I have little important to add to the sea of discourse, but I shall contribute a few drops. A solemn moment in memory of Pearl Harbor. A reminder to check out the Short Film Blogathon at Ed Howard's or Culture Snob's. A few more coming: It's A Wonderful Life gets a day on the 16th; end the year with a Movie Endings blogathon and begin 2008 with opening credits Blogathon. And as always on Fridays, you should be dropping by Left Behind Fridays on Slacktivist. Last week, Buck flirted with Chloe! This week, Captain Steele witnesses to Hattie! don't miss a thrilling moment of bad prose and implausible plotting as the tribulation marches on!
And finally - music: continuing last week's theme, drawing randomly from 2007 records:
1. Grinderman - Get It On - some kind of nonsense about rock star misbehavior, but they know their business, Nick and co.
2. Dungen - Ett Skal Att Trivas - guitar wanking and 70s style half-prog half pop rock... which is kind of a formula for success, as far as I'm concerned. They may not be great art, but they're a consistent pleasure to listen to
3. Bishop Allen - The Rain - clever pop, nice wordplay, "if it's ever gonna get any better, it's gotta get worse for a day"
4. Meat Puppets - Vultures - kind of a mild mid-tempo soft rock song with some noisy noodling on top... more noodling and less soft rock might be better, but this is a start
5. Of Montreal - Suffer for Fashion - I am coming to particularly like this record...
6. PJ Harvey - Broken Harp - another extraordinarily beautiful song...
7. Otomo Yoshihide, Bill Laswell & Yoshida Tatsuya - Fudge - I think this is new, just added it a couple days ago - full on jamming...
8. Wilco - Side with the Seeds - like most of the record, they might as well be the Eaglkes, except for the guitar solos, which do have their merits.
9. Sigur Rus - Hafsol - took a second to figure out who it was, what with all the "post-rock" type stuff I have on here - though the vocals come on and they are unmistakeable. This is a very beautiful song, building and building and releasing - really great.
10. Modest Mouse - Fire it Up - coming on right after that magnificent Sigur Rus piece brings up the weakness of this - Modest Moiuse used to be cool - now - they're a competent, but very very bland, indie rock band, like all the other indie rock bands. Blah.
Video? Live Sigur Rus? I believe this is called "Von" on the new record...
Friday, December 07, 2007
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Quick Notes on Recent Films
I've been way too lazy this fall, with posting and all. Not posting. Except about the Red Sox. Which won't start up again, I sort of promise, at least not until they make a deal for Johan Santana. I'm not having much louck finishing any substantial posts - heck - starting any... so let's try some quicker hits. Maybe coming back to films a couple times over the course of a couple weeks will get more accomplished than procrastinating writing full reviews or essays....
So: as Joseph B puts it - with talk of No Country for Old Men still "whirlwinding" around the internet - let's revisit... not at length: just one or two things. The way the story is told, say - it is a model of economy - actually, 2 models of economy. The first half (or 2/3, or whatever it is, literally) is a chase film, almost silent, cutting between chased and chaser, interested as much in how they do things, from locating a fugitive to surgery at home to dispatching an angry dog to crossing the border. Clean and sharp, without much talk, the attention to what happens. Then - Woody Harrelson comes on screen, and there starts to be a lot more talk: he talks a lot, we get some more scenes with Tommy Lee Jones talking, we even get Bardem and Brolin talking. Meanwhile, as the film gets talkier, the narration gets even more elliptical, though without leaving anything out. In the last third or so of the film, we don't see things happening anymore: the killing occurs off camera, often completely elided; Chigurh appears in rooms he shouldn't be in, without all the detail of how he got there we saw in the first part of the film. But what gives this its kick is that it's all been set up: having seen how Chigurh operates, do we need to see him break into a high rise? do we need to see how the scene with the accountant or the chicken truck driver will end? The Coens have shown us the type of man we are dealing with: they can shift their attention - the story remains coherent. And the shift has an interesting effect - at least for me: it focuses our attention on the way the people live, not how they die. How they face the end - begging for their lives, not begging for their lives, doing a good deed or not - it focuses attention on the value of their lives, period. There is more of this in the Coens' work than they usually get credit for: there's a bitter sympathy for their losers and fools, that hangs around despite the (seeming) jokiness of the violence.
Next - totally unrelated (except in that Fernando Croce piece I linked to a couple weeks ago) - I should try to add a few more words about Southland Tales. It was not that impressive when I saw it - and a couple weeks to think about it haven't helped. I suppose some of it is sort of amusing - lots of pop culture parody, which tends to work better the less is made of it - things like Jon Lovitz simply appearing in the film get more laughs than a lot of the jokes... It has moments, though now, the only ones I can remember involve The Rock - playing himself, basically, sending himself up, mocking his attempts to act, his paranoia, going over the top. He is fun to watch, and the film is almost interesting when he's on screen. Granted, in a more coherent film, the character might not work - if the film wasn't so awful, he might not be so amusing... but I'll take what I can get. The rest - if there were jokes, I've forgotten most of them; the story is useless, a dumb pastiche of Brazil, La Jetee and 12 Monkeys, with some self-conscious, and botched, David Lynch moments throughout. It's too bad - you sense something of value lingering in there somewhere, but, just not on screen.
And finally, since I haven't mentioned it yet: Margot at the Wedding was a treat. Not as good as The Squid and the Whale, but still fine. I like what Jim Emerson said about it - calling it a horror film: a monster comes into a house and devours everyone within it.... It's like that. Nicole Kidman pulls it off - her madness has no redeeming features, it is simply sad - and she gives it that sadness. The ability to make it clear that she hates no one more than herself, and just turns it back on people. The film shows this , especially later on - the way she will hold something for an extra beat, something someone says, as if weighing it, considering what she should do - then coming back with something harsh, to stop whatever it was cold. And the horror film structure holds to the very end, when she puts her son on a bus, and watches him go away - he's almost free - but at the last minute, the Monster comes running up and jumps in beside him... Scary!
So: as Joseph B puts it - with talk of No Country for Old Men still "whirlwinding" around the internet - let's revisit... not at length: just one or two things. The way the story is told, say - it is a model of economy - actually, 2 models of economy. The first half (or 2/3, or whatever it is, literally) is a chase film, almost silent, cutting between chased and chaser, interested as much in how they do things, from locating a fugitive to surgery at home to dispatching an angry dog to crossing the border. Clean and sharp, without much talk, the attention to what happens. Then - Woody Harrelson comes on screen, and there starts to be a lot more talk: he talks a lot, we get some more scenes with Tommy Lee Jones talking, we even get Bardem and Brolin talking. Meanwhile, as the film gets talkier, the narration gets even more elliptical, though without leaving anything out. In the last third or so of the film, we don't see things happening anymore: the killing occurs off camera, often completely elided; Chigurh appears in rooms he shouldn't be in, without all the detail of how he got there we saw in the first part of the film. But what gives this its kick is that it's all been set up: having seen how Chigurh operates, do we need to see him break into a high rise? do we need to see how the scene with the accountant or the chicken truck driver will end? The Coens have shown us the type of man we are dealing with: they can shift their attention - the story remains coherent. And the shift has an interesting effect - at least for me: it focuses our attention on the way the people live, not how they die. How they face the end - begging for their lives, not begging for their lives, doing a good deed or not - it focuses attention on the value of their lives, period. There is more of this in the Coens' work than they usually get credit for: there's a bitter sympathy for their losers and fools, that hangs around despite the (seeming) jokiness of the violence.
Next - totally unrelated (except in that Fernando Croce piece I linked to a couple weeks ago) - I should try to add a few more words about Southland Tales. It was not that impressive when I saw it - and a couple weeks to think about it haven't helped. I suppose some of it is sort of amusing - lots of pop culture parody, which tends to work better the less is made of it - things like Jon Lovitz simply appearing in the film get more laughs than a lot of the jokes... It has moments, though now, the only ones I can remember involve The Rock - playing himself, basically, sending himself up, mocking his attempts to act, his paranoia, going over the top. He is fun to watch, and the film is almost interesting when he's on screen. Granted, in a more coherent film, the character might not work - if the film wasn't so awful, he might not be so amusing... but I'll take what I can get. The rest - if there were jokes, I've forgotten most of them; the story is useless, a dumb pastiche of Brazil, La Jetee and 12 Monkeys, with some self-conscious, and botched, David Lynch moments throughout. It's too bad - you sense something of value lingering in there somewhere, but, just not on screen.
And finally, since I haven't mentioned it yet: Margot at the Wedding was a treat. Not as good as The Squid and the Whale, but still fine. I like what Jim Emerson said about it - calling it a horror film: a monster comes into a house and devours everyone within it.... It's like that. Nicole Kidman pulls it off - her madness has no redeeming features, it is simply sad - and she gives it that sadness. The ability to make it clear that she hates no one more than herself, and just turns it back on people. The film shows this , especially later on - the way she will hold something for an extra beat, something someone says, as if weighing it, considering what she should do - then coming back with something harsh, to stop whatever it was cold. And the horror film structure holds to the very end, when she puts her son on a bus, and watches him go away - he's almost free - but at the last minute, the Monster comes running up and jumps in beside him... Scary!
Monday, December 03, 2007
Keeping a Toe in
The weather outside is frightful, but blogging is delightful, no particular place to go, let it snow etc. Be glad this is not a vlog, or you would be hearing me croon away... yes, that is a horrible thing to contemplate. But - resolving, once more, to try to post more often, here we are, on a Monday, with nothing in particular to blog about, so we shall blog about everything. The weather is frightful indeed - sleet, snow, cold; the power has been blinking on and off the last couple days. Twice this evening, making using the computer something of a gamble. Overnight last night - though I have programmed by brain and body too well, and woke up at my usual time even without an alarm. Bloody thing.
Anyway: don't forget the Short Film Blogathon at Ed Howard's place and Culture Snob.... I, however, have to settle for some long film blogging - for it was a productive weekend on the moviegoing front: Dylan and Imamura... While I hope to come back to Imamura, especially, let me offer up some quick thoughts...
I'm Not There is getting a lot of praise it seems, and I suppose it deserves some of it - it's intermittently inspired, maybe brilliant, but not so much taken as a whole, I'm afraid. All the hype about Cate Blanchett seems right - the film comes alive when it switches to her, or to the kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) - it goes flat when it switches to Heath Ledger or Christian Bale (despite the presence of Charlotte Gainsbourg - hey! when's the Serge Gainsbourgh biopic coming?) - I have no idea what Richard Gere and Ben Whishaw were in the film for. It's one of those films that flips back and forth among a bunch of stories for no particular reason, except, I suppose, to avoid the necessity to work any of them out. I guess it doesn't pay to think too much about it. It's enjoyable enough to watch: and the music is outstanding. It's Dylan, so it's got a leg up - but the performances are worthy of the music (unlike that misbegotten Beatles movie that blighted the world a couple months ago.) But other than the Blanchett parts, there's nothing here really worth seeing again.
That was good and harsh! Whatever virtues the Haynes film had, they were blotted out by the mastery on display later that day.... An Imamura double bill - Vengeance is Mine and A Man Vanishes. The former is one of Imamura's better known and easily available films - it's on DVD, people have seen it. Ken Ogata stars as a petty crook, a con man, I guess, who turns violent - killing a couple ex-co-workers, then going on the run, impersonating randy professors and lawyers for profit, only to end up killing his benefactors, since he can't kill the ones who actually hurt him... This story, told out of sequence for fairly good reasons, is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood - a bullied minority! turned delinquent! a mama's boy! - and very Imamura-esque home life (his wife takes up with his father, under mom's nose - maybe...) pre-crime spree. The centerpiece of the film is the time the villain spends at a seedy inn, seducing the madame, and facing down her mother, an extravagantly tough old bird, just out of the clink herself, where she'd served 15 years for murder - here, Imamura gets into his element, with sex and violence and primitive instincts for survival - and the chance to indulge in some maginifent filmmaking: one shot, where the killer and his mother seem to pass each other on the stairs, and Imamura shifts from one inn to another without cutting, is as glorious as it gets...
Meanwhile... A Man Vanishes is, perhaps, a documentary, about one of Japan's 91,000 (adult) runaways (I think that's the number cited by an expert toward the end,though by that time, things are well out of control; 5,000 a year, if I remember the Takeshi Kaiko story right) - it is a strange documentary, starts strange and gets stranger, and becomes something quite different from a documentary. The "plot" so to speak is this - Imamura and crew start looking for a man named Tadashi Oshima - the point people in this search are an actor and Oshima's fiancee, Yoshie (known as the rat) [no, really - that's what the crew calls her: part of the manipulation is the way we hear the crew talking about the woman they call the rat without naming her - that could be a trick of the translation I suppose, but I don't think so - I don't think they name her until later...] - as they pass through several months (it seems) of unsuccessful investigation, Yoshie starts to fall for the actor... and suspect her sister of murder. Leading to a scene where Yoshie and a fishmonger who saw Oshima and the sister together confront and accuse the sister - who flatly denies it. This eventually brings Imamura himself into the conversation - he lectures them a bit on the nature of truth then has the crew strike the set. Then the gang of them adjourn to the street [or - appear to adjourn to the street: like any movie, this could have been shot at any time - it's only the vestigial traces of documentary rhetoric that even suggests that this is literally just outside the sound stage where the previous scene was shot] where, well - a couple experts come in to talk about the 91,000 Japanese runaways, more witnesses argue and speculate on what happened and what it meant, and eventually Yoshie and her sister and the fishmonger get back into it, yelling at each other and carrying on. All of this, of course, is being filmed by three or four cameras, with sound gear everywhere - a kid keeps running into the shot with a clapper - Imamura mixes the sound and visuals here, as throughout the film, in strange, provocative ways. (There's a post to be written about the sound design of the film: I may, if I ever get any energy.) And then, it ends, with a flourish: a kid laughs - someone askas Yoshie what she will do now and she says she doesn't know - and Imamura freezes on the clapper...
I can't do it justice, not here, not tonight. It's still one of the most disruptive, surprising, strange films I have ever seen. That - I should note - works perfectly well as a documentary about a man who has disappeared without a trace... and as an Imamura film (complete with tough, strange women, possibly fighting over men, maybe killing men, and flatly denying what they may or may not have done - worth noting that the actor is the male lead of Intentions of Murder, which also features a woman murdering a man and flatly denying it in the face of overwhelming evidence - coincidence?)... and, heck - as a parody of L'Avventura... It's very hard to track down, but it's a film that needs to be seen.
Finally - one more Imamura: Profound Desire of the Gods... I can't describe it, so I won't. I have heard people call this his masterpiece - I can't buy it. It is gorgeously shot and made, but it's pretty damned silly, when you get down to it. It's full of mythical stuff - brothers and sisters marrying and founding races and the like - all very sordid, and I suppose that's part of the joke, the depiction of the beginnings of Japan itself as a bunch of inbred hillbillies - but still.... I also fear that this marks a kind of turn for Imamura, where those tough, earthy women he idolizes start to get too symbolic, and too mythological. The earlier ones are tough, independent, and always protagonists - in control or fighting like hell to be in control. But in this film, they become a retarded sex fiend and a plot device: Nekichi's sister/lover, Ryugen's priestess/lover. They are symbols, not characters. This turns sour - this film ends up being misogynist in ways not even Mizoguchi (if you insist on reading him that way) managed: Mizoguchi's women were always agents, one way or other - as were Imamura's earlier women. The women in this film are not, they're just embodiments of Imamura's ideas about what women represent...
