jane dark's sugarhigh!

the golden compass

Softporn from the standpoint of steampunk.

The shift from Pullman's book to Weitz's film, in terms of its central conflict, is akin to making a movie of the French Revolution in which the crux is that Marie Antoinette is mean to kids. As much as we understand that children's books especially do put children in harm's way, as a narrative trope this has now become as powerfully counter-political as, say, the writings of Ayn Rand were in their day.

i am legend

A perplexing film, at once relentless in its linear drive and all over the place. For the first 75 minutes, it's just Will Smith's Robert Neville, the last good man, versus the denuded and albinofied zombies; it's all very kill whitey, though the film seems obdurately unaware of this blazingly obvious fact. Also never mentioned: in the background of Neville's Washington Square townhouse are masterpieces presumptively boosted from MoMA (Henri Rousseau, a couple Van Goghs, etc; he seems to favor Post-Impressionists). The film shares the trope of institutionally marked art rescued by individuals in civilization's collapse with V for Vendetta and Children of Men; do we smell an ideologeme on the rise?

These seemingly incidental elements perhaps make more sense against the film's closure, as the cure is delivered to the lone community of survivors, in a walled enclave in Vermont. For all the fortifications, inside the gates is idealized small-town America. No museums here, no furreign paintings or any other cosmopolitan corruptions. It is, let us say, contamination-free. Goodness has survived after all, and in a dizzying inversion, it's white as an unsullied snowdrift and just as rustic, coded into the town with its autumnal New England crispness, its white-painted wooden church steeple rising salvifically in the exit shot. It could be any day in the history of virtue, except it's not — as the overvoice informs us, it is September, 2012. In fact, it is September 10th as the cure is delivered, the last day of the era of contamination...

two days in paris

Guiding cliché: a version of everyone's fucked up and that's finally okay they can still successfully pair off.

Compare favorably to Waitress: also directed by female actor who appears in film, equally clichéd account of human psychology — this case just happens to be a somewhat less noxious banality.

Compare unfavorably to "One Night in Bangkok."

[ps: modernism/modernity discussion left unfinished: once art stars, displace by machines, turned to chess. Now chess stars, displaced by machines, turn to politics.]

no country for old men

A pretty good movie concerning how the world in which men change their shirts only when shot is slowly being put out of business by the suburbs.

the mist

From the moment the first tentacle comes winding out of the mist, everything's lost. The film, especially in its attempt (mildly updated from the original story) to be an allegory (albeit a confused one), makes a lot more sense if we never see the actual beasts.

Never mind the standard-issue Irresponsible Government Science Unleashes Cataclysmic Result narrative, which hasn't gained much charge since Godzilla (though still promises some interest, in its increasing incoherence). The main allegory, organized around King's passionate if undeveloped dislike for charismatic demagogues of apocalypse, concerns what horrors humans perpetrate on each other, given certain opportunities. It involves Marcia Gay Harden in a burdensome role as prophetess-harridan. Her early diagnosis of the mist — "it's death" — and her leveraging of inchoate fear toward religious violence would be far more interesting (and resonant) if that fear stayed inchoate, if there remained a rift of possibility that it was in fact nothing.

But the mist turns out to be a mere soup in which monsters bob about; obviously, in a smarter movie the medium would be the message. King's (and Darabont's) failure to grasp this, even in the midst of trying to make an oh-so-adult point about how the scary monsters are the other humans, turns out to be an exact measure of their adolescence.

southland tales

In the words of jds! correspondent Chris Nealon, "Fight Club + Buckaroo Banzai + Moby = Southland Tales ÷ Donnie Darko = 0." Though there is perhaps another equation that would involve Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Majestic...

30 days of night

Josh Hartnett revisits familiar territory in what we assumed must be the sequel to 40 Days and 40 Nights ("I am big. It's the titles that got small"). And it sort of is: our hero has to go a month with blue balls, trying not to get drained by a bunch of bloodsucking lovelies while he gets his head right.

The title also turns out to describe what should be a perfectly interesting conceit for a vampire film: in the Arctic Circle, one of the proven anti-vampire strategies is effectively off the table for a month. One could imagine an alternate approach called Land Without Garlic.

Alas, hoping for any narrative device to unfold interestingly in this film would require, as a precondition, the tiniest sliver of logical sense in the plot. No dice. Well, citizens who attend Hollywood cinema for the plot are sort of fucked anyway; it's like going to the club for the time signatures. The pleasures are elsewhere, and more social.

In this case, the main delight is Danny Huston in the Shannyn Sossamon role. Though too much of a set piece, it's entirely thrilling when he rebuts the supernatural tastes of humans with three slow words. "God?" he says in a curdling voice, pivoting his head unnaturally to take in a panorama of the desolated, frozen town, unable to wrap his serrated throat around Anglo phonemes or concepts. "No god."

At another juncture he does his hair up into a little pompadour. With blood. Seriously, let's see Shannyn Sossamon do that.

american gangster

American Gangster's soundtrack, despite a flirtation with a cred-desperate Jay-Z, is comprised of thick dollops of Seventies soul/funk album tracks real and imagined...until the final scene when Frank Lucas, having served his time, walks out into a world utterly changed. Well, utterly changed in one regard: Public Enemy has appeared on the soundtrack, specifically that song of anthemic skepticism, "Can't Truss It." It's a great song, of course, and the "idea" — the distance between Bobby Womack and Chuck D — is clear enough, and explains why Jay-Z had to be turned down: if the whole movie is hip-hop, that last rhetorical gesture can't happen.

But it's an odd gesture, finally. Lucas walks out into the New York in 1991: the world in which gangsta has just replaced PE's nation rap in a swap as total as it was sudden. Moreover, a gangsta track would have made the actual relevant point: not that times done changed, son (duh!) but that the particularities of Frank Lucas's life of crime had become universalized into a worldview, that the black superman gangster with a naturalized corporate sensibility was now the lifestyle icon par excellance.

