Movies posts

I love this cinema montage, put together by Clara Darko (who has put together a ton of cinema montages), of actors breaking the fourth wall and looking right at us.

OK, not always at us. More often, we're momentarily the POV of a character in the film, and the actor is interacting with that character: Saying hey to Harry Potter, hugging Benjamin Button, etc. How good an actor do you have to be to do this? To greet the camera like it's your baby? Impressive.

So who's looking at us? Definitely Superman, and Eddie Murphy in “Trading Places,” and Amelie about to talk creme brulee. Both Kyra Sedgewick in “Singles” and Ray Liotta in “Goodfellas” are telling us stories. So, obviously, is Woody Allen in “Annie Hall.” So is Anthony Perkins at the end of “Psycho,” one of the great wall-breakers of all time.

Darko's whole video makes me happy. I'm happy to see “Un Prophete” in here, and “Come and See,” and “400 Blows.” The song is Manic Street Preacher's version of Frankie Valli's “Can't Take My Eyes Off of You.” I love how it first hits on the rousing chorus, “I love you, baby!,” the moment we see Audrey Tautou in “Amelie”: surely a cinematic moment in which the world sang that to an actress.

The montage is a bit of a lie, of course. It's not the world's movie stars who can't take their eyes off us but the other way around.

Here are the two posters, French and English, for the 2011 film “Les Hommes libres” (“Free Men”), which I reviewed earlier today. Check out the differences.

The French emphasize Michael Lonsdale (top), an actor I could watch forever, and various religious aspects of the story. They don't shy from Islam but they hide the gun.

The U.S.? We emphasize the handsome lead, Tahar Rahim of “Un Prophete.” We also emphasize Paris (which, thanks to Woody Allen, is big again among movie marketers), the Algerian flag (or at least a star, which is always big) and the gun, which has ruled Hollywood forever.

To be honest, neither poster captures the true feeling of the movie.

Last October I wrote about the most filmed character ever, and, via IMDb, came up with Santa Claus. Here are the rundowns:

• Santa Claus: 814
• Jesus Christ: 350
• God: 340
• Dracula: 274
• Abraham Lincoln: 263
• Sherlock Holmes: 246
• Hamlet: 198

Subsequent investigations based on reader response brought up:

• Napoleon: 337
• Hitler: 335

But no one close to Santa. Then last Friday I was talking with a friend at work, mentioned this thread, and back at my desk, for some reason, I tried another guess:

• The Devil: 848

From Georges Méliès in 1896 (“The House of the Devil”) to Billy Zane this year (“Dark Star Hollow”), from Lucifer to Satan to Mephistopholes to Lord of Darkness to Mr. Scratch, the Devil keeps on keeping on. This is the Bible-born Devil, so no “Hades,” and thus no Ralph Fiennes. Also no Al Pacino. Odd. His character in “The Devil's Advocate” is called “John Milton” but he's obviously the Devil. Yet he's not among the 848.

Even so, the Devil's cinematic preeminence makes sense. Despite all the pseudonyms, he's a specific character rather than an archetype like “Angel” or “Clown,” which IMDb correctly divvies up. He's the fallen angel not a fallen angel.

Plus, though Bible-born, he shows up in our secular stories. I suppose it's a consequence of modern living that you don't have to believe in God to believe in the Devil. Or maybe the Devil simply interacts more often with human beings than God does. Every story needs a conflict, and unless you're Job or Christopher Hitchens, you'll find it more easily with the Devil. God has big things to do but the Devil can spend time, say, attacking a group of people in an elevator (“The Devil”), stealing the soul of a stuntman (“Ghost Rider”), or inhabiting the body of a little girl (“The Exorcist”). He thinks small. He's trying to knock us off one by one.

Plus, in our more spiritual films, such as “The Tree of Life” or “Of Gods and Men,” God isn't personified. He's not part of the cast list. Indeed, in the latter film, he's not even singular.

Which is why the Devil wins. At least thus far. There may be another character out there more oft-portrayed than Satan. It would be cool if IMDb allowed us to see such a list, or sort such a list, but they don't. Their response, in total, to my query asking for this feature:

I am afraid we do not have this feature, sorry.

The Devil wins again.

Three of the 848 cinematic incarnations of the Devil: John Huston, impish, in “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1941); Tim Curry bellowing in “Legend” (1985); and Elizabeth Hurley, just being herself, in “Bedazzled” (2000).

While reviewing “The Legend of the Lone Ranger” I kept searching for information on what happened to its star, Klinton Spilsbury, who, like his character, did this thing and rode away and was never heard from again.

Oddly, in our overconnected age, there's not much out there, just mashed-over bits and rumors. Someone said they saw him waiting tables in New York in the '80s. Another said he was living on a ranch in the Southwest. Nothing's defnite.

The bit below is a little less mashed-over and a little more definite. It’s from Charles Grodin’s memoir  “How I Got to be Whoever It Is I Am.” Grodin writes:

Shortly after [the movie came out, bombed, and the original Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore, was allowed to wear his mask again in publicity appearances], I was at a party and got into a conversation with a young actor who turned out to be Klinton Spilsbury, the new movie’s Lone Ranger. He told me that he was a serious actor from New York, had studied a lot, and was really doing very well moving up the ladder when this Lone Ranger opportunity came along. He said the movie was a mess. There were several scripts, and no one could agree on whether they were supposed to be funny or serious. He was having difficulty finding work because of his association with the movie and had moved back to New York to try to pick up the pieces of his career, which basically had ended.

If you know more, pass the word.

No, that's not Rick Springfield on the right; it's Klinton Spilsbury as John Reid, recovering from his wounds, and eyeing, for the first time, a fiery white horse.

Ross Douthat of The New York Times, and film critic for The National Review, posted the following on the Times' site yesterday:

It's a week after Valentine's Day. Look what we found in the remainder bin...

And can you match the quote to the correct movie?

1. American Beauty
2. Anchorman
3. Annie Hall (3)
4. Chinatown
5. The Descendants
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
7. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
8. Gone with the Wind
9. Grand Hotel
10. Hamlet
11. Jules et Jim
12. Moonstruck
13. Say Anything
14. Scarface
15. The Silence of the Lambs
16. Some Like It Hot
17. When Harry Met Sally

I discovered this via Nathaniel Roger's Film Experience site.

Seems professional provacateur Tavis Smiley had Oscar nominees Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer of “The Help” on his show earllier this month. Quickly in the conversation, Smiley brings up his problem with “The Help.” It amounts to “You're playing maids, the same role that Hattie McDaniel played in 1939's 'Gone with the Wind,' and haven't we progressed any further than that in 72 years?” He brings up the Academy honoring Denzel Washington for playing, not Malcolm X or Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, but the thuggish cop of “Training Day.” Why can't more positive, more uplifting portrayals be honored?

Here's Viola Davis' response:

That mindset... is absolutely destroying the black artist. The black artist cannot live in a revisionist place. The black artist can only tell the truth about humanity. Humanity is messy. People are messy. Caucasian actors know that. They understand that. They understand that when you bring a human being to life you show all the flaws as well as the beauty. We, as African American artists, are more concerned with image and message and not execution. Which is why every time you see our images they've been watered down to a point where they are not realistic at all. It's like all of our humanity has been washed out. We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth tellers.

Amen amen amen.

Here's the full interview:

Watch Actresses Viola Davis & Octavia Spencer on PBS. See more from Tavis Smiley.

Remember this post about the most filmed character ever? Of course you do. You're an avid reader.

In my search for the most filmed character, I wound up settling on Santa Claus (814 times) and Jesus Christ (350 times), but was curious if it was possible to sort IMDb's archive for a more comprehensive and accurate list. Wouldn't this be worthwhile? Wouldn't it tell us the kinds of stories that matter to us? And wouldn't this give us some indication of who we are as a people?

I suggested as such when I wrote IMDb's Help Desk.

Here's the answer I received:

Hello

Thanks for your message. I am afraid we do not have this feature, sorry.

----
Regards,
Alex
The IMDb Help Desk

What marvelous things IMDb could do with its database. What it's doing instead.

“Many would argue, if they ever had cause to think about it, that one Bad News Bears movie was enough. But no nine-year-old baseball-loving boy in 1977 would agree, not even one who had, unlke me, seen the first movie. The sequel came out that summer, after Little League season had ended all over the land, and who wouldn't want the season and the summer to somehow go on and on?

”The makers of the Bears sequel keyed in on this need to go on and on. Really, the premise of another Bears movie couldn't have been otherwise: there would have to be another game. But whether by design or happy accident, or some combination of the two, the sequel not only centers on the idea that the season can go on but continually frames it as an urgent question: can the season go on? It is, in a way, the prototypical sequel. Its plot mirrors the very question of its exisence. One story has ended. Can there be another?“

-- from ”The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training,“ by Josh Wilker, part of the ”A Novel Approach to Cinema“ series edited by Sean Howe.

I think ”Breaking Training“ one of the worst baseball movies ever made; but Wilker's short book, with its asides to the American myth of the road, the catchphrases of ”Happy Days,“ Jimmy Carter's ”malaise“ speech, the ”USA! USA!" chant, and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, and how they all intertwine with this horrible, horrible movie, is something close to a work of art.

“It was very good for my blood pressure.”

--Gary Oldman on playing supercalm spy George Smiley in Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” during a Q&A at SIFF Uptown last night

The Uptown Theater in Seattle was shut down in November 2010 and for most of 2011 it was a garbage-strewn, boarded-up ghost of a building with a movie marquee perpetually announcing farewell, until, in late summer, the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) bought it, renovated it, and reopened it in October. Last night, in its main theater, it hosted a screening of Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of John le Carré's Cold War novel,  “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” follwed by a post-screening Q&A with the film's star, Gary Oldman.

Early in the Q&A Oldman mentioned the hurdles he has to jump for every character he plays, and whlie the immediate follow-up was never asked by the on-stage interviewer—what were the hurdles to playing George Smiley?—Oldman eventually answered at least some of that on his own.

“The Ghost of Guinness,” he said, “loomed very large.”

It's such a well-known story, he said, particularly in Britain, and the 1979 adaptation starring Alec Guinness as Smiley is so famous, so imposing, that it took him a month to even accept the part. Even afterwards, he said, he was nervous, feeling like he'd set himself up for a fall. It wasn't until he began to think of the role as akin to a classical role, a Shakespearean role, that he began to relax. Like being one of the many men to play Hamlet. “Pull yourself together, Gary,” he told himself.

Ultimately, he said, playing Smiley was “like being in the company of a dear friend. You just got comfortable with it. ... But you had to do the work.”

I'm generally not a fan of Q&As with the audience—you get stupid questions and pontificators who never ask questions and ... it's just embarassing—but last night there were surprisingly good questions from the audience, including one from a local director, who asked, “What can a director do to bring out the best in you?” After a succinct response that brought laughter—“Leave me alone”—Oldman clarified with a story about a discussion he'd had with Alfredson, the Swedish director of “Let the Right One In,” prior to filming a pivotal scene in “Tinker Tailor.” It was the first time Smiley enters the safe house that the traitor used to transmit information to the Soviets. “It's contaminated,” Alfredson said of the room. It was responsible for the death of friends, the forced retirement of others, and the tarnishing of everything Smiley had worked for. It was like a gas chamber in a concentration camp. Alfredson didn't tell Oldman how to act the scene; he didn't tell him to use this information in his performance. He merely mentioned it and walked away.

“Good directing,” Oldman said, “is knowing when to not saying anything ... to let you flower.”

Review of the movie up later this week.

“I love baseball. You know, it doesn't have to mean anything, it's just beautiful to watch.”

--Leonard Zelig in Woody Allen's “Zelig” (1983)

Target Field, July 4, 2011.

A funny thing happened on the way to being excited over the first shots of Daniel Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's “Lincoln,” scheduled for a December 2012 release.

I ran into women.

OK, I ran into two women: Patricia and a friend on Facebook. Both had the same reaction: repulsed. My exchange with the friend went like this:

She: Yikes, he just dropped off my list of hotties :(
Me: But he looks amazing. He's going to be amazing.
She: I just preferred his look in “Last of the Mohicans.”
Me: This is a different role. I mean, who would he say “I WILL find you” to in “Lincoln”? South Carolina? Jefferson Davis? A decent Union general?
She: I didn't even see “No Country for Old Men” because I just couldn't bear to see Javier Bardem look so awful. Call me shallow, I don't care. Thank god men are more cerebral and don't react this way about hot actresses. ;)

After thinking about it a bit, though, I believe women, who have a rep for being less shallow than men, behave worse in this regard than men. That takes doing.

When I first saw shots of Meryl Streep's transformation into Maggie Thatcher for “The Iron Lady,” I was amazed, not disappointed—but then, one could argue, I'm not hot for Streep. (OK, not much.) So let's talk about more obvious hotties. I was amazed, not disappointed, at Charlize Theron's transformation in “Monster,” and by Marion Cotillard's transformation in “La vie en rose.” On and on. I never thought any of them would be stuck that way. I knew they were acting. In roles. For awards. And getting them.

But for female fans, it seems more personal. They can't get past it. It's like all men are one Amish beard away from forever being struck from the hearts and loins of women.

Thoughts?

Daniel Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln hanging out in a Confederate (Richmond, Va.) restaurant.

More Netflix nonsense.

Based on “Eat Drink Man Woman” and “The Brothers,” Netflix recommends the following films with A STRONG FEMALE LEAD:

Nice. Two women who are scared and one who is grimy and chained for your pleasure. Seriously, Netflix, there's gotta be a better way you can handle this kind of thing.

Other Netflix movies with strong female leads include “Revenge of the Bridesmaids” (comedy), “Practical Magic” (comedy) and “The Housemaid” (Korean sex abuse). But at least they include “Jane Eyre,” “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and “Winter's Bone.” At least they got a few right.

I was doing research on “The Wizard of Oz” recently when I came across this latest horrific example of Netflix's recommendation algorithm:

If you'd asked me to name a thousand movies that were similar to “The Wizard of Oz,” I wouldn't have named any of these. Who is screwing things up at Netflix? Who was fired, and who was hired, and who is running things into the ground there?

As an experiment, I tried it at IMDb.com. These are the recommendations for their “Wizard of Oz” page:

That's a little more like it.

“If you live in France and you have written one good book, or painted a good picture, or directed one outstanding fim, 50 years ago, and nothing ever since, you are still recognized as an artist, and honored accordingly. People take their hats off and call you maitre. They do not forget. In Hollywood--in Hollywood you're as good as your last picture. If you didn't have one in production in the last three months, you're forgotten, no matter what you have achieved ere this.”

--Erich von Stroheim, “Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial Treasury” by Joe Franklin

Casting Tom Hanks as the father who goes missing/dies on 9/11 in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is a great idea for two reasons: one obvious, one subtle.

The obvious reason is that everyone loves Tom Hanks and will feel his loss along with his movie wife and son (Sandra Bullock and Thomas Horn).

The subtle reason is that Tom Hanks himself kind of went missing after 9/11. At least the Tom Hanks we said we loved.

Hanks dominated the ‘90s like no actor dominated a decade. He got nom’ed best actor three times and won it twice. Three of his films were the No. 1 movie of the year (“Forrest Gump,” “Toy Story,” and “Saving Private Ryan”), while others finished third for the year (“Apollo 13”), fifth (“Sleepless in Seattle”), 10th (“A League of Their Own”), and 12th (“Philadelphia,” “The Green Mile”). In 2000, he was nom'ed again for “Castaway,” basically a one-man show on a desert island. But since that one man was Tom Hanks, whom we all loved, the movie turned out to the second highest-grossing movie of the year.

After 9/11? The Oscar noms stopped. “Castaway” was the last.

In 2002, he appeared in two movies, “Road to Perdition,” which finished 19th for the year, and “Catch Me If You Can,” which finished 11th. Both movies, like every Tom Hanks vehicle since 1993, grossed over $100 million.

But this string of successes stopped in 2004. First, “The Ladykillers” bombed with both critics and audiences, grossing only $39 million. Then, inexpicably, “The Terminal,” a feel-good film directed by Steven Spielberg, and launched in the middle of summer, also failed to gross $100 million. As did “Charlie Wilson’s War” in 2007 and “Larry Crowne” this year. “Larry” didn't even gross what “Ladykillers” did back in '04.

Hanks’ recent animated films (“Polar Express”; “Toy Story 3”), as well as his “Da Vinci Code” movies, tend to do well at the box office. But with the exception of “Toy Story 3,” they’re not highly regarded by critics and audiences. No one thinks of them as great films.

Hanks' '90s movies were central to the culture and conversation. Since 2001? What’s worth talking about? What’s worth keeping? Yes to “Toy Story 3,” and maybe to “Catch Me If You Can.” Anything else?

Our culture just doesn’t do Tom Hanks movies anymore. We do tentpole flicks and superhero epics. We do movies about magic powers. We were attacked in the real world so in movie theaters we cower behind capes and wands and imagine we're strong.

Casting Tom Hanks as the father in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is a subtle reminder of all of this. He’s a reminder of what was better about us before 9/11. We miss all of that like we miss an absent father or husband.

He was with us once. Remember?

I posted my review of “Marnie” the other day, a movie which didn't impress me much. But I was impressed by one thing: the lovely neck of a young Diane Baker, who started out as a ballerina, and who is perhaps best known as the senator whose daughter goes missing in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Here's a screenshot from “Marnie.” Baker is on the left:

Who has the most celebrated neck in movie history? Audrey Hepburn? Looking at Diane Baker, above, I'm surprised, certainly saddened, that she never got cast as Audrey Hepburn's devilish younger sister. Imagine that movie. Instead she spent a few years on “Dr. Kildare,” then a few years on a few more shows. And then... and then... She kept working anyway. She got to do what she likes to do. She's now executive director of the acting school at Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Quote from the site:

“Our perspective is simple. Work hard, learn your craft and build relationships.” ~ Director Diane Baker

Good advice in any field.

I wrote this piece for MSN seven years ago, for the 2004 post-season (that glorious post-season), but it's no longer available in uncut form. The site used it for spring one year, fall the next, and eventually trimmed away the negative. It turned it into this. Below you'll find the pure uncut stuff. Just in time for the first game of the 2011 World Series.

Question: Where would you rank recent baseball movies, including “Moneyball,” “Sugar,” “The Perfect Game,” “The Bronx is Burning,” “The Benchwarmers,” “Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story,” and “Fever Pitch”? In the Hall of Fame? In the Majors? Minors? Not fit to carry Costner's jockstrap? Feel free to add thoughts in the comments field.

Arguing with the umpire is encouraged.

This may be the best time ever for fans of baseball movies. Early versions of the genre tended to be black-and-white hagiographies where the actors weren’t athletic, the baseball wasn’t exciting, and kids with names like Jimmy or Timmy were forever stricken with crippling diseases that could only be cured by homeruns hit by big-name sluggers. After the publication of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four in 1970, baseball heroes were finally allowed to appear less heroic—and usually seemed moreso as a result.

But what makes a good baseball movie? After immersing myself in the genre, and seeing more than my share of called shots, key strikeouts, and bottom-of-the-ninth-inning-on-the-last-day-of-the-season homeruns, I’ve come up with the following guidelines:

• It’s better to focus on a season than a career. Probably because the rhythm of a season is closer to a dramatic arc than the rhythm of a life.
• Employ actors who look like they can play. Please.
• Be passionate about your subject. Check out Billy Crystal’s 61* and Aviva Kempner’s The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg for an indication of what passion can do.
• Yankees suck! (OK, not a guideline. Just fun to say.)

The movies below are divided into four categories of descending importance. Play ball!

Hall of Fame

Bull Durham (1988)
Written and directed by Ron Shelton.
The sexiest and wittiest baseball movie is also the most real. Nice triumvirate. It’s less concerned with how a team matures than how people mature. Millie gets married, Annie falls in love, and Nuke Laloosh, so hopeless he needs two teachers, becomes…a little less hopeless. The movie suffers when he leaves. I love Crash and Annie, but they’re both teachers, and when they get together the best parts of her character are subsumed by the dullest parts of his. (This could be every wife’s lament.) But this is just in the last five minutes of the movie. The first 103 are still brilliant.
Heroes: Sexy women and Walt Whitman.
Villains: That one extra hit per week (a flair, gork, a dying quail) that doesn’t fall or get through, and that keeps the .250 hitter from becoming a .300 hitter.
Verisimilitude: Costner’s swing is the prettiest of any actor in any baseball movie. (Redford and Tom Selleck come close.) Robbins’ motion ain’t in the same class but it’s workable. But no A-ball pitcher – I don’t care how good – leaps past Double-A and Triple-A for the majors. Just doesn’t happen.
Baseball cameos: Max Patkin, the clown prince of baseball.
Awards: Best screenplay from all the major film critic groups. The Academy gave the Oscar to Rain Man.
Quote: “Oh my.”

61* (2001)
Directed by Billy Crystal. Written by Hank Steinberg.
OK, so Billy Crystal is a spoiled little shit of a Yankees fan who, in Ken Burns’ “Baseball,” laments the Yankees’ 1960 World Series loss with The Whine Heard ‘Round the World: “I still hurt about it. I still feel bad about it.” Billy, you grew up watching the most dominating team in sports history – 14 pennants in 16 years – and you still feel bad about this one season? Shut up already! … And now his due. With a fantastic script from Hank Steinberg, the little S.O.B. has directed a great baseball movie. The verisimilitude is unparalleled, right down to those odd, fuzzy-looking batting helmets they wore in the sixties. His lead actors (Barry Pepper and Tom Jane) are uncanny, and can act. He doesn’t skimp on supporting cast either: Richard Masur; the always-fascinating Bruce McGill; and Billy’s daughter, the very sweet Jennifer Crystal. Best of all, there’s dramatic tension. It’s about an ordinary man under extraordinary pressure. It’s about a decent man who’s treated as a villain, and an often indecent man who’s treated as a hero. It’s about the friendship between the two. I hate the Yankees as much as Billy loves them, but man I love this movie.
Heroes: Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle.
Villains: Ford Frick; sportswriters; punctuation.
Verisimilitude: You’d need a time machine to get a more exact rendition of the 1961 New York Yankees.
Awards: 12 Emmy nominations. Won two: casting and sound editing.
Quote: “We’re chasing a ghost, Rog. You go into that clubhouse, he’s there. At homeplate, he’s there. In the outfield, he’s there. The fat fuck, he’s everywhere! We’re playing in his house!”

The Natural (1984)
Directed by Barry Levinson. Written by Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry, based upon the novel by Bernard Malamud.
Author Bernard Malamud condemned his characters for the slightest breach of morality (Roy Hobbs, for example, strikes out at the end), and his novel was an amalgam of real myths and baseball myths, so its transfer to a 1980s movie screen with requisite happy ending feels forced at times. I mean: the whole good luck/bad luck thing? Pop is jinxed but Roy overcomes his jinx. Memo is bad luck but Roy can’t overcome her bad luck. Iris is good luck so she counteracts Memo. Why? And why the gambler if there’s no “Say is ain’t so, Roy”? And enough shots with the kids in the stands already. … So with all of these complaints, why is The Natural still in my Hall of Fame? Because every time I see the effin’ thing I start to cry. It’s our An Affair to Remember.
Heroes: Roy Hobbs; golden light from the setting sun.
Villains: Sexy women and the dark. Which is odd because this combination is usually a plus in my life.
Verisimilitude: Redford is completely believable as a baseball star but not as a teenager. It was the last time he played one.
Awards: Four Academy Award nominations. 0-4. Hardly Hobbsian.
Quote: “Some mistakes I guess we never stop paying for.”

Also inducted: Ken Burns’ Baseball (1994); The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (2000)

Major Leagues

The Bad News Bears (1976)
Directed by Michael Ritchie. Written by Bill Lancaster.
The script is unfair to minorities – blacks, Mexicans, Iowans – and the journey of Coach Buttermaker from thesis (doesn’t care about winning) to antithesis (cares too much about winning) to synthesis (cares about the kids) is a little extreme. But it’s still the movie for anyone who ever failed athletically. Which means most of us.
Heroes: Misfits and underdogs.
Villains: Businessmen and the North Valley League Yankees.
Verisimilitude: The Bears look like every kid who ever had trouble catching a pop fly; that’s its charm.
Awards: Matthau was nominated for a BAFTA.
Quote: “Hey Yankees, you can take your apology and your trophy and shove it straight up your ass!”

Major League (1989)
Written and directed by David S. Ward
The quintessential Hollywood baseball story concerns a team of misfit underdogs who, through some galvanizing force (and with or without spinning newspaper headlines), rise from the cellar and contend for the pennant on the last day of the season. This conceit describes everything from Bang the Drum Slowly to Angels in the Outfield, but its purest example is Major League. The misfits here are all colorful and memorable, each is given equal time, and the subplots are kept to a minimum. Best of all? It’s funny.
Heroes: Misfits and underdogs.
Villains: Ex-showgirls and the New York Yankees.
Verisimilitude: Charlie Sheen’s pitching motion is the best I’ve seen from an actor. The others look pretty good, too.
Ballplayer cameos: Pete Vukovich and Steve Yeager.
Quote: “Juuuust a bit outside.”

The Stratton Story (1949)
Directed by Sam Wood. Written by Douglas Morrow and Guy Trosper
This is a simple story simply told. It’s about a country boy who makes the bigs, suffers a horrible injury, and then begins to explore the limits of his new circumstances. What can he do now? How much of his former life can he reclaim? The film relies heavily upon the considerable charm of its star, Jimmy Stewart, and when his character turns bitter and quiet the movie flags. But this is only temporary. Worth watching for the shot of Stratton’s one year-old son learning to walk, with Stratton, beside him, doing the same.
Heroes: Monte Stratton.
Villains: Shotguns and the New York Yankees.
Verisimilitude: A good pitching motion is probably the only area of acting where Charlie Sheen could’ve given Jimmy Stewart pointers.
Ballplayer cameos: Bill Dickey.
Awards: Academy Award for Best Story.
Quote: “A man’s gotta know where he’s going.”

Also in the show: Bang the Drum Slowly (1973); Eight Men Out (1988); Field of Dreams (1989); Pastime (1991); A League of Their Own (1992); The Rookie (2002)

Minor Leagues

The Pride of the Yankees (1942)
Directed by Sam Wood. Written by Jo Swerling, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Damon Runyon
I can hear the complaints already. For decades this biopic of Lou Gehrig was considered the best baseball movie ever made, but time hasn’t been kind. Gary Cooper’s cutesy-pie acting? The idiotic “Tanglefoot” business? Gehrig learning to hit with power from a nerd at the county fair? Slugging two homeruns in the World Series for a crippled kid who’d already been promised a homerun by Babe Ruth? MGM’s weird dance interlude with Veloz and Yolanda? How about this awful line from manager Miller Huggins after Gehrig plays the first of his 2130 consecutive games? “What do we have to do – kill you to get you out of the lineup?” No, not kind at all.
Hero: Lou Gehrig
Villain: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Verisimilitude: They both had shy smiles, but long, lean Gary Cooper had the wrong body to play the sturdy Iron Man of baseball. He couldn’t swing, either.
Ballplayer cameos: Babe Ruth and Bill Dickey.
Awards: Ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Writing, Actor and Actress. Won Film Editing.
Quote: “Today I consider myself the luckiest man (man man) on the face of the earth (earth earth).”

Damn Yankees! (1958)
Directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen. Written by George Abbott, from the novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant” by Douglass Wallop.
There are two big baseball musicals and each lacks what the other has. Take Me Out to the Ball Game has personality (Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra), but the story’s no great shakes and the songs aren’t memorable. Damn Yankees! has a great story (Faust) and great songs (“You gotta have heart”; “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, MO”) but no personality. Ray Walston and Jean Stapleton are delightful, but Tab Hunter just doesn’t cut it. Gwen Verdon’s a fine dancer but not someone you’d sell your soul for. And the team? Well, they’ve got heart anyway.
Heroes: Faithful wives and faithful husbands.
Villains: The Devil and the New York Yankees. Not necessarily in that order.
Verisimilitude: My Sunday softball team could beat these guys.
Awards: Academy Award nomination for Best Musical Score.
Quote: “Wives! They give me more trouble than the Methodist Church!”

For Love of the Game (1999)
Directed by Sam Raimi. Written by Dana Stevens, from the novel by Michael Shaara.
With tighter editing this could’ve made the bigs. It’s got a cool lead character who thinks over his life as he pitches a meaningless game near the end of a meaningless season. And he’s got reasons to think over his life. He’s lost his woman and maybe his career. Halfway through he suddenly realizes he’s pitching a perfect game.
Hero: Billy Chapel
Villains: The past and the New York Yankees
Verisimilitude: John C. Reilly’s got the mug but not the chops to be a catcher. Apparently Costner can play any position.
Awards: The Razzies nominated Costner. It’s time they stopped riding his ass.
Quote: “How do you like to be kissed?”

Also grabbing pine: Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1949); Fear Strikes Out (1958); Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976); Mr. Baseball (1992); The Sandlot (1993); Cobb (1994); Little Big League (1994); Major League II (1994)

Not Fit to Carry Kevin Costner’s Jockstrap

The Babe Ruth Story (1948)
Directed by Roy Del Ruth. Written by George Callahan and Bob Considine, from the book by Bob Considine and Babe Ruth.
The Babe (1992)
Directed by Arthur Hiller. Written by John Fusco.
The greatest baseball player of all time has been the subject of two of the worst baseball movies of all time. In the Bendix version he throws like a girl, hits infield pop flies that magically leave the park, and gets in dutch with his manager for taking a sick dog to the hospital. In the Goodman version, he throws like a girl, hits infield pop flies that magically leave the park, and is hugely fat from the start – when Babe was in pretty good shape for much of his career. At least the nineties version is honest about Babe’s drinking and womanizing, but then they try to make his excesses and tantrums the stuff of tragedy. Both movies have him hitting homeruns for sick kids in the hospital. Both have him calling his shot in the 1932 World Series. The Bendix version actually combines the two: Babe calls his shot for a sick kid in the hospital. I’d call it ruthless efficiency but there was too much Ruth in it.
Heroes: Babe Ruth, and the people who put up with him.
Villains: Hot dogs, booze, and Colonel Ruppert.
Verisimilitude: For the next movie about the Babe? Try hiring a lefty.
Baseball cameos: Mark Koenig played himself in the ’48 version.
Quote: “How can you manage a baseball team when you can’t even manage yourself?”

The Jackie Robinson Story (1950)
Directed by Alfred E. Green. Written by Arthur Mann and Lawrence Taylor.
Jackie Robinson plays himself in this low-budget film full of dull apple pie pronouncements and paternalistic back-patting. There’s odd comic relief from a character named “Shorty,” baseball is presented as Jackie’s best, favorite sport – when it wasn’t either – and at the end Jackie delivers a sudden, embarrassing anti-communist speech. And where’s his famous fire? Only visible for a second when Branch Rickey (Minor Watson) gives him an example of the kind of abuse he’ll face. In a way the movie confirms how far we’ve come by revealing what passed for racial enlightenment in 1950.
Heroes: Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey.
Villains: Southern “lodge” members.
Verisimilitude: You’re not going to get a better ballplayer than Jackie Robinson, but you could get a better actor.
Quote: “We’re dealing with rights here. The right of any American to play baseball, the American game. You think he’s our boy, Clyde?”

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977)
Directed by Michael Pressman. Written by Paul Brickman.
The Bad News Bears Go To Japan (1978)
Directed by John Berry. Written by Bill Lancaster.
In the first sequel they lose Matthau and O’Neal, and in the second they lose Tanner (“Crud!”) Boyle. The first sequel insults Texas, the second Japan. The first sequel includes a Fonzie rip-off, the second goes for the cute black kid. Rudi Stein keeps getting taller. Kelly Leak keeps getting creepier. Yet the filmmakers insist that Kelly’s a cool kid who deserves his own subplots: estranged father in Breaking Training, romance with a Japanese girl in Japan. Apparently they’re re-making The Bad News Bears with Billy Bob Thornton in Matthau’s role. If it happens, I’d advise them to stop right there. These sequels are as unwatchable as movies get.
Heroes: Misfit underdogs.
Villains: Jocks and businessmen. And the New York Yankees. OK, I’m making that up.
Verisimilitude: Anyone who thinks Jackie Earle Haley is a stand-out player can clear out their locker right now.
Awards: The Razzies hadn’t been invented yet.
Quote: “You’re really just a second place team from the Van Nuys League.”

Also unfit for jockstrap-carrying duty: Rookie of the Year (1993); The Scout (1994), Angels in the Outfield (1994); BASEketball (1998); Major League III: Back to the Minors (1998); Hard Ball (2001)

“But [Pauline] Kael had stumbled upon something that could be very disconcerting to the best film critic in the world, just as it appalled the man [Orson Welles] who was increasingly the idol of young directors: that the movies were not and never would be good enough, deep enough, to hold his interest. He had gone deep—no one yet had gone deeper. But it was not enough, not compared with literature, music, painting or just watching life go by. The movies, in other words,  are the art of a culture prepared to settle for the shallow. The artistic status of the filmmaker was not actually substantiated by the work. Citizen Kane was the first move to reveal that—and Welles, for a long time, was the lone man who noticed it.”

--David Thomson, “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles,” pg. 398

Discuss.

It's tough for me to be around the Internet this weekend because I get distracted by these kinds of things. “Moneyball” gets released and so every site has its baseball movies article. In the above link, Salon goes to the experts—Nicholas Dawidoff, Roger Kahn, Joe Posnanski, et al.—and asks two questions: 1) What's your favorite baseball movie?; and 2) Why aren't there better baseball movies?

I answered both questions in 2007 for MSNBC.com without being asked. Here's my lede. No, screw it. Here's the whole freakin' piece.

Two years ago, people were scratching their heads over the idea of “Moneyball” as a movie. Stats? Sabermetrics? What the? But I knew. It's not only a classic Hollywood story—underdogs triumph—it's the classic baseball narrative of the last 30 years. Misfits band together, and, through knowledge, teamwork and that one guy, and against all odds, begin to win.

But I'll still take sex with Susan Sarandon.

Play Ball!
Baseball Movies From “Pride of the Yankees” to “Fever Pitch”

When Bobby Thomson hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth inning to lift the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers and into the 1951 World Series, sportswriter Shirley Povich wrote the following: “The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

When Kirk Gibson hobbled to the plate and hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth inning to lift the Los Angeles Dodgers over the Oakland A’s in the 1988 World Series, broadcaster Jack Buck shouted the following: “I don’t believe what I just saw!”

And that’s the problem with baseball movies. The unbelievable in a game makes you stand up and cheer. The unbelievable in a movie makes you stand up and walk out.

Storytelling is about making life more dramatic; yet if the best of baseball is already too dramatic to be believed, where does that leave storytelling? How does Hollywood dramatize it?

Here’s what they’ve tried.

“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! And they're going crazy! They're going crazy!”: Try to do that in a movie.

Hitting a home run for little Timmy in the hospital
Initially they produced biopics where the point wasn’t the baseball so much as the lack of baseball. Something always had to get in the way of playing.

Consider “The Pride of the Yankees” a template. Sure, Lou Gehrig was a great player — 2,130 consecutive games, third-highest slugging percentage of all-time — but Hollywood could care less from slugging percentage. They made his life into a movie because he died of the disease that now bears his name: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. His life, and the subsequent movie starring Gary Cooper, had a classic dramatic arc: rise (Yankee stardom), fall (ALS) and resurrection (“I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth”).

Most baseball biopics in the 1940s and ’50s followed suit. In “The Stratton Story,” Monty Stratton, played by Jimmy Stewart, is a solid pitcher for the Chicago White Sox (rise); then his leg is amputated after a hunting accident (fall); but with a wooden leg, he makes a comeback, and pitches well enough to make the minor leagues (resurrection). Same arc for Dizzy Dean in “The Pride of St. Louis” (pitching star/arm injury/radio broadcaster) and Jimmy Piersall in “Fear Strikes Out” (taciturn outfielder/nervous breakdown/recovery).

Then feature-film baseball biopics disappeared for decades. They returned in the early 1990s with a couple of mediocre attempts: “The Babe” with John Goodman, and “Cobb” with Tommy Lee Jones. More recently, there was “The Rookie,” a good, quiet film starring Dennis Quaid as Jimmy Morris, a high school science teacher who makes the Tampa Bay Devil Rays squad at the age of 35. But “The Rookie” is in a different category: Less the fall of a titan to mortal status than the rise of a mortal to titan status. It almost belongs with the recent glut of films about fans: “Everyone’s Hero,” “Game 6” and (someone please get Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore off the field already) “Fever Pitch.”

An autographed ball isn't enough. A home run isn't enough. No, little Timmy's one greedy bastard.

Hitting a home run for the broad in the second row
Why did Hollywood abandon the biopic? Jim Bouton is partly to blame (or thank). In 1970, he published his memoir of the 1969 season, “Ball Four,” and it blew the lid off the game, revealing, amid the day-to-day commentary of a guy just trying to fit in, the smallness of management and the stupidity of players. These guys weren’t hitting home runs for little Timmy in the hospital; they were popping “greenies” and trying to look up women’s skirts. Hard to fashion a feel-good biopic around that.

Yet Billy Crystal’s “61*” did just that. The HBO film — not quite a biopic — gives us a warts-and-all account of the 1961 Yankees, and the friendship between Mickey Mantle (Thomas Jane) and Roger Maris (Barry Pepper) as they battle for the single-season home run record. What makes the movie powerful — besides the fact that Crystal, a lifelong Yankee fan, gets every freakin’ detail right — is that Maris’ rise and fall occur simultaneously. The more home runs he piles up (the rise), the more the press and public turn against him (the fall), because he’s not “the right Yankee” to break the mark. Extraordinary pressure is thus created, and that pressure is felt in Pepper’s performance, and in the release we feel when No. 61 flies out and the sparse hometown crowd finally, finally gives the man the standing ovation he deserves.

This shouldn’t need saying but fallibilities make characters more interesting, not less, and great baseball biopics are waiting to be made if studio execs only get off the schneid. You’re telling me you can’t make an interesting movie out of the life of Satchel Paige or Hank Greenberg or Roberto Clemente? Why not ignore the career for the season? Give us Jackie Robinson from the time he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the fall of 1945, through the ’46 season with the Montreal Royals, and end the film on April 15, 1947, the day he broke the color barrier. Talk about extraordinary pressure! There wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.

Barry Pepper as Roger Maris in Billy Crystal's “61*.” More complicated heroes of the modern era.

Misfits win! Misfits win!
So what’s replaced baseball biopics? This formula, mostly: A team of misfits keeps losing; then they find a way to win; then they play for the championship at the end of the season.

This describes everything from “The Bad News Bears” to “Major League” to “Angels in the Outfield,” with films differentiated by: a) how teams start winning, and b) that final game.

How do they start winning? For some, it’s the myth of the one guy. Team sucks, this one guy wanders in the locker room, everything changes. Often he’s associated with magic. Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) has a kind of mystical lightning about him in “The Natural,” while Joe Hardy (Tab Hunter) is the work of the devil in “Damn Yankees!” An annoying little kid with a 100-mph fastball (Thomas Ian Nicholas) turns the hapless Cubs into winners in “Rookie of the Year.” You could even say the turnaround for the Angels in “Angels in the Outfield” is the work of one guy. The big guy. Which seems to me a violation of the 25-man rule.

Other teams begin to win through the myth of teamwork. This rationale is big in movies where the lead character is a selfish S.O.B.: Jack Elliot (Tom Selleck) in “Mr. Baseball” and Stan Ross (Bernie Mac) in “Mr. 3000.” Once the S.O.B. subsumes his gargantuan ego to the group, they start winning. Hollywood, with its above-the-line talent, relates.

Finally there’s the myth of knowledge. The players don’t know what they’re doing wrong, so it’s up to someone, generally an outsider, generally a kid, to set them straight. In 1953’s “The Kid from Left Field,” it’s the batboy, Christie (Billy Chapin), who’s getting tips from his ex-big league dad. By 1994 and “Little Big League,” the studios knew how to pander to kids. Thus Billy Heywood (Luke Edwards), who inherits the Minnesota Twins from his grandfather, is fatherless and turns the Twins around on his own. Daddies? We don’t need no stinkin’ daddies.

The best baseball films tend to combine rationales. The Bears in “The Bad News Bears” need Coach Buttermaker to care enough to impart his knowledge, they need to work together, and they need that one guy, Kelly Leak, to get them over the hump. They get it all. The beauty is it’s still not enough. That’s why the film resonates after 30 years. Read your Roger Kahn: “You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.”

The best of the misfits. “Hey Yankees! You can take your apology, and your trophy, and shove it straight up your ass!”

Hitting a home run with Susan Sarandon
Which brings us to the final game of the season. How do you end it with a bang as big as Bobby Thomson’s and still be believable? “The Natural” got away with it by making their home run bigger than any home run could ever be. They made it mythic.

Other films play smallball. Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger) wins the big game in “Major League” by majestically calling his shot, a la Babe Ruth, and then bunting in the winning run. Jack Elliot wins the big game in “Mr. Baseball” by selflessly giving up the chance to set a Japanese home run record ... and bunting in the winning run. In “Mr. 3000,” Stan Ross selflessly gives up his chance for his 3,000th hit by — you guessed it — bunting in the winning run. You could call it a theme.

I’ll still go with how my favorite baseball movie, “Bull Durham,” handles the big game. The Durham Bulls start out, typically, as misfit losers, but thanks to the wisdom of Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), the arm of Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), and that magical quality where everyone suddenly starts playing well together, they begin to win. And they seem headed for the big game ... when Nuke is called up and Crash is cut loose and he and Annie (Susan Sarandon) spend a glorious sex-filled weekend together before he heads out to find another team where he can quietly set the record for minor league home runs. Afterwards he and Annie talk about their future and, amid quotes from Walt Whitman and Casey Stengel, the summer, the season and the movie ends.

The big game? There is no big game. And for most teams ending their season this week, not to mention most of us, that’s the most believable ending of all.

It ain't the big game, but it'll do.

--Erik Lundegaard sees great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us. You can look him up at http://www.eriklundegaard.com/index.php

“As the writing team came back from Victorville, and as Houseman returned to New York, Welles took over the task of making the script into a picture. From mid-April to mid-July, the script came down to 172 pages [from 268]. Many episodes were abandoned—for example, Kane's honeymoon with his first wife, Emily; a later meeting between Kane and his father, when the older man is remarried to a 'young tart'; Kane's son's involvement in a fascist movement; a good deal of political byplay with an oil scandal; scenes in Rome, when Thatcher goes to visit Kane; an affair Susan Kane has with a younger man at Xanadu. These deletions made Kane simpler to follow—and we should realize that nothing hurt it more on first release than its difficulty. In addition, Welles strengthened the line of dramatic consequence—the way Kane's career hinges upon the exposure of the love nest during the electoral battle with Jim Gettys, and the way Susan's nightmare career breaks the bond between Kane and Leland.”

--from “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles,” by David Thomson; pg. 147

I wrote this for MSNBC.com on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 ...

It doesn’t take long to get chills watching Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.” The film begins with the red numerals of an alarm clock coming into focus. Port Authority cop John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) wakes up, takes a shower, checks the kids and leaves for work as dawn breaks over the Manhattan skyline. On his car radio we hear, “It’s Tuesday...”

