Salon.com > Andrew O'Hehir http://www.salon.com Tue, 21 May 2013 20:43:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Justin Timberlake: I’m a mediocre folk singer! http://www.salon.com/2013/05/21/cannes_justin_timberlake_and_carey_mulligan_talk_inside_llewyn_davis/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/21/cannes_justin_timberlake_and_carey_mulligan_talk_inside_llewyn_davis/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 11:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13303425 CANNES, France – In the Coen brothers’ new movie “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the unquestioned smash hit of this festival so far, Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan play key supporting roles as Jim and Jean Berkey, a folk-singing couple in early-1960s Greenwich Village. Jim and Jean are a bit more clean-cut and success-oriented than their downcast, couch-surfing and considerably more talented friend Llewyn, played by Oscar Isaac in the year’s biggest breakout performance. Llewyn threatens to expose not merely their agreeable mediocrity but also the flaws in their marriage; he has slept with Jean and may have gotten her pregnant. Who’s he going to borrow money from to pay for the illegal abortion? Take a wild guess.

This movie is a delicate balance between comedy and drama, and these characters are, too. Timberlake’s Jim is a genial, basically lovely guy who has the sense that something is changing in New York’s insular folk scene, though he doesn’t quite know what. Timberlake helped compose and arrange the profoundly silly and ludicrously catchy novelty song Jim writes in the movie (“Please Mr. Kennedy”), which will probably earn him more money than Llewyn’s earnest, somber folk-purist approach will earn in a lifetime. Jean, on the other hand, is a ferociously driven woman trapped in the era just before American feminism, when even in the folk-beat world a wife’s role was first and foremost that of servant and helpmeet.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/21/cannes_justin_timberlake_and_carey_mulligan_talk_inside_llewyn_davis/feed/ 4 First look: The Coens’ marvelous folk-music odyssey http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/first_look_the_coens_marvelous_folk_music_odyssey/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/first_look_the_coens_marvelous_folk_music_odyssey/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 20:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302860 CANNES, France – On Sunday morning the sun finally came out on the Côte d’Azur --perhaps briefly, and accompanied by stiff winds – and soggy festival-goers finally had a hit movie to celebrate that did not involve Paris Hilton’s shoe collection. Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis,” which screened for the press late on Saturday and had its black-tie gala premiere on Sunday night, likely won’t reach American theaters until December, so it’s not yet time to write a full-length review. But this mysterious, satirical comedy-drama set in the Greenwich Village folk-music scene of the early 1960s finds the brothers at their richest and strangest, delivering a shaggy-dog parable about the elusive nature of artistic success that’s loaded with colorful supporting characters and pregnant with hidden possible meanings.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/first_look_the_coens_marvelous_folk_music_odyssey/feed/ 3 “Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 13:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302687 CANNES, France – According to “Drive” director Nicolas Winding Refn (who’s also here this year with the ultra-violent “Only God Forgives”), the legendary unmade mid-‘70s film version of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” by Chilean-born mad genius Alejandro Jodorowsky actually exists – and he’s seen it. OK, even Refn hasn’t seen a version of it that can be projected on a screen or played on a high-def monitor, the version that was supposed to star David Carradine, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalì. That doesn’t exist. But Refn says he spent a long evening in Jodorowsky’s Paris apartment while the latter went through the storyboards for “Dune” with him page by page, talking through every shot and every line of dialogue. “I am the only spectator who has ever seen this movie,” Refn concludes. “And I have to tell you: It was awesome.”

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/feed/ 39 First look: A Chinese art-house director goes for blood http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/first_look_a_chinese_art_house_director_goes_for_blood/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/first_look_a_chinese_art_house_director_goes_for_blood/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 23:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302564 CANNES, France – Biggest, grimmest, most visually impressive and most ambitious of the 2013 Cannes competition films to screen so far, Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s “A Touch of Sin” tells four interlinked stories that add up to a sweeping condemnation of the corruption and amorality beneath China’s economic miracle. Jia is a longtime film-festival fave-rave, known for slow-moving, documentary-style and nearly plotless dramas focused on real life and shot in construction zones, factories, godforsaken rural villages and other places where ordinary people scrape out a living.

