Recently in Critical Thinking Category

"Related to this, and common in the comments sections of blogs, is the position that because some random person on the internet is unable to defend a position well, that the position is therefore false. All that has really been demonstrated is that the one person in question cannot adequately defend their position."
-- "Top 20 Logical Fallacies," The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe*

This week my mother went to pay her cable bill. It's a long story, but the cable company said she couldn't keep the account in my late father's name (two years after the fact), so they closed the old account, opened up a new one for her, and then proceeded to apply her payments (made to the new account number) to the deactivated account, resulting in claims that she was past due. Nobody can figure out how they did this. They offered to issue her a refund check in a few weeks, but in the meantime she needed to pay the same amount (again) to her existing account. She did that and they credited it to the wrong account again. In the meantime, the first refund check had arrived. So, she deposited that and, this time, she decided to go to their office in person, pay in cash, and get a printed receipt in her hand. Because that's the kind of gal she is.

She "owed" them $114.25, so she gave the young man at the counter $120, fresh from the ATM. He said he didn't have any coins to give her the 75 cents change. That's OK, she said, here's a quarter. But I don't have any coins, he said. That's why I'm giving you the 25 cents, so you won't need to give me 75 cents; you can just give me six dollars back, she said. But I don't have 75 cents, he said....

In his splendid Salon.com interview with David Cronenberg focusing on "A Dangerous Method," Andrew O'Hehir begins by noting that Cronenberg is "a beloved interview subject for film journalists" -- both because of the richness of his work and the stimulating quality of his conversation. I can testify to this, having interviewed Cronenberg several times over the years (starting with "Dead Ringers" in 1988, which in retrospect seems to have begun the second phase of his career). As O'Hehir says, Cronenberg is "a genuine intellectual in a realm crowded with poseurs and pretenders. He can talk easily about almost any topic you bring up; if he hadn't turned out to be one of the premier cinematic visionaries of his generation, it'd be easy to imagine him as a writer or philosopher or historian." Few filmmakers are as articulate about their own work.

What immediately struck me about the five paragraphs I'm about to quote -- in response to O'Hehir's first suggestion -- is the breadth and depth of Cronenberg's understanding of his own filmmaking process... and even the impetus and history behind auteurism. Cronenberg is a man who thinks when he speaks, exploring and refining his ideas as he communicates them. In the fast-serve business of media-coached mini-interviews and rigid, publicist-enforced talking points, that's a rarity.

O'Hehir raises an idea from Charles Drazin's book, French Cinema, "where he talks about the difference between old-school French movies, what they used to call the 'tradition de qualité,' mostly literary adaptations and historical dramas, and the auteurism of the New Wave, where you had to be a writer-director. It struck me that in your career you've almost gone backward, from the second kind of cinema to the first."

Cronenberg responds:

Click here to watch larger video on Vimeo.

Annotated full transcript of the video here, for easy reference.

In the Cut: Piecing together the action sequence
Part II: A Dash of Salt
Part III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco (Bullitt, The Lineup, The French Connection)

The first of a three-part video series on action sequences at Press Play is a really detailed, shot-by-shot analysis of a famous chase in "The Dark Knight" that has always confused me. Others told me they had no problems following it, but the closer I looked at it, the better I understood what puzzled me.

As I say in the introduction over at Press Play:

When, for example, we're shown someone gazing intently offscreen and there's a cutaway to something else (that appears to be in the vicinity), we assume (having familiarized ourselves with basic cinematic grammar over the years) that we are seeing what they are looking at.  But that's not always the case. Why? I don't know. I find many directorial choices in contemporary commercial movies to be sloppy, random, incomprehensible--and indefensible.

This essay takes a long, hard look at roughly the first half of the big car and truck chase sequence from Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," set on the lower level streets by the Chicago River.  It stops, starts, reverses, repeats, slows down... taking the sequence apart (and putting it back together) shot by shot. The idea is to look at it the way an editor would--but also as a moviegoer does. We notice lapses in visual logic whether our brains register them consciously or not. I found this sequence utterly baffling the first time I saw it, and every subsequent time.  At last, I now know exactly why.

"In the Cut" is presented by Press Play, Scanners and RogerEbert.com.

UPDATE: 9/12/11): Part II is now here. This quotation comes near the beginning:

Realism, as usual, is simply a fig leaf for doing what you want. Virtually any technique can be justified as realistic according to some conception of what's important in the scene. If you shoot the action cogently, with all the moves evident, that's realistic because it shows you what's 'really' happening. If you shoot it awkwardly, that presentation is 'realistically' reflecting what a participant perceives or feels. If you shoot it as 'chaos' (another description that Nobles applies to the Expendables action scenes)--well, action feels chaotic when you're in it, right? Forget the realist alibi. What do you want your sequence to do to the viewer?

--David Bordwell, Observations on film art (September 15, 2010)

A horror or science-fiction movie without subtext is like Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory without electricity. The inner metaphor is what gives it life and resonance. Otherwise, it's just a story about stitched-together people parts. Or take David Cronenberg's "The Fly," a riveting, poignant horror/science-fiction/romance about an ambitious scientist who accidentally gets his DNA mixed up with that of a housefly. Everything about the movie is first-rate, from the direction to the performances to the effects. But what really grabs hold of you is the universal theme: We are all Brundlefly, sentient, self-aware beings whose bodies are going to decay and die. In 1986, a lot of people assumed the subtext was AIDS; Cronenberg later said he was thinking in more general terms about the process of aging. It doesn't matter. The movie works on those levels.

