With Burn after Reading mere weeks away (Sept. 12, in fact), the brothers Coen cast their next flick, A Serious Man, with relative unknown Michael Stuhlbarg in the title role and Spin City‘s Richard Kind along for the ride as a deadbeat brother. As noted here, Serious involves “a Jewish college professor in the Midwest during the 1960s [who] seeks to solve his existential issues from men of God.” Sounds like serious business.
Month: August 2008
Thunder Rolls.
When it comes to penning movie reviews around here, I tend to find writing about comedies the most difficult. (See, for example, my original mulligan on Borat.) For one, it’s hard to quantify exactly what makes a picture *funny*, and often what one person finds uproarious, another finds on the wrong side of lame. (Although I’m sure all right-thinking people can agree on the merits of The Big Lebowski.) For another, comedy more than any other genre seems dependent on one’s mood. (Case in point, Anchorman, which I saw in a funk and shrugged at, then caught later on TV and found quite amusing)
All of which is to say that, even more than usual, my thoughts on Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder should be taken with a grain of salt — Actual results may vary. For my part, even though both Stiller and Jack Black were basically doing their usual schtick, and Steve Coogan is pretty much wasted (in more ways than one), I found Thunder to be a decently funny experience last Wednesday. It’s got a bit of the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach, and some jokes — say, Tom Cruise gyrating in a Harvey Weinstein fat suit — end up getting run into the ground through overuse, Austin Powers-style. But, that being said, I had a good time. It helped that I’m a sucker for the sort of Hollywood inside-baseball humor that Thunder endlessly trafficks in. (IMHO, that’s also the only redeemable thing about HBO’s otherwise aggravating Entourage.) And there are elements of it that just appealed to my funny bone — seeing Nick Nolte finally get all Chris Walken up on us, for example, or the funny-’cause-they’re-tired ‘Nam-era ditties (Creedence, Rolling Stone, Buffalo Springfield) interspersed throughout the flick. So, I’m not going to say it was the best film of the year or anything, but as a diverting and amusing morsel of late-summer fare, Tropic Thunder gets the job done…for me anyway.
The story, as you probably know, involves a behind-the-scenes look at an Apocalypse Now-level movie disaster deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia. After a few wry trailers (the funniest and most dead-on being Satan’s Alley, although I’d have hated to be Eddie Murphy during The Fatties 2), we’re introduced to the gang on hand. There’s fading action star Tugg Speedman (Stiller, being Stiller), drug-addled comedian Jeff Portnoy (Black, going for Farley/Belushi and ending up with Black), Aussie thespian Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr, weirdly genius), hip-hop phenom Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson, used mainly to cover Downey’s ass), and newbie Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel, late of the Apatow factory), all under the supervision of video director Damien Cockburn (Coogan). Once the film ends up a month behind schedule (three days into filming), the who’s-more-grizzled source material for this ‘Nam picture, Four-Leaf Tayback (Nolte), insists Cockburn bring his bevy of spoiled stars into “the s**t.” Well, things go wrong, of course. And, soon, stranded somewhere near the Laotian border without even a Tivo on hand, this cast of thespians — only some of whom seem to understand the trouble they’re in — must navigate and negotiate their way back to SoCal-style civilization…but not before ticking off the local drug cartel, living out the inexorable men-on-a-mission tropes, and, just possibly, making a decent 80’s-style actioner in the process.
