Notable film and media links--special July 4th edition, 2009

---In fashion/film news, the NYT looks at vampire chic and io9 considers the awkward relationship between science fiction movies and fashion.

---One interesting thing about Twitter and blogs: Alice Hoffman tweets her rage at a critic, as Alain de Botton does the same in the comments section of a negative reviewer's blog. Both have shown regret since.

---Jim Emerson laments the decline in arguing as he illustrates his point with a fun Monty Python sketch.

---Andrew Sullivan is always impressive, so I enjoyed hearing his thoughts about blogging.

---Ashens brilliantly summarizes my reaction to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

---Beth Accomando of NPR looks at the zombie pop culture phenomenon:

"Phil Luque, programmer for the San Diego Asian Film Festival Extreme, says zombies provide the ideal means of slipping social messages in under the radar.

"If you want to tell somebody, `I don't like you and I don't like the way you're running the government,' if I can tell it through a zombie movie, they're not going to care," Luque says. "It's just a zombie movie."

Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright paid homage to Romero's socially conscious zombies in their 2004 film Shaun of the Dead.

"We wanted to keep that spirit ... to comment on consumerism," Pegg says. "And in Day of the Dead,on vivisection — and use them as a metaphor."

"Zombies meant different things in different eras," says Wright, who co-wrote and directed Shaun of the Dead. "We always said our zombies are a metaphor for apathy. It's kind of like the great plague is laziness, so it was like the zombies represent sloth."

---Meanwhile, Rob Moffett provides us with the Zombocalypse Survival Kit.

---Of recent trailers, St Trinian's Girls looks iffy, Assassination of a High School President intrigues, and Deadgirl looks all ready for an extended dissection by Sociological Images.

---I think Public Enemies is likely to be one of the best films of the summer. To find out more, check out Michael Mann Week at Radiator Heaven, the "Essential Facts" in the MTV Movies Blog, S. T. VanAirsdale's Esquire discussion of how the film fits into "our culture's antibank blacklash," and Johnny Depp's thoughts on how his family background helped inspire his interest in Dillinger:

"My stepdad was an inspiration to me," Depp says in a hotel suite the morning after the film's premiere. "I knew about his past and I remember when I was growing up him referring to it as his `college years.'

"When I got older and asked him what college he had attended, he said it was Statesville Prison. So for me to be able to get that much closer to him now, especially since he's passed on, was huge for me. He did what he did and I'm proud of him for doing what he had to do to survive. And he and my grandfather were great inspirations for me for Dillinger." Ever since he was a boy, Depp says, he's been fascinated by the Dillinger legend – partly because he was born in Owensborough, Ky., 250 kilometres from the Indiana farm where Dillinger lived as a teenager – but more significantly because Depp's grandfather and stepfather had also operated on the wrong side of the law.

"It has to do with my family and my upbringing," he explains. "My grandfather, who I was very close to as a kid, had run moonshine into dry counties, and my stepfather also had been a bit of a rogue and done burglaries and robberies ... there was some kind of inherent connection I had."

---For Slate, Farhad Manjoo examines "the allure of crowd-sourced, single-topic blogs."

---As a resident of South Carolina, I can only point to Jon Stewart's hilarious reaction to Governor Sanford's treatment of the media recently.

---Lastly, check out Mesai's clever animated short entitled Alarm (with thanks to /film).

"I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, and you": cinematic love in Public Enemies

I may be biased, given my preference for gangster films, but I liked most everything about Public Enemies (except for the over-exposed and ever-grim Christian Bale). I especially enjoyed the way Michael Mann played with metacinematic moments in the movie. In an interview for About.com, Mann said this about it:

"I elected to tell a story that is about what starts with what's Dillinger thinking in the Biograph [Theater] moments before he's going to walk out and get killed. When he’s seeing, you know, Clark Gable as Blackie in [Manhattan Melodrama] really pose questions to him and almost send him messages. And Gable's character, Blackie, is derived partially from Hollywood's take on John Dillinger because he was the most famous American, second only to the President of the United States at that time."

The scene reminded me a lot of another metacinematic moment early in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Soon after Clyde shoots and kills a man after a robbery, the scene abruptly cuts to the 3-person gang in the theater watching the "We're in the money" sequence in Gold Diggers of 1933.

As Clyde cusses out C. W. Moss for stupidly causing the murder, Bonnie shushes them for interfering with her pleasure in the song and dance. In one sense Bonnie and Clyde are in the money, but they are also now wanted for murder, so their success has a bittersweet tinge that colors so much else in the film. The scene also shows how Depression-era fantasy sequences in movies contribute to their dreams of wealth that lead them to this impasse.

