The "new" McDonald's wants to be the glue that holds reality together.

As a child, the word "McDonald's" brought to mind dry, flavorless beef patties, anonymous microwaved buns and limpid french fries, and cavalierness––not to put too fine a point on it––towards the health and wellbeing of its patrons. It's an impression that persists, and when I see someone I know walking into Micky-D's, the first thing I think is, "really? You're going to go in there?"

McDonald's had long been the Kmart of fast food joints, and the obvious thing for it to do was rebrand itself. It has responded to health concerns about its products by selecting a non-trans fat cooking oil, and begun the process of remodeling and redecorating locations to give them a cleaner, more modern appearance. In a nod to America's changing demographics, it launched the Me Encanta campaign to target Latinos. 

I'd be loving it if this marked a real change in how McDonald's sees its customers. But I'm not loving it. For example, take this commercial:

Without McDonald's coffee, this unshaven slob is an even less desirable man-child. 

Poor "Tim" hasn't fully woken up yet. His roomie––still on that Modern Warfare 2 bender––gets the cold shoulder. So does the old dude walking his ankle-biter dog through an upper class neighborhood. But when he hears the words "premium roast coffee for just a dollar," he perks right up. 

It's just like somebody has told him that he should be a total zombie until he gets some. Nobody's so standoffish before his morning coffee that he won't respond to a girl flirting on the bus. 

The target consumer is nearly middle-aged but still co-habitating with his college buds in a house well above their pay grades. His shabby appearance can be traced to his body type and long, greasy hair, rather than to his clothes. A sucker for branding terms like "premium roast coffee" and its inexpensiveness, he's frugal but not cheap. He's a complete asshole until he gets his morning joe. In short, he's trash: a slave to the winds of consumerism, a dick to everyone he encounters, and, by all appearances, a total slob.

I have a general beef with men being portrayed in TV shows and commercials as bums, and lament the rise of the "guy"––male human beings trapped in the doldrums between adolescence and manhood. Tim may be 35-years-old, but he's still living with a room mate. Charlie Sheen plays a slightly less rich and famous version of himself on Two and a Half Men. Ladies, if you had to choose just one, who would it be?

Last night I was watching the World Series when on came yet another McDonald's commercial, in which a man driving a convertible muses that life is better with the top down. And having the top down is better with loud music, which is better with his girlfriend in the car, who is more fun when the sun's setting, sitting on a rooftop––and that the jell that holds this all together is…a Mac 'n fries. Unfortunately, nobody has posted the video (it's not particularly funny or flashy), but somewhere, it's out there.

The commercial reminded me of those "Priceless" MasterCard ads:

Somehow even this huge credit card company understands the difference between what's free and what costs money.

MasterCard sells the means to get what you want. Why carry around all that cash, when this slim little credit card does the same thing? But MasterCard clearly understands the difference between the things we buy and the feelings those things elicit––but alluding to that fact without telling us as much helps blur that distinction. These commercials step right up to the line of telling us that money can buy happiness, but don't cross it, because even the laziest, most idiotic couch potato is likely to leap to his swollen, pasty feet and scream "bullshit!" at his TV the instant that happens.

Last night, McDonald's crossed that line. In the reality of the commercial––and you kind of have to see it to believe it––everything, from the car, to the girl, to the sunset, is contingent on a burger and fries. They're not the capstone to the evening: They're the foundation. Like Tim the Coffee Prick, the pleasures in life simply don't exist without an inexpensive but delicious item off the McDonald's Value Menu. 

McDonald's has tried to insinuate itself into your day by telling you that its food is the center of the universe. This isn't an uncommon advertising tactic, but few campaigns have succeeded in proposing a reality in which, without a certain product, the world around us and our relationships lose meaning. Tim the coffee guy is an unrepentant douche bag until Premium Roast Coffee brightens his day, and your date is a flavorless caricature of romance until you throw down for two Big Macs and fries. 

Worse still is that, when I'm on a date, I'm not in a particular rush, and the last thing I need to project to my lady friends is that I'm cheap. So why go to McDonald's? The answer, McDonald's would have us believe, is that cheap grub on the go just feels good. McDonald's isn't garbage––that was the old McDonald's. 

