This Time ‘In Living Cover’, It’s Jay Brannan

Despite that I first heard his 2008 release, Goddamned, only two months ago, 2009 has already become a Jay Brannan year for me. I’m not sure if it shone through brightly enough in my first post on this very talented singer/songwriter, but that is the best way I could come up with to describe how much his immediately accessible, beautiful, strange and durable songs have come to mean to me. It feels like I’ve known them forever, until I realize I’m actually post-rationalizing: I only wish I’d known them forever, because they would have made sad moments in the past all the more teachable and, even, more bearable, with their common-sense therapeutic misanthropy and confusingly soft-sung snarkiness, and the light moments more darkly funny, highlighting the elusive and absurd nature of even the most affectionate  acts of human interaction.

It is with lyrics fragments of that album still churning around in my head that I approach his second full-length album, In Living Cover. Full length might be a stretch though, as the record clocks in at a mere 29 minutes, having sent seven covers and two new songs into my inner audio and lyric deconstruction lab. It would seem to suggest that Goddamned would be almost impossible to top, if only for the high standard it set. But then again, with their very different conceptual frameworks, I suppose they are not immediately comparable.

Except that they are, at least musically. Even though some people hold the idea of doing an album of mostly covers in low esteem, as something of an old filler trick if you don’t have enough new songs to go into session with, Brannan places himself in a long and honorable tradition in proving that doing a personal cover version that manages to re-open old songs is much more of an art than shelling out mediocre originals could ever be. That is why what could very well be interpreted as a searing critique – that Brannan makes every cover version on this album sound exactly like you would expect a new Jay Brannan song to sound like – should instead be seen as a compliment. It means that even though several of the songs, both in arrangements and vocal presentation, lay close to the original, they never lack that blissfully undramatic Brannan signature, whether it simply be his soft and soulful voice, or, as on his version of the classic nineties Cranberries song  Zombie, taking what was originally a protest song about the Troubles in Northern Ireland into an interesting new context, musically and lyrically. There will always be new wars, but in an American context, Brannan’s protest, scaling  back the aggression for resignation, takes on a particularly interesting meaning.

Relying on the signature Brannan vocals, some of the songs here – like Noami Terra’s Say It’s Possible, Joni Mitchell’s All I Want and Jann Arden’s Good Mother – work so well simply because they are great songs, chosen by a man who knows a good song when he hears it, and also one who knows precisely what he has to contribute to songs already close to his brand of singer/songwriter.  You’ll never get me to say that his version of All I Want - from Joni’s seminal 1972 album Blue, the third best record of all time, beaten only by The Beatles’ Abbey Road and Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run – is somehow too close to the original, because I would consider anything other than a complete butchering of Mitchell’s superb original a supreme achievement. His minor tweakings only made me appreciate both versions more. In the instance of the other two, they stand mostly as proof that Brannan has impeccable taste. He does them both beautifully.

So far, my favorite among the covers could very well be his take on The Verve Pipe’s The Freshmen, which is also the album’s lead single. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the one song I love the most, and the one I’ll return to by default long after the I’ve tired of the rest (if that’s ever to happen), it has more to do with it being the song most improved by his take. Where the Verve Pipe version plays as a fairly formulaic, grungy experience, Brannan successfully brings it down to earth, thus highlighting the vulnerable nature of the lyrics in a way that not even the acoustic Verve Pipe version is close to. This again places the cover songs firmly in the Brannan catalogue, playing up the emotional nerve that lies in his voice. Thus, he also ensures that doing covers should not in this instance be interpreted as him in some way distancing himself from his previous musical self. He’s not taking cover in other people’s songs, so much as he’s making them a seamless but distinguished part of his own project.

That is also why the two new Brannan originals, Beautifully and Drowning, does not feel foreign on an album like this. If there is such a thing, the chorus – It’s not that your not beautiful/You’re just not beautiful to me/She said ‘How beautiful do I have to be?‘ – is vintage Brannan, showing how the surprisingly resonant elegance of Goddamned lives on. The way I read and hear his lyrics, Brannan is an acute observer of people’s need for self-affirmation through others, and how this often complicates honest communication. His trademark dark humor, is also to be found in the most unexpected places, like in the line from Drowning – I’m carving words in my arms, baby/These words are part of my charm -. There’s something very, very painful in that line that at the same time invites a sort of desperately resigned smile (part of my charm). Of the two, Beautifully is the most immediately accessible, but that doesn’t mean they don’t both feel like indispensable part of the album.

On an album full of such inspired choices then, I’m all the more surprised that Brannan took it upon himself to offer to the world yet another version of Blowin’ In The Wind. There’s nothing precisely wrong with it, it’s just that the choice is so annoyingly safe. What was once a great song whose message was bound to resonate deeply with anyone exposed to it, over the years has evolved into one of the most tried and tired safe bets in the canon of American folk music. Nowadays. even when I hear the Dylan original, it’s like I hear the scarring echoes of every bad cover version at the same time. Brannan’s failure has less to do with what he does to the song, it’s all well and good, than with what he fails to do: He  does not add enough newness to the song for it not to be considered anything else than the album’s weakest link.

A weak link on a very good album, that is. If word is effectively spread that this album even exists, one day, when naming the great achievements in the history of the cover version, several of Brannan’s songs here may get a mention, alongside classics like Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower, Joe Cocker’s With A Little Help From My Friends. or even my personal favorite, Emmylou Harris’ version of the Beatles’ For No One. Consider this an endorsement.

Did ‘Total Eclipse’ Deserve Leonardo DiCaprio?

If you remember back to my Young Leonardos post last December, you’d know that actual physical resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio was only of the criteria to qualify for inclusion (although admittedly, it was the most important one). Since Leo is one of my definitive favorite actors, another criteria was that, like him, contenders had to have shown a certain willingness to not only choose safe and predictable roles suitable for pretty-boys looking for a shortcut to super-stardom. This made it impossible not to include Emile Hirsch, who seems to wander off (pun unintended) into more substantive territory even with his mainstream movies (Into the Wild), and Michael Pitt and Kevin Zegers also made the list, courtesy of The Dreamers and Transamerica, respectively. They all followed the example set by Leonardo, just like he followed the examples of River Phoenix (My Own Private Idaho), Matt Dillon (Drugstore Cowboy) or even Johnny Depp (Ed Wood, Dead Man) before him.

The legacy of independent-minded, not necessarily career building moves that DiCaprio hands over to the next generation, includes such movies fairly well-received movies as This Boy’s Life and The Basketball Diaries , but also the movie that’s going to be our topic for today, Total Eclipse. Before we get to that movie in particular, however, I’ll just stop to re-emphasize a point I made when reviewing the porn-themed short film compilation Destricted a while back: Being generally sympathetic to an actor’s ability and willingness to choose unconventional roles, we run the risks of over-emphasizing the supposedly controversial potential of this or that theme, to the point where the provocation itself becomes a sign of quality, regardless of the quality of the movie or the performance. I mention this because even though DiCaprio delivers a good performance in Total Eclipse, the somewhat controversial nature of the gay theme is not nearly enough to make Total Eclipse a good movie.

DiCaprio plays the young, rebellious French 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud, the gay lover of his mentor and fellow symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis). Verlaine, drawn to Rimbaud not only for his beauty but also for the refreshingly uncompromising contempt with which he regards the sedate upper-class circles Paul has married his way into, finds in him someone who will fearlessly challenge his testy temperament. While not exactly unhappy in his marriage, Verlaine is so deeply involved with Rimbaud on an artistic and emotional level, that his marriage suffers tremendously. At the core of the story lies the troubled Verlaine’s attempts to balance his public appearance with his restlessly adventurous soul, constantly fearing that in the process, he’s not in control of neither.

