Colin Marshall

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

In the late 1960s, someone calling himself "Zodiac" made a few phone calls and sent a few letters claiming to be the man behind a series of murders in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of his communiques were written in an unusual cipher, leading to a brief but bright flash of public interest in the case. Finding nothing, the police departments involved sent the Zodiac files to the archives, but Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist at the Chronicle during the time of Zodiac's mailings, remained obsessed with determining the identity of the killer for years — decades — afterward. Graysmith eventually settled on a suspect the cops had previously ruled out, but the guy died before re-examination and the case remains unsolved.

* * *
I came away from Zodiac with one impression at the forefront of my mind: vintage vending machines. The film's packed with them. And I don't just mean vending machines from a single time period: the story spans fourteen years, to we're threated to vending machines from the late 60s, early 70s, late 70s and early 80s. Either Fincher loves him some vending machines, or his production designer does.

Though highly prominent, the vending machines are only representative of a wider excellence in production design. As I've discussed before, recent-past films must be a tremendous pain in the butt to do, because you can't muddle through with modern-day set dressing, and you can't exactly go to the early-20th-century prop department either. Plus, most of the people alive during your movie's time frame are still around to call you on your inaccuracies. (Some guy recently wrote Roger Ebert to complain that, in No Country for Old Men, ATMs weren't nearly as common in 1980 as Woody Harrelson's lines may or may not have implied.) But Zodiac does it so right that there were times I forgot I wasn't watching the actual time period. So obsessive is the detail that it's almost the work of a madman.

But I suppose we should expect no less from Fincher, perhaps the visually slickest filmmaker of his generation. Though not a man with especially bold aesthetic visions, he nevertheless executes them near-perfectly. On other counts, I'm more conflicted about his body of work. The Game pulled me in, but then disappointed me with turgid heavy-handedness about a man's coldhearted, mercenary pursuit of something something. Panic Room engaged me just about as well, but it left my mind as quickly as it entered. Fight Club I at once strongly like and strongly dislike, which depends on whether I interpret it as commentary on the hollow consumerism and societal fragmentation of an America in "late capitalism" (dumb) or as a commentary on the ultimate intellectual bankruptcy of activist movements that tilt against society as a whole (very smart). And Alien³ is, well, Alien³.

Zodiac bears no obvious message about greed, paranoia or Society^TM, which is good. It doesn't even feel the need to tie up loose ends, which is, in a very similar way, good. This ambiguity may have been dictated by the material: after all, they never definitively figured out the Zodiac case, and they're unlikely to make much more progress with their prime suspect sixteen years underground. The picture's big payoff comes when Graysmith, having sacrificed most elements of his life in pursuit of an answer, enters the hardware store where the man he's convinced is Zodiac works. He just stares at the guy, which is way more satisfying than if he'd, say, flown into a rage and given him the old ground-and-pound.

I should address one problem that's common to almost all films this mainstream: you recognize every single actor as an actor. All the primary and most of the secondary characters are "name" performers. Graysmith is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, of whom I feel I've seen an awful lot lately. His confidant about the case is a crime reporter played by Robert Downey Jr. The main cops are Anthony Edwards (with hair!) and Mark Ruffalo. They all do good jobs — some do excellent ones — but they're too well-known to truly become their characters. Knowing details about these players' personal lives via involuntary cultural osmosis gets in the way of knowing their characters in the same way that seeing a friend or acquaintance pop up in a movie takes you out of it. That's not a hard-bitten lieutenant, it's Tyler from school. That's not a hooker on the brink, it's Sarah from spinning class. That's not a Zodiac-obsessed cartoonist, it's this vaguely wimpy-looking dude whose face I somehow see every day.

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11. Well-known actors are usually more distraction than benefit. If I had my druthers, films would be populated only by unknowns. That way, there'd be one less layer of make-believe between the viewer and the character. Tom Cruise will always be primarily Tom Cruise onscreen; only secondarily, if at all, will he be who he's portraying. If they're exceptionally skilled and bring the performance of a lifetime — recent examples include Helen Mirren's Elizabeth II and Daniel Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview — some famous actors can counterbalance the disruption of their presence, but that's a lot of work just to break even.

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1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
   
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
   
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
   
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
   
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
   
6. Anton Corbijn's Control
   
7. Robinson Devor's Zoo
   
8. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
   
9. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
   
10. David Fincher's Zodiac
    
11. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
    
12. Matthew Ogens' Confessions of a Superhero
    
13. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
    
14. Jason Reitman's Juno
    
15. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
    
16. Greg Mottola's Superbad
    
17. Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That
    
18. Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    
19. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
    
20. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
    
21. Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    
22. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
    
23. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
    
24. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie
    
25. J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage

Vernon, Florida (Errol Morris, 1981)

In the early 1980s, documentarian Errol Morris discovered that the tiny town of Vernon, Florida (population 743, in 2000) had the highest rate of auto-dismemberment insurance fraud. Originally intending to do a documentary on these people and call it Nub City, Morris found himself on the receiving end of death threats and so reworked the project into an hour-long examination of a cop, a preacher, a turkey hunter and various old-timers found around town.

