Below, the cryptic but entrancing teaser trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “THE MASTER;” a long-gestating project which is based-onthat is absolutely not at all in any way, shape or form honest really no-fooling a fictionalized account of L. Ron Hubbard and the rise of Scientology. Philip Seymour Hoffman has the Hubbard part – the titular Master – but doesn’t appear in the trailer; which seems to show Joaquin Pheonix as a sailor undergoing some sort of pyschiatric-interrogation.
This will probably end up being one of the big ones this year; but the real interest will be in seeing how the notoriously-litigious, cartoonishly thin-skinnedextremely reasonable and clearheaded Church of Scientology reacts to it.
Until further notice, anonymous commenting is no longer available on this blog. I don’t like it, but there’s been too much bad behavior as of recent and this is the only way to curb it while still allowing the majority of readers to still post. Google and/or OpenID registrations are free, and while I understand and sympathize with those who don’t want to register in some way to post online there really is no other way.
Someday, someone is going to write an AMAZING book about just how hillariously, disasterously stupid the “pop-culture tie-ins” side of the Reagan/Bush era “War on Drugs” push was.
For now, here’s the finale of “The Flintstone Kids: Just Say No!;” with Michael JackSTONE belting out a re-worded anti-drug cover of “Beat-It” for toddler-versions of Fred Flintstone and friends – yes, complete with animated crotch-grab at 0:58. You’re welcome.
Below, a trailer for “2016: Obama’s America,”a political-propaganda documentary that alledges to explain the “real motivation” behind all the sinister things paranoid dumbfuck white people conservatives were sure that Barack Obama was going to do but didn’t do so now they’re sure he’s just waiting to do in his hypothetical second term. The bulk of this particular theory is coming from one Dinesh D’Souza, whose supposed “eureka!” concerning Obama is that he’s not a socialist but rather an Africa-centric anti-colonialist who wants to dismantle American/Western power to the benefit of nations/peoples who previously suffered under Western colonialism – the “between the lines” on that, of course, is “White people, look out! Obama is going to take your stuff and give it to brown people!”
D’Souza, incidentally, is the author of “The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and It’s Responsibility For 9/11;” which argued that secular American cultural exports like feminism, abortion-rights, atheism, gay-equality etc. are to blame for making Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists decide to attack the United States. So… yeah, charming guy.
Does the Republican Party power-structure (who, let’s be clear, would CRUSH this thing if they didn’t think it would help) buy D’Souza’s batshit psychoanalysis? Probably not – but that’s not the point. The point is it offers a faux-reasonable excuse to juxtapose images of the President with footage of black people rioting violently. Y’know, because this is ALL about the economy and has absolutely NOTHING to do with race.
Incidentally, observe the (seemingly) out-of-context, near-subliminal shot of a black family squabbling flailingly over a game of Monopoly starting at around 0:51. You stay classy, GOP.
Sacha Baron Cohen is a great comic talent and a good actor with a lot of potential, so it’s encouraging to see him trying to move beyond the “ambush-interviews-as-a-wacky-character” genre that initially made him a sensation. Let’s just hope that the next “something new” he tries sticks better than “The Dictator” does.
The main problem at work is that while Cohen has wisely abandoned the “interview real people” routine, he’s really only made a lateral progression – once again inhabiting a broad, purposefully-offensive cartoon caricature like Borat, Bruno and Ali-G but this time dropping said caricature into the leading-man spot of a formula fish-out-of-water comedy.
The persona in question is Admiral General Aladeen, dictator-for-life of the fictional North African Republic of Wadiya. He’s basically a pastiche of every “crazy leader” Western audiences have become recently familiar with – a little Saddam, a little Kim-Jong Il, a little Ghadaffi, a little Ahmadinejad, etc; – plus a smattering of broader riffs on Middle Eastern cultural-stereotypes (he’s a sexist, an anti-semite, you get the idea.) This is actually the funniest stuff in the movie – it’s a riot watching Aladeen go about his psycho-supervillain routine; and you start to get the sense that a “Spinal Tap” style mocumentary JUST on the running of Wadiya might be funnier than the rest of the movie.
Along with brutalizing his people while spending absurd amounts of national wealth on his personal fetishes and fixations, Aladeen has also begun seeking nuclear weapons which has pushed him to the brink of international military intervention; which he has been given one last chance to avert by addressing the United Nations in New York. While there, he is betrayed by his uncle (Ben Kingsley) and left for dead – the betrayers planning to replace him with a double and initiate a “transfer to democracy” which will actually involve Wadiya and it’s oil fields being taken over by a cabal of corporate power-players. There’s a lot of potential for smart pitch-black satire in this premise; the idea of a corporate-“democracy” being equal to or even worse than a murderous dictatorship, but other than a well-intentioned but leaden speech at the very end it doesn’t go anywhere. Instead, we follow the (not dead, as it turns out) Aladeen through a bad guy version of “Coming to America,” as he schemes to get himself back into power while hiding in the guise of a Wadiyan refugee and falling for Anna Farris as the boss of a hippie Brooklyn food co-op.
A lot of this is pretty funny; I liked an extended bit where Aladeen visits a restaurant catering to Wadiyan refugees, and you can see a better movie struggling to escape in a subplot where The Dictator turns Farris’ struggling food store around by applying his governing “expertise” to small-business. But it just can’t rise above the level of barely-connected comedy sketches that can’t even bother to maintain some consistency of character: Sometimes Aladeen is a wily schemer, then he’s an idiot manchild, then he’s a derranged butcher (a bizzare laugh-free dialogue exchange is dedicated to him having raped the members of Menudo.) That kind of “whatever’s funniest right now” approach worked in “Borat” and the rest, where the whole point was that the interviewees were only meeting him for that bite-sized moment and the audience is in on the gag; but when it’s a full-fiction movie and Aladeen is playing off other made-up comedy players it’s just tiresome and disjointed.
