The Screengrab

Hi, folks. I'm Lance, the Screengrab's monkey intern, and I'll be handling the Highlight Reel this week. Frankly I asked for this opportunity to address you today because I'm simply sickened that a few bad apples have once again set back my community's efforts to be taken seriously. Folks, it's hard out here for a chimp. Yet we've got these bozos in Japan running around with bottles of Jager for a handful of magic beans. Now it's true that I'm not compensated monetarily here at Hooksexup, but that's because it's an internship, fer crying out loud! Soon I'll be an editor here, and I'll be able to put an end to insulting stuff like this Top 25 Leading Men list. I keep asking the Screengrabbers, where is the list of top leading monkeys? They keep saying they'll get around to it, but I see them laughing when they think I'm not around. Sure, they'll throw me a bone by reviewing Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood, but they treat it as a joke!  Believe me, folks, there are statues of Cheeta where I come from.

Anyway, I guess I've got to pretend that some of the stuff these clowns wrote is worth reading, so here are your highlights of the week:

New Reviews: Ashes of Time Redux, Fireproof, An American Carol

When British Comics Attack: Simon Pegg vs. Ricky Gervais

Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals (ha ha, very funny)

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The second in my weekend mini-festival of movies made by and for people who hate people like me is Fireproof.  So widely is former TV star/religious fanatic/banana enthusiast Kirk Cameron associated with the movie that the theater I went to here in South Texas was advertising it as "Kirk Cameron's Fireproof".  As a thesis statement, this is something I'm eager to put to the test, but just the way it was phrased...is Kirk Cameron really that much of a draw?  Seeing the movie so advertised -- and I later discovered this theater was far from the only place where the movie was thus billed -- was, for me, akin to seeing a marquee reading "Bounthanh Xaynhachack's Appaloosa".  (It's also not entirely accurate:  Cameron didn't write or direct the film, and may not actually know what writing and directing are, as his claim that he was unable to kiss the female lead in Fireproof because she is not his wife suggests that he doesn't actually know what acting is.)  Still, like I said, this movie isn't made for me.  If there are lost millions for whom Kirk Cameron is a legit box office draw -- and the crowded house in the theater suggested that there just might be -- then for tonight, I would be one of them.

In Fireproof, Cameron plays a firefighter who is gradually falling out of love with his wife, played by Fireproof's Erin Bethea.  (Cameron's downright Dukakasian appearance when decked out in fireman gear that looks a size too big for him makes one question why it was chosen as his character's fictional profession, until you gradually realize that it's so they can cut to an occasional action-packed fire rescue as  respite from the constant relationship yackety blap.  That's right, Christian males:  this is a chick flick.)  The reasons are murky, though it's clearly implied that it's mostly her fault for getting on his Hooksexups:  Cameron is relentlessly misogynistic in the movie, and seems to want to repair his marriage out of a sort of bloody-minded sense of obligation than because he actually cares for his wife.  In order to patch things up with the missus, Fireman Kirk decided to follow the teachings of a book called The Love Dare (originally just a made-up gimmick for the movie, now actually available as the producers sensed the presence of additional fleece on the flock); in the end, he learns to conquer his indifference and hostility and grudgingly love his life partner again.  

The biggest problem with Fireproof isn't that Cameron's character, who is named Caleb Holt and acts like it, is an unlikable jerk.  (We're constantly assured by the movie that he is a good person, generally by way of rescuing people from fires instead of just standing around watching them burn to death, but nothing in his behavior towards his wife, his family, his friends, or anyone who isn't actually engulfed in flames manages to convince you that he's not irredeemably schmucky.)  The biggest problem is that the movie is deadly dull.  One of the biggest problems with any message movie is that the message is generally thought by the filmmakers to be more important than the movie part, and that's the case here in spades.  Why should any of us give a shit if Caleb and Catherine can save their marriage, when the script gives us no reason to care about them and the actors give us no reason to like them?  Say what you will about An American Carol (for instance, you could say it sucks), but at least it wasn't boring.  

