The Latest Round of Star Wars Whining, Or: Get A Life

Groggy's always been wary of writing about Star Wars. One, I'm profoundly indifferent to the movies themselves. I rewatched Episode IV a year ago and found it middling at best. It certainly didn't inspire me to review it, let alone revisit the other five movies. Two, I fear (perhaps irrationally) a wave of its obsessive, constantly-kvetching fans descending upon my blog with complaints about childhood rape and Jar Jar Binks. That crowd I could do without.

Nonetheless, I feel compelled to offer brief comment on the latest news - namely, that George Lucas sold Lucasfilms to Disney. And now Disney is putting Episode VII on the fast track to production.

Two general observations:

1. Lucas stated that he'd make a sequel trilogy way back in the '80s. He's waffled on the issue since then but it's not a cynical cash grab any more than anything else Star Wars related.

2. George Lucas has done a remarkable amount, through CGI re-edits and vapid prequels, to ruin his own creation without Disney's help.

These would seem self-evident to me, yet look around the internet and you'll find no end of bitching about this decision. It puzzles me that the same people who have spent the past 15 years complaining about George Lucas ruining the movies are now complaining that someone else is doing them.

Perhaps they feel Star Wars should be left alone? Possibly. Yet you know this lot will be lined up ten days in advance outside the theater, will buy 100 Burger King collectors cups and 55 pairs of Ewok boxer shorts, plus the cheapo X-Box cash-in video games, plus the eighty-three ensuing special editions of the Blu-Ray with deleted scenes of Jar-Jar's tickle fight with Watto and Chewbacca dumping on Han's shoes. These people are either mountainous hypocrites or monumental in their self-hatred. Or else they just like to bitch.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Ben Shapiro is a Big Honking Doofus

Ben at work on his latest piece: "How Liberals Crushed My Nose"

One-tenth score years and nine months ago, I first encountered Ben Shapiro. He made his bones with gasbag Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, squawking about "liberal Hollywood" and showing a complete ignorance of cinema, logic and Strunk & White's Elements of Style. I made a punching bag out of this preening douche nozzle twice (here and here) before moving on to more productive blogging.

Over the weekend I encountered Mr. Shapiro on Front Page Magazine, the neocon hate rag whose raison d'être is assuring readers that a) all Muslims everywhere are out to get us, b) universities are hotbeds of Communism, c) David Horowitz regrets blowing his parents' money on pot in college. In other words, the perfect place for an aspiring crank like Ben.

(Oops, I just violated my political gag order. Offended readers need not read further.)

Ben's latest piece, The Left's Lincoln, is a model of vacuity. Ostensibly previewing Steven Spielberg's upcoming Lincoln, he displays a remarkable ignorance of history, movies and politics in an article he likely hammered out in 20 minutes. Even if you're expecting an article on liberal misuse of Lincoln iconography, you'll be disappointed.

Ben starts off expressing disgust at "radical gay leftist Tony Kushner" writing the screenplay. It's hard to know what disgusts our Michael Medved wannabe more: Kushner's politics or his sexual orientation. Nice of Ben to set the tone immediately.

For an article with that title, you might expect a historical analysis of Lincoln as conservative. Right wingers love to crow about the GOP's laudable early history as an abolitionist "free soil" party and protector of freedmen. (Or most do: a certain strand of libertarian/paleoconservative thought views Lincoln as a repressive tyrant.) Easy subject for an article, right?

Ben does write politics in his spare time, so he's (theoretically) qualified to opine. What does his political/historical analysis amount to? Responding to a Spielberg quote about the GOP and Democrats changing sides on racial issues, Mr. Shapiro writes:

"Well, actually, it’s not a whole other story. Because it’s not even close to a true story. The Republican and Democratic Parties never “traded political places.” Racism is still the preserve of the Democratic Party, which utilizes skin color as a political tool; color-blindness is still the preserve of the Republican Party. There is a reason that Senator Robert Byrd (WV), a one-time member of the KKK was considered the Democratic conscience of the Senate until his death in 2010. There’s a reason segregationists like George Wallace were Democrats. The Democratic Party never flip-flopped with the Republican Party. It just hid its racism beneath a veneer of reverse racism."

There's so much gaping illogic here I don't know where to start. The Democratic Party had a long and shameful history of endorsing slavery and segregation. This however was put paid by Democratic Presidents ushering through the Civil Rights Act and related legislation in the '60s. When millions of conservative Democrats fled the party, Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon eagerly snatched them up by campaigning on identical "States Rights" arguments. It shouldn't need said which party currently invokes states rights in arguments over gay marriage, abortion and government bailouts. The idea that the GOP and Democratic Party hold identical positions to what they did 50 years ago, let alone 150, is simply ludicrous.

Further, Byrd and Wallace both repudiated racism late in life. This stands in contrast to, say, Strom Thurmond, who switched parties over Civil Rights and never offered more than a token recantation. The comment about "racism beneath a veneer of reverse racism" is a masterpiece of doubletalk. And a member of a party who's spent the last four years caricaturing the President as a Kenyan Muslim Communist cannot claim "color-blindness" without seeming idiotic.

The rest of the article drops even this modest line of historical inquiry. Ben doesn't argue whether Lincoln was a liberal or conservative. Instead, he bashes Spielberg's filmography, saying for instance:

"A film like Saving Private Ryan puts an antiwar gloss on the most pro-human rights war in the history of humanity. When the character Sgt. Horvath explains, “Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess,” that’s a pathetic statement given that this conflict was about defeating the worst threat to humanity and humane values ever unleashed."

Shapiro, have you even seen the movie? Saving Private Ryan is possibly the purest embodiment of Greatest Generation cultural iconography. One line taken out of context, arguing that war is a nasty experience, is used to argue a movie is "anti-war." Go play with your plastic army men, Ben.

"A films [sic] like Amistad, which revolves around a slave revolt aboard a Spanish ship and the subsequent trial in the United States — portray white abolitionists as selfish folks out for themselves."

Or it's recognition that not everything is (geddit?) black and white. After all, wouldn't you expect evil progressive Spielberg to show abolitionists as faultless heroes?

Jeez, look at that. I don't even like Amistad and Ben's got me defending it. Nice job.

 "In The Color Purple, Spielberg portrays Africa as a grand sort of multicultural place, while the United States is steeped in darkness."

I'll admit I haven't seen The Color Purple. I do remember Amistad showing Cinque and his tribe kidnapped by black slave traders.

"In Munich, the real bad guys are terrorist hunters rather than terrorists – and Israel is so scarred by terrorist hunting that Israelis must move to the United States and abandon their country for absolution."

It does no such thing. Munich shows its heroes dehumanized by a multi-year campaign of assassinating Palestinian terrorists. That is not portraying them as "the real bad guys" unless you inhabit the Manichean mind of a FPM scribbler.

In the Spielberg world, America is the target; only “progressive” forces, reflecting the pacifist, multicultural tendencies of the filmmaker, can cure America of its ills.

What exactly is this Ben? Movies should portray slavery and Jim Crow in a positive light? All war movies should reflect Gunga Din's childhood game mentality? Did you miss the literal flag waving at the open and close of Saving Private Ryan? And didn't you just note that Amistad portrays its "progressive forces" in a dubious light?

To repeat: Ben wouldn't know consistency if it crawled up his rectum and died.

Spielberg, ironically enough, ignores the gory, ugly, beautiful tapestry of the history of the United States page by page – a true story that would bring to light unique and fascinating elements of human nature.

QED. Above, Ben apparently doesn't think negative aspects of American history should be portrayed on film. So what "ugly" and "gory" aspects does he now want included?

We'll never know. Rather than elaborate on the above paragraph, Ben segues into...

"Spielberg's history... is the story of “progress” toward today’s Democratic Party. John Quincy Adams from Amistad would be a Clinton voter; Lincoln would be a fan of Obama;"

I agree that it's morally dicey, at best, to use historical figures as avatars for contemporary causes. On the other hand, Lincoln and Amistad are works of fiction. I doubt Ben has a problem with Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly using dead presidents in ostensibly non-fiction books to parrot modern conservatism.

