Wanker of the Day
Yes, now that we’re letting the hot wimmens direct films, American meritocracy is over. I can’t believe we would allow The Hurt Locker to degrade a Best Picture award that should be reserved for true totems of artistic excellence like Crash, Forrest Gump, and Chicago, all of which had directors with the right genitalia and I’m not sure if they’re attractive or not.
Bret Easton Ellis is talking about someone being overrated? Gotta love that. But really, it’s a sign that you’re a great author when every single film adaption of one of your books is better than the actual book itself.
This is commonly known as Puzo Syndrome.
Or “The Heinlein Contagion”.
I would totally rent that movie.
“The Asimov Project”
That refers to the opposite phenomenon.
Or “Clancyitis”
With Clancy it’s a wash.
All things are always shitty.
Bret Easton Ellis is talking about someone being overrated?
Works for me: He knows his own kind!
On a more serious note, while I disagree with his methods, I agree with his conclusion.
In any event, Bigelow has been bringing it ever since the late ’80s. Near Dark, her first, is just a brilliant movie, and this is coming from someone who is not inclined to like zombie/vampire movies. But that movie takes a pretty different spin on those genres–it’s both, and neither. And really morally ambiguous and creepy. Highly recommended.
Seconded.
I actually have to disagree. If you are the kind of vampire who is killed by sunlight, as “Near Dark”‘s vampires are, you would think that (a) you’d have a precise idea of when the sun came up and (b) you’d live somewhere where it is not always extremely sunny and cloudless, like the American south west.
But its got early Bill Paxton. Bill Paxton makes every movie he’s in at least watchable.
Besides, redneck vampires are a cool concept.
Agreed. Plus, Paxton’s a genuinely nice guy–saw him in person at the recent Comic-Con in New York.
How come no one’s mentioned STRANGE DAYS yet?
+1
I’ve been raving about Strange Days since before the first Y2K horror story.
When you live hundreds of years, mildew is a major concern.
Trying to apply practical considerations to stories that feature creatures that are damaged by sunlight but absolutely no other source of light, no matter how bright, is a mug’s game. (If it’s the ultraviolet in sunlight, then just slap on the heaviest sunscreen you can find, duh.) It’s really all about the atmosphere, and Near Dark‘s shambolic troupe of bloodsuckers (most of whom were already known for taking part in an awesome showdown with xenomorphs), traveling around that bleak, blasted landscape where their victims might not be discovered for some time, are an effective antidote for any number of glitterpires.
The Flying Snowman: everybody has one.
He’s a d-bag.
Semi-recently, he commented that Matt Bomer (USA’s White Collar, Magic Mike) couldn’t play Christian Grey in an adaptation of “50 Shades of Grey” because he’s gay. Right. Because a gay guy can’t play a sexualized leading man in a Hollywood film…
And now, Ms. Bigelow is just too darn pretty and that overshadows her actual directorial skills.
Regardless of any veracity to his claim about Bigelow, if Hollywood is the topic of conversation, then many of us could go off regarding “overrated” persons in front of and behind the cameras.
Monty, this seems strange to me…
Then why didn’t Point Break get Best Picture?
Not to sound like a sexist pig, but
she’s 61????
seriously?
really?
wow
I’m 46 and look way older than her
If that makes you a sexist pig, you are not alone (and I’m a couple of years younger than you).
Doesn’t make you a sexist pig at all.
She’s a beautiful, talented woman. I can’t believe she’s 61 myself…she looks better than me, and I’m a decade or so younger than her!
She’s attractive, and she doesn’t appear anything like her reported age – but “hot”, by Hollywood standards? Ah, crap, I’m getting sucked into his game, which is dumb.
I don’t see a lot of films, and I so maybe I can’t judge her oeuvre; heaven knows, I know nothing about film direction. IMDB says she’s done a lot of work, most of which I’m not familiar with. But I did see Hurt Locker, and it was gripping. So far as I could tell, it deserved the praise it got, for reasons having nothing to do with the species of its director, let alone their gender. And I loved Strange Days, which apparently wasn’t so much of a critical success.
Yeah, Strange Days is surprisingly good/trashy/engaging and yet totally unappreciated. I’ve always wondered why it never got incorporated into the Scifi cannon.
Probably the Big Bang theory.
Or Ralph Fiennes’ lousy American accent.
Well, Ralph Fiennes amazing hotness basically cancels every other criticism of him out.
Am I the only one bummed out that the “Titans” films represent a defacto Schindler’s List reunion of Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson?
Do people really care about bad accents? Maybe because I grew up in the upper Midwest, it’s kinda all the same to me.
Only when they’re bad enough to be both distracting and painful to listen to (cf. Costner, Kevin: “Robin Hood”).
They should have cast Carey Elwes.
