In the Beginning Was the Nerd...Redux

Some extraneous thoughts that will not be running in my coverage of New York ComicCon in The Onion - A.V. Club this week:

-I moved out of my comic book phase about 10 years ago, but I must admit, spending time at this convention made me all kinds of nostalgic. The writing seems to be much better, and much more thematically diverse than it was even in '96, when I followed more mutant storylines than an episode of The Surreal Life.

-From the looks of it, these nerds are getting laid.

-In my story, I mentioned Eli Roth, the Lynchean auteur behind such masterpieces as Hostel, Cabin Fever, and Hostel 2. Here's something else I learned about him during his appearance at ComicCon: Roth takes a good deal of pride in being a young man of Jewish descent who has managed to crack his way into the tough world of Hollyood.

-Jon Landis, director of An American Werewolf in London, Animal House, Blues Brothers, Three Amigos! and Coming to America, was one of a panel of six legendary horror directors that drew about a tenth as many fanboys as Roth and the chick from Sorority Boys.

-Peter Mayhew, aka Chewbacca, turned me away when I asked for a quick interview. "No press," he said. Actually, his publicist said it. Mayhew himself shook his head and said, "GrrrrrrrreeerhrrWhrrrhrhrBuhhhhrrhrahGaaaaaaaaaaauaua"

The Academy Is...

The Oscars happened. And it turns out that all Martin Scorsese had to do to win one was show Leo in the missionary position and hurl Martin Sheen off a building.

The Departed was as good as a movie gets without being a great movie. (Interestingly, As Good As It Gets is also probably as good as it gets without being great.) Its relative dominance confirms what everybody already knows about the Academy: popularity contest.

But it's not as bad as the rest of pop media. If the E! Channel is the House of Representatives, the Academy is the Senate. It's still about a layer of symbolic bullshit draped awkwardly over the concerns of a small group of moneyed special interests (in this case the studios and their PR teams, who lobby every bit as hard as Abramoff), but whereas the House is tethered to its constituency tightly enough that they have to hop-to with every fickle shift in the polling data, the Senate operates at just a bit of a remove. So the Senators (the Academy members, hear me out on this analogy) become less concerned with earning constituents' pats on the back as they are with earning their own pats on the back.

To wit:

Babel, yet further proof of Alejandro González Iñárritu's ability to convert three half-finished screenplays into an overlong "socially conscious" yarn via arbitrary (and usually implausible) connections. See also: Syriana

The Queen: Another opportunity for the Academy to remind everybody how much they loved Princess Di.

Little Miss Sunshine: Indie filmmaking by numbers. Somebody should tell these guys that if merely mentioning the names Proust and Nietzsche in a piece of writing were enough to make it intellectually stimulating, The Enfranchised would be bigger than The Huffington Post.

Letters from Iwo Jima: I haven't seen this one, but I'm pretty sure we won that battle, planted a big ass flag, and everybody involved went back to their business with much merriment. Truly inspirational.

and of course The Departed. Great source material, a taut adaptation, top-notch performances (including Alec Baldwin whose 'type' seems to have become 'playing against type') and slick direction. Only problem is that it's about a third as good as Goodfellas, Casino, Raging Bull, or Taxi Driver (or Brick, or Children of Men, or Pan's Labyrinth for that matter).

Hey, at least people will stop saying things like, "Scorsese doesn't hold a candle to Academy Award (R) winner Paul Haggis. I mean, did you see Haggis on Entourage?" and "Screw Scorcese, how about Academy Award winner (R) James Cameron. I mean, did you see Cameron on Entourage?)

Rants on a Blog

This is likely the last Snakes on a Plane blog post you'll ever read, but it won't be the last X on a Y post. That's because, like this guy's tattoo, the novelty of SoaP took about a week to wear off but its effects will be felt for quite some time. This much Chuck Klosterman notes, along with just about everything else there is to say about why this movie is bad for your soul, in his Esquire piece.

Among my generation, irony is a language, hyperirony a currency, and hyperirony-for-its-own-sake a narcotic. In other words, to get by a healthy amount of the first is essential, a bit of the second is useful, and too much of the last is dangerous. Call me old-fashioned, but I usually look for films, TV, music and other bits of culture that I enjoy. In any other century that last sentence would be unambiguous, but allow me to clarify: to 'enjoy' something in my sense is to enjoy it intrinsically, and not as an irony delivery mechanism or as fodder for the sneering, self-satisfied, sarcastic nuggets of your fellow hirsute hipsters.

