Academic rigor, journalistic ethics, and “partisan hackery”
[UPDATE: I've made a lot of changes below. Most are typos. Some are in response to critics of my own integrity. I've tried to deal with all of them . Let me know if there are other errors or changes that need to be made.]
It’s been a while since I allowed myself to get righteously indignant enough about someone wrong on the Internet to write a 708-word Facebook comment, and that was just the longest one. And now a whole blog post! But Naomi Schaefer Riley, who is a blogger for The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s website, wrote two blog posts — “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations” and its follow-up “Black Studies, Part 2: A Response to Critics — that are, yes, such egregious displays of arrogance and incompetence that they deserve a good screed in response. However, more importantly (and more professionally, since this new blog is meant to be less screedy than the old one), they can serve as a teaching moment.
This morning, replying to a Facebook request for comments on one issue I want to address below, a friend of mine wrote, “I wonder if people should just stop reading and responding to her crappy little ‘brainstorms.”" (Riley’s blog is part of the Chronicle‘s “Ideas and Culture” collection called “Brainstorm.”) And I thought about it. And I wrote that I’m of two minds about writing a lengthy response. Ignoring it is tempting, since she’s a rather, ahem, irrelevant critic of academia. From what I can tell, no one outside of right-wing think tanks actually takes her seriously. But then there’s the fact that the Chronicle has given her a soapbox, and the Chronicle has a great deal of power. So, I think we should keep the pressure on.
And again: This is a great teaching moment.
What do I want to teach? My current job is teaching undergraduates how to do academic research. I’ve been doing it for five years. Before that, I taught feature journalism and creative nonfiction. And before that, I was a journalist and editor. Throughout all of this, I’ve been a critic, mostly of film, but also of books and music. So I want to teach my readers, whoever you are, what is so wrong about Riley’s argument.
Keeping all of that in mind, I’m going to Fisk Riley’s blog posts.
The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.
April 30, 2012, 10:24 pm
I’m not sure if Riley writes her own headlines, but since it is a blog and it was posted at 10:24pm, it’s safe to make the assumption that she does. So, it’s worth pointing out that this headline doesn’t really make sense. Answering the question “What is the most persuasive case for eliminating black studies?” with “Just read the dissertations” is bit off, isn’t it? The more sensible answer would be, “The dissertations are bad” or, in the case of the Riley’s evidence, “The dissertation topics are bad.” Because Riley didn’t read the dissertations. So, her headline sets up a bait and switch. Headlines are advertisement, and this is false advertising. Writing a misleading headline is not the worst crime in the world, but it’s a bad way to start.
By Naomi Schaefer Riley
When I’m teaching my students how to evaluate a source, I tell them to investigate the author. Usually, when it comes to academic research, the answer is something along the lines of “Sally Smith is a professor of sociology at State University and has published numerous peer-reviewed articles about the effects of the Drug War on the social organization of Mexican border towns.” (The theme of my research class is legal and illegal drugs.) With Riley, the response is a bit more complicated. While she is writing about and for academia, she is not an academic; she does not have an advanced degree beyond her Harvard AB, and none of her work has ever been peer-reviewed. Her bio on the Chronicle‘s site reads “Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of The Faculty Lounges and God on the Quad.” But then on her own site, she gets more specific. She is an affiliate “scholar” at the Institute for American Values, a conservative think tank that is run by David Blankenhorn, who most recently became famous for his embarrassingly fact-free testimony at the Prop 8 trial. Riley has also won fellowships for two other conservative think tanks, Intercollegiate Studies Institute (whose supporters include Justice Scalia and the Scaife Foundation) and the Phillips Foundation (which has awards named after Bob Novak and Ronald Reagan). She was also a deputy editor of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, everyone’s favorite repository of global warming denial, Scooter Libby fandom, and campaigns to drive liberals to suicide.
Oh, and in college, Riley was the editor the Harvard Salient, the campus conservative rag. I was searching for some of her writing from back then, but the Salient doesn’t have back issues available online. I did, however, find a reference to her work there. While in college, she wrote an article attacking National Coming Out Day, telling gay students to stay in the closet because no one cared about their homosexuality (except, I guess, for her and the writers of the other two articles in the same issue, one about Candace Gingrich’s lesbianism and the other supporting employment discrimination against gays and lesbians). Diana Adair, with whom I was friends while I was at Harvard, wrote an editorial in the Crimson criticizing that issue of the Salient, and recounting how fear of homophobia had made her lie about being gay in a scholarship interview. If she’d told the truth, Adair wrote, “Had my interviewer been Schaefer [Riley's maiden name] … I might not have gotten the scholarship.” How did Riley respond? She wrote an enraged letter, feigning offense about Diana’s implication that Riley was a bigot: “As an English concentrator, Adair should understand when I write that she fails to use the techniques of close reading when constructing her slanderous arguments.” Unfortunately, Riley, who was also an English concentrator, didn’t know the meaning of the word “slander.” Slander is spoken, and libel is written. And in the United States, both have pretty high bars; Diana would have had to known for a fact that Riley was not homophobic and then had claimed specifically that she knew for a fact that Riley was homophobic. Since Riley wrote an article telling gays and lesbians not to talk about their homosexuality and edited another that encouraged discrimination against gays and lesbians, it would be difficult to imagine how one wouldn’t assume Riley was homophobic.
Why did I bother to criticize Riley for her work she did as a college student? I’ll get to that.
But suffice it say that if one of my students were to use something by Riley as a source, I would expect the entry in his or her annotated bibliography to point out the Riley’s work is ideologically driven. She is a conservative before she’s a journalist. And, well, I wouldn’t expect this in a formal annotated bibliography, but Riley also has got a history of being hostile to minority rights, discrimination claims, and to criticism.
You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.
