Oscars and Others

Do I have to?

After receiving two (!) messages from my mom on how I was late on my blogging (thanks mom?), I figured that if I was going to go back to this, I would have to tackle the Oscars.

Frankly, I don’t want to, for a number of reasons.

First, I’m burnt out from being on set all weekend, a fairly good time and low-maintenance as sets go (the shoot was in Manhattan and I was a DIT, not a script sup), but the process still tires you out as I huddled against cases trying to make sure that my drives didn’t un-mount via falling off the half- and quarter-apple boxes that they were precariously perched on.

Secondly, I’m at a soul-crushing internship that leaves me with so little self-worth that it makes me wonder whether I would be better or worse if I left, a choice even mostly denied to me by the fact that our office lease seems to be over and its a question of when the people will actually muster the energy to kick us out. There, the people treat me like I was 12, while asking me to do video-editing and outputting jobs that they don’t even begin to understand while my boss desperately looks for a job as a waitress.

“You know,” I told my dad, as we drove one morning from set to get a sandwich. “It’s like a Woody Allen joke. You know there’s something wrong with the production your working at when you’re boss is desperately trying to break into the restaurant industry.”

The building is rickety and cold, with windows that are uninsulated and so streams of chill air seep in from the wind outside. Meanwhile, the water delivery that was supposed to come last week never came, so I’m drinking from the faucet out in the hallway with the lock-broken door.

It’s all enough to make one wonder about their previous state of joblessness and whether this unpaid limbo is any better, really, at all.

Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly to those denizens of these pages who are well tired of hearing me complain about my employment situation, the Oscars this year are pretty boring.

I wish I could even muster up the vitriol to denounce the Oscars for this, but it’s because, mostly, for once, they’ve gotten things pretty right.

I agree with a lot of their picks. I think there are some worthy choices to be had.

I might even have some small modicum of confidence that things could actually go right this year and some good movies could win.

But anyway, there’s some choices to talk about, so enough of my yapping: Let’s talk about the nominees.

***

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

The Hurt Locker

Inglourious Basterds

The Messenger

A Serious Man

Up!

Should win: A Serious Man

Will win: The Hurt Locker

It’s a close call for me in the “should win” category, since I really like The Hurt Locker and even rated it above A Serious Man in my top 10. Still the Coens are nothing if not excellent architects of story and drafters of dialogue in their own idiosyncratic and fully-realized worlds. Fargo, Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski should prove that pretty well, for those needing proof of their skill. This story is among their most restrained, most personal and their finest. Which is not at all to disparage Mark Boal’s script of his own reporting, the most accurate and compelling depiction of our current wartime situation since Generation Kill (the product of another embedded journalist). Really, no bad choices in this category, excluding perhaps The Messenger which suffered from a half-baked love story in the middle, though it had fine touches in the crafting of Woody Harrelson’s Sgt. Stone.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

District 9

An Education

In The Loop

Precious: Based on a novel by Sapphire

Up in the Air

Should win: In The Loop

Will win: Up in the Air

Kudos to the Academy, I suppose, for even remembering about Armando Ianucci’s superb mid-2009 Brit-com In The Loop, a satire of both British and American government that managed to be both toothy and funny without even dating itself too much. I couldn’t even believe it in hindsight. Still this is a much weaker category than the previous one. Precious‘s script wasn’t exactly a thing of beauty, what with some cut-out feel-good character and what felt like a lot of off-the-book from Mo’Nique. Still, I will sacrifice gladly this category to surely the worst of these films, Up in the Air, if it acts as the consolation prize that augurs that the film won’t win the BP Oscar. I think that’s probable. NB: Have not yet seen An Education. Chadd tells me it’s a “B+ Movie”.

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM

Ajami

The Milk of Sorrow

A Prophet

The Secret in their Eyes

The White Ribbon

Should win: The White Ribbon?