"by the end of Munich the protagonist would want to sign up for a tour with the Gaza Flotilla."

It wouldn't be a FPM article without insulting Muslims.

To recap: Badly written? Check. Politically and historically ignorant? Check. Vague and unsubstantiated analysis? Check. Comments on movies that give no indication he actually saw them? Definitely. Wildly inconsistent? That's a bingo! It must be a Ben Shapiro.

Groggy tries not to be overtly political save for extreme circumstances. But this articles intertwines three issues I feel passionate about: movies, history and decent writing. So I feel justified in spouting off, just a little. Ben, please join Armond White in the piranha pool.

"Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, Kurosawa buff or Chris Nolan fan, the one thing we can all agree on: Ben Shapiro is a BIG HONKING DOOFUS!" - Dan Rydell

New movie review tomorrow.

The Ultimate in Fanboy Idiocy, Redux

Today is the release of the newest (and hopefully) last Bat-astrophe from Christopher Nolan. I'll probably see it eventually, because a) a good chunk of it was shot in Pittsburgh, b) a few of my friends are extras in it. My actual excitement level is slim-to-none. The fact that I've never written more about The Dark Knight than the desultory few paragraphs in the blog's early days should indicate my level of interest.

I would have let this momentous date slide without comment, except now the Nolan fanboys are crawling over each other to be the dumbest, lamest, nerdiest loser alive.

The IMDB boards are a reliable source for idiocy. Just browse through some of the thread titles here to get an idea. Of course they'll be completely different ones 15 minutes from now.

Then there's Rotten Tomatoes, where a critic who dared dislike this movie got rather vicious death threats.

Of course, a real-life tragedy has dwarfed the web chatting. At one midnight screening in Colorado, a psycho showed up and killed 14 people. My condolences to those killed in this horrible tragedy.

Of course, some IMDBers, being cretinous slugs, have decided to blame Avengers fans for this shooting.

So yeah, wake me when they bring back this guy:

I'm planning to go out this weekend with friends so probably not a lot of movie-watching in the near-future. I'll try and find something to keep you all entertained. See you in the history books, people.

Armond White: His Life in the Dark

The Caucasian Armond White

A long time ago I blogged about the wonders of Armond White, everybody's favorite imbecile contrarian critic. Recently he published a piece about The Sandler Memo, where he accused everyone who dislikes Adam Sandler of engaging in a massive conspiracy against him. Why?

Hating Sandler gives people the delusion of sophistication; thinking they actually have standards, they pretend to disdain vulgarity. This pretense hides from cultural truths like teacher-student impropriety, fan boy mania and wilder incongruities. Donny and Todd’s estrangement gets to the deeper issue of self esteem. (How it might be conveyed through parenting as much as heritage–also the theme of the Wayans Brothers’ underappreciated Little Man.) ... If That’s My Boy fulfilled its potential it would resemble a vintage class-based melodrama like Stella Dallas.

Read that again. That's My Boy = Stella Dallas. It's a whole new paradigm... of idiocy brilliance.

In related news, check out this piece about Robert De Niro's worst movies. Clearly they missed Rocky and Bullwinkle's remarkably prescient satire of 21st Century media and the blurred line between reality and fiction. By which I mean Armond needs to go swimming with piranhas.

Stupid Oscars

Usually the Internet Movie Database forums are an intellectual cess pool of trolls, fanboys and gossip, but occasionally a nugget of wisdom emerges. A user named Fuzzynavel1 compiled an interesting series of posts regarding 40 years of Oscar Controversy and Stupidity. If he/she posts it anywhere permanent I'll revise the link.

A few choice excerpts for your amusement:

1972 – Charlton Heston was scheduled as the host, but when he got stuck in traffic, Clint Eastwood substituted. Eastwood was not prepared, it wasn’t his fault, and he was stuck with Heston’s material, which made no sense at all coming from him. Eastwood was so embarrassed that he decided never to return unless nominated. Thankfully, most people have forgotten about this atrocious mishap. This was also the year Sacheen Littlefeather accepted for Marlon Brando. His excuse for refusing the award was Hollywood and American society’s treatment of Native Americans. Whether he was sincere or simply staging an elaborate joke is still debated. Littlefeather was not much of a Native activist but an aspiring B-movie actress who later appeared in Playboy.

1977 - The Jewish Defence League showed up before the show to protest the nomination of Vanessa Redgrave for Best Supporting Actress because of her support for a Palestinian homeland. Several of them burned the actress in effigy. She had to be snuck in the back of an ambulance through a secret entrance to get her safely into the theater. In her acceptance speech, she dedicated the award to Hollywood’s courage in resisting “Zionist hoodlums”. Of course, the producers exploded, and it fell to Paddy Chayefsky to go onstage and denounce Redgrave for subverting the Oscars with her politics. She did have her defenders, including Foreign Film-winning Israeli director Moshe Mizrahi. After the ceremony, Redgrave went to dinner accompanied by her bodyguards and no one spoke to her. When Debby Boone performed Best Original Song nominee "You Light Up My Life", she was accompanied by a chorus of little girls who were announced to have come from The John Tracy Clinic for the Deaf and they interpreted the lyrics in sign language. It was later reported that the girls were really students rounded up at a nearby elementary school, and that they were actually signing gibberish. None of them were deaf.

1978 - The biggest controversy was started by Jane Fonda, who led a campaign to prevent The Deer Hunter from winning the top prize, suggesting that her own film Coming Home told the real story about Vietnam. She hadn’t actually seen The Deer Hunter, but her friends told her it was racist. During the post-awards press scrum, when asked about The Deer Hunter, she said “I still haven’t seen it, but it doesn’t matter because our film is the best one”.

1989 – Mel Gibson had recently presented an award via live hookup from Australia, and the feed accidentally opened up again during the performance. Gibson proceeded to munch on a sandwich throughout the entire song.

1991 – Originally, the producers of the show wanted Mother Teresa to present an honorary award to Satyajit Ray, but the idea was shelved when they thought it would be inappropriate to have her mingling among celebrities like Jack Nicholson and Madonna.

1999 - Eighteen days before the awards ceremony, 55 Oscar statuettes en route from Chicago to the Academy were stolen from a Roadway Express shipping dock in Bell, California. A week and a half later, a scrap metal dealer, Willie Fulgear, found 52 of the statuettes in a Dumpster behind a grocery store. For finding the awards, Mr. Fulgear received two tickets to the Academy Awards show where he was given a $50,000 check from the shipping company. A few months later, $40,000 of his reward was stolen from a safe in his apartment. In June 2003, FBI agents in South Florida performing a drug bust found one of the three missing Oscar statuettes.

I knew there was a reason I hated the Oscars.

Dumbass Rides Again

Perhaps you didn't realize it from my recent "column", but Ben Shapiro is an idiot. A week after infecting our brains with his list of Top 10 Overrated Directors, which reads the like the drivelings of a mentally-challenged IMDBer, Shapiro gives us a new piece, listing the Ten Greatest Directors. I'm not going to take too much issue with his list, although it's a pretty basic group of directors, but it's worth noting for his combination of apologia and defensiveness over his last column.

Last week, I stirred some folks up with my Top Ten Most Overrated Directors of All Time... And by “stirred some folks up,” I mean faced down a virtual lynch mob.

Poor you! You get paid for stirring folks up with asinine film lists, and then mean Internet peoples call you names! You have the hardest job in the world, I tell you what.

Okay, some of these comments are pretty mean, but still, if you don't want mean Internet people to flog you, you'd better show more taste and talent than the average denizen of IMDB. Or else forfeit your salary to charity or something.

Who knew that Aronofsky supporters were fans of the film Fury?

Gratuitous esoteric cultural reference? Check.

If you think about it, though, this doesn't even make sense, given that Fury is very much an anti-lynching movie. But as we've seen before, the degree to which Mr. Shapiro's brain repells logic is truly astounding.