For me, that’s all it took. I thought: “Yes, it was a Tuesday.”

Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, in Oliver Stone's “World Trade Center” (2006).

Tuesday
That Tuesday I was spending what I thought was the last day of a week-long trip visiting my sister and friends in Detroit. My sister’s marriage was just two years old; her first son, Jordy, was just two months old. We were going to a Tigers game that night at Comerica Park and the next morning I would fly back to Seattle. I was already thinking ahead to Seattle.

I was sitting in their breakfast nook reading Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free-Press when my brother-in-law, Eric, who had just left for work, returned to stick his head in the front door. “You might want to turn on CNN,” he said. “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.”

I assumed a single-engine. Hadn’t that happened to the Empire State Building?

When I turned on CNN and saw the damage and listened to the commentators, it became apparent this was more than a single-engine. But how could a commercial plane be so off-course? How could you miss the World Trade towers? The eventual answer was: you couldn’t.

At one point I went upstairs to wake my sister—I had the baby monitor and Jordy was waking—and when we all returned to the living room my sister, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, said, “I thought you said it flew into one tower.” I nodded. “So why are both on fire?”

I couldn’t figure it out. Then came news of the Pentagon and rumors of the Capitol. We’re under attack, I thought. When the towers collapsed, I thought: This is irreversible.

“I don’t think we’re going to the Tigers game tonight,” my sister said.

“I don’t think I’m flying out of here tomorrow,” I said.

All the while I kept thinking the same thought a lot of people were thinking: It feels like a movie.

“You might want to turn on CNN,” he said. “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.”

The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of landmarks
While it was standing, the movies had never been particularly kind to the World Trade Center. It’s not just that Hollywood tried to destroy the towers in movies like “Meteor,” “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact”; it’s the kind of movies the World Trade Center appeared in.

Other landmarks got the good films. The Empire State Building played pivotal roles in the original “King Kong,” “An Affair to Remember” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” Mt. Rushmore had its close-up in Hitchcock’s “North By Northwest.” The Statue of Liberty? From the ending of “Planet of the Apes” to the battle royale in “X-Men,” the Statue’s done it all. It’s the first thing immigrants see upon arriving in this country (“Godfather Part II”) and the last thing Americans see when leaving to fight abroad (HBO’s “Band of Brothers”).

The World Trade Center, in comparison, has appeared in crap. It obviously needed a better agent: “The Wiz,” “The Squeeze,” “The Dream Team,” “Big Business,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” “Godzilla,” “End of Days,” and a host of forgettable sequels: “Home Alone 2,” “Die Hard: With a Vengeance,” “American Pie 2,” and “Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.” The towers, interchangeable and rarely pivotal, stayed in the background. They were the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of landmarks.

Before 9/11, the World Trade Center was never particularly beloved. “A standing monument to architectural boredom,” said one critic in the early 1970s. “Two huge buck teeth” blighting the Manhattan skyline, said Norman Mailer. Earlier skyscrapers tended to end like church spires, pointing towards the heavens—the Empire State Building is even called “The Cathedral of the Skies”—but tapering means losing valuable real estate. Thus modern skyscrapers’ blocky shape. The World Trade towers pointed at nothing. They just stood there like tall lunks. They came to represent not architectural beauty like the Empire State Building, nor the liberty of the Statue, but blunt financial power. “Greed is good,” Gordon Gekko famously says in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” and so the film begins with morning shots of the Manhattan skyline, with the World Trade Center front and center. “I have a head for business and a bod for sin,” Tess McGill says in Mike Nichols’ “Working Girl,” but this is a feel-good movie, and so in the single-shot opening, the focus is on another working girl, the Statue of Liberty, who gets her 360-degree close-up. The twin towers are once again relegated to the background.

The World Trade Center, relegated to the background again, from the accidentally prescient opening credits of “Pushing Tin” (1999)

Winged migration
Now those very background shots take our breath away. God, the World Trade Center towered, didn’t it? It towered over even New York City, which towers over the world. Other cities have one tall building, but only New York, New York had the audacity to throw up two. Now that they’re gone, the skyline doesn’t look the same. Now that the buck teeth have been knocked out, we keep probing their absence with our tongue.

Certain scenes in pre-9/11 movies seem like bad foreshadowing. “Pushing Tin” from 1999 begins with a jet airliner banking toward the World Trade Center on a sky-blue day. Bennet Miller’s 1998 documentary, “The Cruise,” about New York City tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch, includes these lines: “Sometimes I like to spin between the two towers. You know, like spin around and make yourself dizzy? And then you look up, and it looks like the buildings are falling on top of you.”

9/11 gave the World Trade Center the deeper meaning it never had in life, and Hollywood’s initial reaction was to remove it from any unreleased movie. “Zoolander”? Gone. “Spider-Man”? Gone. The towers now had too much meaning. We couldn’t bear looking at them.

Slowly, though, the World Trade Center began to reappear in our movies. Halfway through Jacques Perrin’s beautiful documentary, “Winged Migration,” there it is, gloriously, one of many man-made landmarks birds pass by in their journeys. It’s the focus of the entire eighth episode of Ric Burns’ comprehensive “New York” documentary, and the two exclamation points punctuating the end of Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film, “Munich.”

It’s also the centerpiece of the Naudet brothers’ stunning documentary “9/11,” which aired on CBS in the spring of 2002. The two French brothers were filming a year in the life of a probationary New York City firefighter stationed near the towers. On the morning of September 11th a crew was investigating a potential neighborhood gas leak when a plane soared overhead—something you never hear in Manhattan—and the firefighters looked up. Cameraman Jules Naudet followed their gaze and caught the only known footage of the first plane flying into the north tower. Most footage of the second plane flying into the south tower was taken from a distance by news organizations already at the scene of a disaster. Naudet’s footage is taken from the ground, by people in the middle of an ordinary day, doing an ordinary job, and the plane attacks a peaceful setting. It’s one of the worst violations imaginable.

“Sometimes I like to spin between the two towers. ... then you look up, and it looks like the buildings are falling on top of you.” --Timothy “Speed” Levitch, 1998.

A less-Hollywood version of events
This year, 9/11 has been the subject of two major films: Paul Greengrass’ “United 93” and Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.” Both have been the subject of controversy. Some feel Hollywood shouldn’t profit from this tragedy. The right-wing doesn’t trust liberal Hollywood to tell this story, while the left-wing doesn’t trust wish-fulfillment Hollywood to tell this story. Many feel it’s just “too early.”

All of this criticism ignores the fact that we’ve been telling ourselves the story every day since 9/11. The versions we tell ourselves are often fiercely partisan (see Karl Rove’s comments in New York in June 2005) and full of the conceits of Hollywood movies. These conceits include action-hero catch-phrases (“Let’s roll” and “dead or alive”), bold and outsized personalities, and an anticipation of a happy ending.

Hollywood is actually giving us a less Hollywood version of events than we’ve given ourselves. The films they’ve created are human-sized, the heroes ordinary men and women. In “United 93,” a passenger says “Let’s roll,” but quickly and anxiously, without the action hero cadence we’ve given it in our imaginations. In “World Trade Center,” Nicholas Cage as John McLoughlin wears the most ordinary face a movie star can wear, and when his team of Port Authority cops show up at the south tower and look up, you see confusion and fear in their eyes. This isn’t in the manual, they seem to be thinking. When McLoughlin asks for volunteers to go inside, few do, and you don’t blame the others. Once inside, they don’t seem to know what to do. Because: This isn’t in the manual.

“This isn't in the manual.”

Ground Zero
The twin towers of the World Trade Center rose a quarter-mile in the air and each was made of nearly 100,000 tons of steel. In the fall of 2002 I visited Ground Zero, at which point it looked like nothing so much as the construction site it had been in 1966. I remember looking up at a neighboring skyscraper that was maybe 50 stories high, and tried imagining it more than doubled to 110 stories. Then I tried imagining two of them, and both coming down. I could not.

The destruction of the World Trade Center reminded many of us that day of a Hollywood movie. How ironic that it's taken Hollywood to remind us, no, it wasn’t like a movie at all.

George Lucas is at it again. This short video, from the upcoming Blu-Ray release of the original “Star Wars” trilogy, is making the internet rounds at hyperspace:

The addition of the melodramatic “Noooooooo!” is the problem for most “Star Wars” fans, but, let's face it, the scene sucked anyway. I dissected it for an MSNBC article, “Darth Vader Lives!,” back in 2005:

“Jedi” is the worst of the “Star Wars” movies because it illogically prolongs the obvious for imagined entertainment value. Thus Luke enters Jabba the Hutt’s lair without his light sabre so at the last instant R2D2 can shoot it to him and he can save the day. And thus, at the climactic moment Darth Vader watches his son getting fried by the Emperor. What will he do? Oh, what will he do? Witness some of the worst editing in movie history:

CUT TO: The Emperor shooting lightning from his fingers.
CUT TO: Luke writhing in pain.
CUT TO: Darth in close-up, witnessing.
CUT TO: Luke pleading for his father’s help.
CUT TO: Long shot of scene.
CUT TO: Luke writhing.
CUT TO: Darth, in close-up. (Deciding?)
CUT TO: The Emperor pausing to give his final speech: “And now young Skywalker, you will die.”
CUT TO: Darth, glancing back at his son.
CUT TO: Luke, in fetal position, with smoke coming off him.
CUT TO: The Emperor attacking again.
CUT TO: Darth witnessing.
CUT TO: Luke writhing.
CUT TO: Darth turning towards Emperor.
CUT TO: Emperor’s furious face in close-up.
CUT TO: Darth looking back at Luke.

Yes, it’s a long journey back from the dark side but the scene makes Darth appear about as quick-witted as Homer Simpson. Stupid! Pick him up! Throw him over the railing! There you go. Finally.

Early in Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life,” the following existential dichotomy is set up in voiceover narration from the mother (Jessica Chastain):

The nuns taught us there were two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.

The she explains what she means by each one:

Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.

Nature only wants to please itself. Gets others to please it, too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.

The movie focuses on a young boy in Waco, Texas in the 1950s, Jack (Hunter McCracken), who aspires to the way of grace, like his mother, but who succumbs to the way of nature, like his father (Brad Pitt).

It struck me, as I was writing my review last weekend, around the time of the Ames, Iowa straw poll, that our current political struggles, and the upcoming 2012 election, can be seen through this same prism.

Obama is the way of grace. He's been more insulted than any sitting president, and his response has been to work with those who keep insulting him. People on his side often fault him for that. I'm often one of them.

The GOP, which claims to have God on its side, and which claims a kind of Godlessness for Obama, is the way of nature. It wants to please itself. It's about more for me and less for you (or us). It's about lording it over people. You see this attitude, which can be bullying or swaggering, in Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann and the pundits on FOX-News. There's a killer instinct there. Sometimes this instinct exhibits itself in actual calls for violence.

It is, at the least, a stark contrast. The question remains whether this country sees any value in the way of grace, or if we, like young Jack in the film, and like most of us in our lives, will succumb to the way of nature.

Images from Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life” (2011)

“Toscanini once recorded a piece 65 times. You know what he said? 'It could be better.'”

--the father (Brad Pitt) in Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life,” no doubt channeling Malick, a perfectionist, for whom 65 attempts is a dry run.

They named it for a president. They made it soft and cuddly. But then the claws came out...

There's nothing more frustrating than seeing a great trailer like this, that promises a “Summer 2011” release, but then you can't find a release date on IMDb. I'm just saying that I hope somebody releases this thing soon because we need it. Caught between “Final Destination 5” and “The Help,” I'll take the action-adventure movie “The Teddy Bear,” starring Jordan Muschler and Ryan Muschler, thank you.

“Inspire Me Vaguely” originally appeared under a different title in The Rake, a now-defunct, general-interest, Minneapolis magazine, in June 2006, and has since disappeared from the Web. Consider the following post both resurrection and refitting.

This June the American Film Institute (AFI) will count down the 100 most inspirational movies in Hollywood history. I’m not sure what that final list will look like but I’ve seen the 300 nominees and I’m disappointed that one of the most inspirational movies of all time—well, for my older brother anyway—was inexplicably left off.

That movie is “Evel Knievel,” a B-picture from 1971 starring George Hamilton as the daredevil motorcyclist. My brother saw it upon its release, and, 11 at the time, immediately set to work. He took my sister’s medium-sized play refrigerator, relegated to the garage, and laid it flat on the front sidewalk; then he found a sturdy wood plank and laid it on the prone refrigerator for his ramp; then he got on his banana-seat bicycle.

Initially it was enough to catch air but soon he was looking for things to jump: stuffed animals (too boring), then real animals (too disobedient), then real people (just right). It amazed me how many kids in the neighborhood would lie down on the wrong side of the refrigerator for him. At one point I think he jumped seven kids—all huddled together, scared and thrilled and giggling. The fun promptly stopped when a neighborhood mother glanced out her window and saw her youngest child, Geof, last in line, inches from my brother’s landing back tire.

So, yes, “Evel Knievel” was inspirational but not the kind of inspiration AFI has in mind. They’re thinking stand-up-and-cheer fare: “Rudy” and “Rocky,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” They want movies that inspire us vaguely (swell our chests) rather than specifically (give us the idea to jump the neighborhood kids on our banana-seat bicycle). They want good lawyers (“To Kill a Mockingbird”), good coaches (“Hoosiers”), good baseball players (“The Pride of the Yankees”), good prophets (“The Ten Commandments”) and good Gods (“King of Kings”). They want to counteract claims that Hollywood doesn’t represent American values anymore.

Shame. What a discussion we could’ve had otherwise. You want inspiration? How about “Taxi Driver,” inspiration for John Hinkley, or “Death Wish,” inspiration for Bernie Goetz, or “The Candidate,” inspiration for Dan Quayle. Hell, let’s go with the granddaddy of them all, “The Birth of a Nation,” whose story of heroic whites protecting southern womanhood from rapacious darkies inspired William J. Simmons to reorganize the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. Ah, for the days when Hollywood represented American values.

Movies are actually tailor-made for this kind of specific inspiration. What happens in a movie theater? First it gets dark, then you disappear. Then characters appear, larger than life. You become them. The are generally idealized human beings: better-looking and better-dressed, stronger and braver. You’re dazed when the lights go up. Who am I again? What am I supposed to do now? Woody Allen captured this feeling perfectly in “Play it Again, Sam.” While watching the final moments of Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca,” Allan Felix’s upper lip curls under his top teeth a la Bogart; then the lights go up and he turns into plain old Allan Felix again. We laugh at his predicament because we recognize ourselves in it. Drama is who we want to be; comedy is who we are.

I’ve felt that again and again at the movies. In the early 1970s my brother and I went to a re-release of “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid,” and when it was over and we were walking out of the theater, swaggering slightly, I was convinced, convinced, that the gaggle of girls a couple of rows back were looking at us and were amazed, amazed, by our resemblance to Paul Newman (my brother) and Robert Redford (me). What were we really? A skinny 12-year-old with brown hair and freckles and a blonde-banged 10-year-old schlub. This is close to dementia. It took me years to realize that not only was I not Robert Redford, I was Allan Felix.

Did you see “The Incredibles”? All the little boys running around afterwards like Dash. Parents think it’s cute, and it is, but Dash is the ultimate wish-fulfillment for a 4-year-old. Their whole lives, whenever they’ve run towards something interesting, someone picks them up and brings them back to a place that isn’t so interesting. But Dash is the fastest boy alive. A kid running like Dash is saying, “You will never fucking catch me again.”

I ran after seeing a movie, too. Mine was “Rocky,” which is on the list of nominees, and will probably make the top three. When I got out of the theater it was evening, and, feeling pumped up, I began to run down the street. I ran all the way home without stopping. In high school I wound up on the cross-country team.

I biked after a movie, too. Mine was “Breaking Away,” which is also on the list of nominees and might make the top 100. At one point in the film Dave Stoller rides his bike on the freeway. He’s trailing behind a truck, and every time he appears in the truck’s side mirror, the driver indicates how fast they’re going by sticking fingers out the window: 4 for 40... 5 for 50...and then the triumph: 6 for 60! Afterwards I scoffed, “How can someone possibly ride their bike 60 miles an hour?” but my brother told me, “No no no, he was drafting. He was being pulled along by the truck. You can do that.” “Oh,” I said. Biking around one weekend, I came upon a freeway entrance, thought, “I should try that drafting thing,” and pedaled furiously onto the 77 North on-ramp. A minute later the freeway, thank God, drained into the south Lake Nokomis area. There had been no proper shoulder so I had been riding on the freeway, with cars honking and whizzing by me, drafting nothing. Afterwards I felt like a cat that had scurried across a busy street and found itself safe on the sidewalk again, wide-eyed and freaked but trying to maintain its dignity. Both of us probably with the same thought: “Well, that didn’t work.”

My most inspirational film may be “Annie Hall,” another unnominated film. I first saw it as an impressionable 14-year-old and upon watching it again 20 years later I suddenly realized that the loves of my life have tended to be like the title character: sweet, pretty, slightly daffy girls with long straight hair who are fun to be with. Maybe my heart would’ve gone in this direction anyway, but the fact that I don’t know is exactly the point. Woody Allen once said “The heart wants what it wants.” But does my heart want what Woody’s wants?

AFI will seem to be cheerleading for the industry with their list of vaguely inspirational films such as “Rudy” and “Erin Brockovich” and “Seabiscuit,” but they’ll actually be shortchanging it considerably. The movies are so powerful, we don’t know where they end and we begin.

      *  *  *

For this article I did something I hadn’t done in over 30 years: I watched “Evel Knievel” again. Unfortunately they copied the DVD from a bad print—there are pops and scratches and skips—and while George Hamilton isn’t bad playing Evel as public mischief-maker and private hypochondriac, the movie is awful. It obviously had no budget, and Evel’s career is glossed over in favor of, yes, how he won the love of his life. At the same time, there’s this kick-ass song, “I Do What I Please” (surely an anthem for any kid), and the footage of the real Evel jumping cars is still cool after all these years. Many of our cinematic forms of inspiration involve superhuman qualities—running like Dash, trying to bike 60 miles an hour, the Lone Rangeresque Klan of “Birth of a Nation”—and Evel fits right in. When he jumps, he’s defying gravity. Here, this is how inspiring the movies are: I sat there, a 43 year-old critic with notepad out and analytical abilities working, watching this stinky, low-budget thing, and man if I didn’t want to be that guy.

I'm taking a class at Northwest Film Forum on Orson Welles, taught by a woman who knew Welles briefly in the 1970s. The syllabus begins with “The Magnificent Ambersons” and ranges onto “Touch of Evil,” “Chimes at Midnight,” “The Stranger,” “Mr. Arkadin” and ends, where the film career began, with “Citizen Kane.”

In class on Monday, I had a question, a bit long (you know me), which went something like this:

• If, as we've heard, the scenes at the Mirador Motel in “Touch of Evil” influenced Alfred Hitchcock in the making of “Psycho,” which starred Tony Perkins in what became the role of his lifetime ...
• ... and Perkins subseqently starred in Welles' “The Trial” two years later ...
• ... and three years later Welles cast a Perkins lookalike, Shakespearean actor Keith Baxter, to play Prince Hal opposite his Falstaff in “Chimes at Midnight” ...
• ... well, is there anything to all this or is it just some interesting coincidences?

The teacher smiled and said it wasn't just coincidences. When pressed, she said that Perkins and Baxter were the type of man Welles was attracted to.

Orson Welles was gay? Or bi? I'd never heard this before. I guess David Thomson suggests as much in his bio “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles.” I guess Simon Callow suggests as much in his series of bios on Welles. But Welles' daughter, Chris Welles Feder, who wrote her own book on Welles, dismisses the suggestion:

I try to read every book written about my father but I couldn’t even finish reading Rosebud! And in Road to Xanadu there is Simon Callow’s speculation about my father’s “homosexuality.” I asked Simon about that when he came to interview me at my place in New York. His first volume had already come out, so I said, “Simon, do you have any kind of positive proof that my father was homosexual, or is it all just second hand innuendo?” He had to admit he had no direct first hand evidence. It was all just innuendo. I even asked my mother about it, and she was so funny, she said, “oh, absolutely not!” I said, “Well Simon Callow has just published a book that suggests he was homosexual, and she said, “Oh, well that’s just wishful thinking on his part.”

I'll write more if I learn more.

Top: Tony Perkins in Orson Welles' “The Trial” (1962). Bottom: Hal Baxter as Prince Hal in Orson Welles' “Chimes at Midnight” (1965).

Check out this poster from “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” Look at the tagline and then at the release date:

Those of us who bought homes that year, or felt comfortable in our jobs or with our retirement funds, really should've paid attention.

Read the intro here, the first wave (red scare) here, the second wave (gods and lost children) here, the third wave (camp) here, the fourth wave (bad muthas) here ...

9/11 changed everything but the immediate reaction from Hollywood was muted. Invasions, when they came, came small and dark. In “Dreamcatcher,” the invasion is limited to the Maine woods, in “Alien vs. Predator,” the alien (and the predator) never get out of Antarctica. The all-out invasion in “Signs” is as surreptitious as a Bigfoot sighting. Are they there? Is that really them? Even when Steven Spielberg—of all directors—made his grainy remake of “The War of the Worlds,” it felt less than global. What a shock, at the end, to find Boston neighborhoods untouched.

Or did 9/11 change anything? The same battles rage as raged before. Do aliens have more to fear from us (“District 9”) or we from them (“Skyline”)? The camp component hasn’t died (“Cowboys vs. Aliens”). Lost children still arrive, though they’re hardly children anymore (“Super 8”). Metaphors abound: aliens as advanced weaponry (“Transformers”), as an oppressed minority (“District 9”), as the U.S. in Iraq (“Battle: Los Angeles”).

Alien invasion movies really turn on the most basic of human reactions: How do you greet a stranger? With a smile or a frown? With an open hand or a closed one? Whatever our response, it’s often a corollary to the Golden Rule: We expect others to treat us as we treat them. Which is why the scientists in these films tend to be curious while the military men are combative.

History, sadly, would seem to side with the military men. A technologically advanced race showing up one day and slowly wiping out the inhabitants? That’s the story of America. Even in our most paranoid moments—in the 1950s, in the 2000s—we are still what we fear.

--Erik Lundegaard is here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. But he’s got lots of bubblegum. He can be reached at erik@eriklundegaard.com.

--This piece was originally published, in slightly different form, on MSNBC.com

Read the intro here, the first wave (Red Scare) here, the second wave (gods and lost children) here, the third wave (camp) here...

All this time, evil aliens never completely went away. We got good re-makes of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in 1978, and “The Thing” in 1981. On TV, “V” introduced the concept that malevolent aliens might not be monolithic; that within an invading army there might be an underground movement, a White Rose, trying to help humans. “Alien Nation” picked up on this possible complexity as well.

So what the hell happened in 1996? Was it the first WTC attack? The popularity of “X-Files”? Because suddenly that complexity disappeared and we got three all-out alien assaults on our planet: the aforementioned dark giddiness of “Mar Attacks!”; Charlie Sheen’s paranoid thriller, “The Arrival”; and the biggest and baddest of them all...

“Independence Day” was less a return to paranoid 1950s movies than a reactionary response to the Pollyanna vision of Spielberg. Those awe-struck people at Devil’s Tower playing their five-note song of greeting in “Close Encounters”? They’re the first to get fried in “I.D.” Even the plaque the Apollo 11 astronauts left on the moon, and signed by Pres. Richard Nixon, of all presidents, is called into question. It’s shown at the beginning of the film and reads: “Here men from the Planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.” Then the dark shadow of an invading alien army falls upon it. In peace. Saps! Hippies!

Look at the way one phrase is uttered. In “Starman,” Charles Martin Smith views the clean room where our government plans to dissect Jeff Bridges and shakes his head sadly. “Welcome to Earth,” he says. Bummer, dude. In “Independence Day,” Will Smith shoots down an evil alien ship, the first indication that we can take them down, runs over to it and cold-cocks the slimy thing inside. “Welcome to Earth,” he says, then sits down and lights a triumphant cigar. Wooooo! We rock!

That’s ultimately what “Independence Day” offered us: Less Bummer, dude and more We rock!

Read the intro here, the first wave (Red Scare) here, the second wave (gods and lost children) here...

Detente between the U.S. and Soviet Union may have ended with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, but “evil empire” rhetoric never really translated into paranoia on our screens. If anything, alien invasion movies became jokey and campy, mocking their 1950s predecessors with titles like “Killer Klowns from Outer Space” and “Earth Girls are Easy.” In John Carpenter’s “They Live,” the aliens are actually Reagan-era yuppies making money off of trickle-down economics. That’s why the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The rich are aliens; the poor are you.

The jokes continued throughout the 1990s but weren’t particularly funny or representative. “Mars Attacks!” was based upon 1960s trading cards and reflected, more than our odd times, Tim Burton’s odd sensibility. “What Planet Are You From?” is one-note: how men and women seem alien to each other. “Evolution”? A good idea—single-celled alien life-forms grow exponentially until they threaten all human life—but the tone is spectacularly off. Even before the 2001 anthrax scare, who thought experimenting on U.S. soldiers with anthrax was funny?

The best and most representative of these comedies is “Men in Black,” in which, yes, aliens are here and queer, but this time they’re celebrities. Movie aliens, after all, tend to represent what we fear and can’t explain. In the 1950s it was Nikita Khrushchev. In the 2000s, Michael Jackson.

Read the intro here and the first wave (Red Scare) here...

Just as quickly as they appeared, alien invasion movies—poof!—vanished from our screens. Except for a few low-budget crapfests (“Santa Claus vs. the Martians”), we didn’t hear from them throughout the 1960s. A great sociological study could be made of this gap. Did we become less paranoid of outsiders? Did we become more fascinated with our own star treks (Mercury, Apollo, U.S.S. Enterprise) to be concerned with the treks of others here?

Moreover, when aliens did return to earth in the 1970s, during an era of U.S.-Soviet detente, they were almost entirely benevolent. It’s a jolt watching “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) after these paranoid ‘50s films, because at no point does anyone in Spielberg’s movie worry that the aliens might be less than kind. Sure, they kidnap our air-force pilots and small children. But look at the lights! Look at the pretty lights!

Spielberg's two films, on gods and lost children, remade the alien invasion movie.

The benevolent aliens from this period can be divided into two groups: the crash-landers (“The Man Who Fell to Earth” ( 1976), “E.T.” (1982), and “Starman” (1984)), and the gods (“Close Encounters,” “Cocoon,” (1985), and “Contact” (1997)).

The crash-landers are essentially lost children who, like children everywhere, want to go home and watch TV. The man who fell to earth (David Bowie) winds up a kind of Howard Hughes/Elvis figure, so his bank of T.V. sets is pejorative, representing the cacophony of our culture, while E.T. and Starman, sublimating the tastes of their directors, wind up watching famous kissing scenes in old Hollywood films—“The Quiet Man” and “From Here to Eternity,” respectively—which teach each alien about love. Awwww. Thank God “A Clockwork Orange” wasn’t on.

So if the aliens are benevolent, who are the bad guys in these pictures? Generally, the U.S. military. Even when the government has a friendly face (Peter Coyote, Charles Martin Smith), the aliens are still hunted down. Captivity is imminent; dissection is implied. Go, E.T., go! Run, Starman, run!

Maybe this is the reason those other aliens, the gods, rarely land. They simply hover in their big, bright ships and grant the stars of the picture what they need: Richard Dreyfuss a purpose, Don Ameche youth, Jodie Foster a father. Awe accompanies their appearance. In their presence, we are the children, once lost, now found.

While the earlier movie posters drew you in with the unknown quality of the stars, these later posters draw you in with the known quality of movie stars. They also echo their predecessors. “Starman”'s tagline (“He is 100,000 years head of us”) echoes “E.T.”'s (“He is 3 million light years from home”), while the title of “Contact” is the final line of “Close Encounters”'s tagline.

Intro here.

The biggest wave of alien invasion movies occurred between the rise of Joe McCarthy in 1950 and the launching of Sputnik and the space race in 1957. Politically, things were paranoid and repressive; yet while these films certainly play upon our anti-communist paranoias they rarely buy into them. In “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) for example, Mrs. Barley (Frances Bavier—Aunt Bee from “The Andy Griffith Show”) looks the fool when she says the flying saucer that landed in President’s Park is Soviet-made.

The aliens, in fact, seem to worry more about us than we do about them. To Klaatu, the Christ-figure of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” Earth is the Mideast of the galaxy: a trouble-spot that threatens to wreak havoc beyond its borders. In the surrealistic “Invaders from Mars” (1953) aliens are afraid what will happen when we take atomic energy into space. In “It Came from Outer Space” (1953) aliens crash-land, adopt human identities and try to buy hardware supplies to get the hell away again. “Why don’t they come out in the open?” a cop asks the film’s protagonist, John Putnam (John Carlson), a star-gazing writer. “Because what we don’t understand, we want to destroy,” Putnam responds in what amounts to the film’s lesson.

Sure, most of these movies are dated. That’s part of the fun: the hokey rubber masks, the strange pronunciations (“MUTE-ants”), the convoluted nomenclature (“an indefinitely indexed memory bank” for “computer”), the fact that every other protagonist is a pipe-smoking scientist. But there are joys beyond the ironic. “The Thing from Another World” (1951) has smart dialogue (“We split the atom.” “Yeah, and that made the world happy, didn’t it?”), while Ray Harryhausen’s special effects in “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” (1956) are light years ahead of its time. Of course, Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) is a classic, in which the movie’s set-up, neighbors turning overnight into emotionless vegetables, can be seen as a metaphor for Soviet communism or U.S. conformity or the Hollywood blacklist.

Even the crappiest of these movies have moments that inform our own time. In “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,” when the pipe-smoking scientist wonders why the aliens, with their superior technology, don’t just take over, the alien responds:

“Despite our power, the few of us would be busy indefinitely trying to suppress a large, hostile population. In the end, we would be masters of a wrecked and hungry planet.”

Aliens are rarely just aliens.

I first wrote about this in 2007. In the wake of “Super 8,” it feels worth revisiting...

Most are humanoid and hairless, with oversized heads, nostrils for noses, and long thin necks—although one species has a single, three-colored eye and suction-tipped hands (1953’s “The War of the Worlds”), while another, poor thing, is forced to plod along with a space helmet atop a gorilla’s body (“Robot Monster”).

Most are here to take over—don’t kid yourselves—but some are benevolent voyeurs (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), while others simply need a place to hang (“Men in Black”).

Some are defeated by bacteria (“The War of the Worlds”), others are averse to cold or water (“The Arrival”; “Signs”), while one species, in a much-mocked incident, could travel the galaxy but couldn't deal with a simple computer virus (“Independence Day”).

They are aliens who come to earth, and the type we get tends to coincide with our current feelings about foreigners: benevolent aliens during times of peace, ferocious aliens during periods of xenophobia.

Just look at the granddaddy of alien invasion stories: H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” It was first published during the saber-rattling before World War I. A generation later, as the world braced for World War II, a radio adaptation by Orson Welles panicked east-coast listeners. The first film adaptation appeared during the panicky McCarthy years, the second during the paranoia following 9/11.

Consider the first paragraph of Wells’ novella. I’ve added a century and shifted the focus from “this world” to “this country.” Here’s what you get:

“No one would have believed in the last years of the 20th century that this country was being watched...With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this country about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter... Yet across the gulf, [other minds] regarded this country with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the 21st century came the great disillusionment.”

Aliens are rarely just aliens.

Tomorrow: The first wave: Red scare

I first went to Opening Night at SIFF, the Seattle International Film Festival, in 1994. Acclaimed Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci had filmed parts of “Little Buddha” in Seattle a year earlier,  and now his film, and he, would open the festival. Quite the coup. He spoke beforehand, talked about how much he liked Seattle, and Elliott Bay Books, and Scarecrow Video, where they categorized films by director as God intended. Then we all settled in to watch his movie, in which Chris Isaak and Bridget Fonda play the Seattle parents of a boy who may or may not be the reincarnation of the Lama Dorje. Co-starring Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha. One minute in, the film broke, and the screen went dark. One can imagine Bertolucci wasn't pleased. When the film finally started again, after a five-minute delay, I wasn't particularly pleased. It wasn't that good. But what the hell, it was Opening Night.

Last night, I went to my second Opening Night of SIFF, which they dubbed a “Gala.” (I“ll refrain from the Groucho Marx reference.) I suited up, talked with Nancy Guppy, who was interviewing people for the festivities, ran into a few friends. Then Patricia and I and a thousand-plus people settled in for the Opening Night movie, ”The First Grader,“ a British film about an 84-year-old Kenyan man, a former Mau Mau warrior, who wants to go to school to learn to read, and who, with the help of a kindly teacher, fights all the forces (bureaucratic, neighborhood) that get in his way. I was hoping it would be better, more complex, than the trailer indicated.

Except we didn't get the movie right away. First, the co-directors of SIFF made speeches. Then they introduced others who made speeches: this mucky-muck from Starbucks; that mucky-muck from the Seattle Sounders; the Mayor of Seattle. Everyone talked about how much the arts meant. Everyone congratulated each other and us for doing our part. This went on for 15 minutes, a half hour, 45 minutes. By the time the film started I was exhausted. The film didn't help. Was Gordon Willis the cinematographer? Because, man, it seemed really, really underlit. Ten minutes in, the screen went dark. A second later the movie started again, from five minutes earlier, lit properly. One of these years they'll get it right.

Will they ever get the Opening Night movie right? In ”The First Grader,“ good-looking people are good; scowling people are bad; the good-looking people win. Set it in America and it's Hollywood fluff. Set it in Kenya and it must be important. So the SIFF thinking seems to go.

What the hell, it was Opening Night.

”Let Maruge in." She must be right because she's so cute.

I used to look forward to The New York Times' summer movie section to see, you know, what movies would be playing during the upcoming summer. But that was B.I. (Before Internet). Or maybe BIMDb.com. Either way, I rarely look at the list anymore. I know what's coming. In a way, we all do.

But I still look forward to the section for, as they used to say about Playboy, the articles. This year's includes rising stars (Dominic Cooper? Still?), summer movie faves (I like Maya Rudolph's choice: “Purple Rain”), plus profiles of Mario Bello, Michael Fassbender and Thor.

Then there's Terrence Rafferty on summer beach movies, which I was slightly disappointed in only because it's Terrence Rafferty. Isn't the point that beach movies began as fictional farce (Gidget, Frankie and Annette) and ended as non-fictional art (“The Endless Summer,” “Step into Liquid,” “Riding Giants”)? Or that the pop cultural moment may go (Beach Boys, etc.) but the waves keep coming? At the same time, I like the background Rafferty give us on American International Pictures and the Frankie/Annette flicks, and the observation that parents were around for Gidget's film but were essentially banished for Frankie and Annette. Plus these lines:

[“Beach Party”] was awful, and its sequels — “Muscle Beach Party” (1964), “Bikini Beach” (1964), “Beach Blanket Bingo” (1965) and “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (1965), all directed by Mr. Asher — were, if anything, worse. In the last two, the comic relief is provided by the great Buster Keaton, whose characteristically melancholy expression seems, in this context, fully justified.“

But the big article, and the headline of the week, is ”Gosh, Sweetie, That's a Big Gun,“ a back-and-forth between Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott on the rash of young, violent heroines in movies.

In the intro they lump them all together “Hanna,” “Sucker Punch,” “Super,” “Let Me In,” “Kick-Ass” and ”The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo“ trilogy, so initially I was worried. Aren't these movies, and these characters, vastly different? You can begin with the notion that ”Sucker Punch“ is for boys and ”Dragon Tattoo“ is for girls; that the characters of ”Sucker Punch“ never escape the fetishistic fantasy role assigned to them by boys, while Lisbeth Salander is a kind of role model for girls. She is, as I wrote in my review of ”The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,“ a heroine unprecedented in film: the rescuer rather than the rescued; the pursuer rather than the pursued. Scott points out that most of these girls rely on men for their training (”Hanna,“ ”Sucker Punch,“ ”Kick-Ass“) but fails to mention that Lisbeth relies on the men in her movies for nurturing. She's tough on her own. That's a massive-enough difference to turn the world on its head.

But to the main question: What or who is driving all this?

• Scott: ”It seems to me that what fuels these fantasies is also a deep anxiety ... about female sexuality“
• Dargis: ”Male anxiety about female sexual power [can always be depended on to make trouble, but] one difference is the tender age of these recent combatants.“

Dargis gives us a pretty good recent timeline: from Luc Besson's ”The Professional“ to Quentin Tarantino's killer ladies, but even this timeline is misleading: Portman in ”The Professional“ is precocious, not supertough. She's a real young girl. You can't say that about Baby Doll in ”Sucker Punch.“

The two critics, particularly Scott, keep going off target. His ”Social Network“ interlude is particularly unncessary, as his need to assure us, as the father of a 12-year-old, that he likes tough women. He writes that Michelle Williams' character writes ”a new chapter“ in westerns. To which Dargis responds dryly: ”Maybe a paragraph.“

Then Scott does what Scott does. He spends an article dithering, or going off target, or stating the obvious or soothing, and then all of a sudden he lays out the point perfectly:

I think the first Salander movie ran into a serious problem when it tried to translate Larsson’s anger about pervasive sexual violence into cinematic terms. It is in the nature of the moving image to give pleasure, and in the nature of film audiences — consciously or not, admittedly or not — to find pleasure in what they see. So in depicting Salander’s rape by her guardian in the graphic way he did, the director, Niels Arden Oplev, ran the risk of aestheticizing, glamorizing and eroticizing it, just as Gaspar Noé did with Monica Bellucci’s assault in “Irreversible.”

Exactly. I just saw the Japanese film ”13 Assassins," in which there's rape and cruelty. We don't see the rape; we see its aftermath. We see the aftermath, the result, of even greater cruelty. Those scenes are always sobering and horrifying, never titilating or exploitative.

But, now that I think about it, that's a different subject, violence against women, rather than the subject at hand, girls with big guns. Why these girls and why now? Dargis and Scott don't come close to an answer. Maybe because they never bring up comic books, the driving force of the entire industry now, and the source of half the heroines they're writing about.

Dargis and Scott don't see much difference between Lisbeth and Baby Doll.

“At that moment, Matt Dillon saunters past and the girls sway en masse like willows in a spring breeze. ...

”'Aaah, man, I'm tired. See you at rehearsals,' he says, hoisting his boom box to his shoulder. He crosses to the elevators and passes the gaggle of fans. Then something remarkable happens. He stops dead in his tracks and whispers to a pretty brunette. She listens for a beat, then turns to the four girls she's standing with and whispers something to them. Matt fiddles with the volume on the boom box. The girls caucus for a total of four seconds, till the brunette leaves her friends behind and joins Matt for a walk to the elevators. He puts his free arm around her. At the last second, just before they enter the elevator, she turns back to look at her friends. Her expression is one I've never seen before. It's like she has a thought balloon over her head that reads: 'Holy shit! How lucky am I?' Matt yawns, and the elevator doors close. The entire transaction takes less than 45 seconds.“

--from Rob Lowe's memoir, ”Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography,“ excerpted in the May 2011 Vanity Fair. Most of the excerpt, including the above anecdote, focuses on auditioning for and acting in Francis Ford Coppola's ”The Outsiders" in the early 1980s.

From my sister Karen:

Erik, thought of you when visiting the Karps and playing the movie game, Jordan's latest obsession. (Name an actor, movie they're in, another actor in that movie, etc.) It was everyone against Josh, and he still killed us.

From my friend Josh Karp:

as for jordy, he got me with one kubrick film i'd never heard of (eric told me about how he'd wanted to be kubrick for the school biography event and had to settle for hitchcock.). then he tried “the killing,” which i've never seen, but for some reason i knew that sterling hayden was in it. neither he nor karen believed me so i brought it up on my phone. i think both were unable to recover. but jordy will no doubt kick my ass before long. maybe by this summer.

From me, 13 years ago, originally published in Seattle Weekly:

Six Degrees of Boredom

At one o'clock my friend Mike travels up the ramp that separates the warehouse receiving area (his morning detail) from the textbook marking department (where he spends his afternoons). He hangs up his jacket, unpacks a box or two of textbooks, and before the boredom of the routine set in, and with a small smile lifting the ends of his mustache, he glances at his watch. “Hmm?” he asks.

This is his way of signaling for yet another round of the movie game.

The movie game should not be confused with “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” The purpose there is to begin with an actor, travel through shared movies, and wind up at Kevin Bacon before your allotted six turns are up. Humphrey Bogart, in other words, leads to Angels with Dirty Faces, which starred James Cagney, who was in Mr. Roberts with Jack Lemmon, a bit player in JFK, which also featured...ta da!...Kevin Bacon. Easy right?

C'mon guys! Play my game!

Too easy. There has to be competition to make it worth our while. You've got to understand: Our work is not only repetitive but seemingly without purpose. Mike prices textbooks; I receive them and wheel them in large metal tubs down to the textbook department; Jeff, around the middle of the term, collects these same textbooks and brings them back upstairs, where he and Rich remove the prices and return the books to their publishers. Now somewhere in-between my activity and Jeff's there are apparently student purchases, and learning, and the continuation of culture; but these are mere rumors to us. Since we don't know how much of the books actually get absorbed into students' minds, our jobs often seem the bibliographic equivalent of digging holes only to fill them. We receive textbooks only to return them again.

And what to talk about when we're metaphorically wielding or leaning on our shovels? The mornings are usually reserved for politics (local, national and office), sports, music, personal matters. Such talk peters out after a couple of hours, and, in the gathering monotony, we retreat, one by one, into the buzz of our respective walkmans. It is the appearance of Mike that brings us out of these electronic shells.

The format of the movie game is similar to “Six Degrees” except that Kevin Bacon holds no more power than any other actor. A non-participant tosses up the ball, as it were, by naming any actor (Actor A). From there we proceed by predetermined order. Mike names a movie Actor A was in; Jeff then picks a different actor from the same movie; Rich mentions another film with Actor B. Etcetera.

Essentially you try to name an actor or movie that will stump the others but which--important proviso--you can get out of yourself. Presented with Wallace Shawn, it does no good to mention My Dinner with Andre unless you also know something of the screen career of Andre Gregory; otherwise you're grinding the game to a halt. If you pass or guess wrongly, you're given a letter: M, to start. Spell M-O-V-I-E-S and you're toast.

Strategies abound. Since I know something of older Hollywood, I try to wind the game in that direction by choosing an actor's earliest film or a film's eldest actor. Mike, at the other side of this temporal tug-of-war, tries to pull us toward the litany of modern character actors--Tracey Walter, Kurtwood Smith, William Sadler--that he stores in his pockets like so many nickels and dimes. Jeff, meanwhile, wants to trick us all into the swamp of the schlock/horror genre that he rules like some in-bred Alabaman.

Some plots, especially when the field narrows to two, are positively Byzantine. If, from Charles Grodin, I say Midnight Run, Mike will mention Robert DeNiro, to which I can go New York, New York, forcing him into Liza Minnelli, which will lead to That's Entertainment!, causing him to fumble for Gene Kelly. Now he's dead. Of course you can be so intent on your own strategy you don't see your opponent's. Once I had Jeff mired in 1930s musicals when I mentioned Fred Astaire; it shot us all the way to 1981 and the horror film Ghost Story. In a flash we went from my strength to Jeff's, and I, anticipating a pin, wound up flat on my back. It is this kind of drama which leads Rich to suspect that the movie game could make it big on cable access.

