by Andrew Bowcock

Richard Kelly is partially responsible for my obsession with film, as his 2001 cult phenomenon, Donnie Darko, altered my expectations of what films can do.  Ever since I first saw Darko in 2002 I’ve had a difficult time watching films the same way, as I’ve almost always been under the impression that there’s more going on than we simply see on the screen or have told by the characters.  It seemed like a long dry spell before Kelly came out with his follow up film, Southland Tales, an ambitious film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 and was met with almost universally poor reception.  Since I was such a big Darko fan, I had a hard time believing the same guy could release something else that wasn’t anything less than brilliant and crafted with incredible precision…but even I initially didn’t know what to make of Southland Tales. After now seeing it several times and having read the preceding graphic novel that Kelly created to accompany the film’s plot, I’ve grown in fondness for the whacked-out, absurd, colorful and entertaining satirical version of the Book of Revelation (though it still has nothing on his first effort).

When I heard that Richard Kelly was going to adapt a short story by the mighty Richard Matheson, I was very intrigued.  When I heard that Cameron Diaz was one of the stars, I was a bit less excited…but figured it still might be not be a disaster when considering that somehow Kelly made the ridiculously bizarre, spotty cast of Southland Tales work to fit its own eccentric mood.

The tale of The Box (based on Matheson’s Button, Button) is about a young married couple in the 1970’s struggling to make ends meet during some personal and financial struggles.  The husband, Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) is a scientist that works for NASA, one who has aspirations to be an astronaut but somehow fails the psychological exam, while his wife, Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) is a schoolteacher who has been informed that she’ll soon be laid off.  One fateful day a mysterious box arrives on their porch – its contents are simply a small black box with a big red button.  The next day a well-dressed man with formidable and prominent facial scars, Mr. Steward (Frank Langella) appears at their front door explaining the box’s purpose – if the red button is pressed, the couple will receive one million dollars…but the catch is a killer (literally): the pressing of the button will also result in the death of some person somewhere in the world whom they do not know.  They have one day to decide before the box will be picked up by this “Mr. Steward,” reprogrammed, and sent to somebody else who they do not know.

After squabbling over whether or not this whole thing could be real and thinning the list of options, the couple decides to push the button…if anything, out of curiosity.  Mr. Steward returns as he promised, reinforcing what he said before and giving them the money.  However from this point forward Mr. and Mrs. Lewis are met with some bizarre challenges as they try to uncover the truth about Mr. Steward and the purpose of his provisions.  Also, each decision they make seems to be accompanied with counterproductive results, making the pushing of the red button easily one of the worst decisions they’ve ever made.

Just like Kelly’s Southland Tales, The Box has been receiving mixed to poor reviews from critics and it’s understandable why.  Though this film has a somewhat intriguing premise, it feels a bit undercooked by the end.  The mood is a bit reminiscent of Donnie Darko as it has elements of atmospheric horror threaded in with the film’s philosophical quips and sci-fi flavored suspense, but unfortunately the true struggle in The Box doesn’t lie in the choice of whether or not Mr. and Mrs. Lewis will push the button, but whether or not Richard Kelly is actually making a generic film.  The first 20 minutes or so of this film feel pretty lazy…just like they were directed to appeal to as general of a public as you can get.  However, once the film’s plot starts to move, it feels a bit messy…kind of like the rest of the film wanted to stay put whereas the director is trying to pull it in a direction it doesn’t want to go.

There are some minor twists as the film progresses and there are a couple of sequences that I might even deem as “great,” but by the end it almost feels like a good deal of fuss for very little.  However, before I try to beat this film with a criticism stick like most reviewers seem to be doing, I’m actually going to go out on a limb and say that I actually enjoyed this movie…flaws and all.  Maybe it’s partially because I’m a Richard Kelly enthusiast, but I prefer to weigh it in context, so let’s do that:

For me, Donnie Darko was pretty close to being a perfectly constructed film.  It truly just works in just about every aspect whether or not you have a full grasp of what’s going on, so I would call Kelly a great director based just on that one film.  When doing Southland Tales he took on the ambitious feat of creating a film that tried to do everything Darko did but on a much larger scale…and thus (many would argue) he got into trouble trying to make broad strokes while retaining a multi-faceted plot.  With The Box it feels like Kelly’s trying to pull back the reigns a bit, but unfortunately his ambitions for constructing a complex mystery seem a bit misplaced when plugged into this little story.  Though I like some of the things he did with this film visually and conceptually (a key scene set in a library near the last third of the film, in my opinion, was especially amazing, and one sequence near the end stabbed my emotions rather effectively). I feel like his style and imagination are just more fitting when they work by themselves and not in accordance with another story.  When watching The Box it kind of felt like two films – one was Matheson’s story bleeding through while the other was Richard Kelly trying to tell his version of what was going on.  If you appreciate Kelly enough as an artist and philosopher, you might find it enjoyable…if not, it will most likely prod or annoy you.

Is it one of the best films of the year?  Is it Kelly’s best work?  A big no on both accounts, but there is enough for a viewer to enjoy if they’re looking for a simple science-fiction-mystery that’s attempting to be something more, whether or not it succeeds on all cylinders.  I’ll tell you one thing, it’s much more enjoyable than the horribly conceived version The Twilight Zone did of Matheson’s story in the 1980’s.

___________________________________________________________________________

photo sources:

http://www.iwatchstuff.com/
http://alexhluch.files.wordpress.com/
http://justpressplay.today.com/

other resources:

http://www.imdb.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/
http://metacritic.com/

BOHEMIAN MONDAY
Boemi, adunaaaarea la ALDMOVIELAND!
In fiecare zi de luni filme cult prezentate de criticul de film Alin Ludu Dumbrava.
SOUTHLAND TALES
Luni 23 noiembrie, ora 20.00 la The Light Cinema: 
Fluierat dar si adulat la Cannes in 2006, azi film-cult, distopie SF si dezmat vizual , creatia autorului lui Donnie Darko.
Tarif boem: 10 lei
 
  
TEATRU (Bohemian Monday)
CRIZE
Luni 23 noiembrie, ora 21.00 la The Light Bar:
Incepi saptamana intr-o nota vesela, razand de un cuplu romanesc care incearca sa depaseasca criza relatiei lor.
O comedie dupa Mihai Ignat la The Light Bar.
Tarif boem: 10 lei
 
 X-Treme Magic Show

Joi, 26 noiembrie, ora 21:00 la The Light Cinema:
Nou! Incitant! Inedit!
Magie extrema si iluzionsim LIVE in sala de cinema!
Va veti afla la granita dintre real si fictiune, veti simti adrenalina trucului live combinat cu proiectia cinematografica !
Suspans si tensiune cu Andrei Teasca si Cristina Strecopitov.
Tarif: 25 lei/pers
Stand-Up Comedy
Vineri, 27 noiembrie, ora 21.00 la The Light Bar
Razi pe saturate cu doar 10 lei!
Incheie saptamana alaturi de Jokers :
Cosmin Natanticu (Divertis, Taxi Driver, Varza TV)
Marius Coanda ( Taxi Driver, Varza TV)
Catalin Iliescu (Taxi Driver)
Claudiu Constantin

Pentru REZERVARI: 021 369 79 40/ 021 369 97 97

"The Box" Movie Poster

Oh, my. I wanted to like “The Box” so much. I am, you see, a huge Richard Kelly fan. Notice I didn’t say a “Donnie Darko” fan, even though I absolutely love that flick and feel it’s one of the few “cult sensations” truly worthy of its devoted fan base. No, I’m a Richard Kelly fan, because not only do I seriously dig Donnie D., but I think his much-maligned follow-up feature, “Southland Tales,” is even better.  Yes, it’s messy, unfocused, scattershot, overly ambitious, self-indulgent and, in many ways,  even juvenile.  But to my mind it’s also ambitious to a fault, multi-layered, challenging, funny, thought-provoking, ambitious, and even downright groundbreaking. Kelly’s “sins” with “Southland” can all be categorized under the “trying to do too much” category, as opposed to, say, Lars von Trier (I really should learn to leave him alone, I suppose),  whose chief failing with “Antichrist” is doing very little while employing obvious and insulting sleight-of-hand in broad daylight for the purpose of trying to hoodwink the audience into thinking he’s doing a lot.

After “Southland” tanked at the box office in spectacular fashion, Kelly apparently decided — or was forced — to pare down his ambitions considerably, and to concentrate his efforts on a tight little story that would play to his strengths while refusing to indulge his purported weaknesses. Would the result be an effectively creatively neutered Kelly or a sharpened, focused one?

Actually, neither. “The Box” is just a bland, lifeless time-waster.

Based on Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button,” the first third or so of “The Box” plays out well enough, and definitely has a “Twilight Zone” feel to it, with two efficiently-established and well-played characters,  schoolteacher Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz), and her NASA scientist-husband, Arthur (James Marsden) staring into a financial black hole largely of their own making in the mid-1970s. Then, a mysterious stranger with a fucked-up, partially decimated face named (and you gotta love this handle for a Rod Serling-type mystery man) Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) shows up at their door with a box and an offer : push the button on top of the said box within 24 hours and you’ll get a million dollars in cash. There’s just one catch : somebody, somewhere in the world (who, he assures Norma, neither she or her husband knows) will die.

It seems like a horrible joke, in a way — the box is empty, therefore it can’t possibly do anything, so pushing the button must be meaningless, right? Hell, the money is probably even counterfeit.

Except Arthur tests the hundred-dollar bill that Steward left with his wife in the lab at work and guess what? It’s real. But the box itself — it can’t have any actual power, can it?

The trepidation  builds as Norma and Arthur weigh the decision to push or not to push in their minds, and this dramatic tension is really the highlight of the film. Unfortunately, once they do, in fact, make up their minds, the whole movie goes to pot.

Without giving away the choice they make, let’s just say it has consequences and leads to a completely uninvolving mystery that eventually comes full circle. We learn everything there is to know about Steward and his freaky little contraption, every question we have is answered (and even some we don’t), and the ending completes our little 360-degree loop in much the same way that Lynch’s superb ending for “Lost Highway” did. Unfortunately, there is none of the expertly-crafted ambiguity nor any of the multiple levels of meaning and interpretation along the way that make “Lost Highway” an effective and absorbing surrealistic mini-masterpiece. Kelly’s film ends up feeling more like a map of the unknown than a journey within it. All is linear, defined, and hopelessly constricting. Our guy Richard doesn’t trust the audience enough to make up our own minds as individuals as “Donnie Darko” and, to an even greater extent, “Southland Tales” did. In fact, the lesson Kelly seems to have learned from “Southland” is that we just aren’t smart enough to draw our own conclusions.

This doesn’t mean I think that he has emasculated himself creatively, for the ideas at play here are, in fact, suitably offbeat and unexpected. But they’re all laid out so directly and succinctly that they fail to capitalize on their potential to keep us guessing. It’s as if Kelly feels he has to answer each new question that arises in the order that they appear, preferably  within a ten minute (or so) time frame,  before moving on to the next one because our attention spans can’t handle leaving more than one thread unresolved  at a time.

We’re smarter than Kelly gives us credit for with “The Box.” And so is he.

Hello! It’s Sunday. And Sundays, well, Sundays are boring, right? Right.

Went and saw 2012 yesterday, as promised. It was, well… Hmm.

My first reaction to it: Ehhhh. Not horrible, but not great. It’s exactly what’s advertised on the tin, I’ll put it this way. You’ve got a lot of real actors doing some cartoon shit while the world goes to hell all around them. The cast, when you think about it, is actually quite impressive. Also, Woody Harrelson’s in the mix too.

My second reaction to it: Why the fuck didn’t this come out in the middle of the summer?

Third reaction: Comedy of the year, hands down.

Especially in a year when, if you think about it, the big comedy was… what? The Hangover? Right? Get serious. I never saw the movie, I won’t lie, but for a lot of reasons. Primarily, things like the trailer. Did you see it? It looks like it was made for retarded boys. But, you know what’s even worse than the trailer? Listening to people who actually liked the movie. They sound like retarded boys, don’t they? Anyway.

But I really feel like 2012 deserves a good proper Counterforce review. It really does. It’s really our kind of movie, and I mean that in the best and worst possible ways. I don’t know that I’m the man for that job. Benjamin Light, I’m looking at you. Are you the man for that job?

Anyway, I went and saw the film yesterday with Conrad Noir and walking out of the theater, still buzzing from all that ridiculousness, we saw this:

And we thought, “Dear God, who gave that man wings.” Much less Wings Of Desire and much more Red Bull: The Movie.

But then we got into a little conversation, talking about this and that and action heroes of the 80s, mostly cause we’ve been watching a lot of that horrendous/wonderful action movie fare from that decade, and we were talking about how action stars back then were so… foreign seeming. And maybe that contributed a lot to their allure. Maybe it also made some of the ridiculousness easier to stand, too?

For example there, Benjamin Light and were discussing a week or so ago what a remake of The Terminator would look like – since the franchise is up for sale, and should be sold to Joss Whedon, of course, cause why not? – And I brought up the question, “Does the killer robot from the future have to be Austrian?” Commander Light emphatically assured he that it indeed had to be. I’m taking his word for it.

Anyway, so Conrad and I, discussing action stars today, talking about guys like Dwayne Johnson, and how, in our minds, he’s not really latched on with America. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the idea of a “non-conventional” action star quite a bit, i.e. a non white guy running around screaming at people, doing high kicks, and blowing copious amounts of shit up. So why hasn’t “The Rock” caught on with us? I posit two possibilities:

1. In a grab for “credibility” or attempting to “not being as big a joke as he is,” he ditched his silly little wrestling moniker, “The Rock,” and went with his real name: Dwayne Johnson. Except, we can’t root for a guy named Dwayne.

2. Not foreign enough? Perhaps? I suggest investigating this has merit. Especially since it seems American action-loving fans get a bigger hard on from a ponce like Jason Statham than Dwayne Johnson.

Then, walking out of the theater, Conrad and I were looking at the various posters on display, the coming soons and the current releases. Part of me still wants to see This Is It. I’m a Michael Jackson fan, I won’t hide it.  But I’m also a huge Richard Matheson fan, and while I have serious reservations about the movie, I also kind of want to see The Box.

But I don’t know that I trust Richard Kelly anymore. Donnie Darko was okay when it first came out, before you put it through any real tests of serious thought or logic and saw through it’s masturbatory philophosizing. It’s a glorified remake of Last Temptation Of Christ that doesn’t fully pan out. But Kelly also went on to make – speaking of Dwayne Johnson – the gloriously bad Southland Tales.

Look, I’m not going to talk about the Philip K. Dick pastiche that was Southland Tales here. I’m just… not. I’m not going to do it. All I’ll say is I went into that movie wanting to like it. And I sit here now feeling like I’m a veteran of that war. It’s like Richard Kelly is George W. Bush and I was some dumb kid who supported the Iraq war until I went into the fucker and got my bits and pieces all cut off. Now I’m shell shocked.

But, yeah, there’s The Box, directed by Richard Kelly, starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, based on the Richard Matheson story, “Button, Button,” and was previously adapted into an episode of The Twilight Zone. We’ll see if I ever see it.

And again, here we are. It’s Sunday. Tomorrow’s the start of the “work week.” I’d love to Weeks In Review here at Counterforce, but lately it’s just me rambling and I’d feel bad directing the two and a half readers of this site back to more of me rambling. Poor fuckers. Oh yeah, the season finale of Mad Men was last Sunday. And we had a Friday the 13th happen this past week as well. There you go. Oh, and: Young women having sex with sea creatures. Now there you really go.

