Salt

Seen at: Cinema Saver 6, about three weeks ago.

Any of my Facebook friends will already know what I thought of this one. I usually don't mention movies there (for one thing, I haven't seen that many of them lately), but I made an exception in this particular case.

Indeed, I surprised myself. Over the last two years there were so many times I just wanted to walk out of a movie, but until now I always restrained myself, telling myself that if I started to do that, I might walk out of half of the ones I was going to.

But everyone has his/her limits, and Salt pushed me over the line finally.

So sad---I was looking forward to it for months, and waited until it got to the two-dollar theater. Over the summer, it was one of two Hollywood releases (the other being Inception) that I thought might have a chance. I was even willing to give Angelina Jolie another chance.

Inception crashed and burned for me during Act Three. It could have been a good story, but it collapsed utterly at the end (Ben agreed with me that it failed to advance the "false reality" genre even an inch).

Salt, on the other hand, had me churning in my seat from the opening scene---featuring AJ gettting waterboarded in a North Korean prison. What the hell is this, South Park in 2005? Even the promise of a generous role for Liev Schreiber couldn't kindle my interest.

I could have weathered that opening piece of merde, but it just got worse very quickly. The minute I realized that Jolie and Schreiber were CIA agents, and this was going to be another movie where "romantic, heroic CIA agents save the world" as I said in my FB post, it was all I could do not to throw something at the screen. Good thing I didn't have a tomato with me. Pardon my French, but I just don't have time to watch this kind of bullshit anymore.

It doesn't matter to me what the story is---probably something about a "rogue, bad" agent that has to be put down. It's too late for that---way too late. Anything short of a full indictment for that nest of wretched America-killers just doesn't cut it for me now.

Jolie just struck out in my book for the last time. She's on my banned-forever list of movie actors. Go find something else to do, Ms. Jolie, preferably not helping a bunch of rich assholes depopulate Africa so they can turn it into their private game park, like they want to. You suck, Angelina.

Still at this point, I remained in my seat. What finally had me fleeing to exit was a story premise at about minute twenty. Lee Harvey Oswald was a Soviet agent all along, you see...

We don't have time anymore for diversionary revisionary fantasies about what happened in Dallas in 1963. Nothing short of full sunlight matters now. There is too much at stake. Given the recent important disclosures about the JFK case, and what they actually mean, this was beyond insulting. It borders on treason.

I sprung from my seat and uncontrollably yelled "bullshit!" at the screen and stormed up the aisle. For the six or seven other patrons in the auditorium, I suspect I gave them more entertainment than they got from the rest of the movie.

It was the first movie I'd walked out of since my ex-wife and I abandoned The English Patient in Austin in the mid 1990s. I'd rather sit through that twice over before seeing ten more minutes of Jolie's ghastly, snarky smirk in Salt.

But what door have I opened now? Can I possibly force myself to sit through these turkeys anymore. Well, it is Thanksgiving season, at least. And the restored Metropolis is at the Lyric...

By the way, I was quite surprised at the response to my status update on FB. I went away from the screen for a hour and came back to find four "likes" to my post, all from female friends. Seems I'm not the only one who feels this way about these kinds of movies.

Verdict: I'd say burn all the prints, but probably good to keep this one around as reference for just how bad Hollywood got, before it all imploded.

Winter's Bone

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, Thurs. Sept. 8 at 6:00 pm

People were talking this movie a lot, and the concept---neorealistic suspense in the Ozarks made with local actors---was intriguing, but still I waited until the last showing at the Lryic before it left. Too bad. It would have been good to have been able to recommend it before it left.

As I went into this movie, I was musing on a theory of movie narrative I've been toying with. It goes like this:

Every movie has a climax. At the moment of the climax, the main character or characters typically are forced to make a decision regarding an action. If we only saw that moment of the movie, that particular decision by that character might seem bizarre or incomprehensible. The purpose of the movie narrative is to bring us from complete ignorance about the character to a sympathetic understanding of the motivations of that character at the climax. It does this by taking the viewer through a series of emotional states that accompany revelations about the character(s).

Superior movies tend to be the ones that provide solid and satisfying emotional insight into climax-decisions that would be otherwise completely outside our understanding, were it not for insight engendered by the emotional journey of the narrative.

I tested my theory in Winter's Bone. I wondered what the "climax decision" of the main character would be. In this case the protagonist is a seventeen year-old girl taking care of her siblings in their house in the hills of southwestern Missouri and immediately facing the threat of losing her house and land, unless she can locate her absent father and convince him to show up to a court date.

What is the decision she is forced to make at the climax? Well that would be a spoiler, and there's no good in spoiling this movie. But let's just say it was an auspicious start for my new theory.

Winter's Bone advances horror, suspense, and mystery in tangible ways. It is somewhat in the subject-matter genre of the The Blair Witch Project (1999), but without the POV style, and with a much more sophisticated story. We've come a long way since then.

The story is fresh and unpredictable. There's even a cool dream sequence (cf. Inception), used in exactly the way you would want a dream sequence used. The heroine is awesome in her heroism. She embodies the real struggle of Americans right now in a way that Hollywood is flat out ignoring.

I'll throw my wager in with those saying this is going to win Best Picture next March. Given the last two winners, it's hard to see Hollywood not recognizing when it has been bested.

Inception

Seen at: Carmike 10, Ft. Collins, at 4:25 p.m. on Sept 10

This was a fun movie-going experience, because I saw it with my dad on his 70th birthday. I bought the tickets, he bought the popcorn. Off the top of my head, the last time I remember seeing a movie with my dad was 1972--and that was with the whole family.

My dad is a hard-core science fiction fan from the early post-World War II days. He has an incredible depth of knowledge about science fiction paperbacks by the great classical writers, and all the pulp of varying quality that came along with it over the years. While I was growing up, those kinds of paperbacks and copies of little Analog magazine filled our house.

After the end of Inception, I was eager to hear what he thought about it. Most of our movie discussions are me just talking about things I've seen by myself.

I offered my cautious entree to get things going, saying that I was "not sure" about it. He concurred. I could see it was a genuine opinion, and he wasn't just following mine.

Over the next couple of hours, it turned into a rout. Then, and over the following afternoon at the celebration my sister held at her house in the north Denver suburbs, we piled thought about thought about why Inception was so bad, and was one of the most disappointing movies I have seen in a long time.

It's so disappointinga movie, and so deceptive about its premises, that I hesitate to open up the catalog of my thoughts again, lest I feel compelled to write a long treatise on it.

Certainly it is solidly in the genre of Hollywood film that emerged in the 1990s centered on the premise that some or all of the primary characters introduced in Act One are either in some sort of alternate reality state and are either unaware of it, or are dead (in which case the characters in flashback are doomed but are not aware of it).

That being said, Inception utterly fails to advance the genre by even an inch. It's a cop-out, a retreat. The twist of the entire movie turns out to be (spoiler........) that there is no twist and the story is completely linear within a world in which lucid shared dreaming exists. The only plot conflict is about a man getting over his deceased wife---nothing else. That I didn't care at all about the characters, who were like video game characters, can be used to support the idea that the entire framing story is thus also a dream state. Ah, that's it. This movie is about the psychological effect of people living their lives by the quest narratives of video games, and missing out on the real world and family. OK, I get it.

