I am a fan of Lee Daniels' Precious—which chronicles the ridiculously hellish life of a Harlem teen in 1988—for some reasons included here.

But I'm also interested in the ongoing anti-Precious backlash, the most vitriolic contribution to which so far comes from the New York Press's infamous contrarian Armond White:

Shame on Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive producers of Precious....Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show. Offering racist hysteria masquerading as social sensitivity, it’s been acclaimed on the international festival circuit that usually disdains movies about black Americans as somehow inartistic and unworthy.

Courtland Milloy at the Washington Post continues the criticism of Perry and Winfrey:

Of course, "Precious" would not have received nearly as much media buzz if Oprah Winfrey and Tyler "Madea" Perry had not signed on as executive producers. Oddly, neither has made a movie about rising above a challenging background and becoming a wealthy and influential entertainer.

Asked by Entertainment Weekly magazine why she got involved with the project, Oprah said: "I realized that, Jesus, I have seen that girl a million times. I see that girl every morning on the way to work, I see her standing on the corner, I see her waiting for the bus as I'm passing in my limo, I see her coming out of the drugstore, and she's been invisible to me."

Instead of making a movie about how she beat the odds, Oprah has taken to divining ugly life stories from black girls she passes in her limo. Maybe the Obama girls should stay off the sidewalk for a while.

In "Precious," Oprah and Perry have helped serve up a film of prurient interest that has about as much redeeming social value as a porn flick.

To me, a honky watching Precious, the fact that Precious was made by a black filmmaker, based on a novel by a black writer, and co-produced by two media titans who also happen to be black communicated something to me about the film's value and, I guess, it's "truth." But according to Armond White (who, like Courtland Malloy, is African-American), it's all a con:

Perry, Winfrey, and Daniels’ pityparty bait-and-switches our social priorities. Personal pathology gets changed into a melodrama of celebrity-endorsed self-pity. The con artists behind Precious seize this Obama moment in which racial anxiety can be used to signify anything anybody can stretch it to mean. And Daniels needs this humorless condescension (Hollywood’s version of benign neglect) to obscure his lurid purposes.

And then there's this: The testimony of Mo'Nique, who portrays Precious' biggest monster, mother Mary. From an interview with the Associated Press:

AP: How would you describe the film?

Mo'Nique: It is about a forgotten people. It is about obesity. It's about molestation. It's about cruelty. It's about HIV/AIDS. But it's about triumph—and that's the beauty of the movie. People say, "How do you walk away saying it's beautiful?" When you watch it and you understand, through it all, somebody can pick themselves up and keep it moving, that's beautiful... So I was proud to be a part of something that is very honest, and Lee Daniels, baby, he's going to give it to you. He's going to give it to you raw. No chaser, no lollipop licking, this is it. It's the dirt, it's the grime, it's what we're afraid of.....I don't know of any other director that would have given two fat, black women the opportunity to do what we did... The world needs to see it because guess what, Mary Jones exists, baby. So does Precious.

Why I bolded that line above: Despite any and all claims of racism or black-on-black betrayal, Precious represents something all decent people must celebrate: A serious movie filled with almost nothing but great parts for African-American women (that also happens to be directed by a gay guy).

Precious begins its Seattle run today.

Playing tomorrow night ONLY at Northwest Film Forum. Worth it, says Paul Constant:

If you're a fan of Cory McAbee's sci-fi rock musical American Astronaut (and if you're not a fan of American Astronaut, you probably haven't seen American Astronaut), you probably have a good idea of what to expect from Stingray Sam. McAbee stars as the titular space cowboy, who gets yanked from his new career as a lounge singer for one last job—to save a young girl from a creepy celebrity named Fredward who wears a tight red rubber suit. With the assistance of his partner in crime, the Quasar Kid (played with cheerful big-dumb-sidekick equanimity by the mono-nomenclatured actor Crugie), Sam will have to project himself into a tiny robot, survive a climactic gunfight in the desert, and sing and dance.

Read the whole thing HERE.

Charles Mudede:

Even though the narrator of Araya condemns capitalist exploitation (the workers are paid pennies for backbreaking work and survive not on their earnings but from fishing), the film visually worships the dignity of sweat and the greatness of cooperation. The laborers build pyramids of salt as the sun beats on their bare and muscular backs. Sure, the work is hard, repetitive, deprives you of your childhood, and makes you a dumb adult who can only eat fish and sleep in your free time; despite all of this, the work is beautiful.

Read the whole thing HERE.

