Reason Magazine - Topics > Film

Play it Again, Chico

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:10:00 EST

While preparing their 1946 film A Night in Casablanca, the Marx Brothers received a legalgram from Warner Bros. noting that the forthcoming picture's title resembled Casablanca, which had been released approximately four years before. The lawyers demanded that the name be changed. Groucho Marx replied with a letter of his own:

Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal document warning us not to use the name Casablanca.

It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.

I just don't understand your attitude. Even if you plan on releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don't know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.

The entire letter is here, along with a description of the followup correspondence, in which Warner Bros. requested an outline of the film's story and Groucho replied that he would be playing "Bordello, the sweetheart of Humphrey Bogart."

[Hat tip: Bryan Alexander.]

Update: Snopes says that while Warners did contact the comedians with concerns about the movie, it didn't actually threaten to sue them, and that the Marxes spread the story as a publicity stunt. Meanwhile, Wes Ghering's The Marx Brothers: A Bio-Bibliography claims that Warners eventually did file a complaint, though "it was ironed out quickly in arbitration."

Gaming for Columbine

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:35:00 EST

reason contributor Henry Jenkins has posted a three-part interview [1, 2, 3] with Danny Ledonne, the creator of the controversial Columbine video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! The whole thing is worth reading; I'll quote just one of Ledonne's comments:

The controversy around SCMRPG is largely one of the subject matter and not its execution. Only when I give talks at game design schools am I taken to task for my design choices. For example, the Associated Press, Christian Science Monitor, or Parents Television Council were not complaining with:

"Why did you hide a book in the upstairs classroom that you need to complete the last part of the game? I had to start over!"

"The hallway is really hard to sneak through. I couldn't even tell those were security cameras until my friend showed me!"

"The graphics suck, noob."

Instead, the mainstream press attacked the very notion that a game like SCMRPG could exist! Heavens, we can have a film or book or magazine article about Columbine but a VIDEO GAME? This was the tone of much of the initial reporting.

The newshook for the interview is Ledonne's film Playing Columbine, a documentary about the controversy. I haven't seen the movie. Nor, for that matter, have I played the game: It's only available for Windows and I use a Mac. But those of you with the appropriate OS can download the game for free and decide for yourself whether it's exploitative trash, a compelling work of art, or an ambitious artistic failure.

More from Reason: Nick Gillespie reacted to the Columbine shootings here, and I reacted to the media reaction here. Brian Doherty reviewed Bowling for Columbine here, and I reviewed it here.

Idiocracy Now!

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 17:54:00 EDT

In an Early Morning Vein

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:59:00 EDT

Some links to kick off your Monday morning:

* Bill Kauffman looks back at Norman Mailer's mayoral campaign.

* Gene Healy analyzes the bizarre, fascistic Depression-era drama Gabriel Over the White House. (For my take on that movie and its imitators, go here.)

* Jeffrey Rogers Hummel explains why "we now have the worst of both worlds: a massive bailout financed BOTH by Treasury borrowing, in order to avoid inflationary pressures, and a monetary base increase, heralding future inflation anyway."

* Simon Jenkins devotes his final column to decrying the sorry state of civil liberties in England.

Dolemite, RIP

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:32:00 EDT

Rudy Ray Moore, the lost bridge between blue comedy and gangsta rap, is dead. Darius James called one of his movies "ghetto surrealism"; I'll call his films the most wonderfully weird products of the blaxploitation era. Rest in peace, you Avenging Disco Godfather. We will not see your likes again.

Warning: That video is NSFW. But would that have stopped Dolemite from watching it? Hell, no.

Register Now for Reason Goes Hollywood, November 14-15! Speakers Include Drew Carey, Bjorn Lomborg, and Rep. Jeff Flake!

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:24:00 EDT

Lights! Camera! Action!
Reason Goes Hollywood!
Nothing captures the American imagination like Hollywood—and now, lovers of liberty will gather on the Walk of Fame to explore the ways in which film and freedom converge. Come find out more about the future of American cinema—and join in the party of the year as we celebrate Reason's 40th anniversary!
What: Reason Goes Hollywood! and 40 Years of Reason Gala Dinner
When: Friday, November 14 and Saturday, November 15.

Where: Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood, California
The event will be emceed by Price Is Right and Reason.tv host Drew Carey and speakers include Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), and many Reason all-stars.
Registration for Reason Goes Hollywood is open to all, but space is limited. Sponsorship opportunities are available. If you would like to sponsor the event or have any questions, please contact Jennifer Kambara at jennifer.kambara@reason.org, or (310) 391-2245.

The Curious Case of Lousiana Film Subsidies

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:53:00 EDT

One of the biggest bills has come due in Louisiana, where residents are financing a hefty share of Brad Pitt's next movie: $27,117,737, which the producers will receive by cashing or selling off valuable tax credits.
Louisiana, one of the most assertive players in the subsidy game, wound up covering $27 million of the nearly $167 million budget of Pitt's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"—the state's biggest movie payout to date—when producers for Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. qualified the movie under an incentive that has since been tightened....
Until two years ago, Louisiana's program offered a 15 percent credit for virtually the entire budget of a qualified film. Mark Smith, who oversaw the program, pleaded guilty last year to taking $67,500 in bribes to inflate budgets for a company that authorities did not name.

In case you're wondering, there's no evidence that such plans, on whatever scale, actually create jobs (duh).

"There's no evidence yet that this is a particularly efficient or effective way to create jobs," said Noah Berger, executive director of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.
The nonprofit center reviews budget and tax policies in Massachusetts, which is spending about $60 million a year on producer credits. A recent study by the center found that the state's film credit, at 25 percent, is five times what is offered to those who build in designated economic opportunity areas and more than eight times the state's standard investment tax credit.

More here.

Do subsidies really swing that much business? Or are they a waste of tax money? reason has answers dammit.

