By James Slone

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” isn’t a movie. It’s an epic-length infomercial for Hasbro, US auto companies and the military—the only thing missing from the equation are energy drinks, though I’m sure the next installment, which will no doubt run over four hours, will provide plenty of time to work that angle in. This is Hollywood at its most crass, artless and stupid, the boot standing on the human face of filmmaking. Unsurprising, we receive this dollop of unwanted attention from one Michael Bay, a man who inexplicably makes millions by talking down to his audience.

The plot is recycled from the first film: a good team of giant robot toys who turn into brand-name vehicles, led by Optimus Prime (a big rig cum freedom fighter), fights an evil team of robot toys led by Megatron to prevent them from finding a device that will destroy the earth. The good toys, the Autobots, are aided in their endeavor by an elite squad of soldiers whose main function is to be shot and crushed by the evil Decepticons, and to provide Bay opportunities to indulge in muscle-bulging military porn and take a few swipes at President Obama, represented here by a wimpy Washington pencil pusher who prevents the military from doin’ its job. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ben Meuleman

Appearances: Agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) investigates the death of Teresa Banks in Deer Meadow in the early scenes of Fire Walk with Me (FWWM). He is assisted by Agent Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland).

Connections: FBI (Gordon Cole, Sam Stanley, Dale Cooper, Philip Jeffries)

Role: Investigating the death of Teresa Banks.

Clues in Deer Meadow

When Gordon Cole (David Lynch) assigns Desmond and Stanley to the case of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), he uses an odd language of code to brief them on the assignment. A secretary named Lil, dressed as a mime, performs a dance accompanied by various gestures signifying different aspects of the case. The meaning of the gestures (apart from the blue rose) is later explained by Desmond on the road to Deer Meadow (imagine if Lynch had cut this dialogue!). Now, at first sight this entire sequence may seem a little gratuitous, but if you think about it Desmond’s explanation of Lil’s code language is really something of a concession for Lynch, who usually prefers to leave many of the oddities in his movies unexplained.

That is why I believe Lil’s dance, and by extension the entire Deer Meadow sequence, is Lynch’s way to plant clues and hints to help us reevaluate Twin Peaks (the series), especially the events in episode 29. By explaining Lil’s bizarre gestures he’s actively challenging us to reassess the gestures, dress and speech of the Lodge characters. Read the rest of this entry »

Article by Ben Meuleman
Introduction by James Slone

David Lynch’s cult television series Twin Peaks remains one of the strangest, most mysterious and darkly humorous shows every produced in the States, and is arguably Lynch’s best and most accomplished work. No show that has run since has captured the texture, atmosphere or surreal Americana that Lynch and his collaborator Mark Frost accomplished within just two and a half seasons and two story arcs.

The central mysteries of the show—Laura Palmer’s murder and the Black Lodge—may have been wrapped up in the story sense, but the resolutions they provided spawned rabid speculation, fan interpretations, and even more questions. In a sense, Twin Peaks’ mystery was never solved. The aborted second season brought the show to a rapid conclusion, one that left many of its most fervent fans hanging and Lynch’s cosmology incomplete.

A friend of the site, Ben Meuleman, has written several comprehensive and thoughtful interpretations of Twin Peaks, including Lynch’s follow-up film Fire Walk with Me (Fire Walk with Me is arguably the most important piece of the puzzle as it fills in many blank spots in the series) and the pilot. His interpretations are unusually erudite and illuminating, relying on plain English and common sense, a rarity in Twin Peaks fan writing, which too often mimics the series’ opaqueness and the overt obtuseness of academic writing.

End of Media will feature a different article by Ben every week, covering different characters, places and events from the Twin Peaks universe. The first one covers the demonic character Bob, an inhabiting spirit tied to the murder of Laura Palmer.

SPOILER ALERT: Ben writes with the assumption that you’ve seen Twin Peaks. If you haven’t seen the series yet or have just started and don’t want crucial plot points revealed, do not continue to read. If you’ve seen it, continue on.