But again, here we are. It’s Sunday. Let’s see, let’s see, let’s see… Oh! Tonight was the airing of the latest Doctor Who special over in the UK, “The Waters Of Mars,” the start of the end of David Tennant’s run as #10. You can catch it online if you’re good, if you’re very good, and it’s dark. And a bit sad. And leaves you kind of sweaty and breathless too.

Also tonight is AMC’s remake of the classic 60s show, The Prisoner. I’d watch it, but I’m not sure I want to see my childhood get raped so thoroughly and with such production values. Ian McKellen is a good choice for just about anything, but Jim Caviezel? I think I hate you for that, AMC. Honestly, Jim Caviezel makes Keanu Reeves look like Marlon Brando to me.

Oh well, here we are. The weekend’s almost over. I went to the movies to watch the end of the world as we know it and…

by The Great White Gypsy

The Box – Written and Directed by Richard Kelly
The premise of this film sounds like a bad teenage horror story. A strange man gives a box to a couple having money problems. They will get money every time they push the button, but every time, someone they don’t know will die. Though it’s riding on Cameron Diaz’s acting skills (um…), if anyone can make it cool, writer/director Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales) will have no problem.
Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn
November 6

Endgame – Directed by Pete Travis, Written by Paula Milne
Another slow, patient South African political film? Meh. I mean, I really like Hurt and Ejiofor, but Pete Travis directed Vantage Point, which sucked asshole. I really, really want it to be good, I’m just scared it’s going to be really, really bad.
William Hurt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Johnny Lee Miller, Mark Strong, Derek Jacobi
November 6

The Men Who Stare at Goats – Directed by Grant Heslov, Written by Peter Straughan
Actor Grant Heslov hasn’t done much directing. Same goes for Peter Straughan and writing. But if you look at this cast, you really can’t go wrong in a story about Telekenisis/Psychic programs in the army. Hell yes.
George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Robert Patrick, Stephen Root
November 6

Precious – Directed by Lee Daniels, Written by Geoffrey Fletcher
I hate the fact that the full title of this film is “Precious: Based on a novel by Sapphire”. I also hate the fact that Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey are “presenting” this one. However, cliché and cheesy as it most likely is, I seriously almost cried watching the preview. This has the potential for two hours of raw emotion that leaves you speechless. Or two hours of horrible acting and bullshit storyline. I’ll wait for cable.
Gabourey Sidibe, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz
November 6

The Fantastic Mr. Fox – Written and Directed by Wes Anderson
I hate, I hate, I hate Wes Anderson. However, there are always a couple elements of his films that impress me, and his attempts at stop motion animation intrigue me. Will I like it? Probably not. Will I see it? Of course.
George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, Michael Gambon
November 13

Pirate Radio – Written and Directed by Richard Curtis
When I saw the preview for this, I thought, “Hey, that looks exactly like that movie advertised last year called “The Boat that Rocked”. Wait… I have no idea why this film took so long to release, or why they changed the title, but after waiting so long, I’ve built it up to possible “Almost Famous” level in my head. I really hope I’m not disappointed.  About a boatful of radio DJ’s who broadcast banned music over British airwaves in the ‘60’s. Curtis directed Love Actually.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh, Nick Frost
November 13

The Messenger – Written and Directed by Oren Moverman
Foster and Harrelson play a very overlooked part of the military in this new drama about the officers who deliver the horrible news to KIA soldiers’ families. Foster starts to care too much…you see where this is going. Moverman’s first film, looks good.
Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton, Jena Malone
November 13

2012 – Directed by Roland Emmerich, Written by Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser
When I want to see an action packed explosion film with weak story, I’ll catch the new Michael Bay flick. When I want to see a really entertaining film with great special effects that will leave me dumber for having watched it, I’ll go see a Roland Emmerich film (Independence Day, Stargate, Godzilla, 10,000 BC). If you don’t know what this film is about, you should probably look into it, cause we’re kinda running out of time, dude…
John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Oliver Platt
November 13

That Evening Sun – Written and Directed by Scot Teems
I think Clint Eastwood had a scheduling conflict playing a grumpy old man in Gran Turino, so Holbrook stepped in. This is a perfect example of a cookie-cutter Midwest drama starring a senior citizen afraid of change that might not be very good, but will definitely get nominated for at least 2 Oscars. Don’t get me wrong, Hal is great, but the story has the potential to be full of holes.
Hal Holbrook, Ray McKinnon, Mia Wasikowska, Carrie Preston
November 13

Uncertainty – Written and Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel
At the risk of sounding like a douchebag, I am very uncertain about this movie. Part romantic comedy, part drama, part action thriller? So confused. McGehee and Siegel have written and directed three other films together, and I’ve never heard of any of them. But Gordon-Levitt hasn’t let me down so far, and Thirlby and Collins are sexy. I’ll flip a coin.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lynn Collins, Olivia Thirlby
November 13

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans – Directed by Werner Herzog, Written by William M. Finkelstein
Controverial old-school director Werner Herzog (Encounters at the End of the World, Grizzly Man) is remaking the 1992 drama (starring Harvey Keitel) about a gambling/drug addict cop, and he’s setting it in post-Katrina New Orleans. They say it’s Cage’s best performance since Leaving Las Vegas (not really hard), and Kilmer’s presence is reassuring. Looking forward to it.
Nicholas Cage, Val Kilmer, Eva Mendes, Michael Shannon, Fairuza Balk, Xzibit, Shawn Hatosy
November 20

Chi Bi (Red Cliff) – Directed by John Woo, Written by John Woo and Khan Chan
This is an epic film in the style of Hero and House of Flying Daggers. John Woo started out with some good films (A Better Tomorrow, Killer, Hard Boiled), he even had some good American movies (Hard Target, Face/Off), though there were bullshit ones too (Windtalkers, Paycheck). However, his dramas, like Last Hurrah for Chivalry, have gone largerly unnoticed by American audiences. And, of course, it’s been out in China for two years, and we’re just getting it now. Tarantino needs to step his game up.
Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Wei Zhao
November 20

Fix – Directed by Tao Ruspoli, Written by Charles Castaldi and Paul Duran
Documentary filmmaker Ruspoli blends styles in this fictional documentary about a convicted drug dealer and his friends, who are attempting to raise enough money to put him in rehab before 8pm so he can avoid jail time. I can already tell that Andrews’ over-the-top personality is going to steal the show, and Wilde is kinda cute. When’s it coming to Netflix?
Olivia Wilde, Tao Ruspoli, Dedee Pfeiffer, Shawn Andrews
November 20

The Missing Person – Written and Directed by Noah Buschel
Modern noir about a private detective (Shannon in a lead role…nice) searching for a missing person after 9/11. Elements of drama and comedy make it appear a little disjointed, but Shannon and Ryan are solid. Kinda surprised it didn’t go straight to DVD, but whatever.
Michael Shannon, Amy Ryan, Frank Wood
November 20

Me and Orson Welles – Directed by Richard Linklater, Written by Holly Gent Palmo
I can’t see Efron’s name on anything without thinking Highschool Musical, which makes me want to punch everyone under the age of 17 in the eye. However, this film is a little more dramatic, a lot less musical, and Christian McKay looks like the best Orson Welles since D’onofrio in Ed Wood. And if that still doesn’t convince you to see this period film about Welles directing stage plays, I have three words for you: Richard motherfucking Linklater (Scanner Darkly, Waking Life, Dazed and Confused). There you go.
Zac Efron, Claire Danes, Christian McKay, Ben Chaplin
November 25

Ninja Assassin – Directed by James McTeigue, Written by Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski
The directors of The Matrix are producing this balls-to-the-wall violence-fest about…are you ready? A Ninja Assassin. Crazy right? Just think blades, bullets, blood, and nonstop special effects. I can’t freaking wait.
Sung Kang
November 25

The Road – Directed by John Hillcoat, Written by Joe Penhall
I must admit, I didn’t care for Cormac McCarthy’s award winning novel. The fact that writer and director are inexperienced worries me. Whether the acting, cinematography and effects can save it or not, the story makes me think no one will like this no matter what.
Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Garret Dillahunt
November 25

KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN

Metropia – Directed by Tarik Saleh, Written by Fredrik Edin
Anything with Vincent Gallo attatched generally gets my attention (Buffalo 66 was fucking weird). In this animated social commentary, Gallo’s character goes nuts when he starts hearing voices in the expansive underground tunnels Europe was forced to build after gas prices went too high. The animation looks pretty damn cool, so we’ll see.
Vincent Gallo, Udo Kier, Juliette Lewis, Stellan Skarsgard, Alexander Skarsgard
November 6 (Sweden)

Harry Brown – Directed by Daniel Barber, Written by Gary Young
Michael Caine hasn’t really been a badass since Get Carter, but this one may change that. Granted, it’s another cranky old man pissed off at street hooligans, but they did kill his friend…and he is ex-military. Comes out in the UK this month, possible limited releases in US.
Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Iain Glen
November 11 (UK)

Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) – Written and Directed by Pedro Almodovar
Almodovar is huge in Spain, and the last time he teamed with Cruz was Volver, which was damn good. This film is about a writer/director telling a young man the story of why he changed his name after an accident took the life of his true love 14 years prior. Limited release this month, but expect it to be everywhere in time for the Oscars.
Penelope Cruz, Lluis Homar
November 20 (Limited)

Mammoth – Written and Directed by Lukas Moodysson
Husband and wife with a “perfect” life are put to the test when he takes a business trip to Thailand and decides to let loose a little. It looks very similar to parts of Babel, but more focused. Bernal and Williams have grown on me the last couple years, and Moodysson has done good work in Sweden.
Michelle Williams, Gael Garcia Bernal
November 20 (Limited)

En 1996, le futur réalisateur de Donnie Darko et de The Box (cette semaine dans les salles) étudiait le cinéma à la USC School d’où sortent les John Carpenter, James Gray et George Lucas, entre autres. L’exercice, pour Richard Kelly, était de réaliser son tout premier court-métrage, avec comme consignes, de ne pas dépasser les six minutes (il en fera finalement huit) et de ne pas utiliser de dialogues traditionnels (il optera pour une discrète voix off).

Le résultat, brillant, est un mélange entre  Shining et un épisode de La quatrième Dimension. Cela s’appelle The Goodbye Place. Et à 21 ans, Kelly démontre qu’il sait déjà parfaitement installer une ambiance mystique.

J’observe la fin du monde du fond de mon hamac, un verre à la main et l’autre sur tes reins.

À vouloir toujours et encore changer les choses, j’en ai oublié les gens, ces mêmes gens qui font de moi un puzzle ou une pièce unique.

Par habitude, on apprend à vivre dans un musée et l’on se croise les uns les autres un peu gêné, alors on regarde ses pieds, mais plus ses objectifs !

Trop de pieds, de pas, d’histoires, de chemins pour je puisse suivre quoi que ce soit, mais je comprends et peut-être j’apprends ce que je suis en voyant qui je fuis.

Depuis je préfère les miroirs à la psychanalyse !

Les hommes de plomb tremblent, les murs frémissent, la terre défaille et c’est à mon tour de jouir.

Aujourd’hui, c’est la fête du chaos, les instincts débridés des uns construisent en toute hâte la peur du néant des autres, alors disparaissons ensemble !

Pour une fois, pour cette fois, donnons-nous la main – pas pour une cause perdante ou un jeu d’enfant – mais pour se rappeler à quoi cette dernière servait, avant que nous perdions tout notre temps à nous applaudir les uns les autres.

Dites merci à cette peur animale qui vous traverse et aimez vous…

J’ai vu mourir le World Trade Center, l’A.S. St Étienne et la télé hertzienne, qui nous pleura donc ?

Personne, ou peut-être notre créateur et vendeur en nous lisant sur sa pile de publicités démodées dans ses toilettes capitonnées.

Mais sous ses pieds, la ville court à sa perte comme chaque jour sans penser un instant que celui-ci serait le dernier !

Le dernier meurtre de masse au nom de la démocratie côtoie les derniers adultères d’un excès de monogamie dans la plus pure des logiques, puisque tout est lié, acceptons nos liens !

Les chantages d’une nuit se conjuguent aux complots d’une vie.

Et après cela, le monde bascule d’une folie ordinaire à une résignation exceptionnelle sous le joug d’une foule ivre de se regarder dans le blanc des yeux sans avoir aucune raison de se parler.

Une minute de silence pour tout ceux qui ne le connaissent pas !

Je me fabrique des idylles copiant celles de nos idoles pour nos vies sans idéal.

J’ai perdu pied le jour où je me suis senti pousser des elles, gangrené par un bonheur sur mesure.

Nuit après nuit, lit après lit, je me réveille avec un arrière-goût de progrès dans la bouche, puis j’effrite le reste de la matinée entre la chambre et la douche, en évitant soigneusement de penser, le visage concentré en fixant la poignée de la porte.

À force de courage ou de fainéantise, je tire des plans sur la comète, du canapé au téléviseur, moralité je crois en ce que je dois, rien d’autre.

On m’a dit d’aimer, de procréer, de ne pas tuer et tout le reste, pour être sûr que nous savons obéir !

On voudrait me faire croire que j’ai le choix, que mon avis compte et surtout que quelqu’un se souviendra de tout ça, sans savoir pourquoi.

Les pertes de mémoires valent bien ces vérités de toujours.

Alors, je voudrais m’envoyer en l’air jusqu’au 7^ème ciel, tutoyer le nirvana, mais le plafond m’en empêche, si vous saviez, d’aussi bas que vous êtes, en attendant pieusement que ce même ciel ne vous tombe sur un coin de la tête, parce que c’est comme ça, parce que c’est écrit.

…

J’aimerais être vaguement humain le temps de la Fin et arrêter à ce moment de prier la technologie. Moi, le moyen de la chaîne alimentaire, je réalise que je ne suis qu’un animal de compagnie, plus domestiqué que civilisé.

Rien ne se perd tout se revend, je ferai de l’apocalypse le dernier hit sur ton téléphone portable où se reflètent ton teint artificiel, ton sourire en image de synthèse et ta dentition de carnassier végétarien.

L’homme moderne sait qu’il sera le dernier, mais il préfère railler le passé et prendre le peu d’oxygène qu’il reste du globe en otage.

La ville, elle, elle sait, elle le sent, elle se décompose peu à peu, au fur et à mesure que l’heure sonne et qu’elle oublie les morceaux de vie qui l’anime.

A vrai dire, je me suis souvent demandé en disparaissant progressivement dans la foule désorientée des grands jours de consommation, ce qui distinguait un kamikaze d’un suicide collectif ?

C’est peut-être que l’un des deux se pose encore des questions, alors que l’autre a arrêté pour aménager son emploi du temps !

Quand il n’y a pas plus de cris que de bruit, on peut s’attendre à ce qu’il y ait plus d’absences que de silence.

The Box le nouveau film de Richard Kelly sort aujourd’hui (4 novembre).
Un thriller fantastique avec James Madsen et une Cameron Diaz remarquable (voir le numéro de novembre de GQ).

Rappelons que Richard Kelly est l’auteur de Donnie Darko film fantastico-gothiquo-culte qui révéla Jake Gyllenhaal et remit à la mode la chanson de Tears for Fears « Mad World » (dans la version mélancolico-folk de Gary Jules et Michael Andrews).

