Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts

May 30, 2014

"X-Men: Days of Future Past"

X-Men movies exemplify the dominant Minority Supremacist ideology of our age. Mutant superheroes are oppressed by the boring normals, except for the few enlightened members of the uncool majority. Not surprisingly, Bryan Singer's X-Men movies are vastly popular with the teenage masses, who of course are all members of a talented minority, right? I mean, if you can't trust Bryan Singer, boys, who can you trust?

The latest X-Men comic book movie Days of Future Past is a time travel flick set in 1973, much like 2011's pretty good X-Men: First Class was set in in 1962. And I liked X-Men: First Class quite a bit because it was a reboot after Brett Ratner had trashed the continuity in 2006's X-Men: Last Stand, so it stood alone better than most. This new one devotes a lot of effort to patching over problems in the continuity, so it puts the franchise back in good shape, although it may not make for the most scintillating stand-alone flick. And whenever it runs into a problem it just throws some more movie stars at it, such as Jennifer Lawrence, Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen, which is not the worst strategy. 

X-Men movies wouldn't have worked well as a franchise before the Web era since you really need to look up online before you go what all happened in the last movie and who all the teeming mutant freaks are again. I'm not really into doing my homework before a movie so I enjoyed the first one back in 2000 the most. 

Also, I, personally, I find 1962 cooler than 1973. And the previous film let Michael Fassbender as the vengeful Magneto, a mutant supremacist, hog tie and stomp James McAvoy as the nice Dr. Charles Xavier. 

In this one, McAvoy gets more emphasis and he's somewhat cooler -- he's supposed to resemble a 1973 British rock star fighting his heroin addiction in his country estate -- than in First Class. Unfortunately, Fassbender, who may be the top male star to emerge in this decade (although Andrew Garfield is terrific in the otherwise pointless Spider-Man reboot), doesn't get much to do other than to wave his hands around, although at the end he gets to deliver a rousing speech to Richard Nixon on the necessity of Mutant Supremacism.
     

May 28, 2014

"Neighbors"

Seth Rogen plays a new father whose pleasant domestic life with his lovely wife and extremely cute baby is disrupted when a loud college fraternity, headed by Zac Efron, buys the house next door. Torn between wanting to still seem cool to the kids and getting them to turn the damn music down so they can get some sleep, the couple eventually launches a maniacal plot against the bros.

Neighbors is consistently mildly amusing, although not as funny as Rogen's This Is the End last year. One problem is that Rogen isn't really cut out for playing the over-the-top fat guy in the tradition of John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley (although he's probably going to live longer). Nor is he a surprisingly graceful fat guy in the tradition of W.C. Fields, Jackie Gleason, and Kevin James. Rogen's more the voice-of-reason type of lazy guy who makes other people around him funnier. 

The funniest thing I've ever seen Rogen to do was a joint interview with Barbra Streisand on Dr. Phil promoting some movie they made together. Not surprisingly, Streisand is a tad megalomaniacal, and Rogen egged her on and quietly undermined her, directing attention to her elderly diva mania, apparently without her noticing. (I presume they'd plotted it beforehand, but who knows?)

Rose Byrne, a generically pretty Australian actress, plays Rogen's wife. She's given lots of opportunity to be funny in long conversations with Rogen, but her Down Under accent keeps reminding me that this would be more amusing if her role had been played by Rebel Wilson, the fat, blonde, and remarkably malicious Australian comic actress. Perhaps Wilson's getting over-exposed, but I've only seen her in her jaw-dropping cameo as the hostile roommate who evicts Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids and as the self-confident Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect.

One question is why Seth Rogen's character, a schlub with a lousy cubicle job whose main source of workday satisfaction is smoking a joint with his loser buddy in the alley, has a starlet-looking wife. The simplest explanation would be that he'd recently inherited a few million from his Nana, which is hardly unbelievable these days. But, as Thomas Piketty points out, bequests never seem to come up in movies, even though inheritances were a rich source of drama in 19th Century novels.
  

April 5, 2014

"The Grand Budapest Hotel"

Wes Anderson movies, such as 2012's Moonrise Kingdom, generally get on my nerves quickly, but I quite enjoyed almost all of this one. 

Granted, this movie about the concierge (Ralph Fiennes as Monsieur Gustave) at a pre-WWII Austrian luxury hotel is almost entirely made out of frosting -- Viennese pastries and other desserts provide much of Anderson's inspiration for his extravagant art direction. There really isn't much else in the movie besides endless riffs on what the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have had the budget to look like if the unfortunate events of 1914-18 had not transpired. But, old-time Austria and Wes Anderson are made for each other. Anderson has the worldview of a talented, refined, wealthy, and spoiled 12-year-old boy, and for whatever reason Habsburgian styles are an excellent fit for him.

Granted, the movie's plot is just an excuse for Anderson to indulge his cinematic sweet tooth for all things visually mitteleuropäisch. As usual, Anderson mostly just squares up the camera head on like he's making 2001. Anderson's constant dead center framing of shots -- And now look what I've dreamed up this time! -- gives the impression of a child who must have been endlessly praised for his creativity. But in The Grand Budapest Hotel his imagination almost lives up to the smugness of his cinematography.

And the constant guest appearances by Anderson's movie star friends, most of whom have discordantly American accents, start to get tiresome. (Is that Alan Arkin or Harvey Keitel as the con boss in the prison Monsieur Gustave gets sentenced to?) 

And, as in most Wes Anderson movies, there are remarkably few jokes. His movies always look like they are going to be extremely funny, but they almost never are, especially now that the careers of Anderson and his old college buddy, the genuinely amusing Owen Wilson, have diverged since their 1996 debut Bottle Rocket.

Fortunately, all the guest appearances really work just as a setup for the final cameo, in which Wilson, with his Texan accent, steps in temporarily at concierge for Monsieur Gustave as Monsieur Chuck. The joke is more or less: "Now you may be thinking that I, Owen Wilson, don't seem that culturally appropriate as the concierge of an Austrian hotel in 1932, and you may have a point; but, still, you gotta admit I would have been a great concierge and you would have given me a huge tip."
     

February 28, 2014

Commodification of labor: movie star division

Since movie and TV star salaries spiked back in the 1990s, entertainment companies have been working hard to tip the balance of power back toward the owners of intellectual property (themselves) by emphasizing superhero characters rather than star power. A few actors in superhero franchises, most notably Robert Downey Jr., have been able to maintain enough leverage to cash in royally. Yet, Downey's take from playing Iron Man in the vastly successful The Avengers -- supposedly $50 million -- was roughly what Jack Nicholson is said to have earned for playing the Joker in Batman way back in 1989.

