The Genius Child



By David Ross. I make my living stumping for high modernism, so I am not exactly an enemy of the avant-garde and the experimental, and yet I am diffident about the extraordinary reputation of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), the Brooklyn-born Haitian-American wunderkind who during the early eighties vaulted from graffiti artist to Warhol protégé and Madonna boy-toy in a mere ten years before dying of a heroin overdose.

I turned to Tamra Davis’ documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2009) for a glimmer of an explanation. The documentary turned out to be a trove of vintage footage and articulate commentary provided by those who stood just at the perimeter of Basquiat’s spotlight, but in the end I could find no trail of breadcrumbs to lead me out of the postmodern funhouse in which fame multiplies by some hidden law of light and reflection and desire. Basquiat wrote meaningless koans with spray paint and became famous; he founded a band with some downtown types, none of whom could play instruments, and become even more famous; he mooned around the trendiest clubs and become more famous still. He painted childlike hieroglyphics on whatever he could find and became a superstar. Dying young, he became a legend, which is precisely what he had set out to be.

Really, though, what is the substance of his achievement? His art is certainly vivid and energetic, and its neo-expressionist assault on the minimalism and conceptualism of the seventies is impossible not to cheer (“white paintings, white people, white wine” is how one interviewee recalls the pre-Basquiat era). And yet his art does not – for me at least – resolve into meaning. Its presumptive symbol language is too private and haphazard, and it is not tantalizing enough on its face to rouse my analytic energy and resolve. We kill ourselves to make sense of Finnegans Wake because we intuit that there is sense to be made; Basquiat’s art demands a gamble of time and energy that seems to run against the odds of an ultimate payoff.

The film’s numerous interviewees note Basquiat’s influences: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, William Burroughs, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning. There’s something to be said for each of these connections, but Basquiat’s art seems to me closest to that of De Kooning: stark, nightmarish, garishly and luridly childlike, suffocating in its self-enclosed logic. I would say, though, that De Kooning’s punch is more concerted and harder thrown, his vision more ordered and hefty. Basquiat may have been more talented – I have no idea – but I doubt he had reflected nearly as carefully about what he was up to or exercised the same kind of winnowing intelligence. He seems to have worked by spontaneous trial and error, adding, subtracting, and overlaying in accordance with some inner sense of arrangement and meaning. This kind of improvisation can be electrifying when executed with supreme technical command (Keats, Coltrane, Pollock) but Basquiat was very far from virtuosic.

I can comprehend Basquiat only as a talented and perhaps semi-inspired cipher whose most superficial accouterments – name, hair, race – won him the role that had to be filled one way or another: that of the boy genius, the tragic naïf, with royalties and two-hundred years compounded interest owed to Keats. Basquiat was particularly suited to this role, being soft-spoken, dreamy, and vague in a way that might be misinterpreted as poetic. In comparison to Patti Smith, perhaps the only genuine genius of the punk-era downtown scene, Basquiat seems flimsy; his flourishes may or may not dazzle, but they are never more than flourishes.

The film, incidentally, adopts as epigraph Langston Hughes’ bad poem “Genius Child”:

This is a song for the genius child.
Sing it softly, for the song is wild.
Sing it softly as ever you can –
Lest the song get out of hand.

Nobody loves a genius child.

Can you love an eagle,
Tame or wild?
Can you love an eagle,
Wild or tame?
Can you love a monster
Of frightening name?

Nobody loves a genius child.

Kill him – and let his soul run wild.

The suggestion that the world “kills” the “genius child” in a snit of aggressive philistinism or atavism is ludicrous and particularly ludicrous in this case. Everybody loves a “genius child” and certainly everybody loved Basquiat. He was surrounded by benefactors. They paid his rent, slept with him, bought him paints, canvases, whatever he needed, furnished him with studio space, collected his paintings from the very start. Basquiat, in his early twenties, was fast on his way to substantial wealth and permanent celebrity. Had Basquiat lived only a few more years he would have been showered with a MacArthur Genius Grant and other remunerative goodies, and he would have wound up splitting his time between a downtown duplex and the south of France, with occasional appearances on Oprah to pontificate on the strain of being a genius.