Or at least, that’s was I suppose Total Eclipse is meant to be about. Unfortunately, it feels like director Agnieszka Holland is so fascinated with the idea of the poet as an archtypical crazy genius (the artist so absorbed in his art that his people skills slowly wither away) that she forgoes any opportunity to make either Verlaine or Rimbaud seem like real, three-dimensional people. Thus, although David Thewlis’ does a heckuva job making Verlaine an unpredictable and at times downright scary bundle of quirks and inner demons, and although DiCaprio’s stubbornly self-conscious Rimbaud is every bit as magnetic as he needs to be, the script never manages to answer any of my questions: Why exactly, does Verlaine so often resort to violence? What makes Rimbaud descend into the same emotional limbo as Verlaine? And how am I supposed to care for their love story if Verlaine is such an underdeveloped character that I end up agreeing with Rimbaud’s mocking assertion that he is really just an ugly old man in fear of being alone?

I suppose the poet-as-crazy-genuis meme is meant to say something about the clash between two artistic egos, but that point is never dealt with in a way that makes it a particularly credible or interesting key to the Rimbaud/Verlaine relationship. At every point, the movie opts for the vague and pretentious, in the process amassing so many loose ends that the emotional distance between me and the movie’s protagonists simply becomes too great. Of course, this could theoretically be an intertextual metaphor for the novelty and radicalism of the poetry they wrote, but apart from being a far-fetched interpretation, it would also be hard to prove, since the poetry  actually is practically nowhere to be found. This stands out to me as an especially strange choice: On the one hand you offer you no other key to understanding the Rimbaud/Verlaine relationship than the crazy-genius/rivalry meme, while on the other hand, you never make the poetry an explicit part of the story. Which leaves us with either an explicit but still underdeveloped gay love story between two hard-to-understand and not terribly nice people, or a straightforward period piece. Neither approach unearths an interesting movie.

With the benefit of hindsight, Total Eclipse has value as a Leonardo DiCaprio movie for two reasons: First, it can be seen as another step toward perfecting the restless young rebel of This Boy’s Life and The Basketball Diaries that you could also see signs of in both What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and later movies like Marvin’s Room and even Romeo + Juliet. It takes real talent not only to make a character out of this script work relatively well, but also to make us believe and accept that a teenager could actually manipulate and control a much older man the way Rimbaud exerts his power over Verlaine.

Second, it’s Leonardo DiCaprio, stupid. If I didn’t understand much of anything about what constituted Rimbaud’s muse/rival relationship with Verlaine, I could certainly understand the pure physical attraction. I know, I know, he was out to prove that he was something more than a pretty face, and I actually started this piece by praising some of his predecessors for honoring that very tradition and ambition, but hell: When the movie itself is mostly pretentious drivel, don’t tell me it doesn’t help that the angelic Leonardo proved that probably is the best-looking young man in my lifetime. We’re talking almost two full hours here. Of course it helps! Whether Total Eclipse deserved him, see that’s another matter.

Early Gay Crushes: Jesse McCartney

Technically, I suppose that including Jesse McCartney in the Early Gay Crushes series would have to mean that anyone I might have had a celebrity crush on before I admitted to myself that I was gay would now be eligible. I first noticed him in the summer of 2005, a couple of months before my twentieth birthday, but still more than a year before I came out to myself and others. When he’s nevertheless included here, it’s because he’s certainly one of the most important ones, and, judging from his impressive one year run on the Sexiest Males Alive list (he’s the only to never have been lower than #4), one of the most enduring, too.

My Jesse crush was important because it happened at a time when I was actually, at least on some subconscious level, slowly beginning to consider whether these vague and hidden feelings might actually mean I was gay. I still wouldn’t admit it to myself, and when my friends, after I had gushed endlessly about Summerland, quite rightly asked why the hell I was so obsessed with this admittedly mediocre family drama, I kept coming up with lame and only half-reasonable excuses. I actually once said I was following because it was produced by Aaron Spelling (!), who also produced 7th Heaven, and because Ryan Kwanten (!!), a former regular on the Australian soap Home & Away, a TV guilty pleasure I shared with even a couple of straight friends of mine, was in it. But the worst of all this is that I accepted and repeated these excuses even to myself. The real reason was the one I couldn’t get myself to admit to: It was all about Jesse.

Also, it was all a coincidence. While it never really took off commercially in Norway, the title track off his debut album, Beautiful Soul, got ample sampling on the music networks. That meant I was regularly exposed to this incredibly cute blond boy who so reminded why I didn’t have that much against boyband pop after all. Around the same time, Backstreet Boys had made a reasonably successful comeback with the new single Incomplete (a pompous but strangely addictive power ballad hidden within a laughably self-serious video), and (my also gay) brother and I had admitted to each other that we were actually quite happy with having them back. Of course, all of this was said in sort of half-joking way, since we were well aware of the dreaded gay-by-association syndrome infested with being suspected of BSB fandom, but because we had found a way, at least among the two of us, to acknowledge fascination with such a presumably soft pop act, it wasn’t all that hard to admit that Jesse’s music fit our tastes as well. When, by a happy coincidence, Summerland premiered in Norway just a few weeks after Beatiful Soul had begun to make its way around the music network circuit, we both used his music as an excuse to simply see what else this guy might be up to, or whatever thinly veiled excuses we may have used to cover our common less-honorable reasons.  Using GBA techniques, I’m sure my brother and I  both to some degree interprete the Jesse/Backstreet Boys thing as a sign of gayness, but because we were afraid that asking each other about it would leave either of us vulnerable to getting the same question in return, we both refrained (I’m post-rationalizing slightly here, but I’ve talked to my brother about this later on, and he confirmed that it was one of several things that made him suspect I was gay. I could have said exactly the same thing about him).

Looking back, I’m very glad my relationship with Jesse started with the music. It ensured that I would always have something to return to, even after Summerland went off the air. Not that I’m complaining about the still fairly regular reruns of the show, but if it hadn’t been for his music career, he might have somehow slipped from view. For someone growing increasingly comfortable with the soft pop genre, the Beautiful Soul album contained several decent songs (Because You Live, She’s No You, Come To Me, Why Don’t You Kiss Her, Beautiful Soul, The Stupid Things), and though the follow-up, Right Where You Want Me, was something of a disappointment, at least managed to keep me interested. The time that had passed, from 2005 to 2007, also meant I, now an official gayer, no longer felt that I had to wrap my status as a Jesse fan in some semi-ironic and therefore ultimately insincere posture. I don’t think I converted anyone to his cause, but at least I took the time to listen to the music I wanted to hear. This was what later led to my public semi-embrace of Backstreet Boys (meaning that if someone asks what I think of them, I say that I think they were the best act in their genre, and that many of their songs hold up really well).

Still, to understand why it is now possible for me to freely worship Jesse McCartney the actor, pop singer and just plain sexy guy, we have to follow yet another one of those sidetracks, back to 2002. That year,  former N*Syncer and subject to much derision from pop feinschmeckers, Justin Timberlake, released his first solo album, Justified. Instead of trying to retain his original fan base, however, Justin went in a more mature direction, delivering what at the same time was one of the best pop records and one of the best R’n'B records of that year. I mention this because when I first mentioned to friends of mine that I wanted to buy his album (this was after the first two singles, Like I Love You and Cry Me A River), they laughed at me, and I backed off. A couple of singles later, though,  they had actually become Justin fans themselves, and with regard to Jesse McCartney, that made me think that coming from the boyband scene (Jesse went solo from Dream Street) was not necessarily a bad thing when it came to building a credible music career. This is not meant to suggest that Justified and Beautiful Soul are equally good (they aren’t), only that I actually had something to counter my friends with when they made fun of Jesse.

