red fuzzy jesus

Lessons From Summer Movies In 10 Words or Less

I’m taking a break from the political and philosophical and looking at what I learned from all the movies I saw this summer. 

Drag Me To Hell – Revenge can be effective if you’re really good at it. 

Transformers – Sometimes, just enjoy the experience without expecting meaning. 

500 Days of Summer – Let someone go.  New people will come into your life. 

District 9 – Stuff White people like: Oppressing brown beings regardless of species. 

Bruno – Offense can have value.  Valueless offense is just gross. 

The Hangover – Everyone since high school was right.  Sobriety makes me uncool.  

Funny People – Don’t wish for a second chance. Move forward from now.

The Hurt Locker – The value of life is too often determined by circumstances.

Terminator Salvation – Future apocalyptic scenarios reveal cultural fear of progress.

Food Inc. – Environmentalists/workers’ rights advocates who eat meat are hypocrites.

Rage Against the Kids

[Warning: Spoilers Abound]

Friday night I was there with friends to see the opening night of 28 Weeks Later.  Growing up I was never particularly a fan of zombie flicks or horror films in general.  But friends in recent years have changed that and now I’m quite the enthusiast.  In addition to those friends something else has helped changed my mind.  28 Days Later and its sequel promise to transcend if not change all together the horror genre.  The original 28 Weeks did escape many of the trappings of horror movies including the low brow clichés of the Friday the 13ths of my youth – so much so that it has lead to numerous annoying discussions of whether 28 Days is, in fact, a horror film.  Even in reviews I have noticed writers having some difficulty categorizing this film with some calling it a horror movie, others just a zombie movie, and many opting for the more generic “thriller.” 

And thrill it did.  Like the recent Dawn of the Dead, the best scene in 28 Weeks might be its opening.  At amusement parks the thing that kills me is not the big drop on a roller coaster.  It’s that slow ratcheting sound as the coaster is pulled up the first big hill.  Weeks does this well.  The movie opens during the time of the first film when Britain is decimated and the few remaining survivors are barricaded in farmhouses sustaining on canned food and candlelight.  The peaceful dinner and tense conversation of this opening is tortuously long because you know what’s coming; a zombie attack.  And when it comes it doesn’t disappoint. 

The herds of people with the “rage” virus appear on the horizon and make waste of the flimsy wooden barriers over the windows and doors.  They tear through these protections so easily one wonders why the people in the house bothered erecting them.  And the nice elderly couple, the sweet young girlfriend, the gruff young male friend, and the too-cute little boy are predictably torn to shreds.  The only person who gets away is the loving husband and father who chooses to abandon his wife rather than throw himself in front of the zombies in a vain attempt to slow their rampage. 

What Weeks assumes, heavily, is that everyone who sees it has seen the original.  It’s a safe enough assumption.  The target audience for the first is the same as the second and that variety of movie fan tends to be a pretty dedicated bunch.  But I was with someone who had not seen the first and listened as she whispered a lot of questions to her boyfriend.  Weeks makes no effort to inform viewers of what is going on with these zombie people.  It has a quick text at the beginning that indicates a timeline but does not explain how these people and Great Britain got the way they are in the movie.  This is contradicted by a throw away comment about the virus not being able to jump species when everyone remembers humans got it from lab monkeys in the first place. 

This is unfortunate because 28 Days and Weeks offer the most plausible cause of zombieism to date.  Rather than some meteorite hitting the earth, a virus develops that makes people into zombies.  It is perfectly biologically plausible that there might someday be a communicable virus that completely over stimulates adrenaline while totally suppressing logic creating “people” that are nothing but instruments of pure obsessive wrath.  We get from the doctor in the film that the “others” have a rage virus but where it came from and why Britain has all but disappeared is just taken for granted in the sequel and not really addressed.

A good test of a movie like this is how affected I am afterward.  On the way home in the subway an express A train pulled in at the same time an express 2 train arrived upstairs.  This lead to large crowds of people rushing en masse to catch their corresponding trains.  And seeing two thick groups of people rushing up and down the staircase respectively made me really uneasy.  There was no danger, of course, just a large number of people trying to catch their fast trains.  But having just seen Weeks I really didn’t enjoy being in the middle of it. 

