To: E-Trade
From: Mitch Berg
Re: The Kid.
To whom it may concern,
While I’ll allow that the line “Shankapotamus” is inspired and hilarious, I can’t get around the fact that doctoring a toddler to sound like a whinging, chick-drink-slurping late-twentysomething yuppie…
…gives me the serious creeps.
That is all.
I liked the original version of “V” which, back in the Reagan years, was pretty much a rockin’ good war story (as I recall it at the time).
I’ve been looking at the new remake with the usual trepidation one gets when something good gets remade.
But my trepidation is changing to something else:
Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.
The news media swoons in admiration — one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: “Why don’t you show some respect?!” The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader’s origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: “Embracing change is never easy.”
So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait — did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who’s come here to eat us?
Welcome to ABC’s “V,” the most fascinating and bound to be the most controversial new show of the fall television season. Nominally a rousing sci-fi space opera about alien invaders bent on the conquest (and digestion) of all humanity, it’s also a barbed commentary on Obamamania that will infuriate the president’s supporters and delight his detractors.
OK, it’s worth a shot. I hope it’s on On-Demand.
I have a hunch that’s what I’ll need; writing aside (fingers crossed), here’s hoping it survives what will no doubt be a full assault from Obama’s faithful in Hollywood.
UPDATE: Dang. I’m remembering why I liked the first one so much.
Mark Steyn, writing about Hollywood’s instinctive cuddling up to Roman Polanski, hit a bunch of the usual points: Hollywood’s boundless hypocrisy (they all but ran Mel Gibson out of town for crimes immeasurably less than Polanski’s), Polanski’s horrible life (not only losing three generations of his family between Hitler and Charles Manson, but having his surviving mother essentially reject him after the war to keep his stepfather happy).
That, alone, is worth the price of admission.
But at the end came a great point that’s easy to neglect amid the human cost of the rest of the story; Hollywood’s treatment of the likes of Polanski debilitates and infantilizes “art”:
Earlier bad boys – Lord Byron, say – were obliged to operate as “transgressive” artists within a broader moral order. Now we are told that a man such as Polanski cannot be subject to anything so footling as morality: He cannot “transgress” it because, by definition, he transcends it. Yet all truly great art is made in the tension between freedom and constraint. In demanding that an artist be placed above the laws of man, Harvey Weinstein & Co. are also putting him beyond the possibility of art. Which may explain the present state of the movie industry.
When art not only becomes an arm of the establishment (see: most jazz since 1970, when arts grants replaced heroin as the main inspiration for jazz music in America), but when the establishment infantilizes artists, it takes away much of the reason to have art in the first place.
As Steyn notes, Polanski’s work since he went on the lam fits the pattern; except for The Pianist (which was fantastic), it’s been fairly forgettable stuff.
Worth a read.
When my kids do what is described in this cartoon, I respond exactly as the protagonist does, only verbally.
It does irritate them. But it hasn’t stopped the behavior.
Yet.
And it’s mutual; Capitalism has Moore’s poorest opening since his 2002 Oscar-winning exercise in fraud, Bowling for Columbine.
How bad? Even Woody Harrelson beat out Moore over the weekend which, given their relative box-office performances over the past year, is a little like Yemen beating the US in basketball.
D’Onofrio, Erbe and Bogosian are leaving “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”:
Here’s a mystery. What is “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” without stars Vincent D’Onofrio, Kathryn Erbe and Eric Bogosian?
“CSI: Manhattan?”
Seriously, the “Law and Order” franchise wrote the book on surviving cast turmoil – “LandO” has run a total of 26 actors though the six-person nucleus of its cast (DA, Senior and Junior ADAs, the Lieutenant, and the Senior and Junior Detectives) the show goes through more junior detectives than Brett Favre goes through teams.
But “Criminal Intent?”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, all three will exit during the upcoming ninth season. (Yes, it’s been that long. But really, who’s counting?)
Well, not I. I always liked the original LandO, and I always loved SVU (which, oddly, is still largely on its original cast) except for the brief run of madness and incipient PC while Marisky Hargitay was out on maternity leave, but CI usually left me a little unsatisfied, especially after it moved to USA. The stories seemed like throwbacks to traditional police drama. The only part I ever really cared about was the interplay between D’Onofrio and Erbe (and, for a season at least, Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra).
