My Own Favorite Critic

I was poking around the Internet and found this fantastic interview with Owen Gleiberman, one of the two lead critics for Entertainment Weekly. He’s a remarkably eloquent guy and he has some really interesting things to say about the narcissism of Pauline Kael, his hatred for Wes Anderson’s movies and his love for Carrie and Natural Born Killers. The interviewer clearly did his research, asking about Gleiberman’s experience as a juror at the Sundance Festival the year of Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ‘66 and a line from his review of Steal This Movie. I also didn’t know that Owen got his start at the Boston Phoenix, in my hometown. (His break was the movie critic equivalent of getting discovered at a bus stop in Hollywood: the movie critic for the Phoenix, Stephen Schiff, saw his college writing, liked it and hired him to come to Boston.)

I don’t know why, but reading this interview somehow gives me hope that I’ll get a paid job as a movie critic some day as well. A fella can dream, can’t he?

Ranking Scorsese

In honor of The Departed’s success, I’ve decided to rank Martin Scorsese’s movies from best to worst. This is by no means comprehensive; I limited myself to his full-length dramatic works (which regrettably excludes The Last Waltz), of which there are 20. I’ve seen 16 of them. The four I have not seen are: New York, New York; Boxcar Bertha; Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; and Who’s That Knocking On My Door? Because any ranking of “best” is inherently subjective, I’ve looked at this exercise as more of a question of which movies I like best than a question of which movies are best-made.

Robert Altman Dies

Robert Altman died today.

He was one of those great directors who made so many movies, especially so many small, intimate movies, that he was hard to keep track of. I’ve only seen a handful of his flicks–Thieves Like Us, Nashville, The Player, one or two others–but his movies are always remarkable for how much he allows the actors to create their own characters. Unless he’s directing a movie version of a cartoon (Popeye) or a satire (The Player), no character is ever allowed to be simply a type or a caricature; they are all idiosyncratic, real, flawed people. At the same time, though, I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone that’s named a Robert Altman movie among their most cherished favorites. His approach is so subtle, so humanistic that he is paradoxically a hard filmmaker to fall in love with.

I Think I Smell Borat

Borat is an extremely funny movie, but don’t be misled–it’s a rather different breed of comic animal from Da Ali G Show.

Da Ali G Show gets its laughs from the painful tension between Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters and his unwitting subjects. It’s a contest between who’s going to break first: Cohen, who says increasingly offensive, ignorant things while staying in character, or his subjects, whose demeanor of politeness is stretched to its illogical limit. The winner, of course, is always Cohen, who never breaks character (or at least as far as we know from the televised footage).

But Borat the movie mixes that comedy verite with a more traditional brand of staged slapstick. In Da Ali G Show, the only person on film in on the joke is Cohen. In Borat, there are a whole number of scenes where the subjects are in on the set-up: the opening sequence in Kazakhstan, all the interactions Borat has with his Kazakh producer (who is played by an Armenian-American), the bear’s encounter with the kids, the date with the overweight hooker, the grand finale with Pamela Anderson. And there are a number of scenes of questionable veracity: the arrest at the brokers’ banquet, the stop at the “gypsy” flea market, the encounter with the frat boys in the RV. And even those scenes which were not staged often did not happen in the location that the movie says they did.

Some quick thoughts

As I try to clear my schedule over the next week or so to see Borat, a couple thoughts:

As you probably know, Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan won the weekend box office with $26.5 million. Many in the industry considered it a surprise because awareness levels of the movie were fairly low, and Fox even admitted that it was tracking behind Santa Clause III (further evidence that we are a nation of retards).

But the most amazing thing about Borat’s box office is that it came on 837 theaters–which makes it only the second movie since 1982 to win a weekend with fewer than 1,000 theaters. That translates to a $31,607 per-theater average. According to boxofficemojo.com, Borat had the third-best ever per-theater average for a wide release. Historically, it trails only Pirates of the Caribbean II and Spiderman in best per-theater average for a wide release. And those two movies ended up the sixth- and seventh-most successful movies, respectively, of all-time. It looks like Borat will not “be execute.”

Serious About Syriana

If somebody tells you they understood Syriana after one viewing, they’re either a liar or a genius.

This is a complicated, convoluted, sophisticated, occasionally incomprehensible movie that wears its inaccessibility as a badge of honor. That doesn’t make it bad, but that doesn’t necessarily make it great either; and a movie this politically charged needs to be great just to be relevant.

As best as I can tell, Syriana is the story of a disputed oil field in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom and the various forces that covet it. The list of suitors is impressive. There are corporate law firms, Texan-dominated oil companies, Chinese corporations, multinational energy consultants, Arabian emirs and of course, the CIA. That’s not even mentioning the players who don’t have an immediate interest in the oil field, who include Iranian criminals, Islamic terrorists, Hezbollah and the American-based Committee to Liberate Iran.

The plot is two parts The Economist, one part King Lear: the aging emir of the kingdom is waffling over which son should succeed him, the Oxford-educated Nasir (Alexander Siddig) or the lightweight Meshal (Akbar Kurtha). Nasir wants to sell drilling rights to a Chinese firm and use the profits to liberalize and secularize his country. Meshal is under the sway of the American petro conglomerate Connex and likes to talk about his yacht.