It's classy. They swear. 

Amadeus: The brilliant Russian-ness of Mozart

Amadeus is an uproariously funny movie in a liberal arts kind of way. No, you don't really laugh out loud; rather, you think to yourself, "that's damned funny." At three hours in length (and pushing 30 years in age), the film is easier to parody than to watch. But watch it we should––Amadeus tests us in ways that few movies have––and watch it we can: It's available on Netflix Instant.

It's the love story between court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) and Mozart's music. It's also a hate story between Salieri and Mozart (played by Tom Hulce), as Salieri is unable to reconcile the genius of Mozart's music with Mozart the man's arrogance and brashness.

As Mozart takes on a wife, debts, and eventually the death of his own father, his music shifts from witty tunes to soul-searching operatic masterpieces. Meanwhile, his rival assumes an increasingly complicated relationship to the desperate artist––at first trying to sabotage his career, then moving on to an elaborate, Don Giovanni-inspired kind of psychological torture involving a Carnival mask and an opera commission. After Mozart collapses from fever and stress during a production of The Magic Flute, Salieri actually becomes an apprentice to the dying man, though their collaboration ("Requiem") is never completed, and hidden away by Mozart's wife.

Reflecting on this, Salieri asserts that God would rather kill Mozart than allow Salieri to lay a finger on Mozart's music. It's a compelling proof for the existence of a deity.

God may have kept the two men artistically separate, but on screen they share a compelling dynamic. Hulce plays a grubby, sensual Mozart charmed with flouting social convention and inspired by the musicality of the everyday world. (At one point, a tongue-lashing from his own mother-in-law becomes the voice of The Magic Flute's Queen of the Night.) Abraham paints Salieri as a rational, prim, self-satisfied schemer fond of candies and––despite his professed celibacy––the attentions of beautiful women. Were it not for their shared love of music, they would have nothing in common; even their sins are opposites.

The ur-play on which Amadeus is based, Alexander Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri," took artistic license in describing the two competing composers' relationship, turning it into a morality play not dissimilar to Pushkin's short story, "The Queen of Spades," in which a gambling German learns a trick at cards that will make him a fortune. Like Salieri, he misplaces his faith and goes insane after being miraculously foiled.

A little of Pushkin's Russian-ness remains in the film. Salieri's pride and spite make him the quintessentially venial man whose machinations are futile in the face of Mozart's genius. Mozart is a boor with an annoying laugh and a propensity for drink: Neither he nor Salieri is wholly likable, but like the theatrical characters from a Dostoevsky novel, we're unable to hate either because in each we see bits of ourselves reflected in their flaws.

How Real Life Super Heroes scored on my college lit professor

When I was a senior in college, I enrolled in a short story cycle seminar. At the end of the term, I asked the professor if he'd ever consider teaching a graphic novel. "I love the visual arts, but I'm not a kid anymore. So I guess no, I wouldn't," he told me. Immediately a short list of mature graphic novels––Sandman and A Contract with God––came to mind.

I think the problem my professor had with teaching graphic novels is the problem of the superhero. In "Afterword(s)" at the end of Batman: Year One, illustrator David Mazzuccelli wrote, "Once a depiction veers toward realism, each new detail releases a torrent of questions that exposes the absurdity at the heart of the genre."

In short, "The more 'realistic' superheroes become, the less believable they are." And that's anathema to academics, who see realism as a vehicle for the underlying gravity of the human condition––not it's ridiculousness. 

When I read that a self-proclaimed superhero had been arrested, and that there's a whole community of "Real Life Super Heroes" (RLSH), I thought of my professor: how unlike the events of Cane or Go Down, Moses, "heroes" like Phoenix Jones and Urban Avenger finally have the advantage of topicality and realism.

Besides their victory over my aging literature professor and his dodgy hip, some of these crime fighters boast of accomplishments that scratch desperately at the surface of our national despair. Phoenix Jones claims to have confiscated more than 100 crack pipes, and was arrested after stopping a fight outside a nightclub with pepper spray. I bet stealing crack pipes reduces crack use about as much as pepper spray reduces tempers.

