Category: World at Large

A Shadow from the West?


“[I]t sure feels like we are being attacked simply because we are a big fat juicy target – not for any wrong doing. We haven’t even been greenlit yet! It feels as if we have a large Aussie cousin kicking sand in our eyes…or to put it another way, opportunists exploiting our film for their own political gain.“

Out of the frying pan, into the fire: Still reeling from MGM’s dismal cashflow situation and the departure of Guillermo del Toro, The Hobbit now faces another threat from — according to Peter Jackson, at least —an Australian actor’s union muscling in on Kiwi turf, and potentially sending the Land of Middle-Earth over to Eastern Europe.

The link above is PJ’s account of where things stand. I understand he’s management in this instance, but, speaking as someone who’s very pro-union in general but has had issues with some specific organizing tactics in the past, his summary sounds eminently plausible to me.

The Bill Paid at Last.


“The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable — abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilised life of Europe…[N]ations are not authorised, by religion or by natural morals, to visit on the children of their enemies the misdoings of parents or of rulers.” — John Maynard Keynes

Ninety-one years after the terms were first agreed to, Germany makes its last WWI reparations payment this weekend. “Hatred of the settlement agreed at Versailles, France, which crippled Germany as it tried to shape itself into a democracy following defeat in the war, was of significant importance in propelling the Nazis to power.”

The Last Boy Scout.


“I’m a free-market guy. Normally, I would leave this to the invisible hand of the market, but the invisible hand of the market has already moved over 84,000 acres of production and over 22,000 farm jobs to Mexico, and shut down over a million acres of U.S. farm land due to lack of available labor. Because apparently, even the invisible hand doesn’t want to pick beans.“

As you no doubt know by now, and like his White House correspondent’s dinner speech in 2006, the inimitable Stephen Colbert came to the Hill on Friday to deliver his expert testimony on the plight of migrant workers, a topic the media would otherwise have completely ignored in favor of whatever crazy thing Sarah Palin tweeted today.

For those making the ridiculous argument that Congress was horribly besmirched by Colbert’s satirical testimony, I have two words: Twain and Elmo. For everyone else, it was very funny and, as per Colbert’s usual m.o., spoke truthiness to power. “[I]t just stands to reason, to me, that if your coworker can’t be exploited, then you’re less likely to be exploited yourself. And that, itself, might improve pay and working conditions on these farms, and eventually, Americans may consider taking these jobs again.”

Fifty Years at Gombe.


“On the morning of July 14, 1960, she stepped onto a pebble beach along a remote stretch of the east shore of Lake Tanganyika…She had brought a tent, a few tin plates, a cup without a handle, a shoddy pair of binoculars, an African cook named Dominic, and — as a companion, at the insistence of people who feared for her safety in the wilds of pre-independence Tanganyika — her mother. She had come to study chimpanzees. Or anyway, to try.“

Fifty years after her studies began, pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall is honored (again) by National Geographic. “She created a research program, a set of protocols and ethics, an intellectual momentum — she created, in fact, a relationship between the scientific world and one community of chimpanzees — that has grown far beyond what one woman could do.”

Cuts like a Knife.

So…Robert Rodriguez’s Machete. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one, partly because by two weeks later, the movie has already passed its sell-by date. But regardless, a film like this is basically critic-proof anyway: After all, we’re talking about a purposefully cheap-looking, 90-minute Mexploitation flick based on one of the joke trailers from Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse — Does anyone really expect a good film here?

So having said that, I doubt that it will surprise anyone that Machete is more bad-bad than fun-bad, even going in with low expectations (and after libations.) I didn’t have a terrible time watching it, and I guess the movie basically succeeds at what it promised to be — an “ironic,” splatter-filled homage to and/or parody of terrible films of the ’70s. But the whole enterprise still felt really uninspired. In the end, Machete hits its marks, but it definitely doesn’t improve on the 90 seconds we saw of this flick in Grindhouse. (Hopefully we can expect more from Edgar Wright’s Don’t, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, or Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S., once they all get their inevitable day in the sun.)

