Arts & Entertainment – Page 56

Jim Henson’s Dharma Initiative Babies

You’d have to be pretty cynical, or have already given up on the series altogether, not to think that this week’s episode of “Lost” was pretty damn cool. The guys behind the show have admitted to being big fans of Stephen King, which probably explains why this couldn’t have been a better TV adaptation of a Stephen King story unless it’d actually been based on a Stephen King story.

Jacob’s cabin was hella creepy, the kind of potential for surreal scares the show has been hinting at ever since the pilot episode. (But rarely delivering on). I could tell that this season has made me gunshy — when Ben was standing at the door and saying, “once you go through here, you can never go back,” I knew the ending credits were about to start. But hey, we were only 40 minutes into the show! They actually set something up and delivered on it!

More than that, though, is the fact that they’re finally showing signs they understand the balance between creeps and revelations you have to maintain to live up to the potential of the series. It feels less like a lot of hand-waving and “Ooh, look, isn’t that spooky?!? Really cool stuff is coming up later, we promise!” and more like they’ve finally got the balls to put their cards on the table and start coming to conclusions.

Of course, despite everything we were shown, there wasn’t actually a lot of brand-new stuff revealed tonight. Most of it just confirmed what we’d already seen or already suspected. The trick is in the presentation; seeing it from a different perspective made everything seem new and more significant. It’s easy to assume that Ben’s visions of his mother are from the same source as Eko’s visions of his brother (or Jack’s visions of his dad, and Kate’s horse). We finally get some confirmation that the Dharma Initiative is a different group than “the Others,” and we see what form the fight between them took. The whole business with the van and Roger Workman was too pat and contrived, but at least they snipped off another loose end.

Which hints at something clever, but frustrating, about what they did with this episode — by repeating some of the stuff that we already knew, they’re saying that these are the questions they want you to be thinking about. They’ve built up a ton of dangling plot threads over the years, and I suspect they’ve realized it’s going to be impossible to tie up every single detail the internets have speculated about. So they’re repeating the questions they have answers to, and telling us to just forget about the rest. The episode is called “The Man Behind the Curtain,” after all.

There were only two big new things in the episode: meeting Jacob, and meeting Nestor Carbonell’s character 40 years ago. (The cliffhanger was new too, of course, and I thought it was pretty well done). Again, the trick was in the presentation. The scene in the cabin was given a big build-up and made the focus, and it paid off.

The other meeting was just as significant for the questions it raised — obviously, why hasn’t he aged, but also, why isn’t he the leader since he’s been on the island for longer — but was treated a lot more casually. To me, that’s the surest sign the show’s getting back on track, when you can have a conversation that’s significant, but it doesn’t spend the entire time giving you music cues letting you know that it’s significant. It’s a sign that they’re confident they have enough story to tell, and they’re not forced to drag out every new minor plot element to make it last an entire hour.

And of course, the castaways are talking to each other again, for whatever good it does. Having them share what they know only solves half the problem; they’ve got to actually do something about it. And I tell you that Jack and Juliet better have one hell of a master plan cooking to warrant all the nonsense they’ve been doing for the past four episodes. The only time you see a couple of people being more annoyingly coy and smugly withholding information is when you listen to the “Lost” podcasts with the exec producers.

Uncanny Valley

She almost looks real! In robotics (and increasingly used in talking about CGI), the term “Uncanny Valley” refers to the point at which the attempt to make an artificial character more human-like backfires, and the character becomes more repulsive and disturbing than realistic.

Scott McCloud gives a simple, easily understandable explanation for why this happens in Understanding Comics: humans naturally look for patterns, and we want to anthropomorphize inanimate objects to better relate to them. So we turn power outlets into faces, and simple combinations of lines and circles into living, breathing people. In fact, the tendency is so hard-wired that once we recognize a face in something, it’s difficult not to see it anymore. Your brain wants to fill in the missing detail.

But once that extra detail is supplied for you, your brain stops trying to turn it into a human and instead starts to focus on the details that make it not human. The glassy, unfocused stare, or the eyes that don’t blink, or the way the mouth doesn’t move quite right. And as a result, a bunch of simple shapes can seem more like a person than the real thing. Or the simple, stylized dwarves in Snow White are more convincing and relatable than the rotoscoped human characters.

“Heroes” is getting precariously close to the edge of the uncanny valley. When it started out, it was “the show you hate to love”: filled with corny attempts at symbolism, clunky performances, sub-par dialogue, but still completely engaging. If only for the promise of seeing somebody getting the top of his head sawed off, or a still-living person splayed out on an autopsy table, or a guy escaping kidnappers by leaping into the air and taking off like a fighter jet.

But apparently somebody at NBC just couldn’t leave well enough alone, because they started trying to make it into a genuinely good series. They’ve still got the gross-out shots and the stunt casting and the improbable plot twists, and are adding signs that they might actually be starting to understand what they’re doing. Annoying and unnecessary characters are being weeded out, or made less annoying. The show is spending less time marveling at itself, presenting super powers we’ve already seen as if they were these amazing and novel concepts that will just blow your mind; now, they’re actually fleshing out the characters and showing them using their powers.

