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

May 24, 2013

Mike Judge interviewed by Alex Jones about "Idiocracy"

Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis & Butt-head, Office Space, King of the Hill, and Idiocracy, has been interviewed a fair amount over the years, but mostly by media hive workers who haven't noticed that he's not a nice liberal like they and everybody they know are. He's a moderately famous creative artist and social critic, so he has to hold the same views as us, right? (For example, here's a substantial profile in the New York Times from 2011 that's completely clueless about his politics.)

The most obviously interesting question about Judge's career is: what the heck happened to the "release" of Idiocracy in 2006? Since we all know that conspiracies, by definition, don't exist, the decision by a shadowy group of Fox insiders to deepsix Idiocracy for unexplained reasons is just one of those things that happen. Why do you want to know more? What are you, some kind of conspiracy theorist?

So, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones turns out to be the first interviewer I've seen who exhibits much sustained curiosity about Idiocracy.

Judge treads carefully, but he's a little more forthcoming than normal.

This is not to get expectations up too high if you haven't seen Idiocracy. It's kind of choppy and a little short, but comedies don't have to be exquisitely made to be memorable [Caddyshack, anyone?]. Idiocracy compares quite well to the other interesting comedy that came out that fall of 2006, Sacha Baron-Cohen's Borat. In complete contrast to Idiocracy, Borat was marketed brilliantly and appealed to various deep-rooted prejudices of taste-makers, so it made a bundle at the box-office. In the long run, Idiocracy seems like the more profound portrait of the Bush Era (although Ramzan Kadyrov and the vibrant Chechen-American refugee immigrants are doing their best to revive the relevance of Borat -- although Kadyrov is more inspired by Baron-Cohen's underrated The Dictator. The Chechen proxy dictator is currently pranking his Instagram followers with the central plot element of Baron-Cohen's 2012 film about a dictator and his double.)

I don't like watching interview videos because they are a slow way to ingest information relative to reading. So, to save you the time, here are highlights from the video "Mike Judge: The Movie They Couldn't Kill," Alex Jones' 36 minute interview with Mike Judge.

Dale Gribble
At about 7:00 in, Judge says that King of the Hill conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble is based in part on Alex Jones.

15:45 Other than The Simpsons, the animated comedies that have really taken off -- South Park, Family Guy, Ren & Stimpy -- are ones where voices are done by the writer-artists rather than by actors.

17:45 Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" persuaded him to get into the guns -- especially Moore's argument about how there is a lower crime rate in Canada with "the same people." Judge leaves unstated why he found Moore's argument about Canada having the "same people" so unconvincing, implying that you ought to be able to figure out Moore's fallacy yourself, but he returns to emphasizing that he's thought a lot about the statistics of crime. "I took graduate probability and statistics courses."

18:40: He got blamed for Beavis & Butt-head causing crime in youth, but, he half-jokes, homicide has been declining since Beavis & Butthead came on the air in 1993.  He then presents his hand-drawn (but non-joking) table of crime rates in 1992 v. 2011 at 20:05.

21:15 Judge imitates Jones' appearance on Piers Morgan's show.

22:15 IRS targeting of conservatives "is going to make me listen to some more Alex Jones."

The last eight minutes from 27:40 onward are devoted to Idiocracy -- Judge started thinking about evolution and the disappearance of predators during the making of the Beavis & Butt-head Movie in the 1990s. Then, in 2001, was in line with his daughters at Disney's Teacups ride, when two women with strollers in the line behind him got into an altercation. Is this what Walt Disney wanted or expected? Then, he got thinking about the movie "2001" and how 2001 hadn't turned out to be everything pristine and advanced, but was instead the Jerry Springer Show and Wal-marts. So just take that chart from then to now and see where it would go in the future.

He owed Fox a second movie after Office Space. He didn't think anyone would make it. Gave the first draft script to Fox. Not much response. Then Luke Wilson wanted to do it, so Judge rewrote it for Wilson. 

Idiocracy's first corporate joke came after Judge drove past a tanning salon whose sign said "Exotic Tan for Men." But that's just low-rent, so it would be funnier if in the future handjob prostitution had spread upscale to Starbucks. He didn't expect Fox's legal department to approve it, but they came up with the suggestion that it would be less legally problematic if instead of just picking on Starbucks, the movie picked on a bunch of powerful corporations. 

(Sounds like my kind of legal department!)

The President of America addresses
the House of Representin'
"At some point I'm sure somebody flipped out, but I was shielded from all that."

This is pretty interesting because one common theory is that Idiocracy's satire of corporations is what sank it with Fox. Yet, Judge's comment that Fox's legal department came up with the idea of skewering numerous famous companies seem to lessen the likelihood of that idea. 

"They didn't really give it a release. There was a contractual obligation that they had to put it in 12 theaters and that's all they did." Judge talks about how Fox did so little to market the release that they didn't bother communicating the title to MovieFone, so if you called up trying to find when and where it was showing, the recording referred to "Untitled Mike Judge Project."

The Governor of California addresses
the State Senate
"What they told me was that it didn't test very well, which a lot of movies don't. Office Space didn't. ... We got 70% very good or excellent, which is a horrible score." He says that weird movies often get a polite "That was ... good" reaction.

He suggests that maybe Fox's horrible release turned out to be a brilliant strategy to get attention for the movie.

At 35:20, the screen then shows Reihan Salam's September 29, 2006 Slate article "The Movie Hollywood Doesn't Want You to See." I would estimate about 97% likelihood that Reihan read my September 3, 2006 iSteve posting "Mike Judge's "Idiocracy:" The movie the Fox studio doesn't want you to see." Also, my review in the October 6, 2006 issue of The American Conservative came out around maybe September 22. And back on March 26, 2006, I had written a profile of Judge's politics, including a preview of the upcoming Idiocracy for VDARE.

