Movie Matters: Jason Statham: The John Wayne of Our Time?

First a few facts. John Wayne, the Duke, starred in over 170 films , won an Oscar, and received the freaking Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is an American institution and in a league of his own.



Now to my point. John Wayne often played the good-hearted outlaw; yeah, he'd kill if had to, but you always knew he would protect innocents. With highly entertaining turns in this year's, The Bank Job and Death Race, Jason Statham, a 35 year old Brit, has continued that tradition in a slightly more muscle bound and expletive punctuated way. Whether it's robbing a bank to give his family a better life or killing every death row inmate for a chance to raise his daughter, Stratam plays the quintessential Dukesque movie hero by consistanly doing the wrong things for the right reasons.



There is nothing new or innovative about the films Statham stars in and therein lies another connection he has with the Duke; stick with what works. Wayne starred in over 75 westerns and you knew what you were going to get when plunked down your two bits. Similarly, Statham primarily appears in adrenaline drenched, crime inspired, explosion accented films that rarely fail to satiate my appetite for improbable action sequences. After walking out of his films I'm rarely disappointed.

And ultimately that's what a great movie star provides an audience, consistency. Statham will never win the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but I believe the Duke would acknowledge that the two of them were cut from the same ragged cloth.

Music Matters: Girl Talk

Girl Talk - Feed the Animals, Illegal Art
Download Now - The entire album for whatever you want to pay!

If the genius of pop music is its ability to combine disparate genres of music and package them in a way that makes them accessible to the combined audiences of those genres then what happens when you combine pop music with itself? Girl Talk, Gregg Gillis, gives us a musical essay, Feed the Animals, to help us answer that question. The album taps into the nostalgia that underpins the power of pop music.

The Dark Knight Matters: The Joker's On to Us

The hype for "The Dark Knight" has mainly focused on Heath Ledger's turn as the Joker. Hank Stuver, writing for the Washington Post, hints at why:

Finally, in this reevaluation of Joker, there is the obvious matter that the actor playing him died in January, not long after completing the film.

That's a whole other story, about which much has been written, and there is no denying that Ledger's pill overdose increases the macabre fascination we get this time from watching Joker. Ledger's meaningless death is what passes for deeper meaning in the pop world of outsize comic books and the celebrity costume party of superhero movies. If the Joker were real, he couldn't have planned a more cruel joke.

In all the fretting this spring about whether this would affect the marketing of "The Dark Knight," people found it very difficult to say the awful, Joker-like truth: We like it better because of it.

There is no deigning that Ledger's death will hang over ever frame making the film more ominous, more dark, more completely a product of the bleakness that shrouds the Batman myth. Batman has always stuck me as Grimm-like fairytale whose original ending, the one in which Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten, has been sanitized for mass consumption. Unlike Superman, the line between good and evil in the Batman universe is paper thin. Bruce Wayne, like every villain in Gotham, is severely psychologically scared by a society that fails him in an extremely personal way. His and theirs response to this is to operate outside of the boundaries of that society to manipulate it to his or their own ends. The overarching message then is not that Batman is good, but that his bad behavior just so happens to benefit the public (minus all of the property damage he causes).

Which brings us to the current chapter of the Batman saga, Christopher Nolan's, "The Dark Knight." I can't comment extensively on this film, as we are still a week away from its release, but if it's anything like "Batman Begins" where the "happy ending" took place on the rubble of Wayne Manor we should brace ourselves for a movie whose moral could be, "Suffering is all around us, and its meaningless." Mass market Hollywood movies rarely carry such a grim message but the gitty anticipation for this film exposes our collective desire to embrace the darkness.

Blogs Matter - Megan McArdle

Yes, Society is Gendered - July 1, 2008 Blog Post
By Megan McArdle

"I've had about ten requests from men to explain the phrase "winning the cocktail party". None from women. "

The above phrase appeared in a Megan McArdle (for disclosure's sake she works in my building) blog and the phrase "winning the cocktail party" is meaningless to me as well. Megan's blog explains that the phrase refers to the constant competition that goes on between men in social settings. Maybe it's because I always win, but I have never felt that I'm in a battle to win attention over other males at a party. My goal and goal of men I'm assuming is generally to win the battle for the attention of a specfic person not the party as a whole.

