The Academy Awards controversy

I feel that I should take this opportunity to protest the clear lack of diversity that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has demonstrated in its nominations in the acting categories this year.  I do not believe that I have to point out—indeed, tens of thousands of people have already pointed out—that of all the artists nominated in the acting categories only one is a French woman.  I find it hard to believe that the Academy could only find one French woman to nominate for anything when France invented cinema as an art form and has one of the oldest motion picture industries in the world, an industry that routinely produces hundreds of film annually. Such a brutal snub displays, I think, more than a little Francophobia and poses some very pointed questions about the Academy’s commitment to diversity.

As a corollary to the facts enumerated above, I should also point out that none of the nominees, even the French woman, is a member of a municipal fire department. In fact, I believe that I can say with a fair degree of certainty that none of the nominees is a member of a volunteer fire department, either. This, I think, is nothing short of despicable. I believe that all right-thinking people can agree that our nation’s fire departments, both career and volunteer, perform important, indeed vital, work in protecting the American movie-going public from danger every day and that the Academy’s refusal to nominate a fire fighter in any category is nothing short of churlish.

So, what are we to make of the Academy’s actions?  First, that the Academy is clearly biased against French women and fire departments is a fact so demonstrable in this year’s nominations as to be beyond the ability of any amount of face-saving p.r. to refute. Second, it is clear that the Academy will not reform its bigoted mindset unless compelled to do so. The many attempts by the French Embassy and the International Associations of Fire Chiefs to rectify the situation by behind the scenes persuasion have obviously been for naught. Therefore, I am calling on the Motion Picture Association of America, the body that rates the movies for language, violence, and sexual content, in begin issuing new ratings that will inform the public about the number of French women and fire fighters in any given motion picture and I am calling on the American public itself to boycott any motion picture in which an appropriate number of French women and fire fighters do not appear. In addition to these measures, the Academy should set aside a certain number of nominations every year for French women and fire fighters, in order to ensure fairness, and then set up a fund to encourage underprivileged French women and fire fighters to enter the motion picture field. In this way the American movie-going public can rest assured that a corrupt and venal Academy will not assault its sensibilities in such a brutal fashion and the sort of blatant bias we have all seen this year will not repeat itself.  Thank you and I will see you at the movies!

THE ANNALS OF FLIGHT, OR CHUCK YEAGER SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES: I like to watch TCM [Turner Classic Movies, for those of you without basic cable], first, because I like Hollywood movies from a time when Hollywood knew how to make movies that people wanted to watch, and secondly, to indulge my habit of taking characters from one movie and stuffing them into the movie I’m watching at the moment. This is a vile habit, akin to cracking your knuckles in front of your mother or breaking wind during the more solemn parts of a funeral, and it is a habit that makes it difficult to remember movie trivia, since I’m never sure if the factoid I am trying to dredge from the noisome sinkhole of my memory is something that actually occurs in a movie or whether it is something I made up. On the other hand, such a habit can make life interesting at times, as when you watch The Right Stuff and you start to wonder how the movie would turn out if Michael Corleone broke the sound barrier instead of Chuck Yeager. Certainly, the change of characters would have improved the quality of the cinematic cuisine; Gordo Cooper’s burned hot dogs are simply no match for Mama Corleone’s lasagna.

I suspect that the same guy who put a bullet through Moe Greene’s eye did the job on the sound barrier; no one else in The Godfather was anywhere near Edwards Air Force Base, and, let’s face it, the idea of Clemenza in the Bell X-1 rocket plane causes cognitive dissonance on a massive scale; there wouldn’t be enough room in that plane for Clemenza, the gun, or the cannoli. I also have a hard time imagining what the sound barrier could have done to the Corleone family that Michael would feel the need to have the barrier whacked in such a loud and grotesque manner; causing a sonic boom in front of a bunch of eyewitnesses, most of whom work for the government, is not particularly subtle, unless the lack of subtlety is the point of the exercise.

The barrier’s loud demise must have had something to do with the narcotics business, which Don Corleone did not want to get involved with, but this is just speculation on my part; everything I know about the mob I learned from the New York Daily News; but it’s what makes the most sense to me. If the sound barrier got mixed up with dirty cops and the Tattaglia family in the drug trade, then the hit on the barrier may have been simple justice, an example of someone who should have known better becoming involved in a dirty business and then getting what was coming to them. That’s a terrific story, or at least Tom Wolfe thought so, but then again, what do I know?

