Techogeekery

Since I started reading Pitchfork five or six years ago, the site has gone from sneering arbiter of high class indie punk aesthetic to subculturally dominant pusher of ever stranger and more baseless whims of taste, often in the form of head scratching prose. But every now and then, one of the forkers still manage to get something right: Chris Dahlen, for example, in his recent column. It argues that great, dominant writing about pop culture--games, music, and film--has struggled because "pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology."

He analogizes today's tech culture to the 60s drug culture that produced Hunter S. Thompson, and, hilariously, decries the decline of Wired:

Tech magazines are digging deeper ruts in fallow soil. Wired's devolving into Cosmo for geeks: It hypes and glosses over tech the way Cosmo turns the most spectacular human experience, the orgasm, into bulletpoints.

A longtime nerd friend and I were grumbling over the magazine's downslide (as nerd friends are prone to do), and I noted that where the magazine used to give us consistently fascinating stories about the way technology is changing lives and creating the future as we watch, it now seems content to deliver little more than a shallow selection of product reviews and hype-laded features about porn and global warming. Maybe the smart money these days says that porn and global warming are the future, or at least the future of technology. But when I want apocalyptic visions I'll read Revelation, or maybe Mother Jones.

Anyway. Part of me thinks that Dahlen is right, that we lack the vision to see beyond our LCDs, to hear beyond our cellphones and iPods, to think beyond a Google search. We haven't learned to articulately communicate about the experience of technology because technology and communication and thought have all merged into the same thing. I've surgically replaced my hand with a Blackberry. My life has a personal soundtrack, on shuffle. I blog, therefore I am.

But maybe it’s more complicated than that. Maybe Dahlen and others are looking at it from the wrong perspective. In the old, pre-tech revolution world, we relied on individual writers to provide those powerful voices of experience Dahlen is seeking. In tech-saturated modernity, though, maybe it’s no longer the writers who communicate, but the mediums themselves. No single voice can--or even needs--to capture the digression-filled infoglut of the blogosphere or the digital overload of the iPod and Xbox life, because the technology is the experience and the expression of it. The widespread availability of technology means that it’s no longer necessary to crudely (if sometimes excitingly, memorably) convert an experience into words to disseminate it to the masses; everyone can tap in directly. Plug in. Turn on. Power up. Don't just read the experience, live it.

Babbling

In Amores Perros, Alejandro González Iñárritu synthesized Tarantino, Altman, Scorsese and Cassavetes to exhilarating effect. The sprawling, interwoven stories; the non-linear sequencing; the underclass violence; the documentary realism—very little of what the director showed us was truly new, but the combination was undoubtedly exciting, intense, even pointed and poignant. Predating Crash by a good five years, the film spun off a web of vaguely connected stories from a single car crash to look at the way class differences, love (or what passes for it), violence, and friendship—even with pets—alternately connect and separate disparate groups of people living in the messy, often perilous, confines of Mexico City. It was a vivid, if sometimes brutal, dissection of society that let the guts all hang out.

With 21 Grams, Iñárritu took pushed his approach even further—some would say well past its breaking point. No one would argue against the performances—Watts, Penn, and Del Toro all tower, bellowing and emoting with end of life intensity. But the movie’s fractured structure—no one scene follows another in the timeline—and unrelentingly depressing tone put off some viewers. Like Darren Aranofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, the movie was a harrowing tour de force from a promising sophomore director, an expertly crafted emotional assault that seemed determined to drown viewers in a pool of sorrow. Perhaps rightly, some were bothered when the film wouldn’t let them up for air.

Now, Iñárritu is back with the Brad Pitt-starring Babel, and from the looks of things, he’s still clutching the same bag of downer movie tricks. Apple has the trailer, and as expected, it’s soulful and dourly gorgeous. Despite agreeing with some of the criticisms of 21 Grams—it could’ve used some trimming and a little more linearity—I’m a fan of Iñárritu’s work, and Babel looks like another addition to what promises to be the most interesting, maybe even the best, fall movie season since 1999.

It's All About 'Pre-Awareness'

The lesson we can all take from this is that Hollywood will consider any idea just as long as they don't have to come up with it themselves. As Stephanie Zacharek says in her Salon review of Miami Vice, "Hollywood knows exactly what the public wants -- until it doesn't."

Ice Cold

While defending his occasional jabs at Michael Mann, Ross Douthat writes:

I like Mann, really I do, but I would like him a lot more if his movies were just narrative and atmosphere. But alas, Mann does have an idea, and that idea is the celebration of masculine cool - and, by extension, men who take their own coolness way, way too seriously. Mann worships the cool people; he can barely be bothered with everyone else.

Okay—no argument there, and no secret either: I wasn’t the only critic that felt it necessary to drop a “too cool for school” into my review of Miami Vice. But, pardon me for being dense when I ask: how is Douthat's comment a criticism? Mann’s deification of manly cool is precisely what makes him such a directorial badass. Where so many directors are content to half heartedly throw some cool-associated clichés on screen—shades indoors, a cadre of hot girls, fast cars and rippling biceps—Mann’s films exude cool. They eat, sleep, breathe, walk, talk and live the stuff—they’re cool incarnate. Miami Vice is probably his most focused study on abstract cool yet, and that’s exactly its appeal. Don't the movies deserve a director who doesn't just show us cool, but makes us feel it as well?

But forget this line of argument. What I want to know is how Douthat can knock Mann while defending Shamalamadingdong. To paraphrase Jamie Foxx: There's argument for blogosphere's sake, and then there's which way is up.

Miami Vice Review in NRO

I’m in NRO this morning with a review of director Michael Mann’s new Mann-tastic (which is not the same thing, I'll note, as fantastic) movie, Miami Vice. Here's an appetizer:

What’s in a name? For Michael Mann, a lot. For more than two decades, the director has followed his last name’s lead and muscled into multiplexes with serious movies about serious men. Smartly tapping into the alpha-male psyche, Michael Mann gets brainy about brawn. Now, with Miami Vice, he’s let loose yet another man crush (or should that be Mann crush?) on yet another pair of swaggering, surly rogues, this time played by Hollywood diva boys Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. And once again, Mann’s men are too cool for school, blazing through the film in six-figure sports cars and luxury speedboats while dolled up in Armani. In Miami Vice, the clothes make the men, and the men make the movie.

Read the whole thing at National Review Online.

So Ronery

The avid moviegoer is the consumate loner, and many of film history's best directors have been accused of being tyrants on set. So maybe it's not such a surprise that, in 1973, Kim Jong Il wrote a 330 page treatise on film, harping on working class values and the emptiness of capitalist film productions. To which I respond, "whatevs, dude." Filmbrain has the madly fascinating goods.

