Atomworld Annoyances

I'm afraid my blogging ambitions, however modest they might be, have taken another hit. The long delay since my last post is the result of a simple weekend visit to the kinfolk, but now I've heard the news that I shall have to move house... I've known it was coming, the place has been on the market - but nothing had been happening, and then suddenly it did. So I have to stop procrastinating and find a place to live.

Anyway - that's a time consuming and anxiety ridden process, so I fear my already sporadic blogging will become - what's more sporadic than sporadic? At least at the end of it, I should be able to get a cat - a time honored source of blog filler.

Weekly Viewing

I am unduly proud of myself - I have gotten the interval for these review posts down to a week! It will be a miracle if I can keep on this schedule, but I have to hope...

Broken Embraces: 9/15 - another Almodovar film, that I'm afraid starts to blend in with all the other Almodovar films. It takes a long while to get going, and traverses some very well worn ground - a film director, flashbacks, embedded narratives, Penelope Cruz, secrets and lies, dramatic revelations, car accidents and handicaps, vengeance and forgiveness, in jokes, movie quotes, bright colors, etc. - by the end, I have to admit, it's become quite involving - but it takes too long to get there, and you never get anywhere you haven't been before with Almodovar. Still - he's a masterful filmmaker - after suffering through last week's slithering camera, it was a huge relief to see a filmmaker who knew what to do with the camera - when to move it, when to leave it alone, how to stage action for the camera without jacking it up with artificial motion... The Last Station set my teeth on edge - this, even if the story seems like secondary Almodovar, is a joy to look at. Though not as much as the film he produced, that I also saw last week... we'll get to that.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: 10/15 - Story of Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers - marine, Rand corp thinker, hawk, turned disillusioned, turned dove - who, seeing no other hope, copied the pentagon papers - a 7000 page report about US involvement in Vietnam (begun as a study commissioned by McNamara to demonstrate how we got sucked into this mess) - and the aftermath... It's a gripping story - Ellsberg (who narrates, and appears in interviews) is a compelling hero - and there are some neat sidenotes, the heroism of Mike Gravel, who had the papers read into the Senate record, things like that... It's also depressing - to think how useless it is. It helped get us out of Vietnam, and Nixon's overreaction helped ruin him - but 30 years later, have we learned anything? In the run up to Iraq, the secrets and lies were on open display - it was widely known and understood that Iraq had no WMDs - but this was somehow forgotten, marginalized, ignored, ommitted, despite the fact that it was on public display. The gutlessness of the papers and the news, and congress in this decade is agonizing.... This film, as a film, has a good story to tell and tells it efficiently, though I suppose it's nothing particularly innovative as a film. Though there's no need for it to try to be fancy - the material and people involved carry the film.

The Headless Woman: 13/15 - I saw this back in '08, at the Harvard Film Archive, with Lucrecia Martel in town, talking about it... I didn't write about it then - but I thought when I saw it it was the film of the year... It played again last week at the Brattle, the day it was supposed to snow - seeing it again - I'm sure it's a masterpiece. The story is - a woman driving home alone from some kind of family gathering, looks down to answer her phone and hits something - she sits for a moment or two, then drives off, without looking back. (The camera looks back, something - a dog? - out of focus on the road...) It starts to rain - she ends up at a hospital, having her head checked, then goes to hotel, when she meets a man, who takes her home... She is in shock, if not amnesiac - she doesn't react to people, she may not even recognize them - she goes through the motions for a day or so, and slowly seems to emerge from this confusion. But then, she thinks she remembers, hitting a child, not a dog - her husband and other men check around, don't find any evidence of a kid getting hurt - and then they do hear about a kid falling in the canal, drowning. Did she do it? Her husband, brother, etc. erase all records of her accident - does she start to doubt her memory? The film end as she walks into a room, with her family and friends, and she disappears into the crowd... It's an intense, riveting film - Martel keeps us very close to Vero (the headless woman) - tight closeups and fuzzy backgrounds at the beginning, backing off as the film continues and she returns to herself, but still tracking her, as she seems to be absorbed into the world around her. The focus remains on her, but other characters give us tantalzing glimpses of their worlds - a strange young woman with hepatitis; the odd relationship with her lover (who seems to be either her cousin or her brother in law, I'm not sure what.) The extended families that play a larger part in Martel's other films are still present in this one, though the film follows Vero more closely - but Martel can sketch in the suggestion of expansive worlds with the barest details. One of the best films of the past couple years, and Martel one of the best directors working today. It's been something of a slow start to this year - I've seen a couple pretty good films, but nothing that really nails it - seeing this again, one of the decade's best - was a joy.