Jeff Goldblum? It’s like “Monk” with more guns and lawyers.
…says Michael Moore on Leno, promoting his next documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story.”
Um, Michael, greed actually is legal. I’m sure you’re donating all the revenue from your film to charity then, right?
[crickets]
I can’t wait to go see his latest film because what with the economy and all, I’m a little short on cash and I’m sure a film extolling the evils of greed is…free…right?
[crickets]
Moore explained that his vision of democracy is redistributionist, and he gave no voice to the idea that self-reliance and hard work can propel one to great wealth.
“…we live in a democracy,”
“We’re supposed to have like fairness and equality.
Exactly. One citizen, one vote; and the American dream is *like* still widely available to *like* anyone willing to like do the work, at least *like* for now.
“And you know when you have a pie on the table … there’s 10 slices and one guy at the table says nine of those slices are mine…”
Gee Michael, I wonder who that guy is?
“…and the other nine of you, you can fight over the last slice. I mean that’s essentially the kind of economy we have now.”
Well, not everyone can be Michael Moore, can they?
What Michael doesn’t seem to understand is that the reason the one guy gets the nine pieces is that the other nine people don’t “go” for them, and in fact the one guy actually bakes the pie and gives the one back to the other nine.
It’s called a salary.
In America however, the recipe for the pie is public information. Anyone can bake themselves their own pie, and Moore has been doing it for a long time.
Typical liberal: A prescription for thee but not for me:
“Many people find it tough to swallow Moore’s jokes about the wealthy and then watch him fly first class at his publisher’s or film distributor’s expense to his posh home in New York City’s Central Park West, where he also sends his teenage daughter to an elite private school.”
Michael Moore is a talented filmmaker who like many in Hollywood have confused their success in the entertainment industry with an almighty ordination to entreat and admonish the minions at their feet with the gravity of their omniscient wisdom.
“Hey look everybody, it’s Madonna, arriving via private jet and limousine convoy to teach us how to ‘Go Green!'”
Moore’s hypocrisy is legendary, from investments he has made, people he has hired and then stiffed, to his own conspicuous enjoyment of the larger, juicier fruits of capitalism.
One can only imagine the sacrifices a 500-pound man has imposed on himself.
But the Hungry Hippocrit doesn’t care who knows all of this as there is always an ample supply of sycophants, unconscious objectors and serial protesters to stand in line and pay full price to see his drivel.
Which is to say, his hypocrisy hasn’t cost him a penny, so he doesn’t even bother to lift a hammy finger to conceal it.
…which pretty much makes him…a capitalist…pig.
Okay, maybe this is a little off topic…
Is this same woman that is featured in the joke about the blonde that couldn’t figure out why the garage door doesn’t close when she clicks the TV Remote at it?
[Mitch, I think we need to create a “DUH” tag]
(again, please direct complaints regarding Johnny Roosh and/or this crude, tasteless, stereotypical, yet undeniably humorous post to feedbackinthedark at yahoo.com)
It’s one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies…
“I heard you had balls big enough to come in a dump truck, but…..you don’t look like much to me.”
“Opinions vary.”
It was Patrick Swayze, twenty years ago, in Road House.
One of the reasons I hired “Bogus” Doug Williams as executive managing editor at Shot In The Dark was that I could be assured we cover stories like this…:
Fans took to the Internet after Wednesday’s announcement to express either pleasant surprise or total shock that DeGeneres was picked to replace Paula Abdul.
“I mean, really? Ellen DeGeneres?” wrote popular “Idol” blogger MJ Santilli at mjsbigblog.com. “She guest judged ‘So You Think You Can Dance‘ last season, and her critiques were comic relief. So is she going to be a real judge or some kind of joke? She’s a comedian, not a singer or a musician. I’m kinda flummoxed here.”
Others on the Internet, including posters on the AmericanIdol.com forums, said they were pleased that DeGeneres, who admittedly has no formal music experience, just a passion for tunes, would join Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson and Kara DioGuardi on “Idol.”
