Category: Shallow

Today’s profile of Still Holding author Bruce Wagner in The Times (Speed Dialing S for Satire by Bernard Weinraub) got me to thinking about the prolific novelist/filmmakers earlier career: character actor.
If you grew up in the late 80’s, you may remember Wagner’s teeny-tiny roles in “Savage” Steve Holland‘s teenage comedies One Crazy Summer and How I Got Into College. In the former, Wagner played Uncle Frank, a man holed up in his room all summer trying to win a radio contest. (The movie costarred Demi Moore, John Cusack, and the awesome Curtis Armstrong.) In the latter, he played A, the hypothetical “player” in every S.A.T. question opposite B, played by Mr. Show alum (and the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants) Tom Kenny. (Also in the film: Anthony Edwards, Lara Flynn Boyle, and the late Phil Hartman.)
Wagner had a few other minor roles after that, but he mostly stuck to writing; if the reviews are any indication, he made the right choice.
Here are some other well-known writers who’ve tried their hands at acting:
George Plimpton has had cameos and speaking parts in everything from Rio Lobo to Good Will Hunting.
Norman Mailer appeared in Ragtime and played Harry Houdini in Cremaster 2 (perhaps not a “film,” per se, but you can watch it on a screen).
Maya Angelou was in Roots, Poetic Justice, and How to Make an American Quilt.
Kurt Vonnegut had an amusing cameo in Back to School as himself.
Gore Vidal appeared in Bob Roberts, Gattaca, and Igby Goes Down.
Please feel free to use our comments to share others I’ve overlooked.

In this week’s Times ‘Arts & Leisure’ section, Elvis Mitchell takes on every pop culture savvy parents’ nightmare: the child-in-danger film. Mitchell’s essay, For Parents, the Fear Factor Grows does a good job explaining the genre using some recent examples like The Missing, Mystic River, and 21 Grams, explaining that these films portray how “Childhood innocence is caught in the undertow and shattered on the rocks.”
Curiously absent from the piece is the oeuvre of Steven Spielberg, a director who has virtually built his career around children in danger. From the enslaved kids in peril in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) to those kids surrounded by hungry Velociraptors in Jurassic Park (1993) up through Haley Joel Osment‘s little lost robot boy nearly being doused with boiling oil while pleading “Don’t burn me! Don’t burn me!” in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), Spielberg has brought us some of the scariest images of children in danger in film history. The director has played the child-in-danger motif every which way, from tragedy (the little girl in the red coat in 1993’s Schindler’s List) to farce (the friendliest spirit of a dead kid ever in 1995’s Casper). Luckily for Spielberg, he managed to dodge the ultimate kiddie danger bullet by not casting Michael Jackson in Hook (1991): of course, he may have also gotten hexed for life for it.
There’ve been a few mainstream articles and academic papers that refer to Spielberg’s child-in-danger fixation, but not many. It seems that the director’s mainstream appeal, abundant talents, and unrivaled power in Hollywood distract reviewers from the unseemlier aspects of his big budget entertainments. But just beneath the surface of Spielberg’s plastic fantastic films is a barely contained sadism that’s frequently aimed at kids.
The least mainstream (yet most focused) examination of Spielberg’s sadism comes courtesy of Apocalypse Culture author/editor Adam Parfrey‘s alternately kooky and cogent 1993 essay “Pederastic Park?”. Parfrey, for sure, goes too far in his assessment of Spielberg (and the side-by-side comparison of Hook and some truly disturbing pedophile fictions Parfrey somehow “found” in the published version of his essay place the author himself in the rather queasy company of those whom he critiques), but he does get at a certain repressed strain of sadism (often sexualized) in Spielberg’s films. Here’s Parfrey summing up Jurassic Park:

King King, The Lost World, and Godzilla, three monster epics cannibalized by Jurassic Park, achieved their thrills without resorting to on-screen menacing of tots. Indeed, only on milk cartons can we find children so physically raped as the celluloid juveniles of Jurassic Park. The film’s sadistic tone is established early on, when a fat child challenges the paleontological theories of protagonist Sam Neill. Neill turns on the boy, and in low, menacing tones, he demonstrates to the child how a prehistoric nasty would mangle and devour him. Adding a distinctly Peter Kurtenish frisson, Neill slashes near the child’s belly and crotch with a large, sharp claw.

