That’s how I greet this news.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Separated at birth?

Pablo Picasso – aka “The John McClain of abstract art”

and…

Bruce Willis – aka “The Pablo Picasso of the action movie”

I can totally see it.

Danny Boyle is doing a sequel to Trainspotting, 20 years on.

I wonder what Renton’s opening monologue…

…will be like this time?

It was seventy years ago today that Casablanca made its New York debut.

The movie – which started as a script for a never-produced play, “Everybody Goes To Rick’s” – was by no means a sure thing.  Its production, under director Michael Curtiz, was almost legendary for its difficulties; the script was being revised constantly during shooting, both for plot reasons and to satisfy objections from the “Production Code Administration”, the industry’s standards and practices board that enforced the “Hays Code” that governed the morals shown in American movies up through the sixties; the references to Major Renault trading sex for visas, and Rick and Ilse’s fling in Paris, were originally treated much less elliptically than in the final cut.

Indeed, much of the movie’s flow wasn’t nailed down until the final edit.  The immortal closing scene was very nearly augmented by a “real” ending that showed Rick and Major Renault on a ship full of troops – US and Free French – bound for Africa.  This was cut – thankfully – due to Claude Rains’ unavailability – not the only case where a schedule difficulty helped preserve the movie we finally got…

…which was, in its purest form, a parable for what America really stood for on the world stage.  We, like Rick, preferred isolation – but could be swayed by an overwhelming moral argument.

And what an argument it was.  The moment when you started to have the faintest hint that Humphrey Bogart’s cynical, hard-bitten, paleo-noir “Rick Blaine” might have a soft spot (carefully hidden under layers of callouses and scars) for the underdog maybe one of the most gloriously, over-the-top manipulative scenes in cinema:

At first viewing, it’s a “U – S – A!  U – S – A!” style adrenaline rush with the French – who were sympathetic figures to Americans back then – filling the starring role.  The more you watch it, the more layers it has.  Listen to the way La Marseillaise joins in over the Germans’ Die Wacht Am Rhein, as seamlessly as a nightclub DJ would beat-and-key mix them together.

The scene would make a granite countertop emotional.

I had not watched a lot of old movies, beyond the annual ritual of “Wizard of Oz” when I was a kid.  I had little concept of what the golden age of Hollywood had meant, or been. The movie absolutely gobsmacked me.

And it was thirty years ago last New Years Day that I first saw Casablanca.  And I never really recovered.  I’ve watched it dozens of times, maybe a hundred.  Back during college, I saw it so many times that I could recite the dialog along with the movie.

For starters – and it should surprise nobody that a 19 year old would notice this – but you can count the stars in movie history more radiant than Ingrid Bergman on one hand, with a couple of fingers left over.

The boy meets girl (spoilers follow), boy loses girl during a Nazi invasion, boy finds girl in North Africa,  boy loses girl to charismatic underground leader, boy has a shot at getting girl back but uses that to trick her and boyfriend into leaving to carry on the fight while he heads off to fight the Nazis is an oldie but goodie – and has never been done better.

It was thirty years ago this past New Years Day that I first saw Casablanca.  

And it’d be hard to show us a role that is a greater American archetype than Bogart’s “Rick”.

God knows how many people died of lung cancer decades after seeing Casablanca as a kid – because yes, in the hands of Humphrey Bogart, smoking was cool.  It did make you more suave, hard-bitten, dangerous-looking.  I was tempted to take up the habit after seeing the movie my first couple dozen times.

And there has never been a cliffhanger ending like Casablanca’s.  I won’t spoil it.  But if you haven’t seen the movie, you are shirking your duty as a culturally-literate American. Please see to this immediately.

So my evening plans are set, anyway.

Case #1:  Donatelle Versace…

…and Iggy Pop:

More below the jump.   Continue reading →

I saw “Argo” over the weekend, on Saturday night.

It was really, really, really, really good.  That’s a rating of four “Reallys”.  That ain’t chicken feed.

Why was it so good?

