So I’m finally out of my post-Bonnaroo funk, where literally the only thing that could make me feel was Bruce Springsteen and excerpts from St. Vincent’s Actor, and I find out that Ghostface Killah, without question one of the greatest rappers walking the planet today, has a new album coming out towards the end of September. It’s called Wizard of Poetry, which, I guess, explains the Wu-Tang-meets-Wizard-of-Oz album cover:

And then, once I’m done clicking around the internet, I find that the first single, “Baby,” has already leaked. Color me excited, right? I click the YouTube link…and then am smacked in the face by 100 tons of overwrought Auto-Tune. I don’t know if anybody has put a finger on my musical tastes yet, what with the zero music-related posts this year, but I hate Auto-Tune. Not only does it smack of laziness, but it seems like a tool that’s hell bent in obscuring the fact that whoever wrote the song didn’t do a very good job of it. Point in fact: This song is an absolute trainwreck; hardly worth being appended to an album as bonus material, let alone as a lead single.

I get that this is Ghostface’s attempt at R&B, and his hazy, half-baked come-ons are effective, as they usually are. I guess I don’t mind the sample, but it smacks of mid-1990’s commercial stuff. It doesn’t dig at you and it doesn’t go anywhere. A sweet nothing. It and Ghostface just don’t go together. The chorus is where things really fall apart, Auto-Tune working overtime to obscure that DeVaughn isn’t saying anything. I imagine that a woman, when faced with a line like “What a joy we’ve made/from the love we made. Yeah. Yeah.” wouldn’t know whether to smile politely and move the conversation along or roll her eyes full stop. There was more romance when Ghostface rhymed that he wasn’t looking for love in “We Celebrate.” At least then he was being honest.

In the span of 30 seconds, you see Marlon Brando, John Wayne, the Ramones, Maralyn Monroe, and, if I’m not mistaken, some clip from Woodstock, along with some rebelous text about how any article of clothing that aren’t jeans are for big, rich douchebags, narrated by the familiar Mastercard narrator, who may as well be the voice of my generation (sorry, Kanye).

I understand that business is business, and that making yourselves look cool is often a way of ensuring business with my crowd, but at least three of the five clips used in this commercial, to speak nothing of David Bowie and his iconic 70’s material, spoke against conformity. Mastercard: You are a credit card company. I hate to point that out, but it’s the truth, plain and simple. You are the man you’re so keen on rebelling against. Instead, you should have gone with this:

With that being said, I will now present myself as an awful hypocrite:

This Levi’s ad, directed by Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre), is stunning, combining hipsters with two enduring figures of Americana: Jeans, and Walt Whitman. For one minute and two seconds, I was not annoyed that movie theaters have taken to playing unescapable, often terrible ads before their movies–I was overtaken by this most excelent reading of Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!,” a poem that is somewhat overlooked because we take Whitman for granted, especially if the poem isn’t “Song of Myself” or about Lincoln.

The reading is from a 1957 album of recordings from Whitman’s seminal Leaves of Grass, by a group called The University Players. It would be long out of print were it not for Smithsonian Folkways, a non-profit record label opporated by the Smithsonian Institute. It is, for my money, one of the unhearalded aspects of our government; that somewhere, someone is preserving our history of recorded sound. They do this with movies too, via the National Film Registry. Films as diverse as All About Eve and The Terminator will be around as long as there is a United States, ready to be chopped up and regurgitated into Levi’s ads at a moment’s notice. If they’re as good as this one, and don’t shill as hard as the Mastercard one, I’ll allow it. Hell, I might even like it enough to not mind that it’s standing between me and my movie.

