If you consider yourself at all interested in world affairs and have not heard of Irshad Manji (pictured right) it’s about time that you did.

Manji is a Canadian radio talk-show hostess, recently described as “Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare.” Now, being that Manji is an upwardly-mobile, thoroughly-modern feminist, an open lesbian and, as you can see, appears in public wearing makeup and sans-headscarf, that she’d boil any Islamofacist’s blood is not news to anybody. So why the distinction of the special disdain of terrorism’s top dog? (appologies to actual dogs for the comparison, of course.)

Because Manji is herself also a practicing (if thoroughly-skeptical) Muslim, who’s written several books and delivers frequent speeches on the subject of faith and terrorism. And her takes on such? Manji is pro-America, pro-Israel, pro-gay rights, anti-jihad and offers up the following advice to her co-religionists in regards to “understanding” terrorism: She wants fellow Muslim’s to admit that something has gone horribly wrong with Islam as a religion, and that it needs to be fixed.

Yeah.

In case you’re wondering, yes, the windows or her home are currently fitted with bulletproof glass.

Here’s her official website:

http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/

What’s important to note here is that, while she’s earned the ire of religious “conservatives” in her own faith (hatred of gays, independent women and personal freedom in general being, after all, common threads between fundamentalism in almost all major religions) Manji is no self-hater or apostate: Instead, the theme of much of her work is that Islam has lost it’s way from being what was once a progressive faith that once championed science and helped spur the Western Renaissance has in large part regressed into a freedom-disdaining fascism that forces women into burkas, hates modernity and launches suicide strikes on innocent civilians.

Manji aims to help change all that, and to do so from the inside out. Her recent book, “The Trouble With Islam,” is essentially a laundry list of refutations of the typical defenses used to justify or dismiss acts of terrorism. It culminates in a laying-out of her primary formulation: That Islam can only save itself from implosion by enough of it’s adherents rediscovering the lost art of religious skepticism; i.e. questioning the Koran, tossing out medieval notions of “written by God,” and focusing on getting religious faith to fit into the modern world instead of demolishing the modern world to suit religious faith.

I bring this all up primarily because, along with the fact that I’ve long admired Manji’s guts as a fellow enemy of unchecked religious fundamentalism, she’s got a great peice in the current issue of Time that I think everyone should take a look at. Read it here:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1083918,00.html

Money quote from the article:

“While our spokesmen assure us that Islam is an innocent bystander in today’s terrorism, those who commit terrorist acts often tell us otherwise.”

See also:

“For too long, we Muslims have been sticking fingers in our ears and chanting “Islam means peace” to drown out the negative noise from our holy book. Far better to own up to it. Not erase or revise, just recognize it and thereby join moderate Jews and Christians in confessing “sins of Scripture,” as an American bishop says about the Bible.”

And also:

“It’s not enough for us to protest that radicals are exploiting Islam as a sword. Of course they are. Now, moderate Muslims must stop exploiting Islam as a shield–one that protects us from authentic introspection and our neighbors from genuine understanding.”

The “War on Terror,” if it’s ever going to be won, has to be fought with ideas every bit as forcefully as it’s fought with firepower. People like this, with the ability to speak frankly about the dangerous of religious extremism and the guts to do so, are the way to start.

The first thing I took notice of in “Wedding Crashers” was that, right off the bat in the first few minutes of the film, it goes and uses up it’s alotted PG-13 comedy single-use “F-bomb.” Then, a few minutes later, I was surprised (along with, it seemed, much of the audience) by the welcome appearance of actual onscreen female nudity. The initial spotting of the first confirmed “bare pair” was greeted with a round of audience applause, myself included, as it seemed we were all having an “oh, duh!” moment at once: It wasn’t a PG-13 like we’ve mostly expected every single “guy” comedy to be for the longest time. We weren’t going to have to wait for the special unrated DVD. An honest-to-goodness R-rated bare-boobs sex comedy… it’s about freaking time.

This much you know from the trailers: Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are lifelong pals who’ve perfected the art of bedding bridesmaids by conning their way into weddings. Their scheming catches up with them, though, when they infiltrate the nuptials of the obviously-supposed-to-be-the-Kennedys family of Treasury Secretary Cleary (Christopher Walken) and wind up “attached” to his remaining single daughters. Specifically, Wilson gets them dragged along to the Cleary vacation home after being smitten by Claire (Rachel McAdams) while Vaughn has become the fixation of possibly-insane nymphomaniac Gloria (Isla Fisher.)

So there’s your movie: Too funny actors with good chemistry digging themselves into an ever-deepening charade among a wealthy, eccentric family. Complications arise from mistaken identities, Walken’s protective-papa, a foul-mouthed matriarch and the revelation of Claire’s super-evil blueblood fiancee-to-be. There’s no use pretending that you can’t guess how things will end up, who will be revealed as the main villian, how and when the truth will come out, who will have a change of heart and what lessons will be learned, or anything else. This is situation-comedy as a genre exercise, and what matters isn’t how “original” the structure is or isn’t, it’s how well the jokes land.

Simple answer: They land well. The movie is damn, damn, damn funny in all the ways a movie like this should be. No, it never quite hits the levels of absurdity that, say “Bachelor Party” did, but it’s a riot while it’s playing.

