Some Came Running

How not to fight an independent filmmaker

I imagine many of you have already heard tell of an event down in Texas wherein a debate/boxing match between "film critic" Devin Faraci and filmmaker Joe Swanberg occured, in which Swanberg gave Faraci a pasting for the ages. Now, I have nothing against showmanship, and indeed, the prospect of a Faraci/Kenny (we are not friendly) boxing match has been offered on Twitter, which I agreed to on principle, and also in the event that such a thing be staged to benefit a charity. However. It seems to me that arranging such an event as a Thing Unto Itself is kind of adolescent, and says much that is unpleasant about Contemporary Film Culture. But let's put that aside for a moment, the better for me to ridicule Faraci. I know—I should be on his side, right? I'm no fan of Swanberg, or of his films, and I don't much care for many of his friends either. However. When Faraci chooses to compare Swanberg's output unfavorably with that of John Cassavetes, and asserts that "Cassavetes didn't have scripts" you have to wonder about this thing where the Internet means that EVERYONE gets to be a critic. But, you know, you and I, we've been through that. What's really kind of staggering is the opening sentence of Faraci's typically lacking-in-graciousness account of his beatdown, which is this: "Joe Swanberg's first punch knocked out my right contact lens." 

Faraci wrote this thinking it would make a sure-fire gripping "lede." I wonder if he was aware that it would convince a not-likely-insubstantial portion of his readership that he ought not be allowed to leave his house by himself, ever. Because, if one is a boxing novice, and one goes into the ring without wearing protective headgear, keeping one's contact lenses in is about the stupidest thing a supposedly sentient human being can do. I mean, we're talking staggeringly dumb. If you watch the video, which I don't necessarily recommend, you'll see that after the first time Faraci goes down, when the two square off again, Faraci's got headgear on. Somebody got his head out of his ass, or somebody who wasn't Faraci got scared of a lawsuit. Who can say. I suppose Faraci figured he would look more "badass" bare-headed. And he learned how that works. Faraci's gone on on Twitter about taking boxing lessons: he either needs to pay more attention, or get his money back. You'd think he'd have actually tried to get in some shape before the bout, but while Swanberg charges at him with a belly full of spite (he looks genuinely, blue-flame pissed off throughout, as if Faraci's standing in for every critic who's ever talked smack about him, your humble servant included), Faraci is working off of the usual belly full of Cheetos and Fat Tire. And that forward charge of Swanberg's: it's more street fighting than boxing. But anyone with any boxing chops/training would know what to do with such a thing: keep your fucking hands up and keep moving around. Backwards, to the side. Get a circle moving. Don't just put your hands up and stand there and let the guy come at you. A moving target's harder to hit, Einstein. Defend yourself and make your opponent weary, less fierce, and after that, you can get your first shot in. Then make it count. But not Faraci. He barely adopts the defensive stance, and then makes the mistake of trying to land some kind of punch through Swanberg's onslaught, despite the fact that he's acutely aware—how can he not be?—of the size/reach advantage that Swanberg has over him.

Like I said: should not be allowed to leave the house by himself. 

Badass digest

Also, I'm super-tetchy, which means it's likely I'd kill you just for spelling my name wrong.

For context, see here. 

The 84th Academy Awards and the denial of death

Apparently the Internet believes that anyone who accesses it is some kind of a human content maw that requires endless feeding, because there's really no other way to explain the reason that Oscar coverage proliferates like poison ivy despite the fact that said coverage almost invariably obsesses over how lame the Oscars are. I don't often point to myself as a positive example in any respect, but after Ordinary People...well, I don't need to go on, do I? (And yes, before you contemplate getting shirty about it in comments, Ordinary People is, by a certain yardstick, not a bad, or "bad," movie. All right?) After that, "Won't Get Fooled Again" became my Oscar theme song and, until such point as watching the ceremony became something like a professional obligation, I didn't let it trouble me. 

Recently the internet film journalist/gadfly Jeffrey Wells complained that the film producer Gavin Polone was usurping his (Wells') curmodgeonly throne by deigning to outline for New York magazine what he considered to be the problem with the Oscar "farce," as he calls it. Polone's piece is quite the earnest little finger-wag (were you aware, incidentally, that the Miss America pageant is "misogynistic?" Man!), and I suppose we're all supposed to be impressed that a MAJOR HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER is waxing so frank on the irrelevance of the event. Watch as he throws down about acceptance speeches: "by the third speech of someone thanking his spouse, agent, manager, psychic, dog walker, and the person who clears his chakras, I am always bored and left wondering why he couldn’t just have a private conversation with the person to whom he wishes to express his gratitude, and then find something more interesting or entertaining to talk about on television." 

