Too Much, Too Late, Too Loud (A Kind of Review)

Some Thoughts on ASSASSINATION NATION (2018)

Written and Directed by Sam Levinson
Cinematography by Marcell Rév
Score by Ian Hultquist
Staring Abra, Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, and Hari Nef 

Assassination Nation is a film that wants to be Persona meets Sasori meets The Conversation. What is more is that it thinks it's all of these movies. If that sounds either intriguing or a mess to you, the answer is: Yes, yes it is.

Assassination Nation is a style in search of a story. It's a bold, strange movie that wants to tackle a hundred subjects at once and also wants to be 1980's trash horror movie-- and it wants you to take it seriously. Very seriously. It's admirable for its ambition, it is also maddening because none of it works as well as it needs to.

The gravest sin of Assassination Nation commits, style-wise is how over-written it is. I complained a week* or so ago about The Mule and how the big beats of that movie sound like a formula from Final Draft than they sound like people. Assassination Nation has a different, but related problem. The Mule is trying to write plot into peoples' mouths. This movie is trying to write agenda into peoples' mouths. It wants to shout what the point of all of this is and, oh, man, haven't I got you thinking now?

And I'm sitting there watching it, thinking, no, man, you don't. I'm here for the Female Prisoner #701 homage and you have vastly overestimated how much I care what you have to say, bro. And then it just keeps on going about What It All Means and how Current Events are Effecting The Youth. Perhaps if you don't have Twitter this might have some novelty. As a film it feels like a panicked treatise on everything that is wrong with the internet but also a letter on Sam Levinson's keyboard was broken.

The movie pulses with this sort of energy. There is nothing in this film that is at half-dosage. The acting, the direction, the lighting, the set design, the everything, is going as loud and as extreme as it possibly can. Even the quite moments in this film are a panoply of Final Cut editing tools and film school excess. This has some appeal, because at no point does the movie ever become boring. It’s a rocket exploding on the landing pad. Beautiful and loud and probably not what the builders intended.

And on the other hand, the value of Assassination Nation is that it's a sleazy exploitation movie (or a simulacrum of one, a trust fund baby wearing a Sex Pistol t-shirt), is that it's dealing with the regressive nature of the internet and the toxic personalities that it fosters. We're now living in a post-#MeToo world where the president of the United States, a game show host, won an election by convincing your brain-worm infested mee-maw that El Salvadorians were going to break into her house and make her a drug mule. It's wild out there and beyond The Purge and Riverdale there aren't a whole lot of piece of media that are dealing with this issue directly. That itself is a problem, because it also seems like most of the popular media dealing with these stories also seem to be dumber than shit (but I stand to be corrected).

If there is one redeeming quality in the movie, it's that it takes a very dim view of the internet as it stands. As much as we all love videos of capybaras in hot springs, it's also where budding young psychopaths are radicalized into the next school shooter. The internet is an untended garden and Sam Levinson seems to understand this. The internet in Assassination Nation, as in real life, is a platform in which the worst aspects of human nature are allowed to roam freely.

With that said, taking a stand against nihilism is hardly a brave or interesting point of view. Maybe it's a necessary one, but it doesn't feel like something you can hang a movie on-- or at least it's not something you can hang on this movie.

I mean, for a movie with as many Sarah-Connor-in-T2-ass sounding monologues as this movie has, it sure doesn't seem to actually say very much. Now Sarah Connor, there was a woman who had a problem with technology and could tell you what the solution was.

Assassination Nation is never quite lands. It's a film that has a lot going on, but none of it means much of anything. It's a movie that wraps itself around an issue, but ultimately has very little to say about the issue other than it exists (Hey, were you aware that the interent is a cess-pool? Me too!). It's a confused film that isn't entertaining enough to get away with it. It doesn’t seem so much ambitious as it does pretentious. Like the best internet videos, the most spectacular fails are the ones where they really go for it and I can't say that the cast and crew of this movie weren't going for it.

If only for that, Assassination Nation is a film worth watching. Maybe.

  

OTHER THOUGHTS:

• A better version of this "Too much, too now" type of film from 2018 is Sorry to Bother You-- which also happens to be my favorite movie from that year. It's a hell of a ride and, unlike Assassination Nation, all of its extraneous details and asides feel like part of a greater tapestry than stuff Boots Riley wrote into the movie.
• Notably, it objectifies male bodies in a way that I don’t know that I’ve ever seen before in film. Good for them.
• This film stars a trans woman (Hari Nef) and it never goes out of its way to stress that she is trans. She's just one of the girls and that's that. Which is cool and more movies should follow this one's example when it comes to that sort of a thing. Where it gets really cool is that, as much rampant attempted murder as this film features, at no point does feel the need to us the t-word or misgender her-- because this film might be packed with jock douchebags and general-issue psychopaths, but they're not monsters. It's admirable that even a movie that seeks to shock knows that there's a line where it stops being fun.
• This film is directed by Sam Levinson, the son of Barry Levinson, so fuck this guy.
• I can't help but feel-- and I know this is fucked up to say-- that Assassination Nation is the type of movie that Max Landis thinks he's making.
• I was just thinking about Sasori: Female Prisoner #701 and, seriously, just watch that instead and then maybe wash it down with a re-watch of Hackers. Because Sasori and Hackers are ill as fuck. 
• For that matter, also go read Assassin Nation. It's a beaut of a comic. In stores now!

