The movie One Hour Photo, considered as a manifesto for underground image appropriators.
Update: Discussed in the essay:
Art as stalking, collecting as art, invisible distribution systems as art.
Not discussed overtly (but hovering in the air one hopes):
The analog moto photo machine and distribution network and its relation to digital picture-taking and distribution.
"Walter Hill's contribution to the Red Harvest/Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars story family is the Bruce Willis vehicle Last Man Standing. This is perhaps the most overblown, arty, and ultimately exhausted contribution to the 'lone wolf pits rival gangs against each other' form..."
"There you go again."
"What?"
"You take the most current movie of the group, very fast paced and well made and enjoyed by many and claim that you, only you can see its flaws. You align yourself with these older movies, no less exploitation cheapies in their days, and claim, like Holden Caulfield, to be the only one who can see through the current 'phonies.'"
"Yes, but Last Man Standing is a demonstrably worse film than the others."
"We've never heard anyone say that. You need to give us ten examples of someone saying Last Man Standing is 'overblown, arty, and ultimately exhausted.' I mean you come here, to the Walter Hill fan page, shooting off your mouth, trying to claim some kind of moral high ground..."
(Third voice): "Yeah, Yojimbo sucks!"
Who knew that artist Joe McKay's "preReview" site from a few years back, which reviewed movies that hadn't come out yet (and was meant to be a joke), would be the model for a new type of writing by presumably more serious media? Here is a resident psychic of Salon online magazine telling us that the remake of the 1980 movie Fame will be badly dated:
"Fame": It's not gonna live forever
Why the classic '80s musical won't translate in an era of instant celebrity, YouTube and "American Idol"
By Julie Klausner
In a scene from the new "Fame," opening Friday, an acting teacher addresses a crop of aspiring adolescents trying out for a coveted slot at the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts.
"You wanna be famous?" he asks from the seats of the theater. "Then you gotta earn it."
That may be an acting teacher's party line. But that advice blaringly ignores the reality of today's instant celebrity, when YouTube stars like Chris "Leave Britney Alone!" Crocker and the sixth runner-up on "American Idol" are more likely to enjoy name recognition than a kid who learned how to play the oboe at a performing arts school. "Fame" (which was not screened prior to its release) tips its hat to the way things are, to an extent. In the best line from the trailer, an excessively jazzed student exclaims, "The casting director found me on YouTube!" Not, "The casting director liked the monologue I spent ages rehearsing!" Being good at what you do has never been a lock for any actor hoping to land roles in the laughably competitive world of entertainment. But as Tila Tequila can tell you, being famous in 2009 has precious little to do with talent or hard work.
[...]
IMDb commenter Paul Pensom does not like the Jodie Foster movie Flightplan (2005):
Man: "You know we're always saying we could use 50 million dollars?
Woman: "Yes."
Man: "Well I have a cunning plan."
Woman: "What's that then?"
Man: "First of all we need to find an aeronautics engineer working in a foreign country, with a child, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the layout of a particular long-haul plane."
Woman: "Why's that?"
Man: "Well then, you see, we murder her spouse, in such a way as it looks like an accident."
Woman: "What for?"
Man (exasperated): "Well then of course, we bribe the mortuary assistant at the hospital into letting us place explosives inside the casket."
Woman: "But why?"
Man: "I'm coming to that. Then we wait until the woman decides to return the the U.S."
Woman: "But what if she doesn't?"
Man: "She just will, okay? So anyway, when she decides to return home we find out what flight she's on. Hopefully she is not only placed on the type of plane of which she has encyclopedic knowledge, and flying with the airline of which you're a flight attendant, but also on the same flight as her dead husband's casket. Are you following?"
Woman: "I think so."
Man:"Good, we're nearly there. Then all we need to do is falsify the checking-in information to remove all record of her daughter, make sure she gets on the plane half an hour before everybody else, ensure there is a row of empty seats behind her and get me on the flight, sitting nearby."
Woman: "And then?"
Man (laughing): "Now this the cunning part. She takes the empty seats, allowing her daughter to sit in the aisle seat, then when she goes to sleep, all I have to do is steal a food trolley, stuff the daughter into it and hide her in the hold. Oh, and did I mention that we must ensure that nobody on the entire plane sees the daughter?"
Woman: "Isn't this getting a little farfetched?"
Man (angry): "What d'you mean? It's a great plan! All I have to do then is remove the child's boarding pass from wherever the mother is keeping it without waking her, assist her search for the missing child in the guise of an Air Marshal, convince the captain that the woman is mad and that the child died with her father (through a forged note from the mortician), and wait for the mother to escape from my custody.
Woman: "Escape, why?"
Man: "Because the casket can only be unlocked by her, so once she's unlocked it I can set the timer on the explosives. From there we're home and dry. I merely have to recapture her, convince the captain that she's actually not mad but a hijacker who wants 50 million dollars and give the Captain our account number, asking him to ensure the money is paid straight in. Oh, Then we land, everybody gets off the plane, I shoot the mother and blow up the daughter and nobody is any the wiser. We walk away with a cool 50 million. Simple eh?"
Pensom is right about all this but the genius of the movie is that it keeps rollicking along in spite of the absurdity of all these complications. The producers are banking on audiences hating air travel so much they will believe almost any bad thing associated with it.
found this thing I wrote in the comments to my old blog; still viable now that the movie is cable fodder:
Good morbid, del Toro touches--I don't think we'll be forgetting the Nazi ninja surgery addict with the clockwork heart anytime soon. But if I see one more movie with a big energy monster about to "break through into our world" and cause a narrowly-averted apocalypse, I'll...
Hellboy has two narrative trajectories--both simplistic, because it's a Hollywood movie--which converge with the sprouting of his horns at the end. He's been filing them down to nubs to "blend in" with humans and because he's in love with a human woman. She has been flirting with a cute FBI agent and Hellboy's been spying on them jealously. His bad father Rasputin kills her and promises to revive her if Hellboy will open the gates of hell. When Hellboy sprouts horns, they are the monster rack worn in his new role as gatekeeper but also the cuckold's horns. Suddenly, as he is preparing to let the Squid Monster through the Portal, he hears the voice of his good father, John Hurt (saying what exactly I don't remember because this dumb movie is already fading fast), and for the greater good of humanity Hellboy abandons his promise to "always protect the girl" and chooses to stop the apocalypse. At this point he snaps off his horns in anger--a good visual. And because it's a Hollywood movie, there are no consequences to Hellboy's choice--he saves the world AND the girl mysteriously revives and declares her love for him. Thus does the logic of Greek Tragedy succumb to the logic of the Five Script Doctors.
