The Real World: A New Day

Today begins a new day, with the Son about to rise on the steps of the Capitol. Hope abounds as people be gettin' inaugured.

Apparently, we're now in a post-racial society, or so some at CNN would venture to hint towards.

The National Mall is packed. Millions watch in D.C.

John Cusack gets interviewed. Ben Affleck was apparently going to camp out.

I am really excited, or as semi-defunct blogger Peter Johanson kept exclaiming Sunday, "I've got inauguration fever!" Come get some. Unfortunately, I do not have time (and, arguably, skill) to wax poetical.

Tube Steak: Encouraging News

So apparently "Friday Night Lights" premiered with encouraging numbers. This is somewhat shocking because the entire season has already played on DirecTV's TV101 as part of their split-production-cost deal they cut with NBC Universal. Obviously, not everyone has DirecTV as their cable/satellite provider, but it was expected to cut into the potential ratings of the show, yet it was 300,000 viewers from second place in its time slot, and its viewership is not exactly the kind that is in the house on Friday nights.

I did see almost this whole season (shit got messed up with the DVR) and it was pretty good, relative shortness notwithstanding.

Man on Film: Hilarious Crying, etc.

Obviously, Forgetting Sarah Marshall relies far more upon awkward moments for its comedy than most American-made fare, but I'm not sure I've laughed as much at one character's tears than I have at Peter's tears. Perhaps, the most hilarious non-nude crying laughing I derive is from the scene in which Peter breaks into a sobbing fit while playing the theme from "The Muppet Show". Fucking hilarious.

On an sort of unrelated note, I hope Paul Rudd is as happy as I am about the Scott Pioli hire.

I would also like to reiterate how hot Mila Kunis is in FSM which is weird because I never thought she was superhot in "That 70's Show" but now?... Maybe she just had to separate herself from the role by playing a serial killer to shed the burden of being associated with a character in a long-running series.

Someone somewhere is saying something about a "Veronica Mars" movie. That would be neat.

Man on Film: Gran Torino

I'm not sure I laughed harder while watching a film this past year (yes, I'm talking Oscar years, not calendar years) than I did while enjoying Gran Torino. I loved Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express, but I may have actually laughed more at Gran Torino. And I was not laughing at the film--I think--I was laughing with it. This may have been the most unexpected movie chocked full of hilarity that I could possibly have imagined.

Maybe it is my own curmudgeonly person or a deep-seeded desire to cross over the lines of political correctness at every turn, but I thought the tale of Walter Kowalski--a recently widower-ed veteran of the Korean War and retired Ford plant worker who simply goes through life being, well, hilariously insensitive to people of all backgrounds--was a laugh riot. And it wasn't only me. The entire theater was laughing their asses off. And yes, Clint Eastwood directed it.

Now exclaiming from a mountaintop that this film's strength is in its comedy may seem reductive, and I would hate to come across as dismissive of the other merits of the film. It does hit its dramatic marks. It is shot like an Eastwood film. It does have its typical Eastwood-directed-film ending.

The difference here is that the film actually works. His other films taking place in contemporary settings of late have not worked for me. I hated Mystic River. The shot that killed that film for me was the overhead crane shot of Sean Penn in the animal pit over his daughter's body. The sudden Linney Lady-MacBeth-turn in the coda was absolutely infuriating to me. There were so many tonal issues I had with Mystic River that I grew angry with its shortcomings. Million Dollar Baby was a ridiculous feel-good euthanasia movie that just didn't work well enough to get me to like it.

I loved Gran Torino, though, and I am not easily won over by directors who have wasted my time in the past. To say too much would be to give away much of a fairly simple plot. But a simple plot is not necessarily a bad thing, and this film is a late-life discovery of another world and about finding family in the most unlikely of places--and it is hilarious. Shockingly.

Man on Film: The Wrestler

If there is one thing Darren Aronofsky is capable of, it is leaving his audience in a worse state than they were when they walked into the theater. His methods may not always fire on all cylinders (see: The Fountain), but his films taking place in a contemporary setting have been engrossing even if they are not exceedingly re-watchable. I mean, I loved Requiem for a Dream, but I don't sit down to re-watch it annually. The Wrestler while still sharing rarefied air with Requiem comes as close as Aronofsky has come to making a re-watchable film.

