Salon.com > Andrew O'Hehir http://www.salon.com Tue, 02 Jul 2013 18:08:01 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 America’s split personality: Paranoid superstate and land of equality http://www.salon.com/2013/06/29/americas_split_personality_paranoid_superstate_and_land_of_equality/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/29/americas_split_personality_paranoid_superstate_and_land_of_equality/#comments Sat, 29 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13340668 At the close of one of the most momentous news weeks in recent history – with a historic step forward for marriage equality, a historic disembowelment of voting rights and the United States coming off like an incompetent supervillain in the hunt for Edward Snowden – we’re faced once again with utterly confusing signals about what kind of country we live in. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the deepening similarities between our society and the imagined dystopias of “1984” and “Brave New World,” but it’s important to acknowledge that that isn’t the whole story. At the same time, American society remains immensely dynamic, and has become far more diverse and tolerant over the last several decades. I know this is a metaphorical misuse of a clinical term that refers to a serious and complex mental disorder, but at least in the old-fashioned, split-personality sense of the word, America is schizophrenic. For that matter, I’m not so sure we can rule out the clinical mental disorder either.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/29/americas_split_personality_paranoid_superstate_and_land_of_equality/feed/ 7 “The Heat”: Police misconduct as feminism http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/the_heat_police_misconduct_as_feminism/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/the_heat_police_misconduct_as_feminism/#comments Fri, 28 Jun 2013 18:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13340140 Nothing quite says female empowerment like violating the civil rights of criminal suspects, am I right? Stop-and-frisk, racial profiling, harsh interrogation and enforcing the ludicrous laws of the drug war – such are the frontiers of feminism explored in “The Heat,” this weekend’s buddy comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy as a zany pair of mismatched cops. I know, I know: I’m being a killjoy and deliberately missing the point of the raunchy new woman-centric romp from “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig, with a screenplay by “Parks and Recreation” writer Katie Dippold.

Well, let’s talk about that, shall we? What is the point of making a movie that’s just like the dopiest, broadest and most reductive grade of guy-oriented comedy, except with women? With “Bridesmaids,” I could more or less understand why many women I respected seized on the film’s release as a feminist moment, and really wanted it to be a hit. (I still didn’t think it was all that great; Leslye Headland’s much-maligned “Bachelorette” was meaner, smarter and funnier.) If Judd Apatow-style, hard-R, bodily-function comedy was where the money was in Hollywood, then the ladies should get to slice some of that cheese on their own terms, and opening up space for female writers, directors and producers to do their work with bigger budgets could only be a good thing.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/the_heat_police_misconduct_as_feminism/feed/ 53 “White House Down”: Destroying America in order to save it http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/white_house_down_destroying_america_in_order_to_save_it/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/white_house_down_destroying_america_in_order_to_save_it/#comments Fri, 28 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13339020 As gristly, undigested globs of American fear, American hope and semi-justified American paranoia go, “White House Down” is both highly entertaining and perfectly timed (in a way that can only be accidental). This ripping and ridiculous yarn from disaster-movie king Roland Emmerich (he of “Independence Day,” “2012,” etc.) is about a right-wing coup d’état staged against an African-American president who has vowed to take down the “military-industrial complex.” No, seriously! And he kind of says it like it’s a new idea! All in all, the movie is something like an MSNBC remake of “Die Hard” mixed with “Les Misérables” (minus the singing) mixed with a wishful-thinking version of Barack Obama in which he personally takes out Serbians and white supremacists with an RPG. Oh, and just a little bit of “Home Alone in the White House.”

