Blatherist

How to be a Film Critic Without Watching any Movies

A couple of days ago Glenn Reynolds went on a tear against the movie Jarhead, which he of course hasn't seen. (Apparently he heard it was anti-war or anti-military or something, don't ya know). Since he holds an Oprah-like sway over a certain segment of the population this negative "review" (if that's the right word) will undoubtedly have an effect on the film's box office. Now some might take issue with using one's bully pulpit to tear down cultural creations which one hasn't even perused for one's self, but I think it's a great idea. I am now going to use the immense cultural cachet of Blatherist to advocate against seeing the 50 Cent film Get Rich or Die Tryin'. I initially had qualms about doing so without seeing the film but since this approach now has the blessing of "the blogfather" I'm going to go ahead and do it. As per this Slate piece I believe that the film  promotes a repugnant ethos which disdains honest work and those who do it. Having read this piece I've done my due diligence required before inveighing against the movie. This will be even more fun to do with books! If the problem with blogging before was that it was all opinion with no reporting Reynolds is now moving blogs to a whole new level where they express opinions about things the blogger even admits to knowing nothing about.

Tonight's Episode of Rome

WTF!? The only question I have is was that gladiator scene the single most violent thing ever put on film ever? I mean, there's probably stuff that's more violent, but it comes from J-Horror or weird cult exploitation movies or something. I'm talking for mainstream pop culture. And this was realistic gore here too, not the hyper-stylized stuff of Sin City or Kill Bill. I say yes, most violent ever, beating Scorcese, Tarantino etc. by a landslide. I couldn't process much else that happened in the episode I was so distracted by how over-the-top that one scene was but it seemed like a pretty good episode otherwise. The slow process of Vorenus's corruption was well-drawn and I loved how you still  sympathized with Pullo even though at this point he's technically no more than a vicious hired thug (though it somehow still feels to the viewer like he's a more moral character than Vorenus.) His pathetic sacrifice of the beetle in his jail cell and his feelings towards Ereni and towards Vorenus's family were quite moving. It's amazing how it's totally preordained what's going to happen next week (Brutus is going to kill Caesar etc.) yet it's still fascinating to watch it develop. What a great show Rome turned out to be (despite occasional lapses into shock-for-shock's-sake), not as good as my HBO benchmarks - Carnivale and the first season of The Wire, but at least as good as Deadwood and well better than overrated fare like The Sopranos.

E-mail from Darren Jiang

I just received an extremely gracious e-mail from Darren Jiang, thanking me for my encouraging posts about him and about Nike Battlegrounds. It turns out that on top of everything else he's a nice, charming guy. I'm still pissed off that one of the guys told him he only made the team because he's Asian. To say that that was an advantage when all of the coaches and the vast majority of the other players picked are black is idiotic.

This Weather is Killing Me

I think I'm going to start building an ark. This is completely sapping my will to do anything. And Yom Kippur coming today made things seem even more out of whack for us non-Jews, with seemingly most of the tri-state area at services. This is a pretty funny evocation of what the day was like.

You Ain't a Beauty But Hey You're All Right (UPDATED)

Ross Douthat links to a some discussion going on on the blog of vituperative social conservative Jonathan Last regarding what is the single best rock song of all time. Last brought up the uber-cliched "Born to Run", to which Douthat responds with the slightly less cliched (and superior) "Thunder Road".  In the comments I bring up "Badlands" as being superior, as long as were limiting ourselves to cliche Springsteen anthems. I also excoriate Douthat for being like the millionth person to bring up that time when Christopher quoted "Born to Run" to Silvio (Steven Van Zandt) on The Sopranos as some sort of supercool moment because - you get it - Steven Van Zandt was actually in the E-Street band. He's quoting Springsteen to a Springsteen guy! Whatevs. I found that to be annoying, cutesy, pretentious, self-indulgent crap that took me right out of the episode.

Anyway, my point isn't really to link to the discussion, which is fine, though every song proffered is pretty safe and predictable. My point is to call attention to the headline Douthat gives the item: "Pressing Issues of the Day". It's supposed to be a funny title. Yet, it really is a pretty significant topic no? What was the best example of a major part form? Yet, he's saying "look how silly I am for posting this when there are more pressing matters out there". If this is his idea of fluff he really needs to get out more.

UPDATE: Now there's some real fluff. That's more like it.

This Week's ANTM Recap

So Lisa is turning out to be quite the bitch, huh? Or as the scene from next week has Coryn calling her the "alcoholic bitch". Which seems to be about right, girl was keeping that whole bottle of Absolut to herself she was.