The Michael Mann Shower

My review is forthcoming, but here's an amusing passage from an AICN review of Miami Vice:

My one complaint, which is going to sound odd, is that I didn’t like the sex scenes in the film. Not that I was offended by them in any way – just that they seemed to come out of nowhere at times when I’d much rather be immersed in the story. And I’d just like to point out that I shower every god damned day of my life. Every day. These guys, they shower like once every three weeks – and every time they do, some beautiful naked woman strolls in to interrupt. Seriously, Mann.

Pretty accurate, I'd say. Meanwhile, A.O. Scott does a little bit of the old reporting and digs up this fun stat:

The actual operating budget for the Miami police department in fiscal year 2005 was around $100 million, a good $50 million less than the reported production costs of “Miami Vice.”

Up In Here, Up In Here

One of the fun things about media criticism is cataloging the various ways journalists label individuals and organizations in those helpful little comma separated indicators that always follow introductions. Most of the time, you get pablum like "National Review, an influential conservative opinion magazine," or "Superman, the iconic comic book hero," which pretty much tell you nothing you don't already know. But occassionally you can find unexpected absurdist gems like the one from this New York Times article which describes actor/rapper DMX as simply "the dog obsessed rapper from Yonkers." Well. Okay. I suppose it's accurate. But somehow this strikes me as akin to labeling Bush the Elder as "the broccoli-hating former politician from Texas."

Stop the Violins

This is inexcusably late, but let me second Ross Douthat's recommendation that everyone read Rod Dreher’s missive on his years as a film critic for the New York Post. It’s titled, rather succinctly, “Film critics are not like other people.” Indeed. As Ross says, his most interesting point is about the evolution of his reactions to filmic violence:

In major markets, critics will see between five and 10 films a week... [This] leads to critics placing far too much value on novelty. I'll never forget how staggered I was to watch an audience filled with most of the major film critics in North America giving a film festival standing ovation to that sicko Todd Solondz' film "Happiness," which, among other things, featured a grown man's attempt to drug and anally rape a child played for comedy. (I seem to recall that some reviews later appreciatively noted the skill with which the director manipulated the viewer into rooting for the rapist to succeed.) Were these critics perverse? Maybe. But I think that reaction can be explained mostly by the fact that the director showed them something they hadn't seen before, and did so cleverly. Another example: I noticed that when I quit regular reviewing, which happened around the time I had my first kid, I became a lot more aware of the degree of sex and violence in many mainstream movies. I professed shock to my wife, who told me that she thought I had simply grown numb to it because of constant exposure, and was now like a heavy smoker who had quit, and was shocked to discover once again that things had tastes.

Now, I watch a fair number of movies, many of which might be described as somewhat explicit, depending on one’s sensibility. In addition to being more or less a free-speech absolutist, in the way that we libertarians so often are, I’ve never been much of a moralist when it comes to violent or sexual imagery (though tone and suggested meaning are another story). As a teenager, I rebelled pretty strongly against my fairly conservative family and community’s condemnation of onscreen sex and violence, so much so that, like many a geek gorehound, I actively sought out and praised the stuff, if only for its audacity. So it’s not really a stretch to say that watching such stuff never really bothered me.

Or at least for a while. As I started watching movies not just more often, but more intently, and subsequently began writing about them regularly for college classes and as the critic for my school paper, something unexpected happened. Instead of becoming desensitized, I became, oddly enough, resensitized. I became more aware of the fact that, when I saw someone get blown away on screen, I might be seeing something pretty cool—but I was also witnessing a murder, even if only a fictional one. Individual acts of violence have become more shocking, more revolting; I find myself cringing and turning from the screen on a regular basis. I still have a higher tolerance for such images than many of my more sensitive (read: female) friends, but over the past few years it has become more uncomfortable and less breathlessly exciting to watch such stuff.

Now, this isn’t to say that I’ve come to regard onscreen violence as some sort of grave evil or that I’ve shied from my free speech fanaticism. On the contrary, I still very much believe in one’s absolute right to free expression, no matter how distasteful I find it, and I also still maintain that art is better judged by its creativity, complexity, and creation of meaning than by content without context. But what’s happened, I think, is that in being forced, in my capacity as a film student and then critic, to thoroughly detail my reactions to what I’m seeing in a film, I’ve become more aware of how death-charged so much modern filmmaking is. That doesn’t mean it can’t be exciting, even cool, at times—but it does suggest a lingering societal obsession with shallow, violent thrills as well as with praising those who make taking life look so appealing.

Brevity is the Soul of What?

The best writers at The New York Times are the movie critics. No, not Tony and Manohla--the capsule movie critics, or so says Slate's Jack Shafer. Or, in the parlance he praises, "Pithy capsule critics ply wit and snark to devilish effect."

Glass Houses and Computers are the Wave of the Future

In the Wall Street Journal this morning, John Miller has a sharp little piece the original dystopian science fiction novel, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 “We.” It describes the novel’s fraught journey out of censorship, and it does a fine job of tracing the origins of other dystopian classics like 1984 and Brave New World back to Zamyatin's book. And who knows—maybe "We" even inspired George Lucas. It certainly looks that way:

The characters in "We" have numbers instead of names--the book's protagonist is D-503. In Randall's translation, they are called "ciphers" (in other versions, they are "numbers"). They wear matching uniforms and shave their heads. "The Table of Hours" dictates their lives: It tells them when to wake, when to work and when to sleep. "One sees oneself as part of an enormous, powerful unit," says D-503. "Such precise beauty: not one extraneous gesture, twist or turn."

This sounds like nothing if not a description of Lucas’ THX-1138, which, along with Brazil, is one of two or three totalitarian dystopia movies to create a convincing, immersive cinematic world.

Miller also writes that:

In "We," the Guardians do the watching--a task made easier by the fact that everyone lives in glass houses, literally. Curtains may be lowered only at scheduled times for sex, which, because there's no marriage, is rationed through a system of pink slips. Promiscuity is more or less encouraged because it prevents ciphers from creating personal bonds that would conflict with their duties to the One State.

This seems interesting to me. I’m reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress right now, and one of the things that strikes me continually is how accurately the book portrays the future of computers, yet how it misses some things that we take totally for granted. In one sense, it gets the insta-searching, database-perfect memory of computers pretty precisely, the way they tend toward networks like the internet, which acts as an omnipresent catalog of all digital knowledge and spits back answers. But in Moon, the interface is through the phone system, and computing power is still absurdly impractical for the public—the primary computer in the book is a room sized monstrosity owned by the government while individuals aren’t even entirely aware such things exist. But this reflects what Heinlein knew, and thus, what he extrapolated on.

Similarly, in “We,” security isn’t electronic or digital in anyway—it’s accomplished by means of literal, physical, glass walls. The effect is the same, but the technology is laughably outdated. To me, this points to the way science fiction often acts as punditry as much as narrative. For all the concern about the genre’s techno-geekery, much science fiction (or speculative fiction, as many of its authors prefer) is concerned as much or more with societal development as spaceships and laser beams. More broadly, this suggests something about the dismally repetitive nature of society; no matter what the technology, civilizations will always tend toward the same flaws. Fortunately, there will always be science fiction writers to notice these flaws and expound upon their potential abuses.

