March 06, 2005

Heimat 2 to be released on DVD

Posted by Chris

Regular CT readers will know that I’m a big fan of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat and that I was thrilled when it was released on DVD in the UK. The Heimat news page now announces that Heimat 2 (the sequel) will be out in May in the UK (and slightly earlier in parts of Europe). Fantastic!

February 28, 2005

Belated Friday Fun Thread: Oscar edition

Posted by Ted

Thoughts on the Oscars? I’ve got a few under the fold.

  • Every year, the Oscar people make a bug fuss about how many people all over the world are watching the broadcast. Let me tell you something- when I lived in the UK, my fiancee and I had a tradition of staying up all night to watch the Oscar broadcast live. We didn’t have a TV, so we had to find a hotel room that had the right cable channel. Do you know how hard that was? Pretty goddamn hard. One year, the hotel which had promised us an Oscar broadcast turned out to be wrong; they were nice enough to find another hotel with the right channel, but it took them a good hour and a half. (And London isn’t hurting for hotels.) Point is, they’re not watching this all over the world, so get over yourselves.
  • Chris Rock really is the leading comic of our time, but Steve Martin made a better Oscar host. You may remember Steve Martin from such films as Too Many Children! and Teach Me to Dance, Sassy Black Lady, but I still maintain that he might be the funniest man alive. I hurt myself laughing at Steve Martin’s Oscar presentations, whereas Chris Rock seemed to get off his best lines in brief asides (such as “the leading comedian of our time, Jeremy Irons”). It wasn’t a great fit, for whatever reason.
  • While I laughed hard at Chris Rock’s insult to Alexander (“If you want Russell Crowe and you can only get Colin Farrell, wait!”) I think that “get a real movie star” is awful advice. How many movies have you ever seen that would actually be improved by replacing the lead actor with Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves or Julia Roberts?
  • Do you remember the guy who posted an ad on craigslist after the election, challenging a Bush supporter to a fistfight? I feel like doing that to a Robin Williams fan. I’d be a happy man if I never had to hear one of his outrageous impressions (effeminate gay guy, gruff black guy, Jack Nicholson) again.
  • Sean Penn, Jude Law is a big boy. If Chris Rock hurt his feelings, his lovely fiancee can dry his tears with an enormous pile of $1000 bills and old copies of the “World’s Sexiest Man” issue of People. Leave it alone.
  • There are a fair number of other women who have filled Beyonce’s niche in show business in recent years- the beautiful, glamorous soul/r&b/pop diva. Beyonce is the only one where I can point to and say, “She’s performed more than one song I like.” So, go Beyonce. It seemed like a lot to have her perform three out of five Oscar songs, but the producers cannily slipped in Antonio Banderas to make you wish for four.
  • Goofus decides to give little people their awards from the audience. Extra-Goofus does it without even showing a tiny little clip, or even a freaking still. Is that too much to ask, especially for an animated movie?
  • Martin Scorcese can take comfort in his unquestioned place in the pantheon of the greatest directors in history, but it looks like he’ll never win a Best Director Oscar. However, I’m not going to cry any tears over The Aviator, which is soon going to take its place in history’s unmarked grave of forgotten mediocre biopics, right next to Hoffa, Chaplin, and Bugsy.
  • From Fametracker: “Hi, I’m Penélope Cruz. I don’t want to sound ungrateful for the sound-awards presenting gig, but whose idea was it to get me to say the phrase ‘usable original auditory elements’? What is this — My Fair Lady?
  • I think the real Best Pictures of 2005 were Shaun of the Dead, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sideways, and something else. I’m just saying; our grandkids will watch The Incredibles and quote Shaun of the Dead.

(rewritten slightly, and spelling of “Shaun” corrected)

January 16, 2005

Yasmin

Posted by Chris

On Thursday night I watched Yasmin , a movie by Kenneth Glenaan with a script by Full Monty author Simon Beaufoy. A somewhat didactic film dealing with the pressures on Muslims in the north of England since 9/11, it was on TV partly because it has failed to secure distribution to cinemas in the UK (or, I believe, North America). The film centres on the life of the eponymous heroine (played by Archie Punjabi ), who lives a life split beween assimilation (changing out of hijab as soon as she’s safely out the door, flirting with workmates, driving a Golf GTi, going to the pub) and conformity (hijab in her community, arranged marriage to distant relative who wants to get British nationality, deference to patriarchal father). Patriarchal father is, however, a basically good man struggling to adapt to modernity; whereas gansta-rap, bling-sporting, drug-dealing (discount for a blowjob) brother is angry and alienated.

After 9/11 everything changes. The family is riven by angry disagreement about the attack between the devout father who sees the murder of innocents as contrary to every religious principle and the alienated son whose response to the images of the collapsing twin towers is to exclaim “Style!”. At work, Yasmin’s colleagues commence low level harrassment (leaving post-its with “Yas love Osama” on her locker, etc. The useless arranged husband (whom we see Yasmin verbally abusing as “banana boat” and “Paki”) makes a call to a relative in Karachi who has some terrorist involvement, leading to a raid on the house, the arrest of all (except the husband who ends up accidentally surrendering to the police in the street in a state of naive bemusement). Women wearing hijab are openly abused by youths in the street.

Unsurprisingly this leads to a psychological circling of the wagons. Yasmin, who hasn’t been to a mosque in five years starts reading the Koran she’s given in a police cell. Her brother gives up his drug-dealing and falls in with the recruiters for the local Al Quaeda franchise who show him endless footage from Chechnya and Palestine.

I said it was didactic, and probably excessively so. Certainly, the key moment of transition, when Yasmin starts reading the Koran and then throws away the official papers that will grant her divorce from her husband (she still gets him to repeat “I divorce you” three times - but this is a signal that she has derecognized the British state in favour of Islamic tradition) was unconvincing. But the basic message: that unremitting hostility to a community will not lead them to abandon their most reactionary traditions in favour of modernity but will rather have the opposite effect, is a valid one. Yasmin’s return to orthodoxy is not so much a result of the pressures on her from other Muslim’s as her reaction to rejection and stigmatization from the majority society.

So how did this go down in the British blogosphere? I’ve scanned the usual suspects and they don’t appear to have watched it at all. The only response is from the crazed site Dhimmi Watch and is based on a Guardian article about the film rather than having seen it. The post is entitled UK: If ‘Islamophobia doesn’t exist, it must be invented’ but the accompanying comments thread gives more than enough evidence that the phenomenon is flourishing. The comments are, in fact, such that if made about other religious or ethnic groups they would arouse widespread condemnation, but, made about Muslims, they are allowed to pass unchallenged.

December 17, 2004

Heimat revisited

Posted by Chris

A few months ago I expressed interest in seeing Edgar Reitz’s series Heimat again. It was finally released on DVD (in the UK) in mid-November and I was lucky enough to get the 6-disc set as a birthday present this year. It is nineteen years since I first watched it, and just watched the final, eleventh, episode of the 925 minute epic last night. It didn’t disappoint me at all. From the first scenes, when Paul Simon, returning from the 1914—18 war, walks back into the village of Schabbach, I was entranced. Many of the characters, often played by people who had never acted before and never would again, have a quite wonderful presence. Nearly everything is understated and done in an apparently matter-of-fact manner. Yet Reitz manages to reveal continuities of character over very vast stretches of time, as well as having the characters whom one is drawn to admire in one period of their lives turn into ogres in others. Of course, the Nazi period dominates the central part of the series and Reitz is very good at showing a range of reactions to it: Katharina, the matriarch, is the most hostile, after she witnesses the arrest of her communist nephew, and she is willing to confront the odious and evil Wilfried, the local SS-man. In between are characters like Eduard, a somewhat naive man who is pushed by his ambitious wife, the ex-prostitute Lucie, into becoming the Nazi mayor. The constant threads are Maria, born in 1900 whose life we trace from early adulthood to her inheritance of the matriarch role, to her death, and Glasich, the narrator and village drunk, always there with comment, but never doing much. And Paul is always there as a presence or as an absence….

I don’t want to spoil the experience by giving more plot details here. I think it one of the most wonderful filmic meditations on love, time, ageing, family, tyranny, kindness, place, restlessness, forgiveness, memory, …. Everyone should watch Heimat, several times.

Available on a region 2 DVD in the UK , in a rather nice set with accompanying book. North Americans will have to get a multi-region player and a TV capable of displaying PAL, or wait. The complete script is available online (in German).

October 25, 2004

A headstrong woman lost in the perilous world of the Internet with only her sister

Posted by John Holbo

Over at our other blog, my gnawed lambchop sale has been a considerable success. Cavilling critics may object that I have made almost no money, true, but it has been voyeuristically fascinating to stare in the shopping carts. After a while, all the commercial uncovering starts to make me feel as though I am privy not just to buffies but the Buffy of buffies, as Heidegger might have said. Let us try to make it funnier.

First, let’s set a tractarian ground rule. Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.

Moving on down bargain lane.

From the $4.99 DVDs bin:

.com for Murder

The Amazon review:
Award-winning actress Nastassja Kinski stars in this superbly crafted psychological thriller as Sondra Brummel, a headstrong woman lost in the perilous world of the Internet with only her sister, Misty (Nicolette Sheridan), as an ally against a cyber killer. Rock legend Roger Daltrey co-stars as Sandra’s suave boyfriend, while ’80s pop icon Huey Lewis appears as an FBI cyber-crime squad agent. Featuring stunning digital visuals and sound, this nail-biting Hitchcockian suspenser from director Niko Mastroakis will make you think twice the next time you sign on.

Aren’t you $4.99 worth of curious? I’m not. But that’s not including shipping and handling. If you buy, please send a report next time you sign onto the interwebs.

[Belle over my shoulder: “You should get that. Your future craphound self will never forgive you if you don’t.” Me: “But my present craphound self craves things from ten years ago.” Belle: “You’ve earned enough from Amazon Associates already to afford it. So it’s like it’s free.” Me: “But I wanted to buy something good with the money I earned.” Belle: “Think of it as spinning dross into dross, but fluffier.” Oh, very well.]

The Crawling Eye

A classic science fiction terror thriller about a weird creature from outer space which survives in the rarefied atmosphere of the Swiss Alps and terrorizes scientists in a remote high-altitude research station. This hideous monster hides in the fog-shrouded cloud of mist and kills its victims by decapitation. As the mysterious cloud descends on the Swiss village of Trollenberg, United Nations science investigator Allan Brooks (Forrest Tucker), Professor Crevett (Warren Mitchell) and a young woman with psychic powers (Janet Munro) must find a way to stop the monster’s murderous rampage before it’s too late.

What kind of creature could survive in the Swiss Alps? If you are willing to invest $4.99, plus shipping and handling, to find out, please tells us what the secret could possibly be. Before it is too LATE.

Now here’s a genuine classic:

Rocketship X-M

No, really, It’s a genuine classic.

Also - this really is good - you can get several volumes of original Twilight Zone episodes. A buck an episode is a pretty good deal, I think.

Moving up the blowout foodchain we get to the $6.99 titles:

Dark City

That’s about it, unless you think either National Velvet or Cleopatra Jones are worth having. (I’m not going to bother making links, frankly.)

In the $7.99 bin. Quite a bit of good stuff, but I’m getting bored with making links. Except I will point out that you can save a buck on The Crawling Eye by buying it bundled with Invaders From Mars.

Moving on up to the $9.99 DVD blowout, it looks like the best stuff here is a bunch of Mystery Science 3000 episodes, including my all-time favorite: Mitchell!

“The word on the street is you’re a jerk!” Pure seventies gold.