In Public Enemies, this communication between film dream and reality is even more pronounced. Dillinger and his gang are ever conscious of their lifestyles being like a "ride" with movie-like carpe diem intensity. After kidnapping a female teller, one of Dillinger's gangster pals tells her that he's also a "scout for the movies." Dillinger's values seem shaped by the cinema. His pick-up line for Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) has a Bond-like directness in which he promises action movie excitement in exchange for her life in which, as she admits, nothing exciting has ever happened. He says: "I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whisky . . . and you. What else you need to know?" Dillinger's and Billie's odd love affair gives the film much of its narrative drive, especially as he tries to live up to the successful future that he paints for her when he's not evading the Feds.

Dillinger also enjoys sitting in the theater as the public service announcement tells the crowd members to look to the left and the right to see if they can spot him. He's both famous and delightfully anonymous, sneaking a visit to the office of the Chicago criminal investigator who's specializing in his case just as the real Dillinger would brazenly go watch a Cubs baseball game. Bryan Burroughs points out Dillinger's celebrity in his article about the historical accuracy of Public Enemies: in the 1930s, a "poll of moviegoers found Dillinger was drawing the most applause of any major American shown in newsreels, rivaling President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh." Dillinger is the gangster as star, so Public Enemies keeps switching between treating him as hunted prey and as a celebrity, even as the Robin Hood quality of the first feeds the second. He's no sooner handcuffed in the back of a car, sandwiched between two policemen, than the masses of adoring crowds lining the streets oblige him to wave.

His press conference in the Indiana jail takes on a the flair of a Beatles interview when he jokingly answers about the length of his bank robberies "One minute and 40 seconds. Flat."

So what does happen as Dillinger watches Manhattan Melodrama in the Biograph theater? Mann sets up a poignant three way identification between the viewer, Johnny Depp, and the scenes in the movie within the movie. We watch Dillinger identify with Clark Gable as he decides to "Die the way you live, real sudden. Don't drag it out" on his way to the electric chair, a summary of Dillinger's seize-the-day ethos he has lived by. We watch Dillinger gaze upon Myrna Loy at length as if she were the cinematic equivalent of his beloved Billie. The transposition is remarkably effective, in part because Loy carries her own associations with films like The Thin Man, but also because we know that Dillinger will never see Billie again. We can see the movie speaking to him because it reflects the way Public Enemies has spoken to us all along--through images not only of gangsters, but also of a love refined by distance and the brevity brought on by constantly impending violence.

Karl Malden, RIP

Twice now, I've directed a production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and both times we began with the evening poker scene where Mitch awkwardly flirts with Blanche behind the curtain before Stanley throws his fit and eventually yells "Stella!" to persuade his wife to come downstairs. For this reason, I've seen Karl Malden perform as Mitch innumerable times on video and DVD. Now that Malden has passed away, I wonder, would Brando have looked so dynamic and masculine if he didn't have goony Mitch around for contrast? And would On the Waterfront have worked as well without Malden around as Father confessor?

Fortunately, he was there both times. RIP, Karl Malden.

Smuggler's blues: Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell in Miami Vice (2006)

[In honor of Michael Mann's much anticipated Public Enemies to be released this Wednesday and Michael Mann week at Radiator Heaven, here's my of-the-period review of Miami Vice (2006)]

What could be more fun than working for the vice squad? You get to slouch around like a hoodlum, penetrate underworld organizations, and drive Ferraris while wearing designer shades, flashy suits, and beard stubble. In Miami Vice, being on the vice squad means spending plenty of time on your cell phone, driving speed boats, and posing against dramatic cityscape backdrops.

Director, writer, and producer Michael Mann has always conveyed a sense of style in his movies, many of them very good. I liked his early film Thief, and his recent movie Collateral even made Tom Cruise look plausibly vicious. With Miami Vice, though Mann attempts to jack up a successful TV show to over-the-top summer feature length expectations, and something's not quite right. Beautifully shot with high definition film, the movie is so awed with its own myth, it lacks humanity. It is all style to the point where one misses the content. Without much reason for the audience to get involved, the film drags.

To get a sense of the problem, one can contrast Jamie Foxx's work between the two recent movies. In Collatoral, Foxx plays an ambitious but otherwise ordinary cab driver who eventually has to act like an underworld kingpin just to survive. The nuances in his acting makes the film plausible and interesting. You can see him decide to act tough even though it goes against his better nature, yet he also finds he likes it. In Miami Vice, Foxx's version of Detective Ricardo Tubbs is all tough, self-satisfied cool. He appears on the screen at the height of self-possession and stays that way, quickly establishing his heterosexual credentials by stripping off his shirt to show his newly musclebound frame and making epic love with Naomie Harris. Ricardo Tubbs is cool, smart, talented, and hence, a bit dull. Jamie Foxx has so much attitude, his considerable acting ability has nothing to do.

