By this point in our lives, we have consumed so much media, and, being at a university, have consumed so much media about media, that we recognize when the media is trying to manipulate us. Good intellectual training means we should be suspicious anytime you suspect sentimentality, but the problem is you can’t always pick out the phoniness in a message that’s intended for you. You’re not trained to be aware of the manipulation when it actually works on you. This is an issue not just in media but about talking about media.

Besides the sight of Sarah Palin speaking in front of a giant video screen that made it look like the stage was on top of a giant body of water, the strangest moment of the conventions came right after Michelle Obama’s speech when she and her daughters gathered onstage in front of a live video feed of Señor Obama speaking from Kansas. As he praised his wife, one of the girls kept saying “Hi, daddy. Daddy? Where’s daddy?” Obama responded in an endearingly goofy way that he was in Kansas. It was adorable and all but I know that a seven-year-old today knows more about the Internet than I do and sure as hell knows that daddy can be talking from another state.

So, Sasha’s “hello daddy” was staged saccharine. Not a big deal. We’ve all learned that politicians manipulate by appealing to sentimentality. But the emotions or experience it was trying to appeal to exist nowhere in real life—only in Lifetime movies. It wasn’t intended for us. Neither are the rhetorical tactics of film or media criticism. Still, as we enter our twenties in an age when we have no need for those outdated metaphors, we use them.

John McCain. Illustration by Nick Teddy / North by Northwestern

In popular criticism, it’s easy to give definition to a work by making a comparison. But what’s more manipulative are the negative definitions—the comparisons that define something because it’s not something else. After seeing The Dark Knight, my friend explained to me why he liked the film: “It’s not a campy comic book movie, like the old Batman.” Excuse me, but when in the past decade have we actually expected a “campy comic book” movie? Every single adaptation during this superhero craze—The Hulk, X-Men, even Iron Man (he’s an arms dealer—wow, edge)—has aimed to be taken seriously. Since the days of the supposed “dumb Blockbuster” in the 1980s and 1990s, Time Warner and other conglomerates realized that their cultural dominance could only continue if they convinced us that their products had legitimate importance. The dubious depth of Batman enabled us to like movies branded by Warner Bros. without feeling guilty. The old Adam West Batmans are a myth; they never had an emotional impact on us because we were always told that they’re campy.

So, while we may already recognize that some media messages are outdated, we need to create our own rhetoric to discuss and write about media. Sasha’s “daddy!” is a bloodless example, but what happens when the Obama campaign’s manipulation through pop-culture references actually works?
The night of his acceptance speech, Obama emerged on stage to U2’s “City of Blinding Lights.” I normally can’t stand U2 but I was moved by it. Maybe it was the moment, but more likely it had to do with my memories of The Devil Wears Prada. The song is in a small insert scene with Anne Hathaway looking out the shiny windows of a limousine, foregrounded by Meryl Streep, and I could feel possibility, hope and all my guilty desires for fabulousness and the fulfillment through luxury goods. This translated to the image of Obama coming on stage—a chance for hope. It helps that the media construction of Obama might replace Prada as the luxury good of the year.

Barack Obama. Illustration by Nick Teddy / North by Northwestern

I’m fine being manipulated, but I want to stay aware of it. Trouble is, as people our age start becoming the chief creators of pop culture, it’s going to be harder to distance ourselves. We’re old enough to have sentimental attachments to figures who have aged and changed in front of our eyes to the point where they might as well be people we know personally. “Baby One More Time” was released almost 10 years ago, and this year at the MTV Video Music Awards, Britney “made her comeback,” winning multiple awards after last year’s performance breakdown. It became even clearer that Britney’s path from up to down to fragile isn’t so much about her, but rather our need to create a mythic narrative.

But again, Britney isn’t a very personal example. What’s interesting is that media can incorporate the iconography of any B-list celebrity, anyone you have some kind of sentimental attachment to. This fall, Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson has a role on FOX’s The Sarah Connor Chronicles as an evil CEO. It was weird to see my gay icon on TV “acting.” But then again, she’s in a cheesy blue corporate suit with a weird popped collar, looking at a crowd below her window, which is so obviously a grip holding a silver reflecting board to the camera. Her delivery is so stilted, and the situation so badly written.

