On TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

There's a clip I always think of when I think of bigots in America. There was an American Bandstand youtube thing I saw where the audience was digging and dancing and singing along and loving it, until the majority white audience saw that it was a black man singing and then they went cold. So much of American racism is based on the idea you don't like certain things even if you actually have shown yourself to like them. Bigotry is stupid, because it requires the person who believes it to think that entire races and religious beliefs can be dismissed because they are different than yours simply because it's not yours. It's the absolute worst way to deal with humans, as some of the biggest assholes can be any race, creed, sexual orientation, you name it, just as some of the best can be as well. 

I don't want or need to say that I am pro-transgender because I find it distracting/stupid to argue otherwise. I think everyone deserves body autonomy. Period. If Pete Hegseth wants to shoot himself up with testosterone, if people want fake breasts, or whatever, that's just as cool to me as if someone wants to change their sex. The modern Republican party doesn't believe in the rule of law as there is no rule that they can apply to themselves and the people they hate equally. Law would suggest all body modification is wrong or none of it is. This isn't a Christian nation, because there is no denomination that rules us all. Southern Baptists and Northern Protestants aren't on the same page. Shit, there's whole subcultures of Christian religious beliefs that don't have anything to do with the bible. All of it is too stupid to really consider, except we're living it. If it hurts no one, people should be able to do what they want. If some man or woman wants to have sex with a tentacle dildo, that's their business and they can go with whatever God figure they do or don't believe in.

But the world doesn't exist under the rule of law, and as fascism is taking over the conservative movement in America, it means that discourse has also coarsened. For a normal critic, what that also means is that any perceived slight to a minority community can seem like an attack, partly because Elon Musk thought he could win by trying to attack THE ODYSSEY for casting a trans actor. (Elliot Page, it should be noted, has the best line in that film.) This all said, the fact that TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA sits at 99% on Rotten Tomatoes is both fair but also kinda bullshit. That's not to say critics didn't like or love it, I'm not going to suggest that anyone is pulling punches or lying. But a lot of critics are more likely to be sympathetic to a transgender filmmaker than they are Rob Marshall. As I am. And as well they should be. But it also means that there are external factors that make saying "I don't like a transgendered filmmaker's movie" a loaded statement. 

The politics of criticism is so weird right now especially because no one has any power as a critic any more. Mostly because most people don't read criticism just ratings, and partly because movies have increasing made themselves binary. TOY STORY 5, SUPERGIRL, MOANA, SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY, so much of the summer are products, and audiences have accepted this to a certain extent. Just as the audience for smaller films is mostly limited to the people who pay attention. Obviously, there's hope and reasons to think audiences have grown tired of fast food cinema on whole, but McDonald's isn't going out of business any time soon. And as much as most audiences don't go necessarily for art, they do get that films should be more than just porn, but that's what Hollywood has become for the most part. This has fully broken a lot of genres. The desire for marketable material versus having taste and thinking something is a film that should be made has upended the system where even reasonably smart people are considering the marketplace. It's because they have to. It's a shit system where people can direct THE FLASH and get a TV show going with the same company because of good soldiering. 

If you'll allow me, I'm not going to talk about the stupid side of the culture war any more. Everything is complicated, but it's complicated because everything is incredibly dumb right now. You'll just have to trust that whatever I'm saying it's in good faith, and meant with the noblest of intentions. 

I found TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA to be terrible. It's not a bad film, technically, or that side of it, but I think I hate it. It is totally watchable, and if you like sex in cinema, you get some of it, and I'm not going to say anything bad about Hannah Einbinder doing nude scenes. We need more horny exhibitionists, even if she's kinda got that Nepo disposition that she doesn't care because it doesn't matter to her. Anyway, it's not a hard film to sit through, and is worth watching to talk about it, but I think it's ultimately empty. But that emptiness is not something I feel like a lot of people don't want to poke, and it drives me nuts because it's central to the whole thing. 

[Side note: America has transitioned from being a voyeuristic nation to an exhibitionist one, and I truly miss that a lot of exhibitionist in the voyeur era knew that they were being watched, but the fact that they were okay with it was part of the turn on. Part of what made it titillating was the un-had conversation that both parties want this, whereas exhibitionism doesn't allow for the fun of being naughty in conversation with the other person. Rich kids get naked like it's laundry day. People who knew they were incredibly hot but didn't have generational wealth were revealing themselves. The class component magnifies the fact that rich people are less likely to sleep with you, so it ruins the fantasy. The idea of the girl or boy next door is ruined when the girl is Zoe Kravitz. Old Hollywood understood that Marlene Dietrich couldn't play a secretary. Now it doesn't even really know what to do with actors, and definitely doesn't know how to be horny. But not understanding that relatable hot and unrelatable hot are two very different things is part of Hollywood's problem.] 

I won't waste too much time on a plot description, but: Einbinder is Kris, a director who's set to reboot a version of SKEEPAWAY CAMP that is also FRIDAY THE 13th, where someone who wears an air vent is the killer. It spawned a franchise that is set to be rebooted, and so it follows Kris as she tries to figure out how she can make it while meeting with the star of the first film, who slipped out of the public after release. The star is Gillian Anderson's Billy, doing a stoned version of a Tennessee Williams theatrical marm/Gloria Swanson SUNSET BOULEVARD type that still has sex appeal. The two spend time together and Kris reveals that she's obsessed with Billy's death scene where she seems to be communicating multiple feelings at once. Billy was having sex in the film and in real life for the first time but also is murdered in the film. And then there's the figure of Little Death (Jack Haven), who is a transgender killer, that Kris has a love hate relationship with, and eventually, to free herself, Kris must become both filmmaker and star of her own imaginary movie.

There are interesting things about this film. And I may yet read a review of this that makes me reconsider things and take the film seriously. But that's not modern criticism. Maybe a critic will write an appreciation about the film that makes me rethink what I'm about to say. But I would like to be honest, and my honesty will also allow for the fact that I could be dead wrong and that a second viewing or more might change my mind. But, with that said, allow me to talk about why I think this is a bad film. 

There is a sequence in the middle of the movie that seems to be a recreation/restaging of a kill sequence in the middle of one of the fake slasher movies, but also something of a fever dream of shotgunning FRIDAY THE 13TH kill sequences where the whole thing is scored to a Counting Crowes song. It's kind of a oner (I'd have to watch it again to see for sure) where Little Death kills most people in the camp, scored to one of the worst songs of the nineties. It was the moment I had to say I thought the film was bad and pointless. It's because it's kind of doing a similar thing to SINNERS - though I can't say it was done on purpose to mimic it - where there's a oner that shows how a lot of America's greatest music comes through black artists, and that there is a throughline from Robert Johnson to Kendrick Lamar. The sequence in TEENAGE DEATH seems to exist to suggest that ironically liking something is the same thing as liking something. The problem is that director Jane Schoenbrun doesn't do a good job at explaining why liking trash isn't a bad thing. I didn't walk out of the film thinking the Counting Crowes were good. I don't think the film is making an argument that Counting Crowes are underrated or even that it's a good song, because the scene is so over the top that the joke may be that the dissonance is meant to be the punchline. I don't get from the film "you dummy, your expectations of a thing led you to dismiss great art" so much as "I like crap, get used to it."

And none of this would bother me if I could solely watch the film through the lens (that I have to approximate) as a trans appreciator. Wanting to be subject and object is fascinating, wanting to be both man and woman, killer and victim, penetrator and penetrated, wanting to transition is interesting. The problem I have and I can't get over is that almost every horror filmmaker for the last twenty to thirty years aren't very interesting for the exact same reasons I think this is bad.

