sickpeople

Pearl Harbor Sucked And I Miss You

There’s really only one way to say it: Pearl Harbor is a terrible, terrible movie. If someone wanted to describe it as an eternity of half-hearted attempts at seventy-five different genres leading up to an orgiastic style-over-substance set-piece which then goes back to genre blah-ery, even I would have a hard time coming up with tenable responses; I’d probably just make some half-hearted defense about how Ben Affleck has fleeting moments where he looks like he’s having fun and the set-piece may be too stylish but is without question too fucking awesome, but I’d never expect those goods to be sold. Every time Josh Hartnett gives us “serious” or “passionate” or, well, really anything, I yearn for death’s sweet embrace, and I say that as a man who paid good American money to see Romeo Must Die. Twice.

Thank God, then, that I decided a while back to stop being stupid and try to find a way to like movies rather than spend eternity justifying why I didn’t, because I’ve owned Pearl Harbor for close to a year now and it’s proven to be nearly inexhaustible. You’ve probably noticed that some movies get better as they get more familiar – lord knows that’s what I hear whenever I bring up the fact that I don’t have much of a boner for The Godfather in either direction – but it’s equally true that some movies benefit from time simply because of how it erodes our disgust at the godawful shit. Once Upon A Time In The West, for instance, has some of the most atrocious dubbing this side of the Emmanuelle series, but you’d never notice it now that we’ve had thirty-odd years to learn now to get right to the meat of the movie.

Out of the current cycle of Big Directors, I can’t imagine that there’s going to be anyone who’ll benefit more from this phenomenon than Michael Bay. For one, he’s a profoundly influential figure in video media apart from film (he’s actually won a ton of awards for the music videos and commercials that he’s directed, most notably the milk ad about Aaron Burr); it’s not hard to see him growing into the stature of a Sergio Leone or a Sam Peckinpaugh as those aesthetics slowly seep into the art-film mainstream. But perhaps more importantly, everyone knows all of his movies. Bay is the youngest director in history whose body of films grossed over a billion dollars; odds are good that at least some of that money used to belong to you. And anyway, it’s completely possible to get a handle on Bay’s movies without actually seeing them, especially if you aren’t one for reading into movies; it is, I suppose, fair to call Armageddon a movie where a bunch of guys have to save the world by blowing up the giant rock in space and not take it any further. I suspect that most of Bay’s billion came from people who weren’t looking for too much more.

I can draw two conclusions from this. The first is that this is just symptomatic of shifts in the audience, and you can probably sing it along with me: “This is just what the kids want to spend their money on these days, what with all they’ve learnt from their MTVs and their Playstations and their thong underwears and whut-not”. Bullshit. Well, I’m not actually saying that this isn’t true; I’m saying that I don’t care because I have zero way of ever finding out and I’m sick of all the armchair sociologists ruining film criticism for all the armchair philosophers (for obvious reasons). And anyway, whether or not this is even true pales in comparison to the second conclusion that I can draw: Bay’s films only suck because they offend people’s senses of aesthetics. And this makes me think of Harry Nilsson.

These days, it is entirely possible to go for years at a time without ever stumbling upon Harry Nilsson, and appropriately enough, if we run into him, it’s most likely going to be on a soundtrack. I was mostly able to get into Nilsson about half a year ago because I kept running into songs I recognized liking from movies; there is of course “Everybody’s Talking”, but there’s also “Coconut” and “Jump into the Fire” and the entire soundtrack of The Point and plenty more besides. But this is a dramatic change from Nilsson’s heyday; looking back, history provides us with every reason to believe that he could have easily been a literate, fucked-up Billy Joel or Elton John, which is to say that he could have been the kind of superstar who makes pop music which would have sent a very vocal subset of the pop audience into fits of embarrassment.

Nilsson’s best songs, after all, are schmaltzy as all fuck; there’s a reason his big album is called Nilsson Schmilsson, and it’s not too far off from the reason why Mariah Carey’s version of “Without You” sounds more like his rendition than Badfinger’s all-but-forgotten original. And “Without You” is, without hesitation, Nilsson’s shining moment; it was the kind of omnipresent number-one ballad which we’d later associate with, well, Mariah Carey. As I get older, I’m starting to get increasingly fascinated by these songs simply because of their potential to self-destruct: if they’re made right, sappy ballads are among the most devastating songs you can write since people come to love them in ways that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the song itself, which is how Air Supply’s “All By Myself” was reborn as a Hilarious Song About Masturbation. Rather, people just hear the music and the sound and tone of the lyrics and draw their own conclusions.

This, I am convinced, is exactly how one can appreciate Pearl Harbor. Taken at face value, Pearl Harbor is a mountain of shit, three eternal hours of frantic cutting and needlessly complicated camera moves and WAY too much Weepy Cuba Gooding Jr. and Emotive Josh Hartnett and Tragically Unselfconscious Ben Affleck and The Animatronic Kate Beckinsale. But the fact that Pearl Harbor has no interest in trumpeting its own legitimacy in no way means it’s a useless piece of crap; in the same way that pop music can describe the way the world of emotions feels, pop cinema is uniquely equipped to describe the way the practical world seems. And in these terms, Pearl Harbor became an unmitigated success the instant the phrase “We have some planes” suddenly became significant in our culture.

Because, yes, in the context of 9/11, Pearl Harbor suddenly becomes very, very interesting. I have no idea if I’m being intellectually dishonest by continually linking Bay’s films to 9/11, and frankly I don’t much care, because his films seem more relevant to the events and significance of that day than anyone’s else’s conscious responses. Bay’s films are above all visual; understanding the world you see in a Michael Bay film is exponentially less important to the quality of your experience than understanding the actions being taken and whether or not it would be hardcore as fuck to go through that in real life. The cinema of Michael Bay, in other words, is all about confronting images rather than processing them, and that’s exactly the task that we all had to deal with on 9/11: all of a sudden, we had to deal with images a horrific situation which, and I will say this until the end of time, we the audience in no way saw coming.

It’s very rare that I come across people who like confrontational movies, especially confrontational movies which don’t necessarily have anything to offer the audience in exchange for their participation. People like to watch movies and understand what’s going on, presumably because this is a bastard of a trick to pull off in real life; stimulus-response, by contrast, feels cheap and banal. It’s ironic, then, that movies that promise understanding inevitably receive the most praise for their “realism”, when in reality I can’t imagine that anyone would actually take the time for a measured response to any of the characters in Mystic River. Most people, for instance, would probably describe the pre-9/11 world as being tedious and pointless and packed to the rafters with dullards, and yet somehow the part leading up to the actual attack in Pearl Harbor is beyond useless for showing you a world easily described in exactly the same terms. Hell, I was made aware of 9/11 when I was woken up by a phone call from my friend Eric, ordinarily the least hysterical person in any crisis, excitedly telling me that “someone’s declared war on America”, and yet Pearl Harbor is a preposterous load because it has lines like “Looks like World War 2 just started!"

Fortunately, this is exactly the kind of stuff that time either effaces or turns into quaint “of the era”-isms. It’s admittedly hard to imagine Pearl Harbor accruing the kind of significance of a song like “Without You”, but that’s mostly because, as opposed to the Nilsson song, we really do have to deal with a lot of clumsy, movie-cute bullshit which has nothing to do with 9/11 or, apparently, anything other than people involved in an expensive movie earning their paychecks as best they can. But genuine virtuosity undoes a lot of sins; if Harry Nilsson can overcome a thousand Cotillion feel-up attempts and the snide jabs of a million Eric Clapton fans, then maybe someday the world will be ready to get hardcore with Michael Bay. As far as I’m concerned, the world couldn’t actually be more ready than it is right now.