Such a move would scarcely have been genius; it's just the minimum to have an account, and its absence utterly exemplary of the film's ceaseless failures of intelligence, its hemorrhaging of meaning. No one is asking for some kind of heavy social theory, even in a film that takes itself so seriously: it's Hollywood. But throwing up 20 seconds of Kool G Rap (if a New Yorker was needed — though a non-New Yorker would have made the universalizing point better) would scarcely have turned the film into a think piece. As it is, the movie is flatly thoughtless, unable to make even the simplest points it has in mind about the big-boxing of the urban dope trade. Perhaps it merely hopes we've all seen The Wire, Dostoyevsky to this film's Leskov.

And so, unable to think, it simply leaves the drama to the conflict between Lucas and cop Richie Roberts, with some vague suggestion that Frank in his grasp of necessity is as different from the mafia as Richie is different from crooked cops — and thus they meet as odd equals. But even this doesn't really play, given that it's staged by Denzel and Russell Crowe, a comparison able to do nothing but embarrass the latter and his comically bad Jersey accent.

michael clayton

With his blocky size, his surfeit of charisma and screen gravitas, Clooney looks like something beyond the mere human, like he has swallowed every leading man in Hollywood and perhaps had Casey Affleck for a palate cleanser. Tilda Swinton continues to look like something beyond human as well, but more in a hire-me-for-a-remake-of-The-Man-Who-Fell-to-Earth kind of way. They slug it out herein for the fate of the little people, the human beings, making this more like, say, Transformers or Rise of the Silver Surfer than most legal thrillers.

cinema quant: the update

37) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
36) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
35) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
34) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
33) Shoot'em Up (Clive Owen not in fact charismatic enough to make shit smell like roses)
32) The Nanny Diaries (Giammati plays exact same role as in Shoot'em Up, seen from other perspective)
31) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
30) No End In Sight (anti-war doc's breakout star, Seth Moulton, turns out only to want a better war)
29) Stardust (nice swordfight-played-as-videogame scene)
28) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
27) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
26) I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (It's funny, see, cuz they're not gay!)
25) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
24) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
23) The Brave One (a satisfying if false portrait of a Radiohead fan)
22) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
21) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
20) Ratatouille (sugarhigh!'s mother notes this is Singin' In The Rain)
19) We Own the Night (have you noticed that all Joaquin Phoenix's characters have the same scar?)
18) Resident Evil: Extinction (the cinematic ontology of helicopters remains to be written)
17) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
16) The Kingdom ("Let us do our job....We're good at this." Yeah, in what universe? Meanwhile good parts are all Blackhawk Down)
15) Superbad (Not-so-superbadinage; this is what became of Tarantino's New American chitchat)
14) Sunshine (Soderbergh's Solaris plus 28 Days Later divided by Nietzsche)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

elsewhere in the sugarhigh! universe

[Darkness at Noon: photo taken moments before 9/11 reading was called on account of weather; shirt made by East Bay graphics guru Jack Morgan]

A spin-off of sugarhigh! film reviews, the quarterly column "Marx & Coca-Cola" debuts at Film Quarterly (free download; click on "Content: Sample Article").

shoot'em up

Opens to the strains of Nirvana's "Breed," and closes to the Crüe's "Kickstart My Heart." One might note that this historical reversal is suggestive of the film's retrogressive tendencies; better to point out that these two songs are by far the best thing the film has going for it.

superbad

Though the immediate point of contact is earlier-summer Apatovian comedy Knocked Up, an equally apt comparison might be Grindhouse. That film too basked in a period sensibility that fell just short of being an actual period piece, the surface punctured by evidences of the contemporary that read as something between anachronisms and telltales.

The effect is less pointed in Superbad, less self-conscious, but still ubiquitous — from the post-Lovebug font of the posters to the costuming to the period-specific contrived naiveté about the sexual codes of teens, the film floats in a hazy late-Seventies/early-Eighties cloud of reference. The vast majority of the songs are from some shifting past era: the Bar-Kays, Van Halen, Sergio Mendes, Curtis Mayfield, Black Sabbath and Jean Knight, you get the idea. Music, say, from the youth of the two cops who shepherd at least one of the kids through the narrative.

The film was written by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, reputedly when they were in high school themselves. The two leads, played by Michael Cera and Jonah Hill, may be meant to represent Goldberg and Rogen in the time of the script's writing, in the past — but their true proxies are of course the two cops, who while remaining hopelessly juvenile, now have the mysterious and comical authority to make things work out for the poor kids. They are Goldberg and Rogen in the present; one is even played by Rogen.

It's exactly this confusion which generates the period uncertainty, and the puzzlement each time the film's present comes pricking through in some slang, or a song by The Rapture or The Coup: the film simply doesn't know what time period it is depicting. This makes it oddly discomfiting, and is surely the most interesting thing about it. The only efficient way to resolve the confusion would be to understand the two cops as the leads, despite their lesser roles, and the unfolding story to be a fantasy about high school as it survives in the pot-basted recollections of the film's two side players, with contemporary kids recruited to walk through the main parts, baffled by their own clothing and ignorance.

One might note that movies are like dreams: every part in them is the makers in some facet. But this would be to fall into the trap of understanding movies as having singular makers, as being expressions of singular consciousnesses. Hollywood films are directed by money — and money, it would seem, wishes to be uncertain about what time it is, what high school is like, what kids are like. This is perhaps a predictable development: Mean Girls, after all, signaled that Hollywood had completely and flawlessly comprehended its own codes for the teen comedy, and could deploy them in perfectly serried rank — a development which inevitably presages the wistful decline of any genre. No wonder Superbad would helplessly float back toward an era of otherwise-inexplicable salience which just happens to be the cradle of the now-dying genre (emerging, arguably, between 1979's Rock'n'Roll HIgh School and 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High). Lodging its fantasy in the moment of birth, Superbad arrives as a marker of the genre's death. And so another form of the youth movie will have to be developed in the lab of summer releases, and it is to this task that we can expect to see, are already seeing, the Great Director turn.

stardust

It is surely an act of unfairness to judge graphic novel culture on the basis of a movie, one made from a story that meant to be a novel and was only a graphic novel incidentally.

