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45-second movie reviews

Weldon Berger — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 03:48:51 +0000

These are things I recently saw on Netflix. Spoilers follow.

Morning Glory (2010): Starring some youngish woman (hereinafter known as YW) as an irredeemably giddy television producer hired to either resurrect or euthanize a morning show on which Diane Keaton plays a cardboard cutout opposite some dunderhead who gets fired about five minutes in by YW, who replaces him with Harrison Ford playing a gruff and legendary Serious News Man in—apparently as revenge for getting cast in this thing—the style of Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter playing a Serious News Man but with a rasp borrowed from Marlon Brando playing the Godfather. Harrison succumbs in a platonic way to YW’s charms and does for frittatas what Hopkins did for fava beans, only on live TV and without cannibalizing anything except the scenery. You had to be there. Don’t be there. The End.

Mulholland Falls (1996): Mulholland Falls is the only film noir ever shot in saturated color. It’s a tough-cop story set in 1950s LA with Nick Nolte and Chazz Palminteri in the two important cop roles. Actually those are the only important roles; everybody else could have been played by anybody else, which is probably why they phoned it in. It’s not a bad story: a hooker gets killed by an overzealous Army security guy protecting John Malkovich’s dying nuclear scientist/general (and hence the country) from scandal. Nolte is trying to figure out who killed the hooker, and Treat Williams as the security guy is trying to stop him. Nolte ultimately throws Williams out of an airplane, which is how Williams killed the hooker; Palminteri dies in Nolte’s arms as Nick tries to assure him that he’s not … strange. Nobody is asked to act outside their range. Astonishingly this includes Melanie Griffith as Nolte’s wife. The End.

The End

Blogs on Parade: “The Negro’s Revenge” edition

Weldon Berger — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:58:47 +0000

From Lenin’s Tomb, a lefty Brit blog run by Richard Seymour, comes this on the recent London riots:

On the history of British reactionaries blaming black music for riots and disorder:

“It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro’s revenge.”

The link in Seymour’s post is to a bit in the stodgy old Economist of all places. He’s written a lot on the topic, all worth reading (including most recently this on “the sadistic state“). Give him a look.

From Avedon Carol’s Sideshow, a comment on the political acid test:

Back when Ross Perot was running for president, I marvelled at his apparent belief that all we needed was for someone to go to Washington and, I don’t know, put LSD in the water so everyone would love each other and get along? Really, his entire governing strategy, as he explained it, seemed to be, “I’m going to go there and make ‘em all shake hands and get some real work done.” No recognition of the huge ideological gulf between the two sides, just this bizarre Woodstock Nation kind of philosophy that even in the ’60s you couldn’t have sold to a bunch of stoned hippies. But people who look kindly on Obama seem to think that he has the same weird, Sunshine Acid kind of thinking, as if it was all about needing his own special personality to make the flower-wreathed fairy circle emerge.

And more. She always has great links.

From Michael Shaw’s Bag News Notes, a comment on British PM David Cameron’s odd choice to deliver a reactionary screed in front of rather well-done bit of graffiti:

I’m confused. I suppose Team Cameron chose to situated [sic] its “law and order” screed in front of a graffiti mural at a youth center to signify that the same culture that spawns such art is about to get its head handed to it?

Don’t they get that graffiti, and the combination of alienation, frustration, and yearning for identity and expression that underpins it, is the exact thing that Cameron is denying? Unless I’m missing something here, this has got to be one of the most blind and provocative political images I’ve seen in some time.

Bag News Notes is all about the images, so you really have to visit the link to see what Shaw’s talking about. Also from Shaw, during the height of the Midwest floods, a brilliant catch of a visual allegory for the plight of the American worker.

From the Columbia Journalism Review’s Audit Note, Ryan Chittum lauds coverage of the Obama administration’s cozy relationships with economic arsonists:

The American Banker’s Jeff Horwitz has another excellent report on the Federal Housing Administration and its former commissioner David Stevens, who took a bold spin through the revolving door earlier this year to become CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Chittum also takes note of a Center for Public Integrity story about the FBI’s lackadaisical approach to mortgage fraud investigations.