For starters, Mickey Rourke is every bit as good as the myriad accolades his turn at Randy "The Ram" Robinson have said he is. To further add to them would be fairly redundant. It was "the role he was born to play". Evan Rachel Wood was serviceable, which is a compliment from me because hers was a better performance than I thought she was capable of. Her Oscar-nominated turn as Tracy Freeland in Thirteen was one of the most undeserved nominations in recent memory, right up there with anything Juno ended up getting nominated for. In The Wrestler, there was only one moment (in her last scene) where I grimaced at how she spat out a line. In the I-can't-believe-she's-still-this-hot department, Marisa Tomei is in the midst of a respectable comeback. No matter how Aronofsky and crew lit her, she looked pretty spectacular and her late-career commitment to showing off her fantastic body is definitely a positive cinematic development.

As for the film itself, aside from a brief moment towards the end of the film where I thought I was watching an unofficialy sequel to Untamed Heart in which Tomei's Caroline had become a stripper in New Jersey only to fall for another guy with a bad heart, it worked on nearly every level. As far as tales in which the protagonist is a flawed but sympathetic character used and discarded by a society that no longer has a place for him are concerned, this film had enough heart and humor to steer it away from being exceedingly depressing. To say much more, especially this early into its release would be too telling, so I'll stop here. It is certainly worth seeing, if only to have a context for this.

Diversions: Bacon

So the best cook I have ever met in my life just sent me an email that contained perhaps the greatest thing in the history of time. Now when I call him "the best cook I have ever met in my life", I do not want to be misunderstood. This is not some fey chef who sets his tiny little creations on a plate with three-quarters of the plate being open space.

No, this man does not fuck around when it comes to food.

Hell, the reason our friendship began was because he happened to be at the counter where I was working at the time--a place I shall never again mention in this blog--while I was talking about how Mark, Chad, and I had gotten drunk on untold pounds of bacon and brats fried in the bacon grease and then stuffed and wrapped in bacon the night before while watching Burt Reynolds films. This was a story that impressed him, which obviously means that this man is a man's man.

The meat he cooks is otherworldly. By otherworldly, I mean that he will salt-cure a pork shank for six days and then smoke it for six hours, and his prodigious gifts yield the most absurdly outstanding meaty goodness that to go back to other meat is a tragedy that knows no words. He candies bacon. He whips up stews that explode in your mouth, fill your stomach, yet do not do insane damage to your lower gastrointestinal tract. This man is a demigod.

So, the email I received today--after stopping by where he worked to pick up a bit of perhaps the best bacon I have ever had in my life--contained this link, followed by the apt line: best use of bacon ever.

Rediscovering the Past: Hiding Out

In an effort to bring a sense of direction to the inherent ramble that any product of my mind is going to be hampered with, I am going to try to re-brand (or more precisely, brand) this something that more closely resembles thematic unity. This will mark the first such foray into the scary world of focus. In any entry bearing the first three words listed above, you can expect to find me delving--in the manner of a modern Christopher Columbus--into the realm of the previously discovered, as if it were new and exciting.

In this edition, the subject will be Hiding Out. For those of you not familiar with the film, it is the product of a better time. A time in which studios cast Jon Cryer in the lead in not one, but two films. That time was 1987.

Now, I feel I should clarify. I do not want that statement to be read as though I believe Jon Cryer should never have been cast as the lead in films. My beliefs stray as far from that assertion as you could imagine. I prefer Predator 2 to Predator for the precise reason that it is a Danny Glover star vehicle. I love Action Jackson because it stars the man studios decided was a supporting cast member in action films. The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up work in their own respects largely because the Jon Cryers of this generation were entrusted to star in films, not complement the "stars". Sadly, these films are much more the exception than the rule these days.

In 1987, though, things were different. Things were better. Studios were bolder. Jon Cryer was handed the reins to two films: Dudes and Hiding Out. To get an idea as to what that might mean here is a link to the trailer (embedding disabled by request... bastards) for Hiding Out.

As for the film, it is the story of a stockbroker, Andrew Morenski, who ends up knowing too much and is forced to testify against a mob boss. Luckily for the viewer, the mob tries to take him out, leading to Cryer's Andrew going into hiding in a small midwestern town with his cousin (the inimitable Keith Coogan) and posing as a high school student under the pseudonym, Maxwell Houser--lifted from a coffee can in the principal's office. Needless to say, this is a recipe for an awesome fucking movie.

While the story is pretty fucking sweet in the best way possible, there are a couple of weird things going on in the movie that are frankly disturbing.

First, in the film's opening Jon Cryer has a beard. It does not look, well, real. Once he goes on the run, he decides to ditch the beard and the stockbroker hair for an odd dye-job (if you didn't watch that trailer, this is where you'll want to so you can see it in motion) that creates a hair-do rivaling his coiffure as Ducky in Pretty in Pink.