* * *
The least of a great director's efforts is still a good film. That's what Vernon, Florida is: a less-consequential one-off from perhaps our greatest living nonfiction filmmaker. As with its predecessor, Gates of Heaven, the movie is assembled out of interviews and pretty much nothing else. Unlike its predecessor, these interviews don't gel as solidly into a set of ideas, unless you count "Wow, these people think weird!" as an idea.

Each interviewee goes on at length about their own particular fixation in life. There's a couple who have a jar of sand from an A-bomb testing field to which they ascribe magical properties, a nonagenarian "pet collector" with a backyard box full of critters, some guys on a porch, an aged dandy with big ideas about the cosmos, a worm ("wiggler") farmer who distrusts books, a man of the cloth who thinks god gave him a van and a turkey ("gobbler") hunter — well, I'll let you discover the turkey hunter for yourself.

Digging for a theme, I come up with this: these Vernonites operate on eccentric — dare I say inaccurate — mental models of how the world works. Their erroneous assumptions include that a nuclear explosion makes sand grains multiply, that animals possess humanlike intelligence and emotions, that praying hard gets you stuff, and that the brain has exactly four "tracks" that allow the human to perform exactly four — or maybe five — simultaneous actions.

Some friends of mine once met up with a very normal-seeming guy from the internet. All was going well until he started dropping references to his vast, theretofore unreferenced body of occult knowledge. Discussions of real-word problems were met with the pulling-out of a copy of The Scriptures of the Sequestered Order of the Atlantean High Priestesses. "This explains everything," he assured them.

Though that's an exceptional case, we've all, to some extent, built up models in our minds that seem to reflect but don't actually resemble the real world. Heck, the existence of truth and the importance of that truth's countless possible interpretations is a primary theme of Morris' career. I meet few people with stranger ideas about how and why things are they way they are than the interviewees in Vernon, Florida, but the extremity should give us all pause to reflect on our own patently ridiculous beliefs. Some are chillingly common: think of how many people you've heard seriously assert that dead relatives remain causative agents, changing traffic lights and whatnot. ("Grandpa Mel's really looking out for me today.") Think of how many people you've heard put forth patently ludicrous ideas about the world economy as inarguable fact. ("If Bill Gates wasn't hogging so much money, we could all share it.") It is those beliefs, I argue, that we should seek out within ourselves and dismantle ruthlessly, with extreme prejudice.

Though not quite up to Morris' usual standard of coherence, this is still a solid, fascinating hour of cinema. The one big problem is the speech, which, though recorded semi-decently, is still often unintelligible due to odd dialects, advanced ages and what I assume is a total and utter lack of public speech experience. Even though everyone's speaking English, of a kind, I recommend you watch with the subtitles on. Unless, of course, you've got a girlfriend who dislikes seeing subtitles and hearing dialogue in the same language simultaneously — then you're S.O.L

My Kid Could Paint That (Amir Bar-Lev, 2007)

In 2004, painter Marla Olmstead became as famous as one can in the art world with her large, abstract canvasses. The gimmick: she was four. Her work fetched higher and higher prices, until a 60 Minutes segment cast doubt on whether the pieces were created entirely without assistance from Marla's dad, night manager at the Frito factory and himself an amateur painter. The bottom then dropped out of the Marla market, and documentarian Amir Bar-Lev, already in the process of making a film about the kid and her art, faces an onscreen crisis of faith about whether to get on the side of the Olmsteads or the side of the chanting, accusatory rabble.

* * *
A relative of mine was once heard to remark that, if you compare Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans to Leonardo's The Last Supper, it's no contest: clearly, the latter is in every way a superior painting. It seemed to me an odd statement to make, like declaring that, in a battle between the grapefruits and the Magna Carta, you obviously go with the Magna Carta every time. A similarly alien-to-me question, one I didn't realize so many people were asking, so angrily, lies under little Marla's story: is modern art just a big fraud?

Some appear to believe that, simply by virtue of the fact that the work of a four-year-old can sell for seven figures, abstract art must be baloney. The film's title is drawn from what's evidently a common sentiment, typically directed at the work of Jackson Pollock and his countless imitators: if even my kid possesses the motor skills to drip paint onto a canvas without the constraint of accurately depicting anything in the external world, then what makes these prized artifacts of abstract art worthy of so much more praise, analysis, and money?

That's actually a good question, but at its core is a flawed assumption which, in economics, is known as a labor theory of value. According to labor theories of value, the value of a commodity is set, in some fashion, by the labor required to produce it. That's not necessarily false, but empirically, you can pretty much rule out any direct or even sorta-direct labor-value correlation. As P.J. O'Rourke once pointed out, labor theories of value have a tough time explaining why we value a poem more than a hole in the ground. To make it come even close to reflecting real markets, you'd have to bend a labor theory of value so far out of shape that it would no longer merit the name.

In a market for, say, kitchen gadgets, a labor theory of value might at least be able to tell you something. In an art market, it tells you nothing. Especially stung by this is the gallery owner who first takes on Marla's paintings. The guy is a photorealist painter who missed the boat by thirty years, and you can tell that watching the disordered brushstrokes of a toddler fetch an order of magnitude more than his own painstaking streetscapes just kills him, even as he pockets the commission. Skimming from Marla's vogue is his bittersweet revenge, but it's snatched away when the suspicions arise. Yet another case of bad economic knowledge ruining lives.

