Cinema Notes From All Over (Paying the Piper Division)

SAN FRANCISCO, Ca.--Product placements in movies have been our personal bete noire since the 1980s, when the practice exploded. There are arguments for them (they help finance movies) and against them (they're a prime example of corporate greed), but they are, at this point, inevitable.  
   YouTube user FilmDrunkDotCom has put together this fabulous compendium of product placement examples. Though it is by no means comprehensive--remember the Mars Today news box in the space-located Arnold Schwarzenegger film Total Recall, a play on the newspaper USA Today?--but it's telling nonetheless. 
   (On a side note, one is saddened that the film creators' graphics chalkboard evidently lacked spell-check.)

Cinema Notes From All Over (Older and Wiser Division)

SAN FRANCISCO, Ca.--Red, released last year and now on DVD, is the kind of movie that makes one want to stand up and cheer, or it would if one weren't so comfortably ensconced on one's sofa, charmed to death by both the thought and the reality of an irony-laced thriller starring Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren and Brian Cox. 

   Mr. Willis plays Frank Moses, a retired CIA officer whose specialty was "wet work," which every filmgoer over the age of six knows means assassination. Here's our question: has the CIA developed new code terms for its labors now that the old ones have infiltrated thriller scripts bad, good and indifferent for the past twenty years? 
   Frank falls for Mary-Louise Parker--as who wouldn't?--even as his past comes back to haunt him in the form of lots of people trying to kill him.  
   The plot, as it should be, is a cheerful shambles: something about Guatemala in 1981 and the Vice President and an assassinated New York Times reporter and a list of people to be killed by the nefarious powers behind the powers that do the thing over in the place at the time of--well, you get the picture. The whole thing is an excuse for cast members to do their expert thing, tongue firmly planted in cheek. 
   And do it they do. In the hands of, oh, say, Jason Statham, Red (that stands for "Retired--Extremely Dangerous") would be naught but a grim march. Thank the film gods that this one fell into the hands of such experienced, clever actors.
   Mr. Willis, his face now hangdog-ish with age, is his usual wise-cracking and romantic self. The endlessly enchanting Mr. Freeman is a master at appearing to really listen to other actors/characters, a gift only outshined by his delightful smile. As an LSD-damaged ex-CIA conspiracy freak, John Malkovich offers the audience a broad wink: You and I know I'm always typecast as the crazy guy, so why don't we just relax and let me drift though this one, magnetism intact, acting chops subtly revved? Brian Cox, who will always be considered a character actor--and a gifted one, if there is a God--wears a Russian accent like he would a winter mink: with an amused flair and no little wit.
   Ms. Parker, sublime, couldn't have put a foot wrong if director Robert Schwentke had held a poisonous snake to her throat. And is there anything more heartwarming than the sight of Ms. Mirren wielding dangerous firearms while dressed in a flowing white evening gown and, well, combat boots?

    With the exception of Ms. Parker, Red cast members are in their fifties, sixties and seventies. The film is an offering to those of us who have been with them for the long haul. Will everyone be as charmed by the film? A younger filmgoer with whom we watched it certainly was, although, as he pointed out, "There's no sex scene!" Perhaps this is as it should be. Perhaps not. 
   In the end, it doesn't matter. Red has million-dollar talent on abundant display. And it's a whole lot of fun. 
  There's worse you could say about a movie. 
    
   

Cinema Notes From All Over (Heterosexual Marriage Division)

SAN FRANCISCO, Ca.--Just Go With It, in theaters today and starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, is the kind of light Hollywood comedy that keeps the world safe for white heterosexuals by affirming family values and subtly marginalizing all others. 

   Oh, wait, do we sound "politically correct"? Is that opening paragraph enough to put you off already?

  If so, perhaps we should review the concept of "political correctness" before we decode the movie.  

   It is a cultural truism that s/he who names the group wields the influence; in language there is power. 

