Jody Rosen: Justin in Timbaland

The new album by Justin Timberlake isn't particularly sexy. This should be a problem. When you call your record FutureSex/LoveSounds, brag in your lead single about "bringing sexy back," and give your other songs titles like "Sexy Ladies" and "Love Stoned," certain expectations are raised. The term "FutureSex" holds the promise of freaky, science fiction-style erotica—something involving cyborgs, maybe, or the Orgasmatron from Woody Allen's Sleeper. But Timberlake's vision of sex and seduction is thoroughly grounded in 2006—in thuggish pickup lines and hip-hop clichés about hookups in nightclub VIP rooms. ("Let me make an indecent proposal/ Let me take you to the back and do what we're supposed to.") It's not an act that Timberlake is well-equipped to pull off. He's a fine singer, but his feathery falsetto is hardly the world's most macho instrument. Even on "SexyBack," with his voice distorted into a crackly roar, he still sounds like a pipsqueak.

None of which really matters, because FutureSex/LoveSounds is one of the more exciting pop records in a long time. The sex theme is just window dressing—this album is all about sonic surprise. On Justified (2002), Timberlake graduated from 'N Sync to adult megastardom, channeling the genial disco-funk of Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson. Timberlake could have chosen to solidify his status as the new King of Pop, but with FutureSex/LoveSounds he's gone wildly experimental, drenching his songs in a hallucinatory swirl of hip-hop beats and ambient electronica. It's by far the most avant-garde record ever issued under the name of a platinum-selling former boy-band star—a category that includes Michael Jackson.

The man behind the FutureSounds is Tim Mosley, better known as Timbaland, who co-produced 11 of the album's dozen tracks. Timbaland was laying low for a couple of years, but he returned with a vengeance in 2006, contributing several terrific songs to Nelly Furtado's album Loose, including the inescapable hit "Promiscuous." Quite simply, Timbaland is the most ingenious popular musician of the last decade—the man who brought minimalist hip-hop; stark, digital R & B; and all kinds of outrageous invention to the Billboard charts. (He also closed the gap between rap and R & B and post-rave dance music, pioneered hip-hop Orientalism, and did about a dozen other groundbreaking things.) The hallmarks of Timbaland's style—snare- and kick-drum hits on odd accents; bristling electronic high-hats; quirky, infectious little melodies built from synthesizer squiggles and sound effects—were long ago absorbed into the pop mainstream. But none of Timbaland's many followers have matched his knack for supplying fresh sonic shocks every couple of bars, an art that was most festively on display in the extraordinary hit singles he produced from 2001 to 2003 for Missy Elliott, his longtime muse.

Which brings us back to Justin Timberlake. Apparently tired of blowing everyone's mind with each new record, Timbaland and Elliott have drifted apart. (He contributed only two tracks on her 2004 album, The Cookbook.) In Timberlake, the producer has found a new ambassador for his most outlandish concoctions. There are some straightforward moments on FutureSex/LoveSounds, in particular the various attempts to Play Mediareplicate the synthesizer funk of vintage Prince. (Timberlake's Michael Jackson impression is a lot more convincing than his Prince.) But more often than not, the songs are way out there. It takes several listens to warm up to "Sexyback," a spectacularly abrasive piece of music built around the Brillo-pad scrape of heavily distorted vocals against heavily distorted keyboards. The album's second single, "Play MediaMy Love," is even stranger, with Timberlake singing pastoral love lyrics ("I can see us on the countryside/ Sitting on the grass, laying side by side") over some of the least pastoral sounds imaginable: a shivery, overdriven synth figure and some disgusting lip-smacking and masticating from a human beat boxer apparently enjoying a London broil. Midway through, rapper T.I. arrives to deliver some rhymes, and the piece ends in intense Sturm und Drang fashion, with Timberlake pledging his devotion over a cacophony of percussive squeaks and, swooping above the din, a keyboard line that sounds like an opera soprano imitating a theremin. It's an amazing song.

When a great producer teams up with a pop singer, especially a former teeny-bopper like Timberlake, there is a tendency to start talking about Svengalis. There's no question that a sound collage like "My Love" could only have come from Timbaland, but it would be wrong to downplay Timberlake's creative role on FutureSex/LoveSounds. Timberlake gets co-writing credit on all 12 tracks and co-production credit on 11, and there's no good reason to be suspicious of the liner notes. (Among other things, Timberlake wrote and produced songs during his 'N Sync tenure.) What's more, Timberlake is perfectly capable of making excellent music without Timbaland. The album ends with "Play Media(Another Song) All Over Again," a lovely, very old-fashioned soul ballad produced in an organic, anti-Timbaland style by Rick Rubin. Conversely, Nelly Furtado's appealing recent album proves that it's possible to make a far more traditional, pop-friendly record with Timbaland. At this point in Timberlake's career, he can do what he pleases; the decision to transform himself into a millennial funk humanoid was clearly his and his alone, and he should get props for his adventurous spirit. (It's a safe bet that there was serious dyspepsia among the Jive Records brass when they realized their golden boy was going all freaky.)

