Dear Sirs

To: contactus@mpaa.org
Subject: regarding the Trance trailer

Dear Sirs and Madams,

At the movie theater the other day, I saw a preview for the new thriller Trance and, among your helpful descriptors of the justifications for the film's 'R' rating at the beginning, I noticed the phrase "some grizzly images." That's an odd thing to include there, isn't it? Usually you employ far more vanilla cautions such as "bloody violence" or "naughty language" or "sideboob"--you know: neat, lucid info that assists us filmgoers with our viewing selections down the road. Contextually speaking, "some grizzly images" raises more questions than it answers and I've had trouble suppressing my curiosity about it.
 

The Year We Make Contact: Hot Tub Time Machine

John Cusack has been a movie star for almost thirty years, and I’m surprised to find that he’s only 45. He looks older, his face worn and molded into place. As a very young film actor he instantly made a convincing impression as a beleaguered, lovelorn hero in Better Off Dead and Say Anything…, and it’s stained our impression of him even as he portrayed (somewhat) more adept romantic protagonists into the nineties and beyond. He retained his popularity level but never made the crossover leap into prestige like his fellow 1980s heartthrobs Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp, and he’s been stuck between settling for well-paying commercial schlock like 2012 or ignored indie noise like Grace Is Gone ever since—even scoring the occasional cult hit, as with High Fidelity, seems like a fluke every time.

Reading Rainbow

On last Monday’s Colbert Report, the author Ann Patchett explained the incentive behind opening a bookstore in Nashville, supposedly filling a local demand that’s been otherwise drained by arbitrary, nebulous corporate decisions. I have some problems with this woman’s professed mission. For one thing, the “larger issues” contention doesn’t follow her claim that one of the huge bookstores that formerly existed was independent. She says that the other was a Borders, which has gone completely bankrupt and no longer exists anywhere. So it seems misleading when she claims that both of the businesses were profitable “every month they were open.” But it’s also off-putting that she would hype her own venture in such a mercenary way:

Game of Groans

I’ve always loved games. But then, who doesn’t? Games are one of those weird cultural categories in which—allowing for the odd discontinued mechanism or broken link in the chain of memory—there will always be more than there ever were before. I used to only like very specific games. My lifelong aversion to physical activity or competition and my lack of friends in school precluded any interest in sports, and card and board games always pissed me off. (My pouty milquetoast father’s longtime excuse for his dental problems was a disagreement we had over Parcheesi from a time I was too young to remember, or to have understood Parcheesi, for that matter.) Fortunately, I was able to get in on the worldwide joy of structured play thanks to the artistic and technical refinement of videogames in the decade before my birth. I still love them dearly and rely on them as a solitary and social affair, but in college I found that, when coupled with liquor, the poetic import and psychological effect of games took on a whole new definition, and I was off to the races.

Silence for Greedo

On Friday, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was re-released to theaters in digital 3D, commencing a cycle that will continue until the entire fairytale saga has been turned into an expensive laser light show minus the Pink Floyd soundtrack. To promote the release (as well as that of his production Red Tails last month), George Lucas has made one of his periodic excursions from, I assume, his secret base inside a scale replica of the Empire Strikes Back space slug to make the press rounds. Unsurprisingly, much of the words expended concern the controversies over the various alterations he has made to his mutant baby of a franchise starting with the original trilogy’s “Special Edition” release in 1997. The remark that will cut the deepest for fans can be found in this brief chat with The Hollywood Reporter and attempts to clarify the infamous encounter between Han Solo and the bounty hunter Greedo in Star Wars:

Warriors, Come Out and Play

A few days ago I was flipping through the latest entry on Roger’s blog, about the waning excitement of political conventions, and something from one of the mainstay commenters, a weirdly enthusiastic ultra-right-winger, caught my eye. In the midst of some vacuous interpretation of the Punch-and-Judy-esque Republican primaries (he refers to it as “the best show on earth right now,” I guess because his religion prohibits The Vampire Diaries), the reader digressed to share a teary-eyed conservative nostalgia nugget:

“My favorite convention moment is Pat Buchanan's speech in 1992. The culture war speech. It could be given again today, harder, and Newt [Gingrich] would be the guy to give it.”

Super Brothers

I wanted to facilitate a sort of meta-togetherness upon the viewing of this latest American football championship, so I established a small network via the Twitter platform with which to reflect on the event. It went okay.