Make It Stop

I do not want to read any more posts on this topic. Honest to God, people. Isn't somebody trying to spend taxpayer money or bomb somebody somewhere? Let's, uh, cut off discussion on this subject pronto.

Giant Robot Battles

Yeah, did you just see that?

Holy frak.

I am so new-movie deprived right now, I may as well be a sheltered evangelical kid from the rural South. I haven't seen 28 Weeks Later, Pirates, or Knocked-Up. My Netflix que is getting longer, but I'm not getting anything watched. I haven't even watched the last 3 episodes of 24! You know things are hectic when you can't even make room for TV. I did see a very old Hitchcock film at MoMA this weekend: Blackmail, from 1929, the original silent version complete with live musical accompaniment. Interesting to see how, even in his earliest films, Hitchcock's signatures were as clear as in his more famous later films: the tense wrong-man scenarios, the double-crossing and psychological intrigue, the uncertainties over identity, the grand chase-scene finales atop big, monument sets. Guess there was something to that whole auteur business after all.

About a Vlog

Julian Sanchez begins to explore--quite successfully, I'll add--the real potential of political vlogging (still the worst bit of terminology to gain significant traction on this here web thing--even worse, I think, than "liberaltarian"). I've been playing with various prosumer and home-level digital video editing tools for 7 or 8 years now, and I've wondered when this sort of thing would take off. For a long time, it's been too technical, too time-consuming, and/or too expensive to do at the no-budget blogger level, and though it's still not exactly a snap (you can write a blog post in just a few minutes; a vlog like Julian's is bound to take at least a couple of hours), it's gotten to the point where it's doable, at least for full-time stay-at-home writers like Sanchez. Anyway, good show; it may be time for me to start trying something like this (after, of course, I finish the stack of books I'm supposed to read and numerous essays and articles I'm supposed to write over the next few weeks).

Cowabunga, Dude

"I'm totally stoked about this movie."

Those are Michael Bay's first words about Transformers in this featurette at the totally-for-real-live actual Michael Bay blog. Jonathan Last, no doubt, is also totally stoked.

David Mamet's Tale of Introverted Nerd-Empowerment

The completely brilliant and under-recognized Gene Healy speaks truth to David Mamet/Alec Baldwin power:

Alec Baldwin's now-infamous voicemail to his daughter reminds me of how much more I've liked him as an actor since he started playing to type: sloppy, angry, obnoxious and vicious. He's excellent at it, for much the same reason that Keanu Reeves is great at playing dumb guys. It reminds me also of one of the first movies I saw Baldwin play a bad guy in: 1997's "The Edge." But more than Baldwin, what I really liked about the Edge was the Anthony Hopkins character. He's an odd, bookish guy, and although he's filthy rich and married to a supermodel, you can tell he's taken grief his whole life from people who think you're weird if you'd rather read than talk. When he and Baldwin crash their plane in the Alaskan wilderness (long, implausible David Mamet story involving a scenic photoshoot for the Hopkins character's wife), and they have to fight for their lives against an enormous bear, Hopkins has the last laugh. It turns out all that book-learnin' was good for him, as he's picked up all sorts of survival skills from various things he's read. It ends up being a tale of introverted nerd-empowerment, an inspiration to bookish types everywhere. Of course, if this ever happened to me, I'd be left trying to fend off a bear with Raymond Chandler wisecracks and useless anecdotes about Warren Harding.

If it's blood you've come for, you're welcome to join us

As if to make up for the loss of an hour’s worth of sleep last night, Brooklyn residents today were blessed with a gorgeous, sunny mid 50s afternoon.

Naturally, I spent it inside a dark, windowless movie theater.

The movie of the afternoon? 300, Zach Snyder’s sword-n-sandals comic book adaptation. The movie is basically Gladiator’s brain-damaged, steroidal, coked-up younger sibling--and not in a good way either. Yes, the digitally painted sets and heavily processed photography look fantastic, but that doesn’t save the movie from ending up as little more than a blunt, witless exercise in dumb-as-rocks juvenile wish-fulfillment. This might have been fun, at least, except for the fact that its biggest sin is that it’s boring. Honestly, how could such glorious depravity be so utterly yawn inducing?

