Rushfield Babylon

replied to your photo: MOVIES IN REVIEW DOUBLE REVIEW: MONEYBALL plus…

Just so you know, Sorkin did little more than a dialogue polish and added some of the more sappy scenes, but if you’re a big enough name, you win arbitrations. Steve Zaillian and original writer Stan Chervin did the bulk of the work.

Massive relief.

Good Lord we here at NikkiLeaks HQ are so behind on our homework, we’re going to need to do a second senior year at the institute of Finkeology to get caught up.  So many outbursts of inspired behavior, with so many nefarious angles to consider…But so few hours in the day!  It has been a time of gifts, but we’re trying to make ourselves worthy of receiving them.

Right now we’re still busy repainting the dorms to get ready for the incoming freshmen, so we can’t get into all of them, but one thing did occur while reading this Nikki report on ill doings at The Wrap (or The Crap as she calls it with that trademark Finke rapier wit).

First of all, Nikki issues aside, if The Wrap did what Nikki alleges they did - and that is never ever to be counted on; if Nikki Finke tells you the Earth is round, there’s a good chance you’re an inch away from sailing off the end of it - but IF it is true it is horrifying and no Nikki wackiness lightens that.  But it also occurred to us that Nikki’s semi-annual tantrum against her putative rival was a good occasion to take a look at the traffic numbers.   Historically, Nikki has thrown feces down on Sharon Waxman from a relatively high peak, but we thought we detected a tiny note of defensiveness in this particular outbreak, also nicely timed to embarrass The Wrap during its annual conference.  

Well, lookie and behold…according to last month’s Comscore numbers, The Wrap’s traffic is getting dangerously close to Nikki’s exalted peak.  In August, Deadline had approximately 1,568,000 Unique Users, while The Wrap was at 1,116,000.  Still a 400,000  or 40'ish percent difference, but the trend is not on Nikki’s side.   For 2011, Deadline’s traffic has essentially been flat, or even down slightly.  Back in January they saw 1,928,000 UU’s and they have more or less declined since then.  In contrast, The Wrap had 266,000 UU’s in Jan - a 1.7 million gap, and The Wrap has pretty much grown steadily since then.  On their current trajectories, the Wrap could well see itself with a bigger audience than the great Nikki within a few months from now.

Just to put this race in perspective, the Hollywood Reporter in August had about 4,441,000 unique users. Back when I was at the LATimes a few years ago, I think in entertainment we did about five million uniques.

Nothing could have prepared me for the outpouring of hate that would swallow my life since I shared my thoughts the other day about the stunningly overrated Drive.   One consistent argument that the films defenders have made is that Gosling fills in a very complex and unique character with hardly any words at all.

So complex and unique character….Gosh, you know what I’ve never seen before on screen?  A bad guy trying to put the badness within behind him by keeping the world at arm’s length until a woman in distress convinces him he has to let the evil out to serve goodness.  I literally have never seen that before; certainly not ten thousand times in every western/thriller/wannabe noir ever made.  I can’t imagine where the screenwriters came up with such a unique and complex protagonist.

And the idea that this hackneyed leftover cliche of a character becomes more complex and interesting because he does it without words.. Well, that’s the great thing about a character you’ve seen a million times. You don’t really need words to fill it in; you can just point the audience to every movie ever made and say, you know that morally compromised hero you’ve seen a million times, we’ve got one of those too.  

To some people I suppose - the lovelorn generally - silences imply deep complex currents and inner struggles.  I found myself wondering more often if Gosling’s character was perhaps borderline retarded.  The forerunner it reminded me of the most was Billy Bob Thornton’s character in Sling Blade.  Which I suppose has its charm.

Still waiting for someone to tell me the chase scenes were intentionally mediocre; that that was the point…

Step 1. Find a really crummy half baked genre script.

Step 2. Keep every fifth page to make a twenty page script. Throw out the rest.

Step 3. Apply period sheen.

Just back from weekly grocery shopping at the neighborhood TJ’s.  As usual there, fulfilled the family’s grocery needs for a fraction of what I’d pay at any other store; a scintilla of what Whole Foods would take me for if I dared fill up an entire cart with their fineries.

But the remarkable thing about it wasn’t the overall price tag.  It wasn’t even the fact that when I looked at the receipt there wasn’t single item that had cost more than four dollars. The miracle was that I had achieved this without even trying; that I hadn’t even really been paying attention to the prices and still walked away unscathed.   When I awoke from the haze which comes over me when I enter a supermarket, I was stunned to discover this. 

