The President’s Analyst

Hi Aki,

Yesterday I watched The President’s Analyst a 1967 picture written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker, and the finest satire on postwar America I can think of.

Story has respected New York psychoanalyst Sydney Schaeffer (James Coburn) being recruited to be the President’s analyst. It seems the weight of the world (unspecified and thus presumably everything that was going on at the time, from riots to the Cold War to the Vietnam War to hippies and desegregation and Civil Rights) is just too much for any one man to bear. Sydney is checked out by the ‘CEA’ (CIA) and ‘FBR’ (FBI) and cleared, although the director of the FBR, a short humorless man, disapproves of Sydney sleeping with his girlfriend.

Sydney is whisked from New York to Washington and he and his girlfriend are set up in a handsome house in Georgetown. This house is of course thoroughly bugged and spied-upon. The President is too busy to schedule appointments, so he signals when he wants Sydney, and Sydney must go to the White House for counseling. This happens when Sydney is eating, sleeping, making love, in the toilet … soon Sydney is getting frazzled. ‘The President has me to talk to, but I can’t talk even to you,’ he complains to his girlfriend.

Sydney starts to acquire paranoid symptoms. He even begins to imagine his girlfriend is spying on him (and, of course – she is). He knows he’s going to crack, so he slips in with a tour group in the White House and talks a New Jersey family (played by William Daniels) into taking him home with them.

This leads to a sendup of the so-called ‘liberal’ family man with his obsession on the latest sound equipment, making good time on the freeways, and guns. ‘When the right-wingers disarm, we liberals will disarm!’

Word of Sydney’s escape immediately reaches all the secret services in the world. Africans, Russians, Chinese, British – everybody wants Sydney.

Sydney tries to call his own analyst in New York, but can’t get through. Meanwhile Jr. is tapping and recording Sydney’s phone conversation, and two FBR goons (all in suits, without humor, and short) come in with orders to kill Sydney on sight. But Sydney has gone with the parents to eat out in the city.

There he slips away from the couple, but the spies are after him and chase him through the streets. Sydney only makes his getaway by slipping into a minibus owned by a stoned rock band, who agree to take him with them back to Minnesota.

There Sydney, now garbed like a fashionable hippie, trips out and makes love to band groupie ‘Snow White’ in the middle of a green field while various spies kill one another competing to see who can capture him.

He is captured by a British-seeming rock band who turn out to be Canadian spies, and sail on a yacht across the Great Lakes. But the FBR goons take over the ship, murder the Canadians, and are about to kill Sydney – but they are out of bullets and must go reload. When they do, Kropotkin, the Russian spy, kills them and drugs Sydney. He intends to sail to the North Atlantic to meet a trawler.

But at last Sydney gets to use his psychoanalytical skills in self-defense. He succeeds in revealing Kropotkin’s hatred for his secret-service-commanding father. With three to seven years of treatment, Sydney promises to cure Kropotkin of his neuroses. Kropotkin says they will take Sydney back to Washington to carry on the treatment; first Sydney should phone the White House and tell the President to stop the FBR.

Sydney tries to call at a phone booth, but the operator is less than helpful. Kropotkin agrees that ‘the phone company’ is hated the world over, and goes back to town to get more change. Meanwhile Sydney finds himself locked into the phone booth beside the highway in the middle of nowhere. Along comes a large truck that scoops up the phone booth with Sydney in it, puts another in its place, and drives off. Kropotkin meets the CEA agent Dan (Godfrey Cambridge) at the site and are baffled at what could have happened to Sydney.

Sydney comes to in the bowels of an advanced underground lair suitable for a James Bond villain. There (still trapped in the phone booth) Sydney is made to watch a smiling, unctuous man’s pitch: he represents the Phone Company, and they have a breakthrough phone as small as the head of a pin. Surgically implanted in the brain, it will allow everyone to call anyone else just thinking of them; people will get the CC chips implanted before they are born, and all names will be replaced with numbers – their personal phone numbers. If Sydney will just convince the President to push through all the needed legislation…?

Sydney calls him nuts, but it doesn’t phase the Phone Company representative. Meanwhile Kropotkin and Dan break in; Kropotkin sabotages the phone lines so that service will be damaged for months, with the Phone Company getting all the blame, and Sydney, the man of peace, finds he enjoys wielding the automatic weapon and killing all the service technicians who arrive to repair the damage. And the ‘representative’ turns out to be a robot, wired to a plug in the floor.