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Myopia and...*squints*...uh, you

Because I am a sad little man, I spend a lot of time poking around on the internet in search of random bullshit which amuses me momentarily. I realize, of course, that this is the 21^st century equivalent of wasting your life away doing the Junior Jumble; it’s just that every so often, this process leads you to something inadvertently transcendent, and that’s good enough for me. Yesterday, for instance, I found this:

Feel free to stare. A few concessions: yes it’s a joke, yes it’s in poor taste, and no there’s not anything intrinsically wrong with you if you don’t get it. But I have to admit that it made me laugh out loud (in the literal sense); of all the uses that I could have come up with for my copy of Echoes, photoshopping Terry Schiavo’s head onto the cover was never one of them. (I’m aware, incidentally, that Amusing Photoshop Edits are situated in the hierarchy of comedic sophistication somewhere between a Tim Allen routine and hippie protest signs, but we all have our things. I laughed my ass off the first time I saw the one of Lee Harvey Oswald with the guitar, too, so I just have to conclude that I have a weakness for the form. I am, after all, from North Carolina.)

Anyway: Seeing as how I was already on the internet, I figured I’d post a link on a forum where I tend to hang out. Now, keep in mind this is the internet, possibly the only space (real or imaginary) in history where one would face more difficulty trying to find the phone number of a pizza place than trying to find images of people eating poop. Then take the next step and consider the fact that the forum where I posted the link exists mostly so that lonely dorks can congregate and devote an excess of attention to professional wrestling. Suffice it to say, I figured I was in the clear.

Well, no. A few minutes later, I checked my email and found that my account had been temporarily suspended; for the rest of the week, I wouldn’t even be able to access the message board. The irony, of course, is that I’d never been suspended from the board for any reason before despite going way beyond the Echoes parody on occasion. By way of contrast: A few months ago, a sex tape involving ex-WWF wrestlers Chyn@ and ><-Pac surfaced (ah, sweet google-proofing). One of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many reasons to avoid this particular sex tape forever is the fact that the viewer is (apparently) forced to confront Chyna’s gargantuan clitoris; it is (allegedly) the approximate size of a mason jar. For weeks and weeks and weeks on this same forum, you could barely read a thread without someone referring to said monstrosity and someone else inevitably linking to pictures. It’s more than a little funny that laughing at the delicious irony of Terri Schiavo on the cover of an album with the song “Sister Savior” is somehow out of bounds. If my suspension from this pro-wrestling internet message-board hadn’t accidentally afforded me an arcane summation of one of the chief problems facing modern existence, I’d probably be a little pissed.

Because my friends are, by and large, not gigantic dorks like I am, most of the conversations I have about philosophy take place entirely within my head. As you might imagine, these exercises tend to be somewhat reductionist in nature; I inevitably find that the best answer to whatever question I’m posing to myself is the one that uses the fewest words. This is of course only occasionally productive – most of the great pithy philosophical soundbites are taken – but every so often I’ve actually gotten results. Like this:

ME: Okay, I got one – what’s the most basic flaw with modernity?
ME: Easy. If I say “cat”, you know what I’m talking about, right?
ME: Uh, I guess – do you mean “cat” like housecat, or like a tiger, or what?
ME: Like a housecat.
ME: Oh, okay. Got it.
ME: Okay, describe what a cat is.
ME: Uh – four legs, furry, tail…erm…can be loud…uh…
ME: That sounds about right.
ME: Okay, so what?

Well, me, it’s simple: The problem is that even though we can both make reference to the same template of cat-ness, there’s absolutely no guarantee that we’re talking about the same cat. My first cat ever was a stray named Max who’d lost his tail in a fight, apparently right before wandering up to my family’s house. When my counter-ego throws “tail” in among the terms he associates with “cat”, it is therefore completely plausible that I could have leapt up in my cubicle and loudly called him (me) a myopic jackass with no practical knowledge about the term itself. I will assume that you have at least passing familiarity with The O’Reilly Factor and can therefore figure out how productive this approach is.

This is, of course, hardly news; postmodernism has a (paradoxically) long and storied history throughout the course of human consciousness, to the point where we’re all so familiar with the term that we don’t even blink when we hear it mentioned on the E! network. What we’ve lost contact with, however, is the fact that although postmodernism may be a philosophy, it happens to be a philosophy with profound practical applications. It’s one thing, after all, to split hairs with yourself over the difference between two different conceptions of a term like “cat”, but replace “cat” with “evil” and “yourself” with “the President” (or depending on your political alignment, "bin Laden") and suddenly you’re dealing with (overrated yet still relevant) real-world issues. I don’t think that my definition of the general linguistic category of “evil” is all that much different from that of George W. Bush, but there’s a real-world split between us due to the fact that the events and causes that he plugs into that category differ wildly from the ones I would choose. Or, for an even more immediately concrete example, consider the issue of love.

Up until last year, I always thought that my only reason for defending the Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary was that it reflected my own experiences as a catastrophic failure with women with unspeakable clarity, and then sent me home happy with exactly the right ending. (I had similar misconceptions about the genius of the Kaplan/Elfont masterpiece Can’t Hardly Wait, and I say that without irony. As you might imagine, 1998 was a great year for movies tailor-made for James Cobo.) Now that I have owned the DVD for some time and have watched it (1) apart from a crowd, which is essential if you want to determine what your particular relationship is to a movie, and (2) a thousand fucking times, which is essential if you want to determine if a movie still has substance once you’ve wrung all the freshness out - now that all of that’s happened, I can safely say that There’s Something About Mary’s status as one of the all-time great films in the Hollywood canon has less to do with what it says about my life than what it says about life in general.

I always get nervous whenever I hear the phrase “stalker comedy” applied to Mary, which means I get nervous a lot since the film might as well have employed the phrase in its press kit (it actually might have, but again, I am a lazy person). Usually, I’m only discomforted by critical terms when I don’t have a clue as to what they mean, which is why I run screaming in the opposite direction from anything pitched to me as “realistic” or “classical” or “-ian” (usually “Brechtian”, but you can fill in whatever). “Stalker comedy”, however, I can grasp with shameful ease, because that’s basically the way I look at my life. I hate the internet for a vast array of reasons, but if you invent a chip to be implanted into the brain that gives the subject uninterrupted access to the internet, I will fight my way to the front of the line to be the guinea pig. This is due to the fact that in the real world, I am by far the worst conversationalist you will ever meet (aside, perhaps, from Terry Schiavo) because I am governed by the impulse to Not Be Sleazy And/Or Intrusive, and I am sick enough in the head that asking someone – lord, especially girls – even the most banal personal information feels to me like a profound breach of etiquette. This, in turn, comes from the fact that I generally decide the extent to which I like someone within the first split second of meeting them (and I am rarely wrong); given that I already know whether or not I like someone, asking follow-up questions seems like a useless pretext, and I like being straightforward (or failing that, drunk). My general attitude towards people’s personal lives is that if I need to know something, it’ll be made known to me.

