The curse of 'Diner'

I just read that Daniel Stern is playing The Old Man, the father of teenaged Ralphie, in the sequel to "A Christmas Story." That's wrong for an infinite number of reasons -- the phrase "teenaged Ralphie" is enough -- but hearing about "A Christmas Story 2" made me think about the curse of "Diner," working as strongly as ever on the 30th anniversary of that great film.

The movie put debut director Barry Levinson on the map; he earned an Oscar-nomination for his original screenplay about Baltimore guys in 1959 who don't understand themselves, their women or the world. It provided high-profile roles for Stern, Kevin Bacon, Steve Guttenberg, Mickey Rourke, Tim Daly, Paul Reiser and Ellen Barkin.

Yet 30 years later, they barely register on Hollywood's radar. Some got lost in the wasteland of TV sitcoms. Other burned themselves out or acted like prima donnas, burning directors out. Bacon became best known as the guy in "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," a game that showed how prolific he was, but he has had one significant film role in the last nine years: the Nazi maniac in the "X-Men" prequel.

Levinson himself had a terrific decade from 1982 through 1991: he won an Oscar for directing "Rain Man," was nominated for writing "Avalon" and was nominated for directing and producing "Bugsy." Then came the excruciating "Toys," the dumb "Jimmy Hollywood," the pulpy "Disclosure" and a career littered with the likes of "Bandits" and "What Just Happened." His next project, "The Bay" (about an ecological disaster in Maryland), isn't likely to give him a boost at 70.

All of these folks still work steadily somewhere, of course. Nobody has ended up on Skid Row or requires our pity. But they remind us that the people we thought we'd become when we were 25 or 30 are seldom the ones we see in the mirror three decades later.

Now YOU control the multiplex

Have you heard about Tugg? I hadn't, until a filmmaker e-mailed me to tell me about "It's a Girl," a documentary getting a new kind of release around America through this web-based site.

Tugg (www.tugg.com) works this way: You pick a film from the library of movies registered with the site. (Or you can register your own choice.) You can personalize your event by adding short films, setting up a Q&A with the director or inviting a guest speaker. You select a time and date at a venue affiliated with the site -- which, in our area, means theaters runs by Regal or AMC -- and set ticket prices.

You post on Tugg, embedding a trailer and poster, and use social media to get out the word. If you promote the film hard, ensuring that enough tickets are pre-sold to cover the cost, you don't end up paying a screening fee. Presto! You're an exhibitor.

This gives small movies with no distributor a chance to be seen, and "It's a Girl" is a perfect example. It's a tough documentary about a topic that needs to be discussed: Every year, millions of girls in China and India are murdered, abandoned or aborted because parents want sons. (Get details at www.itsagirlmovie.com.)

A look at Tugg indicates that small indies are in demand: "Craigslist Joe" is on tap for Miami, while Lynwood, Va., is about to see "Fat Kid Rules the World." But the site's library also includes the likes of "The Artist," "The King's Speech" and "Blue Valentine."

There's already a Tugg entry lined up in Charlotte for August 30: "Iron Sky," whose tagline reads: "The Reich Strikes Back." (Now that's an evil empire.) The Back Alley Film Series slated it for a screening at AMC Carolina Pavilion, and enough seats have been sold to guarantee the showing.

I like this idea enormously -- Tugg, that is, not "Iron Sky." (I haven't seen it.) Video on demand has become commonplace, but movies on demand -- shown on the big screen, to the communal audience they're supposed to have -- is a new idea, and a great example of democracy at work.

The artist who makes China tremble

I’ve just seen my favorite documentary of the year: “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” which opens in Charlotte Friday. How can you resist a movie about an artist who helped design the stadium used for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 – the one known as “The Bird’s Nest” – and then posted an Internet photo of himself giving it the bird, middle finger proudly extended?

What happened to turn respect to disgust? The May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province. Many schools collapsed, but the government would neither take responsibility for shoddy construction nor even account for all the dead children. Suddenly the artist turned into an activist.

He designed a vast, multicolored banner made up of 9,000 school backpacks, to hang outside an exhibit in Germany; the backpacks formed Chinese characters that read, “She lived happily for seven years in this world,” a comment by the mother of a dead schoolgirl. (That exhibit, titled “Ai Weiwei: So Sorry,” gave the film its title.) He and other volunteers put names and birthdates together for a tribute to the dead, a white memorial that suggests the black stone lists of names on Maya Lin’s Vietnam War monument in Washington.

And, not surprisingly, he became one of those public figures the Chinese government harasses for “incitement to subversion of state power,” an offense so vague it can apply to anything from a public protest to a critical blog post. The tipping point may have been a video in which Ai and many others looked directly at the camera and repeated “---- you, motherland.” He has always been a documentarian himself (the Internet Movie Data Base credits him with nine films as a director) and he knew how to prick Chinese officials’ pride.

