Let me say this: I know Starship Troopers. Starship Troopers is a friend of mine. And Team America, you are NO Starship Troopers.
Michael Atkinson lets us peer into his private fantasy world, where newspaper movie critics wield godlike power to make or break an adolescent action movie at the box office; where directors can deliver incisive political satire without wanting to, or even being aware of it; and where Team America is actually “reproachful,” “burlesque” “satire” of “balls-out martial power” and “gut-level xenophobia,” not just a sell-out celebration of it, complete with detachable air quotes.
Seriously, when someone goes so far as to cite Voltaire and the historicist “diagetic remove” of puppetry to justify their love of a widely criticized film, you can be sure the real battle is in Atkinson’s head: he’s just coming to terms with his suddenly awakened attraction to simulated puppet sex.
You know what, never mind. I think what he needs is for us to be a little more supportive of him right now.
Attack of The Puppet People [Village Voice]
My own conflicted review: Smaller, Shorter, and Most Definitely Cut [greg.org]
Category: movies
Next We’ll Find Out She Bought Necromania
Madeleine Albright just told Jon Stewart that she’s seen Team America World Police.
Maybe it’s not that surprising; if you actually know the person who’s being portrayed as a diabolical puppet, you’re obliged to see the movie.
Bonus Kim Jong Il trivia: he wears high heels. Albright said she stood next to him for a picture, and they were still the same height, and she had heels on…
Nick Denton Sports Wood
from the NYMDb work-in-process folder:
Fleshbot Films [?!] gives Ed Wood’s last film the, um, full release it deserves. It’s the long-lost hardcore version of Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love!; the simulated sex version turned up at a tag sale in 1992, much to the glee of the late filmmaker’s hardcore [sic] fan(s). For the rest of you, no, Johnny Depp is not attached.
IN THE VAULT/ Weird Love [New Yorker]
Exclusive: La Mexicaine Le Interview
While the discovery of an underground cinema in the center of Paris has been widely covered, little or no attention has been paid to what the films actually played there. Les Arenes de Chaillot (The Chaillot Arenas) was created by La Mexicaine de Perforation, a group of self-labeled urban explorers who, for the last five or so years, have used the invisible and forgotten infrastructure of Paris as their own curatorial venue, putting on exhibitions, concerts, and, beginning last year, film screenings.
Early Sunday morning I spoke with Lazar Kunstmann, a filmmaker, editor, and the public spokesman of LMDP about the group’s objectives, ideas, and inspirations. Turns out there were at least two weekly film series, including Urbex Movie, the one that someone narc’ed out this past summer. Here’s what they showed and why:
Set your TiVo’s on ‘Stun’
John Edwards is hosting Dr. Strangelove tonight on Turner Classic Movies. [via fimoculous]
The only bummer is that Kubrick fingered the generals, not the chickenhawks. Still, I’d be less nervous sharing the screen with Dick Cheney than with George C. Scott. Sellers isn’t bad, either.
Three other senators picked movies so predictable you’d think they were up for election this year: McCain (Paths of Glory), Biden (Dead Poets Society), and Hatch (To Kill A Mockingbird).
Party Politics and The Movies Series on TCM
Eros, Thanatos, Thanatos, Eros: Russ Meyer RIP
Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! director Russ Meyer went tits up over the weekend; students of his rather buxom body of work will recognize his fondness for this position.
My greatest Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon triumph was connecting FPKK‘s Tura Satana to Kevin Bacon, via Herve Villechaise, which was possible only with the help of the then-little-known IMDb.com.
Russ Meyer’s Obituary, with nice quotes from fan John Waters & screenwriter Roger Ebert [LA Times]
Try it yourself: Faster, Pussycat! [IMDb]
Don’t mess with her copyrights. Seriously. [TuraSatana.com]
Correction: Explorateurs Urbains are NOT Cataphiles
My apologies for mistakenly calling the explorateurs urbains of La Mexicaine de Perforation cataphiles. In an interview on NPR, filmmaker Lazar Kunsman, the group’s spokesMexicain, explained that cataphiles are “more like nerds,” who just wander around underground without doing anything. Explorateurs, meanwhile, are seeking to produce new forms of creative expression, to create a viable, engaging alternative to the sterile, mainstream culture found aboveground.
So next time you run into a guy in the catacombs, just ask, “Why the hell did Harvey sit on Hero for so long?”
NPR interview with La Mexicaine de Perforation
Previous subterranean cinema posts, including a partial film programme
And you thought THX 1138 was dystopic
“At one point, when we saw him, he was modestly introducing himself to ELEANOR COPPOLA.
“‘Hi, I’m Jim Caviezel,’ he said. ‘I played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.‘
“Then they talked, appropriately enough, we thought, about wine.”
– Boldface Names report from the THX 1138 party at the Guggenheim, NYT 09/16/04
Manohla Dargis: It’s Armenian for ‘driven crazy by jabbering’
So Tony Scott and Manohla Dargis, his new partner in film reviewing, handicap the fall movie season in today’s NYT. Now about the new kid: she praises David O. Russell and Alexander Payne in the same sentence, so she can’t be entirely, irredeemably, Joyce Wadler-style crazy, but the only possible explanation I can come up with is it’s a cry for help:
Even if Before Sunset doesn’t make huge sacks of money, it will probably be one of the best if not the best film [Warner Brothers] puts out this year. It’s too small to get Oscar recognition, because those dolts in the academy rarely look at a movie that tiny, but big Warners has to understand that this movie has great worth.
