Idiocracy

I can't watch Idiocracy often, but I feel that I must own a copy, if only to remind me of how the world would be if the idiots really won.

Comedian Bill Hicks used to have this bit where he pointed to "American Gladiators" as something the American public would rather consume than, say, the truth about the JFK assassination (or, for that matter, even critical analysis of the facts at hand). Here's a clip:

Idiocracy supposes the world will devolve to the point where we're all wearing logo-covered sportswear, eating Carl's Jr. food from rude outdoor vending machines (and sporting Carl's Jr. tattoos), and watering our crops with sports drinks instead of water.

I note that no one in Idiocracy seems to exercise (aside from sexual acts), so I wonder why all the sports drink consumption. Do these people even sweat? How do so many of them get to be so musclebound?

But then again, why all the sports drink consumption now, in our time? The United States of America is the fattest country on Earth. If Gatorade were only consumed by people who exercised regularly, the company would go under.

In our time, energy drinks seem to dominate our culture, what with [insert number]-hour energy drinks and 16 oz. mega cans of "energy drinks," which might as well be just like this one:

Also, I had 36 oz. of Diet Mountain Dew today. I'm not proud.

The film, directed by Mike Judge (Office Space) and released in a very limited run in 2006, not so subtly satirizes the anti-intellectualism so prevalent in our culture, which peaked during the George W. Bush administration in America and threatens to peak again.

All through the film, reading, writing, and speaking coherently is considered "faggy." (How come stupid people always equate intellect with homosexuality, yet the same stupid people don't connect sports rock anthems with the homosexuals who perform them? "We Will Rock You," anyone?)

It's as if we are doomed to live in a world where this is interpreted as Truth:

Or:

Just recently, Indiana lawmakers voted to incorporate creationist study in public schools, thereby blithely disregarding that whole separation of church and state thing. I wish I could say I'm surprised, but then I read this, which is yet another chestnut in the "Indiana is full of morons" collection.

But every once in a while, smarts win out, and I sleep a bit better.

Before I let this turn into a harangue about how everything sucks, let's be fair. Everything doesn't suck — but everything could be better. Other countries are full of stupid, too.

America is far from the worst country on the planet, and I love the freedom we Americans enjoy. What we can do as a nation when we band together with a common goal is nothing short of breathtaking and awe-inspiring.

Oh, but when we screw up, we look like the World's Biggest Bunch of Assholes — especially when we don't apologize or even accept responsibility for our actions.

When you go around saying how America is the Greatest Country on Earth, shouldn't you look and act the part? You can't just go around saying America is the best and then be an absolute idiot.

Well, in Idiocracy, you can.

Idiocracy is a funhouse mirror that amplifies our laziness, complacency, and ignorance, and works as a warning to audiences. Our future might not be all sports drink agriculture and television shows with grown men getting kicked in the testicles, but where are we going, anyway?

Like any funhouse mirror, Idiocracy gives us an idea of "what if," and leaves us to do the rest.

I Love You, Man

I was so happy when I Love You, Man came out.

Finally, a full-length motion picture that prominently features Rush, my favorite band. Finally, a film that depicts two grown men eating delicious fish tacos and playing music in a garage. But mostly, finally, a film with Rush in it:

Rush is my favorite band. A buddy made me a mix tape of Rush back in...7th grade? I say "mix tape," but really it was just a straight copy of Chronicles. Doesn't matter. That tape changed my life. I still have that tape somewhere, but it doesn't play. I keep everything.

Pretty soon, I'd collected all of their albums on cassette — like real, store-bought cassettes. After that, the CDs, and then all the vinyl on Mercury...and then all the CDs again when they remastered all of them in the late '90s. Did I mention the MoFi gold discs? Yeah, those too.

I wore out most of those cassette tapes — especially A Show of Hands, which I used to play in the car on the way to work. I found that the distance from my parents' house to my old job was exactly the duration from "Force Ten" to the end of the album. Some of those tapes melted. I have them in a box somewhere. Told ya, I keep everything.

Some guy I worked with gave me a copy of All The World's A Stage on 8-track, as a joke, but it was awesome. That tape is upstairs on my stereo right now, with nothing to play it.

When I was in grad school at Ohio University, I stopped in at Haffa's Records and found a Hemispheres picture disc, and — holy shit, those are expensive now.