When I visited London for the first time a few years ago I had cheerful English imagery of the Queen and red busses in mind.  Having seen V for Vendetta, Children of Men, and 28 Days in the past year my more recent trip to the city on the Thames had a creepier uneasiness.  I don’t think Weeks is going to help that much either. 

Going back to transcending the genre though, horror films (or thrillers) are sustained through series of bad choices.  In order for the mayhem to continue someone has to do something stupid like run upstairs when they could slip out the backdoor or break away from the group in the woods when you know it would be safer to stick together.  Weeks manages to avoid a lot of that syndrome.  I found myself considering what I would do in similar situations and it didn’t always differ too much from the characters.  Sure, people make stupid mistakes.  The kids in the film set off the conflict by exploring greater London when they should know better.  But, for the most part, people react the way one would if hell was breaking loose around them.

They go down into a dark, zombie-infested subway, which is a stupid choice but makes sense because they’re trying to escape opaque clouds of poison gas and a helicopter.  (The opaqueness of the clouds is another issue.)  The only really unbelievable part that takes you out of the movie is the omnipresence of the zombie dad.  As the kids run and drive all over London trying to escape ragers and American troops ordered to kill anything that moves, zombie dad keeps popping up.  He’s in the building, the street, the park, the subway.  It helps to forward the silly family storyline I guess but it just seems ridiculous that these kids keep encountering dear old dad at every turn instead of any of the thousands of zombies that could come around the corner.  This is made all the more screwy when you consider zombie dad has survived sniper fire, poison gas, and firebombing in order to keep running into to his poor kids leaving one friend to make the hilarious comment, “Man, this guy really hates his kids.” 

Another funny but disjointing moment came when the kids go down in the pitch-black subway.  The doctor directs them through the night scope on her gun.  But, no matter how hard I tried I cannot disassociate night vision from sex tapes.  As the teenage daughter looks back at the night scope in rapt terror I half expected Rick Salomon’s large wang to appear screen left.  I can’t be the only person with this hangup. [Sidenote: The girl playing the teenage daughter is named Imogen Poots!  That is either the best or worst showbiz name ever.] 

All and all Weeks delivers on excitement and a passable, believable plot.  I don’t look for flawless narratives when I go to this type of movie.  I understand that I have to suspend my disbelief a little more and not get hung up on holes or cheesiness too much.  It’s not as raw as it’s predecessor but one assumes that a sequel to a surprise hit is going to have a larger budget and more blockbustery feel.  It doesn’t fail to satisfy my lust for over the top movie violence or blood splattering and it has more than ample tension building and jumpy payoffs.  And the music is surprisingly enjoyable.  It was a fun ride but not life changing.  Like my students, this movie succeeded in passing my expectations but only because I’ve learned to preset those expectations to little and low. 

Thoughts on a Movie

From watching Entourage on HBO I have learned that Hollywood is all about expectations.  It’s not how well you do it’s how well you do as compared to projections.  For example, nutty Tom Cruise raked in 50 million and took the no. 1 spot for the opening weekend of M.I.3.  This, by some measures, would be considered a roaring success.  But, for poor Tom it was quite the disappointment as he was expected to, and typically does, open much higher. 

This weekend saw a very strange turn on the expectations game.  What if a movie intentionally made tacky and cheesy – no sign of Oscar gold – was introduced in the dumping ground of late summer cinema disposal?  No matter how poorly it did it would surely beat its expectations, right?  After all, we’ve already had our code and mutants and string of summer blockbusters so there’s no risk in tacking a popcorn flick at the end.  But what if that film also had months and months of publicity via an Internet phenomenon.  What are the expectations then?

Snakes on a Plane gained quick notoriety because of its blunt title.  Instead of ‘Terror at 40 Thousand Feet’ or ‘Flight of Fangs’ or some other awful Hollywood play on words that hints at the film’s content, this movie just says what it is.  Here’s the plot.  There’s a plane.  And, get this, there are snakes on that plane.  In the first few decades of the Academy Awards there was a statuette handed out for best title.  In another time this one might not have been far from Oscar Gold after all.

