GET HIM TO THE GREEK

Maybe the best drug moment is: you took something stronger than you’d meant to, but now it’s done—smoked, sniffed, swallowed—and you understand you’re bound to see it through. Though you could argue the high point is always the wrestling, wrecked. Or, what about a New York dawn you watch resolve through a hotel window, like the moment the tiger goes limp and the python coiled around it may finally slacken its hold. The small lift in the knowledge that a great amount of activity, out there, will embroider your coming slumber. And somewhere between onset and chaos and fadeout did you think the great thought, this time, did you tug the mystic rope? They get it right. Absinthe, The Shining. In P. Diddy’s role as British rocker Russell Brand’s amoral promoter one detects a trace of grudge over the complicated triangulation by which the English appropriated African-American music without incurring the implicit curse Diddy invokes by discoursing on how those rockers, unlike their American counterparts, didn’t flame out and die (but what about Brian Jones?).

Again and again the hero is a vessel: Alice transports the Vorpal Sword, Perseus the Gorgon head. In this Jonah Hill drags Brand to a venue (“The Greek”—exactly) where he’ll play the show that redeems not him but us, the mob. Essentially, then, the warrior or artist serves form, the name we give to presence purged of doubt. And yes, it follows that it doesn’t really matter if in the process he dies. Brand, about to go on stage, shredded from his trials and a near-suicide, passes his hand over his stricken face and voilà, the star appears. Hill sees it, understands in an instant the true nature of performance, and smiles.

Such not-failing has a name: Destiny. A title card in Prince of Persia, here it funnily hides in the name of a stripper who shoves a massive clear-latex dildo up Hill’s ass. The movie is asshole-obsessed, and tongue-happy. But these are not the great organs of music, art, and love. Consider in their place the organ of true listening, the kind that can ignite the very soundwaves and reach back to torch their astonished source.

Who wants to be a critic, I want to be a clit!

MARMADUKE

The soul of montage: a Great Dane’s face on the screen, a familiar human voice emitting from the surround speakers, and all at once the sequence of unshakable conclusions: thought—interiority—self. The only CGI that matters is the animation of what might easily already be filmed from nature. Only then does it recapitulate the disappointment one feels, looking around at everything: But must this existence be so, so, so existy all the time?

By happy chance, someone’s dumb enough to call us friend. Marmaduke! Two hundred pounds of irrepressible chaos, the black, wet muzzle of joy. In a nutshell, the owner/dad has work-life issues, and his schlepping of wife and kids to Orange County looks all wet when his first big P.R. idea—dog surfing competition, should be foolproof—is undone by you-know-who so that the Petco execs he’s wooing wind up under a punchbowl. The climax (M. has run away, he tried to fit in with the pedigrees and it all went wrong) involves a rescue from the L.A. sewers—a nice, subtle Chinatown nod. Does this film, too, under the mask of its hundred brittle formulations, also despair of justice human, canine, or divine? Must Evil really be a dad?

I know, I’m getting to him—Owen Wilson. But it’s hard to face or even imagine, the studio, it’s almost time for a coffee break, he’s looping some lines the two ex-playwrights sequestered in the hall just punched up, the engineer calls for one more take, he gets it, then the boyish star and failed suicide slips off the cans and lays them gently on their station, zips up his hoodie and goes out shading his face from the sun-stunned L.A. afternoon. What could have brought him so close to oblivion, and is he really healed? Would it help him to see the four delighted little girls in this theater, dancing along to the final all-pooch macarena right down by the screen? Maybe Sam Elliott’s coming in that day, and takes him by the shoulder, and in that drawl a Texan would appreciate, “Steady, kid. You’re in your 40s now, right? You just got through the hardest part.”

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME

Based on a video game. Whose genre’s ontology has it that one purchases a System on which to play a game that always gives you the option to “Continue.” But can you recall the far different structure of the early, brutal arcade: a quarter for three lives. This says more—said more, to a ten-year-old—than just Time is Money, or Three Strikes You’re Out. Rather, it narrows experience to the fundaments of sacrifice and ritual, to the unforgiving arrangement by which we offer payment for the chance—a chance we’ll fail to realize—to coincide exactly with our own Being.

Gyllenhaal’s a beautiful guy: liquid brown eyes, lively monkey-face. I’m sure I used to dislike him but who can remember why. The ark he’s raiding, the stone he’s romancing is that nice young lady who played Io in Clash of the Titans. At the peak of their seduction she gives him a snakey kiss, all upper lip over his lips. She wants his dagger, y’know? Of course a cock is outside of time, but can it turn time back? Their courtship gets erased, he has to start from scratch, though wiser: he hands it over straight off.

