The 40-Year-Old Virgin
I hesitated seeing this film for a long time. I felt certain that it would be one long stupid cruel male bashing joke. But I have to admit that in spite of it's flaws, the film actually does work.

There are certainly plenty of things in this film that are in bad taste or just plain dumb, but ultimately it ends up working because it allows you to sympathize with both the guy and the woman he meets.

It's clear that the studio's marketing department played a heavy hand in the screenplay. Most fictional stories require you to temporarily suspend your sense of disbelief at at least one point, in order to allow the rest of the story to work. But the best writing generally relies on suspension of disbelief as little as possible. This film, on the other hand, requires suspension of disbelief in almost every scene. But I guess that's because the film's very concept requires total suspension of disbelief in the first place.

The lead characters are attractive nice people who can afford to live in nice neighborhoods, there's a near-perfectly P.C. mixture of ethnicities, and nobody ever really gets mean or ugly.

Andy's a stock clerk in the kind of home electronics store that's rapidly disappearing and being replaced by Walmart and Amazon. He can't possibly be making more than $10 an hour. And yet he rides a pretty expensive bike, has an apartment that must cost at least a grand a month, which he's packed with plenty of nice furniture and home entertainment stuff, and which always seems to look like a maid just came through the place. That sort of thing just wouldn't happen on a stock clerk's wages unless he was dealing on the side. But then, if he were a genuinely typical retail stock clerk, he'd probably have to live in a really cheap apartment furnished with thrift store furniture, in a lousy part of town, and the film wouldn't really work with that.

And of course, for the film to work, he also has to be a reasonably decent looking guy with a nice personality. If he were a real middle aged virgin, he'd probably have to be more like American Splendor's Harvey Pekar: a goofy slovenly doofus or an anti-social crank. Or both.

Oh, and wait...he's a reasonably healthy adult male with no regular sex partner, and he's not getting an erection every time he turns around? And he's not following nature's loud and clear instructions by regularly masturbating? And he's not using pornography to enhance that experience by several orders of magnitude? Sorry, that just wouldn't happen.

And Trish...exactly what the heck does she do? She sells other people's stuff for them, on consignment, on eBay? The kind of thing that my grandmother could do for herself? And for this she needs a big storefront on a busy street, with what would obviously be a huge monthly overhead? And she drives a Volvo and lives in a really nice house? And supports three kids? Exactly how many baby daddies are underwriting her lifestyle, anyway? And between running her "business" and dating, and with no apparent man in the kids' lives, what exactly are those kids doing, raising themselves?

Those things said, however, if you're willing to go along with all the film's conceits, there are some worthwhile moments as well.

One of the most annoying concepts in today's Hollywood is the idea that white males are the only people that can be shown in an unflattering manner. Showing anyone else in a less than 100% positive way is racist or sexist or homophobic. Well, this film bravely blows away that nonsense in spades.

Not only is our central character a really nice, likeable white guy who stays nice and likeable no matter how many ugly situations he gets thrown into, but a lot of the women he encounters are drunks, sluts, idiots, and just plain wack jobs. But it all works in the film, since it lets us see the difficulties of a nice decent guy trying to maneuver himself in today's post-feminist social environment.

And the gay jokes abound. There's a whole string of "You can tell you're gay because..." jokes that lots of films wouldn't get away with. But they work here, because sexual identity would clearly be an issue in a story about a middle aged straight guy who's never had a girlfriend.

Beyond that, there's a central theme in the film that nearly everybody can identify with, namely, performance anxiety. The idea is expressed throughout the film: you need to be sexually experienced before you meet the person you fall in love with, so that when you are finally with that person, you won't be quite so inept a lover. Of course this is largely a myth, but it's a myth that millions of people buy into. And the film blows that myth out of the water pretty nicely.

So this film could have been a completely humiliating male-bash, which would have been typical Hollywood. Instead, the guys in the audience end up rooting for our hero to get laid, and the women end up rooting for him to fall in love. And in the end, everybody gets the happy ending they were hoping for.

Idiocracy

Remember all those kids from high school who just barely made it through their classes? The ones whom you just knew were going to end up spending their lives working as clerks at Rite Aid or managers at Pep Boys, and whelping a whole bunch of kids who were just as useless as they were? Well, imagine an entire world, populated solely by nothing but several generations of their offspring.

That's the premise of Mike Judge's "Idiocracy".

Army Private Joe Bowers is selected to be the subject of a cryogenics experiment, in which he is to be put into suspended animation for 1 year. The object is simply to determine if it can be done successfully. Joe is selected because he is the most "average" Private in the entire Army: he has an average physique, average intelligence and aptitude, and an average personality.

