Posted on August 30, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Thanks to Cinematical for referring me to Scarecrow Video’s exhaustive list of all the movie references in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” A nice reminder of why “independent, brick & mortar video stores that employee real people” are not “outmoded and in need of extermination by mail based corporations.”
Posted on August 29, 2009 at 8:00 am
The end of August is the worst time of year for movies. This makes no sense to me. I would think that people would want to see some good movies before the end of vacation. But it has been true for as long as I can remember and this year is no exception. Because Labor Day comes so late this year, we have two weeks filled with movies not screened for critics like “Halloween II,” “Final Destination 3D,” “Gamer,” and “Carriers.”
This provides a moment to look back on the summer’s hits and misses. Time Magazine has a good piece called 10 Lessons from the 2009 Box Office. Keeping in mind the perennially re-learned lesson from Oscar-winner William Goldman — “Nobody knows anything,” Time’s Richard Corliss has some important insights. Stars don’t guarantee success (“Land of the Lost” and “Funny People” did poorly; “The Hangover,” “Star Trek,” and “District 9” did well). Women go to movies — this is a lesson Hollywood always forgets, until the next “Julie and Julia” comes along. Big budget films did well.
Five other films in the summer’s top 10 domestic winners — “Up,” “Star Trek,” “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian” and “Angels & Demons” — had budgets of at least $150 million. Their sponsors must have been pleased, since each of the five earned more than $350 million worldwide.
You could make just as strong a case for the other side by comparing “District 9” ($30 million budget, $80 million box office) to “G.I. Joe” ($175 million budget, $124 million box office). But it is true that big budget movies did better than smaller independent films. This summer had no “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Blair Witch Project,” “March of the Penguins,” or “Juno.”
For me, the most interesting point Corliss makes is the way technology has changed the way people make decisions about what movies to see.
Instant-messaging can make or break a film within 24 hours. At any rate, something viral happened to Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s followup to Borat. Its opening-day gross was a burly $14.4 million, which that Saturday plunged an abysmal 40%. Somebody got out the word — stinker — and did it quick, possibly in 140 characters. The movie’s opening-weekend total was $30 million, and it’s taken six weeks to earn its second $30 million.
So, keeping a movie from critics may not make much of a difference. They can run, but they can’t hide from the audience members who become critics via Twitter and Facebook.
But the most surprising fact in the article was which movie was the top world-wide box office champ of the summer, in fact of the year so far. I’ll bet you can’t guess. Think for a moment before continuing, and, if you have the nerve, give me your guess in the comment box before clicking ahead to see the answer.
Posted on August 22, 2009 at 3:59 pm
The wise and witty Amy Dickenson of “Ask Amy” gets a letter from a blonde named Betty who is distraught that her boyfriend of 67 years is going to marry her rival, Veronica!
Amy has some good advice:
I want you to hold your head up high, go to that wedding and tell yourself that you are better off without him.
At the wedding reception (I’m sure it will be held at the Riverdale Country Club), if you have a few too many appletinis and decide to tell off Veronica once and for all, and maybe dance a little too close with Reggie or Jughead, so be it! You’re a free woman, Betty, and now’s your chance to stand up for all the Bettys everywhere!
Posted on August 20, 2009 at 8:00 am
It has been one of popular culture’s most enduring conundrums: Betty or Veronica?
Until now.
Archie Andrews, after seven decades as a teenager, has all of a sudden grown up. Archie and his friends have made only the smallest concessions to the passage of time. Moose used to be dumb; now he has a learning disability. The Riverdale kids may send texts now, but the punchlines are the same, as are the featherweight story-lines. And the eternal triangle with Archie being pursued by both rich glamor girl Veronica and wholesome girl-next-door Betty seemed as unchangeable as Archie’s immovable red hair.
It is almost impossible to imagine now but there were similar cultural shockwaves when Li’l Abner married Daisy Mae and Dagwood married Blondie. Both comics thrived and became even more popular as their “merry war” bloomed into usually-gentle domestic conflicts. But in those cases, while there was a question about whether they would get married, there was no question about who the couple was. The essence of Archie’s storyline has been the rivalry between the brunette and blonde who were pursuing him — in a high school setting. If he is going to grow up, get married and even, as news reports have noted, have children, is there any Archie-ness left?
It may be that this is a plan to reboot the venerable series. While many people will react to this news by being surprised he is marrying Veronica, many more may be surprised that Archie is still publishing new comics. This put them on the front pages of newspapers across the country. I suspect that there may an accelerated storyline ahead that within a very short time will find the children of Archie and Veronica in high school with the children of Jughead and Ethel, Moose and Midge, and Betty and Reggie (well, if anyone can straighten Reggie out, it has to be Betty). And that the jokes will still be, reassuringly, exactly the same.
Posted on August 17, 2009 at 3:58 pm
“District 9” is one of the best-reviewed films of the 2009. Entertainment Weekly put it on the cover and called it the must-see movie of the summer. Most critics described it as a thinking person’s action movie because it presents its humans vs. aliens story in the context of apartheid and other historic incidents of racial, religious, and ethnic separation.
Desson Thomson, one of my favorite critics, said in The Wrap:
What’s ingenious about “District 9” (co-written and directed by South African born Neill Blomkamp) is the way it cannily appropriates symbols and clichés of the apartheid regime of South Africa — the snarling dogs, the barefoot kids, the depressing shanty houses, the dust, poverty and hopeless — and repurposes them into a stunning sci-fi movie.