Before Sunset just about drove me INSANE. Those two jabbery narcissists deserved each other; the Ethan Hawke character’s invisible wife must plop into a Calgon bath as soon as he walks out the door for his book tour.
Did someone mention walking? I haven’t seen such a pointless randonnee since Gerry. But with its incessant, empty banter, Before Sunset is almost the exact opposite of Van Sant’s nearly dialogue-free buddy pic. Before Sunset is the anti-Gerry. And you’ve gotta pick your poison; you’re either a Gerry person or a Before Sunset person. Unless you’re Manohla Dargis, who apparently loved both. Move over, Joyce.
The Best Movies We’ve Never Seen [NYT A&L]
Related: greg.org on Gerry
Now Playing at Les Arenes de Chaillot
The Guardian’s Jon Henley talks with members of La Mexicaine de Perforation, the urban explorers group who built and operated a cinema in a 4,000-sf uncharted quarry 60 feet under the Place de Chaillot in Paris. They called the cinema Les Arenes de Chaillot.
During the seven-week season, the Mexicans screened films by “Chinese and Korean directors but also Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Coppola’s Rumble Fish, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Clandestine group reveals how it built its cinema beneath the city [Guardian UK]
Now Playing at Les Arenes de Chaillot
The Guardian’s Jon Henley talks with members of La Mexicaine de Perforation, the urban explorers group who built and operated a cinema in a 4,000-sf uncharted quarry 60 feet under the Place de Chaillot in Paris. They called the cinema Les Arenes de Chaillot.
During the seven-week season, the Mexicans screened films by “Chinese and Korean directors but also Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Coppola’s Rumble Fish, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Clandestine group reveals how it built its cinema beneath the city [Guardian UK]
From Abbot & Costello to Zulu: Movie Title Screens
Shill has a giant library of movie title screens. Not necessarily opening credits sequences–which are an artform in themselves–but a screencapture of the title card.
It’s connoisseur-comprehensive, with four versions of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, for example, tracking the nuanced differences in format and transfer quality for each film’s incarnation on laserdisc, DVD, beta dub, or (horrors) VHS.
One of my favorites is Safe, Todd Haynes’ 1995 film, and the main reason we can forgive Julianne Moore for Assassins [as for Laws of Attraction…]. Turns out Safe‘s restrained, ominous titles were designed by Bureau, the firm of artists Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett. [via list.absenter.org]
Looking at Tall Buildings
A correction: Reading Herbert Muschamp’s review of MoMA’s “Tall Buildings” show, which includes the United Architects proposal for the WTC site. [The ‘Dream Team’ proposal is in there, too, but I’ve said all I’ll say about that.]
Coming after the pissed-to-be-publicly-accountable Meier, United Architecture’s proposal was surprisingly moving that morning in Dec.2002. They had made a video (it’s still on their site) with cuts of all kinds of happy shiny people looking up from the street, pointing at the new buildings, “like,” I said, “they used to do.” But it’s not really true.
Unless you were a tourist wanting to get fleeced, or you needed to get your bearings, you didn’t come out of the subway and look up at the World Trade Center, and you sure didn’t point.
Except on that morning. It just occurred to me that Farenheit 9/11 opened with shots of people staring, looking up, pointing. Like an uninsidious version of the Dream Team, United Architects unconsciously incorporated the attacks themselves into its presentation.
Conceived after September 11th, in case the world needed a reminder, “Tall Buildings” makes the complicated psychic and emotional power of skyscrapers as its jumping off point. Which is about as complicated a phrase as I can come up with.
[2018 UPDATE: In 2018 The New York Times reports that five women who worked with Meier, either at his firm or as a contractor, have come forward to say the architect made aggressive and unwanted sexual advances and propositions to them. The report also makes painfully clear that Meier’s behavior was widely known for a long time, and that his colleagues and partners did basically nothing to stop it beyond occasionally warning young employees to not find themselves alone with him. This update has been added to every post on greg.org pertaining to Meier or his work.]
Well, that explains ‘Esther’
The Guardian asked a bunch of brainy Brits what the ‘most hated movies of all time’ are. I say, who knows, especially if you don’t see them all? But there are some very funny answers.
Showgirls (a So Bad It’s Good movie, actually) gets multiple mentions, but Battlefield Earth gets none. Neither does Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil, of that pirate movie that sunk Renny Harlan. Castaway Island Cutthroat Island [which, Deborah protests, is “a perfect pirate film.” And since it was only the biggest moneyloser ever, it was probably only “most hated” by studio accountants. Duly noted.] Citizen Kane‘s in there, though, which is entertaining, but too “bad-boy” an answer, even if it were true.
Leave it to Julie Burchill to come up with the right answer, though: of Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away, starring his wife, Burchill says, “If I was responsible for something this bad, I’d change my name, too.” Mazel Tov.
A To Do for my LA Reader
Mike Mills will be at an AFI screening of his Air documentary Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing Wed. 6/30 at ArcLight Hollywood. 8 o’clock. It’s being shown as part of an AFI series of music documentaries, which until last weekend, people thought made a lot of money.