About Me

Rushfield Babylon

where it all went wrong
Writer, reporter, Idol chronicler, seer. Contact: rr at richardrushfield dot com

Recent comments

  • May 30, 2012 2:28 am
    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 View high resolution

    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

  • May 28, 2012 2:06 am
    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. View high resolution

    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.

  • May 26, 2012 4:17 am
    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.
• First thought: Sweet Yahweh, that was long.  Was that film 27 hours?  Shouldn’t they legally have to break that up into three separate pieces and screen it over consecutive nights?• There is the constant inflation of superhero movies, needing to make them ever bigger to maintain the thrills.  But someone should tell them bigger needn’t mean longer.  And longer doesn’t = more exciting.• That said, before I get really nitpicky and overthink it to an embarrassing degree, it’s basically a decent superhero movie.   All we really need from superhero films is a rolicking adventure and a more or less functional plot and it delivered on those.  So it passes on basic functionality.  But……• The idea that the Whedon managed to give this giant Marvel multi-heroes CGI machine a heart is madness.  He gave it some glib dialoge and had time to insert into each character a rudimentary motivation - Iron Man won’t sacrifice himself to save others; Black Widow wants to do good to cancel out the bad she’s done; Hulk wants to be proud of being Hulk. Most of the runners they didn’t even bother to pay off, which was just as well.• The big question - can these self-centered superheroes learn to be part of a team and not just fight on their own or against each other - is kinda silly on the face of it and taken way too far.   There seems like a good hour in the middle after it’s long been established that the Tesseract is about to cause the entire planet to be destroyed when the heroes still have lots and lots of time to stand around and bicker with each other, which is fairly maddening.  In the re-release, I’d suggest losing about ten of these scenes. 
• But ultimately, that isn’t Whedon’s fault.  There are too many characters and pieces to do much more than that with them.  It’s the same problem the X Men films have and why they mostly become machines.  Understandable, but machines they still are and Whedon very much does not overcome that.• Also I’d suggest to first time viewers the being sad about Agent Colson and his baseball card collection that you broke into his locker to get part would be a good moment for a bathroom break. 
• Captain America is a bore and Chris Evans is a void.  Making jokes about what a stiff his character is doesn’t make him less of one.• Thor is a one joke character.•  I’d rather see Robert Downey Jr do the Robert Downey Jr shtick when he’s not encased in metal and an annoying goatee. 
• As has been noted, Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk is very very good and I might say saves the movie.  He gives it it’s only authentic feeling hint of humanity and vulnerability in any of its characters.
• That said, they completely cheat on The Hulk.  The entire Hulk problem that has made every Hulk vehicle from the comic book onward fail is that as poignant as Bruce Banner is, when he becomes the Hulk, he’s basically a bore as he’s out of control and just runs around smashing things.   They in fact, establish that that is the Hulk dilemma…and then just decide that he’s not and have the Hulk suddenly become a helpful wisecracking team player.• The whole Black Widow/Hawkeye story seems like a follow up to some movie I didn’t see.• As did all the discussion about the tesseract was at the bottom of the ocean next to Captain America’s plane and Stark’s father found it.  And I did see that movie.  Does everything need to be a reference to some piece of Marvel mythology?  Couldn’t they have just said they found the tesseract in a pyramid?• Every line Samuel L Jackson says sounds like it was written for a Samuel L. Jackson character in a comic book and not a living actor.  • Also, he works indoors.  On a big flying aircraft carrier.  Why does he need to wear his overcoat? • Why aren’t they called The Revengers?• The number of moving parts in the battle scenes is just exhausting.  Cutting around the field so much ends up draining from the tension rather than adding to it.• I liked  Tom Hiddleston as Loki very much but his whole plan I must say, seemed too half-baked to have much real tension. Getting a bunch of skeletors to come and destroy a planet so you can be its king and then your annoying brother will be jealous just somehow doesn’t quite seem a masterstroke worthy of a supervillain. And his big trick was to get taken up to the flying aircraft carrier so he could make Mark Ruffalo angry so he’d break some stuff?• The skeletors themselves turn out to be less than terrifying if all you have to do is shoot an arrow at them.• They have a big big problem in that they have made all these superheroes so super that you never feel for a second any of them are in any danger.  They pretty much can stand there and punch out alien skeletors and space centipedes all day until they get hungry or their union mandated break kicks in. In the middle of the battle, Captain America quips to Thor, asking him if he needs to take a nap.  But that pretty much sums up the only danger they face.• Aliens trashing a major American city and shooting everything in sight has happened so many times it is no longer even marginally scary.  Next time maybe have them freeze the whole place or turn it into marzipan?• Where at the end are Robert Downey and Mark Ruffalo driving off to?  Downey lives like a block away.• It’s very unfair to introduce Powers Booth as the evil chairman of the Council and just show us a few shadowy shots of him.  If you’re going to give us a taste of Powers Booth as the evil chairman you should make that the center of the movie. • Finally, I don’t want to get hung up on the hype…but all the critics who emerged gushing from the early screenings saying Whedon has reinvented the genre, I give you four choices to explain what yourselves: A: You are dying to hang out with/interview Whedon and thus can’t kiss up hard enough.  Or to kiss up to the studio(s). Or the producer. Or the industry in general.B. You see a big hit coming and don’t want to stand in the way of public tastes.C. You’ve never seen a movie before, or very few.  So the idea that there can be people moving around on a big screen wearing costumes and punching out aliens from space is still new and exciting.Or D. You’ve just completely lost your marbles and all perspective on what is actually good, bad and just okay in the medium you devote your life to covering.