It was probably innevitable that Cohen was going to stumble in a “transitional” movie in between his original schtick and whatever he grows into, but “The Dictator” is still pretty disapointing. Granted, I laughed hard and I laughed often – but then I forgot that I’d laughed at all.
The premise of “Bait?” A group of random strangers are in an Australian supermarket when a robbery breaks out. Then a freak tsunami hits, trapping them inside the now half-flooded building… with a Great White Shark who rode in on the wave.
It’s a cultural curiousity that, despite the much-ballyhooed presence of Jewish voices in American cinema; you don’t actually see many mainstream movies mining the religious arcana of Judaism the way Catholicism or even Paganism are used by, for example, supernatural films. In fact, most non-Jewish U.S. audience probably couldn’t tell you much about the actual faith beyond kosher diets and a lack of Jesus. You can probably chalk most of this up to history – many Jewish-American families descend from immigrants who escaped persecution in Europe and elsewhere, and “blending in” to a mainstream culture by downplaying the more pronounced differences between their own culture and Christianity was likely an old survival-habit that died hard.
In any case, what this means is that even though there are traditions of dealing with supernatural forces and even exorcism that are unique to Judaism; they’re rarely used as movie-fodder like the by-now humdrum Christian variety is. “The Possession” (formerly “The Dybbuk Box”,) is a pickup by Sam Raimi’s Ghosthouse production label that aims to change this with the story of a young girl whose parents seek out a Rabbinical exorcist to rid her of a possessing demon called a Dybbuk:
Generation Y is beginning to graduate from College and head out into the big scary adult world, which in the marketing biz means it’s time to start re-selling them comforting reminders of their suddenly-evaporating youth.
I was (or, rather, considered myself to be) just a bit too old when the “Power Rangers” first happened to get big into it – though, obviously, the “tokusatsu” series that the franchise grew out of have been and remain a pretty big influence on me – in fact I remember being a perhaps-too-vocal “hater” of it when I was in Junior High and my then-kid sister was a MASSIVE never-miss-an-episode fan of it. I will say, however, that thanks to Linkara’s hugely-watchable efforts I’m more or less becoming sort of a “retroactive fan.”
In any case, I’m sure that while the image to the right is more of a “huh, cool” to me it’s a MASSIVE “about fucking time!!!” to many others. What I CAN say is that Shout! Factory and Saban Inc’s recently-announced plan for releasing the series on DVD is a master-class in how to “do” nostalgia-selling right… Here’s the score: The DVDs are coming out in Season/Volume sets (it started out as a daily series, so “Season One” is incredibly long as kid-shows go) with multi-month release gaps because… hey, they’ve gotta make money and cheaper piecemeal dole-outs let you make it big time off of impulse buys in the “OMIGOD GOTTA HAVE IT NOW!!!” mold, the “Hey, so-and-so loved this as a kid – let’s get it for `em!” mold and especially the younger fans of the current (yet incredibly STILL in some kind of continuity!*) incarnations hungry for more material (seriously, TEN HOURS of episodes for under 20 bucks is a hell of a deal as digital-babysitting goes.)
…BUT! In a welcome acknowledgement that a big part of the consumer base for this will be now-adult collectors with the ability and inclination to buy it in a bigger but more efficient way, they are also set to make a huge box set encompassing every single episode of the first Seven Seasons (for fans: that means the entirety of the “Zordon Era” and the semi-connected seventh “Lost Galaxy” season) available right off the bat through Time Life – similar to the way the “Real Ghostbusters” DVDs initially came out (no price has been set yet.)
THIS, nostalgia-propert license-holders, is how you handle this stuff.
I’m sincerely curious to see how “90s Nostalgia” plays out as a market force. My own biases are obvious in this case; (“…don’t you mean EVERY case, Bob derp de-derp derp derp!?”) but I maintain that one of the reason that “kitsch nostalgia” of the 80s (and the 50s before it) “works” so well as a re-saleable commodity is the unironic earnestness of the era(s). Yeah, there was calculating cynicism behind all that earnestness – what better way to get kids to dump their parents money into the battle between Autobot and Decepticon than to get them sincerely emotionally invested? – but it was there, and I think it’s part of why the stuff endures.
The 90s… had a different “vibe” happening – not necessarily better or worse, but different. The 90s – snuggled too-securely between the end of Cold War fears and the beginning of Terror War fears – was all about affecting a too-cool-for-school “end of history” jadedness, the “whatever” era. Pop-culture of the time reflected that, to a large degree, with lots of cartoons, comics, TV etc. making self-awareness of their own disposability part of their “act;” and I wonder if that’s had an effect on how well it’s managed to lodge in onetime fans’ psyches?
Just for one immediate example: “Power Rangers” itself probably has the most potent “nostalgia cache” of 90s-spawned kiddie properties… and if you go back and watch stuff from the first wave of it what sticks out is that it’s an incredibly “retro”-feeling show even excluding the recycled Japanese FX footage. The upbeat gee-whiz teenage superhero formula it cribs from plays out in precisely the manner of an early-60s Disney show or DC comic, and it’s wide-eyed earnest almost to the point of self-parody. Correlation? You tell me…
*Incidentally, has anyone made the argument yet that “Power Rangers” is on it’s way to being America’s equivalent to “Doctor Who;” i.e. a low-budget kids show that goes on forever as a generational, continuing “thing?” I mean, let’s be realistic – at some point someone is going to float “do a version in prime-time aimed at older fans” to Saban, and if they pull the trigger it’s almost-certainly a moneymaker…
MOVIEBOB CENTRAL 