For some reason, I expect this means Warren Ellis will not write much more for Marvel. Which would be a shame, because Norman Osborne did some fantastic naked ranting.
Comment of the Day
I don't do this often, but man does BenYitzhak deserve props for this comment on my post about the Marvel-Disney merger:
Dorkier Than Wired
I essentially agree with everything Scott Brown has to say in this cri de coeur over at Wired urging geeks to stay home on Friday night and saves the shows we love (or at least think ought to be allowed to continue to exist) from oblivion. But, and perhaps this reveals the depths of my geekdom, is that really such a sacrifice to make? My friend Alex and I regularly got together and watched Dollhouse this spring, often pairing it with something else, and I know we had a great time. I actually have Thursday nights blocked out for Bones and 30 Rock, too. Sure, it's rad to go out some place cool on Friday night, drink something interesting, whatever. But if a critical mass of your friends are geeks, or recovering geeks, like mine are (and I really do mean that with the utmost respect and sense of membership in a tribe, it's not like staying in to save Dollhouse, or Eureka, or whatever, is such a massive sacrifice. Show off some rad cooking skills. Mix up martinis like Betty Draper on a bad day. Rearrange the furniture. And watch Eliza Dushku kick some ass. A lot of Fridays, such an arrangement is probably at least as fulfilling as a night at the multiplex. And for the cost of even two, or three, or four tickets, you can buy a lot of booze and popcorn.
Picking Up Speed
Emily Rutherford writes a lovely reminiscence of watching high school movies during an unhappy high school experience. In particular, this passage stood out at me:
I embraced “Nerd” for all it was worth; I embodied it and owned it. Unlike in the movies, I decided, Nerds do have productive and fulfilling lives, and it’s okay to be better at school than social relationships. It’s not a curse, at any rate, the way it is on celluloid. So now I deal with high school media a little differently: when I rented Clueless from iTunes to watch on a plane last week, or made my way through Skins on Hulu last school year, I spent every second of the movie or the episode with fingers crossed, hoping that the characters would suddenly decide not to adhere to their stereotypes: that the romantic subplot would not work out happily ever after, that the gay character or the black character would provide more than just comic relief, that the naturally pretty characters would not be made over into stylized, painted caricatures, ’80s hairdos and all.
Of course, it never does work out that way, and that’s the beauty of high school movies and part of why, I think, they’re so engrossing to those of us who have, quite definitely, moved on—physically, anyway. As I myself try to psychologically process the weird world that high school was, and to understand why things worked out the way I did, I do find myself looking to the movies and their truisms. If I had changed the way I look, I could have had a more lasting romantic relationship. If I hadn’t tried hard in school, I would have had more fun. If I had been more prone to making bad jokes, or indeed if I had conformed better to gender roles, I would have had more friends.
I obviously don’t really wish those things, and I obviously know the difference between cinema fiction and reality—where it is possible for a Nerd to lead a fulfilling life.
Possibly more than any other genre, high school movies are protean. I remember watching The Breakfast Club in health class in 9th or 10th grade (our high school was strangely focused on using cinema to teach healthy behavior--we'd go on to watch Philadelphia, which was a really interesting movie to experience for the first time as part of a multi-clique group) and being struck and confused and charmed by it all at once. I felt kind of stunned recently when a friend observed that of course Claire and Bender didn't find a way to stay together; my wanting them to had always propelled that relationship beyond the realm of the possible in my memory, as if I'd found a way to willfully misinterpret The Graduate all these years later.
I think it's a sign of my adulthood (or impending adulthood, or whatever) that I can watch high school movies without any bitterness or any expectation that they ought to transcend the simple pleasures that they present. I got sunstroke in New York City last summer and holed up on my friend Julia's couch, sucking hard candies to take the sour taste of dehydration out of my mouth, and watched Clueless with her until I felt better. It was the ultimate comfort movie, a world where things seemed relatively simple, and even the great mysteries and challenges of life could be overcome with an open heart and good works. Once you get out into the real world and high school seems positively benign, it's a pleasure to look back on high school movies. I don't really subscribe to the Heathers or Mean Girls philosophy that high school is as vicious or as complicated as it gets. There's spending too much on a dress, and there's being unable to pay your mortgage. In the words of the immortal Cher, there's way harsh, and there's genuine disaster. But high school is, undeniably, a difficult proving ground on the way to real life. And movies about it are a testament to the fact that we're all survivors.
Disney Buys Marvel
For $4 billion. Please, Santa, may I have a Wolverine-Mulan crossover? Animated by Pixar?
I Realize This Is Old News
But man, have you guys heard The Knux "Bang! Bang!"? I cannot stop listening to it. This may be a total reach, but the cadence in the lines "Like taking food from an animal's mouth" and "Put that pop on you like Redenbacher" sound incredibly familiar to me. Anyone who can jog my memory as to who The Knux sound like in those moments will have my eternal gratitude, and perhaps a gift of another variety if I can think up something suitable. In any case, a duo hat makes a music video with a milk bottle that becomes a catalyst in a gang fight, a potentially transgendered Marilyn Monroeish impersonator, AND these kind of rhymes clearly should keep making music.