The aspect of Tropic Thunder which *originally* was drawing the most heat is Downey, Jr.’s resurrection of one of Hollywood’s darker stains in its past, blackface. (Controversy has since moved on to the portrayal of mentally handicapped people in the film-within-the-film Simple Jack, which, to my mind, is patently absurd. Watch Forrest Gump or Rain Man again sometime and you should get the point.) At any rate, surprisingly given the poor taste involved in reviving minstrelsy in any form, I thought Downey and the writers actually pulled it off. This is mainly thanks to the incredulity of Jackson’s Alpa Chino to most of Downey’s racist tics, such as reveling in crawfish, gumbo, and the like. All in all, I’d say David Roediger should be proud: Downey and the Tropic Thunder team managed to make their blackface routine a comment about the enduring racist foibles of white people (and the supreme actorly ego of Russell Crowe-type Method men) more than anything else, and thus help to subvert black stereotypes by drawing attention to them. (Of course, one irony here, at least from Spike Lee’s perspective, is that Jackson’s “Alpa Chino/Booty Sweat” act could be construed as even more minstrel-ish than Downey’s role.) In any case, it was a high-wire tightrope act for Downey to pull off, and the fact that his performance has elicited so little controversy suggests how well he pulled it off. (In fact, the five minutes where Downey pretends to be Asian, and pretty much just chop-sockey’s it up rather embarrassingly, illustrates how badly this could’ve gone, and how much we’ve still got to work on.)
Saakashvili’s Fatal Blunder.
“How could Saakashvili have made such a catastrophic misjudgment? The answer is that he stepped into an elephant trap set for him by Russia. Moscow-backed Ossetian rebels had been provoking the Georgians for weeks with artillery attacks and raids. Saakashvili took the bait. He sent in his army for an all-out grab. But the Georgian offensive gave Russia just the excuse it needed to send troops and tanks into Ossetia. More importantly, the fact that Georgia launched the first attack has robbed Saakashvili of the moral high ground…Russia has once again proved itself a master of the brutal art of colonial politics.”
As Russian President Medvedev announces he is halting military operations (although, apparently, not quite yet), the Daily Mail‘s Owen Matthews explains what’s happened in Georgia…and what’s at stake. “The only non-Russian controlled oil pipeline from Central Asia and the Caucasus runs from Azerbaijan through Georgian territory to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan…It is too late for Russia to do anything to stop the existing pipelines — but a destabilised Georgia would doubtless undermine Western confidence in non-Russian gas supplies…[In addition] It’s impossible that NATO will accept Georgia as a member as long as its rebel regions are occupied by Russian troops – so in invading South Ossetia, Russia has effectively drawn a line beyond which NATO cannot expand.”
Surveying the Wreckage.
“Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence — on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to ‘do the job from Day One.’ In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel…Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.” The Atlantic‘s Josh Green, who covered the dirt on the Patty Doyle firing earlier this year, tells the story of Sen. Clinton’s primary bid from the inside (thanks mainly to being the beneficiary of vindictive document dumps from across the campaign hierarchy.)
Among the many interesting revelations, Mark Penn is apparently an even bigger asshole than he seemed during the primaries. Regarding Sen. Obama: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050…his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values…Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.” Classy.
Update: Speak of the devil. While giving kudos to McCain for his Paris Hilton ad, Mark Penn emerges from his cave to extol the usefulness of negative advertising. “Picking a president is not just about the candidates’ strengths but also about how their weaknesses can manifest themselves. Imagine if, in 2000, Al Gore’s advertisements had hit George W. Bush hard over incompetence on foreign affairs and as a trigger-happy cowboy.“
Georgia On Our Minds.
“‘I expressed my grave concern about the disproportionate response of Russia,’ Bush said. ‘We strongly condemn bombing outside of South Ossetia.‘” As Georgian forces pull back from South Ossetia in the face of a full-scale Russian assault, the US, UN, and European Commission increasingly condemn Russian attacks across all of Georgia.
Meanwhile, Medvedev argues that Russian operations are winding down, but that troops will stay in South Ossetia for awhile. “Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a colonel-general on Russia’s General Staff, said at a Moscow news briefing that Russia was not intending ‘to invade Georgia’ and that a ‘key principle’ of the current operation was that troops remain inside South Ossetia — ostensibly to protect a population it said was under assault by the Georgian military, as well as its own peacekeepers stationed there.” Update: Russia pushes into Georgia.
An All-New Away Team (Minus One Redshirt).