We've tried other games to occupy our minds. There was “Questions”, from Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where everything said has to be in the form of a question. No statements; no non-sequiturs; nothing rhetorical. But you can only have so many conversations like this:

“How are you?”
“Are you asking?”
“Are you suspicious?”
“Should I be?”

The One-Syllable Game was good for a day. The-point-was-to-make-all-words-just-one-note. Kind-of-stilt...ing.

Attempts to transplant other art forms into the movie game's pre-existing structure have failed miserably. Writing is too solitary an occupation to allow for the necessary cross-connections between artist and product, while musicians, in a more group-conscious field, are less whorish than actors, tending to work with the same people for long periods rather than flitting from co-star to co-star. The movie game stays.

But how much longer? Already certain avenues have worn so smooth we practically slide through them. Tom Hanks to Bachelor Party to Adrien Zmed to Grease II to blah blah blah. Hey, let's talk about girls for a change.

--originally published in Seattle Weekly, October 1998

A dozen pages into Making Movies I sent a copy to a friend for graduation. I assumed the rest of the book would be good enough for such an occasion. I wasn't wrong.

At the time of the writing, Sidney Lumet had directed 39 movies, starting in 1957 with 12 Angry Men, peaking in the 1970s with classics like Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network, then gradually losing steam until, by the early '90s, he was directing vehicles for Melanie Griffith (A Stranger Among Us) and Don Johnson (Guilty as Sin). But this is not a book about one man's rise and fall. Lumet doesn't even see his career as following this trajectory. Who does? If anything, he sees the movie industry suffering in this manner. The last chapter includes diatribes against the National Research Group and their audience surveys, and the fact that certain studios won't green-light pictures until a major star is involved. He writes:

This has two immediate effects. First, the stars' salaries skyrocket... The second effect is that the agencies that represent the stars are automatically in a more powerful position.

Making Movies is an aptly named book because it’s ultimately about ... making movies: the financing, the lighting, the camera work; rushes, answer prints, foleys and timers.

Don’t forget script girls. Because certain scenes may require many takes, and because a portion of take two may be spliced with a portion of take 11, a script girl is employed to ensure that actors perform the same actions at the same moments. Making 12 Angry Men, for example, the script girl mentioned that an actor had taken a puff of his cigarette on Line A yesterday while today he did it on Line B. Henry Fonda disagreed; he said the actor did it on Line B yesterday. So two takes were made. It turned out Fonda was right. This anecdote is told to demonstrate Fonda's incredible movie memory but it also helps reveal movie making’s incredible complexity.

Add artistic considerations if you are artistically considered. It's not about lighting actors well; it's about lighting them in ways that relates to character and theme. Ditto camera shots and camera angles. There is no camera shot of the sky in Prince of the City until the lead character is contemplating suicide. Sky implies freedom, Lumet writes, and the lead character is finding himself more and more trapped as the movie progresses. Since he starts out the movie self-assured, too, and then slowly loses control, Lumet lights the movie to follow this pattern:

In the first third of the movie, we tried to have the light on the background brighter than on the actors in the foreground. For the second third, the foreground light and the background light were more or less balanced. For the last third, we cut the light off the background.

What camera angle? Which lens? How should character A be edited against character B?

With the director needing to answer each question, you might think Lumet would be a proponent of the auteur theory. Nope. In fact, he uses the favorite auteur of the auteur theory, Alfred Hitchcock, to fault it:

He always essentially made the same picture. His stories weren't the same, but the genre was: a melodrama, layered with light comedy, played by the most glamorous actors he could find...photographed often by the same cameraman, with music composed by the same composer... His how to do it was the same because what he was doing was the same.

“Movie directors do not work alone,” Lumet writes. “There will be a visual difference if we work with Cameraman A or Cameraman B, Production Designer C or Production Designer D.” Then he writes about those he works with. He gives credit to cameramen Peter McDonald and Andrzej Bartkowiak and Boris Kaufman; production designers like Tony Walton; editors like Margaret Booth; and stars like Paul Newman and Sean Connery, who wear their fame lightly; who travel without entourages.

He answers questions I’ve long had about the movies. How can the Academy give awards for Best Editing unless you know what they edited in the first place? “In my view,” he writes, “only three people know how good or bad the editing was: the editor, the director, and the cameraman.” He includes tantrums against the uselessness of the teamsters and love taps for Paddy Chayevsky, the screenwriter of Network. His love for the movies is apparent in every sentence, as well as his intolerance for the parasites that high-profile industries like film-making attract. Making Movies is that rare movie book that is as interesting discussing camera lenses as it is discussing Paul Newman. I’ve now got a new book to give to friends.

--May 24, 1996

“Paul leads one of the most generous and honorable lives of anyone I've ever known.”

Sidney Lumet's “Making Movies” was the first insider look at the movies that I read that stuck. I recommended it to friends for years. I bought it for I don't know how many of them. Now I can't find my copy. I must've loaned it out.

Lumet always seemed like a gentleman to me, and gracious toward other talents, and my haphazard reading today has only reinforced that notion. Here he is on Christopher Reeve, whom he directed in “Death Trap”:

What seemed such a nice, simple, artless performance in “Superman” was the finest kind of acting. Reeve's timing — and humor — has to be just about perfect to make the character come off.

Here he is on Tab Hunter, whom he directed in “That Kind of Woman” with Sophia Loren:

Primarily a character actor, yet always used as a leading man because he's so pretty. I've seen him do character parts in which he's really great. But, as a leading man, he tightens up. Mostly, he turned to character work in American television when his Hollywood career started going sour. Then, he played the roles of psychotic killers and so forth, and his talent became clear.

I wonder if this comment on Akira Kurosawa was related to some Q&A, some interview with a journalist, regarding Lumet's 1959 TV movie based on Kurosowa's “Rashomon”:

Kurosawa never affected me directly in terms of my own movie-making because I never would have presumed that I was capable of that perception and that vision.

I know. They made a TV movie based on “Rashomon”? With Ricardo Montalban? Yep, and directed by Sidney Lumet.

He was one of the better directors to come out of 1950s TV. Before he was 30 he'd directed the Gettysburg Address, the Conquest of Mexico and the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with John Kerr as his Jesse and James Dean as his Robert Ford, all for the “You Are There” TV show.

His first theatrical movie, “12 Angry Men,” was more like a play. It didn't move so Lumet made it move. Did he think it was his greatest movie? Do we? The voters at IMDb.com certainly do. It's considered the seventh greatest movie of all time by their rankings, ahead of “Seven Samurai,” “Casablanca,” “The Third Man,” “Rear Window,” almost everything. I wouldn't rank it so high, but ... Not bad for a first film. Lumet began there and ended with “Before the Devil Knows You're Dead,” which contains my favorite performance by Ethan Hawke. Forty-one films between those two. Nice bookends to a career.

His heyday was the 1970s. In a span of three years he directed “Serpico,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” and “Network.” Wow. He was always interested in cops and lawyers and grit and ethics and “How do you do the right thing when everyone around you is getting ahead doing the wrong thing?” He loved New York. He kept filming on location. Is that why he never won an Oscar? Not enough time in Hollywood? Or did he never deserve to win one? He was nominated four times but can you make an argument for “12 Angry Men” over David Lean's “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” or “Dog Day Afternoon” over Milos Foreman's “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”?

“'Network'!” fans will say. “He should've trounced John Avildsen's 'Rocky'!” True. Although that was also the year Martin Scorsese wasn't even nominated for “Taxi Driver.” There's overlooked and there's overlooked.

In the late '70s he kept adapting Broadway (“Equus,” “The Wiz,” “Death Trap”) to not much avail. He merely made an OK film out of one of my favorite books, E.L. Doctorow's “The Book of Daniel.” He remained serious in a business that increasingly wasn't. He made movies for adults, dramas, in an industry that geared its product for the younger and dumber crowd. Soon, well, he was kind of out of the picture.

One of the friends I gave that “Making Movies” book to was my brother-in-law, Eric Muschler, Jordy's dad, who wrote the following to me in an e-mail in 1999:

I loved reading the behind-the-scenes set-up stuff. The planning of each frame, the scheduling. Amazing. And the progression of light and camera angles and how even that is used to move the theme and story. (I.e. 12 Angry Men moving from downward shots to upward shots to grow the sense of being trapped in the room.)

Here's the Times' obit.

Here's Nathaniel's farewell at FilmExperience.net, which includes every one of Lumet's 43 movie posters. (Nathaniel, thanks for line 6, below.)

Rest in peace, Mr. Lumet, you craftsman, you serious man.

“What struck me was how authentic everything felt. The relationships, the internal struggles of each character, the motivations of the army and the Islamists, the feelings of the townspeople. It all seemed clear while remaining nuanced and without snapping to this or that caricature grid. (Bad guys are bad, good guys are good, medium guys are medium.)

”I think the presentation of the monks’ theological wrangling was especially effective—the thoughts about weakness, death, etc. Atheist (or kind-of-atheist) Suzanne found it quite moving, as did I. In fact, there were no points that felt understandable only to Christians or theists. It all made sense in human terms.

“The title struck me as weird, especially because the plural, Gods, misleadingly suggests that the two religions presented in the movie revolve around two different gods. If anything, the action on screen suggested otherwise.”

--comments by my friend Jacob Slichter on the film “Des hommes et des dieux,” all of which feel exactly right to me.

I first saw Isabelle Huppert in “Entre Nous” (original title “Coup de foudre” or “Love at First Sight”), which was playing at the Cedar Theater on the West Bank in Minneapolis, Minn., in 1984. Talk about coup de foudre. Something about her mouth reminded me of a girl I had a crush on at the university, whose name I've since forgotten. (Wonder where she is? Wonder who she is?) Much of the movie went over my head, much has been forgotten, but Patricia and I watched it the other day and ... it's good ... if obviously created from the scattered nature of life (specifically, the lives of the parents of writer-director Diane Kurys) rather than with the compact force of drama.

It was nominated back then for an Oscar for best foreign language film, but lost, deservedly, to “Fanny and Alexander.” It was also nominated for four Cesars: writing, directing, supporting actor (Guy Marchand) and actress. Not for Huppert, btw. For her co-star, Miou Miou, whom everyone, inexplicably to me back then, focused on. Miou Miou was already a star, had already been nominated four times for Meilleure actrice, and had won, once, for 1979's “Memoirs of a French Whore,” which she refused to accept for the usual reason that actors aren't in competition with one other. Huppert was already a star, too. She'd already been nominated five times for Cesars, but wouldn't be named Meilleure actrice until 1995's “La Ceremonie.” Her only Cesar.

I don't know about meilleure but I believe it's our nature to fall in love with what we can't have, which is part of the appeal of movie stars, and certainly part of the appeal of an actress like Isabelle Huppert, who looks beautiful but reveals little. Thus her performance in “Entre Nous” is now, what, triply attractive to me: she reveals little (1), in a movie (2), that is nearly 30 years old (3). I can't get at any of it. Must be love. C'est encore l'amour.

Nathaniel Rogers has a nice post, for the 100th anniversary of Tennesee Wiliams' birth, on the many women who have played Maggie the Cat. Lotta sexy here (Elizabeth Taylor, Jessica Lange, Kathleen Turner), but this is the shot I couldn't turn away from: Elizabeth Ashley in the 1974 Broadway production. Puts the yum in da-yum.

Nathaniel's is a fun piece, which lends itself fairly easily to a quiz:

Match the adjective with the actress playing Maggie the Cat:

Answers, of course, on Nathaniel's site. I admit to being stunned that Barbara Bel Gedes, who gave me the creeps in “Vertigo” with her maternal weirdness, played this very sexy role in the 1955 Broadway production. Maybe she went a different route. Adds a whole other dimension, anyway, to Brick's sexual reluctance.

The Ashley photo also made me flashback, for whatever reason, to the unfortunate timing of the actress's Life magazine cover appearance: November 22, 1963.

“We will have high-definition, wide-screen television sets and a push-button dialing system to order the movie you want at the time you want it. You'll not go to a video store but instead order a movie on demand and then pay for it. Videocassette tapes as we know them now will be obsolete both for showing prerecorded movies and for recording movies. People will record films on 8mm and will play them back using laser-disk/CD technology. I also am very, very excited by the fact that before long, alternative films will penetrate the entire country. Today seventy-five percent of the gross from a typical art film in America comes from as few as six --six-- different theaters in six different cities. Ninety percent of the American motion-picture marketplace never shows art films. With this revolution in delivery and distribution, anyone, in any size town or hamlet, will see the movies he or she wants to see.”

--Roger Ebert, in Omni magazine, in 1987, as dug up by Paleofuture (a pretty remarkable-looking site)

Roger Ebert defending his position on Eddie Murphy's “Raw” in 1987. During this same period, he was also playing Nostradamus in the pages of Omni magazine.

When I was growing up, Elizabeth Taylor was often in the news and I always wondered what the fuss was.

When I was in college I saw “A Place in the Sun” and realized what the fuss was:

Rest in peace.

Links:

• David Thomson on Taylor's rise and fall.
• Andrew O'Hehir scratches his... head.
• The obit of Taylor in The New York Times, written by Mel Gussow, dead now six years.
• Taylor's IMDb.com page.

I've got new images fading in and out to the left—posters for 2011 movies that seem intriguing to me—and none more so that Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life,” which was scheduled to open in December 2009, then at Cannes 2010, then in December 2010 in time for awards contention, and now, finally, hopefully, May 27, 2011. Limited, of course. Delays related to Malick's general perfectionism and U.S. distribution problems. It's now set to be distributed by Fox Searchlight.

All in all, there are 18 films fading in and out to our left, and it's a fairly international group (click on the film name to see the trailer):

• Three from France: “Gainsbourg: vie heroique,” a biopic of French singer Serge Gainsbourg “from growing up in 1940s Nazi-occupied Paris through his successful song-writing years in the 1960s,” which just won three Cesars, including best actor; “Des hommes et des dieux,” which just won the Cesar for best film, on top of its Grand Prix at last year's Cannes; and “Le noms des gens,” une comedie.
• Three that are Britishy: “Beginners,” about a young man (Ewan McGregor) discovering his elderly father (Christopher Plummer) has terminal cancer and a young male lover; “Hanna,” a serious version of “Kick-Ass”; and “One Day” (no trailer available), by Lone Scherfig, the woman who directed “An Education” and “Italian for Beginners.”
• Two from Korea: “The Housemaid,” which I've already seen (review here), and “Poetry,” which opens this week, and currently tops Andrew O'Hehir's list of the best films of 2011.
• From Taiwan: “Monga,” about gangs in 1980s Taipei. I lived in 1980s Taipei. Without the gangs.
• From Denmark: “In a Better World,” recent winner of the best foreign language film at the Oscars.
• From Thailand: “Uncle Bonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” which won the Palme d'Or“ at last year's Cannes Film Festival.
• Seven from the U.S.: ”The Tree of Life“ (the trailer so good it makes me uninterested in any movie I'm about to watch); ”Bridesmaids“ (femaley Judd Apatow but hopes are fading); ”Captain America“ (fingers crossed but hopes are fading); ”Moneyball“ (no trailer, no poster even), which comes out in September, and which I hope is more ”Social Network“ than ”The Blind Side“; ”Super,“ which looks to be a better version of ”Kick-Ass“; ”The Conspirator,“ Robert Redford's film about the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination; and, finally, ”Win Win,“ which got great buzz at Sundance, and is written and directed by Thomas McCarthy, who made ”The Station Agent“ and ”The Visitor,“ but who will forever be remembered by me as the scummy, preppy reporter from the final season of ”The Wire."

So. Any trailers look good to you? Any movies you've heard about that intrigue? What are YOU looking forward to?

I wrote the following for MSNBC in 2006. What did I miss? (Besides, I know, I know, McQueen and Dunaway in “The Thomas Crowne Affair”)? Which categories did I skip? What memorable movie kisses have we seen since? Anything from this series? Or this movie? Or this one? ...

Quick: Name a great kissing scene in the movies.

I’ve asked that of a lot of people over the last month and while some come up with an answer, most simply furrow their brows, put their hands on their hips, look at the ceiling and say, “Isn’t that funny.” And not just the guys either.

Kissing is one of cinema’s most common actions (right up there with punching), and yet what stands out? Something from “Casablanca” surely, and “Gone with the Wind.” “Titanic”? Did Leo kiss Kate on the prow of the boat or was that just in the poster? More memorable for me are the two of them steaming up the car windows, and Leo drawing a topless Kate. It’s like what my friend Seth admitted when I asked him for kissing scenes: “I only remember the boob shots,” he said. He was only half-joking.

Here’s part of the problem with movie kisses: they rarely further plots and often end them. It’s the action we’ve been waiting for, and yet for the plot to kick in again the kissing has to stop. It’s like dance sequences in this way.

Ask for a favorite dance number, though, and you’ll get besieged. There’s an infinite variety to them — limited only by the dancers’ abilities and the choreographers’ imaginations — but Hollywood long ago perfected how a kiss should look and it’s been stuck in the rut of its perfection ever since: Woman’s arms around man’s neck, man’s arms around woman’s waist, man 4-8 inches taller than woman. It’s even called “the Hollywood kiss,” and it’s almost always the same. I once asked a friend in a rock band how they can play the same songs night after night and keep it interesting, and he responded, “We fuck up.” That’s what Hollywood needs to do with their kisses. They need to fuck up.

But with the help of some friends I did manage to cobble together a few memorable kisses. Here they are, just in time for Valentine’s Day, in easy-to-read categories. I apologize in advance if your favorite isn’t listed.

The desperate kiss
Two people need each other, hunger for each other, want to merge into one another. Often something is keeping them apart; often their affair is illicit. In “Casablanca,” Rick and Ilsa (Bogart and Bergman) have to worry about poor cuckolded Victor Laszlo, a great war hero, for whom they will have to give up their love. But in the meantime: Pucker up. For Sgt. Milton Warden and Karen Holmes (Lancaster and Kerr) in “From Here to Eternity,” it’s cuckolded Capt. Dana “Dynamite” Holmes (who apparently isn’t so dynamite), who is the sergeant’s superior (at least in the military). But in the meantime: Let’s roll around the beach as waves crash upon us. It’s the Hollywood kiss with the addition of “wet” and “prone.” Never underestimate the power of “wet” and “prone.”

In both of these scenes the men are pretty cool customers while the women melt, but men in the movies can get desperate as well. The best recent example is in “Brokeback Mountain,” when Jack and Ennis meet again after four years apart, and discover, during their initial hug, four years of unspent passion. Why is this kiss memorable? Because it’s unexpected, and rough, and they risk so much for it (life itself, you could say). There is anger as well as love in it. Hollywood often sweeps this untidy fact under the carpet but anger should be part of a desperate kiss. Think of it. I’m me. I’m happy being me. But then you come along and make me need you. You’ve got your nerve.

That’s why my favorite desperate kiss is between good ol’ George Bailey and Mary Hatch (James Stewart and Donna Reed) as they listen on the phone to that ass Sam Wainwright blabbing away in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” George knows that if he kisses Mary he’s giving up everything for her — his last chance to shake the dust of this crummy town off his shoes and see the world. Who wouldn’t be mad? Jimmy Stewart is a smart enough actor to show that anger. Still, he kisses her and the next thing you know they’re married. The scene I want is post-coital. Is he still happy? Still in love? Or is he thinking: “What the hell did I just do?”

Quitting is not an option.

The kiss in the rain
Rain works on so many levels. Metaphorically it represents passion — the long storm front finally unleashed. It also adds the aforementioned “wet,” which is what we want our kisses to be. It also puts good-looking actors into clinging clothes. So many levels.

The kiss in the rain is usually a subset of the desperate kiss. Witness “Witness,” when John Book and Rachel Lapp (Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis) finally unleash their long storm front — despite her engagement to that lemonade-sipper Daniel Hochleitner.

Three recent additions in this category include “Match Point,” “The Notebook” and “Spider-Man.” Yeah, the upside-down kiss with Mary Jane. Everyone remembers that one. It’s different. He’s upside-down. Hollywood, take note and think of the possibility of infinite variety.

PP and MJ: Not stuck in the rut of their perfection.

The most famous kiss in the rain is probably from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Unfortunately I’m not a fan. I’m a fan of Truman Capote’s novella, of which Norman Mailer — who didn’t exactly parcel out praise to his competition — once wrote “I would not have changed two words.” It’s a love story without sex, and maybe without the possibility of sex, since its narrator is basically Truman, who was gay. Still he loved her. That’s part of the ache of the book that the movie completely misses, and that the movie’s happy ending, in the rain, nullifies. In the book she does not find her cat (he does, later), and says, “[I]t could go on forever. Not knowing what’s yours until you’ve thrown it away... my mouth’s so dry, if my life depended on it I couldn’t spit.” So Hollywood added rain and a kiss and the bland George Peppard as the-anything-but-bland Truman Capote. Blech. Read the book. I love Audrey Hepburn but ... read the book.

The manhandle kiss
Before feminism, Hollywood gave us a lot of manhandle kisses, but the ones I recall later wound up having a sensitive or comic update.

In John Ford’s “The Quiet Man,” Sean Thornton, in perpetual Irish tussle with flame-haired Mary Kate Donaher (John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara), drags her back into the cottage and kisses her. In “E.T.,” our extraterrestrial friend is watching this very scene on television and translates its needs to his empathetic partner, Elliot, who, to pull off the classic Hollywood kiss, must, like Alan Ladd, stand on a box in order to kiss his taller classmate. A sweet update from Steven Spielberg.

One of the best manhandle kisses is in “On the Waterfront,” when Terry Malloy bursts into the room of the virginal, cloistered Edie Doyle (Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint). Terry is responsible for the death of Edie’s brother and his conscience is bothering him, and his love for Edie is bothering him, but when she admits, in the negative, her love for him (“I didn’t say I didn’t love you...”), he pins her against the wall and kisses her and the music stops and they slide down that wall. And there goes the convent. The music stopping is a nice touch. In most kissing scenes it wells up, but a good kiss makes everything stop.

Its modern update?” Rocky,” when Rocky pins the virginal Adrian (Sylvester Stallone and Tali Shire) against the wall and kisses her. Down they slide. Rocky’s approach is certainly more sensitive than Brando’s — Rocky talks her through it, calmly — but this actually makes the scene feel creepier. He comes off as calculated, which isn’t Rocky at all. An argument why sensitivity isn’t always sensitive, and why unthinking brute force sometimes feels clean.

But where have all the good manhandle kisses gone? The best recent example, where an actor grabs an actress and just plants one, wasn’t even in the movies. It was at the Academy Awards, when Adrien Brody won best actor and celebrated the way that any man at a high moment in his life would like to celebrate: by kissing someone as beautiful as Halle Berry.

As to what Ms. Berry thinks? That would be in the next category.

The woman takes charge
Two words: Lauren Bacall. She slinks through “To Have and Have Not” as Slim, the woman who gives instructions on how to whistle. But she has a greater line earlier, when she lands on Bogart’s lap and kisses him.

He (smiling): What was that for?
She: Been wondering whether I’d like it.
He: What’s the decision?
She: I don’t know yet.

She goes in for another and this time he kisses her back. Finally she stands, gives him a sidelong glance.

She: It’s even better when you help.

Now that’s cool.

You could place various woman-on-woman kisses here as well — Marlene Dietrich soft-kissing a female customer in “Morocco” and then tipping her cap in thanks, and Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair sloshing tongues in “Cruel Intentions” — but you’d expect more post-feminist examples since we’ve all gotten so liberated. Apparently not. Fewer manhandle kisses, fewer woman-takes-charge kisses. We’re all so equal now. How boring.

Cartoon, Comic, of Death
There’s more categories, of course: The cartoon kiss (“The Lady and the Tramp”), The kiss of death (“The Godfather – Part II”) and The comic kiss (Anne Bancroft exhaling cigarette smoke in “The Graduate”; Susana (Valerie Golina) kissing Raymond in the elevator in “Rain Man.” Both involve Dustin Hoffman. Some men know how to work it.)

How about “The kiss we’ve been waiting the entire freakin’ movie for”? Recent examples include “When Harry Met Sally” (that’s for you, Brenda), “Lost in Translation” (that’s for you, Brett), “Never Been Kissed” (that’s for you, Kelly) and “A Princess Bride” and “A Mighty Wind” (that’s for me).

And don’t forget “The kiss that sets up the rest of the movie.” In “Notorious,” we get exactly one scene where Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant are a couple, and most of it consists of a single, two-and-a-half minute take which includes many soft, nibbling, hungry kisses on the part of Ms. Bergman. Nice work if you can get it.

But I’ve saved the best for last.

The wow kiss
Let’s face it. Most of the time we know before the movie starts that this actor and that actress are going to kiss. It’s what people do in the movies. Most of the time, too, their characters know it, and desire it, and the kiss is just a culmination of something that’s been building and allows that something to continue on its trajectory. The kiss furthers trajectories but it doesn’t change trajectories.

I would argue that the best kisses in the movies are those that change trajectories. The characters are stunned — visually or verbally. They had seen their life going in this direction, and then they get the kiss and see it going in that direction. A kiss. Boom. Life changes.

In “The Philadelphia Story,” Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn) is about to marry that ass George Kittredge; but on the night before her wedding, she’s drunk and flirting with reporter Mike Conner (James Stewart), teasing him by calling him “Professor.” He shuts her up the best way he knows how. One kiss. “Golly,” she says. Two kisses. “Golly Moses,” she says. The next morning the wedding is called off. Oddly, she winds up marrying another man. Not so oddly, that man is Cary Grant.

Something similar occurs in “The Wedding Singer.” Julia (Drew Barrymore) is about to marry that ass Glenn, when, at the prompting of her cousin, she and wedding singer Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) practice the wedding kiss. Boom. They back away dazed. Life changes.

Finally there’s “The Year of Living Dangerously.” Guy (Mel Gibson) is a reporter in 1965 Jakarta and he’s begun a flirtatious friendship with diplomat Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), who is scheduled to return to Britain. At a swanky party, he takes her away from boring old men and out onto the veranda where he plants one and then asks her to leave with him. “I can’t leave with you now,” she says amused. “Everyone in Jakarta...” He plants another. Suddenly her voice gets serious and throaty. “I’m leaving in less than a week,” she says. It looks like he’ll go for a third, but he backs off and leaves the party. Before he can start his car, she gets in the passenger’s seat.

Now that’s good kissing.

By the way: Some people may consider this information incidental, but, as a writer, I feel it’s part of the public’s right to know — particularly the female public’s right to know. Two of the three “wow” kissers I just mentioned? They share the same occupation. They’re writers.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Never underestimate the power of “wet” and “prone.”

Reading Neal Gabler's book, “An Empire of Their Own,” about the early years of Hollywood, made me curious about Peter Bogdonavich's movie “Nickelodeon,” about the early years of Hollywood. I knew the movie had been panned in '76 but hoped it was one of those that aged well. Nope. Still a mess. Lurches between slapstick and melodrama. Not enough about, you know, nickelodeons. Just one scene in a nickelodeon, in fact, my favorite scene, when our troupe (actors, directors, etc.), realize the power of the movies ... for the actors. For the stars. But there wasn't enough of this: the moment of revelation into what would be.

At the same time, I was startled by the beauty, particularly in profile, of the leading lady, Jane Hitchcock (here with star Ryan O'Neal):

She also wasn't bad. As an actress. “Why haven't I heard of her?” I wondered. “What other movies has she made?” The answer to the second guestion was the answer to the first: none. She was a model who got the part because the studio refused to bankroll Cybill Shepherd, Bogdonavich's girlfriend, in the role, so Shepherd recommended her friend Jane. It's who you know and what your profile looks like. From IMDb.com:

Jane was the only novice in a star-studded cast that included Burt Reynolds and Ryan O'Neal fighting for her character's affections, creating a love triangle in the period film. Although, she gave a charming performance, she received mixed reviews, and the film became a flop. She was disappointed and acted in only one more project, before returning to her modeling career.

The other project was a TV movie starring Esther Rolle (of “Good Times”) and Kene Holliday (of “Carter Country”).

More about “Nickelodeon” from TCM:

In the story, the central characters, who have been toiling away at quickie shorts, go to see D.W. Griffith's landmark feature The Birth of a Nation (1915). Using footage from a special tinted archival print of the film, Bogdanovich and his actors convey the sense of excitement and wonder that accompanied the release of Griffith's film and the momentous change in the art and business of moviemaking that it signaled. After the fictional screening in the movie, the producer Cobb (played by Brian Keith), suddenly realizing the power of the medium, remarks that filmmakers are “giving people little pieces of time that they never forget,” a quote taken from an early Bogdanovich interview with James Stewart.

That's the part of the movie that should've worked but really didn't. Cobb, throughout, has been a blustering businessman, so why give him Jimmy Stewart's line—a line that has the ring of someone working in the industry, and believing in the industry, for decades? Meanwhile, O'Neal's character is too milquetoast and self-pitying to be of interest, while the more racist elements of “Birth” were left out at the Hollywood screening. I know I'm asking for the impossible, but what great mixed feelings we would've had watching our likeable stars getting excited by the KKK rescuing damsels from rapacious actors in blackface? Now that's entertainment.

Despite this, how little things have changed. I looked back 35 years to a movie that looked back 70 years to the birth of the movie industry, and my question was the question on the lips of audiences 100 years ago: Who's that girl?

I suppose it's appropriate that a documentary about Hollywood moguls such as Sam Goldwyn (née: Goldfish), Adolph Zukor (née; Cukor) and William Fox (née; Vilmos Fried) would come to me with its name changed. It's still annoying.

The doc in question is based on Neal Gabler's excellent book, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” and has a similar title: “Hollywood: An Empire of Their Own.”

At least that's what it's called on Netflix's Web site, Netflix's envelope sleeve and Netflix's DVD casing. But once you start watching it, the true name of the doc appears: “Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream.” It's from A&E, always a bad sign, and, though Gabler helped write it, the doc merely begins with Gabler's book, then goes further afield, into areas that feel legitimate (Superman: created by two Jewish kids), and illegitimate or downright lies (the positive images of African-Americans promulgated in 1930s Hollywood films).

In the process, the doc loses the personalities of these moguls: the fierce determination of William Fox or Adolph Zukor; the fierce paternalism of Louis B. Mayer. Harry Cohn, a fierce personality, a real SOB in life, actually comes off without personality here.

The thrust of both book and doc is more or less the same. The six major movie studios (MGM, Universal, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. and Columbia) were each created by Jews born within a 500-mile radius in Eastern Europe. Each fled the nightmare of pogroms and each created a dream factory on the west coast of the United States. These dreams were assimilative, patriotic, and family-oriented. At the same time the nightmare they fled is still reflected in their movies; it's just been transported. It can be seen, for example, when sudden violence (from outlaws, bandits, etc.) bears down on a hardworking family trying to scrape a living out of the American west.

“Hollywoodism” is ultimately too sloppy to recommend. Example: The first thing we see is that quintessential Hollywood western scene of sudden violence bearing down on a family, which reflects the violence of pogroms the moguls fled. “These images conceal memories,” the narrator intones. Except these images are from “Once Upon a Time in the West,” an Italian film, not a Hollywood film. It's Sergio Leone. It has nothing to do with the moguls or their memories. In fact, by the time Leone filmed this scene, all but one of the moguls were dead.

Stick with the book.

Louis B. Mayer (MGM), William Fox (20th Century Fox) and Adolph Zukor (Paramount).

Carl Laemmle (Universal), Harry Cohn (Columbia), Jack Warner (Warner Bros.)

Did you read Frank Rich's column last Sunday? Back in the Bush years, he was required reading for me. Less so now. That's actually good. It's nice to be able to disagree with him about a good president rather than huddle together in obvious opposition to a bad one.

His column Sunday was about the movies and America, specifically what “True Grit” and “The Social Network” say about different visions of America. It was much linked to and applauded.

But the article felt like half truths to me. Rich writes:

What is most stirring about “True Grit” today — besides the primal father-daughter relationship that blossoms between Rooster and Mattie — is its unalloyed faith in values antithetical to those of the 21st century America so deftly skewered, as it happens, in “The Social Network.”

He writes:

But what leaps out this time, to the point of seeming fresh, is the fierce loyalty of the principal characters to each other (the third being a vain Texas Ranger, played by Matt Damon) and their clear-cut sense of morality and justice, even when the justice is rough. More than the first “True Grit,” the new one emphasizes Mattie’s precocious, almost obsessive preoccupation with the law. She is forever citing law-book principles, invoking lawyers and affidavits, and threatening to go to court. “You must pay for everything in this world one way or another,” says Mattie. “There is nothing free except the grace of God.”

Loyalty? A bit, but hardly fierce. Mattie only goes on the trip in the first place because Cogburn finally allows it (Damon's character, LaBoeuf, is horse whipping her, remember). Cogburn and LaBoeuf constantly fight. They split up, come back together when the bad guys close in, and are on the verge of splitting up for good when Mattie sees Chaney, her father's killer, by the stream, and Chaney kidnaps her. These characters are really only as loyal to each other as I am to Frank Rich. I'm with him when the bad guys, the Chaneys/Cheneys of the world, are nearby or in power. Otherwise we squabble.

(Fun fact: Josh Brolin is the only actor who has played both Bush and Chaney.)

Rich then writes of “The Social Network”:

In contrast to Mattie’s dictum [“There is nothing free but the grace of God”], no one has to pay for any transgression in the world it depicts. Zuckerberg’s antagonists, Harvard classmates who accuse him of intellectual theft, and his allies, exemplified by a predatory venture capitalist, sometimes seem more entitled and ruthless than he is. The blackest joke in Aaron Sorkin’s priceless script is that Lawrence Summers, a Harvard president who would later moonlight as a hedge fund consultant, might intervene to arbitrate any ethical conflicts. You almost wish Rooster were around to get the job done.

This is also off. The Zuckerberg of “TSN” pays with his friends, particularly Andrew Garfield's Eduardo, and with his Rosebud of girlfriends, Erica Albright, with whom, at the end, he's still intent on connecting. He's someone who connects the world with each other but can't connect himself. That's his tragedy. That's how he pays.

(Agreement on Summers, by the way, whom the film portrays not only as too self-important to intervene in a student squabble but not visionary enough to see what Facebook might become. He scoffs that it's a million dollar idea when it becomes a multi- multi- billion-dollar idea. This man, by the way, with such strong vision, is once again economic advisor to the president of the United States.)

But that's as far as I got in my critique. Thank God for Richard Brody over at The New Yorker, an increasingly necessary read, who pretty much takes care of Rich in the opening graf:

Pundits who lay hold of movies often seem merely to filter them to yield predetermined results—as Frank Rich does, in Sunday’s Times, in a piece in which he draws tendentious conclusions from a comparison of the stories and the box-office results of the Coen brothers’ “True Grit” and David Fincher’s “The Social Network.”

Actually, “True Grit” is a success because it allows viewers to have their cake (the cake of extra-legal frontier justice) and to eat it (in the form of a wholesome recognition that the pursuit is damaging to the pursuers, and that, though the extrajudicial hunt makes for quite a show, it’s one that, in the modern age, is obsolete, enjoyable precisely and solely as a tall tale). It’s not a movie for the post-meltdown age but one for the post-9/11 age of devil-may-care vengeance.

Does “True Grit” feel like a tall tale to you? As movies go, it's fairly rooted in time and history. It's obviously wish fulfillment, and revenge fantasy, but less so than most Hollywood wish fulfillments and revenge fantasies. The hero is a drunk. His sidekick is full of hot air. The villain, Lucky Ned, has honor. Meanwhile, Mattie, forever using the fact of her lawyer as both bribe and cudgel, is the one who metes out frontier justice on Chaney. But we don't get to enjoy it. As soon as it happens, she begins to pay. Cogburn lost an eye, LeBoeuf nearly a tongue, and now she loses an arm. And a horse. And her youth. That's hardly devil-may-care. That's why the film resonates so. It lives up to its own principles. Nothing is free but the grace of God.

“True Grit” also resonates because it's a good metaphor—not for our time, or for a time long gone, but for our own interactions in times of crisis. Frank Rich, Richard Brody and I are squabbling now; but soon, too soon, the Cheneys of the world will be strong again and we'll ride together.

Rooster, not riding into the sunset.

I have a piece up on MSNBC.com on the oddity of Natalie Portman, Oscar nominee, ballet dancer and multilinguist, shacking up with Ashton Kutcher, tweeter and monosyllabist, in Ivan Reitman's romantic comedy “No Strings Attached.” 

Two weekends ago, when I was in the midst of writing it, some friends and I were at a multiplex in downtown Seattle, talking close to a big poster of “No Strings Attached.” Curious what others felt, curious if it was just me, I nodded toward the poster.

Me: And what do we think of that?

Pause.

Female friend: “Love her. Hate him.”

Pause.

Male friend: “She can do so much better.”

You can check out the piece here.

I have a piece in my alumni magazine about the Marx Brothers and a late '70s college organization called the Marx Brotherhood, and how me and my friend Nathan Kaatrud, who became Nash Kato of Urge Overkill, were the only high school members of that organization, and what the Marx Brothers meant to us, and what's become of them in the popular mind since. A sample:

The first Marx Brothers movie I saw was one of the last they made, A Night in Casablanca, from 1946, which my older brother and I watched one Friday night on WCCO-TV’s “Comedy and Classics,” hosted by John Gallos. I was 10, and their appeal was immediate. The world was full of dull phonies and lousy schemers, then the Marx Brothers burst on the scene and upended everything. They popped the pretensions in the room. While most of the other characters looked normal but felt fake, the Marxes were obviously fake—a bewigged mute with a trench coat full of tricks (Harpo), a piano player with a two-bit Italian accent (Chico), and a wiseass with a greasepaint moustache (Groucho)—but they had an air of authenticity about them. They were always themselves.

The whole thing here.

Honk honk.

It's the next two months that get busy, of course, but thus far it hasn't been a bad year for movies... if you live in a city that plays limited releases and you know where to look.

Here are my top 10* thus far**. No order—although “Un Prophete” and “Restrepo” probably top the list. We'll see what the next two months bring.

What about you? Favorites of 2010? Recommendations?

*click on the poster for the review

**Caveat: I have yet to see “Grown Ups.”

I'm writing a piece for my alumni magazine on a campus organization dedicated to the Marx Brothers, the Marx Brotherhood, which I belonged to in the late 1970s—before I was in college—and so rewatched some of their movies. They still make me laugh.

But one of the more startling moments came in an otherwise throwaway scene in “Horse Feathers.” Zeppo, playing Groucho's son, is about to visit “the college widow,” Connie Bailey (Thelma Todd), with whom he's having an affair, but runs into her maid, Laura, beforehand. They exchange pleasantries and Zeppo takes the breakfast tray from her and brings it to Connie himself.

What's startling? The maid is played by a pretty black actress, Theresa Harris, and contains none of the stereotypes associated with the era and the role. The performance, as small as it is, seems decades ahead of its time:

Apparently Theresa Harris was born in 1909, appeared in 81 movies, including “Baby Face,” “Jezebel,” and “Cat People,” and stopped acting in films just after Montgomery and just before Greensboro. She died of natural causes in 1985.

Has anyone written a book about her? A quick Internet search (Google, amazon) reveals bupkis.

Her Wiki bio. Other observant “Horse Feathers” watchers.

I always seem to be about a week behind in what I want to post about.

This piece, for example, “Longing for the Lines that Had Us at Hello,” showed up in The New York Times a week ago today, and it's been stuck in my craw, wherever my craw* is, ever since.

(*craw (n.): a pouch in many birds and some lower animals that resembles a stomach for storage and preliminary maceration of food)

One, it's by Michael Cieply, who's been a bit of a bete noire for me for the past few years. My site has a search function now, and if you search for “Cieply” you get 10 hits, most of them bitching about this or that now-forgotten article.**

(**My favorite of these is “Two Face,” from July 2008, in which Cieply's April prediction that “The Dark Knight” may underperform at the box office—because it's too gloomy at a time when people want to escape gloom—is juxtaposed with colleague Brooks Barnes' after-the-fact analysis that “The Dark Knight” did well at the box office because its gloominess reflected the national mood. Escape/reflect. Nice when the Times gets it both ways.) 

Two, it's about movie quotes, which I've written about before: once for MSNBC, once for me. So, egotistically, I feel like it's my turf.

Three, the Times' headline plays a bit with the text. Cieply's main argument, or thought, is: Where have all the good movie quotes gone? He doesn't mention longing.

Mostly, though, elitist that I am, I think the movie quotes that everyone quotes (“Show me the money!”) aren't as interesting as the movie quotes that movie lovers quote (“Takin' em off here, boss”). ***

(***Cieply also confuses the categories, putting “The Dude Abides” in the former when it's really the latter. “The Big Lebowski” kinda bombed on first viewing. It took years before quotes about the Dude started coming.)  

Here's the brunt of Cieply's argument:

Sticky movie lines were everywhere as recently as the 1990s. But they appear to be evaporating from a film world in which the memorable one-liner — a brilliant epigram, a quirky mantra, a moment in a bottle — is in danger of becoming a lost art.

I could argue that “Stupid is as stupid does” is not art, lost or otherwise. I could argue that sticky movie quotes get annoying fast. But there's really only one thing to say to Cieply at this point:

Why so serious?

What about you? What movie lines from the past 10 years do you quote? Feel free to put 'em in the comments field below.****

(****Shout-out to Joe Posnanski, from whom I got the idea of footnoting within the text of a blog post.)

Last Friday night a group of us went to Sitka & Spruce for our friend Paige's birthday, where the following photo was taken:

That's Paige on the left, Patricia on the right, me with the shit-eating grin in the middle.

Something about the photo, particularly the lucky bastard in the middle, the way he's leaning, a little bit of the charlatan in him, seemed familiar somehow. Today it finally hit me:

I guess if you have to model yourself on someone...

Tony Curtis, born Bernard Schwartz of the Bronx, died last night of a cardiac arrest at the age of 85. There's an excellent obituary from Dave Kehr of The New York Times here.

A few years ago, to coincide with the release of the Kevin Costner film “Mr. Brooks” (remember that one?), I wrote a piece for MSNBC.com called “When Leading Men Go Bad,” and counted down the top 8 villainous turns of Hollywood heroes. Tony Curtis's Boston Strangler came in at no. 5.

Godspeed, Josephine. Nobody's perfect, but your Cary Grant imitation came close.

5. Tony Curtis in “The Boston Strangler”

For an actor with a lousy rep —nominated by Michael Medved as the worst actor of all time in “The Golden Turkey Awards” — Tony Curtis has given us some great performances. He played a racist con chained to Sidney Poitier in “The Defiant Ones,” a servile PR flak chained to Burt Lancaster’s gossip columnist in “Sweet Smell of Success” and a Roman slave chained to Laurence Olivier in “Spartacus.” Not to mention his comic turn as Joe/Josephine/Cary Grant in “Some Like It Hot.”

But for most of the 1960s he played glib roles in frothy sex comedies like “Sex and the Single Girl” and “The Great Race.”

