Ne travaillez jamais

Margin Call, J.C. Chandor (2011)

2012-01-18T19:23:00.002-06:00

Wow, this got so many raves, and it's such a dog. I use the term advisedly, to ruthlessly mock the writers of this film for trying to pass off a cancerous chocolate lab as a metaphor for the American economy.

The script is relentlessly pedantic, all the performances seem drowned in valium, the pace -- ironically, since this is supposed to be about spectacularly dramatic events -- is grindingly glacial. I apologize for the adverbs.

A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul (1979)

2012-01-12T09:24:00.000-06:00

This is the first Naipaul novel I've read, and I found the experience quite disorienting, in ways both pleasurable and upsetting. I think my upset is what will persist, and that may be a good thing.

I'm well accustomed to literature which travels a predictable path of indignation regarding the injustice of European colonialism. I don't know that I've ever read anything, though, that so fully encompasses the complexity of the relationships between all the various players in a colonial situation. The shorthand version of colonialism -- wealthy European whites exploiting poor African blacks -- conceals a plethora of more nuanced and complicated relationships. That seems a pretty self-evident thing to say, but I don't know of another text that brings it to the fore as forcefully as this. Instead of the basic master/slave dynamic, we find here highly complex systems of classes within classes, exiles within exiles, powers within powers.

An ethnic Indian trader prospering on the east coast of Africa moves with his mixed-race slave to an interior African country which was recently decolonized by a European power and is now tipping into a civil war sponsored in part by European interests and partially by ethnic and class divisions within the aboriginal culture. Everything that's wrong with colonialism (slavery, oppression) and all of its benefits (clean water, electricity) are on display. Everything that's wrong with independence (kleptocracy, recapitulation of colonial power structures) and all of its benefits (a sense of common destiny and self-determination) are on display. Human relationships are a hall of mirrors. "Everyone is a villager," and everyone's a kind of slave. As Naipaul puts it more than once, "It wasn't that there was no wrong and no right. It was that there was no right." He has no respect for any of the systems on offer, imperial or revolutionary or anything in-between, and his analysis of how the different constituents of the river town exercise, cede, and accumulate different forms of power -- economic, political, sexual, emotional -- is nuanced, precise, and persuasive.

All this is an easy sell as far as I'm concerned. I've written myself about what seems to be the sad inevitability of revolutions turning back into empires. The discomfort enters for me, though, because it does sort of seem like Naipaul is especially contemptuous of the revolutionary part of the cycle. There are passages here which remind me of Shelby-Steele-like rhetoric, which seem to accuse the oppressed of abetting their oppression, and that kind of thinking makes this white boy fidget with discomfort. It may well be a productive upset, though, because one thing I can say for sure is that few pieties about colonialism can survive a careful reading of this book.

The Guard, John Michael McDonagh (2011)

2012-01-11T20:57:00.002-06:00

So what's this all this, then? Sort of an Irish Hal Hartley movie, you might say. Makes not much sense as a whole, but the parts are fun: the mood is engaging, there are some craic flights of dialogue here and there, and the whole thing moves along briskly enough, so sure.

Interesting to sit down with Wendy to watch this. The first murder makes her gasp and I realize it's not even registering for me as an act of violence, since this is a comedy at heart. I wonder how many murders I've seen on the screen.

The Sea and Cake, The Moonlight Butterfly (2011)

2012-01-08T16:08:00.000-06:00

Some people get excited when their favorite bands try new things -- they're showing their versatility! they're growing! -- but I am not one of those people. I want my favorite bands to provide a steady supply of new songs that sound exactly like, but different from, the songs I already love. These gentlemen understand that, and they have my gratitude.

The Future, Miranda July (2011)

2012-01-04T21:11:00.001-06:00

Jesus, between this and Beginners, I'm starting to wonder whether I need to personally go out to Los Angeles and slap everybody. I adored You and Me and Everyone We Know, and I think Miranda July's a delight in every way, but here's a deadly example of how quirky can very quickly render out as tedious.

Or maybe -- here's the relentless fear -- I'm just getting too old? Have had my fill of quirky? I can in fact well imagine seeing this in 1988 alongside, say, Betty Blue, and experiencing it as soul-scouring. Was I blind then or am I deaf now?

Ach, that's all nonsense talk. If I'm old, I'm old enough to know that daddy things go in cycles, the way that Kanye West is just ampin' like Michael, and what we have here is Stranger than Paradise for the new ones same as Jarmusch put Godard in Sandusky for us. No harm, no harm! But no joy. I was glad the cat died; it was creeping me out.

Must be said: As ever with July, the details persist: I completely buy the kid digging a foxhole in the backyard, and answering, when queried about where she'll pee, "I'll do it here. Like a soldier." Also a plus is that no one is rich. And also I loved the guy who put the old blowdryer on Craigslist. Actually, I'm realizing now that I enjoyed the first 45 minutes a lot more than the second.

Young Adult, Jason Reitman (2011)

2011-12-27T19:27:00.003-06:00

This thing makes Juno look like a Disney movie. Charlize Theron turns in an amazing performance -- really, when you think about it, a performance in many ways more demanding than the one she did for Monster -- as a terrified and terrifying former prom queen approaching adulthood on the asymptote. I'm not going to go into the plot here because if you have any sense you're going to see this yourself and if you don't then what good would it do. Diablo Cody's script is lean and sharp. She doesn't oversell or fake a single moment, and when she does write big furniture-chewing set pieces, they feel as utterly convincing and sickeningly inevitable as Aeschylus. The fact that all this takes place in a town that could pretty much pass for my hometown maybe twisted the knives even more vigorously for me, but this'll stab you no matter where you're from and/or wish you weren't.

War Horse, Steven Spielberg (2011)

2011-12-26T21:05:00.002-06:00

There's nothing new or unusual about an artist taking a chaotic, terrifying, inexplicable historical episode and seeking to make some sense of it by overlaying it with a cathartic narrative, but whew, Spielberg takes the cake! He doesn't overlay, he positively smothers! This isn't a movie about the insane mechanized apparatus of death that was WWI using the story of a single horse as a vehicle; it's a movie about a beautiful, brilliant, heroic horse who happened to have lived through WWI. This movie's sense of history is so bizarrely out of whack, it spends literally no time on the questions of who's fighting and why; its only concern is the fate of the relationship between a farm boy and his horse.

There may be a kind of willful myopia in play here. We know Spielberg isn't ignorant of history, so if he's ignoring it, might that be a deliberate decision? Does the strangely old-fashioned lighting of the early and late bookend scenes offer a clue? I haven't seen such heroic and artificial sunsets since Gone with the Wind, I don't think. Is this, like Scorsese's Hugo, less a movie about history than a movie about movies? I'm probably fishing in a puddle.

Beginners, Mike Mills (2011)

2011-12-25T15:23:00.001-06:00

This begins slowly, wistfully, bittersweetly, and immediately seizes my attention, but it takes less than an hour for me to start wishing that everyone involved would suddenly come down with the bubonic plague. The main characters here are, purportedly, horribly damaged and in pain. Self-hatred, self-doubt, self-denial! Plus cancer! Your natural inclination is to feel sorry for these beautiful and tragic people, but they do their very best to thwart your instincts by being the most insufferable bunch of self-involved moony whiners LA has ever seen, and that's saying something. The tone here reminds me of S. Coppola's Lost in Translation. The stylish weltschmerz. Every space -- exterior or interior -- just-so beautiful. My creeping horrified realization that no one on the screen ever has to think about money.

Comfort of Strangers, Beth Orton (2006)

2011-12-16T19:44:00.001-06:00

First time through you could be excused for thinking this sounds like background music at Starbucks. But Orton is truly protean, and here she is hitched up with the insanely brilliant Jim O'Rourke on the boards, and every song here rewards repeated listenings; they get weirder and deeper the more you listen. What I love best is the way songs just end when they're done doing what they set out to do. That's a hard skill for a poet to learn: When to eschew finishing in favor of ending.

I've loved Orton for more than a decade. I believe that if she had decided to promote herself harder, she could have been a superstar. She didn't, and I think she's probably stayed sane and happy as a result. I hear that she's got a new one coming, at last, in 2012. I'm excited, but I haven't minded waiting.

Page One: Inside the New York Times, Andrew Rossi (2011)

2011-12-07T21:11:00.001-06:00

No one with any interest in current events could fail to understand that information moves differently now than it did ten years ago, or ten months ago, or maybe even ten minutes ago. These changes have put obvious and well-documented pressure on "legacy media" companies like the Times. In July of 2002, NYT was trading at $50 a share; this past July it was at about $8 a share.

But you know all that. This movie goes over that territory, but where it really shines is in its depiction not of the Times as a company, but the Times as a collection of individuals. There are scenes where people gather around someone's desk and hash out what the ethical course of action is vis a vis some situation that's just arisen. People have principled disagreements, come to conclusions, act on them, and move forward. I found such moments heartening. Whatever else you want to say about the media, the Times, our desperate age, etc., you can't help but come away from this feeling like these people are truly acting in good faith and truly on a mission for good. They're probably doomed.

Win Win, Thomas McCarthy (2011)

2011-12-07T19:28:00.001-06:00

Quirky premise and great cast laid low by a script so plodding I couldn't get through 45 minutes. Life's too short, etc.

Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog (2007)

2011-12-06T21:54:00.001-06:00

In which the NSF flies Herzog to Antarctica so that he can ask a penguin researcher, "Does a penguin ever go insane when they have simply had it with the colony?" If you love Herzog, this will tickle you pink. Dour laconic condemnations of civilization, breathless Caspar David Friedrich-esque romantic ejaculations in the face of ineffable landscapes, a fascination with damaged and fragile characters that comes across as both exploitative and sympathetic at the same time (the scene with the traumatized man who "escaped" from something he can't even talk about (East Germany?) and proudly shows Herzog the rucksack he has ready at all times, should he need to escape again, is without question my favorite moment in this film), and always, always, the magnetic attraction to oblivion. When Herzog talks about the dangers of diving under the ice, or how easy it is to get lost in a blizzard, or the way a penguin will sometimes become disoriented and start walking away from rather than toward the life-giving sea, you understand very clearly that he doesn't dread these disasters; he longs for them.

Herzog continues to make fiction films, but more and more his best attention seems to be directed toward documentaries. (Which, after all, is the more interesting movie, Grizzly Man or Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans?) Might it be that for a mature artist, the claptrap of artifice begins to seem an impediment rather than an aid to the realization of one's dramatic -- and even aesthetic -- goals? Discuss.

Hugo, Martin Scorsese (2011)

2011-12-06T21:52:00.001-06:00

Since the opening ten minutes suggest that CGI is going to be the star here, far more than character or plot, I resigned myself to enjoying some eye candy and settled in with my Milk Duds. After about an hour of sepia-honeyed faux Belle Epoque visuals, though, the movie's agenda changes again. Scorsese is one clever guy. You gradually realize that this whole enterprise is basically an excuse for the maestro to champion his pet (and very worthy!) causes of film preservation and film history awareness. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this before. There are plenty of movies for kids that have broad social lessons to impart -- be nice to people different than you, consumerism is a sickness, take care of the environment, etc. -- but "ensure that cinema history is preserved"? That's some special special pleading! I'm more than sympathetic to the cause, though, so it's all good with me. C+ as a movie, but A- as a PSA.

