The Eagle

The Eagle, by Jeremy Brock.

This was actually good and very engrossing. There were a few cringe-worthy lines, but otherwise it's on par with the writer's other credits, such as Her Majesty Mrs. Brown and the rewritten Brideshead Revisited.

Channing Tatum, pictured in a face off with a fellow hottie in a completely different movie, teams up with his slave Jamie Bell, who I've admired since his role in Jumper, to go north of the Hadrian wall and retrieve a gold eagle totem his father lost to some savages in battle. Once in unfamiliar territory, Jamie becomes the owner and Channing becomes the slave.

The complete absence of women made me think this was a primitive love story between two men of different classes. But I don't think it's necessary to conclude that they're lovers. The relationship between develops nicely. It's believable.

Just Go With It

Just Go With It, by Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling

Once upon a time, about fifty years ago, there was a French play called Fleur De Cactus which was re-written as an English stage play by Abe Burrows, and then turned into a movie starring two famous people and a newcomer from television. The newcomer won an Oscar for her performance and her name was Goldie Hawn. The leads of that movie were Ingrid Bergman and Walter Matthau. The director was Gene Saks and the screenwriter was I.A.L. Diamond.

They were all stellar, first rate talents, the likes of which we'll probably never see again.

The plot of the original movie (I don't know anything about the plays) was that a "swinging single" (Matthau) wanted to get out of marrying his girl-toy (Hawn) so he persuaded his plain jane secretary (Bergman) to pretend to be his wife. She agrees, but suddenly becomes exciting and attractive and Matthau realizes that she is as much of a beauty as his plaything. Thus the title: Cactus Flower.

Cactus Flower was entirely rewritten and renamed, "Just Go With It," which is a hostile and bitchy title, totally representative of Adam Sandler and his not so hidden anger. It should be called "Just Go With It Bitch and Shut The Fuck Up." Somehow, Adam Sandler has found a way of finding writers and projects through his "Happy Madison" company that allow him to express his rage without ever confronting it. He allows himself the freedom to hate without ever explaining why he hates. I could never figure out why P.T. Anderson, who is a great film writer, thought that Adam Sandler was a genius, but after seeing this movie, I think I understand. He is a genius of hidden rage.

Anyway, to get to this pointless remake, the plot is that his secretary is somehow not his subordinate but his equal. He wants to "date" (a.k.a., repeatedly fuck) a twit, but needs to pretend he's married in order to pretend he's getting a divorce. The entire plot hinges on a fuck on the beach (in Malibu, I presume, where people aren't allowed on the beach) behind a large boulder where somehow Happy doesn't take off his shirt but does take off his pants, sleeps with his girl under a blanket pulled from thin air, and then in the morning tells her to look in his front pocket for a business card, whereupon she finds a fake wedding ring and, after this one beach-night stand, becomes outraged that he's "married."

Being gay is so much easier.

From then on it's just a bunch of sentimental and unrealistic schlock: kids speaking like adults and adults behaving like children. The movie is steeped with homophobic clowns: hairdressers, hotel clerks. And the female story-line is no longer about the joy of life, which was what the original movie was: it's based totally on the prominence of the pudenda, which you can actually see in one horrible slow motion-bikini take. I never thought much of Jennifer Aniston and I think now, her major Hollywood accomplishment will be The Girl With No Tattoo. And that WILL be an accomplishment.

After fifty years, this is what it's come to. Very sad. Sad Madison.

No Strings Attached

No Strings Attached

by Elizabeth Meriwether and Michael Samonek

Traditional Hollywood is slightly pornographic, which is probably why real pornography is so rampant there -- in the valley or wherever it's shot.

I was afraid that this movie was going to destroy Natalie Portman but thankfully, unlike most movies featuring the twit in the picture, it doesn't destroy its co-stars as well. I'm thinking of that dreadful movie where he fucked Anne Heche. Who?

Ashton Kutcher is probably the worst male actor to come along since... hmmm... I can't think of any male actor worse than this asshole... oh Burt Reynolds. Burt Reynolds perfected the irritating habit of winking at the camera, as if to say, "Oh yes we know this sucks but it's all good natured fun." It's pretty much the same as monster truck rallies, roller derby, demolition derbys and "Professional" wrestling. Get some beer (and some smokes in ye olden days), watch guys destroy things without risking a single thing. I don't understand it. But then I suppose the audience isn't taking any chances either. It's what separates those "activities" from their 'legitimate' counterparts. A real car race actually poses a risk for the drivers. Real wrestling is not pre-determined. And actors who actually act don't constantly wink at the camera or always keep one part of their mind behind on the other side of it.

In Hollywood, and now, unfortunately, most of the country, people are growing up with two points of view: they are always aware of the camera and that somebody is watching them, or has the potential to watch them. Why do people need to film themselves having sex (on cell phone cameras, no less), if they're not going to use it to masturbate later? What matters more to people these days is that they look right while doing anything. This is how porn has infected us. Facebook is pornography. Twitter is pornography. You Tube is pornography. Sex and The City is pornography. All over New York there are (maybe more "were" now) women running around trying to have Carrie Bradshaw type lives. That's not healthy.

