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Thursday, Oct 27, 2011 12:27 PM UTC

Pauline Kael: Hero or hack?

As two new Kael books arrive, two Salon critics debate the legacy of the influential New Yorker movie writer

By and
Legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael retired from print 20 years ago and died 10 years after. But if you read film criticism online, it's as if she's still with us. She is the subject of a new biography by Brian Kellow, "A Life in the Dark." Salon film critic Andrew O'Hehir and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz got together this week to talk about Kael's impact on film, criticism and their own sensibilities. Laurels are tossed, darts thrown. Excerpts follow.

Matt: Is there any other critic, dead or alive, who’s as ubiquitous as Pauline Kael?

Andrew: Absolutely not. As we’ll see, I have very mixed feelings about Kael and her legacy, but no other film critic has ever been remotely as popular or as influential. (One could argue that less famous writers like James Agee or Manny Farber are more “important,” in some sense, but that’s a different matter.) Kael’s influence is so pervasive it’s almost unconscious. When I was a younger critic and someone accused me of writing like Kael, I was enraged and responded that I’d never read her, which was almost literally true. When I did read her, I had to admit the guy had a point: I had absorbed some elements of her style and outlook without realizing it, as if through osmosis, because they were so ubiquitous in film criticism.

Matt: I’ve actually struggled with this myself. That prose style is so engaging — so powerful and seductive in some ways because it’s like a heightened version of everyday conversation with a really smart person — that it does sink into your mind, whether you’re a regular filmgoer of somebody who writes criticism for a living. Anybody who’s so inclined can actually track my own shifting feelings about Kael’s influence by looking at my past writing about her. I reviewed her 1994 compilation “For Keeps” for the Dallas Observer, my first employer, and it was pretty much a mash note. Seven years later, I wrote an obituary for her that was a lot tougher — respectful, ultimately, but skeptical of some of the very qualities I praised a few years earlier. This was probably because by that point I’d been living in New York for six years, a much richer moviegoing town with a lot more varied types of film criticism available in print, and I started to figure out that even though Kael was the most prominent and maybe influential voice in criticism, there was more than one way to write about movies. And television. And everything!

Andrew: Let’s talk about some of the distinctive and (perhaps) problematic qualities in Kael’s writing. As you say, her voice is both powerful and seductive. She worked very hard to discover and refine a style that was highly intelligent but also sounded very direct and American, and was not full of $50 academic words and intellectual pretension. And she was very clear about the fact that a critic’s role is to speak truth (as she sees it) to power, to be an oppositional cultural force, never to congratulate the powerful for being on top or the comfortable for having such good taste. I have some misgivings about the direction Kael went with that, ultimately, but it’s an important lesson, and one that too many people in our so-called profession ignore.

Matt: One of Kael’s finest qualities was that independent voice — independent not just of the normally parasitic relationship between print publications and the studios that advertise in them, but independent of the New Yorker itself, which until Kael came along, did not regularly publish prose as loose and lively as hers. Right now I’m rereading her 1983 review of “The Right Stuff,” which as much as I love that film, really nails Philip Kaufman’s odd mix of counterculture satire and very conventional, even square hero-worship. It’s got one of my favorite closing paragraphs: “If having ‘the right stuff’ is set up as the society’s highest standard, and if a person proves that he has it by his eagerness to be locked in a can and shot into space, the only thing that distinguishes human heroes from chimps is that the heroes volunteer for the job. And if they volunteer, as they do in this film, out of personal ambition and for profit, are they different from the chimp who might jump into the can eagerly, too, if he saw a really big banana there?”

Andrew: That’s fascinating, funny and perverse writing. It makes you laugh and offers a take on that movie that no one else would ever have thought of. A wonderful example. It’s also a good example — do I dare to say this? — of what I will suggest are Kael’s intellectual limitations. Of course there is a difference between a chimp and a human in the example she provides! The human goes into space knowing he is going into space, in pursuit of some grand, abstract vision, the idea of going to the moon or whatever, along with all the personal glory and fame and money and women and so on. The chimp is presumably just thinking about the banana. In that sense it’s a cheap equation: She is deliberately ignoring or contradicting Marx’s famous maxim that the worst house built by a person is still superior to the best house built by a beaver. One can argue with that, but you see what he means right away.

I realize I’m getting into a seemingly irrelevant tangent here, Matt, but my point is that I think Kael falls in love with her contrarianism sometimes, with her desire to defy what she sees as the conventional wisdom of the upper-bourgeois readers of the New Yorker. That leads her sometimes into brilliant insights and other times into dunderheaded dead ends.

Matt: Such as what? Everybody who reads her has a list of examples. Mine would include her generalized hostility toward Stanley Kubrick — especially “2001,” which I think she entirely misunderstood — and a sort of anti-intellectual upper-middle-class yahoo-ism, which was quite hostile toward a lot of the 1960s European art cinema without which a lot of the ’70s American films Kael adored would not have existed. And there was also a homophobic strain to a lot of her writing on films with gay characters and themes, which was by no means unique but certainly contrasts poorly with her very advanced, matter-of-fact writing about films with black and Hispanic characters.

The new Pauline Kael biography by Brian Kellow gets into this a bit, and it’s not flattering to Kael at all. At one point he quotes Kael’s review of the 1968 film “The Sergeant,” starring Rod Steiger as a tormented military officer who develops a damaging crush on a private. She writes, “There is something ludicrous and sometimes poignant about many stories involving homosexuals. Inside the leather trappings and chains and emblems and Fascist insignia of homosexual ‘toughs’ — [check out those ironic quotes!] — there is so often hidden our old acquaintance the high-school sissy, searching the streets for the man he doesn’t believe he is. The incessant, compulsive cruising is the true, mad romantic’s endless quest for love.” You can feel her going for empathy and understanding in that passage, but it’s really condescending.

