Sometimes you just want to see a lot of people die, but if you did anything about it in real life, you’d get entangled in a lot of red tape. So you head off to the cinema instead and watch stuff like 2012, which is really funny, in spots. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s nice line about the death of sweet, saintly Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, one of the great tearjerkers of the 19th century:

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.

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I’m morbidly devoted to the works of Charles Dickens. It’s a childhood aberration. At a young age I started reading whatever books were on the family shelves and bonded with Dickens and Twain before I had a fully formed cranium, practically. From them I developed a vaguely 19th century sensibility that’s been nothing but trouble. That’s how I come to ruin me-self. (more…)

I finally got around to seeing Paranormal Activity, the low-budget ghost movie that’s making so much money. It’s spinning through the predictable cycle already charted by The Blair Witch Project ten years ago:

1) early fan buzz and glowing reviews, followed by

2) naysayers claiming the movie’s not scary, it’s stupid and boring, while critics begin to damn it with faint praise by saying the film’s “a triumph of clever marketing,” which leads to

3) a total raving backlash, with all agreed that fans of this piece of crap are idiots who don’t even know they’ve been had. And still to come,

4) a vague consensus that, in retrospect, Paranormal Activity was pretty good.

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By now the Coen brothers are so great at filmmaking they’re actually scary. They started out twenty-five years ago with massive cinematic talent and the finest sensibilities in the modern world, and they’ve worked and worked till now they can achieve glorious screen effects with such ease, suppleness, and casual precision, it’s overwhelming if you let yourself dwell on it. But A Serious Man doesn’t let you dwell on it till after it’s over. The last shot alone is so moving, so incredible and complex in its impact, it sears itself into your brain like the twin ghost girls in The Shining, and you go home stunned.

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This article was first published in The eXile on July 8, 2004

Much has been said over the past week about the final collapse of the Russian Left-opposition. Even a neo-con like Michael McFaul publicly lamented (through crocodile tears) the weekend split of the Russian Communist Party opposition, charging that “democracy as a result has suffered.”

But the fact is that the Russian Left died a long time ago — in the mid-1990s, when they agreed to collaborate with the powers-that-be, and to destroy anyone within their ranks who tried breaking free from their sleazy arrangement with Yeltsin and the oligarchy. The Communists didn’t want to win power, in fact they were terrified of taking power — they were safer, and better-off, as a toothless, fake opposition, which served Yeltsin well because he could whip up Return of the Red Scare fever any time he needed more IMF funds or any time Clinton’s people threatened to make a stink about the corruption and genocide that Yeltsin was responsible for.

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Capitalism: A Love Story is a fantastic slap-upside-the-head film, just what we need right now. It’s been playing a week in New York and Los Angeles, and just opened wide. The reviews are “mixed.” Critics say it’s just Michael Moore preaching to the choir again: people who love Michael Moore will go see the film, people who hate him won’t, therefore he has no persuasive effect whatsoever.

Though Dana Stevens of Slate doubts that anyone can really love Moore:

If you already dislike Michael Moore, Capitalism: A Love Story, his latest documentary/provocation/performance-piece/decoupage project isn’t likely to win you over. And if you love him without reservations, this movie has nothing to tell you that you haven’t already shouted through a bullhorn at a “Free Mumia” rally. But is there anyone who falls cleanly into that latter category of unabashed Moore love? The hulking Michigander’s 20-year career as an agitprop prankster, his stalwart refusal either to go away or to hone the blunt instrument of his demagogic style, has made Moore a problem for the left and the right. Even those who largely agree with Moore’s politics are often mortified by the delivery system: the juvenile stunts, the easy demonization of his opponents, the deliberate donning of blinders when a cogent counterargument comes along.

As usual, that leaves me out. I love Michael Moore, and I never shouted anything through a bullhorn. I should’ve, though. Maybe I’ll start. (Note to self: buy bullhorn.)
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If you think our culture is totally, horribly, permanently screwed up, go see The Informant! Because it’s a gallows-humor study of how/why we are totally, horribly, permanently screwed up, so it gives you an opportunity to consider the question. But if you don’t want to do that, don’t go. You’ll find it boring, or an example of pernicious “blank irony,” or something.

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It was in the news the other day that a cheetah had achieved the fastest recorded cheetah-time, running 100 meters in just over 6 seconds, which is about 36 mph.

What the hell? That’s the fastest recorded cheetah time? Are we only clocking old cheetahs, lame cheetahs, cheetahs who aren’t feeling well? Every right-thinking child knows that cheetahs are the fastest land animals and can hit speeds of 60 – 70 mph, if properly motivated. This cheetah they clocked at 36 mph—named Sarah, if it matters—got dropped out of the back of a van and was merely loping after a target.

Then this bogus news story generates the inevitable question: can Usain Bolt beat a cheetah?

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Extract is so bad its rottenness becomes a source of fascination, which is a good thing, because there’s nothing else to sustain your interest while the 89 minute dud drags by. It’s all Mike Judge’s fault, that much is clear. He wrote and directed it as if he’d forgotten what he does for a living. Is he suffering from amnesia? Narcolepsy? Ketamine addiction? The malaise that afflicts so many Hollywood types with so much success and so few brains they wind up in the hospital suffering from “exhaustion”?
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When I heard Quentin Tarantino was making a Dirty Dozen-like action film set in WWII, I groaned in spirit. With all the amazing eras and dazzling historical figures and slaughterhouse horrors not yet represented in cinema, we’re going to visit the Third Reich again? Really? Tarantino-ized Nazis? As they used to say in the old WWII gas-rationing ads, Is This Trip Necessary?

But it turns out to be a pretty interesting film.
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How does your extended family shake out politically? Me, I come from a rabid tribe of right-wingers containing a renegade band of fulminating lefties, plus a couple of pleasant and reasonable moderates nobody listens to.

Fortunately we’re all scattered across the country, trying to make sure each relative has his or her own state in which to be an opinionated pain in the ass. This prevents family quarrels. Or at least, it did for many years. But now, with the internet and all, family harmony is steadily breaking down. Communication, that’s the problem. If you give people the means to do it, they’ll tell you what they think, and that’s when you get those mass-killings we read so much about these days. (more…)

There are a couple of strokes of genius in District 9 that renew one’s hopes for the future of genre film.

One is casting Sharlto Copley, who’s not a trained actor, as protagonist Wikus van der Merwe, a dweeby South African bureaucrat who has greatness thrust upon him and doesn’t know what to do with it. Copley plays him so unheroically that he could head the cast of a South African version of The Office right now, no questions asked.

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Finally, fa-HINE-ally, someone has made a proper comedy. Armando Iannucci, to be exact, with In the Loop, his annihilating satire of recent Anglo-American misadventures in the Middle East. It’s getting fantastic reviews and it deserves every one of them. It’s so ruthlessly funny, I missed half the lines because of the shocked laughter in the theater. So it might be twice as funny as I think it is, and that’s off the charts. Go see it!
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So Harry Potter, the latest one. Making a lot of money. Yep. How many more to go? Ten? Oh, only two? Well, good, that means they’ll finish up before the kids turn thirty.

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Public Enemies is an oddly soft, slow, elegiac film, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some of my best friends are elegiac films. But it seems a regrettable approach to its main subject, John Dillinger, if you know anything at all about Dillinger. Such a sharp, lively renegade, I mean, and here he is on film all melancholy and tragic.

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