Cinema

Good news. I posted a few weeks ago about the availability of Edgar Reitz’s “Heimat on DVD”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000284A56/junius-21 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”:http://www.20thcenturyflicks.co.uk/ , 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.

Heavy rain in Bristol today, so I spent the afternoon watching Volker Schlondorff’s “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073858/ (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)?

Thanks to “Tyler Cowen, over at Volokh”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_14.shtml#1087407794 , I came across “Jason Brennan’s list of movies with philosophical themes”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~brennan/movies.htm . It’s a good list , though a bit lacking in non-American content. Possible additions? There’s already been “some blogospheric discussion”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2003_09_01_archive.html#106244549368342414 of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056217/ and Christine Korsgaard’s “claim that it illustrates Kant on revolutions”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000433.html (scroll down comments). “Strictly Ballroom”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105488/ arguably deals with freedom, existentialism, and revolution. “Rashomon”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876/ is about the epistemology of testimony. “Dr Strangelove”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/ covers the ethics of war and peace and some issues in game theory (remember the doomsday machine?). Suggestions?

UPDATE: I see “Matthew Yglesias”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.html#003568 is also discussing this.

Apart from going to the Rivals, the bank holiday weekend was something of an Almodovar fest for me. I watched “All About My Mother”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185125/ on Friday and “Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095675/ on Sunday, capping it all with a visit to “Bad Education”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275491/ at the cinema last night. “Bad Education”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275491/ 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.

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.

In the wake of the “insta-criticism”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/015583.php of the film “The Day After Tomorrow”:http://www.thedayaftertomorrow.com/ 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.

Following “recommendations”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001761.html from a number of CT readers, I watched Wim Wenders’s beautiful “Der Himmel über Berlin”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093191/ (Wings of Desire) on DVD last night. Ausgezeichnet! (or, maybe, “splendid!”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_04_01_archive.html#108221387921088431 ). 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:

bq. 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.

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!

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”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001L3LUE/junius-20 . 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”:http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/02/05_fogofwar.shtml . Get to see it if you can.

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”:http://westwing.bewarne.com/pres.html is than any recent real-life incumbent. But it isn’t just Bartlet, 24’s “President David Palmer”:http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,274%7C87105%7C1%7C,00.html 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”:http://www.tvheaven.ca/fu.htm ) or ineffectual (“Jim Hacker”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/y/yesprimeminister_1299003453.shtml ). Perhaps only “Harry Perkins”:http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/tv/100/list/prog.php3?id=66 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?

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

bq. “Orders Come From a Talking Lion (Made of Wax)”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/12/arts/television/X12HEFF.html?ex=1394514000&en=0d7f1ed9316e4d01&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

bq. 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.

I recently read Nietzsche’s “The Genealogy of Morality”:http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm 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”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415152852/junius-20 . 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):

bq. …. 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)

[click to continue…]

“High Concept”:http://www.writersstore.com/product.php?products_id=263 for a Horror movie: The “Constitution”:http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html _really is_ a “living document”:http://www.google.com/search?q=constitution+living+document&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8. 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”:http://www.cato.org 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”:http://www.aei.org/.’ 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”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_02_15_balkin_archive.html#107711660024967338 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.

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?