They knew how to kick back, of course. While Ai was en route to testify at a fellow dissident’s trial, police detained him long enough to keep him out of the courtroom and hit him in the head hard enough to send him to the hospital. He was encouraged by officials to build a vast new studio in Beijing as part of an artists’ colony, then told it was illegal and saw it destroyed. In 2011, he disappeared for 81 days; authorities then released him without trial, claiming he owed $2.3 million in back taxes.

Ai, who turned 55 this year, looks like a Chinese Luciano Pavarotti: jovial but guarded, tall and big-bellied, scraggly-bearded and balding. He was dissident material from the beginning, at least potentially: He served five years in a Maoist “re-education camp” with his father, Ai Qing, a poet who was punished for 19 years for the crime of speaking his mind. But the government didn’t make Ai Weiwei’s life miserable until he asked questions about human rights abuses four years ago. (He was forbidden to blog, so he turned to Twitter. He’s at twitter.com/aiww, mostly in Chinese.)

Watching the movie, you have to marvel at the obstinacy and paranoia of Chinese officials: They can never admit wrongdoing, intentional or otherwise, because that would suggest a flaw in the political facade. Their suppression of him reminds us that kings and dictators have feared truth-tellers for centuries; execution, excommunication or exile await those who question fearful, rigid authority figures.

The film made me grateful to be in America, where artists of every stripe – brilliant or stupid, humble or outspoken, optimistic or despondent – can state their points of view freely. And it made me grateful that a few artists in a place like China risk their liberty to speak truth to power. Like water against a boulder, they’ll need a long time to wear their target down. But someday, perhaps....

Some art should be destroyed

I went to the Mint Museum this weekend to check out "Passage: Waterway," one of my favorite outdoor sculptures in Mecklenburg County. It's going to be torn down Thursday, almost exactly a year after it was installed on the front lawn at 2730 Randolph Rd.

I get the idea. Sculptor Tetsunori Kawana meant to show the natural cycle of life: The Madake bamboo had aged from a supple green to a stiff yellowish gray over 12 months, and the annealed metal wire holding it together had weathered along with it. Kawana was born in Japan the same year we dropped two atomic bombs on that country, so he knows about the impermanence of icons.

But I'll miss the sculpture, which I've walked through multiple times. It vaguely suggests life itself n a number of ways: The spiral shape can get you thinking about a DNA helix, a maze, even the wooden supports beneath an old-fashioned roller coaster. (Now that I approach 60, I have aged out of those, too.) I even enjoyed the signs beside it, explaining the "dos" and "don'ts" of dealing with the sculpture: "Please do not eat the bamboo (like a panda bear)."

But maybe some art ought to be impermanent. I first encountered this idea almost 20 years ago, at Spoleto Festival U.S.A. Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery in northern India were constructing a large, intricately patterned mandala of sand, dribbling colored grains out of cake-decorating machinery.

They explained that the mandala would be finished by the end of the festival, then washed into the Cooper River. My eyes bugged in disbelief. A monk explained that Buddhism teaches us not to be too attached to things of this world, even things of beauty we have made. A natural cycle of creation and destruction is always at work; it may take a couple of weeks in the case of a flower or a couple of millennia in the case of a mural, but all things pass away. We have to let them go.

So I said goodbye to "Waterway" Saturday, deciding at last that it reminded me of the fortress the good guys erected to repel bandits in "The Seven Samurai." It went up to serve its purpose; it did its job; it can be taken down again. And I noticed green plants, paler than the grass around them at the sculpture's base, thrusting themselves skyward to start another natural cycle.

"Ars longa, vita brevis," said the Latin teacher at my high school: "Art is long, life short." But neither lasts forever.

Movies make us stupid

As I walked out of "The Bourne Legacy" to give a comment to the Universal Studios monitor -- all critics have to do that -- a fellow walked by and pointed a finger at us. "Never mind what HE says," he interjected with a small grin. "It had lots of action. Three stars!" I hadn't opened my mouth, yet he assumed I'd say something negative. That told me he knew the movie wasn't good, but the free screening had passed the time pleasantly for him.

I thought about this stranger on my way home. There HAD been plenty of action, much of it badly shot. It was blurry, choppy, sometimes incoherent and often nonsensical. (A man on a speeding motorcycle leaps onto the back of an enemy on a speeding motorcycle, who flails at him -- and the bike doesn't change  course at all.) So the stranger's enjoyment didn't come from the skill with which the sequences were done: He simply liked watching bullets fly and cars careen, however drab the characters may have been and however shallow the story remained.

The marginally better "Total Recall" remake has the same qualities: It sets up a patchy story quickly, sketches characters who remain mere outlines the rest of the way, then devolves into scene after scene of mayhem. It's as if the producer told the writers, "Guys, you're allowed to use only 2,000 words total, and the time spent on human interaction can't exceed 30 minutes." The director shot the quiet scenes for the beginning of the picture and thought, "Uh-oh! I've used up all the words! Better start killing people."