Il commit ensuite l’ambitieux et foutraque Southland Tales qui ne parvint, lui, ni à changer l’image de The Rock, ni celle de Sarah Michelle Gellar. Four à Cannes, le film finit par sortir directement en DVD en France.

Avec la sortie de The Box, film (un peu) plus classique, la polémique reprend de plus belle à GQ. Richard Kelly est-il le Tarantino des années 2000 ou le réalisateur le plus surestimé de la décennie ? Impossible de trancher ce débat sans se mettre à dos une partie de vos amis cinéphiles…
J.B.

Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) and Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz)

The writer/director Richard Kelly is shaping up to go down in film history as one of those directors who began his feature film career magnificently but never got close to repeating the same magic again. In Kelly’s case his magnificent début was the 2001 science-fiction teen film Donnie Darko. Since then Kelly released a bland Director’s Cut of Donnie Darko and then in 2006 he made Southland Tales, which was an unmitigated disaster. His third film, The Box, fits somewhere in between as a major improvement on Southland Tales but not even close to the excellent original version of Donnie Darko. Based on a 1970 short story by What Dreams May Come and I Am Legend author Richard Matheson, The Box explores ethical questions about self-interest and the role that distance plays in our ability to sympathise with other people.

In The Box a financially struggling family in 1976 are given a strange box and told they have 24 hour hours to decide if they will press the button on the box that will result in them getting 1 million dollars and the death of somebody completely unknown to them. Despite the intriguing scenario that had the potential to function as a parable for how so many of us complicity live a lifestyle that we know is having an adverse effect on people in other parts of the world, The Box never quite delivers.

Kelly’s film is a slow and moody piece that tries a little bit too hard to generate a sense of mystery with creepy psuedo-atmospheric music, repeated references to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential play No Exit and the constant appearances of random weird people who spontaneously get blood noses. The couple with the moral dilemma are played rather flatly by James Marsden and Cameron Diaz, who sports a bad prosthetic deformed foot.  On the other hand, Frank Langella is suitably unsettling as the man who brings them the box and the CGI effects used to create the effect of him missing half his face are very impressive.

Despite the laboured beginning, the middle section of The Box does have inventive moments that recall the mystery of Donnie Darko but then the film slumps again in the over-explained final act. The Box tries to tackle the big themes of human nature and our place in the universe but it never quite manages to rise to the occasion. It is a film that wants to be profound but it ends up feeling more like a lesser episode of The X Files.

© Thomas Caldwell, 2009

Read more reviews at MRQE

Moi ? Dépressif qui noie son chagrin dans le shopping ? Je vois pas DU TOUT ce qui vous fait dire ça…

Bon, sinon, à part ça, pour samedi. Je vous fait un post-mortem analyse de Lucky Luke le film, ou je vous parle d’un jeu vidéo qui bute auquel vous avez sûrement pas joué ? Vous avez jusqu’à ce soir.

Toda a gente viu Donnie Darko. Quase toda a gente gostou. Toda a gente se lembra do filme.  A estreia na realização de Richard Kelly foi agarrada por uma geração como filme de culto instantâneo. E do segundo filme  do cineasta, “Southland Tales”, alguém se lembra? Alguém viu? Alguém gostou?

Depois da desastrosa projecção em 2006 no Festival de Cannes, a concurso,  nunca mais ninguém conseguiu dar crédito ao filme. Estreou em muito poucas salas nos EUA e no Reino Unido. Por cá nem estreou nem foi editado em DVD. Foi arrasado por quase toda a crítica.

O filme começa num quarto capítulo e segue até ao sexto. Os três primeiros capítulos foram editados em três romances gráficos. A história situa-se num futuro demasiado próximo que entretanto é já passado – 2008. Um Apocalipse aproxima-se e misteriosas intrigas políticas vão-se cruzando enquanto assistimos a um golpe planeado por um grupo de Neo-Marxistas. O filme é uma espécie de Space Opera na terra. Há aqui um onirismo ridículo absolutamente irresistível. Os actores interpretam mais os estereótipos do que as próprias personagens e, partindo deste pressuposto, o casting é genial: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne Johnson, Justin Timberlake e Sean William Scott fazem um desfile de paralisia facial delicioso. Apenas num ponto os fãs e os detractores estão de acordo – isto é tudo uma grande salgalhada. Vale muito a pena comprar o DVD importado e assistir ao filme de mente (e cinefilia) bem aberta. Um filme imperdível  que toda a gente perdeu.

Cette semaine, au programme de  l’observatoire des sociétés mourantes :

Mardi 27 Mercredi 28 : Teaser en série (12) The Wire

Jeudi Vendredi 01 : Me, myself & I : Tu sais quoi ! tu ressemble à…

Samedi dimanche 03 :  Teaser en série (13) Southland Tales

Prenez le temps, avant qu’il ne vous prenne

Foutraquement…

SS

Richard Kelly is the bloke behind the brilliant Donnie Darko (the director’s cut sucked though). He then made Southland Tales which was a huge flop (although Jinja tells me it is not quite as bad as everyone said, just a bit of a mess).

As previously reported Kelly’s next film is based on the Richard Matheson story – Button, Button – now retitled The Box. It stars James Marsden (X-Men, 27 Dresses, Hairspray) and Cameron Diaz (Charlie’s Angels, The Mask).

Hollywood Elsewhere had a review from an Australian Critic called Don Groves and unfortunately it looks as if The Box may be more Southland Tales than Donnie Darko.

“This period sci-fi thriller (i.e., set in the mid ’70s) suffers from a complete lack of logic and woeful miscasting of the lead roles — and, worse, is almost totally devoid of tension.

“Inspired by ‘Button, Button,’ a 1970s short story by Richard Matheson, the film flounders on its preposterous premise: What would you do if someone offered you a million bucks to press a red button that would cause someone, somewhere — a person you didn’t know — to die?

“Anyone with half a brain would tell the crackpot making this offer to shove the box where the sun don’t shine, but not schoolteacher Norma (Cameron Diaz) and her NASA engineer husband Arthur (James Marsden). They’re short of money, you see, because Norma has just learned she won’t get the employee discount to enable her to keep their son in the private school where she works, she’ll have to postpone reconstructive surgery on her mangled foot, and Arthur’s application to become an astronaut is rejected after he failed the psych test.

“So they toy with taking up the offer from the mysterious Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), an elegantly-dressed, courteous chap with a horribly disfigured face. “I assure you I am not a monster, just a man with a job to do,” he intones gravely. The next day, Norma impetuously presses the button, and, across town in Virginia, a woman is shot dead.

“Steward duly delivers the loot and departs to tempt some other hapless couple. Not once does this well-educated, middle-class couple ask him if anyone died as a result of Norma’s succumbing to temptation. Is that plausible?

“The rest of the movie is an incoherent mess filled with clues, red herrings and non-sequiturs. Random people keep getting nosebleeds. There’s a creepy student, a tormented babysitter, inept efforts by Arthur’s cop father-in-law to investigate these peculiar events, and some psychobabble about the ‘path to salvation.’

“Who employs Steward and has orchestrated his mission? All is revealed, sort of, but little of it makes sense. In essence, Kelly appears to be using a muddle-headed morality play to remind us we’re all responsible for the consequences of our actions. Like, who needs reminding?

“Affecting an annoying Southern accent, Diaz struggles to make Norma seem remotely interesting or worthy of sympathy, despite the predicament she precipitates. Marsden lacks the authority to be believable as a NASA engineer and is barely adequate as a husband and father who’s faced with a cruel dilemma. There is almost zero chemistry between them, which makes it hard to believe they’re a loving couple. Old pro Langella is suitably creepy and menacing, but his efforts are wasted.

“To reflect the 1976 setting, Kelly and his cinematographer Steven Poster drained much of the color, resulting in a cold, flat and uninviting look — rather like the film itself. And was wallpaper of that era really so ugly?”

We walked on a red carpet on Monday. I felt like an interloper, especially clad in hobo jacket, Converse, and Green Lantern T-Shirt, but it was still a weirdly thrilling moment. Getting tickets to the first UK performance of Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! (oh, that infuriating exclamation point…) was an accident of timing, not an attempt to rubberneck at a glamour collision, but it’s fine. The London Film Festival seems to be pretty casual. Only Soderbergh, writer Scott Z. Burns and producer Gregory Jacobs were dressed to the nines, and even then they seemed relaxed. Seeing Soderbergh delighted daisyhellcakes, who has had terrible luck spotting celebrities in the past (so far she’s seen Johnny Vegas, Bill Bailey, Jeffrey Archer and Queen Nigella), but refused to take a picture of the great man, stating that it would be gauche. As I’d seen the Enter The Void audience eagerly snapping away at Gaspar Noé last week, I figured it would be okay, but after taking this blurry picture…

…I convinced myself that the final stutter in Soderbergh’s short speech was caused by him spotting me and thinking, “Dude, that’s totes gauche.” For the record, I’m sorry Mr. Soderbergh. I liked Solaris, if that’s any consolation.

The lack of a distribution deal for Enter The Void is making me unbelievably sad. Attending that screening was something I did on a whim after seeing Drew McWeeny become so enthusiastic, and now I realise that if I hadn’t gone I might never have had the chance to see it on the big screen. Just yesterday Edgar Wright was tweeting his frustration at having missed it, and it threw my good fortune into perspective. Is there any way to start a campaign to save it from oblivion on DVD, when the only distribution deal it has seems to be getting a release in Finland next April? As the version I saw was seemingly different from those at Cannes and Toronto, perhaps it’s still being fine-tuned, and then it will be put on the market again. Certainly there are longueurs at about the 100 minute mark, but I’m not sure what could be removed without ruining the flow.

The one thought I had would be for the Prince Charles Cinema to stump up for their very own print. Despite its punishing length, this is the perfect midnight-screening cult movie in waiting, with massive appeal to counter-cultural audiences and cinephiles who can understand what Noé is trying to achieve (a group that excludes J. Hoberman and Variety’s Rob Nelson, who completely missed the point of the movie). It would take time for them to get their money back, as the buzz on this film has yet to grow properly, but it would be a wise investment. Unless it did suddenly get a distribution deal and the film turned up elsewhere, but still, right now, it’s not looking too good.

Sadness over the fate of that one movie aside, the festival has been extremely enjoyable so far. Even the one movie I’ve not liked — Jason Reitman’s disappointing Up In The Air, which I hope to write about soon — has its pleasures, especially the terrific performances from George Clooney and Anna Kendrick. For the most part audiences have been great too, with enthusiastic responses to The Men Who Stare At Goats and The Informant! reminding me why seeing movies at the cinema can be a rewarding experience, though Mr. Honking McOverlaugh who sat behind us during The Informant! was a bit of a trial. Yes yes, it’s a very funny film, but Mr. Soderbergh is sitting at the back of the room and even your guffaws cannot reach that far, especially when my eardrums are absorbing 90% of the sound energy.

It’s not all roses, though. If you’re a new reader visiting this site after searching for info about London Film Festival screenings, please can I beg you to do the right thing and arrive at the screenings with plenty of time to spare? If you’ve not already picked up your tickets, there can be terrible queues, and that’s after navigating the barriers, security guards, and photographers blocking the pedestrianised roads of Leicester Square. The movies have tended to start a few minutes late, but there are no trailers or adverts, so if a film is supposed to start at, say, 16:15, the film will be on the screen at around 16:20, and arriving at 16:30 is going to piss a lot of people off. Oh, and the tickets have allocated seat numbers on them FOR A REASON. This message is directed at the numerous people who seem to love sitting wherever they want, and then look put out when they are evicted from their seats by ushers not long after the film has already started. I’m looking at you, selfish idiots who figured sitting by me was the thing to do and then ruined the start of Enter The Void and White Material, with extra bonus fuck you’s to the couple who turned up late at White Material and then left their phones on. Assholes.

I’ve had fun with the odd connections between the movies I’ve seen so far. The Informant! and Claire Denis’ White Material are centred by main characters (played with great skill by Matt Damon and the incredible Isabelle Huppert respectively) whose inability to see the dire consequences of their behaviour dooms them. In Soderbergh’s movie Mark Whitacre’s insanity is played for laughs for the most part, though those laughs run out by the end as you realise the man is so deeply embedded in his fantasy life that he doesn’t even seem capable of keeping track of it. Maria Vial — the protagonist of White Material — is in just as much denial, but perhaps even to the extent of not recognising her own cultural and ethnic background. Her ambiguous actions in the final moments of the film could be the product of derangement or berserk revenge, but whatever their origin, they were enough to deeply upset the lady sitting next to me. She seemed traumatised, poor dear.

Other connections abound. Jason Bateman teams up with Jason Reitman again for Up In The Air, and also features in Extract, which I’m hoping to see tomorrow. Melanie Lynskey appears in Up In The Air and The Informant!, and is similarly weak in each movie. Clooney appears in The Men Who Stare At Goats and Up In The Air, and co-produced The Informant! Up In The Air and Up (which I saw again on Sunday, though it was not part of the festival) is about men who find escape in flying, and learn to connect with others. The protagonists of White Material and Enter The Void are often filmed from behind: in White Material as a representation of how Maria is hiding her true face from herself and others, and in Enter The Void as a consequence of the PoV conceit. Enter The Void and The Men Who Stare At Goats features talk of esoteric beliefs, as well as the use of hallucinogens.

That was one of the things that annoyed me most about Goats. While Enter The Void took the use of hallucinogenic compounds seriously, Goats used it as a stupid punchline, with characters acting as if they were drunk and high-lariously falling over a lot and talking about how hungry they are. Goats was a lot of fun, but the relentlessly silly tone made it hard for the film to shift gears in the final act when we see the negative consequences of letting a bunch of insecure New Age dipsticks into the army. What was, in Jon Ronson’s excellent book, a sobering portrait of US psy-ops torture techniques gone weird is here transformed into a slapstick romp with one minute of “Oh noes, war is bad” added to give the protagonists something to fight for. The book still manages to be funny, but Ronson’s a skillful enough writer to juxtapose the wacky with the awful. Here it’s shoehorned in, and seemingly only to give a dramatic edge to the Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) character arc that suddenly appears midway through the movie. Writer Peter Straughan does some good work in translating the oddness of Ronson’s book into movie form, and keeps the funniest material mostly intact, but the artificial three-act structure and neatness of the final few minutes smack of laziness. Still, it remains very entertaining, and what it gets right it really gets right. Jeff Bridges — as New Earth Army leader Bill Django — perfectly channels the craziness of First Earth Battalion leader Jim Channon…

…and first-time director Grant Heslov is good enough to recreate the pictures shown in Channon’s manifesto: a lovely touch. It feels like the film will touch on all aspects of the insanity of war in a similar way to Clooney’s previous Gulf War film Three Kings, but even with the addition of warring Blackwater-esque security forces and asides showing Clooney and Ewan McGregor wandering through Iraq getting into scrapes, it never fully takes off. I’d still recommend it, though. As with Up In The Air, Clooney does miracle work holding everything together. It’s easy to forget what a great film star he is. He does comedy and drama equally well, and now he’s removed almost all of his tics, he can excel at both over-the-top dopey comedy or subtle and moving character work. We’re lucky he’s around.

