Spears for President

The "tragic downward spiral" of former teen idol Britney Spears dominated national news in 2007, and may well do so again in 2008. No longer the exclusive domain of gossip rags and E! news shows, talk of her exploits has insinuated itself into a broader arena. Britney supercedes, interrupts and is interwoven into discussions on a range of topics, from the Presidential race to the Iraq thingy to Iran’s nuclear capabilities to Jacques Shirac’s love life (shudder). Even people who couldn’t care less know more about her than they’d like to admit. Even my Mom has an opinion, and she’s…my Mom.

What the hell is going on?

One perky news anchor suggested we prattle on about Britney because she makes the rest of us feel normal. Wrong. Sit down for this. We care about Britney because Britney is normal.

Middle class Americans have been lied to all our lives. Every news organization, every politician, every plastic talking head has blithely lied to us since we were born. Everything will be okay. Trust us. Give us your money. Give us your time. Give us your sweat and your hopes and your dreams and we will spin it all into college tuition and cars and a home and a happy retirement for you. We are good. We will help you. Trust us. And we bought it. Well, most of did, and the rest didn't really have much of a choice anyway.

Until Britney.

Britney Spears is not crazy. Britney Spears is not stupid. Britney Spears has all the money she will ever need at 26. Britney Spears divorced her husband (whom she loved very much) and is desperately fighting a losing battle for custody of her two children (whom she loves very much). She put out a very good album about it last year. Her frustrations and fears are normal. She expresses herself like a normal human being. And she is pretty much the only Person of Note in America who does.

We consume Britney with such hunger because we are starved for truth. Why did Clinton win New Hampshire? Because she really cried real tears. Why is Huckabee doing so well in the Republican race? Because he really says things he really believes. He is also a fucking Nazi, but that is quite beside the point, isn’t it? Apparently.

And so, in lieu of Huckabee the Nazi, I propose that Generation Next launches a Spears for President campaign. Britney will not tell us what she thinks we think we want to hear. She will tell us the truth. Britney doesn’t know what do about Iraq, and she will say so. Britney doesn’t know what to do about the rising cost of health care, and she will say so. Britney doesn’t know how to pay for Social Security in forty years, and she will say so. Spears in 2009? Why the fuck not.

Eastern Promises

When I heard Terry Gross’s Fresh Air interview with Eastern Promises director David Cronenberg and lead actor Viggo Mortensen, I could tell that she had been unusually impressed by certain aspects of the film. This is high praise. After years of interviewing everyone who is anyone for NPR, Terry Gross is a pretty tough customer. But even her gushing did not quite prepare me for how good Viggo Mortensen would be in the film, or how fresh and original a scene they spoke of at length, a bloody duel to the death in a Russian bath, would appear on screen.


I lived in Russia for a total of three years. I lived primarily in Moscow, but did spend two summers in the island of Yuzhno Sakhalinsk, a far less European place. While there, I heard hundreds of English speakers stumble with Russian. I also met many unsavory mucky mucks, for whom I worked as an English tutor. Viggo Mortensen has somehow managed to not only speak Russian with a very convincing accent, but to embody the peculiar soulful emptiness of this tiny subset of Russia: the ruthless romantic affluent male. I am still wondering over it. Were this group a little more visible, more people would know what an incredible feat of transmutation he has accomplished. As it is…well, I know, and that’s something anyway.


Unfortunately for the film, Mr. Mortensen is too good. No one else is remotely convincing as a member of the London Russian mob. Not Frenchman Vincent Cassel, who plays the archetypal son and heir, nor Armin Mueller-Stah in the role of boss. Their bungled Russian and sinister leers would work fine without any competition, but as soon as Mortensen enters the scene, they look like actors trying to be Russian mobsters. Not good.