Alot of it works just because it’s willing to go full-out with it’s jokes and it’s hooks: Freed from any desire to be available to a younger audience, the jokes are loosed for all they’re worth. The evil-fiancee isn’t just a toad, he’s a downright monster who means to hurt people and does.. in other words an actual threat. The “naughty” parts are really naughty, and it’s all really funny.

Beyond that, there’s not too much more to report on: This isn’t really about any kind of complicated reasoning for liking or disliking the movie. It’s funny, I liked it, go see it.

FINAL RATING: 8/10

Did ya hear?

http://www.boxofficeguru.com/weekend.htm

So that’s the end of that. The “slump,” (read: the consistent lower performance of films this year as opposed to films in the same period last yes,) has now been “broken.” Oh, the overall theatrical market is still in deep trouble, and all the various forces driving the lower theater takes are all still in place. BUT, this past weekend the overall U.S. boxoffice was just slightly higher than it was last year, and so now the studios will celebrate: The “streak” is broken, so the “slump” is now over.

First thing’s first: The now-defunct “slump” is, was and ever-shall-be a silly industry trade-paper non-story, and it will remain so.

And, so: What did it?

Or, more importantly, what will get the credit and what will it mean?

Let’s first get to the actual facts: There was no magic-bullet that did this, it was a simple matter of stacking up enough blockbusters on top of one another to hit a high number. The “slump” is now over because “Batman Begins” and “War of The Worlds” are still playing to huge crowds, and the newly-debuting “Fantastic Four” made about $20 Million more than it was projected to. But that’s real-world logic.

The studio-logic, on the other hand, changes completely from day to day based on whatever the current situation is. As I’ve been saying here since the early days of the “slump,” whichever film was #1 the weekend the damn thing was “broken” would get the lion’s-share of the credit and thus shape the studio thinking in the near future in a profound way. As of right now, the movie getting that credit is “Fantastic Four,” and as of right now that feels like kind of a mixed blessing.

The Good: Apart from any actual merits (or lack thereof) “Fantastic Four” is a big-budget comic book adaptation, cast mostly with lesser-knowns and sold on the concept of it’s characters. To my way of thinking, better to have this be the “slump-slayer” that the studios will aim to emulate as opposed to something like “Monster In-Law” or “The Perfect Man” (or “Passion”, for that matter.) If nothing else, this likely means the studios will continue to mine the comic world, or scifi/fantasy genres in general, for stories and not retreat from them.

The Bad: BUT… a comic-based scifi/fantasy/action pic “Fantastic Four” may be, yes. But it’s a godawful one, to put it gently. A half-assed throwback to the “old way”… the “Batman and Robin” way… of doing these things: The source material stripped of it’s vitals, self-consciously embarassed to exhibit any of the qualities that made it worth making a film about in the first place, reshaped into a generic formula-blockbuster, resulting in something little better than a bloated Happy Meal commercial. What “lesson” will the studios take, for example, from this type of comic-adaptation being the golden-boy who broken the infernal “slump”; while “Batman Begins,” practically a three-act how-to guide for making great films out of comic books, was not able to accomplish the “same” task? Nevermind that “Batman” (and WOTW, for that matter) will likely out-earn “Fantastic Four” overall, and that it’s solid week-to-week earnings helped break the slump just as much as F4 did; all that won’t fit in the Variety headline. “Fantastic’ End To The Slump!,” does.

I know, I know… I’m being negative, a big grouch. Whatever. The point is, “Fantastic Four” now being annointed the “slump-slayer,” however better it might be than to have had some Hillary Duff vehicle do it, means the following: The studios have no real reason to STOP making films like it. So yeah, they’ll keep giving us these nifty superhero movies, I’m glad. BUT, they’ll also have one LESS reason NOT to half-ass them.

After all, why go to the trouble of going the “Batman” route… hiring a fresh top-tier director, stocking the cast with high-end acting talent, nailing down a complex, intelligent screenplay and taking care to approach the material with respect… when you can get the same kind of bottom-line financial result AND “slump”-busting bragging rights with the director of “Taxi,” a generic script mostly knocked off from prior, better genre films and an approach to casting typified by a leading-lady primarily qualified by her ability to fill-out her costume?

Or maybe I’m reading to much into this. I dunno, what do you think?

Minor spoilers follow.

Some things are harder than they look.

For evidence, I offer up the case of “The Fantastic Four,” the celebrated comic-book series that, when launched in the early 60s, put Marvel Comics on the map, made names for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, ressurected the mass-market appeal of the superhero genre and generally gets the credit for launching the “Silver Age” of comics. With that sort of pedigree, you’d expect a movie version to be a slam-dunk, an easy score especially in the current wave of comic-based blockbusters.

Instead, it’s a project who’s inifinite troubles date back to the early 1990s, an infamous “troubled production” thats been through more scripts, directors, starts and stops than any similar property… even the notoriously litigious buildup to “Spider-Man” went easier. In one of the more well-reported oddball stories of film production on record, it took so long to get this project moving that an original rights-holder had to produce and then shelve a quickie version just to avoid losing control of the franchise. Simply put, making a movie out of this property has been a tough nut to crack.