Will win: The White Ribbon

Of this category, I’m not sure if I can say what should win as Haneke’s Ribbon was the only one I saw. I can say that it’s received an awful lot of critical raves (and some notable flames), but that I found it fairly extraordinary. Anyway, with an Almodovar there or a comparable name, expect Haneke to win. Possible dark horse in A Prophet which has been garnering some great reviews.

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Burma VJ

The Cove

Food, Inc

The Most Dangerous Man in America

Which Way Home

Should win: ???

Will win: ???

What the fuck happened to this category? Really, the one category I’m actually upset with at these Oscars. This year I have not one but two documentaries on my top 10 list and neither one of them is here. Not only that, but no one I know has seen let alone talked about these docs to me all year! The only one’s I’ve really even been aware of was the Michael Pollan doc Food, Inc, which seems like a Fast Food Nation re-dub, notable mostly for Chipotle’s re-screening of it and The Cove, which i hear is kind of good, shot like a thriller, about people who kill dolphins. I don’t feel informed enough to comment, but I know that The Beaches of Agnes which was a life-work masterpiece and Anvil! (which wasn’t even on the shortlist!) must have been due inclusion on this list.

BEST DIRECTOR

James Cameron, Avatar

Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Lee Daniels, Precious

Jason Reitman, Up in the Air

Should win: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Will win: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

If there’s a Team Bigelow and a Team Cameron, put me squarely on Team Bigelow. The Hurt Locker was an exquisitely directed film, evoking the heat and claustrophobia of Iraq with the tense/intense relationships in an army troop. A straight procedural that doesn’t hit you over the head with messages, Bigelow made nearly no missteps in my opinion, though Rob felt like the film fell apart in the second half. Cameron made a great film too and in some ways deserves the award just as much, if not more, for his pioneering new methods of filmmaking and taking the medium that one crazy step further. Either way’s fine I guess, just don’t give it to Reitman. Worst director of the year, more like it.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Coraline

Fantastic Mr. Fox

The Princess and the Frog

The Secret of Kells (Some Irish movie no one has ever seen/nor heard of)

Up!

Should win: Up!

Will win: Up!

Alright, well I haven’t seen Princess or The Secret of the movie that no one has ever goddam seen or heard of why didn’t you guys just give it to Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs I hear that movie was actually good and it made a whole bunch of money unlike whatever the fuck this movie was that wasn’t even distributed and whose trailer is on some german site on which it doesn’t even load really guys, german, come on.

That said, Coraline, while an interesting premise, was a little short in execution. Fantastic Mr. Fox was a giant disappointment, a Wes Anderson movie that reached for merely “good”, without immersing itself in anything other than Andersonian self-love. Up! was miles better than either and probably my favorite Pixar film, in a three-way-tie with Ratatouille and Toy Story 2. Congrats, Pixar. You did it again.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Penelope Cruz, Nine

Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart

Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air

Mo’Nique, Precious

Should win: Mo’Nique, Precious

Will win: Mo’Nique, Precious

A few “WTFs” in this category, specifically for Nine, a movie that was universally panned (though I, like many others, appreciate Ms. Cruz generally) and for Anna Kendrick of Up in the Air and Maggie Gyllenhaal of Crazy Heart. While I can see Ms. Farmiga, a hard-working actress self-possessed and standing up to a bunch of idiotic men in a movie like Up in the Air getting a nomination and deserving it, Ms. Kendrick fell amidst the many actors in that film blighted by Reitman’s cartoonish and inadequate direction. I almost feel bad for her for how bad she was in that film–just not bad enough to nominate her for an Oscar. As for Gyllenhaal, she’s serviceable but unspectacular in Crazy Heart, playing the stock role of “single mom”. Maybe they’re just playing make-up for Secretary back in the day. Mo’Nique, even for her over-hustling and stingy lack of self-promotion, will almost certainly win the award and deservedly so. Lee Daniels wouldn’t fucking dare to take credit for her performance as he did for Halle Berry’s in Monster’s Ball, so brazenly. Congratulate her and see if she ever does anything again. Side-note: Whatever happened to Jennifer Hudson anyway? I liked her better. Less ‘tude.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Matt Damon, Invictus