Was it not mega-bizarre seeing Janice Dickinson as the photographer? She was still in panel judge mode, giving the girls way too much Janice-like "constructive criticism" when she was just supposed to be photographing them. Why on earth is she doing this? Does she really think she's going to have a semi-respectable career like fashion photographer as opposed to continuing to be a reality TV whore? Who's she kidding? Leave Surreal Life and come back to panel Janice. Twiggy is turning out to be so boring. What was the deal when she came on and gave them all this advice on how they could model better? What's she going to say besides throuw up and use laxatives? Twiggy is not a helpful person for Diana, the token plus-size girl.

With eight girls left it's around this time in the competition when you can start telling who's going to make it far. I feel bad for Coryn but the whole hard/sad face thing is going to kill her. Unfortunately, she only looks that way because she's had a terrible, hard life, but it's the truth. That Kyle girl is unusually dumb (she was confused by the word "accentuate" you could tell) but she is beautiful. Nicole is totally boring but she also has a great look. Those two will make it far along with Nik. They seem to love having Kim around, maybe for the frisson of there being a gay girl, but her pictures aren't that good, though she is beautiful. Lisa is being turned into a villain figure and will get cut like Camille did, but they'll keep her around to stir things up. Lisa is indeed pretty annoying, and looks way older than 24.

The good thing is that while things getting a bit boring last year due to too much camaraderie, they've found a real group of dysfunctional bitches this year.

Oh, and clearly they're running out of photo shoot ideas. The bad plastic surgery themed shot was the stupidest and ugliest thing they've come up with since last years seven deadly sins while being lowered into a grave shoot.

Bizarre Double Feature

What a day. It was a continuous monsoon outside, which made it not worth going anywhere. My girlfriend and I responded by getting under blankets and putting on sweats and watching a bizarre double feature, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy followed by the monumentally depressing Tarnation.

Hitchhiker's, despite displaying some real visual imagination and being well-cast, was probably the worst of all of the different versions of the story. I'm sure I'm biased, since I grew up on the books and on the BBC miniseries as it was re-run on PBS. However, I'm no superfan of Douglas Adams's work. I recognize that it probably just seemed especially keen to me since I was 12 years old or so at the time. Still, the choices that first-time feature director Garth Jennings made with the material were strange. Why bring in material from all of the Hitchhiker books when you only have the length of a feature film? And why bring in extra material and change things needlessly? All four of the leads were great though. Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox was especially inspired. And the art-direction and creature design were great to look at. The movie was just a bit all-over-the-place and unfocused. It would have been better to just actually stick with the first book.

Tarnation was the perfect accompaniment to the gloomy weather outside. I thought it was a good attempt at turning your intimate moments into art though, and an original take on the documentary. I just read some reviews trashing it which make some good points, saying that the amount of material was a bit thin and that the film substituted the fancy editing techniques for content and didn't really give you a feel for the filmmaker Jonathan Caouette's life and times so much as telling you about them. As part of the same MTV generation I actually liked the way it was put together, since that quick cutting and mixing up reality and what you watch on TV is just part of the normal Gen-X thought process. It was sort of the ultimate Gen-X home movie. Did anyone else notice how so many of the techniques and the edits were redolent of horror films, particularly in the early most disturbing part?

If he didn't get most of his family to open in front of the camera it doesn't seem it was for lack of trying but just because they put up such a wall. That difficulty in communicating spoke volumes in and of itself. Tarnation took the raw materials of one seriously messed up family and put them through the blender of every technique from every experimental film and music video you've ever heard of, with mixed results. It may not have been the monument to his mother that Caouette was hoping for, but it's still an impressive documentary that will especially speak to anyone who's ever felt that the pain in their life could best be expressed through the vocabulary of underground music and film.

You Know Who's an Obscure Iron Chef?

Iron Chef Nakamura, whom I'm watching on an Iron Chef re-run now. Now that's an obscure Iron Chef. He was on for what, 3 episodes. I always make sure to watch when he's on, because I'm an Iron Chef completist. The only more obscure Iron Chef was Iron Chef Italian. What was up with that guy? He didn't even get to stand with the other three Iron Chef's and hold his signature fruit or cleaver or whatever. It's always a great thrill to catch an episode where he gets called. Sure, it's kind of like getting the Shemp, but it's still fun to see because it's so rare. He almost always loses, but the poor guy doesn't get any practice.

