Salon.com > Andrew O'Hehir http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 10:39:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Blockbuster fatigue? A summer alt-movie guide http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/blockbuster_fatigue_a_summer_alt_movie_guide/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/blockbuster_fatigue_a_summer_alt_movie_guide/#comments Tue, 29 May 2012 20:50:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12929104 It may feel to you as if the summer moviegoing season has only just begun and many months of popcorn-munching delight lie ahead. That's both true and not true. There's a degree of pseudo-Calvinist predestination about the whole thing this year that's unusual even by the standards of Hollywood, where conventional wisdom and guesswork-in-advance count for actual knowledge.

I mean, nobody knows for sure how much money the 1980s big-hair musical "Rock of Ages" will gross or whether "The Dark Knight Rises" will beat out "The Avengers" as the top box-office hit of the year. (My answers: Not enough to be a huge hit, and no.) But pretty much any idiot with a computer -- me, for instance -- can look at the calendar and figure out what the biggest hits of the summer will be. As I just mentioned, the summer's No. 1 movie, in all probability, has already been released. (I'll save the trollery about how it wasn't really all that great for some other time.) After we get through "Prometheus" and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" in June, followed by "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "The Dark Knight Rises" in July, well, that's pretty much it. I exaggerate, but only a little -- these days, blockbuster season commences in early May and is over by the end of July, with August reserved as usual for offbeat genre movies, the fourth chapters of trilogies, and the continuing careers of Sylvester Stallone and Jackie Chan. (In other words, the good stuff.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/blockbuster_fatigue_a_summer_alt_movie_guide/feed/ 6 Pick of the week: Haunting, gorgeous “Oslo, August 31st” http://www.salon.com/2012/05/25/pick_of_the_week_haunting_gorgeous_oslo_august_31st/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/25/pick_of_the_week_haunting_gorgeous_oslo_august_31st/#comments Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12926333 "Oslo, August 31st" is, as the title suggests, an evocation of one day in the Norwegian capital, as experienced by a troubled young man who's facing the end of summer and the end of his youth. It's a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward. While much of international art cinema can seem overly talky or conceptually alien to American viewers, this second feature film from Norwegian director Joachim Trier is a dynamic, even breathtaking visual experience without much dialogue or any philosophical heavy lifting, following the bony, handsome, exceedingly vulnerable Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) through coffee shops, nightclubs and bodies of water, en route to an ambiguous final destination.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/25/pick_of_the_week_haunting_gorgeous_oslo_august_31st/feed/ 5 “Moonrise Kingdom”: Wes Anderson’s mid-’60s love story http://www.salon.com/2012/05/23/moonrise_kingdom_wes_andersons_mid_60s_love_story/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/23/moonrise_kingdom_wes_andersons_mid_60s_love_story/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 19:55:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12926159 All the details of Wes Anderson's rapturous and hilarious mid-1960s New England summer romance "Moonrise Kingdom," taken one at a time, are plausible. Indeed they are more than plausible; they're perfect, from the fitted uniforms and yellow canvas tents of the troop of "Khaki Scouts" headed by cigarette-smoking Edward Norton to the achingly picturesque island home where the brood of children belonging to Bill Murray and Frances McDormand sit around listening to the Leonard Bernstein recording of "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra." (I'm not going to bother questioning whether that record existed in 1965; some production intern probably spent half a day tracking down its history.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/23/moonrise_kingdom_wes_andersons_mid_60s_love_story/feed/ 11 “The Intouchables”: Racial comedy, French style http://www.salon.com/2012/05/22/the_intouchables_racial_comedy_french_style/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/22/the_intouchables_racial_comedy_french_style/#comments Tue, 22 May 2012 20:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12925419 Here's a startling news item: "The Intouchables," a lively if largely predictable Parisian comedy about a wealthy quadriplegic and his ne'er-do-well immigrant caretaker, has become the biggest international success in the history of French cinema. Indeed, according to some sources -- and these things are notoriously difficult to measure on a global and historical scale -- "The Intouchables" is now the biggest non-Anglophone film of all time, with a worldwide gross approaching $300 million.