A few quick items in response to that piece. First, it was not about “bad directors”...but about overrated directors.

Yeah, we get the distinction, although if you're going to do nothing but bad-mouth them, I'd say that's as good as calling them bad.

Alfred Hitchcock is nowhere near the worst director ever (I was probably too harsh to label him “slightly better than mediocre”), but it is a travesty to label him the greatest director of all time, as so many have.

Yes, an opinion contrary to yours, O Learned One, is clearly a "travesty".

Before you accuse me of hypocrisy, let me be clear that I'm mocking this guy not for his opinions, but his utter inability to argue a point, grasp logic, or write. When your criticism of Raging Bull amounts to "it's gross", you've forfeited my respect.

The same holds true for David Lean (I appreciate Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, and swaths of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I just think he doesn’t deserve to make the top 20 list)

Do you still think Brief Encounter is "half-an-hour too long"? Granted, I wouldn't mind overmuch if you cut out the stuff with Stanley Holloway and Joyce Carrey.

Second, I neglected three directors who clearly should have made the list: Roman Polanski (somebody stop the Chinatown cult!), Spike Lee (how can he make race relations this dull?), and Tim Burton (damn you for ruining Sweeney Todd).

So your apologia amounts to trying to piss off more people.

I'm glad you didn't bring up Polanski though, because you'd probably make some self-satisfied rant about his pedophilia.

Rebecca and Suspicion are the same film, not Notorious and Rebecca;

Well, that's less of a reach than what you were previously claiming, but that's still no more than case than Notorious and Topaz being the same film.

the Orlando Bloom reference was to Black Hawk Down, not G.I. Jane

You mean Orlando Bloom isn't a woman? Could have fooled me.

Now, to the real question:

"How do I have a job?"

the top-ten greatest directors of all time

Oh.

Wait a minute, isn't this the guy who said in his last article that the auteur theory was "idiotic"? What is this article if not a celebration of auteurism?

Ben, maybe you want to familiarize yourself with the concepts of "logic" and "consistency". If you have a moment.

This is truly a rough decision – there are at least two score great directors who could make this list.

If you want to be really technical there are probably hundreds of directors worthy of consideration for such a list. But okay.

Here is my one basic criteria: directors who provide me the most viewing pleasure over the course of their career.

Damn, and my list of favorite directors was based on the "one basic criteria" of whom caused me the most pain!

That means telling a great story in the best possible way

So nothing about cinematography, camera work, acting, art direction, any of that? Gotcha.

Subjective? Sure. Deal with it.

This from the guy who says that it's a "travesty" that someone could think Alfred Hitchcock is a great director. What were saying about logic and consistency?

It's all subjective, though, and I'm sure there's someone in the Universe besides your daddy who thinks you're a good writer.

I’ll admit that this list skews toward older directors, not because older movies are generally better than newer movies (though I think they are), but because directors in the period 1920-1960 generally made more movies, which means more opportunities for directors to shine.

I would strongly disagree with the concept that quantity equals quality, but okay.

I’ll start by explaining why certain directors are not in the top ten.

So a pre-emptive apologia this time around. Nice. This must mean your list is really bad.

Francis Ford Coppola: He had a period of unbelievable creative magic. Within a ten year period, he made Finian’s Rainbow (1968), a charming musical; The Godfather (1972), which requires no commentary; The Conversation (1974), perhaps the creepiest movie ever made; The Godfather: Part II (1974), which matches its predecessor in quality; and Apocalypse Now (1979), a mad journey into the heart of darkness. Then he was done. How this talented filmmaker went from The Godfather to the atrocity that was Jack (1996) is utterly bewildering. It was tough to keep him off the top ten list. It was even harder to boot someone from that list to make room for him.

I only take issue with this because that the Godfather films alone are so friggin' awesome as to qualify Coppola for the list. Coppola has a much smaller number of films than, say, Hitchcock, and I'd say his batting percentage is about the same.

Peter Jackson: I believe Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy to be the finest directorial effort of all time, surpassing even Citizen Kane.

I'll let this speak for itself. Still, I might argue that "the finest directorial effort of all time" would earn one a place on the list of greatest directors.

King Kong was overlong and CGI-obsessed

Compared to what, the modest, tightly-paced character drama that was Return of the King?

Orson Welles: Citizen Kane requires no explication – it is justifiably seen by many as the greatest directorial job ever. His Othello is similarly creative and inspired. The Magnificent Ambersons follows the pattern. But Welles destroyed himself and his career, and the fates should never forgive him for wasting his unparalleled talent.

Nothing on Touch of Evil or Chimes at Midnight or The Trial or F for Fake? Welles' life after Kane was extremely rough, but that doesn't in any way diminish the work he did put out.

Stanley Kubrick: Overrated

That was your last list, numbnuts. Keep focused on the topic at hand.

Fritz Lang: M is the best foreign language film ever made. Period.

No.

Perhaps if I’d seen more Lang, I’d put him up in the top ten (the only other films I’ve seen of his are Fury and The Big Heat), so I’ll claim ignorance here.

Just here? Don't be modest!

Fred Zinneman: Perhaps the best conventional director of all time – a man who simply puts on camera what needs to be there. He’s not the artist that any of the top ten are, but he did create The Day of the Jackal, A Man for All Seasons, Oklahoma!, From Here to Eternity, and High Noon, a list to be reckoned with.

Good on ya, mate, you got one right!

Victor Fleming: How hard was it to come up with this list?

It completely destroyed your faculties of reason and coherence, apparently.

John Huston: The best adventure director of all time, responsible for The Man Who Would Be King, Moby Dick, The African Queen, and The Maltese Falcon. Again, not enough versatility to put him over the top.

What. What? WHAT!?!

Okay, let's take a look at what he just said.

The first three films would qualify under the general rubric of "adventure" films, despite the difference in time and setting. But The Maltese Falcon is a friggin' film noir! What "adventure" does anyone go on there?

This isn't even to mention Huston's Westerns (Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Treasure of the Sierra Madre), social dramas (The Asphalt Jungle), musicals (Moulin Rouge, Annie), romantic character dramas (The Dead), etc. Not all of them are all-time masterpieces, but surely you'd agree that Huston's resume spans a large number of genres.

No versatility. You need a dictionary, boy.

I'm thinking of starting a petition to get this guy fired and out on the street. In these hard economic times, lots of people need work, and when there are people starving, Ben Shapiro should not have a job writing for Big Hollywood.

That is all.

This Post is Overrated

This piece by Ben Shapiro of Big Hollywood (apparently a far-right Michael Savage-loving bag of douche among his other faults) is one of the dumbest film articles I've ever read, steeped in poor writing, bad argumentation, pointless name-dropping and a distinct lack of facts - not to mention an apparently deliberate attempt to piss off as many film buffs as possible.

Besides the whole pointlessness and subjectivity of the overrated debate, Mr. Shapiro - who must be someone's son or distant in-bred cousin - writes a pathetic little screed that wouldn't be worthy of being posted on Film General. And yet he seems to have an audience of thouands in a popular online publication.

Let us see what Big Hollywood is getting for their money. I'll abstain from commenting on David Lynch, Darren Arnofsky or Woody Allen since, I'm ashamed to admit, I've seen none of their films. Well, except for select comments that I can pluck out of context.

Top 10 Most Overrated Directors of All Time

A redundant headline that can perhaps be blamed on the editor. We'll let this pass.

Ever since the advent of the modern motion picture industry, critics have praised directors as the key to great film.

Um... no. For most of early Hollywood, stars and producers were regarded as the primary movers-and-shakers behind a film. The auteur theory as such only came about in the '50s with the advent of Cahiers du Cinema and their looks at John Ford and Howard Hawks.

So you're one sentence into your article and have already made an idiotic comment. This bodes well.

The auteur theory of cinema is idiotic

I wouldn't say it's "idiotic", but I might agree it's overly reductive and overused by certain critics. The most important name on a film is variable, and quite often it's not the director. Fair enough.

since writing is truly the key

So replace one idiotic, overly simplistic critical dogma with another? Okay.

