Proud American, an uber-patriotic movie that was advertised exactly nowhere and sponsored by, I shit you not, Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Wal-Mart and American Airlines, just had the worst opening of all time for any wide-release movie ever.
There is a God.
Somehow, the stage designers at the RNC decided that the best backdrop for Meg Whitman was a staticky blood-red background. Because when I look for an endorsement to sway my vote, I look for who most reminds me of Vigo from Ghostbusters 2.
On a mountain of skulls, in the castle of pain, I sat on a throne of blood! What was will be! What is will be no more! Now is the season of evil! Vote McCain!
Spoilers! Spoilers!
It’s tempting to compare “Hamlet 2” to the sublimely ridiculous “Tropic Thunder”. Both movies have Steve Coogan in them. Both rely heavily on actors who can really bring it to realize some pretty extreme characters (Coogan in “H2”, Downey in “TT”). Both basically tell the easily offended, to quote Amy Poehler in “Hamlet 2”, to suck a bag of cocks, though neither is actually out to attack people based on race or disability or anything like that. And both find their primary source of humor to be people who take movies (and theater) very seriously.
But actually, while I liked both a lot (“Tropic Thunder” will deliver a lot more belly laughs), I can totally see how they have divergent senses of humor, and people who like one may not like the other. “Tropic Thunder” is more broad satire. “Hamlet 2” mines the same territory you see in shows like “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm”—-mortification as comedy. If you don’t like those shows, you won’t like “Hamlet 2”. Drama teacher Dana Marschz is a character in the vein of Larry David and Ricky Gervais, someone whose life is a series of humiliations and social failures. I personally love that stuff, so I enjoyed this movie. Marschz is a self-obsessed recovery addict who has, hilariously, a really poor understanding of the art of drama he lays claim to. Because he’s talentless and tasteless, he’s relegated to living in Tuscon and teaching drama at a school that’s indifferent to hostile, but I can’t help but point out that stubborn mediocrity that thinks of itself as art is the driving force behind 90% of Hollywood’s output.
Hollywood’s perfidious blacklist leaps to the fore again, killing the careers of conservatives such as John Nolte, the conservative screenwriter author of the article. Despite his success (and the continued success of all the conservative people declaring that they’ll be run out of town should the conservatism they’re telling reporters and newspapers about become known), we must realize that at any point they could be dragged off of their custom Posturepedics and denied access to such vital services as spa care and dim sum.
It’s pretty much like Darfur, but in California.
That, by the way, is pretty much all Nolte has to say. Conservatives can’t get work or approved scripts, as we know from all the conservatives getting steady work complaining about how the work isn’t steadier or more conservative. American Carol is the epitome of this, with conservatives banding together to declare that the conservative movie they made will forever tar them in Hollywood, and they’ll make damn sure to tell you all about it after they finish the junkets for National Treasure 3 and X-Men 4.
The pervasive drumbeat of threatened oppression is the Hollywood version of “liberal media bias”. By playing the refs who were never making bad calls in the first place, you hope to build up a movement and expectation that any time a conservative doesn’t get a job, it’s because liberals “blacklisted” them over Chablis and macrobiotic salads and not because they keep proposing a four-hour biopic of Milton Friedman (as played by Bruce Willis and costarring Bo Derek). Where are the talented conservative actors sitting around scrounging for ad work because they wore a Bush/Cheney button to an audition? Where are the conservative movies sitting in limbo that would otherwise set the cinematic world aflame? What is the net effect of this creative fascism on the conservative creative mind, and is there someone who can tell us about it that doesn’t have a growing IMDB listing?
You know what’s less funny than this? Live streaming footage of murder. You know what’s more funny than this? Everything else.
My favorite part is the part where Bill O’Reilly follows fake Michael Moore (played by fake Chris Farley) into the bathroom and then smacks him like a bad little boy.
Or maybe the Trace Adkins song containing the line, “This is the greatest country in the whole wide world,” followed by the massive explosion of fireworks in front of the highly flammable American flag backdrop.
Quite possibly it’s the parts that David Alan Grier and Gary Coleman are in, finally answering the question of which former In Living Color cast member is the worst off of all of them.
I just can’t decide. You weigh in!
Over the past couple of years, American moviegoers have been beset by such godawful crap as Date Movie, Epic Movie, Superhero Movie and the soon be released Disaster Movie.
Conservatives, leaping upon the almost miles per hour of inertia that this chain of shitty movies has left in its wake, found a guy who hasn’t made a good movie since 1988 to write and direct An American Carol, which is basically a Michael Moore spoof starring Chris Farley’s brother, features Jon Voight making political statements and includes a cameo by Bill O’Reilly.
Unfortunately, that’s a far more appealing description than we’re getting from people who have seen the movie.
