Splice Today

In On the Stupid

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:29:38 -0500

Like it or not, The Twilight Saga is no longer just a story about sparkly vampires making the texting-since-they-could-spell generation swoon—it's become a mirror for preteens that everyone wants to scrutinize as if it were the Rosetta Stone. GQ and Esquire ran rival essays about just what the newest vampire mythos represents, while Gawker promptly disagreed and Rolling Stone had the balls to admit the soundtrack wasn't half-bad. But whether or not Twilight represents fag hags wanting "Glee"-hour nooky or accidental, morbid PR for the American pastimes of baseball and motorcycling, it's necessary to ask just how seriously teens take it. Sure, they divide themselves into team Jacob (werewolf) and team Edward (vamp), but it's important to note that the most prominent reaction at the latest installment of the saga, New Moon, was the same as that at the first: laughter. More than anything, kids think Twilight is funny.

But first, a short look at the plot. This time around, Bella (Kristin Stewart) gets a paper cut at a birthday party thrown by her vampire friends, rendering Jasper (who looks like the candlestick in Beauty and the Beast) helpless to resist her purportedly jasmine-scented blood. Edward, her vampire mate (who she can't sleep with for fear of being eaten) realizes he doesn't want to give Bella a life without sex and birthday cakes and decides to flee the scene. After she stares out the window like a lobotomy patient for three months, Bella starts to hang out with the slightly-younger Jacob (Taylor Lautner) and his posse of oddly hairless, Teen Beat-centerfold werewolves. But before Bella can nuzzle her new suitor, she has to jaunt to Europe to participate in what is the mellow climax of the film, and also its sad attempt at a tribute to vampiredom's origins in the decadent, Catholic annals of Europe.

New Moon found Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke replaced by Chris Weitz, who wrote the screenplay and directed About a Boy and the produced Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist; the screenplay is once again adapted by Melissa Rosenburg (of Dexter and Party of Five—talk about an across-the-board, erratic resume), and little has changed in the tone of dialogue. The special effects that were slightly over-used in the last film (at one point, Edward told Bella to "hang on tight, spidermonkey," and then zipped up a tree) are thankfully reduced a fair amount, although there are plenty of human apparitions and CGI wolf expressions that will less-than-likely impress the Twitter generation. But the biggest tragedy of the series remains: horrible casting and makeup. The only person who isn't wearing an obscene amount of makeup and hair extensions is Kristin Stewart (her eyebrows are all the accessory she needs), while the vampires walk around with honey-brown contacts with pupils that don't expand or contract. The character of clairvoyant vampire Alice seems to have been developed after extensive studies of Clarissa Explains it All and Lizzie McGuire, resulting in a spiky bob cut and lots of carefree jumping over the bottom few stairs. And then there's Taylor Lautner who, despite claiming trace elements of American Indian heritage in his principally European descent, is probably not the most appropriate choice to be representing reservation-dweller Jacob Black—but since he packed on 30 pounds of muscle for the role, he should get at least a nod.

Luckily for Robert Pattinson, his character plays a fairly small part in New Moon. It's almost as if writer Stephenie Meyer anticipated that Edward Cullen could only be played by an awkward heartthrob with a dopey American accent better suited for voicing a friend of Winnie the Pooh or a sad cloud in a Pixar film. At one point, Kristin Stewart says, "I can't do this alone," and it's hard to remember she's not talking about the film. Not that her acting ever reaches beyond lots of gulping, blinking and nervous laughter, but her social-phobic personality takes the movie from bland tomato juice to mediocre bloody mary.

Inevitably, New Moon will boil the blood of all gender studies grad students and simultaneously ignite the hormones of girls in training bras. Bella's accident-prone meagerness gets worse as she obsessively calls her dark beaus and screams at night in their absence, but in place of an Amazonian heroine are two studs that are a far cry from the typical middle-school boy who plays Super Smash Brothers and sits on AIM asking girls what color their nipples are. The fans of Twilight know the films are a far toss from reality, but that doesn't mean they're not in on the joke. In Edward's first scene in New Moon, generic rock music is cued and wind blows his button-up shirt away from his chest, and the girls in the theater laugh. They know it's stupid, and they like it.

Forget the Bourgeois

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:54:44 -0500

Precious has arrived! For anyone following the film world, the push for Precious, at first titled Push, began months ago, in the beginning of the year. It has been a long haul. Some of us are tired.

Now it is here and is bound for Oscar greatness, unless you take Armond White seriously. Precious is brilliant and moving, entertaining and important; you should see it, and keep your eyes on Mo'Nique. While there might be some backlash as a result of the Oprah and Tyler Perry hype, I imagine critics will still lavish it with enough praise to carry it to the Academy Awards in fine shape.

Back to Armond White. White, the enfant terrible of film criticism, finds in Precious a kind of bamboozle. White:

"Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show. Offering racist hysteria masquerading as social sensitivity, it’s been acclaimed on the international festival circuit that usually disdains movies about black Americans as somehow inartistic and unworthy."