Still.

One gets the sense that Neil Gaiman's rep as a genius must somehow be a reflection on the subculture that has so elected him. Like the water-cooler boor who becomes the office analyst because he read a Jung book in college, Gaiman seems to have raised himself into the empyrean on the narrow shoulders of Joseph Campbell. Campbell is not a very persuasive starting position in the first place: a sloppy structuralism denuded of whatever force it might have had by spiritualization. Stardust, in film version at least, for all its stylized whimsies, seems like the most mechanical Campbelliana imaginable. There are no characters, only positions, in which squat a rather unfortunate set of actors. The little matrix of the hero narrative has been filled with requisitely "original" figures; it's a movie written entirely in a single page Excel spreadsheet.

To be fair, this may be true of almost every Hollywood movie: that the roles, relations and actions are fixed more remorselessly than in any Russian folktale, and that the pleasures and communications happen in the variations possible within such tight contours (one notes that this account is a mirrorworld of the caricature of Marxian description, wherein the lives of individuals unfold according to the merciless logic of dialectical history, allowed the most limited latitude of action which has an experiential relevance but no determining force on the outcome. Hollywood genre films, one might suggest, are the structure by which this non-determining and intensely limited activity is seen to be nonetheless the entirety of the film's substance, both despite and because of its irrelevance to outcomes).

What grows weary, if not downright aggravating, is when a movie (or graphic novel) wants credit simply for knowing about the structures, varying them scarcely at all — and this, we have been suggesting, is Stardust's calling card. Let's be plain: Joesph Campbell and the like are exactly incisive enough to make dumb people seem more intelligent; it's equally true that they make reasonably intelligent folk seem dumber if they take to parroting them. That Neil Gaiman appears as smarter his cohort...well, this is a verdict of considerable clarity.

This is not to say that the film is entirely without interest. There is something of interest in watching Robert DeNiro go about the grim task of obliterating his own legend, a task that dates at least to Analyze This and has, in contemporary culture, no comparison except perhaps Eddie Vedder (the strikingly unambitious boredom of the last dozen years must be on purpose, right?) By now, DeNiro is merely a poor substitute for other famous and famously stylized character actors in on their own joke (Walken, Hopper, Keitel, etc); at what point will he have effaced his own history enough to return to work?

ratatouille

Wow, Pixar really is the new Hollywood! In the sense that the films are consistently diverting and one must entirely discount the ideological payload and the last fifteen minutes in order not to experience them as exactly the shittiest thing that culture can foist on itself (in the truly insane postlude here, the figure of the intellectual — the critic — ends by confronting his true peasant origins, admitting that intellectual life is a parasitic sham except insofar as it on rare occasion valorizes natural genius sprung from the earth, and then ends by abandoning criticism for the true and authentic peasant life of a tuxedo'd finance entrepreneur).

Up until that moment, we have a different story: the swiftly-becoming-par-for-the-course Brad Bird deal about how true genius sprung from the soil can't be held down, and eventually the world's need for same will trump its need for a confabulated egalité (note to self: is film critique of French Revolution much as Incredibles was critique of cultural revolution?) Bird, perhaps after a thorough reading of Appadurai, seems to believe that the antidote to crass capitalism (the "frozen dinnering" of the deceased great chef's recipes) is, well, uncrass capitalism (see snooty entrepreneur, above).

Which is to say: it doesn't get any more incoherent than this. It's a tangled web.

And on this tangled web, which must be kept in view lest it finally entangle us all, it's a decent few minutes watching a cute animated rat hop about, and seeing how the plot mechanics will be cranked given the particularities of this input. Strictly Mickey Mouse.

sunshine

Sunspotting.

26) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
25) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
24) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
23) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
22) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
21) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
20) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
19) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
18) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
17) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
16) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
15) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
14) Sunshine (Soderbergh's Solaris plus 28 Days Later divided by Nietzsche)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

the bourne ultimatum

...in which Jason Bourne, né David Webb — well-meaning, patriotic, brutally brainwashed into becoming a vacant killing machine — finds himself, late in the movie (the third in a series running since mid-2002, if dates are really needed), asking the lone sympathetic authority figure, Pamela Landy, why she's now helping him.

To which she explains that "this" (black ops, waterboarding, assassinations, etc etc) isn't what she signed off on, initially; now she wants to help him put a stop to it.

Which is to say that Matt Damon plays the American people, as imagined by, oh, The New Republic.. And Joan Allen plays Hillary Clinton as imagined by, oh, Hillary Clinton.

A curiously overrated film; it's not even the summer's most entrancing bit of propaganda, which is all we ever asked for.

25) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
24) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
23) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
22) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
21) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
20) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
19) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
18) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
17) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
16) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
15) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
14) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

ocean's 13

Out at the airport Oedipa, feeling invisible, eavesdropped on a poker game whose steady loser entered each loss neat and conscientious in a little balance-book decorated inside and out with scrawled post horns. "I'm averaging a 99.375 percent return, fellas," he heard him say. The others, strangers, looked at him, some blank, some annoyed. That's averaging it out, over 23 years, he went on, trying to smile. Always just that little percent on the wrong side of breaking even. Twenty-three years. I'll never get ahead of it. Why don't I quit?" Nobody answering. — The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

Nobody needing to answer, it being all too plain.

The house always wins, after all; the games are rigged. Not in the sense that they're cheats, but that the rules of the game say that the player will inevitably put in more than he or she gets paid out. Exactitude of bookkeeping isn't needed to clarify this knowledge; it merely reveals the margins. The only way not to lose is to quit.