–James Slone
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Reviewed by James Slone

For some, the year following college is the time they find a career track, settle down and get married. But for others, it’s a period of directionless wandering, social ennui and sexual confusion. Mainstream movies tend to present college as a sexual free-for-all, a time of exploration and adventure before embracing maturity and responsibility. Presumably, adulthood follows.

“Adventureland,” despite officially being a comedy about losing one’s virginity, takes a hard and generally realistic look at what the post-college years are like for the sexually inexperienced and professionally unprepared when they return home, especially when doing so during an economic downturn—in this case, the summer following the 1987 stock market crash. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

A caustic and witty romantic comedy, “Moscow, Belgium” achieves a remarkably high level or realism for the genre. Directed by Christophe Van Rompaey, “Moscow, Belgium” doesn’t cheat, pull punches or take shortcuts to earn our affection. Instead, it gives us fully realized characters, who despite great faults, strive to love and be loved and fight for a measure of dignity even when the world slings mud at them.

The sharpest knife in the drawer is also the heroine, Matty, a single mother recently separated from her husband and stuck with two kids and a teenage daughter in a small flat in Ghent. Played emphatically by the roughly beautiful Barbara Sarafian, Matty captures the whole tone of the film, a core of warm romantic vulnerability nestled in a minefield of not-quite-resigned-to-her-fate hostility. When we first see her, she’s glumly pushing a shopping cart through a grocery store, her shoulders slumped forward, a look of bored despair on her face. She feels old and discarded, working a dead end job at the post office while her husband, an art professor in the throes of a midlife crisis, screws around with a twenty-something student. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

“Tokyo!” is actually three short films, directed by two Frenchmen, Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and Leos Carax (“The Lovers on the Bridge”), and the Korean director Bong Joon-ho (“The Host”). All three are well-known for their technical abilities, unusual creativity and willingness to mix styles and genre. While their strategies are fairly divergent and the films themselves vary in quality, the general tone of the triptych is darkly funny and surreal, tinged with elements of fantasy and magic realism.

Interior Design

Gondry’s entry, “Interior Design” is the most readily entertaining and grounded of the three films, though Gondry’s felt presence assures you that stranger things are afoot. It begins with the familiar experience of a young couple moving to a new city to find work and an apartment. The couple—Hiroko and Akira (played by Ayako Fujitani and Ryo Kase)—are mismatched. Akira, an aspiring filmmaker, is imaginative but thoughtless, putting Hiroko down without any hint self-consciousness. Worse, he has an easy time adjusting to the move, while Hiroko struggles. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

“Monsters vs. Aliens” features a cute conceit, some fun gags and a few likable characters, but that’s about it. Numbingly ingratiating and ever eager to please, it packs little of the content audiences expect from animated movies these days. You can blame Pixar for raising expectations. In the few moments it rises above light diversion, “Monsters vs. Aliens” offers some simple lessons about tolerance, believing in yourself and girl power. It works effectively on a Cartoon Network/Nickelodeon level, content to be predictably charming and inoffensive.

The story—if one can really describe it in those terms—concerns one Susan Murphy (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), a would-be house frau engaged to a narcissistic weather man (Paul Rudd). On the day of her wedding, she is struck by a meteor and transformed into a giantess. Re-dubbed “Ginormica” by the Pentagon, Susan is a copyright-free 50-foot woman. After the military nabs her, she’s placed in Area 51 with a series of other creatures who have been labeled monsters by the military, including Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie as the Fly), B.O.B. (Seth Rogan as the Blob), the Missing Link (Will Arnett as the Creature from the Black Lagoon) and a giant mutated grub (Mothra, Godzilla, et al.) Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

“Duplicity” wears a lot of hats, some more effectively than others. Always entertaining, it coasts smoothly along even when it’s going through the motions. There’s little underlying substance, but it plies its genres—romantic comedy, globetrotting spy thriller and corporate satire—with unusual proficiency. It stars Clive Owen and Julia Roberts as two ex-spies, now corporate operatives running a complicated yet oddly coherent scam involving their nominal employers, two pharmaceutical giants with the authentically generic names Equikrom and Burkett & Randle.