Over the years, I've collected some strange, rare stuff, like the Max Webster Universal Juveniles CD, with the song "Battlescar," which is a duet with Rush. That was a good find. Throw in some posters, calendars, and other random stuff that says "Rush" on it, and you have a pretty good idea of what my wife has to deal with now.

I've seen Rush four or five times — every tour since 1994, save the most recent one, when they were just touring on hits and the prices were outrageous. And you thought I was lame before this paragraph.

I think I have...10 Rush t-shirts?  Maybe 12.  Some of them are threadbare, pitted-out, and falling apart, but I kept them anyway. When I ruined my white Test For Echo t-shirt, I went online and bought two more so that wouldn't happen again.

Rush became part of my identity. People started to know me as "a Rush guy." This sort of thing happens when you wear 12 Rush t-shirts around town, and write Rush lyrics all over your notebooks, and cite Neil Peart as a world-renowned poet, and say stuff like "Alex Lifeson is the best guitarist in the world," even when you know the correct answer is Eddie Van Halen.

Of course, I never have anybody to go with when Rush tours, so I always ended up taking a significant other (whoever that was at the time), or my buddy Brian, who also likes Rush — just not enough to do anything that I'm talking about here because he's mostly normal. I have one buddy, Mike, who wanted to go see one of their recent shows, but I flaked out. I should've gone with him. Regrets.

But here's the thing (and how this all ties in with I Love You, Man). Whenever I go to a Rush show, I look around and I think, "Man, what a bunch of weirdos." All the air-drumming and air-licking and weird proggy head-banging just seems strange to me.

I have a hard time making friends with other Rush fans. For a band with such a particular type of music and a specific type of audience, you'd think that I'd be in an arena with 25,000 friends at each concert, but that's not the way it goes.

Of the Rush fans I know, most of them are on the Internet — Kevin in Wisconsin, Meghan in Tennessee, Nat in New York — all great people I've never met in real life but get along with great over Facebook. I'd love to meet these people someday, if only to prove that not all Rush fans moonlight as D&D players who don't shampoo or wear deodorant.

So the Rush thing — it's hard to make friends if you're a Rush fan. That band polarizes people. "I don't like his voice," people will say. "Their music is too weird for me," other people will say. "Geddy Lee looks like Death," my wife will say.

I can see what you mean. It just takes me longer. (Those are Rush lyrics.)

(For the record, my wife allowed my groomsmen and I to enter to "Hope" from Snakes & Arrows on our wedding day. So she's not a devil woman.)

But that's not to say that it's impossible to make friends with people who like Rush. I'm being an asshole when I take the D&D/hygiene potshot. They're friendly, well-read people who take their music very, very, very seriously.

LISTEN TO THIS SONG AND TELL ME IT IS NOT FUCKING BRILLIANT, MAN!

OR THIS ONE:

ROCK!

Anyway, I saw this film and immediately thought about my friends, many of which would see this film and think, "Ha! A movie about a dude who likes Rush! That makes me think of John King!"

So in a fit of narcissism, I created a Facebook group: "People Who Saw 'I Love You, Man' and Thought of John King."

I'm the only person in that group right now.

Please be my friend.

I Live in Fear

Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear (1955) is one of five films in Criterion's Eclipse Series 7: Postwar Kurosawa DVD set, which was part of my Kurosawa binge from a few years back. I've never watched this one before tonight.

I'm starting to like watching films for the first time as part of this project. I get to log my first impressions, which isn't something I often do when I watch most films at home (especially rentals), aside from the occasional snide remark or glowing review on Facebook or Twitter.

With foreign films, writing as they play is especially tough. A few seconds of staring at the monitor or into space, searching for a word or phrase or new direction for the next paragraph, can mean missing crucial plot and character development in subtitles I miss. Then I have to back up, start again, etc.

With I Live in Fear, I found myself watching about the first 30 minutes before typing a word. The premise of the film is simple: the elderly patriarch of a Japanese family becomes obsessed with the idea that his entire family will be killed when another atomic bomb falls on Japan. Mind you, the film is set in 1955, ten years after V-J Day.

