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In a kingdom of dicks and d-bags, the one-eyed Ratner is king

Brett Ratner is the dumbest muhfucka on the face of the earth! He’s also the worst director on the face of the earth, but let’s delve into the dumb-muhfucka stuff first.

You’d think that after making a movie where he’s received some of the most favorable reviews of his career, along with getting a gig producing the most prestigious awards show out there, Ratner would work his ass off not trying to sound like his usual dickish self and try to maintain some sort of respectful, professional image. But, no, this is Brett “I Lost My Virginity to a Paraplegic” Ratner. When have you ever known this guy to be respectful or professional?

It started late last week when he appeared for an interview on "Attack of the Show," that tech/T-and-A variety show on cable network G4, to promote his new movie, "Tower Heist." When host Kevin Pereira asked Ratner whether or not he is the unnamed, oft-rumored director former Attack host Olivia Munn had a regretful dalliance with (and whom she later slammed in her book Suck It, Wonder Woman), Ratner responded in the classiest of fashions:

“I used to date Olivia Munn, I'll be honest with everyone here. But when she was 'Lisa.' She wasn't Asian back then. She was hanging out on my set of "After the Sunset," I banged her a few times, but I forgot her. Because she changed her name. I didn't know it was the same person and so when she auditioned for me for a TV show, I forgot her, she got pissed off, and so she made up all these stories about me eating shrimp and masturbating in my trailer. And she talked about my shortcomings.”

See what I mean when I say “classy”?

It’s hard to believe that a guy can go on a TV show, say that a possibly bitter ex made up all these stories about him beating off and eating shrimp and still end up looking like the douchey loser in this whole affair. Was it really necessary for Ratner to be all spiteful and mention that the still-half-Asian Munn “wasn’t Asian back then”? What the hell does that have to do with anything? And, seriously, “bang”? Who the hell does he think he is — one of the guys from "It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia"?

Ratner could’ve handled that whole thing with dignity and tact, perhaps even coming out of it looking like the better man for not attempting to stoop to Munn’s level. But, sadly, this is Ratner we’re talking about, and he felt that not only does he have to stoop to her level, he has to go even lower.

But it turns out none of what Ratner said about Munn was true, as he admitted on Howard Stern’s Sirius XM show on Friday. (He did admit to having some sort of sexual encounter with that in-and-out jailbird Lindsay Lohan.) But the shit didn’t hit the fan until later that evening when he screened Tower Heist at the Arclight Hollywood multiplex and took part in a Q & A afterwards. When asked about whether he rehearses scenes with his actors, he simply responded by saying, “Rehearsal? What’s that? Rehearsal’s for fags!”

If there is anything the Isaiah Washington scandal has taught us, it’s that if you work in the film and television industry, you don’t use the F-word — under any circumstance, even if you aren’t actually referring to homosexuals. Jesus, this is Hollywood – you don’t say that shit! You never know who is within earshot! And who does say that shit? “Rehearsal’s for fags” – for real? I’m shocked Ratner hasn’t received a flaming pile of dogshit on his doorstep from William Hurt yet.

Of course, he went on an apologizing tear the following Monday, telling Hollywood news blog The Wrap that he doesn’t have “a prejudiced bone” in his body and making sure AMPAS president Tom Sherak wasn’t appalled by his words. However, by the next day, as bloggers began demanding that Ratner be fired from his producer duties for the upcoming Oscar telecast, he sent out an open letter to the entertainment industry announcing his resignation. It was a letter filled with Ratner apologizing profusely and declaring, “Having love in your heart doesn’t count for much if what comes out of your mouth is ugly and bigoted.” (I’m shocked Ratner didn’t confirm his tolerance for the LGBT crowd by bringing up how he unknowingly got his first hummer from a transvestite, an anecdote he recalled when people complained of homophobic scenes in Rush Hour 3.)

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this dude? It seems like, in just these past few days, Ratner has been on a self-destructive mission to become Hollywood’s most prolific asshole, a man able to offend legions of people with just one, short soundbyte.

