James Badge Dale isn’t a household name. But he should be.

Over the past ten years, the young actor has played supporting roles in several major films and starred in one of the most acclaimed mini-series of the past decade. One of his first juicy roles occurred in 2003 when he played Chase Edmunds, a CTU agent working under the tutelage of Jack Bauer on “24.”

In 2010, Dale played a lead in the HBO mini-series, “The Pacific.” Since then, he has acted in “The Conspirator,” headlined a television program called “Rubicon” and starred alongside Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan in the critically-acclaimed film “Shame.”

His latest project, “The Grey,” finds Dale facing his own mortality alongside Oscar-nominee Liam Neeson. I recently had a chance to talk to Dale about his emotional scene in the new thriller, his work on “The Pacific” and the Oscar nomination that never arrived for Fassbender.

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Late in the new movie “Shame,” the main character’s sister tells her brother that “we’re not bad people. We just come from a bad place.” That place — the people and the circumstances that made them who they are – is never discussed in the film. But the consequences of it are abundantly clear in this tale of a sex addict who begrudgingly lets his sister move into his home.

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Michael Fassbender, who surprised viewers earlier this year with portrayal of Magneto in “X-Men: First Class,” plays Brandon Sullivan. Brandon begins the story lying in bed, looking as alone and sad as he usually is. He’s addicted to sex in all forms. And he has no power to control that addiction. Even when x-rated images and videos are found on his work computer, he can’t seem to confront his own misdeeds. He’s okay letting his supervisor blame a lowly intern for the sickening images he gawks at during work.

Early on, Brandon’s sister Sissy, played by a captivating Carey Mulligan, arrives in town. She just suffered a bad break up and asks her brother if she can stay with him for a few days. Brandon reluctantly agrees, but he’s accustomed to a quiet life in his sparse apartment. He has female guests over, but they usually only stay a few hours at a time. Sissy’s presence abruptly throws his life off track.

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The sexual furies that roil the new movie “Shame” are poundingly, startlingly graphic for a mainstream release. (The picture is rated NC-17.)

The film’s protagonist, Brandon Sullivan, played with fearless commitment by Michael Fassbender, is an emotional zombie anonymously employed in a glass-and-steel cubical farm in high-rise Manhattan. Brandon drifts through his workdays in a fog of apathy. His consuming interest is an unending search for orgasm—with prostitutes, with nightly pickups, often with himself in office bathroom stalls and laptop porn sessions in his sterile midtown apartment. It’s not much of a life, but it’s all that this priapic automaton requires.

The English director, Steve McQueen (Hunger), tracks Brandon’s obsessive prowlings with a serene, long-take camera style and carefully controlled color design, cooling out the action with Glenn Gould’s elegant Bach variations. So the blunt full-frontal nudity and frenzied couplings are kept at arm’s length, and drained of erotic sensation. The picture has a flawless visual beauty, but it’s as arousing as a laboratory report.

Although Brandon admits that his longest romantic relationship lasted only four months, some women are drawn to his unapologetic predation.

Read the full review at Reason.com:

Modern Liberal pundit David Shuster yesterday denounced critics of the movie Avatar as “shameless and crazy.” 

The invocation of such hateful, pop-psychoanalyzing epithets is common practice in Shame Cultures (totalitarian ones), as a means of character assassination and destruction, rather than honest democratic engagement with ideological adversaries towards greater understanding. 

Since, in this case, Mr. Shuster seems disinterested in objectively considering the valid cultural and political points made by the film’s critics, he resorts to the shameful rhetorical tactic described above in order to secure his own personal cultural worldview as being truer, or even saner than his fellow disagreeable Americans. 

No surprise there.  (more…)

For a couple decades now too many members of the American celebrity and sports class have made millions The Madonna Way: pimping their deviant behavior into fame and fortune — shoving their thug lives, drug lives, and sex lives down our throats and, unforgivably, the throats of our children.  With only “at least I’m not a hypocrite” as an excuse, these irredeemables have waged a war to destroy morality, and heaven help those who complain or demand restraint, for we will mercilessly be ridiculed and demeaned as suburban hypocrites, Puritans and worse.

With that other-world talent of his, Tiger Woods could’ve decided on that route — could’ve gotten as rich as he wanted as the Dennis Rodman of golf. Instead Woods chose a quiet dignity and discipline. I’ve never watched a round of golf in my life, but that’s a quality of his I’ve always admired.

And this laudable quality was once the norm in our public figures, not the exception. People have always been people. Celebrities and stars and sports figures have always slept around and drank too much and flirted with scandal. The difference is that once upon a time being famous didn’t require the removal of the shame gene. The legends of old might not have respected themselves but at least they respected their reputations and their public and children enough to keep their personal indiscretions … personal. (more…)

When the end of the world comes, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse won’t greet us; The Real Housewives of New Jersey’ll tear us to shreds.

Television long ago brought something to the world that should never have been mixed: entertainment and reality. Because the moment you stick a camera in the face of reality, the reality gets lost. What you end up with is the ability for a camera to be on while a human being sheds all traces of its shame. That place where one openly cowers in a passive emotion while being in a public place.
I love a good car crash, not the sort that involves a motor vehicle and some poor slob texting-in his fantasy baseball picks. I’m talking about the car crash that is “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.”  Like a rubbernecking commuter getting one last look at those pretty flashing lights, I can’t take my eyes off that show. Its complete lack of shame coupled by the site of human beings unconsciously relishing in their own self-destruction is thrilling to me.

Shame is the lost gesture in today’s ugly world of reality TV and we need it back. It’s what separates us from the animals. (more…)

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…)