The validity of this argument rests with Jesse’s third album, Departed (2008). Apart from getting him a new look that made him even more crushworthy than before, this album presented us with a Jesse who, while losing none of his musical immediacy and ability to write catchy pop songs, also had matured musically and production-wise. The sometimes overly sentimental love ballads of the previous two albums were now gone (in fact Told You So – vintage Backstreet Boys, only better – and the quite decent final track, Not Your Enemy, were the only two down-tempo songs), and replaced by some of the better floor-fillers of recent years. It might take a little while to get into Leavin’, but once you’re in, you realize that this is the kind of record Jesse was meant to make. The synth details on It’s Over puts a great spin on his soft but surprisingly soulful voice, that nearly allows you to ignore painfully bad lyrics (’Still wake up every morning quarter to ten/still eat my cereal right at the kitchen table‘ Seriously?), and cooing sexily on Rock You (’They call me Jesse, baby‘) he only confirms my feeling this he’s a Justin-in-waiting. My personal favorite among many, though, has always been the irresistibly catchy How Do You Sleep. Just like all great pop albums about love lost, Departure, and How Do You Sleep in particular, manages to put a cheerful spin on even the most depressing lyrics. That’s the main reason why it was my most played album of 2008, and why it’s still a regular on my 2009 playlist as well.

Jesse is important in this category because he represents the strongest link between my ‘pre-gay’ self and the man I am today. That’s also why this piece was included in the EGA and not as a standalone piece. There goes a line from Zac Hanson to Jesse McCartney, and I wanted to celebrate that.

What I Learned From ‘Into The Wild’, The Fourth Time Around

This is an expanded and revised version of a review that first appeared online in March 2008. This piece was updated July 5, with new paragraphs on the psychoanalytical angle and the possible idealization of Chris McCandless’ destiny.

***

It feels about right to do a write-up on Sean Penn’s Into the Wild on the Fourth of July, not only for it’s quintessentially American optimism and embrace of the adventurous and heroic individual, but also for being one of the most geographically wide-ranging cinematic celebrations of the American heartland ever captured on film.

I say this as a guy who nurtures an almost insurmountable skepticism toward movies about the brave individual who battles nature in search of survival and/0r some higher purpose. So deeply rooted was my skepticism, that after having watched and loved Into The Wild the first time around, I half-assumed that it had more to do with my still developing Emile Hirsch crush than with the movie itself.  Previous experience told me that I was too much of a cynic to embrace the almost Romanticist idealism of Into The Wild, particularly since it was directed by Sean Penn, a man famous for creating transparently self-righteous and moralistic movies in the vein of The Pledge. But now, having watched it a second, third and even fourth time, I have learned to appreciate exactly the things about it that I thought I would hate. It’s frequently more subtle and multi-layered than expected, and even where it fails to create the necessary emotional and intellectual distance, it still succeeds in asking a lot of interesting questions. All this, of course, without failing to capitalize generously on my satisfaction with getting to see Emile Hirsch push his well-honed body to its physical limits.

Into The Wild has been accused of idealizing what could be argued to be Chris’ quite irresponsible break with his family and society at large, and even his death. but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t ask intriguing and interesting questions. Excuse me for repeating myself, but like so many other great movies, Into the Wild is just as interesting for its flaws as for its triumphs. In her fairly positive review, Slate’s Dana Stevens led my attention to a flaw that I had somehow ignored in my initial response to the movie. Here, she points out how cheap unconvincing – even unnecessary – the subplot about Chris’ supposedly abusive father (contradicted in the Jon Krakauer book the movie is based upon) is:

In an attempt, perhaps, to justify Chris’ decision not to communicate with his parents for more than two years (…) Penn inserts a flashback back story that shows the McCandless’ relationship as abusive and violent. It’s a Lifetime TV rule that this movie should have risen above: Every questionable moral action must be explained by an equal and opposite childhood trauma. In Krakauer’s account, McCandless’s father, Walt, was something of a remote perfectionist but certainly no wife-beater

By ultimately doubling down on the psychoanalytical angle, he in my opinion makes Chris a less interesting character than he really was. Of course, the task of making us accept Chris’ radical quest would have been made even harder if such emotional shorthands were not used, but it would had been better in keeping with the mystification of human nature and the glowing individualism that movies embraces in other key scenes. The questions to come from such an approach might have been even more interesting.

That said, I’m not sure if I’m the right guy to give such advice. I suspect it would have taken me some time to accept his ambition no matter how clear or unclear his reasons might have been presented to us: He’s stubborn, convinced and idealistic, sure, but isn’t he also something of a self-absorbed egotist, a little too aware of his place in history? The intellectual and emotional tension that this feeling creates only heightens when he encounters the hippie couple Jan and Rainey (played by Catherine Keener and Bryan Drieker, respectively). While generally sympathetic to his project, they are the first two people to seriously challenge his reasoning. Jan, instantly inserting herself as a mother figure to Chris, tells him of the pain she struggles with every day, due to having a son who took off just like him,  and urges him to re-establish contact with his family (‘You look like a loved kid’, she says). The fact that Jan uses what’s perhaps the most provocative source of knowledge at her disposal – her life experience and the perception that with age comes wisdom – of course makes it easier for an unrepentant individualist like Chris to dismiss, but it nonetheless spells out the most interesting question of the whole movie: Who are you responsible for?

Some would hold him responsible for the pain and sadness he inflicts on his family, but even if the answer is that his only responsibility is himself, then shouldn’t he at least be responsible for leading a life that would bring him satisfaction without running the risk of killing himself? It may be frustrating to Chris, but he receives several warnings and advice along the way, even from people initially sympathetic to his dream of independence and self-realization.

But in a sense they all know, even the old and lonely Ron (magnificently portrayed by Hal Holbrook), whom Chris meets in the mountains of North Dakota, that the young man’s steely resolve will not bow to anything or anyone. Chris is happy to receive advice, but he will only follow it if fits in with his own perspective. Therefore, it is Ron who, after having had a deeply moving conversation with Chris at the top of a mountain about life as it is and life as it should have been, is forced to ultimately give up on his impulse to hold Chris back. It’s an especially moving scene because of how seamlessly the movie cuts between before and during the expedition, giving every word a sense of destiny.

And this is what surprised me so much about this movie. What still elevates this movie from good to great for me, apart from extraordinary performances from the entire cast,  is how Sean Penn fulfills the emotional (and visual) core of the story; the same man vs. elements component that bored me to the brink of death while – excruciatingly slowly – tearing down Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Whatever you may think of Chris’ path in life, or his moral obligations to himself or others, it’s almost impossible not to share in the immediate sense of purpose the majestic Alaska landscape inspires. It’s so beautifully shot, and performed with such convincing intensity by Hirsch, that for a moment, I actually thought this was Man’s final victory over Nature. But it isn’t, of course. It may not sound like all that much, but to me, the key scene, in which Chris kills and the slowly and methodically butchers a moose, doesn’t stand back in any way to the epic quality and ambition of the universally praised (and deservedly so) opening scene of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Of course, one could argue that the heroism of these scenes, along with the sentimentalism of the continuing quotes of American nature writing, positions Chris as something of a martyr. I wouldn’t go quite as far as A.O. Scott of The New York Times in dismissing this argument, but even if the movie somehow romanticizes his death, I’m not sure if I think that’s a big problem. Instead of criticizing Penn for lacking the proper distance to the story, it could be argued that he simply trusts the viewers to make up their minds for themselves, much like Gus van Sant did in his controversial, Columbine-channeling Elephant (2003).