   When a dominant societal group names a marginalized one, the language often is oppressive and purposefully divisive: blacks are "niggers" and "coons," Hispanics "wetbacks" and "beaners," Asians "slants" and "gooks," women "girls," homosexuals "faggots" and "fairies," etc. 

   The counter-cultural shifts in nineteen-sixties and -seventies America emboldened marginalized groups to assert themselves. Many signaled this move to power by re-naming themselves.

   Blacks became "African-Americans," Hispanics "Latinos," Asians "Asian/Pacific Islanders," women, well, "women" rather than the reductive "girls," homosexuals "lesbians and gays." (Later, the ultra-inclusive gay communities expanded the nomenclature to "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender," occasionally adding "queer"--a reclamation of a slur--and the somewhat baffling "questioning.") 

   The dominant power structure at the time largely was composed of conservative white males. No dominant power structure passively brooks--not for long anyway--any claim to power by the theretofore powerless. So conservative think tanks did what they often do: flipped language on its head and sent the new linguistic virus into the mainstream cultural conversation. 

   Thus was born the idea of "political correctness," a notion that re-marginalized the groups trying to claim a place at the cultural and legislative table. Conservatives shifted the conversation away from a rational consideration of what it might mean for disenfranchised people to be equal to their fellows and steered it to the “reality” that these very groups were telling others how to speak and think.

   This was, of course, an absurd claim, given that those very groups had essentially been told how to think and speak for decades, sometimes centuries, by the very same power structure then averring they were doing it to others. 

   The clearest example of this kind of linguistic jujitsu arrived, in the eighties and early nineties, in the form of conservative radio entertainer Rush Limbaugh's bloviating. Women at the time were agitating for pay equal to men's, an end to gender discrimination and the right to make decisions about their own bodies.

   Limbaugh dubbed them "feminazis." He thus equated American citizens campaigning for equal rights to psychopathic killers who had decimated roughly six million marginalized people in a country halfway around the globe four decades prior.  

   George Herbert Walker Bush, an American president who served from 1988-1992, did the same thing. Members from the protest group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) demonstrated outside the Bush summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, in the late eighties. They hoped to bring national attention to the Food and Drug Administration's foot-dragging on testing and approving potentially life-saving AIDS medications.   

   Mr. Bush said the protesters were using "Nazi tactics," an odd assertion to make about a group of Americans exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and peaceable assembly. 

   But this marginalized group--AIDS protesters agitating for sick and dying friends--was attempting to assert power. Mr. Bush, a representative of the conservative power structure, therefore equated them with--do you see a theme here?--psychopathic killers who had decimated roughly six million marginalized people in a country halfway around the globe four decades prior. (Victims included gays and lesbians, who were forced to wear identifying pink triangles in the concentration camps.)

   Now, then. Were some of the re-naming efforts by marginalized groups silly and fruitless? Sure. (Hello, “differently abled” and “height challenged” people.) And were some liberals humorless and insufferably self-righteous in the process of asserting power? Absolutely.

   But that only made it easier for conservatives to mock them as “politically correct.” This undermined the groups' legitimate claims to equality by ridiculing the groups as scolds, thus trivializing their drive to enjoy equal rights by likening them to junior high school assistant principles. 

    The vacuum of the "political correctness" argument is meant to leave no breathing room for actual conversation about the way people and groups appear and function in society. So for the moment why don't we suspend that intellectually lazy notion and see if we can't realistically dissect Just Go With It, which bears all kinds of culturally stereotyped characters. 

   We’ll first note this: in one format or another, First of All has been tracking and commenting upon these sorts of character-based media misrepresentations for twenty-five years. We are as tired of doing it as you may be of hearing it. Once-disenfranchised groups have made too many advancements for this sort of thing to much stir us. 

   That said, there is an inexplicable level of white, heterosexual hegemony in Just Go With It. This is odd when, for example, in California, ethnic minorities, taken together, comprise the state's majority. Or maybe it’s not so odd: the ethnic makeup of America is shifting rapidly--indeed, we have an African-American president--and a film such as this one soothes frayed Caucasian nerves by creating a white-dominant fantasy world.