I think the reason for that is, the concept is a little hard to get one’s head around. The setup, a “family” of four differently-powered superheroes, is deceptively simple cover for one of the most offbeat corners of the Marvel Universe: It’s tone a one-of-a-kind melding of superheroics, pulp-scifi and of-the-moment pre-Vietnam family dynamics. The heroes themselves have reveled in a kind of stubbornly-unhip retro-cool even when they were NEW: Mr. Fantastic, the square-jawed super-scientist, was an anachronism of B monster movies upon his inception, ditto for the bruiser man-monster “The Thing.” Young readers may have identified more immediately with the teenaged Human Torch, but from early on the stories were more concerned with the relationship of Mr. Fantastic and The Invisible Girl, who were the age and presumed temperment of most fans’ parents. This is to say nothing of the team’s appropriately bizzare gallery of enemies: a succession of pulp-made-new threats with names like “Doctor Doom,” “The Red Ghost” and “The Mole Man.”

Whenever these comics or adaptations thereof have worked, it’s been when the respective creators have allowed themselves to accept and roll with the outre strangeness inherent in the material. Attempts toward making these particular characters “cooler” or “more realistic” have usually backfired. In fact, come to think of it, lets make that always backfired.

So, then, it’s sad to have to report that “cooler” and “more realistic” seem to be the chief thoughts in the minds of most of those working on this movie. The result is, to my mind, the first major stumble by Marvel in turning one of it’s major franchises into a major film. “The Fantastic Four” is, overall, a stubbornly self-conscious exercise in poor pacing, bad characterization and palpable embarassment by too many of those involved with the material they’ve been given. A ton of attention has been given to making everything look very slick and “Armageddon”-ish in the production design, and the cast is very attractive and clipped in their performances, and none of it is really any fun. This is a property that has always lived and died on it’s own peculiar wavelength, and trying to shoehorn the material into the mold of a generic summer superhero pic has neutered it of the gee-whiz jolliness that should be it’s greatest strength. And if ONLY that were the only problem…

This is a film with no real idea where to go or how to get there, the only thing on it’s mind seems to be getting a feature’s worth of obligatory scenes out of the way, often with only the thinest tissue to connect them. Nothing happens organically. It opens with fast, blunt, poorly-disguised expository dialogue and keeps up that basic pattern for all of it’s running time: Bankrupt scientist Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffud) and his NASA pilot buddy Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) reluctantly seek the financial aid of billionaire industrialist Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) for a space experiment, which Von Doom agrees to mostly so he can travel to space with them and gloat over his newfound romance with Reed’s ex, Sue Storm (Jessica Alba) who brings along her younger brother Johnny (Chris Evans) who has an old an contentious relationship with Ben. All of this coincidence and complication is, believe it or not, supposed to make the story SIMPLER by conflating all five character origins into one.

In a nutshell, a cosmic radiation storm hits while they’re in space, and gives them all superpowers: Reed gets a stretchy rubber body, Sue turns invisible, Johnny controls fire and Ben becomes a superstrong monster made of orange rock. As a bonus, Von Doom gets metal skin and electricity powers, eliminating the need to characterize the villian beyond yet another eeeeevil greedy billionaire who gets powers and goes wacko in the 3rd act (In fact, Doom’s substory is almost a beat-for-beat rehashing of Willem Dafoe’s Norman Osbourne arc from “Spiderman.” )

From there, the film degenerates into a series of episodic “scenes you NEED in a Fantastic Four movie.” Powers are discovered, explained and demonstrated. Story points are raised (Johnny is a showoff, Ben wants to change back, the four are celebrities) and then quickly pushed to the side. Reed’s lab, the Baxter Building, The Thing’s blind love interest Alicia Masters and even mailman Willy Lumpkin (a cameoing Stan Lee) all get franchise-establishing bit moments, and the film even squeezes in some labored fandom face-saving references to Von Doom’s homeland of Latveria (the “businessman” Dr. Doom is a creation of the film in deferance to ‘realism’, as the comic book Dr. Doom is a third-world despot threatening the West with weapons of mass destruction which of course is not realistic at all, right?)

The less said about the screenplay itself, outside of the outright bad structure and pace, the better. The dialogue is awkward, too heavy on exposition and given to truly terrible puns and foreshadowing. Evans in particular gets saddled with some of the worst “funny” lines in recent memory, made all the more painful by a strange disconnect between his performance and the film: The dialogue, such as it is, and Evans seem to lean in the direction of Johnny Storm being an irritating, aren’t-I-cool jerk, but the pace of the film in his scenes seem to want us to actually regard him as cool. Also coming out looking bad is Alba, here saddled with more than her share of the psuedo-scientific exposition. To be polite about it… this isn’t AS big a disaster as handing similar chores to the similarly-“talented” Tara Reid in “Alone in The Dark,” but thats not the same as saying it’s a good idea.

All the characters seem to be making their decisions at the whim of a screenplay, and nothing connects one scene or motivation to another. What should be major character arcs over the course of the film, like Thing’s self-loathing and gradual acceptance of his new form, his meeting and wooing of Alicia or even Reed and Sue’s rekindled romance are done away with in single scenes with almost no thought to narrative cohesion.

The film can’t even think of some grand evil scheme by Dr. Doom to tie the story together: This supposed “supervillian” mainly grouses about his stock portfolio, picks at his slowly-metalizing scabs, dons a rather sorry-looking variant on his comic costume and seeks the power to throw bigger and bigger lightning bolts because “he’s always wanted power.” Whatever. By the end, his “evil deeds” are little more than zapping some expendable extras, a single kidnapping, some property damage and firing a missle; followed by a big final smackdown that marks the weakest attempt yet to mimic the big super-power-showdown from “Superman 2.”

