[Warning: Spoilers]

So I'm a big fan of Scorsese. He brings so much to film: as a filmmaker, as a director of actors, as a cinephile. To watch his career is to get an education on the history of cinema. His movies drip with the touches of DeSica, Hawks, Ford, Ozu and countless others. Moreso Scorsese is impressive because of his indifference to scholarly groupthink. His documentary A Personal Journey through American Cinema with Martin Scorses begins not with any Citizen Kane or Tolerance but with the schlocky Western Duel in the Sun that was about a rancher and the half-breed maid he assaulted, fell in love with and was finally killed by. The movie was decried by the Catholic Church. Scorsese's mother took him to it as a young boy, using the young Marty as an excuse to see what all the fuss is about.

That story is very important. Not only in explaining the perspective Scorsese has towards cinema but how all people come to art. Art isn't only a flawless totem. Often it is entertainment, pleasure often excited by some of its own forbidden corners. Art can many times be part gaudy and cheap. But how it serves us is much more profound then that. Often many of the things we love are flawed or careless. The love operates on many parts of the anatomy that aren't the brain. The flesh, the fingers, the sex. To talk about art where those parts are forbidden from the conversation is to not talk about art at all. It's academic wanking.

And so when many talk about Scorsese they give you the high pillars: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas. The really impressed break out the underrated second tier: Mean Streets, Last Temptation of Christ, The Color of Money, Casino. As great as these films are they give you a heavily biased perspective into the Scorsese oeurve and this is the one that most people live with:

What sort of movies does Scorsese make?

"Gangster pictures... um, movies about psychos and outsiders."

Of course the real filmheads then break out the whole third string class of his films: Scorsese's coked up highly flawed musical New York New York, King of Comedy, the atrocious After Hours, the highly flawed Gangs of New York or the highly underrated Bringing out the Dead. He's done all sorts of films. But even with all of these considered, there is an inherit bias: that of high art Importance and Reverence.

And that leads us to The Departed. After seeing it I knew exactly what was going to happen: people where going to compare it to his last Scorsese (e.g. modern gangster) movies, Casino/Goodfellas, and either declare it the greatest fucking thing ever or calling it a sad impersonation of himself.

The dickweeds (see Jim Emerson... who BTW now that Ebert is back, should stop writing reviews and just go choke on an exhaust pipe) will then gloat that The Departed is "obviously" inferior to the film that it is a remake of, the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs.

The reason? Because movies from other countries where people don't speak English obviously are much more Important. Also a Remake is automatically inferior to the Original. It's the same hipster insecurity complex that is consently seeking for authenticity and does so by attaching itself to older or indigenous things disregarding any actual objective comparison of quality.

Listen, I own Infernal Affairs and I've seen The Departed twice. I'm also a big fan of Scorsese and HK crime films. The critics are full of shit. Mostly because they are judging The Departed on their preconceptions and not the movie that it is.

The first thing the elitist dildos will tell you is that The Departed doesn't have the gravitas of Goodfellas or Raging Bull or any of the top flight Scorsese films.

Well no shit. Neither did Infernal Affairs. Both are action thrillers. This should have been obvious by the levels of over the top violence and ridiculousness going on. A movie about a gangster turned cop and cop turned gangster double agents is supposed to be realistic? Getthefuckouttahere. Movies like this are supposed to quicken the pulse, ratchet up the tension and settle big scores. That The Departed does that where most mainstream movies fail by making the audience numb with their endless onslaught of noise just tells you about the relative quality of the two.

Anyone with half a brain and IMDB would have seen that Scorsese had already done this once before: Cape Fear. Just like The Departed it was a remake (check) of a classic crime thriller (check) with a huge actor (check) playing the major antagonist role (check) who, in Scorsese's movie, was built up to an unreal level (check).

Of course Cape Fear was a fun, creepy and exciting movie. It was also the only Scorsese movie (until The Departed) to win its opening box office. It was his only movie (until The Departed) to do very well in the box office. Of course like other Scorsese movies it worked extremely well, was highly quotable, and got fantastic performances out of its cast (like The Departed).

The jerkoffs completely forget about it- because it seeks to please the crowd. Because it has no deep penetrating levels of Importance. Because it wasn't made with just them in mind. But fuck them. Scorsese knows the truth: that Big Hollywood has been many times Important. That accessible satisfying films can have breadth as well as depth. That the mainstream isn't only just the mob to be cowed with circuses and fights. Many great movies operate on all the other endrogynous zones. Many great movies are Duels in the Sun. And what Scorsese has created with The Departed is a great action thriller, the sort Michael Mann or DePalma make (btw, if one of those two had made this movie we wouldn't be having this conversation).

So what is so great about The Departed? What I said above: Scorsese built a great movie. It is two and a half hours long but it flies by. It's gripping from beginning to end. Matt Damon as the cop with a bad side is charismatic, and wiley. He wields his boyishness to wind his way through his doublelife. Leo finally got a role that sat well for him. I'm not a big DeCaprio fan because he thinks he's Johnny Depp when he isn't. Leo has a far more limited range. He can't do brooding/tough. He doesn't feel mysterious. His ability to be subsumed by a character is not great. He can emote and hit all the notes in a role but you can't expect him to transform into a 16 wheeler. There's a throw away line where he says "You don't have cats... I like that." It's the sort of banal conversation we have, we feel how stupid it is as we're saying it, but we let it because of our own lack of saying what needs to really be said. Leo hits it right on with a sort of "I just noticed/I don't know what else to say right now".

Jack Nicholson is great as well. It's a Jack role: he's expected to be the sort of looney he's sort of hinted at for a while. He's the 800lbs Gorilla in this movie. And he carries it that way. In Infernal Affairs the boss character Jack plays was much more bland. He was threatening but more of just a functional component for the two leads to orbit around. The critics have rolled their eyes at the over the top touches added to the boss but I think it fits perfectly. To make the character any less would have him disappear into the background. Scorsese and Monahan (the screenwriter) knew that they wanted him to be brought out into the front. You do that in an action movie by giving the character bite. You do that by not just making the character eccentric but by giving him an autonomy so that when you put him solo on the screen, he bleeds over the edges. The entire opening with Jack in silhouette grinding on about Boston and crime or when he's feeling out Leo's character in the restaurant because he fears that there's a rat in his unit... well the scenes only carry with their weight because the boss has been given ample notes to carry the solos. The same shit is said about Pacino in Scarface, DeNiro in Cape Fear or Tom Cruise in Collateral (though that one now seems that it wasn't much of a stretch *zing!*). As the zeitgeist has taken in these roles, the critics have been forced in time to give them the basic respect they deserve.

But Scorsese's acumen is demonstrated by how he's able to squeeze so many fucking great roles out of secondary characters. Mark Walberg and Alec Baldwin are so fucking over the top, so fucking goddamn quotable, as the police leads. They hit the Boston accent right on while building up these wonderful characters. Goddamn, do you know how ready I am to break out "I'm the guy who does his fucking job. You must be the other guy." at work? C'mon.

"Go fuck yourself/I'm tired from fucking your wife/How is your mother?/Good, she's tired from fucking my father."

"Patriot Act! Patriot Act! I love the Patriot Act! "

"Want a smoke? What you don't smoke? What are you some kind of fitness freak? Fuck you."

"You may play a tough guy for your gangster friends, but you don't get nothing past me, you lace-curtain Irish fucking pussy!"

"Marriage is an important part of getting ahead. It lets people know you're not a homo. A married guy seems more stable. People see the ring, they think "at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch. Ladies see the ring, they know immediately that you must have some cash, and your cock must work."

And then there's the criminals. "What, you on your period?" The whole "If they don't look at you they must be a cop" conversation. Everything so classic. And that's important in a thriller: because it gets the audience empathizing with the characters. Both times I saw the movie the audience gasped when Martin Sheen was thrown off the building. He was the most sympathetic character. He as a father figure to Leo. When he died Leo was in the fucking dark. I would also give some time to Vera Farmiga but she has gotten two Gray Lady blowjobs in the last month so no reason to treat it like a Cuban sex show.

Of course the complaint is that Scorsese lost all the "seriousness" that made Infernal Affairs so great. No way could Matt Damon text a message one handed. The whole quadruple cross at the end with everyone dying from a headwound and the rat in the last shot. Uh, yeah. Does anybody remember that the two leads in Infernal Affairs met when one of them sold the other guy audio cables after they sat quietly together in front of the showroom speakers listening to music with their eyes closed? Infernal Affairs was so over the top in the two leads so like totally knowing each other but not like knowing the other guy's the other guy's rat!!! Monahan did the smart thing and spread the two out. Anyone with half a brain and access to the two would have otherwise figured the damn thing out. And there are a half-dozen characters like that in this movie: the two undercover police heads, the therapist, the crime boss. Infernal Affairs was *this* close to having them run into each other at the same Starbucks every morning.

And texting in a pocket is bad? How about nonchalantly leaning out of a window to tap Morse code into a wire you placed under the windowsill?

The ending of The Departed is over the top. But hopefully by now that would seem to be natural to the movie itself. The one thing its ending has over the one in Infernal Affairs was that it provided a satisfying amount of closure. Infernal Affairs doesn't end with Leo and Matt and Anthony Anderson and that other guy all dying from gunwounds. It ends with the undercover dead and the Matt character going to jail. Freezeframe. Roll credits.

"... Oh," is your reaction when you are sitting there.

It explains why there have been like five sequels to the damn thing too: the original ends on such an unsatisfactory note. Nothing really gets resolved. One guy's dead and the other is going to jail... ok.

Now could have The Departed ended on less of a slapstick sequence? Probably. By the third headshot the audience is usually laughing out loud. A lot of people hate it. If they just would have avoided killing three people in a single shot (setting up a triple cross) and instead had Leo get shot, Anthony Anderson get shot and then Matt and the other guy drive away only to have Matt, I dunno, shoot him then? It might have seemed like less of a Greek tragedy. But Scorsese has also always held a love for old black Italian drama. The sort of thing where EVERYBODY DIES IN THE END. Shit, it's how all three of The Godfather movies work. In a way The Departed doesn't earn that sequence.

But it at least tells you there ain't going to be no damn sequel directed by Michael Bay.

Scorsese had fun with this. Like After Hours you can see him having fun with this (after the similarly soul-crushing expeditions to create Last Temptation and Gangs of NY). The rat running along the last shot? That's him winking at you. That's him throwing it in the faces of the critics who want to drop him into a five by five cell of Goodfellas and Raging Bull. The sort of assholes who would never enjoy a Jerry Bruckheimer movie or some piece of shit starring Stallone in the 80's. They're the sort of guys who can't ever approach a John Ford or Sam Peckinpah film with the glee of a teenage boy. You wonder if these guys have ever used their dicks in their lives. For them, the rat running across the last shot was Marty squirting a big load of jizz in their face.

The Departed is an action movie. It will thrill you, you will laugh with it, you will laugh at it. You will be entertained. Such are the things that make life good.

Some things are starting to come back to me.

I had a different Art AP teacher my Sophomore and Junior years in HS than I did my Senior. That first teacher, Mr B, retired and went off to his house near the lake with his daughter and daughter. Of course Mr B did come back once in a while. He was friends with the other art teachers.

Senior year I saw him. He smirked and said "You're an asshole. But you're a talented asshole- and I respect that."

What a dick.

Art teachers where a bit different than most teachers I had. Or maybe it was just me. Mr B. could be- was combative. In the fine art context there is a lot of conflict: art is often about choices. You do something because you have an idea or are good at it or are bad at it or want to get better. Those choices may be in direct conflict with the idea of "organized classroom".

But I probably didn't help things.

I am painting many small 1" rectangles, spaced by 1/2" in a space of 15" by 18". I drew the field first in pencil. I then began to paint the spaces between the 1" rectangles in acrylic. The assignment was supposedly more complex: add in repeating simple shapes for something akin to OpArt. But I stuck with just a fleet of squares.

Because I'm uninterested in shapes. I am interested in paint as a medium. I am interested in color theory and expressing it through paint. That's why the background space transitions from purple to red to orange. When I go back and paint the squares they will transition from red to orange to yellow. It's a hypothesis of color adjacents and near-complements. It's also a skill challenge: to get me familiar with blending tones and colors. The effects of washes and strokes.

Many lines drawn in pencil. A lot of primed material to cover. I start small but I become impatient. One line is overstepped, than another. The uniform grid begins to vibrate in a handcast uncertainty.

I thought of Mr B. Not the asshole thing. Assignments: we always butted heads on assignments. I generally hated his assignments. He'd pick out one piece of crap in his classroom and tell us "do that". A sketching exercise I'd finish quickly and then doodle on the edges.

"I like that."

What?

"That," and he'd point to what I had drawn in the corner. "That's interesting. The rest of it. Is just-," the word escaped him; still he was dismissing it. "Why can't you apply what you did there to the actual excercise?"

Exercise. Everything is an exercise. The big assignment was an exercise. The sketch in the corner was another excerise. Every class composed an exercise. My attention loosened, filling pages of college rule with faces is an exercise. Again. Again. Repeat again. Each face wasn't the last face. Each drawing wasn't the final drawing. None of it big, important. This wasn't going onto any wall. This wasn't going to be judge by any contest that mattered. Where was the test? The real one that would divide away the wheat from the chaff? Fuck this scholastic shit. All training. No battles.

