The Projectionist

A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham of a Mockery of a Travesty of Two Mockeries of a Sham

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:12:16 -0500

Mark Graham at Vulture reports that Fox Searchlight has canceled its rollout of Jared Hess's Gentlemen Broncos because of savage reviews. To hell with those reviews. And to hell with Fox Searchlight for losing heart. This is among the wildest and bravest comedies I've seen in years. Sure, some of Hess’s gross-out gags are heavy-handed, and the grotesquery is laid on too thick. But even at its campiest, there's a serious theme. Vastly disparate sexual issues are being worked out through outlandish fantasies — freaky, psychedelic enactments of the hero's novels that are so visionary and intense that they hurtle past Freud into a Jung-like mythical dimension. Gentlemen Broncos is a leap over Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre. Now, Hess doesn’t just gaze on paralyzed nerds from the outside; he takes you into their heads and gives form to their alienation from the physical world. It used to be that movies this ambitiously bizarre could find a home in midnight screenings and develop fanatical cults. Now they go straight to DVD — which deprives us of the fun of experiencing them with a responsive audience. See the movie before it goes away. And Fox Searchlight: Reconsider. There must be a way to help this picture find an audience.

When Push Comes to Shove — and Shove Back, Hard

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:50:23 -0500

Some readers (and a posse led by Latoya Peterson at Jezebel) are angered by my review of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. They believe my language reflects deep and both conscious and unconscious prejudices toward African-Americans, obesity, and the so-called “underclass.” Defending myself against those charges (as well as outright abuse) is bound to be a losing battle, but I respect the feelings of Peterson and many of her commenters (the least abusive, anyway) and am sick at the thought that my attempts to evoke this movie have been viewed so harshly — and, I believe, unfairly.

When a filmmaker in or out of Hollywood makes a movie about a victimized African-American girl, you can expect him or her to cast an actress who is thin and light-skinned with big round eyes to make everyone — black and white — want to identify with her. Lee Daniels, in filming Precious, has gone to the opposite extreme. He presents a heroine, Precious (Gabourey Sidibe), who is, in the context of mainstream American culture, on the bottom rung status-wise. That is not my prejudice; it is reflected in every aspect of our society, from job opportunities to magazine covers. (Outside of Oprah, who has spent millions to lose and keep her weight off, it’s hard to think of another overweight African-American cover girl — until now, anyway.) It is unjust, it is mean, it is destructive, it is inhuman, but it is true. It’s also the whole point of the movie (even more so than the novel). Here is an obese, black-skinned (as opposed to latte-colored), pregnant, illiterate, poor girl: She has everything against her. And Daniels, like Sapphire, continues to pile on the abuses. She is sexually assaulted by both parents. She is beaten into unconsciousness with a cast-iron pan. She is kicked in the face giving birth. She is expelled from school for being pregnant — not even her fault but the result of her father’s rape. She has AIDS.

Contrary to commenters' assertions (“What does it transgress, exactly? Because she is, you know, human, and she looks like a human … The usage is just racist. And sizeist”), “transgressive” isn’t a misuse of my thesaurus and it doesn’t reflect my racism or prejudice against fat people. In the context of movies, her image is a shock; it throws you violently outside your normal frame of reference, forcing you to rethink your assumptions. My assumptions are not, as many have inferred, judgmental. I’ve had weight issues all my life. My mother, an M.D., once treated obesity (or tried like hell) and in filling in for her receptionist in my late teens I saw what women in the African-American community with a certain body type and metabolism were up against — especially since they were surrounded by crap food (which, as the great documentary Food, Inc. makes clear, is both addictive and cheaper — thanks to corn subsidies — than, say, a head of broccoli). As for her affect, Sidibe is reportedly a bubbly, outgoing girl in life, but she is directed to be inexpressive. Again, that’s the point. Horribly abused and slighted or ignored by those around her, Precious has learned to reveal nothing. The first time you can see into her eyes is in her glamorous fantasy sequences, when Precious can let go.

I could have used euphemisms in describing the way she is presented to us, but I don’t think that would have evoked the movie. Daniels is very calculating in how he uses Sidibie’s image. He also has a scene in which she stares into a mirror and sees a beautiful thin white woman staring back, as if to say, “This is how she sees herself on the inside.” If he can so starkly portray how she wants to be versus how she is, if he can say, “Look how many strikes are against this girl,” then at the end when she emerges with real self-esteem, he can claim to have made a truly affirmative film — and I don't mean Hollywood-style affirmation.

So I was taken aback by comments like this:

Can I nominate Edelstein for worstie? That's how a real human being actually looks like in real life. I realize that her appearance may be shocking to you but you seriously need to filter your mouth. I agree with your sentiment and I hope this does spur some type of discussion, but his "reaction" was incredibly rude and shouldn't have been published (at least that bluntly). It didn't even take into consideration that some people do look like that and probably have very fragile self-esteem. As for her "shortcomings," obviously Ms. Sidibe is overweight but, from what I gather, that doesn't really have much to do with the true message of this movie.

It doesn’t have to do with the “true message” of the movie, but her weight is front-and-center.

OK, Edelstein, granted, maybe if Hollywood had allowed for a broader (ahem!) portrayal of black womanhood through the decades, showed the points between and beyond Dorothy Dandridge/Thandie Newton/Halle Berry and Mammy/maids/Medea/Eddie Murphy in a dress instead of spending a century studying how to properly light toothpicks onscreen, you'd find Sidibe less "jarring."

Actually, many of my colleagues and I have complained about fewer opportunities for beautiful women who are darker and more, ahem, broad (read: rounder, less model-skinny), like Angela Bassett. It is in the context of the Halle Berrys that Sidibe is, like it or not, jarring.

Also, her eyes are naturally narrow, not "squashed." I have a longstanding hatred of Edelstein, but this takes the cake.

As Jason Alexander said in Shallow Hal (the ultimate absurdist riff on prejudice against weight), “It takes the whole bakery.” My use of the word “squashed” was meant to suggest that Precious’s most expressive features are, thanks to how she's directed and photographed and lighted, hidden by her flesh; it was not a comment on Sidibe’s eyes, which are lovely in out-of-character photos.

The New York Magazine article confirmed my opinion of magazine and well, uh, all print media. Namely, the shockingly broad de-humanization of black people that exist outside of what it is to be a "good black," namely light skin, "good hair," thin, well off, and devoid of any linguistic trace of "black accents." (See: uh, the vast majority of black female actresses and singers). It's fucked up. It's sad. But seriously. It's about time he just played it as it lays and said "these are monsters." Which is to say, he missed the entire point of the book, the movie, and fucking life, that is, humanity exists in us all. In fact, this review is fucking evidence of some of the fucked up pathology that drives the self-hatred of the main character in Precious.

No one at New York would describe the characters (or people they're based on) in Precious as monsters. That's an unfair prejudice against this magazine. But I think the film does cater to a Reaganite preconception about “welfare mothers” by making Mary — in between the beatings of Precious — obsessed with her “check” and baldly lying about looking for work.

