November 2010 Archives

"it's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world."
-- Stuart Smalley

My Theory of Everything (regarding human behavior) centers on our species' poor understanding of risk assessment and management.* Which is probably why I found this NY Times op-ed, "A Waste of Time and Money," by "security technologist" Bruce Schneier, so very refreshing after all the pre-Thanksgiving junk-touching hysteria. Remember that? It seems to have evaporated over the weekend, but there are still lessons to be learned. So, let's get right to Schneier's point:

A short history of airport security: We screen for guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screen footwear, so they try to use liquids. We confiscate liquids, so they put PETN bombs in their underwear. We roll out full-body scanners, even though they wouldn't have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We ban printer cartridges over 16 ounces -- the level of magical thinking here is amazing -- and they're going to do something else.

This is a stupid game, and we should stop playing it.

It's not even a fair game. It's not that the terrorist picks an attack and we pick a defense, and we see who wins. It's that we pick a defense, and then the terrorists look at our defense and pick an attack designed to get around it. Our security measures only work if we happen to guess the plot correctly. If we get it wrong, we've wasted our money. This isn't security; it's security theater.

Australian film critic Adrian Martin has sparked a discussion about the term "realism" with a short piece he wrote for the Dutch publication "Filmkrant," titled "Make Me Feel Mighty Real." Martin contends that the critical success of David Fincher's "Zodiac" (though it was a commercial disappointment) "kick-started a minor trend" -- he includes Steven Soderberg's "Che," Olivier Assayas's "Carlos" and Fincher's own "The Social Network" -- toward a kind of historical realism he describes as "a low-key realistic soap-opera of guns, sex, death, wealth, power... sticking as far as possible to the exact, wayward contours of the original events."

The term "realism" is one I've always had trouble with, because it's so vague and relative. Is cinéma vérité (or, for that matter, a surveillance camera recording) any more "real" than a Stanley Kubrick film? Not necessarily -- all show the results of decisions that have to do with photography: camera placement, lighting, sound recording, editing, etc. How much of the action is taking place because of the presence of the camera(s)? How aware of the camera(s) are the subjects, or the audience? Timestamps, black-and-white video, handheld camerawork -- they're all storytelling devices available to filmmakers. So, isn't so-called "realism" really more a choice of technology, functionality, technique, style?

Ever since David Thomson's "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" was published in 1975, browsers have said that they love to hate Thomson's contrarian arguments -- against John Ford or Frank Capra, Coppola or Kubrick, for example.¹ Fans and critics can cite favorite passages of resonant beauty, mystifyingly vague and dismissive summary judgements, and entire entries in which the man appears to have gone off his rocker. And that's the fun of it.

To be fair, Thomson broke faith with (or has been suffering a crisis of faith in) American movies at least far back as "Overexposures: The Crisis in American Filmmaking" (1981), and he's been writing about his crisis ever since. To put it in a sentence that could serve as the ending of one of his entries: I am willing to believe that he loves (or once loved) movies even if he doesn't like them very much. (Wait -- how does he conclude the Katharine Hepburn piece? "She loved movies, while disapproving of them.")

When I encountered the first edition of this book, the year I entered college, I immediately fell in love with it because it was not a standard reference. It was personal, cranky, eloquent, pretentious, pithy, petty, ambitious... It was, as I think Thomson himself suggested in the foreword to the first or second edition (this is the fifth), more accurately titled "An Autobiographical Dictionary of Film." Many times over the years I have implored my employers or partners to license digital rights to Thomson's book so that it could augment and be integrated with other movie databases and references (at Cinemania, FilmPix, Reel.com, RogerEbert.com)... but we've never done it. What, they would ask, is the "value-add"? (Really. Some people used to talk that way.) As a reference, its coverage is too spotty (Ephraim Katz's Film Encyclopedia is much more comprehensive but also has loads of incomplete filmographies), as criticism it's wildly idiosyncratic (nothing wrong with that) and as biography it's whimsically selective and uneven, leaving as many holes as it fills.

I was just reading David Thomson's intriguing/perplexing entry on Paul Thomas Anderson in the new edition of his "Biographical Dictionary of Film" (more about that later) and he begins with reports that Anderson had at one point been unhappy with New Line's print campaign for "Magnolia":

Yet, truly, how would you do a poster for "Magnolia"? How would you begin to convey the feeling and form of the picture? Would you bother to ask the question why it is called "Magnolia"? Would you let yourself ask, are posters the proper way to offer great movies?