I Live in Fear is one of the first films I've seen that tackles Japanese emotions about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. What's interesting to me is how the patriarch's paranoia puts him firmly in the minority, while his family somehow remains aloof. Wouldn't one suspect the fear to be a bit more prevalent in this family? I mean, this is a country that was hit with atomic power, not one that just dealt with Russian and/or Cuban bluster. Yet most of the characters appear ready to live rather than watch the skies all day.

This sort of reminds me of growing up during the latter portion of the Cold War — in the Reagan '80s in America, you still had your kooky bomb shelter people, sure, and they stored food and other provisions underground or elsewhere. You also had your strangely aloof people — the ones who either didn't believe there was any imminent danger, or ones who did believe in a real threat, but somehow achieved a strange zen state of acceptance. "You have to die someday," they appeared to assure themselves. And then they watched Rocky IV or something and felt fine.

Lack of control seems to lead some people to paranoia, anger, and other irrational behavior, whereas many other people — often the majority — view a lack of control with resignation and calm. "Keep Calm and Carry On" comes to mind. Of course, under all that, the anxiety brews.

In the case of I Live in Fear, the patriarch wants to take his family away from Japan to the only place on the planet where he feels everyone will be safe — South America. He's even got a scheme worked out where he'll barter with someone living in Brazil — a person who wants to "return to Japan." As bartering is not a major financial transaction (in his head, anyway), the idea seems simple and easy, but convincing his family is another idea entirely. They want him declared incompetent so they can protect what money they have left. The patriarch is slowly spending them into oblivion after trying to build a bomb shelter and arrange for transport to another continent.

Their case comes before a court, wherein representatives must deliberate whether to declare the patriarch incompetent. One of them says, "his anxiety about the bomb is something we all share. [...] We just don't feel it quite as strongly. We don't build underground shelters or plan to move to Brazil. But can we claim that the feeling is beyond comprehension?"

What we do with our anxiety in times of great stress is what often sets us apart.

Kurosawa films are always satisfying, even when they tackle heavy content. Toshiro Mifune is in proper form here — not surprisingly, he simply owns the lead role. The supporting cast is capable, even the extras who play in the spraying water of the garden hose outside the foundry seem to capture a kind of carefree resignation toward it all. You cannot live in fear, even if you have every reason to be afraid.

With this film, Kurosawa seems to be saying that living in fear is not living at all. In that way, one could argue that postwar Japan was very much like Cold War America. Sure, the threat of annihilation was there, but if that's all we thought about, nothing would get done, and all that constant worry would be our undoing.

People have to get up and live, not cower every time a plane flies overhead or tremble at the sound of approaching thunder. For two cultures that are so drastically different, at our core, we share very human ways of dealing with what we dread. I'm sure this isn't an earth-shattering revelation, but for Kurosawa to put this theme forth in postwar Japan is extraordinary.

I Confess

I Confess is a minor Alfred Hitchcock film that I've never seen, and part of my great Hitchcock binge of 2011, wherein your intrepid author purchased some 50 Hitch films on DVD (many of which he has never seen but for some reason could not talk his way out of owning).

The gist of I Confess is a man confesses a murder to a priest, and because of the secrecy of confessional, the priest cannot reveal the murderer to police. Ah, but the murderer was disguised as a clergyman, which casts doubt on the silent priest. Here's the trailer.

This is the first time I've watched Montgomery Clift on film. The guy had some chops. He died of heart failure in his mid-40s, unfortunately. Health problems plagued him throughout his life. Seeing him here is cool — an actor I've heard about for years finally gets a face to the name.

Karl Malden appears in the film as a police detective (shocking). I've never thought of Malden as a heavy hitter in Hollywood (even though he sort of was as a character actor). Malden was never a suave leading man, but that nose, and those distinctive looks made for some great character acting in his long career.

Anne Baxter is here, too — another actor I've heard about from time to time but never really watched. Stuff like this makes me want to watch more old movies, because great swaths of Hollywood remain blind spots to me, including the bulk of Hitchcock's career. I've seen the great Hitch films, but feel obligated to dig deeper.

As long as I call myself an aspiring screenwriter (read: as long as there are older screenwriters and/or younger ones who suck, yet somehow get regular work), then I feel compelled to know Hitch well. As I'm writing this while the movie plays, I guess it's time to focus.