Time Machine:  The movie gives you a good sense of what life was like in the US the last time one of our Presidents left our diplomats out to dry in an “unexpectedly” hostile country – the hopelessness, the impotence, the craven politicization of the White House’s response (Carter’s chief of staff Hamilton Jordan comes off especially weaselly), and the way this nation responded – good and bad – to the “students’” outrages against decency.

And the clothing and hair styles of the seventies, in all their claustrophobic porn-movie-o-liciousness.  Yuck.

It’s an excellently-acted true story that plays like a great suspense thriller.

But perhaps most surprising of all…:

You forget it’s Ben Afflect in the leading role.  He isn’t awful!

Totally worth seeing.  Before the election, even.

Two things, really:

SNL is funny again?: I dunno.  I haven’t watched it in years.  SNL follows a pattern;

1. They fire the old cast and start a new cast – usually 6-8 people.  It’s funny – or at least funny-ish.
2. The show adds more “featured players” to help with some of the sketches.  The show remains more or less funny-ish.
3. The “featured players” get added to the cast, to be replaced by more “featured players”.  Gradually, the show gets less funny.
4. After 3-5 seasons, the cast has grown into the mid-teens, with a big group of featured players in support. And by this point, the show us just desperately un-funny.
5. As the show’s opening credits tip the five minute mark, and the show becomes painfully awful, the critics start to the ritual wondering if SNL isn’t almost done for.  This started in 1981.
6. They fire the old cast and start the cycle over.

We’re apparently in the #1 phase – or so I’m told. I’ve been burned too many times. I’m happy to be the last one on and the first one off that particular bandwagon.

Wait – they went after who?  Lorne Michaels is among the most ossified paleo-libs in showbiz.  The show will treat conservatives – any conservative – with sympathy right about the time Paul Krugman writes a NYTimes editorial admitting he’s a partisan hack who’s outside his depth writing about anything but currency policy.   It’ll never happen.

But bagging on another media outlet?  Well, OK – there, they can have some fun:

Not saying I’m going to watch SNL anytime soon.  But that was fun.

I try not to watch a lot of TV.  I’ve got other things to do.

But I’ll cop to it; I’ve whiled away the odd idle hour watching a few things on TV.

And while nobody asked me, I’ve got a few observations.

• Operation Repo:  I’ve known for a while that the show was scripted, and not remotely “reality”.  But the latest round of plot lines make me wonder if they’re not hoping to be picked up by Lifetime TV.
• Hard Core Pawn: I don’t think I saw more than an episode or two of “Pawn Stars”, the grandaddy of the “how much is all this crap worth?” genre.  It never really grabbed me much.  But I like the Detroit-based “HCP”, if only because, scripted or not (and it’s just gotta be scripted), I can so totally relate to Les Gold’s quiet slow burn with his endlessly-feuding children.  It’s given me the
• Hotel Hell:  If you were waiting for a kinder, gentler Gordon Ramsey, Hotel Hell is the show for you.  I, however, was not waiting for that Chef Ramsey.
• Top Shots:  Not even sure if the show is on the air anymore.  But watching it, I noticed first that the plot, format and pacing were exactly the same as Project Runway, only with marksmanship instead of fashion.  Then I noticed the used exactly the same incidental music  - between segments, to foreshadow things, everything. It is, from a production standpoint, literally Project Runway with guns!
• Master Chef: Master Chef covers the waterfront, from the sublime to the ridiculous.  Ridiculous: the spectacle of the two non-Ramsey judges (Hector Alizondo Joe Bastianich and Flounder from Animal House Graham Elliot) audibly wincing as they sing the praises of Wal-Mart steak, apparently prodded by a rolled up and sharpened wad of product-placement checks.   On the sublime upside, Becky Reams is the new Casey Thompson.
• LIzard Lick Towing: On the one hand, coming up with new “home-spun” lines for Ronnie Shirley (“that lady was greasier than an undercooked burger in a fat guy’s underwear on a hot day”) has got to be keeping some good writers in work.  On the other hand, I give Amy Shirley another season of bodybuilding before she turns into Skeletor.
• Combat Pawn:  They’ve done the impossible: taken one of my favorite subjects (firearms) and a reality-TV subject I”m slowly warming up to (pawn shop dramedy) and added excruciating tedium!