So you know from the title it’s going to be cheesy, it’s going to be bad.  The question is, just how deliciously bad it would be.  Would it be a Kraft American single or a nice hunk of Gorgonzola?  I was pleasantly surprised that the movie was actually quite good.  I’ve said for a while that I’m frustrated by promised scary movies that fail to even make me jump.  But there was some genuine fear and uneasiness generated by Snakes on a Plane. 

And the cheese was delectable.  The sexist, two dimensional co-pilot, the saccharine honey mooning couple, the swishy male flight attendant all added the one-note archetypical characters necessary for good movie crappiness.  And some of those lines… I can’t believe I’m saying this but, does anyone know how to fly a plane. 

There was also humor.  Oh man – spoilers galore – the mile-high-club boob bite was lovely as was the fat slumbering woman getting molested by a wondering python.  But the best part of the entire movie was toward the end.  Once Sam Jackson blasts a hole in the plane’s wall and snakes go flying out you see the boa constrictor fly by with the legs of the snooty Englishman hanging out its mouth.  My lower intestines ached from laughing so hard at that.  Mary Kate getting thrown to the snake was also priceless although, considering the obvious title, as soon as I saw a little rat-dog I was waiting for that outcome. 

So I left the theater feeling satisfied by my Snakes on a Plane.  No summer’s long build up diluted its enjoyment for me.  Since I saw it opening weekend I was with a good crowd.  There was plenty of laughing and cheering to round out the experience for me.  The emmer-effer lines were so obviously added in post-production that the crowd cheered when Sam finally let’s them fly.  And I’m not sure what to think of the human race when we cheer the poor sweet groom spraying foam out of his eyeballs. 

All and all, Snakes exceeded expectations.  It was awesomely bad, yes, but in some ways really quite good.  When you aren’t looking for a complex plot or compelling characters it’s funny how pleasing a movie can be.  I think Snakes is a good example of the opposite of what happened to the Da Vinci Code.  When something is so hyped for so long to be amazingly good it can’t help but disappoint.  It makes me wonder if some industry executive is rethinking his next move – trying to figure out how to cash in on an intentionally crappy movies with a forced, prolonged Internet campaign. Maybe.  I don’t know. All I know is now I feel obligated to come up with an equally blunt title for this article.  How about Thoughts on a Movie?  That’ll do. 

IN THE CLOSET WITH BEN DOMENECH IV

I’ll say a final word on poor disgraced “columnist” Ben Domenech and then let the dead horse lay.  By now most everyone knows that Washingtonpost.com (which is separate from The Washington Post paper edition) hired a 24 year old far-right activist and Bush appointee to offer a unique perspective to their opinion pages.  As Domenech has built his young career solely on inflammatory invectives to everyone who isn’t a right-wing White Christian, the progressive half of the blogosphere rose up to attack the Post.com’s decision.  Most of the criticism centered on Ben’s party-line activism absent a counterpoint blogger.  But as the bloggers dug – really they just Googled his articles’ excerpts – they found Ben to be a serial plagiarist.  What at first seemed to be some poor attribution while writing for the student paper in college was exposed as blatant cutting and pasting for publications like the National Review.  The examples of inarguable and inexplicable plagiarism grew till Ben “resigned” from the Post.com.

I said yesterday that I was uncomfortable fighting to get a blog removed simply because of its views no matter how offensive.  Using en masse protests to smother viewpoints is the calling card of the religious right and progressive minded people should have enough respect for pluralism to dispute arguments instead of just silencing them.  However, plagiarism is a good reason to fire a writer.  While it may seem mean for others to dig through your professional life to find fault, if you build that professional life on a foundation of animosity to so many you should not be surprised when that foundation causes your fall. 