Finally - my home viewing this week was mostly given over to The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin - a show I'd watched now and then in the past, though only isolated episodes, never quite getting into the flow of it. Watching it end to end this weekend was a revelation - it's a marvel.

Losing the Knack

Via the Britannica blog, I see that Doug Fieger, lead singer for the Knack, has died. Sometimes someone will write just one thing that works beyond what you'd think possible. They surrounded the hit with a bunch of really catchy songs that were probably catchier the first time you heard them, as Beatles or Stones or Kinks songs - but My Sharona was the real deal. It obliterated the charts for a reason, for all the right reasons.... I think I may also be one of about 3 people in the world who have heard the Knack's third album in its entirety - a friend of mine actually bought it when it came out, and we listened to it in the abandoned radio station at college (since neither of us actually owned a turntable). I even think I may have liked it.

Things to Read and things to Argue About

Hello world - rather a lot going on in blogland this week, and coming up next week. The big event, I imagine, is the For the Love of Film: Film Preservation Blogathon - starting Sunday and running all week, hosted by Ferdy on Films and the Self-Styled Siren. It's a blogathon and a blog-a-thon - promising what looks like an overwhelming slate of writing on the subject, as well as providing direct support for the National Film Preservation Foundation. An important and fascinating topic - should be a good week of reading...

Meanwhile - Girish has another discussion of Auteurism at his blog - I'm not sure I can stand it. I can't even bring myself to read through it, to tell the truth. I run into an argument about auteurism every couple years somewhere - 2 years ago at Girish's blog, for instance - I can't muster any enthusiasm for another go... On the other hand, Girish posted an interesting question on Facebook yesterday - a question about the diegetic status of Fontaine's voiceover narration in Bresson's A Man Escaped. Is it diegetic or not? the consensus in the thread seems to be that since Fontaine is a character in the world of the film, his narration would be diegetic, even if displaced from the time of the images. Sounds good - though it strikes me that there could be times when you would want to distinguish between diegetic words, and diegetic sound - that is, between words (or perhaps the thoughts or meanings they express) that issue from within the depicted world - and sounds that, perhaps, do not exist in that world. I suppose the Bresson film is not the best example - but what about Joe Gillis' narration in Sunset Boulevard? the words seem to me to be diegetic enough, coming from a character in the film (even if he is dead as he says them) - but couldn't you say that the speech, the actual sounds of those words, don't exist in the real world of the film? Or other examples - Mark Whitacre's voiceover in The Informant! - or Takeshi Kinoshiro's character's words in Fallen Angels. Whitacre's voiceover is presented as his stream of consciousness, but the sounds - the spoken words - do not have the same reality that the dialogue has; Kinoshiro plays a mute - the words are, again, in his head (more narration after the fact - time and memory being a central theme in Wong Kar-wei's work), but never spoken - the words express diegetic thoughts, but the sounds of the words are not real in the fictional world. I'm not sure if diegetic/non-diegetic is the right distinction to make on this - but I think it is important to pay attention to the materiality of the sounds in a film, or the precise form words are given. Filmmakers play with these things, use them - think of how much Soderbergh gets out of the ways the voices in Whitacre's head interact with the words spoken in the film... This question threatens to keep expanding - like, what can you do with the different conventions for presenting a letter in a film? the paper and text on screen; the reader's voice reading (literally, or as voiceover); the writer's voice, the various tricks, like showing the writer writing and saying the words out loud... There's a lot there.

