2006: The Year in Music

So, in the spirit of the awesome music-delivery power of the interweb, I'm linking to samples (mostly at MySpace, much as I despise the site) of pretty much all of my favorite albums of the year. Though I published a couple pieces of music criticism, I've fallen out of the intense pasty-white-music-nerd community to some extent. However, I still managed to listen to more than 100 complete albums this year and parts of at least 200. Was this a good year for music? Well, it depends on how you look at it. I don't think there was a single truly groundbreaking, instant classic released this year, but there was an awful lot of quite listenable stuff. Every month, it seemed, there were at least a couple of albums that caught my attention and stayed at the top of my iPod rotation for at least a few days.

My taste still tracks relatively close with the mainline urban indie yuppie crowd, although I persist in adoring Cursive even after the cool kids gave them a somewhat muted response. After an initial distaste for music blogger fave The Hold Steady, I gave in and succumbed to the adoration that has gripped the rest of the indie music sphere. What can I say? Boys and Girls in America is a paean to single, urban, entry-level life—blue collar rock for middle class kids with lit degrees. And I love it.

I wasn't too impressed with the hip-hop this year, though I did surprise myself and really, really like the new Justin Timberlake record. Not every song works—the Three Six Mafia track is really awful—but there are five or six really impressive, wonderfully experimental tracks.

Of course, the usual disclaimers apply: This isn't a definitive list. It's subject to change. I'm in no way claiming these as the one-and-only actual "best" albums, just the ones I found to have the strongest combination of artistic merit, listenability, and originality. The list (arranged roughly in order with my favorites on top) spans the indiesphere—from guttural metal to disco punk to eclectic folk—so there ought to be something for everyone to enjoy.

1. Cursive – Happy Hollow
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Show Your Bones
3. The Rapture – Pieces of the People We Love
4. White Flight – S/T
5. The Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America
6. Supersystem – A Million Microphones
7. Blood Brothers – Young Machetes
8. Band of Horses – Everything All the Time
9. The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
10. Mastadon – Blood Mountain
11. Forever Changed – Chapters
12. James Figurine – Mistake Mistake Mistake Mistake
13. Bernard – A View Beyond the Cave
14. Dave Bazan – Fewer Moving Parts
15. Justin Timberlake – Futuresex/Lovesounds
16. Jeremy Enigk – World Waits
17. Matt & Kim – S/T
18. Junior Boys -- So This is Goodbye
19. Bright Eyes – Noise Floor (Rarities 98-05)*
20. Joanna Newsom – Ys
21. Professor Murder – Professor Murder Rides the Subway
22. Damien Jurado – Now that I'm in Your Shadow

*In a quick search I couldn't find any tracks from this album, but you can, of course, hear Bright Eyes here.

Hostility

I suspect several of you will be interested in this L.A. Times piece riffing on the meat-n-guts splattered poster for Hostel II (not for the squeamish) and the (supposedly) increasingly gory nature of movies and television. I'll admit that when I was a teenager I'd wax ecstatic over any film with the "bravery" to pound us with really shocking gore. This can probably be attributed to pretty basic teen angst and rebelliousness. But I've since come (somewhat) to my senses. I don't mind hard violence too much if it adds some value to the film, and I certainly still have a taste for excess and over-the-top in film, but I'm increasingly wary of the base, exploitative nature of films like Hostel and Saw. In the article, the marketing director responsible for the photo beams with pride as he claims that the poster is "extremely disturbing. You know those poor girls are in for it." It's that sort of frank admittance that the film is solely devoted to gory titillation that bothers me. I find it repulsive in the way of Laguna Beach, daytime talk shows, or cheesy praise music: It's unrepentantly shallow and pandering, lacking even the dumb-fun enthusiasm of a good guilty pleasure.

Freedom from Fear, Want, and Boredom

Just noticed this: Caryn James has a pretty on-point piece in The New York Times analyzing the differences between the novel and movie versions of Children of Men.

And make sure to read Anthony Sacramone's truly excellent take on the film and its differences from the book. I think he pushes the movie's anti-Bush leanings a little further than they actually go, but he does a marvelous job of reading into the book's Christian themes and how they've been gutted--indeed, used to entirely opposite ends--in the movie.

2006: The Year in Movies

NRO has posted my short end of the year movie rundown along with the year-end summations of several other movie-loving conservatives. I'll have a lot more to add in this space over the coming week, but for now, the weekend calls! Here's a teaser:

I didn't see every film released in Washington this year, and there are still a few potential greats that have yet to make it to our nation's capital (Inland Empire, Letters from Iwo Jima). But I suspect that no amount of catching up will change my impression that 2006 was not a particularly great year for movies.

Not Allusive, but Evasive

Matt Zoller Seitz has, just as we've come to expect, a brilliant take on Children of Men with which I largely concur. Key passages:

The problem with Children of Men is that it's too much of a performance and not enough of a movie. It's filled with emphatic yet fleeting references to a century's worth of miseries and atrocities, from the U.S. war in Vietnam and concurrent domestic unrest to Bosnia-Herzegovina, 9/11, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. And Owen's character, Theo -- an ex-radical turned civil servant who's asked by his ex-lover, the guerilla leader Julian (Moore), to secure letters of transit for the pregnant Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) -- could be seen as emblematic of contemporary western political malaise, if you squnt really, really hard. Unfortunately, although these touches and Cuaron's meticulous direction indicate otherwise, the film lacks a coherent vision. It's a compelling pastiche, and that's not nothing, but I wanted it to be great rather than just proficient and gripping; it never quite gets there, and it suffers in comparison to earlier classics in the same vein. Unlike, say, Brazil, which wove every scene, performance, line and design detail into an analysis of the mechanics of fascism and its bludgeoning effect on hope and imagination, or Blade Runner, whose jam-packed yet anonymous futureworld visualized life in an era where only machines with limited lifespans appreciated what it meant to be human, Children of Men's references feel at once calculated and perfunctory...

