A whole new issue of the Tucson Weekly is online and awaiting its readers to show up and show it some love. Enjoy! Feel free to comment upon it here.
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2008.
We Did This Last Week, and We’re Gonna Do It Again Next Week
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A few comments about “Supercritics!” ….
I notice James Digiovanna and Bob Grimm are pictured on the cover ala the characters in “Superbad.” Does that mean they are bestest friends who have sleepovers in which they lie next to each other on the floor in sleeping bags and proclaim their not-gay-but-kinda-gayish love? Cute! I feel sorry for Grimm having to be the fat guy, but at least his first pseudo-sexual experience doesn’t end with the girl barfing in bed like it does for Digiovanna. Ha ha! Coitus chuck-it-up-us! (I suppose it’s fortunate that the cover image of the two critics plays off of “Superbad” and not “Knocked Up.”)
So, some comments:
War films: James says the (anti) war films all sucked. But did he see “In the Valley of Elah?” I didn’t but it got positive reviews. So does the documentary “No End in Sight” which I think is up for an Oscar.
Hitman’s movie poster: Digiovanna makes an oblique reference to the poster having something suggestive in it. Then Grimm says he Googled “hitman” plus “poster” plus “camel toe” and found labia curves in the silhouette of the rear end of actress Olga Kyralenko. I followed in Grimm’s toe-steps and found the poster in question, which was plastered all over subways in metropolitan cities that aren’t Tucson. It seems it was popular to graffiti a dick and balls under hear posterior. The more you know!
Huh? DiGrimmOvana says 2007 had “movies in which science is bad, and superstition is good. Films like 1408, Premonition and The Reaping all dragged out this tired bit.” I saw “1408” and there was no “science is bad” theme! You just makin’ stuff up now?
There Will Be Boredom: Both Digiovanna and Grimm were cuckoo for “There Will Be Blood.” I think it was Paul Thomas Anderson’s worst film to date. Many individual scenes were good, as was the use of sound and music, the use of setting, and the performances (especially Daniel Day-Lewis — although his over-enunciated speaking style reminded me too much of Agent Smith in “The Matrix”…you know, the guy who says, “MISSSS-ter AN-derson…”). But the epic scope of the film is self-indulgently lavished on a very small character study that, for all its grandiosity, is rather uneven. We watch Day-Lewis for a while, then all of a sudden he’s a cold-hearted homicidal misanthropist. Where dat come from? Lots of sloppy storytelling too: Why did [character X] try to burn [character Y]? Why did [character Y] ultimately reject [character X]? Why didn’t [character Y] have any interest in women? Etc. If the film was intended as parable about capitalism and religion in America, it too was underdeveloped. “There Will Be Blood” was reminiscent of King Vidor’s “Greed” except it replaced gold with oil and Death Valley with a private bowling alley. Finally, what’s with the title? Is it a marketing ploy/promise to keep people from walking out?
The Lives of Others: Digiovanna writes: “It’s very odd to see a film in which the chance for revenge is offered and declined; well, it would be odd if it were an American or East Asian film.” Did we see the same film? The character isn’t seeking, and then rejecting, revenge at the end! If he were he wouldn’t have dedicated his book to the guy!
Zodiac as a plain genre film? Digiovanna says “The following films don’t exceed or play with the conventions of their genres; they just pull them off to such a degree of perfection that they excel by virtue not of innovation, but of sheer quality.” Then he lists “Zodiac” in this category. Huh? “Zodiac” subverts its genre! Consider its extended complication and its resolution.
On Superbad: I thought this movie was overrated and a laff-non-riot, or a laff-yoga-session if you will. Cops destroying their own car and waving guns around isn’t funny and felt like outtakes from “Super Troopers.” Fat and nebbish teenagers don’t win the interest of girls nearly that hot, either. The lead character acted like an abusive dillweed for much of the film, and should have had his face punched in instead of winding up Mr. Lovably Misunderstood Tubbo. My theory is the summer’s crop of films were so malnourishing that famished moviegoers interpreted the half-eaten Twinkie of “Superbad” as a lavish turkey dinner.
DiGrimmOvanna’s Spoiler Non-alert: Hey! Don’t tell us the ending of “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”! Some of us might want to see it, in spite of your pan!
Once and The Host: I don’t think either deserve a “worst” rating, but I am glad you did anyway, because they were both overrated and it makes me feel better about not caring for them. The problem with “Once” is the characters are so blah. The idea is they’ve got all these repressed feelings that they let out in their music, but by the end they had no excuse not to tear each other’s clothes off and go at it like feral cats. Except they wanted to rebuild their other, broken, relationships, blah blah blah. As for “The Host,” it wasn’t the most. I got suckered into seeing this and the main thing I walked away with was an aesthetic appreciation for the concrete undersides of South Korean bridges.