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/white_house_down_destroying_america_in_order_to_save_it/feed/ 20 Pick of the week: The mind-blowing black punk band from 1974 http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/pick_of_the_week_the_mind_blowing_black_punk_band_from_1974/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/pick_of_the_week_the_mind_blowing_black_punk_band_from_1974/#comments Fri, 28 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13339336 We already know about the economic and political history of Detroit as the home of the most iconic American industry, the site of the most extreme urban decay in the country and ground zero for 21st-century DIY urban homesteading. We also know about the Motor City’s unique importance in American pop-culture history as the birthplace of Motown, a breeding ground for house and techno music, and the town that produced Iggy and the Stooges, the MC5, Eminem and Kid Rock. (OK, never mind about Kid Rock.) Last year’s Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” told the strange but true story of Rodriguez, the Detroit-born Latino singer-songwriter who became a huge star in South Africa without even knowing it. Given all that discord, ferment, chrome and vitality, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that three African-American brothers in Detroit created punk rock before it actually existed. Next you’re gonna tell me that sex, marijuana and the movies were invented in Detroit too.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/pick_of_the_week_the_mind_blowing_black_punk_band_from_1974/feed/ 11 “I’m So Excited!”: An air disaster, made fabulous http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/im_so_excited_an_air_disaster_made_fabulous/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/im_so_excited_an_air_disaster_made_fabulous/#comments Wed, 26 Jun 2013 19:53:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13338023 There’s close to zero explicit political content in Pedro Almodóvar’s “I’m So Excited!”, but in its own way the veteran Spanish filmmaker’s latest work is the perfect way to celebrate a landmark week for the cause of freedom and equality. A romantic and erotic fantasy largely set among the passengers and crew of a possibly doomed airplane (the Spanish title is simply “Los amantes pasajeros”), “I’m So Excited!” deliberately recalls the exuberant and outrageous cinema that first put Almodóvar, and the hedonistic cultural scene of post-Franco Spain, on the global map in the early ‘80s.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/im_so_excited_an_air_disaster_made_fabulous/feed/ 2 “How to Make Money Selling Drugs”: The war America keeps on losing http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/how_to_make_money_selling_drugs_the_war_america_keeps_on_losing/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/how_to_make_money_selling_drugs_the_war_america_keeps_on_losing/#comments Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13336804 Despite its slick packaging and overtly facetious premise, director Matthew Cooke and producer Adrian Grenier’s faux-educational documentary “How to Make Money Selling Drugs” packs a wallop. While imparting lessons about the economic realities of the drug trade – a thriving, booming and ever-diversifying realm of entrepreneurial capitalism, in spite of the massively expensive attempt to shut it down – Cooke’s film reminds us that America’s destructive global misadventures of the last 20 years have a corollary that’s every bit as bad right here at home.

If anything, the “war on drugs” has been even worse and even stupider than the “war on terror,” although they’ve become so intimately interconnected in moral, technological and philosophical terms that it’s not like we get to choose. America’s police departments have been increasingly transformed into thousands of high-tech paramilitary squads, just as our overseas military operations have become ever more defined by special-forces ops and targeted assassinations. Seeing cops in middle-size heartland communities driving armored personnel carriers would almost be comical, if it didn’t so often lead to incompetent and illegal home invasions in which the wrong people are arrested, injured or killed. (Wrong-address police break-ins happen several times a week in the United States, according to an attorney seen in the film.)

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/how_to_make_money_selling_drugs_the_war_america_keeps_on_losing/feed/ 44 Are environmentalists rethinking nuclear power? http://www.salon.com/2013/06/22/are_environmentalists_rethinking_nuclear_power/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/22/are_environmentalists_rethinking_nuclear_power/#comments Sat, 22 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13333866 Faced with the near-term catastrophe of climate change and the planet-poisoning effects of fossil fuels, is the environmental movement changing its tune on nuclear energy? It’s not a new question, and let’s be clear that the short answer is still no – or mostly no. You can’t find one major environmental organization, from activist groups like Greenpeace to mainstream conservation groups like the Nature Conservancy or the National Audubon Society, that has come out publicly in favor of nuclear power.