Hanna, Joe Wright (2011)

2011-12-06T20:52:00.001-06:00

The plot here is wholly borrowed -- three parts Bourne Identity; one part La Femme Nikita -- so we'll grade on style points alone, and we'll give a solid B+. Wright usually takes assignments my mom would call "classy," and his obvious geeky thrill in slumming in the action genre is a little irritating. Still, he gets great performances out of his principals -- the albino sprite to the left, plus Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett -- and only at the movie's very end does he allow himself / force us to wallow in an arty and hyperextended symbolist set piece. Completely forgettable but fairly entertaining.

Inside Job, Charles Ferguson (2010)

2011-11-07T21:21:00.004-06:00

If you read the New York Times and watch Frontline you already know most of this stuff, but this is nonetheless a sleek and efficient summary to force your libertarian uncle to watch, should you require a means of explaining to him in 108 minutes just why those damned hippies camped out on Wall Street are so irked. I particularly enjoyed Ferguson's invasion of the business schools at Harvard and Columbia, where economics professors are routinely paid huge sums to say nice things about deregulation but piously opine that they are immune to conflict of interest issues. The professors' ensuing dudgeons are pathetic to watch; incredibly, I end up feeling more sympathetic toward the tasteless Cristal-swilling johns downtown, who at least wear their avarice right on their shiny thousand-dollar sleeves.

A History of Violence, David Cronenberg (2005)

2011-10-03T19:10:00.002-05:00

Wow, I've sat through some serious dreck from Cronenberg in the past and convinced myself it was complex, citing the A-effect, etc., but this is so stupidly wooden and vice-versa I couldn't spin it if my dissertation depended upon it. Go watch Siodmak's The Killers instead.

The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akın (2007)

2011-09-15T21:36:00.000-05:00

Watching this, I was thinking, what was that other terrific movie I saw that dealt with the interpenetration of Turkish and German cultures, and then I remembered it was Head-On, from 2004, and then I found that Akin directed that, too! This one's a bit less visceral, but it's just as affecting and intelligent. This is a young director to watch.

It's too bad that Washington D.C. is so far away from Kabul. If the flight between them were as brief as the one between Hamburg and Istanbul, I think the world would be a different place.

My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, Werner Herzog (1999)

2011-09-15T21:15:00.000-05:00

Well, you have to have a serious predisposition for these two madmen to find any pleasure in this, and if you do have the predisposition, you've probably already seen this. It's somewhat about the relationship between two quite thoroughly co-dependent collaborators, but it's also a "making-of" documentary about Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, which is a lot of fun for nuts like me.

Prince of the City, Sidney Lumet (1981)

2011-09-15T21:00:00.000-05:00

Lumet is a hero, of course, if (at 167 minutes) a little insistent. What we have here is a set of tropes that have become extremely familiar: the bad cop decides to inform on the other bad cops, but doesn't really become good, quite. Good performances all around, but nothing extraordinary.

The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci (1970)

2011-09-15T20:50:00.000-05:00

Almost unbearably delightful. It took me four nights to watch this. More than 30 minutes at a time was too overwhelming. A deeply decadent movie. It's hard to know how to talk about it. It's a crystalline analysis of Italian fascism, but it's also such a carnival for the eye . . .

Ketchup

2011-07-11T08:48:00.000-05:00

These endless summer days I ingest culture faster than I can process it. In addition to a lot of material about PTSD, which I'm reading for a writing project, this is what's been passing in front of my eyeballs.

White Material, Claire Denis (2009). Denis goes back to Africa. Isabelle Hupert makes me nervous. The politics here are a mess, totally confused. A good example of how sloppy thinking likes to masquerade as ambiguity. But it's Claire Denis, so of course we must still love it.

Somewhere, Sofia Coppola (2010). Just letting the camera keep running on a lifeless scene doesn't make it Cassavetes. This is a deeply boring movie.

Another Year, Mike Leigh (2010). Another heartbreaker from Mike Leigh. It's not really a story so much as it is a kind of temporal vitrine, in which are displayed a half-dozen fully-realized characters, interacting with each other and trying to be alive.

True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen (2010). Lacks the Coen whimsy of Fargo, etc. and also the Coen fatedness of No Country for Old Men. Fine, but neither here nor there.

F for Fake, Orson Welles (1973). Sloppy, self-indulgent, self-important, gimmicky, dull. And that's coming from someone who's genuinely interested in and who has great patience for this theme. Poor old fucker.

American Experience: Stonewall Uprising, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner (2010). Nice doc. Lots of fascinating footage of Village life in the 60's.

The Fighter, David O. Russell (2010). Stolid family drama, worth seeing. Has the kind of genuineness and moral seriousness of purpose you rarely see at the multiplex these days. It's about a hundred times less interesting than, say, Raging Bull, but I think contemporary audiences are so incredibly grateful when they're not pandered to, they wind up thinking something like this is art for the ages.

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay (1994). Perfect idea, poorly executed with slack, repetitive prose and a lot of unnecessary self-dealing.

Speed the Plow, David Mamet (1988). Dialogue perfection. Perfect dramatic efficiency.

Still Life: A Documentary, Emily Mann (1982). Really lively, allusive, slippery drama about the collision of eros and thanatos in the post-war life of a Vietnam veteran.

Lethal Warriors, David Philipps (2010). Philipps didn't ask for this job; he was a sports writer in Colorado Springs when the "Band of Brothers" started coming back from Iraq and killing each other and others. Philipps does an admirable job of stepping up and becoming a real reporter, covering some of the saddest stories of the war. Good, thorough, clear reporting. See also the Frontline episode, The Wounded Platoon.

Louie, Louis C.K. (2010-). Makes Seinfeld look like Happy Days.

The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni (1975). Oh, it's horribly pretentious and aimless and even sometimes irresponsible, but it's also of course gorgeous and dizzying poetry. I had to go get my camera to take pictures of it. Then I had to spend an hour planning a trip to Andalusia.

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (1924). Been clambering up this Alp since May. Certainly skimmed some of the later Settembrini discourses, but I genuinely enjoyed almost all of these 700 pages. Took extensive notes elsewhere. This is utterly worth your time. Read it while you're young. What's it about? It's about a young man who decides -- the verb is too strong -- to absent himself from history.

Port of Shadows, Marcel Carné (1938). Oh, France. Merci pour Michèle Morgan.

Damages, Glenn Kessler, Todd A. Kessler & Daniel Zelman (2007-)

2011-06-22T10:33:00.000-05:00

This is one of the most claustrophobic and nasty pieces of television I've ever seen. There's not a single likeable character, everyone is a lying and cheating power-mad narcissist out to stab everyone else in the back and then self-justify. Worst of all, no one even seems to enjoy the overripe fruits of their iniquitous labors. The show is completely humorless and profoundly amoral. Watching it makes me feel dirty and ashamed, but I'm halfway through it now.

The Killing Fields, Roland Joffé (1984)

2011-06-22T10:28:00.000-05:00

Wrapping up "journalist as hero/antihero" week. Joffé's achievement here is easy to underestimate; there are so many ways this could have turned into a disaster, and he avoids them all. The journalist is a hero, and we get that, but he's also a dangerously narcissistic asshole, and we get that too. His colleague Dith Pran is also a complex character, both ambitious and naive, and his character here is also fully three-dimensional. On top of all that, we get here a very detailed and comprehensive history lesson without ever feeling like we're in a classroom -- also a remarkable achievement. Real questions about journalistic ethics, taken seriously, plus a lively and accurate dramatization of one of the 20th century's most despicable crimes. There are worse ways to spend a couple hours.

X Men: First Class, Matthew Vaughn (2011)

2011-06-22T10:19:00.000-05:00

I love this stuff. Serious questions -- should we celebrate our differences, or seek to transcend them? are we controlled by history or do we control it? -- are explored seriously, plus there are awesome action sequences. Summer blockbuster perfection.

Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen (2011)

2011-06-22T10:15:00.000-05:00

Every time, I swear I'll not be swindled out of my $7.50 again, and every time, I falter and fail and curse myself. The premise is charming, the people are beautiful, the light is gorgeous, but the dialogue is so stilted it makes me cringe. It's like Allen has his hand up inside all the actors, flapping their mouths open and shut while he voices variations on the same half-dozen cliches he's been using for the past twenty years.

"Are you coming to the dinner with my parents at Le Cirque?"

"No, I really need to work on my novel."

"Why can't you be happy and enjoy yourself for once?"

Etc. It's exhausting! And the characters from literary and art history are even worse. Gertrude Stein really has nothing more interesting to say than, "I read your novel, it needs more passion?"

Thank God Allen's at least moved from London to Paris; I almost hung myself in the theater restroom after Match Point.

Adrian Brody playing Salvador Dali gets the photo because he is the only actor in this entire film who seems to be enjoying himself. Everyone else trudges through their scenes talking like they're reading off cue cards. I bet $20 that Allen was annoyed with Brody's performance for being too ad-libby.

Salvador, Oliver Stone (1986)

2011-06-13T22:02:00.000-05:00

What an annoying movie. I'm glad Stone wanted to draw attention to the crimes committed by the (American-enabled) Salvadoran right wing death squads, but the James Woods character is so irritating, and Stone is so concerned with his redemption or lack thereof, that the historical quickly sinks beneath the mire of the personal. A pity.

The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula (1974)

2011-06-13T21:40:00.000-05:00

In honor of this week's public release of the Pentagon Papers, it's heroic journalism week here. We begin with this paranoid classic. The relentlessly louche Warren Beatty is pretty improbable as a crusading journalist, but the pure weirdness of the story is ample compensation. As usual in Pakula, banal and efficient modern spaces -- parking garages, convention halls, office buildings, airports -- intensify the horror and dread. This was made at a time when Americans were just getting used to living with the idea our leaders lie to us as a matter of course, but were still capable of being scandalized. Pakula captures the zeitgeist with verve.

Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone (2008)

2011-06-05T09:27:00.000-05:00

Hoo! I let this sit in my queue way too long. When's the last time you saw a Cosa Nostra picture that didn't feature a laundry list of cliches? Garrone, working off the best-selling book by Roberto Saviano, tells five distinct, occasionally overlapping stories of life under the Camorra, from small-time neighborhood hoods with delusions of grandeur to multi-million Euro syndicates dedicated to the expedient (and illegal) disposition of industrial waste. There's some blood, but the movie's delightfully free of the kind of swagger and celebration of violence in American mafia movies. Most of the people involved are involved because they're trapped, bored, scared, resigned, stupid, or some combination of these. Ironically, the scenes of hopelessness played out in the courtyards of the housing projects can't help but remind me of turn of the century American tenements and the organized crime that blossomed there. Old world or new world, past or future, bathtub gin or pirated DVDs, desperate people will always do desperate things.

