The Internet is full of dumb trivia, but this one is not only dumb, but completely retarded. It was a trivia nugget that appeared on the front page of IMDb, though I think these nuggets must cycle randomly because it wasn't there when I returned. It said, and I quote (because you can't make this shit up): "Marlons Wayans was cast as Ripcord [in G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra] after his performance in Requiem For a Dream (2000). Wayans is also a fan of G.I. Joe."How the producers of G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra could watch Requiem For a Dream — a serious, honest-to-goodness FILM of the highest order — and come to the conclusion that he's perfect for their absurd, big-budget, stale-popcorn piece of shit MOVIE is beyond all comprehension. The fact that they were even allowed to say G.I. Joe and Requiem For a Dream in the same sentence proves they're absolutely insane, and Requiem director Darren Aronofsky gets to knee each of them in the balls until they are dead. If anything it's a sad commentary on Marlon Wayans, who hasn't done enough work for Joe producers to name-drop. What are they going to do, say "We picked Marlon for an elite super-soldier because he played a terrific man-baby in Little Man"? Or, "Marlon did white-face better than anyone I've ever seen in White Chicks so we had to have him in this lame-ass action movie." Of course not. The producers are going to name-drop the best thing Marlon has ever done, and that's Requiem, a movie he did 10 years ago and has nothing to do — in this universe or any alternate universes — with G.I. Joe.
Whip It is a sports movie for women, by women, starring women. It’s more sexy than it is macho and for that I’m not sure how a strident feminist would react to it, although I’d hope they approve because Whip It could be an empowering movie for women stuck in the daily grind of womanhood. After all, men aren’t the only athletes who want to bash in an opponent's nasal cavity with an elbow.
The sport is women’s roller derby. Decades ago male and female versions were injected into pop culture as legitimate sporting events. They never really took off. In the last decade, though, a revival has popped up in major cities across the country. More sideshow novelty than sport — matches are often held in gutted warehouses — women’s roller derby was reinvented for the hellbilly, tongue-in-cheek hipster crowd. And that’s how it’s presented here: as a busty tattooed subculture for the ironic and cynical.
Texas beauty pageant contestant Bliss Cavender (Ellen Page) discovers the sport in a head shop, where her mom admires a display of bongs and blurts out, “Oh, what pretty vases you have here.” Lying to her parents, Bliss says she’s going to an SAT class, but instead hops on the senior citizen BINGO bus to Austin, the hub of Texas’ underground roller derby league. It’s there she watches her first match and falls in love — partly with the sport, mostly with the rebellious spirit that pumps through the rowdy players’ veins.
After the match, she meets members of one of the teams, the Hurl Scouts, and they convince her to come to tryouts to which she says, “The last time I wore skates they had Barbies on them.” But the derby girls — with stage names such as Smashley Simpson, Rosa Sparks, Bloody Holly, Maggie Mayhem and Princess Slaya — convince her to try out anyway, though 17-year-old Bliss tells another lie, that she’s 22 years old for the adults-only league.
Of course Bliss makes the team. Of course she helps the pathetic Hurl Scouts climb from the cellar to the top of their division. Of course her age is revealed before the championship match, moments before her disapproving mother wanders in late to have her quiet and proud moment in the back of the crowd. Whip It is not short of cliché. Nor is it shy about even hiding them. But honestly, who cares? Whip It is a deliriously fun movie, one of the most energetic and sincere of the year. And it may use cliché to its occasional detriment, but the film is still a complete original.
What a wonderful and cohesive cast, too. Ellen Page, still sparkling from Juno, is a treasure. She’s thrown up against some big personalities here — including SNL genius Kristen Wiig, singer Eve, stuntwoman Zoe Bell (Death Proof) and a hilarious Andrew Wilson, brother to Owen — yet Page never flinches, never misses a beat, and still acts the daylights out of her co-stars. She’s even given her own catchphrase on the derby track after a long pause and a slow camera zoom: “Let’s. Go. Apeshit.” she says, looking as menacing as her petite frame will let her. There’s also an electric performance by Juliette Lewis, basically playing a nuttier version of herself as derby villain Iron Maven, and another by Drew Barrymore, who seems to get grotesquely injured in every scene.
Barrymore, a staple in Hollywood since her big breakthrough in E.T. in 1982, directs Whip It like maybe she’s been paying attention all these years on movie sets. Her film — from a Shauna Cross screenplay and book — is so much more than a sport movie; it’s a coming-of-age story more delicate than all the flying elbows and knuckle sandwiches will let you believe. It’s really about Bliss being honest with her parents (played by Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern), who don’t see the innocent cuteness in the derby antics.