And it appears now that once Ratner ignorantly shoots his mouth off, we all end up suffering. The day after he resigned, "Heist" star Eddie Murphy, whom Ratner handpicked to host the Oscars, dropped out of hosting. So, thanks to Ratner, we'll probably have yet ahnother boring-ass, four-hour Oscar telecast coming our way.

It’s a shame Ratner still prefers to keep his d-bag persona alive and kicking; after finding myself actually entertained by what I saw in "Heist," I began to have some grudging respect for the man. There hasn’t been a Hollywood filmmaker whose filmography I’ve loathed more than Ratner – and yes, I’m counting Michael Bay. Just like Bay, Ratner became another in a long line of slick-ass music-video directors who graduated to helming slick-ass feature films. But unlike video visionaries turned challenging auteurs David Fincher and Spike Jonze, Ratner became a director who trafficked in crass crowd-pleasers. His comedies are usually crude and offensive, his dramas are bland and lifeless and his action blockbusters are just a whole bunch of noise.

His first movie, "Money Talks," was just a loud, nonsensical vehicle for its star, the equally loud and nonsensical Chris Tucker. Ratner and Tucker would reunite for all three "Rush Hour" movies with Jackie Chan, a franchise that may have been lucrative but more and more mediocre with each volume. His all-star, overblown version of Thomas Harris’s "Red Dragon," complete with Anthony Hopkins hamming it up as Hannibal Lecter, just made me appreciate the moody subtlety Michael Mann embedded in the same material when he made it into "Manhunter." And when he took over for Bryan Singer and directed "X-Men: The Last Stand," it was so gotdamn tedious, me and a comic book-loving friend of mine who accompanied me to the screening immediately went to a bar and got shitfaced while we tried to decipher what the hell was that all about.

So, color me slightly surprised when I left "Tower Heist" quite satisfied. As several of my colleagues who didn’t like the movie have reminded me, it’s a routine story. And while the movie makes some wrong moves narrative-wise, I still found myself getting into it. With "Heist," you get a sense that Ratner has finally understood that when you hire skilled, decent actors to star in your movie, the main thing to do is get out of their damn way and come in when you’re needed, like when it comes time to stage the convincingly death-defying climax.

But when Ratner started saying all this other stuff, the respect I was trying to have for the man quickly became nonexistent. I mean, here is a man who I’m sure has made a lot of money making mediocre movies, considers Warren Beatty and Robert Evans close friends and has had Rebecca Gayheart, Naomi Campbell and Serena Williams as ex-girlfriends. And here he is, acting like he’s still living in the gotdamn frat house! What’s interesting is that Ratner spent most of a 2007 Vanity Fair profile convincing readers he is a credible, competent director. “I eat, sleep and breathe movies,” Ratner said. “I’ve been dreaming about this every day since I was eight years old! I’m not what people think I am – I’m a filmmaker!

Really, Brett? You’re a filmmaker? This is what you’ve wanted to do since you were a kid? Then, for Chrissakes, act like a fuckin’ filmmaker and stop saying dumb shit in public! Jesus Christ, man, you’re 42! You’re officially too old for this shit! A man who is responsible for a slew of hit movies should carry himself with a lot more decorum, especially if he does want to be taken seriously as a filmmaker.

In short, Brett Ratner, stop being an asshole and start being a man. There’s already one John Mayer on this planet. There shouldn’t be two.

Craig D. Lindsey used to have a job, as the film critic and pop-culture columnist for the Raleigh News & Observer. Now, he's back out there hustling, writing about whatever for Nashville Scene, the Greensboro News & Record, Philadelphia Weekly, the Independent Weekly and other publications. He has a Tumblr blog now (unclecrizzle.tumblr.com). You can also hit him up on Twitter (twitter.com/unclecrizzle).

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: The big tease of “Glee”

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following recap of Glee season three, episode 5 contains spoilers; read at your own risk.

Really, Glee? Was it really necessary to end an episode revolving around virginity loss with a shot of a roaring fireplace?