One line of mine I admit was insensitive: “She’s also sexually molested by her jealous, welfare-cheating, gross, and sedentary mother, although the genital fingering might seem preferable to the verbal and physical abuse.” The last thing I would ever do is make light of sexual abuse. In a clumsy way I was trying to suggest that I have read accounts of incest in which victims have said that at least when being touched they weren’t being beaten bloody, that it was perceived by the victim at the time as the lesser of two evils. But that is too complicated and too debatable a point to pack into a single offhand phrase. I apologize.

I think he means it offends his delicate sensibilities to be shown a fat woman on the screen. There should have been a black rectangle over her body so people wouldn't be offended.

No, my “delicate sensibilities” weren’t offended. I was offended based on other criteria. I still believe — and we can debate this I hope without throwing around charges of racism — that the piling-on of abuse and the relentless demonization of the family is a kind of demagoguery. I’m not naïve enough to think that monsters like Precious’s mother don’t exist. But I think the job of an artist is to get inside and understand people like that and not exploit their inhumanity in melodramatic ways to make us furious. It’s the crudeness of Precious I resent, not its message of hope.

UPDATE: Latoya Peterson also points to my description of Precious's mother, Mary, as "too singular to be universal," asserting that I refuse to accept (perhaps because of my different background) "ferocious violence" in this community. I accept its existence, but reject the portrayal onscreen — not out of squeamishness but in the belief that an artist owes us something more than a relentless display of cruelty edited for shock value.

UPDATE 2: I hope this is my last word on the subject, but as we get closer to the opening of Precious, it's important to note how casually the movie's adherents (many of whom haven't seen it) throw around the charge of racism. I've read that by pointing out that Precious is dark-skinned in a world that prizes lighter skin, I've revealed my own bigoted preferences. What garbage. In Sapphire's Push, Precious says she wishes she were light skinned and looks with envy on women who are. Early in the movie, the woman she sees in the mirror who represents — she thinks — who she is on the inside is thin and white. Those weren't my racist projections!

Meanwhile, a woman who calls herself piranha in an entry called "how not to defend yourself," quotes me selectively:

so now he defends himself, because he, david edelstein, isn't racist or sizeist, noooo:
"I’ve had weight issues all my life. My mother, an M.D., once treated obesity (or tried like hell) and in filling in for her receptionist in my late teens I saw what women in the African-American community with a certain body type and metabolism were up against — especially since they were surrounded by crap food"

*sigh*. that really needs no further commentary, does it.

*Sigh*. Maybe it does. Notice how she omits the final, parenthetical clause: "... which, as the great documentary Food, Inc. makes clear, is both addictive and cheaper — thanks to corn subsidies — than, say, a head of broccoli." I guess she doesn't feel that some people are genetically predisposed to obesity — and therefore have a much tougher time losing weight. And if she'd seen Food, Inc., she'd know that among the consequences of America's corn subsidies is a hugely disproportionate rise of obesity in poor communities. The filmmaker shows why a family goes to a fast-food drive-in window instead of eating at home: a) the parents both work several jobs and don't have time to cook; and b) double cheeseburgers are cheaper than a head of broccoli. The book and movie Precious drive this home by showing Precious's breakfast: a tub of fried chicken.

The dishonesty is breathtaking.

Related: When Push Comes to Shove [NYM]
Precious Reactions Interesting, Infuriating [Jezebel]

Come See The Chapman Report at BAM Tonight (and Me, Too)

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:59:09 -0500

Tonight at BAM at 6:50 I’m going to introduce the rarely screened (and unavailable on DVD) 1962 drama The Chapman Report, directed by George Cukor. It’s part of a 1962 series hatched by New York Film Critics Circle ~~president~~ chairman Armond White and the nice folks at BAMCinématek to celebrate the circle’s 75th anniversary. Why 1962? That was the year that — because of a newspaper strike — the NYFCC gave out no awards. Beyond that, it was a year when the culture was teetering between two violently disparate eras and the cinema was beginning to reflect the tension. No film is more quintessentially 1962 — in its strengths and weaknesses — than The Chapman Report.

It’s based on a potboiler by Irving Wallace, who lightly satirized The Kinsey Report and its impact on women accustomed to keeping their sexual preferences to themselves (and often from themselves). The premise is that Dr. Chapman and his team of bright, well-dressed men jet across the country to the Briars, an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, where women line up to answer questions about … oh, gosh, you know … stuff they don’t even say to their best friends. Jane Fonda (frigid widow), Glynis Johns (chirpy painter), Shelley Winters (adulterous amateur thespian), and Claire Bloom (promiscuous alcoholic divorcée), squirm and lie and perform all sorts of Freudian acrobatics as the camera sits on them with a poker-faced (but inwardly screaming) neutrality. In the end, The Chapman Report is fat slab of moralism: It says those marks on Chapman’s sheets have no relation to love. But Cukor makes you appreciate that for something to qualify as the higher trash it needs an orderly, classical, Hollywood frame.

He was a perfect choice for the material. Often called Hollywood’s finest “women’s” director, he was openly but not flamboyantly gay — reined-in emotionally, hyperaware of decorum, a company man in a company that didn’t much care for homosexuals. (He was fired from Gone With the Wind because Clark Gable hated gays almost as much as he hated Jews — and Cukor was both.) Cukor’s feelings about women were ambivalent, but he could certainly empathize with the Female Gaze and understand both the comedy and tragedy of keeping one’s sexual impulses cloaked. In The Chapman Report, Glynis Johns stares in awe at the perfectly proportioned body of Ty Hardin on a beach, and in this context the image is more potent than Harry Reems at his hardest. Hardin was exactly Cukor’s type (he liked them blond and square-jawed and Not Jewish), and never before had he captured it so nakedly onscreen.

The film has a terrible reputation. After a successful screening in San Francisco but before its release, Daryl F. Zanuck (who had been busy with The Longest Day in Europe) had it bowdlerized, and Cukor considered removing his name. He hated the finished product and spoke about it with regret. It’s true that The Chapman Report is a mixed bag. Several of the running jokes have no finish, no punch line. It could use more sex. (Just about every scene in this movie would serve as a template for the hardcore porn films of the next decade.) The men are mostly horrible, with too much screen time given to the worst — Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as the Chapman associate who saves Fonda from a life of guilt and chastity. (Cukor was saddled with a lot of TV actors.)

But I think its lapses, serious as they are, contribute something intangible to the finished film. That such racy material was put into production (in a year when Rob and Laura Petrie on TV slept in twin beds) says something about 1962. So does the fact that it had to be cast with a sexless male lead like Efrem Zimbalist Jr. So does the fact that it was hacked up by an old-time producer with the assent of Jack Warner. The performances survive the cutting. The amusing young Fonda knows how to stiffen her spine to convey turmoil; Johns does delicious double-takes that seem at once lewd and little-girl innocent; and the oft-prim Claire Bloom is stunning in her ravaged despair. Cukor, whose life was divided between polished Hollywood products and private gay bacchanals, finally had a chance to straddle his two worlds and did so with exquisite deadpan.

Yeah, I know the Yankees are on the verge … but you can always record the game! Come to BAM and help me root for the chicks.

Boo!

