In a startling public relations gaffe, a Fox News spokesperson responded to LL Cool J’s unwillingness to have an interview from two years ago reappropriated for Sarah Palin’s new show with this snippy self-righteous rejoinder: “as it appears that Mr. Smith does not want to be associated with a program that could serve as an inspiration to others, we are cutting his interview from the special and wish him the best with his fledgling acting career.”
This would sting if it were remotely true. Fortunately for us, it’s not.
For some unknown reason, probably because I hate myself, I decided I would watch every single one of the music videos featured in Gavin’s recent S,N! post about ‘Conservative Woodstock’.
Since they’re communicating a simple message to a simple people, these videos — all consideration of their aesthetic quality aside — all have a lot in common. They’re as overproduced as you can possibly get on a shoestring budget, they’re built around themes of thoughtless loyalty and vague menace, and they all consist of maybe a shot or two of the dope who wrote the song, and then a bunch of stock photographs* of patriotic imagery. And this is what I wanted to talk about.
*: Now, I know why they all used these same tired images: it’s because they don’t have any money to create actual content. That speaks in an ironic way to their status as the self-proclaimed ‘winners’ in a free market of ideas, but it wouldn’t be modern conservativism without a huge dose of hypocrisy: almost all of those images are copyright-protected, but they got them free off the internet instead of, you know, paying for them like a real capitalist. Didn’t Ayn Rand have something to say about producers and moochers?
A stark example of misbegotten chemistry and its resultant pitfalls, The Bounty Hunter combines Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston and promptly fizzes upon contact. To say that the two are no Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert is putting it mildly; rarely have supposedly charming stars seemed less natural or comfortable playing unlikely soulmates, in this case a slovenly bounty hunter named Milo (Butler) and the tough ex-wife reporter Nicole (Aniston) he’s tasked with finding and taking to jail. The pair receive little help from the contrived scenario of Andy Tennant’s film, which finds them bickering like bitter, petty children along a journey that comes to include dodging a bookie’s thugs, solving a murder-conspiracy, and, naturally, falling back in love.
As America’s foremost movie janitor, I get a lot of questions. Granted, most of them are along the lines of “Hey loser, how about cleaning up the sticky puddle of Dr. Pepper and jujubes in the sixth row?” At which point I have to explain I’m not that kind of movie janitor. Once I’ve given my actual job description, the question I usually get is: “Don’t you realize that every minute you spend watching these terrible movies brings you a minute closer to your own death?” Well, thanks for mentioning it, Mr. Sunshine, but as it happens, that’s not the case! You see, I have a time machine. With the simple press of a button, I can watch every single Ernest movie and all 13 chapters of Friday the 13th, and not a single second will pass in the outside world. This also explains how I am occasionally able to meet my High Hat deadlines.
Noah Baumbach has never been the go-to guy for warm and fuzzy characters, but he seems to be testing the limits with his latest protagonist, the unemployed, unmotivated, and almost thoroughly unpleasant Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller). That’s not to say that the movie named after him is equally unlikable, however; although it sometimes plays like a mumblecore remake of As Good As It Gets, Greenberg finds Baumbach’s acerbic wit and keen sense of interpersonal dynamics intact.
I should probably hate Noah Baumbach. After all, the Brooklyn-born, Vassar-educated son of a novelist and a Village Voice critic wrote and directed his first independent feature at twenty-six, married a movie star (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and gets to make artsy personal films with fellow scions of upper-middle-class intelligentsia like Wes Anderson and second-generation show-biz aristocrats like Ben Stiller (and, well, Jennifer Jason Leigh).
Yet, for all the privilege of his upbringing, Baumbach’s movies are surprisingly relatable to overeducated neurotics from all walks of life. And while the auteur’s effete, hyper-articulate strain of navel-gazing may not be everyone’s cup of fair-trade chai, his films consistently offer a far more realistic portrayal of real-world relationships than cynical Hollywood swill like your average Gerard Butler “romantic” “comedy.”
If there were a Gawker-type site for film critic gossip, the only thing that would keep it from being horrifically dull would be the antics of the NY Press‘ splenetically quotable Armond White, who always seems to be ruffling feathers. The last time we checked in on Mr. White, he was trolling “District 9″ lovers. This new story, though, is more interesting than the usual Armond vs. Rotten Tomatoes sparring. There’s a history.
White’s reportedly been banned from attending all press screenings of “Greenberg” by the personal fiat of writer/director Noah Baumbach and producer Scott Rudin. I was among those who got an email from the pseudonymous “John Doe,” who had some very nasty things to say about the matter.
Unsure of what it wants to be, The Eclipse winds up only being a mishmashed nothing. In a seaside Irish town, high school woodworking teacher Michael (Ciarán Hinds) still grieves over the death of his wife, a loss that’s left him to raise their two kids on his own and has also, it seems, caused him to begin having unsettling ghostly visions of his ailing father-in-law. Again working as an assistant for the region’s annual literary festival, Michael comes into contact with novelist Lena (Iben Hjejle), who warms to him and attempts to encourage his long-tabled writerly ambitions, even as she fends off the advances of an arrogant, boorish literary hot shot (Aidan Quinn) also attending the event.
Like much of the blogosphere, I’m in a state of shock over Alex Chilton’s premature death [on March 17]. I’ve been vocal about how I think he’s squandered his considerable talent over the last three decades or so, but the fundamental truth is that squandering his talent was his prerogative. When he was great – and I don’t think it’s humanly possible to overstate his greatness and importance to rock music - he was wholly unappreciated by the public. When public tastes finally caught up to him, he took one look at the mantle of “elder statesman of rock” and chose to Bartleby. God bless him for his irascibility. There was no one else like him.