Has society ever genuinely killed a “genius child”? It’s very hard to think of a case. Shelley initiated the accusation in “Adonais,” his bloated elegy for Keats, alleging that John Wilson Crocker’s savage review of Endymion in the Quarterly Review had done in the young poet. He writes in his preface:

The savage criticism produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wontonly inflicted.

Hating this kind of misty whining, Byron did his best to stab the trope in its cradle. His wry retort comes in Don Juan (Stanza 60, Canto XI):

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, without Greek
Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate:
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

Byron did his best, but it was no use. Every suicidal, immuno-compromised, coke-snorting, sport-car-gunning boy-genius would be laid like some pierced fawn on society”s doorstep.

The only figure who begins to make sense of Hughes’ silly poem is Oscar Wilde, though his genius was only part of the problem. Wilde was genuinely destroyed; all of the others – from Shelley himself to Michael Jackson – destroyed themselves for reasons of their own.

Posted on December 14th, 2010 at 9:45am.

Ballerina as Careerist: Black Swan

By Patricia Ducey. Darren Aronofsky’s new film, Black Swan, is not The Red Shoes, the original ballet and madness movie that spawned many imitators – and it’s not a thriller (as it’s billed), either. It’s pretty clear early on that our heroine’s worst enemy is her own shaky self. Ballet movies like The Red Shoes and its progeny explore the Romantic ethos of the artistic life; to live, and perhaps even to die for art, is the highest calling of humanity – if we are to believe them.

But Black Swan tosses dance aside. We never do understand why ballet is so important to our heroine Nina (Natalie Portman) or even to autocratic artistic director Thomas (Vincent Cassel). The dancing (even if I had not recently seen the electrifying Mao’s Last Dancer), is sadly pedestrian, even after Natalie Portman’s yearlong marathon of training. Aronofsky’s camera instead focuses mainly on the physical toll to the dancers’ bodies as they joylessly go through their paces. His characters never express dance as any sort of intellectual or spiritual vocation. They do not seek transcendence – they want to be stars! And our doomed ballerina Nina apparently suffers from the worst case of such careerism and perfectionism. We wonder for two hours whether she will make it to stardom, or whether her neuroses will destroy her main chance. This is not so much an opera as an after-school special – albeit R-rated -about self-esteem.

As in his previous films The Wrestler or Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky eschews coherence or depth in his stories and instead uses narrative merely as a frame, as insubstantial as gossamer, on which to hang his feverish and sometimes arresting images. Tellingly, most of the images in Black Swan are not of the ballet itself but of sex (sex with a sadistic boss, in a dirty toilet, between lesbian rivals) and gore (flesh peeled off fingers, feet broken by dancing, guts ripped open by mirror shards).

With such explicit focus from the director on sex and death, what’s left for the actors to imply by nuance or expression? Not much. The arc-less script is not interested in nuance or emotional truth, and this hampers the performances of our two leads. Nina begins the movie as a tightly wound child and ends there, too – she is not destroyed by the dualities of the Black Swan/White Swan at all. She might just as well have been a lawyer or a housewife; the ballet is only a backdrop to foreground her neuroses.

Vincent Cassel does his best as the autocratic sexual-predator director (of course) who has no feeling or opinion on dance at all, and his character stays here as well. Thomas recites his leaden, James Cameron-style dialogue with as much brio as he can: “I don’t think you have it in you!” he bellows over and over to Nina. Yet he chooses her for the starring role anyway, because she shows “spirit.” The evening before, he clumsily and arrogantly attempts to kiss her and she bites his lip in a panic, drawing blood.

What is an actor to do with such nonsense?

Natalie Portman as Nina.

The swan chorus, meanwhile, is a bunch of Mean Girls who sound like foul-mouthed high schoolers rather than skilled, focused artists. So Mila Kunis as Nina’s chief rival doesn’t take all this dance stuff so seriously, ya know? She can go out on the town, down some shots, a little blow, and show up fresh faced the next morning at rehearsal. Yet Thomas continually compares her nonchalance and resultant superior acting/dancing to Nina’s. Why doesn’t he then choose her then for the Swan? At least she’s interesting.

