Mickey has scored again in his analysis of Frank Rich’s supposedly-liberal-but-actually-massively-old-fashioned tut-tutting on “important” cultural issues (Janet Jackson’s breast) in today’s Times. (via Instapundit)…. But, LaDowd, of all people, usually just sneering or merely incomprehensible, is spot on in her column deriding critics of Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” who read the film as some kind of pro-euthanasia tract. The Michael Medveds of the world have a very limited… and limiting… view of art.
All very embarrassing, as Medved frequently, and Rush somewhat less often, manages to be, but wasn’t the group that originally made the accusation one of your classic “differently-abled” special interest groups here in LA? As I recall from the LA Times, for what that’s worth, they were the first, with an indignant press release not unlike the bogus claim that Mel Brooks insulted people with Down’s Syndrome in Blazing Saddles.
I can’t understand what would inspired Medved and Rush to jump on this, unless dissing Hollywood has become a sort of anemone-like reflex with them (it’s in range, sting it). But this is pretty clearly a case of opportunistic attention-grabbing on both sides of the political spectrum.
As for the Jackson/Timberlake incident itself, was it wrong? As one of Napoleon’s advisers once told him after an unjust execution: “It was worse than wrong. It was a mistake.” Do advertisers use sex to sell products during the Super Bowl? Yes, and thank you. Did this go beyond even those lubricious parameters? Of course it did, and more to the point, it did so in a venue where people were not expecting it. If two of your guests at a party suddenly started tearing each other’s clothes off, Roger, I expect you would take issue (unless, of course, they were with New Line, in which case, whattaya gonna do?). Was it accidental, as claimed afterwards? Of course not, unless Janet Jackson usually walks around with some chromed gewgaw the size of Idi Amin’s good conduct medal hanging off her mammary.
It was inappropriate; it was deliberate; everyone involved, from the participants to CBS to MTV, lied about it afterward to cover their asses. To present this as some kind of stand for freedom of expression is dishonest in the extreme.
Interestingly, and just as a sidenote, if you look at one of your favorite movies this year, The Incredibles, that was a movie that could have been produced without changes under the old Motion Picture Code of the Breen, Hayes, and Johnston Offices… whereas Sideways, a movie you rightly excoriated, could not.
I haven’t read Medved’s review of the Eastwood movie, but Dowd’s article was typical “The bluenoses are coming!” hysteria. Is Medved saying anything other than that he didn’t like the plotline and he thought it was a slap in the face to traditional morality? And of course, that its nomination and the snubbing of the Passion reveals the continuing contempt of the Hollywood crowd for the morals of much of the country? Anyway, Medved always strikes me as reasonable; he has been known to rate highly movies where he doesn’t like the message provided it’s well done.
I can think of at least four or five other movies that were obviously intended to sway public sentiment on moral issues that were lavishly and somewhat ridiculously overpraised: The Contender, which was rushed together to get out the point that a politician’s sex life was his or her own business; The Cider House Rules, which showed us that abortion might be wrong but it was needed anyway; The American President, which endorsed the entire liberal agenda on everything from crime to the environment; Dead Man Walking, which railed against capital punishment, and Traffic, which endorsed drug legalization (and which had to be the most ridiculously overhonored screenplay in recent years).
After awhile, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s not just a coincidence that movies like those, which support a liberal agenda on moral issues, are overhonored compared those which push a more conservative agenda.
Pat, have you seen “Million Dollar Baby”? Sounds like you haven’t.
Pat ó The plotline to which the pressure group was objecting…
WARNING… I”M ABOUT TO GIVE AWAY A PLOT POINT HERE
…was that the heroine was going to continue to fight after a life-threatening injury, saying that she’d rather be dead than a cripple.
WARNING! I JUST GAVE AWAY A PLOT POINT HERE
That was the big outrage.
Mickey nails the Super Bowl boobie fiasco. I was watching with my teenage son. He left after a few minutes because the music was so lame. I was watching casually and reading the paper. In fact, I would have turned it off except I wanted to see the commercials. The “incident” was offensive. Not so much because of Janet Jackson’s silly droopy boob, but because she was virtually raped.
There really is no need here to plumb the depths of various censorship arguments. If you want that, see John Milton’s Areopagitica. What we have here is adults behaving badly. Do we really need awful music performed by has beens and a pseudo rape at halftime of the Super Bowl? Of course not.
As my sainted mother often would say after I behaved badly–I brought you up better than that. We’re not talking about censorship here. Rather, I’m lamenting the loss of common sense, the rise of idiocy, and a simple lack of good manners. I never swore in front of my mother, and never felt the need to. Is that censorship?
Sheesh!
