October 26, 2003

Intolerable Cruelty

/ movies

Just saw the latest by the Coen Brothers, Intolerable Cruelty. I’ll see any Coen Brothers movie on spec, and this one didn’t disappoint. Go see it. Love, betrayal, ass-impalings, car smashups, gunfire, and that’s just in the first five minutes–but sets the tone for the rest of the movie. As always, the brothers deliver whacky characters, snappy and occasionally erudite dialogue, funky camera angles, and a good yarn. Plus a lot of alliterative appelations. This movie, somewhat uncharacteristically for them, has an A-list cast, with certified Beautiful Persons George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Eta Beta Tomato Jones, but it is no less a movie for it.

Go see it.

Hollywood is a trans-ironic zone

/ current events, movies

I overheard someone commenting once that we need a word for something beyond irony, because so much that happens in Washington exceeds what we normally think of as ironic.

This is true, and apparently it applies to the left coast as well. I saw a trailer for an upcoming movie, Paycheck, based on a Philip K Dick story of the same name. The trailer starts off by telling us that. in the future, the basis of all busines will be reverse engineering, and that our protagonist is the best reverse engineer in the business.

Why is this trans-ironic? Well, because the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed under the Clinton administration, outlawed reverse engineering, and the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), which runs annoying “public service announcements” before movies telling us not to pirate movies, was one of the primary forces behind that law. And here they are, glorifying the violation of it.

PKD would be amused.