Naomi Watts does a very good job playing an English midwife who stumbles upon a secret, but she too is supposed to be half Russian, and that is absurd. Russian people have a very specific look. They have high cheekbones and almond eyes and, well you can just tell if someone is Russian. Only one person in this film actually looks Russian, a whore who makes good. That annoyed me.


In fact, the whole concept of the film, that David Cronenberg could pull back the curtain on
London’s most elusive mob, annoys me. They didn’t even know that Russian prisoners covered themselves in tattoos until Mortensen showed them a book about it. A book? It sounds like Mortensen was also the only one of the bunch to actually go to Russia. I mean really. I think Americans are too complacent about their ignorance of Russians and Russian culture. We think of Russians as second class Europeans, poorer and more religious and with less good food. They lie somewhere between the French and the Chinese on our Cultures We Don’t Get continuum. We don’t get the French just enough to know we should cast French speaking actors in roles, as Atonement did. We don’t get the Chinese at all, so we pretty much let Ang Lee cover it, as he did so well in Lust Caution. But Hollywood doesn’t even seem to try when it comes to Russian themes. And Russians know it. They watch these films. They know we don’t get them and don’t try to get them, even as they try harder and harder to get us.


My advice to Hollywood is this: slide Russia to one end of that continuum. Either cast Russians in Russian roles, or find a talented Russian director to do the dirty work for you. This is just not working for me.

Talkin Bout My Generation

There seems to be rising interest in this, my Generation Next. The online-only, network-quality, eight minutes-per-episode drama Quarterlife has made something of a splash despite being only mildy addictive and even occasionally silly. (It will be aired on NBC this spring, which sort of negates its whole appeal, but business is business and business must grow.) And now, as part of its ongoing series of stories on Generation Next, NPR has announced studies revealing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 26 are still not quite adults according to themselves, their parents, and the rites of passage generally associated with growing up. These not only include marriage, kids and a mortgage, but moving out and financial independence as well. Why? Are we just dragging our feet, or is there a method here?

My generation terrifies and fascinates me. When I think about all 42 million of us collectively, I despair. Forty two million young men and women just as tongue-tied, embattled, beset and directless as I? How will this fadge? I think all of we Gen Nexters, particularly the liberals, would agree that the big picture looks appallingly bleak. I don't know anyone in her twenties who thinks we will have Social Security to rely on in retirement, or who believes that our country will still be "Number ONE!!!" in forty years or even ten, always assuming we haven't all drowned an an apocalyptic maelstrom by then. But who's going to solve all that? Certainly not us. We are so paralyzed by fear that we can barely muster the strength to move out and pay off our college loans, let alone effect change. And yet these are our problems. Climate change will not be our parents' problem. The oil shortage is not our parents' deal. Globalization is not our parents' concern. The same parents who are coddling us now, who hold us so firmly to their ample bosoms now, do so with full knowledge that some day they will be gone and we will be stuck with a smoldering shit pile of a country and a world and it will be ALLTHEIRFAULT NOTOURSTHOSEASSHOLES. So what does Gen Next do in the meantime? The only thing we can do. We close our eyes, turn away and party like it's 1999. Old fogies of earlier generations think us shallow, spoiled and entitled. They aren't wrong. Gen Nexters from the upper middle class and up have had to go looking for need in order to find it. We were born in the midst of a long slow economic expansion that to our wondering child eyes seemed boundless as the sea. Our parents told us everything would be all right and we looked around and everything was all right, so we believed them. Can they really begrudge us our softness and frailty now?

That being said, I don't think most of are all that spoiled or lazy, at least not after we've lived alone for a bit and seen some of the world. What we are is running scared. Of course we're in the slow lane to adulthood, NPR! The weight of the world is quite literally on our well nourished shoulders. Our parents and grandparents rushed right into adulthood and look what it got them. THIS. If we're going to solve this shit, we're going to need all the extra time we can get. Don't begrudge us that, after all the crap you've pulled.