I love John Carpenter. And one of the things I love about him is he made a lot of different types of films, even different types of horror films. I am less interested in horror movie filmmakers who want to make John Carpenter films. Much as I'm uninterested in horror directors who want to make Sam Raimi, George Romero, David Cronenberg or Wes Craven films. We live in karaoke times, and there's nothing interesting about karaoke artistically. There is an art to karaoke, but if you're locked in to one facet, you're not making art, you're doing pattern recognition. 

I don't think it's wrong to want to make the next FRIDAY THE 13TH PART IV that inspires people like you, I do think there's something wrong with trying to make FRIDAY THE 13TH PART IV again, and it's one of the biggest problems with horror right now. It's why WEAPONS was such a breath, it's why BACKROOMS and OBSESSION hit a nerve when a number of low budget horror films do not. I mean, both of those films may have grossed more than most Eli Roth movies combined. I know a lot of that culture and in some cases the actual filmmakers and I'm not saying they're wrong or bad, or whatever, and a lot of it is that studios don't often embrace more than sequels and reboots, but the fact that Roth made an AI-enhanced horror film or that Ti West made a movie with Johnny Depp after his XXX trilogy doesn't surprise me. No new car ideas. Horror fandom learned guitar but can only play other people's music. THANKSGIVING is maybe Eli Roth's best film and it's because it is basically a 1981 horror film simulacrum. I don't like selfish art that exists less for the audience and more for the director to pleasure themselves, and I don't like it regardless of who does it. Many of our most talented filmmakers may make films that are spank bank shit, but they also generally make it a movie for people to enjoy. A lot of modern stuff does not offer that courtesy. 

And so watching a film where I had to say to myself "Look, this isn't for you, there isn't meant to be a 1:1 with anything SLEEPAWAY or FRIDAY" but when it basically turns the whole thing into a masturbatory fantasy, I had to check out. 

And here's where I think the film is bad bad bad, slasher sequels are often are not about violence. They're about expectations. When you watch a slasher sequel, your expectations are for kills. And I get that, I can enjoy that. But Schoenbrun's whole approach from the violence of Little Death is that the violence isn't real. And it isn't. But that's such a disgusting place for any writer/director/whatever to approach horror. Yes, we accept that in sequels we are there for the thing, but that in itself is disgusting. If horror is based on purity tests it's conservative art.  The ability to enjoy meaningless violence is a thing, but making violence so violent it isn't actually violent makes me sick to my stomach if that isn't the point. What I enjoy about films like STORY OF RIKI or DEATH WISH 3 is partly that they exist in their moment as a singular expression of ultra violence. They're stupid. Is this?

And what does it mean to get off to horror? Perhaps that is the interesting question. Often horror sequels present the villain as the actual hero, and often because the villain is othered it makes them sympathetic to a minority culture that may see them - if not in the right than - misunderstood. But that also requires an understanding of anti-heroes, and what that means, but it does not absolve or forgive them their transgressions. 

Adrianne King is somewhat referenced here, and she left the industry because people wanted to rape and kill her. A number of horror actresses have told stories where the fandom was too weird. I don't get making this movie and not addressing that. Yes, it's a lot, but also, what are we doing here? By having violence mean nothing the teenage sex and death is basically redundant, because the death is the little death of orgasm, made clear by the killer's name. But if you're turned on by violent shit, and are ignoring the violence, then that raises questions the film can't answer, but suggests the filmmaker is a sociopath. 

I'm not dismissing this film as a transgender piece of art, I'm dismissing it as a horror movie that seems to ignore that violence is real and that though while a character being stabbed is not real, that's not an interesting way to look at horror. Accepting the plasticine nature of horror sequels is something we do as a society when we recognize we enjoy violence and punishment as a side effect of these movies, the people who die are generally lame in ways the films communicate, they are sinners killed to appease an angry mob, where even modest transgressions mean a death sentence in films where violence is so gamified that we don't actually take it as real. I understand how this can be interesting - like I can enjoy the shit out of later FRIDAY sequels -  but it's because we have accepted that these films are bad and are 88 minutes of sex and violence. If your main character wants to both direct and act in a film where they are murdered, it's not about violence. And ignoring the violence inherent in horror is such a post-modern, and ultimately terrible approach to cinema. What I hate about so much modern horror is that, and so this angle seems fresh but is also just as mastubatory as (so and so horror wunderkind who recycles their heroes like Adam Wingard, etc. USE A DIFFERNET FONT DUDE). Po-mo "I mean it but I don't" doesn't really interest me.

Look, Jane Schoenbrun said recently that one of her favorite filmmakers is Kevin Smith, and I think she's making a Kevin Smith film. Smith has revealed himself to be a good writer who isn't a good filmmaker. I like Jane Schoerbrun as a filmmaker for the most part, she seems to be after something, but if it's "I want to stew in the films I grew up with and not move on from the things that turned me on when I was a child," it is ultimately conservative art because it seems to lust for a past that no longer exists if it ever did. I'm not dismissive of this film because I think Jane Schoenbrun didn't make the movie she had to, I'm dismissive because I wouldn't trust her to make a movie with a larger budget because she seems just as likely to just recycle the same ideas about wanting to be a subject and object over and over, and it's not that interesting. Masturbation can be entertaining, but it isn't inherently interesting. 

If I'm being honest, the reason I want to write this negative review is because I think Jane Schoenbrun could be a great filmmaker, and if she keeps making movies like this she will be a footnote. Because this isn't a good film. And if she doesn't get any negative pushback she will be as useless as a nepo baby. Treating minority filmmakers like special Olympic athletes causes its own stunting. And ultimately, that may be the only thing I'm critiquing. But at the end of the day, selling audiences on a transgender filmmaker who made a mid film is as dangerous as being negative toward them. If you encourage enough people watch mid trans art, they may dismiss it for being mid. No one is trying to get Matty Rich into the Criterion Collection. No one is trying to suggest BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE is a masterpiece. And there's also a liberal hustle in supporting minorities that often is just as bullshit. Someone sent me a link that Chloe Zhao comes from money, which is not something that most people want to think about. Maggie Gyllenhaal and Emerald Fennell comes from money, and seem to make part of their bones on being feminists or girl powered. If we're in a grifter nation, people selling themselves as a a representative of a minority are just as likely to be corrupt as their antithesis. 

Schoenbrun made a stoner film, and I think it's meant to be taken that way. But stoners are generally dull, and don't think things through because their brains are being pickled. I think also part of it is that if you're going to do a live read of SECRETARY flipping sexes is kind of interesting (I WANT YOUR SEX kinda does that and it's awesome, please go see Araki's latest). But having it be both women is putting a hat on a hat, because part of what makes the film SECRETARY interesting is that it's about heterosexual weirdness. I'm not saying this as a negative against homosexual women, but lesbianism doesn't challenge the patriarchy. They actually like it, because they think it's a performance for them. At the end of the day watching hot women fuck each other is as much of interest to Donald Trump as it is to lesbians. Like nepo nudity, it's point of rebellion intersects with privilege to the point it's not longer actually rebellious. Like how younger people feel like smoking is a rebellion: It isn't. Yes, you're being transgressive, but to destroy yourself. 

And I'm not saying this as a negative against the film (go watch it) or critics. It is a film to watch and talk about and that in itself is rare and interesting. But please dig in. Because a surface level acceptance will not hook audiences. I hated this movie, but not because I think people shouldn't experience it. The films that shouldn't be experienced present themselves as such. It's just, I don't think this is a film that inspires, I think it is very much a closed loop. I don't need Jane Shoerbrun, transexual artist, to make art for everyone. I just wish her whole thing wasn't "I want to be the art that fucks me." And it might be, but that isn't very interesting.  