But of course you can't quit, under threat of starvation and homelessness We're not talking about gambling, after all; that serves as merely as the most transparent metaphor for the structure of surplus value. For that is, finally, the rigged game you can't quit: labor itself, the only necessary rule of which is that it always returns less than you put in.

This and nothing else explains the development of that subgenre of the caper film which specializes in ripping off the casino, for which the modern locus is Bob le flambeur. It gets most directly at the pleasure of the crime whose victim is work itself; one might say that Oceans 11-13 are closer in spirit to Eisenstein's Strike! than they are to The Sting, much less a standard-issue crime film.

Ocean's 13 is generally flabby; for wit, the best it can do is Hollywood stardom metajokes, as when, caper completed, George Clooney suggests that Brad Pitt take some time off between "jobs" to start a family, have a couple kids — and Brad rejoins that Clooney should try to keep the weight off between gigs so he doesn't have to fight his way back into shape each time. That's one way the film has of knowing itself.

But not the only one. In the most ludicrous of the silly subplots, first Casey Affleck and then Scott Caan fall in with — what's that you say? — striking workers at a Mexican factory. The sharpest of ironies is that it turns out that the strikers' demands for annual salary increase — all of them, in total — can be met by what a Clooney makes in 45 minutes. But the automatic sympathy of the heisters for the strikers is the film's only moment of actual thought, on the verge of knowing what it's about.

24) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
23) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
22) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
21) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
20) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
19) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
18) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
17) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
16) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
15) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
14) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
13) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
12) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
11) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
10) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

confidential to manoel de oliveira

Seriously, dude, watch your back.

hot fuzz

Saw this movie.

And now, on to an update on the rankings, with a reminder that these run from worst to best, or from least preferred to most preferred, as indicated by the numbers — so that, for example, the movie numbered "1" is the "number 1" movie on the list.

23) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
22) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
21) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
20) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
19) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
18) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
17) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
16) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
15) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
14) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
13) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
12) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
11) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
10) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

transformers

Given the clarity and accuracy of the reviews here and here, we will merely register in passing the grimmest moment in this generally grim film.

During the climactic battle (which takes place in Los Angeles, Nevada), there's a brief "shot" of the late-arriving Decepticon, Starscream (in his mechanical form as a jet) smashing into and blurring through a couple floors of an office tower. As if in a dream, we watch from a magical viewpoint, mid-air outside the office windows; they spool past like frames of film stock, detailing impossibly the interior stuff — desks, fluttering papers, bodies — being tossed asunder, before Starscream blasts out the building, leaving a defined exit wound. The sequence lasts less than two seconds, maybe less than one.

And yet it is by far the most detailed reconstruction of the iconic violence from the events of September 11, 2001. Indeed, among visualizations, this is the one that has been pointedly disallowed, the image not recreated in the increasing wealth of historical recreations: we have been allowed to see the tower only from the outside, from pre-contact to the leaping bodies. To render that interior image from a perspective too close to reality would be, as we are all given to understand, somehow pornographic; one way to understand this movie is as a sort of measuring device displaying the necessary distance of fantasy at which the events in question can be screened. Or as a particular registration of the certainty that this one day in history is to be the Rosetta Stone of American cultural imagery for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, this gets at the moment of truth within the Transformers franchise, and the occasional brilliance of this resurrection. No other device so lovingly preserves the boy's dream that every single object in the world is weaponized: cars, planes, bodies, existing beyond the capacities of conventional armies. Car-bomb, 9/11, suicide bomber: the fantasy of weaponization is merely the reality of asymmetric warfare, and the story of how it was finally brought to the United States. The movie really should be titled Transformers, or a Brief History of 21st Century Combat. Square-jawed officer Josh Duhamel's one task in the film is to deliver the news to just-a-boy hero Shia LaBoeuf: "we're all soldiers now." This, coming only a few moments after Starscream's arrival, is surely the most dispiriting moment in peculiarly dispiriting — which is to say, peculiarly affecting — film.

harry potter and the order of the phoenix/joe strummer: the future is unwrittten

British Prep School Boys Against Evil.

Only one of these movies has Johnny Depp in it, and Depp's dead man's chest is not to be found in Potter's field. Rather, he shows up to testify on behalf of the oldest and deadest member of the Clash. The curious thing is that he was apparently interviewed on the set of one of the Pirates movies. Either that, or he dresses like that all the time: Depp gives the standard issue Strummer-is-god monologue in full Jack Sparrow regalia, down to the double-dangles of the beard, which automatically makes it the most riveting part of the film except for early Clash footage (especially the opening of Joe laying in the vocals for "White Riot") and the brief second or two of Big Audio Dynamite live.

Now that you mention it, that may be the best future for Harry. Though we hear he ends up a wise Hogwarts parent, it would be a bit better if the Pirates trilogy turned out to be the last three episodes of Harry Potter, wherein Harry, now a wizened and amoral pirate, has to decide again and again whether to be good or evil; the appearance of Keith Richards as his dad would explain almost everything.

Also noted: brief shot across the bows of postmodernity. "The Ministry has determined," says the sadistic schoolmarm Dolores Umbridge, "that a theoretical knowledge of spells should be enough to pass your exams." Quoth Harry, "what good is theory when you're actually attacked"? Etc Etc. Dolores is of course from the Ministry, and is en route to deposing good ol' Dumbledore from his post. As with The History Boys, the posing of theoretical or abstract knowledge as proper to those who have achieved and maintain political power is merely bizarre.

In Order of the Phoenix, the training montage is replaced by a teaching montage, in which Harry takes on the task of imparting pragmatic knowledge of magic to the other students. "You're a really good teacher, Harry — I've never been able to stun anything before."