That’s a trick question. Midway through its third season there’s little that’s necessary about Glee, save for the underused Chris Colfer’s performance as out gay teenager Kurt Hummel, the even more severely underused Mike O’Malley’s performance as his dad, one out of every five musical numbers, and Sue Sylvester’s surreal rants, which Jane Lynch sells even when the writing is just sassy word salad. And even those compensatory values aren’t enough to make me watch each week. After a long and increasingly desperate infatuation with this musical comedy soap — which repeatedly threatened to be astonishing and sometimes delivered, only to settle for cheerfully incoherent inanity at least 80 percent of the time — I’ve relegated it to the second tier of my DVR, which consists of shows that I skip for weeks at a time, then catch up on in one dutiful burst. I doubt I would have watched this installment in real time if my 14-year-old daughter hadn’t reminded me that it promised to deliver big moments this week. Her reactions were more entertaining than the show. She contrived reasons to leave the room whenever nooky threatened to break out, and ended up watching the parts she’d skipped while I was in the next room writing this recap. “If you were 14, would you want to watch this episode with your dad?” she asked later. Hell, no. I vividly recall being in the same tiny house with my mom while she watched The Postman Always Rings Twice on cable with the sound cranked way up, but only because my therapist dug that repressed memory out through hypnosis and primal scream therapy.

You can read the rest of Matt's piece here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is TV critic for Salon and publisher of press play.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: The awesome, thrilling spectacle of Vietnam?

The awesome, thrilling spectacle of … Vietnam?

Before I review Vietnam in HD, the six-hour History Channel epic, I need to get a couple of caveats out of the way.

First, if you have a high definition television, access to the History Channel’s HD signal, and a killer home stereo system, you should record the series and watch it in a dark room with no interruptions, preferably while indulging your inebriating substance of choice. It’s a sound and light show extraordinaire — a trip.

But you should only do this if — and here comes caveat No. 2 — you consider intense, often shockingly bloody documentary images to be just another thing to gawk over; something to toss up on a big screen instead of, say, Sucker Punch or The Dark Knight or The Dirty Dozen. Judged purely as a technical achievement, “Vietnam in HD” (Nov. 8-10, 9 p.m./8 Central) is impressive. It merges thousands of bits of footage collected via the History Film Corps into a nearly seamless whole — a roiling canvas of chopper evacuations, napalm strikes, city and jungle infantry skirmishes, and shots of wounded and dead soldiers with burned and mangled flesh. And it weds these images to the narratives of individual American soldiers who served in different phases of the war, from the early advisor stage (roughly 1961-1964) through the peak of infantry combat (1965-1969), the post-Tet Offensive period of “Vietnamization” and the fall of Saigon. (I’ve previewed the first four hours; the last two, “A Changing War”/”Peace With Honor,” weren’t available for critics.)

You can read the rest of Matt's piece here at Salon.

A critic, journalist and filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for Salon.com and the founder of Press Play.

Matthias Stork: Chaos Cinema/Classical Cinema part 1

Cinematographer John Bailey interviews Matthias Stork

Matthias Stork is more likely to be found hunched over a research desk at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library than in the darker recesses of a multiplex cinema playing the latest Hollywood visual effects laden action flick. He is, after all, a graduate student in the Department of Film and Television at UCLA. He has an M.A. in Education from Goethe University, Frankfurt, in his native Germany. His current focus is on German expressionist films of the 1920s.

In the last decade of the silent era the Hollywood studios siphoned off many of the finest German filmmakers; the stream became a flood with the rise of National Socialism in 1933. It included director Fritz Lang and the great cinematographer Karl Freund, who had emigrated to the US in 1929. Several years earlier, German émigré F.W. Murnau’s first American film, Sunrise, was one of the high water marks of this great stream. But it is the lesser-known director, Paul Leni, who is the object of Stork’s current research. Leni had made the macabre Waxworks in 1924 Weimar Germany. In Hollywood, he directed only four films before an early death at age 44 in September of 1929. He seems a worthy figure for exegesis for a young German film scholar.