Everything also winds up looking shockingly cheap, given the amount of time and money reportedly spent: The CGI and greenscreen work are uniformly sloppy and unfinished-looking, especially in regards to the (admittedly tricky) visualization of Mr. Fantastic. The rest of the effects are a mixed bag: Invisible Girl and Human Torch look passable, and while The Thing never rises above looking like an actor covered in Nerf the filmmakers wisely don’t try to hide the creature at all, and eventually you just kind of “accept it” like Chewbacca or the original Yoda. We get only two major action scenes, (save for a series of out of place Warren Miller-style extreme sports sequences with The Torch that stop the film COLD each time) both overly slapsticky and noticeably smaller in scale than we are obviously intended to regard them.

Most of the actors are doing what they can with all this, and overall much of the blame can probably be lain at the feet of the producers: Forcing a (widely-reported) hurried production schedule onto the project, endlessly rewriting the script (a process the finished film REEKS of) and assigning directorial chores to the woefully underqualified Tim Story (“Barbershop” and “Taxi”) appear to have resulted in a film that looks and plays at it’s best moments like a higher-end Golan & Globus production from the mid-80s.

Cheap-looking, unfocused, badly-written and unmemorable are the order of the day here. Yes, I’m aware I was among those who weren’t really expecting much from this, but I sit here honestly surprised by just how big of a misfire “The Fantastic Four” has really turned out to be. This isn’t merely a case of a dissapointing adaptation, and it’d be a blessing if the biggest problems were merely Jessica Alba’s miscasting or the uninteresting-by-comparison “new” Doctor Doom. No, the problems run deeper and more basic: Script, direction, production are ALL functioning at a seriously lax level here.

This is a plain old fashioned dud, a badly-made film, top-to-bottom, and with it Marvel Films now has a REAL problem on it’s hands, particularly coming as it does in the same summer as “Batman Begins.” The arrival of original “Fantastic Four” books began Marvel’s stature as a driving-force in comics, and now it’s wholly possible that the arrival of the “Fantastic Four” movie could well signal the end of their stature as THE driving-force of comic-based films.

FINAL RATING: 4/10

Someone has to stop the madness.

To listen to the histrionics of the film industry trade papers, we are now in the midst of “the longest slump in modern Hollywood history” following the innability of “War of The Worlds” to not make as much money over the July 4th weekend as “Spider-Man 2” did one year ago.

The time has come for two realities to be faced. Firstly, that the term “slump” is actually studio optimism disguised as doom-and-gloom pessimism since, after all, it suggests that the current run of lessened grosses is a valley among peaks. Secondly, that they are almost certainly wrong, and that if “recovery” is defined as a sudden and prolonged rise is boxoffice then “recovery” is all but impossible at this point.

In dispelling the “slump” myth, the myths of the slump causes must also be put to rest: In all rational likelihood, This is NOT some kind of nationwide uprising against sequels, prequels, remakes and films based on comic books. This is NOT happening because some huge swath of Americans are “boycotting” Hollywood because they disagree with the political beliefs of actors. There are NOT huge movements mobilized in sympathetic support of Jennifer Anniston, nor in organized disgust at Tom Cruise. This will NOT be solved by going the Mel Gibson route and throwing anti-semetic torture-porn onto the screen to lure the “values voters.” Dorm-ensconed Freshmen downloading bootlegs are NOT the main problem. L. Brent Bozell, Ted Baer, James Dobson, Daniel Lapin, Debbie Schlussel and Michael Medved do NOT know what they are talking about.

This comes down to two simple phenomena: DVDs and Video On Demand. The DVD format has shifted the post-theatrical market from film-rental to film-ownership. Netflix and VOD have eclisped the rental markets, and the windows are shrinking. The throwaway joke in Woody Allen’s “Hollywood Ending” about theatrical releases being advertisements for the home-video market has become a simple industry truth: DVD, not theaters, is how the majority of potential customers are preferring to watch their movies.

This is about business, markets and paradigms. The market has shifted, the business is tipping in another direction and there is a new paradigm. The sooner studios accept this, the more likely they will endure. The home/DVD market is secure and growing, and thus safe. It’s the theaters that are in trouble, and if the studios continue to tie their fortunes too heavily to them they too will be in trouble. I don’t pretend to be some kind of authority on the subject, but as someone currently employed in both the film retail and theatre business and as a longtime watcher of the industry, I believe the following steps to be the major things that need to happen for the industry to survive this major consumer-driven shift in it’s structure:

1. The Theater Industry Will Need To Shrink. With respect to the theater biz: There is now less market for your “product” than there was before. In business, that means you need to make yourself smaller so that less money can be more of a profit for you. That’s just simple math. The first move to make, to my mind: Start closing and/or consolidating the multiplexes. Small arthouse and specialty theaters are in no real danger, as the operate with minimal cost and serve devoted niche audiences, the DVD age does not hurt them any more than the invention of poster-prints has hurt The Louvre. It’s the multiplexes that are taking the hit. Multiplexes were designed to be filmgoing for the age of shopping malls, and that function has been supplanted by DVDs on sale IN shopping malls.