Later on, at Christmas, Sydney is happily installed at his Georgetown home. Since his girlfriend is CEA and has just as high a security clearance as he does, he can confide in her. Kropotkin and Dan come by for a Christmas party, and on the news they see that the Phone Company, blamed for incompetence for the bad service of recent weeks, has agreed to be nicer, and lower rates.

As the four friends celebrate, the camera pulls back: they are being watched on a large monitor by a group of shadowy figures. And behind them are rows of men in suits and vapid expressions, sitting in chairs and wired to plugs in the floor…

This is a very funny movie. Shot in Panavision in bright colors, it had a big budget even though this was only Flicker’s second feature (Flicker had a long career as writer and director, almost all of it on television). The action is staged at a nice balance between seriousness and cartoonishness.

Flicker stages things very well. In one hilarious scene, when the Director of the FBR is giving the order to kill Sydney to a room full of suited, humorless agents just as short as the Director, a man walks in from the back of the room – a very tall man. He weaves his way in and out of the agents, head and shoulders above them, deposits a paper on the Director’s desk, and retreats. The contrast in heights make for a great laugh, but Flicker shoots it all in one master shot, underplaying the gag.

My big question about the movie is casting Coburn. He was undoubtedly the coolest American actor in the period, and lends a hipness to the production. He also was a big star at the time, notably as the parodical American super-spy Derek Flint in Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967), so his participation helped green light the picture. But part of the humor of Analyst lies in the prospect of a middle-aged, sober, serious Doctor coming up against the world of wacky spies, getting turned on, and ending up mowing down men. With this in mind it seems that William Daniels, Wally Cox, or Bob Newhart (or even Jonathan Winters) would have been funnier. On the other hand, audiences had shown they liked to laugh at the spy world with Coburn, and his hipness helped bring in younger viewers who wouldn’t have been so keen to go watch Wally Cox.

(21 April 2009)

(Adapting) The Osterman Weekend

Hi Aki,

This weekend we watched The Osterman Weekend a 1984 adaptation of the thriller by Robert Ludlum, directed by Sam Peckinpah in what turned out to be the last picture he made.

The story is preposterous so I’ll just give it brief: CIA agent Fassett (John Hurt) finds his wife murdered. She was killed by the KGB but what Fassett doesn’t know is that CIA head Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster) greenlit the killing in a swap with the KGB, and Danforth’s men even videotaped the woman’s murder along with the lovemaking session between her and her husband moments before she was killed.

Now Fassett has come to Danforth with a proposal: he claims that in the course of tracking his wife’s killers he has uncovered ‘The Omega Organization’ a secret KGB cell of prominent wealthy Americans, all linked by their friendship from college. Every year these three men meet with a fourth, the crusading, ultra-patriotic TV interviewer, John Tanner (Rutger Hauer). Tanner has been attacking Danforth for some time, but Danforth thinks that if Fassett can use Tanner to uncover Omega it will further Danforth’s political ambitions.

Tanner is shocked at the idea his old friends might be traitors but goes along with it and Fassett fills his house (which is set in the wild hills of Oxnard far from anyone else) with cameras and microphones so Fassett and Tanner himself can spy on the three friends during their weekend visit. Fassett plays tapes designed to make the three nervous; they don’t know anything about Fassett, and think Tanner is the one behind it.

Tensions mount and the four are soon at one another’s throats. But when two of them try to escape Fassett has them murdered. This leaves Tanner with Bernie Osterman (Craig T. Nelson) as the only two left, at which point Fassett lets Tanner know it was all a setup – the three men were only involved with a tax dodge, not the Soviets.

Fassett orders his men to attack Tanner and Osterman, but between Tanner and his wife the spies are overcome. But Fassett kidnaps Mrs Tanner and the Tanner boy. He uses this to force Tanner to expose the truth about Danforth on his TV show – because Fassett has unearthed the tape the CIA made of his wife’s murder, and he knows that Danforth had agreed to it. Fassett’s whole plan has been to maneuver Danforth and Tanner to this point, so he can show the world what Danforth really is and be avenged for his wife’s murder.

Tanner seems to go along, but with Osterman’s help he records his part of the show in advance; Danforth and Fassett are both live, but Tanner is involved with somebody (who is never made clear) to track the video feed from Fassett’s secret location so he can confront Fassett. Fassett, his revenge complete, aims his pistol at Tanner, forcing Tanner to shoot and kill him. Tanner finds his wife, son, and dog bound and helpless but unharmed. Meanwhile the final summing-up Tanner pre-recorded plays on: a statement to the television audience that they are really to blame for all this, that television has made the country passive and unconnected with the realities of life, and challenging them to turn their televisions off – expecting that we won’t be able to do so.