Julia, Erick Zonca (2008)

2011-06-05T09:13:00.000-05:00

I would wager that a lot of Europeans think this sort of thing happens in the USA all the time.

Who knows, maybe it does.

This is an update of Cassavettes' Gloria, but the madness here is less about nuance and more about flat-out intensity. Swinton goes completely Oscar-snippet batshit in almost every scene. It must have been exhausting for her; it's exhausting just to watch. Still, it's gripping, at least until the final half hour, where Zonca suddenly and inexplicably gets bogged down in what seems to be some sense of responsibility to honor the ridiculously complicated sets of double- and triple-crosses the plot has imposed upon him. Unusual for a Frenchman to fall under the misapprehension that plot matters more than character.

Bridesmaids, Paul Feig (2011)

2011-06-03T14:30:00.000-05:00

Well, it's more a calculation than a revolution, but it's not all bad. Women get almost all the screen time and absolutely all the jokes, and many of those jokes are genuinely funny. On the other hand, the movie does nothing to undermine, much less undo, the standard assumption of this genre, namely that the two valid paths of fulfillment open to women are cookery and marriage. The moment at the end where the cop/boyfriend takes Wiig into custody by putting her in the back seat of his patrol car pretty much sums it up: the law triumphs, and the dude drives.

Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu (2010)

2011-06-03T14:14:00.000-05:00

A dignified drama, directed with grace and acted with integrity, but doesn't it kind of tip over the edge into bummer-porn at some point? I am not afraid of depressing movies, but this one's relentless hectoring of its hero brought me to the point of wishing he'd fight back by having at least one good thing happen to him, maybe finding a few coins in a gutter or something?

I Am Love, Luca Guadagnino (2009)

2011-05-31T07:04:00.000-05:00

I suppose opera is an early form of the music video, right? Similarly, this is a sort of music video for some lovely pre-existing John Adams pieces, and if you're a fan of his carefully nailed-down chaos, you may be the sort who will enjoy this. As in opera and music videos, plot here runs a distant second in importance to mood and tone. While we are tempted at times to read the story here as an indictment of the inbred and isolated bourgeoisie, any such avenue of thought very quickly runs into trouble, as visual style trumps substance over and over again. I'd go so far as to say that Guadagnino makes Antonioni's La Notte look like a Marxist tract.

Thus not exactly my cup of prosecco, but I can't claim not to have enjoyed it. It's an exact replica of what we used to call "art-house" pictures, and you don't see too many of them any more.

Ketchup

2011-05-30T14:25:00.003-05:00

Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (2009). Eggers tells the story of a remarkable family in a very easy-going and simple voice.

Animal Kingdom, David Michôd (2010). Stark, crisp, finally melodramatic.

Restrepo, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington (2010). They should show this as a curtain-raiser before every war movie. War isn't hell, or glory, or dramatic; it's tedious, confusing, and random.

The Town, Ben Affleck (2010). I've never much cared for Affleck, but this is twice now that he's turned in some really fine work as a director.

Howl, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman (2010). Wow, totally unwatchable! I made it up to the part where they're on drugs and everything turns into an undersea cartoon or something.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy (2010). Sly and fun.

Friday Night Lights (2006-). Has there ever been a more emotionally manipulative show? This thing constantly makes me cry, even though there are precious few characters I really have any sympathy with. It's weird.

The Larry Sanders Show (1992-1998). I got weirdly hooked on this for a while there. Shandling is on the one hand hard to watch and on the other I can't turn away.

Four Lions, Chris Morris (2010). This seemed like a bad idea. I had to check. It was.

The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis (2010). This was tight and gripping. Haggis knows what he's doing.

The American, Anton Corbjin (2010). Lifeless.

The Social Network, David Fincher (2010). Eh.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick (1964). Every other year or so.

Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg (2010). Very nicely done.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct, Jean-Francois Richet (2008).

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, Jean-Francois Richet (2008).

The French are so easily seduced by even the most caricatured image of the outlaw. Richet thinks he's showing us Mesrine's pathos but all that really comes across is how much he worships the man. Still, this is super entertaining and great to look at.

The Way Back, Peter Weir (2010). Almost absurdly epic. Absolutely worth the afternoon.

Colonel Chabert, Honore de Balzac (1832). Superb.

Salt, Phillip Noyce (2010). I can't remember anything about this now.

Cold Souls, Sophie Barthes (2009). Anything with Paul Giamatti is worth a look, in this case only barely.

The Tourist, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2010).

The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry (2011).

Two incoherent and atrocious payday films from relatively interesting directors. It's almost like they're trying to be as contemptuous of you for watching this dreck as they can be.

Fair Game, Doug Liman (2010). This is the dramatization of the Plame affair and one of the best films I've seen about the Bush administration's post-9/11 rush to judgment. Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are both terrific. Highly recommended.

Even the Rain, Icíar Bollaín (2010). Nice conceit, nice try, but it turns out a muddle.

Etc. etc. etc.

Stone, John Curran (2010)

2011-03-14T19:18:00.000-05:00

Good example of how interesting movies can slip under the radar with mediocre reviews because they're too quiet, too slow. Anyone capable of sitting through late Paul Schrader and taking it seriously will find this more than satisfying. The only false note is that DeNiro's supposedly an Episcopalian. Bullshit. He's a stone cold Calvinist.

Ketchup

2011-01-10T07:52:00.000-06:00

The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro (1995). Limpid prose kept me reading all 9000 pages, but there's not much there there.

Youth in Revolt, Miguel Arteta (2009).
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Edgar Wright (2010).
Cleverish enough, I guess. I like this Michael Cera fine, but why can't the protagonist in these things ever be a girl?

Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham (2005). Cunningham's a lovely writer sentence by sentence. The concept seemed too high-concept for me at first, but I grew into it and wound up enjoying this a great deal.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (2010). One of the last great showbiz workaholics.

The Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1988). If you've seen it, you know. If you haven't, you should.

Style Wars, Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant (1983). Terrific, fascinating documentary about the rise of graffiti and hip hop culture. Amazing to see NYC in the early 80's and realize how much time has gone by. Provided me with at least one long-sought source for a sample I'd wondered about: "You only specialize in one thing, you can't call yourself the all-out king."

Foul Play, Colin Higgins (1978). Second only to Seems Like Old Times on my list of Hawn/Chase childhood favorites. One of those 70's flicks that's simultaneously total fluff and highly clever.

The Informers, Juan Gabriel Vasquez (2004). There was no reason not to like this, but for some reason I couldn't engage with it.

Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst (2010)
The Arms Maker of Berlin, Dan Fesperman (2009)
WWII espionage fiction: My annual holiday indulgence. A return to form for Furst, who seemed to me to be phoning it in the last few times. I blame Fesperman for not being Furst, but that's of course unfair.

The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko (2010). This isn't perfect, but it's very good, and it gives me a lot of hope. A reasonably serious and insightful story about a family of two moms and two kids going through a crisis of confidence, written and directed by an out Lesbian. Some might say that the achievement of the movie is that it doesn't even matter that the parents are gay, that it's just a story about a family crisis. That's only about half true. The parents' Lesbianism is integral to the story, but it doesn't determine the story. To me, this seems like a tremendous achievement; the piece neither claims special status for the couple nor asserts that this couple is just like any other. The view of human sexuality on offer here is also refreshing. It ain't Foucault, but it's way more sophisticated than the permanent adolescence Hollywood usually peddles in the bedroom.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Niels Arden Oplev (2009)

2010-12-01T08:19:00.001-06:00

"All the idealizations of the female from the earliest days of courtly love have been in fact devices to deprive her of freedom and self-determination." -- Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel

This movie is repulsive. It's hard to know where to start. How about this: Does that woman over there look like a "girl" to you? Me neither. But it's important to call her a girl, since she represents the ideal of feminine innocence, sullied by masculine perversion, but strong enough to exact revenge when the man she loves is in danger. Like Lara Croft, Nikita, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, etc. etc. etc., Lisbeth Salander is both a totally vulnerable innocent child and a self-contained, self-sufficient, heartless killing machine. She provides everything men want, but asks for nothing in return. (Perhaps the most emblematic sequence here is the one where Salander uses Blomkvist as a human dildo to get herself off. He is of course delighted, but he's even more delighted the next morning, when he gears up for playful post-coital banter, and then realizes that Salander won't require that of him.) The men around Salander decide when, where, and under what circumstances to flip her switch, depending on their needs. (Maggie Cheung's Irma Vep is a rare and useful instance: a self-conscious version of this madonna/murderer type).

Oh, there's so much more. For example: The mindless assignment of every possible outlandish and unlikely depravity to the family of capitalists has the effect of cloaking rather than revealing the actual evils the family business likely perpetrates. The Nazi/rapist/murderer/monster is here defeated, but the conglomerate not only chugs merrily along, it gains a scion which will help ensure its continued existence.

Ugh, it's making me tired to think about. Would someone else please write the term paper on this? I'd recommend starting with the horrific rape/reverse-rape sequence, and Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman.

Anyone thinking right now that I need to lighten up, it's just a movie, should ask themselves this simple question: What would happen to this story if the journalist was a 45 year old woman and the hacker a 25 year old "boy"? For starters, it would never have seen the light of day. Why do you suppose that is?

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (1857), translated by Lydia Davis (2010)

2010-12-01T07:55:00.000-06:00

We are, of course, on paper, thrilled that the scary-smart, MacArthur-certified, uber-cool Lydia Davis has translated the novel that made modern literature possible. What do we do with the fact that her version sounds so stilted? I read this alongside my fusty old Lowell Bair. There are certainly moments where I prefer Davis to Bair, but there are more where I prefer Bair to Davis, usually because Davis's syntax is more convoluted or because she uses more exotic diction, likely with the intention of keeping her vocabulary closer to its nearest French cognates. (I'm not willing to make the effort to dish up a bunch of examples here, unless my faithful readers demand them.) Also, this is minor, but Davis's pages and pages of notes are weird.

I've had a love/hate relationship with this novel for a long time. Insofar as it represents the ascendancy of style over substance, I loathe it. Insofar as it demonstrates that human relationships fundamentally consist of nothing but the collision of one's own self-delusions with those of another, I find it irresistibly perfect. I can't think of another book I hate so much and admire so completely. (I can, oddly, think of plenty that I love but don't particularly admire.)

The Day of the Jackal, Fred Zinnemann (1973)

2010-12-01T06:28:00.000-06:00

Just doing my homework in anticipation of Olivier Assayas's upcoming Carlos, to which I'm looking forward despite myself. This is a very straightforward procedural and nothing to write home about. Its potentially explosive political implications are assiduously suppressed in favor of the cops and robbers storyline. The fun lies almost entirely in getting to see all these delicious shots of 60's Europe.

