By Steven Boone
Press Play Contributor

Terrorism is plain stupid. I reaffirmed this belief halfway into If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, a documentary chronicling the titular organization’s rise and fall. It’s one thing to protest in the streets, sit down in front of bulldozers and stage direct “actions” to draw media attention to a particular issue; it’s another thing entirely to commit violent crimes with the same ends in mind. But did the Earth Liberation Front actually perpetrate any terrorism? Their 1200 or so “incidents,” as a lawyer representing some members calls them, resulted in zero deaths or injuries (other than maybe a booboo sustained while vaulting a fence before the cops came). The violence was restricted to private property.

But the crimes covered in this film were prosecuted in the wake of 9/11, when its principal subject, radical environmental activist-arsonist Daniel McGowan, found himself branded a terrorist in the media and on trial. “I think people look at my case and think, ‘What if that motherf**ker burned down my house?'” he says in the film. “They think it’s just a bunch of young crazies walking around with gas cans, lighting shit on fire and that pisses them off.”

“These facilities” were the offices of park rangers, loggers, an SUV dealership and a horse slaughterhouse. In the ’90s and ’00s, the E.L.F. targeted a range of businesses and organizations it saw as powerful agents of environmental destruction. The members were mostly very young protestors radicalized by brutal police response. Footage of cops beating and pepper-spraying non-violent activists who refuse to disperse does resemble classic civil rights/counterculture tumult. (Scenes of confrontation with loggers, from an E. L.F.-made documentary ostensibly shot in the mid-90s, look as if they could have been shot in the late ’60s.) This was a classic, bright-eyed, idealistic strain of the environmental movement, led by resourceful twenty-somethings.

You can read the rest of Steven’s piece here at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Steven Boone is a film critic and video essayist for Fandor and Roger Ebert’s Far Flung Correspondents. He writes a column on street life for Capital New York and blogs at Big Media Vandalism.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the attacks receded and two wars took center stage, pop culture’s response grew more complicated.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

American popular culture after 9/11. This installment covers Sept. 12, 2004, through the end of 2010 — a dense, varied, fast-evolving period that saw authors, filmmakers, TV producers, graphic novelists and other creative minds dealing with the attacks head-on and in metaphor. This was by far the most difficult of the three slide shows to assemble because by the middle of the last decade, the pop culture response had become more entropic and distracted, and it was harder to find works that were only about the attacks themselves; works about the war on terror, the Afghanistan and Iraq occupations, civil liberties and government conspiracy were, in a sense, about 9/11 as well.

This list includes major novels by Ian McEwan, Art Spiegelman, Don DeLillo and Claire Messud, the first publication of the “Loose Change” videos, two metaphor-laden blockbusters by Steven Spielberg, a flood of Hollywood dramas about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and enough documentaries about U.S. foreign policy to keep film buffs’ Netflix queues packed for months. Please add your own selections in the Letters section. I’m keeping a running list of works you thought I should have mentioned in all three editions, and I might add them to an updated version of this project in the future. In fact, the first few entries in this slide show are about important works from 2004 that were omitted in the last slide show, and that readers were kind enough to bring to my attention.

To read Part 3 of Matt’s series, click here.
To read Part 1 of this series, which covers the last three months of 2001, click here. To read Part 2, which covers January 2002 through fall of 2004, click here.

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

By Simon Abrams
Press Play Contributor

When you buy a ticket for a movie called 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, you know exactly what you’re paying to see, and the fourth film in the sleazy but popular Hong Kong film series is exactly what it sounds like: over-the-top 3D softcore porn.

As its title suggests, 3-D Sex and Zen is halfway torn between peddling spurious ideas about zen spirituality and delivering oodles of titillating images from the novel The Carnal Prayer Mat. When the filmmakers’ minds are stuck in the gutter, 3-D Sex and Zen is fantastically bizarre and consummately dirty. But on the whole, it’s not much of a film, even if watching a heap of naked Asian women dogpile a man with a donkey penis is indeed a cinematic sight to see.