No, seriously, go watch Female Prisoner #701

FOOTNOTES:

* Okay, this took me, like, four months to put out for some reason. Not sure how. Not sure why. But, hey, here we are.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and hasn't had any internet death threats lately. Must be losing his touch. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

Current Mood:

For some reason this scene is becoming more and more topical as time goes on.

Naturally, Germany

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

It was last spring and I getting hammered in a basement bar in Germany. The place was located underneath a hostel named after a Gunter Grass story I had never heard of, much less ever read. I was sitting next to this Australian guy, because I was in a foreign country and of course I was. Of course all of it. I wasn’t ever going to spend a night, alone in Germany not trying to figure out whether or not their beer was better than ours (it is).

And of course Gunter Grass and of course it’s an Australian because it’s always an Australian. I have this sneaking suspicion that if I finally ever got over there, south of the equator, I’d find the entire country emptied out except for a bunch of Aborigines desperate for you not to remind the world that Australia is there and empty. They’ve had a bad run of that before.

And of course we get to talking about politics, me and this Australian (can’t remember his name for the life of me. Feel kind of bad about that, especially nowadays). Despite every reason to come at me (we’re drunk and on his home turf, a bar), he doesn’t. We talk like human beings and we have a good time and get to know each other and understand each other in a way that only two drunk strangers in the middle of nowhere can ever get to know each other. And he brings up Trump. Or I bring up Trump. Because you can’t not bring up Trump. He’s this thing. The Great Orange Juggernaut.

I start talking to him about the whys and hows of it. Not apologia, just yeah, this is us. Not all of us, but us. We’re family. Families can be fucked up and fight and hate each other, but we’re all of a single bloodline for better or for worse. One nation. E plurbus. All that Latin stuff. Don't ask me what any of it is in German.

And I tell him, if we get Trump, we deserve it. Not out of sadism or snideness or because I don’t understand what him or his cabal (then only hypotheticals, boogeymen of the lowest order) want to do to my fellow Americans, but because if we get him, it’s because America is too idealistic to see this shit coming or to stop it. Because of course somebody will see the light of day and do the right thing. Because we’re Americas. Except that, of course, we’re Americans. Fucking up stuff is what we do. Not seeing things coming is what we do. We're the nation that gave Jackass three movies.

So, yeah, of course we got Trump. Of course of course. The American experience is built on the belief that we should get better than we deserve. Whether its your great grandpa escaped the Cossacks or your grandma coming north for work or my own dumb family looking to get into mining or for some place with enough space to pop out ten kids at a go. We’re dreamers. We believe that all of the Indian killing and slaving and civil wars and basic depredations that we inflict on each other aren’t our character, rather that they’re somehow exceptions. And maybe they are (but probably not).

So, of course Trump. Because that’s the world we built. I don’t know if this bullshit has come home to roost, but it’s gotta go somewhere. It's what happens when you don't plan for the future. When you don't see these things coming. When you've heard this story before, but you refuse to remember how it ends. Maybe. I don’t know.

Thinking on this, I started thinking on something else that’s been going through my head this past year or so and I hate it almost as much as I hate the fact that the next time I’m blotto in a subterranean biergarten I’m going to have to either apologize and beg for forgiveness. It’s a quote from True Detective Season 2 and I hate that it makes more sense to me than anything Latin that I’ve heard in the past five years.

“I strong suspect we get the world we deserve.”

That bullshit cowpoke was right. We get the world we deserve. We always do. Even if we don’t see it. And maybe that’s the most disappointing thing in this whole goddamn mess.

Except it isn’t.

And it wasn’t. I woke up late with only a bit of a hangover. Just enough to want to sleep in a bit longer. After that I got a breakfast of hardboiled egg and Redwall-esque lunch meats and got a street car down to the Reichstag. I had myself a balmy walking tour. Saw the Rhine. Saw the Holocaust Memorial. Saw the wall. And I was walking along, the feeling of deja vu suddenly hit me like a brick. It was like I had walked over somebody's grave. As it turns out, it was Hitler's. Because of course it was. Ugly apartment building. Crowded with tourists. And the Fuhrerbunker. Because of I accidentally walk into one of the most evil places in the world (which, as I recall, had a tennis court across the street).

Then I moved on. I met up with the friends that I was looking for. I got a coffee. I saw Checkpoint Charlie and I moved on with my life and walked all the way back to Mitte to my hostel and proceded to start drinking again. Because, fuck it, I was on vacation.

Sorry. You’ve probably heard that one before.

An Addendum

The monster won.

Hate won. Ugliness won. Lying won. Spite won. Fear won. Desperation won. Revanchism won. The wrong person won. A lot of bad things are coming with him.