Inception reminded me a lot of Shutter Island so much that they seem as variations on the same movie. With Scorcese, I pretty much know that I'm going to hate anything new he puts out, and now I can add Christopher Nolan to the list. I should have known. Inception is also the same movie as The Dark Knight, in that they are both incoherent on a basic level of narrative logic, but in different ways.

The Dark Knight's incoherence is on the level of morality and motivation: it uses the mask of classicism, for example the the prisoner's dilemma that the Joker sets up on the ferry boat, to fool the audience into thinking that the story says something meaningful about Batman's choice at the end of the movie. Inception has a much deeper level of narrative disconnect, almost like the molecular bonds of character structure are being dissolved.

The people who liked this movie--well, I suspect a lot of it is because of the special effects. The last half hour ofInception is amazing long and boring for minutes on end. The too-forced parallel narrative structure of the dream levels each coming to their respective climax had me rolling my eyes. But the anti-gravity scenes in the elevator and hallway were unique and interesting such that they are deserving of an Oscar nomination, and perhaps even a win depending on the eventual competition. But not the score. Please not the score.

My greatest anger against it comes from the movie's utter failure to use it's science fiction premise (lucid, shared dreaming) to say anything meaningful about the reality in which we live right now via our shared culture and media. There isn't the slightest hint of this in the movie, really. It's as if one took The Matrix and drained it of all its connotation. You've got some innovative arm flailings enhanced by CGI to be sure, and pretty much nothing else. Is the metaphorical premise of Inception really that "you can't put an idea in someone's head, it has to come from them." That's the only interesting question about psychological that the movie even attempts to raise. To be sure, this was debated in the context of lucid dreamnaut experiences, but the problem is: this kind of dreaming experience doesn't exist in reality. The only meaningful debate is about what this means in our "real" reality.

So is the movie saying that you can't put ideas into people's heads? Is this really a deep philosophical question or is this just the Postmodern shell of the appearance and trappings of rational inquiry? I think it is the latter.

As far as lucid dreamnaut movies go, put Dreamscape (1984) in your Netflix queue instead. I haven't seen it since it was in the theaters back then, back when I'd walk over from our house on Purdue Road to see flicks at the now-long-gone University Triplex. But I thought it was fun when I saw it, and certain images and scenes have stuck in my head from it since then.

Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, three weeks ago.

I saw this on the first Friday afternoon showing when it came to Lyric last month. I had just happened to be in the neighborhood, but this meant that I got to screen it with Ben, the Lyric owner, and a few other people.

For most of the time during the movie, I thought it was an interesting documentary on the street art movement, which is NOT graffiti (think posters more than paint) and which is much fascinating that I had thought. There is plenty of valuable archival footage of the creation of various projects by famous street artists.

Toward the end, the story seemed to lag a little, but that was okay. In the lobby, I swapped opinions with Ben, who had almost the same reaction I did.

I went on my way, on my downtown errands, then remembered I had left my reading glasses, so I came back to get them at the theater. Ben was holding them when I walked in. As he handed them to me, we chatted about the movie again, and he asked a simple question regarding a rumor he had heard in connection with the movie, specifically one concerning Banksy's relationship to the artist who is the subject of the movie.

An hour later, we were still sorting it all out, and along the way we both agreed that Exit Through the Gift Shop was an utter masterpiece. We were laughing not only at the movie, but at our own stupid initial reactions to it.

Thank god I forgot my reading glasses that day.

City Island

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, 3:30 pm today

After the houselights came up, I was the last one in the number two auditorium at the Lyric. Ben came in to walk through to the projection room. As the last credits rolled, he asked me, "So how was it?"

"My kind of movie," I said. "It's a New York neighborhood-family movie, which I like a lot."

I added that Andy Garcia's performance was superb. "You know how every year the Academy nominates an Indie performance for the acting Oscar. Last year it was Richard Wright."

He knew what I meant. "Well, Garcia could be it for this year."

Then I added that the movie got a little goofy at the end, and got fairly Postmodern when Garcia's character actually goes from being a prison guard to an actor, and Martin Scorcese is explicitly invoked.

The story here has a Postmodern dysfunctional family that is healed by bold Classical honesty and courage. It occurred to me that in Scorcese's earlier films, and also in Saturday Night Fever, the New York Catholic Family that Screams (NYCFTS) was not so much Scorcese showing us a New York phenomenon (witness his own personal upbringing), but rather the Postmodern one, albeit in New York garb and patois. In City Island, it's come full circle---the New York screaming family now looks normal American, because we've all become that, somewhere along the way.

But like I said, some good performances by a great cast, and I learned a few things about the place where I dined on lobster on my 35th Birthday, having visited all five boroughs in one day of fun. The film did not let down any of my memories.

Clash of the Titans

Seen at: Carmike 10, six weeks ago.

This was probably the second most notable movie of the recent stretch. I'm a big fan of the original (1981) and was afraid it would be spoiled, in particular by having Andromeda become a "girl with the sword."

They didn't do that, to their credit, and it made the movie interesting to me. The problem is solved by introducing a new character, Io, who is unfortunately supernatural, but that's ok in this genre. She's an active, yet feminine. The way she handles a whip in the scene with the Scorpions is downright sexy. In the credits, I looked for the actor's name: Gemma Arterton. "I've looked for her name before," I thought. But where? Turns out she was the Bond girl in Quantum of Solace. She's in Prince of Persia---the female lead---coming up in a couple weeks. Mark her name.

Back to Clash of the Titans---unfortunately the story with the Gods sucked, and didn't even make sense. Zeus is bad, then good. I later read that the director had actually created a much more intricate story, where Zeus is indeed the bad guy of the movie, and the humans do indeed revolt. It was supposed to be really epic, but the studio got final cut and rearranged the entire movie, and largely ruined it. Like I said, I was just happy that it didn't suck in the way I thought it was going to.

I did not see it in 3-d, because it was not shot in 3-d. I'm not going to pay extra for that.

I still prefer the old version by far---claymation Medusa rules!

Alice in Wonderland

Seen at: Metrolux Loveland, about two months ago

This is the movie that kept me from writing my blog for a while. After I saw it, on a whim after driving through the backroads of Weld County one sunny afternoon, my thoughts got all jammed up. There was too much to say about this movie. I had to let my thoughts simmer down, so I could be succint.

This movie will not be particularly enjoyable by most people who see it. Certainly it gave me a queasy feeling at times. But it is probably the most significant Hollywood movie to come out in the Spring of 2010.

Why? Because it encapsulates so much of what Hollywood is trying to say lately. It is the apotheosis of the "girl with the sword" motif that Hollywood is shoving down our throats lately. Moreover the girl with the sword is sweet Alice, a Victorian young woman.