I go into this tedious detail because I like to imagine that my one accomplishment as a movie critic is getting the ball rolling on saving Idiocracy from oblivion by getting the younger Washington pundits talking about it.

35:30 Judge expresses pride that the word "Idiocracy" has become part of the language. Commenting on the movie's rise in fame and prestige, Judge says, "Maybe since it came out in 2006 everybody's gotten stupider?"

April 23, 2013

Sailer in Taki's: "Chechens Coming Here to Roost"

My new column in Taki's is a rather ambitious attempt to pull together a number of themes raised over the last week.
Over the last few days, as I watched both the homicidal antics of the Boston Bomb Brothers and the characteristically competent Tom Cruise science-fiction movie Oblivion, I was reminded that one of the least expected developments of my lifetime has been how the vast majority of the world’s population is no longer expected or even encouraged to be liberal. At least they are not asked to be “liberal” in the mid-1960s Star Trek sense, meaning obeying a universalist ethic that values all individuals equally. 
Instead, the world’s six billion or so nonwhites are now told to be as conservative as possible. I’m using “conservative” in the sense of being naturally ethnocentric, of having loyalties emanating in a concentric pattern, radiating outward from self and nuclear family to extended family, clan, tribe, nation, religion, or race. 
... Consider the immense marketing campaign for amnesty that was proceeding so smoothly until those Chechen immigrants started acting so Checheny. Almost the entire Establishment has been inciting racialism among Mexican-American voters. The press has been demanding that Mexicans get angry if any American dares stand up for laws against illegal immigration. Why? Because keeping Mexican nationals out of America is an insult to their race. 
The notion that a Republican politician could stand up and ask Mexican-American voters to demonstrate their loyalty to America by voting against illegal immigration because it is, on the whole, bad for their fellow American citizens is simply unthinkable today. Asking Mexicans to think in sophisticated legal terms such as “citizen” instead of crude biological terms such as “race” has become too advanced for today’s advanced thinkers. 
The Tsarnaev Brothers lived in the absolute heart of liberal intellectual America—in Cambridge, Massachusetts, less than two miles from both Harvard and MIT. Therefore, you can be confident that they were never instructed that they owe anything to the country that let them in.

Additional topics brought to bear on this thesis include Macaulay, Tolstoy, Oblivion, and Untouchables. Read the whole thing there.

April 3, 2013

1.625 Cheers for "Admission"

The basic problem with "Admission" is that Tina Fey isn't funny in her role as a staffer at Princeton's Admissions department. Otherwise, it's a pretty intelligent movie on an interesting subject. I rather liked it, but, be forewarned, it's not very funny.

Now, for reasons that are no doubt explicated at some length in the roughly 13,000 articles I haven't read all the way through to the end about why the career of Tina Fey is of epochal importance for the social evolution of the world, many seem to feel they, personally, have a lot invested in her. Me, I just like her when she's funny and don't otherwise think about her.

So, the opening of "Admission" requires Fey to do a lot of voice-over explaining the elite college admissions process from the inside, the overly polished kids, the insufferably pushy parents, the cliches about "Just be yourself," and so forth. 

A lot of decent movies founder on this kind of introductory expository voice-over, which is hard to get right in tone. Blade Runner is a notorious instance. For example, if you ever want to see a fine Bonfire of the Vanities-lite satirical movie about Miami, check out Big Trouble based on Dave Barry's novel, which has a much better selected cast than the movie version of Bonfire. But, Tim Allen airballs a few jokes in the opening voiceover, and a lot of viewers wrote it off then and there without noticing that Big Trouble keeps getting better and better.

It's particularly hard to get the tone right in Admission because the natural emotional response to elite college admissions would be, oh, say, Dr. Strangelove-style satire. But, "Admission" won't let the system have it with both barrels. When it does engage in satire, however, I was impressed with the accuracy (the SAT scores and GPAs of the applicants are exactly right), and with some subtle subversiveness. 

For example, Admission revolves on the fate of a diamond-in-the-rough applicant with a 1.5 GPA after three years of public high school in a hick town in New Hampshire where his parents run a mini-mart. But, the first teacher (played by Paul Rudd) smart enough to understand what Jeremiah's talking about realizes his student is an autodidact, so he has him sign up for 8 Advanced Placement tests, even though he's never taken an AP course. Jeremiah gets 5s on all 8. (I'm a big fan of AP tests being incorporated more into the application process than they are at present, since if kids are going to test prep like crazy, they might as well test prep on real subjects like chemistry and European history.)

Jeremiah then takes the SAT and scores a 2360 out 2400.

And Jeremiah is white and working class. In fact, Paul Rudd does some sleuthing and decides that his young prodigy must be the child Tina Fey secretly gave up for adoption when they were at Dartmouth together. (Not a spoiler because it's in the trailer. And I don't care much about the 21st Century spoiler obsession, which makes writing intelligently about movies even harder than it was before.)

Tina is unmarried and nominally childless, having lived with the insufferable head of the Princeton English Department (Michael Sheen, who usually plays Tony Blair) for ten years, until he dumps her for the department's new Virginia Woolf superstar. 

The point of being an admissions "officer" is that although you don't get paid all that much, you have huge amounts of travel to do, and the faculty don't respect you, you have Power. You get to reward kids who remind you of yourself. (As long, of course, as they are budding young sociopaths who are willing to sacrifice all shreds of dignity -- "Write an application essay about my mother's excruciating death from cancer? Why that's a great idea!" -- to fit into and get ahead in the System.)

For example, the aging preppie admissions staffer really wants to push the legacy applicant who is captain of the high school sailing team (how many schools have sailing teams?) but "doesn't test well." (A braver movie would have also shown the gay staffer pushing all the gay boy applicants.)