There's a lot of things that we could talk about now. Why such a man could get so many votes. How it came as a surprise. Why she didn't win. I don't know. A million other things. Frankly. I'm at a loss. Smarter people than myself are at a loss and I don't think they're as many beers into the evening as I am (I'm working on my third and it's Stella, so I think I'm good).

I am at a loss.

Still, I stand by what I said. Tomorrow is going to mark the beginning of a long project. It's not the project that's going to be about fucking up this man and his hostility towards basic human rights and democracy. That is only one aspect of what we have to do. We have to help out our fellow man. Not just the ones that vote like us, but all of them, because obviously they're hurting too. They're going to hurt worse by the time this thing has run its course. And it will run its course. We have to get to work building each other and our country back up as much as we have to tear down the things they're going to build to destroy us. And they will try to destroy us. We're going to survive and we're going to do it by being smarter, wiser, and better.

And I don't know.

We're all in this together. All of us. E plurbus unum. You know this.

Things will change. The anger will die off and his supporters will be left out in the cold again. Spurned, used, abandoned. It is what he does. When the tables turn and they learn what they have elected into office, we have to be there to bring them along with us. It's a long road and we're going to get there together. I believe that. I have to. Because if I don't, then I don't know what I stand for. I don't know why I am against this man. If we don't believe that we're together, only then does he really and truly win.

As I said before, they do not get to win.

Tomorrow, I am going to get up, hungover and with dread in my gut and a bitterness knowing that in the other room my dad is actively cheering on the destruction of the country he proports to care about. And I am going to get to work. I am going to find charities. I am going to find organizations. I am going to talk to people that need my help (or don't need my help or don't even want my help). I am going to get to work. That's just me. That's what I have to do.

I'll be looking, but I am all ears. I'm here to learn. I'm here to help.

I swear I'll get to

Upsidedown States of America

As of my writing this, neither side has lost. Neither Trump has lost, nor has America lost. Not yet. It isn't looking good.

I am tentatively holding on to the delusion of hope. I'm clinging to it. Not that Hillary will win. Even if she does, she still has to contend with 40% of America that are okay with a profoundly unstable and ignorant man in office (to say nothing of his more specific biases). I'm hopeful because this is still America.

And in America the bad guys do not get to win.

Even when this ends, and if it looks like it's over, nothing is over. Even if it's over, it isn't over. As Barack Obama said tonight, "The sun will rise in the morning." And it will. And it will again and again and again. There's a hope in that. There has to be. For as long as the decent people of the world, on every side of the political spectrum draw breath, we can still fight this cancer that has slowly spread across this country. Despair won't beat it. Despair is what built it.

And fuck that. To quote somebody else, long lost to the Internet's interlocking spheres of re-purposing, it isn't fair that Donald Trump can look in the mirror and feel good about himself and you look in the mirror and you feel terrible.

There's another quote, one we all cling to, one built into the myth of this country's fourth estate. Or at least, it is amongst the pantheon of liberal America. It's from Edward R Murrow. It's from a longer speech, which you can easily watch on your own. The line that sticks out to me, though is this:

We are not descended from fearful men.

It's a beautiful sentiment. It's also a fantasy. Of course we are. We are descended from Indian-killing, witch-burning, slave-driving, segregating, lynching men. We are also descended from men that stood by the wayside for centuries while these things went on.

We are also descended from heroes. Great men and women of all shades, all genders, all religions, all sexualities. People like Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman. Clifford Clinton and Abraham Lincoln. Audy Murphy and Joshua Chamberlain. Harvey Milk and Mary Harris Jones. There are victims, as well. Names and places and people that are too numerous to name. They do not deserve to be lumped in with the stains that cover our history. But the fearful men's blood is in our own. It's alive tonight. It's speaking to us.

Elections have always been carnivals of horrors. They rarely seem to be civil, they only ever seem to be less terrible. The past two elections were rather tame compared to 2004. Especially when compared to 2000. The fearful men were at work there, as well. It's always been this way. From LBJ back to Andrew Jackson. Fear and loathing is an intrinsic part of the American process.

Which is why the American experiment is so expectional. It is that despite the worst of the worst being allowed to live amongst us and occasionally rule over us, we prosper. What makes America exceptional is that despite

Donald Trump is not strong enough to break our Union. Neither is his lapdog Mike Pence. Nor are the cowards in congress or the criminals advising him. He does not get to do that. They do not get to do that. Neither do his supporters. To us liberals it might seem like the United States has been turned upside down. It hasn't. It's doing what it is always doing. It is carrying on. It is continuing an ugly, uneven legacy. Despite that, it will work.

Tomorrow the sun will rise. We will know the kind of men that live among us. And then we get to work.

We donate. We volunteer. We march. We picket. We demonstrate. We become allies. We vote. We fight. We act like decent human beings. We tell ourselves that we might be descended from fearful men, but we do not have to be.

Because this is America, damnit.

That means something.

It is up to us to determine what that means.

Maybe this isn't the best time, but. . .

I was just thinking: My birthday is coming up.

And this can be yours for the low, low price of 447 Confederate dollars (plus Lincoln's cut).

Just putting that out there. . .