Now, to my fellow Cinephile readers, take your Elitism Caps off for a second and lets all admit what we all know: Seeing films on the big screen does not carry the same importance to the majority of the public that it does to us. You know it, deal with it. Now put that Elitism Cap back on, and ask yourself: Would it be even remotely a bad thing for US if the majority of the public stopped going to movie theaters regularly? Do you REALLY enjoy the presence of the majority of the public when you go to the movies? The “majority of the public,” once they enter movie theaters, tend to be loud, obnoxious people who can’t disengage a cell phone to save their life, bring squealing babies because they can’t be bothered to find a sitter and who’s ticket-purchasing habits ensure the continued blight upon the movie landscape of films starring Jennifer Lopez etc.

In other words, would it be a BAD THING if the “mainstream” movie-theater industry simply accepted that the “Monster In-Law” audience is going to wait for the DVD and instead tip their efforts toward catering to the audience that’s still going to the theater: Devoted cinephiles and film-buffs of all stripes who will demand edible food and clean, well-policed with a zero tolerance policy toward cell phones and will reward those establishments that provide such with patronage? Allowing, of course, for the continued “mass presence” at the big “Batman“-sized communal filmgoing events, which will continue as big draws on the “big movie/big screen” pretext.

2. Accept direct-to-DVD as a major market. There’ve already been rumblings of this. Face it: Some films just WILL do better on DVD, at theatrical releases don’t help them. Right now, “Cinderella Man” is a theatrical failure, but everyone “knows” it’s going to be big on DVD where the older, busy audience that it’s aimed at will see it and love it. Already, the arthouse and foriegn markets have seen MAJOR increases thanks to their availability on DVD. Right now, the only reason many “prestige” films open in theaters is because they NEED TO to qualify for the awards season. DVD is the main market for films like “Yes” or even “Cinderella Man,” so why not just be up front about it?

What I’m saying here is… this is no slump, it’s a new world. And if properly handled, it can wind up a better one for casual and devoted film fans alike. But first, we have to stop the doomsaying.

Warning: The following is likely to be controversial, and also discusses elements of at least two recently released major films that should definately by considered major spoiler material.

As we’re all aware when it comes to movies, especially “mainstream” Hollywood releases, there are certain things that while not against any of the MPAA rules you’re just “not supposed to do.” For the last five years, the #1 top entry on that list has certainly been using 9/11 imagery as any kind of referential counterpoint. Exceptions exist, of course, for serious or topical films and even then ONLY in the most tasteful and sombre way.

Above all else, a certain “universal understanding” has prevailed: You’re “not supposed to” use the visual touchstones of 9/11 as an element of emotional manipulation for a fictional onscreen event. Or, in plain english: It’s been understood as “wrong” or “too soon” to deliberately render something in your movie in resemblance to 9/11 iconography in order to stir the audience’s collective emotional memory to help the onscreen goings-on achieve a desired emotional effect. It would be “callous, too soon and grossly innapropriate,” right? This is where we’ve, for the most part, been for a long time now.

But now, here we have “War of The Worlds,” which BLUNTLY evokes the key iconography of 9/11 in tremendously powerful ways. There’s been no official yes or no from Spielberg, of course, but LOTS of people are picking up on this and in my opinion there’s simply no way most of this could be an accident: “WOTW” seems very obviously to base the “look and feel” of it’s Alien attacks on the “look and feel” of 9/11 and it’s aftermath, and it does so to (I think) striking dramatic effect.

Consider, first, the obvious parts: Unlike most big action spectacles where the visual keynote of mass-destruction is fiery explosions, WOTW is all about ash (from death ray blasted humans) and gray concrete dust. Amid the initial Alien attack, Cruise’s Ray Ferrier is shown not so much as fleeing the Tripod itself, but fleeing the massive cloud of dust and ash it causes. I can’t see how it can be overlooked or explained away, that the results serve to deftly mirror the ash-strewn streets and the crashing “wave of dust” we all remember from the captured footage of the day. Later, scenes showing hastily-assembled camps for refugee humans covered with colorful, hand-made signs seeking missing loved ones extremely reminiscient of the same purpose signs that covered much of NY post-attack. Finally, the film twice returns to the surreal image of empty human clothing drifting down from the sky in a manner that recalls the slow showers of office paper that continued long after the towers fell.

And then the more subtle possible inferences: The film never leaves the geography of a largely straight line between the New York and Boston areas… the destination and origin of the hijacked 9/11 planes. When the Ferrier family bunks down for the night in a basement, they awake to find huge sections of the neighborhood crushed by planes that have fallen from the sky. The big “this is bigger than we thought” reveal is that the Tripod war machines have been waiting buried underneath Earth’s soil for a long time… “sleeper cells,” perhaps?

I don’t mean any of this as criticism, just observation. This is Speilberg’s stock in trade after all, no? His ability to understand and use the visual and thematic touchstones of his audience’s collective minds to increase emotional investment in his films. This is why “Schindler’s List” looks like the b&w photographs by which most people already “know” the holocaust, and why “Saving Private Ryan’s” battle scenes mirror the hand-held look of WWII-era archival footage. It’s my arithmetic that “War of The Worlds” looks like 9/11 because 9/11 is now our #1 go-to mental picture of what we “know” mass-scale tragic devastation looks like.