   The only black character is an effeminate and sassy hairstylist. (That's a two-fer.) The other “gay” character is an effeminate hotel staffer. Then there are the videogame addicted Latina nanny and an overweight Hawaiian babysitter who passes out after eating too much food. (You know those female people of color: great for menial work but terrible at anything requiring maternal focus.)

  Even the lead character’s  ethnicity seems to be treated questionably. Mr. Sandler plays a Jewish plastic surgeon. As a young man he has a huge and ugly nose and is considered a schlump by his wife-to-be. In voiceover he notes that he later "got rid of the schnozz" with plastic surgery; we see him as a successful surgeon who is a sexual hit with young women (to whom he lies about being married in order to get laid, the concept that sets up the comedic engine of the film). 

   Doesn’t this imply that the way for the ugly duckling Jewish kid to become the hot adult swan is to surgically alter ethnically endemic features that also happen to the one root of the stereotype about his group? 

   As to the movie itself: it’s marginally cute. It has the sitcom-requisite smart, snotty and scheming kids. Mr. Sandler's character is charming. Ms. Aniston, whose movies we normally avoid, is completely likable. Nicole Kidman, in a role not credited on the movie's posters, shines as a domineering one-time sorority sister to Ms. Aniston's character. 

   Incidentally, with her surgically altered/destroyed face, Ms. Kidman now looks like an ancillary "Ren and Stimpy" character. There is a subtextual joke about this in the movie, and one wonders if Ms. Kidman was in on it. 

   Ms. Kidman the actress has denied having any cosmetic surgery save Botox injections. In one of the film’s scenes, her character asks Mr. Sandler's--the plastic surgeon--what, if anything, he'd do to cosmetically enhance her. He says "nothing," adding that she's perfect. 

   In fact, her face looks like a late-period Picasso. That a plastic surgeon should state that he'd do "nothing" to enhance her looks implies that enough has been done already. But this is never said. Instead, Mr. Sandler's character, getting in a dig to win Ms. Aniston's character's approval, zings Ms. Kidman's character by suggesting that "they"--a reference to her plastic surgeon/s-- took too much fat out of her arms. Her face, however, save that it is "perfect," goes uncommented upon, even as it appears as expressive as a Noh mask.

   Just Go With It is a purposefully frivolous film in which man gets—and marries—woman in the end as the fantasy world’s marginalized people look on and cheer. (The black and presumably gay hairstylist makes Ms. Aniston’s character look fabulous so that she can perpetuate a ruse that unintentionally winds up with her marrying Mr. Sandler’s character. The hairstylist no doubt does it with the stark and dispiriting knowledge that in most American states he cannot legally marry his boyfriend.)

   The movie is a cultural warm bath for the dominant power structure and its aspirational admirers that passes itself off as a comedy. 
   Is it funny? 

   We laughed once.

Cinema Notes From All Over (Double-Wide Division)

CELLULOID-LAND, The Universe--We just watched a ten-year-old comedy called Sordid Lives and can't think of one reason you shouldn't too.
   Shot for next to nothing, based on a play of the same name, and billed as "A Black Comey About White Trash," it stars the extraordinary Bonnie Bedelia and, in an expanded cameo, Olivia Newton-John. 
   Packed with vivid performances, the film tells the story of the death of a matriarch of a poor but spunky Texas family. Her passing sparks all manner of family and small-town drama both madcap and solemn. 
   The film's main theme is the way it takes courage to to live one's own life, propriety be damned. The matriarch's grandson struggles to be honest about being gay; her son comes to grips with being a Tammy Wynette-obsessed cross-dresser. One of her daughters and a friend go on a Thelma-and-Louise-inspired tear, confronting the men who have in some way denied them agency. 
   Sordid Lives also limns the importance of family, no matter how non-functioning the brood might be; the claustrophobic nature of life among the lovably eccentric characters in a small town; and the odd ways that, in the end, love, truth, and a solid sense of spirituality trump life's complexities. 
   If this sounds a little earnest, that's our fault. Sordid Lives is a fun little comedy, camp beyond compare. Do yourself a favor and see it. And invite friends over. It's no fun to laugh alone. 
   (A side note: the movie contains gay themes and momentary full-frontal male nudity. If this is a problem for you, then why on earth are you reading First of All?)