In Aronofsky’s Brutalist school of moviemaking, disgust is all: he despises his weak, needy characters. Why bother with love stories (Requiem) or families (Wrestler) or transcendent art, he seems to ask, since we’ll all be worms’ meat soon enough! In Black Swan he delivers another dollop of the old ultra-violence with close-ups of bleeding skin, broken limbs and even more broken mirrors – but this is more Petit then Grand Guignol: the gore in Black Swan exists for its own sake, completely uncoupled from dramatic context. With each gruesome image, he delivers pain and stimulation and little else; when the story slows down and Nina inspects her self-mutilation scars, you shut your eyes. In The Wrestler, at least, Mickey Rourke’s broken body served the narrative about his broken dreams.

Perhaps Aronofsky, the inveterate bombast, cannot identify with the constraint and tradition and nuance of the ballet aesthetic. To him, striving for the unattainable in love or art is masochism. What’s left for him, then, is merely a simplistic psychologizing of the Swan myth: the good Nina can’t handle her bad Nina. It remains a mystery, though, how this timorous child/woman could ever have risen to the top ranks of any company when her personality continually stunts her performances.

Vincent Cassel with Natalie Portman in "Black Swan."

And so we wait for Nina’s inevitable disintegration – because we no longer expect happy endings from movies, and we’re not surprised when that inevitable disintegration comes. We simply passively wait for it – but this isn’t enough to sustain a long movie.

Aronofsky almost redeems himself in the end – too late, though, to save the film. Nina finally snaps and ‘becomes’ the Black Swan. She dances with all the vigor and sexual energy Thomas has been calling for. The camera follows her as she finally surrenders to her role and leaps out onto the stage, where she appears to molt her human identity and change into an actual living swan. She greets the increasing transformation of her body with joy and she dances, for once, with abandon, and she triumphs. As the camera silhouettes her final bow against the stage lights, the unity of image and psychology and story is simply breathtaking. What a movie this might have been, if Aronofsky had been half as rigorous for the preceding two hours.

There is hope, then, that this ambitious, reckless filmmaker will one day rise – like Nina – to live up to his own artistic potential.

[Footnote: My Christmas present from Hollywood was seeing the trailer for The Tree of Life, Terence Malick’s new film, which promises that in 2011 we will be treated to a film by an artist in full command of his many gifts, one who actually understands and respects the complexity of the human soul.]

Posted on December 13th, 2010 at 2:17pm.

Vanity, Thy Name is Jolie: LFM Reviews The Tourist

By Jason Apuzzo. When you’re the biggest female movie star in the world, and your personal man-servant is Brad Pitt, you can order up a film like The Tourist – more or less as you would order up room service at The Ritz.

That’s the ‘truth,’ such as it is, behind the new Angelina Jolie star vehicle that opens today, co-starring – technically, at least – Johnny Depp, and directed (so the advertising claims) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

Because if the phrase ‘vanity project’ has any meaning, then it applies with full force in describing The Tourist.

That’s not necessarily such a bad thing, in so far as Ms. Jolie is a genuine star – albeit, occasionally a star in the same way that Medusa was a ‘star’ of Greek mythology, earning her points by way of force rather than charm. But in the strange world we live in, in which people like Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon are routinely and incorrectly referred to as ‘stars’ (rather than as what they are, which is ‘actresses’) Angelina Jolie is the genuine article, and The Tourist only confirms that. If there ever was a woman the camera loves as she walks into a crowded ballroom, or as she skeptically raises an eyebrow at a would-be suitor, or as she fixes an appraising gaze on a man she intends to possess – and destroy? – then it’s Angelina Jolie.

The problem is, star vehicles don’t always make for good films – and at a certain point, they also corrode the star’s image. (Ask John Travolta about that.) The Tourist is almost – if not quite – a disaster, a woeful and expensive attempt to mimic charming romantic espionage capers of the past like North by Northwest, Charade or Arabesque; and in the generally misogynistic calculus of today’s Hollywood, Jolie likely can’t afford many more films like it.

Angelina Jolie, with some guy.

There’s more to The Tourist than that, though. There’s also a kind of snarky, dismissive tone taken by the film toward America and Americans that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. More on that below. The bottom line is that whereas I was ready to pass this film off as a harmless failure, an expensive lark – now I’m actively rooting for it to fail.

Frankly, I hope The Tourist tanks.