Point Blank, John Boorman (1967)

2010-11-20T09:39:00.000-06:00

This is a very strange movie which absolutely could not be made today, a French New Wave film made by an Englishman in California. Its narrative head games, its druggy swings from hysteria to Weltschmerz, its boredom with both sex and violence, and above all its conviction that no amount of revolutionary individualism can put a dent in the fortress of capitalist hegemony all work together to provide a devastating critique of the sixties even as "the sixties" was in the deepest throes of its self-regard. Watching this, you'd guess it had been made in 1974, not 1967. It rivals Didion's White Album in its prescience. There are lots of moments you might use to mark the end of the dream of the sixties: Kent State, My Lai, the assassinations of King and Kennedy in 1968, etc. Add to the list the moment in Point Blank when the girl at the psychedelic dance club goes around behind the screen and discovers the bad guy Lee Marvin's beaten to a pulp. He's buried under a pile of film! And the girl's screams of horror harmonize with the soul singer's screams of ecstacy.

Winter's Bone, Debra Granik (2010)

2010-11-10T20:37:00.003-06:00

The plot here is melodramatic and overcooked, but the performances, setting, and tone are so refreshing I don't care. When feature films venture into the heart of the heart of the country, they usually leave any capacity for subtlety back home in their lofts or bungalows, but here you actually feel a degree of sympathy for, and an acknowledgment of the complexity of rural poverty. The protagonist's dilemma--her vanished father has put the family home up as part of the bond he's skipped on--isn't fawned over in the usual Hollywood manner (ooh, look at the poor white trash and their terrible problems!); it's instead simply used as the MacGuffin that gives Granik license to meditate upon and marinate in a culture we rarely see represented onscreen except in the form of cartoons. The movie hits the box office money shot force the moment to its crisis panic button with a sledgehammer in its final passages--which is too bad, because it really wants to be more open-ended than that--but not even chainsawing a cadaver can spoil the tonic of carefully skinning a squirrel in the snow not for fun but from hunger.

The Runaways, Floria Sigismondi (2010)

2010-11-08T08:21:00.003-06:00

The Runaways are complicated. There's the uplifting narrative of five strong young women who wanted to rock, took on the condescending sexist music business, had a great time, and hit it big. There's the depressing narrative of extremely young and naive girls being manipulated, drugged, and exploited by the condescending and sexist music business, which profited mightily. Then someone will inevitably pipe up and say, "It's all about the music, man!" The music was indeed awesome, but it is not all about that. Sigismondi, in her first full-length, does a great if sometimes uneven job of embracing both the joy and the ugliness in this story. She also wrote the script, which is itself pretty darn good. This is far from a perfect movie--it indulges in too many cliches, for starters--but when you think about how easily it could have been so much worse, you begin to recognize its achievements.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick (2006)

2010-11-03T21:14:00.004-05:00

Just what I needed: More corporate/puritanical cultural manipulation to be pissed off about. Dick is an annoying person and is overly fond of ginning up gotcha moments, but here, as in Outrage, his basic premise and his, well, outrage, are well founded. The MPAA rating system effectively controls what does and does not appear on the country's movie screens, and it's run as a homophobic misogynist pro-war star chamber.

I feel sad. I think I'm going to go to bed.

Any Other City, Life Without Buildings (2001)

2010-11-03T14:23:00.001-05:00

Hooked fast by this all week. Altered Images meets Patti Smith?

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974)

2010-11-01T20:41:00.003-05:00

Completely satisfying emotionally as a love story, yet at the same time so critically astringent, there's no way you could call it a melodrama. A lonely widowed German charwoman of a certain age and a Moroccan guest worker fall in love. The forces of hatred, fear, and misunderstanding besiege them from both outside and from within. Love wins, but not until Fassbinder's made it clear that, as Wittgenstein put it, "love is not a feeling; love is put to the test." Utterly convincing, fascinating to look at. This was of course inspired by Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, but does that look like Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson there, eating dinner together? No, it does not. Everyone in Fassbinder's movie looks like a human being, which is part of what makes this picture so affecting.

The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds (2009)

2010-10-22T22:22:00.004-05:00

There's not a whole lot to this novel--it's short, and feels even shorter--but what's here is admirably written and often delightful. In 1837, the rural poet John Clare--once celebrated, now forgotten by the literary powers that be--ends up in an asylum run by a spendthrift renaissance man "doctor" as inept as an inventor as he is primitive as a psychiatrist. Another of the doctor's patients is the brother of Alfred Tennyson, who's come to the neighborhood to be near his troubled sib. Nothing particularly surprising happens: The doctor's daughter falls for Tennyson, Clare hangs out with Roma in the forest, the doctor schemes and goes broke, other patients at the asylum are troubled by their various demons, etc. Still, Foulds--also a poet--writes with clarity and grace, and there's more than enough here to please and amuse you on two or three plane rides, depending on their length.

Ghostwritten, David Mitchell (1999)

2010-10-22T22:21:00.004-05:00

I enjoyed this, but it's uneven. Like Robert Altman and (sometimes) Jim Jarmusch, Mitchell likes to get one narrative rolling, then leave it behind and start an apparently unrelated one, only to show you, further on, that the first and second are actually parts of a whole. Then he introduces a third, fourth, and so on, each time providing a little jolt of pleasure when you recognize how each fits into the whole scheme. That's fun, but here a lot of the connections seem arbitrary to me -- maybe I'm missing something? That's entirely possible -- and some of the sections are a little formulaic, which is my nice way of saying boring. The author of the wonderful Cloud Atlas is hereby forgiven this early ho-hummer. (I haven't read the new one everyone was chattering about a couple months ago.)

A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan (1951)

2010-10-01T20:41:00.003-05:00

This movie's become such a touchstone, I think many people, myself included, assume they've seen it even if they haven't. If I have seen this before, it was prior to my taking up residence in the South, and also, in some respects, prior to my ascension/descension to adulthood. It is, as you know even if you haven't seen it, a hugely histrionic and overheated movie, but it's also fully genuine and fascinatingly weird. I hit this on a whim and am a bit flustered now; I'm afraid of what my dreams will bring tonight.

The Rack, Arnold Laven (1956)

2010-09-22T20:40:00.006-05:00

One of the saddest movies you'll ever see. It has the awkwardness and claustrophobia of a funeral from the very first frame. Paul Newman spends two years in a North Korean prison camp. When he gets home, he's charged with collaborating with the enemy. It becomes clear that if he did provide aid and comfort to his captors, he did it to protect his comrades and/or because he'd been driven insane by torture. The tragic logic of the prosecution is eerily reminiscent of so many contemporary stories. Why was Muhammad Ismail Agha, fourteen, sent to Guantanamo? Because he's a terrorist. How do you know he's a terrorist? Because he was sent to Guantanamo.

Mavis, Mavis (2010)

2010-09-20T14:55:00.002-05:00

Track is "Puzzles and Riddles," from the eponymous Mavis on the indispensable !K7.

Defiance, Edward Zwick (2008)

2010-09-19T20:14:00.002-05:00

This is a movie of the story of the Bielski partisans. It's not a great movie, but it's a great story. You can't eat popcorn while you watch Shoah, but you can eat popcorn while you watch this. I feel kind of sick to my stomach saying that. I don't like Holocaust movies, generally speaking, since I don't like texts that purport to represent the un-representable. But this isn't really a Holocaust movie. That said, I didn't really like it, either.

La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard (1967)

2010-09-16T20:26:00.003-05:00

So very tiresome to experience, yet you're so glad it exists. And it looks so beautiful. I'd be happy to have almost any frame of this film hanging framed on my wall.

Spartan, David Mamet (2004)

2010-09-16T20:25:00.009-05:00

Val Kilmer is a modern-day Spartan, a special forces / CIA / Secret Service type (we're not sure which) whose job is to execute the orders of his superiors, not question them or think them over. But when confronted with irrefutable evidence that his superiors are using him for evil rather than good, he faces a choice. An elegant problem play from Mamet, coated in a thin veneer of action-movie candy so as to sell tickets. Does that last make Mamet something of a reverse aesthetic Spartan? True to his art until marketplace exigencies require him to crank up the special effects machines? Not really, because I think he actually enjoys the shootouts for their own sake. With a very nice turn by the always-excellent William H. Macy, whose parents long had no idea, I'm sure, that they were put on earth expressly to provide David Mamet with his ideal actor.

By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño (2000)

2010-09-16T20:25:00.006-05:00

Marvelous. A playful and morbid treatise on how political, religious, and literary institutions corrupt and compromise the individual. The passages where the protagonist is summoned to lead Pinochet and his generals in a seminar on Marxism are sublime.

This is my second Bolaño. I'm starting with the early small ones before getting to the later big ones everyone professes to love. So far I'm delighted; he reminds me by turns of many of my favorites like Sebald and Bernhard, but is utterly distinctive.

City Island, Raymond De Felitta (2009)

2010-09-14T08:19:00.003-05:00

"Quirky" "indie" comedies are usually so tiresome, but thanks to some brisk writing and energetic performances, this was really pretty charming!

A Prophet, Jacques Audiard (2009)

2010-09-08T12:48:00.003-05:00

Oh, I don't think so. First, in terms of style, everything annoying about contemporary French cinema is in full effect. Turgid symbolism, gratuitous passages of stylized shooting, plink plonk dramatique piano music and vapid ironic pop music . . . ugh. Audiard seems determined that the very celluloid should emote constantly. Second, what exactly is the story here? We French used to have these bad guys, the Corsicans. They were nasty and violent but at least they spoke something close to French, and they looked French, and acted French, and went to the same churches as the French. Now look what's displaced them: Arabs. Dirty stinking double-crossing Arabs. The Corsicans took them in and showed them the ropes, and the Arabs turned around and hung their benefactors with same. Méfiez-vous, peuple de France! The Arabs are learning to read, and the next thing you know they'll be driving BMW's! Double ugh. This movie's prophetic all right, and the prophesy is racism and paranoia.

Homicide, David Mamet (1991)

2010-09-03T06:28:00.002-05:00

People who rent this thinking it's going to be a police procedural must sure get annoyed. Mamet's first film, the indispensable House of Games, established his interest in the confidence game. His second, Things Change, was about the tensions between loyalty to one's self, one's friends, and one's tribe. Both of those themes are present here, plus a new emphasis, on race, that has of course persisted as one of Mamet's preoccupations.

All three of Mamet's first movies employ Verfremdungseffekts to such extremes that they risk complete collapse. Here, the gun battles are absurd (Mamet could have saved some money by just putting up a title card saying "Gun Battle"); the dialogue, as is traditional in Mamet, is by turns histrionic and a stuttery mess; and many of the situations seem to be transpiring not in this world but in a world of archetypes and metaphors. I adore it. It occurs to me that it kind of feels like Paul Auster's New York Trilogy.