Spoofed!

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

“The whole idea of spoof, to me, is just so done and gone,” said David Zucker to The Onion AV Club. “I'm very proud of all three of the Naked Guns, but I think we've declared victory.”

That was ten years ago. In 2001, terrorists attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—or have you forgotten? In 2004, a newly-minted Republican David Zucker donated to the Bush re-election campaign and made a commercial for the Club for Growth that portrayed a line-up of schmucks being as indecisive as John Kerry. “If you never commit to what you believe in,” said Zucker’s narrator, “who will commit to you?”

Zucker stayed committed, producing more political ads in 2006 and directing An American Carol, a feature-length—what’s the word?—spoof of the modern left, of terrorism, of Hollywood, of slavery, and of the never-promising genre of Charles Dickens pastiches. This is an idea even the Muppets had trouble with, and they didn’t have Zucker’s political obligations.

We open on an idyllic Fourth of July picnic, where embalmed-looking, paycheck-needing Leslie Nielsen gathers up some kids to tell them a tale occasionally broken up by erotic, slow-motion daydreams. It’s the story of Michael Malone (Kevin Farley, brother of Chris), a Michael Moore lookalike who is following up his success with films like Die, You American Pigs with a campaign to ban Independence Day.

”I love America,” Malone says in one of the many, many scenes where he’s eating and looking confused. “That’s why it’s got to be destroyed.”

Malone is approached by hard-luck Taliban terrorists who, buffeted by American military success, are having trouble recruiting fresh bodies. Led by Robert Davi, who reads his lines as if he’s smothering them with a hospital pillow, they corner Malone at an award show. ”We heard you were a big fat liar!” giggles Mohammed (Geoffrey Arend), before giving Malone tentative funding for a drama that will finally, finally win him the respect of the Hollywood elite.

All of this happens before any of the Dickensian ghosts show up to shake some sense into Malone. We’ve forgotten what’s being parodied by the time the ghost of John F. Kennedy jumps out of Malone’s TV set to remind him that his high-toned rhetoric disguised an anti-commie ass-kicker. The ghost of George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer) guides Malone through most of his journey, showing him a world where American soldiers never freed the slaves or beat the Nazis, where ACLU lawyers groan and swarm like zombies. He summons the ghost of George Washington (Jon Voight), in a scene of transcendent weirdness, where Malone is shown the ashes of 9/11 victims to shame him out of making documentaries. Malone’s lessons end under the arm of “the freakin’ angel of death,” (country singer Trace Adkins), who shows him a future where morgue doctors play with his remains and Muslim conquerors build him a statue in occupied Hollywood.

Spoiler alert: Malone learns the error of his ways. By the end of the film he’s patched up relations with his Navy man brother, celebrated the Fourth of July, and started production on a patriotic biopic of JFK. He exposes the terrorists’ plot from the stage of a Trace Adkins concert, where the man sings an ode to America that goes, in part, “army, navy, air force and marines/the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen.”

And that’s how David Zucker returns to the spoof genre. (He has directed, but not written, two of the Scary Movie films.) The goals here are as partisan, zealous, and transparent as Warren Beatty’s when he made Reds, or John Travolta’s when he made Battlefield Earth. Zucker has promoted the film across conservative media, at the Republican convention (where screening attendees like Rick Santorum got liberal paper dolls for their kids), and on Fox News. “Laugh like your country depends on it!” bellows the movie’s ad copy. This is not a joke. If a Scary Movie bombs, some people lose money. If An American Carol bombs, Zucker’s quest to make Hollywood safe for conservatives is dealt a Dunkirk.

How successful can he be, though? Like Redacted (2007) and other Iraq films attacked by conservatives as propagandic money pits, the targets of AAC have shrunk since the screenwriters first aimed at them. Just because Michael Moore took four years to put out a documentary on his “slacker uprising” tour doesn’t mean people still take him seriously on electoral politics. Indeed, Moore released the movie for free online. He went through a brief moment as a symbol for everything conservatives hated about the left, roughly from the release of Bowling for Columbine to Bush’s re-election. Spoof targets work best when the subjects are brand new or ripped out of clichés. Farley’s Malone never overcomes the “oh yeah, that guy” factor.

Zucker doesn’t try too hard to understand the left beyond Moore/Malone. Late in the film, we learn that Malone was only ever unpatriotic because, as a portly teen, he had a crush on a girl who hated America, too. When she ran off with a soldier, he doubled down as a political activist. Malone’s motivation is the only one that Zucker explains: The rest of the liberals and left-wingers in the movie are psychopaths who willfully make things up, chant slogans mindlessly, and beat up people who upset them. This is the first Hannity and Colmes comedy, birthed in an echo chamber, with references that only make sense to people who are already die-hard conservatives.

Is it funny? It depends. Zucker funs around with Hitler by recycling a gag from his worst political ad, in which a James Baker III lookalike did the bidding of a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lookalike. There is a truly disturbing scene involving Leslie Nielsen and human dismemberment that might have gotten a chuckle at Ed Gein’s house. There are a few jokes that connect, though, and that puts An American Carol miles ahead of Fox’s short-lived “The Half Hour News Hour.”

It doesn’t put it in league with the great liberal comedy. There’s a reason for that, as TV critics point out every time a conservative comedy or skit fails. Political comedy mocks authority. Conservative comedy in the Age of Bush venerates authority. The “heavies” that corrupt Malone and (temporarily) ruin the lives of his conservative extended family are powerless, silly activists. Malone simply gets slapped around a bit and decides the establishment was right. If you transported Zucker back to 1978 and pitched him Animal House, he’d direct Niedermeyer: Man of Iron.