At times Barrymore mounts the camera on a set of skates and takes off down the banked track capturing handheld images of bloody fists, scabbed kneecaps and mini-skirted derby brawlers. And then, on a dime, she can turn around to allow tender moments for Bliss to cry in reflection at the places her lies have taken her, or not taken her. At one point, Bliss gets a boyfriend, but Barrymore doesn’t let Whip It become some kind of inane romantic comedy. And yet there’s a lovely scene in a swimming pool that is probably one of the sexiest non-sex scenes filmed in some time.
Barrymore also has an ingenious way of describing the rules of roller derby: she has Wilson sketch them out on a white board in pictures so simple that the scene ends with the drawing of a smiley face. If only, as a favor to me, she could use the same method to now describe cricket, a sport that needs some simplification.
I enjoyed Whip It tremendously. The film reinforced one belief (Ellen Page is marvelous) and laid the foundation for another (Drew Barrymore as talented director). And if you’re like me, after seeing Whip It you’ll be searching the Internet for the nearest roller derby match.
This is the fifth in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.
Fog of War plays like a Bond film. There’s political intrigue, black ops, secret meetings, international espionage, coded messages to the Kremlin, a doomsday clock and tape-recorded presidential meetings. It’s riveting on a level far beyond any 007 movie, so it will sound strange to you when I say that Fog of War is a documentary film, a minimalist one, that is filmed plainly and effectively using almost exclusively one camera setup, in front of which a sharply dressed older man talks directly to us.
The man is Robert McNamara. To some he’s the architect of the Vietnam War, and thus the designer of 58,159 American deaths. To others he’s a heroic figure; the man who used numbers to help end World War II, the man who, as secretary of defense, provided valuable consultation to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The movie plays both sides, because in McNamara’s eyes he was both, the hero and the villain. It was McNamara, the hero, who sent the National Guard to Vietnam protests with unloaded rifles. It was McNamara, the villain, who was consulting General Curtis LeMay when the decision was made to begin systematic firebombing of Japanese cities during World War II. As a result, more than 300,000 Japanese citizens were killed. “LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals,” McNamara plainly says. “LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” These are brave questions from a man who has every right to be afraid of the answers.
The film, which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2004, is directed by Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line), a careful and fluent documentary filmmaker. He films his main subject here with a special camera that allows McNamara, still with his trademark slicked-back hair, to look directly into the lens in an engaging, conversational way. The film is essentially his dialogue with Morris, who we occasionally hear setting up stories and asking questions, some of which don’t get answered (“I’m done talking about that,” McNamara says to an off-camera Morris regarding blame during Vietnam). For the most part, though, McNamara shares openly from his past, and from his famous Eleven Lessons, which include: No. 1 – Empathize with your Enemy, No. 5 – Proportionality should be a guideline in war, and No. 8 – Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Since the movie was released, I’ve kept a hand-written list of his rules on my computer monitor and I find it more valuable than my AP Style Guide.
McNamara applies his rules to his own history and offers their origins in Fog of War, which tells his story out of order, from his involvement in Lyndon Johnson’s deteriorating Vietnam debacle to World War II and then forward again to the Kennedy years, when he fought the Soviets and then buried his great leader, to which he sheds a tear and tells the story of how he and Jacqueline Kennedy picked out the presidential plot at Arlington National Cemetery. As if all this wasn’t enough, McNamara was also the president of Ford Motors and head of the World Bank.
The narrative really excels during McNamara’s discussion of the Cold War — “Cold War … hell, it was a Hot War.” At one point, during the Cuban Missile Crisis chapter, he holds up his fingers an inch or so apart and announces, “This is how close we came to World War III.” As McNamara speaks, Morris uses archival footage to show the low-level flyovers of Cuba, the naval blockade, gathering troops in Florida and, using a loup and light table, the negatives of the actual Soviet missiles on Cuban soil from the reconnaissance flights. McNamara hauntingly declares, “There is no learning period for nuclear weapons.” He nearly learned that the hard way during those 13 days in October 1962.
Many of these stories are nearly footnotes in the McNamara biography once Vietnam is brought up. Vietnam was his legacy and curse. He and JFK were worried about Vietnam falling to the communists, but not more worried then getting mired in a war that was unwinnable. As advisors were being sent in, plans were in the wings that could be drafted up to bring everyone home before a full-scale war started. Then Kennedy was killed and LBJ ascended to the throne and began sending young people in by the thousands. In public McNamara was playing the dutiful Secretary of Defense, but behind closed doors he was asking Johnson the tough questions. The film leaves the many comparisons to Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush wide open.
Is the film an admission of McNamara’s guilt for Vietnam? I don’t think so. I think it’s his vindication, and maybe his confession. As the secretary of defense he was no doubt running the day-to-day war, but it was Johnson who was so petrified of defeat. The film plays audio recordings of Johnson’s cabinet meetings where he explicitly says the Kennedys (John and Bobby) were all wrong trying to plan an exit strategy out of Vietnam. The falling dominoes terrified Johnson, and McNamara did his best to quell Johnson’s fire to no luck. Eventually McNamara left the Pentagon, though still today he doesn’t know if he quit or was fired.