Andrew: That’s really pretty awful. One probably shouldn’t resort to biography in a case like this, but it may be instructive to remember that Kael lived for several years as a young woman with the poet and radical filmmaker James Broughton, who was primarily gay but fathered a child with her. It’s extremely tempting to reconsider her attitudes about homosexuality and her hostility to avant-garde or art cinema in that light!

Matt: The biography barely gets into that, by the way.

Andrew: “Anti-intellectual upper-middle-class yahoo-ism” is stronger than whatever I was going to use, but pretty well sums it up. You know, I can understand where she was coming from, as a girl from a modest and relatively rural California background, who often felt alienated by the phony-baloney tastes of the Eastern elite establishment. She believed passionately in movies as mass entertainment that could still be humane, and believed that the power of actors and even movie stars could transport us emotionally in a way no other craft could or would. It isn’t precisely my aesthetic, but I completely respect that.

But as you say, she couldn’t see why cinema that was more formal in its orientation, and wasn’t aiming for a mass audience, was important in a different way, and that the possibilities of the medium were not limited to the upper-middle Hollywood and off-Hollywood movies she loved best. She rejected most of the most ambitious areas of European art cinema, as you say — with the bizarre exception of early Godard. (She was a sucker for a certain strain of French movies, maybe because of the sexual frankness.) You mentioned her inability to get Kubrick, and you could extend that to Terrence Malick. I could be wrong about this, but I think she never even wrote about Andrei Tarkovsky, and may never have seen his films. (She certainly would not have enjoyed them!) And then there is the question of the directors who could do no wrong, in her eyes.

Matt: If you look back over her collected work, yeah, it is pretty light on foreign films after the late ’70s. She seemed to almost lose interest entirely in anything non-Hollywood after about 1982, with the exception of certain American independents that she championed. She wrote one of the best and least condescending reviews of Spike Lee’s first film “She’s Gotta Have It,” a great example of where her sexual frankness and her wannabe-boho fascination with images of blackness converged in a really distinctive, fun way. She was more comfortable writing about African-American characters and stories than almost any other prominent film critic of the time, except maybe Roger Ebert. That makes up for some of the exoticism that hampers other reviews — describing Louis Gossett Jr. in “An Officer and a Gentleman” as being like Woody Strode — a superior being or a representative of a more evolved race or something. But I like that she just puts that kind of stuff in reviews — “Did I say that out loud?”-type comments. So many major critics are much more careful, so obviously very worried about how they come off in print, as if they’re running for office. Kael didn’t care about any of that, for better or worse.

Andrew: Yeah, the uninhibited quality of her voice is something I largely admire, partly because anybody who’s written a lot of reviews understands how much work was required to make it sound artless. And yes, she was a fearless champion of what we might call American independent cinema, long before the term existed or the concept became trendy. (I’m guessing she disliked the label.)

And amid the criticisms that we might have, let’s remember that she was absolutely ruthless in attacking the greed and stupidity of Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality, especially because she believed the commercial enterprise of movies was capable of producing a beautiful and unique kind of alchemy. As the studios increasingly defaulted to formula from the late ’70s onward — or, let’s say, to a set of formulas Kael saw as a betrayal of Hollywood’s soul — I think she began to see that attacking the highbrow tastes of people on the Upper West Side was less and less relevant. Didn’t she remark at one point that had she known trash culture would become the only culture, she wouldn’t have defended it so vehemently?

Matt: Yes, she did say that. Quite a mea culpa, really.

You’re really not a fan of hers, are you? I mean, you defend her in the abstract, but I get the sense that you’re very distrustful of what her kind of accessible, personal criticism represents, even though you’ve learned a lot from it.

Andrew:  I appreciate what she represents and her influence on the craft and form of film criticism, mine very much included, is almost oxygen-like. But I’m not really on her wavelength. Even when I agree with her about certain movies or directors I often don’t see them the same way, and don’t really get what she’s talking about. I’ve honestly never known what she means by “humanist” movies, and I don’t understand her passion for, say, Brian De Palma or James Toback. Such weird and ultimately minor choices! And the way she uses the first-person plural or the second-person plural, to implicitly include the reader in her highly eccentric emotional response — that drives me nuts. It’s manipulative and a little creepy, like she’s saying all right-thinking people will have the same opinion about a motion picture.

Matt: I used to do that all the time, using the royal “you” — then I started trying to break myself of it, and finally I started using it again without guilt, as an alternative to “one,” which is grammatically correct and more accurate but always sounds stuffy to me.

As recently as 10 years ago, there were certain critics who knew Kael or who were directly mentored by her who all got grouped under the heading of “Paulettes” — people like our former colleague Stephanie Zacharek, and Charles Taylor, Michael Sragow, David Edelstein, my former New York Press colleague Armond White, and David Denby, who inherited Kael’s chair at the New Yorker.  That’s funny to me, because the reality of film criticism is that lot of critics are, to some extent, Paulettes, even if the critic never personally knew her. Her voice is just that strong. Even if you choose to define yourself against Kael, you’re acknowledging her influence. It’s like deciding to become a jazz trumpeter and not be influenced by Miles Davis, or becoming an actor and trying not to be influenced by Brando. She has that kind of effect, an elemental effect, transformative and deep. The most recent crop of young film critics definitely have a touch of her style or outlook. They could not avoid it if they wanted to. Reading them, you might also detect bits and pieces of other critics who had an impact of some sort: Manny Farber, James Agee, Molly Haskell, Roger Ebert, Andrew Sarris, Francois Truffaut, even the borderline stand-up comedy-type reviewers like Anthony Lane, and Outlaw Vern and his spiritual godfather, Joe Bob Briggs. They all meant something to writers who came later. They had an impact, though perhaps not on the level of Kael who has been absorbed into the collective subconscious.

But I wonder, Andrew, do you think that deep influence is an altogether good thing?  Or is it a bad thing?

