On the Hollywood front, there’s an interesting, though overwritten (”from the unmediated crudity of The 40 Year Old Virgin, through the mock cryptoconservatism of Knocked Up, to the pseudosolemnity of Funny People“), piece about Judd Apatow’s movies in N + 1 Magazine.  The gist: Apatow’s movies celebrate ignorance. I’ve sort of felt the same.  He’s better with language than most other comedy writers.  I really liked “Freaks and Geeks” and “40 Year Old Virgin” because of Steve Carell’s performance, but in “Knocked Up” Seth Rogan’s character is idiotic.  Loveable because he’s a movie star, but really a dumb ass.  Saying, “I hoped to get a BJ on the second date” is funny to someone, but it’s almost impossibly stupid.  Katherine Heigl, the smart one, dreams of being an “Entertainment Tonight” reporter, so the movie carefully worships at the foot of Hollywood, even if it has the appearance of taking chances.  And part of Hollywood worship is to trump up the success of the idiot.

Take “Forrest Gump,” “Erin Brokovich,” “Good Will Hunting” – these are all fantasy fulfillment.  They’re superheroes of lazy thinking.  Even if you don’t crack a book, you can be more successful than all the eggheads and their “book smarts.”  It’s Sarah Palin’s fantasy.  I know Erin Brokovich is a real person, but the movie version’s a different story.  I had a whole paranoid theory that “Forrest Gump” contributed to the conservative revolution of 1994 – it came out in the same year. At core, a conservative movie. And Apatow’s movies follow a similar formula.  If you’re entertaining, it doesn’t matter if you’re almost totally apathetic:

He delivers a message Americans crave to hear. As long as you behave yourself, take on a modicum of responsibility, and wear the yoke of commitment, it is entirely acceptable—even preferable and profitable—to be stupid.

One of the greater ironies of “liberal” Hollywood is that they take up left wing causes, but don’t seem to realize that they’re contributing to the culture of stupidity – the same culture that gives rise to the entrenched ignorance of the far right.

Judd Apatow actually responded to the piece, which begins:

“Maybe I’m just dense, but I can’t tell if he likes the movies or not. Maybe because when I was reading his article I was watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Go Danielle!

I know you’re trying to look above the fray and that you can deal with criticism, but that’s not helping your cause any.

“I could see where things were headed,” Kurtz said. “The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.”

He added: “The first film and ‘Empire’ were about story and character, but I could see that George’s priorities were changing.”

About the original concept of “Return of the Jedi”:

“We had an outline and George changed everything in it,” Kurtz said. “Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn’t want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason.”

The discussed ending of the film that Kurtz favored presented the rebel forces in tatters, Leia grappling with her new duties as queen and Luke walking off alone “like Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns,” as Kurtz put it.

Kurtz said that ending would have been a more emotionally nuanced finale to an epic adventure than the forest celebration of the Ewoks that essentially ended the trilogy with a teddy bear luau.

I’m not sure killing Han Solo would have been the best idea – might’ve worked.

“Star Wars” was my childhood.  As it was for many people, but it dates me – I was born in the seventies.  If I had this blog when the prequels came out, I would have written pages of vitriol, but no one needs to read that anymore.  Instead watch this.  As a kid, this was a prized possession:

I get the same kind of vibe from Time Traveler’s Wife that I get from Eat, Pray, Love, which I haven’t read or seen and likely will never.  Strikes me as superficial as “Sex and the City” but from a different angle.  This review seems dead on:

Hi! I’m an upper middle class white woman who doesn’t like her husband. I’m going to let a bunch of cute people with accents change my life. Fix me, brown people! Your poverty & inability to escape your problems centers me. Me. Meeeee. MEEEEEEEEEEE! Now I’m centered. I’m going to go marry Javier Bardem.