…with the excellence SITD readers expec, rather than my customary yawn of disinterest.
I never paid that much attention to John Hughes.
Don’t get me wrong. I saw most of his movies. I loved most of them; Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes Trains and Automobiles, even Home Alone – all of them were fun, clever, well-written…
…but not, in my case, because they captured what teenage life was really really like, as MPR’s film critic noted yesterday in reporting on Hughes’ passing from a heart attack yesterday. It struck me as being a great look at what teenage life was really really like in Evanston Illinois. Not where I came from, I grumbled. And I was in my twenties by this point, and kinda past the whole “teenage” thing (He did contribute what I’d call one of my life’s mottos; “You can never go too far”).
And still I loved the movies; Breakfast Club was wonderful; Pretty In Pink rocked my world; I don’t laugh any less at Ferris Bueller now than I did 20 years ago; Planes Trains and Automobiles was not only hilarious but poignant.
But while I knew and loved the movies, I didn’t know so much about Hughes himself. Hughes was almost a brand in his own right, like “Kleenex”; say “John Hughes Movie”, and everyone knew the basic formula right off the bat.
Allison Byrne Fields has the best piece I’ve seen yet, ever, on Hughes the person, told from the perspective of a teenage penpal of Hughes’:
“I’d be honored to be your pen pal. You must understand at times I won’t be able to get back to you as quickly as I might want to. If you’ll agree to be patient, I’ll be your pen pal.”
For two years (1985-1987), John Hughes and I wrote letters back and forth. He told me – in long hand black felt tip pen on yellow legal paper – about life on a film set and about his family. I told him about boys, my relationship with my parents and things that happened to me in school. He laughed at my teenage slang and shared the 129 question Breakfast Club trivia test I wrote (with the help of my sister) with the cast, Ned Tanen (the film’s producer) and DeDe Allen (the editor). He cheered me on when I found a way around the school administration’s refusal to publish a “controversial” article I wrote for the school paper. And he consoled me when I complained that Mrs. Garstka didn’t appreciate my writing.
Read the whole, wonderful, poignant thing.
You can never go too far.
…when you could count on Shot In The Dark to react to this sort of “news” with incompetently-concealed ennui. I’ve never cared for AmIdol much; if overwrought, over-ornamented Mariah Carey knockoffs were money, America would have no deficit already. But for Kelly Clarkson, Jordin Sparks and Chris Daughtry, I doubt I could pick out a single winner, much less contestant.
But now, the news that Paula Abdullah has left the show means something. Before, I’d have yawned…
“With sadness in my heart, I’ve decided not to return to #IDOL. I’ll miss nurturing all the new talent, but most of all…being a part of a show that I helped from day1 become an international phenomenon,” read two tweets posted shortly after 7:30 p.m.
Fox confirmed the news shortly afterward
…but now, with the addition of Bogus Doug – perhaps America’s foremost Idologist – Shot In The Dark leaps to the forefront of AmIdol coverage.
Which is good, because I was wondering who the cute valley girl was, sitting with the gay british guy and the guy who replaced Ross Valory in Journey.
To: Luis Pizarro
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Crack
Dear Mr. Pizarro,
There are so many reasons I want to hate your “reality” show, Operation Repo.
There’s your nightmarish sister Sonia. I’m otherwise at a loss for words.
Or there’s your roid-raging muscle guy Matt, He reminds me of the dumbest crew of bouncers I ever dealt with when i worked in the bars; picking fights at the dumbest provocations; I picture him bellowing “You wanna start something? You wanna start something? You wanna start something? You wanna start something? You wanna start something? You wanna start something?” at waiters who bring him the wrong drink.
There’s the way Sonia and Matt both treat the unflappable, supernaturally-calm-and-collected hook-and-drag guy, Froy; if Froy ever gets tired of “showbiz”, he’s got a harassment suit waiting for him.
All together, they make me hate the show so badly I’ll have to stop watching.
Season after next. Maybe sooner. We’ll see.