The Army also wanted to select a female Private for the same experiment, but it turned out that all of the Army's female Privates were either above or below average in one or another critical characteristic, so they end up having to look to the civilian population. Except that they were unable to persuade any average female civilians who fit the profile to volunteer, so they end up having to hire a prostitute.

Joe and his co-subject Maya are placed in cryogenic pods, where they are to remain in hibernation for a year, after which they are to be revived. Unfortunately, a couple of months into the experiment, the General who sponsored the project is caught up in a scandal involving Maya's pimp. So the whole project is scuttled, and all of it's assets, including the pods with our two heroes, are unceremoniously put into "top secret" storage, meaning that they are mothballed and stashed in a warehouse, where they are promptly forgotten.

Then a cataclysmic event occurs which triggers the "unfreeze" program on their pods, and they are revived. Except that it's not 1 year later, it's 100 years later (in the movie, it's actually 500 years later, it's just better the way I tell it). In the intervening time, all the people with 3-digit IQs have stopped reproducing, the world is now populated entirely by idiots, and Joe and Maya are now the two smartest people in the world (actually, Joe and Maya are not particularly "smart", they're just the only people left who aren't idiots).

Nothing really works the way it's supposed to, and nobody really understands how anything works or how to fix anything. If you speak in complete sentences and have more than about 100 words in your vocabulary, everyone thinks you're a snooty stuck-up jerk. And the only things on TV are reality shows and Fox News.

Maya (actually, in the movie, it's some woman we don't know, it's just funnier the way I tell it) gets hungry, so she goes up to a Carl's Jr. kiosk to order a burger and fries (it works like an ATM, except it's Carl's Jr.). The kiosk asks Maya for her name and uses voice ID to identify her. But because nothing really works the way it's supposed to, not only does the machine fail to give Maya her order, but it deducts all the money out of her account. Then, because it "knows" who she is and also knows that she is now broke, it flags her as a destitute mother and takes all her kids away and puts them in foster care. Except that it's also misidentified her voiceprint with some other woman, so what it's actually done is deduct all the money out of some other woman's account and taken all of her kids away.

Meanwhile, Joe, in an attempt to get some help, has wandered into a hospital, which he's had some difficulty finding because all the road and building signs are misspelled and have wrong information. The receptionist stares blankly into space as she listens to each incoming patient's description of their problem. In front of her is a console with push buttons that have little diagrams on them, like on the cash registers at Burger King: a picture of someone getting stabbed, someone throwing up, someone giving birth. Except that the receptionist never really understands anything anyone says to her, so all she ever does is push the button for the examination room.

In the exam room, the guy running the equipment doesn't really know what he's doing either, so he holds three probes in his hand and tells Joe, "Let's see, this one goes in your ear, this one goes in your mouth, and this one goes up your butt...wait...I think this one goes in your mouth..."

I could give away the whole story, but I won't, although it wouldn't really matter, because the point of the movie is not the plot, the point of the movie is all the "dumb" gags. And the "dumb" gags do indeed abound: nearly every scene has one, and on a scale of 0 to 100, their degrees of success range from 0 to about, say, 45.

But the more interesting part of the story is the part about why the film was barely in the theaters long enough to not count as a "direct-to-DVD" release, even though it was written by Mike Judge, who has established a pretty good track record with Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill, and, of course, the cult classic Office Space.

One could plausibly argue that the studio intentionally low-balled the film because it just didn't think it was a very good script, or that the marketing department declined to get behind the film because the limited budget didn't allow for any name actors (although Thomas Haden Church does appear in one scene and delivers a grand total of two lines, for which he almost certainly got paid more than any of the other actors).

But I suspect that there may be another reason why the studio abandoned the film: not all of the stupid people are white guys.

To be sure, there are indeed a lot of stupid white guys in the film. But, some of the stupid guys are not white. In fact, the President of the United States is a big loud stupid black guy, although he's not one of the stupidest guys in the film by a long shot. Now the Secretary of Defense, on the other hand, is a big fat Mexican guy, and he's definitely one of the stupidest guys in the film. In fact, there are even (gasp) some stupid women in the movie.

So the film violates one of the most important unwritten rules in today's movie business: the only people it's okay to make fun of are white and/or conservative and/or religious Christian and/or male (and if you don't believe me, go see Borat again). Making fun of anyone else hurts their feelings, and some people's feelings are more important that other's.