But, having spent 16 years in this job and having her usual self-esteem issues, the thrill of boosting Mini-Mes who seem like you but are really Other People's Children has lost its thrill. 

Tina's character can't stand all the manipulative parents she has to fend off, but "Admission" raises the question of just how far she would go to get her own kid (assuming Jeremiah really is her baby) into Princeton? 

Pretty damn far, it turns out. 

Periodically, I read articles about how we don't have to worry about affirmative action in the long run because Real Soon Now, black parents will all decide that their kids getting special breaks just isn't fair, so they will demand the end of racial quotas. Yeah, right ...

Other clever aspects: the Paul Rudd character is a globe-trotting do-gooder who moves every few years to some new Third World poverty zone to teach the locals how to dig ditches or whatever NGOs do. Rudd's character hates being thought boring. Along the way, he has adopted an Ugandan boy who is now in 6th grade at the New England alternative school where Rudd teaches.

The little black boy is the movie's wise Numinous Negro, but he's used with a twist. Rudd expects him to be a whiz at schoolwork, but he's not. Why isn't he getting As in Spanish? After all, they've been back home in New England for two years and it's time to head off to the Amazonian jungle of Ecuador to heal the world. But Rudd's adopted son is sick of traveling, sick of the Third World, and likes playing bridge with Rudd's rich Republican mother. The Ugandan kid wants Rudd to marry Fey because Fey is boring and he's sick of Rudd wanting to be interesting all the time.

Director Paul Weitz (who co-directed with his brother Chris Weitz the definitive Hugh Grant performance in the similar About a Boy in 2002) is the son of John Weitz, fashion designer (my mother sent me of to college with a least a dozen pairs of elegant John Weitz socks), race car driver, novelist, historian, and spy, a definite candidate for Most Interesting Man in the World, mid-Century version. I suspect that all of Paul and Chris Weitz's movies are, in some way, about their father.

February 20, 2013

Waugh and Wilder: "Sunset Boulevard's" forgotten roots in an Evelyn Waugh novel

My new column in Taki's Magazine:
Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, with Gloria Swanson as a silent-screen legend plotting a comeback and William Holden as her toy boy, remains one of the most famous movies ever. Yet Sunset Boulevard’s origins in an Evelyn Waugh novel have been forgotten. This cultural amnesia is curious since the reactionary novelist and the refugee writer-director are still two of the more talked-about figures of the mid-century.

Read the whole thing there.

This isn't hugely topical, but it seems like a fairly interesting historical link that has been lost.

February 12, 2013

How movies and videogames are more accurate about recent history than the newspapers

There has been a lot of talk in the news media about how Christopher Dorner's rampage is more or less payback for the bad old days of racism in the LAPD, as exemplified by Dorner's complaints about Rodney King and the Rampart Scandal. 

Rafael Perez
The Rampart Scandal was a huge whoop-tee-doo in the late 1990s that's a good example of how even Hollywood can be less prone to throwing all the facts into the Narrative Blender than the news media. The Los Angeles Times was much celebrated for epic reporting on racism in the Rampart Division, but mostly they just covered up that the four central very bad cops in Rampart were all diversity hires. Indeed, the Big Bad Four had intriguing connections of some sort to the legendary murders going on among famous gangsta rappers.

You might think that exploring the ties between rogue cops and some of the most notorious murders of the 1990s (Biggie and Tupac) would be a good way to sell newspapers, but selling newspapers has long been a lower priority than Shaping the Narrative.

The key figure in Rampart was Puerto Rico-born Rafael Perez, who got himself a short sentence by spilling (or concocting) the beans on dozens of other cops for minor stuff. This suited the LAT's agenda, even though it turned out in court to not amount to a hill of beans.

Oddly, enough, screenwriters saw through the L.A. Times' bias and did a better job of conveying the essence of the story in movies like Training Day, for which Denzel Washington won an Oscar as a bad cop. From my 2001 review of Training Day:
Further, how common are "gangsta cops" in reality? I called one of the LAPD's most prominent critics, "police misconduct" lawyer Winston Kevin McKesson, a protégé of superstar attorney Johnnie Cochran. He remarked that the plot "seems a bit over the top." McKesson said he's sued many cops for excessive force, but of those he's sued, none were "a complete crook." 
McKesson, though, has defended one cop who might indeed fit that description: Rafael Perez. When his theft of a million dollars worth of cocaine from the police evidence locker was finally uncovered, Perez, to win a reduced sentence, incriminated 70 fellow officers in his elite anti-gang unit. Yet, Perez ended up admitting that a large fraction of the worst abuses at Rampart - such as an attempted murder - were his own work, making him look less like a whistleblower and more like Rampart's criminal kingpin. 
Even though Ayer wrote the first draft of his script before the Rampart scandal broke, McKesson noted that there are now "striking similarities" between the character portrayed by Washington and his client Perez. For example, both are black and bilingual, even though McKesson estimates that only three or four out of about 1,000 black LAPD officers can speak Spanish.

Frank Tenpenny
Similarly, the Best Picture winner Crash was an oblique reference to Perez's running amok when assigned to Rampart's C.R.A.S.H. anti-gang program and instead using his badge to become a gangster. Thus, the scene where a white cop shoots a black undercover cop dead and the politicians offer Don Cheadle a promotion, but then Cheadle opens the trunk of the dead cop's car and finds $300,000 in cash -- that happened. (It may be connected, somehow or other, to the deaths of rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie. Screenwriters have been fascinated and frightened by this murky chain of events for 15 years.)

Finally, the lead villain in the videogame Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Frank Tenpenny, is modeled on this line of cultural inheritance.

So, why can't journalists fictionalize no more than screenwriters?