That’s the end of the story. I don’t know what the plot of Ludlum’s novel was, but it has been apparently much changed here. One of the Peckinpah experts on the commentary track in fact suggested the possibility that this tale might have been a more mainstream story of the weekend gone wrong, which after achieving fame Ludlum retrieved from his trunk and overlaid with the frame of the espionage thriller in order to make a quick sale. In turn the producers were eager to get the Ludlum brand name on a production, so they got the rights to this one without having the slightest respect for the material.

So what I want to look at is how do you adapt a novel you don’t like?

In this case, your strongest asset is the Ludlum brand: political espionage thrillers in which nothing is as it seems, and the American government is no different from the Soviets. And so in order to maximize box-office, the producers give us that.

But the meat of the story, and the most interesting scenes, are set in the Tanner house during the weekend, as the old friends find old antagonisms resurfacing, lose trust in one another, and finally confront one another as enemies. So this is what you’d like to see made into the entire Act 2 if you can.

The solution arrived at (this movie) was one we can lay 90% at the doorstep of the producers screenwriters and studio. Ten percent or less would then go to Peckinpah who had not made a film in a number of years, had not had a hit in much longer, had made many enemies in Hollywood and was suffering from ill health. Peckinpah is said to have regarded Osterman not as a major work but only as a move back into the business. He wanted to prove he could shoot this in budget, on schedule, deliver solid entertainment even though the story was crap and preposterous – and then work this into his next deal, which might be closer to a picture he really wanted to make. For their part, the producers got a chance to get a ‘name’ director with a flair for action and cutting at a bargain price, a chastened wild man they hoped they might control. So Peckinpah mainly shot the script, he stayed in budget, didn’t get all the coverage he otherwise would have liked, and worked with the actors to get good performances all around. And then he managed to slip in a bit of his own views and style along the way, as much as he thought he could get away with.

So our first problem is the whole setup. The plot, as ridiculous as it is, bears also the sin of complexity. This is a major flaw since it means half an hour or 40 minutes are wasted just in talky scenes trying to sell us on a situation that is patently ludicrous: that an investment banker, a plastic surgeon, and a TV writer/producer, all successful, all rich, agree to work for the KGB to overthrow the government of the United States (in some way that is never specified). Then a successful network TV newsman who knows just how to manipulate video footage to make it say anything that you want, believes in some footage that he himself calls the ‘easiest sort of thing to fake’ and believes it so much that he now throws away 20 years of friendship and agrees to hand his friends over to the authorities.

Well, you aren’t going to convince anybody of any of this. So either come up with another solution, or cut this to the bone so you win some more time to examine the process of the friends’ falling-out.

What other solution could there be? Here we find a fatal flaw: what Tanner is told is a lie. Therefore we can’t offer him any true evidence. But maybe we could say that the four friends were involved with espionage in college. For that matter, why do they have to be friends from college? They could have been in the army together, or working abroad for some mutual company. This company might have been involved with what the friends thought was industrial espionage, only it turns out (or so Fassett can claim) to have been in truth political Cold War espionage.

This kind of solution is somewhat less preposterous. It lays the foundation for an honest suspicion on Tanner’s part as well as allowing any sort of secrets buried in the friends’ past operations they might not want to see brought to light. Giving the friends a past with some sort of violence in it would also make more believable whatever violence the men resort to when they fall out on the fatal weekend.

Now let’s talk about who’s to blame. The evil is the deception and crimes the government feels compelled to engage in during the Cold War. Danforth believes so easily in the fictitious Omega conspiracy simply because he sees Reds under every bed, he want to distrust everybody he can’t directly control, and he wants to launch some sort of criminal expose to advance his political career to the next step, presumably the White House. (Peckinpah was quoted as saying he modeled Danforth on Alexander Haig ‘as exactly as I though I could get away with.’)

The evil isn’t television per se, which is only a tool or technology the spies use in their work. This makes the final lines, spoken by a man whose career has been based in TV, and who has just used the medium to expose a dangerous man and now tries to blame television for all the evil in the world, seem not only laughable but not supported by anything else in the picture. It may be true, it may be laudable, but it is tacked-on to this picture, and it’s out of place in a suspense thriller. Peckinpah is not Pakula and this movie is not The Parallax View.

