Bloggasm

I was as astonished as anyone that the movie 300 managed to make $70 million in its opening weekend. I mean, I knew the movie had some hype to it, but I thought it was mostly within the comic and film geek world.

It turns out that the small comic book company Dark Horse Comics, wasn’t very prepared for the onslaught of book sales following the movie’s success. Which is kind of silly really since this wasn’t the first time they’ve had a comic book of theirs turned into a movie.

On the heels of my musings about 300’s “gateway” potential, and its record-breaking weekend at the box office, ICv2 is reporting that Diamond, the book’s exclusive distributor to both the direct and mainstream markets, was out of stock of the $30 hardcover as of last Thursday, March 8th. In this case, though, the finger of blame doesn’t point at the much-maligned monopoly, but rather at the publisher, Dark Horse, who once again has a hit movie tie-in (Hellboy, Sin City) but is faced with a shortage of books to fully take advantage of it.

The company quickly sold out of its 15,000-copy print run, and their next shipment will barely cover the back orders. If they don’t act quickly, they might lose out on a lot of the 300 craze and lose a lot of potential profits as well.

Brian Flemming is a film director, a playwright, and an outspoken atheist. In 2005, he released the controversial documentary, The God Who Wasn’t There, a film not just arguing that Jesus wasn’t God, but that Jesus the man never existed at all. He’s also the creator of the faux documentary, Nothing So Strange,and the musical, Bat Boy.

Last year, Flemming developed the Blasphemy Challenge, which called on atheists to upload videos to YouTube where they commit blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

Flemming has a blog where he talks about atheism, film, and politics and a variety of other things as well.

Simon Owens: In the past year, we’ve seen a huge surge of atheists in the media. We have everything from The God Delusion to Letter to a Christian Nation to your documentary, The God Who Wasn’t There. Does this mean that atheists are finally banding together as activists, or that the public is becoming more open to hearing the atheist point of view? Or both?

Brian Flemming: The number of atheists is growing, we’re getting more vocal, and as evidence rises that religion is doing harm to our culture, people are more receptive to a godless point of view. In fact, many people who don’t identify as atheists actually are atheists, in that they live their lives as if there is no supreme being. They may obey the rule that says it is rude to publicly reveal one’s atheism (as it implicitly criticizes theists), but they’re essentially atheists.

The visibility of atheists isn’t much of a surprise to me. I think we’ll see the United States head down the same road as the countries of Europe — which over the past several decades have become not only strongly secular but also specifically atheistic. When religion is openly discussed on a fair playing field, it never wins. It simply can’t be defended on rational grounds. Barring a development such as a great disaster, which could be exploited to empower totalitarian ideologies like Christianity, we’re headed for atheism as a default point of view.

This development is, of course, a very good thing for the United States. There is a correlation between standard of living and atheism — the more atheistic a country is, the healthier it is, in terms of overall lifespan, overall wealth, access to health care, stillbirth rate, children living with two parents and many other measures. Even within the United States, the people doing the worst by these measures are in the Bible Belt. The most religious communities in the U.S., for example, have the highest divorce rate.

As atheism increases, we’ll see others benefit as well. In terms of giving to the less fortunate, the highest rate of giving to other countries occurs in the most atheistic countries.

As facts like these make it into the mainstream conversation, I think we’ll hear a lot more positive things about atheism — and a lot more wonder at how so many of us once believed that Jesus would soon come down from the sky and save us.

Simon Owens: In our last interview in early 2006, you indicated that Bush’s greatest talent was “manipulating the American people with fear.” Do you think that talent has subsided at all?

Brian Flemming: Yes. He really only had that one trick, and its effectiveness is reaching its expiration date. As the man said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Simon Owens: More importantly, will that talent strengthen again if there were another terrorist attack on American soil, or will Americans be more wary next time?

Brian Flemming: I really don’t know. It is very hard to predict reactions like that. I would expect that the Bush Administration would certainly try to exploit any new attack to further increase Bush’s dictatorship powers, but people are certainly a lot more aware of Bush’s basic character now, and they don’t like it.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed a growing trend in documentaries where the documentarian becomes a narrator in the story, while old-school film-makers like Errol Morris hardly speak at all in their documenaries. Do you think today’s documentarians are becoming too intrusive on their work? Which style is more unbiased?

