Rushfield Babylon

THE ROAD FROM BRIDESHEAD REVISTED TO MOONRISE KINGDOM:
The long journey of sleepaway camp art in western culture 

Brideshead Revisited

+ The Kingston Trio 

= A Separate Peace

+ The Nutty Professor

= Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah

+ Expose Yourself To Art posters

= Meatballs

+ Patty Hearst

= Little Darlings

+ Joy Division

= Friday the 13th

+ Mary Lou Retton

= Spacecamp

+ The Indigo Girls

= Indian Summer

+ Rosanne

= Wet Hot American Summer

+ Etsy

= Moonrise Kingdom

MOVIES IN REVIEW: MOONRISE KINGDOM.   Go Wes Young Man!

Visitors to this blog are familiar with my feelings about Wes Anderson, who stands as one of the great villains of Rushfield Babylon.  In my mind, Anderson is one of the Satanic figures of modern culture; the handmaiden of our collective infantilization. 

But his demonic history noted, when it came time to experience Moonrise Kingdom, I made every attempt to walk in with an openish mind.  I have frequently been accused of going to see films just so I can hate them, but I resist this accusation.  Seeing a movie you are not enjoying at all is one of the most painful experiences you can undergo while not in secret police custody.  Seeing a concert you don’t enjoy at all might be slightly more painful, because it’s louder and you’re standing up with people touching you, and it has the potential to go on longer.  Being served a horrible meal is much less painful than seeing a bad movie because after the first bite you usually don’t have to eat any more of it unless it was cooked by someone you really don’t want to offend, and even then ways can be found.

Anyway, seeing a movie I don’t at all enjoy is an awful experience and not one I’d willingly subject myself to, however pleasurable the subsequent rant might be.  I could’ve gotten a helluva rant going out of Battleship, I’m sure, but knowing that there was a less than .01 percent chance that I would like the film, it was not worth subjecting myself to that pain and I stayed away. 

So why see Moonrise Kingdom, despite my recorded hatred?  Well, there were a few things in its favor suggesting there was some chance, say about fifteen percent, that I might actually like it.  First, Anderson, say what you will about him, is not a hack.  He takes his movies seriously and has a vision for them.  He’s not just jumping on any project for a paycheck.  Second, I have liked two of his films before (Bottle Rocket and maybe half or Rushmore and half of Tannenbaums).  Do the math and it might even add up to two and a half.  And third, critics who had like me, abandoned him for the last two films have been saying this one is good.  

So I burned incense, sat in a sweat lodge, did a pineapple juice cleanse and entered the theater with my body and mind free of deadly anti-Wes toxics.   And you know what happened? …Okay, at first, I came close to a relapse.  When I saw poor Bob Balaban dressed up as Paddington Bear, from an uncleansed corner of my soul, the hate poured out.  

But then I settled in. And slowly, shockingly, I started seeing that underneath the Anderson trappings, there was a story that was simple, effective, affecting and moving.  As much as a part of me wanted to deny it, I was stunned than me to find myself drawn in and carried away by this beautiful world that Anderson with his hand never more precise created. There is something so complete and so uplifting about the beauty of this world that strikes at such deep, potent, pre-cynical parts of us that I think it’s not to much to call the experience magical.  As I sunk into my seat, I remembered the urgency of what it is to be young, to feel at odds with the world and saw, through Anderson’s eyes how the only sane reaction to the torment of youth is to create your own world in the purity of your own image.  Before the film was halfway through I was transported into this dusklit lyrical land and with its poignancy demanding to be heard.

Ha. No.  Just kidding!  Actually I thought it was grotesque and could not wait for it to be over.  But more about that later.  First, I will give it its due.

The Good: As noted above, Anderson is a genuine filmmaker.  Moonrise Kingdom is not Horrible Bosses. It is not out just to steal your money with as shody a production as it can slap together.  He has a vision and a story he wants to tell and thinks cinematically. It is a fully realized vision.  Unlike Life Aquatic which just swung wildly out of control, this is completely realized story, done with craftsmanship and beauty.  And there were probably 3  - 4 moments that made me laugh.  Out loud even.

The Rest: Once we acknowledge it is a cinema vision achieved with technical virtuosity, we are within our rights to ask what that vision is and is it a compelling vision?  

Look, if you think dressing up Bob Balaban as Paddington Bear is an important  cinematic statement, if you think setting every scene as a precious little dollhouse creation is a beautiful vision, if a world where everyone acts like mannered little creatures in a school play written by an 11 year old is your cup of tea, who am I to argue.  If you like all that, if you like your breakfast cereal buried under a mountain of sugar, who am I to tell you that looks disgusting?  On the other hand, if you try and tell me, there’s a really great cereal under that mountain of sugar, and I really need to work my way through and find it, don’t go hocking my chinick when I tell you that my teeth will fall out of my skull if I even try to do that.