“A Touch of Sin” both is and is not like Jia’s other films, which include “Still Life,” “The World” and “Unknown Pleasures,” along with several documentaries. Locations for these four allegorical tales are similarly downscale, ranging from brothels to bus and train stations to beaten-down peasants’ households to a dormitory for industrial workers. And then there’s all the killing. It would be a mistake to advertise this as an action movie – although some American distributor probably will – because it sets up false expectations. But Jia has evidently decided he’s done with subtlety and wants to move to a starker level of metaphor. Drawing on several different spectacular true-crime stories – a relatively new phenomenon in China – he delivers an art-house film with the body count of a “Die Hard” sequel.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/first_look_a_chinese_art_house_director_goes_for_blood/feed/ 1 Alex Gibney: Julian Assange has become like “those he despises” http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 16:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302064 So Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and many other political and social documentaries, has made a fascinating film about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks that has already pissed off a lot of people on the left – and is about to piss off a bunch more. “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” portrays the Australian hacker-hero Assange as a flawed and complicated figure. As British journalist Nick Davies puts it in the film, the same extraordinary personality who created WikiLeaks is also the one who destroyed it. On one hand, Assange has led the fight for freedom of information in the asymmetrical conflict between the world’s citizens and fearsome Goliaths like the CIA and the Pentagon. On the other, he has allowed his alarming personal failings and his persecution complex to become much too large a part of the story, and has succumbed to what one source in the film calls “noble cause corruption.”

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/feed/ 71 First look: An Iranian director takes on Western morality http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/first_look_an_iranian_director_takes_on_western_morality/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/first_look_an_iranian_director_takes_on_western_morality/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 13:25:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302403 CANNES, France -- By leaving his native Iran (at least for now) and making what for all practical purposes is a French film, Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi may have given up the principal factor that made him interesting to the West. But those who admired Farhadi’s intense Tehran domestic drama “A Separation” – one of the key movies of this decade so far – will find the same intimate sensibility and the same finely-wrought shifts in perspective at work in “The Past,” which premiered here on Friday. It's still too early at Cannes to start handicapping the Palme d'Or race, but this one's sure to be a strong contender.

This time Farhadi's camera is pointed not at the hypocrisies of life in the Islamic Republic but at the darker consequenes of easy-breezy serial monogamy in the secular West. It’s oddly bracing to have an artist come out of a society that we know he finds overly repressive, and immediately make a film that essentially accuses supposedly liberated Westerners of behaving like a bunch of spoiled children, and of poisoning the next generation with our reckless misbehavior. Mind you, “The Past” is a complex drama that can’t be boiled down to that one theme, and anyway the squabbling middle-class couple in “A Separation” inflicted plenty of damage on that adorably precocious preteen daughter of theirs. It’s not as if Farhadi is preaching either morality or religion. Islam played a role in “A Separation” mainly as a marker of class differentiation, and while several of the characters in “The Past” come from Muslim backgrounds, religion is never mentioned.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/first_look_an_iranian_director_takes_on_western_morality/feed/ 6 First look: Sofia Coppola’s chilly, brilliant “Bling Ring” http://www.salon.com/2013/05/17/cannes_sofia_coppolas_chilly_brilliant_bling_ring/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/17/cannes_sofia_coppolas_chilly_brilliant_bling_ring/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 14:40:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13301413 CANNES, France – Somewhere around the third time the gang of reckless kids in Sofia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring” broke into Paris Hilton’s house – and, by the way, that really is Paris Hilton’s house – I had a realization. While I theoretically agree that crime is bad, I actually had no objection to them stealing handbags and watches and dresses and money and (allegedly) cocaine from Hilton. I mean it: I don’t care. It’s not as if Hilton actually did anything to earn all that crap she has in the first place, and she apparently didn’t notice for many weeks that anything was missing! As far as I’m concerned, the envious, Adderall-dosed suburban teens of the Valley can tear down her house with their bare hands and fight over the Gucci scraps. Maybe it’s a juvenile and stupid version of redistributing the wealth, but this is America, a juvenile and stupid country. What can you expect?