Crispin Glover, who has a chip on his shoulder the size of Chad against Spielberg (he sued him after Spielberg used a Glover look- and act-alike in the sequel to Back to the Future, which Glover co-starred in and Spielberg executive produced) has also logged in his own bad Steven essay (also for Parfrey, in the book Apocalypse Culture II). Echoing Parfrey (and severly abusing the Socratic method) Glover wrote in 2000:

Does Steven Spielberg focus much of his fantasy life on young people? Did he portray children wallowing in sewers filled with fecal matter in Schindler’s List? Did he use children to finger-paint an adult in Hook?… Are the inclinations of Steven Spielberg above suspicion by the media-fed culture? Was Steven Spielberg very friendly with Michael Jackson? Wasn’t Michael Jackson supposed to play Peter Pan in Steven Spielberg’s version of the story? Now that Michael Jackson is no longer held in favor by the mass media, does Spielberg associate with him?

Sure, Glover is a well documented whack-job and Parfrey’s been called everything from “sick” to “fascist” so you might not want to take their word for it. Then again, neither of them pretends to be Mr. Family Entertainment. Spielberg should know to avoid such themes, especially since he reportedly swore off using children in dangerous F/X shoots after John Landis created some real life child-danger when two kids (and actor Vic Morrow) were accidentally killed during the making of Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1983, a film for which Spielberg also produced and directed a segment. (Interestingly, the segment Spielberg originally intended to shoot for that film involved kids terrorized by a bully.) You’d think after a tragedy like that, Spielberg’s appetite for depictions of child endangerment would go away, yet anyone who saw Hook or A.I. knows that’s not the case.
As coincidence would have it, there’s a new version of Peter Pan coming out on Christmas Day. Steven Spielberg was not involved with the production in any way. He’s busy producing Jurassic Park IV, coming to a theater near you in July 2005. It’ll be fun for the whole family—bring the kids.

Must The New York Post always unleash its film editor, V.A. Musetto (left), on every dewy starlet who appears in an independent film? Can’t they find someone other than their resident Cine File to interview these would-be ingenues so we can be spared nauseating passages like this one from his recent date—I mean interview—with Emily Grace, star of What Alice Found:

The show-everything [nude] scene must have been difficult, Cine File suggested over brunch with Grace at French Roast in the West Village. (She ordered pasta, he an omelet.)
“It was and it wasn’t, because it was a closed set and they [the crew] were really respectful. No one made me feel uncomfortable” Grace reported.
“I allowed my own nervousness to fuel the scene. I didn’t try to get rid of it or cover it up. I just let it be as awkward as it was.”
Grace doesn’t have a new movie lined up, but she’d like to work with Sofia Coppola, Todd Solondz, John Sayles and Steve Buscemi.
What about Woody Allen, or is his personal life too troubling?
“Do I have to answer that?” she said after a pause.

(“And would you date an old man with a beard?” Cine File asked off the record, of course.)
This year alone, Musetto has had face time with Erika Marozsan (“The role requires a lot of nudity by Marozsan, and Cine File wondered if she found it difficult to bare all in front of strangers…”); Ludivine Sagnier (“Sagnier, whose erotic performance in the French thriller ‘Swimming Pool’ has people calling her ‘the new Bardot’…”); and 13 year-old (!) Keisha Castle-Hughs (“a natural-born actor…. Keisha is terrific as tomboy Pai, who has to fight for love from her male-chauvinist grandfather, who marginalizes her just because she’s female…”). In the past, he’s enjoyed the company of Summer Phoenix (“The exotic-looking 24-year-old actress—youngest member of the acting clan that includes siblings Joaquin, Rain, Liberty and the late River—has appeared in 10 movies…”); Orla Brady (“Over lunch at Time Cafe in the East Village, Cine File points out that the movie [A Love Divided], which opens here on Friday, portrays the Catholic Church in a bad light…”).
There are more, but I feel icky all over as it is…

