I went, last night, to belatedly see It’s Complicated, since I wasn’t home long enough over the holidays to talk my female relatives into attending with me.  And, I am sorry to say, despite the presence of Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin, and a manly effort by John Krasinski, Nancy Meyers’ movie is, in certain ways, the most relentlessly unpleasant movie I’ve attended in quite some time.  It’s not as dreadful as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, or G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (which I saw for work, I swear).  But there is an unrelenting sour note in between some quite effective bouts of manic humor and occasional tenderness.

Let me put it this way.  Even if I am supposed to empathize with Meryl Streep, because she is a goddess, and because some day I, too, will be in my fifties and may feel insecure around younger women, it is not remotely okay for Streep’s character to have an affair with her ex-husband, who is now remarried to one of said younger women.  And it’s not really okay for a movie that wants us to like Meryl Streep’s character to essentially refuse to reckon with the impact of that affair, which is summed up in a tear group hug with her children after which everything is supposed to be dandy, and one anguished look on Lake Bell’s face.  As the Younger Woman for whom Baldwin left Streep, Bell is horribly abused by the script, reduced to a sexy midriff, occasional nasty hectoring, and then delivers one of the better moments of acting in the film when it becomes clear to her that her husband has fallen back in love with his ex-wife.  It’s a moment, and it’s far more payback than Meyers deserved for giving her such a shrewish, one-note role.  Streep’s character, despite behaving recklessly and selfishly, gets everything she wants.

My real problem with It’s Complicated isn’t the home design porn, of which there is a whole lot.  I tend to believe that it’s basically the equivalent of movies where men have a lot of guns, or nail a lot of girls, or get to drive great cars.  I just can’t get perturbed about that.  No, what bothered me is the refusal to take Jane’s actions, or the loneliness that led to them, truly seriously.  Meyers has made a movie that’s supposed to be a treat for women, particularly older ones, that instead viciously condescends to them.

That said, there is a great, extended, bravura central sequence involving Streep and Baldwin trysting in a hotel, Baldwin fainting, Baldwin having to explain to his doctor that he’s been sneaking FloMax, Streep and Martin getting stoned, Kraskinski getting stoned, and the judicious use of the Fine Young Cannibals “Good Thing” in a dance sequence (although for that song, no movie will ever, ever be better than Tin Men).  The rest of the movie is sort of speechy and moral and nasty.  It’s unfortunate.  I haven’t disliked or been disappointed by a movie so much in ages.

I’ve gotten a number of requests to comment on the New York Times nifty Netflix-rental tracker app.  I played around with it a bit in Washington, DC, and I have to say, I’m not particularly stunned by any of the patterns.  It’s not incredibly surprising to me that, say, Slumdog Millionaire would be a higher rental priority for folks in whiter Northwest Washington than in blacker Southeast, or that the reverse would be true for Seven Pounds, a recent Will Smith weepie.  I suppose I’m surprised by Doubt‘s persistence across the region, since it’s neither a super-fun thing to watch on a weekend nor something that was so critically-acclaimed it seemed like a must-watch (I saw it in New York with Cherry Jones in the title role, and didn’t feel the need to see it on film, no matter how much I love Meryl).  I Love You, Man is popular near Andrews Air Force Base, as is Role Models (curiously, Transformers looks less popular than either of those two movies in that area).  Both Frost/Nixon and State of Play are frequently rented in Northwest and the ‘burbs where a lot of politically-oriented folks live.

Look, as all of you know, I’m a huge proponent of the idea that the popular culture we consume says a great deal about us.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, but where we spend our money and our time is a significant indicator of our priorities, and damn do we spend a lot of money watching giant robots fight people and Channing Tatum flaunt his abs.  But as with a lot of societal indicators, sometimes things are just obvious: people with less money and without insurance probably aren’t going to be as healthy as people with access to both.  People are going to watch movies about people who look like them and professions that they’re involved with.  I’m most interested in the cultural phenomena that dredge up something from our collective subconscious, or seem to.  Does Twilight‘s popularity mean that a couple of generations of American women want submissive, obsessive relationships?  What does Transformers or G.I. Joe say about what we wished the American military looked like in terms of an ability to project forward basically without casualties, despite our queasy feelings as expressed in opinion polling about Iraq and Afghanistan?