While Danny Trejo plays the titular badass — a former Federale-turned-illegal-immigrant for whom “day labor” means cleaving through bad guys — with an admirable Lee Marvinish deadpan, a lot of the joking around in Machete involves stunt casting. This includes Steven Seagal as the Big Bad Mexican drug lord (has Seagal ever been in a good movie? Well, Under Siege, maybe), Robert De Niro as a sleazy race-baiting Senator (more on him in a sec), Jeff Fahey as the Karl Rove of Arizona, Lindsay Lohan as a druggy burnout, and the Nash Bridges team of Don Johnson and Cheech Marin as a racist cop and man of the cloth respectively. (Rounding out the cast: Jessica Alba is ludicrous as a INS detective on Machete’s trail, and Michelle Rodriguez once again does her Michelle Rodriguez thing as underground guerrilla leader “She” — inexplicably pronounced “Shee” insteady of “Shay.” Way to step on your own joke there.)

Well, ok, stunt casting is fun. In fact, one of the things I appreciated most about Rodriguez’s half of Grindhouse — Planet Terror — was both Fahey and Michael Biehn kicking around the movie. That being said, “Ha, it’s Robert DeNiro slumming it!” would probably work better as a joke if DeNiro wasn’t constantly, you know, slumming it these days. When he showed up in Meet the Parents ten years ago, it seemed pretty funny. Now, a la late-career Brando, Pacino, or Nicholson, it just seems kinda sad. (And like David Arquette outacting Harvey Keitel in The Grey Zone, Fahey probably gives a better performance than DeNiro does here. Trejo does for sure.)

Similarly, the meta-joke driving Machete — “Look, Robert Rodriguez made an intentionally bad film!” — suffers from the unfortunate fact that, ironically (From Dusk Til Dawn, Planet Terror) or not, Robert Rodriguez pretty much always makes B-movies. Even El Mariachi, the film that first put him on the map in 1992, is rather unmemorable, in my humble opinion. (I mean that literally — I can only remember the last 15 seconds of that flick — the pit bull and motorcycle and whatnot — which is still more than I can say for both Desperado and Once Upon a Time In Mexico.) For me, the one time Rodriguez struck gold was with Sin City, and that was mainly due to the wise, direct pilfering of Frank Miller’s “storyboards” — i.e., the original graphic novels.

All of which is to say, it’s hard to figure out in the end if Machete is a deft send-up of a bad movie or just a plain bad movie. (I had the same problem, to a lesser extent, with Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police.) Like Kurt Vonnegut said in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” I guess Rodriguez may just be pretending to be a hackish director of forgettable, derivative B-movies, but at this point he’s fooled me. (Maybe he should keep them trailer-length.)

Speaking of that original trailer, I’d recommend just watching that for your Machete experience, along with perhaps Machete’s Cinco de Mayo message to Arizona. Given both the virulence and the abject nonsense driving a lot of anti-immigrant hysteria these days, as well as the unfettered cravenness of the right-wing freakshows who most often push it, there was obviously room for some choice satire in this film. But, a few lines here or there aside, Machete is much more interested in playing with Z-grade movie tropes — breasts, blood splatter, and 70’s sound effects, say — than delving into any real political content about the borderlands. Eh, so be it — It’s Machete. It may be a missed opportunity, but it never pretended to be Traffic anyway.

The upshot here: Machete is (to no one’s surprise, I’m sure) eminently missable. But if you’re at all inclined to board this train, the two trailers cover 95% of the good stuff, so save yourself an hour and a half and just watch those. Having gone for the full ride myself, I left the theater with only one thought in my head: I’d just f**ked with the wrong Mexican.

Regrets, He’s Had a Few.

After a busier than anticipated several weeks — sorry, as always, about the quiet ’round here — time to catch up in the review department: First on the docket, Anton Corbijn’s languid, meditative “thriller,” The American. I doubt this slow-moving, verging-on-ponderous film was everyone’s cup of tea — The folks in front of me basically laughed their way through it, and by the overwrought last few scenes I was chuckling along with them. Still, I wouldn’t sit through it again anytime soon, but I still admired The American for several reasons — for its striking travelogue cinematography, for an out-of-his-comfort-zone performance from George Clooney, and, perhaps most notably, for the film’s uncompromising artiness. Say what you will about this movie — it’s not one that panders to studio notes.

If you’ve seen The American by now, you’ll know that, despite the patriotic title and the presence of Clooney, this flick is in fact about as far from American as you get. Rather, it’s an unabashed throwback to European cinema of the ’60s and ’70s. More well-versed critics than I are name-dropping Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film Le Samourai, and, in terms of camerawork and general philosophical approach, we’re definitely not too far from that fixture of college film classes, Michelangelo Antonioni.