Here’s the sidebar in question. (The non-sidebar piece on Black Studies is here.) And, wow. Both the hostility and the hyperbole here are shocking to me. This is the Chronicle of Higher Education, not FreeRepublic.com or the comments section of Michelle Malkin’s blog. I expect decorum at the least, but I’d also hope that someone writing for the Chronicle would be more careful about encouraging the elimination of an entire discipline based on blurbs describing five dissertations. The reference to “left-wing victimization claptrap” is perhaps more damning, because it makes it clear to the reader that Riley’s critique is ideological: The conservative critique of victimization is based, at its best, on the idea that minorities shouldn’t be helped by social programs created to make-up for historical or structural discrimination. At its worst, the critique is a method for denying that racism, sexism, and homophobia continue to exist, since admitting these things exist threatens the power and privilege of white, heterosexual men. Of course, conservatives are quite obsessed with being victims themselves, as the claims of conservative Christians who claim to be victimized by hate crime legislation, same-sex marriage, and secularism make quite clear. (Ex: The recent faux outrage about Dan Savage. Or, well, Riley’s own “Don’t call me a bigot!” letter she wrote in college. Or most ridiculously, the nearly fact-free piece in the WeeklyStandard.com about Riley’s sad plight.) Finally, Riley makes the rather daring claim that these topics are “irrelevant.” What is this claim based on? As it turns out, it’s not based on any evidence, just on Riley’s imagination. Again, Riley didn’t read the dissertations.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have not always been a paragon of ethics when it comes to my public writing. Over the last year, I have written “DVR This” and “DVD of the Week” sidebars to my weekly movie review. Several times, I have suggested recording or renting movies or TV shows that I haven’t seen. Most of these involved TV broadcasts of original programming occurring in the future — such as the season premiere of Mad Men – and there was no way I could have seen the show. However, last week, I suggested renting both The Vow and Haywire because I thought many of my readers would find it fun to look at Channing Tatum. I can imagine a reader might believe I’d seen those two movies, though I have not. And several months ago, I suggested recording Kiss of the Spiderwoman and A Taste of Honey. I recommended them based on the reviews I’d read, on their reputations, and my own desire to see the movies. While I didn’t claim to have seen these films in the few sentences I used to describe and recommend them, I think a reader could easily assume that I had. I have been told that this lapse in my integrity makes my criticisms of Riley’s integrity hypocritical, and if I am to take integrity as seriously as I urge everyone else should, I must agree. I will let my readers decide whether this then means my critique of Riley is less valid.
That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.
The clause “whatever the heck that is?” is damning. Riley didn’t even bother to google the “natural birth literature,” let alone dig through Google Scholar, JSTOR, or PubMed. If she had, she would have discovered that natural birth is a rich field of study in medicine, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and so on and so forth. But how Riley then took this and jumped to the snide statement that “It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia” is confusing to me. From the blurb, it’s not at all clear that Hayes was making a claim of racism; it’s a rather large stretch to find an accusation of racism in claiming the “nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent” from the literature. Oh, and as a medical anthropologist, I am well aware that white and nonwhite experiences with medicine are different, important, and worthy of study. You don’t need to be a medical anthropologist to know this, of course, just vaguely aware of how race operates within structures of power.
Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s.” Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today.
Again, Riley goes much further with her analysis than the text allows. (Wasn’t she an English major?) The sentence in question is this: “Her dissertation looks at the federal government’s role in promoting single-family homeownership in low-income black communities after the unrest of the 1960s, and how the government collaborated with real-estate agencies to craft those programs.” This is not Taylor’s sentence, by the way, but the blurb’s author, Stacey Patton. Still, there’s no claim of conspiracy here. Stating “the government collaborated with real estate agencies” is not stating that the government and real estate agencies conspired to do something evil.
(Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!)
Riley’s claim that the “entirety of black studies rests of the premise” that the race, culture, and the world is the same now as it was in 1962 is made without any evidence. And it’s not true, as anyone who has even a passing knowledge of the work of Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Anthony Appiah, and so on would know. And the “black president” quip is, well, galling. Obama’s election was a big deal for race relations in the United States, but if you don’t believe race is a deep, abiding problem in the United States, you should look at not just the rise of the Tea Party and people like Jan Brewer, but the discursive responses to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates’s arrest, Trayvon Martin’s murder, or — heck, why not — the casting of black actors in The Hunger Games.
She explains that “The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.” The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.
Oh, my. This is the sort of thing I’d expect in the comments section of a local paper in, I dunno, Idaho. But, again, this is The Chronicle of Higher Education. Riley should have googled “race and housing market.” I didn’t need to, because I read the newspapers. But here’s what Riley should have found: Bank of America paid “$355 million to settle a federal lawsuit allegations that its Countrywide Financial unit discriminated against black and Hispanic borrowers during the housing boom.” The issue of racism and the housing market is a big deal, in academia, public policy, and politics — and, well, just in general. [As one of my readers pointed out, Taylor knows this firsthand, since, as it is explained in the sidebar, she "worked as an advocate for a tenant's rights association in Chicago where she fought foreclosures, blocked evictions, and helped the homeless find housing. Her interest in learning more about the history of race and housing in Chicago stemmed from her close contact with low-income black people who endured material inequalities that were due to racism."] But for Riley, this sort of stuff is “irrelevant.”
But topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy.
With a statement like this, you’d expect some evidence of partisanship and hackery. Since, remember, Riley is all about “close reading.” Partisanship would mean that Levy would only use evidence that supported her political views, or maybe even fabricate evidence that supported her political view, and hackery means that Levy would be lazy or incompetent, prone to writing something without thinking or doing any research.
According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?
Riley’s rhetorical questions imply that Levy believes these things, and the blurb certainly doesn’t indicate that she does believe these things. However, even if Levy believes that not favoring affirmative action is an assault of civil rights, is that “political partisanship and liberal hackery”? If she makes the argument in a lengthy dissertation and bases the argument on the kind of rigorous scholarship that would be expected of a PhD student at Northwestern, is that partisan hackery? If so, wouldn’t all of Riley’s work over the last several years, much of which has been funded by partisan think tanks and an editorial page known for partisan hackery, be even more suspect?
And then there’s the phrase “fundamental problems in black culture.” This is where I think people who have accused Riley of racism have gotten their biggest ammunition. I don’t believe these posts reach the level of racism, let alone hate speech (and this puts me in disagreement with some of her more vocal critics), but “fundamental problems in black culture” is the sort of language that, if made without any explanation or evidence, taints her argument even worse than her refusal to any research. By the way, her husband is black. I’m not sure what to do with that information, beyond it possibly explaining why she was so annoyed with a dissertation that criticizes black conservatives.
Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates. But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments.
And this is based on what evidence? The blurbs of five dissertations from one department make it “clear” that the topics she thinks are important aren’t being addressed? Really? Really? It should be noted that one of the dissertations described in the article that she didn’t mention was about racial profiling by the New York Police Department. I guess she doesn’t seem to understand that one of the reasons that there’s a high incarceration rate for African-Americans is racial profiling. She should also perhaps read up on labeling theory, and how labeling people as deviants results in deviant behavior. And so on and so forth. Riley’s ideological blinders seem to ensure that she will ignore, or at least refuse to seek, evidence contrary to her to her preconceived opinions.
