There's a basic problem with The Walking Dead: its premise allows a lot of leeway for being awful.

The average episode goes something like this: some personal story is set up with stilted dialogue, then zombies, then another 40 minutes of poorly written and poorly paced plot development happens, then a short zombie scene, another scene where the characters attempt to feign personalities, and then some zombies, explosions, or exploding zombies.  

Is there an overarching point to this? Not yet. The living walk, and so do the dead, and periodically something happens to someone where they get hurt or something. We're now in the middle of an interminable plotline where a dude is hurt and a kid is hurt, and - of course - there's a cool setup where zombies are threatening a couple of other people.

The way I measure an episode of Dead is whether I'd watch it if you took out the zombie attacks. I'd watch an episode of The Wire where all they did was sit around and talk about stuff, because the characters on that show just talking about stuff was fascinating. Same for Breaking Bad. Same for a half dozen other shows that could use recurring plot themes as a safety net, but are (usually) well-developed enough to avoid that pitfall.  Breaking Bad could get by if it consisted of fifty minutes of waiting for Walt to use chemistry to get out of a jam followed by ten minutes of Walt using said chemistry to get out of said jam.  

But then it would just be a procedural drama on CBS.

Zombies are The Walking Dead​'s version of Urkel. You wait until they show up, you're mildly entertained, and then you patiently sit there waiting until they either show up again or you realize you're too old for this shit. Right now, I'm still nine years old, and still waiting to hear a "did I do that?" before I turn off the set and go to bed happy.  Except now it sounds more like a thousand guttural moans periodically interrupted by gunshots. 

That would have been the best ending to Family Matters imaginable.  Oh, to dream...

Spoilers.

So, a review of "X-Men: First Class".  Well, it wasn't nearly as good I'd been led to believe from some of the raves I read online.  I think people are so desperate for a superhero movie that actually goes beneath the surface and struggles with some larger themes that they graded this one on a curve.  But this movie had a number of major flaws that were really distracting:

1) While the lead actors were really good, the supporting cast had some distracting clunkers in it, especially January Jones.  I fail to understand casting bad actors in a movie, seriously.  There are thousands of people who want a break who are better than some of these actors. Cast one of them.  What's stopping you?  Laziness, I assume.

2) The script was really uneven.  There were a number of great parts in it, but there were an equal number of head-thumpingly stupid moments.  Some really atrocious lines, and the whole scene where the X-Men are naming themselves needed to be cut, burned, and never spoken of again.  

3) This is minor in the grand scheme of things, but was to me really indicative of how lazy this entire enterprise was.  The costuming in this movie was unforgivable, especially since they were clearly trying to borrow some of the glory of "Mad Men" and the cultural fascination with the early 60s.  As I joked on Twitter, the miniskirt was invented in 1965, but the costume department for this movie seemed to think all women in 1962 were wearing them.  It's not that I object to miniskirts.  That's just one of the most obvious problems.  Mostly the suits men were wearing and other outfits looked generic and modern, and not like the 60s at all.  This is supposed to be a stylized film.  I fail to understand why not just hire the costume designer from "Mad Men" and pay her whatever she wants.  Ditto on the hair, though the make-up was fine. 

I think in a lot of ways it was more disappointing because there was a good movie buried inside this one.  We joked afterwards that "Magneto: Nazi Hunter" would have been an awesome movie, for instance.  I don't really mind the Cuban missile crisis as a backdrop, and the action sequence where they captured the submarine was sublime.  There were lots of instances, in fact, where I just longed for the movie to live up to its potential---the bar scene in Argentina, the joke about the White Queen projecting sexual fantasies so that men believed they were real, things like that.  Above all, I really dug the underlying idea of the movie.  At the end, there is no resolution between Xavier and Magneto, and if anything, the thumb was on the scale for Magneto and his crew of badasses, while Xavier was left with the dorky white dude brigade.  Which is how it should be; audiences should be forced to take Magneto's arguments more seriously than they were asked in the previous X-Men movies, where Magneto was a purer villain and his mutant army seemed like a bunch of whiners because they were skeptical that assimilation was an effective strategy. 

In fact, I suspect there's a draft of the movie that's  much better out there, but that the studio system chewed it up and put demands on the script such as "more time with the younger mutants".  There's a lot of good in the script, especially in terms of characterizing Xavier as an overprivileged twit who can't really understand what it's like to really be oppressed, and in terms of how Magneto's status as a Holocaust survivor and an orphan makes him feel excluded from normal people to begin with.  I can definitely see why people liked it more than I did; they concentrated on the good and ignored the bad.  But I really think that audiences should demand more.  These characters clearly mean a lot to people, and the amount of money spent on these movies should buy, at bare minimum, a clunker-free script, good costumes and set design, and good acting.  I know that it's possible---"Iron Man", the first one, was put together brilliantly, even though it was fluffy on its themes compared to "X-Men".  What we need is a superhero movie that weds the deeper themes of this movie with the level of storytelling skill that was in play in "Iron Man". 

I needed to see something brainless this weekend, and what better than Battle: LA, this year’s official celebration of 1996’s Independence Day?  Yes, it’s been fifteen years since Jeff Goldblum and a newly updated copy of Mac OS 7 saved the planet.

You’ve seen this movie before: aliens invade for some reason; brave Americans rise up and blow the motherfuckers to alien hell.  The movie manages to address some of the nagging problems of this genre, to its credit.  For instance, the multiracial squad of intrepid people, although led by a handsome white dude, contains multiple Negroes and Latinos, and at least one Asian.  And not a one of them is a former gang banger, which is awesome.  The aliens also have armor or uniforms of some sort, which solves the continuing issue of alien nudists massing up to show off their junk to a world most unwilling to view it.