But beyond the business headlines, what's really fascinating about "The Intouchables" is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that's just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags "Driving Monsieur Daisy"). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there's no reason to believe it won't do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether "The Intouchables" traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of "Uncle Tom racism" and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a "performing monkey."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/22/the_intouchables_racial_comedy_french_style/feed/ 8 Male grooming: The movie http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/male_grooming_the_movie/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/male_grooming_the_movie/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 23:15:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12923136 American men are bewildered about their place in the cosmos, or so we have been told repeatedly over the last 20 years. They don't know whether to thread their eyebrows or wield a welding torch, and end up trying to do both at once (which is inadvisable). As comedian Adam Carolla laments in a scene from Morgan Spurlock's documentary "Mansome," the old-time certainties of gender identity have melted away: Women are flying fighter jets and men work at the hair salon; there are no longer "chick jobs and guy jobs."

I get that Carolla is just cracking wise, from inside the bubble of his own lame version of post-rockabilly guy-shtick -- he is interviewed inside a garage, with what looks like an orange Camaro behind him in the middle distance -- and that if you brought up the fact that those old-time "chick jobs" paid 40 to 80 percent less than "guy jobs," he'd get all irritated with you for being a drag. He's still an idiot, though, even if he's an idiot in quotation marks. That's kind of the problem with "Mansome," which tries to tackle the enormous subject of contemporary male vanity as an assemblage of whimsical anecdotes, which are often entertaining in themselves but studiously avoid any semblance of intelligent analysis or historical understanding.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/male_grooming_the_movie/feed/ 6 Maggie Gyllenhaal on sexual liberation http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/maggie_gyllenhaal_on_sexual_liberation/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/maggie_gyllenhaal_on_sexual_liberation/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 13:50:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12922227 When I met Maggie Gyllenhaal about six weeks ago, she was enormously and gloriously pregnant, stretching out on a sofa with her shoes off and feet up in a Manhattan office building. (Since that time, Gyllenhaal and husband Peter Sarsgaard have welcomed their second daughter, Gloria Ray, to the world.) We were there to talk about "Hysteria," the charming, lightweight feminist farce from director Tanya Wexler that explores a key event in the history of female sexuality: the invention of the vibrator by Mortimer Granville, a Victorian doctor who was seeking to cure the mysterious "female malady" that lends the movie its title.

While I wouldn't assume there's a vast amount of historical and social accuracy to "Hysteria," it's a lot of fun, and could definitely provide a viable moviegoing alternative for adult women eager to move on from "Iron Man" and "Captain America." Gyllenhaal's character, the crusading feminist and social worker Charlotte Dalrymple, who becomes the comic and romantic foil to Hugh Dancy's stuffy, stammering Granville, might be described as a supporting character who takes over the movie. Charlotte effectively becomes the modern viewer's window into the world of "Hysteria," insisting as a matter of course that women indeed enjoy sexual pleasure (but are often plagued with partners who don't know how to deliver it) and espousing then-outrageous views about women's right to vote, go to college, work outside the home and so on.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/maggie_gyllenhaal_on_sexual_liberation/feed/ 4 Pick of the week: A class-war thriller from Putin’s Russia http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/pick_of_the_week_a_class_war_thriller_from_putins_russia/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/pick_of_the_week_a_class_war_thriller_from_putins_russia/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12922332 As readers of Chekhov and Gogol and Dostoyevsky are well aware, the pervasive melancholy of Russian culture long predates the Soviet era, and there was no reason to believe that the end of communism would lift the gloom. Some Western reviewers have described "Elena," the mesmerizing new family drama from the brilliant Russian filmmaker Andrei Zvyagintsev, as an updated film noir. That may be a workable shorthand, in that "Elena" is about an ordinary person who persuades herself to commit a terrible crime, with uncertain consequences. But it attaches the movie to the wrong heritage and the wrong set of expectations. "Elena" is a moral drama, all right, but one pitched in a dark and ambiguous Russian register reminiscent of a 19th-century short story or a fairy tale, with no clear lesson delivered at the end.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/pick_of_the_week_a_class_war_thriller_from_putins_russia/feed/ 0 “Battleship”: Dumbest military spectacle ever? http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/battleship_dumbest_military_spectacle_ever/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/battleship_dumbest_military_spectacle_ever/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12921672 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.