Michael Long is a writer and speechwriter in Washington, DC. He teaches speechwriting and public relations writing at Georgetown University and is a director of the White House Writers Group. He is represented by Movable Type Literary Group.
For more information, visit MikeLongOnline.com.
Mike Long
Review: ‘The Hurt Locker’
by Mike Long
The Hurt Locker is not about Iraq, why we went there, what we did when we got there, or whether we should have gone in the first place. It is not about American foreign policy or domestic disagreement over that policy; it’s not even about soldiers or their qualities or character … it’s not about politics at all.
The Hurt Locker is about an adrenaline junkie who gets off defusing bombs.
Sgt. Will James is very good at this narrow work. He is occasionally a fool who takes unnecessary chances. Far more often he is an expert who enjoys that his wisely bold tactics occasionally make him appear a fool—because a fool’s luck has nothing to do with his success. Early in the picture and after much prodding, Sgt. James admits to a superior officer that he has defused “873 bombs, counting today.” (more…)
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Review: ‘Bruno’
by Mike Long
Well, I liked it. That’s no guarantee you will.
Years ago, I did stand-up. Learned a lot doing that. One thing you learn is that there’s often a difference between the craft of comedy and what it takes to reliably get laughs. Some of the most inventive, impressive comedy minds don’t sell a lot of tickets. (I could name them. You wouldn’t know them.) But one act you can almost always count on selling tickets—putting “butts in seats,” as a venue-owner will say—is one that is big and loud and shocking. That is, there is The Fine Art of Stand-up Comedy, and then there is Getting A Reaction Out of The Audience. (That’s why many comedians curse so much. That’s why I cursed so much.) Turns out the latter is almost always going to sell tickets, and people are going to laugh for much the same reason a baby laughs when you play peek-a-boo with him. I think most people laugh at Gallagher not because he’s particularly creative in busting that watermelon with a sledgehammer, but because he had the stones to drag the thing up there the first time and smash it at all. We are surprised, and all but the most unpleasant surprise begets laughter. (more…)
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Review: ‘Terminator Salvation’
by Mike LongA Terminator mega-robot is fun to watch only if he (it?) is making his (its?) marauding way toward its target; generally, that’s the good guy in the movie who, by superhuman strength and unprecedented cleverness, will dispatch said Terminator in the last reel. Every Terminator movie has been defined by this simple conflict: man versus super-machine.
Not this time. And that is why, despite spectacular visual effects, a brooding and hyper-popular Christian Bale in the lead role, and marketing that pretty much stamped the title across my kids’ foreheads, Terminator Salvation is not nearly the success that the other three movies were.
John Connor and his mom (and his friends and pretty much everybody else with whom they ever come in contact) become instant targets for future-born Terminator robots. The setup is pretty straightforward. The time is present day. (more…)
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Review: ‘Management’ Should Go Back to School
by Mike LongI went to see Management because Steve Zahn is in it, and I’ll see him in anything. Steve Zahn turns out to be pretty much the only reason to see Management, and then only if you’re a big Steve Zahn fan, and then only if there’s nothing else to do, because even his always-fun appearance cannot rescue this picture, ostensibly an arthouse vehicle for Jennifer Aniston. (And if you needed any more proof that people don’t go to see Jennifer Aniston in a movie but go to see movies that just happen to have Jennifer Aniston in them, Management is Exhibit A. This weekend, the Aniston picture made only a little more money than Taken, which was released 16 weeks ago and is now available on DVD.)
Zahn plays a slacker (Yeah, what else is new, but he’s so good at it!) wasting away as the night manager at his parents’ rural motel. Aniston sells motel owners the painted-in-bulk art you find in motel rooms. For reasons that are never made clear, she doesn’t try to sell Zahn and his parents any art. She’s in the tiny town to sell to someone else — which made me wonder… (more…)
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Review: ‘Sin Nombre’ Doesn’t Live Up to Reputation
by Mike LongSin Nombre is a fictionalized account of the largely unknown (to Americans, at least) struggle that would-be immigrants go through long before they even get to the U.S. border. The story of a young man on the run from a murderous gang is told through those hardships. Assuming this is a realistic portrayal of life for residents of South and Central America, what these people go through is terrifying and dangerous. Anyone who would willingly face this is a person of character, or at least awfully tough.
