I am not particularly on board with schlock director Uwe Boll’s sensibility or the idea in his forthcoming movie Assault On Wall Street that people who work in finance are worthy targets of vigilante justice:

But I do think there’s something interesting about the way the movie is being marketed, as an “excoriating look at the American financial system that is sure to stir up plenty of Occupy-esque sentiment” (that description comes from Rotten Tomatoes but reads an awful lot like press release copy).

Now, obviously Boll’s main characters’ actions have zip to do with the actual functionality or existence of Occupy Wall Street or any aspect of the 99 Percent movement. Taking up an individual crusade of assassinating bankers is not the same thing as starting up a People’s Library. A gun your main character is buying “for fun” is not the same innovative instrument as the People’s Mic. And perhaps most to the point, an individualistic crusade to recoup your losses on investments is not even close to the same thing as a broad-based movement aimed at exposing society-wide inequality. Tower Heist, Brett Ratner’s surprisingly fun 2011 movie about the employees of a luxury apartment building who rob the Bernie Madoff-like swindler who ripped off their pension fund, at least had the sense to make it the theft an attempt at reasonable and collective redistribution.

But where the aesthetics and tactics of Occupy Wall Street itself were probably never going to be particularly attractive to Hollywood, there’s one way in which the movement is tailor-made for Hollywood. As Kelefah Sannaeh put it in a long review of anthropology professor and anarchist thinker David Graeber’s new book The Democracy Project in this week’s New Yorker: “What’s striking about this formulation, though, is what’s missing: any explicit reference to the one per cent. It was a self-reflexive slogan for a self-reflexive movement, one that came to be known more for its internal politics than for its critique of the outside world.”

A void that needs a face? Hollywood is on it. In Margin Call, we’ve had Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons as sophisticated men made amoral by numbers. Tower Heist gave us Alan Alda as a kindly-visaged, deeply arrogant investor whose kindliness towards his employees curdles into contempt when they dare to question his handling of their money. Assault On Wall Street offers up John Heard as a callous creep who doesn’t care who he rips off. Arbitrage presented Richard Gere as an entitled master of the universe who couldn’t believe the market wouldn’t cooperate to hedge his best, both personal and professional. Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps even offered up a repentant Gordon Gekko. The lords of finance have gotten middle-aged, pasty, and if not outright evil, foolish. Hollywood’s collective portrayal of Wall Street may not have been able to muster a consensus vote from Occupy Wall Street or anywhere else, but in trying to bandwagon on the sentiments of the movement, it’s taken a sledgehammer to the finance industry’s cultural capital—and an image Hollywood helped create in the first place.

Pain and Gain, the action-black comedy hybrid about a team of Miami bodybuilders on a violent crime spree that’s baed on a true early 1990s case that opens this weekend, is an impressive chronicle of the persuasive power of American dumbness. That it’s directed by Michael Bay, a man who’s amassed a considerable fortune by purveying the kind of dumbness at which he now takes cockeyed aim does nothing to diminish the considerable, sick charms of the movie. In between the movie’s engagement with male body image and entitlement, its portrayal of the way the American dream can deform like candle wax, crackerjack performances by Mark Wahlberg, Dwanye Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shaloub, and Rebel Wilson, and the rather provocative question of Bay’s level of self-awareness, Pain and Gain may be the smartest dumb movie of the summer.

The story follows three Miami-based bodybuilders, Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg) and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), who work together as trainers at Sun Gym, and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), an ex-convict who’s chosen Miami, of all places, to try to maintain his sobriety. They turn to crime when Lugo, who’s obsessed with the results of self-improvement if not precisely conversant with the means of achieving it legitimately—he served time on an investment scam—decides that one of his clients, a businessman named Victor Kershaw (Shaloub) , is living the life that ought to be Lugo’s own. “I didn’t hate him. I just thought it would be cool to see France,” Danny explains to us initially. But his resentments harden into a kind of entitlement, one based in part on the disparity between the amount of time he spends working on his body and the time Kershaw devotes to his own physique. “We’re supermen,” Danny tells Adrian. “Don’t you think we deserve better? Because I do.” After recruiting Paul to their cause, the three men kidnap Victor, lock him up in his own sex toy distributorship, and proceed to torture him until he signs their assets over to them. But while the movie’s plot is a crime story, its themes are self-delusion, incredulity, and their related consequences.