But here is the surprise. Stork’s real scholarly passion is the American action film, a genre that at first glance seems ill tailored for an academic suit. But one of the endearing qualities of German scholarship in science as well as in the arts is its ability to imprint an academic perspective on pop culture as easily as on philosophical ontology.

Stephen Pizzello and Martha Winterhalter emailed me the link to a two-part video essay they had found called “Chaos Cinema.” They suggested it would make a good blog essay. Its creator, Matthias Stork, was not someone whom I knew, nor (despite having his own blog) whom I was able to track down easily. Finally, William McDonald, Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA, provided me with Stork’s email. The young scholar met me a few days later on a bench outside the Herrick Library. The juxtaposition of his precise, even scholarly, English—as he spoke about the tropes of “action cinema” with its signature cataclysmic car chases and violent shootouts with exploding body parts—and the spatial and psychic dislocation of the films themselves, was intriguing. Even better, it turns out we both share an abiding love of the seminal films of the French New Wave.

You can read the rest of John Bailey's interview with Matthias Stork here at The American Society of Cinematographers website.

Matthias Stork is a Press Play contributor and film scholar-critic from Germany who continues to pursue an academic career at UCLA where he studies film and television. He has an MA in Education with emphasis on American and French literature and film from Goethe University, Frankfurt. He has attended The Cannes film festival twice (2010/2011) as a representitive of Goethe University's film school and you can read his blog here.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: THE OFFICE and the zen of Robert California

Taking its cues from James Spader's performance, the NBC show has become warm, relaxed and mysterious.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

The post-Michael Scott version of The Office isn’t what I expected, but it’s growing on me. First I had to get over the fact that James Spader’s character — Robert California, CEO of Dunder-Mifflin’s parent company — isn’t quite the scary, malevolent person I hoped he’d be, based on California’s debut in last season’s finale and Spader’s track record of playing unhinged oddballs. California is a mind-effer, to be sure, but he’s more benevolent than expected.

There are times when he casually shatters his employees’ confidence simply because he’s a powerful man who’s used to saying whatever pops into his head without fear of punishment. (When he prompted Andy to talk about his attraction to Erin, and Andy obliged, California cut him off with, “I’m afraid you’ve lost my interest.”) But so far there’s no indication that he’s anything but fundamentally decent; based on last week’s Halloween episode, during which he brought his son to work, he’s also a good dad with a deep (if unusual) connection to his child. He’s not a craven, impulsive, inadvertently destructive person, as Michael often was. He’s wry and aloof. He seems to view the goings-on at the Scranton branch from a lofty perspective — including the reflexive ass-kissing that greets his every pronouncement, no matter how whimsical or baffling. His visits to the Scranton branch are charged with an excitement that no other regular Office character ever summoned, and it’s not just because he’s the CEO. His peculiar energy sparks love and respect as well as fear. (Andy greeted him by blurting out, “Hi, Dad.”)

The Office loses something by having Spader’s Zen master drive the action instead of Michael Scott. When Michael was running things, the Comedy of Discomfort flowed naturally, but with California in charge, it doesn’t — not quite. And when the series ventures into that old, familiar vein (see the garden party episode, which was more silly than mortifying) the discomfort is mild compared to, say, “Dinner Party” or some other Michael Scott-era exercise in cringe humor. I don’t mind, though. Seven seasons of the show showcased enough knife-twisting comedy to last a lifetime. If The Office had to continue — and in a bottom-line sense, it absolutely did — it would have seemed desperate and pathetic if the producers had replaced Michael with a Michael-esque character. Thankfully, they didn’t.