These movies…movies about children told through this childlike vision but clearly for adults and just feel very uncomfortable.   There are plenty of movies about kids that can be enjoyed equally by children and adults.  Watching Moonrise and the young romance, I thought of A Little Romance with young Diane Lane, for instance. A summer camp movie like Meatballs is about kids, but it doesn’t seem to be told by children.  The teens and the grown-ups are their age and not these bizarre stilted creatures like the Ed Norton character is in this.  I just think there was very little about this film that truly was aimed at children as an audience.  I don’t know too many ten year olds these days but I have a hard time believing that a Francoise Hardy and stilted mock-Kubrickian dialoge is what really gets them out of their chairs.   The entire language of this film speaks to grown up, refined sensibilities. And that sense of it’s not a movie trying to appeal to children, but a movie made by adults trying to be children just gives me the creeps. And sitting in a sold out theater of grown ups cooing over the precious little summer camp tents made me entirely uneasy.    

These movies weren’t made 20 years ago. Or 40 or 100 years ago.  Sure, Proust went on and on remembering how awful it was to lie in bed waiting for his mother to come kiss him good night, but he remembered that through an adult’s understanding.  It was from the perspective of an adult interpreting and filtering those memories, writing about them in the most grown up of vernaculars. He was not saying, let’s step away away and go back to that magical time when we can be children in our gorgeous little night clothes, with our wonderful owl clock…

Anyhow, as I say, if 20 scoops of sugar on top of your breakfast cereal is your taste, bon appetite.  For me, it doesn’t go down quite as well.

The Rushfield Babylon Recommendation:  Three stars out of ten.

MOVIES IN REVIEW: Belated thoughts on The Avengers

Finally got around to seeing this.  It seemed like they were doing just fine without me so I thought I could wait until the dust settled. Random thoughts follow in random order.  If you are the other person besides me who hadn’t seen it yet, beware spoilers abound.

I Am A Singing Contest Prophet

On March 9, 2012 I posted the below.  I found myself vilified, excoriated, criticized, nearly stoned to death and pointed at like a circus freak as a result.

In one hour, I will be proven right.

I do not accept your apology.

Here was the original post:

This is what the winners lof the first six seasons of American Idol looked like:

Then something changed and this is what the winners of the following four seasons looked like:

Give you one guess which of the below will be the winner of this season of American Idol:

Prepare yourself for weeks when we can all be shocked and heartbroken and incomprehending as one by one the every contestant who is not Phillip Phillips is mysteriously eliminated.

There are many out there in Idol Nation who are already saying, no, no, no.  It’s not going to happen a fifth time.  This is a woman’s year for sure.  ”It’s not going to happen a fifth time” is the clinical definition of insanity.

The tweenage dictators of American Idol will have blood on their hands. 

The New Rushfield Babylon Podcast is up!  Starring Dave Holmes!  For a Season of TV Goodbyes and Hellos!

Not one but two freewheeling roundtable discussions of the tsunamis reordering the television world this week.

Who the deuce can parlez vous a cow?!

(Source: Spotify)

HAPPY TRAILERS: SKYFALL

So is this how its going to be now?  Everything fun or exciting is just going to be remade as a deadly serious, minimalist, Big Thoughts piece?

I previously complained about how Nolan’s Batman series seems to be about to cross the bridge from doing something “interesting” with the saga of a guy in a cape and a rodent mask running around punching bad guys to putting so much dead earnestness on that series in order to make it serve philosophical points that it risks become actually sillier than Joel Schumacher’s ice ballet version.

The other night was walking with my friend Dietcock, who made the point that The Killing is essentially, a CBS police procedural done in complete deadpan strained, deathly seriousness with heavy music suggesting Giant Important Themes lurking in every mishandled plot point.  

The template for our culture now seems to be voyage of the wacky Honeymoon in Vegas into its deadly serious, ponderous, interminable remake two years later as Indecent Proposal.  

The Bond series of course, already made that transition two films back with Casino Royale.  I supported that film because after the uninspired Dalton and Brosnan eras in which the series limped along on life support, the minimalist approach at least did pump some life into the mannequin and give it some contemporary relevance.  But two films later, if this is what we’re going to be stuck with, angry, ponderous, understated Bond, then I want my money back.  (For the purposes of this discussion and personal sanity, we’re going to pretend that Quantum of Solace never happened).

While it was interesting to see his origin story cast in a different light, the very essence of Bond’s existence is superhuman supercoolness.  For all the crazy cars and fancy Q weapons, the point of Bond is to teach us how to stay cool and unflappable in any situation in life.  The original books are a gentleman’s guide to preserving your savoir faire under extremis, showing us how a man with Bond’s absolute self-mastery behaves in every situation from having to wait for half an hour at an airport baggage claim to being tied down and nearly sawed in half by a beam of concentrated gold dust.  Whatever he stumbled into in his reckless, seemingly nonchalant way, Bond never lost his cool and never doubted that he would find a way out.