The twists and revelations are actually getting pretty interesting. For a while it looked like Isaac’s power was just to paint like Tim Sale, but they added a great twist of having the supervillain’s paintings come out heavily stylized and demented. Last night, they did a genuinely creepy and effective scene that revealed the new villain’s power isn’t shapeshifting, but making people see whatever she wants them to see. And they also put an interesting twist on their main villain, having him kill people all season but horrified to discover that he may be responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

And one of the episodes that aired a while back, “Company Man,” has been getting a lot of praise for being a turning point in the series — it had the hokey twists and the big climax with the cheerleader having her flesh burned off by a nuclear blast, but also added real characterization and a surprisingly moving ending.

The problem is that as “Heroes” approaches a Real Live TV Show, you stop filling over the plot holes and ignoring the clunky dialogue, and start to notice its flaws. I shouldn’t have to care that the characters are able to recognize the Nuclear Man from drawings that don’t look remotely like him. I shouldn’t be thinking that the plot has gotten so convoluted that there’s absolutely no sense of cause and effect anymore; things just happen randomly. It shouldn’t bother me that people just pop in and out of scenes, often in locations hundreds of miles apart from each other, only to deliver a couple of lines of dialogue that don’t amount to much of anything. And it was somehow more fun when you got the sense nobody involved knew much about comic books; now, the references to Jack Kirby and The Watchmen seem forced.

None of that stuff used to matter, back when the show was just a cartoon. But they’re going to have to come to a decision at some point — the whole bomb in Manhattan thing is so convoluted and overblown at this point, that I couldn’t really care less about it. The real explosion is coming when the show gets to take itself so seriously that it collapses under the weight of its own hype.

And one more

There was one movie I forgot to mention in my last post, Hot Fuzz. And the fact that I was talking about every movie I’ve seen in the last three months and forgot to mention it, pretty much says it all.

I’ve got to be one of the only internet nerds who wasn’t blown away by Shaun of the Dead. (I was interested in Hot Fuzz mostly because of the Grindhouse trailer for Don’t). It seemed like a great concept that lost steam as the filmmakers just gave up and fell back on the movies they already know how to make — zombie movies and romantic comedies. There’s nothing inherently wrong with “genre-busting,” but if you don’t do it right, it ends up being tedious and disjointed. When Shaun of the Dead reached the attack on the pub, it stopped being an innovative comedy or even a romantic comedy and just ended up being a mediocre zombie movie.

And Hot Fuzz follows the exact same formula, just replacing “zombie movie” with “buddy cop action movie” and “romantic comedy” with “English countryside murder mystery.” It hits exactly the same notes, right down to the plot-derailing climax and the fake-out wrap-up at the end. There’s nothing wrong with any individual part, and it’s actually pretty clever throughout and has plenty of genuinely funny moments. But apart from the hilariously over-the-top gore, there’s nothing that seems particularly inspired. (Impaling a guy on a church steeple was brilliant, though). (And I did like that the characters’ default exclamation was “By the power of Greyskull!”).

At about an hour and fifteen minutes in, I was ready for it to be over. But then I realized they were going to take every single set-up they’d done so far and wrap it up with a callback, and that was going to take another 45 minutes. A nerdy friend of mine described it as spending the last third of the movie just popping jokes off the stack. You could exactly predict what the next joke was going to be, just by going backwards through the movie in your head — now he’s going to call her a hag, now he’s going to fire his gun in the air and yell “Aaaaahhhh!”, and so on.

The general consensus of the reviews I’ve read says that it’s better than average, but falls just short of being great. And the concept of making fun/paying homage to over-the-top action movies isn’t as inspired as making a zombie romantic comedy. I’d pretty much agree with that, but I think it’s a better movie than Shaun of the Dead in a lot of ways. I just wish they’d shaken some things up some more, and had edited it down a lot. B+

Catching Up

Movie reviews also available in new easy-pour squeeze bottle Crunch mode or no, Netflix still keeps taking my money, so I’ve got to stay on top of the latest in years-old movies I never got around to seeing while they were still relevant. And if you’re horrified at the thought that I’ve been watching movies and not putting my opinions of them up on the internets, then you’ll be relieved to see this post. Although I hate to steal from Lore Sjöberg and Entertainment Weekly, I’ll give each of them a letter grade.

Halloween
I’d never actually seen this movie, so I used the Rifftrax as an excuse to watch it. I guess I must’ve missed the sell-by date, because I just don’t get how this movie spawned such a huge following. The Rifftrax guys try their best, but most of the jokes all come down to one fact: the movie’s just not that scary. I don’t even see how it was that scary in 1978, because there are plenty of scenes in Psycho and The Birds that are a lot worse on shock value alone, much less quality-of-filmmaking. Movie on its own: C. With Rifftrax: B.

The Wicker Man
Another one I watched because of Rifftrax. And I guess you have to give them credit for trying, but they still couldn’t make this pile of crap watchable. It really is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. You may get the impression from “Best Scenes from The Wicker Man“ that those scenes are just the tip of the iceberg, and the whole movie is full of so-bad-it’s-good laughs. Don’t be fooled! It’s incredibly stupid, tedious, and just a total waste of time. It’s not even made interesting by its misogyny; it’s more like being trapped in a long conversation with a boring, self-important guy who has issues with women. I don’t like to turn my opinion about a movie into a personal attack on the creators, but I really hope this ends Neil LaBute’s career. The movie: F-. With Rifftrax: F.

