Freedom of speech, as enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, means that the government itself is not allowed to impair your ability to say whatever it is you want to say — within certain boundaries laid down by various Supreme Courts over the years. The government can prosecute you for shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater (um, maybe), for example, or for uttering ‘fighting words,’ whatever those are.
Ender’s Game
Freedom of speech does not mean that you can say whatever you want to say without consequence. It just protects you from legal consequence. Non-governmental consequences often follow controversial or inappropriate statements. For example, if you smart off to your cranky old grandmother, she might slap you in the face. If you submit a plagiarized story to your editor, you might get fired from your job as a reporter. If you make up stuff in your memoir, you might make Oprah angry. In none of these cases will you go to jail.
More to the point: if you are a prominent and raging anti-gay activist, I’m not going to pay money to see your movie, even if the movie has nothing to do with your anti-gay activism or your rage. The government isn’t involved in this decision of mine. The First Amendment doesn’t apply. I’m also going to be encouraging everybody I know to Skip Ender’s Game, which is my own exercise of my own free speech rights! Ta da! See how it works!
Speech has consequences, because speech matters. It would be a terrible world to live in if the things we say were completely irrelevant all the time, because they were “just words” or “just opinions” or “just” whatever. There’s no “just” about it. Words and opinions are powerful; they matter, and like anything that matters, they have consequences. There would be no reason to speak at all, otherwise. A world where anything can be said because nobody cares is a world where nothing is really said — and that’s the opposite of a world with free speech.
I don’t understand why this is a difficult concept for Orson Scott Card or his whiny-ass fans to understand.
Whether we’re talking about heavy metal music or science fiction or alternative comix or anything else, genre is a conversation, an ongoing back-and-forth. The best genre works aren’t “timeless”– they are very much of a particular moment in the history of the genre that gave them life. They build upon what came before, and point to what comes next. That is exactly what we respond to and why we like them. What’s good about a good genre work is often the way that it bends or breaks the conventions it is supposed to abide by. That particular way of bending and breaking then becomes a part of the genre.
That is why someone new to a genre may have a hard time appreciating it. How can you understand Star Trek without knowing Heinlein, Limp Bizkit without Loverboy, David Foster Wallace without Raymond Carver? Sometimes the new thing is an extension of the old. Sometimes it is a rejection and a negation. But always it is connected to, and dependent upon, what came before.
Joe and I went to see “Silver Linings Playbook” last night because we thought, at the time, that we wanted to see all the Oscar nominees for Best Picture before the awards are announced. Since then, I’ve learned that “Life of Pi” and “Zero Dark Thirty” are nominated, and I have zero intention of seeing them — each offends me on some difficult-to-express level, just by its existence — so we won’t be seeing all the nominees after all. Still, “Silver Linings Playbook” was worthwhile. Here are my quick thoughts:
They did a pretty good job of showing what a panic attack can be like.
The Stevie Wonder song turned out to be a loaded gun in act one that didn’t go off in act three. Surely they intended to use it as a stakes-raising gimmick during the dance contest (one of the other couples dancing to it) but backed off. Good for them. That would have felt cheap. On the other hand, it is weird that they built it up as a threat so hugely in the early part of the movie then let it completely drop. Maybe that’s supposed to imply that that’s how healing yourself from panic attack triggers works?
Bradley Cooper’s performance was terrific, surprisingly understated given the bipolar “movie of the week” kind of vibe of the film overall.
Jennifer Lawrence is turning out to be a real, bona-fide movie star. Yay hometown girl!
It would have been funny if they’d been plowed down by a bus at the end when they were kissing in the street, mirroring his frustration with “A Farewell to Arms.” But I guess I’m evil.
I have seen “Without You I’m Nothing,” the 1990 movie based on Sandra Bernhard’s standup routine/performance art piece/one-woman show, many, many times. I used to love it. It used to define me. My mid-20s would have been a very different time for me if I’d never seen this movie.
If you want to funk, I can show you how.
This time, nearing my 50s, I did not love it at all.