It’s our recognition of those symbols that gives the movie heft. We are watching apartheid in parenthesis. And yet, we are seeing it in an entirely different light.
But at least two African-American critics believe that the film perpetuates stereotypes more significantly than it addresses racism. Frequently contrarian critic Armond White of the New York Press has been attacked by fanboys and other critics for his scathing review of the film. White says that it:
suggests a meager, insensitive imagination. It’s a nonsensical political metaphor. Consider this: District 9’s South Africa-set story makes trash of that country’s Apartheid history by constructing a ludicrous allegory for segregation that involves human beings (South Africa’s white government, scientific and media authorities plus still-disadvantaged blacks) openly ostracizing extraterrestrials in shanty-town encampments that resemble South Africa’s bantustans.
It’s been 33 years since South Africa’s Soweto riots stirred the world’s disgust with that country’s regime where legal segregation kept blacks “apart” and in “hoods” (thus, Apartheid) unequal to whites. District 9’s sci-fi concept celebrates–yes, that’s the word–Soweto’s legacy by ignoring the issues of self-determination (where a mass demonstration by African students on June 16, 1976, protested their refusal to learn the dominant culture’s Afrikaans language). District 9 also trivializes the bloody outcome where an estimated 500 students were killed, by ignoring that complex history and enjoying its chaos. Let’s see if the Spielberg bashers put-off by the metaphysics in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be as offended by District 9’s mangled anthropology.
District 9 represents the sloppiest and dopiest pop cinema–the kind that comes from a second-rate film culture. No surprise, this South African fantasia from director Neill Blomkamp was produced by the intellectually juvenile New Zealander Peter Jackson. It idiotically combines sci-fi wonderment with the inane “realism” of a mockumentary to show the South African government’s xenophobic response to a global threat: Alien-on-earth population has reached one million, all housed–like Katrina refugees or Soweto protesters–in restricted territories.
White says that the aliens in the movie want to go home while the blacks in South Africa wanted to stay and engaged in one of the most stirring and peaceful revolutions in history. And White also objects to the portrayal of black Nigerian gangsters. “These malevolent blacks are also grinning cannibals who later threaten Wikus’ life. They’re a new breed of racist swagger; the kingpin sits in a wheelchair, big, black and scary.”
I have been a fan of DC Girl@The Movies for a long time and especially like her essay on the failures of most movies about racism. Her comments on “District 9” are insightful and thought-provoking. Like White, she objects to the portrayal of the black Africans as “Ooga-booga negroes who think *eating* the aliens will somehow give them their ~*magic*~, gun-toting gangstas, hos, and yes, we even have a barely-there sidekick who is repeatedly called ‘boy’.”
Another of my favorite critics, Cynthia Fuchs, says it is one more film that purports to be about racism but gives the heroics to the white man. “Racism provides the white guy with a very special growth experience.”
Slate’s Jonah Weiner took a friend who lived in South Africa to “District 9” and wrote about their reaction in the site’s Brow Beat blog:
My friend was troubled by the depiction of the stranded aliens as “shiftless” “intergalactic schlubs,” as Dan puts it. There’s something unsavory, he argued, in director Neill Blomkamp portraying his allegorical shack dwellers as dumb, hapless, and helpless members of a community so thoroughly rent by poverty and oppression that the only hope for their betterment lies either in intervention from the outside (Wikus van der Merwe) or the lone efforts of an anomalous, intellectually advanced insider (the alien called Christopher Thompson). This logic can take on an infantilizing, unempowering aspect, he said, that denies oppressed parties agency, the ability to organize effectively from the ground up.
We were both uncertain about Blomkamp’s ultimate point about miscegenation, for lack of a better word, as represented by Wikus’s gooey transformation into a prawn. Right through the film’s final image, Wikus regards his othering from himself as a horror he wants reversed–he fights the evil MNU not out of virtue but out of self-interest and, in the process, becomes a microcosmic model for any “native” body that fears “foreign” contamination. The transforming/transformed Wikus isn’t the embodiment of post-racial harmony. Rather, the metamorphosis alienates him twice over, strands him between categories that are themselves left intact: He’s not a human and he’s not a “prawn,” either.
A couple of points here. First, I have been fascinated with the intensity of debate White’s review has engendered, including more than 500 comments on Rotten Tomatoes and a sort of defense of White from Roger Ebert, who at first said White was valuable because his ideas are outside of the mainstream and then wrote a second piece saying:
I realized I had to withdraw my overall defense of White. I was not familiar enough with his work. It is baffling to me that a critic could praise “Transformers 2” but not “Synecdoche, NY.” Or “Death Race” but not “There Will be Blood.” I am forced to conclude that White is, as charged, a troll. A smart and knowing one, but a troll. My defense of his specific review of “District 9” still stands.
Like Ebert, I think the comments by White are valid, and I’d add in the assessments by DC Girl and Fuchs as well. In my view, however, the movie is not intended to be so closely aligned with the specific events or individuals affected by apartheid, either the victims or the perpetrators and it would be a mistake to try to make it that way — overly didactic and heavy-handed. As I said in my review:
The film is more clever and ambitious than that. Just as the classic original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is claimed by both the right and the left as representing their side, this is a movie that is designed to be discussed and argued over. It is those conversations about Its meaning in light of the way that struggles with the notion of “the other” can inspire both the best and the worst of what it means to be human.