10. Never have to watch that “Maaaangoooooooooo” bit ever again.
9. No more people trying to do clever impersonations of “”Maaaangoooooooooo”.
8. Never have to watch that “Maaaangoooooooooo” bit ever again.
7. I can go weeks without having nightmares about that “Maaaangoooooooooo” bit.
6. Never have to watch that “Maaaangoooooooooo” bit ever again.
5. Never again have to respond to “What is your favorite Maaangooooooo sketch” as long as I live.
4. Never have to watch that “De Jooooze? Eeez Good?” bit ever again. No, wait, wasn’t that Rob Schneider? Dang. That’s another Top Ten list all by itself.
3. I never accidentally stumble across Night At The Roxbury on cable anymore!
2. Never have to watch that “Maaaangoooooooooo” bit ever again.
1. Nobody else ever has to watch that “Maaaangoooooooooo” bit ever again.
With the entry of my “evil” twin brother Jed into the world of low-end didactic cartooning,the hue and cry has been overwhelming; we need a contest.
Who, indeed, is the best blogger/cartoonist in the Twin Cities?
For years, it’s been generally recognized that Tom “Swiftee” Swift- auteur of “Life In The Dumpster” -has been the dean of Twin Cities blog cartoonists. “LITD” has long combined trenchant satiric observation with the sort of gritty anti-style that only the best cartoonists can master.
But much has changed since “Dumpster” earned its first accolades. Ken “Avidor” Weiner continues his prolific output under various names, some not even made public. Tiger Lilly, from the Night Writer blog, has driven minimalism to its far edge. Joe “Learned Foot’ Tucci from Kool Aid Report made “Fleen” – a story of a loveable family of prickly cyphers – into a local tradition before perversely pulling it from circulation. And I gotta say, I think my twin bro is an up-and-comer. (We’ll leave Dan Lacey from Faithmouse out of it for now; in contrast with the rest of the list, he’s an actual professional and recognized artist).
So who’s the best?
We’ll let you decide!
First – the nominees:
Nomination 1: Tom Swift
Few artists make “crudity” – in style, technique and content – a tool in and of itself like Tom “Swiftee” Swift.
The cartoons – done in Microsoft Paint, usually with no more than a thumb and index finger – and intended tolook crude, slapdash and half-finished, as if Swift is commenting on the overproduced, over-colored, over-stylized, self-consciously “Retro” stylings of too many underground cartoons.
Nomination 2: Fleen
Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci’s “Fleen”, set in a fictional void amidst a larger void, is an ironic commentary on the overly-structured pointillism of most “post-modern” cartoons.
Tucci’s been praised for his style – deftly suggesting dynamism and motion even though his characters remain superficially motionless, as if daring one to keep up. It reminds one of the great Danish neo-structuralist cartoons from the sixties through the early eighties.
It’s edgy stuff; some wondered if it didn’t take too much out of Tucci for it to continue, when he pulled his Bill Watterson-like retirement from cartooning last year.
Nomination 3: Planet Terry
This strip is drawn by my twin brother Jed, who says “my aim is to convey everything – love, hate, rage, sex, laughter – with as little effort as possible”.
e
Some criticize his work as derivative and excessively inky. You be the judge.
Nominee 4: Anorexics Inaneymous
The sine qua non of minmalism, AI – drawn by “Tiger Lily” from Night Writer – is a deft commentary on life in the 21st century.
Minimal as it is, the strip conveys deftly conveys an amazing range of feeling.
Nominee 5: Bicyclopolis
Ken “Avidor’ Weiner draws Bicyclopolis.
Looking as if it was cribbed from a 1977 issue of High Times, Bicyclopolis depicts (apparently) a fictional world where peoples’ hands are frozen into grotesque parodies of…I dunno, ham carved into hand shapes. Which is a searing commentary on man’s inhumanity to cartoon hands.
It’s a tough decision, folks. Which is why I’m fobbing it off on all of you.
Who is the best online cartoonist in the Twin Cities?
UPDATE: And that’s a wrap:
Congratulations to all the contestants – because in the world of Twin Cities blog cartooning, just showing up makes you a winner!
Except Jed.
I told you so, JedHead.
Mommy always liked you better.
Go for it Alec!
Emmy Award winner Alec Baldwin is eyeing a post-acting career that could take him off a Hollywood soundstage into the halls of Congress.