What where the conditions of finally sitting down and creating A Piece of Work? Something final and complete? Something that would be worth the effort and patience of staying within the lines? Exercises lead to excuses. Excuses lead to compromised conditions. Compromised conditions lead to impressive but flawed products.

There is structure to a class but its conditions are a permanency of training wheels. Every piece of art is a warmup for the next piece. It goes no where.

I would never hang a piece of my art on my own wall. I'd never give one as a gift. Some one would ask? I'd let them take it. I'd never go to any celebration of any of my accomplishments. All my accomplishments are banal. A birthday, a graduation, a wedding, a funeral. If you did not know me you would not care. We do not notice those things: bodies far and alien to us. No different than darkness. They are not important. I am in more individuals' black inky nights than I am in flourescent awareness. I am not important. No star to navigate to. Only void of years of exercises, compositions of gas. Do particles wait to be fused? This is stupid. The gray stretch between two integers. Lives quite unremarkable. Still lived.

Everyone here's a smart kid.

You shrug, "I'm not that smart."

And you have a gift.

"Eh. I guess."

Talent is like every other rare sought-after commodity: it both at once attracts and repulses. Wealth, beauty. We love these things. No, we adore them. We covet them. We know that they are a finite quantity and so we seek them out. But their rarity also makes us... hedge our bets. We know full well that there is a chance that we may never be talented enough, beautiful enough, wealthy enough. So we hold these things at arms length. Worst would be for us to become frothing envious of something that we never come to possess. The thing is subjective because it is just not the thing; it is the thing and our relationship to it. The distance is how it appears to us (a speck of faint light, far off; in our grasp, brilliant, blotting out all else). There is no real truth to any of it, we know. But what we do see is everyone else, aligned as constellations, hearts, satellites, in their orbits around it. We can gauge distances. We know the record, who is closer, warmed more at the bosom. There is a measureable quantity and we all fear to be found wanting.

Money. Polite company doesn't talk about money. A friend's wife drunk on three glasses of wine pulls out a check for contract work she did.

"Look how much I made for," holds up fingers, "twenty hours of work." Proud. Smiling.

Her husband quickly grabs it and puts it away. "He doesn't want to see that."

To humiliate me? Or would it be worse: "Oh nice. Maybe in a few years you'll be making as much as I do an hour."

A poor measure of all the human characteristics we treasure. The quality of a man. But money is finite and absolute and though it does not say anything about us, it speaks clearly in a striking voice much much else.

So polite company doesn't talk about money.

The same with talent. Eight students at easels, drawing a still life in tones and shades of one color (blues, oranges. Choose one and only one). Two hours painting. Ten minute open critique period at the end. "Let's take a look at what everybody is doing"

"Um..."

So this is an intro to painting class. All skill levels welcome. Noncredit. The actual composition is from no art outside of decades ago mandated art classes to dabblers to those who decided to pick it up again after a detour in occupation.

So what do you say when you can paint? Not just paint but compose, calculate tone, understand the physics of the color, of the brush. You are more interested in how the paint works. How capture how you see it. Or think it should be seen?

They are impressed. Of the eight students you where the only one to attempt to paint the bust. You draw faces all the time. You understand the human face. So many of the steps are already done for you. ...great.

Talent can be abrasive. Yes, the adolescent fear of difference. But talent too can be sweetly off putting. It deliniates the gulf, a wide invisible chasm. They may praise you and at the same time begin to drift away from the shore. What you have done has shown how alien you are. Somehow we are not of the same species.

"I loved that. How did you do that... with the eye?"

How can you take critique? "Are you going to hang it up?" Actually I don't think it's that good. I think that it is a reasonable first stab at painting for the first time in nine years. But there is much to be desired. If we worked in a dark room and with only a single spot of light, it would be much better: its easier to disguise missteps in tone when working with high contrast. This was fine but left much to be desired.

You wouldn't hang this painting on the wall. Right now you are thinking about saving yourself the 2 bucks and painting over it. Perfect your technique. At this level, the rules have changed.

You can't say that. "This isn't good. I plan on destroying this. I will level this forest and plant another. You couldn't do this. If you finally did, know I would destroy it as well. Just think of what I would do then with what you just painted here."

The rules change but the metric is identical. They would never live up to your standards. And they at some point realize it. And soon they too will drift away. The mountain is very high. It pierces the clouds up into thin air and the gaps of empty space. But it is an island. From its very top you can see all the foreign lands. They can all see how close to the heavens you are. Is that some how glorious? You can see how distant all of them are from you. And all together, at the same time. That is how each of us go about this life.

Why am I in at work at 6:50 in the morning on a Friday with no deadlines? Is it because I had to leave work for 2.5 hours yesterday afternoon to wait around for a Comcast tech who DID NOT COME?

Yes!

Excellent. So it's either burn vacay or make up the time. I'm more than happy to make up the time- if the reason why I took off was fulfilled. But it wasn't. Luckily my problem is so spazzy (my Comcast internet goes in and out) that the previous three techs each thought they had solved it only to have the problem come back.

Well, now I've heard the rumor the New Brooklyn has FIOS and I'm going to check on that. Then I can dump these ass clowns.

Really... the guy schedules a tech visit on Wednesday for Thursday 2-5pm, says the tech will try to call twice and then I get nothing. And Corporations wonder why people burn, ravage and riot.

Today, In the Lab

Me: "A dolphin goes: 'Ort! Ort! Or- waitaminute. That's more of an otter. A dolphin really goes 'Eek! Eek! Eek!' A Manatee goes: 'Uhhh... I'm so fat! Where are my fat jeans?!?"

J: "C, don't you miss working in your office?"

C: "I don't get entertained when I sit up there."

Yesterday

Me: "Did I ever tell you about the woodpecker that got in my parents' chimney? It would peck away at the metal lining because it was mating season or something. Made all kinds of racket. This was in their second to last new house. Not their new new house. Anyway, so my dad bought a pellet gun and waited for the bird to perch itself on the the chimney and then *makes motion like aiming rifle. pulls trigger* PSSHT! Tink! 'Eekeekeek!' And the woodpecker never came back."

J: "I really got to meet your father some day."

Later Today

[Walking out of Trapeze. A restaurant that just went up. Underwhelming. It's like Surf Bar 'cause Surf Bar sucks now]

Me: *Does 'Entrance of the Gladiators'*

Me: "If I was a gladiator, I would never come out to 'Entrance of the Gladiators'. I'd just let the Emperor kill me."

J: "'Entrance of the Gladiators'?"

Me: *Does 'Entrance of the Gladiators'*

J: "You mean that circus music?"

Me: "Yes. 'Entrance of the Gladiators'"

J: "No way."

Me: "Yes. Doesn't sound bad ass at all. Even the 'Sabre Dance' doesn't sound like something Cossacks would go rocking out to."

J: "The 'Sabre Dance'?"

Me: *Does 'Sabre Dance'*

J: "Hmm."

Me: "Though now most people would probably know The Gayne Ballet Suite for 'Lullaby'. It's used in every sci-fi movie set in space. 2001, Aliens."

J: "Really?"

Me: "Very slow and majestic. Khatchaturian, one of those great 20th century composers. So good that Stalin loved him and he got his ass thrown in a gulag."

J: "What?"

Me: "Yes. He wrote a symphony that the High Soviet found to be-"

C: "How do you know this?"

J: "I wish I had a photographic memory."

Me: "I don't have a photographic memory."

C: "But you remember all of this stuff."

J: "I bet you only read about that stuff once before, right? You have a photographic memory."

Me: "I dunno."

C: "What's a gulag?"

Me: "A forced labor camp for criminals and political undesireables."

[I don't have a photographic memory. I don't read things and the data gets sucked off of them. I remember things but a lot of it is hazy. I can remember parts of songs, the pages of this month's Esquire. The blurb at the bottom of one page about memory. The color of the page. The bubbled shape of the sidebar. I can see pages and know the information is there, but I can't produce the words and letters. There are so many gaps. I struggle to remember things. But then I like information. Information is interesting and interesting stuff is easy to remember. I can't just remember a line of numbers if you asked me]

Two weeks ago in Orlando, sitting around J's hotel room after the per diem buster meal

Me: "Shit, it's 10:30. We've been sitting here for three hours shooting the shit."

J: "I haven't been doing anything. You've been talking and I've just been agreeing with you."

Me: "Thanks. Now I sound like a fourteen year old girl."

J: "It didn't mean anything. You're just more observant than I am. You bring up all this stuff I never notice."

Two weeks ago, on The Wire

Teacher [to Prez]: "You need Soft Eyes."

Prez: "Soft eyes?"

Today, as I was Leaving Work

T: "Hey s." [She always says my name. But then J and I share the same name. This really tickles her to no end]

Me: "Hey T."

T: "Haha. I love watching you walk."

Me: "What? What's so interesting about how I walk?"

T: "I dunno. You are always so *leans to the side as to demonstrate* laid back."

Me: "Huh."

T: "Have a good weekend."

Me: "You too."

Various

J [to me]: "I'd love to be in your brain- just once. To see what it's like in there."

I just saw the most important movie of the year and I think everyone should go see it.

It describes a cabal of oligarchs who, in a bid to maintain their grip on institutions have set up a tribunal with no transparency. They cast down judgment with no other recourse but the same institution. They provide no material of charge to the defendant and instead hide behind a curtain of noble and pure intentions.

This movie shatters this notion and casts everything into clear perspective: that power, unchecked and unaccountable, has taken hold of this country in the last forty years. The majority suffer dumbly accepting these declarations as part of some moral reasoning that now is obviously all smoke and mirrors.

I rarely get political. I hate politics. But I think this movie is important. How else are we going to realize to treat the highest institutions in our country with the healthy skepticism that every American should have? See this movie.

Of course I'm talking about the MPAA, how they rate movies and the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated.

******
[Now forget what I just wrote. We'll come back to it later]

Nothing is important. No thing you can say, do, or describe has any shining imperial magnitude so that everyone and everything will bend to it. Importance is something that is only useful to historians. And it is just a convenient label to abridge history, or explain why certain things persist while so many other moments and people draw out of memory like water back into the sea. Of course what is 'important' in history is even up to debate. And I guess it makes sense because how else would history academics continue to provide for themselves if there wasn't an endless circle jerk of arguments and books and journals and conferences?

I've been critical of criticism a lot recently, none more so than the idea that it is possible to extract the absolute place of a moment at the very instant it is unraveling. We are all bored. So we play this game. Our little lives are filled with what we think is smart discussion. It doesn't matter. But most of us are smart enough to see how trivial our lives are. Sadly, the critics like to draw it all out again. Nothing like being the first to make the big pronouncement. First on Everest; 14th man at the Last Supper.

I'm tired of talking, thinking and (most of all) reading Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com but his review of This Film is Not Yet Rated has all the implicit crap that makes all criticism the sort of incestuous molecule that has fucked itself into invisibility.

He brazenly declares that only people interested in the "movie business or censorship" would be interested in this movie. He then goes on to complain that the basic structure of the movie defeats catering to this audience.

Implied is the conceit that no one else gives a shit about how a movie is rated. Uh, no? Not even just a little bit? Everybody sees trailers. And everybody's seen movies that they say either "Whoa, how the hell is this PG?" or "Why is this R again?" Sure, you get the "This movie contains strong language, partial nudity and Frenchmen talking, talking and talking" but that really doesn't help a lot of folks. At one time or another most people are curious about it. And if you start talking about it, there will always be one movie that they remember triggering their curiosity.

Take Red Dawn, the first PG-13 movie. Well that movie's pretty damn brutal. Like Commando brutal. Schoolteacher shot dead in front of the school, mass executions, swearing, man getting killed by grenade, man getting killed by bow and arrow, execution of a friend turned traitor. Now if you watch This Film is Not Yet Rated you find out that PG-13 allows for very brief non-sexual nudity, and strong violence that is non-graphic. That basically means you can shoot people and blow stuff up as long as you don't show blood, burnt or mangled corpses.

But wait... Red Dawn had blood and corpses... huh?

After This Film is Not Yet Rated that all makes sense. Basically there are no guidelines or reference points given to raters. They use their own judgment. So they could up and decide Finding Nemo's a PG-13 movie. Also since the raters are not screened for any sort of credential nor are their rulings made public, the whole system is unaccountable. And not only does the ratings board then show consistent inconsistencies and biases they also provide more constructive feedback to studio movies than independent ones in terms of what it would take to trim a cut from one rating to another.

All of this unfolds during the movie as the filmmaker not only interviews other filmmakers and their experiences being rated at the same time as he hires a private investigator to uncover just what sort of people the MPAA anoints to judge what movies you can and can't see (remember, any movie rated NC-17 cannot be advertised for on television, shown edited on television [as the edits must be from at least an R or less film] or sold at Wal-Mart or Blockbuster).

Of course Emerson finds the whole investigation ridiculous. Why not just tell us the results, he whines? He wants more history, more background. Basically more of the stuff that most people find insufferably boring. Who gives a shit what censorship happened to Singin' in the Rain outside of historians and musical fans? Maybe you could sprinkle in some cool factoid like how Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch basically killed the old movie code and when it was put up for rating in 1994 (over twenty years after its original release) it got an NC-17. How fucking badass is that?