Invasion under false pretext, a running WMD reference—oh, right: Persia. And all the while we sit here, oil spills into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s ill-drilled hole. When the Prince activates the special dagger the film runs backward, but the video that shows the undersea oil leak won’t rewind—the gunk blowing out in a tireless roaring plume is the image of time itself, pressurized force desperate to flow ever faster, jostling madly through its fissure, and that’s exactly how it feels in us, it rips through us from the deep cavern of the past and dissipates into, even as it befouls, those vast slack waters called the future.

SEX AND THE CITY 2

Voiceover:

And then it hit me, that Jay-Z song is cold. And that’s when I realized, I need to download it right away. And then I understood, the title sequence’s equation of buildings and bling reminds us that Carrie and Co. aren’t in New York, they are New York, their bodies are the city as truly as it is them. And that’s when it hit me, anyone who says there’s no sex in this movie has no idea what sex really is—institution and demolition. And then all at once I realized, our particular local terror is a terror of singularity. And that’s when it hit me, this fear’s manifest symptom was the twinning of the Towers. And then suddenly I realized, this is why there are the four women, so that’s one’s eyes may slide continuously from one to the next, and indeed must, since to look too long at any is to risk a dazzlement admittedly to be cherished in the blinded aftermath. And then just like that I realized, perfection is banal and excess marks the presence of the divine. And then I wondered, why are they in Abu Dhabi, and who is that guy again? And that’s when I knew, oh yeah, it’s the philosopher DJ from Northern Exposure. And then also suddenly it hit me, they never go to Abu Dhabi at all but to New York, but New York as the desert of the real, its splendor intact but stark, exposed, flickering beside the chasm of pure absence. And then I realized, Big is like Shrek in his frustration with children’s birthday parties, and that they are also sort of a similar body type and pallor. And then I wondered, what if, on 9/11, Big had been at work? And then it hit me, he was. And just like that I realized, there is an elegy at the heart of this humble farce. And that’s when it fell on me like a ton of bricks, Miranda is exquisite and Samantha is stunning and Charlotte is gorgeous, but Carrie is tragically beautiful. And then I realized, she blames herself for not saving him, for not tempting him away from that doomed pyre with what Samantha might call her pussy power. And then I saw as if through a glass darkly, her penance is to be the Slut to the Forbidden. And suddenly it became evident, her endless epiphanies are the children born from the seed of Big’s ghost, flowing from him through her to make fruitful again the dry, parched earth locked in concrete and pain. And all at once it broke over me, Alicia Keys makes the song oh-so-warm. And that’s when I suddenly understood, any diamond’s journey—from free carbon to bound pressure, from dark mantle to humid air, from exploited hands to glamorous debut—is itself what cuts and clears it, and excites the shrieking light. And then it hit me, the lights had come on, Madeleine was like, Are you coming or what? And then I realized, the movie hadn’t ended, and couldn’t, since the very city awaited us beyond the theater doors. And then I grasped it, as surely as the girls adore shoes, how one way or the other, when the time comes, someone’s going to have to be the last one standing in this place. And then I knew, watch your back everyone, because as far as I’m concerned it’s gotta be me and mine.

MACGRUBER

I remember my mother buying the tickets, then handing them out, one to my father and one to me, with the warning to “Keep the stub”—I guess we traveled the precincts of more zealous ushers, back then, though that isn’t saying much. As if I would go to the bathroom, and risk missing a minute. A recent trip upstate confirmed a hunch: only New Yorkers pee after the film, never knowing if where they’re headed next will have a public facility. For us the porcelain present, the flush that heralds opportunity’s bloom.

A mind-blowing film, and that’s not the bong hits talking. Though without them would I have seen, as if never before, the zang of neon resplendent upon the façade? Or been thus reminded of the David Foster Wallace story “Good Old Neon,” regarding the suicide of a seeming success who knows himself to be a bottomless fraud? The very crux of MacGruber—but as comedy so dark I nearly melt laughing, and when Kristen Wiig appears reach hysterics. Carley looks over like I’m losing it.

The 80s! I also had one of those pull-out car stereos with the little handle (stressful). It’s too perfect when someone disses his car and he notes and remembers their license plate, and later it’s revealed keeps a Shining-style notebook devoted solely to that number. Between gags they play it so straight that half the audience buys right back into all the conceits and situations of that period’s tame, absurd entertainments. What indignity and delight to recall it: the journey I went on, listening to Journey.

My one fear: all this autistic wallowing in our own abjection is just more ideology. We ate it—now we have to watch it come up? I’m still so stoned I can barely fix a shoelace—nice one, MacGruber. RIP Dennis Hopper. Blue Velvet, wow. To have truly zoomed in to where the lawn’s depths churn.