Life is too short to continuously blast Raffi's "Banana Phone" or The B-52's "Rock Lobster" just for grins like my ex-roommate did (unless, of course, you actually like Raffi or the B-52s, in which case God bless). That's why when my buddies sent me a canned voicemail of Samuel L. Jackson demanding that I get off my ass and see Snakes on a Plane, I politely informed them that I'd just as soon be on a trans-Pacific flight stocked with a surfeit of venomous serpents.

Oh, and as for the supposed brilliance of the film's title, file it under Ecclesiastes' dictum: There is NOTHING new under the sun. For one thing, nearly every sitcom ever aired followed the same formula of the using the title to spell out the concept, we just never got excited about it because the concepts themselves were usually less absurd (mental exercise: figure out why it is that That 80's Show is a title conceptually closer to Snakes on a Plane than either is to That 70's Show). Then of course there is that other bastion of the upfront title: porn. Now, I know what you're thinking, porn titles at least go so far as to give us some assonance or a second-rate pun (e.g. Butt Fuck Sluts Go Nuts, and Weapons of Ass Destruction, respectively). But lowest-common-denominator literalism gets even lower and more literal than that. To wit: I am apartment-sitting for my buddy and his girlfriend in Jersey City, and one day I took a ganders through their DVD collection in search of amusement. To my delight I found the 1999 gem Hookers in a Haunted House, which was Snakes on a Plane 8 years before Snakes on a Plane was Snakes on a Plane.

And it's got tits.

The Top 25 Revenge Movies of All Time

The situation in southern Lebanon has me ruminating quite a bit on that dish best served cold--not seviche, but vengeance. And so, the best of it on film:

25. Office Space
24. Red Dawn*
23. Robocop
22. Heathers
21. The Punisher (1989)
20. Gladiator
19. The Bourne Supremacy
18. Diabolique (1955)
17. Friday the 13th
16. The Count of Montecristo (2002)
15. Batman (1989)
14. Rocky IV
13. The Karate Kid
12. Star Wars, Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
11. Unforgiven
10. Kill Bill (vo1.1-2)
9. For a Few Dollars More
8. Conan the Barbarian*
7. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
6. Get Carter (1971)
5. Carrie
4. Death Wish
3. Man on Fire
2. The Crow
1. The Godfather

Honorable Mentions: The Toxic Avenger, Revenge of the Dragon, Payback, Revenge of the Nerds, Ocean's Eleven, First Blood I-III (Rambo), Clear and Present Danger*, Commando, Flight of the Intruder.*

*denotes the involvement of John Milius, American cinema's master of vengeance, as writer and/or director.

This list is nought but convtroversial. I suspect many will be confused and upset by how films such as Star Trek II and Conan the Barbarian made it into the top ten while films like Gladiator is ranked comparatively lower. I know there'll be contingents who think Revenge of the Nerds belongs on the list, or another Eastwood movie, or some Bruce Lee movies, or that the Godfather isn't really a revenge movie (it is), or that older films are under-represented in general. Perhaps most fearsome is the cadre of raving children of the 80s who will demand Rocky IV be promoted to #1 or higher (I include it at #14 only as a begrudging compromise. In my mind, anything after Rocky II is barely canonical). In any event, feel free to disagree and state your case.

NB: I'm selling my television

Copy of a letter I just sent to Wolf Blitzer's CNN beardfest "The Situation Room":

I wanted to thank Mr. Blitzer and his "Situation Room" correspondent for their piece on the World Cup headbutting incident.

As if to visually underscore the unpleasentness of Zidane's maneuver, the report included a collage of other headbuttings captured on tape and amassed, no doubt, from the computer desktop of an early adolescent of middling intelligence.

Years from now I'm sure I'll tell my grandchildren it was on July 10, 2006 that the world's premiere cable news network first had the courage and rectitude to show me a video of a grown man's head engulfed by an elephant's anus.

I trust Mr. Blitzer is at this very moment working on his Peabody Award acceptance speech.

In Earnest,

DRF

I: Maxims and Barbs

Forward

As the better part of August comes and goes, I thought it a good time to post the first section of my long unawaited Twilight of the (American) Idols: Or How to Philosophize with a Remote Control, a philosophical tract on the status of the American Public and its Media.

I. MAXIMS AND BARBS

1
Ours is the age of celebrities as whores, and whores as celebrities

2
The genius of Scientology, like the genius of Viva-La-Bam, is its sympathy with (its identity with) its audience: Scientology was Tom Cruise long before Tom Cruise was a Scientologist.

3
Oprah is the opiate of the masses

4
By violently wedging non-sequiturs and flashbacks between plot points, Family Guy achieves in twenty-two minutes an A.D.D. semblance of the pop-culture-shredding absurdist genius it has taken The Simpsons thirteen years to craft.

5
Andy Warhol later said, “I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, ‘In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.’” It is now approximately 13:52.