Tired of slogging through Elvis’ baroque metaphors simply to find out what you should think about The Last Samurai? Don’t have the time to read all of A.O.’s musings on Honey?
Worry no more. low culture’s Dumbing-It-Down desk is here to, well, dumb-it-down for you. In the interest of bringing ourselves that much closer to the depths of Entertainment Weekly we’ve scientifically assigned the traditional star ratings to all of today’s Times movie reviews. (Please note that these synopsis reviews do not reflect the opinions of low culture, they reflect the opinions of The New York Times.)
The Last Samurai
Honey
Monsieur Ibrahim
What Alice Found
Forget Baghdad

It’s time for another one of low culture‘s trademark specious pop culture comparisons, the better to raise the ire (or, more likely, benumb the yawning indifference) of casual readers and insane commentators alike.
And this one has the added benefit of me not even having seen the movie in question, Mona Lisa Smile. Starring America’s Sweetheart emeritus, Julia Roberts, and a pride of her 20-something replacements–in–training, Smile tells the story of an unconventional, inspirational teacher at a staid, upper-crust school. It’s probably a lot like Dead Poets Society only… prettier.
As a Wellesley alum myself, I felt the need to point out some similarities between the film’s stars and some of the school’s most famous former students. (Seriously, no shit: I spent several summers of my formative years at this camp, playing college student while other—so called “normal”—kids attended soccer camp or simply hung around the house being bored for two months.)
Let’s check out some of the film’s stars and their sorta kinda real world analogs, shall we?
One of them went on to become a famous television anchorwoman, a legend in her field.

Another became one of the best humor writers—male or female—of her generation and then went Hollywood with a string of movies no one admits to liking but everyone can quote. (“I’ll have what she’s having.”)

The last one, well, I’m not so sure what she’s done… something pretty good, I bet.

Yes, these women didn’t all graduate the same years, it’s true. But when you make a movie, you tend to fudge over things like dates and continuity. All of these women, like the characters in the film, attended Wellesley during a time of shifting gender roles in this country and went on to become successful and famous in fields that would’ve been closed to then upon entering college. (And if we go by the old “rate a woman’s success by the man she married” formula, these ladies didn’t do half bad: a two-time Oscar winner and multiple nominee; a great journalist and an Oscar nominee; and, oh, the two-term President of the United States.)
Since Revolution Studios, the film’s production company, has shown an acute interest in prurience for prurience‘s sake, I’m wondering how they’ll manage to work in what Ron Rosenbaum has memorably dubbed “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal”.
[Confidential to M.W.: There is no special prize for being the first one to respond to this. Might I suggest using those typing fingers for another activity?

Sometimes in a columnist’s career, there’s one story that’s like his great white whale: it’s his passion, his obsession, the thing that keeps him going. And if that columnist is lucky, that story winds up on the frontpage of the newspaper and on the evening news. Finally, all those years of obsessive toiling, of chasing down leads and cultivating sources pays off and he becomes the go-to guy on the subject, the writer other writers look to for breaking news and critical context.
Take Friedman, for instance.
No, not Pulitzer Prize winning Times op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman. I’m talking about FOXNews 411 columnist Roger Friedman. (To belabor the Friedman/Friedman comparison a minute longer, both men have branched out into movies: Thomas with Straddling the Fence, Roger with Only The Strong Survive.) While the war in the Middle East has brought Thomas his moment of glory, Roger’s got the Michael Jackson case and all the mini scandals that flow from it like tributaries from a raging, crazy river.

That earlier post about how we weren’t going to post any more Hilton-alia? We take it back. Nicky’s gone brown!