Everyone in Pain and Gain is obsessed with the movies, and one of the film’s running jokes is the way people take the wrong lessons away from their favorite movies. “Michael Corleone didn’t become the Godfather by following rules,” Daniel insists, missing the point that Daniel’s transformation into the Godfather is a tragedy that upsets generations of planning, rather than his actual goal. “He did it by keeping a gun behind the toilet and knowing what he wanted.” “I knew the only place a woman like me could be appreciated in the United States,” says Sorina (Bar Paly), a stripper at the club where the gang likes to hang out. “I saw Pretty Woman.” But her assessment of that movie is that Julia Roberts got a shopping trip by showing Richard Gere her vagina, rather than that she got her way out of poverty and sex work by being appealing and emotionally open. Sorina gets her shopping spree, in part because she doesn’t know to want anything else. And they collapse the distinction between the movies and reality on a regular basis. When Danny wants to reassure Paul that his ideas for kidnapping and extortion are viable, he tells the more naive man “I watched a lotta movies, Paul. I know what I’m doing.” Pain and Gain, to be clear, serves up many of the same vulgar pleasures that have lead its characters astray, from gorgeous, unclothed women, to the sick joke of a small dog chomping down on a dismembered toe, but in a movie that’s partially about about the power of such provocations, it’s hard to accuse Bay of hypocrisy—he’s telling us what works, and challenging us to distance ourselves from our enjoyments.
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Watching the trailer for Thor: The Dark World that was released yesterday, I was struck by a sense of how annoyed I would be if my boyfriend went missing for an exceedingly long time, and then showed up only to port me to an alternate universe without even giving me time to let my kicky astronomy colleague Darcy know where I was going. And it got me thinking about what women are allowed to do—or at least what movie studios think audiences will be psyched to see women doing—in trailers for the action movies that will be released this year.

Thor: The Dark World: If you’re a lady in Asgard, you apparently get to be anxious, get kidnapped, and walk around tables. On the upside, you also get to be in battle, which is a great setting for having your hair whip artfully around your face.

Fast and Furious 6: Appear in black-and-white surveillance photos. Be counted among the crew when the gang gets back together. Hang out with The Rock in a professional capacity. Attend parties where they wear miniskirts. Hang from jeeps. Shoot guns. Specifically at Vin Diesel. Have fist-fights in subway stations.

Man of Steel: Kal-El’s mother gets to be pessimistic about her son’s chances on earth. A neighbor lady gets to be perceptive about his abilities. Faora gets to stand near General Zod, though it’s a blind-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance considering she’s supposed to be a significant villain. And in a rare exception, Lois Lane gets to talk about her reporting.

Over at Buzzfeed, Louis Peitzman has a damning piece about the way that Tyler Perry uses HIV as a moral weapon in his latest movie, Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, which he situates within Perry’s injection of HIV into his adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. He explains that in Temptation, the main character Judith, played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell, contracts HIV through her affair with a man not her husband, and that her infection is deliberately related to both another character and to the movie as both the result of her straying, and as a cautionary tale to other women. Louis writes:

Whether or not one condones cheating on a spouse, the implication that a person deserves HIV is horrifying. What’s worse, however, is that Perry has written Temptation as a morality play, in which “Man begins in innocence, Man falls into temptation, Man repents and is saved.” As Madea would say, “Hallelujer.”