The first shock in “The Boston Strangler” is that Curtis, as Albert DeSalvo, isn’t there for the first hour of the film. We see only his boots and gloved hands, and the results of his crimes. When he does show up, well, he ain’t pretty no more. He’s broken-nosed and fleshier of face. We see him commit one crime, then two. In a way this is more than he sees.

Once he’s apprehended (on a breaking-and-entering charge), we find out he’s a split personality — he doesn’t know what he does — so Henry Fonda, as head of the commission tracking him, tries to break through to the other side. Curtis scrunches in his chair like a chastened schoolboy. He twitches. He has flashes of memory in which Fonda, his interrogator, appears. The film was made at a time when Hollywood was still trying to cinematically recreate inner as well as outer journeys, and “Strangler” exhibits this best when DeSalvo feels his wife has betrayed him: He sees her, suddenly, as if from a long distance away. Later, confused and blinking, he says the idea of strangling her popped into his head, but “How did she know?” He doesn’t yet realize he did try to strangle her. He doesn’t yet realize his “ideas” are the Strangler’s actions.

In his book “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” David Mamet calls Curtis’ performance here, “Some of the greatest moments of film acting.”

Which leads to the inevitable question: Is Michael Medved right about anything?

What's up with the MSNBC.com Movies page? For five years I freelanced for them, averaging about 20 pieces a year, but then they aggregated more and more unoriginal content (both senses) from AP and Newsweek, and eventually they ditched the freelance budget.

Aggregating is pretty much all they do now. Here's a screenshot from a few days ago...

The aggregated stories on the left-hand side are new but what's with the slideshows on the right? The bottom one, about "Doomsday Movies," is tied to the release of the film "2012," which came out last November, while the top trumpets such new December releases as "Avatar," "Up in the Air" and "Sherlock Holmes." I can hardly wait.

Seriously, does anyone from MSNBC even visit the site? Does anyone visit the site? One half expects an animated tumbleweed to come rolling across the screen.

Sad. It used to be a place to go to. Now it's this.

Well, I'm sure it's profitable anyway.

Thirteen months ago I was in Los Angeles interviewing Schuyler Moore, a transactional/tax/entertainment lawyer at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, for Southern California Super Lawyers magazine. Moore turned out to be one of my more fascinating interviews. The final article, entitled "A Bit of a Rebel with a Bit of a Cause," included this line: "Is it worse breaking your neck or losing your spleen? Academic question to almost everyone but Moore, who’s done both." Read the whole thing here. I know I'm biased but it's fascinating stuff.

I bring all this up now because what Moore was working on that day, a simple term sheet, has now come to fruiton:

“There’s a film called 'Machete' by Robert Rodriguez,” Moore says, “and it’s a pretty high-profile project, and my client [Hyde Park] wants to close the deal today.” His simple term sheet is now 57 pages. “People started sending attachments and approval lists and waterfalls and sales agent agreements that we kept attaching. So it’s now grown into this beast overnight.” Moore has simplified the waterfall—how the profits, if there are profits, get allocated—from 10 pages down to a couple of sentences, and others are e-mailing and phoning to sign off on this change. “I’m a big believer in E=MC²,” he says. “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

Later in the interview I realized to what extent Moore, who works in the entertainment industry, and who is in fact the grand-nephew of Billie Burke, who played Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, in "The Wizard of Oz," could care less about the product he helps create. That's part of what makes him fascinating:

“I don’t even know who Robert Rodriguez is,” he adds, referring to the "Machete" deal. “Everyone else seems to know who he is. He did 'Grindhouse' apparently?” He reads aloud the cast list attached to Rodriguez’s film: “Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez.” He pauses. “I know De Niro.”

"Machete" opens Friday. I haven't decided whether or not to see it, but I know that Moore, unless he's invited to the premiere, won't. He doesn't watch TV or see movies. I also know the movie won't be as interesting as he is. Probably a correlation there.

Two documentaries about the war in Afghanistan played during the recent Seattle International Film Festival: “Restrepo” and “The Tillman Story.”

I thought “Restrepo” one of the best docs I've ever seen. I thought “The Tillman Story” OK but hardly news.

My reaction turns out to be the exact opposite of Jeff Wells' reaction over at Hollywood Elsewhere. What I loved about “Restrepo,” he hated. What I disliked about “The Tillman Story,” he loved.

Our disagreement doesn't have much to do with politics. We're both lefties.

Our disagreement has to do with aesthetics. What's the point of a documentary? What's the point of a war documentary? What's the point of art?

I'll leave the “Tillman” doc alone. Suffice it to say that people should see it. Particularly if they haven't read Jon Krakauer’s book “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman,“ or are part of the ”Miss Me Yet?“ crowd. Or if they're George Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or... You get the idea.

As for ”Restrepo,“ Wells feels it fails because it fails to give us the big political picture. In a post he calls ”Afghanistan Bananistan,“ he writes:

I think I'm done with war documentaries that make a point of not offering any sort of opinion about anything — no history or context, no political point of view, just ”this is war, war is hell, taste it.“ Well, I'm sick of that shit after seeing Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger's Restrepo, a bravely captured, technically first-rate documentary about a year under fire in Afghanistan's Korangal Valley, a.k.a., ”the valley of death.“

There's no question whatsover that this movie lies through omission about what's really going on in Afghanistan in the broader, bigger-picture sense. I found myself becoming more and more angry about this after catching Restrepo two nights ago at the Walter Reade theatre, and especially after doing some homework.

In my review of ”Restrepo,“ written three weeks before Wells posted the above, I wrote:

“Restrepo” is the best thing I’ve seen or read about our presence in Afghanistan, and it’s not really about our presence in Afghanistan. It’s about, as the tagline says, one platoon, in one valley, for one year. It goes deep into these soldiers’ lives without telling us much about their actual lives (where they’re from, why they signed up, etc.). It’s an emotional movie precisely because its emotions are restrained. It’s artistic without being artistic. It’s artistic in the Dedalean sense. It doesn’t inspire kinetic emotions but static emotions. The mind is arrested. In this sense maybe Afghanistan itself is artistic. Our mind has been arrested there for almost 10 years.

”Dedalean sense“ is a bit hifalutin but it refers to Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce's ”A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.“ His definition of art is known to almost everyone—like myself—who wasted their college years as an English major:

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

Most movies are kinetic. Most documentaries are didactic, and you double-down on the didacticism if the doc is political. Wells, I would argue, wants ”Restrepo“ to be didatic. He wants it to say what he already knows—or what he finds out when he does his homework. That, I would argue, would be an OK doc but it wouldn't be ”Restrepo.“ ”Restrepo,“ I would argue, is better because it doesn't do this.

Another hifaultin quote about art, this one from Norman Mailer:

Art obviously depends upon incomplete communication. A work which is altogether explicit is not art, the audience cannot respond with their own creative act of the imagination, that small leap of the faculties which leaves one an increment more exceptional than when one began.

Part of the power of ”Restrepo“ lies in its restraint, in all that it holds back, in all that we feel as a result. It makes us care about these men and makes us wonder why they're there, and whether they should be there. We do this work, not the doc. We do this homework, if we haven't already. That's part of everything we bring to it. From A.O. Scott's review yesterday:

Like most movies of its kind, “Restrepo” avoids any explicit political discussion. The soldiers can’t wait to leave Korangal but are also determined to carry out their duties, and they don’t have the time or inclination to reflect on larger causes and contexts. But in their close observation of just how the war is being conducted, Mr. Junger and Mr. Hetherington provide plenty of grist for political argument. They also reveal one of the irreducible, grim absurdities of this war, which is the disjunction between its lofty strategic and ideological imperatives and the dusty, frustrating reality on the ground.

What are these guys doing there? It’s hard to watch this movie without asking that basic, hard question.

”Restrepo“ is a brilliant doc for other reasons as well. It sows confusion the way Afghanistan itself sows confusion. What is Restrepo? First it's a soldier. Then it's a dead soldier. Then it's an outpost, the furthest outpost in the Korangal Valley, named for this dead soldier. It's a name that hovers over everything.

The incident with the cow? First it's funny. Then it's happy (”That was a good day“). Then it's neither funny nor happy. It's yet another incident between the U.S. troops and the Afghan villagers that might be good but is probably bad. It's worrisome.

What about the enemy? It's an unseen enemy. We hear them fire on these men, and on the documentarians, but we never see them. Not once. That we know of. That, too, is worrisome.

Are we doing good there?

Is it worth it?

Should we leave?

What happens when we leave?

Hetherington and Junger trust us to come up with our own answers to these questions. They trust us to make that small leap of the faculties that leave us an increment more exceptional than when we began.

”Restrepo" opened yesterday in New York and L.A. It opens in Boston, Philly and Chicago on July 2; San Francisco, Houston and D.C. on July 9; and Dallas and Seattle on July 16.

The Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) ended a week ago Sunday after three packed weeks of movies. I saw eight of them. None of my films, not even “Restrepo,” wound up among the award winners (Golden Space Needle, etc.), which are listed on the SIFF site alphabetically. It's so like Seattle to list award winners alphabetically. We don't want to imply that one is better than another—even when we're saying that these are better than the others.

I'll say it, of course. Of the movies I saw, this is how I'd rank them:

1. “Restrepo”
2. “Au Revoir Taipei”
3. “Garbo: The Spy”
4. “L'enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot”
5. “The City of Life and Death”
6. “The Tillman Story”
7. “The Actresses”
8. “Zona Sur”

As for SIFF itself? It's a great film festival, a local treasure, the largest film festival in the country supposedly (in terms of attendance? length? films? all?), and just getting all of these films here so we can see them in a theater (as opposed to on DVD or not at all), and ahead of critics in N.Y. and L.A., makes one a bit abashed about any petty criticisms one may have.

But here I go being petty:

• I saw “Restrepo” at the Harvard Exit, a group of us waiting outside in the semi-drizzle for nearly an hour on the off-chance of getting in. We got in. But just as we were buying tickets several people butted ahead of us to buy their tickets. But not to “Restrepo,” we found out. To “Les Secrets de sus Ojos.” Which was not part of the festival but was playing at the Harvard Exit nonetheless. I'm sure there was a reason a separate box office hadn't been set up for this non-festival movie, but I doubt the reason is worth the anxiety and bad feelings, for both “Restrepo” folks and “Ojos” folks, that the one line engendered.
• The next day I saw “Zona Sur” at Pacific Place downtown. A separate box office had been set up there, but it was a separate box office with two lines: one to buy tickets, one to pick up tickets. I was in the pick-up tickets line. Unfortunately the pick-up tickets line was the outer line while the pick-up window was the near window, and this meant folks trying to pick up tickets had to cross through the line of folks trying to buy tickets. Once again: confusion and anxiety. Those of us in line talked about how the lines (or the windows) should be switched, and I did my complaining perhaps a trifly loudly (I'm a charmer that way), and when I got to the window, the SIFF volunteer at the other window complained to me about me. Basically he said I should zip it. When I said that all they needed to do was switch the lines and everything would be OK, he interrupted with, “Sir? Sir? Please don't feed the chaos!” A funny line, but in the end it solved nothing.

But all in all my experience this year was better than my experience last year, when the movie I most wanted to see, the “Mesrine” two-parter with Vincent Cassell, was canceled at the last minute. (I think our print wound up in my least-favorite state: Texas.) I still haven't seen that movie yet. On Netflix, its arrival date is “Unknown.” On the plus side, Scarecrow Video in Seattle says they have it for region 1 players.

As for SIFF's Award winners? I'll have to check them out. But I wouldn't be surprised if they were a little too arty for my taste. SIFF listed “Restrepo” as the fourth-best documentary of the festival, and, for the moment, I refuse to believe that three other documentaries could be that good.

The poll below was recommended by my nephew Jordy. Vote early! Vote often!

"Grandmother, melancholy grips my heart when I think of your old violin."

—Opening words of a trailer for a film playing at SIFF, the Seattle International Film Festival. I'm a SIFF fan but this is almost a parody of an overly precious SIFF film.

There's been noise from some quarters that the negative reviews of "Sex and the City 2" are sexist, but this counterargument lands with a thud. Critics take down anything that's bad. That's what we do. We recommend what's good. That's what we do. Excusing "SATC 2" as escapist fantasy for women, while contrasting it with escapist fantasies for men such as "Taken," reveals what's truly bad about "SATC 2." (Which I haven't even seen yet, so...grain of salt.)

"Taken" is about a man who's increasingly relevant. He's necessary and important. Thus he acts as a fantasy figure for audience members who, most likely, feel increasingly unnecessary and unimportant in the world. He also answers every dramatist's first question: What does the guy want? He wants to get his daughter back. The movie is about everything he goes through to get that done.

"SATC 2" is about four women who are increasingly irrelevant. Why is this escapist fantasy? Because of the designer clothes and bags? Meanwhile, the main character, Carrie, doesn't even bother to answer the dramatist's first question. She doesn't know what she wants. She never has. With the exception of Big, whom she now has. Answered prayers.

I doubt I'll see it—SIFF's on—but here are some of the better comments I've read:

"Sex and the City 2" is more than harmless escapism. It's an accidental candid snapshot of the sick, dying heart of America, a film so pleased with its vacuous, trashy, art-free extravagance that its poster should be taped to the dingy walls of terrorist sleeper agents worldwide. More depressing and alarming than the movies themselves is the notion that a certain culture, a certain mindset, birthed it, without a pang of remorse or even apparent self-awareness, much less self-criticism. Ladies and gentlemen, this is why they hate us.
—Matt Zoller Seitz, IFC.com

The thinking behind the movie (written and directed by Michael Patrick King) is undisguised. Let’s start with an over-the-top gay wedding! Then we’ll send the girls to Abu Dhabi so they can rile up the fundamentalists with their sexuality! Then they’ll make fun of women in niqab (“Certainly cuts down on the Botox bill!”) but later show (campy) feminist solidarity! Won’t they look great swishing around the desert being waited on by smooth young Arab men?
—David Edelstein, New York

In one scene, Carrie asks her personal hotel butler, Guarau (Raza Jaffrey), about his family. His wife is back in India, he tells her; he flies home to see her every few months, when he can afford the fare. Carrie looks at him for a moment in silence, and we wonder: Is it possible she's confronting the unimaginable gulf that separates their two lives, the vast global network of consumption, exploitation, and injustice that's brought them together in this alien and alienating place? But no: Although she will later do Guarau a good turn, Carrie is merely wondering how she can get Big to appreciate her as much. Perched at the pinnacle of material comfort and social privilege in the waning days of the American empire, she can still find something to pout about.
—Dana Stevens, Slate.com

Roger Ebert gives us nine reasons "Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should, Too)" in Newsweek magazine. Here's a 10th reason from me. Maybe it's encompassed in one of the others, such as "It Adds Nothing to the Experience" or "Have You Noticed That 3-D Seems a Little Dim?," but it seems important enough to stand alone:

It makes the movies seem SMALL.

I noticed this while watching "Up" in 3-D last year. By creating volume for the 3-D image, it seems to shrink it. The characters don't seem as big, the canvas doesn't seem as wide. It's no longer bigger than life. Maybe you need 2-D to seem bigger than life. Maybe that's what bigger than life means: two dimensions. I preferred "Up" in 2-D, when the colors, per Roger, seemed glorious, and when my imagination, per Roger, provided that third dimension.

Roger's is a good starting point to a counter-argument that no one in Hollywood will listen to. Because they have 2.7 billion reasons not to. Because they think "Avatar"'s success was built solely on 3-D, which is something they can control, rather than expert storytelling and attention to detail, which they can't.

There are important things to say about movie violence, but A.O. Scott, in his piece in The New York Times last week, “Brutal Truths About Violence,” doesn’t say them.

He takes two recent movies that have little to do with each other, or, to be honest, with the film culture at large—“Kick Ass,” which opened below expectations in April, and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” which barely opened in the U.S. at all (153 theaters)—ties them together, and tips them over. He creates his own tipping point. “Enough is enough,” he writes. Or in typically qualifying fashion: “We will, I suppose, each find our own limits and draw our own boundaries [about movie violence], but it may also be time to articulate those and say when enough is enough.”

The problem? These two movies display completely different attitudes about violence. Scott would argue that both revel in it, but at the least they’re polar opposites in intent: “Dragon Tattoo” is trying to make you feel the violence (so you can be horrified), while “Kick Ass” needs you inured to violence (so you can laugh at it).

At this point in his article, though, we’re merely having a mild disagreement. What propelled me to write this post is the way he dissects two scenes of rape and revenge in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” He writes:

[Director Niels Arden Oplev’s] feminist impulse is overpowered by the unwavering attention, pornographic in form if not intent, to the vulnerable, suffering, sexualized bodies on the screen. While the film may want to draw a moral distinction between the episodes — one an unprovoked and heinous assault, the other an act of righteous vengeance — their intensity renders them equivalent.

Renders them equivalent? I don’t know what this means. That they’re both intense? Or that their very intensity renders their differences meaningless? And if the latter, is this specific to “Dragon Tattoo"? Or does the intensity of, say, Dirty Harry killing Scorpio render it morally equivalent to Scorpio killing innocent people?

Hardly stopping for a breath, Scott then ties "Dragon Tattoo" to one of the most infamous movies ever made:

The 1978 exploitation film “I Spit on Your Grave” was widely reviled upon its release, but the violation and vengeance it presents, and the detail with which it depicts a gang rape and a victim’s serial revenge, are not so far from what is shown in “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Both belong on a spectrum with Gaspar Noé’s “Irreversible” (2002), which narrated its story of rape and revenge out of order, and collapsed any meaningful distinction between condemning sexual brutality and reveling in it.

I haven’t seen “Irreversible” so I can’t comment on it. I have seen “I Spit on Your Grave.” Parts of it. And I can comment on why “Dragon Tattoo” is not on the same planet.

Here’s the IMDb plot description for “Spit”:

An aspiring writer is repeatedly gang-raped, humiliated, and left for dead by four men whom she systematically hunts down to seek revenge.

Now here’s the plot description for “Dragon Tattoo.” Apologies for its verbosity:

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, ruthless computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet's disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from almost forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vanger's are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves.

The rape-revenge cycle of “Spit on Your Grave” is the whole story. It was designed to appeal to our darker, prurient desires, and then to metaphorically kill them off, one by one.

The rape/revenge scenes of “Dragon” aren’t even mentioned in this overlong synopsis. The movie’s themes are certainly about “men who hate women” (it’s the Swedish title of both novel and movie: “Män som hatar kvinnor”), but the movie’s a mystery, a thriller, a crime drama, and a kind of romance/buddy tale. The rape/revenge scenes, if we haven’t read the novel, actually come as a shock. They come, to be honest, as a kind of disappointment. Lisbeth is our hero here. We thought she was too smart to get trapped in this manner. It’s like watching Spider-Man getting raped.

Which brings me back to this line:

But [Oplev’s] feminist impulse is overpowered by the unwavering attention, pornographic in form if not intent, to the vulnerable, suffering, sexualized bodies on the screen. [Emphasis mine.]

Again, I’m not quite sure what he means. “Pornographic” in the sense that the scenes show naked bodies? Or “pornographic” in the sense that the scenes arouse lust? I certainly agree with the former definition (we see two people naked) but not the latter. At least the scenes raised no lust in me. And I’m hardly a boy scout.

Rape scenes are always going to inspire some mix of horror and lust, and the goal of a responsible filmmaker, as opposed to an exploitation filmmaker, is to tamp down the lust and increase the horror. And the best way of doing this it to let us know the woman. Let us care about the woman. She can’t be a stranger and she can’t be fake.

Oplev does this. Lisbeth is never sexualized during the film—that helps—but more importantly, at this point in the story, we know enough about her to care about her. Lisbeth reminds us of women we know so we care what happens to her; the woman in “Spit” reminds us of women we don’t know so we don’t. It helps that Noomi Rapace in “Dragon” is a real actress and Camille Keaton in “Spit” is not. She’s a B-movie actress in the middle of an exploitation film, and almost every scene is so badly produced it reminds us that it’s being staged. She can’t remind us of women we know because she’s obviously not real.

There's great irony in Scott's piece. Certain violent movies, he argues, create equivalence (through intensity) or collapse distinctions (through chronology), but I would argue it's actually Scott who does this. He focuses on meaningless similarities and ignores meaningful distinctions. That's either no way to begin a serious discussion about movie violence...or the best way.

There's a nice piece in the Sunday New York Times by A.O. Scott on the career of Meryl Streep and her 16 Oscar nominations—for which she has won exactly two, and not since 1984 (for a 1983 movie)—and he asks the question that probably shouldn't be asked: "Has she received too much recognition or too little?" Then he sheds that awful journalistic ambiguity and gets out with it: "Meryl Streep is the best screen actress in the world." There we go.

He talks about her progression: "The movies that established Ms. Streep as a formidable, even intimidating on-screen force were marked by heavy themes and deep, dark dramatic moods: Vietnam, divorce, the Holocaust, missing children, nuclear anxiety." He suggests she's improved: "She began to reveal a playful, mischievous side, an anarchic impulse that, joined to her formidable timing and technique, has blossomed in the past 10 years or so." I agree. I particularly agree with "anarchic impulse." That's a nice turn of phrase. But Scott really hits his stride while talking about '80s movies in general:

Sandwiched between the endlessly mythologized Golden Age of ’70s New Hollywood and the now almost equally sentimentalized decade of the American Indies, the ’80s are comparatively bereft of nostalgic movie-fan affection or revisionist critical love. And yet the respectable films of that era may represent the last gasp of a noble middlebrow ideal. They were ambitious, unapologetically commercial projects intended for the entertainment and edification of grown-up audiences, neither self-consciously provocative nor timidly inoffensive. Some of us grew up on movies like “Sophie’s Choice” and “Out of Africa,” and our fondness outlasts the sense that we eventually outgrew them. Nowadays “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “A Cry in the Dark” would be scruffy little Sundance movies. “Out of Africa” would be in French. “Silkwood” would be “The Blind Side.”

He should've excised that last example. I like the others. The "Kramer vs. Kramer" reference reminded me of what I wrote about "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" two years ago ("...by the end of its run, 'Cuckoo’s Nest,' a dark film about mental patients—that today would probably get a limited release in art houses—finished second only to 'Jaws' in annual box office"); while, yes, the French still make their nostalgic, dull, magic-hour epics, such as "Un long dimanche de fiancaille." But the "Silkwood"/"Blind Side" comparison is jarring. Both focus on heroic women but one's very liberal and gritty and anti-corporate and has a sad, ambiguous end, and the other's very conservative and family-oriented and pro-business and has a Hollywood ending that isn't less Hollywood for being real. Scott needed a better editor there.

But noble middlebrow ideal? He's exactly right. See the above link and this post from last year's Oscars that I'd all but forgotten about until I ran into it yesterday. Apologies in advance for the Jeff Wellsian "he's right because I agree with him and I was there first" riff.

As for Streep? Scott's words are good but not as good as Morgan Freeman's in this NY Times video in which various actors talk about the best performances of the decade. Some go obscure. Jeff Bridges picks Mike White from "Chuck and Buck." Some don't even remember names or movies. Then we see Morgan Freeman, unamused, and he tells us: "Meryl Streep in anything she's done in the last 50 years." You think he's going to expound but then he looks back at the camera, unamused. End story.

Meant to mention this a couple of weeks ago but we've updated the Movie Reviews section on the site, so now you can sort by year or by genre as well as by title. Much better. At the same time it made me realize what a mixed bag of reviews I have. For the first half of this decade I was a back-up critic at The Seattle Times, which mostly meant reviewing 1) foreign films, 2) documentaries, and 3) Hollywood crap. Give or take a foreign film or doc, it was mostly forgettable stuff. For the second half of the decade, I wrote longer, opinion pieces for MSNBC rather than reviews of individual movies. 2009 was really the first year in which I consistently reviewed the big movies. Of course the pay suffered.

We've also posted the "Three Stories with J.D. Salinger" piece on the General Articles page.

Like any guy I'm poorly prepared on Valentine's Day—these things do sneak up, don't they?—so, checking the cupboards, I offer you this old, hopefully not too stale box of chocolates: My 2006 MSNBC piece on Hollywood's most memorable kisses via the following unscientific categories: the desperate kiss, the kiss in the rain, the manhandle kiss, the woman takes charge, and the wow kiss. Also this nearly 200-year-old poem from Leigh Hunt:

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add
Jenny kissed me.

Enjoy the day.

Stuck in the rut of their perfection.

I don't have much to say about the Golden Globes except Patricia and I watched them—the first hour live before heading out to a Sunday-night dinner party, the rest on DVR Monday as she recovered from oral surgery and I built an IKEA TV cart. (Their motto: so easy even Erik Lundegaard can build one.) I wrote about the sorry history of the Globes last year, and if anything was surprsing this year it was the lack of sorry history. Sure, I would've gone Mulligan over Bullock for best actress, and Damon or Stuhlberg for best actor in a comedy or musical over Downey, Jr.—even though I haven't seen "Sherlock Holmes" and love me some Downey, Jr.—but it's not a bad list. Gervais was funny, rippingly so at times, most of the speeches were good. Two highlights:

• Michael Giacchino winning best soundtrack for "Up." He gets to the podium, has to squeeze in past Cher, who doesn't seem to know where she is, and says: "I just can't believe Paul McCartney said, 'Go, Michael!' That's like awesome. I don't know if I have anything else to say, that's like the greatest thing in my life right there." Anyone of a like age, even non-musicians, know what he's talking about. He went on to talk about Pixar as his family. It was short, sweet, heartwarming, spoke to a generation.
• Martin Scorsese winning the Cecil B. DeMille Award. The highlight reel worked well in terms of theme and music, but, like most things these days, I thought it was too quick-cut, went too fast. But it was Marty's speech I truly loved. Even this went too fast for me. I could listen to him talk about movies for hours and days, not minutes, and recommend, if you haven't seen them, or even if you have, his two documentaries on movies: "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies" and "My Voyage to Italy." As I wrote two years I still hope to someday see "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through World Cinema." His speech Sunday night had elements of that in it. It focused not on his accomplishments but the accomplishments of the medium:

If you've ever sat through the end credits of a movie you know how many people it takes to make a picture: 200, 300, 500. If it's an average of even 300, and I've made 40, 50 movies, including documentaries, that's quite a lot. And saying that movies is a collaborative process is not a cliche, it's the truth. I've collaborated with a lot of people, many of them are here tonight. I want to thank them all. ... I'm especially moved and grateful to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. They've provided The Film Foundation with enormous support for more than 12 years, making possible the restoration of over 70 films. Just a couple of titles: masterpieces like Stanley Kubruck's "Paths of Glory," Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd," and the stunning new color restoration of Michael Powell's and Emmeric Pressburger's "The Red Shoes." Without this generosity the film community would be poorer indeed and the history of film would be incomplete. Because as William Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It is not even past." And as far as I'm concerned, making films and preserving them are the same thing. In this room, none of us who make films and watch them would be here without the people who came here before us. Whether it’s DeMille, Hitchcock, the Senegalese filmmaker Sembène, Kurosawa or John Ford, de Sica, Bergman, Satiajit Ray, we’re all walking in their footsteps every day, all of us…

That's total class. If Gervais pricked the self-importance of stars and awards shows, Scorsese showed why what was being awarded Sunday night mattered after all.

Another example of how liberal Hollywood isn't is the paucity of good movies about the civil rights movement. You've got your documentaries ("Eyes on the Prize"; "Four Little Girls"), one or two good movies starring white people ("Mississippi Burning"), and a good biopic on a man who, for most of his public career, denigrated the civil rights movement ("Malcolm X").

Recommendation: an HBO movie from 2001, "Boycott," starring Jeffrey Wright as a young Dr. King and Terrence Howard as a young Rev. Ralph Abernathy. In an MSNBC piece on Wright in 2005, I wrote the following about "Boycott":

I remember the first time I became aware of this film. I was at Scarecrow Video in Seattle and from the TV above the counter I heard Dr. King giving a speech. Except it was not his rousing “I have a dream” voice; it was his everyday sermon voice that lingered on words but never reached for the stratosphere. Save for the richness of the baritone, it was almost boring, and I wondered why they were showing one of Dr. King’s boring speeches at Scarecrow. But when I looked up it wasn’t Dr. King talking but Jeffrey Wright. I’d seen him play the graffiti artist Basquiat and the Dominican druglord Peoples Hernandez in “Shaft.” Now Dr. King.

When I finally saw the film what blew me away was not just the imitation — that he could do both versions (rousing and everyday) of the public Dr. King — but that he was able to articulate a private Dr. King that felt real. Let’s face it. In most Hollywood biopics great figures are, to quote “Amadeus,” “people so lofty they sound as if they s--t marble.” Not here. Jeffrey Wright’s private Dr. King teases and jokes. He flirts with his wife. While getting ready for bed, when she asks him if he thinks their neighbors will give up their cars to aid the boycott, his rich baritone drops to a purr. “Well,” he says, getting close, “I’ve been told I have certain powers of persuasion.”

The theme of “Boycott” is that history just doesn’t happen. History is a series of choices, and the filmmakers work hard to show you the choices that began the civil rights movement. To do this they need a human Dr. King who works things through — from simply asking for a more humane bus system to demanding the elimination of segregation itself. It’s not just a great performance. No one will ever do a better Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let me repeat that: No one will ever do a better Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Everyone and their brother has posted this already but last week the New York Times gave us a great interactive feature tracing the popularity of 2009 Netflix rentals by zip code. Here's mine in Seattle, for example:

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2. Milk
3. Slumdog Millionaire
4. Burn After Reading 
5.  Twilight
6. Changeling
7. The Wrestler
8. Doubt
9. Rachel Getting Married 
10. I Love You, Man

What do the above movies have in common? Most are smart, some are Oscar contenders, only a handful did well at the box office.

But that's hardly news, is it? More interesting is the fact that you can calculate the racial makeup of cities by toggling toward films such as "Not Easily Broken," starring Morris Chestnut, which was very rented in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, but nowhere rented in Seattle and Minneapolis and Denver. Not a speck of color on those maps. Same with "Obsession" or any Tyler Perry flick. In fact you can guess which is the whitest (or least-African-American) city of the three based on these rentals. According to Netflix's maps? Seattle. And that checks out. According to 2005-07 data, the African-American population in these cities are: 8.2% in Seattle, 9.9% in Denver, and 17.7% in Minneapolis.

Equally intriguing is calculating where films such as "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" are popular (in the South) and where they aren't (in cities). It's the anti-"Milk," which is hugely popular in cities and not at all in outlying areas. Looking at these maps, you realize, yet again, that we're hardly "one nation," let alone "under God." And don't even get me started on "with liberty and justice for all."

Quick quiz. The maps below represent the 2009 Seattle Netflix rental habits for four movies: "Paul Blart: Mall Cop," "Rachel Getting Married," "Cadillac Records" and "Seven Pounds." The darker the color the more popular the film in that area. Click on each map for its answer.

The big question about the rebooting of the Spider-Man franchise, which I didn't ask in my post yesterday, is whether the reboot will become the new norm. The point, in other words, is no longer to tell a story (the movie), or to continue telling the same story (the sequel) but to tell the same story over and over again (the reboot).

And who wants the same story told to them over and over again? Children. Young children. Our culture is definitely infantile but I'm sure it'll keep surprising me with how infantile it is.

One also wonders if Sony will take a page out of the "Dark Knight" playbook by making the first movie about the origin of the superhero while saving the best villain for the first sequel. I wouldn't be surprised.

What's interesting is that Sony's reboot is in direct contrast to what Marvel Entertainment/Studios is attempting to do with their characters/movies. They're treating movies like issues, and builiding toward the creation of The Avengers. They want the whole Marvel Comic universe onscreen, having new adventures, rather than telling the same story again and again.

Oh well. What are the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John if not a reboot of Mark?

The reboot: Marvel was there first. "Tell us that story again, Daddy."

The Sunday New York Times, print edition, had a great section—section, kids—on the Oscars. All yer Oscar news is one spot. You just flip pages. 

First, the front page of the section explicated three great scenes from 2009: Dargis on one of the bomb defusings in "The Hurt Locker" (good brief history of the zoom, too); Holden on "The Messenger" (which, in November, was playing a block from where I work, but which I criminally never saw); and my favorite of the bunch, A.O. Scott on the snowball fight in "Where the Wild Things Are" (a truly underrated film that will hopefully get more attention). I'm a fan of these kinds of scene explications. I've done a few myself.

The section also included an appeal for a Doris Day Oscar (whatever), Mo'Nique's refusal to politick for an Oscar (whatever whatever), and Terrence Rafferty on George Clooney (now we're talking!):

When he finally found a role in which he looked entirely at ease, it was in a film that was neither a standard-issue piece of studio entertainment nor quite an offbeat indie, but something in between: Steven Soderbergh’s tricky comic caper movie “Out of Sight” (1998), based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, and with all the noirish eccentricity that implies. Mr. Leonard’s skewed world, in which competence, wit and unfussy romance are highly prized — and constantly endangered, because there are always way too many thugs and morons about — turns out to be an environment in which Mr. Clooney (if not his character) can thrive.

His performance is all sly looks and bone-dry readings, held together by a general air of barely contained exasperation at the antics of the fools and knaves who surround him. And although he’s a thief and an escaped convict, he looks with undisguised admiration at the United States marshal who’s trying to bring him to justice: she knows her job, and she’s Jennifer Lopez besides.

His style in “Out of Sight” is too elusive, too stylized — it’s like lowlife Restoration comedy — to serve as a repeatable, bankable star persona, but it’s the foundation, in a way, for everything good he’s done since then, the theme on which he works his small, increasingly subtle variations. The larcenous gulf war soldier he plays in David O. Russell’s inventive “Three Kings” (1999) is a tougher, slightly bitterer version of his “Out of Sight” character, and it fits.

On the back page we get the annual, "And the Oscars Should Be...," which is always fun because it's so disagreeable—in the sense that the three Times critics rarely agree with each other. Even with 10 options for best picture this year, only one film showed up on all three ballots: "The Hurt Locker." My tastes run with Ms. Dargis' here: "Summer Hours," "Avatar," "The Hurt Locker," "Where the Wild Things Are," and "The Informant!" All the 22 films listed are good, though. Well, I still don't get the critical love for "District 9." A.O.

But I'm with A.O. on best director: Assayas, Bigelow, Cameron, Coens, Soderbergh. (I wonder why no one picked Jonze as best director, though, since two of the three chose "Where the Wild Things Are" among best pics. That kid didn't direct himself, people.) Does Manohla get intentionally quirky with her acting choices? George Clooney for "Fantastic Mr. Fox"? Zoe Saldana for "Avatar"? James Galdolfini for "Wild Thing"? Two voice performances and a voice/movement performance. Maybe she's making a comment about modern acting.

The only actor on all three lists? Colin Firth for "A Single Man." No actress makes all three. Ditto the supporting roles. Original screenplay? Just Mark Boal for "The Hurt Locker." Adapted? Rien.

Eight categories, 45 slots, and they agree on just four. Fun! 

It's made me begin to think about my choices. (McKay will most likely get a supporting actor nod from me, for example.) What about you? Where are you disagreeable?

Boal and Bigelow: Two of the four that the three agree on

We got the news yesterday, via Nikki Finke's site, that Sam Raimi walked away from "Spider-Man 4" because he couldn't deliver on the summer 2011 release date and didn't want to compromise the series' "creative integrity." (Yeah, we know: "Spider-Man 3.") With him went everything, including Toby Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, and now Sony's planning a reboot with a new director and a new Peter Parker/Spider-Man. And 3-D. The fall-out from the success of "Avatar," I guess. Now every studio will be pushing 3-D the way that, after the success of Cameron's "Titanic," every studio pushed movies with water. Because that was the obvious lesson of "Titanic" to them: People like water. So with "Avatar": People like 3-D. They do, but within limits. "X Games 3D—The Movie" was hardly a hit in August, for example. "A Christmas Carol" did OK in November, $137 million, but 16 non-3-D films did better for the year. You need more than 3-D.

More to the point: A reboot? Of Spider-Man? The original wasn't even 8 years ago! Is that by how much we're speeding things up? By the time Warner Bros. rebooted the Batman franchise, four movies and 16 years had passed. By the time Sony reboots Spider-Man, three movies and 10 years will have passed. Do I hear two movies and 6 years? One movie and 3 years? Hey, let's keep telling the same story over and over and over again.

Oh wait, please don't tell me: Shia LeBeouf? No, can't be.

And this was a successful franchise—one of the most successful franchises of the '00s. The first movie had the highest domestic gross of 2002. The second had the second-highest domestic gross of 2004. The third had the highest domestic gross of 2007. Can't get much better than that.

One wonders what the creative conflict was—and how creative that conflict was. Or was the problem financial? Raimi supposedly wanted a $230 million budget. The L.A. Times also adds:

The studio said it would hire a new star and director and re-boot the movie as a story about Parker's early life as a "teenager grappling with contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises." Because Sony is essentially starting from scratch, the studio has pushed the picture's release to 2012.

"Contemporary" human problems? As opposed to the outdated problems he grappled with originally? Like love, death, guilt, shame?

Somewhere, Electro, the Scorpion, and Kraven the Hunter are sitting back down.

"It was, readers of The New York Times recently learned, a very good year for Paramount Pictures. Two of the year’s biggest hits, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” have helped the studio climb out of its financial hole with a combined domestic take of more than $500 million. Both movies are deeply stupid, often incoherent and hinged on the principle that the spectacle of violence is its own pleasurable end. “Transformers” is also casually racist. But hey, that’s entertainment.

Or, more specifically, that’s Hollywood entertainment in the conglomerate age. The major studios have long been in the business of serving sludge to the world, but now the reek often spreads around the globe simultaneously with massive coordinated openings. “Revenge of the Fallen,” for instance, opened the same day on more than 4,000 screens in the United States — about a 10th of all the screens in the country — and soon about 10,000 more abroad. “Angels & Demons,” the sequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” opened on some 3,500 screens domestically and ate up more than 10,000 internationally. The French film “Summer Hours,” meanwhile, the best-reviewed release in The Times that weekend, opened on two screens.

—Manohla Dargis, "Amid Studio Product, Independents' Resilience," December 17, 2009

Heroes for our time? No, heroes for the opposite of our time:

• "The International" (Clive Owen tries to bring down an international bank just as we were trying to prop ours up.)
• "Up in the Air" (George Clooney fires people as unemployment hits 10%.)

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers:

• "Up"
• "L'Heure d'ete"

They think they're the heroes of their story when they're the villains of their story:

• "Observe and Report"
• "The Informant!"

They can't change that history, can they?:

• "Star Trek" (in which they blow up the planet Vulcan)
• "Inglourious Basterds" (in which they kill Hitler in June 1944)

Flunkying for the rich and famous isn't all it's cracked up to be:

• "Funny People"
• "Me and Orson Welles"

Movies about the people you care about before they did the thing you care about:

• "Coco Before Chanel"
• "The Damned United"

"Someone's hiding some Judaism..." OK, maybe not:

• "A Serious Man"
• "Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg"

Don't worry; we'll care about your art after you die:

• "Seraphine"
• "Bright Star"

Body doubles:

• "Avatar"
• "Surrogates"

This was a tough list to compile. I didn't include a few I thought I would, such as “An Education,” “Red Cliff,” and “Up in the Air,” but I did include a few that will cause some head scratching. That's part of the fun.

These are the movies that had an impact for me that resonated. Some were a joy to watch (“Up”), others were hard to watch (“The Hurt Locker”). Some I still don't fully understand (“A Serious Man”), others I felt deep in my gut (“Anvil! The Story of Anvil”). My no. 1 movie was pleasant enough, then worked on me, both subtly and deeply, ever since. Four of the 10 I've seen twice: “Up,” “Seraphine,” “Avatar” and “The Soloist.”

There are a few contenders I haven't had the chance to check out yet: “Broken Embraces,” “The White Ribbon,” “Crazy Heart.” But the year's at an end and the list needs to get out. Kind of. In E.L. Doctorow's “The Book of Daniel,” Daniel's sister, a '60s radical, upon hearing of Daniel's future plans, tells him, “Just what the world needs, Daniel—another graduate student.” So it is here. Just what the internet needs, Erik—another top 10 list. Hopefully there's something on the list that makes it worthwhile for you.

10. “Inglourious Basterds”: We know the plan won't work. Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Bormann are all at the premiere, and it’s June 1944, and this isn’t the way they go. Hitler and Goebbels kill themselves in their bunker in April 1945. Bormann, it’s assumed, died trying to escape the Red Army in May 1945, while Goering killed himself with cyanide after being sentenced to death during the Nuremberg trials in 1946. We know they won’t die here. At the same time we wonder how Tarantino will handle it. How will he let the Nazis get away but still make it satisfying for us? Here’s how he handles it: He kills them all in June 1944. ... You could argue that Hitler’s merely a prop to him, a movie villain, the way that, say, the Sheriff of Nottingham is a movie villain. He can kill him any way he wants. And this is the way he wants. This is the way that suits his story rather than history. Or you could go deeper. The greatest villain of the 20th century escaped our clutches. Yes, he took the coward’s way out in that bunker but we didn’t begin to get our revenge for all of the death and destruction he caused. The movies have recreated that moment, that horribly uncinematic moment in the bunker, time and time again, but they’ve always played by Hitler’s rules. They always gave him the end he chose. Until Tarantino. Who machine guns his face into oblivion in June 1944. Full review here.

9. “The Informant!”: As the film opens, there’s a virus eating both the lysine in the ADM plants and the profits that the conglomerate demands, and Whitacre’s getting the blame from the son of the boss for not solving the problem. It’s amusing but unfair—in the way that sons-of-bosses are always amusing but unfair. Then Whitacre gets a call from a Japanese colleague who says an ADM mole is responsible for the virus and he’ll reveal the name for $10 million. Rather than pay off, the higher-ups at ADM bring in the FBI, who tap Whitacre’s personal line to find out more. This bothers Whitacre—first a little, then a lot—and with his wife’s prodding he reveals to FBI agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) that ADM and the Japanese are involved in price-fixing the international lysine market. Which is how Whitacre turns informant. “Mark, why are you doing this?“ Shepard asks at one point. “Because things are going on that I don’t approve of,” he says. “They’re making me lie to people.” Hold that thought. Full review here.

8. ”The Soloist“: ”The Soloist“ comes close to being a remarkable film. Near the middle there's a scene that, without trying too hard, feels like it's integrating all of its parts. Weston (Catherine Keener) is in her Los Angeles Times office as a manager, off screen, talking up the company’s “very good exit package,” lets an employee go. Out her window she sees Lopez (Downey, Jr.)  helping push Nathaniel’s shopping cart up a hill. They’re heading to the L.A. Symphony to listen to a rehearsal, but she doesn’t know that, she only knows what she sees. And she smiles this wistful smile. There’s great balance here: the comedy outside and the tragedy within; one man helping another while a company, part of a dying industry, lets another employee go. It doesn’t draw too fine a point—as I fear I might be doing—it just feels part of this big shifting pattern we all create. It’s worthy of Keener’s beautiful, wistful smile. Full review here.

