why are movies as vile as shopgirl being made? why are they marketed in such a way that idiots like me fall for it and watch them? if movies such as this one can be made and sold, why don’t we make and sell really groundbreaking movies that unveil the lies and horror of what is happening to the world?
we watched why we fight last night. how do we make it required watching for everyone? anyway, i found it oddly peace-inducing. it’s all so much bigger than i. my activism is futile. i think i’ll have another mojito.
mmmm, mojito’s! but I have sworn off all rum-based cocktails. are you talking about the world war II Why We Fight films? tell us more….
i’m talking about the 2005 why we fight documentary, which quotes the capra ones both in the title and in the text. it’s an extremely well done expose’ of the bush administration’s imperial ambitions and a general indictment of america’s military aggressiveness as a product of the powerful, and unique in the world, economic ties in this country between the war machine, the defense industry, and congress. the bit that had me shocked is the part in which the documentary details how the big defense contractors have spread themselves all over the fifty states, so that any congressperson who refuses a defense contract (or argues against a war) is forced into the position of jeopardizing the physical livelihood of a great number of his or her constituents.
we have an armament budget that is as big as that of every other country put together (not really, but not far either) because of these tremendously powerful ties between politics and the weapon industry.
the other day i watched the italy-germany game at a sports bar near my house (note to self: for the final, find bar where customers give a toss about game). i don’t have tv and am therefore cut off from that wonder of accurate information, the 24 tv news cycle. right next to the screen showing the game, there was a screen showing fox news, and the whole darn time (it was a loooong game) fox had three kinds of images on: tanks, the space shuttle that had been launched that day, and images related to the north korea missile test-launches. the juxtaposition was rife with symbolisms: WW2 and WW3, real war and the sublimation of war, etc.
but the thing i had forgotten was the relentlessness with which these tv channels reproduce war images. the north korea images were headlined with something like “news break alert.” seriously, we were going to be blown to smithereens any second now. and later i noticed that radio (npr and the bbc, the only stations i listen too) was also totally dominated by this launch. uh… gaza anyone? the, uh, kidnapping of the democratically-elected palestinian government? is there any country in the world other than isreal who could get away with something like this and not get an onslaught of media outrage?
anyway, the documentary is done very well, intelligently, persuasively, easy to follow, and not at all condescendingly. i found the corporation difficult and ultimately confusing, and the michael moore ones (which i like very much) too much spectacle to be reliable sources of information. but this, this is good. and it is certainly a good idea to make it pivot around eisenhower’s leave-taking speech warning the country of the possibility that the military-industrial complex might get out of control (it has). the man comes out as the real hero of this film, which might say something about how the left feels about the man who currently occupies his place. just about any other president is a hero in comparison.
I just made it through a whopping 25 minutes of Shopgirl. Despite the fact that the cool/poor neighborhood was filmed on the corner of the street on which I live (that laundry is never that deserted and always has the TV blaring), I was unable to even get to the point in the film where Steve Martin shows up (I assume he’s in the movie at some point).
I can only imagine that once Steve Martin appears, he’s really funny and charming. Unlike in, say, Cheaper by The Dozen 2, or as I like to call it, Watch Steve Martin get hit in the nuts every five minutes for your enjoyment.
Man, I do love to watch Steve Martin get hit in the nuts. I also like it when a dog bites him in the nuts. I didn’t forsee much of Steve-Martin’s-nuts-getting-hit being foreshadowed 25 minutes into Shopgirl. Maybe I was wrong. Possibly Jason Schwartman bites Steve Martin in the nuts. Maybe that was on the DVD extras. I may never know.
I would have never guessed that the suave, charming older guy in Martin’s book Shopgirl could ever have been played by Steve Martin. Who’d have ever believed that? I mean, maybe if the guy got hit in the nuts a few times in the book, I’d have thought, “You know – I bet Steve Martin ends up playing that guy.”
And I for one welcome our new North Korean overlords.
When the Dear Leader comes Gio, you’ll be first against the wall.
what do you know, mark, steve martin gets chewed in the nuts by claire danes during an amazing sex scene in which she first lures into bed and then… ouch! the chewing bit turn this “romantic comedy” into a gruesome comic/horror flick — just the kind that appeals to my sensitivity.
not that i mind being the first against the wall (what the hell), but i am not sure why you think i would be accorded such privilege.
I dont know why either. B/c no one else was posting about Shopgirl I guess.
Damnit – I knew Steve Martin’s nuts would play a significant role in Shopgirl, but the DVD chapter inddexing didn’t have a section labeled as such.
I hope that the DVD release of The Pink Panther rectifies the situation so that I can skip directly to pertinent moments of Steve Martin’s greatest nut hits.
Actually Steve Martin’s character is neither funny nor charming. Well, he’s charming in a kind of distanced, “hollow man” kind of manner. But mostly he’s lonely, emotionally vacuous, and wealthy enough to purchase what he needs when he needs it no matter who might get hurt in the process. I’m not raving about the film, but I quite liked it. I liked its languorous rhythms and I liked Claire Danes a lot and Jason Schwartzman’s character grew on me a lot more than I might have imagined after twenty minutes of so. Serious, serious . . .
yah, claire danes is great. i like her a lot. as for jason s, i kept praying that he’d cut his hair and shave his stubble. but seriously (seriously), how would someone be able to love someone like steve martin first and someone like jason s. immediately afterwards? the steve martin character lavishes her with so much attention (see in particular when she gets very depressed) that going from this man to that boy must be a real come down, no?
I have to admit that I didn’t hate Martin’s book, so it wasn’t the story or order of lovers that bothered me about the film. It was the film itself; the actors, the smugness, the way it was shot, the way it depicted people, the opening credits flying over cosmetics, the obligatory night-time helicopter flying over downtown, (Oh I get it! LA is all about appearances!!) and so on. Martin’s book is so short, stripped down and even blank, that the details that would have annoyed me couldn’t. I was able to give the characters the benefit of the doubt and imbue them with traits that I’d find acceptable, b/c Martin only barely sketches them out. Only when I was faced with real details and real people on film did I realize I didn’t like these people.
And I find Jason S. and Claire D. very troubling to begin with. I do not like their work and don’t think they’re very good actors. They are never anything more to me than Jason S. and Claire Danes playing parts in a movie. I never believe them for a second.
Shopgirl was so execrable I can’t even believe it. The only thing remotely interesting in it was that Steve Martin’s character was a logician by trade. Can’t say I’ve seen too many films about logicians. Perhaps this was meant to be connected to his coldness. If so, very subtle!
I just watched ‘Why We Fight’ and it really is well worth seeing and much the best of the documentary exposes of the Iraq war. In fact, it is not so much an expose of the Iraq war, as a contextualization of that war. The documentary clearly shows the repeated forms of US intervention since 1945, and it tries — somewhat effectively — to tie those interventions to the military-industrial-congressional-think tank complex.
It is at no point strident. Much of it effectiveness is simply the human stories it tells. The emotional center of the documentary is a retired police officer who lost a son on 9/11. His anger and desire to lash out at almost anyone is palpable. In the most affecting scene, he asks the army to write his son’s name on the side of a bomb to be used in Iraq. You then see the bomb and hear that it was “100% successful.” Finally, when Bush admits on TV that there is no tie between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, the guy just folds up in anger and frustration; all he wanted was the fiction that the war was somehow payback for his son’s death, and with that gone, he is devastated.