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In Which I Finally Watch Scarface

In Movies on April 12, 2011 at 2:43 pm
Scarface has been one of those pillars of pop culture that I’ve somehow avoided seeing all my life. I’d heard of it, certainly, and I’d heard “Say hello to my little friend” quoted again and again, but I’d never actually sat down and watched it.

Then I read that someone was making a $1000 special edition of the thing, and I finally decided to see what the fuss was about. Also, I’d been feeling ill and having a very long movie to take up my time sounded good. I plopped myself in front of my computer, and watched Al Pacino unleash his characteristic bombast.

Short review: Scarface is kind of overrated.

Long review: The film tells the story of Tony Montana, a Cuban immigrant who rises up the ranks of Miami’s cocaine-dealing hierarchy. He starts as a lowly foot soldier and then becomes lord and master of a coke-funded empire.

The story arc was fairly predictable, but I wondered if that was an artifact of me watching it in 2011. All of the rags-to-riches-to-rags tropes seemed to be in place, and I wondered if the movie would have seemed less clunky and obvious in the early eighties. A predictable movie, however, can be overcome with great characters and good writing, though. Unfortunately, there wasn’t very much of that.

None of the characters in Scarface “pop.” All of them are pretty broad and one-dimensional, and the supporting cast is never really given anything to do except react to Tony Montana. The movie really is all about one guy. Tony Montana says something, and the supporting casts reacts. He does something, and the plot moves forward. He gives a speech, and the other characters react with rapt attention. It was as if the people who weren’t Al Pacino just disappeared when they weren’t on screen.

Pacino himself was fine, but to tell the truth I found his goofy faux-Cuban accent get in the way of his acting. For the whole movie I could not shake the thought “Wow, that’s a really stupid voice that Al Pacino is doing.” Pacino is great and quite fun to watch, but I found myself wishing I was watching one of his better performances, like his turn as Satan in The Devil’s Advocate.

I also didn’t find Tony Montana to be all that interesting of a main character. The movie is largely about what happens when a poor guy suddenly finds himself extremely wealthy. Tony doesn’t do anything particularly interesting with his money- he buys a bunch of gaudy gold shit and a big house that he can be bored in. I know that the movie was trying to say something about the emptiness of materialism or whatever, but I had trouble buying it. I sort of wanted to shout at the screen “Why don’t you go take an interesting vacation or something?” I know that Montana is supposed to be something of an uneducated yokel, but I found his gross lack of creativity hard to empathize with.

Also, he’s an utter scumbag. I don’t usually mind following evil characters as long as they’re interesting, but Tony Montana has the drawback of being both a nasty human being and not particularly smart. Late in the movie, the viewer is supposed to empathize with him because he refuses to kill a child. That didn’t get my sympathy, though. Refraining from kid-killing is a fairly low bar to clear, and the scene felt manipulative and false.

So it has a predictable plot, and uncompelling characters. The thing that saves Scarface (a bit) are two very well done scenes. One is a tense scene towards the beginning that ends up with a guy getting killed with a chainsaw, and a subsequent gunfight. Another is the ending, wherein Tony’s mansion is stormed by a small army of hitmen.

When the line “Say hello to my little friend!” did finally jumpt out of the speakers, I did enjoy it, and the bombastically violent finale is fun in an 80s action movie type way. There’s blood and bullets and a nice sense of finality when Tony Montan finally, finally dies.

But Scarface left me cold. It’s not as good as The Godfather, Goodfellas, or even Casino. It’s not really Pacino’s best performance. The action sequences are good, but not enough to carry the movie. Had I seen it with no expectations, I probably would have enjoyed it more, but it certainly didn’t live up to its reputation. Anyone who actually gets the $1,000 special edition of this thing is, I’m afraid, something of a chump.