Grimm on 3-D: Do you really want to see U2 in 3D? Bono’s nose all up in your face? What wouldn’t you watch in 3D? An Olsen Twins video circa 1992? Or what? “Beowulf” was great except for any of the scenes that included dialogue. And I really didn’t need to see Anthony Hopkins’ naked digital ass in 3D.
DiGrimmOvanna on “Spider-Man 3”: Both critics seem to have disdain for Spidey 3. I thought it was one of the better films of the year. Overly packed with plot? Yes. Too many villains, too many loose ends tied up into a giant knot? Yes. But it was great, in the way that a magnificent, overdone Mexican Soap Opera is great. Sam Raimi’s direction was like a world-class juggler keeping 7 balls in play and never dropping one. Every character got generous interplay, even the newspaper editor who hates Spidey for being “full of stick-um.” I’d see “Spider-man 3” three more times before I’d re-watch “There Will Be Spuds.”
Grimm’s spelling: He says, “…this unorthodox look at the rise of a Texas oil barren…” That reminds me of my favorite Peanuts comic — the one where Snoopy fights with the Red Barren… I’m also a big fan of Red Barren pizza, which fills me up real good whenever my stomach’s, uh, baron.
Bob Grimm’s enduring love: “I’ve watched [Superbad] no less than eight times already, and it gets funnier with each visit.” Whoa, Nelly! I don’t think I’ve even seen “Star Wars” eight times.
On Grindhouse: Not sure how this is winding up in critics’ Top Films lists. It’s a 3-hour film that should have been 1.5 hours. Instead of doing full-length homages to bad, drive-in movies, they should have compressed the films into satirical 45-minute chunks. Tarantino should have been forced to excise most of the dialogue that didn’t drive plot, reveal character or wasn’t amusing. Rodriguez should reconsider the diminishing returns of depicting mutilated genitalia (the villain’s dick in “Sin City” and the jar of testes in “Planet Terror”). The best thing in all of “Grindhouse” was the preview for “Don’t” and it was 45 seconds long.
Grimm on “Control”: “I busted out a Joy Division CD after watching the movie and got all sad.” Dude, I do that after every movie. I also do heroin.
Grimm on “Redacted”: “… this movie blew ass … a total piece of shit. It’s awful.” Yes, but did you like it?
What about… As long as we’re talking about “worst films of the year,” didn’t either of you see Lindsay Lohan in “I Know Who Killed Me”? It’s said to be perversely enjoyable in a “Showgirls” kinda way. Lohan is up for two Razzie awards!
Re Media Watch’s report on Dave Sitton’s new show on a Clear Channel owned station. I could be wrong, but doesn’t he work for Clear Channel’s billboard division in Tucson-or used to? Don’t they advertise those beer ad’s with scantally clad females? Here’s a quote: “That’s coming from a culture that tells them to spend every dime they’ve got. That ruins them. (Society wants) them to have sex with everything that moves. In general, that does not do well for them.” Since advertising, including billboards, helps to perpetuate the very culture he’s claiming is bad, will he work to get these ads pulled from billboards in Tucson? From Clear Channel’s radio stations? Inquiring minds want to know….
I saw the Valley of Ellah about three months ago and I must say that it’s a haunting film and has stayed with me this whole time.
The name of the film doesn’t do it justice but by the end of the movie, it all ties in.
Tommy Lee Jones gave an amazing performance. I doubt if he will win but I’m happy to see that he was remembered and nominated.
Charlize Theron’s part as a supporting actress was also well done.
I’m just glad that this film was remembered in some small way because it didn’t get much buzz or play time.
sad sacks Digiovanna and Grimm don’t really come out and tell us how to do movies (or what to do with them, for that matter)… detailed instructions, please!
I think I just read one of the dumbest Tom Danehy columns in a while.
Danehy’s shtick is that he’s Mr. Good Ol’ Common Sense Guy. It’s his primary rhetorical pose….his tabloid raison d’etre. And it’s convincing for a few sentences. Then, you read deeper…and you realize, he’s as nutty as a Payday candybar.
Danehy starts off slowly, with, “Dude, I’ll make fun of the pope, my mama and Nelson Mandela–all in the same sentence–if it’ll get me a laugh. I have my limits, of course. I won’t ever make fun of handicapped people, and … well, that’s it. Everything else is a target.”
Apparently Danehy thinks it’s A-OK to make fun of rape victims. Way to think that one through, Tom.
Danehy: “I’m sorry, but toilets, like vegetarians, are, by definition, funny.”
Dude, if you have to convince us, maybe they’re not quiiiite as funny as you insist they are.