Yes, God forbid anyone should bore the eternally tetchy Polone. Anyone remember that great profile of him in the New York Times Magazine some years ago, in which he volunteered that he and his girlfriend would never have children because the human race sucks and it's better to rescue dogs or something, and how he and said girlfriend were such monkish ascetics in spite of their Hollywood riches that they regularly breakfasted on DIRT (or wheatgrass or wheat germ or something like that, I forget what) and so on? Yeah, that makes it pretty funny that HE should be bitching about people who believe in chakras. Polone is somewhat more interesting on how awards actually skew the business itself, so at least he's complaining about something he has an actual stake in. Somewhat more mystifying is the "Fix The Oscars" interactive thingie going on at Slate, overseen by the ever-engaging Dan Kois, wherein readers and Slate's own delightfully insouciant contrarians offer exciting suggestions on how to make the televised ceremony less stodgy and dull. 

Thing is, the Academy Awards have ALWAYS been largely stodgy and dull; their whole reason for being, the initial screwing-over-organized-labor thing aside, was to confer a certain air of respectability to the filmmaking industry. One watched the awards at least in part to have a lit of a laugh over the extent to which they didn't get it. Hell, even the streaker who "disrupted" the 1974 ceremony was at least a few months behind the curve, as it were. This is acknowledged right off the bat in the intro to the Slate thingie: "Academy Awards ceremonies are laughable, even to those of us who love them." This admission begs several questions, but the answers have less to do with the actual Awards than with the civilians who believe they can improve them. They are film lovers, but not in that starry-eyed way; they have gone on record that talk of the "magic" of cinema makes them break out in hives. No, what's most important to them is their vitality in terms of identifying trends, staying on top of the latest modes of snark, embodying a sensibility that makes them not the ideal Entertainment Weekly reader but some form of an ideal Entertainment Weekly senior editor if Entertainment Weekly were still hiring, or ever likely to hire again. BUT. These people, who still talk of drinking games despite being at least a decade and a half out of college, who still bleg for recommendations of karaoke bars, are intuiting that their time in a desired or even really respected demographic ain't long. No, their coronaries are not coming like Christmas (H/T: Phillip Larkin), no, not quite yet, but they understand that they are approaching a certain age. And so are their children. They will soon be past the age when they're complaining about their snooty friends and Phineas and Ferb and one day they will wake up and not only despise the parents they were once coddled into unconditionally adoring but they will also deem all of the enthusiasms of said parents irredeemably quaint, and WORSE, they will unerringly regard every effort their parents make to adopt enthusiasms of a more contemporary variety as entirely pathetic and feeble. And as their (the parents', that is) waistlines grow even puffier and their hair thinner, the only thing that they (the parents, that is) will be able to cling to with any kind of demonstrable credibility whatsoever will be their claim that they are indeed "hipper," if not actually more "relevant," than the Academy Awards.

And then, like you, me, and Gavin Polone, they will die. 

(picnic, lightning)

"I think for anyone truly interested in girls a single sentence of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita or Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse will give you more insight than Caitlin Flanagan’s whole book."—Katie Roiphe, "Girl Trouble: What Caitlin Flanagan's new book Girl Land gets wrong about girls," Slate, January 11, 2012

The Schwarzeneggerean Concept of Eternal Return

Despite various sins against criticism, and the fact that I am sometimes moved to pity by the wailing and gnashing of teeth of my younger confreres, I've never felt moved to comment on the apprehension-producing output of one Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a really not-so-bright young thing whose staggering smug banalities suggest the witless confidence of the preternaturally attractive, and yet...oh, never mind. However, the gnashing of teeth attending her inaugural column for GQ—I'm not sure if it's both the print and online edition, but if it is, holy crap, copy desk, get on the stick; all that passive voice really tends to stick out on paper—has been sufficiently poignant to stir up sympathy enow to foster a word of commiseration or two.