Pioneers! O Pioneers!
by Walt Whitman

Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental
blood intervein’d,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,
(bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang’d and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon’d mistress,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

See my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill’d,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill’d.
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,
Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life’s involv’d and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo, the darting bowling orb!
Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the West!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock’d and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding
on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call–hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army!–swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

I’ll be frank and say that the hard sci-fi aspects come to a screeching halt around midway through the movie, but until that point, what we have is fascinating. An alien craft comes to hover above Johannesburg, South Africa, eschewing the usual landing spots of Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Moscow. After much deliberation, humans bore into the mothership and make a shocking discovery: A horde of writhing, malnourished extraterrestrials who look a bit like Abe from the awesome-but-somewhat-forgotten Oddworld video games, if Abe had tentacles and mandibles.

Or maybe not, but I wanted to be clever and obscure. Clever obscura?

Having had no experience with aliens who don’t look like us, look like angels, look like stuffed animals, speak our language, blow up our landmarks, or come preaching peace (…or else!), humanity decides to do what it can: Temporarily house them in District 9. Temporary becomes 20 years, long enough for D9 to become a shanty town whose inhabitants pick at garbage heaps for scrap and treat cat food like a five star delicacy. Humanity, expecting more from a race of beings who have mastered interstellar travel, want the aliens out. Multinational United, an organization dedicated to philanthropy, private security, and weapons manufacturing, are ready, willing, and able to make this happen – the Prawns will be evicted and moved to District 10.

There’s a lot of corporate whitewash and “what can you do?” all over this, like the guys at the top of the multimillion dollar corporation really wanted to help but just couldn’t for whatever reason, which just so happens to be a haul of alien weaponry that blows the doors off of human tech but requires the bio-signature of a Prawn to work. MNU can confiscate all the weapons it wants from District 9, but confiscation is about all they can do.

Which isn’t to say that they’re not on the lookout for some sort of skeleton key, which is likely why they’re keen on serving eviction notices. The man in charge of this operation, Wikus van de Merwe (an awesome, previously unknown Sharlto Copley), videotapes the grisly proceedings, like a soldier at Abu Garib who assumes that the film will never fall out of his hands. Caught on tape, van de Merwe’s condescending behavior towards Prawns, eviction notices signed at shotgun-point, violence, a mafia element, souvenir-taking, and abortion. Wikus has a grin on his face through all of it, unless he’s made to look like a fool, which happens quite often, like when he inspects a strange canister that crackles like a Geiger counter and it sprays out a viscus black liquid that was previously seen being cooked on a home chemistry set. Is this some sort of alien meth? Hardly, but poor Van De Merwe reacts poorly to it, throwing up. Later, his arm is broken. Then he has a sort of odd nosebleed. He goes home to his wife after this awful day, only to stumble into a surprise party celebrating his promotion. He throws up all over the cake. He heads to the hospital. He becomes an extremely valuable medical experiment; Gregor Samsa with a bounty on his head.

This, basically, is where the movie stops being an allegory and starts being a chase thriller. Blomkamp could very well have stuck with the docudrama feel, giving us glimpses into Wikus metamorphosis and a treatise on human nature, and I still would have liked it. Instead, he creates an incredibly paced, tightly narrated chase through the slums, where van de Merwe is targeted by both MNU and a Nigerian gang that wants to eat his arm, believing that it will grant them the ability to wield their stockpile of alien weaponry that is otherwise scrap. Acting as van de Merwe’s accomplices are two Prawns, Christopher Joseph and his son, who has cute, big, wet googly eyes that had one of the girls I went to see the movie with cooing about how adorable the little guy was, like Wall-E with tentacles.

As it turns out, Christopher Joseph is not a scrounger. He and his son are two of maybe three intelligent Prawns who are seen in the movie, and it is he who cooks up the black fluid, which isn’t a virus but a fuel of some kind. He also says that he can cure Wikus. “I knew you Prawns were intelligent!” he says, more relieved that he won’t have to become one than pleasantly surprised at his “discovery.”