As a lifelong resident of Massachusettstan, I’m exhausted by the attempts at Boston accents in recent films. Even the actors from here don’t seem to get it right enough.
I only lived in Boston for four years, and even I can tell that actors never get it quite right.
It’s trickier than it sounds.
Actually, it’s not. It’s just that all native Bostonians quack at the same frequency which their own ears somehow can’t pick up. Basically, there has been many good Boston accents. Bostonians are just terribly ashamed that they do indeed sound like that.
In The Perfect Storm, there was one actor who not only managed a North Shore accent, he achieved a Gloucester accent. Everyone else should have saved the effort and just used their plain speaking voice. It would have been less distracting.
A good example of a Boston accent is when Laurence O’Donnell called out Tagg Romney on his show for Tagg’s comment about wanting to punch Obama in the face after one of the debates. He got emotional enough that he reverted to his childhood accent during his challenge, and it’s a pretty good example of a working-class(his father was a cop) Boston accent.
I’ve had the same thing happen with my speech, only I break out into Reformed Egyptian.
I think it probably bugs people to watch a movie that sorta posits the year 2000 as this epochal, meaningful change when they know it wasn’t. Harder to suspend disbelief for that than the virtual reality stuff. I saw it in the theater in 1995 on the night one of my childhood dogs died, so it’s not like that to me, but I imagine it was.
Basically, the script is pretty clumsy and POV murder scenes squick some people out. And a lot of people hate Juliet Lewis like she was Jewel singing Ross Douthat columns. I actually like her, but I seem to be in the extreme minority.
For me, Angela Bassett, Michael Wincott, Vincet Donofrio, William Fichtner, Richard Edson and Tom Sizemore all kick ass in this in parts of varying size.
Seconded. A damn fine film, with Angela Basset being the highlight. A nice Bigelow/Cameron collaboration (with Jay Cocks also contributing to the screenplay). Plus it had a bitchin’ soundtrack.
Did anyone even know what Kathryn Bigelow looked like until last year’s Oscar night? I mean, James Cameron did, but anyone else?
If you were this straight stoner film geek teenager (or one of his friends) in early 90s SoCal, you knew what she looked like. My cohort thought Point Break was, well, not Jesus, but John the Baptist or something. Pointing the way forward for American cinema as we approached the millennium!
Then Reservoir Dogs came out and we lost touch with Ms. Bigelow. But she was a hero there for a while. Still have a soft spot for Strange Days.
So, fuck Mr. Easton Ellis, in other words.
And how cool is it to win an Oscar for best director ahead of your ex-husband?
That would be cool, except Cameron actually won it before his ex-wife.
Yes, Cameron won for Titanic a decade ago. What Rea meant was the year Bigelow won, Cameron was one of the other nominees.
Jay McInerney > Bret Easton Ellis
McInerney is now the wine critic for the Wall Street Journal, which is just about the douchiest thing I could have imagined. Can we consign them both to oblivion?
It’ll just give Mr. Oblivion a bad name
That’s actually well beyond the douchiest thing I could ever hav imagined.
We literally CANNOT WIN. We’re failures if we don’t adhere to arbitrary and often bizarre beauty standards and we’re cheats if we do. Seriously fucked up. FUCKED UP.
But, hey, nevermind, sexism is over. No need for feminism anymore.
If we put some effort into trying to look the way they say we’re supposed to, then we’re shallow and vain. If we don’t, we’ve committed the gravest possible sin: not being fuckable.
In a nutshell.
You left out Titanic, the best movie evAR!
Dude’s objectionable in pretty much every way. He’s famously obsessed with his own childhood and his own sexuality. (His comment on Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign was “reality check: it gets worse”, which is probably true if you’re a douche.) Basically he’s endlessly sentimental, albeit in a derivatively macho way, about HIMSELF. All while his schtick is telling other people to toughen up and not get offended when he insults them and/or dismisses their problems.
Plus fantasizing about hooking up women’s breasts to car batteries.
Yes but
Whoops, that last bit wasn’t supposed to be in the blockquote.
It really says something about Ellis (some of whose work I’ve greatly enjoyed) that I totally believed that the last line was his, not yours.
Isn’t it worse if it’s about him?
Glad you clarified that. It seemed to fit well with the rest of the quote.
Questionable way to charge batteries…
Questionable way to charge batteries…
Well, normally the left nipple nut is used to regulate body temperature, while the right one picks up short-wave radio. But I’ve twiddled these for hours and I just can’t seem to get Jazz FM.
At least there’s a zoom function.
To be fair to Mr. Easton Ellis: what would your Twitter look like if everyone who liked your writing outgrew it by the time they were 30, at the latest?
I mean, Ayn Motherfucking Rand has an audience retention rate of at least a couple percent. But your BEE fans just come and go.