No, Emerson wants a chin-stroking documentary about the long dry history of film censorship.

Someone should have told him that wasn't the movie he was watching.

Because he spends his whole review bitching about the movie This Film is Not Yet Rated isn't, than the one that it is. If he had been observing instead of just looking he would have seen that the whole investigation part of the movie did the time honored thing of Showing Rather than Telling: how much of a supervillain impenetrable fortress the MPAA made, how paranoid they where about leaks of any information, how a few faceless cronies basically run the place and impose their will on what a rating is, how scared people in Hollywood are to piss the MPAA off as it would mean being banished from 99% of the theater and DVD market, how any review is done in a style that seemed more at place in The Prisoner and how, in the end, the final judges of a movie (those who make up the final appeals board) are all executives at the major studios and theater chains... and either an Episcopalian or Catholic official. All of this unfolds organically. It is spread out in a digestible fashion that gives you a real sense how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Did Emerson stop watching the screen or something? Could he not see over the chair in front of him with his nose stuffed into his own taint?

Shit... and this is the same sort of dorky self-absorption that kills the mainstreams interest in any movie described as "great" or "important". Welcome to the age of marketing and a critic is just another marketer. He's trying to sell you a way of life. To agree with them 100% is to place you right at center of their community (be it the NYU film school, Cahier du Cinema, or RuthlessReviews.com).

Of course we are the generation of advertising overload. We don't hear any more. We don't look. All we see are a towering wall of flashing neon and we are blind to it. It doesn't effect us.

So a critic calling down rulings like Moses at Sinai goes over like... well a fucking critic (see all previous mentions of 99% of the population not giving a shit). Stupid critics (see Jim Emerson) just chalk it up to the mainstream not caring. That those who are most receptive where those who where the original audience is a complete false positive. Wow... people most like film critics like film criticism (next thing he's going to tell us is that the sky's blue and water's wet). But that's like being a vegetarian and then marrying into a kosher family. A nice but inert gesture.

All of this is classically illustrated by Bill Simmons (the ESPN Sports Guy) discovering HBO's The Wire. Simmons is a consumer of pop culture. He just as willing to write 3000 words on Miami Vice or Karate Kid as he is to break down the NBA at the All-Star break. That's why folks read him. Now he's a big fan of the Michael Mann crime dramas, The Sopranos and The Godfather... and for the longest time he resisted The Wire.

Why? Because folks attacked him with the "Greatest!...Important!" angle. Like he said here it made him even more stubborn:

Readers kept telling me to watch this show. They implored me. They kept e-mailing me. They badgered me. I didn't listen. As I've described multiple times in this space, I hate being told that I should watch a show; I like discovering them at my own speed. And if it made me three or four years late for the party with classics like "The Sopranos" and "24," so be it. It's just that I can't willingly jump onto a show; it needs to happen organically.

For instance, here's what happened with "The Wire:" On a Tuesday night in mid-August, the Sports Gal and I were home with nothing to watch and ending up stumbling onto "The Wire Re-Up" button on HBO On Demand. I'd been avoiding this show for four years because the Baltimore drug scene didn't appeal to me unless Raffie Palmeiro and Miggy Tejada were involved. But the Sports Gal was the one who said, "Let's watch the first show of 'The Wire' and see if we like it."

Within 10 minutes, we were hooked. We ended up banging out three episodes the first night and another three the second night. Then our cable system switched to a new provider ... and all the Season 1 episodes disappeared into thin air. Now we were scrambling. None of the video stores around us had Season 1 in stock. I ended up ordering Season 1 online (two-day delivery courtesy of Amazon Prime), but we were so hooked on the show that when someone returned Season 1 to our video store, we rented the last three discs that same night. We banged out the last seven episodes in two nights before the DVD was even delivered. That's how hooked we were.

I'll go this far: I'd put Season 1 of "The Wire" against anything. The first three seasons of "The Sopranos." Seasons 1 or 2 of "24." The first seasons of "NYPD Blue," "ER" or "Miami Vice." You name it. I have never seen a show like it. Season 2 wasn't as good (if Season 1 was an A-plus-plus-plus, then Season 2 was a B-plus), and we're just about to dive into Season 3, so I don't have an opinion on that yet. Everyone seems to agree that they outdid themselves with Season 4 and that it's a legitimate masterpiece. Just know that you can absolutely start watching Season 4 without having seen the other three seasons. It's not an ideal way to break into the show, but you can do it.

He ends the article with the money quote:

Anyway, I can't believe I didn't watch this show sooner. It enrages me. I'm not doing the "YOU NEED TO WATCH THIS SHOW OR YOUR WHOLE LIFE WILL BE INCOMPLETE!" routine, because that might scare you away. Just know that it's one of the five greatest shows I've ever seen. And I hope you stumble across it some day.

Organically, of course.

Any marketer would tell you that "organically" is just code for the soft sell. With our hypercompetitive media market, branding is more important than ever and the reason for that is the soft sell. Folks want to feel that they are master of their own choices (even if it's just the convenience of a moment or the subtle effect of watching too many ads). They want a brand to carry as a totem and identify with. People do that with the cars they buy, the clothes they wear, the people they hang out with... and the movies they watch.

Earlier this week Bill Simmons reviewed the hackneyed sports drama The Gridiron Gang . Blah blah blah... Average movie that hits all the right buttons... Hollywood just craps them out now...

Then out of no where he mentions The Wire. He goes deep into the show... looks at how it got picked up for a fifth season even though it's been a consistent weak performer. He becomes introspective on how a show like The Wire, one that has great characters, humor, depth and personality... a show that treats you like an adult... a show that for all of the hard realism to it has an unbreakable faith in humanity, could be so under-watched while folks go gay over the Sopranos and run out to watch the Rock solve all the world's problems in two hours.

Reading that I was struck how profoundly the show had seemingly hit him. In his first post he talks about the show casually. He made glib remarks (Stringer Bell doesn't look a thing like Alonzo Mourning BTW) and kind of pumps up the characters while playing his "organic" angle.

But just a week later the show seems to have touched him at a much more profound level. That a guy who consumes so much disposable shit culture, there was finally something that actually was an awkward slice of perfection. He seemed to be coming to terms with it.

And it's not like The Wire is going to save souls, turn water up from the dry cracked Sahara ground or anything. But for many people who see it, they come out changed. Through this show they pierce the haze and see a single thing clearly, for the first time.

That's what Emerson really missed about This Film is Not Yet Rated. It is an easy film. It isn't comprehensive. Many of its jokes don't work and it isn't going to make anyone a better person. But what would happen if, I dunno, 50 million Americans saw it? What if teenagers across the country understood what a PG-13 mindless action movie meant the MPAA thought about them? That they are irreparably ill-equipped to deal with eroticism but perfect vessels for endless pointless violence?

Gee, at a basic level, maybe the MPAA might get off of its ass and develop an 'A/Adult' rating to sit between 'R' and 'NC-17', a place for all the films that deal with sex and alternative lifestyles and the little movies that most people would be fine never seeing but happy to know they are there if they want them? The 'A' rating that Ebert has been championing for two decades?

Maybe if enough people saw This Film is Not Yet Rated real and lasting change would come to the media industry? Would historians look back and say that, maybe, this film was "Important"?

Heh. Dick.

*****

So, we've reached the end of the post. Now go back to the top and read the first bit from the start to the '*****'. Now which do you find more effective? That or all the stuff that came after it? The hard or the soft sell?

You think for a moment and then say, "More effective? I guess it depends on what you where selling. Maybe you're trying to get everyone to go see This Film is Not Yet Rated." You pause here, "But rereading it... actually, that might not be it at all. Maybe that's just a cover and your whole sell was something completely different."

Ahh, you always where a smart one, you.

nizo was prophetic in seeing the week I've been having. So I'm working on my condo, right? And I got me a nice runner to go through from my front door in my living room to my dining room (the major path of traffic in my place). Real deal. Got it from LL Bean. I ordered it last week and thought it would arrive this week Tuesday (after the holiday). How fucking wrong I was.

Monday

I come back from visiting my family in NE OH to find a FedEx note on my door. It seems that they have tried to deliver my rug twice. Odd since it only shipped on Friday so that either means they tried to deliver it on Sunday or Labor Day (which I doubt). Third time and it's waiting for me at some Undisclosed FedEx Bunker.

Odd, also, that my condo intercom works now. This thing is pretty slick: you set it up by giving it a phone number, in my case, my cell. So when you punch in my name on the intercom, it actually makes a phone call to me. Once we get the last bit in, I will be able to even unlock the door to the common stairwell from my cell. So I could be in NE OH visiting my parents on Labor Day (just as an example) and have a FedEx guy show up and I could buzz him in so he could leave my package there.

The oddness: no messages on my cell for missed calls. So that means whoever was the delivery guy didn't actually use the intercom.

Nice.

Also I find out that the tracking number LL Bean gave me is wrong. So the only accurate copy I have is on that packing note the guy left. And it is two packages. And the guys handwriting sucks. So if I don't have the slip on me I have to go through this long process of "Yes I ordered this package, no I don't have the tracking number, here is my address... here is my phone and name to confirm." business.

Tuesday

So on Tuesday I call FedEx in the morning. I've decided I'll just ask them to hold it for me and I'd pick it up at the Undisclosed FedEx Bunker. The guy gives me the address and I google it. Hmmm, it doesn't show up as anything on Google Maps. Oh well, I've got directions. The guy also says "Ok, just call back early tomorrow because it might accidentally go back out on the truck again."

Huh? What is the point of me calling to hold it if the guys won't even heed my request? Isn't this customer service, right? You (the service) are supposed to supply me (the customer) with what I want, right?

Little did I know that this would start me on a weeklong exercise to get my fucking rug and point out how fucking shitty and worthless FedEx customer support is.

Wednesday

I've decided I have to leave work early to pick up this package because the FedEx Home Servie (i.e the Undisclosed FedEx Bunker) is only open to fucking 5pm. Yes, 5pm. FedEx is running on goddamn banker's hours. So I have to leave work early and make it up later so I can have the honor of picking up my package.

So that afternoon I call FedEx and I get another rep who says "Oh, the package went out on the truck today." I told him I put a hold on it yesterday. "Hmmm, I see no hold here." Ok, I tell him to put a hold on it again and maybe this time it will stick. Once again he repeats that I should call early tomorrow to make sure it doesn't go out on the truck.

Thursday

So I call right after getting in to work and doing early email. It couldn't have been after 8:30. The FedEx rep tells me "Uh oh. It says here the package has gone out on the truck. Here, let me call your Undisclosed FedEx Bunker. *Musak as I'm Put on Hold* Hello, sir? Yeah, it seems the package went out on the truck again. Yeah, you have to call before 8:02 in the morning to make sure you beat the delivery trucks going out. But I see here that they tried to deliver it enough times that it probably shouldn't go out again tomorrow."

Why don't I trust her? Really, don't these people know how to do their jobs? They sound like they know how they should sound but the last three days has demonstrated they have no goddamn idea how to do their job.

This whole time too I'm remembering back to when I had to call UPS about having them hold a package for me to pickup. I called the guy said "Ok, the package is being held. The center is at _______. The center is open until 8pm." I made this call AFTER 5pm (when the FedEx customer support 800 number stops working BTW) and I just drove up to the UPS center, stood in line for 5 minutes and got my CD.

That easy. Luckily I had only one more day to go...

Friday

So today I get up, shower, dress, go down to my car and at 7:27, before I even pull out of my parking spot I call FedEx. The guy says "Oh ok. Here, I'll put a hold on both of those... You might want to call later. Hopefully they will hold them there for you."

Hopefully? As this week has gone on the FedEx customer support guys have become less enthusiastic. Now they are telling me the signs are starting to look hopeless. Fucking great. Three days in a row I've had to abort my plans of leaving early (kind of f-ing up my afternoon workplans). Well today is the day. I've also decided to leave even earlier because who knows what could happen (a swarm of locusts could attack Clarendon and the whole Beltway could get shut down and the Undisclosed FedEx Bunker might get shut down early for fear of arachno-terrorism).

I'm also afraid that the directions I have are incorrect. Not only do they have me driving most of the way down Route 1 (a horrific overdeveloped old-line road) instead of the eight lane I-95, they don't seem to match ANY of the directions I find online.

For one the FedEx website is impossible to use. They give you three types of shops to search for: FedEx fully-staffed, self-service and Authorized ShipCenters. What they don't help you with are where the shipping centers are to actually pick up packages at.

So punching in Beltsville, MD into their locator, you get all these locations but not one that maches the address I got on Tuesday. I didn't like the sound of this. They had the address for one center so I decided to play it safe and call customer support (again. Fifth time this week discounting the one time I called after 5pm and they had all disappeared into the ether).

Now remember when I told you above that the LL Bean tracking number was wrong and I had to go through this whole elaborate process of giving the destination address and then my phone number and name as confirmation?

Heheheh.

Me: "Hello, I'd like to find out the location of a shipping center in Beltsville, MD because I scheduled a package to be held there for me."

Her: "Ok just give me the tracking number."

Me [on autopilot]: "Actually the tracking number I have here is incorrect."

Her: "Oh you need a tracking number. You won't be able to pick up the package without one. I can't help you." [Her tone was that of one who's next words where going to be "IsthereanythingelseIcanhelpyouwith?No?Goodbye."]