You can read the rest of Matt's piece here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is publisher of Press Play.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: The awful brilliance of “American Horror Story”

As the high school dramedy sputters, its producers' new show reaches crazy, brilliant heights.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

Anybody who’s still watching Glee will testify to how awful last night’s episode was — and that’s quite a statement considering that even the most brilliant Glee installments flirt with awfulness. The bits with Mike O’Malley’s garage-owner character, Burt Hummell, running for Congress against Jane Lynch’s venemous Coach Sue were almost tolerable, but only because I love O’Malley and think he’s hugely underused. Much of the episode was dominated by tedious subplots in which 1) innocent/stupid Brittany thought that the Irish foreign exchange student (“Glee Project” winner Damian McGinty) staying with her family was a leprechaun, and 2) Will managed Kurt’s dad, Burt, in his surprise congressional run. Even the musical numbers flatlined. The best of the bunch, McGinty’s “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” was undercut by the ludicrous notion that a handsome young man with a great smile and an Irish accent would be ostracized anywhere, least of all in a Midwestern high school.

If “Glee” has, in fact, run out of steam, I suspect it’s because two of its executive producers, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, are busy putting out another series, FX’s American Horror Story (Wednesdays 10 p.m./9 Central). Like Glee, and like Nip/Tuck, which involved many of the same people, “AHS” flirts — nay tangos — with awfulness in every second of every episode. There is nothing, repeat nothing, subtle about this show, which chronicles the misadventures of a troubled couple, Vivien and Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott and Connie Britton) who buy a beautiful faux-Victorian house in L.A., and are haunted by the seemingly infinite number of violent acts that have taken place there and throughout the neighborhood. It’s a jumble of pathology and mayhem. There are present-day scenes and flashbacks and scenes in which flashback characters materialize in the present, interacting with one or more “regular” characters in real time as if they were flesh-and-blood people rather than ectoplasmic intruders or manifestations of mental illness. A 1920s woman who was married to a drug-addicted abortion doctor who performed Dr. Frankenstein-style experiments in his basement shows up in the present day, inspecting the house she once lived in. McDermott’s character, a therapist who sees patients in his haunted house, hallucinates that their pushing-60, one-eyed maid, Moira (Frances Conroy), is a bubble-butted 20-something and is relentlessly trying to seduce him. And who knows — maybe she is!

You can read the rest Matt's piece here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is TV critic for Salon and publisher of Press Play.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: Brian Williams’ nostalgia act

The NBC anchor returns us to the days when news magazines — with actual reporting! — ruled prime time.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

I felt a twinge of nostalgia watching the debut of Brian Williams’ news magazine Rock Center last night. It took me back to an odd period maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when the networks all figured out they could fill their schedules with news magazines that were cheap to make and reasonably smart (if sometimes trashy or alarmist) and draw at least as big an audience as whatever scripted shows they’d originally hoped to put there. At one point there were multiple versions of the various network news magazines on TV all at once: Dateline (NBC), 20/20 (ABC), 60 Minutes (CBS), 48 Hours (CBS), and a short-lived program called Public Eye With Bryant Gumbel (CBS), which probably no one remembers except me and Gumbel.

Rock Center feels like a nicer version of that Gumbel broadcast, a hybrid that combines old-school, radio-with-pictures TV reporting with wraparound segments in which the host interviews the correspondents about their work. It’s much less awkward, though, because Williams is wittier and more cheerful than Gumbel — he would have made a great permanent host of Saturday Night Live if he’d chosen to go that route — and because he doesn’t interrogate his correspondents like a sourpuss professor dressing down writers in a workshop.

You can read the rest of Matt's piece here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is publisher of Press Play.

SLIDE SHOW: THE SIMPSONS save halloween, again

The Simpsons airs its latest installment of “Treehouse of Horror” this Sunday — a long-standing tradition that lets an already formally daring cartoon show let its imagination run wild. The “Treehouse” segments have been the show’s most reliably inventive during its second decade; while composing this list of my personal favorite segments (not entire episodes) I was pleasantly surprised by how many installments from the later years ended up claiming slots.

What else is there to say? Oh, right: If you’re wondering where “Dial Z for Zombies” is, it’s No. 11, which means it’s not on here. I love it — especially the immortal line “Is this the end of Zombie Shakespeare?” — but I like these just a little bit more. List your own favorites in the Letters section. To quote Marge in “The Shinning,” go crazy.

To view Matt’s slide show at Salon, go here.