In other words, I think this Netflix map is a nice aggregation of data.  But it’s really a couple of steps behind where I would like the conversation about what we like to be.

And what he says this time is that his latest album, the oft-delayed Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty is scheduled, at long last, for a March release date.  It’s been four years since we had an OutKast album, and seven years since we had a great OutKast album (although it’s possible to debate whether Speakerboxxx/The Love Below counts, by nature of the split discs, I think).  I think given the sheer number of tracks that have leaked from Sir Luscious, including “Ring Tone” and “Royal Flush” among others is probably a little unfortunate when it comes to the album’s overall prospects, just because it’s been hypothetical for so long but the whole thing isn’t going to be a revelation, either.  But I am SO excited to hear the rest of “Lookin’ 4 Ya” that I’ll go out and buy the disc anyway.  I mean, come on:

Manohla Dargis’s dissection of how Kathryn Bigelow produced the tension in The Hurt Locker is an excellent piece of explanatory film journalism, and well worth reading.  Take this:

Before James does get down to his work, though, there is a shift, about a minute into the scene, from the film’s customary (and classic) detached narrative position — where the camera hovers next to characters and often shows you what they see — to a shot from inside James’s helmet looking out, as if you were seeing the world through his eyes. You see him. Then you see with him. Although this shift to the first person lasts for about six seconds, a standard shot length in contemporary movies, it feels longer because you’re abruptly removed from the visual and aural chaos. For those six seconds you see what James sees through the helmet that frames the world like a camera, and you mainly hear what he hears: his heavy breathing.

As I’ve mulled it over, I’m pretty sure The Hurt Locker and District 9 were the two best mainstream releases I saw in theaters this year (counting DVDs just gets complicated, and isn’t useful for purposes of comparison).  They have a number of things in common.  First, they were compellingly rooted in place.  The Hurt Locker‘s universe was much more stripped down than District 9‘s fascinating and complete re-imagination of Johannesburg: it’s barracks, bomb sites, an Iraqi neighborhood, and James’s small stateside house, but having just a few location actually worked well for the movie, I think.  They felt lived- and worked-in.  D9 relies on a much broader landscape since it’s a movie about flight and refuge, and I think it makes sense.  One thing I think made it compelling, and that made the detail impressive, was how ugly the landscape was.  I’ve talked before about ugliness and beauty in effects work, and I thought the ugliness in D9  served it well.


I also thought both movies did well in wedding the viewer to protagonists who were, to one extent or another, unlikeable.  They’re uncomfortable in different ways, of course.  William James is so reckless to a certain extent that you don’t want to like him because you’re convinced he’s going to kill himself at some point.  Liking him risks emotional injury, even if it’s only momentary.  His utter detachment from his family is the kind of thing that we’re trained to feel uncomfortable with on screen, although the moment in the final minutes of the movie when he admits to his infant son how difficult it is for him to love beyond a narrow spectrum was heartbreaking.  Wikus Van De Merwe is dislikable for different reasons.  When the movie begins, he’s obviously racist and astonishingly callous–and also, frankly, somewhat stupid.  He begins his trajectory away from those traits precisely at the moment that he begins a grotesque physical transformation–the movie actively throws up challenges to the audience that’s attempting to adapt to the idea of Wikus as a hero, and I liked that about it.


I’m not sure I’ll watch The Hurt Locker or District 9 again.  I found both to be quite intense, challenging viewing experiences, and if I do take them up on a second occasion, it’ll be for my own edification, not for pleasure.  But they were both refreshingly original movies, and refreshingly uninterested in just being enjoyment machines.  Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter.  The movie that arguably made me happiest this year was Star Trek, and a more purely engineered piece of cinematic endorphin delivery is hard to imagine.  But The Hurt Locker  and District 9 were still the best.