That proved to be more substantial a post than I expected coming in, though there is a lot more to be said about any of those films.... There are more Imamura's coming - I hope I can write them up as well, maybe work out a more coherent treatment of some of it. He was one of the great ones, and the run of films he made in the 60s stands with anyone.
Anyway: don't forget the Short Film Blogathon at Ed Howard's place and Culture Snob.... I, however, have to settle for some long film blogging - for it was a productive weekend on the moviegoing front: Dylan and Imamura... While I hope to come back to Imamura, especially, let me offer up some quick thoughts...
I'm Not There is getting a lot of praise it seems, and I suppose it deserves some of it - it's intermittently inspired, maybe brilliant, but not so much taken as a whole, I'm afraid. All the hype about Cate Blanchett seems right - the film comes alive when it switches to her, or to the kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) - it goes flat when it switches to Heath Ledger or Christian Bale (despite the presence of Charlotte Gainsbourg - hey! when's the Serge Gainsbourgh biopic coming?) - I have no idea what Richard Gere and Ben Whishaw were in the film for. It's one of those films that flips back and forth among a bunch of stories for no particular reason, except, I suppose, to avoid the necessity to work any of them out. I guess it doesn't pay to think too much about it. It's enjoyable enough to watch: and the music is outstanding. It's Dylan, so it's got a leg up - but the performances are worthy of the music (unlike that misbegotten Beatles movie that blighted the world a couple months ago.) But other than the Blanchett parts, there's nothing here really worth seeing again.
That was good and harsh! Whatever virtues the Haynes film had, they were blotted out by the mastery on display later that day.... An Imamura double bill - Vengeance is Mine and A Man Vanishes. The former is one of Imamura's better known and easily available films - it's on DVD, people have seen it. Ken Ogata stars as a petty crook, a con man, I guess, who turns violent - killing a couple ex-co-workers, then going on the run, impersonating randy professors and lawyers for profit, only to end up killing his benefactors, since he can't kill the ones who actually hurt him... This story, told out of sequence for fairly good reasons, is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood - a bullied minority! turned delinquent! a mama's boy! - and very Imamura-esque home life (his wife takes up with his father, under mom's nose - maybe...) pre-crime spree. The centerpiece of the film is the time the villain spends at a seedy inn, seducing the madame, and facing down her mother, an extravagantly tough old bird, just out of the clink herself, where she'd served 15 years for murder - here, Imamura gets into his element, with sex and violence and primitive instincts for survival - and the chance to indulge in some maginifent filmmaking: one shot, where the killer and his mother seem to pass each other on the stairs, and Imamura shifts from one inn to another without cutting, is as glorious as it gets...
Meanwhile... A Man Vanishes is, perhaps, a documentary, about one of Japan's 91,000 (adult) runaways (I think that's the number cited by an expert toward the end,though by that time, things are well out of control; 5,000 a year, if I remember the Takeshi Kaiko story right) - it is a strange documentary, starts strange and gets stranger, and becomes something quite different from a documentary. The "plot" so to speak is this - Imamura and crew start looking for a man named Tadashi Oshima - the point people in this search are an actor and Oshima's fiancee, Yoshie (known as the rat) [no, really - that's what the crew calls her: part of the manipulation is the way we hear the crew talking about the woman they call the rat without naming her - that could be a trick of the translation I suppose, but I don't think so - I don't think they name her until later...] - as they pass through several months (it seems) of unsuccessful investigation, Yoshie starts to fall for the actor... and suspect her sister of murder. Leading to a scene where Yoshie and a fishmonger who saw Oshima and the sister together confront and accuse the sister - who flatly denies it. This eventually brings Imamura himself into the conversation - he lectures them a bit on the nature of truth then has the crew strike the set. Then the gang of them adjourn to the street [or - appear to adjourn to the street: like any movie, this could have been shot at any time - it's only the vestigial traces of documentary rhetoric that even suggests that this is literally just outside the sound stage where the previous scene was shot] where, well - a couple experts come in to talk about the 91,000 Japanese runaways, more witnesses argue and speculate on what happened and what it meant, and eventually Yoshie and her sister and the fishmonger get back into it, yelling at each other and carrying on. All of this, of course, is being filmed by three or four cameras, with sound gear everywhere - a kid keeps running into the shot with a clapper - Imamura mixes the sound and visuals here, as throughout the film, in strange, provocative ways. (There's a post to be written about the sound design of the film: I may, if I ever get any energy.) And then, it ends, with a flourish: a kid laughs - someone askas Yoshie what she will do now and she says she doesn't know - and Imamura freezes on the clapper...
I can't do it justice, not here, not tonight. It's still one of the most disruptive, surprising, strange films I have ever seen. That - I should note - works perfectly well as a documentary about a man who has disappeared without a trace... and as an Imamura film (complete with tough, strange women, possibly fighting over men, maybe killing men, and flatly denying what they may or may not have done - worth noting that the actor is the male lead of Intentions of Murder, which also features a woman murdering a man and flatly denying it in the face of overwhelming evidence - coincidence?)... and, heck - as a parody of L'Avventura... It's very hard to track down, but it's a film that needs to be seen.
Finally - one more Imamura: Profound Desire of the Gods... I can't describe it, so I won't. I have heard people call this his masterpiece - I can't buy it. It is gorgeously shot and made, but it's pretty damned silly, when you get down to it. It's full of mythical stuff - brothers and sisters marrying and founding races and the like - all very sordid, and I suppose that's part of the joke, the depiction of the beginnings of Japan itself as a bunch of inbred hillbillies - but still.... I also fear that this marks a kind of turn for Imamura, where those tough, earthy women he idolizes start to get too symbolic, and too mythological. The earlier ones are tough, independent, and always protagonists - in control or fighting like hell to be in control. But in this film, they become a retarded sex fiend and a plot device: Nekichi's sister/lover, Ryugen's priestess/lover. They are symbols, not characters. This turns sour - this film ends up being misogynist in ways not even Mizoguchi (if you insist on reading him that way) managed: Mizoguchi's women were always agents, one way or other - as were Imamura's earlier women. The women in this film are not, they're just embodiments of Imamura's ideas about what women represent...
That proved to be more substantial a post than I expected coming in, though there is a lot more to be said about any of those films.... There are more Imamura's coming - I hope I can write them up as well, maybe work out a more coherent treatment of some of it. He was one of the great ones, and the run of films he made in the 60s stands with anyone.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Friday Random Ten, Year in Review Edition 1
Well, another Friday night, and nothing special to say here - maybe in the next week or two - as Harvard features a series of films by a Particular Favorite (note the banner of this humble blog) - inspiration may return. In the meanwhile - go Celtics! and, well, the year is running down, so - let's start reviewing it! And how better (or lazier) than to bring back the Friday Random Ten, to look at music released in 2007? So for the next month - songs from this year....
1. Buffalo Tom - Hearts of Palm - rather surprising, actually, how many records like this I got this year: 80s and 90s indie bands coming back after years away - Buffalo Tom, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr - never mind the Stooges... or the who (was that this year?) Anyway - none of them are all that interesting, I'm afraid.
2. The New Pornographers - Failsafe - a nice record, I should listen to it more, I sppose. I don't have much sense of this - or most of thes erecords - as albums. Thanks to the iPod of course...
3. Ghost - Caldonia **** - Ghost, Boris, white Stripes - those are records I have listened to over and over this year. This is a darned good song.
4. Grinderman - When My Love Comes Down *** - and grinderman. Another great record; one of the best of the year.
5. Buffalo Tom - Three Easy Pieces - Chris Colburn singing - a nice little song...
6. Of Montreal - Faberge Falls for Shuggie - I admit, though a couple songs on this record are genuinely great, there's a lot of it I don't know if I have ever actually listened to. This might have been the first time I ever actually heard this song - should try to fix that... this is a strange discoish thing that still manages to work...
7. PJ Harvey - Silence - a record I have to listen to more.
8. The Fall - My Door is Never - speaking of old farts, still hanging around, still exciting.
9. Linda Thomas - Day After Tomorrow - acoustic song about a soldier... beautifully sung...
10. Bishop Allen - Like Castanets
And video - let's go with Mr. Smith, doing "Reformation":
1. Buffalo Tom - Hearts of Palm - rather surprising, actually, how many records like this I got this year: 80s and 90s indie bands coming back after years away - Buffalo Tom, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr - never mind the Stooges... or the who (was that this year?) Anyway - none of them are all that interesting, I'm afraid.
2. The New Pornographers - Failsafe - a nice record, I should listen to it more, I sppose. I don't have much sense of this - or most of thes erecords - as albums. Thanks to the iPod of course...
3. Ghost - Caldonia **** - Ghost, Boris, white Stripes - those are records I have listened to over and over this year. This is a darned good song.
4. Grinderman - When My Love Comes Down *** - and grinderman. Another great record; one of the best of the year.
5. Buffalo Tom - Three Easy Pieces - Chris Colburn singing - a nice little song...
6. Of Montreal - Faberge Falls for Shuggie - I admit, though a couple songs on this record are genuinely great, there's a lot of it I don't know if I have ever actually listened to. This might have been the first time I ever actually heard this song - should try to fix that... this is a strange discoish thing that still manages to work...
7. PJ Harvey - Silence - a record I have to listen to more.
8. The Fall - My Door is Never - speaking of old farts, still hanging around, still exciting.
9. Linda Thomas - Day After Tomorrow - acoustic song about a soldier... beautifully sung...
10. Bishop Allen - Like Castanets
And video - let's go with Mr. Smith, doing "Reformation":
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Home Again
Back from holiday... as usual, killing off whatever posting routine I might have... this time, I had some notion of adding another bit to the Kurosawa blogathon, which came to naught. (So far anyway - I might still finish the piece...) Did get a good start on the new Bordwell book - that promises some good reading in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, it interrupted another interesting book, Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics... hopefully, I'll get back to that one... Meanwhile - will I get around to reviewing movies anytime soon? it's possible. I am mildly exercised by Fernando Croce's comparison (linked to from the House Next Door) of the (reverentially derivative noir/western) No Country for Old Men to the reverentially derivative (did Terry Gilliam live in vain?) Southland Tales - the real problem might be with Croce's statement that "Blood Simple and Fargo are their [the Coen Brothers] most characteristic works" - hell no! the comedies are their best and most characteristic films. Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou - Cormac McCarthy might not agree, but Stanley Cavell seems to. But anyway - Southland Tales may not be the disaster it seems to be considered, but there's nothing new about it. No more original than the Coen brothers film, and a lot less well made. Both are straightforward genre pieces - or, the Coen Brothers film would be, except after a stripped down first half, they turn elliptical and meditative and...
Whatever. The ride home, meanwhile, gave me a chance not only to get into the Bordwell book, but to generate a double strength Friday Random Ten! A meme I've sort of abandoned, but since I haven't come up with anything better to replace it, and since long train and bus rides lend themselves to the concept, here goes. with ratings and comments when the spirit moves me.
1. Burnt Sugar - Mermaids Angels and Rainbows
2. Claudes Claudes - Mao Mao - not sure where I came up with this, but it's certainly entertaining
3. Mercury Rev - Secret for A Song ****
4. Thelonius Monk - Ruby My Dear ****
5. Johnny Cash - Greystone Chapel
6. Pere Ubu - Pushin' too Hard
7. My Bloody Valentine - Sometimes
8. Styx - Blue Collar Man *** - memories of 1978! or is this 79? those long hours, impossible odds... about as convincing rock and roll as the Yi yi song... or...
9. ABBA - Knowing Me, Knowing You *** - uh oh. Those aren't three stars. Not for Abba. Not me! no!... well - all right, maybe... Abba at their most theatrical, though - very much plotted, this song - no more carefree laughter, silence ever after, indeed; it's like a Bergman movie!... I better leave it alone or I'll make it 4 stars...
10. Damon & Naomi - The Turnaround
11. Bishop Allen - Middle Management
12. Deerhood - O'Malley, Former Underdog
13. Replacements - Lovelines
14. Richard and Linda Thompson - Dimming of the Day ****
15. John Cale - Mr. Wilson
16. Stereolab - Nothing to do with Me
17. Tortoise - the Taut and the Tame
18. Robert Wyatt - Lullaloop
19. Radiohead - where I end and you begin
20. Dungen - Bortglomd - hey! more Swedish rock!
21. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Well of Misery - an uplifting end...
Okay: and a video? Oh, who's kidding who? complete with Bergmanesque compositions, all those faces at right angles to one another... well, why not?
Whatever. The ride home, meanwhile, gave me a chance not only to get into the Bordwell book, but to generate a double strength Friday Random Ten! A meme I've sort of abandoned, but since I haven't come up with anything better to replace it, and since long train and bus rides lend themselves to the concept, here goes. with ratings and comments when the spirit moves me.
1. Burnt Sugar - Mermaids Angels and Rainbows
2. Claudes Claudes - Mao Mao - not sure where I came up with this, but it's certainly entertaining
3. Mercury Rev - Secret for A Song ****
4. Thelonius Monk - Ruby My Dear ****
5. Johnny Cash - Greystone Chapel
6. Pere Ubu - Pushin' too Hard
7. My Bloody Valentine - Sometimes
8. Styx - Blue Collar Man *** - memories of 1978! or is this 79? those long hours, impossible odds... about as convincing rock and roll as the Yi yi song... or...
9. ABBA - Knowing Me, Knowing You *** - uh oh. Those aren't three stars. Not for Abba. Not me! no!... well - all right, maybe... Abba at their most theatrical, though - very much plotted, this song - no more carefree laughter, silence ever after, indeed; it's like a Bergman movie!... I better leave it alone or I'll make it 4 stars...
10. Damon & Naomi - The Turnaround
11. Bishop Allen - Middle Management
12. Deerhood - O'Malley, Former Underdog
13. Replacements - Lovelines
14. Richard and Linda Thompson - Dimming of the Day ****
15. John Cale - Mr. Wilson
16. Stereolab - Nothing to do with Me
17. Tortoise - the Taut and the Tame
18. Robert Wyatt - Lullaloop
19. Radiohead - where I end and you begin
20. Dungen - Bortglomd - hey! more Swedish rock!
21. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Well of Misery - an uplifting end...
Okay: and a video? Oh, who's kidding who? complete with Bergmanesque compositions, all those faces at right angles to one another... well, why not?
Sunday, November 18, 2007
A Shot from Rashomon
As promised, here's a long bit of geekiness for the Kurosawa blogathon. If this looks like an (imperfectly) edited down version of a paper for school, it is, I assure you.
I want to write primarily about one shot: at the end of the Samurai's tale (told by a medium) - where we see the woodcutter and priest sitting in the background, and see - well - this:
The medium relays the samurai's claim that, after he was dead, someone crept on him and removed the dagger from his heart. Who could that be?
The conceit of the film (which it is famous for) is that it is the same incident told four times, by the participants and a witness. There is a frame story, in which a priest and the woodcutter who witnessed the events tell the stories to a traveler during a storm at Rashomon gate. They have witnessed the trial, where the stories are told, and are perplexed by it all. Kurosawa cuts back and forth between the ruined gate, the court, and the incident itself. In all the scenes at the court, the woodcutter and priest have been visible in the background. They don't do anything in those scenes - the participants tell their stories, answer questions, etc. - the priest and woodcutter just sit and wait.
This shot is different. For a start, Kurosawa cuts in closer - instead of a long shot, with the priest and woodcutter in the background (or a close up of the medium, telling the story) he shoots it so the woodcutter and priest are in the middle distance, the medium something of a frame for them. As she tells the end of the samura's story, we see the woodcutter behind her tensing, blinking, flinching. And when she stops, she collapses out of the frame entirely, leaving Takashi Shimura there alone...
