“Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognize him or herself in you and that will give them hope. It’s done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it. It has profound importance in my life. Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world. Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do. Try not to. This is from E. E. Cummings: ‘To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.’ The world needs you. It doesn’t need you at a party having read a book about how to appear smart at parties – these books exist, and they’re tempting – but resist falling into that trap. The world needs you at the party starting real conversations, saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and being kind.”

Jeremy Renner has faced quite an uphill battle in his recent bid to become Hollywood’s biggest little action hero. After garnering a Best Actor nod for his lead role in 2008’s Hurt Locker, Renner’s been forced to play back-up to the likes of Ben Affleck, Tom Cruise, and – most recently – just about every other A-list actor that appeared in The Avengers. 

Perhaps the biggest bite of all is that once Renner actually did score the lead role in a big-budget film, that film just so happened to be an extension of some other A-lister’s franchise … one that was already rolling three blockbusters deep, no less.

These are difficult – if not insurmountable – odds for any Hollywood actor to overcome, especially when the franchise film he’s been cast in spends a great deal of its time paying homage to his predecessor.

In fact, the only way Jeremy Renner could possibly hope to come out of The Bourne Legacy smelling like roses would be if his Bourne film completely outdid the rest of the bunch. Unfortunately, the exact opposite is true.

The first half of The Bourne Legacy pinballs back and forth between feeling completely bogged down and altogether confused. The second half eventually transitions from super-soldier spy flick to all-out Terminator II. Somewhere in between, Stacy Keach becomes a complete eye – and ear – sore, Donna Murphy manages to look very painfully constipated, and Edward Norton goes jogging in a monsoon at 4 o’clock in the morning.

It would seem as if the end game here is to have Jason Bourne and Aaron Cross either team up or face off at some point down the line. Otherwise, the only reason for slapping the Bourne label on a film like this is to guarantee some worthwhile box office.

That would prove a cheap trick, to be sure. It might also prove the big-budget equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face (Please see Halloween III: Season of the Witch for more on this point). Either way, Jeremy Renner deserves much better than what The Bourne Legacy has laid out for him. 

(The Bourne Legacy opens in theaters nationwide today.)

“To me, there’s no creativity without boundaries.  If you’re gonna write a sonnet it’s 14 lines, so it’s solving the problem within the container … and I think for me commercial television and those boundaries, I like it.  I like that you can’t use certain language.  I like that you have to be bright enough to figure out how to get your ideas across in that amount of time with intelligence being the thing that you hope is showing … not officially, but you want it to be, oh, that was kind of bright.  We have really good writers here.  I think I can safely say that
a lot of people in comedy did their best work here.”

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)

There are moments in Celeste and Jesse Forever where it’s difficult to discern whether it’s the script, the awkward lack of on-screen chemistry, or poor acting choices that makes you want to cringe. Regardless of whether it’s one, none, or all of those things, it cannot bode well for the film.

Celeste and Jesse represents Rashida Jones’ (The Social Network, Parks and Recreation) full-length writing debut. While the film is not without its subtle charms, it plays out via a series of thematic cliches – the ex-couple that insists on remaining friends, the inevitable tension that arises when the two of them meet someone else, the night they both fall victim to desire and wind up doing the panty dance again … y’know, that type of thing.

Have most of us been there? I suppose so, sure. More often than not, we’d like to think of ourselves as the ones passing judgment on a nauseating non-couple like that. But the central problem with Celeste and Jesse Forever boils down to a more base assertion. That assertion is this: Just because a premise happens to ring true does not necessarily mean it’s the kind of thing people might like to see played out on film.

Yet, the reality is, we have seen this kind of thing played out on film before. And, what’s more … we’ve seen it done more effectively … in an endearing way that doesn’t compel audiences to cringe. That’s not really a knock against Jones or Sandler, both of whom seem to have punched their own tickets a long time ago. But it is to say that Celeste and Jesse Forever will not do for Rashida Jones what Mean Girls did for Tina Fey or Bridesmaids did for Kristen Wiig.

Then again, I’m sure if you asked Rashida Jones, she’d tell you that was never really her intention to begin with … even though it clearly was.

(Celeste and Jesse Forever opens in New York and Los Angeles today, with a national rollout to follow.)

There was a time, several years back, when Donald Trump’s trademark brand of unrepentant chauvinism could almost be considered endearing, specifically because he happened to come correct on so many accounts. But all of that’s been rendered moot over the past half decade, as Trump has slowly transformed himself into a made-to-order shill for the conservative right …. shedding both his air of unpredictability and his overall integrity in the process.

Never has this dynamic been on more shocking display than throughout You’ve Been Trumped – a gutsy documentary that chronicles Trump International’s land-grab attempt to build a marquee golf course along the eastern coast of Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

The major sticking point? A handful of native landowners who absolutely refused to stand down when Trump offered to either buy or force them out. What ensued was a modern-day version of David and Goliath, with struggling farmer Michael Forbes and his long-time neighbors on one side, and Trump’s multi-million-dollar arsenal of bulldozers and bullying tactics on the other.

Anthony Baxter’s documentary is a fascinating study of the ongoing struggle between billion-dollar business interests and civil rights. As the bare-knuckle battle for Aberdeen escalates, it’s astounding to note how crooked the whole sordid business becomes, and how altogether simple it might be to have the wheels of justice turn against someone when there’s a steaming pile of bullion at stake.