Cronenberg is particularly ingenious at making the word flesh, and the ways he develops his ideas are often even scarier than the explicit horrors: "The Brood" is a masterpiece about the psychosomatic effects of rage turned inward, and about the legacy of emotional abuse passed down from one generation to the next; "Videodrome" is about technology as an extension of the body and the brain; "Dead Ringers" is about mutant forms of psychological and sexual intimacy; "Naked Lunch" is about a writer who has to internalize his own sexuality before he can create art.... Cronenberg is an organic, visionary thinker, storyteller, filmmaker. His movies have meat on their bones. Other filmmakers whose work strikes me as insubstantial lack this ability to flesh-out their pictures with compelling, animating ideas. Their plots are meticulously plotted, but they're skin-deep and there's nothing to sink your imaginative teeth into.

Which brings me to this summer's hits, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" and "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," neither of which I have much interest in seeing. Instead I'm intrigued by a few things I've read about them -- specifically about their subtext, or lack thereof. In a piece about the racial themes of "The Help" ("Why Can't Critics Just Get Along?"), David Poland writes:

It's simple, really: Trailer for Adam Sandler's "Jack and Jill" (Dennis Dugan, 2011) + memorable scene from "Hardcore" (Paul Schrader, 1979) in which George C. Scott discovers that his missing daughter has been making porno movies. Instant movie magic.

(tip: Pat Healy)

This is why I sometimes love Twitter. Wednesday afternoon I stumbled upon some funny tweets with the hashtag #geriatricnoir, which was actually "trending" for a bit, thanks to contributing comedians, critics and movie lovers. Here are some of my favorites from this fleeting moment in tweeting, including some of my own:

@pattonoswalt The Big Nap #geriatricnoir

@DelilahSDawson The Postman Rang Nine Times Before I Heard It #geriatricnoir

@kriscollins The Talented Mr. Brimley #geriatricnoir

@pattonoswalt Death Wore Depends #geriatricnoir

@sfcaadam Chinamentown #geriatricnoir

@RockabillyJa The Glass Hip #geriatricnoir

@DrMadoror The Postman Always Rings Right in the Middle of Murder, She Wrote #geriatricnoir

@Ugaries Dial M for what are all these buttons? #geriatricnoir

@jondaly Vertigo #geriatricnoir

In his essay about pop culture references in television comedy, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote: "'Krusty Gets Kancelled' is one of the greatest of all "Simpsons" episodes, but if it were a poem, it would need to have nearly as many footnotes as 'The Waste Land' -- and the further away from its original air date we get, the truer that's going to be."

A reader sent him a provocative 2000 Hermenaut essay by Keith Gessen called "'Simpsons' at the Gates: Intimations of the Coming Barbarism." In it, Gessen argues (somewhat facetiously, but not entirely) that the "loss of a referenceable reality will, in all likelihood, eventually destroy our civilization..." He recalls correcting his aunt when she insists that Cary Grant starred in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (1954). He's correct that it was James Stewart, not Grant, in the picture, but the thing is, he's never actually seen "Rear Window." He'd seen a "Simpsons" episode that referenced it. This troubles him:

The kind of faulty reasoning that Stanley Fish writes about so incisively in the New York Times ("So's Your Old Man") derails meaningful discussions in politics and film criticism all the time, and it's so transparently bogus that I wonder how people keep getting away with it. I've railed against it in Scanners many times over the years, but Fish dissects it beautifully here:

We saw it in spades a while ago when Democrats lamented the incivility of public discourse and blamed right-wingers for proclaiming over and over that President Obama was a foreign Islamic usurper working to undermine American values. The right replied by rehearsing the litany of things said by democrats about George Bush -- he was a tool of corporate interests, a warmonger and an enemy of civil liberties. So what gives you the high moral ground, those on the right asked, when you were equally vile in your accusations?

I want to say that this is a bad move (and a cheap trick) because it deflects attention from the substantive claims being made and puts the spotlight instead on propositional consistency. The better move (by either party) would have been to insist that Obama or Bush was in fact those things and to back up the assertion with the marshaling of evidence. The better move, in short, would have been to take a stand on truth rather than shifting the focus to a calculation of reciprocal fairness. What gives someone the high moral ground is that he or she is right, not that he or she is fair.

Whenever research confirms something we feel we already knew intuitively, or from our own experience, there are always people who'll scoff and say, "Well, I could have told you that!" And maybe they could have, but that's not the point. Science is a discipline involving systematic observation and empirical evidence, not unverified hunches. Movies, of course, are optical illusions -- photographic, electronic and/or mechanical phenomena that exploit the peculiarities of our eyes and brains... and elicit all manner of feelings. They are science and they are sometimes art, and the methods of studying one or the other can be complementary.

Take one of my favorite David Bordwell posts ("Hands (and faces) across the table"), which has recently been revived (resurrected! It's alive!) through the eyes of science, thanks to DB's guest-blogger, Tim Smith ("Watching you watch 'There Will Be Blood'"), of Continuity Boy, the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London, and The DIEM (Dynamic Images and Eye Movements) Project.

In 2008, DB wrote about the map scene in Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," in which the camera remained fixed during a long take while the looks and gestures of the actors "directed" the viewer's gaze. He wrote:

At the end of a piece on the "History of Atmospheric Carbon Changes," and the measurements represented by the Keeling curve, a rather cranky Barry Ritholz posted this, which made me laugh. Not that such a statement would be necessary at Scanners (you're better than that) -- but I can think of lots of places on the Internet where this would be fitting:

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, lack of scientific knowledge, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for empirical data. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are anonymous after all.

