F U Tube

It didn’t take long for The New York Times to move beyond conventional election analysis into the murky waters of the trend piece. But here it is, leading the first Sunday Styles section of the post-November 4th world: Generation O. “More 18-29-year-olds went to the polls this year than in any election since 1972…These younger voters…may forever be known as Generation O,” posits Damian Cave. Never mind that percentage-wise the youth turnout was not quite as a robust as had been predicted (and only a smidgen higher, at 52%, than in 2004 when John Kerry galvanized the young imagination).

The Styles section has long prided itself on coining (or popularizing already antiquated) inane catchphrases—think metrosexual, drunkorexia, bromance, the man date. But its breathless coverage of this generational love affair ignores an ironic twist in the 2008 race: the internet, that great agent of the young, was just as important to John McCain’s stodgy campaign as it was to Obama’s slick machine. Only whereas the president elect harnessed the internet’s elusive power, McCain sat by as it led to his undoing.

Grassroots was to the Obama campaign what maverick was to the McCain/Palin candidacy. The first-term Illinois senator was not supposed to win. He was up against the indomitable Clinton establishment and its reservoir of experience and deep pockets. But Obama and his people were clued in to the power of the internet in a way that stubbornly eluded older politicians. There were fundraising websites. Facebook groups. Emails and text messages seemingly from the candidate himself (convincing no more a discerning political pupil than Scarlet Johansson of a personal correspondence).

Obama built an online community that realized the internet’s best potential. He created a savvy, coherent forum that met practical goals (spread the word; raise money, even incrementally) but also realized the loftier ambition of empowering (and flattering) his devotees. Hope and change are intangible. But the internet and its infinite tentacles made them seem within reach.

John McCain did not steer the internet his way and the result was the inverse of Obama’s: a burlesque of disgruntled supporters tragically out of synch with their candidate. An elderly woman at a town hall meeting told McCain she could not trust Obama. Her reason, after a moment’ hesitation: “he’s an Arab.” When McCain mentioned his opponent’s name in speeches he was routinely meet with jeers of “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” A sheriff introducing Sarah Palin at a rally made sure to address the Democratic nominee by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama. You can guess where he placed the emphasis. An Obama volunteer asked a crowd of Pennsylvania Republicans why his friend, under Palin’s policy, should have to pay for a rape kit. “She should pay double,” bellowed a man in the crowd.

McCain hardly enabled this pettiness. He quickly removed the microphone from the elderly lady and clarified that Obama was “a good man. A family man.” (He did not clarify that Obama is a Christian, a seemingly gratuitous revision in light of earlier campaign controversies.) He winced at the caterwauling. But the damage was done. The internet is often lauded for its immediacy, but rarely for its permanence. Witnesses posted clips of these unfortunate incidents on the web, bloggers had a field day and millions of people sent them to the inboxes of family and friends. A picture emerged of a listless candidate surrounded by a lynch mob.

The 2008 election was a modern one, but it exposed some dissonant, primitive truths about the internet. The web creates communities, but also encourages cliques. It enables universalism, but also preposterous niches. Facebook might unite you with a fellow stamp enthusiast, but the time spent ogling each other’s collections via online photo albums can potentially take you away from your family or that next door neighbor you’ve never met. And as McCain ruefully learned this year, the internet provides unparalleled access to information, but also occasional unwanted exposure to the noxious and loathsome (incessant penis enlargement spam being the proverbial, disconcertingly small tip of the iceberg). It wasn’t just the internet that did McCain in, but the subset of ignorant, bigoted McCain supporters that found their way on to the screen and at once appalled and appealed to the admittedly baser instincts of smug liberals and undecided voters alike. To borrow some internet lingo, the internet plagued the McCain campaign with a bad case of TMI.

Let The Right One In

Sociologists take note: accidental exposure to Abba is no longer the greatest threat facing Sweden’s teenagers. For starters, there is the child murderer on the loose in Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. The killer’s peculiar method of draining his victims’ blood serves an even higher evil: feeding his vampire daughter, Eli (Lina Leandersson). Don’t dismiss the thriller as schlock with subtitles. Let the Right One In is a tender, gracefully shot coming of age tale with a slasher veneer. Its genre elements subside as Eli befriends Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), an outcast neighbor whose struggle with the local bullies is so extreme as to make bloodsucker company a relief.

The running joke here is that Oskar suffers more acute isolation than his undead companion. Eli, forever twelve, has practical, immediate concerns (fresh blood, heavy curtains, impatiently waiting to be invited into homes she visits) and is spared the pubescent speed bumps (divorced parents, idiot teachers, schoolyard thugs) that confront frail Oskar. The young vampiress meets Oskar as he fantasizes about the revenge he might have on his tormentors and coaxes the same violent defense mechanisms out of him that she yearns to suppress in herself. But both child actors imbue their characters with a sweet vulnerability and longing that elicit the kind of audience empathy rarely found in horror films. A potent scene in which Eli makes an unbidden entrance into a sullen Oskar's home (and the searing aftermath) illuminates the emotional heft that the movie offers as an antidote to the usual featherweight character development in current horror cinema.