And one more bit of blog business - an interesting discussion springing up at Wonders in the Dark - Sam Juliano ponders the importance of professional criticism, and its relationship with amateur criticism - on the internet, particularly. The proximate cause was this post - a Why I Don't Like Citizen Kane essay by Stephen Russell-Gebbett. Both posts have garnered millions of comments, which makes adding anything to the fray pretty foolish... But, having read the two essays fairly carefully (and skimmed the comments), I can't help adding a word or two hundred.

First - it's a strange piece for Juliano to hang his complaint on - whether Mr. Russell-Gebbett is a professional or not, his post is a fairly serious attempt to make a case against Citizen Kane. The idea, the reasons, could well have been written by a professional - the prose even seems to be competent, careful, etc. - it rather undermines Juliano's point. As does the fact that Russell-Gebbett never says anything that would pass as an attack on professional criticism. He doesn't claim to be taking on the critical establishment, doesn't claim that he's as good as anyone else and just as entitled to his opinion, or any of the other myriad ways bloggers avoid accountability when these arguments crop up. (Maybe there's something like that in comments - I didn't see any in my scan of the comments, but maybe there's something there.) I'm not sure why Juliano attaches that particular set of arguments to Russell-Gebbett's post. (If anything, Juliano indulges in the professional's version of the duck and weave - appeals to authority, deference to authority - the critic's way of avoiding accountability.)

Second - one of the problems in debates like this is that the arguments tends to congeal around the question of whether professionalism makes you a better writer or critic - it doesn't. There is no reason why amateurs can't match professionals at this game, especially in blog sized posts. (And no lack of evidence that amateurs do just that.) It is true that professionals, on balance, are better writers and critics than amateurs - not because professionalism conveys authority so much as that ability tends to get people to be willing to pay you...

Which brings me to a third point, and one I don't see being made that much in this argument. What actually makes you a professional is not a paycheck, but an editor. And particularly, a professional editor. Professionalism is more a matter of credentials than anything else. For academics, the credentialing is explicit - you have to earn a degree, by proving to credentialed experts that you have mastered the field. It's not so defined for writing, but it really does amount to proving to someone that your work deserves to be published under their name. It's the editors that make the professional writer. And in practical terms, for telling the difference between professional and amateur writing online say - that's true for both senses of "editor" - editor as selector of the best work; editor in terms of crossing the t's and dotting the i's and making sure you don't use "barnstorm" when you mean "firestorm." (Not to pick on Mr. Juliano, but...) Professionalism, and whatever authority it conveys, depends on the matrix of professionals vouching for one another - a critics' value is determined by their being accepted and cited by other critics, and by knowledgeable readers.

That, I suppose, brings us around to the facts on the internet. The technology is changing: much of the discourse of professionalism is tied very closely to the technological fact of text being distributed through ink on paper. But text now is distributed almost as much through bits on screens as ink on paper, and the costs and labor and material involved is so different as to be impossible to compare. 20 years ago, if I wanted to play media critic, I might have printed this out and handed it around to my friends; 30 years ago I would have had to type it up and then xerox or mimeograph it. Now, I type it in blogger, hit publish and 20 or 30 people end up reading it before the day it out! a brave new world! But it is - the means of publication changes the dynamic between writer and editor - makes it possible for anyone to be their own editor, basically.