Like Perry’s other movies, there is nothing subtle about Temptation. It’s not just the sin of Lust that Perry condemns: Throughout Temptation, we’re also schooled on Greed (as Judith consumes more and more of what Harley buys for her), Pride (as she begins to show off her body in more revealing outfits), Wrath (Harley’s violent temper), and Envy (Harley covets another man’s wife). Judith’s God-fearing mother Sarah (Ella Joyce) even refers to Harley as the Devil. The traditional morality play presents Satan not as a symbol but as a literal being, battling with God for a person’s soul.

Viewed in this context, it’s not simply that Judith deserves HIV, but that it’s a “sinner’s disease.” HIV — at least, HIV the plot device — is Tyler Perry’s punishment for our sins.

It’s a reminder how depressing it is that Tyler Perry is one of the only black filmmakers in America who can make any movie he wants, at any time, and be assured of financing, and that he’s become perhaps the dominant figure making entertainment aimed at black audiences. If he wanted to, Perry, through his studio and the profits of his successful projects, could have built a generation of black filmmakers with diverse perspectives—For Colored Girls, in particular, would have been a tremendous project for a woman to direct. Instead, he’s consolidated his power, and is using his influence to both make deeply mediocre entertainment and to spread horrible messages about HIV to very large audiences. We’re at a point where it would be both a creative good and a public one for someone else to get treat African-American moviegoers like they’re an audience worth cultivating if only to cut down on Perry’s financial and intellectual market share.

May the Lord help my immature self, but this trailer for This Is The End looks relatively hilarious:

Most parodies of Hollywood action movies tend to center on unexpected people emerging as badasses, which isn’t necessarily much of a parody. From cops who step up to defeat entire buildings full of terrorists in Die Hard, to the office worker who discovers unexpected talents for assassination in Wanted, to even the country cop who’s learned everything that he turns out to need when his town council ends up being full of murderous petty tyrants in Hot Fuzz, both parody and reality suggest that picking up a gun in the right circumstances confers greatness. So I like the idea of something that argues that the people who carry that idea on their handsome shoulders would do really, really poorly in an apocalypse. Also that Emma Watson would be awesome with a fireman’s ax.

I’m actually kind of impressed by the chutzpah it takes to roll out the trailer for White House Down, Roland Emmerich’s latest bit of disaster porn, with this particular quotation attributed—though not actually accurately—to Abraham Lincoln, a United States president who was actually repeatedly in danger, and whose assassins were tried in a military tribunal stacked to require fewer votes: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

What’s grimly hilarious about this, of course, is given what happened when the Pentagon and two commercial buildings were attacked, America would probably go under martial law if the White House and the Capitol were both successfully destroyed. And Emmerich’s movies valorize extraordinary measures in the face of disaster and expansive use of executive power in the same way that would be used to justify major crackdowns after a more significant terrorist act than September 11.

Of course, there’s the whole separate issue that Channing Tatum’s character is an off-duty cop on a White House tour with his daughter when everything starts going down and he mysteriously becomes the only person available to protect the President of the United States, a scenario that probably gives White House Down the distinction of being the only movie to have its plot invalidated by the sequester. But I’m a lot more willing to forgive Channing Tatum-related ludicrousness than civil liberties chutzpah these days. If you’re going to quote Abraham Lincoln, you need to have more to offer up than a lot of helicopters and CGI flames to justify it.

Post contains mild spoilers for Django Unchained, especially if you somehow missed the news that Django kills everybody.

Two of the most challenging movies I saw last year came in December: Django Unchained, and Killing Them Softly. Try as I might, I never managed to cull my many and contradictory thoughts on these movies into a coherent post. Here are some orphaned ideas that continue to trouble me in conversations about the three:

1. Why have Django don the trappings of Calvin Candie in the closing frames of Django Unchained? I didn’t take notes when I saw Django, so I don’t recall the very last shot of the movie with precision. But when Django is done killing everyone on the Candieland plantation, he puts on what appear to be Calvin Candie’s clothes – the red smoking jacket, if nothing else, is certainly Candie’s. He also chomps down with satisfaction on the ivory cigar holder that Leonardo DiCaprio’s vicious dilettante slaveowner had wielded throughout the latter half of the movie. What precisely are we to make of Django stepping into the mantle of his enemy? It fits, roughly speaking, into some of the more unnerving themes from the rest of the film. It seems to reinforce Django’s disinterest in liberating anyone other than his wife, which the PostBourgie podcast crew spent significant time on in their rousing discussion of the flick.