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This week, as the election nears, I decided to treat myself to two movies that I ordinarily wouldn't see under any circumstance.  Not just because they looked terrible -- although they did -- but also because they were movies that, in a very literal sense, were not made for me.  These movies are less artistic endeavors than they are salvos in the culture war, and if they were aimed at me, it was not as a consumer, but as a target.  

But hey, so what?  I go see a lot of movies that aren't really meant for me.  I've reviewed Tyler Perry movies, which aren't meant for me.  I've reviewed Disney animated movies, which aren't meant for me.  I'm a big fan of Stan Brakhage, and his movies weren't really made for anyone.  I'm a professional, damn it, and as a professional, I can take whatever to the other side in the culture wars dish out.  The first tasty bowl of arsenic:  David Zucker's An American Carol.

The film, as you may know from Phil Nugent's earlier piece on it, is a high-dudgeoned but low-minded spoof in which a stand-in for Michael Moore (portrayed by a stand-in for Chris Farley) is interrupted in his quest to ban the Fourth of July by a visitation by three ghosts, who attempt to dissuade him from his wicked anti-American ways.  Why wasn't his movie released at Christmastime?  Why would anyone want to ban a calendar day?  Why would you send John F. Kennedy to attack a prominent liberal?  I figured if I started asking myself questions like that, I would just go insane.  Instead, I focused on whether or not the movie was actually funny.  I hope I will be believe when I say that, all ideological considerations aside, it wasn't.  It's not that you can't be funny from a specific political point of view; in fact, satire (which, really, An American Carol is too dumb to qualify as, but still) depends on a moral standing ground from which to attack.  It's that these jokes lack any kind of universality, humanity or relatability:  the only way you can think it's funny is if you agree with where it's coming from.  Or, to put it another way:  the new, right-wing David Zucker believes it's funny to have Michael Moore slapped around by Bill O'Reilly.  If you happen to agree, you might be modestly amused; if you don't, the joke will fall even flatter than it actually does.  The old, non-political David Zucker knew better:  he just thought it was funny when people get slapped.  

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Jean-Luc Godard once said that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 had surely done its part in getting George W. Bush re-elected. You may disagree, but if an investigating committee of impartial wise men were formed to rank every statement of a political nature that Godard has ever issued in descending order of just how deranged they sound, it's doubtful that the sneer at Moore would make the top hundred. (Maybe not the top five hundred.) Moore said back in 2004 that he hoped that his movie would have an effect on the election, and maybe it did. (How he though that he might inspire some effect that was hurtful to Bush by making a movie specifically designed to comfort those who already agreed with him one-hundred percent while confusing anyone on the fence and pissing off and galvanizing everyone on the other side is a question for a different investigating committee of impartial wise men.) To hear them tell it, David Zucker and the other conservative Hollywood players who worked on An American Carol would like to have an impact on this year's election but are having trouble breaking through that gosh-darn media filter. Zucker, who will probably always be best known, especially at the rate he's going, as part of the team that wrote Kentucky Fried Movie and went on to create Airplane! and the Police Squad/The Naked Gun franchise, has weighed in on political matters before. A few years ago, he produced and directed a series of political ads, including the one above, which chastises the Democrats for being too soft to dictators and terrorists, and the one below, which compares James Baker and the Iraq Study Group to Neville Chamberlain.

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We take no blame for the fact that Beverly Hills Chihuahua debuted at the top of the U.S. box office with a whopping $29 million weekend take. It’s true that I am the proud owner of a Chihuahua-American, but he wanted nothing to do with what he perceived as a showcase for offensive stereotypes. Eagle Eye was second with $17.7 million, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist took in a finite $12 million for third place. Blindness didn’t attract many eyes and finished outside the top 10, but both Bill Maher’s Religulous and the conservative coalition’s An American Carol made the lower reaches of the list, with Maher’s documentary boasting the higher per-screen average.