Why has this become so rare?  The idea of going into a store that will give you decent quality goods for reasonable prices is practically unheard of outside of Trader Joes. Every other nook and cranny of our culture has been occupied people and companies lying in wait to reach their hand into your wallet and ring every last cent out of you the moment you let your guard down just a tiny bit.  Everywhere deluxe versions, special “bargain” sizes, supposedly healthier more expensive iterations of the same product are sitting quietly until the moment when you become so lulled into a stupor by looking at shelf after shelf of boxes that you start automatically reaching for the shiny thing, the promise of…whatever.   And you stagger away from most stores, your spirit broken, your wallet emptied feeling like you’ve been taken into the alley by a chapter of Hells Angels and worked over until dinner time.

To have one last refuge in the world where you can go shop and they are not trying to rob you blind with every decision really is nothing short of a miracle these days. It’s the sort of thing that can make you feel loyal to a place, if that word means anything anymore.  Decent stuff, not “luxury” goods but neither is it 99 cent store leftovers.  I’ve never taken anything home from Trader Joe’s and been horrified by what I opened.  I guess they can do this not robbing you blind thing because they are a privately held company, otherwise stockholders would never stand for such a policy. 

Since the beginning of time, when Hollywood has portrayed itself on the screen it has always cast itself in the worst possible light.  From A Star is Born to Sunset Boulevard to Bad and the Beautiful and onto The Player, Hollywood has portrayed itself as a macabre hall of broken mirrors;  a place where dreams go to be corrupted from the inside and eventually turning to poison.  

Yes, every year at the Oscar ceremonies the star gather to pat themselves on the back, but when it came to scripted entertainment, for almost a century, no one dared portray say, a talent agent or a producer in a heroic light.  We recognized that New Yorkers had cornered the market on self-congratulation and we could never compete with them in the narcissism derby.  Further, on some level as vile as Hollywood could be, it always a healthy sense of shame about its worth, and in its on screen visions of itself, an honesty about the tortured relationship between commerce and arts.

And then along came Entourage to say, this place is awesome!  Look at the cool cars everyone drives.  The hot girls everywhere! And those movies like Aquaman, I love those!  That Michael Bay is a genius.

For the first time in history, the nation rooted for a heroically profane talent agent, helping the little dreamers make good.  Yes, he used underhanded tactics, but all in the service of good.   

Some contend that in fact, Ari was like Virgil guiding Vince’s Dante through the Inferno, that the show was not an homage to Hollywood at its worst, but a portrait of a group of young dreamers who managed to keep their souls despite being surrounded by temptation.  To which I say: sure it is.

So now the door is open and Hollywood weasels need never be shorthand for Satan’s minions again.  All thanks to a handful of young dreamers and their on screen alter ego.  Thank you Entourage.

And please while you’re here enjoy my unauthorized Entourage epilogue over at awl.

Steven Soderbergh is an interesting case of the problem of the modern would-be artiste. Soderbergh is thought of as not a hack genre director, but an intellectual, a director of ideas, etc.  For that he is lauded, celebrated, placed on a pedestal far above mere journeymen directors; Tony Scott wouldn’t be allowed to drink from the same water fountain as Soderbergh. 

The trouble with this is that when Soderbergh does those Idea Films, they are generally horrendous. But when he condescends to makes genre films, he’s really really good.  But if he just made those genre films, he would never be invited to speak at the Ted Conference and all that.  But because he mixes it up, people forget that the Idea films are nearly unwatchable; they just remember he makes them and that makes him not just one of those hacks.

His list of Idea Films includes the six year study in tedium Che, his experiment in depicting prostitution through the eyes of a comatose actress The Girlfriend Experience,  the least needed remake of the last decade with Solaris…Full Frontal…Kafka…

But when he does genre pictures he makes Out of Sight, The Limey, The Informant. Even the Ocean’s movies for fluffy heist films are entirely enjoyable if totally insubstantial.

And now he’s gone and made a disaster film, which may be the best disaster film since…I mean, has there ever even been a good non-campy disaster film?    

