Dodging the Cobra

Read this article in last week's New Yorker and try not to get depressed about today's cinematic landscape. It describes a bit about how movies get green-lighted, but really dives into how they get marketed. Tim Palen, the guy profiled, really is a genius in getting asses in theater seats, but you wonder how many of those asses want to kick his ass once the credits roll.

All of which makes Slumdog Millionaire a bit of a miracle. Danny Boyle is a known quantity, granted, but I bet he had a devil of a time getting funding. No one in this country cares about India, let alone the sufferings of its poor.

But go see it. It is both tremendously disturbing and equally uplifting. Simon Beaufoy's script is among the tightest, most interesting/entertaining you'll ever see transformed into celluloid.

And Freida Pinto is really pretty.

Poor Paul

If you look in the right gutter at the Movies I've recently seen, you'll correctly guess that I've got two relatively small children and very little "adult" time. When rainy days hit, like they did on Saturday, we sometimes hit the theater and hope for the best.

Most kid movies these days are pretty atrocious. The stories are lame and continually go for cheap laughs with fart/feces jokes. My expectations were set a wee bit higher than normal for Open Season, given that Paul Westerberg did all the music. I'd heard a bunch of the songs and thought they were great for injecting some adult-though-safe edge into family-friendly film fare.

From a story in HARP, it seems Paul's work on the music was lucrative, but torturous. Sony continually made him go back and re-write and then even had other artists cover some of the tunes. It sounded like two of the longest years of anyone's life. After seeing the movie, I had to wonder what they even paid him for. There were snippets of maybe three songs and one of them, Good Day, was off 1996's Eventually. I was hoping that Right to Arm Bears, a raucous foot-stomper, would get free reign, but that, too, was cut to about a 10-second chorus.

And the movie? SU-UCKED. Awful story, terrible writing, boring animation. Both of my kids were climbing their seats out of boredom. Someone has to kill the "buddy" concept in these films. Eddie Murphy's donkey in the Shrek series sets the bar and everyone else--especially Ashton Kutcher here--comes up woefully short. Forget the flick; buy the soundtrack.

Iraq for Sale

On Friday night I attended a special screening of Iraq for Sale at the Bedford UU church, the same church where I've taken yoga for years and am now attending Sunday services on an almost too-regular-to-believe basis. The minister, John Gibbons, is the major reason for this as his sermons are the best thing I encounter all week. But that's a subject for another post.

About 25 people attended. A good 2/3 were church members over the age of 70. The other 1/3 was a rag-tag assortment of folks like me: looking for more justification for their rage and bewilderment re: the current state of affairs and soaking up more facts to use in future debate.

Truth be told, the movie itself was not all that great. The "production values" were pretty skimpy and there were no heroes. The movie interviews the families of contractors who had been killed in Iraq and I simply could not believe that they went over there "to rebuild a country." The only thing they were thinking of was that they could make 4x what they made in the States.

Anyway, I did take away some factoids which I'm only too glad to share here:

• Haliburton charges US taxpayers $45 for a six-pack of soda--produced and bottled locally so throw that transportation-cost argument out the window.
• They charge $99 per bag of laundry (about what would fit in a standard washer).
• One of Haliburton's jobs is to purify water for drinking and showering. Of the 64 water purification sites in Iraq, only 1 had water analyzed to be suitably pure. The other 63 had never been treated with chlorine and were riddled with germs and bacteria.
• "Cost+" deals leave no incentive to cut waste. When a tire goes flat or an oil filter blows on an $80,000 truck, they take it out and blow it up and then charge a new truck to the government.
• Contractors get 3x and 4x what a US soldier would make for doing the same job. Except the US soldier has actually been trained to do that job.
• Soldiers actively seek getting out of the service (some by purposely over-eating) so they can go get lucrative jobs with contractors.
• Bremer's security guards were not US soldiers, but employees of Blackwater, a company that provides private armies of mercenaries. A US company.
• One of the jobs contractors "perform" is interrogation. But there's no accountability. If a US soldier interrogates someone and that someone dies, the soldier is court martialed. If the contractor is at fault, he/she may be sent home. That's it.
• The CEOs of CACI, Titan, Haliburton, and Blackwater each made more than $20 million in pay in 2004, with some taking home twice that.
• Most of the contracts awarded were done so without a bidding process.
• All of the companies listed above have board members and officers with deep ties in Washington.

