How Can You Go Wrong With Cute Robots?

Well you can, but Pixar didn't. I realize I'm joining a very large chorus, and taking on all the discomfort that comes with that, but I absolutely adored Wall-E. From its unexpected use of the secondary Broadway song-and-dance number "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" during an animated trip through the galaxy to the final, joyous scene on Earth, this picture owned me. I'd follow Wall-E, this cute little tramp of a robot, just about anywhere, and I'm glad this movie let me.

See it. Live it. Love it. Be it.

The Many Faces of Bad

As longtime readers, all three of you, already know, I'm come to know bad movies of many kinds and styles. And today I've decided, for my amusement, to break bad movies down by arbitrary categories, in hopes of groping toward my bad movie aesthetic.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

(This post, incidentally, is dedicated to the late Jesse Helms, a beacon to bigoted halfwits everywhere, whose long political career is one of the many things that North Carolina will have to spend the next ten thousand years apologizing for.)

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on a Premium Cable Channel: The Lonely Lady

Because I was actively repressing my memory of this movie, I almost put Glitter here. Now Glitter is a singularly awful, cheesy, and exploitive look at the ugly side of show business; but nobody tried to rape Mariah Carey with a garden hose, or marry her off to an impotent guy who carries said garden hose around whenever he really needs to win an argument, or place her spread eagled on a pool table while some sleaze shoots pool balls up her crotch. Mariah Carey, even in the delicate mental state she was in during the making and promotion of Glitter would never have agreed to such humiliations. Pia Zadora, however, being of sound mind, agreed to it straight away. Indeed, her billionaire husband financed it. The Lonely Lady could be used in aversion therapy. Anyone who watches it will shun show business, movies, pool tables, typewriters, eurotrash, garden tools, or human sexual organs for at least ten years. This movie made me ashamed to be a multi-cellular organism.

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on Basic Cable: Jaws: the Revenge

I will give this movie credit for this much: it gave me a catch phrase to use whenever someone does something impossible in a movie. In this picture, the shark attacks a plane that Michael Caine's character has crashed into the ocean. The plane goes under, and presumably Caine does to; but a moment later his cast-mates are fishing him out of the drink, intact, and wearing dry clothes. When they ask him how he evaded the shark and made it to the boat (they don't notice his dry clothing), he says "It wasn't easy!" I say that all the time when I watch wild, inexplicable action in pictures now. Thanks, Jaws 4! Basic plot of the movie? Mrs. Brodie suspects that the shark who attacked her husband in the first movie is now after her and her family. (Apparently, somewhere on the Paramount lot, the shark and Michael Myers merged into one.) So she flies to the Bahamas to be with her son and flirt stupidly with Michael Caine. Eventually, to save everyone else--because everyone else can't just pick up an move to Nebraska where the shark would have a really hard time--she decides to sacrifice herself to the shark. There she has flashbacks to moments in previous Jaws movies, and this is odd because she wasn't present for the moments she flashes back to. Eventually, the black guy dies, the shark roars, and the movie ends.

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on Video: Monster A Go-Go

This movie contains two lies in the title alone. There's no monster, and there's no a-go-go. There's a lot of black screen to make you think your television is broken. There's a lot of tedious dialog that never goes anywhere. There's a long scene where an actor leads the camera away for a long walk down a long hallway, so that it won't see the "monster" tearing up the room the actor has left. There's an actor who, before he answers the phone, makes a "Brrring-Brrring" noise. There's a full cast change in the middle of the movie.

Roger Ebert once described a movie as being no improvement over a blank screen. This movie was a blank screen, occasionally interrupted by visible tedium. Stay away.

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on An Airplane: Armageddon

Because I'm tired of bitching about this picture, I'll turn it over to the fabulous Bad Astronomy and the equally fabulous Roger Ebert. My only addition to what they'll say is what I said when I first saw this piece of shit: "I wanted to walk out of this movie, and I was on a plane!"

Most Morally Degrading Picture I've Ever Seen: tie Sidehackers, Amityville 2: The Possession, The Lonely Lady

Okay, in Amityville 2, a possessed teenaged boy barges into his sister's room one night and asks to take naked pictures of her. Eeew! Right? Y'know what's even more disgusting? She shrugs and whips her top off. The boy's possessed. I want to know what her excuse was supposed to be. Five minutes later, the two are having sex. Why is she involved in that? Is she supposed to be evil too? I thought the point of the movie was that this family was fine before they arrived in this house. It looks to me like they were pretty fucking evil to start with. I would have thought that Satan, or whatever evil hell beast held sway over the Amityville house in the movie, would have seen that and said, "Whoa! Okay! You motherfuckers are too sick even for me! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, Mr. and Mrs. Caligula! Keep the damn house, and may you rot in the filth of your incestuous fornication!" Repugnant!