But there is also a longer and more complicated answer to the question, which is that many people who have long been skeptical about the safety, economic feasibility and ultimate morality of nuclear power are now somewhat willing to consider the argument that, at least in the medium term, we can’t do without it. This is partly also an argument about whether you think the continued development of human society can be separated from the health of the planet as a whole, and about whether people in the developing world have an inherent right to enjoy the energy-guzzling standard of living most of us in the global North take for granted.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/22/are_environmentalists_rethinking_nuclear_power/feed/ 111 Pick of the week: Hijacked by Somali pirates http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/pick_of_the_week_hijacked_by_somali_pirates/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/pick_of_the_week_hijacked_by_somali_pirates/#comments Thu, 20 Jun 2013 23:59:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13332371 If the relentless Danish piracy thriller “A Hijacking” were an American movie, or had been made in English – some of it is in English, actually, since that’s the international language of diplomacy, extortion and blackmail – it would be widely proclaimed as one of the best films of the year. But that’s essentially a ludicrous thing to say, since no mainstream American thriller could ever be made about this subject that resisted simple-minded narrative clichés the way “A Hijacking” does, or that refused to depict its characters as either heroes or villains.

In essence, Tobias Lindholm’s film is a corporate thriller, a story of the business world that explores both the backroom deal-making and its effects on ordinary people. In this case, the deal involves ransom negotiations to free the crew of a Danish cargo vessel that’s been commandeered by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. But for buttoned-down CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling) back in Copenhagen, the negotiating tactics are no different from the ones he’s just used to drive down the price of a deal with a Japanese partner. As for the pirates themselves, they’re a well-known risk in doing business in that part of the world. Sometimes you have to bribe corrupt officials, sometimes you pay millions to consultants who do nothing, and sometimes you deal with pirates. They are practicing capitalism by other means.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/pick_of_the_week_hijacked_by_somali_pirates/feed/ 5 “The Attack”: I married a suicide bomber http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/the_attack_i_married_a_suicide_bomber/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/the_attack_i_married_a_suicide_bomber/#comments Thu, 20 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13332178 At the beginning of “The Attack,” a film by Lebanese-American director Ziad Doueiri that’s adapted from a bestselling novel by Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra, Dr. Amin Jaafari seems to have it all. More than that, Amin seems to embody the possibilities of a new Middle East. He’s both an Arab and an Israeli, a secular Muslim from the Occupied Territories who is now a full-fledged Israeli citizen and a respected surgeon at an elite Tel Aviv hospital. (Indeed, the actor who plays him, 36-year-old Ali Suliman, has a similar biography: Born in Nazareth and educated at a leading acting school in Tel Aviv, he has worked in Britain, Hollywood and Israel.)

