Lost finale liveblog

As I've mentioned before, until last August, I'd never seen an episode of Lost, but thanks to the wonders of Netflix Instant Streaming and Hulu, I got caught up on the entire run of the show over the past 9 months, just in time to partake in the epic finale as it airs. This will actually mark the first time I've watched a Lost episode on broadcast TV, in what promises to be a major television event on par with the series finale of M.A.S.H., with the minor difference that the series finale of M.A.S.H. would probably have made more sense to somebody who hadn't watched every single preceding episode of the series. Also, presumably there won't be a touching scene involving the death of a ragtag group of Chinese musician-soldiers, although it's possible.
Full disclosure: I've never really been that invested in the central mysteries of Lost being resolved in any meaningful way, so I doubt I'll wind up being that critical of whatever is aired tonight. Actually, the looseness and craziness of Lost is one of the things I like best about the show, along with the creators' willingness to screw with the audience, up to and including the time-travel and war-between-gods storylines of the past couple seasons. That antipenultimate episode two weeks ago, which focused almost entirely on two peripheral characters, used child actors, and didn't advance the main plot at all? I loved that shit. It was like that first-season South Park that pre-empted the reveal of Cartman's father with Terrance and Philip. Also, it inspired somebody on the Internet to make this:

I know the plurality of the Lost fanbase is expecting some sort of mindblower that'll tie all the unanswered mysteries together in a neat package, but I'm halfway hoping for something that'll piss people off. It'd be fitting. Narrative blue balls is the real secret ingredient of Lost.

8:01 PM: Wait - they're starting with a character montage set to a maudlin score? DO NOT WANT.

8:03: Desmond gets my vote for best Lost character, hands-down. Kate is probably the worst, particularly when she's whining (which is always) so her inclusion somewhat dampens my enjoyment of this scene.

8:06: Before the first commercial break, we've already had two self-referential winks at this show's tropes (Desmond refusing to explain anything to Kate, and the Sawyer-Kate quipping about telling her she can't come along). They'd better restrain this shit or it's going to be a long couple of hours.

8:09: I have to admit that I like Hurley a lot better this last season, although I can't quite put my finger on why. Maybe it's the fact that he actually serves some sort of narrative purpose now.

8:13: Ben Linus is my second-favorite Lost character. I'm wondering what kind of angle he's playing by allying with BlackLocke.

8:15: Could do without seeing Bernard and Rose again, but whatever.

8:18: Remember when you didn't shudder at the previews for Adam Sandler movies? That Grown-Ups movie looks like an elaborate parody rather than an actual movie.

8:20: There's Miles, aka the only remaining ethnic minority character in the main storyline since they killed off all the others in one scene three episodes ago. I'm not counting Rose in that tally because she doesn't count.

8:24: Is it racist that I've always been indifferent to the Sun-Jin storyline? And how many more flash-sideways epiphanies are we going to have to sit through in this episode? I'm guessing a lot - at least Kate, Sayid, Charlie, and Sawyer are still in the pipe.

8:31: Now Richard Alpert is mortal and coincidentally no longer suicidal.

8:33: Also, Frank Lapides survived the submarine explosion, because he's white.

8:34: Knowing wink number 3: "You're sort of the obvious choice." - BlackLocke to GodJack

8:36: Oh, right. Toy Story 3 is coming out this year. I hope it lives up to the second one.

8:39: I'm kind of indifferent to the revelation that Juliet is Jack's ex-wife in flash-sideways world.

8:43: Now GodJack and BlackLocke are throwing Desmond into the magic waterfall for some reason that I don't understand.

8:44: The Target ads featuring the smoke monster as an ad for a smoke detector sale is a bit much. I guess a bit of craven selling-out during the finale isn't going to hurt the show's legacy. Wait, now there's one for keyboards featuring the countdown-reset stuff from Season 2.

8:45: I wonder if the producers of the Ashton Kutcher-Katherine Heigl flick Killers cast their movie based on the tops of nationwide surveys of most annoying celebrities, male and female division.

8:49: Remember the Seinfeld series finale, where they shoehorned in every bit character in the show's history? This is turning into that. Boone and Shannon just showed up in flash-sideways world.

8:51: I kind of like the way Lost turned Claire into the new Rosseau this season.

8:53: I hope Desmond doesn't die halfway through this thing. That would suck.

8:54: I'm up for seeing Get Him To The Greek. That character was the best thing about Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

8:55: "Doing more and trying more depends on your attitude, not your birth control!" Isn't the birth control pill something that sells itself? Why is this shit necessary?

8:59: Basic outline for this episode: "Remember all those elaborate character connections we developed over five-plus seasons? We're going to recreate all of them at the rate of one every 30 seconds over the course of an hour and a half!" It comes across as kind of pat, which is something I always felt Lost did a pretty good job of avoiding.

9:02: Now Desmond is down in the magic fountain, which is shooting magic light at him, which doesn't really affect him because he's special. He pulls out a big rock blocking a hole in the fountain and everything goes dark. So the wine-bottle stopper metaphor for the island as presented by Jacob wasn't really a metaphor at all. I've noticed that making past elements of the show seem retroactively less subtle is sort of a theme of this episode.

9:04: Now BlackLocke can feel pain, just in time for a brief fistfight with GodJack. Guess that means the rules about the gods not being able to attack and kill each other are rendered null and void. That probably frees BlackLocke up to thin out the character count a little, as this episode has been disappointingly short on shocking deaths so far.


9:08: You can get breakfast at motherfucking Subway now?

9:10: A scene where characters have to deliver a baby without the help of a doctor? What's next, a hilarious dilemma with Sawyer inadvertently making dates with two women on the same night?

9:14: Speaking of retroactive effects, this tearjerker reunion bullshit really flies in the face of Lost's former willingness to kill off major characters. Charlie's dead, damn it, and I liked it that way!

9:17: Now an epic cliffside smackdown between BlackLocke and GodJack, aka the moment we've been anxiously awaiting for at least five days. The fact that Lost took so long to settle on a central conflict kind of hampers this episode's ability to convey a sense of climax. Is anybody really that invested in the Jacob vs. Man in Black deal?

9:22: Kate shoots BlackLocke in the back and GodJack kicks him off the cliff. Where is this going exactly?

9:24: Wait, now the characters are showing wounds they get in the main storyline in the flash-sideways scenes? Is the idea that everyone's respawning from the island into the flash-sideways world, first-person shooter style?

9:31: Sawyer: "Sure don't feel like it's over!" The contrast with all the happy people in the flash-sideways world kind of sucks the tension out of what's happening on the island, whatever that is.

9:35: I'm sure there are a lot of people that were thrilled to see Jack and Kate kiss and say "I love you." Not me! I remember when this show was a sci-fi mystery deal instead of a buncha sentimental nonsense.

9:44: Why did Sawyer taking a candy bar from Juliet trigger the crossover memory when the two or three scenes of him bantering with Kate we've seen in the flash-sideways arc this season didn't? I don't recall Juliet ever giving him a candy bar on the island, but him and Kate were sniping at each other all the time. I guess this is supposed to be some bullshit about true love, right? Maybe this explains why Jacob didn't select any gay people as candidates. Actually, if you think about it, this sort of makes Lost an incredibly elaborate allegory about the superiority of heterosexuality. Don't let me find out that the "defend traditional marriage" crowd was behind this show the whole time.

9:55: Now there's some crap about Hurley being the new defender of the island. Nobody cares! I wonder if Ben Linus is going to kill Hurley out of jealousy. Wait, is Ben Linus gay? Him being evil and all, that would fit nicely into my theory, if I could remember what it was that triggered him in the flash-sideways world. Or did that not happen to him? It's hard to keep this shit straight.