Me: "Huh? Actually every other time I've called this week I've been able to give you guys the address and you where able to find the package for me."

Her: "No I can't do that."

Me [thinking "WTF?"]: "Listen I have the note with the tracking numbers out in my car. I can't get it now. Actually I just need the address of the shipping center. I'm picking the package up in Beltsville, MD."

Her [exasparated that this call has gone on twice as long as it should]: "Ok what's the zip code?"

Me: *pause* "How would I know that?? I'm ASKING FOR THE ADDRESS! It's BELTSVILLE, MD! How many of these shipping centers could there be!"

Her [scolding]: "You need to have a zip code. I can't find the center without the zip-"

I hung up here. *ahem*

FUCK YOU YOU GODDAMN WORTHLESS CUNT! YOUR MOM SHOULD HAVE FUCKING SWALLOWED! THAT WAS HER FIRST FUCKING MISTAKE!! SINCE SHE DIDN'T SHE SHOULD HAVE GONE AFTER YOU WITH A FUCKING COATHANGER AND SOME CLOROX!! YOU ARE A FUCKING WORTHLESS TARD CUNT OF A PERSON AND ALL OF YOUR FUCKING FAMILY SHOULD ROT IN FUCKING HELL!! YOUR FATHER SHOULD HAVE EXPOSED YOU AS A FUCKING CHILD LIKE THE GODDAMN SPARTANS DID WHEN HORRIBLE RETARD CUNTS LIKE YOURSELF CRAWLED INTO THE FUCKING WORLD! JESUS FUCKING HATES YOUR BITCH ASS!!

Is THIS what passes for customer service? I spent a good hour and half this week on hold trying to meet a goddamn courier half way and pick up a package myself. Their fucking competitors know how to do it. Why can't they? And their answer is to then stock their customer service center with folks who's only job isn't to serve the customer but to find the quickest way to end the phone call?? Their suggestion for most of the week was to call and show up at this location and pray.

And that was the best part: I first went to the second place (because I distrusted the guy I talked to on Tuesday even less now) only to wait in line for one worker at this FedEx facility to say "Yeeeaahhh.. that's FedEx Home, 'k? That's over on Baltimore" and handing me back my packing note like it had SARS or some shit. So when I got to the first place, it was some huge poorly labeled building behind a Moter Vehicles Administration building. I had to park among all these trucks and walk across a muddy field into the one of two doors not labeled "EMPLOYEES ONLY". Luckily the one woman who worked there was really nice and I thanked her by telling her that she was the only nice person who I talked to all day. She was tired, it was Friday afternoon, and she didn't do anything outrageous; she just did the simple task of asking me what I wanted, doing it, telling me that she was doing it and doing the required amount to get the job done. "Here it is. I need to see some ID. Yep, that's you. Sign here. Thank you."

Was that so hard?

Of the eight people I met through my interactions of getting my rug one showed me the basic courtesy someone expects. That's 12.5%. That isn't even a good average in baseball. And I don't need anything. See, life in the 21st century is COMPLICATED. What should customer service be? LESS COMPLICATION. Make it so I don't have to jump through hoops (i.e. some gay automated customer service thing that I have to listen to five dozen options to), waste my time, and make me feel like I'm not the one keeping your company afloat. Less is more. I don't want small talk and coffeecake. That is just a hassle. Just get me my shit and let me go on with my life. Do that and you are doing killer.

But this? This was bullshit. Fuck FedEx. Bunch of cocksmoking dogfuckers. Somebody should rape them all with a broomhandle and hang their fucking disemboweled limbs from a fucking overpass.

*****

I feel better.

Caught a Bad One

Grime is dead, you can read about it in the news. Old, lying folded up in a suitcase at the side of the road. Only headless screams in memory telling of what tragedy happened here. I haven't come here to bury Grime. But I haven't come to say its eulogy either. The story I'm interested in is the one that seems to matter least: everything that existed outside of the music. It's because I think this story is important on the individual level. The story of Grime is a microcosm of music as a scene, as a place and as a body. Here and now.

A scene once was a local thing. But it was important and vital. A scene is more than just the artists but it is the whole audience, participating in creating a consensus gestalt. Scenes are what all music genres gestate out of. And while the artists give birth to the art, the scene is the midwife. These days, who participates and how has all changed. The life and times of Grime will let us dissect out those parts. From this cadaver we'll make discoveries.

So is Grime really really dead? Yes and no. Yes as an international phenomenon. Yes as a style that transends momentary fashion. Grime is a fad. So, no, Grime is still going to live on with all those guys who are like, so deep in it man, and like, will never give up the truth. And who knows. It might make a resurgence at some time. But then it'll still be an anachronism.

Since it is has no body and there are no vital signs, you have to read carefully to tell if something is truly, utterly done. The above article by Martin Clark is a perfect sample to get a pronouncement.

Clark can be seen as a classic rock critic: a failed musician. He'd probably call himself "unrecognized" but combine that with the usual rockist tendencies and you get a clear idea where he's coming from. Pitchfork picked him 'cause he's totally in the scene, you know? He's like down there in the fucking trenches.

The article basically breaks down the real flaw in Grime: it's one trick. It's all spastic hyperventilating gunfire sprees. The real question is what exactly makes it a genre instead of just a niche variation of all the other similar styles. I mean, take Hip-hop. We have the classic sort of 1977 Grandmaster Flash sound and soon it migrates out of NYC and forms these long distinct branches that feed back into each other now and then. Southern hip-hop had the Miami Bass sound and that migrated throughout Memphis and Atlanta and Houston to create what we have now. But through that, the Geto Boys were almost classically New York Kool G Rap in their stylings while Outkast had the similar stripes as contemporary West Coast artists on OutKast - Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. And of course Cee-Lo appeared on that as a guest and later went on to do funk as Cee-Lo Green and his Perfect Imperfections and now as Gnarls Barkley. While those might be the edges of the sound, the median too has changed. Crunk has now finally hit a wall (though Lil Jon is going to try his best to keep it alive by milking the Hyphy fad 'til he ghostrides his whip into a tree) and Snap was a infuriating one summer distraction. And all of that for a single regional dialect of a genre of music.

So how the heck did Grime cut itself off from the whole family of UK Urban sound? Shit, Clark's article lists off at least a half dozen: 2step revival, garage, half-step, jungle. All these DJ seem to have played them all. There was Ska which grew into Reggae and Roots were toasters became deejays and we had Dancehall and Tubby threw on some electronic riddims and there was Ragga and then the Amen got cut and speed up and we got Jungle which had our thoughts go to building our own mechanical rhythm in Drum and Bass which spawned out a dozen children including 2-Step and Garage and all of this. But Grime for some reason was positioned as being completely fucking new and seperate. Everyone told us (from the 3000 word articles in The Wire to the weekly slurps on PFM) that this was like when Juan Atkins took P-Funk and melded it with Kraftwerk. A whole shift of the paradigm. Now it's obvious that that wasn't the case. If the true believers are sniping about how "road" something is or isn't, it's an obvious last gasp as everyone in the article (the DJs, Clark himself) all point to Grime just being the most recent stop on a cycle. So what happened?

"GuuuuuuuGHHH!" aka Enjoying the Highlife

Two things: Anglo and Hipster Inferiority complexes. Specifically in reference to Black (American/Brit/Carribean) music which is being consumed by a White (American/British) audience. That whole Black-White thing is heavy here, specifically with all of the built in social and economic class distinctions. The general rockist (and therefore Indie Rock hipster) gripe is that mainstream music is fundamentally insencere, contrived, artificial, manipulated, and tasteless. Actually I think there is a more truthful reason as well: mainstream culture, taken as the only component of your diet, becomes boring. We all know how this conversation goes and how then non-mainstream subcultures are then ascribed all the noble features that mainstream culture is said to lack. [I've always found it odd how liquid the terms ascribed to the mainstream are, particularly "White" which may include (arbitrarily) East Asians, South Asians, gays, Blacks who are too bourgie. The history of "White" is quite interesting itself as you can place the specific time period were Germans in the US went from being thought to looting the dead after the San Francisco earthquake to "one of the good ones" and when Irish became in. "White" is a tool used by people for whatever means they see fit in the culture wars.]

The problem with being White then (and here I'm using it in the overloaded self-hating pejorative) is that you carry your culture with you. To observe a subculture, let alone participate, changes it. It ends up becoming more White by default. Either the word gets out, the the mainstream learns the recipe and the originators get pushed out of the market (appropriation) or the originators rise up and into the mainstream (assimilation). Either way the culture disappears, just becoming another feature in the flat gray landscape. This is all complicated by the cultures themselves having a love hate with the mainstream. They love the money and power it provides, but they know that those things derive from their uniqueness seperated from it. So they define mechanisms to counteract appropriation and assimilation: Selling Out, Nationalism, Authenticity.

That last one is the killer. That's what hipsters survive on. Their whole quest is to carve individualism from their inborn uniformity as average white boys from an average household in an average suburb. Authenticity is what they lack... that and talent. A normal person would just use their given talent to develop their own unique niche. A normal person seeks to have their name recognized for achievements. But that is one of those White things: the first steps to celebrity worship. No, hipsters seek a trait that gives them free pass.

In the case of Grime, Hipsters were smarting from the blowback of their embrace of Hip-Hop. Hipsters have always been at the periphery of Hip-hop. They weren't there during the genesis giving them that crucial foot in the door. Hip-Hop has used Black consciousness as a defense from appropriation. For every white guy in 3rd Bass there was a Vanilla Ice or Marky Mark and no matter how good Eminem was he could never be "Real Hip-Hop". And their embrace of the golden age, gangsta rap, and hardcore only seemed to come years after those artists were vital. The hipster who rocks a Tupac album now probably said "That woman beater got what he deserved" when he heard the man got shot. Hipsters could only approach Hip-Hop at arms length or historically. Even indie rap (all the post-Company Flow/Dr. Octagon varieties) began to hear jeers of delution... from hipsters themselves. The indie rock set has even gotten right up to the front of the bandwagon. They've gone out to endorse and laud all the latest generation trap MCs (Jeezy, the Clipse). It's just that the boat had already sailed on them having any deep part in the Hip-Hop discussion. Then came Grime.

The Anglo angle was slightly different. The Briton hipsters always seem to be looking for that next revolution to call their own. If the best argument some guys make is that they've taken what someone else came up with and made it better then, congratulations, you've just described a Honda Civic. Even the long chain from Ska can be said to be a Carribean thing. The British have attempted numerous invasions of artists and styles. They tried to package Drum and Bass for mainstream appeal (which, like many crossover attempts by underground genres, were subpar efforts), they then shipped over British hip-hop artists (Roots Manuva, the Big Dada set), then it was Garage and lady dynamite and whatever the hell The Streets is branded this week. They wanted that something that they could say "Hands off! This is ours!" It's one thing to be loved. It is something completely different to be lusted after. Then came Grime.

What Grime was... well. You play a Dizzee Rascal tune (most of which are pretty boss). You hear his cadence and voice and say "ahh it's British Hip-Hop". "No," they shoot back, "It's GRIME!" Ahh. Even the production sounds British. All that post-Ska drum structure. But, no, they tell you it isn't like that at all. It's something New (you get the same vibe from automobile companies when they release a new model year).

Now the odd thing was that I was probably the best hope Grime had in the US. Of all the people West of the Atlantic, I should have been on board. I for one like Hip-Hop. I like all sorts but definitely the harder DJ Premier/Wu-Tang Clan era NYC hardcore that Grime has a kinship. I actually even like some British Hip-hop. That first New Flesh For Old disc had a lot going for it (too bad their next two bit enough fat dick between them to get the scarlet P for 'Pederast' branded on their foreheads). I also like a lot of Reggae, Dub, Dancehall, Ragga, Jungle, IDM. Just two years ago I really loved the Doom Ragga stylings of Kevin Martin as The Bug and razor x productions when he merged his bass aesthetic with some of the best deejays around (Daddy Freddy, Cutty Ranks). So I heard these tunes and... I didn't get excited. Not that it was bad. It just didn't have enough intangibles (good enough, different enough) to get me out and listening to more.

But it didn't stop. The hipster media was in full evangelical mode. Spreads, singles, interviews. The whole run. They were advocating out the ass... but why?

You could tell part of this was happening in the background because of all the calls for Instant History. Hipsters (Anglo and American) looove instant history. Albums aren't just great, they're Decade Defining, Socially Impactful. Now how you tell this weeks after its release date I have no idea. How you can reasonably differentiate the feeling you get from listening to something important versus something that you like because it just feels good... mmmm. Especially since most folks would just like an honest review. If this was the first record you got high too and you spent the next three hours teasing your then-girlfriend's muff with your tongue... shit baby, preach. But it goes back to that same psychological need for authenticity: something that will stand unchanged through time.

There is another name for Instant History: Hype. And the hallmarks of hype are obvious. All critiques become openings for ad hominem attacks. And all this instant histroy does is create fads that burn out within years of starting (years if you're lucky. Most fads don't survive flash to bang between taking the photograph and it appearing on page four in the Sunday New York Times Style section). All the message boards threads turned pretty quickly. They all started off with some overheate rhetoric ("Grime is better than any US hip-hop coming out right now") and went downhill from there. Folks were missionaries. They had a duty to bring the word to the world.

