Peter Krupa

It was a difficult afternoon. First we saw 300, and let me tell you, Lynne Cheney should get out there right now and form an investigative subcommittee to look into regulating the gratuitous, senseless, and excessive battlefield speechifying found in many of today’s movies. My head was spinning and I felt slightly nauseated as I walked out of the theater, marveling to myself at the wholesale, craven irresponsibility of the film executives who had allowed so much empty, pseudo-philosophical shouting about glory and freedom taint what would otherwise have been good, clean violence.

Aside from that, I thought the movie did a good job of illustrating the perils of placing the leadership of a population in the hands of a man who had been struck about the head all too much as a youngster and as a consequence has to think mostly with his testicles. Yes, you became quite the dead lion Your Majesty, and glorious it was. But that politician back home just raped your wife, so what’s the real lesson here?

The afternoon didn’t improve when we arrived home and were rudely confronted with an internet video of Bill O’Reilly shouting like a rabble-rousing fascist about how Mexican drunk drivers are going to kill us all - shouting at Geraldo Rivera, I might add, making it a very emotionally confusing moment.

A malaise hung over the apartment, an emotional, slow-motion soup of severed heads, pierced torsos, interminable fucking speeches, and Bill O’Reilly shouting at the top of his lungs like some lunatic on the subway.

So I played Ona a song, then another one. Then we opened a bottle of French wine - a cheap one, with a screw top - and now we are making a little dinner. Later, I think we will watch a Canadian movie.

Nothing is more soothing than a Canadian movie.

Haven’t I already seen this movie at least twice? And isn’t figure skating just too… easy? It’s like Will Farrell is parodying a Will Farrell movie.

The New York Times‘ A.O. Scott - whom I love, dearly - calls Frank Miller’s 300 a “bombastic spectacle of honor and betrayal, rendered in images that might have been airbrushed onto a customized van sometime in the late 1970s.” I think that was supposed to be a criticism. Or was Scott expecting a Frank Miller creation to be un-bombastic?

There’s something fascinating, elegant even, about a palletizing robot. It’s enormous next to its handler, but it does what it is told, like a mechanical elephant, box after box, carefully twisting and bending and lifting and twisting and bending and setting down, then rising and twisting and bending again.

Then there’s the “picker” robots, which, depending on the music and lighting, can be mad-cap and industrious, or downright sinister, like those aren’t croissants being packed but bits of human brains, and with a mechanical thing moving that fast, you can’t look away. And how about the muffinbot, that can tell the difference between chocolate, orange, and chocolate chip?

Recently, a German director came out with a movie called “Our Daily Bread,” which is a silent documentary about the automation of the food industry. From what I understand, it’s not supposed to be critical, necessarily, and after watching these short videos of industrial robots in action, I understand. I could watch this for an hour and a half, the robots picking and packing and twisting and bending and looking.

It gives me that boyish feeling of wonder. Like, gosh, look at what we’ve made…

I found it pleasant to watch a good movie of whose plot I hadn’t the faintest idea, so I won’t tell you much about Lucky Number Slevin, except that it was pretty good. Not great, just pretty good, meaning that you couldn’t exactly guess the plot twists (but you could see them coming) and Ben - excuse me - Sir Ben Kingsley’s New York Jewish accent was passable (but lacking pizzazz).

I had a few other minor complaints, but they were minor. Lucy Liu was very cute. For a mob assassin/silenced pistol/not-as-simple-as-it-looks thriller bit, it was well worth the one hour and 40 minutes.

I’m not really sure why Marie Antoinette was made, artistically speaking. It’s a completely pointless movie, a sort of fashion porn meets nu-wave in, um, France? One has to admire the slyness of Sofia Coppola, as she’s hit on a sweet-spot strategy for “artists” these days. That is, first, have a famous pedigree; then, make a work of art so vague (yet bizarre!) that while the critics fall all over themselves arguing about what it “means” in terms of class struggle/leisure culture/sexual roles, you can stand back and smile mysteriously.