Heroes need villains, but the crime rate in the United States is the lowest it has been in more than 20 years. The real enemies are unemployment, shrinking wages, and dissatisfaction with our elected politicians––problems better suited for the talents of a Bismarck or Caesar than those of Superman or Batman.

In the '80s and '90s, comics writers sought to give heroes recognizable psychologies, but understandably had difficulty envisioning a world like the one we live in today. Frank Miller made Batman a morally absolutist man-child in The Dark Knight Returns, and Daredevil a reluctant and guilt-ridden crime fighter during his (Miller's) tenure at Marvel. Alan Moore's Watchmen sought to place realistic heroes in a world full of moral gray area, but again, crime––and yes, evil––plays a significant role.

Most in the RLSH community came of age when these landmark titles hit bookshelves, and their influence on this crop of urban crime fighters shouldn't be dismissed. Heroes combat evil, and that ethic appears to drive certain flesh-and-blood people to don masks and (lacking a more glamorous or pervasive target) fight crime.

The diminishing criminal element adds to the ridiculousness of the crime fighter who just fights crime, and some have responded by branching out into public service. San Diego's Urban Avenger walks for charity and feeds the homeless. St. Petersburg, Florida's Knight Hood restocks food supplies for local shelters. The Batman premise––that the symbol does more for the cause of right than the mere man––has become more important than Batman's hard-line stance towards crime. 

Here in Boise there's a limo driver who looks exactly like Rod Stewart. There are a lot of people who know his real name, but what's more important is that he's the spitting image of the rock star. He's pretty famous around town. But what if he stood for something? 

What if, just by showing up at the battered women's shelter or the food bank, he sent the message that even though we're out of work, broke, and pissed off, we can still make our communities better places? I'm aware of how preposterous it is for someone to dress up like it's Halloween and "fight crime," but this cohort of real life super heroes seems to have learned the most important lessons comics have to offer, and we should elevate their endeavor to a controversy, arguing that they're insane, or that they act outside the law because it protects the people responsible for our suffering.

It's an argument I wish I could have had in college. Alas, my professor isn't a kid anymore.

13 Assassins: Seven Samurai, the short version

If there's something missing fromTakashi Miike's remake of 13 Assassins, it's the presence of common people. Its most obvious cinematic forebear, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, bursts at the seams with them, and passed down to its descendent films a sense that as a dying class within feudal Japan, samurai were their protectors. Kurosawa populated his pioneering samurai flicks with a sampling of farmers and merchants and fools; Miike deployed them symbolically to illustrate the distress the corrupt Shogunate has wrought.

Miike saves a lot of screen time by paying lip service to these peasants rather than giving them voices of their own. Depending on who you are, this is a trade-off that streamlines an already balanced, well-paced action-drama––or distinguishes a good film from the great film it could have been.

These representative commoners are few, and they're suffering: here, a woman bereft of her hands, feet and tongue, scrawling with a pen in her mouth that her whole family has been massacred; there, a little boy peeing unabashedly in the middle of a village that is about to be destroyed. They're bloody counterpoints to the silk kimonos and swept palaces of the nobility, and driving the movie is this dialectic between those who rule and those who serve.

It makes sense, then, that the movie is about politics. It begins when the violent nihilist son of the previous Shogun and younger brother of the current Shogun, Matsudaira Naritsugu, receives a promotion. A high-ranking government official, sensing that no good can come of this, recruits trusted samurai Shinzaemon to assassinate Naritsugu. Shinzaemon in turn recruits twelve other samurai to assist him. 

By nearly doubling Kurosawa's cast of samurai, Miike draws attention away from the beleaguered peasants and towards his warriors, who are a motley bunch indeed. Some fight for money, some for honor. Others fight for revenge. One fights because he has nothing better to do. The long peace that has reigned in Japan has rendered professional swordsmen almost obsolete, and thus samurai are men of noble birth who must eek out existences as common men: hybrids with a diminishing place in Japan's rigid social structure.