Andrew: Well, since I’ve been playing the role of the hater here a little bit, I’ll say that while Kael’s work is a mixed bag and I often find her judgments on individual films, directors and genres baffling, she made film criticism seem relevant and interesting to large numbers of people in a way nobody had before her. She made Roger Ebert possible, and I’m quite sure Roger would agree with that. In a general way, her influence has been highly positive, and what I mean by a general way is that anyone who tries to write about movies in a direct and colloquial voice but also with erudition and style, anyone who seeks to combine personal observations and social or political criticism in a movie review, anyone who is working to situate this peculiar and seductive art form in relation to the world and to human life owes an enormous debt to Pauline Kael.

Now, here’s the downside, Matt: I think when it comes to the highly specific vision of cinema and aesthetics applied by Kael and some (not all) of the admirers you mention, her influence is way more problematic. She wrote so often about valuing beauty and pleasure in the movies — who can argue with that? Well, I can, when beauty and pleasure are defined so narrowly as to refer almost entirely to the kinds of well-made, sophisticated entertainments built around attractive actors playing likable characters, which was what she liked best. I’ve always felt that Kael did not approve of people who found beauty or pleasure in radically different kinds of films — she never used the word “film” of course, as she found it pretentious — and suspected that we were lying about it or fooling ourselves or mistaking suffering for pleasure.

As we’ve discussed, her definition excludes all kinds of things, from European art cinema to horror movies to a lot of crime films and other genre movies. What troubles me about her legacy is the anti-intellectual component you have mentioned, the idea that Kael provides cover for the persistent critical devaluation of movies that challenge her definition of “movies” because they do not set out to please or entertain millions of people, and may be unsettling or incomplete or unfriendly on purpose.

Now it would be ludicrous to suggest that Hou Hsiao-hsien or Alexander Sokurov or Kelly Reichardt or whoever you want to pick from world cinema remains totally obscure because of Pauline Kael’s ghost. But I see her populism — which she meant as a rebuke to the wealthy and powerful — increasingly employed after her death as a weapon of reverse snobbery that makes common cause between critics, moviegoers and major media corporations, a weapon used to support a very limited and mainstream vision of cinema and drive all others ever further into the margins.

Convince me that I’m wrong.

Matt: I don’t think you’re entirely wrong. Kael said near the end of her life that, in effect, that the war described in her piece “Trash, Art and the Movies” ended at some point, and trash won, and that maybe she felt guilty that trash won, and wondered if she’d played a part in that victory. I doubt she would have praised a lot of the big, loud comic book movies that dominate box office charts today — she was negative on the original “Star Wars” films and very mixed on the original Tim Burton “Batman,” which feels quite old-fashioned, even classical, compared to comparable movies today: “The Dark Knight,” “Inception,” “Avatar” and the like. And I am not sure that her definition of a good film necessarily “excludes all kinds of things,” as you claim.

But you’re right that she naturally gravitated toward certain films and filmmakers. That was her nature. I gravitate toward certain kinds of films and filmmakers. You do, too. All critics do. But I don’t know anyone who is a remotely serious movie watcher who only reads one critic. Brian Kellow’s biography gets into this quite a bit. Kael liked to feel overwhelmed by movies. That naturally meant that she clicked with films that were more emotional and visceral than cerebral or analytical. She detested almost everything that smacked of academia, abstraction or agitprop, unless those qualities were subordinated to what the Kellow biography calls “kineticism.” She loved Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg and early Martin Scorsese, though she felt Scorsese became too arty and careerist too early and lost his way, which is critic code for “became interested in things that I don’t care about.” Her big complaint about “Raging Bull” was that it was “aestheticized pulp” and that it therefore lacked vitality. Vitality was everything to her, so important that it led her to distrust any movie that set out primarily to make one think and reflect.

The titles of a lot of her collections spell this out: “Reeling,” “When the Lights Go Down,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Taking It All In.” They’re blatantly sexual, teasing. They’re a caricature of what macho guys claim that women “need” — i.e., to get laid. It’s no huge shock that Camille Paglia worships Kael and does her own version of the Dionysius-goes-to-the-multiplex thing when she writes about films. Kael wrote of  ”Carrie,” “DePalma is one of the few directors in the sound era to make a horror film that is so visually compelling that a viewer seems to have entered a mythic night world … we can hear the faint, distant sound of De Palma cackling with pleasure.” I think that cackling that she heard was Pauline Kael. The critic was projecting herself onto the movie, and looking for her own reflection in it.

But Andrew, I think it’s really important to point out that this is what all critics do, even if they pretend they aren’t doing it. There is no correct way to review a movie as long as the writer has a moral compass and a firm grasp of film history and aesthetics — which Kael definitely had — and is honest. I wrote a piece for New York Press about Steven Spielberg a number of years ago in which I compared the directors I liked to friends, in the sense that most healthy adults have more than one friend, because we don’t get everything we need from just one friend, humans being so complex and imperfect: “We have friends who are great at giving advice, but whom we wouldn’t trust to feed our cats when we’re out of town. We have friends who’ve deceived or betrayed us, but who are so resourceful and clever that we’d like to have them beside us in an unfamiliar city if our heart suddenly gave out. This same attitude can apply to movies — and moviemakers.”

That attitude can apply to critics, too. Kael was a great friend, even though I never personally knew her. I found her infuriating and bizarre and inconsistent a lot of the time, and there was a period of a few years when I was just kind of tired of her and didn’t want to be around her. I needed some space, I guess. Then I went back to her and appreciated her in a new way, and was able to reconcile my youthful worship of her with what I had learned from reading other critics, past and present. Reading Kael made me feel as though I was sitting across from her at a coffee shop or in a bar, listening to her talk about this film or that filmmaker, or about the wider world beyond the screen. Very few critics have her talent for intimacy and directness. She was an amazing person who enlightened, provoked and changed me. I miss her terribly.

Andrew: That’s great! You tell me I’m wrong while denying you’re doing so, a very Kaelian tactic! Well, a film-critic tactic anyway.

Andrew O

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Matt Zoller Seitz

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Thursday, May 17, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

“Battleship”: Dumbest military spectacle ever?