February 9, 2013

Dorner = Rambo's "First Blood?"

I've only seen bits and pieces of the 1982 Sylvester Stallone movie "First Blood," in which troubled but heroic Medal of Honor winner John Rambo outsmarts corrupt cops tracking him in the cold mountains, but I'll bet Christopher Dorner has watched the whole thing.

He probably didn't watch The King of Comedy all the way through, however.

As a big movie fan, Dorner has probably moved beyond DVDs to downloading and streaming. But just in case he hasn't, I'd advise the cops to find his DVD player, push the Eject button, and see what he watched right before setting off. It might give them some clues.

February 1, 2013

Women and film editing

The percentage of women nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing has declined from 21% in the 1930s to 15% during the last ten years.

This low percentage of women editors is a rather puzzling pattern.

I mean, is film heavy? (That's actually not a totally stupid question: a full reel of traditional 35 mm film is quite heavy, but I have no idea whether apprentice editors are expected to do any heavy lifting of complete reels, the way apprentice cinematographers have to climb ladders carrying heavy lights.)

Film editing is a highly respected if not well understood craft. Oscar voters assume that good movies are good in sizable degree because they are well edited:
Nominations for this award are closely correlated with the Academy Award for Best Picture. Since 1981, every film selected as Best Picture has also been nominated for the Film Editing Oscar, and about two thirds of the Best Picture winners have also won for Film Editing.

On the other hand, film editors are almost never singled out for achievement in an otherwise mediocre film, the way actors often are.

The two most honored editors currently working are Spielberg's editor Michael Kahn (eight nominations, three Oscars) and Scorsese's editor Thelma Schoonmaker (seven and three).

Schoonmaker's career is of interest. She edited a Scorsese student project in the 1960s and earned an Oscar nomination for editing the concert film Woodstock way back in 1970. But she couldn't get into the editor's union for a decade so she was blocked from working on Hollywood features throughout the 1970s. She finally got her union card (she thinks Al Pacino pulled some strings for her), and her first feature with Scorsese was 1980's Raging Bull, which would be high on anybody's list of superbly edited films.

She's edited only one movie since for anybody other than Scorsese, but has edited all of Scorsese's pictures. This may explain something about why Scorsese, who looked in the late 1970s to be headed toward the usual career of a director who burns brightly for just a few years, has made so many comebacks.

IMDB has some quotes from Schoonmaker on the gender question:
I think the women have a particular ability to work with strong directors. They can collaborate. Maybe there's less of an ego battle. 
I'm not a person who believes in the great difference between women and men as editors. But I do think that quality is key. We're very good at organizing and discipline and patience, and patience is 50 per cent of editing. You have to keep banging away at something until you get it to work. I think women are maybe better at that. 
People expect artists to be too normal, I think. I've been around enough of them now to see that they're very extraordinary human beings who behave differently than ordinary human beings. If they weren't as sensitive as they are they wouldn't be great artists. They are not the same as us. People should just learn to accept that.

Schoonmaker has long reminded me of Vera Nabokov, the classic example of the old, extremely unfashionable saying, "Behind every great man is a great woman." Vera put up with Vladimir's eccentricities, organized every aspect of his life, accompanied him to all of his lectures at Cornell, sitting in the first row to keep him on top of things, and even drove the nondriver on all of his butterfly-collecting expeditions across the West. Throughout decades of obscurity and economic deprivation, she remained convinced that her husband was a genius. Suddenly, in 1958 when he was 59-years-old, the whole world came to agree with her.

So, reading up on Schoonmaker on Wikipedia, I was struck by:
Schoonmaker was interested in a career in international diplomacy and began attending Cornell University in 1957, where she studied political science and the Russian language. (She attended classes taught by Vladimir Nabokov.)

In other words, Schoonmaker saw Vera Nabokov at every class.

P.S.  Another director-editor team was Quentin Tarantino and Sally Menke, who died hiking in Griffith Park on a 113 degree day in 2010. Thus, as Uncouth Reflections noted, Django Unchained was the first Tarantino movie not edited by Menke. Surely, she would have talked Tarantino out of including in the final release The Worst Scene Ever: you know, the long episode toward the end where Quentin shows up in Mississippi in 1858 talking in an inexplicable Australian accent, and looking so physically decayed he epitomizes Orwell's line that "At 50, everyone has the face he deserves." (Or in QT's case, at 49.)

January 31, 2013

Oscar nominations by gender - Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling sounds like the least masculine of all the categories, but men have earned about 72% of the nominations over the last ten years.

It turns out that the nominations tend to go less to romantic comedies where the makeup and hairstyling challenge is to make the 41-year-old leading lady look 29 and more to sci-fi, horror, and fantasy movies that employ nerdier boy genius inventor types.

The category wasn't regularized until 1981 following the impressive prosthetic work by Christopher Tucker for David Lynch's The Elephant Man. Before then, it had only been given out twice on a special recognition basis. The current movie Argo celebrates John Chambers (played by John Goodman) who won a special Oscar for Planet of the Apes. Chambers also had a long working relationship with CIA agent Tony Mendez conjuring up disguises for American spies. (Ironically, the dark, unobtrusive master-of-disguise Mendez is played, in something of a non-triumph of movie non-magic, by tall golden boy Ben Affleck.)

The most honored make-up artist is Rick Baker with seven Oscars, starting with An American Werewolf in London and including Men in Black. The target demographic for his creations are, roughly, 12-year-old boys.

Oscar nominations by gender - Costume

There have long been quiet but persistent complaints of discrimination against women fashion designers in the NY-Paris-Milan world of haute couture. This 2005 NYT article lays out the evidence than an Old Boys Club of male designers discriminates against women. 

