There’s a conservative streak in American liberalism, just as there’s a progressive streak in conservatism—-the fast fading, old-fashioned brand, not the Right Wing reactionaryism that calls itself conservative—-that’s brought out by every debate over paving paradise and putting up a parking lot. In such cases, the conservative argument points out the progressive nature of development, how it will bring in not just money, but jobs and opportunity, how it will increase the tax base, giving localities the means to improve their schools and their infrastructure. Meanwhile, you get liberals arguing for leaving things as they are or even putting them back to the way they were in order to protect and preserve the community and communitarian values, to keep out temptations and pressures to live lives devoted to getting and spending and acquiring wasteful and unnecessary toys and gizmos. You even find liberals championing that supposedly most conservative of values, self-reliance—-after all, people can become as dependent upon corporate-created wealth as upon government aid. Second Run Movie Review: Promised Land. Matt Damon cant go home again ☀
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I was not a big fan of The Tree of Life. I have always thought that Malick works best as historian, whether through the Dylan-esque chronicle of a late 50s crime spree, Depression-era naturalism, WW II battlefields, or the sweeping movement of Pocahontas from The New World. His films bank on transcendence as something encountered in history and its events; the materiality of our experience. As his muse Heidegger said, “To dwell is to garden.” Malick’s sacramental gardening has always taken the shape of creative historiography.
To be fair, even The Tree of Life has a slight measure of this sense of location — memoir folded into visual reflections on the cosmic context of remembering. But the great scandal of To the Wonder is its utter sense of the present. It takes place in a generic version of now, rather than in a mythic version of the past. But then there is also Ben Affleck lumbering across most of his frames doing that thing with his jaw to indicate terse, conflicted male. Olga Kurylenko bounds through rapid changes of camera position and exquisitely framed patches of light and shadow similar to the dance of Q’orianka Kilcher through the dappled forests of The New World. But here the rustle of grass and reed are traded for the track of sunlight across freshly laid carpet and the swish of blinds and bedsheets. Rachel McAdams in Carhartts is ripe for a Zizekian double-take.
The Great Lebowski Re-evaluation gradually took root among the youth counterculture after the goddamn plane crashed into the building—exactly 10 years after the Dude buys a carton of half-and-half in the opening scene of the movie… Oliver Benjamin ☀
Over the last 15 years, the Coen brothers’ oddball noir-Western-surrealist comedy about one man’s complicated quest to get his rug replaced after a mistaken hitman pees on it hasn’t just become a cult classic—it’s become something closer to an actual cult. Not only has it launched at least one known, priest-ordaining faith; it’s also become a field of study for religion and mythology scholars, too. In other words, some seek meaning in the movie, while others find meaning, and meaningful fellowship, because of it.
Though Charlie Wilson’s War starring Tom Hanks was “just a movie,” it cemented in the American mind a false narrative which has been repeatedly cited by policymakers, including Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, as justification for continuing a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
Similarly, Argo confirms to many average Americans the unreasonableness of Iranians, who are portrayed as both evil and inept. If negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program collapse, this propaganda image of the Iranians could help tilt the balance of U.S. public opinion toward war.
By contrast, movies on the CIA’s 1953 coup or the Republican interference in Carter’s hostage negotiations in 1980 would demonstrate that there are two or more sides to every story. Granted, such movies would encounter powerful forces of resistance. The moviemakers might be accused of “blaming America first” and the Academy might shy away from handing out Oscars in the face of controversy.
But either of the bookend stories around Argo would get to more important truths than did this year’s Best Picture. The two stories would show how America has manipulated politics abroad and how that practice has come home to roost.
For almost forty years now, Americans have had to live with the creeping Southernization of our culture. The Confederate flags on the pickup trucks right next to the American flags. The country music playing at the car mechanic’s shop. The pundits gushing about the folksy charm of Southern good-ole-boys like George W. Bush. The trumpeting of the South’s superior economic model. The ambivalent portrayals of Confederate history. The notion that only a Southerner can win the Presidency. The very real domination of Congress by a heavily Southern Republican caucus. Etc. etc. But in the last few years, a real pushback has begun. Obama’s election is obviously part of it, but I think it’s much more result than cause. The rest of white America is starting to realize (or to remember) that in many ways, the South don’t really represent them that much. Django Unchained: A white revenge fantasy ☀
If you’ve been to the movies in the last half century, you know the White Savior genre well. It’s the catalogue of films that features white people singlehandedly rescuing people of color from their plight. These storylines insinuate that people of color have no ability to rescue themselves. This both makes white audiences feel good about themselves by portraying them as benevolent messiahs (rather than hegemonic conquerors), and also depicts people of color as helpless weaklings – all while wrapping such tripe in the cinematic argot of liberation.