300 blends heavy metal weapons with a heavy metal soundtrack. In fact, the movie is probably best understood in the same terms we understand bad heavy metal music: It’s guttural, brutal, monotonous, vulgar, comically self-serious, populated by purposefully outrageous characters in silly costumes, often painful to experience*, and just generally absurd and overwrought.

One problem with the movie is that it’s so concerned with being this grand, brutal, epic that it spends pretty much the whole movie extolling itself as a grand, brutal epic and never actually gets around to being one. In acting, the term “indicating” describes when a performer uses motions and expressions that aren’t realistic, but are intended to explicitly tell the audience what a character is feeling. 300 basically spends its entire running time indicating.

Well, that and showing off the super ripped bods of its Spartan warriors.

As others have noted, the whole thing has a pretty serious homoerotic S&M undertone to it. If you love chiseled beefcake, you’ll have a ball with the legions of CGI-assisted six packs on display here. All of the Spartan warriors run around in lace-up sandals, brown leather underwear and big red capes (a fashion trend that’s apparently already catching on in certain parts of L.A.). There is one chick in the movie, but mostly she’s just there to, um… wait, I have no idea why she was in it. It’s as if the filmmakers were involved in some secret competition to make a movie that was both the most hyper-masculine and the most stereotypically gay thing they could possibly make. In that, they succeeded.

Something else to note: The movie is based on a comic book that’s based on a real historical event. So naturally, 300 is a great history lesson. Some of the things you’ll learn:

• That Greeks liked to yell. And punctuate their speech with big. Dramatic. Pauses. So much in fact that they did it PRETTY MUCH. ALL. THE. TIIIIIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Persians liked body piercing so much that they pretty much stuck piercings everywhere. In their lips, tongues, eyebrows, middle of their cheeks—you ever heard of knee rings? Persians invented em.
• Spartans have a daily quota they have to fulfill on usage of the word "honor," otherwise they’re sentenced to 20 lashes and a self-important speech. (The system is lenient, though: You can substitute a beheading for your daily quota.)
  
• Back in the Greek day, the sky was always brown and gold, which I’m sure is Snyder’s way of saying “Look how our skies appeared before global warming!” If he wanted to reduce emissions, he could’ve started by not making 300.

Still, if you’ve ever wanted to learn what an armored battle-rhinoceros trying to take down some gay porn models in knee-high metal boots and red capes looks like, this is the movie for you.

Addendum: Dave’s list of political allegorical matches to the movie is pretty awesome, made extra awesome by including Dilios as Marty Peretz. One quibble, though: I think Officer McNulty was not France, but Congressional Democrats.

*Admittedly, I actually a lot of kind of awful heavy metal. Like, for instance, The Locust. Just one of those things.

Line of the day

Matt Yglesias:

And, I suppose, in some sense invading another country for no reason at all is sort of the most punk rock thing ever.

Besides a leather jacket with pyramid spikes, of course.

New York Livin'

I arrive in New York, disconnected and discombobulated, and, after two days, finally find an internet cafe, only to realize that, in addition to missing two full days of news and blogging... I've missed two full days of TNR's Oscar blog. What next? Truthfully, I don't even want to know.

At least I'm pretty through with the boxes.

PS -- It's a very, very odd experience to go without internet for two days. Not only is it mildly panic-inducing for a news junkie like me to lose all track of the hour-to-hour developments of the news/blog cycle, it's sort of shocking to realize how much I rely on the net for basic information--where stores are located, driving directions, coffee shop open and close times, directions on how to put together prefab furniture. I'm sure this is somewhat exacerbated by the whole moving-to-a-strange city thing (I probably know only slightly more about New York than I know about astrophysics), but still: the internet is seriously like my second brain.

Two Brief Notes

Julian Sanchez asks the question of the day:

I'm resigned to the fact that lots of artists I like are going to have politics I find distasteful, but seriously, do the best hip-hop groups have to be f'ing Marxists?