It has the Postmodern fascination with prophecy. Instead of Lewis Carrol's (classical) mathematical puzzles, we get a magical scroll that shows the future, one in which Alice is destined to pick up a sword and slay the Jabberwock. But the poem says "he" instead of "she." Very gendy-bendy.

There were a few moments that were really hard to take. When Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum seize Alice by the arms and drag her away, I felt my Victorian sensibilities being violated to an extreme degree.

But this is not about the Victorian era. It's a fucked up mirror to our own fucked up times, even more fuckeditty-upped than Shutter Island. It's a must see, if you want to understand what 2010 is about.

Wonderland is really Underland---the Underworld, that is, Sheol, the pit, or Hell. Alice has gone to Hell.

The three-D sucks. It wasn't shot in 3D. It certainly washes out the color (they should have done the Wizard of Oz thing, made it 3-D only after Alice goes to Wonderland/Underland.

The chess pieces no longer move in their prescribed moves. They just charge ahead and attack each other chaotically. It's a civil war of the female: bad mother versus good mother. Do you want to know why the Mad Hatter is mad? It's because of the War. The War drove him mad.

See what I mean? What an awesome movie, in a certain way. The ending was to die for: Alice goes off and founds the opium trade. I kid you not.

War. Opium. Insanity. Johnny Depp breakdancing. This could be the movie of the year.

Kick-Ass

Seen at: Cinemark 16 in Ft. Collins, at 11:45 am today

Good god. What a horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible movie.

Eight hours after seeing it I can't even muster the sputtering disgust at this diarrhea-on-film that I was just forced to sit through. Of all the movies where I've had to restrain myself from walking out lately, this took the most effort to stay in my seat. I got half way up, almost started moving toward the exit, but curiosity to see how far it could go kept me there.

I didn't have any clue it was going to be so bad. Last year, after Watchmen, I wondered where the superhero genre could possibly go, since Watchmen had seemed to put the capstone on it. When the trialers for Kick-Ass started showing up a couple months ago, I thought I had my answer: Kick-Ass appeared to be the logical extension from Watchmen. In a sense, it does that, but really it takes everything that is problematic with, say, The Dark Knight, and magnifies it by an order of magnitude.

But that hardly begins to describe it. Kick-Ass is nothing else than the sick, twisted elaboration of the girl-assassin-with-the-sword fascination that literally has Hollywood masturbating (see first scene of Kick-Ass, complete with a waste basket full of spermy kleenex).

Let me put it bluntly: anyone who thought making a movie about an eleven-year-old girl who turns into a remorseless psychopathic killer who gleefully jams a samurai blade into defenseless people fleeing and begging for their lives, and which endorses these actions as fun, wholesome and righteous, is, in my book fucking insane on a level that makes all other Postmodern dysfunctions seem like quaint melodrama.

To everyone who made this movie: go fuck yourself. Fuck you for getting me to sit through this.

This is what Hollywood at nadir looks like. Can it get any lower?

Here's Ebert's Twitter on this movie.

update: I'm with Roger.

Date Night

Seen at: Carmike 10, 4:55 p.m. yesterday

Yesterday afternoon I showed up at the Carmike on a whim, coming home from a long walk, and hit the showtime for this on the button. As I mentioned before, it's nice to see a movie on the opening weekend so that one is not deluged by headlines of reviews on the web. Date Night was the only wide release film to come out on Friday, so I had no excuse not to tackle this one right off the bat.

Going into it, I knew it was only ninety minutes long. Watching TCM a couple years ago, I used to love the "eight reelers"---the old classics at 85 minutes or so. I give a lot more leeway to films that come under the hour-and-half mark.

This one worked well enough, and at times I found myself comparing to it romantic escapade comedies of recent eras. A film that can do this while offering fresh contemporary tweaks and twists is also one to which I can give much leeway.

The freshest (or perhaps most Classically retrograde) aspect of Date Night was Tina Fey's performance. Although I could imagine an actor other than Steve Carell as the male lead (perhaps not as good, but I could at least imagine it), I simply could not see anyone else besides Fey pulling off the character of Claire.

Fey's secret is that she completely thwarted what we have come to expect of the Postmodern marriage: adult wife, baby husband, where the story is driven around the failings and immature frailties of the male character. Fey's ability to self-deprecate, and still remain powerful female, puts her in a league by herself right how, and points the way to the Post-Post-Postmodern with a big blinking neon sign message.

Thus we have a story about a non-dysfunctional marriage that still has "problems" that need to be solved, ones that don't simply fall back on the formula of "husband needs to grow up, and wife needs to realize that husband will never really grow up all the way she wants him to."

All this was enough to keep me entertained through most of the film. The film seemed well written in the first act. I was impressed by small screenplay touches in the opening minutes, comparing the two principals at their jobs. He's a NJ tax accountant. His wild young clients reject his advice as being too staid and conservative. She's a NJ real estate agent. Her older mature clients reject her advice as being too rash, given market conditions. They both wind up in the same place, by parallel routes.

The story somewhat comes unglued in the last fifteen minutes, as so many of them do. I actually got bored in the scene in the strip club at the climax, where Fey and Carell are forced to perform ludicrous unsexy sex dances for the bad guy. I could barely look at the screen, as it kept going on and on way too long (although at least it speaks to the central issue of the sexlessness of their marriage, and what that means for them as a couple). Not a fatal flaw, just a little bit of discord.

On the other hand, we have one too many scenes involving Mark Wahlberg opening the door of his apartment without a shirt. Twice was OK, but on the third time, my mental "script error" starting flashing bright red. Oh, and the fun, friendly Mossad spy references were enough to make me gag a little (Die, Ziva, die!)

Yet there were plenty of fun things in this movie to forgive the errors. Were I putting together a New Jersey film festival of recent releases, this would certainly belong in it.

As for Fey, in a different era, she would be a blockbuster movie comedienne, and perhaps she will be, but what makes her a genius also have a somewhat of limiting quality to her story range. That's to our loss.

update: forgot to mention that this movie is full of fun supporting performances. I especially liked see Taraji P. Henson again. Hadn't seen her since her outstanding performance in Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys.

The Spy Next Door

Seen at: AMC Promenade in Westminster, Feb. 4 at 2:10 pm

A couple weeks ago I was having dinner with Agnes and Thor. I mentioned having seen this movie a month or so back. We all agreed that not only was Jackie Chan underrated, but that he is perhaps the best living cinematic dancer in the Classical masculine tradition of Gene Kelly.

One can see this latter aspect in several scenes in this movie, in particular during a chase-fight duet sequence with the Russian bad guy (played with hilarious tongue and cheek by Icelander Magnus Scheving (imDb). From this scene alone, one can see that Scheving was cast because of his ability to follow Chan in disguising Classical studio-era Hollywood dance as Postmodern martial arts combat.

That's the secret to understand Chan's real talent. One minute he's fluidly doing Kelly's unmistakable scissor leg swing over a metal staircase to chase the villain. A few minutes later, he's sliding down a drain pipe of a suburban home like Buster Keaton.

Here Chan plays about as goofy as role in as goofy a story as Kelly did in The Pirate (1948). The portrayal of the CIA is about as absurd as it gets. But who cares? It's too much fun.