The great part about the movie is that it manages to avoid the offensive stereotyping of most of its characters.  The bad part is that it does it by giving them all such shitty, bland dialogue that you almost wish the token female soldier (Michelle Rodriguez, playing the same character she always does, but in uniform) would start talking about how she just wants to have babies.  The film’s bold choice to provide virtually no differentiation between its characters also seems less wise once they start dying.  You realize that once you strap a helmet on these people and start dousing them in grime, there’s absolutely no way to figure out who’s doing what and when; when someone gets shot, it’s just one less gun firing.  One of the characters is a virgin.  I have no idea if he survived or not.  There was another one who was afraid of the battlefield or something.  I think he died, but he might also have lived.  The Asian guy definitely died somewhere in there, but I lost track.  Michelle Rodriguez lives, but that’s mainly because Hollywood remains convinced she’s a bankable star. 

I struggled to find a way that Battle: LA related to modern political debates.  (This is where the spoilers begin, below the jump.)

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Spoilers, I’m sure.

I’m not surprised that “Little Fockers” outdid “True Grit” in box office receipts, but unlike many bemoaning this, I’m fairly certain that isn’t a final indictment on our national inability to have any taste whatsoever.  After all, we did, as a nation, embrace “Fargo”, which is the movie most like “True Grit” in both character and plot.  I believe the main reason that “Little Fockers” did better is that people go to the movies for one reason above all others around the Christmas holiday, which is that if they have to spend one more moment in the house with their families, trying to entertain each other, they will lose their minds.  So they want to go to the movie, but they have to bring the whole family, and if that includes little kids and overly sensitive family members, you’re going to go for pablum you know will suck over a movie that has “probably has sex/discomforting violence” written all over it.  And that’s “True Grit”, which, true to Coen brothers history, is heavy on the violence but doesn’t actually have much in the way of sex in it. Which is good, due to the fact that the main character is a 14-year-old girl. 

By the way, have I mentioned that this is quite the feminist film?  It even passes the Bechdel test, though it takes place in a world where women are extremely marginalized, and part of the movie rests on exploring the marginalization of women in this world.  (It passes it in discussions between main character Mattie and a woman who runs a boarding house—-their conversations are strictly about another woman and some dead bodies.)  The main character is Mattie Ross, who is a cross between Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz” and Marge from “Fargo”—-intelligent, calm, thorough, but with a real curiosity and desire for adventure.

This movie also interrogates masculinity in a way that’s increasingly trendy in Hollywood, with shows like “Mad Men” and movies like “The Social Network”, but it does all that and puts an interesting female character at the center of it.  They prove it can be done!

Indeed, I’d say the movie is, above all other things, an exploration of how the breakdown of civilization works for women whose talents and ambitions are far greater than patriarchy ever allows for women to express.  On the surface, Mattie’s world is one of severe repression of women, a world where women are basically sex objects and workhorses, but not seen as real human beings.  Matt Damon’s character, the Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf, works to show exactly how little room women could be given.  He can’t put her in the “sex object” category because of her youth and her unwillingness to entertain him, and so he puts her into the “unruly woman who needs to be put in her place” category, but that ends up not working out very well for him, either.  Because once they go into the Indian territory, outside of the reach of traditional Western civilization, the usual rules are suspended.  And that includes the rule where any man outranks and has the right to control any woman.  That’s why this movie is part “Fargo”—-because it’s built around a woman seeking a murder to bring him to justice—-and part “Wizard of Oz”.  The usual restraints on a young teenage girl don’t count anymore in this world beyond the reach of the social order she’s used to.  Mattie is riot grrrl 130 years ahead of her time.

In case the feminist themes of this movie weren’t obvious from the get-go, there’s actually a parody of the spanking scene in “McLintock”.  The original “True Grit” was a John Wayne movie, of course, but this movie is more interested in interrogating and parodying the John Wayne-type image of masculinity than it is reinstating the myth. The idea of spanking women to control them was a reoccurring theme in the 50s and 60s, and it was pretty much played for comedy and titillation every time.  In this movie, it’s horrifying and completely unfair—-it’s clear that LaBoeuf is spanking Mattie because he can’t best her intellectually or sexually, and so he’s been reduced to trying to beat her physically.  He’s a fool and a coward, in other words.  Rooster, played by Jeff Bridges, respects Mattie and echoes our anger and annoyance at anyone who can’t see this young woman as the respect-deserving person she is.

Overall, the film is unbelievably well-made.  Well, believable because this is the Coen brothers and this is basically their favorite theme, which is a misfit or a band of misfits on a journey of discovery.  It’s the plot of “Fargo”, “O Brother Where Art Thou”, “Raising Arizona”, “The Big Lebowski”, and “No Country For Old Men”, and probably a bunch others I’m not thinking of right now.  They tell the same story over and over, and it’s always interesting and fresh.  Sometimes it’s broad comedy and sometimes it’s very serious, and I think it works better as comedy.  But since they’ve told this one story over and over, the pacing of it is absolutely perfect.  I can’t even say why I always am willing to go along on the ride, since I know that there will be two major revelations by the end of it: 1) The world is a dark, violent place where brutality is absurdly common and sense can never be made of it and 2) Yet, there are good people who live nobly despite understanding the brutality of life, and therein lies hope.  The coda to “Raising Arizona”, I’ve said many a time, basically makes explicit this overriding theme of the Coen brothers’ work. 

Maybe it’s because this theme matters more than any other.  It’s one of the greatest themes of life and literature. But it’s almost never told well.  It’s either too dark and depressing and hopeless, or it’s too sappy and unconvincing. They always strike a balance, probably by making the quietly noble characters very quiet and humble indeed, with the most extreme example being The Dude, who is a broke motherfucker with literally no ambition greater than bowling well.  They celebrate the zen of quiet living, the nobility of the common man, in a way that almost no one else does.  But they also tweak who the hero is in every film, which is how they keep it interesting.  In this film, the hero character is a steely 14-year-old girl, and that adds an intriguing new wrinkle.  Plus, it’s hilarious and endlessly entertaining, so go see it.  Even if you have to leave the overly sensitive and the little kids behind to do so.