Background Noise
Now, it just may be the result of a mediocre rip. But while I do think Drake, Kanye West, Lil' Wayne and Eminem are all operating at full lyrical strength on "Forever," a year-old mix tape that's been leaking everywhere, the same thing bothers me about this track that bothered me about Relapse: the production sounds really muddy and staticky to me.
I can understand the desire for some complexity in instrumentation and production, and I have no problem with that as an ambition. But I think if you're going to operate in a form where lyrical prowess is absolutely paramount, you'd want to make sure your music isn't getting in the way of those lyrics. Especially when you've got a line like: "You would think I ran the world, like Michelle's husband," which may be the first lyric I've heard that prioritizes Mrs. Obama over the President. I could dig that trend, as long as it doesn't get Hillary-is-the-power-behind-the-throne creepy and vindictive.
Below The Surface
Bunmi, who actually is Nigerian, unlike the rest of us tossing around ideas around District 9 in these parts has a fascinating, comprehensive look at the question of how Nigerians are portrayed in the movie. I'd quote from it, but I can't pick between the sections on Pentacostalism, Albino killings, or Italian prostitution rings, and besides, if I chose a section, you might not go over and read the thing in full.
This kind of thing illustrates what I love about blogging, particularly arts blogging. At its best his stuff goes so deep, and is so intertwined with so many cultural strands that I think it's impossible for any of us to unpack all of them on our own. I feel incredibly lucky to be in conversation with folks like Bunmi, who I don't think I'd have stumbled onto if I hadn't started blogging in the first place, and all of you who comment and email. As I've said before, this is a big voyage of exploration for me. It's nice to have folks who illuminate the way for me.
Living In Pixels
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of dalbera.
When she begins to feel a wave of grief or terror washing over her, she likes to visualize a line of cheerleaders in her mind’s eye. They jump and do splits and wave their pom-poms: "Push it back! Push it back! Push it wa-a-ay back!" they chant, and it seems to work. She thinks of how much Allen would like these mental cheerleaders. How he would laugh.
Is better than this passage, about the creepiness of spam:
The message arrived on his computer his first night in Las Vegas, and once again Ryan couldn’t help but feel antsy. This was the third or fourth time a stranger had contacted him out of the blue, writing to him in Russian or some other Eastern European language.
But she doesn't give us any reason why. I suppose the first image is slightly more detailed, and the passage is longer. But Walsh doesn't provide any qualitative reasons why a cliche image of some bouncy cheerleader should be accorded greater weight than a somewhat novel twist on how someone interprets unreadable email in foreign languages.
If you live a lot of your life on the internet, the way you're portrayed there, and the information that comes to you from the internet are more important. I remember preparing for a trip to China last year, and worrying that the Chinese email I was getting were the responses to emails I'd sent to set up interviews. I had no way of telling for sure, but suddenly a huge amount of my spam was freighted with unusual significance. Similarly, I feel like most people I know Google themselves on a fairly regular basis or have Google alerts set up: we want to make sure we know what's being written about us, and we want to that we're being written about. Not everyone behaves like this, of course. But I think more and more of us are aware of the vastness of the internet, and that novels that try to capture that, even if they're imperfect, are looking to the future. Experience isn't less impactful just because it happens online.
Best Of
I really like Matthew Diffee's cartoons for the New Yorker, and having seen him on tour talking about what makes a cartoon work (or, you know, not), I really appreciate the level of knowledge he brings to his art. This list of things that are better than a sidewalk hot dog in New York City is another level of brilliant: it's random, it goes on FAR too long, and while I'm not sure I agree with every single item (I like hot dogs better than sushi. So sue me. Food poisoning will do that to a gal.), it is a marvelous download of the priorities in one man's head.
Rough and Tumble
I suppose I'm marginally distressed that Oasis have broken up--"There are many things that I would like to say to you, but I don't know how" is a bang-up example of a sincere rock lyric, and I suppose I always liked the band fine. But man, what I REALLY like is the style of rock reporting in the Sun:
Liam's no-show at the Chelmsford leg of V on Sunday went down like a lead balloon with his older brother. Viral laryngitis was blamed - but bushy eyebrows were raised about the snarling frontman's late nights leading up to the illness. An old-school punch-up was the only way they would ever be able to settle their differences. It eventually happened - and the last scrap sadly signals an end to their incredible career.
I'm well aware the Sun is not a reputable newspaper or anything. But man, the passive voice of "eyebrows were raised" is totally saved by the fact that the editors let them insert "bushy" in front of it. And the casual acceptance of brawling is just great. I think American journalism would be in a better place if we could adopt the British habit of tempering obsessive interest in celebrities with coverage that treats them like the utterly absurd species that they are. Much better this than the Associated Press announcing that it's beefing up the Britney Spears beat as a business decision. That's just boring.