My recommendation for The Informant! is much stronger. Though we were exhausted while watching, and were sitting in the Odeon West End which — unlike the Vue West End which is showing the majority of films — is not air-conditioned, it turned out to be almost as good as we had hoped. Spoilery trailers and press releases have given away the delusional nature of Mark Whitacre, but Soderbergh and ace writer Burns hide the depth of his craziness until a wonderful final act where everyone involved in the Lysine price-fixing investigation is shocked by his slowly unravelling web of lies. The cast doesn’t have a single weak link, with an unexpectedly complex performance from Matt Damon at the heart of the movie, but I have to give special props to Scott Bakula, who is particularly affecting as the enthusiastic FBI agent whose career goes awry thanks to Whitacre’s deceptions. His increasingly heartbroken face adds a bittersweet note to the zany proceedings. Props also to Joel McHale in his first dramatic role: weird seeing the snarky Soup host playing straight man to Damon.

I also heartily recommend White Material, but I’m still processing that one, so I won’t go on about it too much, except to say that a) Claire Denis has a mastery of pace and atmosphere that would shame other directors, but then you probably already knew that, and b) Christopher Lambert was good enough to make me partially forgive him for his dire performance in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. I can lay the blame that on Kelly, I guess. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, after all.

J’ai hésité avant de parler de ce film car il est de certains film qui font vivre une expérience mais dont il est très difficile de parler tant ils sont au delà du simple film. Southland Tales et un film réalisé par le même réalisateur que Donnie Darko. L’histoire se place en 2008 dans une réalité alternative, la troisième guerre mondiale a eu lieu et nous sommes dans les USA qui aurai completement pété les plomb.Au nom du “patriot act” la société USIDent, sorte de Big Brother, contrôle les fait et geste de tout le monde (internet inclu).

Il y a une brochette d’acteur completement incroyable, et tous sont utilisé pour des rôles assez décalé par rapport à leur image. Ce qui augmente l’impression décalé du film. Sarah Michelle Gellar joue une actrice porno lançant une ligne commerciale a son image. The Rock est un type qui a disparu et qui revient avec une amnésie. Sean William Scott joue un flic avec des troubles de la personnalité. Il y a même Justin Timberlake défiguré qui joue un vétéran taré et Christophe Lambert en marchand d’arme au black dans un camion de marchand de glaces.

La construction du film est très similaire a celle de Donnie Darko. Le réalisateur en interview a dit qu’il avait voulu faire un film entre Blade Runner et Brasil. Il parle aussi de film noir et durant le film il y a à plusieurs moment des extraits de “Kiss Me Deadly” qui sont diffusé sur des écrans. Ce dernier étant lui même un hommage au film noir américain, Robert Aldrich avait voulu prouver que l’on pouvait faire un film captivant et esthétique sans tout en laissant le scenario au second plan. Southland Tales est une belle mise en abime. Le scenario peut être interprété d’une multitude de façon différentes mais ce qui compte c’est le voyage que l’ont fait. Ce qui surprend aussi c’est le coté humoristique très présent alors que l’ambiance générale du film est très pesante. Un hommages majeur, qui est sans doute celui qui a fait que j’ai autant accroché à ce film, est celui rendu à Philip K. Dick. Celui ci étant  sans doute d’un de mes écrivains préféré. Tous les ingredients de ses livres y sont, les drogues, les mondes parallèles, les complots gouvernementaux, la perte d’identité…etc. Blade Runner étant une nouvelle de Philip K. Dick (Les androïdes rêvent-ils de moutons électriques), la boucle est bouclée.

Pour finir je parlerai rapidement de la bande son que j’ai trouvé elle aussi excelente tant dans les morceau planant que dans les morceau nouveau rock. Ça me coute de dire ça étant donné le fait que la BO est majoritairement faite par Moby et que je conchie ce type sur cinq générations. Je finirais donc ce billet par un extrait du film ou Abilene(Justin Timerlake)  apres avoir pris une sorte de drogue chante un morceau de The  Killers. Je ne suis pas fan de ce genre de groupe non plus mais bon plus grand choses n’a de sens et on se surprend à apprécier des trucs que l’ont m’aime pas forcément car tout n’est que rêverie.

I watched Southland Tales the other night and I have to say I was pretty disappointed. I know that some people watched Donnie Darko and wondered what all the fuss was about; I think I would feel the same way about this movie by the same director except I’ve not heard anyone make a fuss about it. Now I know why.

For those that know nothing about the movie, in summary, it’s an ensemble piece set in the futuristic landscape of Los Angeles on July 4, 2008,  (the movie was released in 2006) as it stands on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster. Boxer Santaros is an action star who’s stricken with amnesia. His life intertwines with Krysta Now, an adult film star developing her own reality television project, and Ronald Taverner, a Hermosa Beach police officer who holds the key to a vast conspiracy.

Southland Tales appeared to me to be a movie trying too hard to be something far more than its content and cast would allow. Whilst some of the performances were commendable overall it just seemed a bit lost and limp. Long before the end of the movie my attention had gone astray and I was willing it to be over.

I also wasn’t taken by Justin Timberlake’s voice as the film’s narrator; whilst his screen time is ok I don’t think he has the voice to carry the movies narration. When I first saw him in Alpha Dog I was impressed, I had expected very little from him in that movie and he gave a solid performance, now unfortunately I’ll probably expect slightly less of him in whatever I watch him in next.

I couldn’t help but feel that underneath it all was an attempt to be as clever and well regarded as Mulholland Drive, but in the end it wasn’t even in the same caliber as Arlington Road.

The new TV season is full swing, and yet here I am, still talking about last season. Of course, I’ve farted around for a couple of weeks doing very important things (not playing Halo 3: ODST, no matter what my endless tweets and Raptr updates will say), and am only now getting around to putting this up. Please forgive my tardiness.

Though I don’t want to say too much about the new season, which is just coming into shape, I will say that some shows (Fringe, House) have yet to get back to full strength, some (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Dollhouse, Lie To Me) have come back with a confident bang, and some new shows (Community, Flashforward) have really piqued my interest. One new show (Modern Family) made me think I will never trust another critic ever again. Unless something really dreadful comes along, I think I have my Worst New Pilot of the 2009-2010 Season winner already sewn up.

Anyway, here are my final thoughts on the 2008i-2009 season. There were originally going to be more YouTube clips on here, but I’ve had a dispiriting day watching them get taken down. Fox and NBC, sorry for infringing on your copyright, but all you did was get rid of some free publicity, as I was going to tell the world how awesome your shows were. Except for that clip from Heroes. That was up because Angela Petrelli’s insanely histrionic reaction to her son’s death was the funniest thing of the year. So I can understand that one. And now, on with the hyperbole…

Best New Show: Sons of Anarchy

If one were to be unduly harsh, you could compare the first episode of Sons of Anarchy with the pilot of The Shield. Considering that is easily one of the most impressive and instantly captivating pilots ever made, there was little chance that showrunner Kurt Sutter could ever compete. That he made a pilot as good as the one that kickstarted his biker epic is a testament to his skill as a writer, and his decision to get Sopranos director/producer Allen Coulter in to co-direct it is exactly the kind of smart move that a good showrunner should make. The first few episodes were not perfect, but the building blocks were there.

What sets Sons of Anarchy apart from every other show debuting during the 2008-2009 period — even the eventually superb Dollhouse — is how quickly changes were made, and how confidently they were put in place. By the time season highlight The Pull came around, it was already shaping up to be essential TV, but that episode propelled it onto a completely different level of excellence. Ramping up the pace of the show and throwing one or two of the less interesting characters into terrible danger / potentially ruinous moral compromise, Sons of Anarchy hinted that it could become something that will rival the mighty Shield for complexity and dramatic power. It helps that it features one of the best ensembles on TV right now, filling out its main cast (which, let’s not forget, includes Ron Perlman, an impressive star-making turn from Charlie Hunnam, and relentless magnificence from Kim Coates) with guests spots for Mitch Pileggi, Drea DeMatteo, Jay Karnes, Dayton Callie, Maggie Siff, and the incredible Ally Walker, who blows everyone else away with her terrifying warrior mentality and fearless sexuality. And in season two, we get Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins. Seriously, what’s not to love? From all accounts, the second season is even more unhinged than the first, which is saying something considering the incredible brutality and amoral shenanigans from the first. I can’t wait to dive in.

Worst New Show: Parks and Recreation

Creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur are not idiots, obviously, but this landed with a terrible splat and couldn’t convince me to hang around long enough to see if it would improve. Part of that was because I was mad at the dip in quality over at The Office. Was it fair to blame this show for that? Probably not. Parks and Recreation has been mooted for so long (remember when it was supposed to be a straight spin-off of The Office?) that their attention has probably been divided for a long time, and the fourth season of The Office was great. Nevertheless, the energy of one show definitely seemed to have been split between two, and the result was a listless hour of supposed comedy.

I have fought with myself over whether it would have been worth hanging around to see if it got better, but then I remember little things that irked like the way the showrunners differentiated the talking head interjections from those of The Office — using two cameras for the faux-interviews instead of one — which drove me into fits of absurd rage. The Office already has trouble keeping the faux-doc format going, and this conceit draws even more attention to the fakeness of it all. Perhaps I’m just burned out on this format. ABC’s new comedy Modern Family has been heralded as the next great sitcom after just two episodes, with across the board raves. We watched last week’s pilot in a state of shock. Flamboyant gay stereotypes? Clunking, obvious jokes about the generation gap? Appalling overacting from everyone (with Julie Bowen being the worst offender)? A character misinterpreting the accent of a Columbian woman? (I say Columbian because Sofia Vergara is from Columbia. She’s probably expected to play someone from a different country in this.) Modern Family is exactly the kind of retrograde laugh-track-enhanced sitcom that seems almost archaic now, but because it’s filmed in a single camera faux-doc style, it’s treated as a cutting-edge exploration of modern American mores. Bullshit. It’s Everybody Loves Raymond. Dressing a raccoon in baseball gear doesn’t make it a baseball player. It just makes it a raccoon covered in sport gear. (Note to self: use less raccoons in metaphors. It just complicates things.)

I also remember one potentially funny scene in Parks and Recreation — involving hapless and strangely unlovable Leslie trying to convince a bunch of ill-informed citizens that her plans are worthwhile — failing to take off, and I realise that after this summer of purposely ignorant right-wing hijacking of the health-care town hall debates, this kind of scene probably won’t ever be funny again. Democracy failing to work because of the Crazification Factor getting in the way of intelligent debate is something I just can’t laugh at right now. What makes this turn of events most sad is that the concept is so full of potential, and yet it didn’t even work before the protests. I can’t figure out how you could take an idea this promising and fail to make something that mixes madness and profundity in the same way as The Office. Compare that to Knight Rider. That was always going to be shit. This should have been a potent mix of satire and ridiculousness. That’s why I have to put it in this category. Apparently it has found its stride in the second season, from what I’ve heard on the Hinternet. Sadly, the people who are saying that also keep going on about how Modern Family is hilarious. So, you know…

Best Title Sequence of the Year: Hung

The choice of music (I’ll Be Your Man by The Black Keys), the phallic objects in the background, the pace of it…

…It’s a perfect title sequence.

Best Pilot: Kings

From what I can gather, there was very little publicity for Kings when it made its way onto the screen. Many have said this was the reason for its failure to find an audience, though to be honest a literate curio like this was unlikely to ever become a breakthrough hit. Alternate histories? Playing with Biblical stories? Unappealing main characters? It just seemed like a real long shot. It was impressive to see NBC gamble on making the show in the first place, but as with the equally intelligent Journeyman, making a show and trying to make the show available to a wide audience are two different things.

To be honest, with Journeyman the hurt is greater. That show was less ambitious, but as a result was more likely to find an audience if given a chance. It also improved as it went along. Kings started off incredibly strong and then stalled a little. That’s the problem when a show gets a pilot this impressive. Written by showrunner Michael Green and directed by the underrated Francis Lawrence, Goliath (the name of the pilot) was like no other pilot I’ve ever seen. Even though it was made on a shoestring, it looked incredible. Even more appealing, it had a weird edge of fantasy even beyond the alternate earth conceit, with God interacting with certain characters in a matter of fact way even though the show did not explicitly preach Christian values.

Perhaps this more than anything alienated audiences: atheists might rebel against a show that openly debates the wishes of God, and Christians might be irked by this God not being a recognisable version of their God. While I fall into the first category, I don’t mind God turning up in fiction as long as It’s not used as a deus ex machina or Unexplainable Puppeteer (hello Battlestar Galactica) or as an accurate version of “our” God (a sky bully who gets pissed off if we don’t play by Its crazy rules). The version of God in Kings was not a big deal, but Its mysterious behaviour, and effect on the behaviour of the main characters, was fascinating.

As was the superb character King Silas Benjamin (not to mention his allies and enemies), and the superb use of New York locations (standing in for the fictional city of Shiloh) to give a sense of epic scale to the show, and the incredible cast… As I say, the show was fascinating to watch right up until its unfortunate cancellation, but it never quite lived up to the promise of that amazing pilot, simply because the pilot made you think you were watching the most amazing show ever. We weren’t, but it was damn good nevertheless. Even the slightly disappointing finished product was better than almost everything else on TV. You could practically sense the cult following develop as you watched, not to mention hear the knives coming out for it as you realise how odd the project was. We’re lucky we saw any of it, to be honest.

Worst Pilot: The Unusuals

Seemingly rushed into production as a result of the writers’ strike, The Unusuals matched an underwhelming concept with a poorly defined set of uninteresting characters, failed to find a consistent tone, and handed off directing chores to the ever-feeble Stephen Hopkins, a man who has never made even one good film (I remember liking The Ghost and the Darkness when I first saw it, but I fear I’m being kind). There was no way I was going to enjoy this.

The main reason for my annoyance is that there were some good actors in there who just couldn’t rise above the material or the execution. Some of the most interesting actors — both promising and established — flounder within the show’s poorly thought-through format, with some characters played as broad as possible and others reining in the madness. Jeremy Renner in particular looks like he’s wandered in from another show. Harold Perrineau does okay with his skittish character, while Adam Goldberg sucks all of the energy out of his scenes with a sour and unappealing demeanour, not to mention a terrible mustache. The conceit that a hypochondriac with a fear of death is partnered with a man who wants to die and yet seems blessed is one of those ideas that sounds great on the page and fails on screen.

As for Amber Tamblyn, playing a high-society girl trying to make it as a cop in the cuh-rayzee precinct, it was a more entertaining concept when rich-boy Carter turned up in E.R. That was only one of the shows this seemed to emulate. M.A.S.H., NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Hooperman (for crying out loud): it was an echo of greater shows, a throwback to 80s cop dramas when they started to become more confident and complex. Sad thing is, we don’t want babysteps any more. We’ve moved on. The low ratings and inevitable cancellation of this show proved that. Let’s hope those good actors turn up in better projects now.

Best Pilot of the Year Not Selected For Series: Virtuality

I won’t go into how much I hated the Battlestar Galactica finale again, as I’m beginning to come across as a total crazy person who is obsessed with going on about it, but it did make me reconsider trying out Caprica, the Stoltzified spin-off. Why should I keep watching shows set in this universe, made by this team, who had so disappointed me throughout the last few seasons? Yes, Jane Espenson would be there too, and I love her work, but still, I cannot imagine being invested in this story any more. There is a good chance I’ll relent, because good SF is hard to find on TV at the best of times. Nevertheless, my annoyance remains.