DUMBO, RIP: For the past few months, wild rumors have been flying around the Disney Studios in Hollywood, despite the best efforts of the studio to squelch them, but finally it seems that the truth is about to come out. The Indian Police will announce tomorrow that the rogue elephant that their officers shot and killed in a raid on a village near the Burmese border was, in fact, Dumbo, the star of the eponymous Disney motion picture classic. At first, the studio denied any and all knowledge of Dumbo’s passing, but many Hollywood insiders now feel that Disney knew about their erstwhile star’s final and ultimately fatal rampage and tried to cover the matter up.

Dumbo, the orphaned son of an elephant shot by Burmese police in the early 20th century, rocketed to stardom as a child on the basis of his huge ears and his unusual ability to fly, a skill not usually associated with elephants outside your local bar and grill. The young pachyderm’s rise to fame and fortune was instantaneous; he was one of Hollywood’s bare handful of overnight stars; and his well-documented fall from fame and fortune into an abyss of drugs, drink, and debauchery filled thousands of inches of newspaper column space and shocked a nation. Dumbo went from being one of the most admired to one of the most despised stars in Hollywood in the early 1950’s, although he blamed all of his misfortunes on the Communists manipulating Walt Disney and the studio. His drunken antics, hidden carefully from the public by the Disney publicity machine, reached public notice in 1954, when he over flew the White House and tried to urinate on Mamie Eisenhower as the First Lady played hostess at a state dinner for the Prime Minister of Sweden. Dumbo tried to dismiss the incident as a childish prank, but Disney did not renew his contract afterwards, and the young star could no longer find work in films in the United States. He tried to work in France and in then Italy, where he carved out a small niche for himself in spaghetti Westerns, but even there, his insatiable demands taxed even the indulgent Italian film industry to the limit.

Humiliation followed humiliation: a failed marriage, a custody fight in which his now ex-wife exposed for the first time the full extent of his sexual indiscretions, and then the revelation that he had once given money to a known Communist for a bag of peanuts ended any chance of his return to American films. In the end, circumstances reduced Dumbo to the fourth elephant in the elephant line in a tenth rate circus touring Mexico and Central America.

Dumbo disappeared for a few years; there were reports that he was homeless in New York, while others thought that he might still be in Latin America; and then he turned up in India, where he started, as a member of an ashram. He’d gone there in the 60’s with the Beatles, trying, as he put it in one of the last interviews he gave, to get his head together and get his life back on track.

For a while, it seemed to work. There was talk at Disney of inviting Dumbo back for a sequel to the film that made him a star, but that idea eventually fell through. The old demons that haunted Dumbo from his youth reappeared and he turned to drink, raiding villages along the coast for rice beer with a gang of younger bull elephants who went out of their way to egg the now aging star on to ever more outrageous behavior, behavior that led, in the end, to a drunken rampage on a hot summer’s night and a policeman’s bullet. In a strange coincidence, on the day of his death an Indian court threw out Dumbo’s lawsuit against the estate of George Orwell for the wrongful death of Dumbo’s father, citing the fact that, while Burma at the time of the star’s father’s death, was a part of Britain’s Indian empire, along with what are now the states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, Burma no longer was a part of India, and so the court had no standing to hear a case that occurred in a foreign country. Dumbo was nearly 70 at the time of his death, and he left no survivors, his only son having died in an automobile accident in 1969.

REVIEW:

[cut to camera 3; sportscaster turns to face camera]

…and finally in high school sports tonight, our happy little burg’s varsity Goth team met the league champion Visigoths in the school cafeteria for a pentathlon whinefest. Events included the 100 meter angst, the black makeup hurdles to a getting a job flipping burgers, and the forty kilometer stay in your room with the noise playing so loud the neighbor’s cat can’t hear himself think while writing incredibly bad poetry about what awful snots your totally out of it parents are. The home team held its own until the fourth quarter, when the Visigoths stapled their eyelids shut while piercing their tongues with a white hot fork, which gave them the lead. They were able to hang on to the lead, despite a lackadaisical effort by the home Goths, until the clock ran out the door with the homecoming queen and win, 35-32. Afterwards, the band ritually slaughtered ‘God Bless America’ while the Austrogoths, the team of exchange Goths from Down Under put a mess of shrimp on the barbies for the fans. The two teams did not have any shrimp, preferring to go to their rooms to sulk for a while. And that’s sports. Brian, back to you.

Anchorman: Thanks, Charlie. There any chance of the home Goths going to the championships this year?