Ms. Vargas-Cooper's column is dubbed "The New Canon," and therein she proposes to Take Very Seriously, or Kind Of Seriously In Her Ostensibly Sassy Way, the works of what she calls "our generation of filmmakers." That she chooses to first treat a picture by James Cameron brings up a question concerning that  "our." James Cameron is older than ME, Natasha. I thought you were supposed to be a Bright YOUNG Thing. Ahem. But that's not important, as Leslie Nielsen (28 years Cameron's senior) said in Airplane!.  

What is impor...well, not important, but kind of interesting, in a really irritating way, is how she prattles on as if she's doing something subversive or transgressive by proposing...wait for it...Terminator 2: Judgement Day for her "new canon." Didn't some notion relative to this idea come along with, um, Andy Warhol, or, wait, was it Milton Caniff, and didn't the "bums" WIN that particular argument? I mean, is this individual REALLY rekindling a high/low dispute that doesn't figure in ANYONE'S actual conversation about film or almost any other aspect of culture anymore? I mean, Kingsley Amis dubbed Terminator 2 an "unimpeachable masterpiece." David Foster Wallace disdained it as the first work of "effects porn," and bemoaned that it was a betrayal of its low-budget antecedent. Neither writer, each a certified bonafide highbrow with a fancy college edumication and everything, even hinted that the movie was in any way beneath their notice or consideration. Thinking seriously about a film like Terminator 2 was no more novel to either than, maybe, drinking a glass of water was. And yet here's Natasha Vargas-Cooper, flouncing around like a moron giggling "Look at me! I think Terminator 2 is actually a great movie! Aren't I naughty?"

Sigh. And I'm not even getting into the slack, stupid prose (as I believe I mentioned, that's a big ole passive voice ya got there, Natasha, and I say that as a feller who regularly piles on and abuses the subordinate clauses, if'n ya know what I'm sayin' and I reckon ya do), the unmotivated swipe at a classic film combined with a brag that she hasn't seen it (Rules of the Game, in case you're wondering...) and other such delights. As I said, it's causing a lot of pain for my chums ("Would GQ hire a literary columnist who bragged that she hadn't read Hamlet?" a friend writes, in genuine confusion and anger), but I can't get TOO worked up about it. "Professional" "arts" "writing," particularly on the internets, is becoming something of a zero-sum game conducted AGAINST the reader; the more effin' mad it makes you, the more the desperate-for-relevance-and-page-views editors think it's "hot" and "provocative" and likely to go "viral." And rest assured that Natasha Vargas-Cooper is laughing at you, very loud and very cattily. Include me out.

UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention, relative to a rather inappropriate (to the reading-comprehension and irony-challenged, at least) pastiche-joke I made on Twitter (although, on reflection, pastiche-jokes that call for a lot of contextualizing might not be entirely apt Twitter-fodder, alas), and a few of my phrasings above, that certain of my speculations and opinions concerning Vargas-Cooper were/are on the sexist side. For better or worse I've learned that saying "I am NOT sexist" when someone calls you sexist doesn't really earn you any slack, so my assurances that I would cite "the witless confidence of the preternatually attractive" with respect to a bad male writer who came on as if he looked like Armie Hammer would no doubt be exerted in vain, at least as far as those readers committed to being convinced of my sexism were concerned. Which is a long winded way of saying, "Sorry, but tough."

Feisty young bolshie has brain fart; internet quakes out of lack of anything better to do

Various and sundry have asked for my reaction to a flailingly querulous I-hate-to-call-it-an-essay at a website called The New Inquiry. Said, no-I-won't-call-it-an-essay because it's more a...prose thing, yes, said prose-thing, entitled "Towards A New Film Criticism," authored by the evocatively-named Willie Osterweil, kicks things off by bringing up Big Macs ('cause they're mass produced, you see), then turns his nose up at what he believes is auteurist-based criticism, arguing, or rather stating, that there are no "auteurs" in Hollywood, and that what's taken for a personal artistic signature in the case of someone like Tarantino is really nothing more than a compendium of branding tics. Warming to his topic, he insists:

For mainstream entertainment films, the director must be considered little more than a manager. “But, but, but,” one might protest. “There’s internal consistency to the films of some of the biggest-budget directors—Paul Greengrass, Zach Snyder, Christopher Nolan —these guys have a definable style!” They certainly do, because cinema has been structured around maintaining and capitalizing on the myth of the artist-director. 