And that's when you saw it: confusing the message with the messanger. They finally had what they wanted. They were important. They were there. They were at the murder of Julius Caesar, at the Last Supper, at the one show the Sex Pistols played in Manchester. They could go back in their dark rooms and fellate each other about how they were all here at this important moment in history. Pitchfork created the above Month in Grime/Dubstep to put it on par with its monthly Techno (just a generic 'Electronica' bit) and Dancehall (with some Jungle) features.

But nobody cared. Worse... for all the hype, there was no traction. PFM went out and gave Wiley's debut a ridiculously high score. By the end of the year, the album didn't even make it onto their 50 Best of 2005 list even though lesser ranked albums did. Lady Sovereign got crazy hype with the hoopla of her spitting acappella for S. Carter and him signing her on the spot. But then she did weak shows, released a string of *eh* tracks and folks in the states wondered if they really wanted to pay to hear a female version of K-Fed? Clark's article then basically charts the rest of the tragectory. More albums came out to mixed reviews. No one cared. Roll Deep tried to crossover with mixed results. Months later the acolytes would talk about how it was compromised as if somehow that unholy White patriarchal culture had gotten inside and set about to rot. Now this month both Clark and the Wire have talked nostalgically about Dubstep and the magic of those old tunes while reflecting on the sputtering status of Grime. Everything old is new again.

The odd thing is that it didn't need to all happen this way. Scenes once were these slow cook things. The Internet has sped up the delta on these things for both good and bad. Scenes once required a certain internal gravity. The artist can't escape the audience, yes, but it too needs those acolytes and hype men. Music is itself inert. It needs a host to propogate. Someone needs to play it, someone needs to take it on tour, spin it in a club, talk about it, write about it, dance to it. Music needs a person to give it expression. Like an organism, technology has affected how quickly it can spread. But that too can be a mixed blessing. It can spread itself too thin too quickly and die out, limping along in small pockets of the world.

Now that happened in the old days too. Every where there were and are scenes, most you will never hear of, most which will evaporate at the end of the school year, most not really that good. Now though the mainstream culture is much more pervasive. There are no longer the persistent islands of youth as there once were to feed all the components of a scene. Everyone is supposed to go out and on demand their readymade styles and fashions. All compete against the Leviathan.

These are horrible days to be alive. But this is our address; we don't live anywhere else. Maybe Grime wouldn't have survived 10 years ago. Or maybe it would have. The threat is always trying to cash in on value when you should be investing in growth. It's really hard to tell people that. Scenes are individuals. You put money in front of someone's face, a lot of it that they won't make anywhere else, there's no reason to think they won't accept it. It might be impossible to ever keep a scene from going public before its prime. But the bullshit instant history talk that swirled Katrina-like around Grime did something far worse: it got intended consumers snakebit and distrustful. Once you lose someone's trust it's twice as hard to get them back to being objective. Folks have pretty good bullshit detectors these days and heaping it on can lose you the fight before it starts. Shit, Kevin Martin has talked of doing some singles of his production with Grime MCs over it. I'll buy that shit no question. Why? Because I've got a vested interest with the guy. I'm not going to pretend that I discover everything organically. But the avenues are open and I can chose my own way in. That's how all great things come to pass. Some just faster than others. Given enough injection of talent and skill, a scene will get its props. Maybe it won't go multi-platinum and headline the MTV Awards this year but it will keep the releases out of the PC trash can. I admit that all the heavy breathing turned me off something fierce to the music, like a bunch of Van Dutch hats and PBRs. Scenesters are kryptonite. Things are like that. Not everyone is skilled at the soft sell. We're not asking for hours of foreplay but at least don't think we'll throw up skirts and bend over a parkbench at a moment's notice. But we are always keen to anthropomorphize, ascribing our need to be loved onto something. As hard as you pray, music won't love you back.

So this is probably my one of only a few Cleveland Browns entries this year. It just is too much of a soulkilling occupation to have to write about a team that breaks your heart all the time. Last year I decided to try my George Costanza: do the exact opposite as every instinct I have is wrong. Sure, the Cleveland Browns still only had a 6-10 campaign but *shrugs* at least then I could drown my sorrows instead of reliving each aggravating loss.

Well, for the Bees the preseason ended ignominiously: they got shellaced by the Bears and it wasn't even a fight. Crennel was furious and he should be. For a team trying to show that it has altered its fundamental culture, going out and playing to not get injured was a weak move. Winning is the salve for all ills in sports. Heck, look what it did to the Bengals and the previously hapless-in-the-post-season Patriots. If the Bees go out in the 2006 season with a string of wins then that momentum will carry them and build their character (it's really hard to be a dick when everyone is winning and doing their job). But does anyone see them going out to a 4-1 start? Heh. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Defense (Dem Bees)

I love Chad Johnson. He's everything that old man TO will look back on and wish he was (cue Neil Young's "Old Man"). Chad is everything the NFL is: entertainment and technical ability. He's clutch, he's a gamebreaker... while also being a great teammate and while revving up the Tuesday through Saturday conversation by adding a really goodnatured glee to the game. None of his game is a petty thug staredown. He's the guy you always want at your party because he makes everyone feel three times better (his teammates, his opponents, the fans). Like Clinton Portis and all of his media-day disguises.

And even last year when he had his hitlist on CBs he was going to burn, he still not only gave the Browns the best nickname in the league (Bees thats Orange in reference to their secondary swarming around) he also gave props to Leigh Bodden as the only CB who shut him down last year.

Now I agree with Gregg Easterbrook about the misleading statistics of defenses. Last year the Bees where top in passing defense... and that was because teams where ahead and where burning the clock by running. Of course I wouldn't even put that up to why the Browns had a horrible running D. Their run defense sucked on a general level. Third string rookies could bust out three digits on them. They could never get into the opposing backfield. Now things weren't horrific: the Bees had one of the best red zone defenses in the L. How that happened? I dunno. Usually a bad defense can be killed within the 20 by play action to the slot or TE. But that didn't happen. The Bees defense always seemed to keep the team within the game. Maybe it was them just learning the 3-4 or maybe the lack of appropriate talent.

Well Phil Savage went out to fix that. And before I continue, let me just say that the future legacy of the Browns might have its emotional turn when owner Randy Lerner agreed to stand with the football man (Savage) and not the parasite (Collins). In the movie this is where they have all that high tension music and everyone is all *eeh-eeh-eeh!* and then you have the big payoff and the scene from the press conference and cheering.

Savage paid off by big FA signings of Ted Washington and Willie McGinest. Those two answer the two big needs of the 3-4 defense: run stopping at the line by the DL setting up penetration by active LBs. The LB is the high value asset on the defense. Everything hinges on their performance. Last year the Browns had no veteran brain. Now with McGinest, Crennel has someone to coach up the LB standouts Andra Davis and Chaun Thompson as well as the first two draftees this year, Kameron Wimbley and D'Qwell Jackson. That both Wimbley and Jackson are possible opening day starters speaks to Savage talent appraisal abilities. Wimbley looks like whoa. Against the Bears Wimbley was the only man who seemed to care and did everything: two QB pressures, chasing down WRs from behind. The guy is one of those new freaky LBs: size and speed. The problem is always rookie mistakes. Jackson and Sean Jones bit on pump fakes and other tomfoolery giving up big games. But, again, that's where veterans come in: they demand an excellence that depends on smart play.

Washington does what he does: be big and massive and eat up blockers. That's what he does. And that frees up everyone else to freelance. Running up the gut for 6 isn't the automatic move for opponents.

Now comes the question of the secondary. Leigh Bodden is Leigh but Gary Baxter (one of last year's big acquisitions) is once again injured. Really, who thought that pectoral and arm injuries where so big to CBs? Complicating things was Daylon McCutcheon also being out. Bodden, Baxter and Cutch is a good 1-2 and nickel. But they haven't played together for any length of time. It also seems that Sean Jones and Brodney Poole are coming along as the safeties. Their maturation seems a little slower. Back in the day their growth would have bene par but in this Free Agency era, waiting three years on a position player is about the limit. My hope is that this puts a fire under their ass.

Overall, I like this D. There are a few questions here and there but there is both veteran presence and some really scary talent in there. Given enough games together (read: no big injuries as depth is also a question. Who will back up Ted Washington? Mmmm...) they might congeal into a really killer unit. Shit, I'd love to see the Bees running in and out opposing backfields. At least this offseason no undrafted rookie racked up 80 yards on the ground.

Offense (Supersized)

So the other side of the ball? Well the Football Gods saw it again to have a great humorous account by having local Ohio product... Cleveland... then Ohio State... Pro Bowl... and he went out in the FIRST play of the FIRST no-pads scrimmage in training camp... ahhhh.

Thanks.

Then the Bees got a Center who "retired" out of nowhere and replaced him with a Center who got busted by the NFL drug program and has to sit four games. So they're working on their fourth Center in a year when they thought they made a long-term investment at the position. And the pickup of Schaffer was smart but against the Bears the first team O-line played together for the first time and did absolutely nothing.

*sigh* Of all the positions you need consistency and comfort between the players it's the line. And on that hinges the entire Offense.

The backs are the only thing with any certainty to it. Reuben luckily avoided a court date. And Terrelle Smith is the boss. Finally the off-tempo back was answered by Jerome Harrison. Along with Wimbley, Harrison will surprise folks this year. The guy is a beast. Every preseason game he picked up 80 all-purpose yards like it was no problem. They just seemed to drop him in and he got his touches and got yards. But since he was an all-time back in a West Coast school not named USC he fell to the later rounds. This kid will make noise.

And might be one of the few bright spots on that side. 'Cause everything else is questions. Will Braylon Edwards continue from where he left off last season? Where will Kellen Winslow be? Will fucking Maurice Carthon get all these kids in on the action or is it going to get in the way of his full sex change operation? The biggest Q in on Charlie Frye. When the O-line was hardy and the RBs set, having a green QB seemed to be OK. They got in Joe Jurevicus to be the sure-thing wideout. But now Charlie's going to have to play smart. To the right check downs. Avoid the sacks. Don't try to win the game single-handedly but his single best feature is his way to make something out of a broken play. Frye needs to swing out, work with his skill posession players. He seems to be doing everything right (is beloved, a leader in the huddle) but the production on the field hasn't been there. I think this offense is too liquid. If hit square in the mouth they might take five quarters to get into a rhythm. That's how games are lost.

Special Forces er... Teams

After the mistake of letting Gardocki go and then picking up 8-Yards Frost, Savage picked up Rocketman Zastudil. Dawson is still pretty clutch. Of course he won't hear the end of the grief because he gets blamed for not going 4-4 in a game when the real fault lies with the offense not getting beyond the opposing 30 yard line (which may continue this year).

Also, ex-Kent State QB Joshua Cribbs is becoming an all-purpose player. Extending his great kick-off return work he's taken to the WR position. I guess everyone needs a slash-player now (Mr Punt/Pass/Kick). The kid might be the real deal.

The Season Breakdown

But will any of this save them? My best hope is that the Browns are like the Bears last year (suck offense with above average running game and a good defense. A congealed defense versus the still-in-progress defense is the real killer) but then the Bears where helped out by living in the cheesecake NFC North (where I think a MAC school went 8-8). That they lead Steve Smith put the wood to them spoke to the lie within the W-L statistic. Quantity gets you into the postseason but Quality gets you to the titlegame. The AFCN is no pushover division. Actually I think they might be the toughest outside the NFC South. Let's look at the schedule:

Sunday, September 10 NEW ORLEANS SAINTS
Sunday, September 17 @ Cincinnati Bengals
Sunday, September 24 BALTIMORE RAVENS
Sunday, October 1 @ Oakland Raiders
Sunday, October 8 @ Carolina Panthers
Sunday, October 15 Bye Week
Sunday, October 22 DENVER BRONCOS
Sunday, October 29 NEW YORK JETS
Sunday, November 5 @ San Diego Chargers
Sunday, November 12 @ Atlanta Falcons
Sunday, November 19 PITTSBURGH STEELERS
Sunday, November 26 CINCINNATI BENGALS
Sunday, December 3 KANSAS CITY CHIEFS
Thursday, December 7 @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Sunday, December 17 @ Baltimore Ravens
Sunday, December 24 TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS
Sunday, December 31 @ Houston Texans

I think the Bees will steal one from either the Steelers or the Bengals. It seems every year one of them gives them just enough rope to hang around and take the W. I also think that, even with the inclusion of McNair, the Bees will get one from the Ravens. And although that sounds like a tall order, remember, that's going 2-4 in the conference.

Stratifying the teams, the Bucs, Broncos and Panthers are all almost assured L's (real squads that guile teams that aren't up to the level. They slobber over playing the Browns. A win in Cleveland could turn into homefield advantage). That's three losses (running tally is 2-7).

The Chargers and Chiefs are two teams that still have so many pieces but some big defections (Brees and Roaf respectively) that might be more of a hinderance than pundits are giving credit for. I still see the Bees just getting blown out by the offensive power of these two. The Chargers have a better D too. I'd put them in the top group if it wasn't for the questionmarks around Rivers. Two more losses (2-9).