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/17/cannes_sofia_coppolas_chilly_brilliant_bling_ring/feed/ 21 Cannes: The 10 hottest movies http://www.salon.com/2013/05/16/cannes_the_10_hottest_movies/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/16/cannes_the_10_hottest_movies/#comments Thu, 16 May 2013 14:28:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13299682 CANNES, France -- A chilly downpour greeted arrivals on the Côte d'Azur this week, with the promise of more un-beach-friendly weather to follow. Parties, interview sessions and other manufactured events were feverishly rescheduled to more sheltered locations. But while the sunny weather and picture-postcard scenery of the Riviera are usually a lot more pleasant this time of year, they aren’t the real reason why the entire film industry descends on this overgrown resort town for 10 days every spring. Now we all have an excuse to head indoors and watch movies.

I’ve already read other critics proclaiming in advance that this 66th Festival de Cannes -- which got underway on Wednesday night with the star-studded but rain-soaked European premiere of "The Great Gatsby," followed by murky midnight fireworks -- will be a memorably great one, with one of the strongest lineups in years. OK, sure, maybe. But more than anything, that’s a film-industry reaction to the fact that this festival has premiered several movies in recent years that made a big impact in America, “The Artist” and “Amour” being the most obvious examples. It’s certainly possible that this year’s festival will produce Oscar-winning films or culture-condensing moments, and a lot of people are looking forward to Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska,” the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” and “Jimmy P.” -- the first English-language film from the great French director Arnaud Desplechin -- with that in mind. (Should I work in a gratuitous mention of James Franco's Faulkner adaptation, "As I Lay Dying"? Sure, why not? Puzzlingly, that is officially Franco's fifth feature as a director.)

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/16/cannes_the_10_hottest_movies/feed/ 5 “Star Trek Into Darkness”: Who made J.J. Abrams the sci-fi god? http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/star_trek_into_darkness_who_made_j_j_abrams_the_sci_fi_god/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/star_trek_into_darkness_who_made_j_j_abrams_the_sci_fi_god/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 18:31:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13298750 Apparently I missed the papal conclave. Not the one with Pope Francis and the Argentine torture scandals; I heard about that. I’m talking about the high-level secret meeting in the super-secret sub-orbital space fortress where J.J. Abrams was elected sole curator, conservator and monarch of three generations’ worth of nerdy pop culture history. Seriously, people, how does one guy end up in charge of both the “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” reboots? Give me a break! Isn’t that kind of nuts and megalomaniacal and wrong and just too much of the same flavor of peppermint hazelnut chip ice cream from that one summer in Connecticut, when “Alligator Woman” was on the radio every single day? (We can discuss this another time, but if I could create a world in which Joss Whedon had taken on “Star Trek,” and given Abrams the freakin’ “Avengers,” I’d do it in a heartbeat.)

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/star_trek_into_darkness_who_made_j_j_abrams_the_sci_fi_god/feed/ 140 How the GOP cast Obama as Gatsby (minus the parties) http://www.salon.com/2013/05/11/how_the_gop_cast_obama_as_gatsby_minus_the_parties/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/11/how_the_gop_cast_obama_as_gatsby_minus_the_parties/#comments Sat, 11 May 2013 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13295732 One of the biggest differences between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Baz Luhrmann’s overblown new movie version, as Richard Brody of the New Yorker has pointed out, is that Fitzgerald’s book was (among many other things) a work of prescient social criticism, published at the very height of the Roaring '20s boom, whose dark side he saw so clearly. A few years later, the stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression would smash all the champagne glasses, exposing the Gatsby-scaled dream of ever-widening affluence (which was only ever available to white Americans above the poverty class) as a mass delusion.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/11/how_the_gop_cast_obama_as_gatsby_minus_the_parties/feed/ 33 Pick of the week: Sarah Polley’s family secrets http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 22:55:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13294108 Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” is two or maybe three dangerous kinds of movies all at the same time, and handled so brilliantly that the result is a transformative, unforgettable work of art. This documentary about Polley’s own surprising family secrets -- which includes some sneaky fictional or imaginative elements -- might sound at first like a personal indulgence but becomes something much larger and subtler: A gripping investigation of the ultimately unknowable past, a meditation on how and whether we can actually know anything, and an act of profound love and generosity. That generosity extends not just to the members of Polley’s WASPy Canadian family – although you certainly feel that – but also to the audience. I left the theater thinking not just about Polley’s family secrets but my own, for which of us truly knows where we came from, or what unrecoverable stories of love and heartbreak lie in our prehistory?