Donnybrook: No Longer Just the Misremembered Name of a Country Singer

Donnybrook isn't a good book. Go read Crimes in Southern Indiana instead. If I had stopped there, I would have been a happier man and I wouldn't have to write this screed. But that is a road not taken. Here I am. Angry. Bitter. And with the knowledge of so much wasted time burning at the back of my skull.

Donnybrook is never seemed like a book that would suffer from being too classy. It certainly begins with a fine impression. When we first meet each of the principle characters (a desperate, if well meaning good ol' boy-cum-family man, a troubled cop with a tragic past that doesn't matter, and a guy named 'Chainsaw'), we meet them doing what they do best. They are robbing, shooting, and cooking their way off of the page and into our hearts. The lives of these men is a hard-scrabble life at best. Life was never easy for these folks, especially not in this economy (a fact, I feel like we were told more than once, but maybe I am just misremembering my own questionable works of fiction). As a beginning, it's strong.



This all sour as soon as the plot begins in earnest. That is to say, it goes sour as soon as the lack of a plot develops. Because Donnybrook is not so much a story as it is a series of scenes cut at their most interesting point and inserted somewhere else. It is a technique that reminds me of the kind of movies we got in the 90's after Pulp Fiction had its moment in the sun. And like that great glut of movies, this story is found lacking. Instead we are reminded of better stories-- stories like the kind that made up Frank Bill's last book.

As a story, Donnybrook is nothing but smoke and mirrors. We bounce from scene to scene before we can get bored or notice that this scene makes no sense. Smoke and mirrors posing as a structure can still hold an audience captive, but the the bits between the smoke and the mirrors have to be interesting. Unfortunately, in this case, they are not. Instead we are given men named Chainsaw and a Chinese man named Fu, who might be the only named character of color in the entire book (though, luckily, minorities are spared the vomit-coated brush that Bill paints all of his white characters with). The Chinese man is named Fu. Do you want to guess what he is an expert in? I'll give you a hint: He doesn't own a restaurant and he doesn't run a laundry.

It is that special combination of gritty and trite that eventually tipped me over from mild boredom to full blown anger. I cannot pin point when this happened. It might have been when the back-country soothsayer was introduced. It might have been when I said "Fuck you" into the book. The two events might have been related. Of this I cannot be sure.

As a target of my annoyance, I eventually fixated on how taudry the book is, on how fascinated it seems to be with the most ugly things in the world. I became annoyed because it put a spotlight on these things not to tell a story or to make a point, but to show them because it could. These things are there to get a rise out of me for lack of anything better.

We couldn't get characters that we can have empathy for or enjoy the company of. Instead, like some smelly, drunken Richard Stark charicature, we get action after stupid, crap-slick action. An attempted rape? Sure. A racist cripple? Yeah, okay. Haven't seen that in a while. Another scene in a bar? I've never been to Indiana before, but I am willing to believe that it is made up solely of bars. Children literally biting the ankles of a terrible cop? Go on. What about underage prostitution? Toss that in there too! Secret incest family? Sure. What the hell!  It worked for that broad who wrote The Flowers in the Attic and she got at least two movies out of the deal!

Towards the end of the book there's a description of prize fighters huffing spray paint and I had to wonder, with so many other drugs readily available, why they would bother with such lame high school shit? Are they art major drop outs? Is Frank Bill including these scenes because he's playing a game of white trash bingo with himself? Do I actually care?

In black and white, as a list, these things all sound kind of cool. Even making fun of it, I have this thought in the back of my head that I missed how cool they really were. There is no reason that these horrible thing can't be fun ("fun" being, perhaps a relative term. . .).  We want to read about crankheads and bare knuckle boxers, to be enticed by a story, and to believe it if only for the beauty of the prose.

Writers like Cormac McCarthy, Jason Aaron, Garth Ennis, and sometimes even Nick Cave understand how to do this. These are men who write about violence, often in the same kind of back country that Bill sets this story in. They are different from Bill because they know how to forge these horrors into a story. Frank Bill puts forth these ideas like your cat puts forth a dead rat. There is no poetry to it.

Again: The problem is not the inclusion of these things. The problem is that all of this dope snorting, face punching, bear-trap snapping nonsense isn't attached to anything worthwhile. It's just stuff. It's just an ugly pile of stuff. It's a drunk man showing up at your door with a sack full of broken glass saying that he brought you a new window. It's exactly that.


The reason for all of this praise is likely down to Frank Bill being an example of the American dream. He's a guy who came out of nowhere, with his own voice, who wrote a book that, despite its flaws, does violently clip the reality of modern America. He is also a guy who seems like he would drive straight to Missouri and kick Daniel Woodrell's ass if he didn't get a good blurb out of the man.


Crimes in Southern Indiana might not be a great book, but it is a good one. It's solid as a rock. It has a unique voice and does suffer from the kind of sawed-off fragment sentences that litter Donnybrook ("Butted the hot barrel through Dote's hand" and "Released the man's arm. Listened to him grunt and thud into timber" are the kinds of sentences that seem to exist solely as a bloody-minded challenge to any copy-editor who will take them on).

