addendum to Up in the Air post

addendum to up in the air post: an addendum

i realized that the whole bleeding heart "it's awfully hard for moviegoers" might not be the best argument ever. i feel that it still stands, but it should stand with addenda.

up in the air was enjoyable. super-enjoyable. it's just the fact that it's a "good" movie that makes me leery. how many "good" movies have i watched and actually enjoyed? i'd say, in the last few years, wholeheartedly, about one? half-heartedly maybe two? i really liked igby goes down. and i...don't approve of, but can't deny the affectiveness (not effectiveness, but affectiveness) of the deer hunters. and i did feel that the squid and the whale was good, though i wouldn't watch it again without a fight. same for the secret lives of dentists, mostly because i thought that the hot male dentist's acting was flipping phenomenal.

so we've got about four.

now, out of what list were these four generated? below is a partial example of things i don't like:

i know where i'm going--almost as gorgeous as it was irritating.

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind--dear god don't get me started.

scent of a woman--serious? i don't know. i just know it sucked, despite the philip seymour hoffman quotient.

punch drunk love--kind of liked it, but not enough to call it a good movie.

the human stain--walked out after about seven minutes. WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING?

broken flowers--the title says it all.

shopgirl--seriously? seriously?? "this is what happens when we buy a sad girl gloves. by steve martin."

some movie about a gay chinese girl doctor--cute and nothing else.

chariots of fire--oh my god. the best part is that someone considers that a classic.

a room with a view--ditto pretty much entirely.

kinky boots--whyyy, awesome dude from serenity? whyyy?

beauty and the beast (the cocteau version)--visually stunning. not much going on in the upper story.

the royal tennenbaums--hated it.

bottle shock--quite a pleasant movie...in hell.

so you see what up in the air is up against when it comes to my viewpoint. from classic to shlock-sic, i hate serious movies. if i were to apply this sort of criticism to all types of movies, i'd probably go insane with vitriol and bitterness. but i don't apply this sort of criticism, because in the case of the dragonball movie, or the wolfman, or transformers, it doesn't matter as much. films have plots so that they can effect us--change us into what they want us to be. genre films are hoping to have a possibly unscrupulous, but also relatively un-abusive effect: they want us to be easily frightened, easily amused, easily shocked, and we can become so without much soul-contortion (though the long-term effects of such effectation might bear looking at). serious films want to do something more: they want to change us permanently. and that's where i come back to the argument that if you want to do something important to your audience, you be freaking careful. you make your crap meaningful. don't stick us in the desert with nothing more than a lazy signifier or two to keep us warm at night and cool in the day.

that's all. consider yourself addended, up in the air.

oh, also cooley high and breaking away i thought were very good serious movies, i thought. i have to review cooley high at some point but i'm kind of dreading it, because i really liked it.

Up in the Air: so close

Up in the Air: best picture nominee starring george clooney and directed by the juno dude

i'm grateful to juno. it was a really adorable picture, adorable in the way that isn't too irritating while at the same time being awesome--more than this, however, it hipped me to both patti smith and the fact that the stooges were a band before iggy went solo-ish. i can never be too grateful. every time i hear patti smith say, "the angel looked down at him in his stern coffin and said 'aw, pretty boy, can't you show me nothing but surrender?'" i remember just how much i owe to the juno dude (i also remember angel sanctuary. angel sanctuary: what the hell?).

so i won't be too harsh...or at least i'll think twice about everything negative i have to say about up in the air. it isn't even that it's that much that i thought was wrong. it just succumbs to the temptation to line up all its ducks, and in the end doesn't get to where it should, in my opinion.

