Tedious Action Director Takes To The Stars

The Internet went agog last week at the announcement that J.J. Abrams has been handed the reigns to the Star Wars franchise. This is the sort of insane power grab that, if the territory in question were Western Europe, might cause a second War of the Spanish Succession. Instead, it just produced a lot of nerd-blather. I blathered alongside:

It was announced yesterday that J.J. Abrams has been chosen to helm the as-yet untitled Star Wars sequel, providing unneeded confirmation that no one in Hollywood has any imagination. For those who don’t track these sorts of things, Abrams is also the man behind the recent Star Trekreboot, and is directing the dismally titled Star Trek Into Darkness, which will be loosed upon the unsuspecting public in May. Many nerd outlets have taken issue with the thought of so much dork-power being handed over to one man. In the science fiction universe, the swashbuckling fun of Star Wars has always been balanced by the sobriety of Star Trek—a set-up that ensured harmony throughout the fictional stars. Yesterday’s announcement is tantamount to the dissolution of the Senate by Caesar—or Emperor Palpatine, for that matter.

Something about science fiction just makes me hungry for senseless historical allusions. There's much more—read on.

Lee Marvin, Who Loved Beer And Hated His Dog

I wasted a healthy chunk of the morning reading a decades-old profile of Lee Marvin by Roger Ebert. It was so good that I had to blog about it. To give myself an excuse for writing about something that happened long before I was born—like I ever needed an excuse before—I pegged it to that abysmal Megan Fox profile that was so mocked last week. How the Esquire has fallen.

The late ’60s and early ’70s were the golden age of reporters following famous people around and writing down embarrassing things they said. “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” is the most famous of these bits of postmodern journalism, and as well-known as it is, it is always worth another read. Nearly five decades after its publication, the celebrity profile is at a low ebb, torn between two forces: the journalist’s ego, and the star’s image control. In 2013, the journalist is never strong enough to pull rank on the star.

That tension is what led us to last week’s abominable Esquire profile of Megan Fox. The highlight is the lede, a half-witted description of ancient Aztec rituals that we excerpted here. That the 250 word digression on ancient Aztec sacrifices is too long to print in full is a testament to the fact that it is too long. But more than overlong, I think it’s easy to make a case for it as the worst lede of January.

But forget that nonsense that I wrote. Let's luxuriate in a bit of this magnificent Lee Marvin profile:

Marvin sighed, got up, and walked out to the porch. The air was heavy with fog. 

"That goddamn buoy," he said. Just down from his stretch of beach, a buoy stood in the sand. "It floated in one morning and they stuck it up there. It's on their property. Christ, I hate the sight of it, but I can't do anything about it. It looks like a phallic symbol. Hell, it is a phallic symbol. You get up in the morning and come out here and there's that goddamn buoy staring you in the face." 

He yawned. Down on the beach, a setter ran howling at a flock of birds. There was a chill this Saturday morning, and sounds were curiously muffled. Marvin peered out to sea. "Is that Jennifer Jones coming in on the surf?" he said "No? Good." 

The whole thing just makes me want to watch Cat Ballou again:

From the 1965 movie "Cat Ballou". All the music clips of Nat & Stubby joined together.

I Guess This Means 'Mad Men: Wales' Is Out

Banning smoking in public places did not start with Mayor Mike. Ireland was the first place I remember reading about a smoking band, and the trend soon spread to the rest of the British Isles. Wales jumped on board in 2007, banning smoking in "enclosed and substantially enclosed" public places. Presumably that means that my freelancer's shanty, which is substantially enclosed against the wind and cold, would be a no go.

Such bans are common worldwide, but Wales has taken the enforcement one step farther, banning actors from lighting up on period film sets—a prohibition that, BBC Wales says, is a big pain in the ass. For shows like the revamped Upstairs Downstairs, , scenes featuring cigarettes must be shot in far-away England, where everything is much more expensive. Casualty was forced to drop a storyline in which a dropped cigarette set a hotel on fire, because doing it in a country where they use Ls sensibly proved too expensive. They go on:

The current legislation in Wales makes it impossible to film a lit cigarette as part of a scene. This is problematic for period dramas, which often feature cigarettes as a fact of period life. It is especially difficult to truthfully capture big, emotional moments in close-up shots, where fake cigarettes or CGI don’t create an honest effect.

By fake cigarettes, I assume they mean the herbal ones used on stage and in shows like Mad Men? I've watched a lot of people smoke, on film and in real life, and have never found Don Draper's Old Gold's to be anything but realistic. Though non-addictive, they're not much better for you than regular cigarettes, and the pains of doing take after take drawing smoke into your lungs must take its toll. What's more, they're awful to smoke. In an Esquire interview a couple of years ago, John Slattery called them "Terrible."

