Fast Food Nation (Linklater)

I used to follow the Tomatometer religiously. Whenever a film had more than a 90% rating I would always assume that I almost absolutely had to see it. Likewise, whenever a film had anything less than 70% I would simply assume that it wasn't going to be very good, even if it looked kind of interesting or even if I liked the director. More and more I've been deviating from that line of reasoning, and more and more I've been rewarded with following my own "movie instinct." In short, I can guess what I'm going to like better than Rotten Tomatoes can.

Of course the Tomatometer is set up in such a way that every review, no matter how nuanced, is turned into either a "fresh tomato" or a "rotten tomato." This means that a movie like The Incredibles will get a 97% rating on the Tomatometer and a movie like I Heart Huckabees will get a 61% rating, simply because the former is very conventionally well-crafted and critics can tell very easily whether or not it achieved its objectives, whereas the latter is very genre-defying and not particularly easy to evaluate when applying the usual criteria. In short, it's not necessarily that critics tend to praise less adventurous films over more adventurous ones (although that might be part of it) so much as the Tomatometer makes it seem that way. After all, movie critics are paid to tell their readers, "You will find this movie enjoyable" or "You will be disappointed by this movie." But obviously Little Earl is not the typical moviegoer. He likes movies where he senses that a risk is being taken, or that something is at stake. He does not like movies that play exactly the way people "want them to." So the Tomatometer can only reflect his taste to a point. He's finally realized that he has to go with his gut.

Case in point: Fast Food Nation. I knew I liked Richard Linklater's work. When I heard he was making a fictional film based on a journalistic book, it sounded like it would be, at the very least, interesting. I had not read the book, but somehow that made me even more intrigued. Besides, it had a fascinating cast (Greg Kinnear, Bruce Willis, Luis Guzman, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne[?!]). But when the movie came out, it got a 50% on the Tomatometer. Still, I could tell by the nature of even the rotten reviews (example: "In the end, viewers waiting for an emotional and/or dramatic payoff will be disappointed. As a call-to-arms, it's highly sympathetic but surprisingly mild-mannered.") that I would probably find the film a worthwhile rental. And guess what, folks? I was right.

Here are some other review excerpts:

"[A] sloppy, overarching fiction that tries to do too many things at once. It's like a three-ring circus in which none of the acts is terribly interesting."

"The fiction that Schlosser and the director Richard Linklater have extracted from the book is a mess, with narrative lines that go astray or simply wind up in the air."

"One leaves the theater certain what Linklater's theme was but uncertain why it was presented so ineffectively."

After watching the film, I would say that much of this is true. Nevertheless, I knew after the first ten minutes that I was watching a movie that was worth my time. I could immediately sense that it was about real people doing real things. I was seeing lives that were completely different from mine, lives that I knew nothing about, and yet these were lives that I wanted to experience. It may have been sloppy and ambitious but it was a real movie. I did not know where it was going to go, and that was more enjoyable than whether or not the film actually went somewhere. You could feel Linklater making the movie up as he went along, and while I'm almost positive that some people would want to insult this film with every epithet that they have in their arsenal, I personally found it a breath of fresh movie air.

Let me describe to you one of the opening scenes. A marketing exec named Don (played by Greg Kinnear) is in charge of a fast food burger named "The Big One." He gets called into the boss's office, he sits down and they exchange a few pleasantries. Then the boss begins to lean over and speak in a quieter tone:

"I have a friend that teaches food science over at A&M Microbiology, and this semester a couple of his grad students decided to culture a bunch of patties from fast food chains."
"Uh Huh."
"Well... they got ahold of a couple of Big Ones...the frozen patties? Don't ask me how. And the fecal coloform counts were just off the charts. I'm concerned that this could be a problem for us. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Not exactly."
"I'm saying there's shit...in the meat."

In a later scene Don visits a rachowner in Colorado (played by Kris Kristofferson). After a long, vague conversation, the ranchowner finally leans over and tells him, "By the way Don you seem like a nice fella. But the food your company sells is crap. Total crap. Even when there isn't manure in it." The ranchowner displays a wry smile.