We can test whether women are as discriminated against in the parallel but separate world of designing clothes for movies by looking at Wikipedia's lists of Oscar nominees. Best Costume Design nominations generally go for work on period films or fantasy films aimed at girls. For example, the current nominees are three 19th Century period films -- Lincoln, Anna Karenina, and Les Miserables versus two versions of Snow White: Mirror, Mirror (a film with a wild Eurasian aesthetic, centered on the Punjab) and Snow White and the Huntsman.

So, Costume Design Nominations aren't an apples-to-apples direct test of the sense of where fashion is headed next fall, like haute couture designers attempt to do. Instead, Hollywood honorees are designed for accurate and exquisite reproductions of past fashions, usually with some attempt to make them accessible to current tastes. Either that or some kind of timeless fairy tale fantasy.

Thus, Hollywood's top costume designers are conservative restorationists or fantasists, rather than on the fashion forward cutting edge like the Old Boys Club of New York design. And, to be a name in high fashion requires relentless self-promotion.

Still, these Oscar nominations allow a sort of oranges and tangerines comparison.

The Best Costume Design award was invented in 1948, and Edith Head quickly emerged as the most honored designer, garnering 35 nominations and 8 Oscars. (The character Edna Mode in Pixar's The Incredibles reminds many of Edith Head.) Before Head's rise to dominance in the later 1940s, the most famous Hollywood designers tended to be male, such as Adrian, who designed Dorothy's ruby red slippers. "Gowns by Adrian" was a prominent credit in many 1930s movies. Wikipedia explains that Head revolutionized movie dress design by actually listening to the leading ladies.
Head was known for her low-key working style and, unlike many of her male contemporaries, usually consulted extensively with the female stars with whom she worked. As a result she was a favorite among many of the leading female stars of the 1940s and '50s such as Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Sophia Loren, Barbara Stanwyck, Shirley MacLaine, Anne Baxter, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Natalie Wood. In fact, Head was frequently "loaned out" by Paramount to other studios at the request of their female stars.

Over the last ten years, women have earned 80% of nominations.

So, designing clothes for Hollywood is much less male-dominated than designing clothes for the runway.

January 29, 2013

The Definitive "Argo" Takedown

There seems to be talk that Ben Affleck's movie about hostages in Iran in 1979-80, Argo, will win the Best Picture Oscar (even though Ben didn't get a Best Director nod). 

I thought Argo was fine as a satisfactory example of the Married Couple's Date Movie, which has become rare. But as Best Picture? 

Noah Millman supplies the definitive Argo takedown.

January 10, 2013

188 Oscar nominations: Any Mexican-Americans finally honored?

This morning 188 individual Academy Award nominations were announced. Oscar nominees run the gamut from just about the most famous people in the world to a fair number of Southern California technicians whom you've never heard of but who have, by the norm of the average American worker, really good jobs. Thus, today's names range from Daniel Day-Lewis as Best Actor nominee for Lincoln down to 15 sound mixers.

As a long-time student of both the Vibrant New Face of America and of dogs that don't bark, I've been fascinated by how few of the vast number of Mexican-Americans* ever get nominated for Oscars and how nobody ever notices. 

* I'm defining Mexican-Americans as somebody of sizable Mexican ancestry who was either born here or at least spent at least some of his youth in the U.S. Thus, Anthony Quinn -- born in Mexico, but raised mostly in L.A. -- counts. Guillermo del Toro -- raised in Mexico as the son of an automobile company CEO, only coming to America as a trained professional from the Mexican entertainment industry -- doesn't count. He's Mexican, not Mexican-American.

The last Mexican-American nominated in any of the glamor categories such as acting, screenwriting, or cinematography (and that's stretching the word "glamor" pretty far) was Edward James Olmos for 1988's Stand and Deliver.

But, what about the technical categories?

Looking through today's endless list, I see a few Spanish surnames, but they turn out to be born in Barcelona or Chile. 

Finally, I get to one possibility: Jose Antonio Garcia, one of the three sound mixers on "Argo." Garcia has been working on Hollywood productions since being a boom operator on "Tales from the Crypt" in 1980s. No information is available on where he was born or raised. (There are a lot of other Jose Garcias out there, which makes searching difficult.)

He occasionally works on movies by elite Mexico City directors, such as "Y Tu Mama Tambien," suggesting he speaks Spanish and has a work permit for Mexico. In La Opinion, the Los Angeles Spanish language newspaper, the headline reads (translated): "Mexican Jose Antonio Garcia competes for Oscar." So, I'd give about fifty-fifty odds that he grew up in Mexico, and isn't a Mexican-American. But, he could be Mexican-American, too.

Anyway, the point is that this pattern helps explain the popularity of Mexican immigration among American elites: Having a vast number of Mexican-Americans around lowers wages at the low end but doesn't produce any noticeable competition for elites or their kids at the high end.

Disparate impact? What's that?

January 9, 2013

More on "Zero Dark Thirty"

A few more reflections on Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden:

- Were secrets leaked to the filmmakers? Maybe, but I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know. Bigelow is an artist who tends toward abstraction over informativeness, so, as with most of her soldier/CIA/submariner films (unlike, say, Tom Clancy soldier/CIA/submariner movies), Thirty isn’t broadly enlightening. 

- Since the first half hour of the film consists of a CIA Ph.D. abusing an Al-Qaeda accountant while Jessica Chastain’s heroine looks on, does this mean that torture is effective? Beats me. It’s naïve to assume that any element of this movie is unspun. Every insider who talked to Boal had an agenda. 

- The film's casting of actors to play SEAL Team Six appears to be intentionally confusing. Almost all the commandos are depicted as beefy, bearded, and visually interchangeable. The publicity shot above might be deliberately taunting in its indistinctiveness. The two main commando characters are played by Chris Pratt (the generic-looking big American white guy who played the first baseman in Moneyball) and another actor who looks like Chris Pratt. Any would-be terrorist who sees Thirty Dark Zero looking for clues as to the individual identities of the Americans who killed bin Laden will likely emerge more confused than when he bought his ticket.