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/feed/ 6 “The Great Gatsby”: Debauchery in Disneyland http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/the_great_gatsby_debauchery_in_disneyland/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/the_great_gatsby_debauchery_in_disneyland/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13293174 All novels take place in the imagination rather than the real world, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is a particularly delicate balance of realism and fantasy, entirely filtered through the literary consciousness of its narrator, Nick Carraway. But that doesn’t mean it should seem entirely imaginary, which is one way of explaining the problems with Baz Luhrmann’s spectacular but oddly uninvolving new film version. “Gatsby” has long resisted successful big-screen adaptation, not least because of Fitzgerald-as-Nick’s famous poetic reveries – which are mostly extraneous to the plot – and because of its ambiguous mythic or fairy tale quality. Luhrmann embraces those elements with gusto (perhaps too much so) and creates a larger and more ambitious screen “Gatsby” than has ever been seen before. That doesn’t turn out to be the answer either.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/the_great_gatsby_debauchery_in_disneyland/feed/ 35 What we missed: Steve Coogan and Julianne Moore’s bitter divorce http://www.salon.com/2013/05/08/what_we_missed_steve_coogan_and_julianne_moores_bitter_divorce/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/08/what_we_missed_steve_coogan_and_julianne_moores_bitter_divorce/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13292131 It’s probably best to approach Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s intimate, unnerving and entirely addictive drama “What Maisie Knew” by not leaning too hard on its Henry James source material. While readers of James’ brief and brilliant 1897 novel will surely spot and enjoy the numerous parallels and points of connection, this is an absorbing 21st-century childhood thriller – not a contradiction in terms, I promise – that requires no literary study.

Maisie (the remarkable Onata Aprile, who has just the right combination of slyness and shyness) is a girl of 7 or 8, of the pampered yet neglected sort that’s entirely too common in Manhattan and other metropolitan locales. Her parents are a debauched rock star named Susanna (ruthlessly nailed by Julianne Moore), who has slid past her expiration date without noticing it, and a pompous English art dealer named Beale (Steve Coogan), who may be worse, since he’s wilier and more manipulative. Their custody battle drags Maisie through a half-understood world of nannies, private schools and courtrooms, mostly seen from her perspective.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/08/what_we_missed_steve_coogan_and_julianne_moores_bitter_divorce/feed/ 4 Guantánamo: It’s Obama’s disgrace now http://www.salon.com/2013/05/04/guantanamo_its_obamas_disgrace_now/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/04/guantanamo_its_obamas_disgrace_now/#comments Sat, 04 May 2013 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13289365 Once upon a time, in the long-ago days of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, we may have had the worst and most abusive presidential administration in the history of the United States, but at least there was some moral clarity. You were on their side or you weren’t; you either bought into the idea that the “war on terror” was a special set of circumstances that required an immense expansion of executive power and the indefinite suspension of constitutional norms, or you didn’t. Nothing quite symbolized that division like the military detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It was a locked-down and secretive facility in a country that didn’t want us there, where hooded and manacled men – in theory, the most violent and dangerous anti-American militants on the planet – were kept under mysterious conditions, denied the rights we routinely accord to suspected murderers and rapists, and subjected to interrogations we didn’t want to know about.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/04/guantanamo_its_obamas_disgrace_now/feed/ 97 Pick of the week: I was a teenage anarchist! http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13288181 “Something in the Air” tells the story of a French teenager caught up in the half-crazy early-‘70s climate of political radicalism and artistic experimentation, an era that can seem so far from our own as to be a science-fiction alternate reality. It’s a terrific film, wonderfully atmospheric and alive, but also a curiously appropriate one to encounter right now, as we deal with the aftermath of a cruel and pointless crime apparently committed in the name of some abstract revolutionary ideal. Writer-director Olivier Assayas (of “Summer Hours” and the terrific terrorist miniseries “Carlos”), one of the leading figures in French cinema, has described this movie as generally autobiographical. While Assayas’ young protagonist and his anarchist pals never come to the point of blowing up civilians, they get pretty close, and indeed avoid committing murder mostly through luck. Is this a true story? I obviously have no idea, but it’s a convincing and disturbing one.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/feed/ 17 “Iron Man 3″: A playboy grows up http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_a_playboy_grows_up/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_a_playboy_grows_up/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 17:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13287839 As far as bored and cynical, playing-out-the-string comic-book action sequels go – hey, “Iron Man 3” is a pretty good one! The third and purportedly last of Robert Downey Jr.’s adventures as the armor-clad but increasingly vulnerable Tony Stark features one of Downey’s most nuanced performances, arguably a lot better than the movie around him, and keeps him separated from the physical and emotional protection of the Iron Man suit for extended periods. There are several good supporting performances, not even including Gwyneth Paltrow’s abdominal muscles, which is really all I can remember about Pepper Potts: Guy Pearce, as a nerd genius spurned by Tony Stark years earlier who comes back for revenge; Ben Kingsley, most delicious of all, as a shadowy techno-Osama known as the Mandarin.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_a_playboy_grows_up/feed/ 6 “Post Tenebras Lux”: A perverse, dreamlike masterpiece http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 15:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13286687 A mesmerizing combination of opaque art-house cinema, personal reflection and class-based rural thriller, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ “Post Tenebras Lux” casts a strange and powerful spell. While this is certainly a challenging film on many levels, and one rooted in observation of the natural world, it isn’t one of those drifty contemplative Terrence Malick spectacles where nothing much happens. It’s just that many of the events are puzzling and disconnected, and you have to work out for yourself the allusive or subterranean relationship between them. There’s a neon-red animated demon who invades a family’s home at night, a shooting, a hilarious and heartbreaking rural A.A. meeting, a visit to a perverted sex club and a guilt-ridden killer who commits suicide in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. It’s as if we were sometimes in the world of David Lynch, sometimes in the world of Stanley Kubrick and a whole lot of the time in the world of Andrei Tarkovsky, with the complicated social tragedy of Mexico ladled on top.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/feed/ 6 “Love Is All You Need”: Pierce Brosnan’s lovely, lightweight rom-com http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13285820 Danish director Susanne Bier has spent her career stuck in the mushy European middle, halfway between Ingmar Bergman and Hollywood. She has a tremendous gift for character and storytelling, coupled with a penchant for preachy, melodramatic message delivery in the Paul Haggis vein, especially as her films have attracted a global audience. She won the foreign-language Oscar for the Euro-guilt odyssey “In a Better World” in 2010 – a picture that was conspicuously trying to be meaningful – and has made one semi-unsuccessful American venture, the 2007 “Things We Lost in the Fire,” with Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/feed/ 4 The Boston backlash is rooted in America’s paranoid past http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/the_boston_backlash_is_rooted_in_americas_paranoid_past/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/the_boston_backlash_is_rooted_in_americas_paranoid_past/#comments Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283619 A terrorist attack, small in scale but brutal in effect, shocks the nation. The leading perpetrator is an American with foreign connections, apparently linked – at least in his own mind – to a worldwide movement of violent extremists. Furthermore, this young man in his late 20s with the unpronounceable name had attracted suspicion in the past and struck some observers as unstable, although even members of his own family did not suspect he was planning such a spectacular crime.