It's an important shot - it sets up the possibility that the woodcutter has been lying so far. But it's interesting for another reason - where does this information come from? Kurosawa cuts from back to Rashomon gate, with the woodcutter pacing back and forth. An immediate reminder that we are seeing things that are being told by the woodcutter and priest (and before them, by the people at the trial.) Everything we see, whether from the trial or the stories told at the trial, is a visualization of something they tell the commoner. Everything in the film, from the trial or the woods, comes from a discreet source within the film. It's true that the camera doesn't take the literal POV of the characters, or even maintains a constant identification with them. Kurosawa often shoots from impossible angles, or uses camera movement that can’t be reduced to the perception of the narrators. There are even subjective shots from someone else’s point of view. During Tajomaru’s story, for example, we see shots of the sky, the sun through the trees, from the woman’s point of view. But, even with these shots, the high angles, the “wrong” points of view show events that are being related by the narrator in the story. The woman’s POV shots of the sky in Tajomaru’s tale show what he thinks she is thinking, not what she is thinking. We never really step outside the perspective of the person telling the story.
Except here. That shot of the woodcutters' reaction at the trial is not something anyone tells anyone else. Neither he nor the priest would mention it - the priest doesn't suspect him, and he certainly isn't going to incriminate himself. On the contrary - this bit inspires him to start telling his own version of the story, with the dagger playing no part. The shot of the woodcutter’s reaction can only come from the director. It cannot be traced to one of the diegetic narrators—it can only come from the author’s narration. There is almost nothing else like that shot in the film, certainly not in the embedded stories. Kurosawa does not let us outside the stories being told - he gives us nothing else to let us judge them, pick between them. Except here. He shows us something only the woodcutter would know, and he wouldn't tell.
Not that he doesn't give his agitation away, back at Rashomon, pacing back and forth and immediately launching into his own "true" version of the story. This version is set up, in a lot of ways, to resolve the story - to show what really happened. We've heard from the three participants in the incident in the grove, all peddling wildly incompatible and self-serving tales. Now we see a version from someone who was not involved. And we get it first hand: the woodcutter himself, not through an intermediary. This increased "realism" is reflected in the style - the sound for example: this is the only embedded story not to use music, sticking to the natural sounds. We are primed to see this as the "real" version of the story - the placement of this version of the story, the style and sound, the woodcutter's agitation at the gate, all seem to privilege it, mark it as being more reliable.
But it's a rhetorical trick - undercut before it starts by that shot of the woodcutter at the trial. Kurosawa sets us up to want a resolution - then sets us up to think one is coming - but gives us just another story, told by an interested party. He's told us that the woodcutter is not exactly a paragon; he's also rather pointedly intervened, giving us, for the first time, information not contained in the embedded stories. And when the woodcutter's story gets going, it soon turns into something different than the What Really Happened account we might expect. The stylistic elements (like the elimination of music) that privilege this section are almost immediately countered by other devices. Kurosawa quickly establishes a pattern of repeating details from the other accounts ironically. We see, again, Tajomaru urging the woman to run away with him - but this time ridiculous, wheedling and trite, promising to reform, like countless outlaws before him. She responds by trying to get the men to fight for her - but this time, she is bitter and ironic herself. Her husband reacts by denouncing and abusing her - which is both very conventional, and mostly a bid to save his neck. Everything becomes more stylized as the section goes on - the acting, the characters’ reactions, the direction. The close ups become more insistent; the geometric patterns (the triangles and ostentatious camera angles) become more intrusive. This builds to the mid-point of the story, when the two men fight. And the film has become almost a straight parody of a swordfighting movie.
There's another post to be written about Kurosawa's use of genre in Rashomon. [Actually, that was the other half of the paper I'm repurposing here.] The four segments of the incident in the grove are told in four different styles - Tajomaru’s version is a chambara, full of adventure and derring-do; the woman's is a melodrama; the samurai's a tragedy/horror story. You hear it in the music: Tajomaru’s story has exciting martial music, with hints of sensuality (the harp that emphasizes the wind that he says started it all). The woman's has that Bolero imitation, giving it an exotic, sensuous, melodramatic, tone. The medium’s trance has Japanese music, drums and chanting, and the rest of the Samurai’s story uses dark, foreboding music suggestive of tragedy or horror. The fourth section doesn't so much resolve the "truth" of the stories that came before as it criticizes and parodies the film genres they represent. (And represent something like the future of Japanese films - it points to the Japanese new wave, which shows a lot of the characteristics noted below.) It sets itself up as a "realistic" alternative to them, but soon becomes more of a parody, a deconstruction, of the earlier versions of the story. The style of this section reminds us of the importance of style throughout the film. It exaggerates the generic elements of the other accounts by parodying them; it underlines the role of music by eliminating it. It emphasizes the compositional and editing patterns used throughout the film by exaggerating them. It repeats shots and set ups - the angle used in the penultimate shot of the sequence, showing the clearing through a web of trees, is a repetition of a setup from Tajomaru’s story, used to frame the first shot showing the three principals together in the frame (in the fateful grove.) The use of such overt devices reminds us of the authorial voice in the film, and reminds us that the filmmakers are also interpreting the story. All the reasons we might give for considering the final version of the story more real than the others come from the director, are all elements of his style.
And back at Rashomon gate, what do we know about the incident? we can't trust the woodcutter's story - we've seen how he reacted to the medium's mention of the dagger, but his story contradicts that detail. The commoner certainly doesn't believe him. But more than figuring out what is happening in the story, I think Kurosawa is pushing at the edges of the nature of fiction. By intervening in the story (with that shot of the woodcutter at the trial), giving us information not related in the film, only to allow the woodcutter to contradict this information; and by making his own manipulation of the material more overt during the woodcutter’s story, Kurosawa makes explicit the ways he, as the narrator of these narratives, is imposing his interpretations on the story as much as the characters. In the end, I think the theme of the film is not so much the lack of a stable truth as it is the inextricable entanglement of narrative and interpretation. Each character presents as truth what they think the story means: and so does Akira Kurosawa. He sets up the woodcutter’s story as a resolution, only to undercut it. He comments on the story through the form and style of the final segment. The moments he privileges - the woodcutter’s reaction at the trial, notably - are themselves formal devices, which serve as much to show his interpretation of the story as to show a reality behind the interpretation.
I want to write primarily about one shot: at the end of the Samurai's tale (told by a medium) - where we see the woodcutter and priest sitting in the background, and see - well - this:
The medium relays the samurai's claim that, after he was dead, someone crept on him and removed the dagger from his heart. Who could that be?
The conceit of the film (which it is famous for) is that it is the same incident told four times, by the participants and a witness. There is a frame story, in which a priest and the woodcutter who witnessed the events tell the stories to a traveler during a storm at Rashomon gate. They have witnessed the trial, where the stories are told, and are perplexed by it all. Kurosawa cuts back and forth between the ruined gate, the court, and the incident itself. In all the scenes at the court, the woodcutter and priest have been visible in the background. They don't do anything in those scenes - the participants tell their stories, answer questions, etc. - the priest and woodcutter just sit and wait.
This shot is different. For a start, Kurosawa cuts in closer - instead of a long shot, with the priest and woodcutter in the background (or a close up of the medium, telling the story) he shoots it so the woodcutter and priest are in the middle distance, the medium something of a frame for them. As she tells the end of the samura's story, we see the woodcutter behind her tensing, blinking, flinching. And when she stops, she collapses out of the frame entirely, leaving Takashi Shimura there alone...
It's an important shot - it sets up the possibility that the woodcutter has been lying so far. But it's interesting for another reason - where does this information come from? Kurosawa cuts from back to Rashomon gate, with the woodcutter pacing back and forth. An immediate reminder that we are seeing things that are being told by the woodcutter and priest (and before them, by the people at the trial.) Everything we see, whether from the trial or the stories told at the trial, is a visualization of something they tell the commoner. Everything in the film, from the trial or the woods, comes from a discreet source within the film. It's true that the camera doesn't take the literal POV of the characters, or even maintains a constant identification with them. Kurosawa often shoots from impossible angles, or uses camera movement that can’t be reduced to the perception of the narrators. There are even subjective shots from someone else’s point of view. During Tajomaru’s story, for example, we see shots of the sky, the sun through the trees, from the woman’s point of view. But, even with these shots, the high angles, the “wrong” points of view show events that are being related by the narrator in the story. The woman’s POV shots of the sky in Tajomaru’s tale show what he thinks she is thinking, not what she is thinking. We never really step outside the perspective of the person telling the story.
Except here. That shot of the woodcutters' reaction at the trial is not something anyone tells anyone else. Neither he nor the priest would mention it - the priest doesn't suspect him, and he certainly isn't going to incriminate himself. On the contrary - this bit inspires him to start telling his own version of the story, with the dagger playing no part. The shot of the woodcutter’s reaction can only come from the director. It cannot be traced to one of the diegetic narrators—it can only come from the author’s narration. There is almost nothing else like that shot in the film, certainly not in the embedded stories. Kurosawa does not let us outside the stories being told - he gives us nothing else to let us judge them, pick between them. Except here. He shows us something only the woodcutter would know, and he wouldn't tell.
Not that he doesn't give his agitation away, back at Rashomon, pacing back and forth and immediately launching into his own "true" version of the story. This version is set up, in a lot of ways, to resolve the story - to show what really happened. We've heard from the three participants in the incident in the grove, all peddling wildly incompatible and self-serving tales. Now we see a version from someone who was not involved. And we get it first hand: the woodcutter himself, not through an intermediary. This increased "realism" is reflected in the style - the sound for example: this is the only embedded story not to use music, sticking to the natural sounds. We are primed to see this as the "real" version of the story - the placement of this version of the story, the style and sound, the woodcutter's agitation at the gate, all seem to privilege it, mark it as being more reliable.
But it's a rhetorical trick - undercut before it starts by that shot of the woodcutter at the trial. Kurosawa sets us up to want a resolution - then sets us up to think one is coming - but gives us just another story, told by an interested party. He's told us that the woodcutter is not exactly a paragon; he's also rather pointedly intervened, giving us, for the first time, information not contained in the embedded stories. And when the woodcutter's story gets going, it soon turns into something different than the What Really Happened account we might expect. The stylistic elements (like the elimination of music) that privilege this section are almost immediately countered by other devices. Kurosawa quickly establishes a pattern of repeating details from the other accounts ironically. We see, again, Tajomaru urging the woman to run away with him - but this time ridiculous, wheedling and trite, promising to reform, like countless outlaws before him. She responds by trying to get the men to fight for her - but this time, she is bitter and ironic herself. Her husband reacts by denouncing and abusing her - which is both very conventional, and mostly a bid to save his neck. Everything becomes more stylized as the section goes on - the acting, the characters’ reactions, the direction. The close ups become more insistent; the geometric patterns (the triangles and ostentatious camera angles) become more intrusive. This builds to the mid-point of the story, when the two men fight. And the film has become almost a straight parody of a swordfighting movie.
There's another post to be written about Kurosawa's use of genre in Rashomon. [Actually, that was the other half of the paper I'm repurposing here.] The four segments of the incident in the grove are told in four different styles - Tajomaru’s version is a chambara, full of adventure and derring-do; the woman's is a melodrama; the samurai's a tragedy/horror story. You hear it in the music: Tajomaru’s story has exciting martial music, with hints of sensuality (the harp that emphasizes the wind that he says started it all). The woman's has that Bolero imitation, giving it an exotic, sensuous, melodramatic, tone. The medium’s trance has Japanese music, drums and chanting, and the rest of the Samurai’s story uses dark, foreboding music suggestive of tragedy or horror. The fourth section doesn't so much resolve the "truth" of the stories that came before as it criticizes and parodies the film genres they represent. (And represent something like the future of Japanese films - it points to the Japanese new wave, which shows a lot of the characteristics noted below.) It sets itself up as a "realistic" alternative to them, but soon becomes more of a parody, a deconstruction, of the earlier versions of the story. The style of this section reminds us of the importance of style throughout the film. It exaggerates the generic elements of the other accounts by parodying them; it underlines the role of music by eliminating it. It emphasizes the compositional and editing patterns used throughout the film by exaggerating them. It repeats shots and set ups - the angle used in the penultimate shot of the sequence, showing the clearing through a web of trees, is a repetition of a setup from Tajomaru’s story, used to frame the first shot showing the three principals together in the frame (in the fateful grove.) The use of such overt devices reminds us of the authorial voice in the film, and reminds us that the filmmakers are also interpreting the story. All the reasons we might give for considering the final version of the story more real than the others come from the director, are all elements of his style.
And back at Rashomon gate, what do we know about the incident? we can't trust the woodcutter's story - we've seen how he reacted to the medium's mention of the dagger, but his story contradicts that detail. The commoner certainly doesn't believe him. But more than figuring out what is happening in the story, I think Kurosawa is pushing at the edges of the nature of fiction. By intervening in the story (with that shot of the woodcutter at the trial), giving us information not related in the film, only to allow the woodcutter to contradict this information; and by making his own manipulation of the material more overt during the woodcutter’s story, Kurosawa makes explicit the ways he, as the narrator of these narratives, is imposing his interpretations on the story as much as the characters. In the end, I think the theme of the film is not so much the lack of a stable truth as it is the inextricable entanglement of narrative and interpretation. Each character presents as truth what they think the story means: and so does Akira Kurosawa. He sets up the woodcutter’s story as a resolution, only to undercut it. He comments on the story through the form and style of the final segment. The moments he privileges - the woodcutter’s reaction at the trial, notably - are themselves formal devices, which serve as much to show his interpretation of the story as to show a reality behind the interpretation.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Kurosawa week
A week of Kurosawa posts have started, hosted by Film Squish. As usual, I've been lazy - but Akira Kurosawa is a director I have written plenty about in the past for various purposes, so I can certainly add my two cents - or dollar fifty - to this endeavor.
He's an odd case - one of the directors I picked up on before I really committed to "cinephilia" as it were. Along with Kubrick and Lynch and Eisenstein, back in the 80s - and my opinion of him eroded a bit when I did really get into film. (Which I wrote about, some, for last spring's Altman blogathon.) But it didn't erode far - I never wavered in my love for Seven Samurai - or High and Low, when I saw that, or Yojimbo and Sanjuro - and when I finally saw it, Stray Dog, which still seems to be an underrated masterpiece - not far off his best films (Seven Samurai and High and Low, with Rashomon in there as well.) I've wavered a lot more about Ikiru and Rashomon and Ran, though they are as likely to count as masterpieces as not.
I find - and this is certainly relevant to my ability to generate prose on the subject - that Kurosawa is, and has always been, one of the most stimulating intellectual directors around. His films are infinitely interesting to think about, to write about, to analyze and play with. For all his powers, though, I am not always convinced by his artistry: his films, even at their (almost) best (not in Seven Samurai or High and Low, anymore), have patches of dullness, slip into stridency, obviousness - he loses control of the material in a lot of his films. But this seldom comes hurts their effectiveness as philosophy - only as art.
As art: I think his strength and weakness is in his synthetic style. He uses everything, all the means at his disposal: long takes, fast cutting, acting, compositions, everything - but he lacks, I think, the sense of timing that the (really really) great directors have. With the very best - the Ozus, Capras, Godards, Mizoguchis, Renoirs of the world - scenes never seem to falter or lag; with Kurosawa, there are quite a few scenes that don't quite work. They feel wrong - too long or too short, repetitive, something like that. He lacked rhythm, sometimes. There are sequences in almost all his films (maybe not at the top) that feel stiff and awkward, too stagy, too static, too posed. He sometimes (and this happens even in High and Low, though I don't remember any in Seven Samurai that don't work) seems too fond of his compositions, careful, meaningful - almost turning them into tableaux. Though one of the interesting effects of this is that the "problem" tends to disappear the closer you look at the films: slow them down, watch them on DVD, jumping around, stopping, slowing, speeding up and so on, and their meaning and function becomes more effective. Again - he rewards analysis more than most of his peers: though perhaps at the expense of the organic flow (as well as some the sheer beauty and surprise) the best of them have.
