Our end-of-year movie podcast featured plenty of spirited argument, but one point of unanimous agreement was the excellence of “The Hurt Locker,” which manages to do justice to the Iraq War without lapsing into cheap moralism or clumsy political commentary. If you’re interested, I recommend you check out this interview with the film’s screenwriter, who was previously embedded with a bomb-disposal unit during the war.

Blogging is going to be pretty slow around these parts for the next few days, but before everyone disconnects for Christmas, we’ve got a year-in-review movie podcast for your enjoyment. I’m joined by Freddie and Sonny Bunch, film critic at The Washington Times and a blogger at Conventional Folly, for an hour-and-a-half (!) discussion of 2009’s notable films. Spoilers and witty movie-related commentary abound, as well as a surprisingly forceful defense of prawn apartheid.

Due to some technical difficulties, the first 3:10 and the last minute or so were recorded inadvertently and can be safely skipped. Because of the ridiculous length, the audio also takes some time to load.

Finally, anyone who makes it through the entire thing gets a holiday fruit basket from the League. We reserve the right to quiz prospective prize winners on the podcast’s contents to determine eligibility.

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Here’s Beck on his radio show, taking the Southpark parody rather well I think. [Read more →]

Hulu has just added “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” “A Fistful of Dollars,” “Ronin,” and perhaps most importantly, “Spartacus.” God bless the Internet.

My favorite movie that involves time traveling is Twelve Monkeys.  Anybody know a better time-travel flick?  And, beyond that, has anyone ever seen a time traveling film that made enough sense to be believable?  I find time travel to be the most difficult plot device – it is either used lazily or despite its clever implementation still leaves too many holes and inconsistencies. (And if you have a book or short story you’d like to add to the list, that’s fine, too….)

Update.  I’m moving this to the front page for a bit because I think people should check it out.  It’s good for a laugh, and what with all this madness surrounding the cops picking on that poor, sweet old professor and all, I thought we could all use a laugh.  ;)

This is pretty funny if you haven’t seen it yet.  The website is here.  Full 42 minute movie after the leap…

From the “About” page:

During the WGA strike in 2007 Joss Whedon started writing a three part musical series for the internet after deciding it was time to “change the face of Show Business as we know it”. Co-writers for the internet feature were Joss’ brothers Zack and Jed and Jed’s Fiancé Maurissa Tancharoen. The writing and shooting were completed early in 2008 and the series was released online in three acts and was free for viewers around the world for a limited time.

The first act was released on Tuesday July 15, 2008 with act two and three following on the 17th and 19th. All three instalments were available to watch for free online anywhere in the world (after an emergency code re-write by Hulu to allow international viewing the night it was released) until the 20th. Shortly after the free viewing Dr Horrible was made available to purchase on iTunes in the USA and Canada and went straight to #1 within a week of being released. On July 29 Dr. Horrible was re-released on Hulu for free viewing by people within the USA where it can still be viewed today. iTunes released Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog in Australia and the UK on October 10, 2008.

The soundtrack for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was released via iTunes and also went to #1 spot in the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK.

Actually, despite it being really not very serious for the most part, the end leaves you feeling kind of….odd.  It’s strangely dark for all its humor.  And the music really isn’t half bad.  You should watch it when you get a chance.

By the way, I saw Star Trek this past weekend and it was great fun.  I’m not a big Trek fan – though I loved some of the old movies when I was a kid – but this movie was sheer entertainment and you didn’t really need to be a fan to appreciate it, though I know fans who did.  [Read more →]

Observe and Report is going to surprise many people who go see it this weekend. And perhaps not in a good way.

From the TV spots for Seth Rogen’s new movie, you might think he’s revisiting the irresponsible-yet-good-hearted cop character he played in Superbad (i.e. the irresponsible-yet-good-hearted character he’s played in all his movies so far). Probably not the case. The trailer suggests that Rogen is playing a delusional semi-racist petty authoritarian with a gun fixation, a fragile ego, and no hope outside his demented fantasies. Those viewers who want Paul Blart crossed with Knocked Up might not expect this.

Director Jody Hill, who hails from my part of the country, isn’t a stranger to this territory. His debut feature was the dark indie comedy The Foot Fist Way (filmed in Concord, NC!), which starred the incredible Danny McBride as Fred Simmons, a delusional petty authoritarian Tae Kwon Do instructor with a violent streak, a fragile ego, and no hope outside his demented fantasies. Will Ferrell’s films have prepared audiences to sympathize with such man-children, and for the first half of “The Foot Fist Way” Jody Hill takes that sympathy and rubs it in our faces.

If there’s a justification for this kind of movie, it’s that our culture is littered with egotistical thwarted alpha males. Fred Simmons and Rogen’s Ronnie Barnhardt are the detritus of the culture of narcissism. What does Jody Hill trying to say about such men? I’d like to believe he’s aiming at the Southern gothic, but I worry that what begins as dark satire ends as twisted celebration. Furthermore, Hill, McBride, and their collaborators are working with yet another version of this character in HBO’s future cult classic Eastbound & Down. Will they stretch this approach too thin?