As I mention in my review, I suspect the filmmakers might be playing a similarly-intentioned but opposite trick in casting the memorable-looking redhead Jessica Chastain as CIA analyst "Maya" (called "Jen" in ex-SEAL Mark Bissonette's book).

January 8, 2013

January 3, 2013

In defense of Quentin Tarantino

You hear endlessly about how the movie director is obsessed with low-budget 1970s junk films, but his default cinematographic style is old-fashioned classic, with a big budget Golden Age of Hollywood sheen. Many of his films look like Victor Fleming directed them, with David O. Selznick sending a flurry of memos to make sure the set looks perfect. 

Tarantino would have been a fine director of Technicolor films, which required a heavy three-strip camera and bright lighting. Tarantino likes to find the single best spot to place his camera and then leave it there. He's not exceptionally good at either moving the camera or at choreographing movement in front of the camera, but his camera is always planted pointing in just the right direction. 

No shaky-cam for Quentin. Not much grainy video, either. He interpolates a number of cheesy-looking segments, but his default look is grand.

He likes bright sunshine and rich colors. He's one of the few contemporary directors who doesn't believe that dark themes require dark palettes.

He likes nice scenery for the sake of nice scenery. In Texas, his German hero announces: We'll go north to the mountains for the winter and then we'll go to Mississippi after the snow melts (which he repeats three times because everything is repeated in the movie). So, then you see the cowboys picturesquely wandering around on horseback in six feet of snow with the sun rising on the Grand Tetons. 

Why not go to Mississippi in the winter and Wyoming after the snow melts? Wouldn't that be easier on the horses?

Because it looks nicer that way:

Like a late 1930s director, Tarantino figures the canyon country northwest of L.A. makes a reasonable substitute for just about anywhere that snow isn't required. Thus, the incredibly bad scene late in Django Unchained with Quentin, looking awful, doing a cameo as an idiot with -- for no apparent reason -- an Australian accent. It's supposed to be set in the mountains of Mississippi, but L.A. area viewers will be debating whether that's Malibu Canyon or Placerita Canyon standing in for America's least canyonish state. In either canyon, you can be sure of bright sunshine most days other than late spring, and, in the final analysis, isn't that what truly matters?

Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown was the turning point in his career. It made a nice profit on its modest budget, and was well regarded, especially by those who hadn't much liked Pulp Fiction. He then turned his back, however, on making mature movies.

I have a vague theory that his lack of affection for Jackie Brown has to do with it being unspectacular looking. Tarantino did a good job of capturing what the South Bay area of L.A. looks like in spring -- soft and unthreatening, with some marine layer haze muting the sunshine, and a lot of fairly pleasant but mundane sprawl to look at. There's a running joke in the movie that the scary behavior of the characters isn't in accord with the mild-looking setting. The movie opens with a song about the mean streets of Harlem, but much of the action takes place in the Del Amo Fashion Center mall in Torrance.

But, Tarantino is not in business to make realistic-looking movies, he's in business to make movie-looking movies.

Encyclopedist David Thomson remarks somewhere that movie stills have more power to colonize the imagination than actual movie footage because the mind remembers still images better than moving images. Tarantino is one of the great creators of glamorous pictures, even if he's not all that at moving pictures.

"Django Unchained"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is, among much else during its leisurely 165-minute running time, an adolescent male revenge fantasy about an omnipotent mass shooter wreaking carnage upon dozens of victims. I suspect the film would have appealed profoundly to the late Adam Lanza. 
You might think that this wouldn’t be the best time for a quasi-comic daydream/bloodbath about a deadeye gunman who always fires first and is immune to the thousands of bullets shot at him. But the recent unpleasantness in Sandy Hook has gone almost unmentioned in the critical hosannas greeting Django…because, you see, the invulnerable hero is a black gunman shooting bad (i.e., Southern) white people. 
It’s not much more complicated than that.

Read the whole thing there.

Career Arcs: Woody Allen

Woody Allen movies don't make for quite as apples to apples comparisons as Bertie and Jeeves novels or Aubrey and Maturin novels, since some are intentionally serious and unappealing. But they are still worth plotting out inflation-adjusted domestic box office over time (data from BoxOfficeMojo). 

The Gross column is in millions of today's dollars. The Versus Mean column compares box office to Woody's mean box office (a little under $30 million current dollars). Thus, Annie Hall's $133 million in today' dollars is 350% more than (or 4.5 times) his $30 million mean. 

Title Release  Age  Gross V. Mean Rank
Everything You Always … 1972  36 82 178 4
Sleeper 1973  37 81 172 5
Love and Death 1975  39 76 157 6
Annie Hall 1977  41 133 350 1
Interiors 1978  42 35 17 9
Manhattan 1979  43 124 317 2
Stardust Memories 1980  44 30 1 10
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy 1982  46 24 (19) 18
Zelig 1983  47 29 (2) 12
Broadway Danny Rose 1984  48 25 (17) 17
The Purple Rose of Cairo 1985  49 23 (22) 19
Hannah and Her Sisters 1986  50 84 181 3
Radio Days 1987  51 29 (1) 11
September 1987  51 1 (97) 39
Another Woman 1988  52 3 (90) 37
Crimes and Misdemeanors 1989  53 36 21 8
Alice 1990  54 14 (54) 25
Shadows and Fog 1992  56 5 (83) 33
Husbands and Wives 1992  56 20 (33) 21
Manhattan Murder Mystery 1993  57 21 (28) 20
Bullets Over Broadway 1994  58 25 (16) 16
Mighty Aphrodite 1995  59 12 (61) 27
Everyone Says I Love You 1996  60 17 (44) 24
Deconstructing Harry 1997  61 18 (40) 22
Celebrity 1998  62 8 (72) 29
Sweet and Lowdown 1999  63 6 (79) 31
Small Time Crooks 2000  64 25 (16) 15
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion 2001  65 10 (65) 28
Hollywood Ending 2002  66 6 (78) 30
Anything Else 2003  67 4 (86) 35
Melinda and Melinda 2005  69 5 (84) 34
Match Point 2005  69 28 (7) 13
Scoop 2006  70 13 (58) 26
Cassandra's Dream 2008  72 1 (96) 38
Vicky Cristina Barcelona 2008  72 25 (15) 14
Whatever Works 2009  73 6 (81) 32
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger 2010  74 3 (89) 36
Midnight in Paris 2011  75 55 86 7
To Rome with Love 2012  76 17 (44) 23