I'll Trade a Loaf of Bread and A Dozen Eggs For That Critic

Screenville’s Harry Tuttle, in the comments section, asked me to expand on “the usefulness of markets in determining value” and how that relates to film criticism. I work for a pro-freee market economic think tank. I’m not an economist by training (I do other sorts of work for the organization), but by my job's nature, I end up reading my share of material related to business practice and economic policy.

So here's the thing:

Businesses exist, above all, to make a profit. Profit is made when you sell a good or a service at a price higher than what it cost you to produce or acquire it. The going price for that product or service is, essentially, a negotiated value between the seller and buyer. In other words, the price tells us what something is worth. Obviously, it's bad business--irresponsible business, in fact--to continue funding an individual, project, or department that loses money.

A film critic, like every writer or division of a newspaper or for-profit pub, has some responsibility, then, to be profitable for his employer. Why keep a critic on if he's losing money? That's bad business, plain and simple, and while one might argue that a good critic ought to be kept on for reasons other than his profitability (we need to support good writing, further the public interest, etc etc), I don't entirely buy it. Sure, some loss period may be necessary for the critic to build an audience. But the only way a for-profit publication will really ever be able to support good writing for long is if it makes a profit.

It’s probably impossible to judge the dollar value of any particular staff writer, but what this suggests to me is that critics have some responsibility to consider their audience when writing. Does that mean modifying their opinions to what they think audiences want to hear? Of course not; not only is that not helpful—it’s futile. Brandon Gray does a pretty accurate box office analysis each week, but he’s still tossing darts at the wall (granted, he’s a pretty well-practiced dart tosser). One can’t predict the public taste and shouldn’t attempt to. But a critic—especially in a for-profit publications—cannot simply ignore those who he’s writing for entirely in favor of his own interests and idiosyncrasies. A public platform to opine is not a birthright; it’s a blessing, and it requires one to remember the public. As Tyler Cowen would say: Markets for everything.

Have the Producers of Lost No Shame?

I haven't spent much time digging through the net for clues in The Lost Experience which, for those that don't know, is the ongoing online game that apparently will reveal clues about the show and help tell its story (provided you actually believe it has one). But I have to say, this short YouTube clip of a, um, "audience question" at the Lost Comic Con panel kind of made me grin. Whether or not the producers have any idea what they're doing with the show, they clearly have an idea of what they're doing to its fans, and they seem willing to both lampoon their shady narrative dodges and wring every bit of sadistic pleasure they can out of teasing us information-starved fans mercilessly. Interestingly, EW's PopWatch claims that this clip points to the notion that the island may exist outside of time. This seems like a reasonable possibility to me, but I don't see what in the clip would suggest that.

Be--Excited! Be! Be! Excited!

Just take a few minutes to marvel at this head spinning lineup of trailers: The Science of Sleep, Renaissance, The Children of Men, The Fountain, and The Prestige. Is that not intense? Can you not feel your brain warping and expanding and melting down and reforming only to explode, Scanners-style, with untold lattices of newly-formed neural pathways? Well get ready for more than just the trailers: All of these movies are coming out between now and the end of October. Between these flicks and A Scanner Darkly, this may well prove to be the year for complicated, mature science-fiction/genre movies. As per usual, it looks like theater screens will be dead for the last half of August and the first part of September, filled with dreck like this and this. But the back to school season always provides the doldrums of the cinematic calendar, and as fansof Alien 3 (all 5 of them) know, with every death comes renewal and rebirth.

The Job of a Critic

A.O. Scott’s recent piece on the yawning gap between movie critics and their audiences (uh-oh—better warn Matt Yglesias about a rise in inequality!) is a somewhat ungainly essay, a winding, tangent-laden affair that builds into an empty puff of nothingness. At its most basic, though, it’s a question: What is the job of the movie critic? Scott doesn’t have an answer, and there certainly isn’t one “correct” definition of what a critic is supposed to do. There may, however, be a few broad roles into which a critic might fit.

On one hand, many critics serve merely a consumer guide. They’ll tell you if a movie was good or bad and, if you’re lucky, a little bit about why. A few critics serve as sort of movie diarists, chronicling their own mental topography through their personal reactions to films. Others seek to interpret film using formal means, often with a larger desire to talk holistically about film, or at least narrative filmmaking, as a medium. Some critics write about film’s cultural relevance, what it says about politics, gender roles, and societal institutions—they’re armchair sociologists. And many critics, of course, tend to blend these elements together—maybe with a particular emphasis—but with a willingness to tackle film from a variety of perspectives.

The subquestion, I suppose, in Scott’s essay was about what, if any, responsibility a critic has to the general moviegoing public. This is a tough question for many critics, and for someone like me especially. Most critics would bristle at the thought of having to serve the masses. Pandering, they’d call it, and dismiss the whole idea. As a firm believer in the usefulness of markets in determinging value, however, I'm not as sure. Now, while I have no love for the inscrutable non-taste of the moviegoing masses, I find myself wondering if a critic doesn’t have some obligation to them. Newspapers and magazines are businesses, after all, and they have an obligation to sell papers. A critic without a public is hardly worth whatever investment—however tiny—his or her publication has made in his or her writing.

There are nuances and exceptions. Partisan political journals like The New Republic, The Nation, or National Review don’t make money and don’t expect to. In cases like those, the critic’s job, as with any other writer’s, is to contribute intelligently to the publication’s discourse on arts and culture. This, I suspect, is why publications like these helped birth some of our more thoughtful, respected film critics.

This is not to say either that a critic always has to have a public that likes him or agrees with him. Does anyone really know what the hell Armond White is talking about half the time? I mean, maybe I really did fail to see the virtue of Biker Boyz, but would it be too much to ask for him to, you know, explain … anything. Regardless, he’s a great example of critic who has found an audience by being incendiary, even unlikable. Not to mention batshit insane.

When Scott writes that he and other critics frequently wonder at box office receipts and ask “what is wrong with you people,” he’s not entirely kidding. I hear this sort of talk not infrequently; many critics do have a disdain for the ticket-buying public, and even for their emailing readership. And while I sympathize with this to an extent—it is frustrating when so many people continually ignore cinematic gems in favor of silver screen fool’s gold—I think it’s best to take this not as reason to condescend to the uneducated masses, but instead as a reason to try to pleasantly, helpfully, enthusiastically impart both passion and knowledge.

For, in the end, it seems to me that the best description of a film critic is as a public teacher, one whose job is to be interesting, helpful, available (answer those emails!) and knowledgeable. One hopes that film critics are also film enthusiasts who enjoy not just the entertainment part of film but the intellectual side as well. The job, then, is to spread that enthusiasm, helping readers both to understand film and to enjoy doing so.