Bye, Bye Butterfly
Not to end the week on a down note, but it is absolutely criminal that Reading Rainbow is getting canceled for love of a couple hundred thousand dollars. I, for one, would happily sign up for a subscription donation to keep the program going. National Public Radio explains that:
Research has directed programming toward phonics and reading fundamentals as the front line of the literacy fight. Reading Rainbow occupied a more luxurious space — the show operated on the assumption that kids already had basic reading skills and instead focused on fostering a love of books.The idea that there's a choice here is absurd and damaging. Children need to learn the fundamentals of reading. But they also need a sense of how far and how high a book can take you. If you don't know that reading is transformative, there's not a huge incentive to learn how to do it well.
The Other Detective
No matter how deep my dismay about this winter's Sherlock Holmes may run on any given day, my faith in the shamus genre (which really is the pantheon in which Holmes is supreme deity) is being buoyed these days by the promise of Bored to Death, a delightfully mad-looking new HBO show starring Jason Schwartzman as a novelist with writer's block so severe he takes up private detection as an escape from his life. To wit:
I love, in an entirely sentimental and unironic way, Jason Schwartzman. He basically is my exceedingly screwed-up vision of Paul McCartney, cute, and hardworking, and often extremely vulnerable. He's one of only a few actors I know willing and able to look truly pathetic, not just sad, or remorseful, or whatever, and I love him in both Rushmore and Shopgirl for it, and for growing beyond it. This looks like a great, funny vehicle for him (and of course everyone else involved). I hope it works.
I love, in an entirely sentimental and unironic way, Jason Schwartzman. He basically is my exceedingly screwed-up vision of Paul McCartney, cute, and hardworking, and often extremely vulnerable. He's one of only a few actors I know willing and able to look truly pathetic, not just sad, or remorseful, or whatever, and I love him in both Rushmore and Shopgirl for it, and for growing beyond it. This looks like a great, funny vehicle for him (and of course everyone else involved). I hope it works.
Can't Stop a Train
I've been buttonholing people at parties for years to expound at great length about the awesome that is OutKast's music video work. My editors at The Atlantic let me use the occasion of Pitchfork's naming "Bombs Over Baghdad" song of the decade to expound on that shtick. I hope some of you will consider checking it out; I had a lot of fun writing it, and the videos are gorgeous. We pulled this one from Idlewild, which I think is just lovely:
As some of you may have guessed, I absolutely love music videos, and think it's something of a pity the video networks have moved so far away from them. YouTube's part of the solution, but it's an uneven one.
As some of you may have guessed, I absolutely love music videos, and think it's something of a pity the video networks have moved so far away from them. YouTube's part of the solution, but it's an uneven one.
Right Before Your Eyes
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Howie_Berlin.
Angels in America is visually stunning. A filmed adaptation didn't have to confirm the fact that Tony Kushner's writing is genius, that's long been acknowledged, but the actors dramatically enlivened and enriched an extremely complicated, dense text. And the performances. Oh, the performances. Angels in America MADE Patrick Wilson's career, and was a dramatic turning point for Mary-Louise Parker. It introduced an unjustly ignored Jeffrey Wright to mass audiences, turning him from an arty actor to someone who could play a significant role in restoring James Bond to relevance with a few scenes. Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson are all simply transcendent, Streep and Thompson in multiple roles. Maybe we ought to hold out for a similar big-screen movie for Streep: it would be wonderful to see, particularly if she takes Stanley Tucci along for the ride. Those two are meant to act opposite each other. But if Angels in America ends up being the masterpiece of her legacy, it's worthy of her genius.
This Is How You Know Michael Moore's Getting Old
The new trailer for Capitalism: A Love Story is scored with M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes." That's what the kids like, right? It represents something original, right? I have to admit that I didn't see Sicko, partially because I'm just kind of tired of Moore. Stunt-based filmmaking is only good if the stunts are good. And when everyone knows who you are and what you do, it's hard to pull a good stunt, much less get a good reaction.
Why Yes, Studios DO Spend Too Much Money on Bad Movies!
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Tracy O.
It is abundantly obvious to anyone who goes to the movies, ever, that the budget of a movie has no particular relation to its actual quality, something that, as Jesse Alexander points out in a guest post at io9, is especially pronounced in science fiction movies. This is an obvious point, but the solution to it isn't. It would be lovely if every director, writer, and producer in the world simultaneously decided in the bestest instance of collusion of all time that they only wanted to make movies with nuanced plots, strong character development, nuanced effects, etc. That, however, is an unlikely scenario.
Because in my day job I spend a lot of time thinking about the best ways to motivate people to do their best work, and a lot of that thinking centers around compensation, Alexander's post got me thinking about pay for directors and producers, and what might be the best way to structure it to motivate them to make different kinds of movies. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, median earnings for salaried directors and producers in 2006 were $56,310, and the median 50 percent earned between $37,980 and $88,700. That's not a lot of money for most people, and the salaries are low enough that small increases--or decreases--might provide a powerful incentive to make different kinds of movies.