"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.

"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.

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

@jeeemerson god. Pretty soon we won't be able to tell a knock knock joke, for fear of hurting a doors feelings. STFU

That's an offended tweeter's response to my previous post, "The "gay" Dilemma: If it's a joke, what does it mean?" -- except that it's not really a response, exactly, since it doesn't address anything I actually, you know, said.¹ It's a tweet. Still, it expresses a fairly common attitude among those who are easily offended that others take offense to things they are not offended by: Why are people hurting my feelings by getting their feelings hurt over what I say or what I like? So, to those whose feelings have been bruised in this way, I want to say: Don't stop whining. Don't stop making it all about you. Keep on complaining that your sensibilities are being hurt because you feel that other people should not express opinions other than your own. How dare other people claim that things you honestly feel are funny are not only not funny to them, but maybe even painful or insulting!?! What if that's not even what you meant at all? Just remember, when your feelings are hurt by somebody who says you've hurt their feelings, it's all their fault for being so sensitive to what words mean and being so rude as to tell you. Blame them. You shouldn't have to accept responsibility for what you do or say or laugh at. That's just not fair!

But seriously, folks...

Several of yesterday's commenters mentioned comedic treatments of the anti-gay epithets "fag" and "faggot" on "South Park" ("The F Word") and Louis CK's series, "Louie," which is where the clip above comes from. A group of comedians are discussing the implications of using the word "faggot" in Louis's stage act. Louis asks Rick, the only gay comic at the table, if he thinks he shouldn't use the word. Rick says, "I think you should use whatever word you want... but are you interested to know what it might mean to gay men?"²

On the day after the near-mystical cosmic alignment of Columbus Day and National Coming Out Day (did the Postal Service suspend delivery on the day Columbus came out in 1492?), and the very day that a US district judge issued a worldwide injunction ordering the Department of Defense to stop enforcement of its absurd, 17-year-old "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy for kicking gays out of the military (best of all, the case was brought by the Log Cabin Republicans!), I have found myself reading about a stupid gay joke that's been removed from trailers for the upcoming Ron Howard comedy "The Dilemma," starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James.

I saw the trailer in front of "The Social Network," October 1. Vaughn's character is speaking to some automotive businessmen (is this a follow-up to Howard's "Gung-Ho"?) and says: "Electric cars are gay. I mean, not homosexual, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay."

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper reportedly went on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and said he was "shocked" that Universal "thought that it was OK to put that in a preview for the movie to get people to go and see it." Universal responded by quickly pulling the scene from the trailer. No word on whether it will remain in the movie, which opens in January.

Part 1

Claude Chabrol's "La Rupture" (1970) begins in what could be a cave, with the quotation: "What utter darkness suddenly surrounds me?" The camera abruptly dollies to the right a short distance and the "cave" is revealed to have been a close-up of the bark of a tree. The movement pulls in a rustic-looking apartment building (which the DVD commentary explains is a fake French farmhouse, a suburban style popular at the time). The lens has been focused on the building in the distance the whole time; the camera has just moved around the obstacle of the old tree to show us what was "hidden" behind it. And that's what the movie's about, looking into the darkness beneath middle-class suburban life. This opening is, in its way, a less overtly surrealistic forerunner of the first sequence of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," 16 years later. (Yet there's still something disturbingly surreal about it, don't you think?)

Robert Siegel was interviewing Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and now chief product officer for an Internet "taste-profiling" service called Hunch.com, on NPR's "All Things Considered" the other day. It's a software-driven inference engine of the sort you see all over the web these days that provides you with "if you like this, then we suggest you'll like this" recommendations. Netflix has one, Amazon has one, iTunes' relatively new "Genius" feature is one.

Jonathan Rosenbaum begins his latest Cinema Scope Global Discoveries on DVD column with a "confession" that I find myself sympathetic to:

Since retiring from my job as a weekly reviewer in early 2008, I've been discovering that I usually prefer watching mediocre films of the past (chiefly from the '30s through the '70s) to watching mediocre films of the present--unlike some of my former readers, who assume that I've stopped writing about movies simply because I no longer aid the studio airheads in implementing their latest ad campaigns. I no longer train most of my attention on contemporary industry releases, as I was obliged to do for the preceding 20 years, because, in keeping with Raymond Durgnat's apt observation that dated films sometimes have more to teach us than "timeless" classics, I'm looking for stuff I can chew on. (Try to imagine what literary criticism would be like if most or all of its practitioners decided that 2010 publications currently on sale at K-Mart comprised the bulk of all the literature ever published that was worthy of our close attention.)

The "New Political Correctness," as I came to call it during the aughts (though it is neither new nor correct) is the pressure to reframe discussion by controlling language. In recent years it has come mostly from the political right ("moral clarity," "War on Christmas," "moral equivalence," "homicide bombers," "Freedom Fries," "restoring honor"...) and, I insist, is an insidious menace to society even greater than the old-school institutionalized PC that came from the left, because its motives are transparently rooted in demagoguery rather than civility and altruism.