Extras and Rome

Last night's episode of Extras was the best of the three that have aired so far. Part of what made it so funny was that Ricky Gervais's character was the sympathetic victim of cringeworthy, absurd situations more than the Larry David-like instigator of them. Also, I actually prefer when the celebrities-playing-themselves are people only known to the UK audience as opposed to being American celebrities or UK celebrities who are known to Americans like Kate Winslet. The show never seems to get the characters of the celebrities you know quite right (though the portrayal of Ben Stiller as a complete bastard was inspired). When the person is someone you don't really know (I mean I know who Vinnie Jones is but what American would know Ross Kemp from Eastenders? C'mon.) you don't have any preconceptions and can view them simply as funny characters. As such, both Ross Kemp and Vinnie Jones were hilarious. The final scene with Ricky Gervais and Ross Kemp was cringeworthy, uncomfortable and real on a par with some of the best stuff from The Office. The scenes between Gervais and his collaborator and friend Stephen Merchant playing his hapless agent just continue to get funnier. It's just a pleasure to watch these two do comedy together. And I just love the fact that the theme song for the show is "Tea for the Tillerman" by Cat Stevens. It somehow works perfectly.

The episode of Rome was also the best yet in its series. It was a tour de force. So much happened yet it didn't feel rushed at all. And the characters are starting to get filled out more deeply. Pompey was rendered particularly complex and sympathetic in this his final episode. Caesar is also becoming more of a central and more of a defined character. The moment when he welcomed Brutus and Cicero back into his camp without a formal surrender was priceless. You could just see how much it killed them to have to accept such charity and how it was simultaneously an instance of Caesar's magnanimity and a statement to them of just how in charge he was. Vorenus continues to get more interesting. You really got to see the dual nature of the man and the society when he went so quickly from the ready violence towards Pompey's Greek guide to his chivalrous, noble behavior toward Pompey himself. The escaping on a raft of corpses idea, which was ripped off from the pirate-comic-within-the-comic in Watchmen, which in turn was probably ripped off from some ancient source is still always an exciting deus-ex-machina to see enacted. I don't know what to make yet of the Servilia/Octavia lesbianism subplot. Thus far it seems somewhat gratuitous but maybe it'll become more thematic and interesting as the series moves on. The amazing blood ritual that Atia did at the beginning really showed what a different world this is than ours. However, there was a lot less Atia than usual, and amazingly not any of Octavian - the show's breakout character - at all. It was an episode about foreground, broad historical strokes, yet it somehow helped you know a lot of the characters on an intimate level too. This series is really coming into its own.

So do the opposite of what the cool kids do and skip Curb Your Enthusiasm and watch Extras and Rome instead. You'll be happy you did.

More Nike Battlegrounds Blogging

Okay, I see that these searches are the only reason anyone is coming here. So, now we're one episode away from the game - which is taking place in Akron, OH of all places - and I'm losing it from anticipation. If New York doesn't win I'm personally going to track down the players and hurt them, even my hero Darren Jiang. Why is this so much more exciting than actual professional sports which pits cities against each other? Is it because of that age-old thing, that argument that pro sports would be better if you had to actually be from the city you played for?

I'm not for New York merely because that's my city though. They are simply the more appealing team. They're already cohering as a team and growing and putting their egos on hold while almost all the guys from the Chicago team have terrible attitudes and huge egos, not to mention rap sheets longer than your arm and a bunch of kids. Could you believe that fat kid from Chicago who got cut and he had all this attitude and his whole family was with him and saying "You're making a big mistake" to the coaches? He had to sit out a practice game because he was two hours late to practice and he wouldn't even cheer for his teammates in that practice scrimmage. The most hilarious thing was he and that other guys' excuse for being so late, "I don't have a car and I don't wanna have to get up and 7 o'clock in the morning." Now that's the attitude of a winner! These clowns are impossible to root for, even when they're not punching each other.

Everything about the matchup points to New York having the advantage. They have more talent, better shooters, better coaching, better chemistry, and more heart. However, the Chicago team does have a couple of things going for it: size and sheer physicality. Their guys look huge and they play a more physical game. I'm afraid they'll dominate us in the paint and on the boards. A lot will depend on how the game is called. Anyway, if Chicago wins it will only be because they play an ugly, hacking low scoring game and the ref lets them get away with it. Also, I'm still predicting ugly racial animosity coming from their side.

The different attitudes of the two teams point to the ways in which New York is a superior city to Chicago. Chicago is so segregated and spread out. A poor black kid can grow up in a horrible, crime-ridden neighborhood and never see anything beyond it. In New York you can just hop on a train and see something completely different. Also, New York has largely taken care of its terrible crime problem while Chicago hasn't. The danger and difficulty of moving around in Chicago is one reason these kids are so circumscribed in their neighborhoods and seem to have no concept of a larger reality outside.