No way. Way.

The-Way-Way-Back-imageLast year, when Nat Faxon and Jim Rash accepted the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with Alexander Payner for The Descendants, a bunch of people watching the show said, “Wait, those guys?” Faxon is a dopey-faced blond who has appeared in countless TV sitcoms and B-movies, and bald and awkward Rash plays the hapless Dean Pelton in the cult NBC comedy Community. They weren’t just hammy bit actors, it seems; they could also write. Either that, or they were just edited by the great Payne. Now that their first feature, written and directed only by them, is out and it’s clear Faxon and Rash are not accidental Oscar winners. The Way, Way Back, a coming-of-age comedy set in a summer beach town and its local water park, is one of the best movies of the year: funny, moving, a crowd-pleasing anecdote to the bombastic action films dominating the theaters this summer. Continue…

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Please, queer the movies

superman_gayb1For the last few weeks, I have been passing movie theaters advertising Before Midnight, the third in the series of talky romances starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. I’ve heard that it’s fantastic, the best of the three; and the other two are considered minor classics. But I didn’t go. I am so sick of having to wait three or four years between serviceable, let alone good, movies about gay relationships, and I am also sick of never seeing gay characters, plots, or even subplots in Hollywood features, just punch-lines or sight gags (like half the jokes in This Is the End) or blink-and-you-miss-it Easter eggs (like Catwoman’s line-less, barely there girlfriend in The Dark Knight Rises). TV has a long way to go, too, but there are rich, interesting LGBT characters everywhere on the small screen, on the networks and on cable. But Hollywood seems terrified of queerness in the movies, and I don’t know why. Continue…

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Blingdongs

the-bling-ringI have been travelling with my partner, and at one point, we ran out of clean socks and underwear and the only place open and nearby with such items was Urban Outfitters. Normally, I don’t shop there because the store is mostly owned by a man who donated $13,000 to Rick Santorum; also their clothes are wildly overpriced considering how shoddily they’re made. But I was desperate. When I was paying, I noticed that the store was promoted The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s new movie about the band of teen-aged thieves who robbed Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom, and others in 2008 and 2009. A day later, when I showed the cashier that after one wearing the socks’ seams had pulled apart, I again saw the film’s poster on the little screen where I punched in my debit card PIN. I think the irony is lost on Urban Outfitters: They are best known and most criticized for ripping off the styles of hipsters and high-end designers and they’re promoting a movie about the criminal deeds of pathologically superficial wannabe fashionistas. Not ironically, the movie is as flimsy as the socks I bought. Continue…

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I scare easily

World-War-Z-screenshot-12People are scared that the end is coming. I don’t think they actually believe that Judgment Day is nigh, or that an extinction-level asteroid is on its way, or that Syria (or North Korea, or Taiwan) is going to lead to World War 3, or that a virus will mutate into a pandemic as deadly as the Spanish flu or whatever it was that nearly ended human civilization in Contagion, 28 Days Later, or The Walking Dead. But all of these things are making people anxious – very, very anxious – and somehow this is translating into a desire to buy tickets to movies about what these people are anxious about. They actually make me more anxious than I was already, but it seems that for some people these movies calm them down, sort of like how speed calms down kids with ADHD.

Maybe it’s because they teach us how to respond to the end. Last week, I wrote that, in contrast to the narrow scope of the comedy This is the End, “when Hollywood tackles the end of the world we get giant sci-fi epics focusing on teams of either super-heroes or super-heroic soldiers making the planet’s last ditch effort to stave off oblivion.” Like religious myths of ancient times about deity-caused dooms, these movies tend to have powerful moral centers; we learn how people should behave when most people are about to die. The need for selfless heroism is the lesson of World War Z, the frightening, if somewhat flawed zombie apocalypse movie starring Brad Pitt and directed by Marc Forster. Continue…

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Dark. Super dark.

man-of-steel-flagAs a character, and as stories, Superman has long been bright, optimistic, and wholesome, firmly in the category of mom, apple pie, truth, justice, and the American way. Superman’s unfailing, idealistic, compassionate heroism has never existed in the real world, which is one of the most important reasons that he has been so attractive and so popular for so long. But in Zack Snyder’s massively hyped reboot of the storied franchise – which is written by David Goyer and produced by Christopher Nolan who together created the recent nihilistic and cynical Batman trilogy – Superman is darkened enormously, not just with chiaroscuro lighting but also, and more importantly, in its apocalyptic plot and tone. Continue…

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