When it comes to Detective Sonny Crockett, I confess to a weakness to the memory of Don Johnson's easy smile in the original and influential 1980s TV show. Now we are supposed to accept Colin Farrell in the pastel suit, and I suppose if I were a female reviewer, I would swoon at his gorgeous mullet hair-do, stubbled chin, and drooping mustache. He reminds me of Glenn Frey in the heyday of the Eagles, only with more hair gel. Crockett is supposedly so suave, he steals away Gong Li (playing underworld smuggler Isabella) on a speedboat to Havana to seduce her into further exorbitant drug deals as they both admire their infinite good looks in the bathroom mirror. I never found Farrell to be wholly convincing, perhaps because of the lingering air of disaster left over from his participation in Oliver Stone's Alexander.

Otherwise, the plot rehashes a zillion other smuggler's blues made-for-TV storylines. Sinister white supremacists have a "meet and greet" with some undercover FBI agents underneath a scenic bridge in the dark of night. The meeting goes badly once the supremacists' sniper shoots the agents into smithereens, and so the FBI calls in Sonny and Tubbs to infiltrate a Columbian drug-dealing organization to transport contraband on their speed boats.

While the film's cinematography is consistently painterly, with swooning vistas over Lear jets and Ferraris shining under lightning streaked skies, a large chunk of the plot was lifted straight from Mission Impossible 3 with the usual young woman tied down and tortured in her usual chair. When it comes to meet with the bad guys, where do the filmmakers pick? A shipyard.

Sonny and Tubbs soul-search about whether or not they have gone too far to the criminal side. At one point, Tubbs says to Sonny, "There's `undercover' and then there's `which way is up?'" When some of their police crew start to get hurt, Tubbs questions how much these underworld games are worth, but instead of caring, I mostly lulled by all of the cloud formations, distant gunfire, and windswept palm trees set against the sparkling purplish Miami skyline. Sometimes a movie can be too handsome for its own good.

Notable film and media links--June 28, 2009

---It has been strange to see the press shift away from the continual mockery of "Wacko Jacko" to an acknowledgement of Michael Jackson's considerable achievements. I've been admiring anew the noir aspects of his "Smooth Criminal" and "Billy Jean" videos and the Elizabeth Taylor shrine that shows up in the humorous "Leave Me Alone." Of the tributes, I enjoyed Invisible Woman's memories, Guy Trebay's discussion of Michael Jackson's fashion influence, and Sasha Frere-Jones' words:

"It made me nothing but sad—no change of venue, no new home, no new friends could anchor or comfort the most important musical ghost of the twentieth century. I often thought of a veal calf when I saw him—he had been raised to perform under extreme pressure before he had any idea of what life could be beyond performing for others. Then he spent decades trying to build a life without ever having seen one. He had the best ear in the world but he had no apparent idea of how people experienced everyday comfort, or even boredom."

---As for tributes to Farrah Fawcett, I was most struck by Arbogast's surprisingly tender one.

---As for the general strangeness of living through a media storm occasioned by the death of a celebrity, Pictures for Sad Children analyzes it well.

---Trailers of upcoming films of interest: Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly's The Box with Cameron Diaz, The September Issue, a fascinating-looking documentary about Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue (the original Miranda Priestley), and Daybreakers, a vampire film where human blood becomes the new peak oil.

---Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan continues to share dispatches from Iran. This "Bird's-Eye View of Violence" defies commentary.

---Phil Nugent gives credit to Pauline Kael:

"Kael's great parting gift to the world to leave behind a record of her enthusiasms, which will inevitably result in the creation of new work, because it will continue to inspire people to want to experience creative work as widely and with as tough a mind and as open a heart as she did. Someone that tough-minded doesn't keep subjecting herself to Neil Simon movies over and over just because William Shawn is paying for the tickets; she had to see if something was there, and if there wasn't, she was genuinely curious about why other people thought there was."

---Brian Clark of Copyblogger finds that "Blogging is Dead (Again)" in part due to Twitter and Facebook.

---Newsweek found six writers and asked them to discuss their profession:

"ORLEAN: There's also this new question, which is, will anyone buy this? Will someone pay for this? Will the magazine I'm working for go out of business? I don't know anyone no matter how successful they are—beside, you know, J. K. Rowling and what's-her-face who does the Twilight stuff—but I think the realities of the industry are present. I think you'd be foolish not to be at least aware of it. Maybe not suffering from it, but conscious of it.