Woody Harrelson, The Messenger

Christopher Plummer, The Last Station

Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones

Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Should win: Woody Harrelson, The Messenger

Will win: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Sorry, Chadd. Sorry, everyone really. Harrelson’s performance is the performance of his career, nuanced and tight and fully-formed. It’s a tour-de-force in a way that redefines the cliche. A compressed ball of pain and longing that spills out and explodes only to be mopped up and reconstituted in a Sisyphean hell. It is the finest performance of this year, supporting or not. Look though, I love Christoph Waltz. Welcome to Hollywood, sir! We’re going to like you here! Ever considered playing Dracula? Lenin, maybe? Some sort of thinly-veiled Iraq War allegory-general in Avatar 2? Oh, don’t worry, we’ll talk about it later. For now, just take your award and we’ll talk.

Also, “MATT… DAY-MON”

BEST ACTRESS

Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side

Helen Mirren, The Last Station

Carey Mulligan, An Education

Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Meryl Streep, Julie and Julia

Should win: Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Will win: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side

Again, surprisingly for a year in which I’ve both seen many movies and there were not too many movies to see, I haven’t seen several of the movies in the category. An Education was just an oversight, perhaps it came out at some weird time when I was focusing on other films. On the other hand both Julie and Julia and The Blind Side held no particular interest for me, especially the latter. That said, I saw Precious and thought that Ms. Sidibe gave a spectacular performance especially for a first-timer. She was wounded, but strong, projecting beauty through a peculiar kind of grace and self-confidence. That said, whatever Hollywood tastemakers have decreed that Sandra Bullock win an Oscar. So that’s that I guess. Please let that appease you Oscar gods so that The Blind Side doesn’t win BP in some Tea Party putsch.

BEST ACTOR

Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

George Clooney, Up in the Air

Colin Firth, A Single Man

Morgan Freeman, Invictus

Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Should win: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

Will win: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

Not much to say here. The nomination for Gyllenhaal seems like a good augur that it’s just Bridges’s year. Everybody loves him, I’m pretty sure and he’s been nominated a bunch of times. He’s great and himself as “Bad Blake” in Crazy Heart. Renner gave a great, perhaps arguably better performance, but he doesn’t need the Oscar. Freeman’s a great actor but Invictus was a terrible movie. Ditto Clooney. Firth might be the dark horse here. His performance was pretty universally acclaimed and he’s been around for a while too. Look out for him to get it if the Academy thinks “Blake” is too “Bad”.

BEST PICTURE

Avatar

The Blind Side

District 9

An Education

The Hurt Locker

Inglourious Basterds

Precious

A Serious Man

Up!

Up in the Air

Should win: The Hurt Locker

Will win: The Hurt Locker

Maybe I’m being optimistic here. There’s a gut feeling in me that says “AVATAR”, partially owing to the farce that was the Golden Globes and their blatant acknowledgment of that film’s primacy. But there’s something else in me that says “look at the PGA and DGA awards.” Those are the people that vote in the Academy, not the foreign critics and those are the people who picked The Hurt Locker. I think both movies are great and I won’t really be disappointed if Avatar wins, it was a cool movie and I like the scale that Cameron dreams on. I just think Bigelow’s film was masterful and that it deserves the award. That said, the 10 are mostly pretty good and I don’t think many would be complaining about an award for A Serious Man or Up!. Just please, god, let this not be the year that we get blindsided or thrown up in the air. That would truly be a disappointment.

So basically, like I said. Boring. But I like Alec Baldwin. So maybe, just maybe, it’ll be fun to watch.

