Why Internet Porn Sucks

Here's a link to a letter I wrote to online pornography. One of many money shots that are included in it:

Oh, she’s sucking his dick? That’s nice, I guess, even though he’s having kind of a hard time keeping it up, probably because he did a bunch of coke before they started shooting. How long does this go on for? Jesus, five whole minutes of this monotonous dick-sucking? Now what? Oh, she’s gotten on top of him—great, a long shot of her rubbery labia bouncing up and down on his smooth balls without the distraction of being able to see either of their faces. Yeah, this is hot.

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Why Tron: Legacy Sucked

Why did I see Tron: Legacy last weekend?

I could say I thought it was going to be a good movie—Jeff Bridges! A Daft Punk soundtrack! Shiny things!—but I read the AV Club review and knew it wasn’t going to be “good.” Maybe I thought it would be entertaining, the way Die Hard 4 was kind of entertaining, or the way one of those CSI-esque shows on Fox that doesn’t make any sense but keeps chugging along anyway and sucks you into its bullshit world is entertaining. I didn’t think it would be boring.

Well, it was. Most of the scenes were of people talking, and mostly they were just trying to explain to each other (and the audience) what the hell was going on. The plot is about the people who live in a computer trying to come out and taking over the world with glowing disks and rods, or something, led by Evil Jeff Bridges, and opposed by Good Jeff Bridges and his son, who is played by a guy with only two facial expressions. There’s also some business with some Magical Beings who live in the computer and can “change everything” if they get out of the computer. All of this was treated extremely seriously, with the only comic relief coming in the form of a character who I can only describe as a homosexual Mad Hatter. The action sequences are either sub-Matrix martial arts fights, or stuff ripped off directly from the first Tron or the first Star Wars. Oh, and Good Jeff Bridges talks like The Dude from The Big Lebowski for reasons that are not adequately explained. “You’re really messing with my Zen thing man,” he says at one point. I guess that was supposed to be funny.

It was shiny, I’ll give it that. There were a lot of blinking lights, and when one of the computer people got killed they would collapse into a bunch of cubes. And sometimes entire motorcycles materialize around people! That was cool, but by the climatic, Star-Fox-inspired battle scene, I was back to being bored. It looked about as impressive as a video game, with a story that could have been a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Tron is the kind of movie that makes you incredibly curious about aspects of the story that are skimmed over, despite the mountains of exposition. Like, are all the computer people true Turing-test-passing AIs? And how does Bridges’ 1980s-computer have enough memory to handle all of them? Why does Evil Jeff Bridges only have about five henchmen with him at any one time; why isn’t he using his entire army to track down Good Jeff Bridges? Most importantly, why are the computer programs (apparently) men and women? Do they have sex?

Those last questions, about what kind of sex computer programs have with each other, are kind of unavoidable—there’s a scene at an actually-not-very-exciting-looking party where a couple of sexy lady programs are sitting on guy programs’ laps and we follow Beau Garrett’s hypnotic ass as she walks through the crowd. Seriously, do computer people have dicks, or what? Do they get pregnant? Don’t tell me that Good Jeff Bridges has been cohabiting with his only ally, the smoking hot Olivia Wilde, for what amounts to hundreds of years without knocking neon-covered boots with her. And clearly Olivia Wilde is attracted to Jeff Bridge’s Son The Shitty Actor—there’s an intense one-act play about a father-son-mistress love triangle buried in this movie, but that’s skimmed over. This is a Disney production, after all, and Disney’s house special is creating characters that ooze sexuality (even when the characters in question are animated animals) and then neutering them.

Tron follows a trend, exemplified by Avatar, of extraordinarily stupid science fiction blockbusters. Old-fashioned science fiction was written by people like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who knew their science and wrote intellectually inquisitive stories and novels, albeit ones with wooden prose and thin characters. Hollywood sci-fi keeps the thin characters but doesn’t give a shit about explaining how anything happens or why. Science is just magic in Tron. How does a person go inside a computer and apparently remain a flesh-and-blood being who ages and bleeds? How do computer people made out of data become actual matter when they go outside of the computer? Doesn’t that violate the basic law of physics? No, because everything happens because of magic. You aren’t meant to ask questions or engage with the fictional world or think about anything when you watch a Hollywood sci-fi epic. Just sit back and let the effects wash over you, like you were watching a 120-minute car commercial.

People love this shit, of course—Tron earned 43 million at the box office over the weekend, and at least one sequel is likely. The user review section on Metacritic is filled with high ratings from people who thought it was great, and who use movies to distract themselves from the terrible, soul-crushing reality of their own existences. “It's a moovie for peat sake,” one of the reviews read. Movies like Tron aren’t meant to make you think deep thoughts, the comments section argues, they’re just mindless fun entertainment for you to zonk out to, sort of like heroin but less addictive and more expensive. People like me, who thought that Tron was really boring and not even comically bad most of the time, even when you are stoned and drinking wine in the theater and thinking of snarky things to say about it later, are not supposed to see this movie; we’re supposed to go read the New York Times and re-watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and go to art museums with scarf-wearing women with Etsy profiles. Fine, I’ll go do that. You assholes can have the next five Tron movies, which will be about as fun as watching someone else play a video game.