Sportscaster: I don’t think so, Brian, but my sources in the high school’s athletic program tell me that there’s a couple of real slackers on the junior varsity who can bitch, moan, and whine like nobody’s business. The coaches don’t expect much from them one way or the other, so there’s a lot of hope for next year.

Anchorman [gives that little insincere chuckle that tells you he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about a bunch of moronic pimply-faced teenagers who like to wear weird clothes; this two-bit tank town is just one more ticket to punch on his way up to the network.] : Well, wait’ll next year it is, then. Thanks, Charlie. [turns to Camera 1] A new action thriller opened at the Cineplex today, the much-awaited sequel to The Roach Ultimatum, and here is Todd Talbot with his review. Todd?

[cut to film critic, a man clearly driven out of his mind by the vast amounts of inane drivel he has to watch every year. This should come as no surprise to anyone, since motion pictures in our day and age are made for adolescents and therefore reflect an adolescent sensibility, if you can call adolescents sensible in any meaningful way and that’s always a debatable point, a sensibility formed by the vast amounts of inane drivel they watch on their televisions and their computers all day long, which accustoms them to the practice of spending large amounts of their parents’ money on inane drivel in movie theaters as well. You’d think they’d catch on to the fact that what they’re watching is little more than cinematic slop, but they don’t, what with their critical faculties dulled by years of modern education, and why should the producers spend money making a real motion picture with a real plot and real production values when car chases, massive explosions in Dolby surround sound stereo, and nubile young women wearing or not wearing, as the case may be, the minimum amount of clothing necessary to keep this dog from getting an NC-17 rating will cover any plot hole you’d care to think of?]

Film critic: Thanks, Brian. Yes, today marks the premiere of The Roach Supremacy, the much anticipated sequel to The Roach Ultimatum, and if you loved that film you will certainly love this one as well since the producers evidently decided that the last one was so successful, they ought to remake it, and so they did—there is basically no difference between this film and the previous Roach film except for the cities the producers used as background. The Roach Ultimatum was set in Vienna, London, and Prague; The Roach Supremacy is set in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Jakarta. At least, the producers say they filmed in Jakarta—the longer I watched this movie the more I kept thinking that the Jakarta portion of the film was really the 1982 Mel Gibson film, The Year of Living Dangerously, with the new crop of actors digitally inserted. Hey, I’m all for Hollywood saving a buck or two here and there, but there is such a thing as overdoing it.

As for the plot, you have to ask: why bother? Tom Blattidae stars once again as Roach, the amnesiac insect secret agent who knows more ways to kill you than you know how to die but can’t remember his real name or where he left his car keys last night. I don’t know why Tom Blattidae chose to come back for the sequel and in a way, he didn’t; as far as I can tell, he phoned this performance in from whatever hole in the wall he's hiding from the paparazzi in this week. The movie begins with Roach trapped once again in a seedy roach motel, and is there any other kind of roach motel in these bug genre movies, fighting off a small army of Japanese assassin bugs who want to kill him. Why? They don’t know, and neither does Roach, and neither do I, and I stayed to the end of the film, unlike most of the audience, which decamped about halfway through this clunker to the auditorium next door to check out the newest remake of Pride and Prejudice starring Olive Oyl as Elizabeth Bennett and Popeye the Sailorman as Mr. Darcy.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a super-secret CIA elimination squad and their attempts to kill Roach, whom they regard as a rogue bug. In a film dedicated to the scarcely believable, the rapper Mosca Def plays Phly, the head of this super secret detail, who for reasons best known to himself is rarely seen without a rolled-up newspaper in one hand just waiting for an opportunity to hit something with it. Why is he doing this? It’s a mystery to me and it will be to you too, but apparently Roach is having bad dreams about his secret agent training in Poughkeepsie, of all places, and the CIA doesn’t want him to put two and two together. There’s not much chance of that happening in this stunningly bad film, which involves Roach skittering pointlessly across half a dozen impossibly clean floors while trying to stay one step ahead of the assassin bugs and the praying mantises—there is a subplot involving the Vatican, which, someone should point out to the producers of this film, is located in Rome and has been for centuries, and not in Hong Kong or anywhere near Hong Kong—and saving the world from a suicide bombardier beetle with a thermonuclear device surgically implanted in its body. Don’t ask, it’s better if you don’t know the gruesome details.