Clive Owen has cleaned up nicely since his last hurrah, “The International,” an intermittently entertaining spy thriller that plays somewhat like a serious version of this. Gone is the schlubby scowling exterior and wrinkled suits, and in their place one Ray Koval, a cold, slick son of a bitch in a Bryan Ferry mold, the kind of Owen character that inspires crushes in both sexes. Ray’s on-and-off lover and main sparring rival is pretty woman turned actor, Julia Roberts, whose character Claire Stenwick seems to consider every word and action from a distance. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Dispassionate and unromantic to a fault, the aptly named “Gomorrah” follows the everyday activities of the Camorra, Italy’s most pervasive criminal organization. The antithesis of the Sopranos, these gangsters are as ruthless as they are interchangeable. There are no operatic thrills, only the bottom line. Whether it means illegally burying toxic waste or buying control of slums, money, and its corrosive effect, is the only thing that matters.

Most of the action takes place in and around high-rise slums controlled by the Neapolitan Camorra. Children might play at the pool, but armed gangsters (draped in sports jerseys, gold chains and fake tans) stand watch. The urban landscape here looks scorched and post-apocalyptic. If the off-white buildings seem overfull with impoverished life, the surrounding fields are barren, weedy and desolate. With its ugly anonymous brutality—this really could be set anywhere—“Gomorrah” is perhaps the least touristy film shot in Italy in quite some time. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

At the outset of “Cherry Blossoms,” Rudi (Felix Eitner) is happily married, living a stubbornly simple life in a rural German village. He works the same sanitation job he’s always worked, eats the same stuffed cabbage for dinner and drinks the same beer with his wife before bed every night. His wife, Trudi (Hannelore Elsner), is informed by a doctor that she will soon die. Instead of telling Rudi—she doesn’t want to unduly burden him—she insists on visiting their children in Berlin.

She wants to visit their youngest son, Karl (Maximilian Brückner), in Tokyo, and realize her dream of seeing Mt. Fuji, but Rudi sniffs at the expense. They’re a loving couple, but its pretty clear that Rudi’s stodgy, predictable blandness has prevented Trudi from pursuing her interests in kabuki dance (she keeps a book with photos of herself in kabuki makeup) and travel. She has put her goals on hold for the marriage because she truly loves Rudi. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Clive Owen has a knack for playing jaded men in ridiculous situations. He lumbers around onscreen with his cynical frown and tired voice, and yet holds our attention. The withering stares and ruffled shirts are offset by a glint of sympathetic earnestness in his eyes, the occasional shit-eating grin, and the sheer size of the man. He can sustain an entire film simply by muttering complaints, hurling insults and sizing people up with incredulous glances. A by-the-numbers political thriller, “The International,” is elevated a little by his presence.

If I had to give you a reason for seeing “The International” aside from Owen, it would be the spectacularly bloody shootout in the Guggenheim that goes so far overboard with well-choreographed carnage that it threatens to break the generic film it’s buttressed by in half. It’s brutal, witty and unhinged in an almost liberating way, idiotically pointless but completely absorbing and, most important, entertaining. It’s the kind of scene that wakes you up in the theater—you rub your eyes and sit up a little. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Superheroes are a bad idea. At Batman’s level, they’re reactionary vigilantes; at Superman’s, world-ending weapons. One of the salient points of Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” and Zack Snyder’s film adaptation is that superheroes are a dangerous concept. Moore’s superheroes are violent sociopaths, impotent vigilantes, narcissistic megalomaniacs and mass murderers. And with a few notable exceptions, they’re also sexist, reactionary and antidemocratic. In this setting, a very 1980s New York, Batman would be a racial profiler.