Here's an article on all the movie star hopefuls who workout at Gold's Gym at Venice Beach:
Almost any actor, even some of Hollywood’s most scrawny, can be physically transformed for the part if he’s willing to put in the hard work. The studios know this, which is why any inexpensive unknown can be chosen. ...
For last summer’s megahit “Man of Steel,” Snyder sent Cavill to work out with Twight. “I wanted Henry to be the personification of physicality,” Snyder told me. Cavill and Twight worked together for five months before production started and continued training during the six months of filming. Twight packed the pounds onto Cavill’s 6-foot-1 frame by putting him on a 5,000-calorie-a-day diet. Leading up to Cavill’s two shirtless sequences — a few days at the beginning of October 2011 and about six days at the end of that month — Twight scaled Cavill’s caloric intake back to about 2,800 calories. According to Twight, the pressure on Cavill was intense: “Henry was not a well-known guy, and he had chosen to be one of greatest comic-book icons ever. You’re not going to give that guy an inch.”

The whole physical transformation process is also part of the promotional campaign for the movies. That was part of Sylvester Stallone's brilliance in the 1970s-1980s to tap into this previously inchoate longing on the part of the audience that that the early 20th Century German poet Rilke (who has become a posthumous self-help guru) summarized as: "You must change your life."
A number of trainers and actors told me that steroids were out there and that everybody had a good idea of who was on them — though nobody is willing to name names. But as trainers like Twight make obvious, the Hollywood fitness mechanism is brutal and advanced enough to make any performance-enhancing drug seem primitive by comparison. “Post-‘300,’ there is a machine in place — it doesn’t work for everyone, though,” Twight said. “Not everybody can handle the training.”

Uh, that's what the steroids are for -- to speed recovery times to allow more lifting. 

I'm interested in learning more about the opposite process than adding all that muscle: the guys who went back to being normal. For example, in 2009 I ran into Jake Gyllenhaal at the frozen yogurt stand and he looked kind of silly all pumped up for his 2010 Prince of Persia starring role, but wearing normal Dockers-type clothes instead of a loincloth or whatever is more fitting for that level of musculature. But the next movie I saw him in, 2011's sci-fi Source Code, he looked reasonable again.

Presumably, if Prince of Persia hadn't bombed, he'd still be beefcaked up. Now, he's kind of gaunt for his next role.

Here's something that I can't recall male stars talking about: what it's like to be different shapes. How does it affect how you think? How does it affect your moods? By this point, Christian Bale, say, has a lot of data points on what it's like to be muscular, emaciated, pudgy, etcetera. But there isn't much public interest in that, but there is intense interest in the process of changing body shape.

On the female side, there is a slight bit more freedom for actresses to complain about the ferocious diets they have to maintain (but not to go off them). I can recall about a decade ago that Sandra Bullock's management issued a press release saying that she had decided to not starve herself anymore just to get roles. But, judging by her late-in-career Oscar success in Gravity and The Blind Side, she changed her mind.
  

February 27, 2014

Moneyballing movies: "The Gender Gap in Screen Time"

From the NYT:
The Gender Gap in Screen Time 
Cinemetrics Extracts Statistical Data From Movies 
By KEVIN B. LEE      FEB. 27, 2014 
... Today the Cinemetrics website, run by Yuri Tsivian, a scholar at the University of Chicago, Daria Khitrova and Gunars Civjans, holds statistics on more than 14,000 films. 
... One disquieting finding from my research is that this year’s lead actors average 85 minutes on screen, but lead actresses average only 57 minutes. (When you add in supporting categories, all competing actors averaged 59 minutes, while all competing actresses averaged 42 minutes.) Last year’s results were even more imbalanced: nominated male stars averaged 100 minutes on screen to the lead actresses’ 49 minutes.

I've always said that Best Actor is a much bigger award than Best Actress.

Actors have longer to perfect their crafts as leads in big pictures than do actresses (e.g., Best Actor last year was 55-year-old Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg's Lincoln versus 22-year-old Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook.) While Judy Dench and Meryl Streep continue to get Best Actress nominations, the size of their movies drops as they age.

Most screenwriters and almost all top directors are male (e.g., Silver Linings Playbook was David O. Russell's quasi-autobiographical tale about his mental problems, so Bradley Cooper is the main character while Lawrence is cast as The Girl).
Mr. Bordwell said genre might help explain the gender gap. Male stars are typically the protagonists in action or goal-oriented narratives that require the viewer to follow the story through the lead’s experiences. Female stars are more typically cast in melodramas that require the lead to serve as a hub connecting different characters and subplots. ...
Mr. Cassidy [editor of American Hustle] wagered that there wasn’t much of a gap in the screen time between the two nominated leads of his film. But Christian Bale actually has 60 minutes of screen to Amy Adams’s 46 minutes, a significant difference even in an ensemble movie.

Is there really any doubt that Christian Bale's conman is the main character? American Hustle opens and closes with him. He's the character David O. Russell most identifies with. It's not exactly a secret that successful directors like Russell or Scorsese often see a lot of themselves in the flim-flam man main characters that attract them to projects like American Hustle or Wolf of Wall Street.

In general, as you go up the quality scale, the gender gap gets bigger. There are plenty of run-of-the-mill TV shows where actresses of a certain age solve crimes. There are huge audiences who buy a lot of heavily advertised products for those shows.

But when you get to major film auteurs, you get their obsessions. Martin Scorsese, for instance, thinks about guys, all the time. I doubt if he's thought about any of his five wives as much as he's thought about Robert De Niro or Leonardo DiCaprio. (Maybe one of those ex-wives, however, is slightly ahead of Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel for third place in the Scorsese Attention Sweepstakes.)
   

February 25, 2014

NYT: Blacks don't get enough Oscars for playing nonblacks

From the NYT:
Racial Barriers Still Hold Back Hollywood's Black Talent
By REUTERS FEB. 25, 2014, 8:15 P.M. E.S.T.

LOS ANGELES — When Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won the best-acting Oscar categories and Sidney Poitier was honored with a lifetime achievement award in 2002, the night was a watershed for black actors in Hollywood. 
Since then the debate about Hollywood diversity among the African American community has continued to ebb and flow, but one fact remains constant: nearly all black actors are still only being recognized by the Academy Awards for playing specifically black characters in film. 
... This year, three black actors will be vying for Oscars at the March 2 ceremony, and if "12 Years a Slave" wins best picture, it will be the first film by a black director to do so. 
But as black films and actors are being celebrated by Hollywood, there is no clear indication that the industry has turned the corner on increasing roles not based on race. 
That could be partly explained by the underrepresentation of black talent in senior positions in film studios and among the 6,000-plus members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who vote for the Oscars. 
"When roles in otherwise mainstream movies go to black actors that aren't necessarily written for (them), I think that's a point when there will have been some profile change," said Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California and an expert on African American cinema and culture. "We are not there yet." 

