I found Predators to be amusing as hell, but then, I was in just the right mood for it. I’d had one of those brain-melting work weeks when you do nothing but talk to people, prepare to talk to people, and talk to people some more. At the end of it you either want to sit in a dark, silent room staring at the opposite wall, or you want to see a violent action film showing many people killed. People who talk, that is. First they talk, then they’re horribly, gruesomely slain.

And that’s Predators all over, my friend. The hero is the guy who talks the least. As it should be!
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Notice to readers: We are scrapping the Great Living Americans nominating process due to your miserable failure, and hereby revoke your suggestion privileges. The eXiled has also initiated a review of our policies regarding the solicitation of reader input to make sure that a similar tragedy will never happen again. You people depress us.

In honor of Independence Day, I’d like to return to the topic of Great Americans, or the lack thereof. In an earlier article, I mentioned the Civil War era as a remarkable generator of Great Americans, including Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, William Tecumseh Sherman, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and Ambrose Bierce. I noted that it’s much harder to come up with a list of Great Americans living today. (I nominated Muhammad Ali, Cesar Milan, and the Coen Brothers.)

I asked for nominees, and readers responded with the following:

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I’ve hated Tom Cruise for twenty-five years now. It’s been one of my favorite traditions, hating Tom Cruise. It involved refusing to go to his biggest blockbusters like Top Gun, then occasionally, foolishly succumbing to the temptation to see just how awful he really was in one of his many, many hit films. Say, War of the Worlds, when he completely bolloxed up his role as a blue-collar dad. (Don’t tell me about blue-collar dads, Tom “Rich Putz” Cruise. I know blue-collar dads, and you, sir, are no blue-collar dad, and have no clue how to play one. Blue-collar dads don’t swank around with spa-fresh skins and gym-toned bods, wearing hoodies under down jackets just to prove they work for a living.)
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Seriously, it beats me how people managed to develop such an appetite for sloppy sentimentality. With each successive hit feature, Pixar tests the limit of that appetite, and finds that there is no limit. Audiences drink up vats of Pixar’s patented corn syrup in animated film form, smack their sticky lips, and beg for more. Please, Pixar, could you make the characters even rounder and smoother and cuter, like a vast array of babies’ butts? Could everyone find out that everyone loves everyone else, and then all rescue each other ten or twelve times, with lots and lots of preaching along the way? Our tears, could they be jerked harder, to the point of actual pain and bruising this time?

Sure, says Pixar, and the ticket-money washes in like the tide.
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You might have heard that Mark Twain’s autobiography is going to be published this fall—the real one, not the abridged, expurgated, censored, compromised, cleaned-up, Sunday school superintendent version that’s circulated over the years. 5,000 pages of sheer bile, cussedness, and truth-telling is what’s promised, and I’m ready to pre-order Volume One.
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It’s pretty simple, really. If you don’t like action films, don’t go see The A-Team. That is, if you complain when a film has explosions, and a lot of shooting and punching and special effects crashes and whatnot, and no in-depth character studies, and a plot structure that goes blah-blah-blah-whatever-fight-scene, then you don’t like action films, and you shouldn’t go see a film like The A-Team. There, I hope I’ve finally cleared up this issue for all the professional film critics and non-professional everybody’s-a-critic critics who continue to go see genre films so they can say how much they hate all the traits associated with genre films.

But for those of us who like action, we can talk sensibly. Is The A-Team a dumb film? Yes. How dumb is it? It’s incredibly dumb—nay, exuberantly dumb. And who was it who said, “Exuberance is beauty?” William Blake, maybe. Or somebody just as good.

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We’re desperate for a laugh these days. Life was bad enough already without oil-covered seabirds. So naturally some gits arranged to provide us with oil-covered seabirds, really glopping the oil on them so they’re clearly immobile in the photos except for their terrified eyes, and they’re bound to die there in the muck, slowly and horribly, if someone doesn’t come and rescue them right after the photo is snapped. Which someone does, of course, of course someone rescues them, the photographer himself maybe, pulling them out of the clotted Gulf, careful not to hurt their wings, and cleans them all off till they’re white again and puts them in a nice airy room to dry, and then transports them to a beautiful safe estuary somewhere, where they live happily ever after. The End.