And while you ponder that, let me just note that I've entered the fray and am now blogging over at NRO's the Corner. If this space looks barren over coming days, well, you know why.

Ideological Journalism

Ezra Klein: in favor of capitalism after all. (Okay, okay, he's always been in favor of some tempered version of it.)

Anyway, he makes an interesting point about the paucity of work for full time ideological journalists:

It's very hard, however, to make a living being a conscientious, opinionated, progressive writer. And the problem is basic: There are very few outlets. Think about it. You want to get a full-time job as a liberal pundit-type. Where do you apply? Well, The American Prospect, of course. The Nation too. In These Times really doesn't have any money, and The Washington Monthly has a skeletal staff. I guess you could try The New Republic, but that bridge is charred and smoking. Oh, and Salon, and I'm sure a couple more I'm forgetting.

Not one of those outlets turns a profit. Not one employs more than a dozen writers. Between them, you're looking at fewer than (I'd guess) 30 full-time liberal writing positions, and half of those are at TNR.

I might put the number a little higher by counting journalists who, say, work for environmental magazines like Grist or other more narrowly focused publications with a distinctly liberal bent. And while we're at it, let's throw in Harper's and Mother Jones and maybe even the numerous editorial page writing spots that stick almost exclusively to liberal views, just for the sake of completeness. And if you want to be even more generous, you can add a few think tank type positions that exist primarily to fund progressive writing of some sort. But even still, this number is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, and his basic point stands: It is indeed difficult to make a living as a full time, explicitly progressive journalist, just as it's not always easy to make a living as a full time, explicitly conservative journalist.

However, the difference I see is that liberals have more outlets for, if not explicitly liberal, then soft liberal journalism--the sort of "objective" and/or "mainstream" journalism that doesn't declare its biases but, however subtly, pushes a left leaning viewpoint. And no matter what, there are simply more liberal-leaning journalists working in today's newsrooms. As poll after poll has shown, members of the news media tend to self-identify as liberal by a pretty wide margin, meaning that even if there aren't always a huge number of outlets devoted to ardently liberal journalism, there are plenty of opportunities for liberal journalists.

The District (no, the other one)

Over at No More Marriages, the recently returned Andy Horbal puts District B13 on his year end best list (and also make a good case for why we should appreciate the distribution benefits of the Oscars, even if the whole ceremony itself is a sham). I put the film in my year end best list as well (albeit in a special category reserved for unpretentious genre films), and, having just watched it again recently, I have to say, it holds up really nicely.

District B13, in fact, gets better and better with time. The prologue scene in the secret room and the ensuing action scene where the good cop is introduced... well, someone needs give director Pierre Morel about $200 million and the keys to the ILM wizard room.

Or better yet, don't, and just let him keep making really amazing little action films.

Plus, I love that it harkens back to late 70s B-movies in that it has a serious (but not, of course too serious) political message underlying the action--a laughably simplistic argument for French socialism and general governmental goodwill, of course--but the movie bothers to try to say something it believes in along with delivering the fun, and yet it never once lets its message get in the way of the fun (of which there is much).

On a side note, I can think of pretty much nothing that would give me as much cinematic glee as seeing the two leads of District B13--clearly the best new action stunt stars in the West--go up a against Tony Jaa and his equally jaw-dropping team of Thai stunt players. And maybe Jackie Chan could show up and play the wise mentor . . . any successful producers reading this, just drop me an email and I'll have a treatment at your doorstep like that.

Just saying.

Greatest Galley Slaves post ever. Just saying.

Writing with Clarity

Comments here may be infrequent over the next few weeks as a new chapter, nay volume, of life begins. And there'll be more about that before long, I suspect. But in the meantime, do read Stanley Kurtz's pointed comments on the academic left's obsessions with obscurantist prose. This is an old conservative standby, but Kurtz does a good job with it.