Andrew Wright goes to bat for Roland Emmerich:

Considerable Velveeta factor aside, though, the guy's a visually gifted, unabashedly middlebrow director who consistently delivers big, goofy epics about things blowing up real good, without any of the casual misogyny, smarm, or Genuine Draft sheen espoused by Michael Bay and his posse. (Or the spatial incoherence, for that matter: Emmerich is one of the few remaining blockbuster directors to understand that special effects lose much of their pop when you can't tell what the hell is going on.) If his cinematic sensibilities seem stuck at the level of an imaginative adolescent boy with a bunch of Tonka trucks and a crapload of M-80s, well, that's what pre-matinee booze is for.

Read and comment on the whole thing HERE.

David Schmader approves of We Live in Public:

Nearly a decade before Big Brother, Josh Harris was playing Big Brother, creating a series of outlandish and extreme "human experiments" presented as entertainments for what he dreamed would be an ever-growing audience of round-the-clock internet viewers. In the end, Harris drove himself crazy, Pseudo.com went bust, and, eight years later, documentarian Ondi Timoner expertly captured the whole brilliant mess on film.

Eric Grandy disapproves of (Untitled):

Adam Goldberg is a brooding and failing experimental composer; his brother is a successful painter of institutional art. Goldberg makes crap that nobody likes: unlistenable avant-garde skronk-as-slapstick (his pieces involve, among other things, the sound of him kicking a bucket hanging on a string). His brother makes crap that lots of people like: gentle, inoffensive pastel abstracts that are all but designed for hotel and hospital lobbies. Neither is happy; both want to continue making crap yet be regarded as geniuses. They must have the deepest sympathies of this film's director and screenwriters.

Read both reviews, and lots more, HERE.

• Alonso's Liverpool

Alonso’s films are about lone men, isolated by some combination of circumstance, choice, and temperament, and their movement through their landscapes. In La Libertad, it’s the logger in the forest (with a brief trip into a village hacked into the middle of the wilds). In Los Muertos (2004), it’s a man released from prison making his way up river to his village home and a reunion with his daughter (it could be either reconciliation or retribution, given the film’s uneasy tone). And in Fantasma (2006), the (non)actors from these two films go to see a screening of Los Muertos in a cinema so empty it’s unnerving.

Read the whole, great piece HERE.

I don't like the comic book very much—Mark Millar hasn't written a great comic book in a few years now—but I'm really liking the trailer for the movie version of Kick-Ass.

I can't wait to see this movie.

Steven Carell, Tina Fey, James Franco, and a shirtless Mark Wahlberg—what's not to like?

Can't wait. But quickly: where does the Fey/Carell family live exactly? The presidential suite at the Hilton? Harried parents simply do not have bedrooms that look like that. Movie stars do. And movie stars can be parents, of course, but movie stars are not harried. Their nannies are. Via Towleroad.

Eric Grandy is funny:

The overarching narrative, told in cuts from ship to shore, consists of some harrumphing minister's attempt to shut pirate radio down. In a tacked-on subplot (can a thing be tacked on to a thing that seems to be entirely made out of tacks?), Carl searches for the father he never knew among the ship's crew. There are several scenes of late-night conversations and games and high jinks meant to establish the camaraderie of the shipmates (who nevertheless "roger" each others' "birds" at every opportunity). There are many, many montages set to popular song.

Read the whole thing HERE.

The kid had today off school so last night the boyfriend rented Back to the Future, the film that almost made Michael J. Fox a movie star, and we stayed up late and watched it on our non-flat, non-wide-screen, cathode-ray, Reagan-era television console. It's amazing how well that movie—nearly 25-years-old—has held up. It even has Arab terrorists—crazed Reagan-era Libyans wearing keffiyehs and packing shoulder-fired rocket launchers—which made it feel quite contemporary. The kid enjoyed some milk and Halloween candy while the boyfriend and I enjoyed a bottle of wine leftover from a dinner party the night before.

And that's not okay, according to advice columnist Amy Dickinson. A woman has been watching her grandson two nights a month to give her daughter and son-in-law a break. "When our grandson was born, his parents created a list of rules regarding his care. I understood why they would want to do this. One of the rules is that there is zero tolerance for drinking any alcohol by the primary caregiver..." Grandma respected her daughter's wishes and didn't have wine with her meals—which she did when her kids were young—on those two nights a month. Now her daughter wants to grandma and grampa to take the kid off her hands for days at a time and grandma wants to ask her daughter to rescind her zero-tolerance policy. "Is responsibly drinking wine in one's home mutually exclusive to being able to responsibly care for a child?" grandma asks.

I support the "zero tolerance" policy of these parents. Even one glass of wine can affect your response time and sleep habits. Speak with your daughter, and go over her list of expectations. You should ask her to negotiate a solution—the most obvious being that you and your husband trade off who is the primary caregiver in the evenings. This person will enjoy a glass of apple juice with dinner.