The defense of Ben has been as interesting to watch as the attacks.  First “conservative” bloggers rushed to their keyboards to say that it was all a liberal hissy fit – a vast left-wing conspiracy if you will.  Then, even the fire-breathing uber-right site Ben co-founded, Redstate.com, acknowledged Ben had serious questions to answer.  It was sad because they kept posting updates to previous postings as reality took hold.  Ben flailed his drowning reputation around coming up with bizarre explanations such as P.J. O’Rourke had met him and given him permission to republish his work under Ben’s name.  But the NY Times found O’Rourke who said he never met Ben and never gave that sort of permission to anyone.  Ben claimed he wrote for two publications at once while working at the National Review and that’s why the same text appears in two different articles.  But the other articles clearly have other author’s names attached to them who are still alive to contradict.  Eventually, Ben re-posted ‘contrition’ on RedState admitting to rampant plagiarism. His rabid supporters on the site encouraged him to “take some time off.” 

Of all the defense of Ben the one most compelling is the argument that he made his mistakes when he was young and detractors shouldn’t be going into the histories of teenagers to find fault with their writings.  That is the most convoluted reasoning considering how Ben has been billed.  His bio boasts he’s the youngest Bush II appointee and has all these professional accomplishments at a young age.  Then when those accomplishments are put under scrutiny and found to be wanting we’re told we’re not supposed to pick on the work of people when they were younger and made mistakes.  He’s only 24 now! 

The story reminds me of poor disgraced Steven Glass.  My roommate, Tyghe, and I watched his biopic, Shattered Glass, a few months ago.  He too was a celebrated super successful kid at the age of 24 whom everyone praised for quick assent after college.    But his reputation began to unravel when examined by critics.  It may be an oversimplification but 24-year-olds shouldn’t be editors or senior anything for major publications.  It stands to reason that one grabbing the golden ring that quick cut some corners. 

Of course, Ben was trained exclusively for this type of work.  Much hay has been made about his home-schooling and his pedigree as the son of a Bush appointee.   While some home-schooled kids develop genius aptitudes for spelling bees and Geography olympics many who are home-schooled in order to prevent contradictory viewpoints just end up incapable of original thought.  The “pro-family” websites including Focus on the Family, which Ben wrote for, relentlessly pound the idea that parents should home-school to restrict secular influence on their children.  Put less kindly, the only way to create a foot soldier for the religious right as an adult is to saturate a child’s mind with limited perspective till all he can process is theo-poli rhetoric.  If Ben’s family followed the model of Dobson, and one would assume they did, then Ben’s childhood education consisted of mommy withholding the cookie plate until he prayed to Jesus, Mary, and Reagan.  A thoughtful mind is not constructed from this upbringing. 

Dr. Myers' piece summed up the analysis when he said he was “not surprised to learn that he [Ben] is the product of home schooling, which in its worst instances can foster an unfortunately narrow point of view, and usually means the kid is instructed by someone with absolutely no training in education.” 

Of course Ben went to the same college I did.  But by the time he got there he was so fixed with the theo-politics of his training that he thought it best to criticize the education system the entire time he was there.  While a student he wrote for Boundless – another site by Focus on the Family – in which he bi-weekly criticized how stupid the liberal professors were and how if he were in charge he’d have a whole different education model than the liberal elite.  His four years were just a formality while he waited to advance on DC with the rest of the Christian soldiers. 

Once out of college Ben had no original thought to present but parroted the same repetitious stuff that appears on all the pro-family sites.  What has struck me about Ben’s writings for RedState and Red America is their lack of personal perspective.  The judges on American Idol have an oft used criticism.  When a contestant gets all the notes and words to a song correct but fails to personalize the music they say the contestant sang karaoke instead of making the song their own.  Ben sang karaoke.  He was programmed as a child to utter the talking points of the religious right.  And nothing he wrote came from a personal observation but rather a rote recitation of specific activism.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Ben plagiarized.  He literally right clicked portions of other web pages, selected copy, and pasted them into his own posts.  The evidence is there and someone at the National Review online was asleep at the switch.  But this is exactly what he as a writer was trained to do.  Not think… not critically analyze and be a student of the world…  when new information was presented to him, even in college, if it did not match his programming it did not compute.  So what you are left with is a writer that can only spit out what has been allowed to get in. 