In a broader sense, I believe Marie Antoinette marks the twilight of a certain variety of hipsterdom, much like the Suez Crisis signaled the end of European world domination. Fifteen years from now, people are going to view Marie Antoinette as a pop-culture artifact; a moving portrait of celluloid pink cotton candy fashion porn hipness, from a time when someone thought it would be edgy to cast Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI.

The gist of the story is that an Austrian princess overflowing with heartfelt emotive expression (as Austrian royalty was wont to do in the 18th century) is yanked from the warm bosom of her people and thrust into a world of cold, French formalism where everyone has a British accent, except our heroine, who sounds like she was raised in Cleveland.

Pink, fluffy shenanigans ensue, there are some parties and whatnot, candies and pastries are consumed, then a bit more shenanigans, and, just when it is arriving at the good part where everyone more or less deservedly gets their heads whacked off, the damn movie ends.

What is Sophia Coppola trying to say? Who cares. Let me try on those mink-lined pumps, and can you please pass the truffles? But seriously, if I had to make a wild, ridiculous, speculative observation, it is interesting that all three of Coppola’s full-length films are about girls who lounge around waiting for things to happen - and that in the last two, nothing ever does.

Biography of the daughter growing up in the shadow of her wealthy, famous director father? Once again, who cares. What I do know is that if Mel Gibson had made Marie Antoinette, it would have been in fucking French. And we would have seen those heads get whacked off.

If you see one movie this month, it should be Pan’s Labryinth. I don’t really have much else to add to that. Maybe you could prepare yourself by reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, or learning Spanish, but February’s a short month so you’d have to pick one or the other.

And anyway, it’s not really possible to prepare yourself to watch Pan’s Labryinth. I could tell you the whole plot right now and it wouldn’t matter. It occurs to me to write something about emotional textures, chalk doorways, and the darkness of fairytales.

But never mind. Just go see Pan’s Labyrinth.

Idiocracy is a terrifying movie, mostly because its hyperbole isn’t nearly hyperbolic enough. The premise is that, through a botched military experiment, two normal people from 2005 get put to sleep for 500 years and wake up in a world where everyone is a moron. The idea is, once you suspend the natural process of survival of the fittest by automating everything, what you get is a world full of the people who breed indiscriminately and, thanks to science, survive in uncomfortably high numbers.

Hence, you get a world where the State of the Union address is choreographed like a pro-wrestling match, where doctors sit around smoking splifs, and where Starbucks has evolved with the changing national palette to become a franchised house of prostitution.

Maybe the writers had something specific in mind for that last one. This morning, the LA Times reports on the “sexpresso” shops popping up around California:

“Really, there is no ordinance against scantily clad baristas,” said John Urquhart, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department in King County, which includes Seattle and most suburbs.

As long as breasts and buttocks are more or less covered, it’s legal to serve coffee in a baby-doll negligee and chaps, as a barista was doing at a Cowgirls Espresso stand the other day.

Well! That’s good to know.

In the end, I do kind of have a problem with the way Idiocracy seems to blame Big Irresponsible Corporations for the dumbing of America - fast food, Costco, sports drink companies, etc. You know the drill. This is the same reason I didn’t like Taladega Nights. Making fun of people who go to Applebee’s is kind of asinine, snobby and - well - classist.

It’s really a chicken/egg question: which comes first, the low-brow tastes or the companies that cater to them? HL Mencken would put his bet on the former: “No one in this world … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

I had thought Mike Judge would have put his bet there as well. He is, after all, also the inventor of Beavis and Butt-Head.

The Devil Wears Prada fits in two genre niches: Fashion porn and Manhattan media scene gossip. If you’re not interested in either, there is little reason to watch it, which means I would not recommend the movie to the readership of this blog. Although I have to say, the acting of Meryl Streep as the wicked stepmother boss was so delicious, that it alone makes the movie worth watching. As a rental.