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:58:36 -0500

My kids thought I was a ghost for Halloween this year — I didn't tell them I was actually Michael Myers on the verge of strangling a topless P.J. Soles with a telephone cord. I turned a lot of heads in Park Slope. Little kids were terrified. I upstaged people in amazing getups. A sheet over one's head is the Ur-Halloween costume, but no one ever thinks of it anymore. Are there KKK associations? Something creeped people out. You'd think they'd seen a ghost.

Ghoul Candy: A Tasty House of the Devil and Other Halloween Treats

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:45:53 -0500

More than three decades after I gave up candy, Halloween is still my super-favorite holiday, giving me an excuse to put the rest of my life on hold and revert to the Famous Monsters of Filmland–reading adolescent who dreamed of doing nothing but watching horror movies — by which I mean ghost and monster and mad-scientist movies, not newfangled, generally mindless plague films or hack-’em-ups¹ or torture porn². Just what we need: more films to make us feel even worse about our society at a time when we’ve got at least a shot —pace James Howard Kunstler — at pulling things together. At least the Little Movie That Could (after brilliant viral marketing), Paranormal Activity, for all its absurdities, reminds us of what drew us to ghost stories in the first place: the bump in the night.

In the same old-fashioned non-doomsday mode, Ti West’s The House of the Devil opens Friday, and on its own modest B-movie terms, it’s a dandy. Apart from one serious (and shocking) explosion of gore, it’s an ode to seventies gothic, female-oriented horror films in which less is more. Desperate for money, college sophomore Sam (Jocelin Donahue) answers an ad for a babysitter, and, along with her pal Megan (Greta Gerwig), heads deep into the woods to the old manse of — wait for it — Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. The doleful giant Noonan seems very regretful about what is about to happen. But there is that imminent eclipse of the moon, and his wife and (unseen) mother-in-law are breathing down his neck for ... what?

You have to be a bit indulgent to love The House of the Devil as much as I do. Gothic conventions require the heroine to walk trepidatiously down dark hallways and up dark staircases, and she does this, by my rough count, 72 times. But Donahue is very, very pretty (in a straight-ahead, Pamela Sue Martin kind of way) and I didn’t mind watching her face for long stretches. Mumblecore darling Gerwig has little coils of flakiness popping out of her, and I hated to see her leave the scene so early. Noonan made me laugh every time he appeared — and he's never camp. A.J. Bowen is like a subdued version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre character — and all the scarier for not leading with his slobber. Rarely has a film squeezed so much icky dread from a pizza — two different pizzas, actually. I’m not sure I understand the denouement, but it certainly leaves a door — or a portal to hell — open.

More Fun With Blood and Thunder
• Film Forum has a double bill (10/30 and 31) of Theatre of Blood, an overrated but often delicious bit of British Grand Guignol, in which actor-impresario Vincent Price inventively slays critics (according to methods prescribed by Shakespeare) who denied him a prize. Worse, he recites verse as he does it — and the sad thing is, Price is truly terrible at Shakespeare, all ham and no attention to meter. The critics in the movie are dead-on as well as dead. It’s paired with Scream of Fear, a.k.a. Taste of Fear, an excellent Diabolique retread.

• On the home front, all hail Turner Classic Movies on the 30th, 31st, and the wee hours of November 1! In addition to the usual suspects — The Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, Dead of Night, two Jekyll and Hydes (stick with Frederic March), and Psycho — it’s Boris Karloff central. Beyond The Ghoul (once thought lost, but for all the sepulchral atmosphere, killingly dull) and the Val Lewton–produced chillers Isle of the Dead and The Body Snatchers, you can see all five Karloff mad-scientist/back-from-the-dead, late-thirties/early-forties cheapies: The Walking Dead, Before I Hang, The Man They Could Not Hang, The Man With Nine Lives, The Devil Commands.

I saw them all 40 years ago and can’t begin to remember the difference among the movies with “man” and “hang” in the title. But The Devil Commands, with its telepathic contact-the-dead machine, is altogether ooky; and I have a sentimental attachment to The Walking Dead because unjustly executed Karloff starts out so kindly and ends up so fiendish, and because the film was cobbled together with the grade-Z Son of Dr. Jekyll (also on TCM!) into a movie that the crew was endlessly subjected to in Ensign Pulver, the spotty sequel to Mister Roberts with a cast that included Burl Ives, Walter Matthau, Larry Hagman, Jack Nicholson, James Coco, James Farantino, Peter Marshall, Hymie from Get Smart, Goober, and grown-up Anne Frank actress Millie Perkins as a WAC. There's another Karloff mad-scientist movie in this batch that I've never seen called The Ape: "A mad doctor poses as an ape and kills people for bodily fluids to help a disabled girl." Sounds good; I just added it to the TiVo.

• TCM also has something called Zaat (“A mad scientist transforms himself into an aquatic monster intent on populating the world with his progeny”), which sounds like too much of a hoot not to TiVo.

• On IFC, check out Romero’s flawed but still terrific anti-Mom picture Monkeyshines and Brian De Palma’s so-so Siamese-twin movie Sisters.

• Showtime offers, among other goodies, David Cronenberg’s sex-plague-in-Toronto epic, Shivers (a.k.a. They Came From Within) and Dan Curtis’s Burnt Offerings, which Robert Brustein once told me he thought was one of the most original horror pictures he’d seen because … I forget. It had something to do with Ibsen.

• I wish I had the MGM HD channel, which Time Warner bundles into an expensive package with a lot of extreme sports channels I don’t need. (Why would they do that? It makes no sense.) If I had it, I wouldn’t miss Twins of Evil, a rare and excellent late Hammer vampire movie with twin blond Swedes (one good, one naughty) and an affectingly overwrought Peter Cushing (his wife had just died) as a fanatical Puritan witch hunter. There’s also the way-cool Vampire Circus (hard to see uncut), Donald Pleasance versus subway ghouls in the Guillermo del Toro fave (and mine) Raw Meat, the Manson-inspired The Return of Count Yorga, and the surprisingly nasty Grave of the Vampire.

My daughters have multiple Halloween parties as well as trick-or-treating and the Park Slope Halloween parade, but in addition to Zaat, I’m going to TiVo every one of the Karloff mad-scientist/back-from-the-dead movies, and one day soon when I’m not on deadline or blogging and the kids aren’t around, I’m going to watch them back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. I’m going to do what I dreamed of doing at age 10. And then, damn it, I’ll tell you the difference between The Man They Could Not Hang and The Man With Nine Lives.

Footnotes

¹ For instance, I don’t have much use for Zombieland, which turns the visionary tropes of George R. Romero into so much splatter camp. Enough with the doomsday scenarios. At my neighborhood multiplex, Zombieland was preceded by coming attractions for The Road (a high-toned, quasi-zombie end-of-civilization picture from a novel by Cormac McCarthy) and the latest Roland Emmerich disaster flick, 2012, already beginning to feed the hysteria of apocalyptic religious nuts. (If you want to see an inspired Romero homage, read Max Brooks’s novel World War Z, which takes Romero’s zombie-cannibal world as a given and explores its ramifications in ways — psychological, cultural, geopolitical — that connect with How We Live Now: an amazing book, a series of footnotes with a life of their own.)

