Shane Danielson argues that Zhang Yimou’s Chinese martial arts films should be viewed as successors to the Hollywood musicals, featuring the same massive budgets, and similar attractive men and women performing show-stopping ensemble numbers against aesthetically-gilded backgrounds.

He makes the case for his perspective in this essay occasioned by the release of Curse of the Golden Flower (Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia -2006).

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Variety previews this coming weekend’s release of the Quentin Tarrantino/Robert Rodriquez doublebill Grindhouse.

The 1970s exploitation movie gropes, bites, kicks, slugs, blasts, smashes and cusses its way back to life in “Grindhouse,” a “Rodriguez/Tarantino double feature” that lovingly resurrects a disreputable but cultishly embraced form of era-specific film production and exhibition. A pair of pictures devoted to re-creating their progenitors’ grubby aesthetics and visceral kicks, but with vastly greater budgets, higher-end actors and a patina of hipster cool, they part company when it comes to talent and freshness. The numerous marketing problems for this bizarre pop-culture artifact begin with the three-hour-plus running time and young auds’ unfamiliarity with the format. But the B.O. strength of “Sin City” and “Kill Bill” alone suggests the helmers’ loyal followings will produce a very potent opening frame, with fairly steep fall-off thereafter in the manner of most horror films.

Read the whole thing.

Another Tarantino homage to one of the cinema’s more disreputable genres is bound to be a hoot.

Blogger and independent video-maker Evan Coyne Maloney has produced a new documentary on the subjugation of the great majority of contemporary American universities by politically correct leftism.

Maloney spent two years traveling to campuses across the country, interviewing students, professors, and administrators to find out what life on campus is really like. Instead of the vibrant debate, intellectual diversity, and academic freedom we like to associate with universities, Maloney found violent protests at UC Santa Cruz and San Francisco State, persecution of student members of a conservative club at Cal Poly and the University of Tennessee, divisive racial and ethnic politics at the University of Michigan and Yale, doctrinaire teaching at Duke and Columbia, and much more.

Far from functioning as bastions of serious thought and reasoned debate, Maloney found, campuses today operate as mental processing plants, doing more to tell students what to say and think than to teach them to think for themselves.

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Hat tip to Scott Johnson.

He has some reservations about the film, of course, but Stephenson thinks it’s an acceptable assimilation of history to contemporary entertainment genre.

Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it…

When science fiction tackles classical themes, the results may look a bit odd to some, but the audience — which is increasingly the mainstream audience — is sufficiently hungry for this kind of material (and, perhaps, suspicious of anything that’s overly polished) that it is willing to overlook the occasional mistake, or make up for it by shouting hilarious things from the balcony. These people don’t need irony or campiness self-consciously pointed out to them, any more than they need a laugh track to enjoy “The Simpsons.”

The Spartan phalanx presents itself to foes as a wall of shields, bristling with spears, its members squatting behind their defenses, anonymous and unknowable, until they break formation and stand out alone, practically naked, soft, exposed and recognizable as individuals.

The audience members watching them play the same game: media-weary, hunkered down behind thick irony, flinging verbal jabs at the screen — until they see something that moves them. Then they’ll come out and feel. But at the first hint of politics, they’ll jump back behind their shield-wall, just like the Spartans when millions of Persian arrows blot out the sun, and wait until the noise stops.

Read the whole thing.

Stale’s film critic Dana Stevens has already seen the film of Frank Miller‘s 300, a comic-noir retelling of the fight to the death of the Spartans at Thermopylae.

The ineffable Ms. Stevens finds the film’s pro-Spartan partisanship unacceptable, and reads racist, lookist, free-ist prejudice into the unsympathetic treatment of the 300 Spartans’ 2,000,000 or so Persian adversaries.

If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war…

Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the “bad” (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

This hilarious review was, alas! far too short, but it did remind me of the old-time bolshie Edmund’s Wilson’s animadversions on J.R.R. Tolkien’s systematically discriminatory perspective on orcs.