Hopefully this is a curable problem, a result of eight fat years of Republican rule, the bulk of which were spent apologizing for the Bush administration and agonizing over land wars in Asia. Conservative comedy thrived in the Clinton era; perhaps it can bloom again in the Brumiere of Barack Obama.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason. This article originally appeared at Culture11.

The Great Recycler

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:35:00 EDT

The Noble Bowzer

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:30:00 EDT

Two members of Sha Na Na take to the pages of Columbia College Today to explore the recent scholarly interest in ... Sha Na Na. An excerpt:

During the revolution the year before, the Vietnam-era culture wars had escalated into fist fights, even mob fights, between the "jocks" and the "freaks" (and even "pukes"), as protestors were called....Kenneth Koch stopped his poetry class from rushing down from Hamilton to join in a brawl between jocks and freaks going on below by crying out, like a WWII movie heroine, in his campiest voice, "Stop! WE'RE ... what they're FIGHTING FOR!" His students broke up laughing, sat back down and Koch went on with the lecture, while the jocks and freaks punched it out outside.

Researching in Butler and Avery libraries, [Elizabeth] Guffey discovered George's twice-weekly Spec ads: "Jocks! Freaks! ROTC! SDS! Let there be a truce! Bury the hatchet (not in each other)! Remember when we were all little greaseballs together" (p. 113). The ads consciously "evoked," Guffey commented, a "vision of the Fifties as a pre-political teenage Eden."

After Woodstock, Sha Na Na founders John "Jocko" Marcellino '72, Don York '71, Rich Joffe '72, '93L, Scott Powell '70 and manager Ed Goodgold '65 gained the talents of Jon "Bowzer" Bauman '68 and "Screamin'" Scott Simon '70. Their popular television show joined with Happy Days and Grease popularizing the new myth. By the 1980 Presidential election, America had embraced the dream of the Fifties as a pre-political Golden Age. So much so, [Daniel] Marcus painstakingly shows, that the American political landscape was altered to take advantage of this invented cultural memory.

Watch the movie version of Grease today, with its half-disco soundtrack and its closing wisecrack about Nixon, and it's obvious that it's "about" the 1970s much more than it was ever about the '50s. But I'm not sure that was self-evident at the time. (As my mom said to my dad as my family watched the film on TV, circa 1980: "There really were people who lived like this.") Lest you think this reinvention process stopped in the Carter era, go rent The Brady Bunch Movie, with its curious conceit that the early '70s were a lost age of innocence. (For the target audience, most of whom were under 10 in the original Brady era, perhaps it was.)

The whole Sha Na Na article, well worth reading, is here. Related topics are explored here and here.

[Hat tip: John Kluge.]

Paul Newman, RIP

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:15:00 EDT

Say farewell to the salad dressing mogul, Nation underwriter, and star of such fine films as The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy, The Sting, The Verdict, and this:

In each of those seven movies -- probably my favorites in his filmography -- Paul Newman plays either a rebel loner or a lovable loser. Is that enough to declare him an honorary libertarian?

'Mickey Mouse Should Be Killed in All Cases'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:51:00 EDT

Sheikh Muhammad Munajid, a Muslim cleric and former Saudi diplomat with a show on Iqra TV, deplores the influence of cartoon mice such as Mickey and Jerry, who encourage children to believe the filthy rodents are benign and lovable:

According to Islamic law, the mouse is a repulsive, corrupting creature. How do you think children view mice today—after Tom and Jerry?
Even creatures that are repulsive by nature, by logic, and according to Islamic law have become wonderful and are loved by children. Even mice.
Mickey Mouse has become an awesome character, even though according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases.

Don't even get him started on Porky Pig.

Is this the real reason Farfour had to go? If so, what should we make of the fact that he was "beaten to death by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfour's land"? Perhaps fictional rodent eradication is a cause that can unite Muslims and Jews.

Breitbart on Hollywood Censorship

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:55:00 EDT

Andrew Breitbart, long associated with The Drudge Report, prop. of the excellent newsfeed site Breitbart.com, author of The Washington Times col "Big Hollywood," and maker of lists for reason, finds it larfable that Matt Damon is worried about GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin banning books. Breitbart writes:

The sad fact is that actual artistic oppression—book banning in its many modern forms—is a matter of course in the entertainment industry, especially when the underlying product is declared politically incorrect or runs contrary to the interests of Hollywood's political altar, the Democratic Party.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations runs rings around Hollywood's pious First Amendment absolutists.
"I hope you will be reassured that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs," director Phil Alden Robinson wrote after changing the script from Muslim terrorists to Austrian neo-Nazis in the Tom Clancy thriller, "The Sum of all Fears." "And I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination."
While Mr. Clancy put up an admirable fight, actor Ben Affleck acquiesced, cashed his multimillion-dollar check and fought the dreaded Austrians, whose flagging Teutonic self-confidence again took a hit. Thanks to Hollywood artistic appeasement, Arab youth in totalitarian Muslim countries indoctrinated in anti-Western thought dodged another esteem bullet....
The silence of the celebrity political class was heartbreaking when Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic radical in retaliation for making "Submission," a critically acclaimed film that portrayed horrific female oppression within the practice of Islam.
Yet Hollywood—quick to find martyrs near to its heart (Valerie Plame, et al)—ignored its fallen Dutch comrade and refused to celebrate the film and its maker, fulfilling his murderer's greatest desire.

More here.

The Secret Life of Sarah Palin

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:17:00 EDT

Tyler Cowen has a fantasy about Sarah Palin:

Andrew Sullivan is calling Sarah Palin "Rovian." Maybe, but her first order of business has been to fool the Republican establishment, not the American people. (Read this silly AEI guy.) Her few genuine words on foreign policy indicate her positions are hardly the modern Republican norm. She is "unusual" on pot smoking and benefits for gays and juror nullification. The Republicans are underestimating her role as a Hegelian agent of world-historical change, just as the Democrats did at first.