FutureSex/Love Sounds is clearly a meeting of minds, a singer and producer working symbiotically to produce something neither could possibly do on his own. The songs are long (none clocks in at less than four minutes), and several stretch into lushly melodic, suitelike codas. "Play MediaLove Stoned/I Think That She Knows" begins as a hyperactive R & B track, but around the five-minute mark, it segues into art rock, with Timberlake crooning, "She's got me hooked, it just ain't fair … / I'm love stoned and I could swear/ That she knows" accompanied by droning guitar chords and a string sextet. It's gorgeous, dreamy, lovelorn stuff—which is turning out to be something of a Timberlake-Timbaland specialty. Justin doesn't have the voice, or the disposition, to convincingly play a callous Casanova, but he excels at heartbreak songs and scorned-lover anthems. Of course, the two Tims have been here before. The best song on Justified was "Cry Me a River," the Timbaland-produced breakup ballad whose video made perfectly clear that Timberlake was singing about his ex, Britney Spears. FutureSex/LoveSounds includes a sequel of sorts, "What Goes Around … /Comes Around Interlude," a roiling revenge symphony with lyrics that once again seem to take aim at Britney (and her ne'er-do-well husband): "You spend your nights alone/ And he never comes home/ And every time you call him/ All you get's a busy tone/ I heard you found out/ That he's doing to you/ What you did to me." Let's see: Timberlake sings, he dances, he puts sonically visionary singles on the top of the charts, and he keeps the tongues wagging at US Weekly? Now, that's a pop star.

Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.

Posted Thursday, Sept. 21, 2006, at 7:45 AM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2150107/

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Josh Levin: Zach Braff

Zach Braff has said that his hit movie Garden State (2004) was "a big, life-affirming, state-of-the-union address for twentysomethings." I'm a twentysomething. His new feature, The Last Kiss, documents the mental anguish of a 29-year-old commitment-phobe. I'm at the age when commitment looms. If Braff maintains this pace, he'll be making facile observations about our voyage through life's milestones until he films an indie-rock-infused On Golden Pond. My only comfort is that one day, we'll both be dead. If Zach Braff is the voice of my generation, can't someone please crush his larynx?

Braff is known primarily as a sitcom star (Scrubs) and an indie actor-writer-director (Garden State). His most significant cultural role, though, is as Hollywood's ambassador to the nation's cool kids—the guy who interprets youth culture for film execs and then repackages it for popular consumption.

Want a soundtrack that hipsters will buy? Braff picked the tasteful underground hits that are slathered all over Garden State and The Last Kiss. Want to use the Internet for direct marketing? Braff helped turn Garden State into a grass-roots smash by writing regular blog posts. Need to tap in to the thoughts and speech patterns of the Ritalin Generation? Braff's got that covered, too—he suggested additional shots and scenes for The Last Kiss and punched up the dialogue of Paul Haggis (writer/director of Crash) "to ensure that the characters sounded and behaved like men his age."

What has Braff's keen ear picked up about the nation's young people? If Garden State is to be believed, they spend their days squinting and staring wistfully while slowly learning that it's OK to feel and, like, live. When they do speak, yearbook quotes come out. For example: "Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place." In The Last Kiss, Braff furrows his brow solemnly and ponders a question that's paralyzed millions: Should I replace my incredibly hot girlfriend with an incredibly hot college student? This time, OC starlet Rachel Bilson gets the Ferris Bueller-esque pearl of wisdom: "The world is moving so fast now that we start freaking out way before our parents did because we don't ever stop to breathe anymore." Never has the voice of a generation had so little of substance to say.

So, why do people care about Zach Braff? Tony Goldwyn, the director of The Last Kiss, thinks it's because he has an Everyman quality that recalls Tom Hanks. Braff's adoring fans say he feels more like a friend than a movie star. The introductory video message on his new, Last Kiss-promoting Web site says that he doesn't "want it to be just, like, a site about me because that'll get boring really fast. … I want it to be about you guys, my loyal fans." The populist shtick works—as of this writing, Braff's got 76,072 friends on MySpace.

Braff's doofy looks also help him seem accessible. His face doesn't have the clean, angular lines that usually denote manly movie stardom. He's more like a Claymation version of a matinee idol, with pinchable cheeks and permanently raised eyebrows. His dorky visage and mannerisms work marvelously on Scrubs. We root for Braff's character, the perpetually confused Dr. John "J.D." Dorian, because he's such a good sport about always being the butt of the joke. Braff makes a great doormat—he can pull off both a quizzical reaction shot and a pratfall into a gigantic puddle.

The gee-whiz, aww-shucks affect that works for Braff on TV is irksome on the big screen. Perhaps that's because in the movies he only gets beaten down emotionally—it's much more satisfying to see him fall on his face. Though he's got a mug made for comedy, Braff's ambition is to be the funny-serious guy. He has said he strives to emulate Manhattan and Annie Hall-era Woody Allen. If nothing else, he's captured Allen's self-absorption. Watching Garden State, it's impossible not to remember that Braff is writing for himself and directing himself. As such, it's kind of annoying that 80 percent of the shots are close-ups of Zach Braff. It's also irritating, for that matter, that he created a role that requires Natalie Portman to fall in love with him.

If Garden State is any indication, Braff's weaknesses as a director go beyond narcissism. In the film, he piles on quirky details—a disembodied red gas pump hanging from a car, a guy in a suit of armor, a framed diploma on the ceiling—to keep viewers from scrutinizing his shallow characters and clichéd cultural observations. This is the kind of movie the Zuckers would have made if they used gags in the service of drama rather than screwball comedy. Braff also uses pop songs as a cheat, an easy way to heighten the emotional impact of otherwise unremarkable moments. The music in Garden State is so load-bearing that the movie becomes ridiculous if you swap in different tunes—if you don't believe me, check this out.