I can think of a couple of principles that might encourage more interesting movie-making if they were adopted in a professional salary formula. First, decouple salaries for directors and producers from the the dollar figures in budgets. If compensation is tied to total number of shooting days, or the size of a production staff, etc., bigger-budget productions still might end up producing higher salaries, but that would be because the project is genuinely larger, not simply because more money is being spent on it. If a director or a producer isn't directly involved in certain days or kinds of effects work, perhaps that shouldn't be figured directly into their compensation. But there should be a strong valuation of what a director and producers actually contribute to a production. That leads to a second principle: salaries based on the earnings of a movie are extremely tricky. They might appear to be a straightforward motivational tool, but it's not clear to me that they are. It's not entirely predictable what leads something to be a hit, and less clear how individual directors' work plays into the result, given the variables constituted by stars, release dates, advertising budgets, etc. In other words, tying compensation to profit may not make sense in a world where there isn't (for most directors and producers, anyway) a clear way to measure the connection between their work and ultimate profits. I'd be interested to see contract formulas that reward directors (and other participants in movies) for among other things, performance above financial expectations, critical reviews, academy awards, etc. In other words, a nuanced performance bonus system like the ones used for athletes might encourage actors and directors to pursue different kinds of projects.
Compensation, of course, isn't the only thing bloating movie budgets. But special effects don't just spring into being on their own (at least, not yet). People make the decision to make movies that rely on them, and that they need to be included in movies that don't rely on them. And people make decisions based on a complicated cocktail of factors, including creative vision, desire for fame, and money. There are purists out there. But money matters, and it's something that can be studied, and modified, and controlled.
Brains!
Josh Green's account in The Atlantic of hanging out with a college buddy who has made a career as a movie zombie is delightful, and hilarious, and a smart visit to a subculture within a genre:
Low-budget horror doesn’t aim for white-knuckled fear so much as a kind of grisly camp; buxom “scream queens” who manage to get killed in various states of undress are a genre staple. But the main focus is the killer, who usually gets it in the end. Jed has been shot, stabbed, clubbed, axed, macheted, devoured by a wolf (actually, a “she-wolf”), and another time bludgeoned to death by a giant crayon, and has had his arm torn off by a stripper. It’s not for everyone.I've written before about the challenges actors face in finding steady work. And I agree, it's not for everybody. But if you have a sense of humor, this seems like a decent way to go.
The Blind Side: When The Truth Is Cheesy
Michael Lewis's The Blind Side may be the best sports book I've ever read. It does a couple of important things: a) it explains football beautifully, making it comprehensible at a strategic and technical level to people like me, who were only ever casual fans, b) it gets into the game's history without being boring, and c) explains the culture of the game, in this case, college football and the rooting interests that surround it. It's also an extraordinary story. The way a privileged white family opened their home to a broke, illiterate, hugely disadvantaged black kid is totally remarkable, and moving. But I really hope the movie has the guts to explore the boosterism that may have motivated the Tuohys pretty remarkable actions (they had deep ties to Ole Miss, where Mike Oher eventually went to school): that part of the story is as true as their generosity, and adds some real spice and friction to a story, as well as a connection to the cultural and historical narrative of the book.
Dark Days
Posts will be up sporadically today, folks, since I was up super-late last night finishing a piece for The Atlantic on the greatness of OutKast's music videos, and while listening to "Bombs Over Baghdad" for four or five straight hours may be good for the soul, it's bad for composing blog posts.
In the mean time, let me just say that while The Sun has been wrong about EVERYTHING it's reported about who might play Catwoman in an as-yet-hypothetical sequel to The Dark Knight, it would be particularly tragic if folks gave in to the exceedingly stereotypical choice and cast Megan Fox for the role. What the role needs is someone discovering a genuine dark side, not a dumb starlet with a case of paralytic sexyface. I do really think Catwoman is the next logical place for this incarnation of the Batman movies to go. His love life was always a sort of pure spot in an exceedingly screwed-up worldview in the last two flicks. Letting Batman lose himself in a really self-destructive relationship makes sense, I think, and could keep the movie appropriately dark.
Assuming We're Stupid
Banned Books week is September 26 through October 3 this year, and as it approaches, Wendy Kaminer lays out some of the statistics on censorship attempts in the United States on her Atlantic Correspondents blog. It's also worth sending some love in the direction of civil libertarian and critic Nat Hentoff's best argument against censorship, a Young Adult Novel called The Day They Came to Arrest the Book published in 1983. The novel is a lively romp through a school that becomes divided over an attempt to remove Huckleberry Finn from a high school curriculum on the grounds that the book is racist, sexist, and potentially sexually perverse. And it serves as a reminder of an important fact: underlying censorship is frequently an assumption that readers are too stupid to look at the nuances of a novel and understand what they are, and that teachers are too stupid to understand those nuances and explain them in an illuminating way. Book censorship, especially for children, isn't just an issue about moralism or religiosity: it's about capacity to learn, to think, and to decide, and as such it's even more dangerous than we imagine.