Clerks II
A lot of lame, a joke that seems like it has potential (Jay doing the Jame Gumb bit from Silence of the Lambs) until it goes too far (he does the full frontal bit — yeah, we got the joke like five minutes ago), then a lot more lame. And then one great, genuinely funny moment: “Oooh, cake!” And then more lame. So in other words, it’s another Kevin Smith movie.C

Stranger Than Fiction
Not bad. It’s not as good as I thought it was going to be, or as good as the concept promises, but it’s got plenty of nice moments. You get the sense that this was somebody’s dream project, since it went overkill on the casting and the special effects (gratuitous graphics that are neat but unnecessary). In the end, it’s just not quite as deep or meaningful as it makes itself out to be. B

School of Rock
You’ve got Jack Black and a bunch of child actors. That’s a great start, but there’s got to be a way to make your movie more annoying. Cast Sarah Silverman as the uptight authority figure villain. Good, keep going. Give it a plot cribbed from Meatballs and The Bad News Bears and about 1,000 other Hollywood take-on-the-establishment movies from the 70s and 80s. Getting warmer… Make it not funny enough that you can ignore the plot, but make the plot so vapid it makes the message of Disney features seem deep and insightful? Almost there, but keep at it! Have the lead go on about how kids today are completely ignorant of any art created more than 5 years ago, and then steal a joke from Annie Hall. Congratulations! You’ve just perfectly described a movie that’s so inessential, it’s downright offensive! D+

Little Miss Sunshine
This is an independent movie. From the Fox Searchlight opening, to the dysfunctional family dinner establishing scene, to the shots of blue sky through a freeway overpass, to having two characters giving a movie-summary dialogue on a pier overlooking the ocean — there’s not much more they could’ve done to assert their indie cred short of casting Parker Posey. It’s not bad, it’s just completely unsurprising and forgettable.

Sure, it’s got better performances and a slightly smarter script than your “average Hollywood movie,” whatever that is. But do we really need yet another movie with the message to love your family despite their flaws and to be true to yourself? At this point, making a movie that says “don’t conform to other people’s expectations” is probably the most conformist thing you can do. If National Lampoon’s Vacation and Napoleon Dynamite didn’t already exist: B- Because they do: C-

Children of Men
I only saw one of the movies nominated for best picture last year (see above), but I can’t imagine any of them were better than Children of Men. On a pure technical level, it’s awe-inspiring. There hasn’t been another movie in recent memory that so consistently made me think, “I would never, ever be able to do anything like this.” Film students are always instructed to revere the long tracking shot at the opening of Touch of Evil, but Children of Men has at least four of them, and those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. And they weave in and out of buildings, past explosions, in speeding cars attacked by guerilla fighters, and through apartment complexes in a barrage of gunfire.

It’s astounding, and what’s more, none of it is just movie wankery. Alfonso Cuarón says in one of the documentaries that he wanted the movie to be filmed in a realist style. That one decision meant an incredible amount of work, and it was the perfect decision. You’re never for one second given the chance to believe that what you’re seeing isn’t really happening. That clarity of vision goes through the whole movie; every decision made was the right one. And the real genius is knowing how and when to incorporate the surreal into the hyper-realism — the Pink Floyd pig floating above a factory, a deer wandering through an abandoned school, or a rowboat alone on a fog-covered ocean — those images stand out as if they’d been fired directly into your cerebral cortex.

The movie was so technically well-made, in fact, that it didn’t have to convey its message as well as it does. Even calling it a “message” sounds trite. It’s more of a feeling, a reminder that even in a world of horror and despair, a world where the dysfunction is so big and complex and omnipresent you believe there’s no way to fix it, there’s always hope. And it conveys this idea not with a crucial plot point, or a character’s monologue summing everything up 2/3 of the way through the movie before the final climax, but by putting you through hell and showing you the way out. If I were one of the Academy voting people, I would be downright ashamed not to have picked this as the best movie of last year. A+

An Inconvenient Doofus

Hay im good at photoshop LOL!! It’s an old and tired cliche that Hollywood producers are greedy, clueless, and artistically bankrupt, eager to cash in on something without really understanding it. But apparently it’s not enough of a cliche that there’s a standout example, at least there’s not one I can think of. When you think of gimmicky plot twists, you mention The Sixth Sense or The Crying Game. When you think of TV shows declining in quality, you mention “Happy Days” and jumping the shark. But unless I’m missing something obvious, there hasn’t been an obvious one for doing a movie remake that completely and totally misses the point of the original.

Which is why we should all thank Mandalay Pictures for dicking around with The Birds. For a while it was looking like Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake would’ve been a great candidate (Halloween: coming August 31, 2007!), but re-imagining John Carpenter isn’t quite as a remarkable as completely failing to understand Hitchcock.

The quote from this Variety article is Mandalay president Cathy Schulman talking about their exciting line-up:

A highlight of the Mandalay Pictures’ slate at Universal is the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” scheduled to be in production by early fall.