The Hudsucker Proxy

If you're from Muncie, Indiana, and you see a movie that mentions Muncie, then you know it's a real thrill. If you're not, then I'm sure it's the same feeling if you catch a reference to your own hometown in the movies, whatever town that might be. Of course, I wouldn't know that for sure, because I'm not from your hometown. I'm a Muncie man.

So, unless you're a Muncie Girl (or Guy), you might not know that feeling. If you are, you're probably someone I know, which puts you in the 100 or so people who read this blog regularly, and you know what I mean.

(Hey, a hundred readers is pretty swell. Go Eagles!)

Speaking of swell, Muncie might be the least swell place on the planet — a sleepy, post-industrial midwestern town famous for its ordinary averageness. Hollywood seems to enjoy pointing this out. That's fine.

The Hudsucker Proxy makes Norville Barnes, a Muncie native, out to be the biggest imbecile in New York, and of course, viewers can extrapolate that all Muncie natives are stupid if they want. One look at the stories and letters in the Muncie newspaper won't help.

(Side Note: Many of my Muncie friends who have moved to big cities east or west tell how the news from Muncie is so bizarre, so unbelievable, they often show non-midwestern friends, who in turn read the Muncie paper for entertainment. I'm not kidding.)

There's not much Muncie in The Hudsucker Proxy, but what's here is eerie. My high school colors are gold and blue, and our mascot is the eagle. Imagine my surprise when I saw this in 1995-ish with my then-girlfriend (also from Muncie) and discovered Norville Barnes is not only a Muncie native, but one who came from a similarly themed, (fake) college. Sure, not a high school, but still.

At least the fight song is different.

"The Muncie College of Business Administration" sends a few hundred dreamers to Hollywood every year, and few have done much out there. Joyce DeWitt, maybe. The rest are scrapping to make it happen, and more come and go all the time. None of them are imbeciles for trying. I'm proud of all my friends and former students who give it a go.

Muncie's most famous export isn't in Hollywood, though. This guy went to New York, and 30 years later, he's doing just fine. (Technically, he's from Indianapolis.)

I never went to Hollywood or New York. I never learned how to hula hoop, either. Can't hula, can't roller skate, can't skateboard, can't ski, can't swim, can't play basketball — why, it's a miracle I learned how to ride a bicycle or walk and chew gum. I can run, though, and write a little bit. I took those skills to Chicago after college, along with a truckload of moxie, see.

The opening montage of "experience needed" reminds me of pretty much every job hunt I've been on since I finished college — especially my days in Chicago, where even entry-level jobs require 3-5 years of experience. This is what happens when tens of thousands of people have the same idea. Big pond.

The Hudsucker Proxy is one of my favorite Coen brothers films, but despite the obvious connections to my hometown, I tend to forget the film even exists. Maybe the film offends me a little (not much, but there's a little pin prick each time). Maybe the film is overshadowed in their oeuvre by greater films such as Fargo, No Country For Old Men, or my favorite Coen brothers film, The Big Lebowski.

In fact, one could argue, as my wife the Hudsucker newbie remarked, "So...it's Lebowski as a period piece?" Well, yeah, kinda. A schlub gets in over his head and almost dies. There's a dance number, a white-haired millionaire, and so on. There's even a narrator who seems to know all. Then again, even The Big Lebowski is a period piece, so what do we know?

Say, how come when the janitor stops the clock at the end, freezing Norville Barnes in mid-air and leaving Sidney Mussberger's kinetic balls floating in mid-reaction, essentially stopping time, why do the snowflakes keep falling?

Betcha didn't expect that question from a Muncie man.





Kinetic balls.  Heh.

Hot Shots!/Hot Shots! Part Deux

Watching Hot Shots! again makes me think about how effectively they skewered more than just Top Gun. Twice.

Yeah, most of the sight gags are weak — the opening sequence on the aircraft carrier has a guy doing semaphore ballet, another guy roasting a hot dog by a jet exhaust, and of course some guy falls off while catching a football. In the modern parlance, we call this "weak sauce."

But at least Lloyd Bridges gets to do his schtick again for two films. His work in Airplane! is top notch, and he picks right up here and knocks it out of the park. The guy does not have a flat joke in either film.

Idle thoughts: Why do people keep sitting on small dogs?

Whoa, Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer worked together before "Two and a Half Men"?