Each chapter in Crimes is not so much a short story as it is a sharp slice through a brutal America. There is something tangible about those stories. And even if you don't quite believe them, they do not overstay their welcome. They are notable for being good stories about brutish things.

Donnybrook has all of the same energy as Bill's first book, yet this energy is going in all of the wrong directions. Instead of taking the kinds of scenes that made Crimes stick out and building a bigger world out of them, they are chopped up, tossed around, and garnished with a sprig of pubic hair. Its length, like its violence, exists merely to exist. It's a shame, because any writer that is this fascinated with having people step on fox traps is a guy who should be actively encouraged to write more. He seems like he should be my kind of writer.

All of this made me think of Mr. Rogers. Besides his impeccible sense of style, he a man who exists as a complete contrast to modern America. He is quiet and kind and has a kind of unimpunable sincerity that I find utterly baffling. Writing this review made me think of this quote:

I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. - See more at: http://www.current.org/1969/05/i-give-an-expression-of-care-every-day-to-each-child/#sthash.Gf56XCaO.dpuf

I think it is much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger-- Much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire.

I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. - See more at: http://www.current.org/1969/05/i-give-an-expression-of-care-every-day-to-each-child/#sthash.Gf56XCaO.dpuf

I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. - See more at: http://www.current.org/1969/05/i-give-an-expression-of-care-every-day-to-each-child/#sthash.Gf56XCaO.dpuf

Mr. Rogers wrote a perfect review of this book before Frank Bill was even born.



FUCK YOU HERE COMES THE AD CANNON BETTER GRAB YOUR BUTT

I wrote some comics! I have two stories and they are collected in both Old College Comics Presents and The Freshman Fifteen (You can buy them here). They're all made by a collection of friends who like writing, who like comics, and do not have a patience for waiting for somebody else to publish their work. We're a little indy upstart and every single purchase lets us know that we're doing something right.

I also do a podcast called White Guys, Square Glasses. This one don't cost you anything but time. Which, to be fair, is something that you can't get back, so I don't blame you for not wanting to spend an hour or so listening to two dingbats ramble on about The Hunt for Red October or Danny Trejo's upcoming (fictional) magnum opus.

And while you're at it, why not follow my twitter?

The One and Only True Detective Theory That You Need To Read

There's a lot of chatter on the ol' computer box about who-done-it in the HBO show True Detective. While this show is one of the most talked about programs on TV, one of most important points about the mystery has been ignored. People are focusing on the wrong details and spinning out into crazy conclusions and my theory would save all of those people-- and their readers-- a lot of heartache.

I've been through the episodes over and over again and I think I have a real handle on the TV show and where it's going. I'm no expert, so let know what you're thinking.

(MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD)

(YOU WERE WARNED TURN BACK NOW!)

Okay, here's my theory:

You all need to shut the fuck up and watch the fucking show.

You're not Poirot. You aren't even Miss Marple. Jesus fucking Christ, if you're anything, you're an Inspector Clouseau if he had taken to smoking industrial loads of ketamine instead of having his manservant randomly attack him. Knock it the fuck off and watch the fucking show. Nobody cares about you half-assed, cockamamy ramblings you've dressed up as a "theory." Remember Lost? Remember it? Remember nanobots? Do you? I can see it on your face that you do.

It's going to show its hand when shows its hand. Stop trying to outsmart it. Like solving the mystery before anyone else in the room does makes you enjoy the show any more. That it makes you understand it any more.

The only theory I have about the show and the mystery is that you're all wrong and you're driving me nuts. Shut the fuck up and just be grateful that we're living in the greatest age of television since. . . ever.

Alright. I'm sorry I yelled, but this is what you have brought me to. You think I'm happy about this?

(END SPOILERS!!!!!11!)

Let's Rap About Fast Five

Thanks to my friend Rachel (and about a dozen other caring people) I was made aware of one of Criterion's 50 Percent Off Sales. After deliberation that's probably lasted a year or so, I decided to purchase one of Stanley Kubrick's lesser known masterpieces Paths of Glory. It arrived this week so, naturally come Saturday night I watched Fast Five.

And let me tell you that Fast Five is quite a movie.
 

"PROTECT PRESIDENT CAR! HE'S THE ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS THE CODES!"

There has been a lot dedicated to this particular moving picture, from How Did This Get Made to Jordan, Jesse Go! to Giant Bomb as well as quite a few others (like my friend who shall remain anonymous who works in the JET program who showed it in his class to, I don't know, teach kids about American euphemisms). Knowing that I am not going to waste your time blathering on just how good or bad it is. It is. It's pretty bad and it's pretty good and in the end it has some of the craziest car sequences that you will ever damn see.

So, anyways, Fast Five, what is it? Who is it? What make car go? Who is rock? Why make crime? These are all good questions and I hope to answer them in turn.

This movie stars a bunch of people, only one of them is Vin Diesel (Boiler Room, Saving Private Ryan) and only another one of them is The Rock (The Rundown, DOOM), but most of them are pretty and at least one of them is Paul Walker (Flags of Our Fathers, That Movie Where the Guy Gets Shot With a Shotgun in the Trailer and Flies like a Million Feet).

