I drove to Granada Hills today to buy a rug. To get there I used the Ronald Reagan freeway named after an actor from Illinois who made some films which are widely regarded as being universally unmemorable.



The ex-actor, after retiring from Hollywood went on to sell weapons to the Iranian dictatorship using the profits to arm death squads in central America. He also used funds designated for cleaning up toxic waste to fund instead the campaigns of sympathetic politicians and he closed institutions for the mentally ill which flooded the street with hundreds of thousands of crazy new homeless people that now fill our jails.

     

In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States with two requests which revealed the Hollywood movie-lover in the famous shoe-banger:
1. To go to Disneyland
2. Meet John Wayne.

The United States had a better idea; show him a modern suburb on Sophia Drive in Granada Hills. Instead of inspecting an aerospace plant, he was taken behind the scenes of 20 Century Fox's "Can-Can"

    

I saw Control with Morten. It's the movie about Joy Division and more specifically Ian Curtis. It's funny because the first I heard of it was critics tripping over themselves to point out that they liked it though they'd never heard of the band.  The point is always pretty much, "I'm a square. I'd never heard of these guys but I liked the movie although for a rock band, they sure weren't that much fun." I wonder what those critics were listening to back then. To me, Joy Division are one of those bands that, if you have taste, you should've at least heard during their existence if you were teenage or older. I mean, how separate are the worlds of music and movies that you'd have us believe you've got great taste and an ear to the underground if you still haven't heard of Joy Division. What bigger independent bands were there in the late 70s? And didn't you review 24 Hour Party People not five years ago?

Back to the 24 Hour Party People then. When that came out I saw a lot of dour Raincoats leaving the theater expressing their wish that whole film had been about Ian Curtis and not those awful acid house Blue Tuesdays or whatever was going on after Ian Curtis' death at which point their lot zoned out 'til the credits. Pity them. And I thought of how awful that would be- a film about Joy Division. Biopics are so suspect. Made For Cable movies that sit in the wings like vultures to be released in theaters only in the event of the subject's death because what is an awful film will likely reap the awful rewards at the Oscars.

Control is directed by Anton Corbijn which I didn't know till the end. Whatever you think of the guy, and I love his videos, you've got to admit that his images always have to easy to appreciate visuals. I mean, Bryan Adams got him to direct  "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman" after all. He's fucking Dutch for Christ's sake.

My spies have told me that season 1 of Newhart is going to be released in the winter of 2008. Of all the shows based around Bob Newhart (the others being The Bob Newhart Show (1961-1972), The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978),
Bob (1992-1993) and the bizarrely-named George & Leo (1997)) Newhart (1982-1980) remains my favorite. Dick Loudon (Newhart) is a writer from New York City who buys an inn in a rural Vermont town populated by colorful locals who exist to exasperate Dick. I like Bob Newhart in all of his roles which are essentially the same- a mild-mannered, stammering straight man. A bit like Droopy Dog (minus Droopy's explosions of anger and muscle). As David Hyde Pierce observed, "The only difference between Bob Newhart on stage and Bob Newhart offstage – is that there is no stage."

Trivia- the last two times that I flew, Julia Duffy was on the plane.

I saw Sea Monsters at the California Science Center, a fact which you probably already gathered from the title and not from hours of watching Forensic Files. The film is structured like a lot of the (superior) BBC "Walking With" series that focus on all those crazy monsters that didn't fit on Noah's Ark. Like the Allosaurus episode, Sea Monsters focuses on an slightly anthropomorphic female Dolichorhynchops and her search for a man amidst danger on all sides.

If you're a fan of magic lantern shows, or view masters, then you probably love 3-D. Well, really 4-D because don't all movies have duration/time, width and height already? Why didn't William Castle think of that?

                     View Master!                                         Magic Lantern!                                 William Castle!

      Anyway, Liev Schreiber's soothing tones placate you whilst giant marine reptiles swim toward you interspersed with period re-enactments of paleontologists finding fossils played by really hammy actors... and Peter Gabriel's light touch with the music should minimize any trauma from the bloodshed in all but the biggest bawl babies. Watching this with the sound off whilst tripping would probably be quite different in effect.
     My main gripes are the short length (which is the norm with IMAX) and that, because we stick to the story of one Plesiosaur at the end of the Late Cretaceous we only see maybe four or five marine reptiles. Personally, I'd rather have seen a lengthy and comprehensive expose of marine reptiles from the Mesozoic to the present. That would've given the parents more time to make out whilst sprawled out in the courtyard while the seven-year olds and myself got our learning on.
A Saltwater crocodile, which can grow up to 28 feet long can kill a shark. The largest predatory kind (the Great White) can grow up to 21 feet.

    Lars... whoops- David Arquette                                                               The real Lars

In Lars and the Real Girl Ryan Gosling plays a shy loner who is henpecked by nagging family and friends determined to engage him. He reacts to their attempts to set him up on dates and hang out in familiar and realistic shy guy fashion. Then he buys a sex doll which he falls in love with and all at once we're transported to a world I could only recognize as the familiarly formulaic "quirky indie film". Of course it's in the Middle West (Ontario in real life), the last bastion of quirky, lovable, soft-headed townsfolk with hearts of gold and fresh-baked good intentions.
     What I had hoped was going to be a semi-comic observation along the lines of Punch Drunk Love or Chuck & Buck in one contrived bit plunged straight into the territory of an SNL sketch-cum-movie or an Improv skit that goes on for way too long (i.e. over 3 seconds). OK, it's not as bad as those examples, mostly because of the casting and because you don't have Horatio Sanz cracking up at the hilarity of it all. Ryan Gosling goes a long way in making Lars a character we care about even while the script or direction provide almost no insight into what's going on in his head aside from contrived instances with a psychiatrist. We never know if he really thinks the doll is real, does he ever have moments of clarity? What made him change from a believable loner into a delusional cinematic joke? We never know much of anything that goes on inside. You won't laugh, you won't cry even though it's calculated to make you do just that. Ultimately Lars is just an icon with funny hair, funny clothes, a funny name and a funny relationship with others a la Napoleon Dynamite. Here's hoping he doesn't similarly inspire a legion of "hipster" imitators or else I'm going to have to make a lot more calls to the Redneck Squad.
     I get the feeling that director Craig Gillespie (who also made the critically-despised Mr. Woodcock) didn't keep us distant from Lars deliberately like Todd Haynes did in Safe with Julian Moore.  Lars is viewed as a curiosity from arms length through the eyes of a guy whose prescription for social heterogeneity seems to be getting the world's "weirdos" laid or at the very least, some hugs.
     There are a couple of shots of the sex doll that register on the outskirts of funny and disturbing but for the most part Lars and the Real Girl is (like Waitress or Little Miss Sunshine) only about as quirky as a Halloween episode of Friends. Almost too edgy for an in-flight movie or your great grandmother. The story slowly flows along toward inevitable plot markers at molasses speed and then ends, gratefully, sort of abruptly.
     If you need more convincing if the film's mediocrity, check out these particularly rote hyperboles it inspired among some of the nation's blandest critics:

Joe Morgenstern of Wall Street Journal "nothing short of a miracle"

Ann Hornaday for the Washington Post "a small miracle"

Wesley Morris for the Boston Globe "something miraculous has occurred"