On why I don't like THE LIFE AQUATIC

Quickly, I don't want to bore anyone. There's a Wes Anderson Box set coming out. People are going to revisit his films, and I've always held THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU as my least favorite. Allow me to explain:

By this fourth film, Anderson had established that most of his narratives were about a borderline sociopathic narcissist/dreamer who was both beautiful and terrible. With the first film it was about friends of about equal age (though family loomed) and with the second it was about a young kid dreamer/narcissist and an older father figure. The third was about a father figure who was the dreamer narcissist and his children, so by the third film he established that he had a main character type: someone who both ruins and makes everyone's lives better by being a prickly weirdo perfectionist who is generally surrounded by a family either or blood or found. And they're kind of a director character... made literal in RUSHMORE.

For me to the point of 2004, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS was his masterpiece, with BOTTLE ROCKET not far behind. The problem with the character of the narcissist is that in RUSHMORE, we don't believe we've reached the end of Max Fisher. This isn't the moment the character learns something that changes his being, he's just reached a successful detente. The reason why I pissed off a friend coming out of the movie was because my first thought was "he's so close to his masterpiece" is because RUSHMORE doesn't end, it stops. With BR the main character is Luke Wilson, and so you can end by sending Dignan to prison and it's a mixed moment but a real conclusion. With TENENBAUMS, it ends with death, but one that the film was always about, so it's not really cheating - indeed if it didn't end with Royal dead, it wouldn't work as well because it was always about his death, imagined and then real. 

As good as whatever else about the film there is, THE LIFE AQUATIC is about an old dreamer and a young pup, and in this version Anderson kills off the kid.* 

Were this a first film, I don't think this would bother me, or the first film of this cycle. My problem isn't just that it's a father learning how to be a good person after his kid is killed - which is kind of a gross point to make but more digestible in a different context - it's that it didn't feel to me like there was much of a point in it except as a way to show the narcissist had changed, and death was a tool he learned and used in the previous movie. 

I don't look at writing or filmmaking as math, but when filmmakers do mathematical things, it often trips my censors. If I saw the film out of context of Anderson as a filmmaker, I might be able to go along with it as a narrative choice. Here, to me, it feels like a mildly different iteration of the same formula, and a career death as a fourth film where the filmmaker wasn't making new movies, he was just making a variation on the same one over and over again - which is more appealing in a Boetticher/genre exploration of tropes. It's why I like THE DARJEELING LIMITED more, even if it is a very small little picture. And it's because he literally throws his parent's baggage away. And honestly (even if FANTASTIC MR. FOX is a second "final curtain" for this narrative) I think everything since has been great, though I haven't seen the new one yet. I mean ISLE OF DOGS isn't strong, but its better than its reputation. 

*some have read this as Anderson coping with the fact that his writing partner Owen Wilson was achieving success outside of the nest and was maybe leaving him. It's an interesting read. 

The Ghosts in Hollywood

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I moved to Los Angeles in 2004 at the beginning of November, and moved in the day George W. Bush was re-elected. The more things change. With no family to speak of nearby, my friend Paul Prischman invited me to a friendsgiving that year and it was something we did most years. At least, until 2009 when Paul died.

I got up this morning and ran errands. In 2017 I moved away from the Franklin/Beachwood area for the first time since I moved here as my then-roommate decided to stop paying rent and basically fled the state. I tried to help them as much as I could, but even shoring back rent up wasn't enough to make coming back to LA an option. As they were my closest friend on some level there is a grief to this I don't really know if I've fully addressed. So I moved to Silver Lake for a couple of years. I had to leave Silver Lake during Covid because my roommate moved out because they were furloughed and it did not appear that their work would be coming back any time soon. They also had a unreliable partner that I think they thought being closer to with the thought that that might solve some problems. Don't know. After a couple of months where the owner wanted me to pay an extra $400 a month to have the place to myself and I was like "Yeah, no." the owner was losing their mind and wanted to get me out so she could rent the unit in total, so I moved out and back to the exact same block I was on before. Just a different building/company/etc . But when I left living in Hollywood, I stopped smoking the occasional cigar, so for the most part I generally don't travel down to La Brea near where I would get them, maybe partly because the best way to avoid temptation is to not be close to anything that's tempting. But today I went that direction to go to a store I hadn't been to before: Total Wine to get booze for the holiday.

After twenty years in one town - especially here in the last 20 years - that walk meant going by places that used to be places.  The Cat and Fiddle is now something else. The Sharky's is boarded up. Amoeba's old location is now an art gallery? The still shuttered Arclight sits next to a Veggie Grill that is shockingly still in business. There are many places of sacred memories that no longer exist as they once did. There is some humor in it too, as certain locations turn over so often that you don't feel sorry for the businesses so much as think some rube got rooked by a real estate agent. But then it fades. That time you had that amazing date, was the name of that place 33 Taps? Was it something like that? We watched the soccer game I didn't care about but every dude was jealous of me, and I could tell? The burger joint that was like Devil themed or some shit on Hollywood that did a damn good burger. Umami burgers and American Apparels now just memories.  

Some stuff hasn't changed. The bar across from the Chinese seems to be still going. I used to meet up with James Rocchi there before screenings. When Covid was almost done with the first wave, and vaccines were out but it was still not really over, James and I had reconnected (we were both out of the critiquing game)  and had spoken about going out dancing as middle aged white dudes looking for more friends and maybe someone to talk to when not flirting. Covid scuttled those plans. Sometime thereafter Rocchi had a heart attack and died. James loved cooking. Every time I make rice in a rice cooker and I get a good flop I think of him. 

I got to Total Wine. It's about two blocks away from BevMo but looks exactly the same in a lot of ways in that I can't tell if it's competition or just the same company but different. Going in I felt like I was giving money to Republicans, the discounts weren't great, and I got stuck behind a guy who spent $340.99 on bottles of booze that needed a discount code the cashier was unable to provide. 

Paul died and left some things to friends. One got a bottle of - what we called - Ridley Scott Scotch. It was a gift as Paul had worked on a number of Rid films, but he wasn't much of a drinker. And so every year when friends from the Friendsgiving got together, The bottle's owner Chris and I would have a drink to Paul. So I went to get a nice small bottle of Whiskey as - even when we friends don't get together - I always drink to Paul. Over the course of the years that Friendsgiving group saw multiple divorces, people moving away and death. With the industry such as it is these days, a lot has changed, and it seems whatever was of that tradition is mostly extinguished. I would find this sad if I didn't - like most people I know here - feel like it's hard to know where things are heading, and as work for many has either dried up, or hits in fits and starts, it's hard to be celebratory or even sure if anyone will still be living here in six months, and worse even than that, no longer working for the circus.  

The last couple years have been - especially since Covid - very rocky, and sometimes incredibly lonely. Outside of a month or so working on site for a specialty project (where I was in a room by myself for the most part), I've been work from home for over four and a half years now. I go into the office maybe once a month or so - mostly for pick ups - and as I am the sole person who works the night shift, I sometimes don't go in for events because they tend to be timed for people who work 9 to 5. Last year was the exception. I went to the Christmas party as I was told to come, but back then there were two of us on the evening shift. And so when the party ended (the owner got us barbeque, which was a brilliant choice) I went with my friend and co-worker Steve Kille to get a zombie at a tiki bar. He was big into that stuff. We ended up hanging out for an hour or so as he lived an hour outside of town and traffic hadn't died down  (and I was nursing the drink as I hadn't been drinking at bars in years) and talked all kinds of stuff. When we were slow, we would often video chat about whatever. He was a musician, I told him about something I was writing about groupies and he told me some fun stories. When we were hanging out he was rail thin and I told him, "man, you don't look good."