Back in early 2007, Sarah Silverman's "Jesus Is Magic" prompted me to write this:

I've been arguing for several years now that, especially since 9/11, "political correctness" has evolved into a mostly reactionary phenomenon. The lefty PC that began as a way of showing sensitivity to minorities and those who had been discriminated against for years (women, the disabled, etc.) eventually turned into a form of monolithic, euphemistic denial of reality, where questioning was verboten and anything that could be interpreted as doubt or dissent was denounced as "fascist." Now we see the same thing coming from the right. The terminology has changed but the brainwashed thinking hasn't.

Revisiting Dwight Macdonald's famous essay, "Masscult & Midcult," and other ideas old and new -- continued from "When 'I get it!' means 'I don't get it!' and vice-versa."

"It seems to me that nearly the whole Anglo-Saxon race, especially of course in America have lost the power to be individuals. They have become social insects like bees and ants. They are lost to humanity, and the great question for the future is whether that will spread or will be repulsed by the people who still exist..."
-- Roger Fry (1866-1930), from a letter quoted "Roger Fry," a biography written by Virginia Woolf(1940); also quoted by Dwight Macdonald in "Masscult & Midcult"

A while ago I added to the epigraphs in the upper right corner of this page a quotation from writer-actor-director Tom Noonan that echoed something I had long felt to be true, but had never articulated: "I don't think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away." I don't feel that way very often anymore; gone are the days, when I was first discovering the richness of the still very young art of film, when I might see several masterpieces in a week, or even a day -- in classes, film series, rep houses, art houses, mainstream cinemas or on TV. But I was inclined to feel that movies,the art form of my time (and literature, music, art of all kinds), brought me closer to my own life by focusing my attention on what it means to be alive. Like millions of others, I found the only religion in which I could whole-heartedly believe in movie theaters, libraries, bookstores, and concert venues.¹

In "Masscult & Midcult" (1962), published when "Citizen Kane" was as old as "GoodFellas" and "Miller's Crossing" are today, Dwight Macdonald contends that art (movies included) no longer seeks engagement with an audience, but is content to serve as another opiate of the masses: "The production line grinds out a uniform product whose humble aim is not even entertainment, but merely distraction."

I'm late to mention this piece by William Saletan, published in Slate August 23 ("Is a mosque near Ground Zero 'insensitive'?"), which gets to the bottom of this manufactured emotional wedge issue like nothing else I've read. After briskly demolishing the initial rumors about the Park51 development, Saletan quotes the fallback position of opponents who have questioned the sensitivity of the project: Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol... all people renowned for their respect of others' sensitivities.

Feelings about 9/11 are raw and real. Many people, including families who lost loved ones that day, find the prospect of a mosque near Ground Zero upsetting. I've heard this reaction in my family, too. But feelings aren't reasons. You can't tell somebody not to build a house of worship somewhere just because the idea upsets you. You have to figure out why you're upset. What's the basis of your discomfort? Why should others respect it? For that matter, why should you?

This kind of reflection is missing from the sensitivity chorus....

While reading Dwight Macdonald's famous essay, "Masscult & Midcult," the first version of which was published in 1944, I want to interject a "Yes, but --" or "No, and --" or "Bad example because --" or "But that's not the point!" after almost every sentence. Still, it's endlessly fascinating and, as they say, provocative. In the preface to the later version republished in his 1962 collection, "Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture," Macdonald stated, "If serious and ambitious works of quality are now less likely to be overlooked, serious and ambitious works of no quality are more likely to be praised."

You see what I mean? I appreciate, even partially sympathize with, what I think he's saying (especially since it goes against the grain, or the Conventional Wisdom, these days), but... it's basically an emotional response to anecdotal evidence, selectively interpreted and expressed in the form of generalizations so vague that they can't possibly be confirmed or disputed. Yeah, I think that sums it up.

Also, there are loads of fogey-isms, like: "But now we have pianos playing Rock 'n Roll and le sanglots longs des violons accompanying torch singers." Horrors.

Last week I used a clip from the AMC series "Rubicon"¹ (re-posted after the jump) to illustrate what I felt could be interpreted as a parable about film criticism. Since then, it has come to my attention that "President Obama is a secret Muslim" and somebody is planning to build a "terror mosque" at Ground Zero. OK, those notions have been floating about for a while, but people have very, very strong opinions about them. I haven't seen any evidence that the president is a Muslim, secret or otherwise, and I'm not sure what a "terror mosque" is, but I know that the proposed Park51 Islamic cultural center (at the site of a defunct Burlington Coat Factory outlet) isn't at Ground Zero because I used Google Maps to look it up. The Pussycat Lounge, a strip club one block south, is closer, but people aren't expressing their opinions about it, maybe because it's been there for many years, like some of the other mosques in the neighborhood. So, I'm wondering: Where are all these opinions coming from and what are they grounded in? Mostly, it turns out, they have sprung from other opinions. Which are, in turn, based on disinformation or just something somebody heard somebody else say they heard from somewhere.

Fortunately, facts do exist independent of anyone's opinion about them. They are verifiable. Once you know what they are, you might be able to form some opinions. But, to return to the parable, until you know what the tie actually looks like, your position regarding it (whether you approve or disapprove, like or dislike) is worth, as Edwin Starr once said of war, absolutely nothin'.

Here's something from an Opinionator column by Timothy Egan, a National Book Award-winning nonfiction author, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and writer for the New York Times (and a former colleague of mine at the University of Washington Daily!) called "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings" that ought to be read by anyone who thinks they have an opinion about something.

Because this is a blog about critical thinking, and everyone in the world needs to see and appreciate this "Daily Show" clip, "The Parent Company Trap."