Why the hate for Chicago? You got a problem with musicals? I love Chicago
I thought it was pretty meh, especially as a movie. Although it was certainly better than A Beautiful Mind.
Personally, I think Chicago is really enjoyable.
It was particularly good coming out in January 2003. The open, easy manipulation of the press in order to evade justice and cover up murder seemed almost like an intentional send-up of Bush II & Rove’s selling of the Iraq War. The movie seemed much deeper/more compelling in the context of that time. The press eating up all the flash and bang and glorying in the blood in the streets, while the innocent go to the gallows.
I’ve re-watched it two or three times in the years since, and although I still think it’s quite enjoyable, it doesn’t have the same political salience that it seemed to at that time. Back then, it seemed to speak to the moment, whereas now it just seems like a fun movie.
I think Chicago has a problem that a lot of musicals have in that it’s lesser than the sum of its parts.
It was really pretty, which is basically the same argument that was made for Avatar.
Avatar also had that whole epic scale plot going for it. Not that it should have won, but the Academy does love BIG movies.
Avatar also had that whole epic scale plot going for it.
Well, it is long.
Was it Berube who coined “Dances with FernGully”?
Epic scale plot? What?
There’s the casting, for one. I really don’t rate Zellweger or Zeta-Jones, and I’m not Gere’s biggest fan, either.
Seconded.
Agreed with that. But I did think that there was no way Chicago could be made into a movie, and I thought from that standpoint Rob Marshall was surprisingly successful. Certainly not Best Picture quality though.
Just a matter of taste. I liked them all. Great musical, great movie
Sorta seems like Slate is a natural home for Bret Easton Ellis, actually.
Scott, you’re reading stuff about Bret Easton Ellis? You must be having one of those nothing really going on kind of days.
People who win Oscars always get a lot of attention for their follow ups, regardless of merit. Ocean’s Eleven had Oscar buzz, for fuck’s sake.
I find Ellis’s “Pay attention to meeee!” Internet antics really sad. The whole business where he was starting fights on Twitter about his fancasting ideas for Fifty Shades of Grey, as if anyone in Hollywood would have let his dumb ass within a million miles of the hottest property available, made me seriously think he needed help.
He was so desperate to land the Fifty Shades gig that his twitter feed was reading like a Gil Gunderson joke from The Simpsons,
The teaser trailer for his next flick looks like it was made with iMovie.
Well, as a heterosexual male, I will say there’s an intuition I have that’s similar to Ellis’, which is that attractive women somehow “have it easier”. But I think I know better than to treat that intuition as a truth rather than a reflection of my own awe of attractive women.
I believe Andy Richter covered this in the pilot for Andy Richter Controls the Universe
Another show that Fox bought, aired for just long enough to whet viewers’ appetites, and then killed.
A shame, that.
I kinda liked that show.
I should that, while there is evidence that attractive people in general, are more successful (Beauty Pays), I don’t think there’s a shred of sociology that demonstrates that attractive women are not subject to any less vulnerable structural sexism; perhaps they’re subject to even more. The cost of “attractiveness” itself is interesting in and of itself, as, for women, it involves substantially more cost (e.g. the makeup regime).
jeez, typos, sorry :(
*I should add that, while there is evidence that attractive people in general
,are more successful (Beauty Pays), I don’t think there’s a shred of sociology that demonstrates that attractive women are any less subject tovulnerablestructural sexism.My mother used to say it took her an hour of make-up for every 10 years she wanted to look younger.
Well, as a heterosexual male, I will say there’s an intuition I have that’s similar to Ellis’, which is that attractive women somehow “have it easier”.
As a heterosexual male, I don’t know how you come by that intuition. It’s easier for attractive women to get pawed, leered at, and maybe become models. Taken seriously? Not so much. Attractive males, on the other hand, generally have it made.
You’re 100% right, but the intuition is derived from the experiences of a shy nerd with limited social skills who’s generally intimidated by women (cf Orange Juice/Sebadoh lyrics).
Then it’s not intuition you’re talking about. It’s self-pitying entitlement that you’re not banging the hot chicks you’ve been lead to believe you deserve, coupled with your apparent inability to distinguish individual women from an intimidating Monolith o’ Woman, with a dash of misplaced resentment because instead of learning how to speak and interact with people (“limited social skills”) you’ve placed a small minority of women on a pedestal and then decided it’s other people, and, specifically, those same attractive women who are to blame.
That’s pretty much the textbook definition of nerd misogyny. All that’s missing is some snipe about vain cosplayers or ditzy gamers ruining it for the rest of the real
mengeeks.Way to smack down that introspective bastard. Who does he think he is, trying to understand his own irrational subconcious and use rationality to be a better person? Now let’s you and me go rip some prosthetic limbs off amputees! That’s just another form of lying.