Why not? He’s no less qualified than some recent office-holders including a Fake Wrestler, a Neighborhood Organizer, an Action Hero and a Pornographer-er I mean Satirist.
A native New Yorker, Baldwin said he has been approached by an unnamed Democratic law firm who wanted him to run for governor of Ohio, and he has also considered moving to New Jersey or Connecticut to run for office. “I’d love to run against Joe Lieberman,” Baldwin said of the Independent Democratic senator who is no favorite of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. But Baldwin dismissed the idea, saying “It’s all fantasy.”
Congratulations Minnesota – you’ve started a Saturday Night Live Carpetbagging trend!
Baldwin, who currently stars in the NBC comedy “30 Rock,” told Playboy magazine that he is seriously considering running for Congress. But he acknowledged his opponents would have plenty of fodder to use against him.
Playboy? Isn’t that where our Senator From New York published his thesis?
Periodically, I feature work from my evil twin brother Jed.
Jed isn’t “evil”, per se. It’s just that twins are just that much more dramatic when they are one’s diametric opposite. And Jed loves drama.
He also loves trying new things. He’s changed careers. Again. After spending five years as a forensic intellectual property lawyer, he’s decided to change paths, and become a cartoonist. With that in mind, he’s sent me the first strip of his first effort, called “Planet Terry”. I’ll let Jed describe it:
Planet Terry is the story of a young planet trying to find its way in the universe.
Here it is:
I dont’ know that it’s all that good. I don’t know much about cartooning – just the obvious stuff, like “Swiftee’s a better cartoonist than Ken Weiner”.
Anyway. Jed wanted to say hi.
Hi.
I think we’re all set!
While doing research on how to run better, more effective business meetings, I tripped across a bunch of YouTube links for a 2001 BBC TV show, “Survival Secrets of the SAS”, out on YouTube.
The show – featuring Falklands vet Eddie Stone and 1980 Iranian Embassy rescuer John MacAleese – covers a lot of basic hints about how the SAS (the British Army’s special forces, and the model for groups like the US Delta Force), including some very useful info for dealing witth teenagers, at 7:14 into this segment, for which I’m going to be forever in the show’s debt.
However, I couldn’t help noticing in the episode on protecting VIPs – one of the SAS’s jobs – that in the section on dealing with ambushes, at 6:14 into this segment – I’m no expert (far from it), but I’d think the presence of a clearly-visible sandbag bunker on a rooftop might tip one off that something was afoot?
Again – I’m no expert.
The new film The Hurt Locker opens with this quote, from former NYTimes war correspondent Chris Hedges, in white type over a black background:
The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.
As the movie rolled into the first scene, the last clause – “war is a drug” stayed highlighted.
I watched The Hurt Locker at Ed Morrisey’s place, with Ed and the First Mate, on Saturday night. I drove home wondering exactly what to make of it. I’ve seen lot of war movies, from a lot of subgenres. And viewed through the template of a film like Saving Private Ryan, The Big Red One, Go Tell The Spartans, Full Metal Jacket, A Bridge Too Far or Platoon (to pick half a dozen completely disparate examples), The Hurt Locker seemed to wander, to not make a lot of sense.
I had no idea where to start writing about it.
Of course, it’s an excellent movie. The direction (by Kathryn Bigelow) conveys the atmosphere of Iraq – the endless heat, the soldiers’ boredom, the paranoia of working and fighting amongst those who may be friendly, enemy or both – fluently.
The Hurt Locker is also the first movie about the Iraq war that I’ve heard of that doesn’t swerve into self-serving politics. It’s no The Green Berets – the filmmakers’ sympathies are detectable, but not especially in the foreground.
And the acting is superb; Jeremy Renner (most famous for starring in Dahmer, or as self-destructive punk rocker Jimmy Quidd in “House”), as a bomb disposal expert on his umpteenth tour of duty, brings a nuanced mania to his role – we’ll come back to that. Anthony Mackie and Brian Sanborn round out his team as the cold, calculating professional and the scared-out-of-his-mind kid (who is seeking counseling from an army psychologist played by Christian Camargo).
But I had no idea what to say about the film. Something didn’t quite add up.