Actually the story is deliciously Classical inside a Postmodern shell. Chan is paired with a pretty thirtysomething widow (Amber Valetta) with preteen children. Chan and the widow are boyfriend-girlfriend at the beginning. His girlfriend's children hate him because he is a typical Postmodern milquetoast man, a doormat for the assertive mother. Even the use of the term "boyfriend" in the movie seems to demote Chan's character to being like an extra child in the family, rather than the prospective man of the house.

But all this is just an act! In reality, in his job, Chan's character is a cool, confident superspy with amazing ninja talents who fights supervillains to save the world from destruction. Yet he cannot reveal this to his girlfriend or her children because to do so would compromise not only his own job secrecy, but would put them in physical danger. He resists all temptation to reveal who he is, even though it would put an end to the ego bruising that he takes. That, folks, is pretty much the very paradigm of honor for Classical heroes.

The story of course will force his hand. It must, for the secrecy he is required to enforce is at odds with the Classical (and Postmodern) principle that there can be no such secrets inside conjugal relations. Before he can become the step father, he must come clean to his wife, and through the extension principle of remarriages, to the children as well.

The bad guys in the story thus function as the plot device to force him to reveal his real self to his new family.

Can you see how subtly brilliant this movie is? It didn't get much hoopla at the time, and I suspected that in part it was because the idea of the "perfect stepdad" is just too bizarre for many people to swallow these days, especially disgruntled divorced women who bring their children to places like the Westminster Promenade for matinees. Yet any kid oriented movie will live a thousand lives on Redbox and Netflix, so the producers will recoup their money many times over. No tears must be shed for this.

And why should they? This is Classical comedy!

After talking about Chan, I posed a follow-up question to Agnes and Thor, to get their opinions. Consider this: everyone knows that Astaire and Kelly, in no particular order of 1 and 2, are the two greatest male dancers Hollywood has given us over the last century of movie making. My question: among men, who is third?

Agnes suggested Russ Tamblyn, who is certainly on my short list. I stated that I lean towards Groucho Marx.

click here for bonus clip to this post

Chloe

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, last Tuesday afternoon

Let me wax a bit about Amanda Seyfried, who has recently become one of my favorite young actresses, and who plays the title character in this movie, the lastest issue from Atom Egoyan, about a Toronto prostitute who wreaks havoc in the life of an older married coupled (played by Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson).

I mentioned Kristin Bell in my last post---Seyfried was in a supporting role in Veronica Mars, but lately she has zoomed past Bell to emerge in a varieity of interesting roles that give evidence that she is probably the superior actress, all in all. Not that Bell is bad, but Seyfried, so far at least, has proven that she can more than cope with a challenging roles like this one, and hold her own against heavyweights like Moore (ostensibly the lead here) and Neeson.

To be sure, there were a few brief moments in monologues where the idea of Seyfried as a hooker strained credibility, but here I mostly passed them off as a relic of the fantasy nature of this story, and the way Egoyan deals with this type of subject in his screenplays and his direction.

This story is not meant to be a "realistic" one but one that swims in the lotus-scented waters fantasy. I noticed that given several framing shots of Moore's character looking out a glass window of her office, one could interpret the entire story (on one level) as being the fantasy product of the imagination of Moore's character as she watches a beautiful young woman (Seyfried) leave a luxury apartment building, creating an entire story around her that reflects her own fears about her husband, her marriage, and her lost youth.

Seyfried certainly has a preternaturally beautiful face, at least when shot from full forward. Her round full lips almost look like a sex doll when made up the right way. One of the interesting parts about Chloe is that Egoyan also gives us plenty of unflattering shots of Seyfried here as well, particularly in scenes in which Seyfried appears in profile (much less flattering to her) with stringy hair and looking less than glamorous.

The opening scene---pure Egoyan---has Seyfried in a voice-over monologue as we see her in her undergarments, dressing after visiting one of her clients. Who would not want to see Seyfried half-naked? Yet even here the interplay between the elastic of her undergarments with the shadows of the room seem to highlight bits of cellulite on her that a cleaner and less self-conscious attempt at eroticism would have avoided showing. Right the first we see the flaws in Chloe's pefection. Seyfried sails through it all like a seasoned pro.

This seemed a far more mature statement that Egoyan's Exotica (1994). Here he revisits the same realm of sexuality and voyeurism but in a way that feels updated for the 2010s, in particular in the switch to female voyeurism. Moreover one should not be surprised to encounter the use of audio narration, one character to another, as a way of driving the story (as in, say, Ararat (2002)).

It's far from a perfect movie. The twist was fairly easy to see coming (not a bad thing in this case). The ending was a bit of a letdown, not because it was wrong, but it was the simplest way of bringing the story to resolution, and letting us emerge from the envelopment of the fantasy. I wouldn't have minded the film being fifteen minutes longer, to ease the narrative abruptness.

But really who's complaining? Certainly one does not need to salivate over Seyfried's naked body to appreciate her, but if she does the rest of her career covered from head to toe, at least there is this movie to draw in, if you want to see her undressed.

It was a courageous role for her, and one in which she succeeded. Letters from Juliet, a sappy-looking romantic comedy set in Tuscany is next up for her. I'd go see even if I weren't seeing every movie.

Now if only Seyfried could star in a movie with Pierce Brosnan. That would awsome! Oh wait, it already happened. And she sings!

When in Rome

Seen at: Cinemark Greeley Mall, March 10 at 2:30 pm

As I've mentioned before, in the Postmodern Hollywood paradigm, traditional Christian religion, along with a belief in God, has been largely exiled to fringe movies like the one in my last post. But that doesn't mean Postmodernity is atheist. Instead, we get a smorgasbord of spiritual beliefs in curses, legends, and disconnected spiritual forces that affect our lives.

When in Rome is a good example of this, in the context of a romantic comedy. Kristin Bell, a decent actress of her generation who seems to be gravitating towards harsher bitchy role as she matures, is a romantically down-on-her-luck heroin who blatantly invokes such spiritual forces as a revenge against the Goddess of Love.

She does this by picking up coins out of "the fountain of love" in Rome, thinking it will save the poor lovelorn saps who have thrown in the coins. Later she finds out that according to her Italian brother-in-law, this act by her invokes magical forces that will cause the coin-throwers to fall in love with her. If you've seen the trailer, you will have gotten this premise of the story.

Of course this being a romantic comedy, we know that somehow she will wind up with her soul mate.

How is this Postmodern? So far, it is not explictly so. This could be the set-up to a Classical comedy. The difference is that in this case, the magical forces of the fountain turn out to be absolutely real, instead of simply a legend, as they would be in a Classical story.

Another way of saying this is that there is no naturalistic cover in this story. The actions of the male coin throwers can be explained only by believing that the curse/legend of the fountain is real. As I'm watching this I'm thinking, "wait till this gets out on the Internet about this fountain of love!"