Atonement

A friend of mine just asked me if I would only be writing movie reviews on this blog. Probably not. But I'm watching movies right now. And so, without further ado...

I might be the one to cast the first stone when it comes to Atonement. So be it. It is a poor adaptation of a fairly good book and features a surprisingly misdirected performance by an almost inaudible Keira Knightley. I don’t understand the hype. Not at all.

As an actor in Seattle’s bustling fringe theater scene, I understand the difference between bad acting and bad direction. As someone who read the book, I understand what Atonement the novel did well and what it did not so well. I am a peon. I am baffled as to how so many polished professionals managed to make such a misguided movie in the first place, and how so many professional critics ended up falling all over each other to laud its mediocrity once it came out.

Atonement the novel is compelling because at some point in the story each of the central characters is given a voice. Ian McEwan has done this with uncanny empathy, particularly in his descriptions of Briony Tallis as a 13 year old girl and a 77 year old woman. I am rarely asked to care about female characters in either their early teens or their late 70s and I found myself surprisingly engrossed by the challenge. After the central plot line has run its meandering course, it is this device and not the plot which makes the book a page-turner.

The screenplay makes two mistakes. First, it chooses to focus on this rather thin storyline rather than the engrossing inner lives of the characters, which means the movie evaporates after the first half hour into a true-love-against-all-odds “I will return to you” type deal. Second, and this was surely also the director’s decision, it chooses to take a very detached point of view. We watch the movie not as omniscients or even interlopers, but through a pane of thick glass. This makes the story’s final twist, so shocking in the novel, rather uninspiring and even unnecessary in the movie.

Why have critics been gushing? Maybe because they didn't have as much time as I did to think things over. I must admit that I left the theater fairly content. I was very impressed with leading man James McAvoy, whom I had only seen as Mr Tumnus the Faun and who now seems destined for well deserved stardom. Ditto for Saoirise Ronan, the second very good teenage actress I have seen in a movie this year (the other being Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra in the Golden Compass debacle). Finishing off the film with a monologue by Vanessa Redgrave also helped to muddle my critical thinking skills for a good hour. But I just couldn't shake my disappointment with Ms. Knightley, and it was that discontent that led me to the truth.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

It is lovely to wrap oneself in a masterpiece every once in a while, especially a recent one. It is right and good to occasionally expose oneself to tangible proofs of mankind’s continued ability to reinvent the world from the bottom up. Dazed and weakened by months of stultifying platitudes from Presidential candidates without Stephen Colbert and others to serve it up funny, I had forgotten that artists still have an audible voice somewhere in our society. And then came December. Thank God for the Oscars. Art is still relevant for another few months thanks to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Yes, yes, the movie’s subject is startling, the acting is superb, the camera work is arresting and the American director had to learn French for the movie. Oh, and it’s on most critics’ short lists for Best Movie Of The Year. That was more than enough to get a snob like me in the theater and keep me there. But this is also one of the best movies I have ever seen, and here is why.

Most movies, indeed most Western dramatic works thanks to the Aristotelian model of playwriting, work hard to illicit an emotional response from their audiences. When they succeed, when the comedy makes us laugh or the tragedy makes us cry, the work is generally deemed good. When it fails, it is generally deemed bad. This constant pressure to feel what they would have us feel, even if that feeling is simply “Wow, this movie is so fun!” is something I often find oppressive, but it is also integral to the audience experience in the Western world and as such it’s part of why we come out in the first place.

About halfway through this film, I became conscious of a strange and wondrous freedom within and without me. I have not felt that way while sitting in a theater….well, ever, as far as I can remember, and it took me most of my walk home to figure out what it was. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly does not impose. It does not assume. It does not illicit. It does not decide. It is therefore not easily categorized by a genre. Despite this, it still manages to be gripping, moving, transfixing and most of those other words that we all bandy about in describing films that are much less than this one. A film in this day and age that somehow manages to change the rules? To me, that is genius. Enjoy.