I’ve been holding off on talking about “The Walking Dead” until after the season finale, because it’s a somewhat slow-moving show and I think it needs to be assessed in a bigger chunk than one episode at a time.  Also, I feel like they got off to a shaky start in some respects—-Adam is right that the cartoonishly racist Merle character was a misfire, and one that tends to reinforce the narrative that it can’t be racist if you fall short of donning white hoods—-but on the whole, I think it holds together well.  (They did the same thing with sexism, by taking a genuinely interesting look at sexism in the camp and then making it way over the top by introducing a man who beats his wife in front of others, which is super rare in the real world. Not the beating of women—-that’s common—-but the letting others know about it.)  As regular readers may know, I’ve read the comic book series the show is based on and have my criticisms just on a suspension of disbelief level. That said, my favorite aspect of the comics is that they are genuinely scary, something that should be a baseline for anything deemed “horror”. 

But there are a lot of things I don’t like about the comic that the TV show has been busy correcting.  One is the strong libertarian streak that leads to a poor understanding of human nature.  For instance, one of the most irritating aspects of the comic book was that the whole Rick vs. Shane thing had more than a glint of Nice Gy® logic to it—-because Rick is the hero and his wife Lori slept with Shane, then that must mean that Shane is a horrible person and was always a horrible person.  It didn’t even seem to occur to Kirkman that for this to be true, Lori would basically have to be the kind of woman not worth being married to in the first place.  A more interesting and realistic story would be that Shane and Lori both had much love for Rick, and when they thought Rick was dead, they fell in together, because presumably they were already friendly and have a lot in common.  And voila!  That’s exactly how the show decided to roll with it, and it’s been far more interesting for it.  Now it’s about Shane falling apart under the various stresses he’s under, which is more interesting that the “turn your back and your stupid wife sleeps with an asshole because women are weak and needy” narrative of the comics.

In fact, before things degraded into an too on-the-nose wife-beating scene, there was an interesting rewrite of the sexism of the books, at least early in the books.  In the books, the women complain a little about being shoved off into traditional gender roles of washing and waiting on men, but then cheerfully accept the strange notion that feminism is a luxury of civilization.  (To be fair, the books do get away from this, as I believe Kirkman realized that you can’t exempt half the human race from his notion that people discover new sides of themselves in emergency situations.)  On the show, there’s no indication that the women accept this.  So that was another example of how the TV show gets human nature much better than the books. 

The one thing the show does that the books did that makes me irate is it makes supply-gathering an ongoing problem.  I’m sorry, but the entire area around Atlanta is filled to the brim with rural and suburban areas that would be less zombie-clogged than the city and far more full of supplies that you could ransack until the end of time.  Including guns.  It’s Georgia.  Don’t tell me you couldn’t arm yourself to the teeth in under an hour if you had the ability to ransack any sporting goods store you came across. 

As for the finale, I agree that it was a dramatic shift away from everything that’s gone on, but I feel better about it than the Onion AV Club did.  They’re right that it didn’t feel like a season finale, but more like a mid-season break.  In a sense, that’s what it is—-they’ve only had 6 episodes, which is really only enough time to get the characters to make their first big move, which is what happened.  I was a little annoyed at how the characters aggressively questioned Dr. Jenner, which was only done to raise tensions in what was basically a big exposition scene.  I believe people in that situation would be grateful and conciliatory, especially towards a government official who is the last person they’ll probably ever see who still has some semblance of official authority behind him.  Nor should the director have feared that the audience would tune out during this long exposition.  I’m actually grateful that it was done early on—-if you have to do it, get it out of the way so the actual story can continue.  None of this “Battlestar Galactica” crap, where you wait until the end. 

All in all, I think this is a pretty interesting take on the zombie genre.  The problem with zombie movies is that the genre really does demand more of a slow burn, which is why George Romero kept being able to return to that well.  So even with all its flaws, I’m addicted to “The Walking Dead”.  What do you think?  Have you been watching?

With Election Day drawing near, it’s probably a good time for a solid reminder of exactly how scary the agenda being pushed by the Republican party is.  And I have just the book for that, Jeff Sharlet’s follow-up to his bestseller The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power called C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.  While The Family, often called The Fellowship, is sort of bipartisan, it is more in name than in practice.  For instance, Democrat Bart Stupak was a resident at the C Street house owned by The Family, and he was clearly doing the hardcore social conservative bidding of his Republican fellows in the house, especially Joseph Pitts, who was really the author of the Stupak-Pitts amendment that has been such a disaster for abortion access in this country.

On the podcast this week, I interviewed Jeff, and I highly recommend checking it out. His first book ended up getting him on TV a lot, but it was almost solely because so many members of The Family got tangled up in sex scandals involving their own adulteries.  In the book, he expresses frustration that it’s this and not their political machinations that got so much attention, so I asked him about it on the interview.  His answer is great; check it out. 

This election season, the narrative has all been about how those nutty Tea Party types are throwing mainstream Republicans out and taking over the party.  What has largely gone undiscussed is how the mainstream Republican party has been controlled by the nuts for a long time.  They’re just more genteel, more elitist nuts, but they’re just as fundamentalist.  In a lot of ways, they’re even worse, because their “religion” is adaptable to their needs in ways that would make even the most O’Donnell-like hypocritical goober blush.  The way they coddle each other’s adulteries while pushing a kind of “family values” that is, naturally, about as misogynist as you get is just the tip of this. It’s the way they blatantly bend their beliefs to justify their naked power-mongering that I found most alarming.  For instance, Jeff found that they bring Muslims into the fold, so long as said Muslims have power and resources they wish to exploit.  Even though The Family consider their fellowship to be all about Christianity, they justify this by calling the Muslim fellows “followers of Jesus”.  It’s all just a gloss of religious faith on the reality of what they’re up to, which is creating an extra-governmental, worldwide power brokering alliance, one that’s in service of creating iron fist theocratic powers that just so happen to have lots of natural resources to exploit for their own personal gain. 