Unfortunately for me, the movie opens on Friday, which also happens to be Good Friday. So Jody Hill’s Presbyterian fans probably won’t go to see Observe and Report until sometime next week.

…this time with a brand new Masters of the Universe.  That’s right.  He-Man is back…

Okay, so I can’t quite follow this.

I’m sure Peter’s right about the merits of The International; I haven’t seen it and don’t plan to. But I have a hard time following the logical threads to see exactly how it’s supposed to be a socialist tract. Because it is critical of capitalism? Even if that were the case, being critical of capitalism isn’t sufficient to make a person, movement or movie socialist. I know we’re trapped in binaries in this culture, but come on. I mean, saying “the movie doesn’t put much stock in bankers, banking, or anything related to the financial system” is pretty far from proof positive that it endorses a socialist system. Anarchists, for example, aren’t fond of banks, but are farther from socialism than they are from capitalism. (Even if the movie is saying not just “this bank is bad” but “all banks are bad,” couldn’t that mean the point is “let’s abolish banks as systems of illegitimate control” rather than “let’s bring the banks under the control and ownership of the people”?)

Peter says

Perhaps it’s not capitalism, just capitalism’s excesses—the rapacious bankers who abuse their money and power—which are at fault? Maybe, but when the person delivering the lecture is revealed to be a former Communist stalwart, one whose fall into the banking-world cesspool requires redemption, it’s hard to interpret it any other way.

First, I don’t know that you can fairly call illegal actions in the service of capitalist enterprise capitalism’s excesses. Surely being opposed to crime, whatever the motivation, doesn’t make one opposed to capitalism. I hardly think Peter alone is guilty of seeing socialist critique where there is none. It’s a pretty constant American hobby. There’s a couple things wrong here that you see often. The first is assuming that an attack on capitalism amounts to support for socialism. Socialism means something, and while I don’t blame Peter for taking a rather liberal use of the term, I do think that we in America have rendered the term near meaningless through overuse and misuse. The other problem I have, and I think people do this all the time, is to assume that support for capitalism means support for all of the consequences of capitalism. So saying “capitalism puts too much power in the hands of corporate interests” becomes an anti-capitalist statement. I think that’s not a productive way of looking at things.

What I would like to ask Peter is whether or not he really finds the story of a powerful corporation breaking the law to serve its interests unbelievable, or if he just thinks that the degree to which it happens in this movie is unrealistic. For sure, it probably is unrealistic, being an action thriller. But if the suggestion is that fidelity to capitalism means balking at the portrayal of some large corporations as being unconcerned with law or morality, then fidelity to capitalism requires having a false vision of the world. One of the things that worries me about contemporary conservatism is how disarmed conservatives have become when it comes to recognizing the plain facts of human power politics. These are true things: there are the moneyed and the powerful; there are the poor and powerless; and the first group often uses that power and money to make sure they stay in power and the second group stays out of it; and they often break our rules in doing so. That seems to me to be a simple fact not of capitalism but of human society, as much as I believe progress can and must be made. But conservatives, so sensitive to communism sneaking in the back door, now seem entirely too quick to dismiss any notion of the rich preying on the poor. Look, money carries with it power, and often that power is used unfairly or immorally. That’s just life. If saying so is anti-capitalist then capitalism has evolved into a fantasists ideology.

As to the charge of a thriller being boring, however, there is no defense.

To extend the question of partisan positioning leading to inconsistencies just a bit further (and I promise that I’m done after that), consider James Poulos, echoing Peter Suderman, “If movies aren’t always, or even just aren’t, for moralizing, they’re certainly not for anti-moralizing. Neither are directors.”

What’s interesting about this is that one thing many commentators and bloggers share, across ideologies,  is disdain for liberal “political correctness” in both movies and movie criticism. Suderman, I know, for sure has criticized movies for sandwiching waves towards PC readings of history, and critics for attacking filmmakers for not doing so. Ross Douthat, another reformist conservative and movie critic, has done the same. But consider this in light of the criticism of Steven Soderbergh and Che. Che Guavara, indeed, is a deeply troubling figure who did a lot of bad things. The question is whether any director or screenwriter is required, by virtue of making a movie about him, to indict him within the movie for his crimes.

I think it’s an open question. But I also think such a thing needs to be evenly applied. So, for example, if a director made a movie about Samuel Adams, American patriot and leader of the terrorist organization the Sons of Liberty, is it incumbent on him to indict Adams in the way Suderman and Poulos suggest Che deserves indictment? I’m not saying that their various failings are equal, only wondering aloud about the principle of a required amount of criticism. If  such a movie was made, and didn’t include any criticism of Sam Adams–for leading an organization that terrorized British loyalists and their children, burned their homes and businesses, tortured and murdered Tories– if that happened, and Dana Stevens of Slate criticized the filmmaker for not including that stuff, would Peter and James criticize her? I don’t want to put words into their mouths; it’s certainly possible they wouldn’t. I imagine they would be tempted to. That kind of enforcement of PC history is a major source of criticism from conservatives and liberals alike.