You can imagine how uninterested I was in another Ronald D. Moore / Michael Taylor show (I was never fond of his BSG episodes), especially one that seemed so prosaic. Moore has stated in the past that he was interested in making BSG because he felt the urge to rebel against Star Trek’s chirpy universe and its reliance on holodeck technology to change up the show, which made Virtuality — a show about space travellers who use virtual reality technology to relax — a curious proposition. I resisted this too, and then relented after seeing the feeble Defying Gravity, which seemed to be drawn from the same template. Thinking Virtuality would be nothing more than a space soap along the same lines as the other network drama, I gave it a spin, expecting little.

I love it when I’m proved wrong like this. As much as Fox’s other new SF show – Dollhouse – Virtuality is a fascinating and challenging exploration of ideas, dramatically filmed and featuring an excellent cast. In fact, the cast is even stronger than that of Dollhouse, with excellent turns from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Sienna Guillory, Richie Coster (who needs more work, stat), and the ever-dependable Clea DuVall. All the actors are on top form, but these four really stand out. As for the comparison with Defying Gravity, the only thing they have in common is being set in space. Virtuality is about so much more: our perception of reality and how it will inevitably be twisted by the lens we observe through, how technology can affect us emotionally, how we refuse to let it go even when it is obviously not doing us any good (an idea expressed far more clearly here than in Lee Adama’s ridiculous speech in the final BSG episode). While Defying Gravity really is a soap set in space (with one character seemingly completely defined by the pregnancy she once terminated, which is as regressive a character arc as is possible), Virtuality is about ideas. It’s proper SF.

At least, it was proper SF. Even though it was obviously incredibly ambitious and beautifully made (with top direction from Shades of Caruso favourite Peter Berg), and even though were was huge potential for relatively cheap but gripping drama, it was shelved. I’m utterly depressed by this turn of events. There was only one misstep in the whole pilot, with a nasty perception-rape sequence that made me uncomfortable. Reliance on rape plots always upsets me, but here even this most unpleasant of plot threads is used to further the show’s exploration of whether there is a gap between virtual and actual reality, and what happens to us when we lose track of the difference between the two. If the show was willing to treat something potentially exploitative as cleverly as this, we would almost certainly have seen a lot of very smart SF in the rest of the series. But no. While Whedon got lucky with Dollhouse, the Virtuality team saw their show taken away before they could go any further. The best thing I can say about it? It was better than most movies I’ve seen this year. It’s a crying shame there will be no more.

Most Unfairly Cancelled Show of the Year: Reaper

Patton Oswalt is a brilliantly funny and caustic man, but recently he broke my heart. In this interview, he explained how, while filming his turn on Reaper, he saw the crew and cast crushed by their parent network, The CW.

When I did Reaper, the episode I originally did was supposed to be the beginning of this introduction to this overall mythology, because they clearly were taking the Joss Whedon playbook: You have a monster of the week for a while, and then you start linking it all up, and you create this overarching kind of world and story. And in the middle of the week, the network just came down on them and said “No, go back to monster of the week.” And you could feel this deflation amongst the actors, because they really understood that they had to start putting mythology into things. The network was just like, “Nope!”

This is the network that, when it was The WB, cancelled Angel, so I already have a big problem with them. Now I have an even bigger one. It may have not become something more ambitious, but it was endlessly lovable, and became admirably silly in the second season. The first was funny, but at times the second season was funnier than many sitcoms. The monster-of-the-week format of the show, which had seemed so restrictive, sometimes ended up shoved into the cold open, with the rest of the episode dealing with silly relationship drama, Sock shenanigans, or sly mythology expanding business with recurring characters like Nina or Tony. This might not be as involving as Buffy, but it was never as blandly diverting as something like The Mentalist. It fell right in the middle, which is apparently deadly.

That greater focus on just being daft was working for us, but the lack of a coherent arc from week to week (other than Sam’s lacklustre efforts to get out of his contract, and the hints that he is a more important player in the battle between God and The Devil) seemed to doom it. More than any other show departing this year, this is the one we’ll miss. Goodbye to one of the most entertaining casts on TV, some of the most eccentric writing of the past few years, and most of all, goodbye to the best Devil in recent pop culture history. He may be showing up in Dollhouse, but will Ray Wise be this mischievous, charming, delightful? Ray Wise fans everywhere, please come together one last time to marvel at that beautiful, beautiful grin.

At least one of us is smiling, I guess. [Insert sad-face emoticon here]

Best New Double Act of the Year: Ray Drecker and Tanya Skagle - Hung

When compiling the list of best and worst characters, I had certain unspoken rules in place to stop myself from focusing exclusively on certain shows. Party Down’s cast of beautifully observed characters could have dominated the first list, and Knight Rider could have dominated the second. My biggest quandary was caused by Hung, HBO’s lovable male-prostitution-and-economic-disaster comedy that has so entertained us recently. How do I get to honour two of the funniest characters of the year without breaking that rule? As ever, inventing a new category is the perfect answer. Hung is a show that has a few tonal errors (what was going on with the horribly misconceived Jessica, played with occasional delicacy by Anne Heche?) and a very loosely defined season arc (two pimps fighting over Ray and his magical dong), not to mention some wasted actors (why hire Gregg Henry and put him in about five scenes?). At times, it felt like we were watching half a show.

Nevertheless, it became appointment viewing just because of the wonderful work of Thomas Jane and Jane Adams. Their chemistry, and their relentless bickering and grudging friendship, was the thing that made Hung exceed its limitations. It also made Shades of Caruso reconsider the talents of both actors. Thomas Jane was given moments of pathos which he has never really had a chance to play before, and he excelled, especially in the season finale. Jane Adams has always played sad-sack losers, but this time she was given a chance to give Tanya some nobility even as her plans fell apart around her. Both actors also got to show off their physical comedy skills, with Adams especially amusing during her many impotent temper tantrums.

It was their interplay that really held the show together. Even as other plot threads and arcs seemed to falter or shoot off in predictable directions, watching these two actors play off each other was more than enough to save the show. It’s notable that episodes where Ray and Tanya aren’t onscreen together were the weakest of the season, whereas the ones which explored their dependent relationship and accidental exploration of each other’s personality were the most satisfying. Hopefully the show continues to throw these polar opposites together next year.

Best New Couple of the Year: Sawyer and Juliet – Lost

Ah yes, the love triangle/quadrangle. The constant refrain of Lost doubters (and some fans) is that the show is wasting its time whenever it focuses on the relationship drama of Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Juliet. “We don’t care about that shit! Show more Faraday!” Yes yes, love drama tends to make me go to sleep as well. Many shows are hamstrung by tedious relationship dramas: House is at its dreariest when Thirteen and Foreman, or Cameron and Chase, go on and on about their coupledom; Kings ground to a halt every time David and Michelle made goo-goo eyes at each other. Hell, even the otherwise perfect Party Down was at its least interesting every time Henry and Casey got together. So there is precedent.

However, I love the relationship drama from Lost for two reasons. One: at the end of the season, we see how far Jack has fallen from grace. We thought he was the square-jawed all-American hero who would bring everyone out of the wilderness like a be-stubbled Moses, but over time we see he’s a deeply damaged, semi-psychotic loser who – as we find out in the final episode of season five – even lied about his character-defining anecdote from the very first episode. How much of a loser is he? After pushing away the woman he “loves” with his whiny attitude and various emotional breakdowns, and after years of trying to figure out what his purpose is now that his dad isn’t around to torture him, he has two choices to make a difference in his life: a) man up and seek help for his depression, all while giving up on the thought of making a go of things with Kate, or b) detonate a nuclear bomb, killing everyone on the island, in the hope that it will change history and allow Oceanic 815 to land safely in LAX so he doesn’t have to put up with the mess he made of his life. I’ve said before that one of the things I love about Lost is that it shows the psychology of its characters in minute detail, and this final touch – showing how far people will go to avoid making simple changes in their lives because of their fear of what will happen if it fails – is the perfect metaphor for how we hold onto our broken selves even when we know how to make things better.

Two: It also gave us the wonderful, tragic pairing of Sawyer and Juliet, which justifies all of the sturm and drang to get there. So far, all of the pairings that have been tried were wrong somehow. Jack and Kate didn’t work because Jack is insane. Kate and Sawyer didn’t work because Kate keeps messing with Sawyer’s head. Jack and Juliet didn’t work because Jack was not even slightly into Juliet and was just using her to get over Kate. However, as soon as the fourth season ended with a shirtless Sawyer walking out of the sea towards a drunken Juliet, I knew we would get to see something go right. And, for the most part, it did, even though it was not to be.

It’s not just that the combined hottness of Sawyer and Juliet is so great that it probably melted most of the TVs in the world. It’s also not just that selfish Kate and crazy Jack were finally out of the equation. It’s even not just because seeing Sawyer and Juliet flirting while shooting people was the most awesome thing ever. It’s that there was barely any controversy in the relationship, which probably would have even survived the forthcoming Purge, somehow. It’s only when Kate returns to the island and reignites Juliet’s psychological damage (previously caused by the break-up of her parents, the infidelity of her ex-husband, and the death of her lover Goodwin) that it all goes horribly wrong. Did Sawyer still hold a candle for Kate? Probably. Did he love Juliet? I reckon yes, and I believe he would have done anything for her if she had given him the chance. All of this made the quadrangle emotionally powerful, as we finally had something to hang on to. Would Sawyer and Juliet survive the machinations of the island/Esau and Jacob? More than any other relationship in TV history (except for Fred and Wesley in Angel), my nerves were set on fire by the possibility that those kids might not make it after all. Of course…

Most Upsetting, Most Harsh, and Most Unfair Scene of the Year: The Incident finally happens – Lost

…we all know how it turned out. Nothing else this year made me cry as much as this.

Damn you, stupid TV show! Damn you for being so fucking mean! And damn you Emmy voters for not giving nominations to Elizabeth Mitchell and Josh Holloway. They were amazing all season.

Worst New Couple of the Year: Luke and Bess - In Treatment

In Treatment’s second season deviated dramatically from its source material — the Israeli drama Be’Tipul — when it moved main character Paul Weston from Maryland to Brooklyn, allowing the show to dramatise his dislocation from his family, as well as to provide a reason for why he suddenly has so many new patients. This meant that we lost the chance to see season one patients Amy and Jake return, this time as a divorced couple fighting over their son, leading to the creation of two new patients, Luke and Bess. With their marriage in tatters and resentment flying between them, their son Oliver suffers terribly, putting on weight and falling into depression as his parents either fight for custody of him or, amazingly, against custody.

None of the characters in this show are particularly nice to Paul, but the games Luke and Bess play with him, using his advice as justification for a serious of awful, selfish choices, were worse than the usual antagonism people show their therapist. Many times during the season I was horrified by their behaviour, and by the time the season finished they were openly talking about how their lives had been ruined by their marriage and how they wanted another chance at what they had with barely any regard for Oliver’s well-being. When Paul finally loses his temper with them in episode 28, it elicited a round of applause from us. Figuratively speaking. And to be honest, he should have been even angrier with them.

Of course, this being In Treatment, these two horribly selfish people are written so well that we can see their point of view — and their humanity — clearly enough that even at their worst we cannot completely write them off. Their eventual remorse is a relief, but it’s still not enough considering how completely both parents are oblivious to the young boy’s needs. Thankfully, Paul is there to prove to Oliver that he will still be there for him, in some respect. His final scene with Oliver, talking to him via “phone” in his office, started a deluge of tears from this admittedly weepy viewer. If Oliver escapes this miserable situation with his psyche intact, it will have nothing to do with his parents.

Most Underused Character of the Year: Boyd Langton - Dollhouse

Whedon has a talent for peppering his casts with older character actors playing the “parents” to the younger crew. With Buffy we had Giles, in Angel there was Wesley (though his efficacy is doubtful; he’s arguably more flawed than any of his compatriots), and Firefly had Shepherd Book. These stern characters with hearts of gold gave their respective shows some kind of grounding when things got wacky, though Whedon wasn’t averse to making them run through some ridiculous hoops (Book’s mad hair, Wesley’s various pratfalls, Giles’ guitar playing). Sadly, while Langton got a chance to be silly in the disappointing comedy episode Echoes, he rarely got a chance to do anything interesting either. Many characters got to have interesting arcs and secrets, but Langton seemed to be getting less and less screentime as the series wore on. Making him head of security broke the student-mentor relationship between him and Echo, but then this might be Whedon trying to throw his own archetypes out, confounding our expectations. That he would give handler-duties to someone who appears to have an unhealthy sexual attraction to Echo (I’m talking about the plasticine-man known as Ballard) shows there might be something to that.

Nevertheless, it is a shame to cast someone like Harry Lennix — who has intense onscreen presence and then some — and then not give him as much to do as possible. His new role means he will interact more with Olivia Williams, meaning the two best actors on the show get to bang heads together: joy! That promotion, along with his new connection to Whiskey/Dr. Saunders, suggests he will be given more to do in the second season, but nevertheless, his relative inaction in later episodes was one of the few things I didn’t like about the improved half of the first season.

Most Entertaining Villain of the Year: Gemma Teller Morrow – Sons of Anarchy

One of the great pleasures of Sons of Anarchy is how it mixes up its Shakespeare. The debt it owes to Hamlet has been acknowledged by creator Kurt Sutter, but less attention has been paid to his shameless steal from Macbeth. Gemma Teller Morrow — former wife of SAMCRO leader John Teller — at first seems like a strong biker chick, but by the end of the pilot episode has revealed herself to be a conniving, power-hungry Queen whose sense of morality has been twisted until she will do anything to protect her family and the direction of the gang, a fact proved by her attempt at driving Jax’s junkie wife Wendy to an overdose. Later in the season she apologises to Wendy for this act, but even then she’s only doing it because she’d rather her son stay with a recovering junkie than return to his longtime sweetheart Tara. Plus, she does seem to be implicated in John’s death, possibly committed by her current husband Clay Morrow, which appears to have been done to prevent a change of direction towards legitimacy for the biker gang.

The most miraculous thing about this character is that she has dispelled my previous reservations about the talents of Katey Sagal. I’ve complained about her terrible voicework on Futurama before, where she leaves no joke intact, but I had suspected her dramatic work was not as shaky. She was great as John Locke’s departed love Helen in Lost, for example. In Sons of Anarchy, she’s even better, outacting even Ron Perlman when she’s in full flow. This display of Macchiavellian sneakiness got even more entertaining as the season progressed. There was a certain amount of character modulation during the latter half of the season, with some of her excesses toned down, and the horribly stagy confrontations between her and Tara tweaked until they sounded like actual human conversations, but even so, her Lady-Macbeth-esque manipulations of all around her were a source of delight even when she misfired a little. Gemma, as Journey almost said once, don’t stop conniving.

Least Entertaining Villain of the Year: Miguel Prado - Dexter

Dexter sure does have some crappy nemeses. In the first season, he goes up against his own brother, played with ridiculous camp evilness by Christian Camargo. In the second season, he is forced to conquer his evil girlfriend, manifested by Jaime Murray with a bag of absurd tics even more annoying than those of Dexter’s sister Debs, who is played by the equally dreadful Jennifer Carpenter. In the fourth season we’re getting John Lithgow. My memories of his madness from De Palma’s Raising Cain do not bode well for any Over-Act-O-Meters used to track the progress of this show, though I reckon he will be infinitely more entertaining than Dexter’s other “villains”.