There’s some good, cheap stuff in the classic SF bin. I could tell you a Nietzsche joke about Sean Connery in Zardoz, but what would be the point?

Last and definitely not least, you DO want Sci-Fi Classics Triple Feature, Vol. 1 (Things to Come / Rocketship / Crash of the Moons). Because you want to own Things To Come, which is a fascinating, H.G. Wells scripted, Menzies directed, Korda produced piece of utter filmic peculiarity. From 1936. It was supposed to be the pro-science, modernist answer to Metropolis. I’ll just quote from a letter Wells wrote to the composer, Bliss:

Of all the early part up to and including the establishment of the Air Dictatorship I continue to be confident and delighted. But I am not so sure of the Finale. Perhaps I dream of something superhuman but I do not feel that what you have done so far fully renders all that you can do in the way of human exaltation. It’s good - nothing you do can fail to be good - but it is not yet that exultant should of human resolution that might be there - not the marching song of a new world of conquest among the atoms and stars.

I’ll just quote the dialogue that goes with that bit:

“There they go, that faint gleam of light!”

“I feel that what we’ve done is monstrous.”

“What they’ve done is magnificent.”

“Will they come back?”

“Yes. And go again and again, until the landing is made and the moon conquered. This is only the beginning.”

“But if they don’t come back? My son and your daughter. What of that, Cabal?”

“Then presently others will go.”

“Oh, God. Is there never to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?”

“Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this planet and its winsome ways, and then all the laws of the mind and matter that restrain him … then the planets about him! And at last, out across immensity to the stars! And when he has conquered all the deeps of space, all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.”

“But we are such little creatures. Poor humanity. So fragile - so weak.”

“Little animals, eh?”

“Little animals.”

If we are no more than animals—we must snatch at our little scraps of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more - than all the other animals do - or have done.” [He points out at the stars.] “It is that - or this? All the universe - or nothingness …. Which shall it be, Passworthy?”

CHORUS: “Which shall it BEEEE? Which shall it BEEEEE?”

[When Belle and I were watching, she turned to me and said, ‘You know, the crazy thing is, I agree with all that.”]

The next week I screened Alien in my philosophy and film module. Little creatures, indeed.

The odd thing about the plot, you see, is that all of humanity - having essentially solved all our problems except shoulder-pad chafing - is suddenly divided as to whether we should shoot a space gun containing a couple teenagers at the moon. A poet goes on the vid-radio to denounce the practice. “A time will come when they will want more cannon fodder for their Space Guns - when you in your turn will be forced away to take your chance upon strange planets and in dreary and abominable places beyond the stars.”

Also, there’s a distinctly odd scene - almost an anticipatory parody of the scene in The Matrix in which Morpheus shows Neo ‘the desert of the real’ on the old TV. An old man and his granddaughter, sitting in their all-glass living room, watch pictures of the old New York on their shiny picture screen.

GIRL: “What a funny place New York was - all sticking up and full of windows.”

GRANDFATHER: “They built houses like that in the old days.”

GIRL: “Why?”

GRANDFATHER: “They had no light inside their cities as we have. So they had to stick the houses up into the daylight - what there was of it. They had no properly mixed and conditioned air. Everybody lived half out of doors. And windows of soft brittle glass everywhere. The Age of Windows lasted four centuries. They never seemed to realise that we could light the interiors of our houses with sunshine of our own, so that there would be no need to poke our houses up ever so high into the air.”

This is presented as a genuine ideal, not as some sort of dystopia. As Monty Burns once said: “Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to blot out the sun.”

Later the composer Bliss recalled working with Wells on the picture:
The scene showed the earth being mined, roads made, houses erected, apparently without the aid of manual labour. This was one of the parts of the film in which Wells took a particular interest, watching the ‘rushes’ as they were shown, and caustically commenting. He had expressed a wish to hear my music before the ‘shooting’, so I invited him to come to my house in Hampstead, and there played the music through to him as best I could on the piano. I think at the end his comment was, without doubt, the strangest I have ever heard from any critical listener. ‘Bliss,’ he said, ‘I am sure that all this is very fine music, but I’m afraid you have missed the whole point. You see, the machines of the future will be noiseless!’ Assuring him that I would try to write music that expressed inaudibility I went my own way, and luckily Wells forgot his objections.

Reminds me of this post from a while back. The violent and the voluntary.

I am compelled to note that Things is not really a good film. As Raymond Massey, the star, later wrote: “Wells had deliberately formalized the dialogue, particularly in the later sequences . . . Emotion had no place in Wells’ new world. I had a marathon acting job . . . We were always the puppets of Wells, completely under his control . . . [In the story] a bad dictatorship would be followed by a benevolent one. A benign big brother was bound to be a bore. He was the fellow I played in the futuristic part of the film. I could only act Oswald Cabal as calmly and quietly as possible . . . for six months my skinny legs, bare and knock-kneed, were photographed for posterity on unheated stages and freezing locations.”

It is true one might be forgiven for inferring Wells thought the shape of things to come to be: knee-shaped. Or possibly a frame suitable for hanging towels to dry. (As Wells himself had occasion to muse, some years later, in a somewhat different context: “World peace is assumed, but the atmosphere of security simply makes [the people] rather aimless, fattish and out of training. They are collectively up to nothing - or they are off in a storm of collective hysteria to conquer the moon or some remote nonsense like that. Imaginative starvation. They have apparently made no advances whatever in subtlety, delicacy, simplicity. Rather the reverse. They never say a witty thing; they never do a charming act. The general effect is of very pink, rather absurdly dressed celluloid dolls living on tabloids in a glass lavatory.”)

But it is an interesting film. You can read Wells’ original treatment here. And the novel it is based on is here. A lot didn’t make it from novel, to treatment, and then from treatment to screen. That’s a big part of the problem. One speech that I do regret only made it into the final version in abbreviated form is The Chief’s anti-intellectual rant, just before he is knocked unconscious by the Gas of Peace, the fantasy peace-keeping weapon deployed by the Freemasons of Science, the Brotherhood of Efficiency - Wings Over The World!

BOSS: “Shoot, I say! Shoot. Shoot. We’ve never shot enough yet. We never shot enough. We spared them. These intellectuals! These contrivers! These experts! Now they’ve got us. Our world or theirs. What did a few hundreds of them matter? We’ve been weak - weak. Kill them like vermin! Kill all of them! … Why should I be beaten like this? Weakness! Weakness! Weakness is fatal … Shoot!”

He’s the best character by far.

Another good scene from the original treatment that never made the final cut. The idea is that after a devastating world war - lasting from 1940 to 1966 I think it was - a rational political order of engineers and airmen is established in Iraq, in Basra. The aforementioned ‘wings over the world’. Wells has rather overoptimistic notions of nation building, apparently derived from one scene in The Wizard of Oz, concerning which I fear he has misunderstood his author.

The Airmen’s War. Many aeroplanes of strange and novel shape rising into the air. They fill the sky. A brief air fight between three old normal fighting aeroplanes and one of the new aeroplanes. Over a ruinous landscape, brigands with flags and old military uniforms in flight as the new aeroplanes overhead bomb them. The bombs explode and gas overcomes the brigands.
Sky writing by the new planes: SURRENDER.

Brigands crawl from hiding places and surrender, hands over their heads. Brigands run out from the houses of another town as the aeroplanes approach. They surrender. The sky dotted with the new aeroplanes. Hundreds of men drop from the sky with parachutes. The brigands stand waiting.

A line of prisoners marching. They carry regimental flags. They are the last ragged vestige of the regular armies of the old order. It is the end of organised war at last. A group of the new airmen watch their march-past. Overhead the new aeroplanes are hovering.

In fact, skywriting ‘surrender’ never, never works, I think. (If only the US had such good luck going into Iraq as these fellows had flying out, dropping their ‘gas of peace’ and giving everyone the ‘whiff of civilization’ without shedding a drop of blood.) As Orwell writes in “Wells, Hitler and the World State”: “In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as [Wells] sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man.”

In Things to Come, there is a Romantic poet of the future, Theotokopolos, who is made to look very petty and impotent as he strives to stop the Space Gun project. Watching the film, which narrates an entire century of world history in about 90 minutes, you are struck by how very odd it is for someone to make an SF film in which the rational scientific man is more or less straightforwardly superior in every way, and in which romantic types are presented as more or less silly and antiquated, small-spirited as well as small-minded. (The novel is more ambiguous, but all that gets flattened out in the film.)

A bargain when bundled with two other films (of admittedly questionable value) for $9.99.

Oh, and you should also order Sci-Fi Classics Triple Feature, Vol. 2 (Devil Girl from Mars / Monster from Green Hell / Rocketship X-M). Like I said, Rocketship is a classic. And I’m willing to bet that one of the other two is worth watching as well. Couldn’t say which.

Under no circumstances should you confuse the 1936 film with the 1979 Jack Palance disco ‘sequel’, Shape of Things To Come.

Oh, and I got some of the quotes for this post from a nice little BFI book about Things To Come, by a man named Frayling. Can’t quite remember.

October 11, 2004

Ae Fond Kiss

Posted by Chris

I saw Ken Loach’s latest film, Ae Fond Kiss , last night. Very good it was too. I don’t want to post spoilers, but the film is about a love affair between Casim (Atta Yaqub), a Glaswegian Muslim with a Pakistani background and Roisin (Eva Birthistle), an Irish Catholic schoolteacher. His family, who have arranged for him to marry Jasmin, a cousin he has never seen, and are less than thrilled at his relationship. I thought the depiction of the intergenerational tensions within this Muslim family was terrific. The film works dramatically because Loach is sensitive enough not to play it just in terms of true love versus backward tradition: Casim’s parents aren’t ogres or dictators but caring and engaging characters who are nonetheless bewildered by their children. One of the best films I’ve seen in ages.

[I also saw Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy in Before Sunset . I’d estimate that a third of the audience walked out. I wish I had.]

October 10, 2004

Portraying Guevara

Posted by Chris

Matt Yglesias had some sensible comments the other day concerning Paul Berman’s philistine reaction to The Motorcycle Diaries. As a film, I thought it was OK, though I looked at my watch from time to time. There’s a real question, though, about how to portray Guevara and I’ve strugged with writing something about this for a week. I haven’t reached a satisfactory conclusion, just assembled some provisional thoughts partly inspired by Hegel and partly by Alasdair Macintyre.

Hagiography should be out, but so should the sort of reaction that just carpingly lists bad things he did or unwise decisions he made. One reaction to that type of braying criticism is Hegel’s discussion of critics of Alexander in the Philosophy of History (scroll down to § 34). But Hegel’s remarks are inappropriate for Guevara because of the way in which he points to Alexander’s success in the conquest of Asia. Lack of success and damaging facts should not necessarily be enough to deprive a hero of heroic status: Achilles was flawed, and Achilles was cruel, and Achilles failed, but we still respond to him.

And then there’s the question of sympathetic identification with the cause. In his essay “How not to write about Lenin”, Alasdair Macintyre argues:

For those who intend to write about Lenin there are at least two prerequisites. The first is a sense of scale. One dare not approach greatness of a certain dimension without a sense of one’s own limitations. A Liliputian who sets out to write Gulliver’s biography had best take care. Above all he dare not be patronizing…..The second prerequisite is a sense of tragedy which will enable the historian to feel both the greatness and the tragedy of the October Revolution. Those for whom the whole project of the revolutionary liberation of mankind from exploitation and alienation is an absurb fantasy disqualify themselves from writing about Communism in the same way that those who find the notion of the supernatural redemption of the world from sin disqualify themselves from writing ecclesiastical history.