That said, I suppose that the mere fact that a cynic like could be won over by Into The Wild, indicates that it will continue to be a movie that splits it’s audience. Like me, many will appreciate it as an intellectually and aesthetically accomplished road movie by foot, while others could be expected to dismiss it, due to some of the things that I’ve touched upon only briefly; the slightly over-interpretive and curiously poetic voice-over of Chris’ younger sister in the first half; the somewhat cheap and unconvincing Freudian hangup; or they may find the dialogue to be pompous, where I thought it was beautifully idealistic and thought-provoking. And I would encourage anyone who’s inclined to write off Into The Wild as too sentimental (the fact that I’m generally no foe of sentimentality if used with care and purpose is a topic for another day) to take another look at the surprisingly subtle and sweet way in which the movie handles its obligatory love story.

In a way, I suspect whether you’re able to accept and enjoy Eddie Vedder’s simple and earnest folk rock soundtrack could serve as the final litmus test for whether you’ll end up loving or flat-out loathe this movie. In part to prove a point, and partly because I couldn’t find a better way to pay tribute to one of the best movies of recent years. I’ll simple end by  quoting the opening verse of his song Society, which seamlessly intertwines with the powers of the story and its imagery to sum up the meaning of it all, in this always interesting, never cynical and often exceptional film:

“It’s a mystery to me
We have a greed with which we have agreed
and you think you have to want more than you need
Until you have it all
you won’t be free

Society
You’re a crazy breed
I hope you’re not lonely without me”

An Appreciation From A Disloyal Michael Jackson Fan

Let me apologize right from the outset: In some way or another, this piece will inevitably be more about me than about Michael Jackson, although he’s is the one who was the biggest pop star of all time. And it is he who has now died. But it had to be this way. Granted, I’m still talking about how I will eventually take the spotlight from the most important person in a Michael Jackson obituary, but as I write, I realize that I could just as well have been talking about Michael Jackson’s life itself;. That, too, seemed destined to end in this tragic way, at age 50, under mysterious, and soon enough even mythical, circumstances.

I could easily have gone on from here to endorse practically everything the King of Pop has ever recorded, but this goes to the core of why I need to keep a certain distance to the Jackson worshippers. It’s not because I cannot one some level understand and sympathize with their public outpourings of emotion . It’s the opposite actually: The first days after his death should, for once, be given to those fans, often ridiculed by people like me – soft and distanced Jackson fans as we were – that actually stood by their man even after everyone else lost interest, and never stopped hoping for a grandiose comeback and a public rehabilitation. There are of course other ways to appreciate Jackson’s pop legacy than being a staunch defenders of his every song and his every action, but right now, I suppose many of us secretly wish we had been with them all along. This includes both those old enough to have lived with his forty years of pop stardom, and those youngsters of all ages who, instead of abandoning him over Dangerous, or Blood On The Dance Floor or even Invincible, kept hoping his artistic dry spell would eventually end.

The fact that I was never one of them, however, does not mean that I have never loved Michael Jackson. I did, thought perhaps never in any purist sense of the word. I had my obsessive Jackson period in the aftermath of Dangerous, and I listened to it endlessly on a music cassette someone had taped for me. This lasted for a while when I was perhaps between 7 and 9 years old, but being as easily manipulated as anybody at that age, there was also always something inherently incidental about my MJ fandom. I was introduced to the splendidness of Jackson by a guy who was slightly older than me, and I admired him very much, again like kids have a tendency to idolize anyone older than themselves. Thus, when Jackson turned out to be nothing more than his flavor or the month, or the year or whatever (it did last for a while), I forced myself to give up on MJ, and instead throwing myself into his next subject of admiration.

As you may have gathered already, this is where I admit that my relationship with the Jackson discography is almost shamefully ahistorical. Being introduced to him through Dangerous meant that my fondest memories of his music are connected to such tearjerkers as Heal The World and Will You Be There, in addition to up-tempo songs like Black Or White, Dangerous and Give In To Me. I don’t mean to suggest that Dangerous is necessarily a bad Michael Jackson album, only that I, contrary to almost anybody with any knowledge of Jackson, I never really took the logical next step; to go back in time to his definitive highlights, be they Off The Wall or Thriller or Bad, or at least not until years later. It’s not that I don’t know them. I just don’t know them. For some of the aforementioned reasons, those universally acclaimed classic pop records have never come to mean much more to me than yet another stop on my Bildungsreise in pop music history. I’ve never really taken the time to get to know that Michael Jackson. And now something tells me I never will, in that sense. ‘Cause this changes everything, doesn’t it?

Which means I’ll simply have to stand up for, and define my history as a low-intensity Jackson fandom in the light of, Dangerous. It was slick, megalomaniacal and sometimes soulless, yes, but we should not forget that even in his most cringeinducingly earnest moments, as in Heal The World or Will You Be There, there were always some signs of his inherent genius. The lyrics to Heal The World may have been long since deemed uncomfortably naive, not least if read in light of Jackson’s questionable personal life, but still I cannot help but think of what a smart and well-crafted song it is, with all its gospel associations and the earnestness of the vocals. Likewise, there was one simple reason why the sappy Will You Be There still worked, despite a music video that included not only a young child translating the words in sign language, or pictures of thousands of crying fans, but even an image of an angel embracing a similarly tearful Jackson; Michael Jackson, man, musician and myth, had the greatness to back up even such a theatrical overreach. The music fit the man, and it was not ashamed to admit it.

This is where things get a little tricky, though. We just basically said that Michael Jackson’s greatest strength as an pop musician and an entertainer was our own inability to separate the man from the myth he wanted to create about himself. But following that logic, Michael Jackson could of course also never be completely separated from his other, darker side – the one with the allegations, the out-of-court settlements and the genereally twisted worldview – however much we may like to. The consensus view (which I share) that Jackson could well be the greatest male solo pop-performer of all time is likely to only harden, but to some, this will nevertheless seem dubious: Would it not inevitably mean an implicit endorsement of everything about this deeply flawed man? Although my answer would be no, the my point here is not the answer, but the fact some people may feel compelled to ask the question in the first place. The ‘man vs. myth’ dichotomy will always be a minefield.

But if his music had not secured that already, the tensions created by Jackson’s public and private image, and the fact that he died at such a tragically young age, guarantees that the man and the myth  will live on. The farewell concerts, meant to be his majestic and honorable retreat from the music business, but which had grown so much into a rehabilitation effort that it looked more like a comeback, now instead has become the backdrop to a tragedy: How Michael Jackson might (depending on which rumors and news reports you decide to believe), focused on delivering a comeback show for the history books, ended up worked himself all too hard. We might never know for sure, but it still offers some comfort to imagine. His life and career will forever bring back memories and  induce a sense of melancholy even to those of us who once though we were done with caring about Michael Jackson. We were not, and we probably never will be.

Best Picture Category At The Oscars Expands To Ten. Should We Care?

Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the slate of nominees for next year’s Best Picture category at the Oscars will be expanded from 5 to 10, at least in part to accommodate this year’s outcry when blockbustery critical darlings like WALL-E and The Dark Knight were shut out at the expense of, among others, the awful The Reader. I’m genuinely torn on this. Like so many others, I’m having some  problems transitioning my love for movies into a love for this insanely over-hyped awards show, that more often than not ends up throwing statuettes at unworthy movies. But if my trying to pretend that I don’t really care about the Oscars was really sincere, I guess I wouldn’t be writing about this at all. Yet here I am, typing away.

This leaves basically two other possible reactions. First, I could applaud the (admittedly transparently populist) move as a step on the way to broaden the image people generally have of what makes for an Oscar movie. Expanding the number of nominees should, at least theoretically, make it easier for movies with smaller promotional budgets or slightly less savvy marketing executives to gain their masterpiece a nod. Hopefully, such an expansion could also signal an opening for that movies that don’t necessarily speak equally to all parts of the Academy, or genres that generally have had a harder time getting recognized in the Best Picture category (like comedies, animated movies/children’s movies or documentaries), than the predictably mainstream epics the Academy have made an art form out of over-recognizing. In addition to ideally giving the Oscars broader popular legitimacy and making the Academy able to recognize great achievements over a broader scale of genres, it could also help smaller movies get the audience they deserve. I know, it will still take a lot to make the cut, but we know from recent years what it could mean for small movies to gain a nomination. Michelle Leo was nominated for Best Actress (a category that’s reportedly staying at five nominees) for the low-budget thriller Frozen River last year, giving it a lot more attention, and now that attention could potentially be doled out to other similarly low-budget movies as well. Anything that makes people see more good movies has to be a good thing.