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/battleship_dumbest_military_spectacle_ever/feed/ 44 Sacha Baron Cohen’s dark political farce http://www.salon.com/2012/05/16/sacha_baron_cohens_dark_political_farce/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/16/sacha_baron_cohens_dark_political_farce/#comments Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12921015 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."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/16/sacha_baron_cohens_dark_political_farce/feed/ 85 Global horror takes a new “Road” http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/global_horror_takes_a_new_road/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/global_horror_takes_a_new_road/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 20:15:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12919256 Is there any country on earth -- at least any country with its own cinema tradition -- that doesn't produce its own homegrown horror films, spiced up with a little local gruesomeness? Every time I write about horror, I get at least a couple of letters from people who see the cruelty, bloodlust, misogyny and so forth found in many such movies as a symptom of contemporary culture's descent into depravity and brutality. On one hand, I always want to leave room for divergent tastes and opinions, but on the other -- that's just not true. The appetite for gore and terror that finds its modern expression in horror movies is nothing new: Check out the uproarious Brothers Grimm tale "How Some Children Played at Slaughtering," in which an entire family is destroyed in a pointless orgy of violence. You can certainly argue that you find horror movies repellent, or that they reflect deeply unpleasant aspects of human nature -- but you don't get to blame any of that on Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. (Seriously, I've heard that argument.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/global_horror_takes_a_new_road/feed/ 3 Pick of the week: Childhood adventure from a Japanese master http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/pick_of_the_week_childhood_adventure_from_a_japanese_master/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/pick_of_the_week_childhood_adventure_from_a_japanese_master/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12918567 "I Wish" is an old-fashioned kind of movie about a subject that might sound, at first, both worn-out and a little retrograde: the dislocating and disorienting effects of a family breakup. It's also a movie whose principal actors and characters are children, that tries to view the world from a child's point of view -- and that's an enterprise so perilous, so prone to easy gags, cheap tears and nauseating sentimentality, that hardly anyone ever gets it right. But "I Wish" is a wonderful adventure film that's no less thrilling for its modest scale, and a film whose emotional power and intelligence sneak up on you. Thoroughly accessible and rewarding, it might finally mark the mainstream breakthrough (relatively speaking) of Hirokazu Kore-eda, one of the finest living Japanese directors. I should add that "I Wish" is that rarest of fauna in the international art-house market, a genuine family movie that will charm both adults and children, albeit for somewhat different reasons. If your kids have the patience for a picture with subtitles where nothing explodes, don't hesitate to bring them. (There's no sex or violence.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/pick_of_the_week_childhood_adventure_from_a_japanese_master/feed/ 6 Johnny Depp’s delirious “Dark Shadows” http://www.salon.com/2012/05/10/johnny_depps_delirious_dark_shadows/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/10/johnny_depps_delirious_dark_shadows/#comments Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12917547 Early in Tim Burton's "Dark Shadows," Victoria Winters, the proper-looking aspiring governess played by lovely young Australian actress Bella Heathcote, arrives at the gates of Collinwood, a decaying family mansion in rural Maine. (She's gotten there by riding Amtrak, while we listen to "Nights in White Satin," which is somehow exactly right.) Vicky, whose real name is something else entirely, has always been a strange girl who sees things, and who is dramatically out of step with the pot-smoking, rock 'n' roll youth culture of today (and by today I mean 1972). A strange force has drawn her hither! Could it be the bizarre charisma of the undead monstrosity who (as we already know) lies entombed and enchained, almost beneath her feet? As the door to Collinwood creaks open revealing the idiot caretaker (Jackie Earle Haley, who is priceless), we glimpse a powerful, almost Proustian totem leaning against the front porch: A Schwinn kids' bicycle, with a banana seat. I had already suspected I was going to love "Dark Shadows," even before that moment. But that's when I knew it for sure.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/10/johnny_depps_delirious_dark_shadows/feed/ 40 Bobcat Goldthwait: Let’s kill all the mean people! http://www.salon.com/2012/05/08/bobcat_goldthwait_lets_kill_all_the_mean_people/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/08/bobcat_goldthwait_lets_kill_all_the_mean_people/#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 23:40:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12916971 Bobcat Goldthwait is something like the id underbelly of Michael Moore, with every pretense of journalistic objectivity and reasonableness stripped away. While Moore has a background as a reporter and editor, Goldthwait has always been an entertainer, who began doing stand-up comedy as a teenager in the late 1970s. Both guys present as rumpled, middle-aged heartland Americans with blue-collar roots -- Goldthwait is from Syracuse, N.Y., where his dad was a sheet-metal worker -- who are angry about the debasement of political life and public dialogue in their beloved country.

