Artsy-fartsy in the best possible way

Lee Siegel's television column at TNR has always struck me as eloquently written, occassionally on-target and, for whatever reason, not particularly compelling. Maybe it's that I confine the majority of my television viewing to Law & Order sponsored afternoon naps and a few select shows (Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, 24), but his column rarely sparks my interest in a way that motivates me to actually tune in and seeing whatever show he's talking about. On the other hand, his newish slideshow-based art column at Slate is magnificent. Headier and generally more academic than either his TV writing or pretty much anything else on Slate, it's not just a thrill to read, it's criticism that really energizes me to find out more about his subjects even though my knowledge of fine art is fairly limited.

In the case of his most recent column on Pixar, I'll admit to being fairly well-versed on the work of our era's foremost animation geniuses, but his essay is a delight anyway.

As you follow the mechanics of telling an animated story, you can see why intelligent cartoons might well displace literary fiction. When we disparage a poorly developed character in a novel by calling him a "cartoon," we're saying that he's too general and abstract to be believable as a person. But the generality of a complicatedly scripted animated figure has the reverse effect. As the character deepens from type into a concrete figure, symbolic and specific meanings fuse. Novelists have become increasingly self-conscious about psychological categories. Cartoons, however, offer an evocative externality. The viewer supplies the interiority himself—out of his own.

Siegel's willingness to broach these topics in a weighty, relatively high-minded way alone makes it worth reading. While I dearly love Edelstein's pop-crit wit and the educated snark of Dana Stevens (a writer who actually makes me interested in the TV she writes about), Siegel's clear-but-substantive approach appeals to the same part of me that loved comparing Beckett, Brecht and Abramovic in college. Add this to Slate's recent addition to their movie coverage, the DVD Extras column, which gives second, and often more out-there, mildly obscurantist looks at films after they've had a few months to digest, and Slate (even without dearest Edelstein), has the best set of media critics in the business.

The Movie Club Club

For cinephiles and those fascinated by all things critical, there is no better week each year than when David Edelstein hosts Slate's annual movie club. Without delving too deep into Spielbergian poignancy (ie: I'm neither going to drag out a cute kid and have it weep nor threaten its life after showing how dadgum lollipop sweet it is), this year's movie club bares extra weight, for it is Edelstein's last. After a long run at Slate as the first critic of the internet, he's jumping ship to New York Magazine. And while questions of who is to replace Edelstein's singularly witty, lucid takes on cinema abound, you can stifle the uncertainty with a whole week of movie-critic inside baseball. Savor it folks, who knows if we'll ever have another.

Me-O-Meter, Kong Quick Hit

Relevant has my hastily penned review of King Kong, a film which is two hours of jaw-dropping masterpiece and one hour of lugubrious, tiresome exposition. See the movie. Read my review. Merry Christmas!

Things are quiet here in the heart of the District today, with many of the city's myriad workers having already taken off for the Christmas holiday. If you're still at your computer, however, staring idly into space or perhaps even working, let me reccomend a bit of distraction.

First up is the trailer for new film from Haute Tension director Alexandre Aja, The Hills Have Eyes, which seems to be aiming for the lofty designiation of Best Ever Movie About Mutant Hillbilly Psychos. It's strange to think that there's a market for that genre, although I think the better money would have gone toward The Brokeback Mountains Have Eyes, in which gentle gay cowboys are the target of said Mutant Hillybilly Psychos. Talk about sexual repression; as villians, crotchety white men in business suits just don't compare. For any Hollywood agents reading this, I'm free this afternoon.

And while K Street might be largely devoid of its bespoke clad power players today, there's a well-edited taste of their cinematic counterparts over at Apple. I'm always leery of anti-corporate satire, but this trailer for Thank You For Smoking looks really sharp. Plus, the movie is based on a Chris Buckley novel (which Amazon claims is out of print, but I don't believe that for a minute), so there's always the possibility that it's not deflated by smug moralizing. I'm told by sources in the know that book rails against the greens and health nuts, but I'm suspicious of Hollywood's willingness to include much beyond their usual nannying self-righteous views. The trailer's last line, however, is pretty much the funniest movie dialog I've seen in months. The world can always use more Rob Lowe.

Total bureaucratic meltdown

The Washington Post has a massive expose on the inadequacies and failings of the Dept. of Homeland Security; the headline calls the agency "undermined from the start." The article stays strictly within the play-it-safe rules of objectivity, but it seems fairly clear that it's an attempt to knock the Bush administration for petty squabling and bad management of what ought to have been an obvious idea that everyone should have rallied and sacrificed around. Cheney is singled out for his dismissal of the department:

Cheney opposed the concept of a new department as a big-government mistake, several aides recalled. And Steve Abbott, the retired admiral he picked to head the review, did not start work until a few days before Sept. 11.