(Also, there's a moment in the movie that just defies explanation. The demon has possessed the teenaged boy in the movie, yet the demon also barks instructions to the teenaged boy through his Walkman. Why would this be necessary if he's possessed the boy? Does the demon just need to think out loud a lot?)

The Sidehackers starts out as a pointless, but harmless movie about a ridiculous sport called sidehacking, in which a team involving a motorcycle rider and a guy who hangs off one side of the motorcycle, race around. Soon we meet two sidehackers. One sidehacker's girl tries to seduce another sidehacker, fails, and for revenge claims she was raped. In revenge, the aggrieved sidehacker kidnaps the other sidehacker and his girl, beats him, and rapes her to death. And then it gets grim. By the end, you wish that humanity would just curl up on the floor and die.

You know how I feel about The Lonely Lady.

Respected Film That I Dislike Intensely: Happiness

I respect many things about Todd Solondz's Happiness. Solondz gets good performances from his actors. His dialog is frequently witty and sharp. He has a good eye. But I came away from this film feeling as if it was saying to me that sexual desire inevitably makes people hypocritical, mean-spirited, neurotic, and violent. The characters felt over-determined, which might not have been a problem if they'd been over-determined in service of a picture whose theme struck me as true. Instead, his movie's view of sexuality brings to mind that over-celebrated twit Camille Paglia, whose view of sex the late Molly Ivins dissected in the following fashion:

Paglia's view of sex--that it is irrational, violent, immoral, and wounding--is so glum that one hesitates to suggest that it might be instead, well, a lot of fun, and maybe even affectionate and loving.

I don't know if the fun, affectionate, or loving aspects of sexuality had ever occurred to Solondz; or if he decided to ignore that reality because it wouldn't help him build his case against the upper-middle income suburbanites he apparently loathes. Either way, his denigration of human sexuality leaves me thinking of Happiness as a well-made picture that is also deeply wrong.

Worst Movie I've Ever Seen in a Theater:

I hate to punk out at the end like this, but because I know one of the people who was in this movie and wouldn't want to piss him, or her off, I'm going to demur on this one. (That person, if he or she has guessed which movie I'm talking about, should know that I thought that he or she was the best thing in it, for whatever that's worth.) Those who know me and promise not to tell tales out of school can email me for the offending movie's moniker.

Until next time, kiddies.

The Lighter Side of 007

Daniel Craig is brilliant in this sketch for British TV in which he is besotted with a woman who has no idea that he's the actor who plays James Bond.

Best Line: "She doesn't know what I do, but she knows who I am."

Longer Carlin Post

Because I live in Seattle, I got an extra treat the last couple of times George Carlin came to town. Seattle was either the first stop or one of the earliest stops on Carlin's last two tours, and, because he always showed up with new material, I was among those who heard it first. He'd come out to great applause, place a notebook or a stack of cards on a stool or tabletop, and tell us that, because he was still shaping and refining his material, he'd be referring to these notes throughout the show. I loved the idea that I was, in a small way, a part of his revision process, and that the work he was doing here would eventually shape his performance in an HBO special nine months or a year down the road. When I watched his last HBO special, I thought back to his performance at Seattle Center and, in between laughs, took note of the differences--what he left in, what he cut, where he changed cadence, where he added or subtracted pauses or looks. Yeah, I can forget my wallet or my keys any day, but I've a great memory for voices, and Carlin's was one of my favorites.

What amazed me most about him was his ability to stay fresh as he aged. Most comedians last, if they're lucky, five or ten years before their acts go stale and force them into talk-show hosting or some other menial occupation. But Carlin kept going. From middle-class observational comic to hippy to cantankerous old man, he both changed with the times and remained himself. It's an almost impossible feat, but he pulled it off. His material ranged over a universe of topics. Pick a subject. Carlin had something to say about it, and it was smarter and funnier than anything you'd say about it. His Tacoma show ten years ago (or so) made me laugh so hard that my ribs ached for a week, and kept me thinking long after the ache subsided.

Losing him hurts. He was something to look forward to on a planet that sorely lacks things to look forward to. I'm glad I got to see him as often as I did, but I'm a greedy person. I never got enough, and I guess I never will.

Goodbye George

Sadly, not Bush; Carlin.



Yes, George, something is fucked up. You're not here anymore. I'll miss you.