Cinema Notes From All Over (Deceit of the Crime Division)

CELLULOIDLAND, The Universe - I Love You Philip Morris is not, alas, a film about a shrinking sect of smokers with a passionate fealty to a large tobacco conglomerate who rebelliously use machetes to hack off the hands of the antismoking fanatics who fan those hands in front of their own scrunched-up noses to signal their disdain for cigarettes, cigarette smoke, free will, responsible choice, and anything else that gets in the way of their desire to dictate to others how they should live.  
   Instead, it is a romantic comedy-drama (a "comma"?) about a pair of gay guys. Steven Russell, played by Jim Carrey, is an incorrigible con man. Phillip Morris, played by Ewan MacGregor, is a trusting Southern soul. The two meet and fall in love in prison, where each is serving time for something or other. (Who, in the end, cares why they're behind bars? Life is short; we're all going to die someday. Tracking details of this or that movie's plot is, you might agree, simply too exhausting.) 

   The film is sweet and mildly enjoyable, excepting a scene which for First of All sabotaged the whole thing. 
   In it, Mr. Russell appears to be dying of AIDS. In a wrenching phone call, Mr. Morris, though angry with Mr. Russell for other reasons, sobs wildly when he learns of his lover's illness. For those of us who lost friends to AIDS in the eighties and nineties, the scene is a knife to the heart. 
   Later, it is revealed that Mr. Russell's "illness" was faked. It is another con, one that allows Mr. Russell, posing as a lawyer, to try to spring Mr. Morris from prison. 
   (Oops. Did we spoil the film for you? So sorry.)
   For the AIDS scene to work, the audience must feel Mr. Morris' agony. So the film tricks us in the same way that Mr. Russell tricks Mr. Morris. When the con is exposed we feel Mr. Morris' rage--he slaps Mr. Russell's face--and his exasperation with Mr. Russell's iniquitous duplicity. 
   First of All understands this filmic conceit. You know what? First of All does not care. It is a terrible manipulation of the audience. We found ourselves weeping at Mr. Morris' pain; we recalled our own in the same kinds of situations. So for the illness to be exposed as fake--well, for hours after leaving the theater we boiled at the film's aggressive guile. 
   In fairness, we note that the film is based on true events. Perhaps Mr. Russell's AIDS con did, in fact, happen.
   Still.   


   A side note: Mr. Morris and Mr. Russell's relationship does not last. In this sense theirs is no different from many nongay couplings. Love, sad to say, does not conquer all. Gays and lesbians eager to marry, in prison our out, need take note.
   
   

Cinema Notes From All Over (A Film's Death in Venice Division)

CELLULOIDLAND, The Universe -- First of All has just seen The Tourist, and we can say without hesitation that it is the worst film ever made. 
   We are delighted to report that at the moment it is in theaters everywhere, so you can see it too. You may wish, however, to wait for the DVD release; you'll certainly save money and emotional pain. You'll also be able to rewind scenes multiple times to deconstruct this splendidly execrable misfire so that you never inadvertently make one of your own. 
   The Tourist was directed by a man with the stirring name of Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck. Mr.FMGCGHvD also wrote the screenplay. He was joined in the effort by three others who evidently bore a ferocious grudge against him. They certainly did every writerly thing possible to sabotage his film. 
   That the movie, supposedly a thriller, is chockablock with A-list stars is indisputable; so is the fact that their utter miscasting is so full-blown that it hovers near being brilliant. 
   Johnny Depp is a math teacher from Wisconsin who falls in love with an attractive financial-crimes agent from Britain, the birthplace of the Beatles and rain. (The Beatles even wrote a song about rain. Aptly, it is titled "Rain.") Beautiful and mysterious though the agent is meant to be, as played by Angelina Jolie she resembles nothing so much as an anorexic drag queen automaton. 
   The Tourist means to be a caper film happily enjoyed over a tub of popcorn, the kind in which the two leads dash about an enchanting foreign locale--in this case Venice, the city of lovers and sinking buildings. But the film quickly deteriorates more thoroughly than have any of Venice's vaunted edifices. 

