Miami Vice: Buddy Flick for Aught-Six

Last night, the husband and I fulfilled a lonstanding date with destiny and celebrated his 24th with a viewing of this film on opening night. I say film, and I mean it, although I wasn’t expecting to. I went into the theatre hoping for a couple of eyebrow-raising chase sequences, a little male nudity, and a lot of Miami scenery. I got the third in spades, and the second, and a few of the first, but something else too, something that I can’t stop thinking about. So I’m going to let you into my brain a little bit, and try not to include any spoilers, and not worry that you’re thinking that I think about this stuff too much. It’s just a summer movie, but why leave it at that? It’s one thing to keep raving about obscure foreign flicks and indie you’ve netflixed, things that always meant to change your life, but it’s something else to wade into the fray of what happens when visions are meshed with marketing plans and the accountants have it out down and dirty with actors and look for enlightenment in the midst of mass culture. As my very first film studies teacher constantly reminded us, Hawkes and Hitchcock cared about box office. And what you lose in purity you can gain in cache–ambitious indie films gain a passionate if limited following, ambitious studio movies influence the conversation even when they fail.

Enough justification, let us to the guilty pleasure. I’ll confess I wanted to love this movie, but I will also vigorously assure you that there were many moments during the movie in which I wasn’t so sure I would be able to, but when I could consider the whole, I knew that I did. It won me over, and although I did want to be won, but the film did have to work for it.

There’s a lot about this film that is suprising. First thing, the timing. This film is very deliberately paced. Although it’s basically being sold as a model of your average action movie, it takes pains to separate itself from the very first frame on. Whether you think it works or not, I have never seen a more seamless start to a movie: without warning of any kind you’re waist deep in a South Beach club, listening to Linkin Park’s “Numb,” a little on edge but you don’t know why. Colin and Jamie are working on something, roaming the club but keeping their eyes open, and whatever that something is it goes out the window when they get a cellphone call that sends their whole purpose in life perpendicular from where it was. They then step to the roof, Miami skyline so casually highlighted in the background, and start being the badasses we paid to watch them be. I hope this isn’t a spoiler, but this movie isn’t a remake, it’s an update, and it is pitch perfect 2005. From the Linkin’ Park to the mojito, this movie gets it, although it does seem to flirt, fashion wise and theme wise, with the 80s. Nice mashup. The core reason why I think of this as a film is this very deliberateness. All the while, even when it’s making what are probably mistakes, it isn’t like oops, where’d my action flick go, it’s like, I think I’m going to try this and see if you understand it. Style is everything, and it’s surprising at almost every turn.
From the rooftop to the go-fast boat (gotta love these drug running technical terms), the film proceeds to show us the uber-cool and super gritty side of life in Miami. Yet it does so while showing us the humanity that preceeds the style. Foxx and Farrell get themselves into a wide range of dangerous situations, and not once are we made to feel like it’s in the bag. There is always a very believable sense that things could go wrong, and that it could this time be a hero’s guts splashed on the wall like a Jackson Pollack. Major kudos to the actors for finding meaning in lines that could have been emtpy, and making us believe them. I even forgave the inane “Hola chica, hola chico” on the strength of the actors’ committment to the script and to each other.

YET– all the while, I felt like this movie was so close to being a movie that could make me weep, but it stayed a little aloof. This, I think, is what kept me thinking into the wee hours. Why, with so many pieces in the right place, did I not walk out sold but realizing that if I hadn’t been so hungry for a Miami-hearting artish film I wouldn’t have been totally sold? My verdict is the odd lack of homoeroticism. Again, this film is built on the archetype of the buddy movie, yet totally betrays it. Why? Because it is clear that Foxx and Farrell love their girlfriends way more than they love each other, and that just doesn’t work. Instead of a constant tension between their love for each other that grows out of constantly having to place their lives in each other’s hands and the love that society expects them to have for beautiful women, we have a cool, rational agreement that although they are devoted to each other and their work, they really do care more about their women. Time and time again Mann stokes up the heterosexuality, from the lovely buttnekkid Foxx maximizing his manliness in bed to Farrell’s soulful opthalmic stylings as he watches the drug lordess he’s wooed walk down the street. Women first, buddies later. That’s not what we expect or even really want from a buddy movie. Butch and Sundance ignore Katherine Ross all day, and that’s why we loved them. That’s why we didn’t want them to break up and we preferred their violent ends to the wedded, domesticized alternative. For this Crockett and Tubbs, friendship is business and romance is for real. I suppose in the shadow of Brokeback Mountain, it might be a more daring move to make the heroes 100% hetero, but the film pays the price. Without the guy love, it’s a little harder to care. Not that I want to see women take second place (although in this movie they routinely do in professional spheres, pounding home the point that you can get the guy or you can be a bad-ass on the job, but not both), but the buddy movie relies on there at least being a sense of regret as the heroes move away from each other toward domestic responsibility. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like this was a product of our troubled, homophobic times. Also, our capitalistic times. There is no hedonistic pleasure to be found in this tropical extralegal world, it’s all business, it’s all bottom line.