Ladies, correct me if I'm wrong.

Poetry Matters: Patrick Phillips

Patrick Phillips - Boy
The VRQ Poetry Series, University of Georgia Press

Poetry's magic lies in its ability to articulate feelings and thoughts that you yourself can not express. It brings into focus the blurry images of your mind and allows you to share your new found clarity with others. Unfortunately, mainstream media mostly ignores poetry. But my favorite podcast, The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keiller, bucks this trend and provides listeners with a daily dose of poetry.

During the week of May 4, 2008 the show featured two poems from Patrick Phillips' newest collection, Boy. I have to admit, while I like listening to Garrison Keiller's soothing voice read me poems, I rarely get the urge to buy poetry collections. Like most exercise, reading poetry is demanding and I'm usually too lazy to bother. But after hearing Phillips' "Matinée" and "Falling" I was compelled to buy the collection and dig into some serious verse.

Phillips' poetry works to articulate the transitions of the modern male experience. In "Falling" we meet a man who admits, "The truth is / that I fall in love / so easily because / it's easy," but ultimately he describes, "the only one / I fall in love with / at least once every day." The poem sheds light on how the primal adolescent behavior of cavorting with as many women as possible morphs into the civilized practice of monogamy. Many of the other poems in the collection deal with the role reversals that occur from childhood to adulthood. The verse is always straight forward and easy to understand which, at times, obscures the great depth of each poem.

If you are looking for consistanly poinent insights into the human condition, check out this collection.

Magazine Matters - Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough

Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough - The Atlantic
By Lori Gottlieb

Lori Gottlieb is a graduate of Stanford Medical School, a New York Times best selling author, a contributor to NPR, who has written for The New York Times, Time, and The Atlantic. Her career is a runaway success, yet at 40, she's still single. She wrote, what amounts to an open letter to young, smart, career minded woman, in the March issue of Atlantic, begging them to settle for "Mr. Good Enough." It's a very funny/sad article that made me at once ecstatic to be a man and sad for my female friends for whom this article was written.

Many of those friends, mostly twnetysomethings, have gotten their hands on the article and have been talking about it fervently. I would be interested in hearing their thoughts and I hope they take a moment to respond to this post with their feelings about the article. I did talk to one of my married friends who is in her early 30's and without even reading the article she agreed 100 percent that women should settle. This is a non-issue for me because I'll never have to settle. If I don't find the women of my dreams (a 20 something with a bright future and a palpable sexual energy) in the next 15 years, I'll still have another 15 years to keep looking and never diminish my ability to start a family. Women on the other hand, only have a short window to procreate.

Is this fair? Yes. Men are born with just enough genetic code to exist, while women are born with the complete catalogue of the human genetic code. Therefore women are the greater sex. They have the power to create life with the help of just a few cells. Men need an entire woman to pass on their genes. Once science figures out how to manufacture sperm in the lab, the arguments for keeping men around will hold less and less weight. Men start wars, die sooner, are stupider, and most of us go bald. The advantages we do have are that we get more attractive as we age and our sperm works well into our 70's. So I don't feel bad that you have to have all your children by 37.

Read the article and let's have a discussion.

Music Matters - Melody Gardot

Melody Gardot - Worrisome Heart, Universal Classics and Jazz
Download Now - Worrisome Heart, Some Lessons (Heck just get the whole album for $5.99 at iTunes)

Melody Gardot's sultry jazz vocals are unobtrusive yet deeply affecting. Worrisome Heart, Gardot's first full length album, is the kind of record that you put on for ambient sound, but it's also the album you put on to steady an emotional crisis of the heart. For Gardot, love is real and terrifying. The fragility and urgency of life may be more apparent to Gardot, who survived a serious bicycle/car collision when she was a teenager; she was on the bike. The accident resulted in injuries that require her to use a cane, wear sun glasses all the time, and wear earplugs to treat her Hyperacusis/Tinnitus. She's walks on a fragile frame and has hyper-sensitive senses but the music she makes is sturdy and never overbearing. The musical styling shies away from sugary poppiness and cleaves hard to pure Jazz. The characters in her songs are venerable and exposed, but safe in the hands of Jazz which creates a community of exposed instruments and players. This is one of those rare works of art that meets you where you are and doesn't ask questions.