[Snip]

Its vision of a brutal, paranoid, jackboot-policed, immigrant-abusing-and-deporting England is built on very specific contemporary and recent historical references, and the film certifies its "serious" credentials by embracing a grungy naturalistic vibe. Because of these choices, the film's vagueness begins to seem not allusive, but evasive. It's very, very tastefully pushing your buttons, writing sociological and political checks it has no intention of cashing.

Addendum: Am I the only one who is consistently amazed by Seitz's ability to precisely analyze the formal properties of a film? For a long time, I was almost solely interested in film as a formal medium; I didn't care one way or the other about its cultural/political/social properties. Obviously, that's changed quite a bit. And though I'm not even remotely interested in giving up on culturally inclined criticism, reading the close, formal interpretations of folks like Seitz and Andy Horbal (look what neat tricks he does with Scream and Inside Man) sometimes makes me just a tad wistful for the days when I spent a little more time thinking about shots and cuts, film stocks and lighting...

Dexter: Blood on the Wall

I have to admit: I was apprehensive about Dexter. For one, the premise—a serial killer who works as a police blood spatter analyst—seemed far too consciously offbeat and pleased with itself. And while I loved the satirical amorality of American Psycho as much as the next yuppie-hater, and am quite fond of Seven and Silence of the Lambs, I’m suspicious of any “entertainment” that looks positioned to add to the mythic grandeur of the American serial killer—especially when, like Dexter, it appears ready to ask you not just to give the killer respect, but sympathy. [Mild spoilers ahead]

And in some respects, I was right to be suspicious. Dexter takes the American Psycho route of presenting a fit, attractive, totally affectless serial killer as its protagonist. But instead of allowing us to feel revulsion at such a despicable human being, it asks us to relate, to empathize. And, just as American Psycho conflated disgust between serial killing with our natural antipathy toward the solipsistic materialism of urban yuppie culture, Dexter pulls a similar bait and switch by playing on our natural sympathy for cops, guys with girlfriends and sisters, and vigilantes (crime fighters) who bring the bad guys to justice. Dexter is someone who, by the usual rules of TV narrative, ought to be a good guy; he’s a serial killer, yes, but the deck is stacked in his favor. Occasionally the show gets nervous and backs off, trying to frame its central idea as a question—it is possible to have sympathy for such a cold blooded killer?—but mostly it simply tells us that we should, that it’s okay to look kindly on such a man, that it’s wrong to merely judge him a monster.

This is a dangerous route to go, because it essentially instructs people to ignore their moral sense and to refuse to cast judgment. Dexter’s murderous habit, we’re to understand, isn’t his fault—it’s simply the way he’s wired. The show takes pains never to get too graphic with his murders, never to dig too deep into his rituals and fetishes, never to have him murder an innocent by mistake. It’s a kindler, gentler portrait of a serial killer, one you can take home to meet the folks (or at least the kids—he’s got an attractive, divorced girlfriend, after all). The Sopranos may have humanized its murderous thugs for us, but it never let us forget for too long that Tony and his associates may have been lovable in some respects, but they were also violent gangsters who committed despicable acts. Dexter glosses over its protagonist's gory predilections, making them safe and easy to condone.

That said, the show is often quite captivating. Sure, the shifts in tone we occasionally awkward; early episodes, especially, contained numerous disjointed lurches from light, goody satire to dark, brooding thriller. And, as Alan Sepinwall points out, some of the subplots didn’t work—especially those involving police department infighting—but the primary story was played rather well. The arcs that mattered most (those dealing with Dexter’s father, sister, and the ice truck killer) came through. The revelations about the ice truck killer, I think, were handled particularly well, and in the final few episodes he made an incredibly fascinating, spooky villain. My biggest complaint is that ITK didn’t live through the season’s end. He was such a complex creature—especially in relationship to Dexter—that it would’ve been great to see a season built around his torment of Dexter now that both are fully aware of their relationship.

In the end, I think it’s ITK—Dexter’s truly uninhibited mirror image—that makes the more compelling character. A good guy serial killer is novel, of course (and I’m sure that went a long way toward selling the show), but the way Dexter is presented seems designed to avoid complexity rather than confront it. He is, in the end, just a updated version of Batman—a man with a dark past that drives him to violent action, yet channels it into “good.” But ITK is a real killer, one who murders unabashedly and without reason, and yet still claims to have the moral high ground—or perhaps claims to be above morality altogether. Now that’s a character of real complexity; yet as soon as the show revealed his true nature, it killed him off. For a series that so clearly wants to be seen as bold, innovative, and edgy, that’s a remarkably timid move.

The Critics' Children

It appears that I'm in the minority on Children of Men. Yes, it's well crafted--and the battle-zone single shot through the debris-strewn immigrant camp streets is certainly the extended take of the year--but I still maintain that Cuarón's directorial savvy is in service of little other than itself. And even its most ardent boosters don't offer much to counter this. In Slate, Dana Stevens hails it as "the movie of the millennium," and suggests it will top her year's best list. But her praise is almost entirely technical, and she admits that the details of the film's future world are related only "indirectly" and that one at least could argue that "the particulars of the film's political world are too vaguely sketched" (though, to be fair, Stevens sees this as a positive). Manhola Dargis goes a little further, arguing that the film's vague, meandering nature cleanses it of the "hectoring qualities that tend to accompany good intentions in Hollywood." And I'd agree, mostly, but that ignores the fact that Cuarón seems to have no intentions whatsoever.