Still, I can’t help but play a little devil’s advocate here. I’m not particularly annoyed by how the Academy all-but admits that this expansion came into being because of the declining viewership the ceremony has attracted over the last several years (although it was actually up again slightly this year). I could have been annoyed by that if had actually considered the Oscars first and foremost a noble battle among the finest works of cinematic art in any given year, instead of what it mostly is; a competition between marketing strategists to get the right people within the Academy to see your movie and then spread the word.

But if we back off the cynicism for a minute, a couple of concerns still arise. Most importantly, if we buy into the notion that an Oscar still is the most exclusive recognition a movie can get, an expansion could potentially reduce the prestige of the Best Picture category. If the crop of movies to choose is a weak one, as it arguably was this year, this move could mean that picking a Best Picture winner in the future would mean picking The Better Of The Good, instead of picking The Best Of The Best. Also, I’m not sure whether I approve of the way the Academy seems to have locked itself to the expansion in advance: If next year’s field turns out to be as thin as last year’s, they would still be obligated to choose ten movies, of which maybe two or three are great, another three or four are good but not extraordinary, while the final three or four are included simply to fill the fixed quota and please the big companies. The more sensible approach, and one that would take care of prestige problem while at the same time offering some flexibility, would be to scrap the predetermined number of nominees altogether, and simply nominate the movies that merit a nomination, no matter how many or how few. I know this would not necessarily solve the problem of the unorthodox Oscar movies currently being let out, but it would nevertheless make the move feel less rigid, and bring the focus back on the quality of the movies.

Still, no matter where you end up on the question of whether this is a good or a bad move, a humble or a purely cynical move, I can’t help but think about what it could have meant to this year’s Oscars if next year’s rules had been in place this March. On the plus side, Revolutionary Road and The Dark Knight would probably have been given the honor they deserve, and maybe even Man on Wire, the winner in the Best Documentary category. Alongside Milk (take one here, take two here), they would have provided a much-needed sense of audacity in the way to tell a story and shown that what is serious doesn’t always have to be one hundred percent serious, and equally boring (see: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). One possible downside then, is that a movie like Doubt, a movie good only in the safest, dullest and most distant meaning of the word (it doesn’t hold up well over time), could easily take the slot instead, playing to the Academy’s taste for well-acted but non-spectacular Issue Movies. And, even though in the end this of course is a question of personal tastes, such a retroactive expansion would still do nothing to fix the most serious flaw: After all, The Reader would still have been nominated, and I’m not sure I’m thrilled thinking about the possibility that Australia still could have taken the slot initially reserved for Revolutionary Road…

With Emile Hirsch At Four Months And Counting, The SMA List Turns One

Emile Hirsch won. His authority challenged by the long-awaited, Zac Efron/Hunter Parrish-induced one-two punch of 17 Again, he held firm. Since the nature of rankings is to channel attention to those at the top, that might stand as the most interesting development on the June Sexiest Males Alive list. Three newcomers, a stream of personal bests and a few crushing setbacks, however, means every tier has something to report. Lucas Till, the guy whose presence made Hannah Montana: The Movie a fairly good experience, is Newcomer Of The Month at a very impressive #15, while the recently reintroduced Chris Lowell’s twelve spot surge wins him the title of the month’s best climber. In a brutally quick reversal of fortunes, last month’s big surprise, Jeremy Sumpter, nearly falls off in June, with a whopping fifteen spot slide, to #50. His slide is as hard to explain as his sudden May re-emergence was. Rhys Wakefield is the sole returnee, while we wish Daniel Radcliffe, Rafi Gavron, Gareth Bale and Joseph Gordon-Levitt better luck next time. Radcliffe should have a shot next month as the new Harry Potter movie hits theaters, but Levitt’s fall is somewhat curious, considering that I rewatched Mysterious Skin just last week.

As always, the changes on the list are usually caused by any particular guy being considered by me to be relatively more attractive than he was considered last month. That, however, of course doesn’t necessarily mean that any of the other people on this list have become markedly less attractive, only that they perhaps have not been as good at getting my attention lately. With that said, let’s break it down:

#1-10: The SMA of course is a fiercely subjective list, but I nonetheless strive for some sort of leveled playing field. I don’t have neither the time nor the persistence to treat all possible entrants equally, but if I know in advance that one of the top contenders is likely to gain special exposure, I often try to balance things by spending some time on his main challengers as well. For instance, I had known since last October that the release of 17 Again would represent a prime opportunity for Efron or Parrish to take top honors, so I decided to offer Emile Hirsch some help, to assure that he would not drown in the 17 tsunami. Watching The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Into The Wild and Lords of Dogtown in fairly rapid succession, I of course may have ended up skewing the competition in favor of Hirsch after all, but in the end, he himself is responsible for beating back the challenge. His fourth straight win was as well-deserved as all the others.

Boosted by season nine reruns of 7th Heaven, David Gallagher defended his strong May showing, and built on last month’s momentum. It’s too early to tell, but there are indications that Logan Lerman could be in the heartthrob game for the long haul. A glance at the Gamer trailer, makes me hope that he will take a step back and choose a little smarter for the future, however. Movies like that might be necessary to claw your way to permanence in a very competitive business, but since I have higher hopes for him than his mere survival – a new Hirsch or DiCaprio, say – it’s a little frustrating. The friendly rivalry between Mitch Hewer and Nick Hoult this month is resolved in Hewer’s favor, but apart from that, the real story is the continued rise of their Skins successor Luke Pasqualino. I’m still not convinced of the charms of the third season, but if anything lasting is to come of it, it has to be this guy. He’s sort of like a more obviously heart-stopping version of Chris Lowell, in a way.

#11-20: Speaking of comparing people, doesn’t Lucas Till look a little like Ed Speleers? Yeah, he does, you say, and thus we are all in agreement. Anyway, what follows is meant as a compliment, even though it may not sound like much of one: Till was made to play the regular rural Southern guy in Hannah Montana: The Movie. For all it’s flaws – food fights with pastry, Southern stereotypes, Billy Ray Cyrus – HM is actually decently entertaining, and Till’s calm smile probably was the one thing that made me relax enough to give it a chance. Of course, I’m capable of feeling more than one thing at once, but in keeping with the family-friendliness of the movie in question, I’ll refrain from elaborating on what other things the Till made me feel. The movie may be quickly forgotten, but like Luke Pasqualino, this guy may be a keeper.

Elsewhere in the Disney machinery, results are more mixed. Raviv Ullman, still best known as Phil Diffy of Phil of the Future, has begun the quest to fight his way back into the Top Ten with this month’s slight climb. Matt Prokop, though, who made a great debut in April, faces a five spot decline. When I’m not very concerned yet, that has to do with the consistent pitching of Matt over at the Dreamboats blog, a great source of cuteness and plain, not-all-that clean fun, that should also be attributed with warming me to Lucas Till even before HM. Jay, bless him, also keeps an eye on Logan Lerman.