7. ”The Hurt Locker“: In “The Deer Hunter” there’s that great transition where one moment our boys are partying in rural Pennsylvania and the next moment they’re in a deadly firefight in Vietnam. Screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow do the opposite here. There’s two days left, James has just met his match with a human IED (although he survives), and our boys are in their HUMVEE getting pelted with rocks from Iraqi children. The next second James is standing in an American grocery store, frozen food aisle, muzak in the background. He’s wearing civilian clothes and looks ordinary. The grocery store, particularly compared to the bright heat of Iraq, feels cold, devoid of life, awful. It feels like a dream but not a pleasant one. You feel the cultural dissonance James must feel, the dislocation, the difference between that and this. And as awful as that was, this feels worse. The fluorescent lights are not real lights, the music is not real music, the food is not real food. Everything is false. It’s dangerous to see Sgt. James as more than just Sgt. James but I can’t help it. Is he representative? Does he represent us? In other words, is our incessant foreign adventurism the result, in part, of having a home life, and a home culture, that feels like a lie? American culture isn’t what we’re fighting for; it’s what we’re running from. Full review here.

6. ”A Serious Man“: Larry Gopnik is the kind of man who timidly obsesses over small details—such as the property line with the Brandts, his stoic, hunting-happy Minnesota neighbors—and misses the big picture. Not only is his wife leaving him but his kids have left him. His son, Danny, is a mess of sixties contradictions: he has that classic Beatles haircut (redhaired version), smokes pot, listens to Jefferson Airplane, but only cares to talk with his father when the reception for “F Troop,” the lamest of ‘60s sitcoms, comes in fuzzy. His daughter, Sarah, only talks to her father to complain about Uncle Arthur, Larry’s brother, hogging the bathroom to drain the cyst in his neck. That’s at home. At work he’s being considered for tenure but letters arrive denigrating him. Then a Korean man accuses Larry of 1) defamation, because Larry accused his son of a bribe, and pleading 2) cultural differences, because Larry didn’t accept the bribe. Larry’s helpless before this kind of illogic. He can’t extricate himself from it. Life has the quality of a nightmare: Everything’s repetitive—Sy keeps hugging him, the Brandts keep playing catch, Arthur keeps draining his cyst—and everything’s unknowable. Dream sequences in other films are usually obvious but in the Coens’ films they blend almost seamlessly with life, so we in the audience are in the position of the dreamer: We don’t know what’s dream until it’s over. And even then. By the pool last night—did that happen? Full review here.

5. ”Anvil! The Story of Anvil“: They miss a train. They play dives for peanuts. Their fans are fervent but few. Late to one gig in the Czech Republic, they’re told the place is “jam fucking packed” but they get there and rock out before fewer than 10 fans; then the club owner refuses to pay them. It’s here we see the first of several eruptions from Lips, who, spittle flying, quickly loses his half-smile and nearly goes off on the dude. Their next gig should be a heavy-metal highlight — a rock show in Transyl-fucking-vania, with a 10,000-seat capacity — and as they make their way to the stage through narrow hallways, one bandmember, an obvious “Spinal Tap” fan, shouts “Hello, Cleveland!” Unlike Spinal Tap, Anvil finds its way to the stage. The crowd doesn’t. Only 174 show up. Cut to: Toronto in winter. Full review here.

4. ”Avatar“: James Cameron has done an amazing, ballsy thing with ”Avatar.“ Yes, he imagines an entire world and creates it in meticulous detail. Yes, he sends his main character on a hero’s journey through this world. But within this framework, this age-old story, he critiques the worst aspects of our own culture. “When people are sitting on something you want, you make them your enemy,” Jake says near the end, summing up the sad history of the human race. It’s not an abstract or ancient history, either. It’s current. The villains in “Avatar” use the language of this decade: “Shock and awe”; “fighting terror with terror”; “balance sheets.” They are us. “Dances with Wolves” was set in an historical timeframe, more than 100 years earlier, in which everyone knew the Native Americans would fight and lose. Not here. Here, in this future setting, the humans not only lose but they’re sent back to Earth—to their dying planet that has no green on it. They lose because God literally isn’t on their side. Full review here.

3. ”Seraphine“: By the time most of us sit down to watch “Seraphine,” we know a few basics about her story—she’s a painter who lived in France at the turn of the last century—but this may trump all: She’s important enough that 100 years later we’re watching a film about her. The mere fact of the film, in other words, acts as a kind of redemption for her and a kind of guide for us. We see her scraping by to paint at night but we know, by virtue of the film, that she succeeds. We know, when the boarding-house owner demands to see her work and then dismisses it because the apples don’t look like apples (“They could be plums,” she says), that the woman is a philistine. We know, when dinner-party guests chuckle knowingly about how Seraphine left the convent because she felt God “called her” to paint, that they’re bourgeoisie with lousy bourgeois taste. The thrill we get, then, is as old as the thrill we get from the Gospels: These people don’t know who’s in their midst. They don’t know how special she is. It’s not a stretch to say we wait for her recognition as surely as we wait for our own. Full review here.

2. ”Up“: Pixar movies focus on cultural moments rather than pop-cultural moments: that early 1960s period when astronauts replaced cowboys as heroes for boys everywhere; the difference, and similarities, between 20th-century “adventurers” and 21st-century “wilderness explorers.” Pixar doesn’t need to point to a pop-cultural phenomenon to get laughs. Put it this way: In “Up,” there’s a dog, a talking dog named Dug, and he’s more real than most live-action dogs on screen. What makes him funny isn’t that he’s not like a dog—that he stands on his hind legs and sings a rap song, for example, as he might in other animated features—but that he’s exactly like a dog. Pixar finds, intrinsically within the object, its humor. And drama. ... At Paradise Falls, Carl, burdened by his house, chooses the house, and what it represents, over Kevin, and Dug, and even Russell, and what they represent. Then he sits in it, alone, his longstanding dream finally realized, and he looks through Ellie’s old adventure book, and the unfulfilled promise of STUFF I’M GOING TO DO. But the pages beyond aren’t blank; he’s shocked to find they’re filled with the life he and Ellie lived together. This fact recalls something Russell said earlier about his father: “I think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember most.” That’s what Ellie filled her pages with: the boring, everyday stuff we discount but that means the most. On the last page Ellie includes a note to Carl: “Thanks for the adventure. Now go have a new one!” And as he does, as her words inspire him to throw out most of the stuff in his house to get it aloft again, to get back into the adventure, I sat there, a 46-year-old, tearing up. Full review here.

1. ”L'Heure d'ete“ (”Summer Hours“): The three grown-up siblings have familiarity with, and distance from, one other. They assume they know each other but there’s also this quiet curiosity. I love you, but who are you again? Or now? The rest of the movie is disillusion of the cottage and its precious artifacts. At one point, Eloise, the housekeeper, returns for a visit and sees strangers—art dealers, reps from the Musee d’Orsay—removing this painting, taking that exquisite desk. They’re basically messing up the place she cleaned up for decades. It’s a melancholy sight. ”L’heure d’ete" is suffused with sadness but not nostalgia. Life expands, life contracts, life goes on. Director Olivier Assayas could’ve ended the film at the Musee d’Orsay, with the family's desk on display, looking “caged,” according to Frederic, but chose, instead, a more ambiguous end. He takes us back to the cottage house, where Frederic’s kids throw a huge, loud summer party. At first one is appalled that Helene’s place has been taken over in this fashion. But is this better? It’s vibrant. It’s life. The final shot is of the eldest daughter and her boyfriend, young and unburdened, running away from the camera and toward whatever it is they’ll create, and collect, and leave behind. Full review here.

"What delight and joy in reading the Auburn Plainsman's Ben Bartley, some red-white-and-blue type guy from Texas who's fuming that such an anti-corporate, anti-arrogant, anti-Bush legacy, pro-eco, pro-nativist pantheist tract is raking it in big-time and spreading the myth everywhere, and there's nothing this guy can do about it. Hah! Eat shit, Christian asshole!"

—Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

"Critics" hardly seems the right word, does it, when they're listing off the best of the year. "Here Come the Praisers." "Here Come the Complimenters." More basically: "Here Come the Analyzers." They've sifted through the year in movies, analyzed what's good and bad, and left us what's good. How nice! They're like Santa Claus. An underappreciated Santa Claus.

This is what the tally looks like thus far:

A sweep thus far for Bigelow, and consensus for "The Hurt Locker" and "L'Heure d'ete" ("Summer Hours"), the latter of which I'm particularly happy about since I thought that movie was flying under the radar. I was lucky enough to see it at the Seattle International Film Festival in May or June and recommend it to anyone and everyone—when it finally comes out on DVD. It's a movie that works on you in subtle ways and stays with you in profound ways.

Most observers list off these types of awards as precursors to the Oscars (what does it mean, who's agreed with the Academy in the past, blah blah blah), but for once I thought it would be nice to just enjoy the movies mentioned, and the critics groups mentioned, on their own. I haven't seen "Sin Nombre" and "Crazy Heart" but everything else is worth seeing. These are all movies, stories, that, while trying to entertain, make us feel what it means to be alive: as an IED specialist in Iraq in 2004; as a working-class girl in England in the 1960s; as a working-class artist in turn-of-the-last-century France; and as a French family in an increasingly international and fragmented world. Also what it means when we go.

I began this decade with my first professional movie review, of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "The Flowers of Shanghai," published in The Seattle Times on January 28, 2000, and am ending it with amateur—that is, non-paid— reviews on my Web site. Kind of sums up the decade. More and more of our activities are moving online, for which we're getting paid less and less. Or nothing.

But it means I've been writing about movies for 10 years now—first with The Seattle Times, then with MSNBC, and with sidetrips to MSN, The New York Times (Op-Ed), and The Believer—and yet I'm still wary of compling a list of the best films of the decade. I know if I'd done something similar 10 years ago I would've left off what I now consider my two favorite films of that decade—"The Thin Red Line" (1998)  and "The Insider" (1999)—because, even by December 1999, I hadn't seen either one. That's the main reason the movies below aren't listed in any particular order. I want a discussion more than anything. Maybe I'm hoping that, in that discussion, something better will shake loose.

Each poster is linked to a good review or analysis of that movie. Many of the links are self-serving (they're mine) and many are not (Roger Ebert, Scott Foundas, David Edelstein). Warning: The New York Observer seems to have a problem with paragraph breaks. Or Andrew Sarris does.

Some of the movies below make it because they're just fun ("Kung Fu Hustle"; "X-Men 2"; "Riding Giants"). Some make it because I happened to fall in love with certain scenes (the "Me and Julio" montage in "Tenenbaums"; the silent film in "Talk to Her"). The best work slowly and leave us with a kind of existential amazement ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"; "Spring Summer Autumn Winter...and Spring"; "L'Heure d'ete"). Interesting to note: there's only one best picture from the Academy in the bunch: "No Country for Old Men." Meanwhile, if I had to choose my best picture of the decade, I'd probably go with Roman Polanski's "The Pianist." Thus far.

A lot of war here. The decade began with "Black Hawk Down," a sober tale of attempted nation-building in Somalia in 1993, and it ends with "The Hurt Locker," a sober tale of attempted nation-building in Iraq in 2004, and in-between we got cartoons and superheroes. How have we changed? "Black Hawk Down" was releaed into 3,000 theaters, was no. 1 at the box office for three weeks, and it made over $100 million domestically. "The Hurt Locker" never rose above 535 theaters and never made more than $13 million domestically. Apparently we don't want to know about it anymore. Not when we can watch giant space robots battling each other for the primacy of our sun.

But that's the bad stuff. Here's the good. Discussion welcome.

Interesting video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz on the revenge motif in Clint Eastwood's films. But how true is it? Is Eastwood's ambivalent attitude about revenge artistic or simply ambivalent and contradictory? A key line for me is near the end:

Many Eastwood movies have a self-critical aspect, a sense that Eastwood (as actor, director, or both) is examining dark impulses within himself (and humankind) and finding them troubling, pathetic, repulsive. It's the sentiment of a moral, humane, internally consistent filmmaker. Eastwood is all three—when Eastwood the icon isn't undercutting Eastwood the artist.

For me, too often in his career, Eastwood the icon undercuts any artistry. Even in "Unforgiven," one of his best films, the last scene is iconic and thrilling rather than—as it should be—horrifying. We're rooting on William Munny. We want him to kill. He's justified, because the people he kills are scum—bullies and toadies—and because they've lynched his partner Ned. If there had been collateral damage in the carnage, maybe I'd feel different about the scene. If he'd killed a prostitute by mistake or the parasitic scribe on purpose. Instead he's just a guy out for revenge—his and ours. He's Popeye, but with whiskey rather than spinach, with shotguns rather than fists.

Munny's actually part of a cycle of revenge in the film in which a group of people are labeled pejoratively ("whores," "assassins"), which then gives the labeler the right to do whatever he wants to them (cut them up, kill them). Munny does the same to the people in the town. He labels them, they who have labeled him and Ned "assassins," and kills them, and shouts drunkenly at them. But we don't see him as part of the cycle; we see him as the final word in this cycle. He ends it, and ends the movie. Instead of another ring in the cycle, he's its final authority, its Old Testament God. Thus Spaketh Clint.

And that's the problem. In the real world there is no final authority, but our stories, Clint's stories, which have been absorbed by our culture, lead us to believe there is. We think with one big shotgun blast we can end the cycle of revenge. But it's a cycle and cycles return. Always.

"Thank you, God. For letting me have another day."

—Amarante Cordova (Carlos Riquelme) upon arising, painfully, in the morning, in Robert Redford's underrated "The Milagro Beanfield War." For all the movie's magic realism, and its issues of class and rampant development (it's a Redford movie, after all), this is what stays with me. This simple line. I wish I could live it. Doesn't mean I won't keep trying.

THE GOOD

A nice line from David Denby in his New Yorker review of "The Messenger":

“The Messenger” joins the group of strong Iraq-war movies that, like rejected suitors, stand hat in hand, waiting for an audience to notice their virtues. (My canon includes “In the Valley of Elah,” “The Hurt Locker,” and the commercially conceived but affecting “Stop-Loss.”) Box-office wisdom holds that it’s too early to make movies about this conflict, but how can it ever be too early to make a good movie?

It's exactly my canon. Even "Elah," which has that too-obvious end—although, to cut Paul Haggis some slack, I don't know what I would have put in its place.

THE NOT BAD

In A.O. Scott's surprisingly scattered piece about the decade in movies and what it all means, he does give us the following:

This [Manichaean struggle defined by an endless cycle of vendetta and reprisal] was even true of Jesus, whose travails in Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” played like the first act of a revenge drama, the one in which the hero is humbled as pre-emptive justification for whatever fury he comes back to unleash at the end.

Which is what I've been saying ever since I saw it: "It's the first third of a revenge flick," I said when people asked. "With the last two-thirds implied." And implied mightily. Jesus emerges from his cave to a martial drumbeat. Because of the cultural noise surrounding the film, I always assumed he was out to get revenge less on the Roman soldiers who whipped him than on, say, me, the non-believer.

THE KINDA UGLY

Finally, there's the usually reliable Lynn Hirschberg, whose piece on "The Self-Manufacture of Megan Fox" begins thus:

Yes, Fox is beautiful and often scantily clad, but dozens of beautiful girls arrive in Hollywood every day who are more than happy to pose nearly naked. Unlike them, Fox has a quality that sets her apart: Fox is sly. Canny.

The evidence comes a paragraph later:

Fox, who is 23, understood instinctively that noise plus naked equals celebrity.

Admittedly I'm way up here in Seattle, but it's my assumption that hundreds, probably thousands of pretty girls in Hollywood have figured that out. Before they even stepped off the bus.

• It feels like Richard Brody is a bit too kind to Wes Anderson in his Nov. 2nd, New Yorker profile on the director, "Wild, Wild Wes." Or maybe he's simply too kind to Anderson's 2003 film, "The Life Aquatic," which came on the heels of his biggest hit ("The Royal Tenenbaums"), which came on the heels of his most critically acclaimed film ("Rushmore"). After detailing several critic complaints about "Aquatic," Brody writes:

"In fact, 'The Life Aquatic" does tell a story, but it's one that sprawls with an epic ambition and a picaresqe wonder. Anderson's playfully unstrung storytelling was both purposeful and meaningful: life in the wild, the film suggests, doesn't follow the neat contours of dramatic suspense but is filled with surprises, accidents, and sudden lurches off course. ... 'The Life Aquatic' was proof of Anderson's maturation as an artist..."

• Come again? Here's my 2007 take on Anderson and his ouevre. I actually like Anderson, within limits, which I hope my article makes clear, but I'm not a fan of "Aquatic," for reasons stated, none of which has to do with its lack of storytelling. The short version of Brody's article is here, but you have to buy, or borrow from your local library, the Nov. 2nd New Yorker to read it in full.  Or subscribe. I recommend subscribing already.
• The Washington Post focuses on a quiet but powerful contingent that is being ignored in the same-sex marriage debate: the ex-spouses of now-out-of-the-closet gay men and women. This section in particular packs a whallop:

Many of these former spouses -- from those who still feel raw resentment toward their exes to those who have reached a mutual understanding -- see the legalization of same-sex marriage as a step toward protecting not only homosexuals but also heterosexuals. If homosexuality was more accepted, they say, they might have been spared doomed marriages followed by years of self-doubt.

"It's like you hit a brick wall when they come out," Brooks said. "You think everything is fine and then, boom!"

Carolyn Sega Lowengart calls it "retroactive humiliation." It's that embarrassment that washes over her when she looks back at photographs or is struck by a memory and wonders what, if anything, from that time was real. Did he ever love her?

"I'm 61 years old," said Lowengart, who lives in Chevy Chase. "Will I ever know what it's like to be loved passionately? Probably not."

• I'm going to have to permanently link to Joe Posnanski below but in the meantime here's his early Hall of Fame arguments and they warm the cockles of my cold, cold Seattle heart. Actually his argument is: Who is the best eligible hitter not in the Hall of Fame? He then goes through the usual suspects. Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe and Barry Bonds are not eligible so he eliminates them. Mark McGwire? Impressive, certainly. A homer ever 8 at-bats, "but we knew how he did it," and anyway there's that lifetime .263 batting average. Dick Allen? Don Mattingly? Minnie Monoso? Babe Herman? I'll cut to the chase—particularly since the photo at right is a giveaway. Posnanski suggests Edgar Martinez. He talks about why he's a great hitter, all of which should be familiar to Seattle fans (lifetime: .300/.400/.500), and why he won't make it anyway, which will also be familiar to Seattle fans. Edgar's got the percentage numbers, but he played the majority of his career as a DH and he didn't play long enough to accumulate the gross numbers: the 3,000 hits, etc., because the Mariners (idiots!) didn't bring him up until he was 27. If he'd played his entire career at third, I think he would've made it. If he'd been a DH but had the cumulative numbers, I think he would've made it. It's the two together that put the kibosh on him. Of course I'd vote for him in a second but I'm obviously biased. At the same time, here's my non-bias: How many career .300/.400.500 guys, with as many at-bats as Edgar, aren't in the Hall of Fame? Extra credit. We've just been talking lately about what a great pitcher Mariano Rivera is. So how did Edgar do against Rivera? 16 at-bats, 10 hits, 3 doubles, 2 homeruns, 6 RBIs. A .625 batting average and a 1.888 OPS. Don't know if anyone with double-digit at-bats against Rivera has ever done better. Obviously that's not an argument in favor of the Hall but it is fun.

"It is a hazard peculiar to cultists in the arts—that is to say, to highbrows—that unless they keep their transatlantic signals open and alert, they tend to canonize foreign talents that are rejected on the home ground as commercial hacks. There was, I remember, a delightful period in the late thirties and early forties when American highbrows yearned for a native naturalistic actor as mighty as Jean Gabin. Their counterparts in Paris were meanwhile lamenting the early demise of Gabin as a 'serious' talent, and panting over Bogart for what the critic of Le Matin called his 'vitalisme, tendre et profond.'"

—Alistaire Cook, "Epitaph for a Tough Guy," in The Atlantic, May 1957

Mostly it has to do with the dying of the light. It gets awfully dark awfully fast in November. Worse, I know the light will continue to leave us for another month-and-a-half, and I rage, rage against its dying. Well, "rage." I shake my head. I look disgruntled. I sigh, sigh against the dying of the light. November is the month of death. December at least gives you rebirth in either pagan terms (Winter Solstice) or religious terms (Dec. 24), when either we begin to return to the sun or the Son returns to us, but the only thing November gives you is cold and rain and bare, scraggly trees.

And Thanksgiving. It's its one saving grace. My favorite holiday is in my least-favorite month.

Thanksgiving has never been a favorite in Hollywood, though, which is why the paltry selection of posters fading in and out to our left. What do we have?

Home for the Holidays (1995): Jodie Foster's film is the most emphatically Thanksgiving-related movie in recent memory. I wrote about back in 1997—two years after it was released—but for some reason never bothered to put up for this site. Not sure if the film is worth revisiting. Anyone? Anyone? Here's some of what I wrote back then:

Yeah, we all know what a pain the holidays can be, and how meddlesome parents can be, and why it's necessary to have your favorite sibling there when you tackle both parents and holidays—which is why, in Jodie Foster's Home for the Holidays, we understand when Claudia Larson (Holly Hunter) pleads with her brother, Tommy, to show up and help her out. Bad news: Tommy is played by Robert Downey Jr., which means he's a hyperactive, insensitive lout who causes more problems than he solves. He snaps Polaroids of people in embarrassing situations, he taunts, he teases, he mocks sensitive conversations. What the hell did she need him there for anyway? I actually liked her parents (Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning). The father's phone conversation with Tommy's lover, for example, demonstrates a kind of class that Tommy doesn't come near. Claudia never seems to realize that she needs her parents to protect her from Tommy rather than vice-versa.

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973): This is how old I am: I still think of "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" as the new one. The Peanuts Christmas and Halloween specials first aired on television when I was 2 and 3, respectively (1965 and '66), so, as far as I was concerned, they were always there. The Thanksgiving special? Didn't come around until 1973, by which time I was 10 and beginning to move away from "Peanuts" and toward Marvel comics, and I didn't think it was as good as the first two. Something cheaper about it. And nothing as memorable as "All it needs is a little love, Charlie Brown" and "I got a rock." On the other hand, I know people, younger people, who love it, with its absurd Thanksgiving feast of popcorn and toast, so maybe it's less a consequence of what it is than when I saw it. If you're a fan, just consider this report a bunch of wuh wuh wuhs.

The Ice Storm (1997): Another film I wrote about back in the day but never posted here. It takes place the weekend after Thanksgiving, 1973, when both the U.S. government and famiies are falling apart. It's a cold world and a cold poster, and Sigourney Weaver plays a cold bitch, but man she still makes me hot:

Right from the start, when teenager Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire) quotes from an early '70s Fantastic Four comic book, I was into this pic; and while I never lost sympathy for Paul, I had none for the other characters. They were all distant, creepy, obtuse or sexually perverse—or some combination of that less-than-fantastic four. Admittedly, there's a nice juxtaposition of the adults' empty sexual rompings with the unsupervised teenagers' fitful entries into sexuality. The movie seems a lesson in the dangers that result when grown-ups don't grow up. A more obvious lesson is as old as Winesburg, Ohio: suburban lives are empty, empty, empty.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987): My favorite John Hughes' film. Just flat-out funny. Ten years earlier Steve Martin was the world's wild-and-crazy guy but by this point he'd become the world's straightlaced guy; the guy who needs to loosen up a little and sing a "Flintstones" song now and again. The world punishes him here for being so straightlaced. What a change. It wasn't until I read Martin's memoir, Born Standing Up, that I realized he never was that wild-and-crazy guy. Even when he seemed the hippest guy in the world, the most popular host on the hippest late-night show on TV, he was pretty square, and always had been. In the midst of the '60s, for example, when everyone was into politics and pot and love, he was off at two-bit carnivals performing magic tricks. It's actually kind of fascinating—the bent road he took to hipness, before finding his way back, via vehicles like this, to becoming just another uptight suburban dad, trying to get home for Thanksgiving, and shouting impotently at the sky: "You're messing with the wrong guy!" Martin was goofy-funny as the wild-and-crazy guy but I never identified with him. But "You're messing with the wrong guy"? Oh yeah. Who can't relate? The world is always messing with the wrong guy.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986): How long has it been since I've seen "Hannah and Her Sisters"? Ten years? I didn't even remember, until I began researching for this post, that one of its main dinners is a Thanksgiving dinner, in which, apparently, no one gives thanks for what they have but keeps pursuing what they don't. I.e., Barbara Hershey. "God, she's beautiful." So true. The movie also contains one of my all-time favorite lines, delivered with a slight, disgusted shake of the head by the great Max von Sydow. The artist Frederick has just been watching TV, and he's about to find out that his girl, Lee (Hershey), is sleeping around on him, but in the meantime he delivers this spot-on diatribe about American culture. It's the last line that's my favorite but I'll include the whole quote:

You see the whole culture. Nazis, deodorant salesmen, wrestlers, beauty contests, a talk show. Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling? But the worst are the fundamentalist preachers. Third grade con men telling the poor suckers that watch them that they speak with Jesus, and to please send in money. Money, money, money! If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name...he'd never stop throwing up.

Pieces of April (2003): Anyone see this thing? I didn't. I remember when it came out, though, playing at the Guild 45th in Seattle, back when Katie Holmes was trying to be Ms. indie-actress. This is her second Thanksgiving related movie, after "Ice Storm," making her Ms. (or Mrs.) Thanksgiving. Invite her over. Break out the turkey and stuffing and corn pudding.

I was going to include "What's Cookin'," a 2000 Thanksgiving/family comedy, but I couldn't stand the poster so didn't bother. But which movies with Thanksgiving themes did I miss? Which movies with great Thanksgiving scenes did I miss? There's gotta be some.

It's slightly startling how little Hollywood has given us about the great American holiday, but then Thanksgiving has always been treated, by men in the marketplace, as poor cousin to the more lucrative Christmas. The first week in November is for opening movies like "Elf" and "Fred Claus," and, this year, Disney's "A Christmas Carol," which opens tomorrow. "Disney's." As if Charles Dickens had nothing to do with it. Of course this really is Disney's version. Doesn't Scrooge, in his nightshirt and cap, rocket into space here? What fun! What mayhem! The kids'll love it! If Charles Dickens came back and saw what's going on in his name...

Enjoy the leaves (courtesy of Patricia) while they're here.

• It's already over but here's a great piece from Dan Savage who defends the sexification of Halloween as a kind of straight people's gay-pride parade: a day when straight people are allowed to dress up and bust loose:

We don't resent you for taking Halloween as your own. We know what it's like to keep your sexuality under wraps, to keep it concealed, to be on your guard and under control at all times. While you don't suffer anywhere near the kind of repression we did (and in many times and places still do), straight people are sexually repressed, too. You move through life thinking about sex, constantly but keenly aware that social convention requires you to act as if sex were the last thing on your mind. Exhausting, isn't it?

• Martin Scorsese on the 11 scariest movies of all time. I've seen 1, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 11. I keep missing the Brits.
• It's not just me. Even members of the Academy question havng 10-best-picture nominees.
• Hilarious piece from The Onion on the long, sad, World Series drought for the Philadelphia Phillies. Sample: "To put into perspective just how long the Phillies have gone without a championship, the earth has almost made one full orbit of the sun since the franchise last paraded through downtown Philadelphia holding the famed Commissioner's Trophy."
• Floyd Norris, in his column in The New York Times last Friday, says people who ask why financial-industry CEOs are so well-compensated are asking the wrong question. The real question is: Why is there so much more money in the financial industry than there used to be? From 1929 to 1988, the financial sector averaged 1.2 percent of GDP. Then it shot up in the 1990s, peaking at 3.3 percent in 2005. Why? He tosses out some possibilities, including higher charges (for managing hedge funds) , concentration (the big guys are bigger), the derivatives debaccle, evading taxes and rules, and excessive risk-taking. Worth reading the whole thing.

MOVIES

• This is pretty exciting: The screening of "The Cove" at the Tokyo International Film Festival and the mostly positive and/or startled and/or embarrassed Japanese reaction. This part, though, is sadly indicative: "Taiji’s mayor, Kazutaka Sangen, has advised fishermen to carve up whales and dolphins in indoor facilities so as not to provoke activists further, according to the newspaper Yomiuri." Nice. My review of "The Cove" here.
• The cover story in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine asks: "Is America ready for a movie about an obese Harlem girl raped and impregnated by her abusive father?" But it's the wrong question. The correct question is: "Is Lionsgate ready to distribute such a film?" OK, it's both questions. But America can't be ready for "Precious" if Lionsgate (of the "Saw" franchise) isn't willing to distribute it beyond NY, LA and your Seattles and Chicagos and Minneapolises. And I doubt they are. Unless, of course, Tyler Perry, whose films are also distributed by Lionsgate, and is an executive producer on "Precious," can strongarm them in some fashion.
• The Minneapolis Star-Tribune's film critic Colin Covert has a nice Q&A with Chris Rock about his doc "Bad Hair," which I now have to see. Rock remarks that "Bad Hair" is the funniest movie he's ever made, which initially sounds impressive until you consider the options. "Down to Earth"? "Head of State"? "I Think I Love My Wife"? Rock is frequently hilarious in his stand-up (less so in his most recent, "Kill the Messenger"), but for whatever reason that hilarity has never transferred to movies. 
• Via Patrick Goldstein, who got it from Danielle Berrin's "Hollywood Jew" blog, here's a fascinating 2001 Index Magazine interview with Rachel Weisz and some pretty blunt talk about the Jewishness of Hollywood, as well as the sterile sexuality of Hollywood, as well as the sexiness of comedians. Quote from Weisz on the difficulty of Jewish women having success in Hollywood: "In some way acting is prostitution, and Hollywood Jews don't want their own women to participate. Also, there's an element of Portnoy's Complaint — they all fancy Aryan blondes."
• Francois Truffaut is my favorite director of the French New Wave, and Richard Brody, blogging on the New Yorker's site, acknowledges the 25th anniversary of Truffaut's death at age 52 with some choice quotes.
• Nathaniel over at Film Experience Blog gives us the history of who's presented the best picture Oscar. I hadn't really thought about this before. Best Actor gets the previous year's Best Actress, and vice-versa, and same ol' switcheroo for supporting awards, and directors tend to get directors, yes? The other categories get someone who will hopefully keep people watching. But for Best Pic? It's usually a big-name actor. Nathaniel's complaint? It's usually the same big-name actor—and rarely a big-name actress. He makes suggestions. His first one is so obvious only the Academy wouldn't have thought of it by now.

POLITICS

• I've always thought FOX-News was as close to a government-run news agency as the U.S. has had during my lifetime. James Fallows, who spent the last three years in China, says the same thing.
• We need smarter from the New Yorker. Most MSM columnists now agree that FOX News is a biased network, as does Louis Menand here, but it goes deeper, doesn't it? Via his Facebook account, Minnesota journalist Robb Mitchell quotes Jason Bartlett, a new media columnist (and not the shortstop for the Tampa Bay Rays), thus: "Bias is not the issue for the controversy with FOX and media access, it is their continual intentional manipulation of facts for the sake of propoganda. To say what FOX does is okay because now MSNBC 'does it now too' misses the point of their intentional deception to the American public."

BASEBALL

• I appreciated this piece from William Rhoden on how losing two games to the Angels exposes what nervous nellies Yankees fans really are.
• This past week, Tyler Kepner is writing about all the right things. First he gave us those dream quotes from Mike Scioscia before Game 6 of the ALCS on the ridiculousness of all the off-days in October. Then he followed it up in yesterday's paper with a piece about where all of those off-days lead: to a November World Series. Kepner ticks off what can't be done to prevent this in the future but the question looms: What can be done? I'd start by examining the smartness of Wednesday-night starts, which the networks and MLB feel draws higher ratings than, say, a Saturday-night start. Really? So why have World Series ratings dropped like a rock over the last 25 years while the Super Bowl recorded its greatest ratings just last year? Is MLB overstaying its welcome in October and November? Could a tighter schedule mean a tighter storyline? Do fair-weather fans not want to watch the game played in foul weather? COULD THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE HAVE NO MOTHERHUMPING CLUE WHAT THEY'RE DOING?!?! Not that I'm espousing any opinion one way or another, mind you. At least Kepner's asking the right questions and getting the right quotes from the right baesball people. Here's Scioscia again: "You can’t control the weather to a certain extent, but the earlier you can schedule these to get them in, the better chance you have of finishing this in weather that is, I think, conducive to the outstanding level of play that is going to be on any playoff baseball field." Exactamundo, Cunningham!

JIM WALSH

• I linked to this last year but it'll always be relevant: Jim Walsh's 2003 piece calling for a Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. Jim's writing always makes me feel more alive.
• Dig if U will the picture: Prince plays, Jim writes.

For Sunday Movie Night, befitting the month, we watched William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" (1973), which I'd never seen before, but which, because of documentaries, film books, old "Carol Burnett" skits, I still "remembered" more of than almost everyone else there—most of whom had seen the movie just once, either 35 years ago, on television, or more recently on DVD. We all liked the fact that Friedkin took his own sweet time giving us Satan—comparing the pace favorably to the quick-cut, roller-coaster rides of today's movies. And we all loved ourselves some Max von Sydow. Of course, the inevitable questions:

• What's the connection between the northern Iraq burial dig and Georgetown?
• Why this family and this girl? (Is it: Why not this family and this girl?)
• Once the Devil shows himself, why does the mother (Ellen Burnstyn) take the roundabout way of getting help? Why ask, cry, explain? Why not: Come see THIS! These quiet, conversational scenes between the scary devil-in-the-girl-in-the-bed scenes don't feel quite real, given the unreal circumstances.

"The Exorcist" was the no. 1 box office hit of 1973, and, adjusted for inflation, it's the 9th-biggest domestic film of all time, grossing, in 2009 dollars, $793 million. Since it was released in 1973, only four films have—in adjusted dollars—grossed more: "Jaws," "Star Wars," "E.T.," and "Titanic." It was also nominated for a best picture Oscar—as was every no. 1 box office hit between 1967 and 1977.

Here's what I took away from the film: the Devil, as we tend to portray him, ain't that smart. If his goal is to turn people away from God, then he should do one thing: Nothing. The story of Job got it backwards. Nothing brings people closer to God than evil or misfortune; than a hint of the Devil. There are no atheists in foxholes, etc. In "The Exorcist" a priest is losing faith...until the Devil shows up. Thus he helps save Father Karras (from doubt), who helps save Regan (from the Devil). He's his own worst enemy. Maybe that should be (and maybe it is) the great Devilish dilemma. Satan knows the best way to win is to do nothing, but, man, he just can't help himself. It's just so much fun messing with people.

• That shot of Eli Roth (SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS) emptying his machine gun into Hitler's face at the end of Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Bastards" reminded me, in a way, of the ending of "Idi i Smotri" ("Come and See") (1985), a Soviet-era World War II drama about a kid caught in the Russian countryside during the Nazi invasion, which I'd seen numerous times while volunteering for Ben Milgrom's University Film Society at the University of Minnesota in the mid-1980s. I assumed I was the only one to make this connection. Of course not.
• "Idi i Smotri" is, according to Time Out London, the best movie ever made about World War II. Their whole list is worth checking out. Start with 50-41 ("Stalingrad," "The Last Metro," "Empire of the Sun"), continue to 40-31 ("The Pianist," "Letters from Iwo Jima," "Downfall"), then 30-21 ("The Great Escape," "Mephisto," "Night and Fog," "Casablanca," Schindler's List"), 20-11 ("Saving Private Ryan," "Bridge on the River Kwai," "Army of Shadows," "The Dirty Dozen") and 10-2 ("Rome, Open City," "Cross of Iron," "The Thin Red Line"). The point isn't to find out where you invevitably disagree with Time Out London, but to find movies, particularly British movies, worth watching. I don't think I've seen half the movies here.
• I came across Time Out London's list via the Scarecrow video site, which has its own list of movies that possibly influenced "Inglourious Bastards." Everyone in Seattle knows Scarecrow as the place to get the video no one else has.
• And I showed up on the Scarecrow site in the first place looking for the documentary "From Hollywood to Hanoi" (which, oops, they don't have), and which my friend Andy Engelson got to see in Hanoi at the Hanoi Cinematheque. Read about his experience here.
• And that's how we careen the pinball.

Andrew O'Hehir of Salon has a good piece on "Chinatown" and the Polanski problem. First really good line:

Towne's original script, he tells us in an accompanying featurette [of the DVD], included no scene actually set in L.A.'s Chinatown; it was Polanski who insisted that the movie's racially tinged guiding metaphor had to be made explicit. After Nicholson's Jake and Dunaway's Evelyn Mulwray finally go to bed (for the one and only time), he tells her that he used to be a cop in Chinatown, where "you never really know what's going on." He once tried to protect a woman there, and only ended up making sure she got hurt. "Dead?" Evelyn asks him, and then the phone rings. It's the end of the movie calling.

Second really good line:

I am certainly not speaking out in defense of Roman Polanski, who apparently did something that was both heinous and illegal, and should long ago have faced the consequences. I guess I'm saying that it's hypothetically possible to learn something from a movie, and totally impossible to learn anything from the sordid private lives of celebrities.

Entire thing.

I have a piece up on MSNBC today on the top 5 baseball scenes in non-baseball movies. The idea came to me after reading that Koufax biography over Labor Day weekend and thinking about how thoroughly dominated the Yankees were during the ’63 World Series. Yet in my no. 1 scene, the “Cuckoo’s Nest” scene, the Yankees dominate Koufax. Amusing. And that’s not in Ken Kesey’s book. That scene isn’t even in Kesey’s book. So who came up with the pro-Yankees play-by-play? My guess is Jack. Jack, the Yankees fan, recreating the ’63 Series to the Yankees’ advantage. You gotta love the jutzpah, but let’s face it: Anyone who thinks that Koufax in '63 could be hit that easily deserves to be in the cuckoo’s nest.

Here are a few other scenes that didn’t make the cut.

Seeing about a girl in “Good Will Hunting” (1997)
This was the second scene—after “Cuckoo’s Nest”—I thought of: a South Boston genius with issues, Will Hunting (Matt Damon), is seeing a South Boston therapist with issues, Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), who breaks through when he hits Will in his vulnerable spot: Will lacks experience in everything that matters—particularly love. Maguire has been there and back, and eventually Will begins asking questions. When did he meet his (now dead) wife? Turns out: Oct. 21 1975. The day of Game Six of the ’75 World Series, the Carlton Fisk homerun, “biggest game in Red Sox history,” says Maguire in those post-Babe Ruth, pre-David Ortiz days. Then he begins to explain the game. But who’s he explaining it to? Will knows. So he’s explaining it to us. That feels false right there. Then we find out Maguire wasn’t even at the game. He had tickets but told his friends “I gotta see about a girl”—his future wife—whom he saw in a bar beforehand. I.e., rather than get her number, go to the game, and call her afterwards, he gives up the ticket immediately. Immediately. It’s supposed to be romantic, and maybe it is, but it’s Hollywood romantic. It rings false. Hell, rather than the grand romantic gesture it’s supposed to be, it could be a negative symbol of domesticity: "You can get the girl you want; but no more Game Sixes for you, chief."

A bush-league pitcher comes close to creating a third (Fascist) party in “Meet John Doe” (1941)
Has any movie been so schitzophrenic about populism? The people are good, although easily manipulated, and watch out or they’ll turn into a mob quickly. Hell, they’ll go from loving you to hating you in 30 seconds. The mob follows the mob. The overall story is about a media creation, John Doe (Gary Cooper), who, even as a creation is a bit schitzophrenic. First he’s angry. I Protest! Then he offers hope, and small-towners, aw-shucks folks, flock to him. They love him, because he’s an aw-shucks kind of guy himself. But he’s really a ballplayer with a bad wing who just needs money to survive, and who acts a bit cutesy for a guy who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from. The main baseball scene is a pantomime in a hotel suite, and it, too, is overly cutesy. It adds nothing, detracts a lot. Parts of “John Doe” feel amazingly contemporary—a placard reading “The Bulletin: a free press means a free people” is chiseled off its building and old experienced reporters are subsequently fired—and oil man and media baron D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold) is genuinely, powerfully scary. But the movie can’t overcome its schitzophrenia.

No lucky hats or bats for “Max Dugan Returns” (1983)
One of my favorite childhood books was Leonard Kessler's Here Comes the Strikeout, and it contains the following lesson, much repeated in the book and much repeated by both my father and I ever since: “Lucky hats won’t do it. Lucky bats won’t do it. Only hard work and practice will do it.” When it comes to little league, Hollywood generally relies on lucky hats and bats. One time the kid strike outs, the next time he gets a game-winning hit. “Max Dugan” is one of the few films that prescribes hard work and practice. OK, it’s a mostly forgettable movie. Marsha Mason plays Nora, an early ‘80s widow whose refrigerator is breaking down, whose car is stolen, whose life is breaking down and feels stolen. Then her absentee father, Max Dugan (Jason Robards), returns, on the lam and loaded for bear ($680,000), and ready to solve all her problems. New fridge, new car, and, for her son (Matthew Broderick, adorable in his first role), who can’t buy a hit in little league, batting lessons from former Royals batting coach Charlie Lau. We get free lessons, too. Where’s the weight on your feet? Relax the grip. Head down. Wiggle the butt. Basically: concentrate but stay loose. It leads to another Hollywood ending but this time it’s not lucky hats or bats that do it. That one was for you, Wittgenstein!

Dads and baseball in “City Slickers” (1991)
Billy Crystal, the little Yankee-loving schmuck, knows his baseball: in the Ken Burns doc, in “61*,” which he directed, and in the baseball dialogue in “City Slickers,” which I’m sure he helped write. Mets cap aside, we know his loyalties, and they’re present in the “best day” discussion. For Mitch Robbins (Crystal), the best day of his life was when he was 7 and his father took him to Yankee Stadium: “Sat the whole game next to my dad. Taught me how to keep score. Mickey hit one out. I still have the program.” Earlier (or is it later?), there’s the Clemente vs. Aaron argument, which, I have to side with Ed Furillo (Bruno Kirby), is no argument. 755 homeruns, end of discussion. But the best line is this explanation to Helen Slater about the deeper meaning of baseball: “When I was about 18 and my dad and I couldn't communicate about anything at all, we could still talk about baseball. Now that—that was real.” And that’s such a good line it almost elevates “City Slickers” into the top 5.

What about you? Favorite baseball scenes in non-baseball movies?

Impress a pretty girl.

• Here's a good piece by my friend Jessica Thompson, who's lived in India for a year now, on the sexual harassment—called "Eve teasing"—there: "Eve teasing is to sexual harassment what Delhi Belly is to projectile vomiting and diarrhea: both are really ugly things hidden behind a cute name."
• Jeff Wells begins the end-of-decade ceremonies with his top 37 (37?) films of 2000-2009. It's a fun list—particularly his no. 1 choice. Have only vaguely thought about my top list, but it would include "The Pianist" (his no. 9) and "United 93" (his no. 5). What else would I have? "Yi Yi"? "Spider-Man 2"? "Munich"? "Brokeback Mountain," definitely. That movie just gets better with age. What about you? What movies in this decade stand out in your mind?
• Is "web" really the proper metaphor for this thing? It works, although not with the verb. You crawl a web while we claim to surf this one—and surfing is much cooler than what we do here. The metaphor that comes to my mind is pinball. I bounce from spot to spot. I careen the Pinball. The other day I visited Jeff Wells again, and he bounced me to this James Rocchi piece on MSN about press junkets in general and "Couples Retreat"'s in particular, and after reading one sentence I sought more of Rocchi and bounced all over the place. Found this MSN review on "Transformers 2," which definitely echoes my feelings about that abomination: "Where the first film was desperate, this one is desperate and sad. Where the first film sent mixed messages about ethnic and racial groups and women, this one is overtly racist and sexist. Where the first 'Transformers' was clumsy, 'Revenge of the Fallen' is paralyzed with its own stupidity." Rocchi's own site is here.
  