In the L.A. Times, Kenneth Turan makes the best case for the movie by comparing it to Blade Runner. Like that film (one of my all-time favorites), it's a dystopian sci-fi flick that strips its source material of most of its interiority and detailed societal rumination and substitutes more conventionally cinematic material--a noirish detective story in Blade Runner, an episodic chase narrative in Children of Men. If I alter my opinion on the film, it will be in the same spirit that loves Blade Runner, both the novel and the movie, as drastically different as they are.

But I'm not sure that will happen. Blade Runner takes the skeleton of Philip K. Dick's story and world and builds it into both a grand futuristic vision and a rather complex exploration of what makes one human. Children of Men discards most of what makes James' book great and replaces it with a lot of technical flash, but, as far as I can see, not much else. Even Turan gives mostly technical praise, saying only that it "comment[s] on the problems society faces today" without giving us a hint of what, exactly, it has to say about those problems. Perhaps this is because it says nothing.

Perhaps I would've liked Children of Men more had I not read P.D. James' book first. But even trying to think about the movie apart from the source, I still find myself coming to the same conclusion: It's stunningly produced and often gripping in a chaotic sort of way, but ultimately it's hollow, a whole lot of uproar over nothing.

The things we hate and love

It's hard not to love Annie Hall. What other romantic comedy is as honestly touching, smart, funny, and sad? It's a cliche to write those terms in combination (You'll laugh! You'll cry!), but in this case, it's a cliche that's true. In the last three decades, only a handful of films come close (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I think, is its nearest competitor). Reverse Shot reminds us exactly why we all fell in love with the movie, and with Annie.

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

Aunt Clara had for years labored under the delusion that I was not only perpetually 4 years old, but also a girl.

What are you doing reading blogs? You should be watching TBS' 24 hours of A Christmas Story!

And oh yeah: Merry Christmas. Whatever you do, avoid this:

Mmmmm, HDMI cables...

I was going to write something about how the obnoxiousness of people in general and bloggers in specific gloating over their new electronics purchases (mostly flat panel televisions) is the modern day equivalent of showing off baby pictures. Yes, it's wonderful, I'm so happy for you, but does anyone other than you really care? But why bother? The Office already beat me to it.

And yes, my new TV is pretty freaking sweet.

In the Presence of Greatness

McSweeney's also agrees that The Wire is amazing. In other words: Pretty much total across-the-board consensus.

It's actually kind of weird, and I think people are kind of noticing how weird it is, that the critical/journalist community has actually noticed that we're in the presence of a True Classic while it's still current. Usually it takes years, even decades, to build this sort of unified consensus. How often does this happen? Ever? The only thing I can think of that comes close, at least in the film/TV world, is Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, which was recognized, even by those who didn't adore it, to be a pretty amazing achievement. Maybe you could put out an argument for The Sopranos, but there's a lot of debate about whether the show is really as great as its boosters proclaim and at what point it went into decline (for the record, I think it stayed strong until the sixth season).

Colonized by PR Flacks

Read Francine Prose's NYT review of the new Dave Eggers novel, and then go back and re-read the first half of this.

When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth

PopMatters has a rundown of what they're calling the year's best indie pop, a sort of dubious classification of really standard, unoriginal music that they shrug their shoulders at and decide to like anyway. As you might expect, a lot of it's pretty blah, but that shouldn't stop you from checking out "George Romero," by The Sprites, which is unquestionably the most pleasingly bland pop song I've ever heard about horror movie icons. Who else is going to half-rhyme "Tom Savini" with "Sam Raimi?" Genius!

Christmas-release reviews in NRO

For those who plan to spend Christmas at the movies, I've got a little advice for you: Maybe you shouldn't? Yes, I'm in NRO today with reviews of two Christmastime releases: the post-apocalyptic sci-fi thinkpiece, Children of Men, and Robert De Niro's elegant but overlong CIA history, The Good Shepherd. Neither quite lives up to its potential.

Here's a glimpse of the future:

Children of Men ... which takes place in a near-future Britain struggling to maintain some semblance of order after the human race has inexplicably lost its ability to bear children, shares some fears with its apocalyptic counterparts. But whereas its predecessors tended to be premised on a sudden, grand failure of infrastructure, usually due to some human folly, director Alfonso Cuarón's movie posits a slow, painful decline caused by a mysterious loss of biological will. Instead of looking far into the future after civilization's collapse, it presents a near-future in which humanity lies on its death bed — an end-times vision of demography-as-destiny, in which demography has failed and the only destiny is the grave. It's a subtler take on humanity's destruction, but unfortunately, not subtle enough.

And The Good Shepherd:

The modern spy-story paradigm tends to prize excitement over believability, tension over coherence, and tangled plotting over depth of character. The Good Shepherd, director Robert De Niro's richly produced CIA epic, reverses these predilections, opting to elevate character and seriousness over action-film frivolity. For a little while, this is promising, and the elegant production sustains an air of thoughtful luxury throughout. But eventually, it becomes clear that this is a spy movie so concerned with its own weighty-yet-vague ambitions that it's traded edge-of-your-seat for put-you-to-sleep.

Deconstructing Braff

This is so genius I can't even believe it. More gushing comments, etc. [FYI: The accompanying image is kind of NSFW.]

The man I seek is off by himself in a corner, clearly intoxicated -- not with alcohol, but with music. So with a reverent wave, I approach Zach Braff. He holds up a finger to silence me as he listens to his iPod. After 20 seconds of what can only be described as intense grooving, he removes the headphones.

"Sorry -- I was just listening to this great new artist called Cat Power. I discovered her out of nowhere when she did a 40-minute set on KCRW followed by 2 Amoeba in-stores. But pretty soon she won't be just my little secret anymore." He is referring to Cat Power's inclusion on his soundtrack to Staring At Nothing, his latest movie, which stars Braff, Scarlett Johannson, Jessica Biel, Keira Knightley, Jessica Alba, Anne Hathaway, and Dustin Hoffman.