what i mean by the ducks is as follows: 1. up in the air subscribes to charlize theron character's solution to maeby's oceanwalker conundrum in season 3 of arrested development by choosing not to end. that is its prerogative, but one can't help but think that maybe up in the air could have chosen some less annoying way to end a story about a character that one doesn't care very deeply about in the first place (guess who won't be buying the up in the air dvd?). i mean, if the fate of george clooney man left the theater with me, and then became a source of personal torture for weeks on end, i'd say, yeah! give me that old fashioned indeterminate ending! but...no. to have george clooney character not end put kind of a fine point on the fact that i didn't really much care what happened to him either way. 2. up in the air includes, as far as my mom found out from npr, footage of actual normal-people firees talking about their firing. woot. this is the kind of stuff that the oscar judges dig, man. this footage was incorporated into the movie with a lot of grace, and i feel like it was right of the movie to give real people the opportunity to talk about their experience--and the gesture, the gravity, the beauty of the idea and its application would have been so much improved if this movie wasn't in the running for best picture or whatever oscar it's in the running for. i know that that's a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't," and i won't belabor it.

3. is the real sticking place for me: the question of genre. now, if up in the air were a comedy, even a bittersweet comedy, i think i would have liked it. juno director dude can handle his metaphors, and he does a good job of making sad things funny and funny things poignant, capturing the everyday exchanges of humor and pathos in a way weirdly reminiscent of james cameron-when-he's-not-attempting-to-tell-the-main-story (that's a compliment). juno director takes things seriously, and extends the everyday to a point that seems somehow close to realistic: things that happen in life don't just happen; they touch us nearly--they hurt and they're funny. up in the air does both of these things well. what it doesn't do well, to me, is hold itself together. now, george clooney character in many ways does hang together, but there are ways in which he just doesn't--

it's hard to explain. the movie focuses around a rather unlikeable, difficult to get to know character. i feel like it fills in probable details for every facet of this character's character: he's afraid of attachments because his dad died? because he used to be a jock? because he's good looking? any one of these are possible, but the point is that the movie doesn't leave that sort of detail out. if you want an explanation you can find it. what the movie DOES leave out is...heart? no, it has heart. soul? maybe closer. george clooney character has situational drama pressing in on him from every side; his character, in my eyes, does not sustain this onslaught. his issues don't make him more interesting. they make you feel more sympathy for him, but that sympathy doesn't turn to empathy--the character doesn't merit the acting that clooney puts into him.

i mean, what are we doing peeking in on this dude's life? the movie, which does so many things so well, doesn't seem to be able to answer this question. he's pretty, he's aging, he's good at his job, his job provides a lot of situational comitragic opportunities...the introduction of his tight-ass new boss-type and his loose-edge girlfriend provides characterization exposition, but what do we learn? nothing that we didn't learn in the first five minutes of the movie: man likes to be alone, and cares about other people with only middling success. plot development after plot development get thrown into the abyss of this characterization, but in essence it stays the same. it's not up in the air; it's completely definite. his issues get explored; his character does not. are characterization and issues the same? i'd always before this movie kind of thought so too. apparently i am wrong.

what i mean by genre is this: if this film had been made as a weird quirky buddy movie, i would have liked it. if it had been made as a romantic comedy, i would have liked it. but it was made as a serious movie, and as such, i don't feel that it quite did what it could have. i walk into a serious movie, and i have to be given back what i've put in. i am willing to fall in love with george clooney character, to cry for him, to laugh with him, to feel his pain, and to carry him with me for the rest of my life. but i'm NOT going to do ANY of that without a fight. and this is for reasons--i still remember sitting in the theater sobbing over snow falling on cedars, like, ten minutes after it was done, knowing the whole time that it was one of the worst movies i'd ever seen. movies can't just expect loyalty and devotion when they want to be serious--they have to earn it. i speak, because nobody else seems willing to, for viewers like myself, who are willing to give everything to an experience, if the experience is capable of asking everything. up in the air wasn't, quite.

and, please, find a band that can sing. i am totally going to your next movie, juno dude. but i would take it as a personal favor if all of the songs underlaying the action were not basically rewrites of "hallelujah." it's a kick-ass song, and i like broken acoustic riffs as much as the next person, but the movie could have used something else. just once.