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Why the Oscars Suck

As we've heard from countless acceptance speeches, receiving an award is an honor, a priviledge, and a deeply humbling experience, but giving out awards is a far more cynical act than accepting them. For starters, it takes an enormous amount of chutzpah for any organization to decide it has the authority to judge the “best picture,” “best album,” or (in the Nobel Peace Prize's case) “best human being.” Awards are never given in the spirit of altruism—the purpose is to honor the recipient, but also to elevate the ones doing the honoring. Award ceremonies satisfy a fundamental human need: everyone involved gets to dress up, make speeches, and feel important, even if all they did was make a film about blue people fighting tanks.

For the major award-bestowing organizations, then, the problem is to get the general public to care about the award they're bestowing. The Grammys do this by endorsing whatever music happens to be popular, to the point where people who love and care about music universally agree that the Grammys are a complete joke. This is obviously not ideal. The Nobel Peace Prize committee, perhaps tired of honoring humanitarians from countries no one has heard of, recently took a page from the Grammys' playbook and forced itself upon Barack Obama on the grounds that a lot of people liked him. (The war in Afghanistan counts as Bush's war, I guess, just like a relief pitcher in baseball isn't charged with runs scored by runners who were already on base when he came in.)

The Academy Awards face the same difficulty the Nobel people do. Most people do not know the names of the world's greatest humanitarians; neither do they see movies that deserve to be called the best movie of the year. We don't like to pay 11 bucks and sit for two hours to be challenged or disturbed or changed, which a good movie might try to do to us. As the top-10 grossing movies of 2009 indicate, we like shiny, shiny garbage, preferably with a message that we already know, like “be true to your friends,” or “don't give up on your dreams,” or “peaceful nature-loving aliens with disturbingly sexy bodies are preferable to evil corporations who employ sadistic ex-Marines.”

If the Oscars were the Pulitzer prize, or the PEN/Faulkner award, or the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, everything would be fine. Those awards frequently go to people who have accomplished things that—to be blunt—most people don't give a shit about. But the Academy wants to be loved by everyone—film industry folks, professional film critics, and the average joe who saw and loved both Transformers movies and thinks “Fellini” is a kind of Italian sandwich. Most of all, the Academy wants everyone to watch their award ceremony, and this is the real problem, because watching that ceremony is the dullest four hours anyone can have outside of a doctor's office waiting room.

For starters, there are the technical awards that not even most of the attendees pay much attention to: Makeup, Cinematography (vital, but ignored by the world at large) Art Direction, Film Editing, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing (do you know the difference? Does anyone?), and Costume Design. Those awards are for people in those industries, everyone else can go grab a beer while they're being announced. Then there are the best short films, the best documentaries and the best foreign film, none of which anyone has ever heard of, and then there's the Best Animated Film, which is just whatever Pixar movie came out that year. The Oscar for Original Film Score gets awarded each year, sometimes not even to John Williams, and the world greets it with a collected grunt. The award for Best Original Song is only interesting because it led to a period of time when Three 6 Mafia had an Academy Award while Martin Scorsese didn't. Best Supporting Actor and Actress are sometimes referred to as major awards, but I dare anyone to name a specific winner from last year or any year. Best Director is a major award, of course, but also the most confusing besides sound editing/mixing—isn't the best directed movie also the best movie period?

The only awards that the general public cares about are for Actor, Actress and especially Best Picture, which is why those come near the end of the marathon ceremony. And this is where the Academy decided to tweak things to get more people interested. They expanded the field of nominees for best picture from five to 10, essentially to make sure that at least one or two bonafide blockbusters could get nominated. Thus, Blind Side got nominated despite middling reviews (a 52 on Metacritic), and District 9 slipped in even though it was the kind of thoughtful sci-fi film that usually get ignored by the Academy (see Men, Children of*). Actually, this year Avatar would have probably got a ton of nominations and therefore dragged in a lot of viewers for the Oscars even if there were only five Best Picture slots, but the important thing is that the Academy has no problems tweaking its format to bring in more eyeballs, and that might be a step toward Grammy-style critical irrelevance.

John Farr, the film writer for the Huffington Post, recently wondered if the Oscars were being corrupted by all the behind-the-scenes marketing and lobbying—if, in other words, the great and venerable Academy Awards were collapsing under the weight of two much hype. (The infamous letter that Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier wrote was only condemned because he directly insulted another film.) This complaint seems a little off-kilter. The Oscars are all hype and marketing—PR flacks sell the films to the Academy, and the Academy tries to sell the pomp and circumstance to the viewers. Complaining about marketing in the Oscars is like complaining about the pumpkin in pumpkin pie. To stay popular, the Academy Awards are going to have to endorse whatever movies are popular.