Brian Flemming: I think we’re seeing the language of the documentary expand, and that’s a good thing. But the old guard will always gripe and complain. Errol Morris himself was undeservedly rebuked by the establishment for using re-creations in “The Thin Blue Line,” which is the best documentary ever made.

As it becomes easier and easier to make a documentary (and that possibility now extends as far as the lower-middle class) we’re going to hear a lot more voices that are unhampered by establishment rules — one of which is that a documentary should be “unbiased.” There’s a place for the kind of documentary that imitates newsmagazine segments, but there are also many other ways to make a documentary.

I personally don’t mind if a documentarian “intrudes” on the movie — so long as that documentarian has a strong point of view that is worth my attention or has some essential role in the action of the film. I’ve never heard anyone complain about nonfiction writers of books or magazine articles who use the word “I” — if that first- person point of view is justified by the material. Text nonfiction runs the gamut from sterile schoolbook prose to intimate personal essay. There’s no reason that video nonfiction can’t do the same thing.

Simon Owens: Do you think the “blasphemy project” is an effective way for atheists to come out of the closet?

Brian Flemming: The Blasphemy Challenge has certainly encouraged quite a few godless folks to unequivocally state that they aren’t afraid of Satan. I think it’s hilarious that this is actually a controversial statement to make — as if Satan were not a purely mythological character. The Blasphemy Challenge is radical compared to how we normally talk about superstitions such as Christianity, but it shouldn’t be. It should always be acceptable to declare one’s independence from Bronze Age myths. In fact, it shouldn’t really be news at all.

Simon Owens: Does the internet provide an outlet that atheists wouldn’t normally have?

Brian Flemming: Yes. It is hard to imagine a project like the Blasphemy Challenge without a site like YouTube to organize it. It’s amazing how easy it is for the participants in the challenge to communicate their views using video. Not too long ago, this ability was tightly held by corporations who controlled access to the extremely expensive equipment needed for TV broadcast. Now, a webcam is as cheap as $20.

Given that religion in the United States is a strongly intimidating force on media outlets, the internet is the perfect medium to express an atheistic message. Religion has created a rule in our culture that says religious beliefs are the sole beliefs that cannot be critically examined — one is allowed to state the most outlandish conclusions under the banner of religion, and it is considered rude to question those conclusions in the way one would question any others. Mainstream media outlets largely follow this rule. They praise the emperor’s new clothes.

Since atheists are essentially pointing out a naked emperor, it’s great that we have the internet to get around the special exemption that religion has declared for itself.

Simon Owens: As an atheist, do you view all religion with equal disdain? Are there any religions you dislike more than others?

Brian Flemming: I don’t see much difference between the beliefs of, say, Scientologists, and those of Christians. The space-alien theology of L. Ron Hubbard is no more or less ridiculous than the flying-dead-man theology of the Holy Bible.

Simon Owens: What is the future of atheist activism? What specific issues should atheists focus on first?

Brian Flemming: I think we’ll see many different atheists concentrate on many different messages. Declared atheists tend to be independent-minded folk with strong points of view, so we’re never going to gather under a single banner. Which makes sense — we don’t see organizations of “a-Clausians” (people who don’t believe in Santa Claus), as that group is filled with far too many sub-groups. Since atheism is merely a rational default position with regard to a certain brand of mythology, we shouldn’t expect a great deal of ideological unity within this group.

One could lazily say that Sacha Baron Cohen’s ability to make us laugh simply lies with his keen adeptness to draw out the most racist and sexist personas of his interview subjects and display them in all their ridiculousness. But then that would ignore some of the funniest scenes in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which seemed as if they could have snugly fit within the realms of a Jackass movie. In fact, Cohen at some points dives so far into the shock factor humor that the audience becomes desensitized to it, as is often the case with race humor. When we watch the citizens of Kazakhstan participate in the annual “Running of the Jew,” in which large hulking costumed “Jews” chase the children through the streets, you’ll likely hear forced laughter in the audience at what is essentially over-the-top anti-semitism. Later in the movie, when Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his producer Azamat (Ken Davitian) find out that they’re spending the night with a Jewish couple, their fear that the couple will poison them never does much in inducing real laughter.