The Wolfman was YES YES YES

The Wolfman:

new release starring benicio del torro and a girl who looks really familiar

(the blog title is a modified quote from arrested development, by the way--in season 2, george michael gets an extremely dangerous rocket that allows him to fly kind of, and the title of the informational dvd [i think] is "jetpacks was yes." you're welcome.)

man alive, is this ever the last time that i do that: i went to rottentomatoes.com--a site which gave the film let the right one in, the experience of the watching of which could be leagued with something like getting your eyeteeth ground down to stumps, a 97% rating (this still makes my jaw drop)--to see why precisely the wolfman is getting a 31%, and was redirected to someone else's blog in order to read a "splat" review. garth franklin of dark horizons. he really knew the horror genre. i very much enjoyed the style of his writing. he's WRONG, but i enjoyed reading him.

instead of taking on garth franklin on a point-by-point basis, which would be self-indulgent to the point that i can hardly resist the temptation but am going to make myself do so, i'm going to talk in terms of analogy. i'm going to talk about mansfield park, because that's what's springing to mind. now, more than one austenite might say that aside from northanger abbey, which can't be blamed because it was one of the very earliest written of her published novels, mansfield park is the hottest mess out of all of them. "sure, it's good, because it's jane austen, but if it weren't jane austeney, it might not be that good," said austenite might claim.

this hypothetical austenite, however, is falling into the same trap that garth franklin seems to me to have fallen into: mistaking unevenness for crappiness. mansfield park is one of my top two jane austens, not (only) because i'm a twisted weirdo, but because i feel like austen kind of lets it all hang out--and the book still ends up being a work of genius. she's brutal to everyone in that story...and still the characterizations don't suffer. that's what, to me, makes mansfield park stand out. you don't even like edmund by the time it's over, but her depictions, however harshly worded, remain masterful, amazing, empathetic...you can see austen hurting herself for an ending, and when the ending comes, it sucks, but it's true.

i feel that this the wolfman is like that, but multiplied by anywhere from 10 to 45: it might suck in all the ways that franklin points out, but it's still true. it still gets at the spirit of the universal horror film tradition.

i keep making analogies because it's hard to get to what i'm trying to get to: a sense of the film as valuable either despite or because of its messiness. another analogy i'm thinking of is ang lee's the hulk. which was just a mess, period--in part because ang lee wasn't, from what i remember anyway, really working within the genre of superhero films...and not that i know much about the hulk, and not that i don't love ang lee, but he didn't seem, frankly, to really be working within the genre-area of the hulk, either.

whereas this the wolfman, to me, was working within the genre. admittedly, it threw the signifiers of the genre around like they were...i don't know, dollar-store candy? the post-post-german-expressionist the others/the orphanage* atmosphere of the filming and editing mixed with various dismemberments mixed with freudian interpretation, man-vs-woman, man-vs-beast, good old fashioned doses of victorian (edwardian?) mental torture, hammer studios-style set-the-entire-house-on-fire-for-some-reason-probably, and the usual "the evil was us all along" sort of late 20th century aesthetic--it was all crammed in there.

but i feel like the film survived all that. i couldn't say how, exactly. the soundtrack was nothing special, though unlike some it was entirely adequate. it might have been the acting. someone on rottentomatoes says that they thought anthony hopkins' dis-involved madman act was ridiculous, but i thought it was pretty brilliant. and emily blunt could have been SO MUCH MORE ANNOYING than she was--i thank her for that--she did a great job. and benicio del torro, to me, nailed it. granted, i think that possibly the main reason for this movie happening was that one day a film producer was staring at del torro's face, and suddenly said, "wolfman!"--that's just how logical of a choice he is--but despite being born for the part, i think he played it really well.