• Some good lines from Anthony Lane on "The Invention of Lying": "...as for the soundtrack, it’s like being haunted by the ghost of Easy Listening Past. Supertramp and the Electric Light Orchestra are one thing, but Donovan: there’s no excuse. And what really galls is not the songs themselves but the greasy way in which they are wrapped around crucial passages of action, to muffle any awkward transitions; thus, once Mark has armed himself with white lies, he strolls off to reassure all the other miserable folk we have encountered so far—old-timers, bums on the street, a bickering couple—with a smile and a word in their ears. But what word? We can’t tell, because Elvis Costello is busy belting out “Sitting” by the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens."
• The New York Times' business column is becoming more of a must-read every day, particularly David Carr's on Monday and David Leonhardt's on Wednesday. This week, Carr wrote a sober, infuriating piece on the $66 million in bonuses delivered to Tribune Co. managers who mostly axed reporters to increase profits...which mostly went to them. Funny how that works. Leonhardt, on Wednesday, wrote of the excesses of left and right economic thinking, and who on the right (Bruce Bartlett) is finally going beyond "cut taxes" as a means to economic stimulus. We'll see how it plays. A smart voice on the right would be a nice change.
  
• Not all these links are worth clicking on, by the way. This is one. I'm sure you heard about it: The First Lady has white, slave-owning ancestors. That's the big story. A bigger story for me is that Mrs. Obama's great-great-grandfather, Dolphus T. Shields, the first child born to Melvina Shields, who was born into slavery, co-founded the First Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., which was pivotal in the civil rights movement. It's amazing, on the one hand, how carefully the Times tells its story, and, on the other, how carelessly. "While [Melvina] was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time." That's in the second graf. I would definitely lose "under circumstances lost in the passage of time," which is, given the circumstances, so romantic a phrase as to be close cousin to "under circumstances now...gone with the wind!" Plus the quotes from Edward Ball, "a historian who discovered that he had black relatives, the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors," are embarrassing: "We are not separate tribes," he says. "We've all mingled, and we've done so for generations." Nice verb: mingled. 
• Finally a must-read by another friend, Jim Walsh, in Southwest Journal in Minneapolis, on the funeral of the father of a friend. Jim's the real deal. Not just as a writer.
  

Take a gander at the U.S. poster for "The Invention of Lying" at right. Who came up with this concept? Gervais is an airbrushed afterthought in it—and after the likes of Rob Lowe, Jennifer Garner and Louis C.K.—and the overall design reminds me of, I don't know, semi-serious romantic-comedies with multiple partners. I can't quite place it. It's not "The Holiday," it's not "Spanglish" but it's like something, and something not very good. Plus only one of the three quotes they throw up is actually in the film—the "baby rat" line. The other two are not only marketing inventions but not funny. Plus the light blue is all wrong. Plus it's too busy. Plus plus plus.

Now here's the version of the poster for Great Britain (below), where they don't have to worry about who knows Ricky Gervais because everyone does. Regardless of what I actually think of the film, this would make me want to see it. I crack up just looking at it:

From Force of Evil (1948), written and directed by Abraham Polonsky, who was soon to be blacklisted. I like the repetitions in the dialogue, and the way simple language conveys the most profound thoughts. Thomas Gomez plays Leo Morse. This scene alone makes me want to hold a Thomas Gomez film festival.

Leo: I'm glad you called me, Freddie. I'm glad you thought it over to listen to me. To calm down and listen to me so I can help you. [To waiter] Coffee. [To Freddie] I know how bad you feel, Freddie. It was a wicked, foolish thing to do to put a gun in my brother's hand. For him to kill you. That's what you wanted to do. That's what it was. I know how it feels to try to find someone to kill you—to finish you off—to take the crimes of your life on his head, in his hands.

Freddie: Please, Mr. Morse, all I want is to quit. That's all, nothing else. They won't let me quit and I want to quit. I'll die if I don't quit. 

Leo: I'm a man with heart trouble, I die almost every day myself. That's the way I live. Silly habit. You know, sometimes you feel as though you're dying here [rubs palm]...and here [back of hand]...here [below his heart]. You're dying while you're breathing.

[Car pulls up; Freddie looks panicked; Leo looks over his shoulder and quickly realizes he's been betrayed.]

Leo: Freddie! What have you done? Freddie! What have you done to me!

Sober political pieces:

• Hendrik Hertzberg has been writing too many obituaries lately, as we all have, but here's a good one on former Carter press secretary Jody Powell.
• A smart take on the "is it racism or isn't it?" question regarding the vociferousness of the response to Pres. Obama's policies, via an unnamed reader on Andrew Sullivan's site. Money quote: "Of course they are screaming 'socialism.' They've been doing that since the 1950s at least. They're not talking about economic redistribution of wealth—they never have been. They've been talking about redistribution of privilege this whole time."
• "Turkeys of the Year" from Minnesota Law & Politics, which is the first, parent magazine of the company that employs me. The difficulty isn't finding the turkeys anymore, it's choosing among them. There's a section here, "Quick! Cancel My Membership to the ACLU," that is so full of the idiocies being spouted in public and political life that it might make the founding fathers rethink the First Amendment. Michele Bachmann rightly (no pun intended) gets her own section—including her frequent attacks on and insinuations about the U.S. Census Bureau. Glad that worked out. Then there's last year's gem from John McCain on why his pick, Sarah Palin, is qualified to be VP: "She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America," he said. How awful that reads today. What a sad thing they were trying to sell. What a sad thing they're still trying to sell.

Drunk movie pieces:

• What does it mean to be a back-up critic at a daily? It means you don't get first dibs. And it means that in looking over Rotten Tomatoes list of the worst-reviewed movies of the last 10 years, I discovered I reviewed no. 91 ("Surviving Christmas"), no. 36 ("The Whole Ten Yards"), no. 5 ("National Lampoon's Gold Diggers") and...wait for it...no 1! ("Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever") Not to nitpick...OK, to nitpick. "Gold Diggers" should've been no. 1. It was the worst thing I've ever seen—and I've seen garbage stewing for weeks by the side of a Taipei road in 100-degree heat. The big surprise for me is that "Elektra" didn't even make the cut. Now that's an impressive decade of film.

Partying baseball pieces:

• Ichiro is ejected from a game for the first time in his Major League career. Must've learned how to finally say "c***sucker."
• Finally, here's an upper: In the pregame show before a late-September game between two teams going nowhere (Seattle at Toronto), color commenator and former third baseman Mike Blowers, known for the way he didn't crowd the plate during his playing days, made an insane prediction. He said Mariners rookie third baseman and Bellevue native Matt Tuiasosopo, who had all of 59 career at-bats going into the game, would hit his first career homerun that day. Not only that day but in his second at-bat. Not only in his second at-bat but on a 3-1 fastball and into the second deck in left field. Make sure you listen to what happens. I swear, Dave Niehaus has gotten such joy out of such lousy material—the short sad history of the Seattle Mariners—that he qualifies as the Patron Saint of the Pacific Northwest. And here, with great material, he's downright giddy. "I see the light! I believe you, Mike!" Way to go, Mike. Way to go, Dave. Touch 'em all, Tui. (UPDATE: Damn, even Rachel Maddow is on this story. Here she is, via Patrick Goldstein, who is also on this story. Hopefully more get on the story. It's a story worth telling.) (UPDATE: Here's the full play-by-play of the Tui homerun. It's worth listening to the entire thing.)

We've got the pumpkins out (thanks to Patricia), the trick-or-treaters are hanging on the steps (below), and the scary movie posters are up (to the left, to the left). Looks like Halloween!

The posters are a mix of classic horror (Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man) and movies that actually scared me over the years: The Haunting, The Changeling, The Shining, The Others, The Orphanage. The key to scaring me, apparently, is a restrained take on the sad, supernatural dead. A horror that echoes past death and troubles the living, who are more or less confined to a specific place, and who can't get away from the horrified dead. Apparently I'm also a fan of blunt titles: definite article + noun.

I've included, as well, Tarantula, a 1950s atomic-explosion b-picture about a giant tarantula that scared the bejesus out of me when I saw it as a kid on some weekend afternoon in the '70s, and which led, or at least contributed, to a lifetime of arachnophobia. I'm sure if I revisited the film it would be hokey as hell but it still might scare the bejesus out of me. Which might not be bad. I have too much bejesus as it is. (Etymology of "bejesus"? Anyone?)

Other treats:

• As a kid, this lead-in to the late-night "Horror Incorporated" show on KSTP in Minneapolis was generally scarier than the movies—often b-pics—that followed. The hand coming out of the coffin and that final scream in particular. Sometimes I purposefully avoided the intro so I wouldn't be too scared to watch the movie.
• These local "Horror Incorporated"-type shows were parodied brilliantly by SCTV in their Monster Chiller Horror Theater with Count Floyd (the incredibly funny Joe Flaherty), to whom we owe our blog-post headline. Couldn't find my favorite bit online, when the programmers, who always screwed up, booked "The Odd Couple," and poor Count Floyd had to make it sound scary, kids. "It's about a neat guy and a messy guy who...drinks blood! Awooooooooooooooooo!" But this one does in a pinch. R.I.P., John Candy.
• Of course Brenda would kill me if I didn't include Jerry Seinfeld's Halloween monologue, which has the funniest line ever about good vs. bad Halloween candy: "Hold it, lady, wait a second, what is this, the orange marshmallow shaped like a big peanut? Do me a favor, you keep that one. Yeah, we have all the doorstops we need already, thank you."
• Finally, here's an article I wrote over 15 years ago on trick-or-treating and the hierarchy of Halloween candy.

What about you? What films scared you? What trick-or-treat memories do you have?

If you missed yesterday and want the questions, scroll down. Or go here.

1. Which two summer releases made the most money overseas?
The correct answer is D) “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” and “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” "Harry Potter" has grossed $625 million abroad—the 8th-most a film has made overseas—while "Ice Age 3," which grossed $195 million domestic, killed overseas, grossing $674 million, or the 3rd-most money any film has made abroad. "Ice Age 3"! Only "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" ($742 million) and, of course, "Titanic" ($1,242 million) have grossed more abroad.

The overseas numbers thus far:

• "Ice Age 3": $674 million
• "Harry Potter": $625 million
• "Transformers 2": $430 million
• "Angels & Demons":$351 million
• "Terminator: Salvation": $236 million

2. According to the documentary “Food, Inc.,” what is added to almost everything we eat and drink?
The correct answer is A) Corn. Mark Whitacre mentions the same thing in "The Informant!"

3. In “Wolverine,” after Logan’s half-brother Victor tells him, “We can’t let you just walk away!” and Logan begins to walk away, what do the murderous team of mutants do to bring him back?
The correct answer is D) Nothing. They let him walk away.

4. Who’s Richard Greenfield?
The correct answer is C) The market analyst who downgraded Disney’s stock earlier this year because he predicted a bad outing for Pixar’s “Up," which is currently the third-highest-grossing movie in the U.S. Its overseas totals ($124 million) lag mostly because the film hasn't opened yet in Germany (late Sept.), the UK (October) and Japan (December).

5. In what way is the new “Star Trek” similar to the original “Star Wars”?
The correct answer is E) All of the above. J.J. Abrams knows you go with what works. 30 years ago.

6. “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is currently ninth in terms of domestic gross, with over $401 million. But where does it place when you adjust for inflation?
The correct answer is C) 67th, just behind “Smokey and the Bandit.” But it did already pass "Twister" and "The Poseidon Adventure." So: Kudos.

7. Before Sam goes off the college in “Transformers,” what does he say to his loyal, automobile-transforming autobot Bumblebee, whom he’s leaving behind?
The correct answer is D) All of the above.

8. What is Summer’s biggest hang-up in her relationship with Tom in “(500) Days of Summer”?
The correct answer is C) She doesn’t believe in love. Or "lurve." Or "luff." Although it turns out she does. It's just that, as the saying goes, she's just not that into him.

9. In “District 9,” what is the name of the main alien protagonist?
The correct answer is C) Christopher Johnson.

10. What do the following films have in common: “In the Loop,” “The Cove,” “Paper Heart” and “Cold Souls”?
The correct answer, sadly, is C) None went wider than 100 theaters. Brother, can you spare a screen?

11. Which film opened in the most theaters without making at least $100 million?
The correct answer is D) "The Land of the Lost," which didn't even get halfway there: $49 million.

12. Of those films whose widest release was fewer than 3,000 theaters, which grossed the most?
The correct answer is C) "Julie & Julia," whose widest release was 2,528 theaters but has grossed $88 million and counting. Fifteen films that opened between May and September played in more theaters yet haven't made as much money, including "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3," "The Final Destination," "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past," "Funny People," "Land of the Lost," "Year One," "Aliens in the Attic," "Shorts," and, of course, "Imagine That." All of those films opened in more than 3,000 theaters.

"J&J" also outdid the three other films mentioned in the multiple choice: "The Ugly Truth," "The Time Traveler's Wife" and "My Life in Ruins." Those films focus on women who have careers and search for love. "Julie & Julia" focus on women who have love and search for careers. It don't know if there's a lesson there, but it's a nice change.

Cloudy outside? Rainy? Chance of meatballs? Must mean it’s September. Since you’re stuck indoors why not try a quiz? Hey, why not try this one! Apologies for the format. One day I'll get up-to-speed on proper quizzes that provide instant answers and gratification. In the meantime here's the delayed kind.

1. Which two summer releases made the most money overseas?

• a. “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “Angels & Demons”
• b. “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “Up”
• c. “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “The Hangover”
• d. “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” and “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”

2. According to the documentary “Food, Inc.,” what is added to almost everything we eat and drink?

• a. Corn
• b. Dolphin
• c. Beer
• d. Tranya

3. In “Wolverine,” after Logan’s half-brother Victor tells him, “We can’t let you just walk away!” and Logan begins to walk away, what do the murderous team of mutants do to bring him back?

• a. They begin howling
• b. They call him names
• c. They cry
• d. Nothing. They let him walk away

4. Who’s Richard Greenfield?

• a. The groom who goes missing in “The Hangover”
• b. The assistant played by Ryan Reynolds in “The Proposal”
• c. The market analyst who downgraded Disney’s stock earlier this year because he predicted a bad outing for Pixar’s “Up”
• d. The FBI agent who kills John Dillinger in "Public Enemies"

5. In what way is the new “Star Trek” similar to the original “Star Wars”?

• a. The opening battle is between a small ship and a gigantic ship, and what escapes from the small ship is the key to the eventual destruction of the gigantic ship
• b. A third of the way through the film, an entire planet and its billions of souls are destroyed
• c. In a cave, a hooded wise man is found who teaches the young hero his proper destiny
• d. The heroes are feted at a medal ceremony at the end
• e. All of the above

6. “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is currently ninth in terms of domestic gross, with over $401 million. But where does it place when you adjust for inflation?

• a. 3rd, just behind “Star Wars”
• b. 28th, just behind “The Dark Knight”
• c. 67th, just behind “Smokey and the Bandit”
• d. It’s mathematically impossible to adjust for inflation. Duh!

7. Before Sam goes off to college in “Transformers,” what does he say to his loyal, automobile-transforming autobot Bumblebee, whom he’s leaving behind?

• a. “You know, freshmen aren't allowed to have cars.”
• b. “Look, the guardian thing is done, okay? You did your job. It's over with.”
• c. “I can't be the end-all deal in your life! I wanna be normal, I want to go to college. Everybody has this, and I should be able to experience this. And I can't do that with you.”
• d. All of the above

8. What is Summer’s biggest hang-up in her relationship with Tom in “(500) Days of Summer”?

• a. She doesn’t like “The Smiths”
• b. She doesn’t like IKEA
• c. She doesn’t believe in love
• d. Her favorite Beatle is Stu Sutcliffe

9. In “District 9,” what is the name of the main alien protagonist?

• a. Neill Blomkamp
• b. Mzwandile Nqoba
• c. Christopher Johnson
• d. "You couldn't pronounce it"

10. What do the following films have in common: “In the Loop,” “The Cove,” “Paper Heart” and “Cold Souls”?

• a. They’re all lame
• b. They all include appearances by Michael Cera
• c. None had a wider release than 100 theaters
• d. They were the first films reviewed in the revamped “At the Movies,” with A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips

11. Which film opened in the most theaters without making at least $100 million?

• a. "G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra"
• b. "G-Force"
• c. "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific"
• d. "Land of the Lost"

12. Of those films whose widest release was fewer than 3,000 theaters, which grossed the most?

• a. "The Time Traveler's Wife"
• b. "The Ugly Truth"
• c. "Julie & Julia"
• d. "My Life in Ruins"

Answers tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is... (OK, answers here.)

Have a heart-to-heart with Dad.

Have a heart-to-heart with Mom

I've seen the trailer for Michael Moore's latest doc, Capitalism—about the global financial meltdown—about 10 times now, and it hasn't drawn me in. The initial shot of Moore with bullhorn saying he's going to perform a citizen's arrest on the board of AIG made me laugh, but it's followed by Moore running into the usual lobby-security-guard brick walls, plus a bad joke about his cameraman not speaking English. "Donde," Moore tells him, instead of, I suppose, "Vamanos." Then the street interview with the lowly U.S. Rep. How is this helping? How is this explaining anything? So no excitement on my part until I read Jeff Wells' blurb over at Hollywood Elsewhere this morning:

Capitalism is a bold-as-brass slam at the basic evils unleashed by unregulated capitalism, and a clean and irrefutable explanation about how the U.S. system has taken the basic unfairness of life and magnified it tenfold, especially since the ascension of Ronald Reagan.

"The basic unfairness of life and magnified it tenfold." That certainly describes how I feel about the U.S. system since Reagan. I'm on board again.

The other night Patricia and I watched Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, a 1945 film directed by Robert Bresson, and both of us were struck by how much the star, Maria Casares, looked like Chloe Sevigny. No?

There appears to be no relation, though. She is, however, the daughter of Santiago Casares Quiroga, who was prime minister of Spain when the fighting that led to the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936.

The ending of Les Dames is disappointing but otherwise it's a good entry into the "scheming woman/women" subgenre, with Macbeth, The Women, Gone with the Wind. What are the recent entries in this? Or do cinematic women just kick ass now, rather than scheme for power, or men, or revenge? The scheming seems left to the teenaged girls now.

• How Hollywood Portrayed Terrorism Before 9/11, from 2005: "Watching these movies, in fact, one wonders all over again about right-wing attacks on Hollywood. These movies encourage patriotism, faith in our leaders and an-eye-for-an-eye. They encourage a simple absolutist view of the world. There are good guys and bad guys and never the twain shall meet. The hero is always right, and the people who disagree with the hero are always wrong, and if the hero needs to — and he usually does — he can go it alone. Sometimes the hero is the President of the United States. Sometimes he wears a flight suit. Sometimes he says tough things like “Get off my plane!” I know: It’s all so anti-Republican."
• The history of the World Trade Center on film, from 2006: "We’ve been telling ourselves the story of the World Trade Center every day since 9/11. The versions we tell ourselves are often full of the conceits of Hollywood movies: action-hero catch-phrases (“Let’s roll”), bold and outsized personalities; and an anticipation of a happy ending. Hollywood is actually giving us a less Hollywood version of events. The films they’ve created are human-sized, the heroes ordinary men and women."
• United 93 for best picture, from 2006: "The passengers’ cobbled-together, whispered plan is inspiring. Everyone pitches in. This guy knows judo, this guy can fly single-engine airplanes, this guy was an air traffic controller for eight years. It's a team effort. If the plane hadn’t been flying so low when they stormed the cockpit, you get the feeling they would’ve survived. They would’ve brought the plane home."

In June 2001, “The Fast and The Furious” opened and wound up making $144 million domestic, $62 million international. It went through several sequels before returning this March with the original cast and the orginal name, sans definite articles (“Fast and Furious”), and wound up making, thus far, $155 million domestic and $187 million international.

In March 2000, “Final Destination” opened and wound up making $53 million domestic, $59 million foreign. It went through several sequels before returning last week with the original name, plus definite article (“The Final Desination”), and has wound up making, thus far, $33 million.

It’s still too early to tell whether movie audiences are completely turned off by the definite article. Adjust for inflation, for example, and “The Fast and the Furious” did better domestically than its article-less sequel.

I’m just saying what a boon to sequelmakers—which is pretty much everyone now. You no longer have to bother with cumbersome roman numerals (“Halloween II”), Arabic numerals (“The Pink Panther 2”) or subtitles (“Revenge of the Fallen”). You no longer have to wring your hands over adding “part” or “episode” or what have you. If only George Lucas had been this innovative! Instead of “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” which is a mouthful in any language, we could’ve gone to see “The Star Wars.” Sure, it would’ve led to some confusing Abbott-and-Costello-like conversations:

“Have you seen ‘The Star Wars’?”
“You mean the ‘Star Wars’?”

But then it already did:

“What’s your favorite ‘Star Wars’?”
“Probably the first ‘Star Wars.’”
“You mean the first episode of ‘Star Wars’?”
“I mean the first one chronologically.”
“Chronologically in our time or their time?”
“The first fucking ‘Star Wars,’ alright?”

Me, I can’t wait for the following definite-article-less sequels:

• “Gone with Wind”
• “Raiders of Lost Ark”
• “Passion of Christ”
• “Lord of Rings: Return of King”

Or these:

• “The Gone with the Wind”
• “The Star Trek”
• “The Angels and the Demons”
• “The The Godfather”

It’s all so easy now.

Follow your dreams.

Via Jeff Wells' site, a mash-up of (yet again) the angry bunker scene in "Downfall" with (this time) the online disaster of the "Avatar" trailer.

Most of this stuff bugs me because it's dissing what doesn't exist yet—wait for the movie, people—but I'm posting the link for these lines:

Lt.: Sir, you expect a miracle from Fox Studios.
Hitler: Goddamn Fox would give Wolverine webshooters and a bat cape!

Exactamundo, Cunningham.

Learn a foreign language. Even poorly.

Go outside

I understand why Drew McWeeny of Hitflix is upset. If you’re part of a group, and an outsider disparages the group, you rally ‘round even if you tend to agree with the outsider. When I lived abroad and someone said something negative about the U.S., my back went up even if I tended to agree. Hell, even if I agreed completely. It’s a human reaction.

So older movie critics (A.O. Scott, Jeff Wells, Roger Ebert) have disparaged the tastes of younger moviegoers, and WcWeeny, a younger movie critic, has sided with “young” rather than “movie critic” and fought back. It’s understandable. Not being young, I read the above pieces and merely nodded. A.O. Scott’s article felt particularly spot-on. He was describing my feelings about the current state of movies and popular culture. He was describing the reality I was seeing. “Delicate, exotic flower, released into art houses” is the quote of the year.

At the same time, this debate isn’t really about “G.I. Joe” or “The Hurt Locker.” It’s about “Transformers 2.” That’s the one that hurts. That’s the one that feels like a final insult to movie critics—no matter their age.

Other no. 1 box-office hits of the year could be explained away. “Dark Knight” was good. “Spider-Man 3” and “Dead Man’s Chest” and “Sith” were crappy sequels to good movies, and, one assumes, moviegoers went for the good movie and wound up seeing the crappy sequel. C’est la vie. C’est la mort. Movie critics knew that we were far from the days when “The Graduate” or “The Godfather,” or even “Rain Man” or “Saving Private Ryan,” could be the no. 1 movie of the year, but at least moviegoers hadn’t lost their minds.

But the mindnumbingly stupid “Transformers 2” was sequel to the mindnumbingly stupid “Transformers”... and people still went to see it. And they didn’t stop seeing it. It didn’t have great legs but it had better legs than I’d hoped. I wanted it to fall off a cliff but it just rolled down a steep hill like a happy idiot, babbling grosses all the way. It’s knocking at $400 million domestic right now.

At one point in his piece, McWeeny argues that the perceived direction of our culture is off-limits to critics. That you talk about the film and that’s all:

I don't care if anyone agrees with me. Ever. ... I don't think the job of a critic is to rail against what is popular, or to insult the taste of the viewing public, or even to question it.

I’d argue that none of this takes place in a vacuum. Everything matters. What we see, what we eat, the sites we click on, all affect us and our culture. I know I’m part of all this, not apart from it. If this air gets polluted it pollutes me, too.

I have no doubt that the 14-year-olds who flocked to “Transformers 2” will be the 15-year-olds, and the 20-year-olds, and the 46-year-olds who will blanch when they see it one or six or 32 years from now. Doesn’t matter. It’s already pulled in tons of money. That reality’s been made and can’t be unmade. Other movies just like it—violent movies based on toys, but for everyone— will be produced and marketed to us and to the people coming behind us. And on and on, world without end. Until it ends. And it won’t end when Decepticons try to turn off the sun; it’ll end when we all become as blisteringly stupid as the stories we absorb.

The latest news? Warner Bros. plans to develop a movie around Legos. Here’s hoping the Eiffel Tower survives.

Via Jeffrey Wells’ site, here’s Stephen Sommers, director of “G.I. Joe,” on movie critics:

I don't think the mainstream critics are relevant [when it comes to G.I. Joe]. They have criticized themselves into irrelevancy. ... I make the kind of movies critics love to hate. They love dark and depressing movies.

And here’s a list of movies that garnered a 90 percent or better rating from top critics on Rotten Tomatoes over the last few years:

• “Ratatouille”: 100%
• “WALL-E”: 97%
• “Hairspray”: 97%
• “The Bourne Ultimatum”: 97%
• “The Incredibles”: 95%
• “Casino Royale”: 95%
• “Spider-Man 2”: 95%
• “Iron Man”: 92%
• “Enchanted”: 90%
• “The Dark Knight”: 90%

An argument can be made that “The Dark Knight” is “dark and depressing,” but I don’t think that’s the kind of film Sommers is talking about. We know what he’s talking about. And of course he’s wrong. The numbers show he’s wrong. But he’s got the courage of his cliches.

Just as right-wing politicians have labeled Hollywood “liberal” when its product is most decidedly not, so Hollywood executives have labeled critics “elitist,” and lovers of things “dark and depressing,” when the reality is both more complex and more simple. Good critics love good movies. In whatever form they come in.

A few days ago The Independent ran a short piece on the most controversial films in...history? Or just 10 banned films? If the former then “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) is the most banned film ever (11 countries), while Singapore, no surprise, is the banningest of all countries, preventing seven of the ten listed films from arriving on their chewing-gum-less shores. A bigger surprise, at least for me, is the second banningest country, Ireland, which refused “Chainsaw,” A Clockwork Orange,” “Life of Brian,” “Freaks” and “The Evil Dead.” And who’s Italy to ban “Last Tango in Paris”? Have they seen some of their own films?

I’m also curious what constitutes a ban. Not every film is distributed abroad, so... Do distributors have to begin inquiries before the ban is announced, or are some governments more proactive in their banning? Refusing before it’s offered, as it were.

This list includes two best picture nominees (“A Clockwork Orange” and “The Exorcist”) and one best picture winner (“All Quiet on the Western Front”), and it was this last one that intrigued. Which country, you might ask, banned the peace-loving, war-hating “All Quiet”? Why Germany, of course, after the Nazis took power. In fact, according to The Independent...

During its brief run in German cinemas in 1930, the Nazis disrupted the viewings by releasing rats in the theatres.

 Another reminder of what democracy isn’t. Disruption—whether with actual rats or with the kind Rachel Maddow talks about here.

Future "At the Movies" co-host A.O. Scott's piece on the increasingly infantilization of the American movie-going public isn't bad but he really hits his stride in the second half. Everything below is just dead-on:

Wolverine, Captain Kirk, Harry Potter, Hasbro — those trademarks and secondary merchandising opportunities will reliably get kids into the theaters. But the examples of “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” “Public Enemies” and, perhaps, “Funny People” are widely taken to mean that artists like Denzel Washington, John Travolta, Michael Mann, Johnny Depp and Judd Apatow may not have the same guaranteed pull. Never mind that “Public Enemies” has actually done pretty well after a slow start, and that the running time, subject matter and tone of “Funny People” make it hard to compare with “Knocked Up” or “Happy Gilmore.” Conventional wisdom is always happy to ignore such nuances.

This may be because any reduction in the clout of stars or the autonomy of directors redounds to the benefit of the companies that own the copyrights and distribute the goods. ... Middle-aged actors and critically lauded directors look like extravagances rather than sound investments. Forty is the new dead. Auteur is French for unemployed. “The Hurt Locker” — the kind of fierce and fiery action movie that might have been a blockbuster once upon a time — is treated like a delicate, exotic flower, released into art houses and sold on its prestige rather than on its visceral power.

The box office numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole story either. The weekend grosses, widely guessed at on Thursday night and breathlessly reported by the middle of Sunday afternoon, record the quantity of tickets purchased, but they cannot register the quality of the experience. The aggregate of receipts shows that a lot of people like going to the movies, but not necessarily that they like what they see.

Commercial success may represent the public’s embrace of a piece of creative work, or it may just represent the vindication of a marketing strategy. In bottom-line terms, this is a distinction without a difference. A movie that people will go and see, almost as if they had no choice, is a safer business proposition than one they may have to bother thinking about. In this respect “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is exemplary. It brilliantly stymies reflection, thwarts argument, arrests intelligent response. The most interesting thing about the movie — apart from Megan Fox’s outfits, I suppose — is that it has made nearly $400 million domestically.

There is nothing else to say. Any further discussion — say about whether it’s a good movie or not — sounds quaint, old-fashioned, passé. Get a clue, grandpa.

Or go see “Up,” the only hugely successful movie of the summer that engages genuinely adult themes. It’s about loss, frustration, disappointment. And it offers one of the season’s most pointed and paradoxical lessons. If you want to make a mature film for mature audiences, make sure it’s a cartoon.

OK, this is a funny video: A nice take on all of those "Star Wars" parallels in the new "Star Trek" movie. A nicer take on how all of our action films are being made from the same glop.

My friend Adam wrote a funny and heartfelt tribute to John Hughes. 18 months ago. He beat the rush. Another way of saying he meant it.

I have to admit I wasn’t a huge fan. Of the movies he directed I liked “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” Of the movies he wrote, add “Mr. Mom” and some of “Home Alone.”

Did he devolve? In his first films, teens were the smartest people in the room. In his latter films, kids were. Imagine if he’d kept going.

Maybe if I’d been a teen when “Breakfast Club” came out in 1985 it would’ve meant more to me. But I was 22 and it already felt reductive. I couldn’t stand Judd Nelson’s character, and I couldn’t stand that the filmmakers (Hughes) seemed to like Nelson’s character more than the others. I loved the Beatles, too, but Hughes' John Lennon references felt cloying. "When I was a kid, I wanted to be John Lennon." “After all, he was the Walrus.” Please.

No doubt “Pretty in Pink” and “Some Kind of Wonderful” would make a great double bill, if only to test their double standards. Same set-up, different genders. In the first, a girl has two possible boyfriends: the nice, popular rich kid and the goofy friend; she winds up with the nice, popular rich kid. In the second, a boy has two possible girlfriends: the nice, popular rich kid and the goofy friend. He winds up with the goofy friend. Girls are so shallow.

“Ferris Bueller” would make a great double bill, too, but with a non-Hughes film also starring Matthew Broderick: “Election.” Bring your kids. Scare them. You see, this is this guy when he’s a teen, and here he is again 13 years later. Boo! Both films are actually fairly accurate as to how each age perceives itself. In high school, you know it all, or feel like you don't have anything else to learn. Stuck in adulthood, you’ve never felt so dumb, and wonder why you didn't learn more when you were younger.

One wonders what he thought. We’ll all be in that spot. Fuck, this is it. I should’ve... Here’s my main thought about a man whose films fetishized youth: 59 is too young.

"The battle of the sequels continues ad naseum. No sooner did That's Entertainment, Part 2 open than serious negotiations for That's Entertainment, Part 3 began. Meanwhile, Dino De Laurentis not only has King Kong 2 on the boards before the premier of the first King Kong but even has a hat trick in mind, and is offering Jeff Bridges $1 million to perform in King Kong 1, 2 and 3."

—New Times magazine, May 28, 1976 (cover story: "Demystifying Jerry Brown: The politics beyond the lotus position," by Robert Scheer).

Kong is now known as such a bomb that I laughed when I read this—and was equally amused by the magazine's futzing over harmless That's Entertainment sequels—but it turns out that not only was King Kong the no. 3 movie in America in 1976 but a sequel was made. It's called King Kong Lives and it came out 10 years later, in 1986, produced, yes, by De Laurentis (who, in the interim, had produced Orca, Flash Gordon, Ragtime, Dune and the Conan movies) and directed by the same director, John Guillerman (who, in the interim, had directed Death on the Nile, Mr. Patman and Sheena). The corrected summary from IMDb: "The giant ape, King Kong, who was shot and fell off the World Trade Center, has been in a coma for 10 years and desperately needs a blood transfusion in order to have an artificial heart implanted. Suddenly, in the rainforest, another gigantic ape is found—this time a female... " It was Guillerman's last feature film. De Laurentis lives, he's 90 this year, and is still producing movies.

Oh, and the sequel-mania that New Times feared came from the no. 1 movie (and best-picture winner) that year: Rocky. A year later, Star Wars was released, and we were off to the races.

What greeted me when I went to Netflix just now:

New Release For You!
Because you enjoyed:

• Idiocracy
• Swimming with Sharks

We think you'll enjoy:

• Visioneers

I hate this kind of thing. I watched "Idiocracy" but that doesn't mean I enjoyed it. In fact I was horribly disappointed by it. And while I re-watched "Swimming with Sharks" for this article, that doesn't mean I liked it any more than when I saw it in a theater in '95. Which is to say: Not much.

Hollywood makes this kind of mistake all the time. See, for example, this year's backlash against "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which, yes, many people watched.

I remember before they showed “Jurassic Park” in theaters in the summer of ’93 they gave us a trailer for the upcoming “Flintstones” movie. Upcoming in the summer of ’94. Me in the audience: “Aren’t they getting a little ahead of themselves?”

Now that time-frame is the norm—particularly with journalism. “Now” is so last week, and “next week” is so five minutes ago. On Entertainment Weekly’s latest cover, we get Robert Downey, Jr., Scarlett Johnasson and Mickey Rourke with the headline "THE RETURN OF IRON MAN (Did You Miss Me?)" Miss you? Weren’t you here just last year? Ah, but I guess last year is so five years ago. Next year, when “Iron Man II” opens, is the new now.

Here's part of my review of "Food, Inc.":

The business of business is to speed up the assembly line, to push things through the system at a faster and faster rate, and in doing so, they’ve created a product that is not the product.

So we get food that is not food and news that is not news. This emphasis on ignoring what is, or has been, in favor of what isn't yet, feels like this to me: We can't stand ourselves.

From their July 17th issue, on the backpage “Bullseye” section, far from the center of the bullseye (Brookie Shields’ eulogy for Michael Jackson):

Jon and Kate spend July 4 together. Remember three weeks ago, when we actually cared about them?

No, I don’t. Because I never did. But I remember when EW did. And that’s the problem with EW. They reflect the fleeting, crappy taste of a generic America rather than commenting on it or attempting to channel it. They flatter whatever’s up and kick whatever’s down. So in the July 17th issue, “Bruno” was no. 1 on its “Must List,” with someone (everyone?) writing, “So dirty we can barely describe it...” In their July 24th issue, after a disappointing opening weekend, this headline: “Did Bruno Go Too Far?”

The subhed of the Must List is “The Top 10 Things We Love This Week.” The emphasis, I guess, is on “This Week.”

Patrick Goldstein, over at The Los Angeles Times, begins today’s blog with a callback to his summer movie posse of six random, L.A. teenagers, who, in early May, gave their thoughts on the trailers and the prospects of some of the big summer movies. I was expecting such a callback. I assumed it would be a mea culpa. It’s not. It’s merely a lead-in to another story. It’s used to demonstrate the concern the powers-that-be have for teenage opinion.

I still want the culpa. Here’s Goldstein explaining the point of his posse:

I'd happily put the Posse's picks up against any Entertainment Weekly summer movie box-office prediction. The Top 5 picks from last year's Posse were: "Pineapple Express," "The Dark Knight," "Hancock," "Iron Man" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" -- all five were big hits. Their Bottom 5 films included "Love Guru" and "Speed Racer," so I'd say they were pretty in touch with the summer movie zeitgeist.

 So what did this year’s posse think of the big coming films? This is their final tally, with 60 being top score for a film:

 First, it’s odd that “Up” and “The Hangover” aren’t even on it. Particularly “Up.”

That said, among its top five picks, you have one overperformer (“Star Trek”: $252 million), one underperformer (“Terminator”: $123 million), one about-right–for-a-Michael-Mann film (“Public Enemies”: $70 million), one bomb (“Year One”: $41 million), and a film that opens in August. Not stellar.

Among the bottom five picks, meanwhile, you have, yes, two bombs (“I Love You, Beth Cooper”: $6 million: and “Land of the Lost”: $48 million), and two underperformers (“Drag Me to Hell”: $41 million; and “Night at the Museum 2”: $170 million—versus the $250 million the first film made), but also, ahem, the biggest movie of the year, freakin’ “Transformers 2,” about which the posse not only gave their second-worst score but was blistering and dismissive:

Ben: "I can't say this got my hopes up. It's just a lot of explosions."

Molly: "And they only said five words in the whole trailer. I'm sure all those special effects were hard to do, but if you haven't seen the first movie, I'm not sure you'd even understand what was going on. And most of what was going on sure didn't look that good."

Jasmine: "I wasn't sure I even knew what the movie was about until halfway through the trailer, and I probably know more than most people, since I have a little brother who's into Transformers. I think he'd be a lot more interested in the movie than me. It just felt pretty senseless."

What does this mean? Either the summer movie posse, like most focus groups, ain’t worth much, or our popular movies have gotten too dumb even for teenagers. Whichever, Goldstein still owes us his mea culpa.

Of course it’s nothing like the mea culpa Michael Bay and fans of “Transformers 2” owe us.

Denby, who has bugged me in the past, seems to be getting better. Here he is on what's not quite right with "Public Enemies":

Yet, for all its skill, “Public Enemies” is not quite a great movie. There’s something missing—a sense of urgency and discovery, a more complicated narrative path, a shrewder, tougher sense of who John Dillinger is.

At the same time, he adds what's exactly right with Crudup's performance and the tone director Michael Mann sets:

Billy Crudup, who has done inventive work onstage in recent years, returns to the movies with a brilliant piece of high comedy. His cheekbones built up, his handsome features on the verge of disappearing into jowls, he plays the young but already insufferable J. Edgar Hoover as a bullying, righteous, and wary man, a natural-born populist authoritarian. One of Mann’s wittiest accomplishments is to recapture the stiffly formal side of official life in the thirties, the pompous tone of bureaucracy and media, too—the sound of a newly powerful country trying to impress itself with its own importance.

In the same review, he also takes out "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"...as much any critic can take out that $400-million piece of garbage:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” directed by the stunningly, almost viciously, untalented Michael Bay, is much closer to the norm of today’s conglomerate filmmaking. Two sets of leaden-voiced, plastic-and-metal monsters, the Autobots and the Decepticons, having failed to settle their differences over a parking space on an alien planet, fight it out on Earth—with human beings, in the dubious form of the teen couple Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, in the middle.

If Micheal Mann's movies feel denser, heavier than most films it's because they are. They have the weight of history on them, the weight of detail. Here's Mann, from the director's commentary of "Collateral," talking up Tom Cruise. I'd copied it down years ago for a possible "In Defense of Tom Cruise" article that never happened, but it works here, on the day "Public Enemies" opens. I've been excited about this film for a while, writing about it here and here and here. In an odd coincidence, three years ago this month, I wrote about both Mann and Depp for MSNBC.com. Mann was my choice for subject, Depp was my editor's, but both were fun to write about.

In the meantime, here's Mann on Cruise and on why details matter:

ON HOLSTERING THE GUN
“The real sign of how integrated Tom was to become with the skills that Vincent, in fact, would have, is the expression on Vincent’s face after he shoots these guys and when he’s holstering his gun. He’s not thinking about holstering the gun. He can do that in his sleep. Immediately after he fires that last round his attention gets focused on Wilshire Boulevard down at the end of the alley. Is anybody coming at us from there? Did anybody hear these gunshots? What’s Max doing? He immediately switches over to the next task and that’s absolutely perfect craft. And it’s exactly what somebody who had a lot of trigger time, who had been in the kinds of conflicts we imagined Vincent had been in, that’s exactly what he’d be doing. He wouldn’t be worrying about how he holsters his gun.

“So that is a beautiful little movement and it’s a testament to the commitment of Tom to the work of turning himself into Vincent, and having deeper and deeper understanding as well as acquiring all the physical skills. There’s no cutting in it, and Tom draws and fires five rounds in 1.4 seconds.”

ON ED SADLOWSKI’S STEEL WORKERS LOCAL
“Tom and I did a lot of work in trying to understand where this guy came from. If he was in a foster home, if he had an institutionalized childhood. He was back in the public school system at age 11, that would have been sometime in the ‘70s. He would have been dressed very awkwardly, he would have probably been ostracized cause he looked odd, and the kind of brutality, you know, [of] pre-teens and early adolescents. We postulated an alcoholic abusive father who was culturally very progressive. He was probably part of Ed Sadlowski’s steel-workers local in Gary. He was a Vietnam Veteran. He had friends who were African American on the south side of Chicago. The Checkerboard Lounge is 30 minutes away at the Calumet Skyway, so the father probably, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, was an aficionado of jazz. There was a great jazzy scene on the south side of Chicago. Modern Jazz Quartet. But it’s almost as if the father blamed the son, i.e., Vincent, for what happened to the mother. And the father drank. And as Gary was being reduced—you know, it looked like Dresden at the end of the second World War—the father never tutored the boy in jazz but the boy extolled the virtue of knowing about jazz because he heard his father talking about jazz—not to him but to other people—and that’s why he knew about jazz."

ON VINCENT ON KILLING HIS FATHER AT AGE 12
“Now this is the truth but Vincent doesn’t play it for truth. And, again, this is a moment where I believe Tom absolutely hits a very difficult thing to nail, which is that Vincent is brilliant and he knows how easily shocked is petit bourgeois Max, and he says things to absolutely horrify and appall Max.”

ON WHY DETAILS MATTER
“We all bring our whole history with us into any moment of the present.”