I tend to agree with this critique in general (and you can always point to the Alan Sokal Social Text hoax as the prime example of the left's obscurantist tendencies gone utterly awry), but would probably classify fewer writings as incomprehensibly muddled than some conservatives. When writing about abstract art or modern theater, for example, it's sometimes necessary to write in a manner that, at least initially, seems difficult, even inaccessible. Abstract notions, I think, demand something like abstract prose, at least when describing them, and this prose won't always be generally accessible--much like how detailed economics and policy writing isn't always instantly accessible to the masses. The trick (in interpretive/critical writing anyway) is to bring those ideas into clarity and accessibility on the tail end. So, don't deny the ambiguities and vague ideas, but then use those to point toward meaning (or lack of).

Alternately, you can point to material like the dramatic theories of Artaud which you might be able to dismiss as sheer nonsense, but are also lit by a fairly undeniable linguistic power. He's not always clear, and in some passages he's downright impossible to understand, but that doesn't mean there's not something of value there, that there's no use reading his work and making an attempt to pull some stable, concrete ideas from it. None of this is to argue with anything that Kurtz wrote, or even to suggest that I think he and I would differ much on the principles involved, just to say that, just as there's a liberal tendency to snidely dismiss material that's too accessible, there's an opposite conservative tendency to push away material that doesn't deal with absolutes and concretes in quite as firm a manner as we might like.

Addendum: On the other hand, there are a solid number of conservatives willing to engage in exactly the sort of difficult, somewhat inaccessible writing I'm talking about. Take, for instance, Steve Talbott, whose essay "The Language of Nature" in the new edition of The New Atlantis (unfortunately not yet online)--the quarterly journal of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where Kurtz is employed--contains the following wonderful line:

When we crucify the world-text upon a scaffold of grammatical logic, the resulting corpse presents its own fascinations, but these are not the fascinations of the original meaning; they are only a shadow of it.

This is not entirely impenetrable, but robbed of its context, it is certainly daunting, and even in context, it's a sentence that may appear imposing to some readers, and will require rereading by many. However, it's actually a very good sentence in a remarkably insightful essay about how the current scientific approach to nature denies its content and meaning in favor of diagramming its structure in an abstract mathematical manner.

John Podhoretz,,,

is funny.

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.

Mean Critics

Rod Dreher on American Idol and "mean" criticism:

I watched some schlub in the tryouts talking about how great she was, and how her husband didn't support her trying out because, in her view, he was jealous of her desire to soar. She talks for a bit about how much of her own self-worth and dignity and dreams and yadda yadda are riding on this tryout.

Sure enough, she stood in front of the panel of judges, and she's horrible. Excruciatingly bad. And boy, did they let her know. I'd heard that this Simon person is especially cruel, but it shocked me how harsh he was with that young woman. She begged for another opportunity to sing, but after the second one, they sent her away with a fusillade of insulting remarks. Offstage, she sobbed, which you knew was coming. She graspingly tried to salvage her dignity by saying that she was "sick," and that that had affected her voice. But she was, of course, completely untalented. She didn't realize that. She does now, most likely.

I did something I never would have done 10 years ago: I turned off the TV. The schlubby young woman was a fool, but it was unbearable watching her torn down like that. To be honest, it reminded me of when I used to be a critic, and would gleefully trash untalented filmmakers, actors and the like. Had a blast doing that. Never once thought about the real people with real hopes and real dreams, however tawdry and delusional, that I was bashing. My reviews could be really funny and entertaining, but if I were ever to return to criticism, I wouldn't write reviews in the same way. I'm not saying that I would pull punches, and overpraise something that didn't deserve it just to be nice. But I would put aside callow cruelty, of which there is too much in the world. I regret having added more than my share back in the day.

I sympathize with this sentiment, but I'm not sure the comparison between an amateur singing competition and Hollywood entirely stacks up. I imagine a lot of critics--no matter what the topic--will, at least once in their life, take a moment to wonder about the targets on the other end of their pens. Many will at least be tempted to feel a little bit of guilt about their harsher words. Does anyone really deserve to be made fun of in a public forum?