That is not to say that the racism isn’t funny, it’s just more entertaining when Borat manages to let his interview subjects spew their racist remarks. Perhaps this is why he only spends a very small portion of the movie in New York City before hitting the road, because Cohen understood the guarded, stand-offish nature of the New Yorker. When Borat goes to kiss a random New Yorker on the street, the response you almost always hear is “Get the fuck away from me, don’t you fucking get near me.” When he’s in the south, the southerner will either awkwardly let him kiss him, or politely tell him “No, we don’t do that kind of thing here.” Cohen preys on the exaggerated polite mentality of southerners, who will go out of their way to accommodate even the most obnoxious guests. Borat is always able to cause the southerners to let down their guard through his own sexist and racist affirmations, and through some bizarre assuredness that the camera filming them will never reach American eyes, they spew forth the most vile stuff imaginable.

Borat, in its faux-documentary style, puts together a coherent plot rather than jumping from interview to interview like in the short lived Da Ali G Show. Borat is a Kazakhstani journalist who has been sent to America to make a documentary about American cultural life that will theoretically be emulated by Kazakhstan’s people (something that’s confirmed in the epilogue of the movie). He’s accompanied by his producer Azamat who is there to keep him disciplined towards his final goal. But when Borat watches an episode of Baywatch, he becomes immediately transfixed with Pamela Anderson and decides right then and there that he is to marry her. He convinces Azamat that they need to travel to California in order to get the full range of American life, and of course on the way there they curve their path into the deep south.

The attempt to make a coherent plot is a thin one, and Borat’s interactions with Azamat are, for the most part, insubstantial and not very funny (with the main exception being when they get into a huge fight that causes them to part ways). During their trip in the south, Borat encounters an entire range of southerners, from rodeo owners to tongue-speaking evangelical churches to antique dealers, and to borrow a cliche, hilarity ensues. To dictate said hilarity into the written word would flatten it and dry it out; its humor can only be conveyed through the screen. But suffice it to say that Borat is probably the funniest movie to emerge this year.

With its major popularity and inevitable cult following, Cohen must have realized that the death of Borat is eminent. He has been propelled into a notoriety so large that he will never again be able to sneak under the radar in order to trick his interview subjects. But perhaps that’s what’s so fantastic about the movie, that he approaches it with his gloves off, willing to do the most outrageous things imaginable until tears of laughter well up in the audience’s eyes. Many critics will label this movie a mockumentary, but Cohen has painted such a true-portrait of the south’s landscape that he will no doubt be the envy of any serious documentarian, who must deal with the barriers created by those who know every word of theirs will be picked over and dissected by the unrelenting liberal-than-thou criticism of their fellow Americans. Cohen has managed to remove the lense of political correctness to display the racist southerner in its most basic, Neanderthalic beauty.

***

Related posts: The Science of Sleep, The Prestige, Best Blonde joke ever, Thank You for Smoking: If only lobbyists had it so good

“I can’t remember to forget you,” Leonard Shelby’s voice-over says of his dead wife in Memento, and even though Charlie Koffman has his characters poke fun at screenwriters who use voiceovers in Adaptation, Christopher Nolan crafts them so that they convey such a lonely obsession that we never even question their legitimacy. And it’s intentional irony that Nicolas Cage’s Adaptation character speaks often in the very voice-over that is so bemoaned. There were times during Hugh Jackman’s voice-overs in The Prestige where one could almost believe that Guy Pearce was hired to do them. Nolan uses these voice-overs to symbolize his character’s isolation within his own head, conveying to the viewer that by becoming obsessed with something, you are essentially alienating everything else in your life.

Obsession is a theme that Nolan portrays well. Leonard Shelby is told by Teddy that he no longer knows who he is, indicating that one can be defined by his own obsession. Shelby is so set on finding his wife’s killer that (spoilers!) it no longer matters if he finds the right one. In the case of Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), he too is consumed with an obsession so acute that he often sacrifices his own wealth and happiness to achieve it.