You see what he's doing there, with the talking straw man and all. The only actual critic he quotes is David Edelstein, whom he characterizes as "levelheaded (if mediocre)," and I hope someone's checked to make sure that this devastating attack hasn't sent poor David to the bathtub with a straight razor. For the rest of the piece he reverts to the royal we:

Film criticism must dismiss the concept of auteurs and understand the film as a mass-produced object. Just like a cheap beer on a hot day or a fast food burger on a long road trip, entertainment cinema can be truly satisfying, but do we discuss a Big Mac the same way we talk about a three-star meal? Do we enjoy a Bud by the same criteria of a perfectly crafted Belgian beer? So why do we talk about Thor the same way we talk about Carlos?

Short answer is, we don't. Long answer is, well, why the fuck should I go to the trouble of digging up examples of how we don't if you can't dig up examples of how we do?

Later Little Willie starts rewriting Gang Of Four lyrics, and badly: 

Feel lonely? Don’t worry, someday your eyes will meet those of your perfect mate.Wait for the end of your loneliness, don’t change your behavior or your expectations, but make sure you look good, always, so your love can recognize you in one glance. Feel powerless? You might be a wizard, or a superhero, or friends with a secret agent: At the very least, there’s one coming to rescue you.Don’t worry, individuals will always have the power to overcome and appear when they’re needed, so don’t unite or organize. Think being poor sucks? But even this fat slob succeeded by being in the right place at the right time! Keep working. Opportunity comes for everyone.

Just imagine the italicized parts as the bits that Andy Gill speaks after Jon King sings the plain text. Still doesn't work, right?  (As it happens, Mr. Osterwiel himself has a band, "provocatively" named Vulture Shit, that could have just as well been named, say, Gang Of Why The Hell Did We Bother.) Anyway, for some reason this dogshit has excited some commenters on the interwebs, including, I regret to say, the otherwise, what's the word, oh yes, levelheaded, Kevin B. Lee, who was moved to interview Mr. Osterweil, whose responses are, in the parlance of what he (Osterweil) calls "The Current," comedy gold. "I think theory is too bogged down in questions of definition and accuracy, and I think people who write it should take more risks." Suck on that for a minute; and now consider that the pronouncement comes immediately after he pulls, directly from his ass, a description of how the filmmakers he approves of get their pictures made. Also, it's Potter Stewart, not "The Supreme Court." In any event, the best part is at the end, when Osterwiel tells Lee that "I am for the end of all professions, because I am for the end of capitalism." You can tell Willie is only a little past the legal drinking age, because it's clearly never occurred to him that there's a correspondence between the "perfectly crafted Belgian beer" his dick is so hard for and, erm, capitalism. Just in case The Man is looking for a way to really hit Little Willie where it hurts. 

Is there anything Nicolas Winding Refn CAN'T do?

I'm decidedly mixed on Drive, for reasons I articulate in my upcoming review for MSN Movies, and as such I'm a little more impatient than I'd normally be with the utterly breathless and increasingly relentless unwarranted dribbling over the film and its admittedly talented director Nicolas Winding Refn. I hit a bit of a Twitter wall with it earlier today when one Industry Tweeter™ chimed in "Drive Director Refn Talks Scouting Gritty Los Angeles Locations." Ooooh, I thought. Refn went to gritty places to scout. No other director does that. So I tweeted some imaginary Refn headlines. They were: 

Drive Director Refn Heals Lame, Makes Blind See, Raises The Dead

Drive Director Refn Successfully Negotiates Middle East Peace Treaty; Tears It Up & Throws It In Your Face, Just For A Laugh

"Please Have Violent Sex With My Wife/Girlfriend," Dozens Of 30-Something Male Film Critics Beg Of Drive Director Refn

Drive Director Refn Allows Lars von Trier To "Kill" Him, Destroying Final Nazi Horcrux

Can you top these? Do you want to? Am I overreacting?

Have a delightful Labor Day Weekend. 

The bearable predictability of the internet, or, sometimes I think Lee Siegel was right