The last thing I told Steve Kille was I loved him. That, in retrospect, is a nice (albeit small) comfort. As he was going through Chemo, he was already less likely to answer when I called (which I had done a couple of times), and when he was put on call - basically "let go" though I don't know exactly how that worked and I was told the company was trying to help him so there could have been more to it that I don't know about, dude had cancer, his attention span wasn't doing well, etc. - I didn't know what to say. I don't know when Steve died, but as we were work friends, and as the whole social media + work friends thing isn't always great (often I think most of my old coworkers stay friends in case we need to find work, whereas I like to sometimes post things that people find combative), I never tried to friend him, and I don't know if he had socials. All I know is that one of my supervisors let me know he died and all I had was a phone number. Not an address or anyone else I could contact about it. What am I going to do? Call a dead man's phone to find out about a funeral that I wasn't invited to?

During quarantine we both got into making deluxe drinks and my go-to has been the White Russian with fruit as ice. He loved his zombies, but I am not making that, so I also got White Russian makings while out. 

I went to Trader Joe's off Hollywood and Vine. One friend works there and they told me today is their busiest day of the year. but when I went in, I got some frozen fruit and breezed out. The cashier lady I was talking to was also surprised it was quiet, but then after I paid I scoped the place out some more and saw that they no longer had any turkeys or ham. Any. "Yeah, we sold out on Tuesday."

Tomorrow, for the first time in my life I am cooking a proper Thanksgiving meal for myself. I have done a big ass cut of meat and scotch and Bond films, and other somewhat festive but not terribly elaborate dinners before on Holidays, but I've never done a turkey or ham. I generally top out at two stove tops in use at once. Tomorrow I've got a ham, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and green beans to make (along with cranberry sauce, which is good to go) so I think I will be hitting a full house, or four up one down or whatever cool expression there is for using the whole stove. I would buy bread or deserts, but as an adult booze and beer kind of takes their place. And though there will be leftovers, I won't be dining by myself. Those ghosts aren't all bad, you see. And though they might not be a comfort, they aren't always a burden either. It is better to live with ghosts than not. 

On Dakota Johnson (NSFW)

Without going through the history of nudity in cinema, which I'm kind of prepared to do, I think I can safely say that everyone understands movies aren't the hot beds of lust they once were, and as much as that has to do with foreign markets, the fact that you can watch whatever porn you desire on whatever device you're using to read this is a bigger factor. People used to go to movies for pornography, like how people used to masturbate to clothes catalogs. And though there are people who will tell you that the hint of sex is more erotic than sex itself, and that there's something infinitely more erotic about seeing but maybe not seeing a nipple or the hint of areola than someone spread eagle showing all, the former takes work, and involvement. Porn skips to the end.

Which is why it was something of a big deal for an actress to play the lead in FIFTY SHADES OF GREY because that book talks about the "Dirty Sex" that one woman wanted the leads in TWILIGHT to have, so it's something of a bait and switch. You might be drawn in by the idea of butt plugs and leather, but the end result is of course, marriage and domesticity. Having only worked on it without watching in total in the final film, they get married and I don't think anything actually naughty happens by the end. They have married sex. No one gets peed on. The sex contracts are a thing of the past because Christian is I believe "cured." Because it's a pornographic fantasy. No one's throwing a finger in the other's butt for old times sake because that would connote a real relationship. 

Taking on the role of the girl (I am not looking it up, its Anastasia Steele or something IIRC) in the film was a big deal, and made Dakota Johnson's career. And yet the films - like the books - have fallen off the world. Though recently How Did This Get Made did the first film, and I think they were planning on watching all three (they still might) but I got the impression that the film sucked too much for them to continue. As Jason Mantzoukas so eloquently put it "Why am I bored when there's this much nudity on screen?" Which is basically asking the question "Why isn't it erotic when Dakota Johnson is naked?"

I'm about to show some NSFW images of Miley Cyrus to make a point. So, if you're embarrassed easily, I'm sorry. 

Hopefully you've seen these before, I'm only using them to make a point. But here we see Miley Cyrus felating both a Billy club and an actual dildo. These are provocative images, and you can make an argument that Cyrus is bold and transgressive for doing this. 

But, and hear me out: What if she's not? What if instead of this being revealing (and there are less censored versions of these images), she just doesn't actually care? And that lack of care is actually just privilege? 

For generations, people who have posed nude for photos and cinema knew what they were doing and that it could come at a societal cost. Or if nothing else they were being revealing, that they were showing themselves in a way that was - for lack of a better word - naked. That people were so desperate to see Halle Berry topless that she could get paid a million dollars to do a nude scene. That attractive people could get naked and make a living at it. There is good and bad to this, but it isn't my point. Outside of actresses seemingly convinced they should after the big phone hacking, most new starlets don't really want or have to do nude scenes any more because that's the province of television. But we've seen a lot of nepo babies being almost cavalier about nude scenes. Dakota Johnson, Zoe Kravitz, Margaret Qualley, Maya Hawke, Lily Rose-Depp, etc. etc.. But at a time where most stars don't have to. 

But as the math is different, a lot of their nudity doesn't feel revealing or intimate. When Miley Cyrus is doing what she's doing in the pictures above, it might be shocking but I don't think it reads as erotic. Arguably it isn't meant to be erotic. It achieves a blatancy as does a lot of aggressively sexualized behavior that it's no longer recognizably human. You may want to sex someone so hard their eyes cross and their toes curl, but you can cross that line into it being so performative it isn't actually about the thing anymore. These are pictures that are so about sex they aren't. Because I don't believe Cyrus is wrapping her lips around that police pole with the intention of getting cops turned on, nor is it much of a commentary on policing, etc. It's pointless provocation and weirdly sexless sexuality. But maybe the point is its pointless if - and only if - Miley does it. From a semiotics viewpoint, she isn't giving anyone pleasure but herself, it's pictures of auto-fellatio. She's sucking her own dick, not anyone else's.

There's the old quote about rich people not being like you or I, but one thing that's changed is that the ability to be bubbled is greater than it's ever been in the history of the world. Angelica Huston saw some shit, but a lot of these nepo talents, born into fame and into ridiculous money, given the best private schools, told that they are special from birth, gifted into an industry through easy connections, never having to worry about paying for things or needing things or not getting free things... perhaps there is an entire class of people who - if not removed from humanity - have no idea how it functions for everyone else, and have no interest. Maybe we can feel that Johnson doesn't care. Maybe what's happening is that we know they're bragging that they can do this and there will be no consequences because they've proven they can do it without consequences so it doesn't have an erotic charge of being revealing. Maybe Miley Cyrus isn't celebrating the freedom that everyone can suck a cop's Billy club and not get in trouble or have people look at you funny, or in any way endanger your career. Maybe she's showing that she can, and most everyone else can't. And maybe Dakota Johnson isn't bad at acting or line deliveries, maybe she's just trying to act like a normal person but doesn't know how to, because she doesn't actually understand things like hunger or desire on a primitive level as she's never experienced them. And maybe we've got an entire generation of famous actors children who are incapable of emoting certain levels of remorse or despair because it's just not in their wheelhouse. Why should it be, they didn't have to work to get it. 

TIRED OF THE DISCOURSE: ON BLONDE ON

FIRST HALF: ON BLONDE

For anyone who wants to avoid Andrew Dominik's Blonde, may I recommend the South Park episode about Britney Spears. It's been a while since I've seen it, but it points out how America elevates a pretty woman into superstardom and is just as quick and likely to absolutely destroy them. To sacrifice them. The episode is about 21 minutes and gets much of the same point across (so does David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). But - since before Monroe, and definitely after - we've seen the world destroy some of its most beautiful creatures, and if it doesn't destroy them it often makes them insane. America and the world is horribly misogynistic, and there is a base connection between arousal, self-hatred, and the desire to hate what makes you aroused (because of often religious - AKA bullshit - guilt) that often leads to tragedy. 