Roger
While Dowd is better than usual, but really, SPOT ON?…
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What I love about movies and plays is seeing fictional characters behaving in ends-justify-the-means ways I never would. What I hate about politics is seeing real officials behaving in ends-justify-the-means ways on the W.M.D. “crisis” in Iraq, the Social Security “crisis,” and the spread of federal disinformation from paid “journalists.” Now that’s worth howling about.
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No, the above is worth scowling about. Surely you don’t agree with the puchline do you? Excuse the example but that is like urinating on a fine dessert, she ruined it. I’ll let someone else try to pick a cherry out of that one. Punchlines matter.
Old Dad, with all due respect — which, as usual, should be read “whaddarya nuts?” — this (all too common) trope of equating the obviously contrived and choreographed removal of a piece of breakaway costumery, revealing an even more contrived and choreographed piece of costume jewelry as well as the tiny remaining piece of unmodified nipple it didn’t hide with sexual assault or “virtual rape” is just silly and, to me, kind of offensive in itself.
(I will, by the way, be submitting that sentence for prize consideration as soon as I can decide whether to send it to the Guiness Book of World Records or the Bulwer-Lytton contest.)
But seriously, that wasn’t any more a “rape” than an Apache dance or a serious tango is.
Charlie (Colorado):
Gotta disagree–respectfully. Using “tango” and whatever one might call Justin Janet’s little performance in the same sentence is, a little silly. Tango is an art form. What we had last Super Bowl was not even parody. Its crudeness is what I condemn.
Some people think that killing people off because they happen to be disabled is wrong, even if the disabled person wants it. So obviously they are going to dislike a movie that they feel promotes a message that killing disabled people is okay.
This is always such a funny debate, because the people on one side of the issue also are generally aginst abortion, for the same reason, but for capital punishment.
OTOH, the other side seems to be against executing criminals, but for abortion and disabled people.
Both seem to be okay with killing people sometimes, but have completely opposite standards.
Roger:
I have not seen Million Dollar Baby so I can not comment about it. The reason I avoided seeing it was because I did not want to see another Hooywood treatment of the very serious issue of suicide as I did with “The Hours”. Clint may be giving this subject a more balanced treatment the “The Hours” did and I still may go see it. But “The Hours” also received glowing praise and I found it to be a very narrow, incomplete propaganda piece about the glories of suicide.
I attempted suicide and came within 15 minutes of death. After years of spiritual and medical therapy I am doing fine and have a different outlook on the subject. I didn’t mind that “The Hours” examined suicide but that it made suicide into an almost religous expierence.The Ed Harris characters death not only released him from the horrors of life but it caused the Streep character to reconcile a failed marriage. The suicide attempt that was stopped was presented in a gorgeous, almost sensous water scene that made ending your life almost attractive. I can tell you that it is not pretty, it is dark and ugly. And of course Kidman’s character argued brilliantly that if you don’t have the ability to write anymore then of course suicide is the perfect solution.
If Hollywood is going to examine suicide it should at least bring some realism to it. Show what happens to the people who see Ed Harris’s character splatter on the sidewalk in front of them. Show what happens to the friends and relatives who suffer after the suicide is over.I have seen what damage was done from my failed attempt and it is devestating. Also show how people who are crippled, who are mentally ill, can actually learn to live with,control somewhat, and find a valuable way to live the remainder of their days in the difficult circumstances that their disabilities bring to their lives.
I am goiong to go see “Million Dollar Baby” and hopefully it will be better made and more balanced then “The Hours” was. I don’t mind a serious examination of the topic, I just object to the slick, facile, one sided way Hollywood often approaches whayever the current buzz topic of the day is.
Well I would like to register a dissenting view here and say that the nipple itself was too a problem. The simulated sexual assault was a way bigger problem, but the nipple in and of itself was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Under what precise conditions would the display of Janet Jackson’s nipple avec ‘nipple ornament’ in the midst of a Super Bowl performance sans the rape tableau have been A-OK?
None that I can think of.
Nevertheless, Kaus is certainly correct as far as Frank Rich et al go. (Loved the line about how Rich wouldn’t want to see open displays of Republicanism at halftime! Eek! Eek! A Mouse!)
Which reminds me: at dinner last night I was seated next to a man who told me that within 5 years we would have pogroms here in the U.S.
Fortunately I was armed to the teeth with James Webb & the Scots-Irish, because this fellow, I realized, was himself a Scots-Irish belligerent. I’m starting to recognize the type. In this case it was the over-the-topness of the pronouncement that was, shall we say, familliar.
I got him at least half-persuaded, possibly 80% persuaded, that he’s in an apocalyptic frame of mind because he is a gay Scots-Irishman, and with all the FEMA stuff his warrior self has been activated, which is to be expected, but does not automatically mean that we are going to have pogroms in 5 years, or any time else, for that matter.
It ended up being great. He said he got his combative nature from his Irish mom—well YEAH!—and that he basically spends a fair amount of his life forcing himself NOT to get in brawls with dinner party companions—HELLO! BEEN THERE, DONE THAT!