Roles in mainstream movies do go to black actors that weren't originally written for them -- it's just that those kind of movies don't get Oscar recognition. Thirty years ago, Beverly Hills Cop was planned around Sylvester Stallone, but Eddie Murphy wound up playing the role. Murphy wasn't nominated for an Oscar in it, but then Stallone wouldn't have been either.

Murphy and Stallone have each only been nominated once, both for highly ethnically specific roles: Murphy for Dreamgirls and Stallone for Rocky.
Seven of the nine best-picture nominees in contention for an Oscar this year, including large ensemble casts in "American Hustle" and "The Wolf of Wall Street," do not have any black actors in leading or supporting roles.

American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street are both period pieces inspired by true stories of white collar criminality, so wouldn't it be racist to imply that blacks were involved?

Both are set in East Coast white ethnic milieus by East Coast white ethnic directors (David O. Russell and Martin Scorsese) who specialize in movies about non-Protestant whites.

And both movies are well-cast: would Kerry Washington really have been funnier than Jennifer Lawrence? Would Kevin Hart have been better than Jonah Hill as the drug-addicted cousin-marrying sleaze Donny Azoff?

The one piece of casting in either movies that is a little off is Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort (whom you can see introducing DiCaprio as himself in New Zealand at the end of Wolf). DiCaprio doesn't attempt a Long Island accent and it's not clear how the vaguely Slavic-looking DiCaprio is supposed to be Rob Reiner's son. (I had assumed from the trailer that Reiner would play Jonah Hill's dad.) But, other than the accent, DiCaprio works hilariously hard throughout the movie. If you want to see a famous movie star look like he's about to have an aneurysm, several times, well, The Wolf of Wall Street is just your ticket.
The two films that do, "Captain Phillips" and "12 Years a Slave," have landed acting nods for stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is up for best actor, and Lupita Nyong'o and Barkhad Abdi in the supporting categories. 
British actor Ejiofor and Kenyan-Mexican actress Nyong'o both play slaves in McQueen's pre-civil-war drama, while Somali-American newcomer Abdi, in his first acting role, portrays a Somali pirate who seizes command of a cargo ship.

In other words, African-Americans had a poor Oscar year, but non-American blacks had a very good one, but why talk about complications of ethnicity when we can talk about race and keep it simple: black and white?
More than 50 black actors and actresses have been nominated and won Oscars throughout the history of the Academy Awards. Most have done so for playing specifically black characters, either historical or fictional. 
Washington managed to play an alcoholic airplane pilot in "Flight," a role for which he was nominated for best actor in 2013. But that was one of the rare exceptions.

Terrific performance, fine movie. Washington's performance is pretty similar to DiCaprio's in terms of a big star working hard.

In general, though, movies with generic leading roles that could be filled by any ethnicity don't get as much Oscar attention. For example, Mark Wahlberg, a former Boston juvenile delinquent, is mostly a a non-specific leading man who competes for roles in commercial movies with other leading men. Most Mark Wahlberg movies don't get a lot of Oscar respect, but some of the ones where he stays closer to home, such as The Departed (Scorsese) and The Fighter (Russell) do.

Similarly, Will Smith competes with Tom Cruise for a lot of sci-fi roles as the Last Man on Earth and the like, but he's only been nominated twice for an Oscar, both times (Ali, Pursuit of Happyness) for biopics playing real life black characters. (Similarly, Tom Cruise hasn't been nominated since 2000.) Oscar voters are prejudiced in favor of detailed drawn-from-life roles, and are content to let the box office reward roles that either Will Smith or Tom Cruise could have played.
"Why couldn't there be an African American starring in the role that Joaquin Phoenix plays (in 'Her')?" said Boyd. "When you see that, then there's a change."

I'm not sure Professor Boyd understands what the W in SWPL stands for.

By the way, as usual, nobody is interested in Mexican-Americans.

January 31, 2014

A note to Gregory Clark on surname persistence

From an article by Gene Maddaus in the L.A. Weekly:
Salmon P. Chase
Remington Chase and Stefan Martirosian should be on top of the world. In the last two years, they have produced a dozen films, including Lone Survivor, starring Mark Wahlberg as a Navy SEAL fighting for his life in Afghanistan. Two years ago, no one in the industry had heard of them, but now they mingle with A-list stars. By their own estimate they have become the biggest independent financiers in the business, plowing $100 million in cash into production, plus another $200 million in bank loans. 
In the week before Christmas, just before the premiere of Lone Survivor, they're having coffee at Urth CaffĂ© in Santa Monica — and sitting down for their first in-depth interview. 
But Chase and Martirosian aren't here to talk about the bravery of the Navy SEALs or about working with Peter Berg. Instead, they want to quash a story about their pasts.
Remington Chase

And no wonder. Their backgrounds include convictions for cocaine trafficking; ties to the Russian oil business, the Armenian government and the African diamond trade; and stints as federal informants. Most disturbing are allegations that they orchestrated a contract killing in Moscow — allegations that the Moscow police took seriously enough to investigate. 
Chase and Martirosian say they can explain everything. (They've brought along a Hollywood publicist to help.) 

Spoiler Alert: Seven pages later the two movie producers / crooks are still talking about their post-Soviet connections and crimes; here's the ending:
Throughout the conversation, Maxine Leonard, the publicist, has been quiet, occasionally looking down at her phone. But as the conversation progresses, her eyes grow wider and wider. Finally, she simply has to interrupt. 
"Can I just stop right here?" she asks, in a very polite British accent. "This is all just kind of incredible, amazing stuff. You don't want any of this — nobody wants any of what I've been listening to for the last 30 minutes, anywhere in any kind of like print story about you guys being involved in Hollywood making movies." 
They try to allay her worries, but she is not kidding around. 
"Any of this stuff coming out," she says, "is horribly damaging."
Stefan Martirosian & Remington Steele:
a study in different quality dye jobs

By the way, for the purposes of estimating social mobility over the centuries via surname analysis, it should be noted that Remington Chase isn't actually descended from Lincoln's treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase, in whose honor the Chase gigabank was named, nor does he have ties to the Remington gun company, nor to the Remington Steele TV show. Nor does Remington Chase look much like Pierce Brosnan, but if you assume he does based on a series of murky associations in your mind that you haven't really thought through, Remington Chase probably wouldn't object.