Aliens invade a Navy recruitment video and turn back the gender-politics clock in this moronic blockbuster

By A still from "Battleship"

One of the great marketing constants of contemporary Hollywood is the idea of appealing to the 11-year-old boy within every moviegoer (whatever gender that person may manifest on the surface). Almost every American movie released during the summer season has that squirmy pre-adolescent id in view, and about two-thirds of the movies made the rest of the year. But what about a movie as baffling and incoherent and flat-out stupid as “Battleship” — an alien-invasion adventure by way of a Hasbro game, or maybe the other way round — a movie that would make your inner 11-year-old stomp out of the theater in disgust?

It’s undoubtedly gilding the lily to claim that “Battleship” is the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen — for all that I front as someone who only likes Turkish films where people stare at the landscape without talking, I’ve seen a lot of dumb movies — but it’s definitely up there. Over and above its extraordinary, mind-melting level of stupidity, “Battleship” (which is directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Peter Berg, of “Hancock” and “Friday Night Lights,” and written by action-flick brothers Erich and Jon Hoeber) is also extremely weird. Its shameless and nonsensical combination of ingredients finally won me over, after a fashion, when I realized that its gung-ho Navy-recruitment propaganda and retrograde gender politics shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than the ZZ Top, AC/DC and Billy Squier songs on the soundtrack. The only point of the whole exercise is to make small boys whoop and holler.

You know that bar over on the roughneck side of town, the one where all the jingoistic, pro-military, America-hell-yeah movies go to quaff some brewskis and swap tales about kickin’ Communist hiney? Yeah, that one. Well, when “Battleship” shows up there and starts breaking beer glasses on its head, “Top Gun” and “Red Dawn” and “The Green Berets” get to feel all grown-up and complicated and full of girly-man sensitivity. That’s how stupid it is. Come to think of it, that’s the same Oahu tavern where we first meet our handsome but headstrong hero, Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch, last seen fleeing the ruins of “John Carter”), who’s enjoying a birthday beverage and stern lecture, both provided by his uptight Navy officer brother, Stone (Alexander Skarsgård). Let me back up and repeat that key piece of information: Skarsgård’s character is named Stone Hopper, and I promise that if you remind me of that in three years, I’ll still think it’s hilarious.

That bar on that evening is also where Alex first claps eyes on Sam (Brooklyn Decker), a leggy, cheerleader-ish blonde who’s come into this testosterone-rich dive bar unaccompanied, only to be denied a microwave burrito. Alex gets her that burrito, and wins her heart, at the end of a painful slapstick sequence that involves the total destruction of a convenience store and him being repeatedly Tased by local law enforcement. Funny! Shortly after that, we get to see Sam wearing short-shorts and a tank top, smooching with Alex on the beach — and that’s the one and only moment of faint implied sexuality anywhere in “Battleship.” Decker’s Sam might as well be encased in a glass vitrine; for the rest of the movie she’s seen only in chaste white dresses or tomboyish outdoor clothes. She’s less a Megan Fox-style sex object than a small boy’s vague and non-threatening idea of a sexy lady, and in her remaining scenes with Alex she spends her time urging him — I’m not kidding about this! — to ask her father for her hand.

Alex doesn’t get around to doing that right away, because after the seemingly endless throat-clearing of these early scenes, stuff finally starts happening and the action movie gets here at last. See, Alex has been dragged into the Navy by his big brother Stone Hopper and somehow gotten an officer’s commission, and Sam’s dad (Liam Neeson, doing his growly Amurkin act) is some big-shot admiral who hates him, and then some huge alien vessels from outer space show up, because of a beacon sent out there by geek scientists (thanks, nerds!), destroy Hong Kong and land in the Pacific right in the middle of RIMPAC, which sounds vaguely pornographic but is actually a massive naval exercise involving fleets from many nations. The alien ships are immense gleaming CGI monstrosities wielding impressive firepower — as usual, far beyond our comprehension, etc. — but they’re also kind of the McMansions of the alien-invader world, meaning that they look great for the first few minutes and then you start wondering what the point is, and how well anybody thought any of this through before they started building.

There appear to be no clear rules governing the behavior of the marauding aliens, which is to say that the only rule is this: Despite their overwhelming military superiority, the invaders must have weaknesses that will eventually allow the United States Navy to boo-ya all over their asses. So the aliens never fire on anyone who doesn’t pose a direct threat (except when they do), even though their apparent purpose is world conquest. They come from a planet that, as we are repeatedly told, is very similar to Earth, yet they have reptilian eyeballs and cannot tolerate direct sunlight. Their ships can apparently fly — or, at least, they flew here across millions of miles of space — yet they navigate through the ocean with a frog-hopping motion not unlike metallic whales doing the butterfly stroke. In fairness, all the big machines and humanoid monsters and things that go boom are awesomely rendered; Berg has definitely spent his reported $200 million budget on stuff you can see. It’s just all so profoundly stupid.

Thanks to whatever marketing logic dictates that these kinds of summer movies have to last more than two hours, Berg and the screenwriters pack in all kinds of Navy protocol, ludicrous subplots and irrelevant comic business, among the explosions. R&B star Rihanna is here, in a nothing role as a tough-as-nails petty officer, and Tadanobu Asano, a major Japanese star whose presence may pay off in East Asia, plays a kind of guest-star captain who figures out how to track the radar-cloaked alien ships using a low-tech grid that somewhat resembles — yes! — the traditional layout of the Battleship game. I bet there were high-fives all around in the writing room when they figured that one out. (Let me observe here that playing the Hasbro version is lame; Battleship can and should be played with graph paper.)