Which narrative do you find more plausible?:

"Lovely Sarah, she's saying and doing everything we want her to. What a quick learner. How pliable she is. Remember Descartes [sic] on tabula rasa?"

"Once John and I are elected, they'll need me more than I need them."

The people who are right now the happiest may end up the most concerned. For better or worse, they're about to lose control of their movement.

Needless to say, Cowen's evidence for this theory is thin. But I understand where he's coming from. There's just enough curious wrinkles in Palin's resume -- her apparent support for jury nullification, her friendly relations with the Alaskan Independence Party, her roots in the Mat-Su Valley -- to let a libertarian dream that the unvetted vice president will have a secret agenda, if that's the sort of dream you're predisposed to have. And why wouldn't you be so predisposed? There's a longstanding cultural myth that an honest, authentic person will come to power accidentally and enact sweeping, benign reforms. This might not happen very frequently in real life, but it happens in the movies all the time.

I'm all for film-fueled reveries. But I hope this sort of thinking doesn't lead anyone to actually vote for John McCain's ticket. Even if we set aside the question of whether Palin really has a hidden agenda, such a strategy would be troublingly passive; when a movement is reduced to hoping for a deus ex machina, there's a fundamental sense in which it has given up. We're in bad shape if our plan to expand American liberties owes more to the plot of Dave than to any hard-nosed political calculations.

The (Soviet) Patriot

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:28:00 EDT

Noting the local release of the hagiographic documentary Trumbo, DCist writes that while he may "not necessarily [be] a household name when it comes to American patriots, novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo earned the title." Oh brother. Perhaps the commenters can debate what it means to be "a patriot," but I suspect that we can all agree that shilling for Joseph Stalin isn't a necessary qualification. No need for to revisit Trumbo's love affair with totalitarianism when historian and Red Star Over Hollywood author Ron Radosh recently did it for us. There are so very many terrific examples of his lazy and dishonest Stalinophilia, but this seems a good place to start:

Trumbo also bragged about his role in keeping anti-Communist films from being made. He had defended Stalin as "one of the democratic leaders of the world," and was proud to have helped keep Hollywood from filming Trotsky's "so-called" biography of Stalin, as well as books by James T. Farrell, Victor Kravchenko, and Arthur Koestler—all of which he called "untrue" and "reactionary." In 1954 he wrote a fellow blacklisted writer of the Communist party's "fine tradition . . . that whenever a book or play or film is produced which is harmful to the best interests of the working class, that work and its author should and must be attacked in the sharpest possible terms."

Read Radosh's entire review of Trumbo here.

Manny Farber, RIP

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:05:00 EDT

Manny Farber, who just died at age 91, was one of the most influential critics of the last century. He was an extremely opinionated writer, which means, naturally, that I had enormous disagreements with him; he denounced some great films and praised some poor ones, and at times his prose veered from the idiosyncratic to the incoherent. But that's not what was important about him. Farber gave a vocabulary to everyone eager to knock down those walls separating "high" culture from "low." In essays like "Underground Films" and "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" and in appreciations of filmmakers as diverse as Val Lewton and Don Siegel, he denounced overblown, self-satisfied Art-with-a-capital-A and celebrated well-crafted detritus:

The best examples of termite art appear in places other than films, where the spotlight of culture is no where in evidence, so that the craftsmen can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it. The occasional newspaper column by a hard-work specialist caught up by an exciting event (Joe Alsop or Ted Lewis, during a presidential election), or a fireball technician reawakened during a pennant playoff that brings on stage his favorite villains (Dick Young); the TV production of The Iceman Cometh, with its great examples of slothful-buzzing acting by Myron McCormak, Jason Robards, et al.; the last few detective novels of Ross MacDonald and most of Raymond Chandler's ant-crawling verbosity and sober fact-pointing in the letters compiled years back in a slightly noticed book that is a fine running example of popular criticism; the TV debating of William Buckley, before he relinquished his tangential, counter-attacking skill and took to flying into propeller blades of issues, like James Meredith's Ole Miss-adventures.

This is all old hat now, of course, but such attitudes were liberating in the '40s, '50s, and '60s; they helped pave the way for a day when much of the intelligentsia assumes as a matter of course that a video game or a comic book might have more merit than a Merchant-Ivory picture. And Farber wasn't some philistine engaged in cheap reverse snobbery: He also championed some of the most challenging avant-garde efforts of the era. The man practiced what he preached, too -- after years of writing for The New Republic, The New Leader, and other places where the spotlight of culture was very much in evidence, he...well, I'll let J. Hoberman tell the tale:

he signed on as the movie reviewer for a second-string strokebook, Cavalier. (According to Greg Ford, who helped Farber assemble his one anthology, Negative Space, Farber never bothered to save these pieces, which then had to be excavated from Times Square backdate magazine stores.)

And then he jumped to Artforum. These juxtapositions might not seem unusual in the Internet era, when roughly a third of you are reading this with a New Republic story open in one tab and a porn site up in another. You'll have to trust me when I tell you that this is not an ordinary career path.

Farber was also an acclaimed painter, a part of his life that eventually edged his criticism aside. I have to admit I thought he'd died long ago. I'm glad to hear he made it to 91.

The Minstrel Man from Malibu

droot@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:17:00 EDT

Reuters reports the perhaps unsurprising news that actor Robert Downey, Jr. is not yet in trouble for appearing in blackface in the new comedy Tropic Thunder, which opens in theatres this week. His character, a white actor named Kirk Lazarus, corks up for a war movie that suddenly turns all too real. High jinks ensue. From the story:

Downey told reporters in recent interviews that his role was a satirical send-up of actor narcissism, and different from older uses of blackface that reinforced harmful stereotypes.

"It's entertainment that's set up by people who are high-minded enough to not be racist or offensive," he said.