In Honor of Washington’s Birthday: Our New National Anthem

In Movies, Music on February 22, 2011 at 12:59 pm
It was March of 2007. I was in Tokyo for the first time, crashing in an inexpensive hostel. In the morning I heard an American voice singing in the shower. “America!” it sang, “Fuck yeah!”It was The Fourth of July, 2009. Rolling down the streets of North Portland, a ridiculously augmented pickup truck rapidly rolled. The wheels were raised and beneath it various auto parts vibrated audibly under the influence of it’s immense speakers. “America!” said the speakers, “Fuck yeah!”

It was a week or so ago. I was making breakfast. Eggs, probably. Someone said “America.” I said, instinctively, “Fuck yeah!”

And of course, there’s this:

Team America: World Police was, at best, an uneven movie. There were parts of it that I enjoyed, but other parts of it that I thought fell flat as satire. The abovereferenced song, though, is probably the most successful thing that Trey Parker and Matt Stone have every created. It is better than any single moment of South Park or Cannibal: The Musical. It is better than Orgazmo. I doubt that their upcoming musical, The Book of Mormon, will be able to best their success here.

The song is obviously about how bloviatingly bombastic America and Americans are or are perceived to be. It’s a send-up of the ultranationalism and chauvinism that typified George W. Bush’s America, a thumb to the nose of everyone who has a “Don’t Tread on Me” bumper sticker. Parker and Stone go out of their way to portray America as evil (by referencing slavery), shallow (by calling out Bed Bath and Beyond) and stupid (by taking credit for sushi, which is notably from a place that is not America).

However, if the song was only a hateful spitwad, it wouldn’t have the enduring appeal that it does. There is something genuine about the song. Even an urban liberal type such as myself really does think, at times “America! Fuck yeah!” I don’t think that the guys in the big truck blasting on the Fourth of July were getting it wrong, either. It wasn’t the case that the satire was lost on them. They were reveling in the very real (and sort of obnoxious) patriotism of the song.

Yes, I think this song is patriotic. In a juvenile and twisted way, it is. Displays of patriotism are often overtaken with saccharine injections of sentimentality that make them nigh-unpalatable to anyone with even a modicum of skepticism. Parker and Stone, though, have put in just enough self-critical irony make it palatable.

Yes, I know there are problems with irony, but put those aside for a moment.

Let’s all admit, if only for a moment, that F/A-18s are really fucking cool. That it’s sort of awesome that we invaded France and kicked Hitler’s ass. That we totally won the Cold War. And, that ruling the world is sort of badass. Yes, yes yes. Admitting this makes you feel weird. Trust me, I feel the same way. I used to have a Che Guevera poster on my dorm wall, for god’s sake.

But, just for a moment, think about how stupidly awesome we are. Doesn’t it feel sort of neat?

Parker and Stone made it possible to sing proudly about America even as we acknowledge all of the problems this place has. All of the stupidity and greed and big, nasty history. All of those things that get in the way of singing about Purple Mountain Majesties. (And besides- since when are mountains purple?)

Patriotism doesn’t mean being uncritical or sentimental. It doesn’t mean you love unreservedly. It also doesn’t mean that you have to be all solemn and pietistic. It doesn’t mean you have to stop being self-aware.

So, happy birthday, George Washington! Thanks for kicking King George’s ass, though you couldn’t have done it without France’s help.

America.

Fuck yeah.

A Pretty Okay Daft Punk Video: What I Thought of the New Tron Movie

In Movies, Music, Science Fiction on December 19, 2010 at 7:04 pm

Given that I had a previous post on Tron, I feel bound to offer up a few thoughts about the new movie, which I saw last night.

It was highly adequate. There were a few good thing about it, and a few less good things as well. I’m just going to do a rundown of them. Spoilers ahoy!

Good Stuff:

-Jeff Bridges. Had Bridges not appeared as Flynn, the movie would have very little reason to exist. His being there made it seem more like a “real” Tron movie, and not just an attempt to cash in on geeky nostalgia (even though it is totally that). I loved it that Bridges played the older Flynn as basically an all-purpose Jedi/Buddha/Jesus/The Dude sort of character, an old man with crazy powers in the Grid akin to that of some kind of wizard/god. Also, seeing him digitally de-aged was a neat party trick. I’m sure that it will look terrible and dated in five years, but I enjoyed it for the time being.

