CulturePulp.

'Elk Hunting with Lee Marvin'

One of my favorite actors, gravel-voiced meat-eatin' tough guy Lee Marvin, died 21 years ago today. So it's time for me to post one of the weirder pieces of "celebrity journalism" I've ever stumbled across: Marvin's beautifully written, ambivalent first-person account of hunting -- and then sparing -- a magnificent elk bull.

About a year ago, I found a May 1964 issue of Gun World magazine lying on a counter at a shooting range. The mag reeked of mildew; someone had obviously found it in a box or attic, then dumped it at the range.

What caught my eye was the cover: "Elk Hunting with Lee Marvin." Marvin apparently wrote the essay inside.

I actually believe he penned this piece without help, BTW. In the documentary "Lee Marvin: A Personal Portrait," friend and director John Boorman reveals that Marvin was a terrific writer and painter. Midway through the doc, Boorman even asks director Jim Jarmusch to read a passage from Marvin's autobiography -- in which the actor and former Marine talks about getting shot in the ass in the Pacific theater during WWII, only to be filled with guilt as he eats ice cream in sickbay while his friends get shot to hell onshore.

"Lee Marvin: A Personal Portrait" is on YouTube. Here's the whole thing -- it's a must-watch for fans:

[ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ] [ Part 3 ] [ Part 4 ] [ Part 5 ]

You can also download "Elk Hunting with Lee Marvin" right here (PDF, 3.2 MB) or read the whole thing after the jump.

I personally don't hunt, but found this piece fascinating for a number of reasons. First, it's a throwback to a time when actors didn't fall into tidy political categories. Marvin seems to have been one of those Hemingway lefties who drank and sport-fished and got in fistfights and dabbled in multimedia. It's also a throwback to a time when leading men lived long, vivid, and sometimes traumatic lives before they ever stepped in front of a camera -- which of course made them infinitely more interesting to watch than the pretty-boy milk-sops that pass for action heroes today.

Here's Marvin, from the piece, writing discreetly but powerfully about his WWII experiences and how they kept him away from firearms for years:

Nature is something you can forget. In the caverns of the Hollywood sound stages, surrounded by harsh lights, microphones and other mechanical monsters of the movie and television industries, even in the concrete jungles of Beverly Hills, nature becomes something dream-like and a long way off. In short, it seems unreal.

That, I think, is one of the reasons I had decided to take up serious hunting again, after a layoff of nearly twenty years; as a release; an escape from every day pressures; or perhaps a chance to simply commune with the basics. Call it what you will.

As a teenager, I had gone to school in Florida and had spent weekends and spare time hunting deer, puma, wild turkey and bobwhite in the wilds of the then uncharted Everglades. In those days and that area, the shotgun was the universal all-purpose gun, shooting everything from 00 buckshot to bird sizes, selecting your shot to match your game.

Then, when World War II came along, I had enlisted in the Marine Corps. It wasn't long before I had gotten my fill of serious shooting with the game, this time, shooting back. As a result, when I was discharged, there was a period when firearms held no particular charm for me. After all, I had virtually slept with a rifle at my side for months on end. The Corps had insisted that, like all Marines, I was married to this bit of precision machinery, and perhaps I had begun to take it seriously.

Then, before I could go through that post-war cooling period that a lot of us needed, I got into this acting business and attempting to shape a career began to eat up what otherwise would have been recreation time....

Try to imagine any modern leading man writing this earnestly or well today about the very real experiences that Marvin brought to bear onscreen in countless Westerns, thrillers, and war pictures. The full story after the jump.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Traitor'

Longer version of a review in today's Oregonian:

Sudan, 1978. A boy named Samir Horn watches his devout Muslim father die in a car-bombing.

Flash-forward to Yemen, present day, and the now-grown-up Samir (Don Cheadle) is selling six crates of Semtex detonators to a terrorist group. "I can teach you how to use these without blowing yourself up ... unintentionally," he jokes, dryly.

It's easy to see why Cheadle wanted to play Samir, the hero of the post-9/11 thriller "Traitor." Cheadle's face is basically a perfect delivery system for woe, sadness and gut-wrenching internal conflict. And Samir -- a deep-cover operative trying to infiltrate the highest ranks of that terrorist outfit -- has to make brutal Sophie's Choices roughly three times a day.

Samir's a fascinating character. He's a devout Muslim and political cynic who works for the U.S. government as a deep-cover counterterrorist. He's so far off the books, he's only known to a single handler (Jeff Daniels) -- and he has two dogged FBI agents (Guy Pearce, Neal McDonough) working overtime to catch him because they think he's a major threat.