What a filmmaker might say, and we might be inclined to agree, is that saying “Sam Adams was a murderer”– or, if you prefer, an orderer of murders– may be true, but also may not be the whole story, or the only story. The director or screenwriter might say that he or she is merely telling a different part of the Sam Adams story. The question is, would that director or screenwriter be fairly called an anti-moralist? Or is it simply a matter of the fact that we broadly agree with the story of American revolution, and not the story of socialist revolution, so we judge each differently? I don’t really know the answers to these questions; I’m afraid I’m going to have to again annoy my critics by qualifying my opinions with “I thinks” and “I don’t knows”. Sorry. (Still better than “I knows” and “I’m sures”, if you ask me.

Entirely separate from what Peter and James have said, I have to say that I for one am deeply bored by various “takedowns” of El Che that have arisen in popular media in response to the movie. Not because I don’t agree; I do, actually, think that Che Guavara is a terribly bad choice for someone to be held up as a revolutionary ideal, although I don’t follow some and put him on a moral plain with Stalin or Pol Pot. I just am bored by the whole “Che was a murderer” thing because I’ve heard it so many times before, and few things are more annoying than when someone places a critique or idea under the banner of the new when it’s really just tired. Sure, Che t-shirts are a cliche. So are anti-Che t-shirt screeds. Just an aesthetic thing.

Personally, my revolutionary t-shirt has Eugene Debbs on it.

I think it was Eagle Eye that finally broke me. I just can’t take any more movies that don’t make any sense. Not because that forgettable Shia Labeouf vehicle was particularly nonsensical– it didn’t make any sense, but it shares that attribute with most other major studio movies of the last ten years– but just because of the utter banality of its incoherence. Not just the fact that it didn’t bother with internal consistency or anything resembling logical motivations for the behavior of its characters, but that it doesn’t seem to recognize that a film should pretend to have those things. There was something stunning, to me, in its basic assumption that no one would notice or particularly care about little issues like gaping plot holes, wildly changing premises and characters who do things without any apparent motivation at all. The incoherence is a problem; the assumption that no one could care about incoherence is an insult.

But it’s not an assumption, unfortunately, that I don’t understand the filmmakers making. I remember shaking my head, watching Ocean’s Twelve, thinking “here is a movie that no one can believe makes sense”– hey, guys, I know we already stole the thing we need to steal, but let’s undergo an incredibly convoluted plan involving being thrown in jail and then sprung by one of our gang’s long lost parents, all for the sake of fooling the villains who, logic dictates, have no opportunity whatsoever to actually observe us undergoing this massively complicated plan that we have undertaken entirely for their sakes….

But I knew, at the time, that insult to the audience inherent in that level of narrative ridiculousness wouldn’t actually keep the movie from being hugely successful, and it was, and sent us all hurtling towards Oceans Thirteen. The makers of big budget spectacle have absolutely no reason to believe that they need to make movies that make sense in order to turn a tidy profit. Breaking news: the masses like lousy art; film at eleven.

So it’s not like I’m walking around outraged that, for example, our intrepid archeologist survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator in Indiana Jones: Geriatric Edition. (The makers of Frigidaire, I salute you.) I know that these movies never make sense. I just want the courtesy of both of us, moviemaker and moviegoer, pretending like we have some sort of relationship built on trust. It’s like a stripper flirting with you during a lapdance; we all know it’s bullshit, but we like to keep the pretense going. (Uh, or so I’m told.) I don’t need my intellect respected by Plastic Man or whatever else is the latest superhero blockbuster; but it would be nice for some vague moves to be made in the direction of respecting me.

Still, I know that looking to the blockbusters for consistency or logic is probably barking up the wrong tree, at this point. What saddens and frustrates me now is that it seems like the movie critics and awards voters are now demonstrating the same blase attitude towards plot oversights and changed premises that audiences have demonstrated for years. There’s been several movies that have been feted by the critics in the last several years that haven’t made a lick of sense, but I’m talking specifically here of The Dark Knight, a constant presence on year-end “Best Of” lists, and very often, number one with a bullet. And that, far more than the billions of dollars it’s made and will make, depresses me, the fact that some of our last cultural arbiters who are supposed to care about quality and not profitability have fallen for a movie that’s such an utter and shameless fraud.

The Oscar nominations have come out, and Heath Ledger has been nominated. Director Christopher Nolan and the movie itself, thought likely to be nominated, weren’t. Bear in mind that this is being reported as a “snub”, or even a “shocking snub.” Well, taste is subjective and opinion is free, but to me that’s sort of like calling Mike Gravel’s failure to secure the Democratic Party presidential nomination a shocking snub. [Read more →]