If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.
None of the dissertations she described “blame the white man,” though structural racism is probably central to Taylor’s work. There’s a big difference between blaming the white man and examining how structural racism was involved in the housing market. That Riley refuses to engage with that is lazy at best, and callous partisan hackery at worst. Riley’s “analysis” is based on the premise that blacks are largely to blame for their own problems, that they are victimizing themselves, that racism isn’t much of a problem anymore. These are problematic notions, to say the least, and they need to be supported with something other than snark to be used as central warrants in an any argument — even a blog post.
And then there’s the “legitimate scholars” phrase. I find it rather amazing that Riley — who, again, does not have an advanced degree, has never done any academic research, and has never been peer-reviewed; who refuses to do any amount of research about a topic before making grand statements about a topic; who would trash three graduate dissertations that she did not read — would be so arrogant to claim to know what topics of study are legitimate.
Needless to say, Riley’s blog post caused an uproar. There are 402 comments on the post as of this writing, several good blog posts, and probably more tweets and Facebook posts that you could shake a stick at. There’s a petition asking to have Riley fired. (It was started by the woman who wrote the first, best blog response.) I signed it, because the Chronicle should not be giving a blog or a column to someone who takes their job so unseriously. (The Chronicle has demurred. [UPDATE: They fired her. And then apologized!]) There are a lot of interesting arguments to be made about the problems inherent in all area studies, from Latin American Studies to African-American Studies to Gender Studies. But Riley isn’t concerned with curriculum science and education theory; she’s concerned with furthering her political ideology.
But wait. It gets worse.
When Riley responded to the response, she sounded rather like the 1997 version of herself who was shocked, just shocked by the criticism.
Black Studies, Part 2: A Response to Critics
May 3, 2012, 3:02 pm
By Naomi Schaefer RileyI was never a big fan of the feminist mantra that the “personal is political.” But the corollary–that any political remark must be taken personally–seems in many ways even worse. My last blog post has earned me even more opprobrium than usual among the Brainstorm commenters, and it seems that they have decided to take as a personal attack something that is clearly not.
This seems to be setting up an argument that the people who disagree with her previous post are taking it too personally, that they’re being too emotional, that they just can’t hack criticism. This is a weak argument, since much of the criticism of her post was neither personal nor emotional. It pointed out that her argument was terrible. But to pretend that her vicious attack on Black Studies would not get people emotional is disingenuous. I guess she doesn’t quite understand how identity politics work.
The comments regarding my post seem to boil down to the following:
I am picking on people because they are black (and I am a racist).
I am picking on people even though I don’t have a Ph.D.
I am picking on people who are too young and inexperienced to defend themselves.
I am picking on people even though I haven’t read their entire dissertations.
Don’t you love how she mocks and minimizes the criticisms by using the term “picking on”?
Let me take the first two criticisms first. My qualifications to post on this blog consist of the fact that I have been a journalist writing about higher education for close to 15 years now.
That doesn’t indicate competence. Judith Miller. Robert Novak. Everyone on the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board. They all have “experience.” But they’ve all gotten things horribly, horribly wrong.
My work has been published in every major newspaper in the country and I have written two books on the subject as well.
This is not an excuse for how the blog post was written — without any research, without any knowledge of the topics, with every part of argument filtered through ideology.
The editors at those papers and those publishers and at The Chronicle have all been aware that I hold no advanced degree. Black studies is now an academic discipline at most universities, which means I get to comment on that too.
This is on the Chronicle. They should never have hired Riley, and they certainly should never have published the post as it was written.
If the dissertations in question were written by white people, I’d call them irrelevant and partisan as well.
This is a lie. Or at least astonishingly disingenuous. If Taylor was in political science department and wrote the same dissertation, Riley wouldn’t have blinked. Of this, I am 100% convinced.
Moreover, I have called other disciplines (having nothing to do with race) irrelevant and partisan.
I’m sure this is true. It is also true that these attacks on other disciplines were based on political ideology and not on whether or not the scholarship was well done, whether the curriculum was sound. Read through some of her book The Faculty Lounges, which is clearly a partisan attack on academia. Here’s her Q&A on the book with Inside Higher Ed.
I find the idea that there is something particularly heinous in criticizing graduate students or dissertations to be laughable at best. Just because they are still called students doesn’t mean they’re not grown-ups. When someone in their 30s (me) criticizes the dissertation topic of someone in their 20s, that’s “bullying“? Boy, life as a graduate student in a trendy discipline at a prestigious university sure is tough. Unless The Chronicle features you in a piece, being a graduate student is just like being “invisible” (Ralph Ellison, please call your office). A word to the wise: If you’re trying to convince the wider world that black people in America are oppressed, I’d skip using the experience of black graduate students as an example.
Let’s look past her defensive condescension and look what she’s actually saying: Everyone is fair game for public criticism. Okay, then, that’s why I took us back to her days as an undergraduate at Harvard. She was an adult. She should have known better. However, her inexperience in academia is pretty glaring here. Graduate students focus on topics for numerous reasons, and often the reasons have to do with who their advisers are, what data is available, and so on. Their arguments are developed in similarly fraught environments. Using her bully pulpit to trash unfinished dissertations without any knowledge of their arguments, methods, or conclusions may not be “bullying” but it does show a distinct lack of respect and a weirdly gleeful cruelty. And the bizarre claim that black graduate students are somehow free from oppression is amazing. How can she claim to be an expert on higher education and not know about racism on university campuses? She should google “UCSD and racism” and see what happens.
Finally, since this is a blog about academia and not journalism, I’ll forgive the commenters for not understanding that it is not my job to read entire dissertations before I write a 500-word piece about them.
My jaw literally dropped when I read this. There is simply no excuse for writing an attack piece on three dissertations without reading them. It’s lazy. It’s dishonest. It’s incompetent. It’s contemptible. More than anything else she has written, this is the statement that should get her fired. I have been told I should be fired from my column for recommending my readers record Kiss of the Spiderwoman without having seen it myself. If you would like to petition my editor to have me fired because you believe my sin is as great as Riley’s, I urge you to do so.
I read some academic publications (as they relate to other research I do), but there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery.
If you refuse to do the research about a topic, you should refuse to write about a topic. And you certainly shouldn’t be paid to write about how you can’t be bothered to do research on what you are paid to write about. I asked some of my friends in journalism their opinion of such excuses. Some responses:
That is incredibly lame. #totalfail
That’s pretty weak.
I think those excuses are bullshit!