BLOCK: I suppose you have to be, in the sense that you're professional. But I think the less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do. The enormous mistake a lot of young writers make is that they want to know what people want.

ANDERSEN: The problem is, any time you try to game it in that way and then it doesn't work, then you feel like a complete schmo.

BLOCK: Yes, absolutely."

---J. Robert Lennon of Los Angeles Times unveils what's really going on when writers are supposedly working:

"I surveilled myself during a recent writing session. The results are below.

8:04. Subject says goodbye to older son leaving for school.

8:05. Subject turns on laptop and sits on sofa in pajamas.

8:05-8:23. Internet.

8:23. Subject lets cat out.

8:23-9:07. Internet.

9:07. Subject lets cat in.

9:08-9:15. Really fast typing.

9:15-9:17. Subject makes toast.

9:17-9:30. Subject eats toast while rereading article in local paper about rural UFO cult.

9:30. Subject puts extra pair of socks on over extant pair of socks."

---Not Coming to a Theater Near You reviews Buster Keaton's The General.

---Shooting Down Pictures found an interesting video sample of one of Greta Garbo's earliest films The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924) with commentary by Jan Olsson.

---Lastly, IFC.com shares "The 50 Greatest Trailers."

The Film Doctor's top 10 favorite film books

Movieman0283 of The Dancing Image tagged me to respond to his excellent "Reading the Movies" meme. I've been slow to respond, due, in part, to being intimidated after reading the lists from the likes of Campaspe, Glenn Kenny and Richard Brody, but also because I don't really remember books that profoundly affected me long ago. So this list will combine influences as well as good film books I've read recently.

1) I mostly grew up reading the movie satires in Mad magazine.

Recently, while rewatching Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, I realized that that film is already a Mad satire of the nuclear arms race, making it the ultimate cinematic tribute to the magazine. Roger Ebert has confessed to Mad's influence, as can be seen from his quote that I found at Wikipedia:

"I learned to be a movie critic by reading Mad magazine . . . Mad's parodies made me aware of the machine inside the skin--of the way a movie might look original on the outside, while inside it was just recycling the same old dumb formulas. I did not read the magazine, I plundered it for clues to the universe. Pauline Kael lost it at the movies; I lost it at Mad magazine."

2) Speaking of Pauline Kael, my parents left copies of The New Yorker lying around the house, so I also grew up reading her reviews religiously.

When I left home for Sewanee Academy in Tennessee, I arranged to have The New Yorker sent there too, much to the derision of my dormmates. If nothing else, Kael taught me how movie reviewing can be an art unto itself. Also, you should always be fearlessly honest to your gut response to a film, no matter what kind of trouble it might get you into later. I like Reeling, although For Keeps is probably the best introduction to her work.

3) Walker Percy's first novel The Moviegoer was also a big influence on me. An existential work that borrows from Kierkegaard and Albert Camus' The Stranger, The Moviegoer helped me fall for New Orleans years before I visited the city, and Binx Bolling's nonchalant spectator attitude toward life was a pleasure to absorb:

"In the evenings I usually watch television or go to the movies. Weekends I often spend on the Gulf Coast. Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. The fact is that I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too met a girl in Central Park, but it was not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man."

While not technically a film book, though Perelman includes some movie appreciations amidst his humor pieces, Most of the Most of S. J. Perelman is still a great stylistic influence for writing movie reviews, so I reread this book frequently. I also like to read Lester Bang's criticism for the same reason.

5) With A History of the French New Wave, Richard Neupert provides an excellent introduction to one of the best film movements. I especially like his discussion of Jean-Pierre Melville.

6) Since I tend to have an obsessive interest in everything related to Bonnie and Clyde, I enjoyed Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. What exactly did Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty argue about all day when they should have been shooting the movie? Here's a quote:

"Beatty and Penn's discussions often concerned aspects of the script as small as which word in a line should be emphasized or as unquantifiable as the tone of a particular moment. A flourish, a camera angle, a reaction, a grace note--no issue was too trivial to stop both men in their tracks. `What else is making a movie,' Beatty said, `except attention to detail?'"

7) I've used Mascelli's classic The Five C's of Cinematography in my video production class. He neatly diagrams the basic syntax of camera work. Also, I like the very formal 1950s look of the photography (lots of severe haircuts).

8) I just read Howard Suber's The Power of Film during a trip to the beach. His alphabetized entries concisely examine how heroes, villains, and other aspects of classic movies form patterns of use for future screenwriters, and I liked the way he kept bringing up The Godfather as an example.

9) Anthony Lane's collection Nobody's Perfect shows why he's perhaps the best stylist/film reviewer writing today.