I’m holding a palm card that was just given out at the Heritage Foundation to promote the new David Zucker film An American Carol. If I fill out the card, I can take one of four pledges, such as “Yes, I will send the trailer to my contacts” and “Yes, I want to be AN AMERICAN CAROLER or THEATER CAPTAIN.” It’s an induction to a movement, as the slogan on the card makes clear: “Finally, a movie for us.”
By “us,” of course, the filmmakers and promoters mean conservatives. Executive producer Myrna Sokoloff has put together a “pro-soldier, support our troops, pro-America” comedy, which Stephen Hayes previews in the new Weekly Standard. In it, filmmaker Michael Malone (Kevin “brother of Chris” Farley) and his organization MoveAlong.org are trying to repeal the Fourth of July when three angels—the Angel of Death, George S. Patton, and George Washington—come to him and convince him to change his ways.
No, wait. It gets worse.
John McCain’s attempt to relive those glory days of FDR’s fireside chats is already paying dividends. Today, bad jokes, tomorrow…more bad jokes.
John McCain is mocking the oratorical gifts of Barack Obama, recommending that he “should consider someone with a knack for brevity and directness, to balance the ticket.”
“Taking in my opponent’s performances is a little like watching a big summer blockbuster,” McCain sneers in his weekly radio address, “and an hour in, realizing that all the best scenes were in the trailer you saw last fall.”
Those of you watching the Olympics may also notice the difference between McCain and Obama’s ads. Obama’s are about Obama and him being president, McCain’s are about Obama and him being fancy. I’m just having a hard time understanding what McCain’s message is supposed to be - obviously, there’s the whole elitist angle to this, but the entire point of the elite angle is that people don’t like elites. The evidence for Obama’s elite credentials is that he’s very popular and people like what he says. Far from being detached, Obama’s right in the thick of things, drawing people to his positions, rallying them around his beliefs. While we all understand that such things are largely impossible for John McCain to accomplish - few like watching a bitter man read things he’s not familiar with uncomfortably off of a poorly located teleprompter - perhaps it would help him not to associate his opponent with, you know, being competent.
Plus, John McCain is like a troubled blockbuster that was supposed to be released in June but, due to going over budget and getting really bad feedback from test audiences, gets a half hour chopped off and is shoved out the door in October as counterprogramming to the latest installment of the Saw saga. Snap.
And in case you were wondering, Saw V is coming out on October 24, 2008, officially disproving the existence of Jesus.
BONUS FUNNY: The Obama campaign is like the Kremlin, because they didn’t immediately say “bomb Russia” when the opportunity presented itself. Fuck, at least the McCain campaign didn’t run the Bernie Mac ad they had in the quiver.
If you haven’t read this article about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie stereotype, do. It’s hilarious and really nails the nature of this disturbing fantasy that’s revisited time and time again on screen. But I just have to quarrel with two of the picks, just a little. I think Kate Hudson’s character in “Almost Famous”—-a MPDG named Penny—-is actually a send-up of the stereotype, though not a send-up in the ha-ha way, but more in the “unmoored girls with mental problems are real human beings, not fantasies to project on, you prick” sort of way. Her complete meltdown after the way her self-image is dashed by the certain knowledge that the men she thought she was charming actually thought of her as nothing but a fuckhole was sobering. The movie was about the main character’s losing his grip on a lot of fantasies that dominate the adolescent imagination, and her overdose was the end of the fantasy of the MPDG, replacing her with a real human being with serious problems. Same story with Shirley MacLaine in “The Apartment”. Her suicide attempt never struck me as part of a charming eccentricity, but the direct result of the miserable situation her older, married lover had put her in. That said, she is a MPDG in other ways, mostly because she’s blunt, which was eccentric in that era but doesn’t come across as remarkable now.
Annie Hall is totally that character, but it’s fair to point out that she doesn’t save the protagonist from himself.
Thoughts? Am I nit-picking too much? Here’s some other takes that amused me. By the way, it’s totally worth it to watch that video.
I’ll admit that I haven’t regularly scoured Showtime or HBO for cinematic viewing choices since about five years ago, but I’m assuming there’s an economic reason why channels with access to thousands of movies only play a couple of dozen each week. As reticent as I was to watch The Ten the first five times it aired today, it’s looking like a good choice on the sixth go-round.
Anyone have insight on this?
The Dark Knight apparently being the most popular movie ever, reviewing it is a bit of an odd task. On the one hand, the receipts say everyone loved this movie. On the other hand, I didn’t. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)
It’s not to say that the movie was bad - it wasn’t - but that it suffered from a bit of Schumacher syndrome (using too many characters) and a bit of something else - the tendency to confuse thematic elements until they become a mishmash of contradictory lessons. As Atrios and Alterman put it, it’s a movie that endorses a libertarian fascism.