As an author, journalist and NBCC member in good standing, I can say unequivocally that if you’re going to pan it–especially if you’re going to pan it–you have to read every word or watch every frame. I’ve suffered through the sloppy middle of too many crappy books and dreadful CDs to put up with lame excuses like that. If you can’t find the time to read the crap, you don’t earned the right to open your yap. And yes, you may quote me on that.
yes, writer should have read book or seen movie. absolutely!
Back to Riley:
In fact, I’d venture to say that fewer than 20 people in the whole world will read it. And the same holds true for the others that are mentioned in the piece.
Does Riley not know what a dissertation is? Probably less than 1% of dissertations are read by more than 20 people. These are not books, nor are they meant to be. They are exercises, long analyses of data used to prove that the student is are worthy of a degree. Some dissertations become books; most do not. Riley should understand this if she is an actual expert in higher education.
Such is the state of academic research these days. The disciplines multiply. The publication topics become more and more irrelevant and partisan.
Again, how is she called an expert in higher education? If she were to look at the dissertation topics of graduate students 75 year ago, 50 years ago, 25 years ago, she would see that all of them are narrow, specific, weird, and probably a lot less “relevant” than one about how racism was involved in the housing market. She would know this if she did academic research; you find out all sorts of things when you are a graduate student. It seems like “partisan” is the word she likes to use whenever someone is doing research about a topic that the right-wing doesn’t want to think about: basically anything to do with inequality.
No one reads them. And the people whom we expect to offer undergraduates a broad liberal-arts education (in return for billions of dollars from parents and taxpayers) never get trained to do so. Instead the ivory tower pushes them further and further into obscurity.
Writing a dissertation on a narrow topic has absolutely nothing to do with whether you can teach a broad topic to undergraduates. It’s an absurd, indefensible claim. The low quality of teaching in American universities is about the lack of training of graduate students in teaching. If she were an expert in higher education, this would be abundantly clear.
I’m sort of upset with myself that I spent my Saturday writing this. I should have been working on my dissertation, which I’m sure Riley would think is irrelevant and partisan. But I couldn’t stop myself. Rarely does an opportunity come along that is so perfect to turn into a teaching moment. Also, she really pissed me off.
NOTE: If there are typos or factual inaccuracies, please let me know. I’m capable of admitting to mistakes.
Whit Stillman, wordy WASP
I miss the early 90s. Sort of. Of maybe I miss the days when I thought it would be cool to live in a Whit Stillman movie. Here’s the link to my review, which is also here.
Read MoreThere was a period in the early 1990s when Whit Stillman was going to be the WASP Woody Allen. With Metropolitan and Barcelona, Stillman had made hyper-verbal, hyper-intellectual, and hyper-ironic comedies about privileged white people from the Northeast, been nominated for an Oscar for the former and lauded by critics for the latter. But 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, about the “urban haute bourgeoisie” trying to make sense of disco, didn’t work; it was stilted, a bit dull and not very funny. And then Stillman disappeared for 13 years. I adored his first two movies, so I was thrilled that he had a new one; I was primed to love Damsels in Distress. As Violet says in the film, “The past is over, so why not romanticize it?” But Violet, as it turns out, is somewhat of a dolt. Damsels in Distress reminded me of what I loved about Manhattan and Barcelona; I laughed and laughed. But it also revealed that Stillman has not gotten any better at directing movies or controlling his own wit.
Taking a cue from Mean Girls, the film opens with the arrival at the fictional Seven Oaks College of Lily (Analeigh Tipton), a down-to-earth transfer student who is immediately taken under the wing of three women who run the Suicide Prevention Center: Violet (Greta Gerwig) is the articulate, opinionated, arrogant and often-wrong leader; Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) has an English accent and is proudly obsessed with proper appearances; Heather (Carrie MacLemore) is pretty and quite dumb. Lily’s new friends are appalled by the odors of the dirty dorms and adore the world of the Roman Letters Houses (Seven Oaks’ frats), because the men there are such losers and are so lost and therefore need their help. And what help: Their treatment for clinical depression mostly involves tap-dancing and donuts.
The plot mostly revolves around Violet and Lily’s love lives and friendship. Violet is in love with the amazingly boneheaded Frank (Ryan Metcalf), while Lily is enamored with the French-accented, oddly religious Xavier (Hugo Becker); at various times, both Lily and Violet also date Charlie (Adam Brody), who may or may not be a management consultant. These various entanglements are fodder for Violet’s pontifications about right behavior, wrong attitudes and good manners. Her monologues, with Rose and Heather acting as a sort of Greek chorus and Lily as a foil, are as good as any Stillman wrote in the 1990s. They are absurdly hilarious because they are such brilliant parodies of everyone from Miss Manners to Candace Bushnell.
As pointed and snappy as Stillman’s writing is – and as great as everyone in the cast is at reciting his lines – I found it hard to figure out what his point was. Some of his characters behave consistently and naturally, but others are pure comic archetypes who exist simply for the benefit of an extended joke. While I think it’s easy for the audience to relate to the believable Lily, Violet is so absurd, so arch that she is not a possible person. And Thor (Billy Magnusson), one of the morons of the Roman Letters Houses, is so ignorant that he does not know the names of the colors. His scenes are hilarious, but it’s hard to understand how he exists in the same world as Lily, Xavier or Charlie. Stillman has thought through his jokes with amazing skill, but the film has the depth of a skit. Granted, it’s a pretty sharp and funny and fully-realized skit.
MOVIE REVIEW
Damsels in Distress
Written and directed by Whit Stillman
Starring Greta Gerwig, Analeigh Tipton and Adam Brody
Rated PG-13
At Landmark Hillcrest
Bully them into seeing Bully
Bully isn’t a movie; it’s a feature-length public service announcement. But it’s one everyone should see. Here’s the link to the review in LGBT Weekly, and here it is also:
Read MoreUnfortunately, most people only know about the documentary Bully because the Motion Picture Association gave it an R rating for an utterance of the word “fuck,” refused an appeal, and then, following a nationwide outcry orchestrated by the mogul and PR genius Harvey Weinstein, relented and gave the film a PG-13. The rating matters particularly for this film because it is about the bullying of teenagers, and with an R rating not only would it be a great deal harder for teens to get into the movie theater, but few schools would show the film or take students on a field trip to see it. And every teenager in the United States should be forced to see Bully. While it is not a particularly impressive piece of filmmaking, it is extraordinarily effective, and badly needed propaganda for a righteous cause.