Nothing about what this movie is makes sense to me and that's sort of the magic. This all starts with the cast. You've got one of the leads,Vin Diesel, who was once known for being something of an indy breakout actor in the late ninties and early two-thousands who then ended up in the Riddick films-- excuse me-- the Riddick Saga and then finally scoring his much sought after yacht fund with the Fast-cum-Furious flicks.

In Fast Five he play a fat guy who everyone in this world is too polite to call "chubby and kind of old and sad," which naturally means that he's a deadly criminal who is really good at cars and, like everyone else, really good at showing up or having people show up at the exact right moment to save the day. Also, he's really good at cars.

Then there's Sir Paul Walker. In this movie he plays a white guy with a t-shirt with a hot girlfriend/baby-mamma (SPOILER!!!). Despite common belief Paul Walker is not the same person Stephen Dorf. In this movie he plays the white guy that doesn't seem to offend anybody by appearing on screen. He's also important because he's the one guy in this movie that we're 100% sure is full-blooded honky.

Then there's the Asian Guy (Better Luck Tomorrow, Fast and Furious 6). His purpose is to bone Tall Natalie Portman. His job in the crew is supposed to be to blend in and be an everyman, which he proves by being Asian man in Fast Five that drives a car super well and is inserted into this film with the specific purpose of boning Tall Natalie Portman. You know, a real everyman. He also, like, looks at a thing once and maybe understands what they are once, which I guess makes him a super-valuable heist team member or a guy with Asperger's. Not exactly justifying his placement on the crew, but then again he does get up in Tall Queen Amadala, so I can see why one would fly two thousand miles on such short notice.

Tall Natalie Portman is their "muscle," whatever the fuck that means. I mean a good half of their crew is yoked to the point of being a poster on the wall of a confused male teenager's wall, but she's their muscle, because I guess they said so. She is notable for not providing muscle at any point in the entire picture. But she does manage to pull the palm print of a criminal off of her ass. Like Asian Guy, she is just kind of there. And that's well enough because the men are just sort of there, as well. Everyone is just sort of there. Black. White. Asian. Latino. Miscellaneous. We are the United Colors of Pointlessness.

Because someone has to make those cars go.

Two dudes just chilling straightly.

The LGBT community is completely unrepresented in this movie except in subtext-- but I'll get to that in a second here-- because gay people require a level of complexity that is simply beyond this movie. The proof of this is that straight people are barely even there. Unless you can do something with a car in this movie (getting married, passing, or whatever else), it doesn't appear as anything more complex than something that could fit on a Post-it.

Then again, I complain a lot about how movies go out of their way to say what's going on. It's why I think Downton Abbey is such a big hit, because nobody ever says what they want or what they're thinking and that simple technique is drama. So, with that said I don't know that we need to establish any homosexual characters when one of the big draws of this film is two sweaty, bald men grappling with each other.

GET IT!?

The Fastiverse is a sexless, hateless universe that exists to drive machines with no feelings about your hormone treatment, the president's birth certificate, police brutality, or anything else. In many ways it's as old fashioned of a movie as there is, yet it is rife with Hispanics, the ethnically ambiguous, black people, the casually bilingual, and Asians and dead people and everyone else and none of that matters because they're all here to drive cars real quick like.

To me that is amazing. Fast Five, like the guy in Shine, has somehow managed to allow both some of the most secretly progressive ideas into the film and, yet, manages to make none of them an issue by making their ability to make cars go fast more important. Can you make a car drift? Go get married. Can you make this car jump this ramp? You qualify for a tax deduction. Can you make this car go real, real, real fast? Good. Because I'd be proud to have you as my neighbor.

It works because the film has no idea what it's doing. Hell, for that matter, it isn't just post-racial, it's post-human.

Don't worry they're fine. They landed on some poor people.

It's a thing that is everywhere. It's what society is built around. It's what we got in our hearts. It's what pirates hide and children giggle about. What I'm talking about is butts.

We like butts. We love butts. Some people-- often boring people-- want to look at butts. We were bred to do this.

More than that, it's what we want to see in movies right next to nice beaches, gothic manors, gothic manners, space, and sweet rides. As much as that is what we want to see and as much as that can go south, Fast Five is rather demur. Like James Bond movies, though, this movie can be shocking just how quaint it can be about the human body.

While it does have the obligitory ass shots and bikini clad babes that come from shooting a movie Rio de Janero it is a movie that is, importantly, shot in Rio de Janero. That's how people dress over there. It's a beach town in a hot and humid location and it's Brazil, I'm pretty sure even the president wears a bikini. There's a certain amount of casual half-nudity that comes with the territory.

So, in a movie in which Riddick and Paul Walker swing a bank vault into roughly a thousand cops and where Americans can storm into a former colony and shoot everyone that can be shot, this movie still has some sense of semblance of decency about showing a woman's breasts. Or, yeah that ass. Or, God help us, front cleavage.

Is it there, yeah? It's kind of weird when you see it, yet it doesn't ever treat any of the female characters as a nice ass except in the case of one very silly plot point. Women in this film are mothers, sisters, wives baby mommas, drag racers, cops, commandos, and, yes, damnit, career women. There is a franchise in which women are having it all and it isn't directed by Tina Faye.