I'm no philosopher of art, so I will reinvent the wheel in this discussion, but I think the controversy over Marla Olmstead is really about the issue of the intrinsic qualities of art objects versus the information associated with art objects, and which, if either, really matter. Detractors of modern art in general focus a tad too strongly on one element associated with an art object: "what went into it." When they think about abstract stuff, they assume that very little could have gone into it: some splotches, some blotches, some strokes here and there, and bam, two mil please. This in contrast to the decades of training and refinement necessarily required of a more representational artist, which I guess is what they believe they're paying for.

But I also think that supporters of Marla and the enterprise of modern art wrongheadedly place too much importance on information associated with, rather than the qualities contained in, art objects. (In the film, NYT art critic Michael Kimmelman flat-out states that, for most buyers, abstract art is about the story associated with it.) Who could seriously deny that a substantial amount of the premium on Marla's art at its peak — and maybe all of it — comes from her age? Painted at 34 rather than four, Marla's best-selling canvasses would maybe be notable, but never all the rage.

As an enthusiast of abstract art to the exclusion of most figurative art, I suppose I look as if I've got some blood on my hands. My money will one day become a factor pumping up the price of abstract pieces, because they're what I'll buy. But I defend myself thusly: I care only — only — about qualities actually contained within an object of art. I don't care if the thing was made by a baby, the hot sullen young Brit of the moment, or a retarded monkey piloting a malfunctioning robot. The important question is what aesthetic response it inspires within me, and to my mind, it's the only question. When I say that I like Josef Albers, I don't mean that I like whatever the German mathematician and painter named Josef Albers happened to paint; I mean there exists some work that I appreciate for its own qualities, and that happens to have been painted by a guy named Josef Albers. If it turns out that a stevedore named Alsef Joblers painted them instead, big deal.

All this, of course, isn't what My Kid Could Paint That is ostensibly concerned with. Midway through the film, when the 60 Minutes exposé (hosted by C to the R) airs, Bar-Lev suddenly becomes Nick Broomfield, which every filmmaker but Nick Broomfield is very bad at. He'd believed the Olmsteads' story that Marla did the paintings herself, but then again, footage of her painting process seems to suggest that she didn't, at least not entirely. What she paints on camera looks quite different from what she allegedly paints off-camera: when under the lens, she tends to squeeze out huge piles of color and mush them into the sludgy green-brown associated with childhood art classes, a process not evident in most of the work sold under her name. Oh, and when she's filmed, she's a lot more likely to paint a crude sun in one of the canvas' upper corners, or maybe the three-circle face of Mickey Mouse.

Marla's parents probably believe that their hands are completely off, I'll give them that. But it's a slippery slope from letting your baby sit on a canvas and paint to giving her coaching as she goes along, suggesting that a little more color might look good over there, applying a base coat to the canvas yourself — after all, that's just preparation — and only giving her one or two colors to work with at a time. But your guess is as good as mine. As abstract as I like my art, I can't really get with Marla's paintings — or, you know, the art objects associated with the name "Marla Olmstead", etc., etc.

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Anton Corbijn's Control
7. Robinson Devor's Zoo
8. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
9. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
10. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
11. Matthew Ogens' Confessions of a Superhero
12. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
13. Jason Reitman's Juno
14. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
15. Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That
16. Greg Mottola's Superbad
17. Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
18. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
19. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
20. Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
21. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
22. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
23. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie
24. J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage

The Mask: The Hunt for Green October (Evan Dorkin and Peter Gross, 1995)

An ominous jade mask of obscure provenance transforms the wearer into an an amoral, hyperactive, invincible version of themselves. Those that discover the Mask are at first thrilled with their newfound powers, seeing them as a way to finally get their lives in order. Unfortunately, the Mask's persona controls them as much as — and perhaps more than — they control it, leading to regrettable acts of property damage and even murder.

A bag woman discovers the Mask on the outskirts of Sky City, a decrepit East Coast-y burg that's seen better days. She sells it to Ray Tuttle, a crippled artist and junk shop owner who, still bitter about the faulty merry-go-round that crushed his hands and wife years ago, goes on the requisite Mask rampage, killing the developer who owned the offending amusement park. Though he regrets his actions, Ray also notices that his mute daughter has become a fan of "Big-Head", as the media had previously dubbed what they assumed to be a single green-skinned maniac. On the days leading up to Halloween, warring gangs of neo-Nazis, Yakuza, Mafia and something called the "Iron Triad" all descend on Sky City in search of the Mask.

* * *
The Mask was one of my favorite comic lines as a kid. While I rejected the cartoonified Jim Carrey movie — as every Mask fan surely did — I embraced the genuine ink-and-paper article. Written by cartoonist Evan Dorkin and drawn by Peter Gross, The Hunt for Green October was the third or fourth Mask series and probably the darkest, which is saying something, considering that, in the first series, the Mask-wearer immediately sets out to beat the crap out of his first-grade teacher.