But all these are quibbles. It was fine. If they had asked me in the first place and listened to me, however, they might have made some money off this thing and broken it out of the indie ghetto.

The Rushfield Babylon Recommendation: Six stars out of ten. View high resolution

    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.

    • First thought: Sweet Yahweh, that was long.  Was that film 27 hours?  Shouldn’t they legally have to break that up into three separate pieces and screen it over consecutive nights?
    • There is the constant inflation of superhero movies, needing to make them ever bigger to maintain the thrills.  But someone should tell them bigger needn’t mean longer.  And longer doesn’t = more exciting.
    • That said, before I get really nitpicky and overthink it to an embarrassing degree, it’s basically a decent superhero movie.   All we really need from superhero films is a rolicking adventure and a more or less functional plot and it delivered on those.  So it passes on basic functionality.  But……
    • The idea that the Whedon managed to give this giant Marvel multi-heroes CGI machine a heart is madness.  He gave it some glib dialoge and had time to insert into each character a rudimentary motivation - Iron Man won’t sacrifice himself to save others; Black Widow wants to do good to cancel out the bad she’s done; Hulk wants to be proud of being Hulk. Most of the runners they didn’t even bother to pay off, which was just as well.
    • The big question - can these self-centered superheroes learn to be part of a team and not just fight on their own or against each other - is kinda silly on the face of it and taken way too far.   There seems like a good hour in the middle after it’s long been established that the Tesseract is about to cause the entire planet to be destroyed when the heroes still have lots and lots of time to stand around and bicker with each other, which is fairly maddening.  In the re-release, I’d suggest losing about ten of these scenes. 
    • But ultimately, that isn’t Whedon’s fault.  There are too many characters and pieces to do much more than that with them.  It’s the same problem the X Men films have and why they mostly become machines.  Understandable, but machines they still are and Whedon very much does not overcome that.
    • Also I’d suggest to first time viewers the being sad about Agent Colson and his baseball card collection that you broke into his locker to get part would be a good moment for a bathroom break. 
    • Captain America is a bore and Chris Evans is a void.  Making jokes about what a stiff his character is doesn’t make him less of one.
    • Thor is a one joke character.
    •  I’d rather see Robert Downey Jr do the Robert Downey Jr shtick when he’s not encased in metal and an annoying goatee. 
    • As has been noted, Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk is very very good and I might say saves the movie.  He gives it it’s only authentic feeling hint of humanity and vulnerability in any of its characters.
    • That said, they completely cheat on The Hulk.  The entire Hulk problem that has made every Hulk vehicle from the comic book onward fail is that as poignant as Bruce Banner is, when he becomes the Hulk, he’s basically a bore as he’s out of control and just runs around smashing things.   They in fact, establish that that is the Hulk dilemma…and then just decide that he’s not and have the Hulk suddenly become a helpful wisecracking team player.
    • The whole Black Widow/Hawkeye story seems like a follow up to some movie I didn’t see.
    • As did all the discussion about the tesseract was at the bottom of the ocean next to Captain America’s plane and Stark’s father found it.  And I did see that movie.  Does everything need to be a reference to some piece of Marvel mythology?  Couldn’t they have just said they found the tesseract in a pyramid?
    • Every line Samuel L Jackson says sounds like it was written for a Samuel L. Jackson character in a comic book and not a living actor.  
    • Also, he works indoors.  On a big flying aircraft carrier.  Why does he need to wear his overcoat? 
    • Why aren’t they called The Revengers?
    • The number of moving parts in the battle scenes is just exhausting.  Cutting around the field so much ends up draining from the tension rather than adding to it.
    • I liked  Tom Hiddleston as Loki very much but his whole plan I must say, seemed too half-baked to have much real tension. Getting a bunch of skeletors to come and destroy a planet so you can be its king and then your annoying brother will be jealous just somehow doesn’t quite seem a masterstroke worthy of a supervillain. And his big trick was to get taken up to the flying aircraft carrier so he could make Mark Ruffalo angry so he’d break some stuff?
    • The skeletors themselves turn out to be less than terrifying if all you have to do is shoot an arrow at them.
    • They have a big big problem in that they have made all these superheroes so super that you never feel for a second any of them are in any danger.  They pretty much can stand there and punch out alien skeletors and space centipedes all day until they get hungry or their union mandated break kicks in. In the middle of the battle, Captain America quips to Thor, asking him if he needs to take a nap.  But that pretty much sums up the only danger they face.
    • Aliens trashing a major American city and shooting everything in sight has happened so many times it is no longer even marginally scary.  Next time maybe have them freeze the whole place or turn it into marzipan?
    • Where at the end are Robert Downey and Mark Ruffalo driving off to?  Downey lives like a block away.
    • It’s very unfair to introduce Powers Booth as the evil chairman of the Council and just show us a few shadowy shots of him.  If you’re going to give us a taste of Powers Booth as the evil chairman you should make that the center of the movie. 
    • Finally, I don’t want to get hung up on the hype…but all the critics who emerged gushing from the early screenings saying Whedon has reinvented the genre, I give you four choices to explain what yourselves: 
    A: You are dying to hang out with/interview Whedon and thus can’t kiss up hard enough.  Or to kiss up to the studio(s). Or the producer. Or the industry in general.
    B. You see a big hit coming and don’t want to stand in the way of public tastes.
    C. You’ve never seen a movie before, or very few.  So the idea that there can be people moving around on a big screen wearing costumes and punching out aliens from space is still new and exciting.
    Or D. You’ve just completely lost your marbles and all perspective on what is actually good, bad and just okay in the medium you devote your life to covering.
    But all these are quibbles. It was fine. If they had asked me in the first place and listened to me, however, they might have made some money off this thing and broken it out of the indie ghetto.
    The Rushfield Babylon Recommendation: Six stars out of ten.