I'm sorry to seem to dwell on the negative. It isn't negative, quite - it's more of an explanation of why I tend to react to him analytically more than emotionally. He doesn't leave me with a sense of awe - more one of inspiration. And probably an explanation of why I am more likely to write about Ikiru and Rashomon - great films I waver on, and have to convince myself of their greatness, rather than Seven Samurai, which is obvious. In any case, it's late tonight, so I have to leave you with a teaser (and Stanley Cavell is speaking tomorrow, with one of my favorite films of the decade) - but with a week to do it, I should be able to get a couple posts up for this blogathon. Starting with rehashed old papers, edited down to workable lengths - maybe moving beyond that. And of course - I look forward to the wealth of material I hope will appear in this blogathon. Kurosawa was a giant of the film world, and one who has had the great good fortune to be pretty widely available in many formats through the years. I am looking forward to it.
He's an odd case - one of the directors I picked up on before I really committed to "cinephilia" as it were. Along with Kubrick and Lynch and Eisenstein, back in the 80s - and my opinion of him eroded a bit when I did really get into film. (Which I wrote about, some, for last spring's Altman blogathon.) But it didn't erode far - I never wavered in my love for Seven Samurai - or High and Low, when I saw that, or Yojimbo and Sanjuro - and when I finally saw it, Stray Dog, which still seems to be an underrated masterpiece - not far off his best films (Seven Samurai and High and Low, with Rashomon in there as well.) I've wavered a lot more about Ikiru and Rashomon and Ran, though they are as likely to count as masterpieces as not.
I find - and this is certainly relevant to my ability to generate prose on the subject - that Kurosawa is, and has always been, one of the most stimulating intellectual directors around. His films are infinitely interesting to think about, to write about, to analyze and play with. For all his powers, though, I am not always convinced by his artistry: his films, even at their (almost) best (not in Seven Samurai or High and Low, anymore), have patches of dullness, slip into stridency, obviousness - he loses control of the material in a lot of his films. But this seldom comes hurts their effectiveness as philosophy - only as art.
As art: I think his strength and weakness is in his synthetic style. He uses everything, all the means at his disposal: long takes, fast cutting, acting, compositions, everything - but he lacks, I think, the sense of timing that the (really really) great directors have. With the very best - the Ozus, Capras, Godards, Mizoguchis, Renoirs of the world - scenes never seem to falter or lag; with Kurosawa, there are quite a few scenes that don't quite work. They feel wrong - too long or too short, repetitive, something like that. He lacked rhythm, sometimes. There are sequences in almost all his films (maybe not at the top) that feel stiff and awkward, too stagy, too static, too posed. He sometimes (and this happens even in High and Low, though I don't remember any in Seven Samurai that don't work) seems too fond of his compositions, careful, meaningful - almost turning them into tableaux. Though one of the interesting effects of this is that the "problem" tends to disappear the closer you look at the films: slow them down, watch them on DVD, jumping around, stopping, slowing, speeding up and so on, and their meaning and function becomes more effective. Again - he rewards analysis more than most of his peers: though perhaps at the expense of the organic flow (as well as some the sheer beauty and surprise) the best of them have.
I'm sorry to seem to dwell on the negative. It isn't negative, quite - it's more of an explanation of why I tend to react to him analytically more than emotionally. He doesn't leave me with a sense of awe - more one of inspiration. And probably an explanation of why I am more likely to write about Ikiru and Rashomon - great films I waver on, and have to convince myself of their greatness, rather than Seven Samurai, which is obvious. In any case, it's late tonight, so I have to leave you with a teaser (and Stanley Cavell is speaking tomorrow, with one of my favorite films of the decade) - but with a week to do it, I should be able to get a couple posts up for this blogathon. Starting with rehashed old papers, edited down to workable lengths - maybe moving beyond that. And of course - I look forward to the wealth of material I hope will appear in this blogathon. Kurosawa was a giant of the film world, and one who has had the great good fortune to be pretty widely available in many formats through the years. I am looking forward to it.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Two Films and Remembrance
Checking in with a couple links and a movie or two... First - Armistice Day is over, but there are a few more hours of Veteran's day - there's a great post on the Great War on Making Light, with links to film footage and much more, and a nice link from Lawyers Guns and Money to a list of the remaining surviving veterans of the war to end all wars. There's much to be said for Farley's comments about the specificity of this holiday: WWI was a pretty sharp and decisive break with something - you can trace a direct line from damn near anything that's happened since back to it. From modern art to WWII to the end of colonialism to horror movies...
...including prohibition, and after prohibition, the "war on drugs" in all it's stupid variations... and thus, American gangsterism, the tradition of American crime fiction, and the Coen Brothers! And Sidney Lumet... two new takes on that venerable genre came out this weekend... Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a new version of the ever popular heist gone wrong picture - in this case, Philip Seymour Hoffman (as a dope fiend embezzler) lures Ethan Hawke (as his loser little brother) into an ill advised scheme to rob a mom and pop jewelry store... heh heh heh... I hope it doesn't spoil anything to say it goes spectacularly wrong. It's a fine little film - it reminded me somewhat of Exiled: a pure genre picture, made for the pure pleasure of going through all the paces of the genre - not quite up to Johnny To's technical chops, but similarly blessed with first rate actors biting into meaty roles... None of it adds up to a thing, except the plain pleasure fo the style, the genre, the craft of it, which we are invited to share without illusions...
No Country for Old Men starts somewhere like that: a genre tale told with full attention to the specific pleasures of the genre itself. But it keeps going. First - because the Coen brothers have filmmaking chops that surpass Johnny To - partly since they bring the same command to everything, not just the set pieces, but even on the merits: they are better story tellers - much of this film is virtually silent: men running, chasing, searching, sometimes fighting... dialogue when it comes up is almost incidental (especially in the first half) - though it can pack a punch... The story itself is as generic as anything in the Lumet film: a schmoe finds a suitcase of money, various bad guys are looking for it, he has to lam, the bad guys come after him (and each other), a trail of bodies ensues. Good enough and well told on the face of it, it slides toward something more as it goes... Peter Keough at the Phoenix talks about Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, magnificent, while sporting an unfortunate late 70s page boy haircut) as Death, and the film as being about Death: which is just about right. The film is, basically, a hideous and intolerable allegory about Death: random, inescapable, the end of every story. It is to their credit that they do this, incorporate a walking symbol into the film, and make him fit, make the story work on its own terms. And - because they find new ways to tell the story: they can surprise you, even when you know what's coming, and how, they find a way to tell it that can take you unawares. It's impressive work. They've had a bit of a down run lately - I like The Man Who Wasn't There a good deal less than a lot of people - and no one defends their next two films. This is a nice return - maybe not up to their best films (Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou? - that's a damned impressive stretch; plus Raising Arizona, I say) - but close.
...including prohibition, and after prohibition, the "war on drugs" in all it's stupid variations... and thus, American gangsterism, the tradition of American crime fiction, and the Coen Brothers! And Sidney Lumet... two new takes on that venerable genre came out this weekend... Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a new version of the ever popular heist gone wrong picture - in this case, Philip Seymour Hoffman (as a dope fiend embezzler) lures Ethan Hawke (as his loser little brother) into an ill advised scheme to rob a mom and pop jewelry store... heh heh heh... I hope it doesn't spoil anything to say it goes spectacularly wrong. It's a fine little film - it reminded me somewhat of Exiled: a pure genre picture, made for the pure pleasure of going through all the paces of the genre - not quite up to Johnny To's technical chops, but similarly blessed with first rate actors biting into meaty roles... None of it adds up to a thing, except the plain pleasure fo the style, the genre, the craft of it, which we are invited to share without illusions...
No Country for Old Men starts somewhere like that: a genre tale told with full attention to the specific pleasures of the genre itself. But it keeps going. First - because the Coen brothers have filmmaking chops that surpass Johnny To - partly since they bring the same command to everything, not just the set pieces, but even on the merits: they are better story tellers - much of this film is virtually silent: men running, chasing, searching, sometimes fighting... dialogue when it comes up is almost incidental (especially in the first half) - though it can pack a punch... The story itself is as generic as anything in the Lumet film: a schmoe finds a suitcase of money, various bad guys are looking for it, he has to lam, the bad guys come after him (and each other), a trail of bodies ensues. Good enough and well told on the face of it, it slides toward something more as it goes... Peter Keough at the Phoenix talks about Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, magnificent, while sporting an unfortunate late 70s page boy haircut) as Death, and the film as being about Death: which is just about right. The film is, basically, a hideous and intolerable allegory about Death: random, inescapable, the end of every story. It is to their credit that they do this, incorporate a walking symbol into the film, and make him fit, make the story work on its own terms. And - because they find new ways to tell the story: they can surprise you, even when you know what's coming, and how, they find a way to tell it that can take you unawares. It's impressive work. They've had a bit of a down run lately - I like The Man Who Wasn't There a good deal less than a lot of people - and no one defends their next two films. This is a nice return - maybe not up to their best films (Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou? - that's a damned impressive stretch; plus Raising Arizona, I say) - but close.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
I'm Brian and So's My Wife!
The Film & Faith blogathon is reminding me what a lazy slob I can be some time. I have plenty of time to plan and prepare and what do I do? Watch the Red Sox, watch the Celtics, load Syd Barrett and Sigur Rus CDs into iTunes - NOT rewatch Naked or O Brother Where Art Thou or After Life or A Touch of Zen (nothing says it has to be Christian) or Pulp Fiction or The Gospel According to Matthew or Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, or Lady Vengeance, or any other promising subject - not work up a decent essay on the subject. Sloth! one of the Deadly Sins!
Still, it's too interesting a topic not to do something. I might work up a post out of an existing piece - in the meantime, let's expand a bit on the clip in that last post... In fact, I think Life of Brian is, not just a great film - which it is - but a darned good religious film. Presents a more appealing vision of christianity than most overt christians do - Passion of the Christ? God, no... Life of Brian takes an interesting approach to religion - it analyzes it a bit, taking it apart into its component parts. Religion, after all, is not, really a single, unified thing: it's a melange of social organizations and institutions, ideologies and belief systems, behaviors, ethical and moral values, rituals, traditions, ethnicities, identities.... Life of Brian offers a fairly savage attack on part of this - religion as social and political phenomenon, as ideology used to support social and political control. It is much more sympathetic to the ideas and behaviors inspired by faith. A big part of the point of the film is, in fact, the way admirable and sensible religious ideas get warped into excuses for forming gangs and attacking other people.
It's interesting, actually, that faith and belief don't figure all that much in the film. Some of this, of course, is due to the fact that it is more about politics than religion anyway. It's also because faith and belief are simplified in the film: collapsed into a couple main ideas. First - the good idea - that religious belief is about values - specific values - getting along, treating people well, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Being yourself and respecting others. Blessed are the peacemakers. The film (being a political satire) puts more energy into the second main idea about religion: the ways beliefs, ideas, etc., are transformed into ideologies, ways of controlling people. It’s done pretty directly: blessed are the cheesemakers; we are all individuals - good ideas are absorbed by society and twisted, put to use as ways to control, as tools for the exercise of power. (The Pythons aren’t quite as Foucauldian as Frank Capra, but they make a good start sometimes.) Good ideas and values are turned into dogmas and ideologies useful for forming gangs: defining who’s with us and who’s against us, who’s in, who’s out, who you can abuse and who you can’t. That’s a pretty universal Monty Python theme - the misuse of language - words, turned into tools for power. (Or resisting and undermining power, sometimes.) The ideology of religion hardens, into taboos and irrational codes, stupid vows of silence, excuses for stoning people, that get twisted and warped all around each other themselves. With pretty serious, seriously awful, consequences - those idiotic revolutionaries convincing themselves that Brian is dying for the cause - and the even more idiotic crack suicide squads...
All of it a perversion of the perfectly sensible things Jesus and Brian say in the film; probably an inevitable perversion, since we are social and political animals and do those things naturally. Though what makes what they say sensible is their insistence on the worth of the individual against the group, or within the group. A kind of calling out from the group - to not forget that social and political organizations are conveniences, ways of living in the world. There’s a sense in which something like the Sermon on the Mount is a call to flexibility of mind - don’t judge lest you be judged; take everyone as they come; see the world as the other fellow sees it. Don’t get tied down to any one group or set of ideas, even if you are part of one group: social organizations are fluid and changeable. We should be fluid and changeable. At least that seems to be something like the conclusion the Pythons draw about it - their work constantly condemns people who treat their particular class or profession or any given role as an Absolute Value. Hell - the boys themselves embody the idea, playing all the roles, working, most of the time, in sketch comedy style, rather than establishing one persona, one universe, to live in, to act in.
Anyway - here's another clip, the sermon on the mount falling on deaf ears....
Still, it's too interesting a topic not to do something. I might work up a post out of an existing piece - in the meantime, let's expand a bit on the clip in that last post... In fact, I think Life of Brian is, not just a great film - which it is - but a darned good religious film. Presents a more appealing vision of christianity than most overt christians do - Passion of the Christ? God, no... Life of Brian takes an interesting approach to religion - it analyzes it a bit, taking it apart into its component parts. Religion, after all, is not, really a single, unified thing: it's a melange of social organizations and institutions, ideologies and belief systems, behaviors, ethical and moral values, rituals, traditions, ethnicities, identities.... Life of Brian offers a fairly savage attack on part of this - religion as social and political phenomenon, as ideology used to support social and political control. It is much more sympathetic to the ideas and behaviors inspired by faith. A big part of the point of the film is, in fact, the way admirable and sensible religious ideas get warped into excuses for forming gangs and attacking other people.
It's interesting, actually, that faith and belief don't figure all that much in the film. Some of this, of course, is due to the fact that it is more about politics than religion anyway. It's also because faith and belief are simplified in the film: collapsed into a couple main ideas. First - the good idea - that religious belief is about values - specific values - getting along, treating people well, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Being yourself and respecting others. Blessed are the peacemakers. The film (being a political satire) puts more energy into the second main idea about religion: the ways beliefs, ideas, etc., are transformed into ideologies, ways of controlling people. It’s done pretty directly: blessed are the cheesemakers; we are all individuals - good ideas are absorbed by society and twisted, put to use as ways to control, as tools for the exercise of power. (The Pythons aren’t quite as Foucauldian as Frank Capra, but they make a good start sometimes.) Good ideas and values are turned into dogmas and ideologies useful for forming gangs: defining who’s with us and who’s against us, who’s in, who’s out, who you can abuse and who you can’t. That’s a pretty universal Monty Python theme - the misuse of language - words, turned into tools for power. (Or resisting and undermining power, sometimes.) The ideology of religion hardens, into taboos and irrational codes, stupid vows of silence, excuses for stoning people, that get twisted and warped all around each other themselves. With pretty serious, seriously awful, consequences - those idiotic revolutionaries convincing themselves that Brian is dying for the cause - and the even more idiotic crack suicide squads...