Because there are so many twists to the actual plot of The Prestige, following it for too long drags the reader so far into Spoiler Land that it seems futile to do so. Add to this the fact that it’s actually difficult at times to follow the linear progression of what is happening in present time because of the constant use of flashbacks, then one can truly understand the difficulty of providing even a basic premise to the film.

The Prestige is the story of two rival magicians, Robert Angier (Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), who essentially progress through their entire careers trying to simultaneously out-do and sabotage each other. The crux of this rivalry lies in the debate of whether or not Borden is responsible for Angier’s wife’s death in a magic trick which went fatally wrong. How it went wrong–Borden’s stubborn insistence on using a different kind of knot when binding her hands together–represents his inventive resistance to the norm. It is Borden’s belief that magicians should be continually refining their acts to push through to new levels of greatness; he isn’t satisfied with what he considers boring, stale tricks. Angier, on the other hand, is less inventive but more given to the theatrical nature needed by a good magician. In his mind, the trick itself isn’t what matters, but rather how one delivers it. Borden, though his tricks are easily more amazing, doesn’t know how to handle the crowd, and the viewer can see this plainly with the rather dull settings of his magic performances.

Borden eventually creates a new trick called “The Transporting Man,” which causes Angier to digress from a mere rivalry to an unhealthy obsession. He can’t figure out how the “The Transporting Man” is done, so he makes it his life’s almost-spiritual quest to unlock its mystery. This segways into another rivalry between the famous scientist Thomas Edison and another scientist named Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). Their scientific battles are juxtaposed against Borden and Angrier’s own, and so Angier naturally takes on a kind of comradery with Tesla in their quests to out-do their opponents. How they help each other do this lies so deep within the realms of Spoiler Land that we dare not venture that far.

All of this is told in flashback form. In the present, Borden is in prison, and the viewer deduces early on that he was framed at some point for murder during the mental battle of the wits with Angier. Because that’s what this is, a mental chess game, where moves are often made in the anticipation of how the other will respond, allowing for a plethora of surprises and the notion that nothing is as it truly seems. Borden often plants misleading clues along the way to throw Angier off his scent, and the viewer is forced to follow Angier down every path, even the ones that turn up cold.

The Prestige is easily one of the best films this year. As one reviewer put it, it’s the movie that gives Nolan enough room to fully extend himself so that his complex narrative can be realized. The movie is over two hours long because it needs to be that length. It’s multi-layered and has the room to slowly unfold itself, and though a keen viewer will be able to guess several of the twists before they happen, he or she won’t feel let down by it since Nolan never makes the story hinge off the twist, as is often the case with directors like M. Night Shyamalan. No, the entire story rests upon the weight of obsession, and how it slowly becomes its own antagonist, a beast that will never release its stronghold from the neck of its own creator, not until he’s destroyed by that very obsession for which he was defined.

Related Posts: The Departed, Thank You for Smoking: If only lobbyists had it so good

Martin Scorsese knows he’s walking through a minefield of potential cliches in his movie The Departed, so much so that the film often takes on a metafictional quality in which his characters have to justify their own actions. When Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) emerges from his stint in jail and goes to his cousin to try and work his way into the drug trade, his cousin says something along the lines of “You know what I have to ask you, it’s the thing we always have to ask in situations like these,” to which Costigan replies, “I’m not a cop.” How many times in movies have we seen scenes where an undercover cop is accused of being a cop? Hell, how many times have we experienced this ourselves? It seems that every time I’ve been in a room full of strangers where some kind of drug was pulled out, that question inevitably found its way to me, this question that is utterly useless because of how the answer will always amount to “no,” whether it’s true or not, so why bother asking? But it must be asked anyway, because that’s how these situations play out, so Scorsese has his characters wink at the audience every now and then to let us know that this really is a different movie after all.

At some points in this movie, the prevalent theme seems to be father figures, since both of our main characters are fatherless and taken under the wings of someone else: With Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), it’s a mob boss named Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), with Billy Costigan, it’s the head of the Boston undercover police division, Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen). The problem lies with each character’s connection to his father figure. We get a brief scene in the beginning where a young Colin Sullivan first meets Costello, who for some reason buys him groceries, but throughout the entire movie we’re constantly questioning Sullivan’s loyalty to the mob boss, and though that loyalty finally does cave in, there’s seemingly no reason it was there in the first place. For DiCaprio’s character, we’re given a series of flashbacks of a dying mother coupled with a vague explanation of why he’s decided to join the police, but we’re never completely sure why he decides to risk everything.