But just because the characters are sympathetic doesn’t mean they’re in a good movie.
Sin Nombre is at once an illuminating portrayal of anonymous people (hence the title: in English, Nameless) and a thriller marred by long stretches of un-illuminating inactivity, poutiness by the lead character as a substitute for acting, and a spectacularly clichéd climax. The fact that the picture is in a language other than English elicits in some American critics the same reaction that British accents bring out in American audiences: This doesn’t sound like what I hear every day, so it must be important. (more…)
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Review: ‘Star Trek’ is Slick Fun – Nothing Wrong With That
by Mike LongEvery action picture is a science-fiction picture anymore. How else to explain Hero Survival In A Hail of Bullets, Inexhaustible Supply Of Energy In A Street Fight, and the Amazing Car That Still Operates After Driving Off A Building? Star Trek is not an exploration of an alternative physics or the ramifications of technology that’s possible only after the intractable engineering problems have been solved. Star Trek is an action picture set in space. It’s good fun, it’s exciting and engaging, it nods to a few perpetual icons of pop culture, and it’s even suitable for families. What’s not to like?
The most notable achievement here is the extraction of the franchise from fanboy fever swamps into mega-mainstream entertainment. The first three or four Star Trek movies were events with fanfare and media pomp, but after that they diminished into little more than baubled-up TV episodes for fans. You had to know not only the characters but also the Star Trek “universe” to really care about what was going on and why. But this picture works for anybody who even stumbles into it: Kirk is a tough guy, Spock is a smart guy, the rest are identifiably quirky in a Syd Field kind of way, and everybody who aspires to be above the title in their next movie is sexy. (more…)
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‘Crank: High Voltage’ is Brilliant
by Mike Long
Crank: High Voltage is surely the most visually inventive picture of the year. It is not just candy for your eyes, it is amphetamines. It is among the best times I’ve had at the movies in the past few years.
A director usually focuses on one or two typical movie elements to the detriment of the others, which is why you so often see a dull picture filled with intense acting, or a blockbuster story with throwaway characters. The most common of all permutations is action ueber alles in which car chases follow bar fights follow gunplay follows airplane battles follow robot wars. But the rarest is one in which the director finds a string of absolutely original things to do for nearly every minute of the movie. That’s what happens in Crank: High Voltage, and that’s what makes it so exciting. (more…)
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Review: ‘Wolverine’ is Lazy Moviemaking
by Mike LongX-Men Origins: Wolverine sounds like an idea for a direct-to-DVD cash-in project: pluck out one character and fill in the back-story, which is considerably cheaper than bringing back the whole cast for another big-screen adventure. But Wolverine aspires to more than that, of course, and Hugh Jackman as the title character probably takes up most the casting budget anyway: He’s the main draw for the X-Men movie series, the most dynamic and complicated of the characters, and if you had to pick the one best-suited to pure action sequences, it’s this guy.
Yet Wolverine still feels like an afterthought, a distant cousin to the original franchise, a sidebar that adds little to the main narrative. That’s probably because the picture is a gloomy exercise: There’s no one to cheer for except Wolverine, and he’s working so hard at being Eyore with Elvis sideburns that it’s hard to root for him anyway. Then again, who can blame him? The character lives in a world populated almost entirely of bad guys. Besides your standard-issue unrepentants, you’ve got good guys who turn out to be bad guys, family members who turn out to be bad guys, trusted leaders who turn out to be bad guys, and lovers, friends, and comrades in arms who turn out to be bad guys, too. There are a few good guys who don’t turn out to be bad guys (I counted two), but they don’t survive long enough to earn a spot beyond the last third of the closing credits. (more…)
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‘Last House on the Left’ Presents Rape as Entertainment
by Mike LongThe explicit portrayal of rape in Last House on the Left (2009) is repugnant and coarsening and wrong. Director Dennis Iliadis dwells on the act long past the moment in which we get the point; long past when we have been emotionally affected. The scene quickly becomes exploitation.
