Month: August 2012

New in Theaters: ‘2 Days in New York’

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If you’re looking to improve box office, it might make sense to replace Adam Goldberg with Chris Rock. As a leading man opposite co-star/writer/director Julie Delpy in her romantic comedy 2 Days in Paris, Goldberg chiseled a bit of comic gold, but he was hardly a draw for most moviegoers. Rock, who replaces him in 2 Days in New York, is a star with proven appeal, even if his on-screen timing has always been a poor cousin to his stage persona. But, as it turns out, this tradeoff is costly…

2 Days in New York opened last Friday; my full review is at PopMatters.

Trailer is here:

New in Theaters: ‘The Chilean Building’

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Macarena Aguiló’s melancholy documentary about her childhood spent in group safe homes with other children of Chilean revolutionaries is like some home movie for the generation who thought they could change not just the government, but the very idea of family itself…

The Chilean Building is playing now in limited release; it not near you it should be available on DVD and On Demand soon. My full review is at Film Journal International.

The trailer is here:

The ‘Jefferson Lies’ That Weren’t

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After selling some 20,000 books, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson is pulling all remaining copies of David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson (foreword by Glenn Beck). In his zeal to burnish Jefferson’s image, it seems Barton’s facts weren’t quite up to the argument he was making.

According to NPR, the publisher had a “loss of confidence” in the book’s accuracy:

Since its initial publication, historians have debunked and raised concerns about numerous claims in Barton’s book. In it, Barton calls Jefferson a “conventional Christian,” claims the founding father started church services at the Capitol, and even though he owned more than 200 slaves, says Jefferson was a civil rights visionary.

Additionally, Barton tried to shoo away evidence of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings. When the book was first published earlier this year, Alan Pell Crawford had this to say about it:

A commitment to the notion that Jefferson promoted Christian orthodoxy leads Mr. Barton to misinterpret the early history of the University of Virginia. It was precisely because American colleges were created to produce clergymen that Jefferson established an institution where, he declared, “a professorship of theology should have no place.” … Clergymen who opposed Jefferson’s attempt to hire freethinkers as faculty members he dismissed as “satellites of religious inquisition.”

…No doubt Jefferson has suffered at the hands of glib revisionists. But attempting to make this complex man a simple, reassuring and unambiguously admirable figure does no service to his reputation—or to the American past.

New in Theaters: ‘Red Hook Summer’

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In Red Hook Summer, star Clarke Peters spends a lot of time moping his brow. Theoretically, that’s because the film is set in the middle of a hot Brooklyn summer. It soon becomes difficult, though, to imagine Peters is sweating for any reason besides the fact that he’s working overtime trying to breathe some life and purpose into this directionless work from the possibly past-his-prime Spike Lee. In the grace and power of Peters’ performance, Lee has created one of his most memorable characters. Sadly, it’s nearly all for naught…

Red Hook Summer — Spike Lee’s first narrative film since 2008’s Miracle at St. Anna — opened in limited release on Friday. My review is at Film Journal International.

Trailer is here, and is worth checking out for Peters’ singing alone:

Reader’s Corner: David Rakoff (1964-2012)

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It’s been a bad few weeks — the literary world has been robbed of yet another glorious voice. David Rakoff, whose print and radio essays were some of the darkest yet most violently life-affirming things you will ever encounter, died on Thursday from the cancer that first appeared when he was just 22 years old.

His books (Half Empty, and particularly Don’t Get Too Comfortable) are rich with life and haunted with death, like most of the best writing is. He served on the airwaves of National Public Radio and on the shelves of smarter bookstores everywhere as a kind of grumpy conscience, the mordant cousin to David Sedaris (who championed his early writing).

In this fantastic segment from a live-recorded episode of This American Life from just this past May, Rakoff talks about his youth, dance, what he termed “all this nonsense”, and getting on with life after an operation severed the nerves that controlled his left arm.

“I’m done with so many things,” he says with the glint of sadness which always gave his humor that unique sting.