² Also at the multiplex is Saw VI, which I haven’t seen (after four of them I got the gist), but about which Melissa Lafsky at the Awl writes most engagingly:

The REAL question is: Why the hell are these chunks of cinematic shite so popular? The answer is simple: American guilt. We’re all thrashing around in a culture built on Me-ism—I want mine, I’ll do whatever it takes to get it, and fuck everybody else. And deep down in places we don’t talk about at parties, we KNOW we’re steeped in a moral wasteland, and that we’re little better than most criminals for spending our time worrying about how many panda-skin Jimmy Choos we can buy while a single mother of four works three jobs and still can’t afford to have a fucking cavity filled.
The beauty of these movies is that they’re blank slates to assuage our guilt — the scenarios are so ambiguous (random people plucked from ordinary assholery) and the characters so bland, they allow every one of us to imagine we’re the guilty douche in the torture chamber/poisoned house/corpse-sprinkled public bathroom. And they let us feel better, by presenting someone worse than us (drug dealers, wife beaters), and creating some sort of internal justice system. “Sure, I wrote a few misogynistic blog comments and scowled at a homeless man, but THAT guy killed a kid with his car! He’s worse than me! He deserves to have his extremities slowly twisted off by a giant Medieval crucifix!”

The Art of Work: Michael Jackson’s Inspiring This Is It

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:12:43 -0500

Good news: The assembly of Michael Jackson rehearsal footage bearing the apt title This Is It does not play like the work of necrophiliac greedheads squeezing the last dollar out of a moonwalking skeleton. It’s vivid, illuminating, and sometimes — more often than you’d think possible — inspiring. Despite the (anonymous) reports in the days after Jackson’s death of his inability to rise to the occasion, the prospective London concert series that consumed his final months doesn’t look to have been an inherently doomed enterprise. Touch and go, certainly. But Jackson’s discipline and drive outlasted his body. He wanted one last time to go onstage and be as he was.

He doesn’t spell that out, and neither does anyone else. This Is It provides no context, no posthumous commentary on the sad trajectory of Jackson’s life, no reference to anything outside the Los Angeles auditorium in the final weeks of rehearsal before the huge company would depart for Great Britain. This footage would probably have ended up as a DVD supplement to a concert film. There are a Chorus Line–like casting session and brief interviews with overawed dancers, singers, and musicians (“Michael is the epitome of one of the great entertainers of all time”), but most of the movie is process. The concert series — his first time onstage in over a decade — was to feature his big hits, from “ABC” with the Jackson Five through “Billie Jean,” “Black and White,” all the way up to that eco-anthem with the elephants and rain forest. There would be elaborate multimedia interpolations, among them updates of the incomparable “Thriller” and “Smooth Criminal” videos. There would be fireballs, elevators, and a bulldozer. Jackson did nothing small. There would be no acoustic set. There would be no acknowledgment that he was a 50-year-old man.

The challenge for the film’s director, Kenny Ortega (who was also directing the stage show), and the army of heirs, moneymen, and meddlers, was to walk a delicate line: They had to remind us why Jackson was the King of Pop but also to leave in signs of his vulnerability. Too much potency and our morbid curiosity would go unsatisfied; too much pathos and the charge of exploitation would be even harder to fight.

They got the balance about right. Jackson’s legs are pool-cue thin, so that every time he lands you fear a crack … Yet when Ortega splits the screen into run-throughs on two or even three different days, the dancing is awesomely on point. Jackson’s not just keeping up with the superhuman young specimens in his troupe; he’s credibly leading them. “Smooth Criminal” has the old rat-tat-tat electricity. “Beat It” has you bouncing in your seat even if Michael is a quarter century older than the members of the gangs he’s magically separating. He’s not impersonating Michael Jackson, he is Michael Jackson — and everything emanates from him. Before the final round of auditions, Ortega tells the prospects, “Dancers in a Michael Jackson show are an extension of Michael Jackson” — and as skinny as Jackson is, they do seem like projections of his spirit and will. Another choreographer explains that it’s not just athleticism that’s required: “If you don’t have that goo, that ooze coming out of you, you’re not gonna get the job” — which sounds alarming, but makes perfect sense. The choreography is all snap and ooze, snap and ooze, violent spasm and simmer.

… and all of it controlled by the man himself. “That can’t trigger on its own,” he says, more than once, about the back-up dancers’ moves or a light change or a downbeat. “I gotta cue that.” Jackson emerges here as a control freak who swaddles his commands in diapers of love: “It’s not right but that’s okay, it’s all for love — just get it there.” Having once been terrorized in rehearsal by his dictatorial dad, he’s bent on getting the same results in a different way. “I know you mean well,” he tells his sound crew, pointing to his headphones after a botched performance of “ABC.” “I’m trying to adjust the inner ears with … the love, the love, L-O-V-E.” No one knows what he’s babbling about, but at least he’s not humiliating anyone. From offscreen, Ortega speaks to him as he might to the 6-year-old monarch in The Last Emperor.

The voice — well, that was a potential disaster. Accounting for his pitiful sounds from the stage in “I Can’t Stop Loving You” (“I’m trying to conserve my throat, please, so understand … I shouldn’t be singing right now. I’m warming up to the moment. Don’t make me sing out. [To singer Judith Hill] You’re fine to do it. I gotta save my voice … ”), he seems to think the problem is his cords; to my inexpert ears, it sounds like he doesn’t have the lungs. In some numbers, his vocals have clearly been sweetened, but Ortega leaves in enough wobbly notes to let you know that even the oohs and yips were an effort. (So many top singers lip-synch these days that they could probably have done a work-around — but the proud, perfectionist Jackson might not have been able to live with that.)

One of the techies gushes that Jackson always has to “push the boundaries” — which must have been especially worrisome to someone whose boundaries had already been pushed as far as any human’s can go. Perhaps if he had pulled this concert series off, he might have been able to leave that young Michael behind and move in a new direction … reinvent himself … maybe alongside John Lennon if Mark David Chapman had misfired … and Buddy Holly on back-up guitar if his plane hadn’t crashed, and … Oh, what’s the use? He was a mess and destined to self-destruct. When he held forth onscreen in a prologue to that song about the danger to the Earth (“I love the planet … I love trees … What have we done to the world?”), all I could think was, “What have you done to your own natural state?” In the name of evolution, this beautiful African-American boy turned himself into a whey-faced ghoul with a nose whittled down to cartilage. Maybe in the end he displaced his horror at his own self-mutilation onto Mother Nature.