I came back to it when I found all four issues while flipping through my old comic book collection. As with anything from childhood to which I return, there's a chance that I'll grasp references I couldn't before, but there's another, even larger chance that I'll discover that what once thrilled me is actually lame-o. The Hunt for Green October turned out to give me a little of both: I caught a couple Clockwork Orange gags, a play on "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" and a reference to Dorkin's own Milk & Cheese for the first time, but I also realized that there's not all that much to this series.

If you haven't read any Mask comics, you should be apprised of the formula. So first, someone somehow acquires Mask. (That's the genius of the concept: Dark Horse could theoretically spin out series after series forever, able to change absolutely everything about the setting and characters except that one of them has to wear the Mask.) Then, they wreak ultra-violence on nearly everything and everyone around them. When they take the Mask off, they see the consequences of their actions. Regardless, they usually put it back on anyway, causing second- and third-act complications that must usually be resolved with the aid of the Mask, either on the finder's face or someone else's.

Because the Mask-wearer can transform into anything he wants and materialize objects at will, the artist has complete freedom to draw whatever. In one panel, Big-Head might turn into a steamroller and crush some cars. In the next, Big-Head will turn into a green Arnold Schwarzenegger and Terminate some stuff. In the next, Big-Head will suddenly be morbidly obese, crushing all in his path with pure girth. All the while, he will crack corny jokes, usually puns or riffs on famous movie lines.

This lets the writers and artists get creative, but it's maddening for the reader. Because no rules apply to Big-Head — even Big-Head's head doesn't have to be big, though it does have to be green — anything is possible. Because anything is possible, nothing matters, least of all to the reader. Though Big-Head's actions do have repercussions in the world around him, a protean psychopath who's totally invulnerable makes for a rather uninteresting centerpiece.

The one advantage to this device is that it can amplify the underlying character's traits. Receipt of the Mask is a potentially effective analog for sudden windfalls of money, power or influence and how they tend to, for lack of a better term, exaggerate a person, for better or worse: the quixotic become more quixotic, the generous become more generous, the spiteful become more spiteful.

Protagonists of Mask series tend to be spiteful. Stanley Ipkiss, the milquetoast lead of the first series, was spite embodied, quivering with rage at a world he thought had been playing him since childhood. His rampages were strikes at life's nuisances. Ray Tuttle, he of the skeletal hands, dead wife and silent child, has more to complain about, though he does it pretty generically ("Damn that Nelson Hathaway and his shoddy, uninspected merry-go-round!") before the Mask. After the Mask, he's still generic, all about class resentment, sticking it to "yuppies", "fat cats" and what have you. He even materializes a Robin Hood costume for a couple panels.

So, lost opportunity. Ray could have been a more complex incarnation of Big-Head. He could've been more like the brilliantly-written out-of-town lawyer in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, who's utterly convinced that there is someone to blame for the small town's school bus crash: maybe it's the bus manufacturer who skimped on one safety feature too many, maybe it's the bus inspector who slacked off for a day, maybe it's the county government who negligently ignored ice on the road, maybe it's whoever installed a railing that might not have been up to code. But it's someone; of that he's damn sure.

But no, The Hunt for Green October gives a garden-variety "eat the rich" type. When Emily dons the mask, she's a little better defined as she rails loudly and crudely against the thousand indignities of childhood, but it's too little, too late. By the end, I found that the story of the whole series is basically this:

1. Ray acquires Mask, rampages
2. Ray rampages again
3. The gangs swarm into town
4. Emily acquires Mask, rampages
5. The Nazis capture ray, but Emily gives him the Mask
6. Ray rampages, defeating all gangs in the process

A thin gruel indeed. Or am I expecting too much subtlety from a comic where Nazis fight the Yakuza?

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (Dan Ireland, 2005)

A widow moves into a London Hotel, which scene turns out to the Future Corpses of Great Britain, with nearly tolerable English cuisine served daily. On her way back from picking up a library book for one of her hotelmates, she falls and scrapes her knee. Having witnessed her accident through the window of his nearby basement flat, a ragged-edged but extremely courteous young writer rushes to her rescue. The two become friends, and eventually the young man adopts the guise of the old woman's absent grandson, becoming the talk of the hotel in so doing. Trading of life lessons ensues.

* * *
I watched this one because my parents thought I resembled Ludovic, the Nice Young Man who comes to the frail protagonist's aid. As the guy has a zest for life and something of a way with the ladies, I could take the comparison as a compliment. Then again, he chain-smokes, squats in an acquaintance's apartment and busks for money. Then again, I've always wanted to try busking.