The answer is more complicated than Rod seems to make it. I might agree with him that there's little need to lay into someone as deluded as the AI contestant. But when a filmmaker makes a product designed to waste your time, money, and thoughts--when a filmmaker, either by intention or incompetence, makes a sucker of you, the paying audience, then I think there's a good argument that he or she deserves to be the target of scorn, if not ridicule.

I also tend to think a critic has a responsibility to honestly portray their own reactions. Movies (or politicians, or sculptures, or restaurants, or architecture) that make a critic irate should be treated as such. And critics also have a responsibility to engage their readers--which means that they, like movies themselves, need to make use of entertainment, humor, wit, etc. Publications don't pay for pep talks to filmmakers, nor do they pay critics to squelch their own views. As a good employee, a critic has a responsibility to both readers and bosses to write in an honest, engaging manner--which often means being, well, what Rod might call "cruel."

Of course, a good critic will (hopefully) be able to judge the appropriate tone for a piece, will not indulge in gratuitous mud-slinging, and will avoid piling on easy snark at the expense of substantive content. But sharp words are a tool that should not be yanked from of any critic's rhetorical arsenal just to salvage some creator's feelings. And, just as conservative and liberal pundits can often share drinks and make peace even while launching print salvos at each other (well, usually), knowing that it's just part of the trade, I think both the critics and the criticized can have some understanding about the nature of their business and not get too worked up over harsh judgments.

Overstreet's Top 25

Jeffrey Overstreet has an impressively long year-end feature in which he discusses his 25 favorite films of 2006 with other movie critics, writers, and filmmakers. I had the opportunity to go back and forth with him about The Science of Sleep (with some overlap into Marie Antoinette) down at number 15.

Bauer Power

Jim Henley has interesting, funny, useful thoughts on the new season of 24 here, here, and here. Best point (which I wanted to make, but didn't have the willpower to go back and figure out how long each of the annoying suburban subplot characters lasted):

This season’s “suburban teen subplot that needs to end ASAP” is done, and in record time. Last year, they kept Derek on my TV screen through hour 5. The year before that, Behrooz was on my TV screen for nearly half the season, but it was OK because his terrorist mother was the awesomest villain in any season of 24. In season 3, viral decoy (don’t ask) Kyle Singer was on my screen for 6 hours (and they didn’t even kill him!). And in seasons 1 and 2, despite constant kidnappings, every single villain failed to kill Jack’s annoying daughter.

I also have to say that this season's suburban teen subplot was far less loathsome than the others, mainly because it focused on something directly related to the action at hand. Did anyone really care about Behrooz and his teeny bopper girlfriend? No. Not for a minute. But dealing with the way decent folks handle finding out that their nice neighbors are actually terrorists is, well, kind of interesting (if typically ludicrous).

Hustle and Moan

Am I the only one who is intensely curious about Steve Sailer's take on this?

Two Films Enter, One Film Leaves

Over at The House Next Door, they're linking to Armond White's end of the year list--a side-by-side comparison called the "Better-Than" list, in which the always-cantankerous White lines up films he thinks are "better than" certain mainstream favorites. In the comments section, site editor (and recent addition to the New York Times movie crit roll--congrats!) Matt Zoller Seitz writes:

Armond's list, while necessarily fragmented, showcases the critic at his button-pushing, Sermon on the Mount best. It's also a refinement of an experiment from last year that's trying to move beyond the usual Top 10 list of capsule verdicts. ... This should be a weekly feature, I think.

But isn't it kind of already (regular if not weekly)? White regularly goes out of his way to champion his favorites as not just good but explicitly better than what he sees as the mainstream picks.

It's okay every now and then, but the regularity of it--and making it into a full-fledged feature like this--strikes me as a bit juvenile, fanboyish, and standoffish, like the Ain't It Cool talkbackers always arguing over whether Heroes or Lost or Battlestar is the One True Good Show--as if, Highlander-like, there can only be one.

This isn't to say that White doesn't often interest me, that he's not an unbelievably powerful writer (his best sentences, of which there are many, have wrecking ball force), and that we don't need someone challenging the conventional critical wisdom. But sometimes I think that he's more concerned with picking a fight than with championing good filmmaking.