This poison goes down smooth because Last House is creepy, frightening, and well-executed, as horror movies go. The movie looks as good as any other mid- to big-budget Hollywood picture. The acting is above-average for this kind of thing, the villains are creepy (though made oddly sympathetic at times), and the updates to the original story make the plot far more believable than it was in the amateurish, junk-pile original from 1972. (more…)
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Review: The Great Buck Howard—A Show Biz Valentine
by Mike LongThe Great Buck Howard is a funny, knowing gift for anyone who loves old-fashioned show business: It celebrates the entertainer who is in it for the fun of putting on a good show, and for bringing a little pleasure to anyone who cares enough to come out and watch.
Buck Howard the man is an old-fashioned show-business type: He is a mentalist—a magician who does mind-reading tricks. But he is preternaturally good at what he does (in contrast to his complete lack of self-awareness), and he was once a pop-culture fixture, a regular on The Tonight Show. (“The real one—with Johnny Carson,” he constantly reminds—this will have its intended melancholy effect only on those over 40 or so.) Now he plays half-empty halls in third-tier markets. Not that this tempers his enthusiasm, or that of his fans. Which is exactly the point. (more…)
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Review: Gomorrah — Five Minutes of Action Crammed Into Two Hours
by Mike LongWatching Gomorrah is like learning Latin: You’d rather say you’ve done it than actually do it.
Gomorrah is a slightly fictionalized portrayal of life under the influence of the criminal organization Camorra (unknown to most of the U.S., but apparently running things with bloody fists in Italy). It’s a situation that deserves attention. A picture could have presented events as riveting entertainment or art, and perhaps helped to bring about change. Yet Gomorrah fails as art, entertainment and promotional tool. Any publicity about the horror of the Camorra has come from the existence of the film, not the watching.
Gomorrah is dull and flat and emotionally uncompelling: It is a sprawling tour of future-less lives and hollow days punctuated occasionally—very occasionally—by brief set pieces in which something violent and terrible happens. That may be true-to-life, but so is sitting at a desk all day, and neither is particularly interesting to watch. If filmmakers have any foundational obligation, it is to make a picture that makes you want–need–to keep watching. These filmmakers feel no such burden. It is as if they have taken the seriousness of their subject as license to relieve themselves of the obligation to sustain the interest of the audience. They’re counting on guilt or something to keep us interested, and they could not have been more mistaken. (more…)
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‘Two Lovers’: One of the Best of 2009
by Mike LongLots of filmmakers set out to make an evocative picture without concern for making an engaging one. Their motivation, I believe, is to do something out of the ordinary that will set them apart as artists. They see storytelling as a conventional skill, subject to, well, convention: Why bother with tension and release and plot? Anybody can do that. I, the artist, will evoke a mood. And that certainly can turn out okay, but most of the time it does not. Most of the time, it results in another volume for the ongoing arthouse library of self-indulgent twaddle.