Second, this twenty-something stockbroker, when hiding out, falls for a high school senior played by Annabeth Gish. Of course it is perfectly natural to need to insert a love interest for our hero, but someone decided that Hiding Out needed to become a platform through which the filmmakers could sell the acceptability of statutory rape to those fabled residents of Peoria. I'm not blaming Jon Cryer here. He's beyond reproach. These filmmakers, however, seem to have had a hidden agenda...

As perhaps the only good personal post-script I will ever have on this website, about three weeks after I watched Hiding Out I ran into Jon Cryer. Not being able to pass up the opportunity, the following exchange (paraphrased very slightly) took place:

me: So, I actually just watched Hiding Out a couple of weeks ago.
JC: Really? That's one I haven't thought about in a while. Was it on cable?
me: No. I rented it.
JC: Oh... Sorry.
me: No. It was fun. I mean I wasn't expecting Citizen Kane, but it was fun. I liked it.

Man on Film: Synechdoche, New York

Call me lazy, but I really don't know that I can actually write a review of this film.

Simply said, "Synecdoche" should be seen if only so that you can make your own judgment on the film.

I personally liked it, but by the end I was completely emotionally and mentally drained. I still don't feel like I have completely wrapped my head around it. I'm not entirely sure that five more viewings would change that.

It is completely unlike anything I can think of, and it's a helluva trip into the neurotically warped mind of Charlie Kaufman. But it is not an easy watch.

I did get the sense early on that upon having his first trauma to his head that the film might be going into a dream realm, but there was little to no evidence to support that by the end of the film past the growing sense of surreal neurosis that began to envelop the film.

I really think I am just not smart enough to decipher the film's meaning upon one viewing.

Man on Film: Valkyrie

While I could expound upon this film's inadequacies for hours, its lack of worth does not warrant such effort on my part.

First off, I was not excited about seeing this film. I did not want to see it. It was not my choice. I went because others wanted to see it to use a gift card. Maybe I was in the wrong frame of mind.

I do not think that is the case.

Past the art direction and production design, there was simply little to like about this film.

The average moviegoer probably knows how this film is going to end. Hitler commits suicide in his bunker in Berlin as Allied Forces close in. There is not a successful assassination by German officers. So if one is equipped with even the most basic knowledge of World War II, the film better be insanely entertaining/captivating/interesting for Valkyrie to actually work.

Guess what?

None of those things are the case. The attention to detail in establishing the period is there. What they forgot was a script that told a compelling tale with fleshed out and complex characters and a lead who was capable of acting. The only times Tom Cruise has been even remotely interesting was when he was essentially lampooning his own celebrity, like in Magnolia or this year's Tropic Thunder. In Valkyrie, we are treated to Tom Cruise in WWII in a German uniform. Barring voice-over German over the first 30 seconds of the film, this is Tom Cruise with his American accent acting alongside an almost entirely British cast. It could be worse, I suppose--we could have been subjected to Harrison Ford's K-19: The Widowmaker* Russian accent--but the under-estimation of the intelligence of the audience (which is at least inherent from the studio/production side of the equation) in films like this always strikes me as extremely lazy. Sure, Americans managed to elect George W. Bush twice, but are that many of them actually going to go out and see a movie portraying sympathetic Nazis anyway? Know your demographic, dicks. But back to the point, Cruise is leaden. His attempts at imbuing his character with intensity simply come across as lame. His delivery of his admittedly weak dialogue is wooden at best, inflected with little affective emotion. The actions of his character could even potentially be moving in the hands of a skilled actor, but Tom Cruise is not that.

Past Cruise's shortcomings, the film is still not good. The other actors are given little to work with. Kenneth Branagh, who I usually like, is underutilized to criminal lengths. Bill Nighy plays the heel to adequate effect but is still working from an underwritten standpoint. Tom Wilkinson is given little to work with and, honestly, at times it seems as though even he was mailing it in.

The only interesting aspect of the film past aesthetics is that of the relationship between General Fromm and his Aryan underling, and that is only because of the seemingly implied homosexual longing that his assistant has for him when Fromm is under arrest. The looks of longing are at least comical.

Clearly, I was not impressed with this film.

Welcome to 2009

We're only a couple weeks away from an entirely new era* for the United States of America. We're only a few weeks from a new Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band album. A little later, and there will be a new Jason Isbell album as well. The Wrestler will start opening wider. The actual good movies and not the lame pre-Christmas schmaltz will start coming out. "House" moves to Mondays. New episodes of "Flight of the Conchords" will soon begin airing. It will be increasingly difficult to avoid "The United States of Tara", which despite the involvement of John Corbett (who I like, and from what I've heard is a nice guy), looks insanely bad.

*I write enough about baseball that I reflexively capitalized 'era'. Huh.

Be prepared.