-The movie is beautiful. Stunning. Shiny. Dazzling. Electrifying. It is an eye-poppingly wonderful calvacade of cool visuals. The lights and sets and costumes are all fantastically extravagant and orderly all at once. The aesthetic of Tron seems to be that there is a profusion of energy and color, and it is all tightly controlled. It is ecstatically mechanistic, like a choreographed rave. I wish there was a more positive word for “soulless” because the machine-world of Tron is soulless and gorgeous in the best way possible.

-Likewise, the soundtrack by Daft Punk is excellent. There are very few movies where, upon hearing the soundtrack, I think “I would like to hear that in a context outside of this movie.” This was one of them.

-References to other films were nice. Flynn’s apartment outside of the Grid resembles the apartment at the end of 2001, and at one point he quotes War Games saying “the only way to win is to not play.” Bridges also seemed very conscious of his most famous character, The Dude, and put more than a little Big Lebowski flavor into Flynn.

…And that, unfortunately, kind of does it for the really good stuff.

Less Than Good Stuff:

-The action sequences hit their marks, but they weren’t all that thrilling or memorable. While I didn’t find myself groaning or disliking them, they weren’t incredible.

-Garrett Hedlund, the guy who played Sam Flynn, was dry, bland, and didn’t really seem like his father’s son. He was too preppy and well-coiffed, too much of a nice, clean leading man. Also, the part where he parachutes off of the skyscraper is just dumb.

-Olivia Wilde (Quorra) also didn’t thrill me, but she was very nice to look at.

-I didn’t imagine I’d ever think, while watching a movie, that it needed more Bruce Boxleitner. Tron: Legacy, though really did need precisely that. Tron himself appears several times in the movie, but always wearing a black face mask that completely obscures his features. Normally, I’d just think that this was the kind of cheap trick that a director would use if they couldn’t get a given actor for their movie, but Boxleitner appears as Tron’s creator, Alan, early in the film. He also shows up as Tron in a flashback. He could have totally whipped off the mask for a big dramatic reveal! I was expecting that. Not having that there was strange and aggravating.

-Oftentimes, the movie was way too talky and self-important. Instead of dramatic it seemed staid.

-The filmmakers seem to have forgotten that Tron is supposed to happen inside of a computer. The Grid is portrayed as a kind of alternate dimension. In the original film, Tron & Co. were inside of a specific computer system. They don’t explicitly contradict this, but it bugged me somewhat.

All in all, the movie wasn’t great unless you were already a Tron fan, and even then, it was only kind of okay. I’m sort of nervous that the franchise (which had once been a nice little piece of cult nostalgia) is going to get crushed under a new wave of sequels and spin offs. I saw Star Wars get revived, only to be crushed to death by its resurrection. That franchise is in a state of deeper necrosis than it ever was precisely because things were added to it. I don’t want the same thing to happen to Tron.

On the other hand, I did love all the pretty glowy lights set to Daft Punk.

Goodbye, Blank Slate or What I Think About That New Tron Movie Coming Out

In Movies, Science Fiction, Video Games on December 7, 2010 at 6:22 pm

It is occasionally alarming how much geek culture is defined by nostalgia. Watching Star Trek or Star Wars or the rest of it does not make me me think of the future or possibility or sweeping vistas of the world of tomorrow. Instead it calls to mind childhood and adolescent comfort, something familiar, tested, and proven. They are narratives and artifacts that don’t have to stand up to the rigors of contemporary scrutiny. Why should they? They carry so much emotional cache.

The fact remains, though, that they don’t transport me to the future. They transport me to the 1990s.