It is one of the great travesties of artistic justice that no one remembers the writers of great movies – nobody knows Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, for example, but everyone remembers Frank Capra.

It's one of the great travesties of universal justice that more people know who you are than any of the people you just name-dropped.

Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong. There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong. Here, then, are my top ten overrated directors of all time…

Wait, wait, wait - I'm sorry, what the fuck is this? You just forced us to sit through a little self-satisfied rant about the idiocy of the auteur theory, and then you create a lengthy list-based article based around the concept of the auteur?

Well, I guess consistency isn't going to be a hallmark of Mr. Shapiro's article.

Ridley Scott: Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments.

I almost agree with this, as I'm no big fan of Ridley Scott's. So not a bad start.

Michael Mann: All style, no substance.

That's really all he has to say. That's not an abridged quote. Look it up yourself.

I think you can see what kind of analytical mind we're dealing with here. This might pass muster as a random message board post but as part of a lengthy published article, it's beyond worthless. Especially when he has space for extended rants and idiocy regarding other directors.

David Lean:

You just fucked with the wrong blogger, pal. Now the gloves are coming off.

Everything Lean made is too long by at least half an hour.

Which thirty of the eighty-six minutes of Brief Encounter would you cut out, oh great one?

I know it’s mortal sin to suggest that Laurence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Ryan’s Daughter are anything less than masterpieces, but … they’re all less than masterpieces.

Thanks for the insight. Your criticism of Lean amounts to "his films are long", which immediately labels you as a pillock. And who in hell thinks Ryan's Daughter is a masterpiece anyway (besides me of course)?

Mike Nichols: No. Just no. The Graduate is contemptible and snort-worthy spoiled 1960s-child angst. The ending of that movie alone makes it unworthy of human viewing.

I have sympathy for this particular opinion, inasmuch as I hated The Graduate, but this is the only film Mr. Shapiro seems apt to comment on in Nichols' lengthy career. Nothing on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Catch-22 or Primary Colors or Angels in America or Charlie Wilson's War, all good-to-great films.

In fact, who in hell thinks Nichols as an all-time great director anyway? He seems to be one of those craftsmen like Michael Curtiz, Robert Wise and Fred Zinnemann whose films are better-known than their director.

Quentin Tarantino: I recently watched Inglourious Basterds and marveled at Tarantino’s skill. But he is a gifted high school child given a camera for his birthday, and entranced with his knowledge of cinema.

Meh, I like Tarantino's early work but I agree with this up to a point, at least in regards to his last few films.

Which means, in simple terms, he doesn’t know how to tell a story

Wait. What? What?

What!?!

Are you seriously arguing that Tarantino is a bad storyteller? That's his greatest fucking asset as a filmmaker, you imbecile. Argue that he's self-indulgent and self-important, that he's completely unoriginal and rips off older movies, that he's overly fascinated with gorey violence, that he cares more about wowing the Cannes crowd than making a good film. But don't sit there and tell me Tarantino cannot tell a story.

To paraphrase William McAdoo on Warren G. Harding,

No one in the history of Planet Earth ever cared what William McAdoo said about Warren G. Harding. Ever. This is name-dropping at it's most puerile and obnoxious, and funnily enough it comes in the midst of mocking Tarantino for same.

This would be the historical equivalent of Tarantino using a Death Rides a Horse track in Kill Bill: it might sound cool, but no one cares.

Sometimes Tarantino’s films actually capture a struggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner … until the idea dies of servitude and overwork.

Do you even understand what you just wrote, you pretentious douchebag?

From his otherwise skipped-over Woody Allen commentary:

As a side note, he made Diane Keaton into a “legitimate actress,”

Apparently The Godfather films didn't do that?

Christ, what a dunderhead...

Martin Scorsese('s)... films are entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters.

Yeah, I might agree with this, but that doesn't make it bad. I don't think Scorsese wants us to like Tommy DeVito or Travis Bickle or Ginger Rothstein.

With the article wheezing to a climax, here comes the heavy title-dropping! Fasten your seatbelts.

Nobody cares what happens to Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed (in fact, in one screening I saw, people cheered when he got it in the head).

Arguing a generalization by anecdote. Nice.

The Aviator takes as long to tell as Howard Hughes did to live.

Modestly clever I guess.

on a side note, there is no excuse for killing Liam Neeson in the first ten minutes of a film

Yeah, because his leaden and wooden presence is rarely necessary for a film to be entertaining. In any case, Scorsese is hardly the only one guilty of this - Neeson has made a career out of playing doomed mentors.

Casino is nasty, brutish, and long.

Yes, it is, but it's also Scorsese's most complex and underrated film. And your quoting Hobbes, while slightly less pathetic than your McAdoo namedropping, fails to impress anyone.

Goodfellas is similarly disgusting – you feel the need to take a shower after watching.

Disgusting? Well, it's not exactly a paragon of moral virtue, but I'd save that classification for something like a gore-soaked slasher flick.

The Last Temptation of Christ is baffling.

That's it. It's baffling. Genius.

Raging Bull is gross

What are you, six? Gross is when your classmate picks his nose and rubs the booger on your jacket. A boxer's life degenerating into depravity is many things, but "gross" is far from the word I'd use.

Mean Streets is gross and soporific

It's my love for the bizarrely dichotomous perhaps, but I love the mixture of an incredibly immature comment with a "big word" in the same sentence. Indubitibly, dude.

Taxi Driver is perhaps the most overrated film in Hollywood history — dreary, grungy, and subzero.

Dreary, yes. Grungy? Explain that one. Subzero? Now you're making shit up.

1. Alfred Hitchcock:

The sad thing is I'm not at all surprised.

He never made a great film.

To make such a broad claim about a director who made sixty-seven feature length films, and at least a dozen acknowledged classics, you'd better have some real ammunition to bring to the table. Sadly, I'm expecting Ben to be feeding .22 bullets into his .50 machine gun.

The psychoanalysis at the end of Psycho is laughable.

I think most everyone will agree that the Simon Oakland exposition scene at the end is overlong and completely unnecessary. But that's about three minutes of a two-hour film.

North by Northwest relies on the tried-and-true random helpful coincidence to save our hero, time and again.

Would you make this criticism of Dickens or Shakespeare or any other novelist who uses coincidences? I'd actually say North by Northwest has really clever plotting, and they get him into trouble as much as they get him out of it. Not realistic, perhaps, but certainly excellent for that type of film.

It brings to mind one of Twain’s rules of writing,

How many times do I have to tell you? No one cares.

Spellbound once again relies on amateur psychoanalysis.

Okay, I'll give him this one, since there's not much more to it.

Notorious is the same movie as Rebecca.

Excuse me, what the hell?

Notorious: a CIA Agent recruits the daughter of an executed Nazi spy to help break up a ring of neo-Nazis, marrying one of them. She falls in love with the agent, but gets poisoned by her husband and his mother.

Rebecca: a middle-class woman marries a handsome, rich widower who worships his ex-wife. As she struggles to adjust to her new life, her husband's chief servant tries to drive her insane. Meanwhile there's a murder investigation into Mrs. DeWinter's death.

Yeah, no difference at all between those two.

Rear Window makes one reach for the fast-forward button.

If you have the attention span of a caffeinated chimp.

Vertigo makes one reach for the cyanide.

Why? Care to back up this argument with a modicum of analysis or actual criticism? Or are you just a prick little kid who can only laugh, point and name-call at things he doesn't like?

Wait, I know this one!

In some ways, this little rant of mine is the pot calling the kettle black. But I have an excuse: I'm a blogger whose stuff is read by maybe a dozen people. Mr. Shapiro doesn't have that excuse. Plus he wrote a really stupid piece of shit article and I'm just making fun of him.

The Ultimate in Fanboy Idiocy

Just when you think people couldn't get any stupider, you come across an article like this, that makes you realize how great it is to be a cynic.

James Cameron's completely immersive spectacle "Avatar" may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora

Okay, let's please read this again, shall we?