Blogging Liberal-tarians

Are the Wonkettes closet libertarians? After reports like these, they certainly seem to be hinting. And, after all, it makes a bit of sense: Libertarians, it's true, may not have much sway at the polls, but they (we?) put the “party” back in political party. Now, it seems, the Wonkettes are practically handing their site over to that bastion of government-hating outrage, Reason magazine. Last week, it was editor in chief Nick Gillespie, this week, it’s Reason’s brand spankin’ new political reporter Dave Wiegel. Now all we need is an official Wonkette coming-out party. No, not that kind.

Playing Nice

On the other hand, maybe Ruth Franklin just needs to give up on book criticism and read the movie pages, which regularly burst with awesomely savage prose like this line from Joe Morgenstern's WSJ review of Lady in the Water:

This cloying piece of claptrap sets a high-water mark for pomposity, condescension, false profundity and true turgidity -- no small accomplishment for the man whose last two features were the deadly duo "Signs" and "The Village."

No one could possibly confuse this bit of invective with "nice reviewing," and for that, I say thank goodness.

Why Does J.J. Abrams Hate Story?

AICN gives us a couple of hush-hush factoids about the upcoming season of Lost. You can go read them for yourself; they won’t really spoil anything. But I’ll just cut through all the Lost producerese and give you the translation: More neat questions. No answers.

I’m on board with Lost, at least for now, but the season two finale was a pretty big letdown. We know now, of course, that the island isn’t purgatory and that it seems to exist in normal time (or in a location where, at least, it can affect normal time). We can also infer that its location(due to the polar bears and where the blip came from) has something to do with the poles.

But after 48 hours of TV, that’s about it.

This would bother me less except for the fact that this is a J.J. Abrams creation, and with M:I3, Abrams seemed entirely uninterested in the normal structure of narrative. Like Lost, that movie was filled with taut, gripping moments, polished sequences crafted with maximum dramatic intensity in mind—but with without any real significance to the larger story. And the longer you think about it, there was barely a story there at all. I’m not an Alias fan, but I’ve heard similar complaints about that show too. His stuff is so precision-built from moment to moment that it’s tough to look away. But designing a million rooms to perfection only goes so far if you can’t built a house.

New York Reads

No time to delve into elaborate criticisms, unedited ramblings, and typos as usual, so I’ll just recommend these three articles and promise to comment sometime in the future.

Our boy Tony Scott adds his two cents to the what do critics do debate. I think, by the informal rules of this blog, I’m obligated to comment on this. And later I will. You can occupy your time till then with the following articles.

Drama nerds (especially those, like myself, concerned with drama as text rather than as show) should rejoice at this Tim Parks article on Beckett in The New York Review of Books. In typical NYROB lit-geek fashion, it’s long, intricate, and pretty wonderful. Dig the close readings, kids:

Even [Beckett's] language aligns itself with this imprisoning environment as groups of words are repeated as though to form the walls that close Murphy in: "eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off" is mirrored by "eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off," while in between "a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect" faces "medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect." Those compound, hyphenated adjectives—medium-sized, north- western—reinforce the sense of entrapment, making the irony that Murphy's room might "command" a view even heavier.

If passages like that don't make you sweat like a double major word geek in a beer-fueled dorm debate during finals week, well, you're probably a well-adjusted human who has no business reading this blog.

And returning in the New York Times, Janet Maslin makes up for all of William Grimes’ sins with this delightfully vicious takedown of the new Shyamalan-worship handbook, The Man Who Heard Voices. Ruth Franklin may believe that there’s not enough bile in book reviewing, but Maslin deploys enough blunt negativity to kill an entire girl scout troop, beginning by calling out the book as a “full length, unintentionally riotous puff book.”

Ahhhkting

Film critics squabble endlessly over how much to talk about visuals and “the language of film,” versus how much to talk about story, narrative, and political subtext. Broken down, the conflict is over whether to focus on story or technique. There is no answer to this, although I doubt that will stop critics from taking sides because, well, that’s what critics do. But what gets lost in this dichotomy is something that too few film writers seriously talk about: acting.

Now, it is true that performers get talked about. In out celebrity obsessed culture (sorry; impossible to finish a post like this without that phrase), we fawn ceaselessly over those adorable collections of neatly sculpted figures, sharp cheekbones, and glistening, perfectly trimmed hair. Like the custom built Italian sports cars they drive, they are fragile, outrageously expensive, rare, and undeniably beautiful. But talking about performers is not at all the same as talking about performing. No, in too much film criticism, acting gets left out, save for a few tossed off phrases about watchability or dullness.

It strikes me as plausible that many critics aren’t entirely certain what, exactly, actors do. Oh sure, they can namedrop Stanislavsky and talk a little about blocking because of its visual nature, maybe drop in a few funny lines about how Keanu Reeves is still a surfer dude. “Whoa.” Ok, fine, but the more quickly we get back to discussing the color palette’s weird mix of sorrow and delirium the better. Film schools and lit programs don’t teach much acting; they teach story and technique, and consequently, that’s what gets talked about.

So it gives me great pleasure to see this excellent, informed post on acting from Lee Siegel over at TNR. It’s not entirely about film acting, but it draws nice, clean lines between film and theatrical performance, explaining, quite rightly, why neither is particularly easier than the other.

Look for the Fork in the Essay

In the most recent issue of The New Republic, Ruth Franklin seems to have written a 5,000 word review of David Mitchell’s fourth novel, Black Swan Green. I say seems to, because what she’s actually done is written a literate, 2,000 word unfinished rant about the state of book criticism and the problems with delicately phrased reviews, and then followed it with a 3,000 word book review. It’s an article that announces itself to be one thing, proceeds for a good while to be that thing, and then suddenly decides to veer off haphazardly toward becoming something else.

The trouble starts before the article begins. Titled “The Trouble With Book Reviewing,” the headline seems to indicate that this will be yet another example of TNR’s contrarian posturing. And for a while, Ruth Franklin takes shots at the play-nice attitude of too many book reviewers, transitioning though a few interesting points before finally landing on the “confessional” problems of reviewing books you love. “Falling in love,” she writes, “even with a book, makes you vulnerable, and most of us are not inclined to parade our vulnerabilities in public.”

And then she stops, waylaid in mid essay, and hops off the contrarian essay train and onto the long-form book review ferry, never bothering to really close out the ideas she starts with. And the review she gives us is a fine one, full of close readings and sharp linguistic interpretation, everything that William Grimes failed to conjure up in the last essay that prompted a post hre on book criticism. But, for the all the review’s strengths, it’s not even tangentially connected to the opening essay, except that she generally steers clear of most of her criticisms of book reviewing. Both pieces—for there really are two, distinct essays here—are quite good. But doesn’t it seem fairly self-evident that an article titled “The Trouble With Book Reviewing” should be primarily about, erm, the troubles with book reviewing? Who fell asleep at the editorial meeting and muttered yes to this schizo pitch?

Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves

Everyone knows about this already, but I'm going to go ahead and remind you anyway. National Review Editor at Large and Reason Editor Nick Gillespie are going to go at it pitbull style in an ultimate libertarian/conservative smackdown. It's being held at the Heritage Foundation, so the conservatives have the home turf, but AFF, the host group, tends to be more libertarian than not, so that evens things out somewhat. I obviously have sympathies on both sides, so I'll be happy no matter who wins.

Color Me Excited (in Black and White)

October is going to be a damn good month for movies with solid black posters bearing white text. Oh, and Martin Scorsese HK remakes where Jack Nicholson tries to add in scenes of his character snorting coke off a stripper's ass. It's pure fiction. I promise.

States of Mind

Philip K. Dick is one of my favorite authors, and I’m pleased to report that after a long series of sometimes intriguing, sometimes entertaining, sometimes awful adaptations of his novels, Richard Linklater has finally made an adaptation that captures the essential spirit of PKD. Read my review of A Scanner Darkly at National Review Online:

A Scanner Darkly is Richard Linklater’s loopy, ramshackle adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel about cops, drugs, and the security state. Whether in offbeat fare like Waking Life or more mainstream work like School of Rock, Linklater often seems to have a soft spot for aimless slackers. Now, with A Scanner Darkly, another quirky, sympathetic ode to the bloodshot ramblings of lunatic losers, he’s officially crowned himself the stoner philosopher king.

Video Bangs Criticism

Clive Thompson, the Wired writer with the best rebuttal to Klosterman's plea for a Lester Bangs of game critics, notes that Bangs himself had some thoughts on the subject, according to this interview excerpt:

Interviewer: Do you think there's a danger of rock 'n' roll becoming extinct?

Bangs: Yeah, sure. Definitely.

Interviewer: What would there be to take its place?

Bangs: Video games. A lot of things we don't like to think about.

As Thompson says, it’s perfect because “it's both prophetic and inadvertantly meta.” Maybe Lester Bangs would’ve been the Lester Bangs of game criticism.

Spoilcast

The spoiler special feature at Slate, a podcast in which Dana Stevens and some other editor discuss recent films in their entirety, free to reveal the ending, is a neat idea. Certainly, it fills a gap in movie criticism that limits mainstream critics from talking about endings—often the most important parts of a movie in terms of creating meaning. It’s a fun listen: Stevens has a good voice for this sort of thing, and of course, she’s a very smart critic. What’s surprising is how casual the conversation is. While discussing Pirates 2, Stevens freely admits to not being able to remember subplots and dismisses the movie as confusing. Editor Bryan Curtis isn’t certain he remembers the name of Orlando Bloom’s character. They talk to each other in the unpracticed rhythms of everyday conversation. This isn’t a criticism, and in fact, I think it’s kind of neat; but it still surprises me a bit to contrast this sort of casual banter with the relatively polished, formal look of the New York Times’ movie minutes or other high profile multimedia broadcasts.

Elsewhere

Over at No More Marriages, Andy Horbal has a useful collection of links to pieces that talk about video game criticism. Clive Thompson’s Wired column is probably the most helpful of the bunch. I suspect I’ll have more to say about this subject later. Also worth noting is Filmbrain’s post the issues involved with mixing political punditry with movie criticism. Not surprisingly, he uses Armond White’s review of The Road to Guantanamo as a jumping off point. And just because it’s a fun, quick read, The Cinetrix still enjoys being a girl with her review of The Devil Wears Prada.

Repeat After Me

I don’t read all that much book criticism, and, contributions to summer reading lists not withstanding, I probably read far fewer books than I should. A three book month is an accomplishment for me, and too many barely reach the loneliest number.

Much of the book criticism I do read is published in explicitly ideological publications; National Review, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Reason, and the like. The goal of publications such as these (at least with regards to political tomes) is, often enough, to filter a book’s arguments through the magazine’s ideological predispositions. For writers of these reviews, taking sides isn’t merely allowed, it is presumed.

Other publications without declared biases—The New York Times, for example (let’s save the debate over their alleged slant for another day, or better yet, never)—face a somewhat different task when reviewing books that take political or ideological stances. But just what is that task? It seems to me that it is to report briefly on what the book says, engage with its announced ideas, attempt to draw out any underdeveloped thoughts or low-lying implications, and assess the effectiveness of its ideas and its presentation using evidence from the text. In other words, it should be criticism.

But too often, we get uninspired drivel like this, William Grimes’ NYT review of former New Republic editor Peter Beinart’s book on liberals and terror, The Good Fight. It is little more than a ho-hum summary of Beinart’s arguments followed by a tidy, wholly unsupported conclusion that Beinart’s book is just nifty. Like a middle school book report, there is no engagement, no implication, no insight—just a single, blurb-ready statement that calls the book “a bracing read, a good two-fisted polemic intended to stiffen the Democratic spine,” and a final note that this might prove difficult, a thought only slightly more revelatory than if A.O. Scott had announced that Quentin Tarantino enjoyed making allusions to other movies.

None of the Times’ movie or music critics could possibly get away with turning in such a passive, unchallenging press release and calling it criticism. I’d have minded far less if the essay was a frothy love letter to Beinart’s undeniable brilliance—as long as it actually engaged the ideas! But we get no such thing. This isn’t criticism; it’s perfunctory repetition.

Michael Douglas Is: Sir Not Appearing In This Film

Whose moronic idea was it to cast Matt Dillon as the straight man? And what the hell is above-the-title Michael Douglas actually doing in this movie? Someone needs to revise the title to just You and Dupree, because I’m sure not going.

Pixel Critics

To massively oversimplify things (as tend to happen in blog posts), book criticism can be divided into two parts: the author’s choices and the reader’s reactions. When writing about film, things get a little more complicated: the critic has to write about the choices of not just the writer and director, but also of the editor, the actor, the cinematographer, the composer, and the entire creative cohort behind the film, in addition, of course, to his own reactions as a viewer. Making this more complicated, we in critic land have no way of absolutely knowing which choices were made by which creative director: Was this shot given its steely tint by Spielberg or Kamisnki? Did Philip Baker Hall choose that line reading, or was it given to him by P.T. Anderson? What’s more, the choices made by the various filmmakers are, in some ways, informed by their reactions to the choices of the other creatives. Things get muddy rather quickly, but nevertheless, it’s the job of the critic to sort through the sprawl of choices and reactions to figure out how those interactions mix with viewer responses to create sensory experience and meaning.

Knowing this, how might one approach criticism in a medium that places heavy emphasis on non-linear interactivity—specifically, video games? Via the internet’s most formidable battle rapping, brown raging blogger, the man known only as “Reihan,” we’ve got at least one suggestion from Esquire’s Chuck Klosterman:

What makes video-game criticism complex is that the action is almost never static. Unlike a film director or a recording artist, the game designer forfeits all autonomy over his creation—he can't dictate the emotions or motives of the characters. Every player invents the future.