Nostalgia pieces by definition wistful, and bring to mind forgiving smiles and gentle rationalizations of their flaws. An object of nostalgia might appear simple, but we justify it by saying that it was from a simpler time. Effects were less sophisticated. Budgets were lower. Audiences weren’t as savvy. That’s what we tell ourselves to excuse Luke Skywalkers’s ludicrous comment about “power converters,” or to justify transparently cheap monster costumes.
Nostalgia is not bad or wrong per se, but it is warm and unchallenging. It is easy to idealize the objects that produce it, to put layers upon them and add dimensions that are not there. In almost every incident, the idea of the nostalgic item is much better than the work itself.
Which brings me to Tron.
Tron blew my fucking mind. I don’t remember how old I was when I first watched it. Maybe eleven? Twelve? I don’t really know. But there were glowy lights on everything and it was about a guy who got zapped into a computer and, man, that was cool. The guy had to play computer games inside of a computer! C’mon- how neat is that? There were tanks and motorcycles and everything was covered in neon because back then that’s what the future looked like.
I watched it again in college, and, much to my surprise, found that I still liked it. Last year I actually got my ex-girlfriend to watch it and she had to concede that the movie that her geeky, overenthusiastic boyfriend had recommended to her was “kind of fun.”
And it is. Tron, though, is quite a simple movie. There isn’t much to it, really. Why is the Master Control Program so evil? He just is. Why is Tron the good guy? He just is. How is it that Tron’s disc will bring about a new order on the grid? It’s a MacGuffin- just go with it.
Tron is a very pretty movie with an okay plot. Fortunately, it seems that the filmmakers knew that. Tron is shallow, but has no pretension to depth. It is thin, but does not pretend to be substantive. The ultimate message of Tron is, really “Hey, look! Shiny computers! Whee!” This is all well and good, and makes it the perfect nostalgia piece.
Because Tron is so basic, it’s completely possible for a thirty-year-old geek like me to invest it with all kinds of layers and awesomeness as I wistfully recall it. Fans like me can imagine any sort of drama or depth we want of Tron, because the movie is ultimately just a bunch of cool blinky lights and zoomy computer game action. In lots of ways its a blank slate that we can project all kinds of affection and imagination onto. The idea of Tron is oftentimes better than Tron the actual movie. If it were to come out now as an original film, it would probably be dismissed as readily as Avatar was by people who actually care about science fiction.
Disney has decided to cash in on the widespread affection and nostalgia for Tron and release a sequel later this month, nearly three decades later. Like many other genre fans, I’m completely geeking out about this and probably will fork over the extra cash to see this thing in 3D. However, once the sequel comes out, a certain amount of the nostalgic “oomf” of the original is going to get taken away. Tron will cease to become an object of nostalgic affection, and turn into a franchise.
With that, it will go from being something that can be vague and unspecified, to something specific. It will no longer exist primarily in the minds and emotions and memories of fans- instead it will be an actual thing, separate from their feelings and ideas of of the original. Tron won’t be something that belongs to fans anymore, a pop-culture byword that recalls shared experiences of wonderment about computers. Instead, it will become the first movie in what is likely to be a series. We won’t have a blank slate to play with anymore. The idea of Tron will be gone, and in its place there will just be Tron.
This does not bother me too much. Later this month, though, I’m going to buy a movie ticket, put on a pair of 3D glasses, and a little bit of my nostalgia and geeky affection for Tron will be gone forever.

"I Don’t Create. I Own.": In Which I Finally Watch Wall Street

In Movies on October 8, 2010 at 9:53 pm

Goodfellas is, ultimately, a movie about how hollow and empty the life of crime is. Chances are, says Goodfellas, that you’ll probably end up dead. Or, if you don’t, you’ll at least end up washed up and existentially empty.

Yet when watching it one thinks, “Being a gangster sure looks like fun, what with all the snazzy suits and easy money.”

Wall Street is, ultimately, a movie about how hollow and empty the life of stock trading is. Chances ares, says Wall Street, that you won’t produce anything and you might go to prison. Or, if you don’t, you’ll at least end up washed up and existentially empty.