Please do check this one out. It’s definitely worth the watch.

(You’ve Been Trumped opens at the Angelika Theater in New York City this Friday, August 3rd, with possible plans for a national rollout to follow.)

1. Genetic predisposition
2. Consistent refusal to recognize or accept undue authority
3. Constant need for acceptance
4. Lack of self-esteem
5. Dysfunctional relationship with my father
6. The lifelong circle of friends I grew up with
7. Ongoing desire not to end up like the majority of authority figures surrounding me
8. Being pushed into major life decisions I had no interest in pursuing
9. General lack of accountability for my own actions
10. Lack of any worthwhile support system
11. Ongoing fear of commitment
12. Consistently feeling as if I’ve failed to live up to others’ – and my own – expectations
13. Mounting layers of guilt and self-loathing
14. Financial instability
15. Misleading those who were closest to me
16. The drinking culture surrounding me
17. The collegiate drinking culture
18. Spending nearly a decade working in the amusement industry
19. Living in a town where the bars were open until 5 AM (And another where the bars are currently open until 4 AM)
20. Ongoing lack of confidence in my physical appearance
21. Lack of any other worthwhile means of distinguishing myself
22. Inevitable need for a crutch in the majority of social situations
23. Desire to meet or approach members of the opposite sex
24. Desire to resemble a lot of the early heroes I chose
25. Type-A personality
26. Anxiety
27. Depression
28. Iatrophobia
29. Arrested development
30. Mistakes made as a result of previous binge-drinking incidents
31. Every Samuel Adams Seasonal Lager with the exception of Spring Ale
32. Rumple Minze
33. Taking on too much at once
34. Years of surface rejection
35. The notion that binge drinking might do for me what I lacked the guts to do for myself
36. The fact that binge drinking was responsible for some of the best – and worst – nights of my life
37. The desire to overcompensate for my general lack of self-esteem by consistently bedding drunk strangers
38. The notion that years of binge-drinking might provide a guilt-free alternative to suicide
39. Subconscious desire to push away every person who ever tried to love me
40. Subconscious cry for attention
41. The prevailing myth that all great writers were also alcoholics
42. The proven reality that a lot of world-class writers are also world-class drinkers
43. Need for escape
44. Cowardice
45. Never feeling quite right in my own skin
46. General failure to connect with people on a day-to-day basis
47. A sense that people might excuse some of my awkward behavior if they simply chalked it up to me being drunk
48. Leaving home at the age of 18
49. Never quite feeling like I had a real home after running away
50. Habit (i.e., cyclical behavior)

***

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB.)

©Copyright Bob Hill

“What I explore in all my work is wilderness. I like that saying of Thoreau’s that ‘in wildness is the preservation of the world.’ Settlers on this continent from the beginning have been seeking that wilderness and its wildness. The explorers and pioneers were out on the edge, seeking that wildness because they could sense that in Europe everything had become locked tight with things. The things were owned by all the same people and all of the roads went in the same direction forever. When we got here there was a sense of possibility and new direction, and it had to do with wildness. Throughout the work of James Fenimore Cooper there is what I call the American terror. It’s very important to our literature and it’s important to who we are: the terror of the Hurons out there, the terror of the bear, the avalanche, the tornado – whatever may be over the next horizon. It could be the biggest, most awful thing in the world. As we came to the end of the continent, we manufactured our terror. We put together the bomb. Now even that bomb is betraying us. We don’t have the bomb hanging over our heads to terrify us and give us reason to dress up in manly deerskin and go forth to battle it. There’s something we’re afraid of, but it doesn’t have the clear delineation of the terror the Hurons gave us or the hydrogen bomb in the cold war. It’s fuzzy, and it’s fuzzy because the people who are in control don’t want you to draw a bead on the real danger,
the real terror in this country.”

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)

By Bob Hill

It was Easter morning when the two of them first met.

She was hanging stuffed animals above the Ring Toss, and he wandered over to lend a hand.

She was tall and blonde, with high cheekbones. He was thin and awkward, with unkempt hair.

The promenade was desolate that morning … desolate enough that one could hear the crack and whoosh of newly-assembled rides being tested; cool enough that one could feel the chill of mist from the midway flume.

She passed him notes from the Ring Toss that afternoon. He cracked jokes to keep from seeming insecure. She gave him her number, and a few days later he called her from a pay phone. Her sister answered, explaining she wasn’t home. He went to look for her, much like she had gone to look for him. They found each other on the boardwalk. He invited her back to his apartment.

Once there, they talked for three long hours, ignoring the shadows as they stretched – and slowly faded – along the far side of the room. He walked her home along Atlantic Avenue that evening. He asked if she would come and visit him again the following night.

On the second night they kissed. Her arms felt warm around him, and her hair smelled fresh like apples.

In the days that followed, he would come to her house, very often late, after her father and her sisters had fallen asleep. She would wait for him along a porch, where the two of them would talk. He would explain the tense relationship that he had shared with his father. She would explain the tension that had accompanied growing up as a child of divorce.

In her, he saw the prospect of settling long inside that town. In him, she saw the prospect for escape.

Certain mornings, he would appear outside her bedroom window, urging her to wander off and watch the sunrise. Certain nights the two of them would walk along the beach at dusk. It was a fleeting time, beset with caution. The two of them were falling in love.

Day 223

©Copyright Bob Hill