[snip]

Video-game criticism should be going … toward the significance of potentiality. Video games provide an opportunity to write about the cultural consequence of free will, a concept that has as much to do with the audience as it does with the art form. However, I can't see how such an evolution could happen, mostly because there's no one to develop into these "potentiality critics." Video-game criticism can't evolve because video-game criticism can't get started.

This is something I have considered before, and I think that Klosterman is generally right. A video game critic wouldn’t just write about the choices of the game designers and the player’s reactions; he or she would also write about the choices made by the game players. What’s signified by the choices that are available? How do the options built into the game allow the player to shape his character, to win or to lose or, with the open ended trend we're seeing in games like Grand Theft Auto, to simply exist? If film critics are essentially Calvinists--everything is preordained!--then video game critics are the Wesleyan-Arminian open theists--not even the creator knows what's going to happen.

And of course, as a highly visual, painstakingly designed medium, the choices made by the game creators would have to factor in as well, as would the reactions of the player—and, possibly, in a multiplayer game, the reactions of other players as well.

Klosterman worries about the problems of marketing video game criticism too. Although I don’t buy Michael Dougherty’s somewhat elitist, overly pessimist take (he must be a Siegel fan), I’ll admit that there’s probably not a major overlap between serious gamers and regular readers of thoughtful criticism. Even smart gamers don’t tend to intellectualize games the way rock music or film fans do, so there’s a bit less of an impetus to find an outlet to publish something that doesn't really exist yet.

Still, I think that as the gaming generation grows older and gaming becomes more ubiquitous amongst those outside the young, bored, and hip set, we’ll see some softening in this area. More importantly, though, I think that good, strong writing—clever, stylish prose bursting with wit and insight—will help develop the market for smart, game-based criticism. Despite Klosterman’s odd thought that whoever pioneers this will get rich (only a writer for a glossy like Esquire would naturally assume that a critic could rake in the cash—if only!), there’s almost always a market for fun, frivolous writing.

"I'd Buy THAT For A Dollar!"

I picked up the special edition of The Mad Dutchmen’s teen heartthrobs in fascist futuristic warfare pic, Starship Troopers, this weekend, and I have to say, a better six dollars has rarely been spent. Along with the first two Blade films, and Verhoeven’s other cheesy sci-fi gut busters Total Recall and Robocop, it’s one of—maybe my favorite—truly trashy movies. I mean, really, there’s just no way to excuse the film on any level. The effects are above par, I suppose, but the action scenes themselves are (purposely, I suspect) limp and melodramatic. As with all of Verhoeven’s sci-fi flicks, the set design is plasticky, almost toy-like; it always looks like an underbuilt studio backlot. The acting makes most daily soap stars look like Altman-film Oscar winners. So what gives? Maybe it’s just the sheer lunacy of it. Maybe (probably) I’m just a sucker for space marines and swarms of killer aliens. Maybe I’ve got some rare susceptibility to anything that is pure, vapid irony. Or maybe—and this is as close to an actual argument for the film as I’ll likely ever come—Verhoeven manages, somehow, to capture that unadulterated, utterly mad big movie energy that a relatively mainstream cinemaniac like myself is helpless to resist.

The Proposition Kicks Up Dust and Guts

The Proposition is a bloody, dirty movie that is determined, above all else, to prove just how bloody and dirty it can be. Offering an artfully composed but determinedly grueling and despairing look at pre-modern frontier life (this time in the late 19^th century Australian outback), it succeeds in proving its grisly bona fides—perhaps too well.

There comes a point when a film’s devotion to the cruel terrors of life can make it simple unpleasant to watch, and if The Proposition doesn’t cross that line, it certainly skirts it. It is, essentially, two stories in one: On one hand, we see follow Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce), the middle child in a three brother outlaw gang, who has been told to kill his brutal older brother or watch his frail younger sibling hang. Interspersed with this, we see Police Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) attempt to coral his surly men while attempting to shield his delicate wife (Emily Watson) from their rugged society’s rampant miseries. This back and forth narrative reflects the dual nature of the film’s central motif: the split between civility and barbarism.

The film presents these two ends of the societal spectrum as complete, a wholly bifurcated view of existence, in which there are only the affects of civility and the base instincts of chaos. Director John Hillcoat plays with these two disparate elements in a number of interesting ways, filming the untamed wilds of the outback with real elegance while focusing on the dirtier, grittier aspects of organized society. The final sequence, in which a murderous gang tears down the door to Stanley’s house during a formal Christmas dinner, suggests that, even in the most pointedly civil surroundings, the bloodthirsty violence and unkempt rage of man’s basest instincts is always ready to explode onto the scene.

But Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave don’t seem to know exactly what to do with their polarized view of existence, and they’re often distracted by showing the hardness and casual misery of frontier life. So instead of going somewhere with their idea, they simply recycle it into new and ever more twisted forms. It’s an interesting concept, and much of the pciture is beautifully filmed, but in the end, it has no reason to exist other than to partake, repeatedly, in the long, grueling slog of living. The ragged violence of both the desert and its inhabitants isn’t just hard on the film's characters—it’s hard on its viewers as well.

More than Meets the Eye

The website is up. The teaser trailer is out. Entire theaters full of grown men are being turned into awe-struck 6 year old boys even as I write this, just for having glimpsed a shadowy robot figure stomping a satellite. When that figure appeared before Pirates at a packed house in Georgetown last Friday, you could feel a wave of reasonably well adjusted men melt into a wild-eyed fantasy world of giant, Crayola colored robots pummeling the crap out of each other. Because the shadowy figure’s name is legend: Optimus. Prime. And he’s under the control of Mr. Badass Explosion-Auteur himself, Michael Bay.

Now, despite my high-minded grumbling about the triumph of spectacle over story, I absolutely cannot wait for Michael Bay’s Transformers. It’s got me in a serious Harry Knowles-like tizzy. I can honestly count myself as a no-kidding fan of the director, and the prospect of seeing the Autobots and Decepticons go at it in a bazillion dollar blockbuster is almost more than I can handle. And then you get set reports like this…

Let's talk about explosions a little bit. I deeply regret not keeping an explosion count from the very moment I stepped onto that white sand. I'd love to give you guys a completely accurate number of explosions on this single day of shooting. But I didn't even think of it until I was halfway through my visit and at that point it'd be useless to keep count. So, my guess is that I saw at least 40 explosions. Some single big explosions. Some a large grouping of 5 or 6 smaller explosions. Some explosions on buildings, walls, sand. It was nuts and just about the perfect example of a day on a Michael Bay set. I would have been pissed if I had gone out and spent the day on a stage watching 2 people talk.