The lady’s grotesque attitudes toward the film, of course, are perfectly representative of the contemporary left’s Pavlovian rush to embrace anyone and anything inimical to their own civilization and its values. I expect I’ll have to run out and see this one.

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For more information on the educational history of America. Check out our site for a great article on education.

The London Times reports that some leftwing filmmakers began making a documentary as a tribute to Moore, but unhappily discovered the real character of their idol and his work. They wound up pursuing Moore in precisely the manner Moore pursued the CEO of General Motors.

THE hunter has become the hunted. Michael Moore, the celebrated left-wing film-maker, has become the unwilling subject of a new documentary that raises damaging questions about the credibility of his work.

The director and star of successful documentaries such as Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore has repeatedly been accused by his right-wing enemies of distorting or manipulating the material in his films. On his website he dismisses his critics as “wacko attackos”.

Yet the latest assault on Moore’s film-making techniques has come from an unexpected quarter. In Manufacturing Dissent, a documentary to be shown for the first time at a Texas film festival on Saturday, a pair of left-wing Canadian film-makers take Moore to task for what they describe as a disturbing pattern of fact-fudging and misrepresentation.

“When we started this project we hoped to have done a documentary that celebrated Michael Moore. We were admirers and fans,” said Debbie Melnyk, who made the film with her husband, Rick Caine. “Then we found out certain facts about his documentaries that we hadn’t known before. We ended up very disappointed and disillusioned.”

Melnyk and Caine are best known for their previous documentary Citizen Black, about Conrad Black, the Canadian-born former proprietor of The Daily Telegraph. Last week both of them acknowledged an important debt to Moore for popularising the documentary genre.

Yet when Caine and Melnyk began to follow him as part of their own documentary, their efforts to interview him met with the same kind of obstruction, denial and, ultimately, physical ejection that Moore had suffered when he tried to track down Roger Smith, the former chief executive of General Motors, for his first film, Roger & Me.

Read the whole thing.

Even leftists, if they look closely, can tell that Michael Moore is a liar and a fraud.

Tim Cavanaugh, at Reason magazine, reviews three titles discussing Zombie cinema and the role of zombies as political metaphors.

The conservative blogger Tim Hulsey sees the undead as a Randian nightmare vision, a mobocracy in which “weak and incompetent corpses band together and achieve a dominance over the living minority that they could not otherwise attain.” For Hulsey, “when the zombies attack, their arms are outstretched toward the victim, as if they were begging for something. Which, in a manner of speaking, they are.…The idea of being overwhelmed by stinking masses, of being forced into a way of life (or death) we would not choose for ourselves, lies at the maggot-infested heart of the original Dead trilogy.”

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

I was momentarily glancing at the television earlier today. I did not have time to sit and watch a movie, but I happened to catch a few minutes of dialogue from the David O. Selznick-produced 1962 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.

An annoyingly bumptious American is bothering the luminaries in the Divers’ glamorous European circles. Having been rebuffed by the famous composer, he turns to the Mitteleuropa aristocrat, and inquires, “What do you do?”

“I shoot.” the aristocrat curtly replies.

The American smiles. “Anything at all?”

“Lions in Africa; tigers in India; bolsheviks in Europe.”

“Haven’t you any ambition to do anything more serious?” the American sneers.

“I’m planning to restore the Holy Roman Empire.” comes the response.

Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival brings us the next cinematic breakthrough in defense of unpopular sexual minorities, following the example of Brokeback Mountain. This year’s cutting edge entry is titled: Zoo.

Zoo” is a documentary about what director Robinson Devor accurately characterizes as “the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible.” But remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted.

“Zoo,” premiering before a rapt audience Saturday night at Sundance, manages to be a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director (the little-seen “Police Beat”) and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals. Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews (two of the three men involved did not want to appear on camera) with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations. The director himself puts it best: “I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it.”..

I was certainly asked many times, often with a wrinkled brow, ‘Why are you making this film?’ It was something I did resent; I thought artists had the opportunity to explore anything.”

In the end, Devor ended up agreeing with the Roman writer Terence, who said “I consider nothing human alien to me.”

