In The Company Of Glenn

Hollywood bashing: Narrative versus reality

Conservatives all over the blogosphere and beyond are gloating over the miserable box-office returns for Brian DePalma's Iraq-war-themed picture Redacted, which grossed all of about 25 grand on its opening weekend.

Credit where due...

I sometimes treat L.A. Weekly reporter/blogger Nikki FInke as a figure of fun, generally because she'll come out with such goofy pronouncements that it's just too easy to do so, and we've also had differences of a more serious ilk. But the work she's doing right now on the Writers Guild strike over at her Deadline Hollywood blog is a) invaluable info for anyone who covers or even vaguely cares about the industry; b) an excellent example of what she does best and why, for all her often risible, shall we say, eccentricities, she's worthy of (provisional) respect; and c) a model of "new media" journalism. So, kudos. (Although as I type out the word "kudos" I can almost hear Finke saying, "I don't need any kudos from you, you nobody...")

'Chevalier' gets its due

I'm glad to learn that Hotel Chevalier, the "Part One" of The Darjeeling Limited, which played before the film at press and festival screenings and has been available as a free download on iTunes (where it's racked up over 500,000 downloads) is going to be screened with Darjeeling when it goes a little wider—to 800 screens—on Friday. As I've said before, I think Chevalier is a vital organ rather than an appendage of the splendid Darjeeling, a key to the film's deeper theme. And of course a delight on its own.

I would have been even gladder to get the news from someone other than Lia Miller of the New York Times, whose report is smarmy, smirky, and inaccurate. Miller constantly stresses that Chevalier got better reviews than Darjeeling itself—so what?—makes a point of simultaneously raising her eyebrows and covering her own ass whilst bringing up Nathalie Natalie Portman's "nude scene" in Chevalier (Miller herself doesn't care about it, you understand, but it is good for publicity!), and ultimately reveals herself as a complete and utter dumbfuck by asserting that Portman "does not appear in the feature." Portman does, and she's even listed in the credits. We all make mistakes, I know, and one ought not throw stones, but this one seemed fairly avoidable. And I doubt Miller gives a damn in any case...

The locusts do have a king, it turns out.

I've got nothing to say about Mr. Owen Wilson's situation save that I hope he gets well soon. In the meantime, Variety this morning demonstrates just what a warm, caring, compassionate entity Hollywood is with a prominent story headlined "Owen Wilson Projects In Question." The article's lede: "Owen Wilson's emergency hospitalization and recovery are throwing a major monkeywrench into production of two movies and causing marketing headaches for two more."

Ah, headaches and monkeywrenches. Damn these human beings and their failings for fucking up our marketing!

Mind you, I don't condemn Variety or its reporter Tatiana Siegel for this. They're just doing their jobs in a company town. And sometimes it's instructive to get such a vivid reminder of exactly what this business we call show really is.

Art Film Pissing Contest (Updated)

I didn't comment on Jonathan Rosenbaum's New York Times op-ed "Scenes From An Overrated Career" for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that I came to it a little late. Second, just reading the headline made my stomach sink. I got a mental picture of a meeting of the Times' op-ed staff, and some callow dickwad saying, "Hey, you know how everyone's saying how great Ingmar Bergman was? Why don't we run a piece saying that he sucked?" and heads bobbing wildly in agreement. Jeez. The guy's not even in his grave yet by then, probably. But you know these Times types—they all like to think they're Rick James, bitch, right after hitting Charlie Murphy in the forehead. "That was—'Coooold Blooded'!! Ha!" In other words, I was repelled by precisely the kind of forced, fake-ass "contrarianism" that animates the 85% worthless e-mag Slate.

A Times op-ed staffer pitches an anti-Bergman piece.

Then, my fevered imagination tells me (and please, anyone with inside dope on how the piece came to be should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, which I suppose I must be), on being unable to find anybody to say that Bergman actually sucked, the Times dickwad settles for the genteel scepticism of Jonathan Rosenbaum. [UPDATE: Jonathan Rosenbaum very graciously and gamely responds, with a real account fo the piece's evolution and more, in the comments section. I'm keeping the paranoid ravings in the post for their putative entertainment value. Thanks, Jonathan.] This brings me to reason three. (P.S. I know that my explanations for why I didn't write about the piece in the first place are delaying my explanation for why I'm writing about it now. Please bear with me.) I hold Rosenbaum in very high esteem, and the Times op-ed was—as George Clooney once said of Tarkovsky's Solaris, I'm always amused to recall—not his best work. A lot of Rosenbaum's critical "debunking" here goes consists of defining what Bergman was not—e.g., not an avant-gardist and/or formal innovator on the level of Godard or Resnais. He brings up what he sees as Bergman's "perpetual retreat from the modern world," a variant of the "solipsist" position on Bergman which kind of begs the question as to exactly which world, say, the characters in Scenes from a Marriage inhabit. But these are supportable positions; I just don't happen to share them. The stuff about the blond, blue-eyed cast members, however, practically screams "Holy shit! I'm under by 200 words!" The snipes at Bergman-chic are about as critically substantive and useful as, say, making fun of a Pedro Costa fan for his taste in t-shirts. The evocation of "relevance" is tiresome. And finally, there's the "hard fact"—unverified, as it happens—that "Mr. Bergman isn't being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson - two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman's heyday."