The film is quite basic. Director Lee Hirsch follows the lives of three bullied teenagers and the families of two bullied boys who saw no way out but to kill themselves. The dominant narrative is the story of Alex, a 12-year-old boy in Sioux City, Iowa, who is a little awkward and slightly odd looking, as well as enormously sweet and surprisingly articulate. He is also bullied relentlessly by boys on the bus, boys in the gym and boys on the playground, and Hirsch’s footage of the bullying is profoundly upsetting. But Alex is so used to it that he doesn’t even seem to notice how awful it is anymore; he is so used to it, so desperate to fit in, that he doesn’t tell his parents what is going on. An assistant principal at his school, a thick blonde woman bursting with self-importance and a creepily saccharine voice, is in either actual or strategic denial of how terrible the bullying at her school is. And Alex’s parents are confused and frustrated and ill-equipped.
The other stories, while not as well visually documented, are nearly as upsetting. Kelby, an optimistic 16-year-old out lesbian in rural Oklahoma, was hit by a minivan full of jocks screaming homophobic insults at her. Her parents are flabbergasted that their town made pariahs of the whole family. Ja’Maya, an African-American girl in Mississippi, responded to relentless bullying by threatening the passengers on her school bus with her mother’s revolver. She is kept in an adolescent psychiatric ward for five months. The parents of Tyler, a 17-year-old boy who killed himself after years of bullying, open the film, and their quest to get Tyler’s school to do something about bullying allows Hirsch to film school administrators making statements as clueless as they are self-serving. And the Smalleys, also of rural Oklahoma, are shown immediately after their 11-year-old son kills himself. Their grief is so palpable, I was mortified to have witnessed it in amovie theater.
Hirsch’s direction and his team’s editing make the film flow nicely. It is paced well, and the shifting stories are clearly delineated, and Hirsch pulls no punches with filming tears, grief and anger. This is not a movie about bullying as much as it is about the simple emotional reactions of the victims of bullying. There is no examination of school policies, adolescent competition or the social psychology of this kind of emotional and physical violence. Hirsch’s goal is to get you to cry and to get angry and then to cry some more and he succeeds expertly.
I saw Bully at 11:45 a.m. on the day it opened in San Diego, and I was surprised that there were more than 40 people there, and half of them were teenagers or younger, some accompanied by parents. I doubt many kids will willingly pay to see the movie; it will have to be assigned to them. All lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people know how profoundly traumatic bullying is. Those of us who survived don’t need to be persuaded that teenagers need to be taught to treat each other with respect and kindness. But we need to ask, demand, and maybe bully teachers and administrators at junior high and high schools to make sure their students see what they are capable of.
Bully
Directed by Lee Hirsch
Written by Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen
Starring Alex, Ja’Maya and Kelby
Rated PG-13
At Landmark Hillcrest and AMC La Jolla
Don’t go in the basement!
OMG. I loved The Cabin in the Woods. It was all Whedonesque and awesomesauce. I dunno when it will appear on the LGBT Weekly site, so here’s my review.
Read MoreIf you’ve seen the ads for The Cabin in the Woods, I think you may have the impression that it is the same old horror movie: a group of sexy, stupid, and doomed young people go to the woods for a weekend of liquor and sex and they get attacked by creepy things wielding big knives. That movie has been made before, and you’ve seen it. But there are some quick glimpses in the ads of some things that don’t fit in the traditional hack-and-slash-in-the-woods film. You see a room full of computers, and some technicians are fiddling around with knobs and keyboards and on monitors above them, we see the nubile victims. They’re being watched, and maybe their fates are being controlled by these nerds. This makes the movie a little bit different, because it’s not a lone nut pulling the strings, as in Saw, but rather something like NASA.
But the ads don’t tell you much, and per the request of the film studio, I’m not going to tell you much about what’s really going on. But I will tell you something very important that the ads don’t seem to want you to know: The movie was co-written and produced by Joss Whedon, the man who gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and Firefly. I’m not sure why anyone would underemphasize something like that, since Whedon has a cult-following of fanboys and a bigger-than-a-cult-following of people who like their fantasy and sci-fi witty, wise, weird, and full of fully realized characters. The Cabin in the Woods was co-written and directed by one of Whedon’s protégés, Drew Goddard, who wrote for both Buffy and Angel as well as for two other major fanboy touchstones, Alias and Lost.
Of course, pedigree isn’t everything. But in this case, it’s a great predictor, because Whedon and Goddard’s movie is simply awesome. It’s scary, gory, and thrilling, as all horror movies should be, but it’s also ingeniously, surprisingly plotted and as funny as the best of Buffy and Angel ever were. That the five kids being chased by knife-wielding zombies is connected to, and caused by, the people in the NASA-like control room is established within the first 15 minutes, but it takes the whole film to explain why. And in that hour and a half, we are treated to bloody fighting, hysterical conversations, and jaw-dropping plot twists.
As usual, Whedon’s great casting serves him well. The five kids are played by the wanly beautiful Kristen Connolly, a slightly less roided out Chris Hemsworth (who is better known as Thor), a constantly baked but oddly wise Fran Kranz (who was in Whedon’s short-lived series Dollhouse), Jesse Williams (from Grey’s Anatomy), and Anna Hutchison (the yellow Power Ranger). Connolly has to carry the movie, and she has never had this big of a role, but she does it with the same kind of unexpected surety that Sarah Michelle Geller did the first season of Buffy. The control room is staffed by Bradley Whitford (The West Wing), Richard Jenkins (Six Feet Under), and another Whedon vet Amy Acker (Angel, Dollhouse). Whitford and Jenkins both crackle as wise-cracking semi-competent apparatchiks, and that makes their true goal so much more shocking.
And I still can’t tell you what is really going on. But I’ll give you some hints: It was clearly inspired by Wes Craven’s Scream, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, Lost, and The Truman Show, and Whedon and Goddard also drew from their own work on Buffy and Dollhouse. But the movie is not at all derivative; it is both using and commenting on the influences. The dialogue and the themes are unmistakably Whedon, and that is a great thing.
The Cabin in the Woods
Directed by Drew Goddard
Written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard
Starring Kristen Connolly, Fran Kranz, and Bradley Whitford
Rated R
Open April13
At your local multiplex
Goooooooooon!
I totally loved Goon. Read it here, or here:
For a few years in the 2000s, one of my roommates was a skinny hipster Canadian who loved Belle & Sebastian and Alice Munro and David Cronenberg movies, and so it was surprising to me that the mix he made for the road trip we took to Montreal opened with the theme song to Hockey Night in Canada. Canadians like their hockey, and I think outside some areas of New England, most of the United States has no clue what all of that is about. I think many us think that it’s just bearded dolts in mullets beating each other up on ice skates. I know that this isn’t really what’s going on, since hockey is a sport that involves a great deal of athleticism, training and skill.