10:00: Now Kate's giving some reassuring words about motherhood to Claire, furthering this episode's quest to leave no stone of sentimentality unturned.

10:02: Jack puts the long stone back in the hole to try and stop the destruction of the island. This could also be seen as a visual representation of the civilizing power of heterosexuality if one were so inclined. As I am, seeing as it's the only way I can seem to get any enjoyment out of this episode.

10:11: Now Locke is going to Eloise Hawking's temple in the flash-sideways world. Ben Linus is there and he gives some sort of tearjerker apology to Locke about how he was jealous of him because he was "special." He also says that he "has some things he needs to work out." This seems to strengthen my Linus-is-gay theory considerably.

10:13: There's also a shot of Locke rising from his wheelchair and walking that would have been as poignant as it was intended to be if Locke hadn't been walking for THE ENTIRE FUCKING SERIES.

10:15: Now Linus is giving Hurley some self-actualizing pep talk about being the guardian of the island. Then Hurley makes Ben his Richard Alpert.

10:16: Hurley, to Ben, in the flash-sideways: "You were a good number 2." Ben, in return: "You were a great number 1, Hugo!" This is maybe the gayest exchange of dialogue in the history of dramatic representation. I'm actually kind of shocked at how robust this theory of mine is turning out to be.

10:20: Jack's dad is apparently alive in the flash-sideways? Is this the Man in Black's escape from the island or some sort of allusion to the similarly bullshit ending of Contact? And why is there so much crying in this episode?

10:23: Now Jack's dad is talking about the importance of friendship and some touchy-feely crap about "moving on." Apparently they're in heaven or purgatory or some such nonsense.

10:24: Now all of the show's characters are having an ice-cream social in the church. Lots of hugging is involved. How come Mr. Eko, Michael, and Ana-Lucia don't make the cut while Charlie and Boone do? Did Hurley, Sun and Jin fulfill the token minority quotient?

10:28: Notice how all the male and female characters are cuddling up to one another in a church, aka the only place where romantic unions can be consecrated in the eyes of God almighty. My theory will not be defied!

10:30: Jack dies on the island as the rest of the survivors escape on the jet. Roll credits. Brief review: this finale sucked.

Suspect Zero liveblog

I wasn't sure if I was going to do one of these this week, but it so happens that I was cruising Netflix Watch Instantly, which functions as an online repository of every shitty movie ever made and twelve or so good ones, when I stumbled across Suspect Zero, which I vaguely recall hearing about at the time of its release. I read the description of the movie, which I'll reproduce verbatim here:

A serial killer is on the loose, and FBI agent Thomas Mackelway is on the case, sifting through clues to uncover the criminal's identity. But there's one unusual twist: The bloodthirsty felon's victims of choice are other serial killers.

I can't pass up a movie that sells itself on its sheer density of serial kilers. Plus, it's in high-def. 

0:30: The credits are in a scratchy font that's overlaid with a distortion effect, which means that this movie has managed to rip-off of Seven before the first scene even begins.

1:15: We open on a diner in the rain, which could also be considered a ripoff of Seven, although I guess Seven doesn't really have a copyright on rain in movies. Although it probably could.

3:43: Ben Kingsley sits down across from a fat man and starts up a stereotypical "crazy person conversation" by asking invasive questions and by showing the fat man some pencil sketches, which I guess we're supposed to assume are crazy person drawings.

5:25: The fat man gets in his car and starts driving away nervously. I wonder how long it's going to take before we find out that he's really a serial killer.

6:55: Ben Kingsley is hiding in the fat man's backseat pulling on surgical gloves! He shows one of his "creepy" drawings and implies that he's going to kill the fat man. End scene. I'm impressed that nobody who made this movie was tempted to put any sort of clever spin in lifting the old killer in the backseat urban legend.

8:15: Hey, Aaron Eckhart's in this movie, playing an FBI agent who's been transferred to Albuquerque from Dallas. The office also contains the guy who played Boyd in Dollhouse and someone who had a bit role on lost.

10:14: Now Aaron Eckhart's getting some strange faxes of missing people marked for his eyes only.

12:15: Aaron Eckhart and Boyd from Dollhouse go to investigate the death of the fat guy from the first scene. The Albuquerque police/FBI are being portrayed as

13:22: Did I mention that the score for this movie is a combination of vaguely Native American woodwinds and chanting? It's clearly supposed to be arty, but it comes off as kind of annoying. Also, Ben Kingsley's doing some sort of guided imagery meditation and having some sort of psychic vision of Aaron Eckhart investigating the dead fat guy's car, which he draws a picture of.

17:13: Now Trinity from The Matrix is here, who is also an FBI agent from Dallas sent to help with the fat guy's murder. They're reviewing pictures of forensic evidence on a table in the middle of a diner. Are they allowed to do that?

20:23: Aaron Eckhart and Trinity from The Matrix are alluding to a boring backstory when they find a dead guy in the trunk of a car in the diner's parking lot with the movie's logo carved into the back of his chest.

21:00: Remember when I said this movie was trying to rip off Seven? I was wrong. It's trying to rip off Twin Peaks. Inexplicably, it's apparently doing so by shooting on the crappiest digital video I've ever seen and having all the actors to deliver their lines with no intonation, and not setting any sort of context for what the hell is going on.

26:12: Aaron Eckhart and Trinity find Ben Kingsley's lair. He has a bunch of clippings of newspapers that detail how Aaron Eckhart got in trouble by arresting a killer in another state without an extradition treaty. This is reiterated in a flashback scene that also intimates that Aaron Eckhart also has psychic powers.

31:10: I need to point out that there appears to have been no attempt whatsoever to employ lighting in this movie.


31:52: Now we're in psychic-vision again (read: a red filter slapped across a canted long-shot) and we're seeing someone who's probably Ben Kingsley sketching Aaron Eckhart's face and writing "Heightened Awareness. Chronic Insomnia. Acute Migranes. He Is The One." Is this all an elaborate clinical trial for Excedrin PM?

32:13: Another arty montage of Ben Kingsley drawing and more psychic visions of Aaron Eckhart doing police stuff.

34:44: More serial killin's afoot! Some redneck abducts a woman in the parking lot of a bar and rapes her in a truck. Then Ben Kingsley shows up, pulls him out of the window of the truck, and kicks his ass, which seems physically improbable. Then he kills him.

37:40: It turns out this victim is the same guy that got off when Aaron Eckhart flagrantly disregarded state jurisdiction statutes. More ambient music and lots of close-ups of Aaron Eckhart's face, presumably conveying his harried emotional state. Aaron Eckhart finds a message left by Ben Kingsley saying "You're Welcome Tom"

41:11: Now they're at the FBI office talking about how the locations of the bodies match GPS coordinates found at Ben Kingsley's old room. I can envision the meeting where the writer and director of this movie are desperately trying to think of plot devices that haven't been used in a thousand other serial killer movies. "I know - GPS coordinates!"

42:28: Now Aaron Eckhart's getting a message from a "professor of criminal biology." What the fuck does that mean? The movie, of course, doesn't bother to even make it sound like a real thing. Aaron Eckhart goes to visit this guy, who has a bunch of Native American crap on his walls. Cue more fucking flute music. The professor of criminal biology explains that Ben Kingsley was once a student of his, his Anakin Skywalker if you will, and that he had a pet theory about somebody he called the "suspect zero," who is basically a serial killer that nobody can tell is a serial killer because he's so good at being a serial killer there's no consistent pattern to the murders.

44:33: Aaron Eckhart asks the professor of criminal biology if Ben Kingsley might be the suspect zero. "That's a plausible theory." Based on this, we can safely assume that there's no way that Ben Kingsley is the real suspect zero and that it's going to turn out to be Aaron Eckhart himself in a shocking twist ending in about 45 minutes. The "he is the one" thing would seem to foreshadow this. Backup possibility: it's Trinity from The Matrix.