Dave Allen Talks Religion

One of my favorite comedians, Dave Allen, on growing up Irish Catholic:

Tut-Tutting As the First Refuge of A Scoundrel

Michael Gerson, Washington Post columnist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wags his finger at Al Franken for his satirical piece in Playboy:

In the razor-close and nationally important Senate race in Minnesota, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman is presented with a unique political problem. Should he raise in his ads the issue of comedian Al Franken's offensive vulgarity? Or would this risk a backlash against Coleman for coarsening the public conversation? Remember that when Ken Starr detailed Bill Clinton's most repulsive antics -- stained dresses and such -- it was Starr who was accused of sexual obsessiveness.

Franken's defenders explain that his edginess is the result of being a "satirist" -- a term he embraces. "My work, dare I say, is provocative, touching and funny," Franken has explained. "It sounds immodest, but I now have a brand name in political satire."

Satire has been called "punishment for those who deserve it." Writers from Erasmus to Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have used humor, irony and ridicule to expose the follies of the powerful, the failures of blind ideology and the comic weakness of human nature itself.

So what is Franken's "provocative, touching and funny" contribution to the genre? Consider his article in Playboy magazine titled "Porn-O-Rama!" in which he enthuses that it is an "exciting time for pornographers and for us, the consumers of pornography." The Internet, he explains, is a "terrific learning tool. For example, a couple of years ago, when he was 12, my son used the Internet for a sixth-grade report on bestiality. Joe was able to download some effective visual aids, which the other students in his class just loved." Franken goes on to relate a soft-core fantasy about women providing him with sex who were trained at the "Minnesota Institute of Titology."

Well, I've always felt that since most of us have done the "repulsive act" that results in stained dresses, or sheets, or other household fabrics (Billy Mays is ready to start shouting about a new cleaning solution, isn't he?), the vulgarity does lie with the blue-nosed twirp who insists on invading our private lives, parading the stained fabric before the public, and harping on it for months on end. But let that pass.

The clip Gerson quotes from the Franken piece doesn't strike me as the most original comic idea in the world. Still, it does offer an amusing take on the way we hype the internet as a learning tool even as we use it, mostly, to polish our tools. Does it fail to live up to the dignity we expect from members of the U.S. Senate? I dunno. Considering that Dick Cheney, current president of the senate, once invited a senior member of the senate to violate himself in a highly impractical fashion, I'd say it actually rises one or two notches above the apparently acceptable standard. At least Franken was kidding.

Is Gerson finished? Nope:

Our popular culture, of course, violates even these expansive boundaries of tastelessness with regularity. We laugh at comedies featuring the C-word and at cartoons of foul-mouthed third-graders. In the cause of relevance and realism, our common life is already decorated with excrement. Why should political discourse be any different?

For at least one reason: Because vulgarity is often the opposite of civility. This is not, of course, always true. I know a brilliant and large-hearted academic with roots in south Philly who uses the F-word with the frequency of "like" or "and." But the vulgarity of "The Jerry Springer Show" or misogynous rap music -- the cultural equivalents of Franken's political "satire" -- generally expresses contempt and cruelty. Franken is not content to disagree with Karl Rove; he calls him "human filth." He is not satisfied to criticize Ari Fleischer; Franken terms him a "chimp." The objects of Franken's humor -- including political opponents and women -- are not merely mocked but dehumanized. His trashiness is also nastiness. Rather than lampooning the emptiness and viciousness of our political discourse -- a proper role for satire -- Franken has powerfully reinforced those failures.

Hmm...I'm not sure that someone who looks down his nose at people who get a laugh out of South Park, one of the cleverest satirical shows of the last twenty years, should be in the business of determining the "proper role for satire". As for Franken's calling Rove "human filth", I think that when speaking of a man who has gleefully accused opponents of child molestation without evidence, who has used push polling to intimate that Ann Richards's staff was dominated by lesbians or that John McCain had a black child, and who has helped build the most corrupt and criminal presidential administration in history, calling that man "human filth" is actually a bit tame.

I'm suspicious of people who call for civility in public discourse because the Bush administration used those calls as a euphemism to cover their true wish: "Let's stop arguing so that I can do whatever the hell I want." Underneath all the Gersonian tut-tutting was the Dick Cheney "go fuck yourself".

If civility is your bag, the courts of renaissance princes were truly wonderful places. There was a lot of calumny and murder, of course. But the slander was always elegantly whispered, and the daggers were always polished. I prefer my politics straight and down-home. That means more open fights and naughty words, but it also means that the peaces are more genuine, and the compromises are more inclusive. When I see M.P.s in the British Parliament yelling at each other during question time, or the House of Commons slamming the door in the Queen's face every year, I say, "There's a country that's all right."