With the controversy certain only to get steeper as fewer and fewer slots remain for more and more of everyone else's favorite movies, let us waste no time in returning to the intrepid duty before us, that of listing The Key Grip's choices of the 100 best of his first 2000 critically watched films. We left off with position number 90.
90. Das Boot (1981). "These guys didn't know anything about international affairs," said movie critic F. X. Feeney about this film, as part of an interview for a documentary about the Z-channel. "All they knew was each other and their submarine--and it's kind of heartbreaking to think that the giant thumb from the Monty Python sketch is about to come straight down on their heads." Ain't it the truth.
A group of forty-nine Kriegsmarine recruits, many of them too green to bear the commissioning ceremony on deck without getting seasick, are placed aboard a German U-boat and put to sea, at the precise moment that the British have cracked the Enigma codes and will henceforth know the sailors' every move. In this classic hunter-becomes-the-hunted suspense piece, the crew dodges every possible peril from storms to depth-charges to the capricious folly of their own government, until both they and the audience are so weary and exhausted that their inevitable end descends upon us all as something not unlike a blessing.
Most people familiar with this film are keenly aware of the razor-sharp acting, the delicate balance of cinematic art with grim realism, and especially the astonishingly claustrophobic cinematography, which cynches this movie's place in line with its handling of the most memorable scene: a deep dive in which the structural rivets holding the sub together begin popping out and sailing around inside the sub like bullets. What most people don't know is that, as long as the U.S. version of the film runs (2:29 for the theatrical release; a whopping 3:29 for the director's cut / video release), the German version of the project actually runs significantly longer, and was shown as a television miniseries.
89. The Verdict (1982). In what is easily the pinnacle performance of his career, Paul Newman is Attorney Frank Galvin, a washed-up and semi-functional alcoholic trial attorney who has had but four cases in the previous three years -- and lost them all. In a final act of pity Galvin's long-time mentor Mickey Morrissey (Jack Warden) arranges to have Galvin represent the husband and sister of a woman who will spend the rest of her life in a persistent vegetative state as a result of negligence at the largest and wealthiest catholic-run hospital in Boston. Told to settle the case quickly and live off the proceeds, Galvin becomes emotionally invested in the victim's plight and decides to bring the case to court.
There follows the very sort of desperate struggle against all possible setbacks that only a down-on-his-luck achoholic can experience without even trying: His own clients threaten to sue him, his expert witness turns out to be African-American, the judge actively undermines his case at every turn, even his girlfriend (played by Charlotte Rampling) proves a far greater challenge than Galvin has quite signed himself up for. Many films are better coutroom dramas (cf. Anatomy of a Murder, Twelve Angry Men, Presumed Innocent, Witness for the Prosecution), but The Verdict isn't really about the courtroom at all: It's about that very peculiar flavor of redemption that comes when a person stops worrying about the mark he'll leave to history, and starts worrying about simply doing that which he knows is right, as best he can.
88. Citizen Kane (1941). Memo to the people over at AFI: You almost had it right. You only missed this movie's rightful place on the list of great films by--what, eighty-seven spaces? A great and enduring tale of power and accomplishment failing to bring happiness, this loose biography of William Randolph Hurst is hobbled by too much ham-acting, too many side-stories, too much length, and way too much soundtrack (even by early 1940s standards, and that's saying something), to come anywhere close to the top slot--at least in this author's humble view.
Still, no movie afficianado's card is punched without knowing what "ROSEBUD" means, and if you're sacked out on the couch on a rainy Sunday afternoon, or perhaps recovering from the flu, you definitely owe it to yourself to see what all the shouting is about. I believe I've said too much already. Let's move on.
87. Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989). There isn't a single movie by Steven Soderburgh that doesn't probably belong on somewhere on this list. Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, The Limey, Bubble, and The Good German come to mind without even breaking a sweat. But of all his directorial accomplishments, none have ever quite recaptured the edgy, something's-not-right-here resonance of this, his writer/director debut film. Andie McDowell plays the part of Ann Bishop Mullany, a bored and disaffected goody-goody whose lawyer-husband John (Peter Gallagher) happens to be sleeping with Ann's sister Charlotte (Laura San Giacomo). When John's best friend Graham (James Spader) moves to town, Mullany takes it upon herself to show the newcomer around and make sure he's comfortable--whereupon she discovers just how far afield from her own visions of a well-adjusted homelife the rest of the world can be.
We forgive the relatively contrived and straightforward resolution because so much of what goes into it is so authentic that a straightforward resolution seems only fitting. In the real world there would be no big "gotcha" reversal, of course: Graham would be found to have done things he shouldn't have; John would be found to have done things he shouldn't have; Charlotte would be found to have done things she shouldn't have -- and Ann would be left to stew in the juices of wondering if she'd missed out by not doing things she shouldn't have.
86. Mystic River (2003). Could anyone ever have thought that Clint Eastwood the director would someday surpass Clint Eastwood the actor, in the annals of expert Hollywood filmmaking? Well one person who might have is Eastwood himself, a man whose directorial prowess began not insubstantially in 1971 with Play Misty for Me, a thoroughly unexpected suspense-thriller in which Eastwood plays a disc jockey who is befriended, bedded, and ultimately stalked by a comely admirer, a full generation before Glenn Close was boiling little kids' rabbits on their fathers' stoves.
Since that time, Eastwood has directed any number of the sorts of pictures a person might associate with him generally--from High Plains Drifter to Eiger Sanction to Outlaw Jose Wales to Sudden Impact to Pale Rider. But a funny thing happened on the way to Eastwood becoming a tried-and-true action director: He grew up all over again, beginning in 1988 with his stunning direction of the impeccably done bio-pic on the tragic life and times of Charlie Parker, Bird.
Since that "breakthrough" effort (can a man who'd already won two Oscars and directed himself in Jose Wales really be described at that late date as breaking through?), Eastwood has more-and-more consistently gravitated to serious works of film and left the kiddie stuff behind for the kiddies. From White Hunter, Black Heart to Million Dollar Baby -- with a few notable exceptions -- Eastwood's golden age has indeed been golden, and it is to the betterment of us all that the script for Mystic River wasn't shown to him until this new era in his career had found him, content and well-fed and eager to make something genuinely important and good.
Three childhood friends who've grown apart as adults, Jimmy, Dave, and Sean (Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon) are brought back in contact with each other when Jimmy's daughter is abducted and brutally murdered. But with all three men knowing the desperate childhood episode that scarred Dave for life, and knowing the specific ways in which it scarred him, the other two are left with the increasingly uneasy and difficult-to-shake suspicion that the killer might be literally in their midst. Add to this palpable undercurrent of unease the fact that the bereaved father is a hardened criminal, while the third friend is a cop charged with investigating the crime, then sprinkle a generous dose of marital boredom and possible infidelity involving the three friends' spouses, bake the whole thing at a stagnant, ninety-three degree southside-Boston summer, and what comes out of the oven is a noire thriller stretched so tight with bad feelings and good acting that you can almost ping it with your finger.
85. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Master-Director-Extraordinare Robert Altman's only contribution to this list weighs-in at number eighty-five, held down mostly by a positively infuriating soundtrack, in which Leonard Cohen punctuates every scene by singing a plot narration over the top of the events themselves. The movie overcomes this handicap, somehow, to engage the viewer despite his better efforts not to be engaged by a story that should be at once so banal and so unsympathetic.
A small-time player and possible con artist named John McCabe (Warren Beatty) settles in a dreary Pacific-Northwest lumber town with the dream of making his fortune by opening a whorehouse. When McCabe is befriended and be-partnered against his will by the prim and priggish Constance Miller (Julie Christie), both he and we expect that the whorehouse's days are numbered--but Mrs. Miller surprises us all by, instead of shutting the business, running it like one. Patrons are made to bathe before seeing the staff, and the facilities are kept clean and orderly and dignified.
It all goes so well that before long McCabe and Mrs. Miller are expanding into other forms of entertainment, building on to their hotel and their other properties with the very sort of recklessly high profile that leaves all but the least experienced filmgoer feeling an ever-tightening knot inside his stomach. As had to happen sooner or later, the thriving business attracts the attention of the greedy railroad barons, who upon finding themselves rebuffed in their efforts to painlessly buy our lead characters out, turn to contract killers to settle the matter for them in the grandest of climactic, western-movie styles.
The final scene, in which McCabe desperately tries to take on the well-trained and numerous killers as he trudges from building to building through three-foot drifts -- all while wearing a woman's fur coat -- is of course the most iconic and memorable. But for me the most hair-raising scene by far has to be the one in which the youngest, and by that measure most menacing of the rabble confronts a good-natured and benign cowboy on a footbridge. Altman never made another western, before or since, which bears further testament to the high reaches of his directing craft: he seems almost to have done it on a larf. And what he ended up with -- whenever Leonard Cohen deigns to leave the rest of us alone and let us watch it -- is one of the finest westerns ever made.
84. Punch-Drunk Love (2002). "I've been watching a lot of fucked-up movies lately," I remarked to a dear friend once at the dinner table, not too long ago. "Oh, you mean like Punch-Drunk Love?" he replied -- after which of course I immediately had to race out and acquire Punch-Drunk Love.
Well he was right.
Adam Sandler is Barry Eagan in this Paul Thomas Anderson-directed tour of the touchingly surreal, and Barry Eagan's life is nothing if not touchingly surreal. Harried into a self-despising spinelessness by his eight loquatious and pushy sisters, Barry lives the barest of existences in a dreary and under-furnished apartment, despite the fact that he also operates a successful business selling bulk loads of toilet plungers to casinos and hotels. In a misguided effort to help her brother, one of the sisters arranges for Barry to meet a friend of hers from work, Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), but unfortunately not before Barry finds himself extorted by the woman he has just impulsively contacted on a phone-sex line.
Along the way to closing the big sale, extricating himself from the phone-sex blackmailers, wooing his new girl, and resolving his terribly conflicted feelings toward his sisters, Barry also finds time to pursue a scheme to amass proofs-of-purchase from containers of pudding in order to exchange them for frequent flier miles, and to rehabilitate a harmonium that was placed in front of him on the sidewalk by one of the witnesses to a ghastly car accident.
At all events this is a fine, fine film -- probably not as humorous as those versed in Adam Sandler pictures are expecting, but funny where it needs and wants to be, and not anywhere that it doesn't. It also features some genuinely arresting performances by all the major players involved, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor whose talent is scandalously under-represented by this overall list.
83. The Hunt for Red October (1990). It is 1985 and Cptn. Marko Ramius (Sean Connery), an aging veteran of the Soviet Navy, has just been placed in charge of a new and ultra-secret nuclear submarine, capable of silent propulsion using a hydro-magneto, or "caterpillar" drive. Despairing over the recent death of his wife, Ramius decides to break his orders and leave the protective confines of his scheduled war-games exercises in the North Sea, whereafter he finds himself hotly pursued by the bulk of the Atlantic fleets of both the US and Russian Navies, at least one of whom is actively trying to destroy the sub and all aboard. Alec Baldwin plays the part of Jack Ryan, a CIA analyst who persuades his bosses that Ramius' intentions might not yet be clear, and whose reward for said persuation is to be sent directly into the teeth of the crsis in the storm-torn and leaden mid-Atlantic.
The supporting cast is just this side of un-assemblable, the Russian "side" including Stellan Skarsgard as an overconfident rival sub captain and Joss Ackland as the Russian Ambassador to the United States, with Sam Niell stealing entire scenes in the role of Ramius' trusted second-in-command. Meanwhile the Americans are represented by James Earl Jones as (an eerily Colin-Powell-like) Director of the CIA, Richard Jordan as the head of the NSA, Scott Glenn as the captain of the fast-attack submarine USS Dallas, Jeffrey Jones as a consultant brought in to diagnose the grainy black and white photographs of Ramius' sub, and Fred Thompson -- yes, that Fred Thompson -- in a memorably form-fitting role as the shoot-first, shoot-later captain of an aircraft carrier positioned at the fulcruum of Ramias' projected path of approach to American waters.
As with all Tom Clancy-adapted films, the military mumbo-jumbo is kept to a minimum and also totally, down-to-the-detail authentic: there really is such a thing as a caterpillar drive, and the US Navy really did "fiddle around with it for a few years, and couldn't make it work." John McTiernan's direction is straightforward and unpretentious, wisely choosing to let his astonishing cavalcade of stars carry the scenes for him. The set decorations are universally enthralling, the cinematography is just tense enough to strip our defenses, the soundtrack knows exactly when to shut up and when to clobber us over the heads, and the near-total absence of women (they get a grand-total of three spoken lines of dialogue among them, two from a flight attendant), is almost forgiveable given the genre if not the time. Of all the high-tech cold-war thrillers, be they Clancy vehicles or otherwise, Red October is without a doubt the standard bearer: required viewing for anyone whose pallete includes a thirst for depictions of the cat-and-mouse espionage that unfolded for more than a generation between the nuclear superpowers.
82. Gozu (2003). "If the end-titles roll right now," said a close friend of mine with whom I was recently watching this movie, "I'm gonna run to the nearest living thing, and kill it." And then the end-titles rolled. Director Takashi Miike (Audition, City of Lost Souls, Visitor-Q, Ichi the Killer) outdoes even his own rarified achievements for the disturbing and surreal with this barely coherent diorama of senseless violence, bizarre encounters, creepy sex and inexplicable rituals.
Minami (Hideki Sone) is a Yakuza underling, tasked by the top boss with the job of rubbing-out his own mentor, Ozaki (Sho Aikawa) after the latter begins acting embarrassingly derranged. Ordered to drive Ozaki to Yokahama, Minami briefly believes that he has killed Ozaki by accident after suddenly slamming on the brakes, only to emerge from a coffee shop fifteen minutes later to find Ozaki's body is gone from the back seat of the car. He enlists the help of a passel of shadowy and increasingly odd-behaving accomplices in his increasingly frantic efforts to recover Ozaki, only to find himself confronted by a comely young female (Kamika Yohino) who insists that she is the living reincarnation of Ozaki and "proves" it by recounting several intimate details of the two men's friendship.