Guevara wasn’t Lenin, just as he wasn’t Alexander, but he did personify a historical moment and he did turn his back on a comfortable future as a communist bureaucrat to pursue the goal of the revolutionary liberation of humanity. Thersites from Des Moines (or wherever) can carp all he wants — and much of the carping will consist in a recitation of facts — but criticism that isn’t appropriately informed by a sense of grandeur, tragedy, heroism and tragic failure just misses the mark.

September 20, 2004

Stage Beauty

Posted by Chris

I sometimes wonder about the utility of mentioning films on CT because by the time us Brits get to see them (UK release dates being later than those in the US) they’ve often finished playing in cinemas in the US and elsewhere. But Richard Eyre’s Stage Beauty , which I caught on Saturday is an exception. Set at the time of the Restoration, it explores the fate of Ned Kynaston, a male actor who specializes in female roles (women being prohibited from performing). When the law is changed, first to allow women on the stage and then to prohibit men from playing them altogether, Kynaston is out of a job. I won’t post spoilers but just say that what we get includes a good deal of exploration of sexual identity and sexuality. And I also laughed out loud (a lot) at some parts and was moved by others. (Sarah from the excellent Just Another False Alarm has more — but with spoilers).

September 13, 2004

Ocean's What?

Posted by Kieran

Leaving aside the question of whether a sequel is a good idea in the first place, if anyone can give me a plausible argument why Ocean’s Twelve is a better title than Ocean’s Dozen then I’d like to hear it.

July 08, 2004

Why Is There a Mary Astor, Rather Than No Mary Astor?

Posted by Belle Waring
Pursuant to a discussion of the recently popular Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, Will Baude makes the following remarks:

My friend mentioned that she has some trouble with all of those old Bogart films because she finds Bogart so physically repulsive that he detracts from the role. To be sure, H.B. was not Hollywood’s prettiest face, a fact that (unsurpisingly) seems to bother more female viewers of the films than male ones. [Female members of my family voiced a similar complaint about Something’s Got to Give last Christmas.]
This is funny to me for two reasons. First, though Bogart’s no beauty, he’s hardly replusive. Second, Bogart is perfectly cast in one of the great movies of all time, The Maltese Falcon, a movie which is marred by the single most egregious miscasting of all time. (Perhaps it is not the worst in absolute terms, but it is a hideous flaw in an otherwise brilliantly cast movie.) I refer, of course, to the wretched, wretched Mary Astor. She was only 35 when the movie was made, but she looks much older. The character she plays, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, is supposed to be a knockout who can wrap any man around her finger. A sexpot. Men’s eyes are supposed to pop way out on stalks and develop pounding hearts for pupils, while steam shoots out of their ears and they make various foghorn and train-whistle noises. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Mary Astor falis to plausibly elicit this reaction.

I asked my grandmother whether Mary Astor had ever had any sex appeal, say in the 20’s, before she became the slightly haggard woman with an atricious perm and a high, flat midwestern ass who wrecks up all her scenes in what would otherwise be the greatest movie ever. Grandma thought about it, and said, no. Not even back in the day, when she played characters like Mimi Howell, in 1930’s deathless Ladies Love Brutes. (Note that even in this film, at the alleged age of 24, she plays a striking divorceé.) OK, she had a sort of winsome charm in her early silents, and the shellacked hair suits her (go see for yourself). But, honestly, what were they thinking with The Maltese Falcon? Just think how much better it could have been with Lauren Bacall. (OK, OK too young at 17. But still.)

In the repulsive guys miscast as romantic leads category, I think it’s a tie between the hideously aged Clark Gable macking on a grateful(!) Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and the raddled (though in principle well-loved) Fred Astaire making time with a grateful(!) Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. Needless to say, the competition in this category is a miilion times stiffer due to the enduring Hollywood trend of pairing aging actors with nubile starlets. (And Bogie’s in the running with Sabrina.) Thoughts?

July 04, 2004

Tangled webs

Posted by Henry

Matt Yglesias gives us a “long philosophical rant” about the inconsistencies in Spiderman 2. More power to him, I say - but he’s still very likely wrong. Spiderman is not only a really, really good movie, it’s not necessarily making the claims that Matt suggests it does. Warning: spoilers follow.

Matt’s problem with the movie is its suggestion that you can be a good guy, devoting your waking and sleeping hours to fighting crime, and still get the girl.

For most of the film, Spiderman 2 is very good at dramatizing the reality of this ideal. Being the good guy — doing the right thing — really sucks, because doing the right thing doesn’t just mean avoiding wrongdoing, it means taking affirmative action to prevent it. There’s no time left for Peter’s life, and his life is miserable. Virtue is not its own reward, it’s virtue, the rewards go to the less consciencious. There’s no implication that it’s all worthwhile because God will make it right in the End Times, the life of the good guy is a bleak one. It’s an interesting (and, I think, a correct) view and it’s certainly one that deserves a skilled dramatization, which is what the film gives you right up until the very end. But then — ta da! — it turns out that everyone does get to be happy after all. A huge letdown.

There’s a good argument to be made for Matt’s interpretation. Throughout its end sequence, Spiderman and Peter Parker seem to be morphing into each other, as more and more of Spiderman’s outfit gets ripped away. And he does get the girl, and go swinging gloriously through the skyscrapers at the end of the movie. But what Matt doesn’t take into account is that this is the second of three, closely interconnected movies.1 The first movie provides a thesis - that Spiderman has to renounce love in order to fight evil-doers, and take what joy he can from the solitary pleasures of web-slinging. The second is the antithesis - that he can too get Mary-Jane and swing between the roof-tops. The third, one can confidently predict, is going to be the synthesis - the discovery that balancing different responsibilities is a lot more difficult than Peter Parker thinks at the end of Spiderman 2. First witness for the prosecution: the mixed feelings playing across M-J’s face as Spiderman leaves her to chase after the cop-sirens, 30 seconds after she’s declared her undying love, engaged in passionate clinch etc etc. If Sam Raimi doesn’t do more with this in the third movie, I’ll be very surprised indeed.

1 The closing stages of Spiderman 2 set up the villain for the third - Harry discovers his father’s lair, to become the second incarnation of the Green Goblin (or perhaps the Hobgoblin if they want to play a bit fast and loose) in the next installment.

June 30, 2004

Heimat soon out on DVD

Posted by Chris

Good news. I posted a few weeks ago about the availability of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat on DVD and I’ve just found out that Tartan will be releasing it in the UK in August (Region 2 only, though). As some CT readers may have noticed, I’ve been watching rather a lot of German films recently. I’m getting somewhat depressed, though, by the fact that, though German cinema had a golden age in the 1970s and 80s, the last twenty years have seen a sharp decline in quality. Some directors are dead, of course, and others have taken to producing films in English for Hollywood. My local rental shop, which has a very extensive range , has shelves and shelves of French, Italian and Japanese films on DVD but I’ve more or less watched my way through their German holdings. They have some more in store, but mainly on fading VHS tape since there has been no DVD release (at least in Europe). I’d like to think that this is just my perception and that there’s a treasure trove of recent German cinema that I’ve not discovered yet.

June 26, 2004

Katharina Blum

Posted by Chris

Heavy rain in Bristol today, so I spent the afternoon watching Volker Schlondorff’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (based on the Heinrich Boll novel). For those who don’t know, the film is about what happens to a young woman after she spends the night with a man who turns out to be a terrorist suspect. She is alternately bullied by the police and villified by the gutter press. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events. (If you’ve not seen the film, don’t be put off by the sole IMDB commenter, who has also posted politically-motived negative reviews of Rabbit-Proof Fence and Bloody Sunday.)

IRRITATED UPDATE: Why is a classic of the New German Cinema available on DVD in Region 1 but not in Region 2 (including the UK and Germany)?

June 17, 2004

Philosophical movies

Posted by Chris

Thanks to Tyler Cowen, over at Volokh , I came across Jason Brennan’s list of movies with philosophical themes . It’s a good list , though a bit lacking in non-American content. Possible additions? There’s already been some blogospheric discussion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Christine Korsgaard’s claim that it illustrates Kant on revolutions (scroll down comments). Strictly Ballroom arguably deals with freedom, existentialism, and revolution. Rashomon is about the epistemology of testimony. Dr Strangelove covers the ethics of war and peace and some issues in game theory (remember the doomsday machine?). Suggestions?

UPDATE: I see Matthew Yglesias is also discussing this.

June 01, 2004

Bad education

Posted by Chris

Apart from going to the Rivals, the bank holiday weekend was something of an Almodovar fest for me. I watched All About My Mother on Friday and Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown on Sunday, capping it all with a visit to Bad Education at the cinema last night. Bad Education really is a terrific film, and the main device of a film-within-a-film (and a script-within-a-script) works well. I won’t post any spoilers, but I will say that it contains one great cinematic moment and that Hollywood would deal with the sexual abuse of boys by priests rather differently. Highly recommended.

May 28, 2004

Home cinema

Posted by Chris

This may well be an idea that has already occurred to most of you, but I hadn’t heard it before. Ingredients: a laptop with a DVD-drive, a data projector of the sort widely used for PowerPoint presentations, a large flat white wall. Yes with just these three items (and connecting cables) you can project your favourite movie in a rather more stylish manner than on a wide-screen TV.

May 18, 2004

The Day After Tomorrow

Posted by Kieran

In the wake of the insta-criticism of the film The Day After Tomorrow because it is a silly big-budget action movie and not a policy briefing paid for by the coal industry, CT will be providing further movie criticism along these lines. Reel in shock at The Fast and the Furious for its inaccurate picture of driving conditions in Los Angeles! Be outraged at The Pricess Bride for its whitewashing of the reality of aristocratic forms of government! Fume at Godzilla for ignoring basic facts about radiation and the typical size of lizards! And get ticked off at almost every movie ever that suggests that you eventually get the girl. Or that girls even look like that in the first place.

Update: Re-rading this post in a more non-jetlagged state than when I wrote it, I think I was a bit unfair to Glenn Reynolds. I still think carrying on a debate about global warming through the medium of the people who brought you Godzilla isn’t a good idea, but let that be a general principle rather than a criticism of Instapundit.

May 10, 2004

Wings of Desire

Posted by Chris

Following recommendations from a number of CT readers, I watched Wim Wenders’s beautiful Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) on DVD last night. Ausgezeichnet! (or, maybe, splendid! ). No doubt everyone but me has seen it already, but I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t, so, by way of recommendation, I’ll just say that some lines from Dennis Potter’s final interview came into my head whilst watching it, and have stayed there. Potter, facing death from cancer, spoke thusly:

I can celebrate life. Below my window there’s an apple tree in blossom. It’s white. And looking at it — instead of saying, ‘Oh, that’s a nice blossom’ — now, looking at it through the window, I see the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. If you see the present tense — boy, do you see it. And boy, do you celebrate it.

April 22, 2004

Afternoon delight

Posted by Ted
Isn’t she lovely
Isn’t she wonderful
Isn’t she precious
Less than one minute old
I never thought through love we’d be
Making one as lovely as she
But isn’t she lovely, made from love

Congratulations, John and Belle!

April 18, 2004

The fog of war

Posted by Chris

Just a quick plug. I’m just back from watching Errol Morris’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara . For those who don’t know about it, the film is a long (and cold) confessional interview with McNamara interspersed with documentary footage from WW2, from his time with Ford and from the period when he was Secretary of Defense (including the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war). The film is structured around a series of “lessons” which focus on the fallibility of leaders. There are some chilling moments, such as when McNamara contemplates the incinteration of hundreds of thousands of human beings in the firebombing of Tokyo and leaves open the question of whether he and Curtis LeMay committed war crimes. There’s a good page on an event at Berkeley with McNamara and Morris here . Get to see it if you can.