All of it a perversion of the perfectly sensible things Jesus and Brian say in the film; probably an inevitable perversion, since we are social and political animals and do those things naturally. Though what makes what they say sensible is their insistence on the worth of the individual against the group, or within the group. A kind of calling out from the group - to not forget that social and political organizations are conveniences, ways of living in the world. There’s a sense in which something like the Sermon on the Mount is a call to flexibility of mind - don’t judge lest you be judged; take everyone as they come; see the world as the other fellow sees it. Don’t get tied down to any one group or set of ideas, even if you are part of one group: social organizations are fluid and changeable. We should be fluid and changeable. At least that seems to be something like the conclusion the Pythons draw about it - their work constantly condemns people who treat their particular class or profession or any given role as an Absolute Value. Hell - the boys themselves embody the idea, playing all the roles, working, most of the time, in sketch comedy style, rather than establishing one persona, one universe, to live in, to act in.
Anyway - here's another clip, the sermon on the mount falling on deaf ears....
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Catch Up
No, I don't have a good excuse for not posting in a week. I don't know - just the occasional spell of sloth. Anyway - we have 2 blogathons tempting us back to the internets: New Critics asks, What is the purest comedic moment you have ever experienced? - and RC at Strange Culture hosts Film & Faith. Both are pretty wide open, and should genehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifrate lots of good reading. I hope I can muster a contribution or two, but meanwhile - I have gotten my movie viewing in, so let's run through some recent shows. With stars! the first resort of the lazy critic, and that's me...
Control - ** - the Ian Curtis biopic - it looks great; sounds good - the music being superb; has a nice approach, in some ways - getting at the sordidness of Curtis' life - but it's still static and dull, and not very revealing. The music gets short shrift - and the sad fact is, without the music, Ian Curtis doesn't matter much. We wouldn't have heard of him, and his story would be just another another miserable tale, told (in this film) without much life or insight... Flashes of Stroszek on the TV screen remind you of what a great filmmaker can do with poverty and desperation, and the flashes of the music remind you of what a great mind can do with their pain and worries. The most interesting thing about the film is thinking about how it brings a photographic style to cinema (the reserve of some of the discussion around Tucker's Jeff Wall post). I'm inclined to think that "cinematic" photography is photography that activates offscreen space: so photographic cinema might be film that negates offscreen space. Though of course - this is always relative: the offscreen always exists in cinema, just as it doesn't exist in photography - but an artist like Cindy Sherman uses thttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifhe absence creatively. Corbijn, in a way, freezes the spaces and things in this film: there is very little sense of things happening that the camera doesn't see - a sense of the world being closed in. It's a relative thing, of course. It's also pretty effective, given the material: it gives a claustrophobic, elegiac sense to the film, which works. So whiile it is not the film you would probably want to see, it has merits. And is, I say, handsome to look at, and has just enough of that great music...
What else? Lars and the Real Girl and Wristcutters: A Love Story are a pair of neat little indie pictures, clever high concept pieces graced with enjoyable performances and some nice ideas, though neither one can quite justify 100 minutes with the concept, and neither one has an ounce of actual filmmaking style. I am spoiled: I have, in the last month or two, seen films by Pedro Costa, Wes Anderson, Michael Haneke, Johnny To, Arnaud Desplechins, a couple fine Romanian films, and a raft of Val Lewton (to celebrate Halloween) - it's hard to come back to watching plain looking indie films like this, however well they are written or acted. But - they are pretty well written and acted, and do what they do efficiently and entertainingly - I suppose I could compare them to Lust, Caution - they start to look like masterpieces.
Exiled - *** - Johnny To sets several pf his favorite actors loose on a very hoary plot about that Last Big Score (gone, of course, Terribly Wrong) - Anthony Wong, Francis Ng, Simon Yam as a flamboyant boss - Nicky Cheung, Roy Cheung, Lam Suet... scenery is chewed, figurative at least, then shot to hell... robbery, styling gunslingers, Ennio Morricone style music, empty streets, morbid jokes follow, all as sharp and clean as a Ramones song. What can you say? Not up to the Election films, but a sharp, dead on genre parody/pastiche done right....
Okay - that's if for now. Meanwhile, here's a teaser for both blogathons.... jehovah jehovah jehovah!
Control - ** - the Ian Curtis biopic - it looks great; sounds good - the music being superb; has a nice approach, in some ways - getting at the sordidness of Curtis' life - but it's still static and dull, and not very revealing. The music gets short shrift - and the sad fact is, without the music, Ian Curtis doesn't matter much. We wouldn't have heard of him, and his story would be just another another miserable tale, told (in this film) without much life or insight... Flashes of Stroszek on the TV screen remind you of what a great filmmaker can do with poverty and desperation, and the flashes of the music remind you of what a great mind can do with their pain and worries. The most interesting thing about the film is thinking about how it brings a photographic style to cinema (the reserve of some of the discussion around Tucker's Jeff Wall post). I'm inclined to think that "cinematic" photography is photography that activates offscreen space: so photographic cinema might be film that negates offscreen space. Though of course - this is always relative: the offscreen always exists in cinema, just as it doesn't exist in photography - but an artist like Cindy Sherman uses thttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifhe absence creatively. Corbijn, in a way, freezes the spaces and things in this film: there is very little sense of things happening that the camera doesn't see - a sense of the world being closed in. It's a relative thing, of course. It's also pretty effective, given the material: it gives a claustrophobic, elegiac sense to the film, which works. So whiile it is not the film you would probably want to see, it has merits. And is, I say, handsome to look at, and has just enough of that great music...
What else? Lars and the Real Girl and Wristcutters: A Love Story are a pair of neat little indie pictures, clever high concept pieces graced with enjoyable performances and some nice ideas, though neither one can quite justify 100 minutes with the concept, and neither one has an ounce of actual filmmaking style. I am spoiled: I have, in the last month or two, seen films by Pedro Costa, Wes Anderson, Michael Haneke, Johnny To, Arnaud Desplechins, a couple fine Romanian films, and a raft of Val Lewton (to celebrate Halloween) - it's hard to come back to watching plain looking indie films like this, however well they are written or acted. But - they are pretty well written and acted, and do what they do efficiently and entertainingly - I suppose I could compare them to Lust, Caution - they start to look like masterpieces.
Exiled - *** - Johnny To sets several pf his favorite actors loose on a very hoary plot about that Last Big Score (gone, of course, Terribly Wrong) - Anthony Wong, Francis Ng, Simon Yam as a flamboyant boss - Nicky Cheung, Roy Cheung, Lam Suet... scenery is chewed, figurative at least, then shot to hell... robbery, styling gunslingers, Ennio Morricone style music, empty streets, morbid jokes follow, all as sharp and clean as a Ramones song. What can you say? Not up to the Election films, but a sharp, dead on genre parody/pastiche done right....
Okay - that's if for now. Meanwhile, here's a teaser for both blogathons.... jehovah jehovah jehovah!
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Boris, Live
...or, the blogger relives his 20s. I don't think I have ever posted a concert review on this blog. That is mostly because I have barely seen a concert since starting this blog. In fact, I believe I have now seen three in the three years of its existence: one was some old college friends of mine, playing a church in New Hampshire; the other two were Damon and Naomi, supporting their previous CD and now this show, last night, opening for Boris. It was not always thus: in my youth, in the late 80s, I saw many concerts - some of my friends and I made a habit of it, frequenting the Channel, the Rat, TT The Bears - following local bands (The Zulus, Bullet LaVolta, Galaxie 500 [as one may surmise from my recent concert experiences], Buffalo Tom, The Blood Oranges, as well as national indie bands. Seeing The Feelies at least once (usually twice) a year; the Butthole Surfers, Meat Puppets, Husker Du, Replacements whenever they came to town, and bands like that. I didn't see many really big acts: I saw U2 and REM in arenas (the woostah centrum - whatever it's called these days), saw Husker Du, Lou Reed, The Waterboys, a few others at middle sized theaters.... Mostly clubs.... But I stopped going in the early 90s - I started listening to jazz all the time; people got married and had kids and stopped hanging around nightclubs; the rock scene got boring - Nirvana? christ, I'd seen 15 bands that sounded like them by the time they came around - why were they the ones getting big? So now - I still go to shows once in a while, but it's either people I personally know or it's those one or two bands I insist on giving money to - Damon and Naomi; Pere Ubu and its many offshoots.
Which brings us around to last nights show. In 2004, coincidentally, David Thomas played Cambridge the very night the Red Sox won game 4 of the world series: however devoted and passionate a Pere Ubu fan I may be, I never pretended to be David Thomas growing up, and god knows I pretended to be Carl Yastrzemski from more or less as soon as I could lift a toy bat. I had some fears of the same thing happening this year - a Rocky win wold have brought on a game 5, with Beckett closing out the series - could I have resisted that for a concert? I certainly hope so.
Damon and Naomi were fine - they were touring with a kind of big band - cello, horns, Kurihara - playing most from their new record, which is okay. It's taking a while to settle in - longer than their previous couple records did, for some reason. But they were fine, more than enough to get me out on the first really cold night of the year, probably even if they were going up against Josh Beckett. But I admit - Boris was the kicker. I've been listening to them almost constantly this year: Pink began separating itself from the bunch of psychedelic hard rock prog I've been listening to over the last year or so (Comets on Fire and bands of that ilk, including Ilk) - and Rainbow, the Kurihara record, has become one of my favorites in the last year or so. So I had high hopes.
I was not disappointed. It's been a while - it was about as good a show as I have ever seen. Overpowering: as loud as I can remember, certainly the loudest band I have ever seen sober (seeing groups like Ministry, the Surfers, a couple death metal bands - Rigor Mortis! - I made heavy use of the bar....) - but what was strange is how well I could hear it. All the drones and feedback Boris uses, the overtones and guitar interplay, I could hear. I can't hear anything today, but that's life. I could hear the band. And I have to say - they hit my sweet spot. Pummeling volume, hard fast songs, epic solos, double, blended guitar parts (at least with Kurihara), a good deal of variety for all that - fast songs, slow dirgy songs, experimental songs, straightforward melodic songs - sometimes all at once.... It was bliss.
I can't resist - the wonders of the internet being what they are: here is a clip from a show in Georgia, just a taste...
Which brings us around to last nights show. In 2004, coincidentally, David Thomas played Cambridge the very night the Red Sox won game 4 of the world series: however devoted and passionate a Pere Ubu fan I may be, I never pretended to be David Thomas growing up, and god knows I pretended to be Carl Yastrzemski from more or less as soon as I could lift a toy bat. I had some fears of the same thing happening this year - a Rocky win wold have brought on a game 5, with Beckett closing out the series - could I have resisted that for a concert? I certainly hope so.
Damon and Naomi were fine - they were touring with a kind of big band - cello, horns, Kurihara - playing most from their new record, which is okay. It's taking a while to settle in - longer than their previous couple records did, for some reason. But they were fine, more than enough to get me out on the first really cold night of the year, probably even if they were going up against Josh Beckett. But I admit - Boris was the kicker. I've been listening to them almost constantly this year: Pink began separating itself from the bunch of psychedelic hard rock prog I've been listening to over the last year or so (Comets on Fire and bands of that ilk, including Ilk) - and Rainbow, the Kurihara record, has become one of my favorites in the last year or so. So I had high hopes.
I was not disappointed. It's been a while - it was about as good a show as I have ever seen. Overpowering: as loud as I can remember, certainly the loudest band I have ever seen sober (seeing groups like Ministry, the Surfers, a couple death metal bands - Rigor Mortis! - I made heavy use of the bar....) - but what was strange is how well I could hear it. All the drones and feedback Boris uses, the overtones and guitar interplay, I could hear. I can't hear anything today, but that's life. I could hear the band. And I have to say - they hit my sweet spot. Pummeling volume, hard fast songs, epic solos, double, blended guitar parts (at least with Kurihara), a good deal of variety for all that - fast songs, slow dirgy songs, experimental songs, straightforward melodic songs - sometimes all at once.... It was bliss.
I can't resist - the wonders of the internet being what they are: here is a clip from a show in Georgia, just a taste...
Sunday, October 28, 2007
World Series
There is is: Papelbon blows some kid away - boom boom boom. Made it a bit interesting, the Rockies, but - I guess I was right - this was basically San Antonio vs Celeveland - no more doubt...
So then - who's the MVP? Pabelbon? Nope - the other obvious choice: Lowell. And the question - which is better, this team or the 04 team? I suspect - 04 - they had 7 inning starters, who could keep away from the bullpen - which did make things exciting here. Though this team got 4 great starting performances - Beckett was Beckett; Schilling went 5 plus, but, did he make a bad pitch in his outing? he had fresh Okajima and Papelbon, so that game went well. Matsuzaka had his best start in months, and Lester was just plain great. What can you say? It's fun to play these games, though: I'd say this team is up there - probably not up to the 2004 team, with its 373 doubles and all - even watching this series, compared to 04 - the Cards were a far far better team than the Rockies - so I'm guessing.... In fairness though: the 2004 red sox team, I think, was, in fact, the best team of the decade. This one is good too - though #2 I think is probably the 2005 White Sox, another team loaded with starters, a deep bullpen and a bunch of great hitters, that beat some really good teams, in tight games. But this is impressive.
Back to this: as a fan, this is strange. It's nice - but it's not the end of the world (the brilliace of Manny.) In 2004 - that win - yes - that was the end of the world. This is fun, but without all the emotion. Just fun: you get to just enjoy winning. It's such a relief.
Okay: anything more? Oh, right - like in 2004, everyone chipped in - everyone in the lineup contributed, most of the pitchers did good work - and then Bobby Kielty - Bobby Kielty!!!!!! comes in and hits the game winning home run!
Anything else? Not much, I guess. I'm certainly glad they won in four - I get to go see Boris tomorrow night without missing anything. Great stuff: finally - this was a pretty boring post-season - all the sweeps and so on: but it does portend well. The red sox are likely to be around a while - they have the money, but they have a nice organization as well: all those rookies, all those young players they have, even Matsuzaka, Beckett... But they aren't alone. This whole post-season might be a kind of passing of the guard. The Red Sox will be around, the Angels - but both have some kids, Weaver and Kendrick and so on, that are as important as the big money players. And the rest - the Indians are a groups of young veterans; the Rockies and Diamondbacks are bother very young teams, that should get better. Get Milwaukee over the hump, get some pitchers in Philly? a new bunch of teams will be comign through.
So - baseball looks good right now - the Yankees are done (A Rod leaves, as Fox had to pop in t0 talk about - Jerry Remy thinks that's "disgusting" - well, they had to talk about something - the game was pretty much done. Stil - what a bunch of dinks.) The sox will take some of their place, but the rest is oging to be more open than it's been in years. Nice news.
And finally - yes - I can hear the people yelling from Kenmore square. What fun. Good night.
So then - who's the MVP? Pabelbon? Nope - the other obvious choice: Lowell. And the question - which is better, this team or the 04 team? I suspect - 04 - they had 7 inning starters, who could keep away from the bullpen - which did make things exciting here. Though this team got 4 great starting performances - Beckett was Beckett; Schilling went 5 plus, but, did he make a bad pitch in his outing? he had fresh Okajima and Papelbon, so that game went well. Matsuzaka had his best start in months, and Lester was just plain great. What can you say? It's fun to play these games, though: I'd say this team is up there - probably not up to the 2004 team, with its 373 doubles and all - even watching this series, compared to 04 - the Cards were a far far better team than the Rockies - so I'm guessing.... In fairness though: the 2004 red sox team, I think, was, in fact, the best team of the decade. This one is good too - though #2 I think is probably the 2005 White Sox, another team loaded with starters, a deep bullpen and a bunch of great hitters, that beat some really good teams, in tight games. But this is impressive.