We have Sunday movie nights occasionally here on First Hill and last night the nine of us watched "Jaws." Some of us hadn't seen it since it came out; some of us had never seen it. I've seen it, what, four, five times? As recently as a few years ago, as long ago as 1975 at the second-run Boulevard Theater in south Minneapolis (99 cents anytime), five blocks from where I grew up. Back then I shut my eyes through several scenes: the initial skinny-dipping attack; Hooper scuba-diving under the hull of Ben Gardner's boat. Basically anything that combined "shark" and "dark." How much did this movie eff me up? I could barely take a shower for months afterwards. Rinsing, say, shampoo out, I'd think: "What if I open my eyes and I'm underwater and there's a shark coming towards me? WHAT THEN?" Stupid brain. Stupid Spielberg.

It was the movie that changed movies, that made the summer blockbuster possible, yadda yadda, but it's still smart, and it's still adult. It's got an early '70s vibe: the corruption of local government, personified by Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton, Mr. Robinson from "The Graduate"), who puts tourist dollars ahead of tourist lives; the class distinctions on the island, which Quint mocks; the use of locals as extras; the wonderful scene between Brody and his son at the dinner table, where the son keeps imitating the father; Quint's horrifying story of the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Hell, the entire introduction of Quint is great: the fingernails scraping the chalkboard, the frank discussion of the shark, the offer made with a glint of the eye. Add it to the list of great cinematic introductions: Pepe in "Pepe Le Moko," Rick in "Casablanca," Capt.Jack Sparrow in the first "Pirates." Off the top of my head. Feel free to add more below.

Spielberg frames his shots beautifully. I particularly like Brody, Hooper and Vaughn arguing and walking, and then, without a cut, walking into this shot, which is just perfect:

"Jaws" was the no. 1 movie of the year in 1975, and, for a time, the no. 1 movie of all time. (Adjusted for inflation, it's still seventh.) It was also, lest we forget, nominated for best picture. Back then we could do that kind of thing.

So... Any recommendations for next movie night?

"In a career that spanned almost 50 years Jack Lemmon was seldom a soothing presence. Sweaty, stammering and hyperactive, Lemmon seemed to embody the countertype of the monumental, granite-jawed leading men of the 1950s — stars like John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck.

"Where Peck, for example, seemed to embody the World War II squadron leader slipping into middle age and forced to operate on the unfamiliar corporate battlefields of Madison Avenue (“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”), Lemmon was the junior officer eagerly polishing the brass of his superiors (in his Oscar-winning supporting performance in “Mister Roberts”), a tactic he queasily carried with him into the business world (“The Apartment”). Lemmon’s recurring predicament is that of the desperate conformist who ultimately discovers that conformity comes at too high a price."

—Dave Kehr in his NY Times article, "Everyman, Tempted" about a new Jack Lemmon DVD collection

James Allen: Must you go home?
Helen: There are no musts in my life. I'm free, white and 21."

—from "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932). The Worldwide Dubya isn't much help with the phrase. One assumes it was a semi-common, possibly regional (i.e., southern) comment back in the day, but I don't see any specific reference to it before this film—which, I should add, includes a lot of black actors in roles that, while mostly non-speaking, aren't too embarrassing for the time. The line subsequently wound up in a few other films from the era: "Dames" (1935) and "Kitty Foyle" (1940). It also became the title of indie movie from 1963 about an African American on trial for the rape of a white woman.

Dad: And the buildings went up. When they were finished the damnedest thing happened. It was like the buildings were too good for us. Nobody told us that. It just felt...uncomfortable, that's all. [pause] You guys still go swimmin' in the quarries?
Dave: Sure.
Dad: So, the only thing you got to show for my 20 years of work is the holes we left behind.
Dave: I don’t mind.
Dad: I do.

Listen, no one likes picking on teenagers, but, over at The Big Picture blog, Patrick Goldstein has trotted out his summer posse to take a gander at this year's summer movies. As prognosis, it supposedly worked last year and it may work this year, too. But do they have to open their mouths? Or, if they do, does Goldstein have to quote them? The deadliest excerpt:

Molly Philbin, 15: "I'm a 'Star Trek' fan, so I'm eager to see what the movie is really like. But I wasn't in love with the trailer. It really didn't show very much of a plot or any references to any 'Star Trek' episodes. It seems like it's just about a guy taking his father's position. I wish it told me more."

Basically she encourages what I discourage: knowing too much about a film before you even get a chance to see it. Jasmine, also 15, echoes her thoughts, so maybe this is generational thing. Or maybe it's an L.A./other America thing. Either way, I would've appreciate Goldstein getting a little more involved here. Questions remain. Does the trailer still make you want to see the film? If it does, then it's a success, end of story. So are there trailers that give away too much of a story? If she and Jasmine never think that, at least we know where they stand on the issue.

My fear: It's the L.A. Times blog so industry people will read it, it's teens so they'll pay attention, and our trailers, which already give away too much of the plot, will give away even more. Because of Molly, 15. Thanks, Mr. Goldstein.

In brighter news, almost flowery news, Nathaniel Rogers, over at The Film Experience blog, has followed his April showers theme ("Psycho," "Changeling") with some May flowers, and today he's highlighting everyone's favorite flower girl, Eliza Doolittle. I first saw the film on TV when I was little and fell in love with Audrey's face and Marni's voice—not realizing they weren't the part of the same package—and I'm still in love with her/them. Mostly her. And I agree with Nathan about the slippers—God!—but I'd still have trouble ending the movie before "The Street Where You Live," which is just a beautiful, romantic song. I guess it'd be the little darling I'd have to kill. 

• A.O. Scott on animated movies: “Enough with the winking, tiresome pop-culture allusions... Try telling a simple story with conviction. The merchandising tie-ins will take care of themselves.”
• Manohla Dargis on digitial filmmaking: When it was first introduced, the process seemed as if it might expand the cinematographers’ toolbox. But because of their ease of use, those same tools are being usurped by studio executives, producers, directors and even actors who all want a say in how to digitally “fix” the image.
• A.O. Scott: You all keep trying to make Rock Hudson-Doris Day-style romantic comedies with the golden guys and gals of the moment, and the results are sexless, subtextless, bland career-girl-in-search-of-Mr.-Right retreads...
• Manhola Dargis: Audiences complain that there’s nothing to watch, and that may be true if you live near a multiplex that plays only the latest in schlock entertainment. But if you live in a city like New York or Los Angeles, you have no business whining. New York in particular is a cinephile’s dream, and there’s almost always something shaking up the screen at Film Forum, the IFC Center, the Walter Reade Theater, Anthology Film Archives and BAMcinématek...

Why does the audience keep coming to this type of photoplay if neither lust, love, hate, nor hunger is adequately conveyed? Simply because such spectacles gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American.

In his office, Arkoff had a variety of movie posters propped up against the wall, adorned with catchy titles and ad slogans. Embarrassed that I didn't recognize any of the titles, I said, "Geez, I'm sorry I missed these films. They look like they're a lot of fun." Smoking a cigar as long as a Cadillac, Arkoff laughed me off. "Don't apologize," he boomed. "We haven't even shot them yet. Never make a movie until you know if you can sell it first."

Mortiz’s father, Milt, spent several decades working for Arkoff as his head of advertising and publicity, so he knows of what he does. That’s how “F&F” came about. Mortiz the younger saw a documentary referencing “The Fast and the Furious,” an early Roger Corman feature, and got Universal to buy rights to the title. Start with the title; fill in the story later.

Which is the second, related thing Mortiz represents: the concept picture in ascendance over the star-powered picture. It’s another reminder, as if we needed one, of how the majors now put a high-gloss finish on former “b” pictures while the independents give a grittier look to former “a” pictures. B = A, A = B. Bizarro Hollywood.

Goldstein, like a lot of journalists (and like some part of me, too), has a reserve of admiration for these guys — guys that can sell crap. Maybe because they’re good copy. (That’s a great quote, above, from Arkoff.) Maybe because they're fun. They're not striving after art, they're striving after business. It seems a more sensible way to live. Until, maybe, you look at what you've left behind.

Here are some of the words and phrases you too can learn by watching "Pineapple Express" with the French subtitles on:

• nichons: boobies
• c'est la Cadillac: it's the best
• ma bite, votre bouche: my dick, your mouth
• gros con: asshole
• t'emmerdes Goldblum: f**k Jeff Goldblum
• sois cool: chill out
• nique la police: f**k the police

Intro. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

My most-quoted movie lines keep changing, of course, and they’ll certainly change after this. Will they change because of this? It almost feels like writing them down makes them too... established. Can I hear myself saying Fredo’s line anymore? I’m 46. Isn’t it time to stop quoting Superman already?

Thankfully there’s always backup: 100 years of it. Quotes that explain some aspect of life :

• “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” — Gen. Patton in “Patton”
• “When young, we mourn for one woman... as we grow old, for women in general.” — Old dude in “Slackers”
• “My girlfriend’s a vegetarian, which pretty much means I’m a vegetarian. But I do love a good burger.” — Jules in “Pulp Fiction”

Most of the time, though, I simply find myself in a situation similar to a situation I’ve seen in a film...and the line’s waiting for me like an old friend.

Your wife/husband/friend is making plans for the two of you that seem far-off and/or pollyanna-ish? “You keep thinkin’, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.”

Everything about your day going wrong? Imitate Steve Martin’s impotent flailings at the fates in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”: “You’re messing with the wrong guy!”

Don’t know if that project you’re starting will lead anywhere? Jack Warden’s line in “All the President’s Men,” spoken just after the Watergate burglary, lays out the options: “Could be a story, could be crazy Cubans.”

Now that I think about it, even these quotes explain some aspect of life. Plans fail, the fates don’t care. But sometimes, if you’re in the right place at the right time, it’s not just crazy Cubans.

Intro. 5, 4, 3, 2...

1. “Welcome to the party, pal.”
John McClane in “Die Hard” (1988)
Screenplay by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza

Poor John McClane. He’s just a regular New York City cop visiting his estranged wife at the hoity-toity international corporation she works at in L.A., when the building is taken over by hoity-toity European terrorists. Fortunately, after this and that death struggle, he gets through to the L.A. police on an emergency reserve channel and tells them what’s going down. Unfortunately the woman at the other end merely chastises him for using the emergency reserve channel. Even after he’s shot at — even after she hears him being shot at — she sends only one black-and-white to investigate, and it’s driven by the proverbial fat, donut-eating cop who hasn’t used his gun in years. McClane, already bruised and bloody, watches from above. He sees the dude drive around and go in. Then he has to fight and kill another terrorist. Then he sees the cop about to leave, about to do nothing. So he gives him a present. He drops the terrorist’s body 30-plus stories onto the cop’s car. Which is when the terrorists inside — realizing the jig is up — begin shooting up the car like it’s a duck at a shooting gallery, and the cop is screaming for backup even as he backs his own car into a ditch to escape the gunfire. And above, John McClane looks down and says the line: “Welcome to the party, pal.”

It’s a real American line, isn’t it? Nothing hoity-toity about it. McClane’s been dealing with something for a long time, and now someone else is dealing with it, too. And he’s nothing if not a  gracious host.

I say it under similar circumstances — sans the blood and sweat and terrorists.

A car cut you off while you were biking? Welcome to the party, pal. You have asthma? Welcome to the party, pal. You’re 30 years old and have broken many hearts, and now, just now, your own heart has been broken for the first time? Welcome to the party, pal.

If something’s truly tragic, of course, I won’t say it. I’m not a complete dick. Otherwise...

Mostly I say it when the complaining person is too obtuse to realize I’ve been suffering under this “thing” (asthma; rosacea; losing baseball teams)  as long as I have. Like they’re bringing me news.

Also when their news is more or less universal. Broken hearts. Stupid bosses. Rain.

In a way, it isn’t even a “gotcha” line. Pull back far enough and it’s basically saying the human condition is messy and unpleasant. But let’s call it a party anyway. And let’s call you a pal. And welcome.

Intro. Lines 5, 4 and 3. Would love to hear your most-quoted movie lines below.  

2. “The truth is these are not very bright guys...and things got out of hand.”
Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men” (1976)
Screenplay by William Goldman

Man, I’ve been quoting this a lot this past decade.

Scene: It’s the first underground-garage meeting between Bob Woodward and Deep Throat and Woodward is asking about the bits and pieces he and Bernstein have gathered, which they don’t know how to fit together. He talks about John Mitchell resigning to spend more time with his family. “Sounds like bullshit,” he says, in that less-cynical time, that pre-Watergate time. “We don’t quite believe that.” “No,” Deep Throat adds, “but it’s touching.” Deep Throat sees not only the larger issue with Watergate but the larger issue with Woodward. So he says the line, a line which, in its own way, explains everything. “Forget the myths the media has created about the White House,” he says. “The truth is these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”

The problem isn’t just the people in charge; the problem is our myths about the people in charge. We believe we live in a meritocracy. We believe — we still believe! — people are where they are through talent and hard work. Yet what accounts for success? If I had to make a list, it might look like this:

1. Connections
2. Salesmanship
3. Persistence
4. Ruthlessness
5. Luck

Maybe intelligence should go on there. Maybe talent. But replacing what? Ruthlessness? Luck? I almost feel like I’m being charitable. I didn’t include lying, for example, or bullshit. Maybe that’s packaged under “salesmanship.”

Forget the myths...

I first began to think of the line not when I worked at the University Book Store in the mid-90s but during the five years I spent at Microsoft Games — first PC, then Xbox. The bookstore was what it was and I expected little from it. But wasn't Microsoft this mega-successful company? Shouldn’t it know better? Yet in some ways it was worse. The people in charge assumed their success meant they were smart, and that their smarts would ensure continued success. This was in the late 1990s. They were arrogant, and not very bright, and things got out of hand.

Now it seems I can’t go a month without saying the line. A friend will complain about something at work, something stupid his boss is doing, something idiotic and expensive the higher-ups are planning. “Why do they think this’ll work? How could they be so dumb?”

The truth is these are not very bright guys...

Don’t get me started on politics, on business. “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Mission Accomplished, “Bring ‘em on,” Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie,” the Terri Schiavo case, the U.S. attorney scandal, credit default swaps, Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros. “They were doing what with the prisoners?” “They were doing what with our money?” “They thought they could get away with what?”

...and things got out of hand.

The line is like “The Wire” before “The Wire.” It explains everything. It’s not just for the Nixon administration anymore.

Intro here, No. 5 here, No. 4 here. Would love to hear your most-quoted movie lines below. 

3. “I’m smart! Not like everybody says — like dumb. I’m smart!”
From “The Godfather – Part II” (1974)
Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo

It's a heart-breaking scene, isn't it? At the start of this saga, there are three sons: Sonny, Fredo, Michael. Sonny’s the volatile one, the future godfather. Mike’s the war hero, and, we soon find out, a rather cold bastard. And Fredo is, well, John Cazale. Not particularly attractive, not particularly adept at the family business. While his father’s being gunned down at a fruit stand in Little Italy, he’s doing a Woody Allen bit with his gun; then he slumps, crying, by his father’s bullet-riddled body. They don’t even bother to shoot him. In Vegas, he momentarily takes Moe Green’s side against the family, and in “II” he’s used as a pawn by Hyman Roth in Roth’s attempt to gun down Michael. Not smart.

In this scene, which takes place in the Corleones’ Nevada compound in the middle of winter, Michael is plotting strategy around the U.S. Senate investigation into his affairs, and, needing information, he leaves his office and consults with Fredo in a side room. This is the first scene between the two since Cuba, when Michael found out Fredo betrayed him, and Fredo is, understandably, offering mea culpas and excuses. He sits slumped in his chair, a puppet whose strings have been cut. Eventually, though, he lets loose. We find out how he feels about being stepped over (not good) and how he feels about being errand-boy for the family (ditto). Michael says, in his flat voice, “That’s the way pop wanted it” and Fredo screams, “That’s not the way I wanted it!” By this time his body is racked with almost palsied shaking — compare it with Michael’s half-lidded cool — and he says the line, a line which reveals its opposite (that Fredo isn’t smart) three times over.

First, it’s hardly Henry James. Grammatically, it’s a pretty dumb way to say you’re smart.

Second, anyone who has to say he’s smart, isn’t. Try to imagine Einstein saying the line. Try to imagine Michael saying it.

Third, haven’t you been paying attention to family lessons? Hold your friends close and your enemies closer. Never let anyone outside the family know what you’re thinking. By this point Fredo should be wary of Michael. He should view him as his enemy. And yet he still reveals everything to him. Michael probably would’ve had Fredo killed anyway, but this outburst let him know, as much as anything, how much resentment, and how little self-control, Fredo has. Thus Fredo's final boatride: Hail Mary, full of grace...

Me, I say this line (wrapped, yes, in a bad John Cazale imitation) whenever I realize I’ve just said or done something stupid. When I'm battling against my own stupidity. It’s my third-most-quoted line. You do the math.

This feels like an April Fools joke. From Variety:

MGM and the Farrelly brothers are closing in on their cast for “The Three Stooges.” Studio has set Sean Penn to play Larry, and negotiations are underway with Jim Carrey to play Curly, with the actor already making plans to gain 40 pounds to approximate the physical dimensions of Jerome “Curly” Howard. The studio is zeroing in on Benicio Del Toro to play Moe.

At first I thought, "Well, maybe the actors are playing the actors playing the Stooges. I.e., in their early days in Hollywood. Maybe it's a biopic." Nope. They're playing doofuses involved in madcap predicaments. Three Academy Awards between them, countless noms, and they're going to be poking fingers into each others' eyes and (no doubt) making more fart jokes than Ace Ventura. Low culture has never been so high. High has never been so low.

As long as it's funny. 

Read the introduction here and No. 5 here. I'd also love to hear other people's most-quoted movie lines below.

4. “I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world!”
— George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946)
Screenplay by Fances Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Frank Capra. From a story by Philip Van Doren Stern

I misplaced this in the film. In my mind it was in the scene where we first see George Bailey as an adult, as Jimmy Stewart, and he’s checking out suitcases for travel abroad. Nope. He actually says it later that evening, to Mary, as they’re making their way home from Harry’s (and Mary’s) “Class of ‘28” graduation dance. Talking and flirting after their dunk in the pool, they spot the old Granville place, the home he and Mary will eventually live in, and, as per the custom, and over her objections, he makes a wish, throw a rock and breaks a window. His wish is the line. It’s what young men have wished for forever.

I love the word “crummy” in there. Poor George has been stuck in Bedford Falls for four years now while friends like Sam Wainwright — that hee-haw bastard — went off to college. At this point George is still a young man and he still thinks he controls his destiny. Before the line, he tells Mary what he’s going to be doing the next day and the day after, and none of it involves her (even as he’s falling for her), and so she makes her own wish and breaks her own window. Pretty awful, now that I think about it. Her wish — the wish we suspect she makes — is to trump his wish. Sure enough, by scene’s end, George’s father has a stroke, then dies, and George has to take over the Building & Loan. And there goes Italy and Greece and the Parthenon — let alone Samarqand. Nice effin’ wish, Mary.

Three years ago, I got into a good discussion with my brother-in-law, Eric, about this movie. We both thought it was inspirational but I argued it was inspirational only within the parameters of  “even if.” Even if you’re stuck in the same town your whole life, even if you don’t get what you most want out of life, yes, life can still be wonderful. Even if. He thought it was inspirational because of those parameters. We were both right, really, we were just in different places in our heads and hearts. Eric had done everything he could to return to his home state of Minnesota, to be near his parents and raise his kids, while I had returned to Minneapolis for a job and felt slightly uncomfortable being back. He wanted Bedford Falls and I didn’t. I still wanted to shake the dust of that crummy little town off my feet and see the world! God, I said the line a lot back then. Wrapped in the worst Jimmy Stewart imitation ever.

I say it less now but it still rings true. Every town is crummy when you’re stuck in it. The world’s a big place and worth seeing. Go. The Class of 1928 is nipping at our heels.

Superman: Surely you don’t mean that, Lois.
Lois: I don’t believe this.
Superman: Lois?
Lois: Hmm?
Superman: I never lie.

Me: Did you hear (Lehman Bros. collapsed, Obama got elected president, it's supposed to snow tonight)?
She: No!
Me: It’s true.
She: I can’t believe it.
Me: (shrug)
She: Are you sure?
Me: I never lie, Lois.

"The days of Nicolas Cage’s sensitivity and risk-taking as an actor have been over for so long it’s hard to get worked up about a new lame performance. But I’ll try. He makes only the broadest of acting choices. He MOPES in capital letters. He DRINKS in capital letters. He SHOUTS whenever he can get away with it (the late film bad acting shouting duet with Rose Byrne is especially funny). When the movie needs him to cry he doesn’t cry so much as hunch his shoulders and jam his eyelids together as if he can force tears out physically. He’s like a Terminator mimicking emotions they’ve seen humans express that they don't quite grasp. Cage doesn’t just overact. He overacts and then underlines. Then he starts circling his emotions with a big fat red marker."

— Nathaniel Rogers, from his review of "Knowing," on Film Experience Blog

In January 2005, I wrote a piece for MSNBC.com anticipating the American Film Institute’s June countdown of the 100 most memorable lines in movie history, and, in it, I included a prediction of their top 10. I wasn’t far off  (AFI’s rankings in parentheses):

1. “There’s no place like home.” (23)
2. “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse” (2)
3. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” (1)
4. “Plastics.” (42)
5. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” (5)
6. “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender…” (3)
7. “May the Force be with you.” (8)
8. “E.T. phone home.” (15)
9. “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” (19)
10. “You talkin’ to me?” (10)

All famous lines, but how many do we really use? Telling a girl, “Here’s looking at you, kid”? Telling a friend, “May the force be with you”? Too corny. Too calcified. Of course this may be a generational thing, in which case these movie lines are like George Trow’s father’s fedora in his book, “Within the Context of No Context.” What the father wore with dignity the son could only wear with irony. The movie lines our parents repeated with sincerity we can only repeat with a smirk.

Let’s face it: Movie lines are only really fun when they’re not part of the national lexicon. Otherwise we risk coming off as the boob at the party saying “Do I make you horny, baby?” one too many times.

I came home last night feeling empty, watched Terrence Malick's "The New World," and got up two-plus hours later mesmerized. This was my second viewing — the first was at the Lagoon Theater three years ago — and back then I wasn't overly impressed. But "The Thin Red Line" means so much to me I wanted to try it again, and for whatever reason this time it took.

It's almost a silent film, isn't it? There's very little dialogue and I'm a dialogue man. Just images, voiceovers, music, glory. Its beginning shares a lot with the beginning of "Thin Red Line," and parts of it almost fit into the grooves dug by "Dances with Wolves," which is why, I believe, so many people (and maybe me) had a problem with it. But it doesn't slip into those grooves. Capt. John Smith is tempted but doesn't go over — even as he wonders why he doesn't go over. It's a moment with which I thoroughly identified. Why stay here when my heart and happiness is somewhere else? The only answer, really, is momentum. And then suddenly it's too late.

Three years ago I had a breakfast conversation about "The New World" with my friend Craig Wright, a playwright, head writer for "Six Feet Under" and creator of "Dirty Sexy Money," and I was so blown away by what he said I encouraged him to write it all down and I would get it in print. I forgot the first law of Lundegaard: I can't sell shit. After numerous attempts it went nowhere. It's been sitting on my desktop all this time. So here it is. It's nice to finally get it out in the world, new or not, world or not.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, or GO SEE “THE NEW WORLD”

By Craig Wright

Near the end of “The New World,” there is a ravishing sequence in which the camera chases Pocahontas through a manicured garden somewhere in England.  Having met the King and Queen and then, far more importantly, having reconfirmed her affections with her husband John Rolfe after bidding a touchingly brief farewell to her handsome but faithless ex-paramour John Smith, she is found playing hide-and-seek in a garden with her and Rolfe’s young son, during the brief time that was supposed to directly precede the family’s return to America.  As she and the laughing boy race past the meticulously well-managed hedges, however, Rolfe (in voice-over) tells his son, in a letter meant to be read in years to come, how his mother died unexpectedly only weeks later, without ever returning to America.  As Rolfe commends his dead wife’s love and hopes to the grown son she’ll never know, the boy vanishes from the sequence and the accelerating camera chases Pocahontas alone past the carefully-tended topiary as the sweeping strains of the Overture from “Das  Rheingold” (a piece of music used only once before in the movie, when the two cultures, English and Powhatan, first glimpsed each other through the trees) rise and rise. 

The feeling one gets as all these meanings are so carefully gathered up and thrown at the sky is nothing short of ecstatic.  This brief glorious sequence of pursuit through greenery has a complicated provenance, however, that, once explicated, may make it even more appealing to viewers unwilling to be moved by mere majesty.

Near the end of Malick’s previous film, “The Thin Red Line,” there is an equally pivotal sequence of pursuit through a verdant world.  In that scene, Witt, the visionary pacifist caught in a world of bloody conflict (played by Jim Caviezel), is chased through the jungle by a group of Japanese soldiers whose attention he has diverted in order to buy his trapped compatriots time to escape.  Both of Malick’s two other films, “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven,” also ended with similar chase scenes.  In “Badlands,” Martin Sheen played “Kit,” an amoral serial killer who was ultimately pursued into the woods by the law, a law with whom we were able to sympathize due to the cold and chillingly random nature of Kit’s crimes.  In “Days of Heaven,” Richard Gere’s character “Bill” met his end in the heart of green nature as well, and again at the hands of law enforcement officials, but in that film the murder he’d committed was in self-defense, and our sympathies, as he was shot down by his thoroughly unpleasant-looking nemesis, were with him.  Malick’s protagonist had evolved from sadistic animal to confused Everyman.  He was one of us.

Witt, however, as he runs through the jungle at the end of “The Thin Red Line,” self-consciously sacrificing his own life to save the lives of others, isn’t one of us.  He’s better.  The setting is the same as ever – wild green nature – and the basic conflict is the same – it’s a scene of pursuit – but the moral content of the story Malick is telling has now risen considerably.  He’s no longer dispassionately watching and, in the case of “Badlands,” aestheticizing random violence, nor is he compassionately recounting the bloody outcome of a mythic misunderstanding, as he did in “Days of Heaven.”  In the closing moments of “The Thin Red Line” he’s saying, “This is how we should be.  Placed as we are, against our will, in a world of unavoidable violence, we should, when it becomes necessary, give ourselves up to death in place of others.  This is what it means to be a human being.  It is in the freedom and the will to choose our own annihilation for the sake of others that our humanity resides.”  In “The Thin Red Line,” Malick goes out on a limb and unapologetically advocates for a moral ideal, and in doing so, he – Terrence Malick, the filmmaker – becomes one of us. Even when we grant that human morality is only a fragile parenthesis within a much larger, amoral natural world, to see this moral development in Malick’s protagonists from one work to the next, to glimpse the vector of his deepest ethical concerns arcing upward through his oeuvre, is inspiring. 

So how does the sequence of pursuit through greenery with which Malick brings “The New World” to its stunning conclusion relate to these earlier scenes?  Unlike Kit and Bill, Pocahontas has committed no crime: she’s not being pursued by the law. Is she then, like Witt in “The Thin Red Line,” self-consciously giving herself up for the sake of others?  No way.  Are we really willing to assume that Terrence Malick would sell us, for ten bucks a pop, a vision of noble savagery, personified in a beautiful young woman, willingly sacrificed on the altar of Progress?  No. In the closing moments of “The New World,” Pocahontas is neither fleeing justice or creating it in some cinematic hieroglyph of an historical suicide mission. 

She is running for pleasure – pleasure and play – into a new world that is manicured and managed but still brilliantly, beautifully green.  She is chased into that world, in the name of love, by her son, who vanishes from the screen and is immediately replaced by us, the modern viewers whose deepest roots still run all the way back to her experience and beyond.  Malick and his camera chase his heroine into a new world beyond crime, beyond justice, beyond sacrifice and beyond the need for it, into a world of Life caught up in the adventure of coming to know and experience Itself in all its variety.  Critics who characterize “The New World” as a naive binary discourse between an innocent natural realm of noble savages and a hideous realm of acculturated conquerors with English accents miss the point.  The finely-tuned greenery into which Malick’s heroine finally rushes isn’t a natural world ruined by culture.  It is an obviously constructed environment where nature and culture coexist peacefully – not without effort, certainly, but without sadism and cruelty.  That carefully-crafted garden into which Pocahontas rushes, as real and artificial as the medium of film itself, is the true pattern of Malick’s “real” New World, a place where the pain and beauty of change find themselves in a peaceful if not completely painless balance.

As the leaping theme of “Das Rheingold” reminds us in those last few precious seconds, “The New World” was discovered by both the English and the Powhatans the moment they met, and is rediscovered every day, in all its messy, sometimes bloody complexity, by anyone willing to open their eyes to a world full of beauty and difference and see it. 
 
Robert Frost said, of poetry, “You have to hold something back, for pressure.”  So too, Malick ends his latest masterpiece with a similar sense of restraint.  The breathless, racing, heart-filling acceleration suddenly stops without warning and is replaced – like that! -- by the almost-perfect stillness of ancient trees.  They are seen from the ground, far far below, from the humble human point of view that doesn’t know why it was born or why it has to die, that looks helplessly, wonder-fully up at the silent world that somehow, in its wordlessness, says everything.   With that in mind, I will resist the triumphalism my enthusiasm thinks it requires, and stop here: see “The New World.”

"Why does the audience keep coming to this type of photoplay [Action Pictures] if neither lust, love, hate, nor hunger is adequately conveyed? Simply because such spectacles gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American."

— Vachel Lindsay, "The Art of the Moving Picture," 1915

"I am apparently in the lonely 1.4% of the public who is only somewhat interested in this movie. In other words I want to see it but I'm not salivating after that 15 minutes I saw. NY Post wonders if Zach Snyder is the new Stanley Kubrick. This is why I'm not salivating. Mass preemptive hyperbole just kills my will to live."

— Nathaniel R. on Film Experience Blogspot.

Check out, too, Anthony Lane's review in The New Yorker in which he tears "Watchmen" (and "V for Vendetta," not to mention leering 19-year-olds in general) a new one. 

"My best friend gets hit by a streetcar and winds up in the hospital, civil war in Spain and earthquakes in Japan...and now you wear that hat."

— James Cagney to his girlfriend in “The Great Guy”

"When asked why she had so many sexual partners, Marlene [Dietrich] shrugged. 'They asked.'"

— from "It Happened at the Hotel Du Cap" by Cari Beauchamp in the March 2009 Vanity Fair.

Why does Sean Penn remind me of James Cagney? If I met Jimmy Markum in a dark alley, I think he would have more remorse about killing me than would Cody Jarrett (Cagney’s character in “White Heat”), but both Cagney and Penn are great at expressing the heat of conflicting desires — it’s in their posture, in the way they move their feet, in the set of their shoulders, in their faces. Both of them make other actors seem slow and cool. Both of them make every script unpredictable. Yes, I know before I see “Mystic River” or “Milk” that mayhem and grief will ensue, but somehow, as the movie unfolds, Sean Penn makes me think that he might just evade his fate after all.

Actually I like that last line – it’s the comparison that’s the problem. Why does Penn remind her of Cagney? I don’t get that feeling. In fact, I think of them as opposites. Cagney had energy — and that energy transferred through the screen to the audience. You got jazzed watching him. You left the theater with more energy than when you entered. Penn, while a great, great actor, is exhausting. Sorry. He saps our strength. At least he saps mine. Two and a half years ago I did a piece on him for MSNBC, and watched — again— most of his movies. I remember watching She’s So Lovely, lids at half-mast, and when John Travolta shows up it’s like a breath of fresh air. Yes! Energy! After writing that piece I had to see a shrink. I’m not joking. Try it sometime. Watch 10 Sean Penn movies in a row and see where you wind up.

Actually — Jesus! — I just re-read my piece, and I make this very comparison back then. With Cagney as the anti-Penn:

Watch “She’s So Lovely,” an awful title for a flawed film, in which Penn plays Eddie Quinn, another small-timer who — I think this is the point — goes crazy when his girlfriend (Robin Wright Penn) lies to him about the bruises on her face. He spends the next 10 years in a mental institution because of this lie. When he gets out, she’s married to Joey (John Travolta), a rich construction something-or-other with maybe mob ties. Travolta’s character is boldly drawn and external — the way Cagney was always external — and the movie becomes fun for a moment. We draw energy from Travolta. Then Penn’s character shows up again, all intricate and internalized and self-contained, and the fun disappears. We lean forward. We try to understand. In this way Penn draws energy from us. He exhausts us. He’s not much fun.

I don't mean to disparage Penn here but Smiley. At the least, we each see something different in, or draw something different from, Sean Penn.

Enough of that. Here’s a shot of Penelope Cruz. Have a nice day:

"It's funny that Paul Haggis says he was worried that Crash's trailer "was going to seem like overly significant claptrap," because that's how I felt about the entire movie. So I'd say the trailer was pretty accurate."

— Ross Pfund on The Man Who Sold "Crash" to the World

After potential Oscar-nominee “Gran Torino” did so well at the box office, I checked out how the other Oscar contenders are faring:

The box office for “Dark Knight” is obviously no surprise. It’s a good film but it’s in the running because of its box office. If it had made, say, $19 million, like “Milk,” you’d be hearing crickets.

Kudos to Paramount. They put “Benjamin Button” out there and people are responding. Kudos to people.

The box office for “Slumdog Millionaire,” meanwhile, is a nice surprise but shouldn’t be. Fox Searchlight is the same studio that smartly promoted “Sideways” in 2004, “Little Miss Sunshine” in 2006, and “Juno” in 2007. Apparently they know what they’re doing. Apparently they can sell a good film with universal themes even though it’s set in a foreign country. How about that?

But WTF with Universal and its specialty division Focus Features? Two of the most talked-about films of the fall, “Milk” and “Frost/Nixon,” and moviegoers have barely had the chance to see them. Is the studio waiting for the Oscar noms before they push? What if the noms are disappointing? What if the attention goes elsewhere? What then?

Perhaps I should cut Focus Features some slack — they slipped “Brokeback Mountain” into a homophobic America in 2005 and made $83 million — and one assumes the strategy for “Milk” is similar. But then there’s this worrisome report from Patrick Goldstein.

More, Focus’ strategy with “Milk” isn’t looking at all like their strategy for “Brokeback.” Check out the theater totals for the first seven weekends of both “Brokeback” and “Milk”:

Meanwhile, I have no idea what Universal is doing with “Frost/Nixon.” Ron Howard has had a long-time relationship with the studio. He’s made 10 films for them, including five that made more than $100 million, including, from those five, two Oscar contenders (“Apollo 13”; “A Beautiful Mind”), and every one of those 10 films played on more than a thousand screens. One assumes they know what they’re doing with “F/N,” too. On the other hand, the studio’s last movie with Howard was “Cinderella Man,” which the studio opened wide and disastrously in June 2005. Maybe they’re gun shy. Or maybe, to stay with the Nixonian theme, it’s as Deep Throat says in “All the President’s Men”: “The truth is, these aren’t very smart guys, and things got out of hand."

It was nice to see "Slumdog Millionaire" win big at The Golden Globes.

OK, it was nice to hear that "Slumdog Millionaire" won big at the GGs because, while I watched some of it while straightening up, folding clothes, etc., I went to bed before the big guns came out. A couple things that struck me as they had my spotty attention:

1. Odd to see Kate Winslet tearing up for her award for best supporting actress for "The Reader." I thought: "Doesn't she know this is the Golden Globes, the Hollywood Foreign Press, and so doesn't matter much? It's not an industry award like the Oscars. It's not a critics award like the NSFC. It's just this." 

2. Glad "In Bruges" won some awards, including Colin Farrell as best actor in a comedy/musical. The film, though, should've won best comedy/musical over "Vicky Christina Barcelona." If you haven't seen it, see it.

3. Salma Hayek looks great in HD.

4. A commercial played for "Frost/Nixon" and, as usual, the VO said at the end: "Now playing." To which I responded, "Now barely playing." Expect an upcoming rant about this. At the moment, Universal has "F/N" in only 205 theaters around the country. As opposed to, say, Paramount which has "Benjamin Button" in 2988 theaters around the country. Not sure what Universal's strategy is here — particularly since they're shelling out dough for the ads.

5. Did I mention that Salma Hayek looks great in HD? For that matter, so do Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.

So what does it mean that "Slumdog" won best drama? In terms of the Oscars, not much. The last GG/Drama winner that wound up winning the Academy Award for best picture was the third "Lord of the Rings" movie in 2003. Since then, the GGs have gone with "The Aviator," "Brokeback Mountain," "Babel" and "Atonement." None have picked up the Oscar. Some, obviously, should have, but that's a whole other can of whupass.

UPDATE: Nikki Finke live-blogged the GGs here. Good insider stuff: Who's buying what.

UPDATE: David Carr adds his thoughts — particularly on the vanishing and hobbled indie divisions of the studios.

The Directors Guild of America came out with their nominees for best picture yesterday and it's the same five as the PGAs, which is the same five as Entertainment Weekly went with last week, which is the same five that insider friend of Jeffrey Wells picked in early December:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost/Nixon
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire

Does that mean we're down to it? Is this the list the Academy will wind up with? Perhaps.

The big question is: Have the PGAs and the DGAs ever agreed on all five nominations, and, if so, what was the Academy response?

Yes to the first part. Two years ago, both the PGAs and the DGAs agreed on all five picks: Babel, The Departed, Dreamgirls, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. But the Academy went with only four of the five, opting for Letters from Iwo Jima over Dreamgirls. That could happen again. Hell, it might even be a Clint Eastwood movie again.

The big question is still Dark Knight. A superhero film has never been nominated best picture. But, if reports are to be believed, some members of the Academy are tired of how marginalized best picture nominees have become and want a blockbuster in there. DK is certainly that.

And keep in mind: DGA and AA best pic nominees are more likely to agree than not. Of the 40 films both bodies have nominated this decade, they've agreed on 34. Four years in a row (2002-2005), there wasn't a difference between the two.

We'll find out for sure on January 22. 

The PGAs, or Producers Guild of America nominees, which honors producers of both motion pictures and television, were announced a few days ago, and in the key category, motion picture of the year, the nominees were:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost/Nixon
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire

First, it's nice the PGAs don't alphabetize the way Comcast does (yeah, I'm not letting go of that one), and, second, the list is the same list of best picture nominees EW predicted for the Oscars a few days earlier — not to mention the same list Jeff Wells (or an industry insider Friend Of Jeff Wells) mentioned in early December.

Which means?

As far as EW and FOJW? Who knows. As far as the PGAs, if recent history has any meaning, it means we're down to four of the five. Since 2004, the PGAs and the Oscars have agreed on every picture but one — with the PGA going for, in order, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" over "Atonement" (2007), "Dreamgirls" over "Letters from Iwo Jima" (2006), "Walk the Line" over "Munich" (2005) and "The Incredibles" over "Ray" (2004). Before that, the PGA sometimes picked six nominees and it gets harder to calculate. 

In other words, we're down to Agatha Christie territory. The five nominees should be looking at each other, wondering which one is going to get the axe. If, again, recent history has any meaning.

One thing is for sure: The days of "Doubt" and "Australia" being among the mix are long gone. 

My guys, the National Society of Film Critics, in their annual first-Saturday-night-in-January meeting, went with "Waltzing with Bashir" as the best movie of 2007, with both "Happy-Go-Lucky" and "WALL-E" coming in second.

"Bashir," which I began to hear about only recently, isn't playing in Seattle yet, so I'll have to wait to see it. Not that there isn't a glut of good films out there to see. Too big a glut. Too many good films. David Carr takes this tendency apart in one of his latest columns for The New York Times. He also tells people to STFU while they're in movie theaters. Double bravo.

I've got a good STFU story myself. Remind me to tell it one of these days. But first here's the entirety of the NSFC's list:

Best Picture: "Waltzing with Bashir"
Best Actor: Sean Penn, “Milk”
Best Actress: Sally Hawkins, "Happy-Go-Lucky"
Best Director: Mike Leigh, “Happy-Go-Lucky”
Best Writer: Mike Leigh, “Happy-Go-Lucky”
Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Marsan, "Happy-Go-Lucky"
Best Supporting Actress: Hanna Schygulla, "The Edge of Heaven"

"Bashir," a Sony Classics pic in the mode of the distrib's 2007 release "Persepolis," is Israeli writer-helmer Ari Folman's animated meditation on his own experience as a soldier in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It is seen as a contender in both the animation and foreign-langauge Oscar categories but hasn't been a regular winner of major early-season kudos.

In the same issue of EW there's a nice interview with Dustin Hoffman, who's still a star to me but apparently not to the Hollywood establishment:

EW: For the last decade, you've taken supporting parts in films with young directors. Was that a conscious decision? 
DH: It was put on me. In this country, the leads are in their 20s, 30s, 40s. What happens in their 50s, their 60s? Unless you make your own project or you're an action star—people are more forgiving if you have a gun—you're supporting the lead. And I love working. I don't mind doing supporting parts. It has its rewards.
EW: Jack Nicholson once said that he started taking supporting roles earlier in his career because he knew that one day he wouldn't be able to play the lead, and he didn't want it to look like a defeat.
DH: I always knew he was smarter than me. 

A couple of goofs in their "First Look 2009" section. They call Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer a newcomer in "Angels & Demons" even though she played the wife of Eric Bana in "Munich." Worse, as a sidebar to the Hoffman interview, they include five tips on aging gracefully in Hollywood. Here's no. 2:

Take small roles where you can do something unexpected. Gene Hackman's turn in The Royal Tenenbaums showcased a quirky new dimension to his acting.

First, Hackman's role in Tenenbaums wasn't small, it was the lead. Second, "quirky new dimension"? Jesus. Third, he stopped acting three films later to write books. He's hardly the example you want for sticking around in Hollywood.

Seriously: Quirky new dimension? My god.

Johnny Depp: Out of nowhere this script arrived with a note: "Michael Mann would like to talk to you about playing Dillinger."
Entertainment Weekly: What was your reaction to that?
JD: Well, certainly intrigued. Intrigued by both Dillinger and Michael Mann. It's always interesting to get in the ring with a director and explore their process and see what does it for them.
EW: And what does it for him?
JD: The details of the details of the details. [Laughs] They should invent a word to describe it, because it's not just details, it teeters on microscopic obsession with every molecule of the moment... You got to salute that.

—From the 1.09.09 issue of Entertainment Weekly about the summer film (July 1 opening) I'm most excited about.

A couple of days ago Tim alerted me to this post by Max Barry about his problems viewing a “Dark Knight” DVD. I sympathized. Now I sympathize a little more.

Last night, still getting socked by bronchitis, I wasn’t in the mood to watch anything too highfalutin, and, of Comcast’s “On Demand” films, the one Patricia wanted to see the most was “The Dark Knight.”

Except it wasn’t available in HD. How could that be? It was listed in the “Just in” section, but not among the “HD” films.

I suggested we watch something else instead. But she really wanted to see “Dark Knight.” So...

It began with that awful, VHS-era line about the film being formatted to fit your TV. Bad enough, in other words, that we couldn’t get it in HD. Now we had to get the pan-and-scan version? Even though our TV has been formatted to fit any film? I couldn’t stand it. But we’d already paid for it.

For the first 20 minutes I made apologies. “This looks much better in HD,” I told Patricia. Even so, she was enjoying herself. She’s not much into comic-book movies, but with “DK” she kept saying “Cool” and “Fun.” She’s always liked Christian Bale. And she was blown away by Heath Ledger.