Then I looked up the rest of Chris Hedges’ quote. I found it, from a piece he wrote for Amnesty International back in 2002:
…one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers -historians, war correspondents, filmmakers novelists and the state-all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface within all of us.
And then it hit me. It’s not a war movie – or should I say, it’s not just a war movie. It’s a movie about war as a drug, and its affect on its addicts.
Sergeant James (replacing Guy Pearce, a bomb disposal expert killed in the film’s opening scene) takes risks that are seen as reckless, even suicidal, by the rest of his team, from his opening action (eschewing a bomb-disposal robot and walking into the middle of seven 155mm artillery shells rigged into a huge bomb), escalating through taking apart a car bomb as vague, paranoia-inducing signs of an insurgent attack mass all around them, to his ultimate scene, racing into a warren of alleys to try to find a tanker-bomb’s trigger-man rather than calling the infantry (whose job it is!) to do the job.
Other than Pearce, the two A-list actors in the movie provide turns that seem at first blush to be incoherent, almost nonsensical – until you go back to Hedges’ quote.
Ralph Fiennes plays the leader of a team of British contractors who give of whiffs of being ex-SAS men (dressing in mufti and passing as Arabs, their immediate-action drills, capturing high-value Iraqi targets, travelling about the desert in an SUV) who is killed in a long-range duel with an Iraqi sniper (who kills two of the other Brits). The team’s two survivors collapse – which is not the behavior one expects of Brit Special Forces veterans…
…but is what one might expect from an addict falling off a bad trip. James (and Mackie, as the professional soldier, Sergeant Sanborn) then one-up Fiennes – taking the position in which he was killed, despatching the sniper in a tense duel that leaves James with a gleeful psychological hangover (in the following scene, in the barracks).
And after a particularly reckless disarming job, David Morse steps into the scene, playing a bird colonel – a career soldier. Sounding as jovial as a surfer who’s still buzzing from catching a righteous curl, the colonel interrogates Morse in a scene that feels like it has to be a setup for a traditional Army-officer-style chewing-out; the colonel sounds too happy, too admiring of James’ recklessness, and his long record – hundreds of disarmings, following a tour in Afghanistan as a Ranger which, we are led to believe by extension, just wasn’t enough of a buzz. But the chewing-out never comes. It made me shake my head and write it off to bad editing at first – until I remembered Hedges’ quote. Morse’s colonel, a man who’d made a career out of fighting, was as giggly and overcome with adrenaline from the situation as a surfer waiting to go out and catch a different curl, or as a drug addict comparing highs with a fellow stoner – or as Sergeant James after a particularly dangerous job.
Of course, all addictions have their ups and downs; we see Sergeant Reed (and other addicts, like the psychologist) go through some “bad trips” (which I won’t spoil). But when the chance comes to break the addiction? And it’s not that the drug leaves him out of control; the movie includes scenes when his innate humanity goes thirteen rounds with his addiction. Staff Sergeant James is a fascinating character, as far from being a one-dimensional caricature of good, evil or insanity as I’ve seen.
Again – can’t spoil it.
The more I think about it, the more I want to see it again. It’s well worth a trip.
Ed reviews it, too…
Friday night, I saw The Stoning of Soraya M with several dozen of my closest friends.
The movie – which has garnered plenty of critical praise – depicts exactly what the title says it depicts. A true story of a “legally”-sanctioned mob lynching in Iran in 1986, the movie is an examination of the corruption of power and the power of and pornographically-seductive nature of mobs.
Soraya is the wife of Ali. Together, they have four children. Ali clearly relishes the power that Iran’s Islamic revolution gave to men; a misogynistic monster, he’s well on his way toward turning their two boys into angry little clones. And his eye is wandering – a 14 year old girl. He demands a divorce, is rebuffed, and sets off a trail of events that lead, with a sickening inevitability that wafts over you like a foul foreboding cloud, to the eponymous murder.
If it doesn’t sound like a great date movie, you might be right – although modern American “women’s studies” students should be encouraged to see it, if only to see how very, very good things have been for American women in comparison for the past 200 years or so.