Quote of the Day: Martin Amis

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Martin Amis, barbed-pen satirist of the modern era and boon companion of the late Christopher Hitchens (with whom he shared a sharp impatience with lazy thinking), has taken it on the chin from the press and the literati in his home country of England for years now. Hard to say why, perhaps it was that habit of speaking his mind. But in any case, when Amis decamped from London to Brooklyn to set up home there with his (American) wife, the sniping started all over again.

In The New Republic, Amis — whose newest novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, comes out August 21 — has a few things to say on the cult of the author and the attribution of false statements:

Backed up by lavish misquotes together with satirical impersonations … the impression given was that I was leaving because of a vicious hatred of my native land and because I could no longer bear the well-aimed barbs of patriotic journalists.

“I wish I weren’t English”: Of all the fake tags affixed to my name, this is the one I greet with the deepest moan of inanition. I suggest that the remark—and its equivalent in any language or any alphabet—is unutterable by anyone whose IQ reaches double figures. “I wish I weren’t North Korean” might make a bit of sense, assuming the existence of a North Korean sufficiently well-informed and intrepid to give voice to it. Otherwise and elsewhere, the sentiment is inconceivably null. And to say it of England—the country of Dickens, George Eliot, Blake, Milton, and, yes, William Shakespeare—isn’t even perverse. It is merely whimsical.

 

DVD Tuesday: ‘Clue: The Movie’

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Somewhere buried deep in an email chain that’s been slung like Spider-man’s web from producer’s office to various screenwriters to yet other producers in Hollywood right now may well reside infinite variations on this question: How do we make a movie out of the board-game Clue?

It’s extremely likely that nowhere in this abstracted committee of moviemaking has anybody suggested, “Hey, how about making it into something of a sex farce that’s also an allegory for the McCarthy era?” That’s not just because it was already done but because such an idea would never fly. Except it did, in 1985. Somehow…

The Blu-ray release of Clue: The Movie hits stores today; and yes, it includes all three endings. My full review is at PopMatters.

Trailer Park: ‘The Master’

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A lot of the initial buzz that’s going to swirl around Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master will center on whether it’s inspired by Scientology. It’s easy to see why: the 1950s setting, the cultish leader who poses as a hybrid master of all disciplines, the dark threads of systematized paranoia and neurosis. But if the trailer is any indication — lush visuals, Joaquin Phoenix in full Walk the Line meltdown and Philip Seymour Hoffman owning the screen in that sulphuric Talented Mr. Ripley fashion — focusing on that subject alone could sidetrack attention from the potentially genius qualities of what could be the film of the year.

Check it out:

New in Theaters: ‘La Source’

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In this short, gleaming little gem of a documentary, a Princeton janitor devotes seemingly everything to the cause of bringing fresh water to his Haitian village. It’s the rare example of an issue film that lets its subjects sell the story instead of having it thrust upon them…

The very rewarding La Source (narrated by Don Cheadle, with music by Sigur Ross) is playing now at the Docuweeks festival in New York. My full review is Film Journal International.

Here’s the trailer:

Reader’s Corner: John Keegan (1934-2012)

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Another passing of a literary great was reported Friday. In short, John Keegan was the preeminent military historian of the modern era.

A believer in writing for the popular audience, Keegan bore some comparison to Niall Ferguson, particularly in staking out contentious theories, such as his support for the Iraq and Vietnam wars (thinking both were the least bad option) and his dismissal of the classic Clausewitzian definition of war as “politics by other means.” He was also a consummate gentleman to any who were lucky enough to hear him read.

Starting with his 1976 classic, The Face of Battle, Keegan helped turn the discipline from one that cared only about mass troop movements and the decisions of great generals to one that embraced a more holistic view of conflict, in particular how it affected the individual soldiers on the ground.

In this typically vivid scene from The Face of Battle, which studied the day-to-day experiences of British soldiers in three battles: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, Keegan wrote about an officer who fell asleep the minute the march was halted:

…[he] did not think of food until later in the night, when he woke to eat some chops cooked in the breastplate of a dead cuirassier (meat fried in a breastplate was very much à la mode in the Waterloo campaign, rather as rats spitted on a bayonet were to be in 1871 or champagne exhumed from chateau gardens in 1914).