This is such a known thing that we've come to accept it. You Must Remember This can have a series on Dead Blondes. The jokes about the downfall happened before Tara Reid (or whomever you want to fit under this guise) burned out. Some of the attitude about this changed with the Me Too movement - it's impossible to look at the stumbling out of control-ness of Paz de la Huerta and now think "oh she's a hot mess" when the truth is she is an assault survivor. There are no set pattern to the ends of Monroe, Sharon Tate, Dorothy Stratten, Dominique Dunne, Brittney Murphy, and on and on, but it seemingly always happens. We've known about the producer's couch since long before I was born, but it has only been moderately curtailed as of the last - what? - six years? The system makes it hard not to go crazy if you want to be a successful working actress, and the audience is ready to hate you for being beautiful. Showbiz: So glamourous. 

As someone who was born in 1976, I first became aware of Marilyn before I was sexual. And like a lot of sex symbols thrust upon me at a young age, I wasn't moved. Not because I don't find Monroe attractive, it's that my sexual tastes didn't really exist yet beyond preferring girls in a general sense, so when you're told before you can control your erections what the hottest person who ever lived was, it doesn't make you go "oh, you're right." I don't know, maybe some people fell for her right away. Maybe because I could "discover her" or maybe because she didn't play dizzy dames, or maybe because she had huge boobs, I was always more a Jane Russell kind of guy.    

But I do know this: The Seven Year Itch is really gross. And so by the time I became a cinephile I never warmed much to Monroe's star filmography outside of the ones she did for Howard Hawks. Not because she was bad, but because the movies tended to be - at best - pretty good, and she didn't do it for me enough to want to watch her work for Fox hacks. As such, I never invested much in her, and I guess like the Manson murders, it just never felt worth investigating for me. It was just... sad. 

But even as someone who never got excited about Marilyn Monroe, or felt the need to defend her as an artist (she was), her legacy has been well known for almost my whole life. The lobby in one of the theaters I spent my youth going to had a French three sheet for The Seven Year Itch up until it closed. We know she died young and not sober. We know she sang for the president, we know the key images, from Playboy to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which served as inspiration for Madonna, if not intentionally lyrically than at least visually. Not everyone knows she appears in The Asphalt Jungle or watched There's No Business Like Show Business, but most everyone - even people who may not know they're doing it - can do a Monroe version of "Happy Birthday."

A lot of people who don't like Blonde hate how it treats Monroe. I don't think the film is interested in her at all. I think it's interested in the legend of Monroe. As such, it doesn't even mention plastic surgery, or show her making more than a handful of her films. It doesn't waste time with pointless "and here's Jon Hamm as Clarke Gable" or whatever you normally expect from showbiz biopics. I think because it's not about trying to understand or make sense of Monroe's life. It's trying to unpack her image. And in doing so it's kind of an unpleasant ride. Granted, as someone who loved semiotics and dissolves, I was probably always going to appreciate a movie where Marilyn achieves orgasm as her bed dissolves into Niagara Falls, but the reason why I think this is a good movie is because I find its intentions interesting.

What is the myth of Marilyn? For everyone that's probably a little different, but of a certain age, Itch, Gentlemen, Some Like it Hot, JFK, Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, ODing, being a hot mess are part of the popular consciousness. And almost every single one of them is gross. Gross to her. Gross in general. As funny as Gentlemen is, and I'm an avowed fan, removed from the joke of it all, the most famous images are Monroe in an opulence bukake as men proffer her money for her attention as she sings "I'm going to get old, and people won't pay me any more, so I take the money (I am a whore)." Itch gets into the whole weird sexual energy of the time, where leering at Monroe's panties (because they hide her vagina) is what the film was sold on. 

The film was sold on leering at her privates. 

The film itself has Monroe playing someone completely (seemingly) unaware of the effect she has on men so she tells her neighbor she puts her underwear in the fridge. Hawks gives her power, but the conceit of Blondes is that Monroe believes it's okay that sex is transactional because she is a venture capitalist. But even though it empowers her, it's still saying she's kinda a prostitute. Some Like it Hot has her complaining about getting a raw deal and dating musicians, and it ends with her with a musician with no prospects. It's not a mistake that Monroe is tied to the birth of Playboy, which introduced the idea of getting nudie mags into peoples homes under the auspices of being a gentleman's journal. The explosion of porn becoming commonplace is tied directly to her.

There's a lot to unpack about American sexuality in that era, and put in this form it showcases that every single thing that marks Monroe's fame and notoriety is tinged in terribleness. Arthur Miller didn't get her or take her seriously, she was never respected as an actress, she got hate mail from women, etc. etc. And what would happen if you're having an affair with the POTUS? When you game it out, it sounds terrible, being a - at best - kept woman? Though it's fascinating in an historical sense, the reality of it would be sport fucking, and dudes who can't keep it in their pants aren't known for respecting women. I get why people don't like Blonde. but I also think it's possible they're not appreciating what the film is trying to do. I get not liking or enjoying the film, but also, this is not meant to be definitive, or even close to comprehensive. 

But then also, this is based on a book, and so I get how this may be tired discourse - there are some people who are probably sick of pointing out the bad and would rather focus on her strengths and the positive side of her. But for me, as likely the target audience, the way Dominik shot the subway grate sequence, it made me sad, angry and a little disgusted, to which the film twists the knife: her husband is offended, but mostly because he sees her crotch as his property. If Monroe is treated only as a great icon that doesn't acknowledge that her story should also be warning that Hollywood and America  will destroy beautiful women because men want to pretend that they're animals.

END HALF: Blonde On

Blonde premiered about - what - two weeks ago at this point, and has been out for less than a week. It kinda feels like it's already done. 

Recently when I've gotten together with my film loving friends, we find that a common thread is "Avoiding a movie that became a talking point." Waiting to watch films like Licorice Pizza, or The Last Duel, or JoJo Rabbit, or West Side Story, or whatever because you are tired of the discourse. Nowadays, films aren't just graded by stars, they're also graded by morality. And if you like them, do you really want to defend a film that people feels seems to be okay with pedophilia? Or racism? Or features someone accused of a sex crime where there's no law involved so it's like "is it real or is it internet"? Or whatever? Why would you want to have a public opinion on anything like that? The problem is this discourse often happens around films about adult subjects that expect the audience to meet them halfway. 

Part of the problem is the dying of criticism. Timed tweets. Insta Reactions. No one has time to digest art any more. How many people are composing their reviews and tweets while the film hasn't even finished? News Stories about "That infamous scene" for a movie that comes out in two weeks. No one gets to sit in art, and any film that deals with troubling things leads the most basic of us to question "this shows a bad thing, is this a bad thing?"

The thing that makes this most troubling is that when films are about problematic things without addressing them, no one says shit. Elvis Presley met Priscilla when she was how old? And kept her? And Married her when? And cheated on her throughout? Dude's a literal groomer. Doesn't everyone think that's bad now? If the film Elvis doesn't put it front and center does that make it okay, does it make Elvis okay? Top Gun got hundreds of people to join the Navy, are we not going to talk about how its sequel is also propaganda? Are we going to address the role of the military in American cinema ever? How they give money and tools to Hollywood because they're peddling Viagra warrior fantasies?

 We don't sit with art any more, we consume it. We move on to the next. And a lot of art that asks people to look at the worst of us is treated like it's bad art. Granted, right now, we've been going through some shit, and the last three years have been a hellscape. But I wonder, as we see fifty year old men think nothing of buying Star Wars clothes for themselves, and have very serious opinions about the MCU and Star Wars, and Halloween basically starts in September now, the fact that adult art is dying is likely because a lot of adults have little interest in being adults any more. (That though, is way too big a topic, so SIGNING OFF).

