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Caryn James, film critic for The New York Times, points out a string of allusions to September 11th in recent films. Aside from the reenactment films ("World Trade Center," "United 93"), in "25th Hour," "Civic Duty," "Shooter," "Breach" and "Reign Over Me," James detects "an unspoken 9/11 approach, referring to the events without using the actual words," she writes.

Does the approach preclude commercial success?

It must be more than a coincidence that none of them, not even commercial movies like “Breach” and “Shooter,” were big hits. Works that take an unspoken approach to 9/11 assume that no one needs to be reminded of what happened; that ignores the possibility that maybe no one wants to.

Maybe the filmmakers have been willing to sacrifice some measure of commercial potential in order to express themselves on the topic. Or maybe the scripts as originally written were defanged and neutered during the production process, turning the films' messages into dim shadows of what they might have been. Great scripts may have became merely competent movies.

But if you wrap the unspoken 9/11 approach in the existing mythology of a popular comic book character, box-office records are still within the realm of possibility.

Link:
No One Says ‘9/11.’ No One Needs To. (NYTimes)

Earlier posts:
Spider-Man 3 and September 11th
Columnist Detects 9/11 Connection in Spider-Man 3

From the archives:
Review of "25th Hour" for Bank Systems & Technology, May 2003 issue

Labels: 9/11, movies

Huffington Post blogger Steve Rosenbaum writes:

Now, maybe its just me, or maybe its the fact that I was close enough to the attacks to have it burned into my brain -- but as the Sandman attacks the city, and knocks a huge construction crane off it's base -- i found myself stunned. Images of a New York skyscraper with a gash in its side, with people hanging on for dear life... then slowly sliding out of the buildings now crippled facade. The dreadful slow-motion fall of one of the film's damsels in distress. Of courses, in the movie, Spiderman swings in at the last minute and breaks her fall -- a fairy tale ending. But in real life, there was no such superhero. And for New York, images of burning buildings and falling bodies are far too real to be left to the realm of entertainment.

He concludes by advocating greater sensitivity by Hollywood filmmakers on images that inadvertently mirror 9/11.

I also noted the 9/11 imagery and the Marvel Comics treatment of 9/11 in its 2001 comics, and outlined a disturbing allegorical reading of the film that would suggest the imagery is far from inadvertent.

Labels: movies

Everyone cries in Spider-Man 3. The good guys, the bad guys, the bad guys with good intentions, you name it. Scooter remarked, "this movie was weepier than Beaches."

And I shed a tear as well.

It was during an early scene, with student/model/daughter-of-the-police-chief Gwen Stacy falling out of a skyscraper. The scene evoked the memory etched into the cerebral cortex of every New Yorker, that of 9/11. People jumping to their deaths from the burning towers. No superheroes catching people on the way down, just ordinary heroes on the way up to rescue ordinary people.

As documented on the comics page at The Authentic History Center, in the December 2001 edition of The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel imagined how Spider-Man would have reacted at the scene of the attack. Spider-Man surveys the burning wreckage, thinking: "Some things are beyond words. Beyond comprehension. Beyond forgiveness."

However, in the 2007 film, the act of forgiveness drives the entire narrative. The traditional dichotomy between superhero and supervillain was swept aside in favor of a simple test: Do you forgive? Take away the costumes and the fancy graphics, and you have a medieval morality play.

Most morality plays have a protagonist who represents either humanity as a whole (Everyman) or an entire social class (as in Magnificence). Antagonists and supporting characters are not individuals per se, but rather personifications of abstract virtues or vices, especially the Seven deadly sins.

Morality plays were typically written in the vernacular, so as to be more accessible to the common people who watched them. Most can be performed in under ninety minutes. (That was before computer graphics -I.)

-Wikipedia

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

In the end, most of the main characters have a good cry, forgive one another and hug it out.

Spider-Man fights the aggrieved Sandman, a shifting pile of sand impervious to brute force, able to regroup even after grievous injury, and able to transform from an amorphous shape to a hammering attacker at will.

I've seen this movie before, and it's on CNN every night.

Peter's wealthy childhood friend Harry Osborn is gregarious, openhearted and loyal when he forgets himself, but turns into a brooding, melancholy, reclusive, misanthropic goblin when driven by his obligations to his deceased father. Spider-Man was able to convince Harry to abandon his father's stern dictates, embrace the doctrine of forgiveness, and sacrifice everything for his friends during the climactic battle against the combined forces of sand and darkness. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, but is Osborn a Jewish name? Aren't the Jewish people supposed to play a big role in the eschatalogical narrative of the Left Behind crowd? I almost expected that director Sam Raimi would give Willem Dafoe a long beard and two stone tablets. My semite-senses are tingling, big-time.

