Beck Secret Show: Big Rock, Small Scale

At 4:15 yesterday, I and some coworkers were sitting in the Bureaucrash office when an email came in: according to the Washington Post’s entertainment blog, Beck—yes, folk-rapping, platinum selling, enormodome-playing Beck—would be playing a secret, unannounced midnight show at the Black Cat. And not even on the main stage, but on the venue’s tiny backstage, and for just 170 people. Naturally, we dropped everything and high-tailed it over to U Street.

The line was surprisingly short when we got there—maybe a dozen people. We were relieved, figuring we’d definitely get in—that is, if there was actually going to be a show. The staff wouldn’t even confirm that Beck was playing, and once they did confirm, they couldn’t (or wouldn't) tell us when the doors would open, if we’d be able to buy tickets for others, if there’d be re-entry, or if we were going to have to stand outside on the street the whole night while the regularly scheduled show went on at the main stage. The entire thing seemed to be designed to prevent anyone from making any firm plans. Give up your evening for the chance to stand an arm’s length from Beck, was the message, and we bought it all the way.

Eventually, of course, we got in, got stamped, got food and beer (both quite necessary at this point) and hung out in the Cat’s Red Room, a little buzzed from having made it through the line gauntlet.

The other lucky concertgoers milled around chattering loudly, jittery with excitement of reckless spontaneity. Many were still dressed in suits and uncomfortable work clothes, not having eaten and not having any plans on how to get home (Metro closes at midnight, which is when the show was scheduled to start). Can I crash at your place? Work is going to suck tomorrow. But these concerns were superfluous: We were there for rock, responsibilities be damned.

When the staff finally ushered us into the tiny, basement-sized space where they were holding the show, the room crackled with delirious energy: We’re going to see Beck here? In this dingy little punk-rock hole? How odd—and how amazing! At 4 p.m. that afternoon, no one in the room had any idea that at midnight they'd end up where they did, still suited up for the office, acting like crazed teenagers. But there they were, loving every minute of it.

For those of you outside the music nerd sphere, it’s the musical the equivalent of going to a local sports bar and watching a game with President Bush. It’s like having Conan O’Brian do a show from your living room. It’s like meeting up with Quentin Tarantino to watch Death Wish on a 27” TV.

And it’s exactly how live rock music should be seen.

For all the trippy, awesome excess of stadium and large venue rock shows, I’ve never been all that impressed with them. You drop a wad of cash to listen to overprocessed, might-as-well-be-CD music while standing a quarter-mile away in a crowd of zillions. Live music isn’t just about hanging out and hearing music—you can do that at a bar with a DJ any night of the week. It’s about getting a sense of the musician, about being close to them, watching how they interact with both the crowd and with their music.

On your iPod, the music you listen to is personal, but only to you. In concert, you get to see how it’s personal to the artist. You already know what it means to you—going to the show lets you share the experience of what it means to them. And that really only happens in the smallish, grungy, cinderblock rock-n-roll dives that continue to host this country’s dying rock scene.

And it’s even true, I think, with record stores. People are bemoaning the loss of mega music outlet Tower Records, with Slate quoting some lost record store wanderer complaining, “I can’t help but notice that there’s never anyone younger than me shopping at Tower.” Tower may not be drawing the youngsters, but if the crowd I saw last Saturday afternoon is any indication, the tiny, independent record stores like Park Avenue CDs in Orlando still bring in the kids because, like those grungy rock clubs, they provide a sense of community, of passion for their art, of personal commitment—and it blows away Tower’s perfunctory appeals to the masses.

Last night, I stood 10 feet away as Beck put on a flawless, fantastic set in a badly-lit cinder-block hovel, and yet, despite the lack of high-tech showy distraction—in fact, because of that lack—it was amazing: a great big rock star playing with the perfection that only a great big rock star can, yet also somehow reduced to being just another guy with on a stage with a guitar and a microphone. You can call it intimacy, or staring into a rocker’s soul, or just small-is-beautiful, punk rock style. But whatever you call it, it’s pretty damn excellent, and it’s the only way to see a show.

Addendum: DCist has some photos and a post-show rundown. Hell yes indeed.

Addendum Redux (loving Web 2.0 edition): Catherine has pictures of the line, at least one of which includes me (well, my back). And Jason from Bureaucrash grabbed a good cell phone snap of the Beck himself from our very-close vantage point.

Think fast

In addition to the whole mini-vacation thing, I’ve also been staying busy learning the ropes of my new position as the Associate Editor of Doublethink, the quarterly print magazine published by the fantastic America’s Future Foundation. The winter issue is now out and available online, and I certainly hope others will enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed working on it.

Playing Tourist

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I’ve been busy. And you’ve missed me, haven’t you? (Well, either that or forgotten me like everything that happened after 1 a.m. last night. Don’t worry; eventually someone will explain to you how you ended up in the bathtub wearing that bumble bee costume.)

I have no lofty commentary—or, if you prefer, rambling diatribes—with which to enthrall you, but I can report that Minus the Bear is perhaps best left to the CD format, where their mathy-yet-mellow guitar wizardry and lackadaisical melodies aren’t forced into trying to create energy they don’t have. They’re not a bad show altogether, but they lack the zip of a truly impressive live act.

I did, however, enjoy seeing them in an Orlando, Florida club that had been converted from a Firestone Tire depot. Somewhat oddly, the club’s decorator decided not to stick with the obvious car/tire/mechanic’s garage design motif, and, instead, decided to decorate one wall with a collage of oversized ink-drawings of O.J. Simpson’s face. I’m sure it made sense to someone, at some time.

Meanwhile, let me say that The Rapture put on a helluva show, a wild-n-crazy, booty shaking dance party for skinny white kids with black lungs showing off pirate-striped t-shirts and horror-movie haircuts. It was my first trip to DC's premiere small rock venue, the 9:30 Club, and it was excellent. What really made the show, though, was that the behind-the-stage VIP viewing area was clearly populated by band member parents, middle aged suburban folks rockin’ out to their boys’ rowdy tunes. When the band members’ parents show up at the 9:30 club, you know they’ve got to be good.