it might just be the fact that i like films that attempt to appeal to my senses as well as those that try to gross me out, and am willing to forgive them for lots of stuff provided they do said stuff in style (the tom jane the punisher, for example. i love that movie. i know it's exploitative and ridiculous, but i feel like it comes out the other side of said exploitative ridiculousness--it gets to a place that's true). rottentomatoes posited that the marriage of old-style horror monster movie with new-style gross-out monster movie is unfortunate--i don't agree. i'd say maybe it's awkward, but i like it anyway.

that might in fact be what i have to say about the whole thing. i'd agree that it's kind of awkward--i really like it anyway. don't try to tell me that none of the kaleidoscopically-multifaceted plot-points are fleshed out enough, because i don't think i care. are our plot-points fleshed out for us in real life? well, yes and no--but you can say "no" enough that the wolfman could be seen as a reflection of that. don't try to tell me that there are too many different types of filming styles, because, again, don't really care. ang lee's the hulk didn't pull it off for me, but i feel like the wolfman did.

to conclude:

in the movie, near the end, there's a shot of del torro walking through some woods that are being chopped down. now, we see it, and if we're certain types of viewers we say, "SYMBOL!!!" and then we start to drool slightly. and then we wipe ourselves off and think about what it meant. some of us say, "industrial revolution for 200, alex." others of us say, "the wolfman's habitat--his place of filmic existence--is within the woods. for them to be being chopped down is symbolic of the dissolution of the place of the horrific--the driving inward of mankind's demons--its leaking into reality as is exemplified in wes craven's new nightmare." OR we can say, "it's walking music, del torro! walk, walk, walk to that walking music!"

i think i make the third choice. i couldn't tell you what the truth is that's contained within that moment of del torro walking in woods that are being decimated. i can only tell you that there is one. it may seem superfluous, but to me it's superfluous in a bleak, wild, but life-affirming way, as opposed the the terrible algorithmic superfluity of, for example, the entirety of love actually.

kind of like mansfield park, in that whole part with the hee-haw (or the ha-ha?).

Percy Jackson: but where were the spiders / while they fly tried to break our balls?

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief
movie; recent release

i had a bang up evening yesterday. i stole an amazing pen from the cheesecake factory--i really hope that that wasn't the server's personal pen, because if it was he's probably missing it as much as i'm loving having it. i had two beers. i got to hang out with friends. and i went to barnes and noble. admittedly those fruitcakes don't have the loveless #9 that's been filling my hopes and dreams with girlish (read: desperate) anticipation (read: craving), but i did get to get into this awesome 1970's edition of frederica--because you can never have too many editions of frederica. frederica, by georgette heyer. find an awesome older edition and read it at your local mega-bookseller's today.

oh, and i saw percy jackson and the spiders from mars.

i mean, the title makes some sense--the bad guy does kind of look like david bowie.

oh, wait, that's not the title. well now i don't get it at all.

oh, wait, no...no, i totally do. you have to understand that this movie works on a plane of INCREDIBLE analogic subtlety. "percy" is actually "perseus," for example. "auntie em" (or something) is MEDUSA. the "em" stands for the "m" of the first letter of her name. the lotus eaters operate out of vegas, and olympus is on top of the empire state building, and the demigod camp is hogwarts, and zeus is boromir. you see it? there's a pattern, by which ancient greek myths are related to modern-day america...and j.k. rowling. a lot of j.k. rowling. and daddy issues. dear god, the daddy issues.

i'm being a gigantic jerk right now--a., there's no fault in borrowing from an author that one likes, or who's been successful. rowling borrows from c.s. lewis; bronte borrows from gothic literature...everyone sounds like someone. b., analogies don't have to be complex to be successful. everyone i know loves casting favorite shows and books (sex and the city springs to mind, also we had an epic lord of the rings brainstorming session once in a carl's jr) with friends and relatives. c., some of the best conceits ever have sprung from major daddy issues. i should focus on something more germane to the movie itself--

like the fact that the dude who plays percy jackson pretty much seems to consider himself the next zac efron--but he's not. he's no zac efron. the fact that a 27-year-old female is willing to defend zac efron from possible copycats says much more about that 27-year-old female than it does about either zac efron or the dude attempting to copy him, but i still say, hey, percy jackson actor, get your own schtick. the problem is that he seems to think that the zac efron thing sells, and it does, but that doesn't mean he can do it and expect it to sell just as well...although it might.