It should suffice as proof that things only get stranger from there that the US title of the film, Gozu, translates from Romanji as "cow head." This is probably a film best saved for that special mood -- in this case, the mood for something completely inscrutable and shockingly disturbing at the same time -- but make no mistake, it's a virtuoso effort on the part of all parties concerned; the sort of picture that doesn't just get inside your head and stay there but seriously considers charging you rent to share the space with it.
81. Good Will Hunting (1997). If Richard Ford only ever wrote one truly good book, and DaVinci ever only painted one truly great painting, then it may also be true that Robin Williams, despite all his promise as an unimaginably versitile and quick-witted entertainer, has only ever filled one truly great starring role in a motion picture. But it's okay, because that role -- Dr. Sean McGuire, the therapist tasked with mending the violent temper and unresolved childhood of a young super-genius discovered mopping the floors at MIT -- is truly one for the ages.
Matt Damon is of course stunning in the "title" role of Will Hunting, the troubled math-whiz whose future is as luminous as his past is ugly, and supporting roles by Stellan Skarsgard and Minne Driver lend just enough conflict to the lives of the two aforementioned leads, respectively, that the film forecloses any risk of saccharine feel-good dismissal. Gus Van Sandt, in the first of three directorial credits to make this overall list, places a carefully tuned emphasis on the Boston setting -- notably including that distinctly sharp and timing-dependent humor that Beantowners are so peerless at. ("When are you going to pay your tab?" "I got the winning lottery ticket right here." "I don't think that will cover it." "Yeah, well, it'll pay for your sex-change operation.")
After some mostly preliminary dealings with the outside world, the movie finds its footing in the fourth reel, when Hunting's childhood traumas and discomfort with intimacy risk destroying both his newfound opportunities and his newfound love, and the job of saving him falls to McGuire, whose impulse not to push the youngster too hard has freshened painful recollections of his own. Worth it for the final line of dialogue in the film, alone.
Next up: Films 71-80. Stay tuned....
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Sunday, May 3, 2009
The 100 Greatest Movies (part one)
My love for movies started out as an arranged marriage.
Growing up in a household first too frugal and later to remote for cable television, I was relegated to watching mostly PBS and a scrappy independent channel originating from New York City, WPIX-11. From PBS I learned to be fascinated with the 1960s and 70s (and with Southeast Asia in particular, which I have visited as an adult three times), and from WPIX I learned to love the New York Yankees--when they were playing. When they weren't playing, however, the programmers at the scrappy independent channel had a bit of a dilemma, in the form of a three-and-a-half hour block of prime time that couldn't be filled with reliably scheduled programming, since that programming would only be preempted when the pinstripers retook the field. The obvious solution was to show movies.
It could've been much worse: As a completely independent station in the richest market on earth, WPIX had the unusual combination of freedom and deep pockets with which to show outstanding movies in general, added to which I happened to be growing up in the aftermath of the early 1970s, the only true heyday of the (American) motion picture industry. I didn't just learn to love movies, in other words; I learned to love good movies--which is not always or even generally the same thing.
I spent my twenties repeatedly crowing about how much I loved movies, but without the kind of fully versed exposure to the medium that it would take to engage in a serious discussion of the subject--a self-embarrassment that was only driven home to me when, on a lazy spring day in 1999, a dear friend of mine and his wife asked me what my number-one, all-time favorite movie was, and after a moment's befuddled hesitation I said Apollo 13. Obviously I was going to have to get a lot more systematic about this list-making business, if ever I were to be taken seriously as an authority on film. It was in this spirit that I set out, ten years ago almost to the day, to amass and view a collection of the world's best movies -- all the best movies, regardless of origin, content, period or style -- so that if ever I were asked again what my number-one, all-time favorite movie was, I wouldn't have to say Apollo 13. From my WPIX-viewing days I knew it wasn't going to be easy.
Part of the problem with answering such a question is of course the question itself: One can't really compare Unforgiven to Brazil, no matter how technical the heuristic--it would be like trying to choose a favorite between Brahm's Second Symphony and Fleetwood Mac's Rumors album. Part of the problem, too, is that the world's collection of great films is inherently unwatchable. You don't set out to view every oil-on-canvass painting worth hanging in a museum because, well, you can't. Period. There's just too many of them.
But with the recognition that neither of these limitations has ever stopped anyone before (and that neither of these explanations would negate the embarassment of having ever said Apollo 13), I've spent these past ten years gradually assembling a heuristic in my own mind that would at once be personal and intellectually defensible. I've seen during that time about two thousand potentially interesting or important films--as well as some that were conspicuously neither--and devoted a sizeable chunk of my non-viewing time to thinking about exactly how a less awkward answer to the question might come together.
To begin with, it would have to be a list. There can be no single-movie answer to the question; I don't care how many times you've seen Casablanca. Every movie is different and too many of them are too good. The list would have to be arbitrarily short (so as to eliminate the risk that it might be arbitrarily long), and it would have to be numbered--if only because other people would dismiss the absence of numbering as a cop-out.
It would also have to be mine. If I didn't think The Graduate was one of the hundred greatest movies of all time--and I don't--then The Graduate wouldn't find itself breathlessly added at the last minute to preempt that criticism of the list. If a person wants to see a list that has been vetted by an army of film critics, or a list that has been vetted by a non-scientific court of public opinion, those two lists are readily available, and re-creating either of them here would be a waste of bandwidth. If a famous director ended up with no titles on the list, that would have to be okay. If a ubiquitous movie (or two, or three) didn't make the cut, that would have to be okay too. Only my own opinions were allowed to matter.
On the other hand, I also harbor a deep (some would say depraved) adoration for a long list of movies that are clearly not entitled to the mantle of greatness by, well, anyone's standard. Including any of these--even as a nod to the simple pleasure and purely arbitrary nature of such an exercise to begin with--would end the experiment by ending its readership. A balance would have to be struck between the hundred movies that I watch over and over, and the hundred movies that my asshole friends would let me get away with posting to this blog.
Here, then, is the first installment of that list: the ten movies from my first 2,000 critically viewed films, that merit positions 91-100.
100. Bottle Rocket (1996). Wes Anderson's directorial debut is superior both in narrative structure and in laugh-value to his later, more widely known works such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, and way superior to Darjeeling Limited--a movie which is perfect for people who love Wes Anderson, but wish he was a no-talent hack who doesn't know how to end his own films. Brothers Luke and Owen Wilson play hapless, shiftless, vaguely spoiled friends who are fresh out of school and decide to make their mark on the world by launching what just may be the least competent crime spree in history. Kudos to James Caan, in a role at once perfect for him and so unexpected as to leave me and my friends staring open-mouthed at the screen with our hands on our heads. No one who claims to be a fan of heist movies can hold a conversation about the subject without first proving that he has seen this movie.
99. The Sweet Hereafter (1997). Veteran Ian Holm and then-eighteen-year-old Sarah Polley team up to perform an arresting tale of a small Canadian town slowly tearing itself apart in the litigious aftermath of a horrifying school bus accident. Into this already transfixing story director Atom Egoyan weaves equally poignent threads from different chronologies and different narrative points-of-view, covering topics ranging from a father's powerlessness to stop the downward descent of his troubled daughter, to the taboo of incest. Special recognition is deserved to Ms. Polley who, with only bit-part supporting actress roles to her previous credit, stepped forward to fill the enormous shoes of the shattered and yet still self-empowered young heroine, and sang all of the vocals in the soundtrack--including a genuinely hair-raising rendition of The Tragically Hip's haunting tune, "Courage," for the end-titles.
98. Three Days of the Condor (1975). Robert Redford plays Joseph Turner, an improbably (if also believably) bookish and un-macho CIA analyst who returns to his nondescript Manhattan station office to find that the rest of the staff have all been brutally murdered. There follows a cat-and-mouse between Turner and any number of different would-be neutralizers, some of whom begin as friends and others of whom don't seem to work for the same set of people who are trying to kill him. As with so many great 1970s conspiracy flicks, nothing is quite what it seems and nothing is clear or predictable until the very end. This picture would have deserved a place on the list for no other reason than its status as claimant to one of the truly great scenes in cinema--the oft-copied confrontation between Turner and his arch-nemesis, Station Director Wicks, in which Turner surreptitiously enters Wicks' house in the middle of the night and summons him from his upstairs bedroom by playing the stereo as loud as it will go. Look the other way for the scenes glorifying Turner's decision to kidnap and restrain Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway); look the other way and plug your ears when Dunaway's character falls in love with him for doing it. It was the seventies, after all.
97. Ben Hur (1959). There's little to say about this picture and its still heart-quicking chariot race centerpiece that hasn't already been said twice, so instead I'm going to tell you a story about the time I went to see it in 70mm at the Senator Theater in Baltimore: My next-door neighbor, having agreed to drive in return for his ticket, sat stoically through the entire 212 minute story of "Juda Ben Hur," without uttering a sound. Then, when the end-titles were rolling up the screen, he turned to me and said, "So, they're not going to show the part where he sells Jesus?" True story. The book was written by General Lew Wallace, incidentally--and the only reason I know that is because he was from my mother's home-town of Crawfordsville, Indiana, in which there is now a Ben Hur Theater, a Ben Hur Pizzaria, a Ben Hur Dry Cleaner's, and a Ben Hur Day Care. Which you may imagine is a little arresting for a town plopped unceremoniously in the middle of a vast and featureless sea of bean fields.
96. Dirty Pretty Things (2002). Stephen Frears comfortably out-does his previous works (My Beautiful Laundrette, Everything is Illuminated), to craft a sort of "low-current" suspense movie in which the charge of the thing emanates more from our own capacities for empathy and dread than from anything specifically happening to the characters on the screen. Audrey Tauto and Chiwetel Ejiofor play two illegal aliens who work in a posh London hotel and who eventually become entangled in an unsavory enterprise being orchestrated by the hotel's dark and menacing manager, Senior Juan, played with Oscar-worthy pitch perfection by Segi Lopez. You know you've surrendered your disbelief to this picture when, about thirty minutes into it, you find yourself thinking that deportation would be a comparatively benign outcome for the two protagonists. Hat-tip to Nathan Larsen, too, for the film's engaging and yet magnificently suffused and un-obtrusive soundtrack.
95. Rocky (1976). We all know the plot summary by now: A down-and-out fighter named Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), living in the toughest neighborhoods of Philadelphia and making ends meet by breaking peoples' legs for a loan shark, unexpectedly finds love at the precise moment that the World Heavyweight Champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) unveils a plan to commemorate the bicentennial by plucking an unknown boxer from a random gym and giving him a shot at the title. This would have been a good movie -- indeed a very good movie -- if Balboa had come out of nowhere and won the fight. It is the fact that he didn't, at the end didn't even care, that makes this film difficult even to think about without choking up a little: The magic of the picture was that Rocky knew who he was. He knew he was never going to beat Apollo Creed. All he wanted was to go the distance. "There ain't gonna be no rematch," Creed whispers into Balboa's ear when the fight is over. And Rocky, equally muted, whispers back, "I don't want one." ...Did I mention that this film is hard to think about without choking up?
94. Sling Blade (1996). Most supposedly underrated actors are either rated that way by everyone or not very talented. Billy Bob Thornton is an exception, and one need look no further for the proof than his virtuouso performance in the leading role of this film--never mind the fact that he also wrote and directed it. The movie begins with a collegiate journalist interviewing mentally impaired killer Karl Childers (Thornton), soon to be released from the instution in which he has spent the bulk of his life after having slain his mother and her lover as a child. Childers settles in a nearby small town, where he befriends a precocious and trusting young boy whose stepfather seems to be slipping further and further into alcoholism and disempowered rage. The shockingly violent denoument of the film, at once unexpected and unavoidable, leaves the viewer feeling wind-blown and spent--as if he, too, had just emerged from the nightmare of domestic abuse. Mulitple tracks by French Canadian musician Daniel Lanois serve only to underscore the minor-note, vaguely off-kilter feel of the project, about which not a single fiber is out of place.
93. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). One of the last, and comfortably the greatest of the "spaghetti westerns," this Sergio Leone-directed Clint Eastwood vehicle manages somehow to spin sympathetic narrative from a premise consisting only of a psychopathic bounty hunter in pursuit of a bank robber and his con-artist wingman. Along the way the film also makes room for an ongoing tone-poem about the Civil War, a significant if not altogether credible statement about honor among thieves, and more than a little humor at the expense of each of the title characters. But as memorable as the film is--especially the final scene at the cemetery--the highest accolades are reserved for that iconic and still infectious hook-line in the soundtrack. Ask yourself: When, since 1966, has a stand-up comedian, anywhere on planet earth, told a joke in which a stern and disapproving family member stands stoically in a doorway, without pausing in his delivery to hum to the audience, "DOO'wee-DOO'wee-DOOOOOO, wah-WAH-wah"?
92. The Station Agent (2003). This Sundance triple prize-winner is a simple and unfailingly heartwarming tale about finding one's footing in social circumstances outside of one's control. Fin McBride (Peter Dinklage) is a self-alienated trainspotter born with dwarfism who, upon the death of his only friend and benefactor at a railway hobby store in Hoboken, finds himself totally alone -- and also the sole inheritor of a railway station in rural New Jersey. Fin moves to the station, whereupon he is befriended against his will by a wide assortment of appropriately flawed and ecclectic characters, including accident-prone Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), loquatious lunch-truck drivin' Joe (Bobby Cannavale), and the consciously innocent schoolgirl Cleo (Raven Goodwin). For the first three reels the film is content to dish-up a steady diet of inoffensive humor at the expense of the lead character, whose desire "just to be left alone" keeps somehow getting harder and harder for him to realize. When the movie takes its obligatory turn in the direction of just how it would feel for Fin to get his wish, our hearts melt in spite of our best efforts to dismiss the whole thing as too predictable. The cherry on top is director Thomas McCarthy's down-to-the-microsecond awareness of precisely the right moment to end his movie and roll the credits. You'll have to watch it to see what I mean.