What I’m asking is, since WOTW has now come out and seems well on the way to being a boxoffice success using this formula… does this mean that “thou shalt reference 9/11 for dramatic effect” commandment has now been retired? Will WOTW and Summer 2005 be remembered, then, as the movie and the year wherein in finally became “okay” to deal with the memory of 9/11 in abstract or even allegorical ways? If so, what does that mean? Will ash-clouds and softly-drifting debris now replace fireballs and clashing steel as the action-movie “ka-boom” effects of choice? Does it mean we’re that much closer to films set around or in relation to the attacks or, even a 911 movie?

Come to think of it, we may have already crossed this line earlier this summer. What about some of the subtle post-911 era concepts at work in “Batman Begins?” Amid the main thrust of Batman’s origin is a big villian plot with an eerily familiar ring to it: A shadow army of moralistic terrorists seek to destroy a “corrupt and decadent” Western city by instilling widescale panic among the citizens, a key element of which involves driving a hijacked mass-transport vehicle into a massive corporate tower that dominates the skyline. The terrorist mastermind behind the plot, it must be noted, hides out in a remote mountain range and even has an Arabic name: Ra’s Al Ghul (“The Demon’s Head.”)

Anyway, thats what I think. I’d like to hear what some of you think: Am I seeing things that aren’t there or am I onto something? And, if so, is this a good development? A bad one?

I’ve spent the last few weeks leading up to seeing “War of The Worlds” doing something I truly, deeply hate: Watching news about “wacky” celebrity behavior. I did so not by choice, as I am generally want to avoid entertainment “journalism” unless I’m trying to see the TV debut of a trailer. In this case, “celeb wackiness” journalism has crept into “mainstream” journalism based on the antics of Tom Cruise. For those luckier than me who HAVEN’T heard, apparently Mr. Cruise has a bit of an ego, a bit of a temper, a very public relationship with otherwise completely unnoteworthy starlet Katie Holmes, and that much of this has been amplified in one way or another by his adherence to the religion of Scientology.

Evidently, the fact that a popular movie star has turned out to be a bit of a nutter is more worth devoting news broadcasts to than the status of American soldiers in the ongoing Iraq conflict, or the slate of recent Supreme Court decisions, OR the overall notion that we’re still living in an age of worldwide terrorism. Who knew? In any case, watching Mr. Cruise’s endlessly-repeated blowup opposite Matt Lauer i.e. the science of psychiatry, it occured to me that someone was in need of an intervention. No, not who you think.

WE are in need of an intervention. What the hell is the matter with us? There’s a pretty good-sized war going on, we’re told it’s part of an even larger global conflict, there are health and financial crisis breaking out all over the world and how much did YOU pay for gas this week? Amid all this, the placement of any sort of entertainment “news” in a “front-page” setting is damn near vulgar. Even a serious, insightful, art-centric dissection of a film of major cultural importance would be too frivolous to devote major news time to in these circumstances; devoting it to the religious eccentricities of an actor still best known for a winning smile is damn near pornographic. And not the good kind of pornographic, either.

What I’m driving at, guys, is that it’s pathetic enough that the “Tom Cruise is a nut” story has unjustly overwhelmed the arrival of his and Steven Spielberg’s new movie “War of The Worlds,” but it’s almost a SIN that we’ve allowed it to overwhelm actual news. People, we need to get a collective grip here: Tom Cruise being a religious nut (“Dianetics-thumper?”) is not important or worth a massive public debate about. Hell, as movie-actor religious nuts go he doesn’t even measure up to Mel Gibson, having yet to have produced a feature length work of torture-porn propaganda for his respective daffy sect.

SO, then, we should all take a deep breath and ruminate on the following: Mr. Cruise is the star of “War of The Worlds,” which happens to be an excellently-mounted scifi feature that you should really check out. Stop giving this person’s public eccentricities more attention than they deserve (read: ANY attention) and put your minds to something worthy or at least not-as-unworthy as this. At the very least, let’s have more discussion about this fascinating new spin on the summer scifi blockbuster motif and less on any “wackiness” attributable to the guy who stars in it. My review of “War of The Worlds” appears below (if I’ve got this Blogger posting thing figured out.) I reccomend you check out the review, in which I reccomend that you check out the movie.

I’m glad we had this talk.

I’m also accutely aware of the irony at play in talking down cultural obsession with something by spending five paragraphs bitching about it, so no one needs to bring that up 🙂

Yadda yadda spoiler warning yadda yadda.

Setting Sarcasmatron to “stun”…

You might’ve missed it, but along with being a public eccentric Tom Cruise is also in a movie this week. Apparently there’s some sort of lack of information available on this topic this summer, so here’s the skinny: The celebrities, those people “exposed” doing “crazy” stuff on Access Hollywood? Many of them, in addition to behaving in societally-atypical ways for your amusement, are in a profession called acting. They do so in movies, which are kind of like TV but usually longer. These “movies” are then shown in “theaters” before making their way to a space on the DVD rack an apparently large number of you will pass by on your way to purchase the first season of “Desperate Housewives.” Yeah, I was surprised, too.

