Since today is movie day at Crooked Timber, I thought I’d share. If you haven’t yet seen Michael Haneke’s Amour then you probably should make the effort. Emmanuelle Riva’s performance as Anne is one of the most brilliant pieces of screen acting I’ve ever seen. On the other hand, this is an almost uncompromising portrayal of aging and dying and of incomprehension across the generations with the end in plain view. When we left the cinema, several people outside were in tears and when I started to talk about the film I found I couldn’t without starting to dissolve myself. Some audience members sat in their seats staring at the screen for a while afterwards, and some of those were quite elderly. So if you go, and, as I say, it is a great work, do so knowing that you’ll probably be somewhat upset by the end. As you should be.
From the category archives:
Cinema
For some strange reason, Amazon is selling a Criterion Collection 2-disc set of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
No, I’m talking about the film, not Daniel’s post (his thread, rather). Following up my bad experience with Sixteen Candles, I rewatched Say Anything and it really holds up. It’s a delight. It’s funny and sweet and sentimental, but in a good way. John Cusack is great. Cameron Crowe is the real deal. [click to continue…]
I just watched “Shane” (1953) and “Sixteen Candles” (1984). Reason: I never watched the first one before. I haven’t seen all that many Westerns and I just thought I’d try it. Result: yep, all pre-Clint Eastwood, non-John Wayne Westerns feel vaguely like “Star Trek” episodes to me. It’s like I’m caught in a nostalgia wormhole for this later thing that hearkens back to this earlier thing. I experience time in reverse! The Old West was always already nostalgic for Spock to cock an eyebrow: ‘primitive technology, captain’. And Kirk gets that rakish gleam in his eye and we’re off! Trivia: how many times does that kid yell ‘Shane!’ A lot, that’s how many. [click to continue…]
A couple weeks back the LA Times ran an article about how ‘millenials’ don’t find it as strange as normal humans do that they rebooted Spider-Man so soon after making a perfectly good Spider-Man. (I haven’t seen the new one myself. I’ve heard it’s just fine.) On the other hand, the BFI’s 2012 “Sight & Sound” critics’ Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time poll is holding the line against this sort of amnesia. They prefer if people suffer from that condition the guy in Memento suffered from, approximately. (Maybe they should rename it: ‘of all times except recent ones’?)
I made a little chart, pushing my Excel chops to the limit. It shows number of films that made the Top 50, by year. (Yes, there’s nothing after 2001, you’re reading it right.)
Following up Henry’s post, my Dark Knight Rises take is this. The Nolan brothers are determined to make some kind of serious, dark, brooding, non-fascistic moral sense of Batman, and that’s just flat-out impossible. Can’t tell it that way without the basic story logic boxing you into a place you don’t want to be (as Henry says, there’s too much baked in the cake). If what the world needs is masked vigilantes behaving in this crazy way, then fascism needs a serious look-in as a political philosophy. But what we should really conclude is not that the moral sense of the film is fascist – or even aristocratic. Rather, we should conclude that the film makes no moral sense whatsoever. It conveys no moral message. It’s morally illegible. Lots of explosions and fighting. That’s it. [click to continue…]
Attention conservation notice: contains spoilers and copious idle speculation about the Deep Political Meaning of popular cultural artifacts of the kind that is barely tolerable at blogpost-length, and surely intolerable beyond it.
I saw _Batman: The Dark Knight Rises_ on Saturday (I was a little nervous about copycat shootings). It has some excellent set-pieces, but is not a great movie. If the standard is ‘better than _The Godfather Part III_,’ it passes muster, but by a rather narrower margin than one would like. It wants to be an _oeuvre_, saying serious things about politics and inequality, but doesn’t ever really get there. This “Jacobin piece”:http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/07/the-dark-knight-is-no-capitalist/ by Gavin Mueller argues that it’s not a pro-capitalist movie, but a pro-monarchist one. I think that’s wrong. It’s a _pro-aristocratic_ movie, which isn’t really the same thing. Mueller’s observation that:
bq. There is barely any evidence of “the people” at all – it’s all cops and mercenaries battling it out. So instead of a real insurrection, the takeover of Gotham functions via Baroque conspiracies among elites struggling for status and power.
is exactly right – but a movie about “elites struggling for status and power” without some master-figure, however capricious, who can grant or deny them recognition isn’t actually about monarchy. It’s about the struggle between the elites themselves.
Because not every post should be about libertarianism! [click to continue…]
A brief note for anyone who remembers “my post from last August”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/08/25/the-rise-and-fall-of-dr-struensee/ on the career of Dr Struensee. “A Royal Affair”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276419/ is now out, I’ve seen it, and it is excellent. Superb performances from Mads Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander, beautifully shot and with a cracking script. There’s even a guest appearance for _Du Contrat Social_. Don’t miss it!
In case you are bored with libertarianism …
I see that Invasion – The Complete Series
Oh joy! “Gerald McBoing Boing”! “Rooty Toot Toot”! And thirtyplus other titles, many of which I’ve never seen! All these lovely old UPA cartoons are finally available on DVD – UPA: The Jolly Frolics Collection
You can read a short version of the UPA history on Wikipedia. Really short version: UPA was founded by disgruntled former employees of Uncle Walt who pioneered some simplified techniques while working for Uncle Sam, which – admixed with artistic ambition and modernist design sensibilities – led to some great animation. Then there was the Red Scare and they got into the Godzilla business and … well, more of a whimper than a bang. Ah, well. [click to continue…]
Following up on the last post on Autism, one important way to get some glimpses, or some partial sense, of what it can be to living with autism, are movies. If you ask the vast majority of people whether they have every seen a movie on autism, I suspect they will say they’ve seen Rain Man. I haven’t seen this movie for many years, so shouldn’t talk about it in detail, but what I can say is that it so much skewed my understanding of autism that I wonder whether it may have been better if I had not seen this movie at all. I have, by now, met many people with autism, but not a single one that resembles Rain Man. Yet it does point to a much more general issue, which is that given how radically different people with autism can be, one single portrait of a person with autism will inevitably lead to a very limited understanding of what autism is. But except if one were to make a movie on an organization (a school, or a company) that has many members who have autism, I don’t see a way around this problem.
So, here are two other movies I’ve seen recently, that I’d like to mention for different reasons.
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Today’s Observer (at the Guardian website) has a review of Roman Polanski’s new film Carnage by Philip French. Here’s what Mr French had to say about Polanski’s past:
bq. At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.
Like a number of other people, I posted a comment on the site. I can’t reproduce my comment exactly, because it has now been deleted for “violation of community standards” but it read something like “What? ‘transgression’ hardly seems to be an appropriate word.” Other commenters have been deleted, again for “violation of community standards” merely for quoting Mr French’s exculpatory paragraph _in extenso_ and say that it is “ludicrous”. The Guardian’s guidelines on “community standards” are here. They are not unreasonable and contain the assurance:
bq. In short: – If you act with maturity and consideration for other users, you should have no problems.
It is hard, therefore, to see why politely objecting to Mr French’s words should provoke deletion. Apparently, the Guardian thinks otherwise.
Shelagh Delaney has died aged 71, having written something extraordinary when she was 18. “Guardian obituary”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/nov/21/shelagh-delaney
I’ve been fixing the footnotes to a new translation of Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland (fn1) and whilst doing so happened upon a really fascinating bit of Danish history. Rousseau has a cryptic remark:
bq. You have seen Denmark, you see England, and you will soon see Sweden. Profit by these examples to learn once and for all that, however many precautions you may amass, heredity in the throne and liberty in the nation will forever be incompatible things.
What would they have seen in Denmark?
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