“We think we have a very contemporary take,” Schulman said. “In the original, the birds just showed up, and it was kind of like, why are the birds here? This time, there’s a reason why they’re here and (people) have had something to do with it. There’s an environmental slant to what could create nature fighting back.”

No, Ms. Schulman, it wasn’t “kind of like,” why are the birds here? It was exactly like, why are the birds here?

Cause you know The Birds is fine and all, but what was the whole point? They had this romantic comedy going, and all of a sudden out of nowhere these damn birds start attacking for no reason. If Hitchcock hadn’t been such a hack, he would’ve put some effort into explaining why the attacks started and how they could be stopped. As it is, it’s almost like he’s saying our hold on civilization is tenuous and that we have no real control over our own fate, and at any moment our entire existence could be threatened by the most seemingly innocuous thing, for no reason and through no fault of our own. Yawn.

While they’re at it, I hope they remember to add in some good music. Hitchcock didn’t even bother adding any music to his version. It was boring and downright creepy.

So far, this stands as the most boneheaded movie remake I’ve ever heard of. (Gus Van Sant’s Psycho was completely useless, and every minor change made was the completely wrong thing to do, but at least it didn’t mess with the original too much). So that’s an exercise for the readers: leave your own awful, completely-miss-the-point movie remake ideas in the comments! Casablanca with an improved ending so that Rick and Ilsa get together! Memento in chronological order! A re-imagining of Planet of the Apes where it’s not set on Earth!

Too Hot for Television

Cars Last night Fox aired the two-part pilot for its series “Drive”, with another episode tonight. It’s about an illegal cross-country Cannonball Run-style car race for 32 million dollars, where the racers are coerced into participating, spies hired by the race operators are everywhere, and death is one of the punishments for finishing last (presumably). It’s got cross-overs into the Joss Whedon universe of TV shows: Tim Minear from “Angel” and “Firefly” is one of the show creators; Nathan Fillion of “Firefly” and Serenity stars as a gardner (or is he?!?) coerced into competing in order to rescue his kidnapped wife, played by Amy Acker of “Angel.”

I’ve watched the first two episodes, and I spent the entire time willing myself to like it. At times, it was like when you’re driving and your low fuel light comes on and you start semi-subconsciously trying to scoot the car forward with your butt to help it get to the gas station. I definitely wouldn’t call it “bad,” but it just kept falling just short of “great.”

There’s a real American Beauty taint to the proceedings; like that movie, the series always one-ups its various cliches… by replacing them with other cliches. By the end of the first two hours, it’s gotten everybody settled into pairs like on “The Amazing Race,” but they’re even more predictable archetypes than on the reality show: the young soldier and his girlfriend, the Latino ex-con and the half-brother he never knew, the Black Girls^TM, the dad reconnecting with his hip teenaged daughter, and a mousy abused wife and an in-it-to-win-it wild girl.

Latino guy drives a Low Rider and calls everyone “homes.” The teenaged daughter refers to him as a “road show production of West Side Story“, which I found out last night is known as “Hanging a lampshade on it.” Normally, I’m all over that kind of thing, but here it just seemed clumsy and bugged me even more.

There’s just something that feels safe and predictable about the whole thing. Even though Fox put frequent “Viewer Discretion Advised” warnings after the commercials, there was never anything particularly shocking, intense, or even surprising. It all seemed like a concept that needed something more than standard network television to really work, but would never work as a movie, either.

Still, I like the main story, as implausible as it is. And while I don’t get the crazy obsessive mania over Nathan Fillion that a lot of internet nerds have, I do like the guy and have never seen him do a bad job in anything. The show’s interesting enough to keep watching (I can’t imagine its lasting longer than a season, and I wouldn’t want to), and I hope it gets an audience if only so I can find out how it ends.

Reel Missing

A white-hot juggernaut of interminable talking! I got even more to say about Grindhouse. Cory made the point that people are trying to claim if you didn’t like Death Proof, you didn’t “get” it. You can see that in a lot of the internet reviews, and I’m sure if I had a job where I actually talked to people, I’d be hearing even more of that. So at the risk of devolving into yet another internet movie nerd shut-in (too late for that), I want to show that: yes, Tarantino did know what he was doing; and yes, we do get it; but no, we didn’t want it. And okay, yes, it does have some pay off.

But I think to appreciate Death Proof at all, you have to be either really, really horny, or have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen in it. (Or both). The trailers, marketing, and reviewers have done a good job of keeping it under wraps; I didn’t realize how good until I’d seen the movie and noticed how little of the movie actually ended up in the trailer. And since I don’t have a way to do spoilers in the comments yet, here’s a separate post.
Continue reading “Reel Missing”

Grindhouse

Man, Grindhouse pissed me off. I knew as soon as I heard about it that this was a movie that’d have me shifting uncomfortably in my seat, but I thought it was going to be from the gore and cheap scares. Not out of annoyance.

The “problem” was Quentin Tarantino’s half of the double feature, Death Proof. As predicted, and as mentioned in just about every review, it starts out slow and egregiously talky. (Even the ones that revere Tarantino as if he were a cinematic messiah mention this — I actually read one that said Robert Rodriguez was Salieri to Tarantino’s Mozart.) And after the enormous build-up of the first half, Planet Terror, and the fake trailers during intermission, the second half plays like the annoying boor at a party that ruins everything and just makes everybody cringe. The one where everybody’s talking and laughing and just having a great time, and he manages to say the one thing that just kills the mood dead. (Usually it’s some variant of a dead-pan “That’s funny.”)

