Thought for the Day (from Hank Moody)

Replaying Season 1 of Californication, gearing up to screen Season 2…..

Hank Moody: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber, you know? I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically 4 figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratise us but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. You know, people …. they don’t write anymore, they blog; instead of talking they text, no punctuation, no grammar, LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me that it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo- communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a protolanguage that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.”

Rollins: Yet you’re part of the problem. I mean, you’re out there blogging with the best of them

Hank: Hence my self-loathing.

BP Quick Hitter: Taken

 

She said she was just going to the mall and would be back by 1o.

Taken is the first film I’ve rented using Redbox. There’s one around the corner at the Harris Teeter.

Redbox is the service that lets you pick a DVD from a kiosk and rent it the next day. And it lives up to its initial impression as a vending machine, where you’ll always find a Reese’s Cup but rarely a Zagnut. So, don’t expect to be taking home The Bicycle Thief for your evening’s entertainment. In fact, I think going forward the terms “Redbox” should be synonymous with mainstream, multiplex offerings, offering cheap thrills with a minimum of thought. (As in “I saw the new Redbox with Anne Hathaway.”)

On that score, Taken delivers. It’s actually a strange little action film, made in France a while back and starring, of all people, Liam Neeson, taking a break from his mopey, hang-dog dramatic personage to play a mopey, hang-dog former CIA agent.

In doing so, Neeson may have established a new subgenre: The Divorced Dad’s Action Fantasy Movie. In more traditional settings, these kinds of movies had their day as families split in the 1980s and 90s. Then, Dads would do crazy things to get their kids to like them again, such as dress up as a woman, or be reincarnated as a talking snowman.

That won’t work in these more ruthless, desperate times. In Taken, Neeson, in order to just spend some time with his teenage daughter, has to travel to Paris and rescue her from Albanian sex traffickers. You can’t do brunch at Ruby Tuesday like the rest of the divorced dads?

BP Double Bill: Ice Age-Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009)/Murphy’s Romance (1985)

Like TV dancing contests and Sarah Palin, dinosaurs score in all key demographic categories.

Son, in my day, all you needed was a cowboy hat and a smile and the audience was yours.

First things first, never write a post that says the hiatus is over and then go on an even longer hiatus.

But there is one defense. Last month, my HDTV went belly up after just three years. (A Toshiba 42HP66 if you are curious) leaving me with little incentive to watch movies, except on my computer–which I find sort of excruciating. TV programs are one thing, movies are another. Even TV shows I love, such as 3o Rock, go down easy on a monitor–but movies, especially now, demand a bigger screen, some panorama, and quality sound.

These days, however, when I go to a real movie theater, it’s usually for my 4-year-old daughter. During the holiday, I took her to see the third Ice Age movie. I had wanted to take her to see Up–Pixar can do little wrong in my eyes–, but reviews on the net suggested it was too violent and somber for her. (And yet the film is called “Up.”)

Now, after 80 minutes of listening to Ray Romano and Queen Latifah play two Woolly Mammoths, I wish I had gone ahead and gambled on Pixar.

But getting to the heart of the matter: The inescapable fact that big-studio pictures are marketing vehicles first. (And if you ever had any doubt, this article in the New Yorker will vaporize it.) And that I am even bother to restate such an obvious notion shows that I am well on my way to becoming the kind of old coot I was always fearful I would become. It’s irresistible to claim that “in my day” things were better–and a true sign of age is when you truly, with all your critical heart, believe it. You’re convinced of it and of the belief that any objective analysis would bear that out. (I can claim the 1970s and the 1990s as “my day” but never mind….)

BP Double Bill: Only Angels Have Wings (1939)/Major Dundee (1965)

Now, the men here eat first, understand?

I can’t quit you. . .

What we have here are two sides of same coin. Or perhaps both sides of the coin share the same image, a device used in Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings.

These are movies about men and the manly things they do. Angels is a about a ragtag group of commercial pilots on a rundown airstrip in South America. Dundee is a Civil War movie that features Native Americans, the French, Mexico, Confederates, swordfights on horseback, tequila, whiskey, brown skinned temptresses, questions of honor and, for sure over the top enjoyment, scenery chewers Charlton Heston and Richard Harris, who spend most of movie threatending to kill each other “when this is all over.”

Dundee was an early effort from Sam Peckinpah, whose career was largely defined by establishing a new level of hyperrealistic violence in Westerns. The legendary (and loathed) Peckinpah was not a subtle filmmaker. His masculine code is telegraphed througout his body of work. Men drink, fight, and die, in that order, and maybe they’ll stop a moment for a pretty girl, but she had better not get in the way. And of course, the women will never, ever understand.