And speaking of horror movie haircuts, I managed to get down to Universal Studios for their annual display of drunken, pseudo-scary idiocy, Halloween Horror Nights. Only in America—more specifically, only in Florida—can you pay $65 to run around an over-decorated movie backlot drinking syringes full of glowing jello shots while local college theater majors and old wannabe movie extras all painted up like zombies growl semi-convincingly and threaten you with (quite real!) chainsaws. The place is done-up in splendorific Halloween luxury, all fake cobwebs and assorted spooky whatnots; someone clearly dropped a bankroll at The Party Store. The place is already a decorated-to-death movie theme park, so it's fake-everything squared: what you’ve essentially got are decorated decorations, facades over facades. The effect is pure, strung-out overkill, like mixing red bull, cotton candy, and vodka. Which they also do.

Girls scream; men act like buffoons; everyone spends scads of cash on overpriced theme park refreshments ($4 bottles of water!)—it’s an utter triumph of needless American capitalism. And I loved every bit of it.

Also, there was a two-story tall fire-breathing robot dinosaur that picked up cars and crushed them in its robo-paws. You know, in case anyone was feeling under-stimulated.

Does this mean more movies during math class?

There are no rules to writing, despite what grammarians and high school English teachers might tell you. But if there is one important maxim to live by, it’s that effective writing is structure. Learning to write is learning to structure and organize information. Undoubtedly, there is art, there is craft, there is research, verbal flourish and all of those things that might writing wonderful. But effective writing is, at its most basic, well-structured writing, and no matter how much we might want more than that, strong structure is the most necessary element.

Hold on to that thought for a moment, and let me say that my first response to Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on a company that uses raters and computer algorithms to analyze and predict the box office success of film scripts was something like that of the skeptical movie executive reported in the article:

The executive seemed to think of the Epagogix team as a small band of Martians who had somehow slipped their U.F.O. past security. “In reality, there are so many circumstances that can affect a movie’s success,” the executive went on. “Maybe the actor or actress has an external problem. Or this great actor, for whatever reason, just fails. You have to fire a director. Or September 11th or some other thing happens. There are many people who have come forward saying they have a way of predicting box-office success, but so far nobody has been able to do it. I think we know something. We just don’t know enough. I still believe in something called that magical thing—talent, the unexpected. The movie god has to shine on you….My first reaction to those guys? Bullshit.”

The story brings up all sorts of questions about the nature of art, commerce, and human experience, far beyond the sort of "neat technology meets a little philosophy" angle that Gladwell takes. Gladwell starts by talking about Platinum Blue, a company with a computer program that analyzes the mathematical signatures of songs and predicts—with supposed 80% accuracy—whether or not the songs will be hits. He then gets into Epagogix’s similar system for the movies. That system uses two raters who’ve analyzed a wide array of narrative elements in a large sampling of films to read scripts and assign values to these elements. These values are fed into a computer, and out pops a predicted box-office result. The article reports only successes, but doesn’t indicate on way or the other whether the program has had any significant failures. Nor does anyone claim that it predicts “good” movies—only movies that will make money.

Attempts at this sort of thing have been made before, and, predictably, they’ve failed. And at first glance, this method seems just as improbable. After all, it suggests that factors external to the narrative don’t matter: stars, directors, marketing, current events, etc. To believe that the cumulative effect of these elements is practically nil seems rather far fetched. After all, does anyone really think that George Lucas’ ludicrous, mediocre Star Wars script would’ve been as effective under a different director? That Blair Witch would’ve made more than a hundred million dollars without its marketing scheme?

Platinum Blue’s musical program seems, initially, like evidence that this sort of thing might work. How can you judge music, after all? It’s totally subjective, or seems to be. But unlike narrative and visual arts, music is just math. You can break down every sound, note, timbre, and rhythm into a mathematical signature pretty easily. Anybody who’s ever taken a music theory course knows that notes and rhythms are connected by numerical relationships. Computers may never be able to produce completed pop songs, but it doesn’t really surprise me that they can analyze those numerical connections.

But it occurs to me that maybe there’s something to this, and in part it’s because it’s a text-only analysis. If, as I believe, writing is structure, then maybe a well-trained analyst really can accurately assess its value on a numerical scale. After all, this is what AP exam test readers do with thousands of high-school essays. If those graders can be trained to give roughly accurate numerical grades to essays, what’s to say it isn’t possible—if obviously somewhat more complicated—to similarly assess the characteristics of a screenplay? Unlike music, text doesn’t have any intrinsic numeric values, but a skilled, trained reader can, I think, assign approximate values with reasonable accuracy.

The problem, still, is that this means that the screenplay is the only thing that matters when tallying up the box office, and that still seems fishy to me. What do we do with movies that have really terrible scripts but are saved by strong direction and performances? Batman Begins and Face/Off, for example, are both pretty putrid, script-wise (the stories are weird and underdeveloped, and the dialog in both is really wretched stuff saved by performances even more brilliant because of the awful source material). But both still ended up strong films—and, importantly, financially successful films—because of great direction, design, and performances.

Somewhat counter intuitively, however, I don’t think that if something like this were to take over it would prove deadly to making interesting, unique, oddball films. Obviously, a system like this would only reinforce Hollywood’s tendency to repeat what’s worked before, as you can’t make statistical predictions about untested material. But my guess is that, even still, a small to mid-sized market would develop for interesting, niche films that would cost a little and make a little—just as has happened with the indie music scene. And maybe with all the money studios would be saving on not making any more failed hundred million dollar behemoths, they’d be able and willing to finance a larger number of smaller, experimental films for the small but passionate group of us who enjoy them.

Wherefore art thou, Red-State Romeo?

The official summary for Conventioneers describes the movie as:

“…a Romeo- and-Juliet story of a Republican man who falls into a politically forbidden relationship with a Democrat woman who is protesting the Bush agenda. As the Convention draws near, one of her activist colleagues must reexamine his politics when he is hired as a sign language interpreter for the very man he’s working to defeat: President George W. Bush.”