Braff is tapped in to how young people consume, if not how they think. Sure, Garden State and The Last Kiss resemble overlong iPod ads with less adventuresome music choices. But the soundtracks that Braff compiled for both films have been remarkably successful—the Garden State CD sold more than a million copies, and The Last Kiss is currently No. 38 on Amazon. It makes sense that Braff is so popular on MySpace, a site that exists so people can list what they like—friends, celebrities, music, movies. Braff is, essentially, an aggregator. His soundtracks are lists of his favorite songs. Garden State was a list of funny anecdotes and off-kilter objects rather than a cohesive story. He might not have anything original to say, but Braff does offer this insight on our generation: We are inclined to mistake stuff for substance.

Braff's problem is that he's come of age at a time when we want our stars—Beyoncé, J. Lo, George Clooney—to do everything. He writes, acts, directs, DJs—next time out, he'll probably lash a pair of cymbals between his knees. Instead of focusing on the one thing he's good at, Braff is quitting Scrubs after this season to focus on his film career. His rumored upcoming projects reveal two possible career paths. The first: the leading role in a Fletch remake. The second: starring in, writing, directing, and producing a remake of a Danish Dogme film about a woman whose husband gets paralyzed in a car accident. Please, Zach, leave paralysis to Lars von Trier. Chevy Chase—now there's a guy you should look up to.
Josh Levin is a Slate associate editor. You can e-mail him at sportsnut@slate.com.

Posted Friday, Sept. 22, 2006, at 4:59 PM ET

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Christopher Hitchens: Papal Bull

There are many popes within Christianity—the Coptic Church has one, and the Eastern Orthodox Church also boasts a patriarch or holy father—but we have acquired the habit of using the term to describe only the bishop of Rome (as the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church describe him), and this is a pity for many reasons. It confers a sort of supreme authority on the leader of only one Christian sect, and it therefore helps to give non-Christians the impression that the representative of Roman Catholicism represents rather more of the "West" than he actually does.

Attempting to revive his moribund church on a visit to Germany, where the Roman congregations are increasingly sparse, Joseph Ratzinger (as I shall always think of him) has managed to do a moderate amount of harm—and absolutely no good—to the very tense and distraught discussion now in progress between Europe and Islam. I strongly recommend that you read the full text of his lecture at the University of Regensburg last Tuesday.

After the most perfunctory introduction, Ratzinger goes straight to his choice of quotation, which is taken from 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II. This potentate supposedly once engaged in debate—the precise time and place is unknown—with an unnamed Persian. The subject was Christianity and Islam. The Byzantine asks the Persian to "show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." (On the face of it, not a very open-ended inquiry.) But, warming to his own theme, the purple-clad monarch of Constantinople allegedly added that "to convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death."

Now, you do not have to be a Muslim to think that for the bishop of Rome to cite this is the most perfect hypocrisy. There would have been no established Byzantine or Roman Christianity if the faith had not been spread and maintained and enforced by every kind of violence and cruelty and coercion. To take Islam's own favorite self-pitying example: It was the Catholic crusaders who sacked and burned Christian Byzantium on their way to Palestine—and that was only after they had methodically set about the Jews, so the Muslim world was actually only the third victim of this barbarity. (Sir Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades is the best source here.) Yet of all the words he could have chosen, to suggest that religion might wish to break its old connection with conquest, intolerance, and subjugation, Ratzinger had to select an example that was designed to remind his hearers of the crudest excesses of the medieval period. His mention of Manuel II was evidently not accidental or anecdotal. He refers to him repeatedly and returns to him again in the closing paragraph, as if to rub it in.

And of course now we hear, as could have been predicted, the pathetic and unconvincing apologies issued by his spokesmen and finally Ratzinger himself. These will only serve to convince infuriated Muslims that by threatening reprisal, calling for the severing of diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and issuing a few more sanguinary fatwas, they can force yet another retreat. The usual things have happened: the shooting of a nun in Somalia and the desecration of Christian churches in Palestine. And so the ecumenical "dialogue" goes on.

To read the bulk of the speech, however, is to realize that, if he had chanced to be born in Turkey or Syria instead of Germany, the bishop of Rome could have become a perfectly orthodox Muslim. He may well distrust Islam because it claims that its own revelation is the absolute and final one, but he describes John, one of the apostles, as having spoken "the final word on the biblical concept of God," and where Muslims believe that Mohammed went into a trance and took dictation from an archangel, Ratzinger accepts as true the equally preposterous legend that St. Paul was commanded to evangelize for Christ during the course of a vision experienced in a dream. He happens to get Mohammed wrong when he says that the prophet only forbade "compulsion in religion" when Islam was weak. (The relevant sura comes from a period of relatively high confidence.) But he could just as easily have cited the many suras that flatly contradict this apparently benign message. The familiar problem is that, if you question another religion's "revelation" and dogma too closely, you invite a tu quoque in respect of your own. Which is just what has happened in the present case.

The Muslim protesters are actually being highly ungrateful. When the embassies of Denmark were being torched earlier this year, Rome managed a few words of protest about … the inadvisability of profane cartoons. In almost every confrontation between Islam and the West, or Islam and Israel, the Vatican has either split the difference or helped to ventriloquize Muslim grievances. Most of all, throughout his address to the audience at Regensburg, the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth maintained a steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith. He pretends that the word Logos can mean either "the word" or "reason," which it can in Greek but never does in the Bible, where it is presented as heavenly truth. He mentions Kant and Descartes in passing, leaves out Spinoza and Hume entirely, and dishonestly tries to make it seem as if religion and the Enlightenment and science are ultimately compatible, when the whole effort of free inquiry always had to be asserted, at great risk, against the fantastic illusion of "revealed" truth and its all-too-earthly human potentates. It is often said—and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate—that Islam is not capable of a Reformation. We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way. Now its new reactionary leader has really "offended" the Muslim world, while simultaneously asking us to distrust the only reliable weapon—reason—that we possess in these dark times. A fine day's work, and one that we could well have done without.