Note: most of the times I have seen this film were in a tight cluster of months shortly after it was released to home video. My college buddies and I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Queer cabaret culture generally had a vibrancy to it back then. This was the era of Phranc and Paris is Burning and Wigstock and whatever. It was also the era of George H. W. Bush. We had never heard a president of the United States utter the word “gay.” We had been on the outside for a long, long time, but we felt the change coming. That our culture was starting to move into the mainstream — and Bernhard, her lesbian bona-fides just barely held out of our view, but hinted at often, represented a move of our culture into the mainstream, believe it or not, despite how far she was from the mainstream, because we were even — this sentence is too long! — farther from it still — gave us a sense of inevitability and conquest. That growing power and relevance culminated, I think, in the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, and then crested and fell afterwards, when he broke his promises to us. This week was the first time I’ve seen “Without You I’m Nothing” since then.
Which is maybe why I don’t like this movie anymore. It makes me miss those days, when we thought we were on the verge of taking over the world, and yet it also points out to me their hollowness, the emptiness of our aspirations, via the thinness of Bernhard’s own commitment to her poses. Her rendition and rehabilitation of Sylvester’s “Do You Want to Funk” as a liberation anthem was revelatory after almost a decades’ worth of “Disco Sucks” backlash and AIDS hysteria, for example. I literally jumped out of my chair and pointed at the screen, the first time I saw it. (I was a silly queen in my 20s; I know this is difficult to believe.) Now it just sounds a little bit off-key, a little bit desperate, a little too easy. Its primary targets — Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart — had already been the targets of late-night television comedy for four or five or eight years by this time, made into easy targets precisely because of the thousands upon thousands of jokes that had already been made about them by people who had no political agenda at all. These three television preachers were certainly the enemy, don’t get me wrong, but they were the individual examples of the enemy who had already been personally defeated. The real enemy remained untouched by Bernhard’s song. That’s a fairly moderate form of liberation.
My friends and I didn’t notice the offkeyness and the emptiness before because the very act of celebrating that particular song, at that particular time in our history, was enough for us.
Queer stuff has to speak to a higher standard now, I think. It has to go a little deeper. It’s not enough just to wave at its queerness. And even Bernhard’s waving at queerness comes off as a little too subtle, nowadays, come to think of it anyway. Was she, or was she not? Do we even need to know anymore? Probably we don’t.
None of what I have said should be taken as a minimization of the movie’s importance for its time. But it is of its time, is what I’m finding myself believing — and is sort of stuck in its own time. Which may simply be a function of cabaret generally. Or maybe I’m just too close to it, and too mired, myself in its time, to see what this movie is capable of inspiring in anybody today. That’s always possible.
Okay, so, first: let me warn you that Unbreakable has a bit of a twist ending. I will be spoiling that ending here — if “spoiling” is even possible after the passage of twelve years. You’ve been warned.
Unbreakable is probably the quietest movie on my list. People mope and stare and talk in level tones, for the most part. They look at their feet. While there is a train wreck at the beginning, it happens between cuts. The only real action sequence — which occurs very, very late in the film — mostly consists of Bruce Willis climbing out of a swimming pool. You’d be forgiven for mistakenly believing that Unbreakable isn’t a superhero movie, that it doesn’t, as a friend of mine said on Facebook, “participate in the genre conventions of the superhero.”
You’d be wrong. But you’d be forgiven.
The reality is that Unbreakable depends on the tropes and cliches of the superhero genre more than most superhero films. It’s not colorful and flashy and filled with loud violence. True. But the tropes and cliches are so important to the meaning of the film that Samuel L. Jackson, as “Mr. Glass,” the “supervillain” of the story, has to educate you about them. Most of his dialogue — including the part where he explains the twist at the end — serves to bring any non-comics-obsessed viewers up to speed on the superhero storytelling conventions that Shyamalan is hanging his story upon. It’s a superhero movie hiding in plain sight.
“In a comic, you know how you can tell who the arch-villain’s going to be?” says Mr. Glass, toward the end. “He’s the exact opposite of the hero.”
Mr. Glass, a character whose bones break easily due to a birth defect, is the exact opposite of Bruce Willis’ character, a man whose bones never break, who has never been sick a day in his life. If we had been more familiar with superhero storytelling conventions, Shyamalan seems to be saying, then the ending wouldn’t have been a “twist” at all. We’d have known not to trust Mr. Glass.