As for darkness, Peter Parker's rival in the black spidey-suit refuses to forgive and perishes in flames, an Inquisitorial auto da fé. Embrace forgiveness or die.

How does it all end?

Only through forgiveness and confession does Spider-Man come to terms with the Sandman, who leaves on his own accord with mutual understanding.

In the closing shot of the climactic battle scene, from one of the upper floors of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, the camera faces south towards the Empire State Building and then zooms to the early-morning sky where once stood two tall towers.

In the Marvel Universe, nothing's beyond forgiveness anymore, except those who will not forgive.

[Update1: Edited for clarity]

Labels: movies, religion

Some notes on Shooter:

• The protagonist Bob Lee Swagger lives in the mountains with his dog before the military interrupts his idyllic existence with a personal request to do a job. This is reminiscent of Commando, in which Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) lives in the mountains with his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano) before being similarly called back into service. The two films have a comparable body count, although it's not quite a fair comparison because Matrix was able to kill scores of enemy soldiers without the benefit of a spotter.
  
• Remix of Lethal Weapon, with Danny Glover channeling the power-abusing South African bad guy from Lethal Weapon II and Mark Wahlberg playing the Mel Gibson righteous anger role.
  
• The part of Philadelphia was played by New Westminster, at least during one of the car chase scenes by the riverfront.
• Scooter says Mark Wahlberg is the new Bruce Willis. But the old Bruce Willis hasn't gone anywhere, considering that there were two previews for upcoming Bruce Willis movies. We can expect a Willis-Wahlberg buddy movie one of these days.
  
• Post-Entourage, it's hard to watch Mark Wahlberg without thinking, "Did Ari push him to do this movie, or did Eric actually like the script?" "What's Turtle's angle?" "Where's Drama?"
  
• More speeches than a Rocky movie.
• Second Amendment lovefest with revolutionary fervor and vigilante justice, Charles Bronson-style.
  
• Missed opportunity to bring back the 80s action-movie tradition of the kill-shot one-liner. If you've just wasted the bad guy after two-and-a-half freakin' hours, say something memorable and quotable.
• Speaking of one-liners, I still can't watch Ned Beatty without thinking of Deliverance.
  

Bottom line: They don't make 'em like they used to.

Labels: movies

Everyone's got problems. In The Lookout, former high-school hockey star Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt) has cognitive disabilities stemming from a youthful indiscretion involving a fast car, fireflies and farm equipment. His roommate Lewis (Jeff Bridges) was blinded while cooking up a batch of crystal meth. Bad guy Gary Spago (Matthew Goode) frequently uses an inhaler, and "Bone," the No. 1 Henchman, wears sunglasses throughout the film, indicating extreme sensitivity to bright light. And as for the love interest and pole-dancer Luvlee (Isla Fisher), she's disablingly hot.

This portrayal of disabled people as both protagonists and antagonists seems to depart from the James Bond formula in which physical disability represents moral impairment. Almost all of the Bond villains have something wrong with them, including Casino Royale's "Bloody-Eye" Le Chiffre, sporting a platinum inhaler for dramatic effect.

When the good guys and the bad guys all have disabilities, how can the audience tell them apart? In "The Lookout," that's simple. The bad guys with disabilities are the ones planning to do something wrong in the future (i.e. rob a bank), while the good guys with disabilities have already done something wrong (i.e. reckless driving, making drugs) and they now suffer their disabilities as a punishment for past sins.

It would be refreshing to see disabled people portrayed as heroes without a moralistic reason for why they're disabled, but "The Lookout" isn't that film. Because of Hollywood's pernicious influence, whenever I see someone using an inhaler, such as at a housewarming party last night with Scooter's friends from work, I nudge Scooter to indicate, "Hey, look, there's someone using an inhaler who's probably up to no good."

Labels: movies

At the movies, preceding the feature presentation there's typically a brief segment admonishing people to be less annoying during the average two-hour film. Why isn't there a similar public service announcement before a six-and-a-half hour flight?

The airline could put together a montage of comedians doing their obligatory routines about flying ("Don't you hate it when..."), which are always funny – just like blog posts about flying, which never fail to make interesting reading.