The article might as well have included a little slashdot style tag -- -- after this sentence. The gall of Cheney! Big government haters! But just a few sentences later, we get this, which the article treats as a conclusion:

The lesson [DHS director Tom Ridge's] staff took away was the need for secrecy: When bureaucracies were informed of potential threats to their empires, they tended to resist. "Everybody realized the agencies were not going to look at mission first, they were going to look at turf first," recalled Bruce M. Lawlor, a National Guard major general working for Ridge.

In other words, the department's major problem was that it was exactly what Cheney said, another grubby bowl of big government stew that no one wanted and couldn't be made to work. More bureaucracy. More managerial levels and ill-defined goals, all hamstrung by the natural tendency of government to muddle and trip through everything. Is anyone really surprised that the DHS is anything more than another bloated government mess?

More Praise for Munich

Edesltein hails Spielberg's Munich, offering a fairly strong rejoinder to those who claim the film is an apology for Palestinian terrorism, and a vehement defense of The Beard as well:

Munich has been regarded in some quarters as an affront: How does Spielberg have the audacity to make a commercial thriller that questions the very concept of retaliation? And while we're on the subject, how does he have the audacity to make a sci-fi picture like War of the Worlds, which uses a Martian invasion to evoke the trauma of 9/11?

Well, it's too bad we don't have more mainstream narrative filmmakers with that kind of audacity. Munich is the most potent, the most vital, the best movie of the year.

I'll see this film this weekend; I hope Edelstein (my favorite critic) is right.

The Risks of Deregulating Marriage

Here's an essay by Stanley Kurtz from NR a few years ago arguing that the real danger in legal homosexual marriage is that it breaks the social requirement for monogamy in marriage. It attempts to answer the "libertarian question" of why those who're hesitant to regulate personal freedom should be in favor of not legalizing gay marriage.

He also has the cover story in this week's Weekly Standard, which tackles the growing trend toward polyamorous relationships and how, in Sweden, there's a movement that seems poised to push for legalized polyamorous marriage, which would likely follow in the US as soon as gay marriage becomes legal nationally.

I'm just iffy on this, though. I agree with him that polyamorous, non-monogamous lifestyles are often detrimental to those who practice them. And I'm even willing to concede, to a degree, that legalized homosexual marriage and polyamorous marriage will further break the taboo on extra-marital relationships; it will weaken our already fragile will for monogamy. But it still seems pretty precarious to me to want to regulate this sort of risk, but not, say, that of smoking. Everyone agrees that smoking is bad for your health, and I think it's obvious that portrayals of smoking in movies, video games, etc... makes people more likely to do it themselves: it's advertising, and big, glamorous, idealized (even if villianous) images are influential. (Why else would companies spend billions each year on advertising?) But this doesn't mean we should regulate smoking or smoking in the media. Transfer that logic to the marriage debate and it becomes quite the thorny question.

The government's job isn't to protect people from risk or unhappiness, and neither should we want that to become its job -- the government just isn't very good at it. So why marriage and not smoking? Why marriage but not anything else, for that matter? Risk is a part of life. Individuals should inform themselves about it and have the power to make their own decisions about how to proceed. Right?

Waiting for the Ender

Via Slashdot, IGN is reporting more delays in the terminally gestating development of an adaptation of Orson Scott Card's science fiction classic, Ender's Game. Despite the new plan to (once again) use a script written by Card himself, I'm deeply suspicious of this film. Even with Card's guidance, this threatens to go horribly awry and become a Narnia sized mediocrity -- or worse.

Card's writing has remained good over the years, but not great, and certainly not the standard he set with the first three Ender books. And he doesn't always show the greatest cinematic judgement either. The movie was, for a long time, set to be directed by German epic-meister, Wolfgang Petersen, whose films continue to descend into bloviated pompousness. It's not widely disputed that Petersen's last film, Troy, was an ill-formed wreck, but when it was released, Card defended it.

Card has since shown better judgement, trumpeting Serenity as the example of what he felt Ender's Game should live up to. Serenity is a wonderful, spry little movie, but it worries me that Ender's Game should be thought of as "living up" to Serenity. Ender is a real classic, one of the best books about the struggles of transitioning from adolescence to adulthood I've ever read as well as one of the most thoughtful, human sf novels in the history of the genre. Matching Serenity would be acceptable, but it would be a step down from the novel.

Were Card and Warner Brothers -- the folks with the power over this film -- to read this, I suspect they would probably disagree. Philip K. Dick, in his bizarre meta-novel Valis, offers some useful words for matters such as these. Describing one of protagonist Horselover Fat's revelations, he writes:

1) Those who agree with you are insane.
2) Those who do not agree with you are in power.