Sarcasmatron disengaged…

And so here it is. Steven Spielberg’s $130 million, ultra-restrained-shooting-schedule summer opus “War of The Worlds.” The last great hope, we’re told, of the studios to avoid dubbing 2005 “the summer of Slump.” It’s been more talked-about for the circumstances of it’s existance, it’s budget and the behavior of it’s star than it has for it’s actual merits for a year now, but here it is finally available for judgment on it’s own merits. So here goes…

If “War of The Worlds” cannot end the “slump,” then it does not deserve to be ended. If audiences are willing to pass on rousing, psychologically-intriguing and deftly executed works like this, then it may be time to give some credence to the idea that the “slump” is more evidence of a lack of taste in the audience than a lack of quality in Hollywood’s output.

This isn’t the first or even tenth review site on anyone’s rotation, so by now you know the score: The film updates H.G. Wells book, the patient-zero of alien invasion yarns, to present day New Jersey and updates the aliens from Martians to maybe-but-maybe-not-Martians. Cruise’s less-than-heroic dock worker Ray Ferrier has weekend custody of his kids Rachel and Bobby (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin) when freakish worldwide lightning storms knock out most of Earth’s electricity. This presages the alien invasion, culminating in the baddies’ giant Tripod war machines erupting out of the ground and laying waste to the countryside. Rachel is panicked nearly to the point of a shock-coma, and Bobby is immediately jazzed to join the vengeful military counterattack on the invaders, but Ray is running on the only parental instinct he seems good at: Protect-and-survive.

There we have the film’s first stroke of brilliance: Ray Ferrier is not a heroic, admirable or even especially likable guy. It’s immediately easy to understand why he’s divorced and why neither of his children seem thrilled to be staying with him. He and Bobby fight like a pair of perpetual adolescents despite only one of them having an excuse for such, while wise-beyond-her-years Rachel sits idly by losing faith in the male gender. When the invasion goes down, his strategy is to hijack a working car and get as far away from the aliens as he can.

It’s Bobby who’s the “heroic” one, risking his life to save fellow escapees dangling from a gangplank in one scene, and eventually heading off to join what he percieves to be the Charge of the Light Brigade, but he’s also shown to be rash and self-endangering in his grand gestures. Likewise, Tim Robbins turns up as a weapons-hording redneck survivalist (fuuuuuunny) named Oglivy who plans for La Resistance but turns out to be unbalanced and a danger to the safety of those around him, leading to probably the darkest moment involving the “hero” of any film this summer.

Making Ray an antiheroic, only gradually less-unpleasant jerk also gives Spielberg the necessary alternative-perspective to differentiate his film from any other big-scale alien invasion films: Like the novel and the famous Orson Welles’ radio broadcast, this “War” is seen through the eyes of people who spend most of their time fleeing or hiding from it. Save for the instances wherein the Ferriers are unable to avoid coming face-to-“face” with the invaders, we mainly see the Tripods and the havoc they wreak in powerfully composed longshots. Up until the third act, the main “human-level” menace to the heroes are a creepy serpentine probe snaking around a basement shelter and, briefly, the invaders themselves whom I’m happy to report are basically old-school Bug-Eyed Monsters and not the usual Geigeresque knockoffs.

In fact, there we have the OTHER masterstroke, one which I think will form the basis of most complaints about this film but at the same time makes me love it all the more. My favorite “style” of fantasy/sf filmmaking is that in which the silliest and most impractical genre concepts are treated with absolute unblinking sincerity and realism, and this is the motif Spielberg is working for all it’s worth here. “WOTW” determinedly throws out ALL the “modern” tropes of alien movies and mythos, from Roswell to Groom Lake to “X-Files” to “ID4” to Spielberg’s own “Close Encounters” and goes way, way, WAY back to basics of Welles’ novel and the generations of pulp, pop-art and B-movies it inspired: Bug-Eyed Monsters with creepy suction-tipped fingers stomping across the cityscapes in clunking mechanical horrors walking on skyscraper-sized spindly legs and blasting indiscriminately at fleeing humans with Death Rays. Later, said Tripods take to scooping up human victims with long tendrils and depositing them in (really) big bird cages hanging down from their chasis.

This kind of retro-fetishisim is either going to rub you the right way or turn you off. Me, I adore it. Roger Ebert, on the other hand, awards the film a paltry 2 stars based almost entirely on his unwillingness to accept the inherent impracticality of the Tripods. He will not be the only person to have this reaction.

What works for me, wonderfully so, is that Spielberg elects to play all of this 100% straight. As far as the tone of the film and it’s characters are concerned, there’s nothing impractical or silly and everything terrifying about the Tripods and their operators, and he’s a good enough filmmaker to actually pull it off: The large-scale destruction and scenes of society tearing itself apart in panic are the stuff of disaster movie legend, but he really excells when the Death Rays are unveiled. Here is one of scifi’s oldest and generally goofiest tropes, a beam of light that vaporizes it’s victims instantly, but the film dwells on the ickier aspects to startling effect. Death Ray-blasted humans explode into clouds of instantly-cremated ash (leading to a great shock scene in which Cruise realizes he’s literally covered in the cremains of his neighbors) leaving their empty clothing to flutter down to Earth in grim tableaus that bear impossible-to-be-accidental similarity to 9/11’s eerie shower of office paperwork. (“Is it the terrorists!!??” screams Rachel as they flee the initial destruction of New Jersey.) Come the third act, we also get the most unnerving explaination yet for the strange red weeds that Wells’ martians seemed to be terraforming the planet with.