April 08, 2004

Fictional leaders

Posted by Chris

I recently bought the DVDs of the first three series of The West Wing, which make for far too compulsive viewing. Watching it, the same thought occured to me as has occured to many others: namely, how much better President Josiah Bartlet is than any recent real-life incumbent. But it isn’t just Bartlet, 24’s President David Palmer would also get my vote (if I had one) over most post-war Presidents. Fictional Presidents seem to incarnate the ideal virtues of the office. Not so fictional British Prime Ministers, who seem to be either Machiavellian (Francis Urquhart ) or ineffectual (Jim Hacker ). Perhaps only Harry Perkins comes close to matching an ideal in the way that Bartlet and Palmer do. I’m not sure what this says about our different political and televisual/cinematic cultures and I’m sure there are more examples of fictional leaders to play with. Suggestions?

March 12, 2004

Brown in Hollywood

Posted by Brian

The NY Times reports that my department just acquired a new fictional graduate.

Orders Come From a Talking Lion

Jaye [the main character in Wonderfalls] lives in a tricked-out trailer, which makes her seem resourceful; she also has a degree in philosophy from Brown. And in the second episode we learn that she can write.

I would like to think that when we learn she has a degree in philosophy from Brown, we thereby learn she can write, but I’m not sufficiently down with the requisite fictional conventions to tell for sure. I do think it’s cute that saying a character is a Brown grad is a way of placing them in American fiction. I don’t know how exactly many other schools have fictional stereotypes associated with them, though obviously there are a few.

February 29, 2004

Nietzsche and Gibson, Locke and Pasolini

Posted by Chris

I recently read Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality with a group of colleagues. To the extent to which I understood the book (and despite the book’s brevity I’m feeling somewhat sympathetic to those snakes who have to sit around whilst they digest a large mammal), my comprehension was greatly assisted by Brian Leiter’s excellent Nietzsche on Morality . Reading the reviews and commentary on Mel Gibson’s Passion, I was immediately reminded of a passage from the second essay, where Nietzsche is writing about the genesis of guilt from the sense of indebtedness (at first to ancestors) and remarks on the further excruciating twist that Christianity brings: on the pretext of having their debts forgiven, believers are put in a postition of psychological indebtedness from which they can never recover (He sent his only son, and we killed Him):

…. we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity—God’s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! (sec. 21)

I haven’t seen Gibson’s film yet (since it doesn’t open in the UK for another month) but it is clear from the reviews that it is precisely this aspect of the Christian story that Gibson accentuates through his relentless focus on the torture and suffering of Jesus. (And see the email of the day on Andrew Sullivan for evidence that some believers are taking the movie in exactly this way.)

Contrast this with, say, Pasolini’s treatment of the story in his The Gospel According to St. Matthew , where another aspect of the Christian message is emphasised: that we all belong to a common humanity, that each person has moral worth and should be recognised as such, and that compassion is an appropriate attitude to the suffering of our fellow humans (a vision powerfully expressed, also, in Joan Osborne’s song “One of Us”). Nietzsche doesn’t like this aspect of Christianity either, of course, but for me at least, it is the most attractive feature of the religion. Not just attractive, of course, but morally and politically important and influential: the basic equality of humans posited by both Locke and Kant is strongly rooted in this Christian tradition (which poses an unresolved problem, I think, for those of us who want to hang onto that moral idea whilst rejecting religion - c.f Jeremy Waldron’s recent God, Locke and Equality ).

One of the reasons I can’t bring myself to share the antipathy to religion that is expressed by someone like our esteemed regular commenter Ophelia Benson , is that, at its best, religion succeeds in a symbolic articulation of universal moral concern that secular morality finds it hard to match up to (motivationally, I mean). Secular morality is a thin gruel compared to the notion that, as children of God, we are to think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. It sounds as if Gibson’s film is a reminder not of religion at its best, but at its very worst: cruel and sadistic and aiming to provoke a mixture of guilt, worthlessness and rage in believers. I’m keeping an open mind about whether the film is specifically anti-semitic, but it sounds very much as if the film draws on and inflames the very reactive attitudes that have inspired much religious violence and persecution (not to speak of personal unhappiness) in the past.

February 28, 2004

Memo to Peter Jackson, Eugene Volokh, et al.

Posted by Kieran

High Concept for a Horror movie: The Constitution really is a living document. Key scenes:

  • Night. CONSTITUTION escapes from display case in Library of Congress. Seen lurking in alleyway off of Mass Ave. Shadows. Attacks and eats Cato Institute INTERN.
  • Day. The NATIONAL GUARD attempt to capture the Constitution on the Mall. Suddenly, ARTICLE III is invoked in a novel way. The GUARDSMEN find themselves guilty of treason and are forced to arrest themselves.
  • Morning. Quiet alley. Constitution hides in a dumpster. We hear it interpreting itself in a high-pitched chatter. BABY AMENDMENTS push up the dumpster lid and escape into the city.
  • A home office. A MAN sits at a computer. The Constitution moves stealthily behind him, past a banner on the wall reading ‘Proud to be a Resident Scholar at the AEI.’ He hears a noise behind him, turns and brandishes a gun. The Constitution quickly reinterprets the SECOND AMENDMENT and the gun disappears. The Man looks at his hand in horror, and then up at the advancing AMENDMENT. Fade Out.
  • Day. Golf Course. The EIGHTH AMENDMENT appears from the heavy rough and devours Justice SCALIA from the legs up. Vice President CHENEY putts to save par, makes some adjustments to Scalia’s scorecard, and smiles quietly to himself.

The linking scenes pretty much write themselves. Call me for a complete synopsis.

February 26, 2004

Life of Mel

Posted by Belle Waring

The Washington Post review of Mel Gibson’s Passion is basically a pan which concedes there is more than a whiff of anti-semitism about the whole thing. (Based on the visions of a 15th-century german nun who “sets out to clear Pilate’s name, describing the famously ruthless governor as a weak and unwilling pawn of Jewish blood lust”? Oh, that sounds good.) But for some reason the author backslides into the trap of “journalistic objectivity”, which quoted item differs from real journalistic objectivity in consisting merely of empty formal gestures towards balance. It can be seen most vividly in articles about Bush economic policies, in which sentences starting “critics claim…” or “some Democrats argue” are followed by incontrovertible statements of fact. See Brad DeLong’s “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps” series, parts I-MMDCLXXIII. (And while I am digressing, I would like to encourage all readers to adopt the Poor Man’s pithy formulation of the current scandal, which he terms “WhatInTheNameOfAllThatIsHolyAreYouDoingToTheEconomyGate.”) The item I object to is here:

Gibson’s use of Aramaic and Latin is similarly helpful in grounding his story, although it’s been suggested that first-century Romans would more probably have spoken Greek.

Is there anything wrong with just saying “even though the characters in the film would actually have been speaking Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean”? (I realize that as a blanket statement about “first-century Romans” it’s false, but that’s what editing is for.) I mean, you’ve already accused Mel of a pornographic taste for violence, anti-semitism, being a hackneyed director (ooo, Judas tosses the thirty pieces of silver in slow-motion!), and trivializing the mysteries of the Christian faith. Is it necessary to bring out misleading qualifiers like “it’s been suggested” when accusing him of historical inaccuracy?

February 19, 2004

Heimat

Posted by Chris

I’ve recently started going to German classes in an attempt to move beyond my dismal O-level German of thirty years ago. One thing I this has spurred me to want to do is to watch Edgar Reitz’s Heimat again. Heimat is the 11-episode-long dramatic chronicle of a German village from 1919 to the 1980s and tracks the ordinary lives of Germans against the background of political and military cataclysm. When it was broadcast by the BBC on successive evenings in the 1980s we stayed in and watched the whole thing (we had a small baby at the time, so staying in was just the way it was). Reitz’s immensely humane film makes explicable, but does not excuse, how German society could succumb to the lure of Nazism and it has to rate as one of the best things I’ve ever seen in TV. Its successor, Die zweite Heimat , dealing with the lives of young Germans in Munich from the postwar period to the present was much less compelling - but still good. Now I see that a further series, Heimat 3 , is in production. Disappointingly, as far as I can tell, Heimat is not available on DVD or video but if anyone knows differently — let me know.

(Here’s a page with some clips in MOV format.)

January 26, 2004

Favourite movies

Posted by Chris

Norm has posted the results in his top movies of all time poll. My own two favourite movies got absolutely nowhere and fifteen people (10 per cent of the total!) were deluded enough to vote for the Shawshank Redemption (4th= best movie of all time? — you must be joking!). Still, it gives us something to talk about and has been a lot of fun. So thanks to Norm for his efforts.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Posted by Chris

I went to see Les Parapluies de Cherbourg at my local cinema yesterday afternoon. An extraordinary banal story, real soap-opera stuff, but so strange and wonderful when every line is sung to French semi-jazz music. And the final scene when Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo meet again is so moving. Wonderful multicoloured wallpaper in every room too! The poignancy was accentuated by the mentions of war in Algeria: ambushes, comrades killed and so on. If I’d seen this a year ago these would have been little more than words but now it is easy to imagine the scenes.

January 21, 2004

North By Northwest

Posted by Chris

I watched North By Northwest again last night and was struck more than I had been before by the boldly modernist style the film projects. The texture of the film is wonderful: the future we were promised and never had. The opening title-sequence in which the titles are aligned with the straight lines of an international-style skyscraper with New York taxis reflected in the windows is really striking (the Seagram building?). And Roger O. Thornhill and Eve Kendall (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) throughout project a thoroughly enviable lifestyle that is sharply at variance with other images of the 1950s. In fact the whole film (1959) has a taste of the optimistic side of the 1960s about it: the NASA—Expo 67—white-heat-of-technology—007 side. That optimistic image of the future is something I grew up with: children’s comics like Look-and-Learn painted a picture of future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes (those who weren’t travelling by monorail of course). That isn’t exactly what is happening in North by Northwest, but rather a projection of of what the future might be like if the world of North by Northwest were the present (a TV in every hotel room in 1959!). Architecture and design do the work: from that opening sequence, through the United Nations (clean, sharp lines) through the exquisite train ride from New York to Chicago, through the scene in the cafe at Mt Rushmore (such a clean Scandinavian feel) to the Frank Lloyd Wright-style house at the end. Fantastic.

January 19, 2004

Rousseau on film

Posted by Chris

Since CT has a decent-sized readership, I’m appealing for help to try to get hold of a copy of a biopic about Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the Swiss director Claude Goretta. The title is Les Chemins de l’Exil and it appeared in 1978 and was, I believe, broadcast on the BBC. All my googling has drawn a blank, and contacts have come up with nothing. But if someone out there has a copy or knows how to get hold of one, drop me a line at chris-at-crookedtimber.org.

January 18, 2004

Local boy made good

Posted by Chris

Today is the centenary of Cary Grant’s birth. Grant was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, the city where I live and work and attended Bishop Road School, the same local primary school where my own children went many year later (and which Nobel-prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac also attended). There’s a statue of him in the new Millennium Square (near to Bristol boy-poet and forger Thomas Chatterton ). His best films? I’d vote for Bringing Up Baby and North By Northwest .