The movie steers carefully around a host of pitfalls, even as I was sure it would plummet with every turn. First, as the summary above makes obvious, it's one of those two-people-at-different-life-stations-tr

ade-perspectives stories, which isn't so bad in itself, but the form has a track record of schmaltz and flaccid ineffectiveness. Second, it's a movie where one character masquerades as another; the plot threads of these almost always converge on either a wacky confrontation, or a wacky rapid-change-of-identity sequence like in Mrs. Doubtfire. Both are just death, but Mrs. Palfrey includes neither; the real grandson never even learns there was a fake. Third, it's an English film with many English trappings which did reasonably well in the States: that's a big red flag for the sort of embarrassing Anglophilia from which I stay far, far away. Modulo a lot of talk about Brief Encounter, the picture controls damage well on that front, too; a competent screenwriter could transplant the story to Boston or someplace without breaking a sweat. So Mrs. Palfrey beats most of the possible charges, except one: a way-too-expressionistic score. I just happened to come across this passage in Alexander Theroux's new Laura Warholic; or, the Sexual Intellectual, which sums up my thoughts nicely: Such an effect on him reminded him of the false way the musical score of a brainless film with its rising diapason forces one to feel, pushing the moviegoer into various emotional directions he would otherwise not have taken, that is if he had stayed in the theater in the first place. This is not a brainless film, but I hate being told what to feel by a triumphant orchestral swell or a melancholy tinkling of the ivories. Hate it. * * * 10. Strongly expressionistic music is, almost by definition, ineffective. Either a film gets emotions across through the characters or it doesn't. If it does, an emotional score is redundant and distracting. If it doesn't, then swells and orchestral hits only underscore the deficiency of the script and/or performances.

Confessions of a Superhero (Matthew Ogens, 2007)

Every day, a gaggle of guys and gals in movie character costumes mill around Hollywood Boulevard, attempting to make a living off of tips handed to them by tourists who want their picture taken with a simulacrum of their favorite silver-screen hero. Documentarian Matthew Ogens interviews four of them: a man who not only plays Superman but has dedicated his life to the collection of Superman memorabilia, a former homeless dude who now wears a Hulk suit (inside which it can reach 130 degrees), a Tennessee transplant who spends her days as Wonder Woman, and a vaguely Clooneyesque Batman with a (possibly fabricated) checquered past and anger management issues.

* * *

Just as Vegas residents steer clear of the strip, Angelenos in their right mind put the maximum possible distance between themselves and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I don't even live in L.A. yet, and I think the thing is sheer grotesquerie. Last time I had to go by there, I couldn't stop looking at one of the characters in particular. Perhaps owing to the recent film trilogy, Spider Man is a very popular costume for a professional character — I think there are six of them — but one Spider Man stood out to me, because his suit was just a little too loose. A lonely Spider Man, standing on the sidewalk, slightly too skinny for his costume, hoping for tips, his Nikes visible, waving. The essence of human tragedy.

Few things are more intriguing to me than learning the details of unusual jobs, hobbies or pursuits. Suiting up as the Caped Crusader in the morning and then shaking down sightseers in fanny packs fits that bill nicely. I was thrilled when, in a voiceover, Christopher "Superman" Dennis said "here's how it goes" and walked the audience through what it's like to work as a character. The strategy is to look appealing enough that tourists approach you. If they start to snap a shot, make it known that you "work on tips." Make it well-known, but not too well-known, and make damn sure not to cross the thin line between public and private property. When the rubes hand over the bills, stuff them into your costume and keep on milling.

I've often wondered how lucrative an enterprise this is. Answer: the very best days bring in close to $600, but you might get nothing, too. Considering the low barrier to entry, even a $300 per day average isn't a terrible wage. (Work six days a week, and you pull down a good-but-not-great $86k per year, tax free.) Too bad the work sucks; standing around all day in the L.A. heat requires certain makeshift cooling measures, such as strategically moistening one's costume. (Yes, the film shows this moistening.) There's also the issue of non-paying customers: as Superman frequently reminds the often-hostile Batman, tipping is not mandatory.

All four examined characters are doing this to cover their bills while they look, mostly in vain, for acting work. Perhaps non-coincidentally, all four of their lives are near-absolute trainwrecks. Superman's tiny apartment is impossibly crowded with Man of Steel memorabilia, Wonder Woman is stuck with a lethargic frat-boyish hubby, Batman is perpetually surrounded with seediness and The Hulk only recently stopped sleeping in the gutter. Most are past their sell-by dates, snagging the occasional commercial or walk-on in movies that look like they were shot on VHS. (The Hulk is the standout success, having by the end of Confessions landed a role in Justin Lin's comedy about The Game of Death.)

I see two major questions at the heart of all this. First, why do so many aspiring actors — and I wonder why there are so many in the first place, given the glutted market for actors — just plop themselves in L.A. and hit audition after pathetic audition, refusing to lay any groundwork? Do they think they're in a Horatio Alger novel? Their intention is clearly not to hone their craft, as, say, your Samuel L. Jacksons did in their early years. They're not taking challenging small-time theater roles to build their skills. They seem to think acting is an occupation at which nobody is better or worse than anyone else, and is only succeeded at by being plucked out of the crowd by a studio bigwig who "likes your look." It's as if they were trying to enter a building by repeatedly walking into it, hoping to eventually abrade away the wall in their path, when they could, with just slightly more thought and up-front effort, climb in through a window.

Second, why do tourists go to the Walk of Fame at all? It's so unappealing, so tacky. There's nothing to do but gawk, and what's there to gawk at isn't fascinating. Why do they want their pictures taken with lowlifes in costumes? What, precisely, is the value of a snapshot of yourself with a gap-toothed Superman, sloppily skinny in his leotard and boots, who goes home to two rooms brimming with junk and a fiancée who, after some work, could qualify as homely? They act like it's thrilling, but isn't it, I don't know, saddening?