So the marketing and PR (and probably legal) folks at Fox Studios probably made the accurate calculation that, if they pretend the movie never happened, then nobody will notice it, and they won't have to defend it.

But that shouldn't dissuade anyone from buying it on DVD and enjoying it at home, ideally as a double feature with Office Space. And the fact that it's not a particularly well-executed film actually works in it's favor.

So enjoy Idiocracy for the guilty pleasure it is. And be sure to have some "Big-Ass Fries".

Basic Instinct 2

No, of course I didn't pay $9.00 to go see this abortion in a theater. The film ran for a total of 3 weeks and recouped about $6 million of its estimated $70 million production costs, which must have been a terrible disappointment to Katie Kouric and Diane Sawyer and the countless other TV and print infobimbos who spent weeks ahead of the film's release crowing about how terrific it was that there was finally a movie about a middle-aged woman who was just as much of a murderous slut as any 23-year-old. (Of course, the film also grossed an additional $35 million in foreign markets, which means that overall it was only about $29 million down the tank...) Meanwhile, knowing that it would only be a matter of a few weeks before the film went to DVD, I bided my time, and recently went to my local video store and rented the DVD, thus saving myself a good 10 bucks (when you count in the popcorn).

Sure enough, just as I suspected, the basic (no pun intended) problem with this film was that it targeted the wrong audience. 14 years ago, millions of 25-to-45-year-old guys flocked to see the original Basic Instinct, and they were all going for the same reason: to fantasize about banging Sharon Stone. But that's not who showed up to see this movie.

This movie, to the extent that it gets rented on DVD at all, will be seen mainly by two audience segments: middle-aged women and gay men. And both groups will be watching it for the same reason: to fantasize about being Sharon Stone. Unfortunately for the producers of this film (and Stone herself), a 45-ish Sharon Stone is really not all that attractive to the kind of handsome, studly young guys that middle-aged women and gay men fantasize about being attractive to, and that audience segment, predictably, largely ignored this movie.

Sharon Stone, who, by her own account, screamed her head off at director Paul Verhoeven when she saw the rushes of the crotch scene in the first movie, spent the better part of ten years practically begging to get this movie made, by any means available, in an effort to revive her completely flaccid career.

But this film was not written by Joe Eszterhas. This film was not directed by Paul Verhoeven. The music for this film was not composed by Jerry Goldsmith. And, perhaps most importantly, this film did not co-star Michael Douglas.

Ironically, a 60-ish Michael Douglas is exactly the kind of guy that millions of men in their 50s and 60s today would be perfectly happy to trade places with. And a nasty, slutty 45-ish Sharon Stone is exactly the kind of woman that millions of those guys would have no trouble at all fantasizing about banging and tossing. But that's not the audience this movie was made for.

If this movie had co-starred Michael Douglas (or a reasonably age-appropriate stand-in), and if he had spent the entire movie wildly banging her, and if he had been the one fucking with her head for a change, and if the last scene of the film had shown him with a satisfied look on his face as he watched her crazed, shrieking, murderous, psycho-bitch ass being hauled off to Death Row, then this film probably could have been almost as big a hit as the original. As it is, this film will probably be about as big a hit as, say, "Crash".

But, hey, who knows, that's exactly the kind of film that gets Oscars these days...ones that almost nobody besides middle-aged women and gay men want to see. So maybe Sharon Stone will end up with an Oscar for symbolic reasons. And maybe she'll end up reviving her career, sort of. After all, this is Hollywierd we're talking about...

Superman Returns

Oh, great. Superman is a toned down metrosexual wuss who is more interested in promoting vegetarianism and lecturing kids about smoking than he is in hunting down and killing terrorists, Lois Lane is Maureen Dowd on steroids *and* a she's such a slut that she doesn't even know for sure who really inseminated her fatherless bastard kid, and there's no such thing as The American Way. And I'm supposed to pay $10 to sit through two and a half hours of this? No thanks. At this point, my new heartthrob, Debbie Schlussel, has said it better than I ever could, right here.

Akeelah And The Bee

I read several reviews of this film, hoping to find the phrase, "inspired by actual events", or some words to that effect. I also studied the official web site for the film, hoping to find some similar phrase. Then, out of heightened curiosity, I paid $9.50 to see the film, and searched the opening credits (just a title) and the closing credits (extensive), again in vain, for the phrase, "inspired by actual events", or words to that effect.

This film would have been terrific if it had been grounded in some form of reality. Surely there must be some real success stories out there that this film could have drawn on for it's source material. Surely there must be some real black kids out there, who do reasonably well at English, and who would do much better at it if they simply had the same parental and school guidance as other kids who do well at English.