Some people saw a movie, and not only did they like it, they liked so much that they're going to kill themselves because it's not real.

And somebody wrote a 1140 word article about it.

...

You can't really get any dumber than that. Except that I'm not only reading this article, but writing a lengthy "Fisking" of it. But let's move on.

On the fan forum site "Avatar Forums," a topic thread entitled "Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible," has received more than 1,000 posts from people experiencing depression and fans trying to help them cope.

Why does it not surprise that hopeless fanboys would hang out at a message board?

The topic became so popular last month that forum administrator Philippe Baghdassarian had to create a second thread so people could continue to post their
confused feelings about the movie.

This is news? Overspill from other threads leading to the creation is quite common. This is only news to a moron who's never been on a message board.

Shit, why am I reading this again?

"I wasn't depressed myself. In fact the movie made me happy ," Baghdassarian said. "But I can understand why it made people depressed. The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don't have here on Earth.

Maybe its because Earth actually exists and isn't a made-up movie fairyland.

Anyway, I can't be too upset that we don't live on a Dinosaur Planet with 7 foot tall Blue Kitties. But that's just me.

I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed."

People who spend every waking hour on the Internet are living in "a completely different world." It's called Mom's Basement.

A post by a user called Elequin expresses an almost obsessive relationship with the film.

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie," Elequin posted.

So you could go from one obsession to another! Thanks for revealing how big a fucking loser you are.

A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site "Naviblue" that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie.

The unasked question here is whether or not he contemplated suicide before seeing the movie.

"Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them.

Watching Lawrence of Arabia made me want to be a millionaire Oscar-winning film director who shags anything in a skirt. The difference is, one of our dreams is (theoretically) possible.

I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it," Mike posted.

This sounds pretty close to what I experience when I see a really great movie. Who doesn't break down crying watching the epic panning shot in Lawrence of Arabia, or watching the flashback in Once Upon a Time in the West, or watching Deborah leave Noodles on the train platform in Once Upon a Time in America, or listening to Lara's Theme? Well, who doesn't that's not named Groggy Dundee, anyway?

So, nothing at all wrong with that, but then...

"I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in 'Avatar.'"

Well, it ain't gonna happen. You'll be a loser in any life.

Other fans have expressed feelings of disgust with the human race and disengagement with reality.

Well, I suppose that is what comes from being picked on in school your whole life.

The world of Pandora is reminiscent of a prehistoric fantasyland, filled with dinosaur-like creatures

Because human interactions with dinosaurs always go well:

mixed with the kinds of fauna you may find in the deep reaches of the ocean

You mean like these guys?



Yeah, how magical.

Compared with life on Earth, Pandora is a beautiful, glowing utopia.

That is a matter of opinion.

Ivar Hill posts to the "Avatar" forum page under the name Eltu. He wrote about his post-"Avatar" depression after he first saw the film earlier this month.

"When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed ... gray.

So you woke up color-blind?

It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning," Hill wrote on the forum. "It just seems so ... meaningless. I still don't really see any reason to keep ... doing things at all. I live in a dying world."

You're only saying that because your toaster oven is on the fritz, HughesNet is cutting back on your broadband connection, and your dad scrambled the Playboy Channel. And worst of all, Mom is making you get a job.

Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design

Wait, you called a random guy all the way in Sweden to ask him his thoughts on Avatar!?!

Jesus H. Christ.

Hill, 17

Well, he has an excuse. But the moron who wrote this article doesn't.

"Virtual life is not real life and it never will be, but this is the pinnacle of what we can build in a virtual presentation so far," said Dr. Stephan Quentzel, psychiatrist and Medical Director for the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. "It has taken the best of our technology to create this virtual world and real life will never be as utopian as it seems onscreen. It makes real life seem more imperfect."

I'd say duh, but this is the one sane person in the article (except possibly Stephen Lang) so I'll let it pass.

Fans of the movie may find actor Stephen Lang, who plays the villainous Col. Miles Quaritch in the film, an enemy of the Na'vi people and their sacred ground, an unlikely sympathizer.

I hope that even the fans find his character the enemy and not the actor. I guess this was an attempt at cleverness by the guy writing this.

But Lang says he can understand the connection people are feeling with the movie.

So Ike Clanton, Stonewall Jackson and Charles Winstead is a fanboy!?! Say it ain't so!

The bright side is that for Hill and others like him -- who became dissatisfied with their own lives and with our imperfect world after enjoying the fictional creation of James Cameron -- becoming a part of a community of like-minded people on an online forum has helped them emerge from the darkness.

They find a community of people who are even bigger losers than they are! That will cheer them up because they didn't think that was even possible until now.

Quentzel said creating relationships with others is one of the keys to human happiness, and that even if those connections are occurring online they are better than nothing.

I guess that's true.

"Obviously there is community building in these forums," Quentzel said. "It may be technologically different from other community building, but it serves the same purpose."

If the purpose is to make people completely unable to function in real life, then mission accomplished.

I know all too well the ravages of Internet addiction, but the worst I can be accused of is posting too much on IMDB or being a David Lean fanboy:



Which doesn't quite qualify me as a nutcase. (Other things do.)

Some people are just beyond help. It's one thing to be socially awkward and to try to escape into books (remember those?), movies and even the Internet - that's something I can certainly relate to. It's quite another to devote yourself utterly the world of the movies, living your life through its characters. I may find T.E. Lawrence a relatable character in many ways, but I don't wish I was him, or that I lived in the Hijaz killing Turks for a living. And it's pathetic because these people will never be able to function in real life.

If you're going to kill yourself because your movie world doesn't exist, you are beyond pathetic.

This reminds me so much of that Simpsons episode with Emily Blunt as the crazy girl who creates Equalia with Lisa because her life is so boring. Lisa was able to realize just what a nutcase her friendly really was, though it took being locked in lobster cages by Jimbo and his bully buddies to snap her out of it. I doubt most of these people will, even when they turn sixty and are still living in their (now-deceased) mother's basement like a techno-Norman Bates.

Within the fan community, suggestions for battling feelings of depression after seeing the movie include things like playing "Avatar" video games or downloading the movie soundtrack,

So cope with depression by doing things that remind you of what depresses you. I gotcha.

in addition to encouraging members to relate to other people outside the virtual realm and to seek out positive and constructive activities.

This seems like telling a serial killer to stop killing people and go make popsicle stick houses. It ain't gonna happen.

I don't think there's really a story here, just pathetic fanboy losers being interviewed by lazy reporters cashing in on Avatar's immense popularity. Thanks for alerting us to their existence, Jo Piazza. Even your name sounds like a fraud.

Maybe I'll actually see this damned movie this weekend. Hopefully I won't be so awed by its splendiferous splender that I'll feel all suicidal like and go on a killing spree when I get back to Oakland. I'm more likely to feel that way if it sucks, quite frankly.

Besides, I don't think General Allenby would take it too kindly if I found a new obsession just now. And you've got no disguise from Allenby's Eyes!

Blech.

Some People Are Tiny-Brained Pillocks

I have not yet seen James Cameron's Avatar, although I remain leery of a movie that consists of computer-generated Blue Kitties fighting Space Marines on a Dinosaur Planet. But quite a bit has already been written about this film, some of it interesting and insightful, some of it predictably insipid. Which brings us handily to our main topic...

Brett Michael Dykes of Yahoo provides us with an article with the shocking fact that Avatar has - gasp! - anti-war and pro-environment themes! This is one of the most useless, air-headed observational pieces I've come across, and the idea that it constitutes any form of journalism is frankly insulting.

Since it opened last week, James Cameron's much-anticipated film "Avatar" has won praise from movie critics and been a juggernaut at the box office. But some who have seen the film say that it contains hidden messages that are anti-war, pro-environment, and perhaps even racist.

Ooh, look at the big brain on Brett!

These messages are not "hidden". Just a quick glimpse at the plot summary or trailer makes it clear that these "messages" are in fact the very basis for the film's story. You really think that a movie with this plot - think Pocahontas in Space - is not going to have messages about ecology and imperialism? The only thing missing is Colors in the Wind and a talking willow tree. But I kid shitty mid-'90s Disney flicks.