In truth, he's had lots of names (such as William Paul Elliot and William Elliot Westwood), and Remington Chase is just the cool name he was using when he went into the history books as a big time movie producer.

Take note, Dr. Clark.

Note to Hollywood publicists like poor Ms. Leonard who are hired to represent career criminals: Insist that your clients only be interviewed while wearing dresses. Guys like Stefan and Remington will no doubt initially object, but they will thank you in the long run. 
      

January 25, 2014

"Him"

Like I said, the Best Picture-nominated movie Her is a lot funnier when viewed as a parody of the kind of people who like Her.
   

January 20, 2014

"Oscar Gold"

From the comments:
We need to write a script for a movie where the Russians and Yankee WASPs join forces with Southern WASPs and plot to take over the world from the Maidstone Club. The diabolical plot is uncovered by a heroic transgendered migrant worker busing tables at the Knickerbocker Club to help pay tuition at Harvard Law School, pay to feed his four children, and cover the sex-change operation that will turn him into a single mom. Oscar gold, Steve! OSCAR GOLD! 
"Oscar Gold" would be the name of the movie since that will be the name of the migrant hero for obvious reasons. 
   

January 19, 2014

NYT: "Russians: Still the Go-To Bad Guys"

Movies these days tend to be extremely accurate visually about what the past looked like or would have looked like if people back then had more money and time to work on their looks (e.g., all the work put into, say, American Hustle to look like 1978-80).

But the kind of people who write about movies are generally pretty clueless about how people thought or behaved in the past. Cultural pundits today mostly absorb some generally acceptable lessons about the evil attitudes of the past and don't look for nuance.

Thus, from the New York Times:
Russians: Still the Go-To Bad Guys 
By STEVEN KURUTZ
THE movie “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” which opens in theaters this weekend, revolves around an American C.I.A. analyst first introduced in Tom Clancy’s 1984 novel “The Hunt for Red October.” The source material isn’t the only thing that’s a little creaky. Ryan’s destination is Moscow, his target a Russian businessman plotting to crash the American economy through a terrorist attack. 
In portraying the diabolical oligarch Viktor Cherevin, Kenneth Branagh delivers his lines in the thick, menacingly slow accent that defines Eastern European baddies on screen: “You think this is game, Jack?” 
Nearly 25 years after the Berlin Wall fell and marked the end of the Cold War, Hollywood’s go-to villains remain Russians.

That assumes that Russians were the movies' go-to villains during the Cold War, which was hardly true. An obvious example is the James Bond movies, in which the novels' original bad guys, the Soviet SMERSH agency, were replaced by the nonideological for-profit multinational SPECTRE.

In general, Cold War movie bad guys were far more often the CIA, the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the rich, and so forth and so on. (Among powerful American institutions, the Marine Corps and the FBI spent a lot of money and effort schmoozing Hollywood to keep from being portrayed badly.) Overall, the Soviets didn't figure much in American entertainment, and when they did, were usually seen as not the real problem.

The use of the Soviets as bad guys tended to be a 1980s idiosyncrasy of a handful of out-of-the-closet conservative action stars (e.g., Sylvester Stallone) or writer-directors (John Milius -- Red Dawn). Their anti-Communist movies were extremely controversial at the time since they were much more popular with the public than with the culturesphere.

In general, Hollywood saw the Nazis as having agency, while the Soviets did not. They were a mere unfortunate reaction to our own agency. That's not a wholly unreasonable interpretation of history, but you can see why it wasn't very stimulating for making movies, so there were few anti-Soviet movies.

Even then, it is difficult to recognize any sort of negative ethnic stereotyping of Russians of the type we see today. Throughout the Cold War, American culture producers tended to view Russians as a cultured people as seen in all the great Russian novels and plays of the pre-Communist era. Many of the Russians in the West during the Cold War were refugee aristocrats of impeccable manners: some became head waiters, others novelists (Nabokov). For example, Ensign Chekov on Star Trek was named to call to mind the great Russian playwright.

The current notion of Russians as flatheaded goons didn't exist in America before the Berlin Wall came down.

While Soviet government officials were seen as boring and badly dressed, Americans during the Cold War tended, if anything, to overrate Russian culture as more elegant than American culture. For example, the Bolshoi Ballet was hugely famous during the Cold War. Similarly, young Texan pianist Van Cliburn winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 was gigantically famous at the time. Russian figure skaters and gymnasts were highly admired. Even the U.S. victory over the Soviet ice hockey team at the 1980 Olympics was seen as bumptious upstarts somehow knocking off a team that was far more elegant than the brutal North American style.

At the upper end of Hollywood prestige, note Dr. Zhivago, the second biggest grossing movie of the 1960s, which depicts Russians as soulful, literary, and romantic but sadly victimized by Stalin. The movie ends with a travelog of a giant new Soviet hydroelectric dam showing the bad times are over and progress is being made.

The current stereotype associating Russians with organized crime simply didn't exist during the Cold War.
The last few years alone have seen a sadistic ex-K.G.B. agent (“The Avengers”), crooked Russian officials (“A Good Day to Die Hard”), Russian hit men (“The Tourist”), a Russian spy (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”), a Russian-American loan shark (“Limitless”) and so many Russian gangsters they have displaced Italians as film’s favored thugs (“Jack Reacher,” “Safe,” “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas,” among others). 
I suspect screenwriters and studio executives have deemed Russians to be politically safe villains. No advocacy group will protest.

E.g., Steven Spielberg thought Hindus were a safe set of villains in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 30 years ago, but quickly discovered that he'd better go back to Nazis.
No foreign distribution deal will be nixed. Russian moviegoers here and abroad are probably inured to seeing themselves portrayed as Boris Badenovs on screen.

Russia is second only to China as a growth market for Hollywood movies. The movie industry is very concerned about Chinese sensitivities, so it would be interesting to see why it doesn't seem concerned about Russian sensitivities.
Why make a TV show about modern-day surveillance and wiretapping when you can do a Red-scare period piece and offend or provoke no one?
Still, it doesn’t make for as powerful drama as it once did.

If you grew up during the Cold War, you viewed Russians with a potent mix of hatred and fear, and felt in your gut that a nuclear war between our countries could erupt any second, obliterating everybody and everything. That’s why movies like “The Day After” and “Threads” were so visceral.