Still, this one got under my skin. Visually, emotionally, philosophically. In the end, this is an existential flick following the classic hero’s tale. You’ve gotta be pretty disillusioned to be a drug runner or risk your life on behalf of something as theoretical as US law enforcement. The reason I loved this story was because it represented the compromised state I have come to believe that most adult life is conducted in. The last time a movie grabbed me this way was, I think, the first time, and the movie was The English Patient. And in all of my obsessive post-viewing research, I found a review somewhere that said something like this: to feel the earth move under this movie, you have to have outlived a few dreams. Well, to steal shamelessly from this writer I don’t even know the name of, ditto. This movie doesn’t hold up perfect people and tell us to emulate them. It holds up people that have found a niche, by intention or by accident, and who live in that niche for all it’s worth. They make choices on the margin of society, and their choices affect almost no one but themselves, but for them, every choice is of ultimate consequence. It’s a world where every minute might be too late but you might not know it yet, where there’s backdrops you can’t argue with like money and heat, where you are under a thumb and the best you can do is squirm with attitude. Maybe you have to be a little tropicalized to get this one. Maybe you have to look at the grainy skyline crowded with points of distilled light, unblinking in the face of tragedy and joy, and see it as a reality you’ve lived. Even if you’ve never touched a gun or broken a law in your life, you can still relate to a story that tells each choice in terms of life, passion, and death.

They Could, and Did, and Should Never Again, Write a Book

Since Big Hollywood Director (henceforth BHD) shared a little of his glam job reading material with me this week, I thought I would pass on the love with a little peek inside the world of a library intern in technical services, the part of the library that handles everything to do with the books before they get to the shelves. You never see us. We work in basements wearing jeans and t-shirts.

So yesterday, I was packing up a new shipment of books to be “outsourced” which means “sent to Ohio to be cataloged.” This particular shipment was full of gift books, books that have been sitting on our back shelves for months to years because someone gave them to us and someone accepted them for the collection but alas they have no cataloging info printed inside. They are sent to Ohio in groups of a hundred, and there’s always a good thousand waiting in the queue.

These books are generally, in a word, bad. And just for you, I typed up a sample of some of yesterday’s best. Without further ado, I bring you the kookiest books we are paying to add to the shelves of a university library:

The Miler, by Hap Cawood

(please G&B, can you put a character named Hap in that novel you are editing?)

This is directly off the back: “A Kentucky mountain boy pursues the dream of a distance run that takes him further than he thought he could go—in an era when James Dean left the scene, Elvis came into it, life was simpler, love was the same, and few people ran the roads.” Because nothing begs for a cliche like a story set in Kentucky.

That, shockingly, is not the worst part of the blurb. Consider, “With a driving thrust beyound the bounds of the ordinary, the runner holds his will steady and his motion smooth in the fury.” I had a strong urge to wash my hands.

The Intuitive Observations of a Lowly House Painter: The Social Commentary, Political Humor, and Philosophical Reflections of a Common Man, by Marc Sanz

I think the title of this one pretty much says it all, but it is definitely rounded out by the cover art: a picture of said housepainter sitting on a ladder naked (except for his painter’s hat) in the pose of The Thinker with a paintbrush where the fig leaf should have been.

Chin up, Mom by Suzanne Douglass

The author of this book is under the misguided impression that she was writing poetry. In any case, the “verse” collected within is divided into four sections mirroring the stages of motherhood: Pregnant, The Early Period, The PTA Period, Reflections on Family Life.

 

A couple of choice excerpts:

“Eggs-actly” (yes, that is the title of the “poem”)

As I stand here coloring Easter eggs…

That’s all I’m including from this poem, but I’ll hazard a guess that the author’s allusion to Tillie Olsen’s clasic short story “I Stand Here Ironing,” was unintentional, while it could have been joining in Olsen’s critique of motherhood’s domestic servitude as self-actualizing bliss, it probably wasn’t, as evidenced by this next one.