Of course that leaves out all kinds of things. Like the fact that Gilbert (as portrayed by Roberts) is a self-involved angsty shrew, but everybody adores her anyway, immediately, and sometimes even after she’s opened her mouth and actually said things. (I found this unbelievable.) And the fact that the whole film pays homage to the Benevolent White Lady trope, wherein a Benevolent White Lady goes to another country/depressed neighborhood and makes all the sad foreign people/underprivileged youth happy with her inherent White Lady goodness. (See: Gilbert fixes an arranged marriage in crisis! Gilbert and all her yuppie friends buy a poor Indonesian lady a house!)…

These are the kinds of movies that appeal to upper middle class white women like movie-Gilbert (I refuse to believe Elizabeth Gilbert is a real person) because it’s tempting to see shallow concerns and mild personality disorders as Real Problems. Gilbert had money, friends, and a career, but she still felt empty. Instead of spending a little more time paying attention to all of the other people who still seem to care about her, she decides to take a year for herself. Because nothing cures narcissism like a journey of self-discovery.

That last line is everything.  I know these movies are for women, but pop culture is pop culture.  It has an affect on the culture so it affects me.  And the mixture of spirituality with Hollywood narcissism is perhaps more vapid than the “Vogue” magazine explosion of “Sex and the City” – because it purports to be actually meaningful.  Basically, these movies are about how good it is to be rich – to go shopping or shopping for spiritual meaning isn’t really much of a difference.

Synopsis:

A group of young, mildly douchey friends are spending the weekend partying at a swanky hotel on the outskirts of Los Angeles. After a night of revelry, they are awakened at 4:27 AM by strange, booming noises. They head outside to see strange blue lights vaporizing downtown Los Angeles. When two of the characters go out to the roof to investigate, they see UFOs descend from the clouds, and other people start getting sucked off the rooftops into the ships.

So, “Cloverfield” meets “War of the Worlds.”  Curiously, L.A. seems to be the main target of aliens these days.  TABOTD takes place in L.A., as does my life.

My problem with these movies is not just that the alien story is potentially more multi-faceted than they’re here to kill us. It’s propagating a fear of the other, and trumping up the idea that it’s always a good idea to go to war with the other. That it’s playing on terrorist paranoia is not really much of an insight, but our response to terrorism is to go to war with two countries where we shouldn’t have been. But not only that – the Bush administration and the media painted terrorists as a black and white boogie men, while overlooking our own deficiencies – killing hundreds of thousands, displacing families, torture. So it’s relaxing to have a movie where an antagonist is so unquestioningly evil, but it’s also a dangerous sort of conditioning.

I find it uniquely mysterious that there were so many disaster movies in the late nineties before 9-11 – “Independence Day,” “Volcano,” “Deep Impact,” “Armageddon,” even “Titanic.” Not for a second saying that there was a conspiratorial effort to condition people, but when people said, over and over again about 9-11, “It was like watching a movie,” they’re also remembering the black and white antagonists of Hollywood blockbusters. If 9-11 was like a movie, so was the impulse to bomb the shit out of anybody after it. We’re still there, long after the death wish for revenge is gone from the country’s psyche.

I’ve written two novels about Hollywood, so I’m not just obsessed with the UFO issue, but how pop culture sculpts popular thought, and there’s so much more that could be explored about the topic of UFOs – but it’s usually covered with violence or mockery. Frankly, that’s as un-nuanced a position as the blatherings of the Republican base.

I respect his brutal honesty like other writers mentioned here – Philip K. Dick or Charles Bukowski. He’s willing to make himself look like an asshole, willing to bare himself naked. Something I want to emulate in my own writing, even if it hurts to make yourself open to criticism. If I think some of the things I’ve written about parenthood are crossing a line, I just have to watch this.

I always wondered what his wife thought about stuff like this.  And now they’re divorced.  I have no idea why, but I wonder.

To tie this back into the subjects on this blog, William Gibson recently tweeted:

As much as I respect Gibson, he’s not a personal writer like PKD, which is why I’m a Dick-head and find Gibson colder like the concepts of cyberpunk or the singularity.  PKD’s paranoia and mysticism will always speak to me more, as is his willingness to make himself look totally deranged. Total fearlessness is the way to go and it’s missing from a lot of writing.