No, these were basically movies about how Ronald Reagan was going to blow up the world. It's funny how the gigantic Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s is so forgotten that it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page.
I doubt today’s teenage moviegoers are walking around with the same mixed-up feelings about the Russians. Ivan Drago, the Soviet-bred fighting machine who battled Rocky Balboa in 1985, may have been absurd but he was a fall guy for his time. Has our pop culture not moved beyond “Rocky IV”?  

Once again, Stallone was notoriously out of step with the rest of Hollywood in the 1980s by making anti-Communist movies, from which he made lots and lots of money, much as Mel Gibson made lots of money off the Mexican-American market with The Passion of the Christ. And don't forget that Rocky IV still ends with Rocky Balboa negotiating world peace with the young new Soviet premiere.

Now, in defense of post-Berlin Wall Hollywood screenwriters, let me point out that they were faster at sniffing out that something funny was going on in Yeltsin's new free market democracy than was, say, Stanley Fischer.
 

January 16, 2014

Oscar nominees I've actually reviewed

Best Picture nominees:




"American Hustle"

"Gravity"

"Captain Phillips"

"Dallas Buyers Club"

"Philomena"

"The Wolf of Wall Street"

Glad to see Nebraska getting its share of the endless Oscar love for all things Alexander Payne.

My strong suit as a reviewer, however, is not telling you that good movies are good or bad movies are bad, but finding the ones that aren't quite what they seem to be.

For example, 12 Years a Slave could have been a very good movie by just adding one twist at the end. Remember how the guy comes home at the end from being kidnapped and apologizes to his family? It's a puzzling scene: why is he apologizing? Lots of deep explanations have been offered, but my guess is that the director had him apologize because the first 20 minutes of the movie were as phony as they looked: the weight of historical evidence suggests that Solomon Northup enslavement had started out with him as part of a con man ring playing the old skin game and something went wrong. What a kick in the gut to modern audiences it would have been with an ending in which Northup apologizes to his wife for trying to pull another con and getting caught. But, that would have been too disturbing and interesting for contemporary critics.

From what I've seen so far, I would probably vote for American Hustle. It's a thoroughly entertaining movie that seems like a respectable Interim Placeholder Best Picture until enough time has passed for us to actually figure out what really was the best movie. 

Gravity would be fine, too: my main complaint is that at 91 minutes it's too short, and thus stints on motivation, character development, and some explanations for the audience of Newton's Three Laws of Motion. The missing first act almost writes itself. But to say that you wish the movie were longer is not exactly a devastating criticism, whereas seemingly almost nobody would mind an Editor's Cut of Wolf of Wall Street.
   

January 15, 2014

Herbanism

Michael Wolf photo of Hong Kong
From Gizmodo
Tall is Good: How a Lack of Building Up is Keeping Our Cities Down
Urbanism -- Alissa Walker
Early in Spike Jonze's new film Her, Joaquin Phoenix's character gazes out his Los Angeles window. As the camera pans, we see not a squat, sprawling metropolis, but a golden-lit landscape of skyscrapers stretching all the way to the horizon. 
When I saw the film last Friday night, this scene made me gasp. 
It wasn't just the shock of seeing L.A. rendered as a vertical city. It was because this L.A. of the future looked like a place where I wanted to live. 
This digitally enhanced, metastasized Los Angeles—an L.A. that grew up instead of out—is almost a secondary character in the film. Jonze tapped graphic designer Geoff McFetridge and production designer K.K. Barrett, and also consulted with architect Elizabeth Diller on the look of L.A.'s future, which—for once—was blissfully free of those dystopian stereotypes. Even against the bleak narrative (no spoilers, don't worry!) the city around the characters is bustling, colorful, vibrant. It's a gorgeous world of tall buildings, mass transit, and busy sidewalks. 
Dare I say, this movie made density beautiful. 
Beautiful density is, of course, a reality for many cities; some of Her's most dramatic shots were filmed on the skyways and skyscrapers of Shanghai. But here in L.A.—like many cities that aren't Shanghai, or Tokyo, or New York—many people are doing everything in their power to suppress this future, citing detrimental side effects from building heights, whether it's shadows or earthquake danger. Even some already dense cities make it impossible to secure air rights, pass ridiculous parking restrictions, and work hard to incentivize low-rise development. 
But there is a huge problem looming larger than any skyscraper. Many major cities are experiencing a housing shortage which is pricing out large swaths of their populations—the workers, the creators, the young'uns. We need to start thinking big—or, rather, tall. 
In theory, most of us know density is good for us—it allows us to live closer together, share resources, save energy, and stay safe. But we like the idea of skyscrapers right up until the point where one is constructed next door. 
Suddenly, we lament that a tall building might obscure our view, or darken our perfect afternoon sunlight. There is an ongoing sentiment that density should be for someone else. I should be able to keep my car and my yard, while my neighbors get a subway and a public park. 
Anti-skyscraper urbanist Jane Jacobs argued for a "proper density," which it can be assumed looked a lot like the typical 1960s Greenwich Village street that she canonized through her writing.

Jane Jacobs liked her own neighborhood. Most people grow fond of where they live. I've liked every neighborhood I've lived in (except the one that had drug addicts shouting all night for their dealer Eddie to buzz them in so they could get their cocaine -- that started to get on my nerves). This is not to dismiss Jacobs, a wise woman, but urban planning mostly works by who it attracts and who it repels, not by the re-engineering of souls.
With this reasoning, we'd organize all the residential buildings into neat four-story walkups and go to work in the skyscrapers (an equation which obviously does not work out in today's cities). Jacobs was fearful of those towers sprouting throughout Manhattan at the time, which she believe took away a neighborhood's diversity and sense of community.

However, that doesn't seem to be the case. Hong Kong, which has more buildings over five hundred feet tall than any other city in the world, has been the muse of photographer Michael Wolf, who captures the towers as well as the people living inside them. These photos are shocking at first in their overwhelming scale. But 80 percent of the residents Wolf interviewed said they were happy, thanks to the sense of community. "The important lesson to be learned is that it's not space which is important for humans," Wolf told Atlantic Cities. "It's your neighbors."

Indeed. 

For example, in Chicago, Cabrini Green and Sandburg Village were modernist highrise complexes that were built about a mile apart at about the same time. The former was a public housing project that all the white residents soon fled, while Sandburg was a city-led for-profit project intended to drive out the Puerto Ricans from the neighborhood. It became a proto-yuppie haven. Cabrini Green is gone, but Sandburg Village is still there.

The unmentionable fear, of course, is running out of good neighbors. There are only so many to go around. And the American establishment has had as its policy for decades to make the population less white, more diverse. 