Unfortunately, this film is a complete fabrication. And what a fabrication it is. It's about a black kid from South Central L.A. who not only embraces the idea that she must master standard English, but who masters it well enough to compete in (and win, on her first try), not just her local spelling bee, and not just her school district's spelling bee, but the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the most competitive contest of its kind in the nation, and perhaps in the entire English speaking world.

However, a thorough perusal of the list of winners of the Scripps National Spelling Bee over the last 25 years or so, reveals lots of girls with names like Amy and Amanda, and lots of boys with names like Scott and George, and even a few kids with exotic East Asian names like Anurag and Pratyush. But there are no kids on that list with names like Demondre or Twontonette. And that's not just a coincidence.

All sarcasm aside: the idea that the way to get kids to improve academically, is to do what this film attempts to do, namely, to boost their morale by inspiring them to feel good about themselves, has already been so thoroughly debunked that it's a wonder anybody still believes it. The sad fact of the matter is that African American kids today, already have the highest self-esteem of any racial group of students, yet their math and English performance remains dismal.

And the idea, strongly suggested throughout the film, that there is some special combination of circumstances or support that disadvantaged black kids require, in order to succeed academically, is the only truly racist idea involved here. Akeelah only succeeds because she has a UC Professor of English (Lawrence Fishburne) tutoring her, for months and months on end, at no charge. And, of course, he has to be black. And, of course, he has to include lots of black history lessons in his English tutoring. And make no mistake about it, this is the only way Akeelah can succeed: toward the end of the film, she looks up at her free, volunteer, Ph.D. tutor, and literally says, "I wouldn't be here without you" (she even pronounces 'without' correctly).

But even that, by itself, isn't enough. Everybody in her neighborhood had to pitch in to help her study. The military-bound big brother, the Korean grocer, the well-to-do Hispanic kid from Westwood, the homeless panhandler, even the homies and gangbangers had to help out. And of course, her overworked mother (Angela Bassett) had to stop standing in her way, and of course she had to have a picture of her slain dad to always look up to. After all, it takes a politically correct village to raise a child. Even the ending of the film is politically correct: Akeelah and the Asian boy who is her last remaining competitor play to a draw, so they're both co-winners, and nobody's a loser.

Look: anybody, including me, would be inspired by any story about a kid who succeeds academically in spite of long odds. I was probably just as choked up as anybody at the end of the film. And I have no doubt that the people who made this film had their hearts in the right place. But tugging on people's hearts isn't what's going to make the difference. And the fact that it's supposedly a "kid's film" doesn't let the the filmmakers off the hook. Besides, the film is actually directed as much at adults as it is toward kids.

It is certainly true that many black kids do face a special obstacle, in that they first have to un-learn the concept that Ebonics is a language and that "aks" is a word. But the fact remains that the way to get kids, all kids, any kids, to improve academically, is to teach them to take school seriously and to knuckle down and work their butts off. And that's a job that can only be done effectively by parents. Any substitute is a poor substitute. And when kids start by taking school seriously and working their butts off, then their performance improves, and when their performance improves, then their self-esteem and morale improves genuinely, because they've earned it.

(Which reminds me. Starbucks, which is underwriting the distribution of this film, has ads in all their stores in the style of flashcards, with a slogan at the bottom saying, "What's your word?" Well, okay, my word is "aquila", which, in addition to being an actual word, in not one, but two languages [being both the Spanish and Italian word for "eagle"], would probably be a perfectly fine name for a girl, provided that her parents could pronounce and spell it correctly. Sooner or later, a real "Akeelah" will probably want to know why her mother couldn't.)

The perfect companion/antidote to this film is a *real* documentary, made several years ago for PBS, entitled "The First Year". It follows the experiences of five real rookie teachers in the real Los Angeles Unified School district through their first academic year, and shows what these and other real teachers are really up against every day. Intended to have the same effect on adults as "Akeelah And The Bee", namely, to inspire them to come up with creative, special new ways to teach disadvantaged minority kids, the film has exactly the opposite effect. The experiences of these five young teachers were so awful that all of them, including the idealistic young black man of whom so much was expected, ended up quitting after their first year.

"The First Year", which was originally intended to be shown annually, all over the country, as the cornerstone of the "Teach America" program, in an effort to inspire young college students to persue public school teaching as a profession, was, instead, shown only once, on a handful of PBS stations, mostly at midnight, and then quietly shelved. Any adult who decides to become a teacher or tutor after seeing "Akeelah", should be required to also see "The First Year", so that at least they'll be going into the experience with open eyes.