91. The Silence of the Lambs (1991). We can fix the small problem that horror movies aren't supposed to win the Academy Award for Best Picture by calling this film something other than a horror movie. We can fix the small problem that movies with this much unspeakable violence and unnerving terror aren't supposed to carry grown-up cache, by talking about the stellar, top-of-their-form performances by Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. We can shake-off the goosebumps of the unexpected switcheroo that lifts the curtain on the film's climactic scene, as something we should've seen coming. What we can't do--won't do--is ever forget exactly where we were and who we were with, the first time we saw this tour de force of suspense and cold-blooded terror. Audiences don't yelp in theaters very often. People yelp after seeing this one twice.
Next up: Films 71-90. Stay tuned.
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Growing up in a household first too frugal and later to remote for cable television, I was relegated to watching mostly PBS and a scrappy independent channel originating from New York City, WPIX-11. From PBS I learned to be fascinated with the 1960s and 70s (and with Southeast Asia in particular, which I have visited as an adult three times), and from WPIX I learned to love the New York Yankees--when they were playing. When they weren't playing, however, the programmers at the scrappy independent channel had a bit of a dilemma, in the form of a three-and-a-half hour block of prime time that couldn't be filled with reliably scheduled programming, since that programming would only be preempted when the pinstripers retook the field. The obvious solution was to show movies.
It could've been much worse: As a completely independent station in the richest market on earth, WPIX had the unusual combination of freedom and deep pockets with which to show outstanding movies in general, added to which I happened to be growing up in the aftermath of the early 1970s, the only true heyday of the (American) motion picture industry. I didn't just learn to love movies, in other words; I learned to love good movies--which is not always or even generally the same thing.
I spent my twenties repeatedly crowing about how much I loved movies, but without the kind of fully versed exposure to the medium that it would take to engage in a serious discussion of the subject--a self-embarrassment that was only driven home to me when, on a lazy spring day in 1999, a dear friend of mine and his wife asked me what my number-one, all-time favorite movie was, and after a moment's befuddled hesitation I said Apollo 13. Obviously I was going to have to get a lot more systematic about this list-making business, if ever I were to be taken seriously as an authority on film. It was in this spirit that I set out, ten years ago almost to the day, to amass and view a collection of the world's best movies -- all the best movies, regardless of origin, content, period or style -- so that if ever I were asked again what my number-one, all-time favorite movie was, I wouldn't have to say Apollo 13. From my WPIX-viewing days I knew it wasn't going to be easy.
Part of the problem with answering such a question is of course the question itself: One can't really compare Unforgiven to Brazil, no matter how technical the heuristic--it would be like trying to choose a favorite between Brahm's Second Symphony and Fleetwood Mac's Rumors album. Part of the problem, too, is that the world's collection of great films is inherently unwatchable. You don't set out to view every oil-on-canvass painting worth hanging in a museum because, well, you can't. Period. There's just too many of them.
But with the recognition that neither of these limitations has ever stopped anyone before (and that neither of these explanations would negate the embarassment of having ever said Apollo 13), I've spent these past ten years gradually assembling a heuristic in my own mind that would at once be personal and intellectually defensible. I've seen during that time about two thousand potentially interesting or important films--as well as some that were conspicuously neither--and devoted a sizeable chunk of my non-viewing time to thinking about exactly how a less awkward answer to the question might come together.
To begin with, it would have to be a list. There can be no single-movie answer to the question; I don't care how many times you've seen Casablanca. Every movie is different and too many of them are too good. The list would have to be arbitrarily short (so as to eliminate the risk that it might be arbitrarily long), and it would have to be numbered--if only because other people would dismiss the absence of numbering as a cop-out.
It would also have to be mine. If I didn't think The Graduate was one of the hundred greatest movies of all time--and I don't--then The Graduate wouldn't find itself breathlessly added at the last minute to preempt that criticism of the list. If a person wants to see a list that has been vetted by an army of film critics, or a list that has been vetted by a non-scientific court of public opinion, those two lists are readily available, and re-creating either of them here would be a waste of bandwidth. If a famous director ended up with no titles on the list, that would have to be okay. If a ubiquitous movie (or two, or three) didn't make the cut, that would have to be okay too. Only my own opinions were allowed to matter.
On the other hand, I also harbor a deep (some would say depraved) adoration for a long list of movies that are clearly not entitled to the mantle of greatness by, well, anyone's standard. Including any of these--even as a nod to the simple pleasure and purely arbitrary nature of such an exercise to begin with--would end the experiment by ending its readership. A balance would have to be struck between the hundred movies that I watch over and over, and the hundred movies that my asshole friends would let me get away with posting to this blog.
Here, then, is the first installment of that list: the ten movies from my first 2,000 critically viewed films, that merit positions 91-100.
100. Bottle Rocket (1996). Wes Anderson's directorial debut is superior both in narrative structure and in laugh-value to his later, more widely known works such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, and way superior to Darjeeling Limited--a movie which is perfect for people who love Wes Anderson, but wish he was a no-talent hack who doesn't know how to end his own films. Brothers Luke and Owen Wilson play hapless, shiftless, vaguely spoiled friends who are fresh out of school and decide to make their mark on the world by launching what just may be the least competent crime spree in history. Kudos to James Caan, in a role at once perfect for him and so unexpected as to leave me and my friends staring open-mouthed at the screen with our hands on our heads. No one who claims to be a fan of heist movies can hold a conversation about the subject without first proving that he has seen this movie.
99. The Sweet Hereafter (1997). Veteran Ian Holm and then-eighteen-year-old Sarah Polley team up to perform an arresting tale of a small Canadian town slowly tearing itself apart in the litigious aftermath of a horrifying school bus accident. Into this already transfixing story director Atom Egoyan weaves equally poignent threads from different chronologies and different narrative points-of-view, covering topics ranging from a father's powerlessness to stop the downward descent of his troubled daughter, to the taboo of incest. Special recognition is deserved to Ms. Polley who, with only bit-part supporting actress roles to her previous credit, stepped forward to fill the enormous shoes of the shattered and yet still self-empowered young heroine, and sang all of the vocals in the soundtrack--including a genuinely hair-raising rendition of The Tragically Hip's haunting tune, "Courage," for the end-titles.
98. Three Days of the Condor (1975). Robert Redford plays Joseph Turner, an improbably (if also believably) bookish and un-macho CIA analyst who returns to his nondescript Manhattan station office to find that the rest of the staff have all been brutally murdered. There follows a cat-and-mouse between Turner and any number of different would-be neutralizers, some of whom begin as friends and others of whom don't seem to work for the same set of people who are trying to kill him. As with so many great 1970s conspiracy flicks, nothing is quite what it seems and nothing is clear or predictable until the very end. This picture would have deserved a place on the list for no other reason than its status as claimant to one of the truly great scenes in cinema--the oft-copied confrontation between Turner and his arch-nemesis, Station Director Wicks, in which Turner surreptitiously enters Wicks' house in the middle of the night and summons him from his upstairs bedroom by playing the stereo as loud as it will go. Look the other way for the scenes glorifying Turner's decision to kidnap and restrain Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway); look the other way and plug your ears when Dunaway's character falls in love with him for doing it. It was the seventies, after all.
97. Ben Hur (1959). There's little to say about this picture and its still heart-quicking chariot race centerpiece that hasn't already been said twice, so instead I'm going to tell you a story about the time I went to see it in 70mm at the Senator Theater in Baltimore: My next-door neighbor, having agreed to drive in return for his ticket, sat stoically through the entire 212 minute story of "Juda Ben Hur," without uttering a sound. Then, when the end-titles were rolling up the screen, he turned to me and said, "So, they're not going to show the part where he sells Jesus?" True story. The book was written by General Lew Wallace, incidentally--and the only reason I know that is because he was from my mother's home-town of Crawfordsville, Indiana, in which there is now a Ben Hur Theater, a Ben Hur Pizzaria, a Ben Hur Dry Cleaner's, and a Ben Hur Day Care. Which you may imagine is a little arresting for a town plopped unceremoniously in the middle of a vast and featureless sea of bean fields.
96. Dirty Pretty Things (2002). Stephen Frears comfortably out-does his previous works (My Beautiful Laundrette, Everything is Illuminated), to craft a sort of "low-current" suspense movie in which the charge of the thing emanates more from our own capacities for empathy and dread than from anything specifically happening to the characters on the screen. Audrey Tauto and Chiwetel Ejiofor play two illegal aliens who work in a posh London hotel and who eventually become entangled in an unsavory enterprise being orchestrated by the hotel's dark and menacing manager, Senior Juan, played with Oscar-worthy pitch perfection by Segi Lopez. You know you've surrendered your disbelief to this picture when, about thirty minutes into it, you find yourself thinking that deportation would be a comparatively benign outcome for the two protagonists. Hat-tip to Nathan Larsen, too, for the film's engaging and yet magnificently suffused and un-obtrusive soundtrack.
95. Rocky (1976). We all know the plot summary by now: A down-and-out fighter named Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), living in the toughest neighborhoods of Philadelphia and making ends meet by breaking peoples' legs for a loan shark, unexpectedly finds love at the precise moment that the World Heavyweight Champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) unveils a plan to commemorate the bicentennial by plucking an unknown boxer from a random gym and giving him a shot at the title. This would have been a good movie -- indeed a very good movie -- if Balboa had come out of nowhere and won the fight. It is the fact that he didn't, at the end didn't even care, that makes this film difficult even to think about without choking up a little: The magic of the picture was that Rocky knew who he was. He knew he was never going to beat Apollo Creed. All he wanted was to go the distance. "There ain't gonna be no rematch," Creed whispers into Balboa's ear when the fight is over. And Rocky, equally muted, whispers back, "I don't want one." ...Did I mention that this film is hard to think about without choking up?
94. Sling Blade (1996). Most supposedly underrated actors are either rated that way by everyone or not very talented. Billy Bob Thornton is an exception, and one need look no further for the proof than his virtuouso performance in the leading role of this film--never mind the fact that he also wrote and directed it. The movie begins with a collegiate journalist interviewing mentally impaired killer Karl Childers (Thornton), soon to be released from the instution in which he has spent the bulk of his life after having slain his mother and her lover as a child. Childers settles in a nearby small town, where he befriends a precocious and trusting young boy whose stepfather seems to be slipping further and further into alcoholism and disempowered rage. The shockingly violent denoument of the film, at once unexpected and unavoidable, leaves the viewer feeling wind-blown and spent--as if he, too, had just emerged from the nightmare of domestic abuse. Mulitple tracks by French Canadian musician Daniel Lanois serve only to underscore the minor-note, vaguely off-kilter feel of the project, about which not a single fiber is out of place.
93. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). One of the last, and comfortably the greatest of the "spaghetti westerns," this Sergio Leone-directed Clint Eastwood vehicle manages somehow to spin sympathetic narrative from a premise consisting only of a psychopathic bounty hunter in pursuit of a bank robber and his con-artist wingman. Along the way the film also makes room for an ongoing tone-poem about the Civil War, a significant if not altogether credible statement about honor among thieves, and more than a little humor at the expense of each of the title characters. But as memorable as the film is--especially the final scene at the cemetery--the highest accolades are reserved for that iconic and still infectious hook-line in the soundtrack. Ask yourself: When, since 1966, has a stand-up comedian, anywhere on planet earth, told a joke in which a stern and disapproving family member stands stoically in a doorway, without pausing in his delivery to hum to the audience, "DOO'wee-DOO'wee-DOOOOOO, wah-WAH-wah"?
92. The Station Agent (2003). This Sundance triple prize-winner is a simple and unfailingly heartwarming tale about finding one's footing in social circumstances outside of one's control. Fin McBride (Peter Dinklage) is a self-alienated trainspotter born with dwarfism who, upon the death of his only friend and benefactor at a railway hobby store in Hoboken, finds himself totally alone -- and also the sole inheritor of a railway station in rural New Jersey. Fin moves to the station, whereupon he is befriended against his will by a wide assortment of appropriately flawed and ecclectic characters, including accident-prone Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), loquatious lunch-truck drivin' Joe (Bobby Cannavale), and the consciously innocent schoolgirl Cleo (Raven Goodwin). For the first three reels the film is content to dish-up a steady diet of inoffensive humor at the expense of the lead character, whose desire "just to be left alone" keeps somehow getting harder and harder for him to realize. When the movie takes its obligatory turn in the direction of just how it would feel for Fin to get his wish, our hearts melt in spite of our best efforts to dismiss the whole thing as too predictable. The cherry on top is director Thomas McCarthy's down-to-the-microsecond awareness of precisely the right moment to end his movie and roll the credits. You'll have to watch it to see what I mean.
91. The Silence of the Lambs (1991). We can fix the small problem that horror movies aren't supposed to win the Academy Award for Best Picture by calling this film something other than a horror movie. We can fix the small problem that movies with this much unspeakable violence and unnerving terror aren't supposed to carry grown-up cache, by talking about the stellar, top-of-their-form performances by Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. We can shake-off the goosebumps of the unexpected switcheroo that lifts the curtain on the film's climactic scene, as something we should've seen coming. What we can't do--won't do--is ever forget exactly where we were and who we were with, the first time we saw this tour de force of suspense and cold-blooded terror. Audiences don't yelp in theaters very often. People yelp after seeing this one twice.
Next up: Films 71-90. Stay tuned.
Click Here to Read More...