Everybody should also read Nicholas Kristof's column, "Taking bin Laden's Side":

In short, the proposed community center is not just an issue on which Sarah Palin and Osama bin Laden agree. It is also one in which opponents of the center are playing into the hands of Al Qaeda.

These opponents seem to be afflicted by two fundamental misconceptions.

The first is that a huge mosque would rise on hallowed land at ground zero. In fact, the building would be something like a YMCA, and two blocks away and apparently out of view from ground zero. This is a dense neighborhood packed with shops, bars, liquor stores -- not to mention the New York Dolls Gentlemen's Club and the Pussycat Lounge (which says that it arranges lap dances in a private room, presumably to celebrate the sanctity of the neighborhood).

So far (four episodes in) I am enjoying AMC's Sunday night "Mad Men" companion, "Rubicon," the "seductive conspiracy thriller," as the ads say. What I like most about it is its "Twin Peaks"-like snail's pace (a two-chord repetition in the score echoes Angelo Badalamenti's) when it comes to unraveling the central mystery, which has something to do with crossword puzzles and four-leaf clovers and suicide and murder/accidents and sets of characters who haven't even met each other yet. I'm in no hurry. The worst parts of any mystery come when they start explaining things.

But this speech, in which a CIA intelligence analyst analyst tries to explain to officials at a National Security Council meeting something about the reliability of subjectivity, taste and evidence, struck me as an interesting parable for the practice, and uses, of criticism. Check it out and see what you think...

(via Radiolab)

Imagine a film in which all the characters are manifestations of a single consciousness, and the main way they communicate is by telling each other (and the movie audience) the story in which they, as characters, are participating -- while they are actively in that story. In other words, what if the driving consciousness of the picture belonged to... Basil Exposition!?!? That's my tongue-in-cheek take on a typically brilliant and enlightening shared dream post by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell on "Inception" at Observations on Film Art.

KT says that the first time she saw Christopher Nolan's multi-leveled narrative she didn't particularly enjoy it until about the last 36 minutes, when the van started falling into the water -- the section that "marks the end of what we've called the Development portion of the film and the beginning of the Climax."

At that turning point, it dawned on me that Nolan has elevated exposition of new premises to the main form of communication among characters. Discussion of their personal relationships, hopes, and doubts largely drops out. As the Russian Formalists would say, exposition, usually given early on and at wide intervals later in a plot, becomes the dominant here. That's an unusual enough tactic to warrant a closer look.

Is this where it all began? Did Disney really implant this idea in Christopher Nolan's subconscious, the way it implants things in everybody's? Read the full comic here, or download as a .pdf. Don't stop reading in the middle or you'll get stuck in limbo.

(via I Watch Stuff)

I greatly appreciated A.O. Scott's NY Times piece last Sunday, under the headline "Everybody's a Critic Of the Critics' Rabid Critics." (And not just because he had kind words for me and Dennis, though I most certainly appreciate that, too.) The article was about the curious reception of "Inception" (before it even opened), and the critical rush to proclaim it either a masterpiece or a disaster. As if it could only have been one or the other.

Scott's review of the film itself, like my initial response and many others, was ambivalent. I love his summation of the critical reaction (and reaction to the critical reaction) in his final four paragraphs, which I quote in their entirety:

So maybe I was subconsciously splitting the difference. Or maybe -- like the Nolanistas and anti-Nolanistas who had come before -- I was just trying to give an honest account of what I had seen. In the end I don't believe that the smitten first responders were simply bedazzled by hype, nor that the second-wave skeptics were merely being contrarian. Just as critics need to operate in good faith, so should consumers of criticism proceed from the assumption of good faith. We may be wrong, but we tend to say what we mean. It's a responsibility of the job, as well as one of the perks.

Knowing that the summer would bring new releases by two of today's most "controversial" (as Entertainment Weekly might put it) auteurs -- M. Night Shyamalan and Christopher Nolan (one with a critical reputation on a downward slide, the other on the upswing) -- it seemed like a good time to plug some notable gaps in my experience of their filmographies. I still haven't seen Shyamalan's pre-"Sixth Sense" features, "Praying with Anger" (1992) or "Wide Awake" (1998), or Nolan's pre-"Memento" chronology-shifter, "Following" (1998) -- which, the credits reveal, features a thief named Cobb, like "Inception." More significantly, I suppose, I hadn't seen (all of) Shyamalan's hit "Signs" (2002), or any of Nolan's "The Prestige" (2006) -- the former because it just hadn't held my interest the first time I tried to watch it and the latter because my critic-friends who'd seen it were unanimous in finding it dull and uninspired.

It's a question to ponder -- especially when they're Andy Warhol movies (whether or not Andy Warhol actually had anything to do with them besides putting his name on them). Consider this story from Reid Rosefelt at My Life as a Blog:

... I was a huge fan of Warhol's films, despite the fact that I had never seen a single one. Most, if not all of the films had been withdrawn from circulation, or very rarely shown, certainly not in Madison. That didn't stop me. I read everything I could about them, and I was totally fascinated.

Spotting Warhol standing at an appetizer table, plastic cup in one hand and plate in the other, during a late-1970s party in New York, RR worked up the nerve to approach the artist. It went something like this:

Errol Morris kicks off a five-part, 20,000-word series about how the test of true stupidity is our inability to recognize our own stupidity. (Or, in Forrest Gump's phraseology: "Stupid is as stupid does.") It's called "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What it Is," and it revolves around the idea of "unknown unknowns," particularly as reflected in the famous quotation from Donald Rumsfeld (February 12, 2002) about instability in Afghanistan after the U.S.-led invasion:

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns."