True enough, I think.

Of course, Dick also claimed to have achieved a theophany via a pink laser beaming information into his head from space. So take his words as you will.

A history of progressivism in the press

Over at the new and much-improved (which is saying something) TCSDaily, Patrick Cox has a chronic;es the rise of the left's media dominance, giving a history in miniature of how the big city press developed its progressive slant. It's a must-read for those who are as interested in understanding the liberal culture of the press as they are in heckling it.

Essentially, he argues that population density caused major metro areas to become increasingly depending on big-government programs. Meanwhile, immigration, which is naturally heavier in cities, infused population centers with people from nations overrun by government corruption, making them more appreciative of the allegedly well-meaning American bureaucracy. This combination of dependence and immigrant thankfulness meant big city populations gravitated towards pro-government policy. Newspapers a;sp flourished more in bigger cities, owing significantly to the ease of distribution in densely populated areas. And, since these cities already swung left, so too would their journals.

While I agree with nearly everything Cox says, I think he also misses a few things. Big cities, simply by virtue of having more people, are going to be more diverse economically, socially, and racially. The wider array of cultural exposure afforded to city-dwellers has the effect of loosening their standards of what is "acceptable" and "normal." Humans have a natural tendency to equalize with their surroundings; our minds and bodies cope with stress by developing ways of incorporating jarring input into our daily routines and worldviews. So, what begins as out of the ordinary quickly becomes passable and routine. Small town dwellers with a narrower range of experience consequently tend to have a similarly narrower range of what is socially permissable. This, I think, accounts significantly for the urban elite's socially liberal slant.

I'm also a bit dubious about his take on the progressive shift of immigrants. While there may be something to the escape-from-corruption-relief he proposes, it seems to me that our country's self-promoted reputation as "the land of opportunity" may have something to do with as well. The American government has, throughout history, trumpeted its willingness to give anyone and everyone an opportunity to succeed -- the American Dream and all that. I think many of those shoving off for the States seem to take the word "give" a little too literally. The attitude often seems to be that it's the government's job not to get out of the way of opportunity, but to instead stick its regulatory crowbar in the works and pry opportunity (preferably with some guarantee of success) out of our market. Broadcasting that we're the land of milk and honey -- if you can find it -- regularly translates into the notion that we're handing the stuff out at the door, free of charge.

Shortblogging Monday

Mann on Miami: This has got to be the best bad idea for a movie since Michael Bay announced intentions to make a live-action Transformers. Master of slick crime grit Michael Mann is turning Miami Vice into a movie starring a nearly-mulleted Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx (who is following up his previous Mann vehicle, Collateral). I’m a sucker for Mann’s elegiac, showy, faux epics (with the exception of the burdensome Ali), the way he turns darkened cities into seething, neon-lit danger zones strewn with grizzled anti-heroes. “Badness, happening right now,” Farrell says in the trailer. The staff of the New Yorker couldn’t write a better description of what this movie will surely be.

V for Very Cool: Anti-government vigilantism in post-apocalyptic, totalitarian Britain just got a little bit cooler. The Wachowski Brothers' newest sci-fi parable, V for Vendetta, has a new trailer up at Apple. Ain’t It Cool recently scored the first ever screening of this film, and they’ve been pimping it hard. Still, it was the last film in a 24 hour long cinema marathon, so those who saw it may not have exactly been models of intellectual perspicuity while watching. It doesn’t really matter though; the Wachowskis, anti-government sentiment and sci-fi comic book geekiness pretty much guarantees my ass will be front and center come March.

A Supersized Idiot Returns: Morgan Spurlock will be adapting Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War on Science, which chronicles the legions of armored red-staters who’ve lined up with their bazookas and battle axes to fight the evil scientific menace. Sure to be as insightful as his last documentary, which exposed the previously unknown fact that eating 5000 calories of fatty food every day is, gasp!, unhealthy, you can file this under “more statist bloviating from the we-wish-this-were-true world of leftist agitprop” (because I know all of you have a file with that title).

King of the Jungle Indeed: Despite its mediocre box office returns, I’ll put forth that the last two hours of King Kong are some of the finest filmmaking I’ve seen in years. My review will be up soon, but do yourself a favor and find the biggest, baddest, loudest movie theater you can and see this film now.

The Me-O-Meter, Quick Take: Over at the Tech Liberation Front, Tim Lee recommends my article on legislation designed to “plug the analog hole.” Many thanks to Tim and the rest of the excellent TLF crew.