Though it’s more serious than the series’ preceding entries, 3-D Sex and Zen is very much a sex comedy that infrequently mistakes itself for a serious drama about fidelity and carnal vice. Wei Yangsheng (Hiro Hayama) is a lascivious but dutiful man lucky enough to marry Yuxing (Leni Nam), the woman of his dreams. Though they enjoy just being with each other, the young lovers spend much of their time having sex. Or as much sex as they can have before Wei prematurely climaxes. The fact that they can’t have more than a few seconds’ worth of bliss at a time bothers Wei very much, so he goes on a quest to the Pavilion of Bliss, where he learns that the key to seducing women is having a massive penis. Wei replaces his penis with a donkey one, and beds a harem or two full of women — all for the sake of better pleasing his wife.

Director Christopher Suen makes it perilously easy to ignore the pretext of seriousness to 3-D Sex and Zen’s outlandish series of disproportionate events. Amidst panoramic shots of many much naked women running around and gasping for joy as they’re taken by force, even the threat of rape is a joke. A scene where a woman dies while being raped becomes impossible to take seriously in this context. Her flailing body is violated underneath a writing desk after a bed sheet is inadvertently draped over her head. We know that this scene is supposed to be a tainted form of spectacle because of its pompous, foreboding orchestral score, but it ends with a corny close-up of the attacker’s face, now bathed in a lurid and fittingly cheap-looking red light, making it very easy to dehumanize a male protagonist who was Wei’s idol just moments ago. But hey, isn’t that the kind of cheese you came (no pun intended) to see?

If the answer to that question is, “Well, yes, but…,” just think: as long as you can ignore the film’s half-hearted serious scenes, you can revel in the absurdity of hearing a ghost say, with a straight face, that he had previously decided to possess a woman’s body so he/she could “infiltrate the palace and rape their children.” (“Now I’m on the court’s most wanted list.”) When 3-D Sex and Zen is not goofy, it’s pretty lame, but you probably knew that already….

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut.

By Ali Arikan
Press Play Contributor

“One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested – his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. […] Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like.”– “Rudyard Kipling,” by George Orwell (1942)

Last weekend, as the worst case of food poisoning I’d ever encountered in my life tore my ass asunder, I sought some semblance of solace in familiarity, and, at a rare moment of lucidity between my regular bouts of hysteria and insentience, I found myself listening to David Bowie’s 1971 magnum opus, Hunky Dory. It is a universally acknowledged truth that the album is one of the chief paradigmatic standards of the musician’s classical period. In the wake of the decidedly heavy guitar sound of the previous year’s somewhat lacking The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory was a surprising yet rapturous non-sequitur, boasting as it did a wide variety of styles, from Ray Davies-esque British Invasion pop (“Kooks”) to proto-symphonic rock (“Life on Mars?”); from folksy glam (“Changes”) to kitschy camp (“Oh! You Pretty Things”). For a brief moment, I was lulled into elation by one of the greatest works of art of the past century.

My dear friend Stephen, an English teacher in China, phoned to check up on me and my rectum, and, for obvious reasons, our conversation on Hunky Dory eventually turned to the 2006 BBC sci-fi/crime drama Life on Mars. I decided to revisit said show for the first time since its debut for a bit of comfort viewing, and Stephen retired to watch J.J. Abrams’ Super 8, despite my advice to the contrary. A scant hour and a half later, my phone rang and it was Steve again, beside himself with agony, and, for the next hour, we cursed nostalgia. We are lonely men.

Super 8 is like E.T. meets Cloverfield meets cholera, at least in aesthetic estimation if not literal form. Admittedly, it’s been a few months since I saw the film, but, was it a hallucination or did the little kid (Joel Courtney), the Elliot surrogate (let’s call him E.S.), actually look a hideous, slobbering alien in the face, have a heart wrenching moment, and say, “Everybody hurts sometimes,” or some such drivel? I’m really hoping it was a hallucination, because when E.S. looked into the eyes of the giant man-eating alien and spouted out an anachronistic, Southern-Californian, wishy-washy aphorism, another pillar of western civilization was obliterated – the pillar marked “Common Sense.” Like a cannibal narcissist with gastric flu, I threw up my hands.