Christopher Nolan can blend crisply defined action scenes with complicated situations and fleshed-out characterizations. But most directors can't, and Hollywood has realized they don't have to: People will pay fairly large sums of money for second-rate goods. Moviegoers are like people at an all-you-can-eat seafood bar: They don't mind if the lobster is bland and lukewarm, as long as they can eat a mountain of it.

This is a mind-deadening cycle. Studios say, "Why take the trouble to make great movies? Audiences don't seem to care or even notice." Moviegoers may grumble a bit but hand over their money, because they don't know better or aren't willing to stay home until they get something better. As they receive less for their dough, they begin to expect less: "Well, this is how movies are nowadays." The films have been dumbed down -- but so has the audience.

Nobody's too big to fail

But 26 years ago, I thought Marvin Hamlisch was.

He'd already had a Broadway hit with "They're Playing Our Song," shared a Pulitzer Prize and won a Tony for the groundbreaking "A Chorus Line" and collected three Oscars in one night for "The Sting" and "The Way We Were." (He had also written "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows" for Leslie Gore -- briefly, when I was 10, my favorite song.)

Now he was composing a new musical with Howard Ashman, the witty lyricist from "Little Shop of Horrors." (Ashman's great Disney collaborations with Alan Menken were ahead of him.) They'd chosen to adapt "Smile," a satire of the beauty-pageant world that had gotten strong reviews as a movie in 1975. Future "Little Mermaid" star Jodi Benson had the leading role, and Rock Hill's own William Ivey Long (who had recently won the first of many Tonys for "Nine") did the glittering costumes.

I bought an orchestra seat weeks in advance for the second day of the Broadway run, before reviews were posted, and enjoyed the show. The songs, I thought, were especially strong. But the critics were brutal. Despite its strong advance sale, "Smile" closed six weeks later.

Hamlisch went on to win his "EGOT," as people call the Emmy-Grammy-Oscar-Tony cycle. (He's one of only 11 people to do that competitively. Only two have also won a Pulitzer: Hamlisch and composer Richard Rodgers.)

But his career was never the same. Between "Smile" and his death this week, he never again wrote a musical that could run for six months. He never again wrote or adapted a score for a hit movie. He ended up as a musical director for tours by Barbra Streisand and Linda Ronstadt and conducted pops concerts for symphony orchestras.

His death reminded me once more how fickle show business can be. One of the hottest musical figures of the 1970s hit a couple of rough patches in the 1980s, and boom! He was old news. Maybe his confidence failed. Maybe his talent had reached its limits anyhow. Either way, he was all but gone. So I'll say R.I.P. here to a man forgotten before his time.

Mel Gibson, kicked again

You may have noticed that Mel Gibson's latest film went directly to DVD and video on demand. More likely, you didn't, which is my point: For the first time in more than 30 years, Gibson couldn't get a theatrical release for a movie in which he starred.

Early reviews for "Get the Gringo" were favorable: Gibson's apparently in "Payback" mode, as a career criminal who learns to survive in a Mexican prison with the help of a 10-year-old boy, then takes revenge on his enemies. (I haven't seen the film.) Yet no American distributor would touch it.

Gibson's anti-Semitic babble has made movie executives (many of whom are Jewish) justifiably irate. His problems with alcoholism and women, which I would guess to be related, have hurt his public image. Christians embraced him eight years ago when he directed "The Passion of the Christ," but that support has eroded over time. Thus, "Gringo" stayed in cinematic jail.

So here's my question: If Mel Gibson has made a hash of his personal life, can we separate the artist and his art?

Spiritual depth, personal decency and a benign outlook don't necessarily lead to good art: The world is full of pleasant composers, painters, writers and filmmakers who do second-rate work year after year. And monsters sometimes produce masterpieces, or we wouldn't be listening to the operas of Wagner or appreciating the paintings of Picasso.

Every audience member can vote with his feet: My dad, still disgusted by Jane Fonda's behavior during the Vietnam War, has never rented or attended one of her movies for 45 years. I have a friend now who feels the same way about Gibson; she hasn't seen anything he's made since "Signs." Both of them have missed some worthwhile motion pictures.

But a critic needs to distinguish between the worker and the work. Four years ago, Marion Cotillard made idiotic remarks about the "real" reason the World Trade Center was destroyed and doubted that astronauts walked on the moon. (She later took the WTC comments back.) Did she still deserve the Oscar for playing Edith Piaf in "La Vie En Rose"? Yes. Did she do a good job in "The Dark Knight Rises" this summer? Yes.

I have no idea whether "Get the Gringo" sizzles or stinks. But I'd have reviewed it with an open mind -- or so I hope -- if distribution companies hadn't decided to slap Gibson down.