Jim Abrahams has written and directed three comedies featuring airplanes..? Add his involvement with the Naked Gun films, plus Top Secret! and The Kentucky Fried Movie and you have one of the most successful and prolific comedic minds of the late 20th century.

I use the "blow it all on hats" joke just about every time the wife and I talk about money. I'd forgotten where I stole that joke until tonight. Here's a movie that came out before I finished high school, and I'm still using that joke in semi-daily conversation.

This is my life. I'm not proud.

Hot Shots! and Hot Shots! Part Deux are just a couple more examples of the kinds of films I grew up watching and for which I still have a soft spot despite some pretty major gripes, which I'll get to in a moment.

My siblings and I probably watched this a half dozen times when we were growing up, and a few more times on television. Funny thing, though — I don't feel nostalgia in quite the same way as with many other films, and here's why:

Remember when killing Saddam Hussein was a wishful joke in silly movies? Google sort of takes the air out of those jokes now, you know? Evil tyrant, mass murderer, horrible human being, yes. And now if you want, you can go on Google video and watch him die.

So, can I laugh now when Topper drops a bomb into Saddam's lap in the movie? (I guess so, because somehow he lives.) Or how about when they go to assassinate him in the sequel, and he speaks with a lisp?

I mean, I don't feel any pangs when Saddam hands The Dude his bowling shoes in that dream sequence in The Big Lebowski, but that's different — even tasteful.

The Hot Shots! films, released shortly after Gulf War I, are some pretty strong indicators of the lack of closure in western culture re: Saddam. They make Saddam out not so much as a brutal dictator as a bungling fool, stepping on rakes, tripping over dog beds, and running face first into a bug zapper. We couldn't get him then, so we settled for making him a joke. Humor is a great way to deal with pain.

For more than 10 years, that lack of closure festered and ultimately led to another war.

Both Hot Shots! films are a strong indicator of the mood of this country in the period between the two Persian Gulf Wars. Throw in a parade of jokes that are simply racist and ignorant and you have possibly one of the lowest points in American cinema, right?

Except I don't think it's that simple.

Consider, instead, that these films were made precisely to lampoon the jingoistic bullshit of films like Top Gun and Rambo: First Blood Part II (and III). Richard Crenna even shows up here, spoofing his own role in the Rambo movies!

I mean, an Iraqi torturer steps out of the shadows wearing a Holiday Inn towel on his head. You don't get a whole lot more racist than that. But is this more of a comment on what viewers think rather than what the filmmakers think?

The filmmakers uniformly substitute obscure words and mumbled names of famous people as foreign language. "Kareem of onion! Al Jarreau!" "Omar Sharif!" "Sufferin Succotash!" And if you're sharp-eared, you can catch it. If you just hear foreign language as so much gibberish, you won't even hear English. The filmmakers are testing you.

There's just so much legitimately brilliant comedy here that I can't get upset no matter how badly I want to decry this film as racist or ignorant. I can't get self-righteous about them. I can see these films as equal opportunity offenders.

Ryan Stiles, who plays a demolition expert and seems like an early, much milder draft of the character Danny McBride plays in Tropic Thunder, really nails it:

"Know what I'm gonna do if we make it? I'm gonna go back to Eagle River and marry my gal, Edith Mae. Gonna get us a nice little place with a white picket fence. You know the kind. Two-car garage. Maybe a fishing boat. And in 15 years, when they're all paid for... I'll set my charges and blow the shit out of them."

The more I ponder that quote, the more I feel that those words are a microcosm of what makes the Hot Shots! films brilliant parodies of American culture, not just Top Gun. (Read a certain way, Top Gun is a brilliant parody of American culture.)

Also consider Miguel Ferrer's line, "Thank you, Topper. I can kill again. You've given me a reason to live." Later, he has another great moment, smiling and mugging for the camera before saying, "War: It's fantastic!"

Both Hot Shots! films are a comment on the American dream and our insatiable thirst for violence, and not just in film. There's even a video game counter at the bottom of the screen in Act III, tallying the death toll and declaring this the bloodiest film ever. Do we not keep a death toll during times of war?

Nothing is safe from parody here — even the audience's world view. They even take a shot at Apocalypse Now, throwing in Martin Sheen for a cameo, and turning Iraq into Vietnam, just with Iraqis this time. For so many Americans, what's the difference?