Planet Terror delivers on all the bad-assery the trailer promises. It’s over-the-top gore, cheesy characters, ridiculous dialogue, explosions, and full to bursting with all the gimmicks that come with the concept — scratchy film, missing reels, even the variations on the theme song are funny. I’d been a little worried, since movies never live up to the potential shown in their trailers, but Planet Terror is like the Grindhouse trailer turned up full blast and sustained over an hour and a half.

And then comes Death Proof with at least forty solid minutes of a bunch of women talking like Quentin Tarantino talks. It’s not just a sudden cold shower, it’s more aggressively annoying. Maybe a cold shower filled with bees.

But here’s the really annoying part: Death Proof pays off. There’s about 30 minutes of just totally bad-ass movie in there. First car scene with Rose McGowan: pretty cool. Second car scene with the girls: very cool. Third car chase with the girls: annoying (why doesn’t anyone in these movies just pull over?) but cool. Final car chase: absolutely incredible, with Kurt Russell doing stuff I totally didn’t see coming, and one hell of a final shot. This isn’t like the interminable talking in Kill Bill Volume 2, which just fizzled out to the conclusion; this was a real pay-off that just felt right, a moment that Planet Terror never quite reached, a moment where you think “now that is exactly what was possible from these movies.”

There are plenty of people who’ll insist that all the talking was necessary to get the pay off. That it builds sympathy for the characters. That it was necessary, after the frenetic pacing of the first half, to slow everything down and build back up to an explosive conclusion. Or, simply, that it’s truer to the spirit of the grindhouse movies that inspired it. The first point is just wrong — you don’t feel sympathy for the characters, you’re eager to see them get killed. The second, I’m highly skeptical about — I still believe they could’ve cut Death Proof to 45 minutes or less and still get as satisfying a reaction.

The last point, I can’t really say much about. Apart from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and maybe the movies from “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” I haven’t seen any of the movies that inspired or are referenced by this one. But from what I do recognize, I don’t think either of half of Grindhouse really gets it exactly right.

Planet Terror looks the part on the surface, but its plot is a little too coherent, and its production values are a little too high. I’ve already forgotten where I read it, but somebody on the internets described it as “what the grindhouse movies wanted to be, not what they were.” Death Proof, as the self-important internet film critics will point out, dispensed with the surface-level gimmicks and instead captured what the originals were really like. Lower budgets meant less action and more talky scenes that went nowhere. Editing rambled and meandered to make the most out of the film that was shot. There was only enough money for a couple of expensive action sequences. Using a stunt person as a cast member was a bonus.

But I’d counter that while that makes for a more genuine recreation/reinterpretation, it goes too far down the path of movie nerd wankery and loses sight of the big picture: big, stupid, fun movies. And Planet Terror is simply more fun. I just saw it yesterday and already I’ve forgotten most of it, while there are elements of Death Proof that still stand out in my mind and just seem cooler and more bad-ass the more I think of them. But that feeling of just plain anything-goes fun has to be what attracted these guys to those movies in the first place.

But all of that is just written under obligation; when a movie has two halves, you just have to compare them. While I’m at it: you’re also supposed to pick your favorite of the trailers. The Machete trailer is gold, but my favorite is the awesome one for Don’t.

I wish I could say I were surprised the movie isn’t making as much money as they’d hoped. It’s definitely a day at the movies, and there’s a reason double features fell out of favor in the first place. But although it’s not a surprise, it’s a shame, because annoyances and all, Grindhouse is a blast. It’s a great homage to these movies, and like Kill Bill it’s made me seek out a lot of the originals that inspired it (in particular, I want to see Vanishing Point now). And it’s proof that a movie can be filled with movie nerd wankery and experimentation and not end up with too-clever post-modernism or indie self-indulgence. It can just be fun.

I can’t stop it I don’t know how it works!

I watched Thank You For Smoking a few weeks ago, but I was so let down by the ending I didn’t know what to make of it. Surprisingly, the whole Don Imus scandal puts it into perspective.

Thank You For Smoking plays out as a well-produced, well-performed, cleverly-written story that seems to be building up to some incisive satire about lobbyists, politics, and the tobacco industry. It sets the stage, defines the characters, and takes a few detours for some really slick and well-done scenes that don’t really say anything remotely original. There’s a long and genuinely funny segment where the main character meets a fancy Hollywood movie executive and his fawning assistant; it ends having said nothing more than “Hey, aren’t LA people phony?” Afterwards is a scene with Sam Elliott perfectly cast as the original Marlboro Man; that results in the razor-sharp observation: “people are often motivated by money.”

The movie spends all this time with Aaron Eckhardt’s character, setting him up as a charming man who could talk his way into or out of anything, a man who’d built his entire life around the idea that there is no solid dividing line between right and wrong. And, like most smokers, he’s built elaborate networks of denial and self-delusion in order to maintain an addiction that he and everybody else knows is dangerous and lethal. As he explains to his son at one point: by changing the argument from “are cigarettes dangerous” to “do I have the right to choose for myself,” he moves the line, shifting it from an indefensible position to one where he’s the victim and he’s got the moral upper ground.

