Barbenheimer Whiplash

Now that Barbie has sold more than ONE BILLION dollars of tickets at the box office worldwide and our beloved Greta Gerwig has become the #1 commercial female director in movie history, it’s time for the complaints.

Oh, but wait.

Now that Oppenheimer has sold more than $600 million dollars of tickets at the box office worldwide and proven there is no ceiling to how popular, acclaimed and profitable THREE HOURS of dark, dramatic filmmaking can be, it’s time to eviscerate Christopher Nolan and IT into the cinematic equivalent of swiss cheese.

Boo hoo, right?

I know.

Nevertheless, this is why we can’t have nice things.

As life goes on you get to the point where you not only realize you can’t please everyone, but that you really don’t give a sh-t and stop trying.

In reality, the only person you can actually please is yourself.

And even that is unlikely.

Especially when you are doing something artistic.

Actually, the arts are no different than life in that regard so let’s amend that thought to include everything. When you try to be (or do or create) all things to all people you wind up with not much of anything worth spending time with.

I tell writing students that it doesn’t matter if a subject they write about has been done before because:

a. Everything (and everyone) has been done before, and

b. If you dig deep and tell the story in a personal (Note: But necessarily autobiographical) enough way, it can’t help but be original because no one has exactly your take on the world (Note: Clones, accepted).

It only took me decades of therapy to get to this point but here I am preaching what the most truly evolved of us knew far earlier in life.

Still, better late than never.

I was a movie critic at Variety for many years, many decades ago, and the most astute remark I ever heard about critics came from my colleague Jim Harwood, a really smart guy who sat at a desk to the left of me and used to write for the Wall Street Journal before covering show business and writing short clever columns about people like Ted Turner and Kirk Kerkorian long before that was popular.

When someone asked him once what qualified him to be a critic, he turned tartly to them and without missing a beat, said:

Because I have an opinion and a place to print it.

Now, of course, EVERYONE does.

Including me.

God (Note: Or whoever you imagine Her to be) help us all.

See, what Harwood, as we all called him, got before any of us and is worth reminding all of us of at this moment, is that critical thought is nice but it’s not an absolute and there isn’t a right or wrong.

There’s simply an opinion.

There are a lot of boys (Note: Well, adult males acting like little boys) up in arms about what they perceive as the small-mindedness in which they are ALL being portrayed in a film about a doll.

Just as there are lots of conservatives foaming at the mouth that a short sequence where little girls toss aside their Betsy Wetsy-like infant dolls in favor of a hip, curvaceous, fashion -forward plastic version of young women, means motherhood is in peril and the very future of society as we know it is being put at risk.

Oh. My. Goddess.

The complaints about what was going on in the mind of the genius man who supervised the invention of the first nuclear bomb and enabled it’s launching is a bit more complicated but nevertheless operates on the same principle.

Choosing to show a genius of the 1930s, 40s and 50s working in a boy’s club of mostly men (Note: Despite the fact that far less than 5% of the scientists working with him at Los Alamos were women) must mean that the filmmaker, not the math genius, ignores (nee marginalizes) women. And the idea that the two primary sexual partners shown in his life were a female biologist and a female psychiatrist is further proof that the guy who made this movie can only see women as his own personal sexual receptacles.

Worse yet, is the clear racism employed by not showing re-recreated or existing documentary footage of the actual atomic bomb going off at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and getting to literally view the faces of tens of thousands of Japanese people being ripped away.

That couldn’t be an artistic choice to center the film on the man’s existential crisis of good vs. evil and not the literal enormity of the bomb. It can only be the means by which one gets to negate every achievement that came before it and dismiss the film, in its entirety, as a relic of storytelling of the white male privilege kind.

Well, I mean, Chris Nolan IS a white guy who is a bit of a genius just as Greta Gerwig IS a feminist with a passion for the color pink and cheeky comic irony.

What else could, or SHOULD, their movies be???

Oh, OF COURSE I get the complaints and where they’re coming from.

I’m not a TOTAL moron. (Note: Even though it might be easier to dismiss me as such.)

But to accuse the films as either a whitewashing of history or a too woke view of men and/or women-hood is truly a bit reductive.

I was tempted to use the word self-serving but that would be a putdown to anyone else’s viewpoint, which I don’t seek to do (Note: No matter how tempting). It’s merely to suggest that no one work or person or place can be 100% inclusive of everything and/or everyone.

And even if they could, guaranteed a bunch of the rest of us wouldn’t like the result of that either.

So instead, here’s a thought:

If you don’t like what’s out there – do your own film. Or, get a group of friends together who think like you do and have them do it.