I could go on and on. The situation is simply disgusting. The usual argument for outsourcing is that someone can do something you can do better and for less money. In this case, however, it's just the opposite. They provide meals, purify water, secure areas, clean laundry, service equipment, and a dozen other tasks far less proficiently than their enlisted peers and do so for much more money.

The fact that we're spending $2B a week on Iraq is appalling enough. That 40 cents of every dollar goes to contractors who are consciously squeezing ever dollar they can out of the system at the expense and suffering of our troops should have this country in open revolt.

Syriana

Everyone in America needs to see this film.  Really.

Let's face it: in this country, we take our energy for granted.  Our houses are warm, our cars are gassed up and ready to go.  And we go, go, go in them, don't we?

As a nation, we produce about 6% of the world's oil.  Yet we consume 25% of it.  So, we are beholden to a handful of other countries for the resources that lie beneath their soil.  Their soil.  As in, not ours.  Sure we pay them for it; it's not like they're giving it to us.  But what happens on the day when they decide not to sell it to us anymore?  That would be their right, wouldn't it?

Syriana explores the myriad ways we keep that oil flowing West into our factories, furnaces and SUVs.  And those efforts produce not a few unpleasant by-products.

It's an incredibly complicated film and I found myself getting frustrated more than once during the first third of the movie.  But then you realize that what you're watching is a mosaic, where each scene, while not particularly charged on its own, is adding immeasurably to the film as a whole.

We love our cars.  We love our warm homes.  This movie really makes you wonder about the ends and the means.  And what we'll accept (or tacitly look away from) to keep the oil flowing.

Broken Flowers

With the wife and kids away in Maine this week, I actually have evenings to myself that are not completely encumbered by chores.  Last night I pushed off a bunch of tasks to go see Broken Flowers, the new Jim Jarmusch movie with Bill Murray.

I thought it was a cool premise for a movie and well designed, but actually pretty mediocre in its execution.  The main problem--and the main attraction--was Bill, himself.  He's generally mesmerizing on the big screen, but when he stays catatonic throughout the movie, his allure greatly diminishes.  And he stays catatonic throughout this whole film.

I would have killed to see a sliver of the Stripes or Rushmore Bill.  Even an inkling of outward emotion on either end of the spectrum would have helped immensely.

The women were all pretty good, although I thought Sharon Stone was just so-so.  I love Tilda Swinton, but she's on screen for all of about 30 seconds.

Bill should think long and hard about his next film.  I realize wearing a blank expression for two hours makes for some pretty easy money, but he's going to stare away all his fans if he's not careful.

A Cautionary Tale

I saw Cinderella Man on Friday night as a bachelor before making the trek to join my family in Maine Saturday morning.  Like all Ron Howard movies, there's more than a healthy streak of Pollyanna running through the script, but these days, it's sometimes healthy to get a solid dose of goodness every once in a while.

I liked (not loved) the movie.  Russell Crowe is great as usual and the fight scenes literally had me writhing in my seat (especially the last fight with Max Baer).  But the thing that has stuck with me from the film is how quickly a family can go from comfort to destitution.

And the more I think about it, the more worried I become.  Oil is at $60 a barrell and sure to climb.  What happens when the winter heating bills grow larger than the mortgage payment?  What happens when people can't afford the gas that will get them to and from their jobs every day?  What happens when China muscles us out for future natural resources?  What happens when all this religious nonsense becomes genuinely disruptive?