For over an hour, the movie builds sympathy for his character so that the line becomes blurred even for the audience. And then finally, one of his choices is turned on him, and everything in his life is ruined — his job, his only friendships, his relationship with his son, and he can’t even smoke anymore. We see a video segment where every thing he’d done in the movie up to that point is re-examined and described with a different spin — now, the actions and words we’d been led to believe were harmless seem cold, manipulative, and downright evil. He’d manipulated everyone, including the audience, and probably even himself, into believing his own spin. After seeing that, I became convinced that this movie was the best, most effective indictment of moral relativism I’d ever seen.

And then, of course, the movie works to undo every single bit of that. His friends and family come back to him, his son still idolizes him, those who had wronged him are shown getting their come-uppance, and not only is he offered his job back, he gets the greatest pleasure of being able to turn it down. I’ve said before that I don’t mind happy endings, and an ending that’s negative just for the sake of being negative or “edgy” is even more vapid than having Lassie show up and E.T. come back to life. But a happy ending is just deadly to satire. Without the edge — and especially the way this movie shies away from the edge so much you’d think it were a hemophiliac — you’ve just got a “character study.” Which is just a tactful way of saying, “a story with no point.”

So what does any of this have to do with racist comments from a radio shock jock? Not much, until you find this Time magazine analysis of the reaction to Imus’ comments, and in particular John Rogers’ response to that article.

The Time story is titled “Who Can Say What?” and asks the same question a lot of people are asking: where’s the line? Why is there such an outcry when Imus says the same things that [insert black celebrity here] has been saying for years? And why such a strong reaction to this incident, when Imus himself has been saying the same thing for years? Why is it okay for Sarah Silverman or Sacha Baron Cohen or “South Park” to say hateful things about blacks and Jews, but suddenly the offenderati comes out with White Liberal Guilt guns blazing whenever Don Imus, Isaiah Washington, Michael Richards, or Mel Gibson says them?

And the reason I like Rogers’ commentary so much is that he cuts through all the attempts at cultural analysis of a Very Complex Issue and says simply: it’s really not that complicated. (He goes on to describe it in terms of comedy and power brokering, which is fine but just a smaller part of the whole thing).

Like it or not, there’s still a line there, and it hasn’t moved all that much in the last 30 or 40 years. And shame on anyone who tries to make it out that it’s constantly in flux, being manipulated by some “cultural elite” of easily-offended liberals who, as part of their nefarious hidden agenda, are forever lying in wait to bait people into thoughtcrimes and discredit them.

You see that claim alleged over and over again, people forever asking, “So when exactly is it okay to be racist/homophobic/anti-semitic/misogynist?” The answer is pretty simple: “Never.”

“But wait,” they claim, “black/gay/Jewish/female people say that stuff all the time and they not only get away with it, they’re applauded for it!” And that’s the heartbreaking part. Because you realize you’re not just explaining comedy anymore. You’re having to explain basic human decency to a person who just doesn’t get it, and it’s like trying to explain algebra to a caveman. They don’t understand it, they’re never going to use it, but everybody keeps telling them that it’s important and they should be ashamed for not understanding it. And all they can ask is “Is this going to be on the final?” (Considering that intolerance and religious fundamentalism so frequently go hand-in-hand, I’m surprised more people don’t realize that yes, this is going to be on the final.)

One of the bits that the Time article seems to be bewildered by is from the Sarah Silverman show. There’s a scene in the pilot where she meets God, who’s played by a black actor, and she asks, “Are you God’s black friend?” Why is that acceptable, when Imus’ calling a bunch of college basketball players “nappy-headed hos” isn’t? Both are racist comments intended for shock value. And neither is coming from a black person, so you can’t say that it’s “taking back the word.” How can this be?

Some would say that it’s just because Silverman’s funny and Imus isn’t. Some would say that it’s because Silverman’s liberal and Imus isn’t (Silverman makes a comment against that in the article). Some would go into a long explanation about the political inequities of comedy and how it’s only acceptable when those of a lesser socioeconomic status are using words to negotiate an exchange of power with those who are traditionally in dominant societal roles, and because a Jewish woman can relate to a position of inequity better than a wealthy white male, Imus was perceived as a bully while Silverman isn’t.

Which is all just more White Liberal Guilt mixed with political correctness and pseudo-academic wankery. There are aspects of all that that are correct, but it all boils down to the same thing: Silverman can say racist words because she isn’t expressing racist ideas. One is saying, “look at how idiotic racist over-privileged white people are;” Imus was saying, “look at how scary and dirty those black people are.” It shouldn’t take a damn dissertation about “context” to explain that.

But why now? Why is “nappy-headed hos” such a colossal offense, when Imus has been saying the same type of thing for years? The problem is in thinking that the two are unrelated. That there’s some hidden dictionary only the offenderati have access to, where “suddenly” one phrase has been listed as objectionable, and the only way to know what’s offensive is to keep guessing until you get Al Sharpton to complain. A much simpler and more obvious explanation: maybe this shit’s been building for years. The context isn’t some weird imbalance of power between college basketball players, a radio shock jock, huge broadcasting corporations run by Rich White Men, and the liberal media. The context is that the guy’s been showing himself to be a racist for years, and he finally got called on it. Even shock jocks tend to have more intelligence than a puppy, but the media reaction to Imus’ case has been more like “you have to catch him in the act or he’ll never learn!”