For Joe Strummer, this was less of a problem.

severance

The serial obliteration of a bunch of employees for a defense firm by the ghost remainders of the Balkan troops they've armed is the obvious moralizing structure, but in fact is almost trivial. Rather, this film achieves even the barest intelligibility (even within the flexible near-magical-realism of the horror b-film) via the acceptance of one unquestioned premise: that First World anglos are unable to distinguish between a luxury hotel and a derelict state medical facility.

As long as it's in Eastern Europe.

And this is in fact somewhat interesting, highlighting exactly the peculiar place of Eastern Europe within the core/periphery order of civilization, as it exists in anglo imaginations: at once industrialized and premodern, citizens of a new European order in which state war seems unimaginable — except for the actual presence of internecine conflicts, that thus seem to belong to more distant states and centuries. The cultural anxiety is clear: geographically, it seems like the kind of place that should follow First World "rules," and thus be navigable by, well, us. And yet even in the last two decades since the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact, it isn't.

Would we know what a nice hotel looked like? And might our lack of code-comprehension, our uncertainty about the success of the project which involves remaking the world core in our image, turn out to be fatal?

waitress and knocked up

"The film also deserves credit for showing a young, unwed mother taking responsibility for her actions, rather than opting for the easy abortion route." This quotation is timeless, in its way; in this case it's three years old, from a review of Saved! that appeared in the Catholic News Service.

Saved! is perhaps the most influential comedy in American cinema...this Spring (especially if you're watching the new DVD release of Weeds Season 2, wherein Saved!'s adult romance between Mary-Louise Parker and Martin Donovan, as mom Lilian and Pastor Skip, returns in the form of mom Nancy and DEA Agent Peter). Both this season's hegemonic Hollywood comedy, and its little indie that could, revolve around the same core plot point; apparently the Non-Sequel/Franchise market is committed to the drama of the implausibly pregnant young woman facing down a complicated and morally ambiguous choice.

As you will know by now, that choice isn't whether to keep the baby. As in Saved! (and many others; this seems to convenient analogue for particular reasons), the abortion option is thought about only far enough so that it can be shown to be unthinkable even in secular terms. To this point, Waitress and Knocked Up are roughly identical films.

Of course, they go different directions: in Waitress, the protag keeps the baby but ditches both husband and lover; in Knocked Up, the woman is not really the protag and thus, by definition, keeps the baby and the father. It would be nice — or interesting — if this gave the movies meaningfully different valences, but it doesn't; they both finally read as sentimental moralizing.

However, at least a couple distinctions can be drawn, the most obvious of which is that, non-stop for the first 70 minutes and intermittently after, Knocked Up is really freakin' funny. Waitress, conversely, is only very intermittently funny (largely thanks to the diner's's Flo, Cheyl Hines, late of the Larry David Show), and goes instead for a sweetness which is now wounded, now cloying. This might be by way of noting that one is a big studio machine, one a tiny Sundancer (relatively speaking).

And this indeed the difference that counts, in every possible way. One might enjoy how Waitress, more free to defy phantasmatic heartland test audiences, allows its hero to go her own way rather than re-coupling up per Hollywood protocols. But that would way overplay the film's independence of thought: it ends with the most grating affirmation of "core values" imaginable, insisting that the mystical bond between mother and child is absolute, transcendental, beyond human will or desire or freedom. Not only is this demonstrably not true, it's every bit as theological as any ending you could imagine; it certainly doesn't curtsy any less to the grinning idiocy of Christian values than does Knocked Up or, for that matter, than does The Greatest Story Ever Told.

And that, finally, is what sucks. Proffered as an "independent" and even propositionally hip and eccentric film, it forwards the most conservative, essentializing, and traditional message conceivable. Knocked Up, we suggest, is all the good parts of Saved!: well-written, well-framed, charming, with an appealing supporting cast. Waitress is just Saved!'s "Pastor Skip," brought in to retrench the community's core values and indeed revivify them, turning backflips and speaking in excruciating hip-hop patois to better convince his Fundie flock that the moralizing message is still relevant and even cool.

Given its circumstances, this is a movie that should have been impossible to hate.

18) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
17) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
16) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
15) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
14) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
13) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
12) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
11) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
10) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
9) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
8) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
7) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
6) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
5) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
4) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

28 weeks later

So it turns out that the problem with zombie movies is symmetrical to the problem with war as such. War is so amorphously expansive and at the same time so socially powerful that it can cast its shadow on the most varied of films (and poems and plays and paintings...) so that they are each in turn seen to be "about" the war (one would need only to read the last couple years of film sections at the Gray Lady and the AltWeekly Formerly Known as the Voice to be exhausted by this fact).

Zombie movies (especially if one annexes vampire flicks) have, symmetrically, the broadest screens on which allegorical shadows might be thrown, aimlessly taking the penumbral shape of the social crisis du jour: now colonialism and now communism, now consumer culture and now AIDS. The receptivity of the zombie film may indeed explain why any notable changes in the genre (as in the recent trend of "fast zombies") is such an occasion for critical meditation, inspired perhaps by the hope that the films might take on a somewhat-greater specificity.

That's not to say that zombie films are no damn good. In fact, fast zombie films are on a roll — as enlightened viewers of 28 Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead will attest — and the sequel to the former keeps things rolling. Its achievement is for the most part that it bridges the symmetry mentioned above; indeed, the presence of occupying US soldiers, Green Zone and quarantine is plain enough that, to rely on the ever-useful wisdom of Giles the Librarian, "the subtext is rapidly becoming the text." For a brilliant minute or so, it seems that the film's formal innovation will be to use recorded headset audio from the actual Green Zone (as seen on YouTube!) as the entirety of the dialog, and improvising the zombie movie around it. That would be audacious indeed.

However, that's unfair to what makes the movie appealing, which is not merely that it's a zombie movie about Gulf War 2, or a war movie with zombies. The kicks are largely in swift brutality, again shot not just for maximum aggression but also to disguise the highly relevant information of who's been bitten and infected). We get as well some shiveringly ambiguous moments: there remains no way to know why, exactly, Robert Carlyle's wife invites him to kiss her while she lies on a gurney in the med lab's panic room. Love, revenge, pure mephistophelian calculation. But on that kiss hangs the tale.