The other costuming moment that stuck in my mind was Django’s choice, when Dr. King Schultz tells him he can pick his clothes, of a powder-blue outfit with high white socks and a white cravat. This got a hearty laugh in the Silver Spring, MD, theater where I saw the movie, and that includes me—it’s a good gag, if somewhat cheap. Looking back, I felt okay having laughed at it because its exploitation of modern stereotypes about black men and outlandish fashion choices fits Tarantino’s fundamentally fantastical project of putting a Blaxploitation twist on a Western homage set in the antebellum south. Shortly after the cheap gag of a smash cut to Django gone dandy, he’s whipping an overseer while wearing the same getup, and I was half expecting to hear Curtis Mayfield cut into the soundtrack. And once on board with Tarantino’s aims, it’s tough to single out elements of it as going too far.

Still, that endpoint bothers me. Django relishes stepping into his wife’s owner’s clothes and signature accessory just a little too much for me not to feel queasy.

2. Did Killing Them Softly stink, or was it brilliant, or did it brill-stink? I did take notes while watching Andrew Dominik’s overstylized, beautifully acted, and well-written hitman movie. They include, on the top of the first page, things like “this kinda sucks” and “pacing??” and my little glyph that represents the universal PG-rated sign for self-indulgence. The movie is set in late 2008, and its only soundtrack is news clips of various speeches from President Bush and Hank Paulson and President-elect Barack Obama, on the financial crisis and our government’s response to it. A couple of these moments could have been a masterstroke of subtlety, but Dominik prefers to beat you over the head with the parallels between the inept criminal organization in the background of the story, and the ineptitude of every other major American institution. If someone described Killing Them Softly as a crime thriller filtered through a few reads of “Twilight of the Elites” and a few Occupy general assembly meetings, you’d be intrigued, right? The cruelty of Killing Them Softly is it heavy-hands everything that should be interesting about that idea, and leaves critics wishing for the Coen brothers version of this picture.

So why am I holding the door open to the possibility that it’s brilliant? For one thing, the performances and dialogue are marvelous. Richard Jenkins’ squeamish mob go-between is funny and dour and occupies basically the same place within his organization as Paul Bettany’s character in the excellent Margin Call did within that movie’s not-Lehman Brothers financial firm. James Gandolfini’s prideful, depressive, unraveling hitman is captivating every time he’s on screen. Brad Pitt’s protagonist hitman with a simple code is enjoyable to watch, most of all in his immaculately written conversations with the Jenkins and Gandolfini characters. But more than the performances, what keeps a torch half-lit in my mind for Killing Them Softly is how relentlessly unsexy and frustrated and dysfunctional and inconsistent an underworld it portrays. Our expectations for crime movies are that they’ll be all efficacy and power and languid allure, and that a lot of folks will get killed in a lot of awesome ways. Most of all, everybody will be cool. They’ll talk cool and smoke cool and shoot even cooler. Nobody does any of these things in Killing Them Softly, and nobody is particularly cool, including Pitt. And the big climax isn’t gunplay, but a heavyhanded yet effective soliloquy about the ways America lies to itself to sleep at night. By refusing to give me anything that I expected from a gangster flick, Killing Them Softly made me tempted to forgive its cinematic sins.

Teasing over these kinds of questions is part of what makes film so much fun, and I hope some of y’all have thoughts on these two movies.

When the Motion Picture Association of America on December 20 came out in support of President Obama’s efforts on gun control in the wake of the Newtown, the organization simultaneously aligned itself with the productive side of a national conversation and set up a strategic trap that the National Rifle Association walked into the very next day. In a shocking and incoherent press conference that attempted to shift the conversation away from regulation of gun and ammunition purchasing and ownership, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre blamed pop culture that was, in some cases, decades old, for America’s mass gun killings.