A recent example of this is The Family’s interest in Uganda, where members of their fellowship have worked to pass harsh anti-homosexuality laws that would result in the death penalty for anyone caught being a “serial offender”, i.e. someone who has sex twice with someone of their same gender.  You can read about some of that from Jeff in Harper’s.

Spoilers.

Fun with juxtapositions: Guess what I was doing right before I left the house to go see “The Social Network”?  I was reading about the Duke University woman who gained instant infamy by having a private joke about her sex life leaked onto the internet. I was struck by how overt the double standard was in this case; young men use bragging about conquests (with often way more derogatory commentary about their partners) as a way to score points with friends all the time.  I’m sure many elaborately document it for these purposes.  But they don’t get dragged on TV to apologize.

Then I go to see “The Social Network”, and the opening scene is an apparently true-to-life story of Mark Zuckerberg blogging horrible things about a woman because she dumped him, and his creating of Facemash, which was a “hot or not” kind of site that got him in some trouble with the school board.  Marc and I were annoyed as fuck at the idea that 22,000 hits would crash all of Harvard’s servers, which is a) ridiculous and b) turns out that it never happened.  But that Sorkin and Fincher decided to tack that on points to what I think the movie was trying to say about this incident.  In the movie, unlike real life, the focus in his disciplinary hearings was on the fact that he breached Harvard security and crashed Harvard servers.  He isn’t punished in any way for making misogynist sport out of his fellow students, even though this is objectively the worst thing that he did. 

I was already thinking about double standards, and subsequently I was intrigued by the juxtaposition.  Owen creates an intentionally private joke about her sex life that implicates no one but the direct parties involved, and she’s publicly shamed.  In this scene, we see a man do something much worse—-publicly humiliating a woman for dumping him and taking his anger out on basically all women—-and he ends up becoming a billionaire. 

There’s all sorts of caveats you can attach to this, of course.  The Zuckerberg thing is fictionalized and his financial success was built on something else entirely.  But it was still one that made obvious to me what I think was subtle to a lot of people in the audience, which is that the filmmakers are pointing you in a direction of being appalled that Zuckerberg got away with treating women so shabbily.

There’s a tendency for smart people to watch TV shows and movies, ignore the thoughts that are inspired in us, and instead focus on what we believe the lowest common denominator is getting from a film.  And then we hold the filmmakers accountable for the way we believe the lowest common denominator would react instead of thinking that perhaps our reactions were the point.  I think “The Social Network” has definitely created this problem, especially when it comes to women’s role in all this.  In the movie, smart, capable women are pushed to the sidelines and the main characters—-the various men who created and fought over the ownership of Facebook—-surround themselves with bimbos. And this is aggressively portrayed; at one point, two women in the room ask if they can help on a Facebook-related project, and they’re told they have nothing to contribute (insinuation: you are here to provide orgasms and shut up).  This was the contradictory reactions that arose in me:

My honest feeling about this: “This makes these guys look like assholes and nimrods.  They try a little too hard to prove that they’re Real Men, and in doing so, they deliberately use women as props.  There are a lot of men actually like this in the world, and a lot of media aimed at glamorizing a world where genuinely relating to women is treated as emasculating.  But watching these characters, I feel like they’re pathetic because they can’t actually cope with women who do anything but play the bimbo role.” 

My attempt at reading what the lowest common denominator thinks: “Cool. I wish hot bitches would just shut up and fuck me, too.” 

You often see people who make the mistake of arguing that portraying equals endorsing, which means that they disregard the discomfort they feel when, say, misogyny is portrayed onscreen.  They assume straightaway that their discomfort is wholly theirs, and that the filmmakers didn’t intend to provoke their discomfort. I’ve even made this assumption myself, and have to watch for it. You even see this interpretation when it comes to something like “Mad Men”, where it couldn’t be more obvious that they’re hoping you suck your teeth when the characters do something really sexist or racist.  And when it comes to “The Social Network”, I’m seeing a lot of people assume that the filmmakers had no intention whatsoever of making you question the misogyny they portray onscreen.  The evidence for this is a lack of Strong Female Characters that are central to the story.

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Spoilers.

Scott Pilgrim!  Yes, I saw it.  I’ve already engaged in some media about it, by being a guest on Overthinking It, where I contributed by being the person who’d had the opportunity to read all the way through book 6 of the series.  But I thought I’d go ahead and post on it, because I want to expand on my sadly cliched opinion that the books were ultimately more satisfying.  I really, really liked the movie.  It was entertaining as fuck, and perfectly pitched to people like me.  As we discuss on the podcast, the movie is supposed to take place in present times—-the technology and a couple of cultural touchstones indicate that—-but the fashion, attitudes, and majority of cultural references had a 90s era feel to them.  Scott even wears a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt.  In this, they’re basically like the books, and that makes sense, because the writer Bryan Lee O’Malley is playing with the idea of past and memory, so it feels right to invoke the era when people our age (he’s two years younger than me) were actually the ages of the people in the book. Between that, the video game stuff, and the loving rendering of the indie rock scene, this movie was bound to be exactly as fun as it is for someone my age.  I don’t know if it has much appeal beyond that, which is why I think the box office wasn’t as great as it should have been.  Too bad, because it really is a funny movie.

But I really hope people read the books, because there’s a depth to them that simply wasn’t in the movie.  I ran into Sarah Jaffe last night, and she put her finger on exactly why, noting that they basically had to save time in the movie by writing out Ramona’s character. I mean, she’s still there and she’s still cool, but the entire story line in the book where Ramona has to struggle with her past and get over it isn’t really in the movie.  The many layers of Ramona are just lifted out of the story.  Scott is also rewritten somewhat to fit a more standard Hollywood narrative where the meek guy gains courage.  In the books, Scott is never what I’d call meek.  His journey is more that of a self-centered guy who has to stop thinking of himself in black-and-white heroic terms, and choose instead to be a human being.  The books are hilarious and clever, but ultimately they’re a meditation about the nature of love and the past and what it takes to go forward and take the leap of faith that is committing to love after you’ve had your fuck-ups.  And for that, the more in-depth portrayal of female characters like Ramona and yes, Knives and Envy is a critical element. 