If war — and particularly insurgency — is contagion, the opening space of contagion in this film isn't Mesopotamia but Europe. The referent in that regard is no more Iraq than the French Revolution, which threw the Continent into a panic at the threat of ideological infection. And not just the Continent; no one, perhaps, was more repulsed than Edmund Burke, crafting his withering analysis while clinging to Britannia's splendid isolation. Here of course it's England where the insurgent plague, the "Rage virus," is birthed; situation is reversed. Can it be quarantined? As ever, it's a matter of carriers: a boy, a helicopter, the same pilot from The Matrix...

16) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
15) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
14) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
13) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
12) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
11) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
10) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
9) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
8) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
7) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
6) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
5) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
4) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

paris je t'aime

...in which 18 directors set about proving it's impossible to make an interesting five to ten minute movie in Paris. The only ones who come close (Oliver Schmitz, Tom Tykwer) do so by approximating longer narratives via heavy flashbacking. Because otherwise it just can't be done.

15) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
14) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
13) Paris je t'aime (wasn't Smokin' Aces; didn't have Hayden Christenson)
12) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
11) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
10) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
9) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
8) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

disturbia

Having very little to say about Disturbia other than "Not-That-Bad goes a long way of late," we'll borrow the formulation of our movie date, who noted that the resetting of the Real Window story to the suburbs meant, at a basic material level, that there were fewer things for Shia Le Boeuf to peer toward from his bedroom window — requiring in turn that the panoplistic scopophilia had to be satisfied by a variety of, how you say, "techno-windows": monitors hooked and not hooked to remote lenses, cameras, cellphone screens, and etc.

The distinction between a window and a monitor as regards (so to speak) looking at the world has been one very much on the mind of Hollywood (et al.) for a while; one needs only consider the founding confusion of The Matrix, and what seeing really might be. The concept of ideology figures; so does simulation, and McLuhan's light on/light through distinction. What's striking about Disturbia is the extent to which this is simply not a big deal; for the most part, in this film, all windows are windows. In that regard its logic is less that of simulation-anxiety, but of marketing convergence, in which the phone, iPod, computer monitor, television and etc all function as of-a-kind destinations for content, or for the-world-repackaged-as-content. In this movie the content is one neighbor is hot and the other one totally sucks.

14) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
13) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
12) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
11) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
10) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
9) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
8) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

fracture

You may have noticed we've been wasting away again in hiatusville; what's more, in the grand tradition of the original paper-based zine also called jane dark's sugarhigh!, we've been coopted by mainstream media. An entry from this very blog will appear, or so we're told, in the next edition of Best Music Writing; moreover, as of July we'll be starting a column over at FilmQuarterly, which will basically cover the kinds of movies we've been covering here, more or less in this style. In fact, the editor wishes for it to be like this blog, but focusing on more than one film at a time. And what will it be called? Marx and Coca-Cola, natch!

Still, we are intent on logging every new movie seen in a theater. Hence...

We can't quite be sure, not being lawyers or etc, but we're pretty sure that the legal denouement of Fracture is, uh, total nonsense? Someone out there, enlighten us: wouldn't the bullet to be removed from the wife's brain equally be found to come from the detective's gun and not Hopkins'? And once one of you legal whippets clarifies this for us, can you elucidate on the plausibility behind almost every interaction between Gosling and his new boss? We have rarely been so baffled. Maybe there are a lot of invisible jump cuts. Seriously, a little help?

13) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
12) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
11) Fracture (was neither Factory Girl nor Smokin' Aces)
11) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
10) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
9) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
8) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

"no"

Of all the films that end in horror, only this can compare to Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: a ten-minute short about a person being forced to return to work by the very union reps and friends she believed had promised something else entirely. A French short (here with annoying German subtitles), it's called in English, Return to Work at the Wonder Factory, 10 June '68.

grindhouse

It's not clear that Grindhouse's duo of Planet Terror and Death Proof is a better double-feature than, say, a pairing of Slither and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! — each of which is a fine representative of the genres parodied herein, the zombie plague apocalypse and the psychopathic war of the sexes on a lost highway.

That's not to insult this current Rodriguez/Tarantino beast, which is largely delightful and gross and over-the-top, and has as significant flaws only a couple: at a local level, the latter feature suffers from Too Much Banter, which would be less of a problem if Tarantino's banter was as sharp as it was last millennium. But it ain't, and will never be again. At a global level, it's dull the way this package arrives essentially critic-proofed, having way overdosed on ironic self-awareness and being a bit heavily committed to making sure we know they know how any response besides Aww yeah! Fuck yeah! is likely to sound — a defensiveness which makes the whole thing feel a little waterlogged. Fine; a fair trade for all the good stuff, and the even better bad stuff. We only mean to suggest, by mentioning Slither and FPKK, that the ludicrous genre films these films celebrate, recapitulate, and spoof, are themselves a) really good too, b) equally self-aware and sometimes in funnier, cannier ways, with even more awesome exaggerations, and c) still being made.

So why does it somehow seem more pleasing to see this than the aforementioned Slither/ FPKK double-feature might be? The answer must be: Because we'll never know. That pair would be as anachronistic as the pointedly anachronistic gestures of Grindhouse, filled with Seventies flavor and Fords and filmstock and fonts, and decomposed to look that old — until some character pulls out their QWERTY smartphone, or mentions Osama bin Laden. Why not just keep us in the Seventies, in the dearly-departed era when "grindhouses" still existed in Times Square and elsewhere, still showed sleaze-gene double-features? Because for Grindhouse-the-Event to work, have to think of now too: of how, in this present moment that's finely gestured toward, the very thing we're enjoying no longer exists — is itself an anachronism. But as we suggested above, fun pieces of genre sleaze can still be had. They still exist. It's total pretense that what's being brought back is a kind of movie, rather than a kind of movie-going. The "thing we're enjoying that no longer exists" isn't movies like this; it's the form of the double-feature itself. The added value of these films is added value, a household economy of time and dollars in relation to going to the movies that has indeed passed away.