January 15, 2004

Screenwriters Series

Posted by Micah

On a slightly lighter note, if you’re a moviegoer and you just happen to be in London over the next couple months or so, this series at the British Library looks excellent. The audio/transcripts in the archives are pretty good, too. (The organizers of some academic conferences would do well to follow suit—but that’s for another post.)

December 29, 2003

Love Actually

Posted by Chris

I went to see Love Actually last night. My vote was for Master and Commander , but since that meant getting in the car and driving to a mulitplex whereas LA was showing at the end of the street, it was a battle I was never going to win. Two reactions: first, the intellectual in me was saying “this is utter crap” throughout; second, my eyes watered at various points during the evening. Now it isn’t hard for a film to engage my emotions — I always find it hard to stay composed during the closing scenes of Crocodile Dundee — but for what it’s worth the film does work pretty well on that level. Hugh Grant’s as Prime Minister really is awful, but Bill Nighy as the ageing rocker is really funny and both Liam Neeson and Emma Thompson put in fine performances. It isn’t that I want to recommend it as such, but it did overcome my determination not to enjoy myself.

December 26, 2003

Return of the King

Posted by Kieran

Just went to see The Return of the King, which opened in Australia today. As the Nazgul were dive-bombing the crap out of everything during the battle of the Pelennor Fields, I found myself wondering whether there was a deputy assistant undersecretary from Gondor’s Defence of the Realm Department hiding under his kitchen table somewhere on the fifth level of Minas Tirith thinking, “I must have written dozens of memos about Mordor’s air superiority, but would they listen, oh noooo! Just like every other year, the whole goddamn budget was blown on horses, silver filigree and whitewash.”

December 25, 2003

Movie: Good-Bye, Lenin!

Posted by Eszter

I just saw the movie Good-Bye, Lenin! It is about a young man in East Berlin struggling to make it seem to his sick mother as though the Berlin wall hadn’t fallen and nothing had changed since when she fell into a coma (just before the political changes) in order to make sure she doesn’t have a relapse. It was a good movie, I recommend it.

It will bring back quite a few memories for those who lived in an Eastern European country in the 1980s. Speaking from that perspective, it was great. I suspect it’s quite good from another perspective as well, but I know my take on it was definitely influenced by recognizing so many things from 1980s Hungary and the changes that followed.

One of my favorite parts was the son’s experience looking for old food items in the supermarket as he tried to satisfy his mother’s requests for snacks. The inventory of grocery stores had changed very quickly in those years. I remember great products disappearing from the shelves. Companies from the West would buy up plants in these countries only to stop production of existing local products. They thereby eliminated competition for their own products with which they flooded these new markets. Some of the foods that disappeared were really wonderful and the assumption that anything from the West must be better was frustrating. (I guess we can add this to the list of cases where better quality does not always lead to triumph in the market.. but in this case mostly because the products were removed from the market even before they had a chance to compete.)

The movie does a good job of portraying how personal lives were affected by what on the surface may just seem like political issues. For more on the movie, read this review in the Guardian.

December 22, 2003

Favourite films of all time

Posted by Chris

Norman Geras is running one of his polls again. The latest one is for favourite films of all time (deadline January 18th). So get over to Normblog and cast your votes (up to ten). Here are mine, in no particular order except that the first on the list is my all-time favourite (with All About Eve probably my second choice):

The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut)
All About Eve (Joseph L Mankiewicz)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Third Man (Carol Reed)
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston)
The Tenant (Roman Polanski)
Boyz N The Hood (John Singleton)
Diva ( Jean-Jacques Beineix)
Lift to the Scaffold (Louis Malle)

I adopted a private one-entry-per-director rule, though, which limited my Hitchcock nominations, and I was really conflicted about which Louis Malle film to choose (Milou en Mai gets one aspect of France so right). And I’m puzzled that Stanley Kubrick didn’t end up on my final list.

December 04, 2003

A name to my pain

Posted by Ted

My friend Charles Kuffner has his list of the ten worst motion pictures that he’s actually seen. Here’s mine in no particular order, borrowing heavily from people who are funnier than me.

1. Rollerball

Roger Ebert on Rollerball:

Someday this film may inspire a long, thoughtful book by John Wright, its editor. My guess is that something went dreadfully wrong early in the production. Maybe dysentery or mass hypnosis.

This was the most amateurish major motion picture that I’ve ever seen. If the Chewbacca Defense was a movie, it would be “Rollerball.” Has to be seen to be believed.

2. Teen Wolf Too

I saw this in the theater when I was a kid. About an hour into it, there was a problem with the projector, and the film burned up as we were watching it. The audience started cheering. I swear to God that this is true.

3. Undertaker and His Pals

It’s unfair to pad these lists out with dumb B-movies, but I promise you that this is really something special. I saw this during a 30-hour bad movie marathon at college. It was head and shoulders above its competition.

An undertaker and his pals (a restaurant owner and someone else that I forget) drum up business by starting a motorcycle gang that kills people, serves their flesh in the restaurant, and provides the funeral. In order for the copious cannibalism puns to work, they have to be very selective about their victims. This is an actual scene, reconstructed from memory; I might be a little off, but you get the tone.

(The detective who has been sent to unravel the case is in the restaurant of Undertaker Pal. The camera lingers on today’s special, “LEG OF LAMB.”)

UNDERTAKER: Did you hear about the murder of Sally Lamb?

DETECTIVE: Yeah, I did.

UNDERTAKER: I hear they cut her legs off.

DETECTIVE: Yeah. Say, what’s the special today?

UNDERTAKER: Leg of lamb.

The next victim, if I remember correctly, is Ann Poultry.

At the end of the movie, every actor whose character who died during the movie is shown smiling and waving, getting out of the big pot, freezer, shower, or other death scene. This is apparently meant to reassure the viewer that all the killings were just make-pretend. I may never be clean again.



4. A Beautiful Mind

Based on a true story, in the sense that Species II is based on On the Origin of Species*. I know that it’s rude to yell at the screen in the movies, but I could barely keep myself from shouting, “Stay away from modern pharmacology, John! Paranoid schizophrenia can be cured with the love of a good woman!” Ron Howard’s next film, “Squeeze It Out”, is a powerful story about how the power of hugs can overcome cystic fibrosis.

5. Roadhouse

If you’re like me, when you first saw Anakin Skywaker’s mom tell Liam Neeson that Anakin had no father in The Phantom Menace, you got a peculiar feeling, a weird combination of nausea and slack-jawed awe. Sort of a “I can’t believe they actually tried to pull that off” feeling. Roadhouse gave me that feeling for 90 non-stop minutes.

I’d like to share, from Mystery Science Theater 3000’s “Let’s Have a Patrick Swayze Christmas”

Open up your heart and let the Patrick Swayze Christmas in.

CROW: We’ll gather at the Roadhouse with our next of kin.

TOM: Not bad!

JOEL: And Santa can be our regular Saturday night thing.

‘BOTS: We’ll decorate our barstools and gather round and sing.

TOM: Oh, let’s have a Patrick Swayze Christmas this year!

CROW: Or we’ll tear your throat out and kick you in the ear!

A truly amazing motion picture. Ask anyone who’s seen it. Or just sit next to them quietly for a few minutes; they’ll probably start muttering about it.



6. Beastmaster II: Through the Portal of Time

If you enjoyed Conan the Barbarian but thought that Conan was a little too much of a quick-talkin’ smoothie for you, you might enjoy the Beastmaster series. Marc Singer makes Arnold look like Oscar Wilde. It’s basically Masters of the Universe without the star power.

7. Nell

Says Fametracker, “(Jodie Foster was) nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for Nell, a role originated a full nine years earlier by The Goonies’s wildly overlooked ‘Sloth’”. Horrible, treacly, cynical Oscar grab.

8. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:

From the Trailer Trash:
The Trailer Trash would like to offer a full retraction for our assertion that League of Extraordinary Gentlemen would be “idiotic dogshit.” We regret any confusion we might have caused readers who assumed from our review that they would be in for an idiotic dogshit film. We now know, of course, that LXG is not a film at all, but rather a two hour slideshow of random images, presented in such a way as to promote the deepest pain and resentment in a viewer possible.

Based on its silly trailer, we fully expected LXG to be awful. What we didn’t expect— what none of us could have expected— was that it would be the most awful thing in the history of mankind. Folks, LXG is Batman & Robin awful. It’s Avengers awful (also starring Sean “Eagle Eye With the Scripts” Connery).

Once a year or so, my fiancée and I deliberately set out to watch a double feature of the worst films we can find. This year, we saw Gigli and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on the same night. LXG made Gigli look… not good, but like an actual motion picture.

9. Moulin Rouge

A screaming, grotesque kabuki show of a movie. It’s centered on a love story that’s feels completely false; the stars fall in love just because they’re the most attractive people in the room. Edited by a hyperactive 10 year old locked up with a crate of Red Bull, this is a big fat squealing mess. Some people love this movie, but it felt like a horrible dream to me.

10. To be determined. Last Samurai, I’m looking in your direction…

  • The original Species was based on I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

October 22, 2003

Neighborhood values

Posted by Henry

I went to see Mystic River last weekend - strongly recommended. Sean Penn is outstanding, Tim Robbins very nearly as good, and there isn’t a single bad, or even middling performance. It’s the best movie that I’ve seen in the last two years. However, I still reckon that you should read Dennis Lehane’s original book too. The movie concentrates almost exclusively on the individuals and the moral choices that they make. It thus misses out on one of the richer aspects of the novel - the relationship between honour, community and assimilation among immigrant groups.

There’s a telling difference between the movie and the book. In the movie, Sean the future cop, and Jimmy the future criminal, are next-door neighbors when they’re growing up. In the book, they’re from different parts of town. Sean lives in the Point, a respectable working class neighborhood, and Jimmy lives in the Flats, just twelve blocks away, but a crumbling community. This difference defines them - Sean assimilates into the wider community, and marries away from his roots, while Jimmy, after a short-lived marriage to a Puerto Rican (which diminishes his standing among his friends), marries into a family of local crooks. Sean moves on, or tries to; Jimmy never leaves the neighborhood where he was born.

Both the book and the movie are about random and inexplicable violence, and how people try to deal with it. For Jimmy, the solution lies in the neighborhood, and in its code of honour. At the beginning of the book, he’s gone straight - he isn’t involved in the local community, which is falling apart around him. The local criminals aren’t smart or organized enough to get their act together; yuppies are moving into the neighborhood and changing it, perhaps irrevocably. When Jimmy’s daughter is murdered, he’s shattered; but he recreates himself through an honour slaying which reasserts a certain kind of order, even if the killing is fundamentally mistaken in its object. And this honour code is the corner-stone of community. Jimmy should have been king of the neighborhood; it’s gone to ruin while he concentrated instead on running his local grocery store. At the end of the book, he’s about to take up his crown again, displacing the local thugs who’ve been screwing things up.

That’s not how you did it. You kept your business out of your neighborhood; you didn’t make the neighborhood your business. You kept your people clean and safe and they, in gratitude, watched your back and became your ears to whispers of trouble. And if occasionally their gratitude came in the form of an envelope here, a cake or a car there, then that was their choice and your reward for keeping them safe.

Sean, in contrast, takes the random violence that he deals with in his day-to-day life as a cop, and displaces it onto his wife, ruining their relationship. She’s unfaithful, and has a baby which may or may not be Sean’s - she leaves him. Sean’s reaction to the murder of Jimmy’s daughter, and Jimmy’s subsequent, misplaced act of vengeance, is to apologize to his wife, to make it clear that no matter whether he is the biological father of his daughter or not, he is prepared to accept her; that he wants his wife and daughter to come back. He does precisely the opposite to what Jimmy does - rather than standing on his honour, and seeking to avenge a wrong that’s been done to him, he apologizes, he forgives. Sean and Jimmy become implacable enemies (or, more precisely, realize that they’ve been enemies all along without knowing it). They’ve embraced different - and radically incompatible - ways of coming to terms with America.