Two Lovers is a splendid exception, both evoking a mood and telling a story. Not a complicated story, not a Jurassic Park story, and not even a Moody Family Drama story, but a story of familiar feelings in what for most us will be an unfamiliar setting populated by unfamiliar people. Two Lovers is mood-heavy account of a young man’s simultaneous romances with two women. Instead of ending up in bathos–the usual destination–the filmmakers show this young man carrying around his past while he tries to find a happy future. This conflict directs the nature and depth of the romances. In the end we see how happy endings are sometimes the saddest of all. (more…)
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Review: ‘The Echelon Conspiracy’ Is Shameful
by Mike Long
The Echelon Conspiracy could spin off a veritable global economy of work in the form of books, magazine articles, documentaries and parodies to investigate and explain the dissonance between the picture’s pre-production pedigree and the post-production fiasco. There are surely a lot of fascinating stories here: How such a rancid wreck got made in the first place; how it didn’t end up going directly to DVD; how so many A-list actors such as Ving Rhames, Jonathan Pryce, Ed Burns and Martin Sheen got involved; why screenwriters Michael Nitsberg and Kevin Elders figured they could rip off the end of War Games—at times, nearly line-by-line—and that no one would notice; and how a movie with a reasonably interesting premise, at least one notable idea at its heart, and enough Bush-bashing to please every liberal film critic in America could end up (as of this writing) with a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. (more…)
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Look to DVD for Best of 2008
by Mike Long
Some of the biggest movies of any year aren’t in wide release until January, so some of us don’t see all them until much later. As of this week, I think I’ve seen what passes for “everything” from 2008. Herewith, my list of the Top Ten for the year just passed:
10. Sex Drive. Hilarious, under-seen, low-budget comedy starring the creative partner of the funny Michael Cera. Defeated at the box office because of its name, it features a few show-stopping scenes with Seth Green and a live-action pair of Beavis-and-Butthead types who steal the whole thing. This’ll do great on DVD. (more…)
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‘The International’ is no ‘Michael Clayton’
by Mike LongI saw The International a few days after I saw Fired Up and I’m trying to figure out how two lowbrow pictures can inspire such different reactions in me. Going in, I knew that both were peddled as screen fodder—something to fill the multiplex, not the mind or the heart. I had a good time at Fired Up despite its obvious weaknesses and flaws. The International left me cold.
I think the reason goes something like this: A comedy movie, at least of the Fired Up variety, is a series of jokes in the form of stories, one-liners, set pieces, sketches, situations, characters and reactions. If one doesn’t work for you, hang on, ‘cos there’ll be another coming right along, and you might like that one better. (more…)
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Review: ‘Fired Up’ for Mindless Entertainment
by Mike Long
I enjoy silly comedies, and Fired Up fills the bill. It’s a standard variation on a plot done a million times before. In this case, two football jocks decide to attend cheerleader camp in order to apply their formidable sexual prowess to the extraordinary female-to-male ratio. The picture is entirely unrealistic in almost every way, from the preternatural romantic confidence of the male leads to the ease with which these two underage youths navigate the adult world. (more…)
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G’night, All
by Mike Long2008 was not a very good year for movies–that’s the lesson here. But Big Hollywood rules. Thanks, Andrew & John, for the chance to get to knock it around with the other contributors. Good to get to know y’all a little bit, this way. Later.
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by Mike Long
Slumdog. Fine director. Okay movie. Weak excuse for “Best Picture.”
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Hudnall Nails It with…
by Mike Long… “sanctimonious wife-beating creep” re Penn.
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by Mike Long
Everyone seems to love Mickey Rourke, but I thought the “acting” was just the guy with a few pounds on and bleach-job extensions. Clearly I lack the sophisticate’s eye.
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by Mike Long
Adrien Brody is Latin for Who cares.
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by Mike Long
In case you didn’t see it, here’s what The Reader is about: If you killed Jews in the Holocaust, being illiterate is an excuse.
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by Mike Long
Tonight, the role of Toast will be played by Sophia Loren.
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by Mike Long
what’s with the stupid you-go-girl speeches, actress to actress? this is like some sort of support group where every chick ends up in sync with each other’s period…
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by Mike Long
some of these actresses should fight the patriarchy and wear pants
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by Mike Long
Danny Boyle is such a talent, and if you want to see some of his best work–better than Slumdog Millionaire–rent his picture from a year or so ago, SUNSHINE. His very best, I say. Good on Danny Boyle, a creative director who has not confined himself to a genre or two, but who instead makes movies about whatever moves him, and he makes them well.
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Best Original Song = Farce
by Mike LongThe best song was the theme from GRAN TORINO. There was no competition. Seriously. Don’t take my word for it, go download it from itunes or amazon and listen to it. Best song from any movie this year. Or from the last few years for that matter. GRAN TORINO. And not nominated.
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Melanie Graham
by Mike LongHa to the joke. ha to the construction. Love the construction. Is it okay to love the construction?
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by Mike Long
There’s a lesson in the fleetingness of fame. Jerry Lewis is one of the biggest stars ever in Hollywood. He gets a few minutes for this award, and then we’re off to the next thing. When he dies, he’ll get another moment or two and then that’ll be it for Jerry Lewis. Just sayin’.
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