I’m back to reading Webb after a hiatus for STATE OF FEAR, but one thing I’ve been thinking about Scots Irishness is that we get our backs up too fast and make mistakes about who the ‘real’ enemy is.
I can’t tell where I’d land on the ‘Bush question’ if I were gay. I might get mad and stay mad, WOT or no. I’m hoping I would manage not to run with it, as I know I’ve done in the past, but there’s no way of knowing.
At the end of the party he told me there is a woman in NYC who does ‘ethnic heritage’ therapy (something like that). I must learn more.
It seems that the Million Dollar Baby marketing/release strategy is going to provide the point of attack in the annual effort to derail the Best Picture frontrunner.
Michael Medved was one of the two people I read or heard from prior to Million Dollar Baby going into wide release (last weekend) who named the issue dealt with in the third act and who objected to not knowing it was going to come up.
Million Dollar Baby is, easily, the best of the movies nominated for Best Picture and each and every one of the five is better than The Passion of the Christ.
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Mickey is a smile. For the FCC it was the “wardrobe malfunction” (the nipple.) The Order and Statements by the Chairman and three other Commissioners can be found here: http://www.fcc.gov/eb/Orders/2004/FCC-04-209A1.html
OK, just read Kevin P’s remark, and have not seen MILLION DOLLAR BABY, and am only suspecting what this is about: disabled person commits suicide?
Yes?
No?
Whatever, I’m against it.
I’m against suicide, I’m against euthanasia, I’m even against assisted suicide.
Kevin is right that suicide is horrifically and permanently damaging to the survivors, and I’m inclined to think that family-assisted suicide is even more so.
Making an artistic/romantic/tragic/sentimental story out of “assisted suicide” is, in my opinion, downright immoral. If a person is in such terrible shape that they want to die, then let them do it themselves. To make someone of the stature of Clint Eastwood ‘do it’ is ugly.
Back in the good old days, ie, Germany of the 1930s, a similar movie was made: the hero, an anguished doctor, with a lovely Ophelia of a wife, the latter whose life was ‘not worth living’, and so with much anguish, and and and BRAVERY, the husband ‘euthanized’ his wife, out of love, Understand?
It is easy to say that there are some lives not worth living – but who has that right???
Euthanasia. Helping an unfortunate someone ‘along’ to ‘heaven.’(Like that Downs syndrome 19 year old Iraqi dressed up in explosives – I am sure the good folks who made him into a bomb were honestly convinced that HIS life wasn’t worth living either) You see, this slope is really slick. Clint Eastwood and the folks should be ashamed of themselves.
I can’t help but recall the movie, “Pretty Baby”, starring a 12 year old Brooke Shields as a child raised in a brothel, and the very artistic presentation of her as a virgin in the service of one of the Carradine actors. This marvy movie was made by Louis Malle, who also made another one featuring incest between a mother and her son. Terribly artistic, so foreign. And now it is common to see young people prostituting themselves on our city streets. Nice.
Medved devoted a segment of his show recently to a discussion with his old partner Jeffrey Lyons about Million Dollar Baby. Medved maintained his primary concern as a reviewer, artistic issues aside, is that people be forewarned that they wouldn’t be seeing an updated transgendered version of Rocky. He claimed that any personal distaste for the subject matter, though noted, was beside the point. Lyons, while having no problem with the surprise “twist”, generally didn’t care for the film (as I recall, he used words like “cliche” and “pedistrian”). I can’t comment on a movie I haven’t seen but, in my experience, neither gentleman is a wholly reliable film critic (but then, who is).
There was a film years ago called Whose Life Is It Anyhow(Anyway?) (starring Moses Wine himself Richard Dreyfuss) about an artist who becomes paralyzed from the neck down and petitions to end his life. It had remarkable performances and dark humor and, since it had been adapted from a very successful stage play, I knew what I was getting going in. I liked the film and appreciated the film, but I’m not sure I can say I enjoyed the film. If I were just in the mood for Rocky, plunked down my ten bucks and ended up with Whose Life Is It Anyhow/way, I probably would be ticked regardless of the film’s artistic merits.
As for Rich, I only read him when I’m already in a foul, “go ahead, piss me off some more” kind of mood. I always thought he and Jimmy Breslin were two peas in a pod and that both of them should either get on the wagon or climb back off.
Oh, and no one needs to see Janet Jackson’s nipple (unless he/she has made a specific request and even then not at a wholly inappropriate venue like the Super Bowl). Janet looks just like Michael at a particular stage in his transformation and, frankly, she creeps me out. And, although I admit I’m judging from a remote perspective, she seems a mediocre talent.
I agree with Kyda. I thought I was gonna get an ultimately triumphal, uplifting Rocky; I got depresso-rama.