Matt Zoller Seitz is TV critic for Salon and publisher of Press Play.

RECAP: THE WALKING DEAD, Season 2, Episode 3: Save The Last One

Editor’s Note: The following recap of The Walking Dead season 2, episode 3 contains spoilers; read at your own risk.

The best and worst qualities of The Walking Dead were on display in tonight’s episode; the extremes were so pronounced that my notes suggest the exuberant jottings of a split personality. “Gorgeous.” “Oh, for chrissakes, quit while you’re ahead — you already showed that, why re-hash it?” “Some of the best atmosphere on TV.” “Oh, shut up.” “Jon Bernthal is KILLING in this episode; he has Richard Gere’s oily, furtive, ‘What am I NOT guilty of’ body language.” “I wish Rick and Lori would get eaten so I didn’t have to hear their ‘discussions’ anymore.” “Brilliant ending — best of series so far.”

My sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter, slap, slap, slap.

Scott M. Gimple wrote this episode; Sopranos veteran Phil Abraham directed. It was the best of Dead, it was the worst of Dead. Bottom line: When The Walking Dead is dramatizing its characters ‘ moral and ethical conundrums and letting them play out through physical action (or inaction), it’s as good as the very best zombie films that inspired it. But when one character says to another, “Can I talk to you for a second?”, the show’s slow-burn momentum halts so abruptly that they might as well signal an upcoming heart-to-heart by laying a “screeching brakes” noise on the soundtrack. [“Hey, Shane, ya got a minute?” SCR-EEEeeeeEEEEEEEE!] I wish this show would have faith in its B-movie spirit and considerable filmmaking prowess, model its dialogue on an old cowboy picture, and keep things moving. There’s no reason to keep turning every scene into Zombie Oprah. Honest.

You can read the rest of Matt’s piece here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the publisher of Press Play.

Pauline Kael: A conversation

As two new Kael books arrive, two Salon critics debate the legacy of the influential New Yorker movie writer.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael retired from print 20 years ago and died 10 years after. But if you read film criticism online, it’s as if she’s still with us. She is the subject of a new biography by Brian Kellow, “A Life in the Dark.” Salon film critic Andrew O’Hehir and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz got together this week to talk about Kael’s impact on film, criticism and their own sensibilities. Laurels are tossed, darts thrown. Excerpts follow.

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Andrew O’Hehir
Salon staff writers

Matt: Is there any other critic, dead or alive, who’s as ubiquitous as Pauline Kael?

Andrew: Absolutely not. As we’ll see, I have very mixed feelings about Kael and her legacy, but no other film critic has ever been remotely as popular or as influential. (One could argue that less famous writers like James Agee or Manny Farber are more “important,” in some sense, but that’s a different matter.) Kael’s influence is so pervasive it’s almost unconscious. When I was a younger critic and someone accused me of writing like Kael, I was enraged and responded that I’d never read her, which was almost literally true. When I did read her, I had to admit the guy had a point: I had absorbed some elements of her style and outlook without realizing it, as if through osmosis, because they were so ubiquitous in film criticism.

Matt: I’ve actually struggled with this myself. That prose style is so engaging — so powerful and seductive in some ways because it’s like a heightened version of everyday conversation with a really smart person — that it does sink into your mind, whether you’re a regular filmgoer of somebody who writes criticism for a living. Anybody who’s so inclined can actually track my own shifting feelings about Kael’s influence by looking at my past writing about her. I reviewed her 1994 compilation “For Keeps” for the Dallas Observer, my first employer, and it was pretty much a mash note. Seven years later, I wrote an obituary for her that was a lot tougher — respectful, ultimately, but skeptical of some of the very qualities I praised a few years earlier. This was probably because by that point I’d been living in New York for six years, a much richer moviegoing town with a lot more varied types of film criticism available in print, and I started to figure out that even though Kael was the most prominent and maybe influential voice in criticism, there was more than one way to write about movies. And television. And everything!

You can read the rest of Matt’s piece here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz and Andrew O’Hehir are TV critic and film critic for Salon, respectively.