I ♥ Huckabees
I ♥ Huckabees is a glorious mess. It's also a unique instrument. It is not realistic enough to be realism, but it is not abstract enough to be allegory. It dresses psychology up as philosophy (not to worry, William James did the same thing). Its political theater is unrecognizable, but it bolsters the case made by Three Kings that David O. Russell is the most politically committed of the Wordy Indie Wunderkind set (Anderson, Anderson, Baumbach, Stillman; not to mention Gondry-Kaufman-Jonze). I'm going to have to see it again to really write this post. For now, I just wanted to put something up with the ♥ symbol.
Team America: World Police
Of all the things that mean never having to say you're sorry, "political satire" may be eligible for the gold medal. Jon Stewart knew that yesterday when
he went on Crossfire and
nailed Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala to the wall; when they chided him for lobbing softballs at John Kerry, he lamely defended himself by saying "you're comparing yourself to a comedy show?" (On all other points, he clobbered them.)
Matt Parker and Trey Stone know whereof he speaks. They've expertly established as unassailable their brand of conservative "anti-P.C." libertarianism. To their advantage, they are very, very funny people: my first half-dozen viewings of the 5-minute "Spirit of Christmas" South Park short left me in good abdominal pain. They emerged right after the most noxious salvos of the anti-P.C. wars had subsided, and in doing so, seemed to say, "It's safe to play now. We've established that we all like each other; now let's make fun of each other." Their relentless vocabulary of misogyny and homophobia is just unpredictable enough to let jokes lapse into delightful lunacy, shielding them from charges of overt bigotry; matched with their gleeful potty-mouths it comes off as rebellious. And they have chosen their targets in so scattershot a fashion that conventional wisdom holds that they chiefly oppose sanctimony. The conventional wisdom is bulletproof: anyone who's bothered by their comedy must therefore be sanctimonious! And no one wants to be sanctimonious.
Team America: World Police slips from this balance, that I think South Park actually maintained, into a downright conservative movie. Ostensibly, it takes aim at targets on the left and the right. In actuality, it attacks, on the one hand, outspoken left-wing actors, and, on the other...action movies. Critics have proposed that it attacks the idea that America should go around blowing up anything its leaders feel like in fear of terrorists; but this is pretty sorry parody. For one thing, it lampoons not one actual figure associated with that idea (George W. Bush, his cabinet and their apologists come to mind; there are even right-wing celebrities who could stand a drubbing). By comparison, every actor who spoke out against the drive to war in Iraq comes in for mockery first and dismemberment second. Yes, it's funny to see Matt Damon portrayed as a hulk whose only verbalization is the repeated squeaking of his own name. And it never hurts to kick a Baldwin around; stick around past the credits to hear Kim Jong Il sing "you are worthless, Alec Baldwin". But it's certainly not even-handed. At bottom, in October of 2004, it seems a bit dim to make a feature length movie that criticizes everyone who said that invading Iraq would be a bad idea, and takes the piss out of not of a single person who said that invading Iraq was a good idea.
So, the politics suck. The jokes aren't great either. There are some funny ones—Kim Jong Il is hysterical throughout. His panthers, played by housecats, are funny. Puppet sex and puppet vomit is funny, and the Mos Eisley Cantina reference is slyer than the (yet another) Matrix parody and the Pearl Harbor put-downs. If all the jokes had been crammed into one half-hour episode, I probably would have hurt myself again.
We have been reminded at length this election season that the country is not over Vietnam. The country mostly is. Swift Boats notwithstanding, John Kerry's opposition to the war will probably turn out in the end to be only slightly more relevant than Bill Clinton's pleasureless marijuana story of twelve years earlier. Although it doesn't mention her name once, Team America: World Police turns out to have an obsession with Jane Fonda and her trip to Vietnam. The climax of the movie occurs in a "peace conference" sponsored by Kim Jong Il where the aforementioned actors gather in North Korea. Here, the lampooning of the actors goes well past their being well-meaning dupes: while speaking for peace, they pick up automatic weapons and try to take out the members of Team America. The movie transposes Fonda's solidarity visit to North Vietnam into a fantasia of modern-day collusion with terrorists, along the lines of Andrew Sullivan's original post-9-11 fever dreams of fifth columns. Team America's light sport associates criticism with violent treason. But don't mention it. After all, it's just comedy. And you don't want to be sanctimonious!
A Dirty Shame
I'm not concerned about the fact that this movie wasn't great. I'd pretty much written off John Waters by the late 90s-- after Cry Baby and Serial Mom. Then he busts out with Pecker in 1998 and shows that sometimes when you give a cult director the big bucks, it'll pay off in a serious way.
Since then, he's had two more forgettable movies: Cecil B. Demented and now A Dirty Shame. I have faith, though, that before the end of the decade we'll see another work of genius out of him.
This film did answer a long-standing question about the nomenclature of fetishes: what's the name for getting off on vomiting on others and being vomited on? Roman showers.
Hero
On why, when some movies are playing at the Vista, you see them there and then, and not wait until going to a multiplex in Columbus, Ohio.