But that vision of a Middle East beyond bigotry and warfare is in many ways an illusion. That’s the vital and essential delicacy of “The Attack”: Doueiri, himself a child of the Lebanese civil war who grew up to become a cameraman for Quentin Tarantino and now a filmmaker in his own right, believes in the possibility suggested by people like Amin, but also understands its difficulties and pitfalls all too well. He violated both Lebanese law and long-standing Arab custom by making a film in Israel, one that acknowledges that Israelis are human beings rather than monsters, and now the only way his own people will see his film is by way of pirated DVDs and YouTube clips.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/the_attack_i_married_a_suicide_bomber/feed/ 1 “World War Z”: The zombie apocalypse gets super-sized http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/world_war_z_the_zombie_apocalypse_gets_super_sized/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/world_war_z_the_zombie_apocalypse_gets_super_sized/#comments Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13330930 You’re a lot better off if you see “World War Z” while putting all the Hollywood news and gossip surrounding the film out of your mind. If you don’t think about its tormented production history, its multiple rewrites and reshoots, or a budget that purportedly reached close to $200 million, what you get from Marc Forster’s movie is an expertly paced action thriller in a familiar apocalyptic vein, on a near-epic global scale and featuring some truly breathtaking set pieces. Yes, it seems severely underexplained and oddly curtailed; indeed, after two hours it pretty much just stops, rather than reaching any satisfying denouement. But “World War Z” is a genuinely exciting thrill ride that only occasionally feels bloated or painfully dumb; and overall it’s a good enough summer popcorn flick that Paramount Pictures execs can go to sleep tonight without an entire bottle of Ambien.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/world_war_z_the_zombie_apocalypse_gets_super_sized/feed/ 23 A head trip to a haunted recording studio http://www.salon.com/2013/06/18/a_head_trip_to_a_haunted_recording_studio/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/18/a_head_trip_to_a_haunted_recording_studio/#comments Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13329115 In one direction, British writer-director Peter Strickland’s peculiar and powerful movie-geek head trip “Berberian Sound Studio” is a tribute to the gothic and grotesque Italian horror-thriller genre of the ‘70s and ‘80s often called “giallo.” (In Italian, that word is applied to any kind of crime thriller, regardless of origin; the local variety is often called “thrilling all’Italiana.”) It’s about a mousy English sound engineer called Gilderoy, played by the always-terrific Toby Jones, who is hired, under mysterious circumstances, to come to Italy to work on an especially gruesome sub-Dario Argento giallo titled “The Equestrian Vortex,” which seems to involve Satanism, human sacrifice, rape by goblin and lavish scenes of inquisitors torturing witches.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/18/a_head_trip_to_a_haunted_recording_studio/feed/ 6 From Ike to “The Matrix”: Welcome to the American dystopia http://www.salon.com/2013/06/16/from_ike_to_the_matrix_welcome_to_the_american_dystopia/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/16/from_ike_to_the_matrix_welcome_to_the_american_dystopia/#comments Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13327374 American society has been sliding toward the realm of dystopian science fiction -- toward a nightmarish mishmash of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick -- since at least the early years of the Reagan administration, and arguably a lot longer than that. (Since Watergate? The Kennedy assassination? The A-bomb? Take your pick.) We may have finally gotten there. We live in a country that embodies three different dystopian archetypes at once: America is partly a panopticon surveillance-and-security state, as in Orwell, partly an anesthetic and amoral consumer wonderland, as in Huxley, and partly a grand rhetorical delusion or “spectacle,” as in Dick or “The Matrix” or certain currents of French philosophy.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/16/from_ike_to_the_matrix_welcome_to_the_american_dystopia/feed/ 114 Pick of the week: Fighting the world’s worst homophobia http://www.salon.com/2013/06/13/pick_of_the_week_fighting_the_worlds_worst_homophobia/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/13/pick_of_the_week_fighting_the_worlds_worst_homophobia/#comments Thu, 13 Jun 2013 23:59:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13325926 If the moving, shocking and ultimately inspiring documentary “Call Me Kuchu” is about the struggle for gay rights in the African nation of Uganda, where a combination of evangelical Christianity and anti-Western resentment has produced a uniquely toxic climate of institutional homophobia and public hate speech, it’s also about something much larger than that. This urgent eyewitness account of an activist struggle amid extremely dangerous conditions has all the heroes, villains, twists and turns of a political thriller. It’s a tale of hatred, hope and enormous courage, and a lesson in the contradictions of post-colonial Africa. It’s a story about the way we live now, in our suddenly interconnected world, and one that dares to imagine how we might live in the future. It’s a love story and a story of martyrdom, both of them heartbreaking. I’ll be surprised if any other movie this year affects me as much.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/13/pick_of_the_week_fighting_the_worlds_worst_homophobia/feed/ 7 “Man of Steel”: Truth, justice and the Nietzschean way http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/man_of_steel_truth_justice_and_the_nietzschean_way/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/man_of_steel_truth_justice_and_the_nietzschean_way/#comments Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13324688 If no movie like “Man of Steel” had ever been made before – an attempt to darken up a superhero legend with a little mythological depth, some cutting-edge cinematic skills and a whole bunch of action – then Zack Snyder’s brooding and seemingly endless 143-minute Superman reboot might feel like a breakthrough. (I guess the "Superman Returns" reboot from 2006 really didn't take.) To be fair, “Man of Steel” has an idea behind it and superior production design, which puts it ahead of a whole bunch of Hollywood movies. Superman aficionados will no doubt find it suitably canonical, with an extended prologue set on the dying planet of Krypton, even if Superman’s classic uniform is now made of that inevitable nylon-mesh athletic fiber that supposed to suggest contemporary coolness (if you’re 12 years old and really into LeBron James).