By contrast, a Classical version of the story would have somehow explained the coin-throwers' encounters with Bell's character in a way that did not explicitly endorse the reality of the magic fountain. This kind of thing was taboo in Classical cinema to a large extent, because it violated the Christian paradigm of free will.

So instead of the universality of God, in Postmodernity we have a world in which every petty old wives tale turns out to be mystically true. I've seen it over and over again in Postmodern cinema, to the point where I'm beginning to think of it as the "Postmodern Religion."

Forutnately there is a little more to the movie that this premise. The real love story of the movie turns out to independent of curse/magic of the fountain. This is the twist at the end of the story, one that very easy to see.

We may be in Postmodernity and wallow in our belief in animistic magical forces around us, but Postmodern women still want and need to believe that men fall in love with them not out of compulsion from magic, but from free will.

Youth in Revolt

Seen at: AMC Promendade in Westminster, late January

I had to chase this movie down in Westminster, after I let in leave Fort Collins early in the year. I saw it on a trip to my visit my sister's family.

This was not the movie I expected it to be, but this is an earlier effort by Michael Cera, that is just now getting released after his success, so I don't bedrudge him this role.

I thought it was going to go like this: sweet young Postmodern adolescent boy discovers that sweetness only makes life very frustrating for him, when it comes to women. Somehow he gets in touch with his "bad boy" side, creating an alternate persona with a French accent and a mustache who is the manifestation of this side of himself, and shows him how to "have success" with women. At first it seems to work, and he has "success." He meets a girl who could be his true love (could be, because they are teenagers) and wins her love (through innocence amidst his new persona). But eventually he takes the "bad boy" thing too far. It causes him heartbreak and the (temporary) loss of the affection of his could-be-true-love (the heroine). Somehow he is able to tame the "bad boy" (on his own terms) by a fusion of the spirit of it, back into his "sweet" self (his true character). The mustached persona fades away into oblivion, but not really, because it was the hero all along. By his renewed humbled innocence, and no longer the pushover Postmodern boy, he wins back the heroine. All's well that end's well--for a teenage comedy.

The movie didn't go like that at all. It started off like that, but then it crossed the point of no return by having the hero go "full bad boy." He commits manifest crimes of property, threatening the lives of others. He disgraces and dishonors himself and his family in public. That is, he goes off the Postmodern cliff.

By any classical standards, the story has boxed the hero into a corner. He must go to prison at the end. There is no way around it. But because this is Postmodernity, he also wins the girl too.

One person who really liked this movie is my friend Ben, the owner of the Lyric. I told him how I had to go down to Westminster to see this, because it left the local multiplex after two weeks. That set in a motion a chain of events that has led to Ben declaring "war" on Cinemark.

I swear I didn't want it to come to this!

Remember Me

Seen at: Cinemark 16 in Ft. Collins, last Sunday afternoon

This year I took the occassion of the first day of Spring to do some hiking up in the Big Thompson Canyon, in Roosevelt National Forest. I'd rented a pair of Black Diamond trekker poles from REI, and I wanted to try them out in the recent snowfall, to see if I wanted to purchase a pair. After a jaunt up to the overlook on the Round Mountain trail, I decided that only an idiot would ever go hiking without them.

In the afternoon, after a wonderful outing, I rolled up to the Cinemark to see a show. I love seeing movies this way---just arriving and seeing whatever is showing next. Actually I cheated a little because I knew that Remember Me was showing there, and that since it wasn't showing at the Carmike, it meant that I better make it priority before it leaves town.

This ending to this movie was spoiled for me on the Internet before I even knew anything about it. Given the subject matter, I was glad it was spoiled, because it gave me a chance to look at the film while knowing in advance the fate of the protagonist (Robert Pattinson, from the Twilight movies), and the final twist.

(start spoilers here)

This is 9/11 movie, to be sure, but what's good about it is that it doesn't try to say everything about 9/11. Instead it looks at the life of one person who winds up being killed in the attacks.

The story kept me going without flagging. I was surprised to enjoy Pattinson in this role. His "listless young man" character (who of course works at the Strand Bookstore in the Village!) has more than a dash of Holden Caulfield in his character, especially when he is interacting with his younger sister (who is about ten years old, an age that many young women in the audience of this movie would have been at the time of 9/11). In a way, it is the younger sister through whom the sentimental "memory story" of the memory is cast.

I also noticed in this movie that both characters of the love story are supposed to be Irish-American (see the map of Ireland next to Chris Cooper in one scene). This lends a patina of Celtic mourning to the story, in an oblique way.

The casting was well done. It's always pleasing to see Pierce Brosnan as well, the second time this month. Here he is Pattinson's father, a powerful businessman who does not think much of what his son is doing. Brosnan is my favorite "actor's actor" who will apparently attempt any role (including being a centaur in the recent Percy Jackson release). Here he does a New York accent that doesn't really work, but that's about the only overt negative I can say about this movie.

Chris Cooper, another of my favorite supporting actors, was exactly in his element here, and reminded me of his role in American Beauty (1999), a movie that I have long thought of us as "America on the eve of 9/11."

Can't forget a surprise supporting appearance by Lena Olin. Always nice to see her on screen.

Yes, it has a downer ending, but in narrative terms it completely works (by a a first-time screenwriter, apparently). Moreover the film really impressed by what it didn't do. Leading up to the climax I began to worry that the movie was going to attempt to re-create the strike on the tower by digitally showing us a 767 flying into WTC 1.

The last thing we need is Hollywood to contribute to our collective false memories about what happened that day. Instead the film completely eschewed any special effects that would add to our collectively video vocabulary of that morning. When I realized this, I heaved a big sigh of relief in my seat. This gave me permission to like the movie, which I did.

On the other hand, there was ample implied horror, in that Pattinson's character is seen mounting to the very upper floors of WTC 1 right before the attack. Those people in the top ten floors were the ones who were doomed right from the very first moment, if they weren't killed outright.

(end spoilers here)

Don't expect much more than a young adult drama if you see it. The main narrative is driven primarily by father-son conflict, a theme that arguably is one of the strengths of Postmodern film.

Curiously it's also another entry in the recent string of Brooklyn films (three in one month), in that it is framed by a backstory involving an incident in Brooklyn that happens to the heroine in her childhood. In a way it thus contributes to the subgenre of films that speak to the Brooklyn-Manhattan divide, although in a way that seems far away from the viewpoint of Saturday Night Fever (1978).

This will probably remain a guilty pleasure for 2010. On the other hand, I feel no guilt about my new Black Diamond trekker poles, ones that purchased on the spot after returning my rentals. Some things are mandatory.

She's Out of My League

Seen at: Carmike 10, at 4:25 this afternoon

On the surface, She's Out of My League purports to follow the logical progression of the Weak Postmodern Man to its ultimate conclusion. The hero is an undereducated and underemployed young man, slender of frame and with a personality that is less than assertive. He is every "omega male" out there in America in 2010.

We meet him at the most awkward moment of his life so far, as he pathetically attempts to win back the love of an ex-girlfriend (whom we can tell is beneath him in character).