"They're like smoking sand," he said. "You take a drag and you've got half the cigarette in your mouth and half on your pants. You're trying to act smooth and you're on fire!"

Or has Wales said no to those as well?

The BBC complaint is especially interesting to a yank, who imagines the BBC to be more beholden to the government than they actually are. They're right to complain about the ban. I'm all for keeping smoking out of public places—although I sometimes wonder if bars shouldn't be allowed to choose—but for god's sake, it's a film set! People know it isn't real!

As far as theater goes, I assume this means that Welsh audiences have been treated to five years of actors picking cigarettes up, holding them for a minute, and putting them back down. I always find smoking on stage a bit distracting. Actors have so much other things to do that it's almost impossible to smoke naturally. Whenever a Broadway actor lights up, all I can think is, "Boy, I bet he doesn't smoke in real life. Those vocal chords are valuable!" That said, period productions need a certain blue smoke haze. Grow up, Wales. Let our actors smoke.

Farewell, Liz Lemon, You're Breaking My Heart

30 Rock is over in two weeks. The sitcom won't survive January, top medical sources suggest. I got myself all caught up today, and it made me really sad, so I wrote a post about the last time the TV schedule was perfect. It's been a while.

2007 was a good year for TV. Battlestar was in its heyday. 30 Rock had found its footing. Mad Men and Breaking Bad blew my mind every week. Even better, the scheduling of those four shows meant that one of them was airing new episodes at any given time. There was always something to look forward to, and for two years, there were no dead spots.

Watching television week-to-week is more important to me than it is to most people. I have never gone in for binge-watching. It’s so rare to find a show to love—I don’t see the point in burning through it in in a weekend. Two days of pleasure is nothing compared to the anticipation that comes when a show is red-hot, and you have to wait for it to air. That’s seven days of impatience, anxiety and joy—all from 22 or 44 minutes of programming. I call that getting your money’s worth.

Read the rest. Don't blame me when your keyboard is ruined by tears.

The Girl Who Got Screwed By Manhattan

In the giddy, sleepless weeks and months that preceded the premiere of The Carrie Diaries, I could not decide if I was excited because the show would be awful, or because I held out secret hope that it might be good. I've always had a soft spot for Sex & The City, and was  thought of young Carrie Bradshaw running around in the '80s, swimming in booze, embalming herself in cocaine, and pushing through her hangovers to turn her math homework in on time.

What can I say, I love '80s sleaze. Last week, just to get a fix, I subjected myself to the relentlessly average Alphabet City, a stylish "thriller" with no script to speak of. It would have been nice if The Carrie Diaries were 10% this grungy, but I didn't really have high hopes. As it turns out, what little I had were dashed on the rocks.

When Sex & The City was big, I was in high school. If I’d been living in New York, the show may have left the same sour taste in my mouth that Girls does, with the mention of Sarah Jessica Parker. Instead, the show was exotic. The wilder girls watched it with their mothers, leading to (I imagined) frank discussions about sex and the consumption (gasp!) of white wine. High school was innocent; the show was not. Filthy, knowing and occasionally brilliant, it was something to aspire to.

The Carrie Diaries is not.

The premise of this half-baked prequel intrigued me: high school Carrie makes mischief in 1984 New York—the last days of decadence, when Brooklyn was but a whisper and cocaine was king. The version of The Carrie Diaries that I imagined—not knowing the source material, mind—was dirty and dangerous, with Carrie misbehaving, making mistakes, and washing up like hungover flotsam on the shores of every famous touchstone of 80′s nightlife. In the first episode, we get a glimpse at Indochine, but there is not a whiff of Bolivian marching powder in sight. This New York will never give Carrie a chance to make bad decisions. Oh well.

More at Bullett.

One thing The Carrie Diaries made me realize is that, although Girls irritates me, I'm happy it's out there, being honest about the fact that post-teenage life is embarrassing, sleazy and weird. Teenagers need that to aspire to.

The Most Perfectly Tedious Moment Ever Filmed

As a child, I wondered why no one in the movies ever had to go to the bathroom. When suiting up to fight crime, Batman never tells Robin, "Now, kid, go now, because we're not going to have time later—and you know how hard it is to unzip these codpieces." Ecto-1 was never delayed because one of the Ghostbusters—probably Venkman—misplaced the keys. There are no scenes in Wayne's World of Wayne wandering around his kitchen, murmuring that he was hungry but unsure of what to eat.