I’m not even getting into the bizarre “Space Cowboys” twist toward the end, in which a mothballed World War II-era battleship, and its crew of geriatric docents, is dragged into the fray in a last-ditch effort to save the world. I mean, I know what the title of the movie is, but it’s somehow especially funny that they got all worried about the fact that the real-life Navy doesn’t use battleships anymore. (“Man, we can’t let down the people like this! They want a freakin’ battleship, and they’re gonna get one!”) Plus, did you know that museum ships built 70 years ago are kept all fueled up and ready to go, with stacks of live missile shells piled up behind the Grab-a-Smurf machine? Me neither! But please forgive me; I’m just bitter. Unlike Taylor Kitsch’s endlessly enthusiastic character, I never did get around to asking my wife’s dad for her hand in marriage. And when you get right down to it, isn’t that kind of a charming custom? Why in the world did we let that one get away?

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Andrew O

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Wednesday, May 16, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

Sacha Baron Cohen’s dark political farce

The "Borat" creator's nutty Arab "Dictator" moves to Brooklyn, falls in love -- and schools the West in democracy

By Sacha Baron Cohen in "The Dictator"

What exactly is Sacha Baron Cohen up to? This question, stupid as it may appear on the surface, has intrigued me ever since “Da Ali G Show” began airing in the United States. It’s a stupid question because Baron Cohen is a comedian; as “edgy” or “controversial” as his topics and material may sometimes be, his job is to make people laugh. But most comedians don’t try to get laughs by interviewing Pat Buchanan or Boutros Boutros-Ghali (“Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali,” as Ali G introduced him) under false pretenses, or by leading a group of unsuspecting Arizona nightclubbers in a rousing chorus of “Throw the Jew Down the Well.”

It’s an ancient truism of comedy that what makes us most uncomfortable and shocks us the most is also where the deepest veins of humor reside, and throughout his career Baron Cohen has specialized in prodding those sore spots, sometimes with an evident political point of view, and sometimes totally not. In a throwaway moment early in Baron Cohen’s new movie, “The Dictator” (directed by Baron Cohen’s frequent collaborator Larry Charles, who was also at the helm for “Borat” and “Brüno”), we see the bearded North African tyrant Admiral General Aladeen, portrayed of course by Baron Cohen, playing a first-person-shooter video game called “Munich Olympics.” You’re groaning already, right? Here’s how it works: You knock on the door marked “Israeli Olympic Team.” When a cute little Smurf-like creature in a yarmulke and side-curls answers the door — “Shalom!” — a pop-up widget announces “Shoot the Jew!” and you waste him. It continues from there: “Oy vey!” “Mazeltov!” “Meshugenah!” cry the cheerfully dying figures.

This is funny precisely because it’s not funny, and if that sounds too mystical or dialectical for you, let’s remember that we’re talking about a guy who has cited World War II-era historian Ian Kershaw, who was one of his professors at Cambridge, as a major influence. “I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust,” Baron Cohen once told Rolling Stone interviewer Neil Strauss, while making it clear that in exposing the casual cruelty and docile conformity of the ordinary people with whom he interacted he was doing exactly that. You can argue there’s a personal agenda at work here, since Baron Cohen grew up in a prominent British Jewish family and is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor (in his words, the last Jewish girl trained as a ballerina in Nazi Germany). But I see something more than that, a dark and even misanthropic moral and intellectual vision that conceals, somewhere way deep down, the smothered hope for a better world.

We laugh at the “Munich Olympics” video game (if, indeed, we do laugh) because we’re appalled and we see some truth in it. We’re appalled that Baron Cohen and his co-writers were malicious enough to come up with it, we’re appalled with ourselves for so readily accepting it as humor, and we’re appalled by the incontrovertible fact that some people — in places like Aladeen’s fictional homeland, the Republic of Wadiya, but also in Britain and the U.S. and anywhere else you care to mention — would take smirking delight in such a game if it existed. (Which, for all I know, it may.)

“The Dictator” is a much more normal kind of movie than “Borat” or “Brüno,” perhaps because Baron Cohen is now too famous — and has been threatened too many times with lawsuits and/or beatdowns — to pull off his in-character performance provocations. (Frankly, hadn’t the shtick worn out by the time of the very mixed “Brüno” anyway?) Despite some cleverly snipped bits of real news footage from the Libyan crisis, “The Dictator” is a scripted entertainment from start to finish, with Baron Cohen playing both the vainglorious and idiotic Wadiyan autocrat and also the even dumber rural goatherd selected to serve as his assassination-thwarting double. On a trip to New York to address the United Nations, the real Aladeen gets separated from his entourage, thanks to an incompetent CIA blowhard played by John C. Reilly. Shorn of his beard and of his access to voluptuous hookers and anti-Semitic video games, the erstwhile dictator is forced to work in a feminist food collective in Brooklyn, where he falls hard for Anna Faris, as its unshaven-armpit, pixie-cut sporting, ultra-p.c. manager. (Aladeen repeatedly remarks that she has the physique of a preteen boy — and specifically of Harry Potter — but it’s not clear whether that’s a bad thing.)

Although the character of Aladeen seems awfully predictable by Baron Cohen standards, the movie itself veers from one hilarious, absurd and patently offensive setup to the next, mercilessly mocking the stupidity and paranoia of Americans, the venality of celebrities — there’s a joke about Katy Perry’s purported relations with Aladeen that I can’t even euphemize successfully — the Chinese lust for world domination and the cultural vapidity and backwardness of the Arab world. There are moments of unabated vulgar silliness, as when a rich woman gazing out the window of a Manhattan luxury hotel gets an unexpected faceful of wobbly Aladeen dong. And there are even moments when Baron Cohen’s portrayal of the benighted dictator — who is perhaps more ignorant and miseducated than innately evil — borders on sweetness, if you can really use that word to describe a film that involves jokes about rape, torture, abortion and fellatio performed with a geriatric drug dealer’s severed head.

But let’s revert to my original WTF question about Baron Cohen by way of this film’s obvious relationship to Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 “The Great Dictator,” which is also about a demented world leader with genocidal fantasies and the ordinary citizen (in Chaplin’s film, a Jewish barber) who becomes his accidental replacement. On one level, of course, the comparison is ridiculous. Chaplin’s film is a masterpiece, or something close to it — prescient, daring and almost unbearably tragic, an optimistic and sentimental plea for reason in a world teetering on the edge of the abyss. Remember that when that film was released, the U.S. and Germany were not yet at war and the worst atrocities of the Holocaust had not yet happened, although the film seems to see them coming.