Ketchup

2010-08-29T11:34:00.008-05:00

Sometimes the rate of my consumption of culture outpaces my capacity to reflect upon it. Here's what's passed through my head of late:

The Wire, David Simon et. al. (2002-2008). I believe this displaces The Sopranos as the best television I've ever seen. If you've seen it you already know what I'm talking about; if you haven't seen it, you should. There were of course some passages that were more successful than others--I for one found the invented serial killer idea too clever by half--but on the whole this is a masterpiece. I was very sorry when I ran out of episodes, but then I realized that this story is of course far from over; all you need to do is read the Sun paper now and then and imagine the episode Simon would have wrought from the day's news. Here, this one took me about forty seconds to start scripting in my head.

Just Before Dark, Jim Harrison (1999). What a pleasure to read Harrison's collected nonfiction about Leelanau by a lake just northeast of Muskegon on a July afternoon.

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Joan Didion (2006). What a pleasure to read Didion's collected nonfiction in the air over California's central valley. Old and new favorites. Too bad this edition's pages are so thin.

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1930-1942). Oh my stars. I'm only on page 500 or so of the some 1200, and I'm going to have to put this away now that school's started, but I feel like it's OK not to read this straight through, and I also, frankly, feel like I've mostly gotten what's on offer here, namely deliciously incisive diagnoses of a grand society striding confidently toward the edge of a cliff. I can't think of any other novel that so decisively nails the 20th century's disastrous obsession with progress. "With a little attention, one can probably always detect in the latest Future signs of the coming Old Times. The new ideas will then be a mere thirty years older but contented and with a little extra fat on their bones, or past their prime, much as one glimpses alongside a girl's shining features the extinguished face of the mother; or they have had no success, and are down to skin and bones, shrunken to a reform proposed by some old fool who is called the Great So-and-so by his fifty admirers." Paging Ross Perot.

The Ghost Writer, Roman Polankski (2010). Whew, Polanski's just oozing decadence these days. This is supposedly a thriller about a CIA plot to, you know, take control of everything, but Roman can barely be bothered to flesh out any of the absurd plot points; he's too busy setting up beautifully lit shots of fog and sad adulterers. Beautiful photography, but not really a movie. The amazing house on the beach at Sylt receives more attention from the director than do any of his stars.

The Green Zone, Paul Greengrass (2010). Essentially a continuation of Greengrass's Bourne movies, in that Matt Damon takes on the entire corrupt U.S. military-industrial complex and wins. This one is purportedly set in the "real world," though, namely Baghdad's green zone. The movie is absolutely absurd, but the takeaway for the action movie crowd at the mall is that their government lied to them about Iraq, and that's a truth I'm delighted to see promulgated as widely and effectively as possible.

Who Killed the Electric Car?, Chris Paine (2006). Muddily structured but useful. I really had no idea this was going on when it was going on.

The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke (2009) does for 20c European history what Bergman's so-called "trilogy of faith" (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence) did for God. Namely, shows it to be incomprehensible and cruel, but absolutely beautiful to look at in luminous black and white. Go back and look at those Bergman films, though, and then look at this again, and see if you don't feel, as I did, how creepily clean Haneke's images are. Maybe I've been spending too much time in Lightroom, but The White Ribbon feels like a masterpiece of post-production as much as anything.

Colorado Territory, Raoul Walsh (1949). Walsh remakes High Sierra as a western, with Joel McCrea in the Bogart role. Nice enough for a Sunday afternoon, particularly if you like Virginia Mayo, which I do, but a minor Walsh by any measure. I like the hideout in the ruined village of Todos Santos.

Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges (1955). Sturges also directed The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and The Eagle Has Landed, among many others. Notice a theme? Manly men in conflict with other manly men. This one fits. A strange and small picture, in which Integrity (played by Spencer Tracy) squares off with Deceit (Robert Ryan) and comes out ahead. Atmospheric and nice to look at for a while, but finally the claustrophobia that Sturges is trying to engender just turns into tedium.

A Single Man, Tom Ford (2009) has its affecting moments, but is mostly, probably predictably, an exercise in style. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if the style brings pleasure. Some here does--lots of beautiful California summer light, lots of fantastic bric a brac to ogle--but someone really should have steadied Ford's hand on the post-production dials; the gimmick where he keeps making people pale when they're sad and rosy when their faith in humanity (and/or libido) is restored is tacky and emberrassing.

Band of Brothers, various authors (2001). The Pacific is way better, and do you know why? Because this is pre-9/11 triumphalism, and that is post 9/11 realism. That's oversimplifying, but really, the difference is amazing. In Band of Brothers, PTSD is represented as tough luck that befalls the weak. In The Pacific, it's clearly shown that those who appear not to have PTSD are the truly weird ones. Like I said, The Pacific's a great example of how our understanding of historical realities is shaped by our present historical circumstances. So is Band of Brothers, unfortunately.

Music in rotation: Tosca, Up Bustle & Out, Jazzanova, Cal Tjader

The Baader Meinhof Complex, Uli Edel (2008)

2010-07-07T15:50:00.004-05:00

Vague revolutionary sentiment in late 60's America begat the bloody praxis of the Weather Underground in the early 70's; similar sentiments in the FRG in the late 60's begat the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader Meinhof gang. (Are there even any old pinkos still breathing and capable of a withering critique of that gross oversimplification right there? I had a geriatric Trotskyist neighbor in Madison fifteen years ago who could have spent an entire pot of bad coffee parsing the ideological differences between John Jacobs and Ulrike Meinhof, but he's got to have gone to his atheist reward by now.) These were the days when students not only protested, but also wrote long tortured Gramsci-inspired treatises and read them to each other to get fired up to rob banks and blow up police stations. The RAF lasted a lot longer than the Weathermen did, harrying German officialdom throughout the 70's and into the 80's. Anyway, here's a movie about them, and it's really good. It's long -- 150 minutes -- which is a good thing, because it needs room to do both the exciting part, where the beautiful young people fuck and drink and howl against injustice, and the enervating part, where everyone goes gray and mad and to jail. I don't know enough of the history to say how strictly educational the movie is, in a documentary sense, but it definitely conveys a strong and believable sense of the zeitgeist.

GasLand, Josh Fox (2010)

2010-07-05T15:14:00.004-05:00

So we've all heard that one solution to the energy and global warming crises is to turn from petroleum to alternative fuels, like for instance natural gas. Natural gas! It's awesome! It's clean and cheap and plentiful and domestic! Well, guess what. Big corporations are drilling down into shale formations all over the country, and blasting toxic fluid down the holes to free up the gas so they can suck it out for you. This is causing widespread pollution of groundwater reservoirs, to such an extent that this guy in this picture here is able to set his tap water on fire.

You can find out all about it here. http://gaslandthemovie.com/

It's a terrible situation but, the formalist must take note, a very fine movie. Fox is personally involved in the problem -- a gas company wants to drill on his own property in upstate New York -- and acts not as a narrator of the film but as a character in it, to great effect. An extremely engaging and effective piece of agitprop.

Crude, Joe Berlinger (2009)

2010-07-05T15:13:00.003-05:00

One of those movies that's interesting for reasons other than the ones the filmmakers wanted it to be interesting for. From 1964 to 1974, Texaco (now owned by Chevron) drilled for oil in Ecuador's rain forest. After 1974, Ecuador's state-owned oil development company continued to drill. Now the area is an environmental catastrophe. Local peoples filed a class action suit against Chevron in 1993, and now, 17 years later, the court case creeps imperceptibly forward. That's the story, and it's an important one. The film's another matter. It reminds me of a homely kid desperate to be popular as it lurches from one overweening attempt at pathos after another. It is relentlessly spotty when it comes to facts, and relentlessly bombastic when it comes to Poignant Tableaux. It looks to me like the filmmakers, in their understandable eagerness to get this story told and to move viewers to sympathy, if not action, have sacrificed reportage for spectacle. It is, as I say, understandable, but it's also unfortunate.

Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh (2008)

2010-07-05T07:03:00.005-05:00

Well of course it's no such thing, this being a Mike Leigh joint. The real subject here is the same as it always is for Leigh: How can we live with other people? Poppy, a character based on my good friend Bailea, is fundamentally an optimist. Her driving instructor Scott is fundamentally a pessimist. Can they get from A to B without crashing? That makes the movie sound simple, which, in terms of its plot, it certainly is. The nuance and pleasure of a Leigh movie lie in the nature of the performances, which Leigh shapes but does not determine, such that the actors seem not to be acting but being. That purity is less in evidence here than in other of Leigh's movies--a few of the set pieces here are too obviously contrived to be taken for naturalism--but there are still many moments which resemble authenticity so closely they could just as well be authentic. Ugh, I've got a terrible mouth full of marbles on this one; I'm trying to say it's charming and you should see it.

The Asphalt Jungle, John Huston (1950)

2010-07-05T07:02:00.003-05:00

Some noirs excite and energize; others depress and enervate. I tend to prefer the former films, but I make an exception for this beauty, one of the most laconic and unforgiving heist films I know of. It's nearly classical, the way you can see the disaster coming from the very beginning, and know there's no way to avoid it. Poor Doll Conovan, poor Angela Phinlay, poor Dix Handley, poor us all.

Away We Go, Sam Mendes (2009)

2010-06-14T20:34:00.004-05:00

The husband and wife are absolutely unremarkable people who also happen to be the coolest, smartest, most reasonable, and funniest people you've ever met. They're like your best friends except minus all of the things that are annoying or weird about your best friends. They get pregnant and go on an odyssey to find the best place to raise their child. Along the way they meet a lot of people who are imperfect: Self-defeating people, pretentious people, insecure people, paranoid people, etc. In the end, they decide the best place to raise their child would be to raise it exactly where the wife was raised. This makes sense, because the wife is perfect, and if they raise the kid where she was raised, then chances are the kid will be perfect too, and then their objective will have been realized and they can die perfectly happy. I hope it works out for them, but if it does, I never want to hear from them again. If, alternatively, something happens to make them massively unhappy, I'd be interested in knowing about that.

Road House, Jean Negulesco (1948)

2010-06-13T12:35:00.004-05:00

If I were a programmer at Film Forum or something, I might put together a group of noirs that take place in the sticks, as opposed to the city. Out of the Past, for sure, and also this one. I know there are others; I just can't think of them right now.

This is a pretty straightforward story of two guys after the same girl. It's distinguished by its unusual setting, as mentioned, and by Lupino's gorgeously ravaged voice.

The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky (2008)

2010-06-12T12:34:00.003-05:00

Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream depressed the hell out of me. It was one of those movies you see and you feel like its misery sticks to you for days afterward. The Wrestler isn't depressing; it's sad, and quite beautifully so.

Aronofsky's interesting. Four films so far, all quite different but with a consistent wistful darkness. It will be fun to watch him grow.

The Assignment, Christian Duguay (1997)

2010-06-09T11:41:00.004-05:00

Sometimes you watch a whole movie knowing that it's like eating a whole bucket of junk food. That's not so bad. But sometimes you watch a whole movie knowing that it's like eating a whole bucket of junk food, and then afterward you realize you don't even like that kind of junk food. That's not so good.