If there are problems with arranging a film like this, you wouldn't know it for all the swordplay. Coherent, smartly choreographed duels and battles help smooth the movie's plot hick-ups, and give it an almost epic gloss. The longest battle, at the end of the movie, is almost 40 minutes long and marred only by the running of some clumsily-animated CGI bulls. 

This last scene is exhausting to watch, and make fighting look like real work. Covered from head to foot in blood, sweat and grime, our heroes use guile and skill to destroy a small army, and the effort it takes 13 elite samurai to battle hundreds of semi-skilled warriors is enough to make you sweat in your seat. 

There's something cruel about watching this film in light of the recent nuclear power station catastrophe in Fukashima. Discipline, unity of purpose, and sacrifice pay off for Shinzaemon's samurai, and though many don't live to see it, it's implied that their efforts have contributed to the liberalization of the government and better living conditions for the people of Japan. But the nuclear age brought the meaning of our lives and efficacy of our efforts into question: 13 Assassins sometimes feels like a reminder of bygone days when pouring body and soul into a cause meant something. 

It's available on NetFlix Instant.

My review: Attack the Block

[SPOILER ALERT]

The most stunning thing about Joe Cornish's Attack the Block is the final scene, when Moses, the head hood of a gang of London youths, is packed into the back of a police paddy wagon to the sound of grateful neighbors chanting his name. You're leaning forward in your chair almost far enough for the person in front of you to hear your breathing, and you're thinking what you would say as a character witness at his trial. At the beginning of the film, Moses (John Boyega) is a 15-year-old miscreant with a deep, angry stare protecting his vulnerability. In the final scene, that stare has transformed into the hard gaze of someone willing to sacrifice himself for the people he cares about. You almost forget about the aliens.

One of these aliens falls out of the sky, interrupting Moses and his gang of wannabe hoods as they mug Sam, a young nurse living in "the block," a high rise, low-rent apartment building in London. Moses and his posse chase down the alien to an abandoned building, where they beat it to death and haul it to a local pot peddler (Nick Frost) for safekeeping. Unbeknownst to all, this little act of street cruelty brings down a hail of aliens looking for their fallen brethren, and it's up to Moses' gang and its unlikely ally Sam to save the block while evading the police and a psychopathic small-time drug lord.

Cornish's characters have a loving reality worthy of a Calvin and Hobbes strip––and in a genre known for anything but realism. Moses' reluctance to apologize for robbing Sam has the power to make us blush: Who hasn't been in the position of being too proud to say, "I'm sorry"? Sam's skepticism at the boys' claim that they've been attacked by aliens has the look and feel of an adult's practiced disbelief in tall tales, and her surprise upon learning the truth as it crashes through her front door rings sincere. 

Moses is a stand-in for the talent and resources lost to the world through poverty. A brief glimpse at the flat he shares with his absentee uncle gravely replaces the obligatory scene in which the alien is finally revealed. Filth covers every available surface, and it's clear Moses sleeps under the same sheets he did in his now-distant childhood. It's difficult to imagine a person reaching adulthood amid such squalor and neglect becoming a contributing member of society. 

It's no accident that the destruction of Moses' flat is a decisive moment––one that made the audience in my hometown theater clap.

The aliens take a back seat to the people in the film by design. Vicious, furry, and black as midnight, they're regularly referred to as wolves, and their noisy, glowing green teeth are at first mistaken for eyes. Avoiding definition at every turn, everything known about them is at best a guess or approximation. Brewis, a pothead zoologist trapped with Moses and Sam, speculates that the aliens are attracted by the smell of their own blood, on the evidence that everyone they've killed has come into contact with a dead alien; he admits, however, that he is incredibly stoned and probably incorrect.

For a movie that addresses inner city poverty, hooliganism and responsibility, Attack the Block is free from ham-handed catharses and clumsy moralizing. Taking its cues more from Goonies than Alien, it has the humor and lightheartedness to make it a family favorite without sacrificing smartness and vitality. And with a production budget of $13 million, it proves that thoughtful direction and clever dialogue are effective substitutes for bloated special effects budgets.