But I feel pretty confident that even Moore would not make a movie about a laid-off worker who hits the road with a runaway teenage girl and goes on a killing spree aimed at right-wing talk-show hosts, obnoxious reality-TV subjects and people who talk on the phone in movie theaters. "God Bless America" is Goldthwait's fourth film as a writer-director -- I'm going clear back to "Shakes the Clown" in 1991, often described as the "'Citizen Kane' of alcoholic-clown movies" -- and it's definitely his most coherent and most consistently hilarious, perhaps because its canvas is so large and the world it depicts so insane. It plays a little like "Network" mixed with Mike Judge's "Idiocracy" mixed with "Natural Born Killers," and in the very first scene its main character, the depressed, divorced and soon-to-be unemployed Frank (Joel Murray), does something completely unforgivable.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/08/bobcat_goldthwait_lets_kill_all_the_mean_people/feed/ 22 Gorgeous saga, global crisis http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/gorgeous_saga_global_crisis/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/gorgeous_saga_global_crisis/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12915326 Here's the short version of humanity's relationship with water, as delivered by hydrologist Jay Famiglietti in Jessica Yu's compelling and often gorgeous documentary "Last Call at the Oasis": "We're screwed." Yes, we should all install low-flush toilets and plant gardens that require less watering, but conservation is simply insufficient to cope with a global fresh-water crisis that involves many interlocking factors: overpopulation and overdevelopment, depletion of groundwater, climate change, and widespread contamination.

Solving the human race's worsening water problem requires overcoming what Yu's film terms the "Hydro-Illogical Cycle," which is defined by the belief that because most of the Earth's surface is covered in wet stuff, there's no problem. As one horrified woman proclaims in a hilarious segment that explores the possibility of marketing recycled and purified sewage water (to be sold under the brand name Porcelain Springs), "This says to me that there's some shortage I don't know about. When they show those photographs from space, there's a lot of water!"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/gorgeous_saga_global_crisis/feed/ 32 Pick of the week: An early-’60s hipster time capsule http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/pick_of_the_week_an_early_60s_hipster_time_capsule/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/pick_of_the_week_an_early_60s_hipster_time_capsule/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12914461 A time capsule loaded with smack from the bohemian underbelly of JFK-era America, Shirley Clarke's 1961 film "The Connection" is an illustration of how much things change, and how much they stay the same. I'd be stretching to call "The Connection" a great film -- it's mannered and edgy, in a way that's partly deliberate but also distinctive to its period -- but it's an important one in cultural and historic terms, despite being largely unknown. Watching this ensemble drama about a multiracial group of New York jazz musicians and beat philosophers in a run-down apartment, waiting for their drug dealer to show up, is like traveling back 50 years in time, only to encounter the same people you might meet on the street today (at least, in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, San Francisco, Austin and so on). At one point, the characters even debate the illusory distinctions between "hipsters" and "squares."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/pick_of_the_week_an_early_60s_hipster_time_capsule/feed/ 4 “The Avengers” and Hollywood’s gender wars http://www.salon.com/2012/05/02/the_avengers_and_hollywoods_gender_wars/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/02/the_avengers_and_hollywoods_gender_wars/#comments Wed, 02 May 2012 23:15:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12913831 I don't think I'm breaking any news if I tell you that "The Avengers," Joss Whedon's ensemble action-adventure that unites an entire posse of Marvel Comics superheroes, will be far and away this weekend's No. 1 film at the box office. (In fact, "Avengers" is already the eighth-highest grossing film of 2012, with more than $260 million in global revenue before its North American release.) Or that a large majority of those ticket buyers will be teenage boys and young men. Like most summer "tent-pole" productions -- those designed to support franchises, and ensure the financial future of major studios -- "The Avengers" is aimed squarely at guys under 35, long the demographic, psychological and economic bulwark of the movie industry. In the weeks ahead, we'll see a whole bunch more male-centric, big-budget releases: "Battleship," "The Dictator," "Men in Black III," "Prometheus," "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "The Dark Knight Rises," potentially the biggest of all.