That, however, does not make all writing equal - what it does is create a problem - when anyone can publish more or less at will - how do we credential one another? One way, obviously, is through sites like The House Next Door - edited websites, that can vouch for the ability of the writers there. But they also provide a lot of links to blogs and sites that aren't professional in any meaningful sense - and provide a kind of endorsement of them, as well. But that's a different kind of endorsement, and implies a different kind of relationship among writers, readers, editors and the like. The internet does undo the hierarchical model of credentialing that editors provide - but that doesn't make all writing and criticism equal. Good writing is still good writing; good criticism is still good criticism. (And professionalism is no guarantee of good criticism - has everyone forgotten the Tom O'Neill's Sunrise article? He's a pro...) What I think it means is that "credentialing" becomes less formalized - it becomes a function of links, from people you trust to other people you trust - from good critics to other good critics, or maybe more precisely, from good readers to good writers...

I think there is too much attention paid to the internet as a means of publication, as an outlet for writers, and not enough to the ways the internet creates a network of readers - who then report on their reading to one another. I think this is a responsibility we need to pay more attention to - we need to be better readers, and to act as readers who can recommend strong (interesting, knowledgeable, creative, what have you) writing. I think perhaps people reading and writing on the internet need to pay more attention to the way that we are becoming collective editors. I don't know what will become of journalistic criticism, in its current form - I don't know if it will last very long. I think in fact, blogs and whatever sites carry on this kind of writing, might well absorb most of the functions of that kind of criticism. Indeed have - blogs now are as good a read as most professional reviewers, and often approach the quality of good film journals - though you have to wade through a lot more second rate stuff to find the good stuff. Not to mention the way blogs and Facebook and the like blend more or less serious film writing with all manner or fluff and all kinds of other writing... though for me, that very mixture of discourses is a feature of the medium, not a bug. It's one of the main attractions...

I better stop, before I start thinking about the future of academic criticism, and film books... cause that's a whole other set of questions, isn't it...

Two Weeks of Movies Noted

Well - another way too long layoff here at this blog. Can't say I have much excuse for the first week, but then the cable went out over the weekend - that stunk. Though with no TV or internet over the weekend, I watched movies (and Get Smart) instead, which is good. Turning over the Netflix queue, trying anyway... So here's a roundup, bi-weekly, films seen.... Typing is not too successful just now - I have a cut finger, which is annoying me quite a bit, but I am going to grind it out...

Fish Tank: 10/15 - Andrea Arnold's follow up to Red Road... Story of Mia, a 15 year old girl living in a wretched apartment with her wretched mother and ghastly little sister; she wants to be a dancer, she fights with her friends, she tries to save a horse from a family of drifters - misery abounds. Then her mother brings home a new man - Michael Fassbender, looking gorgeous, looking like a cross between Matthew McConaghey during the week or so he was a star and a downscale Heath Ledger... Things happen - she starts hanging around one of the boys with the horse, she gets ready to audition for a club as a dancer, she flirts with the boyfriend... This, needless to say, goes badly. But for all the misery on display, it's not precisely a downer of a film - Mia is too feisty, the actress playing her is riveting, Fassbender comes off as a budding star (as he has in the other films I've seen him in) - Arnold has a good eye, and a tough minded and direct approach to the material. And - as someone said, in a review or article or post somewhere a few months ago, when it was on the festival circuit - Arnold presents an unapologetic vision of female desire in the film. Her characters ogle Fassbender, and so does the camera...