Friday, May 1, 2009
What a New Republican Party Might Look LIke
A Person would have had to be living on Mars (or at the very least, not so politically minded as to have routinely checked for the past four months to see if there are any new entries on this blog), to have missed the news that things are going badly for the Grand Ole Party -- and on any of a wide and growing assortment of fronts. According to the most recent polling data on the subject, about twenty percent of respondents now self-identify as Republicans, the lowest that number has ever been in history. A plurality of Americans now support gay marriage, the impending retirement of Supreme Court Justice David Souter will come at the precise moment that the GOP is scrambling to fill its most senior position on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Newt Gingerich is in a shooting war with his own party chair, and Lindsay Graham, Steve Schmidt, and Megan McCain are all running around talking in various ways about the need to embrace some of the least likely talking-points for Republicans to consider embracing since Nixon reached out to the south. Meanwhile, a certain Governor of Alaska has suddenly and inexplicably gone to ground during all of this "re-branding" talk--presumably since re-branding the GOP away from its current forumla of lowest-common-denomenator hate-baiting would render her instantly obsolete. All of which begs the question: Assuming the Republican party survives at all (incidentally, not an automatically safe presumption), what would a competitive version of it look like, moving forward?
Obviously any exercise in visualizing a future Republican party is going to be speculative on two important levels: it must presume omniscience with respect to the thought processes of the people who will actually carry it out, of course, but it must also presume enough precience about future events that major re-invention continues to seem necessary long enough for it to happen. If the United States should suffer another terrorist attack on its own soil this coming September, for example, and if--as happened the last time--it should turn out that the President was briefed about the danger in advance, there can be no question but that Republicans will cheerfully embrace the hypocrisy necessary to scapegoat the Administration and run the midterm electoral table by making blood-soaked hay with the whole affair.
On the other hand, this author has been thinking for quite a long time now that there are certain innate inconsistencies in the Bush/Dole/Bush/McCain incarnation of Republicanism, that these inconsistencies are not (for the most part) mirrored with offsetting hypocrisies on the part of the Democrats, and that cleaning up some of the mess might render the decision of which party to support a much more interesting one in the hearts and minds of those white males who are capable of thinking in complete sentences about anything more serious than Monday Night Football. Here, then, is the list of changes that The Key Grip believes are inescapable prerequisites to a revitalized and nationally competitive Republican Party in a post-Bush twenty-first century:
1) They must abandon the 1988 playbook. Many people have spoken very eloquently about the incomperable genius of Karl Rove as an electoral tactician, and that's a curious thing in this author's judgment, since Rove was a first-circle protege of Lee Atwater--the man who gave us the first of the post-Reagan, slash-and-burn, lowest-common-denomenator hate campaigns, back in 1988. In the absense of a washed-up movie actor who could still use a teleprompter to plagiarize his commemoration of a space shuttle disaster, the Republican agenda was essentially dead in the water. Most people don't remember it now, but in early summer polling Michael Dukakis was leading Reagan's default successor by seventeen points. Nobody doesn't remember what happened next: With breathless speed, the Atwater operation descended on Dukakis' character with what became the textbook Republican one-two punch of questioning the man first, and then the policies. Dukakis was shown riding in a tank, and then Willie Horton was... well... just shown, if it comes to that. The whole thing was cynical, odious, and intentionally tailored to the "low-information voters" whose emotions (not to say their racism) could easily be manipulated by images on television. And it worked.
It worked in 2002 and 2004, too, when the deep and searing anxiety about September 11th so overwhelmed the American public's capacity for reason, that the man who'd been reading nursary rhymes to schoolchildren when the whole thing happened could somehow argue that he was the only person in the country who could keep us safe. On the Democrats' opposition to what we all now realize was a trumped-up war being argued on false pretense with tenuous connections to the attack, he ran up his numbers in the '02 midterms. On the Democratic nominee's representation of himself as a strength-and-security alternative, the incumbent's Atwater-protege campaign strategiest trotted out the Atwater playbook to maximum effect: Question the character first, and then, once the character is questionable, question the policy. And it worked. At least in part because the guy they were doing it to, is a douchebag. But that's another column.
Point being, a lot has changed in the world since 2004--and not just the replacement of security as the top issue concerning most Americans, either. In 2008 and 2009 and beyond, the primary vehicle for political discourse simply isn't television anymore; it's the new media. It's the internet. It's blogs like this one. And the thing is, hot-button catch-phrases just don't work in a comment-driven medium like this one. John McCain runs an ad saying that Barack Obama wants to teach sex education to kindergarteners, and the story gets blurbed in the political news websites all over this country, after which the comment forums directly beneath the stories overflow with meticulous dissections of the ad for the hate-baiting drivel that it is. The hot-button defenders weigh in, but are quickly shouted down by an avalanche of reasoned, thoughtful, one might even say nuanced counter-argument, until eventually they give up and go back to listening to their AM-radios at the vacuum cleaner store.
Meanwhile, the "low-information voters" whose television-based voting heuristics have, after a generation of being rewarded for lower and lower levels of information, inclined them to decide that all politicians are rascals, have responded in the only way they can: by sitting the whole thing out. Much was made about the comparatively small up-tick in voter turnout this past election cycle; it is my belief that the top-line data hides the story: there was an abnormally high "churn" in voter turnout, with television-watchers supplanted by normally self-disenfranchised new agers whose ire could no longer be suppressed by the latest album out of Windham Hill.
Like it or not (and this author at least does), the new political debate is one of substance over shock-and-awe. Internet forums don't let people shout emotion-fanning nonsense and have the last word the way television does. If the Republican party wants to revitalize itself, it will have to start with a repudiation of the anti-content, anti-intellectual, anti-agenda with which it has been auguring the country into the ground for the thick end of my lifetime. It'll have to stand for something more significant than repealing the estate tax and calling the other guy a socialist. Because the only people who vote anymore will be waiting to swat-down anything less.
2) They must embrace small-c conservatism. It's been said before by persons more articulate than I, on both sides of the political aisle, but there's a fundamental inconsistency inherent in calling one's group "the party of small government" on the one hand, and embracing runaway defense spending, on the other. And the irony is that the Republican party hasn't always been like this: in the days preceding the second world war, Republicans were clamorously non-interventionist, fearing that militarization of the national economy would unduly empower the federal government. Indeed after the war, none other than Dwight David Eisenhower used the opportunity of his farewell adress to warn the country of the growing power of the "military industrial complex" to set the national political agenda.
Forty-eight years later his words seem heartbreakingly prescient, and the party from which he hailed now holds the record for the largest explosion in military deficit-spending in history. A party that claims to be for smaller government can't withstand the glib, internet forum smack-downs that it so richly deserves for gobbling up our children's future to spend it all in Iraq. And unless and until the small-government wonks can gain the upper hand over the shoot-em-in-the-face crowd, a tea party to protest basic, Keynesian recovery-spending on roads, bridges and schools will ring hollow in the minds of anyone who bothers to scroll down and read the first four comments beneath the story. In 1993 the tea parties would've made for great television; in 2009 they make for self-caricaturing blog comedy--and the Republican brand just sinks lower and lower and lower. Not everyone would support a smaller-government party, but at least that party would be self-consistent with respect to the two biggest planks in its platform: taxes and spending. This would seem a relatively obvious prerequisite to re-branding the Republican party, regardless of who in the current coalition would have to be sacrificed in the process.
3) They must be more inclusive with respect to faith. I myself have no faith, indeed am proud to count myself among those who have no faith, but there is no particular reason why a political party whose agenda includes renewed commitment to faith-based living has to be fundamentally offensive to me the way the 2008-2009 Republican party is. The reason they make people like me so angry (and scare the hell out of everyone else) is not so much their embrace of faith but rather their rejection of it--specifically, their rejection of any faith that isn't extremist, born-again Crhistianity in its least christian and most aggressive forms. Granted, a re-branded Republican party could position itself in the other direction, toward a more "libertarian" approach on social issues, but there's a reason why libertarians are so few in number: They're either Republicans because they don't like taxes or they're Democracts because they don't believe in God.
I believe that a re-branded Republican party succeeds not by renouncing its faith but rather by re-positioning itself to focus on the objectives of that faith, a la Mike Huckabee: It could be the party that opposes not just abortion but also the death penalty. It could be the party that supports not just orphanages but ending world hunger. It could be the party that welcomes not just Southern Baptists and Joe Lieberman, but right-minded persons of all faiths, instead. I'd have a hard time supporting a party that wanted explicitly mulitdenominational religious instruction in our public schools, but I'd have a harder time being so angry and scared by the idea as I am by the existing intention to turn our nation's classrooms into hot-houses of extremist Christian-right-wing proselytizing.
4) They must find their roots on the subject of free enterprise. Your intrepid author has attempted a Ph.D. in economics, depending on how you count, no fewer than three times in his life, and all of them have ended in failure. Part of the reason is that your intrepid author isn't bright enough to pass the tests--but that's only part of the reason. The rest is a crippling and ubiquitous frustration with the fundamental, nay preposterous self-inconsistency of the modern conservative economic paradigm. It advocates greater market concentrations so as to exploit economies of scale, but ignores the anti-competitive side-effects of the decreased competition. It embraces free trade on the premise of lower product prices, but ignores the nagging detail that the only firms large enough to justify the move to cheaper labor markets are also large enough to withhold the cost-savings from their customers. It calls agriculture a perfectly competitive industry despite the fact that all those countless farmers get together once every October to sell their production to a monopsony buyer, with all the market distortions that appertain thereto.
There is absolutely no reason why a re-branded Republican party couldn't embrace all aspects of a less-encumbered, properly functioning market economy--notably including some basic checks on the extent of anti-competitive corporate power. They could advocate for freer trade, while at the same time supporting wage insurance and increased investment in workforce training. They could espouse less government regulation over the subject of opening and operating a business, without also embracing anti-perfect-information policies with respect to product- and workforce safety. They could be cavalier about the environment without coming across as cavalier about the downstream, downwind safety of our kids. I'd probably still vote the other way, but a party that said "free enterprise only works when there's less government intervention and smaller firms with greater competition" would at least be a lot harder to dismiss on the basis of open and shameless hypocrisy, the way this Republican party and its corps of professional economists is, now.
5) They must drop their one-sided policies with respect to immigration and the Middle East. This one is a toughy, since the White House is so tough to win without holding Florida and Arizona, but neither the Latino community nor the well-informed political junkies of the internet are going to suffer cheerfully a political party that panders to anti-Hispanic rhetoric in the desert southwest, or to an "anti-terrorist" plank that green-lights unilateral military adventurism by Israel. The situations on the borders between the United States and Mexico and between Israel and the West Bank are both bad and getting worse--not in spite of, but because of the Republican party's tacit acceptance of a race-dividing status quo with respect to the former and a barely contained anti-Muslim furor with respect to the latter.
When the path to citizenship is difficult, bordering on impossible, the only people who try are the most desperate (and, to that extent, the least easily recognized as potential benefactors of hard work and ingenuity). An easier path to citizenship in this country encourages not just free enterprise but increased innovation, attracting the very people most likely to be frustrated by their home country's thwarting of their Horatio-Algier spirits. It's a little-known but important fact that if Albert Einstein was alive and living in Germany today and wanted to come to the United States, he'd have to go through the infamous April Fool's lottery like everyone else--and probably wouldn't get in. (It'd be okay, though, because he could go build the atomic bomb for a more welcoming country somewhere else, instead.) Until the path to citizenship in this country returns to its free-enterprise-encouraging ease, and corporations are forced to hire U.S. citizens and pay them a living wage, no party that claims to love free enterprise can rest on a bed of anything other than hypocrisy when it advocates such ridiculous and race-dividing measures as the construction of a fence along the border.
Meanwhile in the Middle East, the previous Administration's quietude on Israeli excesses has created a powderkeg of disempowered resentment on the part of the Palestinians, largely in response to the Israelis' construction of a border fence of their own--a nightmarish concrete monolith that already stretches to over 200 miles, dividing families, destroying towns, suppressing Palestinian economic activity and effectively ruining all prospects for peace for the duration of its own existence. No political party that claims to be in favor of suppressing terrorism can turn a blind eye to this outrage without risking dismissal in the political news comment pages as a vehicle for shameless doublespeak. To re-brand itself in a way that would appeal to a plurality of better-informed and more racially diverse voters, the Republicans would have to drop the anti-immigration hate mongering, and call for a renewed commitment to forcing all sides to the peace table in the Middle East.
None of this will happen right away, of course, and most of it will never happen. Fortunes will turn and much of this re-branding will be either overtaken by new events or rendered unnecessary by some offsetting implosion on the other side. The purpose of this column was never to suggest that these are the only ways out of the low-20's doldrums for the Republican Party--but rather, to lay out the principal changes through which the "new" Republican Party would be harder for this author not to vote for. It might not make for an extra thirty-percent of the public in its corner, but making it harder for hardened Democrats like myself to dismiss it out of hand could well be the first, big step toward the next realignment of political fortunes, however far into the future that realignment may be. Lest we forget, the Democrats were in a situation not unlike this one in the early days of the Reagan Administration--and it took just this sort of reexamination of principles to get it where it is today.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Obviously any exercise in visualizing a future Republican party is going to be speculative on two important levels: it must presume omniscience with respect to the thought processes of the people who will actually carry it out, of course, but it must also presume enough precience about future events that major re-invention continues to seem necessary long enough for it to happen. If the United States should suffer another terrorist attack on its own soil this coming September, for example, and if--as happened the last time--it should turn out that the President was briefed about the danger in advance, there can be no question but that Republicans will cheerfully embrace the hypocrisy necessary to scapegoat the Administration and run the midterm electoral table by making blood-soaked hay with the whole affair.