47:42: Now Ben Kingsley is at a funeral in a black church and is crying for whatever reason.

49:11: Aaron Eckhart is looking over all of the crazy scribblings that Ben Kingsley has sent him. One of them is a drawing of a vagina. He's also having psychic visions, which are different from Ben Kingsley's because they are grainy black and white.

50:12: Now Aaron Eckhart goes over to Trinity's house (in the rain, natch) and mumbles a bunch of stuff about how he's close to cracking open the case and also expresses some generic torment about his headaches. It's revealed that he and Trinity have a romantic past. Have I mentioned this is a terrible movie?

53:13: Aaron Eckhart goes to question the fat guy's wife again on a hunch, but she can't talk to him for very long because she has a PTA meeting to go to. You'd think she'd take a break from that shit considering her husband just died. As she leaves, Aaron Eckhart notices that Ben Kingsley's sent him a bunch of drawings of the house, so he breaks back into it and finds a big trunk in the attic with a bunch of serial killer stuff. Then in a voiceover scene Aaron Eckhart tells us that the FBI also figures out that the other dead guy who Aaron Eckhart and Trinity found in the car a half-hour ago was also a serial killer. We are now officially caught up to the amount of information that was contained in the two-sentence Netflix summary.

1:00:23: Now Ben Kingsley gets pulled over by a cop and has an essentially pointless conversation where he claims to be a former FBI agent. This was also mentioned earlier. Ben Kingsley sends Aaron Eckhart a message to come over to his weird basement deal. When he gets there, there's a filmstrip playing that basically says that Ben Kingsley really was in the FBI, in some sort of special experimental deal codenamed "Project Icarus" which isn't at all a retarded codename for a special project. Was "Project Hindenburg" already taken?

1:07:08: Ben Kingsley's doing his scribbling thing again, and seeing another psychic vision of what's probably another murder victim, only you can't tell because it's just a kid on a swing who then disappears and his mother starts frantically running around looking for him. During this time, Aaron Eckhart is tearing wallpaper off of a wall for some reason and revealing a mural of a black hole or some shit. Apparently the mural is of all of the murder victims that Ben Kingsley has psychically seen.

1:13:11: Now Aaron Eckhart is trying to convince Trinity and Boyd from Dollhouse that Ben Kingsley is a good guy. Now apparently he's chasing some trucker who's abducting little kids. Yes, all this is supposed to be happening in one part of New Mexico.

1:15:45: Aaron Eckhart starts tracking the child killer using his psychic visions or just happens to catch sight of him on the roadway (I can't tell). Then Ben Kingsley shows up and kidnaps Aaron Eckhart somehow.

1:18:33: Aaron Eckhart's hogtied on the floor and Ben Kingsley is yelling about killing him but doesn't for some reason. Then it cuts to them riding in a car where Ben Kingsley is talking about being psychic and how it sucks because he doesn't know how to not be psychic anymore and he's always seeing murder in his mind. What a crybaby.

1:22:34: They drive to a farm somewhere that has a ton of bodies buried in mounds in the backyard and then Ben Kingsley given Aaron Eckhart a gun and they start to chase the serial killer, who's driving a refrigerated truck. Everybody goes off the road and flips over for reasons that are not evident. Aaron Eckhart chases the serial killer guy on foot while Trinity saves the kidnapped kid. More fruity music plays in the background.

1:29:13: The serial killer trucker manages to get the drop on Aaron Eckhart even though Aaron Eckhart is chasing him through the desert, has a gun, and is psychic. Aaron Eckhart turns the tables and kills the serial killer with a big rock. Then Ben Kingsley drops to his knees and put Aaron Eckhart's gun to his head in an exact replica of the staging of the climactic scene from - yes - Seven.

1:33:15: Ben Kingsley goes into an outrageously hammy speech about how he wants to die because he can't take the psychic visions any more and how he wants Aaron Eckhart to take his place as the new psychic avenger or some such. Aaron Eckhart refuses to kill him, but then Ben Kingsley pulls out his knife to attack him and Trinity shoots him instead.

1:36:11: Ben Kingsley's final words: "So...tired." Me, too. This is one of the most incompetent movies I've ever seen. It's not entertaining-bad, it's hack film-student bad. It didn't even have the decency to shoehorn in a wildly implausible twist ending. Also, I never want to hear Native American music ever again.

The greatness of multiplayer Halo

Above: Blood Gulch, site of many fond memories. There's a shotgun in that building on the bottom screen!

The original Halo has a very special place in my heart. Not only was it one of the first games that I owned for the first Xbox, way back when it came out in 2001, the multiplayer was also a staple of my entire college career. After the massive popularity of the online-enabled Halo 2 and Halo 3, it's easy to forget how unlikely it was that the multiplayer in the original became a phenomenon in its own right. Halo, however, came out at a time when splitscreen was the only game in town. You could theoretically get up to 16 players into a game by networking four consoles with four controllers each, but who the hell would have the space and the resources to pull that off? When I first got the game, I had all of two controllers to work with, which meant that my friends and I were limited to one-on-one deathmatch. Mind you, Halo was not designed for one-on-one, most of the maps were actually targeted for 6-12 players. It should have been mindnumbingly boring. Instead, it was glorious.

     
Playing a multiplayer shooter with only two competitors dials the pace way back. With Halo, it turned a chaotic blastfest into a tactical affair, where long periods of mutual stalking build up to an explosive flurry of moves and countermoves. This worked so well in Halo for two reasons: the regenerating shield system, which is now an industry standard but was completely innovative and new at the time, and the fact that the default spawn loadout included a cache of grenades and a remarkably effective scoped pistol. In Halo, you can hold your own even if you wind up in a fight before you can find a better gun, and if an opponent gets the upper hand and starts inflicting damage, you have the option of falling back and recouping. Compared to other shooters of the time, Halo had a unique and fluid rhythm that fluctuated constantly between defense and offense, with no one tactic guaranteeing success at any moment. Not only was it fun to play, it was fun to watch - which was important, because with only two controllers, somebody would always be watching and waiting for their turn.

Later, when I bought some more controllers, we started played 3 and 4 player matches, which brought back some of the chaos and randomness of the game. One thing we did semi-regularly is setting up King of the Hill matches (where you score points from standing in a random spot on the map that moves every 30 seconds) where every player spawned with a rocket launcher by default. This turned the game into a kind of Warner Bros. cartoon, where within 5 seconds of getting into scoring position, you'd be nailed by multiple explosions that left you staring at your corpse as it pinwheels across the map through the third person death camera that's one of Halo multiplayer's subtler pleasures. Even though this was probably the least skill-intensive permutation of Halo competition, it was hilariously fun to play.

I skipped Halo 2 multiplayer, mostly because the game came out when I was in grad school and didn't really have online access or anyone to play splitscreen with. I did play quite a bit of Halo 3 online, which I enjoyed. Since that game concluded the story arc begun in the first game, I figured that it would wind up being the apex of the series and basically assumed that any subsequent games would be less inspired or more minor entries, which seemed to be born out by Halo 3: ODST, which was a lot of fun, but hewed pretty closely to the basic gameplay formula of the parent game. So when the two-week multiplayer beta test for this fall's Halo: Reach opened up to ODST owners, I figured that I'd download it and play a couple matches to check out the graphics and new weapons and that would be that.