Last year we got to see Jimmy Smits contend with the usual quota of ineptitude, improbable motivation, and mustache-twirling obviousness that comprises the Dexter Big Bad, and he made a meal of it. Amping up his intensity to sky-high levels, Miguel Prado went from saint to madman in the blink of an eye, all pretense at showing him as a morally complex human thrown out of the window with a haste even this most feeble of shows has never exhibited before. His cluelessness meant his occasional victories against Dexter relied upon our “hero”’s IQ dropping 100 points, which is a flaw that has run through the show from the beginning. Prado would then, naturally, make a bunch of mistakes, all the while chewing scenery like a murderous Donald Sinden. I say he was the least entertaining villain of the year because watching his character arc was deeply unsatisfying, with him changing his personality from moment to moment in order to move the plot, and not vice versa, but I did get a lot of pleasure from his reaction after he finally kills a bad guy.

Nastiest Villain of the Year: Nolan – Dollhouse

I can’t make any glib observations about this. Whedon is an avowed feminist, and this new show seemed to be a peculiar expression of that worldview, drawing both perplexed condemnation and optimistic readings. The fact that the show didn’t immediately say that the Dollhouse was a bad place threw a lot of viewers (including myself), but I’m sure a lot of Whedon’s fans (again, including myself) hoped that things would be clearer in the long run.

By the end of the season it was obvious that the Dollhouse tech was meant to be The Worst Thing That Has Happened To Humanity Ever, and not just because it brings about the end of the world (or at least, the end of Humanity). The most graphic and upsetting example of this comes in the excellent episode Needs, where the Actives come to and “escape” their prison (but only because they are allowed to). Drawn to the terrible things that have made them volunteer for Activeness, we see November visiting the grave of her child, and Echo deciding to stay behind to rescue her fellow Actives (surely this should worry the Dollhouse executives a bit more). Sierra, who I’d never found to be particularly compelling, goes to see the man who has paid the Dollhouse to make her an Active. Any doubt that the Dollhouse is a force for evil is removed once we find out that Nolan (played with oily menace by Vincent Ventresca) has paid the Dollhouse to turn her — a woman who once refused him — into an Active just so that he can violate a woman her whenever he feels like it. As Couch Baron says here, there truly are no words that can describe how awful this is. It was the most potent way to show how dreadful this technology is, and upset me deeply. The bad taste remained for the rest of the season. How rare for a network show to explore this kind of moral depravity without shying away from it.

Best Cast of the Year: Party Down

Just as with this year’s Best New Double Act category, I created this category last year to give shout-out to Reaper’s wonderful cast, which featured a host of great actors, especially Ray Wise, Tyler Labine, and Ken Marino. This year, Party Down gets a nod for featuring so many great actors, including Ken Marino. If I’d been blogging when Veronica Mars started, I probably would have highlighted the terrific cast of that show too, which would have meant discussing Ken Marino’s turn as sleazy private investigator Vinnie Van Lowe. Basically, Ken Marino seems to be my weakness. If he’s around, I am helpless.

Which is not to say Party Down worked solely because of him. As I’ve mentioned at length in my Best New Characters award list, Jane Lynch is breathtakingly good as Constance Carmell, and her replacement (Jennifer Coolidge) was just as good. Of the core cast, I’d highlight Ryan Hansen too, playing the adorably clueless Kyle Bradway — basically Dick Casablancas with a heart of gold. His vapid interactions with Jane Lynch are the highlight of many episodes, and he even manages to make tolerable the time spent with Martin Starr, here doing worryingly convincing work as the deeply unpleasant Roman DeBeers. He’s probably the weak link in the cast, though I would also become annoyed by the endless hipsterish emotional evasions of Casey Klein, played by Lizzy Caplan. (Side note: I think it’s fair to say that, thanks to real-world annoyances too numerous to count, I automatically take against any character on TV who spends all of their time on the phone instead of doing their job, or while other people are trying to talk to them. Those caveats are meant to signify that Jack Bauer is not to be considered one of these people. When he’s on the phone, he’s actually saving the world).

At the heart of this amazing ensemble is Adam Scott, formerly playing Palek the Vulcan Inseminatron from Tell Me You Love Me, and now utterly rehabilitated from that indie-movie-aping earnestness after his incredibly bold turn in Step Brothers. Here he is required to be in enormous emotional pain for the majority of the time, and it’s a credit to him that playing a completely shut-down shell of a man doesn’t mean he isn’t funny. His ability to mix up this world-weariness and emotional vulnerability with deadpan wit is essential to the success of the show. He’s Tim-from-The-Office, but even more pathetic. You weep for him in every episode.

So, they’re a fantastic core group, but they’re not the only reason Party Down wins this award. Just as with 30 Rock and Arrested Development before them, this show manages to get some of the best character actors around to populate the secondary cast. In the first season we saw Ken Jeong, J.K. Simmons, Steven Weber, Marilu Henner, Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel, Joey Lauren Adams, Molly Parker, Breckin Meyer, Rob Corddry, Rick Fox (as himself), George Takei (also as himself), not to mention — for the Veronica Mars fans out there — Kristin Bell, Enrico Colantoni, Daran “Cliff McCormack” Norris, Ed Begley Jr., Alona Tal and Jason Dohring. Matched up to the best sitcom scripts of the year, there was no way this show was going to fail. Even though I’m agnostic on the appeal of Megan Mullally (drafted in to replace Jane Lynch in season two), I have a strong feeling she will be magically transformed by this most glorious of shows.

Worst Cast of the Year: Parks and Recreation

I feel a little ill, because I’m about to criticise the casting of a show that has Amy Poehler in the lead role. Amy Poehler, who was the best thing about last year’s Baby Mama. Amy Poehler, who was one of the best things about SNL for the past few years. Amy Poehler, who was one of the three things in Southland Tales that was actually great and entertaining instead of desperately bad and misery-inducing (the other two things being The Rock and Wood Harris, with whom she shared her scenes). She makes me laugh pretty much every time I see her, but not here. In that case, I’m willing to assume she was just dealt a bad hand, and given a character who is unworkable. The only times Leslie Knope comes alive and becomes more than a badly formed lump of unrealistic character flaws is when she pines over Mark Brendanawicz, her selfish and unappealing colleague played by the talented Paul Schneider. Again, another talented actor playing an unlikeable and uninteresting character. Maybe I should rethink this category. Is it the cast, or the show, that I don’t like?

Well, Aziz Ansari is in it. I’ll admit, I have not seen much of his work. He was in Funny People for a couple of minutes, and the effect he had on me was akin to having my soul Maced. Perhaps I’m wrong. This show seems to be underwritten and poorly thought through, which could account for it, but his turn as Tom Haverford is almost unwatchable. I’d say that’s more than just a glitch in the writing. The same goes for Nick Offerman as the Dwight-Schrute-esque Ron Swanson, a character that screams desperation from the writers but is not at all helped by Offerman’s flat performance. Both Haverford and Swanson seem like the kernel of a joke expanded to character-size without much thought given to whether these characters will work. As it is, they’re just belligerent. The less said about Aubrey Plaza and her pointless teenage character April Ludgate, the better. (See above for comments about affectless, oblivious characters like Ludgate and Casey from Party Down.)

Perhaps the thing I resent most is putting someone as funny as Chris Pratt opposite a comedy void like Rashida Jones. She was charming enough in The Office but wasn’t expected to be particularly funny. Here she is either a dope being manipulated by Pratt’s Andy, or she berates him, making her seem churlish and him seem like a victim, which he isn’t. Crappy couples on TV are not often fun to watch (ask any Lost fan who despairs whenever Jack and Kate get together). I’m more than willing to accept that a lot of these actors are far better in other roles. Hell, I’ve seen them be better. Pratt was hilarious in The O.C. as Che, and Paul Schneider was riveting in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Perhaps I’m being way too harsh on these actors. Sadly, the bottom line is that, unlike The Office that came with only a couple of good characters, already based on archetypes from the UK series, and then built the supporting cast as they went along, Parks and Recreation started from scratch and got none of the characters right. Even a good cast would have trouble making this bunch of half-formed comedic scribbles come to life. In time, if it doesn’t get cancelled, perhaps this will change. Let me know when it does. Until then, I’ll stick with Community, Dan Harmon’s brilliant new sitcom, which recently started almost fully-formed and will hopefully keep getting better.

Best Guest Star of the Year: Jon Hamm - 30 Rock

For a little while, we were non-converts to the Cult of Hamm. He entertained us enough in Mad Men, but we had enough reservations about the first season that he didn’t really register in our consciousness, even after the Dick Whitman revelation gave Hamm the best acting opportunities. Perhaps we thought he was just a pretty face, and couldn’t imagine there was anything else in there. Canyon was also offended by his Brylcreemed hair. She deemed it unappealing. I wasn’t about to argue.

Then came the far superior second season, and sightings of his normal hair (adorably floppy), and then a turn on Saturday Night Live that was so confident and charming that I fully expect Hamm to eventually challenge the hosting records fought over by Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Dramatic excellence, perfect comic timing, a willingness to play off his image, and seriously, one of the handsomest faces on Earth; if he can sing and dance, he’s got it all. We are now members of the Cult. Wearing robes and everything. It’s proper infatuation.

His three episode run as Dr. Drew Baird on 30 Rock was joyous. It was so good that the plot of his final episode, with him coming to realise that having everyone fawn over him all the time is something that doesn’t happen to anyone else, was even alluded to in the third season of Mad Men (reacting with bemusement when Sal points out that he doesn’t get hit on by flight attendants on every flight he takes, unlike Don, who is obviously spoilt for choice). Once Mad Men is over, Hamm can pretty much pick a direction. Not many actors get to achieve stardom and show both comedic and dramatic chops. Maybe he’s more like Dr. Drew than he realises.

Most Resurrected Character of the Year: Captain Jack Harkness - Torchwood: Children of Earth

I thought I always wanted Captain Jack’s immortality to be used more, as it’s a nifty little gimmick. I don’t think that any more.

Most Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Akiva Goldsman on Kings and Fringe

Akiva Goldsman has done some awful things. His script for Batman and Robin is rightly reviled. He’s great at simplifying complex narratives and turning them into multiplex fodder (A Beautiful Mind, I, Robot). He’s the go-to guy for big movies based on crappy thrillers by bad writers (he’s adapted John Grisham and Dan Brown). When nerds hear his name, they sob with misery. “Why is this man so beloved of Hollywood?”, they shout. “It must be proof of its awfulness, along with the career of Michael Bay!” Of course, my own feelings about Bay are not so straight-down-the-line, and now, Goldsman has begun to win me over.

All he had to do was build up his experience as a director by making two of the strongest hours of TV of the 2008-2009 season. His debut, on Kings‘ The Sabbath Queen, showed a talent for atmospherics and interesting visuals, pacing the episode beautifully and getting some good performances from even the weaker actors on the show. After that he wrote and directed Bad Dreams, one of the highlights of Fringe’s first season. Again, the creepy atmosphere was beautifully judged, and the opening few minutes were hypnotically staged. Even better, the big finale was disturbing and tense, even as it played with some less than fresh ideas, and then we got a video clip of a young Olivia that wouldn’t have looked amiss in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. If you’ll forgive me for cheating and ignoring my own rules, we’ve also seen his work on the first episode of the second season of Fringe, and again, it was very impressive. In time it’s obvious that he will be directing films too. I hope he finds some interesting material to work with, but even if not, I look forward to seeing what he will come up with.

Least Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Greg Yaitanes on House and Lost

Shades of Caruso took against the TV (and occasional film) director Greg Yaitanes after some hilariously overwrought and showy work on shows such as Heroes and Drive, and we’ve yet to be convinced he deserves reappraisal. Last year he won an Emmy for his work on the first part of the House season finale, which would have been understandable when you take the logistics of the shoot into account, but is frustrating when Katie Jacobs’ work on the far more affecting final episode wasn’t even considered (and she’s listed as co-director of the Yaitanes episode too, but didn’t get a nomination). Since then, Yaitanes has been given a co-producer credit on House, and contributed numerous episodes to this season, including the shocking Simple Explanation, in which Kutner (Kal Penn) commits suicide offscreen.

I will say this: the scene where Foreman and Thirteen discover the body was brilliantly done. Unfortunately, Yaitanes had a vision for this episode and went ahead with it. Everyone at Princeton Plainsboro is obviously very depressed about Kutner’s death, so Yaitanes lights the entire episode as if all the colour has been drained from the hospital. It’s an entirely grey hour of TV, just in case you didn’t get it from the performances or dialogue or sad music all over the place. To be honest, the episode Joy, directed by an unexpectedly off-colour Deran Serafian, featured the worst direction of the season, but Yaitanes was consistently bad here, and worse elsewhere.

You see, he also managed to infect my beloved Lost with his ridiculous film-cooties. I could talk about the flashy work he did on Heroes, but to be honest he’s the least of that show’s problems, so I don’t really mind if he stays on it. Lost, however, is a totally different matter. He had worked on the show before, in the first season, and as we started rewatching the show recently, I noticed he was kinda bad then too. That was when the show was in its infancy, and was still trying to find its tone, so his attention-seeking excesses were less obvious. By now, we all know what works and what doesn’t work within the very specific Lost world, which made Yaitanes’ excesses even more noticeable than usual. We know that Ben is creepy and Sayid is scary and intimidating, which are characteristics stressed by their very specific line-readings. In He’s Our You, we see a flashback to a face-off between the two characters, and both Michael Emerson and Naveen Andrews draw out their sentences to absurd lengths, with poorly edited pauses between each shot emphasising that they are both very methodical people who hate each other.

Lost usually treats these big moments with a sense of grandeur that works well, considering the unapologetically grandiose nature of the narrative, but this scene stepped over the line between epic and ridiculous. It made my favourite show seem like a parody of itself. I don’t even want to get into the awful “interrogation” scene later (included above), which was poorly written but even more poorly directed. What was Andrews doing here? It’s all over the place. The final scene with Sayid shooting young Ben was brilliant, but it was the only bright spot in a very disappointing hour of Lost. When you compare this horrible misinterpretation of the tone of the show to the consistently impressive work of star directors Jack Bender and Stephen Williams, it just looks amateurish. I keep hoping he’ll settle down, but the latest episode of House was directed by him, and as it was about a games programmer, most shots seemed to feature arms coming out of the side of the frame towards the person being observed, just like an FPS, so it might be a while before he realises less is more.

Best Shout-Out of the Year: House

Stephen Colbert is a huge fan of House, and it seems the feeling is mutual. (It’s the photo above his shoulder, obviously.)

This is the only way Colbert is ever going to get on a Fox channel without being mischaracterised as a baby-eating Trotsky clone.

Intensity of the Year: Lance “Intensity” Reddick – Fringe

While Parks and Recreation fans, or Dexterites, or people with Unusual taste, might be mad at me for being a big meanie and saying such terrible things about their favourite shows, surely there can be no controversy here. No one else this year was so stern and scary and just fucking in charge.