Crazy Heart: 10/15 - Jeff Bridges vehicle, and let's hope it wins him an oscar. The story is not unfamiliar - aging country star, down on his luck, drinking himself to death, meets a lady, younger and livelier, and it sort of brings him back around. But he's still a drunk and soon enough something will happen to screw things up - though the film departs from the formula somewhat in allowing people something like a happy ending. Probably most surprising - a happy ending without a couple - that you don't see so much, not in this country. The film is best served by its actors - Bridges and Duvall and Colin Farrell all turn in great work, Bridges carrying the film, the other two providing clean detailed character turns... Maggie Gyllenhaal, though gorgeous and very likable, is a bit outclassed - though her character seems a little underwritten as well. She's got a bigger role than Farrell, say, but doesn't seem to be anywhere nearly as sharply written - she's just a bit too much of a device here... Shame... You get hints in the film (Ebert mentions one, a turn of a phrase that indicates his ability) or why this younger, more together woman goes for old drunk Bad Blake - both what he offers and what kind of person she is to be drawn to him - but they aren't developed... or she doesn't sell them - I'm not sure who to blame... But overall - it's a neat little film, that twists its formulae here and there in ways that give it real juice. (Farrell's character; the separate happy endings, as it were...) And finally - it is a pretty explicit riff on Jeff Bridges' career - full of Lebowski references, to name one - the bowling alley he plays in; picking his glasses out of a trash can; the "barley pop" line ("oat soda" in Lebowski)....

A Town Called Panic: 8/15 - amusing little Belgian animation about three roommates, cowboy, Indian and horse - cowboy and indian want to buy a present for horse - order 50 bricks, but get 50 million; this ruins their house, and when they rebuild them, fish start stealing their walls - hijinks follow. Surreal and amusing, but probably better suited for TV. As an ongoing series, it's one I think I'd watch...

The Last Station: 7/15 - Polite, sometimes interesting biopic about the last days of Tolstoy, from a Jay Parini novel. Secretary arrives - a naive young man, a vegetarian (and celibate and a virgin) - he will serve the master. He will also spy on everyone for everyone. Instead he is caught in the power struggle between the countess and Tolstoy's associates. This is very one sided, as the Tolstoyans are all monsters (twirling their mustaches and stealing the poor man's copyright from his loving family) - while she is a long suffering (though somewhat histrionic) wife, etc... There is much drama, the kid gets paid, Tolstoy dies, the actors get to ham it up (with inevitable - and deserved, don't get me wrong - oscar nominations) - not much is made of the fact that it is 1910 and Russia has 7 years of this nonsense left before things get really wild... I don't know if there is much to say pro or con about the film - there do seem to be some ideas hiding in the margins (all those camera; gramophones and ticker tapes, the modern world creeping into furthermost Russia), but they seem pretty incidental; I don't see much point in the film's existence other than providing Plummer and Mirren with juicy roles - though that's not to be discounted.... Unfortunately, the most substantial reaction I had to the film was irritation at the constantly moving camera. I suppose it's par for the course in mainstream films - the camera roves and drifts round and round endlessly - but to no purpose at all. The best you can hope for is a shot that draws your attention to different objects in turn - but most of the objects turn out to be meaningless as well. All the action is in the words and the actors delivering them - but the camera won't stay still and let them do their thing - or even just follow them around... the movements are gratuitous, distracting and pointless. It makes me mad! The only time it stopped was for obvious second unit work - landscape shots, that sort of thing - and closeups in extreme shallow depth of field, where moving the camera would have put the actor's face out of focus. The only thing worse than the endless meaningless motion was when the director hit on the Utterly Unprecedented Device of shooting a Violent Argument with a wobbly handheld camera - great heavens! why has no one ever thought of doing that before? Anyway... it's pointless to complain... but reminds you rather sharply of the difference between contemporary art films (in all their shapes) and contemporary - whatever this is - prestige pictures....

As for DVDs? I had to watch the Big Lebowski again - it gets better every time, smarter, more moving, and funny as hell... a couple more Langs - Return of Frank James, which while a fine movie, seems the most generic of the Langs I've seen - a very well executed old fashioned western. It seems to have established Lang's ability to work on American genre pictures, and the ones that come after it are more individualized... like The Woman in the Window - a superb little noir, with a strange twist in the tail - that - I should save for another post to talk about - it seems to be doing a couple things at once, and it's hard to describe them without rather massive spoilage... And finally - though I can't quite force4 myself to watch it all the way through all that much, I find it awful tempting to put Inglourious Basterds in and watch scenes at random...