By fate he is going to run into a "solid 10" in the form of Molly, an event planner with sparkling blue eyes and blonde hair. Hence the title.

A review that I read on the web told me what to expect of this movie, namely that there is no realistic way that such a woman would fall for such man. The movie actually asserts this "He's a 5, She's a 10," and that's too big a leap to make.

Thus we have the rarified view of the Hollywood view of modern romance: all men are beneath all women. The strong men are assholes. The non-assholes are weak. All women realize this. Only the Goddess of Love herself keeps things going, by leading the heroine to somehow overlook the faults of the hero.

The movie lived up to my expectations on one level, but during the first scene in which the two principals meet, I could tell that the web review I'd read simply didn't understand the movie.

In the language of classical cinema, the movie was telling me that the premise of the story (that the hero is a typical omega male) was a ruse. In fact the hero had quite a few strong classical characteristics that made him exactly the kind of man that the "solid 10" heroine would be interested in getting to know.

Specifically, it is apparent that Molly knows very well that men slobber all over her when they meet her. They are distracted by her. They put her on a pedestal.

The hero is somewhat immune to her, refreshingly, precisely because he is so beaten down. At the magical moment when their eyes meet (across a crowded airport screening area), he allows himself only the most temporary flash of true love. Then he returns to his placid acceptance of the reality of the situation--temporarily drained of self esteem, yet firm in his actions as an airport employee (because a man does his job).

He is at the low point in his life, and he barely keeps his eyes open. He isn't even interested in looking at her.

That's a necessary but not sufficient condition for the hero to pique the interest of the heroine.

What wins her over, in the first scene, is that he becomes her champion. When his fellow TSA employees are hassling her at the airport screening line, he naturally and without pretense takes the position of honor. He stands behind her, literally, and speaks up for her when she cannot (because then she'd be a bitch).

Moreover, we understand that his desire for her is not simply because she is a hot babe. In reality, they are alike, because he, as an intelligent young man, has to suffer a constant stream of indignities from his friends, co-workers and families. She reflects his own spiritual state, and that is why there legitimately is magic when their eyes first meet.

At this point, I knew the love story would work for me. It kept getting better after that.

For example, eventually if the hero is really win her completely, he must provide an overt demonstration of his desire, specially by a physical action which he initiates. The way the story handles this, subtly over several scenes until it reaches, uh, a climax (wink wink), made for a hefty portion of the charm of this movie.

The story here was quite clever on many levels. There is a fun play on the literal meaning title by the use of hockey, played in both a professional arena and in a family basement.

The story amazingly never took the painfully obvious route I thought it would. It put the characters in fresh scenarios of tension, instead of the same old Postmodern chestnuts. At every point it kept inventing a new way to have the principals move the story forward, and to create sharp but pleasing waves of tension when their love ambitions are temporarily thwarted (as it must).

This could almost be a Gary Cooper-Barbara Stanwyck movie, catapulted into the language of the early 21st century. Some loving and enjoyable second unit cinematography of Pittsburgh, including the Warhol Museum reception hall, made for a visually engaging film experience.

It had just the right dash of contemporary crudeness to speak in the vernacular of today's audience. What more could one ask for in this type of movie?

Moreover, in the climax it connects in a seamless way to the present-day cultural notion that asks women to become the active heroine, i.e. "the princess must save the (weak) prince, so that he is no longer weak." One saw the extreme version of this is the teeth-baring courtship rituals of Avatar. IN this movie, we understand the necessity of this active quality of the heroine as championess, because of the "perfection" (by cultural surface standards) of character Molly.

Thus in the climax of the story, it is she, not he, who must actually travel the furthest physical distance to where they can embrace (in the airport of course). In terms of courtship dynamics, it is he, not she, who must break away from his family to stand by her side (she is already her own woman).

Yet this apparent inversion (or warping perhaps) of the classical courtship paradigm leads back to a place that seems familiar in a classical sense. Namely, we arrive at the notion that seduction is the woman's game, not the man's, and that any intelligent woman knows instinctively that when she meets a good man, she must go out of her way to grab his attention. Like I said, this could almost be Cooper and Stanwyck, in a Postmodern Mobius Strip sort of way.

Extraordinary Measures

Seen at: Reel Mountain Theater, Estes Park, Colorado, about six weeks ago

There are two movies theaters up in Estes Park, but only one (the Reel Mountain) that is open all year round. I'd been meaning to get up there for some time, but mustering up the gumption to drive all the way up the Big Thompson Canyon just for a movie had been elusive.

To be honest, I wasn't even planning on seeing Extraordinary Measures. That's right---I was going to skip it. In January I decided I was tired from seeing movies constantly in the way I've doing for a year and a half. I privately decided to take a break. My plan at the time was to let some of the minor winter/spring Hollywood releases leave the theaters, then to catch them later on DVD by the end of the calendar year.

Like I said, that was my plan. Along those lines, I noticed that Extraordinary Measures (a movie that was not high on my to-see list) was leaving all the theaters in northern Colorado, even the ones in Denver. "It's time," I decided. The next Friday came around and Extraordinary Measures was officially gone. I'd crossed the Rubicon of my movie project.

But it was not to be. My plan was thwarted when the very next day, on a whim, I looked up the Estes Park listings on. I saw that Extraordinary Measures was now showing up the canyon!! It seemed like fate: at last I had a definite reason to go up there.

It turned out to be a nice result. In the morning, I used the opportunity to do some winter hiking on the trails on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. That afternoon, I drove into town to the theater, which I found to be a charming and quaint independent showplace on the edge of town---very well run and tidy. Five buck matinees and cheap popcorn too.

The movie itself more than surpassed my expectations, which were very low, actually. First off, I had developed an aversion to Brendan Fraser. He's really not a bad actor. He just seems to choose really awful screen projects. But in my contrarian way, at the start of the film, I decided, "Heck, I'm going to try to like Brendan in this one." I guess it worked because I became entranced by the fleshy protuberances of his one-of-kind profile as he was leaning into confort his sick child.

Yes, the sick kid thing, with the corresponding race against time to find the cure. That's certainly a barrier to my embracing a movie---one knows that the story's going to pull heartstrings, so one almost must take a defensive stand against the onslaught of emotion, to force the movie to be genuine. But the simple straightforward story in this case won me over, just as I was won over last summer (in a big way) by My Sister's Keeper. I came out of the theater a tad less cynical than when I walked in. Most people I know would not like this movie, but for the kind of movie that this is, it works.

Harrison Ford was certainly a surprise here. In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he looked like a tired old man doing a geriatric Saturday Night Live parody of his Indiana Jones character. Here he plays a (very) cantankerous University of Nebraska professor, and he seems to relish every minute of it, hopping and bouncing around the screen as if he were twenty years younger than in Skull (coincidentally Estes Park has multiple businesses that sell only University of Nebraska paraphernalia to the tourists---I guess I really did come to the right place to see this one).

This day-trip adventure to the mountains was so successful that I reconsidered my entire decision to take a break, and have forged onward (for now) without missing a beat. Soon after I discovered that forgoing the trailers really helped me with emotional stamina as well, so I got a second wind with movies in general.