Indeed, Brett provides a lengthy, in-depth plot summary of the film, with the helpful observation afterwards that:

Are you beginning to get a sense of why some viewers noticed what they believe are underlying messages in the film?

A poorly-written sentence for a start ("Are you beginning to get a sense"? Really?), a completely banal bit of weasel journalism for another, refusing to admit a pretty obvious fact for fear of offending someone. Nor are these messages in any way hidden when, as Brett himself goes on to say:

But are these hidden messages really all that hidden? James Cameron himself hasn't been shy in publicly proclaiming the fact that he's an environmental activist who believes that humans and "industrial society" are "causing a global climate change" and "destroying species faster than we can classify them." In a recent interview with PBS' Tavis Smiley, Cameron admitted that he made "obvious" references in the film to Iraq, Vietnam and the American colonial period to emphasize the fact that humans have a "terrible history" of "entitlement" in which we "take what we need" from nature and indigenous peoples "and don't give back."

Further, one of the film's stars Stephen Lang told CNN that he is "not surprised at all" that some people have taken note of the film's political messages, mainly because the central theme of humans "destroying" a "pristine world" out of "blindness and greed" is so "overt."

Gee, thanks for undermining the whole premise of your pointless article, buddy. Now why are we reading you again?

I guess what I'm saying is that could not be more obvious in a film with Earth Marines invading a planet to plunder its resources and slaughter the peaceful, environmentally-conscious natives, that some sort of Dances With Wolves Meets Fahrenheit 9/11 As Enacted By Blue Cat People "message" is intentional. And yet we need 602-word article by a tiny-brained pillock who probably flunked his Intro to Journalism course to reveal this. Nice work, Brett.

Groggy's Top 10 Villains

Today IMDB posted a link to this article, sort of a commentary of an interview with NPR film criic, talking about why people find movie villains so fascinating or some garbage like that. I think a lot of the reasoning therein is rather insipid, inaccurate and simplistic, but on the other hand, it did get my own brain working, which is occasionally a good thing.

What makes a villain interesting depends on the story - or the villain himself. There are tragic villains, men who were good at one time, but were corrupted into being evil, or are driven to evil by circumstance or revenge. These certainly make complex and interesting characters, who might well be protagonists in another story. A great many examples come to mind, from Shakespeare's Richard III and Iago to blockbuster villains like Mr. Freeze to Davy Jones. On occasion, though, the just plain evil rotters, who were born evil and have little or no justification for wickedness, are just as effective. Witness the popularity of Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight, who despite the idiotic claims of the above-mentioned author, is best-observed as a psychotic who delights in causing chaos and destruction.

Really, what matters is that the villain is compelling - that the writer, director and actor do a good enough job of making him memorable, regardless of whether his motivation is avenging a slain family member or a loose screw.

Here is my fairly provisional list of my top ten movie villains. For a somewhat more comprehensive list, peruse this video of mine.

10. Colonel Saito - Sessue Hayakawa (Bridge on the River Kwai)

Saito is one of the ultimate examples of the tragic villain. The brutal head of a Japanese prison camp in World War II, he is an artist and engineer out of his depth dealing with an officer like the bullheaded Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), a born soldier with a literally unshakeable conscience and constitution. Despite his protestations of following the Bushido code, Saito clearly has no stomach for his work, and engages in a stand-off with Nicholson on account of sheer, bull-headed pride, even as his bridge project falls short of completion; the scene where he breaks down in his hut after ceding ground to Nicholson humanizes him to a degree that the British Colonel never is. Even with his limited command of English, former silent-film star Hayakawa (who won a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor nod) makes Saito a compellingly tragic figure, nearly matching Guinness's Oscar-winning turn, and arguably emerging as the more sympathetic of the two.

9. Eve Harrington - Anne Baxter (All About Eve)

The only female on this list (probably because I'm some sort of sexist), Anne Baxter portrays Eve Harrington as a truly repulsive yet chillingly believable ladder-climber. At first, she's convincing enough as a star-struck aspiring actress worshipping Margo Channing (Bette Davis), whose bitter descent in decrepitude and obsolescence provides a perfect cover for Eve's creepy infiltration of Margo's celebrity. However, her subtle, near-undetectable scheming soon puts Eve towards the top, and always firmly in control. Her displays of false modesty become increasingly hollow, and after we learn her true motives - when she suddenly bears her blackened soul to the helpful Karen (Celeste Holm) - they become downright chilling. Ultimately though, even Eve is no match for the duplicitous theater critic Addison De Witt (George Sanders), who puts the conniving Eve in her place - for the moment. At the end of the film, we see Eve as arrogant as ever - though it seems the ultimate cinematic justice is just around the corner.

8. Emperor Maximillian II - Tom Hollander (Land of the Blind)

Tom Hollander is a perennial favorite of this blog, and his manic performance as the spoiled-brat dictator of Robert Evans' excellent dystopian satire is undoubtedly his career-best. Maximillian is alternately funny, frightening and even sympathetic - a Kim Jong-Il-esque dictator who uses the film's fictional country as a private playground, making Godawful films, engaging in sex games, randomly killing staff members, pigging out on lobster, and generally acting like a child too big for his britches - which indeed he is. He shows no signs of intelligence or insight, is manipulated by his Lady Macbeth-ish wife (Lara Flynn Boyle) and advisors, and his very imbecility is what makes him so dangerous - when this child throws a temper tantrum, people die. And yet, when Maximillian is faced with execution by his political rival Thorne (Donald Sutherland), he becomes strangely sympathetic - an ignorant, childish slug with no right to be where he is, he is somehow undeserving of his cold-blooded murder. Of course, it doesn't help his case that Thorne's totalitarian revolution proves even worse, even if there's a method to his madness.

7. Liberty Valance - Lee Marvin (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)

Lee Marvin's star-making turn as the sadistic Liberty Valance is one of the greatest rotters in film history. He's a bastard without a single redeeming feature, a gun-toting, whip-wielding loud-mouth who robs stagecoaches, whips old ladies, beats unarmed men, murders ranchers, steals steaks, shoots up towns, rigs elections, and hangs around Strother Martin and Lee Van Cleef, oozing flamboyant menace from every pore. He's not a remotely subtle or layered character, but as a depiction of pure evil on film, he has very few equals. When it takes the combined might of James Stewart and John Wayne to take a man down, he has to be one hell of an SOB.

6. Uncle Charlie - Joseph Cotten (Shadow of a Doubt)

Casting actors against type is a common trick, but when it works, the effects can be devastating. Witness the role of Joseph Cotten, the nice guy-next-door from Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Third Man and Gaslight, as the psychotic Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt. Cotten and director Alfred Hitchcock trade brilliantly off of Cotten's screen persona; even though he's introduced as a vampiric figure hiding in a dark room at high noon, he's such a swell guy that it's no wonder everyone cottons (look, a pun!) to him.

Of course, it doesn't take long for the facade to break, as Charlie degenerates into impromptu rants about the uselessness of widows, and the generally foul nature of human society. Cotten is brilliantly chilling as he segues seamlessly from polite small talk to some of the nastiest monologues outside a Strindberg play. The seductive, hypnotic effect Charlie has on everyone around him makes him all the more creepy; he's evil hiding in plain sight, and no one except his niece (Teresa Wright) seems to notice. The banality of evil has never been more palpably portrayed on film.

5. Gentleman Brown - James Mason (Lord Jim)

About two hours into Lord Jim, around the time the plot goes off the rails, James Mason shows up out of nowhere with a wonderfully portentious introduction. He casually strolls up to co-villains Curt Jurgens and Akim Tamaroff, as the latter declaims:

"This Gentleman Captain Brown has given more men unto death than the bubonic plague. From Java to Fiji, he's wanted for slavery, for mutiny, piracy, rape, murder - and some things that aren't even mentioned in the Bible!"