The generically indie looking poster is positively drenched in lazy signifiers: It shows our studly, suit-wearing Republican male saturated in red and the tank-top clad, cigarette smoking, go-gettem feminist liberal lady similarly saturated in blue. The tagline is “a fair and balanced love story” (Ow! That’s so sharp it hurts! Fox News jokes never get old!).

Meanwhile, blog entries by the film’s creator start by mentioning the “blood, sweat and tears” she shed when the cops put her in jail for a night during filming at the New York Republican Convention. The actors are described in typical generic pablum—“brave and courageous”—and she hopes that the movie will be “a time capsule for that tumultuous moment in history,” whatever that means.

And then we have the trailer. Its pivotal line—“I’m here for the Republican Convention” (delivered with a 7-11 MegaMug of Southern boy Red State swagger)—is followed by one of those record scratch sounds that used to signal “whoa!” moments on cable children’s shows in the 80s but that you now find on every free sound effects download site on the internet. And, of course, it ends with a painfully generic montage of “ominously eccentric” convention footage.

Sure, I haven’t seen the movie, and it looks like it’s won some awards and praise from a few folks who aren’t necessarily total cinematic morons, so it’s always possible that there’s really something there besides the pasty vanilla "balance," the self-impressed platitudes, and the blinkered shallowness that soak through every bit of its advertising. Of course it’s also possible that the next David Lynch film will be a straight narrative feature, that Ezra Klein will become a principled religious conservative, that Harry Knowles will start writing brilliant, concise criticism, or that Daniel Larison will go a month without a blog post, but I’ll believe all those things when I see them.

Against Singles

I’m something of a music fanatic. No, I’m not an encyclopedic song-freak like Dave Wiegel, but I grew up on music, playing it, listening to it, reading about it, talking about it, buying it—all pretty much constantly. Before I was a movie nerd, I was an obscure-music junky, always ready to give a spin to some bizarre new sound, and finding the newest, strangest, craziest, hippest, most exciting and unforgettable band remains a thrill I still chase regularly.

Needless to say, I second the love of urban music fanatics everywhere when I say: I love my iPod. And now that I can watch video on it (albeit on a screen that’s far too small), well—it comes close to a digital media fetish device.

But I confess: I don’t now and never have understood people’s obsession with shuffle; with playlists; with yanking out a few singles from a record (what an odd, anachronistic term to still use) and forgetting the bulk of the tracks.

So, not surprisingly, I’m totally baffled when Farhad Manjoo writes:

Like many others in the so-called iPod generation, years of surfing the Web have reduced my attention span to not much more time than the length of a typical YouTube clip; consequently, my iPod, stocked with 4,124 songs, routinely turns me into a hyperactive freak show. If you have an iPod, I'm sure you know what I mean. You put on something that you've been wanting to listen to all day. Lucinda Williams' "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" album, say. But you're three-quarters of the way through the first track, and even though you're really digging it, something about the scratchiness of Williams' voice reminds of something else entirely -- the Carter Family. And, hey, don't you have a copy of "Wildwood Flower" on here? Why, yes, you do. So you switch. But of course, putting on the Carter Family is going to remind you of Johnny Cash. And you have the feeling that you must, just this minute, play Cash's version of "In My Life" now. So you switch again. But you're a minute into Johnny and you start to wonder about the Beatles' original version of the track...

The plethora of choice makes taking in something completely new particularly difficult. Listening to an album you've never heard before is work; it requires time, patience, and attention. You can't do it half-assed.

The singles culture just doesn’t make any sense to me. Great music, for the most part, isn’t about the ability to produce a few nifty singles; it’s about creating a complete sonic landscape and exploring it fully, or maybe even just covering more terrain in a place that someone else discovered. The artists I value—even the purveyors of raucous, rowdy stuff that many sensible folks would find obnoxious—don’t just do a quick trick or two and go on their way; they build a home and invite you in to spend time engaging with their ideas. Maybe it’s related to why I despise cover bands or can’t stand listening to the twitchy, singles-driven minefield of pop-music radio.

To ignore the majority of a record seems like a disservice to the music and to yourself. On a good album, not every song may be as essential as every other, but there's no filler. Yes, any number of radio-friendly artists round out their albums with junk just to hit the requisite album length, but why support an artist who intentionally pads their record with crap?

And in my experience, despite what Manjoo and many others think, the iPod actually encourages paying serious attention to albums in their entirety. I have a 45 minute commute to work in the morning, which is just about perfect for listening to an entire new album. It’s the beginning of the day, meaning I don’t yet have the weight of work and the omnipresent distraction of email scattering my thoughts, so I can give a record the patience it deserves. And then throughout the day I can go back to it, maybe follow some of those threads that Manjoo talks about, compare it to an artist’s previous work or other material out of the same scene, and give it some thought. By the time the day is over, I’ve got the album down. I know its ins and outs, its weaker moments and its strengths—and that’s what I like: the complete experience, not the instantaneous rush of a hot single, but the deep, settled satisfaction of listening to an artist’s complete offering, letting one set a tone and falling under the spell.

Don't rock for socialism

We all know that the failure of Soviet communism is item number 1 on the official list of reasons why collectivism doesn't work. But for legions of indie rocking hipsters, the dissolution of Broken Social Scene may be ready to edge its way into the number 2 slot. I guess Matt Yglesias will have to find another justification for socialized healthcare other than "it promotes really cool indie rock."

I’m listening to Slate’s spoiler Podcast for The Prestige, which is quite useful for confirming all the intricate twists I suspected about the movie, and I realized how incredibly similar the movie is to Orson Scott Card’s bizarrely wonderful (if fairly disturbing) 1978 short story “A Thousand Deaths,” which can be found in Flux, a rather excellent collection of Card’s stories about humanity’s future.

Addendum: Card’s new book, Empire, means another title to add to the to-read stack. I want to take two year’s leave of absence from life and just read books. I suppose that's called "graduate school," but who has time for that?

Compensating For What Now?

Writing about movies is sublimation, a way of compensating for a doomed, unrequited love affair with a flickering image.