Based on the Japanese Hong Kong film, Infernal Affairs, The Departed depicts the lives of two snitches–one an undercover cop posing as a gangster, the other a gangster posing as a cop. In the middle Scorsese throws in a too-convenient love triangle, though none of the characters know the true implications of the love triangle they’re in until the very end– Costigan never figures out he’s having sex with Sullivan’s girl throughout the entire thing, in fact he never even learns her boyfriend’s name. Eventually, both the police and the gangsters figure out that there’s a rat in their midsts, and so it becomes a cat and mouse game of who gets found out first.

There are multiple layers to this movie that deserve a very long review, but unfortunately it’s very late, and since I’m having a hard time articulating my thoughts tonight anyway, we’ll move through them quickly: You can always tell that you empathize with a character when you watch him get into a pickle and share his “Oh fuck” moment, and there were times when DiCaprio’s character almost gets caught and you really do have that “Oh fuck” feeling. Matt Damon’s character however, though well acted, never gets our sympathy, mostly because we realize he could walk away from this whole thing and clean up his life. He has no real incentive to work for Nicholson, and so whenever he comes close to being caught, the audience knows he probably deserves it.

I listened to Filmspotting’s review of this movie, and even though they spent most of their review trashing the movie, they had to come around in the end and admit that they really liked it, and reading back over what I wrote, I realize that I’ve done the same exact thing. Up until now, you’d probably think that I didn’t like the movie, but such is not the case. It’s flawed, but it’s also great, and one of Scorsese’s better films, and definitely his best recent one. Even though it has some unsatisfactory twists and turns near the end, and character motivation often seems to be lacking, there’s a certain charm to everyone, and you end up liking just about every single character.

I didn’t talk about Mark Wahlberg’s performance at all during this review, so let me just end this by saying that this guy can act. I’m one of many critics who is perturbed that somebody who used to call himself Marky Mark could turn himself into the actor he is today.

Related posts: Filmmaker tries to jump-start Brazil’s movie industry

There’s an Ann Coulter line known by most people who never bothered to read her books. It’s not a coincidence that it’s on the first page of How to Talk to a Liberal, because it’s the first line that we read when we’re standing in a bookstore and decide we want to remind ourselves of how crazy she is, read the first page, and promptly put the book back on the shelf where we found it. It goes something like this: ““Traditionally, the way to change a liberal is to make him move out of his parents’ basement and start paying taxes.”

I roll my eyes every time I hear that line, but it was something that popped into my head as I watched The Science of Sleep. The main character, Stéphane (Gael García Bernal), suffers from such blind artistic idealism and has such a child-like demeanor that one has a hard time building empathy for his sorry situation as he seems unwilling to help himself. He digresses into such childish behavior that we have to actually struggle to root for him to get the girl, and instead we can’t help from thinking, “Grow up already,” in a way that would make Ann Coulter (may she rot in hell) proud.

The Science of Sleep is what Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would have been if Michel Gondry hadn’t been hindered by Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay. And I use the word “hinder,” in a positive way, because Kaufman gave the story just enough structure so that Gondry’s directing style worked to enhance the surreal effects while at the same time create a realistic relationship between the two protagonists. But in this movie, Gondry is both screenwriter and director, and from the very beginning the cohesiveness of the story is fickle at best.

Stéphane is an artistic individual who is conned into moving back home by his mother, who has tricked him into taking a job with a calender publisher, because for some reason he thinks the company will allow him to publish his economically infeasible art called Disasterology (art work that pictures disastrous things happening). We learn that his father has just died, but Gondry decided that this was not an important theme to exploit and bring to the forefront of the plot, rather it comes up a few times in the movie but never enough so we can see how it resonates within Stephane’s life. One day when he’s on his way out the door to go to work, he’s crushed by a piano falling down the stairs and then whisked into the apartment of a woman named Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who comes to his medical aid along with her friend Zoé (Emma de Caunes).