Only Because Paul W.S. Anderson Didn’t Make a Movie This Year:

The movie world’s favorite grad-school dropout, A.O. Scott, ponders the disappearance of extravagantly awful movies, making the strange suggestion that the lack of gutter-lining gunk may be related to the lack of truly excellent filmmaking. I’m not sure I really buy his thesis, which rests far too much on a few individual examples of possibly interesting films driven into adequacy by the needs of convention, but I find it intriguing that Scott seems to think that what films really need more of is the “spark of madness” that gives violently trashy films their memorable qualities. About the film industry, Scott says that,

“The kind of ambition that can yield greatness or abomination is not something Hollywood has much interest in encouraging these days.”

And he lauds the unhinged insanity of Oliver Stone’s bloated disaster of a biopic, Alexander, saying,

“The narrative scheme makes no sense; the motives of the major characters are at once overly emphatic and maddeningly opaque; it is too long, too ornate, too talky - too much. But no one would ever call it mediocre, or accuse Mr. Stone of laziness, indifference or unseemly willingness to compromise.”

As well, he argues that Memoirs of a Geisha’s only memorable bit was one of unchecked passion:

“The one truly memorable sequence - in which Gong Li, wild-eyed and disheveled, sets fire to the geisha house - is a symbol of precisely what the film refuses to do, which is to go crazy and make a mess.”

This strikes me as a weird modern equivalent to Antonin Artaud’s call for drama to take on the properties of plague. In his essay, The Theater and the Plague, he writes, “We must recognize that the theater, like the plague, is delirium and is communicative.” Later, he says,

“[The theater] reforges the chain between what is and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible and what already exists in materialized nature. It recovers the otion of symbols and archetypes which act like silent blows, rests, leaps of the heart, summons of the lymph, inflammatory images thrust into our abruptly wakened heads.”

Scott’s call for madness fits nicely with Artaud’s desires for some inexplicable, impossible theater that would have the meta-real qualities of a dream, in that it could shock, terrify, thrill, arouse and generally shake us to our core in a reflexive, physical manner – and yet leave us essentially unaffected in a permanent sense. It’s easy to dismiss Artaud as nuts, and not just because most of his writing was overloaded (if gorgeous) space-cadet rambling, but because he was actually diagnosed as medically insane for a time. But maybe it takes a lunatic to really find the joy of dramatic insanity. It’s fitting then, then Scott ends his essay like this:

“There are fewer and fewer movies being made that send us from the theater reeling and rubbing our eyes, wondering "what the heck was that?" or demanding a refund. For precisely that reason, we are less and less likely to emerge breathless and dazzled, eager to go back for more and unable to forget what we just saw.”

Breathless, dazzled and reeling, unable to describe what we saw: if that isn’t channeling Artaud, I don’t know what is.

Critical Aesthetics and Critical Ideas

DCist reports that Munich, director Steven Spielberg’s Tony Kushner-written take on the Mossad revenge assassinations that followed the slayings of 11 Olympic athletes, has won top honors amongst the Washington Area Film Critics Association. I won’t see this film for a few more days, and I’ve already written about the film’s controversial moral equivalence, so I’m not going to speculate directly on the film. But I will say that I think it’s important for serious film viewers to be willing to separate a film’s aesthetics and its ideas.

This is not the only way to view a film, and I don’t want to suggest that there are films whose aesthetics aren’t altered by their ideals. The Constant Gardener is my go-to example there, a very good film that could have been far better if it weren’t so painfully sure of itself. I’d also include Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda in that group, as its vision of love as some sort of uncontrollable, outside force – a wind that we cannot help but let sweep us along – removes the primary dramatic issue surrounding conflicts of the heart, which is that love is a choice. As for films made better by their ideas, I’d argue that Minority Report’s distrust of big government security states lifted it from being a reasonably good sci-fi thriller into a quite good one (no classic, but worthy of repeat viewing), and that The Incredibles, which already stood atop greatness, was rocketed into the celluloid stratosphere by its emphasis on individual achievement and talent.

But it’s also possible for a film (or any piece of art or writing) to be an exemplary piece of craftsmanship and advocate a unequivocally wrong message. Erin Brockovitch, for example, might have been a typical anti-corporate message film, but Steven Soderbergh’s stylistic mix of early 90s indie tropes and French New Wave lifted it from ho-hum tract to filmic excellence. Even The Matrix, with its pseudo philosophical undertones that suggest that the mind is the true arbiter of reality and that all societal constructs (including, I suspect, morality and civility) are really just systems of control to be rebelled against, is just a brilliantly original film from an aesthetic perspective. Who in the world would’ve thought to blend comic book origin stories with dystopian science fiction, bondage gear and Woo-esque martial arts action? And yet that blend seemed so fitting, so natural, that The Wachowski Brothers have arguably had more impact on Hollywood filmmaking than any other filmmakers to debut in the last decade. Their view of reality (or lack thereof) might have been bunk, but their presentation – their craftsmanship and delivery – was outstanding, and deserved to be recognized for it.