If you care enough to examine his writings, and you probably don’t, compare them to a similar topic on CWFA.com, Family.org, WND.com, or any of the other “pro-family” propaganda mills you will see endless redundancy.  Dogma is all they can sputter.   So, Ben Domenech was disgraced not because he was a religious right writer who got caught cheating but because the very essence of religious right writing is lack of original thought.  Because a writer needs to go through a process of finding his voice and developing a personal style he usually isn’t on top of the world at age 24.   It requires personal development over years to have an authentic and unique perspective on life. It also requires the type of formal and informal education that exposes you to viewpoints with which you disagree and people that live by different codes.  Without that type of development and influence Ben had nothing new to say.  The inability to speak personally rocketed him to success within the fandom of the far right but that same inadequacy is what caused his downfall once exposed to a wider audience.       

ANTI WAR (OF THE WORLDS)

I’ve always thought it was kind of silly when people boycott a movie because they don’t like an actor’s politics or disagreed with the ‘agenda’ of the film.  An actor is just playing a character.  A good movie is a good movie.  But this summer I’m going to boycott a movie I’ve wanted to see for a long time for perhaps an even stupider reason.  I refuse to go see War of the Worlds because Tom Cruise is an enormous tool.

Yes, I’ve seen the clips from the Oprah show.  He acted like a lunatic and I have no doubt pulling Katie Holmes from backstage was a publicity stunt.  Not only was he mad phony with his over-the-top affirmations but he was also brutally rough with poor Katie.  He grabbed her by the upper arms, thrashed her around a bit before literally shoving her on Oprah’s stage.  Oprah laughed along but her face turned to concern for a moment.  Why didn’t she say something?  She later described him as “gone,” whatever that means.   

[For a funny look at Tom "killing" Oprah, take a look here, courtesy of my friend Din.]

Then there was the access Hollywood interview with Billy Bush in which Cruise was smug and condescending.  He talks about wanting to save children from Psychology and all sorts of other voo-doo, science fiction, pseudo-religion crap and Billy has no idea what to do with it.  That show is supposed to be fluffy entertainment and Tom is psycho-serious with dire warnings.  Confucius says: one stops being entertaining when one thinks he is Ghandi.   

His reaction to the infamous squirting microphone prank solidified my opinion.  He could have been pissed and just walked away but he held the ‘reporter’s’ hand and wouldn’t let him leave and just kept repeating what a jerk the guy was.  Note to Tom, the people that get punked by Ashton Kucher and laugh about it with him find it helps their career.  Tom could have laughed or walked away looking like a victim.  Instead his diatribe was relentless and more humiliating than a little squirt in the face ever could be. 

Did you catch him on the Today Show?  What a jerk.  All Matt Lauer said was [paraphrased] ‘I know people that have used anti-depressants and said they helped.’  Tom then calls him “glib” and tells Matt he hasn’t done the research that the astute Dr. Cruise has done.  It’s one thing to disagree or want to get a point across.  It’s another thing entirely to, again, tout some weird anti-Psychology agenda when you’re supposed to be promoting a movie and to be down right insulting to the host for no reason.  What a douche bag.

I’m sure a lot of actors in Hollywood are rich assholes.  I’m sure a lot of them have fake relationships and treat underlings poorly.  But Tom is so upfront and nasty that I can no longer separate Tom Cruise the person from any of the characters he plays.  If Tom were facing down an alien in WOTW I would associate it too closely with that intense look he gave while proselytizing Billy Bush.  A lot of celebrities have big egos that could be credited for their fame in the first place.  But when you’re so self important that you elevate yourself to all knowing guru of a religion most people associate with Trekies, you’ve gone from ego maniac to just plain maniacal. 

Tom Cruise is famous because he’s good looking and has starred in lots of exciting movies.  His behavior lately makes him less attractive and the summer box office is a competitive field.  I hope the movie tanks.  I also hope poor Katie’s career recovers after she’s less advantageous to the sexually-vague Tom.  Remember his red hot love affair with Penelope Cruze?  That inexplicably fizzled after international promotion for Vanilla Sky ended.  Katie needs to politely decline Mr. Hyde’s proposal before she’s considered uncastable or one of her shoulders gets pulled out of socket.  There’s only so much movie promotion her poor little frame can take.   