***

A couple more things. This has been a long post due to Oscar prognostication, but this past week marked the first major screening of Zach Weintraub’s Bummer Summer, the premiere of Robert Malone’s Puppy Whistle and the departure of both of them on their road-trip-cum-feature-film-shoot for their improv’d movie Fresh Starts For Stale People or FSFSP for mercifully shorter. While I’ve heard different descriptions of the plot from different people, I’m not as excited for it as Chadd was, who seemed to summon a smile to his face at the mere thought of the coolness of it. Perhaps, it was because I am necessarily more cynical about road trips, having had a few bad ones of my own. Perhaps it was because I felt disinvited from this one, a road trip my friends were taking across country to have an adventure while I stayed here and struggled with shitty internships and shitty jobs I couldn’t even get. Or perhaps, it was because in some way, with the departure of Zach Weintraub and Rob Malone from New York City for an unspecified amount of time, some of the semblance of continuity I had after graduation was dissolving, the dissolution of a community.

“It’s the end of an era.” Mike Sweeny told me via text message as I simul-texted Zach about festival acceptances (none here). Mike told me he was only half-joking, but even in his bookishness and intellectual-sometimes-pessimism, he thought that even if the people who had been a sort of center of our community were leaving, it might be an opportunity for us to branch out, to reform, to make the rest of our lives. At least, that’s what I intuited. Mike just said “it could be exciting”.

The Bummer Summer premiere/Directors’ Series went over well, due to some good Facebooking and Zach and I’s handing out flyers at Tisch the night beforehand. We had, at Zach’s suggestion, met up at the Weinstein NYU dining hall previous to the leaflet campaign, where we proceeded to mix a small flask of Jim Beam with fruity sodas (Welch’s Grape for me, Dr. Pepper for Zach). I can attest that the combination, while exciting in theory, quickly turned disgusting as a sugary overload mixed with some end-of-the-day Halal food we ate to give a queasiness that was, indeed, reminiscent of Freshman year.

As we handed out fliers in Tisch, I’d speak effusively, pitching woo to the students on the virtues of the “home-made mumblecore film’ while Zach would stand idly beside me and try to disown me and my film. At one point a graduate student even accused me of being drunk to which Zach answered for me “yes”, much to her disgust.

“Why the fuck did you do that, Zach?” I demanded of him in the dimmed-up lights of the 10th floor of Tisch. “I’m not drunk and you gave me the Jim Beam anyway.”

“Because it was funny, dude.” Zach told me. “And we got a ‘Laurel and Hardy’ thing goin’ on besides.”

The movie went over well. The crowd dug it and even my friends who hadn’t seen it enjoyed the film. Jeremiah Newton even liked it, whose film has recently been selected for play at Berlin (where I had been rejected among, at this point, many other places). Jeremiah came up to Zach afterwards with festivals he could submit to as we all headed over to the Puppy Whistle premiere/afterparty at Andres Cardona’s house. On the way, we toured with Marc Dickerson, a Pennsylvanian and Malonely co-conspirator whom we introduced to the joys of Baoguette and Pommes Frites, once the rest of the crowd headed off for College Night at McDonald’s. Eva even stopped by a truck for a “liege wafel” piled high with 8 toppings and called a WMD (wafel of mass deliciousness). She ate sloppy-happy as we ate our sammys and fries.

Puppy Whistle was fun and weird with a star turn by Eva and a cameo by yours truly and the party that accompanied it was fun. It was only later, the next day, that Blake would point out to me that the film could be seen as autobiographical, a story about a filmmaker who goes away and the party he hosts. There was even a scene within the film that mimicked the exact circumstance of the audience as they were watching it, huddled in to a similar apartment, many of them having participated in the scene in the film they were seeing as well. Regardless, the uncomplicated of it was that I was going to miss Rob, miss Zach and that the movie, however fun, wasn’t going to help. And I had to be on set tomorrow. And Andres had cats that I was allergic to. So I left.