That shoudl do it for now.

The rumor’s been bouncing around for the better part of a decade; “someone’s doing a remake of Red Dawn“.

And some people seem almost surprised that it’s supposed to be awful:

North Korean paratroopers descend on an American small town. U.S. military resistance collapses. Korean armored vehicles roll down the streets unopposed except for a band of heavily armed bros in hoodies.

No, these are not images from some teenage gamer’s fever dream. They’re scenes from the movie Red Dawn, a remake of the 1984 cult classic about a joint Cuban-Soviet invasion of the U.S. and the attractive young American insurgents — the Wolverines — who help defeat it. The revamped Red Dawn, starring Chris Hemsworth, a.k.a. Thor, blasts into theaters in November.

But don’t expect it to linger very long.

Well, no kidding.  The world’s changed a bit since 1984; on the one hand, we simultaneously have little fear of nuclear armageddon, even as the idea of being attacked on our soil is no longer novel.

But the article, in Wired, does hit on one key point.  We’ll come back to it.

Where the 1984 original successfully played upon widespread public fears over a supposedly rising and belligerent Soviet Union, the remake expects viewers to take North Korea seriously as an existential threat.

It’s a stretch.  Although let’s be clear; the Soviet Union wasn’t “supposedly” belligerent in 1984.  They made a pretty good show of it.   In much the same way as Putin does today, only with thousands of missiles and tanks and hundreds of submarines and lots and lots of soldiers, and no, I’m not going to get into an argument about whether the Soviets were or were not a threat, since history and Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, JP Deuce and Lech Wałęsa already settled that for us.

We’re guessing the flick is going to get a lot of unintended laughs.

You see, the actual North Korea is a country of 24 million people with a GDP roughly equal to North Dakota’s. It’s an impoverished, even starving, prison state that lacks modern weaponry and any ability to deploy forces globally.

Which, if you think about it, is kinda like the USSR in a lot of ways.  And yes, I know, the remake sounds dumb…

…which shouldn’t obscure the fact that the original was dumb too.

How dumb?  I’m Norwegian and Scottish; I squeeze 15 cents out of a dime.  And I never go to movies I think I’m going to walk out of.  And I darn near walked out of Red Dawn the first time I saw it.  It was the scene where the “student council president” tries to call for a vote over going back to town after the invasion; my “dumb” meter pegged so hard it bent the needle.  I had my butt up out of the seat…

…but stayed.  Partly because in those days, I didn’t waste $3 lightly.

Partly because while the story didn’t get a whole lot better, it got a whole lot more fun.  Dumb, escapist, adrenaline-pumping fun.

And in an age where “video games” were geometric shapes that floated on black screens and beeped and borked and shot little pips of electrons at other geometric shapes, Red Dawn was an “immersive experience” that went ever-so-slightly beyond “escapist” to “fantastic”, with the emphasis on “fantas”.  Once I turned my English major’s critique-o-matic off, and just started enjoying it for what it was – a movie about a bunch of guys in the woods with machine guns blasting bad guys and saving the free world and rescuing Jennifer Gray and knocking off a little Lea Thompson in the bargain – I settled down in my seat and took my jacket back off.

Now that kids can immerse themselves in games that serve as stories much more involving and immersive, I can’t imagine hordes of twentysomethings doing the same thing these days.  Not without Robert Pattinson in it.

Indeed, a movie about the making of the remake sounds like it’d make a better movie:

The new Red Dawn has been sitting on the shelf for a couple years owing to financing troubles and at least one major revamp by screenwriters Carl Elsworth and Jeremy Passmore. As originally written, the relaunched Red Dawn was only slightly less silly. The bad guys were Chinese. And while China has no discernible intention of invading anyone [tell that to the Taiwanese - Ed.], much less the U.S., Beijing at least commands a $7.3-trillion economy and an increasingly modern, two-million-man army. But it’s bad business to portray one of the world’s fastest growing film markets as brutal world conquerors, so the producers swapped in North Korea, a country no one counts on for ticket sales.