On the other hand, this author has been thinking for quite a long time now that there are certain innate inconsistencies in the Bush/Dole/Bush/McCain incarnation of Republicanism, that these inconsistencies are not (for the most part) mirrored with offsetting hypocrisies on the part of the Democrats, and that cleaning up some of the mess might render the decision of which party to support a much more interesting one in the hearts and minds of those white males who are capable of thinking in complete sentences about anything more serious than Monday Night Football. Here, then, is the list of changes that The Key Grip believes are inescapable prerequisites to a revitalized and nationally competitive Republican Party in a post-Bush twenty-first century:
1) They must abandon the 1988 playbook. Many people have spoken very eloquently about the incomperable genius of Karl Rove as an electoral tactician, and that's a curious thing in this author's judgment, since Rove was a first-circle protege of Lee Atwater--the man who gave us the first of the post-Reagan, slash-and-burn, lowest-common-denomenator hate campaigns, back in 1988. In the absense of a washed-up movie actor who could still use a teleprompter to plagiarize his commemoration of a space shuttle disaster, the Republican agenda was essentially dead in the water. Most people don't remember it now, but in early summer polling Michael Dukakis was leading Reagan's default successor by seventeen points. Nobody doesn't remember what happened next: With breathless speed, the Atwater operation descended on Dukakis' character with what became the textbook Republican one-two punch of questioning the man first, and then the policies. Dukakis was shown riding in a tank, and then Willie Horton was... well... just shown, if it comes to that. The whole thing was cynical, odious, and intentionally tailored to the "low-information voters" whose emotions (not to say their racism) could easily be manipulated by images on television. And it worked.
It worked in 2002 and 2004, too, when the deep and searing anxiety about September 11th so overwhelmed the American public's capacity for reason, that the man who'd been reading nursary rhymes to schoolchildren when the whole thing happened could somehow argue that he was the only person in the country who could keep us safe. On the Democrats' opposition to what we all now realize was a trumped-up war being argued on false pretense with tenuous connections to the attack, he ran up his numbers in the '02 midterms. On the Democratic nominee's representation of himself as a strength-and-security alternative, the incumbent's Atwater-protege campaign strategiest trotted out the Atwater playbook to maximum effect: Question the character first, and then, once the character is questionable, question the policy. And it worked. At least in part because the guy they were doing it to, is a douchebag. But that's another column.
Point being, a lot has changed in the world since 2004--and not just the replacement of security as the top issue concerning most Americans, either. In 2008 and 2009 and beyond, the primary vehicle for political discourse simply isn't television anymore; it's the new media. It's the internet. It's blogs like this one. And the thing is, hot-button catch-phrases just don't work in a comment-driven medium like this one. John McCain runs an ad saying that Barack Obama wants to teach sex education to kindergarteners, and the story gets blurbed in the political news websites all over this country, after which the comment forums directly beneath the stories overflow with meticulous dissections of the ad for the hate-baiting drivel that it is. The hot-button defenders weigh in, but are quickly shouted down by an avalanche of reasoned, thoughtful, one might even say nuanced counter-argument, until eventually they give up and go back to listening to their AM-radios at the vacuum cleaner store.
Meanwhile, the "low-information voters" whose television-based voting heuristics have, after a generation of being rewarded for lower and lower levels of information, inclined them to decide that all politicians are rascals, have responded in the only way they can: by sitting the whole thing out. Much was made about the comparatively small up-tick in voter turnout this past election cycle; it is my belief that the top-line data hides the story: there was an abnormally high "churn" in voter turnout, with television-watchers supplanted by normally self-disenfranchised new agers whose ire could no longer be suppressed by the latest album out of Windham Hill.
Like it or not (and this author at least does), the new political debate is one of substance over shock-and-awe. Internet forums don't let people shout emotion-fanning nonsense and have the last word the way television does. If the Republican party wants to revitalize itself, it will have to start with a repudiation of the anti-content, anti-intellectual, anti-agenda with which it has been auguring the country into the ground for the thick end of my lifetime. It'll have to stand for something more significant than repealing the estate tax and calling the other guy a socialist. Because the only people who vote anymore will be waiting to swat-down anything less.
2) They must embrace small-c conservatism. It's been said before by persons more articulate than I, on both sides of the political aisle, but there's a fundamental inconsistency inherent in calling one's group "the party of small government" on the one hand, and embracing runaway defense spending, on the other. And the irony is that the Republican party hasn't always been like this: in the days preceding the second world war, Republicans were clamorously non-interventionist, fearing that militarization of the national economy would unduly empower the federal government. Indeed after the war, none other than Dwight David Eisenhower used the opportunity of his farewell adress to warn the country of the growing power of the "military industrial complex" to set the national political agenda.
Forty-eight years later his words seem heartbreakingly prescient, and the party from which he hailed now holds the record for the largest explosion in military deficit-spending in history. A party that claims to be for smaller government can't withstand the glib, internet forum smack-downs that it so richly deserves for gobbling up our children's future to spend it all in Iraq. And unless and until the small-government wonks can gain the upper hand over the shoot-em-in-the-face crowd, a tea party to protest basic, Keynesian recovery-spending on roads, bridges and schools will ring hollow in the minds of anyone who bothers to scroll down and read the first four comments beneath the story. In 1993 the tea parties would've made for great television; in 2009 they make for self-caricaturing blog comedy--and the Republican brand just sinks lower and lower and lower. Not everyone would support a smaller-government party, but at least that party would be self-consistent with respect to the two biggest planks in its platform: taxes and spending. This would seem a relatively obvious prerequisite to re-branding the Republican party, regardless of who in the current coalition would have to be sacrificed in the process.
3) They must be more inclusive with respect to faith. I myself have no faith, indeed am proud to count myself among those who have no faith, but there is no particular reason why a political party whose agenda includes renewed commitment to faith-based living has to be fundamentally offensive to me the way the 2008-2009 Republican party is. The reason they make people like me so angry (and scare the hell out of everyone else) is not so much their embrace of faith but rather their rejection of it--specifically, their rejection of any faith that isn't extremist, born-again Crhistianity in its least christian and most aggressive forms. Granted, a re-branded Republican party could position itself in the other direction, toward a more "libertarian" approach on social issues, but there's a reason why libertarians are so few in number: They're either Republicans because they don't like taxes or they're Democracts because they don't believe in God.
I believe that a re-branded Republican party succeeds not by renouncing its faith but rather by re-positioning itself to focus on the objectives of that faith, a la Mike Huckabee: It could be the party that opposes not just abortion but also the death penalty. It could be the party that supports not just orphanages but ending world hunger. It could be the party that welcomes not just Southern Baptists and Joe Lieberman, but right-minded persons of all faiths, instead. I'd have a hard time supporting a party that wanted explicitly mulitdenominational religious instruction in our public schools, but I'd have a harder time being so angry and scared by the idea as I am by the existing intention to turn our nation's classrooms into hot-houses of extremist Christian-right-wing proselytizing.
4) They must find their roots on the subject of free enterprise. Your intrepid author has attempted a Ph.D. in economics, depending on how you count, no fewer than three times in his life, and all of them have ended in failure. Part of the reason is that your intrepid author isn't bright enough to pass the tests--but that's only part of the reason. The rest is a crippling and ubiquitous frustration with the fundamental, nay preposterous self-inconsistency of the modern conservative economic paradigm. It advocates greater market concentrations so as to exploit economies of scale, but ignores the anti-competitive side-effects of the decreased competition. It embraces free trade on the premise of lower product prices, but ignores the nagging detail that the only firms large enough to justify the move to cheaper labor markets are also large enough to withhold the cost-savings from their customers. It calls agriculture a perfectly competitive industry despite the fact that all those countless farmers get together once every October to sell their production to a monopsony buyer, with all the market distortions that appertain thereto.
There is absolutely no reason why a re-branded Republican party couldn't embrace all aspects of a less-encumbered, properly functioning market economy--notably including some basic checks on the extent of anti-competitive corporate power. They could advocate for freer trade, while at the same time supporting wage insurance and increased investment in workforce training. They could espouse less government regulation over the subject of opening and operating a business, without also embracing anti-perfect-information policies with respect to product- and workforce safety. They could be cavalier about the environment without coming across as cavalier about the downstream, downwind safety of our kids. I'd probably still vote the other way, but a party that said "free enterprise only works when there's less government intervention and smaller firms with greater competition" would at least be a lot harder to dismiss on the basis of open and shameless hypocrisy, the way this Republican party and its corps of professional economists is, now.
5) They must drop their one-sided policies with respect to immigration and the Middle East. This one is a toughy, since the White House is so tough to win without holding Florida and Arizona, but neither the Latino community nor the well-informed political junkies of the internet are going to suffer cheerfully a political party that panders to anti-Hispanic rhetoric in the desert southwest, or to an "anti-terrorist" plank that green-lights unilateral military adventurism by Israel. The situations on the borders between the United States and Mexico and between Israel and the West Bank are both bad and getting worse--not in spite of, but because of the Republican party's tacit acceptance of a race-dividing status quo with respect to the former and a barely contained anti-Muslim furor with respect to the latter.
When the path to citizenship is difficult, bordering on impossible, the only people who try are the most desperate (and, to that extent, the least easily recognized as potential benefactors of hard work and ingenuity). An easier path to citizenship in this country encourages not just free enterprise but increased innovation, attracting the very people most likely to be frustrated by their home country's thwarting of their Horatio-Algier spirits. It's a little-known but important fact that if Albert Einstein was alive and living in Germany today and wanted to come to the United States, he'd have to go through the infamous April Fool's lottery like everyone else--and probably wouldn't get in. (It'd be okay, though, because he could go build the atomic bomb for a more welcoming country somewhere else, instead.) Until the path to citizenship in this country returns to its free-enterprise-encouraging ease, and corporations are forced to hire U.S. citizens and pay them a living wage, no party that claims to love free enterprise can rest on a bed of anything other than hypocrisy when it advocates such ridiculous and race-dividing measures as the construction of a fence along the border.
Meanwhile in the Middle East, the previous Administration's quietude on Israeli excesses has created a powderkeg of disempowered resentment on the part of the Palestinians, largely in response to the Israelis' construction of a border fence of their own--a nightmarish concrete monolith that already stretches to over 200 miles, dividing families, destroying towns, suppressing Palestinian economic activity and effectively ruining all prospects for peace for the duration of its own existence. No political party that claims to be in favor of suppressing terrorism can turn a blind eye to this outrage without risking dismissal in the political news comment pages as a vehicle for shameless doublespeak. To re-brand itself in a way that would appeal to a plurality of better-informed and more racially diverse voters, the Republicans would have to drop the anti-immigration hate mongering, and call for a renewed commitment to forcing all sides to the peace table in the Middle East.
None of this will happen right away, of course, and most of it will never happen. Fortunes will turn and much of this re-branding will be either overtaken by new events or rendered unnecessary by some offsetting implosion on the other side. The purpose of this column was never to suggest that these are the only ways out of the low-20's doldrums for the Republican Party--but rather, to lay out the principal changes through which the "new" Republican Party would be harder for this author not to vote for. It might not make for an extra thirty-percent of the public in its corner, but making it harder for hardened Democrats like myself to dismiss it out of hand could well be the first, big step toward the next realignment of political fortunes, however far into the future that realignment may be. Lest we forget, the Democrats were in a situation not unlike this one in the early days of the Reagan Administration--and it took just this sort of reexamination of principles to get it where it is today.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Film Review: Happy Go Lucky (2008)
Far be it from me, the owner of several volumes each of The Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and even Jackass, to criticize those who seek pure escapist entertainment from their movies. There's no shame in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill; there's no shame in Defending Your Life; there's no shame in Used Cars. They're all escapist pieces designed not to stimulate one's intellect or morals as much as to salve the throbbing abrasions to intellect and morals that life seems so often to deliver outside of the theater. Wanting to escape inside such a movie is nothing to hang one's head about, shy from admitting, or seek consciously to overcome. The trouble begins when there isn't quite a movie into which to escape.
Such is the case with Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, starring Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan. Mind you, I wish that it weren't: With such unimpeachable past successes as Secrets & Lies, Topsy Turvy, and above all Vera Drake, Mike Leigh has earned his chops as a writer/director for whom I want only the best of success, and from whom I've come to expect rather a lot. Too bad for both of us, then, that Happy Go Lucky falls several crucial elements short of being an actual motion picture, by even the most broad and permissive standards of the term. The premise is encouraging enough on paper--"Poppy" is a youngish and terminally optimistic London city girl in a dead-end job and no relationship beyond the unflagging support of a friend and a sister, when she decides to snap out of her doldrums by taking-up driving lessons from "Scott," a contract instructor whose cranky disposition, repressed upbringing and near-fanatical religious beliefs have alienated him from the prospect of true happiness. So far, so good.
Trouble is, Mr. Leigh would seem to have found himself bored by the somewhat formulaic corner into which he'd written himself with those beginnings, and as such the film he created veers inexplicably and without justification into a series of vignettes that are neither funny nor interrelated to even the tiniest possible degree. We see Poppy exercising on a trampoline and hurting her back, visiting the chiropractor for an adjustment, taking flamenco lessons from a volatile and possibly demented Spaniard, visiting the seaside with her mates, and any number of profoundly discursive moments that might in other movies have helped us to understand her character--except that in those other movies there'd be rather a lot more to understand, and besides which the vignettes themselves would contribute something, anything, to the advancement of the plot. Even if we didn't find out what that something was until later. Instead we get things like, "Do penguins emigrate?" "What, you mean like, do they spend their winters on the Costa Del Sol?"
The driving scenes themselves are, in far more typical Mike Leigh fashion, pitch-perfect: Poppy belittling Scott's insistence on taking himself and his profession way too seriously; Scott desperately straining to keep his composure in the presence of a pupil who has no intention of taking his expertise to heart. "If you do not listen to me," Scott says, in an illustrative moment while the two of them are parked by the side of a quiet residential street, "you will get into a terrible crash, and you will burn up, and you will die." Too bad for the rest of us, then, that a film about an optimistic woman taking driving lessons from a cranky teacher doesn't have the good sense to accept itself for what it is and stay in the bleeping car.