  • May 23, 2012 8:49 pm

    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. 

  • May 23, 2012 4:21 pm
    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.

First, a gathering of internet all-stars convene to discuss the American Idol finale and the state of singing contests in general.  We are joined byVulture’s Dave Holmes,Grantland’s Tess Lynchand the AV Club’s Emily Yoshida to chew over the twists and turns of Idol, The Voice and The X Factor season ahead.
Then a report from the TV upfronts.  Two hard-nosed reporters who were on the scene tell us about the networks’ presentations of their seasons ahead, what we can expect to be watching - or ignoring - this fall and about the state of network television in general.  Vulture’sDenise Martin and Hitfix’sGeoff Berkshire give us the inside story.
Plus - thoughts about the New Boring: Hollywood’s gold standard for weightiness.  And a new theme song by The Ventures. 
Download it direct right here.
Or on iTunes. (in a few minutes)
Or Stitcher!

    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.

    First, a gathering of internet all-stars convene to discuss the American Idol finale and the state of singing contests in general.  We are joined byVulture’s Dave Holmes,Grantland’s Tess Lynchand the AV Club’s Emily Yoshida to chew over the twists and turns of Idol, The Voice and The X Factor season ahead.

    Then a report from the TV upfronts.  Two hard-nosed reporters who were on the scene tell us about the networks’ presentations of their seasons ahead, what we can expect to be watching - or ignoring - this fall and about the state of network television in general.  Vulture’sDenise Martin and Hitfix’sGeoff Berkshire give us the inside story.

    Plus - thoughts about the New Boring: Hollywood’s gold standard for weightiness.  

    And a new theme song by The Ventures

    Download it direct right here.

    Or on iTunes. (in a few minutes)

    Or Stitcher!

  • May 22, 2012 2:40 am

    Who the deuce can parlez vous a cow?!

    (Source: Spotify)

  • May 22, 2012 1:28 am

    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.

  • May 19, 2012 2:25 pm
    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. View high resolution

    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.

  • May 18, 2012 6:42 pm
    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) View high resolution

    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)

  • May 17, 2012 12:05 pm
    THE NEW RUSHFIELD BABYLON PODCAST IS UP!  TRUE TALES OF CRIME AND OTHER SORDID DEEDS WITH MICHELLE MCNAMARA AND DAVE HILL!

Tales of true crimes and other sordid misdeeds on this week’s show.
First off, blogger and Master Detective Michelle McNamara, author of the True Crime Diary blog talks about her life in and around crime.  One of America’s premiere internet slueths we discuss how the tools of the internet can let an amateur investigator leapfrog police investigations and in particular, her work on the red hot track of one horrific serial killer.
We are then joined by comedian, raconteur and author Dave Hill who tells us about his new memoir, Tasteful Nudes.  We discuss the writing process, the comedy process, the getting into silly situations process and what makes a truly idiosyncratic personality like Dave Hill.
Plus - thoughts about the end of Smash, the finale of Survivor and mood setting music!

 
Download it direct right here

Or find us on itunes and stitcher under rushfieldbabylon

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

    Tales of true crimes and other sordid misdeeds on this week’s show.

    First off, blogger and Master Detective Michelle McNamara, author of the True Crime Diary blog talks about her life in and around crime.  One of America’s premiere internet slueths we discuss how the tools of the internet can let an amateur investigator leapfrog police investigations and in particular, her work on the red hot track of one horrific serial killer.

    We are then joined by comedian, raconteur and author Dave Hill who tells us about his new memoir, Tasteful Nudes.  We discuss the writing process, the comedy process, the getting into silly situations process and what makes a truly idiosyncratic personality like Dave Hill.

    Plus - thoughts about the end of Smash, the finale of Survivor and mood setting music!

    Download it direct right here Or find us on itunes and stitcher under rushfieldbabylon