"It's about how strange this thing we call life can be," explains Braff. "Like in one scene my character meets a guy who walks around covered in bees. And there's a guy who only talks in Pig Latin. And a guy whose guts are all on the outside of his body. And a guy who lives in a trash can like Oscar the Grouch. And -- spoiler alert -- the ending is that my character meets a guy who walks around with chopsticks up his nose. That's when he learns that sometimes love is just a four-letter bed where your heart sleeps."

Addendum: All of this pretty much just goes to show that Reihan is right, even when he does weird things like put his blog posts in the comments section. Of course, maybe this is to be expected when you're the kind of guy who casually admits to having a "favorite social scientist." Favorite food? Favorite movie? Favorite pair of jeans? Okay. "Favorite social scientist?" Extreme. Awesomeness.

All My Children

My review of The Children of Men comes out tomorrow. I wanted the movie to be as brilliant as the book, but my reaction, even after several weeks of consideration, was to find it intense, captivating--and basically empty. It's directed to the hilt, though, with one shot that will cause true cine-nerds to blubber in jaw-agape awe. So it's one of those films that I may eventually reevaluate. If there's a film this year that critics, and maybe even mass audiences, will look back on and rethink, Blade Runner style, this is it. (And by that, I definitely want you to gather that The Fountain will not be that film.) Anyway, you should read this interview with Cuaron and this Voice review by J. Hoberman, both of which put the movie in a useful light.

Just FYI

Jonathan Last is on a freaking roll.

And I'm still doing the Jeremy Lott thing. (There's even a picture of me, which, come to think of it, might be a disincentive for you to hit the site. Hrrmmm.)

Barney Baloney

Sometimes, when reading a particularly good review, I get writer-envy. Other times, I just nod my head in recognition and respect.

This is one of those times.

What we have here is almost certainly the best line--and certainly the best closer--in film criticism this year:

After a meager 72 minutes, the man who once stretched an obsession with testicles into a five-film cycle remains as unknowable as ever.

Zing!

Home away from home

I'll be guest blogging at my friend and colleague Jeremy Lott's place over the holidays. I'll probably still post here from time to time (certainly I'll make sure to post any articles--what's a blog good for if not shameless self promotion?), but most of my daily blather will fill up his server rather than this one. So bookmark jeremylott.net, or add it to your RSS doohickey, or go totally, wildly primitive and type out the individual letters one by one. If you're anything like me (and for your sake, I hope you're not), you probably need the exercise.

Come together... right now

As if you needed more reasons that Tim Carney is awesome: His column today is a perfect example of why libertarian-conservative, and even libertarian-Christian, fusionism is still a superb idea. Emphasize the similarities, not the differences--the two groups are far closer than the last six months of conventional wisdom would suggest.

Die Harderer Again Some More

Hi, my name is Peter, and I like Big Dumb Action Movies.

Still, Live Free or Die Hard, the awesomely-titled fourth sequel to the ultimate 80s action series, starts with some serious weights on its ankles: the director is Len Wiseman, the hack who did the Underworld movies; Bruce Willis' costar is Justin Long, the irritating indie-yuppie from the new Mac ads; and the movie is set in Washington, but was filmed in Baltimore--a total slight to my home city.

But despite all that, I have to say: I like this trailer. There's basically no dialog, no suggestion as to what the story might be (though earlier reports suggest it's got something to do with computer hackers)--in fact there's really nothing at all except stuff going boom real good. And I'm okay with that, because that's what the Die Hard movies are about, and this trailer, it seems to me, is declaring from the outset that Die Hard 4 is gonna kick it old school, shamelessly and spectacularly blowing the crap out of everything in sight. Even better is that it's coming out July 4th weekend opposite Michael Bay's sure-to-be-insanely-ridiculous Transformers movie. In other words, an entire generation of mid-20's males will be tripping on megasized action and 80's nostalgia next year (with the Ninja Turtles movie as warm up), and you can bet I'll be one of them.

Poorly executed, yet not

Matt Yglesias' explanation of Time's Person of the Year award (which, as you're probably aware, was won by Me this year) is priceless:

I think you've got to give credit to Time magazine. The Person of the Year concept is basically unsound, is obviously basically unsound, is poorly executed each year, is expected to be poorly executed each year, and nevertheless no matter what kind of silly choice they make it gets buzz and sells magazines. Meaning, at the end of the day, that it's actually a really good idea that's always executed well. Other publications would die for a formula that tried and true.

And you've also got to sit back and ponder the ludicrous awesomeness of the interwebs in specific and 2006 in general when you get Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Tim Lee volleying back and forth over the intricacies of the coming robot economy and using Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel--which, at 8, was the first adult novel I ever read--as evidence. The nerds have truly won. Long live the future.

Nothing to do with Stargate spinoffs

You should always devour each and every issue of EPPC's wonderful technology and culture journal, The New Atlantis, immediately and fully upon its release. However, if you haven't had a look at the latest issue (it's a busy month, I know), let me especially recommend Brian Boyd's "The Dotcomrade," which tackles the evolving nature of friendship in an online world, and Sonny Bunch's "Techno-Horror in Hollywood," which looks at technology fears in Hollywood J-horror remakes and their original foreign counterparts. And I would be remiss not to mention my colleague Iain Murray's essay on the meta-fight over climate change rhetoric (the issue is so contentious that we don't just fight over the issue itself, but the right to talk about the issue as well).

We have those in raw denim

Forget about the Sartorialist, this is the fashion blog post of the year. Really, who doesn't fret about designer denim in this day and age? And if you don't, move to Brooklyn already. Start a band. Get a blog. For serious. If America put as much time as it does thinking about hot-shit jeans into [insert your pet cause here], why, why, um... I forgot the rest. But you'd be all happy.

