This movie is really way out on the other end of the spectrum. I think the goyim in the audience will be lost at points.

Saw this Friday and it’s good. Sometimes funny, sometimes suspenseful, and intermittently horrifying—like the Tarantino of yore. It’s a gutsy move to make such extensive use of foreign language dialogue in several different languages (a bit reminiscent of La Grande Illusion in this respect) rather than Hollywood’s more conventional “Nazis speaking to each other in German-accented English.” The movie also does a great job of deploying the historical setting to throw some plot curveballs at the audience.

But aesthetic qualities aside it’s also an interesting example of how Jews and the Holocaust have moved closer and closer to the American cultural narrative of World War II. The war itself is sort of the foundational myth of America’s drive for worldwide hegemony, and the story sort of works better with Jews closer to its center. The reality, of course, is that while rounding up and killing Jews was fairly central to Germany’s wartime policymaking, and anti-semitism was certainly central to Hitler’s worldview, rescuing Jews from harm played essentially no role in Allied policy. And of course Basterds in an entirely typical way manages to more-or-less airbrush the Soviet Union out of the European Theater despite the U.S.S.R. fairly clearly being the main Allied combatant on the continent.

None of that is a complaint about the movie itself, which hardly presents itself as historically accurate, but it sort of puts into relief the extent to which even less explicitly fanciful cinematic depictions of the war are pretty far out there.

I didn’t want to make too much out of District 9’s political message since “racism is bad” is really not the most challenging theme in the world, but David Sirota’s appreciation of the film did get me thinking about one thing that I thought was nicely done:

Even more important than the visuals, though, is the plot. By setting the movie in South Africa, the refugee camp/anti-alien racism is a powerful allegory about the universality of oppression. One of the film’s most powerful messages (and there are a number of messages in this movie) is that even groups that have been oppressed can themselves turn into oppressors. In the movie, South Africa’s black population is just as anti-alien as its white population. In real life, we have plenty of examples of the same kind of thing. As just one of many examples, in Israel, some (but certainly not all or most) Jews – despite their own history experiencing oppression – express extremely racist views about Arabs.

Something that I noticed watching the movie was that District 9’s version of South Africa seemed pretty free of racial tensions. There was a tendency, as in real-world South Africa, for whites to disproportionately occupy high-status social and economic roles. But class dynamics weren’t explicitly racialized, and nobody said anything related to black-white (or, for that matter, anglophone-afrikaaner) tensions. Instead, the introduction of Prawns and, to a lesser extent, Nigerians into the dynamic apparently helped build a greater sense of human and South African solidarity. That kind of thing isn’t the prettiest element of human nature, but it rings pretty true—broadening the circle of tolerance often entails identifying a new “other” against which the new, broader “we” can be defined.

I saw and enjoyed District 9 on Sunday evening and have been struggling ever since to decide exactly what I really think about it. Now I think I’ve decided that what it really shows is how hollow and crappy so many of our summer blockbusters have become.

One is tempted to complain that the political and social commentary offered by the film is a bit tired and not really all that insightful. But then you fall back on the question of why, exactly, I was expecting a movie that starts with aliens and ends with a big shootout to offer really novel social and political commentary. And I guess it’s because these days when you start watching a high concept movie that’s not utterly witless and boring you think you must have stumbled into an incredibly ambitious art house project. But maybe someone just wanted to make a well-done action/suspense movie about aliens. It’s not unheard of, after all. We’ve got Alien. We’ve got Aliens. Why shouldn’t we have District 9, a fun a summer movie that happens to involve a story that’s actually interesting, actors who have some chops, and characters who are sketched out with a bit of depth? How about a screenplay that understands how to avoid clunky exposition? Wouldn’t that be nice?

And, yeah, turns out it is nice! Very nice. I actually want to go see the sequel.