You can guess how that turned out. I've been totally hooked on Halo: Reach. It's probably a good thing that the beta ends on Monday, because I'd probably keep playing it into the forseeable future, even though the selection of maps for the base game is limited to two (there's a couple other maps that are devoted to specialized modes, one of which is a kind of variant on the Assault gametype from Unreal Tournament). Reach is a chronological prequel to the existing Halo games, although it's not going to feature the same characters, and it seems pretty clear to me that Bungie's using the opportunity to bring back some of the feel of the original Halo multiplayer: there's no more dual-wielding mechanic, no more grenade types beyond frag and plasma, and the scoped pistol is back in slightly modified form as a default weapon. More importantly, they've tuned the game down substantially away from Halo 3's emphasis on close combat - the default strategy of running straight at an opponent while firing the shitty default assault rifle until you're close enough for a melee blow doesn't work nearly as well now, and the grenades are substantially more effective. There's also a mechanic where rapid-firing precision weapons reduces accuracy. All in all, the feel of the game is a lot closer to the tactical balance of the original Halo, and I love it. 

There's also a lot of new stuff, with the most significant addition being the substitution of persistent abilities (jetpack, sprint, invisibility, or power armor) picked from a class-selection menu that replace the temporary power-ups of previous Halo outings. I was skeptical about this when I first heard they were doing it, but it's amazing how well-implemented it is in giving you more options to alter the flow of combat without breaking the game. I tend to favor the sprint ability, which lets me close into medium range more quickly to better use the pistol, but I've seen other players use each of the other powers in smart ways, and you're free to equip an different one between lives a'la the Call of Duty class system. The new weapons are also very cool and surprisingly substantial in terms of differences from Halo 3 - pretty much everything has been rethought or replaced. Below is a shot of me, captured using the Theater mode that's been brought over from the last game, in the process of taking out somebody with the new grenade launcher:

So I'm seriously impressed by Halo: Reach: it's much more of a new-feeling game than I was expecting given the wide acclaim and huge sales figures of Halo 3. The design choices evoke some serious nostalgia for the first Halo and all the good times I had playing it back in college, while also adding a bunch of new and modern wrinkles to the gameplay. This is definitely a must-buy for me when it comes out later this year, and based on the small taste available through the beta, I can see myself getting more than my money's worth out of the online multiplayer.

Law Abiding Citizen liveblog

"(I)f trying to be intense and serious and succeeding only in looking completely goddamn ridiculous were an Olympic sport, Law Abiding Citizen would have been crowned its Michael Phelps based solely on the two-and-a-half minute span presented above." Me, after seeing the trailer for Law Abiding Citizen back in August of last year.

Join me to find out how far Gerard Butler will go to avenge his murdered family after being failed by the justice system. My guess: further than Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence, but not as far as Charles Bronson in Death Wish.

0:00: I have a question: how come the main takeaway from the success of 300 was "Gerard Butler should be a major mainstream movie star"? I haven't made a habit of seeing any of his movies since then - maybe I'm missing out, and The Ugly Truth is actually a new-era The Philadelphia Story - but he strikes me as a puffier Russell Crowe with the fratboy aloofness of Vince Vaughn. Now that I think about it, I guess I can see why a casting director would go for something like that. Though I wonder how he's going to fare in the Sam Worthington era.

0:00: Fun fact: Law Abiding Citizen was written by Kurt Wimmer, the writer/director of the underrated Equilibrium, which achieved a kind of greatness due to featuring some seriously inventive action sequences and Christian Bale in full-on overachiever mode. I don't know if the writing really distinguished itself in that one, though.

1:34: Gerard Butler gets hit in the face with a baseball bat by some robbers after a whopping 42 seconds of character establishment (summary: he has a cute family). The robbers rape his wife and kill his kid, but don't appear to actually steal anything except for a trophy from the mantelplace, presumably awarded to Gerard Butler for Family Least Likely To Be Killed.

3:35: Now we open on ambitious young prosecutor Jamie Foxx, being ambitious and young. He decides that he can't take the risk of prosecuting both the robbers, so he makes a deal to send one of them to Death Row while convicting the other one on a lesser charge. "This is just how the justice system works!" Gerard Butler is sad.

9:12: Now the deal is closed, and of course the more evil robber is the one that has the lighter sentence. The more evil robber shakes Jamie Foxx's hand and says "It's nice when the system works" in an evil voice. Oh, the irony! Gerard Butler looks on with a look of slight annoyance.

11:34: Now Jamie Foxx is talking to his pregnant wife's belly.

11:55: TEN YEARS LATER - this movie really doesn't waste a lot of time on exposition. Now Jamie Foxx is a slightly older but still ambitious prosecutor. His wife is bitching at him about never making it to their kid's piano recitals because he's so invested in his work.

14:00: It turns out that he's going to the execution of the less-evil robber that was sentenced to death, because he totally has to be there and couldn't possibly miss that to see his daughter play in a recital. There's some classy intercutting between the recital and the execution that probably should have been a match on action, but isn't.

14:15: This movie's commitment to not trying to make its actors look 10 years older despite having flashed forward ten years is truly impressive.

16:15: The execution goes bad! It's supposed to be a basic painless lethal injection, but instead it causes the less evil robber's heart to explode! Jamie Foxx is not happy and wants answers.

20:34: Now the more evil robber is running from the cops because they want to question him. But Gerard Butler calls him on his cellphone using the voice masking deal from Scream and guides him to safety. Then he pretends to be a cop using a wig and fake mustache and lets himself be captured by the more evil robber, only it's really a setup so Gerard Butler can turn the tables on him by letting the robber steal a fake gun that has spikes that come out of the grip.

22:00: The more evil robber is paralyzed with "toxin from a Caribbean puffer fish" that immobilizes him but still lets him feel pain. Gerard Butler does some Saw type torture stuff and cuts the more evil robber up into pieces.

24:19: The prosecutor team is now trying to figure out who could have messed with the lethal injection device. This is not what the intro to Law & Order (RIP) let me to believe prosecutors do. They find out that the more evil robber has been chopped up in a warehouse owned by Gerard Butler. We also learn that Gerard Butler is a "tinkerer" who holds "19 patents" which I think is shorthand for "super-genius." 

29:15: Now they're off to arrest Gerard Butler, who takes his shirt off before the cops get there for some reason. He's wearing the bracelet his daughter gave him in the first 30 seconds of the movie. The prosecutors are helping to search the crime scene, because there are no other crimes in the city of Philadelphia that need their attention.

31:20: "We have zero evidence. We're going to need a confession!" Isn't the clear motive and the fact that the murder was committed on his property enough to make a case?

32:10: Jamie Foxx's daughter gets a DVD that she thinks is of her recital but is actually of Gerard Butler carving up the more evil robber.

33:30: Jamie Foxx is now interrogating Gerard Butler in the middle of a comically overlarge cell that looks like something from the third act of The Silence of the Lambs.


34:20: "You might want to cancel your 12:30 lunch with Judge Roberts." Gerard Butler really is a super-genius! He must have hacked into Jamie Foxx's Outlook calendar.

36:15: "You've got me confused, I don't deal with prison stuff." - Jamie Foxx, who based on what we've seen so far does pretty much everything except prosecute criminals, including probably planning the meals in the prison cafeteria.

38:15: Now they're trying to trace Gerard Butler's holdings, which are registered through a Panamanian dummy corporation.You can tell the movie is trying to make a half-assed nod to real police work here, while hoping that the viewer doesn't know what prosecutors actually do.


40:35: This movie is kind of a rip-off of the little remembered Anthony Hopkins-Ryan Gosling movie Fracture, which was itself kind of a rip-off of Primal Fear.

41:00: We see Jamie Foxx doing some actual prosecuting! More specifically, requesting that Gerard Butler not be granted bail. Gerard Butler gives a speech in his defense, which uses the words "law abiding citizen," and cites precedent. The judge is impressed and looks ready to grant him bail. Then he gives another speech about how the justice system is too lenient and says to the judge "I feed you a couple precedents and you jump on them like a bitch in heat!"