I can’t resist feeling that “The Dictator” (whose screenplay is credited to Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer, along with Baron Cohen) restages Chaplin’s great farce in a darker and more vulgar register, to reflect a world that has been fundamentally poisoned, not just by Hitler’s crimes but by decades of subsequent mendacity and hypocrisy. I shouldn’t spoil Aladeen’s climactic speech, in which he praises the many virtues of dictatorship (which the Western world has so foolishly left behind), except to say that it’s a brilliant, sardonic response to the paean to progress and democracy delivered by Chaplin’s barber in the guise of the dictator Hynkel — and that its targets are you and me, not the known tyrants and despots of the Arab world. “We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality,” Chaplin’s character tells the world. There are good reasons to suspect that Baron Cohen, who spent his teen years active in the Zionist-socialist youth organization Habonim Dror (which advocates peace between Israel and its neighbors), is a lefty somewhere deep down. But the new world without hate, greed and brutality — nuh-uh, he’s heard that one before.

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Tuesday, May 15, 2012 3:30 PM UTC

American influx at Cannes

American filmmakers dominate this year's line-up at France's annual glitzy celebration of cinema

By , Associated Press Workers sets up a giant 65th Cannes Film Festival official poster featuring Marilyn Monroe on the Cannes Festival Palace, Monday, May 14, 2012. The Cannes Film Festival will start on Wednesday, May 16.(AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau)(Credit: AP)

CANNES, France (AP) — Despite the mood in Europe, don’t expect any austerity at the Cannes Film Festival, the annual Cote d’Azur extravaganza where glamour is wrapped in world cinema fervor and gauzy Mediterranean sunshine.

Except for the Oscars, it’s the flashiest red carpet in the world, a ruby staircase flanked by tuxedoed photographers — and a world away from financial turmoil.

Yet Cannes, the 65th edition of which starts Wednesday, fetes its directors as much as it does its stars. This year, there are plenty of both: esteemed international filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami and Michael Haneke to big-name talent like Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman.

Among the 22 films in competition, there’s a particularly large American contingent, starting with the opening night film, Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom.” The movie about adolescent love on the run brings a few new actors (Bruce Willis, Edward Norton) into Anderson’s carefully orchestrated world.

Later, there’s David Cronenberg’s Don DeLillo adaptation “Cosmopolis,” starring Robert Pattinson, and Walter Salles’ (“The Motorcycle Diaries”) anticipated adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s beloved “On the Road.” That film, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, stars Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund, but has attracted more attention for its supporting roles, including Pattinson’s “Twilight” co-star Kristen Stewart as Dean Moriarty’s girlfriend.

There’s also John Hillcoat’s “Lawless,” a Prohibition-era bootlegging tale starring Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy, and Andrew Dominick’s “Killing Them Softly,” a crime film starring Pitt as a Mob enforcer. The unusually large U.S. group is rounded out by Jeff Nichols’ “Mud,” with Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon, and Lee Daniels’ “Precious” follow up, “The Paperboy,” a death row drama starring McConaughey, Zac Efron and Kidman.

“The Americans are coming!” heralds Daniels, whose “Precious” screened in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section.

That echoes the same sentiment of Cannes’ artistic director Thierry Fremaux, who declared America cinema “back in full force” when announcing the lineup.

For Daniels, the festival is a comfortable place to premiere his latest.

“We get so caught up, as Americans, in a specific type of film experience that we forget that this is a small fraction of what cinema is about,” he says. “It’s OK to be odd. I remember when I was doing ‘Precious,’ everybody looking at me and scratching their heads like, ‘What are you doing, really?’ I remember feeling that I was odd, and I don’t feel odd at Cannes.”

Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” last won the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, the first American film to do so since Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11″ in 2004. Although the French silent film ode “The Artist” was bested by “Tree of Life” at Cannes, it went on to win best picture at the Academy Awards.

“The Artist” had been picked up for U.S. distribution ahead of Cannes by Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Co. will release “Lawless” and “Killing Them Softly” this fall. He’s frequently used Cannes as a place to both acquire and launch films.

“Cannes is a worldwide arena,” says Weinstein. “It’s just a great opportunity to launch something. The worldwide press is there and it commands worldwide attention. You get such a difference of opinion, and when it comes together as a consensus, you can really launch a movie like we did ‘The Artist’ last year.”

Several films in competition will be looking for distribution, and some have already found it. “On the Road” was last week acquired by IFC Films and Sundance Selects with plans for a release late this year. In deals signed in hotel rooms and aboard yachts, many other films in various stages of production will be bought and sold. After a robust market in 2011, Weinstein — “a buyer and a seller” this year, he says — describes this year’s market as “maybe stronger.”

Other films will seek to benefit from the global convergence of media, like the upcoming DreamWorks animation blockbuster “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” which will screen out of competition, and “The Dictator,” for which Sacha Baron Cohen is expected to make an in-character promotional appearance on the waterfront Wednesday. The festival will also host a fundraiser for several Haiti charities, including Sean Penn’s.

Whereas Penn and Pitt are familiar favorites at Cannes, this year’s festival includes a new crop of young actors seeking more adventurous work, including LaBeouf, Efron and Pattinson.

“When you fantasize about how the world views you as an actor, you’re like, ‘I want to be recognized at Cannes,’” says Pattinson, who has drawn high compliments from his director, Cronenberg, for his performance in “Cosmopolis.”

Pattinson has previously been to Cannes to promote the “Twilight” film “New Moon” in 2009, but he’s clearly thrilled to be a part of the main slate.

“Hopefully, people don’t hate it,” he says, alluding to Cannes’ famously vocal audiences.

Newcomers, though, are outnumbered by veterans this year. More than two-thirds of the directors with films in competition have previously had films at the festival.

