FutureWorld: everyday life in the third millennium

I mostly knew Jeremy Renner from his part in “The Town,” with Ben Affleck. Jeremy played a thug / bank robber with great abandon, and he has big staring eyes and a strange dominating presence, and he’s very real.

 

This is a big deal in the movies. You need to look real.

 

I heard last spring that he was playing Hawkeye in the forthcoming Avengers movie, and I smirked a little. Minor role in a major movie: who cares?

 

Well, he was wonderful. He was creepy and elegant and very convincing. He also bulked up amazingly, and did not look ridiculous when appearing with Iron Man and Thor and the Hulk at all; in fact, he looked like their peer.

 

Now he’s playing a superhuman secret agent in “The Bourne Legacy.” He still has that huge bulked-up body, and those chilly eyes. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’m already in love with him. My friend Apollonia (who has vowed herself to Robert Pattinson) has admitted to me that she finds Jeremy attractive.

 

And now I discover that Jeremy, before his very successful career as an actor, was a makeup artist.

 

Behold this sequence from a recent episode of “Ellen”:

 

 

He is adorable.

 

I don’t care if he’s gay or straight. (He looks straight to me, but I’ve been wrong about these things before.)

 

He is a fine actor, and is also very cute, and can do makeup, and packs on muscle very nicely when necessary.

 

As someone online said: “It’s nice to have something to fall back on, in case Plan A fails.”

 

Jeremy has lots of things to fall back on.

 

Whatta guy!

 

Partner and I have not been to the movies much this summer. Neither of us has been feeling great this summer, and – frankly – the summer movies (since “The Avengers,” anyway) haven’t been that appealing.

 

Finally, last weekend, we went to the movies, and saw “The Dark Knight Rises.”

 

Oh, kids, it’s got everything: explosions, and Tom Hardy, and Gary Oldman, and Christian Bale, and the destruction of Manhattan (AKA Gotham City), and Liam Neeson.

 

You know I am mostly about the boys. You expect me to drool over Christian’s abs, or Tom’s gigantically developed chest and back. (All of which are fine, by the way.)

 

But I want to speak to you about Anne Hathaway.

 

I always thought of her as a lightweight actress, a comedienne: “Princess Diaries,” “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Alice in Wonderland.” I think she’s very pretty – I love her big dark eyes – but as a gay man, I realize that my estimations of a woman’s sexiness are maybe not the same as a straight man’s.

 

But Anne Hathaway is utterly wonderful in “The Dark Knight Rises.”

 

She is Catwoman. The movie is smart enough not to call her by that name. She’s a clever thief who dresses in a tight-fitting cat costume when it suits her. She is skillful enough to baffle the omniscient Batman.

 

That’s the character. But the actress – ah. Anne is funny. She switches from droll to deadly serious in milliseconds. Her voice goes from obsequious to flat to sarcastic in nothing flat. Her face, even behind a mask, is wonderfully expressive. (Spoiler alert! But not much of a spoiler alert.) At one point in the movie, she and Batman are working in concert. He’s trying to show her how to use his Bat-motorcycle.  He begins to speak –

 

And she leaps onto the Bat-cycle, revs the motor – vroom vroom! – and looks bored. “Yeah, I think I got it,” she says.

 

She is a certified tough girl.

 

There have been lots of Catwomen on TV and in the movies: Eartha Kitt, Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry.

 

Anne Hathaway is the best of the lot.

 

Vroom vroom!

Apollonia and I were talking the other day (don’t ask me why) about Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen.  “I like Flavor Flav,” I said.  “I wish I had the nerve to wear an alarm clock around my neck.”

 

“I like Brigitte Nielsen,” Apollonia said definitively.  “She’s – real.  She’s very real.”

 

“Well, she’s huge, that’s for sure,” I said.  “I remember the first picture I saw of her, right after she married Sylvester Stallone.  She was at least six inches taller than him, not counting the ostrich plumes she was wearing on her head.”

 

“But real,” Apollonia said definitively. 

 

Like Apollonia, I admire women who take charge. Brigitte, for example; can you imagine what that marriage must have been like?  (Not that Sly’s not a scrappy little bruiser.  But still.)

 

Then there’s Grace Jones.  I remember her from one of the “Conan” movies as a terrifying-looking warrior. I also remember her from the Pee-Wee Herman Christmas special in the early 1990s, singing “The Little Drummer Boy,” swinging her arms and looking like a renegade android.

 

Also Tina Turner.  If you’ve never seen the movie version of “Tommy,” go watch it: Oliver Reed! Ann-Margret! But also, for a few scary minutes, Tina Turner as the Acid Queen, vibrating like you can’t imagine.