White wants to revise black film history to include lowbrow schlock that nonetheless portrays black people as happy deviants, not real deviants—or something like that. The truth is his argument isn't very good. His criticism of Precious is old and predictable, even though he masks it under the guise of going against the mainstream.

The truth: Precious is just one film in a long history of black movies that go against "responsible" images of black people.

The tradition of portraying black life as raw, honest, bleak or resistant really began in earnest in the 1960s. According to Donald Bogle, author of the classic review of black cinema, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, writes that the 60s brought a challenge to assimilationist and watered-down stories: "No longer were sad-eyed black people trying to prove their worth in order to fit into white worlds. No longer were submissive, patient Negroes pleading for acceptance. Instead, the headstrong militants appeared."

Bogle documents a lengthy history of 60s cinema, from the relatively reserved Raisin in the Sun (1961), with its sober portrayal of black anger at injustice, to the more openly radical Up Tight (1968) and Slaves (1969), both depicting revolution, modern and historical.

Yet it's the 1970s that was commonly thought to change black cinema, and no one gets more credit than Melvin Van Peebles and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. In truth, Van Peebles has done other, subtler movies, like the complex and fascinating La Permission (Story of a Three-Day Pass), but Sweet Sweetback is so shocking—even today—it absorbs the lion's share of his acclaim. Van Peebles' depiction of the renegade black men, violent and sexual but noble still, resonated with black audiences—male and female—who wanted an image of themselves as active and resistant. Blaxploitation films with female leads like Pam Grier as Foxy Brown provided similar catharsis. The 1970s were a fruitful time for black cinema, too vast for an essay this short.

Still, blaxploitation was fantasy, escapism. It provided an image of black America that, while feasible under some circumstances, was difficult to sustain.

Resistant images took on new forms in 1980s, though perhaps some would characterize it as a lull. Yet it impossible to talk about Precious without noting The Color Purple. Purple's Celie is in many ways the 1980s equivalent of Precious. Like Precious, Celie is a victim of rape, impregnated by her father at a very young age. The movie delves into the dysfunctions of black families in ways that have "similarities … to past films that have portrayed black people disparagingly," Jacqueline Bobo writes in Black women as cultural readers. Yet, for all the criticism levied on the film, black audiences, particularly black women, according to Bobo, identified with the film's characters. Showing black people, and really black women, as survivors, even when it doesn't look "nice" to the rest of America, was a ballsy challenge.

Then we got Spike Lee. Now the most celebrated black filmmaker living today, perhaps ever, Lee began his career with a small movie about a black woman looking to take control of her love life in She's Gotta Have It. The film has admirers and detractors, but it can be said that no film like it ever preceded it. In some ways the anti-Color Purple, it shares with that film a certain in-group dialogue, the idea that this story is about black people managing their own lives.

But it’s Do the Right Thing, inaugurating a second moment of revolutionary black films that gets credit for upsetting norms and challenging the status quo. As much controversy as the film engendered, its popularity within the black community again stems from its defiance, both in the way it is shot and the narrative it tells. Yes, this was "black people behaving badly," and it wasn't supposed to make white people or upstanding black people feel comfortable (though the bourgeois really like it), but it is nonetheless remarkable in its daring. (And, in my opinion, more ambivalent and nuanced in its ending than it gets credit for).

The hood movies are the early 1990s and the Spike Lee's Bamboozled—again, controversial—took up, with varying degrees of artistry, where Do the Right Thing left off. These films are recent enough to need to no explanation. Now there are whole host of films—and I'm not talking Tyler Perry—which embarrass and upset the black bourgeois.

Despite Armond White's insistence that Precious will destroy either the pristine image of the downtrodden-but-noble black person in the eyes of white liberal America or stoke the fires of bigotry in the eyes of conservatives, the truth is the long history of black cinema, which I've only touched on here, has done that many times before. And it will do it again. It is an important political and artistic project and, really, in the end, wouldn't we be bored otherwise?

I don't know what's going on here

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:29:23 -0500

It's kind of like Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:02:00 -0500

Hokey Smoke! 50th anniversary of Rocky and Bullwinkle

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:16:15 -0500

Fifty years ago Thursday, a squirrel wearing an old-school aviator's hat and goggles came flying across the screen followed by a goofy moose, launching arguably the greatest cartoon in television history

Good lord, the body count... A compilation of all the deaths in Total Recall

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:26:24 -0500

Making the Complex of All of These

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:25:30 -0500

RIP Edward Woodward

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:39:49 -0500

I am deeply sad today as we’ve lost the great Edward Woodward.He was very dear to me and a dream to work with, as I hoped he’d be.

For all you Man On Wire fans

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:24:45 -0500

Dr. Horrible Prequel

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:45:46 -0500