Back to this: as a fan, this is strange. It's nice - but it's not the end of the world (the brilliace of Manny.) In 2004 - that win - yes - that was the end of the world. This is fun, but without all the emotion. Just fun: you get to just enjoy winning. It's such a relief.
Okay: anything more? Oh, right - like in 2004, everyone chipped in - everyone in the lineup contributed, most of the pitchers did good work - and then Bobby Kielty - Bobby Kielty!!!!!! comes in and hits the game winning home run!
Anything else? Not much, I guess. I'm certainly glad they won in four - I get to go see Boris tomorrow night without missing anything. Great stuff: finally - this was a pretty boring post-season - all the sweeps and so on: but it does portend well. The red sox are likely to be around a while - they have the money, but they have a nice organization as well: all those rookies, all those young players they have, even Matsuzaka, Beckett... But they aren't alone. This whole post-season might be a kind of passing of the guard. The Red Sox will be around, the Angels - but both have some kids, Weaver and Kendrick and so on, that are as important as the big money players. And the rest - the Indians are a groups of young veterans; the Rockies and Diamondbacks are bother very young teams, that should get better. Get Milwaukee over the hump, get some pitchers in Philly? a new bunch of teams will be comign through.
So - baseball looks good right now - the Yankees are done (A Rod leaves, as Fox had to pop in t0 talk about - Jerry Remy thinks that's "disgusting" - well, they had to talk about something - the game was pretty much done. Stil - what a bunch of dinks.) The sox will take some of their place, but the rest is oging to be more open than it's been in years. Nice news.
And finally - yes - I can hear the people yelling from Kenmore square. What fun. Good night.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Misc Films Catching Up
What do we have? another day before the world series starts so another chance to get something written. I still hope to write something non-trivial for the Double Bill-a-thon but it's competing with the Sox, and I've been lazy as a dog lately.... I also want to write up a real review of Darjeeling Limited - which might turn out to be the double feature (I saw it the same day I saw California Dreamin', as it happens - 2 films about Americans on a train stranded in a far off land, one from the POV of the Americans, one not....) But not yet. Instead, a few film capsules and comments, I suppose...
First: why do I keep spending money on Ang Lee films? They're all the same damn film - the same dull melodrama spiked with some kind of twist: Explicit Sex! Gay Cowboys! Hulk Smash! Kung Fu! Jewel's tits! I don't know why I keep going. I suppose the main reason I saw Lust, Caution was to see Tony Leung - anything of his that gets released here I suppose I have to see... otherwise - why? They keep coming out, and winning awards - I suppose he's the classic Hollywood prestige director - set design and photography, classicist editing, the impersonation of substance - that's all you need, I guess, and it marks you out as "serious" in Hollywood.
I suppose I should try to muster something to say about the film itself, but it's hard to think of a point. It's basically a remake of Notorious with Claude Rains getting away with it. Without the filmmaking skills or Cary Grant, and with the infamous long kiss replaced by acrobatic sex. Which reminds me - can't anyone make a movie with explicit fucking in it where the sex looks like fun? At least stop these films - even Last Tango in Paris or Lies, for all the downer sex, the characters at least looked like they were getting off on it. This is a mopey boring film with mopey bring sex - after this, I'd settle for Catherine Breillat....
Meanwhile, not everything I've seen has stunk: in fact, it's been a pretty good couple of months. Some fine series' - Romanian films, Pedro Costa films, Michael Haneke films - Haneke will be in town this weekend (at both the HFA and MFA), following Costa who was here back in September, and Arnaud Desplechins, who was on hand last week with Kings and Queen and Life of the Dead. Kings and Queens is one of my favorites of the decade - Life of the Dead was his first film, an hour long examination of the family of a young man who has shot himself - packing an old house full of actors (from all different styles, he said), and bouncing them off each other. It's a very accomplished first film - handing the cast and space with aplomb, telling stories subtly but fairly clearly. It establishes what seems to be a pretty characteristic style for Despleshins - a rhythm he has: calm/movement - stillness and sudden movement - empty shots and spaces/full shots and spaces - which he maintains throughout his career. This one also seems to me to have a strong Rivette flavor - the old house, the huge cast, the decentralized story telling, the fact that the "real" story (the boy dieing) is happening somewhere else - along with the fact that he brings along several of Rivette's actresses - Mariane Denincourt; Laurence Cote... It's very good.
First: why do I keep spending money on Ang Lee films? They're all the same damn film - the same dull melodrama spiked with some kind of twist: Explicit Sex! Gay Cowboys! Hulk Smash! Kung Fu! Jewel's tits! I don't know why I keep going. I suppose the main reason I saw Lust, Caution was to see Tony Leung - anything of his that gets released here I suppose I have to see... otherwise - why? They keep coming out, and winning awards - I suppose he's the classic Hollywood prestige director - set design and photography, classicist editing, the impersonation of substance - that's all you need, I guess, and it marks you out as "serious" in Hollywood.
I suppose I should try to muster something to say about the film itself, but it's hard to think of a point. It's basically a remake of Notorious with Claude Rains getting away with it. Without the filmmaking skills or Cary Grant, and with the infamous long kiss replaced by acrobatic sex. Which reminds me - can't anyone make a movie with explicit fucking in it where the sex looks like fun? At least stop these films - even Last Tango in Paris or Lies, for all the downer sex, the characters at least looked like they were getting off on it. This is a mopey boring film with mopey bring sex - after this, I'd settle for Catherine Breillat....
Meanwhile, not everything I've seen has stunk: in fact, it's been a pretty good couple of months. Some fine series' - Romanian films, Pedro Costa films, Michael Haneke films - Haneke will be in town this weekend (at both the HFA and MFA), following Costa who was here back in September, and Arnaud Desplechins, who was on hand last week with Kings and Queen and Life of the Dead. Kings and Queens is one of my favorites of the decade - Life of the Dead was his first film, an hour long examination of the family of a young man who has shot himself - packing an old house full of actors (from all different styles, he said), and bouncing them off each other. It's a very accomplished first film - handing the cast and space with aplomb, telling stories subtly but fairly clearly. It establishes what seems to be a pretty characteristic style for Despleshins - a rhythm he has: calm/movement - stillness and sudden movement - empty shots and spaces/full shots and spaces - which he maintains throughout his career. This one also seems to me to have a strong Rivette flavor - the old house, the huge cast, the decentralized story telling, the fact that the "real" story (the boy dieing) is happening somewhere else - along with the fact that he brings along several of Rivette's actresses - Mariane Denincourt; Laurence Cote... It's very good.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Local Nine Make Good
Well, first up - the Red Sox are back in the World Series. Coming back from down 1-3 to the Indians, which might have seemed more impressive if they hadn't come back on the Yankees from 0-3 in 2004. But still something. Last night's game was a good one - the closest 11-2 rout I've ever seen. (Kind of like how game 2 was the closest 13-6 drubbing you're likely to see.) The talk is mostly about the misfortunes of the Indians - poor Kenny Lofton*.... Of course, 30-5 in three games is a bit more than "misfortune". The big "turning pint" plays last night - Lofton being called out at second; Lofton being held at third - were probably being oversold a bit - especially the latter. I'm not sure how being in a 3-3 tie would have made Pedroia miss that high fast ball in the bottom of the seventh. It would have just made Okajima the winner instead of Matsuzaka. Still - there were breaks - though fairly even on both sides. Take Lofton held at third - he wouldn't have been on if Lugo hadn't dropped an easy pop up. Though that's the real difference: first - the Red Sox got the big breaks, the ones that scored runs or stopped a run from scoring (Manny's bad hop over Peralta; the bad call at second; Garko's 400 foot blast to the left of the line in center; holding Lofton); and second - when the Red Sox got breaks they took advantage of them: got the double play ball; delivered the baserunners who reached on errors; picked up the guys they got on when Peralta and Blake ran into each other in the "bermuda triangle" in the 8th. They made the plays, the Indians didn't. which isn't exactly true - the Indians did a good job of making plays in the field, which kept them in this game until Westbrook found his groove - but they didn't make the plays at the plate. The sox did. Which you can explain any way you like - luck? or the Red Sox are just a better team and better teams come out in the end - or they are a veteran team, and less likely to under perform over a long series. More likely, that is, to rise to their accustomed levels. Which I think is pretty much all there is to clutch play - the ability to perform at your accustomed level under pressure. Guys like Beckett, Ortiz, Schilling (who set it all up in game 6 - pitching 7 kept the bullpen 100% for game 7, which they needed: if that game had been 12-8, and Okajima or Papelbon had had to see some time, things could have been a bit more nerve wracking in the 7th game) - are all first rate players all year long. But in the playoffs, it tough situations, they just do what they usually do, as well as usual - it's harder than it looks. It's not magic - just the ability to keep your head.
I was thinking about that watching Matsuzaka pitch. Especially Garko's at bat, when he hit the double - one of those epic battles, down 0-2, Dice-K making pitch after pitch and Garko fouling them off, taking the balls... I think, though it's a bit of a speculation, that this is the kind of thing where Dice-K goes wrong. Francona alluded to it in the interview between innings - hoping he didn't try to get too fine when he got ahead of hitters. He does that - he nibbles - he doesn't challenge people, sometimes... But it's also that he seems to lose his concentration. I've seen some games where someone will do that sort of thing with Papelbon - keep fouling off his pitches, make him work... But he never seems to lose those battles. He keeps making his pitches until he gets them out - or, at worst, the hitter makes a great play to get a ball into the outfield. Matsuzaka, though, made a bunch of great pitches - then left one in the middle of the plate to hit. It's like he gets frustrated and misses the target.
I have high hopes for Daisuke - it's still pretty clear that he has nasty stuff, he's tough and smart and competitive... another year of seasoning, getting used to the league, getting used to Tek, I think the odds are good he develops like Beckett did this year. They're similar pitchers - lots of success, though without quite proving themselves - Beckett couldn't stay healthy until last year; Dice-K pitching in Japan... coming to Boston and being both brilliant and awful. But the next year, Beckett has been just brilliant - I think Matsuzaka will do likewise. He has the stuff. Maybe he needs to learn to pace himself - to trust his catcher and fielders, to trust himself to get people out. I think he probably wore himself out this year - too many pitches, too many innings - which didn't have obvious physical effects, but probably forces him to work harder to achieve the same effects, probably disrupts his concentration. I expect that to go better next year as well. Last night though - to be honest, he did his job. Faded as he went, but came up big in the bottom of the fifth again, shutting down a bit of a rally. Got to the bullpen, which last night, with Okajima and Papelbon available for extended work, and Beckett as a safety net, was not likely to let it go - just what the doctor ordered.
So on to the Rockies and their 21-1 record... That's not against teams like the Red Sox (or the Indians, for that matter) - it's not much of a predictor of what is likely to happen next. The rockies can hit, have enough pitching - but Boston has pretty much everything you could ask, they are hot themselves, they just came back from 1-3 and did it without extending their roster - though with Fox's idiotic schedule, they could have played 20 innings last night and been rested for Wednesday... It's going to be a hard road for the rockies. This isn't quite San Antonio vs Cleveland in the NBA finals (and baseball is always a contest), but it's the same idea. Deep, veteran club that has proven itself capable of more or less anything - vs a nice young team playing over its head...
* Good lord, I almost forgot this: why are people still referring to Kenny Lofton as a "speedster"? Have they seen him walk lately? My brother and I saw a game this summer, when Lofton was still in Texas, he was playing center field, right in front of us (we had bleacher seats in dead center.) And inning or so into it my brother said, "look at Lofton - he's walking on one leg." He was: warming up, jogging in and out, you could see that he didn't put any pressure on one of his legs - you could see that he was basically unwilling to bend the knee. He looked like Bill Buckner. He could still move - he could still get going and motor when he did, but it hurt to watch him - and I have to say, I felt sorry for him, then, a great gutsy player like that, stuck in Texas.... so it was very satisfying to see him tearing up the Yankees in the playoffs... and rather poignant to see him the center of the Indians' failures last night. He deserved a lot better. Too bad he wasn't on the Red Sox!
Not that we need him. The other notable point of that game I saw was that it was Jacoby Ellsbury's major league debut: a great thrill! Then he beat out a routine ground ball to short stop his second time up...
I was thinking about that watching Matsuzaka pitch. Especially Garko's at bat, when he hit the double - one of those epic battles, down 0-2, Dice-K making pitch after pitch and Garko fouling them off, taking the balls... I think, though it's a bit of a speculation, that this is the kind of thing where Dice-K goes wrong. Francona alluded to it in the interview between innings - hoping he didn't try to get too fine when he got ahead of hitters. He does that - he nibbles - he doesn't challenge people, sometimes... But it's also that he seems to lose his concentration. I've seen some games where someone will do that sort of thing with Papelbon - keep fouling off his pitches, make him work... But he never seems to lose those battles. He keeps making his pitches until he gets them out - or, at worst, the hitter makes a great play to get a ball into the outfield. Matsuzaka, though, made a bunch of great pitches - then left one in the middle of the plate to hit. It's like he gets frustrated and misses the target.
I have high hopes for Daisuke - it's still pretty clear that he has nasty stuff, he's tough and smart and competitive... another year of seasoning, getting used to the league, getting used to Tek, I think the odds are good he develops like Beckett did this year. They're similar pitchers - lots of success, though without quite proving themselves - Beckett couldn't stay healthy until last year; Dice-K pitching in Japan... coming to Boston and being both brilliant and awful. But the next year, Beckett has been just brilliant - I think Matsuzaka will do likewise. He has the stuff. Maybe he needs to learn to pace himself - to trust his catcher and fielders, to trust himself to get people out. I think he probably wore himself out this year - too many pitches, too many innings - which didn't have obvious physical effects, but probably forces him to work harder to achieve the same effects, probably disrupts his concentration. I expect that to go better next year as well. Last night though - to be honest, he did his job. Faded as he went, but came up big in the bottom of the fifth again, shutting down a bit of a rally. Got to the bullpen, which last night, with Okajima and Papelbon available for extended work, and Beckett as a safety net, was not likely to let it go - just what the doctor ordered.
So on to the Rockies and their 21-1 record... That's not against teams like the Red Sox (or the Indians, for that matter) - it's not much of a predictor of what is likely to happen next. The rockies can hit, have enough pitching - but Boston has pretty much everything you could ask, they are hot themselves, they just came back from 1-3 and did it without extending their roster - though with Fox's idiotic schedule, they could have played 20 innings last night and been rested for Wednesday... It's going to be a hard road for the rockies. This isn't quite San Antonio vs Cleveland in the NBA finals (and baseball is always a contest), but it's the same idea. Deep, veteran club that has proven itself capable of more or less anything - vs a nice young team playing over its head...
* Good lord, I almost forgot this: why are people still referring to Kenny Lofton as a "speedster"? Have they seen him walk lately? My brother and I saw a game this summer, when Lofton was still in Texas, he was playing center field, right in front of us (we had bleacher seats in dead center.) And inning or so into it my brother said, "look at Lofton - he's walking on one leg." He was: warming up, jogging in and out, you could see that he didn't put any pressure on one of his legs - you could see that he was basically unwilling to bend the knee. He looked like Bill Buckner. He could still move - he could still get going and motor when he did, but it hurt to watch him - and I have to say, I felt sorry for him, then, a great gutsy player like that, stuck in Texas.... so it was very satisfying to see him tearing up the Yankees in the playoffs... and rather poignant to see him the center of the Indians' failures last night. He deserved a lot better. Too bad he wasn't on the Red Sox!