New in Theaters: ‘360’

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Fernando Meirelles’s new drama 360 looks on the surface to be another of those broad tapestry films like Babel and Crash—set as it is in multiple cities from Denver to London to Vienna and packing enough thespian firepower for one of those off-year Woody Allen misfires. But except for an unnecessary voiceover at the opening and climax, which tries to tie a loose ribbon around what we’ve just seen, it’s not nearly so self-important or desperate. Because of that, it will also (perversely) probably be much less popular than the films mentioned above, even though there’s life practically bursting out of every pristinely shot scene…

360 is opening today in limited release but should expand around the country fairly soon, given the Oscar firepower in the cast. My full, mostly positive review is at Film Journal International.

Check out the trailer here:

The Happy, Happy Poors of ‘Downton Abbey’

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Danny Boyle’s Industrial-New Wave mashup of an Olympics opening ceremony aside — which, for all the pomp still included strong references to labor struggles and protest that would be unthinkably left-wing were it being held in this country — a yearning for the supposedly simpler and more dignified England prior to World War I still holds a powerful sway. Never mind the brutal working conditions or harsh class divisions, there is a curious nostalgia among Americans (likely the Brits as well) for a time when, for better or worse, everybody knew their place, whether they wanted to or not. Call it the Downton Abbey effect.

Consider this from Judith Flanders’ caustic review of Paul Thomas Murphy’s new book Shooting Victoria:

British television has a lot to answer for. From “Upstairs, Downstairs” to “Downton Abbey,” it has perpetrated an image of “historical” Britain as a country filled with a loved, even revered, upper class that gracefully patronizes the lower orders, who in turn are thrilled to roll over and have their tummies tickled by their social superiors. Absent is any sense of political, much less social unrest—there are no bread riots, no Luddites, no machine wreckers. Thus many PBS viewers might be surprised by the violence that accompanied the 19th century’s extreme political instability. And they might be positively shocked to learn that no fewer than seven of Queen Victoria’s subjects made attempts on her life.

As viewers of Downton Abbey know well, the villains are just about never the well-mannered (if occasionally clueless or bratty) owners of the great house itself. Chaos and distemper always appears in the form of the servant who’s getting above themselves or the nouveau riche interloper who thinks he can simply buy his way into the upper class. This fictional world is not one where the downstairs crew might ever be shown to have a true grievance against a mostly nonworking aristocracy that’s been feeding off their labor for centuries.

But then if BBC America started pitching a series about suffragists and the Jarrow Marchers, it might provide fewer opportunities for petticoat eye candy. So serious, those protesting types.

‘Citizen Kane’ Gets a Downgrade

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Those glorious Brit cine-eccentrics over at Sight and Sound have just put out their annual critics’ poll of the Top 10 films of all time, which wouldn’t normally be that newsworthy. However, given that they were one of the critical organs that was responsible for elevating Citizen Kane to its current stratospheric ranking in the canon, here’s the shocker: Vertigo is now number one. This is the first time a film besides Kane has occupied that position since 1962. It’s now been relegated to number two.

It was probably about time for a change of leadership. Does anybody really think Vertigo is the best film of all time, or even Hitchcock’s greatest work? Certainly one of the master’s more impressive films, but no Rear Window or even Shadow of a Doubt. Many other issues besides that with the list — no documentaries, not a Lean, Scorsese, or Kurosawa to be seen — but they could at least pick the right Hitchcock…

Vote yourself:

Reader’s Corner: David Maraniss and the Untwisted Fact

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They say no good deed goes unpunished. It’s just as proper to say that no reported fact goes untwisted. Thusly Obama biographer David Maraniss’ op-ed in the Washington Post:

In the introduction to my book, I took note of a sick political culture where “facts are so easily twisted for political purposes and where strange armies of ideological pseudo-historians roam the biographical fields in search of stray ammunition.” That sentence is now cited on right-wing Web sites as evidence that I hold them in contempt. True enough, one of the few accurate things that I’ve read from them. I do hold some of them in contempt, not because of their politics, nor because of their dislike of Obama. Political debate and disagreement are the lifeblood of American democracy. No, I hold them in contempt for the way they disregard facts and common sense and undermine the role of serious history as they concoct conspiracy theories that portray the president as dangerous, alien and less than American.