Objectively Speaking

Chuck Tryon admits to having enjoyed Sci-Fi's miniseries The Lost Room, so I suppose I might as well do the same. It's goofy pulp that takes a fun concept and does a reasonably good job of seeming to complicate things without ever getting actually complicated. It's like the series is wall-papered with the look and feel of complexity, but underneath it all is a fairly standard, sturdy, plain--and mostly enjoyable--pulp concept: The world is filled with so-called Objects, each of which came from a mysterious hotel room and each of which has a special ability, some useful (stopping time), some not (boiling an egg). In combination, the Objects take on new properties, and there are various organizations of differing beliefs about the nature and origin of the Objects that have set out to collect all of them and exploit whatever properties are available from the array of combinations. In the midst of this is Joe Miller (Peter Krause), who has lost his daughter in some sort of time/space void created by the room.

Ok, so maybe it is a little complicated.

But mostly it's just zippy, shameless sci-fi storytelling, with a strong, scalable concept: any time things slow down, you can bring in a new Object, a new sect, add a little bit of backstory to the room, and exploit the possibities inherent in each. And because each Object has its own special properties, and usually an offbeat owner to go with them, learning the stories of the Objects and their possessors always feels as if you're discovering something new. In other words, it doesn't get bogged down in go-nowhere mystery like that other show with the word Lost in the title.

Addendum: Scratch that. The (non) ending sucked.

That's about the dumbest thing I ever heard.

Peter Boyle, Taxi Driver’s The Wizard, has died. His advice on life?

A man takes a job, you know? And that job-- I mean, like that-- That becomes what he is. You know, like--You do a thing and that's what you are. Like I've been a cabbie for years. Ten years at night. I still don't own my own cab. You know why? Because I don't want to. That must be what I want. To be on the night shift drivin' somebody else's cab. You understand? I mean, you become-- You get a job, you become the job. One guy lives in Brooklyn. One guy lives in Sutton Place. You got a lawyer. Another guy's a doctor. Another guy dies. Another guy gets well. People are born. I envy you your youth. Go on, get laid, get drunk. Do anything. You got no choice, anyway.

Or, for a lighter selection:

Throwing Rocks

Modernity has created a cosmic difference between intellect and action, even when both are driven by the same motives; as such, the only people qualified to lead a present-day revolution would never actually do so.

Vive la complacency, right?

Titans of Metal, and Absurdity

I'm really sorry I missed this.

School's Out for The Wire

The fourth season of The Wire is over, and it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what I was already fairly certain of—that it’s far and away the best, most brilliant, most powerful dramatic series in the history of television. Calling something Shakespearean is kind of a joke, but if anything qualifies, this is it: the perfectly composed and executed narratives; the expert balance of pathos, humor, and suspense; the dialog, at once so natural, entertaining, and layered with hidden meaning; the sprawling cast of fascinatingly drawn characters. The show is hard to write about because I just end up spewing superlatives.

And, as Ezra Klein points out, it’s so good that pretty much everyone likes the show: Klein, of course, as well as fellow progressive Matt Yglesias, and folks on the other end of the size-of-government spectrum too. And it’s not just liberals and libertarians either: The Weekly Standard ran a positive review by Sonny Bunch at the beginning of this season, and I know it even has fans in the right’s paleocon wings.

Klein thinks this is a result of the show’s unrelenting dour outlook:

Nearly everyone likes the show. That's possibly because it's a masterful story, expertly told, and exquisitely acted. It may also be because it's little kinder to state intervention than personal initiative. While none of the problems would be solved by charter schools, the public schools aren't making progress either. Indeed, it may be the radical apocalypticism of The Wire's vision that makes it so palatable: By offering absolutely no hope, it evades arguments over solutions.

I’d agree. If anything, it doesn’t go far enough. The Wire doesn’t just “evade” arguments over solutions, it posits that no solutions actually exist. As Reason’s Radley Balko notes, the show constantly suggests that “even well-intentioned public policy tends to pervert incentives,” and yet it doesn’t hold much hope for individual achievement either. As Klein writes, “Every one of the kids who'd taken affirmative steps towards improving their lives had seen their efforts destroyed by circumstance.”

And yet, despite the show’s hardline defeatism, it offers a real respect for the dignity and humanity of its characters—every one of them. The cops, the manager/officer class, the politicians, the dealers, the teachers—some of them may come off as jerks or fools, but they all get a fair shake. Not once does the show simply give us a “bad person.” You can, of course, point to the pains the show has taken to get its audience to respect the dealers. But even on the other side, there are no simple bad guys. At the end of the first season, Rawls (a Major then, as I recall), a deft, scheming, manager-class cop who is one of the show’s most often unlikable characters, gives McNulty an amazing, bracing pep talk in the hospital lobby after Kima’s shooting. He is a scheming, self-centered game player, but he’s not without loyalty to his fellow cops, and you have to respect his drive to get things done, no matter what.

The Wire hates bureaucracy, and it hates the system, the man, the rules that pen people in and keep them down—no matter what form they take. But what really gives the show its emotional core is that it loves people, all people, even if they can be awful, and even if they’re part of the system, willingly or not, that it despises.

The Passion of Mel

In my review of Apocalypto, I posed the question of whether the traditionalist motifs Mel Gibson wove into the film were really just a moral gloss on an excuse to indulge in his love of primal mayhem. Rod Dreher hasn’t seen the movie, but based on previous Gibson films, he seems to think the answer is yes:

I suspect that Gibson is … indulging his passion for savagery -- a passion he might not fully understand -- and attempting to justify it by saying that he intends it for a moral purpose. If he knows what he's doing, he's a hypocrite. But if he doesn't -- and my guess is that he is blind to his real motives -- then he's a tragic figure.