Farr ponders aloud whether the winning film will win for “lasting creative merit, or sheer popularity, as evidenced by box office?” This is something only a professional film critic who cared about awards would say. For film executives and producers, “sheer popularity” is the only thing worth caring about, and the best thing about winning an Oscar is that your film becomes more popular and rakes in the money on DVD sales. And unfortunately, the Academy also cares about popularity more than anything. So I'm betting that Avatar will win Best Picture, even though there are movies I think deserve it more and would benefit more from the wider audience that a Best Picture pedigree would provide (coughThe Hurt Lockercough!). But for Avatar, tonight's just a victory lap. It already won the box office, which is Hollywood's real highest honor.

*I know, Children of Men was nominated for three Oscars. But it didn't get a whiff of Best Picture, even though it was one of the best photographed, best written, and best edited films of the year. That was the year The Departed won for being directed by a guy who should have won a Best Picture Oscar 25 years ago. High five, Academy!

(Image from a Dan Savage column, by Misako Rocks!)

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Why Avatar Sucks

James Cameron's latest film, the many-long-years-in-the-making Avatar, has currently grossed 1.1 billion dollars worldwide, which is more than the entire GDP of Burundi. It cost about as much as the Panama Canal, but its finances are so complex we'll likely never know exactly how much money it took to make, market, and distribute the film. To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi: “That's not a movie, that's a space station.”

When discussing a movie that cost so much money to make, it's absurd to deconstruct it for themes and meaning the way you might a work of literature or art. (Though some people have given it the old colege try.) Avatar was created to make money, and by that standard it has succeeded beyond the wildest, wettest dreams of the studio executives. It looks pretty, the story and characters are made of 100 percent recycled materials, and it never asks the audience any hard questions. That's a recipe for box-office success, and if you ignore the disturbingly arousing alien sex scene, you'll probably enjoy it, unless you're Armand White.

Here's a plot recap: Marine goes to exotic alien world to work for Evil Corporation. Marine joins a program that allows humans to pilot alien bodies around. Marine spies on aliens, who turn out to be warm-hearted, nature-loving. Marine—surprise!--falls in love with an alien woman (commence disturbingly arousing sex scene) and discovers Nature Is Good. Marine leads battle against Evil Corporation. This takes a hundred and sixty minutes. If you stripped Avatar of its eyeball-bursting special effects, you'd be left with a longer version of FernGully.

But that's not why Avatar sucks—nothing's wrong with FernGully, after all. The reason Avatar sucks is tied to a phenomenon common to Hollywood films, something I'll call The Karate Movie Paradox

The name comes from a standard scene in a lot of movies about karate or another fighting technique: the Wise Old Man training the hero in the ways of Kicking Ass says, in his wise old way, “But you must never use these things I have taught you for anything other than self-defense. Violence is never the answer, young one.” (Check out The Karate Kid or Ong Bak for direct examples of this.)

That's a fine philosophy for the Wise Old Man to teach his students. The paradox is that the movies that contain this philosophy are violence delivery systems, paper-thin plots built around long action setpieces. Yoda may teach Luke to avoid conflict, but we want to see some fucking lightsaber duels and spaceship collisions.

We can expand this idea to include movies about evil corporations that are bankrolled by corporations, movies that extol the virtue of a native culture while casting non-natives in key roles (I'm looking at you, Braveheart), and so on. The short definition of the Karate Movie Paradox: Hollywood films have themes and messages that are directly contradicted by the reality of the movies themselves.

Avatar is supposed to be all about preserving nature, respecting animals, and honoring the Earth (or whatever planet you happen to be on). But there is pratically no nature at all on the screen—everything is state-of-the-art CGI effects. The characters keep repeating bromides about saving the trees they love from big, bad profiteering technocrats while surrounded by trees that are the products of real-life profiteering technocrats. The nature that is being saved in the movie is fantastic: glowing leaves, six-legged horses, plants that retract suddenly when touched. Some features, like the cliffs that float in the air, are startingly beautiful, if we're allowed to say that about a combination of computer-generated polygons.

The problem is nature on Earth isn't quite so fantastic. Trees don't glow, we don't ride dragons, and the people who want to build strip-mines and pollute aren't cartoonishly evil. Conservation in reality doesn't involve shooting arrows at mechanized infantry. It means driving less or not at all, drilling for less oil, recycling, eating less meat, and maybe going to the movies less. Protecting the nature that we actually live with, as opposed to the one manufactured by computeres, is boring, difficult and important, which are three words that simply aren't in the Hollywood dictionary.

Conservatives have attacked the movie for being “environmentalist propaganda,” but the movie's pro-Green/pro-pagan sympathies are only skin deep. If anything, it sets back environmentalism, portraying Greens as weird hippies who spout bullshit about the sacred communion between all life instead of rational people who say, “Hey guys, let's make sure the seas don't engulf Manhattan in the next 20 years.” Avatar's brand of environmentalism is misty-eyed, soft-hearted, and totally unrelated to the world we live in—in the end, it's as forgettable as Mr. Miyagi's preaching of nonviolence.

Which is good for the picture's bottom line. A genuinely environmentalist movie might force people to examine their lives, and might even make them feel bad about themselves. You don't earn 1.3 billion dollars at the box office by telling people what's wrong with them. With Avatar, everyone leaves the theater and piles into their SUVs thinking that they are good people, that they would be on the side of the peace-loving aliens, not the evil corporate soldiers. Talk about escapism. Read more!