I’ll go through the motions and describe the film’s ‘plot,’ although ‘plot’ in this film is strictly an afterthought. We start with Jolie, who’s in Paris being surveilled by Scotland Yard for reasons as yet unknown. The Scotland Yard team is led by Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton (highly underrated as James Bond, I might add) – just two members of this film’s expensive supporting cast, which also includes Steven Berkoff and Rufus Sewell. Jolie gives Scotland Yard the slip, and finds herself on a train bound for Venice where she picks up Depp as a decoy to keep her pursuers guessing. Complicating matters is that a crime lord (Berkoff) who’s also pursuing Jolie mistakes Depp for a criminal who recently made off with about a billion dollars’ worth of his dirty money. Double-crosses, pseudo-adventure, predictable revelations and passing glances at romance ensue.

What non-chemistry looks like.

A few other things ensue, as well. One of the film’s motifs is that of Depp acting out as a bumbling, graceless and naive American in one of Europe’s most exotic and resplendent cities: Venice. (It’s simultaneously one of Europe’s grimiest and crassly commercialized cities; even Goethe was complaining about it back in the 1790s, long before there were Americans around to ruffle anybody’s feathers.) Depp plays the 2010 version of the ‘ugly American’ overseas, although in this case he’s more like the bumbling, gauche American – and The Tourist tries to play his ‘fish-out-of-water’ status for as many cheap laughs as possible.

It’s pathetic, and none of it works. It also happens to be obnoxious – a ‘look at the dancing American monkey’ routine – and immediately reawakened my dormant contempt for all-things-Depp.

By why restrict my venom to Depp? How about the director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck? You can stick a fork in him. His 2007 film The Lives of Others was a breath of fresh air on a challenging, politically incorrect subject (i.e., the legacy of communism in Europe). Whatever good-will he established with that film has now been swiftly squandered – and for what? To play personal valet to big-dollar American movie stars on a European holiday? To indulge in cheap anti-Americanism, so he can fit in better with the Malibu gentry?

A fairy-tale Venice, with no tale to tell.

Donnersmarck does not appear to have ‘directed’ his stars here at all, actually. Perhaps he was over-awed by the talent suddenly put at his disposal. Jolie swans through the film doing her usual routine – which is fine, it’s a good routine, except that she lacks the vulnerability here that she shows in her better roles. As for Depp, he really needed to be directed because – conventional wisdom to the contrary – he is neither Cary Grant nor Laurence Olivier, and needed to bring more discipline to his performance (beginning with cutting his hair, and getting a shave) in order to be convincing as a math teacher from Wisconsin.

The deeper problem here, though, is that Hollywood is long out of practice making films like this – and it shows. The Tourist feels like a tourist ride through other, better films – films with higher stakes (as during the ideological struggle of the Cold War; one thinks here of Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews), or with more style (say, Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik). Donnersmarck doesn’t want to take too many chances here, though, and potentially risk his shiny new Hollywood career; ironically, his career may now get scuttled by this film.

The temptation to ‘go Hollywood’ is a strong one, one that only the most willful and stubborn can withstand. It’s probably very tempting even for an Oscar-winner like Donnersmarck, with serious things on his mind, to become – in effect – little more than another member of Angelina Jolie’s livery.

There are no doubt worse fates, but some of us were hoping for more from him.

Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 6:14pm.

One City, Three Drivers: Beijing Taxi

By Joe Bendel. It is an open question just how beneficial the 2008 Olympics were to average Chinese citizens. They were a source of pride perhaps, and certainly the well-connected made money through construction contracts and the like. Yet for the city’s working class cabbies, the Olympics – as well as China’s precipitous industrialization – have been a decidedly mixed bag. Indeed, life is not particularly easy for any of the three drivers director Miao Wang unobtrusively follows in Beijing Taxi (trailer above), which opens this Friday at Brooklyn’s reRun Gastropub Theater.

Starting two years prior to the Beijing Games, Taxi documents a city in flux. The games should be a boon to the drivers, what with all the tourists expected. Of course, nothing is so simple in China. Facing new language requirements (ironically, it seems travelers would be more likely to find an English speaking cabbie in Beijing than in New York) and rising costs, Taxi’s subjects are feeling increasingly pinched.