The film has all the usual distractions to keep the audience from thinking about the plot too much and there is even Vanessa Cardui reprising her role as Roach’s hooker with a heart of gold girlfriend, but she gets killed in the first half hour of the film; I suspect that Miss Cardui, a lovely and talented actress with a bright future in Hollywood, read the second thirty pages of the script while on the set and decided to get out of this bomb with her career intact while she still had time. Tom Blattidae apparently didn’t have that option in his contract; he had to stay for the whole thing and so did I, and I advise you not to bother. The Roach Supremacy? Not likely. Step on it a couple of times and make sure it’s dead. This is Todd Talbot. Brian?

[cut to anchorman]

Anchorman: So you didn’t like it, Todd?

Film critic: That may well be the understatement of the year, Brian.

[anchorman gives another phony chortle; turns to camera]

Anchorman: That’s the news for tonight. Stay tuned here for a special investigative report on the effects of steroids on zebra mussels; are your children at risk? For all of us here at the news desk, thank you for watching and good night.

[dramatic music swells like the anchorman’s ego after winning an Emmy. Fade to black. Commercial begins.]

300: The thing of it is, of course, that it is almost always a mistake for me to go see a film based on a historical event. Before I got into the bookslinging trade, I planned to teach history to that class of mental ruminants known as the American teenager, for reasons I am pretty sure wouldn’t stand any prolonged examination if I looked at them now. I was young and idealistic then, as well as broke and foolish, and becoming a history teacher seemed an ideal way of combining my love of history, my otherwise useless degree in the subject, and my overwhelming need for gainful employment. I still love the subject, and if working in the egregious mold pit provides any compensation whatsoever, beyond being able to grow penicillin on the surface of my lungs, it is that I can access almost any new book on the subject that I care to get my hands on.

My love of the subject, however, does come with this one drawback: historically based films tend to annoy me no end. It’s not that I have anything against the genre per se; I simply find that no matter how much I want to suspend my disbelief I can’t help noticing what the producers got wrong. Even such an innocuous film as the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice annoys me when I watch it. There’s nothing wrong with the film, of course; with a screenplay by Aldous Huxley and starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, this version of Jane Austen’s classic is one of the best cinematic adaptations of a great work of literature ever made. What annoys me is that while the novel is set at some unnamed point in the 1790’s and early 1800’s, the women in this adaptation are wearing clothing that wouldn’t be in style for another thirty or forty years. Pointing out this sort of thing tends to mark one as insufferably pedantic at best and as an unspeakable bore at worst, so I usually try to go to such films by myself, the better to gloat over the stupidity of the producers, who spent all of that money getting the facts wrong when they could have gotten the facts right and still have an excellent film.

This leads, invariably, I think, to a discussion of 300, the new multimillion-dollar cartoon about the Spartan stand against the Persians at Thermopylae. This film is based on a graphic novel, a form of publication people my age still call comic books because calling them comic books annoys teenagers no end, and let’s face it, anything that can annoy a teenager no end can’t be all bad. The trouble is that the comic book and its sensibility, if you want to call them that, damage this film from start to finish. There are so many problems with this flick that the mind boggles at where to start, so let’s start with the basics: the script bites the big one.

At this point in my movie going career, I know the drill when it comes to historical epics: the dialogue is always stilted, stiff, and altogether dopey, and does not, in any way, shape, or form, resemble human speech as such speech is known to occur in all human societies at all periods since the Paleolithic Age. The further back in history you go, the worse this problem gets. The 1964 movie version of this battle, The 300 Spartans, starring Richard Egan and a host of other people whose names escape me at the moment, has the same problem, although it has one great line that somehow managed to get into the script: “the gods give us beautiful girls to marry, and then they turn them into wives.” This sort of heavy wooden dialogue is simply part of the genre package. Ten-ton dialogue is especially prevalent in almost any movie based on the Bible. In The Ten Commandments, for example, Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner could have raised a couple of pyramids using the words in the script alone, and I would be willing to bet good money that the reason Heston and Brynner got those roles is that they were the only two actors in Hollywood who could say those lines and one, make them sound even vaguely credible, and two, not collapse in hysterical fits of laughter on a regular basis while trying to say them.

Most people, however, other than the usual suspects, do not speak as if they thought the FBI had a bug in the room and they didn’t want get caught saying something incriminating. Even people in 480 BC didn’t talk that way. 300’s dialogue problem occurs because no one should be saying this stuff out loud in the first place; you should be reading it in a balloon over the character’s head, and now, freed from the space limitations of the printed page, you can listen to more of it than you really want to. The dialogue feels like someone’s pumped it full of steroids and couldn’t care less if the actors can’t pass the drug test. The actors aren’t really delivering their lines, they’re bloviating on camera, and their inexperience shows; only politicians can really bloviate well, and why would you spend ten bucks to see actors bloviate badly on a movie screen when you can, in the comfort of your own home, watch Congress bloviate for free on C-Span?