Instead Leigh makes time to "weave" a b-story about one of Poppy's elementary-school students finding himself at the mercy of an abusive stepfather--a thread that seems destined to culminate with Poppy striking out through an edgy neighborhood at night to investigate the boy's home life. Ah, the potential! Will she land in over her head at the stepfather's flat, and desperately in need of a coincidentally passing-by driving instructor to burst in and save the day? Will she find herself cornered and mildly assaulted by that bizarre homeless man with whom she's just become entangled in strange anti-conversation? Er... No, actually. Instead all that happens is that she natters away in increasingly saccharine platitudes to the shifty vagrant, who (like the rest of us) eventually gives up on her and walks away muttering. Turns out she wasn't even walking through the night for reasons having anything to do with the boy in her class--or if she was, we are left none the wiser: The instant the homeless man leaves her, there's a sharp cutaway to a daylight scene with no apparent explanation of what she was doing in such an awkward and potentially dangerous situation. For all we know she could've been out for milk.
The issue with the student then disappears entirely from the consciousness of both Poppy and the audience, while the former takes a holiday in Brighton and the latter begin air-conditioning the theater with the collective gesture of flicking their wrists to see how much of this palaver is actually left to sit through. Only at the end of the movie, when Poppy meets (and abruptly sleeps with) an external counselor brought in to help the boy, does the B-story resurface with so much as a mention. And pardon me, but if this character is so worthy of our admiration, isn't it a bit odd that, in the face of a possible child-abuse case happening right under her nose, she could fuck-off down to Brighton for twenty minutes of the picture and not utter a single syllable of gloominess about the poor lad's predicament? Is she terminally optimistic in a way we're supposed to imagine for ourselves, in the end--or is she just profoundly self-absorbed and vapid? Or is Mike Leigh trying to suggest that this is what we should imagine for ourselves?
At least Mr. Leigh has the good sense to retrieve the formula he should've embraced throughout when the critical moment comes: a climactic confrontation between the still-innocent Poppy and her suddenly jilted-feeling and (we've just learned) stalker of a driving instructor. As only Mike Leigh can have such things, it's a long, difficult scene without a whiff of flinch in it anywhere, and for those six-and-a-half minutes at least, he holds every seat in the theater as if by a puppet string. People stop chewing popcorn; they stop whispering to the person next to them. They hold their breath.
And if the message of the film is that sunny people must work so much harder than the rest of us to protect themselves from the infectious influence of other people's envy-soaked gloom, then surely Leigh has accomplished the delivery of that message with this, the scene that makes the balance of this disaggregated mess worth the ticket price. And yet even here, at what should have been the redemptive moment in which Mike Leigh proves that he is still Mike Leigh, the film treats us instead to a sharp cutaway to a rowboat, in which Poppy is speaking to one of her chums as if essentially nothing has just happened. It is almost as if Leigh was intentionally setting-out to make a picture so feel-good that it was incoherent, and only reminded himself of this objective after lapsing for a few minutes into far more typical greatness.
I have a confession to make: It's been several weeks since I saw this film in the theater. I'd been planning to write a review that said something of the, "when you're in a mood not to work quite so hard for your entertainment" variety--suggesting that the picture is harmless enough and shouldn't actually offend even the most purist and committed movie snobs among us. Then I'd planned to draw an analogy between the typical rental customer and Poppy, on the one hand, and between myself and Scott, on the other: We could stay chipper and enjoy the ride, as Poppy would have it, or we could sit grimly cross-armed and fervant and self-alienating and miss all the fun like Scott. But you know something? There are far too many other choices of "feel-good" movie out there, choices that actually work, for me to pull that device out of the hat, now. A feel-good movie that doesn't hurt anyone doesn't also have to fail to make sense. And I for one am surprised that Mr. Leigh, of all people, would have failed so spectacularly to figure that out.
The Key Grip gives this picture two bald heads. If someone else has rented it, you won't lose any time off the back of your life to watch it with them. Otherwise, give it a miss.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Such is the case with Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, starring Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan. Mind you, I wish that it weren't: With such unimpeachable past successes as Secrets & Lies, Topsy Turvy, and above all Vera Drake, Mike Leigh has earned his chops as a writer/director for whom I want only the best of success, and from whom I've come to expect rather a lot. Too bad for both of us, then, that Happy Go Lucky falls several crucial elements short of being an actual motion picture, by even the most broad and permissive standards of the term. The premise is encouraging enough on paper--"Poppy" is a youngish and terminally optimistic London city girl in a dead-end job and no relationship beyond the unflagging support of a friend and a sister, when she decides to snap out of her doldrums by taking-up driving lessons from "Scott," a contract instructor whose cranky disposition, repressed upbringing and near-fanatical religious beliefs have alienated him from the prospect of true happiness. So far, so good.
Trouble is, Mr. Leigh would seem to have found himself bored by the somewhat formulaic corner into which he'd written himself with those beginnings, and as such the film he created veers inexplicably and without justification into a series of vignettes that are neither funny nor interrelated to even the tiniest possible degree. We see Poppy exercising on a trampoline and hurting her back, visiting the chiropractor for an adjustment, taking flamenco lessons from a volatile and possibly demented Spaniard, visiting the seaside with her mates, and any number of profoundly discursive moments that might in other movies have helped us to understand her character--except that in those other movies there'd be rather a lot more to understand, and besides which the vignettes themselves would contribute something, anything, to the advancement of the plot. Even if we didn't find out what that something was until later. Instead we get things like, "Do penguins emigrate?" "What, you mean like, do they spend their winters on the Costa Del Sol?"
The driving scenes themselves are, in far more typical Mike Leigh fashion, pitch-perfect: Poppy belittling Scott's insistence on taking himself and his profession way too seriously; Scott desperately straining to keep his composure in the presence of a pupil who has no intention of taking his expertise to heart. "If you do not listen to me," Scott says, in an illustrative moment while the two of them are parked by the side of a quiet residential street, "you will get into a terrible crash, and you will burn up, and you will die." Too bad for the rest of us, then, that a film about an optimistic woman taking driving lessons from a cranky teacher doesn't have the good sense to accept itself for what it is and stay in the bleeping car.
Instead Leigh makes time to "weave" a b-story about one of Poppy's elementary-school students finding himself at the mercy of an abusive stepfather--a thread that seems destined to culminate with Poppy striking out through an edgy neighborhood at night to investigate the boy's home life. Ah, the potential! Will she land in over her head at the stepfather's flat, and desperately in need of a coincidentally passing-by driving instructor to burst in and save the day? Will she find herself cornered and mildly assaulted by that bizarre homeless man with whom she's just become entangled in strange anti-conversation? Er... No, actually. Instead all that happens is that she natters away in increasingly saccharine platitudes to the shifty vagrant, who (like the rest of us) eventually gives up on her and walks away muttering. Turns out she wasn't even walking through the night for reasons having anything to do with the boy in her class--or if she was, we are left none the wiser: The instant the homeless man leaves her, there's a sharp cutaway to a daylight scene with no apparent explanation of what she was doing in such an awkward and potentially dangerous situation. For all we know she could've been out for milk.
The issue with the student then disappears entirely from the consciousness of both Poppy and the audience, while the former takes a holiday in Brighton and the latter begin air-conditioning the theater with the collective gesture of flicking their wrists to see how much of this palaver is actually left to sit through. Only at the end of the movie, when Poppy meets (and abruptly sleeps with) an external counselor brought in to help the boy, does the B-story resurface with so much as a mention. And pardon me, but if this character is so worthy of our admiration, isn't it a bit odd that, in the face of a possible child-abuse case happening right under her nose, she could fuck-off down to Brighton for twenty minutes of the picture and not utter a single syllable of gloominess about the poor lad's predicament? Is she terminally optimistic in a way we're supposed to imagine for ourselves, in the end--or is she just profoundly self-absorbed and vapid? Or is Mike Leigh trying to suggest that this is what we should imagine for ourselves?
At least Mr. Leigh has the good sense to retrieve the formula he should've embraced throughout when the critical moment comes: a climactic confrontation between the still-innocent Poppy and her suddenly jilted-feeling and (we've just learned) stalker of a driving instructor. As only Mike Leigh can have such things, it's a long, difficult scene without a whiff of flinch in it anywhere, and for those six-and-a-half minutes at least, he holds every seat in the theater as if by a puppet string. People stop chewing popcorn; they stop whispering to the person next to them. They hold their breath.
And if the message of the film is that sunny people must work so much harder than the rest of us to protect themselves from the infectious influence of other people's envy-soaked gloom, then surely Leigh has accomplished the delivery of that message with this, the scene that makes the balance of this disaggregated mess worth the ticket price. And yet even here, at what should have been the redemptive moment in which Mike Leigh proves that he is still Mike Leigh, the film treats us instead to a sharp cutaway to a rowboat, in which Poppy is speaking to one of her chums as if essentially nothing has just happened. It is almost as if Leigh was intentionally setting-out to make a picture so feel-good that it was incoherent, and only reminded himself of this objective after lapsing for a few minutes into far more typical greatness.
I have a confession to make: It's been several weeks since I saw this film in the theater. I'd been planning to write a review that said something of the, "when you're in a mood not to work quite so hard for your entertainment" variety--suggesting that the picture is harmless enough and shouldn't actually offend even the most purist and committed movie snobs among us. Then I'd planned to draw an analogy between the typical rental customer and Poppy, on the one hand, and between myself and Scott, on the other: We could stay chipper and enjoy the ride, as Poppy would have it, or we could sit grimly cross-armed and fervant and self-alienating and miss all the fun like Scott. But you know something? There are far too many other choices of "feel-good" movie out there, choices that actually work, for me to pull that device out of the hat, now. A feel-good movie that doesn't hurt anyone doesn't also have to fail to make sense. And I for one am surprised that Mr. Leigh, of all people, would have failed so spectacularly to figure that out.
The Key Grip gives this picture two bald heads. If someone else has rented it, you won't lose any time off the back of your life to watch it with them. Otherwise, give it a miss.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Monday, January 12, 2009
Today's vocabulary term is: game theory
Speaking as someone who received a modicum of academic training as an economist, let me be the first person to concede that most of the professional writing by the current generation of economists is... well... bullshit. But a certain branch of the discipline has occupied my thoughts over the past few days for its apparently versatile applicability to the current crop of news stories, and that branch is called game theory. The idea behind game theory is that a system with a limited number of actors is less suited to graphical, "supply-and-demand" analyses than more densely populated ones, because the starting conditions faced by any one actor are influenced by whatever decisions the others have already made.
If, for example, Delta Air Lines slashes its fares, the subsequent pricing decisions made by Northwest Airlines will have to take this action into account, raising the prospect of a multi-stage sequence of strategic actions that don't fit neatly into slice-in-time pictures with intersecting curves revealing some magic point of equilibrium. Instead the various strategies that will be adopted by the various actors must be mapped out, one move at a time, to best inform our prediction of what another actor will do in response, and the "equilibrium" in such cases won't be a temporal answer, but rather a description of the considerations that will produce the most stable set of strategies, regardless of whether those strategies are in the actors' best interests. And the thing about that process is, we can apply it to the situation in Gaza; we can apply it to the wave of republican retirements in the Senate; we can apply it to Barack Obama's approach to engineering an economic recovery; we can apply it to the state of the Minnesota recount.
In Gaza, the Israelis face a set of strategic decisions that are such classic examples of game theory modeling that they may one day be incorporated into textbooks on the subject as a shining example: If the Israeli government pursues every last militant in Gaza, regardless of the collateral bloodshed that results, the sub-community of nations that has already registered its outrage will howl even louder, but the Israeli military will surely get its men (as it nearly always does). If, on the other hand, Israel ceases its operations in Gaza before it is satisfied that it has rooted out everyone with whom it finds disfavor, it runs the risk of leaving some of these people intact to commit future acts of violence against Israel but--and here's the rub--it gains nothing in the eyes of all those disapproving nations. They'll disapprove of the institution of the operations in the first place. They'll disapprove of the military imbalance. Most of them will disapprove of Israel, period. At the very least, it seems reasonable to presume that no government on earth is going to normalize its relations if the Israeli military stops, now.
What does game theory predict? It predicts that continuing the operation is a so-called "dominant strategy"--one by which the actor in question loses nothing but gains more than nothing, and which will therefore be adopted with near certainty, assuming that the actor in question is smart enough to have figured all of this out for itself. Moreover, this awareness also raises the prospect of an obvious course of action for the United States in the matter, too: Unless the "milk" of this particular military intrigue can be "soured" by Israel's principal benefactor, both militarily and diplomatically, the intrigue itself will be seen in the eyes of the persons who ordered it as an action without downside consequences--thus raising the prospect of even more unilateral bloodshed in the future.
Back at home, the country is in the grip of a wave of Republican senatorial resignations, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the early days of the Roosevelt Administration. Here the game theoretician looks not so much at the resignations themselves, but at the likely pattern of floor-votes presaged by the senate's current makeup. A filibuster-proof majority for the Democrats, as it happens, isn't nearly as important as most outsiders (including journalists) seem to think it is: The moderate Republicans can, and presumably will, vote against certain filibusters because they quietly support whatever legislation is being considered, then vote against the legislation itself if they feel they need to appease the RSCC and general party leadership. Conservative Democrats, meanwhile, can vote against the filibuster and against the bill, too, since their votes are more crucial in securing the first outcome than the second--thus fortifying their chances of reelection by conservative constituencies.
All of this means a high likelihood of significant legislation being passed by the next congress, and with it a game-theoretician's dream scenario for predicting large-scale strategic behavior on the part of the minority party. If a Republican senator opposes these legislative efforts hammer-and-tong, especially if they represent a purple state, their opposition is far more likely to redound to their own detriment than under normal (say, 1993-era) circumstances--since the country is in so big a mess already that few persuadable voters are likely to believe that any Democratic policy initiatives are likely to make matters any worse. If instead the Republican senator in question chooses to ascent to whatever is being proposed, he ends up either supporting something he disagrees with, facing a primary fight for his own reelection, or both. And since very few stupid people make it as far as the United States Senate (though in fairness it does occasionally happen), the writing on the wall for Republicans facing difficult reelection campaigns in purple states is that now might be a good time to announce retirement, as a dominant strategy permitting a far more flexible and centrist stance on any number of genuinely beneficial initiatives likely to come from thew new Administration, without actually lowering the chances of breezy reelection, because they were already zero.