There are certain things, I realized later, that are too boring to film. Everyone besides Peter Jackson knows this. Well, everybody besides Peter Jackson and, apparently, Bret Easton Ellis.

"It's not The Hills... THE CANYONS is a contemporary L.A. noir from director Paul Schrader, writer Bret Easton Ellis, and producer Braxton Pope about the dangers of sexual obsession and ambition, both personally and professionally, among a group of young people in their 20's and how one chance meeting connected to the past unravels all of their lives, resulting in deceit, paranoia, cruel mind games and ultimately violence."

There are a lot of things amazing about this preview clip from The Canyons, the Ellis-written, Paul Schrader-directed "star vehicle" that will be the next car to plow into the infinite-car pileup that is Lindsey Lohan's career. The Observer's Drew Grant chooses to focus on Lohan's apparent inability to act with props. Fair point—the way she knocks over that water bottle is truly puzzling. Other items to note:

• James Deen is a more natural actor than Lindsey Lohan.
• The dialogue in this film was either lazily improvised or lazily written.
• Lindsey Lohan does not look good.

I could come up with some nasty metaphors about the degree to which she does not look good, but that would be cruel, and I'm not here to pick on Lindsey. I'm here to make fun of this script.

This is a two and a half minute sequence about somebody trying to find her cellphone. This happens to all of us. Your phone has been mislain. You ask someone to call it for you, or, if you own a landline, you dial the number yourself. You look around for it. You listen to the receiver to see if it's ringing. You wonder how long the delay will be between when you hear it ringing in the receiver, and when you hear it in real life. You wonder if you left it on vibrate. You find your phone. Or you don't.

Every moment of this is dramatized, thanks to the dramatic powers of Schrader & Ellis. Not just dramatized, but lingered over, the way a good film might linger over something interesting. But this is not interesting, and boy oh boy, this is not good.

At the end there's a bit of yelling, a bit of violence, that suggests that while Lindsey was searching for her phone, there was supposed to be some tension. In context, maybe there would be. But to release this as a preview clip, to suggest that this is the most tantalizing moment of the film, well...I suppose I did just write a couple hundred words about it.

You know what? I'm onboard. Consider me tantalized. But if this movie is just meant to troll—if it's supposed  to be tedious—then it has already lost. Nothing in The Canyons could possibly match the wonderful stupidity of Lindsey Lohan's masterwork: the scene in I Know Who Killed Me when her bionic leg dies because she forgot to charge its battery. That's what I called filmmaking. That's what I call Lohantacular.

"You Don't Throw Oranges On An Escalator!"

The best movie I've seen in this young year might be California Split, a bit of minor Altman which was much better than I expected. I jibber-jabbed a little about it here.

Why is California Split the finest poker movie of all time? Because it doesn’t have any poker. That’s not a koan; it’s the truth. Portraying games on film is always a tricky business. Every sports movie has to end with The Big Game—there’s almost no way around it—and when the outcome of the story must be either “good guys win” or “good guys lose,” the screenwriter is in dangerous waters. This is why most sports movies suck, and why the few that transcend their genre are among the greatest films of all time. To wit: Bad News Bears.

(Thankfully, not every portly child athlete is so difficult to like. This kid, for instance, is amazing.)

Gambling movies should have an easier time of it. In gambling, it’s not just win or lose. You can win big or small. You can lose a little or you can lose your legs. It’s a world of possibilities. And yet, there are almost no good movies about gamblers. The best racetrack movie is The Killing, a Stanley Kubrick casino picture. The best casino movie is either a mob movie (Casino), a heist movie (Ocean’s Eleven) or a romantic comedy (The Cooler). And until yesterday, I was convinced that there is not a single good movie about playing cards. Thankfully, Bill Paxton set me straight.

As usual, there's much more over at Bullett. Two wonderful bits I didn't get to:

• Elliott Gould offends a woman at the track, making her so angry that, when he tries to leave down an escalator, she hurls the contents of her purse at him—including a few heavy looking oranges.
• Gould hustles a bunch of teenagers at pick-up basketball, huffing and puffing his way through the first game—to "Sweet Georgia Brown," naturally—before betting them $50 in a game of one-on-one. He shoots eleven straight baskets, and blows the kids' money at the track.  

Basically, I can watch Elliott Gould do anything.

War Crimes of Hollywood: The 200 Minute Movie

Because I am a cranky old crankypants, I wrote a screed about how movies have gotten, on average, too long. Because I am a lazy young lazypants, I have not yet done the research to confirm this fact. If someone wants to apply for a $300,000 grant in my name and do the lobbying necessary to make sure I receive it, I'll make a spreadsheet and do some math. For now, we're going to have to go with my gut reaction that The Hobbit, a 300 page children's novel, does not need to be a nine hour, three part film.