This movie is fortunately well written enough that for brief moments, you can actually forget that a porno actor is one of the leads. The movie is about the fear of a woman to feel and I think it's because it's primarily about the woman's problem (the woman in this picture, has the harder journey), that we can overlook the smug, creepy I'm-so-famous acting of the male lead. But I'll never watch it a second time.

Usurper

This review is about a book.

Addiction memoirs fascinate me only because they are almost entirely about action and almost nothing about feeling. Bill Clegg's "Portrait Of An Addict As A Young Man," was interesting for about five minutes until I realized that his play on the title of James Joyce's first novel was simply an appropriation, and not actually relevant. Of course I finished the book, if that's what you could call it --- there is only one book that I have ever not finished and maybe someday I'll tell you --- but it's nothing but a single note, and only reinforces the fact that publishing is an insular dead party staffed full of pretty boys and girls who are, literally, going outside to smoke crack.

I used the title Usurper for this blog utterance because when I got to the end of the first chapter of Ulysses, I realized that I had been a very lazy reader all my life, and had to look up the definition of a word that I should have known. This is a lazy book and should have been called Usurper.

There is nothing in this book that warrants "borrowing" from James Joyce. Stealing that title is just another form of drug use. But he's not a writer and this is a memoir, so I guess you're allowed to.

Oh my, he spent seventy grand on crack. Who cares? We're supposed to be fascinated because he was a successful literary agent and had a Manhattan friends and so on. I have Manhattan friends, but I'm not successful. Yet if I told the same story it wouldn't be interesting, thanks to Warhol and our obsession with fame. That is all this book is about, is fame, so it's another entry into the anus, I mean annals, of American literature.

He basically paid no price for any of his doings. He was re-hired back into the industry after he got clean, and is apparently making money off of it (and his retelling of it). That 70,000 dollars he blew on crack was nothing compared to the money he has already gotten from the movie rights. You get page after page of monotonous drug taking and then finally, once he finally gets his boyfriend (Ira Sachs, left in the photo above, with his new partner) to leave him, by attempting suicide and failing, he turns things around. This memoir once again, like all addiction memoirs, (I haven't read Mary's yet), shows that addiction is simply a format, and offers no insight into the mysteries of human behavior.

I was very disappointed.

Something that has always bugged me about James Cameron movies is his liberalism. His liberalism always seems to be couched in the comfy nook of technology.

Little Fuckers

Little Fuckers

by Who Cares

A punch line should not be made into a movie, much less several movies. The first one was mediocre okay in that Ben Stiller kind of way that most of his movies are, but I don't think the creators were relying solely on that stupid name to sell it.

The Spy Who Shagged Me, which really means The Spy Who Fucked Me, was another, but at least it was a little witty. Is there really a surname Focker? I've never seen it.

Just stop.

True Grit

True Grit

by Joel and Ethan Coen

I've almost convinced myself that the Coen brothers are the Barnum & Bailey of the film world. Most of their movies are genuinely about America and the types of characters found in the American landscape, of all eras, and most of the movies are about hucksters, suckers and fools. I think it was Barnum who said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

Almost every movie they make the characters are foolish, simple, unable to think. Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading who doesn't understand that his demand for a reward is blackmail. The husband in Fargo who hires someone to kidnap his wife so they can demand ransom from his father in law and then give him the money. This list of numbskulls in the Coen brothers movies is a very long one.

After Burn After Reading I realized that they are mocking Americans for the most part and this is what is particularly fun about their movies. They're very sophisticated ways of showing the tea baggers for what they really are.

But after watching True Grit, which doesn't seem to mock anyone, but has the same feel, I think there's something else that they do, which is that they don't let their characters change. From a writing point of view, which is what this blog is ostensibly about, this is an error according to the Hollywood 3 act formula. And generally I believe people read, see movies, etc., because they want to see a character change. It's the nature of living and being able to converse. We talk about what things happened today or yesterday, but it's all about the change that took place. We don't talk or want to hear about the fact that you urinated when you woke, unless your urine was blue or red.

What the Coens do is take characters and put them through the wringer of PLOT and then have them come out exactly the same character-wise as they were before the plot took place. They learn nothing. They change in absolutely no way whatsoever. In True Grit, the only change that takes place is that she loses her lower arm to a snake bite. But as a person she is exactly the same person as she was before the movie began. If you asked her what did she learn from the experience she would not say, "how to depend on someone," or "love," or "killing a man isn't easy," or "forgiveness," she would say that, "a rifle has a powerful back kick."

Likewise Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges in probably what is his best performance ever, I think, and better than the drunk Bad Blake for which he won the Oscar), could not point to a single thing of the heart that he might have learned and in that character's case, there probably isn't even a single fact that he learned, since he knew pretty much everything when the story began.

I'm guessing that in the John Wayne version, there was some sort of emotional connection made between the girl and the man which would be the 'change' that we want to see. The reluctant Rooster comes to care for the young girl with the snake bite. In this version, it's not there. He races across the territory to get her some help and after the horse drops dead he carries her the rest of the way (by this time she's passed out). But his only thought was "I'm getting old." Maybe that's what he learned.

I think this is what defines the Coens' style and what sets them apart from Hollywood. There is no sentimental mush in their movies; no false emotion. My favorite line from all of their movies is the last one in Fargo, "I just don't understand."