As bad or as good as it is it could have been so much worse and it isn't and when you consider pornographic bilge like Transfomers 3, you should realize that this is a pretty good case that our society might not completely and utterly hate women. It might be that we like them and we want them to hang out with us and help us, and, yeah, it isn't exactly Waitress, but, then again, what is?

It is meathead cinema at its pinnacle and it still doesn't treat women like pieces of meat. Sure, they're still hot and super capable "professionals" with nothing to do in their lives but rob banks, but they aren't these objects of desire or points of leverage for the plot. They're women. They get shit done. In that sense they're just like the men. There's no equivocation, there's no discussion, there's just chicks in cars moving the plot along.

And they make the cars go vroom real good, so what other qualifications do you want?

In 2011 you will believe man can walk. . . real slow while looking into the middle distance.

People in this movie are cogs to movie the plot along to the next bit of fetishism. I was trying to describe this feeling to my friend Kevin and the best parallel I could come up with was a body builder talking about his hobbies. He says he's into French cooking or gardening or going to the movies, but we all know what his real passion is: It's body building. We all know where the heart of Fast Five is and it isn't in what people feel about fatherhood.

Because as much as Transformers is about selling toys to people or Pirates of the Caribbean is about selling illeteracy, this movie is just about cars. These cars do things.They get results. More importantly cars are really kind of rad.



Fast 6 has come and gone and it's basically a preconceived notion that this series will go on, hopefully, forever. I just want to put my foot in the door now with what I think Fast 8 (AKA Hard Eight With Cars This Time) should be--

VIN DIESEL
Looks like we've got to bring in another driver, the best there is. One I've been trying to forget about. . . UNTIL NOW.

PAUL WALKER
Who's that?

VIN RIDDICK
A ghost.

A SHELBY VIPER drives TOWARD THE CAMERA and drifts a few inches from the camera. A driver emerges from the driver's side door. He is wearing a helmet. He removes his helmet to reveal:

CGI STEVE MCQUEEN (as played by Army Hammer).

STEVE MCQUEEN
I heard you guys needed a driver.

BOOM.

FAST EIGHT.

BOOM.

IN 3D IMAX.

BOOM.

DUBSTEP.

WUB.

SUMMER.

BOOM.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Come on! You know you want it!

I could apologize forever about this dumb, dumb, DUMB piece of cinema (and I do that a lot), but you know what? I don't care.

For once I'm free of all of the shame and irony and anything else you could make me feel about liking something this colossally stupid. I could talk about how cars are in America's DNA as deep as guns or unsolicited flag waving (I saw several American flags waving during a report of the announcement of the new Pope, so there you go), but in the end the reason I am talking about this movie is simple: I had fun.

You should have fun, too. That's why we watch movies. Maybe that fun is different sometimes and maybe we all have different ideas of fun, but we movies don't move us because we hate them. That's fun sometimes, yeah, I'll admit. That isn't what keeps us coming back. Sometimes it's a great piece of storytelling, something emotionally effecting, or great acting or all three. Sometimes its dumb people driving cars. Sometimes that is all that it has to be.

Fast Five did what it wanted to do. It made me have fun watching cars go over, under, and around things that cars should try their hardest to avoid for insurance reasons. It's why I watched Bullitt, it's one of the primary reasons why I love Ronin, it's why French Connection is burned to brightly in my mind, it's a dozen other films that made me remember them. It's the fact that Fast Five, for all of its many blindingly obvious faults, is a movie that uses machinery in novel ways to make something worth seeing.

You don't need me to tell you that that is a pretty good movie.

Where is Anything Anymore: Road Trip Journal Part V

I'm getting location fatigue. I really have no idea where I've been. It's all a blur. One town after another, one long highway after another. The Red Bulls and drinking every couple of days can't be helping, either. There's no pace to it, no rhythm, just one long slog that molds into another.

Not that this isn't great country or a fine trip, it's just that it is slowly becoming one big ball with no beginning and no end. I guess I have the photos to dileniate one day from the next. I guess that's one of the reasons we keep photos, right?

That's one of the reasons I went on this trip. I won't kid you that I went on it because I love my dad so very much that I had to spend two weeks with him. Hell, I've been in love and I don't know if I'd choose to spend two weeks with her on an island somewhere or a well-equipped SUV, even. I wanted to go on this trip to see large chunks of this country that I've never seen before and I wanted to go on it to find and buy stuff.

Today I finally found some of the things I was looking for. It's only been a small amount of postcards and some clothing items. It proves that this junk is out there, though, it isn't just all

The things we buy have a certain allure. Whether or not that power is a good thing is a whole other discussion, but the things we buy and live around have more meaning than just what they're meant to do.

There's a Japanese called "tsukunogami," which is the idea that after an object hits its centennial, it becomes a living being. I'm sure I'm missing part of the trick here. The general idea remains, though, which is that these objects have an energy of their own.And I love it because it means that I'm not just buying up crap to fill my life with. It means that I'm buying up the spirit of something that has a history and an energy beyond you buying it over a counter. It's why old stuff is cooler than new stuff.