James Dobson (official photo)

Ross Douthat has a great column in today’s times looking at American social conservatism through the lens of Judd Apatow’s movies. All three Apatow films have, as he points out, strains of conservative values running through them. But in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up conservative choices wind up working out suspiciously well. In the darker Funny People, by contrast, bad choices have unchangeable consequences and doing the right thing proves painful:

Still a virgin in middle age? Not to worry — you’ll find a caring, foxy woman who’s been waiting her whole life for an awkward, idealistic guy like you. Pregnant from a drunken one-night stand? Good news — the oaf who knocked you up will turn out to be a decent guy, and you’ll be able to keep the baby and your career as a rising entertainment-news anchorwoman. Frittering away your life on porn and pot? Fear not — your wasted twenties won’t stop you from being a great dad.

With “Funny People,” though, Apatow is offering a more realistic morality play. This time, doing the right thing has significant costs — but you have to do it anyway. This time, doing the wrong things for too long has significant consequences — and you have to live with them. It’s the first Apatow film in which love doesn’t conquer all. And it’s the first Apatow film in which you get punished for your sins.

Ross says this is “probably what American audiences don’t like about” Funny People because the United States is a country that’s “conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.”

I think this explains a lot about the appeal of anti-gay crusades to social conservative leaders. Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard. Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.

What professional blogger wouldn’t be excited about the imminent release of Julie & Julia, the first-ever film based on a blog? That said, the preview and the ads for the movie keep annoying me. Right at the beginning, the voiceover says that “before Julia Child changed the face of cooking, she was just a woman searching for her calling in life.” I suppose that’s true in some sense, and it nicely sets the story up as a cliché, but in fact before Julia Child was a famous cookbook author she was a spy, which is considerably more interesting:

The famous chef let slip the story of her war-era spying in a 2002 autobiography, but the release of thousands of documents from the U.S. national archives on Thursday confirms her participation in a secret organization formed by President Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War.

Hidden among the 750,000 classified pages released Thursday is a picture of the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives called the Office of Strategic Services.

OSS was created during World War II as a wartime emergency measure. Later, as the US slipped into the “permanent emergency” of the Cold War, it was reorganized at the CIA. She worked directly as a kind of assistant to OSS chief William Donovan and then got posted to a field job in Sri Lanka. That’s where she met her husband who was also an OSS operative. Now that’s not to say that she wasn’t also searching for her calling in life, but it’s still pretty different from that “aw shucks” presentation the ad hints at. I hope the actual film manages to mention the considerably-more-interesting truth.

(wikimedia)

Alyssa Rosenberg wants to see the great American news media movie:

I don’t know why there hasn’t been a truly great movie about journalism in the United States in recent years. I thought the State of Play remake was fun, but not even close to great. Perhaps it’s that Hollywood isn’t inclined to kick journalism when it’s down. Or that American politicians who hate the press these days tend to hate it with a dull, hammer-like disregard, rather than a poisonous, personal, specific loathing combined with need, something that colors both In the Loop and State of Play (I was at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota last year when delegates at the floor began chanting “NBC” in derision and doing a kind of reverse tomahawk chop in the direction of the press box. Strange to say the least).

I think the issue here is just that not enough happens in journalism. I’ve watched Spencer Ackerman report out some pretty good stories. It involved a certain amount of looking stuff up online, a great deal of waiting for people to return phone calls, some taking notes, some talking. And then you kind of need to do it all over again. Filling out FOIA requests is important, but watching someone do it would be deadly dull. If you think about All The President’s Men they manage to build an awful lot of somewhat frenetic physical action into the process—people are always physically going places to do things. Which makes the film watchable, but I think is not all that reflective of how people really find where the bodies are buried. Back when I had bosses who wanted to try to turn me into a real reporter-type journalist, the slogan was “pick up the damn phone” not “go do something that would look interesting on a large movie screen.”

That said, journalists stationed abroad are another matter. I think Welcome to Sarajevo is very good and there must be some great stories to tell about life in the Baghdad Bureau of an American news organization.

