Salon.com > Tom Carson

Making liberal hearts bleed in anytown, U.S.A.

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Political issues come and go, but message movies never change. Thanks partly to a relatively novel subject—fracking—and partly to an elliptical set-up, Gus van Sant's Promised Land, written from a story by Dave Eggers by its stars, Matt Damon and The Office's John Krasinski, varies from the norm only in fooling you for almost half an hour into thinking it actually might be up to something interesting. Too bad the movie turns into the same Ibsen for Idiots combo of a burning deck and a stacked one that was creaky when Jane Fonda was just another lonesome gal with a few New York modeling gigs to her credit.

Is Hollywood stronger than ever?

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 16:47:00 +0000

This has been a fertile year for people to lament the decline of movies. In fact, two of the most distinguished critics around—Davids Denby and Thomson—more or less proclaimed in 2012 that the jig was up for film as an art form. Since one of them is 69 and the other is 71, the "Après nous, le déluge" side of this might strike skeptical readers as a mite self-involved.

Nonetheless, if they're talking about Hollywood's output as opposed to very-much-alive-and-well world cinema, they don't lack for circumstantial evidence. Between endless iterations of durable comic-book franchises and ever dumber, more ineptly made comedies, no wonder lots of people who used to love movies now prefer HBO and Showtime when they want their intelligence massaged. All but the worst hack reviewers dread the paucity of recommendable commercial movies for grown-ups until Thanksgiving's arrival starts coughing up the usual Oscar fodder. And then a lot of the Oscar fodder—e.g., Silver Linings Playbook—just hopes we'll mistake corn for cornsilk.

“Zero Dark Thirty” doesn’t celebrate torture!

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 21:09:00 +0000

Zero Dark Thirty doesn't even come out until next week, but Kathryn Bigelow's much-hailed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden is already provoking outrage in some quarters for allegedly "glorifying" — OK, sometimes "celebrating" — torture. As all too bloody usual, the loudest howls are coming from people who haven't actually seen ZD30, some of whom — yes, Andrew Sullivan, I mean you — really ought to know better. Ginning up controversies about movies without bothering to watch them first is really more Bill Donohue and the Catholic League's sort of thing, and does Sullivan want to be in that company?

Since plenty of other folks apparently do, I hope you won't mind two cents from a lowly movie critic who admires the hell out of Zero Dark Thirty and isn't exactly big on vindicating Dick Cheney's worldview. There are really two separate arguments here, and people shouldn't confuse the two — though they already have. One is about factual accuracy, and worth taking seriously. The other's about Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal's attitude toward the very grim stuff they show us, which is an appalling thing to just guess at sight unseen.

Don’t trust the mouse with “Star Wars”

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Temporarily turning even Sandy's aftermath into an also-ran all over the Twitterverse, the news earlier this week that Disney had acquired George Lucas's entertainment empire for some $4 billion—including the right to make more Star Wars movies, with the first post-Lucas installment set to roll out in 2015—seems to have left fans about evenly divided between feeling stoked at the prospect (how can more Star Wars be bad?) and dismayed at Papa George's sellout to the Dark Side. "Get your childhoods ready," one negativist tweeted. "They're about to get pissed on again."

Since I don't have a dog in this fight—not my childhood, kiddo, and we all know Disney will eat everything one day—it surprised me to notice I wasn't totally indifferent. An as yet not-quite-formulated regret was creeping in, despite my basic allergy to Lucas and the Millenium Falcon he rode in on. While I've never bought into the "Star Wars killed the movies" rap that some of my crustier colleagues like to peddle, the whole franchise's appeal has never exactly caught me up in its fever.

Lance Armstrong: Biggest sports fraud ever?

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:51:00 +0000

The next thing you know, we'll find out he never even really had cancer. Short of that, it beats me what new revelation anyone would need to confirm the verdict Chicago Tribune sportswriter Phil Hersh delivered recently on CNN: "You can push Marion Jones and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Rosie Ruiz aside. Lance Armstrong is the greatest fraud in the history of sports."

Armstrong famously beat testicular cancer and assorted other illnesses to win count-'em seven Tour de France titles between 1999 and 2005. But I might as well admit that, beating the Big C aside, the man never loomed too large on my constantly shrinking White Guys I Admire list. In 20/20 hindsight, wasn't his can-do vibe always just a little too much like one of those Charlton Heston sci-fi movies where a jut-jawed Chuck wakes up to learn he's the last American left alive on the planet? Even that too-perfect name—outside of comic strips, who the hell has ever really been named Lance Armstrong?—almost seems as if it should have awakened our suspicions from the get-go.

When America acted up against AIDS

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 14:01:00 +0000

Starting with my inability to believe Mitch McConnell isn't one of Disney's talking teapots gone rogue, there are plenty of good reasons I don't and shouldn't run the zoo. But if I did, "How To Survive A Plague" would be mandatory viewing for Occupy Wall Streeters. First-time director David France's new documentary about the 1987-'93 glory years of ACT UP—aka AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, in case you've forgotten—is a wrenching remembrance of a gay holocaust that's already dimmer than it should be in our memory. The movie is also an exhilarating portrait of human beings discovering what they're capable of in a crisis. But above all, it's the story of how a never too numerous band of obstreperous activists successfully changed public policy.

On that count, France may gild the lily somewhat. Left out is the groundwork laid from 1982 on by the pioneer AIDS lobby, Gay Men's Health Crisis—co-founded by playwright and veteran thorn in complacency's side Larry Kramer, who moved on to help birth ACT UP once the GMHC proved too apolitical for him. The omission slights how ACT UP's radical bent ended up repositioning other pressure groups as the mainstream version of AIDS-era gay activism, an invaluable lesson in how defining the fringe can help redefine the center.

George Custer: An American embarrassment

Fri, 07 May 2010 01:01:00 +0000

"More than anything else, he wanted to be remembered." That's how Nathaniel ("Mayflower") Philbrick sizes up George Armstrong Custer toward the end of "The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn," and no one will dispute that America's ultimate glory hound got his wish. Too bad the victorious Lakota and Cheyenne weren't feeling respectful after wiping out his command in what's now Montana on June 25, 1876. They not only punctured the dead Custer's eardrums because he "wouldn't listen," but -- in a detail long suppressed by decorum -- jammed an arrow up the corpse's penis.