This, of course, is the backbone of Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” As historian Kate Masur recently wrote in the New York Times, it is yet another “movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States” but one in which “African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them.” The result, she writes, is a film that ignores actual events of the 19th century, “helps perpetuate the notion that African Americans have offered little of substance to their own liberation” and thus reinforces “the outdated assumption that white men are the primary movers of history and the main sources of social progress.”
Coming from Spielberg, this isn’t particularly surprising. He is, after all, the creator of one of the most unselfconsciously archetypal White Savior movies of all time: “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” In that cartoonish adventure, a whip-wielding white archaeologist drops from the sky into India and quickly becomes the only person able to save destitute peasants from the rein of a tyrannical human-sacrificing cult.
In China, however, Cloud Atlas is on top of the Mainland and Hong Kong box offices, beating out other Hollywood and Chinese blockbusters and charming critics nationwide.
The October release date for Cloud Atlas in the United States was sandwiched between the big-budget summer and award season winter. Though ticket sales during this period are generally expected to yield low numbers, Cloud Atlas’s barely 27 million USD lifetime domestic gross was surprising. Further releases oversea with emphasis on the Russian market, where it performed unexpectedly well, brought its worldwide box office up to 85 million USD to date and though an improvement, the heavyset budget and marketing costs are holding the film’s profits below water.
Its physicality is why Django Unchained is so necessary. If you watch Lincoln, you might imagine that American slavery was a matter of debate and policy, that it was a matter of law, and that all white people needed to do was correct their intellectual error of categorizing personas as property. For a film about the bloodiest period in America history, Lincoln is oddly bloodless. Early on in the film, the president gives a long speech in which he explains the difference between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, as if that were what mattered. The only really graphic scene is a battlefield filled with the (mostly white) bodies of Union soldiers. Their suffering is the film’s focus, the glorious dead who paid a price so that American law could be corrected. There’s a scene in which Senator Thaddeus Stevens gets into bed with his African-American housekeeper; this is the closest we come to the sexual reality of life in a time of racism and racial mixing. And even then the message is: Look, black and white people can live together just like regular white people. Lincoln is confronted by an African-American woman near the film’s end, and he really has nothing to say to her. He admits, “I don’t know your people.”
Django Unchained knows that America’s relationship to slavery was not merely through legal institutions; it was a physical reaction to black flesh — a potently horrific mixture of abjection fused with desire. That physical sensation is what distinguishes American racism from the racism of Europe or the British Empire, where the hatred of black people was (and still is) rooted in a fundamentally intellectual contempt inscribed in law and custom. The slavemaster monster of Django Unchained, Calvin Candie, lives entirely surrounded by black people; Schultz and Django first meet him in “The Cleopatra Club.” He is much more intimate with his slaves than with his sister or his white neighbors. His head servant, a terrifying Uncle Tom played by Samuel Jackson, does not hesitate to insult him in front of visitors, but the owner of Candieland finds these antics charming; he treats his old servant like a well-loved but ornery family dog. He sleeps with black whores. His primary recreation is watching “Mandingo fighters” kill each other. Certainly, he can offer intellectual justifications for why white people are masters and black people are slaves — he goes into a disquisition on phrenology, and he accepts the existence of free black people because they are protected by the same law that protects his own property interest. But the law is only a cover that allows his sick and violent passion free rein and expression. Candie’s life is consumed by his relationship to black flesh, which he either wants to screw, pet, or tear to shreds — sometimes all three at once.
And what the film tries to do is thread together evidence that many people know about – the increasing struggle of the middle classes to just get by, the way that the top 1% of society has unshackled itself from the rest of us and has seen its income increase exponentially, and the ever-increasing cost of the traditional avenues of improvement, such as higher education – and weave it into a cohesive and convincing narrative. It is, in some respects, a theory of everything. Reich charts the three decades of increasing median income after the second world war, a period he calls “the great prosperity” and then examines what happened in the late 1970s to put an end to it. The economy didn’t falter. It kept on growing. But wages didn’t.