Sincerity
I was thinking about this a bit in the context of yesterday's Third Eye Blind post and a bit in the context of the fact that I'm on a huge Don Williams kick right now, but I think very straight-forward sincerity in love songs is underrated. Music about flirtation, about lust, about sex, about the girl you see across the room, all of that's great, of course. So many songs get close to straightforward declarations of love without quite getting there. Many of them are gorgeous. Belle & Sebastian's "My Wandering Days Are Over," for example: "I hung my boots up and then retired from the disco floor / Now the center of my so-called being is / The space between your bed and wardrope with the lourvred doors" is a phenomenal set of three lines, but it's not actually a straightforward "I love you."But I'm really into directness at the moment. It's one of the reasons I love the Beach Boys so much: the Beach Boys generally address their songs to "you," while the Beatles usually sing songs about "her." I don't mean the kind of pop stuff where love shows up a million times in the chorus and verse, it's not so much the word itself, but the songs that distill what love is in a way that makes it more explicable than it was before. And so, to wit, a mid-week mix of some great, direct love songs.
1) Don Williams--"Listen to the Radio" (no embed, sorry). "When someone wants you, they should just say it's so" is a killer line in its gentleness. A whole song about how much Williams loves someone, and how hard it is to find the precise words it is to say that convincingly. Gorgeous, short, and sweet.
2) The Zombies--"I Want Her, She Wants Me." "There's nothing on my mind / Life seems kind / Now I want her, she wants me." Such a great, succinct description of the transformative power of love. This whole album is fantastic, and extremely underrated if you've only ever heard "Time of the Season." "A Rose For Emily" is the tragic inverse of this song.
3) Bruce Springsteen--"Tougher Than The Rest." Seriously, does there exist in popular music a sexier line than the Boss singing "If you're rough enough for love, baby I'm tougher than the rest"? This is THE definitive "true love is no picnic, but I'm ready to go" song. Patti Scialfa is the luckiest woman on the planet.
4) Patti Scialfa--"Spanish Dancer." This song really ought to be disqualified on the grounds of excessive metaphor, but I am a total sucker for the directness of the phrasing: "Oh, mama, the bridges were burned / Over a river black and cold / But I walked when love commanded me / Up to the edges of his soul / I'm still frightened of that dark divide / Will I gain entrance or be denied?" This song is the absolute definition of the kind of bravery I aspire to. Bruce Springsteen is the luckiest man on the planet.
5) Split Enz--"I Got You." The terror in this song is absolutely amazing. I can't think of another song that crystallizes the fear you sometimes feel in a perfectly happy relationship in the same way. The vulnerability of admitting "I don't know why sometimes I get frightened" is admirable.
6) Pet Shop Boys--"Home and Dry." The Boys are the absolute masters of cutting lyrics, but "Home and Dry" is one of the sweetest songs I know. And it has one of those rhymes that I fall for every time: "There's a plane at JFK / To fly you back from far away / All those dark and frantic / Transatlantic miles."
7) Scritti Politti--"Snow In The Sun." Probably the most emotionally complicated song on this list, sung from the perspective of someone who probably doesn't deserve the love he's getting, a la the Beach Boys in "You Still Believe Me." "There'll be something good about me soon" is one of the saddest promises I've ever heard.
Queens of Civilization Are on the Mic
It's driven me insane for months that I couldn't find "Ladies First" on YouTube--not through my own incompetence or anything, but because copyright claims had shut down the very few people who posted it. So I was glad Ta-Nehisi found an embeddable version, giving me an excuse to put it up here:
It's a good reminder that YouTube has a lot of stuff, but it's not necessarily a good indicator of what constitutes a classic. As far as I can tell, the most-watched version of "Juicy," for example, has been viewed 324,000-0dd times, while "Closer" is long past 35 million loads.
It's a good reminder that YouTube has a lot of stuff, but it's not necessarily a good indicator of what constitutes a classic. As far as I can tell, the most-watched version of "Juicy," for example, has been viewed 324,000-0dd times, while "Closer" is long past 35 million loads.
You Know, It's Too Bad Julia Stiles Seemingly Abandoned Her Career....
Because there is no one better at looking at another person like they're stupid. No one.
Guess Who?
Well, I worried about this in a piece for The American Prospect last year, but I guess we're going to get at least one female Avenger in the movie slated for 2012. I'll do my best not to complain that it's Scarlett Johannsen playing the Black Widow. It could be Jessica Alba. ::Shudders::
New Tracy Letts!
I have to admit to doing a little bit of clapping my hands in my seat after reading this quick New York interview with Tracy Letts about his follow-up to August: Osage County. First, having grown up loving Homer Price, I'm a bit of a softie for anything set in a donut shop. And second, I feel like Letts does with words what Tony Kusher (whom I genufluct towards every time I write, so no disrespect intended) sometimes overshoots at when he's trying to be playful. The line "Forsook you, and the horse you rode in on!" from an argument about how to pronounce the tenses of forsaken, is one of my favorite language-nerd insults of all time.