1. Gone With the Wind
2. Star Wars
3. The Sound of Music
4. E.T.
5. The Ten Commandments
6. Titanic
7. Jaws
8. Doctor Zhivago
9. The Exorcist
10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
11. 101 Dalmations
12. The Empire Strikes Back
13. Ben-Hur
14. Return of the Jedi
15. The Sting
16. Raiders of the Lost Ark
17. Jurassic Park
18. The Graduate
19. The Phantom Menace
20. Fantasia

Now, the less said about The Phanton Menace and Titanic the better, but in general you’d have to say that cracking that list would be a pretty impressive achievement.

Bay’s Aaron Burr “Got Milk” is also a great commercial. Longtime readers know that I’m a Michael Bay apologist, but there’s no doubt that his finest work occurred outside the confines of feature filmmaking.

This business of having ten Best Picture nominees at the Oscars seems like a terrible idea. It means that the winning film from among the nominees could sneak through with extremely little support, and that tactical voting is going to become a paramount consideration. Clearly the goal here is to increase the quantity of films able to juice attendance by saying they were nominated, but if they want to make this switch they also need to reform the voting procedure to something with ordered preferences or something.

Pixies fans will, of course, recall Buñuel as the auteur behind Un Chien Andalou, whose eyeball-slicing scene is the inspiration for “Debaser.” I was saying to myself, “someone should really do a YouTube mashup of the movie with the song” but of course it’s already been done:

The other thing I watched was the first three episodes of Planet Earth on Blu-Ray. This really makes the case for Blu-Ray pretty convincingly; it’s simply jaw-dropping. That said, the series seems to have an anti-American bias. The episode about fresh water doesn’t even mention the Great Lakes! And it goes beyond that to make the controversial claim that Lake Baikal is the largest lake in the world. This is true by volume, by Lake Superior is the biggest by area, which I think is a more intuitive way of understanding the phrase. And either way, it’s hard to understand how you can profile the world’s lakes without mentioning this giant series of lakes we have. Oh well.

What’s missing is much of anything that could be plausibly described as fun. Director McG–best known for his work on music videos, commercials, and the Charlie’s Angels movies–paints his post-apocalyptic landscape in a palette of sand and steel, as if color itself had been bleached from the world. But in contrast to The Dark Knight (one of the obvious models for this reboot), he fails to imbue his grim vision with any depth, texture, or complexity. A slender, silly movie that is upfront about its silliness (say, Star Trek) can be a giddy pleasure; a slender, silly movie that presents itself as an unflinching portrait of human endurance is setting itself up for failure.

I keep hearing McG’s music video work referenced in negative reviews—see, e.g., Smash Mouth’s annoying years-old hit “All Star”—but in my view the quintessential McG work was the short-lived Fox cop show “Fast Lane”. It was about a small crew of sexy undercover narcotics cops (two dudes who I forget, with Tiffany Amber Thiessen as the boss) in Miami, who worked out of some kind of giant barn full of awesome stuff they’d confiscated from bad guys. The show was terrible, but damn stylish. This scene has Mischa Barton and “Pictures of Success” by Rilo Kiley:

I can’t really stomach the way the Terminator franchise has inconsistent treatments of time travel paradoxes.

Definitely worth checking out the movie if it’s playing somewhere near you.

The early gossip around Star Trek had me very nervous. It was clear that the studio wasn’t interested in doing something that, like the TNG-based films, was basically designed to appeal to fans. Instead, they wanted to turn Trek, which has always been a kind of weird thing, into a mainstream broadly accessible movie.

Given those constraints, I thought they wound up doing an extraordinary job of not doing anything that’s outrageous from a real fanboy perspective. Handling the desire to ditch elements of the established history through the mechanism of a goofy time travel plot is very much in the spirit of a franchise that’s full of goofy time travel plots. And under the circumstances, the use of select snatches of homage (the bug like the bug from Wrath of Khan, Captain Pike in a wheelchair, etc.) served to drive home the idea that we’re watching the same multiverse unfold.