The Notorious Bettie Page


Some of the reviews of this film were quite disparaging, but this is one of those occasions where I must disagree with many of the professional critics. It probably tells the story of Bettie Page's early life and modeling career about as well as any film could, given the source material that was available to work from, including, primarily, the surviving photos, and, of course, Bettie herself. And thank goodness the film was made while she was still alive so that she was still available as a source.

If the film does come across as shallow and uninsightful, well, it's probably mostly because Bettie herself is basically a rather shallow and uninsightful person. But in the case of this film, that's probably as much of a blessing as it is a fault. The film seems to be a straighforward effort to portray the porno industry of the 1950s, and the events of Bettie's career in that industry, without being either preachy or condescending.

And make no mistake about it: tame as they may seem by today's standards, the photos and films Bettie made were indeed pornography. Men bought these pictures to jerk off with, and the people who were making them knew perfectly well (at least for the most part) that that's exactly why they were buying them.

Bettie herself, however, genuinely seems to have been blissfully unaware of the real reason that men wanted to look at these pictures. And while the combination of a religion-influenced upbringing and apparent sexual abuse could easily have twisted anyone's personality in some rather ugly ways, that doesn't seem to have been the case with Bettie. If she really was abused as a teenager and even gang-raped as a woman, that would certainly be something she had in common with a large percentage of the women who do pornography. But something else she had in common, with probably an even *larger* percentage of the women who do pornography, is that she just wasn't a particularly bright person.

Assuming, however, that one is willing to accept the source material on its own terms, the film comes across as a mostly honest attempt to convey the atmosphere, style, and sensitivities of the people, their times, and their circumstances. Perhaps the closest the film comes to being mocking is in the music used during the Senate hearings, which is deliberately sinister and melodramatic (although, even here, the music is not out of character with the type of music that would have been used during that period.)

Even during these Senate hearing scenes, however, the film remains mostly straightforward, including its depiction of the testimony of a man who describes discovering his son dead, after what sounds like an episode of auto-erotic asphyxiation. The father goes on to describe how he also discovered, after going through his son's belongings, a collection of bondage photos that sound very much like the ones Bettie participated in making. Whether Bettie ever actually heard such testimony in 1955 is not really known. But it's entirely plausible to suppose that she would have heard such descriptions at some point in her life.

Gretchen Mol conveys Bettie's persona with pretty much exactly the sweet, friendly, and naively trusting characterisitcs one would expect, given the tone of the few interiews she's given over the years. And I must say that she looks absolutely lovely in those 50s outfits. And I don't mean the bondage gear or lingerie, I mean the conventional dresses and such.

This is particularly true in the Florida scenes, which are shot in color, with a reliance on primary colors and a level of saturation that elegantly recreate the color motifs and style of the mid-1950s. The cinematography, in general, tries to be consistent with the material. The black and white cinematography in the New York scenes does leave something to be desired, probably mostly due to the use of modern equipment and film stock. But many of the color Florida scenes are beautifully composed, and several are quite faithful to the style and color composition of the Bunny Yeager photo sessions.

The film, which was produced by HBO, also features a generous helping of character actors who have figured prominently in several HBO television shows. John Ventimiglia, who plays restauranteur Artie Bucco in The Sopranos, is a member of an amateur "photographer's club". There is also a party scene featuring Ventimiglia together with Max Casella, who plays Artie's recent nemesis Benny Fazio in The Sopranos. Chris Bauer, who was featured in the HBO series The Wire, plays photograher Irving Klaw, and Lili Taylor, who had a regular recurring role in Six Feet Under, plays his sister Paula. And Bunny Yeager, who did several color shoots of Bettie in Florida, including the 1955 Playboy centerfold, is played by Sarah Paulson, who was featured in the HBO series Deadwood.

Additional character actors in the cast include David Strathairn (who recently starred as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night And Good Luck), in a very straighforward performance as Senator Estes Kefauver. John Cullum, of Northern Exposure, plays a southern preacher. And, bringing up the rear, the indelible Austin Pendleton, who plays a teacher in Bettie's acting class.

Any film attempting to tell the story of Bettie Page's career is limited by the scarcity of surviving documentation, and by the rather uninsightful details that Bettie herself has provided. But reaching for a deeper level of analysis would require speculation, along with the interjection of the filmmaker's own personal opinions and biases. Writer/director Mary Harron has admirably managed to use this film to tell Bettie's story, on Bettie's terms, without ramming her own personal viewpoints down our throats. And for that, she is to be commended.