“Inception” was fucking incredible, but not entirely what I was hoping for. I was hoping for more of a “Matrix”-style exploration of “What is reality?” – if dreams are as tactile as reality, then maybe reality is no different than a dream. The movie does that somewhat, but the rules of the dreamscape are pretty straightforward. You enter a dream, walk around, then wake up, where you don’t have the same kind of manipulation of reality as you do within the dream. Where Philip K. Dick would take this is to suggest that there is no difference between our waking and sleeping worlds – but “Inception” doesn’t really explore these implications.  This is not a polemic about consciousness, it’s a spy movie.

I also think that the world of dreams as portrayed in “Inception” isn’t quite realistic. Put another way, by portraying dreams as another realistic world no different than waking reality, it’s actually a less realistic depiction of what it is to dream. Dreams actually seem to be fairly chaotic. I’m sure most people have the experience in dreams where suddenly the dream is in a totally different locale, about a different subject entirely.  It’s rare when a dream takes on a realistic narrative where I wake up and think – I was just told the plot of a novel (this has happened).

Of course, if you were to lucidly enter a dream, you might have control over this kind of chaos, so maybe that’s moot, but what would have made “Inception” more psychedelic is if the dreams themselves were more unexpected and imaginative. It does that somewhat by showing how Leonardo DiCaprio’s relationship with his wife enters the dream world, but if he’s truly entering his subconscious, we’d also see talking rabbits and other things totally separate from our flat reality.

To do that, though, would have been another movie – and six hours long – so Christopher Nolan stuck with this premise, which is really just a spy movie, where you’re spying on the mind. He calls attention to this very much in the James Bond sequence in the snow at the end. So the movie’s a bit about the fantasy of moviemaking – the inherent unreality of movie fiction. The death bed sequence in the end is reminiscent of this scene from “2001″:

The snowmobile sequence is where the movie actually lost me – you enter the world of dreams and all you get are thugs with machine guns? There’s also a moment where a guy’s shooting a gun – the “forger” steps up to him and says something like “dream bigger” and the machine gun turns into some kind of grenade launcher.  If that’s the case, why weren’t they doing this over and over again? Why couldn’t they “imagine” the thugs away?  Maybe I’m missing one of the core rules about what you’re allowed to do in these dreams.

These criticisms are sort of a nitpick though for a movie that’s hugely imaginative and more entertaining than most movies coming out of Hollywood in last ten years, maybe ever.  I just wished it spent some time covering the mystical implications of the different levels of dreams.  What’s it mean for our waking life – what else can be extracted from the subconscious?  Because if we’re eventually able to enter dreams and all we use it for is corporate espionage, then we’re pretty fucked.

At the very least the movie’s sparking interesting articles like this one:

Inception: peering into the science of dreams

In the movie, the dream-snatchers use a drug called somnacin and a dream machine to upload a scenario into someone’s sleeping mind. One or more of them then go to sleep themselves, hooked up to the machine, and enter the target’s dream.

This fictional dream machine is called a Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous (PASIV) Device.

A device does already exist that can effectively read someone’s mind. A functional MRI scanner takes snapshots of brain activity, and then the software recreates images of what the subject was looking at.

The researchers say it has the potential one day be able to record someone’s dream – without the mess and danger (or the fun) of actually sharing that dream.

More:

• The Real Science of Dreaming
• How to Tame Your Nightmares
• Dream Sharing: Science or Fiction
• Inception: Dreams, Waking, and Epistemology

But not completely.  Here’s some info about Mel Gibson’s church:

Gibson’s secretive sect is not recognised by the Catholic Church because it does not acknowledge the authority of the Pope or the Vatican and rejects the universally accepted teachings of the Second Vatican Council….

Gibson’s church, which offers a daily morning Mass in Latin, follows an antiquated ideology of Catholicism dating back to the 16th century.

Female followers must abide by a strict dress code requiring them to wear veils over their hair and long skirts. Pants are banned.