10) Is there a better compendium of film criticism than Phillip Lopate's American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now? This is the place to learn not only of the history of the form, but also of the film critics who are scary good, like Manny Farber.

Other books that almost made the list: Nicholas Christopher's Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, Bernard F. Dick's Anatomy of Film, Stanley Kaufman's Regarding Film, and Sidney Lumet's Making Movies.

Here are five excellent bloggers I'd like to tag:

1) Dr. K of Dr. K's 100-Page Super Spectacular

2) Dr. North of Spectacular Attractions

3) Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule

4) Hokahey of Little Worlds

5) Chuck Tryon of The Chutry Experiment

The outer limits of awful: notes on Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

[As of this time, 7:49 pm on Wednesday, June 24, 2009, the film doctor is still recuperating from his ill-advised midnight viewing of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. He had meant to write a review of the movie, but he was so traumatized by the jack-hammer-to-the-eyes-and-ears experience of watching it, he has spent much of the day muttering "Bumblebee, Allspark, Autobot" under his breath while twitching and wondering if his stapler is in actuality a Decepticon. He did manage to cobble together these few notes. He knows that his life will never be the same again. When he was younger, he could take a series of summer blockbuster wannabes in sequence. Now, with the one-two punch of Land of the Lost and this movie, he's not so sure.]

1) The definition of "Hack" from Dictionary.com: "a person, such as an artist or writer, who exploits, for money, his or her creative ability or training in the production of dull, unimaginative, and trite work; one who produces banal and mediocre work in the hope of gaining commercial success in the arts." Michael Bay is a successful hack.

2) Most every excruciating aspect of Transformers 2 can be explained by Point #1. For instance, take the odd cliche-spouting robots ("Damn, I'm good," "Vengeance is mine," "We can destroy your cities at will," "You picked the wrong planet," "The boy will lead us to it," "Fate rarely calls us at a moment of our choosing," "I rise, you fall!"). How do you try to lend some adult authority to these grandiose inflated Hasbro toys with World Wrestling Federation posturing? Answer: by bringing in lots of military footage of aircraft carriers, submarines, and various generals barking orders: "Man your battle stations!" And so on. Whether it be the pounding music, the length of the movie, the size of the protagonists, etc., Bay inflates everything. No emotion can be earned. Bay must figure out a way to rig it first.

3) According to /film , Bay wrote this on his online forum back in April:

"Steven Spielberg sat next to me in a big 100 person theater at Sony today. There were 98 empty seats. The lights came up after we just watched my cut of Revenge of the Fallen. He turned to me and said ‘It’s awesome’ He felt this movie was better then the first - and probably my best, who knows - at this point in a movie you start to lose your objectivity. I just hope the fans like it.”

This comment, if true, crushes my great respect for the director of Duel, Jaws, and even Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which Bay steals liberally from for Transformers 2). Then again, Spielberg may have been having fun imagining what would be the best Bay film: The Rock, perhaps?

4) Then there are the dubiously caricatured robots, now in competition with Jar Jar Binks as the most ill-advised creatures in cinematic history. Skids, with his gold tooth and floppy ears, and Mudflap, the two goofybots who say things like "I'm gonna a bust a cap in yo' ass" could have just as well been called Amos and Andy. Bay says he invented these characters for the children in the audience. Minstrel show robot humor for the kids? The internet inquiry is just getting started on those two.

5) I find the correlations with other films curious. Bay begins with a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey when robots appear back in the beginnings of civilized man. As the savages ran around, I wondered, is there some correspondence here to Year One and the apemen of Land of the Lost? Did screenwriters in Hollywood stand up at one point two years ago and say "I know! Cavemen!"

6) One of the Decepticons kept calling another one "Master" in a servile way. Is he meant to be an Igor to the other's Frankenstein?

7) While the first Transformers movie was kind of fun for awhile, mostly because of the novelty of watching the bots transform into cars, jets, Rock -em, Sock -em robots, and so on, this sequel tends to settle into long involved fight scenes between Autobots and Decepticons where you can see Shia LaBeouf at the bottom of the screen jumping over a tree limb or something to give the CGI fight scale. (These scenes raise the question: why do humans matter with all of this robattling? Just because LaBeouf's character has something in his brain that the Decepticons need? Most of the humans seem included for comic relief only.) At any rate, the movie feels physically aggressive to the eyes as the military score pounds in your ears. I felt bludgeoned, and the entire last full hour in the desert seemed tacked on for one last combined military/robot battle. Revenge of the Fallen is not quite right. Michael Bay should have called it Cringe, Viewer, Cringe.