Maybe Manson wasn’t cast on her own merits as an actress, but her character’s goth black eyeliner draws on her Garbage persona that is largely forgotten. Or maybe this redhead almost-has-been was cast because Tilda Swinton was too expensive. So the scene does have some pathos—time has passed and career fortunes have shifted for my icon—but in the end, it’s just a low-rent knock-off of something else.

If you went to the AMC Michigan Avenue or AMC River East over the past two weekends, you wouldn’t think anything special was going on in these cookie cutter multiplexes. Look up and you’ll notice that strange names, such as I’m Gonna Explode, are displayed on the digital marquee instead of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Walk into an auditorium and you’ll find a packed audience watching Filipina transsexuals offering their services outside of a porn cinema. And then you realize that you’re at the 44th Chicago International Film Festival.

From October 17 until October 29, the annual film festival will screen almost 175 movies from 47 different countries. And it’s pretty cool to realize that the only thing that separates a movie about a family-owned porn theater from the more family-friendly Beverly Hills Chihuahua are two flimsy auditorium walls.

There were American films, to be sure, including the gala premiere The Brothers Bloom, featuring Rachel Weisz. The Wrestler, directed by Weisz’s husband Darren Aronofksy, has been hailed as a return to form from a man who last gave audiences 96 minutes of Hugh Jackman talking to a tree in outer space with The Fountain.

Yet for the most part, foreign and foreign language films were the highlights of the festival. The top award, the Gold Hugo, was given to the UK/Irish film, Hunger, Steve McQueen’s (not the dead macho one every male lists as their influence so they can forget that they’re doing an interview for Details magazine) debut feature about imprisoned Irish Republican Army leader Bobby Sands’ 1981 hunger strike. The Grand Jury Prize went to longtime cult director Kiyoshi Kurosowa for Tokyo Sonata, a drama about the quiet disintegration of a Japanese family after a father loses his job.

Sonata has been considered somewhat of a change of pace for the director who has been known primarily for his “J-Horror” (Japanese horror) work, but a film about the insidious threat of economic collapse seems to fit a director who has created movies of such unsettling dark humor and dread for over a decade. As a friend suggested, The Dark Knight might have been heavily influenced by his Cure (1997), in which the villain, like the Joker, chooses to forget his identity and persuades other people to murder for him.

In addition to the regular screenings, British director Mike Leigh, usually recognized for his partially improvised ensemble films like Vera Drake and Secrets and Lies, was given a special career achievement award in time for the Chicago premiere of his latest film–the poignant, lovely Happy-Go-Lucky. The comedy follows Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a London school teacher who approaches various situations with an eternal perkiness that alienates some of the film’s characters, and perhaps the audience. On paper, it’s a character that Meg Ryan could have played, but through steadily revealing more and more details about her life, Poppy becomes an interesting character-–she’s well-traveled, confident, open to a relationship, but not needy. Happy-Go-Lucky is a feel-good movie whose optimism seems so sincere because both Poppy and the movie — through its long, wide shots and distanced framing — acknowledge that life can be extremely difficult. Leigh’s been nominated for an Oscar twice before, and since the film is being distributed by Miramax in time for award season hullabaloo, expect actress Sally Hawkins to get, at the very least, a Golden Globe nomination. And judging from her film performance, she’d be fun to see sloshed at one of the most ridiculous indulgences of Western civilization (mildly more indulgent than the articles that mention them).

Mike Leigh has been a staple of art-house cinema since the early 90s, but two current world cinema trends of the aughts — the canonization of Chinese director Zhang Ke Jia and the revived interest in Mexican cinema — were also acknowledged in the festival. Jia’s latest film, 24 City, is a faux-documentary that features staged interviews with actors playing former factory workers from the Chengdu providence as the factory is being torn down to make room for 24 City, a set of super-modern condominiums. 24 City deals with the challenges and downsides of China’s “economic miracle” without any Michael Moore polemics. The film’s empathy is in the masterful shot framing: In one shot, a young woman, Sun-Ta, tearfully explains that she wants to earn enough money to put her factory-worker parents in the 24 City. She stands in front of two large windows looking over a spaghetti-junction of cars. As the traffic goes by and cars are going down the ramp, appearing lower in one window than the other, it’s clear that this woman is both a product and an accomplice of her environment.