But like the baseball fans who love the HBO baseball satire Eastbound and Down(or Major League, back in the day), I think even the most die-hard hockey fans will adore the hilarious paean to hockey thuggery Goon. Ostensibly based on a true story, Goon is about a Massachusetts bar bouncer who becomes the star enforcer – also known as an assassin or a goon – in minor league Canadian hockey. It’s sort of like a hockey version of Invincible, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a bartender who becomes a Philadelphia Eagle. Goon, however, is a not really an inspirational story; it is a broad, filthy and violent comedy whose clear inspiration is the 1977 Paul Newman comedy Slap Shot.
Seann William Scott plays Doug Glatt, the bouncer-turned-goon, and this is the first time I have seen him not play the same wise-cracking, occasionally lovable jerk he’s been typecast as since American Pie. Glatt doesn’t crack wise mostly because he’s as dumb as a hockey puck; he’s also sweet as candy corn and cute as a button, if there are buttons that look like muscle cubs. Since his father (Eugene Levy) and gay brother (David Paetkau) are both doctors, he feels particularly left out. But when he beats the crap out of a professional hockey player for calling him a faggot (“My brother’s gay! Take that back!”), and Glatt’s victim’s coach asks him to join the team as its assassin, Glatt finally feels as if he has something to do.
With his amazingly crude best friend Ryan (Jay Baruchel, who co-wrote the movie) as his cheerleader, Glatt becomes the next star goon, a space left open when the gooniest of goons Ross Rhea (Liev Schreiber, basically reprising his role as Sabretooth from Wolverine) is suspended for 20 games after a particularly vicious hit on the ice. He quickly is hired at a minor league team in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the rest of the movie follows a typical sports film trajectory: rival players, foul jokes, injuries, suspensions, and a love interest (the wonderful Alison Pill being wonderful). There’s also a lot of bloody, often very funny fist fights, all leading up to the inevitable play-off game and battle between Rhea and Glatt.
I loved almost every second of Goon. Playing stupid, loyal, and truly good, Scott has never been better; while he’s usually very funny, he’s never been as deeply sympathetic or as believable as a romantic lead. Baruchel is doing what he normally does, which is loud and geeky and dirty, but working with his own lines, he steals most of his scenes. Pill is not just a love interest. Her cynical, self-proclaimed slut is conflicted and surprised to be in love, though after 90 minutes of watching Scott as Doug Glatt, no one else is.
Goon
Directed by Michael Dowse
Written by Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg
Starring Seann William Scott, Alison Pill, Liev Schreiber
Rated R
Opens April 6
At Landmark Hillcrest
Read More
American Idol x Lord of the Flies
So, The Hunger Games opened today, and my review won’t go to print until next Thursday, so I’m putting it up now. I couldn’t have written a book about this movie, but I stayed within my word count, mostly. Here it is.
Over the last ten years, Hollywood has been obsessed with turning young adult sci-fi and fantasy series into billion dollar film franchises, and not always successfully. For every Harry Potter and Twilight there have been movies like The Golden Compass and The Dark Is Rising. While the Harry Potter movies eventually became watchable, even good, the rest of the franchises have been cinematic porridge: mushy, dull, forgettable. Compared to all of these, the film adaptation of The Hunger Games is Citizen Kane. Based on the first novel in the wildly popular Suzanne Collins trilogy about a post-apocalyptic dystopia where former rebel districts must send teen-agers to an annual fight to the death, The Hunger Games is a relative, not actual, masterpiece. It is exciting, inventive, infuriating, weird, long, and ultimately very entertaining.
The plot is a basic competition story, while the broader universe in which it is played out is not at all simple. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) lives in the poorest of the former rebel districts, and when her little sister is chosen by lottery to be the girl “tribute” at the Hunger Games, Katniss volunteers. Katniss has made her living hunting, and she actually has the skills that might be needed to survive the games. The boy tribute is Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), a charming but much less able fighter. They are given a mentor, a former winner of the games, named Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), who is a drunk, but a wise one. The other 22 fighters run the gamut of barely able but sweet 13-year-olds to highly trained and vicious near-adults, with skill levels dependant on the wealth of the district from which the kids hail.
The games, which are run as something like a cross between American Idol, The Olympics, and Roman gladiator contests – with a huge dose of Lord of the Flies barbarism – are hosted by Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) and produced by Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley), all under the watchful eye of the sinister President Snow (Donald Sutherland). The first half of the film follows Katniss and Peeta’s selection and training in the sparkly Rome-meets-Singapore Capitol, and the second half focuses on the brutal and bloody battle in the forest arena
There are two stars of the film: Jennifer Lawrence and the production design. Lawrence, who was nominated for an Academy Award as the heroine of the country noir masterpiece Winter’s Bone, is basically playing the same role in The Hunger Games. In both, her father is dead, mother is useless, sister needs her, and her courage and hubris both get her in trouble – and she kills and cooks squirrels. Lawrence’s intensity, whether she’s firing an arrow or crying over a friend’s death, is her greatest attribute as an actress, and Katniss is a perfect role for her. With the exception of Stanley Tucci’s wild, ridiculous performance as Flickerman, Lawrence is the only actor whose performance is indelible.
Gary Ross’s direction involves a lot of handheld camera work in Katniss’s drab district and during the anxiety of games, but when he is shooting the Capitol, he gives us long and lingering shots of the retro futuristic architecture and cityscape designed by Phillip Messina and the insane costumes of Judianna Makovsky, who seems to have been inspired by Louis the XIV and Leigh Bowery.
As fun to look at as that all is, that androgyny and garish effeminacy are meant to telegraph the evil of the Capitol’s men, that its women are all vapidity and pancake make-up, seems a bit obvious to me. And I was disappointed that story’s politics – class warfare, brutal starvation, and rule by child murder – are under-examined in favor of the easier, and duller, theme of survival of the smartest and scrappiest. Structural violence and forced poverty are not themes that billion dollar film franchises are based on.
The Hunger Games
Directed by Gary Ross
Written by Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins, and Billy Ray
Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, and Stanley Tucci
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex
Read More
Busted
So, I laughed my ass off at 21 Jump Street, but the fear-of-gay-sex jokes got under my skin as I started writing the review. I don’t think I would have used the headline that LGBT Weekly ran with the review — “Excessive homophobia dulls this absurd comedy” — but it’s accurate. The version that ran here is a bit truncated, so here’s the unabridged version.