He then references my review, particularly the line “Apocalypto simultaneously celebrates both man’s peaceful, communal side and his most primal, violent instincts,” and responds, simply, “’Celebrates.’ On that word hangs everything.”

Dreher is right about the importance of that word, I think. Because that contradiction really is what's essential to the film: It promotes both a rural, peaceful lifestyle and unrelenting violence; it abhors the decadence of modern, urban society, but also plays directly to that decadence by delivering on our desire for wanton violence as entertainment. And though I think it's useful to wonder if one part is just an excuse for the other, I don't think you can really declare one the "real" intention, the "correct" meaning. Both parts, however divergent, are equally true.

The movie is honest about its passion for communal life; it’s also fiercely dedicated to wringing every last bit of cinematic adrenalin from its violence. That’s a major part of what makes the movie so interesting—that it fully embodies both ideas despite the tensions between them.

And I don’t think that, as Dreher suspects, Gibson is blind to his instincts. I think he recognizes his hang-ups and tries to resolve them in his films. He knows he’s got a penchant for violence, and he knows the dark places that might lead. So he uses that drive for something he believes to be good, channeling his mania rather than letting it control him. He puts his bloodlust in service of defending his most basic beliefs. It’s the Dexter approach to movie directing—a sort of vigilante filmmaking, using scandalous means to what he believes to be a moral ends. And the result is some really powerful filmmaking that uses blunt force to in service of some fascinating, even inspiring, ideals: Braveheart, about oppression and freedom; The Passion, about the persecution, suffering, and dedication of Christ; and Apocalypto, about the bonds of family, community, and nature. It's edgy material, but it makes for really good cinema. Bloody good.

Let's Go, Spartans, Let's Go!

Thanks to the wonders of the internets (and old college pals), we can experience the newest 300 trailer in oversized ultramegavision--technically known as a 350mb 1080i HD video file. I was suspicious of this film at first; come on, Zach Snyder? But holy-washboard-abs, kids, this looks like 14-year-old boy wish fulfillment on a truly massive scale. In other words: Count me in.

And for a little history on Thermopylae and its badasser-than-thou Spartan warriors, check out this piece in The New York Sun.

Bloggers review movies. Whodathunkit?

At last: Larison posts his Apocalypto review! Read, and be amazed. I'll probably have more to say about his review and Rod Dreher's "here's why I'm not seeing Apocalypto" post soon.

And while you're exploring religion and the movies, Anthony Sacramone has one of the finer reviews of Apocalypto I've read, along with a rather amusing (and quite accurate) take on The Fountain that skewers its shallowness while praising its ambition.

Multicultural Mel

If you're looking for other perspectives on Apocalypto, I'd recommend Britt Peterson's TNR piece, Mel Gibson, Multiculturalist, which makes a case I briefly considered including in my review. Petersen admits that the film isn't exactly an academic cultural-historical study, and it has its factual waffles, but, on the whole, she thinks it's worth praising Gibson's effort to recreate and expose foreign civilizations to the American masses.

I'd probably agree, and I'd add that, when I was taking a Medieval Film & History course (no, they did not have films in the middle ages, silly) in college, one of the points my professor harped on was that a lot of the primary sources historians rely on were really more like present day films than scholarly research. Their emphasis wasn't so much on getting the minute details and timelines precisely correct, but instead was on crafting narratives and perspectives that served the historian's--or his patron's--purpose. In other words, maybe filmmakers like Mel Gibson, or even Ridley Scott, are truer historians than we might like to admit.

The Apocalypto is Upon Us

I’m in NRO today with a review of Mel Gibson’s latest maniac action-epic, Apocalypto. As many critics have noted, it’s a bloodbath, but it’s also a stirring, stunning action film—and, strangely enough—a rather passionate case for traditionalism. Here’s a starter:

As a filmmaker, Mel Gibson has guts, and he also loves to spill them. Like Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto is a commercially risky film, as well as a bloody one. In Gibson’s signature style, it revels in grisly primitive carnage: battered bodies, slit throats, severed heads, ritual human sacrifice, ferocious animal attacks — you name the body part, and you’re likely to see it torn apart. Yet Gibson’s bloodlust cannot be easily dismissed. For not only is he an enormously talented filmmaker, he is also one of genuine conviction. And so we have Apocalypto, a stunning action epic, a gory personal indulgence, and a forthright defense of family, tradition, and local community against the decadence of urban modernity. It is a journey into an ancient foreign land filled with exoticism and excitement, but it is also a visit to the haunted, occasionally disturbing, yet undeniably compelling cinematic world of Mel Gibson.

Read the whole thing at National Review Online.

Miramax Gets Churched Up

Apparently, the Weinsteins think there's money in the silver-screen God racket:

The latest hoppers-on aboard the post-Passion, pro-faith movie-distributing train? That'd be Harvey and Bob W, whose Weinstein Co. has just announced a deal with Christian shingle Impact Entertainment to (eventually) put out six faith-based flicks a year.

I'm not entirely sure what to say about this, except that, well, markets for everything, right?

Addendum: Over at Looking Closer, Jeffrey Overstreet has some critical thoughts on the creation of what he calls "Contemporary Christian Cinema."

Blood Diamond No Gem

Blood Diamond is a terribly mediocre film. It is gorgeously photographed, especially the landscapes, and most sequences are handled with some competence. Mostly, though, it serves to further reveal director Edward Zwick to be the movie director equivalent of a bad foreign correspondent. Like his last film, The Last Samurai, it is about a cranky, selfish white mercenary who redeems himself with some help from a native culture in the midst of violent upheaval. And, like that film, it is almost unbearably preachy, alternating between three types of scenes: earnest lectures, emotional pleas, and deeply confused action scenes.