The Falcons have been exposed. Mora's going to get Vick mobile this year (mostly because it means his job) but Vick hasn't shown the growth into the QB position. Good LBs kill them every time. The Texans are getting waayy too much dap. WTF THEY HAVE NO RBS!! No Davis and no Reggie Bush. Marvin might be a fine DE but who cares when the rest of the defense is crap? They would be in the running for the most overhyped team if it wasn't for people overrating what the Dolphins did last year and Arizona did this year (two classic teams of analysts saying "you know the _______ could make some noise this year" and they go on to lose 10 games while having three players who put up nice numbers). These are fantasy football teams: great on paper, great statistics but no heart, no guile and that sums up to no W's. Everyone always discounts these sort of teams losing all those little players who keep the wheels from falling off. I'd say the Raiders are the same except they have Randy Moss, LaMont Jordan and fifty thousand scrubs. If you're calling Aaron Brooks savior, you are in trouble. These seem to be battles of head coaches and I'd take Romeo against any of these characters (even the great Art Shell who is in the first year of a looonng project).

So adding on the Jets and the Aints, the Bees could go 7-9... but that won't happen because Cleveland always seems to give away one of these games (one of those PAINFUL experiences where each team is trying to give the game away and the commentators and fans are just dumbstruck looking at this bullshit. It's where no one cares. It's a goddamn Benny Hill sketch. Last year it was the Texans game, the year before that was against the Fins).

So that is 6-10. Now some moron would say "well that's what they did last year! They're just spinning their wheels!" To which I would throw that asshole on a fire. See, real teams do one thing more than anything:

They never lose to teams worse than them.

There are no dumb losses. Dumb loses tell you the 9-7 teams to bet against in the first round. Teams that are always game faces and only lose to bad teams when God Himself curses them (i.e. insane injuries, implausible plays).

The Bees going 6-10 this year would require them to beat all teams within their same weightclass and below. That's the crawling that comes before walking. If they maybe lose the game to the Jets but then take one from Carolina or Denver (flying east and down to sealevel) or KC (lakeshore in December) and keep others close. Well then your in the enviable position of being one of those feisty teams that no one wants to play and casual fans don't know. The teams with the chip on their shoulder that takes them to the title game next year. The Bees can have that if they start playing consistently. The defense is clearly ahead of the offense (as they've already had a year in the 3-4 scheme with only veterans and smart rookies coming in). And I just don't trust Carthon to use his skill players. But Reuben and Harrison can probably team up to make any game interesting. If Braylon catches on fire or if Frye keeps on finding KW2 for 12 yards...

The Browns won't be in the playoffs. They will probably be sub .500. But they will be worth watching. And maybe worth writing about before a January autopsy. And that has me excited.

It's Fall in America. Sundays and apple pie and pigskin.

King of the Streets

So we are now over two months into the Sans Roger Ebert Era. He went in for some post-cancer work, they found something not quite right and he's been hospitalized/bed-ridden since. At some point he'll be ambulatory. At some point he will be back writing again, then on television then out at festivals. I suspect his hope is to make it to Toronto.

What this period has given us is the true sense of how lacking we are in great cinema voices. Film is different than music. Music is aided but does not need Lester Bangs. Why? Spend five minutes and you have listened to a song. Spend a half an hour doing something else, the music in the background (driving, cleaning, doing sinful things to your body over... and over) and you can have an artist's work encapsulated. Now do you know the whole sum of his work? Can you speak profoundly, deeply as you do of things most cherished? No. But you have the inkling of what it is and if you would bump it again.

Movie's aren't that way. They are a long form. Like books, casual users don't have the luxury to spend plowing through every last movie on the planet. The time to go to a theater and see every multiplex offering. To catch them when *oops!* they're off the screen and now you get to wait four months for it to pop up on DVD (or, ahem, just happen to fish it off of some sort of mutual-exchange network). You can't take Shawshank and summarize it with ten 30 second snippets. It don't work.

So we need critics. Someone to inform us. And, man... far far in the future, when we are done of Roger Ebert... the days look black.

The folks running RogerEbert.com where so nice to point out some of Ebert's favorite critics but just reading those who've stood in for him? *shudder* Watch the show. Roeper's as plastic as ever. The rotating wall of guests is even worse. Jay Leno? Kevin Smith?

Now leading up to Roger's absence I had begun reading the Scanners Blog, the Blog of Ebert's Editor, Jim Emerson. I guess he ran some site before showing up there, does a little more Hollywood high school drama talk, and had worked with Microsoft on some cinema product they once had. It's kind of interesting. He was mentioned on Colbert (if that means anything to any of you). He's doing this "Opening Shots" series of movies. Kind of an interesting idea. Most folks would be hard pressed to tell you what the opening shot of their favorite movie is (mine is easy. It's Nic Cage getting thrown in front of a police photography wall). Something to pass the time between Roger's new reviews on Fridays, his random interviews and Sunday where he either does a Great Movie or the Movie Answer Man.

With Roger gone, Emerson has taken over some of Ebert's reviews on Friday. And they are... hmmm. Let's come back to that.

Reading is for Fuckos

A couple of days ago, Emerson posted an entry about the "Death of Film Criticism". Now there's a lot of this going around, most of the same "Post Crisis on Infinite Eberts" alternative storyline we are living in right now. The whole post starts off by laughing at the stat that "among 18- to 24-year-olds, only 3% said reviews were the most important factor in their movie-going decision making." Emerson makes the good point about how that is a straw man as it doesn't A. make reference to 'is 3% up or down?' and B. where does criticism rank as the second or third and averaged overall? It is quite possible that the #1 factor for most people is what their friends say while criticism turns out to be #2 by like 84%. Who knows. Like all statistics in vacuum, they get sucked into the ether. Emerson then theorizes about how people actually use film criticism. It seems that most people use it post hoc: going back and getting a reading on a movie they just watched. He then goes even further to say that most people who really really read reviews are a more select group who not only love movies (as everyone is a "big movie fan") but love them so much that they want to read about them, discuss them and persue other insights. So that's fine-

But Emerson continues on, and on (into a second long rambling entry) and after a point my eyes start glazing over and my mind starts drifting and I realize:

I don't like this guy's fucking writing.

And then I realize something more:

I really don't read the reviews he writes.

And then a third thought came to me:

This guy doesn't seem to realize where is paycheck comes from.

Now, granted, there is a film literature culture out there. People who like to talk about mis-en-scene, diegetic v. nondiegetic and all sorts of shit. These are the high dialogue people. Meanwhile there is also the bulk of folks who go and watch movies. So let me throw out a question out there:

Which one of those two groups will write to a film critic (say, Roger Ebert) forcing his editor to review them (say, a Jim Emerson type)?

Probably the first, right? Unless the critic says something that riles up the mainstream reader (say like some statement they think is insulting or inflammatory), the mainstream reader probably will read the critics reviews and return the words with silence. Of course, this is just hypothesizing. It is as plausible as Emerson's theory of "only film buffs really read reviews" and until someone actually goes out and does a scientific survey, we are basically pissing right into the wind. But my theory at least explains why Emerson, as Ebert's editor, might have said bias based upon who writes and who doesn't.

But I think the numbers bear out that a lot more people than just the film buffs read Ebert, mostly because so much of Ebert's output is... well, pedestrian. Anyone ever pick up Ebert's big fat books of reviews? Sort of basic. They aren't Leonard Maltin's regurgitation of marketing but they aren't piercing analysis... the sort of piercing analysis a film fan would want. Hmmm, looking at my bags and bags of books on my office floor (note: must hit up IKEA for some Billy bookshelves here soon) I see two dozen film books and not one Ebert book. Even Ebert's Great Movies books I don't have. For one, I can read them online at any time. But more importantly if I want to read about the works of Scorsese I'm going to get a big fucking book on Scorsese. I'm probably going to get three, each with a different angle (say one that is all interviews or one that is written by a psychotic Hungarian mute). Ebert distills whatever he has to say about a movie into 800 words. A film fan is going to want more.

But wait, I said that I read his Great Movie reviews every Sunday, right? So why do I do that?

How Ebert Works, In a Deeply Technical Way (With Graphics)

Well, because there is a difference in this world between the thing call Analysis and the thing called Opinion. And that is the crux that is hidden between all these talk of "what the fuck is a Film Critic?"

Frankly, depending on who you ask, a Film Critic is can either be an Analyst or the Opinionated. And we all know this. We can list off film critics and comfortably push them as being more predominantly in either camp:

The Analysts (who seem to stem from a film criticism pedigree and approach each movie as if part of the great pantheon of Cinema): Dargis, A O Scott, Elvis Mitchell, Roeper, Maltin.

The Opinion-Givers (who are your standard internet/fanboy types who view everything from the scope of being huge geeks on stuff and derive their view of every movie through the spectrum of their own self-viewed movie mythos): Harry Knowles, Kevin Smith.

And this isn't some black and white thing. Everybody has a bit of both objective and subjective in them. But usually what you get is a dose of one or the other. A lot of the film geek sites (say, Filmthreat) will write a review arbitrarily analytically or subjectively. Shit, most alternoweekly reviews are the same way. Usually it is something that a guy is pissing his boot-cuts to talk about or he just wants to use it to flex what he learned in Film 201 last week. That's usually worse. You got no idea what you're getting when you click the link. It's film review via Dr Jekyll and Mr Dumbass.

This is where the genius of Roger Ebert lies: he always writes as a dialectic. Ok, you know he's got the long tooth film criticsm chops. But he wasn't trained in film criticsm. He's got his degree in Literature with experience in Journalism. He was only going to get a doctorate in Film when the Sun-Times critic job opened up.

So we have a Schrodinger's Cat: Ebert is both deep within the film world (30-40 years writing, books, television) and yet an outsider. He's a literate fanboy. And that's what we get from his writing. The fact he has an English and Journalism background just aids him in the task he has at hand: conveying what he thought of a movie.

Coming back to the idea of him being a dialectic, Ebert's reviews always come out as a synthesis between the antithetical Analytical and Opinionated components. You can hear them both between the lines, fighting it out. He only pens who, this time, comes out on top.

So if a movie strikes him as being really well made... but some technical thing sticks out to him? He'll write and grade it on that. However if he sees a movie as a turd... but it has something redeeming, he'll write that too. He'll tell you if he was surprised, underwhelmed, blown away. He'll tell you if he spent his time thinking of something else or if a note was struck in him and it went back to something else that he had read a long while ago... You can read Ebert and the words are inescapably his.

Now he's momentarily out of the picture, and we can see that such writing in movies is a rare rare thing.

What Happened?

Maybe he's just an old salt and doesn't give a damn but... shit, most of the writing out there seems so... desperate. Who wrote this and why? No, no, get off my leg and just leave me alone. I don't want to love you. I'll never love you, not as long as you keep trying to force me to play these insipid games.

Let me give you an example and we'll go back to Jim Emerson's fill-in reviews, specifically his review of Factotum . He didn't like it. But he gave it the weakest sort of star rating: 2.5. That's the bare minimum rating to get a thumbs up on At the Movies. WTF? Grow a goddamn pair!

Of course it will take you to the third to last paragraph to start to get anything other than a basic plot-for-plot reading of the movie. Up until that point Emerson just kind of goes on about what goes on in the movie and who is in it and how they are all kind of good actors and, oh yeah... I didn't like it.

Wha? 800 words and that's it? Talk about the most pitiful missionary thrusting. You could at least eat us out a little bit before rolling off and going to sleep. Too much needless foreplay. We only have 800 words and they have to count.

And for... Bukowski? Shit... ok, here, let me show you how to purr her engine:

Factotum: it's an adaptation of the Charles Bukowski collection of the same name. You know Bukowski right? Bukowski was a slob, scarred by hideous adolescent acne... went from shit job to shit job, drank in dive bars, fucked ugly women, bet too much, lived in the heat and desolation of urban pity... and wrote some of the most beautiful words about it. Ham on Rye, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. Bukowski was the best poet of the second half of the century. He talked about banging gash, horrible luck, the victories only a drunk could celebrate 'cause that was the only light that shown into that damned world. Bukowski. My favorite Bukowski, called "Dog":

a single dog
walking alone on a hot sidewalk of
summer
appears to have the power
of ten thousand gods.
 
why is this?

See, Emerson? That's how you explain to people why they would make a fucking movie about some drunk-ass poet. You then tell them that Mickey Rourke's film career pivoted on him playing Bukowski in Barfly. You tell them that Bukowski hated it (because Bukowski never got women like Faye Dunaway) and so he wrote about it, in Hollywood. You talk about the fantastic Bukowski documentary Born into This. Shit, you LINK to the FOUR STAR REVIEW of that documentary by THE VERY CRITIC WHO'S AEGIS YOU ARE WRITING UNDER!!!

People make movies about writers and poets because of some fundamental hunger those artists sate in them and others. You give those unfamiliar those words so that they too might be intrigued. How they might go in naked and yet come out fed and clothed. Art sometimes accomplishes that.

But Emerson don't read. Ok, maybe he "does". He might look at books and capture some of their knowledge. But there seems no wisdom. Even if forced to read Bukowski you take that bit away as to, theoretically, why someone would read it. But Emerson doesn't do that. Ebert does. Shit, go read his reviews of Sylvia or The Rules of Attraction . Ebert is a man of letters. He has a life outside of movies, before movies.