You begin to see, of course, why calling Mary a “stalker comedy” would make me nervous. Ben Stiller is tortured by guilt over whether or not he’s intruding too much on Cameron Diaz by hiring Dillon and so on; meanwhile I live every day of my life willfully denying myself the right to Google-spy every girl I’ve ever had a crush on. “Willfully denying” may actually be an understatement; my relationship to the internet’s power to provide me access to people’s personal information without being broadcasting my intrusiveness to the world at large (until now, I guess) is pretty close to that of a crystal meth addict, insofar as that I want to do it constantly but cannot shake the awareness that it’s ruining any chance I have at being a human being worthy of respect. As such, when I watch Mary I usually find myself understanding Stiller with perfect clarity as a stalker and a helpless idiot for Diaz.

Now obviously, a lot of the credit for this has to go to Stiller, who to be fair really does nail a lot of little things about the profound shittiness of this particular schism to within three or four decimal places. But Mary isn’t The Usual Suspects; if they’d made Mary exactly the same but replaced Stiller and Diaz with, say, Joshua Jackson and Tea Leoni, it would still be a movie worth watching, and credit for that has to go to the Farrelly brothers. Mary is a deceptively tight movie; it has no shortage of extraneous “stuff” (the dog, for instance), but overall there are surprisingly few moments in the film that you can’t trace to the actions of Stiller. About a fifth of the way through the movie, for instance, Dillon goes down to Miami in search of Mary; what’s striking isn’t so much what Dillon does as it is his approach to Mary. Stiller inadvertently zips his nuts up to his neck in an effort to demonstrate the purity of his intentions towards Mary; this is of course in sharp contrast to Dillon’s switching to higher-powered binoculars in order to scheme a better peek at her rack. The closer you read the actual shot-by-shot text of the film, the more apparent it gets – compare Dillon’s interactions with Mary to Stiller’s, and you’ll see that Dillon and Diaz are frequently kept separate by conversing in shot-reverse shot form, whereas Stiller and Diaz have a number of nice little moments in a quiet, restrained two-shot (my favorite probably being the conversation they have sitting on the car after dinner). You can even point to a number of jokes which visually hinge on Stiller or his actions occupying the center of the frame, which I was taught is where you’re supposed to put the action that you want the audience to focus on. You’d be surprised how nuanced a movie Mary really is, considering that most people remember it for Ben Stiller wrestling a dog.

On one level, of course, this is just textbook “good filmmaking”. I, however, no longer care about that level; I think that the skill involved in getting the audience to comprehend the way Stiller understands his world is far less interesting than the actual feat of, y’know, getting the audience to comprehend the way that Stiller understands his world. And this understanding is crucial if you’re going to “get” the drama of the film’s closing; if you can’t see both how Ted sees himself and his life and his chances of being a worthy companion for Mary AND how Mary might see virtue and value in Ted, then the ending is roughly as sophisticated as the last reel of a silent movie (although if that’s what you think, you should probably watch more silent movies). It’s the kind of understanding you can only get from only being presented with the opportunity to identify with one character, and that in turn is exactly the way human beings live their real lives. The pleasure of Mary, in other words, comes from the revelation that in spite of everything we know about the world, both of the main characters – both the one we understand and the one we idealize – have the same definition of “cat”.

The opening essay in Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs deals with the idea that all scenarios of love promised by cinema are inherently artificial, and I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment that if you sit around waiting for things to work out like they do for Ted, you’re in for a lifetime of bullshit. But there’s no shortage of movies about losers who end up getting exactly what they want and the audience feels they deserve, and yet There’s Something About Mary towers over all of them. The idea, after all, that there may in fact exist complementary subjectivities to your own – complementary subjectivities that you want, even – is infinitely more valuable than the idea that you can get the impossibly hot girl after all’s said and done. It’s telling that although critics can debate the aesthetics and the social weight of Mary until the cows come home, the film remains nearly universally respected among ordinary people (which makes me want to compare it to Goodfellas, but this is long enough already) who actually pay money for tickets and DVDs and such. To me, that says that this approach works on ordinary people because this is how ordinary people live their lives, and the fact that it works gives me hope for humanity. Which isn’t to say that Mary offers a glimpse into some Candyland of linguistic clarity and shared humanist values – it’s not Mystic River, thank fucking Christ – but rather speaks to a frustration in the modern person about the limits of experience, and to a hope that this frustration isn’t insurmountable. There’s Something About Mary hasn’t and won’t change the world, but (at the risk of LiveJournaling it up) if we can at least all agree that a better world is possible, that's a start.  And hopefully - hell, by definition - this world will be completely devoid of Chyn@'s nether thumb.

(bonus content for making it this far: Here is the link to the entire photoshop thread. It is even funnier/more horrible than you could have possibly imagined.)

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(Hi. I'm trying to stick to my schedule of updating regularly every Sunday and Wednesday, but I have plans which will hopefully leave me incapacitated tomorrow, so you get this a little early. It's long as all fuck, so there's that.

Oh, and I just noticed that I have comments [thnx yall], so I'll get around to responding to those when I get a chance. Enjoy.)

The Scariest Place On Earth

There are moments when I get embarrassed by the fact that I’m forever drawn to some ludicrous, shitty movies – if one’s taste can be taken as representative of their character or intellect or whatever, yada yada yada. But lately I’ve been thinking that it’s not so much that I’m drawn to bad movies through any personal defect as it is that when you get down to brass tacks, I’m pretty lucky to live the life I live. The fact that I have no use for a movie like Mystic River, in other words, doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate its qualities; it just means that because the world I inhabit isn’t so skewed that I feel any compulsion to get a new perspective on molestation or family duty or whatever. When the problem you deal with most consistently is basically “There’s all these damn snails everywhere and I keep accidentally stomping on them in the dark”, it makes sense that you’d find more value in lighter stuff.

Except, of course, for international terrorism. It’s not that I’m afraid of being blown to bits or seeing a plane screaming at my window (although I do live in Los Angeles and objectively, we’re pretty lucky to have not suffered an attack yet), but that doesn’t mean terrorism has no weight in my life. Terrorism has affected the way we travel and vote and spend our money, and the fact that it doesn’t affect us as profoundly as it does an Israeli or an Iraqi doesn’t mean we aren’t being affected at all. Terrorism gives momentum to modernity in the same way that the issue of civil rights did forty years ago; it doesn’t surprise me in the least that all those superhero movies keep breaking the bank.

Thing is, those aren’t the movies “about” terrorism that interest me; it’s not that they have nothing to say, but simply that they all draw from a conception of the threat that I just don’t have. Movies like Spider-Man work because you understand the threat implicitly - Doctor Octopus wants to fuck up the city because XYZ happened and so on. This always seemed like a nice, neat little way to wrap everything up which really doesn’t work that well in reality; it’s convenient and tidy to say that Zarqawi keeps beheading people because he’s an Islamic fundamentalist who hates what the West stands for, but anyone – ANYONE - who devotes more than two seconds of serious thought to the matter will concede that it’s probably more complicated than that.