We are missing box office data for his early comedies like Take the Money and Run.

Before those, he was a joke-writing prodigy making thousands of dollars per week as a teenager in the mid-1950s. It took him longer to develop as a stand-up comic, then as a movie star and director, getting started in movies just before turning 30.

His comedies in the first half of the 1970s like Sleeper did consistently well, then he peaked with Annie Hall and Manhattan in the late 1970s when he was in his early 40s.

True fact: as originally filmed, Annie Hall was a two hour and 20 minute murder mystery. Allen's editor, Ralph Rosenblum, convinced him to dump the entire crime plot (which was resurrected years later in Manhattan Murder Mystery), add some voice-over, and voila, he had a short romantic comedy. Although Annie Hall won the Oscar for Best Picture, Rosenblum wasn't even nominated for Best Editing. (Granted, Star Wars won, and deserved to win, Best Editing, but still ...)

Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986 was a big peak, followed by Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1991. Then he made 21 straight movies that failed to reach his mean, which has to be some kind of record.

My impression is that Allen doesn't run over budget, so his financial backers know that although they will probably lose money, their losses will be limited. So, they are more patrons than investors, but they also have a chance of making a profit. So, funding a Woody Allen movie is like buying a ticket in a charity raffle. And, Allen's prestige and popularity with Oscar voters means that big movie stars will work in his films cheap, so his patrons get extra vicarious glamor from dropping a quite finite amount of money on his projects.

And then, just when it seemed completely hopeless, at age 75 he made 2011's very entertaining Midnight in Paris.

December 26, 2012

Quentin Tarantino's next movie: "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion National Park"

Coming in the Summer of 2016: 

In late 2008, following the horrifying defeat of gay marriage at the polls in California, fiances Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Madsen (the ear-cutting Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs) uncover the secret plot by which Utah Mormons control the California media. In response, Jackson-Madsen assemble a team of gay lovers denied their sacred right to marry (couples hoping to head to the altar include Harvey Keitel-Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis-Robert Forster, Steve Buscemi-Bo Svenson, Tim Roth-Eli Roth, Kurt Russell-Mickey Rourke, and Danny Trejo-Rutger Hauer). In a 75-minute finale that has audiences cheering wildly, the AR-15-toting heroes gun down each of the 360 members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir execution-style, pausing only for long, insightful discussions about the old Kung Fu TV show.

December 8, 2012

NYT: Is Hollywood finally ending its War on Women by sending women to war?

In December of each year, the New York Times film critics, like film critics everywhere, write Deep Think pieces about what patterns in the movies released in the current year tell us about Trends in the Big Issues. The annual answer ought to be: Virtually nothing, because what gets released in a single year is a close to a random sample of projects that had been in the works for years and happened to come to fruition now. But that never stops the critics from pontificating on 2012: The Meaning of It All.

Not surprisingly, they are still using Obama Campaign talking points.

A.O Scott starts out by recounting that some nobody in some nowheresville (Buffalo?) complained about Snow White and the Huntsman being yet another Butt-Kicking Babe movie in which a 105 pound starlet whomps on bad guys in hand-to-hand combat.
The picture’s apparent reversal of gender norms — this Snow White wears armor, wields a sword and leads an army into battle — struck Parlato (who does not seem to have seen it) as emblematic of “a Hollywood agenda of glorifying degenerate power women and promoting as natural the weakling, hyena-like men, cum eunuchs.”

Neither the NYT scribe nor the nobody in Buffalo seem to notice that the main audience for Butt-Kicking Babe movies are nerdier guys who wish women would be interested in the kind of stuff they are interested in: weapons, fighting, quests, and so forth.
A Hollywood agenda of glorifying powerful women — now that is news. Granting that Parlato’s rant seemed to emanate from the same zone of the culture-war id that undid a few Republican Senate candidacies this year, you might still be inclined to wonder if, in sensing a shift in the portrayal of women, he was onto something — or for that matter to hope that he might have been.

In reality, Snow White and the Huntsman was least interesting for its Butt-Kicking Babe aspect -- pothead Kristen Stewart's under-energized Snow White has been dropped from any sequel, with Chris Hemsworth's Huntsman more likely to carry. And it was most interesting for Charlize Theron's Wicked Witch, because evil women characters, such as that Golden Age of Hollywood mainstay, the femme fatale, have largely disappeared due to a combination of feminism and movies being aimed at younger, more innocent males who are more idealistic about girls.
After all, the contrary complaint — that Hollywood is a swamp of testosterone, turning out entertainment that marginalizes or condescends to women when it does not ignore them entirely — has been around much longer, and has, to say the least, a much stronger grounding in reality. Have things really changed that much?