The battle scenes are suitably gory, as befits a war film, but even here, where the film should be on solid footing, the whoppers accumulate like crabgrass. If the producers of 300 had taken the trouble to consult a book about Sparta other than the comic book they based the film on, they would have quickly learned that the Spartans, like the Prussians, were not a country with an army; they were an army with a country. The Spartans were, without a doubt, the premier soldiers of ancient Greece, the individual Spartan soldier being the final and finest product of a militaristic society that brutally trained men from childhood to withstand anything any enemy could throw at them. War and the preparations for war were the central focus of all Spartan society, subsuming every other field of intellecual, artistic, or commercial endeavor. Combat provided the Spartan state and the individual Spartan soldier with the very reason for their existence. In short, unlike the cinematic Spartans of 300, the real Spartans were probably the last group of men in ancient Greece to show up for a major battle wearing only their underwear.

Yet, in the movies, as with the Almighty, all things are possible, and in 300, the Spartans fight while bare-chested and wearing leather underwear (I am assuming that it’s leather and not very dirty Fruit of the Looms). The producers let the cinematic Spartans keep their shields, swords, spears, and greaves; I suppose they did not want to strain the audience’s credulity too much, although I should point out that there were no elephants at Thermopylae, no cavalry charge at Thermopylae, and no armored rhinoceros at Thermopylae, either (I thought the rhino was pretty cool, though). If Xerxes really wanted to bring along an elephant or a rhinoceros he could have found someone to get him a pair, I guess; he was the king, after all, and as Mel Brooks says, it’s good to be king; but he didn’t. Neither did he order a cavalry charge; if had done something that stupid Herodotus would have mentioned it in his history of the war. No, Thermopylae was a straight up infantry battle that the Persians won because they found a way around the Spartan position; a man named Ephialtes told the Persians about the mountain track that led around the position, ratting his fellow Greeks out for money. Herodotus does not mention if this two-bit stool pigeon looked, as 300 would have it, like a Hellenic version of Gollum.

As for the political intriguing in Sparta, the less said the better. Much as I like watching a good-looking woman eviscerate a crooked politician with a sword, this scene poses two immediate problems. First, why doesn’t this scheming pol have his money at home in the freezer like any good anti-war politician should, instead of carrying his boodle around in his wallet, and second, the Persians paid the man off in gold. The man was a Spartan. Where was he going to spend the money? The Spartans used iron bars tempered in vinegar for currency; they wanted to make sure no one spent a lot of time trying to get rich when they should be out training to fight someone. The Spartans had little use for commerce in general and none at all for luxury goods. They were a plainspoken, simple, agrarian society and the Spartans intended to stay that way.

As for the Persians in 300, well, if I were an Iranian government official looking at this film, I wouldn’t be happy, either. Iranians regard this period, from the rise of Cyrus the Great to the toppling of the ancient monarchy by Alexander, as one of the greatest eras in their long national history, and watching Hollywood turn your culture into prolonged camp cannot be that easy to stomach. I mean, really, is it just me or does Xerxes and his travelling freak show look remarkably like they’re trying to find their way to San Francisco’s annual Gay Pride parade? The producers make Xerxes look like an epicene twit who’d have a monumental hissy fit if those nasty Spartans broke just one of his fingernails. And there were entirely too many shots, I thought, of bare-chested Spartans standing around looking buff in their leather briefs. Gay erotica is all very well and good if you like that sort of thing, but 300 is, ostensibly, a war movie, even a tragedy, and not, as the producers seem to believe, a celebration of beefcake.

And I suppose in these politically correct times I should point out that, for all their talk of freedom, the Spartans weren’t exactly the most inclusively democratic people who ever lived, but that is anachronism in its purest form, and I had a history professor who warned all his students that engaging in anachronism, speculation, and the genetic fallacy were historical sins you should avoid at all costs. So, I will take his advice and skip the usual rant about the gross inequities of Spartan society, and just say that if you really want to know what happened read Herodotus’ The Histories. There is a great film in the epic Greek stand against the Persians in the mountain pass of Thermopylae. 300, unfortunately, is not it; in fact, 300 barely qualifies as the cartoon version.