Read MoreThere seems to be two ways to turn a TV series into a movie. One way is to take the original show seriously and try to replicate the good stuff while making it grittier and widening the scope. This worked for The Untouchables and The Fugitive, while it was abject failure for The Mod Squad and The Last Airbender. The other way is to admit that the original show was cheesy or updating it would be impossible, so you make a wacky, preferably filthy comedy doused in enough irony to make John Waters smirk. The few times this was successful was in The Addams Family movies and, to a lesser extent, Starsky & Hutch and Charlie’s Angels. The movie based on the pretty lame 1980s cops-undercover-as-high-school-kids show 21 Jump Street (only remembered for giving Johnny Depp his start) takes the second tact, and – what a relief – it works. Okay, it more than works. It’s really, really funny – as long as you ignore the homophobia.
As in the original show, 21 Jump Street refers to the address of the headquarters of a squad of cops who go undercover as high school students to bust drug rings, chop shops, and so on. A slimmed down Jonah Hill plays Schmidt, a smart, but pudgy and awkward cop, partnered with Jenko (Channing Tatum), a dumb, but absurdly studly cop. In high school, they were nemeses, but in the police academy they realized their strengths and weaknesses were complementary, and they became best friends. After they make a series of ridiculous errors trying to arrest members of a drug gang, they are transferred to 21 Jump Street, which is run by self-proclaimed Angry Black Man Captain Dickson, played with great irony by Ice Cube. He assigns them to root out a drug dealing operation that may or may not have caused the death of a student. In the last seven years since they graduated, what is cool has changed, and suddenly Schmidt makes friends and Jenko is the nerd, and their attempts at fitting in reaches a level of vulgar absurdity that would never be allowed on TV.
As with most broad comedies, the plot is secondary to the jokes. Much of the humor in 21 Jump Street is physical, and Jonah Hill is shameless and expert at using his body as a punching bag, both actual and metaphorical. He also does comically outraged quite well, too. Channing Tatum is playing dumb, which means he was perfectly cast, but he also does a fine job lobbing one-liners and reacting to the ever-increasing absurdity of the case. Hill and Tatum are as mismatched as Laurel and Hardy, and their friendly and sometimes not-so-friendly fights are gleeful fun to watch.
The supporting cast is roundly great. As Schmidt’s love interest Molly, Brie Larson plays the same wise-beyond-her-years character as she did so expertly in The United States of Tara. James Franco’s brother Dave does a great job being beautiful, arrogant, and outmatched as the high school drug dealer. Rob Riggle, as the track coach, is as crass as The Office’s Ellie Kemper, playing the chemistry teacher hot for Jenko, is horny.
But an abnormally high – even for a vulgar, hard R comedy – percentage of the jokes in 21 Jump Street involve fear of gay sex, from anal sex as humiliating punishment to male-on-male oral sex as torture. While Schmidt and Jenko state clearly that they don’t dislike gay people, their and the film’s extensive use of gay sexuality as something to mock and fear belies a homophobic subtext that isn’t very funny at all. The film is ultimately about male friendship, and it’s sad that the filmmakers, including the screenwriter of the wonderful and progressive Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, felt the need to basically scream “no homo!” throughout the movie to make such a theme palatable to their target audience.
21 Jump Street
Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller
Written by Michael Bacall
Starring Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, and Brie Larson
Rated R
Opens March 16
At your local multiplex
Kitsch-y
It doesn’t look like my review of John Carter ran in this week’s issue, so here it is in its entirety. Make your weekend movie choice wisely, my friends.
Read MoreWhen you cast someone’s whose last name is Kitsch in a bound-to-be-cheesy sci-fi action film, you’re begging for a review that says that the movie is “kitschy.” And that would be perfect description of John Carter, since the film is “a worthless imitation of art of recognized value.” (Thank you, Wikipedia, for that apt definition.) In some ways, I thought I was watching some weird mash-up of two other kitsch touchstones, Flash Gordon and Stargate. Yet, I think the director Andrew Stanton, who gave us the Oscar-winning Wall-E, and the film’s original screenwriter Michael Chabon, who won a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, were trying for populist high art, something along the lines of Avatar or Star Wars. But the film, despite its technical achievements and good, silly fun, is just two hours and 12 minutes of kitsch.
John Carter is based on A Princess of Mars, the 100-year-old novel that was the first of Edgar Rice Burrough’s enormously popular Barsoom novels. In these books, the people who live on Mars call their planet Barsoom, and John Carter is a Civil War veteran from Virginia who is mysteriously transported from a cave in Arizona to the dusty deserts of the red planet, where he falls in love with a Martian princess, befriends some green tribesmen, and gets into a lot of fights. The eleven novels in the series were credited as major influences of Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Michael Crichton, and even the work of NASA. Burroughs, who also gave us Tarzan, is arguably the greatest pulp fiction writer of the 20th century. While his work was certainly not kitsch, and it was certainly wildly imaginative, it was certainly not high art. So maybe John Carter is an apt representation of Burroughs’ work.
After a brief prologue on Mars, the film begins with John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) dying at a young age and leaving his massive estate to his nephew, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Among John’s belongings is a diary, which tells the story of John’s accidental teleportation from a strange cave to Barsoom, where he is at first taken captive by the Tharks, a tribe of giant, six-armed, two-tusked green men. John befriends both the tribe’s chief Tars (Willem Defoe) and his daughter Sola (Samantha Morton) before he inserts himself into a battle between warring humanoid Martians that occurs in the skies over the Tharks’ city. John rescues Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins, playing a feminist revision of Burroughs’ damsel in distress) of the city of Helium from the evil Sab Than of the city Zodanga, and, of course, Carter and Dejah fall in love. Sab Than has been given a strange, all-powerful blue zapper from some god-like beings and is out to destroy Helium – unless Deja marries him. There are sword fights, explosions, impressive special effects, a little romance, and a dialogue as wooden as anything James Cameron has ever written.
It should also be noted that on Mars, all humans speak with English accents. And they’re all played by actors best known for their roles on HBO shows like Rome, The Wire, and True Blood. And they all do the worst work of their careers, which isn’t terribly surprising since they’re acting on green screens and speaking words that would sound absurd coming out of Meryl Streep’s and Laurence Olivier’s mouths. Kitsch, in the first of his two mega-budget sci-fi action films that arrive this spring (the next is Battleship) and mark his transition from Friday Night Lights brooder to hopeful movie star, is fine – handsome, fierce, charming. But he is not very much of any of these things, and like Collins and the whole movie, while not worthless, he is mostly forgettable.
