Link Banana

Aside from telling an interesting story of how the Chinese government has nurtured it’s own flourishing film industry and adding a few more Chinese movies to my Netflix queue, Grady Hendrix’s piece includes this sentence:

The film [If You Are the One] has a cameo by Hitler, a suicide, some savage scenes of heartbreak, an ending that is qualified at best, and lots of jokes about Obama, the weak American dollar, and the current economic crisis.

I’ve never seen anything Tyler Perry’s done — I keep meaning to but not doing it — but what little I’ve seen leaves me desperately curious about what his goals are. When linking to an annoyingly superficial article I begrudgingly read — if you won’t let me see your whole article on a single page, I’ll generally not read it — MOLT said this:

“Tyler Perry is simply reflecting the thinking of a lot of uneducated, working-class African-Americans.” Anecdotally, I know that sentence to be untrue, I work with plenty of educated African-Americans who love Perry, but ever since we moved to Atlanta, the center of his “empire,” I’ve been fascinated by him. His show “House of Payne” comes on 2-3 times a day here on a local affiliate and it is amazingly bad. It is quite literally the TV equivalent of a train wreck and I can’t look away. The man is a genius. He filmed 100 episodes of the show in a year, doing almost 3 a week so that he could get into syndication faster and make the real money. The cast was showing up to the set and seeing their dialogue for the first time on the day they were filming. And believe me, you can tell. Horrible acting, dreadful writing (not, mind you, horrible actors or writers, but people being asked to do the impossible) - you would think it was farce if it didn’t take itself so seriously. The man is making money hand over fist and seems to be a gaming the system to perfection.

(Can you tell I’m trying to clean out my really old tabs?)

Long a sucker for both well-written counterintuitive opinions and Frank Capra, I have mixed feelings about Wendell Jameson’s argument. His thesis:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

I have mixed feelings about the merits of posts like this one, but I always look at them.

To address this problem, I looked for a pun to make this post worth writing. I didn’t find it, but I still find Simon Pegg’s argument against running zombies to be fairly compelling.

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

Though I think giving Nigeria’s active but low-budget film scene an “-ollywood” is tacky, these are some interesting (and graphic) photos of it.

(via Boing Boing)

This is certainly the coolest graph I’ve seen in a while. It might be the coolest ever.

(via kottke)

This game looks decidedly “meh.” Mostly it’s just that I can’t resist an opportunity to reiterate the point that The Princess Bride may well be the greatest movie ever.

(via BuzzFeed)

Two octogenerians talking about movies? It’s like a longer, more crumudgeonly Siskel and Ebert (or whoever the pair is now). I’m unexpectedly delighted by this.

(via Austin Kleon)

Over at Salon, Megan Dolls points out that any fans of City of God will probably be interested in the related television series — now available on DVD — from the same director:

In “City of Men,” a televised miniseries that ran in Brazil from October 2002 until December 2005 and is now available on DVD, Meirelles and his collaborators add dimension to “City of God’s” gory view of Rio’s other half, depicting domestic life in the favelas — shantytowns cobbled together from concrete, corrugated tin and cinder blocks by their poor inhabitants. Whereas “City of God” followed its characters through the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, “City of Men” looks at contemporary life. Preserving the gritty, neorealist aspects of Meirelles’ film, the TV series offers glimpses into the homes, schools and shops where daily life in the favelas unfolds.

Speaking of Hitler… The Telegraph tells the rather interesting story of the German archeologist who inspired Harrison Ford’s character:

Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail - the cup reputedly used to catch Christ’s blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn’s obsession ended up costing him his life.

(via kottke.org)

Andrew Sullivan recently pointed out this approachable article in The National Interest that compares the three major strains of contemporary American foreign policy theory — liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism, and realism — to characters in The Godfather. A sample:

Rather than ignoring this phenomenon like Tom or launching a frontal assault against it like Sonny, Michael sees it as a hidden opportunity. For Michael knows that if the family acts decisively, before the Tataglias and Barzinis have acquired a commanding margin of power, it can rearrange the existing institutional setup in ways that satisfy the new power centers but still serve vital Corleone interests. This he does through a combination of accommodation (dropping the family’s resistance to narcotics and granting the other families access to the Coreleones’ coveted New York political machinery) and institutional retrenchment (shifting the family business to Nevada and giving the other families a stake in the Corleones’ new moneymaker, Las Vegas gambling). In this way, Michael is able to give would-be rivals renewed incentives to bandwagon with, rather than balance against, the Corleone empire, while forcing them to deal with him on his own terms.

Brawndo, the drink of choice in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, is now on sale. Rob Walker had some interesting thoughts about what it means:

It’s interesting to consider the Brawndo project as metasubversion, making it possible to express knowing amusement at the absurdity of American commerce by buying something. But maybe the message is simply that cautionary tales about dumbed-down culture are a futile endeavor: show us an argument that we will buy anything, no matter how idiotic, and we say, “Awesome — how much for that?”

National Geographic has dug up a 1955 story by Heinrich Harrer — author of Seven Years In Tibet, and played by Brad Pitt in the eponymous movie — about his time in Tibet. It’s a rather fascinating read, and a great way to see how much the world has changed since then.

(via brijit)

Also of note: A similarly resurrected story. This one’s from 2002.

It certainly makes an interesting mashup.

(via Douthat)

But in a good way:

IN “RATATOUILLE”, the most recent animated film from Pixar, a film studio owned by Disney, a talented cook named Remy, who happens to be a rat, finds his way into the kitchen of a once-great restaurant. Its head chef has given up on creativity and instead plans to churn out ready meals branded with the name of the restaurant’s revered founder, Auguste Gusteau. Eventually the chef loses control of the restaurant, the frozen meals are tossed out and Remy’s cooking helps it regain its reputation and inventive flair.

Something similar appears to have happened at Disney. Four years ago it was in turmoil, with its then chief executive, Michael Eisner, under siege from shareholders who accused him of stifling the firm’s creative culture. Today under Bob Iger, who took over as chief executive in 2005, Disney is enjoying a remarkable and profitable run of hit TV programmes and films. “Disney’s creative momentum is so strong now that there’s no comparison between it and other big media companies,” says Lawrence Haverty, a fund manager at Gabelli Asset Management.

You don’t have to agree with Ross Douthat’s politics to agree with his assessment of War, Inc..

Ross Douthat tackles how and why modern Hollywood pictures look relatively similar to those of the Vietnam era.

This doesn’t mean that the current paranoid, doom-ridden mood in cinema and television was manufactured in Hollywood and foisted on an unwilling public. Up to a point, at least, Hollywood is meeting Americans where they are. Mistrust of government and disquiet about the country’s future have risen to Vietnam-era levels, and reviving ’70s-style paranoia and pessimism is a natural way for the culture industry to connect with a public coping, once again, with a military quagmire, rising oil prices, prophecies of ecological doom, and corruption in high places.

io9 put together an alarmingly uncomprehensive report card for the physics and space movies. It’s still entertaining though.

(via Boing Boing)

A slightly old story, but an interesting one:

Two men whose daring escape from a New Jersey jail was reminiscent of the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” pleaded not guilty Monday to escape charges. […]

Authorities said the men fled Dec. 14 by squeezing through a hole they had dug through a cinder block cell wall. They had covered the hole with a pinup photo, a ploy similar to one depicted in “The Shawshank Redemption.”

(via Davenetics)