or the fact that athena's warrior maiden daughter is hot, a pretty good actress--and has no characterization or real reason for being in the movie. or the fact that grover is annoying. or the fact that the plot seems to have been strung together in order to make the cgi possible, like handelian recit, if the cgi is the aria. or the dialogue. dear gods in heaven-or-possibly-at-the-top-of-the-empire-state-building, the dialogue.

i know i should be lenient, because, again, i'm hardly the target audience here. i haven't read the books, for example. i'm not an 8-year-old boy. i didn't much like 300; why should i be expected to like 300 lite? but, okay, percy jackson and the gigantic absent father-figure movie is really a piece of crap. the imitating zac efron thing is indicative: this movie is doing what it thinks sells. it hired christopher columbus, who made harry potter into such a mess in movies 1 and 2. its soundtrack swells appropriately but without any character. it inserts a "strong" girl and then doesn't have her do ANYTHING aside from stand there, drive a car, and have glowing blue-gray eyes. the cgi is impressive, but, in the manner of that of avatar, literally nothing we haven't seen before. i remember that hades demon-figure from end of days...i think. he's much more elegant in this iteration, but it's the same idea.

a-ha-ha-haaanyway. i knew it was going to be bad. and i got this rocking pen out of my excursion, so it wasn't anything like a wasted night.

American Gigolo, or, oh my GOD i don't care

American Gigolo: '80's movie starring richard gere

...in the most un-likeable performance ever. normally i'm pretty well-inclined toward richard gere--i enjoyed his performances in chicago and runaway bride, but american gigolo bored me to tears while simultaneously managing to make me feel dirty all over. it's general knowledge that i love skeeve--i'm not ashamed. i enjoyed flavor flav's stint on vh1 as much as the next person; i like movies that feature tentacles and not much else; i'm not into john waters, but only because i feel like his movies lack characterization. but this crap just sucked. leon, the gay black pimp who sets richard gere up, has a line in which, when asked why he set richard gere up, he says something like, "because i don't like you. nobody likes you." it was the single moment in the film that made me feel like cheering.

don't bother buying the soundtrack; it's just one song.

i mean, if you like watching richard gere work on his core, have the most terrible sex scene i've seen in a movie since underworld and possibly ever, drive, and unbutton his shirt, this movie may be for you. oh, also walk around. he walks around a lot. there is a good twenty minutes of footage in this movie of richard gere walking--often in monochromatic outfits. he just walks and walks--usually along softly lit hallways, but sometimes outside--often with a jacket slung over his shoulder, but sometimes simply with his shirt fairly unbuttoned. if the who were still all around and wished to record a song that they'd pretty much already written for richard gere in american gigolo, i'd recommend, simply, replacing "see" to make the lyric, "i can walk for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles."

here are some of the alternative blog titles i tried before deciding for the relative simplicity of the one i went with:

American Gigolo: richard gere's madame tussaud's statue has gone missing and been found in this movie, walking, talking, and acting kind of

American Gigolo: i pay 8.99 a month to netflix to watch richard gere learn swedish

American Gigolo is American GigolNONONONONO!