A Horror Movie With Braaaaaains

[[Warning: spoilers everywhere]] This weekend I went to see the movie Dawn of the Dead. In it people are converted into bloodthirsty zombies after being bitten by other zombies. The zombiefication spreads quickly like a virus until zombies take over all of greater Milwaukee and, implied by the opening montage, the entire world. The plot follows a handful of lucky humans who somehow escape the feeding frenzy and hold off zombies by locking themselves in a shopping mall. Not wanting to sit and starve in a mall they craft a plan to drive armored buses through the zombies to a boat

The movie is pretty intense and I enjoyed it even though it was cliché start to finish. Every 10–15 minutes a character dies until only the main characters are left. At the end, just as the main characters are about to make it to safety, one of them reveals he too has been bitten and remains on the pier while others float away. Between the pit stop killings the plot skips along with barely an attempt to be plausible.

Zombies are just like rabid animals. They don’t think and they can’t drive cars or pilot planes. All they do is run you down and bite you. In the movie, the people survive because they’re in a locked mall. Zombies apparently can’t break down doors or take elevators. But, the rest of the city turns into zombies. Zombies even conquer a military base where people flee for safety. It’s absurd to think that the whole city would be overtaken. Plenty of people in highrise offices and apartment buildings would survive. At my office you have to have a special fob to get on the elevator and all staircases are locked. Zombies couldn’t get up here. At most apartment buildings the security is the same. The poor doorman might get bitten but that’s as far as it would go. In the circumstances presented the zombies manage to take over everywhere despite their limitations. Even if they could get up every building it is unlikely they’d be able to spread past an urban area. Between the suburbia surrounding major cities there are vast open areas of rural America. Zombies can’t drive. The ‘virus’ only passes orally so there’s no reason the military couldn’t contain the outbreak within a certain perameter. There’s absolutely no reason a military base with tanks and guns and bombs couldn’t defend itself if the locked doors of a shopping mall can prevent invasion.

The movie also missed plenty of opportunities for meaningful social commentary. The only thing the zombies do is run down people who aren’t zombies yet and bite them. They have no concern for their own well-being, emotions, or reasoning ability. They run. They attack. One could easily use the zombies as metaphors to single-minded, consumerist America. Buy buy buy bigger SUVs, more food till we’re too fat to fit in a seat on an airplane, success determined by possessions, etc. Nope. In the movie they just kill and no one tries to make a message out of it. My favorite exchange in the movie happens when the surviving humans stand on the roof of the mall and see rows of zombies meander to the parking lot. “Why are they coming here,” one character asks. Another answers, “I don’t know, instinct I guess.” Instinct compels mindless humans to a shopping mall? How accidentally poignant.

Zombies don’t really eat people either. If they ate people then when they attacked bodies would be devoured and there wouldn’t be so many zombies. Instead they just bite people and victims turn into more zombies. It seems that the driving compulsion of zombies is not human flesh but replication. Do humans use violence from wars to bar fights just for blood or do we resort to violence primarily to make other people more like us? Don’t ask questions. The blonde girl is being dismembered by a chainsaw!

I know punching holes in plots takes away from the fun of the bloodbath. I know social commentary is not the point of horror. I know by choosing to go see a zombie movie I agree to suspend my disbelief to a ridiculous degree and abandon all hope of art commenting on life. But I wish I didn’t have to. To me the most enjoyable parts of the movie showed officials in press conferences unsure how to handle the zombie problem. The opening includes images of zombies overtaking the lawn of the White House. The breakdown of society is infinitely more disturbing than an individual attack. This is all dismissed as background but I would love to see a horror movie where elements like these are successfully incorporated. Most movies in the genre are like pornos. Violent killings, like animalistic sex, satisfy something basic in us and the “plot” around these parts is filler for atmosphere. What I would like to see is a movie that combines an improbable problem like zombies in a fully believable setting. How would police, military, media, churches, schools, families, and government officials respond to people rapidly changing into the undead? More importantly, how would individuals (complex characters with full identities) respond? I would love a movie that combines the visceral fear of being eaten with the modern complexities of organized society and human relationships. Cognitive horror is the rarest of cinematic gems. If I could relate to a single character or envision living in their world Dawn of the Dead would successfully frighten me. The product now just made me uneasy and somewhat humored. The only thing frightening was the $20 I spent on parking, a ticket, and a slurpee at the theater.