 

And let’s not even mention Cher (whom Partner and I saw some years ago here in Providence, and who was amazing, and who (I think) smiled at us).

 

I’m with Apollonia on this one. 

 

Tough girls: represent!

It will tell you something about the weather hereabouts when I say that it was so flippin’ hot last weekend that we did not run out to see “Magic Mike.”

 

We managed to see it on Tuesday evening, however.

 

You won’t be surprised to hear that we were nearly the only men in the (packed) theater. It was definitely a Chippendales crowd: lots of mamas (and a few grandmas), giggly and excited. I was worried that they might lose their composure during the movie and rush the screen, but I am delighted to report that the theater was utterly silent during the film: all those mamas and grandmas wanted to soak up all that 100% American biceps-and-baby-oil goodness.

 

Naturally there were those, um, dance routines. Channing Tatum, in case you didn’t know, was a stripper for a while, and can really dance. He’s amazing: athletic, erotic, and funny all at the same time. He goes from a gawky kid’s grin to a smoldering stare in nothing flat.  Watching his routines made me feel funny, like when I sit on the washing machine during spin cycle.  The other cast members (Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Alex Pettyfer, Kevin Nash, Adam Rodriguez) do elaborate routines too, but they’re amateurs compared to Channing. (I wanted more Joe Manganiello. He’s adorable: huge and winsome. They give him lots of sidelong comedy bits: there’s a wonderful scene of him sitting at a sewing machine mending an outfit and wearing glasses. Did I mention he’s adorable?)

 

The movie begins with a young guy (Alex Pettyfer) with no prospects getting drawn into the male-stripper racket. Fun, games, lots of one-dollar bills.

 

Channing (AKA Magic Mike, the star dancer) takes Alex under his wing, partly at the behest of Alex’s serious sister (Cody Horn), who warns Channing that he’d better take care of her brother. And Channing tries, very hard, to take care of Alex.

 

But Alex does not want to be taken care of. He loves the whole scene: sex, drugs, excitement.  And Channing begins to realize that he’s too old for this. (There’s a scene in a bank in which he’s practically begging for a SBA loan to fulfill his dream of setting up a custom-furniture business; he’s even wearing glasses, in order to look more serious and earnest. The loan officer nearly orgasms when she sees him, but he doesn’t get the loan.)

 

The whole movie covers the space of three months. And it ends with a kiss.

 

The women sitting behind us howled with anger when they realized that there would be no more gyrating men. They felt cheated.

 

One last word: Matthew McConaughey plays the manager/owner of the strip club as a manipulator, and a weasel, and a sociopath, and very charming.  I generally loathe him, but he was perfect in this role; he even does a strip number that’s almost (but not quite) as erotic as any of Channing’s. Partner says he might be nominated for an Academy Award for this role, and I think it’s possible.

 

Go see it, girls, if you haven’t already, several times.

 

(But I still say we could have used a little more Joe Manganiello.)

So sorry to see another witty smart person go: Nora Ephron, who died just yesterday.

 

I love her novel “Heartburn.” Here are a couple of (inexact) excerpts:

 

“I was hired by the National Caper Council to develop a bunch of recipes including capers. For a month I put capers in everything including milkshakes, and I realized that everything that tasted good with capers tasted better without.”

 

Also (I paraphrase broadly on this one): the narrator is in the hospital, watching over her critically ill mother. The nurse comes in and covers her mother’s face with the blanket. “Our mother’s dead,” the nurse says warmly.

 

Narrator flares up. “She’s not our mother! She’s my mother! And – “

 

And all at once Mother sits up in bed, spreads her arms in triumph, and says:”Ta da!”

 

(And then dies shortly afterward.)

 

(Rest in peace, Nora. We will miss you, and your wit, and your warmth.)

(Warning: I am going to spoil several movies for you here.  Specifically, I am going to ruin “Chronicle,” “Sunset Boulevard,” and “Dark Victory.”  If you don’t want to know what happens in these movies, click away immediately.)

 

(Still with me?  Read on.)

 

Partner and I saw “Chronicle” a few months.  It’s one of those “found footage” movies like “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity,” all grainy video, supposedly filmed by the participants / characters themselves.  The problem with these movies is that you have to find a pretext for the filming.  In “Blair Witch,” they’re doing a documentary project.  In “Paranormal,” they’re trying to figure out what’s going on in their house.  The pretext in “Chronicle” is that one of the characters is being bullied and abused by his father, and is filming everything in an attempt to set up a shield around himself.  This device becomes a little difficult later in the movie – almost a hindrance.  After he becomes a maniacal supervillain, he sucks all the video devices out of the hands of the people in the restaurant at the top of the Space Needle and floats them around himself, to film himself.  Crazy!