George Romero can’t seem to stop making zombie movies.

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A few weeks ago, we spotlighted the anti-Michael Moore spoof/jeremiad An American Carol. But if that's not your speed, here's what Moore himself has been to lately.

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My fellow Americans, I am here to humbly accept your nomination of Recapper of the Week in Screengrab! I think we all know it is time for a change. No longer can we sit by, complacent, while the screenwriter of Showgirls turns to Jesus. No longer can we allow Robert Downey Jr. to badmouth The Dark Knight. No longer can we stand by while good men like Phil Nugent and Andrew Osborne face-off over Judd Apatow and Pineapple Express!

No, my friends, this is a time for unity. A time for us to gather together and marvel at the World’s Greatest Animated Shorts – Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five! We must respect the Screengrab Fall Preview Picks of Andrew Osborne and Leonard Pierce, as different as they may be, as equal planks in our broad platform.

Some will tell you Guy Ritchie is caught up in the zeitgeist of slaggery. Some will insist that Fascination and Meet the Spartans are actually watchable movies. Some will wonder when Robert Zemeckis went bad, or why Terrence Howard would record an album, or under what circumstances David Lynch met Devo.

We don’t have all the answers!

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I’ve heard some conservatives speaking of “the humorless left,” but if this trailer tells me anything, it’s that humorlessness can be found on both sides of the aisle.

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One of the favorite activities of the modern movement conservative is to claim that, since not every single aspect of the culture panders to him, he is being discriminated against.  Having never actually experienced any actual discrimination -- unlike, say, black people -- the right-winger seems to believe that it is an oppression too heavy to be borne that he is sometimes made aware of things that he does not personally enjoy.  Liberal arts classes in college taught by liberals?  Discrimination against conservatives!  Some people don't adhere to the tenents of the Southern Baptist Convention?  Discrimination against conservatives!  Young people listening to the rappity-hop music?  Discrimination against conservatives!

This week has seen a big push in one of the favorite such complaints of the movement conservative:  that, because of the preponderance of liberals in Hollywood, conservatives are being discriminated against in Hollywood.  Jason Appuzzo, founder of the late, unlamented Libertas Film Festival, was one of the biggest purveyors of this ridiculous myth; Brent Bozell is another.  But in the last ten days, we've seen an op-ed by Jon Voight in the right-wing Washington Times in which he blamed American liberals for the murder of millions by the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and claimed that "if, God forbid, we live to see Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way".  The editorial was widely scoffed at, and conservative gadflies, who mistake being made fun of for being blackballed and having your entire career destroyed, immediately came crawling up from the cellar to complain about "establishment entertainment journalists expertly wielding the tools of the New McCarthyism".  So says Andrew Breitbart (who, earlier this year, I heard peddle the absurd notion that Hollywood celebrities are afraid to say they support our troops in Iraq, lest they face censure at the hands of the liberal bosses).  While conservatives almost universally react to liberal opinions on the part of entertainers with some variant of "shut up and sing" (witness the widespread hostility the Dixie Chicks faced a few years ago), let one of their own get laughed at for mouthing of some ill-conceived right-wing talking point, and we're witnessing the vile fascism of "a town that doesn't embrace free speech anymore".  Breitbart's commenters are even worse, claiming that "the old McCarthyism was harmless compared to the new".  (Those who wish to compare and contrast may note that Mr. Voight currently has three films in production, and starred in one of the most successful films of 2007, as opposed to, say, Dalton Trumbo, who spent a year in prison because of the blacklist, or Hanns Eisler, who was more or less forced to leave the country and ended up in the hands of the Soviet East Germans, or Alvah Bessie, who never worked in her chosen profession again, or Canada Lee, Bartley Crum and John Garfield, who all died because of the horrible after-effects of coming under McCarthyite scrutiny.)

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