Obviously, immigration policy interacts in all sorts of ways with urbanism policy. America has been testing the diverse future out in ultra-immigrantish Los Angeles for a long time. (You might think that some lessons could be learned, but that'll never happen.) For example, the nice liberals of Beverly Hills have been resisting building the L.A. subway through Beverly Hills for the last 28 years. And if that mountain is finally climbed, the so-called Subway-to-the-Sea will still stop four miles from the sea because nobody has a clue how to get the People's Republic of Santa Monica to agree to a subway.

But you aren't supposed to think about that. Thus, in the movie Her, the population of Future Los Angeles has grown immensely, but almost all the characters are attractive white people.

In reality, Mexicans hate taking public transportation, hate high rises, hate driving Priuses. If they were suddenly renamed South Texans, the New York Times editorial board might even defy Carlos Slim and rethink this whole immigration amnesty project.

Armenian-type white immigrants like driving large expensive new cars really fast.

So, there are urbanist lessons to be learned from L.A.'s experience with immigration, but please don't mention them.

The other issues with high rises are traffic and that American white people don't breed in them. They are like zoo creatures -- to get them to reproduce, you need to take them out of small cages and put them in big enclosures. In Her, there is only one child and she lives in what appears to be the only single family home with a yard in Future Los Angeles.

L.A. subway map from Her
Also from Gizmodo:
One of the best moments in the new movie Her is watching Joaquin Phoenix ride an elevated train through a Los Angeles of the near-future, dance through a bustling subway station, and emerge at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. 
The scene got a surprised laugh from everyone at the screening I attended. After years of nimby battles and funding shortfalls, director Spike Jonze had just completed the Subway to the Sea!

Of course, it's the people who have upcoming movies screened for them who have done the most over the decades to keep the LA subway out of the liberal westside of LA. Funny how that works.

By the way, is this Google driverless car thing ever going to happen? If it does, who will take public transit then if you can sit in your own car and watch videos while Jamesbot drives you right to your destination? (Note, I'm not saying it's going to really happen.)
    

Heartiste on the bearable whiteness of "Her"

The late River (top)
and Joaquin Phoenix
Heartiste writes about the Oscar-contender Her, which is set in a future Los Angeles purged of anything offensive to advanced tastes:
Replying to a Steve Sailer review of the movie Her as a mischievous chain-yank of the exquisite sensibilities of white people who majored in humanities, commenter stari_momak pithily spits,
You notice how [as] America has gotten darker, white people have gotten fairer (or paler)? 
One consequence of the CH axiom Diversity + Proximity = War is, ironically, a racial self-segregation that belies the media message drumbeat propagandizing the opposite. Her is very much a SWPL (Stuff White People Like) utopia: clean urban spaces, softening pastels, car-less mass transit, bicycle lanes, love affairs with an advanced Siri AI who sounds like the whitest white girl who ever whited, a noticeable lack of bling or vibrancy. 
It’s almost as if the crushing weight of diversity (especially in LA) has freed upper middle class whites to wall themselves off in cultural compounds of their own making. Sure, they have to guss up their motives with doublespeak, but their actions — their revealed preference in economese — is strictly for a society of the whites, by the whites, for the whites.

Here are the names I recognize from the cast of "Her:"

Joaquin Phoenix -- the Spanish first name is due to his having been born in Puerto Rico where his American parents, John Bottom Amram and Arlyn Dunetz Jochebed, had gone as missionaries.
Amy Adams, Matt Letscher, Joaquin

Amy Adams -- Born at an American air force base in Italy, raised in Colorado, ex-Mormon.

Rooney Mara -- Catholic football princess of the Rooney (Steelers) and Mara (NY Giants) dynasties

Chris Pratt
 -- Born in Minnesota, and looks it. The phrase "corn-fed" comes to mind.

Olivia Wilde -- Daughter of one of the Cockburn journalists (making her some kind of distant niece of Evelyn Waugh). Her maternal grandfather was president of the San Francisco Golf Club. The USGA holds the U.S Open next door at the Olympic Club because SFGC doesn't want hoi polloi wandering its superb grounds.

Portia Doubleday -- She's probably not Gen. Abner Doubleday's direct descendant, but she looks like she could be.

Spike Jonze
Voice-only actors:

Scarlett Johansson
Kristen Wiig
Bill Hader
Brian Cox
Spike Jonze

In terms of diversity, Chris Pratt has an Asian-American girlfriend who is a lawyer and has a few lines. And there is an Asian waitress who serves Joaquin and Rooney in one scene. The worker at the next desk at BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com is a black lady, but doesn't interact with anybody.

There is one child in the film. She's explained to be the daughter of some friends of Theodore Twombly, who aren't seen in the movie. She's blonde.

The extras in the crowd scenes are heavily Asian (some of the outdoor scenes were shot in Shanghai, some in downtown Los Angeles). Apparently, Asians have pushed Mexicans out of Future LA, which doesn't seem utterly implausible. Overall, though, Larry David's social circle is more diverse than the one in this sci-fi movie.
    

January 14, 2014

Spike Jonze's "Her:" A Two-Hour Put-On?

Professional letter-writer Joaquin Phoenix's unique emotional insights are affirmed
by his manager Chris Pratt at the lovely offices of BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com
From my movie review in Taki's Magazine of the classy little sci-fi film Her, which just won a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay:
But critics’ rapturous responses says more about how adroitly director Spike Jonze pushed their class marker buttons. For example, the normally intelligent Christopher Orr burbled in The Atlantic
Why Her Is the Best Film of the Year: Thoughtful, elegant, and moving, Spike Jonze’s film about a man in love with his operating system is a work of sincere and forceful humanism. 
One reason Her is so much less popular with viewers than with reviewers is because it is set in a future Los Angeles depicted as a serene, benevolent utopia stripped of everything that English majors have traditionally found tawdry about the real LA: swimming pools, movie stars, and fancy cars. Granted, those are the only things that the rest of the world likes about LA, but tasteful writers have always been irritated that Los Angeles was the Dream Destination of the Uncouth.
Thus, critic Liam Lacey explains in the Toronto Globe and Mail
Some things about this Los Angeles of the future are much better than today: Density has replaced sprawl, so everyone lives in high-rises looking out over other high-rises (many of the exteriors were shot in Shanghai), to the thrum of a trancey aural wash of Arcade Fire music. They walk on elevated walkways and ride a subway system and work in rooms in velvety pastels. Poverty and cars seem relics of the past. In Theodore’s underpopulated workplace, everyone is polite and supportive.