6
Boardroom adage amendments passed by unanimous vote: “(homo-, metro-, bi-)sex sells”

7
If I had a bullet in my lower intestine for every time MTV played back-to-back music videos, I’d retire at age 67 along the Florida panhandle.

8
Reference is the new meaning

9
To wit: it is possible among men of our age to converse exclusively in bits of Will Farrell dialogue.

10
Precisely what’s wrong with Seth MacFarlane and most university students is that they think nos. 4, 8 and 9 are good things.

11
It should surprise no one that as hip-hop artists shift from have-nots to haves, so too does their audience.

12
Pimp my Ride as exemplar of media marketed to 18-25 year olds: hot bodies and digital effects slapped on the same rusted out old frame with the same shitty transmission.

13
Give it five years and ABC will look like HBO, HBO will look like the Playboy Channel, the Playboy Channel will look like a hardcore gangbang flick, and a hardcore gangbang flick will look like a bunch of Asian children being taken out into the street and shot.

14
Precisely what's wrong with me is I think (most of) no. 13 is a good thing.

15
I mistrust all Six Feet Under fans and avoid them: the will to melodrama is a lack of integrity

16
Zack Braff’s worst crime was making it impossible to like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, since it is an immutable law of nature that every girl who lists Garden State among her favorite films lists it as well.

17
That Conan O’Brien evades any mention of his Harvard education on his show—usually by knocking over his desk mike and making a poop joke—is what success with his target demographic has meant.

18
I was once at a poker table in Atlantic City across from a young man wearing a t-shirt with “NO LIMIT TEXAS HOLD’EM” printed across its front. Sizing up our competition, a friend remarked to me that he had never seen a New York Yankee wearing a “PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL” t-shirt. Apply analogical reasoning when interpreting a Surreal Life cast-member’s claim to be “an actor.”

19

The only thing we have to fear is Fear Factor itself.

20

The Axis of Comedic Evil: Andy Dick, Kathie Griffith, and Kathie Griffin

21

I have been called, among other things, a metrophopic. These charges are unwarranted. I said only that I have a sneaking suspicion that the Queer Eyes are running out of Straight Guys, and that as a result I fear for my flannels.

22

Heron and Trippi had it backwards: The Television will not be Revolutionized.

The Man Who Sold the World (Or Star Wars Episode III: The Empire Strikes Out)

In the weeks now since Star Wars Episode III was released, the invectives leveled against its progenitor, George Lucas, have reached proportions more epic than anything that’s come out of the brain trust at Skywalker Ranch. The British daily The Guardian called Lucas less a director and more a “chief executive-cum-potentate in charge of a vastly profitable franchise empire in which striking back is not an option,” whose corporate avatar, Industrial Light and Magic, contains “no magic, little light [and] an awful lot of heavy industry.” An ‘alt’ American paper, The Observer, suggested assessing films of negative aesthetic merit in terms of “Lucases” - as in, ‘Dude, Where’s my Car? got three Lucases in the Chicago Tribune’. The Salon review, marked by its usual sass, was entitled “Same old Sith” and the film summarized as the work of “an occasionally clever but mostly simple-minded auteur-wannabe”. But perhaps it was the dreaded New Yorker (which, it should be noted in fairness, is responsible for more conversions to the Dark Side than Palpatine ever was) who went furthest in criticism qua witticism. Anthony Lane calls the Bard of Endor a “rootless soul” with “a near fascistic rage for order” who has created:

“an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation. I keep thinking of the rueful Obi-Wan Kenobi, as he surveys the holographic evidence of Anakin’s betrayal. “I can’t watch anymore,” he says. Wise words, Obi-Wan, and I shall carry them in my heart.”

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that most critics with a failed-novel on their shoulders and a circulation of over 10,000 are prone to the occasional hyperbolic judgment. But rarely is such lavish and luxuriant venom heaped upon a film that makes no pretensions to Oscar-worthiness. Surely, this literary-lashing, this critical-cornholing, can’t be warranted, not by Our Man George. Can it?

The short answer, children, is yes. Yes it can.

Star Wars Episode III sucked. It sucked essentially - sucked at the root of its very being, and sucked by and large because of an obscenely wealthy, beard-and-pompadour-sporting pestilence known as George Locust - er - Lucas. Lucas, then, is worthy of revile. Still, I won’t offer much of a critique of the film itself - that has been done, with all the subtlety and restraint of a blowjob from a vacuum cleaner. Besides, I actually hold certain of its elements beyond reproach; protected, as it were, from a death of suckitude stretched indefinitely in space and time at the event-horizon of suckiness that is this Lucasian suckfest of a Black-Hole-suck-suck.