Repo Men

Seen at: Carmike 10, at 1:35 pm today.

This week had been like a taste of early summer. Last night the temperature dropped and the snow rolled in. Smitty called in the late morning. He was having a snow day. I hadn't seen him since we saw Sherlock, so it seemed like a fun idea.

Repo Men just opened today, so in case you haven't seen the trailer, it is set in the near dystopian future, and stars Jude Law who is a repossession agent for a giant biomedical firm that sells artificial organs. When payment falls too far beyond, Law's character (or one of his comrades) is sent to collect the "artiforg." In certain case this results in instant death (for example, with heart repossession).

At one point in this movie, I thus realize that it is about psychopathic serial killers, in the guise of normality. It reminded me of Daybreakers a little, but much more sophisticated, using pure naturalism instead of supernatural.

Some impressive sci-fi in this movie. Original concept right that sheds light on the horror of contemporary society. I was hooked. For example, I was curious to know what it was, about this future society, that would cause so many people to need so many artifical organs? The movie gave a partial explanation, but left open to wandering about more of the back story about this horrible future.

That kind of open-ended wondering is a good thing for a sci-fi movie, in my opinion. It forces you to fill in the details on your own.

Another great thing about this movie was Liev Schreiber, one of the better supporting actors in Hollywood lately. He gets to play the heavy, as the head of the evil corporation, and he does it well.

Unfortunately there is a horrible plot twist in the last part of this movie, one that I saw coming a mile away. It completely changes the theme of the story at the climax, taking it from being a corporate dystopia movie to being a psycho-nihilistic thriller in a way similar to Shutter Island. Yes, it becomes one of those kind of movies, that want you to go back and re-evaluate earlier scenes, like a parlor game.

What an awful disgrace, that the movie had to be marred in this way. There was no reason to do this. The story worked beautifully up to that point.

It was a narrative train wreck at the end, to be sure, but not as bad as the plot malfunction at the end of Daybreakers, which was a more lower-level violation.

Along those lines, in Act Three of Repo Men (spoiler in this paragraph) there is an interesting bit of classical stitching that ties together the two pscyho-realties. In the "fake" reality inside the mind of Law's character, Schreiber gets tasered by Law a second time. Schreiber says sarcastically, as he slumps unconscious, "this again?"

At that instant, I immediately thought of the "variational rule" of movie plots: never twice should we see the same action with the same result (or almost never). That the story violates this rule is actually a signal that the climax of the movie is not "real," but a virtual one inside a character's dreaming mind. This kind of thing really impresses me, when I notice it.

But like I said, this whole twist was a pointless distraction, and even a dismantling of the up-to-then successful biomedical corporate dystopia story. Why wasn't it enough, to tell the dystopian story without the psycho-nihilistic plot twist at the end?

I think the answer to that question is a key to understanding Hollywood and America right now.

The Crazies

Seen at: Carmike 10, Ft. Collins, Feb. 27 at 4:30

Please note that I made a point of seeing this on the first afternoon of its release. One should see zombie movies on opening day, to catch the fullest manifestation of the vibe of the audience seeing it.

I haven't seen the George Romero original, but the fact that Romero is the executive producer here is good enough for me. Someday the Academy will stand for George too.

The movie earned my complete respect in the first couple minutes. First, in a rural establishing shot (supposedly eastern Iowa) we see a cloudy sky with a patch open in the middle. In the patch we see the criss-cross patchwork of several chemtrails.

It really shocked me to see chemtrails in the movies. I've been a chemtrail watcher informally for about six months, and it had occurred to me chemtrails would never show up in movies, because they make the sky look ugly.

But I was wrong. Here they were---in a Romero movie. Then a few minutes later we see a jet crossing the sky, a close-up, emitting what could either be a contrail or a chemtrail. This was getting good.

The story revolves around a deadly virus that is unleashed in a rural town. The virus escape is caused by the crash of a military jet carrying it.

At this point it occurred to me: oh, god, they are going to make up stupid explanation about chemtrails. This is the way it works: before the public is turned on to something the government is doing, it will show up in a Hollywood movie, in some slightly outrageous but obviously fictional setting. That way, later if one tries to bring up the topic, many people will say, "Oh, you saw that in a movie."

But that's not what happened here. Thankfully chemtrails never showed up explicitly in the plot. All we saw were the small references at the beginning. That's the way to do it, by small references that introduce the images, that subtly encourage people to notice the unspoken phenomenon.

Like I said, I gave the movie a complete pass after I realized this, and enjoyed the story, plot-holes and all, including the outrageous climax that violates verisimilitude on a level noticeable by someone from Iowa, but utterly forgivable for the sake of storytelling.

Love live narrative!

Daybreakers

Seen at: Cinemark Greeley Mall, about six weeks ago

Imagine watching your favorite baseball team play. They are down one run, late in the game. Your team is at bat. One of your best hitters comes to plate and hits a long majestic fly ball. It looks like it's going to go out of the park and tie the game. But at the last minute it falls into the glove of an opposing outfielder, who nonchalantly makes the out and lowers his glove, as if he knew the whole time exactly where the ball was going to land. Bummer.

That's how I felt after seeing Daybreakers. It was almost a dramatic home-run, but then at the end it just fizzled out. And this from Lionsgate, alas!

The movie came and went so fast in the theaters that many people probably didn't even see the trailer, which showed frequently during action movies throughout mthe late summer and fall,. The movie got delayed in its release until after the new year, which meant the trailer played for quite a while, and let me build up anticipation of seeing it (especially through the spate of gawdawful fauxpire movies throughout the fall).

What a premise Daybreakers offered---a future (or alternative present) in which a disease of the blood has swept quickly through the human race by vampiric action. Most of the human race has been turned into vampires. The remaining humans are hunted and farmed for blood.

It is a post-apocalypse scenario, but a highly ordered post-apocalypse. This is because vampires are classical. In fact, they are often indicatory of the malformed remnant of pure classicism.

As I often like to stay: werewolves are classical morality stripped of classical order; vampires are classical order stripped of classical morality; zombies are stripped of both.

The vampire order in this post-apocalypse not suprisingly has nostalgic features, and resembles the U.S. in the 1940s, but with technology slightly more advanced than today. For example, vampires drive cars around in the daylight because of special shades on the windows and video cameras that allow them to see the road and navigate. The cities have sprawling networks of underground tunnels (the movie was shot in Australia).

On top of that, the vampire world is, not surprisingly, as corrupt and evil as today's Wall Street and military/industrial complex. On the scale of social commentary, Daybreakers was heading straight for a Nadia perfect 10.

The protagonist (Ethan Hawke) is a vampire hematologist, wracked with guilt of vampiric treatment of humans, who is looking furtively for a substitute for human blood before the supply runs out (which is about to happen). He meets up with some humans on the run. The story is driven by the meeting of Hawke's character with that of Willem Dafoe, who turns out to be a former vampire who has been cured, and returned to human status.