41:33: Gerard Butler is right about the American justice system. If this were say, good old Soviet Russia, criminals would be shot in the back of the head immediately after a show trial and a bill for the bullet would be sent to their surviving family. The way it's supposed to be!

48:13: Now Gerard Butler blackmails Jamie Foxx into buying him a steak lunch because he kidnapped the more evil robber's attorney and buried him alive with a bunch of oxygen tanks. They don't get to save the attorney because Gerard Butler didn't get his lunch exactly on time. Meanwhile, Gerard Butler kills his cellmate with the bone from his steak.

58:15: Jamie Foxx visits Gerard Butler in solitary confinement and gives him back the bracelet that his daughter made him. So far, there are shockingly few correctional officers in this prison.

59:20: Now some government agent guy is revealing that Gerard Butler is a super-smart brainy government operative who can plan anything. Actual dialogue: "Just assume this guy can hear and see everything you're doing. Every move he makes, it means something." I can't help but think this dialogue wouldn't be necessary to establish the character if Gerard Butler were a better actor.

1:00:34: Now Jamie Foxx is talking to the judge, who's going to let them keep Gerard Butler in solitary confinement even though it's against his constitutional rights (but not really, because he has committed a murder THE DAY BEFORE). Then the judge's cell phone rings and she picks it up and then the phone shoots her in the head, because that can happen.

1:03:41: More ranting from Gerard Butler about how the justice system doesn't work and he's going to bring it down with his terrorist campaign. I wonder if Nancy Grace did an uncredited punch-up on this script?

1:05:15: "Release me before 6 AM and drop all charges." "Or what?" "Or I kill... everyone!"

1:06:00: Now they're talking about Panamanian treaty law. Those corporate accounts are the real key to solving this murder case!

1:08:44: It's 6 AM - what's going to happen?

1:09:47: Gerard Butler kills Jamie Foxx' attractive deputy DA with a carbomb! He also planted two or three other carbombs that go off without killing anybody, because explosions are cool.


1:12:15: More actual dialogue, from a new character who appears to be a boss of some sort: "Let me get this straight. Not only do we know who did it, we have him locked up and he's still killing people? You boys sure fucked this one up. The press is going to kill us!" I like how in the world of Law Abiding Citizen the justice system is horribly inept at locking people up and the press is apparently voracious in speaking truth to power. That's cutting-edge social realism.

1:14:35: Now Jamie Foxx is beating up Gerard Butler and Gerard Butler is taunting him by saying that he's planning "von Clausewitz shit, total fucking war." How philosophical!

1:16:20: Older, wiser prosecutor at cute junior DA's funeral: "Did we bring this all on ourselves?" Cursed by their own hubris!

1:18:14: Now the prosecutors are leaving the funeral and they get ambushed by what appears to be a 50 caliber machine gun and rocket launcher mounted on the Mars Rover, controlled by an unseen figure with gloved hands. The older, wise prosecutor gets blown up.

1:20:52: Now, the person who was yelling at Jamie Foxx two scenes ago, who is apparently the mayor, is promoting him to head DA. Then she gives a briefing to Jamie Foxx and a couple other people about how the city of Philadelphia is too scared to go outside because of the killings

1:23:38: Back to the tax records, which is turning out to be the retarded sister of this movie's subplots. Jamie Foxx has a breakthrough and finds a property that Gerard Butler bought through his dummy corporation. He and the asshole DEA agent from Con Air break in while making more disparaging comments about civil rights. They find a big mining tunnel hidden under a car that leads into the prison that Gerard Butler is in, complete with an underground armory and a bunch of disguises. In an unbelievably half-assed attempt to make this movie look smarter than it clearly is, there's also a plaque with a quote from von Clausewitz that looks like it was produced by the custom sign department at a Staples.

1:28:10: "He tunneled into every cell!" Yes, this is actually what happens.

1:29:04: Now Gerard Butler is at City Hall disguised as a cleaning person, because apparently he's been operating a cleaning service for several years in anticipation of this plot. Jamie Foxx and the asshole DEA agent from Con Air run over to City Hall without calling for backup, probably because they're prosecutors, not law enforcement, and therefore aren't allowed to call for backup.

1:33:42: They find a bomb Gerard Butler left, but Jamie Foxx decides not to evacuate the building, becuase obviously that's what Gerard Butler would want them to do. Gerard Butler goes back to prison and watches the mayor's meeting on a device that looks like a mix between a portable TV and a piece of gym equipment.

1:36:09: Jamie Foxx is waiting in Gerard Butler's cell when he gets back. They have their fifth conversation about how Gerard Butler is betraying the memory of his family by killing everyone and Jamie Foxx tried to talk Gerard Butler out of blowing up City Hall because it will make him feel bad. Gerard Butler hits the detonator anyway.

1:39:15: Jamie Foxx moved the bomb to underneath the bed in Gerard Butler's cell! Gerard Butler blows up in a slow motion shot while looking at the bracelet his daughter made for him. Also the bomb appears to take out a good chunk of the prison wall, which you would think Jamie Foxx would have taken into account when formulating this plan.

1:41:18: And now Jamie Foxx finally makes it to one of his daughter's music recitals, having learned a valuable lesson about fatherhood in one of the scenes we must not have seen. End of movie!

Bonus: There's a special feature on the DVD called "The Justice of Law Abiding Citizen" The self-aggrandizing special features attached to crappy movies are often times even more entertaining than the movies themselves, as they give the filmmakers a chance to engage in wild hyperbole about thematic elements that are either barely present or poorly handled in the finished product. The interview with Dan Brown on the DVD for The DaVinci Code is a bona-fide classic of this type.


From Law Abiding Citizen director F. Gary Gray: "The best thing about this concept is that it doesn't fit into the normal Hollywood formula." Exactly! There are formula movies about people taking violent revenge for the murders of their families, and there are formula movies about Machiavellian geniuses implementing ridiculously complex criminal plots while under the direct surveillance of authorities, but only Law Abiding Citizen has the iconoclastic spirit to adopt every single element of both of those types of movies and knit them together in a semi-coherent fashion. Also, whoever produced this special feature had the sheer balls to run that quote over a clip from the movie featuring a huge explosion.

From producer Lucas Foster: "Every scene is about 'are we really receiving justice or not in the modern age?' And I don't know if we are." I think that Lucas Foster is right, and I predict that one day, not too far from now, Law Abiding Citizen will be on the curriculum for Ethics courses in some of our nation's most forward thinking community colleges.

Also from Lucas Foster: "We think of the justice system as something where, when someone is arrested, and they're put into the system, that's more or less the end of it." Um, we do? Even someone who's knowledge of the legal system is based entirely on TV dramas has a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the justice system than this.

There's actually a former prosecutor explaining how when a felony murder is committed, everyone involved is considered culpable. She also says that Jamie Foxx in the movie would have a tough time trying the case of Gerard Butler's family's murder because it's based in eyewitness testimony. Then another former prosecutor says "eyewitness testimony can hold up, and frequently does, but there are no guarantees."

There's also a special feature about the visual effects of the movie, one of which is about how they added snow in one scene for a "visual, ethereal vibe." Other than that, it's the typical boring special feature where the producer brag about how much of their movie is unnecessarily produced inside of a computer.

Iron Man 2 review (in five brief points)

A

Above: The most difficult part of scripting an Iron Man movie is probably coming up with reason after reason for his helmet to be off.