“Wanker of the Day” is not a competition, Anonymous.
+ harrumph.
Don’t be an asshole, Anonymous.
Anonymous got it 100% right, IMO. Those of us who have been around the feminist block are sick of the “waah what about the poor socially awkward nerds” shite.
Hilarious that her astute observation upset three different commenters.
“astute” doesn’t mean “pulling out of one’s arse”, or “coming to trite conclusions based on one’s ill-considered interpretation of a few words someone else writes”. No need to thank me, I’m glad to help.
You seem to be confused about the meaning of “upset” as well. Can’t help you with that. Ask your mum.
LOL. Won’t somebody think of the poor put-upon socially awkward menz? It’s so good of them to realize that women are people too, instead of just scary fucktoys who meanly refuse to sleep with them! Let’s all bake Somosmuitos a sheet of cookies for meeting a minimum standard of decency!
Women in general, not just attractive women, have problems with not being taken seriously, and I’m not sure if being attractive improves one’s chances of being taken seriously or not.
In the sciences and engineering, it’s a detriment, though being otherwise has its own cost. My friends and I who are women scientists and engineers have noticed this for a longtime. If you’re conventionally attractive and femme, you’re seen as frivolous and probably less intelligent. If you’re not conventionally attractive and/or butch, you’re seen as someone who can be taken more seriously as a scientist, but also as a pitiable, repulsive, or bitchy freak.
I suspect this is not unique to STEM, it’s just noticeable since there aren’t that many women in many fields of it to begin with.
I can see that.
It would not be surprising to learn that attractiveness could be detrimental in proportion to how male dominated a woman’s environment is.
“If you’re conventionally attractive and femme, you’re seen as
frivolouslazy and probablyless intelligentsleeping with the first sergeant to get promoted.”Fixed your statement to apply to females in the military. At least from what I have personally seen.
True, there are potential pitfalls in being a pretty woman. But I doubt any of those ladies would trade places with other women less-favored (who often receive some of the same unwelcome advances and encounter some of the same inconveniences, piggish guys not being known for their selectiveness). All women encounter obstacles based on sexism, but goodlooking people of either gender have an edge over everyone else.
Attractive people in general have a smoother path through life, but that’s beside the point.
Ellis is engaging in a particularly sexist form of ad hominem, attacking the attractiveness (or lack thereof) of a successful woman instead of engaging in legitimate debate of her accomplishments.
Wouldn’t that be ad feminem?
Ad feminam
Homo is neutral.
I haven’t actually seen anything she’s made this century, but Point Break was a lot of fun and Strange Days was at least really, really well shot.
I happened to watch K-19: The Widowmaker just yesterday. It’s pretty damn gripping.
The title is terrible, but the film itself is pretty tight. It’s basically a horror-thriller in a submarine, where the enemy is the reactor with the busted cooling system.
As a preteen Tom Clancy fan back in the day, this is clearly something I should have seen.
I didn’t know that was one of hers.
I remember liking it, though I bet Farley could give me a dozen reasons why I shouldn’t.
File next to ‘Obama only won because he’s black’ in the stack of statements that only sound non-bigoted if you are a huge bigot.
Less Than Zero was one of the most unreadable pieces of crap I’ve ever encountered.
Not a bad film, amazingly
… aaand, we’ve come full circle, back to the first comment in the thread.
The best thing about the film is that Roy Orbison sings a song written by Glenn Danzig over the credits. (The song is just a rewrite of “In Dreams”, but FFS, Danzig.)
A Sun Records comp of Danzig covers is a huge missed opportunity.
Try Rules of Attraction.
Or better yet, don’t.
BEE is being a shitbird on Twitter? Whoa, is it Friday already?
Sorry for the length of quote (it is DFW after all and the previous paragraph provides the context) but it seems like this may be the source of BEE’s Wallace-trashing:
FWIW, I find even Wallace’s worst, decades-old interviews to be better reading than anything by Ellis.
If BEE has a mad-on for DFW because of that interview passage, in which DFW criticizes BEE in the course of criticizing himself (and, IMO, with absolutely dead-on accuracy about both American Psycho and BEE’s work in general), then BEE deserves every bad thing that’s ever been written about him.
It’s a stupid thing to say, but the truth is being ‘good looking’ and tall are very helpful in raising the perceptions of others regarding one’s work and perceived worth. Same with having black or dark brown hair.
So, yeah, rant all you want. But it’s hard-wired into humanity. Being tall. Being good looking. Those things help you.
Do you like Huey Lewis and The News, Brett?
I’m guessing Mr Ellis is still smarting over the fact that the movie version of American Psycho — also directed by a woman — is more fondly remembered and critically acclaimed (and, let’s face it, better all around) than the book it was based on.