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/02/the_avengers_and_hollywoods_gender_wars/feed/ 57 “The Avengers”: Will superhero movies never end? http://www.salon.com/2012/05/02/the_avengers_will_superhero_movies_never_end/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/02/the_avengers_will_superhero_movies_never_end/#comments Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12913153 If you're new around here, this is how the script goes: I damn "The Avengers" with faint praise, observing that the (supposed) culmination of the long, laborious Marvel Comics movie franchise is a competent but pointless popcorn entertainment that's being wildly overpraised simply for existing without being incoherent and terrible. Some readers sniff from behind their digital copies of the Atlantic: Why did you even bother? Others lament that, once again, a non-fan of comic-book movies was sent to review something whose true significance, as with a sacred scroll written in Tocharian B, is yielded only to a coterie of gnostics and believers. (An enormous coterie, in this case.) Someone will invoke the ghost of Pauline Kael to instruct us that movies are meant to entertain, and someone else will suggest that the editors send me back to covering films about lesbian sheepherders made in Azerbaijan.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/02/the_avengers_will_superhero_movies_never_end/feed/ 116 “Sound of My Voice”: A tense sci-fi puzzler http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/sound_of_my_voice_a_tense_sci_fi_puzzler/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/sound_of_my_voice_a_tense_sci_fi_puzzler/#comments Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911337 David Lynch likes to talk about "movies that make you dream," and he's made his share of them. (Whether any sane people wanted to share the dream that was "Inland Empire" is another question.) I've always preferred a more prosaic phrase: Movies that mess with your mind, using another verb in place of "mess." My personal view is that even when cinema apparently depicts the most quotidian reality, it poses a sort of epistemological challenge: How do we tell the difference between image and narrative and reality, when all we ever have to work with are mental constructions of those things anyway? There are the crowds who (supposedly) ducked in terror while watching the Lumière brothers' 1895 film of a train arriving at La Ciotat, and there are people who have Internet arguments about what "really happened" in "Memento" or "Mulholland Drive." Both are caught on the horns of the same dilemma.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/sound_of_my_voice_a_tense_sci_fi_puzzler/feed/ 22 “Whores’ Glory”: A riveting, humane prostitution documentary http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/whores_glory_a_riveting_humane_prostitution_documentary/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/whores_glory_a_riveting_humane_prostitution_documentary/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:42:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12910555 Prostitution isn't just the world's oldest profession. It's also a longtime focus of cultural obsession, across many historical periods and on every continent, from the poetry of Catullus to the woodblock prints of 19th-century Japan. There's such a long history of male artists, writers and filmmakers who depict prostitution in erotic, romantic and sentimental terms that it's only natural to approach Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger's "Whores' Glory" with suspicion. Indeed, in the film's opening scene, Glawogger's camera directly engages the lurid allure of sex work, showing a group of scantily clad young women in a Bangkok brothel called the Fish Tank as they try to attract clients: Pretending to make out with each other, pressing their breasts and buttocks against the window, using a laser pointer to pick out likely-looking men on the street. But those are just the opening moments of a long journey, a daring, novelistic and unforgettable account of the real lives of female prostitutes in three very different countries and social contexts.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/whores_glory_a_riveting_humane_prostitution_documentary/feed/ 39 “Season of the Witch”: Nicolas Cage’s ludicrous medieval mashup http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/season_of_the_witch/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/season_of_the_witch/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 03:13:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/01/05/season_of_the_witch So if I tell you that a medieval action-adventure starring Nicolas Cage, directed by the guy who made "Gone in Sixty Seconds" and released in January -- traditional burying ground of cinematic failure -- is kind of trashy and stupid, I'm guessing you're all, like, yawn. I mean, Cage, who seems compulsively unable to turn down a role, playing an overamped tough guy in a bad movie? Surely not! Now, if I add that the movie in question, which is called "Season of the Witch," resembles a Hollywood-by-way-of-Hungary remake of Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" filtered through the B-movie aesthetic of, say, Roger Corman, then maybe I can get your attention for a couple of minutes.

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