So, yeah, if that last sentence didn’t tip you off, The American is arguably the most self-consciously artsy, existential, and Sprockets-y flick to hit the mainstream-multiplex circuit since Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s ludicrous 21 Grams. And, if you don’t roll with its arthouse ambitions, I figure The American will lose you…fast.

The reason being, you really can’t overstate how little happens in this movie. After a deceptively busy opening vignette where Things Go Horribly Wrong in Sweden, mystery man Clooney — he could be an assassin, or just a very good gunsmith (but either way, he’s got undeniable fashion sense) — is forced to cool his heels in an idyllic and self-consciously Old World Italian village, a la Joe Biden’s recent Mexican adventure. (Castel del Monte, to be exact.) There, he’ll amble across the cobblestones, looking pained, mopey, and/or hunted. Occasionally (very occasionally for Clooney — more on that in a bit), he’ll have a clipped and portentous conversation with one of the locals — usually either a priest (Paolo Bonacelli) or a beautiful woman (Thekla Reuten, Violante Placido.) Sometimes, he fiddles, in impressive craftsman-y ways, with the new gun he’s been assigned to build by his handler (Johan Leysen). Then he’ll go back to being pained, mopey, and/or hunted. Spoiler alert: This sums up about 85% of the movie.

The glacial pace of The American aside: If all of this sounds like it could be maddeningly pretentious…well, it kinda is, and, worse, there are hoary cliches strewn about everywhere like spent bullet casings. We’ve got an oh-so-sage priest harboring a few secrets of his own. We’ve got a stunning hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, one who falls for the protagonist despite his bad behavior. (Interesting film fact: The actress, Placido, is the daughter of Simonetta Stefanelli, a.k.a. Michael Corleone’s doomed Sicilian bride Apollonia in The Godfather. Maunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday…) And the last reel is so wildly over-the-top in its high-school existentialism that it verges on self-parody. One half-expects a fade to black-and-white and a “FIN” title card to close out the film.

For what it’s worth, The American — much more so than Corbijn’s first movie, Control (#45 of the Oughts) — also feels rooted in Corbijn’s music video work over the years. As someone with a fondness for Strange, Corbijn’s Depeche Mode mini-movie circa 1988 (a.k.a the Music for the Masses era), it was hard not to think of “Behind the Wheel” (see: femmes fatale and Old World moxy) and “Never Let Me Down Again” (every time Clooney chats up the priest) throughout The American. (For that matter, the scenes in the bordello are lit up like Corbijn’s photo shoot for “Policy of Truth” — Yes, I grew up taking my Mode seriously.)

So why did I end up appreciating The American regardless? Well, a lot of the credit has to go to Clooney. Sure, he’s stepped away from his usual fast-talking, charming-rogue persona before, most notably in Michael Clayton (where the usual charm offensive never helps him) and Syriana (where he gained a paunch and came off, as Stephanie Zacharek memorably put it, like a “depressed circus bear.”)

But, here, Clooney has gone wayyy out on a limb and stripped himself of his usual glib, “Dr. Ross” persona almost completely. “The American” isn’t charming. Heck, he barely even speaks. And so Clooney must construct this twitchy, haunted character without the benefit of his usual toolbox, and, to his credit, he gets it done. It’s an impressive star turn by one of the only honest-to-goodness movie stars of his generation. And, despite the many ways this movie could (and arguably does) go wrong, The American is another feather in Clooney’s cap, and doesn’t interrupt the rather remarkable string of quality films he’s been involved with. Just next time, let’s ease up on the woe-is-me pop existentialism, ok Mister Butterfly?

Modern Family.

Still in catch-up mode on the movie front, so this past weekend I saw two flicks that have been making the rounds for awhile now. The first, and by far the better of the two, was Lisa Cholodenko’s well-observed situation dramedy The Kids are All Right — a smart, tautly-written family portrait that for at least its first two-thirds (before the inevitable recriminations pile up and all the characters start to vent at each other endlessly) is decently good fun.

Like I’ve said of movies like The Station Agent and You Kill Me in year’s past, Kids is unabashed indie-tainment, the type of small-bore, character-driven film that IFC or The Sundance Channel will no doubt be running into the ground six months from now. So, no, it’s not really the type of film anyone needs to rush out and see on the Big Screen, per se. Still, it is a well-made, well-acted picture, and not half bad as counter-programming if you’re looking for a grown-up, television-y alternative to the usual summer movie mayhem.