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Anton Corbijn's Control
7. Robinson Devor's Zoo
8. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
9. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
10. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
11. Matthew Ogens' Confessions of a Superhero
12. Jason Reitman's Juno
13. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
14. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
15. Greg Mottola's Superbad
16. Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
17. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
18. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
19. Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
20. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
21. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
22. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie
23. J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage

Experts and Intermediates (Jason Eaken and B.J. Gailey, 2007 - )

The best thing about writing Podthoughts isn't just having justification for listening to homemade radio when I should be working, it's holding the title of Podcast Kingmaker: I wield the awesome power to anoint certain ventures with a slight audience boost, and to cruelly withhold a slight audience boost from others. This week I crown Experts and Intermediates [iTunes link], an arts-and-culture gabfest for which I've got high hopes. High-apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes. Why "high hopes" rather than straight-up "high praise"? Because, while I already enjoy the program, I think it's got big untapped potential. Before getting into what the podcast could be, however, let's talk about what it is.

Of all the new kinds of shows the Podcast Revolution^TM has loosed upon our unprepared society, perhaps the most visible format — or, I guess, audible one — is the Two Twentysomething White Guys. I am forever in the debt of erstwhile Podthinker Ian Brill for introducing me to Battleship Pretension, an excellent weekly film discussion that might also be titled Two Twentysomething White Guys on Movies. There's another swell show called Jordan, Jesse, Go! — perhaps you've heard of it — whose alternate title could easily be Two Twentysomething White Guys on Being Two Twentysomething White Guys... Hilariously!

Experts and Intermediates could fly under Two Twentysomething White Guys on Convergences in Cultural Opinion, which is marginally less catchy but could probably land a public radio grant. B.J., Jason and sometimes a designated "expert" take on different works of popular culture each time, including:

• Shakespeare, especially the problematic nature of The Merchant of Venice
• The best Spider Man and Batman story arcs
• Hip-hop duo Atmosphere
• High School Musical
• 20th-century dystopian literature
• Night of the Hunter
• Christian rock

Looking at that list, you'd think the guys make their selections at random. But while the show is informed by a hearty spirit of randomness, there's actually something of a throughline, at least to the best episodes. I would submit that B.J. and Jason are primarily interested in works about which (a) one's experience or opinion differs sharply from the other's or (b) both of their experiences or opinions differ sharply from those of the work's fan base.

This is borne out by two of the show's regular features. The second-best, "Will We Be Infected?", has the guys pick out something popular yet, to them, unsavory — the aforementioned Disney franchise, or some thrashing for Jesus — and mainline it to see if they, too, will get on the bandwagon. The best is when the hosts give each other assignments. Typically, the item assigned is something the assigner believes the assignee hasn't consumed enough of; for example, B.J. assigns the comic-bereft Jason a Spider Man series. I love hearing and experiencing reactions to something out of one's own cultural sphere. If the podcast consisted entirely of assignments, that'd be fine by me. It might solve the show's slight focus problem, too.

What else does Experts and Intermediates need before taking the podcasting world by storm? First, regularity; a month between episodes isn't unheard of. (In all fairness, B.J. and Jason acknowledge the inconsistency, not that that makes it any easier for the fans.) And the guys shouldn't even bother talking about music without including clips for the audience; I won't utter that old "dancing about architecture" line, but come on, we gotta hear the stuff before you dissect it. These, however, are mere issues of polish, ones that a deserved kingship should provide the impetus to address.

[Originally published at Maximumfun.org.]

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, 2007)

Desperate to fuel their vices, erase their debts and fund escape plans from their lives, two brothers go in on a "victimless crime": knock over the parents' jewelry store, take the money and run, then let the insurance take care of the rest. This goes south, as perfect heists do, when the frightened younger brother hires an edgy thug to hold up the shop for him. The resultant domino line of crises leaves nobody a winner, and some dead.

* * *

This is essentially a soap opera episode, if soap opera episodes had budgets of paper money, were acted by consummate professionals and were directed by Sidney Lumet. (It was shot on video, adding to the lurid daytime-TV vibe. As a follower of digital video technology for nearly a decade, I was thrilled to hear a filmmaker as established — and, er, old — as Lumet say he'd never go back to the pain in the butt that is film.)

Now, I'm no soap fan, but I am a fan of stories where, despite how every character makes what seems to be the rational choice at the time, things trainwreck anyway. The perfect example of this is my favorite film of the Coen Brothers', Blood Simple. (Less perfect, but nearly so, is No Country for Old Men.) Similarly, every plan in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead springs a leak, and every plan to plug a leak causes two more.

It goes like this: the older brother hatches the plan, and strongarms the younger, child-support-crunched brother into performing the robbery himself. Which would be okay, but the younger brother gets spooked and pays off a lowlife buddy to knock over the store while he waits in the car. Which would be okay, but the woman running the shop pulls out a gun, causing a mutually fatal exchange. Which would be okay, but the lowlife has a wife with an extortion-minded brother, and the usual old woman had to do something that day, so the boys' mom was manning the store. Criminal genius that he is, the older brother doubles down, deciding to rob his eccentric young drug dealer and split the country. Which would be okay, but by this point he's out of his mind with paranoia, and his father's hunting him down. Notice how the trouble could resolved by the removal of any one of the problematic elements; this is some Greek stuff.