I have a theory about Christopher Joseph: He isn’t the only smart Prawn in District 9. Sure, what we see of the Prawns before he becomes the central one isn’t a pretty picture. They riot, they pick garbage, they enjoy catfood, and they’re apparently stupid, completely failing to meet our expectations as to what a visiting species would be, looks aside. But where do all of our images of Prawns come from before Wikus unknowingly stumbles into Christopher Joseph’s shack? The documentary footage of Wikus’ journey into the camp, and news footage. Consider the state of the news media, then ask what the sexier headline is: “Are Aliens Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” or “Aliens Land; Ask for Directions to Alpha Centauri.” We see what we want to see, and after 20 years of seeing an alien craft hovering and rusting above a major metropolis, many of us would stop seeing an intelligent race with the ability to travel throughout the galaxy, preferring instead to think that, back home, the Prawns pick through garbage heaps for food, hoping for a scrap that tastes like Fancy Feast. This is why people who go to Sea World don’t see dolphins as incredibly smart creatures, but as constantly smiling dopes who are happy to do back flips for minnows. In the D9 time line, Earth has been given 20 years to think that the Prawns are dumb, violent, bumbling creatures. We create stereotypes, then give their subjects no choice but to live within it. I don’t know what that’s worth coming from a white college kid, so take it for what you will.

On the other hand, the Nigerian gang who are shown selling cat food, other meat, and sex to Prawns for guns and money are one dimensional, meant to intimidate, rather than educate. They eat Prawn parts to gain their power, adhere to voodoo, and do little more than leer, yell, and shoot things. There aren’t many positive black figures in the movie (the only one I can really think of has an extremely minor part), but it wasn’t exactly like Blomkamp went out of his way to make Wikus the world’s most likable white man, either. I don’t want to accuse anybody of nitpicking, but what does it say when we complain that the secondary villains, who are there basically as deus ex machina/cannon fodder, aren’t well developed? Not every white man acting as VP of some division in a weapons manufacturing company is an ethics-skirting asshole in a power suit, but I don’t see too many people coming out of the woodwork to suggest that Blomkamp’s portrayal of the 21st century business man was less than fair to the 21st century business man. Suggesting that this is how the movie sees all Africans (Nigerians, at least) as violent, ill-tempered, voodoo warriors is like suggesting that Silence of the Lambs sees all MTF transsexuals as knife-wielding, dungeon-digging, skin care obsessed psychopaths, and Silence didn’t even give the courtesy of having a nice transsexual somewhere in the background.

If anything, the film’s fatal flaw was its third act, a shootout that was exciting but that added nothing in terms of message. I won’t go so far as to call it a cop-out, but the film leaves things very much up in the air, not wanting to answer any of its own questions or follow up with the Prawns, who are moved into District 10, described by Wikus as being like concentration camps, via title card. I was glad for the shootout, not wanting to be lectured after a breathless second act, but yeah, it was a wee bit thin, and leaves us with enough uncertainty that a follow-up would be awfully convenient for all involved; which I actually wouldn’t mind, providing that it focused on the slums and the Prawns more than MNU and weapons. There’s room enough for an effective political statement, but 33 years after apartheid, a lecture smacks of apology, which, as an Irishman, I didn’t want from Gangs of New York, either. This isn’t a movie about racism, but it doesn’t use the allegory as a mere prop, either.

Probably the best movie of it’s kind since Total Recall. If you know anything about me, you know that’s extremely high praise.

The Dude Abides

Their kids hit puberty and start talking like clean versions of Notorious B.I.G. albums from the tender age of eight. We’re lucky if kids ever escape that phase.

George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is not a good person. You could, if you wanted to, draw a comparison between him and C.F. Kane. Both live alone in their huge houses, interacting mainly with staff. Both have many acquaintances and business associates, but no friends. Both have gained an incredible amount of wealth, material and monetary. Both seem destined to die alone and misunderstood. Simmons, unlike Kane, is woken up from his long nightmare by a sudden revelation: He has cancer. Worse: It’s a cancer that only eight percent of people survive.