When the books were written, friends in the espionage world admonished Fleming that any agent who behaved as Bond did would be dead in a week.  But that was never the point.  The Bond books were not nuts and bolts lessons in how to climb down from the side of a skyscraper, but aspirational and inspirational guides to life.   They were meant as satires of the spy genre from the first. (Which is what is so infuriating about the Austin Powers films which are the work of a moron making fun of something that he doesn’t realize is a joke in the first place.) 

Let the Bourne films furrow their brow the hardest; show us a hero who can run harder, hotwire a car faster and find a way to beat someone up with a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup better than any other spy.  Bond is not there to be the hardest working agent on the beat. He doesn’t show us how to spy at all in fact.  He shows us how to live.

Atheists argue that if God is all-powerful he is not good and if he is good, he is not all powerful.    Likewise, if Bond is flustered he is not cool and if he is cool he is not flustered. And if he is not cool, he is not Bond.

Seriousness is our modern disease.  Americans in particular have always been distrustful of comedy.  In England where irony was invented,  if you take yourself deadly seriously you are considered a fool. In America, you’re considered one if you don’t.  (At least that’s how it used be, the UK may be sadly surrendering that birthright.)  No comedy of course has won the Oscar since Annie Hall in 1977.   The past decade saw a grand total of one comedy even nominated.  American intelligentsia are so distrustful of comedy that they invented a new category called Humor (Capital: This American Life)  which essentially means things that make you chuckle or smile knowingly instead of actually laughing.

So when we want to make things matter, or to pump life into something that’s run out of steam, it’s no surprise that our prescription to get the patient back on his feet is a heavy dose of deathly seriousness.    Especially as American films on the upper rung are more geared towards a creative or quasi-creative elite that take themselves ever more seriously as the way to define themselves as a race apart, it is not surprising that this prescription gets handed out ever more often.  Unfortunately, in the case of James Bond, it is a cure that is certain to kill the patient.

MOVIES IN REVIEW: THE DICTATOR

Funnier than Bruno.  Less funny than Borat.

I liked this film because it was small.  88 minutes and out.  A marginally funny character/idea.  A handful of clever bits and jokes, barely strung together and then time’s up before it wears out its welcome (very unlike Dark Shadows). It was not going for epic re-inventing comedy scope like Borat, just to make a funny little movie. It had the feeling of a ramshackle 70’s comedy much more than the successors of those films which poisoned film comedy forever - the SNL skit adaptation which needed to justify turning something as slight as a two minute skit into a feature film by building a giant and always tedious apparatus around the central gag.  

Although the conceit of building a movie around a Moammar Gadhafi impression already feels a little stale, Baron Cohen when he puts his mind to it is a brilliant enough comic actor to jolt some life into an obvious gag. Some of the jokes I found quite funny.  As for the shock humor assiduously stepping on every third rail in western culture, I appreciate the effort but mostly that felt too contrived, more trying hard to offend than the result of any great comic inspiration.  The bawdy humor came dangerously close to Austin Powers territory to me.  (I don’t mean that as a compliment.  Austin Powers Territory = lazy cracking one’s self up with one’s own ability to be naughty comedy). 

Not an Earth-shattering film, but funny enough I say. Amidst of a bleak season, a minor ray of light.

The Rushfield Babylon Recommendation: 6 stars out of 10. Maybe 6.5.

IN A NUTSHELL…WHY I CANT STAND WES ANDERSON

If you believe his above statements for a minute, that he, a multi-million dollar grossing making of multi-million dollar Hollywood financed productions, who has been working as part of the American cinema industry for a decade and a half, does not know that Battleship, which is on the side of every bus in the world, is a movie…well then you are either a character in Moonrise Kingdom or you are wishing too hard to be one.

But this is exactly what bugs about him: it is one thing if by some quirk of nature your emotional development was stunted at age 8 and you can never move past a magical land of sad clowns, and little boys in felt suits and caligraphy lessons. But it is quite another to spend your entire life, well into your 40’s pretending that your emotional growth was stunted at age 8 and you’re just a little boy with the Prince Valiant haircut and kelly green suit with boutonniere that your mother dressed you in.  And you’re so wrapped up in the magical world of your imagination that you don’t even see the giant bus ads plugging one of the major productions of your industry as you drive by them 50 million times a day.

(Interview from)

THE NEW RUSHFIELD BABYLON PODCAST IS UP!  TRUE TALES OF CRIME AND OTHER SORDID DEEDS WITH MICHELLE MCNAMARA AND DAVE HILL!