As Eva and I walked out, down to Houston St and through the cold-air-night, she told me about a girl who had come up to her and told her how much she’d loved her performance in Puppy Whistle and asked how she’d “gotten that greasy”.

“It made me realize,” She told me. “That being famous must suck.”

I hugged her close to me as I nodded and went home.

***

For those nostalgic for some Weintraub-o-philia, here is an interview with him from the Cinequest website. The picture is laughable, but then again, most times, so is he.

Bon chance, fellows.

Won-Ton Movie Over-Load

Awards season is almost here.

In some ways, the inanity of it all gets you.

A whole year full of movies and indie producers and pushers expect you to pay attention for just about a span of one month.

Is the Academy to blame? Sometimes. They certainly do pick shitty movies to win their awards from time to time (Read: Crash, Slumdog Millionaire) but in honest and in earnest, it would seem, they’ve attempted a feat of getting people to see-slash-consider more movies throughout the year by expanding their roster of “Best Picture” nominees to 10. This means that good movies from the summer that might be partially forgotten by the time academy season rolls around (Read: The Hurt Locker) might actually not only be in contention for an Oscar, but with a potential split between Oscar-hogging movies, might actually sneak in and win an award.

It’s exciting, in a way. But still, the fact remains: unless you are unemployed, down on friends and are hell-bent on depleting whatever savings you might have left on going to a theater to sit in seats where you’re lucky if what you just stepped on was gum, you haven’t seen most of the movies worthy of consideration in this small time.

Who could possibly have such an insane bent, such an aversion to daylight, anti-social behavior and participation in murky, unsavory activities?

If you guessed one of the vampires from that new-fucking Vampire-hyphen-Werewolf movie that made a lot of money while maintaining Mormon value overtones, you probably guessed incorrectly: I’m a jew.

Anyway, here are the films.

***

I’ve been a fan of Andersonian melodrama ever since Rushmore, which appealed to the stifled low-performing nerd in me, and The Royal Tenenbaums, which still stands for me as Anderson’s masterpiece. I discovered Bottle Rocket afterwards and deemed it a worthy debut, if not overly affected by the Reservoir Dogs fever of the day. I panned the last two films he’s made, justly as it would seem the community has vindicated those choices (though mob-rule doesn’t always speak right). The Life Aquatic seemed to airy to me, too focused on style, too obsessive about Anderson’s own love of his wacky compositions: too concentrated on the quirkyness of his story as opposed to the story itself. The Darjeeling Limited suffered from the same sort of flaw, an attempted homage to Indian cinema that was all about Whitey, as brashly colonial and ignorant of its surroundings, as the Brit-influenced train of the film’s title. In short, Anderson had drank his own Kool-Aid, embraced his own narcissistic qualities, sometimes abetted by fellow hep-cats Noah Baumbach and Jason Schwartzman. The Fantastic Mr. Fox offered him a way out of that narcissism, a chance to create a movie of pure imagination without branding it as a “Wes Anderson” movie in a way that drew attention to itself. Like Tim Burton, he could lose himself in animation every so often to rejuvenate his sense of the possible. I admit worry when I saw Meryl Streep and George Clooney heading up the cast for Fox, but they were fine in the film and I shouldn’t have worried about Streep particularly, an actress capable of disappearing when the part calls for it, like she did in Mamma Mia!. The movie itself felt fun and mostly sly and glib and occasionally triumphant as a movie about a fox (or a Roald Dahl book) should. But what it wasn’t was great. Like Where The Wild Things Are (the superior of the two, by a bit), Fox suffers from some poor music choices, rock and brit-invasion stuff, that Anderson peps in. There’s also some stuff about karate that feels tacked in, a weird character called Kristofferson and a bumbling subservient (like Pagoda or the kid whose mom Max wants to bang in Rushmore). In short, Anderson has made Fantastic Mr. Fox into a Wes Anderson movie, to its detriment. Every element is composed and planned: wacky, but only ever in the exact way Anderson intended it to be. There is no joy of discovery to be had as we had meeting the Things in Wild Things, nor are their ways to think about the way that memory evolves, like the best animated film of they year, Up!. Instead, we get what we planned for, what we paid for, nothing more. Anderson would be a better filmmaker if he took more risks and let a wacky world evolve from his characters organically, even a little bit. Instead he’s only a good-kind of children’s storyteller:

The one who tells the children what he wants to tell them and not what they want to hear.