The film is almost unbearably intense; the stoning is brutal (as befits such a brutal form of ritualized murder which, the movie’s closing montage points out, is still practiced all over the world) and, to those whose tastes have been trained to expect the Hollywood last-minute reprieve or rescue, inevitable. Once events take their fatal plunge from the absurd to the depraved, there’s really no way off the track.
The description above gives away a fair amount of the story, and yet none of its substance. It’s an excellent movie that I recommend, even as I advise you that it takes an emotional investment.
I thought two things as I watched, trying to absorb it all:
Sure enough, Steven Holden of the New York Times writes an impermeably imperceptive review for whom unthinking PC must be the only motivation:
The Stoning of Soraya M.,” a true story of religiously sanctioned misogyny and mob violence in an Iranian village, thoroughly blurs the line between high-minded outrage and lurid torture-porn.
And it was with that line that I checked out. Holden missed the entire point. It was torture-porn, all right – for the people in the village, for whom the stoning was the outlet for a sickening onslaught of rage and blood-lust that could only be described as “pornographic”.
The screenplay’s oratorical tone is partly intentional, since the movie’s heavy-handed style harks back to the kind of 1950s Hollywood quasi-biblical parables starring Victor Mature and Jean Simmons that paraded themselves as sacred.
I’m not sure exactly what Holden is aiming for here; if he’s trying to draw a parallel between the unnamed movies of the fifties, he’s wrong; nothing is “paraded as sacred”; there is merely a flash or two of hope, inasmuch as Soraya’s aunt Zahrah (portrayed by Shorhah Agdashloo, from House of Sand and Fog and from Day Three of 24 (the mother of the sleeper-cell femily) manages to get the story of the murder to a French-Iranian jouralist (played by James Caviezel), but otherwise, the film is a horrified trip through the ultimate profanity.
Visually as well as narratively, the movie embraces extremes. The village is arid, the countryside around it paradisically lush.
One wonders if Mr. Holden needs this little swatch of fairly elementary symbolism explained to him via some medium scrutable to the modern, paper-thin, trite, quasi-literate film critic, perhaps a tattoo across Zooey Deschanel’s back would get his attention; “In this beautiful place, a malignant ugliness has bloomed into hideous, ugly life”.
Almost everything is either-or. Soraya is a beautiful martyred innocent and Zahra a stormy feminist prophet. With the exception of the mayor (David Diaan), who has qualms about the execution, and Mr. Caviezel’s reporter, who appears only briefly at the beginning and end of the movie, the men are fiendishly villainous.
Mr. Negahban’s Ali, who resembles a younger, bearded Philip Roth, suggests an Islamic fundamentalist equivalent of a Nazi anti-Semitic caricature. With his malevolent smirk and eyes aflame with arrogance and hatred, he is as satanic as any horror-movie apparition. The fraudulent local mullah, who collaborates in his scheme after being rejected by Soraya, might as well be carrying a pitchfork and breathing fire.
And there’s the PC reference. While the film references murder that is judicially sanctioned under Islamic law because, for those who missed it, it’s based on a true story of a murder sanctioned under Islamic law, the film takes pains to point out what Mr. Holden seemingly can’t be bothered to: the local mullah is a former criminal, sprung from hard time under the Shah’s regime by the revolution, a man whose piety is no deeper than a layer of mascara.
Would could also describe Steven Holden’s perceptiveness:
Yet it must be said that “The Stoning of Soraya M.” wields a crude power. At last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the movie was voted runner-up to “Slumdog Millionaire” for the audience choice award. As “The Passion of the Christ” showed, the stimulation of blood lust in the guise of moral righteousness has its appeal.
Mr. Holden: If “being inspired to try to not be the mindless drone that unthinkingly participates in a mob atrocity” is “moral righteousness”, I think I’ll cop to it.
See the movie if you get the chance. Well worth it.
I saw The Stoning of Soraya M at the Uptown last night.
First things first; it’s a harrowing movie. As in Passion of the Christ harrowing.
Too harrowing, at this remove, to really write a coherent review. That’ll come soon.
But do yourself a favor; ignore the NYTimes’ specious review. The Times writes the movie off as ‘Torture-Porn”. They hit the point and still it completely; the village men doing the stoning were acting as if they were taking part in pornography. That is exactly the point.
