Summer wind.

You know we may have at last been blessed with an at least interesting summer blockbuster when critics are split as widely as, say, Bradley Steinbacher, raving in the Stranger ("may be the most grown-up - and most emotionally fucked-up - comic-book movie ever assembled"), and Tony Scott, panning in the New York Times ("incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid"). Oddly, it's a pleasure to run across so much disagreement in a season when we're so often subjected to the sight of a zillion critics all struggling to come up with a unique way of saying the same thing, e.g., highway sequence: wow, Zion sequence: snooze.

It's almost - almost, but probably not quite - enough to prompt me to actually see The Hulk in a theater rather than simply wait for the DVD as originally planned. If only to see how closely this one follows the Inverse Cost and Quality Law (ICQL) as explicated by David Foster Wallace in a 1998 article for Waterstone's Magazine (recently rediscovered via Metaphilm). Back then, DFW began with a solid assertion, namely, that the 90s had spawned a new genre:

Special Effects Porn. "Porn" because, if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they're eerie. Just like hard-core cheapies, movies like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park aren't really "movies" in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes - scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff - strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.

Several hundred words and 17 footnotes later, DFW boils things down to two corollary formulations of his ICQL. The first is obvious: "The more lavish and spectacular a movie's special effects, the shittier that movie is going to be in all non-F/X respects." The second, we can only hope, will not prove true in the case of Ang Lee: "There is no quicker or more efficient way to kill what is interesting and original about an interesting, original young director than to give that director a huge budget and lavish F/X resources." It may or may not prove true for this single outing, but we do know that F/X alone do not put a crimp in Lee's style - see Crouching Tiger - and we know that his talents and range are solid enough to withstand a popular and critical bump in the road - if, in fact, that's what The Hulk turns out to be. And if it does, the culprit here would seem to be not F/X themselves, but rather, money.

David Poland's ideas on how the cogs and wheels of the summer blockbuster machine actually spin, particularly on the PR end, comprise an argument that he admits, halfway through, "gets a little schizophrenic." But basically, it boils down to this: He wants more access earlier to the stuff of scoops. Not a surprise ending. Nonetheless, all the surface material he glides over to get there - who lets whom in on what when - is kind of interesting and serves as another reminder - a lot spicier, if more disheveled than USA Today's - of the ever-expanding role of the Net in all this.

Finally for today (look for a load of shorts tomorrow), Poland's colleague at Movie City News, Ray Pride, follows some finely written praise for The Eye with a hit-n-run stab at Slavoj Zizek, claiming that the "goofy academic"'s take on Matrix Reloaded is "a reductionist political perspective."

Did Pride read the first three paragraphs of what Zizek actually wrote? That's where Zizek covers himself from that very accusation quite conveniently, claiming that all readings of the Matrix series are suspect (and that would have to include his own) since the Wachowskis "are not philosophers, but just two guys who flirt with and exploit, in an often confused way, some 'postmodern' and New Age notions in the service of science fiction" and the films themselves "function as a kind of Rorschach test, setting in motion the universalized process of recognition, like the proverbial painting of God that seems always to stare directly at you from wherever you look at it - practically every orientation seems to recognize itself in it."

Granted, Zizek goes on to treat the films as a text, albeit an unself-aware one, on which he then hangs a tall order: In the third film, the Wachowskis are going to have to "produce nothing less than the appropriate answer to the dilemmas of revolutionary politics today, a blueprint for the political act the left is desperately looking for." But come on. Zizek knows that's not what'll be served come November. Inherent in his text is a wish he knows will go unfulfilled. Zizek has always been a much more fruitful source of provocations than of conclusions.



Posted by dwhudson at June 20, 2003 7:12 AM