See photo above.

By the way, writer-director Spike Jonze is the co-creator of the Jackass franchise, and star Joaquin Phoenix made a hoax documentary about how he was quitting acting to become a rap star.

I don't know if I'm right that Jonze and Phoenix are pulling an expensive prank on the SWPL niche audience by making an intentionally dweeby movie, but Her is an awful lot funnier when viewed from that perspective.

Read the whole thing there.
      

December 15, 2013

Peter O'Toole, RIP

From my review of Stephen Fry's 2004 comedy "Bright Young Things," a fine adaption of Evelyn Waugh's bleak comic novel Vile Bodies:
Nonetheless, the brilliance of Waugh's ear for spoken idioms has made Vile Bodies a steady seller for three quarters of a century. Those conversations help make watching "Bright Young Things" far more satisfying than reading Vile Bodies. Although Fry's ensemble comedy ... is rather slight, no film rendition of a major novelist's work has been this much more fun than the original book since Bogie and Bacall steamed up Hemingway's embarrassing To Have and Have Not
For example, Peter O'Toole delivers a howlingly funny cameo performance as a passive-aggressive eccentric, one as striking as John Gielgud's similar role as Jeremy Iron's slyly mad father in the famous miniseries of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I went home sure that Fry had penned some new jokes because the character is so much funnier than I recalled. Upon checking the novel, however, I found that Mr. O'Toole, being a much better reader of dialogue than I am, had only drawn out hilarity that I'd never noticed.

A surprisingly high proportion of the great actors are great readers.

December 12, 2013

Uh oh, Martin Scorsese took my advice

While reading about Martin Scorsese's upcoming movie The Wolf of Wall Street (opening Christmas) with Leonardo DiCaprio playing convicted stock swindler Jordan Belfort, I keep wondering, "Didn't I already see this movie?"

Yes. The 2000 movie Boiler Room was also based on Belfort's pump and dump business. In fact, I blogged a quick review of the movie in 2009 in response to the subprime crash:
So, I rented the 2000 movie. It's well worth seeing, as are so many movies that give you an inside view of some masculine institution.
A movie about the U.S. Marines, for instance, doesn't have to be terribly good to still be entertaining. There's just so much lore the screenwriter can crib. For example, there was a spat over "Jarhead," about a Marine in the First Gulf War, because the author of another memoir about that war pointed out that that a speech a colonel gives welcoming the Marines to the war zone was lifted nearly word for word from his book. Veteran screenwriter William Broyles ("Apollo 13") replied that that, sure, it's the same speech, but it's also the same speech Broyles heard from his colonel when he arrived in Vietnam in 1965. Marines don't let a good speech go to waste.
Similarly, it's fitting that the real life subprime peddlers at Ameriquest all watched "Boiler Room" because the crooked stockbrokers in "Boiler Room" all watch "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Wall Street." They get together in the evening in one broker's giant empty house and watch "Wall Street" on the big TV and see who can do Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko lines best.
High pressure salesmen watch movies about high pressure salesmen for pointers. The rest of us could use a refresher in the games they are playing on us. The chief reminder, of course, is that they persuade men to make dumb outlays of money by challenging their manhood.
"Boiler Room" has lots of great lines, although it's a little clunky overall. This is a very young writer-director's first movie (Ben Younger was 27 when it was released) and it shows. 
The casting is a little off. I wonder if somebody told Ben Younger that for his lead, the conflicted college dropout who can't decide whether he wants the money or his soul back, he should get, "You know, what's-his-name, that young guy, the pale one with the really Italian-sounding name," but instead of getting Leonard DiCaprio, he got Giovanni Ribisi instead. (Of course, there are a lot of movies that could have gone from half empty to half full just by DiCaprio in the title role.) 
Ribisi's quite good in the selling scenes, but he never sold me on the idea that he should be a Hollywood leading man -- he's too toad-like and his complexion resembles the singer's in My Bloody Valentine. 
Ben Affleck has the Alec Baldwin in "Glengarry Glen Ross" role as the sales manager who gives motivational speeches. (Here's the Youtube clip of the "group job interview" -- language NSFW.) Affleck is a guy who has shown some talent as a director and screenwriter, and has had enough work done that he looks like a leading man, but he's not really quite good enough of an actor. He's fine here giving motivational soliloquies, but there's fifty guys who could have done them even better. 

On second thought, that might be a little harsh. It's just that in general, you don't want to get into a head to head acting competition with Alec Baldwin.
Vin Diesel plays the one senior broker who is not a total jerk. I like Diesel, and I think he's a rather good actor when he's not talking (his control of his facial muscles is surprisingly delicate). But Diesel has some kind of speech impediment. I'm not sure exactly what it is -- some times it's a lisp, some times something else. But "Boiler Room" is the wrong movie for him: way too talky. 
Here's a Youtube clip of him reeling in a client where his charisma is locked in uneasy conflict with his speech impediment. (The really odd thing about Vin Diesel is how much his facial expressions resemble those of Jerry Seinfeld.) 
With DiCaprio starring, Martin Scorsese directing, and an extra $100,000 of script doctoring, "Boiler Room" would be one helluva movie.

So I left myself an out there -- if Wolf of Wall Street isn't good, it's because they didn't spend quite enough on script doctoring.

November 19, 2013

"Nebraska:" Bruce Dern, Alexander Payne, and Bob Nelson

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
Will Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s modest masterpiece starring 77-year-old Bruce Dern as a taciturn ex-mechanic who stares like a senile prairie dog, somehow edge out frontrunner 12 Years a Slave for the Best Picture Oscar? 
If it does, we’ll never hear the end of it. How often since Obama’s reelection have we been reminded that it’s long past time for stale pale males to exit the stage for the more vibrant? 
Yet, annoyingly, old white guys keep doing things that can’t be overlooked.

Read the whole thing there.

Also, eight seconds of Bruce Dern screaming at Jane Fonda.

November 18, 2013

The black market in films


At year end, organs of responsible cultural opinion devote much attention to the question of whether Hollywood has spent the year oppressing or empowering African-Americans. Yet, the movies actually made and watched by African-Americans themselves seldom get mentioned in these thinkpieces. So, it's worth stopping to notice what African-Americans will pay to see.

Although “Thor” hung on to the No. 1 spot at the box office this weekend, the big story was a stellar opening for “The Best Man Holiday,” which trounced all expectations to debut with a studio-estimated $30.6-million.