The last one is the most telling, of course, because he’s a misogynist prick. Not just misogynist, but murderous. Listening to Mel Gibson’s rants is like being inside OJ’s mind before the murders. It’s not just normal drunken anger, it sounds demonic, which is particularly telling given that his story about Jesus didn’t focus on peace, but violence.  Say what you will about the ADL, but there’s truth to this:

“If it’s true what’s reported, frequently hatred, bigotry and prejudice, which is controlled, explodes at moments of stress and crisis,” said Rabbi Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “Liquor loosens the tongue of what’s in the mind and in the heart, and in his mind and in his heart is his conspiracy theory about Jews and hatred of Jews.”

Given the torture porn of “The Passion,” a lot of people saw this coming.  It is a plainly insane movie.  What is just as insane is that people were moved by the endless flagellation of a spiritual figure.  Mel Gibson is evidently an abusive person, and he was willing to abuse – not just his mistress – but his savior.  This is demented.

But what’s also demented is the number of apologists you’ll see online.  If you go to Radar Online, you’ll see many, many comments defending Mel Gibson and claiming Oksana Grigorieva drove him to it, she’s a gold digger, etc.  To them, quotes like this are reasonable.

(Click for all)

So celebrity doesn’t just drive certain movie stars crazy – it drives followers crazy as well, much like religion. Mel Gibson’s actions are totally indefensible, as are the Pope’s on sex abuse, or Pat Robertson’s on virtually everything. Perhaps the truth will always come to the surface – it just takes years. Which means Palin may one day have a hard Shakespearean fall, and everything that’s so obvious to many people will become obvious to her adherents. Except religious leaders say stupid things constantly and people look for ways to justify it. Such is blind devotion – and why I think Hollywood is just as anesthetizing as religion.

Mel Gibson is an incredible blend of both movie star and religious figure, which is why his fall is so  important.  Anything that exposes the hypocrisy of fundamentalists is good by me.  Apologists of Mel Gibson’s actions today aren’t that much different than apologists for the “Passion of the Christ” – they both excuse violence.  I’ll grant the difference: “The Passion” inspired increased piety.  Mel Gibson’s murderous rants accomplish nothing. But mixing violence and religion is as dangerous for Christianity as it is for radical Islam – and Mel Gibson’s rants today are just proof what kind of dangerous mind that movie came from.  There are millions of fans of “The Passion” that are likely disgusted by Mel Gibson and feel betrayed, but they shouldn’t. They should feel betrayed by “The Passion.”

Radical left-wing bookstore owner Tom Flynn (Adam Nee) finds himself in the fight of his life when his suspicions surrounding the events of Sept. 11 land him on the radar of a group of nefarious conspirators. When he crosses paths with a mysterious woman who claims to be in possession of evidence implicating the U.S. government, Tom soon realizes that exposing the truth to the world at large may cost him his life.

Sounds cool enough.  I had no idea that it’s actually the Sander Hicks story – publisher of my first novel (now this).  The left-wing bookstore is Vox Pop, and the book the character writes is Sander’s own:

Vox Pop:

Director says,

Once again, the movie is fiction. The Able Danger story line is right out of a Dashiell Hammett novel. But the Vox Pop Cafe/Bookstore is real. The Big Wedding is a real book. The idea was to make a hero out of the man I initially considered a cook, to place his maverick investigative journalism into the context of a Sam Spade adventure. He is the modern day Don Quixote taking on windmill-dragon of our collective understanding of truth as determined by the corporate oligarchies that control mainstream media. If there was a Vox Pop in every community, I think things would be a bit different ’round here.

Crazy strange and entertaining.  Better directed than written I thought.  Actually really well-directed.  Bafflingly complicated at times, but noir’s supposed to be, and conspiracy theories get convoluted.  What’s also strange is (spoiler warning, barely) that this is sort of the plot of The American Book Part II – guy writes a book, gets involved in conspiracies.  And I’m connected to Sander in some way.  Almost makes me feel like part of a conspiracy.