Current pop-cultural zeitgeist (as nebulous a term as that might be) is defined by futile attempts at recreating the delicate ambience of the past. Nostalgia, in all its forms, is the usurper of wit and intelligence. Famously, Super 8 tries to recreate the early-’80s Amblin pictures of Steven Spielberg, specifically E.T., but also Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Goonies (though I doubt the latter ever boasted the Amblin logo – I could be wrong). The superficial sympathy the film asks the audience grant the man-eating alien (who, let us recall, develops an unbreakable bond with whomever it comes into tactile contact with, which, nonetheless, does not deter it from devouring the fuck out of them, hats, jeans, shoes and all) is illustrative of the ill-informed liberal ethos of the current depoliticized Hollywood mindset: “Just understand the villain’s motives and then it’s okay!” (By the way, I am a liberal, thus, in the previous sentence, “ill-informed” is not a generalization but a particular specificity.)

Instead, what the film reflects is our ideological uncertainty. So deranged is our sense of right and wrong that a man-eating alien has become a monstrous slimy figure of sympathy. Super 8 strives for the nostalgic effect of early Spielberg without committing to any deeper political motives and is emblematic of the depoliticization of popular culture. Abrams tries to recreate childhood memories all the while weaving it around a “modern day” pseudo-fable, but there is nothing to it except for the pyritical sheen of nostalgia. The film doesn’t end up evoking Spielberg as much as it ends up being a pale imitation. Abrams is a skillful technician; he just does not have the heart. I am reminded of Birdy’s (Scarlett Johansson) unsuccessful audition with Carcanogues (Adam Alexi-Malle) in the Coens’ criminally underrated The Man Who Wasn’t There: “I cannot teach her to have a soul. Voyez, monsieur. Look. To play the piano is not about the fingers. We make with the fingers. But the music, monsieur, should come l’interieur, from inside.”

J.J. Abrams lacks the political insight and the aesthetic wherewithal of Steven Spielberg, and instead opts for imitating him in the most superficial manner. What made Kipling stand head and shoulders above his contemporaries, as pinpointed by Orwell in his 1942 essay, was his way with words and verse, yes, but also his dedication to a cause, however blindly it may have been. Similarly, the broken home in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. is a political statement about the shallowness of the post-war nuclear family of the baby boomers, a motif the director still employs with panache (e.g., the destruction of the model “nuclear family” during the nuclear test at the beginning of the latest Indiana Jones flick). Spielberg has subtly remained a political filmmaker through the years, with, for example, the one-two punch of 2005’s War of the Worlds and Munich possibly being the two greatest artistic responses to the 9/11 attacks.

In Super 8 (and, to a certain extent, his Star Trek reboot), J.J. Abrams peddles in nothing but nostalgia, with no hint of incipient sexuality, no political subtext, no social commentary. Of course, the presence of those elements does not automatically mean artistic superiority; if anything, such heavy-handed digressions into “meaning” usually turn a piece of art into a piece of shit. However, Abrams makes such blatant use of both the early ’80s time period and the kids’ ages that one seeks an explanation, and hopes that it is not simply, “Because I thought it would be cool.”

Of course, it did not have to be that way. Abrams could have utilized that era to tug on the heartstrings with nostalgia and all that horse-shit while actually saying something that mattered. And he didn’t have to look too far for inspiration, either. Abrams’ sometimes-partner-in-crime Matt Reeves (and another one of Spielberg’s latter-day protégés) deftly weaves themes as diverse as religion, politics and child abuse in the “coming-of-age” narrative of Let Me In. Out of the godless, Scandinavian Let the Right One In, he recreates a totally American work of art, and neither the ages of the protagonists nor the story’s time period grate; in fact, they reinforce the film’s strengths.

A similar approach is also present in BBC’s Life on Mars, especially in the first series. Of course, the show itself is a throwback to ’70s copper dramas, with sexism, racism and homophobia as commonplace as the three-day work week, the death knell of the trade unions and other depressing pre-Thatcherite minutiae. But the show’s success does not spring from such winks at the audience. Life on Mars is not so much a lamentation of better times gone by, but rather a detailed post-modern study (each episode deals with a separate crime drama trope) of the end of old Britain and the beginning of the new one. To paraphrase old Rudyard, if you can deal with nostalgia and not make nostalgia your aim, you might not be a storyteller, my son, but in this cynical day and age, you’d be halfway there.

Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV, a Turkish news portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert’s Far-Flung Correspondents. Ali is also a regular contributor to The House Next Door, Slant Magazine’s official blog. Occasionally, he updates his personal blog Cerebral Mastication. In addition, his writing appears on various film and pop-culture sites on the blogosphere. You can follow his updates on twitter at twitter.com/aliarikan.