Samir doesn't seem like he's fighting for America so much as he's fighting for the right to be a moderate Muslim. ("I don't feel at home anywhere," he says.) He lost his devout father in a car-bombing, and he's busting radical terrorists because he sees them as perverting Islam for political ends, using the faithful as pawns. "They betrayed Islam," he says of the conspirators at one point. "They used us for our faith."

But in the course of ingratiating himself with the bad guys, Samir finds himself faced with exponentially worsening no-win scenarios that leave gallons of blood on his hands.

This is solid, page-turning raw material with a meaty protagonist; it's kind of mind-boggling that the basic story idea was cooked up by comedian Steve Martin and written and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, whose major prior credit is scribbling "The Day After Tomorrow." The film trots the globe and looks superb doing so, and Mark Kilian's music score sounds like a cross between a "Bourne" film and a Putumayo compilation CD. And "Traitor" generates real suspense toward the end -- particularly when Samir faces the seemingly intractable problem of stopping 50 suicide bombers on 50 different buses.

Unfortunately, the movie stumbles a fair bit, as well.

Our hero is placed in a brutal Yemeni prison almost immediately, and it gives the film's momentum a bizarre early pause. There's a cliched, pointless scene where Samir meets with his girlfriend (Archie Panjabi) in a park. McDonough's character is stuck with stupid-meathead dialogue like "Sorry -- I must have forgotten my Bill of Rights at home!" and "This cat thinks he's gonna be in paradise by the end of the week!" and "You're an egghead who got dragged into a street fight!" And I'll mail five bucks to first person to explain to me how Samir got Guy Pearce's e-mail address.

"Traitor" doesn't marinate in moral ambiguity as delicately as the "Bourne" flicks, either. Characters on either side make nearly identical and completely un-subtle declarations about winning at any cost. "You must be willing to sacrifice some of your pawns if you want to win the game," says one terrorist; "This is a war -- you do what it takes to win!" says Daniels. But when Samir guilds the lily by commenting on those similarities, as well, it puts a big, fat, obvious, writerly, this-is-what-the-movie-means exclamation point on the parallels.

In an effort to make the villains compelling and human, the terrorists are elegant, good-looking and well-spoken -- a strong storytelling choice. But they also discourse in an unbroken stream of Moral Relativism 101:

• "We use violence only because it has been used against us!"
• "Once the Americans were the terrorists to the British!"
• "This government is proud of saying it represents its people -- so everyone in America is equally responsible for their crimes!"

It gets annoying (and, frankly, condescending) in a hurry -- especially when the film's PG-13 rating makes all the terrorist bombings essentially bloodless affairs.
_____

C-plus; 113 minutes; rated PG-13 for intense violent sequences, thematic material and brief language.

'Traitor' (The Oregonian, Aug. 27, 2008)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Elegy'

From the Friday, Aug. 22 Oregonian....

David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) is getting old -- and he's lamenting his loss of participation in "the carnal parts of the human comedy."

Kepesh is a New York lit prof, a highbrow-media star and author of books with titles like "The Origins of American Hedonism," so he tends to talk that way about his most base and universal desires. He also says, early on, "I've always been vulnerable to female beauty," as if it were some kind of rarified sensitivity cultivated over decades.

It perhaps comes as no surprise that Kepesh is a creation of novelist Philip Roth. "Elegy," director Isabel Coixet's terrific new movie about Kepesh's romantic last gasp, is based on Roth's "The Dying Animal" -- the last in a trilogy of Kepesh books that also includes "The Breast" and "The Professor of Desire."

Kingsley, Coixet and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer ("Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan") wring a lot of nuance out of Kepesh's emotionally arrested inability to commit. The professor left his wife and son decades earlier and erected great walls of intellect, achievement and culture around his horny-old-man core. He enjoys periodic, no-strings-attached romps with a former student (Patricia Clarkson).

"My whole life was dedicated to independence," Kepesh says. "And at cost, I had achieved my goal."

His carefully constructed ideal life falls to pieces when he tries out all his well-worn seduction routines on a grounded Cuban-American student named Consuela (Penélope Cruz). The professor worships her body and expects a quick affair -- but the fact that she's frank, emotionally intelligent life-partner material (with that body) awakens Kepesh's jealousy and fear, just as he's starting to realize his intellect and achievement might be reaching their expiration dates.

The film is exquisite on every level, full of sadness and emotional surprise as Kepesh reluctantly starts trying to engage the world like an actual adult. Kingsley is quieter and subtler here than he's been in years; he captures both Kepesh's immaturity and his analytical distance from that immaturity with a skill that actually has you rooting for the fellow despite his tendency toward self-mythologizing bullshit. Dennis Hopper has terrific chemistry with Kingsley as a womanizing poet (his long-suffering wife is played by Debbie Harry!). And this is very likely the best English-language work we'll ever see from Cruz -- her deeply alive performance contrasts pointedly with the way Coixet photographs her as a piece of objectified art.