State of Play, Kevin Macdonald (2009)

2010-06-09T11:36:00.004-05:00

Pretty good! But not great. The movie's got this baroque D.C. corruption/sex/extortion/murder/bribery scandal plot, but it's not really about that, it's about the decline and decay of contemporary journalism. It's no All the President's Men, though. Why? Because that movie had the guts to be about a real scandal, rather than a made up one. Russell Crowe digging the dirt to get David Addington put away. That wouldn't have been as sexy, but it would have been more satisfying.

Three Novellas, Joseph Roth

2010-06-07T14:32:00.013-05:00

We have here "Fallmerayer the Stationmaster" (1933), "The Bust of the Emperor" (1935), and "The Legend of the Holy Drinker" (1939). I suppose the last of these is the most famous (partially because Roth died not long after writing it and partially because it seems to offer autobiographical insights), but my favorite is the middle one, which sums up Roth's keen sense of the social, political, and cultural dynamics of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in a single bittersweet parable. All three short pieces are well worth the read.

The Messenger, Oren Moverman (2009)

2010-06-07T14:32:00.008-05:00

This is not a perfect movie. There are a few flabby passages, and a few overly determined scenes. There are some fatal--though not necessarily obvious--inconsistencies in the script. The first-time director sometimes seems unsure of where to put the camera and where to point it. But the imperfections serve to accentuate what a truly superb work this really is. The cast--Samantha Morton in particular, closely followed by Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson--is absolutely fantastic. (Samantha Morton, I have to stress this, is amazing. I can't remember the last time I saw a performance this good.) The script takes serious issues seriously without pandering to us or trying to edify us. The mise-en-scène perfectly captures the comfortable banality of contemporary American spaces--TV rooms, bars, malls, kitchens, cars, etc. And best of all, above all, the movie never hurries to make connections or draw conclusions. Silence is permitted, digression is permitted, reflection is permitted, and so genuine thought is possible.

Given the complexity of the subject matter and Moverman's lack of experience, it's all the more amazing that this turned out so well. It could have so easily been a disaster. I see that Moverman is at work on a Kurt Cobain picture. Another project with long odds, for sure, but seeing this makes me think he might be able to pull it off. God knows Van Sant didn't.

A slightly bizarre afterthought: This reminded me of nothing so much as the sublime You Can Count on Me, another of the very few movies I can think of which seems to depict actual human relationships rather than cartoon versions of same. Screen those two as a double bill and you'll be walking around with your guts turned inside out for a week.

Le Doulos, Jean-Pierre Melville (1962)

2010-06-03T20:27:00.006-05:00

Bernard Tavernier says Melville wanted more than anything to be the French William Wyler, which makes a great deal of sense, but of course that could never happen, because Melville, however much he admired and even imitated the great bread and butter Hollywood directors like Wyler, had a talon d'Achille: he was the Frenchest Frenchman ever. That's what makes these gangster pictures of his so weird. All the Hollywood noir tropes are in place--dive bars, brassy molls, trench coats, double crosses, stool pigeons, big cars, cigarettes--but the-- what, soul? core? mien? there's probably a French word for it--of the characters is completely different than that of the characters in an American noir. They all come across as incredibly vulnerable, sensitive artistes playing the roles of tough guys. I mean really, Belmondo? Robert Mitchum could eat him in one bite. (Remember too that this is made in 1962, by which time noir was already being parodied and deconstructed in Hollywood.) Anyway, I'm not complaining that this is a failed noir, since I don't think it was intended to be a noir at all. It's a kind of pseudo-nouvelle vague take on noir, maybe. A very curious picture.

Abrazos Rotos, Pedro Almodóvar (2009)

2010-06-03T09:32:00.004-05:00

Even Almodóvar's lesser movies, of which this is one, are always worth watching. The moves here will be familiar to fans--passion, dissolution, artistic inspiration and ennui, telenovelistic revelations and reversals, improbably beautiful people in fantastic apartments--but there's a desultory quality to the movie, a sullenness; it feels like Almodóvar is setting out his usual predictably affecting wares, but he's not terribly excited about it, and doesn't care if you are, either. I had a similar response to Volver, in 2006. It's beginning to look like the great era of of Almodóvar's comedies was the late 80's, the great era of his melodramas was the early 00's, and now he's sort of coasting down the other side with these smaller, more wistful pictures. I hope I'm wrong and that more greatness is coming.

Marathon Man, John Schlesinger (1976)

2010-06-01T22:23:00.006-05:00

God, the 70's were so WEIRD! This is an incredibly strange movie. Dustin Hoffman's father was a victim of history (blacklisted during the McCarthy purges). One of his sons (Roy Scheider) has grown up to be a -- God, I don't even know what he's supposed to be, I think a CIA agent slash bagman for fugitive Nazis living in South America slash mobster. His other son (Hoffman) is a graduate student in history, writing a dissertation about "the role of tyranny in American political history." Yeah, um, better buy some extra typewriter ribbons, pal.

The plot here is hard to figure exactly, but I do know that it is extremely paranoid. Everyone--students, professors, businessmen, cops, government officials, bankers, and especially dapper elderly Germans--is lying, cheating, stealing, and, sometimes, performing dentistry without anasthetic. Furthermore, Schlesinger's apocalyptic Manhattan would make Travis Bickle's look good to Carrie Bradshaw.

It's all very washed out and depressing, yet I will say this: Movies were perhaps a bit more willing, at that moment in history, to go ahead and be washed out and depressing. Nothing's any less effed-up now than it was then, yet it's almost impossible to imagine something this effed up making it into production today. We still have plenty of critique and paranoia at the multiplex, but it's a lot slicker, more digestible, and easier to look at than it used to be, don't you think?

Time Stands Still, Donald Margulies (2009)

2010-05-27T10:18:00.004-05:00

Ha! I've been fussing at the old rosary of whether activist drama has any usefulness whatsoever, and then I stumble across this play in which the author shrewdly avoids the need to answer that question by instead simply stating it. It's an exquisitely and numbingly honest setup: Two idealists are racked with doubt about their ability to change the world. Making themselves and each other miserable. One of them decides to just give up. The other one decides to just keep trying. They both remain racked with doubt and miserable. The end!

This is a great example to pull out when you hear someone complaining that such and such a movie, novel, play, etc. is "formulaic." Life is formulaic!

Red Cliff, John Woo (2008-2009)

2010-05-24T15:09:00.002-05:00

What do you do on days when the dictates of the medical industrial complex and/or your own rebellious body require you to spend the entire day on the sofa? I watch movies, and the best kind of movies to watch on these days must meet two criteria: They need to be very engaging and accessible; and they need to be really, really long. I used to deploy Tora! Tora! Tora! for this purpose on a fairly regular basis, but I've seen it too many times, so I went with this. If you get the Asian release, it comes in two parts, it's more than four hours long, and it totally does the trick.

Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1991, 1993, 1995)

2010-05-24T15:06:00.004-05:00

A very stolid, very British trilogy set during WWI, concerned less with the fighting itself than with its cultural, social, and psychological ramifications. I enjoyed reading this, but looking back it seems to me more like a particularly informative and well-designed museum exhibit than a work of art. I learned a lot and enjoyed myself, but I wasn't changed. I feel misanthropic saying that, because it's really very well done, but there it is.

One more grouchy but true comment. The jacket copy goes on about how these are antiwar novels. This is not true. The books feature many antiwar characters, both historical and fictitious, but the spirit of the enterprise is clearly one which values most stiff upper lips, heroism, willingness to kill, allegiance to comrades and country, and all that.

Actually, when I really get thinking about it, these books are kind of rotten. Barker presents us with a large group of vivid and sympathetic characters, all of whom are opposed to the war in one way or another, and all of whom are marked by self-doubt, moral failings, and various other weaknesses. By the end, though, all the books' heroes have sucked it up and gotten on with being soldiers, and it's pretty clear we're supposed to be proud of them.

I might feel differently again tomorrow, but just now I'm kind of thinking these are really kind of pernicious!

Ruined, Lynn Nottage (2009)

2010-05-23T08:55:00.003-05:00

The use of rape as an instrument of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most horrific ongoing crises in the world today. Lynn Nottage and Kate Whoriskey traveled to the DRC and heard the stories of many rape victims first-hand. Nottage used this material to write this play, which Whoriskey directed.

I can think of few other examples of works of art which so vividly demonstrate the problem of the representation of human depravity. That problem being that on the one hand, one wishes to see terrible crimes brought to light, in hopes that once exposed they will be ended and punished, but on the other hand one despairs to see the indescribably horrible described, since any such description inevitably minimizes the scope of the crime.

Nottage's play succeeds for me in theory, because it draws attention to a crisis which is not receiving enough attention. But it fails in practice, because it turns that crisis into a narrative, with types for characters and a classic Freytag pyramid for a plot, and so provides a coherence, structure, catharsis, and sense of resolution which the reality in the Congo does not possess.

I've been asking this question of myself for twenty years, and I know I sound like a broken record, a whiny American bourgeois, a useless intellectual who would have been shipped out on the first train to the pig farms during the Cultural Revolution, but the question persists regardless, namely, how does the politically-engaged artist ensure that the audience won't feel they've already done something to help just by experiencing the art?

Enron, Lucy Prebble (2009)

2010-05-23T08:53:00.003-05:00

Can you tell I'm trying to find a play or two to use for my "Uses of History" course this fall?

It seems clear that Prebble's play loses more than most by just being read on the page rather than seen on the stage, since apparently the production itself is a real extravaganza of dance, music, zippy high-tech effects, and so on. Spectacle is no doubt an appropriate mode for this story, which is all about the use of smoke and mirrors to occlude reality. The play itself is loose and lively, with lots of fast-paced short scenes stitched together, rather than long lugubrious capital-D dramatic scenes. I'd have to see it to say much more, but this seems to me a promising mode for coping with the problems of depicting historical realities on stage.

In my comments on David Hare's The Vertical Hour, I opened up a little vein regarding Anglo/American relations as played out, so to speak, through the vector of theater. Add this to that, filed under Interesting and Unexplained: Prebble's play was a smash hit in London but absolutely bombed when it moved to Broadway. Thoughts?

Taken, Pierre Morel (2008)

2010-05-22T17:49:00.006-05:00

I knew it! I knew it! I watched fifteen minutes of this and knew Luc Besson had to be behind it. One brooding, incredibly kick-ass super-spy assassin dude. One ingenuous giggling Lolita. Squads upon squads of horrible hairy criminals lining up to be stabbed, garroted, etc. Emasculated French bureaucrats. It's got to be Luc Besson! And sure enough, there he is, with top writing credit. I've written before about how relentlessly creepy this dude is. This one had me positively giggling at how much of his twisted slip is showing. Ex-CIA strongman's impossibly girlish (the girl wears clothes in toddler-bright patterns, and literally skips instead of walking) 17 year old daughter goes to Paris, where she is immediately abducted by swarthy Albanian human traffickers. Of course--happens all the time, right? The very next day, the girl's friend and traveling companion has already been hooked on heroin and chained to a whorehouse mattress, but because she is a virgin--Besson has taken care to let us know that the friend has already been deflowered, while daddy's girl remains pure as snow--our girl is sold at an auction (which appears to take place in the same mansion where the masked ball is held in Eyes Wide Shut) to a--c'mon, you can guess this--hook-nosed Arab sheik who enjoys raping virgins on his yacht. Do you think daddy will arrive in time to save his milky-skinned baby girl from the sheik's warty scimitar?