Or write it. Or sing about it. Or paint it. Or rhyme it in couplets.

And then disregard anything I, or the world, has to say. Especially if other people, but most importantly you, like it.

Billie Eilish – “What Was I Made For?” (from Barbie)

07.29.18

by notesfromachair

Mission Implausible

By all accounts Mission Impossible – Fallout, starring the bionic version of Tom Cruise in more ways than you can count, or would want to – is a hit.

It opened worldwide this weekend and has already accrued about $140,000,000 plus ($60 mill in the US alone) at the box-office.

It is the best reviewed of all SIX films in the franchise, receiving positive reviews from 100% of our country’s top film critics – all of whom should be ashamed at the ease with which they have been lulled, co-opted and otherwise seduced into dropping their necessary job description of sometime party pooper.

That’s right.. I said it.

And it is a BIG hit with filmgoers, earning a 93% favorable audience rating also from Rotten Tomatoes – the universal, and in this case, totally unreliable, arbiter of what is generally good, bad or middling at the movies.

For in truth, the only area the new M.I. movie excels in is seeming to be a wonderful, diversionary summer entertainment.

Yes, Mr. Cruise looks almost the same as he has for decades if you squint a bit in the way he seems to be permanently doing these days, though to his credit with exactly the same seemingly earnest, genial manner.

still short though #shade #lifts #imtallerthanhim

And sure, Mr. Cruise also appears to have just as much stamina as he ever did as he drives motorcycles through the streets of Paris at top speed, parachute jumps out of planes from 25,000 feet in the air, and gets in and out of helicopters that he himself glides up and down and through and past various mountain tops and other quite dangerous terrain.

And of course, ABSOLUTELY, for you doubters (Note: Or party poopers, because someone has to be and live in the real world), that IS actually the real Mr. Cruise DOING HIS OWN STUNTS – EVEN THE DANGEROUS ONES!!!

The filmmakers have given countless interviews stating it is this action star’s commitment to authenticity that makes his appearances in this franchise so convincing.

I’m so impressed

This, of course, is amusing in a film where nothing is convincing or makes much sense at all, even in those rare moments when the twists and turns are discernible. Though those are not to be confused with any other number of other scenes where some poor actor has an unsellable chunk of dialogue designed to summarize the objective of the next set action sequence and make it believable.

There was a time when summer action movies like Die Hard or Indiana Jones (#1 and #3), or even November releases like the Daniel Craig as Bond remake of Casino Royale, found a way to give us death defying thrills along with memorable and even vaguely human characters whose actions didn’t need to be explained but instead simply unfolded. These kinds of films were not so much deep but infinitely watchable diversions where fantastical still things happened and the day was still saved by seemingly superhuman, larger than life guys.

The difference was these guys were flawed, they failed – often fatally – and their outer shells didn’t look as if they had been dipped in formaldehyde and frozen for all time. They were slicker and wittier and quite a bit less wordy than any of us real people but when they spoke they nevertheless actually sounded as if they could be us if we were possessed with great luck, superhuman strength, a fab outfit (or two or three) and one or two fancy gadgets.

OK.. maybe not every gadget.

What they were not, or at least what they never seemed to be, were manufactured for maximum audience tastes – an amalgamation of major studio index cards.

A director, a writer, an actor or even a costume designer (or some combination thereof) somewhere along the way gave these guys a real soul and took him beyond a carbon copy of an action hero. Instead, they invented a true man who rose into the role of hero, often against his better instincts because at heart you knew that as far as the world goes, he was not crazy enough to think that HE, ALONE, COULD FIX IT.

Of course, the above might be exactly why we have a character like Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt currently burning up the box-office – a guy whose ex-wife even says she sleeps better knowing he’s on-the-job.

Never Forget

It’s an uber desirable contemporary fantasy to have this kind of slick looking guy come in and save us from our worst selves with no discernible super powers other than his own moxie and experience. It’s even more tempting that he be someone who has been around a long time but still seems ageless – with hair that’s a real color and outfits that don’t so much show off his wealth but the flattering lines of his body.

He’s almost like an Apple Edition of our much-needed 2018 action hero – a high tech version with all of the all-American qualities we need to take our country back.

Excuse me Chair, what am I.. chopped liver?

Now, if only he were real – or at least seemed that way. We could either put him to work immediately or use him as a model to train someone else to help get us out of the mess we’re currently in.

As it stands now, however, he’s a mere shell of everything we need. Much in the same way that we are a shell of everything we once were. Or will be, unless we find out a way to rescue ourselves.

That’s our real Mission – should we decide to accept it.

Mission Impossible TV Show Theme Song

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: film critics

Barbenheimer Whiplash

Mission Implausible