The Fetishistic Nothingness of THE BATMAN

Fun fact: I didn't grow up reading comic books. I was born in 1976, and other than feeling fucking old of late, one of the big things about my generation is that we didn't have Disney films growing up like other generations. Those of us born in that era were in that sweet spot where home video was growing but not ubiquitous, while Disney animation itself was on a slow decline for over twenty years before they figured out how to make animated films again, and I was way more likely in 1988 to watch BIG BUSINESS or OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE (Disney/Touchstone films) than, say, OLIVER AND COMPANY . The first animated film that brought them back came out when I was thirteen. And though I may still have been watching DUCK TALES, I wasn't exactly going to go to the theater or rent a video for THE LITTLE MERMAID. Subsequently, I didn't see much of the Disney relaunch at the time. Teen boys weren't running to see THE LION KING or MULAN in the nineties. I saw reissues like BAMBI and new stuff like THE BLACK CAULDRON, but was driven more towards stuff like E.T. and GREMLINS as a pre-teen and was on to ALIENS and ROBOCOP by the time I was hitting double digits. But basically, I don't like being resold my youth. I hate it. I want to be an adult. 

Maybe because I was also front and center for the world of Grunge. And though there is a lot of pick through with that whole movement, the idea that corporate art sucks is something that has always been with me. Not that a corporation can't make great art, but it is never in their interest; they would rather be able to sell something marketable, and marketable and good are not always the same. But we are now at a point where most of the major art that can be made in a studio setting isn't new. It has to be IP, and it suggests that film - as it currently exists - will be dead in the next ten, at best twenty years? Like, who do you get to direct the next Marvel movie if indie directors are coming from under million dollar budgets and isn't that basically TV people, so the big difference between theatrical and home viewing will become how much it cost to make, but only event films will then be theatrical? Disney are such fucking assholes for not making non-Disney movies when they own Fox at this point. They have no interest in the future of cinema, and will likely destroy it as it currently exists. 

The problem is that movie fandom has been taken over, upended as it were, by comic book movies. They do not function like normal films, and going by Marvel and DC's more recent output, they sometimes barely function as films.  They are often very successful, sometimes insanely so. But we are getting to a point where it must be said, whatever the appeal of these movies taps into isn't about cinema. That's not to say comic book movie fans don't love movies, but there's an entire audience of movie goers that either doesn't understand or care about craft. But then also, that gets weird too. Respected critics gave Zack Snyder's JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE ASSEMBLY CUT glowing marks and it's hard to tell if they liked it, or are afraid of the violence prone dweebs who like to threaten critics for not genuflecting to lord Marvel and God Snyder, which is a legitimate reason to hand wave it off. That said, I think people may legitimately love ZSJL, but it isn't a movie. Whatever it is isn't as intended even as it tells you it is as intended which is the lie that you have to swallow. And a lot of modern fandom requires swallowing things. As there have been so many sea change moments, none sticks with me more than knowing people hated the Ewoks because of how crass and commercial they seemed. Forty years later and Baby Yoda is fucking everywhere. SELL OUT/THEY LIVE/CONSUME it says. The audience seems to say "yes, yes, take my money." We are culturally at a point where adults know what being pandered to is, and want it more than going to movies that don't. "Please, don't challenge me in any way!" 

One of the things that's been happening is that as the Comic Book Movie Universe grows, we've seen that structure and cohesion no longer matter, and that narratives have no economy. It's all about the saturated fats, it's all about bloated runtimes to make you feel satisfied that you got a full meal, even if there's no great story or action, why complain if you get so much of it? Third acts that basically have no stakes because they have no alternate conclusions. A lot of this started with the prequels, which famously had a sword fight take twenty minutes that could have been over in thirty seconds. That there is a rabid fanbase for the prequels who think everyone was wrong asks the question about some childhood favorite and if they have ruined people's tastes. 

I saw THE BATMAN. There's a point maybe when you're with a friend and they are being hit on by someone else and you tell your friend "that person is trying to take pictures of you having sex while you're dressed as a clown and if you don't walk away they probably will." And you know it's bad news, and you know your friend may be plied with flattery and substances that might take a hard no to a soft yes, but you know it's not your place to parent your friend, so you're also left asking yourself "should I have done more, did they want it, or did they get talked into it?" as they try on clown shoes "as a goof." 

I guess from my perspective, making a grounded three hour movie about Batman chasing down The Riddler is where you end up, and maybe it seems like a good idea at the time, but from where I'm sitting, GROSS. I don't think it's where anyone started their night, and I think if you don't think about the start, you don't maybe think about how each iteration keeps getting more and more boxed in to one version of the character. And it's not that the film is bad, far from it, it's totally watchable, exciting in parts, but it only exists because fandom craves seeing Batman, but Batman in a very fetish-specific way. And I've got nothing against fetishes, it's just so much effort for so little, and this seems like the moment where the world is pot committed to this nonsense in ways that mean movies will be even less artistic.

Batman is the story of a rich orphan who beats up criminals. Now, say, eighty years ago when people like Al Capone and the like were part of the fabric of pop culture, the idea of super villains made a lot more sense. But here we are. This is more disconcerting with the DC movies because they want to traffic in the real (Marvel movies are lame at times, but they don't try to suggest anything is practical or realistic any more, so you don't really have to think about the real world), and so the question becomes, why are people jerking off to a rich guy beating the crap out of criminals that don't exist? Look, as often as these characters can bring in some "of the moment" devices, The Riddler is modeled on The Zodiac. Who killed people fifty plus years ago. 

So again, is this what you really wanted? You want a realistic portrait of a crime fighter, but then also he goes up against criminal masterminds that are more cinematic invention than reality, while Batman also spends some time around The Penguin and lets him get away with criminal acts. Literally does crime in front of Batman. The important part is that Batman punches good? I don't get it.

For the record: I think the Adam West film is great, and the TV show is a blast because it isn't serious. It's kids stuff. I think Burton found the camp he wanted, and with the German expressionist visuals, he created something that exists clearly as fetishistic and weird and cartoony, mixing film noir with pop art. I find both his movies uneven, very horny and fascinating, though I don't think most of the characters are in the same movie. Schumacher saw the whole thing as camp, and that gave the game away somewhat. Homophobes don't like being told their homoerotic art is gay, it seems. That said, Schumacher seems vaguely indifferent as a filmmaker, so I can't hold his two in high regard, even if that reveals how much he feels like the whole thing is beneath him, which it might be. Nolan going more realistic was refreshing at the time, it worked and was its own thing (It also happened 15 years ago, before a lot of the Marvel/Wall Street crash/housing bubble/Trump, etc). If the wheels came off that run by the final movie, a lot of that has to do with Heath Ledger dying. But also Nolan had his own vision of the character that was nothing like what was done previous. The Snyder Batman is interesting, because Affleck is inspired and he does good work in dogshit movies, though I don't really think of those as Batman movies, or really movies. Van Art? But also, that's not a practical Batman, because he's dealing with space aliens and Amazons. Snyder would have been the absolute worst choice to do a solo Batman movie (especially after Rorschach-ing WATCHMEN, a film I like), but he doesn't desecrate the character too much (other than that futureworld sequence where Affleck basically threatens to kill Leto's Joker using an F word that feels like the actor smiling while he says it) like he does Superman, so there’s that  