That said, I still think the Trek concept has always been something that best unfolds on television. A quintessential Trek scene, from any of the series, consists of a bunch of people standing around on the bridge of a starship (or DS9 equivalent) talking to one another, followed by a cutaway to a shot of a ship in space, followed by a return to the standing around talking. It’s just not something that particularly requires the big screen. And it’d be nice to see the energy and money and talent that was dedicated to re-imagining the Enterprise just put toward doing something original and new.

Dana Stevens writes:

Star Trek’s vision of the future, as guided by creator Gene Roddenberry, was also a relic of its time, the age of NASA and the Cold War and Kruschev pounding his shoe on a podium at the United States. The show’s faith in diplomacy and technology as tools for not just global but universal peace might seem touchingly dated in our post-9/11 age of stateless jihad, loose nukes, and omnipresent danger. Yet in a weird way, Star Trek’s cheerfully square naiveté makes it the perfect film for our first summer of (slimly) renewed hope. It’s a blockbuster for the Obama age, when smarts and idealism are cool again. In fact, can’t you picture our president—levelheaded, biracial, implacably smart—on the bridge in a blue shirt and pointy ears?

I don’t think there’s anything particularly “weird” about it. In some ways, the original Star Trek is very much a product of the Cold War era. But in a more precise way, it’s very much a product of the high tide of American liberalism that was occurring in the 1960s. That era gave way to a more conservative era, but now, arguably, the pendulum is swinging back to liberalism.

]]> http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/05/heroics-for-liberals.php/feed 46 http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/05/x-men-origins-wolverine.php http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/05/x-men-origins-wolverine.php#comments Mon, 04 May 2009 19:48:17 +0000 myglesias http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/?p=31381

This is not a very good movie. But some of my friends have gone off the deep end and started making absurd and overblown claims about its awfulness. So to be clear, lots of problems with this one. But it’s definitely better than Daredevil, Elektra, X-Men: The Last Stand, Punisher: War Zone, Fantastic Four, or Fanastic Four 2.

But why quibble? It’s not good. And in a larger sense, it’s horribly ill-conceived. Wolverine isn’t a character whose origins we’re curious about. Wolverine is a character whose origin is that he has no memories and we don’t know where he’s from other than that at some point he was mixed up with a shady covert ops program that bonded adamantium to his skeleton. That’s the origin. That’s the character. Apparently the Origin comic on which the film is based was written specifically in order to pre-empt Hollywood doing the origin. But Marvel’s initial instincts were right—it’s integral to the character that we don’t know his origins.

Meanwhile, as a Canadaphile it was disappointing to see Logan, a Canadian, depicted as having served in the American army in World War One and World War Two. Given that the Canadian military actually entered both wars years before the American military did, it would be kind of odd for a Canadian with a taste for warfighting to have waited around for the states to get involved.

]]> http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/05/x-men-origins-wolverine.php/feed 49 http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/culture_in_the_balance_commercial_or_non_commercial.php http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/culture_in_the_balance_commercial_or_non_commercial.php#comments Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:14:22 +0000 myglesias http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/culture_in_the_balance_commercial_or_non_commercial.php Via Julian Sanchez, a neat video mashup of different dance scenes from different Walt Disney animated films, that shows the reuse and recycling of certain motion patterns and tropes. Check it out:

I watched that video and got a few minutes of amusement from it. And so far thousands of other people seem to have done so as well. And with the video bouncing around on some blogs, that number ought to keep rising. So the world has, in a small way, been made a better place by the fact that modern digital technology makes it feasible for a hobbyist to create this even though there’s no real prospect of monetary reward.

And yet in the name of halting “piracy” there are those who would so tighten intellectual property rules as to make it impossible for these kinds of creative works to be made. That would boost the financial incentives for for-profit corporations to produce high levels of cultural content, but it would also raise substantial barriers to the creation of amateur, hobbyist, or not-for-profit content creation. That’s worth keeping in mind whenever you hear debates about intellectual property issues. Strong IP is usually branded as “good” for “creators” but the main impact of the digital revolution has been to advantage non-commercial producers relative to commercial producers, and the main impact of strong IP law is to shift the balance of power back to the commercial world. We’re accustomed to thinking of capitalism in opposition to socialism, state-direction production, but in the information realm the main opposition is between capitalism and activity that is simply non-commercial in nature.