At the premiere last night, I was worried when Ortega introduced the film to audiences in seventeen cities via a live feed from L.A.: “Tonight we come together in the name of blah blah … this is for the fans blah blah … the last sacred documentary of our leader and friend blah blah … ” Would Michael Jackson be thrust at us as a deity? Maybe if the footage had supported it. A new video made for “Smooth Criminal” onstage showed the 50-year-old Jackson interacting with Rita Hayworth as Gilda and dodging Bogie’s bullets — and it seemed wrong, a horrible disconnect. That Jackson doesn’t belong with Hayworth and Bogie, but the earlier Jackson of the original videos of "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" and "Black and White" and "Smooth Criminal" sure does. The Jackson of This Is It is worth treasuring for a different reason. Like all great artists behind their mythical facades, he was in there working, counting steps, working, trying to hit the notes, working, and working, and still, always, working …

Black Friday

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:01:37 -0500

I'd intended to blog on the New York Film Festival today but took the wrong cold medicine last night and spent the next eight hours on the couch in front of the TV. I'd like to say I plucked one of my fabulous Kino box sets from the pile and filled in the gaps in my Murnau, but it was mostly a semi-stoned voyage through the late-night bowels of cable movie channels. I recall something with the kid from American Beauty following around with a video camera a serial killer who'd kidnapped his mom (!), some bikers killing supposed high-school students in the desert, nutberg Mark Wahlberg pawing a nubile young Reese Witherspoon and getting chucked out the window by William Peterson, a cut-rate alien in a sub menacing Robocop and Amanda Pays, a scientist who kept killing and reanimating his assistant for no clear reason, a Most Dangerous Game update with a serial killer hunting a naked woman in the Rockies, Jack Bauer's uninteresting daughter getting tortured by serial killers, Jack Bauer himself as a telepath hunting a serial killer ... I did rewatch, for the tenth time, the last 45 minutes of Carl Franklin's classic thriller One False Move, with its increasingly canted angles and nearly unbearable suspense (even if you know what's coming), Michael Beach and Billy Bob Thornton (who co-wrote the film) as among the coldest and scariest killers in film, and Bill Paxton — maybe the most sheerly likable of modern leading men, back then and now, as a harried Mormon. The bloody final confrontation takes less than half a minute, yet you'd be pressed to find its like for pure catharsis. I hate to admit I hadn't seen all of Showgirls, but I finally, finally got through it after stopping every fifteen minutes when Elizabeth Berkeley's big teeth got too much and coming back after watching part of another serial-killer movie. Gina Gershon hissing in Berkeley's face reminded me of the giant Komodo spitting at the giant cobra in another movie I caught in stroboscopic flashes ... Truly a dark night of the soul ...

But then I read something that renewed my faith ...

I found this by the great Roy Edroso at alicublog on Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. As you'll see, he's less conflicted about Moore than I am (he mostly hates him), but is also more open to startling, unexpected transitions:

Most interesting is the way he positions black citizens in the Obama theme. An interview is interrupted by the news that the election is won, and we see black folk leap and cheer — a common image during that news cycle, but (as I mentioned about the portrayal of Republicans tumbling out of the closet in Republican Gomorrah) newly piquant in a narrative context: The most traditionally despised and debased people in the country suddenly filled with optimism.

The payoff comes near the end, when Moore reproduces FDR's 1944 call for a new Bill of Rights — a late New Deal legacy that presaged Moore's own hopes for the nation. We may be aware without reminding that Roosevelt's vision — including that of "every family to a decent home ... to adequate medical care ... to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age and sickness and accident" — went unrealized after his death. Next we see the crowds weeping at FDR's funeral procession — many of them African-American. Then Moore avails a stealth-shock cut — it takes a few moments to realize that the helicopters we are next shown are hovering over the flooded homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and that the terrified citizens begging for rescue are black.

I'm a terrible cynic, but the sorrow and anger at injustice I felt at what I saw, I am convinced, were not drawn by a gimp-string, nor by a clever concatenation of my own prejudices, but by the craft of a real filmmaker turning bare facts and images into art. It's political, certainly. But sometimes, if rarely, a political gesture is sufficiently inspired to cross the line.

This is wonderful on so many levels I can't do it justice (extra points for the Manny Farber gimp-string reference). It's also a sobering reminder that full-time film critics like me who feel a duty to synopsize can miss the trees for the forest.

Next week I'll catch up with the horrid, Michael Haneke–like Afterschool. Also look for a doc called In Search of Beethoven directed by Phil Grabsky that mixes rather ordinary schoolmarm narration with scenes in which great conductors and musicians play snatches of the work and tell us — in very specific, evocative language — just why the evolution of the composer's music can be followed like an epic novel. It could only be better if Grabsky brought Leonard Bernstein back from the dead to add to the sum of all the wisdom.

Spotty New York Film Festival Blogging: Lars von Trier’s Daft Antichrist

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:06:01 -0500

It turns out what they say about Willem Dafoe is true: The man has a schlong the size of an oil tanker.* [see update below] Charlotte Gainsborough’s pudendum is nothing to sneeze at, either. Too bad both sets of privates get mutilated in close-up.

Camille Paglia will admire the basic conceit of Antichrist: Woman (Gainsborough) as the embodiment of chthonian nature, too wild and demonic to be healed by the touchy-feely pointy-head psychotherapy of her husband (Willem Dafoe). Bring on the ax, carving knife, etc. I liked the idea better when David Cronenberg did it in The Brood — when a psychiatrist’s est-like exhortation to a woman “to go all the way through” a primal trauma produced not inner peace but deformed psychotic babies that hammered people she didn’t like to death.

In this case, Gainsborough’s trauma has to do with the death of the couple’s toddler, who in a prologue jumps out a window (in lyrical slow motion) while they're making the beast with two backs (plus one humongous wiener). I thought Von Trier would be above such shots as the one of the dead child’s stuffed animal bouncing and coming to rest. But for all pretentions he’s not above much. To think the festival selection committee went for this over the Coens’ A Serious Man!

Still, I can’t hate the movie, laughably overdone as it is. Von Trier, who rarely travels, showed up at the NYFF press conference on a big screen via a computer hookup, looking as if he’s still fighting the depression that led him to make the relatively rough-hewn (compared to his last, more formal exercises) Antichrist. The famously abusive, misogynistic martinet looked so sweet and vulnerable that it put the movie in a more tender light. Depression becomes him.

UPDATE: Damn. It seems that von Trier claimed that the wang in close-up belonged to a porn star. Well, Mr. Dafoe will have to set the record straight. Milton Berle's record holds. However, my judgment of Ms. Gainsborough's privates is based on a full-body shot and not no porn-star close-up. So there.

The Arrest of Roman Polanski

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:20:52 -0500

Roman Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland and will reportedly be flown to Los Angeles to stand trial after 35 years. This is as it should be — alas. But it didn’t have to go down this way. The excellent documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired did not minimize the horrific nature of the crime, but also made a good case against the late judge who held up a plea agreement between Polanski and the prosecutor. Now, there will be a lot of grandstanding by idiots, who will say that Polanski is worse than the likes of Peter Braunstein and should be thrown in prison for the remainder of his life.

I welcome your thoughts in e-mails (and will print the best), but have little to add to the conclusion of my review of The Pianist in Slate:

I think it's also important to add that this great and moral movie — the best of 2002, and one of the most indelible Holocaust films ever made — is the work of a sex criminal, a man who fled this country after drugging and molesting a teenage girl in the mid-'70s. I frankly don't know how to reconcile my feelings about The Pianist with my feelings about Polanski. What I do know is that he lost two families — with sickening brutality — in a single lifetime, and that he has been through a hell that few of us can even imagine. Perhaps returning to his native Poland for the first time in 40 years — and to the Holocaust — has given him a new moral clarity. Perhaps it is time for this magnificent artist and monstrously conflicted human being to return to the United States and make amends.

