The Mumpsimus

The question is not whether Red Dawn is a good movie. It is a bad movie. As the crazed ghost of Louis Althusser might say, it has always already been a bad movie. The question is: What kind of bad movie is it? (Aside: The question I have received most frequently when I've told people I went to see Red Dawn  was actually: "Does Chris Hemsworth take off his shirt?" The answer, I'm sorry to say, is no. All of the characters remain pretty scrupulously clothed through the film. The movie's rated PG-13, a designation significant to its predecessor, so all it can do is show a lot of carnage, not carnality. May I suggest Google Images ?) My companion and I found Red Dawn  to be an entertaining bad movie. I feel no shame in admitting that the film entertained me; I'm against, in principal, the concept of "guilty pleasures" and am not much interested in shaming anybody for what are superficial, even autonomic, joys. (That doesn't mean we can...

I suppose that comparing the late Tony Scott to Dziga Vertov will seem ridiculous to many (most!) people, as will proclaiming Domino  a masterwork. So be it. Here's a tribute to Tony Scott in which I do both of those things: Painter with a Movie Camera: A Tribute to Tony Scott from Matthew Cheney on Vimeo . And here are the tributes I mention in the video: Manohla Dargis, "A Director Who Excelled in Excess" Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, "Smearing the Senses: Tony Scott, Action Painter"

Scarface, 1932 There's an interesting two-part video essay by Matthias Stork posted at Press Play about what Stork calls "chaos cinema" -- action movies (mostly from the last 15 years or so) that violate classical principles of staging, framing, and cutting. I am in sympathy with Stork's overall point, and one of my few absolutely fuddy-duddy tendencies is a belief that classical action composition and editing is usually superior to the chaos cinema style Stork identifies -- I often want to yell at directors like Christopher Nolan  (who is five years older than me), "You kids will never understand why Howard Hawks is great!" But I have some reservations about Stork's analysis. Basically, they are two: 1.) He interprets an aesthetic technique as a single type of moral expression; 2.) he assumes all audiences watch the way he does.