You couldn’t pay me to see Lincoln. It’s not the subject matter—I’m an avowed abolitionist. It’s not the casting—I like Daniel Day-Lewis nearly as much as I dislike slavery. It’s not that I can’t handle period pieces—in fact, I find that they offer the best chance one has of seeing a heaving bosom. It’s the running time, plain and simple. I believe firmly, as a matter of public policy, that a movie studio should require a special dispensation from the president to make a film longer than two hours. And Lincoln, no matter how cozy Spielberg may be with his title character’s ghost, does not deserve a presidential thumbs up.

I’m not the first to observe that this year’s Oscar crop is especially long, but it’s possible that I’m the most irritated by it. The Hobbit is 2:46 minutes. Les Mis is 2:30. Zero Dark Thirty is 2:40. When did the average length of a motion picture jump from 90 minutes to 150? When did Hollywood decide that I have an attention span?

Read on, sucker!

Wait, no, you're not a sucker. You're a good guy.

As my buddy Nate pointed out—on Twitter!—overblown Oscar bait movies have been around forever. Cleopatra and Gone With The Wind, say, clock in at 192 and 238 minutes. Most classic musicals run around 2:30, as do a lot of the most famous World War II movies. And the other day I read that the average runtime in India is about 150 minutes. (Not sure if that's bumped up by Bollywood's love of musicals.)

The real loss, Nate points out, isn't that directors of prestige pictures aren't editing themselves, but that the movie studios are essentially making nothing but Lincoln or The Avengers. The B picture is long dead, and Hollywood is the worse for it. This is why, when a 93 minute barnstormer like Taken is released, everybody freaks out. There should be ten Takens made a year, and we should only be subjected to one Lincoln at a time.

The Half-Baked Spring Preview You've Been Waiting For

There are plenty of awful things about January, but it's not all bad. As we stagger across the hellish waste that is the first month of 2013, there are plenty of things to look forward to. More specifically, there are four.

Once, summer was dead. Heat choked New York City, forcing culture-consuming citizens to flee boiling theaters for polo grounds of the Hamptons or the sideshows of Coney Island. Even after air conditioning made culture possible year-round, the arts have never really given up the summer break. Opera is strictly a cold-weather pursuit. Almost no Broadway plays dare risk a July opening. Until cable TV upended the schedule, summertime on the tube meant reruns, game shows and more reruns. Even film, which feasts on summertime, follows its own nine month schedule, with January, February and March serving as the dead period.

There is something reassuring about all this. How nice it is, at season’s end, to look back over the last nine months and remember when it all began. To rank your favorites, to remember the worst of the bunch, to mourn those plays or television shows that closed before their time. But even better is to be where we are now—in the middle of it all. The holidays, thank God, are behind us, and the next great wave of new stuff is about to hit. We have new plays, new operas, new TV shows, and the worst movies we will see until August. Some of it will be worth remembering—most of it will be trash. In either case, this is what I’m looking forward to loving or hating, across four formats—because in 2013, all culture is the same, so long as it’s longer than 140 characters.

But what are they, you ask? Bwahahahahahahahahaha. You have to click on it to see.

Now Is Your Chance To Think About James Bond

Continuing my tradition of breaking news harder than any other typist in New York City, I have cracked open an early candidate for scoop of the year.

Spy books are awesome.

Zero Dark Thirty goes into wide release next week, and viewers across the country can expect something that has been lacking from this year’s Oscar season: a movie with some meat on its bones. In terms of running time, that’s a bad thing. No movie has any right to be 160 minutes long. But in terms of storytelling, it’s a positive. This is a war movie that doesn’t hold your hand. Its first two hours are obsessed with the grit of intelligence gathering, and shot through with lingo that will be incomprehensible to all but the most devoted viewers of Homeland. But even when it’s difficult to follow, the film has two things that carry the viewer through: a strong central character, and a touch of authenticity that is, in espionage thrillers, impossible to do without.

Nobody else is telling espionage stories this compelling. For its feverish, brilliant first season, Homeland had this. But by the end of season two, the tension was gone, and the authenticity followed soon after. Skyfall was as gritty as any James Bond film since The Living Daylights, but the villain’s absurd plan meant that it was, when the credits rolled, just a very good Bond movie. For those who like their spies cold, their villains believable, and their armories gadget-free, may I suggest turning to the golden age of espionage: the Cold War.

If you are positively nauseous with boredom, here are three books that can help.