"The whole film is based on the idea that what we (actors) do at some level is offensive and who we are, at some level, is despicable and pathetic, which is the truth and not the truth. But the part of it that is the truth, is entertaining."

I'm not sure I followed that last bit, but with Spike Lee apparently more outraged by Clint Eastwood's failure to include any African American soldiers at the Battle of Iwo Jima, Iron Man looks like he's in the clear.

Full story here. Back in 2002, I took a look at country music's tangled roots in blackface minstrelsy. Read about that here.

Modern Day Frankensteins

mmoses@duke.edu (Michael Valdez Moses) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In a memorable scene in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) reenter FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. for the first time since The X-Files left the airwaves in 2002. Waiting in a hallway they notice a portrait of George Bush that hangs on the wall. Knowing looks of alarm and disapproval cross their faces as the signature six-note musical theme of the television series is heard for one of the only times in the film (aside from the opening credits), and the camera pans right to reveal a matching portrait of J. Edgar Hoover. In a movie surprisingly free of overt references to current events, this scene is a reminder that The X-Files was a political barometer of the 1990s, a show that purveyed a relentlessly dark and subversive view of government as a vast conspiracy against the American people. Serious fans in need of a post-9/11 fix of anti-government paranoia are likely to find themselves still jonesing after leaving the theatre. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Frank Spotnitz, who co-wrote and co-produced I Want to Believe with director and X-Files creator Chris Carter, confirmed that the two consciously steered clear of the grim political mythology that characterized the TV series.

Yet despite their best intentions, the boys sometimes just can't help themselves. Granted, I Want to Believe does not present the FBI as fully complicit in the axis of evil; the bureau even seems willing to "forgive" Mulder his past misdeeds and welcome him and Scully back into the fold. (At the conclusion of the TV series, Mulder was secretly detained by the government in a Guantanamo-like facility on trumped-up murder charges. Tortured and denied all legal rights, he was convicted by a kangaroo tribunal and sentenced to death before making his escape and going underground. Little wonder that Mulder insists in I Want to Believe that it is not he but the government that needs to be forgiven.)

But as it turns out, the FBI acts like a magnanimous big brother only because it unexpectedly needs Mulder's expertise concerning paranormal phenomena. When flown to Washington in one of the infamous black helicopters that were symbols of government oppression in the old show, Mulder and Scully learn that the FBI is as incompetent, inflexible, cynical, and self-serving as ever.

After an FBI agent is abducted, the bureau opportunistically makes use of Mulder just as it does Father Joseph Crissman (Billy Connolly), a psychic ex-priest and convicted pedophile, whose visions may provide clues to the agent's whereabouts. Unsurprisingly, the bureau fails to earn the trust of either the citizens who assist its efforts or those whom it purportedly serves. In fact, the bureau considers dropping the case when its missing agent turns up dead (its bureaucratic imperative is at an end), even though a civilian is still missing and presumed to have been abducted by the perpetrators. Only the persistence of Mulder (who refers to himself in one scene as a "non-cop") and Scully, acting on their own without government authorization, eventually leads to the apprehension of the two suspects responsible for a series of murders, and, more importantly, to saving the life of a victim. In the end, the FBI predictably discounts Mulder's interest in the paranormal, covers up his contribution to the investigation (along with that of Father Joe, whom the bureau publicly defames as an accomplice to the crimes), and takes full credit for stopping a dangerous foreign conspiracy involving illegal traffic in human organs. The FBI not only fails to save the life of one of its own agents but manages to get a second one killed. With the singular exception of its maverick Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), who acts out of personal loyalty to Mulder and Scully, the FBI does nothing to solve the case; its methods and protocols only retard its satisfactory resolution. Another job well done at J. Edgar's old haunts.

If I Want to Believe portrays the government as incompetent and self-serving, rather than as the TV series had it—malign and conspiratorial—the film nonetheless remains focused on the difficulty in distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys in the contemporary political scene. Far from being haphazard and meandering (as a few critics have suggested) the movie is carefully structured around two parallel stories. The main plot involves two perpetrators, Janke Dacyshyn (Callum Keith Rennie) and Franz Tomczeszyn (Fagin Woodcock), who have serially abducted, murdered, and dismembered several victims. The same-sex pair, who are legally married in the state of Massachusetts, rely on a team of Russian scientists to perform a series of "full-body" transplants that prolong the life (or, more accurately, the head) of Tomczeszyn. The latter, who suffers from cancer as a result of radiation poisoning, manages to extend his life by having his head serially grafted on to the bodies of his victims (mainly young women), who share his AB negative blood type. Tomczeszyn heads a firm that legally deals in the transportation of human organs, but he and his partner also appear to be engaged in the illegal trade of organs harvested from their murder victims. Father Joe, the ex-priest, believes his visions provide him with a psychic link to one or more of the victims abducted by the murderers; but as it turns out, his real spiritual connection is with the perpetrator, Tomszeszyn, one of 37 altar boys whom the convicted pedophile sexually abused in the past.

A second seemingly minor subplot involves Scully's efforts at Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital to save the life of Christian Fearon (Marco Niccoli), a young boy suffering from Sandhoff disease, a fatal degenerative neurological disorder with no known cure. Over the objections of Father Ybarra (Adam Godley), the hospital administrator, and Christian's parents, Scully attempts a radically new "and extremely painful" therapy that draws on the newest breakthroughs in "stem cell research."