If nothing else, The Kids are All Right gives the promising Mia Wasikowska a peg to hang her hat on in 2010 after the thoroughly atrocious Alice in Wonderland. As Joni, an eighteen-year-old on the verge of leaving the family nest for college, she and her brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) impressively hold their own with their two, thespian A-lister moms, Annette Bening (Nic) and Julianne Moore (Jules). Taken together, this foursome is a 21st century nuclear family just like any other (a point which the movie perhaps overly belabors at first) — controlling oenophile Nic can’t leave work at work, flighty, hippie-ish Jules feels taken-for-granted, Joni’s chafing under the maternal yoke, and Laser has lousy choice in friends — until the two kids decide, out of curiosity, to get in touch with their biological father, a.k.a. their moms’ sperm donor.

That would be Paul (Mark Ruffalo, who I find more palatable now that he’s less over-exposed), a charming if self-satisfied local restauranteur who needed some easy money way back when and has scarcely taken on any more responsibilities since. Still, Joni digs his insouciance and his motorcycle-riding ways, and Laser likes him ok too, even if Dad’s not quite what he was expecting, and so Paul slowly becomes integrated into Nic and Jules’ household. Too integrated, for Nic’s taste — Perhaps slightly paranoid even on the best of days, she starts to feel pushed out of the way as the materfamilias, and after awhile, for very good reason.

And so the family tension crackles and pops, as per films of this genre. For the most part, the writing here (by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg) is admirably subtle and character-driven — the problems that emerge seem natural outgrowths of these particular people’s traits. Still, I have to confess the film lost me a bit in its final act, as the winds of marital strife blow in earnest, and everybody keeps yelling at everybody else. This isn’t to say it’s not well-done (although one of the main characters does seem to drop out of the story rather perfunctorily), only that watching people clearly in love writhe in pain, and/or waiting for second act bygones to get bygonned, as they pretty obviously will, becomes unengaging to me after awhile.

As a sidenote, which I doubt will affect y’all’s enjoyment of this movie one way or the other, I’ll also admit to feeling some distance from these characters throughout the entire story — not because of the non-traditional (yet universally applicable) marriage at the movie’s heart, but because the action, locale, and characters here are so…Californian. Nothing against the Bear Flag Republic — I’ve got great friends out there and from there, and, as Biggie says: Great place to visit. But, as someone who grew up in the South and has lived on the East Coast for decades, I always feel a bit like Alvy Singer or Roger Greenberg while on the Left Coast — ever-so-slightly not among my people.

And, what with the locavores and the wine-enthusiasm and the car culture and the emphasis on landscaping and the skater rats and the sandals and all the “Right On”!s, Kids is as California suburbs as Mystic River is Boston, or, for that matter, Larry Clark’s Kids is N.Y.C. It’s to the film’s credit that it possesses such a strong sense of place, I guess. But as a processed-food-eating, beer-enthusiast, carless renter of the East Coast persuasion, at times The Kids are All Right seemed as much of an exercise in local color as the Appalachia of Winter’s Bone.

This is merely a quibble, of course, and probably speaks less well of me than the movie. In any event, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids are All Right is certainly All Right, and probably a good bit better. It’s a reasonably compelling dramedy that’s precise in its details and laugh-out-loud funny at times. If you’re in the mood for a slightly Lifetime-ish family drama this summer, you could do much worse. And, if you were to wait until it ends up on Netflix a few months hence instead, well that’d be all right too. Right on.

Joe Wilson’s War (or: The Plame Game.)

Sean Penn and Naomi Watts reunite to tell the story of Valerie Plame and the imaginary yellowcake in the new trailer for Doug Liman’s Fair Game. Hmm, ok…but I’m getting a Lions for Lambs/Green Zone flavor from this trailer — edutainmenty and too little, too late. Still, it pretty much has to be better than 21 Grams.

The (No) Big-Bang Theory.


“In his proposal, time and space can be converted into one another, with a varying speed of light as the conversion factor. Mass and length are also interchangeable, with the conversion factor depending on both a varying gravitational “constant” and a varying speed of light (G/c2). Basically, as the universe expands, time is converted into space, and mass is converted into length. As the universe contracts, the opposite occurs.“

By way of cdogzilla, PhysOrg’s Lisa Zyga describes a new cosmological theory by Wun-Yi Shu of Taiwan that, among other things,does away with the Big Bang. “Essentially, this work is a novel theory about how the magnitudes of the three basic physical dimensions, mass, time, and length, are converted into each other…The theory resolves problems in cosmology, such as those of the big bang, dark energy, and flatness, in one fell stroke.”