Such awkward questions could accumulate in Hollywood marketing offices, which have so little time or practice with the crosscutting ironies and countervailing doubts that obsess Anderson and are the energy of his films.

Yes, the job of marketing and advertising is to present the movie to the public and (if it's an honest campaign) entice them with a taste of what they can expect from it. And we all know that sometimes the efforts are woefully inadequate: "It's Terrific!" ("Citizen Kane"); "The Damndest Thing You Ever Saw!" ("Nashville"). I think the original paintings and drawings done for the Polish movie market -- most of which use no images from the movies themselves -- often do a stronger job of suggesting the feel of the films, like my favorite posters for "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "The Phantom of Liberty."

I was hit with a heckuva headcold last weekend and I feel like Steve Buscemi at the end of "Fargo." If only I could get my head out of this woodchipper. I've been making notes and trying to watch some stuff, but it's too hard to write through all this viscous residue in my head. Hope to post again very soon. NyQuil calls...

Phlegmatically yours,

Jim

My recent post called "Framed" triggered memories of one the most evocatively titled books about cinema: Leo Braudy's "The World in a Frame." (What does it evoke? See quote from Martin Scorsese in upper right corner.) Published in 1976, the sub-title is "What We See in Films," and re-reading the introduction and early chapters reminds me that we no longer see movies the way we did back then. Technology has fundamentally altered our perceptions of what a movie is. Here's an observation (true at the time) from the intro, "Movies in Mind," that I find rather moving:

Incidental talk after a screening, fan magazine biographies, and film criticism -- all serve first of all to bring the short-lived image into a continuous world of ordinary discourse, to ensure its life beyond those moments in the dark, to make it exist. Unlike the products of the other arts [musical or theatrical recordings], movies are ephemeral. They aren't available, at least not yet, for easy reference on bookshelves, in prints, or on records. One of the first problems for the student of film is taking notes in the dark -- to catch for a moment the rapidly vanishing sound and image. So, too, the aesthetic situation of the movie audience in general is reminiscent of Homer's first audiences. Once the bard has sung a line, the audience can't demand to hear it again; and so the movie audience is passively drawn from scene to scene, with no ready text or score against which to judge their particular experience, with only the experience itself to generate its own standards, for when movies are repeated, unless you have a video-tape machine and can pirate fragments, they must be repeated in their entirety.

What Braudy describes there, of course, is the way all but those who worked in the movie business (from camera operators to editors to projectionists) had always experienced movies -- as events that occurred at a particular time in a particular place. When we buy a ticket to a theatrical screening, we're not purchasing anything concrete (besides the receipt that serves as proof-of-purchase for entry); we're just renting space -- a seat in an auditorium -- for a particular length of time while images are projected on a screen, accompanied by synchronized sounds. There's no guarantee that we will enjoy the images, or that we will find the experience worthwhile, only that we'll be shown the movie whose title is printed on the ticket.

Frustrated with the constraints of watching films as a critic, the strange new world of publishing in HTML, and the diminishing returns of the movies themselves, critic Duncan Shepherd of the San Diego Reader, after 38 years, says "So Long":

Old Hollywood, it would not be mere nostalgia to recall, always strove to be inclusive. Not with every movie, but with the aggregate. These days I find myself asking after a movie -- a gestating new critical criterion now aborted before its public debut -- whether, if I were not a critic, I'd have gone to it, and whether, having gone, I was glad I went. The declining percentage of affirmative answers translates into a declining percentage of hope. [...]

Attractive alternatives are fewer and farther between. "Appaloosa," a thickly disguised reworking of the Earp-Holliday tale, was a chewable bone thrown to us Western bitter-enders two years ago, but we would have to dig back five more years for another such bone, "Open Range." A healthy movie industry ought to be hatching five of those every year, not one of those every five. It goes against my sense of the fitness of things. Could "Hickey and Boggs" or its equivalent come out today, a pair of marginal L.A. private eyes on a case that embodies E.M. Forster's slogan of "only connect," it would be by a mile the year's peak pleasure. An inconceivability. The long and short of it is that what seems nowadays to fire up other people (3‑D, CGI, comic books, video games, Brangelina, the weekend box-office) seems unable to fire up me. That was always true to some extent, given the disparity between a casual interest and a vocational one. But the extent has yawningly ­widened.