People were intelligent in this movie. And nobody was a villain. Even the supposed villain said a lot of things that made absolute sense to me. I rarely eat fast food anyway so I didn't expect the film to change my dietary habits (it didn't). And there were definitely some scenes of slightly embarrassing quasi-liberal speechifying that I could have done without. But did it deserve a 50% on the Tomatometer?

I say no.

Children of Men (Cuaron)

Don't you hate it when somebody else beats you to a good idea? See, me and Alfonso Cuaron, we've got some business to settle between us. I know he just adapted somebody else's book, but I don't care. It's not really fair because he already had a bunch of actual movies under his belt, an actual movie career and, presumably, an actual finished screenplay. But I'll pick a fight with the bastard anyway.

See, a few months ago, I had this idea for a screenplay. Yoggoth and I were planning on writing it together. ** cue the laughter ** My idea was that we would do a science fiction film, but make it very, very plausible. It would take place about twenty years into the future. Since I personally don't believe that the immediate future of the Western world looks very promising, I supposed this fictional future of ours would be rather dystopian, but not quite 1984 dystopian. Many science fiction films have a vision of the future that's incredibly amazing and exotic, but in reality the future will probably be rather mundane. Remember how in the 50s everybody assumed that the future would be like the Jetsons and we would all be flying around in little airplane cars and have robot maids and eat pills for a meal? Didn't happen. People still drive cars and wear jeans and cook hamburgers. Our lives have changed, but in subtler, sneakier ways. Certain parts of the earth could be in for a big change, but for most of us, my bet is that daily life will not be noticeably different, at least not in a Jetsons sort of way. Some nukes will most likely go off, but T.S. Eliot probably hit it right on the nose with that whole "not with a bang but with a whimper" thing. If humanity's in for extinction, it's in it for the long haul. Finally, this conception of the future is quite convenient from a filmmaker's perspective because it requires virtually no budget.

The reason why I felt this was a subject with much potential was because, the way I see it, many middle-class Americans at the moment are currently in a bit of a state of denial regarding the ease with which our mostly prosperous and orderly society could slip into some sort of third-world disaster zone. The problem isn't so much the slip, if you ask me, as it is the denial. A great work of fiction at this time could close the gap between people's ignorance of the future and the reality of that future. This was the motivation for our screenplay. Sadly, the screenplay came to a quick impasse due to Yoggoth's possible lack of enthusiasm for the project (?) and our unease with the creation of a female protagonist.

Suddenly, a few months later, I heard of the impending release of a new film called Children of Men. I read an early review and...hmm. "Dystopian future"? "About twenty years from now"? "Most of civilization destroyed by nukes"? Sounded like somebody had beaten us to it. Naturally I was a little concerned, wondering if this new film would render our idea obsolete. On the other hand, I saw the situation as one of possible relief; if this film covered all the ground our film had hoped to cover, then maybe we wouldn't need to make our film at all and we could work on something else. Either way, I was highly curious.

I became more curious when the film received some ecstatically orgasmic reviews. Slate called it "the movie of the millenium" or something impressively hyperbolic of that nature. The Rotten Tomatoes message boards were practically hemorrhaging with awe over the film. Some users with pretty respectable taste were already adding the movie to their top ten lists of all time. "No film could be that good," I thought. Then again I never thought Adaptation. would be that good, and Adaptation. made it into my top ten, so who knows? Still, I was skeptical because I knew that over the past few years or so there have been plenty of movies that have been called flaming masterpieces that really were not. Masterpieces are hard to make. They don't happen with ease. Certain films with many strong elements going for them are not necessarily "masterpieces." A masterpiece has to have a little of that intangible something extra. It has to have a kind of magic about it. Reading about Children of Men, it didn't really seem like that kind of movie. But of course I had to go see it anyway.