Posted Monday, Sept. 18, 2006, at 11:40 AM ET

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Jody Rosen: Bob Dylan's Make-Out Album

If Bob Dylan's 31 studio albums have taught us anything, it's not to take his words at face value. The title of album No. 32, Modern Times, is a typically mischievous Dylanism. For one thing, it's a joke. Since the early '90s, Dylan has been in revolt against musical modernity, forsaking contemporary production values, singing traditional folk ballads, and steeping his own songs in old-timey sounds. In an interview in the latest Rolling Stone, Dylan calls digital recordings "worthless" and "atrocious." ("I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years," he says.) Of course, the album title also alludes to Charlie Chaplin's classic 1936 film. And there is something Chaplinesque about the impish Dylan of 2006, with his funny mustache and old hat. The tragicomic hero who trudges through Dylan's recent songs is a lot like the Little Tramp—a spiritual hobo, battered by cruel fate and heartless women, wandering, as he sings on the new album, down a "long and lonesome road."

Dylan nearly died from a heart infection in 1997 and became a senior citizen this past May. Recently, he's been busy with legacy management, publishing his autobiography and collaborating with Martin Scorsese on a worshipful documentary. But the real achievement of the last decade is his magnificently rejuvenated career as barnstorming live performer and recording artist. On Time Out of Mind (1997) and Love and Theft (2001), Dylan reconnected to his songwriting muse. Among other things, these albums showed that Dylan's famous conversion to rock 'n' roll—when he "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—was a big fake-out. Whether shouting above the supercharged rock on his classic mid-'60s albums or singing these raggedy blues-soaked tunes in his time-ravaged voice, he's always been a folkie, or more precisely, a folklorist. Hardscrabble blues, 19th-century parlor ballads, gospel testimonies, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and other songs as old as the hills, and as immovable—Dylan's music has carried these echoes from the start, but never with such a sense of mission as in his recent work. If there is an extra hint of fatigue in his rasp these days, it may be because he's weary from bearing that heavy load. It's not easy being America's living, breathing musical unconscious.

Modern Times is a better album than Time Out of Mind and even than the majestic Love and Theft, which by my lights makes it Dylan's finest since Blood on the Tracks (1975). As usual, it's verbose. Dylan pours out verse after verse—aphorisms and parables, jokes and laments, valentines and metaphysical musings—over loose-limbed vamps from his excellent touring band. In the opening boogie blues, "Thunder on the Mountain," Dylan sings about God, the apocalypse, vengeance, war, and more earthy matters: "I got the pork chops, she got the pie/ She ain't no angel and neither am I." The songs are full of such jarring segues, moving in a line or two from grand spiritual yearnings to yearning for Alicia Keys. It's a great songwriting technique, and it's also a worldview—the idea, consecrated in the blues and, for that matter, in 40 years' worth of Bob Dylan songs, that the sacred and the fleshly exist on the same plane.

Not all the words and music here are Dylan's. He lifts lines from Memphis Minnie, Merle Haggard, and his favorite source, the biblical Yahwist; "Play MediaRollin' and Tumblin' " is a rewrite of a Muddy Waters number. But Dylan surrounds these borrowings with his own brilliant and uncanny poetry: "I'm walking with a toothache in my heel"; "Gonna raise me an army of some tough sons-a-bitches/ Gonna recruit my army at the orphanages"; "I wanna be with you in paradise, and it seems so unfair/ I can't go back to paradise no more/ I killed a man back there." "Workingman's Blues 2" starts out as awkward social realism, with Dylan singing about "the buying power of the proletariat." But then come the bursts of lyricism: "In the dark I hear the nightbird's call/ I can feel a lover's breath/ I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall/ Sleep is like a temporary death."

Those who haven't kept track of Dylan in recent years may be startled to hear his voice. On the ballads, he sounds exceptionally sweet and plush, his famous nasal croak giving way to a kind of nasal croon. I don't use the term lightly: Dylan's fondness for the dulcet, lightly swinging ballads of Bing Crosby and other '30s crooners surfaced on Love and Theft and is further explored here. Back in the '60s it was Dylan more than anyone else whose brash, visionary music swept away genteel old-guard pop. It's fun to hear him revive the music of his parents' generation in songs like "When the Deal Goes Down" and "Play MediaBeyond the Horizon," whose lilting Hawaiian guitar and lyrical references to The Bells of St. Mary's make the Crosby connection explicit.

That song is one of the most starry-eyed Dylan has ever sung, a gently tumbling soft-shoe that takes a celestial view of romance: "Beyond the horizon/ In springtime or fall/ Love waits forever/ For one and for all." The lines vaguely recall Philip Larkin's famous "what will survive of us is love," and for all the blues-drenched premonitions of doom and rambling bad-ass tales on Modern Times, I suspect that love is the thing that will survive of it. Dylan has for so long been spoken of as the "voice of his generation" and (more absurdly) as a "protest singer" that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that—from "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," "I Want You," and "Lay Lady Lay" to the wrenching lovelorn plaints on Blood on the Tracks and Desire (1976) to Love and Theft's rapturous "Moonlight"—love has been his great subject. Of course, Dylan can be brutally anti-romantic: In "Rollin' and Tumblin' " he barks, "Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains," a doozy of a misogynistic dis, even by Snoop Dogg standards. Still, you won't hear a sweeter moment this year than the one in "Workingman's Blues 2," when Dylan coos, "Come sit down on my knee/ You are dearer to me than myself." Modern Times will amply reward the solitary Dylanologist, poring over its runes for clues to the eternal mystery of Bob and the universe. But this is an album best experienced with a loved one; I hate to break it to Justin Timberlake, but a wheezy old man has recorded the best make-out songs of 2006. Put Modern Times in the CD player, pull your sweetheart close, and—as a young man advised a lifetime or so ago—shut the light, shut the shade.

Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.

Updated Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2006, at 7:37 AM ET

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Bryan Curtis: Pirates Gold

With the summer-movie season winding down, it's worth asking where the titanic battles took place: at the theaters, where The Da Vinci Code, Superman Returns, and Snakes on a Plane were released, or in the newspapers, where their box-office receipts were displayed? As a devoted summer-movie buff, I'm beginning to suspect the latter. To quote Variety, Superman received a "hero's welcome" of $106 million, Pirates of the Caribbean "swashbuckled" its way to huge overseas grosses, and The Da Vinci Code, last seen steaming toward the $800 million mark, "broke records of Biblical size." It all feels very captivating and important—and, when you think about it, more exciting than anything that actually happened in Pirates of the Caribbean, Superman, or The Da Vinci Code.

These days, the summer moviegoer has two things vying for control of his imagination: the movies and the box-office receipts. Each operates according to an outsized, cartoonish aesthetic. Even for those of us who chuckle at the notion that summer blockbusters are special-effects abominations that have "ruined" the movies, it's striking that the numbers should exert such a hold over us. What should rightfully be a dreary Hollywood business story—"the Miami Vice speedboat overtook the Pirates of the Caribbean juggernaut …"—has become an attraction in and of itself.

The weekly box-office inspection has become such an integral part of moviegoing that it's difficult to understand its strangeness. On Sunday nights, the grosses are tallied, and the heads of the Hollywood studios come forward to offer quotes. If their films log a big number (do "boffo b.o.," in Variety idiom), the executives' words will be giddy and triumphant: "It's one of those movies—pardon the pun—firing on all cylinders. When you have Will Ferrell and NASCAR, you just know you are going to have a crowd pleaser. But this was way beyond expectations." (Rory Bruer, Sony Pictures, Talladega Nights.) If the opening gross is "soft," they will be a terse and unadorned: "It's much less than what we wanted. The marketplace is crowded. The kids have been bombarded." (Jeff Goldenstein, Warner Bros., The Any Bully.)

The box office even has its own dedicated color men, whose job it is to peer at the data and extract larger truths. My favorite of these is Paul Dergarabedian, the president of an outfit called Exhibitor Relations, who has become a fixture of the box-office news story. During the summer, Mr. Dergarabedian has offered up the following: "Hollywood's on a roll. Last year at this time it was all gloom and doom. Eighteen of the past 20 weekends have been up over last year. This is a terrific summer … There is so much variety. You pick a genre and you can find a movie … This was the quintessential counter-programming move and it totally worked … Pirates 3 is the definition of a predestined blockbuster." And a personal favorite, regarding Oliver Stone's World Trade Center: "By and large we still feel very safe on our own soil going to the movie theater."

Why go through this? To some degree, our obsession with the numbers can be explained as a side effect of the blockbusterization of American cinema. The blockbuster movement began in earnest with Jaws, which grossed a record $7 million on its opening weekend in 1975. Jaws was the antecedent of the event picture—a buzz-building publicity campaign, a "wide" opening—and as studios followed suit over the next two decades, aiming for the all-important opening weekend, it stands to reason that we'd pay attention to the results.

But there's very little in the way of truth to be gleaned from box-office numbers. Unless you're a studio executive, the opening-weekend tally of Pirates of the Caribbean doesn't have much of an impact on your life, and, moreover, none of us have any idea what those huge totals really signify. The studios finesse the weekend numbers, and while we can safely say that Pirates performed well, we'll never how much was siphoned off by production costs, special effects, advertising, and the points promised to Johnny Depp. The numbers, to a great extent, are meaningless.

Our obsession is abetted by the fact that the mainstream press has begun to sound a lot like Variety and the trade magazines—aiming to provide an "insider's perspective" on the entertainment industry, straddling the line between art and commerce. Writing in the New York Times last month, Variety Editor in Chief Peter Bart complained that "weekend box-office numbers are trumpeted as if a movie's take provided valuable insight into our pop culture." Perhaps Bart was feeling a bit territorial, because it feels like lots of media, starting with Entertainment Weekly and moving outward toward local newspapers and morning television, have assumed Variety's mission to fetishize box-office receipts.

Moreover, we have begun to feel an intimate connection between money and filmgoing. I'm not one to argue that blockbuster cinema has made the movies worse (before Jaws, there was The Towering Inferno), but it has, in an interesting way, created a more commercially sensitive audience. Money is everywhere in the movies these days—most notably in the special effects, but also in the wall-to-wall ad campaigns—and even those of us who venture to Michael Bay films without wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses can't deny the whiff of commerce. There was a time when understanding what was going on in the movies required you to study the methods of certain French directors. These days, it feels like you need to study the marketing plans.

That, and the fact that the weekly numbers are so mind-bendingly huge—$100 million!—can make reading the Monday paper feel like following Hollywood's version of a pennant race. In what I suspect is not an uncommon sentiment, I find myself rooting for movies I like to rally past the competition. Partly it's because I want the filmmakers rewarded for a job well done. But partly, I think, it's because there's something satisfying about having my taste in movies seconded by a few million other consumers.