And given how Hollywood supports Obama, it’d be bad politics to piss off the one country that can still pay for all his plans.

I went with the Morrisseys to see “Act Of Valor” last Saturday.  You’ve probably heard about it; it’s the movie ostensibly about Navy SEALs starring, well, Navy SEALs.

The film’s gotten mixed reviews from the usual film-critic suspects.  Some point to the quality of the acting (while there are a few C-list actors playing terrorists, CIA agents and government officials, everyone in a US uniform is a serviceperson, mostly active-duty SEALs); others say that the script swerves from simplistic to outright jingo; some call it a “recruiting film”.

But it’s gone over gangbusters with the critics that really matter, the audience; it crushed the (admittedly lackluster) competition to be the top-grossing movie  in the country in its first weekend out, the weekend before last.

I don’t go to a lot of movies – the last two I saw in a theatre during their first runs were True Grit and, before that, Gran Torino.  But I figured it was worth a quick review.

First, A Minor Quibble:  There are few things I find as tedious as people who pick over otherwise-watchable movies looking for continuity errors.  There are entire sites devoted to the practice – and beyond the few really obvious howlers, the practice bores me stiff.

That said, there was one error that stuck in my craw – and maybe mine alone, among people who were not in the Navy.  After the initial raid into Costa Rica (I won’t give any spoilers), the “LT” – the commander of the SEAL platoon that stars in the movie – is standing on the deck of the USS Bonhomme Richard, an “Amphibious Assault Ship” built to carry Marines and their helicopters (and the odd Harrier jump jet) to wherever they need to attack.  It looks like an aircraft carrier – and it literally is, in that it carries aircraft, in the form of helicopters and vertical take-off aircraft.

But in the scene after the raid, the “LT” is standing on the deck, talking with his wife on a satellite phone; he has to wait while an airplane (an S3 Viking antisubmarine patrol plane) gets shot off the deck by a steam catapult; think the opening sequences in Top Gun.  The scene ends with a long-shot of the Richard, its deck covered in choppers, and not a fixed-wing plane in sight – because the ship has no catapult to launch big fixed-wing planes.

It’s a minor quibble – but we North Dakotans are a seafaring race, and we take our ships seriously.

Next, A Major And Overlooked Spiff:  The cinematography is amazing.  Many have written about the  helmet-cam perspective shots during the firefights, so I expected heart-pounding, heavy-breathing first-person point of view shots.

But the rest of the movie is visually stunning on many levels.  The direction of action shots above and beyond the firefights is amazing; a scene where someone is being rolled into a carpet is not only edited with a blurry crispness that conveys the blurry confusion of the moment, but includes a shot from a rolling camera to complete the disorientation

The just-plain-cinematography – from the visual feasts of the Costa Rican jungle or the streets in the Philippines to the claustrophobic-yet-panoramic night fight scenes – was excellent, and often stunning.  If it weren’t for all the suicide bombs and exploding heads, parts of the movie could be shot for “Planet Earth”.

And visually speaking, it all comes together in one scene, where a bunch of drug-cartel sicarios who’ve been chasing the SEALS through the jungle wind up on the business end of a couple of boat-mounted miniguns during an incredibly adrenaline-blast exfiltration scene.  Between the cinematography, the film and sound editing and the direction, it’s an incredible visual of the mayhem on the business end of all that firepower; it’s an amazing bit of visual art, and I don’t mean that from an “America F**k Yeah!” or a “firepower pr0n” perspective.  Realistic?  I don’t know, I’ve never seen three miniguns hit a pickup truck.  Visually overpowering?  You bet.

The Acting: I’d heard all the stories, pro and con, about the movie’s “stars”, the SEALs (all credited pseudonymously, none of whom appear on the movie’s IMDB page) and their acting chops.

I’ve got three answers.

First – the goal of great acting is to make you forget you’re watching a performance.   Did the SEALs make me forget?  Yes and no.  There were scenes – mostly when the SEALs are off-duty and waxing colloquial – when you’re acutely aware that they’re saying lines from a script.  A few scenes play like high school theatre.  Not bad high school theatre, mind you – it takes a decent director to get things as close as they are.  I drove home thinking “if the movie were an indy film at Sundance about barristas in Seattle confronting their sexual confusion at an “Occupy” protest, starring real barristas, it’d be hailed as fearless and daring cinema”.