***

The Messenger feels like the exact sort of movie I wouldn’t see in an off-year. An “American indie” with its street-cred from Oren Moverman (I’m Not There, Jesus’ Son), it tackles “difficult” “contemporary” “issues” with some hottie Shia LeBoeuf wannabe and a fat Samantha Morton. And what I described is essentially just accurate. But those missing The Messenger will miss the best performance of the year so far and one of the most sympathetic portrayals of a man left behind by history I’ve ever seen. Sgt. Stone, as portrayed by Woody Harrelson, is a veteran of Desert Storm, “the first Gulf War” who speaks admiring of Kuwaiti prostitutes as he tilts back in forth between nights of pretty bartenders and messy alcoholic binges. He is required by his duty, as he’s assumed, to inform the relatives of men killed in action that their child is gone, a task he is both perfect for and which destroys him utterly. A soldier, a “POG” as Ben Foster accuses him of being in the film, who is a victim not of gun-fire or PTSD, but of the Army’s machismo: that he joined to be a hero, but never got the chance. Instead he crawls with envy, hatred, sympathy and distance as he coldly approaches the designated Next-of-Kin. He is the most complciated non-warrior I’ve seen in cinema and it’s Mr. Harrelson’s performance (and to a lesser degree, Mr. Moverman’s writing) that has created him. If the only the movie was aboout Mr. Harrelson’s Sgt. Stone as opposed to the over-acting Mr. Foster’s wounded private and his relationship with a terribly miscast Samantha Morton. Still, to see Harrelson act in such a movie and such a way, is something retro in a good way, a call back to when good actors worked in hack jobs for money in the sort of films that got made because they were on schedule to be made and for little other reason.

***

I almost feel like side-stepping the controversy around Precious. In all honestly, I don’t feel qualified to speak about it. Perhaps I’ll just put it my two cents and then just bow out. As I might have noted before, Lee Daniels, the director of the film, had what amounted to a monstrous portrait of himself and his movie in The New York Times (“The Audactiy of Precious”) which seemed to be entirely justified in its villainy of him. It depicted him as an opportunistic joker, accosting Helen Mirren when she broke her shoe in the sidewalk and looking at his watch hand to see how long/hard a European audience would clap for an “authentic” portrayal of “American black folks”. In short, it seemed like exploitation and those often guilty of such things (Oprah, Tyler Perry) joined in with endorsements, making it seem all the more true.

All of this seemed to be at odds with the film I saw, which while melodramatic and over-the-top, seemed to strenuously avoid exploitation and condescension to its obvious target protagonist. Terrible thing are heaped upon Precious–two unasked-for children, thrown TVs, sexual-abuse from all sides and AIDS just for starters–but in a seemingly non-forced way, she just never gives up. As a protagonist, her strongest resemblance is to Jake LaMotta of Raging Bull, whose only real obstacle was his own lack of character and intelligence, but is the only other leading character I can remember with such believable tenacity. Precious doesn’t give up because she realizes her own strength, because she is able to accept and experience everything that happens to her. Because she sees and is articulate. Obviously, she is a symbol that transcends race and position, a metaphor for the need of self-expression and transcending obstacles and boundaries.

How it does it without feeling exploitative? I couldn’t tell you. Except there seems to be humor and reality in Precious’s classroom and none of her desires seem absurd. The actress Gabourney Sidibe portraying her plays it easy and never assumes an “acting” stance.