I see that in the photos my dad has already bought, in the photos that spurred this road trip on in the first place.A photo of a bunch of men in mustaches is just that until you come back to that exact place ninety years later and hand that photo back to the person who owns the place. It proves the place existed, that people went there and cared about it back then and it isn't just some ugly place where people get drunk. Not to say that it isn't that, as well.

High Point: Dad and I rolled down into town and after some detective work, which included talking to a cowboy who trained at the same Army base as my dad, we figured out where one of our old bar photos belonged. It was down the street aways and even had an article in the newspaper that very day (none of it mentioned the old business that was in the postcard, much less the giant bear in the postcard. . . ).

I had to talk him into believing that it was the place, but after finding a few architectural indicators, he finally broke down and admitted it was the place (not that I was right, just that it was the place that I was saying it was).

The building was abandoned and the door was wide open. We walked in, shouting ahead of us, partially out of respect for the place and its owners and mostly out of a desire to not get a face full of birdshot to the gut. It is Montana, after all.

Sub-High Point: I got to wear my Brokeback Mountain cordouroy jacket today when it started raining.

Low Point: I lost two pool games in a row by sinking the Eight Ball within three or four turns. It was rough. Real rough.

Waldoism of the Day: "We wake up, we eat breakfast, we dive, we eat lunch, we go to sleep, we wake up, we do it again."

This is the Avengers Entry

I just got out of Marvel's The Avengers (or if you're from Europe Marvel's Avengers Assemble) and I will get to my opinion of the film, but in light of the things that

Here are the facts:
I went to beverages and more and ran into my friend Simon Estrada. He is a talented artist. I then bought a Tsing Tao and a bottle of Cutty Sark.

I got a burrito, ate that burrito, filled my flask up, and watched half of Community (sorry, I will check it out on Hulu).

I went and watched Marvel's The Avengers (because I refuse to not spell out its stupid, stupid title).

Afterwards I went to the adjacent Yard House and got a Guinness.I thought about getting two, but then again I drained that Sark flask and had to get home to a dog and a cat and hell.

I chatted with a couple.

That is always precious. Talk to people. That is why I hate clubs and trendy bars. It casts off basic humanity. Nobody should or would or could talk to anybody there. That is why I talked to this couple.

Damnit. We are none of us misanthropes.

Side note: Is friendship necessarily a thing? Must it be?

We move on.

After befriending said couple and chatting about sports (they agree that the Yankees are Hitler youth and the Red Soxes are from Boston) the bar hit last call and I gave them a tour of Old Town Pasadena and ended up at Barney's Beanery. We talked. We touched hands. He went to the bathroom.

And that is when I was informed that I was leading him on. Suddenly one or two stray comments made sense. As it turned out we were due for a threeway. I was the catalyst for the threeway. Alright. I let the lady know that, sorry, that was not my scene, hon. I was, unfortunately, straight. The fellow returned. Then I went to the bathroom.

Holy crap, dude, I am in a bathroom. I do the bathroom thing and finish up and walk back up the stairs. There is a local looking dude. I appraise him. "Hey, man, I don't know. That sounds like a situation." I know, right. "Yeah!" Yup.

I am in a situation. It is official.

I rejoin with said couple.The guy pays the bill and we head out and I decide to guide them to their hotel, them being out-of-towners to varying degrees. There is no way I'm letting people tell their neighbors that LA (Pasadena) is full of assholes. Never that. Also, hey, if Israel can find peace so can we. I am no ideologue.

We part ways.

I call up my friend Alex and talk to him about this. We do. Then we talk about other things. That goes on for some time.

I decide to write about this.

And here we are. Afterwards, I write about this and then decide to write a worthwhile version of this story in addition to a short story based on this experience because, man, what the fuck vibe is it I am giving off?

Apparently not a vibe, but A Vibe. The Vibe, even, something that makes Chaos Theory a doctorate.

It's weird.I don't even get carded anymore. And that preclude the Ralph's on Colorado. They know my ass by now, shamefully. They know me for my dad too. But bars I have never been to don't even card me> The hell? And first of all, what hell?

I realize this comes hot on the heels of a woman my mom's age (but not looking like it) propositioning a situation where she might teach me things that younger women do not know. This happened at the Rancho. This is a fact. There is more to this. I'd tell you what but it'd get in the way.

My life amounts to something 19 year old me would have begged for. It is madness and I am grateful that he never ran into these things.I could never make up this shit and as I get older and less creative the only things I can truly put to paper are the mistakes that I remember not making, because, seriously, this might as well be the Gomorrah that killed Lot's wife. And she had not tales to tell.

It'd be a curse if it wasn't so silly.

Listen to Your Prophets

This vignette speaks to how I feel in a way that I couldn't ever express in so few words. I agree with him completely. This is what America is. This is the America somebody has built.



Try and tell me I'm wrong.

Wake up, Time to Die

If this doesn't make you feel something, then I don't know what will.



Maybe nude photos of ScarJo? I don't know, I'm not God.

(via The Economist/War is Boring.)