And now a word about media consumption on JetBlue. Instead of showing a limited selection of commercial-free movies (edited for language and sexual situations) as do other airlines, JetBlue has back-of-seat live satellite television. So, instead of sitting back and passively soaking in a new movie that's not out on DVD yet, I had to become an active channel-surfer in an attempt to stay entertained. Maybe that would be acceptable if I were flying during television's sweeps week, but it's not the best tradeoff on a Saturday night featuring nothing much other than a SNL rerun that was barely tolerable the first time around; a commercial-laden, expletive-deleted airing of "Friday" on Comedy Central; or an "I Love New York" marathon on VH1 (which I couldn't even watch, since I'm saving it for DVD).

Even a bad film can knock a two-hour chunk out of a cross-country trip. By contrast, live television segments the journey into hundreds of tiny moments, "Isn't there anything else on?" *click* "Another commercial for the electric knife" *click* "Oh look at that, Anna Nicole...still dead" *click*

I couldn't even stare at the map for hours at a time, since the flight tracker was punctuated with commercial messages from JetBlue. How many times do I have to see the drinks menu? Why, when I'm trying to remember how to pronounce Couer d'Alene, should I be barraged for the 100th time with the unappetizing suggestion of a pairing between the house merlot and a bag of Doritos?

In-flight entertainment should make the flight seem shorter, not interminable.

Labels: movies, television, travel

My cousin went with the Patch Adams posse on a recent "Humanitarian Clown Trip" to Venezuela.

Turns out that Patch is not a big fan of the movie that bears his name. Not only does he NOT wear a white coat ("It's not colorful enough"), but the Hollywood Happy Ending where Patch opens his own clinic was a fabrication. The truth is, Patch Adams and the Gesundheit! Institute needs your support in order to build a 40-bed rural community hospital in West Virginia. Please give generously.

Did I mention that I was an extra in Patch Adams? If you have the DVD (who doesn't??) you can make out a blurry blotch in the background in the library scene. I met that blotch.

Labels: good works, movies

Just saw The Number 23. It's about a guy whose wife gives him a book about an obsession with the number 23. He starts reading the book, and begins noticing things that add up to the magic number. Letters convert into numbers which add up to 23 (e.g. NED: N=14, E=5, D=4; 14+5+4). Historical dates convert to 23 (9/11/2001 = 9+11+2+1 = 23). And so on.

Good movie fun. On the visual plane, you can play "spot the 23" in virtually every frame, and the numerology game also provides great diversion. Plus, there's a metaplot about the power of literature and storyteller, the writer's fantasy that a work of literature can "infect" or inspire others.

And then I started thinking – both my birthday and Scooter's birthday add up to 33. And my earlier blog post about The Number 23? It was written on 2/22/2007 = 2+22+9=33! And since that day, I've written at least one blog every day, and this is 22 days later. During this period, I've made 44 posts. 22+44=66, and 66/2=33!

Another reason to like this movie is that it almost - but not quite - has a talking dog. It's definitely a very communicative, hyper-intelligent dog, and the protagonist speaks to the dog as if the dog can understand exactly what he's saying.

I really only had one major problem with the film (and I'll try to be careful not to spoil the movie, but if you're really sensitive about that kind of thing maybe now's a good time to click elsewhere) The idea that love and rationality can cure mental illness is highly problematic. You can't just click your heels and wish away dementia, contrary to how it was depicted in the film. It wouldn't have hurt the film to have some good old-fashioned pharmacology, a little more Girl, Interrupted and a lot less cartoon insanity.

But what do you expect? This is the movies!

Labels: movies, talking dogs

Zodiac opens with a tracking shot from the inside of a car looking out of the passenger window while driving down a suburban street on the Fourth of July. Fireworks visible in the background, people in their yards gazing at the sky, smoking, doing just what people do on a hot summer day. A teenage boy approaches the car window. Who's in the car? Is it the killer? From the opening shot, you know you're in for a great ride.

Zodiac is quintessential David Fincher, bringing together in a true crime story the taunting serial killer from Se7en with the man-seeks-authentic-life ethos of Fight Club.

In Fight Club, Ed Norton's character worked as an insurance claims adjuster, running "the formula" on the cost-benefit of whether to order a recall for defective automobiles. For Zodiac we have Jake Gyllenhaal's portrayal of Robert Graysmith, an ineffectual editorial cartoonist for a daily newspaper, hovering around the news desk of talented, hard-drinking, hard-news reporter Paul Avery (played to type by Robert Downey, Jr.). The protagonists of both Fincher films represent minor cogs in the wheel of a larger machine that profits from the threat of death, one via insurance premiums and another through fearmongering.