Coixet and Meyer tone down some of the rough-sex antics in Roth's novel, and inject maybe the tiniest bit of hope where Roth probably saw more of an abyss. As Hopper's character tells Kepesh with a smirk, "You should stop worrying about growing old and start worrying about growing up."
_____

B-plus; 106 minutes; rated R for sexuality, nudity and language.

'Elegy' (The Oregonian, Aug. 22, 2008)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Clone Wars'

During the Friday, Aug. 15 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, I enumerate the many, many disappointments of "Star Wars Colon The Clone Wars."

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Aug. 15, 2008) [ iTunes ]

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Star Wars: The Clone Wars'

Movie review in the Friday, Aug. 15 Oregonian....

Hey, kids! Wanna pay full ticket price to watch a TV-series pilot?

"Star Wars: The Clone Wars" strings together the first three episodes of George Lucas' impending Cartoon Network animated series -- which will tell tales of Anakin and Obi-Wan's wartime heroics between "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith." It's aimed at kids and was made on a relatively tight budget, so I should issue a couple of qualifiers before totally ripping into this thing:

1. 1. If I'd seen "Clone Wars" on TV, I'd probably be more forgiving -- or at least I'd be more impressed by its computer animation, which tries to be epic while taking clever shortcuts that don't blow up to the big screen so well.
2. 2. If I was a 10-year-old boy, I might regard this film's droning action as cinematic Cocoa Puffs.

But I'm not a 10-year-old boy. I was 10 when "The Empire Strikes Back" came out, I hold the series to that standard, and I found "Clone Wars" monumentally depressing. It's a simple-minded, low-stakes, woodenly written story signaling that "Star Wars" is now entering its "Star Trek: Voyager" period -- diluting its mythmaking ambition until it's nothing more than television product designed to sell toy product.

The movie retains one of the worst qualities of the prequels: Everyone loudly frets about abstract political stuff like trade routes. These trade routes are controlled by Jabba the Hutt, who will award them to the good guys if they can rescue Jabba's kidnapped son.

What follows is numbingly repetitive. People call each other on hologram cell phones, re-iterate their plans and have meetings -- all between forced banter and long war scenes cursed with a grinding sameness, in which endless supplies of faceless clones fight endless supplies of faceless droids.

None of it has the crazy-fun energy of Genndy Tartakovsky's hand-drawn "Clone Wars" cartoon shorts that came out a few years back. The new movie also introduces not one, but three of the most annoying characters to ever grace "Star Wars": a wailing, belching baby Huttlet; a tween Padawan with "attitude" and refers to Anakin as "SkyGuy"; and Ziro the Hutt, a feather-wearing, lisping parody of Truman Capote so stereotypically fey, I have expected him to lurch around with a mint julep and a cigarette holder. The non-John Williams score is dull and generic, to boot.

I could go on and on. But getting worked up over this is like getting worked up over a Saturday-morning cartoon. Unlike its predecessors, this one doesn't even try to aspire to myth. It aspires only to merchandising.
_____

C-minus; 98 minutes; rated PG for sci-fi action violence throughout, brief language and momentary smoking.

'Star Wars: The Clone Wars' (The Oregonian, Aug. 15, 2008) 

MOVIE REVIEW: 'American Teen'

From the Friday, Aug. 8 Oregonian....

The Sundance hit "American Teen" is a "successful" documentary on one level: Its subjects blandly keep your attention in almost the exact same way that reality-show contestants keep your attention.

Director Nanette Burstein ("The Kid Stays in the Picture") embedded herself with a group of suburban Indiana high-school seniors -- kids consciously or unconsciously selected based on their resemblance to characters from "The Breakfast Club." There's moody outsider Hannah, basketball star Colin, romantic geek Jake, and mean-girl princess Megan.

Unsurprisingly, the formulaic "Breakfast Club" casting yields a formulaic narrative. Burstein crafts a surprisingly tidy story arc for each character over the course of the 2005-06 school year. Hannah (clearly Burstein's favorite, probably because she resembles Burstein) struggles with fear, depression and wild artistic/romantic passions. Colin needs a hoop scholarship, and he's choking under the pressure. Magnificently awkward console-gaming nerd Jake needs a girlfriend.

And Megan is just horrible to everyone. Even after learning of real tragedy in her life, I can't forgive her misdeeds -- which include mass e-mailing a topless photo of a friend for kicks and spray-painting gay slurs on the home of a kid who disagrees with her prom-theme idea.

The kids make you kind of angry, they make you laugh a little, and ultimately their striving (especially Jake's) is sort of heartening. However -- and this is a serious, deal-breaking "however" -- I also felt extremely manipulated by "American Teen," and didn't trust much of the film.

These kids were in diapers when "The Real World" premiered on MTV. And, to be blunt, too many moments in this doc felt like savvy teenagers grandstanding for the cameras.