In various ways, the three cab drivers represent the inherent contradictions of contemporary Chinese society. While critical of China’s go-go economic policies, fifty-four year-old Bai Jiwen also fully recognizes his opportunities are limited because the Cultural Revolution permanently cut short his education. By contrast, thirtysomething Wei Caixia embraces China’s entrepreneurial ethos, but she is not so keen on the hard work part. Perhaps Zhou Yi is the most contented with his lot, but he still tries to maintain links to traditional Chinese culture.

Eschewing celebrity narration and talking head interviews, Taxi is not incompatible with the work of China’s so-called “Digital Generation” or “D-Generate” filmmakers. Though in many ways it functions as a critique of China’s comrade capitalism, Taxi is not the gritty, unremittingly depressing cinematic experience one finds in documentaries like Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home. Granted, Taxi’s three central POV figures certainly endure life’s challenges, they nonetheless prove to be quite resilient and even optimistic, at least to an extent.

Their real life dramas are also bookended by a surprisingly cool opening and closing credit sequence, which give the film a bit of panache. Indeed, it is well conceived and executed by the New York based Wang, who immigrated to America in 1990 (one year following the massacre at Tiananmen Square).

Cinematographers Ian Vollmer and Sean Price Williams dramatically capture the pulse and power of Beijing. However, this is a glass and steel urban jungle – which might disappoint viewers hoping to see an ancient and exotic capitol city, much like the underwhelmed tour groups Zhou Yi chauffeurs. Still, the cabbies offer a perfect vantage point for Wang to essentially ask “where are we and how did we get here?”  Considerably more accessible for general viewers than one might expect, Taxi is worth a trip out to Brooklyn when it opens at the reRun Gastropub this Friday (12/10).

Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 10:06am.

Rear Window

From Wafaa Bilal's "Domestic Tension."

By David Ross. Here’s the latest odor emanating from the moldering flesh of the art tradition. Wafaa Bilal, a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has in manner had a camera implanted in the back of his head. On December 15, the camera will begin to upload constant footage to a website (www.3rdi.me) associated with the new Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar (see here). The project will raise “important social, aesthetic, political, technological and artistic questions,” Bilal told the AP (see here). According to the AP, Bilal’s recent works “have invited debate and controversy”:

In a 2007 online installation, “Domestic Tension” in 2007, virtual users could shoot a paintball gun at Bilal 24 hours a day. The Chicago Tribune deemed it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time” and named him Artist of the Year that year.

A 2008 video game piece, “Virtual Jihadi,” was censored by the city of Troy, N.Y. where it was shown. In it, Bilal inserted an avatar of himself as a suicide bomber hunting then-President George W. Bush. The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a claim against the city of Troy for closing the arts center showing the work.

The artist has said the work was meant to shed light on groups that traffic in hateful stereotypes of Arab culture with video games like Quest for Saddam.

In a recent live performance piece titled “…and Counting,” Bilal had his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty. Bilal, whose brother was killed by a missile at an Iraqi checkpoint in 2004, used the piece to highlight how the deaths of Iraqis are largely invisible to the American public. The dots for the Iraqis were represented by green UV ink only visible under black light, while Americans were represented by permanent ink.

The AP story on Bilal’s latest opus generated a mountain of vituperative user comment. Some of this response has a racist and right-wing cast, but most of it indicates deep, genuine, and politically neutral bitterness at the cooption of the arts by leftwing stunt-pullers and theoreticians of the fundamentally empty. The people crave art of the eye, hand, and mind as they have since the cave painters sat in smoky meditation with their berry juice and charcoal. Their comments grope for words like those of Yeats’ great injunction from “Under Ben Bulben”:

Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did.
Bring the soul of man to God.

Thomas Kinkade has grown rich speciously filling this void (see here). Why can’t someone fill it genuinely? Where is the Martin Luther of art with his 95 theses? The reviver of the arts will need incontestable artistic genius, intolerable arrogance, and a scathing polemical or satirical tongue. I envision some combination of Beethoven, Whistler, Oscar Wilde, and Wyndham Lewis. He or she will have to clear the way by force, because institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have decades of dubious decision-making to defend, and they are not going to let their multi-billion-dollar collections evaporate in a puff of punctured theory.