Although Mason has maybe fifteen minutes of screen time, he's a wonderfully odious presence, whose mere appearance inspires foreboding and dread. It certainly doesn't hurt that he has some of the best dialogue in movie history, to wit:

"You're out, he's in - but HE'S the fool?"
"Drunk, you're useless!"
"His Highness has pretensions to heroism - a form of mental disease induced by vanity."
"You have a natural talent for disaster! Try and improve yourself into an ordinary failure by keeping your mouth shut!"
"Shut your gob!"
"If I'm an expert judge of human weakness, depravity and avarice - and I am - then we shall not go unrewarded for our labor."
"His Highness has the wreaking stench of a converted sinner."

Imagine James Mason saying those lines and you should have no trouble understanding my appreciation of the character. My only criticism is that he doesn't show up sooner.

4. Colonel Von Waldheim - Paul Scofield (The Train)

When we first meet Colonel Von Waldheim, he is enraptured by a gallery of French paintings, awed beyond words by sheer artistic beauty. He engages in a civil discussion with the museum curator (Suzanne Flon), who thanks him for protecting the art during four long years of Nazi occupation. Then Waldheim's henchmen arrive to take the paintings away, and the Colonel's cultured nice-guy image is immediately shattered. And we see that Waldheim's interest is not simply an aesthetic appreciation for art, but a personal obsession - he will stop at nothing to see this paintings protected, but only if they remain in his hands.

The beyond-brilliant Scofield (A Man for All Seasons) portrays Waldheim motivated by an abstract idea of beauty and its worth - nothing else matters but these expressions. Where he's villain is that he won't share the art with those considers unworthy of having it - but does he have a point here? When he declaims to Burt Lancaster's embattled Labiche at the end, "Beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it", we can certainly understanding, even if we find the Colonel warped - how much blood has this man shed for the shake of a crate load of paintings? To be fair to Waldheim, however, it is at least something tangible, unlike the inscrutable riddle of patriotism and pride for which millions die.

3. Marcus Licinius Crassus - Laurence Olivier (Spartacus)

The ultimate in Roman decadence and brutality, Crassus is a ruthless fascist who flaunts his wealth and power, and will stop at nothing to return Rome to his bizarrely idealized "tradition". He is a Machiavellian schemer par excellence, engaging in a political chess game of with the gleefully crooked Republican Gracchus (Charles Laughton), fanning the flames of Spartacus's (Kirk Douglas) slave revolt into a major uprising that sees him poised to take over Rome. He is also, at base, an insecure man who wants to be loved, trying without success to seduce his servant Antoninus (Tony Curtis) and Spartacus's lover Varinia (Jean Simmons), and having little more success in persuading his political rivals to come to heel.

Though a bit hammy at times, Olivier is generally excellent, capturing all of Crassus's many facets: the cold-blooded schemer, the ruthless dictator, the driven patriot, the empty, insecure man. The scene where, with all the power of Rome behind him, he is humiliated by a bound and silent Spartacus is a wonderful piece of acting; Crassus's control is only illusory, and he is destined to lose it in short order anyway, as we see with his conversation with Julius Caesar (John Gavin) at film's end. Joaquin Phoenix's turn as Commodus in Gladiator was clearly modelled on Olivier's Crassus (don't bother mentioning Fall of the Roman Empire, which has a distinctly different characterization of Commodus) - if Olivier's Crassus were a whiny teenaged castrato.

2. Frank - Henry Fonda (Once Upon a Time in the West)

Imagine a smiling Tom Hanks shooting a defenseless eight year old and you have the shock registered by 1968 audiences in Henry Fonda's introductory scene in this film. The iconic Hollywood good guy, up there with John Wayne as the eternal symbol of righteousness in films like My Darling Clementine and 12 Angry Men, is a cold-blooded, remorseless hired gun, usurps the power of his dying boss (Gabriele Ferzetti), rapes our heroine (Claudia Cardinale), and all around proves himself to be a cold-blooded son of a bitch with not a single redeeming feature. And the most frightening thing is that it's all so casual; Fonda does not seem remotely ill at-ease playing a psychopathic killer, which makes his performance all the more chilling. Who doesn't get goosebumps as the final flashback unfolds, with a bearded younger Fonda slowly coming into focus, spitting out a cruel "Keep your lovin' brother happy!" to the young Harmonica before lynching his brother?

1. Bruno Anthony - Robert Walker (Strangers on a Train)

Another Hitchcock villain, even more chilling than Uncle Charlie, Walker's Bruno gets the top award. When we first see him, he seems a bit too friendly towards Guy (Farley Granger), but otherwise not a bad person. That he discusses murdering people shouldn't bother us overmuch in a Hitchcock film. However, the absolutely chilling scene where, seemingly on a whim, he stalks Guy's disloyal wife through a carnival and kills her, lets us know that we're dealing with a psycho - and not just any garden-variety psycho either. And, of course, he expects Guy to hold up his end of the bargain, leading to scene after chilling scene of Bruno watching Guy from a distance - at a party, a tennis match or a family gathering, there's nowhere he's safe.

Walker wins by delivering a marvellously subtle performance, not resorting to mad man stereotypes but remaining restrained and believable even in the depths of dementia. Although many critics read a homosexual angle into Walker's portrayal, it seems more to me that he's just plain sick - a highly intelligent and jovial, but childish, immature and utterly warped individual, spoiled rotten and turned into a killer by a combination of lousy parenting and mental illness. The film doesn't explain Bruno's psychosis (unlike, say, Psycho) but gives us enough clues (troubled past, domineering mother, distant father, posh lifestyle) for us to piece things together. A combination of Norman Bates and the Terminator, he is truly the most repulsive and frightening villain in film history.

A Word On Roman Polanski (Or, Why [Some] Of His Defenders are Degenerate Morons)

By now, I'm sure you're all aware that director Roman Polanski has been nabbed by authorities in Switzerland for his rape of then-13 year old Samantha Gailey in Los Angeles thirty-some years ago. After days of reading about the issue and arguing futilely about it on (where else?) Film General, here's my two cents.

A lot of people, from Hollywood directors to French politicians to geeky FGers, are rallying to Polanski's defense and making him into something of a perverse cause celebre. There are legitimate reasons, perhaps, to drop or reduce the charges on Polanski:

- Although I'm more inclined to believe the victim's side of the story in this instance, to be absolutely fair to Polanski, there's enough ambiguity in the situation that there could possibly be room for doubt as to what exactly went on.

- The crime happened thirty-two years ago. (I will say, though, that there is no statute of limitations since he was convicted and then fled.)

- Polanski himself is 76, hasn't (apparently) engaged in such activities since then, and at his age is arguably no danger to anyone.

- The victim herself has expressed willingness to forgive Polanski, on more than one occasion. This has little legal strength but it's certainly a powerful emotional appeal, and might in and of itself make the justice system's actions cold-blooded and hard to defend.

- The judge who was prosecuting him was an ambitious prick who planned to railroad Polanski for little good reason, and so he had at least some justification for fleeing.

These are arguments that, even if I take issue with them up to a point, I could accept and at least be on the same wavelength as. But too many people, from the misogynist amoral teenage apes of IMDB to the bone-headed gliteratti of Hollywood and beyond, to even French and Polish politicians (!), more specious, idiotic reasons are being advanced, that range from the illogical to the idiotic to the insane.

- What Polanski did was not a crime, or else should not be.

- There are people with far worse crimes out there, why should the US focus on Polanski?

- The girl in question was old enough to say no, she consented to it, etc. Some have even gone so far as to argue that because she may have had sexual relations prior to that, she somehow deserves it.

- Polanski has somehow atoned for the crime through his admittedly traumatic life.

- The American criminal justice is corrupt, mean-spriited and barbaric.

- Polanski has made a lot of great films since the crime - doesn't that exonerrate him?

Allow me to address each of these points in fairly abbreviated fashion:

- That's not for you to say, is it, bonehead? Too bad we don't have your wisdom to enlighten all of us, eh wot?