This is big stuff, exciting stuff, smart stuff and just plain awesome stuff. It’ll be worth seeing how people react to this, especially the decision to stick with the less outwardly crowd-pleaser aspects of the original story, and whether or not people are yet ready to see the still-smoldering visual touchstones of the national 9/11 experience so broadly transposed onto a fictional scifi tale. But right now go see it, so the discussion points can begin.

FINAL RATING: 9/10

Such an enigma is Nicole Kidman. Born in Australia, yet posessed of what can accurately be called a natural “classically-Hollywood” beauty and effortlessly able to affect a pan-European “cool” native to neither land. Gorgeous enough to coast the length of a career on sex-appeal alone, but instead driven to consistently appear in good, challenging roles in successively better films with relatively few missteps. When the history of this era of filmmaking is written, Kidman will be remembered as one of the most enduringly talented “movie stars” of her time.

So… what the hell is she doing in a Nora Ephron movie?

Ephron, you may be unlucky enough to remember, in 1989 had the great fortune to preside as writer over “When Harry Met Sally,” which should have been the LAST word on the modern Romantic Comedy. The unlucky-for-us part is, she wouldn’t LET it be the last word and instead kept that most quality-resistent of Hollywood genre films going as a director of “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.” Ephron’s films as a director seldom, if truly ever, have occasion to rise above the level of extended sitcoms, so in fairness there were probably WORSE choices to direct a feature-length retooling of the TV classic “Bewitched.”

The resulting film, on the other hand, is exhibit-A that there could hardly have been a worse choice to write the film than Ephron and her sister Delia, who have delivered just about the most awful, unfocused and unfunnily-written film of the entire Summer so far: The only thing that keeps this from sinking to “Monster In-Law” depths is that the cast is talented enough to salvage what they can from a truly hopeless venture.

Let’s be direct about this: The only reason this film even exists is because Nicole Kidman looks similar enough to original series topliner Elizabeth Montgomery to be considered interesting casting. “Bewitched” is one of the enshrined “classic” cultural touchstones of early-60s television, dually revered as a better-than-average sitcom on the surface and as a hallmark of the pop-culture “find the hidden themes” passtime.

The TV premise (all-powerful witch Samantha marries mere-mortal Darrin, agreeing to hold her reality-reshaping powers largely in-check so that he can at least have the illusion of a traditionally in-charge husbandhood) may have been largely knocked-off from the James Stewart/Kim Novak vehicle “Bell, Book & Candle,” but the series’ 1960s milieu eventually turned it’s lead character into a kind of protofeminist icon: the Kennedy-era housewife as omnipotent Earth Goddess in disguise. In one of the most sublimely metatextual moments of my life, this past week a bronze statue of Montgomery-as-Samantha was installed right here in Salem, Massachusetts, where the onetime site of Puritan witch hunts has been “recclaimed” as a kind of American mecca for neo-pagan Witches, many of whom have a certain kitschy fondness in “Bewitched’s” rosy image of Witch-as-suburban-everymom.

This new film turns on the “clever” premise that a new version of “Bewitched” is being mounted, and the producers accidentally hire an ACTUAL witch-come-to-Earth to play Samantha. The witch in question, Isabelle Bigelow, (Kidman) is sadly no sharply self-confident Samantha Stevens: Instead, we’re faced with a perplexing, strange character I can best describe as Kidman attempting an improv routine of “what if Marilyn Monroe had played Leeloo, the alien/womanchild fetish doll from ‘The 5th Element?’” Isabelle is fleeing the suffocation of her “instant gratification” witchcraft lifestyle, as personified by her serial-philanderer father Nigel (Michael Caine, looking perpetually distracted by dreams of what brand of boat he’s going to purchase with the money it must have cost to get him onto this set every day.)

Unknown to Isabelle, the show is ACTUALLY a retooled Darrin-centric vision of the story, a career-saving last effort by failed movie star Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell.) When she does learn that her character is to be marginalized and, worse yet, that Jack doesn’t respect or like her, she unleashes Samantha-style unholy hell on the set. There’s probably a cute comedy in that premise, but the Sisters Ephron throw it out almost immediately in favor of an entirely new plotline: Isabelle is sexually aroused by Wyatt’s human hopelessness and attempts a love-connection, first through magic and later through the more human means of calling him out on all his character flaws which, in bad Romantic Comedies, always makes the recipient of the criticism fall head over heels for the critic. No sooner has THAT plotline died-on-arrival than we get yet another, as Wyatt discovers Isabelle’s true nature and takes it poorly in a series of breakdown scenes we assume were meant to be funny.

In among all the colliding plots, the film stretches the allowable limits of self-awareness past the breaking point: At least one other character in the film is a Witch in-disguise, and at least two characters from the original TV show pop up in the “real” world of the movie. I think. Aunt Clara shows up around the midpoint, seemingly Isabelle’s actual aunt only coincidentally a doppleganger for the Clara of the show. Later, Steve Carrell turns up in a scene-stealing, nearly movie-saving cameo playing Paul Lynde’s “Uncle Arthur” character. Arthur suggests that Isabelle’s constant mucking with time and space is (I think) causing reality and the TV show to get mixed up, an idea which would probably make a better movie than this one.

They’ll be talking about this one for awhile, I think. “Bewitched” is the biggest walking-disaster big star movie to arrive onscreen in some time. I’d advise you to avoid it.

FINAL RATING: 2/10