Peter Keogh, who wrote that at his blog, also has an interesting—if not entirely convincing—article in the Boston Phoenix on how trends at the movies may signal electoral doom for Republicans. (Via Dave Wiegel at Hit and Run). More on this later, at least I hope.

Unrelated: Supersystem, who, as far as I can tell, is the epitome of updated-for-2006-post-Fugazi-D.C.-dance-punk, pretty much rules live.

Quarter Life Crisis Movies, The Prestige, Snoop Dogg

I turn 25 today, so, naturally, I’ve got a piece in The Washington Times on quarter-life crisis movies. The piece covers The Last Kiss, The Science of Sleep, Mutual Appreciation, and my favorite movie of the year so far, Marie Antoinette. The basic idea goes like this:

Reacting to the increasing instability of work, romantic relationships, and marriage as traditional social norms and roles dissolve, these films capture an essential uncertainty about how -- or even if -- one ought to progress beyond the consequence-free frivolity of childhood. Tentative, anxious and obsessively self-analytical, these quarter-life-crisis movies embody the self-contradiction of their generation: They're coming of age films about the refusal to come of age.

You can read the piece online* or, better yet, pick up a copy of the paper. When you do, make sure to check out the introduction of The Washington Times’ Film Snobs Only page on the inside of the Show section. It’s got part of my article and two wonderful pieces by Kelly Jane Torrance. Obviously I’m pretty biased here, but I highly recommend it.

Also, I’m in NRO with a review of Christopher Nolan’s slightly muddled but highly entertaining dueling magicians flick, The Prestige, which pretty much does everything I wished The Illusionist would’ve done.

The Prestige arrives packed with more dirty tricks, dark secrets, and unexpected revelations than a hotly contested congressional race. And, like those electoral battles, even after you know how it all turns out, it can be rather difficult to determine exactly what happened and why. Yet even if the story occasionally appears to do the impossible, there can be no doubt that it’s often a breathtaking spectacle to watch. Director Christopher Nolan’s fiendishly plotted movie about dueling illusionists is a masterful bit of cinematic wizardry that is both intimate and epic — like using sleight of hand to make an elephant vanish.

A final note: Happy birthday to Snoop Dogg and Michelle Malkin.

*Due to a technical snafu, there’s no byline yet at the online edition, so you’ll have to take my word that I wrote it. Or, as previously suggested, pick up the actual paper.

Beauty and the Movies

As Ezra Klein points out, this sped-up video of the transformation from plain model to glamorous billboard superbeauty is rather amazing. I’ve seen this sort of thing before and, as an occasional graphics designer, done similar work (though never this drastic), but it's still kind of stunning to see. Klein, ever concerned with equality, thinks this sort of thing has a “weirdly democratizing” effect, which I’m not sure I agree with—after all, how many people have time and access to the cadre of professionals it takes to accomplish this, and how many of those that do can afford the time and expense it takes to get so done up every day? But I have to say I think Klein is correct when he makes a similar point about the way television and movies distort beauty standards:

More pernicious, at least to my eyes, are movies and television, which rely on some of the same trickery, but mainly "cheat" by hiring outliers on the beauty scale and then placing them in shows and scenes that retain the atmospherics of normality. By skimming actresses from the 99.999th percentile of attractiveness and then using them in apparent representations of reality, they create an ideal and expectation that, while theoretically more achievable than the photoshopped model from the video, is actually far less realizable.

Klein zeroes in on something that has bothered me for a long time, namely the way movies and TV shows tend to cast only women (and mostly men) from an incredibly thin pool of impossibly beautiful candidates in a very specific zone of age and looks—and then tends to make things worse by giving these people unbelievable homes and clothes. How many ultra attractive 28 year olds making six figures can there be in the world, and what’s the likelihood that any office or group of friends will be made up entirely of people in this category? The only milieu in which that might be probable is … the cast of a television show.

I think this tends to be far worse on TV than in movies. The movie world is made up of stars, people that society has generally recognized to be especially more attractive than most and publicly bestowed with massive riches as a result. It’s more often clear in the movies that these people are of a different class—a fantasy class—that simply can’t be a reality for most. Television, on the other hand, is a little more insidious, because it takes performers we don’t recognize and puts them in situations that tend to have a more familiar feel (workplaces, homes, etc). Plus, it gives us long-term regular exposure to these performers—in effect desensitizing us to their beauty. Television does far more to propagate the myth of an all-super hottie society than do movies.

Addendum: In the comments, Pstonie makes the point that there's not exactly a conscious plot among TV show producers to undermine America's self-image, and I agree. It's not exactly a plot, or certainly not a dark and seedy one anyway. Casting directors and producers tend to cast performers who will attract attention -- and, well, that means attractive people. But whatever the intention behind it, the result is the same, and it leads to both body-image misperceptions and a bland, overwhelming sameness to the types of figures and faces we see on most network shows.

A Giant Crazy Hall of YouTube Mirrors

Modern art inanity: It's what YouTube was invented for. Yes. This is me at work.

Score, Dude

Jan Swafford has a fun article in Slate that attempts to pick the “greatest film composer of all time.” The article recognizes that it’s an impossible and foolhardy task, but goes on to try anyway, and for that I commend it. Especially nice is the section on Bernard Hermann:

A lot of people will declare, as I would have at one time, that the greatest film composer of all, hands-down, is Bernard Herrmann. His résumé starts spectacularly with Citizen Kane in 1939, and he died virtually in the saddle in 1976, hours after the last recording session for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. En route, Herrmann scored Hitchcock films including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. Herrmann's most famous moment is also, I submit, the quintessential movie-music cue: the shower scene in Psycho. It's one of those bits (the shark music in Jaws is another) that you only need to "sing," or rather, howl—as in Reeeek! Reeeek! Reeeek!—to conjure up the whole bloody affair. Psycho is as much state of mind as movie, and the shower scene embodies that. The music is utterly expressive of the action: The string glissandi make a nasty slicing sound that equally suggests female screams and the shrieks of predatory birds (recall Norman's little taxidermic hobby). Above all, the cue is perfect because it's nearly invisible, so imbedded in the moment that I suspect a lot of people don't realize there's "music" in the scene at all.