Yet when watching it one things, “Being a stock trader sure looks like fun, what with all the snazzy suits and easy money.”

I finally sat down and watched Oliver Stone’s eighties epic this evening, and while I enjoyed all 125 of its minutes, I couldn’t help but feel that the movie kind of misfired. Reason being, I ended up being utterly charmed by Gordon Gekko, the slimy stock trader who was really supposed to be the villain.

Make no mistake- Gekko is presented as a reprehensible person. He’s a lying, manipulating bastard who plays other people to get his way, and wholly owns that. The “greed is good” speech has been widely touted as summing up the movie (and in context, it is pretty badass) but when Gekko proclaimed “I don’t create. I own,” that really summed up his character for me. He owns his leechlike state. He touts his non-contribution to civilization as a point of pride.

He does not provide any good or service to anyone. He enriches himself on the labor of others. He can decide the fate of thousands of people, yet in the end he’s little more than a petty oligarch.

Yes. I got it. I was totally on board with Wall Street‘s anti-corporate message.

The problem, though, is the Michael Douglas, as Gekko, is pretty damn charismatic. He eats up the screen, chews up and spits out the scenery, dominates the entire film, and is ultimately just bigger than anything else around him. He’s huge, vibrant, attractive, and looks like he’s having a great time. I had a hard time hating him, even though he was so obviously a son-of-a-bitch.

This is why Wall Street, at the end of the day, is something of a failure. At least ideologically. After seeing it, I kind of wanted to go to New York and blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on steak dinner, hookers, cocaine, and abstract art; all the while surveying the Manhattan skyline from a lofty perch. I will bet you anything that there are swarms upon swarms of WASPy little douchebags infesting trading floors and financial institutions because they were inspired by this movie.

Hell, I’m super-liberal, borderline-socialist, tree-hugging, crypto-hippie, and I was nearly inspired to go put on a pair of suspenders and become a professional swindler. Imagine what it could do to someone more nastily disposed. At Goodfellas is about the mafia, an organization that is sort of hard to join. Wall Street, though, is about the financial service industry, an industry that hires people all of the time.

And that’s why Wall Street is, ultimately, a failure. Its heart is in the right place, but its inspiration points staunchly in the other direction.

In Which I Probably Read Too Much Into Dirty Harry

In Movies, Politics, Rants on July 25, 2010 at 7:44 pm

I recently watched Dirty Harry for the first time, which had since then been something of a hole in my pop-culture education. I enjoyed the movie, but found its politics to be somewhat objectionable.

To briefly sum up the film, Harry Callahan pursues and catches the Scorpio killer, a serial murderer who uses a sniper rifle, through San Francisco. Scorpio is let loose after his release, though, because the district attorney say that Harry didn’t inform the suspect of his rights, that he violated multiple sections of the Constitution, and that all of the evidence that Harry obtained was done so illegally.

The scene in which Harry is informed by the district attorney that there is no way that the authorities can bring a case is preposterous. If anything, a district attorney passing up the chance to put away a serial killer seems highly improbable. The chance to lock away a high-profile sicko is the career-making move that most DAs probably dream of.
However, the prospect of realistically portraying the civilian authorities (along with the DA, the police chief and the mayor are portrayed as similarly toothless) is not Dirty Harry‘s project. The film goes out of its way to portray such authorities as weak so that Harry, by comparison, may appear strong.

Dirty Harry posits that the warrior caste of a society may second-guess the civilian authorities. Not just may, but should. Harry’s decisions are portrayed as wiser, braver, and more socially responsible than those of his police chief, the district attorney, or the mayor.
A democratic, civilized society means that the state retains a monopoly on force. Force is controlled, regulated, and not used lightly. Private citizens may not initiate force- they may only use it in self-defense. Indeed, the state may not display aggression, either- it may only use it in a situation where the larger ends of society are served by the judicious application of violence.