]]> http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/culture_in_the_balance_commercial_or_non_commercial.php/feed 53 http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/i_love_you_man.php http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/i_love_you_man.php#comments Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:42:00 +0000 myglesias http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/i_love_you_man.php On one level, I Love You, Man is a funny movie that at the end of the day isn’t quite as hysterically funny as some other funny movies of recent years. But to dismiss it as mediocre, à la Ezra Klein, is to miss the important element of genre-play in the film.

Nobody discusses I Love You, Man without using the term “bromance.” And that’s the point. There’s no such genre as a bromance. The “buddy movie” is a genre—Lethal Weapon, etc.—but ILYM is not a buddy movie. It is, rather, a bromance, of which there is no such thing. What Ezra perceives as a lack of “tight” plotting and narratives arcs is, I think, an extension of the subversion. The film meets the minimum formulaic standards of a comedy in that it ends with a wedding and everyone is happy.

But it rips the guts out from the underlying optimism of the formula. None of the underlying tensions are resolved. Jason Segal has found no way out of his increasing isolation from his friends and peers, and Paul Rudd hasn’t discovered any real answer to the question of why he’s marrying Rashida Jones. Dad’s disavowal of favoritism between his sons is unconvincing. And yet all the underlying problems and lurking misery are completely consistent with a plot that counts as both “comedy” and “romance” in conventional terms.

]]> http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/i_love_you_man.php/feed 28 http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/03/watchmen.php http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/03/watchmen.php#comments Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:44:16 +0000 myglesias http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/03/watchmen.php

In general, I agree with most everything Spencer Ackerman says here. I’ll add that I wasn’t thrilled by the decision to use so many famous and iconic songs in the soundtrack. I don’t see any real basis for that in the original material, and it’s somewhat distracting. It also poses some weird questions about the nature of the alternate reality we’re witnessing. One of the pleasures of Watchmen is seeing all the little things that are different about the world—airships, the popularity of Indian fast food, etc.—but it’s strange to think that the different historical trajectory would still have left us with a completely identical “99 Luftballons.”

Beyond that, the main thing to say is that I think it’s pretty clear that the Watchmen people have been seeing this weekend isn’t the real Watchmen. The film was clearly crafted with a great deal of respect for the original work and its fans. And that’s great. But still, certain concessions to basic reality had to be made in terms of tolerable length. But there will be a Tales From the Black Freighter animated DVD. And there will be a longer “director’s cut” version of the film. Eventually, perhaps you’ll see the longer version of the film with the Freighter animation intermingled between chapters. Obviously, normal people wouldn’t want to go see that in a theater. But I’d definitely buy it on Blu-Ray. And the ultimate test for the work will really be how good that is.

All-in-all, I’m torn between immense admiration for the film and regret that it was done as a movie at all. In retrospect, I kind of wish we’d instead gotten a 12 part HBO maxi-series that was really uncompromising and didn’t leave anything out.

]]> http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/03/watchmen.php/feed 78 http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/02/the_ontology_of_transformers.php http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/02/the_ontology_of_transformers.php#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:14:46 +0000 myglesias http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/02/the_ontology_of_transformers.php

There’s no denying that this is a pretty amusing poster. Still, it reminds me that I think the film engaged in a bit of revisionism when it portrayed the Autobots as humanoid-shaped robots capable of change into cars and trucks and so forth. My understanding from my childhood is that we should think of them as car-shaped robots capable of changing into humanoid-shaped ones. After all, they’re called autobots, like automobiles. Their essential property is their car-ishness.

On the other hand, they’re also called transformers which indicates that it’s the transforming itself that the essential fact. They’re neither humanoid nor car-shaped, but transformative. Or something.

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