As Swafford points out, Hermann’s scores—like most great film scores—aren’t just great because of their compositional strengths, they’re great because they seem inextricable from their films, part of their nature on a cellular level. The score is the movie is the score, which is to say that on one hand, the score and the film are interchangeable: each could serve almost as a substitute for the other; you almost only need one. But on the other hand, to consider either the score or the film wholly apart from the other would be to do tremendous damage to both.

I bring this up in part because I witnessed another such film/score combo last night at an early preview of The Fountain. I can’t talk about the movie too much right now (though I’ll say that I was maybe a bit less enthusiastic than some of the early reviewers), but, like Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, the movie is textured and shaped by a remarkable Clint Mansell score performed by The Kronos Quartet. There’s nothing in the film quite as a staccato and percussive as the music and editing in Requiem, but the movie is affected just as much by the score. I always think it’s fascinating to see films like this and try to imagine them without the score, or with something different, and it’s a weird experience. In a way, the best scores seem perfect, as if no other combination of notes could possibly exist to serve this film, as if, somehow, the composer pulled the one perfect set of sounds out of the infinity of possibilities and found not just music that works, but the only music that possibly could have worked. The Fountain’s marvelous score is like that, and no matter what other issues the movie might have, it makes the movie worth seeing.

Crank: Speed on a Thug

Not too long ago, I caught a packed late night showing of Crank, the recent hyperactive ghetto gangster film starring Jason Statham as a thug who, after being injected with a deadly drug, goes after his attackers while trying to keep his adrenalin pumped to the max—as he must in order to stay alive. As many have noted, you might call it "Speed on a thug." It’s a cruel, misogynistic, gratuitously violent exploitation film, and as much as I found it repulsive, I have to say I also found it pretty damn entertaining. Why? Because, as amoral gutter cinema goes, it knew its audience and gave them exactly what they wanted: an unrelenting procession of inner city machismo, crass ethnic stereotypes, gut busting violence, and bloody-minded, lowbrow, macabre humor.

Basically, Crank is the unofficial movie adaptation of Grand Theft Auto, a pumped up, frantically-stylized celebration of the thug ethos. As one might expect from a movie with such an absurd, literally testosterone-driven premise, everything is tweaked to max; if the movie had a pulse it would thump at a thousand beats per minute. This means that there’s barely any time for any of the boring filler that too often finds its way into these films. Every scene is about action, and that means that no matter what else, the movie is always ready and willing to entertain.

So I appreciated, in the way that one appreciates unreprentant lowbrow thrills, a lot of what it did. And if it hadn’t been so casually vulgar in its violence, I might’ve even counted it as reasonable-quality “silly movie”—the sort of violence-fueled guilty pleasure I might’ve returned to sometime. But the movie is the product of an utterly desensitized video game generation, and as such, it doesn’t know when to quit. I don’t usually object to action films going over the top, but Crank’s violence lacks the sort of wit it takes to pull off its brand of violent chuckles. In Blade, the gimmick with the vampire henchman who kept having his hand--the same hand--chopped off was clever enough to be funny; too often, Crank’s grisly jollies are just icky.

Not Even a Season?

Well, this looks like bad news for Aaron Sorkin and his baby, Studio 60, and this looks even worse. I can’t say I’m all that disappointed, or surprised. It would’ve been nice if Sorkin could’ve brought back some of his West Wing/Sports Night magic, but that would have required him to drop the self-righteous moralizing and actually write about something other than his own oversized, easily-bruised ego. It'll be interesting (well, and probably irritating) to see how Sorkin reacts if (when) his show doesn't make it. Who wants to bet that the usual targets--red state Christians and other neanderthals who don't make Sorkin's elitist cut--get the blame?

The Zodiac Killer

AICN gives us more reason to suspect that my favorite living director (and for the picky word nerds amongst my readers, note I didn't say "best"), David Fincher will return to stylish, methodically menacing form with Zodiac. The very nice poster for the film can be seen here.

Robin Williams: Not the Man of the Year

I'm in The Washington Times this morning with an essay/review about Robin Williams' wretched new "comedy," Man of the Year, and how Hollywood misrepresents the business of politics. Here's a teaser:

Watching many films, you'd think elections and legislative battles were won entirely through speeches, debates, and television appearances rather than by the deal making, fundraising and complex policy decisions that drive politics in reality. It's probably only fitting, though, for an industry as narcissistic as the movies. By substituting self-righteous speechifying for action, Hollywood turns Washington into a version of itself, plying politics as show business.

Buy a copy of the paper or read the whole thing online.

Planet Terror

Yes, I know, I know: I'm supposed to be critical of vulgar, tasteless movies and other pop art that might contribute to the moral decline of our culture and such, but I'm just bursting with glee at the trailer for Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, his half of Grindhouse, the double feature homage to the ultraviolent schlock genre flicks of the 70s that he's doing with genre-film mashup genius Quentin Tarantino. Yes, it's bloody and shameless and juvenile and all sorts of morally void. And, just like Rodriguez's last grisly paean to black-hearted pulp, Sin City, I'm going to love every minute of it.
A note of warning: this trailer probably isn't for everyone. It's not quite R-rated (and I'm sure it'll be nothing compared to the film), but it's definitely toward the gruesome (and just flat out absurd) edges of PG-13.

Box Office Docs

Jonathon Last points out the embarrassingly bad box office returns on Al Franken’s lefty political documentary, God Spoke, and helpfully notes this Box Office Mojo chart listing political documentary grosses. He writes:

Notice how many of the biggest-grossing political docus have come in the very recent past: 15 of the top 20 were released post-2000. Also notice how many of them are of a leftward persuasion. If nothing else, George W. Bush's administration has been great for liberal documentary filmmakers.

Alright, that's too glib. But it is striking how the liberal documentary market has come alive in the past six years. Of the 62 highest-grossing political documentaries of all time, 49 of them were released after the 2000 election, and nearly all of them are lefty. It's another entire medium that has come to be dominated by the left.