Emerson is just a film dork, as all those Analysts and Opinionated are too. And that means he has nothing to say about a movie about a poet.

Until the end: "How many people still read Bukowski in their 30s, 40s and beyond?"

Are you a goddamn bitch? Especially when following it with this sentence: "I sometimes imagine him as a case of arrested development -- as if the Tom Waits of the '70s, who made boozy atmospheric records like 'Closing Time,' 'Nighthawks at the Diner' and 'Small Change,' had never developed the richer, more mature and poetic music of 'Rain Dogs,' 'Alice' and 'Blood Money.'"

Again, did you see Born into This ? In that movie Tom Waits talks about how important Bukowski was and still is to him and reads some of his favorite pieces. Tom Waits... 57 at the time of filming Born into This.

Emerson fundamentally misses any sort of connection between Bukowski and Tom Waits. And he fundamentally misses the mark as to why anyone would read a movie review.

The Home Stretch

The worst sort of information you can get is that which someone thinks you "want to hear". The worst author is one who writes to appease an audience. It might not be his audience but some golden ring of an audience that he pines for.

Analysts... Opinionated all write what people want to hear. The Analysts write to preserve the canon of the Great Film Pantheon. They watch a movie, they are supposed to give an instant analysis as to where in the great scheme of moviedom it belongs. Of course like all hipsters, this leaves them unable to distinguish between fads and truly unique art. The subjective are just as bad, only they try to do it for the basic political clout of their get and genus. TEH STREETS IZ WATCHIN! and all that fake posturing white rapboy talk. They are often the victims of genre and expectations similar but different than those previous more academic types.

Rereading Emerson's review of Factotum you can see how he fails in both aspects. He writes from the start about the movie in rote humble tones. He gives you the movie as it is. He tells you that Matt Dillon is a good actor. We know he is a good actor because the Academy said so. We ignore the fact he is a wooden robot who has been boring and generic in everything that he's done. Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei are given two sentences. The words: positive... but uncommited. Emerson gives us the nod to Bukowski but his heart isn't in it.

At the end he drops that bit about "How many still read..." and Tom Waits. You can feel the fucking wink-wink-nudge-nudge coming at you. No one really likes this stuff. Don't worry, I can namecheck Tom Waits (wherever that came from) and Burroughs. Of course he doesn't mention one thing that isn't related by one degree from a movie (Burrough's Naked Lunch and Tom Waits is knee-deep in Jim Jarmusch movies as an actor and orchestrator). Frankly, that reading and listening sounds like the reading and listening you do because you saw the movie first. One degree of seperation. Outside the walls of cinema... there is no interest.

So his writing is flat and childish and stupid and, most of all, derivative. And now I understand why I couldn't finish his two part Death of Film Criticsm journal. It is derivative and boring. Reading it and I get the mistaken sense of deja vu. There is humanity there, but it isn't his. No, he's regurgitating some other authors past and cobbled them together like some run around the Turing Test.

And that is why Film Criticism in the mainstream suffers. I wouldn't call up Jim Emerson to find out what he thought about a movie because he's got no goddamn opinion worth anything. Either you're going to get some hacked together film crit spiel or some doggy blogsphere trill. Hang up the phone, no words; there is white static at the other end. Recombining the parts of other people only makes you Frankenstein's monster, not a whole new person. People like this are an absence. Everywhere, they are unstoppable, a great sea of nothing. It is pollution, spilling up, outwards. It tastes like a narcotic: flavorless, chalky, as asprin does. You only want to sleep, sleep. Death and sleep. It's all there is. Echoes of great glaciers once that came down from the North.

We kill for souls, for others, for them to understand us. For understanding, we kill for. That's how it is, to be at sea- drifting. You dip your hand down into the water and drink it. But it does not fortify you. Your spirit rejects it. There is no nourishment, damn whatever they say.

And we don't demand that we are siblings with critics. I don't want them to tell me my opinion. I'm damn fine with the fact that Ebert likes movies made in Chicago or anime. It is because that is his shape. I recognize it. I can look at a movie and look at what he says about it. Great strings tie them together, strings tie us all to them. I can read his review, have him say he loved it, and make damn sure I won't see it. I fucking hate Paul Haggis. Ebert jizzing about Haggis' effect is a strong propholactic against me making the mistake of throwing down hard earned cash. I can see his spirit wrestling with the movie the same way I watch my friends wrestle with them.

That's why we read critics: for a known quantity. A known quantity with a touch of expertise. So he might not like Frat Pack movies. I don't care. But if he gives one a good review... aren't you the bit curious why?

There: the horizon. Ships.

Bruno Kirby, a veteran character actor known for playing the best friend in two of Billy Crystal's biggest comedies "When Harry Met Sally" and "City Slickers," has died. He was 57.

Damn... turns out he just got diagnosed with Leukemia. Really, the guy was on this season of Entourage! He was still out there grinding!

I think Bruno Kirby was up there with a lot of the other great "That Guy" actors like Christopher McDonald (Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore). Not only was he great in the above mentioned movies but he brought stuff to the table in movies like Donnie Brasco (where he was Pacino's buddy who they wrongly killed for thinking he was an informant) or Good Morning, Vietnam (where he played a wang to a T).

Of course the role I'll remember him most for was as the Young Clemenza in The Godfather II. That scene where he "pays back" young Vito by going over to his "friend's" house and stealing the rug? Classic. Of course the best way to see it is in The Godfather Saga, the merging of the first two movies in chronological order. You get a couple extra scenes not in the theatrical releases of the first two movies, one of which is a great sequence of the Young Clemenza selling the dresses he and Vito nicked. Clemenza's selling them the old fashioned way: door to door. Of course he runs into a fille and without any money he makes her an offer she can't refuse. Ahh, classic.

Anyway, a toast: we are worse with him gone; we are better for having him.

Help spread the word by sending out personalized messages of Samuel L. Jackson demanding that you, yes you, should go see SNAKES ON A PLANE . Phonespam all your friends! We are just two weeks away from the reckoning!!!

Shoot me. Shoot me right in the goddamn face. I guess the Browns are going to beat out the Indians for breaking my heart: at least the Indians wait until the season to crush my hopes.

Reading back to Ian McShane, before this season of Deadwood on HBO, who was interviewed by the New York Times Arts & Leisure section, on how the dialogue in the show is so strange because where it was common in the period to speak with a single inversion in a sentence, David Milich is inclined to layer two or three inversions in a sentence.

Not that it was easy to read. But there's a reason why we sometimes invert normal sentence structure. A normal sentence:
[Subject] [Verb] [Object]
And an inverted sentence:
[Object] [Verb] [Subject]
or
[Verb] [Subject] [Object]
or
[Verb] [Object] [Subject]
The whole hallmark is that the Subject comes after the Verb it is operating on the Object with. The idea is that it gives emphasis to the Subject instead of to the Object. We could call this Yoda-ism... if sucking the last three Star Wars movies did not do.

In the last few months we've gotten a slight uptick in possible Portishead news with such things as getting hat-tipped by Dangermouse in the New York Times, then Portishead (or whoever is masquerading as them on Myspace) shitting on said DM for being a hack (laffs all 'round), and faked ads. Just short of a decade we might actually have a third Portishead disc in our hands at some point here. And that they've held up for so long, with so little visibility while other peer acts have risen up and burnt out... it's pretty damn impressive.

And something notable about Portishead lyrics is that they often use sentence inversion for extensively and to good effect (and, yes, this is just a good excuse to link to some video).

Portishead "All Mine"

Let us consider "All Mine", probably the most simple use of inversion. The chorus goes:

"All Mine, You Have to Be"

Which we could return to the simplified sentence form as

"You have to be all mine"

Reading either out you can feel the air get sucked out of it when returned to just the basic sentiment. But what is interesting is how both versions are about possession and the necessity of said possession but the inverted form is exponentially more powerful. This comes from the comma seperating the two clauses and Beth singing each with equal emphasis so that our expectation is that the "All Mine" would stand alone as a bit of pop chorus sloganeering. However, by actually having it dependent on the "You have to be" it sort of corrupts the purity of the notion. It's the kind of thing you'd expect from a psycho ex: they'd speak, and it would sound passably human... yet you got the idea that something was lurking within it... that it was a show... and then they'd drop this little qualifier on there and all the warning flags would go off.

Portishead "Wandering Star"

And that's the genius of the lyric. Another example is "Wandering Star" (my personal favorite):

"Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved, the blackness of darkness forever"

Which can be unwound to:

"The blackness of darkness is reserved for wandering stars forever"

Here the structure is more complex with an additional prepositional phrase (the "for...") and, when inverted, the subject kind of plops down within it (bookended by the adverb "forever"). It's a bit labyrinthine but this too works as it sort of feels like the idea is uncoiling as it is sung. It isn't just declared. It's brought up piecemeal and then fused at the end (btw, I dig the variation Portishead throws into "Wandering Star" in the video above... it ain't acoustic as the poster says but it is still damn boss).

"Sour Times" has a likewise different feel. It's chorus goes:

"'Cause nobody loves me, it's true, not like you do"

This (at first) doesn't seem to be an inversion and that's the brilliance of the chorus. It (like that of "All Mine") feels, on the first bar, like a normal declaration. But the "nobody loves me" is actually a dependent subclause of the "not like you do". But the song goes so far as to bury the subject by throwing in an additional subclause with the "it's true". So where the original notion is something like:

"You love me like nobody else loves me, it's true"

But the listener feels that Beth is emoting her loneliness and affirming it ("it's true")... before it turns out that she actually is loved (or feels that way). This idea is sort of juryrigged casually on the end and creates the clash of two polarized ideas (to be loved versus unloved) in a single statement. The complexity is now all that is unsaid. What could provoke such a phrasing? Is it a love that only she seems to see? Is she some crazy broad chasing some dude around? Or is it some doomed relationship going to the grave while everybody is just going through the motions and she is having a Freudian Slip moment? It makes you wonder and that is the delight: a song that lets you meditate on it, lets you return to it and see something new in it you might not have seen before.

Luckily Portishead doesn't go too overboard with their stylings. They use regular syntax more often than not. But they are more lyrically adventurous than most. They aren't afraid to give you something complex. And that is a rare treat.

Parents of the world, do not give your children the following first names:

1. Vulgar or semi-vulgar slang.
2. Names of fictional characters from shows you only liked in elementary/high school/college.
3. Names of Popular fictional morons (e.g. Fredo) unless you want him to be a moron.
4. Last Names (e.g. Stone, Madison, Chase).
5. Proper Nouns (e.g. US states, inanimate objects) unless you live in a tent.
6. Mispellings of actual names (e.g. Britney instead of Brittany, see #3).

The Fannings fucked up one this account but that's mostly on them. These rules are to avoid the mistake of having your child with a Fad Name: one that will seem extremely dated by the time they are thirty and will result in years and thousands of dollars in therapy. Just. Say. No. And usually I would leave it alone but I thought it was useful to just lay out those rules (that are too often forgotten). Even the Bible gets it wrong now and then (Methuselah was the Case/Rory of the Old Testament).

But with that out of the way, Dakota Fanning's sins are more profound. She is not a good actress. She hasn't been a good actress. And that isn't because she's only been in shitty movies but because she isn't good at performing the fundamental task of acting. She is bad. Very bad. And it stems from the fact that she, on screen and in person, acts like a little fucking adult. Which is annoying, dumb, and unrealistic. And I would just stop there if it wasn't the fact that she is the iceberg tip peeking out of the water with a large bloated history pushing her up from the waves. The apex of a movement that has been building some time. So let's hit the wayback machine.

Kreepy Kids

This weekend was actually the perfect time to discuss this topic. For one, M Night Shaymalan's Lady in the Water is opening this weekend (read a hilarious review here). Also the New York Times Sunday Magazine is running an article on the takeover of the J-Horror genre in America slasher cinema.

These where two distinct genres that collapsed into the singularity of the Americanized version of Ringu getting released in the US and becoming the best performing horror movie since The Blair Witch Project. The two share many of the same hallmarks of which the Creepy Child is the most prominent. Now in J-Horror it (usually) isn't so bad. J-Horror is built on those old school Japanese ghost stories and many are wierd and elegant and so translated as such. The classic Kwaidan is a good example to see where it came from. But as with all genres the style goes from being about expression to a deathly mechanical rote. Many of the ideas we usually ascribe to J-Horror are actually foreign in origin. You could say that David Lynch was the first J-Horror director with Eraserhead. Content-wise, the early work of David Cronenberg is also highly influential. The sexually born parasites of The Brood, the telepathic/kinetic/pyrokinetic/technokinetic psychics of Scanners. That might also be the first example of the creepy kid in a J-Horror context: one of the major plot revelations is that the psychotropic drug found to be the source of the scanners was actually marketed to pregnant mothers. This is discovered after a scene where the scanners go to an OBGYN and in this bright cheery waiting room of pregnant mothers comes this dull droning thud: the psychic stirrings of the unborn children. But it has also existed in more mainstream American cinema (the perverse devil ramblings of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, who is best known for being privvy to who and who doesn't suck cocks in Hell) as well as foreign (the perpetual child protagonist of Guenter Grass/Volker Schloendorff's The Tin Drum where we get to see a 30 year old with the body of a 8 year old eat out a woman... ahhh Europe in Wartime).