Something Meta This Way Comes
Leonard DiCaprio is a fine actor, and Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese are fine directors. Still, I'm not sure it's good for any of their careers that DiCaprio is starring in two psychological thrillers with questionably flashy special effects, directed by the two men, coming out at similar times. Neither Shutter Island nor Inception look terribly good to me. In the former case, just because Dennis Lehane wrote the novel doesn't mean you need Michelle Williams to act spectral in it and have a separate budget line item for fog:
And in the case of the latter, I'm feeling somewhat dubious about a movie with a premise involving fluctuations in gravity:
The truth is, when I think about it, I haven't seen a DiCaprio movie since 2002, when I watched both Catch Me If You Can, and Gangs of New York. I do feel that I should see The Aviator and The Departed's in my Netflix queue if only because I'm trying to work out a couple of things in my head about Mark Wahlberg. And I think that's because of something that seems abundantly clear in the trailers for both Shutter Island and Inception: DiCaprio's evolved, I think with more than a little unfortunate assistance from Scorsese, into an incredibly humorless leading man. Like every girl on Planet Earth in 1996, I fell blindly in love with him in Romeo+Juliet, (though my affair with Harold Perrineau's been the one that lasted, and Strictly Ballroom is my favorite Baz movie) so it's a shame that he feels like a real drag to watch now.
Full Moon
Well, the studio's being crabby and won't let me embed it, but I'm intrigued by the trailer for The Wolfman. I like me some Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt. But mostly I like me some movies that suggest that the supernatural is actually frightening. Vampires are defanged, or sparkly, or John C. Reilly these days, which I supposes fills all sorts of niches for all sorts of people, but none of which tickle my scary bone. It looks like The Wolfman is going to get at all of our magic-related terrors: Del Toro gets dunked in ice water in what looks like a pretty frightening exorcism, threatens to kill a bunch of decent-if-superstitious townspeople in a courthouse, and I'm pretty sure he's not stalking Blunt in the trailers' last scene because he's going to surprise her with a fluffy puppy and two tickets to Disney World. And that's all too the good. Lately, I think America's replaced Things That Go Bump In The Night with Eli Roth's flayed and gutted girls in the category of things we want to be frightened by. And I think the former is better for introspection, and probably better for art.
Nostalgia
I was really, spectacularly off the internet for the second half of last week, which was incredibly refreshing. But it also, of course, meant that people went and posted a lot of good stuff, and I'm only catching up now. One of the things I missed was Vulture's defense of Third Eye Blind, which raised a whole bunch of points I hadn't particularly considered about the band. And it gave me a chance to revisit my personal favorite Third Eye Blind song, the kind of remarkable "Motorcycle Drive-By." As I've said before, I'm a total lyrics fiend, and I love the lyrics in this one. But it's also a song where the lyrics and music crest and fall together. "Motorcycle Drive-By" is the best encapsulation I know of the emotional arc at the end of a relationship:
You've got wistfulness, preemptive nostalgia, rage, exhaustion, and the decision to move on for your own good. Plus, I just love this image of letting someone you love go:
Visions of you on a motorcycle drive-byThe cigarette ash flies in your eyes and you don't mindYou smile, and say the world it doesn't fit with youI don't believe you, you're so sereneCareening through the universeYour axis on a tiltYou're guiltless and freeI hope you take a piece of me with you
Putting "serene" and "careening" next to each other? Kills me every time, sonically and verbally. And I'll admit to associating it with a particular guy who was a senior in high school when I was a sophomore, and I'm sure never gave me a second thought. He smoked cigarettes, which I thought was both stupid and daring because he knew it was stupid, and angry, which I thought was frightening but interesting. It's a good song that can work for you when you're 15, 21, and 25. We'll see how it holds up beyond that.
Beyond the Sea
Max argues that Finding Nemo is the disability-friendly movie I'm looking for:
Your history was made in Finding Nemo. Nemo has a crippled fin, but his main problem is his relationship with his dad; Dori's memory problems are an obstacle for her, but they're only one aspect of her character. There's even a conversation in the beginning between a group of kids in Nemo's "school" about how each of them has a disability or quirk of some sort.I feel conflicted about this. I kind of agree, and I think metaphor is useful in teasing out societal issues. But something like disability, which is grounded in the human body and how we see it, is really hard to express by translating it into another species. Nemo's cute despite--and in fact because of--his dumpy little fin, but able-bodied people often react to disabled people with curiosity, stares, if not outright revulsion. Our emotions and assumptions about how people are supposed to look, and function, are much more complicated than the things we feel when we look at chubby little animated fish.
Another Perspective On Avatar
I really appreciate this response to my thoughts on Avatar from Evan at Crippled Politics (which is smart, and well-written, and has a logo that cracks me up. Go check it out.):
The notion that one disabled character can or is even intended to speak for all disabled people is a bit ridiculous. That's like suggesting that a black main character in a movie is the representative of all black people. That's just not how it works. Sam Worthington's character may, in fact, be intended to speak for a segment of the disabled community or experience. Maybe not. All I can say that the wish to not be in a disabled body, to be in a completely new one is not some movie invention. I experience it almost everyday. That a disabled man would accept the offer to be put in another body, a body that is alien to both him and his species, does not strike me as insulting. For me it's chance to see publicly displayed a feeling with which I wrestle constantly: that I would be happier if I could walk.I basically agree with the argument that no one character should stand in for an entire class of people: tokenism is a huge problem. But I do still think that when pop culture represents a certain class of people extremely infrequently, it's important to interrogate all of those representations, even if ultimately we're okay with them. And I do think it's important to acknowledge that people feel differently about their physical abilities, their blackness, their gayness, their femininity, their masculinity, whatever defines them. I think it's important to make movies to make movies about people who wish they could walk. And I think we'll be in a really good place when we can make a movie about someone like Harriet McBryde Johnson, too, when we are able to avoid automatically assuming anything about what disabled people as a group do and don't want.