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/man_of_steel_truth_justice_and_the_nietzschean_way/feed/ 153 “This Is the End”: Dude, it’s the apocalypse! http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/this_is_the_end_dude_its_the_apocalypse/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/this_is_the_end_dude_its_the_apocalypse/#comments Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13323542 There’s a certain grade of contemporary movie comedy that feels a lot like a “Saturday Night Live” celebrity sketch pumped up to 100 minutes or so. OK, you’re right – that’s actually almost every Hollywood comedy of the last 30 years. But “This Is the End,” in which a bro-pack of young Hollywood dudes, playing themselves as weed-smoking, self-absorbed idiots, face the apocalypse at James Franco’s house (where else would it hit?), is the ne plus ultra of such films. It’s the best and funniest and most absurd and outrageous and self-referential of all high-concept, stars-playing-themselves, Jewish Rapture movies ever made. Which is a long way of saying that I enjoyed the hell out of it for a while, but it got irritating and self-congratulatory long before it was over and I desperately do not want to see it again.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/this_is_the_end_dude_its_the_apocalypse/feed/ 17 Is Alex Gibney’s WikiLeaks film “state agitprop”? http://www.salon.com/2013/06/11/is_alex_gibneys_wikileaks_film_state_agitprop/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/11/is_alex_gibneys_wikileaks_film_state_agitprop/#comments Tue, 11 Jun 2013 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13322925 Last week the author and longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges, a leading figure in left-wing journalism, published a movie review as his weekly column for Truthdig. It’s not his usual beat, but this was no usual review. Hedges issued a thoroughgoing takedown of Alex Gibney’s documentary “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” describing it as a work of “agitprop for the security and surveillance state,” designed to marginalize both WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and accused U.S. Army leaker Bradley Manning by depicting them as criminals. Especially in the current climate of heightened awareness around issues of surveillance and secrecy, this was clearly an attempt to kill the movie. And the review marked the public coming-out party, at least on this side of the Atlantic, of a campaign of vilification against Gibney and “We Steal Secrets” that began when the film premiered last January at Sundance and has scarcely abated since.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/11/is_alex_gibneys_wikileaks_film_state_agitprop/feed/ 102 Obama’s “Dirty Wars” — and a soiled presidency http://www.salon.com/2013/06/09/obamas_dirty_wars_and_a_soiled_presidency/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/09/obamas_dirty_wars_and_a_soiled_presidency/#comments Sun, 09 Jun 2013 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13320549 This is what it’s come to for Barack Obama: Reality has sunk in for many Americans, who at last understand that the guy we elected on the naive expectation that he would undo the excesses of the Bush-Cheney national security state has instead made them much worse. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for Obama to escape this legacy now. He is the drone president, the assassination president, the domestic-surveillance president, whose entire administration has a professionalized passion for secrecy that makes the low-rent paranoids of the Nixon White House look like Keystone Kops. I did not suspect that I would ever again find an occasion to quote a Sarah Palin gag line, but hey: How is that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?