SHREK FOREVER AFTER (3D)

To bite into the sheath of the 3D glasses feels like too much to bear, knowing that once the plastic gives way an opening will race along a fault line as crisp and inevitable, after the fact, as the trippy floating text of three-dimensional titles was always in a way prefigured by the Hollywood sign. “Dreamworks”—I’d call the conflation ideological, but even Freud saw the unconscious as a laboring-place, and Stephen Dedalus refers to “the smithy of my soul.” Tell me about it. I’m so alone and wired on 5-Hour Energy drink and afraid I won’t do justice to Shrek.

I’ve never seen one of these, but I gather that by this point in the series Shrek’s a celebrity—fame monster—since a tour bus goes by his house every day, which bugs him. They want their privacy, as gods famously don’t like to be surprised in the bath. They also want, and by “they” I mean “we,” to cross an L.A. parking lot in pajamas and oversized sunglasses, lips flattening the straw of a frappuccino or some delicious and decadent equivalent, while in their low periphery paparazzi kneel, at risk of cart and car, making explicit by their presence what all shopping and spa/salon time really is: the handmaiden to craft.

Another comedy of remarriage, in which a kid’s birthday party sends the domesticated hero over the edge (he roars). Well. He signs one of those fairy-tale contracts whose riddles throw a cape over the two dire horns of any wish: you won’t get what you want, or else you will. To wrest his world back he fights witches and the Pied Piper, that wonderful orphic poet, pest control expert, and I’m guessing crypto-Jew. Shrek can’t understand why his roar doesn’t terrify the townspeople. What he doesn’t see is that it is no different from Alvin’s squeak, that is, the shrill whine of his own trembling before the void of even the most beloved series’ inevitable end.

JUST WRIGHT

Queen Latifah’s name, in Arabic, means “gentle,” and so she plays a physical therapist whose godsister is chasing NBA star point-guard Common. Goldbricking montage. But when he gets injured, it’s Latifah to the rescue—physical therapy montage—she falls asleep on his shoulder one night just as he flips on the enormous flat screen and up comes Romancing the Stone. But why call forth that old, sublimated love letter to insurgency and blow? Impossible not to like these two. He loves his mother, holds doors, “hates weaves,” plays jazz piano, fixes things, gives to charity, appreciates interior design, and understands. She eases his pain, helps him believe he can do it, is a homegirl, likes soul food and sweets. It’s bad news for that rival sister when she reveals herself too well-versed in a Morimoto menu. And anyway, sushi’s suddenly a bit déclassé, right?

The camera lifts from the final kiss to show the stadium’s banner of signs: “Barclay’s.” Yes, he’s a New Jersey, soon to be Brooklyn, Net. Show me, in ten years, the low-income housing that was promised in the Atlantic Yards complex, show me the local jobs. It will be too late, but I’ll show you three vibrant neighborhoods with a clog at their navel, and around it a knot of traffic and ring of junk t-shirt shops and shitty bars. Aw, who am I kidding, I can’t stay mad at these guys. Common can handle the ball convincingly, they shoot his dunks from below the rim. Originally named Common Sense (a Thomas Paine shout-out?), he rejects homophobic hip hop lyrics and has worked for AIDS awareness, PETA, and Obama. Could the name of this film be a quiet nod to the minister whose guidance this rapper and our president once shared? I’m not sure hoops brings anyone together—it’s beautiful but freighted, inherently gravity-obsessed.

Hope. U.N.I.T.Y. When Matt Longabucco plays basketball, an angel dies.

ROBIN HOOD

That fascinating cartoon trope: an arrow made of bees. Friar Tuck keeps them for honey and, from the honey, mead. Ben and I drink an absinthe before the show and afterwards, an ale. Ferment: summer: splendor: thoughts. What a buzz.

The Crusaders return—I’ve made that lurchy Channel crossing myself, supine, taking shallow breaths. And what awaits these veterans, fresh from the Middle East? Taxation montage. “We make our own fate from now on.” Crowe wears Renfair well—what a hunk. The plot has him an impostor-knight welcomed home by that old Crusader von Sydow and his original’s waiting wife. Every fraud’s deepest fear: no one cares. One hunk’s as good as another where the fields want “seed.” He’s in like Flynn—what was I, maybe ten or eleven, the VCR still a novelty, when first I saw the great swashbuckler himself, he springs in sporting kelly-green tights and a little pointy cap and he’s got that enormous stag slung over his shoulders, fresh-poached. Flashing a twelve-point outlaw grin.

An archer—Artemis, Sagittarius, Chewbacca. But how many of us know a bow? And so how can we understand the matrix of difficulties involved in shooting one? Those old Zen masters spent a year just teaching the novice how to breathe and draw, another year to release. The incredible tension makes it seem impossible to smoothly let go the shaft. Think of something as simple, like a trackpad or mouse. The cursor hovers above the highlighted link, sure, but it’s no small act to click it. In fact it’s all fraught and frustrating, slow or stuttery where it should be crisp. Just to push a button. To aim without trying—but it’s cool if you can’t, oafish West. No wonder those little green fairies have so much fun at our expense.