That the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley is not exactly a revelation, and I, along with every other living film buff, grew weary of heist films around the turn of the millennium. Also, money is the root of something something. Still, Lumet — no pun intended — pretty much pulled this one off. Roger Ebert appropriately wrote, "It keys into three common nightmares: (1) You clean and clean but there's still blood all over the place; (2) You know you have committed a murder, but you are not sure quite how or why; (3) You know you have forgotten a small detail that will eventually get you into a lot of trouble." Sure, he wrote it about Blood Simple, but still.

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Anton Corbijn's Control
7. Robinson Devor's Zoo
8. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
9. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
10. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
11. Jason Reitman's Juno
12. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
13. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
14. Greg Mottola's Superbad
15. Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
16. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
17. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
18. Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
19. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
20. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
21. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie
22. J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage

A Year with Swollen Appendices (Brian Eno, 1996)

At the dawn of 1995, musician/artist/producer Brian Eno decided to start scheduling family outings in advance with the aid of an A5 page-a-day diary. Though his resolve to preplan on the pages rapidly dissolved, he stuck with the opposite use, writing up his days after they'd finished. Ten months in, he realized that publishing this diary and a set of associated essays might be the ideal way to deliver on a book contract for which he'd long since been paid the advance.

* * *

"I have a wonderful life," writes Brian Eno at the beginning of his book's second, explanatory introduction. No argument here. It consists, essentially, of the following:

• Cooking delectable-sounding meals
• Giving speeches
• Cycling
• Producing David Bowie's Outside and the U2 collaboration Passengers
• "Enlarging bums" in Photoshop
• Jetting between London, New York, Egypt and Bosnia (remember Bosnia?)
• E-mailing Stewart Brand
• Playing with his daughters
• Messing around with generative visual and music computer applications
• Organizing large-scale art shows and charity events

Much content is quotidian, but quotidian through the Eno filter:

Right ribs hurt from bunk-climbing accident. Cooked two poussins for dinner.

Sludgy days at work, these last few. I can't get into it properly. I need someone to boss me about.

Up to get Herald Tribune and croissants. Lovely mild, sparkling morning sitting outside eating croissants and honey with Irial and Darla — delightful.

So much to sort out. Paper pouring in through every hole — requests, invitations, reminders, theses, suggestions, ideas, demands. Piles everywhere.

Evening: Die Hard with a Vengeance at the Electric — I really enjoyed it.

The nostalgia of gooseberry jam on white bread — fruit-picking as a child.

Customs confiscated a video I ordered America (Muscle Up — female body-builders) on grounds of 'indecency'.

I've noticed I'll eat anything black. Tonight ink risotto.

However, it's also peppered with thoughts that are, for lack of a better term, straight money:

Self-confidence — the last definable sine-qua-non artistic talent.

It's so easy to make 'sonic landscapes' now — and there just millions of people at it. A whole technology exists for it, leading to the thought that by the time a whole technology exists for something it probably isn't the most interesting thing to be doing.

Repair is what beautifies.

Do very hard things, just for the sake of it.

Why are Wildean wits so miserable in real life? Perhaps cynicism is not a containable talent — and ends up extending to oneself.

The only value of ideology is to stop things from becoming showbiz.

Try to make things that can become better in other people's minds than they were in yours.

Perhaps people who are unfulfilled are inclined to lavish more time on their children's.

Book proposal: The Bumper Book of Penis Torture. Coffee-table.

Lately getting a sense of how at art aristocracy evolves and coheres. Mutual attendances, good causes, 'We've stayed the course' and suddenly a certain group are being invited everywhere together. Interesting to plot this constellation.

Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.

I first picked up the book in my senior year of high school. Up to that point, I knew Eno only as a onetime member of Roxy Music, a creator of several spacey records and an occasional dropper of cool quotes — example: "I hate the sort of photography in Penthouse and Playboy which is such a compromise between something to give you a hard-on and something which pretends to be artistic. The straight pornographers aim right there where it's at." — and a bit of an eccentric. A few pages into his diary, however, I realized that he's so much more, and that his is a life that will always serve as a model for me.

Given how I stood on the brink of leaving home, there wasn't a moment in life — and there may not be one again — where I was as receptive to examples of lives well lived, or at least lives unusually lived. Eno's diary both gave me plenty new to think about in terms of the tracks onto which I wanted to guide this Colin train, and galvanized a bunch of inchoate visions that had already been floating around my mind. If works should be judged one's favorite by how much they inspire, then A Year with Swollen Appendices is my favorite book.

Having read it again at this postcollegiate age, I feel as if that late-high-school Colin is getting the old Lazarus treatment, rising after a four-year lacuna. The classes are over, the papers are written, the tests are taken; now, where was I? Wasn't I trying to do something different? There are ways in which the Colin Age 23 is disappointing Colin Age 18 — where, for one, is my t-topped car? Or my racks and racks of vintage synthesizers? — but now, I suppose, is my chance to rectify that.