“There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games with names like ‘Bullet Storm,’ ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ ‘Mortal Combat,’ and ‘Splatterhouse,’” he said. “I mean we have blood-soaked films out there, like ‘American Psycho,’ ‘Natural Born Killers.’ They’re aired like propaganda loops on Splatterdays and every single day.”

The absence of any evidence that Adam Lanza, the alleged Sandy Hook shooter, had consumed any of the cultural artifacts LaPierre brought up would have been enough to render LaPierre’s assertions ludicrous and diversionary. And that’s without taking into account in the question of what impact media consumption does and doesn’t have on the general public’s actions and social attitudes, rather than on people who are mentally ill or who might be predisposed to violence, a subject nicely and soberly summed-up by the media scholar Jason Mittell. But there’s a difference between suggesting that it makes more sense to regulate mass culture than to regulate our access to the weapons that make it possible to translate violent plans into mass killings, and talking about what it would take to shift our mass culture away from violence as a major subject and as a primary way of demonstrating competence and heroism. But the people who try to hide behind the former argument are almost uniformly uninterested in the policies and shifts in the market it would take to accomplish the latter without regulation or abridgment of freedom of speech.

1. Increase funding for public broadcasting: If you want to see more non-violent television on the airwaves, it makes more sense to treat it like an emerging product, like solar energy, that needs to be significantly subsidized until it can build the market that allows it to be self-sustaining. I imagine the NRA and other conservatives who spring to blame violent popular culture for American violence would never get behind massively expanding funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but that, rather than trying to regulate Sons of Anarchy and Game of Thrones, is probably the quickest way to make non-violent popular culture more competitive in the overall marketplace. What about funding levels that would allow PBS to start an HBO-like movie channel, buying the rights to buzzy, relevant films like Margin Call and producing features like Too Big To Fail? How about funding that would support the purchase of more British shows like Downton Abbey, letting PBS take on BBC America, or a foreign language network that would broadcast subtitled shows from Israel, like Hatufim, or Scandinavian noir shows that have become part of the competitive advantage for services like Hulu or networks like Link TV? Or simply funding that would let PBS advertise more of its programming more heavily, building the kinds of audiences that networks can with in-company ad slots? This will never, ever happen. But that it won’t shows how unserious conservative media critics are about building credible, mass-market alternatives to successful, and violent, commercial programming.
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I hadn’t read World War Z by the time the trailer for the Brad Pitt-Mireille Enos movie came out, but after I finished it this morning, it was clear what a travesty this adaptation seems poised to be. It would be impossible to adapt the oral history as a single, coherent narrative. But the book seems like it would lend itself to a miniseries that could float between different perspectives, or perhaps even more fittingly, a series of movies like the Red Riding trilogy, which explored the long-running investigation into a Yorkshire serial killer. Here are the six sections of World War Z that struck me as the most likely candidates for stand-alone films:

Section: Kondo Tatsumi and Tomonaga Ijiro
Director: Stephen Chow
Why It Would Be Great: An otaku and a blind gardener take Japan back from the zombies? It would be one of the greatest genre mashups since Kung Fu Hustle, not to mention a pair of fantastic roles for Asian men. And while Chow is from Hong Kong, rather than Japan, his touch with Hustle was absolutely delightful. I’d love to see him have a shot at pitting two unlikely heroes against a mob of incredibly scary antagonists, and to pair it with some gorgeous landscape cinematography.

Section: Todd Wainio
Director: Ed Zwick
Why It Would Be Great: As he proved in Glory, the man can do a battle sequence. And it would be exciting to see a filmmaker with his kind of conscience take on the utter failure of the American military, and its attempt to recover from it, strategically and psychologically, and to turn the tide. Also, if Nicholas Brody’s going to get killed in the finale of Homeland this weekend, Damian Lewis is going to have some time on his hands. I’d love to see him take on this soldier’s role, particularly for the chance to see him get paired up with an honest-to-God, badass battle nun, who is Wainio’s partner in the reformed military.