The Time article has a quote from one stringy-headed ho in a passage about the escalation of offensiveness in the media:

Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter is probably the best example of this, playing a constant game of “Can you top this?” with herself, as in March, when she told the Conservative Political Action Conference that she would have a comment on Senator John Edwards, “but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word faggot.” Coulter is only the most egregious example — from Bill O’Reilly on Fox to Glenn Beck on CNN, offense is the coin of the cable realm.

As much as I hate to feed a boorish, skeletal lich with the attention she so desperately and transparently requires to feed her minions and wreak unholy vengeance upon this Earth, she makes it difficult not to, because she’s just such an obvious example of irresponsible evil in the media. Describing how to be a decent person without mentioning Coulter in contrast is like a game of Taboo where you have to describe “goodness” without mentioning the word “evil” or “badness.”

Coulter’s fans and fellow pundits — which is to say, “idiots” — would say that that one quote wittily and effectively counters so much of what’s wrong in today’s media: we’ve lost our edge and our honesty, we’re no longer able to say what we really think because the lines of acceptability keep being redrawn, and the weak and inoffensive are rising to power.

Bullshit. What that quote says is: “John Edwards is a faggot.” And if that’s what passes for incisive commentary from pundits on The Right, I don’t know why they’re crusing Beltway bars for cretinous sluts who’ll say anything you want if it means they get a sound bite and a book deal, instead of going directly to a fifth-grade playground.

I always assumed that Limbaugh, Coulter, and the others who I’m sure are every bit as offensive but don’t get as much media attention, were evil because they were so manipulative. They were just savvy enough to recognize what people are scared of and what they don’t understand, and were able to manipulate that to discredit the other side. But every time I see the outrage and bewilderment in the media over what should be obvious to anyone who had parents or a kindergarten that taught them how to treat people, I have to wonder — do they really just not understand? And which of those possibilities is worse?

The line is still there in plain sight to anybody with any intelligence. Contrary to what they’d have you believe, it’s not being moved by an unseen hand, and they’re not just saying what “everybody thinks” but is “too afraid to say out loud.” Most people can still see the line; the only question is whether they have the dignity or class or intelligence or have just plain earned the right to step over it. It’s not a case of “political correctness.” We matured past “political correctness” a long time ago, not long after it became a buzzword. And we didn’t do it by being proud of being “politically incorrect;” we did it just by being correct.

One of Them

I think I missed the cut-off date for talking about this week’s episode of “Lost,” but it’s kind of difficult.

For one thing, I feel guilty. Maybe I’m seeing something that’s not there, but it feels like the show’s in desperate-to-please mode, like a dog that’s been scolded for getting on the couch too many times and now he makes a point of showing you all the time how not on the couch he is right now. This last episode was all, “hey look, see we’re getting away from the Others camp and we’re focusing on the main characters again and we’re answering big questions from the first season and isn’t that what you wanted?” and I have to wince and say, “I really just wanted you to be better!”

And for another, I’m in danger of turning into one of them. The people who really just don’t seem to enjoy the show anymore but still watch it, either out of masochism or a defeatist “I guess that’s as good as it gets” mentality. And I really don’t dislike the show, and I’m not even as frustrated with it as a lot of other people are; it just seems like it’s always a relatively solid show that keeps reminding you how much better it could be.

This week’s episode was all about Juliet, which is fine by me. She’s the most interesting character they’ve got going now; again, unlike every other character in the series, she somehow gets more intriguing the more you find out about her history. We found out even more about her this episode, but they were all fairly insignificant details, and still nothing about the three year gap where she received her ninja kung fu training. And we still don’t know her real motivations. I was saying last week how cool it would be if she turned out to be a villain — this week’s non-twist wasn’t so much a shocker as it was coming to a fork in the plot and nudging things in one direction instead of the other. I’ve still got hope that we’ll find out more about why she’s doing what she’s doing, instead of discovering she’s just another Michael.

And again, Elizabeth Mitchell just does a great job with the part. She’s the only member of the cast these days (apart from Terry O’Quinn, I guess) who gives the impression that there’s really things going on inside her head, and she’s not just delivering lines. Her best scene was the showdown against Sayid and Sawyer. I read somewhere that it was completely implausible she could make them turn tail, but I totally bought it. It’s that look. That look of “I’m not angry, I’m just very, very disappointed in you.” That’s some black belt manipulation right there. And as she was walking away, she had the perfect expression of “holy shit I never expected that to work.”

Still, my mind began to wander. I kept thinking about how the show could be more interesting if they played around with the flashbacks, introducing an aspect of the unreliable narrator to them. Actually showed us how these events were remembered, instead of how they really happened. Maybe what Juliet remembers as being browbeaten by Ben into staying on the island, he remembers entirely differently. So you’re not just given a villain and This Week’s Shocking Twist^TM, but you have to interpret what happened for yourself.