* * *

Values I derived from Brian Eno's 1995:

Life doesn't really require every day to be spent in the same place, doing the same thing. I hadn't yet realized that the necessity of the 9-to-5 grind is a lie fabricated by society. And maybe the media. And maybe whichever politicians I dislike today. (Lousy politicians.) Turns out some people don't spend every day in the same building: one can instead work on a rich variety of projects, some lucrative, some less than lucrative, some personal, some collaborative, some long-term, some short and one-off, some with David Bowie, some with Bono. Put more simply, life can comprise jobs rather than a job.

One should be open about one's preferences. For instance, Eno refuses to hide — hell, he refuses not to broadcast — his appreciation for the human female posterior. I've similarly adopted the be-an-open-book-about-what-you-like ethos, whether the taste in question is musical, culinary, aesthetic, architectural, technological, educational, literary, philosophical, sexual, or what have you. (But is that just because it makes it that much easier for others to argue, and thus makes my own preferences more subject to alteration?)

Ideas can come from anywhere, and variety of experience is their fertilizer. It hadn't occurred to me that any new or unusual experience carries benefits not directly related to that experience, benefits in the form of randomness, in the form of unpredictable connections, in the form of shaking up one's routine thought processes. In the book, Eno gets it from working and interacting with people he wouldn't normally or, at the suggestion of his wife, going to areas more war-torn than those he'd usually visit. (Subvalue: the junk that just pops into your head can, in fact, be valuable; the subconscious is a harder worker than you'd think.)

Conversation is valuable, especially with fascinating people who do stuff. In 1995 alone, Eno records stimulating and informative conversations with not just his family members, his musical associates and his Stewart Brands, but Tom Stoppard, Jeff Koons, Lou Reed, Bryan Ferry, Julian Schnabel, Richard Dawkins, Rem Koolhaas, Björk, Kevin Kelly — the list goes on. I've very much taken to heart the notion that conversation, not least with those who percolate with ideas themselves, is sustenance. And not just intellectual sustenance

Writing a diary need not be a verbose, self-indulgent exercise in navel-gazery. As evidenced by the above excerpts, Eno's diary style is, for the most part, clipped and succinct. That makes the form easier to read, but it also makes the form more effective for the writer. His prose is an ideal example of how to get one's thoughts about the day down on the page quickly and cleanly when you're worn-out at the end of it. Too many hang-ups about style, after all, and the diarist is unlikely to give the day's happenings the thought they deserve, and that can only come from setting them in words.

Crap from the Past (Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber, 1992 - )

At the tender age of eleven, Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber began laboriously copying the chart positions of every single on the American Top 40 into a binder, genuflecting before the divine word of Casey Kasem. At the same time, he began regularly purchasing 45s of every top single he didn't already own. His enthusiasm for pop music has, in the ensuing three decades, evolved into Crap from the Past, where he's been behind the mic passing the love on to us for sixteen years now.

Gerber currently broadcasts out of KFAI in Minneapolis, with syndication in England and New Zealand. (Luckily for everyone who isn't a Kiwi, a Brit or Prince, there's a podcast feed.) If he were simply slapping a hodgepodge of pop tunes onto the turntables every week, his program would be no worse — and, let's admit it, probably better — than most of that which spews forth from community radio. But Crap from the Past is so much more; the Boogiemonster bills it as, in effect, "a graduate-level course in pop music," but it's even better than that, because he rarely if ever resorts to critical post-structuralist gender theory.

See, when Ron Gerber lays down a show on Tears for Fears, he doesn't spin "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and call it a night. He spins "Everybody Wants to Run the World", which the band re-recorded from scratch as a charity single for some kind of benefit run, changing only one word. He spins "Victims of Fact", a single recorded by Neon, an early group comprising the members of what would become Tears for Fears and the members of what would become Naked Eyes. He spins a cut recorded for The Karate Kid Part II by Mancrab, a one-off outfit helmed by Tears for Fears' lead singer. And he digs out his 1980s issues of Billboard to read out the original reviews of these songs.

Similarly, a New-Kids-on-the-Block-themed program features Biscuit, the boy band's bodyguard-turned-rapper, the Perfect Gentlemen, an even younger boy band created by the New Kids' producer Maurice Starr, and the James Brown records off of which Starr bit to formulate that irresistible New Kids sound. Interwoven are interview excerpts from a New Kids concert VHS tape. (Imagine how full this guy's house is, and of what else.)

Gerber also conducts the occasional interview of his own: electronic pop pioneer Thomas Dolby, forgotten — and much Boogiemonster-championed — power-popper D.L. Byron and mayor of Funkytown Stephen Greenberg, to name only three.

Though Gerber introduces certain songs as, say, "atrocities," don't take the Crap in Crap from the Past too literally: the show's not some sort of kitschfest, but if it's necessary to play some kitsch, the Boogiemonster won't back down. (He may, however, talk over said kitsch or yank it off early.) As a man unashamed of his pop habits, I adore Crap from the Past. If you don't deign to enjoy pop yourself, prepare to be converted. It's a bit of a cliché to put it this way, but were you to give his show a listen, you'd almost certainly be infected with his near-obsessive — okay, obsessive — passion for well-crafted pop and all information relating to it.

[Originally published at Maximumfun.org.]