Section: Admiral Xu Zhicai
Director: Shawn Ryan
Why It Would Be Great: Last Resort may be toast, but Ryan was on to something interesting with his story about a submarine crew gone rogue after it was given orders to fire a nuclear weapon on Pakistan. I’d love to see him take a shot at capturing the story of a Chinese submarine crew who smuggled their families on board and created a survivable society on board their ship as they fled from the zombie apocalypse consuming their country. Instead of deciding not to fire their nuclear weapons, as is the case in Last Resort, this story ends with the agonizing choice to nuke a bunker full of hardline Chinese leadership. It’s a harrowing adventure, but a deeply creative one, and it would avoid some of the pitfalls Ryan ran into when he tried to build out not just a sub crew but the population of an island in his ABC show.

Section: Xolelwa Azania
Director: Connie Field
Why It Would Be Great: Field directed Have You Heard From Johannesburg?, the amazing documentary series about the end of apartheid. While most of the people I recommend to direct these movies are feature directors, it would be fascinating to see Field go fictional and tackle South Africa’s decision to implement the Redeker Plan, an effort to save a core of South Africa by abandoning some of the population and the country’s land to the zombie infestation. As a story about racial reconciliation despite the echoes of apartheid in the plan, this could be a fascinating, subtle movie.

Section: Christina Eliopolis
Director: Patty Jenkins
Why It Would Be Great: This story of an Air Force pilot bailed out in the middle of infested zombie territory, staying alive with a voice on the radio as her only guide, could be an incredible showcase for a young female action star, maybe Gina Carano. And Jenkins knows a thing or two about directing a woman under extreme duress. This could be a simple, stripped-down, incredibly scary movie that wouldn’t even need to showcase a lot of zombies to be terrifying.

Section: Breckinridge Scott
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Why It Would Be Great: In Contagion, Soderbergh featured a repellant blogger, played by Jude Law, who spread the news of a false cure for a global pandemic, and was later found to be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company which hoped to spike sales of herbal remedies. I’d love to see him put this kind of scenario at the center of a film, instead of addressing it as one of many threads in a single movie. He’d have so much fun tearing into a figure like Scott, and portraying the luxury he lives in as a kind of suffocating rot.

As someone who’s been shouting from the rooftop about all of the amazing female characters who already exist in the Star Wars Expanded Universe and really should be featured in the upcoming sequels to the films, I was excited to see Luke Plunkett report this bit of Star Wars trivia at Kotaku:

Turns out that there were four female pilots cast and filmed for Return of the Jedi‘s climatic Battle of Endor. Two of them were A-Wing pilots, the other two piloting an X-Wing, with one, played by Vivienne Chandler, having an entire page of dialogue.

Sadly, according to Star Wars Aficionado, they’ve remained mostly unknown and unseen until now. The two A-Wing pilots, one elderly, can at least be seen buried in the extras on the Star Wars blu-rays (I’ve never seen them), but the two X-Wing pilots went straight to the editing room floor. Bizarrely, one of the A-Wing pilots, pictured up top, had her lines dubbed over by a male voice actor in post-production (though people are telling me she’s still visible in the film).

Things like this really make me increasingly convinced that it would not just be nice, but important to see a Star Wars movie that’s centered around a woman who is on the same kind of hero’s journey Luke Skywalker took all those years ago. This is a moment when we have a generation of young actresses who are credentialing themselves primarily as action stars, from Jennifer Lawrence, to Chloe Grace Moretz, to Hailee Steinfeld, and to a lesser extent, Saorsie Ronan and Abigail Breslin. We have proof that female-centered action franchises, like The Hunger Games, can be global smash hits. But what we don’t have is women worked into major franchises like The Avengers as equals. Having the next trilogy of Star Wars films focus on a woman like Jaina Solo, Han and Leia’s daughter, would be a real passing of the torch, and passing it in a way that’s fully integrated into the franchise already.