Yoda, for one. Yoda can do no wrong for me, not since he watched Luke’s X-wing lift-off from Degoba, squinting sagely and replying to Obi-Wan’s portentous claim that “that boy is our only hope” with “No, there is another.” Anthony Lane is so perturbed by our little-green-friend’s cadence that he begs us to “break [him] a fucking give”. True, Yoda’s inversions may be contrived and irrelevant, but they are fucking YODA’s inversions. Besides, Lane’s review shares column space with New Yorker cartoons. He should know all about contrived and irrelevant.

Two. Natalie Portman. The poor girl is as beautiful as she is useless in this role. I mean, we know she can act. Just look at her wonderful performance as the Madonna-Whore in Closer; and her in some ways even more impressive turn as the Atlas to Zack Braff’s globular ego in Garden State. The problem is that Herr Lucas writes romance like he would a car stereo installation manual, and he has forcefully ejaculated such unspeakable tripe past the lips of Amidala that - could I prove paternity - I would bring him up on charges of rape.

Needless to say, most if not everything else in the movie sucks. Or if it doesn’t itself suck, it is so bathed in Lucas’s putridity that one can’t stand in its presence for long before one’s stomach turns and one’s eyes water.

Still, Lucas’s real crime has nothing to do with the film itself, but rather its audience. I saw Revenge of the Sith a week after opening, at a 10PM showing in Oxford (a highly disreputable time to see a movie in England) and the house was packed. A line had formed outside the small theatre 45 minutes before the 45 minutes of commercials before the 45 minutes of trailers before the movie. When John Williams’ anthem and STAR WARS finally leapt to screen, a great applause went up: the sound of an anxious hope that an under-the-desk hand job - begun in 1977 in the spirit of innocence and exploration and gas shortage - was finally to reach its climax after seven-odd years of cinematic blue-balls. When it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t to be, we ragtag band of geeks, dorks and dungeon-masters turned to the one weapon losers have wielded since time immemorial in the face of romantic (Romantic?) jilting: self-important, sneering mockery.

In short, we laughed. And we laughed not just at 3PO’s obliviousness or R2’s irascibility, not just at Palpatine’s coiffure or Mace Windu’s purple light saber; nor even did we draw the line at snickering over Hayden Christensen’s bitchy rejoinder to Ewan MacGregor’s warning of the Sith lords’ evil (“Not from my point of view! From my point of view the Jedi are evil!”). No, friends, I am sad to say that we laughed at the Man in Black himself. When Vader, freshly be-suited and strapped into a Kafkaesque device of wrought steel, is deceived by the Emperor into believing that he has killed the woman he loves, he tears free of his restraints, shakes two black-gloved fists in the air and vociferates the kind of “NOOOOOOOOOO!” that can only issue from the darker regions of James Earl Jones’ soul.

And we chortled with all the righteous irony of Janine Garafalo at a straight bar. We laughed at Darth-motherfucking-Vader. And why? Because some dude in this dumb ass movie was totally ripping off Star Wars, and didn’t he realize how fucking kitsch that was?

In the short time it took Luke and Lea to be born, something distinctively American died. That bright-eyed, naïve earnestness; that seriousness about kidding ourselves; that starving for a mythos which was as fun and facile as it was sacred and indispensable. In a word, that unselfconsciousness. That - can I even say it without you cringing in this age of I Love the 80s and Best Week Ever?…..that innocence.

Somewhere in the vast conceptual gulf between the Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks, Star Wars became what Jean Baudrillard (known in some circles simply as ‘French Theorist #163’) calls a simulacrum - a cultural copy of a copy whose original has long since gone the way of the sitcom. Worse yet, it became a simulacrum of itself. A kind of hyper-movie (or hyper-franchise) whose logic and aesthetics we had already chewed up, spoofed, and spit out into the dust bin of irony-for-its-own-sake. In short, even if the prequels had sucked half as much as they actually did, they were destined to be subjected to the bored and disaffected nihilism of an X-generation of maladroit malcontents who wear bowling shirts with other people’s names on them. In the greatest cultural perversion in recent history, Star Wars has become Space Balls. And Space Balls - if you ask the average video store clerk worth his salt in vapid cynicism - has become Citizen Cane.

None of this, of course, is to exonerate Herr Lucas, whose Leviathan ILM was practically at the helm of Hollywood’s perfection of the vacuous summer blockbuster. But if you ask me, his soul is cleaner than yours or mine. After all, he’s got your ten bucks, and he carries it with a perfectly straight face all the way to the bank. You and I, on the other hand, are left in this Recycled Land of Thin-Candy-Shelled Men, wondering why it is we can’t help but smirk every time we hear the name “Grand Moff Tarkin”.