Although Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo’s third feature, I’m Gonna Explode (Voy a Explotar), went away from the main competition empty-handed, it confirmed that Naranjo is a talent to watch. In the film, two teenagers, Roman and Maru, rebel against high school conformity by running away from their parents and, of course, engaging in a doomed love affair. The gimmick is that they deceive their parents by being right in front or on top of them: camped on the roof of the mansion belonging to Roman’s politician father. The camera whips around with flair, and it’s always fun to see characters wear what I could buy from Urban, but the best moments come from small scenes with the adults. For example, Roman’s father condescendingly consoles Maru’s single mother, and a guard in the foreground just plays with his cellphone.

Seeing lesser-known Swedish director Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments made me interested in the director’s career, which included a stint in Hollywood in the 70s. When people discover a new film at a festival, they become curious enough to explore a cinema history they’ve never thought about before. And that is one of the reasons why the Chicago International Film Festival can be labeled a success.

Hunger and Everlasting Moments will be released by IFC Films late this year/early 2009. 24 City will be released by Cinema Guild in early 2009. Tokyo Sonata will be distributed by Regent Releasing in March 2009.

Grade: C
Bottom line: Dull as dishwater, but hairstylist Peter Tothpal nails Diane Lane’s dull Southern suburban ‘do.

I can’t say I’ve noticed a more appropriate haircut for any character or actress in a movie this year than the style Peter Tothpal crafted for Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe. It’s that short, shoulder-length cut with blonde highlights one finds on a lot of upper-middle-class Caucasian women in the suburban South, one that suggests yoga lessons after an anxious morning sending the kids to school.

Lane’s haircut is a sign that the actress is perfectly cast for the bland sentimentality of Nights in Rodanthe, based on a novel by The Notebook author Nicholas Sparks. Seeing her master a caricature that she’s played in other films might be the most entertaining aspect of the otherwise dull, perfunctory Rodanthe. In this film, like in Under the Tuscan Sun and Must Love Dogs, Lane is the kind of wronged, middle-aged woman whose constant revealing of self-history mixed with peppy humor and self-pity is squirm inducing.

Lane plays Adrienne Willis, a separated mother of two, whose husband (Christopher Meloni) announces that he wants to get back together. She takes the weekend to think it over, while she manages her best girrrrrrlfriend’s (Viola Davis, playing another variation on the stereotypical black best friend often used as a shortcut for “soul” in Hollywood romances) rarely-visited North Carolina beachside inn. Conveniently, the moody and attractive Paul Flannner (Richard Gere), a recently disgraced plastic surgeon, is the only guest, just as a huge hurricane hits the beach. The two find love, lessons are learned, and James Franco has some scenes as Gere’s surgeon son, but, as with any good romantic drama, the love affair can never truly last. To paraphrase Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, this is how these movies keep their own kind of authenticity: By having something prevent the characters from staying together, the movie both preserves the love affair as something pure (before the characters grow tired of one another), and at the same time, acknowledges that a movie romance can never last.

Rodanthe is the second feature-film from George C. Wolfe (his first, Lackawanna Blues, premiered on HBO), the acclaimed former director of the Public Theater in New York. Though the film doesn’t have much visual appeal, the actors bring occasional humanity and flare to an otherwise saccharine script.

After the hurricane hits the house, Lane, surveying the damage from the beach, picks up a skateboard on the ground and awkwardly twirls it as she talks about her kids; it’s pretty weird, yet the actress has conviction. And Gere amusingly drops character in one scene, or perhaps shows some genuine human reaction to Lane’s sentimental motor mouth, when, as she shows him a picture of her children, he gives a brusque, uninterested, “Yeah.” It’s something an average person might do when they’re bored – and it might be one of the more human moments in the movie.

In Rodanthe, like in some other romantic dramas, the film’s interest in the characters’ passion is matched by its interest in interior decorating. The interior of the beach inn has the look of a Southern Living spread: an aqua blue kitchen, strands of red peppers hanging from the walls and white French doors and windows. The interiors are pretty, but on the outside, the inn is creepy: Like the eponymous home in another slightly strange romantic drama, The Lake House, the house lacks a clean structure. The three ramshackle floors jut over each other, looking ready to fall at any moment. The movie doesn’t particularly use the location in an interesting way– in one wide shot before Lane and Gere realize they’re meant for each other, the two characters, who have rooms one floor apart, stand on their balconies, overlooking the ocean. Maybe that’s a metaphor. Maybe that’s shabby chic. Speaking of shabby chic, man, I really want a chipped, blue door as a coffee table. So maybe Nights in Rodanthe worked as wish fulfillment for me. While others may have admired Gere’s bland mug or Lane’s haircut, I wanted the furniture.