Why do I love this movie? It’s hard to say. I have to admit that it’s not a lot of fun to watch, not even at the end when it all comes together. “Fun” isn’t the goal here. Unbreakable is essentially a grown-up film about grown-up things (divorce, missed opportunities, the lies we tell those we love in order to spare them, the disappointing decline that comes with middle age) that also manages to be about all the fantasies and weird power trips I used to go on when I was a twelve-year-old boy. That’s a potent combination. That it takes both sides of that equation seriously — the adult stuff doesn’t make the childish stuff look childish, and the childish stuff doesn’t really look like an escape from the adult disappointments — is a major achievement. Forget the disappointing decline of Shyamalan himself (I expect he’ll have a comeback): Unbreakable is the real thing.
After finally catching The Dark Knight Rises the other day, I mentioned on Facebook that Tom Hardy (who plays Bane in DKR) and Henry Cavill (who was in the Superman trailer they showed before the film) need to have a kissing competition, so I can figure out which one is cuter. I still believe this.
Who is cuter? It’s so hard to decide …
A friend recommended I watch Bronson, one of Hardy’s earlier movies. “Half-naked, covered in tattoos and body paint, shaved head, huge mustache, acts like a psychopath — you will drool!” she enthused.
She was right. It’s a little disturbing that she knew me so well.
Bronson is the story of Britain’s most famously violent prisoner, one Mickey Peterson, who gave himself the stage name of “Charlie Bronson,” after the American actor. Usually, I like my tragic biopics to be more naturalistic. This one kept up a tight ironic shell around itself: you couldn’t care about anybody in the movie because the characters were never allowed to be more than fun little meatmasks for actors over-acting — especially Tom Hardy. He gets his maximum daily allowance of scenery chewing, and more, in every single scene. He was irresistible to watch, though, and not just because of his sexy psycholiciousness. It takes a rare charisma to be able to overact this widely and keep an audience on your side.
That’s why I think he may be the William Shatner of his generation.
I do not say this sneeringly. Shatner’s gifts are astounding, flailing arms, halting lilt and all. He would have been considered the greatest actor of his day, if his day had been a hundred or two hundred years earlier, before naturalistic acting and “the Method” came into play.
Think of Shatner and Hardy as cousins of the Booths and the original Barrymores. They’re still playing to the balcony seats in the back, shouting their lines and mugging their faces. I like it. Johnny Depp goes in that direction a bit, too, but he’s not nearly as hot shirtless as either Hardy or (the young) Shatner.
I am overstating my case a little bit. The quiet, dangerous things that Hardy does with his voice sometimes — in Bronson, in DKR, and in every other role I’ve seen him play — would be impossible without the microphone, and it is the microphone (as well as the close-up) that ushered in the age of the intimate, understated performance.
But I can ignore that, because I’m a blogger, and bloggers don’t have to actually believe everything they say, especially when the subject is Cute Actors.
As for the original impetus behind this post: I kind of think Henry Cavill might be hotter than Hardy, though he’s a far more conventional contemporary actor. I still need to see that kiss! Maybe Shatner should join the competition as well.
Updated to add: in a post from a few months ago, my friend Christopher Wright makes a convincing case that “the Method” is precisely what was responsible for Shatner’s acting style, and the quiet, understated performances we are accustomed to are what replaced “the Method.” Chris has actually studied this stuff, so he knows whereof he speaks. His post on the subject is really good, too — you should read it, if you have any interest in the evolution of acting styles (and how that relates to writing, which is where he ultimately takes it).
You thought this one was going to be number one, didn’t you?
Any of the top three could have been in the number one position: we’ve hit the rarified-air portion of our program. There is, and I want to say this emphatically, nothing not to love about The Incredibles, except, you know, for that one terrible thing. And that one terrible thing? I’ll get to that in a minute. The fact that there are two other off-brand superhero movies I love more than I love The Incredibles is my problem, ultimately, not yours. Please don’t get yourself worked up about it.