They'll make it back on DVD. Fourfold, we estimate.

13) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
12) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
11) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
10) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
9) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
8) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

blades of glory

...so the argument for gay marriage turns out to be that, as necessary, the pitcher and catcher (in this case quite literally) can switch places — the utilitarian claim that trumps any idealist hokum about differences in "nature" (as signified by the unnatural pair of incestuous siblings, the ambiguously named Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg).

12) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
11) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
10) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
9) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
8) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
7) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
6) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
5) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

shooter

The keywords for this film's imdb entry seem about right: Assassination / Marksman / Falsely Accused / Based On Novel / Military Veteran. Of course, they can't begin to get at the two most basic questions: when will Mark convert his supporting-cast eccentricity — and he really is the most riveting sideman in Hollywood — into lead role charisma, if ever? (Not here, though he's litely charming enough even when being "heroic").

And also, who was the production genius who failed to buy Lil Wayne's song "Shooter" for the opening credits or middle montage or closing credits, surely one of the most embarrassing gaffes/absent presences in recent cinema? (Probably Mike Flicker, though Producer Eric Howsam probably deserves some blame as well — but honestly, shouldn't Marky Mark have insisted? Shouldn't it have been in his deal? If we were doing choreographed high-drama sniper shit in a liberal revenge fantasy, and if we were former rappers who had found our true calling but were still true to the game, we would have a seventh attorney who was in charge of exactly those kinds of things.)

11) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
10) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
9) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
8) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
7) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
6) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
5) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

avenue montaigne

Since 1964, Claude Brasseur has appeared in about 100 films; he has played Mussolini, Maupassant, and an inspector (in the movie Dancing Machine). Sugarhigh! has seen exactly none of these films that passed between the slight roundelay of Avenue Montaigne and the slight serie noir crime film Band of Outsiders, 42 years earlier. In the former, he plays a one-time cabbie who has climbed to the top of society and now, near death, is selling of his world-class art collection. In the latter he plays a casual criminal who comes to a bad end. One of these might be the best movie ever made.

All movies are in the present, the always-unfolding present; seeing Brasseur enter the scene here, it is as if no time at all has passed since he departed the field outside the house of Odile's aunt. But it is stark to see a face age four decades without a sequence, or a slow dissolve; as shocking a jump-cut as anything Godard could have contrived.

10) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
9) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
8) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
7) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
6) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
5) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

the host

The Host makes one wish to know much more about contemporary and recent Korean history; one has the sense the film is ludicrously, incoherently canny about its own symbolic stakes, which lurk just under the surface — like the film's monster itself — in this case underneath the surface of the conveniently superficial symbolic tradition of the Asian monster mash-up exemplified by Godzilla.

But to some extent, the urge to read the film in such a manner should be resisted. Monster movies offer this too easily and often too neatly. This film is a thicket of signs, an excess of signs; it would be an insult to its hurlyburly to make it tell some particular story, to make the repressed be SARS or avian flu, foreign military presence or toxicity, the rise of the Asian Tigers or the drama of disunification. None of these will do, though all may linger about. This sense of excess culminates in the monster's death: like Rasputin, it dies poisoned, shot, stabbed and burnt.

Moreover, the film has real force outside the realm of the symbolic, not just in its formal capacity to jolt some adrenaline out of the audience but within its story. The scene in which the bereft family members silently imagine feeding treats to Hyun-seo (whom the monster has taken) in their family foodstand/bunker, is brief, unremarked, untelegraphed, and, as the freshmen are wont to say, heart-rendering.

Moreover, the national dramas are sometimes closer to the literal than the symbolic. Much to say, surely, about Hyun-seo's dopey father, with his backstory of malnutrition and his drill to the brain; same for Park Nam-joo, the half-formed hunt-goddess with her national medal in archery. But the wittiest story belongs to the young uncle Park Nam-il, handsome in his University suit; at some point, desolate over Hyun-seo, over their own inability to help her, over his family's pressing incompetence, he breaks down into a bitter monologue about how he went to University and "sacrificed for democracy" (apparently connected facts), and now he can't even get a job.

This, pace the sense of national duty, is of course the song of many a graduate. What's ticklishly elegant about the plot is that it will turn out — again, this goes entirely unremarked, it just happens — that Nam-il's education has fore-armed him flawlessly for the film's climax: a scene that plays out after a demonstration has forth along the river, a panoramic and nervous confrontation, all placards and puppets and colored chemical clouds.

Even those with only a passing local knowledge will know a bit of South Korea's modern history of public political manifestations; the Second Republic begins in 1960 after the violent repression of a student protest sets off the April Revolution. The tradition has not abated; a dopey 1998 article in Salon renders the local color of Pusan like this:

I opened my blinds and looked down to see 100 or so helmeted police in black storm trooper outfits and plexiglass shields charging up the street through a cloud of tear gas. Directly in their path -- forming a vague skirmish line at the front gate of Pusan National University -- a mob of masked student demonstrators hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails. The spectacle looked like a Shakespeare-in-the-park production of "Star Wars".... I didn't know it at the time, but this was part of a rather normal springtime ritual in Korea. As is the case at many Korean colleges, Pusan National University students have the option of joining political demonstration groups in the same way that they can join a reading circle or a ham-radio club. Street protests -- which are always held during the mild spring months -- have become a theatrical, somewhat listless coming-of-age ritual for young students here.