In a second tier dominated by minor incidents – Tyler Hoeclin and Ryan Sheckler are down slightly, Kevin Zegers regains what he lost in May and Alex Pettyfer is locked in at #19 – I cannot help but pointing to Zac Hanson yet again. If Jay could be credited with pitching Lucas Till, then credit certainly is due for Bryan on the subject of Zac. A follower of this Tulsa treat for more than ten years, I didn’t exactly need serious convincing, but Bryan’s persistent advocacy nonetheless made it easier for a preternaturally nostalgic soul like me to fully embrace even Zac’s non-musical qualities. Now I love them both. Finally, Gaspard Ulliel’s seemingly significant five-spot decline should not be read as a particular sign of weakness. For a guy who, unlike people like Hoechlin who has regular syndicated television exposure, or Zegers or Pettyfer who are all over the gossip blogs, has no natural source of exposure, it’s highly impressive to stay comfortably within the Top Twenty for months now. Same goes for Charlie Hunnam, who has not been a mainstream feature since Undeclared in the early 2000’s, apart from small movie appearances, and the fairly marginal TV series Sons of Anarchy.

#21-30: In the case of Chris Lowell, you would be forgiven for assuming that I’m overcompensating again. Chris Lowell was simply let out of the April edition, after all, and he returned last month, his #37 showing seemed to spell trouble. But when I saw an episode of (the missed and frequently excellent) Veronica Mars a couple of weeks I ago it was strictly coincidental, even though I immediately understood that it would seriously bolster his standing. For June, he climbs a massive twelve spots, to #25. Next month will be the real test of his strength. While I’m optimistic on his behalf, Jeremy Sumpter’s story may serve as a reminder that it can be incredibly hard to defend such huge gains. Or I could point to Adam Brody or Jesse Eisenberg, who, while they have climbed in smaller steps, are no strangers to the ups and downs of this list. Now, Brody is once again looking up, while Eisenberg slips six spots to #28, running counter to my expectations. I half-expected him to benefit from the physical association I made when watching Adam Samberg in I Love You, Man, but the competition is exceptionally hard at the moment. That seems to have hit Jamie Bell,, too. His slides to #29, his weakest showing to date. The aforementioned examples, however, suggest that we be careful in reading too much into it. That leaves Ryan Donowho as the beacon of relative stability in a rather volatile environment. Jay Brannan, who made a big splash with his #18 return, drops a significant but not entirely unexpected nine spots. If we compare with his previous run on this list, #28 is still high for him. Wiliam Moseley and Jonathan Taylor Thomas continue to silently work their way up.

#31-40: Here, Rafael Nadal has finally been able to break a cycle of decline, surging eight spots at the back  of an excellent profile in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Unfortunately, he has since withdrawn from next week’s Wimbledon, making it very hard to predict how he’ll fare in the coming months. Hopefully, he will at least be fit (heh) for U.S. Open in August. In other positive news, Joe Jonas’ surprise rise to #34 clearly deserves some attention. With Jonas Brothers releasing their new album, Lines, Vines and Trying Times, he has of course gotten lots of exposure, but I have to admit that it was these pictures that did it for me. I’ve never looked at him this way before. Generally, the bottom two tiers are the place for people on the decline, so kudos still go to Taylor Hanson and Ryan Phillippe for rising. Chris Pine makes his debut at #39 courtesy of Star Trek, and if the memory does not fade, I wouldn’ t rule out that he could be accompanied by Chris Hemsworth, his Trek co-star and formerly of Home and Away. Speaking of H&A, Mitch Firth no longer seems able to ride the coattails of the recent Chris Egan EGA, falling eight spots to #35. Cristiano Ronaldo confirmed his move to Real Madrid this month, but in the short term, his moving away from Manchester United doesn’t seem to have won him much in terms of upward drift on this list. With regard to Leonardo DiCaprio, I’m awaiting my copy of Revolutionary Road to see if he might be on the up.

#41-50: Over the last couple of months, two things have been discussed continually in this space: The questions of the true hotness of Aaron Carter and Chace Crawford. As far as the preliminary verdict goes, both have reason to worry. The shift from May is most dramatic for Carter, a ten spot slide suggesting he has reached a point of no return, while Crawford seems to have stabilized somewhat at #44, but such a reading risks underestimating both Carter’s ability to bounce back, and Crawford’s recent lacking displays thereof. His showing actually disguises an under-performance, as the publicity he garnered when he was named to replace Zac Efron in the Footloose remake should have given cause to a climb. Apart from Carter, then, Dev Patel is in the worst shape of the fifth tier. Franz pointedly asked me what I saw in the guy, and I felt I couldn’t really say. Upon re-examination, it felt right to move him down. Maybe rewatching Slumdog Millionaire (highly unlikely) can save him? June’s final newcomer is Corbin Bleu, at #44. This guy has been on the bubble ever since I caught HSM3, and after having had to endure Lucas Grabeel’s brief stint on the March edition, his time has now finally come. It should be interesting to see whether and how he benefits from his role on the upcoming CW drama The Beautiful Life. Mysterious Skin probably helped Brady Corbet stay on for another month, while Jeremy Sumpter seems practically doomed.

1. Emile Hirsch (Previous ranking: 1)
2. Hunter Parrish (3)
3. Zac Efron (2)
4. Jesse McCartney (4)
5. David Gallagher (5)
6. Logan Lerman (9)
7. Mitch Hewer (8)
8. Nicholas Hoult (6)
9. Chris Egan (7)
10. Luke Pasqualino (14)
11. Zac Hanson (13)
12. Tyler Hoechlin (10)
13. Ryan Sheckler (11)
14. Raviv Ullman (16)
15. Lucas Till (new)
16. Kevin Zegers (21)
17. Gaspard Ulliel (12)
18. Charlie Hunnam (17)
19. Alex Pettyfer (19)
20. Matt Prokop (15)
21. Ryan Donowho (20)
22. Jonathan Taylor Thomas (23)
23. William Moseley (26)
24. Adam Brody (29)
25. Chris Lowell (37)
26. Ed Speleers (25)
27. Jay Brannan (18)
28. Jesse Eisenberg (22)
29. Jamie Bell (24)
30. Sean Faris (30)
31. Rafael Nadal (39)
32. Shad Moss (28)
33. Taylor Hanson (34)
34. Joe Jonas (41)
35. Mitch Firth (27)
36. Cristiano Ronaldo (31)
37. Leonardo DiCaprio (36)
38. Ryan Phillippe (42)
39. Chris Pine (new)
40. Fernando Torres (38)
41. Andrew Carroll (40)
42. Aaron Carter (32)
43. Dev Patel (33)
44. Chace Crawford (43)
45. Cody Linley (47)
46. Corbin Bleu (new)
47. Rhys Wakefield (RE)
48. Brady Corbet (48)
49. Michael Pitt (46)
50. Jeremy Sumpter (35)

The Sex-Negativism of ‘Antichrist’

Danish director/crazy genius Lars von Trier’s (Dogville) new movie Antichrist tells the story of an unnamed, married couple (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe), whose young son is killed falling out of an open window while they are having sex in a nearby room. This tragedy sends the mother into a deep depression, powered by a strong sense of guilt and self-loathing over the circumstances of her son’s death. The severity of the depression then convinces her psychiatrist husband to take her to a cabin deep in the woods, in an effort to confront her inner demons, treat her depression and help them both move on. However, the therapy goes both ways, to unveil dark secrets in both of them and setting of a bare-knuckle psychological standoff that, we quickly understand, can have no winner.

Or something. The point is not whether this short synopsis does the movie justice (I’m pretty sure it does not), it is that it is written at all. After Antichrist premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in mid-May, predictably splitting audiences between those who considered it further proof that Lars von Trier is the most wickedly visionary guy in modern European film-making, and those, just as many, that saw in Antichrist a movie so blatantly sadistic, misogynist and over-the-top crazy that Trier should be forced to apologize for even giving it an audience, it was all in a haze. Lost in the heated allegations was not only what the film itself was about, which I have tried to summarize above, or what the whole thing meant, but also what exactly elicited so much froth among film critics. For the first couple of days it was practically impossible to understand what the shouting was about, since the reactions themselves became the story. Sadly, even though it eventually became clear they were reacting to some very disturbing scenes of self-mutilation and unorthodox ejaculation of bodily fluids, that didn’t make it easier to assess the movie’s reception, because the debate on the merits was so obviously uncomfortable and vague (so as not to spoil a central plot point). However much I hoped to avoid it, this piece will probably suffer from some of the same weaknesses.