More of my days ought to be in need of explosion counts; until that happens, I’m patiently awaiting the next Fourth of July, and Michael Bay’s Transformers.

The Printed Page

Through what is clearly some sort of serious clerical error, I was recently asked by Brainwash arts editor extraordinaire Kelly Jane Torrance to contribute to one of those omnipresent summer reading lists in which noted individuals wax on about their beach lit of choice. I’m doubtful that I deserve to be on a list titled “What the smart set is reading,” surrounded by such an array of bright minds, but for whatever reason, there I am. If you want to find out what this science fiction/drama nerd is reading this summer—or better yet, what books a host of sharp young conservatives are paging are paging through during this year’s hot months—Brainwash has the goods.

It Was Rated ARRRRRRRRR

And now, from the director of the Budweiser frogs commercials: Pirates of the Caribbean, Again. That’s right. Director Gore Verbinski got his start making high profile, instantly memorable, gimmicky advertising. Despite his switch to the feature film format, the only real difference between his older and newer work is length, for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest plays like nothing if not a high-concept, gimmick-riddled two and a half hour commercial for itself.

Bigger, broader, more expensive, and more determined to please at any cost—even a few hundred million—this is a movie that, more than anything, wants only to bulldoze brain cells and swing viewers into a drooling, tingly, summer-movie stupor—a braindead buzz that seeks only to further itself. Intermittently, it succeeds, but on the whole it is too concerned with trying to impress rather than actually being impressive. The setpieces and comic digressions don’t provoke laughs and thrills so much as wave their arms and make arguments about how exciting and funny they are.

I don’t have much to add to the general consensus on Pirates. It’s too long by far; calling it poorly structured is almost a compliment, in that it implies it has a real structure. There are too many subplots that end up marking time. Orlando Bloom is a bit better than he’s been before, but the overall effect is somewhat like watching a promising high schooler take an AP math exam: He’s pretty cute, and he seems to be working very hard, but it’s deadly dull for the rest of us. Knightley’s got a nice combination of raw sex appeal and flustered pluck, but she isn’t given enough to do. Depp is sometimes fun, but just as often, as one of the rowdy lads at Chud says, he looks like “Depp playing Depp playing Jack Sparrow.”

The effects are excellent, of course, at least in terms of invention and integration. But the construction of the action sequences themselves is only slightly better than average. Sure, the action is big, bigger, biggest, and there are enough explosions and giant sucker-laden tentacles for a lifetime’s worth of medieval Japanese theme dinners. But Verbinski doesn’t have any sense of pace or build up, and the shots he chooses are more functional than breathtaking.

As our boy Tony Scott says, it is “a movie with no particular interest in coherence, economy or feeling.” What concerns me most, though, is that this is the fourth major movie this summer that I’ve found somewhat entertaining, but which was robbed of very real potential for summer greatness by an underdeveloped script. Mission: Impossible 3, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Superman Returns and now Pirates have all been technically adroit films with solid premises and decent performances. They all had the raw materials, but none was able to really deliver. M:I3 and X-Men fell to rushed, underpowered stories, while Superman and Pirates both floated aimlessly on scripts marked by bloat and confusion. Sure, every one of them bore sequences of pure dazzle, but they displayed, at best, fleeting inspiration. They were of the moment, but nothing more. Perhaps this is the true result of film’s increasingly painterly nature—grandiose, often elegant imagery that demands your instantaneous awe, but cares little for your lasting thought.

Political Drama

The dual-mouthed, acid-for-blood, insect-like creatures of the Alien series are often described as “perfect killing machines.” They seem to be designed for maximum deadliness and little else—physical specimens cast into a monolithic perfection. Although there may not be such thing as a perfect killing machine, James Fallows’ write-up at the Atlantic’s Aspen blog, which recounts his recent encounter with former President Clinton, suggests there may be such a thing as the perfect political machine:

What do you notice [about Clinton] close up? A few details:

- His physical scale. As measured by the tools known to modern science, Clinton is not technically that big a man. When standing next to him waiting to go on side, I was re-astonished to realize that I was looking straight into his eye. Even before his noticeable weight loss of the last few years, his body wouldn’t stand out by modern American standards as being particularly huge. But everyone who has ever seen him in person is first struck by his size and his room-filling quality. The reason I was astonished to find we were actually the same height was my certain knowledge that, as I walked behind him onto the stage, I was going to look like the batboy accompanying the slugger onto the field. Part of the explanation is that his head is disproportionately large, and so (as former White House correspondent James Bennet has pointed out) are his facial features. His hands, too, are to a scale of a man six inches taller than he is. They are also much more gracefully formed than the rest of him, he gestures with them as if were aware of their visual impact – as he must be. It is a predictable act of tromp l’oeil: like a cat or dog that makes itself much bigger by puffing out its fur, Bill Clinton somehow makes himself seem physically bigger than he could really be.

[snip]

- Being around Clinton in the prelude to this kind of live event is a reminder of how physical the professional of politics is. Before a similar on-stage interview in New York, I was with him for about ten minutes before we went on stage. He spent the time as if he were a batter in the on-deck circle. He did squats, cracked his knuckles, turned his head from side to side, and in general looked as if he was working himself up into the right fighting form for the performance ahead. (Meanwhile, I was nerdishly going through my notes.) This time he roared up with the Secret Service and we were on stage 30 seconds after his arrival.

- Bonus point on the physicality of politics: I have never seen anyone write about what I know (from having worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976) to be a fundamental reality of a national political campaign: Fatigue explains a very large amount of what goes well and poorly on a campaign. It also it a huge advantage any incumbent has over a challenger. (The incumbent travels in style and gets a lot more sleep.) More on this later.

[snip]

- The other exception [to Clinton’s normal style of statesman-like answers] was of course Clinton’s answer about Karl Rove. After hearing some mention of Rove in an answer, and remembering that Rove was coming to Aspen (though not on the day I mentioned), I decided on a whim to ask Clinton what he would ask Rove. His face changed in a way that suggested that the Id was coming out. You could see a man who loved the act of politics – and who actually respected Rove as a fellow devotee.

Not surprisingly, I’m no fan of Clinton. But his political acumen deserves respect, at least when it comes to communication. As a maker of policy, his record is debatable at best, but his flair for performance is unmatched in recent politics. Politics is, in a sense, our nation’s ongoing story of itself, its narrative framed in perfect dramatic terms: two starkly opposed sides in complex, ever-shifting, high stakes conflict. People often grumble about the politicization of art and drama, but what Clinton and the best political performers do is turn politics into a dramatic art.

Do You Mean Like Stupid Stupid?