In the aftermath of the attack, some people assume it was the work of a sinister global conspiracy against America, despite little evidence. Others see an unemployed and alienated loner, unable to connect to the promise of the American dream, who turned to extremism out of personal despair or mental illness. Many political commentators call for a crackdown on immigration, the restriction of civil liberties and an aggressive military-style counterattack against anti-American radicalism, both at home and abroad. As the nation’s energetic young president puts it, counteracting this tide of violence is the most significant question facing the United States, and one that could even endanger the nation’s future.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/the_boston_backlash_is_rooted_in_americas_paranoid_past/feed/ 84 Pick of the week: Michael Bay’s self-mocking crime farce http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13282238 With his pumped-up and violent crime farce “Pain & Gain” – a thoroughly reprehensible and frequently hilarious satire that depicts American life as a circus of stupidity, artificiality and self-regard -- Michael Bay sends a clear message to those of us who’ve been making fun of him: He’s been in on the joke the whole time. I can think of a variety of responses to this, but they all basically boil down to “Yeah, so what else is new?”

There has always been a powerful current of self-mockery, or at least self-awareness, in Bay’s ludicrous “Transformers” movies, which embraced bigness, loudness, dumbness, visual incoherence and cartoonish female pulchritude (see: Fox, Megan, entire career of) as central formal elements and stylistic first principles. I wasn’t the only critic to observe that Bay’s enormous 2011 hit, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” had elements of avant-garde surrealism and elements of high camp, and could be described as a “performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment.”

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/feed/ 27