Amy wraps it up by accusing grandma of having a drinking problem and provides us with a nifty new way to determine whether you're an alcoholic: if someone else has a problem with your drinking, then you have a drinking problem.

Um... in my family when you dropped your kid(s) off at grandma's house you were practically expected to drop off a bottle of wine at the same time. I survived my visits with my grandparents and my son has survived his visits with his grandparents, responsible wine drinkers one and all. And I don't think I know any parents who aren't light drinkers. Zero tolerance? Advisa please. Drinking is sometimes the only thing that makes parenting—which can make you miserable if you're not careful—tolerable at all.

No, conservative entertainment blog Big Hollywood knows that it failed because of a Chicago Tribune interview with Jim Carrey where he "makes the latest film version sound like a ham-fisted socialist diatribe, hardly a strategy for drawing middle American families in great numbers." To wit:

“I was thinking about it this morning, how this story ties into everything we’re going through,” says Carrey, who, thanks to the technology, plays Scrooge as well as the three ghosts haunting him. “Every construct we’ve built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can’t protect us against personal greed.. . ."

As Big Hollywood says, America does not want "any kind of brief for socialism," and that's why A Christmas Carol failed. If motion-capture Jim Scroogey taught Tiny Tim how to invest his meager savings in the stock market at the end of the film, rather than just giving him socialist health care like Obama wants, the Teabaggers would have come out in droves for this movie.

Life-ruiner Brendan Kiley gives away all its secrets without so much as a spoiler alert!!!

A middle-class couple in '70s Virginia receives a mysterious present, a box with a button protected by a glass dome. A man with a big hole burned into his face explains the deal: Press the button and you get a million dollars, but somebody you don't know will die. Easy, right? The couple is middle-class with a NASA husband (James Marsden), a Beckett-teaching wife (Cameron Diaz), and an annoyingly smart-ass son (Sam Oz Stone). They're running out of money to send their kid to private school, but it's not like they're starving or anything. And since rule number one in life is Don't Make Deals with Devils, they shouldn't push the button. Of course they push the button, almost casually. Why?

Read the whole spoiler-ridden thing HERE.

So. Robert Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol 3D opened on Friday (because it's Christmas!...right, guys?*). In it, Jim Carrey plays seven different characters**—among them, the most annoying Ghost of Christmas Present EVER (and he's the one we're supposed to like! He's supposed to be the fun one!)—and Gary Oldman plays Bob Cratchit AND Tiny Tim, and even though these famous actors were paid (human money!) to stand in a room and talk to each other and act, Zemeckis insists on taking a computer and doodling on them until they look like a bunch of expressionless, waxy, reanimated corpses. Which is precisely what I wrote in my review of Zemeckis's 2007 adaptation of Beowulf (a review titled, thanks to the great Annie Wagner, Waxy Waxy Anglo-Saxy):

Did you read Sean Nelson's great review of A Serious Man, the new Coen Brothers movie?

A Serious Man plumbs depths even major Coen devotees might not have imagined were there. It's not a departure, exactly—except in the way all their films are departures. It's an expansion, a magnification, a breakthrough. Yes, like all their movies, it's kind of a big joke, but a joke with the darkest punch line ever. The Coen brothers, who for 25 years have been called cold formalists with more interest in Steadicams and storyboards than in human characters, have made a movie about the twilight of the Jewish soul.

I saw A Serious Man last night, and I can't stop thinking about it. I've watched the trailer a dozen times since I came home from the theater. Have you seen it? It's one of the best trailers ever:

It's an especially fitting trailer because every scene in the entire movie seems to be based on some sort of rhythm; either the scene is based around a song, or the cameras seem to be moving to an unheard beat. I'm a huge Coen Brothers fan (except, as Sean points out in his review, for The Ladykillers, which was a painful aberration), but this movie feels different than the standard Coen Brothers film. It has so many layers and emotions at play in every frame. It's about faith (and not just religious faith, either: As commenter Guillaume smartly points out on Sean's review, the movie has a lot to say about quantum mechanics, too) and love and hope and everything else that makes life worth living.

Watching A Serious Man, to me, was maybe the closest that a cinematic experience can ever get to reading a novel. It was so dense and honest and powerful. I recommend the hell out of this movie.

Charles Mudede on Claire Denis and the modern urban family:

The urban family has a different and deeper set of values that are not connected by a sense of soil, wholesomeness, health, or devotion, but by the condition of being with (and close to) others who share the same fate, loneness, and melancholy. The urban family exists in a disenchanted world—science, capitalism, and cosmopolitanism have made it clear to everyone that life is short and death is final. All the urban family has are shared moments in time.

Read the whole thing HERE.