It strikes me this is kind of a Daisy Miller story.

It would be fun, and not terribly time-consuming, to make a list of the identities available to females in Besson's universe. There are pure innocent virgin children like this one; fallen wild whore children like la Femme Nikita; stupid middle aged cow mothers who, once they have borne their beautiful daughters, are good for nothing but vapidly following after the most powerful man they can find; and knowing world-weary sages of a certain age. I think that's about it. Of course, that's a few more roles than are available to men; about them Besson is very strict: you are either a killer or killed.

Charade, Stanley Donen (1963)

2010-05-22T17:31:00.003-05:00

Nice chemistry, some charming scenes, fun travelogue of Paris, but it's no Roman Holiday. It's Grant's third to last movie, and he seems a little tired.

This Is Happening, LCD Soundsystem (2010)

2010-05-19T12:29:00.002-05:00

The sound here keeps sending me back to the primitive electronica and new wave of my yoot, and indeed I think what's happening with LCDSS here is somewhat similar to what happened with Eno in the 70's and the Talking Heads in the 80's: There seems to be some ambivalence over whether to create soundscapes or songs. Sound of Silver felt more soundscapey to me; this new one feels a bit more like songs. So if you prefer Another Green Day to On Land and More Songs about Buildings and Food to Remain in Light, then you'll prefer This Is Happening to Sound of Silver. Me, I'm in the both/and camp on all counts, though I do not like this record nearly as much as I liked Sound of Silver.

Unfortunate: Photos of the band members and the recording studio on the album sleeve. Unfortunate: Videos featuring the charming/nerdy band members. These are bad signs. A big part of what's worked for me with the LCDSS has been the sense of the music's impersonality, the sense of it issuing from a construct, from an always-already-depopulated clean room somewhere in Loisaida. Now that the music is being made by personalities, I imagine the party will very soon begin for them--SNL, Letterman, whatever--but end for me.

Treme, Eric Overmyer and David Simon (2010)

2010-05-18T12:18:00.004-05:00

This started slowly and creakily. Ours is a household that loves New Orleans, and we were wary. Despite all the protestations precisely to the contrary we heard the filmmakers utter in interviews, it seemed to us the show was bogged down in a lot of explaining, pandering, cliches, and oversimplification. Its New Orleans is a place where everyone eats rice and beans on Mondays, everyone knows who Kid Ory was, everyone dances second line every other day. I've been watching The Wire lately, and they don't make everyone in Baltimore eat nothing but crabcakes; I think N.O. gets singled out for this kind of overtypification simply because it seems, to people from other parts of the country, like something of a foreign country. I almost want to call the show's vision of N.O. a kind of orientalism. I hope viewers realize there are square people who live there, too. There's only one square person on the show--a dentist--and he's been banished to Baton Rouge.

All that said, things did pick up and we wound up sticking with it, even developing an iota of affection for the initally hugely irritating and grotesquely caricatured Steve Zahn (as Davis). I don't know if we're going to make it much further, though. Looking over the remaining chararacters, I find that the only one I really want to know much more about is the one played by Wendell Pierce (Antoine Batiste). I am fervently hoping that the troubled couple of young musicians (Annie (Lucia Micarelli) and Sonny (Michiel Huisman)) fall off a ferry as quickly as possible.

The Pacific, Jeremy Podeswa (2010)

2010-05-17T20:03:00.002-05:00

You could write a dissertation--someone probably has--on how successive generations of WWII narratives--movies in particular--have shaped the way we remember these events. This vivid and dynamic miniseries succeeds as a story because it has, obviously, the unity of opposites in spades, and also some quite idiosyncratic and well-developed characters to care about. But it also intends to revise or enlarge some of our assumptions about the war in the Pacific, and it succeeds at that too. First, it introduces, among the more familiar locations like Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, some less familiar but nonetheless devastating and crucial battles, like those at Peleliu and Cape Gloucester on New Britain. Second, the series contrasts--gently, gently, ever so gently--the nonstop hellishness of fighting in the Pacific, which could sort of be like D-Day every day, with the different type (i.e., less hellish) of fighting in Europe. Third, and most notable, the series deeply engages with the fact of the psychological trauma soldiers experienced during and after the war. "Shell shock" here isn't ignored, mocked, covered up, or glossed over: It's pretty much front and center the whole way through, which seems as much to reflect our growing contemporary awareness of the ubiquity of war's invisible wounds as it does the historical reality of the phenomenon.

The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker (2009)

2010-05-17T14:27:00.006-05:00

A nice plum trifle from the trifle-master, about a semi-"successful" poet trying to meet a deadline and win his ex-girlfriend back. The long disquisitions on scansion are pretty dumb, and the soi-disant barbs about the "poetry world" are way less pointed than they could be, but as always Baker offers plenty to love on the local level of the one-liner insight, especially when he's talking about the contortions writers go through in order not to write. Both the ink-stained wretches in this household read this in a weekend, frequently snorting with glee.

Oh, I do need to add that I found it weird but kind of wonderful how Baker insists on taking so many of his examples of poetry from poets who are not much thought of these days, like Teasdale and Swinburne, for instance. I'm not likely to develop a sudden desire to go back to all the dusty 19th century poets Baker mentions, but the fact that he did, and found happiness in doing so, is a good reminder that the culture's conception of greatness changes. At one point the narrator suggests that Olson's time in the sun isn't likely to last much longer, for example, and that seems to me quite possibly true. Twenty years ago, Jorie Graham was YHWH; I wonder if my 20-something students give her a second thought today. I can see how poets might find this state of things, or rather the lack of any state of things, anxiety-producing; I personally find it hugely liberating, since it means I'm permitted to like what I like when I like it without having to promise I'll always like it or feel bad because I failed to like it in the past.

Oh, and while I'm nattering. Just read some excerpts from David Shields' new Reality Hunger. I find his thesis--fiction, with its rickety claptrap contrivance of plot, has become unbearably dull, and so should be supplanted by writing which does away with artifice and speaks directly to the reader--incredibly stupid, for a whole bunch of reasons I won't go into now. However! Shields would find this novel, as well as several others, perfect fodder for his argument, since the characterization and plot here feel very much like makeup on the face of what is essentially an essay.

Venus, Suzan-Lori Parks (1996)

2010-05-17T14:05:00.005-05:00

I only read this, I didn't see it. That's an image from a Public Theater/Yale Rep production directed by Richard Foreman.

I really loved Parks' Topdog/Underdog, but this one was a big disappointment for me. It was disappointing in an interesting way, though, namely, it's a vivid instance of the imitative fallacy: Parks makes a spectacle of Saartjie Baartman as she attempts to condemn those who made a spectacle of Saartjie Baartman. I rush to make clear that I well understand that Parks has created her spectacle out of sympathy, while Baartman's captors acted out of ignorance and cruelty. Still, this is a play which makes little to no effort to empathize with Baartman's plight; instead, she is set down on the stage, presented for our consideration, and talked about. Which is to say, she's made a spectacle of.

Elizabeth Alexander wrote a book of poems about Baartman, and Barbara Chase-Riboud wrote a novel about her, and those works, like Parks' play, also seemed to me sadly flat. I commend all three authors for trying, since this is a story which exemplifies in microcosm so many forms of repugnant injustice and prejudice--racism, sexism, and colonialism, for starters--and so, I think, is an important one to tell. But it seems that when a particular situation is so overwhelmingly blatantly obviously horrid, artworks which try to represent it often just sort of point at it and say, "Look. Look how horrid." Which of course we already know.

But does that mean Baartman--or Auschwitz, or My Lai, or Emmett Till--shouldn't be represented by artists? Certainly not! I'm just saying that artists who pick up subjects like these have set themselves up for some serious challenges, to say the least.

The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh (2009)

2010-05-17T14:03:00.003-05:00

I thought this was a hoot. Matt Damon is a kind of Talented Mr. Midwestern Schmuck who keeps a running commentary concerning his own putative awesomeness going under his own breath as he goes through his days cheating and thieving and blowing the whistle on cheaters and thieves. As usual with Soderbergh, it's as much the look and texture of the film that you enjoy as it is the story; the perfectly-rendered banal sweetness of the Midwestern offices and dining rooms and clothes and accents shot me like a rocket back to my childhood.

The Vertical Hour, David Hare (2006)

2010-05-13T13:52:00.003-05:00

Didn't see it, just read it, but I think it's as much meant to be read, as the characters spend a lot of time reading off position-paper type speeches along the lines of

People who blame materialism blame it because they feel it doesn't nourish them. And you could say it's true: materialism, by definition, isn't heroic. In the West we no longer prize heroism. People no longer want to do dangerous, outstanding things. All they want is to live as long and as comfortably as possible. And so this new Western ethic of survival, simply surviving as a human being--merely surviving--as though the world were everything, and the manner in which you live in it secondary--seems to other people, other cultures . . . well, ignoble.

This and much like it is delivered not in a classroom or on a political talk show, but at dinner. I sometimes host dinner parties, and I think many of my guests might well hold opinions not dissimilar from those expressed above, but I can't recall any of them fulminating quite so explicitly over wine and salad, as if they were explaining the world to a sixth-grader.

That said, I found myself quite enjoying the way Hare manages to leaven his extended flat political speeches with a fairly bubbly Albee-ish family drama, wherein a creepy but brilliant father playfully bats at his faithful but dull son's lover, a Yale professor who's so desperate to do the right thing at every moment that she almost never succeeds.

I'm sure much hay was made of the fact that the men are British and the woman American -- Hare offers commentary throughout on the different ways in which the two nations do power, war, gender, politics, education, medicine, et. al. -- but that sort of thing both bores me and makes me feel sorry for the British, because when they they appear so bent on defining themselves on the basis of their differences from us, as they so often do, it just makes them look pathetic. (A hint for the Commonwealth: The opposite of affection is indifference, not disdain. We know you love us "underneath.")

The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West (1918)

2010-05-13T13:35:00.002-05:00

This slender novel was West's first work of fiction; her first book, published two years earlier, was a study of Henry James, and the Master's influence is clear here in West's intricate syntax and piercing psychological analyses, though there are moments too where you feel her almost physically shake him from her shoulders; after a long and careful sentence you get: "Well, she gave Chris duck eggs for tea."