Let the Right One In’s vampire story might serve as adolescent parable, but the movie respects its genre roots. The lighting is austere, alternating pitch black fright scenes with stark white, snowy landscapes. Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography eschews gruesome close-ups for elegant wide shots. And Johan Soderqvist’s score spares viewers the cheap musical jolts that so often cue horror fans to jump in their sets. Still, Alfredson and writer John Lindqvist (upon whose novel the movie is based) do not take their film too seriously and include gleefully dark comic moments (particularly a school ice-skating trip gone fantastically awry) to lighten the somber mood.

Things only fall apart in the final scene, a tacked on coda that spoils what would have been a subtle conclusion. Let the Right One In is a horror film with few scares, a black comedy with few outright laughs. What kept it ticking until its very end was the fragile bond between Eli and Oskar and the fortitude Oskar’s supernatural friend inspired in him. But the movie ends not with a triumph of humanity but of the supernatural. It is a lame concession to genre norms, at its hoariest going so far as to hint at a sequel.

Sulk Mania

Randy “The Ram” Robinson, the hulking over-the-hill prizefighter in The Wrestler, is not the film’s only player looking for redemption. Star Mickey Rourke and director Darren Aronofsky also aim to revitalize their careers with the unassuming drama. Robinson’s floundering career in the ring has left his personal life a shambles; his estranged daughter Stephanie (Rachel Evan Wood) detests him and his only love interest is the reluctant stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei, in another role with a single digit costume budget). After a heart attack and failed attempts at stability with both women, Randy enters the fray one last time. But Rourke’s and Aronofsky’s naturalistic performance and direction suggest that neither career will burn out anytime soon.

The Wrestler is Aronofsky’s first feature to deal with human destruction working from the outside in. Pi, Requiem for a Dream and the misguided The Fountain all examined the effects a ravaged mind could have on the body. But Randy’s punishment begins externally. It comes in the gruesome, hard-to-watch form of body slams, folding chairs and staple guns. Fans that had to turn away from Requiem’s close-ups of track marks and plunging hypodermic needles: you have been warned. Fittingly for a movie about the physical, The Wrestler is the least cerebral of Aronosfky’s films in tone and production values. Robert Siegel’s dialogue is restrained and straightforward, its more emotive moments tersely distilled to their cores. Maryse Alberti’s cinematography provides a bleached palette to match Randy’s weariness and the film’s forlorn Jersey Shore setting. And gone are the flashy editing techniques—split screens! Time jumping! Hyperkinetic montages!—that defined Aronofsky’s earlier efforts.

The Fountain, despite its intellectual and visual ambitions, flummoxed many critics and alienated all but Aronofsky’s most avid fans with its muddled time travel story arc. Ann Hornaday called it an “earnest, magnificent wreck” in The Washington Post. Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times was less kind, saying that enduring it was “a pretty decent case for euthanasia; here is what it’s like to long for a swift, merciful end.” With The Wrestler, Aronofsky and Rourke (no stranger to career frustration himself and, by the weathered looks of him, a man who could identify with the Ram’s pathological self-abuse) find success by scaling back their ambitions. Rourke withdraws further and further into himself over the course of the film. At its conclusion he is an empty shell, spurned by the two women who were his last hopes. “That’s the only place they love me. Out there,” he says of the ring—displayed here as more of a fraternity than a deathtrap—before his ill-advised final brawl. And so he flings himself back into the embrace of the community that had lost faith in him. Aronofsky and Rourke have done the same and famously forgiving Hollywood is sure to provide a warm welcome back.

"The Roaches Wave Hello"

Mars Bar does not blend. Its exterior is caked in evolving neon murals and graffiti, “Dive In” scrawled above the glorious dive bar’s rickety front door. But its outward brazenness betrays a dark, dank inside whose patrons want nothing more than anonymous bender. Recently, both sides have taken a hit. The Mars Bars windows have been cleaned. Timid passersby can finally look in and the customers, reluctantly, can see out.

A series of Avalon luxury buildings have enveloped Mars Bar’s block in a cloak of hastily constructed glass mediocrity. Down the street you’ll find Blue and Gold, a high priced boutique imported to the East Village from East Hampton, the neighborhood’s spiritual antithesis despite the shared geographic moniker. Also on the block is Bowery Wine Company, co-owned by Bruce Willis (who honed his chops as a restaurateur with the highly regarded Planet Hollywood franchise) and easily among the most generic bars an unlucky soul might stumble upon in Manhattan. Across Houston is a behemoth Whole Foods store, saved from complete yuppie oblivion only by the marvelous, cheap beer store at its northeastern corner. True, Mars Bar does have a neighbor in debauchery with The Cock (nee The Hole), the notoriously louche cesspool of a gay bar just an eightball’s throw away. But gone are the days when Mars Bar was the rule of the area and not the exception to it.