Indeed, there's a hint of populism in our obsession with the box office. Last month, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott wrote an essay defending the role of the critic in this environment—the outgrowth, one imagines, of Scott's e-mail box filling up with notes like, "Well, Mr. Smart Guy, if Pirates made $400 million, than how can it be so bad?" As Scott describes it, there is a suspicion that critics are "elitists" out to dismiss the popular entertainments. And in the face of a critical pan, the weight of those grosses—$50 million! $100 million! $500 million!—can feel like the answering cry of the public: This is what we like!

It's not just a game of populists vs. the elitists, though. Box-office performance is equated with cultural impact. In 2004, pundits peered at the gross receipts of The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 to predict (simultaneously) that George W. Bush and John Kerry were going to win the presidential election. Last winter, one of the troubadours at National Review Online's group blog, the Corner, cheered when The Chronicles of Narnia sped past blockbusters that were not based on Christian parables.

There's something reassuring about following the box office, as long as it's going your way. The old adage was that going to the movies made everyone into a critic. Peering at the numbers has made everyone into a studio executive.

Bryan Curtis is a Slate staff writer.

Posted Friday, Aug. 25, 2006, at 6:21 PM ET

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Hua Hsu: A Band Apart

Over their 12 years as recording artists, OutKast has defied hip-hop's conventions with brilliant ease. André 3000 and Big Boi debuted as two ingénues from the uncool recesses of the South, then evolved into yin and yang oddballs who pushed their music toward the fringe, time and again. But, in 2006, OutKast—with their separate photo shoots, tour buses, and album sides—rarely feels real at all. Instead they are described (by everyone but them) as a marriage of convenience, a mutually beneficial business agreement, or just another case of best friends grown apart. Now comes Idlewild, a film and album (but, confusingly, not a soundtrack) that appear to be the duo's swan song. Both feed the perception that OutKast—the arrangement, the music, the everything—is deeply weird and not long for this world.

Throughout a career that stretches all the way back to middle school, Big Boi and André have embraced their dialectical tension, bisecting themselves as "the player and the poet." Over the first four albums, the pair thrived on this enigmatic contrast. In time, as the fork widened and the two settled into roles as Big Boi—the pragmatist with the stripper pole in his house—and André—the sensitive, fashionable aesthete who name-checked Chekhov and the Smiths—it became difficult to keep up with OutKast's coherence. All of this backstory makes Idlewild a fascinating experience, a metaphor for the state of OutKast. Slimmed to a synopsis, the movie appears to be yet another rapper-driven "hip-hop film," wherein a virtuous but conflicted protagonist attempts to escape the conditions of his or her life through some climactic act of art, violence, or both. Idlewild tells the story of two best friends making last-ditch efforts of escape, but with the kind of surreal wideness of vision that powers OutKast's music. Frenetic and outlandish, colorful, collision-happy, and witty: It is history written in hip-hop.

The film is set in mythical Idlewild, Ga., an almost-reconstructed Southern town that seems to have escaped Jim Crow but not the nefariousness of backroom patronage or rigid intraracial hierarchies. The year is 1935: the year Georgia repealed Prohibition, catching up with the 21st Amendment; the prizefighter Joe Louis was slugging his way upward; jazz and the Great Depression were happening; the great migration was drawing African-Americans northward; the dying days of the Harlem Renaissance; World War II was just around the corner; there is no New Deal in these parts.

Within this fraught moment are Rooster (Big) and Percival (André), dramatizations of the actors' real-life personalities. Bonded by a childhood love of music, the pair represent a contrast in styles as young adults: Rooster is the charismatic, slick-talking lothario and family man who stars nightly at the Church, Idlewild's premier juke joint; Percival is the shy, romantic mortician's son, too timid to do much with the sheet music (a likely nod to Prince's Purple Rain) he clutches and slaves over.

At its best, Idlewild feels like the kind of wild juxtaposition of history and style that hip-hop has enabled. The scenes in the Church are chilling: Jitterbugging couples heave each other across the room, only to break and pause when one among them dashes to the center and evokes a 1980s B-boy freeze. Meanwhile, onstage, amid fire-breathing girls and a band that looks like it was around for the birth of jazz, Big Boi raps. The entire sequence is a dizzying, beautiful collapse of the 20th-century African-American experience in five vibrant, perfectly choreographed minutes.

Percival is a useful insight into André's current state: an artist who is shrinking from the light of center stage and instead hoping to time-travel backward through his music. For this, André is often feted. But it is fitting that Big Boi's Rooster anchors the film's most exciting scenes, that the crowd's delirium is directed toward his character as he raps some 45 years too early. It redeems hip-hop as something futuristic and bizarre, even if the music and its fans take that fact for granted today.

OutKast's limitless skills as rappers is something that only the real-life André seems willing to forfeit, an ambivalence that adds intrigue to the film but divides the album. While it can be a delight to see a closeted free spirit and a brash showman banter on-screen, it's not as much fun hearing them fake their way through a record together. Idlewild the album is an occasion for lamentation, a merely okay work from a pair who had reshaped the possibilities of hip-hop with each new outing. Little of it appears in the film; rather, the album shades in bits and pieces of Rooster and Percival's story lines. Despite moments of brilliance, André's attempt to retell the Idlewild story through bluesy jaunts and off-kilter jazz sketches pales alongside the free-association joy of Big Boi's half. When they do rap together, as on "Mighty 'O'," André spends much of his share admitting his own boredom, dampening down the song's frolicking organ blares and pattering drumrolls. It's an album without a center, with the ho-hum André making the zealous Big Boi seem quaint, even tacky, by comparison.