These controversial scenes, and the fact that Trier wrote Antichrist while fighting his way out of a depression himself have led some critics to the somewhat cheap charge that it’s not much more than a lesson in self-therapy. I’ll say one thing about that; even if it were simply a therapeutic movie for Trier, it would have been worth watching. That’s why I’m not particularly troubled by the fact that I still, days after my screening, can’t say what I really think about it. Some of the critics who actually liked the movie have been outraged by the reaction the most absurdly brutal scenes in the movie have gotten from some audiences. Faced with such incredibly detailed depictions of pain and violence, some people naturally will react by considering the absurdity of the whole thing, and simply laugh it off. More than it’s a cowardly way to avoid thinking about what the scene they’re seeing actually mean, such a reaction should be respected both as a legitimate interpretation – Trier is never easily pinned down, and particularly not when he deals in the grotesque – and an understandable coping strategy.

To dismiss such a reception of a Trier movie would mean to rob him of something that has characterized all of his movies: His unrelenting drive to challenge and provoke his viewers, all the way from Breaking The Waves to The Idiots, from Dogville to Manderlay. Honoring that tradition, in an incredibly beautiful epilogue Trier neatly and provocatively cuts between of the couple making love and their son as he falls out of the window, so as to say to that terrible things will happen once people give in to their instincts. In a recent post about John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, I labeled it sex-positive. If such a term exists, Antichrist is its definitive negation. It turns out the provocation of the epilogue is a central theme of the entire story, as sex, often understood as a stand-in for nature itself, is seen as inherently evil. Nature is Satan’s church, the mother says at one point. Sex seems to be held in equally low regard.

The philosophical nature of the thesis advanced in Antichrist makes it an interesting indictment of psycho therapy as well. Perhaps not surprisingly, it turns out that the husband, who insists to treat his wife himself, also has problems keeping his sanity. This is disturbing because we are educated to assume that the psychiatrist is the one in control of his feelings. That is the very reason he is entrusted with taking patients at all. But apart from playing with our perceptions of the psychiatrist as the solid rock in a sea of unpredictability and irrationality, Trier also twists the professional emotional detachment of Willem Dafoe’s character to such lengths, particularly at the beginning of their sessions, so as to make him an almost laughable figure. I ended up hating him for the way he staunchly kept his cool while his wife hurled the most outrageous accusations at him, because it reminded me of the kind of mind-numbingly self-disciplined moral relativism psychiatrists are supposed to cling to. No matter how much that may be his job and his best advice, it couldn’t help but feel a sort of suspicion from Trier’s story towards the psychiatrist’s tendency to conceptualize any feeling, hoping to make it seem like something relateable.

This leaves us with a problem I often have with movies whose most interesting feature is how they fail. Because they don’t succeed at what they’re trying to do, they have to be watched with some intellectual distance in order to be appreciated. It is my thesis that, conciously or not, this means that a certain amount of post-rationalization is necessary, because the movie as it unfolds does not grip me as a viewer on an intuitive level. I’m not saying that only simple, straightforward movies can be truly great, but I do think that movies like Antichrist, that are better at making you think than making you feel (in this particular instance it could of course have something to do with its cynicism) will start at a disadvantage.

The More Respectable Way To Watch Zac Efron’s ‘17 Again’

This piece follows somewhat in the footsteps of my I Love You, Man review, in that my expectations going into Burr Steers’ rather bland romantic comedy 17 Again, to some extent influenced my final verdict. Like any non-professional consumer of the light, blockbustery fluff of the summer movie season would know, there are a host of reasons that could end up deciding what movies you decide to cough up for, and which will have to wait for later. It can be the movies themselves, the buzz surrounding them, what movies the people you’re going to the movies with want to see etc. All of these are perfectly respectable excuses for choosing one movie over another, and few people would argue with them.

For me however, in this case, (and others that I have written about before), the main reason was one of those that you’re not supposed to admit to. I want to see 17 Again for two reasons only: Zac Efron and Hunter Parrish. If you care what people think of you (which, in instances like these, you should not), this is kind of an impossible situation. Had I been younger, I would have been supposed to deny that I was interested in male eye candy at all, but now that I’ve actually reached an age where I’m not concerned about that, I’m supposed to stay away from 17 Again because I have grown out of its targeted demographic. That’s why I decided to give a damn about the whole thing and see it anyway.

I’m telling you this not because I think that’s a particularly brave or interesting thing to do, but because it offers some background to on what premises I watched the movie. I did not see it because I expected it to be good in any traditional sense, and my patience with Freaky Friday-esque romantic teen comedy is very limited. But now that I had taken the chance on it anyway, I needed a way to enjoy it, something a little more substantive than the pleasurable presence of Misters Efron and Parrish.

The messy but not particularly original plot of 17 Again probably is the wrong place to look. Here goes: 37 year old Mike (Matthew Perry), once a talented basketball player who decided to go with family life when his high school girlfriend got pregnant, starts wondering about how it would be like to live it all over again, when his marriage falls apart. Then for some reason he is transformed into a 17 year old version of himself (Efron), and the comedic potential is meant to lie in how the supposedly more mature and experienced Mike copes with the codes of today’s youth, and how he works to steer his children (who are now his schoolmates) safely through their everyday life, without disclosing who he really is. Throw in Mike’s extremely annoying manboy best friend covering as his dad, the school bully (played with abrasive sexiness by Hunter Parrish) dating Mike’s daughter, and several cougar hunting jokes, and it doesn’t exactly sound like much fun.

But it turns out to be quite enjoyable anyway. You just have to approach it the right way.  I tried to watch it in two ways at the same time. On the one hand, I watched it through a sort of High School Musical lens, but simultaneously I watched it as an admittedly sentimental, but still semi-sincere reflection on the special bond between parents and their kids. More than anything, these two angles were crutches I used to make sense of what would otherwise have been a dreadful movie, and the not-easily converged nature of these two readings answers neatly to a certain schizophrenia already apparent in the movie: Does it want to be a goofy teen comedy, or a reflection on paths not taken? The movie never comes down on one side or another, which is actually something of a strength.

The fact that young Mike plays basketball makes the link to Efron’s HSM legacy fairly obvious, and the first trailer (I wrote about it here) made an intertextual reference to it (’He’s back in the game‘). In my review of HSM3, my point was that it would have been a far better movie if it had concentrated on the singing and dancing instead of littering the script with laughably self-important (’I guess my heart doesn’t know this is high school’) lines about Troy and Gabriella’s Perhaps Great But Oh So Uncertain Future. Clumsy writing made the kids sound far older than they were supposed to be, which is often the result when writers don’t exactly know how to tell something kind of serious in a matter-of-fact way. Luckily, however, the contextual baggage that Zac Efron brings to 17 Again makes the best out of exactly what made HSM3 feel so clunky.

Sure, this is where my argument takes a turn for the cynical. But it is inherently hilarious (and a tad absurd) when young Mike, with the mind of old Mike, speaks gravely about what challenges the future holds for his children, in pretty much the same way that Troy and Gabriella did in HSM3. It’s particularly clear in a scene from sex-ed, and another in which young Mike has to comfort his own daughter (this is where the logic goes off the rails) after she’s dumped by her boyfriend. The point is: In HSM3 the self-importance was a flaw. In 17 Again, Mike actually has good reason to speak and act in this way, which makes 17 a quite fresh parody of Efron’s past, an interpretation mildly encouraged by all the perhaps-conscious references to what Mike and Troy have in common. I know it’s a lot to ask of the viewer (among other things, fairly deep knowledge of the plot of an unrelated film), but seen through this prism, 17 Again made me smile more than its set of atrociously over-written supporting characters ever could.