I’m not trying to say that it’s the duty of movies like Spider-Man to aim at a shades-of-grey reality; I tend to think that kind of decision is best left up to the filmmaker, and anyway we haven’t even begun to see the movies actually “about” terrorism yet. It’s just that the movies about terrorism that I like make an active effort to subvert your understanding of the threat; the best ones tell you nothing beyond how you’re going to die. This, I think, is more the point of terrorism itself; the scary thing about 9/11 wasn’t that your plane could get hijacked and atomized, but rather that that’s the kind of potential situation you’d have to be conscious of from now on. I think of terrorism as the constant threat of being violently reminded that we don’t always get to understand the world, and if I’m going to interact with a movie on that level, it’s the movie’s first task to make things as uncertain as possible.

Consequently, Armageddon is by far the best movie I’ve ever seen about terrorism, and I’ve been pretty passionate about looking. The facts are pretty simple: we know that we’re all going to get crushed from above somehow, but we have no way of knowing how or why we’re going to die. The only thing we know is that this shit happens because it’s happening right now, and that’s the key to appreciating this movie; it’s about people dealing with the most threatening, least comprehensible situation possible, and if that doesn’t have any resonance after 9/11, we aren’t interested in the same kinds of movies. The only difference between 9/11 and the events of Armageddon is that if we buy into the film, we know for a fact that the asteroid’s going to wipe us all out; it promises to deliver where al-Qaeda can only threaten.

I’m aware, of course, that you’ve got to buy into a certain level of abstraction in order to connect 9/11 to Imminent Space-Rock Death, but the buy-in actually turns out to be a lot cheaper than you’d think. I remember seeing Armageddon in the theaters and walking out in a state of anger at having wasted my money; I don’t think I actually stalked the halls of the Wynnsong theater howling about that dumb-ass movie where they blew up New York with rocks, but I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that I had. Today, of course, the Kill New York scene is one of the most fascinating scenes in the movie simply because of how much shit Michael Bay got right; the scene is full of things like skybound objects smacking into the World Trade Center and panicky mobs and Mark Curry (!) howling about how “Saddam Hussein is declaring war on us!” and such. These simply aren’t historically neutral images anymore.

I don’t mean to imply that Armageddon is full of accidental pre-references like this – I mean, it absolutely is, but if that was the extent of the movie’s allegorical relationship to 9/11, I’d have probably been done with it by now. No, in reality I’m most fascinated by how well the main story (the one about the team of deep-sea drillers enlisted to go blow up the giant space-death-rock hurtling towards us all) matches up with the story of Flight 93, the plane which crashed into a Pennsylvania field instead of (apparently) the White House. Quite frankly, I can’t see how the two stories are different at all: both are pitched to us as stories of everymen sacrificing themselves in order to overcome a threat the enormity of which they have absolutely no way to comprehend. It’s hardly a perfect match, of course, but I absolutely think it’s fair to say that understanding the drama and significance of one can lead to a deeper understanding of the other. In 1998, for instance, the infamous Bruce Willis/Liv Tyler exchange had me choking with laughter, but once transcripts of those cell-phone calls from inside the plane cabins started emerging it suddenly played a lot more seriously; when I watch it now, it’s actually a poignant (if unsophisticated) piece of storytelling. We can understand the movie now in a way we couldn’t then, simply because the movie isn’t a work of complete fantasy anymore.

But complete understanding of Armageddon, however, comes when you remember that on September 10^th, the events of 9/11 would have been considered just as fantastic as the movie. We’re in our fourth year since the attacks and we’re still having issues sorting everything out; huge gaps persist in our understanding of how and why everything happened that we’ve barely begun to address. What Armageddon and similar movies offer us, then, is a chance to run through a simplified allegorical version of reality so that we can actually come away with some sort of understanding of what actually went on. Which isn’t to say that Armageddon has some buried explanation as for why nobody scrambled fighter jets to intercept the airlines, of course – that would be asking far too much of a movie about blowing up a rock in space – but the movie is an unavoidably thorough exploration of what it’s like to actually be terrorized, and that kind of understanding is absolutely helpful in understanding why things happened the way they did on 9/11. Other movies, for instance, have had quickie life-flashing-before-the-main-character’s-eyes montages before, but in the context of a guy sacrificing his life to save the citizens of the world of Armageddon, I’ll admit that I started wondering if that’s what it was like for Todd Beamer. The fact that I have zero way of ever knowing for sure if it is or isn’t barely matters compared to the way the sequence actually gets me to put myself in Beamer’s shoes; it’s remarkable enough that the movie connects me so directly with reality that I don’t much care if the movie itself bothers to do so.

I am, of course, aware that most people would prefer to eat a used diaper than to use Armageddon to connect to reality; we’re nearly seven years removed from its release and people still jump to bash it. I can’t deny that Armageddon is in many ways a deeply terrible movie, especially whenever Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler have to share screen space in front of me; I don’t have a comeback for the people who accuse it of being jingoistic (except to point out that the Americans have to work with the Russians to beat the rock) or provincial (except to point out the diversity of the crew marshaled to beat the rock) or overblown and unfunny (except…ah, pick your battles). All of this stuff is absolutely, unavoidably in there, whether you agree with it or not; I personally don’t think they’re good enough reasons to ignore Armageddon, but generally I just shrug and assume it’s their loss.

What I don’t get, however, is the dogmatic insistence of most critics that the stylistic choices of Armageddon make it totally frivolous and unworthy of discussion; I haven’t heard people get so worked up by a piece of art since Piss Christ. Michael Bay’s movies, if you listen to most people, are an affront to the cinema; it’s apparently a bad thing to move the camera that violently and cut so aggressively and carpet your movie with loaded music, or at least it’s a bad thing when you’re just doing it to make a movie about a rock in space. I’ve been dealing with these people ever since I contracted my strange and uncontrollable fandom of Michael

Bay; clearly they’re not going anywhere. Imagine the exact inverse of the Star Wars fanatic (and I find that the one is very frequently the other), and you’ve got it.

These people are idiots. Armageddon is a Great film in the same sense that I Stand Alone or L’Avventura are Great; it is a work that gets at reality by doing something completely different and unconventional. The caveat, of course, is that my version of reality is completely autonomous from everybody else’s. I can live with this, because my point isn’t that my version of reality is the right one: it’s that I bet my version of reality is a lot closer to most people’s versions than ever gets discussed.

Because I live on the West coast, I slept through 9/11; I only found out about it when my friend Eric called me after the last plane had hit. As such, I experienced 9/11 second-hand; I only saw the planes collide with the towers in footage being replayed, and the towers collapsed while I was in class (reading, of all things, this). What this means is that while I can absolutely claim to be fully versed in the events of the day, I missed out on the uncertainty and surprise of the event itself entirely. I’ve heard over and over again how people thought the first crash was just a horrific accident, and that it took the subsequent crashes to force them to realize that these were acts of war; all I can say is that that’s a very different experience from waking up and hearing that the country’s under attack.