There are numerous ways of understanding this disheartening turn of events. Maybe the secret note that George W. Bush left in the top drawer of the Resolute desk on Jan. 20, 2009, contained a “Manchurian Candidate”-style code word that switched on the programming! Or maybe, somewhat more plausibly, the entire secret apparatus of American counterterrorism at home and abroad has become an independent and self-replicating organism, a Hydra-headed monster that can’t be killed. The president himself indirectly took that tack on Friday, when he tackled questions about the surveillance revelations for the first time, during a supposedly unrelated press conference.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/09/obamas_dirty_wars_and_a_soiled_presidency/feed/ 130 Pick of the week: Joss Whedon does Shakespeare http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/pick_of_the_week_joss_whedon_does_shakespeare/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/pick_of_the_week_joss_whedon_does_shakespeare/#comments Thu, 06 Jun 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13319193 Shakespeare scholars didn’t take “Much Ado About Nothing” seriously for many years, partly just because it’s a comedy that lacks the death and dread factor of “Hamlet” or “Lear” or “Macbeth” and partly – I’m not kidding – because the title led some to conclude that the Bard rated it pretty low himself. But there’s a reason why it’s among the most widely produced of Shakespeare comedies, and why Joss Whedon has produced a DIY, no-budget American film version, set at an all-night party in contemporary California, even though the much-beloved Kenneth Branagh-Emma Thompson production from 1993 is readily available.

Despite its focus on the importance of female purity and chastity that seems just a wee bit out of step with 21st-century morality, “Much Ado About Nothing” offers a wonderfully contemporary pair of sparring lovers who believe themselves ill-matched but are of course made for each other. Shakespeare didn’t invent this pattern, to be sure, but his Beatrice and Benedick anticipate Jane Austen and the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movies and “Moonlighting” and pretty much every screwball-type romance ever devised. (Including the clear suggestion in the text that these two have already been lovers who couldn’t stand each other and broke up, which becomes explicit in Whedon’s version.)

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/pick_of_the_week_joss_whedon_does_shakespeare/feed/ 12 “The Internship”: A fatal overdose of Googliness http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/%e2%80%9cthe_internship%e2%80%9d_a_fatal_overdose_of_googliness/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/%e2%80%9cthe_internship%e2%80%9d_a_fatal_overdose_of_googliness/#comments Thu, 06 Jun 2013 20:05:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13319053 What do you get when you combine the dumbest and most formulaic kind of Hollywood dude comedy with the most smug and self-congratulatory grade of information-economy arrogance? Apparently you get “The Internship,” a two-hour infomercial for one of the world’s biggest technology companies that fronts as a laddish Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson farce. Unless it should be phrased the other way around, and “The Internship” is better understood as a machine-made conventional comedy that breaches new frontiers in product placement – by branding the entire film with a corporate logo so familiar that you’ve probably seen within the last five minutes.

Either way this movie is stuffed to the brim with “Googliness,” a word that is used several times, in a pseudo-whimsical fashion that’s supposed to make you think it’s not corporate drone-speak. It means something like: Innovative! Or: Nerdy, while also fun and team-spirited! Or: Totally workaholic and subservient, and acclimated to a ruthless Darwinian economy where talented young people are pitted against each other, Hufflepuff vs. Gryffindor style, in a geek-Olympics where they work really hard all summer for no money in the hope of someday, somehow, getting an actual job! So, so much Googliness. What this movie and all its Googliness produces in me is “oogliness,” that feeling well known to tech-company interns on Friday nights where you have to leave one foot on the floor and place a bucket by your head when you go to sleep.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/%e2%80%9cthe_internship%e2%80%9d_a_fatal_overdose_of_googliness/feed/ 12 Morton Downey Jr.: The man who broke talk TV http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/morton_downey_jr_the_man_who_broke_talk_tv/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/morton_downey_jr_the_man_who_broke_talk_tv/#comments Tue, 04 Jun 2013 22:58:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13317243 I can't find the source of this quotation, but someone reviewed Alain de Botton's late-'90s self-help bestseller "How Proust Can Change Your Life" by observing that any book about Proust had to face the test of whether you wouldn't be better off just reading Proust instead. By that standard, the new documentary "Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie" is golden. Watching a movie about the late trash-TV pioneer turns out to be fascinating, even when his story is told as messily as it is here. Whereas watching Downey himself -- an unleashed teenage American right-wing id, in the body of a chain-smoking middle-aged man -- was so acutely and perversely painful it surely violated several provisions of the Geneva Convention.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/morton_downey_jr_the_man_who_broke_talk_tv/feed/ 63