And finally, what my daughter said I had to hear: Splendid, splendid heartbreaking chops.
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You know we’re in deep shit when …

Weldon Berger — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 05:47:13 +0000

I read the transcript of the Obama debt-ceiling speech and aside from killing any lingering hope for a jobs program and the preservation and improvement of our social safety net, it didn’t seem too awful. And I’ve been told by professional progressive persons who watched the speech and the response to it from Orange John that Obama came off like an adult and Boehner like a petulant, oddly tinted child.

Still, I think it’s ultimately more useful to think of the debate principals in the context of the hit musical and film, Sweeney Todd. Which of them is Sweeney Todd, the demon barber who will slit our throats, and which is Mrs. Lovett, the baker who will make us into meat pies for our masters?

Well okay, that’s not actually useful either.

You know we’re in deep shit when our president invokes American exceptionalism in support of his conviction that Americans, which in this instance means one more than half of our 535 financially well-off federal legislators, will somehow find the strength to determine how and how deeply to screw their constituents in order to pass a routine fiscal measure.

The entire world is watching. So let’s seize this moment to show why the United States of America is still the greatest nation on Earth – not just because we can still keep our word and meet our obligations, but because we can still come together as one nation. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

Something to tell the grandkids, right? I witnessed vast armies of men, women and children marching with Dr. King. I learned about the Marshall Plan and saw film of the Berlin Airlift in school. I watched as our nation put a man on the moon. And now, the crowning achievement of a resurgent America: the passage of the 2011 debt ceiling bill.

As our neighbors to the north might say, “We’re fucken doomed, eh?”

This is not your father’s Musak

Weldon Berger — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:06:22 +0000

When I was a kid, the music played in grocery stores was infantilized versions of things such as classic swing and pop tunes from the 1930s forward to the early 1960s, with people like Henry Mancini playing castrated versions of the originals. Imagine a down-tempo, lush string version of Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” (Benny Goodman’s famous version here, with a demonic Gene Krupa on drums) and you get some idea of the butchery going on.

Then at some point the stuff moved from string versions of the more placid early Beatles tunes to the actual tunes themselves and from then on it was mostly the real thing, pop and soft rock stuff usually from 20 or 30 years prior to the current shopping experience.

Now we’re in 2011, and what grocery store music programmers apparently believe to be the soothing rock of 30 years gone is stuff like the Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop” and the Clash’s “London Calling,” cuz that’s what I heard back to back at my neighborhood Vons store a few days ago. I suppose “London Calling” is lyrically more suitable (marginally) than “Someone Got Murdered” even though the latter is considerably more mellowmusically, and maybe “Blitzkrieg Bop” is better than “I Wanna Be Sedated” but still I wouldn’t have thought either the Ramones or The Clash to be especially good for prompting people to buy stuff. It’s pretty far from either band’s philosophy, too.

So I’m sad. The high energy, rebel music of my relative youth is now considered to be Boomer Muzak. People were slam dancing or doing the Pogo to this stuff back in the day. What’s next? “Anarchy in the UK?”

Makes me weep.

Shopping religiously

Weldon Berger — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 15:00:36 +0000

I went to Santa Monica Place a few days ago. It’s the new—resurrected, more accurately—shopping establishment in Santa Monica, which until now was desperately lacking in places to spend time and money.

It’s huge. I had no idea. All you can really see from the street is a generous corridor with a few shops lining it and beyond that, part of a courtyard. But that view shows just a fraction of what’s actually there. It’s sort of like what I remember of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico—narrow passageways opening into enormous caverns. And just as at Carlsbad, the place has elevators.

It’s so big that I spent an hour there taking pictures and never saw more than the first level of three, and only about half of that. Here are some of the photos, including one shot from the … mall? I don’t know what to call it … to the street. The first one is a shop name in carefully faded paint on what I think is actual old brick. And of course there’s much more on my Flickr site.
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