The movie makes a game effort to detail and sell the conspiracy, but I think it’d be better to go the exact opposite way: since you’re never going to get us to buy this whole thing, don’t give us any exposition of it. Leave it surreal, abstract. Suggest without saying. Indulge in the sin of obscurity whenever clarity leads to preposterousness.

So here’s my suggestion: open with the death of Fassett’s wife. But show us Fassett screening it over and over in some dark room. Then the titles over the Tanners on a hunting trip (they are good bow-hunters, which figures in the resolution of the siege of the house later on). The Tanners come home to find their house taken over by Fassett and his men. He has already installed all his surveillance gear and gives a bare-bones explanation of this Omega business, then introduces Danforth via video. Danforth agrees to be on Tanner’s show providing Tanner goes along with Fassett this weekend. Tanner is still making up his mind when his friends drive up.

One of the principles in getting us in the audience past what can’t be explained, or what we’ll never believe, is to move quickly through the scenes, while distracting us with eye-candy: violence or sex or gags or stars. In the end maybe we’ll walk out of the theater shaking our heads in disbelief, but we won’t mind so long as we feel we’ve had enough enjoyable sights and stunts along the way.

Maybe the biggest sin of this movie is that with the great cast it had (Chris Sarandon and Dennis Hopper round out the four friends; their wives include Meg Foster, Cassie Yates, and Helen Shaver) it doesn’t make the most of them. The growing suspicions, doubts, distrust among the friends could have played out (in another world) like The Big Chill meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Rather than short-change the exposition, the movie instead short-changes the dramatic rupturing of the friendships. And this was done in the name of making sense out of the nonsense of the setup which turns out to be not only nonsense, but false.

(20 April 2009)

Baby Mama

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Baby Mama a comedy (semi-romantic comedy) that came out last year, starring two women stars of Saturday Night Live.

Kate (Tina Fey) is a successful vice president of a natural food grocery chain, given the biggest assignment of her career, to open up the biggest, best ‘Round Earth’ healthy food store in Philadelphia, where the chain first started. But unknown to all her colleagues, Kate has a secret longing: she has always wanted to have a child. And now at age 37 the urge has completely taken over her mind.

She tries everything. Nothing works. Her specialist tells her she has no better than a one in a million chance of getting pregnant herself. As a single woman, she will have to wait for years on lists before any institution will consider allowing her to adopt a child.

At last she signs up with a clinic which, for a $100,000 fee, will oversee impregnating a surrogate with Kate’s egg, fertilized from artificial insemination from a sperm bank.

All that is left is to find the woman who will be the surrogate, and even this is hard: the surrogates, in short supply, get to choose which infertile women whose eggs they will carry. And as a result Kate ends up teamed with Angie (Amy Poehler) who is in every way opposite to Kate (surprise surprise!) – she loves junk food, never graduated from high school, and is a total loser in life … except she gets pregnant really, really easily. In addition Angie is living with a total yahoo jerk of a boyfriend, who put her up to ‘the baby business’ in the first place.

Well, Angie gets pregnant all right, but then the trouble starts. Angie has a fight with her boyfriend and moves in with Kate. Kate is totally possessive and demanding, and wants to control everything Angie eats, what music she listens to, everything she does while pregnant. The ‘odd couple’ pairing is set up for lots of gags and laughs.

But there’s a twist or two along the way – of course! This is Hollywood! In the first place Kate meets a guy she likes (Greg Kinnear, who has made a career out of this kind of part). But the big twist is that Angie isn’t pregnant after all. She failed to get pregnant, but she and her boyfriend figured they would go on collecting checks from Kate for 9 months, then escape with the money. And the boyfriend keeps turning up, demanding that Angie come back to him or he will tell Kate that Angie is lying to her.

Over and over, Angie makes up her mind to tell Kate. But every time she tries … she can’t do it. Finally she is undergoing ultrasound, when the truth must come out, she tries really hard to tell the truth – and finds out the ultrasound checks out. She is pregnant after all. But, it’s with the boyfriend’s baby, not Kate’s.

So there is another lie, another secret that Angie hides. But in the baby shower, it all comes out when her boyfriend bursts in. Kate learns Angie has been lying; boyfriend learns that he will be a father (again, I guess, unless Angie has been having abortions … which might be true); and Kate on her part tells Angie that as part of the process, the pregnancy test might have given a false negative – the baby might still be Kate’s. Meantime Kate’s boyfriend hears about this for the first time, and Kate breaks up with him.