I suspect Lance “Intensity” Reddick can atomise titanium just by looking at it. As with Harry Lennix on Dollhouse, Reddick is pretty under-used on Fringe. Most of the time he is onscreen he’s taking the Fringe team to various crime scenes, or giving Olivia either a bollocking or a pep talk. This is not a good use of this man’s talents. He also showed up in Lost, as the sinister Matthew Abaddon, where he stopped being sinister just before getting shot and killed. Which sucked. I hope season two of Fringe sees him doing more entertaining stuff. I’d like him to shoot one of their ridiculous monsters (a part squid, part mushroom teenager hiding under carpets, for instance), or have more screen time with Blair Brown and Her Metallic Arm. If the Fringe showrunners don’t hurry up, he could well get very bored very soon. In this AV Club interview,  he says he wants to try his hand at comedy. (For the record, though he is seemingly never required to show it on TV, Mr. Reddick is fully capable of expressing amusement, and isn’t just a scarily intense man.)

If he left Fringe to do that, you know I’d be checking it out.

And that’s it for this year. In the next few weeks, some new polls or something. Maybe some chatter about the London Film Festival (I got really carried away buying tickets the other week). Stay tuned, new readers. As you can see, I may not post as often as I would like, but when I do, I tend to post big.

So, I thought, to change the pace with this second entry, I would take some valuable time to partake in a tender American pastime: I wish to berate a horrible film. Hopefully, this new, funnier post will demonstrate that I’m not as hoity-toity as my last post suggested, but in fact ten times more so. Read as I make you laugh and cry at the same time by turning Southland Tales into fodder for deep social commentary.

(Side note: While the whole simultaneous laughing crying thing is something I aspire to as a dramatist, I realized the other day that I will never be as good at it as the world is on its own. I realized this when I read a blogpost from Americans for Truth regarding Nancy Pelosi and the Folsom Street Fair’s “Anti-Christian” ad parodying the last supper.)

And now, Southland Tales.

I was warned. It got terrible reviews (when it came out three years ago). But I have recently been on an apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic movie binge, so, despite fair warning, I couldn’t resist when Southland Tales showed up on Comcast OnDemand. Besides, I couldn’t sleep. And I was intrigued, because the premise sounded possibly intelligent, maybe even political–two nuclear detonations in Texas, WWIII with the “Axis of Evil,” the US is a surveillance state, and there’s a rebel group called the Neo-Marxists.

I came first to an obvious conclusion: no wonder it got terrible reviews. However, through watching it I reached a deeper understanding of why it got terrible reviews. Southland Tales was not made for a generation containing employed movie reviewers. Instead, well, the statistics on how many 12-18 year old boys (the clear intended demographic) can read and write at even an age appropriate level are depressing at best, so it makes sense that few positive reviews have surfaced.

Visually and narratively, the film is chaotic, fractured, indecisive, gratuitous, and while promising in premise, ultimately full of fail due to its almost impossible emotional and analytical shallowness (admittedly this might also be a side effect of it being set in LA). It is tailor made for eyes and minds that have been raised on the chaotic, fractured, ADD media of the digital era. Psychologist Marc Prensky calls this generation “digital natives,” referring to people who have, “spent their entire lives surrounded by and using  computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age.” (Prensky, 2001) In the end, the film became, for my perversely analytical mind, a demonstration of the worst possible consequences of the way digital natives absorb today’s depthless media. It is an insensitive, cursory, and horrifyingly shortsighted vision of the future.

I was struck immediately with the realization that I wasn’t watching a movie; I was watching a video game I had no control over. Except it kept cutting between different games, navigating menus I didn’t understand, sometimes cutting to television, sometimes to home video, channel surfing like a clicker on the fritz. The film is told in TV news screen inlays (tickers, headlines, names, and captions embedded into the video display), zoom-out to multiple TV screens all playing different news, gaudy cuts from newsreel to newsreel (the kind where the 2d picture spins offscreen in 3d, iMovie splendor), and, occasionally, there is live action with b-list actors that looks (and often is) shot on a home video camera, at one point interrupted for a full length music video. There is so much going on (on the screen and in the narrative at large) that only a mind that was raised in the modern barrage of information and imagination—intimately familiar with StumbleUpon, Japanese video game plotlines, video game characters (which is to say, characters with no character at all), sci-fi fan fiction, and the acting on Cinemax late at night—could process it all without vomiting. But being a digital native, exposed to all of those things, I could handle that. What I couldn’t handle was reconciling my expectation of something at least vaguely political with the actuality of the film.

Southland Tales is about as much about politics as Kujo is about veterinary medicine. Instead, Southland Tales, still like Kujo, is actually about cursory public fears, and it draws from the most obvious cultural sources in the least analytic way possible. It’s like the people who think Swine Flu will be the next bubonic plague were allowed to make a movie if those people were also sat down Clockwork Orange style as children and forced to watch the history of the years 2000-2006 in the aforementioned style of the clicker on the fritz. In addition to being shortsighted in its fear and in it’s inability to focus, it is also shortsighted in part because it is, in fact, shortsighted, placing itself only a year in the future from it’s release date. This is a mistake few screenwriters, lit majors, half-intelligent sci-fi fans, or lab rats, would make, because they would all figure out that, in a year, their vision would be invalidated by actual events. Not to mention that, since a movie can take years to make, any screenwriter is already trying to predict the future by imagining what audiences will want to see 1-3 years from when they’re writing, so the risk involved in setting anything that close in the future would be undertaken only by the Evel Knievel of screenwriters. But most of all, they all would have realized that, in 2006, with the sensitivity and complexity of current events, looking just one year into the future, their vision would have to tread on the present as subtly as a ninja across the tin roof of his victim’s house. Instead, Southland Tales treads like a T-Rex through the Piazza San Marco, butchering Bush era politics in a torrent of ignorance, anger, fear, and pop culture/hollywood flare. It’s vision is crude as oil spectacle, provocative like porno (or like its own image of an SUV mounting an inferior SUV and pounding it in the exhaust pipe).

The SUV image echoes of early video game writing—think back to GTA’s SUV gag, the Maibatsu Monstrosity. It preys on a cheap and long cliched target of criticism just like the rest of Southland Tales’ easy targets: the war in Iraq, the PATRIOT Act, and the greed and incompetence of the media. At least, like the SUV commercial, all of it’s images admirably reflect the depth and maturity of its inquiry. It’s criticism of the Iraq war is captured best by the eloquent commentary it makes in the full length music video it includes (for no apparent reason) of Justin Timberlake drunkenly waving his beer can at the camera, lip-synching to the Killers’ song “All These Things That I Have Done,” “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier” while flanked by a fleet of scantily clad medics who for some reason are practicing a beached synchronized swimming routine on the ski-ball lanes of an old video arcade. This image is seconded by the provocative climactic (insofar as the film has a climax—it’s hard when there’s no plot) sequence where several outlaw civilians are massacred by gun turrets of which there has never been an establishing shot, let alone an explanation. The message is so clear, the PATRIOT Act, the police state, you’ll never see it coming until it’s too late. And by then, characters will be so devoid of humanity that we won’t even care when they die because we will have no compassion left. It is a bleak future indeed, where the world’s evils really do become as simplistic as I perceived them to be in high school.

It is in this way that Southland Tales envisions the future as digital natives might envision it, through eyes which have little focus, have been exposed to politics only through the mockery that is television journalism and debate, and are detached and withdrawn into a world of entertainment and unbridled imagination. Eyes that are imaginative not in an artistic or creative way, but in a schizophrenic way that reflects a profound ignorance regarding the limits of reality and the practicalities/actualities of everyday existence. It is an imagination without an understanding of what it means to be human and without meaningful implications (analytic or emotional) for the world in which we actually live.

On the other hand, perhaps Southland’s vision is uncannily accurate in its prediction of a world where all people have are delusions and possess the emotion depths of kiddy pools, where irrationality and indiscriminate sex and violence are king. If Southland Tales represents the way digital natives perceive the world, then perhaps it’s deranged unreality is what the world will degenerate to under the control of digital natives. Perhaps we will create a Southland Tales kind of world, where we do not have to focus or feel or think. But I doubt it.

I like to think media can be generative rather than degenerative. I like to think that digital natives are more informed than previous generations, not less, and that, if they appreciate Southland Tales, it is as a complete mockery of the mediaverse they know and love even though they understand its weaknesses. If they appreciate it, it’s because, as digital natives, they get the joke. They get that the film is a joke.

Southland Tales came from Richard Kelly, the writer/director of Donnie Darko, a film which I loved despite, or for it being an equally imaginative, chaotic, fractured, shocking, and schizoid film. I think the difference between the two films highlights something very important about the experience of the digital native. Donnie Darko worked because it was about an individual having delusions about the world around him. The protagonist was trying to deal with a world that was, almost literally fracturing around him, devolving into chaos, as he fell behind trying to pick up the pieces. Donnie Darko was the audience in the post-modern theatre, the digital native trying to piece together the world around him from the images and information the media provides. Southland Tales somehow got confused, and portrayed the world through the images and structures of modern media without recognizing that that media is NOT reality, that the pervasive fears observable in the pop culture of the present are not indicative of a future in which those fears are realized.

Those observations can help answer some of the questions this blog seeks to ask. Southland Tales mistakes the experience of modernity for modernity itself. Modernity is the state of human civilization as a whole, it’s what one would see and understand if one could grasp all the worlds’ societies, cultures, technologies, and the systems that keep human civilization buzzing as a coherent and cohesive whole. Modernity is thus defined in part by rules and order and systems, it is the objective reality of the state of human civilization and existence. However, it’s understood in modern day that such a larger understanding is impossible for any one individual to reach. Instead, the modern individual must grope at an understanding of that larger whole through the fractured lens of modern media. That is what characterizes the experience of modernity: the experience of knowing that one sees the world through a glass darkly—through a subjective lens through which one’s view is impossibly flawed, fractured, and probably somewhat delusional. However, in spite of this, the experience of modernity is also characterized by the fact that one is always groping, through equally flawed means and media, for something more.

Para mí, Southland Tales es una de las mejores películas que he visto. Y ésta de aquí abajo es una de las escenas que me dicen por qué. Precisamente porque son incapaces de decírmelo. Si en algún momento lo supiera, se acabó. No son cosas que una sepa. No son cosas que una deba saber.

After a lackluster-at-best summer movie season, we have all been (strangely) blessed with an incredible 09-10 season to look forward to.  I seriously haven’t been this jazzed about movie-going in a few years.  It seems that an amazing new debut is announced weekly at this point, which is really cutting in on my Hollywood bitching time.  Below, I’ve created a haphazard, make-shift rundown of what I am absolutely chomping at the bit to see in the upcoming season:

The Road-Cormac McCarthy’s novel’s big screen adaptation was recently pushed back to Thanksgiving, frightening me all the more as I fear that studios are losing faith in its bankability.

Sherlock Holmes-Robert. Downey. Jr.

Alice in Wonderland-Tim Burton’s CGI-fest update of Lewis Carrol’s classic.  Though I am EXTREMELY skeptical, Depp as the Mad Hatter with Matt Lucas, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Michael Sheen, Crispin Glover, Stephen Fry, and Alan Rickman are keeping my cries of “CGI-FOUL!” at bay.

Iron Man 2-I’m intrigued to see Downey fight Mickey Rourke.  Intrigued enough to include this entry on this list.  Past that, to be honest, I don’t see this film panning out much differently than its predecessor, but, as long as they deliver on some great Downey/Rourke headbashing, I’ll be content.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus-This is, hands down, the crown jewel of this list.  Terry Gilliam’s fantasy epic starring the late Heath Ledger had to improvise with its script as Ledger passed away during filming.  So what is one of the most revered directors in Hollywood to do when he loses his lead actor?  Simple, he calls in Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Ferrell to replace him.  All in one movie.  Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Ferrell, and Heath Ledger all play the same role.  I was trying to come up with a new word to describe this event, but I simply can’t.

Zombieland-I’m not even a self-professed zombie-buff like many of my co-horts, but the trailers for this endeavor look too astounding to pass up.  Watching Woody Harrelson annihilate zombies while taking the less-than-menacing Jesse Eisenberg under his wing is all I wanted over the summer ‘09 movie season.  Was that so much to ask?

I Love You Philip Morris-Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor in a dark comedy about an inmate who breaks out of jail once his lover is released from the same prison.  I love Jim Carrey.  I love Ewan McGregor.  I love the premise.  I Love You, Philip Morris.  (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

A Christmas Carol-Robert Zemeckis retells Dickens’ classic utilizing Jim Carrey as Scrooge and all three ghosts.  Need I say more?

Fantastic Mr. Fox-Wes Anderson helms this Roald Dahl retelling with a cast the likes of Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and Owen Wilson.  CAN. NOT. WAIT.

Inception-Christopher Nolan’s first at-bat (no pun intended) since The Dark Knight.  A sci-fi/thriller starring Leo DiCaprio.  How many good things can we combine into a single movie? 

Youth in Revolt-Michael Cera adopts an alternate persona all in the hopes of wooing a love interest.  My description doesn’t do the title nearly as much justice as images of Cera with a faux mustache. 

Bronson-Having been called A Clockwork Orange of our time, Bronson chronicles the true story of Charles Bronson, the prisoner, who attained superstar status from simply being an unruly inmate.

(Untitled)-An art flick commenting on the absurdity of art flicks and art in general.  Seems to be everything Art School Confidential promised to be but failed to deliver on.

Gentlemen Broncos-Jared Hess’ latest directing forray is a surreal fantasy about a down-on-their-luck sci-fi writer who steals a young boy’s manuscript and profits greatly.  I was sold upon reading “A surreal fantasy.”

The Box-Richard Kelly (who I’m STILL giving credit for Donnie Darko) directs James Marsden and Cameron Diaz in a thriller about a married couple who discover an obscure box left on their doorstep.  Try to forget Southland Tales for just a minute and remember: James Marsden.

World’s Greatest Dad-This could very well be the role that brings poignancy back to Robin Williams’ career.  Williams plays a failed poet father who finds his son dead due to auto-erotic asphyxiation.  To lull his son’s unfortunate fate, he writes a beautiful suicide note that gets absurd publicity and paints his son as a genius.  Williams then must decide whether to out himself as the genius or maintain his son’s newfound celebrity.  Did I mention that Bobcat Goldthwait is helming the project?

The Vampire’s Assistant-All production stills simply do not do this flick justice, you HAVE to check out the trailer.  Otherwise it just looks like John C. Reilly attempting a recreation of Nic Cage’s The Magician’s Apprentice, and that isn’t even out yet!  This quasi fantasy-quasi comedy-quasi drama seems to be perfect for John C. Reilly who stars in the lead role. After pulling schlock duty at the Apatow-Factory for the last few years, it will be good to see him be able to stretch again and actually play with something with some meat to it.

Where the Wild Things Are-Spike Jonze’s adaptation of everyone’s favorite children’s book looks amazing and I’m very curious to see how good/bad it pans out.

9-Back to John C. Reilly!  This voice cast is amongst the best I have seen in years.  Christopher Plummer is a catch in any medium. 

The Lovely Bones-The trailers all look AMAZING and have kept my appetite satiated for this neo-fantasy thriller involving a young girl slain before her time and her attempt to reach out from beyond the grave.

Big Fan-Patton Oswalt has put down a show-stopping dramatic performance that has stunned and stupefied most critics with its un-abashedly powerful and sincere dramatic intent.  Oswalt steps out of the image he has been stereotyped with and fully explodes on the scene with a (hopefully) attention grabbing portrayal.

Not Quite Hollywood-A documentary (which I am usually a sucker for) about the explosion of the Australian film market in the ’70’s.  Pure.  Genius.