But then, that’s the kind of thing you’re left to think about when your mind is wandering. And when you’re desperately forcing yourself not to think about inconsistencies. Like it’s still weird that they didn’t just move into the Others’ camp, but accepting that, why didn’t they at least take a shower first? Instead of walking through the jungle with caked-on mud and being delighted to find a stream to wash off in?

I’m glad that the episode ended as it did, because the idea that Juliet was given a complete run-down of Ethan’s entire plan, down to where he hid the medicine stash, and she still remembered every detail after this time, was straining credulity. (And I never notice that kind of thing.) As it turned out, that part ended up making sense, but in the Never-Ending Jenga Game that is Lost Episode Plausibility, the explanation of Claire’s abduction doesn’t make sense anymore. Even though it was a complete, exhaustive, plausible, and well-thought-out explanation, and it’s now been replaced with “we were careful to insert a magic radio frequency hemmoraghing device for just such an emergency.”

Speaking of which, I’m less convinced now that Ben & Juliet’s Scooby-Doo style exposition from a few episodes back was the clever self-referential comedy I’d thought it was at the time. It seems like all they do is have clandestine meetings together where they clumsily remind each other of what’s happening. “Boy, it sure was nice of your aunt to let us use her island for top-secret experiments in fertility and electromagnetism!” “You said it! I just hope we don’t run into a… sm-sm–sm—SMOKE MONSTER!”

Hellboy + Obakemono = Nerd Bliss

Normally, seeing my favorite things come together three separate times in one week would be downright eerie, but I don’t think Hellboy: Sword of Storms counts. For one thing, it’s old news. It was aired on Cartoon Network back in October, and due to a TiVo mishap, I’m just now catching it on DVD. For another thing, nerdy white American guys who think Japanese stuff is just radical is hardly some eclectic, obscure branch of fandom — it’s basically a demographic.

It’s not that hard to find fans of Hellboy, either — start by looking at the production of the comics or any of the adapations or spin-off projects, and just about everybody involved will confess to being a Hellboy fanboy. So the people making these things really love the source material. In the case of The Amazing Screw-on Head, you end up with a slavish recreation of the comic. That was an admirable effort, but came out a little bit cold, and also revealed the problems that can come when you try to adapt a very graphic comic art style to animation.

The new series doesn’t do that; they made a conscious effort to give it an art style different from the comics. According to the documentaries included on the DVD, it had to suggest Mignola’s style but at the same time he wanted something that would be more modern and streamlined. On top of all that, it had to be animatable on a television production’s budget. Personally, I’m not floored by the result — I think it’s fine, but if they were going to simplify the characters anyway, I wish they’d taken them a little bit further. The character designs regress into Disney Television Animation mode more than I would’ve liked. There are hints of the comic style all over the place (especially the hands, which is a good touch), but the characters frequently look too traditional and too “safe,” like something you’d see on any other TV action series cartoon.

Of course, this is criticism from a guy who knows pretty much nothing about art. And my disappointment that it didn’t go further doesn’t mean I disliked the movie; I’d even say it’s about as good as a TV-animated Hellboy series could possibly turn out. Watching the making-of documentaries, you could really tell that they put a lot of thought into the production, and that they made the right choices all along. And throughout the movie, you can really see what they were doing, even if you don’t entirely agree with how they did it.

As far as subject matter, it was obvious that I was going to be all over it. Most of the movie works like a survey course of The Obakemono Project. (Of course, it also wipes out my plans for NaNoWriMo this year, even though I swear I had the idea a year before I even heard about this movie). Mike Mignola and Guillermo del Toro mention that the original idea just came from wanting to see Hellboy with a samurai sword, and seriously, who wouldn’t want to see that? There are plenty of cool moments taken from the comics, from Japanese folklore in general, and images from classical Japanese art — there’s a great bit with the Gashadokuro, a giant skeleton that was also referenced in Pom Poko.

Apparently the second in the Hellboy Animated series, Blood and Iron, came out last month. I can’t blame the TiVo for missing that one; I was simply unaware that it was coming out. If anbody saw it, let me know how it turned out, because I’m going to have to wait until June to see it.

So Like Us

Speaking of set detail and “Battlestar Galactica,” I think I may have uncovered more shocking evidence that the colonists have connections to Earth. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again:
From BSG's 'No Way Out' inspired episode
Powered by NEC
Like all of the Battlestars, the Galactica relies on NEC’s Multisync Series for the brightest, sharpest LCD displays in the entire galaxy. So see we all.

Has anybody on the internets made a parody video showing a Cylon waking up in the resurrection chamber and hearing the “Intel Inside” start-up sound? If not, pretend I made one and posted it here, because that is high comedy.

That same episode has what might be my favorite shot in the entire “Battlestar Galactica” series to date:
The Colonists' optical drives use OCDs
“I suspect this disc might be a fake, Commander. My first clue that it wasn’t an actual Colonial Defense Ministry disc is that we don’t have any devices that will play it because it’s not round.”

One of the comments from Ron Moore’s podcast about the series is that they never bothered to explain how the fleet got its infinite supply of cigarettes. I think the best explanation is that they form them out of all the excess paper they obsessively cut the corners off of.