President-elect Obama, of course, knows all of the same strategic maneuvers and their likely outcomes--not least because he hails most recently from the United States Senate himself. Accordingly, his own approach to engineering economic recovery has been surprisingly centrist, some might even say conservative (though presumably with a small "c" and not a capital one), since he knows full-well that any spending he submits to congress is far, far more likely to get bigger than it is to get smaller, by the time it comes back to him. By choosing the dominant strategy of shilling a relatively unambitious package of new initiatives, featuring relatively targeted and quotidian solutions to our nation's ills, he spares himself the bulk of an otherwise messy fight with the few remaining Mitch McConnell's of the world, while at the same time not really limiting the depth or breadth of the remedy.
Which only leaves the question of whether he have the votes of fifty-eight senators or fifty-nine, with the answer dependent, of course, on the eventual outcome of outgoing Senator Norm Coleman's faint-flickering gambit to have the result of Minnesota's closely contested recount overturned in civil court. The fact that courts almost never overturn certified election results apparently hasn't fazed Mr. Coleman all that much, as he seems as intent as ever to prove that any number of curiously one-sided incidents and judgment calls have robbed him of his election-night lead. In what has been dubbed by some people as a "kitchen sink" brief, Coleman is alleging that he has been unilaterally injured by double-counting, under-counting, wrongful inclusion of absentee ballots, wrongful exclusion of absentee ballots, and, to top it all off, a long litany of individual decisions by the canvassing board that seem in his mind curiously to have no offsetting counterparts on the Franken side of the ledger. Most mainstream columnists, to say nothing of a sizable plurality of Minnesotans, believe the challenge to be rubbish and want Coleman to give it up. But what would a game theoretician say?
A game theoretician would predict that Coleman would continue to pursue the court challenge for as long as he deems the benefit to outweigh the costs, and then (and only then) give it up. But there's a wrinkle here: Ordinarily, the costs of such an obviously whiny and unwarranted suit would be measured in decreased future electability, but in this case we're talking about a guy who lost one statewide race to a wrestler, won one against a dead man, and now appears to have lost to a comedian. The dominant strategy for Mr. Coleman, in other words, arises from the fact that he is completely and utterly washed up, regardless of whether he chooses now to bow-out gracefully or to fight to the ultimate, bitter end. He has nothing to lose. Accordingly, he's playing this precisely as someone who has nothing to lose--filing every possible objection and not bothering too much to justify the apparent contradictions that those various objections represent. To a game theoretician this is a perfectly rational course of action for him (provided the money holds out). If there is a 0.1% chance that he will still prevail, that's still 0.1% higher than his chances of ever holding statewide office in the future.
Oh and there's one other thing worth mentioning under the general heading of game theory as it applies to political realities at home and abroad: If dominant strategies continue to play as big and resurgent a role as they have over the past few weeks in shaping our national and international destiny, only good things can come of it. After all, the dominant strategy for a Republican Administration facing the need to choose a hurricane response wouldn't have been to let people drown, and a dominant strategy after September 11th would most assuredly NOT have been to invade Iraq.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
If, for example, Delta Air Lines slashes its fares, the subsequent pricing decisions made by Northwest Airlines will have to take this action into account, raising the prospect of a multi-stage sequence of strategic actions that don't fit neatly into slice-in-time pictures with intersecting curves revealing some magic point of equilibrium. Instead the various strategies that will be adopted by the various actors must be mapped out, one move at a time, to best inform our prediction of what another actor will do in response, and the "equilibrium" in such cases won't be a temporal answer, but rather a description of the considerations that will produce the most stable set of strategies, regardless of whether those strategies are in the actors' best interests. And the thing about that process is, we can apply it to the situation in Gaza; we can apply it to the wave of republican retirements in the Senate; we can apply it to Barack Obama's approach to engineering an economic recovery; we can apply it to the state of the Minnesota recount.
In Gaza, the Israelis face a set of strategic decisions that are such classic examples of game theory modeling that they may one day be incorporated into textbooks on the subject as a shining example: If the Israeli government pursues every last militant in Gaza, regardless of the collateral bloodshed that results, the sub-community of nations that has already registered its outrage will howl even louder, but the Israeli military will surely get its men (as it nearly always does). If, on the other hand, Israel ceases its operations in Gaza before it is satisfied that it has rooted out everyone with whom it finds disfavor, it runs the risk of leaving some of these people intact to commit future acts of violence against Israel but--and here's the rub--it gains nothing in the eyes of all those disapproving nations. They'll disapprove of the institution of the operations in the first place. They'll disapprove of the military imbalance. Most of them will disapprove of Israel, period. At the very least, it seems reasonable to presume that no government on earth is going to normalize its relations if the Israeli military stops, now.
What does game theory predict? It predicts that continuing the operation is a so-called "dominant strategy"--one by which the actor in question loses nothing but gains more than nothing, and which will therefore be adopted with near certainty, assuming that the actor in question is smart enough to have figured all of this out for itself. Moreover, this awareness also raises the prospect of an obvious course of action for the United States in the matter, too: Unless the "milk" of this particular military intrigue can be "soured" by Israel's principal benefactor, both militarily and diplomatically, the intrigue itself will be seen in the eyes of the persons who ordered it as an action without downside consequences--thus raising the prospect of even more unilateral bloodshed in the future.
Back at home, the country is in the grip of a wave of Republican senatorial resignations, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the early days of the Roosevelt Administration. Here the game theoretician looks not so much at the resignations themselves, but at the likely pattern of floor-votes presaged by the senate's current makeup. A filibuster-proof majority for the Democrats, as it happens, isn't nearly as important as most outsiders (including journalists) seem to think it is: The moderate Republicans can, and presumably will, vote against certain filibusters because they quietly support whatever legislation is being considered, then vote against the legislation itself if they feel they need to appease the RSCC and general party leadership. Conservative Democrats, meanwhile, can vote against the filibuster and against the bill, too, since their votes are more crucial in securing the first outcome than the second--thus fortifying their chances of reelection by conservative constituencies.
All of this means a high likelihood of significant legislation being passed by the next congress, and with it a game-theoretician's dream scenario for predicting large-scale strategic behavior on the part of the minority party. If a Republican senator opposes these legislative efforts hammer-and-tong, especially if they represent a purple state, their opposition is far more likely to redound to their own detriment than under normal (say, 1993-era) circumstances--since the country is in so big a mess already that few persuadable voters are likely to believe that any Democratic policy initiatives are likely to make matters any worse. If instead the Republican senator in question chooses to ascent to whatever is being proposed, he ends up either supporting something he disagrees with, facing a primary fight for his own reelection, or both. And since very few stupid people make it as far as the United States Senate (though in fairness it does occasionally happen), the writing on the wall for Republicans facing difficult reelection campaigns in purple states is that now might be a good time to announce retirement, as a dominant strategy permitting a far more flexible and centrist stance on any number of genuinely beneficial initiatives likely to come from thew new Administration, without actually lowering the chances of breezy reelection, because they were already zero.
President-elect Obama, of course, knows all of the same strategic maneuvers and their likely outcomes--not least because he hails most recently from the United States Senate himself. Accordingly, his own approach to engineering economic recovery has been surprisingly centrist, some might even say conservative (though presumably with a small "c" and not a capital one), since he knows full-well that any spending he submits to congress is far, far more likely to get bigger than it is to get smaller, by the time it comes back to him. By choosing the dominant strategy of shilling a relatively unambitious package of new initiatives, featuring relatively targeted and quotidian solutions to our nation's ills, he spares himself the bulk of an otherwise messy fight with the few remaining Mitch McConnell's of the world, while at the same time not really limiting the depth or breadth of the remedy.
Which only leaves the question of whether he have the votes of fifty-eight senators or fifty-nine, with the answer dependent, of course, on the eventual outcome of outgoing Senator Norm Coleman's faint-flickering gambit to have the result of Minnesota's closely contested recount overturned in civil court. The fact that courts almost never overturn certified election results apparently hasn't fazed Mr. Coleman all that much, as he seems as intent as ever to prove that any number of curiously one-sided incidents and judgment calls have robbed him of his election-night lead. In what has been dubbed by some people as a "kitchen sink" brief, Coleman is alleging that he has been unilaterally injured by double-counting, under-counting, wrongful inclusion of absentee ballots, wrongful exclusion of absentee ballots, and, to top it all off, a long litany of individual decisions by the canvassing board that seem in his mind curiously to have no offsetting counterparts on the Franken side of the ledger. Most mainstream columnists, to say nothing of a sizable plurality of Minnesotans, believe the challenge to be rubbish and want Coleman to give it up. But what would a game theoretician say?
A game theoretician would predict that Coleman would continue to pursue the court challenge for as long as he deems the benefit to outweigh the costs, and then (and only then) give it up. But there's a wrinkle here: Ordinarily, the costs of such an obviously whiny and unwarranted suit would be measured in decreased future electability, but in this case we're talking about a guy who lost one statewide race to a wrestler, won one against a dead man, and now appears to have lost to a comedian. The dominant strategy for Mr. Coleman, in other words, arises from the fact that he is completely and utterly washed up, regardless of whether he chooses now to bow-out gracefully or to fight to the ultimate, bitter end. He has nothing to lose. Accordingly, he's playing this precisely as someone who has nothing to lose--filing every possible objection and not bothering too much to justify the apparent contradictions that those various objections represent. To a game theoretician this is a perfectly rational course of action for him (provided the money holds out). If there is a 0.1% chance that he will still prevail, that's still 0.1% higher than his chances of ever holding statewide office in the future.
Oh and there's one other thing worth mentioning under the general heading of game theory as it applies to political realities at home and abroad: If dominant strategies continue to play as big and resurgent a role as they have over the past few weeks in shaping our national and international destiny, only good things can come of it. After all, the dominant strategy for a Republican Administration facing the need to choose a hurricane response wouldn't have been to let people drown, and a dominant strategy after September 11th would most assuredly NOT have been to invade Iraq.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Saturday, January 3, 2009
After fifth-pile, Franken +225
UPDATE: 11:02PM Sunday, Jan. 4: CNN is reporting that the Minnesota State Canvassing Board will certify Al Franken the winner of the 2008 statewide election to United States Senate, defeating incumbent Norm Coleman. Mr. Coleman is widely expected to formally challenge the result in court, about which much more below:
=============
Norm Coleman and his campaign lawyers are nothing if not doggedly persistent. Over the past two weeks, ever since Al Franken took the lead in the recount for Minnesota's 2008 Senate race,t they've tried floating a specious story about Franken votes being found in somebody's trunk, they've tried claiming that 110 or so ballots were actually counted twice, they've tried objecting to the counting of 1,350 absentee ballots that the county election officials felt had been improperly rejected the first time around, and, finally, they tried to have those 1,350 ballots supplemented with nearly 700 additional absentee ballots that a grand-total of nobody else on earth thought should be included. The bad news is that these antics are par for the course with Republicans; the good news is that they haven't gotten away with it.
Today, as a blizzard loomed with ominously impeccable dramatic timing, the Secretary of State of Minnesota opened the 955 ballots that had survived a preposterous "everyone must agree" standard, out of the 1,350 that seem to have been improperly rejected, and at the end of that count Al Franken had widened his lead to 225 votes. As small as this margin is, the significance of the number cannot be over-stated, since it reduces to zero the possibility that Mr. Coleman could reverse his deficit if he prevailed on both court challenges pertaining to the supposed double-voting and the supposedly "found" ballots. It also reduces to very nearly zero the possibility that Senator Coleman could reverse the deficit with the inclusion of all 700 of the ballots that he preposterously claims for inclusion, since even those are sure to contain a significant tally for Franken. At this point, the only remaining path for Coleman is to challenge the election in court--but in the absence of a clear and substantial case of either negligence or malfeasance by the state canvassing board, the likelihood of a court overturn of this result is very, very small indeed.
What happens next is anyone's guess: Mr. Coleman is within his rights to challenge a significant number of the ballots that were informally tallied for Franken this afternoon, when they are formally added to the count at Monday's meeting of the canvassing board. He is within his right to make further "emergency" appeals on further, specific procedural grounds, to the Minnesota state supreme court. He is also within his right to challenge. Another possibility is that Mr. Coleman could concede the outcome, based on today's results (which were far more conclusively pro-Franken than even the most optimistic projections that had been reported before the absentee ballots were opened). It would seem that whether Coleman chooses to fight on or concede will come down to how today's events are relayed to him by his closest advisers. If they report the matter as a 90-10 proposition, knowing Mr. Coleman personally as I am unfortunate enough to do, it seems unlikely that he will choose to concede. If they report the current state of the matter as a 99-1 proposition, he may need another day.
If I learned one thing from a seven-and-a-half year stint in economic development in the state of Minnesota, it's that assuming Norm Coleman will show even the tiniest scrap of dignity or class is a sucker bet. But on the other hand, George Allen didn't show a lot of class when he called a reporter "macaca," either, and after an understandably protracted interval of self-reflection and personal anguish, he eventually emerged from his home in Virginia and did the right thing by conceding his 2006 senate contest to Jim Webb. If the pattern holds, Mr. Coleman has for himself the perfect opening to find that same shred of career-salvaging graciousness, both in today's result and in its timing: He can spend all day tomorrow very conspicuously saying nothing public to anyone, and then on Monday he can concede.