To balance out the cynicism though, there is also a kinder way to read, and possibly appreciate, this movie: Simply to take its semi-sincerity at face value. Viewed in that light, the aforementioned scenes of relationship advice and sex-ed become more somber reflections on the problems teenagers have with imagining a different future for themselves, and the natural grown-up instinct to imagine what could have been in retrospect. Since this also allows us to take some aspects of the story more seriously than others – you could appreciate the sort-of-sincerity and still detest the cheap excesses of the supporting roles – the whole cougar hunting/screwball comedy aspect of the story becomes a little easier to enjoy as well. Here I should add that this perspective was the one I was most influenced by going into the film, thanks to a fairly sympathetic review from an older Danish critic, Per Juul Carlsen, of Danish Public Radio.

That said, I can’t say I particularly liked 17 Again. The two competing perspectives are not immediately compatible, and trying to watch it in two different ways simultaneously creates an an inevitable distance to the proceedings. Also, much to my surprise, it’s Efron, not Perry who is supposed to carry the comedic weight of the movie on his shoulders. He does fine when the point is to simply stroll around and look dazzlingly self-conscious, but his comedic range is nothing to crow about. The dullness of Perry’s character also reminded of everything I don’t like about him; he simply is not the right guy to play someone whom life has dealt a lot of disappointments.

Finally, there is the feeling that, for all its attempts to balance the stupid with the sincere, 17 Again is first and foremost a marketing tool. Nowhere is this more transparent than in the opening scene, one of many that plays gently on Zac Efron’s HSM history. There is no reason whatsoever for him to be shirtless while throwing the ball around, but if you are to attract the teen crowd, you gotta give’em something to watch. To me, it’s a little embarrassing to admit that I displayed pretty much the same schizophrenic reaction that is built into the movie as a whole. On the one hand I knew that I shouldn’t be fooled by such easy tricks, but on the other hand, I certainly found the view very pleasurable, and I also knew that New Line Cinema had successfully calculated my reaction even by greenlighting this project in the first place. Damn you!

Who The Man, And Other Questions ‘I Love You, Man’ Doesn’t Really Ask

I’ve been holding off writing about the Paul Rudd/Jason Segel-driven buddy comedy I Love You, Man for several days, in the ultimately fading hope that I would eventually end up liking it. Apart from disclosing that I in fact did not warm to it over time, this statement should tell you two things. First, that I really wanted to like it. It had great buzz, Paul Rudd and a decent premise, after all. And second, that I believe that there is no such thing as a totally unbiased way to watch a movie. My expectations when watching I Love You, Man unavoidably were colored by my previous experiences with buddy comedies, Paul Rudd etc. People who write about movies should not be so afraid to disclose these kinds of pre-judgments. Mine was that I knew going in that I wanted to like the movie. Now that you know, you should be better equipped to judge whether I gave the movie a fair shake.

(A third, more indirect takeaway from the initial statement: I dubbed the movie a buddy comedy for a reason. I chose that label because I desperately wanted to avoid calling it a bromance or (even worse) a dick flick, two patently absurd terms that have gained traction lately in describing movies about the awkwardness and absurdities of male-male friendships, of which Knocked Up is a prime (but wildly overrated) example. Of course, dick flick sounds vaguely like a joke about gay porn, which may sort of be the (mildly amusing) point, though I suspect the main point is far more obvious, creating a male counterpart to the chick flick. Anyway, one question begs to be asked; would you consider telling people that you were going to see that new Paul Rudd dick flick tonight? Didn’t think so.)

My problems with I Love You, Man are not with the plot, although it does feel a little convenient at times. It’s that I don’t really like neither Peter (Rudd), the groom-to-be, on the lookout for a close male friend, or Sydney (Segel), the guy he eventually connects with. Or at least I don’t like the person Peter becomes after he bonds with Sydney. I didn’t think I was able to say this about the instantly likeable Paul Rudd, but at times I felt like the the classic fratboy relationship between Peter and Sydney was established in a slightly cheap, excessively corner-cutting way. It seems like because the movie is channeling stereotypical views on how alpha males like Peter and Sydney interact (although in a gently mocking way), the work is moved from the writers to write some actual jokes, to us using our sense of those cliches to do the work for them. In saying this, I make myself vulnerable to charges that I either didn’t really understand the point of the movie – that their relationship is not supposed to be subtle, but rather to symbolize a fairly recognizable archetype of male-male friendship – or at least that I’m over-analyzing it to the point of taking all the fun out of it. And granted, there are several moments of genuine fun and even sweetness here (like the scene in which Sydney seemingly suggest that Peter’s girlfriend should give him oral sex more often, which is, oddly, both funny and somehow sweet, because you end up hoping he wouldn’t say just that), in which connecting with them becomes easier. Still, in the end, their fondness for irrational textbook masculinity – getting drunk, starting fights, connecting over rock music, etc. – falls predictably into the traditional romantic comedy narrative I sort of expected or at least hoped it would actually stray from.

This is where my main problem with the movie becomes apparent. I’ve got nothing against movies that make me think. The problem here is that I mostly thought about all the questions I Love You, Man didn’t ask, or at least failed to answer in a particularly interesting way. I didn’t feel like the movie had anything really new to say about how straight men negotiate their friendships, perhaps because I didn’t care all that much about the main characters in the first place. Sure, it’s kind of fun to see how almost everything two people say to each other is invariably interpreted through a gay-straight lens. But how fresh does it actually feel to see Peter practicing his lines before mustering the courage to set up a meeting with Sydney? To me, this does not qualify as turning the cliche (you see, it’s usually a guy and a girl) on its head. It simply feels lazy. And even though it’s a little cute how Peter starts to talk about Sydney in the same way he talks about his wife, did we really need a scene in which she accuses him of shutting her out and being more attentive to Sydney than to her? That scene, and the final scene (which I will not ’spoil’), reluctantly convinced me that I Love You, Man is a lot less unconventional than it wants you to believe.

To me, Peter’s gay brother Robbie (played by the strangely attractive Andy Samberg, who looks like Jesse Eisenberg ten years from now, which probably explains the attractiveness thing right there) is another example of a potentially interesting character never fully conceived. I often criticize Hollywood for dealing in gay stereotypes, and thus it would perhaps seem ungrateful of me to accuse Samberg’s character of being ‘under-gayed’, but try to follow me on this. I loved how Robbie is portrayed as a gay man who, while not explicitly straight-acting, has no need for the tics and references generally associated with the Hollywood gay (I laughed really hard when he brushed off the fluffy Chocolat, here symbolizing the ultimate gay movie, as if he hadn’t even heard of it). I guess my criticism mostly has to do with how the movie doesn’t seem to realize the real potential in having Robbie as the against-type gay offering a contrast to the aforementioned unspoken codes of a straight male friendship, more than the character himself.

To somewhat forcedly paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go into production with the script you have, not the script others might have wanted you to have at a later time. While it would seem unfair to judge I Love You, Man based on the movie I would have most wanted it to be, I can’t free myself from a sense that a slightly reworked script could have helped the movie immensely. There are so many ‘what ifs’ to choose from: Had the many, many scenes in which Peter and Sydney goof around as cliched man-animals been better connected to the movie’s overall point. Had the jokes been a little bit sharper. Had the gay-straight dynamic been given more prominence. Had they not chosen to write the whole thing into a fairly predictable rom com framework. Etc, etc.   As it stands, to me I Love You, Man is that potentially great buddy comedy that wasn’t.