From Box Office Mojo on the opening weekend performance of TBMH, a sequel to the popular The Best Man from 14 years ago:
According to Universal's exit polling, an overwhelming portion of the audience was African American (87 percent). The audience also skewed older (63 percent above 35 years of age) and female (75 percent). They awarded the movie a rare "A+" CinemaScore, which suggests word-of-mouth will be strong. At this point, it seems safe to assume that The Best Man Holiday will earn at least $80 million by the end of its run.

Judging from the trailer above, The Best Man Holiday  is not terribly different in setting from, say, Whit Stillman's Metropolitan: bourgeois friends gather in Manhattan for the end-of-year social whirl. (I suspect that the characters in The Best Man Holiday, however, spend less time than the characters in Metropolitan articulating their forebodings about how many more generations can this go on before the trust funds are dissipated.) 

The upper half of African-American tastes in movies today tend to be pretty similar to the mass market's during the Depression: they like to watch rich black people. I like black bourgeois movies myself.

For example, last year's hugely profitable buppie hit, Think Like a Man, made $91 million domestically off a $12 million budget. Buppie movies make very little overseas, but they can be made for a moderate budget ($17 million for TBMH), so the profit potential is solid.

But, they generate minimal buzz among whites. From the Los Angeles Times last year:
After “Think Like a Man” opened at No. 1, one studio president decided not to mention the film during the studio’s Monday morning production meeting, curious to see how long it would take to surface as a topic of conversation. 
Fifteen minutes into the meeting, no one had mentioned the film. When the studio boss finally brought it up, asking who had seen it over the weekend, the room was silent. None of the all-white staff had bothered to go see it. 

By the way, The Best Man series is written and directed by Malcolm D. Lee, who is said to be Spike Lee's more commercial cousin, although I can find no pictures of them in the same frame together, perhaps because at over 6'3", Malcolm must be much more than a foot taller than Spike.

November 12, 2013

"12 Years a Slave"

Brad Pitt drops by 12 Years a Slave
after a barnraising on the Witness set
From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
New Movie, Same Old Skin Game

12 Years a Slave—a biopic about Solomon Northup, a black fiddler born in New York who somehow wound up a slave in Louisiana from 1841 until the law rescued him in 1853—is the nearly universally acclaimed frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar. 
Yet it’s built upon a fourth-rate screenplay that might have embarrassed Horatio Alger. Screenwriter John Ridley’s imitation Victorian dialogue is depressingly bad, reminiscent of the sub-Shakespearean lines John Wayne had to deliver as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror
12 Years a Slave is hailed by critics as a long-awaited breakthrough that finally dares to mention the subject of slavery after decades of the entertainment industry being controlled by the South. Yet as cinema encyclopedist Leonard Maltin notes: "12 Years A Slave is a remake."  ...
You can watch Gordon Parks' 1984 version, Solomon Northup's Odyssey, online for $2.99. 
The remake has more whippings, though. 
The message behind the ongoing enshrinement of the rather amateurish 12 Years a Slave is that the cultural whippings of white folk for the sins of their great-great-great-great-grandfathers will continue until morale improves.

Read the whole thing there.

By the way, here's the lobby card from the 1971 movie that has unexpectedly turned out to be one of the major influences upon this decade's Oscar contenders:

Any resemblances between Skin Game, starring James Garner and Louis Gossett Jr. as itinerant rapscallions in the South in 1858, and Django Unchained are not coincidental. Any coincidences between Skin Game and 12 Years a Slave are ironic.

September 25, 2013

School Daze, Stomp the Yard, Good Hair

From the AP:
SCHOOLS CRITICIZED FOR BANS ON DREADLOCKS, AFROS 
BY LEANNE ITALIE

"Why are you so sad?" a TV reporter asked the little girl with a bright pink bow in her hair. 
"Because they didn't like my dreads," she sobbed, wiping her tears. "I think that they should let me have my dreads." 
With those words, second-grader Tiana Parker of Tulsa, Okla., found herself, at age 7, at the center of decades of debate over standards of black beauty, cultural pride and freedom of expression. 
It was no isolated incident at the predominantly black Deborah Brown Community School, which in the face of outrage in late August apologized and rescinded language banning dreadlocks, Afros, mohawks and other "faddish" hairstyles it had called unacceptable and potential health hazards. 
A few weeks earlier, another charter school, the Horizon Science Academy in Lorain, Ohio, sent a draft policy home to parents that proposed a ban on "Afro-puffs and small twisted braids." It, too, quickly apologized and withdrew the wording. 
But at historically black Hampton University in Hampton, Va., the dean of the business school has defended and left in place a 12-year-old prohibition on dreadlocks and cornrows for male students in a leadership seminar for MBA candidates, saying the look is not businesslike.

There's an interesting radical v. bourgeois division at all-black colleges like Hampton, which can be seen in Spike Lee's 1988 movie School Daze about his experiences at Morehouse. (Spike's a 3rd generation Morehouse man). Some students go to black colleges to live out the black radical dream (e.g., Spike), others to be as bourgeois as they wanna be without feeling like they are Acting White (there's an aspect of that in Spike, too). The movie Stomp the Yard, about an inner city black kid who gets a scholarship to an expensive black college where he learns to appreciate middle class norms, is one of the few approving portraits of fraternity life to appear in movies in recent decades.

As for black hair styles, I'd point out the male v. female division. Most cultures in the world, other than, say, Masai and Rastafarian, endorse longer hair on women than on men. I read back in the 1990s that white women's hair will grow, on average, 12 inches longer than white men's hair before falling out, which makes long hair a sex-linked trait. (I haven't seen that since, so don't take it on faith. Anybody know for sure?) Among blacks, however, hair grows so short overall that the sex difference (if it exists) is small in an absolute sense. 

So, black women have substantial problems with their hair competing in integrated countries with longer haired women for men. This leads to African-American women spending a huge amount of money and time on their hair (see Chris Rock's documentary Good Hair, and above is the "Good & Bad Hair" musical number from School Daze.)

So, I sympathize with black women who try to come up with a look for their hair that doesn't involve scary chemicals (and especially for those who try to keep weird hair-straightening potions away from their little girls' scalps).

In contrast, black men may have fewer hair issues than white men. Michael Jordan started going bald so he shaved his head. Perhaps he would have been even more popular with a full head of hair, but, if I recall correctly, he was fairly popular as is. So, it seems perfectly reasonable for Hampton's B-School to enforce professional-looking hair norms for their male students. I mean if Harvard Business School polices how its students dress on Halloween in the name of feminism, why can't Hampton Business School police how its male students wear their hair in the name of getting a job?