The story thus becoms about whether the rebel team can get this Dafoe cure to the vampiric world in time to turn them back human, before the blood runs out and all the vampire turn into goat people and die horrible deaths. It's a vampire blood cure thriller.

There's some good subplots along---vampire CEO father versus daughter (father played by Sam Neill with reptilian eyes). It all works right up to the climax.

What goes wrong? Well, like I said it's about a cure for the vampire disease. So far so good. But the rule of narrative in this case is that, all other things being equal, there should be only one cure for the vampire disease, namely the one that Willem Dafoe's character accidently discovered.

But at the climax of the story, all of a sudden, there appears a second cure for the vampire disease (discovered in a previous scene by the characters but not revealed to the audience). It is this second cure that resolves the story. The first cure (Dafoe's) doesn't even enter into the story at all. The end.

Got that? What a disappointment. This kind of thing really peeves me because it completely defanged, if you will, what had been a nice decent horror thriller up to that point. But one cannot fail on this level of story and still make a good movie. It just doesn't work.

Sadly, Daybreakers is not the only movie I could say this about. It seems to be the story coming out of 2009, that so many movies had the same kind of brain-dead plot problems. It happened across genres.

What's going on here? These are story mistakes that should never have happened. They certainly were never seen in any classical Hollywood studio movies, at least after about 1932, by which time the narrative rules of Hollywood cinema had been established. It's as if we've been catapulted back before this time, or into some dystopic future.

As a consolation for you, here's the awesome trailer for Daybreakers that I mentioned, which includes a nice use of Placebo's cover of "Running Up That Hill."
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi4040294937/

Dear John

Seen at: Carmike 10, 4:20 pm today

Academy Awards over, back to catching up. Buying a ticket for Dear John this afternoon, I asked the college student behind the glass, "So this is the movie that won the Best Picture Oscar, right?" He didn't quite know if I was joking or not.

Why did The Hurt Locker win? Certainly it had wonderful cinematography, and a great score. But above any other movie it captured the lousy feeling that Americans have about the war in 2009, and by extension the lousy feeling they have about so many other things.

On the down side about it (if the reports are true), the soldiers seem to hate the movie because it fails basic verisimilitude tests about the actual experience of detonation squad soldiers in Iraq. That's an old Hollywood issue, of course. On a personal level, the descriptions of why the soldiers in Iraq didn't like it made me wince a little, because they reminded me of the kind of naive mistakes about the Iraq War that I made with Thor when we were writing a screenplay about Iraq five years ago. I expect more out of an Academy Award winning story than my own limited level of imagination. They actually went to the Middle East.

But I can forgive all that about The Hurt Locker because of the emotional power of the movie, and the fact that it is somewhat of an independent production (in a Hollywood kind of way).

More disturbing to me, however, were the thoughts that arose from seeing the Awards last night, where I could discern what it was about the movie that left me a little sideways about it, after first liking it so much.

When Bigelow spoke about dedicating the movie not only to the men and women in uniform in the military, but also to the hazmat teams teams, it occurred to me how much we now see the war as like a firefighting operation. It is a messy thing, but it is something that has to be done, and so we should honor the sacrifice of those that do the job for us.

The war has thus been completely depoliticized, seven years about Michael Moore got on stage and said, "We live in fictional times."

Bigelow then addressed the uniformed military, saying something along the lines (I'm paraphrasing) that "as long as you are out their doing what you are doing, "\we'll be back here..." whereupon she fumbled a little for words. I think she was about to say "making propaganda to support you." That's what she seemed to want to say, but she couldn't say that out loud right now, even though we all know it's true.

But this development, i.e. the complete acquiesence of Hollywood to the war, should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been going to movies in the U.S. on a regular basis over the last year or two. Lately, at many corporate multiplexes, if you arrived five to ten minutes before screening, you were very likely to be treated one of the short music videos created by the National Guard for recruiting purposes.

All of them are awesome---perhaps the best American music videos I've seen lately outside of Katie Perry (no shame in losing to her).

The one with Kid Rock, called "Warrior" has a rap mosh pit of soldiers in uniform jumping like the gorillas in Planet of the Apes. Can you beat that? It's hard not to wince, however, when he opens with the line "so don't tell me who's wrong or right when liberty starts slipping away."

The Three Doors Down video, called "Citizen Soldier" mixes footage of present-day U.S. forces in Afghanistan and the homefront with the militia of the Revolutionary War running through the woods firing muskets. I think Three Doors Down might have started the Tea Party Movement with this video (just kidding, of course).

I liked both videos, and looked forward to seeing them, even though they made me cringe a little each timey. They ran through most of 2008 and early 2009. More fun, however, was the late 2009 version of the ad campaign, which switched over to a chorus signing "Carmina Burana"-style Germanic chants with words like:

I will live by this credo
I will protect the U.S.
and I will fight to liberate all!

...I will always place the mission first!

The citizen soldiers go out to help a I.S. community in distress and wind up kicking in the door of a house. The boot heel comes to the rescue!

My favorite part of the video is virtual reality morph sequence, showing a pretty blonde high school student with her school books swirling into a placid-faced dutiful soldier with a beret.

My conclusion was that there is a de facto mild federal subsidy of the corporate movie chains through these advertisements. I think The Hurt Locker and movies like it as Hollywood's way of saying "thank you" back to the Feds.

As for Dear John, the movie I actually saw today, well of course it's a wet hankie movie in the old style. Written by the guy who wrote The Notebook, it plays a lot like Nights in Rodanthe Goes to Iraq.

But I'm dissing the movie too much. It was actually pretty good, for the kind of movie it is. Chandler Tatum is the perfect "dumb brute American" of the millennial generated "minted in the year 1980. He may have no intellectual thoughts about the war (because none of us do anymore) but who is nevertheless honorable, honest, loyal and kind. He's the best we think about our youth right now, the way we wish young men become when they serve the country.

Because he's a war hero, moreover, he doesn't have to be the stupid Postmodern boy when he courts the love interest, the pretty girl. She actually chases him, old school style.

In a way this was a very classical movie (all of the wet hankie movies by this author are), but that is part of its downfall. It tries to do too much with the novelty of being sound as a story. It builds up too much story momentum, almost as if showing off how elaborate the story can be, and still work.

This doesn't ruin the movie (the beauty of classicism is that it holds water even when overdone) but does create a long and somewhat fatiguing Act Three.

Amanda Seyfreid really impressed me, however, in a sentimental role that called for her to "grow up to womanhood" during the story. She certainly has a future as a serious actress. So does Tatum. I've quietly become of fan of his work. I predict one day he will get a truly significant role, probably in a war drama, i.e. "This Generation's Platoon," that will earn him some serious attention.

Maybe this will happen when we figure out what the war is actually about, and Hollywood comes out of its coma to make a statement about it. In the meantime, these videos I mentioned from the National Guard are worth checking out, especially the last one, which has been the one they've been showing since last fall. If you sign up, best not use my name as reference.

Kid Rock "Warrior" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHzSBEVbXtM

Three Doors Down "Citizen Soldier" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ww5-LDwUVQ

"At this Moment" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbfPj00pTNY