Though they may seem unrelated, the two subplots tell the same story: a tale of the Promethean effort to transform, adapt, remake, and preserve human life outside traditionally defined "natural" limits. At its best, the film imaginatively explores the great promise and the tremendous dangers of the brave new world of bio-technology. Dacyshyn and Tomszeszyn are meant to embody practices that violate the "natural order" of things: gay marriage, gender reassignment, trade and transplantation in human organs, stem cell research, vivisection, hybrid speciation, the indefinite prolongation of life. By contrast, Mulder and Scully seem to represent the traditional heterosexual couple who respect the limits of nature and who heroically save an innocent soul from the clutches of what the papers call a "modern day Doctor Frankenstein" at the risk of their own lives. Unlike their dark counterparts, Mulder and Scully do not resort to kidnapping and murdering young women in order to maintain their relationship or prolong their own lives. Nonetheless, Mulder and Scully are more representative of the brave new world than they or we might like to believe. Scully confesses to Father Joe that she and Mulder are not married, though they have lived together for several years. And although they have had a "son" (William), whom they've given up for adoption, they have never been sure if he was conceived through "normal" sexual relations. Fans of the show will recall that William may be a human-alien hybrid created by a conspiratorial syndicate via a sinister combination of genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization.

Moreover, Scully, despite her professed faith in the Catholic Church, eagerly embraces the cutting edge of (presumably embryonic) stem cell research and the most radically experimental forms of medical technology in her attempts to save the life of a dying boy. Were she to take on faith the Church's view that life begins at conception, she would have to concede that her attempts to save the life of her patient depend upon sacrificing the "lives" of those embryos from whom the crucial stem cells have been gathered. In any case, she refuses to allow the hospital to release Christian Fearon to a hospice and insists upon an untried medical procedure with little chance of success—but with the certainty that her patient will suffer agonizing pain.

Suggestively, the advanced stem cell research she relies on for her new surgical procedure appears to have been pioneered by the very same Russian medical team that carries out full-body transplants on Tomszeszyn. Mulder and Scully can, of course, fall back on their long-standing emotional and spiritual connection with each other to win our sympathies, but there's no reason to believe that their homosexual counterparts are any less fanatically devoted to each other—indeed, we witness a tender bed-side scene between the two in which Dacyshyn assures his failing partner that he will live, that he's "going to have a fine strong body again." The two couples thus represent two images of the very same phenomenon: the human endeavor to master nature and prolong human life. The parallels between the two couples thus work to erode the questionable distinction between what is or is not natural, and between those who live according to a natural order and those who challenge its authority.

The pivotal figure that conjoins the two plots is Father Joe. When we first meet the ex-priest, he significantly lights up a cigarette, a gesture that visually connects him with the arch-villain of The X-Files, the Cigarette Smoking Man. (Father Joe's long grey hair and terminal lung cancer are additional links to the Cigarette Smoking Man of the series finale.) The ex-priest is tormented by what he calls "monstrous appetites," desires he never asked for, and which he believes must come from God. In fact, he claims that he only ever wanted to "serve God," and he now seeks divine forgiveness for his sins and reengagement with the Church. In a remarkable scene, he spontaneously bleeds from his eyes after he envisions the body of the young woman tormented by the very person Father Joe abused years before. His painful visions turn out to be the penance he pays for his own "unnatural" desires. Pedophile and priest, psychic and saint, Father Joseph is that quintessentially ambivalent figure in whom the flesh and the spirit, good and evil are thoroughly mixed. And it is he who prophetically tells Scully that she "must not give up," which, she will learn, means she should pursue her Frankensteinian efforts to save the life of her dying patient, Christian Fearon.

At the close of the romantic era in early 19th century Europe, a number of writers and artists who had once been enthusiastic supporters of the French Revolution lost faith in the capacity of mankind to remake the world according to a new ideal of human freedom. The terror of the Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, the endless wars that marked his reign, and the repressive counter-revolutionary period that followed the Congress of Vienna made it difficult for these late Romantics to sustain a faith in liberal ideals or in the possibility of meaningful political reform. Lord Byron, Georg Büchner, and Mary Shelley did not so much turn away from politics as apply the bitter political lessons of their age to the cosmos as a whole. Rather than understand the corrupt ancient regimes of Europe as the source of human unhappiness and servitude, they projected a Gnostic vision of the universe as malignantly organized. In post-9/11 America, Chris Carter's conspiratorial view of government as a plot against the people has, like the visions of the late Romantics, become something of an indictment of the cosmos. The defects of a corrupt and incompetent government would seem to inhere in the nature of things. As Father Joe would have it, it is God (or if you prefer, nature's God) who authorizes those "monstrous" or unnatural desires that set loose evil in the world. And yet, for all the metaphysical darkness that pervades I Want to Believe, the film ends on a hopeful note: Scully takes heed of Father Joe's cryptic message, also sent by the divine powers: "don't give up." However harrowing the possibilities and however monstrous the risks, she's willing to accept the Promethean challenge and ventures forth once more to try and save the life of young Christian.

Michael Valdez Moses is Associate Professor of English at Duke University, author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture, and co-editor of Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939.

Idiocracy Now!

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

If you can see Swing Vote the way I saw it, do so. First, score a free ticket from a D.C. activist group (in my case, Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform). Second, get a seat next to an assistant secretary of education for the Bush administration and five rows in front of a disturbingly content-looking Tom DeLay. Third, set your neck to “swivel” and watch a roomful of lobbyists, journalists, beltway careerists, and politicians react as Hollywood lobotomizes their life’s work.

Of course, you’re not going to be able to do that. When Swing Vote opens on Friday it will be the latest lame entry in the oeuvre of low-denominator political pop. It's not quite as lousy as the 2003 Chris Rock vehicle Head of State (a dizzying fantasia about an inexperienced black Democrat who beats a blundering white Republican) or the 2006 Robin Williams landfill-expander Man of the Year. There's at least one idea present in Swing Vote. Too bad the filmmakers don’t seem to realize it.