The lectures and emotional please are obvious, the sort of “these people are dying!” monologues actors have been earnestly delivering in hopes of Oscar success for years. Zwick with the same sort of stolid, portentous seriousness—learn these lessons, people—that inflicted every frame of Last Samurai, and the result here is no better. For Zwick, everything boils down to a matter of Western capitalist guilt; half the scenes feel like deluded trust-fund brats giving their first report in a world cultures elective.

At least this isn’t surprising. It’s the action scenes that really rankle. They are confused at a fundamental level, never sure whether to be exciting or horrifying. We watch mass slaughter of innocents, but Zwick isn’t sure he should make these sequences simply traumatic (this is a big-star Hollywood movie, after all), so he gives them some action-scene zip. Be thrilled as Leonardo DiCaprio dodges bullets and guns down rebels! Watch the rebels spray down crowds of civilians and hack off their limbs! Zwick’s directorial instincts flail between these two poles, as if he can’t decide whether to simply make a guilt-inducing message movie or to make a guilt-inducing message movie that’s also fun and exciting. The problem, of course, is that neither are good ideas.

Rock and Roll

Last Sunday night I caught a performance by the Father of Emo, Jeremy Enigk. In the early and mid 90s, his band Sunny Day Real Estate helped launch what would eventually become the (now extremely annoying) emo craze of today. Enigk is the original sensitive, silky-voiced punk rocker. Before there was Ben Gibbard and Death Cab for Cutie, there was Enigk and Sunny Day Real Estate.

As you might expect, the show was quite good, suitably epic and eloquent, and the live setting really shows off how amazing Enigk’s pipes are. On CD, you realize the guy has a good voice; live, when you know it doesn’t have the benefit of ProTools and is booming through club speakers, you understand that it's borderline miraculous.

Incidentally, the show was at Rock N Roll Hotel, D.C.'s newest rock venue in the up-and-coming Atlas district. The venue’s sound is only mediocre (I’ve heard much worse, but also much better; one friend grumbled a bit), but the atmosphere is really nifty. It’s been done up like an actual old-style hotel, and the upstairs bar and private rooms, with their classy antique furniture and musty wooden décor (mixed, appropriately, with rock paraphernalia), well—it’s one of the coolest rooms I’ve been in since moving to D.C.

Addendum: I really like the folks at AEI, but somehow I just don't buy this. I drink far, far, far more coffee than any human should, and I'm definitely addicted. It's so important to my day-to-day existence and my work productivity that I sometimes joke that it's responsible for a significant portion of my life's successes. Come to think of it, it might not even be a joke.

Sailer on Lynch

Steve Sailor's early review of the new David Lynch nightmarescape, Inland Empire, is worth reading:

The basic structure of the film is promising, resembling the setup for a complicated Tom Stoppard play. Dern plays a classy Hollywood actress married to a jealous Polish millionaire. She lands a big role in a Southern Gothic film about adulterous lovers and the husband who will kill them if he finds out. Her leading man is a Colin Farrell-type star notorious for sleeping with all his leading ladies, especially the married ones. Not surprisingly, you soon can't tell whether the love scenes depict the characters in the film-within-a-film, or whether the stars are rehearsing a little too realistically in their spare time.

But Sailor, unlike AICN's Moriarty, doesn't come away satisfied:

A half hour into the film, my hopes were high. But then … the story never develops any momentum. And it just goes on and on and on forever and a day. You know the last ten minutes of "2001," where the astronaut keeps walking into strange rooms, staring in puzzlement at different versions of himself? Well, multiply that by 18 and you'll grasp what this three-hour disaster is like: Laura Dern walking into scores of rooms and staring in horror at what she sees. But there isn't much that's all that horrible to look at, so the film doesn't even offer the amusements of a horror film. The soundtrack consists of endless minor key chords and thump-thump heartbeat-like percussion, which is pretty creepy for awhile, but gets old eventually. Lynch himself seems to get bored with this, and keeps introducing characters that don't fit into his already overstuffed four-level structure.

I can see how this could become tedious, tiresome, or difficult to watch, but with Lunch involved, that's always a possibility. In a way, Sailer's review just piques my curiosity. Lynch's movies can be frustrating because they seem to promise interesting stories and concepts, they don't really capitalize on them. Instead, Lynch is concerned with creating intuitive, imagistic portrayals of fragmented subconscious, often with unexpected, unplanned results (and, as Moriarty revealed, most of this movie was totally unplanned). It's an altogether different focus, one that doesn't necessarily lend itself to accessibility: Most directors tell us stories; Lynch paints dreams.

Addendum: David Edelstein seems to think similarly, acknowledging that it's a dense, willfully obtuse head scratcher, but, well, he kind of thinks that's a good thing:

I remembered, watching Inland Empire, why Twin Peaks began to hemorrhage viewers in its second season. There are really enough distorted lenses, absurd non sequiturs, portentous warnings, and inexplicable symbols for ten canceled TV shows. And yet … and yet … Lynch serves up enough irrationally disturbing images for 100 classic Asian horror films, and the bedraggled Dern is so overflowingly open that you can’t dismiss the movie as an arty exercise.

And they have a plan

There's probably a lot I could say about last week's Battlestar Galactica, but I think I'll just stick to this: Battlestar Fight Club meets Eternal Sunshine of the Galactica. And yep, just as good as that sounds.

Switching Sides

By now you’ve read Brink Lindsey’s New Republic article on liberal-libertarian fusionism, and you’ve probably read Jonah Goldberg’s brief response as well as Sebastian Mallaby’s column. It’s a good piece, certainly much more persuasive than Markos Moulitsas’ absurd notion of the Libertarian Democrat. But I don’t think I entirely buy it—at least not yet.