The question when watching a movie doesn’t always have to be, What does this say and do I agree? Just as often, it’s important to ask, What does this say and how well is it being said? Agreement isn’t necessary for appreciation.

"The first denizens of the post 9/11 world"

I'm still dubious about any 9/11-related film, but Paul Greengrass, director of the upcoming Flight 93, about the plane that went down in Pennsylvania, has some interesting words about the production in an interview over at Chud. It's worth reading, but here's what I found stuck out most:

What’s really interesting is that when you look at it like that, you realize something important about Flight 93, which is that it, in many ways, occurred in the post-9/11 world because of the quirk of fate that that airplane was delayed on the ground for forty-five minutes. Not long after it was airborne, the first two planes went into the World Trade Center. By the time Flight 93 was hijacked, the third plane had practically gone into the Pentagon.

What it means is that you had forty people – or slightly less, as some had been killed – essentially you had a small number of people on an airplane who were the first people to inhabit the post-9/11 world. For all the rest of us, whether we were in civilian air traffic control, Presidential bunkers, or just ordinary folks like us watching on TV, we knew something terrible was happening, but we didn’t really know what. We maybe knew it was terrorism, but we didn’t know what. But for those people on the airplane they knew exactly what it was, they could see what was facing them, and here’s the thing – they faced a terrible, terrible dilemma. The dilemma was: what do we do? Do we sit here and hope for the best? Or do we strike back at them before they do what we think they might be about to do? In the course of action of whatever those two choices we make, what are the chances of a good outcome from either of those two choices?

John Spencer, icon of the bureaucracy, is dead

I had just finished reading Terry Teachout’s remarkable post on his brush with possible death (one thankfully sidestepped), when I arrived at Ain’t It Cool and found the incredibly saddening news that actor John Spencer, best known as Leo McGarry on The West Wing, had died.

I’ve been on the Spencer bandwagon a while; he’s a great actor who absolutely defined our cultural image of The Government Man. Big Bad Bureaucracy, as villainous as it might be, always looked better when John Spencer was at its helm. Especially in his later years, with roles like FBI director Womack in The Rock, Spencer personified the bureaucratic curmudgeon like no other, putting a face on the seedy upper levels of government management with devastating, and highly entertaining, effectiveness.

As McGarry on The West Wing, Spencer nailed Aaron Sorkin’s blisteringly fast, precisely timed dialog, bringing to it a real sense of moral gravity. Other actors on that show had passion; Spencer had gravitas. He played McGarry as a take-no-shit hardass of the first order, demanding always, above all, that Things Be Done Right. But beneath that crotchety exterior, he let us in on the very personal world of a man, just a man, who had trouble keeping his wife, even talking to his daughters. Sorkin may have written the words, but Spencer gave them life.

I suppose I’ll have to retire my ongoing plea that someone make a Donald Rumsfeld movie with Spencer in the lead role. So here’s to a great actor, and the final role he should’ve played.

Syriana: a good film that leaves an oily liberal residue

I’ll be to the point today, for once, because I’m on deadline for multiple projects, but today, National Review Online is running my response to the new oil and politics thriller, Syriana, which is George Clooney’s latest in a volley of bids at social and political relevance. I previously wrote on his last message movie, Good Night, and Good Luck, at AFF Brainwash. Enjoy a weekend of shopping and present-wrapping, and remember: When the mall gets you down, there’s always Starbucks!

CORRECTION: In my essay, I incorrectly refer to the men seen in the opening scene as "Arab." The men are Pakistani. I deeply regret the error.

Darker and darker

Ain’t It Cool just published a whole slew of reviews of A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater’s animated-over-live-action adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel. They’re mixed, but the most negative review comes from someone who hasn’t read the book.

I just finished reading PKD’s Time Out of Joint yesterday, a book with outrageous similarities to the Truman Show. I’m sure it’s been pointed out already, but it’s basically the same thing, except better. This is mainly because PKD’s novel takes its characters outside their shell existence and avoids the heavy-handed Garden metaphors in favor of social-activist, youth-revolution paranoia, which, while just as socio-politically stupid, is a lot more entertaining. I’d love to see a Truman sequel about his adjusting to whatever sort of life is outside his dome (actually a town just a few minutes from where I grew up in Florida), but director Peter Weir was too concerned with turning the fall of man into some sort of righteous morality tale. Whatever.

Anyway, as much as I love Blade Runner (it's one of my half dozen favorite movies ever), PKD needs a great adaptation. Blade Runner is a great movie, and certainly the greatest science fiction film ever, but it’s only a middling adaptation of what PKD wrote. Linklater’s ability to mix surrealism, philosophy, paranoia and period detail suggests he might be the one to deliver a movie that matches the sort of the Buchner-esque blend of madness, paranoia, druggy, and tripped-out sci-fi psychosis in which PKD specialized.