Mike Barthel at Awl really dug into this issue, making similar observations about how the movie simply doesn’t have time to flesh out the female characters, much less pass the Bechdel test.  Which isn’t to accuse the movie of sexism!  Like Michelle notes, it’s actually a really refreshing film in that the female characters behave like actual human beings.  They have actual personalities that are theirs and not some manifestation of some generic Hollywood assumptions about femaleness.  Even as Ramona is holding down the spot of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she’s really not, since she doesn’t have MPDG mandatory traits like being all-forgiving and accepting of the hero or being unattached to reality.  (She even has a job that she’s uniquely suited to perform!)  It’s hard to blame the movie for not having the depth of soul of the books because it’s not a function of sexism or bad writing so much as just an issue of time.  Once you work in the seven evil exes and the video games and the battle of the bands and the love triangle, there’s not a whole lot of room to explore the issues the book ends up being most interested in, namely what it means to choose to love someone and to fight for that. 

So, see the movie but please also read the books.  It’s very rare to see romantic love portrayed so honestly and yet without losing any ability to be touching.  In fact, I’d argue that it’s more touching for all its realism.  As one of the podcasters on OTI said, the movie falls into the trap of talking up destiny when it comes to love.  The books are basically the opposite of that—-they’re more interested in choice.  The person who thinks love is about finding The One that you’re destined for and living happily ever after in harmony is a fool, but I do think it’s a widespread kind of foolishness.  Moving forward and being able to choose to be happy is, in the books, a matter of dealing with the past not as something to ignore or as some kind of horrible baggage, but just being what it is.  It shapes us but it isn’t us. 

Plus, it tells this story with more than a little humor and cleverness. 

Spoilers!

We don’t go to the movies as often in New York as we did in Austin for one simple reason: There isn’t an Alamo Drafthouse here.  It’s strange, because I think one would go over really well.  But like competent country-western bands playing in bars or nachos that are assuredly not made with baked beans, we’ve learned to let go with a smile in our hearts, because New York otherwise has so much on offer.  What’s funny is that one thing that New York does have that Austin doesn’t have for most—-a solid 20-30 minute walk home in which to hash out the movie—-was something we did have because we just so happened to live pretty close to the Drafthouse when we lived in Austin.  The measure of a really intriguing movie was that this walk home didn’t feel like enough to hash out the finer points of the film.  I mention this, because it took us about 30 minutes to walk home from “Inception” Friday night, and we spent most of that walking talking about the Christopher Nolan movie we’d wished we’d seen.

Don’t get me wrong; “Inception” was enjoyable, even though you could knock half an hour off to make a more interesting, tighter film.  But Nolan’s trademark ability to leave the audience truly wondering as they leave wasn’t in evidence, and was instead replaced with featherlight hints.  The ending with the top was supposed to be intriguing, but there was really no emotional weight.  The question, “Are you or are you not still in a dream?” left me saying, “Who gives a shit?”  Contrast that to “Memento” or “The Prestige”, where the central questions you’re left with at the end of the film are truly unresolvable and haunting. 

In this movie, there was never a moment of real doubt that the main character’s struggle with Imaginary Wife was about him accepting his loss and moving on with his life, and since we get a big—-admittedly moving—-speech that resolves that question, all the oomph of the ending was taken out.  On the walk home, I decided that this could have easily been rewritten to make it more ambiguous and haunting.  Start with the question of whether or not Mal was right, something that Cobb basically rejects out of hand throughout the movie and, in the end, is shown to have been wrong about.  If Mal was right, then when she threw herself off that building, she would have woken up to find her husband sleeping there.  Is there any doubt that she would have gone back into his dreams to get him?  You could build a movie around this question—-is the Mal he’s seeing flitting around real Mal or projection Mal?  To raise the stakes, have projection Mal trying to kill Cobb (instead of making questionable decisions like merely wreaking havoc for no reason), driving him and the audience to wonder if his subconscious is attacking him out of guilt or if she’s an actual person trying to get her stubborn husband back.  This plot would not have to interfere with the MacGuffin action plot about putting an idea in the businessman’s head.

With this, you can create an ending with way more emotional impact than the one we got.  Because Cobb never really makes a decision, because he never really doubts the existence he’s in.  But what if that wasn’t true?  What if he spent the whole movie doubting and fighting Mal while not knowing if she was real or not?  What if, at the end, he decides that he can never really know, so he decides on the world he knows with the kids but without Mal and not on a potential world with both Mal and the kids?  Instead of a final shot where we’re like, “Ooooooh, what if he’s still in a dream?” because he’s spinning the top, we instead have a final shot of him locking the top in a safe (another image used throughout the movie) to symbolize his resolution to pick this reality, leaving the audience to wonder, “What if his choice was the wrong one?”  Obviously, there would have to be some conversation with Mal that gets this resolved, one where the audience is left to wonder if her acceptance of his choice is simply a projection of his imagination, or his actual wife deciding to give up the fight for her husband and move on.  You could even start the flick off, for maximum pretentiousness, with the quote from Albert Camus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