As one of the ever-dwindling holdouts of the East Village’s CBGB heyday, any sign of a Mars Bar cleanup or, heaven forbid, renovation is greeted with consternation by it grizzled, stumbling clientele. Rex, the Dee Snyder look-alike who does not appear to have left the bar in eleven years, says the cops (who have busted into the place on the few occasions I’ve found myself there past New York’s 4am closing time) have it in for the joint. But with a set of customers like Rex, Crazy Dave (thrown out of the bar an average of twice a day) and Handsome Eddie (whose Lazy Boy chair occupies a corner), you can rest assured that one of New York’s great bastions of sleaze and grime will not go gently into that good night. Where would East Villagers drink when the sun comes up if it did?

George Washington

“He just wanted greatness.” That’s how Nasia (Candace Evaofski) describes her friend George (Donald Holden) in David Gordon Greene’s George Washington. The same could be said for the wunderkind director himself, just 25 when he made the ambitious, lyrical film. George Washington depicts one summer in the lives of impoverished youths in a decayed North Carolina town. Tragedy and triumph bookend the season and catapult the protagonists into complicated, compromised adulthood.

Greene flaunts his influences. The film is uncannily reminiscent of Terrance Malick’s masterful Days of Heaven. This means lush cinematography (by Tim Orr) of pastoral landscapes threatened by (and dependent on) modern industrialism. Evaofski’s stirring voiceover narration, packed with plainspoken childhood wisdom (“The grown-ups in my town, they were never kids like me and my friends. They had worked in wars and build machines.”) also recalls Malick. But unlike Malick’s seemingly effortless beauties, Greene’s film, while an ascetic delight, occasionally falters under the weight of its artistic flourishes.

Editors Steven Gonzales and Zene Baker’s provide an elliptical structure that compliments the film’s dreamy tone, but negates Greene’s naturalistic dialogue and simple plot. Moments of ethereal grace—George visiting his friend’s burial place (“No one will bother you here”), Nasia telling George, “I hope you live forever” — rub against stalled narrative asides and Orr’s overdependence on slow-motion.

George Washington suggests a literary horror film. Characters are challenged by their own mortality. “I’m not a very good person. I didn’t feel anything,” says Sonya (Rachael Hardy) after witnessing a friend’s death. Viewers will not say the same of Green’s fitfully transcendent debut. Thankfully, the young director is unlikely to face his own mortality any time soon.

Hack to School

The few compelling scenes in Antonio Campos’ Afterschool occur within its first thirty seconds and do not belong to the movie itself. Robert (Ezra Miller) watches You Tube clips from his boarding school dorm. There are cackling babies and sleeping kittens. The bits grow ominous: a skateboarder crashes onto concrete; Saddam Hussein’s is hanged; a young girl is debased in a needlessly protracted porn outtake. Sadly for the audience, it only gets worse. When Robert starts shooting his own videos, his camera catches the drug overdoses of two popular students. The memorial video he is assigned to produce details the school’s and his own unraveling.

Afterschool mistakes formal pretension and glacial pacing for art. Cinematographer Jodie Lee Lipes favors spare wide shots and reluctant pans. This refinement suggests a corrective to crude viral videos. But the framing is still an amateurish debacle. The images lack the beauty and foreboding intrigue found in Elephant and Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s deliberately paced studies of teenage disaffection. Some good will come out of Afterschool if You Tube amateurs realize they can save their money and skip film school.

Campos’ dialogue is similarly muted and unadorned, realism at odds with the clinical photography. Characters betray zero emotion and lack a plot that might have mitigated these flaws. But there is no narrative arc or climax to supplement the contemplative stillness; the film is all reaction. A cheap last minute twist excels only at audience manipulation. Afterschool is a joyless lecture on How We Live Now. It suffers from the same shortcomings of the Web 2.0 culture it means to critique. Only here, artifice compounds banality. Stick with the sleepy kittens.

Iowa Lineman

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is named after one of the titular musician’s songs, but it also describes the relationship between the Iowan teen runaway and the 1970s downtown New York counterculture he helped define at its multicultural, pansexual peak.

Russell was a beguiling composite of divergent traits: shy, yet forceful; avant-garde with pop sensibilities; a perfectionist who never met a deadline and painfully insecure about his talents despite genius. His reticence and transmutability—he struggled to accept his homosexuality—formed a charisma that drew people in just as his stubborn work ethic repelled them. The most heartrending moments in the film are the interviews with those who never questioned their allegiance to the complicated, difficult man: his overwhelmingly decent parents— have Kleenex ready for their segments—and his boyfriend, Tom Lee.

Russell’s music imbues Wild Combination with hypnotic grace. The documentary’s most vivid moments feature how-did-they-get-this footage of ecstatic dancers at legendary downtown clubs like The Loft. Russell drew on the orgiastic ferment of the 1970s New York underground with nods to disco, soul, folk, spoken word and the ambient “echo noise” that later defined the New Wave movement. The movie expertly captures that dynamic, bygone time that claimed Russell, who died of AIDS in 1991, as a victim.

Wild Combination is the rare film chronicle of art that registers as art itself. It is a compliment to say that the films more esoteric shots—wake from the Staten Island ferry, spasmodic bursts of monochrome synced to the music, lyrical shots of farmland—are reminiscent of the gorgeous, calculated randomness of Russell’s work itself.