So I saw it, and now five months later, what do I think? I think it's almost impossible for me to have an unbiased opinion, is what I think. I can see why people were impressed. I can see why certain viewers and critics thought it was the best film of the year. Because it was very ambitious and very plausible and it's been a long time since a science fiction film has been more than basically just an action film in disguise. But most of the people who went to see Children of Men hadn't already been thinking about a work of fiction along similar lines. It's a bit preposterous for me to say that I view Alfonso Cuaron as competition, but yeah, he's competition, the fucker. So while I could understand why the film would have been impressive to others, to me it was...something of a disappointment. Many of the elements were superlative, I grant you that. But overall I didn't really feel that the film had explored the potential of its premise to the fullest.

First of all, the film was simultaneously ambitious and yet...not ambitious enough. It was more like a short story than a novel. By confining the action to only a few characters and to only a few days, Cuaron took the easy way out. It meant that he didn't have to address any of the really thornier questions that a science fiction has to deal with, like how the world got the way it did, or what happened to the rest of the population. The limited scope meant that while the film never did anything awkward or silly, it also meant that it never really went anywhere profound or thought-provoking either - at least not as profound and thought-provoking as the subject matter could have allowed.

What was the film trying to say? That humanity's ability to give birth to children is essential for its own happiness? Is that really humanity's biggest problem right now? I would say that a more pressing problem is the opposite: that humanity is giving birth to too many children. Sure, I guess the disappearance of childbirth is one thing that could happen to humanity in the next few years or so. But it's hardly the most likely thing. More likely is that people will keep giving birth to children who will die violently at a young age. This is the more pressing issue: the prevalence of death that seems outrageous now but will probably become the norm. The denial gap needs to close. And Children of Men didn't really help close the denial gap.

Yes, the film was gripping and thoughtful and well-made. But a "masterpiece" would need to not only be gripping and thoughtful and well-made, but also rejuvenate the viewer and fill him with the intangible beauty of life. That's how I felt about one of Alfonso's earlier films, Y Tu Mama Tambien. Now that was a fucking masterpiece. It was a masterpiece because it kept surprising me around every turn with a twist I didn't see coming but thought I should have, or a quiet observation that changed my perception of the characters in an instant. It was detailed and funny and shocking and weird and joyous. Children of Men, by comparison, was more like a good idea than a movie. The characters barely even showed up. I didn't feel like I knew these people, and if I didn't know them then I didn't really care what happened to them. Y Tu Mama Tambien was like an undertow because the characters were so vivid.

But hey, I liked Children of Men a lot. If it hadn't been instantly drooled over as "the movie of the decade" or whatever, then I'd be probably be defending it a lot harder. We need more movies like it, certainly. But it's kind of annoying to hear everybody praise a movie when you're sitting there thinking about how your movie would have been even better! Of course, the game is still young.

Maybe there's hope for our hopeless dystopian future yet.

The Last King Of Scotland (Macdonald)

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An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim)

I'm starting the series with a movie that's hardly even a movie, but I thought I'd try to be sneaky. Indeed, in light of my discussion of movies as "product," this kind of movie is almost like "movie as news bulletin." I didn't go see An Inconvient Truth for the cinematography, if you know what I'm saying. But this raises the question about what makes a movie "important." It's possible that if the human race manages to outmaneuver its own idiocy and survive global warming, this movie will be looked back upon as the most important film of its time. Certainly after seeing it, I realized how puny most movie subjects really are. But that doesn't necessarily make An Inconvenient Truth a great "film." In short, documentaries are weird.

Having said that, I think there are certain ways to judge the effectiveness of a documentary (where the usual standards of film criteria do not apply), mainly: Did the film persuade me of its argument? The answer is yes and no. I think the film essentially has two arguments, and I agree with one and not the other.

The first (and more overt) argument is that global warming is really happening, and that scientists agree on this already, and that companies have tried to stall by pretending that the issue is still up for debate. The movie basically convinced me of this. I think they should have left out the scenes about Al Gore's "personal post-election journey," not because they bothered me, but because they might have bothered someone else. The absense of those scenes wouldn't have diluted the potency of the argument, and as they stand now they could potentially alienate less open-minded viewers. One of those scenes, however, was very effective: Gore explains how his family used to farm tobacco, but when his relatives started dying of lung cancer from cigarettes, they sold the land and changed their ways. Metaphor to the rescue!