Correction, 11:46 a.m., Sept. 27: The original version of this article misstated what state the movie took place in.

A few weeks ago, a friend directed me to the Web site Stuff White People Like. The concept would be funny, but thin, were it not for its ingenious presentation. The site is structured as a top 100 list (at last check there were 91 entries), as if to guide an outsider on how to make friends with the race. Entry 70 explains that white people actually enjoy the process of breaking up with their significant others: “If you are lucky enough to speak a second language, the best thing you can do for a white person in this situation is to give them an expression in that language that relates to breaking up. This will make them feel better since they are comforted by the gesture and happy to be learning a new sentence that they can reuse to with their friends.” Dead-on in its assessment of a contemporary sensibility, it will, like any Web satire, soon lose of any of its trenchancy.

Still, the site’s inclusion of Michel Gondry in the “canon of directors white people love” proves prescient for Be Kind Rewind. In Gondry’s latest film, Jack Black and Mos Def accidentally erase all of the videotapes in their cutely decaying video store, and rather than switch to DVDs, they remake Hollywood blockbusters with homemade sets and cardboard costumes. It’s cute and warm until Gondry’s whimsical encouragement of DIY art comes unsettingly close to the movie’s fetishization of a black neighborhood and its naïve equation of “blackness” with community. Living in ethnicity becomes a badge for the protagonists’ own kookiness.

Gondry should never be mistaken for a realist. He’s interesting because he creates fabulist worlds that extend from real places. In Rewind, as the homemade remakes incorporate more and more of the people of Passaic, New Jersey, the movies become an illusion, as J. Hoberman said, of an illusion: the projection of a naïve hope for utopian community.

It’s one thing for Gondry to present his characters’ hopes as a wishful fantasy; it’s another for him to turn Passaic into a fantasy without any awareness of its reality. He portrays the city as a predominately lower-middle-class black neighborhood — besides a few cops, Jack Black is the town’s sole white guy, living in a trailer and hanging out with Danny Glover, Mos Def and their Latina friend, played by Melonie Diaz. In fact, according to the 2000 census, 35 percent of the real town’s population is white, only 13 percent is African-American and 39 percent is of other races.

It begs the question: Why are the extras in the film played by predominately black actors? Again, Stuff White People Like seems to provide the answer: “White people love being the only people in the room.” Black’s and Mia Farrow’s kookiness, as the only significant white characters in the film, is understood partly because they’re the only two in an “ethnic neighborhood.” The movie is conscious of this — Glover pulls Black aside after he dresses up in blackface to play a semi-famous jazz musician. But it’s a winking gesture, evading the idea that Gondry is racist, because, hey, he can laugh about blackface and still know the limits. It’s all a bit hypocritical from a movie in which one character calls Driving Miss Daisy “condescending.”

I can’t squawk that Be Kind Rewind is just another dubious exploitation of black culture, because Gondry is genuine — at least about the DIY’ness. Intentionally sloppy, the movie shares the spirit of Black’s junkyard cinema. That’s no small feat from Gondry and his photographer, Ellen Kuras, who in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep always seemed to end up with slick, glossy colors. This is also Gondry’s first film in 2.35:1 widescreen, and the actors look appropriately awkward inside the frame. A conversation between Glover, Mos Def and Black is also cut in such a way that they never appear to actually interact with each other, pointing out the truly weird way in which movies are edited.

Movies increasingly rely on a specific, temporary discourse with an audience. To understand Black’s character requires me to understand the implicit, racist connection between quirk and otherness. Between Knocked Up and Juno, comedies that work only within the immediate context of today’s culture look to be here to stay. The problem is, like Juno’s wannabe cynic, they only look sincere. We know Katherine Heigl’s careerist character needs a baby to make herself worth something, but we never get to hear her talk about it. Instead of speaking to us explicitly, these movies only work because their politics are implicitly understood — and legitimized by the audience that watches them.