Even if that's true—so what? One might recall in the late '80s Godard, for example, pretty much dropped off the map of critical and commercial consciousness in North America—his great 1990 Nouvelle Vague never got a proper release here. Actual critical assessment and the noting of critical fashion are two different things, as Rosenbaum ought to be the first to know. Also, if nobody cares about Bergman anymore, why call him overrated?

But all this is not why, finally, this piece winds up being one of those things out of which no good can come.

Michael Cieply, spoiler king

I get a lot out of Michael Cieply's reporting on Hollywood in the New York Times, but I have to say maybe he gives too much in today's front-page story headlined "With Real Bullets Still Flying, Hollywood Brings The War Home." In the first four grafs, he gives away virtually the entire plotline of Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Edah (which I gave some initial thoughts on here), including—spoiler alert, sort of—the picture's near-ruinous punchline. I know that punchline, and many of the other film's particulars, are likely to be hotly debated soon after the picture opens. But the picture doesn't open for another two months. And while Edah is based on true events, part of what ought to make the picture fairly engrossing for those not familiar with the real-life case is how well Haggis handles the whodunnit aspect of the story. All that's out the window once you read Cieply. I'll guess that Paul Haggis is one mightily pissed-off filmmaker today.

I understand that Cieply cites these specifics in order to bolster his overall characterization of the type of Iraq war movies coming out of Hollywood today. But I think he could have been substantially subtler and still made his points. Maybe's he taking his cue from Nathan Lee's self-serving spoiler-justification op-ed from last week.

An Industry of Death

"To defend mindless exercises in sadism like 'The Hills Have Eyes II' by citing 'Macbeth' is almost like using 'Romeo and Juliet' to justify child pornography," says screenwriter and recent first-time director Mike White in his May 2 New York Times op-ed contribution "Making a Killing." This might be a proposition worth arguing with, except that as far as I know, nobody has ever actually attempted to defend The Hill Have Eyes II by citing Macbeth. Did White face down Wes Craven at a party or something? No, I don't think so; I think the reason he doesn't mention any instances in which this actually happened is because THERE AREN'T ANY. (This inconvenient truth does not inhibit Hot Blog author David "yes you did, you invaded" Poland from declaring this passage inconvertibly "true.")

Wanking In L.A.

So will Hollywood mega-producer Brian Grazer now give Andres Martinez a job? I ask because Grazer seems to have unwittingly cost Martinez one. Martinez resigned last week as the editorial-page director of the Los Angeles Times over a non-controversy that became a controversy over Martinez's assigning Grazer to guest-edit an opinion section at the paper. Seems that Martinez is dating Grazer's publicist, or one of his sub-publicists—it's very hard to keep track—which, you know, seems kinda conflict-of-interesty. But nothing an editor's note couldn't take care of. Some at the paper disagreed with that conclusion, ears were bent, the section was killed, Grazer felt "humiliated" (boo-frickin'-hoo), and Martinez resigned.

What, Me Fascist?

From its blurb on the "Inside" box on the front page—"Message Movies, by Accident...audiences can find buzz-inducing political agendas in films even when none are intended"—to its headline —That Film's Real Message? It Could Be: 'Buy a Ticket'"—to its tsk-tsking of Berlinale audience members who "insisted on seeing [300's] presentation of the Spartans' defense of Western civilization in the face of a Persian horde as propaganda for American's position vis-a-vis Irag and Iran," Michael Cieply's front-page New York Times Arts section piece on 300 and other films presumably of its ilk is a masterpiece of coy disingenuosness. 300 originator Frank Miller's refusal to be interviewed for the piece and executive producer Deborah Snyder's dismisssal of "irrelevant" any questions about her and director Zack Snyder's politics are delicious cherries on its top.
I saw 300 some time ago, at what one might call an exploratory screening, and was initially quite, um, flabbergasted, although not quite filled with the righteous indignation that a lot of colleagues have expressed about it. But all the whose-side-is-it-on tap-dancing that Cieply's article indulges in aside—although, given the neo-con-wet-dream of its "throw the Persian down the well" bit, I don't believe that those Berlinale bawlers really had to insist too hard in order to get their point across—you'd have to be mighty dense not to see 300 as an exemplary example of fascist aesthetics. The grandiosity, the worship of combat, the worship of death in combat, the horror of putatively aberrant sexuality, and so much more—like the Prego commercial used to say, it's in there. Boy is it in there. (Fascism looms pretty large in Frank Miller's work as a whole—his Sin City comics channel noir through a particularly adolescent variant on the will to power. And while the original RoboCop was a deft satire of the authoritarian mindset, Miller's script for RoboCop 2 argues that authoritarianism itself isn't so bad, just as long as the "right" people are holding the authority.) That Cieply, who's written sharply about the semiotics of movies in a number of publications, including this one, ignores this sack-of-hammers-subtle point is beyond me.