I recently saw a rare non-Photoshopped picture of OutKast together. It appeared that André was wearing a raccoon tail out the back of his flood pants—this seemed perfectly acceptable to me. As the hip-hop culture around them has become more and more unintentionally surreal (one word: pinky-rings), OutKast has come to symbolize two methods of dealing. One dreams of a space in between Prince and A Love Supreme and scavenges for life and color beyond hip-hop, while the other continues rapping, guarding the torch that represents one of the most startling cultural developments of our lifetime; one escapes into the distant past, while the other looks forward. The tension they once thrived on having grown too great, it is likely that Idlewild represents the duo's last attempt to merge their respective passions. It feels like both a last stop and a return to that magical origin. Idlewild, Ga.: a small, funky, rural outpost that exists on no maps but their own.

Hua Hsu is a writer and student living in New York.

Posted Friday, Aug. 25, 2006, at 12:42 PM ET

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Seth Stevenson: Suck It Up

Are you offended by the word sucks? Do you loathe the way it's crept into everyday conversation? Are you shocked that preteen children and primetime television shows blithely employ a vivid slang term for oral sex? Do you wish sucks would just fade away, like other faddish colloquialisms that were eventually discarded?

Well, sucks to be you.

Sucks is here to stay. And what's more, it deserves its place in our lexicon, for a couple of reasons. First, it's impossible to intelligently maintain that sucks is still offensive. The word is now completely divorced from any past reference it may have made to a certain sex act. When I tell you that the new M. Night Shyamalan movie sucks (and man, does it suck), my mind in no way conjures up an image of a film reel somehow fellating an unnamed beneficiary.

Nor should this image pop up in your brain when you hear that the movie sucks. That is, unless you are obsessing over the word's origins and thus have fellatio in mind each time you encounter it. But such obsessing is silly. When someone says Bill Gates is a geek, do you picture him as a circus performer biting the head off a live chicken? Of course not. The word's root meaning has been replaced with a new connotation. Similarly, when I call Paris Hilton a moron, I don't mean she's mentally retarded, and when I call bungee jumping lame I don't mean it's disabled. What once was offensive is now simply abrasive. Language moves on, and the sucks-haters are living in the past.

Besides, it's not even clear that sucks has naughty origins. We might trace its roots to the phrase sucks hind teat, meaning inferior. Or there's sucks to you, a nonsexual taunt apparently favored by British schoolchildren of yore. Of course, when a 9-year-old girl walks up to you tomorrow and tells you that "Blue's Clues sucks," she won't be aware of these past usages. But neither will she have in mind (or understand) the much dirtier alternative. The point is that sucks has become untethered from its past and carries no tawdry implications for those who use it.

But this debate is tired. We could argue all day about whether sucks is an obscenity or not. (I'll just note that time is on my side. Frequent usage in all sorts of contexts means sucks grows less obscene by the minute.) What's far more interesting to me is the word's utility.

Sucks is the most concise, emphatic way we have to say something is no good. As a one-syllable intransitive verb, it offers superb economy. Granted, some things require more involved assessments (like, say, James Joyce: I find his early work unparalleled in its style and its evocation of emotion, while his later writing became willfully opaque in a manner that leaves me cold). But other things don't require this sort of elaboration (like, say, John Grisham: He sucks).

Oddly, this concision seems to work against sucks. More than any saucy origin-story, I actually think what's holding sucks down is our long-held (and unexamined) prejudice against intransitive verbs as a means of expressing merit (or lack thereof, in this case). Consider: We have countless options when it comes to expressing our basic distaste for Ann Coulter. We can use a predicate adjective ("Ann Coulter is awful"). We can opt for an attributive adjective and a noun ("Ann Coulter is an awful person"). We can let the verb do more work ("Ann Coulter disgusts me"). We can find any number of more complex ways to express this very simple and important idea.

But now try to simplify the sentence while saying the same thing. I think you'll find the most direct route is the intransitive verb. "Ann Coulter sucks/blows/stinks/rots/bites." Notice something about all those verbs? They're vulgar, to varying degrees. Can you find an intransitive verb that expresses the same idea, but in a manner that wouldn't seem out of place in formal speech? Because I can't. For some reason, this construction is innately casual. (The same is true with the only two intransitive verbs I can think of to express basic admiration: "Kate Winslet rules/rocks." Not vulgar, but still clearly slang.)

What do we have against the simplicity of the intransitive verb as descriptor? Linguists don't really have an answer. But Donna Jo Napoli, a Swarthmore College linguistics professor I spoke with, suggests a helpful way of looking at the matter. In her eyes, it all goes back to the war between Germany and France. No, not that one. Or that other one. She means the war between the Germanic and French roots of the English language.

English speakers have traditionally turned to our tongue's Germanic side when we seek to be direct. (Some Germanic words: run, eat, beat, and yes, suck.) But we turn to our French romance roots when we're looking for a little more formality. (Romance words: saunter, devour, chastise.) It's not precisely the same thing, but a similar duality has come to affect our sentence constructions. We get short and direct when we're being casual, but we tend to add layers and buffers when we're reaching for a formal air. Perhaps the X sucks/stinks/rocks/rules formulation is just so blunt it strikes us as unseemly.