Things That Make Me Smile
Roxanne Shante leaning on her record label to live up to their half of her contract and pay for her to get her PhD--which she's used to open a therapy practice aimed at African-Americans in urban settings, utilizing her skills as an MC in a different setting. I've always wondered about second acts for hip-hop artists. This seems like a pretty good one, even if Warner Music comes off looking pathetic for hedging on her.
Feeling Blue
I'll leave it to others to praise or condemn what appears to be the potential cheesetasticness that is the trailer for James Cameron's Avatar. I'm not a special effects expert, so all I can really say is that the images look inventive, if not real.
But what's bugging me about what appears to be the plot of the movie is this: the movie seems to imply some things about disabled people and their desire to escape their bodies that strike me as somewhat uncomfortable. I'm able-bodied, and I'm fully aware that I have absolutely no idea what it's like not to have part of my body move, or not to have part of my body at all, much less what it's like to live with a disability. But I'm also aware that I have no right, and no grounds upon which, to declare that people's lives would be better if they were able-bodied. And so it seems a little odd, and unnecessary, to me to use disability as the device that prompts Sam Worthington to try to enter another world. You can want to escape your life if you're able-bodied just as much as you can if you're in a wheelchair.
Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive. But I'm hard-pressed to think of a movie in which a major character is just disabled, nothing more, nothing less, where the plot is not an inspirational story of difficulty overcome, or some sort of tragedy. It's the same thing with token black characters, or token gay characters, except movies don't even really have token disabled characters as a trope. I'm glad Glee has a character in a wheelchair whose disability doesn't appear to be a major issue, but that's one show, that's aired one episode. We'll see how it goes. When representations of disabled people are so limited, I think we have to be thoughtful about every single one of them. Avatar may make effects history. When movies start including disability as a measure of diversity, rather than as a tragic vehicle, it'll be history of a quieter, but more socially important, kind.
R.I.P. Karla Kuskin
The Philharmonic Gets Dressed is one of THE great books, children's or otherwise, about the individuality of artists. Its author will be sorely missed.
Glorious and Strange
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Steve Rhodes.
I have no particular desire to see Inglourious Basterds when I didn't get to see District 9 on opening weekend and I still haven't seen Funny People, (500) Days of Summer, Cold Souls or Thirst (and, if I'm honest, I don't particularly feel like helping to make anything Eli Roth is in a success). But, by all accounts, it's a movie that posits a history-alerting role for the movies, and that idea is bumping up against several others I have about the importance of movies in particular and popular culture in general. I think Quentin Tarantino thinks about movies, and their importance, in a different way than I do, but not entirely.
In her introduction to her essay collection Wallflower at the Orgy, Nora Ephron wrote:
I should say that almost everything in this book was written in 1968 and 1969, and almost everything in it is about what I like to think of as frivolous things. Fashion, trashy books, show business, food. I would call these subjects Popular Culture, but I like writing about them so much that I hate to think they have to be justified in this way--or at least I'm sorry if they do. One night not too long ago I was on a radio show talking about an article I had written for Esquire on Helen Gurley Brown and I was interrupted by another guest, a folk singer, who has just finished a twenty-five-minute lecture on the need for peace. "I can't believe we're talking about Helen Gurley Brown," he said, "when there's a war going on in Vietnam." Well, I care that there's a war going on in Indochina, and I demonstrate against it; and I care that there's a women's liberation movement, and I demonstrate for that. But I also go to the movies incessantly, and have my hair done once a week, and cook dinner every night, and spend hours in front of the mirror trying to make my eyes look symmetrical, and I care about those things, too. Much of my life goes irrelevantly on, in spite of larger events.
I love this passage, because of the way Ephron places pop culture in the context of people's lives, asserts the right to treat it as important, even in a world where there are terrible and momentous events underway. But I'd take her argument a step further. In the middle of those terrible and momentous events, amidst the opinion polls that seek to interpret how people feel about those events, pop culture can be a strong barometer of what people seek out, what they shy away from, what interests them. Of course movies, books, music, etc., also become popular because of marketing campaigns, not simply as a pure measurement of what Americans are attracted to or repelled from. But our susceptibility to advertising also measures what we are influenced by. And ultimately, even more than polls, even more than votes, the pop culture we choose to experience shows what we care about, because we spend money on it.
Quentin Tarantino has made a movie in which movies become a fulcrum for world events: movies are literally a catalyst for an explosion. I don't know that I think popular art has that power. Some movies can become part of a public conversation about an issue, like Schindler's List did, to a certain extent, with the Holocaust, when it was incorporated into public school curricula, etc. But I don't think it even has to do that, much less provoke riots or provide a means to kill Nazis. I think maybe it's enough for pop culture to hold up a warped glass up to society, to provide us with infinite grounds for divination as we try to understand who we are and what we think.