Despite holding a job in which I do a fair amount of layout and design, I have to say that this captures my feelings about Macs a lot better than this (although I have to admit a weakness for pretty much anything that can be described as “pretentious film school”). Maybe it’s my lack of Mac-savvy that keeps me from digging the new Gnarls Barkley album as much as pretty much everyone. I mean, sure, it’s got a catchy mellow cool to it, but it’s no Outkast. And if laid back sample-pop is what you want, you'll be stoked about the sun-burnt beach bum texture of the new James Figurine record. It's not quite a new Postal Service album, but it's close, and the video for the first single is super cute.

Cartoonified

In lieu of actual content today, let me recommend Sam Anderson’s ode to the brilliant, oft-overlooked mid 90s cartoon, Dr. Katz. To follow up on yesterday’s post, the one place where two dimensional cartoons have succeeded with adult audiences is television comedy, and Dr. Katz was one of the pioneers.

Film, Photography, and Animation

Well, this certainly doesn’t quite look like anything we’ve seen before. And yet it also looks oddly familiar, like an amalgam of Sin City, A Scanner Darkly, V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, and big-name dystopian anime flicks (as far as any dystopian anime film can really be called “big-name”) like Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed. No matter what, the animation looks intriguing, conjuring up some of the best hard-contrast sci-fi noir images I can recall. And, as always, it’s nice to see animation being used in service of something other than kiddie flicks, even good ones.

Despite many failed predictions in this vein, I’m still convinced that one of these days an animated film geared toward adults (or at least older teenagers) will come along and make a big splash at the box office, totally reshaping notions about the target audience for animation. Sound implausible? Maybe. Or maybe I'm too late with this prognostication; maybe it’s already happened.

As I mentioned in my Superman Returns review, due to advances in CGI, big-budget directors have almost unlimited freedom to fuss and fret over their images—film is now as malleable as a director’s imagination allows it to be. Mise en scene, which used to be a product of the careful synchronization of physical objects with camera movement, is now, just as often, about simply deciding how much detail to cram into the background and how to make the CG camera whirl and spin with as much flash as possible—it’s no longer a question of what can be done so much as of what can be thought of.

The result is that much of modern filmmaking ends up emphasizing the painterly aspects of film rather than the photographic aspects. Films of medium to high budgets like Superman Returns, Sin City, Sky Captain, and Revenge of the Sith are all, essentially, feature length animated paintings. Without even being entirely aware of it, animation has taken over. Odd, maybe, but hardly surprising—after all, more perplexing things happen in this crazy world of movies all the time.

Always More Books

Over at About Last Night, Our Girl in Chicago, writing about facing the unenviable task of tossing 300 precious tomes, presents a compelling picture of book-mania (which is pretty similar, I suspect, to DVD mania and CD mania, both of which I know a bit about). Here's a snippet:

For now, a general observation. I was a graduate student in English for many years but have not been for a little more than a year now. When you're a graduate student—especially if you're me—you buy books very nearly indiscriminately from new and used bookstores. You pick up free books from the box outside Powell's or a box left outside a faculty office. You go to the annual library sale and go a little nuts. You must have books. Wanting to read a book is not a necessary condition for buying it; merely anticipating wanting to read it at some undesignated time in the future will do.

For one thing, having the right books gives you a sense of belonging and being in the know. More substantially, there's almost nothing you can't imagine possibly, somehow, at some point, helping you with your research, if you only have it at hand at the right time. (Actually, this outlook explains a lot about why my dissertation was doomed. There's never not something else you can and should read, there's always important stuff you don't know.) Buying books added hope and subtracted anxiety. I hadn't read a certain Raymond Williams book? That was bad. But merely buying the book, I discovered, made me feel halfway better. When my unfamiliarity with the material became a real roadblock, there it would be, readable on the spot. This, folks, is the way to amass a truly unmanageable and largely unread library.

Stars and Stripes, Spandex and Capes

Happy Independence Day, which, thankfully, has not yet been abbreviated to ID4. May this day be filled with beer, lively conversation, consumer grade explosives purchased from gas stations, and other things that make America great. If you’re looking for some grist for the pre-fireworks tailgating chatter, try reading my article in The Washington Times today on the de-Americanization of Superman in Superman Returns.

Long a marker for American greatness, Superman wasn't just a superhero, he was an explicitly American superhero. ...Although previous incarnations of Superman boldly proclaimed their American roots and values, the newest variation has been cleansed quietly of any hint of patriotism, transforming an icon of Americana into a touchy-feely cosmopolitan savior.

Just doing my part to keep up our country’s patriotic fervor.

Band of Outsiders: Listen Up

Pardon me momentarily while I quote myself: In my review of American Movie Critics, I wrote:

While reading this book, one quickly discovers that the best critics are those who can make you want to drop everything and see some unknown film right now. If [Pauline] Kael doesn’t make you want to see Band of Outsiders before the day is through, then nothing will.

Perhaps this will cost me some of my film geek cred, but I wrote that line in part because, until just a few hours ago, I hadn’t seen Band of Outsiders. One of the developments that’s going to arise in the next few decades of criticism is that the next generation of critics is simply not going to be as intimately familiar with the whole of film history as previous generations. While many of us young twerps that Dave Kehr is so suspicious of (not entirely without reason) may watch movies at a prodigious rate, we’re also confronted with far larger chunks of film history to digest than those before us—especially if we hope to even remotely “keep up” with current cinematic offerings. What this means is that there will be people like myself who write somewhat professionally about film but have not seen canonical pictures like, for example, Band of Outsiders.

Fortunately, though, I no longer fit that bill, and thank goodness. Band of Outsiders is a reckless romp that careens through its 96 minutes with the same youthful dramatic streak as its three leads. Tragic, funny, and shockingly free-wheeling in its stylistics, it swerves and zooms with unhinged juvenile vigor.

The film is packed with stylistic tricks that, 40 years later, still spark with originality, but what interested me most was the film’s use of sound and music. The minute of silence in the café (which is really only about 40 seconds—thank you DVD player info screen); the dancing sequence in which the music drops out to make way for narrator while the characters keep dancing; the boiling swells of jazz that build into a climax and then just vanish, as if someone tripped over the record player cord; all of these moments seem designed to call our attention to what the non-diagetic music is doing.

Even after Godard has pulled out the musical rug from under us several times, each new use of the music seems entirely natural. It comes in, sets the tone, tells us what to feel about what's going on--all those movieish things that a score should do. Yet he continues to whisk the musical track away unexpectedly, leaving us with only the chaotic, unmixed background hum of the original shots. When the music plays, all is frivolous and romantic and exciting; when it stops, the world returns to its noisy, uncontrolled state. By toying with the entrance and exit of the music, Godard is reminding us of the difference between the jazzy, passionate, purposeful world created by the movies and the bustling, impersonal world we actually live in. This is a distinction his offhandedly criminal, movie-obsessed protagonists cannot make, and in the end, it costs them. Godard loves Odile, Franz, and Arthur so much that, no matter the consequences, he cannot bring himself to chide them for their fantasies; he can, however, tell his audience—at least those who listen closely.