Not that we need him. The other notable point of that game I saw was that it was Jacoby Ellsbury's major league debut: a great thrill! Then he beat out a routine ground ball to short stop his second time up...
Friday, October 19, 2007
Seeking New Advances
Not that I have anything profound to say. Baseball playoffs still going on - from the looks of it, they may be going on in January. At least Boston and Cleveland are making it worth while - the only competitive series of the post-season so far. Not surprising that it's competitive - they're the best two teams and playing like it. Boston has been underwhelming, but they've been oddly resilient all year, looking about ready to choke and then not choking... so I'd say it's still about even money who wins it. Edge to the Indians, but close. The Rockies, meanwhile, get to sit around and think about it for a week - a red hot team with a chance to cool down; a young team with a week to think about how amazing it is that they're in the world series... with the best team in baseball coming up. Meaning - I'll stick to predicting the AL to win. Though the real fun, as it pours rain here in Boston, is the fact that they will be starting the world series on, what, October 23 - in either Boston or Cleveland, then going to Denver, the last weekend in October. Barring rain, snow, sleet.... that's first rate planning.
In other sports news - Yankees let Torre go. As a red sox fan, I am happy. I can't see anyone else winning in that situation any time soon. Even with the players they have, and they probably won't have them for long. Go Blue Jays!...
Meanwhile - leaving sports for a bit - plenty of bloggy goodness around. Close-Up blogathon rolling along; Montgomery Clift blogathon a couple days ago, on his birthday; next week, a double-bill-a-thon. (I have a couple movie posts I've put off so long they might end up in this blogathon - fortunately, it might fit...) Elsewhere, Tucker points to the Write a novel in a month website - an idea that always seems appealing in October, but I never seem to do anything about....
And Walter at Quiet Bubble has a couple comics posts up, including this magnificent tribute to Gasoline Alley. I may have a comics binge coming on: just bought Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics - we'll see if that leads anywhere. I'm building up a huge backlog of things to procrastinate writing about here...
Finally - sorry, no random music links. I dunno. I want to write about music, but I'm getting tired of that gimmick. We must find a better way.... But in the meanwhile, a video is in order. I picked up a Creation compilation recently - lousy sound quality: great music. I think I posted a video of the band doing Makin' Time some time back - no harm doing it again, but happily, there's more from the same show, 3 songs, including Makin' Time. Good stuff.
In other sports news - Yankees let Torre go. As a red sox fan, I am happy. I can't see anyone else winning in that situation any time soon. Even with the players they have, and they probably won't have them for long. Go Blue Jays!...
Meanwhile - leaving sports for a bit - plenty of bloggy goodness around. Close-Up blogathon rolling along; Montgomery Clift blogathon a couple days ago, on his birthday; next week, a double-bill-a-thon. (I have a couple movie posts I've put off so long they might end up in this blogathon - fortunately, it might fit...) Elsewhere, Tucker points to the Write a novel in a month website - an idea that always seems appealing in October, but I never seem to do anything about....
And Walter at Quiet Bubble has a couple comics posts up, including this magnificent tribute to Gasoline Alley. I may have a comics binge coming on: just bought Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics - we'll see if that leads anywhere. I'm building up a huge backlog of things to procrastinate writing about here...
Finally - sorry, no random music links. I dunno. I want to write about music, but I'm getting tired of that gimmick. We must find a better way.... But in the meanwhile, a video is in order. I picked up a Creation compilation recently - lousy sound quality: great music. I think I posted a video of the band doing Makin' Time some time back - no harm doing it again, but happily, there's more from the same show, 3 songs, including Makin' Time. Good stuff.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
My Kid Could Paint That...
...probably not, actually. My Kid Could Paint That is a new documentary about Marla Olmstead, abstract expressionist in diapers. It's a cute story - dad's an amateur painter, Marla, aged 2, wanted to play with the paints so dad let her - and she produced things that looked like real art. Someone put some up in a coffee shop - where they sold. A gallery owner started showing her work - and it sold. And sold and sold and she became rich and famous and lived happily ever after! Until 60 Minutes came calling and put a camera in the basement and got footage of dad telling her where to put the red... Scandal! Mom and dad fought back, producing a video of their own showing the tyke painting a piece from start to finish, while hoping the documentary would clear their name. But the director, Amir Bar-Lev, was having his own doubts. All the time he filmed the family and the kid, he never saw her paint anything start to finish either. Hmm, thought he. And so the film ends, with director saying he doesn't quite believe it, then telling mom and dad, so they walk off, mom in tears... and you, viewer, are left to make up your mind.
It's quite a yarn. Enough that when I first saw the trailers, I thought it was fiction - a mockumentary. (Not having read anything about little Marla before this.) And even now, I'm not so sure it isn't fiction - you can create one hell of a viral marketing campaign on the internets - which I suppose is the theme of the film. Is little Marla, 4 year old genius painter, a work of fiction? Charlie Rose and a child psychologist say no: she's a normal kid, whose father coached her into creating works of art. The family of course says no no no! she did it all! Bar-Lev says - I don't believe it, but I have nothing more to show you, one way or the other. Which plays a bit like a cop out - though it's honest enough. But ending it there feels wrong; we need something like the ending of Imamura's A Man Vanishes: where the final confrontation between film crew and subjects seems to take place in a restaurant - but halfway in, a crew starts taking it apart, and it turns out to be a set on a sound stage. Now that's how you acknowledge the artifice of a film - not having a critic or newspaper columnist tell you your film will be a lie... (At least the critic asks if he can say it, then says it, as if he expects the scene to be edited: leaving it in is a nice touch.)
The truth is - I wish Bar-Lev had followed through more on the promise that the film would be about modern art, and what it means that a 4 year old can (or can't) fake it. The point is raised, a couple times: hostility to modern art, the idea that if a kid can fool the experts then the experts are full of crap, or that no one buys art like this for what it is, just for what they can say about it. For the story. That's the only part that is really addressed, though - the ways abstract expressionism, action painting, was about the story of the painting being made as much as what ended up on the canvas. And that drives this story, clearly: people buy these paintings because a precious little girl painted them - or rather, they pay $20,000 for these paintings because the precious little girl painted them. Which, to be fair, is a significant element of modern art - it has become increasingly "indexical" rather than "iconic" - taking meaning from their production more than what they represent. But there is a lot more going on in abstract art that the conditions of their painting - and Bar-Lev doesn't do much to explore those things.
What does makes a good abstract painting vs. a bad one? It's an important part of this story: it's why people like these paintings - why people are "fooled" if they are "fooled" - why they got attention in the first place. It's also why people doubt that Marla painting them: they are too good - and they are good in ways that betray too much knowledge and understanding about art, and abstract art. They are, as far as I can see, nice paintings - pretty, pleasant to look at - with a decent sense of unity and compositional sense - they have balance, structure - the forms and colors lead the eye around, and satisfy it. They work for the same reason classic abstractions work - they look good, they are unified, they create an enveloping visual field. Which, I have to say, is one of the things that casts some doubt on them. People say it in the film - that they are too finished, too complete - kids don't cover whole canvases like that, when left to their own devices. And it seems to me (and my amateur eye) that they are too well designed - they have too much balance, of color and form.There's no sign that little Marla even knows how to draw - and these paintings don't look like something you could get more than once in 10 tries without being able to draw. Drawing takes more than just making the hand do what the mind wants it to - it's knowing what the hand should do. Marla just makes shapes and marks - it's hard to see how she could know to create paintings that look like these, except by accident. Maybe she's painting 10 bad ones for every good one, and the bad ones are disappearing - there's no sign of that though.
(This is "Dinosaurs" by Marla Olmstead. Image found at the New York Times.)
And there's more. First - I don't want to say they are great paintings - they're nice, they're pretty, but I don't know what more to say about them.... For one thing, they are about 50 years behind the times. Abstract expressionism was a product of the 40s and 50s - by the 60s it was being replaced by pop art and minimalism and conceptual art. This is important too - especially if you think this story and this film are about resistance to modern art. The real story of Marla Olmstead is that abstract art has long since ceased to be anything special. This kind of modern art is now completely mainstream, completely safe - it's pretty and fun and looks good on the wall. Which is not a condemnation - that's equally true of Pollock or Matisse or Degas or Warhol these days. But it means this story isn't quite about resistance to abstract art. It's about the acceptance of modern art, it's transformation into mainstream culture....
In any case: this is what is missing from the film. any kind of formal discussion of the paintings - or a fairly serious historical discussion of them. Just assuming the kid is painting them - what does it mean that she's working in a 40 year old style? more or less. But more significantly, Bar-Lev should have found time for some kind of analysis of the paintings. There are comments in the film related to these issues - the adult themes, the big ideas, the compositions and so on - but none of it is developed. What is an "adult theme"? a "big idea"? How do these paintings have them? why isn't that here?
For that matter - the hints that the film might be about the question of the emptiness of abstract art - "a kid could do that!" - aren't really fulfilled either. The most substantial statement of that case comes fro the gallery owner himself, kvetching that he slaves over his photo-realist canvases for ages and this kid dashes hers off in a couple sittings and gets almost as much money as he does - he even claims he pushed her to expose the con game of modern art. This rant might be more convincing if it didn't come right after the 60 Minutes revelation in the middle of the film. Now, sure - Bar-Lev could be cheating here: there's no indication of when Brunelli said those things - Bar-Lev puts them right after the 60 Minutes footage, but he might be cheating. But it sounds about right - it sounds like sour grapes, like something Brunelli would say when he thought he'd lost his cash cow. In fact, the paintings are still selling, and he doesn't seem to have stopped pushing the kid's art - though I suppose if he's in it for the money, he wouldn't... But at best, it says more about him than the kid's art (or her dad's art, if this is all a scam.)
Not that it matters anyway. Brunelli's claims aren't very convincing anyway. Painters have never been paid by the hour: the value of art, to collectors and critics alike, has never been determined by the effort put in. Ease, effortlessness, spontaneity are valued just as highly as hard work (more so, though it's usually a myth - the effortless genius. That's another aspect of this whole story that gets short shrift: the utter pervasiveness of the myth of the genius, whose work is a miracle - that's what little Marla is, just like Giotto before her!) Spirit and feeling valued as highly as skill, overall effect and expressiveness as much as virtuosity. Though all of this tends to simply circle the question of how much ability is involved in being able to create a truly great abstract painting. And that's still open for debate, guess. I got into a fracas recently over the merits of Pollock and Rothko and the like - defending them against a fairly standard array of arguments: a kid could do it, it takes no skill, it shows no skill, it's boring. All of which, to me, seems driven by a refusal to take the painting at face value, or to read it on its terms. I found a nice quote from Clement Greenberg, the great champion of this kind of art: "art is essentially a matter of means and results, not of means and ends." Whatever Greenberg meant by it, I think you can take it to mean, you can't impose your idea of what art is on the work. You can't judge the skill, the effort to create it, on something outside the work itself.
Which has wandered a ways away from little Marla Olmstead and whether or not her dad painted her paintings. But it is still related. First - because abstract paintings are not simply random patterns of paint - the good ones have structure and unity (or a significant type of disunity), that sometimes arises from randomness and chaos. Second because, the fact that a 4 year old might do something like this would not, really, discredit the work of the Pollocks of the world: it doesn't discredit painters to discover forms in nature like the forms in their work. It's probably not far fetched to say Pollock and others like him were trying, at some level, to reproduce natural forms, with their mixture of randomness and structure - it's also probably not to far-fetched to expect a 4 year old's paintings to have a similar natural mix of randomness and structure. She isn't reproducing it - she's just doing it... if she's doing it. And I suppose - it tends to undermine the claims that she did this unaided: it seems far more likely that she was guided, probably by her father. He doesn't seem to have had the ability to paint these things himself - but he probably has the eye to "edit" his daughter's improvisations into more unified canvases. At least, that is my interpretation of it.... Unfortunately - I don't know enough about art to really make the case I want to make here. I wish I did - and I wish this film had done more to make it.
And finally - I will say that this film comes at a very good time, as far as I am concerned. I've been thinking about art. I've been wondering how to work in more posts about art, music, books, and so on - not that I've been banging out the film posts recently. But I'm interested in art: I was grateful for the post I linked to above, and for Tucker's recent post on Jeff Wall - both were chances to talk about art. Arguing about Rothko, especially, sent me to the books - to Greenberg and others - and to the BMFA, to look for specific things. (Unfortunately, all their 20th century art is in storage - no Pollock! Dove! O'Keefe! Sheeler! Davis! Marin! even the Hoppers are out of sight! even the Picassos and Legers are gone! Fortunately, one can make a lot of good arguments about Pollock and Rothko from Monet alone.... And there are compensations - a wonderful wonderful wonderful exhibition of Japanese art. That should be a future post, if I have any discipline in me at all.) This film, whatever its failings, fits in well with my current mood. It makes a good jump off point for all kinds of thought about art, the media, documentary filmmaking, whatever you'd like.
The real thing - Pollock's Lavender Mist. Your kid couldn't paint that.
It's quite a yarn. Enough that when I first saw the trailers, I thought it was fiction - a mockumentary. (Not having read anything about little Marla before this.) And even now, I'm not so sure it isn't fiction - you can create one hell of a viral marketing campaign on the internets - which I suppose is the theme of the film. Is little Marla, 4 year old genius painter, a work of fiction? Charlie Rose and a child psychologist say no: she's a normal kid, whose father coached her into creating works of art. The family of course says no no no! she did it all! Bar-Lev says - I don't believe it, but I have nothing more to show you, one way or the other. Which plays a bit like a cop out - though it's honest enough. But ending it there feels wrong; we need something like the ending of Imamura's A Man Vanishes: where the final confrontation between film crew and subjects seems to take place in a restaurant - but halfway in, a crew starts taking it apart, and it turns out to be a set on a sound stage. Now that's how you acknowledge the artifice of a film - not having a critic or newspaper columnist tell you your film will be a lie... (At least the critic asks if he can say it, then says it, as if he expects the scene to be edited: leaving it in is a nice touch.)
The truth is - I wish Bar-Lev had followed through more on the promise that the film would be about modern art, and what it means that a 4 year old can (or can't) fake it. The point is raised, a couple times: hostility to modern art, the idea that if a kid can fool the experts then the experts are full of crap, or that no one buys art like this for what it is, just for what they can say about it. For the story. That's the only part that is really addressed, though - the ways abstract expressionism, action painting, was about the story of the painting being made as much as what ended up on the canvas. And that drives this story, clearly: people buy these paintings because a precious little girl painted them - or rather, they pay $20,000 for these paintings because the precious little girl painted them. Which, to be fair, is a significant element of modern art - it has become increasingly "indexical" rather than "iconic" - taking meaning from their production more than what they represent. But there is a lot more going on in abstract art that the conditions of their painting - and Bar-Lev doesn't do much to explore those things.
What does makes a good abstract painting vs. a bad one? It's an important part of this story: it's why people like these paintings - why people are "fooled" if they are "fooled" - why they got attention in the first place. It's also why people doubt that Marla painting them: they are too good - and they are good in ways that betray too much knowledge and understanding about art, and abstract art. They are, as far as I can see, nice paintings - pretty, pleasant to look at - with a decent sense of unity and compositional sense - they have balance, structure - the forms and colors lead the eye around, and satisfy it. They work for the same reason classic abstractions work - they look good, they are unified, they create an enveloping visual field. Which, I have to say, is one of the things that casts some doubt on them. People say it in the film - that they are too finished, too complete - kids don't cover whole canvases like that, when left to their own devices. And it seems to me (and my amateur eye) that they are too well designed - they have too much balance, of color and form.There's no sign that little Marla even knows how to draw - and these paintings don't look like something you could get more than once in 10 tries without being able to draw. Drawing takes more than just making the hand do what the mind wants it to - it's knowing what the hand should do. Marla just makes shapes and marks - it's hard to see how she could know to create paintings that look like these, except by accident. Maybe she's painting 10 bad ones for every good one, and the bad ones are disappearing - there's no sign of that though.