This desperation for a laugh may make Get Him to the Greek seem funnier than it actually is, but we don’t care about that right now. There are some definite laughs in it. Good enough. It’s from the Judd Apatow comedy factory, so we know exactly what to expect, the guy-love, the women-hating, the raunch, the bizarre moralizing everyone calls “sweetness,” the scenes that work and the draggy interludes in between, and either Seth Rogen or Jonah Hill or both, to represent supposedly cuddly porcine men everywhere. Fine!
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Feck, as the Irish say. Feckin’ independent film, it’s not worth shite.

I just watched Ondine, this Neil Jordon thing set in contemporary Ireland about a soulful fisherman played by Colin Farrell, who catches a young woman in his fishing net and wonders if she might be a water nymph or some damn thing. It’s a crusher, a masterpiece of patience-testing boredom. It’s one of those films that keeps almost ending, but just as your flattened spirits perk up a bit in anticipation, you realize there’s a whole other wearisome sequence to go through before the characters emote their way to the obvious finale. By the time the real ending arrives, you’ve lost your capacity to rejoice in freedom regained, and you plod out sighing, “Well, the cinematography was beautiful.”

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Maybe somebody could explain Facebook to me. I’m on it and I still don’t get it. I hate it without understanding it, like a dog barking at a vacuum cleaner.

Facebook’s in the news for violating people’s privacy and selling off their information, for general malfeasance and sleaze, the usual stuff. Boycotts are called for. It’s made me wonder: is something as apparently rotten as Facebook worth the trouble of boycotting? If you’re misguided enough to join Facebook in the first place, don’t you deserve everything you get?
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Iron Man 2 is such a huge hit, it’s clear everybody’s going to see it regardless of critical praise or condemnation. Each of us can—or will soon be able to—fulminate about why it’s good, bad, or meh. We don’t need no stinkin’ critics, etc.

Personally, I enjoyed it, but then I hadn’t seen a movie in a theater in about a month, for various reasons I won’t bore you with, so I’d’ve enjoyed anything that oscillated onscreen to accompanying noise. Baby Einstein would’ve worked for me.

Bearing that in mind, I’d still like to make a case for points of avid interest in Iron Man 2. One thing I’ve noticed about professional critics, they’ll tell you everything except the interesting things that go on in a movie. They’re generally mum about those. Some guild rule, perhaps.

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Of course it goes without saying that you don’t watch Glee, you couldn’t care less about Glee, you wouldn’t touch Glee with a stick. It’s a teen musical on TV, for Christ’s sake, there could hardly be anything lamer than that. Even gibbering fans of this series acknowledge its lameness by calling themselves Gleeks.

But Glee’s now a cultural phenomenon, and hard to ignore. After one season, its soundtracks are best-sellers and its songs are much downloaded. Its cast got invited to perform at the White House Easter Egg Roll because the Obamas are big fans, and then they went on Oprah. Done deal! Now every known music performer and band in the world wants to have their songs covered on Glee, which has already taken on Kanye West, Katy Perry, the Rolling Stones, Beyonce, Rihanna…and coming up there’s Madonna, Lady Gaga, Coldplay…

This madness is only going to get bigger once the show’s second season starts this Tuesday. If you aren’t Glee-conscious already, pretty soon you’ll be hearing about it whether you want to or not. Here’s a fun fact to help you through it: Glee is a blatant rip-off of the great 1999 movie Election. And for some reason, nobody mentions it.
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Lotta books on The Big Lebowski have come out recently, and I’ve slogged through them so you don’t have to:

I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski by Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Will Russell, and Scott Shuffitt

The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers by Cathleen Falsani

BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski by J. M. Tyree and Ben Walters

The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe
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I woke up for the second morning in a row with a vague feeling that something terrible had happened. Then I remembered I watched the Oscars.
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Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is messed up in some ways—we’ll get to that in a second—but it’s seriously beautiful at intervals that command attention. There’s a war theme in it that’s pursued with surprising gravity. Example: the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) is heading an insurgency against the savagely cruel Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), and urges Alice (Mia Wasikowska) to play her part by slaying the Jabberwocky (Christopher Lee).

Alice says, primly, “I don’t slay,” and the Hatter says, with angry severity, “You don’t slay?”

Not only is that a nice play on the early 20th century response, “You don’t say?” (signifying incredulity), it’s a great encapsulation of a righteous moral stance that we don’t encounter much lately. That is: in such a world as this, blighted and murderous, filled with monsters laying waste to everything good, you consider yourself above taking violent action against monsters? Shame!
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Read the sensational Vanity Fair profile on The eXile, and founding editors Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi: (more…)