Of all the figures of the 20th century, I find McNamara one of the most compelling. Some of history has vilified him, as is no doubt warranted, yet the film shows a different character: it shows an articulate and well-expressed man who was put under great pressure from some of the century’s darkest times. He made some bad decisions, but I don’t think he ever made the same mistakes twice. And what he did get wrong he was willing to admit to at the end of his long, illustrious life. The film neither sides with or against McNamara; it just frames him within his own words and actions, which play out louder and with a ferocity that no history book can deliver.
Robert McNamara died July 6 of this year at the age of 93.
At the Tempe screening of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell the real Tucker Max, the main character from the film, made an appearance. Four minutes into his pre-show routine — one in which he treats every fan like a hostile witness or comedy-show heckler — he had painfully shared stories of dead prostitutes, objectified turkey legs and using abortion payments to rack up frequent flyer miles on his credit card.
One fan stood up, grabbed a mic and seemed ready to brag about a sexual assault he perpetrated as a “joke.” Tucker, the screening’s foul-mouthed court jester, cut the fan off before he implicated himself in something that required police intervention. “Hey,” I thought to myself, “at least Tucker has some limits.”
Tucker Max is offensive for offensive’s sake. He claims he’s not a bigot because he hates everyone almost equally. He claims he’s not a misogynist because, after all, he has sex with thousands of women, so by default he must love them, right? Remember when mountaineering pioneer George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest and he responded, “Because it’s there.” Why does Tucker say crude things? For no other reason than because they’re there.
The movie would have been better served without its star personality in attendance, mainly because afterward you could plainly see how the film watered down the real Tucker, a mean-spirited and bitter young man who has crafted a franchise from his drunken sexual exploits for the frat-boy branch of future alcoholics of America. The Tucker in the film is not nearly as toxic, which may be its only redeeming quality.
The film follows law student Tucker Max (Matt Czuchry) as he pesters his friend Dan (Geoff Stults) for a rambunctious bachelor party before his wedding to a girl far too sweet for a movie like this. Against his better judgment, Dan relents to a road trip that can only end bad, and has ended bad in a dozen other better films. Tucker and Dan bring along another buddy, Drew (Jesse Bradford, Flags of Our Fathers), who recently broke up with his girlfriend when he found her cheating with a celebrity rapper named Grillionaire, which sounds like a McDonalds prize giveaway.
Beer in Hell pretty much follows a well-worn path through the rowdy bachelor party formula: naked women shimmy from poles, the drinking increases, someone ends up in jail with puke in his hair, the wedding is in jeopardy after the bride’s phone calls go unanswered and Tucker wakes up in bed with a little person, a conquest on par with his bedding of a blind girl and a deaf girl. “Hey, you’re halfway to a Helen Keller,” a friend tells him. Disabled Americans should froth at all this, even if it’s all in “good fun.”
Most of the film is Tucker sharing his twisted theories on life with whoever will listen, be it strippers, drunk bachelorettes or his easily manipulated friends. His core belief system is that women are nothing until a man completes them. That man, of course, is Tucker, who thinks he’s God’s gift to everything.
Parts of the film are funny, though not nearly as funny as similar scenes in its far-more-intelligent 2009 comedy counterpart, The Hangover. Many parts are disgusting beyond description, including an extended sequence involving diarrhea and plastic-wrapped toilets. One of the better subplots is with the Bradford character who is so angry and bitter toward women after his breakup that he can barely stomach the strippers gyrating in front of him. He taunts and ridicules them until one fights back, they retreat back to her place to have a Halo 3 tournament and then he falls in love with her. I wasn’t sure I liked this development until they left the club and began actually talking and you could sense they were real, albeit shallow, people.
Most of the movie, though, is a vain attempt for Tucker Max to mythologize and deify Tucker Max. It’s a monument to himself disguised as a comedy franchise. The stories, or variations of them, are taken from his book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, a book I’ve read and appreciated for its honest writing and Gonzo style. Seeing it on the screen, though, made me cringe. I would compare it most to Fight Club, another flawed monument to man’s failing masculinity — Roger Ebert called it “macho porn,” a term that works for both movies.
Who cares whether they serve beer in hell or not. My question is this: Is hell big enough for Tucker Max’s over-inflated ego?
The Internet is full of dumb trivia, but this one is not only dumb, but completely retarded. It was a trivia nugget that appeared on the front page of IMDb, though I think these nuggets must cycle randomly because it wasn't there when I returned. It said, and I quote (because you can't make this shit up): "Marlons Wayans was cast as Ripcord [in G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra] after his performance in Requiem For a Dream (2000). Wayans is also a fan of G.I. Joe."