“By an ironing board”

I think that I shall never cease

To wonder as I sprinkle

Why cloth that will not hold a crease

Holds every wrinkle

(Please give me back Alice Munro please! At the very least Carol Shields!)

But this last one beats them all. Imagine the following lines printed across the page, in block caps, in the concrete form your eighth grade English teacher warned you about taking the shape of a woman’s silhouette, complete with breasts and baby bump, and you will have some idea of what I will never be able to wipe off my retinas:

“It didn’t come from high heeled shoes, this posture that you see; although my spine’s not on a line the fault rests not with me. It was caused back in my teenage by the books I had to carry and I thought it would correct itself when I left school to marry. But now that I’m a matron there’s an even greater dip; I simply traded text books for a baby on my hip.”

 

Heartbreakingly, as I opened the back cover to stick a card pocket on, an unattached book plate slipped out informing me that the book had been donated in the memory of someone’s mother. I hope they have martinis in heaven, because she is going to need one if she ever finds out.

 

And a final fine addition to the university collection:

Coming Back: The Science of Reincarnation

Bills itself as “the most comprehensive and easy to understand explanation of reincarnation ever published” next to a pic of a towheaded tot in Osh Kosh B’Gosh. Thankfully, I noted that that this book had not been donated in the memory of anyone’s mother.

More Oliver Stone Ick

G&B said it best: dude is a loon. Further lunacy here. Or maybe just unprincipled capitalism–after all the crapalicious flicks he’s foisted onto us high-minded liberals, he’s probably desperate to tap a whole audience full of people who’ve never seen one of his movies before. He can now proceed to direct Iraq: Mission Accomplished or Bush, parts one and two.

If you need another reason to avoid World Trade Center

As much as I love Mr. Cage, watching his overanguished face contort in the commercial for this newest Oliver Stone flick was enough to steer me clear, but here’s an even better reason: apparently the Fox newsies love it! Todays edition of Salon’s The Fix reports: Stone’s “World Trade Center” has already come in for a lot of conservative love: “It is one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see,” writes Fox News’ Cal Thomas, who can’t believe his eyes. “What? Oliver Stone, who indulges in conspiracy theories and is a dues-paying member of the Hollywood left?” Thomas asked. “Yes, THAT Oliver Stone.” ” Ugg.

My enemy’s good movie is a bad movie, right?

He’s “bringing sexy back”

I swear, I’ve never watched an entire episode of TRL before in my life, but as I was doing my pre-workout channel flip, I happened to catch it right at the beginning and as soon as they mentioned a world premiere of Justin Timberlake’s latest video, that dial was not moving. I think I’ve heard the song a couple of times on the radio already, but it didn’t really grab me, but I knew a video would allow me focus my attention. A girl can hardly be faulted for indulging in a little MTV as she sweats away on a treadmill, and besides, they promised me Mr. JT. Well, they delivered, and if you are one of the few non-Mac people who frequents this blog, they claim you can watch the video at MTV Overdrive on demand. (Mac injustice police: they claim their platform can’t work with us! Psshaw!)

So, this is just a snap judgment based on a single viewing, but I think the song will catch on, and I feel it to be especially appropriate for clubs and as a getting ready to go out background song. The video has an interesting Euro-spy storyline, but there appear to be two Justins in it and it’s hard to tell exactly what they are up to. I like the clearly plotted, heart-felt perversion of the Cry Me A River video. Also, neither of the Justins dance, which is just a waste .

So the album is apparently not coming out until September (for real), but we do know that the title is Future Sex Love Sounds. The Web 2.0 geek in me is thinking, that sounds just like a tag cluster on del.icio.us. Sad really. Good thing the video showed a greater sense of promise than my sense of cool.

Christmas in July, brought to us by G&B

Okay, now that I have actually opened up the enticing USPS thick envelope package that arrived for me and D today, I realize that my last post was way lame.  This a lot more than “yeah!” people:

This is like the coolest thing that’s happened to me since T-Fap (aka SB) got off the plane on June 30th!  This is like reaching my hand into the goody bag again and again and again and never coming up empty! Wow! This is so cool! And it’s hard to see on this pic, but every mix CD has its own cover of thumbnail album covers, preserved in all of their polychromatic artistic glory. If you could get a close up look at these little masterpieces, you would trust the future of print media to this lady too. Shall we all raise a toast to friends with good taste? Let’s shall!
Hugs and laughter are hereby mentally and electronically sent in your direction.

Yeah!

G&B’s care package of mix CDs has arrived!!! Can’t wait to dig in.