 

Anyway, the movie’s about teenagers who (for some reason) develop telekinesis.  They get better and better at it.  Then one of them gets really sad and depressed, and –

 

Then there’s a big fight scene. It was blurry and murky, unfortunately; I had a hard time who was doing what to whom.  There was lots of smashing and crashing, anyway. Supervillain loses.  Superhero zooms away.

 

And then – horrors – there’s an epilogue. 

 

“Andrew!” our hero yelps into the camera.  “You were a good guy!  I know you were!  I’m gonna figure this thing out, and – “

 

Honey, Andrew nearly destroyed the city of Seattle.  He was not a good guy. 

 

Also, that epilogue scene was pretty much an embarrassment.   Too much; too cute; too obvious; too clearly a signal that, if this movie does well, we will have “Chronicle II.”

 

I was describing this scene to one of my student assistants, and she was giggling.  “I think that final scene did it for me,” I told her.  “Maybe they just should have chopped the movie off after the death of the villain, with the hero zooming off cryptically into the sky.” 

 

And then it occurred to me, epiphanically: editing is important.

 

Ever seen “Dark Victory”?  Bette Davis plays a wealthy Virginia horse-owner with an incurable illness.  All she knows is that she is going to drop dead very suddenly; she will, however, go blind about fifteen minutes before the end. In the movie’s final scene, Bette’s working in the garden with her best friend, and says innocently, “Did the sun go behind a cloud?” 

 

They suddenly realize what’s happening, and –

 

The whole thing takes only a few minutes.  The screen fades to black.  THE END.

 

Terrific ending.  But then I read the original screenplay.  In it, her widower and her best friend are at the races together, watching one of Bette’s beloved horses win the race.  They look at each other tearily.  “Wouldn’t she have loved it?” one says to the other.

 

Blech.  Thank god they cut that scene.

 

Movies are generally much too long.  Have you noticed, even in action movies, they slow down to accommodate love scenes and character-development scenes?  (As if we care about characters development in something like “Fast Five”!) One of the things I love about older movies is that they’re often under 90 minutes. Moviemakers in those days understood the attention-span of the average viewer, and our impatience with silly details.

 

And sometimes the story needs to end in the dark.  A movie called “Dark Victory” needs to end by fading to black.  “Chronicle” needed a darker ending; the villain, a persecuted boy who gains superpowers and uses them badly, is a tragic character.  We don’t need Light and Happiness; we need a moment to gather ourselves and move on.  (Yes, I know, it’s basically a comic-book movie.  Aren’t they all?)

 

One last editing story: the great movie “Sunset Boulevard.”  A great silent-movie actress (played by the real-life silent-movie legend Gloria Swanson) has driven herself nutso believing she’ll make a comeback.  She “hires” the handsome young William Holden to help her with the script that will reestablish her as a star.  She ends up insane; he ends up dead.

 

In the release version of the movie, we open on a scene of a man running out onto a patio.  We hear shots.  He falls into a swimming pool face first.  “Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard,” we hear William Holden intone wearly.

 

He is the dead man.  He narrates the entire movie; we don’t see him, but we know it’s him, and we know he’s dead.

 

In the initial “Sunset Boulevard” production, which was shown to preview audiences, the opening of the movie went like this: the camera pans through a morgue, with bodies on slabs.  Suddenly a body sits up and begins to speak …

 

The preview audience shrieked with laughter. 

 

The director and producer were smart enough to realize that this was not the effect they were looking for.

 

Editing is important.  And also: shorter is almost always better.

 

(And now that I’ve written this much-too-long entry, I ponder upon how I should accept this lesson into my own life.)

Partner and both like animated movies, so long as they’re clever and well-made. For this reason, we don’t see many of them. 

 

But we both wanted to see “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.”

 

If you’re unfamiliar with the franchise: the stars are four animals from the Central Park Zoo – Alex the shy/showoff lion (Ben Stiller); Gloria the sentimental hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith); Melman the hypochondriac giraffe (David Schwimmer); and Marty the hyperactive zebra (Chris Rock). The first movie took them (and a group of four paramilitary penguins) from New York to Madagascar, where they met a surreal band of lemurs led by the sublimely self-absorbed King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen); the second movie got them as far as Africa, where they dealt with their various back-to-nature issues, and in which Alex met his birth parents.