The one terrible thing is not that The Incredibles is terribly derivative, though it is. Superheroes, by definition, always are. Even Superman, the first superhero, stole much of his schtick (including the name and location of his secret hideout) from earlier pulp heroes like Doc Savage. Longtime comic book fans have noted a very strong similarity between The Incredibles and the original quibbling superhero family, Marvel’s Fantastic Four — down to the costume design and the power set (though the powers are distributed differently among the family members — the mom’s power in The Incredibles is the dad’s power in Fantastic Four, etc). The imitation (shall we call it “borrowing?”) doesn’t end there, though. There’s a bit of Watchmen in the governmental clampdown on superheroics, too. Director Brad Bird knows the superhero genre treasure chest well enough to know exactly what to steal, when, and in every case his crime does pay. The very first scene, for example, is an homage to Christopher Reeves saving a cat from a tree — though Mr. Incredible’s methods are more harried and desperate and direct. Bird’s star turn as Edna Mode, fashion designer to the truly super superstars, puts him in a position to comment on the ridiculousness of the genre’s conventions (“No capes, dahlink!”) while celebrating them at the same time. It is not parody, but it is also not not parody. I think.
The one terrible thing is the overall theme.
“When everybody is special, nobody is,” several characters say during the course of the film. It is the explicit goal of the villain, ultimately, to “make everybody special — so nobody will be!” And so on. This is just an indirect way for the filmmakers to say: “some people are naturally better than others, and we shouldn’t try to pretend otherwise.”
That sounds okay if you’re, say, a talented graphic designer comparing the way you and your friends rock the hipster t-shirts at the local brew pub versus the losers from down the street at the other brew pub who look stupid and unswell. Sure, you’re better than they are. Kudos. It’s not as interesting or defensible a position to take if you’re, say, a talented money market manager squeezing profit out of your clients using legal but shady derivative trading (you can — so you should!), or if you’re a hulking bully from the less-trendy brew pub down the street kicking the ass of t-shirted hipsters (because they’re fucking annoying, which they are, and, besides, you can). It’s downright anti-civilized, this idea that superior people should be allowed to use their superiority however they see fit. Maybe this, too, comes from the superhero genre itself — I have no doubt that that’s the case. But it’s not subtexty enough for me. It’s explicit and proud.
You think I’m reading too much into this? Maybe so. I wouldn’t try to defend my position on the film’s undemocratic impulses as an academic thesis. It feels icky, though, the Randian/Nietzchean uberlord thing. Not icky enough for me to hate the movie! I love the movie. The movie is a movie of moments, and every moment is awesome. I do mean that. I can’t think of an unawesome moment. But the ickiness is there, all the same, right alongside and mingled up within the awesome.
You know and I know that Jim Carrey’s schtick got old. After he played the same character for the seventy-fifth time we were all sick of it. I’m going to say that that was when he played The Riddler in that Batman movie with Val Kilmer, though that may have only been seventy-two, or even seventy-one movies after The Mask, I don’t remember. They all blend together. Even Carrey got sick of it, eventually trying to reinvent himself in films as wannabe-serious as The Truman Show and Man in the Moon. Did that work out for him? I honestly didn’t pay enough attention to have an opinion one way or another, after a certain point.
Smokin’!!!!!
The Jim Carrey schtick wasn’t old yet when he starred in The Mask, though. It is not surprising that everybody loved this performance back then. This comic book wasn’t created specifically for Carrey to star in the movie adaptation of, but it could have been. There was also the relative newness, at the time, of his schtick — let’s stop calling it, generically, “schtick” and call it what it was: audacious and grandiloquent and perfectly-timed insincerity layered on top of embittered vulnerability, for the win. Carrey really was a cartoon character come to life. In 1994, nobody had ever seen anything quite like him.