Romantic interest blossoms within Stéphane, but not for the obvious girl. Rather than choosing Stéphanie, who is artistic and sometimes eccentric like Stephane, he first turns to her friend Zoe, despite the fact that she openly mocks him and has nothing in common with him. In fact, the only thing that could be said for her is that she’s the more conventionally attractive of the two, which simply highlights Stephane’s own hypocrisy: He pretends to have too much artistic integrity to lower himself into doing grunt work for his calendar company, but at the same time is wholly superficial in his romantic interests.

Anyone who has watched the trailer knows that Stephane often retreats into his own dreamworld, and though we’re first led to believe that this only happens when he’s asleep, as the movie progresses we find out that he can fall in and out of his dream state while being wide awake. As can be ascertained with a little bit of logic, the movie quickly becomes confusing as we are unable to separate dreams from reality. And perhaps this is quite fitting, because Stephane suffers from the same predicament.

His dream world is aesthetically pleasing, reminiscent to claymation models used in old SciFi movies. The television studio from which his dreams are broadcasted comes with video cameras made from cardboard and uses empty egg cartons for walls. The doorway that acts as a portal into the dreams is a clear plastic shower curtain, and everything has a 70s Austin Powers feel to it with Gondry’s choice of strong color. The whole setting feels like a mixture of an Erector Set and the Mouse Trap board game, in that it’s transparently mechanical.

The main problem with the movie is that rather than building the imagery around the plot, the entire movie seems built around the imagery. There’s no doubt that Gondry is artistically brilliant with the props and setting he uses, but he often sacrifices characterization by sending Stephane into his surreal dreams, and without the characterization we’re unable to feel the connection between him and Stephanie.

There are times when the movie is genuinely funny, with real laugh out loud moments. Stephane eventually comes around and pursues Stephanie, but every time he comes even close to getting her, he acts immaturely or does something to creep her out and then he’s back at square one again. Eventually, we stop caring whether or not she’ll ever be with him, and after he blows his last chance with her by not bothering to show up on a date, we actually hope that she doesn’t accept the torture of bringing him into her life.

By the last scene, he has lost all his child-like charm, and we literally watch him throw a tantrum because he doesn’t get what he wants, hiding up in Stephanie’s bed and refusing to climb down when she pleads with him to do so.

In most romantic movies of this sort, the director should have us hoping that the guy gets the girl, but in this case there is no such comradery. Though the movie is an interesting foray into the structure (or lack thereof) of dreams, there’s not enough of a tether to keep us going along while the plot derails into Stephane’s surreal world. And when the ending credits begin to roll, there’s this feeling that closure hasn’t been reached, that any semblance of denouement was skipped over because of ambiguity and Stephane’s childish resistance to change.

Related posts: When viral advertising backfires: People don’t like being duped, Garden State 2 aka The Last Kiss

Fernando Meirelles, director of the Oscar-winning (best supporting actress) movie The Constant Gardner, is to launch a new series of movies out of Brazil, and Focus Features has taken the bait:

The 2005 film “The Constant Gardner” won acclaim at film festivals and an Oscar for best supporting actress Rachel Weisz. Now the film’s Brazilian director is harnessing his fame to jump-start his country’s struggling movie industry.

Fernando Meirelles has signed a three-year deal with Universal Pictures and its Focus Features unit to bring Brazilian-made films, in English as well as Portuguese, to the studio.

I never really thought The Constant Gardner deserved anything close to an Oscar. Like Crash, it was filled with self-importance and subscribed to yet another artsy cliche: Set a movie in Africa, include lots of footage of poverty along with grainy African images, and then don’t bother with a compelling plot.

What I find interesting is that having a dictatorship actually helped its movie industry, which didn’t go downhill until after the dictatorship collapsed:

Brazilian cinema got its start in 1930 and reached its apex during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, when the government created the state-run giant Embrafilme to promote Brazilian culture as part of a national development project called “Big Brazil.” After the films were produced they were turned over to the government for censorship.

Related posts: Movie sales at theaters are on the rise while DVD sales are down