 

The third movie is as freewheeling and joyous as the first two, and maybe more so. Our heroes end up (don’t ask) in Monte Carlo, where they tangle with a vicious over-lipsticked ninja assassin animal control officer named Chantel DuBois (Frances McDormand). They escape by hiding out with the animals of the Circus Zaragoza: a goofy sea lion (Martin Short), a broodingly angry tiger (Bryan Cranston), and a sweetly matter-of-fact jaguar (Jessica Chastain). The animals bond, and triumph over their various adversities.

 

But I didn’t need to tell you that, did I?

 

The fun of the movie is in the details. The dialogue is blazingly fast and funny. (Near the beginning of the movie, Alex the lion is romping through a model version of Manhattan. “Look!” he crows. “A street with eight Duane Reades!”) The plot twists are sharp and cleverly planned. (King Julien, the insane lemur, falls in love while in Rome, and needs a ring to seal his love. And, if you’re in Rome and want to steal a ring, who has the biggest and best ring of all?) The character development is surprisingly deep. (Vitaly, the Russian tiger, has a wonderful story arc, and his final redemption is brought about by hair conditioner. That’s a spoiler, but you’ll never figure it out in a million years without seeing the movie.) Some of the jokes are actually sophisticated. (DuBois the animal-control officer does a killer rendition of Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien” to inspire her fellow animal-control officers, and I would love to know if that’s really Frances McDormand singing, because – if so – she’s terrific.) The animation is beautiful: there’s a chase through the streets of Monte Carlo that is spectacularly gorgeous, and I’m convinced they must have taken the animators there to get the details right.

 

And – I never thought I’d say this – I wish we’d seen this movie in 3D. You could see it in every scene: stuff popping out at you, characters flying through the air, sudden vertiginous angles. Maybe another time.

 

And here’s another spoiler-without-being-a-spoiler: there is a wonderful circus scene – all of the circus acts taking place around each other, in midair, in bright colors, dancing and doing trapeze routines, set to Katy Perry’s “Firework,” that is truly entrancing and joyful.

 

Can you tell I enjoyed this movie?

 

Go. Take the kids, and grandma, and tell your friends. Forget your troubles and spend a pleasant ninety minutes.

 

You won’t regret it.

The most frightening movie experience I ever had was in early 1980, when I saw “Alien” at the Avon Cinema in Providence, Rhode Island.

 

I saw it alone, by myself.

 

Luckily, I lived only about a block away from the theater. I walked home deliberately, trying not to make a fool of myself by running in terror. Once I got inside my apartment, I sat in the dark and shook for a while. I was completely terrorized.

 

Well, when I saw that Ridley Scott was producing this “Alien” prequel, “Prometheus,” Partner and I were in the ticket line in nothing flat. I wanted to be frightened like that again. I dreaded it, but I really wanted it; it was like anticipating one of those really horrendous roller-coaster rides that flips you upside down at 180mph and almost but not quite rips your head off.

 

Sadly, kids, I have to report that this movie is not “Alien.”

 

Mostly this is because we’ve already seen “Alien,” not to mention lots of other stuff. There’s nothing new here. Narsty creatures that get inside you and then bore their way out? Check. Octopus/squid things glomming onto your face? Check. Creepy black fluids that turn out to be alive? I think that was “X-Files,” actually.

 

Some of the acting is good. Michael Fassbender (the young Magneto in “X-Men: First Class”) is eerily charming as David, the robot crewmember. Charlize Theron is icily creepy as the corporate leader of the space expedition. Idris Elba is hunky and sympathetic as the big funny/sarcastic captain, with his concertina that used to belong to Stephen Stills.

 

Then there’s the rest of the cast. Two of the main roles – the two scientists who are heading the expedition – are played by Noomi Rapace (who played Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish versions of the “Girl Who …” movies) and Logan Marshall-Green (whom I didn’t know at all, but who, IMDB tells me, was a featured actor in both “The O.C.” and “24.”) They are both – hm – adequate. She huffs and pants a lot; he looks pained a lot. These two, who I’m sure are wonderful actors in other venues, are seriously miscast here. They don’t fit.

 

There are lots of other misfires in this film:

-        The plot is miserably tangled. Just go online if you don’t believe me; you’ll discover people having heated arguments about what this scene or that scene meant. Suspense and mystery are good things; confusion and sloppiness are bad things. The abundance of confusing / irrational things in “Prometheus” made me think that the screenwriters just weren’t working things out, and thinking: We’ll figure it out in the sequel.