Lindsey’s argument, to oversimplify, boils down to asking libertarians to give up hardline support for economic freedom and become pragmatic capitalists, while asking progressives to give up collective identity, hard egalitarianism, and serious centralized economic planning. Needless to say, this strikes me as a difficult proposition. Libertarian angst against Republicans is strong enough right now that it might seem plausible, but I have a hard time believing that there’s really all that much support amongst libertarians for a party whose key positions include a general support for strong business regulations and government programs. This, in fact, is why I’m so reticent to endorse conservative proposals to use government for its ends (even if I have a general respect for those ends). Libertarians aren’t really all that likely to hop parties en masse anytime soon, but if the right makes an active switch away from small government to managed government, they’ll follow Lindsey and turn away.

Of course, as Goldberg notes, there’s an upside to this:

We should all hope that Lindsey's project succeeds. Who among us unapologetic conservatives wouldn't like to see the two parties get in a bidding war over who is more libertarian on economic issues?

And sure, it’d be nice. But it’s also pretty much impossible—and exactly why a true libertarian-liberal alliance will never really happen.

Just Super

If you haven’t been keeping up with Heroes, now is the time to hit up iTunes for back episodes and get with the program. The show lacks any of the grimy moral ambiguity of Battlestar Galactica or The Wire, and it can’t touch 24 in terms of deliriously souped-up action thrills. But it’s genuinely got something that none of those shows, and, as far as I know, no other show on television, has right now: heart.

The show takes recent trends in superhero films and expands on them. The new crop of superhero movies has succeeded largely due to its willingness to focus on the heroes as ordinary folks with ordinary problems. One one hand, they provide an opportunity to witness the special effects extravaganzas that we demand from our monster movie hits, but they also promise us a decent human core story about a guy with girl problems, a hard childhood, or trouble fitting in. The heroes in those films are involved in epic struggles to save the world, but, like all of us, they’re also just trying to get along in it and be happy.

Heroes expands on that idea by shifting the emphasis almost entirely to the ordinary and the everyday. And though it doesn’t have BSG’s depth (or Lost’s illusion of it), it’s got a solidly engaging story arc and, most importantly, tremendously endearing characters. They are, for lack of a better word, cute—and yet not a bit cloying, not a bit irritating. They react as you might expect both to the strange and ordinary events in their lives, alternately incredulous and accepting, and, most importantly, they share information consistently and sensibly.

And unlike so many of the long-form narratives in our current television landscape, there’s very little overt cynicism to the show. Oh sure, bad things happen, and there’s distrust and deceit and painful decisions (this is drama, after all), but the show wants to showcase and celebrate decency and good-heartedness rather than negativity and dysfunction.

Yes, the show has problems—its chance meetings between characters occasionally seem arbitrary, and there’s an ill-defined but undeniable glossy soap feel to some of it (creator Tim Kring's previous show was Crossing Jordan). But it’s really a fun, determinedly good-spirited take on what it might actually be like to just suddenly sprout superpowers in the midst of a very ordinary life.

Wikiality

The NYT Magazine's cover story on the intelligence community's use of Web 2.0 information-sharing tools like blogs and wikis does an expectedly good job of covering the issue's bases: advantages (faster information development, more communication), disadvantages (inability to keep secrets), legal and cultural criticisms (laws that prohibit cross-agency sharing, civil liberties violations that occur from massive information collection and analysis). What interested me most was its description, somewhat familiar to Wired-reading geeks out there, but still nicely stated, of the benefits of information dispersal capabilities of newer web technologies:

The C.I.A. set up a competition, later taken over by the D.N.I., called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?

Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the “reader-authored” encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia’s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly… What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia’s self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them — and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.

… In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically.

The reason this works, when it does, is because of the assumption that in a massive, dispersed information-sharing community, bad faith either doesn't exist or is mitigated by a tide of good actors. The counterpoint to this is the Colbert notion of "wikiality"--the mass movement of information sharers to game the system and produce inaccurate results. You can argue that there's no real incentive for such activity, nor is there an effective mechanism for organizing the large dispersed groups that it would require. But we've already seen similar schemes work with other popular information collection tools: Googlebombing is an overt attempt to distort the value and meaning of information in order to alter public perception. Web 2.0 knowledge sharing works because it assumes a collective incentive to organize and disseminate trustworthy information will drown out individual bad actors; it fails, however, to account for the way mass media can mobilize groups to form a collective interest in acting in bad faith.

Dividing lines

Yuval Levin's Weekly Standard piece "Putting Parents First" makes an argument that conservative governments should position themselves as negotiators between the interests of the market and the family--an argument that I suspect we'll hear more and more in coming years. The piece reminds us that, despite the cover of the new American Prospect, populist class-warfare policies are going to have a limited appeal, and that the right needs to focus its governing on the interests of the aspirational "parenting class." Like Ryan Sager's recent book, the article leans heavily on the fiscal/social divide in the Republican coalition. But unlike Sager, who recommends that Republicans take a more libertarian slant, the article wants conservatives to focus on developing the links between middle class social conservatives and pragmatic capitalists.

In some sense, I'm sympathetic to both arguments; Sager's small-government bent is obviously appealing to me, while Levin's pro-family tack is, I think, at least a strong part of the necessary strategy for winning elections. However, it seems to me that the flaw in both arguments is that they make too much out of the divisions in the right. In the end, both end up leaving one end of the spectrum out in the cold. Sager would practically abandon Souther social conservatives in favor of independent-minded Western libertarians, and Levin, though careful not to come out and say it, would let libertarians flounder ("In this effort, there is a role for government" just isn't going to appeal to many serious small-government types).

But instead of playing up gaps between the two groups, the focus should be on reminding them of their shared interests. Southern social conservatives need to be assured that godless libertarian types aren't really a threat, and libertarians need to be reminded that religious conservatives have as much interest in liberty as they do. Easing tensions, not building them up, should be the goal.