Hannah stares moodily into the distance in multiple perfectly framed setups. Kids stare into space in their rooms, supposedly feeling authentic emotions while a camera hovers inches from their faces. They have gran-mal, life-changing arguments while wireless microphone transmitters stick out of their back pockets. (Did Burstein wire them up for sound before or during the underage drinking parties she loves to film?)

The sweeping title suggests that "American Teen" offers a definitive portrait of today's high-schooler. But the film feels slight, superficial and, in this reality-TV age, kind of staged. How is the filmmaking technique here substantially more "real" or less manipulative than that employed by the crew of MTV's "The Hills" -- other than that the kids (except for Megan) are nicer?
____

C; 95 minutes; rated PG-13 for some strong language, sexual material, some drinking and brief smoking -- all involving teens.

'American Teen' (The Oregonian, Aug. 8, 2008)

CORT AND FATBOY: In which Aaron Duran and I totally throw down.

This particular "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast is easily the most reckless in which I've ever participated.

• We were broadcasting live from the Bagdad, and Cort and Fatty are, well, they're kind of buzzing on microbrews.


• I go all ranty with my hatred of "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor." But I also make the mistake of calling out Aaron Duran for (a) liking "Mummy 3" and (b) drunkenly defending "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace."


• Aaron shows up for his segment, Cort and Fatty tell him about my calling-out -- and it's on.


• I'm dragged back into the studio, and Duran and I spent a few minutes sparring at the top of our lungs.

Good times!

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Aug. 1, 2008) [ iTunes ]

Mr. Do and Mr. Don't celebrate the arts in August.

In their latest comic strip, beloved instructional characters Mr. Do and Mr. Don't teach us how to behave at various Portland cultural offerings in August.
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Mr. Do and Mr. Don't celebrate the arts in August (Webcomics Nation)
Complete CulturePulp archives at WCN

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor'

"Director's cut" of a review in the Friday, Aug. 1 Oregonian....

"The Mummy" (1999) was a nice little pastiche of Ray Harryhausen and Indiana Jones -- welcomed at a time when everybody thought there wouldn't be any more "Raiders" sequels.

"The Mummy Returns" (2001) was a great big stupid sugar bomb of a follow-up. Its story made no sense (it plays like a first-draft brainstorming session), and its special-effects set pieces were so numerous and rushed that much of the film's CGI looks half-rendered. But lead actors Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz were still adorable, and the movie sort of squeaked by on charm.

"The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" is just noisy.

This shrill, unfunny, unpleasant and incredibly disappointing third installment in the "Mummy" series takes place in the late '40s. Adventurer Rick (Fraser) and his wife Evelyn (Maria Bello, attempting to replace Weisz) are rich, retired and bored out of their skulls in England. Their smarmy son Alex (Luke Ford) -- now a college-aged knockoff of his much-cooler dad -- accidentally helps unleash an all-new undead bad guy: an ancient Chinese emperor (Jet Li) who wants to awaken his cursed clay army and conquer the world. Along for the ride are Evelyn's drunk brother (John Hannah), an immortal witch (Michelle Yeoh) and her daughter (Isabella Leong) a Chinese paramilitary army, a drunk pilot, a trio of Yeti (Yetis?)....

There's also some business involving Shangri-La and a diamond that awakens the undead army and Jet Li morphing into various monsters and an epic battle between good zombies and evil zombies (none of them "mummies" by any strict definition of the word).

But in a few days, I'm pretty sure I won't remember any of these particulars -- because the movie suffers from relentless overkill at the hands of director Rob Cohen ("xXx," "The Fast and the Furious").

Cohen replaces original "Mummy" series director Stephen Sommers, and he seems to think everything in the movie needs to be turned up to 11 at all times. The action is always frenetic and filmed with a shaky-cam. There are too many characters, and they're always screaming.

(It doesn't help that the gifted Bello offers up one of the worst, most mannered English accents I've heard in an American movie in years -- were no actual English actresses available? -- or that Alex is such a smirky meathead that you'd prefer to see him crushed by a Yeti instead of drawing focus from Fraser.)

Every landscape is enormous without feeling epic. The music is always squealing and soaring. The editing is always quick, even when it should settle down and let you enjoy the sights (especially when Yeoh and Li finally trade blows for a second or two). And every other line is someone screaming about how they "hate mummies!," as if we needed to be reminded what the movie's about.

Of course, the end result of everyone and everything screaming at you is that you don't hear any of it. Every vestige of the first "Mummy"'s wit and charm is buried in an avalanche of noise and motion. It's exhausting.
____

D-plus; 112 minutes, rated PG-13 for PG-13 for adventure action and violence.

'The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor' (The Oregonian, Aug. 1, 2008)