Should have known, Clint can’t put together a happy ending to save his life. He’s massively talented, but at this point I’m sure to be more entertained by Rob Schneider, who aims to earn your money.
How sad is that? That I’d have more fun with Deuce Bigalow 2 than Clint?
I have a friend who is disabled [spinal cord injury] who finds the notion that someone would rather be dead than be like him a tad depressing, not to mention condescending. But I have not seen the movie.
As for Janet’s nipple, it was tacky and deliberately insulting to the audience.
Catherine, did you like State of Fear? I just started it and have only gotten a few pages into it. I seem to be having trouble connecting.
Is it too much to ask that people refrain from passing judgement on movies they have not seen?
Pat Curley, I agree with your statement about the agenda-backed Hollywood movies. With the exception of Traffic, which I thought was great. The drug policy is a real mess. Everybody knows it, nobody says it, it’s the elephant in the living room. Besides, isn’t Catherine Zeta-Babe in it? “Nuff said. I thought Dead Man Walking was ok but really quite banal. I never grokked the hype surrounding it.
Catherine: this fellow, I realized, was himself a Scots-Irish belligerent. I’m starting to recognize the type. In this case it was the over-the-topness of the pronouncement that was, shall we say, familliar
Hmmm, now that you mention it, that is starting to sound like a real familiar scenario, it seems like I know somebody just like that, somebody close, let’s see….
Kyda Sylvester: neither gentleman is a wholly reliable film critic (but then, who is)?
Personally, I go for the hive-mind film critic at IMDB these days.
There aren’t very many “agenda-backed” Hollywood movies, if you think about it, WichitaBoy. “Dead Man Walking” was a so-so indie made several years ago for a very small budget. Propaganda pictures from any point of view have long been among the hardest movies to get made in H’wood. Samuel Goldwyn said it all decades ago — “If you wanna send a message, call Western Union!” The moguls have been following his prescription ever since.
I like all the movies on the agenda-driven list with the exception of The Contender. Rod Lurie’s personal story is compelling; his movies are not. John Q and The Day After Tomorrow are more recent, and truly dreadful, agenda-driven movies.
Is it too much to ask that people refrain from passing judgement on movies they have not seen?
Probably.
Charlie(Colorado) ó Heck, if you apply yourself, you can even criticize a movie before it’s made. Just ask Mel Gibson…
Roger,
You’ve got me dead to rights; I didn’t know Dead Man Walking was an Indy.
I agree with you completely about the moguls. I’m certain that making money is the only thing that keeps them up at night. You’ll find that’s true in a lot of industries, even academia.
Still, I think Pat’s point is that almost any time we see an agenda-driven movie coming from “the Hollywood community”, even if not from the studios themselves, it has the same unchanging agenda time after time. (There are a few exceptions such as Passion [full disclosure: haven't seen it, don't care to]). Even though I tend to agree with that agenda more than most here, the perpetual one-note becomes a bit irritating after a while, particularly when the perpetrators portentously pride themselves on their originality.
Just to snatch one example from thin air, Sullivan’s Travels seems like a socially-conscious movie which is fresh by comparison.
The worst part of (ahem) “Nipplegate” is that a year later, we’re still talking about it. Inappropriate, yes, world/life changing, no.
Okay, shoot me. (twelve hours since the last post here, so I think I’m safe.)
If I had been watching the Superbowl last year, I would have died laughing. Of course, that doesn’t mean I have no sympathy with those who did not laugh. I guess I’m, in some ways, still a liberal at heart. I see nekkid bodies every single day in my Poser program and no joke, seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all. I’m just de-sensitized is all. (And, yes, the Arab world needs a LOT of desensitizing.)
But as for movies with their ‘propaganda themes’ I don’t mind them. Just wish there were more of opposing views as well.
As I see it, what many of these films do is show circumstances that might contradict CW on a matter. The film might be saying ‘See. Not all assisted suicides are bad. Think about it.’ Or that for a particular set of people this policy, drugs or whatever, is harmful.
Yes, it’s a liberal way of exaggerating to make a point. I see nothing wrong with it. As long as we can get the other side as well and as long as the lesson taken is not over general.
Yes, I’m defending liberals here. I don’t mean the anti-war anti-American idiots, nor the busy bodies, but the ones who stretch us in ways we wouldn’t go otherwise. I’ve said this before but our environment is cleaner, our cars safer, our workplaces safer too and that was liberals at work.
The conservative’s mission is to stop the liberals from going too far too fast…and they failed miserably the last few decades. As far as I’m concerned, the liberals have gone way too far with political correctness, environmental religion, multi-culti and victim politics. They’ve been stopped in their tracks the last few years by circumstances beyond their control and it’s just too jarring for people who have had their way for far too long. It’s a battle royale right now.
So, though I stand with conservatives now, I don’t disparage any ‘good’ liberals out there. Even if I haven’t seen any lately. There must be one or two left.