Both the graphic novel and the film rewrite history so that in the 1940s, eccentric do-gooders decided to wear costumes and take down crooks. Sometime before Kennedy’s assassination at the hands of one costumed crime fighter, a nuclear experiment went awry, creating the god-like Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a man who exists on a quantum level (”the superman exists, and he’s American!”). Richard M. Nixon, in his best super villain turn, uses Dr. Manhattan to annihilate the North Vietnamese and installs himself as permanent president stateside. This is all shown during a slyly skewered title sequence, arguably Snyder’s best work here. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

“Waltz with Bashir” examines one of the darkest moments of the 1982 Israeli intervention in Lebanon, the Sabra and Shatila massacre. A big story at the time and largely forgotten in the States since then, the massacre involved the killing of thousands of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Phalangist militiamen with both tacit and direct support from the Israeli Defense Forces, then under the leadership of Ariel Sharon.

Men, women and children were indiscriminately murdered by the Christian Phalangists in retaliation for the assassination of their leader, Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, while the IDF watched on from periphery of the refugee camp. A lot of soldiers knew that something was going on—some even witnessed the shooting of civilians and noted that the Phalangists had carved crosses into the chests of some of the Palestinians—but no one did anything. Not because they were evil necessarily, but because most people are complacent and helpless before directives and orders. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Three Monkeys” tells the grim story of a Turkish family torn asunder by deception, violence, misplaced honor, and repressed emotions run wild. It’s a domestic drama without a hint of irony or distance. It’s suspenseful and tense without relying on editing or frenetic camera movements, content to linger on its subjects as they walk in their circles. Given all this, it might surprise you to know that it also looks gorgeous.

The film takes place in Istanbul, but to those of us whose exposure to the city has never gone beyond touristy photography of historical sites it might as well be an alien planet. The story is mainly set in rundown neighborhoods built on ancient, crumbling seawalls. Dark gray clouds hover over the sea, the only light from the sun flitting through them. The landscape is expansive, but the clouds seem to enclose the characters and the city. It’s a beautiful purgatory. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former president and warlord, was deposed in 2003. He is currently being tried in The Hague for 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder and mutilation of civilians (hacking off limbs and heads for example), abducting both adults and children to serve as laborers and soldiers, and using young girls and women as sex slaves. While most of these charges are for acts he committed in Sierra Leone, the way Taylor treated his own people wasn’t much better.

Elected to office in 1997, Taylor’s regime was mired in human rights abuses, including widespread use of torture and violence against civilians. He recruited child soldiers and put them to work terrorizing his population, allegedly using human sacrifice and cannibalism as psychological weapons against his political enemies. The Muslim rebels (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy or LURD) and warlords who fought against him weren’t any nicer, recruiting preteen soldiers, pumping them full of drugs and sending them on armed rampages where they raped and murdered thousands of civilians. War and rapine became facts of life, creating a huge flood of displaced refugees who trickled into Monrovia, Liberia’s capital. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Looking at this year’s major Oscar nominees, you get a pretty good sense of Hollywood’s sensibilities. What they want are big and brash entertainments, crowd pleasers, sentimental melodramas and in-your-face political polemics. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with these approaches, of course, but they tend obscure everyday, recognizable reality behind layers of supped-up editing, swelling soundtracks, exaggerated close-ups, and lots of blood, sweat and tears. And despite this, at least half of them are pretty boring too.

Consider the alternative. “Wendy and Lucy,” Kelly Reichardt’s follow up to the aggressively low-key “Old Joy,” eschews the sound and fury for something much more realistic and considerably less bombastic. It like a demonstration on what movies can be when they’re content to linger and observe everyday experiences. Not a lot happens in “Wendy and Lucy,” but it’s never boring. In fact, it’s deeply affecting, and it’s angry without being insistent on its political themes. It engages you without telegraphing its ideas with music or speeches. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

With “Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle attempts to use the horrors of the developing world to add heft to a light-weight romantic fairytale complete with a Bollywood dance number. The results are mixed but slick enough to elevate the film to Oscar status. This isn’t Boyle’s first “real world” fairytale movie. That honor goes to the similarly smooth, inspiring and nakedly manipulative “Millions,” about a couple of kids who stumble on a stash of cash. Money proves to be just as liberating and problematic in “Slumdog Millionaire,” which uses the Indian version of the game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” as a narrative device.