Movies are more masculine than advertising-funded media because they are largely paid for by ticket-buyers, and, on average, males pay for movie tickets more than females. There are plenty of roles for actresses of a certain age solving murder mysteries on TV, because advertisers love the women's market, because women spend more than men, because men turn more of their income over to women than vice-versa.
There is a smattering of evidence to support the impression that they have, because 2012 was, all in all, a pretty good year for movies and also a pretty good year for female heroism. In addition to “Snow White and the Huntsman,” there was “Brave,” whose flame-haired heroine, Merida, combined Disney-princess pluck with Pixar’s visual ingenuity; “The Hunger Games,” which drew on young-adult literature to find, in the resourceful person of Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence), a new archetype of survivalist girl power; ...And we should not forget the culmination of the “Twilight” saga, speaking of Kristen Stewart, whose Bella Swan, grown from a sulky, indecisive teenager into a fiercely protective vampire mother, fought alongside her in-laws against the supernatural forces of evil. Forget about Team Jacob and Team Edward: it was Team Renesmee that triumphed in the end. 
Of course it would be silly to proclaim, on the basis of a handful of movies, that some kind of grand role reversal has taken place, that cultural power has shifted toward women, or even that 2012 is yet another “year of the woman,” a wishful phrase that surfaces periodically in movies as it does in politics.

Let me focus on Twilight, Brave, and The Hunger Games, because those are coming from farther right in the cultural landscape than normally makes it into movies. Twilight is a woozy Mormon fantasy, Brave comes from Pixar (which long ago set itself up in Northern California to stay out of the Hollywood cultural orbit), and The Hunger Games novels were written by a woman trying to channel her military historian father. 

The big innovation in Brave and The Hunger Games in the Butt-Kicking Babe genre is that the heroine does not fight with her fists or feet, a gun, or a sword, but with the more culturally traditional bow. Of course, this is an ancient trope, going back to Diana/Artemis. Archery was extremely fashionable among mid-Victorian maidens because it gave them an excuse to show off their legs in Robin Hood-style tunics and tights. (One contemporary complaint was that because archery was so fashionable, girls wouldn't wear their glasses while shooting, and thus many couldn't even see the target or perhaps even the bale of hay the target was pinned to.)

October 24, 2012

"Argo"

Ben Affleck has made himself into a brand name over the last half decade for directing well-made suspense movies for intelligent grown-ups: Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and now Argo. They're not quite Drop Everything and Hire a Sitter movies, but more like When You Get a Chance, You and Your Spouse Will Enjoy This Movie movies. Thus, Argo didn't have a huge opening weekend, but it had an excellent second weekend, down only 15%, indicating fine word of mouth.

Argo is based on the once well-known 1980 "Canadian Caper" in which Canadian diplomats in Iran sheltered and help to extricate six American diplomats who had avoided being rounded up with the rest of the embassy hostages. The CIA side of the extrication was kept secret until 1997, and the movie focuses on the American machinations, somewhat unfairly to the Canadians.

And, most of the last half hour of exciting plot twists didn't actually occur, but they were all plausible enough that they well could have happened.

Also, unsurprisingly, Affleck strives to make the Democratic Administration of the time look as good as possible.

It's interesting to speculate how good Affleck-directed movies would be if he didn't make movies in order to cast himself or his brother Casey as the lead. For example, Affleck has himself play Tony Mendez, who was a CIA expert on disguises and forgery. Mendez called up an old friend, the Hollywood makeup artist who won an Oscar for Planet of the Apes, and they cooked up a fake sci-fi movie production to get Mendez into Iran as a Canadian movie producer scouting for exotic locations. 

Mendez entitled his memoirs Master of Disguise. Affleck is, by the standards of well-known actors, not very good at blending in. He's tall and he had a lot of work done to look like a TV movie of the week version of a Hollywood leading man the way Mitt Romney looks like somebody you'd cast to play the Republican candidate in a movie about the Secret Service trying to stop terrorists from blowing up a Presidential debate.

So, in Argo, Affleck dyes his hair black and grows a huge beard to cover most of his square-jawed, symmetrical face.

Apparently, the real Mendez has outstanding conman skills (he's an expert forger as well as make-up artist), which ought to make him an interesting character. But Affleck's chief trait as an actor is earnestness, so nothing much gets developed along those lines.

One amusing bit of history that was distorted in order to build tension was the secret six's reaction to Mendez arriving with elaborate cover stories about how each was a movie person scouting locations. In Argo, Affleck has to win them over to trust his crazy scheme enough to risk their lives on it. Tense arguments ensue. 

In reality, the six thought it was the most fun idea they'd ever heard. Without prompting from Mendez, they immediately started scrounging up more fashionable clothes and blowdrying their hair to look more Hollywood. When he returned the next day, they excitedly showed off their new looks.

A lot of crime and suspense movies these days are elaborate metaphors for movie-making: e.g., Inception, or The Town's ultra-competent bankrobbers are really a movie technical crew. (Real criminals tend to be screw-ups.) The Canadian Caper was an instance of this movie trope slopping over into real life, and, if anything, Argo underplays this.

October 16, 2012

Post-Apocalypto: Mel Gibson in "Get the Gringo"

From my new movie review in Taki's Magazine:
Among literary critics, a controversy has been raging tepidly over what purpose reviewing might hold in this age of crowdsourcing. Why rely upon one fallible pundit’s thumbs up or thumbs down when you can access the wisdom of crowds by averaging many ratings, whether elite or mass? 
As a 21st-century movie reviewer, I’ve always found this catcall hard to dismiss, which is why I try to only write about movies where I can explain something more interesting than whether I liked it or not. While I take a backseat to no one in admiration of my own taste, I have to admit that the aggregation sites are reasonably reliable. 
Consider Mel Gibson’s new crime movie Get the Gringo, which debuted in Israeli theaters back in March but is finally out now on Netflix and DVD here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.