-        The cinematography isn’t great. We saw the 2D version, but it was easy to see which scenes were meant to be 3D-spectacular: a huge sandstorm, a big virtual-reality planetarium scene, a couple of others. Then again, there were garbled closed-circuit camera scenes (you’re always seeing things from other peoples’ point of view, through a camera), and ancient holographic video, and it’s all pointillistic and strange, and hard to make out. Why? These are supposed to be advanced cultures, man. Don’t they have better video than this?

-        A lot of time is spent on irrelevant details. Example: much time is spent on showing how robot Michael Fassbender admires Peter O’Toole’s performance in “Lawrence of Arabia,” to the point of quoting him, and trying to look like him. Why? No reason. It ends up adding exactly nothing to the movie.

And finally, and most damningly: it didn’t scare me. I was looking forward to having the bejeezus scared out of me again, the way “Alien” scared me in 1980. A couple of times during “Prometheus,” I braced myself – and nothing really interesting happened.

 

Wait until it comes out on cable, kids. Nothing to see here.

 

My friend Tab and I were having one of those meandering conversations the other day. We went from RuPaul to Laura Linney to “The Big C” to Idris Elba, the extremely versatile (and very handsome) actor who played Laura’s hotter-than-hell boyfriend in the first season of “The Big C.”  “I appreciate him,” I said. “Wow, do I appreciate him. It’s a shame they covered him up with so much fabric and costume jewelry in ‘Thor.’”

 

“Who was he in ‘Thor’?” Tab asked curiously.

 

“He was Heimdall,” I said, both proud of my knowledge and ashamed to show how much of a comic-book geek I am. “The guardian of the Rainbow Bridge.”

 

Tab giggled. “Rainbow Bridge,” he said. “Seriously. How gay can you get? All the gods and warriors are wearing accessories.”

 

I began to see his point. “Asgard’s sort of the biggest baddest gay club ever,” I said. “It fairly pulses with bad house music. And Heimdall’s the bouncer.”

 

“And,” Tab said, “do you remember that beam they travelled around in? I mean, my god, how phallic was that?”

 

“Also,” I mused, “Thor has a very big hammer. And he likes to hit things with it. Also he likes to go out drinking.”

 

(Side note: Thor does seem to like girls, or at least Natalie Portman. Natalie Portman is, however, a little – hm – boyish, especially with that short haircut. Also there’s a brief scene in the movie of Natalie and Thor serving their friends breakfast. Or could it be – gasp! – brunch?)

 

My god. Why didn’t I realize all this before?

 

No wonder I liked that movie so much.

 

Partner and I saw the preview for “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” several months ago. We began salivating at the mere sight of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith and Tom Wilkinson, and agreed on the spot that this was a must-see.

 

We made our pilgrimage to see it this weekend, as did lots of other oldsters. (I heard the lady behind us say: “It looks like an AARP meeting in here!”) We were seated behind a whole row of Red Hat Society members, who’d pulled out all the stops fashion-wise: not just red hats, but red scarves, red feather boas, red sequined purses, red fascinators. Throughout the theater there were wheelchairs, and walkers, and lots of querulous discussions about not being able to hear the dialogue.

 

But, my goodness, once the film started, you could have heard a pin drop in there.

 

The movie is a lot of fun. It follows seven people who decide to take a chance on a retirement hotel in Jaipur, India: Judi Dench as a sweet impoverished widow, Maggie Smith as a tough bigoted hip-replacement patient, Tom Wilkinson as a retired judge with a haunted look, Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton as a married couple on the lines of Richard and Hyacinth Bucket, Celia Imrie as a sassy flirt, and Ronald Pickup as a funny old satyr.

 

I’m not going to give you too many spoilers, but I can safely tell you that everyone finds India to be a life-changing experience. I can probably tell you also that there is at least one death, but (if you’re like me) you’ll be surprised when it happens. Dev Patel, from “Slumdog Millionaire,” is the hyperactively charming hotel manager; he’s adorable, if a little puppyish and bouncy. (Of course, in comparison with his co-stars – who have about 500 combined years of stage and movie experience – he’s bound to seem a little juvenile.)

 

The movie’s a fairy-tale, naturally; it’s absurd; it would never be like this in real life. India is presented as a kaleidoscopic whirl of life and color; one character refers to it as “squalid,” but we never see the squalor, only the charm.  As an American, I found the setting charming; I don’t know how I’d have reacted if I’d been an Indian. (I felt this way about “Outsourced” too, both the movie and the TV series; I thought they were great fun, but I wondered uneasily the whole time if I was enjoying the culture-clash stuff in the wrong way.)

 

But, back at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, pretty much everything ends happily, and even dinosaurs like Partner and me need our happily-ever-after movies.

 

So pop in your dentures and grab your cane and go see it.