Robert Pattinson is great as Batman. It's just, he's playing a variant of Bale's version. I mean, I'm sure people will make a case that it's totally different, except there's nothing really to latch on to with any iteration of Batman. He's not an interesting character as a superhero or human being, and basically all Batman cinematic narratives come to that conclusion. The main reason he had love interests in the Burton run is because that's what you did then (and also to de-gay all the leather, because, honey). There's some stuff about his parents maybe being POSs that's interesting, but it's 2022. Rich people fucking suck. We know this. What is Batman a fantasy of and who's it for? Why are we now accepting three hour runtimes from popcorn movies that should be 105 minutes? I guess I can understand if it becomes a hyper-stylized essay on good and evil or a fun phantasmagoria type situation. And I totally get having a take on these movies. I don't think JOKER is a great movie, but it is a movie and it does have ideas. This feels like a variant on everything that's been done before, just enough different that it isn't 100% Nolan-y, but just Nolan enough to make those fans happy. Im trying to think of a singular insight the film has in to human behavior, crime, violence, etc  I don’t think it has one.  So why is there a new Batman? Because the market is there, and the audience is rabid  

The film uses Kurt Cobain - who famously wore a "Corporate Magazines Still Suck" shirt to a Rolling Stone photo shoot - and the song "Something in the Way" to be a Batman theme. The lyrics go like this: 

"Underneath the bridge
Tarp has sprung a leak
And the animals I've trapped
Have all become my pets
And I'm living off of grass
And the drippings from my ceiling
It's okay to eat fish
Cause they don't have any feelings"

Sounds like a portrait of a homeless man losing his mind. The antithesis of a rich kid who beats up bad guys and fights crime for catharsis. My guess is Batman and the filmmakers, like the audience Cobain decried, knows not what it means. Knows not what it means, and I say yeah.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED (FROM DAMON’S DESK)

Hey, readers, I started this as my review of No Strings Attached, but it became something greater, so it is a review of that, but mostly in passing and near the end. As I am more interested in writing about the genre than the film itself, I’ll give you my star rating, and talk about the film intermittently, but there you go.

ON ROMANTIC COMEDIES AND NO STRINGS ATTACHED

The problem with romantic comedies is partly the nature of cinema. For most of us, relationships are defined by attraction and then functionality. These are sometimes mutually exclusive: sometimes the people we want to fuck are a hot mess to deal with, and sometimes the people we’re most comfortable with offer no sexual thrills. Attraction is inherently cinematic but can only be drawn out so long, while showing how a relationship works is probably best left for television than a two hour narrative. Even when people “meet cute” in real life, generally the obstacles that keep them apart are easy fixes or are ultimately too great to hurdle but – at the very least – are generally not that funny. If you are married and meet someone you like better, then that’s not that amusing. Such is why great romance narratives use world events as a backdrop, or use great tragedies (like Titanic or Remember Me) to heighten the immediacy. Sometimes you meet someone and there’s that passionate flame, but then there’s the after, and the after is hard to turn into a three-act structure without a dilemma.

Rom-coms usually have very silly obstacles and it’s difficult to show the relationships after the two leads have had sex because then there is a level of acceptance (especially in Rom-com films pre-1970) that negates the rest of the narrative. This is partly because sex was considered reserved for marriage (at least in movies), but even without marriage, once sex is introduced it’s hard to find a better ending. In real life sex is usually a dividing line of seriousness or something that comes early, which is why setting a film in high school (even that gets dicey now), or in a workplace (like The Office) can add some juice to explain why the two leads aren’t already jumping in the sack and calling themselves exclusive. No Strings Attachedhas a semi-solution to that problem, but it also shows the weird chemistry that is involved with making a good love story.

Most films in the rom-com genre find the most strained ways to keep their perfect couples from fucking (which is usually the closer). That’s generally why the best relationship comedies aren’t about meeting and falling in love. Annie Hall is the ultimate example, but melancholy doesn’t really go hand in hand with films starring Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl. Some of the best love stories are buried within genre work (like – as I’ve said before – the films of Edgar Wright, all of whose films could be describes as rom-coms), which often create an obstacle greater than the clichéd Baxter character. “I will become a man for you by standing up to zombies” is – in its way – usually more interesting than “she thought we were second cousins” or “she thought I was married,” etc. But to that end, Rio Bravo can be typed a romantic comedy. If we remove genre efforts, the object of all romantic comedies is to find a believable obstacle that keeps two attractive people from each other long enough so they get to know each other and we believe they could be happy together, if only.

Bringing up the Baxter, it’s worth delving into that cliché. The Baxter was defined by the film The Baxter, which had Michael Showalter playing a character with numerous perfect women, but always left for the “better man.” The archetypal Baxter is Bill Pullman’s character in Sleepless in Seattle, but this character exists in a lot of movies as both men and women. The problem with a Baxter is that the film needs to dismiss them, and if it shows a powerful or interesting man or woman with an asshole, a doormat or a loser, it also dings your sympathy for them. In You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks is dating Parker Posey and at no point do believe they would be together. Then you’ll have one like Bradley Cooper in The Wedding Crashers, who pretends to be a nice guy. But – again – the problem with that is it suggests the female lead doesn’t know the real person they’re dating. Romantic comedies rarely have the time or interest to make it about a real struggle to abandon this person, and though being in a bad relationship or dysfunctional one is commonplace, it’s hard to make that cinematic without dinging your character’s sympathy. One of the best movies about this is Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, where both women the male character has to chose from are worthy of his affections. But then also being alone is awkward because it suggests the character is not currently sexually successful, and/or desirable.

The best romantic comedies tend to fuck with the formula in interesting ways, either by playing on role reversal (like The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or by diluting the saccharine (like The Apartment or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The genre is mostly a ghetto, but a lot of the greatest filmmakers have made them and the one’s that work best don’t come from a bullshit place. On the commentary for Say Anything, Cameron Crowe talks about how John Cusack brought a darkness to his character, and it may explain why it’s still one of (if not the) best things he’s ever done.

And what’s interesting about modern romantic comedies is that they usually come from a place of complete and utter bullshit. They are removed from those sorts of pain, even if they mostly come with a musical montage when the female or male lead blows it. Let’s take a film like Failure to Launch. The premise of the film is that Mathew McConaughey (how’s it going) is a successful guy who lives with his parents. Right there, the film is harder to swallow than Peter Parker designing his own web-shooters. But then Sarah Jessica Parker plays a woman whose job it is to help men like him to find their way out of their parents’ house. I guess metaphorically, the idea that a number of men are grown-up boys is a good start for a romantic comedy, but the film throws anything resembling reality out the window. And for set pieces, you have a scene in a film like The Ugly Truth, where a young child finds the controls of the vibrating panties that Katherine Heigl is wearing. So basically she’s being raped or sexually assaulted by an underage boy. Something I’m sure most viewers can relate to. But this is also escalation of the new sensibilities, and trying to find the new “I’ll have what she’s having” is a hard business.

But that said – so many things in mainstream romantic comedies that are considered charming or romantic could lead to a restraining order. This cuts both ways – Amelie is either a slice of whimsy or a movie about a sociopathic women who doesn’t enjoy sex and likes to interfere in other people’s lives. Cinema Paradiso used standing outside a woman’s window every night as proof of an everlasting love. Lloyd Dobler shows up outside his ex-girlfriend’s house and to make her reconsider their break-up plays the song that played during their first sexual encounter. These things are romantic when the two parties love each other. But if they don’t…

One of the biggest romantic comedies of the last twenty five years involved Julia Roberts playing a hooker, so perhaps the appeal of these sorts of films for a modern audience is their complete bullshitiness. Figures of romantic allure like Robert Patinson or Richard Gere may seem unattainable to the lady in accounts receivable, so saddling the narrative with real world problems only conflates the dissonance of a masturbatory fantasy (it adds zippers to the zipless fuck). Some men may aspire to be Spider-Man like some women aspire to be Kristen Stewart in Twilight. The core truth (doing good, being loved) is not clouded by the things we cannot be. But the modern skewing of these male fantasies is toward more and more realism and darkness, where the modern feminine fantasy has become in mainstream cinema less realistic. Or perhaps part of it is that these are considered date films, and there’s nothing less appealing than being on a date and having your problems reflected back on you.