Few movie mannerisms annoy me as much as the gratuitous zoom, which modish hack directors have been using since the 1960s to underline and over-punctuate their shots. For a number of years (particularly in the late '60s to mid-'70s), the ubiquitous zoom, having no correlative to any function of the human eye, was most often deployed as a cheap substitute for actual camera movement. And yet, in the hands of, say, certain French New Wave filmmakers, the zoom could feel refreshingly free and spontaneous, like guerilla documentary footage. Or it could signify varying degrees of counter-cultural psychedelic grooviness, from "Laugh-In" to "Easy Rider" to... "Austin Powers." (Meanwhile, directors such as Altman and Kubrick have been known to use the zoom's telephoto properties with purpose and intelligence -- though the former used it to open up the frame and the latter to lock it down.)

Any device can be used or misused, but not even such egregious clichés as the now-ubiquitous snatch-and-grab and shaky-cam techniques, or the endlessly circling twirly cam, irritate me as much as the wanton zoom. Which is why I found this passage from Glen Kenny's piece on the Duplass's movie "Cyrus" to be both amusing and gratifying. (It doesn't matter if you or I have seen "Cyrus," or how zooms are used in that film; it's the precision of Kenny's bullshit-detector argument that I appreciate.) He observes:

For Francois Truffaut, it was James Bond. In a 1979 interview with Don Allen in Sight & Sound, Truffaut said he felt "the film that marks the beginning of the period of decadence in the cinema is the first James Bond -- 'Dr. No.' Until then the role of the cinema had been by and large to tell a story in the hope the audience would believe it... For the first time throughout the world mass audiences were exposed to what amounts as a degradation of the art of cinema, a type of cinema which relates neither to life nor the romantic tradition but only to other films and always by sending them up."

As Ronald Bergan points out in his book "Francois Truffaut: Interviews), the Cahiers du Cinema critic turned nouvelle vague auteur was "recognizing postmodernism before the concept became current in the 1980s." Truffaut (himself known as "The Gravedigger of French Cinema" for his scathing reviews in Cahiers during the 1950s) died in 1984. Surely there were those for whom the French New Wave itself indicated the End of Cinema -- a decline in professional production values and, well, what Truffaut himself attacked as the tradition "the well-made film."

Michael Chabon, probably best-known as the author of the novels "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" and "Wonder Boys," has an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times called "Chosen, but Not Special" -- about the myths of Jewish exceptionalism that Semites, anti-Semites and Judeophiles all share: the fanciful notion that Jews possess "an inborn, half-legendary agility of intellect, amounting almost to a magical power." Chabon argues we should acknowledge the dangers of this dumb stereotype right now.

The "widespread shock at Israel's blockheadedness in the aftermath of the raid" on the Mavi Marmara should, perhaps, not have been so shocking, Chabon writes:

An honest assessment of Jewish history must conclude that even the collective act that might seem most tellingly to argue in favor of Jewish intelligence -- our survival across millenniums in spite of constant hatred, war, persecution, intolerance and genocide -- is ultimately just the same trick performed by our species as a whole (at least so far).

"I'm not a racist by any stretch of the imagination, but whenever people start talking about diversity, it's a word I can't stand."
-- Prescott, AZ, City Councilman (and former radio talk-show host) Steve Blair

Roger Ebert posted a blog entry with his thoughts about the Prescott, AZ, Miller Valley Elementary School mural fiasco that Steve Blair ignited. It's bizarre beyond belief: On his radio show, Blair objected to large images of children of color on the mural (the models were actual students at the school); which prompted some Prescott citizens to drive by and shout things like, "You're desecrating our school," "Get the nigger off the wall," and "Get the spic off the wall," at the artists working on the mural; which led "school officials" to direct the muralists to lighten the faces of the darker children -- you know, so they wouldn't incite such controversy...

They've since reversed that latter decision, but that's not even the craziest part of the story. Blair was fired from his FOX News radio affiliate gig, but he's still a city councilman (as of this writing) and here's what he actually said on the air, May 21:

I like this Einstein fellow's intellectual attitude (see the final paragraph, below). While firmly disagreeing with someone's philosophical stance, he nevertheless insists that they may have much to say to each other "if we talked about concrete things." (Hey, what do I always say? Any valid exchange of ideas must be rooted in specific, mutually recognizable observations and solid reasoning, no matter what your opinions. Einstein said so, and he was no dummy!)

This letter, dated January 3, 1954, was written to Erik Gutkind, author of the book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt," which had been recommended to Einstein by a mutual friend, Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer. (Full document at Letters of Note.)

Still, without Brouwer's suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this....

Some people are proposing a boycott of Newsweek because of a silly article that criticizes gay actors -- specifically on TV's "Glee" and in the Broadway revival of the Bacharach-David Musical "Promises, Promises" -- for acting too gay in straight roles. This strikes me as fundamentally hilarious for several reasons, the most obvious of which are:

1) I didn't know anyone needed additional incentive to not read Newsweek, since circulation figures indicate that lots and lots of people have been not reading it without making any concerted effort not to do so.

2) "Glee" and "Promises, Promises" are both Musicals, for god's sake. Where would the Musical be without the participation of gay actors? The movie version of "Paint Your Wagon" -- that's where. You Musical fans want to spend the rest of your lives watching and listening to Clint Eastwood singing "I Talk to the Trees"? Then go ahead and complain that gay performers are too gay to star in Musicals.