Most people, if pressed, would probably tell you that they experienced 9/11 like everyone else, and that it all came as a shock and that they saw it happen. I just don’t think that’s true; if 9/11 were a movie, my guess is that most people would be able to tell you the plot and their reactions to it, but I doubt that most people were following the events so explicitly. I’d bet that more people experienced 9/11 like my mom, who had a dentist’s appointment and heard what was happening as the assistants kept running in the room to tell everyone. I’m not trying to diminish anyone’s experience, of course, but there’s something to be said for processing the information yourself as it comes instead of simply putting it in order

So you can see why I might be drawn to the visual chaos of Armageddon: I may have missed processing all the information live on 9/11, but the film’s a pretty damn good analogue. Bay gets a lot of criticism for making his movies “hard to follow” due to all the camera tomfoolery, to the point where I wonder if it might not be worth considering that he’s doing it on purpose – not to confuse the audience, of course, but rather to overload them with information and refuse to let them settle into any particular logical pattern. Which isn’t to say that there’s no rhyme or reason to his films – nobody on earth right now can hold a candle to Bay when it comes to quickie montages, like the one introducing the drilling team in Armageddon – but rather that the logic of his movies isn’t necessary for understanding it. God only knows how laughably simple Armageddon is to understand; a four-year-old could get it (although I never hear anyone criticizing The Wizard of Oz for that particular sin). But all we know about the rock itself is that it’s way too big for us to even imagine what would happen if it touched down, and way too alien for us to ever be able to visualize with any degree of satisfaction (Bay meticulously animated the asteroid, going so far as to layer dust trails on dust trails on dust trails, in an effort to guarantee that the audience never saw the same asteroid twice). Well, that and that we’ve got to stop it in order to protect our way of life. Perhaps you see why I can connect this movie to terrorism.

As funny as it sounds, I’ve been trying to write about Armageddon for a couple of years now, and I’m still not sure I’m able to do a good job at getting across how deeply satisfying a movie experience it is. Granted, it wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying had it not been suddenly and unexpectedly plugged into a reality we can all point to, but interesting is interesting is Armageddon is interesting. I can honestly say it’s not an inverted case of sacred-cows-make-the-best-hamburgers (although I have to admit that it is a fun angle to play); it’s simply a case of reality and fabrication intersecting in a very unexpected fashion, and that’s good enough to cancel out a vomitous love story any day of the week in my book.

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Mark, You Ignorant Slut

Most people, when looking through my DVDs, see things like Pearl Harbor and Keeping the Faith and immediately think “guilty pleasure”. These people are at least partially wrong; I lost any sense of guilt over loving bad movies way back in the back-when (and anyway Pearl Harbor is pretty great if you can get past how shitty it is). But I don’t want to come off like I’m immune from guilty-pleasure movies; it’s just that my guilt is a little different from most people. Most people, for instance, would hold up a movie like Stone Reader as an example of their erudition, but I can’t watch it without feeling like I’ve accidentally eaten a hamburger somebody found near a dumpster.

I watch Stone Reader an awful lot. I don’t, however, think that should count for much; I’ll watch any movie ever made about reading and/or writing for the same reasons I’ll watch any movie set largely in a record store. People like movies about the things they do. And, to be fair, Stone Reader is an excellent movie about reading and writing; it features incredibly insightful remarks and absorbing anecdotes in equal share, and it invites you to test your knowledge on a very casual, open-armed level. In no way do I want to give the impression that I don’t like this movie, because I enjoy it every time I watch it. Fortunately, however, I can walk and chew gum, because in practice I hate Stone Reader very nearly as much as I enjoy it.

Or, to be a little more specific, I hate hate hate hate hate Mark Moskowitz, the director and star of the film. It’s not that he’s everywhere in the film that makes me hate him; I have no implicit beef with star-making machinery, and the way the film’s set up (low-budget indie documentary about a guy trying to track down an author who wrote a potent yet long-forgotten book called The Stones of Summer and then disappeared), it’s probably the only way to organize the movie coherently. Rather, it’s the transformative effect that Moskowitz’ presence has on the film which turns me eight shades of red, as he turns a perfectly respectable movie into the literary equivalent of Spinal Tap. Moskowitz, in other words, has accidentally made the most ridiculous movie ever.

I’d love to think that there’s no stigma attached to the act of recreational reading, but that and fifty cents etc. Reading is pretty much the most self-involved thing a person can do, and it would be useless to pretend that anything offering that much myopic pleasure isn’t bound to attract insufferable assholes (see also “indie rock”). And everybody’s encountered these assholes – the ones who talk shit about you if you haven’t read Hemingway, or the ones whose Impassioned Arguments basically come down to page numbers in other peoples’ books, or the ones who digest one book and then run around screeching about it like it’s some lost Biblical text. The nature of reading, as even Stone Reader points out, is that when you read, you’re the one giving life to the text; dealing with people who want credit for this, I guess, is just one of those things we have to deal with as a civilized society.

Moskowitz, however, is the absolute king of these people. Even setting aside the comical degree of self-justification required to motivate someone to make a movie about tracking down the author of a book you AND ONLY YOU loved, the guy just plain sucks: he shows off his commitment to reading like a precocious seven-year-old, he can’t have a conversation that doesn’t devolve into Dueling Pontifications, and he explains the stupidest, most basic shit to his audience (actual line: “I liked stories with subplots and twists to them”). It’s like watching James Lipton interview Ira Glass summed up in one man’s charisma.

The problem, of course, is that the movie only works if you give yourself over to accepting Moskowitz’ approach. The whole movie is pitched in terms of his experience as a devoted reader, both in general and in the particular case of The Stones of Summer; if the movie is to make any sense to the audience, it is because the audience presumably has experienced the joy of reading in a very profound manner and can see what Moskowitz is trying to accomplish. It’s just that Moskowitz’ manner of behavior is so insipid and self-righteous that it makes me ashamed even to identify with him, both as a person and as an artist. Even setting aside my profound distaste for the tote-bag-and-whale-songs-CD milieu he epitomizes so adroitly, the man’s just fucking dishonest; the film is full of instances where the narration tries to pass off staged shots as “happening right now in the story”, like showing his friends “finding” the book in their mailbox or setting up items ahead of time in order to run across them “in the process” of doing other stuff and making “off-the-cuff” glib remarks (taking a copy of The Stones of Summer out of an [opened] mailer and, with a note of surprise in the voice, referring to it as “a box of stones” = VOMIT).

I think that movies like this do the same type of disservice to the field of documentary filmmaking that the Darkness do to the genre of heavy metal. People take movies seriously because they like the whole process of movies – choosing the movie, watching it, talking about it, seeing how it does, etc. – but it didn’t take people too long to realize that on a certain level, you can’t watch a movie without it fucking with you. Consequently, we got the documentary genre, the sine qua non of which is the assurance that you can believe that what you’re seeing is legit. This isn’t to say that the genre of documentary necessarily equates to “no manipulation”, but just that the manipulation is pitched at an everyday level. You can take Randall Adams seriously in The Thin Blue Line, for instance, because Errol Morris put a lot of effort into editing his interviews to efface his own presence and make it seem less like Adams was addressing someone present; you’re watching Adams talk just like you’re watching anyone talk from across a table.

Stone Reader doesn’t work like that; instead, it trades legitimacy for continuity. It’s impossible for a normal human being to experience the events of Stone Reader as Moskowitz puts them forth; even Moskowitz himself didn’t experience the action of sending the books to his friends the way he shows it in the film. You get to see everything, but there’s no support for any of it; you just have to take it on faith that this happened and then this and then this and then this guy said this and hey we’re out of time. Which is fine, I guess – but how are you supposed to take it seriously when it’s trying to puff you up to the level of omnipotence? Is it worth watching the metal-detector scene if we’ve watched Derek Smalls shove the foil-wrapped cucumber down his pants beforehand?