Well, sure, the Republican-controlled Bush era has been a boon to lefty filmmakers, and while I second Last's lament that the medium is so dominated by one political side, I think the left's "accomplishment" is somewhat less impressive than it might intially seem. First of all, as Last goes on to note, digital video and cheap distribution methods have made filmmaking far more affordable and accessible to the masses. The left, for too many reasons (Ross Douthat does a nice job of analyzing the situation here), has long been better at rallying and encouraging the artistic community than the right, and those drawn to inexpensive political filmmaking are—at least in our current cultural climate—going to tend to lean leftward.

Additionally, I think our increasingly visual, image-saturated culture is really ceasing to differentiate film from text. I’m not suggesting that text will go away, but the distinctions people have traditionally made between videos and words are increasingly blurry and bound to become more so. Eventually the right will pick this up, but for now, the artistic innovators are mostly on the left.

And, I think, it’s also useful to note how limited the success of these films really is. Look at the list: Only 9 films have made more than a million dollars; only three have made more than 10 million; and only one—Fahrenheit 9/11—could genuinely be called a mainstream hit. Yes, Bowling for Columbine and An Inconvenient Truth were both fairly profitable, but their actual reach and box office performances were, in Hollywood terms, fairly small. Twenty million dollars in ticket receipts just isn’t much our current days of hundred million dollar movie marketing plans. When studio advertising execs casually declare that an expenditure “may seem like a paltry $2 million,” it’s a reminder of how unbelievably moneyed the movie industry is. Political documentaries tend to get far, far more attention than other films of similar cost and stature, and thus at least seem to wield more influence, because many members of the media have, understandably, a jones for the intersection of art and liberal political advocacy.

Also, as I mentioned, the left has the art and entertainment world pretty much bagged, meaning that it will focus its own considerable powers of promotion on its favorite products. Witness the sparse coverage and mild reaction to Ron Galloway’s sensible, relatively well-produced free market documentary defense of Wal-Mart versus the media hype surrounding Robert Greenwald’s anti-Wal-Mart tirade, The High Cost of a Low Price (back in December, I compared the two films). These films seem much more successful than they are because of the attention they get, but for the most part, they’re tiny blips on the box office radar with little mainstream reach.

Making the Most of Your Political Motivations

As someone whose interest in politics and culture stems primarily from a religious upbringing, I think the TNR-hosted debate between Ross Douthat and Damon Linker over the place of religion in public life is too interesting not to mention. It’s a sort of secular royal rumble of the secular and religious intellectuals, and it’s fascinating to behold.

Ross opened strong (“it's somewhat difficult to tell whether you think that previous irruptions of faith into American politics were just as dangerous to the health of our secular republic as the "theocons" and their sinister agenda--or whether you think there's something particularly un-American about Neuhaus and company”), and he got a reasonably good response from Linker, seeming to mount a decent defense (“liberal politics presumes that it's possible and desirable for political life to be decoupled from theological questions and disputes”). But in his rebuttal today, Ross simply trounces Linker and his absurdly narrow definition of the “liberal bargain.”

Linker’s essential proposition is that, in liberal society (by which we’re talking about modern, rights-based, not “liberal” as in left-leaning Democrat), one must give up one’s religious inclinations when arguing or acting in the public square. So, in his formulation, you can argue for a position that your religion might lead to believe, but you must leave any religious backing for that reason out of your reasoning—and even then, Linker and the other theocracy-shouters seem to reserve the right to question whether a “reasoned” position is really just a religious position cloaked under a veil of argument. It’s a cheap way of discounting the arguments of opponents based entirely on their motives rather than on the validity of their actual position or even the strength of their arguments. As Michael Dougherty says:

There seems to be a fundamental suspicion that religious convictions are, for one reason or another (usually expressed in halting, or coughed over mumbling about separation of church and state) inferior to all other sources of political motivation. This hostility is usually unreflective. Anyone who observes modern politics with even slightly open eyes can see that politics are driven by the irrational: hatreds, resentment, group identification, tribalism (whether that be ethnic, religious or class), bigotry of all kings, wish fulfillment - and on and on. Liberals like Linker should thank Neuhaus. Linker may not like the catechism out of which Neuhaus teaches the peasants, but it is certainly more high minded than the "I'd have a beer with this guy.

Similar, but unmentioned, is the manner in which some have been attacking arguments made by anyone harboring a profit motive. Just as some are trying to prod religious believers out of politics, despite the fact that many of the decisions made in the public sphere affect them, there is an ongoing effort to, as the President of CEI (and my boss), Fred Smith, has written, remove the market from the marketplace of ideas.

Now, of course, it’s always useful to understand the motivations of anyone making an argument, and there’s nothing that says that a speaker’s motivations shouldn’t in some circumstances discount their position to some degree or another. But to totally disallow positions taken on the basis of religious motivation or profit interest is, as Ross points out, a far larger threat to the pluralistic, tolerant, "liberal bargain" on which America was founded than any of the overly broad alarmist claptrap spouted by so many anti-corporate and anti-religious doomsayers.

The Blogging Will be Televised

I know this site has started to seem like TV and Culture recently, and I promise I will talk about movies again soon. Things have been hectic recently, and, especially with the new Fall season, most of my viewing has been television rather than film. When I was wee, a stern adult would likely have warned me that so much TV was bound to give me square eyes, or at least poor vision. Despite my best efforts, neither ever occurred.

(I wonder: In the age of 16:9 televisions, do adults now warn kids that they'll get rectangular eyes? Or is it just a moot point because has Steven Johnson won the Everything Bad is Good for You wars and convinced the nation's parents that watching 24 and playing Xbox are good for kids? I certainly hope not. Even though I basically agree with his thesis, I also kids need to be warned away from such pop culture trivialities. They're going to take an interest in them no matter what, but if they don't have someone to argue with about why such entertainments are worthwhile, they'll never learn to approach the stuff critically. Sometimes you have to apply a little bit of authoritarian pressure in order to teach people to fight back. As with building muscle, building critical thinking skills requires one to encounter some resistance.)

Addendum: I saw this and this today. One of them was good.