John T. Chance is an enforcer of justice. He doesn't wear a cape or a mask; he wears a badge and a hat -- the latter a well-worn specimen just like the one Duke Wayne himself wore in John Ford's Cavalry Trilogy. But just because he's a towering figure and a natural-born leader, the kind of authoritative moral icon ordinary mortals look to -- and look up to -- doesn't mean he's invulnerable. Even the greatest of heroes age, and Chance has to face the limitations of flesh and blood while still keeping the good citizens of the town, those he has sworn to protect and defend, safe from the greedy and less scrupulous elements who would put themselves above the law.

"For me, the border between feature films and documentaries has always been blurred. 'Fitzcarraldo' is my best documentary and 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly' is my best fiction film. I don't make such a clear distinction between them -- they're all movies."

-- Werner Herzog, interview with Index Magazine, 2004
- - - - - - - - - -

"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" was the first Werner Herzog film I ever saw, back when it was released in the United States in 1977. It was one of the first films I ever reviewed, too (for my college newspaper, the University of Washington Daily). All I knew about Herzog at the time was what I'd read in an extraordinary profile by Jonathan Cott in the November 18, 1976, issue of Rolling Stone, which portrayed Herzog as a mad visionary in search of new images, not unlike the obsessed outsiders at the heart of his movies.

I couldn't stop staring at the haunting photograph that surrounded the article, from (as I recall) such films as "Signs of Life," "Even Dwarfs Started Small," "Aguirre," "Kaspar Hauser" and "Heart of Glass." They certainly didn't look quite like any movies I'd seen before. And essential to the spectacle was the knowledge that Herzog had gone to remote and exotic places in order to capture these images and bring them back into the cinema. They were unquestionably photographical realities (imagine Herzog speaking that phrase), not optical tricks created in post-production. The boat in the tree in "Aguirre" -- the one the feverish characters could no longer recognize as real -- was an actual boat in an actual tree, not a miniature or a matte painting. Even the photographic effects -- the time-lapse clouds flowing through the mountains like a river around boulders in "Kaspar Hauser" "Heart of Glass"; or the high-speed "ski-flying" (high-altitude, long-distance ski-jumping) footage that allowed Walter Steiner to float through the air in "The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner" -- were actual recordings of real-world phenomena.

"People should look straight at a film... That's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. And film culture is not analysis, it is agitation of the mind. Movies come from the country fair and circus, not from art and academicism."

-- Werner Herzog, 1978 interview quoted in
John Sandford's book, "The New German Cinema" (1980)

We knew it was going to be interesting. Seeing "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) for the first time in 25 years (even though I'd seen it many times before) with Werner Herzog, Ramin Bahrani, Roger Ebert and a Conference on World Affairs Cinema Interruptus audience in Boulder, CO, last week reconfirmed that not only is Herzog a magnificent, instinctive director, but a first-class showman in the carnival tradition, a compelling speaker and storyteller, and a wonderful actor. Some of the wild tales he related to the audience in Macky Hall are, I'm told, also on the director's commentary track of the American DVD of "Aguirre" -- and some I've heard him tell many times over the years, but there's nothing quite like hearing Herzog spin his spiels in the flesh -- even (or maybe especially) when he's a booming voice in the dark.

Bruce Eaton, in his 331/3 book on Big Star's "Radio City" (2009):

Beyond talent, there's the often dismissed importance of experience -- in music and life. Does an artist have something interesting to say and the ability to say it in a unique and interesting way? The answer is usually "not really." One of the chief reasons that rock and roll from the 1960s and early 1970s still looms large is that its creators had deep reserves of experience to draw upon when the time finally came to go to the well in the recording studio. Take The Beatles or The Stones, Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen. Each knew hundreds upon hundreds of cover tunes -- a disparaged concept today but vital to learning how music works -- and had played endless gigs trying to sell them to indifferent, if not downright hostile, audience. That experience takes patience but it eventually can get you to a point where you can write songs of your own that become a meaningful and permanent part of other peoples' lives.

This is pretty much exactly what most new indie and studio movies look like to me. Not just the Oscar-hopefuls and the Sundance selections. And not just the trailers, but the entire movies themselves (which are usually laid out, beat by beat, in the trailers). This one's funnier, though, because it doesn't pretend to be anything more than a familiar schematic diagram. Which is exactly what these comfy, risk-averse movies seem to be aiming for.

Starring Robert Pattinson or Adam Sandler, Natalie Portman or Sandra Bullock. Directed by Ron Howard or someone whose only previous work has been on YouTube.

(tip: Max Kleger)

In case you didn't know, the top five Muriel Awards for Best Picture of 2009 are:

1) Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds"
2) Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker"
3) Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox"
4) Joel & Ethan Coen's "A Serious Man"
5) Olivier Assayas's "Summer Hours"

(Click titles above for mini-appreciations by Muriel voters.)

Surprisingly, three of those are among the ten Oscar nominees for Best Picture, too. I was honored to be asked to provide a Muriel blurb for the Coens' existential comedy, my favorite movie of the year. It goes something like this:

A great, cut-through-the-crap piece by NYU journalism associate professor Jay Rosen at PressThink asks why reality has been declared off-limits in American political journalism. Rosen zeroes in on one key line in David Barstow's fair and balanced New York Times piece on the Tea Party movement, "Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right": "It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny."