John Carter
Directed by Andrew Stanton
Written by Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews & Michael Chabon
Starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, and Dominic West
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex
Hippies are still funny
Wanderlust isn’t that great, but I laughed and laughed and laughed. My review won’t be printed until next Thursday, bu the movie is already open, so here’s the review.
Read MoreAfter seeing Wanderlust, I was exhausted and teary. Happily, it wasn’t a maudlin factory of crying jags, like some of last year’s Oscar bait. No: I just hadn’t laughed as hard at the movies since Bridesmaids. While not nearly as surprising nor as carefully and smartly written as Bridesmaids (which was deservedly nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay), Wanderlust does something similar: it mines the recession’s soul-crushingness for cathartic humor. And it gives Paul Rudd yet another opportunity to prove his meddle as the best comedic leading man working in Hollywood today. Reteaming with David Wain, with whom he did Wet Hot American Summer and Role Models, Rudd leads a mostly wonderful ensemble that laser-pointedly satirizes New York City real estate, HBO’s programming, Atlanta’s suburban sprawl and ennui, and the eccentricities of modern day hippies.
Rudd plays George and Jennifer Anniston plays his wife Linda, and they are a yuppie Manhattan couple who, as the movie opens, are buying a tiny apartment in the West Village. It’s a tiny studio but their real estate agent (Linda Lavin) convinces them that it’s a “micro loft.” And they convince themselves they can afford it, since Linda is convinced she’s going to sell HBO her documentary about penguins with testicular cancer. Just as her meeting at HBO goes terribly awry, the financial services company where George works is shut down by the SEC. George and Linda are then forced to move to Atlanta, where George’s horrifying boar of a brother Rick (Ken Marino, who co-wrote the screenplay) has offered him a job at his successful porta potty company. On the way to Atlanta, George and Linda end up spending the night at a bed-and-breakfast run out of a hippie commune called Elysium Fields, where the pot is stellar, the residents are spacey, and the love is free. When Rick’s racist humor, searing arrogance, and McMansion lifestyle get too much, George and Linda, broke and with nowhere to go, decide to try living at Elysium Fields.
That the lifestyle of the commune – or rather “intentional living” – isn’t going to work out for George and Linda is pretty obvious from the beginning. And it’s also obvious that the hippies’ default leader Seth (Justin Theroux) is up to no good. There’s always a snake in the Garden of Eden, and there’s never been a movie made about hippies that isn’t intent on picking apart their idealism and reifying the standard American consumerist lifestyle. And aside from Taking Woodstock, it’s the rare movie about hippies that admits how gay that community was and is; that the free love in Wanderlust doesn’t even hint at bisexuality is pretty lame and very cowardly. But Wain and Marino don’t want Wanderlust to break ground or make point, and certainly not a political. They just want you to laugh.
Rudd is usually best as the straight man playing off someone or something wacky or exasperating – he delivers sarcasm better than anyone – but in Wanderlust he has several scenes in which he gets to be insane. One, in which he’s psyching himself up for some free love, is, well, epic. Anniston, who is a pretty great comic actress, is fine and earns some good laughs, but her role isn’t as meaty as Rudd’s. Alan Alda, as Elysian’s grandpa, is similarly underused, though it’s always nice to see him on screen. Anniston’s current boyfriend, Justin Theroux is a sly, sexy foil, though I felt he was more of a device than a character – as was Elysian’s goddess, Eva, who Malin Ackerman phoned in. Ken Marino and Michael Watkins, who plays Rick’s heavily sedated wife, steal their scenes from Rudd and Anniston; their vicious parody of Stepford suburbia is nothing new, but it’s still wonderful to behold.
Wanderlust
Directed by David Wain
Written by David Wain and Ken Marino
Starring Paul Rudd, Jennifer Anniston, and Justin Theroux
Rated R
At your local multiplex
Terribly stupid, totally fun.
I needed a laugh when I saw This Means War. And I got it. Terribly stupid, but totally fun. Also: Tom Hardy.
Read MoreI broke my rule last week. I read a review of This Means War before I saw it. I only read one: Roger Ebert’s vicious pan of the film. While I’ve not always shared Ebert’s taste, I have developed a deep affection for him as a champion of independent movies, liberal politics, and, after cancer surgery left him without the ability to speak, how to live with a disability with integrity.
So I was rather dismayed at the tone he took in his review of This Means War,which not only attacked Reese Witherspoon for not being a sexpot and therefore absurd as a woman that Chris Pine and Tom Hardy would go to war over, but also blasted the relationship between best friends Pine and Hardy, who do everything together and adore each other like brothers. “Because surely they’re gay,” Ebert writes.
If only. I’d love Tom Hardy to play gay. With me. But there’s nothing gay about Tuck (Hardy) and FDR (Pine) and their friendship unless you believe, like so many adolescent homophobes seem to, that any vague display of affection between two men must mean they’re sleeping together.
I saw the film in a theater full of young straight guys and they seemed to love the movie. Partly, I’m sure, because of the competition between Tuck and FDR, and partly because it’s very, very funny.
This isn’t to say that This Means War is a brilliant film. It is absurd; the plot requires more than your average suspension of disbelief. Tuck and FDR are twoCIA agents who are grounded after turning a covert mission in Hong Kong into a frenzied gunfight that ends with the brother of their target falling from a skyscraper. Instead of doing their desk jobs, they both start dating Lauren, who doesn’t know they are CIA agents or that they know each other. As the men compete for her affections, they devote more and more CIA resources to tracking and sabotaging each other. And then the target of the Hong Kong fiasco shows up to take revenge. Insanity ensues.
As silly as it is, I found This Means War very funny and very entertaining. McG paces the comedy and the action equally well, but he also has Reese Witherspoon, something like a cross between late ’80s Meg Ryan and mid ’60s Doris Day. Tom Hardy, who is distractingly sexy, oozes charm and winking humor. Chris Pine, who has a distractingly large forehead, pulls off FDR just fine, but I would rather the role had been cast with someone a bit less safe, a little more dangerous. I doubt a little more edge would have pleased Ebert; he just hated it, and possibly for all of the wrong reasons.
This Means War
Directed by McG
Written by Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Tom Hardy, Chris Pine and Chelsea Handler
Rated PG-13
About Ted
I am a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, and I am writing my dissertation on the subjectivities of HIV+ men who have sex with men and use crystal meth. I am also the film critic for San Diego LGBT Weekly. I like cats.
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