Now the creepy devil child is a perfect mix for the ghost story. And it really opens up the ability to crosspollinate ideas to surreal and freakish effect: young child who skitters up walls like a spider, a young child who groans like a dog, a young child who has the dangerous intellect of something unholy and thousands of years old. It juxtaposes our urge to protect and nurture children with threat and danger. It's easy to let your imagination run free and then just shrug off explaining it with the one line "ghost baby".

And in the J-Horror setting the creepy-child-who-acts-like-an-adult-because-they-are-a-demon is perfectly acceptable as long as the auteurs are able to keep the concept fresh and imaginative. No one likes a horror movie when they know right away who the killer is. And the ability to suspend disbelief is hindered when the child loses the 'super' in the 'supernatural'.

M Night Ego

M Night Shaymalan's time in Hollywood parallels the J-Horror revolution in the 90's. And we can't blame him for making the Creepy Kid a standard (Ringu was released the year before in 1998 and already had the big wide-eyed boy who talked to ghosts). But what The Sixth Sense did, by being really good, was that it started one of Hollywood's favorite activites: duplication. And the formula was pretty much this: take a completely normal setting, drop an elephant into it and have no one notice but the protagonist and the audience. Season with gore, sped-up film and shit jumping out of the corner of the screen to taste. This is where you have your The Fallens, Stir of Echoses, Stigmatas. But Hollywood isn't above actually taking ideas wholesale from successful films... including the Creepy Kid: Bless the Child, Dragonfly, White Noise. M Night wasn't even above stealing from himself for Signs and Unbreakable.

Things Fall Apart

And that is the killer. There is no more blood to get out of the stone. There is no more gristle or bone to beat out of the horse. The Creepy Kid is a cliche. And it wouldn't be so bad if we where just talking about fads like Tarantinoesque pithy conversations about nothing or semen-drinking teenager sex romps. The problem is that the Creepy Kid cliche has infiltrated into how filmmakers now write children. And that's a sad and terrible thing. Why?

Because at one time filmmakers knew how to write children plausibly and realistically. Writing children is hard. Children act differently at different ages. It is hard for an adult to associate with them, to get in their minds and so writing dialogue and action is a tightrope. The problem is that the Creepy Kid is a tempting carrot and an escape hatch. Basically the Creepy Kid is just the simple arithmetic of:

Child Actor + Adult Dialogue = $$$

Simple. Screenwriting regressed. You just write children the same way you write adults. No difference except that when we wake up in the morning, the parents go to work and the kids go to school. But motivation and conversation wise? They are interchangeable.

And Dakota Fanning has made a career out of it. Transcribe all of her dialogue in Man on Fire or War of the Worlds and put in an 18 year old actress instead: same difference. Actually it'd make more sense then. You suddenly accept the fact that she was able to offer advice to Denzel Washington or of the same mental age as Tom Cruise and her brother. That she is smarter and more wise than Brittany Murphy. But for a twelve year-old? It's a bad joke. It's cheap and convenient. Her pose, her manner, her delivery, her awareness and content are all adult. No, the pose of an adult. Look at her as she stands around in her lil'Versace dress on the red carpet giving her lil'blurb to E! News as she gives lil'smiles and does lil'press junkets. And it comes off incredibly fake and contrived.

Ironically, that's the most authentically child-like thing about her.

Ladri di Biciclette

So how should a child behave in a movie? Oddly, Hollywood knew how to do this way back in the 40's. And they probably still do. I'd suggest watching The Sixth Sense or A.I. for HJ Osment's work. Though right at the tipping point of being intolerable, Osment is able to hold on to that bit that still makes him seem like a kid. The problem is that directing children is a task that isn't the same as directing anyone over the age of 17. You can tell because there are always the directors who seem to be able to really bring out the performance of young actors (see young Spielberg). Just as there are directors who specialize in theater-types (Mamet) or those who work best with stoic Victorians (Merchant-Ivory) there are directors who excel at directing children. Probably the best was Vittorio De Sica and this is easily illustrated in his movie The Bicycle Thief.

The film is simple (in that Italian neo-realist way) *start spoilers*: an unemployed man, Antonio, finds a job but needs a bicycle. Because he has a family he goes into hock for it. While working his bike gets stolen. He and his son look for it. They don't find it. In desperation he steals a bike, gets caught, gets let go. The End *end spoilers*

Actually the story's so simple that the spoilers really aren't spoilers. It's all about the presentation and little stuff that makes the movie work. The simple story is just a vehicle for character studies and self-examination (would you judge a thief if you knew his own desperation first hand?). Getting into Antonio's skin means getting into his relationship with his wife, with his friends and with his son, Bruno.

In The Bicycle Thief Bruno is important because he is a physical manifestation of Antonio's drive to get a job. Bruno is the family and household Antonio is responsible for. He is duty. And having his son there instead of, say, his wife, allowed De Sica to let us study a man's relationship with his duties.

Bruno is an interesting character. We meet him about 20 minutes into the movie where he is seen in the morning before Antonio's first day of work polishing the bike. He and Antonio leave and Antonio drops him off at what appears to be a gas station for what is his job (a bit shocking since Bruno is probably only eight years old). When the two head off they do matching grooming in front of the mirror (fixing their hair, their uniforms), put matching sandwiches from mama in their pockets and walk out together to their jobs.

The brilliance of De Sica is that he doesn't have Bruno hit this one note of just being a lil'Antonio. Compare his cocksure pose during their morning routine to his baffled look in the heart of their doldrums. We all know that our first words, our first motions, our first steps are all mimicry done out of observation. The child watches and then parrots the moves of an adult. He wants to do those things (get the cookie off the counter, play with the microwave, have money in his pocket, be the curious center of attention, get other people to laugh). So he repeats them, studying the cause and effect. It's the deepest form of respect: sons walking like their fathers. Dressed up in those clothes, with the same big shoes.

So in the activity of the familiar morning activity, Bruno is brave and confident like his father. But with the bicycle lost and his father at his last end... he too is lost. It's brilliant subtlety by De Sica. And notice how in both Bruno is looking up at his father expectantly. It's a look studying for approval. Searching for adulthood. It would be foolish though to have just one reading of it. A similar look can have can arise from the complication of the scene, such as when Antonio accuses a young man of stealing the bike only to realize his mistake of doing it in the boy's neighborhood. It's a look of fear and seeking protection.

[At this point I accidentally deleted the rest of it and had to rewrite it from scratch]

De Sica goes even further with this interplay. At one point as their search turns more dire, Bruno paternally scolds Antonio for losing the bike in the first place. It's the belittling petty tone of a spouse. Probably picked up from Antonio's wife. Antonio hits him and instantly realizes his mistake. At once Bruno falls back into his natural childishness and begins crying. He scampers away into the woods. Antonio asks for forgiveness. He tries to reason with his son. Bruno threatens to tell his mother. They continue their search but no longer hip to hip. Antonio leaves Bruno at a bridge and, as he's walking away, he hears a crowd cry out that a boy has fallen in and is drowning. Antonio rushes over only to see its some other, older boy. He turns and sees his son watching him. It's really a smart scene, showing a deft touch. No dialogue passes between them but the look is one that understands that the father still does care deeply for his son. Antonio then plies his son with food. Hungry they go to a restaurant and he buys his son food and wine (noting that his mother will just have to accept that "we" deserve something for all their hard work). Bruno is happy, playing with his food, eager for the adult treatment.

De Sica also plays this child-adult duality for comedic effect. When a downpour hits and the father and son seek shelter under an awning, Bruno slips and falls (rewatching it the fall looks authentic. De Sica probably decided to just go with it). Antonio doesn't notice until he turns to see his son wiping mud from his legs.

"What happened to you?"

Bruno looks up, hesitates for a moment and then gives the perfect appropriation of a bitter old Italian man, "The streets all slippery and I fell down!" You half expect him to curse the street's mother and spit on it.

By the end of the day the two are exhausted. Bruno lags and then races to catch up, at one point slipping again and almost getting hit by a car. Antonio is too lost to even notice. At this point, he decides to finally steal a bicycle himself. He gives Burno money and tells him to take the trolley home. Tired, Bruno doesn't even notice the look in his father's eye. But he misses the trolley and turns around to see his father circling a bike leaning in a doorway. The boy doesn't seem to comprehend until Antonio jumps on the bike. Sadly the man isn't as good or as lucky as the thief who stole his bike. He is instantly spotted and a mob starts chasing after him (bitterly, since no one came to his cries earlier in the movie). He tries to amateurishly escape only to get caught. The mob starts to beat him and drag him to the police station.

Bruno has been watching and runs to him. He hugs his leg and screams out a pleading "Papa! Papa!" It's a bewildered cry. Antonio has no answer for him. He is ashamed, humiliated, and now to be punished. The bike owner notice Bruno and says he's not going to press charges. Having his son to see what he's done is bad enough. Antonio and Bruno begin walking. For the first time in the movie, the father reaches out and takes the hand of his son. They melt into the anonymity of the crowd.

Where We Are and Where We Are Going

Now compare that to every movie Dakota Fanning has been in. Each time she's been a pompous micro-adult. A convenient writer's shortcut for creating a victim or explaining a bad plot to everybody. You can use her to tell a character everything that's wrong with them instead of using shit like, I dunno, pacing and direction. Simple-minded and dumb. Every time I see that she's in a movie I know that a director is going to use her as a plot device. If she could transform into a briefcase she could work part-time as a McGuffin in every heist movie and corner the goddamn market.

Last Friday I saw on CNN Ms Fanning had just finished up a movie where she is raped. The segment naturally focused on the morality of having a twelve year old playing a twelve year old being raped. What was more interesting was the bit about how "Dakota's people" had "calculated" that this was a great way for her to get an Oscar. And we can just see the braintrusts figuring that one out.

We all know the list. The "Play This in a Movie and Get a Statuette" list: mentally handicapped, mentally ill, physically handicapped, gain a lot of weight in a role, lose a lot of weight in a role, wear prostheses to make yourself ugly, get raped, be gay, be a famous person famous mostly for having killed themselves, be a famous person famous mostly for being killed.

The goddamn comedy of this list is how fucking BS it is. Before the Creepy Kid/Micro-Adult, my most hated Hollywood trope was the Magical Retard. First we had Rain Man which was followed by Forrest Gump, The Other Sister, Radio, I am Sam and Keanu Reeves's career. The killer is that those movies precipitously drop in quality. By the end their motives are so telegraphed and blatant that people just laugh and point.

And anyone with a brain would tell you that it doesn't work. That The List is all just catalogued from movies where the character being insane or gay was just an artifact of the movie... which was usually really fucking good. Did Bobby D's Jake LaMotta in work because he got real fat at the end? Or was that it that he was Bobby Fucking DeNiro, costarring with Joe Fucking Pesci in a movie by Martin Fucking Scorsese in what was the best movie of the 1980's? It was Raging Fucking Bull. DeNiro gaining the weight is shocking but then the audience soon realizes that the movie is really fucking good regardless.

Getting her twelve year old ass raped is (on the other hand) just boldface calculation on Ms Fanning's (and her "people's") part. And I'm not shocked or appauled. I just don't care. See, as a single guy most of my interactions with children are when I'm at a party and some parents bring theirs along. Now every once in a while when you are introduced you run into a kid who really digs it that an adult is talking to him. Hell, I was that way. There's something revealing about getting treated like a peer. Having someone really listen (which is something adults usually like as well). It's understandable. Probably the only adults in their life are their parents and their teachers. All of them authority figures. Now they get a chance to talk to an adult and this person is responding to what they're saying (instead of telling them what to do)? Sweet!

Of course for the adult it's a little different. We see the illusion. The kid is playing big but they don't see we're playing small. You're being nice and it's cute but since I'm not in the child-rearing business I have better things to do than talk to a kid. And there will be a time when the kid grows out of it. When he realizes how annoying and unadult he acts. That little seed of embarassment hits and they learn once more what it's like to be like an adult.

But when I throw down nine of my good dollars and have some director and punk kid pull the same trick on me, I've got no reason to give some rah-rah Special Olympics "everybody gets a trophy because everyone tried real hard" shit. I'm not in the business of paying money to make someone feel good about themselves. Dakota Fanning has been in a lot of movies and probably has a lot of money. She probably needs someone to give her the hard objective truth: she sucks. She doesn't even know how to fucking act her age let alone as a different character who thinks and sees and feels. She plays a sock-puppet with the screenwriter's fist up her ass and expects us to laud the fact that chimpanzees do the same thing when we give them cigars and little bicycles. She's someone's snotty kid who only seems to exist to annoy the shit out of everyone. Lucky for her she's young and has time to get introspective and actually learn her fucking craft. Either that or she can hope to pull a Natalie Portman and grow up to be really cute and not have to learn to act. It's-

Hold on.

*picks up cellphone*

What? Yeah? Oh yeah?... Ok, I'll see you there.

*puts cellphone away*

Hey, there's a meeting at Paramount I've gotta be at fifteen minutes ago. Listen, there's a brunch I'm having tomorrow with Spacey and Fareenz at Spago. Stop by 1-ish and we can hammer this out and maybe you can figure out how to show up on a movie screen and not make everyone throw up in their mouths. Waddaya say? No? Then jump on a rusty spike and fall in a fucking fire.

Ciao!