Something's Amis

No, I don't really have anything interesting to add, but you'll enjoy this TNR review of the new Kingsley Amis biography.

Not Everyone's a Critic, but Everyone Should Have an Opportunity to Try Out for the Job

Sorry, but I just don’t buy Richard Schickel’s notion that “not everybody’s a critic,” and that bloggers will never be able to fill in the gaps of professional critics. He paints the whole thing as a false dichotomy between enthusiastic know-nothing bloggers and elite aesthetes with eyes and minds of steel. And his intimation that, because most reviewing is just hackwork, and therefore the business is too open and democratic already, is either bizarre or nakedly self-serving. He envisions a world in which the only critics are the super-elites, the George Orwells and Edmund Wilsons, and other critics are marginalized or gone entirely. Well, that’s fine, I suppose, if you already have a gig at Time, but what he’s asking for—whether he knows it or not—is for there to be less criticism, less writing and response and discussion about books, movies, and other popular arts. He’s making the classic argument of the entrenched powers—that they and only they deserve to be at the top, and the bottom not only isn’t worthy, it shouldn’t be bothered with—maybe even shouldn’t exist—at all. Now, lord knows I’m all for qualifications and historical knowledge and carefully refined aesthetic judgments, but I don’t see how any honest lover of the popular arts (or of criticism, for that matter) could really want to limit the discussion to a few high-profile gigs held by the entrenched elite. More discussion is better, and out of the masses, voices worth listening to will arise. Schickel thinks the open critical landscape will turn criticism into a standards-less din; what it will really do is open up the application process for our critics, giving more voices a chance to be heard and read, making it even more—not less—likely that the best, the most knowledgeable, the most readable and entertaining, will come out at the top of the heap.

Radar on New York

I enjoy a good magazine vs. magazine barfight as much as the next media scene gawker, and New York magazine (much as I enjoy it) would seem to be ripe for a nasty takedown. But John Cook's attempted hitpiece on the glossy in Radar is almost entirely unconvincing. Yes, the magazine might benefit from a bit more crassness; they've yet to find a Chris Hitchens or a James Wolcott to take cranky swipes at the passing world. (Their website seems a little more playful, though never anything you'd really call mean.) And sure, it's geared, in some ways, toward New York's moneyed elite. But even more than that, it's geared toward the middle and upper-middle class strivers who desperately want to be part of the true elite; those are the people who dominate and influence so much of New York in 2007, and I don't see why a city magazine can't be focused on their lives.

As for their so-called inability to tell a story, it's actually one of the things I like most about the magazine; if I want a recitation of facts--names, places, dates, numbers--I'll read the Wall Street Journal. New York's stories tend to be a little more thoughtful and a little bit juicier all at the same time. Sure, the insights are exactly what you'd expect from yuppies and indie yuppies and everyone in between, but that doesn't make them uninteresting.

New York scenes

I always liked Nighthawks, but I was also never terribly impressed--possibly because of the ubiquity of the image. But Slate's feature on Edward Hopper has converted me. When I strike it rich in... I don't know, whereever someone like me strikes it rich... I'm going to convert my house into a Hopper museum.

My "Me-ness"

And the award for the most insane, most unbelievably narcissistic, un-self conscious, buffoonish interview subject in history goes to. . . internet dating blog celebrity and Gawker gossip fave Eric Shaeffer in this Salon interview by Rebecca Traister.

I submit that I'm no different from 99 percent of everybody. The only difference is that I acknowledge that I have these feelings. I [want] someone who is unconditionally supportive of me in my me-ness.

Nothing to say, really, except. . . wow.

No, Spengler, I won't admit it

Spengler's column on why you really hate modern art is pretty funny, and probably sort of accurate for a lot of folks, but I can't say that I'm one of them. I actually do like the stuff, just as I actually like atonal experimental music (though I'm not particularly into atonal orchestral music). Of course, neither can I say that I'm exactly "a decent, sensible sort of person without a chip on [my] shoulder against the world." (I'm working on it though. Honest.)

Really, I think the difference for the modern/abstract art and music lover, or at least for me anyway, is that while most people experience art and music in a fairly surface, sensory manner, and therefore gravitate, quite reasonably, toward art that's comfortable and pleasant feeling, I tend to experience art from a far more argumentative, analytical perspective. Most people prefer stuff that calms the senses; I, and a minority of other cantankerous folks (many of whom tend to be critic-types) prefer material that riles the mind. This is often a source of frustration for critic types who feel that everyone should follow their experience, and although I don't propose a solution, it does seem to me that critics and others of similar disposition should generally refrain from castigating general audiences for not getting something. (Other critics, however, are fair game.)

Cooking for social justice.

OK, I haven't actually read the entire New York Times today, but I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that the following sentence is the most ridiculous, most awesome line in today's paper:

At 16, Ms. Moskowitz dropped out of the High School of Music and Art in New York to follow bands, live in squats in the East Village and cook for social justice.

I imagine this involved her cooking up meals, handing them out, and declaring, "Justice is served!" This person also has a show called "Post Punk Kitchen," which we all know is just a lame retread of Spencer Ackerman's original punk rock kitchen. I mean, honestly.

One word.

Yes!!!!!!!!!

Mentions

I'm sure David Denby's New Yorker essay on the future of movies in the internet age will provoke a lot of discussion amongst the blogogeeks (John Podhoretz has already weighed in with agreement), but for now I'll just say that I think he gets a lot right, but that even in doing so, he misses some of the good ways in which film will evolve as a medium.

And I probably should've mentioned this last week, but the New York Observer has a review of (semi) fallen TNR critic Lee Siegel's book of criticism, Falling Upwards, that's worth reading.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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).