Months pass, and at a court hearing, Kate and Angie meet for the first time to learn the official DNA tests. It isn’t Kate’s baby. Awwwww… Kate is disappointed. But out on the street Angie goes into labor, and Kate takes her to the hospital, and attends the labor, and faints.

And in the morning Kate is told she is pregnant! Hurray!

An epilogue shows the party for Angie’s kid’s first birthday. Kate is there with her baby and boyfriend/fiancé, Angie’s boyfriend is there, still a jerk … most of the cast is there, all one big happy family while the credits roll.

I laughed at several points in the movie. There were good gags. Not a waste of time. But, to apply your test: $8 ticket worthy? $2 ticket worthy? Worthy to watch on TV for $0? Hmmm.

This movie of course is pitched at women, not me. I’m not the audience for it, except maybe for boyfriends and dates the women drag in with them. So, I would say in that regard, it is worth it. I mean, if my girlfriend or wife says, ‘We have to see this movie!’ I will go with her, and I won’t feel that I wasted my time.

The biggest annoyance here was the use of montage. Honest, there must be 10 montage sequences in this sucker. That is about 10 too many! It’s as if the writers and director (credit is given to one guy as writer and director, but I’m sure Tina Fey and Amy Poehler contributed gags, and Fey had her whole TV show writing crew on set with her every day) don’t know how to make a scene. All they know how to do is come up with gags. So the montage sequence lets them throw up a whole bunch of gags. One or two will get a chuckle, at least, then move on.

I think there should be a movie rule: No more than one montage sequence in any movie. And, zero is better than one!

Another thing that struck me is how awkward it is to film on location. They chose Philadelphia as the location and, since this is not Los Angeles or New York, they had to insert local flavor references and shots. Even though they didn’t advance the story or have anything to do with the story. So we have scenes shot out on location that aren’t conducive to good performances, good sound, and that just plain distract us in the audience from what is going on.

Finally, there is just one little other thing. This is a common complaint of Hollywood movies. Kate is a ‘successful career woman.’ Fine, but does she have to be a bloody millionairess to be called successful? I mean, as soon as she agrees she will pay $100,000 to a service just to have a baby, she puts herself outside the category of almost every other woman on Earth!

People have real problems out there. Like having a job, any job. Like getting enough food to eat. Like getting an operation or medication to stay alive. Seriously, $100,000 to buy a baby? What kind of world do these Hollywood writers and executives live in, anyway? Why the hell do they have to blow everything up to such absurd levels? And then they try to pass Kate off as just Everywoman with a fertility problem?

Okay, I know I said ‘finally’ up there, but there’s another thing. The whole ending. This movie is about surrogacy. Only it ends up not being about surrogacy at all. Angie doesn’t carry Kate’s baby, and Kate ends up getting pregnant anyway! COME ON!!! Maybe this is the most annoying part. None of the whole plot was necessary. A deus ex machina reached down out of screenwriting Heaven and gave Kate her own baby with a cute guy who is going to marry her anyway!

I know you like the stories to end with everybody getting what they deserve. But this is just too much. This is giving everybody what they want. Moral of the story: you can do everything and have everything.

You don’t have to live in reality when you’re in a Hollywood movie.

(8 April 2009)

FLOW – For Love of Water

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched a doc on the global water crisis called FLOW: For Love of Water. This was an excellent doc in the advocacy genre. It does its job by giving us some very pretty (probably stock) shots, with interviews of passionate witnesses, from many countries, with snippets of stories of the water problems we face around the world – especially the problems that arise from privatization of the world’s water supplies.

First it makes you scared. Then it makes you mad – darned mad. Then it gives you hope. And it gives you some models of people who succeeded in defying the corporations, who here are cast as the villains.

No balance is offered: this movie was made by people who are mad and interested in action, now, before it’s too late.

(written around 12 March 2009)

Fog of War

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched ‘fog of war’ a doc by Errol Morris about Robert Macnamara who was Sec. of Defense during the Vietnam war. it’s very interesting how much Morris can get to the ‘opposing argument’ when he only interviews Macnamara, and includes some archival footage. He doesn’t interview Macnamara’s critics, or other experts – just Macnamara. And yet I did get the sense of an alternative viewpoint.

Morris is famous for sitting the subject in a chair, facing the camera, asking him one question, and after the subject answers, staying quiet. The subject feels the pressure of the silence, and he assumes his answer was not satisfying, so he says something else on the topic. And some more. Morris stays quiet, and the subject begins to ramble, ramble, talking more and more, and eventually, Morris hopes, he says something crazy – something that reveals the inner heart, not the public face the subject wishes to show us.