Danehy then paraphrases the following story: “As for environmental damage: On a plane trip once, I read a story about how overpopulation had pushed the Earth to the brink. The solution was to hold a worldwide death lottery in which everybody would take a pill at the same time. Half would be poison; the other half would be placebos. Right before the lottery, someone realized that the dead would have to be dealt with quickly, and the resulting smoke from the funeral pyres all over the world would probably cause a change in the climate that would kill all of the lottery “winners.””
Was this story in a Dianetics book? Whoever wrote it had a real strangelehold on how the greenhouse effect works. Hate to break it to you and Mr. L. Ron Hubbard, Tom, but humans are resourceful enough to dispose of 3.5 billion bodies. Besides cremation, the bodies could be placed in large pits, landfills, meteor craters, dropped in volcanoes, fed to cats, used as mulch, set in rows for a panoramic art photo, used to make Soylent Green, or frozen as an endless supply of cadavers for the University Medical Center (“home of the heart transplant”!).
But that was just a warmup for Mr. Danehy. He goes into Doofus Overdrive with this paragraph: “Which brings me to this question: What would happen if everybody on Earth just magically stopped eating animal products tomorrow? How many hundreds of millions or billions of people would die in a short period of time? We have people starving to death all over the world now. How could we possibly grow enough food to feed everybody? The food riots would get ugly in a hurry.”
Notice Danehy confuses his own argument by refering to “animal products” instead of “meat.” Only VEGANS refuse to eat “animal products.” Look it up. In any case, I suggest Tom Danehy open up a 5th-grade level book and read the basics of nutrition. The main benefit of meat is its protein content. You can get protein from scores of other sources besides meat: nuts, beans, legumes, avocados, etc. The majority of these are much easier to grow in large amounts than, for example, chickens. The main reason people still eat meat is cultural, not because they’d starve otherwise.
Danehy writes: “Then there’s the fact that lot of people (like me) are allergic to a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, so their choices would be limited.”
Really? How many hundreds of fruits and vegetables are there? Did you know, Tom Danehy, that a vegetarian can eat other foods besides fruits and vegetables? Think of the most delicious pizza you can possibly imagine. Now subtract all the meat from that pizza. It’s still a delicious pizza.
Danehy: “I’ve developed a certain fondness for protein, which is in short supply in the plant world.”
General question: Would it kill Danehy to do even a bare minimum of research before he wrote on a given subject?
Danehy: “I have no doubt that people can subsist on a vegetarian diet, but as for his claim regarding “a plethora of studies that show vegetarians have more robust health than meat-eaters,” I’m just not buying it. There are super-healthy omnivores and sickly vegetarians and all kinds of people in between. That’s just how it is.”
Since when is “That’s just how it is” a passable argument for a writer with over two decades of experience? “That there’s what it is!”
Deny reality all you like, Danehy, but the fact remains that people who consciously choose a healthier diet will, in fact, be healthier. Weird how that works.
Danehy: “He closes with a quote from one Dr. Neal Barnard, who zooms into Never-Never Land with, “The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters and all automobile accidents combined.” That’s the stupidest crap I’ve ever read. And I’ve read Ann Coulter.”
It does sound stupid. But it sounds like it’s a reference to the rate of heart disease in the U.S., which is much higher than in other industrialized countries. By that measure there’s something to it. The healthiest diets are in parts of East Asia, where people eat a lot of vegetables, soybeans, rice, and small portions of fish or poultry.
Why don’t you just give this one up, Danehy? You keep wasting your columns on replies to letters from a month ago. What, you don’t have anything to say about the 395203 other controversies happening in the world? You gotta keep going around on a debate that you’re LA-HOOOOOSING just because you got a piece of kippered beef jerky stuck in your craw?
Regarding Hard-Rock Ranchers by Tim Vanderpool, I am very surprised that Vanderpool does not explore the possibility that the Augusta Resource Corporation might have put a ranch on its newly acquired land in order to get tax benefits specially designated for ranchers.
Here is a story that details such abuses in Texas. I’ve read about this numerous times, where a large corporation such as Houston Oil will buy up a large area of land for an industrial use, but then maintain a minimal number of cows on the property to justify tax write-offs. It sounds like what Augusta Resource Corporation is doing in spite of their dubious claim that their only motive is “to demonstrate its commitment to preserving open space and the area’s traditional vocation.” The ranch on the property might cost them an additional $200,000, for example, but allow them upwards of $600,000 in tax breaks (just throwing out numbers here, but you get the idea).
I read through the story with interest wondering if anybody suspected such a motive. It’s mentioned nowhere in the article. Yet of all the possible reasons why a mining company might maintain a ranch on its land, that seems the most likely.