Intensely realistic, the film gets under your skin and is absolutely terrifying in that every moment of the disease’s spread seems completely plausible.  In the disaster films of yore, there always had to be a human manifestation of evil; the man who put profits before building code, anti-bee protections, vaccine safety.  Here there is no villain just some annoying bureaucrats to slow things down.  The only truly sinister seeming person, Veronica Mars’ father who plays an anti-terrorism official, immediately crumbles in the face of a bigger terror than he has imagined.

Soderbergh is wise to see that more than we fear the things that live under the bed or getting caught in a burning skyscraper or trapped in a bus by a swarm of bees, germaphobia is our national neurosis.  It is an outgrowth, I think, of our fear that we have all been sucked into this grid that while giving us all kinds of great opportunities and stuff, there is this fear that something has been implanted at a very deep level that isn’t supposed to be there; that our interconnectedness is the very thing that will kill us.  "There is something in nature that doesn’t love a wall" takes on a very insidious meaning when you think of that in terms of international plagues.

A few other thoughts with very minor spoilers:

• Don’t worry. Gwyneth Paltrow dies right at the beginning. You won’t be stuck with her.

• This movie led me to declare Matt Damon the finest actor of our time.

• When we first meet Jude Law, who plays a disease blogger, he is wearing an Andy Capp type flat cap.  The cap instantly telegraphs this man is a nut.  I can’t think of another piece of wardrobe not made of tin foil which could make that point so simply and effectively.

• There’s not nearly enough Brian Cranston, but such is the problem of an ensemble film.

The Rushfield Babylon Recommendation:  Highly recommended for people with a fairly secure handle on your neuroses.  Anything less should stay away.  Six stars out of seven.

Had lunch today at a new bar and grill thing on the Westside of LA.  It’s a place that’s gotten a bit of positive buzz in the weeks since its opened but as a solid bar and grill, not as a new fangled foodie destination.  The menu is full of standards -  burgers, roast chicken - rather than Ludoesque experiments of pork belly gelatin or anything of the like. The decor is old fashioned bar and grill and the location is off the foodie main line.

The food was very good.  Much better than you would expect at your standard bar and grille in that neighborhood, so I was very pleased.  But there is nothing like a restaurant constantly telling you how special it is to make you root against it.

The waiter explained that the menu had been created by “Top Chef Angelo Sosa”; our attention was directed to many subtleties of its pages that may have escaped our notice. When I asked if I might have a burger without a bun, the (very nice) waiter pursed his brow and said he would have to take the question up with the kitchen, as all of the dishes had been coordinated to feature a trinity of flavors.  

And I reiterate, this was not at some lauded foodie destination, but a bar and grille which given its neighborhood, probably will cater heavily to business lunches.  So has foodieism come this far so quickly that it is now only one step away from TGI Fridays? And by foodieism I don’t mean people making better food.  I mean this preciousness about the “craft of cooking.”    Despite the audiences for Top Chef, etc, I would venture that ninety-nine percent of the people in any restaurant don’t care if the chicken on their plate was prepared on a rotisserie or by being submerged for forty days and forty nights in a vat of liquid nitrogen or by the chef chanting ancient sanskrit curses over it.

Placing this in the context of the world going to hell, quickly, I attribute this trend to the growing overwhelming narcissism of our culture.  Nothing is about the result anymore, about the thing itself, but all about what we did to prepare.  It’s all about how special our journey was to bring this to you…the result itself, the plate of chicken, is almost irrelevant to that journey.   

As for keeping your mouth shut and letting other people praise you, rather than filling over crevice with your own self-love, well, that vanished long ago.

That said, the chicken was pretty damn good.

No one is more surprised than I am to find that somehow Matt Damon has become the great young actor of our day.  It’s about time someone said it.  And it turned out that someone would have to be me.  Read it here at The Daily Beast.

replied to your photo: MOVIES IN REVIEW (BELATED): THE HELP So the last…

I haven’t seen The Help but it seems like it’s been the target of such opprobrium compared to more obviously vile stuff BECAUSE it pretends to be innocuous but has toxic assumptions underlying it.

I question how toxic those underlying assumptions are.  I think that is a major stretch that many people want to make because they cant stand a middlebrow feel good film.  I think the film’s assumptions are overtly blandly platitudily uplifting and covertly patronizing and un-self-aware, but that is a long way from toxic.  In any event, I’d happily take covertly patronizing over overtly toxic, which is what 2/3 of Hollywood produces is.