I have to admit that I’m less inclined to give Moskowitz any credit simply because the man seems like the type to take supreme pleasure in the smell of his own farts; inhabiting an insufferable person’s universe isn’t all that tempting an alternative to reality. I think it’s very telling that most of the truths I find in Stone Reader come from the interview portions, as it seems entirely within the realm of possibility that I might have nothing to learn from these people if I wasn’t so exasperated with Moskowitz. But it also seems possible that I find truth there because unlike the rest of the film, I actively have to look for truths in the interviews rather than simply be informed of them. Omnipotence vanishes when the credits start rolling.

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HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA

For posterity: Fox seems to have given up on tonight and assumed that the Academy Awards are going to win the ratings game tonight. So guess what they're running against Hollywood's celebration of the virtues of cinema?

Independence Day. God bless.

Tae Kwon Do is for faggots

Spin Kick is a stupid, shitty movie; anyone who tells you differently is just trying to show themselves off as a jet-setting cinecoteur enthusiast who’ll tell you his top-ten-list of all the good Korean movies made before Better Luck Tomorrow regardless of whether you want to hear it or not. I know that I’ve got a bad habit of finding meaning in shitty, stupid movies, but this isn’t one of those cases – a cigar isn’t necessarily a marital aid, y’know. I’ll gladly admit that I had a fine time watching Spin Kick, of course, but when I keep comparing a movie to BASEketball and finding that it comes up short in a lot of ways, it won’t do anyone any favors to pretend we’re dealing with quality here.

Of course, I did watch it all the way to the end, and there were a bunch of times when I was duly impressed, and there were even a couple of moments when I can unashamedly say that Spin Kick totally got me. The story behind the movie (rag-tag assemblage of Sporting Misfits has to come together for the sake of Team and Institution) is older than dirt; structurally, the only difference between Spin Kick and Major League is that the former is about Tae Kwon Do instead of baseball. What’s interesting, and I’m completely willing to accept that this is the kind of thing that’s only interesting to me, is that I was able to understand Spin Kick at all. Going into the film I knew as much about Tae Kwon Do as I knew about baseketball going into, well, BASEketball, and there was never a time when I felt like the drama of the film had gone over my head.

We in the Western world (or Western-influenced world, which in terms of culture studies is pretty much the same thing) have kind of a skewed perspective on how movies like this work. Major League, for instance, works for us because the drama gets played out in terms of baseball – can Charlie Sheen summon enough character to strike this guy out? can Wesley Snipes actually back up all his shit-talking? can a team be so totally repulsed by a woman that they’re actually motivated to win? Movies like this work because we’re all so inured to the institution of baseball by this point that we don’t even have to try to see how character comes out in the actions of the game –we’ve even got a parallel news industry at least partially devoted to explaining how this happens. More importantly, however, we can safely assume this understanding isn’t privileged information. If they partake inAmerica’s Pastime in Communist Cuba, it’s safe to say that the cat’s out of the bag.

But imagine if you’d never heard of baseball – or better yet, that you’d heard of it, but had no understanding of how it worked. It’s a pretty safe bet to say that you’d have a prohibitively harder time unlocking the mysteries of Major League. And yet this is never a problem with Spin Kick, in spite of the fact that the movie plays heavily off of how Tae Kwon Do works as both an institution and a sport. Of course the movie left me serially befuddled – I must have thought the movie was over about three times before it was actually over – but I never felt oblivious to what was going on in the film; I could always tell when the characters were stepping up and when they were getting totally crushed, and I was generally able to fill in most of the emotional blanks in between.

I think Korea may be the most interesting place on this earth about whose culture I know absolutely nothing. I mean, I know they’re a gigantic economy and that they’re way ahead of the curve technologically (I seem to recall someone telling me that South Korea has more per-capita high-speed internet connections than anywhere else in the world, although I’m far too lazy to google that fact for backup), but I can understand facts like that only in an American (or “global”, if you’d rather) context; if you asked for my opinion on the state of affairs for the lower-class Korean woman, I’d be only slightly more helpful than your average Godsmack fan. As a result, I find South Korean movies fascinating because, well, I find them fascinating, even though I can’t make a single claim as to why I should know what’s going on. Either these movies are just flat-out well-done or my psychosis isn’t funny anymore.

By way of explaining this, I have to talk about music a little bit. You may have heard of M.I.A. by this point, as the tidal wave of hype she’s currently riding is starting to carry her into the pages of Spin and Rolling Stone. What you might not know, however, is that the discussion that’s been raging on around her for the last year and change has yielded one of the more interesting categories of music that I’ve come across recently: post-rap. M.I.A.’s music, you see, takes a lot of cues from things like dancehall music and British hip-hop and Timbaland, but doesn’t necessarily demonstrate any particular loyalty to them; her music sounds like what you’d get if you asked someone with her taste who’s also really, really good at making music to make an album that sounds cool as all fuck to them. The problem, of course, is that these are all things that have deep meaning for other people, and nobody wants to see the things they keep dear held out to everyone for a nice Blueshammering.

I won’t bore you with the details of how the argument’s playing out, but I will say that at some point, someone described her sound as “post-rap world music”, and I just about fell out of my chair in envy. It’s totally defensible to talk about M.I.A.’s music in terms of rap or dancehall just like it was totally fine to talk about Remain in Light in terms of African polyrhythms; you just have to be willing to admit that it’s a work of appropriation. Arular is not a rap album, or a dancehall album, or a whatever – but it does work like that, and that’s all that matters. It’s music that works because we all know how rap works. <>

I think, then, that it’s fair to say that my attraction to South Korean cinema is so profound because it’s as close as we’ve gotten to “post-cinema”. It’s worthwhile to watch movies like Spin Kick (or better yet, good Korean movies!) because we can use them as Rosetta Stones to figure out exactly how cinema works and where we stand in relation to that. I’ve found that the best Korean movies are easily sold to other people in pop culture terms; if you know someone who likes Se7en or Kill Bill, you know somebody who wants to see Oldboy even if they don’t know it, etc. By this point, we’re all so familiar with how cinema works – both the West and South Korea – that we don’t even have to worry about making something comprehensible; we’re all fundamentally speaking the same language.

Critics have been talking about the “death of cinema” since the French New Wave ground to a halt, arguing that the medium of cinema has been steadily losing its vitality as the shock of the new wears off. It’s hard to disagree, really; by this point all we definitely know about cinema’s relationship to the world is that it can choose to either reflect reality or not reflect it at all, and there aren’t a lot of directions to go once you’ve exhausted those particular possibilities. But I categorically object to the idea that there’s nowhere left to go. I think that cinema may be uniquely equipped to give us the kind of perspective rich parents hope to instill in their kids by sending them to public schools, the kind that teaches us that simply because we’re all the same doesn’t mean we’re not very different too (and vice versa), and I think that’s a far more relevant lesson about the world and the people that inhabit it than some pedantic work of bullshit like Ray. Movies may not be able to show us anything new, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t show us anything at all. One would think that that would be the point of cinema.

Again, I don’t want to attach any undue significance to Spin Kick; I may have enjoyed it, but it didn’t really send me anywhere (or at least that’s not the point). My guess is that if I weren’t totally sick in the head for ontology, I would have returned it without a second thought. It’s just that it’s rare to find a foreign movie which you can deal with so thoroughly like a domestic one, and even rarer when you can analyze it without being beholden to its quality; it’s thrilling to deal with cinema as the object of a cipher rather than as a cipher itself. The dialogue between the movies and the audience has reached the point where we know what’s up when one of the young punks in Spin Kick  says “Tae Kwon Do’s for faggots”; regardless of what country he’s from, you know he’s a mouthy little shit who’ll end the movie with a newfound respect for blah blah blah. We get it, thank God.