Honestly, I’m befuddled. I don’t know how to reconcile the Daniels I read about with his film. But as it is is going now, he could be the first gay or black person to win best director or best picture. Hollywood does love that sort of story.

***

What can I say? Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans?

Well.

It was fun.

As my friend Rob-Mostly-Gotten-Back-His-Beardo pointed out, like its predecessor (in whatever way), it was a well-done B-movie with an ace leading performance. Is Harvey Keitel a better actor than Nicholas Cage? I would say yes, or at leas the’s more to my tastes, though Cage is often excellent and here especially.

Cage has a devotion in BL:POCNO that verges on the insane, something that Werner Herzog is, well, perfectly poised to understand. All I can really say is good job Edward R. Pressman. I’m sure a million fucking people told you were absolutely bonkers to make a sequel to an indie NC-17 B-movie wihere a nun gets raped and devirginized by a crucifix, also with none of the same cast. But somehow–SOMEHOW–you got a pretty perfect combination here of wacky actors and wacky directors, all using their style in good harmony with the script. In short, you made a good movie.

Bravo.

Are their problems? Of course there are problems! It’s a B-movie! I assume as in Entourage, Werner Herzog didn’t give Eva Mendes any direction because he thinks she sucks (and thus she does, a self-fulfilling prophecy). Also, the script is often questionable, verging on the fact that this “bad lieutenant” is particularly sanitized from Abel Ferrara’s mad-cap Catholic fuck-a-thon. He’s not actually that bad. He saves peoples’ lives at great risk to himself, he gets his criminals, he even gets his hooker girlfriend on the straight-and-low. He doesn’t murder anyone and there aren’t even the crazy-long shooting-up scenes from the first film. “Unorthodox and Probably Insane but Pretty Damn Effective Lieutenant” could have been the title of this movie, if not for space constraints.

In the end though, a simple question, one often asked to movie critics: Should you see this?

Answer: Of course! Where are else are you going to get crazy Nic Cage antics, Werner Herzog-induced fish-eye iguana-shots and a cackling performance by mid-level rapper Xzibit?

I bet my friend Jason Lee just creamed in his pants.

***

One last note.

I recently saw The Brother-Sister Plays over at the Public Theater with curly-gurl Christa (for the first one) and my sister (for all three). I was glad I found people to see them with, which was difficult even after Brantley compared the playwright to Eugene O’Neil and Sam Shepard in the same paragraph. As I expected, the comparison is not really true, or at the least, overstated. Both of those artists have an emotional connection in their dialogue that push pin-pricks and stabs into the audience’s mind. They are unafraid to grab at your thoughts and hold them against the wourld they are trying to show you, a twisted tableau out of their minds that you know, when translated, might echo back to you. Another obvious comparison to the playwright of these plays, Alvin McCraney, might be the non-naturalist Suzan Lori-Parks, who is also black and whose plays tackle with ebullient style “the issues” as they might be.

Mr. McCraney doesn’t have that skill yet. He’s only 29. But what he does have is storytelling ability, the ability to connect myth to reality and sprinkle in history and family too, in a way that might be attributed to his old master August Wilson, or probably more accurately, to another gay minority artist, Tony Kushner. Mr. Kushner is above all else an alchemist, spinning the many worries of Jews and men into concoctions that are often funny and outrageous and always broadly ambitious. If Mr.McCraney doesn’t dream on this scale yet, he’s on his way with The Brother/Sister Plays. The first play, The Red and Brown Water is the weakest, but still memorable, a tale of a young runner and the things she can’t escape. The second and third plays, The Brothers Size and Marcus involve family and the search for identity. All of them involve the issues of the world, the details of everyday life and the inter-connectedness of community.

To my peers, the plays are only 20 dollars a piece (40 for all three). They can be seen all on a Saturday, a Sunday or both as I did.

Theater is a throwback which stirs thoughts inside you. It may not always be as crafted as film. But unlike film it is immediate and cannot be denied.