(This is "Dinosaurs" by Marla Olmstead. Image found at the New York Times.)
And there's more. First - I don't want to say they are great paintings - they're nice, they're pretty, but I don't know what more to say about them.... For one thing, they are about 50 years behind the times. Abstract expressionism was a product of the 40s and 50s - by the 60s it was being replaced by pop art and minimalism and conceptual art. This is important too - especially if you think this story and this film are about resistance to modern art. The real story of Marla Olmstead is that abstract art has long since ceased to be anything special. This kind of modern art is now completely mainstream, completely safe - it's pretty and fun and looks good on the wall. Which is not a condemnation - that's equally true of Pollock or Matisse or Degas or Warhol these days. But it means this story isn't quite about resistance to abstract art. It's about the acceptance of modern art, it's transformation into mainstream culture....
In any case: this is what is missing from the film. any kind of formal discussion of the paintings - or a fairly serious historical discussion of them. Just assuming the kid is painting them - what does it mean that she's working in a 40 year old style? more or less. But more significantly, Bar-Lev should have found time for some kind of analysis of the paintings. There are comments in the film related to these issues - the adult themes, the big ideas, the compositions and so on - but none of it is developed. What is an "adult theme"? a "big idea"? How do these paintings have them? why isn't that here?
For that matter - the hints that the film might be about the question of the emptiness of abstract art - "a kid could do that!" - aren't really fulfilled either. The most substantial statement of that case comes fro the gallery owner himself, kvetching that he slaves over his photo-realist canvases for ages and this kid dashes hers off in a couple sittings and gets almost as much money as he does - he even claims he pushed her to expose the con game of modern art. This rant might be more convincing if it didn't come right after the 60 Minutes revelation in the middle of the film. Now, sure - Bar-Lev could be cheating here: there's no indication of when Brunelli said those things - Bar-Lev puts them right after the 60 Minutes footage, but he might be cheating. But it sounds about right - it sounds like sour grapes, like something Brunelli would say when he thought he'd lost his cash cow. In fact, the paintings are still selling, and he doesn't seem to have stopped pushing the kid's art - though I suppose if he's in it for the money, he wouldn't... But at best, it says more about him than the kid's art (or her dad's art, if this is all a scam.)
Not that it matters anyway. Brunelli's claims aren't very convincing anyway. Painters have never been paid by the hour: the value of art, to collectors and critics alike, has never been determined by the effort put in. Ease, effortlessness, spontaneity are valued just as highly as hard work (more so, though it's usually a myth - the effortless genius. That's another aspect of this whole story that gets short shrift: the utter pervasiveness of the myth of the genius, whose work is a miracle - that's what little Marla is, just like Giotto before her!) Spirit and feeling valued as highly as skill, overall effect and expressiveness as much as virtuosity. Though all of this tends to simply circle the question of how much ability is involved in being able to create a truly great abstract painting. And that's still open for debate, guess. I got into a fracas recently over the merits of Pollock and Rothko and the like - defending them against a fairly standard array of arguments: a kid could do it, it takes no skill, it shows no skill, it's boring. All of which, to me, seems driven by a refusal to take the painting at face value, or to read it on its terms. I found a nice quote from Clement Greenberg, the great champion of this kind of art: "art is essentially a matter of means and results, not of means and ends." Whatever Greenberg meant by it, I think you can take it to mean, you can't impose your idea of what art is on the work. You can't judge the skill, the effort to create it, on something outside the work itself.
Which has wandered a ways away from little Marla Olmstead and whether or not her dad painted her paintings. But it is still related. First - because abstract paintings are not simply random patterns of paint - the good ones have structure and unity (or a significant type of disunity), that sometimes arises from randomness and chaos. Second because, the fact that a 4 year old might do something like this would not, really, discredit the work of the Pollocks of the world: it doesn't discredit painters to discover forms in nature like the forms in their work. It's probably not far fetched to say Pollock and others like him were trying, at some level, to reproduce natural forms, with their mixture of randomness and structure - it's also probably not to far-fetched to expect a 4 year old's paintings to have a similar natural mix of randomness and structure. She isn't reproducing it - she's just doing it... if she's doing it. And I suppose - it tends to undermine the claims that she did this unaided: it seems far more likely that she was guided, probably by her father. He doesn't seem to have had the ability to paint these things himself - but he probably has the eye to "edit" his daughter's improvisations into more unified canvases. At least, that is my interpretation of it.... Unfortunately - I don't know enough about art to really make the case I want to make here. I wish I did - and I wish this film had done more to make it.
And finally - I will say that this film comes at a very good time, as far as I am concerned. I've been thinking about art. I've been wondering how to work in more posts about art, music, books, and so on - not that I've been banging out the film posts recently. But I'm interested in art: I was grateful for the post I linked to above, and for Tucker's recent post on Jeff Wall - both were chances to talk about art. Arguing about Rothko, especially, sent me to the books - to Greenberg and others - and to the BMFA, to look for specific things. (Unfortunately, all their 20th century art is in storage - no Pollock! Dove! O'Keefe! Sheeler! Davis! Marin! even the Hoppers are out of sight! even the Picassos and Legers are gone! Fortunately, one can make a lot of good arguments about Pollock and Rothko from Monet alone.... And there are compensations - a wonderful wonderful wonderful exhibition of Japanese art. That should be a future post, if I have any discipline in me at all.) This film, whatever its failings, fits in well with my current mood. It makes a good jump off point for all kinds of thought about art, the media, documentary filmmaking, whatever you'd like.
The real thing - Pollock's Lavender Mist. Your kid couldn't paint that.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
More Baseball
That was quick! 3 sweeps? And thanks to TV and stupidity, a week of waiting. why not start up Tuesday? Anyone? anyone?
Anyway, we do still have the Indians trying to finish off the Yankees - and a happy reminder of the good old days of the Bronx Zoo, with Steinbrenner threatening Torre's job if he loses this series. That's very good news, for a Red Sox fan: it's hard to imagine anyone else getting much out of that Yankees team; and if Steinbrenner sticks his nose in, things can only get worse in the Bronx. So go Tribe!
I might as well repeat my predictions - nothing need change. Sox over whoever wins (since it isn't over); Diamondbacks in the NL. Which isn't to say the Indians couldn't make it close - it's going to depend on what they get from their 3-4 starters and bullpen. If they win tonight with good pitching - it could be a very tight series. (They can still lose, obviously - but... oops! there goes the Greatest Pitcher in History! perhaps for the last time ever! For about the 10th time in his career...) Beckett and Schilling continue to demonstrate why they are such big game pitchers - and will get plenty of rest... but Sabathia and Carmona are no slouches, and the Indians have a nice team on the field. It should be good.
As for the NL - both teams come in hot: but I the Diamondbacks are in fact, the best team in the league. Momentum, as they say, is only as good as today's starting pitcher. So there we go...
Anyway, we do still have the Indians trying to finish off the Yankees - and a happy reminder of the good old days of the Bronx Zoo, with Steinbrenner threatening Torre's job if he loses this series. That's very good news, for a Red Sox fan: it's hard to imagine anyone else getting much out of that Yankees team; and if Steinbrenner sticks his nose in, things can only get worse in the Bronx. So go Tribe!
I might as well repeat my predictions - nothing need change. Sox over whoever wins (since it isn't over); Diamondbacks in the NL. Which isn't to say the Indians couldn't make it close - it's going to depend on what they get from their 3-4 starters and bullpen. If they win tonight with good pitching - it could be a very tight series. (They can still lose, obviously - but... oops! there goes the Greatest Pitcher in History! perhaps for the last time ever! For about the 10th time in his career...) Beckett and Schilling continue to demonstrate why they are such big game pitchers - and will get plenty of rest... but Sabathia and Carmona are no slouches, and the Indians have a nice team on the field. It should be good.
As for the NL - both teams come in hot: but I the Diamondbacks are in fact, the best team in the league. Momentum, as they say, is only as good as today's starting pitcher. So there we go...
Monday, October 01, 2007
Baseball Post Season Guesses
Holy Cow! Baseball season is over! almost! Playoffs! A Play In to the Play Offs! etc! After last year's 0-8 debacle, I should know better than to go on record picking anything: but I never learn. It's too bad the Padres and Rockies are already underway: if not, I'd have a chance to go 0-9 this year! It looks like I'm already on the way: the Rockies are up 3-0 as of this writing, and I would not have picked them. In fact - this is a good time to offer free advice: Rockies to win it all: because if I match last year, they'll be taking it all.
But that was a fluke. I hope. No - this year I have a rooting interest again! that has to help... though not much, because, like last year, I don't see much separating any of the teams in the playoffs. There is a pretty obvious gap between the AL and the NL this year - the win loss records reflect the quality of the teams - all the AL teams look significantly better than any of the NL teams. Within the leagues, there doesn't seem a lot to pick between. But that won't stop me.
AL 1: BOSTON over Anaheim: I am not picking against the Red Sox anywhere in the post-season. That is the rooting interest - and there is more. They had the best record in baseball - and probably are the best team in baseball. They lagged after the fast start - injuries (Schilling at the beginning of summer, Wake at the end, Manny in September), fatigue, especially to the Japanese pitchers, slumps and such slowed them down - never enough to put them in serious danger of missing the playoffs, but enough to make people lose track of how good they are when they are all together. They've put things back together the last week or so - rested Okajima and Matsuzaka (who's had a couple nice starts to end the season); gotten Manny and Youk and Coco back in the lineup; the DL stint seems to have preserved Schilling - he seems fresh enough to be something like his self in the post-season; and all the injuries gave Ellsbury a chance to develop into what could be a series breaking wild card. So - I say they go all the way.... But I say that knowing well that there isn't a lot of difference between them and the Angels - who have tough pitching, enough offense, and are playoff hardened enough to win it all themselves. It's a close match: I say Red Sox out of loyalty as much as anything.
AL 2: CLEVELAND over the Yankees: granted, the Yanks have had their number; granted the Yanks can beat the bejesus out of the ball; granted the Yanks are hardened veterans - some of them played in the very first World Series, I think! Still - I think the Yankees are clearly inferior to the rest of the AL post-season pack - because pitching catches up with hitting sooner or later in the post-season, and all three other teams have genuinely superb pitching. The Yankees pitchers were also superb - in 1998 (Clemens, Mussina, Pettitte?).... The Yanks have to get past 2 teams with better pitching than they have. They might as well fall to the Indians.
And then, I think whoever wins this series will get sent home by Boston or Anaheim. The Red Sox/Angels series should determine the world series winner. I probably would have said that about the Twins and A's last year, and you saw how that turned out. But truthfully, last year was weird: usually, there are 2-3 genuinely superior teams in the post-season and they end up winning it - I think it's that way this year. Last year you couldn't really tell - you could make a case for anyone (except the team that actually won it). This year, you can make a strong case for the Sox and Angels, a solid case for the Indians, and maybe the Yankees. Go Sox!
NL 1: PHILLIES over TBD - actually, I don't know if I believe that. The Padres, if they win, have a very deep rotation, nice bullpen and all - missing 2/3 of their outfield will probably sink them though. The Phils are the NL version of the Yankees without the pitching. They should club their way through this series, but it's a closa call against SD - they should not get past the next team. And they are not going to beat any of the AL teams.
NL 2: ARIZONA over the Cubbies: I could be wrong. The Cubs didn't win all that much, but they have some very nice players, a couple strong pitchers at the top of the rotation... But I think the Snakes are more balanced - and they aren't the Cubs. Though I can see the Cubs getting hot for a month and going far. Maybe this will be a Chicago - Cleveland World Series! it's too late for the Red Sox/Cubs apocalypse - but the Indians would be an okay substitute.
But more likely, the Diamondbacks win that series - and the next one (unless the Pads get going - they're up 5-4, by the time I finished the post, so maybe... if they do, I am going to pick them t win another one)- and lose in the world series.
But that was a fluke. I hope. No - this year I have a rooting interest again! that has to help... though not much, because, like last year, I don't see much separating any of the teams in the playoffs. There is a pretty obvious gap between the AL and the NL this year - the win loss records reflect the quality of the teams - all the AL teams look significantly better than any of the NL teams. Within the leagues, there doesn't seem a lot to pick between. But that won't stop me.
AL 1: BOSTON over Anaheim: I am not picking against the Red Sox anywhere in the post-season. That is the rooting interest - and there is more. They had the best record in baseball - and probably are the best team in baseball. They lagged after the fast start - injuries (Schilling at the beginning of summer, Wake at the end, Manny in September), fatigue, especially to the Japanese pitchers, slumps and such slowed them down - never enough to put them in serious danger of missing the playoffs, but enough to make people lose track of how good they are when they are all together. They've put things back together the last week or so - rested Okajima and Matsuzaka (who's had a couple nice starts to end the season); gotten Manny and Youk and Coco back in the lineup; the DL stint seems to have preserved Schilling - he seems fresh enough to be something like his self in the post-season; and all the injuries gave Ellsbury a chance to develop into what could be a series breaking wild card. So - I say they go all the way.... But I say that knowing well that there isn't a lot of difference between them and the Angels - who have tough pitching, enough offense, and are playoff hardened enough to win it all themselves. It's a close match: I say Red Sox out of loyalty as much as anything.
AL 2: CLEVELAND over the Yankees: granted, the Yanks have had their number; granted the Yanks can beat the bejesus out of the ball; granted the Yanks are hardened veterans - some of them played in the very first World Series, I think! Still - I think the Yankees are clearly inferior to the rest of the AL post-season pack - because pitching catches up with hitting sooner or later in the post-season, and all three other teams have genuinely superb pitching. The Yankees pitchers were also superb - in 1998 (Clemens, Mussina, Pettitte?).... The Yanks have to get past 2 teams with better pitching than they have. They might as well fall to the Indians.
And then, I think whoever wins this series will get sent home by Boston or Anaheim. The Red Sox/Angels series should determine the world series winner. I probably would have said that about the Twins and A's last year, and you saw how that turned out. But truthfully, last year was weird: usually, there are 2-3 genuinely superior teams in the post-season and they end up winning it - I think it's that way this year. Last year you couldn't really tell - you could make a case for anyone (except the team that actually won it). This year, you can make a strong case for the Sox and Angels, a solid case for the Indians, and maybe the Yankees. Go Sox!
NL 1: PHILLIES over TBD - actually, I don't know if I believe that. The Padres, if they win, have a very deep rotation, nice bullpen and all - missing 2/3 of their outfield will probably sink them though. The Phils are the NL version of the Yankees without the pitching. They should club their way through this series, but it's a closa call against SD - they should not get past the next team. And they are not going to beat any of the AL teams.
NL 2: ARIZONA over the Cubbies: I could be wrong. The Cubs didn't win all that much, but they have some very nice players, a couple strong pitchers at the top of the rotation... But I think the Snakes are more balanced - and they aren't the Cubs. Though I can see the Cubs getting hot for a month and going far. Maybe this will be a Chicago - Cleveland World Series! it's too late for the Red Sox/Cubs apocalypse - but the Indians would be an okay substitute.
But more likely, the Diamondbacks win that series - and the next one (unless the Pads get going - they're up 5-4, by the time I finished the post, so maybe... if they do, I am going to pick them t win another one)- and lose in the world series.
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