If tyranny is impending, Rosen asks, why isn't that a story? Is it enough to report that somebody is making serious allegations? Or might it be the duty of the press to report whether any evidence can be found to substantiate those allegations?

It kept coming up, but David... did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state... can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don't see how we can. [...]

I just want to say: Wow! Here are frame grabs from three shots in Kenji Mizoguchi's 1936 "Osaka Elegy" ("Naniwa erejî") that strikingly illustrate what in-depth staging and deep focus are all about. In the first one, we see Ayako (Isuzu Yamada), a switchboard receptionist at Asai Pharmaceutical, in her glass operator booth. The image has an Art Deco sheen to it (highlights on shiny objects twinkle with little starbursts) and the frame is soft around the edges, but in the center the focus is deep. I don't know if the blurred edges are a separate artistic choice or simply an optical property of this particular lens.

Anyway, this is our introduction to Ayako, who appears in a close-up profile on the left side of the frame. She notices a woman enter the office to speak with Susumu Nishimura (Kensaku Hara), a young man with whom, we will learn, she has an undeveloped romantic friendship. Ayako places a call and we realize who she's calling when Susumu -- that's him in center frame -- answers it. (He may look a little out of focus in this particular frame, but that's only because he's moving his head.) She turns her face away from us to make eye contact with him across the room, and as she does so we see her face reflected in the glass of her booth. Fantastic! It's a spectacular composition, but it develops without seeming contrived, leading your eye from place to place in the shot quite naturally as you discover what's going on.

Here's Adam Curtis's six-and-a-half-minute documentary segment on how, over the last 50 (75?) years or so, we have become a culture of increasingly paranoid weirdos. (Satirical, too.) It reminded me of "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" (2004), the essential documentary about the politics that led up to 9/11, and how they continued afterwards. And then I realized why: They're both Adam Curtis films! From the intro to "Power of Nightmares":

I saw six movies this past weekend and it was exhilarating. That's a lot for me to suck up these days (though it didn't used to be), unless I'm neck-deep in a film festival. I used to think nothing of a double-bill a day, but this was such a rich and rewarding movie-weekend that it reminded me of the great intensified cinematic forages of my 20s and 30s, when I seemed to encounter, and ravenously gobble down, fresh new masterpieces (heralded or unheralded) for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It also got me thinking about how unimaginably different the experience of finding movies to watch is now from what it was then.

Here's the breakdown: None of the movies I saw were available in my local theaters. I saw all of them at home, on the same 55" screen -- three on Comcast On Demand (two of those in HD widescreen, one in SD widescreen) and three on DVDs (all at 1.33:1) from my own library (in other words, not rentals, Netflix or otherwise). The movies themselves were made between 1947 and 2009, three were originally shot on 35mm film, one on Super 16mm, and the other on HD video. Four of them were in color, two in black and white. Three were serial-killer/corrupt cop thrillers, two comedy-dramas, and one an adaptation of a serious play about religion. None of them was American-made, but three were in English (though sometimes it was hard to tell), two in Japanese and one in Danish. Two were sanctified classics, one a lesser effort by one of cinema's greatest directors, and the other three recent works by established but not particularly well-known British filmmakers. All but one were new to me -- and that one I hadn't seen I booked it in 16mm, as a Seattle premiere, in a university film series 30 years ago.

OK, here's what I saw, in order:

In 1959 Jean-Luc Godard famously proclaimed that tracking shots are a matter of morality -- an inversion of fellow Cahier du cinéma critic Luc Moullet's formulation that "morality is a matter of tracking shots" ("morale set affaire de travellings," sometimes translated as "morality is in the tracking shots"). The evangelical theorists behind what became known as the French New Wave had a tendency to ascribe moral values to cinematic style and technique.¹ André Bazin and the late Eric Rohmer, especially, championed the moral as well as aesthetic superiority of mise en scène over montage, of Hawksian "invisible cutting" over dictatorial Eisensteinian editing, and of deep-focus over a more selective, shallow depth-of-field. Bazin praised directors such as Orson Welles and William Wyler (in collaboration with cinematographer Gregg Toland) for staging shots so that "the viewer is at least given the opportunity to edit the scene himself, to select the aspects of it to which he will attend."

As David Bordwell summarized:

Their "deep-focus" style, he claimed, produced a more profound realism than had been seen before because they respected the integrity of physical space and time. According to Bazin, traditional cutting breaks the world into bits, a series of close-ups and long shots. But Welles and Wyler give us the world as a seamless whole. The scene unfolds in all its actual duration and depth. Moreover, their style captured the way we see the world; given deep compositions, we must choose what to look at, foreground or background, just as we must choose in reality. [...]

[Bazin wrote that deep-focus] "forces the spectator to participate in the meaning of the film by distinguishing the implicit relations" and creates "a psychological realism which brings the spectator back to the real conditions of perception."

The tweet from Errol Morris came through a little before noon on Saturday, January 30:

SENSELESS TRAGEDY: My beloved editor Karen Schmeer was killed last night by a car used in the robbery of a drugstore. She was 39 years old.

It was a freak hit-and-run accident just before 8 p.m.on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Karen Schmeer, on her way home from working on an HBO documentary about chess player Bobby Fischer, was crossing Broadway at 90th when she was struck by a rented 2010 Dodge Avenger, which was being pursued by police following a Zyrtec robbery at the CVS pharmacy on 86th and Amsterdam. The alleged driver was arrested and charged with second degree murder. Two other male suspects fled on foot.