Filthy Lucre: Capitalism: A Love Story

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:56:23 -0500

The big blowhard Michael Moore is a hugely successful left-wing carnival barker in a culture of right-wing carnival barkers, and for that he deserves our admiration. He has, it is true, been caught playing fast and loose with timelines — not a negligible crime. But he rarely stoops to the level on which his rivals permanently reside: He’s obnoxious but not corrupt. He doesn’t spew talking points. He’s out there, on the streets, corralling evidence to support his theses (or thesis — there’s really only one). And he is, point for point, difficult to refute. His new cinematic circus, Capitalism: A Love Story, is the film to which he has been building for the last two decades. It’s sprawling, scattershot, sniggery, and, in one instance, exploitative. It’s brazenly one-sided. But Moore calls questions that no one else in the mainstream corporate media goes near. His other films focused on symptoms. This one tackles what he sees as the disease.

Let’s start with his conclusion: “Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil.” That’s enough to give anyone pause, especially in light of the sorry history of other political and economic systems. (I’m not sure whether Moore has ever argued on behalf of the mass-murderer Mao, but he plainly adores Castro.) He has a less controversial case when he examines the flimsy intellectual connections between capitalism and democracy, which Americans tend to see as sibling-close, united under the umbrella of the U.S. Constitution. They’re not: One of Moore’s stunts is a trip to the Capitol rotunda to examine an original copy, while guards look on, intrigued. Jefferson, Adams, and even Adam Smith (although Moore doesn’t invoke him) warned of the dangers to democracy of an unregulated free market in which the wealthy few accumulate too much power. The fact is — the fact is — the pinko Moore follows in far more illustrious footsteps than the free-market Masters of the Universe, most of whom are too a-skeered to submit to his questions. (Having made close to a billion dollars at Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson has a lot of mansions in which he can hide.) Moore also follows in the footsteps of Jesus, who, let’s remember, took violent issue with material wealth. Around his old hometown of Flint, Michigan, Moore has found several priests and a bishop to denounce capitalism as the root of American injustice instead of the Christian Promised End. But he scores even more points with satire. He takes a threadbare Biblical dramatization and redubs Jesus to make him a free-marketer, refusing to heal a cripple because the man had a “preexisting condition.”

I wouldn’t use the term “documentary” to describe this film: It’s a barbed comic monologue with big jolts of pathos. The movie opens with footage of a clean-cut fifties’ narrator portentously informing us that the story we’re about to see is hard to believe, and Moore borrows that Daddy-knows-best tone for his own singsong narration: This, kiddies, is how our society really works. I know people who are put off by the implied condescension, but it didn’t bother me. Americans — myself included — are so profoundly ignorant of major historical and economic truths that we can always use a good primer: “See Dick. See Dick lobby against government regulation and make wildly disproportionate amounts of money.” The fifties capitalist propaganda is easy to laugh at and, at the same time, hard to shake off. (It was an awkward moment at the Lincoln Center New York Film Festival premiere when Moore flashed a shot of Lincoln Center as part of his montage of decadent elites.)

What about content? It ranges far and wide, though rarely deep. Moore begins with foreclosures and predatory lending, hewing closely to the same narrative as Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s recent American Casino; draws hilarious comparisons (drawing on more cheapo film epics) with the fall of the Roman Empire; and then brings on the politicized playwright Wallace Shawn to recall the way capitalism was supposed to work: The person with the best products and service (cue vintage footage of small entrepreneurs in small towns) makes the most money. Perhaps Moore means to invoke Shawn’s bracing My Dinner with Andre, but that was a true drama, a dialogue of opposites. This is Shawn telling Moore what he wants to hear. No matter: It sets the stage for a recap of our post–World War II economy, after the Allies reduced German and Japan industry to rubble and had markets all to themselves. (Moore sees the 90 percent tax on the very wealthy as a good thing: It helped fund our infrastructure.)

Then it’s time to bring on cowboy figurehead Ronald Reagan and his corporate cronies, who began dismantling regulations that — in Moore’s view — brought off a coup d’état and wiped out American industry. (Don Regan is shown pulling Reagan’s strings.) He trudges with his elderly dad to the now-bulldozed site of the spark-plug factory in which the old man used to work, returns to Flint (and GM) for an acid reminder of Roger & Me, and works his way toward the chainsawing of Wall Street regulations under George W. Bush — which, combined with a reassignment of FBI agents to Homeland Security, helped set the stage for what he calls the greatest wave of white-collar crime in American history. Then, with jabs at Alan Greenspan and other free-marketers from Lehman, Countrywide, Goldman, AIG, Bank of America (especially predatory), etc., it’s on to predatory lending, the collapse of the mortgage racket, and what real-estate watchdog Peter Zalensky calls the arrival of “bottom feeders” — vultures who buy up foreclosed homes and sell them for profit. Meanwhile, Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo is giving sweetheart loans to movers and shakers like Senator Chris Dodd. It should be said that Democrats are not exempt from Moore’s rage: Loosening of Wall Street regulations was a feature of that wild-eyed leftist Bill Clinton’s administration, too.

Among Moore’s more appalling segments is the one in which he lectures on what happens when government shifts its responsibilities to for-profit businessmen: the notorious Wilkes-Barre case in which a judge named Ciavarella took kickbacks from a pal (allegedly — the 48-count indictment is still working its way through the courts) to send some harmless 6,500 juveniles to the man’s private correctional facility. One girl spent more than six months under lock and key for writing snarky things about an assistant principal on her Facebook page. Then he brings on Hudson River hero Captain Sully, who testified before an increasingly uncomfortable congressional committee that pilots now work for as little as $22,000 a year, receive food stamps, and have to supplement their incomes with second and third jobs. Watch Moore’s face as he listens to a pilot describe selling one’s plasma.

Moore makes one detour I consider unforgivable. After a shocking segment on blue-chip companies that make millions by secretly taking out life-insurance policies on employees, he introduces us to a family in which the mother — a Wal-Mart worker — died following an acute asthma attack. The children read letters to her they’ve written. They weep and Moore holds on to them. But what’s the context here? She wasn’t failed by the health-care system. The grief of her family, however moving, has no bearing on Wal-Mart’s windfall. This is just demagoguery.

But it’s nothing, I repeat, compared to the other side. Not so long ago I found myself sitting next to an old family friend and was stunned to hear her assert that (a) Obama was a socialist taking the country to socialism; (b) the bank failures were brought on by poor blacks, not by the banks themselves, which were forced by the government to make loans to minorities who could not pay them back; and (c) what happened in Detroit had nothing to do with grotesquely bad management or lack of innovation — it was unions that had driven up wages to the point that American manufacturers couldn’t compete. Where does this bullshit come from? Nothing Moore says in Capitalism: A Love Story is remotely as mendacious or self-serving. (At least my old Texas uncle at the same table, after whispering, “You can’t argue with these liberals,” said he wished Obama success — even if he was a colored fella.)