In a nut-shell, The Devil Wears Prada is a cautionary tale about how one shouldn’t let the New York fashion world destroy one’s soul with its shallowness, in-fighting, arrogance, ruthlessness, and arbitrariness. Instead, one should find peace in New York’s restaurant, art, and newspaper professions, which have none of those negative qualities (rim-shot please).

But seriously. I enjoyed it quite a bit now that I live and work in the aforementioned media scene. I got all the provincial references to New York City things, recognized the streets, subways, taxis, stereotypes, etc. The fashion montages were many, yet unnoticed by me at the time. Looking back, however, I can sort of imagine the pitter-patter of the female heart watching the heroine don $500 shoes and select a wardrobe from the “samples” room.

The male equivalent is that scene in action movies where the heretofore helpless and beleaguered good guy discovers his superpowers, or finds the back room with all the guns hanging on pegboard and the ammo piled up in kegs along the wall. Dude. Sweet.

But there were larger social issues. Oh yes. Social issues. For example: the failure of feminism. I know what you think I’m going to say, and I’m not going to say it. I don’t particularly give a shit about the 21st century feminist dilemma of family versus career.

What’s interesting to me is what “career” tends to mean in the life of a woman today. Consider the main character, Andy Sachs. Not only is she perfectly willing to be abused and vilely shat upon as a lowly assistant - she’s willing to be an assistant.

Look around the professional world and you find this type everywhere. The cute (but not hot) PR girl, the event planner, the editorial assistant, the personal assistant, all young, smiley, bright, educated women whose nurture instincts are turned on full blast.

These women in the professional world aren’t setting the agenda. They’re planning, organizing, and scheduling for their bosses, who are often men. They are screening calls for their bosses, who are often men. They are running errands for their bosses, who are often men. They are doing a job which you rarely find men doing, and which in former times had a much more pedestrian title: secretary.

Draw whatever conclusions you want about that. I’m just making an observation. Without positing a cause for the phenomenon (Nature or nurture? You decide.), let me just say it will be hard for women to close the gender gap while their best and brightest are content to play a supporting role.

I finally saw Mel Gibson’s much-ballyhooed Apocalypto. It was a good action movie. And there’s not much else to say. Because that’s what it is: an action movie.

Did he inaccurately depict the historical, cultural, and technological richness of the Mayan culture? Sure. But while it might be true that Gibson exaggerated the Mayan human sacrifice thing, it’s also true that a person can’t really run six miles after being shot in the lung.

Get it? Action movie. Ammo is endless. The Russians are sinister. Good-guy wounds are flesh wounds. Bad-guy wounds are fatal. Details of cultural and historical significance are probably fudged in order to get a good angle on that bad-ass Steven Segal round-house.

The real story, as far as I’m concerned, is the media’s obsession with Mel Gibson’s obsession with violence. Last time there was this much hand-wringing over cinematic violence was probably in a Congressional hearing on the topic. It was like someone handed out talking points. Here’s two headlines:

Slate: “A Pre-History of Violence: Mel Gibson’s bloody, bewildering Apocalypto”

Salon: “Apocalypto: Mel Gibson’s latest pretends to care about the fall of man, but it really only wants to impale, flay, disfigure and torture him. Sound familiar?“

And the lede to the New York Times review:

“I’m going to peel off his skin and make him watch me wear it.” This grisly threat is delivered by one of the main bad guys in Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” The promised flaying never takes place, but viewers who share this director’s apparently limitless appetite for gore will not be disappointed, since not much else in the way of bodily torment has been left to the imagination.

Great, thanks. We already knew this, it’s a Mel Gibson movie. Imagine a review of a Tarantino movie with the headline, “Tarantino: What he really wants is more blood,” and then an explanation of how he’s botched Japanese culture.

Something Mel’s critics never get around to mentioning is that the reason the gore in his movies is so excruciating is because, meanwhile, there’s usually a family waiting to be saved, or a young love that’s been snuffed out. Sappy stuff, sure, but in terms of violence, that’s what makes the difference between a gore-for-gore’s-sake slasher flick, and something with characters and pathos.