1.) Is there any other comic book movie franchise where the action set pieces feel like an unwelcome distraction from the character beats and dialogue exchanges? The first act of Iron Man 2 has a great action scene that takes place on the track of the Monaco Grand Prix, but the other battle moments are sort of lukewarm. The final fight sequence is better than its counterpart in the first movie, but isn't anything that's going to have you out of your seat and cheering. I think this has something to do with the fact that all the work the movies put into establishing how badass the Iron Man suit is makes it hard to believe the character ever faces any real threat. All the character banter is still great, though. I'm half-convinced that Robert Downey Jr.'s flippant playboy act can make any movie worth the price of admission. Since I'm starting to think that special effects have reached a point of diminishing returns with regard to making a genuine impression on the viewer, Avatar aside, Iron Man 2's approach is probably a smart one.

2.) The new characters in this movie are really well-cast. Sam Rockwell's Justin Hammer, a glad-handing Tony Stark wanna-be, looks like he's having a ball, and more importantly, fits perfectly with the movie's comic edge. Mickey Rourke was a great choice for the main villain, who's set up as a doppelganger of Iron Man; he plays the character as a taciturn and deeply internal contrast to Tony Stark's showiness and charisma. Scarlett Johansson wears a lot of tight costumes, is mostly successful at affecting a grim determination, and blends in well with her fight double in a pretty well-choreographed. Don Cheadle is good, even though his character is kind of a thankless one, but honestly, when is he ever bad?

3.) Iron Man 2 is definitely worth seeing, but it's not up to the standard of Spider-Man 2 or The Dark Knight in terms of raising the bar. There's some missed opportunities that keep the film from being as good as the first. Like I said above, Mickey Rourke is a kick-ass villain. He plays off of Robert Downey, Jr. incredibly well. Unfortunately, he only does so in a whopping two scenes, one of which doesn't even really count because it's a fight sequence where everyone's wearing masks and blasting each other with lasers. It would have been killer to see the two of them match wits a couple more times in the second and third acts. What do we get instead? Fifty scenes of Mickey Rourke tinkering with electronics in various rooms. Also, there's a subplot about Tony Stark being poisoned by the reactor in his chest that doesn't really get too far off the ground. It's clearly intended to highlight how he's bit off more than he can chew with the Iron Man persona and mission, and that he needs to learn some humility, but that thematic point is somewhat undermined when he solves the problem completely on his own, and again, the movie can't really seem to commit to putting its hero into genuine danger.

4.) That being said, the continuity between this film and the first one is worthy of praise - Iron Man 2 picks up right where the first one left off and establishes the new characters and plot efficiently. There's not much "previously on Iron Man," so if you're fuzzy on the events of the first movie, better hit up Wikipedia before you go to the theater. The Marvel universe coherence effort is still in play, too. Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, introduced in the bit after the credits of the first Iron Man, has a full-on supporting part in the sequel, and the upcoming Avengers superhero-alliance movie continues to be telegraphed apace. There's another little bit after the credits in Iron Man 2 to tease the upcoming Thor movie, so if you are unlike me and have more than a vague understanding of the character of Thor, you may be excited for that.

5.) There's a sequence bridging the second and third act that shamelessly steals from the "Careers in Science" episode from season one of The Venture Bros. If you're familiar with the episode, you'll know it when you see it.

2012 liveblog

Join me as I watch 2009 disasterpalooza flick 2012 on DVD and attempt to convey the experience of watching a megabucks SFX movie through pithy comments on the onscreen action.

0:00: The cover of the 2012 DVD (pictured above) shows Tibet getting hilariously pwned by a tsunami while a monk looks on haplessly. Is it too conspiratorial to theorize that this is a sly attempt to boost the movie's appeal to Chinese audiences?

:30: The credit sequence is a bunch of shots of planets. Is the solar system secretly working for the Mayans?

2:00: Hey, it's Chiwetel Ejiofor, universally beloved for his lead performance in David Mamet's Redbelt! He's apparently playing the Jeff Goldblum role in this movie. Neutrinos are coming from the sun and heating up the Earth's core!

5:50: Oliver Platt has fallen a long, long way from the heady days of Lake Placid.

8:00: Danny Glover is playing the Bill Pullman role. He's giving a grave speech to the G-8 about the world ending.

10:15: There have been approximately 15 scenes in the last 10 minutes, establishing what will no doubt prove to be a totally necessary cast of characters.

12:40: John Cusack, in the Will Smith role, is running late! His regular car won't start, so he has to drive a limo for some reason. Also, his ex-wife won't get off his back. Women!

16:30: One of these backstories is apparently about a conspiracy to use the end of the world to steal famous works of art. No, really.

20:15: Back to Danny Glover's White House. I've noticed that most of the characters in this movie are pretty much the same characters as in Independence Day, except the ones who were white in that movie are now black and vice versa.

24:00: John Cusack and his kids went on a hike in Yellowstone National Park and stumbled upon Chiwetel Ejiofor's secret geology study, which is located on a massive and easily visible location. They talk about John Cusack's book. No, really.

26:15:  "All our scientific advances, all our fancy machines. The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago." - actual dialogue

28:00: Woody Harrelson is playing a kooky character because of course he is. No disasters yet, but John Cusack is apparently getting WiFi in the middle of Yellowstone National Park. His kids are bitching about how much they hate being children of divorce. Fucking kids.

32:00: Woody Harrelson is showing off his "blog," which is actually a Flash animation, to John Cusack. He's telling John Cusack about all the ways in which this movie plans to rip off Deep Impact.

36:45: Scott Templeton from The Wire is John Cusack's ex-wife's annoying new husband. Also, finally an effects shot, set in a supermarket to best facilitate a product placement for Vault energy drinks. It looks fake and stupid.

40:25: All the rich people in the world have been briefed on the end of the world ahead of time and are conspiring to consolidate their power after the cataclysm. Did Naomi Klein write this movie? John Cusack turns out to be a limo driver for a bunch of rich Russian stereotypes and their annoying kids say something that reflects Woody Harrelson's conspiracy theory so John Cusack automatically makes the assumption that it's completely true.


45:30: First big action sequence! It combines a bunch of CGI destruction with rear-projected reverse shots of John Cusack pretending to drive while yelling. Then Scott Templeton from the Wire has to fly a plane out of LA at low altitude as it collapses into the ground, because he hasn't had enough lessons to fly upward. More reaction shots of John Cusack yelling "whoooa."

53:00: Chiwetel Ejiofor's father, a jazz musician on a cruise ship, is introduced to dispense some standard wise old black man wisdom. And John Cusack is going back to Yellowstone to get Woody Harrelson who has some map to the rich people rocket ships. I like how the movie completely skipped over the logic of John Cusack going to Wyoming to take his kids camping instead of one of the many national parks in California.


57:00: Now there's a big volcano blast that looks like a nuclear explosion and throws off comets that John Cusack has to outrun in an RV to get to the airstrip. This action sequence has exactly the same premise as the one 10 minutes ago, but subs in a volcano for an earthquake.

1:05:00: I should mention that the compositing in this movie is horrible. It's about at the level of Conan O'Brien's old bit where he drives his desk around.

1:08:34: Danny Glover is praying in the White House chapel and sharing a pointless nostalgic anecdote with Chiwetel Ejiofor. Glover's idea of portraying gravitas involves standing like he has a rod in his ass and talking like he's recovering from laryngitis. It's something less than convincing. He's delivering a dramatic address to the nation which mercifully cuts out while he's quoting the Bible as something that represents all the faiths of the world.

1:10:23: Third "collapsing airfield" shot of the movie!

1:17:15: An airport control tower was just exploded by volcanic ash somehow.

1:18: 04: Remember when our heroes were flying out of a collapsing LA at low altitude? Get ready for a thrilling sequence of our heroes flying out of a collapsing Las Vegas at low altitude!