I realize that you can argue that this choice is in fact made, but it’s made in a marginal way where the audience is left with no doubt, and Mal is left with no chance to make a decision of her own (because we’re to assume she’s dead—-which couldn’t be true if this is a dream world!).  In fact, the struggle between husband and wife has no emotional pull, because it’s not a struggle between two people, but just a man coming to grips with his grief.  There’s no suspense and no intrigue.  Compare that with “The Prestige”, where the struggle between the two main characters is truly epic.  Nolan is very good at creating competitive relationships between men in his movies—-that’s what really matters in “The Dark Knight”—-but pulls away from struggles between men and women.  Is he afraid to paint female characters as having real emotional power?  It seems strange, because he has a lot of feminist instincts otherwise.  Consider, for instance, how Ellen Page’s character never has to go through the “by golly she’s a lady!” ropes.  It’s never mentioned, never assumed unusual, and she’s not saddled with a love interest to excuse her presence to nervous ninnies.  But I fear his intentions to not talk down to or objectify his female characters crashes into a fundamental fear of writing female characters, since they are so few and far between, and the real struggles are often between men.  The MacGuffin storyline, for instance, was about the projection of the dying father, but the struggle between father and son actually provoked suspense.  Who would win?  We never get this between Mal and Cobb; their resolution is easy to figure out the second we know what the struggle is.  At the end, Cobb even articulates it—-she’s easy to conquer, because she’s not even real.  Leonardo di Caprio is a great actor, and moved me when he made this observation.  But upon reflection, I find it annoying. 

Did you see the movie?  What did you think?

You didn’t think I’d leave you hanging, did you?  Not when I’m fairly obsessed with “Mad Men”.  I wrote a piece for Alternet before the premiere with some speculation about season four.  A lot of what I predicted remains to be seen, but my biggest prediction, which is that the season finale of season three hinted at stylistic changes on the show, seems to be panning out.

The finale of season three signaled a shift in the world of “Mad Men.” Viewers have no doubt that when the curtain comes up, the advertising industry players will find themselves living in the nascent days of the Swinging Sixties of our collective imagination: miniskirts, the British Invasion, the birth control pill, desegregation, and of course, the creative explosion in advertising.

(Yes, I’m aware that Peggy got an Enovid prescription in 1960, but at the time, that would have been off-label use. By late 1964, though, millions of married women and even some single women were switching to the pill.) 

As I predicted, the energy of the show went up a couple of notches, as did the height of women’s hair.  Matt Zoller Seitz noted that along with the faster pacing of the show, the characters speak to each other more forcefully and with a bluntness that they didn’t have before.  This doesn’t strike me as accidental; Weiner is trying to suggest that the changeover from the 50s mentality to the 60s mentality brought with it this energy, freedom, and frankness.  The last scene, where Don decides to drop the mystery man act and instead portray himself as a brazen, exciting guy who is a bit of an asshole, reinforces how much this is all intentional.  The meditative “Mad Men” may be over, replaced with a faster-paced show that reflects the faster pace of the time the show is set in. 

GD wrote about the season premiere at Ta-Nehisi’s place, and an interesting debate broke out in comments about Don Draper’s tantrum with the Jantzen people.  Was it a sincere moment of overwhelming anger, or did Don plan for it after the Advertising Age article made him realize he needed to remake his public image?  Answering that question struck me as the linchpin of the episode.  On one hand, we’ve seen sparks of Don’s temper before, such as when he yelled at Rachel Mencken in the series premiere, or when he stomped out of a meeting with the new British owners.  In most cases, his temper tantrums actually resulted in him getting his way, either immediately (as with the Brits) or after he smoothed things over (as with Rachel).  But all this is just more reason I think that Don may have planned this bigger, more explosive temper tantrum.  After all, his previous tantrums weren’t nearly as over the top, and he rarely ended them with a delighted instruction to a secretary to capitalize on what just happened.  Last season, Don spent months bowing and scrapping to Conrad Hilton, and he got shit for it.  He’s realizing this is a new era, where the advertisers are going to be the stars and the clients are going to line up to be a part of it all.  So he staged the temper tantrum, and attacked clients that we know for a fact are having meetings with every advertising firm in town.  In other words, he made sure that when he exploded, he did so in a way that the news would spread all over town in minutes.

But what is really telling is something that a commenter at Ta-Nehisi’s blog pointed out—-the B plot is all about feigning conflict to get attention.  Don scolds Peggy for the Sugarberry ham stunt, but just a couple scenes later he’s pulling a similar stunt in order to attract attention to the firm.  Of course, the actresses who got into the ham fight really did end up having a fight, and I suspect that’s because we’re meant to assume that Don is going to start inhabiting this new role he’s created for himself just as thoroughly.  But as a stunt, it will work.  There will be fallout, but the primary objective of drumming up business will be achieved. 

I had mixed feelings about Don’s conclusion that he should create and trumpet conflict, and use gossip as a marketing tool.  On one hand, it was delightful to see him get his mojo back after what had obviously been a trying year for him.  On the other hand, we were also witnessing a fictionalized version of the creation of the celebrity-centric culture that has grown particularly tawdry in recent years.  In Don’s glowing account of the way they got away from Sterling Cooper, I could hear the end game of that kind of journalism, which is a nation of assholes enjoying Lindsay Lohan’s personal crisis, as if she’s not a human being who deserve sympathy instead of abuse.  I heard an impeachment trial over an adultery.  But perhaps I’m overthinking it.  The era of holding your cards so close to your chest didn’t do much for people’s well-being.  The benefits of a culture based around individual stories and even gossip have been profound, as well—-the second wave of feminism was able to ride the use of personal stories documenting sexism straight to massive social and policy change for women.  The high note of rock music as the episode went out was there to encourage us to view this new personability with enthusiasm; we’re meant to feel its liberating effects.

I can’t decide if I hate Drake or not.  But Zach Baron at the Village Voice has decided that I probably do, and that I’m wrong about it.

Drake pushes the unconsciously rockist button inside critics—the one that puts an emphasis on authenticity, struggle, and unpolished talent. As Weiner quotes Jay-Z as saying about Kanye: “We all grew up street guys who had to do whatever we had to do to get by. Then there’s Kanye, who to my knowledge has never hustled a day in his life. I didn’t see how it could work.” Neither do a lot of rap fans, who hear a lot of ungrateful talk about the good life and are appalled that someone so lucky could be so ungracious about the whole thing.