The central relationships in the movie are between the golden boy DA Harvey Dent and Batman and between the homicidal psychopath Joker and Batman. The former is a relationship built on who’s the better leader for the lost populace of Gotham, the second built on the relationship between order and a chaos systematically built on destroying that order. In many ways, the movie feels like an academic argument rather than a fight for the soul of a city - leaders loftily arguing principles in life or death fights that spill over onto the populace rather than involve them; you realize ultimately that these people are all concerned with the functioning of a system as a thing in and of itself, largely unbothered with the people their actions affect under the presumption that they are, of course, doing the right thing.
One of the first conversations in the movie comes between Dent and Batman’s alter ego, Bruce Wayne, as they discuss the Roman practice of selecting a single man under times of crisis to lead them.
Conservative actors are banding together as “Friends of Abe”, a secret group of secret conservatives secretly worshiping at their portable altars of Ronald Reagan.
The group, whose members call themselves “Friends of Abe” after Abraham Lincoln, was organized as an underground movement because of fears that prominent industry titans with outspoken liberal views would retaliate, said participants. They often were reluctant to name members of the group in interviews for fear it would hurt their careers.
“It’s a growing movement, and word is getting out that there’s many of us in this business ...,” said 1950s singer Pat Boone, one of the few conservatives to talk about the movement publicly. “If certain studio execs - hirers and firers - learn that this is a movement and growing, and that some of these people that they hire are of this inclination, these people could be unemployed.”
You know, I know of a few very successful Republican actors - Fred Thompson, Kelsey Grammer, Bruce Willis - and it always seems as if failed Republican actors are willing to blame their failure on their political beliefs rather than on the fact that tons of people fail in Hollywood. Case in point: Ron Silver, who I remember getting on Fox News to protest the sort of roles he and other conservative actors were getting, ignoring the fact that before he supported Bush in 2000, he had a recurring role on Veronica’s Closet. And he was the bad guy in Timecop. He kind of had a crappy career beforehand, and it’s continued unabated down his path of mediocrity. Hell, even the world’s worst “celebrities” are getting direct help from the McCain campaign to make an appearance in Iraq, at no apparent detriment to their inexplicable careers.
An idea: Hollywood aversion to conservative views may have something to do with the Republican view that it’s the world’s largest purveyor of communism and forced anal sex at age 15, and have no problem beating them over the head with it whenever they need to score easy family values points. Maybe instead of trying to tell the studio bosses that there’s conservatives here, too, they should send that message to the GOP.
Or, alternately, we can have another few years of theorizing whether or not Iron Man was a hateful liberal screed against capitalism.
Warning: I spoil. Get used to it.
I love Jesse’s idea of doing “Bamboo Reviews”, so I thought I’d review Sex and the City, which I did end up seeing after all. I think I have a taste of what the people who voted for Hillary Clinton because of the sexist backlash were feeling, because I probably would have blown off seeing this except that it was clear that much (most? all?) of the rabid antipathy that developed against this movie was rooted in sexism. Oh noes! Four women who make their own money and can actually take or leave men! That all four happily took men—-that the show went out of its way to calm fears that straight women who have a choice might not choose to be tied to one man—-seems to make no difference. After reading (I forget where and can’t find it on Google) that female critics generally liked the movie, and male critics generally disliked it, meaning that the Metacritic rating was permanently fouled by prejudice, I grabbed a girlfriend of mine who also remembers the show as I did, which is that it was a show with actual characters who were interesting instead of, as critics seem to remember it, a non-stop montage of shopping and giggling. And that remembered that the reason women liked the show so much was that it dispensed with so many of the romantic cliches that usually make “women’s” entertainment so hard to watch.
In fact, decrying the double standard between this movie and the fluff made for boys that doesn’t get near how misleading the SATC backlash is, because this movie was much smarter than the boy fluff. The writing is consistent and sharp, and they actually have subtle, interesting things to say. This isn’t a strict clothes-for-girls, boom-for-boys thing, because SATC actually tries to be smart. My concerns about seeing it—-that it would betray me the way the end of the show did, by forcing everyone to hook up, even if it was out of character—-were pretty much corrected. The show got a do-over and really did-over.*
I like this topic, so I’m stealing it for a post here: What films should you not watch until you’ve seen others that give you the background material? Ones suggested in the thread: “The Great Escape” before “Chicken Run” and the Romero movies before “Shaun of the Dead”. (I love “Night of the Living Dead” with ferocity, and I still missed the part in “Shaun” with “I’m coming to get you, Barbara.” Auguste had to point it out to me.)
A couple off the top of my head: you should read Emma before you see “Clueless”, and you should have a passing familiarity with Anne Rice’s wretched vampire stories to really get why “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was a welcome relief. Tarantino’s movies are 100% more enjoyable if you have a good background in trashy B movies. You should see “The Apartment” before you watch the series “Mad Men”.
An interesting one from Marc: You should watch “Yojimbo” before you see basically anything with Clint Eastwood in it, but especially “A Fistful of Dollars”.
What are your suggestions for the list?