“It happens,” the filmmaker said, “so it’s part of who we are.

Maybe of who you are, Devor.

As far as I’m concerned: “He may be a brother of Big Bill Taft, but he ain’t no brother of mine.”

Get ready for next year’s cinematic sensation, Funeral Parlor.

Dagny Taggart?

The New York Times reports that Randall Wallace, screenwriter of Braveheart (1996) and We Were Soldiers (2002) is inching toward completion of a script for the filming of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

The challenge, Mr. Wallace said, was immediately tempting. As for how he is distilling Rand’s novel and its Castro-length monologues to a two-hour screenplay, Mr. Wallace insisted he had the material under control and was on course to deliver a finished draft this month.

“I can pretty much guarantee you that there won’t be a 30-page speech at the end of the movie,” he said. “I have two hours to try to express what Rand believed to an audience, and my responsibility is not only to Ayn Rand, but to the audience, that this be a compelling movie. More people will see the movie than will read ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ And the movie has to work.”

Of course, Randall, that has to mean that you outrank Rand.

A film production of Atlas Shrugged lacking John Galt’s speech would be like a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony omitting the Ode to Joy. If you don’t think John Galt’s speech is a key part of the novel, if you don’t like John Galt’s speech or find it intrinsically boring, you don’t really connect with Ayn Rand, and have no business trying to do a screenplay version of her work.

No, I wouldn’t advocate a word-for-word performance, but Atlas Shrugged without the Speech would be like the New Testament without the Resurrection.

Not even Angelina Jolie as Dagny is going to save this turkey.

And can you imagine? The Times reports that they were able to buy full creative control from that worm Peikoff. Rand must be spinning at 78 rpms.

Earlier Story – 27 April 2006.

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Comments on Casino Royale, from the discussion on my Class list.

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Sean Connery was the wrong physical type, too large, too hirsute, and the wrong-eye color, but was such an agreeable actor to watch working that no one much minded
the transformation of Bond into a somewhat hulking Glaswegian Geordie.

The Bond films long ago lost any real relationship to the original character or the books, becoming instead a strange, spectacularly vulgar, and American (in the worst sense) thing all their own: extended exercises in elaborate special effects, supplying PG-level sex and violence accompanied by comforting repetitions (with new elaborations and surprises) of the same cliches.

I thought Daniel Craig was less two-dimensional than any previous Bond, but he is even further removed from the original character than even the braw Scots Sean Connery or the Las Vegas lounge lizard Roger Moore. Bond was, after all, a thoroughgoing U Englishman, an orphan from an artistic sort of background perhaps, with languages and Continental education, but still –underneath it all– a sound public school chap (even if he was sent down, a one biographer contends), a gentleman, and (as Marlow would say) “one of us.”

Daniel Craig is no gentleman at all, only a half-civilized, arriviste thug, straight out of London gangland, if not Borstal itself. His motivation to rise in the ranks of MI6 to the point of becoming that organization’s most conspicuous and short-lived species of cannon fodder seems perfectly mysterious.

I thought it very strange indeed to have the long-abandoned skeleton of the first Ian Fleming novel disinterred, and used with the most insolent anachronism imaginable, yet still more accurately used as the movie’s framework than any of the original novels have been used in forty years. How Ian Fleming would have howled, if he were alive, to see Baccarat replaced by Texas Hold ‘Em as the locus of Bond’s battle of wits and nerve with Le Chiffre. The destruction of Venice would surely have proved comforting though.

Le Chiffre was commendably cast.

Watching the film, I could not help reflect that there must be very, very few, some absolutely tiny number of people in the world, who are capable of designing and choreographing those amazing and elaborate chase and fight sequences. They certainly deserve their millions.

But it was depressing to see, fifty years on, just how much the world has grown stupider, shorter of attention span, less critical, and more vulgar. The hero of the mass audience is less the gentleman than ever, and James Bond is now played as what Britons would call a yobbo. I sometimes think that if we could live another century, we would see mankind reduced still further in grandeur and dignity, perhaps to some sort of quadruped.