Hawks, on the other hand, is one of the most celebrated directors of all time, one who could work comfortably in any genre. But he, too, created worlds of masculine energy, where men set the rules in the strongest possible terms. Angels is certainly representative. In probably the film’s most famous scene, the pilots drink after one of their own, Joe (Noah Beery), goes down in a fiery crash. When the token female on the premises, Jean Arthur, expresses her horror at the cavalier attitude of the pilots, she is ridculed by Cary Grant. “Who’s Joe?” he snaps.

BP Double Bill: Burn After Reading (2008)/The Man Between (1953)

I often find myself watching movies consecutively that share some sort of connection, even if it wasn’t my plan to begin with. So it was last evening when I screened the latest Coen comedy, Burn After Reading, and then simply flipped over to TCM, to find the Carol Reed film The Man Between. They, oddly enough, make natural companions.

(I only guessed it was a Reed film, because of its similarities to Reed’s The Third Man, especially the prominence of bombed-out Berlin as a backdrop. I was pleased to find myself correct.)

Burn After Reading took a lot of heat, so to speak, from critics who deemed it an unworthy followup to No Country For Old Men. And there’s no doubt the latter movie is superior–although frankly, I would be fine if I never saw it again. But the Coens’ high standards are frequently held against them. What struck me the most about the film was how comfortably it fit in the moment. While the Coens may populate their movies with exaggerated characters, they are undeniably inhabit the world around them. The Coens see the world as absurd and exaggerated. Their characters only follow suit.

BP Quick Hitter: All the President’s Men (1976)

Just get the byline right. The rest is automatic.

Director: Alan J. Pakula

Writers: William Goldman (and Bernstein and Woodward, naturally)

Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jason Robards

Didn’t so much create the concept of investigative journalism but canonize it. Still, nice to revisit a time when reporters were considered to be heroes, as opposed to craven opportunists or self-promoting prospective franchises. What struck me while watching this film again, however, is how much has changed. Woodward and Bernstein operated the old-fashioned way, with phone calls and shoe leather, largely because they were more sophisticated–and more committed–in their methods than those they were pursuing. This was a time when you could call government officials and politicos on the phone and they’d talk to you, not hide behind spokesmen and talking points and counter-information. Watergate, in part, gave rise to the modern public relations state, where every action is focus-grouped, field tested and downscaled for easy consumption.

With the current popularity of Frost/Nixon, is it finally a time for NixonMania? The historical reassessment he always craved?

BP Quick Hitter: The Wizard of Oz (1939)

I hope we don’t end up sleeping at the Port Authority.

Director: Victor Fleming

Writers: Noel Langley. Florence Ryerson

Starring: Judy Garland, Florence Hamilton, Ray Bolger, Burt Lahr, Frank Morgan

I don’t have much to say about this movie, except this. For something that is supposed to be a building block for every child’s cultural mythology, I realized while watching it that it’s entirely possible I never paid much attention to it before. And what I discovered (unsurprisingly I am sure to most) was a much more complex and emotionally engaging film that I ever remembered.

That’s part, I suppose, of the magic of reliving films with your children. You see them in new ways, as an adult, but  also through the eyes of the child. You can witness the wonder, the pure joy, that films like this can provide even in our jaded 21st Century. Since we watched it the first time, my daughter has watched it four or five more times, preferring it often to much more modern and sophisticated entertainments from the Disney/Pixar assembly line.

BP Quick Hitter: In the Valley of Elah (2007)

I need to know something. Can you pick up the check?

Director: Paul Haggis

Writer: Paul Haggis, Mark Boal

Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron

A largely quiet meditation on the fractured nature of perception. Army vet Jones’s son goes AWOL upon returning home from Iraq and Jones takes it upon himself to investigate, with the help of taciturn police detective Theron. (These two together don’t produce heat, just the opposite; their lived-in resignation in the face of inalterable truth puts the entire film under a cloud.) There is something wonderful, if not novelistic, in the movie’s march toward its conclusion, one that refuses to tie anything up neatly, but has much to say about pressures soliders face. Jones knows more about himself, his son, and his country by the end of the movie. But to him, there isn’t much reassurance there.

BP Quick Hitter: The Kingdom (2007)

I know this isn’t the time, but damn if you aren’t one fine FBI agent.

Director: Peter Berg

Writer: Matthew Michael Carnahan

Starring: Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman

There was real hope here for awhile. Director Peter Berg was responsible for the sublime (albeit still bombastic) Friday Night Lights. And in its early reel, the film takes some pains to detail the inacessible nature of Saudi society. And more hope in the form of supportings Chris Cooper, Jeremy Piven, and Jason Bateman (as an FBI agent? Really?). But all of that flies out the window as things begin to explode, rockets fire, and automatic weapons rattle. Syriana for Dummies. Black Hawk Down for, well, those who never tire of urban shoot-ups. I blame Jamie Foxx.

Thus endeth the hiatus

I hope.

Going to start cranking up this blog again. The election, Christmas, life, work and everything else took over. If you have ever bothered to stop by, please bother again.