Friendly advice on a giant gorilla

An astute friend of mine had some none-too-complimentary words about King Kong. I missed out on seeing it last night, but an email he wrote this morning adds to my earlier worries:

I'm not a movie critic ... but I could simply not wait for this to be over. The best thing I can say is this thing was MADE for Mystery Science Theatre 3000. If you watch it like that --high comedy. Otherwise -- my intestines were trying to wrap around my
brain stem.

Another friend suggested wisely that the "intestines killing their owner by brain stem suffocation" might actually make a pretty decent horror film. Better than Boa VS. Python anyway.

Nevermind the bow tie, Will knows from ANWR

George Will drops a bunker-buster on ANWR protesting collectivists in his column today, giving them a solid round of pummeling that finishes with this:

For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag. Such people use environmental causes and rhetoric not to change the political climate for the purpose of environmental improvement. Rather, for them, changing the society's politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.

The unending argument in political philosophy concerns constantly adjusting society's balance between freedom and equality. The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality.

People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government. Government says the constant enlargement of its supervising power is necessary for the equitable or efficient allocation of scarce resources.

Therefore, one of the collectivists' tactics is to produce scarcities, particularly of what makes modern society modern -- the energy requisite for social dynamism and individual autonomy. Hence collectivists use environmentalism to advance a collectivizing energy policy. Focusing on one energy source at a time, they stress the environmental hazards of finding, developing, transporting, manufacturing or using oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear power.

It's worth reading, but I'll add this. Collectivist scalliwags are undoubtedly the root of the modern enviromentalist scourge, but there are also an awful lot of genuine believers in the necessity of caring for the planet. For myriad reasons, the free-marketers haven't done the best job of communicating not just that progressive environmentalism hurts people from an academic economist's standpoint, but from that it also is more likely to hurt the planet by placing either indifferent, incompetent or outright malicious leaders in charge of its care. Private property rights promote good stewardship of resources; collective ownership creates incentives for abuse. The modern environmental movement, however earnest in their goals, has it entirely backwards.

A dubious Munich

Fresh off my long-winded babble about the confusing relationship between politics and aesthetics, I’ll point to a couple of interesting articles on Spielberg’s new film, Munich. When the film was first announced, I was willing to defend it, at least tentatively, because I don’t see anything terribly wrong with recognizing the moral cost of even the most necessary violence.

Terrorists deserve to be hunted down, but if you think that those who have to do the hunting—especially in peaceful, urban areas and face-to-face situations, as the Mossad retributions apparently occurred—won’t be changed in doing it, you’re n some sort of ultra righteous dreamworld that doesn’t recognize that even the most justified violent response has a cost.

Spielberg and Kushner, however, seem to think that not only does violent retribution have a cost, it has the same cost as the original terrorist acts. Killing is killing is killing is probably the best way to summarize the attitude Leon Wieseltier accuses the movie of in The New Republic, and while that might make for some classically symmetrical dramatic writing, it’s not even remotely decent politics or morality.

But if Wieseltier’s piece is accurate, the film is probably exceedingly well made, in that overwhelming, sentimental bombast way of Spielberg’s, and those of us who appreciate his cinematic marvels—I thought War of the Worlds was damn near perfect until the final moments turned out to be all gooey cornball sentiment and none of the harsh terror of the first hour and a half—will probably appreciate being once again “blown away” in classic Spielbergian style, despite Wieseltier’s objections.

So what does one do with a film likely to be dominated by both an asinine moral symmetry and spectacular filmmaking? The temptation for many in the field of political and cultural commentary is to condemn it, but I think it’s possible to condemn a film’s political attributes without condemning the film. It’s a tough thing, to praise showmanship and denigrate the show, but I think it’s important for both conservatives and liberals to find ways to, er, love the art and hate the message.

PS: This NYT article gets a similar negative response from an Israeli diplomat, though the “official” response from the country is summarized as, “It's not so great for Israel, but so what?”

King Kong worries

I'm seeing Kong tomorrow evening, and I'm honestly not expecting all that much. Undoubtedly it will be good, but I also suspect it will be overpraised. An Ain't It Cool reviewer recently compared it to Titanic, and while I liked that film more than many, it was highly overrated -- a leaden boy/girl story punctuated by spectacular disaste effects (it's James Cameron; go figure). The metacritic score for Kong currently stands at an ape sized 87, suggesting the sort of critical fawing usually reserved for, say, gay cowboy love stories, but what worries me most is that my favorite critic, Slate's David Edelstein, called Kong:

"A spectacular three-hankie tragic love story--sometimes dumb and often clunky and always pretty cornball, but just about irresistible."

