18 February 2000

THE TRULY UGLY: Have you ever seen a quote whore walking...well I did. (You can sing along if you like old songs or even if you just know "Pennies From Heaven" pretty well.) Have you ever seen a quote whore talking...well I did. If you ever saw quotes saying "Love you Pitch Black" or "Boiler Room's the hottest film," then the critic who's talkin' and the whorin' that is walkin' is the critic seated close to you.

What can I say? I rarely find myself compelled to bowdlerize our own Christopher Brandon in print. But since he's become the lead quote for the TV campaign for Pitch Black and had the insight to give Boiler Room a $7.00 roughcut.com review, I have to stand up for sanity somewhere along the line. He's right. Boiler Room is nothing like Fight Club. It is derivative crap posing as envelope-pushing insight. You see, there is an interesting idea in a generation that does nothing much more than pretend to be what they thought was cool in the past. But you have to have something to say about it. Ben Younger has nothing to say that I could derive from his movie. I guess that makes me a trite anarchic idiot...as opposed to finding insight in a long-used phrase like "don't pitch the b**ch." If Boiler Room really is "the definitive representation of young American men at the start of the 21st century," then we are in for a very boring and masturbatory decade.

But it's not only Chris that I want to take critical issue with today.

Michael Sragow, with whose work I have a love and hate relationship, hit the hate button this week. A movie from 1999's Sundance Film Festival called Judy Berlin is finally coming out. Why is it coming out now? For one reason, I suspect. The star, Edie Falco, is a big hit on "The Sopranos". I will tell you this. Her performance is great. The rest of the movie is hard to take, despite the presence of some really good actors. But like Chris Brandon's sanity-pushing comparison of Boiler Room to Fight Club, Sragow has to go over the deep end and suggest that Judy Berlin is not only as good as American Beauty, but superior and most shockingly, "vastly better acted." Sragow was not alone in his praise of the film. Eric Mendelsohn won "Best Director" at Sundance in 1999 for this film. But I think that win is one of the reason's why critics have called Sundance 2000 one of the best year's ever. Mendelsohn won for black + white pretension (with good acting -- and acting is the most consistent part of Sundance, always) and this year's films and filmmakers won for (gulp!) actually making watchable movies.

It's funny, because while at Sundance last year, I made a point of approaching Edie Falco to tell her how much I enjoyed her performance and she then introduced the director, who was sitting next to her. My mouth couldn't quite form words, because I liked her performance so much and his film so little. I think I mumbled something in Czech (a language I don't speak) and shuffled off, flush with emotional discomfort. I think that it's more than a coincidence that in the last year, Sundance's Best Director 1999 took a year to find distribution for his film or that he hasn't been given another film to shoot. On the other hand, Tim Roth's The War Zone went begging as well. Of course, that was because the content scared everyone. And Judy Berlin, outside of some good performances, scared me.

RADIO RADIO: George and I and who knows what Oscar contender, this Saturday at 10aPT on KABC790. Also, I'll be co-hosting an Oscar night viewing party at the Roosevelt Hotel in March. If you want to join us, click here to get tickets or find out more.

HAPPY TRAILERS TO YOU: I was sent a great trailer, given the Week of Knowles, for a trailer that kind of mixes The Blair Witch Project, Apocalypse Now and a Disney classic all into one. If you have the nerve, you shouldn't miss it.

BAD AD WATCH: Also sent by an AICN reader who just joined the Hot Button family was a link to a site I had never seen before, but immediately fell in love with, Adcritic.com. But the clip I "had to see" was a bit of a spoof on our very own Cartoon Network and the great ads they do. Of course, Cartoon Network had nothing to do with this, but it is fall-down funny. Click here to see the ad. And if, like me, you hadn't seen the original, you will find a link to the original on the left side of the page. It's the #2 commercial in the Top Ten.

READER OF THE DAY: Not much mail yesterday, as many of you seemed to think that the column didn't run since the link disappeared from the roughcut.com home page. Apologies for the screw-up. (The column is still available by clicking here.) This did get through, though.

From RET: "Aside from popular support, The Sixth Sense is a questionable nomination for Best Picture. I did enjoy it immensely, but what kept it from borderline greatness was the employment of Munchausen Syndrome, which not only fogged the logic of a long dramatic sequence for most of the general audience, but which was also an unsettling storytelling mechanism in itself. It doesn't raise awareness for a popular disease--that is an extremely rare psychological condition. There is no dramatic payoff even for the initiated: the mother is not evil for her condition, and not enough character exists for us to simply be happy the young victim's soul can rest. (This is all in regard to the funeral scene). Frankly, it's like a long message to a very select group in a distinctly popular movie. That's just dumb.

A similar fault vexes me about American Beauty, though it is admittedly less prominent. That the Colonel is homosexual doesn't raise awareness about gays in the military, or prove that military men are hypocrites or achieve anything apparently at all. We're all hypocrites. The thing is, it's like raising awareness of the "disturbing underground world of killer Army gays." That group doesn't exist to any measurable degree, Chris Cooper's character was barely this side of believable, and the only conclusion I can draw is that it is a fear-inspired cheap shot at the Army mentality. Fine. Do it realistically, if you really think you must eradicate the Army.

Cider House Rules was by most accounts dismissed, and I didn't even see it. For me that leaves The Insider and The Green Mile, both of which I liked. I also felt they were each done with such skillful exaggeration that they may only be called subtle.

I'm objecting here to dishonesty mistaken as plot and character, not auteurist touches. The premise of The Sixth Sense was bothersome enough, because it offered just enough fantasy to set up a child's suffering for two hours without offering solutions to real problems. Okay, it's entertainment. And it is basically honest to reality outside of observable scientific laws. Still, when an artist is given a chance he/she should say something. We have an obligation when we are not purely entertaining to use our powers for good. A lot of movies waste those opportunities, not on evil, but on incompetence."

E ME: Do you object to dishonesty or to auteristic touches?