Love & District 9
Guys, I may have been wrong about District 9. Not in my prediction that the movie had a chance to be remarkable, which I believe it is. The movie's palette, shooting Africa in grays and browns, rather than the gaudy-but-gorgeous colors that show up in movies that spend time in African slums, like The Constant Gardener, and Lord of War (man, I should do a post on that movie's underdiscussed virtues someday), did a wonderful job of reinforcing the movie's grimness. There are a ton of marvelous little details in the movie, the cadance of protestors' strides, for example, looks right out of the documentaries I watched in my South African history classes. The engagement with beliefs in witchcraft and spiritualism and healing may have come in a discomfiting package (Spencer Ackerman and Matt Zeitlin's conversation about the portrayals of Nigerians in the movie is well worth reading) but it's not necessarily totally out of line with some African beliefs, and even if we're not comfortable with it doesn't mean it's an issue that shouldn't be engaged with. The metaphors for apartheid (including for South Africa's biological weapons research) were nicely balanced.
But
MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT
the area in which District 9 got to me was one that I didn't remotely expect: the movie contains the most touching and earned romance I've seen in a movie in what feels like years.
Now, I'm a sucker for sentiment: I cry easily at movies, while reading, and watching TV. But I do feel that we've been so conditioned to the rhythms of certain kinds of romances that they've begun to produce diminishing returns. For example, in The Ugly Truth, there is a nice set of two short scenes in the middle of an otherwise mediocre movie in which a fairly coarse, confident character retreats into himself as he acknowledges how attracted he is to a woman . It's not a bad little bit of acting, but because it seems almost certain that he and the woman will get together, despite a blond, bronzed, blue-eyed obstacle shaped like an eligible doctor standing in their way, it's hard to get worked into an emotional frenzy over it.
In District 9, the arc is exceedingly different. Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley, in a role that ought to spark a very promising career) enters the movie in a role universally declared to be the South African equivalent of Michael Scott. He is a mortal dork, sweater-vested, unable to get a body microphone on, convinced of his own competence, with a streak of cruelty wide enough to allow him to merrily destroy alien eggs and compare the sound to popcorn. When we hear that he's married to the daughter of an executive of the company he works for, the dastardly Multinational United, we figure him for an even deeper nebbish than we initially supposed, and her for some sort of deluded crazy--a South African Jan, to complete the analogy to The Office. Instead, Tania's gorgeous, loving, devoted, but not in a way that seems venal or off. From some of the movie's earliest moments, she tells her interviewer that she insisted that Wikus's things be brought back to the house after they have been removed in the course of an investigation. She throws a very sweet party to congratulate her husband on receiving a promotion he probably didn't deserve, complete with a cake that looks like MNU's headquarters, and guests packed into their small kitchen.
It's a modest and genuine kind of love, one that's hugely complicated when Wikus, who in the course of evicting aliens from the slum where they have been quarantined, messes about with a bit of alien technology, sprays some sort of liquid on himself, begins throwing up, bleeding black fluid, losing fingernails, and refuses to go to the hospital until he collapses, at which point it's discovered that his left hand has turned into a claw. Tania is kept from him, and her father lies to her, telling her that Wikus is dying as MNU experiments on him, ultimately deciding to harvest his organs. After Wikus escapes, his father-in-law spreads rumors that Wikus contracted his mutation by having sex with aliens, leading Tania to reject him. But she changes her mind, telling him she wants them to be together again.
Most movies would give them that reunion, and would give the audiences that relief. District 9's core courage lies in the fact that it doesn't. The movie hinges on a choice. The fluid that started Wikus's transformation can either heal him, or get the aliens he's allied himself with home, and Wikus ultimately makes the decision to let his comrades leave, and let the horrifying transformation he's been going through run its course. The movie ends with him ostensibly vanished, and with Tania unwrapping a small metal flower that's been left on her doorstep, telling herself it's absurd to even imagine it could be from her husband. But the last image in the film is of an alien folding another flower in a trash heap: Wikus can't go home to his wife, he's not human in any way that would let them bridge the massive divide that's opened up between them. But despite his shell, claws, and tentacles, Wikus's love for Tania ties him to the human world. Alien or man, he makes her the same kinds of gifts, loves her in the same way.
It's entirely wrenching, and it's earned. These characters have been through something dreadful (unlike the [very young] lovers in Ponyo, which I found unusually soft and un-rigorous for a Miyazaki movie), and when the movie ends, they're still going through it. I walked out of the theater feeling deeply touched, but also feeling like my emotions weren't equal to what the characters were experiencing. I think this is rare. Generally, I walk out of movies feeling like I've watched sort of reverse ghosts, people who are pleasantly cushioned and protected from the actual difficulties of life, who get to operate in patterns that I feel would make my life simpler if only I could live within those systems of risks and rewards. District 9 left me feeling like I'd never known heartache, never really known isolation, even though I, like most of us, have done my time as a grieving citizen of a nation of one. It's a truly grownup romance, a species that feels even rarer and more precious than a movie rooted in historical realities these days. I wish there were more of them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)