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Gloriously Inappropriate

By this point, my guess is that I’ve enjoyed Roger Avery’s The Rules of Attraction more than just about anybody on earth not involved in its production. Of course, considering how nearly every single thing I heard about it upon its release in 2002 was unhesitatingly negative, this may not be much of an accomplishment, but facts are facts, and the fact is simply that I can watch this movie forever in a completely unironic way. Everyone who writes this movie off as “shitty” or “empty” is both wrong and stupid (though mainly wrong), and I am right. It’s that simple.

It’s not that I can’t understand why people hate Rules so much – far from it, since their reasons were pretty much sufficient to keep me away from it for close to two years after its release. When people complain about how it’s oppressively stylized (read: “annoying”) or how it doesn’t come to a resolution (“depressing”) or how it takes the cheap way out with lots of drug use and sex and pop music (pretty self-explanatory, although I never really saw it as a negative), I can’t really mount an argument. Rules is absolutely a movie that offers no reassurance whatsoever and inflicts a degree of artistic oppression on its audience usually reserved for the two loathsome Andersons; being opposed to it is simply the other side of the coin of being opposed to Reality Bites because it’s “too Hollywood”. This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable stance to take.

Of course, I love Reality Bites too: movies about philosophical concepts are rare enough, but movies about philosophical concepts that don’t come down to the formula of Story + Talking About Philosophy, that actually operate under the conditions that they propose – those are rarer than hen’s teeth. We’re ten-plus years removed from the release of Reality Bites and, if the post-9/11 media is to be believed, at least four years removed from the “death of irony”, but I continue to be impressed by the way the film’s definition of irony (paraphrase from memory: “It’s when the situational meaning is completely different from the literal meaning”) plays out in the film’s resolution; what else is the conclusion to that movie besides characters making a choice between the literal and situational meanings of the term “love”? Movies like this are incredibly useful if you like to think about what nebulous concepts like irony have to do with your life – certainly useful enough to put up with all the bullshit that led the movie from conception through production and right up to the point at which you saw it.

I guess it’s possible to describe myself as “lucky” in at least one way: if someone asks me to define my life in terms of one idea, I can comfortably say “propriety” without feeling like I’m leaving much out. My guess is that I’m not alone, if simply because I can’t be the only person whose parents did their damnedest to instill values in them contradictory to their place in society. My dad was a respected ophthalmologist for Duke University, and my family kept some correspondingly high-brow company; when I went home for Christmas, my mom told the story about how she nearly had to decapitate Stanley Fish when, at a party, he knocked a glass of wine out of her hand and shrank into the background to avoid being blamed. Yet in spite of that, I was essentially raised as a post-sixties liberal – I still remember being “corrected” when I came back from elementary school having been shown and impressed by a video of one of Reagan’s speeches, for instance, and I can’t even begin to count the number of lectures I sat through about notions of equality between races or genders or whatever.

My point is this: while I certainly don’t begrudge my parents even a little bit for their efforts or their net worth, I can say without hesitation that to a certain extent, it does play hell on a kid’s mind to reconcile notions of equality with the presence of the housekeeper. It’s really not even so much the contradiction between the two as it is the fact that you have to deal with it seemingly straight out of the gate: it turns issues of class into day-to-day stuff, and the process of learning about issues of class and other issues like it almost becomes part of the background noise rather than the developmental signal itself. Over time, you barely even recognize that you’re making a decision in the first place, and that’s where the trouble starts.

I don’t mean to imply that Rules is all about class (although the three protagonists clearly come from some level money), but it is about the result of the same kind of process – the effects that arise when people confuse “instincts” with “decisions”. Rules goes above and beyond most movies ever made in an effort to get you into the characters’ head-spaces; you may be horrified and outraged by what the characters are doing, but moments where you’re unclear as to what you’re watching happen in Rules are few and far between. Following Rules, in other words, is easy; it’s just that the characters themselves are so profoundly and distinctly fucked up that it’s occasionally a little difficult to make any sense out of any of it.

This is, I think, because Rules doesn’t necessarily try to make sense; it merely plunges you into the subjectivities of the characters and leaves everything else up to you. Rules has a very long and complex pre-title sequence; it opens with Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon) telling you that the story you’re about to hear isn’t necessarily worthwhile right before throwing you into a maze of voice-over and editing tricks and oppressively subjective shots. And yet right from the jump, you can tell that there’s a profound disconnect between the values these kids project onto the world in order to make it make sense and the way the world actually works. Deciding whether someone’s gay or not is a profoundly political action with legitimate real-world consequences, and yet Paul (Kip Pardue)’s first line in the film is a conclusion to that effect. Clearly we’re not following these characters from the beginning of their story – only from the beginning of the film’s story.

I eat shit like this up with a spoon. One of the main problems that I always have with reading and discussing movies is that since they’re pitched as such complete and self-contained products, I’m tempted to draw conclusions about reality from a thing which offers artificial openings and conclusions. Suppose that twenty years after the conclusion of Casablanca, Rick decides that he hates Captain Renault and gets back together with Ilsa – what does that do to the lessons of the movie itself? More importantly, what if we don’t get to see any of that; what if it just happens and we have no way of knowing about it? By contrast, Rules is clearly “incomplete” (it even ends in the middle of a line of dialogue), and as such we’re free to take whatever we want out of it. It’s just a movie, right?

But here’s the thing about Rules: it matches its realities up the same way real-world realities match up. Put another way, we can’t necessarily point to things in the movie and say “reality”, but we can talk about the movie using the same terms that we’d use to talk about the real world. Midway through the movie, Paul goes home for some reason and suffers through an incident where a friend of the family (named “Dick”, hurr hurr hurr) makes a gigantic scene seemingly for no reason. That’s fucked up, no matter how you slice it; my friends might not have picked a fight with my family exactly like that or for Dick’s reasons (whatever they are), but friends picking fights with your family = fucked up. The open-endedness practically forces you to make independent value judgments.

And then it throws you completely for a loop. It’s a little tricky to discuss the central scene in the movie without giving a lot of the movie itself away; for the sake of convenience, I’ll call it the Harry Nilsson scene, since the whole scene is set to A Certain Amazing Harry Nilsson Song. Formally, this isn’t unusual for the film; as soon as the opening credits stop rolling, it dives right into a montage set to the Cure’s “Six Different Ways” (AKA the good song by the Cure), and not too much later there’s a VERY neat split-screen montage to a Donovan song. Unlike these earlier side-trips, however, the Harry Nilsson scene isn’t just a fun/interesting way to get to Point B; it’s about showing you something and making damn certain that you understand how serious it is.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I doubt I’m making any sense (although you’ll thank me when you see the movie. Which you will). What’s important that you understand is that all of a sudden, the world of the movie will treat some things with profound gravity. However, this movie being what it is, I do have an alternative example of the kind of seriousness I’m dancing around.