On election day, shiftless, alcoholic New Mexico egg farmer Bud Johnson (Kevin Costner) is rousted out of bed by his daughter Molly, played by Madeline Carroll with precociousness on loan from Roald Dahl. She wants him to cast his vote for a school project; he wants to avoid the jury duty rolls. “Voting doesn’t count for a goddamn thing!” shouts Bud as he drops Molly off and speeds off, late, for work. He loses his job, gets drunk, and—this really happens—hits his head on a wooden “Vote Today” sign, which knocks him out cold. Plucky Molly, rubbing away tears as she sits by the polling station, forges his signature, Harriet-the-Spys her way past election judges, and casts her father’s vote just as the power goes out. Because the election is a tie, and because New Mexico’s election security is handled by Robert Mugabe (I’m assuming, here), the state tracks Bud down and tells him to cast a new vote in 10 days.

What follows is a blistering critique of that idiot of the American landscape: the undecided voter. Everything Bryan Caplan has to say about the ignorant voter is embodied in Bud. He has no idea who’s actually running. He’s completely won over by bribes and flashy displays of power. When Richard Petty lets Bud drive his car to the landing strip housing Air Force One, Bud resolves to vote for President Andrew Boone (Kelsey Grammar, channeling Gerald Ford). Willie Nelson switches Bud back when he tells him to vote for acid-washed Democrat Donald Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper, reprising the hippie-gone-corporate role he played in Land of the Dead). Most of Bud’s sentences end in an awkward laugh or a mumble; when he has to talk about a political issue, he repeats the last thing he’s been told, which leads (in an interview with Mary Hart!) to worrying about “insourcing” and “Mexicans taking our jobs.”

If this was the point of the movie, we’d at least have something to like, even though The Onion did it all better a year ago—and in less than three minutes. But it isn’t the point of the movie. Bud, we slowly learn, is an everyman who lost his way. As the country, then the town, grow tired of his instant celebrity, he schedules a debate with the candidates and prefaces it with a teary, rambling confession of his sins as a citizen. “I’ve taken freely and given nothing back,” Bud says, his voice breaking. “I’ve never served or sacrificed.” All that he’s ever been told to do is “pay attention and vote.” The only hope for people like him is that the candidates become “bigger than speeches”—as if one of them can become a “superman.” Any resemblance to those round-the-clock AARP ads, or to a Gene Healy nightmare, is pure coincidence.

It’s not Bud’s fault he’s so lazy and stupid. It’s not even the politicians’s fault that they’ve become such pandering nincompoops. The villains are the political advisers, a Republican played by a skin-headed Stanley Tucci and a Democrat played by a rumpled, foul-mouthed Nathan Lane. I’ll spoil the surprise: Neither one of them has a soul. On election day, Tucci’s Martin Fox commands young Republicans to scare “old Jews” from the polls and Lane’s Art Crumb (based on ne’er-do-well Democrat Bob Shrum, down to a reporter’s crack that he’s lost seven elections) baselessly accuses the president of a gambling addiction.

Tucci and Lane are responsible for the best comedy here. Both are aware that the new stakes of the election are to win over one deeply stupid man. Thus whatever he claims to believe becomes grist for a new election ad or a national park declaration (Bud wants to keep fishing in the Pecos River). The faux ads are cartoonish and cleverly staged, especially one where Hopper walks past a wave of “undocumented actors” running across the desert, promising to seal it shut as Border Patrol vans hurtle past him. (Tom DeLay laughed a little too hard at this.)

But since they’re the villains, Fox and Crumb set this up with a surplus of grimaces and Dr. Evil speechmaking. “I don’t know what we stand for anymore,” whines President Boone in a pensive Air Force One moment. “Winning,” says Fox. “If we don’t win, we can’t do the great things we want to do.”

It’s yet another simplistic flaw in the film. Boone and Greenleaf believe in nothing but the artifice of power, which makes them seem dopey and harmless. When Bud gets his courage up at the debate, he demands that they stop leaving him alone and start meddling with his life already. “If this is the wealthiest country on earth,” he asks, “why is it so hard to live here?” The candidates gaze at him as if he's just handed them a sequel to the Federalist Papers.

I don’t know if a more acidic screenwriter could have saved Swing Vote. The plot veers completely apart from the political themes. A running hint that Molly’s illegal vote will be exposed comes to nothing. A local news producer played by George Lopez gets way too much screen time to deliver simplistic riffs about the media (“Check your conscience at the door! This is TV!”) and one-liners as brutal as “I’m so excited I got my accent back!” Unable to decide whether they were making a Billy Wilder farce or a saccharine message movie, the filmmakers are as tortured and ultimately as irritating as Bud himself. In his defense, they got more focus groups to work with.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Airplane! 3: The Hijacking

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:32:00 EDT

Politico has some movie news:

David Zucker, the director and writer who helped create "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun" franchise has called on Hollywood's tiny but tightly knit Republican A-list crowd to help him make a broad yet unusually right-leaning political satire titled "An American Carol."

The low-budget indie co-stars Emmy winner Kelsey Grammer with Oscar-winner Jon Voight, cinema icon Dennis Hopper, model-heiress Paris Hilton and frequent Zucker stooge Leslie Nielsen in minor roles. Release is planned sometime by year's end; the director suggested Friday, Sept. 12, to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Now there's a tasteful tribute. But why no role for O.J. Simpson?

Part of me wants to give Zucker the benefit of the doubt here -- the man has made some deeply funny movies in the past -- but he had his chance to show us that he could mix humor and politics when he did some anti-Democrat ads in 2006, and the results were...not inspiring:

The line "History has taught us that evil needs to be confronted, not appeased" has no place in a David Zucker film, unless Leslie Nielsen is saying it while Ricardo Montalban gives him a wedgie. And if you have any doubt that the new movie will be more of the same, Politico's plot summary should disabuse you of the notion:

In a climactic scene, [Michael] Moore's stand-in (here named "Michael Malone") finds political clarity at the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center while the admonishing ghost of George Washington (played by Voight) hovers nearby.