Wafaa Bilal and his camera.

There are certain promising developments in architecture, where the brutality of modernism, the juvenility of postmodernism, and the sheer laziness of the strip-mall remainder have been answered by a resurgent aestheticism with both neo-classical (see here) and neo-modernist manifestations. Julian Bicknell’s Henbury Hall (1986), Cheshire, epitomizes the former development, Santiago Calatrava’s Tenerife Concert Hall (2003) the latter. Le Corbusier’s corrosive notion that “a house is a machine for living” seems to be in retreat, and tendrils of extraneous beauty are beginning to peep through the cracks in the modernist concrete.

Might fine art follow this pattern? It’s possible, but there’s the important point that architecture is a relatively unfettered and unmediated arrangement between client and builder (cf. the tale of Henbury Hall), while art is tangled up in the bien pensant folly of museums, government agencies, and universities, and subject always to the media-driven fads of the marketplace.

The Tenerife Concert Hall.

Three salutary if fantastic measures: 1) Fire all the artist/professors, 2) Close the museums of contemporary art, and 3) Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and similar troughs of largesse. Let artists sell their wares in the street and relearn of necessity the language of the human. Let them rediscover how to carve, draw, and shape with their hands, and let them try to create what people might actually covet and save and pinch to own. Let them sketch passers-by in parks and squares, dawn to dusk, until they rediscover what Yeats calls the “old nonchalance of the hand.”

What? Return the arts to the bondage of the masses! The Dutch Golden Age was built on the tastes of burghers and merchants, men who drank beer and drove hard bargains. Turner was the son of a barber, Ruskin the son of a suburban wine merchant. As the comments on Bilal’s work suggest, the “masses” can at least spot a charlatan, which is more than can be said of so many museum mandarins.

In the worst case, Thomas Kinkade and his kind win out. So be it. I prefer juvenile notions of beauty to sophisticated denials of beauty. I prefer a saccharine village scene to a dead shark in formaldehyde. The former can at least evolve in the direction of genuine beauty because it has not broken ranks with the human. The latter is hopelessly estranged; nothing can be built on its example.

Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 9:43am.

Invasion Alert!: Christina Hendricks, Michael Bay & Even Pauley Perette Join the Invasion!

By Jason Apuzzo. • Tron is approaching, a wave that’s looking smaller as it approaches shore. The film is tracking poorly; it’s also getting mixed reviews thus far (see here and here) … oh, and the total cost of the film, with marketing? Apparently around $320 million. Plus, people are starting to scratch their heads about the fact that this is the debut feature for the film’s director, Joseph Kosinski (see interviews with him here and here), whose background is in architecture and design rather than in drama or literature – you know, those old-fashioned disciplines that involve human beings.

Boomer New Age morality tale?

So, what are we about to get here with Tron? I’m guessing something stylish and dull – with a dash of retro-liberalism (of the anti-corporate variety) to keep the Boomers happy. (Incidentally, there’s some speculation that this new film may already be subtly setting up the corporate villain for the sequel … )

In the meantime, Olivia Wilde continues to flaunt herself (see here), and otherwise make herself out to be the face of the production. As annoying as she is, that’s probably a good idea given how flat Garrett Hedlund seems, and how spaced-out Jeff Bridges seems in his interviews about the film (see here). Somewhat more fun are the Daft Punk guys, whose “Derezzed” video just hit.

More sinister, however, are inferences from several people (see here and here) that Disney is psuedo-suppressing access to the charming, old version of Tron while the new film gets its marketing binge. That’s certainly an ironic development for a movie that’s supposedly a sub rosa critique of ‘fascism’ and enforced sameness. (In fairness, the old film just got remastered and will be getting a Blu-ray release in 2011.)

Incidentally, whatever happened to that Path to 9/11 DVD, Disney?

Beau Garrett in "Tron: Legacy." Maybe she knows where Disney's "Path to 9/11" DVD went.

• Michael Bay is coming out of his cocoon as he finishes Transformers 3. He’s talking to the media about the film now (see here and here), he’s allowing people to visit the set, and is now saying that he loves working in 3D. Also, a teaser trailer is coming, and there’s a new poster out for the film.