LETTERS TO JULIET

The 4:20 show. This drug book argues that the structure of reality is synaptic—matter as thickened thought. So whose mind conjured up theater five (the leaker)? Luckily, the sun shining. Couple in the back row, a woman alone, me, and ten tweens, other side of the aisle, remarkably absorbed except, naturally, when the story gets too intense and they giggle and take pictures of each other with their phones. In their defense, none of the signage in the theater explicitly prohibits flash photography. What’s playing all day is us.

Seyfried (Dear John) is a young, ambitious Brown-grad-cum-fact-checker at The New Yorker (I wish I could italicize it more, but it would fall over). So Oliver Platt is Remnick? And Seyfried eats street pretzels? Off to Verona with fiancée Gael Garcia Bernal, an excitable would-be restaurateur (those guys are all nuts) who offends her by seeking out local ingredients and cooking lore instead of taking her sightseeing. But R & J are saps, too, till they meet and give over. Our heroine finds a bundle of 50-year-old love letters in a niche of Juliet’s wall, which belong to shaky Vanessa Redgrave, who arrives to track down her old flame with sundressed Seyfried in tow, the latter falling in love the while with, stay with me, Redgrave’s prickly grandson. It doesn’t matter. It’s one of Shakespeare’s hardest, actually. Love-talk is an unstable compound, if not an oxymoron outright.

In the late 90s I thought I recognized a growing subgenre of movies interested in coincidence and fate, a seeming weak secular cosmology, tailor-made for the end of history. Now I see more clearly: every movie’s about fate. “Do you believe in destiny?” she asks, on the road through golden Tuscany, unreal fantasy-space that for Americans means: land so old it’s sweet. The old flame is found, he rides up a vineyard path on a stallion, framed by a sky of deepest viagra blue. The last lost love of the Facebook age, just as R & J, texting, would have survived to grow old. It’s not that we don’t believe in destiny—on the contrary, we invent all we can to kill it. Seyfried’s climactic dash for the guy. Yeah: if you’re going to Italy for the Big Declaration, go ahead and rent the Audi, girl, wear the wonderbra. Due cappuccini, per favore. “Grazie, Destino.” And she writes it all down, and then gets it published you-know-where. “Our Far-Flung Correspondents.” Oh, fuck it all…

IRON MAN 2

Consensus among the posse is for Iron Man the first. I didn’t see it. Amy piles her gummy bears on top of her popcorn, the better not to fuss with a candy wrapper in the dark. Alex told me, in a recent dream: “Relax, it’s a witty city.” And Ben and I once went to a masquerade party wearing costumes involving click-on lights hung over our chests, the insignia of our made-up cult. But anything’s made-up until you sacrifice for real.

I could write a book. Yet it’s tempting, too, to leave this dense fable un-parsed, blockbuster sequel obsessed with media overload, techno-fantasy haunted by late-capitalist sins—check the Giacometti, here seeming a much-flayed Golem striding forth for the final time. Iron Man’s long-dead dad talks to him from, where else, a movie screen, to tell him a city is an atom is a machine is a heart. He drinks chlorophyll, essence of plant, to keep his cyborg-body alive, and the final showdown unfolds beside an edenic little waterfall-and-stream—an artificial one, however, created inside a dome that wears a real corporate logo, and the logo reads Oracle. So who is the Iron Man? Says Pinchbeck, “Traditionally, the evolution from ordinary human state to shaman is marked by a series of visions and dreams of the novice being killed, dismembered, eaten, regurgitated, and put back together by the spirits. His or her bones are replaced with quartz crystals, precious metals, or similar magical substances. For instance, in Borneo, according to Eliade, the spirits of past shamans come to the initiate, they ‘cut his head open, take out his brains, wash and restore them…insert gold dust into his eyes to give him keenness and strength of sight powerful enough to see the soul wherever it may have wandered; they plant barbed hooks on the tops of his fingers to enable him to seize the soul and hold it fast; and lastly they pierce his heart with an arrow to make him tender-hearted, and full of sympathy with the sick and the suffering.’”

Downey. His one request: keep up. It’s a witty city. Everyone in the room with him gets an invitation, the one he paradoxically offers by his compulsively phony, echt-L.A. patter. The nice meta-joke about “blood toxicity” being his problem. Mickey Rourke’s cool electro-whips. Scarlett Johansson: hot little number. Gwyneth: cold little number. That Sam Rockwell is the real deal, folks. We have a future, but not one you’re gonna want to cuddle up with on a chilly night.