Miami noir

In preparation for this week’s long-awaited release of Miami Vice, I am indulging in Joan Didion’s Miami, a collection of essays that explores the outer reaches of invisible underworld power and the comma splice. It’s a fantastic read during the steamy summer and I know it’s getting me ready for a dose of seedy violence backlit by my beloved neon skyline. Didion writes about Miami via Cuba, or how Miami in the last half of the twentieth century was pretty much an alternative Cuba, a second stage for the passions of revolutionary politics, and all the while Cubans ran the show while white Miami (or as Didion more accurately refers to them, the Anglos) ignored them. We’re talking 56% v. 44%, Hispanics equalling the larger part, and at that time, Cubans being the better part of that. There was a fundamental schism in perspectives on. Anglo Miami assumed that the Cubans were a group of immigrants, settling down and starting businesses and generally assimiliating. Cubans, on the other hand, never relinquished the mental status of exile. Tomorrow was always the day they were going home, provided that tomorrow the US had made good on its promise to invade the island and shut Castro down once and for all. No matter how much money they made here, how much English their children spoke, or what passport they carried, they were renters, not immigrants. The result was literally two worlds: the world of el exilio, self-policing true believers in a Castro-free Cuba or death, and the world of Anglos who hadn’t yet realized they were the literal minority population, esconced in their traditional network of whites-only restuarants and a newspaper which published two editions in two languages and few overlapping stories.

20 years later, I wonder if my perception that a lot has changed is, yet again, merely the ignorance of an Anglo circulating in the middle class. You certainly don’t read about as many bodies turning up in parking lots, although the recent and continuing Vamos a Cuba fiasco apparently generated a bunch of death threats for school board members. I know plenty of Cubans, and I’ve still only met one who was willing to say good things about communist Cuba. I have driven through a lot of the neighborhoods Didion was advised never to enter, but then again rarely has a weekend gone by this summer that I haven’t opened up a Herald to find out about a poor black child shot on a drive-by in Opa Locka. There might be more than two worlds now. We all might know less about all of them, but that’s probably growing more broadly true than just in south Florida, now that the Internet hooks everyone up with their filtered cultural information, no browsing through stuff you don’t agree with required.

I can say for certain that one thing has actually changed, though. Didion writes about scores of new condo buildings remaining unoccupied as downtown violence loomed on a daily basis, new units unsellable at any price. Ha! Those must have been the days. Too bad I had no money when I was six years old, I could have retired already.

Not in our heads, ladies

In honor of G&B’s summer goal of Thinking Like a Dude, I wanted to pass along this interview with Ben Barres that made the most-emailed list on the NY Times for a little while this past week. Actually, D rooted it out of the Wall Street Journal a week ago and brought it to my attention then, but with my sis in town and all that homework I haven’t had time to comment as yet. Plus I think the WSJ is only available to subscribers.  Anyway, what makes this he so special is that he used to be a she, and that he has now been a brilliant scientist in both genders. And no surprise, he’s found a big difference between being smart while female and being smart while male. The biggest difference: “People who do not know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect. I can even complete a sentence without being interrupted by a man.” Thank you for pointing that out, Mr. Barres. Now that you’re a man,  maybe someone will not only let you finish that sentence but listen to what you have to say.

Between now and Friday

I’m going to do a lot of stuff. I’m going to finish designing a real actual hompage that I just might let you see when it looks like an actual something.  Well, it almost looks like a something. It looks like more of a something than the practice ones did for those of you (SB) who helped me figure out if they were even visible to the world at large in the first place.  I’m also going to write a 10-15 page proposal for a digital library, which happily I do not have to actually build. That means I can come up with some crazy idea that no one would ever fund and make up reasons why it would work. I’m going to do some kind of class presentation tomorrow, which unhappily is the culmination of a group project that has involved, so far, no work by any member of the group. Well, hardly any. But then again this is the prof who literally gave us points for writing our name on a piece of paper, so I’m going to sleep peacefully tonight. I won’t even be perturbed by the untimely exit of Malan on Project Runway. His fake accent and heavily greased hair will be sorely missed.  I especially also won’t be perturbed by the dishes in the sink or the mold on the wall. Yes, the mold on the wall, the creeping crawling mold that dooms me to a life of poverty and futility. A future Cheaper Than Therapy posting if ever there was one. I will be not at all perturbed at this hour, however, by any of these things, because a few hours of quality Italian television (no, really, quality) and a big plate full of garlicky, olive oily spaghetti does a body good.