Plus Drake’s signature style—he’s a better singer than a rapper, probably, and he does the former as much or more as the latter—signals an old-fashioned showman’s ability (the fact that he was a successful teenage actor doesn’t help with this impression) that jibes real badly with rap values that privilege the raw, the untrained, and the spontaneous (see also: the hue and cry that arose after Drake “freestyled” a verse he cribbed off of his Blackberry). Thus the Clipse can rap with the same singleminded fixation about selling coke that Drake applies to the vagaries of fame, and be lauded by the same audience that criticizes Drake for having only one subject.

Baron is wrong, for one critical reason.  I’d say that easily the majority of Drake’s music is about how much being famous sucks.  Or how being famous changes his relationships, or him.  Or just about being famous and the weird things that happen that he doesn’t know how to handle.  And the very reason we know what he thinks, in depth, about fame is because he keeps making songs about it that make him more famous.

Hip hop has become increasingly more meta in the past decade - it’s rare that you pick up an album any more that doesn’t contain at least a dozen references to how much the album’s going to sell, or all the things the artist can afford because they released the album.  It’s a frustratingly vapid form of expression, like reading a quarterly report about how fucking awesome your quarterly reports are.  Drake has tipped the balance in a lot of ways, choosing from his inception to make a mixtape about how nobody believed that he could make music, a bunch of singles about how great his mixtape was and how weird it was to be famous off of his mixtape, and finally, an album about how all of that made him so famous that it’s no longer really desirable.  It’s a short and clear causal chain that makes you realize he wouldn’t have to make whiny music about how hard his life is if he just stopped making whiny music about how hard his life is.

There’s also the simple problem that, as evidence by the above video, Drake’s just…not that good.  The fascinating thing about his rise to fame is that every person he surrounds himself with, from the Young Money collaborative to his various guest artists, is more talented and more inventive than he is.  Drake’s staccato, sometimes near-monotone raps combined with his soft, breathy singing don’t exactly set the world on fire; his major innovation is the non-simile simile punchline rap (described at We Eat So Many Shrimp).  An example:

Makin’ sure the Young Money ship is never sinkin’
‘Bout to set it off, set it off, Jada Pinkett

You see, Jada Pinkett was in the movie Set it Off.  So by referencing her, you understand that he’s referencing both the movie and his activity as a rapper.  And by removing the word “like”, he saved literally a syllable that can be used in later lyrics.

You too fine to be layin’ down in bed alone
I could teach you how to speak my language, Rosetta Stone

No, you aren’t a Rosetta Stone, he’ll teach you how to speak like he’s using Rosetta Stone!  I know, I know.

At the end of the day, what Drake does is take what’s wrong with hip-hop, distill it down to an often-bland style over acceptable to good beats, and leave the listener with the question of why he does something that so often seems to be a terribly painful struggle for him.  Unlike the Clipse, who have a similar single-minded topicality, Drake doesn’t seem to be working toward anything (at the very least, your average hustler artist has a narrative arc that’s clear, if trite: I sold drugs, I found music, now I make music about selling drugs, ha ha motherfuckers); he’s achieved what he set out to achieve, and now just needs to constantly vent about it in order to maintain whatever precarious status quo of fortune and fame he finds himself in. 

The compelling part about the marked mediocrity of a man who has a lot of money and sex is the ballsy hypocrisy of his making money off of bitching about it ad nauseum, but eventually, that will disappear, Houdini.  And then he’ll be left with a lot of shitty albums and people’s vague memory of his former fame, 311.

Spoilers.

So, I cracked and went to go see “Get Him To The Greek”, even though I was like one of the few people out there who didn’t really like “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”, and roughly the same group of people made both movies.  What can I say?  Movies from the Apatow factory often annoy me in major ways, but they’re usually pretty funny, and I needed a hearty laugh.  Which I naturally got.  But I have to say, out of pretty much the entire Apatow factory of films, this one ranks with “Superbad” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” in terms of actually being a pretty good movie as well as just a laugh factory.  Not that it isn’t without its flaws, but I have to say I really liked it.

And it was a gazillion times better than “The Hangover”, while mining the same Lost Weekend theme.  The drug humor was suitably surreal, and the sex jokes were genuinely raunchy, instead of just being misogyny disguised as raunch.  It helps that the two movies come from different worlds.  The characters in “The Hangover” are douchebags, and it’s hard to care what a bunch of overgrown frat boy douchebags do.  But this movie is about a sweet A&R guy, his girlfriend the doctor, and a drug addict rock star.  By default, these are more interesting people than the douchebags in “The Hangover”—-say what you will about A&R folks, but at least they, you know, like music. 

This movie is probably way funnier to people who care about the music industry.  If you’re really indifferent to it, or don’t know much about it, some of the best bits won’t matter to you.  But for me, this movie worked so well because they actually bothered to dig in a little with the satire of pop music and the failing record industry that backs it.  For instance, they drew heavily on Lily Allen when crafting the character who is the focus of the rock star Aldous’s attentions.  (They actually bothered to write entertaining, funny songs for the movie, and one of hers drew one of the biggest laughs.)  Aldous reminded me of Courtney Love more than anything, but I’m sure there’s more than one male rock star on the wane who has decided to replace not sucking with an enormous pile of drugs.  Russell Brand plays the character to a hilt—-I can’t say I’ve ever seen such a hilariously accurate portrait of a egomonster rock star.  Sorry, “Almost Famous”.  Casting Sean Combs as the head of the record label was a stroke of genius, too.  Many of the best jokes in the movie are basically are cracks on pop music, from over-earnest “saving the world” songs to the fucked up way that tabloid media and the industry encourage the talent to engage in self-destructive behaviors. 

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You asked, and so I’ll answer.  We saw “Iron Man 2” last night, and the universal opinion was, “Holy cow, did that suck shit-covered maggot balls.”  Or something to that effect.  If you can make Robert Downey bore me, then you must really suck.