And while I can appreciate clunky and cornball during a first viewing in a theater (it's the reason I came out of all three Star Wars prequels goofy and exhilirated), it's those qualities that bite back in further pondering and viewing. Those Star Wars prequels were just about irresistable themselves, at least with midnight crowds and years of light saber swinging geek-fetish-dreams swirling in my head, but after the opening day residue dried up, they all turned out to be pretty rotten, even the sorely overpraised Revenge of the Sith. Titanic left me similarly thrilled when I walked out; now I look back and defend it against the backlashers but don't see much more than a hokey romance and a cruiseboat's cashload of watery film wizardry.

Art and politics, part 3932939564320943287

Via About Last Night, an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education dealing with the competition between aesthetics and ideology in art. Here’s the gist:

The death of Susan Sontag, in 2004, served to point out just how much things had changed in the critical world since the annus mirabilis of 1964, when the Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl and Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation" appeared. She spray-painted on the walls of the academy the incendiary line, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Railing against imposing theories of interpretation on the "sensuous surface" of art, she rejected the New Criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, and other attempts to inflict meaning on art. Pleasure was her principle. Forty years on, what we have 24/7 in most English departments is the complete and total ascendancy of hermeneutics. Instead of the erotics of art, we've got the neurotics of art: the meaning-mongering of interpretation for its own sake.

As an arts writer for various politically and ideologically oriented publications, this is something that weighs heavily on my mind. How does one approach politically? Should politics even be a factor, and does all art have some socio-political or cultural statement which can be ground down to bare bone of meaning?

There is, of course, no certain answer. Politics an art are in a marriage of both necessity and convenience, and the two have their share of regal gala dances and domestic disputes alike—no marriage is without its pleasures or its difficulties. The thing is, I think, to remain open to the myriad ways in which art, even shallow pop art, works to both dazzle the senses and deliver—or at least reinforce—political and cultural meanings and values. Not to be too postmodern about it, but there is no one right way.

Most Americans experience art (or at least pop art) as an escape, a frivolous bit of throwaway time designed to provoke a mild tingling in their senses and little else. And as an occasional critic of pop art, I feel it’s my duty to respond to that desire to be thrilled, wowed, entertained and generally diverted from electric bills, cramped apartments, annoying clients and paper work. A friend once asked me about a movie, and I began to explain its various interleaved motifs and he stopped and said, “Yeah, OK, but is it any good?” Critics and elitists may quibble over the simplicity of such a question, but it’s what readers want to know, and just as it’s rude to refuse to answer a question from a friend, it’s snobbery to avoid giving readers a straight answer to that question, as best as is possible.

But there is another component to the job of critic as well, and that’s the way in which, in the processing of answering “is it good?” a critic can gently, constructively guide the reader into a fuller appreciation or understanding of the way a piece of art works. Critics, I think, often like to think of themselves as guardians of taste, upholding all that is worthy and cruelly degrading all that deserves their vitriol. And certainly, this is tempting, especially when dealing with film, much of which is basically superficial trash (there I go doing it myself). But writing about the arts and entertainments of the world, we serve a more important purpose, and that’s to give the average viewer, or listener, or whatever, a boost in their ability to see the larger implications of a work. In many ways, it’s what science reporters and political analysts do: they are experts in their areas, toiling daily in the minutiae of their fields so that their readers can benefit from their expertise. It is not that we critics are necessarily blessed with Good Taste and Important Ideas, it is that we have decided to train ourselves, through schooling and through far too much reading, watching and discussion, in how to quickly grasp the breadth of a work. We have seen all the director’s films, read the interviews and followed the set reports so that the reader doesn’t have to. It is then our responsibility to deliver a verdict based on all this in an entertaining and elucidating manner. Critics may be the groundskeepers of taste, but they are far from its owners.

But back to the question of meaning-mongering vs. aesthetic appreciation: as groundskeepers of the art world, it’s not our job to impose meaning on our patrons and visitors, but to suggest possibilities. So art may seem political, or may have some exuberant, sensuous component; it’s the critic’s job, then, to parse out what’s most prominent in a work and then help that become apparent to the viewer, reader, listener, etc…

Understandably, this is somewhat ancillary to the more academic debate in the article (you’ll find little more than fragments of "theory" in most mainstream film criticism), but within the sphere of popular commentary (popular being a term that does not describe this blog), there are clear parallels, and, I think, the issue at hand is that the battle lines between aesthetics and ideas do not have to be so firmly marked. For once, diversity, or at least an openness to a variety of ideas, may be the key.