So, I haven't seen Steven Soderbergh's Contagion yet, and when I do various and sundry ethical concerns will enjoin me from officially commenting on it (most of my sources, including but not limited to a co-screenwriter of Ocean's 13 and The Girlfriend Experience, for what it's worth, assure me that it's real good), but I have seen the trailer; saw it almost the minute it went up last night in fact, and it's creating quite a "buzz" on the internet, largely because various and sundry smart alecs are having a time rejoicing over the fact that the trailer reveals that one of the film's big-ticket stars buys it in the movie. EW.com's Anthony Breznican  sums it up in typically pithy EW.com fashion, complete with obligatory tired South Park reference, here. I don't know what Gwyneth Paltrow ever did to engender the hostility of internet smart-alecs everywhere, and too bad for her, I guess; what irks this observer is the fact that all these yo-yos seem to be under the impression that it's unbelievably clever and incisive and witty to make some remark about how that health smoothie Gwynnie was flogging on her snooty website couldn't save her from the deadly virus that apparently rampages through the whole world in this picture, ar ar ar. I probably don't need to point out that every individual who makes a variation of this joke appears to be under the impression that he or she is the first individual on the planet to have come up with it. I'd say "try harder," but honestly, I'd rather the attempt not be made at all. People need to let off steam? That's what gyms are for. Also, again, what did Paltrow ever do to you?

Time, then, to break out the immortal panel from Drew and Josh Alan Friedman's immortal "Marnin Rosenberg In Bad Luck With Women" (collected in the great Warts and All). I usually deplore the Rosenberg "straighten you out" tendency, which is cropping up more and more often in what passes for film criticism these days (see Sam Wasson's recent unholy piece on Terrence Malick and The Tree of Life in LA Weekly, and no, I ain't linking to that mess), but that isn't to say that I don't sometimes understand it. Yeesh. 

In which the 63-year-old David Mamet approximates the intellectual condition of a 25-year-old Demi Moore

I know they say you can find anything and everything on the internet, but that's not true, and it's not true in a lot of ways, and I was just reminded on one of the ways it isn't true just now, as I searched in vain for a print morsel or even the TV interview clip in question, to no avail. In any event, I'll just have to recollect it and you'll have to take my word for it, unless one of you can actually FIND the citation which would be awesome. In any event, what I was recollecting was a television interview, which perhaps aired on Entertainment Tonight or something like it, depicting the then-25-year-old Demi Moore attending the 1988 Democratic National Convention (the self-same event at which Moore colleague Rob Lowe had that whole sex-tape thing happening) and offering up her views on what was wrong with the system. And her laying out, rather passionately, this complaint about how people should be able to check boxes on their tax returns to specify what they wanted their money, that is, the tax revenues collected by the U.S. Treasury, to be spent on. Because, as Demi astutely pointed out, some people might object to their money being spent on evil things like bombs and stuff, and those people ought to be allowed to SAY NO to that, on account of their consciences and whatnot. This argument clearly was not all that thoroughly thought-out, policy-ramification-wise, and clearly doesn't really "get" the whole concept of "render unto Caesar," which concept one is of course free to mentally reject but which ought to at least be cited as some sort of precedent before advancing any kind of proposition involving taxation.

I thought about Moore's entirely earnest complaint on my way today to the public pool in my neighborhood, which opened on Wednesday and will stay open until Labor Day, and could conceivably stay open later, but won't, because budgets, which are reliant on tax revenues, aren't sufficient to keep it going past then. And the pool, at the Red hook Rec Center, is a honey; huge, clean, and...well, what more do you need besides huge and clean? Yeah, the locker room could use a sprucing up, but whatever. I thought of Moore and I concurrently thought of David Mamet, whose recent book The Secret Knowledge describes a political conversion during which—and here I CAN give the exact words, as the book's been getting a good amount of attention—he made the galvanic personal discovery that...wait for it..." I not only hated every wasted hard-earned cent I spent in taxes, but the trauma and misery they produced..." 

Well, let's cut the guy some slack, and allow that he is describing his direct personal experience. It is not the experience of a particularly mature, or wise, or, as it happens, particularly smart person, but there you have it. And still: Has David Mamet never been to a public library, or a municipal pool? I imagine he's likely to have done the former at least once. So when he did, did he think, "my tax dollars at work, and I feel pretty good about it?" Also, has no one told him about tax dollars and the wonderful part they play in U.S. aid to Israel? If not, will doing so cause a matter-meets-anti-matter explosion to take place in what's left of Mamet's brain? 

It occurs to me that in my making a mental collage of these two quotes, I was being a little unfair; even without allowing for Moore's naivete and inability to construct a coherent policy plank out of what is after all only a feeling about what is fair and what is right, her dumb proposal comes from an altogether better place than Mamet's petulant complaint does. And if you're wondering why I thought of Demi and David together in the first place, just remember...

...About Last Night.

"No posing for photos! Never ask a movie star to pose with you for a picture."—Roger Ebert

Ah, get stuffed, Roger.