There are no women directors in competition this year, after four last year — an outcome that the feminist group La Barbe has condemned in an online petition.

Haneke, the Austrian director who won the Palme d’Or for “The White Ribbon” in 2009, returns with “Amour,” about an octogenarian couple. The British filmmaker Ken Loach, winner of the Palme in 2006 for “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” is back with “The Angels’ Share” — atypically for Loach, a comedy. The Iranian master Kiarostami, whose “Taste of Cherry” won the Palme in 1997, has the Tokyo drama “Like Someone in Love.”

That also leaves international heavyweights Jacques Audiard (“Rust and Bone”), Cristian Mungiu (“Beyond the Hills”), Matteo Garrone (“Reality”), Hong Sang-soo (“In Another Country,” Carlos Reygadas (“Post Tenebras Lux”) and the 89-year-old Alain Resnais (“You Haven’t Seen Anything Yet”).

Several of the American films are international collaborations, helmed by filmmakers from Brazil (Salles), New Zealand (Dominik) and Australia (Hillcoat).

At Cannes, the context is always macro: all the world, all of cinema.

“It’s great to have an American genre film in that kind of arena, where what you’re coming to do is just share storytelling and the love of filmmaking as opposed to national boundaries,” says Hillcoat. “That’s what’s really exciting about Cannes.”

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Monday, May 14, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

Whitewashing, a history

From "Tiffany's" to "Khan," we look at Hollywood's illustrious tradition of casting white actors in non-white roles SLIDE SHOW

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The extraordinary box office success of "The Hunger Games" has launched a heated discussion of Hollywood's peculiar habit of casting white actors in nonwhite roles. Why does this happen? We decided to turn to a very important studio chief for answers -- channeled here by comedian (and "Daily Show" correspondent) Aasif Mandvi.

All I have to say is that whitewashing has been going on since as long as Hollywood has existed — it’s a tradition — and rather than non-white people complaining about it, they should embrace it. It will make going to the movies so much easier and more fun. But there are just a few things you need to understand.

First, stop watching movies as ethnic people and start watching them as white people. There’s nothing that white people like more than seeing other white people in movies and on television. When you go to the movies with your ethnic “judgment” eyes, you miss my point. Watch as a white person, and suddenly your outrage turns to understanding and laughter.

Take a minute to walk to your limousine in my Gucci shoes, and you’ll realize that I’m just trying to make people smile. Mickey Rooney with buckteeth and a crazy accent in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? It’s so much funnier than finding a real Chinese actor just talking like himself. Then you’d have to get a screenwriter to actually write genuinely funny lines for that character. You get so much more comedy bang with buckteeth and a funny accent. I mean, it made me laugh. Many people, including myself, were also convinced that Charlton Heston truly was a Mexican/Native American/Egyptian/Ape who talked to God. And I think I convinced a lot of Asians that Genghis Khan really did look like John Wayne back in the ’60s. “Short Circuit” was one of my biggest hit movies and I was completely convinced that Fisher Stevens was Indian. Who knew he was a Jewish guy from New York? That accent was spot on!

My point is, I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the rich guy. When you look at it through my studio executive lens, you understand how important it is that both white people and non-white people believe that Indians, Asians, Mexicans and Arabs are truly just white people in brown makeup. I don’t like thinking that way. I just don’t have the luxury not to. I’m a businessman. White people spend more money on shit than anyone else. (Except on fast food, which is mostly blacks and Mexicans … at least that’s what I have heard. I’m a vegan.) So hey, non-Caucasians, stop buying tacos and start buying Cadillacs.

White people are also cheaper to light than dark-skinned people, and just so you know, you the moviegoer end up paying for that extra cost. Sometimes it’s just too unbelievable to cast an ethnic actor. I turned away a lovely Indian actress once who auditioned for the role of a hobbit. I mean there are no Indian hobbits. Audiences would never believe that.

Now, look: I am trying to do the right thing. America has changed and Hollywood should attempt to portray a truer depiction of the ethnic diversity that makes up this country. The fact that many television shows now hire a certain percentage of non-white actors is a step in the right direction, right? I am even prepared to make a deal with you ethnic people out there. Every time you let me cast a non-Caucasian character with a Caucasian actor, I will give you two or three non-white actors in smaller supporting roles. Why not lead roles? Because I’m trying to make a living here. I have spent a lot of time and money throughout history convincing everyone that white is normal. I have even convinced non-white people that white is better, prettier, smarter, stronger, and that only white people can truly be the heroes. Everyone has bought into it, and now you want me to just abandon all my hard work? OK, I will make an exception for some of you non-whites: If you are a hot Latina, you can be the lead. Why? Because white guys want to fuck Jennifer Lopez.

Here are a few more key elements to remember when watching a movie the way white people have been programmed to react. Laugh at the funny accents, because they are funny. Ignore the source material; I’m making movies, I don’t give a shit about staying true to your comic books. And … hold on! Why the fuck is Idris Elba playing a Norse God!?

To view a slide show of Hollywood’s egregious moments in white-washing, click on the link below — and share your own most memorable moments in the comments. (Slide show by Max Rivlin-Nadler)

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Aasif Mandvi is an actor and writer who appears as a correspondent on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." He also co wrote and stars in the film "Today's Special" and will be appearing this summer in the films "Premium Rush" and "Ruby Sparks." More Aasif Mandvi.

Sunday, May 13, 2012 1:00 AM UTC

New Yorker profile? No, thanks

It's an honor to be the subject of a long, flattering, well-written New Yorker piece. It is also the kiss of death

By (Credit: AP/Salon)

Last year, The New Yorker ran a long, flattering profile of the director Andrew Stanton, the Pixar veteran who was engaged at the time in reshoots for the troubled “John Carter.” The article, by Tad Friend, noted some of the studio’s concerns about the initial cut of the film, which was Stanton’s debut in live action, but for the most part, its tone was highly positive, portraying Stanton as nothing less than Pixar’s resident storyteller: “Among all the top talent here,” an executive is quoted as saying, “Andrew is the one with a genius for story structure.”