Moore’s greatest weapon is the pathetic case the other side makes for itself — like The Wall Street Journal editorialist’s admission that as far as he was concerned, “Capitalism is more important than democracy.” No one Moore interviews can coherently explain derivatives or credit default swaps (though it should be said that the Alexes Chadwick and Blumberg on NPR did a superlative job last year, though they needed a full hour). Moore’s heroes here are, in no particular order, Jonas Salk, who gave away his polio vaccine for free; workers in a Chicago window-and-door company who barricaded themselves in their factory when BofA tried to kick them out without paying their wages; smiling assembly-line workers who run their own company and share in the profits (and collect on average $65,000 salaries); and Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who fights the bailout and then advises evicted residents to become “squatters in your own homes.” (She also alleges to Moore that “promises were made” to congressmen hoping to run for the Senate in their respective states to switch their votes to bail out the banks. More, please, Moore … ) The election of Barack Obama is viewed as triumph of democracy — although Moore doesn’t bother to note that the thievery goes on and on.

In the final sequence, Moore pretends to try to make citizen’s arrests on Wall Street and then puts crime-scene tape around the Stock Exchange. On one level: groan. On another: No one else is going to make those arrests. No one else would make Capitalism: A Love Story, either. The title, though amusing, doesn’t begin to do the movie justice, since the love is incestuous and — Darwinian libertarians notwithstanding — unnatural, vile. To be continued.

The Time of Our Lives: Remembering Patrick Swayze

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:04:17 -0500

In Dirty Dancing, Patrick Swayze combined brawny physicality and feline grace in a way that made millions of women (and a lot of men) weak in the knees. That’s still a singular feat in American movies, where there has always been a schism between hoofers and jocks. Swayze behaved as if the divide never existed. His persona was fluid — and irony-free.

Because of Swayze’s physical immediacy, there was no tension between body and spirit: He was there. I think that’s what made his incorporeality so poignant in Ghost. He was of the Earth, at one with that pottery wheel. How bereft he looked without the substance of flesh. Only the poet of machismo-in-extremis Kathryn Bigelow could create a world, in Point Break, in which Swayze’s body wasn’t enough — in which his character had a jones for the big wave that would swallow him whole (and Keanu Reeves had a jones for him).

Why did his career lose steam? Yes, he could be stolid. But I think his loss of popularity had more to do with the movies themselves. The action and romance genres began to incorporate more self-reflexive ironies, more camp, and Swayze’s earnestness didn’t fit. He didn’t want to look like he was in on the joke. He wanted to act.

The one time I met Swayze was in 1984, when I interviewed John Milius on the release of his red-meat (but funereal) Cold War opus, Red Dawn. In my Village Voice pinko mode, I made some barbed reference to Eagle Scouts and Swayze said, “I was an Eagle Scout.” He didn’t add, “You girly-man,” which I appreciated. He was unapologetic about Milius’s militarism, which he saw as simply the need to be prepared, and in the face of his sincerity — as opposed to Milius’s fatuous liberal-baiting — it was difficult to argue. I ended up liking him a lot.

Pancreatic cancer is among nature’s swiftest killers, but Swayze made it fight for every cell. We’ll miss him. He was solid.

No Impact Man and the Idiotocracy

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:14:41 -0500

On Tuesday night, I got to moderate a spirited Q&A at the Pelham Picture House with Laura Gabbert, co-director of the documentary No Impact Man (opening 9/11 at the Angelika), and Michele Conlin, wife of the film’s main subject, Colin Beavan. (She looms large in the movie as well.) I’m now reading Beavan’s book, which carries the chewy subtitle: “The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and His Way of Life in the Process.” It’s an entertaining, amusing, provocative film (I’ll be reviewing it in next week’s mag), but one of its most fascinating aspects was, for me, upsettingly evocative. Beavan’s project — to live with his wife and young daughter in Manhattan and yet, for a year, never take an elevator or drive or watch TV or buy clothes or eat anything grown non-locally, etc. — makes him a figure of fun in the media and among his friends and acquaintances. Almost from the start he needs to defend his project — and himself.

That brings back a time. In the eighties, I shared an apartment in New York with my dear friend Bill McKibben, around the time he was getting in touch with his inner Thoreau. (He was also writing for The New Yorker and running a homeless shelter.) When his seminal book The End of Nature was published, it was no surprise to see it attacked by Rush Limbaugh, who called him “an environmental wacko.” (I imagine Limbaugh consumes more in a day than Beavan in a lifetime, and that his trips to the loo generate more methane than most dairy farms.) What was striking, though, was that Bill was also ridiculed by the then reliably snide New Republic and those fearless pseudonymous crusaders at Spy, who calculated the number of trees killed to print his book. (Ho ho ho, what a witty idea!) In other words, journalists who likely masquerade as progressives seemed to have a vested interest in knocking down a true idealist — calling him “sanctimonious” and “preachy.” (Later, an especially egregious fool at the Washington Post pretended to be a fan and then, in print, made fun of his clothes and the spare breakfast he ate.) Bill was, of course, way ahead on the issue of global warming, and from the start challenged us to “live more lightly on the Earth.” But to the mainstream media's idiotocracy, he was wide open. (Bill now works tirelessly with former Middlebury students on behalf of the earthwide carbon-emissions-reduction campaign 350.org. Click on the link and see what they’re doing.)

Something like that happens in No Impact Man, too. After a writer for the New York Times read Beavan’s blog and wrote a story, the headline was “A Year Without Toilet Paper.” How unhygienic! (A colleague of Conlin’s told her that his wife warned him not to shake her hand.) In the film, we see Stephen Colbert in his ironic right-wing blowhard persona refer to the non-consumer Beavan as an enemy of capitalism. That was hilarious — but watch, as No Impact Man opens in New York next week and then goes wide, how many people will ridicule Beavan as a “limousine liberal” or an “environmental wacko” or “sanctimonious.” They’ll make fun of his breakfast, too. Watch them fiddle while the planet burns.

Midnight in the Garden ...

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:59:20 -0500

Snapshot of a 12:05 a.m., August 28, 2009, Halloween II show at the Pavilion Theater, Park Slope/Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn: More people going into the 3-D Final Destination movie, also screening a little after midnight. Whole families. Young kids. I guess there were no midnight 3-D Pixar movies tonight. There’s a little girl at Halloween II as well, maybe 8 years old. I saw a 4-year-old at Sin City, so nothing surprises me anymore. But I feel sick about what kids — who don’t need to know how deeply sick the world is — have to process nowadays. I know they’re no angels; I’ve read Lord of the Flies. I know babysitters are expensive. But sometimes I dream of a little less capitalist laissez-faire and a little more nanny-state finger-wagging. I look at those parents and think how fun it would be to see a scene in a hack-‘em-up in which a mom and dad take a little kid to an R-rated slasher movie and get sliced and diced while their tot laughs and eats another Milk Dud ...

Six guys in the row in front of me. Big, beefy, on the dufus-y side. The lights go down and, instantly, out come the BlackBerrys and iPhones. They can’t even hold their focus for ten seconds. I know, Sam Anderson makes a brilliant case for distraction. But this isn’t Hou-Hsiao-hsien, it’s Rob Zombie. Concentrate, people. Ommmmmm. Michael Myers is wasting three people with a big fucking butcher knife; you don’t need to check the Mets score. Or maybe you do. Maybe that’s how you stay pure at heart. Not me. I'm engaged.