Those who apply violence for desirable social ends do so at the pleasure of civilization at large. The police and soldiers who may engage in violence do so in a context where they are ruled by civilization. It is most decidedly not the reverse. The warriors do not rule in a democratic society. (Hence the hooplah some years ago about W. wearing an Air Force jumpsuit. Presidents, even if they have served in the military, traditionally always wear civilian clothes.)

Dirty Harry posits that the mechanisms of democracy are fundamentally broken, that the safeguards of law and order, the rights embedded in the Constitution, are deterrents to justice. In Dirty Harry, the implication is that if San Francisco really wanted to catch the Scorpio killer, if they were serious, then they would not go to the mayor, the police chief, or the DA. If they were serious, they would go to Harry Callahan and allow the warrior caste to call the shots over the civilians, not the other way around.

The stance implied by the film is a deplorable and socially irresponsible position, basically stating that borderline-sociopathic individuals such as Harry Callahan are necessary for civilization’s survival. The whole thesis of the movie reminded me of another famous speech, wherein Jack Nicholson’s Co. Jessup rationalizes his existence in A Few Good Men.

The scene above, though, is more nuanced because Jessup is explaining himself to other members of the military. A Few Good Men is essentially about members of the armed forces who conduct themselves as normal participants in a democracy rooting out and investigating those (such as Jessup) who behave as if they belong to an exceptional warrior caste a la Harry Callahan.

The polar opposite of Nicholson’s speech (and ideological sibling to Dirty Harry) is Team America: World Police. I’ve always found the final (NSFW) speech to be something like the opposite of A Few Good Men, and in it Trey Parker and Matt Stone seem to articulating something akin Dirty Harry’s thesis- that society needs a certain population of nasty, violent people in order to survive.

Though they admit that pussies are necessary, too. How big of them.

Make no mistake, I am not a pacifist. Not by any means. I don’t believe that we should dismantle the Pentagon or anything like that, and I find people who are reflexively anti-police to be kind of strange. Every contact I’ve had with people who’ve been members of the armed forces or law enforcement has led me to believe that those who are responsible for public safety are more or less normal people. I worked for the Department of Public Safety at the University of Oregon for two years, and none of the police officers I met (a few of which were former military) seemed nearly weirdly barbarous as Harry Callahan. My grandfather was in the U.S. Army, and while he had seen and participated in WWII’s horrors, he certainly wasn’t a monster.
Granted, the Dirty Harry is a bit self-conscious about how monstrous the protagonist is- the word “dirty” is right there in the title, after all- and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t delight in seeing Clint Eastwood blow dudes away while glaring that steely glare of his. But, Dirty Harry tries to turn the pathologies of the main character into virtues; virtues that civilization supposedly needs in order to endure. We do need warriors, certainly. We need cops and soldiers and marines and fighter pilots. That is true. But we do not need monsters. We do not need Col. Jessup or Team America, and we certainly don’t need Harry Callahan to survive.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Westerns

In Movies on May 30, 2010 at 8:58 pm

Two anecdotes:

I am nine years old. In an effort ot distract me and my sister from our mother’s recent death, my father takes the two of us (and our tiny brother) to a rodeo just outside of Portland. It rains, and the performance is not particularly good that night. My sister and I are pelted with rainwater and are undistracted from our loss.
The other:
I am fifteen years old. I have completed my freshman year of high school, and it is summer. For most places, I am just too young. They will hire sixteen year olds, yes, but not anyone younger. Because I cannot find a job in Portland before summer vacation lets out, my father arranges for me to work on a garlic farm in eastern Oregon.
I get off a Greyhound at the designated spot. A man in a workshirt asks me if I’m Joe, and I say that yes, I am. I get in his car and he takes me to his farm, where I’m work for the duration. I live with his family- he, his wife, and two daughters. My room is in the basement, and I sleep on a cot next to a large meat freezer. On the wall, there is a poster. It is a poster of Ronald Reagan. He is wearing a cowboy hat, and the poster reads: “AMERICA: REAGAN COUNTRY.” I sleep next to this. When I am alone in the basement, I listen to the Led Zepplin tapes that I brought with me, or read some of the Asimov novels that were in my suitcase.
During the day I move irrigation pipe. I learn how to ride a motorbike, shoot a rifle, and move large sections of pipe in a set pattern. It is an easy job because I don’t have to think. It is a hard job because it is repetitive and physically exhausting.
When I converse with people, I realize that I am in the minority. The people in eastern Oregon do not like abortion, or gay people, or people who are not Christian. They listen to Rush Limbaugh and modern country music. They watch versions of Hollywood movies that have the nudity edited out, and the swearing bleeped. I am in foreign territory.
I try to stand up for what I believe in- I tell that that it’s okay to be gay or have abortions. I am argued with, and I lose, because I’m only fifteen. I know that I’m right, but I cannot defend myself.
Therein are the reasons that I’ve never loved westerns. Also, my dad liked them and I dismissed them as a genre for old people.
Westerns have reminded me, perhaps unfairly, of that postmortem rodeo and that summer on a farm. I am reminded of a certain bleakness, crying in the rain, or trying naively telling a whole swathe of America that homophobia is wrong.
When I thought of westerns, I thought of that poster of Reagan in his smug cowboy hat, “AMERICA: REAGAN COUNTRY” above my old cot. I did not want to be a part of that. I did not want to enjoy or abet that.
I thought of westerns as enemy territory- lumped them in culturally with Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, and Christian rock. The repetitive myths of Red State America.
I am now prepared to say I was wrong about westerns.
Yes, this is all in part because I’m playing through Red Dead Redemption right now, for those of you who know what a horrendous geek I am. That is the catalyst. But, I have to acknowledge that there were always examples of the genre that I’ve enjoyed.
I quite liked the Dollars trilogy, The Magnificent Seven, High Noon, Stagecoach, The Searchers, and Unforgiven. However, each and every time I watched a western I enjoyed, I simply assumed it was an exception, a classic that was non-representative of the genre. Last night I saw Tombstone with some friends of mine, though, and it’s really clicked for me- the western is not a genre that has much to do with rural America.
Yes, Red State America might lionize the cowboy, but, truth be told, westerns are just like space operas, gangster movies, fantasy, etc. They are fantasy films. They do not actually take place in America in the 1800s. The desolate land they show is an idealized no-man’s-land, a fantasy apocalypse. The movies where Clint Eastwood guns down outlaws have nothing to do with history- they take place in the same cinematic universe as Star Wars and Kill Bill. This is a facile revelation to have, but, fuck it, I’m enjoying it.
Westerns, now that I’ve divorced them from history and political context, are a great genre. They’re about civilization without infrastructure, organized crime, social and political progress, self-reliance, social and political ostracism, and, of course, shit-tons of dead dudes.
The world that they take place in is fairly divorced from the actual American frontier, if only because several of the gun tricks pulled off by cinematic gunslingers are actually impossible. More importantly, though, there is nowhere that bleak violent. There is no place that is actually as nihlistic or horrible as the west that the Man With No Name or his compatriots inhabit. It is as fanciful as Dagobah.
Because of that, (and because of encroaching maturity) I’ve been able to watch westerns and simply enjoy them, like them as a genre piece as opposed to monuments to Red America. I recently rewatched A Fistful of Dollars and loved it. It, like the science fiction movies and books that I love so much, exists in a world apart from and other than our own. Its world is a compelling alien and cinematic one, an open dead place of violence and airlessness and unthoughtof potential. It is an curious place, one that exists without coordinates or real dates. Because of that, I thought not at all of the horrid bleakness of Red America and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Awesome Thing: Moon

In Awesome Things, Movies, Science Fiction on May 20, 2010 at 11:18 am

I’ve added categories to this blog, and after doing so realized that I tend to blog quite a bit about media. No surprise there. I’ve decided to intermittently endorse various things that are not necessarily current, stuff that I enjoy for some reason or another. All of these will be under the “Awesome Things” category. Here’s my first non-current endorsement, Moon.