Caveat: If he works in a sequence where the next 9/11 is foiled by a heroic autopilot, I'll forgive everything else.

Opposable Thumbs

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:54:00 EDT

Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper are departing the TV show that made them celebrities. Someday I'll write a detailed appreciation of Ebert's smart, funny, and unpretentious writing. For now I'll link to Patrick Goldstein's comments about the show in the L.A. Times:

[T]he success of the original "Siskel and Ebert at the Movies" was a fluke, owing more to the engaging personalities of the two critics than their actual opinions. Siskel and Ebert, though trained as ink-stained wretch newspaper men, turned out to be a great showbiz buddy team, the film-critic version of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. They had a chemistry on screen that transcended critical heft. Siskel was no Pauline Kael-style deep thinker, but on camera, he had verve and a dry wit. Tall and slender, Siskel was Stan Laurel to Ebert's chubby Oliver Hardy. They were song and dance men, even when reviewing the drekiest of summer trash. As much as I admire Ebert, once Siskel was gone--he died in 1999--the show lost momentum. The magic was gone. Teaming Ebert with Roeper, with all due respect, was like putting Walter Matthau on screen with Greg Kinnear--a respectable match, but not one made in heaven.

Television is a performance medium. Criticism is about words and ideas, which is why it belongs on the page, be it in a newspaper or on a computer screen. As a fan of Ebert, I'm delighted to see him abandoning TV and putting all his energy into writing again.

Goldstein adds a couple of bonus videos. I liked this one best:

Remixing Television

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Bob Barr Claims to Have Sense of Humor

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:25:00 EDT

In an online Q&A session sponsored by The Washington Times, Brendan Conway dares to ask Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr the question on everyone's mind: Has he seen Borat yet? Barr's reply:

It's still true that I haven't seen the movie. I also hear that he's making another film so we're on the lookout to make sure that we don't get taken again. ;) My staff does its best to get as much background information before an interview takes place. They did the same for "Borat's" interview. They called the numbers provided, found a web site through a search and felt it was legitimate. Clearly that was not the case. While it was in good fun and no harm was done, I'm not a fan of this style of movie making as the terms are not honestly presented to the person or group being interviewed.

You have to give Barr credit for signaling (twice) that he understands Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was a comedy. I'm not sure if that proves he has a sense of humor—something I wondered about last year, after Barr discussed his Borat appearance with Arlen Specter during a Senate hearing on the privacy implications of data mining. It might just be that Barr realizes people like a politician who can take a joke. Also note this exchange from a Village Voice interview last May:

VV: Do you have a good sense of humor about it?
BB: Hell yeah! If you can't have a good sense of humor about this business, the way I look at it, you have no business being in politics.

Bruce Conner, RIP

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:30:00 EDT

The great beatnik filmmaker Bruce Conner has died at age 74. No director has surpassed Conner's ability to assemble found footage into something entirely new; in experimental movies ranging from his Zapruder-meets-Owsley short Television Assassination to his Devo video Mongoloid to his haunting dream-film Valse Triste, he laid the groundwork for the current explosion of remixes and mash-ups.

Other filmmakers have done it before. But mainly in a comic sort of way. I'd seen a Marx Brothers movie in which Groucho said to Harpo, "There's a revolution going on. We need help." Harpo goes out and pins a "Help Wanted" sign on the door. Suddenly you see tanks and airplanes and soldiers and elephants all coming to their aid. After that I started thinking...I became aware that putting in an image from a totally different movie you could make it more complex. Like taking the soundtrack from one film that was made in 1932 and put it on top of images from a movie made in 1948, and inter-cutting other images together with it. I had this tremendous, fantastic movie going in my head made up of all the scenes I'd seen...a three-hour spectacular. --Bruce Conner, 1974

He didn't just do this with film. He created weird, witty, sometimes Ernstian collages (like Bombhead, pictured to the right). And he made grotesque but transfixing assemblages -- sculptures, sort of -- out of stretched stockings, faded photos, beads, hair, and a host of found objects, from a suitcase to a high chair, a crucifix to a bicycle wheel. In some ways these resembled Joseph Cornell's shadow boxes, but they had a messier, more organic quality, as though they had been left in a garage rather than carefully preserved on a shelf.

Not all of Conner's art was assembled from preexisting material. Leafing through 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II, I see drawings, paintings, photograms, and forms I'm not sure I could describe with a single word. He also made some films the old-fashioned way, photographing them himself rather than compiling them from other people's images. (The best of those is probably Looking for Mushrooms, a mesmerizing movie shot in Mexico and California.) He seemed eager to try his hand at every conceivable medium -- he even spent a spell doing light shows for rock bands.

Now that you can pass off a prank as "conceptual art," I should probably mention that Conner was a great prankster as well. (He has his own chapter in the classic Re/Search anthology Pranks!) He loved to play with identity, and once plotted to present an exhibition of new collages that he would inaccurately attribute to Dennis Hopper. (The actor was a friend, and Conner was an informal consultant on Easy Rider. He made the collages, which are stunning, but the larger plan never came off.) In 1967 he ran a jape campaign for San Francisco City Supervisor, at one point giving a speech that consisted entirely of a long list of desserts. And as the San Francisco Chronicle's obituary reports,

Mr. Conner announced his own death erroneously on two occasions, once sending an obituary to a national art magazine, and later writing a self-description for the biographical encyclopedia Who Was Who in America.

I'd like to believe he's still alive this time too, sharing a beer somewhere with Andy Kaufman and chuckling at the gullible media.

When I Hear the Word "Gorbachev," I Think, "Zombies! Zeppelins! Cleavage!"

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:12:00 EDT

Brush up on Russian history and the proper ways to slaughter the undead with the best music video ever.