It’s at the Uptown again tonight. It’s not the feel-good hit of the summer – I haven’t seen a group walk out of a building looking so emotionally smacked around since the Holocaust Museum.
But it is so good. An amazing movie. Go if you get the chance.
Every truly repulsive trend has a nadir, eventually, something that makes even fans and participants sit up and go “oh, good lord, is this what we’ve sunk to?”
For Britney-watching, it was the 24/7 coverage of her complete meltdown, after which the nation engaged in a sober debate on the ethics of milking celebrities’ difficulties for ratings, and then went looking for nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens.
For daytime TV, it was “Jenny Jones” and her attempt to out-Springer Springer which went horribly awry, ending in murder. It served as the high-water mark on the loathsome tide of daytime talk shows in the nineties.
With hair-metal, it was Winger.
With the plague of people posting videos on themselves talking onto Youtube, it was Chris Crocker, who singlehandedly breathed new life into the “ex-gay” movement.
And, maybe, please dear Lord, the Gosselins and their full-contact french kiss with Faust will do the same for “reality” TV.
Personally, I would have been more surprised if they announced that they were ending the show to save their marriage, but after watching them bicker through this season, that probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. Some people just aren’t meant to be together forever, and these two have seemed to have some issues for a long time. But now the big question is what will happen with the TLC series “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” and what will happen with the kids.I would hope that this means the show would be over, but now we apparently get to watch not only the dissolution of their marriage (and have to see their faces on every gossip columns that stalks their future relationships) but we get to watch as the kids try and cope with this on TV. Those poor kids. I get that this is reality, but it’s just not a fun show about the chaos of eight children anymore. It’s uncomfortable to watch.
So don’t.
I mean it. Everyone. Stop!
So my favorite TV show of the past couple of years is USA’s Burn Notice. Sharp, well-written, funny, Bruce Campbell being Bruce Campbell, and lots of interrogation techniques to use on teenagers. Well worth the odd watch. Indeed, since its season is whenever 24 isn’t on, it’s kinda my only real “appoitnment” TV these days.
But I have to wonder: there’s car crashes, car chases, enough running gun battles to make Dirty Harry blush with shame, pitched fights, Venezuelan commandos slipping in from the sea into a marina in full battle rattle, and explosions, explosions, explosions – and nobody in Miami calls the police.
But Michael Weston swims in from the sea, crosses the beach and runs into a hotel, and a full dragnet turns out?
David Letterman did the unthinkable.
Apologized for a really inappropriate joke.
“As they say about jokes, if you have to explain the joke, it’s not a very good joke,” he said. “I take full blame for that.”
“I told a bad joke. I told a joke that was beyond flawed,” he said.
“So, I would like to apologize, especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke,” Letterman said. “I’m sorry about it and I’ll try to do better in the future.
Nearly unprecedented I reckon.
Then again, it’s sort of like your buddy apologizing for passing gas on a road trip in the winter. You hear the apology and all but your eyes are still burning and watering for miles.
While I watch little television, especially that late at night, I have watched enough Letterman over the years to classify it as the high-fructose corn syrup of the medium.
David Letterman really has no nutritional value either.
Letterman’s joke…
…that (Sarah) Palin’s “daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez” at a recent Yankees game, still insisted he was referring to Palin’s 18-year-old, Bristol, who gave birth to a boy in December, and not her 14-year-old, Willow.
…wasn’t funny, but given the source it really wasn’t surprising.
Or relevant.
What is interesting is that David Letterman, in apologizing, forwent a potential Donald Trump v. Rosie O’Donnell-esque battle that would have most assuredly been a ratings boon for Letterman, who is reportedly already beating upstart Tonight Show host Conan O’Somethingorother in the ratings.
Then again, maybe it isn’t really all that interesting and I should go to sleep now.
Sorry I wasted your time.
Who’s less excited about the new Sacha Baron Cohen film than I am?
British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen currently still has a massive fan base in Austria, but that is soon to change as the media dubs his latest film “dull”, “insulting” and a threat to the country’s world image – and economy.
To be fair, most Americans haven’t been aware of anything from Austria since Yahoo Serious.
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