2 a.m.: The movie is over. Men stand at urinals and pee in silence. I wonder if they were this ruminative after Final Destination. I sit in the lobby typing up my notes while the staff closes up. Why was I at the midnight show of Halloween II instead of home in the bosom of my family? More important: Why isn’t there a 2:15 a.m. show of Final Destination 3-D?

Garish Priest: Rob Zombie’s numbing Halloween II

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:36:36 -0500

Two years after Rob Zombie’s misshapen but ferocious and often striking Halloween remake comes the aggressively unpleasant Halloween II, which is basically Zombie trying to hack his way out of John Carpenter’s smooth, well-ordered universe with a machete and going nowhere slowly—and loudly, and savagely. There have been far more pointless movies in this genre, but none in which the plotting has seemed so random, so — if you’ll pardon the expression — helter-skelter. Freed from the original Halloween template, Zombie is aiming for something hallucinatory, almost abstract: a tone poem of madness and sadism and family ties that bind (and garrote). But the picture runs out of ideas about halfway through, and what’s left is splatter in a void.

The idea is to take pretty, sunny Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and show her mental and physical degeneration after the Halloween night slaughter of her family and friends — and her own point-blank pulverizing of Michael Myers’s head. As the ravaged teen lies in a hospital, the masked behemoth (Tyler Mane) returns and continues his butchery — or does he? Maybe it’s a nightmare. Maybe the whole movie is a nightmare. Maybe it was my nightmare. A year later, Laurie is living with Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) and her fellow Myers survivor Annie Brackett (Danielle Harris), and Zombie is hop-scotching among three plotlines: Laurie’s mental convulsions (her therapist is Margot Kidder!); the publication of a new Myers book by Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell, high on the hog), who has metamorphosed into a sleazy profiteer; and the trek of Michael back to Haddonfield, stopping along the way to saw off or stomp the heads of assorted violent rednecks who, all things considered, have it coming. Michael is led by a vision of his blond young self (here Chase Wright Vanek) and his dead mother (Sheri Moon Zombie), a loving mom in life but now a radiant white angel astride a white horse — exhorting him to kill, kill, kill.

It wasn’t until I sat through this Halloween II that I realized how fundamentally different Zombie’s universe is from Carpenter’s — and how their visions don’t begin to mix. The sick joke of the original was the contrast between the rage against young girls' sexuality and the clean visual lines and limpid tracking camera and repetitive theme music that climbed the scale and dropped back down — but the chords of which never resolved. (Some critics complained about Michael Myers’s lack of motivation for killing — as if a disturbed little boy or boy-at-heart needs a motive to fantasize about harming nubile babysitters!) But clean lines don’t interest Zombie. He shoots violence close, too close, to disorient you and make you jump. A nihilist headbanger, he’s magnetized by squalor and free-floating sadism. He clearly never wanted to be stuck in tidy Haddonfield—he kept drifting to the outskirts with its seedy strip clubs and rusty pick-ups and slobbering white trash misogynists with tattoos and goatees who are all potential rapist-murderers. His world is a nasty, carny freak show in which families (genuine or surrogate) that stay together, slay together.

However primitive, Zombie has talent, and even Halloween II — his worst film — has a few good jolts. I liked one of Laurie’s nightmares, a kaleidoscopic, Chamber of Horrors montage with the kick of a thrash-metal instrumental. Scout Taylor-Compton isn’t up to her big hysterical moments, but she has an appealing lightness; her good nature seems genuine. The first half is tolerable, before you sense you’re going nowhere you haven’t been. Zombie isn’t a storyteller, he’s a wallower. And because his movies take place in a culture of violence and sadism, there’s nothing for Michael Myers to do except echo what’s already there and slaughter weaker sadists. To enjoy Halloween II, you have to forget the idea of characters who change and grow, forget catharsis, forget everything but the theater of cruelty — which can be just as reductive and tedious as The Mickey Mouse Club.

The September Issue: Queen of the Undead vs. Mother Hubbard

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:38:17 -0500

R.J. Cutler’s slick new behind-the-scenes-of-Vogue documentary The September Issue is alternately depressing and “amusing” — the latter adjective, in this context, loaded, since editor Anna Wintour cites it as her highbrow, politically progressive family’s characterization of her superficial specialty. The film presents itself as a fly-on-the-wall look at the most powerful woman in the fashion industry as she prepares the most titanic magazine issue (September 2007) of her career. But vérité-shmérité, this thing is crafty. It’s shaped as a battle between darkness and light.

Almost from the start, Cutler creates a competition for the viewer’s affections between the brusque, chill, dictatorial Brit Wintour and the endearingly transparent Wales-born creative director Grace Coddington. It is, of course, no contest. Under her Prince Valiant coiffure and big, omnipresent sunglasses, Wintour resembles the transvestite razor slasher of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, while the ex-model Coddington has a face in which the lines of passion and heartbreak are deeply etched. Wintour never enthuses or examines her own aesthetic; she simply accepts or, more frequently, rejects others’ work; whereas Coddington’s eyes are always open, searching out new colors, patterns, ways of using the space. The case is finally clinched when Coddington, commanded by Wintour to do a last-minute reshoot, has a surge of inspiration and casts the documentary’s cameraman, Bob Richman, in a startlingly kinetic shot of a black-clad cinematographer, his face hidden behind the camera, leaping in sync with a young model. Stunning! Later, Wintour, scrutinizing Richman’s slight paunch in the photo, turns to the movie camera and suggests that he (standing in for us) go the gym, then orders his tum-tum airbrushed out. When she leaves, Coddington tells him (standing in for us) not to go the gym (“Nobody’s perfect!”) and countermands the airbrushing order. Take that, toothpick Ice Queen!

Watching The September Issue, I learned less about fashion than about business and office politics. In their studios, celebrity designers fawn over Wintour as they would Queen Elizabeth (the First!), sometimes pleading certain pieces aren’t finished while she freezes them with her stare. The average exchange with her employees goes something like this:

Underling: Now this photo … I think is interesting.
Wintour: No, it’s ugly, it’s wrong.
Underling: No, that’s what I what I was thinking, too, it’s ugly.

Fashion naïf that I am (Wintour would tell me to go the gym, get a hair transplant, see a tailor, and leave her office), I was unaware of the ties (or collusion) between Vogue and big clothing stores like the Gap, but I guess that’s inevitable when many women read the magazine with one foot out the door for Neiman Marcus.

Scary as he shows her to be, Cutler does probe Wintour’s hard surface, suggesting her demeanor is rooted in a titanic inferiority complex. (Even her daughter, Bee, planning a career in law, labels her mother’s career “amusing” — ooh, the pain.) Still, I found myself wishing the director would go on and make some kind of case for her creative vision (by which I mean have someone else make the case for it) and not just her fearsome authority. There’s an unspoken subtext: For years it has been rumored that Wintour is on her way out, and The September Issue must have seemed to her a way to cement her celebrity and thereby make her even more difficult to dump. (Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada — inspired by Wintour but as played by Meryl Streep nothing like her — did her more good than harm.) So the movie-camera-shy Wintour is basically there under duress, with those of us who’d quake in her presence invited to feel superior to her. It’s an uncomfortable dynamic — but in spite of everything a guilty pleasure.