Studio 60 Gets Dowdified

I watched Studio 60 again. Not even really on purpose. I was trying to finish watching The Good the Bad and the Ugly, but for all its grisly Western grit, it’s kind of a quiet, contemplative movie at times, and so it doesn’t gel well with a raucous house full of mid 20s men and their stereo systems. Clint Eastwood may be a nameless cigar-chomping badass, but somehow he loses his mystique when set to a thudding techno beat. So off went the DVD player while the channels just flipped themselves right over to Sorkinland.

And yes, it’s still very much a show that is first and foremost about Aaron Sorkin, almost more so than it is about its ostensible topic, television. Christine Lahti showed up playing a wry, attractive, left of center D.C. columnist always ready with a quip. Yes, folks, it’s former Sorkin flame Maureen Dowd reimagined as . . . a blonde. Lahti got the mannerisms down pretty well, but she didn’t have much to do other than bat her eyes and show some cleavage while helpfully providing a pivotal piece of plot information. One wonders (or perhaps hopes) what dirt he’ll dish on Dowd as the show continues.

With the inclusion of the Dowd character, Sorkin is starting to seem absolutely incapable of keeping anyone from his life out of his show. You know how that turned out for Woody Allen in Deconstructing Harry, don’t you? “I’m a guy who can’t function well in life but can in art,” is the film’s key line, and it’s probably just as appropriate for Sorkin as it is for Allen.

Still the episode was much better than the last two, mainly because the show focused on—shock and surprise!—the character relationships and the hectic business of running a live, weekly TV show. If Sorkin can keep this up, I might even go back to watching the show on purpose.

When Robots Attack

Several of my coworkers and I were at our usual table in the basement bar after work Friday when, as it often does, the subject of plans for the evening came up. Rather quickly, we realized somewhat horrifically that quite a few of us—the young, ostensibly cool kids (as much as there is such a thing amongst nerdy D.C. think tankers) —were, at least initially, headed home to watch Battlestar Galactica. You can take this any number of ways, including as a signal of my office’s geek-streak, an indication of how watching TV has become a prioritized activity rather than a time-killer, or maybe just another small sign of how utterly brilliant Ronald D. Moore’s Galactica remake really is.

The show isn’t always as consistent as I’d like, but at its best, it’s equal to any TV show ever produced. This weekend’s two hour season three premiere was the show at its best, totally gripping from minute one.

No show on air is more attuned to the political conflicts between societal institutions: Galactica opens up the hood of democratic society and gets dirty and greasy monkeying around with the gears and pistons that make human civilization run. It’s always working on at least two levels: the individual humans in question and the societal segments they represent.

But it’s not just broad social theorizing; the show engages with current politics, especially the war on terror, better than any other show on TV (as well as most of the recent spate of “political” movies). This is because Moore always refuses to let his show descend into polemic. Drama always works best when it exposes the way that things don’t work, the ways human nature inevitably fails, the way in which our lives are besought by uncertainty. Moore recognizes this, and instead of aiming for pat solutions or faux balance, he works to keep the show aware of the way in which every society and every person is bound to certain intractable ambiguities and uncertainties.

Last weekend’s show has already caused some controversy, with some seeing it as a critique of American war policy in Iraq. The Cylons, having opted to stop their attempts to annihilate humanity, have instead taken over the small human settlement on New Caprica, turning it into a tightly controlled police-state. The stated goal of the Cylons is to help the humans see “God’s will” (which, hopefully, we’ll find out more about soon). Many of the humans, of course, aren’t interested, and have started a violent resistance, even going so far as to engage in at least one instance of suicide bombing. Toward the end, the Cylons—fronted by humans recruited to police their own people—round up suspected dissidents in a scene shot through a shaky, night-vision POV camera distinctly reminiscent of footage taken from U.S. raids into local homes in Iraq.

Daniel Larison wants us to leave Battlestar Galactica out of the war debate. Like a picky eater, he seems averse to letting the two touch each other on his plate. He writes:

If you think Colonials fighting the Cylons = jihadis fighting Americans, you have your wires crossed somewhere. The Cylons are the inhuman religious fanatics, remember? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s science-fiction and doesn’t have to have an immediate political application. Maybe BSG is a more fundamental story of human survival and, as many good sci-fi stories have been, a study of human nature in the extraordinary circumstances of a fantastic alien situation.

I’m inclined to think he takes this a little too far. Regardless of what Moore intended (or says), there’s a clear connection between the show and the current war, and the night-vision sequence all but flashed the words POLITICAL ALLEGORY on the screen. And of course, the suicide bombing by the humans is tough to take without making political correlations in this age of suicide-driven terrorism. So, while I’m sympathetic to Larison’s disinclination to ascribe partisanship to the show, I’m not entirely willing to depoliticize it completely.

If Moore intended it as a direct comment on Iraq, though, then I have to say I’m not convinced. The humans on BSG come from a free, open, democratic, basically peaceful society that operates on pretty standard Western notions of individual rights and freedoms. The Cylon occupation puts them under the rule of an authoritarian outsider who rounds people up and kills them. To try to generate sympathy for Muslim suicide bombers this way stacks the deck by suggesting equivalence between Middle Eastern totalitarianism and Western democracy. Whatever problems I may have with the war, this seems clearly false.

So I don’t think that the show works as pure war-bashing. Instead, it recognizes that strong cultures, especially those under the duress of occupation, will defend themselves by sacrificing their lives. We saw this in World War II and Vietnam as well as Iraq. The French certainly faced it in North Africa. There’s something innate in humanity that causes us not to deal well with outsiders, even in the best of circumstances. Our country is, by most measures, about as inviting and open to those outside our cultural sphere as any, yet conflicts over immigration continue to erupt. For good and for ill, strong communities defend themselves, and the more put-upon, the more forcibly invaded and robbed of its identity a society feels, the more likely it is to take extreme action. Anyone who thinks an occupation of America (especially by non-humans who seemed to have some physical vulnerability) wouldn’t spur suicide attacks is kidding themselves. The rules of polite warfare go out the airlock when the basic integrity of your civilization is threatened.