Kick-Ass-Michael Cera and Nick Cage star in Mark Miller’s adaptation of his own graphic novel in which an everyday kid takes on the mantel of the superhero.  Miller’s graphic novel has a die-hard, monstrous fan base while being a relatively new title.  Plus, Nic Cage.

Cold Souls-Paul Giamatti plays himself in a Being John Malkovich sort of drama, in which Paul, a successful actor, takes part in a breakthrough soul-removal-procedure.

This entire effort seems fairly frivolous, because, while this is all I can think of now, as soon as I finish writing this article, fourteen more trailers will be released and will stupify me.  I’m FAR from complaining, however, as it has been years since I’ve been anywhere near this excited about anything Hollywood has done. Happy movie-going everyone!

Shameless self-promotion, everyone!
Bears With Sparklers

“Receive with simplicity, everything that happens to you.”

That’s the quote that the Coen brothers use to introduce you to A SERIOUS MAN. But by the end of the film, I wanted to amend it to say, “Receive with appreciation everything you’re about to see and hear,” because it is A LOT. Not in a sprawling, “Dear God, will this ever end so I can try to figure out what has just uncorked itself in front of me kind of way (see SOUTHLAND TALES), but in a compact but detailed to a fault examination and exploration into a very particular time (the late 60s, suburban-style), culture (Jewish), and man (the central character played by Theatre veteran Michael Stuhlbarg).

Stuhlbarg plays ‘Larry Gopnik”, a physics professor at a small Midwestern school that almost immediately faces a shit-storm of unbelievable, if intimate proportions: A Korean student unhappy with a grade tries to bribe him, his potentially violent neighbor is encroaching on his yard, and his own house is filled with strife thanks to a bickering son (facing his own demons from a school bully/dealer) and daughter, his inept brother torn between his obsession with a possible genius mathematical “map of probability” he has discovered and the daily draining of a cyst that terrorizes him, and best yet – a wife that wants to leave him for an overbearing (and I can’t begin to describe how much that word doesn’t begin to do justice to this guy) family friend.

Gopnik’s life as he knows it is turned upside down from the get-go, and as he says during a lesson plan, “Even though you can’t figure anything out, you’ll be responsible for it on the midterm.” He goes to a succession of rabbis for advice, one more practically inept and unhelpful than the last, as he stumbles through a period of discovery and re-awakening in his life that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. But this isn’t simply a comic Job story, because the Coens would be bored with that. No, this is a comic storm that is both messy and sometimes indiscriminate in who and what it targets. But in the end, regardless of how it all plays out – they’ll be responsible for it. And if you’ve been hoping for the Coens particular brand of humor to return after NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, you’ll be happy for it.

Nice start for a film festival, huh. After that I ran into Spout.com’s always delightfully acerbic film writer and critic Karina Longworth. Love her. In a film world video game, you could pit Karina against George Sanders’ classic character in ALL ABOUT EVE and play for hours. Anyway, she gave me the inside scoop on what she had seen. Which is, of course, the “sport” of a film festival. Compare notes and dish out the thumbs up and thumbs down on everything you’ve seen up to that point.

Next up was Diablo Cody’s JENNIFER’S BODY. “Wait,” you say. “Isn’t that directed by Karyn Kusama?” “Yes,” I reply. Pause. Anyway, it’s Diablo Cody’s JENNIFER’S BODY. Which means depending on your predilection with JUNO–style dialogue and verbal toss-offs, it’s either clever and instantly quotable or irritating and quickly wearing out its welcome. Oh, wait. It also stars Megan Fox. Hmm…my last bid was from wearing out its welcome. Do I have another bid…?

“Hell is a teenage girl.” And “Sandbox love never dies” Those are the watch-quotes to go by for the film. The idea is simple: Megan Fox plays the hottest girl in school, who – after inadvertently being turned into a demon by a small beer indie band looking for a shortcut to fame via a sacrifice to the devil, runs gorily roughshod through the boys in school while her nerdy best friend (Amanda Seyfried) tries to figure it all out.

And it’s not scary. Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t succeed in what it’s aiming for. No, my guess is if you’re putting your money down to see this film, then it’s all about Megan Fox. And wisely, Cody and Kusama know that. In fact, it’s so transparent that the boys get a reward practically after every kill. Megan Fox demon eviscerates a boy, Megan Fox hottie is filmed slow-mo skinny dipping. Megan Fox demon has seconds, Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried have a hot girl-on girl make out session. So, it’s like, “one for you and…one for you.”

The fact is, that while I understand the Megan Fox porn star hotness appeal, I am still fascinated over the ability of the hype and marketing machine’s ability to keep that T&A train operating at full speed. And while JENNIFER’S BODY does have some smarts to go with its smart-ass, ultimately it plays a minor key. And not just in horror-land.

Next up was Joe Dante’s THE HOLE. In 3D. That’s right. A film festival movie in 3D! That’s just all kinds a good, right? Here’s the deal about the 3D thing. Either those 3D glasses are the most expensive things ever to produce or there is technology involved that could bring down a nation. Because, I swear there was so much paranoia involved in giving those things back to the people running the screening that it made me long for the comparative lack of concern the airport security displayed as I flew in to Canada in the first place. “You need to leave the theater to go to the bathroom? Fine, hold on to the box cutter, but give me the 3D glasses.”

Anyway, THE HOLE is a story about two brothers that relocate to a new home with their single mom. Upon arriving at the new home, they discover a cute girl living next door and…wait for it….in the basement under their house…wait for it…under an ominously padlocked plank in the floor… A hole.

I’m betting the title gave it a way.

And, of course, the boys, not knowing any better, unlock the padlocks and free the evil force residing inside the seemingly bottomless hole. And since it’s their mess, they – along with that cute girl next door will have to clean it up. Or something bad will happen to them. Which is the appropriate way to describe the stakes because this is a horror film for the kids. A gateway drug, if you will. So scary stuff happens and there are various threats to people. But in a “safe”, un-gory, limited exposure to evil kinda way. The film is so completely aimed at a specific age demographic that Teri Polo (the go-to actress for sexy but safe) is cast as the mom.

And the movie IS amusement park ride fun. The scares come from things like malevolent clown dolls (your kids homework will be a follow up viewing of POLTERGEIST) and those stop-motion walking a crawling spirits (okay, do an assignment on THE RING too), courtesy of your not-so friendly basement dwelling hole.

And then there is the 3-D thing. Which is cool. I’ll just give myself up to that willingly. However, is it just me or – like the perfunctory tricks that gymnasts have to accomplish in their Olympic routines – does every 3D movie have to throw a baseball at you? Or they get 3D points deducted from their overall movie score? Just curious.

So, take the kids to this thing so you can speed along their horror-film development and you can also enjoy yourself as well – as opposed to just napping, like so many of my friends who are parents did during G-FORCE.

That was it for the films. The next order of business was something new for me. The red carpet. Or specifically: being a journalist on a red carpet. This is ironic in that I practically live on red carpets – or to be more direct – running them. I am frequently that guy managing the traffic at the beginning of the filmmakers and movie stars entrances: welcoming them, assigning escorts to them to walk them down the thing, introducing them to the photographers, etc. That is frequently my little show.

And I take care to not just manage the placement of the press on my red carpets but to also pay attention and ensure, as best I can, that everyone gets the photos or interviews they need and want and no one goes home empty handed.

This was different. A first come, first serve policy combined with the fact that I was “print” and didn’t have a video camera joined at my hip meant that I was destined to not only be at the end of the line – I was also going to be relatively inconspicuous.

The entrances were for Steven Soderbergh’s THE INFORMANT! And the potential interview targets on hand would be Soderbergh, Matt Damon, Scott Bakula and Melanie Lynsky. Not a bad group at all. So, I am standing next to a guy writing for a national tabloid that like me has not seen the film yet. However, unlike this guy, I had read reviews and stories and did some background on the film. In addition, I also had a decent knowledge of popular culture pre-Jonas Brothers. Because, for the life of him, he could not think of a question to ask anyone not named Matt Damon. After spying Lynsky at the front of the carpet, he asked me, “Does she kiss Matt Damon in the movie?” To which I replied, “Well, I haven’t see it but she does play his wife. So I’ll hazard a guess – yes.” Next question, “Do their characters have kids together?” Desired response: “I don’t have that much insight into their pretend home life.” Out loud: “I don’t know.”

But now I was feeling the pressure to come up with good questions myself for everyone. Something that wouldn’t have been asked twenty times immediately before me or at the very least, phrased in a creative, yet concise way that would send each of them off to the races with clever, funny, witty and insightful sound bites for the readers. So thinking quickly, I put together my winning question for each of them – knowing that this far down the line I would get one and only one question. Because, by this point in the line, they just want to get in the house and be done with it.

Well, I needn’t have worried, Because each one of them – Soderbergh, Damon, Bakula and Lynsky – passed us by. Didn’t give us a shot at the question or even acknowledge us. Publicists rushed Damon through – typical – that’s routine. “He’s got to get in now. Quick! The movie’s gonna start in a half hour, so he needs to be inside RIGHT NOW! Soderbergh literally stood in front of me – with his back to me – for ten minutes but would not turn around to answer a question. And Bakula and Lynsky even brushed us off. Melanie Lynsky!

But to be fair, this is all on the publicists. The film’s reps and the Toronto Film Festival publicists. It’s their job to regulate the traffic flow and make sure that everyone gets some love. It’s something that I work my ass of to achieve at AFI FEST, DALLAS and each of my other film festivals and agonize as it is happening to ensure that fairness and equal play. And it was great to see first hand, exactly why it’s so important that I do that. Because the personal publicists DON’T WANT TO – bottom line. You should have seen the look Bakula’s sawed-off little guy gave us before he shielded us with his back from being able to get to Scott. (Honest Disclaimer – I have a long ago and far away Hollywood history with that little wiener dude and it’s possible he recognized me. Regardless…) If the film festival’s publicists aren’t on point (at best) or just don’t care (at worst), then the end of the line is exactly that for a journalist at those red carpets.

To paraphrase Diablo from JENNIFER’S BODY, “That’s not just high school evil. That’s actual evil.”

Southland Tales (2006)

Rated MA

Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Justin Timberlake

Donnie Darko is one of my favourite movies of all time. If not my all time favourite. A few years ago, I started hearing word of Richard Kelly’s next project, Southland Tales. And I waited. And I began to believe this movie was mythical. IMDB said it existed. Movie reviews said it existed. But I just couldn’t get my hands on a copy. I was hesitant to buy a copy of a movie I hadn’t seen before. What if it wasn’t worth the money? The reviews I had read weren’t very complimentary. But then I found it. Sitting on the shelf at my local video store in the weekly section. And it was $1 Tuesday. Score!

So was it worth the wait? Was it a work of unappreciated genius or an utter disaster? With an abundance of recognisable stars, a soundtrack by Moby, and special effects galore, there’s a lot going for this movie. It’s an apocalyptic tale of the end of the world. It’s a satire of the war on terror and the infringement of civil liberties. It’s a music video. It’s a love story. It’s a science fiction tale involving time travel and creepy psychic scientists. It’s a multi-media experience involving comic books and websites. It’s all of these things and more.

Have a nice apocalypse.

After a nuclear attack in modern day Texas, the USA commits itself to several large scale wars in the middle east. In response to this critical war, the American government have cranked up homeland security and surveillance to protect the people and are in desperate need of alternate fuel sources seeing oil from the middle east isn’t exactly forth coming. Society is on the brink of disaster. Neo-Marxists cells spring up, determined to take down the government. But all hope is not lost. The Baron, a mysterious scientist with his fingers in many pies, presents a solution – Liquid Karma, which promises to solve the energy crisis as well as bringing some other interesting results.

Narrated by Pilot (Justin Timberlake), an all seeing, disenfranchised soldier with visions of the future, Southland Tales follows three individuals whose paths cross through out the movie: Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson), amnesiac action movie star with political connections who has just written a screen play which eerily seems to predict future events; Krista Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), an entrepreneurial porn star with prophetic visions who is caught up in the Baron’s plans; and Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), a soldier returned from the war who impersonating his police officer twin brother in an attempt to discredit the government. As these three individuals become aware of what is really going on behind the scenes, they come to realise that this may in fact be the end of the world and that there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

Southland Tales is a movie that needs to be watched more than once. There is a definite sense of information overload. It can feel like you’re being bombarded with information that at first seems like scene setting but turns out to be crucial to the story being told. On top of this there is an explosion of visual stimuli. The creators have not been subtle with the visual feel of this movie, which can be quite overwhelming at first. By the end of the movie, I began to see how it all fit together. What felt like ham-fisted broad-strokes at the start of the movie became nuanced story telling devices by the end. This is a movie to be watched multiple times. It deserves to be dissected over and over with friends. It is not a movie for the lazy viewer who wants everything explained to them simply and offered up on a platter. It needs to be worked for.

The book of Revelation is often quoted in movies, television, etc, to give a sense of gravitas and forboding. As Timberlake’s voice over repeated these oft heard words, I thought nothing of it. Generally I find Bible verses in movies to be stylistic choices that don’t really add anything to the movie. So I ignored it. Until I realised – Southland Tales is the story of Revelation retold through the lens of 21st century fears of the end of the world. It’s all there: the whore of Babylon, the anti-christ, the two witnesses, etc. The story of Southland Tales is the story of Revelation. Timberlake’s narrator acts as the apostle John, watching the end of the world unfold before him and struggling to communicate what he has seen to those who will listen. Once this revelation (excuse the pun) dawned on me, I saw the movie in a new light. The promise of the end of the world in this movie’s advertising was not an empty one.

The biggest difference between Southland Tales‘ apocalypse and the Biblical one is where it goes after the world ends. The movie finishes with the end of the world. And then the credits roll. The viewer is left to ponder what happens next. Not so with the book of Revelation. When Christ returns and this world comes to an end, justice will be done. Jesus will call all of humanity to account for their actions. And then all will be brought to justice. Those who follow Christ, who have put their faith in the redeeming sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, will enter the new creation, the new heaven and earth. They will live for eternity with God, free from the stain of sin. Those who reject Jesus, however, will face the unfortunate reality of eternity in hell. The book of Revelation may be filled with imagery and scenes that we find difficult to understand, but at its core, the message is clear. Jesus will come to bring justice. Will you spend your time after the apocalypse in heaven or hell?

As a treat, check out this dream sequence from Southland Tales, featuring Justin Timberlake.

I super passed out last night before I could blog. I was just so exhausted that I couldn’t believe it when my friends left and it was only 9 p.m. Needless to say, I fell asleep early and said, “Forget blogging.”

I was so tired because Mags, Ash, Jamie, Tyler and I went to Stroud’s Run in Athens. We had a cookout with some delicious burgers and dogs that Ashley and Maggie grilled. We swam a lot. At one point, we attempted to swim from the swimming area to the other side of the lake where the treeline is. We made it, but then turned around in the last 10 feet because it looked all icky and gross on the other shore. We laid out in the sun and worked on our “tans,” and by tans I mean “sunburns.”

Then, we headed home, much to Ashley’s dismay, and ate pizza and watch Southland Tales, which most of them hated, though I loved it the second time, with my parents. They left shortly after. It was dark, so I assumed it was bed time, but was informed that I, as a grownup, can’t go to bed at 9 p.m. So, then I just fell asleep on the couch, pretending to be an adult, until my mom came upstairs and sent me to bed.

That’s how summer days should be, right? Right?!