Six months later, “John Carter” became one of the costliest flops in Hollywood history, and while the film may have its redeeming qualities, story structure isn’t among them. Read in retrospect, the Stanton profile now seems laden with irony, and it isn’t alone: A striking number of recent New Yorker features on movie directors and actors have been followed by embarrassing setbacks for the artists in question, usually involving the very projects that the articles are extolling.

In other words, whenever a New Yorker profile shows a director hard at work in the editing room, the studio should start to worry. Since the beginning of 2010, the magazine has published eight features on artists best known for their work in film. Two are profiles of Clint Eastwood and Jane Fonda that are basically career retrospectives. Of the remaining six, five of their subjects — Steve Carell, Guillermo del Toro, Anna Faris, John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton  — experienced significant professional reversals soon after the articles appeared. And while I’ll discuss the one exception in a moment, such a dire track record might well give pause to Armando Iannucci, the British director of “In the Loop,” who was profiled by the magazine in March.

To put it mildly, there’s something of a New Yorker feature curse going around Hollywood these days. It doesn’t always hold true — Dana Goodyear’s profile of James Cameron certainly didn’t hurt “Avatar” — but when it does, the results can be startling, especially when you set the articles alongside the films they so effusively describe. Tad Friend’s profile of Steve Carell, for instance, portrays its subject as “a brilliant piece of software, a 2.0 fix for the problem of unfunny comedy,” whose approach to collaboration is nothing less than “a painstaking set of procedures aimed at maximum creativity.” The result? “Dinner for Schmucks,” a critical and commercial nonevent that few would hold up as a model of “the golden age of improvisation.”

Other profiles read even more strangely in hindsight. Last May, the film “Bridesmaids” had everyone talking about the role of women in modern comedy, a topic that Friend addressed in a lengthy feature published the month before. “What’s at stake is not merely a tenable marketplace for ‘hard’ female comedies,” he writes, “but a fresh vantage on romance and, perhaps, a fresh way of seeing men and women.” Unfortunately, he isn’t talking about “Bridesmaids,” but about Anna Faris in “What’s Your Number?,” which came out in September and promptly sank like a stone.

I don’t mean to pick on Tad Friend, a fine and perceptive writer, because he certainly isn’t alone. I first noticed the phenomenon in an article on Tony Gilroy by D.T. Max, who glowingly describes the creative process behind the underwhelming “Duplicity.” More recently, Guillermo del Toro had the curse hit him twice, first during the writing of a profile by features editor Daniel Zalewski, which coincided with del Toro’s departure from “The Hobbit,” and shortly after the piece appeared, when Universal passed on “At the Mountains of Madness.” These articles are invariably graceful, smart,and insightful — and their subjects are all talented. Yet there’s no shaking the sense that such a feature rarely bodes well for the future.

Sports fans have talked for decades about a Sports Illustrated jinx, in which a player’s cover appearance seems to lead to a string of unusual bad luck. The reason for the jinx, if it exists, isn’t hard to understand: Athletes generally make the cover after an exceptional performance, which is right when they often regress to the mean. The New Yorker doesn’t put stars on the cover, but its features are valuable real estate, so it tends to favor subjects with a big success already behind them. There’s room in the magazine for emerging artists, but it’s in the Brooklyn of the back pages, not the Manhattan of the features section, which prefers seemingly sure things. Much as in Hollywood itself, you can’t get fired for going with last year’s star.

In finance, this is called performance chasing. It means investing in today’s interview subject based on yesterday’s hit movie, which, as an outlier, is often followed by a slump. This is how we get a look behind the scenes of “Duplicity,” not “Michael Clayton,” and it sometimes results in reportage that has a troubling tendency to ignore obvious warning signs. Anthony Lane’s feature on John Lasseter and “Cars 2,” for instance, is written in his characteristically prickly style, but for all his evident cynicism, he never raises a crucial point that many other observers had noted at the time, which was that Pixar was making a sequel to one of its weakest films. In the end, Lane’s skepticism is only skin deep, and it’s ultimately sacrificed to the needs of the narrative, in which the critic is grudgingly won over by the studio’s charms.

Occasionally, of course, the feature section does devote space to an emerging talent, as Rebecca Mead did last year with the director Lena Dunham, before the release of “Tiny Furniture.” (Iannucci can take some comfort from Dunham’s example: Their shows “Veep” and “Girls” were both renewed last week by HBO, one of the few forces around that can reliably beat the curse.) In this article, the exception mentioned above, several elements combine to push it into feature territory — social media, the New York art scene, “the cinema of unexamined privilege” — and the result is a rare instance of a profile catching an artist on the way up. Dunham jumps the queue because her story feeds into fashionable issues, a fact she lightly mocks: “There’s always an article coming out, saying ‘The new thing is funny women.’”

And this gets close to the heart of the problem. Many feature articles — including this one — strive to tie a bow on the story, to tether themselves to some larger theme, a tendency visibly pronounced at the New Yorker, thanks both to its reputation and to the relatively small number of movie features it publishes. At four or so profiles per year, an article can’t just be about Steve Carell or Tony Gilroy or Anna Faris: To justify the use of such premium space, it has to be about the future of comedy, or adult drama, or funny women, which leads to grand claims that can ultimately seem peculiar when we finally see “Dinner for Schmucks.”

“Nobody knows anything,” the writer William Goldman famously said of Hollywood, and if that’s true of filmmakers, it’s doubly true of the journalists who try to draw conclusions about so unpredictable an industry. If journalism is the first draft of history, it’s no surprise that the draft occasionally contains 10 finely reported pages on “What’s Your Number?” But that shouldn’t stop reporters from trying. We desperately need thoughtful articles that go deeper than the average star profile, like Ian Parker’s New Yorker feature from a few years back on George Clooney, which remains one of my favorite pieces ever published in the magazine. It came out the same month, naturally, as “Leatherheads.”

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