The figures that Reich supplies are simply gobsmacking. In 1978, the typical male US worker was making $48,000 a year (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile the average person in the top 1% was making $390, 000. By 2010, the median wage had plummeted to $33,000, but at the top it had nearly trebled, to $1,100,000.
“Something happened in the late 1970s,” we hear him tell his Berkeley class. And much of the rest of the film is working out what happened.
Some inequality is inevitable, he says. Even desirable. It’s what makes capitalism tick. But at what point does it become a problem? When the middle classes (in its American sense of the 25% above and below the median wage) have so little of the economic pie that it affects not just their lives but the economy as a whole.
It’s so awful and atrocious. Unlike the way Steve and I really dealt with each other. I didn’t want to have much to do with that movie. Steve Wozniak ☀
Les Misérables” defeats irony by not allowing the distance it requires. If you’re looking right down the throats of the characters, there is no space between them and you; their perspective is your perspective; their emotions are your emotions; you can’t frame what you are literally inside of. Moreover, the effect — and it is an effect even if its intention is to trade effect for immediacy — is enhanced by the fact that the faces you are pushed up against fill the screen; there is no dimension to the side of them or behind them; it is all very big and very flat, without depth. The camera almost never pulls back, and when it does so, it is only for an instant. ‘Les Misérables’ and Irony ☀
How does one play the global face of evil? I wasn’t sure at first if I could actually pull it off. I didn’t have an agent looking after me or a team around me to help prepare for the part. I hadn’t seen the script. And I was definitely not “Bin Laden skinny.”
My journey to becoming Bin Laden started in March of last year, when I got a call from a casting director in London, who said she had been trying to get hold of me for a week — apparently the phone number I had registered on the Spotlight database, an online resource used to contact actors, was an old one. I apologized. She asked if I could come in the next day. I said yes, what for? She said she couldn’t tell me.
The next week, I was offered the part of the world’s most notorious terrorist. My first reaction was an expletive that cannot be printed here. I am a 29-year-old native Londoner, a moderate Sikh with a drama degree from Royal Holloway, University of London — a pretty far cry from a 54-year-old Saudi multimillionaire-turned-terrorist who had been on the lam for nearly a decade after murdering some 3,000 people. I guess I do look a bit like Bin Laden — I am 6 feet 4 inches tall, about what he was. I have brown skin and a prominent nose, but it’s not as though anyone has ever stopped me in the street and shouted, “Hey, aren’t you Bin Laden?” (And I think I have a better smile — not as creepy. At least my girlfriend says so.)
What you notice right away is that the filmmaker has no sense of American history or geography. One moment you’re in the Sonoran Desert, the next moment the Montana Rockies. Huh? Of course the line on Tarantino by film savants is that his weltanschauung is a gleeful composition of movie history pastiche. That is, his ideas come only from other movies (or television), not from the so-called real world and the record of goings-on there. So in this case they are derived from previous movies made by earlier auteurs who got the details wrong about mid-19th century life. That may be so, but the difference is that the earlier movie directors, however mis-educated or befuddled by convention, might have cared about the milieu they attempted to represent. Tarantino is content to be wildly wrong about just about everything. Or rather, the details don’t matter as long as the fantasy satisfies portions of the brain where ideas are not processed. What interests me about all this is how perfectly Tarantino’s mental universe reflects the current situation in our nation, in particular the infantile disregard for the facts of life, the self-referential inanity of our culture, and the complete absence of authenticity in anything. What disturbed me about the movie was the sense that Tarantino has set the table for race war, like a jolly arsonist playing with matches and gasoline in a foreclosed house. James Howard Kunstler ☀
As a whole, Prometheus evokes a lot more than it explores (spoilers ahead). It’s a movie of what-ifs, interested in posing “mind-blowing” questions but not investigating the implications. What if the creature from Alien was created by another extra-terrestrial race? And what if humans and this race had met before? Indeed, what if they made us? The movie keeps suggesting such possibilities, without ever letting any one of them settle into a narrative of forward momentum.
This is, ultimately, a movie of multiplying MacGuffins, with God being one. There’s nothing heretical about that (He’s been called far worse), but for those of us genuinely interested in science and faith – and deep-think sci-fi that really digs into both - Prometheus is a shallow exercise.
A GNT creation ©2007–2013