   If this is the fault of the rousingly named Mr.FMGCGHvD, it is equally the fault of the stars. 
   There was a time when First of All would have sold our firstborn, if we'd had one, in return for a lifelong romantic partnership, not to say the occasional romp in the hay, with Mr. Depp. That time extended from the moment we watched the first episode of 21 Jump Street, in nineteen eighty-seven, until the moment, a few hours ago, we watched The Tourist. 
   Mr. Depp now appears oddly bloated and shockingly aged. His shoulder-length hair is a nonsense tangle and his makeup is only slightly less bizarre than Ms. Jolie's. Note to Mr. Depp: heavy eyeliner? Awesome for that Keith Richards/Captain Jack Sparrow look; not so awesome when you're playing a math teacher from Wisconsin. With his blocky body and ragged goatee, Mr. Depp resembles a female-to-male transsexual; this is not a terrible look for anyone except perhaps a math teacher from Wisconsin. 
   Ms. Jolie, on the other hand, appears to be drugged. She has acknowledged past heroin use; has the habit made a comeback? Well, no; she seems less a junkie than someone enjoying a lifetime prescription for Xanax. She floats serenely through every scene, head high, body taut, chin jutted, makeup caked; she is an affectless queen in her own private parade. 
   Ms. Jolie's character is a stick figure--figuratively and literally. Late in the movie she dons a shoulder-baring black gown. She is dreadfully thin, so much so that First of All, while reviling those who talk noisily in theaters, was hard pressed not to scream, "Angelina! Three words--burger and fries!"    
   The Depp-Jolie pairing is awesomely amiss. Can chemistry between actors actually exist in negative space? The Tourist boldly answers in the affirmative. Mr. Depp and Ms. Jolie make implausible lovers. The problem is not just the bloat and the heroin (Xanax?); it is the vast emotional chasm that yawns between them. 
   Johnny Depp looks like he just arrived from smoking opium with Aleister Crowley under a bridge. Angelina Jolie looks like she just arrived from having her electrical wiring switched on in some shady East European laboratory. The Tourist could have been made with no lead actors a'tall and it would have had more sparkle and star power than it does now.
   Then there is the plot, which involves--well, who knows? Indeed, who cares? In these sorts of movies, the joys of being diverted by a sensible--or even insensible-- plot run a distant second to the joys of watching famous people be themselves in glamorous places. The Tourist is meant to provide pure escapism in the tradition of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood thrillers. But Mr.FMGCGHvD, the director, manages to make Venice look bland. And his misdirection of his stars is so total that it verges on the inspiring. 
   The Tourist falls through all the cracks. It is neither a feather-light caper nor a so-bad-it's-good camp gem. Instead, it is a turd for the ages. One watches it in the same way that animals inspect their bowel movements: to be sure that, yes, this is indeed feces, and then to bolt in order to escape the stench. 
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UPDATE (Dec. 23, 2010): We are extremely pleased to report that in televised interviews promoting the appalling The Tourist, Johnny Depp appears to have returned to his usual state of unbelievable hotness. First of All hereby throws its hat back in the ring viz. having a stable, longterm and physically raucous relationship with Mr. Depp, notwithstanding his really peculiar accent--part Brit-English, part Jack Sparrow, part Pepe Le Pew, part... well, who knows? It's Johnny Depp, for Chrissakes. That alone is enough. To be sure, it is all there needs to be, as one can see below.