So yeah, Al pretty much had me (even though I was already inclined to agree with him anyway). He brought up every counter-argument you could think of, and he carefully explained why each one was complete, moronic bullshit. So hey, it's good to be informed.

But the film had a second argument, and it's with the second argument that I'd like to pick a bone. It was not a blatant argument, so I wouldn't blame anyone for missing it, but to me it seemed unnecessary. That second argument went something like this: We should be really, really afraid of global warming, and we're all gonna die, and humans have done something incredibly wrong.

Well wait a minute buster.

The film's tagline is: "By far the most terrifying film that you will ever see." I'm not sure fear is the appropriate reaction to global warming. Here's what I'm thinking: OK, so humans are altering the weather patterns of the earth. So what? “Well, that will be really bad for mankind.” Why? “Because people will have to move from the coastlines, and storms and droughts will get worse, and it's just going to be a big fat hassle for everybody.” Yeah, but what are humans in the course of the whole universe? It's just one planet out of an apparently endless number.

It seems to be a given that humans fucking up the earth is an absolutely negative thing. But in a sense, it's basically neutral. Humans are on this planet, after all. This is obviously the natural course of our development, because hey, it's what happened. If humans really fuck up their existence, who cares? I mean, I understand why that might be a bad thing for humans, but as far as the universe is concerned, it's just a little splotch on the windshield. There's this idea that nature is (and always was) a static thing, and that if global warming were true, it would be like we somehow altered the “natural” course of everything ever. Obviously if it's happening, then it's “natural.” There never was any fixed “natural.” We haven't really altered the matter of the universe. What about the birth of the planet, huh? Humans couldn't live on hot lava, could they? Catch my drift? The truth is that nature is always changing. Obviously it's impressive how rapidly we've managed to alter the ice caps and the seasons and everything. But it's not inherently negative. It's not written in stone somewhere that the human race must survive and reproduce and do its thing until the end of time. A lot of this environmental panic is driven by the fear of “preservation”: we must preserve our current way of life – the way that's always been. But it hasn't always been that way. And there's no way it can stay that way.

Basically, it's up to us. Do we want to stick around, or do we want to fry on the BBQ? I'm pretty ambivalent about these sorts of things. So maybe I wasn't really the target audience for this movie. Still, I'll help out while I'm around, I guess. I mean, if it won't take that much effort to slow down this ridiculous process, then we might as well make the effort. Otherwise, it's just laziness and greed. Even if Al Gore's wrong, what do we have to lose? So some CEO has to find a different job. Boo freakin' hoo, you know what I'm sayin'?

Personally, I don't think there's too much that I can do differently. I don't own a car. If I ever have to get one, though, I guess I'll try to get a hybrid. Maybe I should turn my computer off more often. I'm not sure if that really does anything. And I'll vote, of course. But voting in San Francisco is kind of like pissing in a bucket. I'll just try to go on about living my normal life. I think the important thing is awareness, anyway.

If anything, the "scariest" part of the movie was all those satellite pictures of the Earth. Those always creep me out. It's like looking at the satellite photos on Google. There's something about it that makes me think, “This photo isn't something I should naturally be seeing.” And then to see all these photos change so rapidly...it's somewhat disconcerting.

Actually, now I know what the scariest part was: it was that Melissa Etheridge song at the end! Holy Mother of God! If global warming at least destroys Melissa Etheridge, then maybe it won't be so bad after all.

2006 - The Year In Movies According To Little Earl

Having sat on my ass for the whole year reading other people's reviews of movies and complaining, I've decided to finally chip in with my 48 cents and explain why all those other people are either completely wrong, or exactly right, or utterly irrelevant, or just plain daft. I will be doing so on a loose, eight-week installment plan.