Usually Morris had done this with a fixed camera. Morris places himself right next to the lens so when the subject looks at Morris, it seems that he is looking at us, in the audience. This time Macnamara seems still to be looking at us, but the camera shifts a little, gets closer, pushes Macnamara’s face screen left, then screen right. It’s a bit offputting, but more varied and bearable than the same composition for an hour and a half.

Macnamara was the statistician attached to the unit that fire-bombed Japan in the war. He tells something I had not realized, just how extensive and brutal the fire-bombing campaign was. The first night of it, in a raid on Tokyo, they killed 100,000 Japanese civilians. One night! Macnamara goes on to talk about percentage of cities destroyed. A lot. His final estimate is between 50 and 90 percent of over 60 Japanese cities was destroyed in those campaigns – all before the atomic bombs were dropped.

And he adds, that he and General Lemay, the man in charge of that unit, both realized that if the us had lost the war, they would both have been charged and convicted of committing war crimes.

He also asks rhetorically, ‘Why does an act become a war crime if you do it and you lose, but not a war crime if you do it and you win?’

But on Vietnam he’s less honest. All the same, it’s clear that he tells us one big lesson there: he, and the presidents, did not know what was going on in the minds of the Vietnamese; the Vietnamese didn’t know what was in the minds of the Americans. The Vietnamese were quite certain that the Americans had simply replaced the French and were trying to subjugate Vietnam as a colonial extension; the Vietnamese were fighting for independence and unification. Macnamara was quite certain the Vietnamese were wrong, were only tools of the Chinese and Russians.

But I think that all those American wars had elements of imperialism to them, even if it was not in the minds of the commanders. it’s just that ‘imperialism’ as Macnamara was thinking of it lay in terms of the British Empire, rather than selling Coca-Cola, and Firestone Tires getting rubber plantations, and the like. But Ho Chi Minh saw Coca-Cola and Firestone as arms of imperialism; he saw how American imperialism was different from the british model.

(written around 7 March 2009)

Bobby

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Bobby, Emilio Esteves’ movie about the day Robert F Kennedy was assassinated. Like Grand Hotel, the 1932 MGM movie somebody mentions in the film, this centers on the hotel as its own city, with soap opera tales of the hotel workers, a singer and her husband, campaign workers, and reporters as they get ready to host the campaign celebration. it’s primary day in California, and the feeling is if Kennedy wins in California, he will probably win the nomination, and go on to win the election.

Intercut with the soap opera tales is footage from Kennedy’s campaign in newsreel and archival footage. The idea is that Kennedy is like a huge presence looming over everyone and everything.

Then after declaring victory in California, Kennedy walks out through the kitchen, and is shot, fatally.

The Weinsteins in their Weinstein Company produced. Oddly enough, the company is only TWC in the logo.

This is another big money loser for TWC as well as MGM, the distributor. it’s kind of a rule with me: if MGM distributes a film, odds are it will be a financial failure, and probably a bad movie too. This was not a bad movie, I liked it.

Lots of stars in small supporting roles. Sharon Stone plays the hairdresser of the hotel, married to the hotel manager. I almost didn’t recognize her in her makeup. Demi Moore is the drunk singer, and emilio himself plays demi’s lapdog husband who finally has had enough abuse and leaves her. Ashton Kucher, Demi’s real-life boytoy, plays a drug dealer who gives LSD to a couple of campaign workers.

(written around 28 February 2009)

Fight Club

Hi Aki,

We saw Fight Club tonight.

The first time I saw it I didn’t like it at all and didn’t even watch all the way.

Then I saw something that gave away the ending. I watched it again and really liked it.

My dad ordered it so I saw it for the third time – second time all the way. I liked it a lot still.

But you know, it’s funny – the film is really dated now. it’s basically a rejection of a world that is now passed. Such stories and ideas can’t survive the things they reject.

But positive stories and ideas that are a celebration of some ideal can live on long after the world they sprang out of has died. Even though these ideals are formed as the opposite of the world they are born in.

Fight Club is nihilistic in that all it can manage to offer malcontents is the pleasure of destroying the world that oppresses them. It doesn’t offer them any answers or any way forward past the destruction. As such maybe it actually helps the world continue: we destroy the world through the movie, through the book, so we feel better about our oppression, and we don’t move to actually destroy the world. We just watch a movie and rent the dvd and watch it again.

Now that world is destroyed, and we all have bigger and better things to think about than childish temper tantrums.

(written around 12 February 2009)