Stranger things have happened. Indeed, stranger things have happened in this election.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
=============
Norm Coleman and his campaign lawyers are nothing if not doggedly persistent. Over the past two weeks, ever since Al Franken took the lead in the recount for Minnesota's 2008 Senate race,t they've tried floating a specious story about Franken votes being found in somebody's trunk, they've tried claiming that 110 or so ballots were actually counted twice, they've tried objecting to the counting of 1,350 absentee ballots that the county election officials felt had been improperly rejected the first time around, and, finally, they tried to have those 1,350 ballots supplemented with nearly 700 additional absentee ballots that a grand-total of nobody else on earth thought should be included. The bad news is that these antics are par for the course with Republicans; the good news is that they haven't gotten away with it.
Today, as a blizzard loomed with ominously impeccable dramatic timing, the Secretary of State of Minnesota opened the 955 ballots that had survived a preposterous "everyone must agree" standard, out of the 1,350 that seem to have been improperly rejected, and at the end of that count Al Franken had widened his lead to 225 votes. As small as this margin is, the significance of the number cannot be over-stated, since it reduces to zero the possibility that Mr. Coleman could reverse his deficit if he prevailed on both court challenges pertaining to the supposed double-voting and the supposedly "found" ballots. It also reduces to very nearly zero the possibility that Senator Coleman could reverse the deficit with the inclusion of all 700 of the ballots that he preposterously claims for inclusion, since even those are sure to contain a significant tally for Franken. At this point, the only remaining path for Coleman is to challenge the election in court--but in the absence of a clear and substantial case of either negligence or malfeasance by the state canvassing board, the likelihood of a court overturn of this result is very, very small indeed.
What happens next is anyone's guess: Mr. Coleman is within his rights to challenge a significant number of the ballots that were informally tallied for Franken this afternoon, when they are formally added to the count at Monday's meeting of the canvassing board. He is within his right to make further "emergency" appeals on further, specific procedural grounds, to the Minnesota state supreme court. He is also within his right to challenge. Another possibility is that Mr. Coleman could concede the outcome, based on today's results (which were far more conclusively pro-Franken than even the most optimistic projections that had been reported before the absentee ballots were opened). It would seem that whether Coleman chooses to fight on or concede will come down to how today's events are relayed to him by his closest advisers. If they report the matter as a 90-10 proposition, knowing Mr. Coleman personally as I am unfortunate enough to do, it seems unlikely that he will choose to concede. If they report the current state of the matter as a 99-1 proposition, he may need another day.
If I learned one thing from a seven-and-a-half year stint in economic development in the state of Minnesota, it's that assuming Norm Coleman will show even the tiniest scrap of dignity or class is a sucker bet. But on the other hand, George Allen didn't show a lot of class when he called a reporter "macaca," either, and after an understandably protracted interval of self-reflection and personal anguish, he eventually emerged from his home in Virginia and did the right thing by conceding his 2006 senate contest to Jim Webb. If the pattern holds, Mr. Coleman has for himself the perfect opening to find that same shred of career-salvaging graciousness, both in today's result and in its timing: He can spend all day tomorrow very conspicuously saying nothing public to anyone, and then on Monday he can concede.
Stranger things have happened. Indeed, stranger things have happened in this election.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Friday, January 2, 2009
Film Review: Milk (2008)
Sean Penn is an outstanding actor. Whatever else you think about him as a person--and by the way there hasn't been much reason to think poorly of him as a person in rather a long time--let no one who claims to be a lover of good movies call him anything other than one of Hollywood's elite performers. Is he as good as Philip Seymour Hoffman? Not on Penn's best day. Is he as good as Tom Hanks? No. Is he as good as Kevin Spacey or Ed Harris or George Clooney? Probably, yes: he is.
But like so many other actors before him, his very skill has become his fatal weakness--to become at what should be the height of his career a victim of the entrenched conservatism, some would say laziness, of the most under-estimated influence in film-making: the casting community. Like a more talented Paul Giamatti, a more consistently employed Sam Waterston, like a less funny Ben Affleck, Sean Penn, alas, is a "type." Only difference being, with Mr. Penn the type in question is anything shocking. Need a profoundly disabled character who fights tooth-and-nail for custody of his seven year-old daughter? Get me Sean Penn. Need a shamelessly violent, venom-spewing sociopath who may or may not be guilty of the specific crimes for which he's about to be executed? Get me Sean Penn. Controversial director Gus Van Sant needs someone to play the first openly gay elected official? A character who lives most of his adult life in the Castro district and eventually wins an election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but who finds plenty of time in-between to make out in broad daylight with his boyfriend? Needs him naked for a scene with the boyfriend in a half-lit bedroom? Let the cry go forth from every rooftop, Get. Me. Sean. Penn.
This, sadly, is Milk's undoing. Make no mistake, a script intentionally crafted to convey an unflinching representation of what these individuals were really like and what they struggled against and (briefly) overcame is a laudable approach to the subject matter. Indeed there could have been no other, especially in these times when all the victories that Harvey Milk and his inner circle won for the civil liberties of every American are being so brazenly taken back in unconstitutional referenda from Florida to California and back again. Make no mistake, either, about the choice of Gus Van Sant, who is gay, to direct the film: With a work as profoundly affecting in its ability to normalize gut-wrenching tragedy as Elephant, with his previous explorations of homosexual alienation in My Own Private Idaho and elsewhere, there could hardly have been another choice to direct a film about Harvey Milk without begging the question of what, exactly, Mr. Van Sant had been so busy with at the same time that he couldn't be persuaded.
But somewhere along the white-hot arcs of Penn's and Van Sant's careers they have slipped from being comfortable with unflinching portrayals of taboo-stripping situations, into people who seem to revel in them -- and for this reason casting Mr. Penn as Harvey Milk was ultimately a tragic mistake. With all of that "unflinching-ness" piled so high in every corner of the room like so many bloated little elephants, by the time the film is over it feels less like an honest bio-pic and more like unflattering caricature. Indeed in places it skates perilously close to being offensive. Yes, we find ourselves muttering under our breaths, Harvey Milk kissed other men in public. Yes, he once picked up a long-term partner on a subway platform in New York City and took him straight back to his apartment and had sex with him, for no better reason than it was his birthday. Yes, he slept with men in his apartment above the camera shop that would be his campaign headquarters in the Castro. Yes he had a boyfriend who killed himself and others who tried. We get it.
But in the end, of course, the very point of Harvey Milk's tragically shortened life is that gay people aren't different from anyone else -- and all of this "let's show Mr. Penn unafraid to kiss men on camera" nonsense has (well at least for me it had) the unintended effect of making it seem as if we were supposed to be continually reminded that they are. Instead of leaving the theater thinking, "Hey, you know what? Homosexuals are every bit as ordinary and banal--and deserving of the same ordinary and banal civil rights--as the rest of us" (as Mr. Milk himself would surely have intended it), I was forced to leave the theater thinking, "Gosh, he effected all of this constructive good in the world, and stood passively while a campaign operative stuck his hand down the pants of the pizza-delivery boy?"
Heaven only knows what the gay community would think of Milk--if it wasn't the closest thing to a sympathetic portrayal that they are ever likely to get. Which of course it is. In the meantime, I for one was keenly aware of Mr. Van Sant's and Mr. Penn's intent to celebrate themselves for all their lack of flinch, and that's exactly the opposite of how I would have wanted to leave the theater feeling about a film that was supposed to make me see homosexuals as just like you and me.
There is also the not inconsiderable problem of the painfully contrived and obvious plot device that needlessly prods us forward through the chronology of the story--namely, Mr. Milk, seated alone in the dark at his kitchen table, narrating the whole thing into a tape recorder "in the event that I am assassinated," which of course we already know that he will be. Mercifully there is almost no voice-over of the individual vignettes from Milk's past, but in a way that only exacerbates the glaring pointlessness of the cutaways to Penn holding that ridiculous microphone, muttering things into the cassette that we are all about to see with our own eyes, anyway. The individuals with whom I saw this movie were split 50-50 on whether the device was jarring enough to pull them completely out of the film, but I didn't hear a single word spoken by anyone on his or her way out of the building that defended those tape-recorder scenes as somehow indispensable to the delivery of the story.
In the end what rescues the film more than any other single aspect of Van Sant's direction or Penn's acting, is the story of Harvey Milk itself. Through its poignancy, through its touching moments of personal affection, through its triumphs and tragedies and, most of all, through its significance to all of us as a canary in the coal-mine of our collective civil liberties, Milk is an experience that will resonate with critics and audiences alike. It deserves to. It's just a shame that, with a few slightly different and carefully placed decisions--with a few strategic reminders to Mr. Van Sant and Mr. Penn, that they were supposed to be depicting someone we could all connect with as being just like us--it could have been so much better.
The Key Grip awards Milk four bald heads out of five. And will scream bloody murder if it wins Best Picture. Which it probably will.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
But like so many other actors before him, his very skill has become his fatal weakness--to become at what should be the height of his career a victim of the entrenched conservatism, some would say laziness, of the most under-estimated influence in film-making: the casting community. Like a more talented Paul Giamatti, a more consistently employed Sam Waterston, like a less funny Ben Affleck, Sean Penn, alas, is a "type." Only difference being, with Mr. Penn the type in question is anything shocking. Need a profoundly disabled character who fights tooth-and-nail for custody of his seven year-old daughter? Get me Sean Penn. Need a shamelessly violent, venom-spewing sociopath who may or may not be guilty of the specific crimes for which he's about to be executed? Get me Sean Penn. Controversial director Gus Van Sant needs someone to play the first openly gay elected official? A character who lives most of his adult life in the Castro district and eventually wins an election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but who finds plenty of time in-between to make out in broad daylight with his boyfriend? Needs him naked for a scene with the boyfriend in a half-lit bedroom? Let the cry go forth from every rooftop, Get. Me. Sean. Penn.
This, sadly, is Milk's undoing. Make no mistake, a script intentionally crafted to convey an unflinching representation of what these individuals were really like and what they struggled against and (briefly) overcame is a laudable approach to the subject matter. Indeed there could have been no other, especially in these times when all the victories that Harvey Milk and his inner circle won for the civil liberties of every American are being so brazenly taken back in unconstitutional referenda from Florida to California and back again. Make no mistake, either, about the choice of Gus Van Sant, who is gay, to direct the film: With a work as profoundly affecting in its ability to normalize gut-wrenching tragedy as Elephant, with his previous explorations of homosexual alienation in My Own Private Idaho and elsewhere, there could hardly have been another choice to direct a film about Harvey Milk without begging the question of what, exactly, Mr. Van Sant had been so busy with at the same time that he couldn't be persuaded.
But somewhere along the white-hot arcs of Penn's and Van Sant's careers they have slipped from being comfortable with unflinching portrayals of taboo-stripping situations, into people who seem to revel in them -- and for this reason casting Mr. Penn as Harvey Milk was ultimately a tragic mistake. With all of that "unflinching-ness" piled so high in every corner of the room like so many bloated little elephants, by the time the film is over it feels less like an honest bio-pic and more like unflattering caricature. Indeed in places it skates perilously close to being offensive. Yes, we find ourselves muttering under our breaths, Harvey Milk kissed other men in public. Yes, he once picked up a long-term partner on a subway platform in New York City and took him straight back to his apartment and had sex with him, for no better reason than it was his birthday. Yes, he slept with men in his apartment above the camera shop that would be his campaign headquarters in the Castro. Yes he had a boyfriend who killed himself and others who tried. We get it.
But in the end, of course, the very point of Harvey Milk's tragically shortened life is that gay people aren't different from anyone else -- and all of this "let's show Mr. Penn unafraid to kiss men on camera" nonsense has (well at least for me it had) the unintended effect of making it seem as if we were supposed to be continually reminded that they are. Instead of leaving the theater thinking, "Hey, you know what? Homosexuals are every bit as ordinary and banal--and deserving of the same ordinary and banal civil rights--as the rest of us" (as Mr. Milk himself would surely have intended it), I was forced to leave the theater thinking, "Gosh, he effected all of this constructive good in the world, and stood passively while a campaign operative stuck his hand down the pants of the pizza-delivery boy?"
Heaven only knows what the gay community would think of Milk--if it wasn't the closest thing to a sympathetic portrayal that they are ever likely to get. Which of course it is. In the meantime, I for one was keenly aware of Mr. Van Sant's and Mr. Penn's intent to celebrate themselves for all their lack of flinch, and that's exactly the opposite of how I would have wanted to leave the theater feeling about a film that was supposed to make me see homosexuals as just like you and me.
There is also the not inconsiderable problem of the painfully contrived and obvious plot device that needlessly prods us forward through the chronology of the story--namely, Mr. Milk, seated alone in the dark at his kitchen table, narrating the whole thing into a tape recorder "in the event that I am assassinated," which of course we already know that he will be. Mercifully there is almost no voice-over of the individual vignettes from Milk's past, but in a way that only exacerbates the glaring pointlessness of the cutaways to Penn holding that ridiculous microphone, muttering things into the cassette that we are all about to see with our own eyes, anyway. The individuals with whom I saw this movie were split 50-50 on whether the device was jarring enough to pull them completely out of the film, but I didn't hear a single word spoken by anyone on his or her way out of the building that defended those tape-recorder scenes as somehow indispensable to the delivery of the story.
In the end what rescues the film more than any other single aspect of Van Sant's direction or Penn's acting, is the story of Harvey Milk itself. Through its poignancy, through its touching moments of personal affection, through its triumphs and tragedies and, most of all, through its significance to all of us as a canary in the coal-mine of our collective civil liberties, Milk is an experience that will resonate with critics and audiences alike. It deserves to. It's just a shame that, with a few slightly different and carefully placed decisions--with a few strategic reminders to Mr. Van Sant and Mr. Penn, that they were supposed to be depicting someone we could all connect with as being just like us--it could have been so much better.
The Key Grip awards Milk four bald heads out of five. And will scream bloody murder if it wins Best Picture. Which it probably will.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
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