out-of-control federal government (nowhere to be seen in the original) that now serves the role of villain. The county-level officials and mountain townsfolk are now on the side of the alien children, helping them escape the evil Feds who are after them. More than anything else I have seen recently in movies, this shift in the villainy to the high level of government illustrates the magnitude of the cultural change we have witnessed since the 1970s.

Moreover, the sheriff who sticks up for the fleeing alien kids is played by none other than the same child actor who played Tony, the boy alien in the original (Ike Eisenmann). Likewise the helpful local waitress in the restaurant is played by the woman who was Tia in the original (Kim Richards). If I hadn't just seen the original the night before, I might have missed all this, as well as the fact that the town is called "Stony Creek," taken directly from the 1975 version. In fact, it's not impossible to think that the sheriff and the waitress actually are the alien kids from the original, now living comfortably in a mountain community with a healthy suspicion of the federal government.

We sat there at McDonalds for nearly an hour discussing the movie in detail. We both agreed that the movie had used the Winnebago cleverly. We also agreed that it had failed to wrap-up one its sub-plots (involving the relationship between Johnson's character and a group of Las Vegas mobsters), and that it had also surprised us by not having one of the Fed agents (Chris Marquette) rebel against his tyrranical boss and help the alien kids at a critical moment at the climax.

But I never delve this far into thinking about a movie unless it has really made an impact on me, and this one was a pleasure to watch. There was nothing about it that really disappointed me.

I could write a lot about Escape to Witch Mountain, which I consider to be an important landmark in the use of aliens in storytelling, including its relation to later Spielberg movies in setting the parameters for Postmodern cinematic poetics. But that would deserve a whole treatise on its own. Sometime I'll have to delve into it.

On the ride home my nephew peppered me with questions about moviemaking, specifically in how stunt drivers were used during the action sequences. I described to him the process by which the actor is temporarily replaced, so that he doesn't get injured, something that would be a disaster to the production. It felt like a fitting ending to the whole experience, which was, after an official homeschool outing.

I Love You, Man

It has been slow-going over the last month of moviewatching. Somewhere along the line, going to the theater ceased being very much fun.

Part of it was that since I had caught up on moviewatching, there were only a few choices each week that didn't involve going into the City. That meant I couldn't pick and choose among half a dozen films, depending on my mood. I was more constrained, and frankly, I just wasn't in the mood to see some of the stuff coming out lately.

But it seemed like something deeper was going on, something having to do with the situation of current events. I have been up late nearly every night, sifting through the hundreds of web news articles and blogs, following the news like a short wave operator in 1940 trying to glean all the latest reports about the Battle of Britain.

We are witnessing, I believe, the most significant and amazing events in our lifetimes, right up with the fall of the USSR.

As far as movies go, it's not that I don't need distractions, or narrative, or art right now. In fact I probably need those more than ever. But what started to stick out in my mind was the movies I was watching already seemed to be from another era. Culturally, in some sense, they felt dated, inevitable relics of the time only a year or two ago, when they were written and produced, before the conflagration broke out, as it now has.

That feeling, more than anything else, the one that movies now in theaters are disconnected from the reality we are now experiencing, was probably why I had lost my enthusiasm.

But that wasn't going to keep me from actually going to the theater. I was determined to soldier on.

Two weeks ago, I drove over to Leominster to see I Love You, Man, the comedy that had topped the box office, and which was getting good reviews.

During the opening credits,the familiar Dreamworks logo came on the screen. In a comedy, this is indication of one sure thing: lots of lowbrow raunch to come. Indeed the first couple minutes included cunnilingus humor, a harbinger of plenty of oral-sex-related material in the rest of the movie.

Much of the humorous funny raunch in I Love You, Man is in the trailers, including the fart gag during the real estate open house scene. But as I've noted before, it's almost as if Dreamworks and the other studios think they need a raunch coating to sell this kind movie. There's enough of this kind of material to cobble together to make trailers packed with it, to be sure, but it doesn't necessarily mean the movie will be crammed with this kind of humor.

As per the title, this was a movie about men, and the contemporary concept of manhood. In the Postmodern view, there are two kinds of straight men. On the one hand, you have the crude, caveman overgrown-boy types who cannot act but through their own infantile ego needs, oblivious to the needs of others, and especially to women. On the other hand, you have the emasculated and feminized types who live at the mercy of the cavemen and the women in their lives. Gay men, interestingly enough, are allowed to span the duality between action and empathy, and to have fully-developed male personalities.

For a Postmodern comedy to be interesting, therefore it needs to not only further this duality about straight men, but to make some kind of fresh commentary upon it, to stretch the canons of existing storytelling to put these kind of men in some new and interesting situation that challenges our (and their) assumptions about male character. On the whole, I Love You, Man seemed fairly successful in this regard, and while I watched it, I found myself intrigued about where the story was going to go.

Paul Rudd plays a Los Angeles real estate agent who dreams of building live-work developments in the shadow of downtown (already this feels like part of the lost world of pre-2008). In the opening scene, he proposes to his girlfriend after an eight-month courtship. On the ride home, we see that whereas she has many friends, with whom she freely shares her sex-life details, he is rather alone and friendless when it comes to other men. His own father prefers the company of his gay brother over him.

The protagonist is thus one of the empathic feminized males who can have female friends but who has no connection to the barbaric hyper ego-assertive males that move in the world around him. An inferior comedy would simply show his difficulties in coping with this, and take this duality for granted with delving deeper. But this movie was thankfully not inferior, and the story charts his voyage of discovery as he tries not only to find a real male friend (who can thus serve as the Best Man at his wedding), but also to get into touch with his inner action/expressive male.

The story moves to a higher level when it connects this voyage of self-discovery back to the original male-female love story by having him question his motivations for proposing marriage at the moment that he did. This creates a temporary rift between himself and his fiance that can only be healed by his discovery of his true male nature (as it should, in a classical sense). In other words, the male-liberation story leaps to the wider issue of how manhood in the Postmodern era effects male-female romantic relationships, and addresses specifically why women should be interested in this topic, since it touches on their well-being very directly.

I liked most of this movie, and my heart was sufficiently warmed to give a damn about what happened to characters. It certainly was fresh enough, and funny at times, to deserve to be at the top of the box office rankings when it came out.

One minor quibble: the movie went through over an hour and half before it decided it had to have a character blurt out the title as a line of dialogue, in literally the last couple minutes of the film. It was completely unnecessary, and should not have been included. Thor has worked up an elaborate theory on the use of the title within movies themselves, something I'll have to write about some time.