Part of the problem was that even though everyone in my group went in with lowered expectations, we did take the time to watch the first movie before we went.  And boy, what a gap!  The first sparkled with wit, and even made sense!  It had clever little satirical jabs at the military-industrial complex.  “Iron Man 2”, on the other hand, had stupid jokes and seemed to back the idea that a privatized military would be preferable to one under the control of douchey politicians.  (Even though Tony Stark gets drunk and runs the risk of killing people by goofing off in his suit.)  The romance was tacked on, the acting was mostly tedious, and did I mention the jokes weren’t funny?  The only thing that woke the audience up was Scarlet Johansson kicking ass for a short (and genuinely funny) scene, and that was about it.  Robert Downey Jr. did his best, but there just wasn’t anything to work with.  It was a muddled, stupid mess. 

But one good thing came out of it.  Our pre-movie movie-watching was hosted by Darcy James Argue, who mixes fancy cocktails with the best of them.  To honor the occasion, I decided to make an Iron Man mixtape, on the grounds that pop music has a lot to say about the major themes of Iron Man: drinking, being rich, being all science-y and smart, and the military-industrial complex.  So check out the song list:

1) “Iron Man” by Stereolab
2) “The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism” by The New Pornographers
3) “Atomic Dog” by George Clinton (honoring both the atomic age goofiness of Iron Man, and Tony Stark’s doggy ways)
4) “Don’t Come Home A-Drinking” by Loretta Lynn
5) “He’s Got The Power” by The Exciters
6) “Wargasm” by L7
7) “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems” by the Notorious B.I.G.
8) “Summer Wine” by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood
9) “Billionaire” by Peaches
10) “Ohio” by Devo (cover of the protest song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
11) “Baptize Me In Wine” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
12) “The Sounds of Science” by the Beastie Boys
13) “Money” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings
14) “Chemical Warfare” by The Dead Kennedys
15) “Genius of Love” by The Tom Tom Club
16) “Robot Rock” by Daft Punk (which is the only song I heard pop up in the movie)
17) “Free Money” by Patti Smith

Videos below the fold.  What songs would you put on an Iron Man mix?

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There were two things I knew coming out of the movie “Kick-Ass”: that I loved it, and that it was going to be one of those movies that really divides people.  Do not see it if ultra-violence pisses you off.  Do not see this movie if little girls with foul mouths piss you off.  I’d say don’t see this movie if Nicholas Cage pisses you off, except he usually pisses me off, but he was perfect in this movie. 

But if all these things merely make you uncomfortable, but you can see why they’re entertaining, see this movie.  It’s perfect for you.  It treads the line between entertaining the fuck out of you with the off-the-hook violence, and making you question how fucked up it is to enjoy these things. 

Hand-wringing over Chloë Grace Moretz, who looks not a minute over 11 years old in this movie, cursing and slicing motherfuckers up has a tendency to miss the point of this movie.  Are we supposed to root for this little girl and her deadly march through a drug kingpin’s organization, or drop our jaws in horror at the idea of turning a child in to an unstoppable killing machine?  The answer I got, and it seemed most of the audience got, was this: Both.  (As he stood in the hallway as the movie let out, Marc heard many variations from fellow audience members of this: “That was awesome, but fucked up.”)  Most superhero movies cannot handle complexity in the slightest, but this movie deftly managed to convey that it was fucked up to make this little girl a killing machine, but now that she is what she is, it’s hard not to root for her victory.  This movie both relished the opportunity to engage in some ultraviolence, and portray vigilantism in a negative light. 

Above all, the movie satirized the long-standing superheroes trope of minimizing the violence.  Superheroes are supposed to be vigilantes, but in order to take the edge off the darker implications of that and to remain “family friendly”, the stories have always kept the actual murdering to a minimum.  And the character of Kick-Ass stands in for that—-even though he doesn’t have any super powers (in this universe, no one does), he decides to fight crime while carrying non-lethal weapons.  And in contrast to Hit Girl (the real star of the show) and Big Daddy, he’s an inept loser.  But while effective, they are morally depraved individuals who enjoy killing people.  In comic books, the superhero who loses a parental figure and goes on to fight crime is a romantic figure.  In this movie, you’re reminded that this is unrealistic, and that someone who reacts to a trauma by turning him or herself into a violent vigilante would be a fucked up person.

This is nothing new, of course.  Interrogating the romantic tropes of superhero stories started with “Watchmen” and has, according to people who read a lot more comics than I ever have, gone on since then.  But it’s never translated well to the big screen.  It’s legitimate at this point to suggest that most people’s knowledge of superheroes and all their tropes comes from the movies and not comic books, and so this lack puts the superhero movie watcher decades behind the comic book reader on this curve.  The movie of “Watchmen” failed to really deliver—-it had promise for the first half, and then completely lost it in the second. This movie manages to walk the line between entertaining as hell and disturbing throughout.  Chloë Grace Moretz actually does a great job of being a combination of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Rorschach from “Watchmen”.  If that sort of thing appeals to you, I think you’ll love this movie.

Imagine that someone gave you the Twilight series and, for the sake of argumentation, vampires were a new thing that you’d never heard of before.

Now, imagine that you’d read through about the first book and a half to two books, and by the end of them, you almost sort of understood what a vampire was, but not quite, and the main plot development over the course of the two novels was that people really didn’t like vampires at all, except some vampires that everyone was cool with, and you weren’t entirely sure why, and you also never really got to see what a vampire did ever, so you were never entirely sure why anyone was afraid in the first place.

Welcome to the first twenty hours of Final Fantasy XIII.

At this point, I don’t really care about the game itself - you can read about the gameplay on any number of gaming sites.  What I want to focus on is the plot of the game.

Because it is the worst written thing I’ve ever encountered.  And I’ve read Vince Flynn novels.  Plural. 

Spoilers ahead.

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