Personally, I wish sucks could escape from its slangy ghetto. It's a terrifically punchy little syllable, with that "k" lending it the proven Starbucks/Nike/Kinko's power of the "sticky consonant." And take heart, sucks-haters. Soon enough, another bit of slang will come along and gain entrance into our common language, and it will be vastly more offensive than sucks ever was.

For proof that this escalating battle of raunch has been going on for years, I present a fantastic exchange (click here to listen to part of it) from the 1940 film classic The Philadelphia Story. Witness a mother and daughter debating the relative merits of vulgar intransitive verbs:

Dinah Lord: "This stinks."

Margaret Lord: "Don't say stinks, darling. If absolutely necessary, smells. But only if absolutely necessary."

Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate.

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Christopher Hitchens: Mel Gibson's Meltdown

I was just in the middle of writing a long and tedious essay, about how to tell a real anti-Semite from a person who too-loudly rejects the charge of anti-Semitism, when a near-perfect real-life example came to hand. That bad actor and worse director Mel Gibson, pulled over for the alleged offense of speeding and the further alleged offense of speeding under the influence, decided that he needed to demand of the arresting officer whether he was or was not Jewish and that he furthermore needed to impart the information that all the world's wars are begun by those of Semitic extraction.

Call me thin-skinned if you must, but I think that this qualifies. I also think that the difference between the blood-alcohol levels—and indeed the speed limits—that occasioned the booking are insufficient to explain the expletives (as Gibson has since claimed in a typically self-pitying and verbose statement put out by his publicist). One does not abruptly decide, between the first and second vodka, or the ticks of the indicator of velocity, that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are valid after all.

There's a lot to dislike about Gibson. He is given to furious tirades against homosexuals of the sort that make one wonder if he has some kind of subliminal or "unaddressed" problem. His vulgar and nasty movies, which also feature this prejudice, are additionally replete with the cheapest caricatures of the English. Braveheart and The Patriot are two of the most laughable historical films ever made. (Englishmen don't form picket lines outside movie theaters when "stereotyped," but still.) He has told interviewers that his wife, the mother of his children, is going to hell because she subscribes to the wrong Christian sect (a view that he justifies as "a pronouncement from the chair"). And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.

This is not just proved by his twistedly homoerotic spank-movie The Passion of the Christ, even though that ghastly production did focus obsessively on the one passage in the one of the four Gospels that tries to convict the Jewish people en masse of the hysterical charge of Christ-killing or "deicide." It is validated by his fealty to his earthly father, a crackpot who belongs to a Catholic splinter group of which our Mel is a member. This group more or less lives off the stench of medieval anti-Semitism. Allow me (as one who has Mel's father's books to hand) to give you an example. In an attempt a few years ago to heal the breach between the Vatican and the Jews, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger did his best to make nice. Jews did not accept Jesus as savior and redeemer, said the man who is now the pope, but they did originate monotheism. Therefore, Judaism could perhaps be regarded in some ways as an "elder brother" of Christianity. The response of Gibson senior was to say that Abel also had an elder brother. … You know what? I think that this qualifies as anti-Semitism, too.

I do not believe for an instant that the sins of the fathers should descend to later generations. But when asked about his old man's many effusions on this subject, from the cheery view that the Jewish population of Europe actually increased in Hitler's day to the no less upbeat opinion that persons unknown brought down the World Trade Center, the younger Gibson stonewalled consistently by saying that "my father has never told me a lie." At the time he said this, I was impressed despite myself. He was being invited to disown a raging Jew-baiter at the same time that he was trying to cash in with a Hollywood epic. And he wouldn't do it! All credit for true and staunch conviction. (But don't run away with the sentimental idea that he had to stick by his father. Scott McClellan had been on White House spokesman detail for only a few days when his male parent produced a book arguing that LBJ had murdered JFK. Even in this tussle over two dead Democrats, McClellan had enough dignity to say that he loved his father, even though the old boy had some wacky ideas. Try and get Gibson to say that.)

At the time when The Passion of the Christ was being released, many nervous evangelical Christians tried to get the more horrifying bits of anti-Semitic incitement toned down. (The crazy scene where the rabbis demand the blood of Jesus on their own heads was taken out of subtitles, for example, but left as it was in Aramaic.) Many conservative Jews, from David Horowitz to Rabbi Daniel Lapin, stuck up for Gibson as a man who defended family values against secular nihilism. And the Muslim world allowed the movie to be screened widely, though from Ben-Hur to King of Kings it had prohibited the physical representation of any "prophet" mentioned, as Jesus is, in the Quran. (Don't ask yourself why this was, unless you want to feel stupid.) It was even proudly announced that Gibson's next big project would be about the Holocaust.

Whether Gibson tries this last catch-penny profanity or not, it is time to lower the boom on him. Those who endorsed his previous obscene blockbuster are obliged to say something now or be ignored ever after. But this should not be yet another spectacle of the "offensive" and the "inappropriate," swiftly succeeded by rehab and repentance and perhaps—who knows?—a joint press conference with Elie Wiesel. Gibson did not "misspeak"; indeed according to many trustworthy reports, he nearly copped the customary celebrity "get out of jail free" card and had his remarks stricken from the record. (When will the sheriffs decide to release the evidence?) No, he spoke his "mind," and in case anyone wants to burble about political correctness, it should be added that he spoke this way because of his religion, not just his warped personality. Let him keep the fortune he made from a pogrom movie, and let him by all means continue to sponsor his Latin Mass sectarian church in Malibu, where sinners are thick on the ground. But there was another touch of in vino veritas when he tearfully told the cops that "my life is f---ed," and this inadvertent truth ought to be remembered in all charity as the last words we ever want to hear from him.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

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