Two hours later, during the credits, I hit the “stop” button, which takes you back to the “On Demand” screen, where one of those fluff-jockeys prattles on about the latest films. This one talked up “Dark Knight,” which was, she said, “available in HD.”

WTF?

I went back to Comcast’s HD movies and scrolled to the D’s. Nothing. Then it hit me. I scrolled to the T’s. There it was. “The Dark Knight.” Listed under the T’s.

My god. How dumb can we get?

Thanks for the sour taste, Comcast. 

Despite what you might have read on Wikipedia, Mr. Eastwood is not a vegan, and he looked slightly aghast when told exactly what a vegan is. “I never look at the Internet for just that reason,” he said.

Despite their reputation as plugged-in experts on other countries, many C.I.A. officers do not even have Internet access at their desks. Worse yet, they don’t think they need it.

“You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.”

The Globes have long been the entertainment industry's dirty little secret. At the heart of the con is the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., the tiny, cliquish group of foreign entertainment journalists -- and I use each of those terms liberally -- whose votes determine the winners.

The members of the association are not, generally speaking, film experts (like the people who judge the National Society of Film Critics awards) nor are they members of the creative community (like those who give out the Oscars). They're not even representatives of prominent foreign publications, like Le Monde or the Guardian or Haaretz.

Only a handful are full-time journalists; the rest are freelancers for mostly obscure publications, and some are simply hanging on for the parties and movie stars. To maintain their status in the organization, they need only write four articles a year.

Industry insiders say that if you want to really read between the lines in the voting, ask yourself--which movies that have been largely ignored by critics groups did especially well with those 85 Globes voters? The answer would be "The Reader," which landed a surprising four nominations, including the much-coveted best drama nomination, and "Vicki Cristina Barcelona," which scored an even more surprising four nominations, including one for best comedy.

What do those two films have in common? They are both released by the Weinstein Co., whose fearless leader, Harvey Weinstein, has assiduously courted HFPA voters for years...

Because they serve everyone's agenda. The studios get their films promoted, the TV networks hype their shows, the stars get face time and rub elbows with friends during the dinner -- and NBC and the association rake in millions. Everyone wins.

Now it’s the New York Film Critics Circle’s turn. “Milk” for best picture, actor (Penn), supporting actor (Brolin). “Happy-Go-Lucky,” which opened quietly in October, and whose widest release has been 202 theaters, won for best director (Mike Leigh) and actress (Sally Hawkins). Cruz won again. “Man on Wire” again. Momentum for these two.

BTW: I may preface these awards with the title “Oscar Watch,” but it really doesn’t mean much in terms of the Academy. Critics are critics, and, for best picture, the NY version has only agreed with the Academy twice this decade: 2007 and 2003:

2007: No Country for Old Men
2006: United 93
2005: Brokeback Mountain
2004: Sideways
2003: The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King
2002: Far From Heaven
2001: Mulholland Drive
2000: Traffic

More importantly, they’ve only agreed with me... a couple of times. I guess it only counts if you make a pick, and I don’t remember picking much earlier in the decade, but, if I had, I wouldn’t have picked what they picked. “Traffic” was a huge disappointment. Same with “Mulholland.” Can’t fathom “Far From Heaven” over “The Pianist.” Was never a big “Lord of the Rings” guy. Despite what I wrote yesterday, I chose “Munich” in ’05 but liked “Brokeback” well enough (OK, a lot). But for the last two years? Yes. “United 93” is a great, underrated movie that didn’t even get nom’ed by the Academy, did it? Don’t know if it’ll last but it’s truly powerful. And "No Country" definitely over "There Will Be Blood."

There’s an article on the NYFCC site, from Stephen Garrett at Time Out New York, that touts this organization the way that I touted the National Society of Film Critics a few years ago, but either he, or they, left off some of the misses. Sure, they picked “Citizen Kane” over “How Green Was My Valley.” They also ignored both “Godfather” movies in place of foreign films. The valley isn’t always greener.

All of which is to say: It’s a tough biz saying within a year — really, within a month — what the best pics are, and Lord knows I’ve changed my own mind enough times. The last two years of the ‘90s, my original pics were “Saving Private Ryan” and “American Beauty” but now I’d go, in a second, and with full force, for “The Thin Red Line” and “The Insider.”

But it’s nice to have an opinion; it's nice to care. Most years I just shrug.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced their annual awards yesterday and not only did they go popular ("WALL-E"), they went popular twice (runner-up for best pic was "The Dark Knight"). This is in direct contrast to their recent history. Throughout the decade, L.A. critics have awarded best picture to character studies or quiet, somber films, drained of color, in which something horrific happens and is then resolved ambiguously or painstakingly:

2007: There Will Be Blood
2006: Letters from Iwo Jima
2005: Brokeback Mountain
2004: Sideways
2003: American Splendor
2002: About Schmidt
2001: In the Bedroom
2000: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Not a lot of laughs there. I guess not a lot of laughs in "WALL-E" or "Dark Knight," either. This is not criticism, by the way. My best pics this decade, which would include "Crouching Tiger" and "Brokeback Mountain," were mostly somber films: "The Pianist" in 2002, for example.

So a break from their recent history but not from their history. The Association, which has obviously differed over the years (you can see their current membership here), has often awarded bold, popular movies. I'm thinking "Star Wars" in 1977, "E.T." in 1982 and "Pulp Fiction" in 1994. I'd add "L.A. Confidential" and "The Insider," two Russell Crowe movies from the late '90s, but, as good as these movies were, I don't think they were ever popular at the box office.

Here are their picks over the years:

1999: The Insider
1998: Saving Private Ryan
1997: L.A. Confidential
1996: Secrets & Lies
1995: Leaving Las Vegas
1994: Pulp Fiction
1993: Schindler’s List
1992: Unforgiven
1991: Bugsy
1990: Goodfellas
1989: Do the Right Thing
1988: Little Dorrit
1987: Hope & Glory
1986: Hannah and Her Sisters
1985: Brazil
1984: Amadeus
1983: Terms of Endearment
1982: E.T.
1981: Atlantic City
1980: Raging Bull
1979: Kramer vs. Kramer
1978: Coming Home
1977: Star Wars
1976: Network & Rocky
1975: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest & Dog Day Afternoon

Not a bad list. I'd also recommend checking out the LAFCA Web site, which is clean and well-designed for this kind of research. 

The rest of their picks for this year, including Best Actor (Sean Penn) and Best Supporting Actor (Heath Ledger) can be found here.

David Carr, yesterday, on the only thing we have to fear...and why we've got a lot of it. Money quote:

Every modern recession includes a media séance about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be, but there have never been so many ways for the fear to leak in.

Michiko Kakutani, today, on the new Marlon Brando biography, "Somebody." Money quote:

He was hailed as the “Byron from Brooklyn” (though he was from Nebraska, not New York), a “genius hunk,” “the Valentino of the bop generation” and the essence of “the primitive modern male.” John Huston said he was “like a furnace door opening” — so powerful was the heat he gave off. Eva Marie Saint said he had the ability “to see through you” and make you feel “like glass.” Jack Nicholson said he had a gift that “was enormous and flawless, like Picasso”: he “was the beginning and end of his own revolution.”

Dave Kehr, today, on the DVD release of "Mornau, Borzage and Fox." Money quote:

It’s great to see Fox embracing its studio heritage with such scholarly dedication and serious financial commitment. Only Warner Brothers has done anything comparable, and Fox has perhaps gone a bit further in releasing these sets, comprehensive anthologies devoted not to genres or to stars but to major authors in the field of motion pictures.

And A.O. Scott, in a video blog, tells you everything you already know about "It's a Wonderful Life." But I like his last line a lot.

On the Hollywood Elsewhere site, Jeffrey Wells, who always seems to misspell my name ("Eric") whenever he reacts to one of my articles, posts an Academy insider's picks for Best Pic:

Slumdog Millionaire
Milk
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
The Dark Knight

The supposed shocker is Dark Knight, but I wouldn't be surprised and might even be happy to see it nom'ed . Either way, I get the feeling we're getting down to it. This is beginning to feel right — particularly with Doubt garnering tepid reviews. It would also mean that both Kate Winslet movies (The Reader, which I'm reading now, and Revolutionary Road) would be shut out. Again, not a surprise. Best pics tend to be male- rather than female-oriented, and have been for quite a while. 

Read the whole post here.

Best film: “Slumdog Millionaire”
Best director: David Fincher for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
Best actor: Clint Eastwood for “Gran Torino”
Best actress: Anne Hathaway for “Rachel Getting Married”
Best adapted screenplay: Eric Roth for “Benjamin”; Simon Beaufoy for “Slumdog”
Best original screenplay: Nick Schenk for “Gran Torino”
Best supporting actor: Josh Brolin for “Milk”
Best supporting actress: Penelope Cruz for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”
Best documentary: “Man on Wire”
Best animated film: “WALL-E”

Quick thoughts. Glad to see “Man on Wire” win. Cruz killed in “Vicky.” Brolin was great but wasn’t his role in “Milk” a bit small? Maybe not. Happy for my friend Deb whose friend Nick won for best screenplay and who wrote the screenplay that is garnering a legend like Eastwood acting accolades so late in his career. That's impressive. Have yet to see “Slumdog.” This weekend, I hope.

Most articles mention that NBR’s pick last year, “No Country for Old Men,” went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture. So a good indicator, right? Well, let’s pretend life goes back a little further:

2007: “No Country for Old Men”
2006: “Letters from Iwo Jima”
2005: “Good Night, and Good Luck”
2004: “Finding Neverland”
2003: “Mystic River”
2002: “The Hours”
2001: “Moulin Rouge”
2000: “Quills”

Last year was the anomaly. Only once this decade has the Board’s pick gone on to win the Oscar for Best Picture. In fact, in general, NBR is one of the awards bodies I agree with the least. Their picks are rarely surprising — the way that The National Society of Film Critics can surprise (“Babe”; “Out of Sight”) — and often feel safe and soft. Critics’ favorites that don’t have much staying power.

Oh, and among their top 10 movies for the year? This one. WTF?

Since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences settled on five Best Picture nominees in 1944, there have been only six years in which no nominee was among the year's top 10 box office hits: 1947, 1984...and the last four years in a row. I wrote about this last January.

So the question: What recent top 10 box office hit has been worth nominating? Here are your choices:

2004
1.    Shrek 2
2.    Spider-Man 2   
3.    The Passion of the Christ   
4.    Meet the Fockers   
5.    The Incredibles   
6.    Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban   
7.    The Day After Tomorrow   
8.    The Bourne Supremacy   
9.    National Treasure
10.   The Polar Express

2005
1.    Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith   
2.    The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
3.    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
4.    War of the Worlds   
5.    King Kong
6.    Wedding Crashers
7.    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory   
8.    Batman Begins
9.    Madagascar
10.  Mr. & Mrs. Smith

2006
1.    Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
2.    Night at the Museum
3.    Cars   
4.    X-Men: The Last Stand   
5.    The Da Vinci Code
6.    Superman Returns
7.    Happy Feet   
8.    Ice Age: The Meltdown   
9.    Casino Royale
10.   The Pursuit of Happyness

2007
1.    Spider-Man 3
2.    Shrek the Third
3.    Transformers
4.    Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
5.    Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix   
6.    I Am Legend
7.    The Bourne Ultimatum   
8.    National Treasure: Book of Secrets
9.    Alvin and the Chipmunks   
10.   300  

Of these, the only movies that had a shot at a nom, really, given the Academy's traditional predilections, are "Passion of the Christ" in 2004, "The Da Vinci Code" and "The Pursuit of Happyness" in 2006, and... that's about it. "Passion" didn't make it because, some may argue, it was too political in the wrong way. I'd argue it just wasn't good enough. "Da Vinci Code"? Again, not good enough. Same director and star as "Apollo 13" but no "Apollo 13." "Happyness"? Who knows? Probably should have been nom'ed, though — over "Babel" certainly. It's one of the few films over the last five years in which art and commerce blended well enough to create the happy medium that is usually the very thing the Academy honors. But they ignored it. Or, more precisely, it didn't make their top 5. Might've been no. 6.

Non-traditional arguments can be made for "Spider-Man 2," "The Incredibles" and "Casino Royale," but each would be unprecedented (superheroes, superhero cartoons, Bond), and it still doesn't answer the question: Whatever became of the happy medium of films like "Dances with Wolves" and "Apollo 13"? Has Hollywood changed? Has the Academy? Have we?

Interesting if inconclusive piece in yesterday's NY Times by Hollywood insider (and frequent source of my disappointment) Michael Cieply on the Academy and its battle to reign in new membership.

The battle began in 2004 and has resulted in a slight increase in executive membership, along with decreases in acting and writing memberships, but the biggest change, unnamed in the piece, is a tendency toward political correctness: more foreigners, more indie filmmakers. 

Producer Lianne Halfon gets asked to join but not her production partner Russell Smith, who has virtually the same curriculum vitae. Mexican actress Adrianna Barraza, nominated for the nanny role in "Babel," gets asked, but not recent American nominees Ellen Page, Casey Affleck and Amy Ryan. Cieply writes: "...roughly a quarter of the 115 new members invited in 2007, for instance, worked on films like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Queen” — and those from the independent film world."

Unmentioned, and probably unknown, is whether this percentage (1/4) of new foreign and indie members is unusual. I assume it is.

Unasked is whether the Academy, which is a Hollywood and thus American institution, should lean toward foreign membership, when most countries have their own version of the Academy Awards. What's the point in going international? Does it make sense, and, if so, what kind of sense: cultural (the world is shrinking) or economic (increased viewership abroad at the expense of viewership at home)?

The result of this trend, if it is in fact a trend, is, Cieply writes, the promise of more indie and foreign-flavored movies like "Babel" and "Little Miss Sunshine" getting nom'ed at the expense of mainstream and commercial films.

But is that the question? How's this for a question? Which commercial and mainstream films should've gotten nom'ed in place of "Babel" and "Little Miss Sunshine"? Do the studios make those kinds of films anymore? I'm not talking "Gone with the Wind." I'm talking "Dances with Wolves" and "The Silence of the Lambs" and "A Few Good Men" and "Apollo 13," all of which wound up among the top 5 box office hits for their respective years in the 1990s and all of which got nom'ed. If "Dances with Wolves" was released this year, how many theaters would it wind up in? Enough? Or would it be considered a prestige picture and given to us in dribs and drabs?

The problem isn't just the Academy or its changing membership. What top 10 box office hit of the last five years has been worth nominating? 

More later.

The Carpetbagger (aka David Carr) is back in the NY Times and his first column on this year's Oscar race contains his usual mix of fun, breezy writing, industry gossip, celebrity details (Kate Winslet wears size 11 shoes, which makes Patricia, same, happy) and throwaway personal info ("the Bagger has been on the circuit on your behalf, enduring abundant buffets and spurning proffered cocktails..."), but mostly he's good at taking the Oscar race both seriously and not-so-seriously. He's also got his early picks for Best Picture noms in more or less this order of likelihood:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Slumdog Millionaire
Frost/Nixon
Revolutionary Road
Milk
Doubt
The Reader
Gran Torino

Buzz must be strong. He agrees on the first four with EW — same order and everything — but has more doubt about "Doubt," which slips to sixth, overtaken by "Milk." He also adds two more quiet somber films, "The Reader" and "Gran Torino," instead of the noisier films "Dark Knight" and "Australia." We'll see. That is, we'll see these films when they arrive. Six of the eight are December releases. But so far it hasn't been a great best picture year. So far this year, so far this decade.

In the latest issue EW lists their front-runners for the Best Picture nom in order of likelihood:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Slumdog Millionaire
Frost/Nixon
Revolutionary Road
Doubt
Milk
The Dark Knight
Australia

We'll see how things play out. Interestingly, "Slumdog" made no. 2 before its Mumbai locale became the top news story of the week.

Of the eight, I've only seen, um, one: "The Dark Knight." Hoping to see "Milk" and "Slumdog" this weekend. Racked my brain for other, deserving movies that should get nom'ed and came up with zilch.

Interesting group of trailers before "Quantum of Solace," by the way. It was nice seeing the "Star Trek" trailer on the big screen rather than this screen. It was nice seeing those original uniforms, and hearing those sound effects, and I liked the allusion, at the end of the trailer, to the show's original opening chords. They kind of sound like the notes of greeting in "Close Encounters," don't they? Never thought about it before.

Then we got trailers for "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "Watchmen" and "2012." The first is about the end of the world, the second is about the end of the world, the third is about the end of the world.

I sense a theme.

In the great battle for the American epic, an astute reader suggests "There Will Be Blood."

Once again, here are the parameters I gave for an American epic:

I define “American” as about Americans and set in America; I define “epic” as long (150 minutes of screen time, 5-10 years of onscreen time), grand, nostalgic, and with a hard-to-define “sweeping” element.

So "TWBB" is about Americans and set in America. It's 158 minutes of screen time and over 10 years of onscreen time. It's grand. It "sweeps."

Is it nostalgic?

Not really. It doesn't mourn the loss of that time — for either us as a nation or those people as characters. Doesn't mean it's not an epic; it's just not an epic by these parameters I've set up.

Which raises the larger question: Does an epic, by its nature, have to be nostalgic? Many of them are but do they have to be? Another adjective, which I didn't use in the above description, is "romantic." Epics are often romantic — see: "Un long dimanche de finacaille" or "A Very Long Engangement" — and "TWBB" isn't that, either. It's harsh. It's brutal. So are "The Godfather" movies, but those films also seem romantic and nostalgic to me. There was a nostalgic tone to both Little Italy, and to the Corleones at the height of their familial power — when Vito controlled, with judgment and respect, when Michael was an outsider, when the family was together. Coppola romanticized his Corleones. They were big and grand and almost everyone against them was racist in some fashion. When you went against the Corleones, you almost always had to spew a racial epithet; then you got yours. Nothing like that in "TWBB."

But my definition of "American epic" is just that. Mine. It doesn't mean much beyond that — particularly if it doesn't make sense to you. The American Film Institute, for example, defines an epic this way:

...a genre of large-scale films set in a cinematic interpretation of the past. Their scope defies and demands—either in the mode in which they are presented or their range across time.  

By their definition, which involves no specific time parameters, or inclusion of nostalgia, "TWBB" would be an epic. Maybe it is.

But even if I'd included "TWBB" in the discussion, I doubt it would've made my top 5. Unlike some people, many people, I was disappointed in that film. Maybe my hopes were too high when I first saw it. I recognized its artistry but it felt limited — nothing resonated beyond the screen for me. By the time we knew the main character he was already morally lost. It was in seeing him act immorally that we finally knew him to be immoral. But what we don't know, and what the film doesn't help us with, is whether he was always this way or became this way. Since we don't what he was, we don't know what was lost.

Writing that out, one wonders if that's not a truer definition of humanity than the nostalgic, Edenic one we cling to.

Regardless. The main point of this post is to raise the question that has been gnawing at me for the last month: Just what the hell is an epic anyway? You may choose your parameters, as I did, but dissatisfaction always seeps through, as it has for me.

Yesterday the New York Times Magazine had one of their year-end thingees in which they asked wide-ranging and head-scratching whozits (Ken Layne; Starlee Kline) to comment upon their favorite wide-ranging and plugged-in yadda yaddas ("7 Things"; Grand Theft Auto IV) of 2008. The world is getting away from us, or from them, and this is an attempt to both bring it all together and show that the New York Times Magazine is still hip. It somehow has the opposite effect.

One bit I liked: author Ann Pachett's take on James Marsh's documentary about Philippe Petit, "Man on Wire," which I wrote about here and here. You can read Ann here, about halfway down.

I never did get around to writing about the doc myself, which I saw in August. Conventions got in the way, then campaigns, then elections. In Minnesota, they're still getting in the way.

Not much to add to Ms. Patchett. I like her comment about the intersection of recklessness and precision. Put another way: to be gloriously reckless you have to be precise. These guys were. Petit was.

What a time. Imagine a group of foreigners huddled together, plotting and scheming for months and years, and bringing in their equipment from foreign lands in order to do something to the Word Trade Center. In their case it was to celebrate it. Petit loved it at its birth. We only got there at its death.

I got turned off, immediately and ironically, by Entertainment Weekly's latest cover story, "The 50 Sexiest Movies Ever."

It's not the picture. Who doesn't love and lust for Kate Winslet? It's the fact that four movies are mentioned on the cover — Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Notebook, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and, most prominently, Little Children — and none of them was released more than 10 years ago.

The list is worse. Of the 50 films, only five were released before 1980. The list is weighted for race, for sexual preference, but hardly at all for history. For shame.

As for the list itself? It's easy to disagree with whatever choices anyone makes in this kind of thing — people do it to me all the time — so I'll just mention the ones I absolutely agree with: Out of Sight, Body Heat, Bull Durham ("Oh my"), Y Tu Mama Tambien (their no. 7; I'd have it higher), The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Seven Year Itch, Mulholland Drive (Paul Allen? Seriously?), Swimming Pool, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Secretary.

Oh yeah, and the car-washing chick from Cool Hand Luke. Puttin' em on here, boss.

Leslie: We really stole Texas, didn’t we? From the Mexicans.
Bick: You’re catching me a bit early to start joking, Miss Leslie.
Leslie: But I’m not joking, Mr. Jordan.
Bick: I’ve never heard anything as ignorant as some eastern people!

A great American story is here. It just gets lost in the vastness of Texas and epic filmmaking.

How the West Was Won (1962)
It’s certainly epic. It was made during an era of epics, when the film industry was trying to distinguish itself from its bastard cousin, TV, by making everything big and long. This thing is so big it required three directors to finish and contains almost every genre Hollywood created: the western, the musical, the war picture. Its all-star cast includes Gregory Peck and John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, even if the movie itself focuses more on the less-interesting Debbie Reynolds and George Peppard.

It begins during a time when there was land for the getting but you had to get there. A family of Quakers, led by Zebulon Prescott (Karl Malden), head west down the Ohio river and run into the usual problems: first, river pirates, whom they escape with the help of mountain man Linus Rawlings (Jimmy Stewart), and then rapids and waterfalls. These kill Zebulon and his wife but their deaths leave their daughter (Carroll Baker), named, of course, Eve, determined to set up shop exactly there. “This is far as they got,” she says. “Seems to me this is where the Lord wanted them to be.” Amen. She also stills the restless spirit in the mountain man, who joins her, but younger sister Lil (Debbie Reynolds) continues on to St. Louis, where she’s part of a musical hall act, and then on further west with the wagon trains, which are attacked by Indians. En route to San Francisco, her heart is broke by gambler Gregory Peck.

Meanwhile back at the farm, the U.S. Civil War is starting and Eve’s son, Zeb (Peppard), is hot to follow in his father’s footsteps and go. He does. But youthful enthusiasm is quickly extinguished in the Battle of Shiloh, and he’s in the act of going AWOL with a Reb (Russ Tamblyn) when they happen upon Generals Grant and Sherman (Harry Morgan and John Wayne). The Reb tries to kill Grant but Zeb stops him. Then the war is over, mother and father are dead, and Zeb heads further west with the railroads, who are breaking treaties with the Indians. Eventually he becomes a marshal. We get an old-fashioned railroad robbery stopped by Zeb, who has become the law in what was once lawless. The final shot is what all that struggle was for: the modern L.A. freeways.

What a mess.

In 1962 we were beginning to seriously question our various Manifest Destiny myths, but the film, while admitting to some broken treaties, mostly goes hokey. And it never even raises the most basic questions of all. Why our restless spirits? Why this need to go? Eve, unknowingly, says it best: “Half the people that come west don’t make much sense, I reckon.” This is the movie for them.

Ragtime (1981)
Read the novel by E.L. Doctorow. Its epigraph is from Scott Joplin — “Don’t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast” — but you can’t help but read that novel fast. It moves.

The movie, which can’t collapse years into a sentence, or represent desperation and yearning as succinctly, loses a lot. It loses the better part of Tateh’s story, which, in the novel, is so sad and desperate that when he finally sells that silhouette cartoon book in Philadelphia, it become a moment of pure joy — as opposed to the ho-hum moment in the movie. Mostly it loses that great interchange between historical and fictional people that made the novel so unique. No J.P. Morgan here — except for his N.Y. mansion. No Henry Ford — except for his Model “T.” No Emma Goldman. No Kaiser. No Houdini.

Does “Coalhouse” Walker dominate the novel? I think he does, but not much. He dominates the movie but should’ve dominated it more. Howard E. Rollins is so handsome, has such life, and what happens to him is so awful that is sears into the middle of the movie, obliterating all else. His revenge is awful, too, particularly as viewed through a post-9/11 prism. (It also makes one wonder why there weren’t more Coalhouse Walkers in the days before MLK. No caves to hide in, probably. No neighboring country to hide in, probably.) And check out the members of his gang. You’ll see both a young Samuel L. Jackson and Frankie Faison (“The Wire”).

The “Coalhouse” centerpiece works. The rest gives us an OK glimpse into life from the turn of the last century, and all of the forces at work that would make the century, for good and ill, what it was. But read the novel.

The Color Purple (1985)
Most epics are nostalgic, such as “Gone with the Wind,” which was nostalgic about, of all things, slavery. Steven Spielberg understands he’s making an epic with “The Color Purple,” based upon the best-selling epistolary novel by Alice Walker, and so the film has a sweeping, nostalgic tone. Yet what is the film nostalgic about? We get sweeping shots of this beautiful farm...right before Mister tries to sexually molest Celie’s sister. Ah, the good old days.

Maybe the film should’ve been grittier, tighter, less epic. Maybe it should’ve started out in black-and-white and eventually, as Celie grew and came into her own, expanded its palette. Instead Spielberg went epic, and nostalgic, and celebrated a time when the protagonist had very little to celebrate. Celie’s babies are taken from her, her sister is taken from her, she’s married (but not married) to a man who despises her, forced to mother horrible children to whom she’s not mother, forced to lay beneath a man who “does his business” when she feels nothing. Mister keeps from her (yet, oddly, does not destroy or even open) the letters Nettie sends her from Africa. He’s a horrible man yet comic. He’s predatory one moment, clownish the next. The film resolves none of these dichotomies. It veers between pathos and slapstick.

The main storyline I remembered from my first viewing, years ago, involved Oprah Winfrey’s Sofia. There’s tragedy there: How a mighty spirit is beaten down. We have less patience for Celie. She’s a mostly mute, internal character, which is why she works in a novel but feels blank on screen.

The last half-hour drags. Mistakes are made. It was a mistake to bring in Mister’s father to help explain Mister. It was a mistake to resolve, or even bring up, Shug’s father issues. (In a world where fathers rape their step-daughters, who cares that one father ignores his willful, jazz-singing daughter?) It was a mistake to juxtapose the African knife-cutting ritual with “shaving” Mister. It was a mistake to spend so much time in Africa. It was a mistake to redeem Mister.

Mostly, it was a mistake to make "The Color Purple" an epic.

Pearl Harbor (2001)
I’ll give Michael Bay this. The biggest box office hits of all time — “Gone with the Wind,” “Titanic,” “The Sound of Music” — concern a woman choosing between two men against a backdrop of historic tragedy, and that’s what he tries to give us with “Pearl Harbor.” His movie made a few bucks, too: $449 million worldwide, to be exact, good enough for 84th place on the unadjusted list. And dropping.

But it’s an epic for yahoos. The two men, Rafe and Danny, Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, are both countrified flyboys who don’t exist beyond these rather narrow parameters. Rafe is cocky, Danny quiet, but that’s the extent of their personality differences. Hell, it’s the extent of their personalities. They just want to fly. Let them. The woman who has to do the choosing is also without personality. They give her the name Evelyn Johnson. They make her a nurse and a lieutenant. In the beginning she’s oddly spunky, overdosing Ben Affleck’s backside, but even this trait disappears under the weight of sudden love. Does she even do any choosing? She falls for Rafe first but he dies in England. Then Danny appears and they make love amidst the silkiness of parachutes. Then Rafe turns up alive but by this time she’s pregnant by Danny. “And then all this happened,” she tells Rafe, by which she means the Japs bombing Pearl Harbor. Surely one of the dumbest lines in movie history. As Anthony Lane wrote back in 2001: “I guess we should thank Michael Bay for so bold a revisionist take on the Second World War: no longer the clash of virtuous freedom and a malevolent tyranny but a terrible bummer when a girl is trying to get her dates straight.”

Everything is romanticized, glossy, in slow-mo, even (or especially) the destruction at Pearl Harbor. The film glorifies it, loves it. I’d say these scenes are like the probing of a wound, but it’s not our wound, it’s someone else’s wound, someone whose pain we don’t feel. We feast upon their anguish and call it empathy.

So “Pearl Harbor” is beyond bad; it’s morally repugnant. It glorifies two things it doesn’t feel: love and death. It takes stick figures and puts them in stick situations and calls it history. It’s a movie that will live in infamy.

Gangs of New York (2002)
They should’ve lopped off the opening battle scene. Warriors out of “Mad Max” following the Priest (Liam Neeson) into battle against the nativist elements of Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day Lewis)? They even had a catwoman. How dumb is that? It’s supposedly historically accurate but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t look ridiculous. And a movie in this position can’t afford to look ridiculous.

Imagine, instead, the movie opening with Amsterdam (Leo) getting off the boat. That way we’d be wondering who he is — as he wonders who he is. We’d wonder what his connection with Bill the Butcher is — as he agonizes over it. And once we know, once we realize that Bill the Butcher killed his father, we’d wonder why he doesn’t take his revenge — just as he begins to. We’d be with him instead of twelve steps ahead of him.

As it is, we’re set up for a revenge flick when this is more a voyage of self-discovery. Amsterdam isn’t initially geared for revenge; he’s geared for survival. Sixteen years on his own taught him that. It’s only the return to the Five Points that begins to spark his need for revenge — and his interest in Jenny (Cameron Diaz), and her relationship with Bill, sparks it more than any stories about his dead father.

I do like the end. The backstory (U.S. Civil War, draft riots) overwhelming the main story (the gangs fighting for their turf). The Irish gang emerges pumped up for their fight but to a different world: an elephant being chased through NYC. You think this story is about you? It isn't. You're about to be swept aside by history

The documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has already tightened the race for Best Documentary to 15 films. They are:

1. Steve James and Peter Gilbert's death-penalty critique "At the Death House Door"
2. Ellen Kuras' "The Betrayal," about the impact of 1980s U.S. military operations on a Laotian family
3. "Fuel," Josh Tickell's examination of America's oil dependency
4. "I.O.U.S.A.," Patrick Creadon's primer on the nation's fiscal crisis
5. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's Hurricane Katrina chronicle "Trouble the Water"
6. Errol Morris' Abu Ghraib thinkpiece "Standard Operating Procedure"
7. Werner Herzog's visit to the South Pole, "Encounters at the End of the World"
8. Gini Reticker's celebration of female peace activists in Liberia, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell"
9. Daniel Junge's true-crime account "They Killed Sister Dorothy"
10. Roberta Grossman's "Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh," about a Hungarian-born Jew who fought to save her people during WWII.
11. Stacy Peralta's "Made in America"
12. Scott Hamilton Kennedy's "The Garden"
13. Scott Hicks' "Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts"
14. Jeremiah Zagar's "In a Dream"
15. James Marsh's "Man on Wire."

Check 'em out wherever you can. I've only seen two of the 15: "Man on Wire" and "I.O.U.S.A." The first was uplifting and beautiful; the second was scarier than all hell. And that was before banks starting collapsing.

I'm particularly interested in seeing the death-penalty critique. If the use of DNA evidence has taught us anything, it's that we sometimes arrest and convict people innocent of the charges against them. And the only reason we haven't yet found a case where an innocent man was put to death by the state (that is, by us), it's because the dead don't petition for a new trial.

Has it been only two years since Daniel Craig first showed up as Bond, James Bond? I'm hoping to see QUANTUM OF SOLACE this weekend but in the meantime here's the stuff I did two years ago for MSNBC. First, a piece on the history of James Bond. My favorite graf — and apologies for quoting myself:

Bond’s goals with both villains and women were the same — to infiltrate the seemingly impenetrable fortress, make things explode and then get away — and many feminists thought him a misogynist. Yet if you look at the early films, sex is one of the ways Bond differs from his villainous counterparts. The bad guys were either clumsy around women, like Goldfinger, or asexual beasts in starched Nehru jackets, sublimating their sexual desires by repeatedly petting cats. The meta-message was that sex was good. As soon as it was denied, well, you began thinking up ways to destroy the planet.

Then there's the James Bond quiz: 25 questions in all. Fairly in-depth since I re-watched all of those 21 official James Bond films. How in-depth? I just re-took it and got a 24. (I missed no. 15 if you're keeping score.) So even the quizmaster can't master his own quiz. As Bond would say, "He always did have an inflated opinion of himself."

"Tonight we got Hayfield. Like all the other schools in this conference they're all white. They don't have to worry about race. We do. But we're better for it."

—Coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) in Remember the Titans.

And we are.

How rare is it when at least one of the best picture nominees isn't among the year's top 10 box office hits? Since 1944, it's happened only five times: 1947, 1984...and the last three years in a row: 2004, 2005, 2006. What was once a rarity has now become routine.

However, several [Oscar campaigners] noted a belief that audiences — weary of economic crisis and political strife — are ready for a dose of fun from the entertainment industry.

The [summer movie] mix may not perfectly match the mood of an audience looking for refuge from election campaigns and high-priced gas, said Peter Sealey, a former Columbia Pictures marketing executive who is now an adjunct professor…

What movies, included in this “mix,” did Cieply specifically mention that the audience might not be in the mood for? The comedy Tropic Thunder, which quietly made $110M, and, of course, The Dark Knight, which noisily grossed $527M. Internationally, it's approaching $1 billion.

You’d think a journalist might be shy about quoting Hollywood insiders in the exact same way after dropping a bomb like that. Not here. Seriously, I encourage everyone to read Cieply’s May article. It’s instructive. Hell, it’s downright Goldmanesque. Nobody may know anything but some of us really don’t know anything.

In the end, and depending on what gets released in the next few months, I wouldn’t mind seeing Dark Knight get nom’ed. It shouldn’t win, of course (Three Coins, Love Story and Raiders didn’t win either), but it was a hugely popular, critically acclaimed film and in the past that’s been enough for the Academy.

But that’s only one part of the equation: a box-office hit will have gotten nom’ed. The other part — a weighty best picture nominee that becomes a box-office hit — will take more work. Work, I should add, the studios don’t appear interested in doing.

This season, following the disaster of Medellin, in which, in fat suit and moustaches, Vinnie Chase played (or overplayed) Colombian druglord Pablo Escobar, our movie star's career is in free-fall. He's out of money. He can't get a lead. He's resorted to sweet 16s and modeling gigs to make ends meet. He considered, for a time, starring in a "Benji" movie, then had to fight his ass off to get a supporting role in Smoke Jumpers, a movie about firefighters, when everyone knows movies about firefighters never do well at the box office.

My quick-and-easy prediction? No matter how well Smoke Jumpers does at the box office, Vinnie is nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor — as creator/producer Mark Wahlberg was for The Departed. Then we get all that hoopla. That's my hope anyway. As soon as Walhberg was nom'ed, I hoped they would translate it into the "Entourage" world.

Question: Did Mark Wahlberg ever have a Medellin? Doesn't seem so. Some of his movies may have underperformed, and he's taken hits (OK, pings) from critics (myself included) who thought he didn't bring much to good-guy lead roles, but he's never had a gigantic bomb that prevented him from getting leads. Or so it seems from the outside.

“Marlon’s going to class to learn the Method was like sending a tiger to jungle school.”

Or wasn't acting. Brando says of his teacher, Stella Adler, "She taught me to be real, and not to try to act out an emotion I didn't personally experience during a performance." That's when I understood — as much, I suppose, as a non-actor can understand. He's got to actually feel what he's saying or it doesn't work. It accounts for the unevenness of his work. The subtitle of the piece is "How the greatest American actor lost his way," but the article is also about how the greatest American actor found his way. Everyone loses their way — everyone — but not everyone finds their way in the first place. There's a My god, what might have been? quality to the article, but, again, and maybe this is the Minnesotan in me, there's also, in the article, a sense that: My god, what WAS. The author ticks off the five or six great performances that Brando gave us in great movies, and, because of the ferociousness of his talent, that's a lament. For me, that's the pinnacle. I go back to David Mamet's Bambi vs. Godzilla: "Mike Nichols told me long ago that there is no such thing as a career—that if a person has done five great things over three decades of work he is indeed blessed." Brando was more than blessed; he blessed us.

"Tonight we got Hayfield. Like all the other schools in this conference they're all white. They don't have to worry about race. We do. But we're better for it."

—Coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) in Remember the Titans. It's not a good movie — there are very dishonest parts — but these lines, part of the "big game" speech, resonate beyond the film. They articulate my hopes about our country. Other countries, in Asia, in Europe, haven't really been dealing with racial matters for as long as we have, and haven't gone as far as we have. And I like to think we're better for it. 

Other factors will come into play. “The Dark Knight” is better than “Pirates 2,” so it should have longer legs. Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker, singled out for high praise and Oscar buzz, may draw into theaters moviegoers who might not otherwise check out a superhero pic. And if Ledger, or the film itself, is nominated for an Oscar next January, that could boost its box office as well. Assuming it’s still in theaters. Even so, it would take a lot to make up $85 million.

Now it’s time for Wagner’s close-up. The camera is on him, and all Newman has to do is stand out of range with the script in his hands and read his string of insults. The camera rolls, Newman reads, and suddenly, as actors say, Wagner fills the moment —

—on camera, in close up, Robert Wagner starts to cry. This is, let me tell you, a bonus. And it’s genuinely exciting.

And no one is more excited than Newman. In fact, he’s so excited at what’s happening with Wagner that Newman begins fucking up the lines. All he has to do is stand there and read and he can’t get the goddam words out right.

It didn’t matter, thankfully. They got the shot. Wagner was so deep into what he was doing that the crying continued. After the shot was finished, everyone ran to Wagner and milled around, congratulating him; it was that thrilling.

Wagner said a moment like that had never happened to him before. He added one more thing: It was the first time in his experience that a major star had actually stayed around and stood there off camera, reading the lines with him, acting along, as it were. Usually, when the star is done with his shot, it’s off to the dressing room, and the remaining performer gets to act with the script girl reading the star’s lines. Script girls are very important on the set, they work like hell—but they are also noted for a certain woodenness when it comes to reciting dialog. No question that Newman’s presence helped Wagner fill the moment.

"It would be the easiest thing for me as president to ask for a declaration of war. A man on a horseback is always a hero. But I wouldn't have to do the fighting. Some poor farmer's boy, or the son of some great family would have to do the fighting — and the dying. When I ask them to do that, I want to be very sure that what they're dying for is worthwhile."

— Pres. Woodrow Wilson (Alexander Knox) after the sinking of the Lusitania in Wilson (1944) 

"I often think of something Woodrow Wilson said to me. 'It is only once in a generation that people can be lifted above material things. That is why conservative government is in the saddle for two-thirds of the time.'"

—Franklin (Ralph Bellamy) to Eleanor Roosevelt (Greer Garson), in Sunrise at Campbello (1960)

"There is no expert on the subject. I mean, there is no wise old man. There's... Shit, there's just us."

—Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner) to JFK and RFK on the first day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, after Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson, despite what he sees as the inevitable consequences of the act, recommends bombing Cuba, in the movie Thirteen Days. 

Two days later, for the same article, I watched Thirteen Days, the 2000 account of the Cuban Missile Crisis starring Kevin Costner as Kenny O'Donnell, JFK's special assistant, and Bruce Greenwood in an understated and suggestive turn as our first telegenic president. (I should add that, for all the faults of the film, Timothy Bottoms did a fine job as Bush in DC 9/11.)

So it's early in the crisis and the joint chiefs are recommending bombing Cuba back to the stone age. Even former Secretary of State Dean Acheson is recommending same with a foreknowledge of consquences that is truly frightening: We warn, we strike, they strike back in Berlin, NATO kicks in. "Hopefully," he says, "cooler heads prevail." On the third day, General Curtis Le May gets into the act with this rationale:

"The big red dog is diggin' in our backyard and we are justified in shooting him..."

Afterwards, JFK and his advisors, who are looking for the alternative, which, of course, turns out to be the quarantine or blockade of Cuba, joke about the general's language — the reduction to homey metaphor of an act that might end the world — and I realized, for the zillionth time, that for the last eight years we've had the General Le Mays not only running things but giving rationales for our actions: "Wanted: Dead or Alive," etc. We've had no real leadership. We've had no one demanding more evidence and looking for alternatives. We've had no cooler heads. We've rushed in where angels fear to tread. Hell, the General Le Mays of the Bush administration have been the cooler heads.

So, as bad as things are, and they're pretty bad, thank God we didn't have Bush and his team in place in October 1962. 

• “We’re gonna hunt down and find those folks who committed this.”
• “Whoever did this isn’t going to like me as president.”
• “We’re going to kick the hell out of whoever did this. No slap on the wrist this time.”

Powell: The mission is the destruction of al Qaeda. Hussein isn’t your man.
Rumsfeld: He is if we’re talking about terrorism in the broadest sense. We know he never stopped developing weapons of mass destruction...
Cheney: Al Qaeda lacks weapons. That’s why they used our own aircraft. You put Hussein and bin Laden together...?
Bush: Is that an immediate threat?
Cheney: The enemy is clearly more than UBL [bin Laden] and the Taliban. If we’re including people who support terrorists, that does open the door to Iraq. But unlike bin Laden, we know where to find them.

“At some point, we may be the only ones left standing. And that will have to be OK. That’s why we’re America.”

“Only because he was unable. But he’s got the arms. He’s been developing everything from nuclear weapons to smallpox to anthrax. A whole range of weapons of mass destruction. ... All he’s lacked is the means to deliver those weapons to our shores. Well, UBL has shown him he’s got a system of delivery.”

Here’s what’s awful. The reason our foreign policy mistakes were disastrous are there in the script for anyone to see — and they were visible back then. 9/11 did require a new playbook. We were attacked by a loose organization that could hide, rather than a nation-state that couldn’t. Yet our ultimate response was to attack a nation-state because, in Cheney’s words, “We know where to find them.”

Which is the very reason we shouldn’t have attacked them. That was the old playbook. It’s still the old playbook. And we still don’t get it.

DC 9/11 is either so funny it’s sad or so sad it’s funny. It should become a cult classic like Reefer Madness: a propaganda film that, through its over-the-top idiocy, proves its opposite. It’s also a good reminder of what once constituted conservative spin. Remember Bush as action hero? As cowboy? “[Saddam] is surely developing WMDs,” Bush says. “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” Bush says. We’re going to “rid the world of evil,” Bush says. “This will decidedly not be another Vietnam,” Bush says.

Maybe it's because it's Friday and I'm tired after the long week, or maybe it's the idiocy of the presidential campaign finally getting to me (I'm looking at you, John McCain), or maybe it's my age (I'm looking at you, Erik Lundegaard), but after the long day and the short bikeride home, I found, in my pile of mail, the latest Entertainment Weekly with Anne Hathaway on the cover. Their head and subhead?:

ANNE HATHAWAY: A PRINCESS NO MORE: Post-scandal, she bounces back with an edgy new role. Is Oscar next?

I looked at it for a second and thought, "This is the kind of thing that just makes me want to stop living."