I’m not sure how much juice the Transformers series still has, really, but we’ll probably learn something from that trailer. Footnote: Megan Fox is really seeming out-of-sight/out-of-mind right now.

• Nobody’s hitting the panic button yet, but the Cowboys & Aliens trailer did not go over well – not just with me, but apparently with test audiences who laughed at it, thinking the film was a comedy. Ouch. Anyway, the production team is now suddenly doing a lot of interviews (here’s Favreau) and allowing set visits (see here and here), but questions are still being raised about whether this picture is going to work.

Also, Nikki Finke noticed today that the one-sheet for Dreamworks’ Cowboys & Aliens looks a lot like the one-sheet Dreamworks’ other alien invasion thriller, I Am Number 4. Oops.

They’ve since put out a new poster, although it still has the same feel.

I’m getting bad vibes about this project. Cowboys right now is looking like one of those All Star teams in basketball or baseball that looks great on paper but doesn’t play well. We’ll see.

• Ridley’s Scott’s Alien prequels have been pushed back to 2013 and 2014. What’s more annoying, however, is that Olivia Wilde is suddenly in the mix to play the lead. PLEASE STOP CASTING THIS PERSON. She’s already in Tron, Cowboys & Aliens and the Logan’s Run knockoff Now (which also just halted production) … and now Alien? Look, I haven’t seen Tron yet but I’ve seen enough of House to know that she’s not that good, besides which she’s almost as abrasive as Natalie Portman.

The new poster for "Apollo 18."

• I Am Bored by I Am Number 4, but it’s marketing binge has begun. This alien invader thriller – also from Michael Bay – has a new poster, the film will apparently be converted to IMAX (why?), and there are new interviews out with the director (here) and babes Teresa Palmer (here) and Dianna Agron (here). Basically this looks like another movie about a WASP teenage guy with Special Powers. Never seen that before.

• In other Alien Invasion News & Notes: The Thing has a new release date (October 14th), and there’s a new interview out with the film’s director, Matthijs van Heijningen; Pauley Perette will be playing a girl from Mars in Girl from Mars; Guillermo del Toro provides an update on At the Mountains of Madness (produced by James Cameron); SPOILER WARNING … this may be what the alien looks like in J.J. Abrams’ Super 8; a production still has been leaked for The Darkest Hour; Star Trek’s screenwriters claim they’ve broken the next story; new set photos are out for Judge Dredd 3D; District 9′s Neill Blomkamp is going forward with a mysterious sci-fi project called Elysium; Alex Proyas is going to do a big new sci-fi spectacle called Amp; a Red Faction movie is coming to the SyFy channel; Mars Needs Moms has a new trailer out; Apollo 18 has a poster out already; there’s a big new Avatar exhibition in Seattle (see here and here);  and author Jonathan Lethem takes a look back at John Carpenter’s 1988 alien invasion thriller, They Live. Whew.

• On the Creature Invasion Front: Troll Hunter will be having its world premiere at Sundance; besides having one of the greatest titles in the history of the cinema, Piranha 3DD now also has a release date (September 16th); and David Ellis’ untitled 3D shark thriller recently got picked up for distribution. So there you go: sharks, piranhas and trolls.

• In the time since our last Invasion Alert! we’ve lost the great Leslie Nielsen from Forbidden Planet. Our condolences to his family; he certainly will be missed.

• On the Home Video Front, some classics from Roger Corman are finally coming to DVD: Not of this Earth, War of the Satellites and Attack of the Crab Monsters (not as bad as it sounds). Also: have I told you people that I caved and bought the whole first season of the new V? I’m definitely enjoying it thus far (here, by the way, is a review of the Complete Season 1 on DVD).

• It was both funny and sad to read about the Skyline guys’ surprised reaction to the torrent of abuse that film received on-line. Apparently they couldn’t understand all the trash-talking because, as they put it, “Brett Ratner liked it!”

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … I finally got around to watching the sci-fi music video “The Ghost Inside” that Christina Hendricks did this summer (see below). It’s a little odd, and slow … but it’s got Christina Hendricks in it as a robot with detachable parts, so how bad could it be – right?

And that’s what’s happening today on the Alien Invasion Front!

Posted on December 8th, 2010 at 9:06pm.