I’ve been meaning to blog about Moon for quite some time now. You really ought to watch it. I don’t want to give away too much about it, but was far and away one of the best science fiction stories that I’ve seen or read in a long, long time.

When I was a kid, I devoured Asimov, Clarke, and Dick’s short stories. I checked out collections of Hugo-winning short stories and novellas, and devoured them with gusto. Science fiction, I think, is uniquely suited to the short story. Brief narratives can be built around a single interesting idea, a nice little “what if…” scenario that can put a human face on speculation and abstraction.
Moon reminded me a great deal of those stories by Asimov & Co. The film is science fiction in the traditional sense, starting from a speculative scenario of what it would be like to live by yourself in a station on the moon. It goes from there, with Sam Rockwell having no one to talk to except himself and his computer buddy voiced by Kevin Spacey.
I wish I could talk more about the plot. I really do, but I don’t want to spoil a thing about it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. There is a twisty moment in the middle, but something that I really, really love about the movie is that the further sci-fi weirdness is used as a departure point, not a conclusion. When the audience does find out about a given futuristic oddity in the world of Moon, the movie does not just say “PRESTO!” and leave it at that. Instead, it actually develops the weirdness, exploring it just like good science fiction should.
Moon reminded me of all the reasons I love science fiction. It reminded me why I love speculation and wonder, why I think that “what if…” is a great question to ask, why I devoured all those short stories, and why I wanted to be a sci-fi writer when I was younger. (Actually, I still sort of want to be a sci-fi writer sometimes…) It is everything good and neato and smart and clever about the genre, and it reminded me not that I love stories about space and robots, but why I came to love them in the first place.

One More Thing About E.F.N.Y…

In Movies, Science Fiction on April 22, 2010 at 10:37 am

The best part of the movie. It happens in the future! The gritty, dark, crime-infested future where America has become a brutal police state!

In other words, 1997. I cant’ wait until 2019 rolls around, and we finally get off world colonies, replicants, and umbrellas with LED handles.

An Interesting Idea From A Totally Badass Movie

In Movies, Science Fiction on April 22, 2010 at 8:34 am

A while ago I was watching Escape From New York, which I’d never seen. Short review: It was pretty good. But, that’s not what I want to rant about, really. At the beginning of the movie, Snake (Kurt Russel’s character) is being escorted through a prison office building, and a recording is playing over the loudspeakers. The recording says that before the prisoners are locked away, they have the option to be euthanized and cremated. In the context of the movie, it’s meant to seem creepy and sinister. However, I thought to myself, “How humane- that’s a pretty good idea.”

Really. I think that offering prisoners to off themselves would be a pretty good idea. What’s more, I think it’s the type of thing that both liberals and conservatives could get behind.

Liberals have a number of reasons to support voluntary criminal suicide. Physician assisted suicide is already in place (here in Oregon) and the option allows a greater degree of autonomy for people who are suffering. Those who are doomed to suffer ought to be able to take their own lives, be it because of a life-crushing disease, or a life inside the criminal justice system.

Conservatives ought to support voluntary criminal suicide as well. If someone supports capital punishment (as most conservatives do, and I, for the record, don’t) then they already have demonstrated that they are alright with criminals being killed via state-applied violence. They should also, then, be alright with criminals being killed via self-applied violence. While I can’t prove it, there’s also the possibility that prisoners killing themselves would save the criminal justice system a fair amount of money.

With this in mind, it’s ridiculous that criminals sentenced to death be put on suicide watch, or not allowed objects such as belts or pens. If anything, they should be able to say the guards “I would like to go now,” and then be allowed to press the lethal injection button themselves.

Not that I want to turn this into a rallying cry or anything, but in a sane society, I see no reason why criminals shouldn’t be given the very option that Snake and his fellow prisoners were. Turning Manhattan into a giant prison may have been kind of insane, but this detail was something they got right.