- Bullshit moral equivalence. What Henry Kissinger did in Chile or Cambodia or Angola may well be a crime, but it has no bearing on this case in particular, so drop your smug act of superiority. Unless you want to argue that only murderers and capital criminals should be prosecuted.

- Although Ms. Gailey (now Geiner) has expressed willingness to forgive Polanski, she has not changed her story but for a few details. Her testimony seems to indicate the equivalent of a date rape, where she was drugged and clearly resisted his advances. Not to mention, I would seriously argue that a 13 year old girl - let alone one who was drunk, on drugs, and being advanced upon by a much-older, very-famous film director - isn't old enough and sound enough to consent to sex anyway (If you believe otherwise, you're either overgeneralizing or just being a pig.) As for the latter point, I hope I don't need to detail how misogynistic and disgusting it is - but to the amoral monkeys who don't see pedophilia as a bad thing, well, there's no hope in persuading them anyway.

- Polanski certainly had one hell of an awful life, losing relatives in the Holocaust and the murder of Sharon Tate by the Mansons. Should that alone clear his record? No. Pretty much every criminal has some background circumstances that might drive them to crime, from a broken home to a traumatic incident to mental illness. Should they all be pardoned too? In any case, Polanski hasn't expressed any regret over the incident, so why should we factor this in?

- Maybe so, but I don't see it as being remotely relevant to this particular case. He committed a crime, was convicted of it, and fled justice. Most repulsive, to my way of thinking, is the implication that Polanski is somehow a martyr to justice for sodomizing a thirteen year old girl. Come on, you idiots, let's not make him into Martin Luther King Jr. (although it wouldn't surprise me after the way Hollywood rolled out the red carpet for Tookie Williams and Mumia Abu Jamal).

- This last one is, without a doubt, the most idiotic. If it were confined to IMDbers, that would be expected and no big deal, but members of the French and Polish governments are saying as much in protest of his arrest. Give me a fucking break, people! Art undoubtedly has its value in society, but that does not exonerrate an individual from responsibility for their own actions. To quote George Orwell, "If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear."

Not much more to say, except that those who advance such arguments reveal a great deal of unpleasantness about themselves.

Let's face facts here. Whatever the reasons advanced, most are defending him because he's a film director, plain and simple. If Polanski were Joe Schmoe, a politician, or (God forbid!) a priest, these people would either not care or be all over him like Mr. Freeze on an ice pun. But because Polanski is an artist and a celebrity, he's somehow above the law, and we must unquestioningly forgive him his trespasses.

Well, screw that. If you really think that a film career exonerrates a man of a heinous crime, you've forfeited my sympathy and respect, and outed yourself as an amoral ape.

The Curious Case of Armond White

All evidence to the contrary, I generally try to be open-minded towards other opinions on film. I may ridicule the idea that everything is subjective and that there's no distinction between a fan of Transformers and a fan of Citizen Kane, but I'm willing to accept reasonable debate. After all, a gentleman who dislikes There Will Be Blood and Barry Lyndon can't be too stuck up on this issue; film is an art and no two people will agree on everything. However, there are limits to which I'm willing to accept this, and a point where opinions go from acceptable to just plain dumb.

Which brings us to Armond White. The film critic for the New York Press has gained a great deal of infamy for his bizarre, contrarian opinions. Recently, none other than Roger Ebert wrote an article defending White's iconcolasm - only to retract it and admit he is a "troll". He is a figure of ridicule all over the Internet, even having a (now-defunct) blog devoted to lambasting his writings. Where White sees a brilliant, unique and controversial contrarian, most people see a race-baiting, self-aggrandizing, tasteless (and gormless) imbecile.

Lest you think Mr. White is being unfairly lambasted, let's look at a few of his reviews over the past few years:

- In his review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - universally panned by critics, but embraced by the popcorn blockbuster crowd - White says that director Michael Bay is "a real visionary" with "a great eye for scale and a gift for visceral amazement". If by amazement one means incredulity at a film's slack-jawed, effects-driven mindlessness, then I think he has a case.

- The much-beloved and garlanded Slumdog Millionaire is, in White's estimation, "pandering to liberal sensibilities while entertaining safe, middle-class distance", "absolving the white man’s burden with game-show flash and shrillness", and calls director Danny Boyle "a poverty pimp with an Avid". (Give him this much: if nothing else, White knows how to turn a phrase.)

- The towering comedic masterpiece Little Man "zeroes in on our culture’s usual infantilization of the black male, satirizing it as a literal form of bastardization". Funny, I thought it was an awful movie with a Wayans brother's face CGI'd on a child's body. Similarly, Eddie Murphy's Norbit is "a spoof on American gentility which Murphy then integrates with explosive caricatures" and is "enough to confirm his status as the most brilliant comic actor in America", even better than the late Peter Sellers!

- There Will Be Blood is, in White's eyes, a film which "personif(ies) everything that’s wrong in American character: greed, selfishness, stinginess and unchecked ambition", claiming that "Americans are meant to identify with Plainview for the worst aspects of themselves". Fair enough, as I'm not the biggest fan of the film myself, But, he does praise Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as "is the most remarkable movie performance since Eddie Murphy’s Norbit trifecta", so that's good.

These are just a few of the more obnoxious examples. Here's a quick chart to help you further break down Mr. White's decidedly eclectic taste.

The point is not that White simply strays from the critical consensus more often than most. There just doesn't seem much point to it; it doesn't seem his genuine opinion so much as an esoteric intellectual exercise. The late Pauline Kael, the matriarch of modern film criticism, brought snooty contrarianism to an art form; in White's hands, it seems like an erudite film student spouting off jargon to impress his professors. Or is it? Is he perhaps a master satirist, deliberately eschewing film criticism for all to see?

It's really difficult to gauge White's seriousness. His article on Little Man is critical analysis at its absolute worst. You could read a message of black society into Little Man, but you're much more likely to find it a juvenile, idiotic bodily function comedy. This is pretty close to the Jacques Rivette line of shit that Monkey Business is a masterpiece just because it's a Howard Hawks film. He seems to praise lowest common denominator trash as a challenge - either an attempt to see just how far you can possibly take film analysis, or as a massive joke on his readers. Certainly the archaic verbiage and compulsion to name-drop literary, philosophical and filmic references into every review wreaks of parodying a blog written by a wannabe film student. The results are devoid of any intellectual or critical merit - but, one must admit, extremely entertaining, in the way that Billy Jack is entertaining.

White is also preoccupied with issues of race, which I suppose is fair enough, if this obsession didn't manifest itself so obnoxiously. This article on Eddie Murphy suggests that anyone who dislikes his films - except for the despised-by-him Dreamgirls, Murphy's one post-Beverly Hills Cop performance most everyone can agree is good, but which White sees as "soul-rotting" - is a racist. That includes the universally-trashed Norbit and Meet Dave, which he claims contain insightful messages on the state of race relations in America. He wrote a similar article on marginally-funny black comic Tyler Perry, asserting roughly the same. Sometimes a spade's a spade, or a bad comic a bad comic, and race has nothing to do with it. Even more oddly, though, he spends an inordinate amount of time slamming Samuel L. Jackson, Will Smith and Spike Lee, presumably for "selling out to the Man" (track those reviews down yourself).

In this regard, White seems a parodic caricature of critics who read completely spurious "insight" and analyses into everything - the "Marxist", "Feminist", "Queer" and "Post-Modern" critics which every English, Theatre and Film student must suffer through at some point in high school and college, reading everything from Moby-Dick to a Geico commercial through the narrow prism of their personal obsession (and then writing a 25-page essay on it). (I will never forget the bottomlessy-stupid essay I once read on how Sense and Sensibility is a metaphor for female mastrubation.) I have to admit that I doubt it's intentional. If it is, though, White is a satiric genius.

Whether Armond White is serious or taking the piss out of his readers is unknowable. Either way, he's a dope who writes some of the most unintentionally hilarious reviews out there. God bless Mr. White, the Leprechaun of Film Critics; I hope to be ridiculing you for some time.