The power of the novel is that it doesn’t judge between the two, or if it does judge, it does so very subtly. Jimmy’s crime is horrendous - but it revitalizes a community which has become a waste land. The Fisher King heals himself, and his people too. Sean’s act of forgiveness redeems his relationship with his wife and daughter - but it’s purely personal in its effects. It doesn’t help the community where he grew up, and which he has effectively foresworn in favour of a wider America. It’s a retreat from randomness and disorder, rather than a solution to it.

These are choices that face all members of tightly-knit immigrant communities - whether to stick with your own, or cut off these thick relationships in favor of the weaker ties that hold together the wider society that you live in. Mystic River has an extraordinarily subtle discussion of this dilemma, but doesn’t come down on the one side or the other. I remember going to a conference on Anglo-Irish literature ten years ago, where one of the panelists complained that nobody had written the Great Irish-American Novel. Mystic River ain’t Augie March, but it’s surely a contender.

October 13, 2003

Dude, where's my brow?

Posted by Ted

Did you know that Rita Mae Brown, who wrote Rubyfruit Jungle*, the frequently-assigned novel about growing up lesbian, also wrote the screenplay for the slasher movie The Slumber Party Massacre? (She also writes a popular series of mysteries.)

If I was a professor of cultural studies, my head would be spinning. Accurately measuring the brow altitude of American culture is a job for braver souls than I.

UPDATE: Just Rubyfruit Jungle, not The Rubyfruit Jungle. Thanks, Patrick.

September 25, 2003

In a world...

Posted by Ted

My favorite spoof of movie cliches is right here, but the good people at Fametracker are having some fun with them in this discussion thread.

Highlights from the comments:

  • “Whenever watching a chase scene in a cop movie, there will always be a chain link fence that the bad guy hops over that will either make or break the chase. What is the deal with that??!! Chasing after a serial killer in the middle of the woods in Alaska? Watch out for that chain link fence. Chasing a kidnapper in a Louisiana moat? Watch out for that chain link fence. No matter the location, there will always be that handy dandy chain link fence there, for which to make the getaway easier or more complicated for the pursuer. I live in South Jersey and have yet to find a respectable chain link fence to scale if ever I was being chased by the law.”
  • “My problem with the use of bullet-time in movies now is that at least in The Matrix, it was explained away because they did not fight in the real world and thus defied the laws of physics. Now? Moviemakers just expect us to accept the fact that Charlie’s f**king Angels exist outside the realm of reality.”
  • “‘Something important, name, something important.’ Used when a character is about to drop a big-ass revelation on another character. ‘Just try your best, Johnny. Just try your best.’ ‘It was her all along, Anna. It was her all along.’ Who the hell talks like that?”
  • “It way not be visual, but a cliche that needs to be stopped and shot dead is the ironically named desert town. Come vist Prosperity, Arizona. Stay awhile in Perfection, Nevada. Welcome to Not Desolate Or Bleak, New Mexico.”
  • “Another cliche is that no matter how decent, sober, reasonably good looking, gainfully employed someone might be, if they wear glasses and/or have a few allergies, they are automatically a loser and deserve to be unceremoniously dumped for no good reason without any regard for their feelings. (See Sleepless in Seattle)”
  • “I really really hate when people drink cappucino and get foam on their upper lip or nose. Who does that? No one. Because most people have depth perception. Plus, if you do get it that far up, you’ll probably also spill scalding hot coffee on yourself. Don’t be dumb, movie people. Don’t be dumb.”
  • “Being the surprise final shooter of the lead bad guy is an incredibly exhausting task. Once the bad guy slowly realizes he’s been shot and falls to reveal the “surprise” shooter, the shooter drops the gun and is always gasping for air like he just ran a marathon.”
  • “‘It’s quiet!’
‘Too quiet!’

Why is never exactly right amount of quiet? Dammit.”

  • “The Billowing Curtains of Egress: A movie hero who has been falsely accused of a crime will end up in a motel/hotel room of some sort, trying to clear his name. When the cops inevitably turn up and bang on the door, the hero will freeze for a moment. If he has a companion, they stare at each other.
Cut to the fuzz knocking down the door. Pan around the room to reveal… nobody. End pan at an open window, where a set of curtains, usually white and diaphanous, will be blowing in the wind. Cut to the head cop, who will sigh and/or have a bemused expression on his/her face.”

September 14, 2003

Good Bye Lenin

Posted by Chris

I blogged a while back about wanting to see Good Bye Lenin, and I finally managed to do so last night., so this is just a minor update. I’d recommend it: it is warm, funny, touching and humane and I managed the suspension of disbelief a lot better than I’d anticipated from contemplating the idea of the film. I was surprised to see that the auditorium was packed. I have the good fortune to have a small cinema at the end of my street (how long it will survive, I don’t know) and I’d been to see Veronica Guerin a couple of weeks earlier in the same place on the same night of the week and there had been just three of us watching. Odd that GBL should be so much more popular.

September 10, 2003

Ouch

Posted by Ted

I see that Christopher Walken nearly walked out of the remake of The Stepford Wives because he was unhappy with changes in the script.

When the star of The Country Bears, Kangaroo Jack, Gigli, Jungle Juice, Joe Dirt, The Prophecy 1,2, and 3, Blast From the Past, and Mouse Hunt nearly leaves your movie because of the script, that’s got to hurt your feelings a little bit.

September 06, 2003

Pasolini's gospel

Posted by Chris

I watched Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew yesterday. I’d been meaning to watch it after reading Jerry Cohen’s report of the effect it had had on him (see If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich?). I’m not a religious person, but the film did not disappoint. It is an extraordinarily sparse portrayal of the story, shot in black and white against the Italian countryside. The acting can’t account for the power of the film, because, there really isn’t any. The actors are all non-professionals and, mostly, they just stand around and look (there are many closeups on their faces). The camera often shakes, and the production values are crude. But Pasolini succeeds in creating something of great beauty and emotional power.

Some reviews I’ve read stress the social aspects of the film and, perhaps guided by the fact that Pasolini was a communist, emphasise that he portrays Jesus as a campaigner against injustice. The overtly political aspect didn’t strike me as particularly prominent (though it is there, especially in the scenes with the priests). What Pasolini does communicate, very effectively and movingly is the notion that we all belong to a common humanity and that even the most rejected and downtrodden have their moral worth. The Italian setting underlines the fact that the people of the 1st century in Palestine and the Italian peasants of the south, despite being separated by nearly two millennia, lived lives that were very similar: rural poverty, crushingly hard work and exposure to oppression, disease and death. A condition that still grips most of the worlds poor and that we are all only a few generations from (on which subject, see Angela Lambert in today’s Financial Times).

The figure of Jesus is both compellingly charismatic and disturbing, leaving the viewer (or at least this one) very ambivalent. Christ is solitary: he broods and he glares. This seems to me exactly right: Pasolini has to make it believable that so many would abandon all to follow this man and that others would be repelled.

Many scenes in the film call to mind other portrays of the story. So I was moved to think both of Bellini’s Agony in the Garden and of Tintoretto’s Crucifixion from the Scuola San Marco in Venice. Odd that a monochrome film can call to mind such richly textured paintings, but it did.

The music Pasolini chooses intenfies the film’s impact. He uses blues, Bach and Mozart and Webern’s reorchestration of the Ricercar from Bach’s Musical Offering. There’s also a wonderful rendition of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”, but I’m not sure who the singer is (the Time Out Film Guide says Billie Holliday, but it didn’t sound like her to me [Update: Odetta is the artist]).

I’ll be watching it again, and soon.

September 04, 2003

National characteristics as revealed in cinema

Posted by Chris

From a Guardian article bemoaning the decline of national cinematic traditions comes the following catalogue of national characteristics as revealed in film:

The Japanese, haunted by feudal warlords and ancestral ghosts. The Italians, preoccupied with fascism, communism and huge family meals. The Spanish, grappling with catholicism, beggars and a taste for the surreal. The repressed, puritanical, Swedes. The French, who adored infidelity, bourgeois dinner parties and murders in provincial towns. The British, engaged in an interminable class struggle. The Russians, the Poles and the Czechs, evading the communist censors with sophisticated comedies and metaphorical allegories. And, of course, the Americans and their obsession with rugged individualism, the wild frontier and the “American dream”.

September 03, 2003

Clint Eastwood as Rousseau's lawgiver

Posted by Chris

Over at the Virtual Stoa, Chris Brooke has an highly entertaining post on the uses of the classic western in explaining Rousseau’s political philosophy:

One of the many valuable things I learned from Bonnie Honig when I was a graduate student was that the reasons why Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s lawgiver must leave the city he helps to found in Book Two Chapter Seven of the Social Contract are the same as the reasons why the cowboy rides off into the sunset at the end of a Western….

September 01, 2003

Veronica Guerin

Posted by Chris

I went to see Joel Schumacher’s Veronica Guerin on Saturday night, and left the cinema with mixed feeings. On the one hand I’d spent a reasonably enjoyable evening watching a moderately exciting film; on the other, I felt that justice really hadn’t been done to an important true story. The characterization was pretty weak and the whole thing had a made-for-TV feel about it (it wasn’t). Cate Blanchett as Guerin was all gloss and pressure and her portrayal of the journalist was very one-dimensional (driven obsessive with a side interest in football to give the appearance of depth). Ciaran Hinds as gangster-informer was a bit better, but most of the gangster characters were straight from central casting. The key moral dilemma of the story, Guerin’s choice to put her child at risk for the sake of her cause, was far too quickly and easily dealt with. There’s another film covering the same material - When the Sky Falls - I hope it is more convincing.

August 29, 2003

Time Travel Movies

Posted by Brian

I’m teaching a freshman seminar on time travel at Brown this year, so I’ve been watching a lot of time travel movies as ‘preparation’. I always knew that many time travel movies don’t make a lot of sense on a bit of reflection. What surprised me on recent re-watchings was that some seemed unintelligible even on relatively generous assumptions.

Philosophers normally break time-travel stories into two categories: those that do make sense within a ‘one-dimensional’ view of time and those that don’t.

The ones that make sense on a ‘one-dimensional’ view never have it the case that at a particular time something both is and isn’t the case. They don’t require that the direction of causation always goes from past to future, that would stop them from being time travel stories after all, but they require that there be a single complete and coherent story that can be told of the history of the world. Some philosophers are known to reserve the label ‘consistent’ for these stories, but that’s probably a bit harsh.[1]

Some stories keep to this constraint, even when they are under a lot of pressure to break it. The first Terminator does, the second Terminator might (though it’s normally interpreted as violating it), and both 12 Monkeys and it’s inspiration La Jetée display quite a bit of ingenuity in telling an involved time-travel story that has a coherent one-dimensional history.

But obviously this kind of constraint is not a universal norm among time-travel stories. For example, the whole point of the Back to the Future movies is that what time-travellers do can change the course of future history. (If you need, or even want, a refresher on what happens in the movie, one is available here, though be warned that site launches a very annoying MIDI file unless your browser is configured to block that kind of thing.)

In Back to the Future in 1985 the first time around George works for Biff, and the second time around, after Marty has changed the past, Biff works for George. So this is a violation of the one-dimensionality principle. I had always assumed that the movie could be made sense of on a ‘branching time’ model. Indeed in the second movie that’s exactly the kind of model they say they are using.