Boyle employs a convoluted flashback structure to tell the relatively simple story of Jamal (played as an adult by Dev Patel), a street kid from the slums of Mumbai who falls in love with his childhood friend Latika (Freida Pinto) and makes it his life’s mission, and indeed his destiny, to serve and protect her. He becomes a contestant on the game show to win the kind of the money that will impress her and free her from the bonds of poverty, not to mention the strong hand of an abusive gangster husband. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

People waiting for a glowing hagiographic biopic of Ernesto Guevara will probably be disappointed by “Che,” Steven Soderbergh’s detached and analytical two-part epic account of Guevara’s exploits in Cuba and Bolivia. This isn’t your standard episodic point-by-point biopic with swelling music and a star-studded cast, but rather a tightly focused and cerebral look at two periods in the life of revolutionary, one marked by triumph and the other by dismal failure. It’s kind of instructive in a way: here’s what being a professional revolutionary is like during those rare good moments, and here’s what it’s actually like most of the time. It’s like following up “the Battle of Algiers” with the decades of violence and heartbreak that came after the events it portrayed.

The first film, “The Argentine,” covers the July 26th Movement’s revolutionary struggle against the Batista regime in Cuba, from Fidel Castro and Che’s landfall in Cuba to Che’s eventual military triumph in Santa Clara. Castro’s columns disperse into the Sierra Maestra Mountains, carry out attacks against the military’s barracks, form alliances with communists and other radicals from Havana, and eventually route Batista’s demoralized forces on the plains and in the cities. Read the rest of this entry »

James Slone

“Che” comes prepackaged with controversy, which is one probable reason for why Steven Soderbergh avoided the kind of hero worship that usually accompanies films like this (see “Motorcycle Diaries”). As you would expect, the usual talking heads, right-wingers, Republican politicos and Cuban-Americans have already denounced it, sight unseen, because it offers a generally balanced portrait of someone who in their mind is a mass murderer. They ignore the evil of the regimes Ernesto Guevara fought against, exaggerate his own evil and generally disregard the brutal realities of a cold war that made monsters out of everyone.

They shirk questions raised about social justice, American culpability and the much greater violence of the Batista regime. They shrug off Guevara’s accurate accusations against the United States at the time: that we supported sociopath tyrants like Rafael Trujillo, that we used the largely undemocratic Organization of American States (OAS) for our own antidemocratic purposes, that Cold War calculations led to a criminal embargo against a country based solely on the seriousness of its reforms. Let it be said here that Castro’s revolution is mostly a failure. Cuba’s a poor, isolated and destitute country. But let’s not ignore the role the United States played in its failures. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Clint Eastwood has been unusually prolific lately, though the results of this latest period of productivity are decidedly mixed. “Letters from Iwo Jima” was a sturdy work of humanizing drama while “Changeling” was almost unwatchable—a melodramatic weepy with a plot so mechanical you could hear the gears turning beneath it. Copious output, as Woody Allen has demonstrated over the years, doesn’t equal consistent quality. So it was with a measure of trepidation that I attended a screening of “Gran Torino.”

I was expecting something predictable, which is exactly what I got. But I was surprised to also find myself somewhat engrossed and even touched in parts. What makes “Gran Torino” work a little better than some of Eastwood’s other recent output is its general insistence on simplicity and lack of overt self-consciousness. Only in its third act, which is a little too neat and contrived, does it get dragged down by Eastwood’s heavy-handedness. Read the rest of this entry »