It’s interesting that men have in some ways co-opted the genre in that a lot of films that cast schlubby men in the romantic leading role, though this may have more to do with modern living. Men like love stories as well, and so a rotund Seth Rogen or a sexless 40-year-old man become the male avatars. Even something like Notting Hill suggests that the fantasy is more for the male character than the female (though Julia Roberts is playing the polar opposite of her character in Pretty Woman). These films speak to male insecurities about attractiveness and experience. There have been few – if any – plump female romantic comedies, and generally they star Toni Collette. The Farrelly brothers tried to wrestle with this, but ultimately failed in Shallow Hal. But – for whatever reason – the more male versions of these sorts of movies are usually the one’s championed, be it the work of Judd Apatow, or There’s Something about Mary. In these cases it’s the men who are the ugly ducklings, but the sappiness is diluted by profanity and more explicit sexual talk (but the films themselves have become relatively sexless). And such may be why Elizabeth Meriwether’s script for No Strings Attached is peppered with profanity and the – now expected – somewhat filthier sex talk. But – like so many of these films – there’s not a lot of lust. When you watch a film like The Lady Eve that Henry Fonda wants to have sex with Barbara Stanwyck is unquestionable. Or Ball of Fire (one of my favorite films in the history of ever), Gary Cooper definitely wants Stanwyck’s sexual attentions. Whereas when I watch something like No Strings Attached, I don’t know if I really believe either actor wants to make hot monkey love, and if I give Twilight credit for anything, it’s that Kristen Stewart definitely seems hot to trot for her leading man in the film (which may be the ultimate sign of acting).

The funniest thing for me in the watching of No Strings Attached was talking to a number of female colleagues when the film was over. The premise of No Stringsis that Natalie Portman and Asthon Kutcher’s characters decide to become fuck-buddies (the film’s original title), who just have sex but aren’t supposed to be committed to each other. Kutcher shows up at her place after a bender caused by his ex girlfriend dating his father (Kevin Kline). He wakes up on the couch and then moves to her bedroom where she suggests they get to the fucking with a less than two minute insert-to-complete timeline.

“Imagine what he’d smell like?”

“Terrible. I keep breath mints near my bed so it isn’t gross to kiss in the morning.”

“Also, he’d been drinking all night. I would be shocked at his… readiness.”

“Or hers.”

“Sandpaper.”

“And who would that be good for? You’ve just proved that he can pop quick.”

Funnily enough I didn’t mind the scene as much as the women did, but I understood their points. For me the moment I was turned against the film happens early. The film has about three prologues, with the two leads meeting as children, then in college, and then in current times before Kutcher’s night of debauched drinking. In the college setting, we’re introduced to the four main characters, with Kutcher and Portman hanging out with their friends who also are their BFF’s a couple years later. Greta Gerwig plays the female best friend, and she’s supposed to be the antithesis of Portman’s character in her way (that is to say, in a vaguely defined sense that may have been left on the cutting room floor), and is the more slutty of the two. But her character is introduced wearing shorts that say “whore.” It was a moment I felt shame for the actress, her character, and everyone involved.

Oh well. From there the film sets up about its premise (these two have sex and then fall in love), but then it also establishes a vague threat in a male Baxter. You know you’re not with the film when you think that guy has a point. He’s a coworker who tells Kutcher that he’s just an empty headed prat who she’ll fuck for a while until she realizes that Kutcher’s a loser. and he’s a doctor. Since Portman wants a relationship with someone who understands she works 80 hours a week, he’s got a point and Kutcher’s character denies that he’s had his life handed to him, but seems to have gotten his job because of his father. This is made less sympathetic by his desire to be a writer – but a writer for the show he’s on, which appears to be a High School Musical clone. For people in the industry this might make more sense than for those not. Often getting started means working on things you might normally not, but the film doesn’t build that in any reasonable way, so his real goal appears to be writing for a Disney/Nickelodeon type show.

If there’s one thing that No Strings gets mostly right is how digital technology has changed everything. These are characters who text. And if I’m not satisfied by the end product, it’s at least fair to say that the film recognizes the current dating landscape where texting is way more prevalent than – in a lot of cases – talking on the phone, and where a text message has both a timeline, but a long editing session. Personally, other than my immediate family members, I’m more likely to text or Skype than call these days, especially in the exploratory period.

But though there’s a Baxter-y threat, the main thing that keeps the two characters apart is the fact that Natalie Portman’s character is insane. This isn’t necessarily in the text, but her reasons for breaking up and wanting the relationship the way it is are barely explained at best. I guess it’s because she’s a career-driven woman, but the problem is that – at a certain point in the film before the two break up and before their end reunion (spoilers?) – she all but says that she loves him. Kutcher’s character is in love with her from the start and puts up with her shit, and it only takes situations like him taking two women home after she suggests that they see other people, or later another woman after she’s ended it for her to figure out he’s a keeper. At a certain point I would have been happier if the film didn’t end up with them together, because – as Robert De Niro would say – she had her shot and she BLLEWWWW it. Forgiveness is romantic in its way, but there’s a point where if someone doesn’t understand that you love them, or they can’t reciprocate when comforted with dead-on feelings, I don’t understand sticking around. At least cinematically. But Portman’s (and by default their) biggest obstacle is that she’s nuts. Take it back, maybe this does speak to certain truths. No wait, it doesn’t.

The other big problem in the film is that their obstacle is no obstacle, so they spend the middle of the film basically having a great time together, and acting like they’re in love, so there’s about zero dramatic tension. If you’re fucking and go on romantic dates, then you’ve removed any sense of escalation, because cinematically they spend all their time together. They’re – in the film’s terms – clicking, and that’s all we see, so okay, what’s the problem? The problem is that she just wants to be fuck-buddies, but doesn’t understand that sex has an emotional component that comes from hanging out with each other? This would be a better film if someone said that Portman’s character had Aspbergers, because the problem with their relationship is an ill-defined sense of definition, whereas the human condition is usually contingent on malleability. Or, to quote someone else, “life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.” The film doesn’t do a very good job explaining why Portman’s character doesn’t want attachment after it appears she is mostly attached.

To that end, director Ivan Retiman and company pepper the film with a number of great female actresses and waste them. Lake Bell plays one of Kutcher’s coworkers, Abby Elliot plays a bisexual – possibly lesbian – waitress, Mindy Kahling and Greta Gerwig play two of Portman’s housemates, Jennifer Irwin (of Eastbound and Down) plays a bitchy boss, and Olivia Thirlby plays Portman’s sister. The film has much stronger females, though Ludacris does have a funny line or two, and Kevin Kline is way too good as the hippy, drug taking father. Kline is encased in Teflon in the film, he gets to show up and do what he wants. Reitman at this point hasn’t made a great film in fifteen years (I’ll give him Dave), and he’s not really on his game in this film, but in a lot of ways the film feels more like the product of Meriwether, or at least she seems more like the driving force. Perhaps that’s the publicity, or the sense that Reitman likely doesn’t text as much. It’s funny that Meriwether comes from Diablo Cody’s posse (no jokes) because Juno is a way better textured romantic comedy. This film is mostly harmless, but the premise of dealing with how people often fall for each other after they’ve had sex is a great place to start, as is a film that at least tries to attempt to deal with sex in more modern terms. But, ultimately, this feels like a strong pitch-based premise that never cracked the film’s conceit. Which seems to the number one problem with genre: They find some convoluted excuse for people who are going to fall in love to have difficulties, but it rarely feels real because the conceit is inorganic.