What is surprising is that the thing still holds up almost twenty years, and lots of bad Jim Carrey films (eighty? ninety? a thousand?), later. I hadn’t expected to laugh out loud watching The Mask again, but I did. His very first caper, when he tries to sneak past his landlady’s door using big, balletic, fake-tiptoeing steps, only to be foiled by the bouncing alarm clock that jumps out of his pocket, that he has to swat down with a ten-foot-long mallet, also from his pocket, made me emit an abrupt, three-noted, barking laugh. That’s the best you’re going to get out of me when I’m sitting alone at my kitchen table watching a movie on my laptop. I kept laughing, awkwardly and overloudly (again, remember, sitting alone in my kitchen, with noise-canceling headphones on) from time to time throughout the course of the movie, and not just at Carrey when he was The Mask. Also at Carrey as Stanley Ipkiss. Cameron Diaz, and the truculent cop played by Peter Reigert, got to me occasionally, too, with their humorous behavior and/or way of speaking and/or actual words. My dogs were not sure what to think. They didn’t like it. Me sitting there by myself laughing.
Like The Rocketeer, The Mask, as a franchise, hasn’t benefited from the kind of slow burn, constant-exposure mode that we like to see in a superhero franchise. Spider-Man, Batman, and those other Marvel and DC characters, all keep themselves alive through the decades by having a constant presence, and a constant stream of new stories being told about them away from the eyes of (most of) the public, in the form of comic books. Those comic books may not seem important to the average moviegoer, but they do keep the character up-to-date as time flies by, and (maybe even more importantly), they provide lots of fodder for screenwriters. The X-Men movies, for example, are basically a Cliff’s Notes version of thirty years’ worth of Chris Claremont comic book scripts. There hasn’t been a comic book starring The Mask in a long time, as far as I know. There hasn’t been much of anything done with this great character. There was the cartoon series shortly after the movie came out. There was another movie, starring some other dude, that I never bothered to see. And that’s it. This seems weird to me, given that the credited creator of the character, Jamie Mike Richardson, is also the publisher and founder of Dark Horse, the “third publisher of the Big Two” of the comic book industry.
Not that I ever read any of the comics in the first place. Maybe nobody did. Maybe that’s the reason there aren’t any more of them. No big, whatever. The movie, though is an under-appreciated classic. Run out and rent it tonight. It’s not on Netflix streaming, but you can get it from Amazon Instant Video (which is what I did), or from Vudu (which is what I did not do).
As you might imagine from the title, this post is the seventh in a series of ten. You will find more posts in this series behind the “More” link, below.
When you compare The Rocketeer to the other superhero films from its graduating class (this film, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Crow, and RoboCop all fall within a year or two of one another), it’s amazing how little it resembles them. The Rocketeer takes itself seriously as an action film, as a period piece, and finally, incidentally, ultimately, as a story about a superhero. In this regard, it looks a lot more like the best of contemporary big-budget superhero films — let’s say “superhero films post-Blade” — than it does anything that came before. Even the high-water marks of superhero cinema from the 80s, the first two Superman films by Richard Donner, and the first two Tim Burton Batmans, winked and nodded to the audience, apologizing for the corniness at the edges of their conceits. The Rocketeer lets us into the story on its own terms, the way any “normal” movie would, without any hint of surrealism (Burton’s distancing strategy) or stiffness (Donner’s). I’m not saying that those films weren’t great. I’m saying they don’t feel contemporary anymore, the way that The Rocketeer still does.
Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s very much a superhero movie, with all the insane comic book action that that phrase implies. Spoiler alert: the ending begins with a shoot-out between mobsters, Nazis, and the FBI, and ends with the main character and his girlfriend jumping off of an exploding airship onto a rope ladder dangling from an airplane piloted by Howard Hughes. If that doesn’t sound like your kind of thing you probably don’t like superhero movies.
The Rocketeer is so pitch perfect, so exactly what it should have been, that Marvel’s choice to call on director Joe Johnston to helm its own period superhero outing, Captain America: the First Avenger, twenty years later, seems inevitable. In some ways, it was a practice run (though, honestly, I like the earlier film more).
There is one flaw. When surrounding a house, and peppering same with machine gun fire, the FBI would probably watch the back door to make sure nobody escaped. I’m just saying.
As you might imagine from the title, this post is the sixth in a series of ten. You will find more posts in this series behind the “More” link, below.
If you’re going to see The Avengers this weekend, please consider doing the ethical thing, by matching your ticket price with a donation to The Hero Initiative, a charity created to help the often-destitute creators of these (and many other) billion-dollar characters. Here’s more info on why and how.