1:22:03: Now there's a dialogue sequence between John Cusack's ex-wife and a tertiary Russian trophy girlfriend character. Did anything they shot for this movie get left on the cutting room floor?

1:26:30: Now they're flying over Honolulu, which is being melted down by another volcano. They ought to have named this movie John Cusack Watching Buildings Collapse From The Air. It has an avant-garde quality to it.

1:29:10: Danny Glover's President is now helping to locate the missing father of a little girl. I can't remember the last time I wanted a character in a movie to die so badly.

1:31:05: Vatican City falls apart, crushing the Pope and a bunch of people praying. Most movies would probably choose to either emphasize the power of faith and the human spirit or show the futility of human endeavor in the face of certain death. Not only does 2012 do both, it does so within the same scene and does this over and over again.

1:34:29: Danny Glover finally dies, in the front lawn of the White House, after a huge wave drops an aircraft carrier on top of him. Yes, really - it's awesome. His last words: "Dorothy, I'm coming home." I presume the context for that was in one of the many speeches he gave that I tuned out in the first half of the movie.

1:41:13: The latest plot point: John Cusack and the rich Russians are about to run out of fuel in the middle of the ocean, but come to find out that the Earth's crust has shifted a thousand miles and now they're right where they need to be to catch the spaceship, which is in China. Can't argue with plotting like that!

1:47:40: This movie's commitment to maudlin nostalgic dialogue exchanges is truly heroic. Each of the roughly ten thousand characters has had at least one, and all the black characters have had at least three.

1:52:22: Now a minor character who was onscreen for 30 seconds in the first ten minutes of the movie gets a dramatic death scene.

1:55:10: John Cusack and Scott Templeton from The Wire are bonding over the fact that John Cusack's kids love him despite the fact that Scott Templeton from The Wire actually gives a shit about being a father figure. They're in the back of a pickup truck driven by a Tibetan monk we met in the first act. Also, John Cusack's ex-wife wheedles their way onto one of the spaceships, which are apparently really just big boats, by appealing to Asian mysticism.

2:01:45: Now Chiwetel Ejiofor is making an impassioned speech about altruism and humanity, which everyone listens to despite the fact that they're supposedly 15 minutes away from certain death. And they all agree to open the gates to save everybody in the immediate vicinity, who I guess are mostly rural Chinese peasants and some of the rich people who paid to be on the ship.

2:04:14: The gate winds up crushing Scott Templeton from the Wire to death.

2:08:40: "What is happening? What's going on?" - actual, and apropos, dialogue

2:11:19: Now they're running around the interior of the ship while it's flooding, in a sequence that seems blatantly ripped off from Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon, which I guess they can get away with because nobody saw that movie.

2:12:30: Also, Hollywood can't do CGI water for shit.

2:16:10: John Cusack is going on a "suicide mission" to unjam the gate that killed Scott Templeton from The Wire and is preventing the ship's motors from engaging, which means the ship can't avoid slamming into Mt. Everest. He manages to squeeze in a maudlin speech to one of his kids beforehand.

2:23:00: John Cusack saves the day, but is taking too long to come up for air and everyone is worried that he's dead, except for anyone who's ever seen a movie before.

2:26:30: Flashforward to 27 days past the apocalypse, and everyone seems to be in pretty good spirits. Chiwetel Ejiofor is making romance with Danny Glover's daughter! And John Cusack and his ex-wife are happily back together, which is OK because her husband was ground to death in the gears of a massive door.

2:29:15: Apparently the tectonic shifts worked out in a way that preserved the entire continent of Africa, so that's where the rescue vessels are heading to rebuild civilization. The screenwriters probably meant this to be a powerful allusion to the biological roots of humanity and not a hearty endorsement of colonialism, but it kind of fails at the former while succeeding at the latter.

2:30:34: And that's the movie, save for 8 minutes of credits for effects animators soundtracked to some of the worse music I've ever heard. 

On Further Viewing... L.A. Confidential

Since the fall of 2009, I've been thinking more and more about how the last ten years have affected my outlook and taste. Since I've amassed a pretty decent collection of DVDs dating from the early 2000s, I've decided that it would be fun to revisit the movies that I liked back around the beginning of the decade to get a critical look at how well they've held up. This is the (long overdue) third of the series.

The movie: L.A. Confidential was a critical darling and a pretty successful 1997 pulp-noir film that was more or less overshadowed in the popular imagination by Titanic-mania, although it did net Oscars for Kim Basinger (Best Supporting Actress) and Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson (Best Adapted Screenplay). It's an adaptation of James Ellroy's novel of the same name.

What I thought at the time: I went into L.A. Confidential as a high-schooler thinking that it was going to be lame because of the 1950s period setting. Instead, I was blown away by the labyrinthine plot, violence, and blackhearted cynicism. It was probably one my first exposure to noir as a genre (although it's more of a homage), and it definitely sparked an interest in the form.

On further viewing: As a movie, L.A. Confidential is a great by pretty much any measure, but it's one of the absolute best adaptations ever made. The novel L.A. Confidential is brilliant but unfilmable: the plot of the book is incredibly convoluted and spans decades, and just establishing the sheer amount of characters would take most of the running time of a feature film. The movie trims all that down drastically, yet still manages to capture the spirit of the book to a surprising degree. How?

A big factor is the white-hot laser perfection of the casting. Check this list: along with Basinger, L.A. Confidential features Kevin Spacey when he was still good, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Danny DeVito, James Cromwell, and David Strathairn. Although the plot diverges significantly from the source material, the characters are incredibly faithful, and a surprising amount of Ellroy's world comes through in small details peppered into the background. The screen adaptation smartly plays up the dynamic between underestimated hothead police officer Bud White (Crowe) and coolly analytic careerist detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce). Both actors disappear into their roles completely; re-watching L.A. Confidential reminds me why Russell Crowe is a major star and why Guy Pearce ought to be one (seriously, between this, Memento, and The Proposition, how many more reasons do casting directors need to put Pearce in their movies?).

The screenplay, which doesn't so much reproduce the plot of the novel as distill it into an extremely streamlined form, rarely suffers from the abridgment. The only real exception to this is Jack Vincennes' (Kevin Spacey) character arc, which is pretty severely pared down and ends in an effective but somewhat contrived twist that feels transparently motivated by the need to get to the third act underway. On the whole, though, there's remarkably few seams for such a complicated endeavor.

A final aspect of L.A. Confidential that bears mention is the direction and the visual design. It must have been tempting to do the film as a fanboy-style homage to 1950s noir, but director Curtis Hanson downplays the anachronisms and recasts the genre to acknowledge the cultural and technical changes in filmmaking. Hanson's version emphasizes naturalistic acting, elaborate set design, masterful widescreen cinematography, and unrestrained profanity and violence, none of which were trademarks of the heyday of crime noir. Even though the film's unmistakably a period piece, there's a heavy emphasis on contemporary elements that make it compulsively watchable for non-genre buffs. The modern feel of L.A. Confidential has the side benefit of calling attention to the thematic parallels with the LAPD's early-90s corruption scandals without being heavy-handed about it.

In the final accounting, L.A. Confidential does justice to Ellroy's book. Hollywood is one for two in feature adaptations of Ellroy's work, with the demerit being Brian DePalma's campy butchering of The Black Dahlia. Apparently, George Clooney was cast as the lead in White Jazz, but dropped out. It's a shame, he's perfect for that character. What I'd really like to see is a big-budget miniseries adaptation of American Tabloid, Ellroy's fantastic historical conspiracy noir centered around the Kennedy assassination. Apparently this may actually happen, with HBO's backing. I'll believe it when I see it, but if it happens, it could really be something to look forward to.