In review

Blogging regularly is clearly not my forte, but since no one seems to read these little missives, it's not exactly a major deal. Right. So, updates:

Mission: Make Tom Cruise Not a Wacko Again -- M:I3 might actually be the ticket, if this trailer is indication. Highlights: Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a cool ass bad guy, Tom Cruise swinging, jumping, and generally trying very, very hard to look tough, the 14th St. Bridge, which seperates me from the Hill, fast cars, pretty girls and Laurence Fishbourne as, er, someone. I'll see this movie, and bets are, you will too.

Let me tell me where you can stick your "how much" -- Unsurprisingly, Ross says "government spending isn't going to get dramatically smaller any time soon," and then goes on to preach the gospel of big(ish) government conservatism. Well allow me to retort. I'm willing to recognize that big government isn't going to magically dissappear overnight. And I'm also willing to admit that the better bet at this point is that a complacent American public that thinks the government's job is to provide for them isn't going to allow, much less pressure, any serious moves toward a deregulated state with a weak central authority. But just because the national mood for policy is swinging in a certain direction doesn't mean that conservatives ought to grab hold of the big government pendulum and let it swing wildly away. Conservatism isn't simply about producing good results, it's about maintaining the integrity of the process used to get them. So even forgeting that massive centralized spending won't achieve what it intends, conservatives ought to resist it purely out of malice towards the way it attempts to achieve those ends, however good they might be. Of course, we'd be having another debate if big government actually had a minute chance of really working, but it doesn't. And don't even get me started on global warming.

Everyone's favorite cross dressing, bondage-loving, movie-making brothers -- I was impressed by The Wachowski's first film, Bound, which is truly the slickly-fashioned, theatrical, lesbian noir its reputation suggests. From their weird mix of art-deco and modernist set design to their one, short bit of gunplay which foreshadowed their now legendary lobby shooting scene in The Matrix, the film was an excellent preview of their talent. And although Revolutions is best left unwatched and undiscussed, I'm very much looking forward to their next film, V for Vendetta, for which they wrote and directed second unit (action scenes). The trailer is inspired, and geek Harry is batshit psyched about the preview of the film he showed at a recent festival. Harry is known for overenthusiastic reviews of genre films before their release (see his early praise of Godzilla), but he's also a fairly good barometer of the geek jolt value of any given movie. This is a movie I really want to be good, and now I have reason to believe it might be.

Three point shot -- On one more geek note, Sci-fi's The Triangle was far better than it should've been, with a great cast and a surprisingly decent script. This is all relative, of course, and I'm probably more thrilled with it than I would be if it weren't a Sci-Fi channel original. However, Eric Stoltz, Bruce Davison and the strangely smokin' Catherine Bell all deliver serious performances rather than simply collecting a paycheck. Sam Neill doesn't have much to do and the guy who played the hot research prof was kind of a schmoe, but it was, on the whole, a fairly enjoyable bit of genre fluff, even managing to wring a bit of emotion out of some of Bell's scenes with her lost-in-another-dimension mother. It makes me wonder, though, how these semi-respectable performers - Stoltz, you'll remember, was in Pulp Fiction and was once considered something of an indie darling - must feel being given what they know at least appears to be Z-grade cable sci-fi garbage. Even if it's pretty decent stuff, and even if Sci-Fi pimps the famous producer's names of Dean Devlin and Brian Singer at every opportunity, most folks won't suspect that it's actually a relatively entertaining, amusingly scripted series. Whatever the real artistic value of the program, it looks like niche-channel trash, and that can't be good for the rep, which, for an actor, is a pretty serious thing. I wonder the same thing about the stars of the honest-to-God brilliant Battlestar Galactica, which everyone outside the nerd world surely assumes is goofy, stupid and juvenile.

The Me-O-Meter -- And on a final note, NRO gratiously published my take on the two recent Wal-Mart documentaries today, in which I attempt to sort through the film's competing progressive and free-market appeals. I'll have reviews of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Syriana and probably Kong Kong up within the next several days, so stay tuned, or refreshed, or whatever it is one does with this here internet thing.

magazine money

The Atlantic has lost money for all of living memory, and The New Yorker was unprofitable for most of the last two decades. So are all the little weeklies. Call it cultural philanthropy or call it vanity publishing, but without rich guys willing to take financial baths, magazines of literary and political journalism and belles lettres would scarcely exist in America.

Yep.

Me VS. The Terminator

I’ve always been known as a contentious fellow, but as of last Thursday, December 1^st, I’ve chosen to knock heads with an opponent of blockbuster proportions – literally. That’s right, I’m taking on that hulking tree-trunk of a legislator, the Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his recent decision to sign a law barring the sale of certain violent video games to minors. The Orange County Register has my take on why the law – far from helping parents -- actually provides an incentive for them to avoid parental responsibility. Free registration may be required to view the article at the Register; the article can also be viewed at CEI’s website.

In the shit

In the words of the star, "Yeah!"