The thought of my Grace and Charlie sleeping in a house with no heat is positively chilling.

Wes, You're Naked

I love Wes Anderson films.  Er, maybe I should say I love films written by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson.  The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is not one of these films.

Bottle Rocket was good, primarily because you could feel the promise and potential dripping from every set.  Rushmore was, to me, a perfect movie.  It ranks in my top ten films of all time. I even own the screenplay and it's as much fun to read as it is to watch.  And then came The Royal Tenenbaums, a film that felt a little bloated.  Too many actors clamoring to work with Wes, too many gushing reviews, too much budget.

So I was dying to see if The Life Aquatic was going to be a return to form or a slide further down the bell curve.  Unfortunately, it's the latter.  The story, written by Wes and Noah Baumbach, is single-ply thin and utterly devoid of any meaningful conflict.  The acting is wooden and smirky.  It's rarerly funny or clever, and by the end, I was slightly aghast at how bad the whole thing was.

Critics and blindly adoring fans keep slathering emperor Wes with more praise, but I'm here to say he's butt-naked.  I sincerely hope his next movie has an actual story filled with characters one cares about.

And that he calls Owen to work on the script.

A Laugh Riot

I must say, I haven't seen a film produce more black and white opinions than Million Dollar Baby.  The Academy liked it, of course, and so did I.  I loved the minimalist approach and the grainy, sweaty feel of the movie.  Others were utterly disappointed.  They thought it was cliched and too predictable.

To give one data point, my brother-in-law, a fairly sensitive type, actually LAUGHED OUT LOUD when Clint pulled out Hillary's breathing tube.  Much to my sister's chagrin.

Bad Things to Good People

I saw Million Dollar Baby on Saturday night and two days later, I'm still processing.  It really is a terrific film, incredibly understated and driven purely by story and great acting.  Besides the three salaries, how much could it have taken to make this movie? $347?

Hilary Swank was very good, but you leave just blown away by Clint.  Whatever prune juice this guy is drinking, I want a tanker truck filled with it.  And maybe it's because when you're watching him, you're realizing he's the guy who is putting it all together.  An awesome effort.

Sorry, but Morgan Freeman didn't deserve his Oscar.  He exhibits more range after eating a big bowl of chili than he does in this film.  He's fine, like he always is, but you get the sense he could have rolled out of bed and nailed this one on the first take.  Thomas Hayden Church got robbed.

I'm trying to pin down why I've been carrying around a pit in my stomach the past couple of days.  I think it's because Frankie and Maggie were such great characters who deserved so much better than they got.  Bad things happening to good people never goes down easy.

Clint's not much for sugar-coating.  Million Dollar Baby is the true twin of Unforgiven.  A real-to-life, anti-Hollywood spin on genre that's been done to death.  For a change.

Great Music, Lousy Lessons

My daughter is pretty into musicals.  First it was Hello, Dolly! and now, as of Tuesday's snow day home from school, it's My Fair Lady.  There is nothing like hearing a six-year-old's voice work its way through "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" or "It Takes A Woman" especially when the lyrics get mangled in such a charming manner.  In the latter case, she sings/belts "Oh yes it TAKES a woman, a grandchild (in place of "fragile") woman to bring out the good things in life."  And that's the mildest of the mangling.

What gets me about these movies is the underlying themes.  In both cases, the woman falls for/pursues a much older man who has basically treated her like shit the entire film.  In Hello, Dolly!, Walter Matthau's Horace Vandergelder is a mean, grumpy old crab who never veers from the curmudgeonly path.  He is never even remotely pleasant (save the last 2 minutes) to Barbra Streisand's Dolly.  And it would be nearly impossible to treat someone worse that Professor Higgins does Eliza.

What a crappy lesson for young girls: go for the guy with the "old man" smell.  He may sag, be sprinkled with liver spots, and treat you like garbage, but at least he'll give you a roof, some clothes and food.

You wouldn't want that parade to pass by.