Me and Ayn Rand

Define irony: an stamp issued by the federal government bearing the likeness of Ayn Rand

One of the most interesting things for me personally in seeing the resurgence on the right of the parts of libertarian ideology that oppose government spending for the purposes of saving the economy and increasing access to health care (the libertarian influence on matters involving limiting the security state and reining in defense spending being curiously MIA) is Ayn Rand's return to semi-relevance in the national conversation. For the uninitiated, Ayn Rand is a Russian emigre who rose to prominence as a novelist and philosopher in the 1950s and 60s. Her topic du jour was the persecution of the individual by society, mostly by government and religion, which she believed needed to be fought by celebrating the moral importance of self-interest and by implementing an unrestricted economic system of lassiez-faire capitalism.

Rand's return to scrutiny was probably inevitable given the circumstances; she's by far the most accessible anti-regulation thinker around, and her apocalyptic streak fits well with the prevailing emotional tone of modern conservative populism, making her a natural avatar for the right on economic issues. For the left, Rand's relevance is more tied up with the contribution of her acolyte Alan Greenspan's deregulatory reforms during his lengthy tenure as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, which contributed substantially to the current economic crash. As such, the default attitude toward Ayn Rand among in-the-know liberals tends to involve eye-rolling and sneering, which isn't really a new development, but more pronounced these days. So it's in a bit of a strange position that I admit that Ayn Rand was a major influence on my intellectual development.

Hear me out - I'm not the type that'll be at the next Tea Party rally. I never exactly was. In fact, what drew me to Rand initally was her strident atheism. It's mentioned fairly infrequently in the present day, but Rand's contempt for the religious makes Richard Dawkins sound like Thomas Aquinas, and I first read her pretty shortly after I realized that religious faith held no meaning to me. This was in 1999, around the time of Bill Clinton's impeachment, and it felt to me like half the nation was suddenly stewing in moralistic outrage and pious theatrics. When I read Ayn Rand, I felt very acutely that she was the sort of thinker that would go blow for blow against the Jerry Falwells and Bob Barrs and match or exceed them in fury. The initial appeal of reading Ayn Rand (dissected brilliantly in this recent GQ article) comes from the sheer force of her stridency over all other factors, which spoke to me because I began reading her during a strident period of history and at the time in the lifespan (late adolescence) when force of passion seems most like a legitimate form of argument.

My attraction to Rand's social ideas made me more interested in her economic ones, which is actually fairly hard to avoid given her insistence that her philosophy is an irreducible whole. Now, this is where things got challenging, because I was raised in a solid Democratic household devoted to 1950s and 60s-vintage mainstream liberalism. By no means was it a radical milieu - in point of fact, my namesake is Robert F. Kennedy, famed for his efforts in elbowing out Eugene McCarthy - but enough to the left that Rand's jaundiced eye toward progressive social doctrine and unabashed championing of selfishness and capitalism were a fair shock to the system. Since the whole package was framed in terms that I found quite attractive -the importance of individuality and independence, the rewards that come from developing one's talents and capacities - I engaged with it in a serious way. In fact, in the span of about a year, I read both of Rand's major novels, the lengthy The Fountainhead and the gargantuan Atlas Shrugged, and probably four book-length collections of her essays. (I haven't actually picked up a Rand book since that time, and I probably never will again - thematically speaking, the sheer amount of internal redundancy built into her writings more or less obviates the benefits of revisitation, and only a masochist would read her for the prose.)


At this time, I hadn't ever really immersed myself in a topic intellectually the way that I did with Ayn Rand's philosophy, which was a formative experience in and of itself. I'd never felt the sense of immediacy and relevance that can accompany the act of thinking deeply about something (public high school is extraordinarily ill-suited to facilitate this kind of experience) and this was my first hint of how fulfilling and rewarding that can be. That's really more of a developmental milestone than something that can be attributed to Rand specifically - I'm sure I would have had it even if I had never read her. What Rand added to the mix was the insight that intellectual engagement is particularly valuable and important when ideas are being challenged.


The knee-jerk liberal critique of Rand's work is that it essentially carries the water for conservative establishment ideas, and post-Reagan and Greenspan, this isn't totally inaccurate, although it probably reverses the direction of influence. What this leaves out, though, is that Rand was essentially a pugilist and a contrarian rather than a supporter of one political establishment or popular line of argument. My favorite Rand essay is probably "Racism," written in 1963, which combines one of the brutally frank excoriations of the practice of racial prejudice that I've ever read with a pre-emptive strike against the Civil Rights Act of 1964; although I don't agree with her about the legislative aspects, it's impossible for me not to be impressed with someone who composed this paragraph while George Wallace was busily amassing a large national following and four-plus years before the notion of the Republican "Southern Strategy":

One of the worst contradictions, in this context, is the stand of many so-called "conservatives" (not confined exclusively to the South) who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism at the same time. They do not seem to possess enough concern with principles to realize that they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. Men who deny individual rights cannot claim, defend or uphold any rights whatsoever. It is such alleged champions of capitalism who are helping to discredit and destroy it.

Above everything else, I came away from Rand convinced of the value of considering things from a rational and independent viewpoint. It's not remotely a stretch to say that the time I spent with her works taught me how to think critically. I think I learned this lesson in a far better way than I would have just relying on my university education (which was excellent) alone - liberal arts curricula seem to have a way of explicitly encouraging students to "think and analyze material critically" while implicitly adding as long as you reach the conclusion I want you to or, more insidiously, as long as you don't "offend" anyone in the process.



It's practically a law of nature that reading Ayn Rand in late adolescence tends to turn one into an insufferable asshole. In fairness, that could be said of practically anyone getting into politically-oriented thought in that time of life - try and hold a conversation with a college sophomore who's read Naomi Klein - but I was certainly no exception to the rule. In retrospect, I was extremely fortunate that I didn't fall in with a crowd of Rand devotees during my college years, which would have worsened things considerably; one of the odder things surrounding Ayn Rand - which is really saying something - is the manner in which she ju-jitsued her philosophy of bold independent thought into a rigidly enforced cult of personality which is sadly still very much in existence. 

As I got deeper into college, I became a lot less attached to what Rand thought, but I never really lost my appreciation for how she thought. This is a distinction that is too often obliterated by our discourse's relentless focus on categorizing people and their ideas into columns marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable." I've found that developing and maintaining a critical focus and a distrust of consensus to be extremely valuable in every area of my life. I should note that Rand isn't the only route to this conclusion (and very probably not the best); I recently read through Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian, which is a far more compact volume that anything Rand ever put together, yet concludes with a beautiful summary of exactly the type of mentality I've been attempting to describe:

"So I have no peroration or clarion note on which to close. Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the "transcendent" and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant and selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."  

Since it's rather impossible at this stage in time to admit of any affection for Ayn Rand and not discuss politics, I can say that I remain a self-identified liberal, and a registered Democrat, but I don't consider myself overly identified with party affiliation to the point where I would feel pressured to refrain from criticizing, say, Obama's shameful continuation of indefinite detention policies or his implementation of targeted assassination programs. I will admit to some sympathy and interest in libertarian thinking, which can and does promote things like a genuine respect for data (check out Megan McArdle's analysis of whether or not Toyota's cars were actually accelerating due to mechanical defects) or a commitment to challenging the long-held ideas of ideological allies (David Boaz's takedown of the myth that America "used to be more free" is truly praiseworthy). I'm very interested in the appearance of libertarian thinkers like Will Wilkinson who are advocating for replacing the longstanding conservative-libertarian alliance (the existence of which never made any sense to me) with a liberal-libertarian one, as elaborated in this essay by Cato's Brink Lindsey.

All of which is to say, I find these to be interesting times, for more reasons than the sport of speculating on whether or not the Tea Party is racist.