George is distraught, as most people who are told that they have an eight percent chance of coming out of treatment alive. He decides to go back to stand-up comedy, an odd choice for a superstar comic with piles of movie offers on his kitchen counter, and winds up playing to silenced crowds at the Improv, who don’t get that his “How will you go on without me?” act isn’t really an act—he wants to know how America will go on without one of its icons. “Why me?” mixed with “You poor bastards.”

Meanwhile, Ira Wright (Seth Rogen, who lost weight) is an aspiring comedian who works at a grocery store and sleeps on his friend’s couch. His roommates, a more successful comic (Jonah Hill, who didn’t lose weight), and the star of an awful, teen-orientated sitcom (Jason Schwartzman, perpetually skinny), and his co-worker at the deli (RZA) all point out his fatal flaw: He isn’t funny. It’s sad, and perhaps lucky, that he has to go on after George, who just bombed. When his original material doesn’t go over so well, he starts ragging on George, who is looking on in the back sullenly.

George hires Ira to write jokes for him and eventually become his assistant. For Ira, it’s a dream job. He gets to open for George, hang out in a massive house, and get paid to write material for stand-up comedy. For George, it’s a necessity. Ira is the first person in some time he has let into his life, the first person to realize how crushing his lonely existance is, and the first person to find out that he has cancer.

From there, the movie changes gears. It becomes less about funny people and more about the process of finding oneself. George has a lot of soul-searching to do, and, unlike 99% of movie characters who go through his situation, he isn’t very good at it. Sure, things seem to be moving along while he’s sick, but what’s to stop George Simmons from going back to being a jerk when he’s healthy?

Nothing, which is why he becomes a celebrimonster as soon as the doctor (Torsten Voges) tells him to go out and make another movie. Rather than do that, George wants to pursue Laura (Leslie Mann), the woman he would have married had not he cheated on her. The problem with that plan of action is that Laura is married to Clark (Eric Bana) and has two kids. He has a choice: Make himself happy and destroy a family, or look for happiness elsewhere.

If that’s what you expected to see going in, more power to you. You were clearly paying attention during Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshal, or his TV shows. If you were expecting an Adam McKay-like parade of dick, fart, and masturbation jokes with nothing else, you might walk out a little nonplussed. “Funny People?” you might ask. “Was I supposed to laugh when Sarah Silverman made her face look like a vagina, or was Judd just fucking with me?”

Well no, probably not. The people making the trailers are likely to blame, not that the Comedy Central stand-up special helped any. Any time two comedians are in the same room in this movie, there is some kind of awkwardness, an invisible competition running between the two, and an odd, mutual loathing. The jokes they crack offstage are often not funny, they don’t look happy shaking hands and taking pictures with people they don’t know, and, you may be shocked, the big guys hire open mic night people to write jokes for them. Only Eminem seems to get it, but if he believes what he’s saying, every new release is the highest form of cowardice. It’s all an act, even when it isn’t.

I, like most people, I imagine, liked the first half of Funny People more than the second. While I won’t go out on a limb and call Apatow indulgent for putting his wife and kids front and center, I do wonder at why two radically different movies were smashed together, pushing an extremely likable Seth Rogen so far into the background that, at one point, he is told to go watch a movie with the kids…which he does without protest.

Stand-up comedy is a heavily veiled world that few ever get a peek at, and Apatow went with a brilliant set-up to give the audience a chance to see where our favorite stand-ups got their start. It’s unique. It’s fresh. Marital drama, no matter how well it’s executed, seems a bit dull by comparison. The tacked-on ending helps neither half of the movie.

That doesn’t mean that Funny People isn’t a movie without a lot to say. If anything, it has too much to say and spends too much time finding the words. While it might go unappreciated now because August is the month usually dedicated to Sandler fare like You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, this is a challenging, sometimes brilliant movie waiting to be picked up and appreciated by people who want something beyond the dick and fart jokes. This is no minor entry in Apatow’s canon.

Far Fucking Out

Seriously, it took until the year 2008 for some guy to put these two in a movie together?