The description is not so different from that scene in The Host. In the movie (and in most realities but Salon's, where the story turns out to be about the most important thing: the status of the American's job) there do seem to be some real stakes: the crowds has come to confront not the monster but the government and its helmeted cops, taken to be using the monster (and the virus it supposedly hosts) as a sort of pretext for populace management. The tradition of student street-fighting remains current; this decade has seen a ceaseless series of local revolts against Korea's participation in the WTO and similar globalizing initiatives, protests which often unite students and farmers.

This poses the problem of cultural translation in its purest form; can an American audience, almost entirely unable to imagine the basic political life of Korea (and much of the globe), encounter the force of a movie which, while not necessarily about such things, builds itself Lego-like from these matters? Perhaps not, though a healthy beginning might involve a visit to this po'faced charmer of a website, if for nothing but a refresher on what political activity looks like elsewhere.

Indeed, one of the several punchlines in The Host that surely resonates differently here involves Nam-il's crucial contribution to the slaying of the monster. For it turns out that he has learned exactly what he needed at University: how to throw a molotov cocktail. Confronted with the hybrid, appendage-strewn beast (even its form is incoherent ,and thus seemingly unassailable) that has swallowed his niece and laid waste to local life along the river, his student skills — which until this moment have consisted largely of wearing a suit and whining — suddenly blossom into heroism. The ways in which this does not recede into the symbolic, but tells a local and current story likely to be a cipher for a US audience, may perhaps be the most striking fact of the film, written in aggressively beautiful poppies of fire on the bank's paving stones.

9) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
8) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
7) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
6) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
5) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

factory girl

Giving the objectification of women an even worse name. In general this is not a warpath we cruise — if one attends to Hollywood films, one must do a little negotiating between the baby and the bathwater. The problem with this film is, in short: it lacks a baby.

Jim Lewis, for all his you-still-don't-get-Warhol keening, is quite right about the utterly invidious dynamic that the film sets up between Warhol and crypto-Dylan, larded with the hateful folkie-organicist worldview that it's hard to believe still survives: let's all go back to Eden-Woodstock, and when I say "all," I don't mean it!

At least as vexing, however, is the simple fact that the stakes of Edie's life have to be routed through two dudes; it's a pretend form of thinking special to mentally inept boys (speaking of mentally inept boys, who was the casting genius behind Hayden Christenson-as-Dylan? What absurdity must we suffer next — Ryan Phillippe as a cunning intel agent?)

But worse than all this from where we sit (for all these complaints really do regard tertiary matters) is just how tedious the movie is, and it is almost incomprehensibly tedious. Dear Hollywood: when you make movies featuring, e.g., Sienna Miller's tits, could you please include something else appealing in the 100-minute window, so that it isn't transparently obvious that everything else in the film is bare pretext? Which is to say, this isn't exactly a bad mainstream release, but among the world's worst porn films.

8) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
7) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
6) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
5) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
4) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
3) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

dreamgirls

It's been well-remarked that the songs for Dreamgirls are inaccurate pastiches of Motown that insistently sound like (and are choreographed like, and shot like) nothing so much as Broadway showtunes of no particular provenance. Somewhat less noted is that the songs are just plain bad. But even this is not the movie's Achilles heel.

To care about the story, the tragedy of the wronged, proud and ruined Effie, one must believe that she is a better singer than Deana — and in turn believe that, as performed, Jennifer Hudson is a better singer than Beyonce. This is on par with believing that Joe Cocker is a better singer than Mick Jagger. Wow, that Joe Cocker, he can really belt it out.

Which is sort of the point. Jennifer Hudson, she can really belt it out. She's a perfectly capable singer of a particular kind: a pastiche of the Aretha-style Baptist-soul shouter. As it happens, Beyonce (even as she dulls down her edge for the first half of the film) is an exceptional singer of a particular different kind. To buy the movie's entire emotional premise, one must accept that the former kind of singing (no matter how much we patter about being so over it) is more authentic than the latter, that Effie is a real chanteuse while Deana is promoted to center stage because she has more white appeal and more sexy. Triumph of appearance over essence. Debased age of the image. And on and on.

Every single thing about the movie reiterates this message, except our ears — most obviously in the song "One Night Only" where we are offered the slow soulful version by Effie, followed rapidly by the vapid disco version (because we all know that disco is vapid, right?) by Deana et al. We are supposed to ignore the extent to which the latter is much better; to hear the set of cultural presumptions, and not the songs. But that's merely the moment in which the film most overplays its cards; once you notice that Deana, — despite her inability to belt it out — is a more interesting, mobile, nuanced singer than Effie, the entire film becomes nonsensical.

It's not just that its aesthetic blindness gets contemporary music all wrong. By now we know that, even if Mick Jagger wanted to be a bluesman at 19, he found himself as a great singer when he departed that mode — after he found thirty other ways to sing songs, the least of which reveals Joe Cocker's technical chops and capacity to push a lot of air as bare schtick, giving of the narrowest and most bathos-laden emotional valence imaginable. And by now we know, one prays, that that Aretha style is but one among many; that it's no more real or authentic than the styles of Martha Reeves or Dusty Springfield or Donna Summer or Michael Jackson or Beyonce or The Brazilian Girls. That Aretha happens to be transcendently magnificent within that style is a fact about her, not about the style. Beyonce, as it happens, is the Aretha of her style. Jennifer Hudson is a better actress than singer.

Even less honorably, the movie's confusion gets Motown utterly wrong. Berry Gordy, Jr. was almost assuredly not a good guy, and the formation of Motown surely had the usual quiver of terrible motivations. Nonetheless, to paraphrase the great music critic Ludwig Wittgenstein, Commercial melodic soul seemed like a discovery, but what its discoverer really found was a new way of singing, a new comparison: it might even be called a new sensation. The idea that Florence Ballard, no mean talent, was in Diana Ross's league as a singer of songs is comical; Ross was perhaps as compelling within the new sensations of Motown as Aretha was on good ol' Columbia. The idea that Motown sold out art for commerce, talent for gold, is truly tone-deaf; the attachment to