American Gigolo: here's hoping that this movie recouped at least the amount spent on the tanning oil required to make the entire caucasian portion of the cast basically the color of malibu barbie and her coterie

American Gigolo, or, richard gere repairs his car

again, i like richard gere. don't feel attacked, rich. and i like jerry bruckheimer too--i guess even he started small. and gross. and pointless. don't see this movie unless you want to get a handle on kind of cool '80's fashions, and then just watch it with the sound off. make up your own script. i guarantee it will be better than the one used by the movie.

cruising: an epic fable about the consequences of homophobia...possibly

Cruising: a film starring al pacino

long before there were weird american remakes of japanese horror films, there was cruising.

seriously, that's the genre i would stick this film into: american j-horror-remake. except, according to wikipedia, it's not a remake of a japanese horror film, which just sort of adds to the inexplicability. what it really reminds me of is cure, an actual j-horror film that i don't think has been remade by americans...yet...in which a dude researches another dude and eventually kind of becomes that dude possibly.

yeah. cruising is like that. except with a lot of leather and a DESPERATELY unhappy-looking al pacino. i was kind of hoping that maybe his character would get serial killed, just to put him out of his misery--serial euthanasia, i guess--but no such luck. he might be the murderer, and then his girlfriend dresses like a killer, and then there's another tugboat shot, and that's the end. huzzah.

as a self-professed fan of asian horror cinema, as well as a fan of bizarre american remakes of asian horror cinema, i can't just write off cruising. i might say that it's an unfortunate amalgam. if the idea is supposed to be that we're all gay and it makes us all killers (because the passing of the hat/glasses/jacket signifier from character to character seems to be pointing toward the universality of whatever said signifier is supposed to represent), then that's just unfortunate period. if the idea is supposed to be that quashing our natural gayness MAKES us killers, that's still maybe not great, because in the end gayness is still the source of the antisocial instinct (it's like, you know, a holiday ad for liquor: "be queer responsibly"). and if the idea is supposed to be that we all kill gay people, then said idea, though possibly...um, quasi-pro-gay, still has gay people as some sort of bizarre scapegoat landscape object as opposed to at the very least an active part of a legitimate binary (not that i'm a major fan of binaries)*. basically, it's the old rko pictures "we are the monster, the monster is us" conceit...except instead of a monster, you have the gay s&m leather scene.

which is, yeah, you know, objectionable. because the gay s&m leather scene should not necessarily be treated like, you know, a robot from the future, or a series of mummies.

but shall we sneer at the unintelligible just because it takes place on objectionable ground? NEVER!! to unintelligibilities! and beyond! i didn't understand what cruising was getting at in the end, and i like that. it isn't like the player, which irritated me with the self-consciously delicate irony of its heavily ironic ending (all the "touches" of in and out jammed into the last seventeen seconds of a medium-boring satire...urgh! urgh!!!). it's genuinely unintelligible, and for this i say, go go cruising! go go!

end judgment: if you see one film this year, don't make it cruising. if you like j-horror and don't mind a slow beginning (cuz, hello, you like j-horror), go ahead and watch it. dare the indeterminate! find your next year's halloween costume! i know i did one of those things!

*and not that this isn't necessarily on purpose on the film's part. the details of the way that the server dude gets treated by the cops (i make no mention of the guy with the hat and the thong--that part was awesome), as well as the fact that what's-his-face whose print matches the coin gets 8 years if he confesses to like 16 murders, and the sanctimonious attitude of mr. sad-clown eyes superior officer, could be argued to be part of the film for the purpose of pointing to the fact that the gay s&m scene IS being used, like a punch press, as the ground on which various issues can work themselves out--"straight man's burden," etc. it's just that, as with the "white man's burden" argument, pointing out the mechanics of its working doesn't in the end make the ground (aka africa, race relations in africa, africans' rights, etc. [note the "etc."; that's exactly what i'm talking about]) on which it plays out any less commodified. the movie may say, "hey, look how we're commodifying this queer ground, on which various political, psychological, and physical issues from OUR straight world are getting played out--" but it doesn't do much to make said queer ground any less of a commodity. i guess maybe it gives us the redhead neighbor man. yeah, thanks, cruising.