Where the Ed Norton character responds to his ennui by forming the fight club, Graysmith grasps for authenticity by attempting to solve the Zodiac mystery, joining the "Zodiac Club" of cops and forensic experts. Like Tyler Durden's Fight Club army, the members of Zodiac Club seek each other out, exchange knowing glances, and break rules for the cause.

Unlike Fight Club, the members of the Zodiac Club are not single, disconnected men. They have children and wives, and their wives have a lower threshhold for sacrifice in the search for justice. They want their husbands free from the Zodiac obsession and the real danger it represents. Zodiac being a dramatization of a real event, it's a much messier story with human characters having depth beyond the symbolic. However, aside from Mark Ruffalo's portrayal of police inspector David Toschi, whose Animal Cracker-fueled performance changes registers at the drop of a clue from jaded to annoying to endearing to angry to conspiratorial, the characters tend to remain in a predictably monotonic range – Gyllenhaal plays earnest, Downey Jr. does world-weary, and so on.

Why? Because the movie enlists the characters into the service of describing a larger idea, that the system is broken. Killers walk free because justice comes second to the profit motive, because the organizations entrusted with the protection of society are engulfed in internecine turf battles, and the because the human desire for ease and comfort takes priority over solving yesterday's crimes that happened to other people.

At one point, Paul Avery chides Robert Graysmith for his interest in the Zodiac case and his desire to "do something."

"What did you do? Go to the library?"

Going to the library - it's more than most people care to do under similar circumstances, but not nearly enough.

Labels: movies

An auction house just sold Ol' Ben Kenobi's cloak for £54,000.

Which is a rip-off, because the original was destroyed during the explosion of the first Death Star.

The sale of Dr. Who's entire outfit for about £24,600 was a relative bargain, and scientifically plausible considering that Dr. Who had a time machine, most recently used by Pete Townshend et. al. to continue touring in support of their new album.

By the way, did you know that "The Who" was originally a problematic Google search? The words "the" and "who" are both considered "stop words," which were ignored by search algorithms. Now, if you search for a term that contains only stop words, Google will conduct the search. The results for "the who" – just as expected.

But Google hasn't yet figured out "The The" (search results here).

Labels: auctions, movies, music

In Chris Cooper's brilliant portrayal of Robert Hanssen in Breach, he greets the young agent assigned to him with an odd request: "Tell me five things about yourself, only four of them true."

Interesting game. Sure, you could list a bunch of innocuous statements, such as "My favorite color is blue," and "My favorite ice cream is pistachio." But that'll never teach you how to become a good liar, and it won't be enough to get people to believe something important as your lie. Instead, serious players have to come up with items that are at least as interesting as the untruth. You're trying to gain someone's trust to the point where they accept the entirety of what you say, and you can't do that by being reticent and withdrawn.

In coming up with the five things, you have to consider the following questions:

• What do you expect that your opponent will believe about you? The lie has meet a plausibility threshhold.
  
• What do you think your opponent won't believe about you? In order to divert attention away from the lie, you have to make at least one of the true items wild enough that your opponent will doubt that it's actually true, and pick it instead of the lie.
  
• What can you reveal safely? Remember, this is a game supposedly played by counterintelligence agents and Russian spies. As such, it's probably unwise to mention childhood traumas, crimes committed, sexual peccadilloes or other things that can be used against you. While it's tempting to put something scandalous and personal out there as one of the "true" items with the idea that your opponent will believe that you'd never admit to something like that, it's probably too high of a price to pay.
  
• Should the lie be something positive (e.g. "I ran the Boston Marathon"), or something negative? (e.g. "I was arrested for truancy.") Remember, your reputation can be damaged as much by a lie of your own creation as by an incautious revelation of something true.
  
• Knowing that your opponent knows the dynamics described here, how should you adjust your questions?
  

It's game theory fundamentals in action. In essence, you have to pick four items that skirt the edge of plausibility but that do not overly jeopardize your reputation, plus add another item that resembles the first four.

Anyway, I thought this would be a good exercise for a blog post. See if you can spot the lie.

• I was kicked off the high school chess team.
  
• I scored well on the LSAT.
• I performed at open mic night at a NYC comedy club.
• I am a thoughtful and considerate lover.
  
• I was an extra in Patch Adams.
  

If the correct answer jumps out at you, then perhaps you should consider a career in the intelligence services. Or you're my ex-girlfriend. Good luck!

Labels: movies