But to summarize at the start, I think cinema is in a very healthy state at the moment. Although it is probably more fragmented than it ever was, this also means that there's something out there for everybody. I look at the box office winners week after week and wonder who in the hell is paying money to see Epic Movie and Stomp The Yard and The Hitcher. It's clearly not me. But as long as I get my Squid and the Whales and my I Heart Huckabeeses and my Rays I don't really care. The truth is that there are two completely different ideas of "movie" out there right now. One is product and the other is art. They are not mutually exclusive, and even the most highbrow movies like Volver are on some level a product that has to make money somehow. But the people going to see Epic Movie and Stomp The Yard and The Hitcher just want to go out with their friends and kill some time, the same way they'd go to a baseball game or get a case of beer. It's a casual source of recreation. Thus it doesn't make sense to blame these movies for being unimaginative and predictable; they serve a function and that's all there is to it. If one of these movies ever tried to be surprising and weird, it would incur the wrath of the mildly sentient customer. This actually happens. Because both types of movies are created by the same Hollywood system, and frequently feature the same sort of actors, often confusion results among the less astute members of the moviegoing populace. They might walk into Spielberg's A.I. expecting a crowd-pleasing science fiction film in the vein of E.T., and then storm out angrily, feeling like they just wasted their time and money on a stupid piece of shit. This is what my friends said when I went and saw A.I. with them. I personally felt that although I didn't necessarily like the choices Spielberg had made with the ending, I found the film as a whole risky, daring, and fascinating, and I felt like I could watch it again. (Of course there were also people who understood artistic cinema and still felt A.I. failed at being successful on the artistic level, but whatever.) My point is that, although occasionally messages become crossed and the two different types of film find themselves in an uneasy collaboration, for the most part people understand that there are two cinemas and that's that and everything's cool. All I'm saying is that I personally choose to reserve my time and energy for the "other" kind of cinema, and that "other" kind of cinema is, in some ways, the only actual cinema right now, even though it shares theater space and box office figures with "moron" cinema. "Moron" cinema isn't even trying to aspire to that kind of scrutiny. Most of those movies are trying to make a quick buck and help people forget about their problems for two hours and then vanish into the cultural ether. No one is making those movies with the notion that anyone would want to watch them in 20 years. And that's fine. I personally do not share the desire for that product, and therefore I have nothing to say about it. But I want to make clear that it's not that big of a deal that most people don't share my interest in "real" movies. It's understandable. Still, when I say that the state of cinema is very healthy, I mean "real" cinema, not all cinema. The blockbuster machine can do its thing in its little corner spin around in perpetuity. I find it neither positive nor negative. But I do wish more people shared my taste in "real" cinema, because nobody wants to be lonely.

And yet there are a shitload of people out there, like Yoggoth, who understand. It is to you that I speak, then, fellow understanders. We currently have a wonderful arena for our hopes, our fears, our wants, our joys. This was not always the case. My pet example is 1980s American cinema. It's my opinion that cinema was in a screaming pile of shit at that time. Things are much better now, for reasons that I'll save for another post, I guess. They're not perfect, either. It's not quite the 1970s - but it's not too far off, either, and that's saying something. Mostly it's hard to say how the 00's will stack up in the long run, and that makes film reviewing a very difficult activity. Paid film critics have to see so many really bad movies that I think they tend to overrate the reasonably decent ones. The truth is that masterpieces are hard to make. But critics see a movie that is at least trying to be a masterpiece - like Children Of Men, for example - and they go all out crazy. Masterpieces are delicate little creatures. Sometimes they are blaringly obvious on first viewing, but more often than not it takes a little time to let a film's true colors show. I don't think it's very important. Everyone was scrambling around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out whether or not The Departed was a "masterpiece" or not. Who cares? Just enjoy it for what it is, and then figure it out later. Since when did we have to be so scientific about the categorization of art?

In that spirit, I will not provide ratings for the films I discuss, because I am taking the coward's way out and just writing a bunch of pretentious nonsense.

Here we go!