I came to this out of an interest in shell shock, but Chris Baldry's war-induced amnesia turns out to be only the macguffin West deploys in order to set in motion the drama with which she's centrally concerned, one about competing versions of gender and class. Absolutely no regrets, though, since this is an exquisite, deeply intelligent, near-perfect little book.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson (2009)

2010-05-13T13:23:00.004-05:00

I suppose if one definition of "auteur" is a filmmaker who makes the same movie over and over (Kurosawa: The powerful vs. the powerless; Welles: The corrupt vs. the naive; Scorsese: The outsider vs. the insider; etc.), then Wes Anderson fits the bill, as he here offers up yet another charming rogue father, another long-suffering and lied-to mother, another squad of over-achieving anxious children, and yet more strangely ineffable mid-century-meets-thrift-store-meets-80's-era-preppy art direction. This time, of course, everyone's a puppet, but it doesn't make much difference. Enjoyable but not great, and certainly not worth the billion hours it must have taken to shoot.

The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer (2005)

2010-05-10T10:33:00.007-05:00

Interviewing candidates for a position in creative nonfiction this past winter, I noticed that many of them were mentioning the name Geoff Dyer in conversation, and felt chagrined that I'd never heard of the fellow. I did a bit of research and found that it's no wonder CNF types are into him, since his shtick is to write not so much on subjects, but to write about himself writing about subjects, a stance rapturously endorsed by the AWP.

It so happens that one of Dyer's books -- this one -- uses a subject matter quite dear to me, namely photography. So this seemed like a great place to begin to get to know him.

I should have known better. Early on, Dyer makes very clear that he doesn't know anything about photography. Um, OK. Then he lets us know that his account of the history of photography will be wholly idiosyncratic and aleatory. Um, OK. Then he proceeds to remind us, every five pages or so, that he can't be held accountable for anything he says because of how idiosyncratic and aleatory he's being. Um, not OK. After fifty pages or so of truly stupid interpretations salted with assertions of how exciting I'm supposed to be finding same, I put it down.

What really drove me over the edge was Dyer's perseverating insistence on the originality of his conceit that photographers are continually taking and retaking versions of the same photograph, inhabiting each other's styles, reincarnating each other's images over time. (Hence his book's title.) It's a fine idea, as it goes, not terribly original (cf. Eliot, cf. Bloom, hell cf. Heraclitus) but useful enough and valid as a through line. What's absolutely maddening is Dyer's incessant meta-commentary on the boldness of his decision to use this as a framework. He's like a proud toddler who thinks he's the first to have ever successfully shat in the proper location.

Still, a few weeks later, I went back. I think the awesome Eggleston on the cover kept drawing me in. Also, I paid eleven dollars for this thing.

There are many wonderful moments in this book, most of which exist despite rather than on account of the author's intentions. It seems clear Dyer thought this was to be a book where he'd ignorantly stumble through the history of photography, making associations and finding insights which would be valuable precisely because he isn't an expert on the subject. This does in fact happen here and there, it really does, but not nearly as often as Dyer thinks it does, and not nearly as often as he announces to us that it has.

Fortunately, though, Dyer's a very good researcher, and he has a really good ear for telling quotations and anecdotes from other sources. So the book I wound up reading isn't the one Dyer wrote but the one he found, and that book, unlike the other, I can recommend without hesitation. Ignore Dyer's fulminations and boasting and instead focus on the comments, anecdotes, and images from Strand, Stieglitz, Evans, Kertész, O'Keefe, Weston, Arbus, Winogrand, Lange, Frank, Eggleston, Shore, Meyerowitz, et. al., and you'll find plenty to enjoy.

It's kind of like eating lobster: a lot of work and a lot of trash but worth it for the sweet bits.

Rendezvous, William K. Howard (1935)

2010-04-29T22:13:00.003-05:00

Delightful vehicle for the always-enjoyable William Powell and a feisty newcomer by the name of Rosalind Russell. Pretty lively for a spy picture of this vintage, featuring lots of good humor as well as some cleverly thought-through espionage bits. Russell isn't great yet, but it's fun to watch her knowing that in a scant five years she'll be Hildy Johnson, one of the greatest comic roles ever played.

Diana & Nikon, Janet Malcolm (1997)

2010-04-29T22:05:00.003-05:00

A collection of previously published exquisitely perceptive essays on photography and photographers from one of my favorite writers. Really helped me contextualize the pas de deux of photography and painting from the 19th century through the 1980's, and also brought a number of the great photographers to life for me. Criticism of the highest order in that it both fully engages its subjects and ramifies beyond them, all in prose to die for. Thanks!

Brothers, Jim Sheridan (2009)

2010-04-29T08:41:00.002-05:00

Bad news: After fifteen minutes, my clip-on cliche monitor badge was already white-hot, so I had to turn this off and send it back to Netflix unwatched.

Good news: If I can just get up the gumption to write the heimkehrer I'm planning, it can't possibly be this bad.

Let's take a moment here to lament the tanking of Jim Sheridan, whose first picture, My Left Foot, was so terrific, but whose subsequent outings have gotten progressively worse.

Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood (2008)

2010-04-29T08:16:00.007-05:00

A mismatched-buddy picture ala Beverly Hills Cop, a crusty-mentor picture ala Finding Forrester, an urban revenge fantasy ala Taxi Driver, a man-damaged-by-war-learns-to-be-human-again picture like so many of the movies I've been watching lately, a can't-we-all-just-get-along overcoming-racism-through-food picture I can't think of another example of right now . . . In short, a lot of things, but no one thing in particular. Oh, I forgot the nagging priest making a case for Catholicism. An awkward and manic-depressive movie, now ebullient and now morose. Oh, I forgot how terrible the writing is. (Eastwood to mirror: "I have more in common with these gooks than with my own family." As if the movie hadn't already pounded us over the head with that information a hundred times in a hundred ways already.) Politically speaking, I can't make heads or tails of it. For starters, Eastwood's character is supposed to be this huge racist, but in one strange scene he makes pretty clear that all his slurs are just "how men talk to each other," that the racism is just an act. OK, he might not be racist, but the movie sure is, even -- especially -- at the moments when it thinks its being most enlightened, as in the portrayal of the Hmong protagonists as helpless and naive. The only Hispanics and African Americans on offer in the picture are gangbangers. It's like Eastwood threw all these ingredients into the pot and hoped they'd make a meal, but really it's just an inedible mess.

Army of Shadows, Jean-Pierre Melville (1969)

2010-04-27T11:28:00.003-05:00

Melville's chilly formalism has turned me off in the past, but it works quite brilliantly in this account of a French resistance cell's wartime activities. There are scenes of great drama, action, daring, cunning, etc., but they're all conveyed with stony austerity, so the effect isn't one of excitement but of grim duty and honor. I should have thought of this before, but Melville's style recalls not so much that of the American noir directors with whom he's said to have been obsessed, but rather the Japanese pictorialists like Ozu or Mizoguchi, who like Melville are always conscious of the relationships between every figure in the frame.

A particularly tragic, and I imagine sadly accurate aspect of the story is how focused the resistance fighters must need be on the potential for one of their own to betray them. An early scene where a miserable, terrified turncoat must be executed speaks elegantly to the deadly and ironic pathos of the resistance fighter who finds himself having to harm one of his own in order to strike at his enemy.

On Dangerous Ground, Nicholas Ray (1952)

2010-04-11T07:50:00.004-05:00

A formulaic, even hackneyed noir in terms of its plot and script, but the mise-en-scène, even in this muddy crap copy on TCM, is exquisite. In the gritty city, space is terrifyingly claustrophobic and dark; in the wintry countryside, space is terrifyingly desolate and blinding. As complex and pure as a glass of water or a Freudian case study. Ida Lupino!

The Men Who Stare at Goats, Grant Heslov (2009)

2010-04-05T09:19:00.004-05:00

Nice premise goes totally off the rails into complete incomprehensibility.

5000

2010-04-01T17:02:00.003-05:00

I'm reading Don Quixote because Kundera can't stop talking about it in The Curtain, a book I love.

I'm reading Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment. This book is extremely irritating for a lot of quite interesting reasons involving the notion of creative nonfiction as a genre, the question of expertise, ways of reading/seeing, and authority. But I'm not going to get into that here, for reasons soon to be explained.

I'm reading Color Correction for Digital Photographers Only for 20 minutes at a stretch, because it puts me to sleep.

I watched Chris Rock's Good Hair, and that was totally fascinating.

I watched Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story and kept bursting into tears, which made me angry, because I should be doing something about injustice instead of crying about it while I eat pesto in front of the TV.

I'm not doing much about injustice, though I have been harrying my elected state representatives to pass HB-1 to get rid of Alabama's punitive sales tax on groceries.

I've been taking a lot of pictures. You can see some here and here.

I've started a garden. It looks like this.

I've written some new poems. You can't see those anywhere yet.

I'm reading and rereading Borchert obsessively.

What I haven't been doing is writing on this blog, because it's started to feel like a chore. So I'm going to set it aside for a while. I don't think this is going to be much of a blow to my readers, of which there are, I think, probably only three or four anyway.

Nevertheless, I would like to say to those readers that I love them.

5000,

JB

Up in the Air, Jason Reitman (2009)

2010-03-24T16:42:00.005-05:00

I adored Reitman's Juno and was ready to feel the same about this, but no dice. Suffice to say that the grownups in this film are far less complex and as a result far more predictable than the kids in Juno, so there's just not as much here to hold your attention. I didn't hate it at all, and I enjoyed looking at it, but finally its too formulaic to think about for very long.

You know what would have helped? Casting someone damaged for the lead, instead of George "Rico Suave" Clooney. The whole thing has to turn on this character gaining consciousness that his life is empty, but it's clear from frame one that his life is awesome, because he's George Clooney.

A young Jack Lemmon. That would have helped.

Two Originals of Jack Rose, Jack Rose (2004)

2010-03-24T16:26:00.008-05:00

I don't like cracker music. This isn't. It reminds me a little bit of the solo Jim O'Rourke on his great Drag City releases, but stripped down to pure yearning guitar. I also recently received Luck in the Valley (released by the world's greatest label) which is also terrific. Sadly, Jack Rose died last year, way too young.

Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino (2009)

2010-03-23T16:30:00.006-05:00

I've never gotten Tarantino, and I don't get this. I note all the tropes from earlier WWII movies acknowledged and remixed. I note some references to specific movies (which of course also causes me to realize that there must be additional references I'm missing). I note the retro fonts of the credits. I note the metaphors, especially the enormous "college sophomores everywhere: please write a paper about me" one where movie bullets turn into real bullets and then back into movie bullets. I note the skillful orchestration of the elaborate set pieces. I note the repeating rhythms of long slow burns concluded with -- big surprise -- explosive violence. I note the hokey-jokey "hey, you're watching a movie!" devices. I note the usual Tarantino grotesqueries, catchphrases, and histrionics. I note the urgent, almost childish need on the director's part to seem to be a maker of serious films; his deep fear that he is not; and his resulting compensatory self-abasing gestures. I note and I note and I note, but I don't enjoy, I don't excite, I don't see.

This often happens to me with poems: I note their characteristics, but can't find a way to care about them. I always figured that was a busman's holiday problem, but obviously that's not the case here. Ach, what do I know. The kids seem to like it, and it seems harmless enough.