"Now, getting over 200,000 people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement, and gave me hope. And what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August. Although it weighed the same."
-- Bill Maher, "Real Time," 11/06/10

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was all about tone. As Stewart said in his speech, "I can't control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions." And that boiled down to this: "We can have animus and not be enemies." Stewart and Colbert are masters of tone, and I have often argued that Bill Maher is not only tone deaf in his delivery (some find it funny; I find it sanctimonious and condescending), but too often plays fast and loose with facts and logic. And yet, he provided an important perspective about false equivalencies in his remarks about the rally on "Real Time" this week, which he summarized like this:

With all due respect to my friends Jon and Stephen, it seems to me that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you'd side with the sane and the reasonable, and not try to pretend that the insanity is equally distributed in both parties.

Keith Olbermann is right, when he says he's not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts, the other one is very close to playing with his poop.

I believe Kevin Smith has said all this before, but now he's got another movie to promote (called "Red State," due in 2011), so he's evidently saying it again. WorstPreviews.com reports that Smith is "taking to Twitter and radio" with this message:

Smith says that he doesn't hate critics, but simply disagrees with the fact that they get to see movies for free in order to write a review. His argument is that critics are just doing their jobs and sometimes don't want to see a certain movie, which means that they probably go into the theater hating it. He adds that he would rather show his movies to 100 fans and let them write reviews even if they don't have a newspaper.

Makes sense to me. Smith would prefer to have his movies reviewed by his fans -- those who've seen his other movies and who are predisposed to like them -- rather than by critics who have seen his other movies and therefore may be predisposed to not like them, so that sounds like a good proposition for him. (And I agree he should let the fans write reviews even if they don't have a newspaper, or a blog or a keyboard or a napkin and a Bic.) Not screening his movies for critics (or making them pay) also sounds like a pretty good deal for the critics who don't want to see or write about his work. They could watch or write about something else instead -- and not have to worry about all the ethical dilemmas involved in paying or not paying to see a Kevin Smith movie. The world would be a cleaner and more orderly place.

The Self-Styled Siren (aka Farran Smith Nehme) makes no apologies for her passion for pre-1960s movies. In a particularly lovely piece called "Intimacy at the Movies" she examines the mysterious forces behind her "old-movie habit." You see, the New York Film Festival was in October, and the Siren devoted herself to catching some of the big cinephiliac treasures of the fall, like Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cannes-winning "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," Raoul Ruiz's "Mysteries of Lisbon"... and she loved them, but...

Sometime around the two-week mark the withdrawal became too much and I posted on Facebook and Twitter that I was going to dig up a pre-1960 movie and watch it to the last frame. Maybe some followers thought I was being cute about how much I needed to do this. I was as serious as "All Quiet on the Western Front."

And I watched "Ivy" [Sam Wood, 1947; starring Joan Fontaine and Herbert Marshall]. And it was good. So good I started to wonder if this was simple addiction. It did feel uncomfortably like I was one of those people who went to sleep in Shreveport and woke up in Abilene. "Come on, Oscar nominee from 1934, let's you and me get drunk." But surely nobody ever wound up in rehab because they couldn't stop quoting Bette Davis movies. I can, in fact, stop anytime I like. Don't look at me like that. I have a Netflix copy of "Zodiac" right there on my dressing table, you just can't see it because it's under the eyeshadow palette. I've had it three weeks and haven't watched it yet, but I'm telling you I could watch it right now if I felt like it and if my daughter weren't already downstairs watching the 1940 "Blue Bird." I just don't want to. I'll watch "Zodiac" this weekend. Right now I need to keep watching old movies, I have too much else going on to quit something that isn't harming me anyway. Hey, did anybody else notice some benevolent soul has posted "Hold Back the Dawn" on Youtube?

Here's what Bill Maher said on his HBO show last Friday night:

MAHER: The most popular name in the United Kingdom, Great Britain -- this was in the news this week -- for babies this year was Mohammed. Am I a racist to feel alarmed by that? Because I am. And it's not because of the race, it's because of the religion. I don't have to apologize, do I, for not wanting the Western world to be taken over by Islam in 300 years?

MARGARET HOOVER: If you were with NPR you'd be fired.

MAHER: Right. That's so similar to Juan Williams, who said last week, 'I'm nervous --'

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL (MSNBC): No, it's worse. It's way worse than what Juan Williams said.¹