The idea is that the history we are familiar with is only one branch of the tree of time. This isn’t a wholly unknown picture. I’ve been told that Aristotle believed something similar, and (if you believe everything you read on the web) a few quantum mechanics specialists also hold a similar view. (Personally I think it’s about as plausible as the world-rests-on-a-giant-turtle theory, but the history of philosophers making speculations about physics is not great, so I’ll be a little restrained here.) On this picture the other branches exist, and the only thing that’s special about our branch is that we’re in it. Before a branch point it isn’t determined which branch we will end up on. The full story of the world includes a whole array of things totally unlike anything we know - our history is the story of a particular climb up the tree of time, a climb that could have turned out very very differently to how it actually did.

It should be easy to fit Back to the Future style time travel into this picture. When Marty goes back into 1955 it isn’t pre-determined whether he will stay in the branch from whence he came. And he changes his world enough that he more or less has to move into another branch - ultimately a branch in which his parents are much more successful than they actually are. (Or were. Or something. Ordinary tense words don’t handle this kind of situation very well, as Douglas Adams pointed out somewhere.)

So far so good. Now obviously one part of the movie isn’t compatible with this picture. If Marty is safely and soundly in his new branch, there’s no reason to think he will ‘fade away’ if in that branch his parents don’t meet and marry and conceive etc. He’s there and that’s all there is to it. So a major plot line of the movie becomes a little incomprehensible. But apart from that, I thought it was going to be possible to make sense of it all.

What surprised me on re-watching the movie [2] was that even granting them a branching time universe, and ignoring the lack of reason for Marty to ‘fade away’, the story in the movie still didn’t make sense. Here’s why. In the new branch that Marty moves onto, his parents meet, he is conceived, born and grows up in a successful family, rather unlike the family he remembers growing up in. Marty also travels forward in time in that branch from 1955 to 1985. The Marty that got to new 1985 by time travel is around at the end of the movie - we see his surprise at how different new 1985 is. But the Marty that was born, raised etc is not. On the branching time model, there should be two Martys around now, but the movie only gives us one.

Maybe the movie could make sense on an even stranger metaphysics than regular branching time. What we need is a metaphysics with not only branching time, but also some cross-branch relations that determine who (in one branch) is the same person as whom (in a different branch). And we need those relations to have enough causal force that when a person is in a branch they shouldn’t be in, or are too often in a branch they shouldn’t be that often in, the relations somehow make the world fix things. But even this doesn’t explain why new 1985 Marty should not remember growing up in a successful household. It’s really all a mess, even granting a really wild metaphysical picture. What amazes me is how it seems to work under its own logic while one is watching it. Some enterprising grad student should work out just what that logic is - they could probably justify anything whatsoever using it.

[1]There are several interesting aesthetics questions related to this distinction. For instance, is it a vice in a time-travel story that it does not make sense on a one-dimensional view of time? I used to think the answer was yes, then I decided that was much too snobby. But after my recent bout of time travel movieing, I’m drifting back to my former position. At the very least, it’s a virtue of those stories that do keep to one-dimensional time, just because one-dimensional time-travel stories are so pretty when done well. The plot devices in the last two Harry Potter stories may have been fairly awful, but the time travel story at the end of The Prisoner of Azkaban is rather good for just this reason. That story gets bonus degree of difficulty points for having the characters interact with themselves (admittedly at a distance) in a more-or-less psychologically plausible way.

I think that stories that violate this constraint too frequently rely on our assumption that causality always moves forward in movie (or book) time. I’d be surprised if someone could tell a decent time-travel story in a movie where the order of scenes didn’t match up with what happened in real time or in any character’s personal time. (Think Pulp Fiction meets Back to the Future.) I imagine that the result would be incomprehensible. I’ve seen some people argue that the final scenes of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes should be understood this way, but since those scenes are incomprehensible, that doesn’t really hurt my point. On the other hand, I imagine that with some ingenuity one could chop up a good ‘one-dimensional’ movie like 12 Monkeys into all kinds of rearranged scenes and it still be tolerably coherent.

[2]Well, not the only thing. As has been noted here previously, the 80s were a really strange time. The ‘fashions’ are … well the less said the better. But the thing I’d totally blacked out was that in the movie they try and make Marty look cool by having him play in a Huey Lewis cover band. It’s hard to comprehend what they were thinking. I was rather shocked to hear a Huey Lewis song on a ‘classical rock’ station in Seattle, but the idea that at one time associating with his music was a way to impress pretty 17 year olds is just wild.

On the other hand, I shouldn’t play up the fact that I remember much of this time at all. Many of the students in my course won’t have been born when Back to the Future was released. Hopefully that means they won’t ask too many hard questions about why the plot doesn’t seem incomprehensible on first viewing.

Time Travel Movies

Posted by Brian

I’m teaching a freshman seminar on time travel at Brown this year, so I’ve been watching a lot of time travel movies as ‘preparation’. I always knew that many time travel movies don’t make a lot of sense on a bit of reflection. What surprised me on recent re-watchings was that some seemed unintelligible even on relatively generous assumptions.

Philosophers normally break time-travel stories into two categories: those that do make sense within a ‘one-dimensional’ view of time and those that don’t.

The ones that make sense on a ‘one-dimensional’ view never have it the case that at a particular time something both is and isn’t the case. They don’t require that the direction of causation always goes from past to future, that would stop them from being time travel stories after all, but they require that there be a single complete and coherent story that can be told of the history of the world. Some philosophers are known to reserve the label ‘consistent’ for these stories, but that’s probably a bit harsh.[1]

Some stories keep to this constraint, even when they are under a lot of pressure to break it. The first Terminator does, the second Terminator might (though it’s normally interpreted as violating it), and both 12 Monkeys and it’s inspiration La Jetée display quite a bit of ingenuity in telling an involved time-travel story that has a coherent one-dimensional history.

But obviously this kind of constraint is not a universal norm among time-travel stories. For example, the whole point of the Back to the Future movies is that what time-travellers do can change the course of future history. (If you need, or even want, a refresher on what happens in the movie, one is available here, though be warned that site launches a very annoying MIDI file unless your browser is configured to block that kind of thing.)

In Back to the Future in 1985 the first time around George works for Biff, and the second time around, after Marty has changed the past, Biff works for George. So this is a violation of the one-dimensionality principle. I had always assumed that the movie could be made sense of on a ‘branching time’ model. Indeed in the second movie that’s exactly the kind of model they say they are using.

The idea is that the history we are familiar with is only one branch of the tree of time. This isn’t a wholly unknown picture. I’ve been told that Aristotle believed something similar, and (if you believe everything you read on the web) a few quantum mechanics specialists also hold a similar view. (Personally I think it’s about as plausible as the world-rests-on-a-giant-turtle theory, but the history of philosophers making speculations about physics is not great, so I’ll be a little restrained here.) On this picture the other branches exist, and the only thing that’s special about our branch is that we’re in it. Before a branch point it isn’t determined which branch we will end up on. The full story of the world includes a whole array of things totally unlike anything we know - our history is the story of a particular climb up the tree of time, a climb that could have turned out very very differently to how it actually did.

It should be easy to fit Back to the Future style time travel into this picture. When Marty goes back into 1955 it isn’t pre-determined whether he will stay in the branch from whence he came. And he changes his world enough that he more or less has to move into another branch - ultimately a branch in which his parents are much more successful than they actually are. (Or were. Or something. Ordinary tense words don’t handle this kind of situation very well, as Douglas Adams pointed out somewhere.)

So far so good. Now obviously one part of the movie isn’t compatible with this picture. If Marty is safely and soundly in his new branch, there’s no reason to think he will ‘fade away’ if in that branch his parents don’t meet and marry and conceive etc. He’s there and that’s all there is to it. So a major plot line of the movie becomes a little incomprehensible. But apart from that, I thought it was going to be possible to make sense of it all.

What surprised me on re-watching the movie [2] was that even granting them a branching time universe, and ignoring the lack of reason for Marty to ‘fade away’, the story in the movie still didn’t make sense. Here’s why. In the new branch that Marty moves onto, his parents meet, he is conceived, born and grows up in a successful family, rather unlike the family he remembers growing up in. Marty also travels forward in time in that branch from 1955 to 1985. The Marty that got to new 1985 by time travel is around at the end of the movie - we see his surprise at how different new 1985 is. But the Marty that was born, raised etc is not. On the branching time model, there should be two Martys around now, but the movie only gives us one.

Maybe the movie could make sense on an even stranger metaphysics than regular branching time. What we need is a metaphysics with not only branching time, but also some cross-branch relations that determine who (in one branch) is the same person as whom (in a different branch). And we need those relations to have enough causal force that when a person is in a branch they shouldn’t be in, or are too often in a branch they shouldn’t be that often in, the relations somehow make the world fix things. But even this doesn’t explain why new 1985 Marty should not remember growing up in a successful household. It’s really all a mess, even granting a really wild metaphysical picture. What amazes me is how it seems to work under its own logic while one is watching it. Some enterprising grad student should work out just what that logic is - they could probably justify anything whatsoever using it.

[1]There are several interesting aesthetics questions related to this distinction. For instance, is it a vice in a time-travel story that it does not make sense on a one-dimensional view of time? I used to think the answer was yes, then I decided that was much too snobby. But after my recent bout of time travel movieing, I’m drifting back to my former position. At the very least, it’s a virtue of those stories that do keep to one-dimensional time, just because one-dimensional time-travel stories are so pretty when done well. The plot devices in the last two Harry Potter stories may have been fairly awful, but the time travel story at the end of The Prisoner of Azkaban is rather good for just this reason. That story gets bonus degree of difficulty points for having the characters interact with themselves (admittedly at a distance) in a more-or-less psychologically plausible way.

I think that stories that violate this constraint too frequently rely on our assumption that causality always moves forward in movie (or book) time. I’d be surprised if someone could tell a decent time-travel story in a movie where the order of scenes didn’t match up with what happened in real time or in any character’s personal time. (Think Pulp Fiction meets Back to the Future.) I imagine that the result would be incomprehensible. I’ve seen some people argue that the final scenes of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes should be understood this way, but since those scenes are incomprehensible, that doesn’t really hurt my point. On the other hand, I imagine that with some ingenuity one could chop up a good ‘one-dimensional’ movie like 12 Monkeys into all kinds of rearranged scenes and it still be tolerably coherent.

[2]Well, not the only thing. As has been noted here previously, the 80s were a really strange time. The ‘fashions’ are … well the less said the better. But the thing I’d totally blacked out was that in the movie they try and make Marty look cool by having him play in a Huey Lewis cover band. It’s hard to comprehend what they were thinking. I was rather shocked to hear a Huey Lewis song on a ‘classical rock’ station in Seattle, but the idea that at one time associating with his music was a way to impress pretty 17 year olds is just wild.

On the other hand, I shouldn’t play up the fact that I remember much of this time at all. Many of the students in my course won’t have been born when Back to the Future was released. Hopefully that means they won’t ask too many hard questions about why the plot doesn’t seem incomprehensible on first viewing.

August 13, 2003

Bullseye

Posted by Maria

Jacob Levy hits it with his thoughts on Daredevil:

“I’m also, finally, ready to stop taking on faith that Affleck is a good actor. I’ve cut him years of slack based on Chasing Amy, but I think his talents run to hammy comedy. His looks mean that he’s not going to get cast in those sorts of roles as a matter of course, unfortunately.”

