Wednesday, December 04, 2002

PASSAGE (from Radley Metzger's 1976 film The Image:) "I remembered clearly the look Claire had given her. It was the look of one viewing a rerun of a successful film one had directed oneself, whose plot couldn't possibly have any surprises."

posted by clark 12:35 PM

CRASHED: On one of Cinemax's tertiary channels late Monday night, I finally saw Highway, a pathetic little action-thriller movie filmed three and a half years ago under the working title A Leonard Cohen Afterworld.

It's an awful low-budget (yet completely corporate) "Gen X" movie like hundreds of others. It starts in Las Vegas with Jared Leto getting caught schtumping a mobster's wife. Leto and pal Jake Gyllenhaal run from the mobster's hired thugs by taking a road trip, ending in Seattle. Along the way they have unimaginative misadventures, punctuated by unimaginative cuss words that are apparently meant to be funny just because they're really loud.

It only qualifies for mention here because of one scene toward the end—a full-scale re-creation of the Kurt Cobain memorial at the Seattle Center International Fountain. I saw it being filmed—that's the only reason I can tell you it was a full-scale re-creation. All you see on screen are a few close-ups of the actors. Leto is heard complaining that Kurt's death meant nothing to him compared with the demise of "that Led Zeppelin guy." The thugs promptly show up. The dudes run off. One shot later and we're a mile and a half away in Pioneer Square, where the thugs (in cars) finally catch up to, and beat the metaphoric crap out of, the dudes (who've presumably been running all that way).

Naturally, neither Nirvana nor any other Seattle act is heard on the soundtrack, a pseudo-"grunge" guitar pastiche created by a member of the more Hollywood-acceptable Black Crowes.

Not only does the story have nothing to do with Cobain, it contradicts almost everything he stood for. It treats its characters as one-dimensional stereotypes. It treats young-adult males in general as a target market to be cynically marketed to. It insults the intelligence of its would-be audience. It glorifies violence and stupidity. Its "heroes" are just the sort of jocks-in-punk-clothing Cobain had repeatedly denounced.

A much better version of the same premise can be found in the 1998 Canadian indie drama The Vigil (for Kurt Cobain).

The guys n' gals on that film's road trip are depicted as human beings, who loved Cobain's music and learn to love one another. The Vigil doesn't actually show the vigil. To re-create it the way Highway did would've busted The Vigil's tiny budget. So instead its road-trippers show up in Seattle a day late, but decide they've had an invaluable learning and coming-O-age experience from the journey itself.

Nobody learns anything in Highway, except perhaps not to get caught schtumping a mobster's wife.

posted by clark 12:15 PM

Monday, December 02, 2002

YOU KNOW WE LOVE TYPOGRAPHY, so you know we love this stie full of 20th-century Russian circus posters! You don't need to know the Cyrillic alphabet to understand the classic spirit of rah-rah showmanship, bursting through Czarist/Soviet official grayness.

posted by clark 5:07 PM

WE'VE NEVER HAD many good things to say about Ronald Reagan. But a member of an email list we're on recently reminded us of a speech Reagan made during the 1964 Goldwater campaign, containing these prescient words:

"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path."

posted by clark 11:52 AM

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