Captain, the second wave of posters from the Star Trek reboot has hit off the starboard thrusters, and this time it’s Bones, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov. Hmm…ok. Simon Pegg seems bizarrely unrecogizable at Montgomery Scott here (despite the hairline), and Anton Yelchin and Karl Urban look quite like their original counterparts. But, while I dig Harold as much as the next guy, the distinctively Korean-American John Cho seems a somewhat lazy and distracting choice for Hikaru Sulu. Couldn’t they find anyone of Japanese lineage, or did they just expect us not to notice?
Grandson of a Millworker?
“[I]t is inadequate to say to the people who believed in me that I am sorry…I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic. If you want to beat me up — feel free. You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself.” So…Edwards. To be honest, I can’t say I’m surprised by this revelation — When the story first broke back in December, it just seem too detailed to be completely implausible, and I figured it was only a matter of time before the Enquirer closed the deal.
That being said, it seems clear we Dems clearly dodged a bullet by not backing Edwards’ candidacy, and he really shouldn’t have played roulette with us by trying to keep this under wraps. (Then again, diehard Clinton flak Howard Wolfson seems to think Edwards’ silence gave the nomination to Obama, which may or may not be true, so maybe he had an important part to play nonetheless.) I don’t think revelations of an affair would’ve necessarily been a ticket-killer this year, particularly given the shadier turns of McCain’s personal life. But it would’ve put us at an enormous disadvantage out of the box, honesty and character-wise, for no good reason whatsoever. (And, by the way, amiable southern white male narcissist who can’t keep it in his pants? Been there, done that.)
Adieu, Bernie and Chef.
“‘He was a hard man and he made no apologies for that,’ Childress said. ‘When it came to me and my mother and my daughter he was the softest.’” Bernie Mac, 1957-2008.
And, if that surprising bit of news wasn’t sad enough, Isaac Hayes, 1942-2008. “They’re standing on our shoulders. Some of them don’t realize [it] because they sample me so much.“
Methuselah Speaks of the Devil.
“Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign’s red-white-and-blue ‘O; logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.“
You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan? In TIME, Amy Sullivan parses McCain’s recent “The One” ad to discover that it’s basically a dog whistle for Left Behind evangelicals, declaring Obama is the Antichrist. “A new TIME poll finds that the most conservative evangelicals are the least enthusiastic about McCain’s candidacy. Convincing them that Obama does have two horns and a tail might be the best way of getting them to vote.“
Obama is the Antichrist? Has it really come to this? I know the GOP are feeling on the verge of “Left Behind” this November, but that’s gotta be just about rock-bottom. It’s hard to even imagine an anti-McCain ad that would stoop that low (well, other than that it would probably have to involve the Queen of Diamonds.) And, what with the crazies already percolating, feeding this type of chum to the confused anti-Greg Stillson types out there borders on the criminal.
Come November, these GOP asshats had better lose, and lose big.
Bastard out of Tennessee.
“Much of the pic’s dialogue is in French or German, and subtitles will be used, though Pitt will speak English in his role as a Tennessee hillbilly who assembles a team of eight Jewish-American soldiers to take on the Nazis.” Brad Pitt officially signs up for QT’s forthcoming WWII epic, Inglorious Bastards. Also in negotiations to join the project at the moment: Nastassja Kinski, Simon Pegg, David Krumholtz, and B.J. Novak.
Hmm…I dunno. I haven’t read the script, which I heard was floating around, and probably won’t before I see the movie. I’d like to think that this’ll be a return to the form of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown for Tarantino. But the Kill Bills and Death Proof were so loopy, bloated, and self-indulgent that I fear QT has entered George Lucas territory, meaning that he’s surrounded by sycophantic yes-men and has sadly disappeared up his own ass, never to emerge again. And casting his buddy, torture-porn director Eli Roth, first only increases my wariness that this’ll be yet another self-referential bric-a-brac homage to exploitation flicks of the past. Still, hope springs eternal.