I toddled over to IMDb to see just how long it is since Ben’s been convincing in any half decent film. For my money, that would be Shakespeare in Love where he played, ahem, a hammy over-actor. And that’s 5 years ago. In Chasing Amy and GWH, he played very affecting losers. I think Ben’s essentially quite goofy, but success means being cast in rather straight, square-jawed, leading man roles.

And while we’re at it, perhaps it’s finally time for me to accept that Keanu Reeves had only one Prince of Pennsylvania in him…

BTW I think Jacob’s right on target about Colin Farrell too, but I’ve gushed too much on that already.

August 05, 2003

Geras on Polanski

Posted by Chris

A bit more online content from Imprints: Norman Geras’s reaction to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. He concludes:

The Holocaust and other calamitous experiences not only can be represented, they must be, whatever the difficulties. There will be those who err or fail in the way they do it. Others, though, will not, as The Pianist itself exemplifies. And if part of what is revealed in these efforts to represent the universe of pain and death is some surviving human value, so be it. Would the world be better without this, or for not being shown it? No, it would be then truly without hope, the hope that Polanski professes to have found in Szpilman’s story in spite of the enormity of the surrounding horror.

August 03, 2003

Back in the GDR

Posted by Chris

I’m very much looking forward to seeing Goodbye Lenin!, especially because I’ll be interested to find out how far the film tallies with my own (admittedly brief) experience of the GDR. I spent a week there in 1984, staying with some medical students in Leipzig whom my girlfriend had made friends with in Hungary on an earlier holiday. They’d been very interested that we thought of ourselves as Trotskyists and we, in turn, were keen to discover what a “deformed workers’ state” (to use the official Trot jargon) was like. At the time (early Thatcherism) Britain was in a real mess, and the claim was frequently made that the GDR had a higher per capita GDP than the UK. So we went there expecting both a somewhat repressive society and one where living standards were similar to our own. So what did we find?

The population, so far as we could tell, was neither fanatically pro-regime nor pro-Western. I remember an elderly woman hearing us talking in English in a cafe and striking up a conversation. She told us that she had spent the Nazi years in Leeds, only returning to Germany with the end of “fascism” as Nazism was universally referred to. I’ve blogged before about our experience of playing a game of Monopoly with our hosts. They certainly didn’t have the capitalist ethos (near bankrupt players could depend on their comrades to bail them out!) and we Western socialists thrashed them easily! At the time, the people I talked to said that they wanted more democracy and political freedom, but not Western-style capitalism. They all seemed moderately hostile to the regime and I remember that there were jokes about people from Dresden being orthodox communists because the Western tv transmitters didn’t reach that far. East Germans were both proud and ignorant of their own history. Leipzigers in particular were proud that their town had witnessed the defiance of Dimitrov, later secretary to the Comintern, who was put on trial by Goering in 1933 (and won). But though they new about the high points of Communist history, they didn’t know much about the lows. My friends knew nothing of the history of the KPD (the pre-war Communist Party) before the Stalinist Thaelmann faction took control in 1927. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were known, of course, but as icons rather than as thinkers (their ideas would have been too radical for the GDR).

The public face of the regime was, of course, everywhere, with many banners and posters vaunting the achievements of the regime and the benefits of “Peace”. We didn’t get to see East German tv until I was in West Berlin (as our friends didn’t have a tv set, and when we did, we saw two programmes: a long (a really long) speech by Chernyenko and a drama about sabotage in a factory making agricultural machinery. As for political repression, I really have very little to say. We know now, of course, that the Stasi kept tabs on pretty much everyone (so I’m sure there was a little file on me somewhere). We misread the conditions of our visa and failed to report to the local police until three days after our arrival. But when we did go, full of trepidation, the policeman was very friendly and relaxed and stamped our passports without making a fuss. One of my student friends, who had been required to read “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (not one of Lenin’s best IMHO) told me that he had asked at the library for a copy of the work to which Lenin’s was a reply (Kautsky’s “The Class Struggle, I think). Although the work was in the catalogue, he was told that he was not permitted to inspect it, let alone borrow it. The same friend also displayed a certain wariness when out in public with us, and on one occasion, when we visited a bar, asked that we remain silent and not speak in English.

It was evident, almost immediately, that East German living standards were way below those of capitalist Britain.There was a terrible selection of consumer goods. There really was not much worth eating in the shops (and endless bottled vegetables), though many East Germans grew their own produce on allotments. Having heard our hosts moan about the difficulty of getting decent food, we were amazed to find a wide range of cheeses for sale. Or so we thought. In the shop, there were packets advertising Rocquefort, Camembert, Brie, Gouda and many other varieties. We bought many packets and took them home to general hilarity: all the packets contained identical processed cheese. Oranges from Cuba did seem to be plentiful (though they were a horrible brown/green colour) and on a trip to the zoo we discovered animals chewing through enormous quantities of turnips. Back at our friends’ place we looked up “turnip” in the German-English dictionary to find it rendered, literally as “animal food”. Clearly there was room for Anglo-German cultural disagreement on what counted as “food”.

The impression of generally poor living standards seemed to extend to housing. Our friends lived in the only inhabited apartment (on their staircase) in a condemned tenement block. One thing that took some getting used to was the toilet facilities. To go, one had to step out into the corridor and into what looked like a cupboard where there was a bench and what seemed to be a saucepan lid. On lifting the lid one was presented with a shute running straight down to the cesspit several floors below from which rose a most appalling stench. I was constipated for days! Apparently, a modern, flushing wc had been scheduled for installation, the parts had been delivered on day 1, but had been stolen by the time the workmen arrived on day 2. Nevertheless, the official records stated that the apartment had been modernised (in this respect, anyway!) and since the records must be right, nothing could now be done.

One day we visited Wittenberg (the town where Luther did all that nailing-to-the-door stuff) and spent a whole morning thinking there was something strange about the place. There was - the silence! Since East Germans had to wait many years to acquire a Trabant (the little state-manufactured car powered by a 2-stroke engine) most did not have one. There was no traffic, and so no traffic noise. On the same day we met an East German teacher of English and her teenage daughter, who were amazed to see Western tourists. I have to say that the teacher’s English was not especially good - but since she had never visited and never could visit an anglophone country, that was not surprising.

There was a definite edginess in the streets in the neighbourhood where our friends lived. We dressed oddly by East German standards and were shouted at by strangers on one occasion. We also witnessed a violent confrontation in front of the main railway station between football fans and police. When we saw gangs of fans in other areas later, we felt pretty nervous.

There are many other things I could mention (the pollution and how bad it was, for one). The main thing to say, though, is that though the GDR was a shoddy and poor place, it was not, at least for most of its history, a place that matches the dystopian fantasy imaged of the communist bloc that one sometimes finds in the blogsphere. There were not, as far as I could tell, widespread disappearances, torture or any of that stuff. Rather, people adjusted, adapted, whispered and grumbled and hoped for better times (though all thought that the wall was there for the rest of their lives). Grim and depressing, sometimes, but this was not Leningrad 1937. It was also a place where people could, on the whole, be pretty certain about the shape their lives would take. Sometimes this meant compromise. My doctor friends wanted to be together and get married, but they knew that there was a danger that once they had passed their exams they would be assigned to different cities. There was some flexibility in the system: you could say where you would prefer to practise. If thet put down a popular city like Berlin, then the likelihood was that they would each be sent to random towns, perhaps at opposite ends of the country. So they chose to go to Chemnitz (or Karl-Marx Stadt), guessing, correctly, that there would be few volunteers for that grim industrial Saxon city. They were right, and they got to stay together.

ADDENDUM: The Financial Times has a review of recent books on the GDR.

August 02, 2003

Gibson's movie

Posted by Micah

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Mel Gibson’s movie about the death of Jesus. The New York Times reports that Gibson has shown “The Passion” to:

friendly audiences, but has refused to show it to his critics, including members of Jewish groups and biblical scholars. In Washington, it was shown to the Web gossip Matt Drudge, the columnists Cal Thomas and Peggy Noonan and the staffs of the Senate Republican Conference and the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and others. In Colorado Springs, the capital of evangelical America, the film drew raves. A convention of the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative Roman Catholic order of priests, saw a preview, as did Rush Limbaugh.

Why is it that no Jews seem to have seen this movie? (Do correct me here if I’m wrong.) Gibson’s people won’t show it to the Anti-Defamation League. The Times quotes the marketing director for the film as saying: “There is no way on God’s green earth . . . that any of those people will be invited to a screening. They have shown themselves to be dishonorable.” So the obvious question is: why doesn’t Gibson show the movie to some “honorable” Jews? Seems like he’s shown it to just about eveyone else.

Update: I’m corrected already. Matt Drudge is Jewish, and he liked the film. Somehow, that doesn’t allay my concerns.

July 22, 2003

One of these things is not like the others

Posted by Brian

From the NY Times review of 28 Days Later

”28 Days Later” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has many scenes of maiming, dismemberment, clubbing, shooting, bayoneting and shoplifting.

Actually it’s not entirely obvious that any shoplifting takes place, but we’d need another law and cinema post to work that out.

July 13, 2003

ARRRR!!

Posted by Henry

I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean last night, and really can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s as much fun as movies can get. Johnny Depp is a revelation as Captain Jack Sparrow, moving like a fey, drunken Keith Richards who hasn’t gotten his land-legs; Geoffrey Rush is nearly as good. The plot is hokum of course, something about cursed Aztec treasure and blood sacrifice, but you don’t notice while you’re watching; you just go along for the ride.

By coincidence I’m reading a really fun book which also features sinister Aztec relics, Alex Irvine’s A Scattering of Jades. Selecting on the dependent variable, I’ve come to the conclusion that all forms of popular entertainment with Aztec treasures are ipso facto good. Jades is Irvine’s first novel, but it’s really very difficult to tell. He’s maybe a little too obviously influenced by Tim Powers, but that isn’t a bad influence to have - and A Scattering of Jades stands up to comparison with Powers’ best work.* Closing the circle of reference, Powers has also written a pirates’n’zombies novel, On Stranger Tides, which reads in places like a more literary version of POTC. Somehow, somewhere, it all connects together …

  • Imo Powers’ best novels are The Anubis Gates, Last Call and Declare, if yer interested.

July 11, 2003

Bollywood Jane Austen

Posted by Chris

It seems to be Jane Austen day here at Crooked Timber, as the BBC brings news that Bend it Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha - announcing that Jane Austen must have been a Punjabi in a previous life - discusses her forthcoming Bollywood adaptation of Pride and Prejudice:

Chadha’s film, renamed Bride and Prejudice, stays faithful to Austen’s original story, although the Bennett family become the Bakshis, and Mr Darcy becomes a wealthy American. Aishwarya Rai takes the lead role in the film His unsavoury friend Mr Bingley is still an Englishman - in this case a barrister - and according to Gillies, who plays him, his character will be “more despicable”.

Ah, those national stereotypes …. a pity they couldn’t get Alan Rickman.

Slash fiction

Posted by Henry

The WP’s review of Pirates of the Caribbean has some useful insights into the scriptwriters’ authorial intentions. It informs us that in the production notes to the movie, one of the film’s authors says:

We wanted it to be a very classic, Jane Austen-style, bodice-ripping romance.

This is, I have to say, a rather lovely idea, which should be developed further. We already have Jane Austen’s Terminator (courtesy of Making Light). Surely it can’t be difficult to sex up, say, Pride and Prejudice a little bit? If Alastair Campbell can make weapons dossiers sound lascivious, Jane Austen should be a cinch. And why not include a congeries of cutlass-waving undead pirates too, while we’re at it. Friends, I hand the task over to you.