But – secondly, and perhaps obviously? – it was the scenes involving the SEALs plying their craft, doing the sort of things that in real life would send the most grizzled Hollywood stunt veteran running to his union to file a work rules grievance, that most made you forget you were watching a performance because, really, you weren’t.  The battle scenes, shot with a buzzy combination of traditional shots and rattly helmet-cam footage and edited to a modern sheen, tightly-edited enough to make Paris Hilton and Rosanne Barr look kinetic?  Sure, of course.

But if you’ve spent your life watching Hollywood action-adventure and war movies, with their somersaults and John Woo gun grips and all the other cliches that have grown up around the genre, one thing that impresses about the SEALs in the battle scenes is the extreme economy of their action.  There’s none of the dashing and Jackie-Chan-like somersaulting and pseudo-ninja buncombe of so many Hollywood movies on the subject;  my impression wasn’t so much “this is accurate” as “this looks real”.  There’s a difference.

The third bit about the acting is related.  There’s an interrogation scene – I won’t spoil it – starring the “Senior Chief”, the intelligence analyst of the platoon, an older SEAL (late forties, I’d guess) who has settled into middle age in the same way a rattlesnake settles into a cave; of the entire SEAL platoon, he, whoever he is, radiates the most effortless menace, with his grandfatherly (or Taliban-impersonating-ly) beard and his arklahoma accent and sense that he’s not trying to radiate anything.  He interrogates a suspect – again, no spoilers.  I joked with Ed afterward that the scene played like a community theatre production of 24.  I meant it as a compliment; as the Senior Chief drawls through his lines, there was also the acute sense that he wasn’t performing; that he knew the psychology behind what he was doing at a level that goes way deeper than Stanislavsky could ever teach.  He said his lines plenty capably; but he lived the role.  And while the scene took  some dramatic license – it took about five minutes, rather than the days or months it would have taken in real life – it was very, very effective.

Jingo – There are those – mostly on the left in Hollywood – who deride the movie as a “Navy recruiting film”.   There’s something to that; the closing credits are very, very long on people with ranks and billets in various Navy Public Affairs offices.  And Tom Clancy gets a producer-level credit.  Still, Obama-supporting Hollywood shouldn’t complain; since the President has both based his strategy on having lots of SEALs and other special operations forces while simultaneously cutting the regular militaries from whence those troops come, they’d best hope it works.

Beyond that, though?  As imperfect and occasionally mawkish as the film may seem to the jaded film fan’s eyes, it’s not Top Gun, or Rambo, much less Charlie Sheen’s Navy Seals.  There is a resemblance to Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan; all of them pay homage in their own way to a “greatest generation”.  The closing crawl broadly refers to all manner of those who risk all for others, and for all the rest of us – everyone from firemen to fighter pilots to lifeguards.

But I thought – what’s the perfect film analog?  And in thinking of the movie’s “narration” – by “The Chief”, a real-life chief petty officer who is the platoon’s second in command – it occurred to me. not since John Wayne’s The Green Berets has there been a movie that unequivocally held up the “Warrior Ethos” – duty, honor, sacrifice for a greater good – as unironically good things.

And even that wasn’t quite right.

The narration is the bookend for the movie – and to a life-long civilian, it almost sounds like something from a cartoon, at first.  ”My father told me the worst part of getting old was that people stopped seeing you as dangerous”, it starts.  But as it dissolves into the movie’s opening scenes, and then wraps back in at the end, as a paeon not to “appearing dangerous” – which is, itself, counterintuitive to most people today – but to the even more counterintuitive-to-our-culture notion of an almost-monastic dedication to something the rest of the culture considers distasteful, foreign, or just something for others to do, whether that something is going into burning buildings, repairing people in inner-city emergency rooms, or going where the bad guys are and killing them quickly and violently.

And then I figured out why it was so hard to find a movie since the mid-sixties that so unironically exalted that way of life; because there really hasn’t been one.