Rules occurs at a college, and consequently a lot of the events take place at parties. Now, because Rules was adapted from a (presumably loathsome) Bret Easton Ellis novel, these parties are all given coolly apocalyptic names – the “Dress To Get Screwed Party”, the “Pre-Saturday Night Party”, and most relevant here, the “End of the World Party”. Yeah yeah yeah; all in good wry collegiate elitist fun, right?

Well, according to IMDB, the End of the World Party was filmed on September 11^th, 2001. Hell of a downer, innit?

The value of this movie, then, is based entirely on its capacity to call your sense of propriety before the judge. Set next to the Harry Nilsson scene, the logic of the characters seems trite and petty, just like the logic you use to figure the movie out seems pretty small next to the events of September 11^th; it has power because it can all of a sudden make you confront things which are much bigger than you ever expected. The term I want to use to describe this movie (even though it’s patently unfit for service here) is “wake-up call”, simply because few movies actively call your judgment into question on any level, let alone two at once. And while I understand that not everybody wants or needs to have their values checked (and as such should probably stay far, far away from this movie), I can’t see how that diminishes the accomplishments of this movie in any way. That it works at all is miracle enough.

 

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Same As the Old Boss

It’s always seemed rather strange to me that, in spite of the fact that film critics may be the only unavoidable critics working (q.v. any movie preview on TV), there’s not really a “scene” of criticism or even really of cinematic discussion. Naturally there are a thousand counterexamples, but when you really get down to it, “film criticism” as we know it basically boils down to a forest of independent voices howling into the void and occasionally coming to agree on some stuff; we haven’t had a movement since Cahiers took a Turn in 1968.

Contrast that to the pop music scene, which is of course alive and kicking. My favorite example is ILX, a message board where you can find roughly a billion people who write for a billion publications; it doesn’t seem unfair to credit them with a lot of recent advances in pop music habits, not the least of which are the emergence of grime and the flowering of the MP3 blog.

Why exactly isn’t there a scene like this for film (not that I’m necessarily advocating one) - is pop music just better (no), or is the medium of film too sophisticated for this kind of scene-fostering(also no)? I can think of three reasons:

1. With music, there’s more room to creatively describe stuff, which is the easiest, most democratic method of criticism around – even YOOOOOO can come up with a funny thing to compare the new Interpol album to. It is, however, worth pointing out that this turns criticism into multiplayer Notepad.
2. Music is more easily worked into your everyday life – you can’t surreptitiously watch movies at work, but you can play your radio or whatever and nobody’ll even notice.
3. The iPod.

You think I’m kidding about the last one, but you’re wrong. iPods come up over and over and over again on ILX, usually just referentially but occasionally as a subject of legitimate discussion. By this point it seems safe to say that the iPod is the most significant consumer electronic to come out since the VCR; other items may have moved more units, but none of them have changed the users interact with the entertainment half as much. It may seem like a status symbol, but it’s a symbol in the same way that the horse used to be a symbol for the gentry back in the day – it only represents something because it gives the user the power to something that the non-user absolutely cannot. As you can probably tell, I recently bought one.

By now, everybody can probably sing the iPod’s biggest selling point along with me: “You can always have total access to all your music”. Which is more or less true; I can certainly say that I’ve gotten into a bunch of new artists since getting the iPod, since I generally only want to hear Dizzee Rascal right when I actually want to hear him (although I reeeeeeeeeeeeally want to hear him right then). But in actuality, this isn’t really the side of the die that keeps me from feeling like I’ve wasted my money; that’s an honor reserved for the “shuffle” function.

Shuffle is exactly what you think it is: it throws every song on your iPod into one playlist ordered at random, and I swear before God and Christ together that it is absolutely the most fascinating thing you will ever access if the act of listening to music is something you like. It’s like the perfect synthesis of the radio and your taste; you’re not necessarily going to hear something you never saw coming (still the major selling point of the radio), but the next best thing to that is “not knowing what’s coming up next”, and that ain’t half bad. I doubt I would have ever had a split second for Dntel’s “The Dream of Evan and Chan” if it hadn’t come right on the heels of TV on the Radio’s “Satellite”, but it did, and now I can’t stop listening to it.

Now, given that you’re the one loading up your iPod with the music files themselves, you’d think that the attraction to this feature would be driven by the amount of control it offers you; you would also be wrong. Shuffle isn’t attractive because it presents you with stuff that matches your taste (or if that’s why it’s attractive to you, then you’re probably always half of a very irritating conversation) – it’s attractive because the power of selection is out of your hands. The sneaky thing about the iPod is that it’s actually a very smart piece of electronics, in that it can manage your data way better than you’d have ever thought, and right out of the box no less; I remember being floored once I realized that it factored out the word “the” when arranging a list of artists alphabetically. Clearly, this is a machine that knows how to organize information, and it doesn’t organize information like you do, unless of course you happen to be wholly electronic. It’s like catching a radio station and SkyNet holding hands.

My point is that film can’t possibly compete with that. The whole idea of cinema is that you apply logic and recognition skills you learn in the real world to a fake one, and in a relationship like that, there isn’t really a whole lot of power left to give over to the gadgets. If anything, the gadgetry of film empowers the audience; the handheld camera made the audience filmmakers, and the VCR (and later DVD player) turned any television into a potential site for cinema. I suppose that you could make a device that lets you cut movies up into even smaller units and then shuffle scenes or shots, but Christ almighty would that ever get irritating - I mean, there's got to be SOME respect for the form, right?

So I guess there’s no burgeoning scene for film right now because there’s nothing really new going on, or at least as far as the relationship between the consumer and the product goes. This isn’t to say that there’s no work being done in those terms – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 11’9”01 short is nothing if not eleven minutes of just that – but you get my point. People are always going to be drawn to the brand new, and right now the aesthetic experiences offered up by the iPod are just to shiny to be ignored. There’s movement in a direction going on with music right now, and that would win out.

Which is exactly why I find myself very interested in film all of a sudden. Film right now is well past its iPod stage; the VCR is old and busted, and the DVD player – which is really just a VCR for the new millennium – is only marginally more interesting than a toaster oven by this point. And yet the VCR totally exploded our notions of how we interact with film; suddenly audiences were surrendering more to a film’s content than to the experience of going to a movie, sitting in the dark, and staring at a giant image. Now we’re stuck with a raging debate about whether people who learn about film from watching DVDs and videotapes are actually learning anything about film whatsoever; I would imagine that there’s a storm brewing in the music community as to whether someone can legitimately understand a work outside of its original context.

I dunno. This is the kind of stuff that fascinates me; truly modern civilization always has the watermark of accelerated consumption. All I’m saying is that we should be dealing with cinema right now specifically because we deal with it more slowly, and if that means movies are replacing books (and, presumably, music is replacing movies?), then so be it. I still read books too, y’know.

 

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Okay, so I swear that I'm about to sit down and write a sizeable thing, but first (via ILF), BAHAHAHAHAHA:

Filmmaker: What would you say to critics of yours that think maybe you are contrary for the sake of being a contrarian?

White: I’m not a contrarian at all.

I long for the day when you can stab someone over the internet.

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ugh.

I swear before Christ that I've got about three essays nearly fully-formed, so there will in fact be content coming soon (fuck, I'm paying for this blog, so there better be) - but CERTAINLY not today. I always did think that characterizing It's A Wonderful Life as a Christmas movie was a little misleading, since if there's a holiday that makes that movie work for the audience, it's Valentine's Day. Thinkabootit.

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