The Departed review at NRO

I’m in NRO today with a review of Martin Scorsese’s latest brilliant crime pic, The Departed, a massively entertaining cops-n-robbers flick that's loaded up with stars: Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, and Alec Baldwin. Here’s a starter:

With The Departed, the director has returned with a guns-blazing reclamation of his old crime-movie turf. Once again delving into the brutal machinations of the criminal underworld — albeit in Boston rather than New York — he has fired off his most ferocious, explosively entertaining film in more than a decade. Crime may not pay, but for Scorsese (and his fans), crime movies most certainly do.

Read the whole thing at National Review Online.

Lost: The Others Revealed, Sort Of...

Here is my plea to the gods of the island: Can one of the characters--Jack, Sawyer, Locke, anybody--ask a direct question of someone who has relevant information about the workings, purpose, and history of the island and get a direct answer? I think I could even handle a flat refusal to provide information if we could at least get the survivors to start being a little more curious about their surroundings and a little less mopey about their love lives and unimportant events from their past. But no, instead of demanding anything that could possibly be consequential to his current surroundings, Jack wants to know if his lost wife is "happy." He shows a good strong desire to take direct action to escape, but he just doesn't show much curiosity other than a vague "what's going on?" And Sawyer isn't any better. When Kate's put in the cage looking shaken and hurt, wouldn't you think his first response would be "What happened to you? Where did they take you? How did you get hurt?" You know, specific, relevant information. Nah, he just calls her "freckles" and throws her a bear biscuit.

If only I had the will power to stop watching.

Sketchy Sorkin

Near the beginning of last night’s Studio 60, network exec Jordan McDeere—after finding out that responses to a focus group question about the fictional comedy show’s patriotism split down party lines—asks something to the effect of “Since when did Democrat and Republican become demographic characteristics that television networks cared about?” It’s a good question, one that showrunner (and writer of last night’s episode) Aaron Sorkin might ask himself. Because, after three episodes of a show allegedly about the behind-the-scenes drama at a sketch comedy show, we’ve barely seen much that’s really about sketch comedy.

When Sorkin’s West Wing cast ran around D.C. spouting overly eloquent monologues in favor of liberal idealism, it made sense, because, well, it was a show about professional liberal idealists. (Whether Democratic operatives are actually such people is another question, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.) You expect a show about the inner workings of a Democratic Presidential Administration to be chock full of fluffy lefty boosterism; it goes with the milieu.

But now Sorkin’s writing a show about television—something into which you’d think he’d have some insight—and yet the characters spend a surprising amount of time engaged in dorm room cultural bull sessions that have little to do with the business of running a television show. From the three episodes we’ve seen, you’d think the single dominant challenge to getting a weekly sketch comedy show produced was prudish red state moralists making cranky calls to the local affiliates.

I loved Sorkin-era West Wing; I really did, and even though I strongly disagreed with 90% of the show’s underlying political assumptions, I loved that it was clever and earnest and made a genuine argument for the value of being smart and cultured. And when that show tried to make it seem as if many of the major difficultywith running the free world was the obstinacy of Republicans and capitalist goons, it made sense, because, from the perspective of a White House Democrat, it probably was.

But Studio 60 hasn’t bothered to change up the challenges with the setting, and as a result it’s coming off smug and kind of clueless. When Sorkin actually gets into the business of running a 90 minute live weekly TV show—surely not an easy task—it’s great. Mostly, however, his bashing of the political right feels forced. That’s not to say that I care a bit for our country’s legions of letter-writing, station-calling conservative scolds or that I’m a huge fan of Bush—I’m neither. But I do care for strong, smart television, and the gratuitous—and really, rather tired and uninteresting—politicization of entertainment that Sorkin’s engaging in is killing what ought to be a fun show.

Addendum: And come on, isn’t there plenty of juicy L.A./Hollywood material for him to scour? Do actors and actresses really sit around engaging in cutesy discussions about the plays high schools are banning? Or, more likely, are they out getting into trouble, making gossip headlines, engaging in prima donnaish antics, demanding absurd salary raises, and generally making mischief like the entitled and spoiled stars and starlets of the left coast glitterati they are? Or is a little Hollywood sin and turmoil too much to ask of Sorkin and his hopelessly blinkered belief in the essential goodness of people (or at least liberals)?

Giving 2006 Some FutureLove

I don't edit or write entries at Wikipedia, but I do use it regularly, not so much as a source of definitive information, but as a guide for generally understood basics and helpful tips on where to find the firmly authoritative material on a topic--in other words, pretty how one ought to use an all-encompassing encyclopedia. Naturally, I think the phenomenon is fascinating, as it approaches the task of collecting and organizing All Knowledge in the only way that really makes any sense: decentralizing the workload. A recent issue of The Atlantic contained a pretty fascinating article on the topic by Marshall Poe, and today, Tim Lee links to and comments on another interesting bit of research regarding the distribution of contributors on the site.

The burst of growth in Wikipedia and the general sprawl of the web suggest, I think, the odd way in which society is evolving in simultaneous competing directions. After browsing through the excellent exhibits at The Phillips Collection today, I picked up a book in the gift shop that had a lengthy timeline of notable art events in the last century. One of them was the formation of a Russian art group (I can't remember the name) that declared its art to be a response to the needs of "a collective society." At that time, I'm sure this seemed entirely reasonable. These days, however, most of society is moving further from collectivization, as least in its traditional political forms. Especially in America, society has become fragmented and atomized, obsessed with the individual.

But in another sense, we're forming ever stronger collective bonds through developments like the internet, wikipedia, blogs, YouTube, MySpace, and the rest of the thriving participatory culture. Our individualized society, through technology, is actually producing a fairly robust, dynamic collective self, encompassing art, information, dating and relationships, and countless other areas of life. Yes, it has its limits right now, but these limits are constantly being expanded, and there doesn't look to be a definitive end. It's enough that, once in a while, in the midst of all of this, I actually get the sense that, yes, I've made it. I'm actually living in--or at least on the brink of--the science fiction future that, as a bookish, Asimov-obsessed youngster, I always assumed would arrive. Where is this all leading us? I'm not certain, but I sure am glad I'm along for the ride.