Anti-Fascist

Speaking of Noah -

Just like I'm trying to call attention to the problems with critics using the phrase "transcend the genre" (or its variations), I'd like to suggest a moratorium on using the word "fascist" to describe some aspect of a work of art/pop culture/etc. unless, you know, it actually is fascist. That is, a lot of critics and culture vultures seem to use the word "fascism" as a catch-all term for almost any kind of political/moral ickiness and/or a synonym of "anti-liberal". (Pauline Kael was a big offender here and maybe we can blame her pervasive influence. But, as the song goes, those were different times.)

For instance, over here, Noah writes that old-timey super-hero comic book artist Fletcher Hanks "is a law-and-order fascist."

So, what makes Fletcher Hanks a law and order fascist as opposed to an adherent of some kind of home brew Nietzscheanism? Maybe there is something there: I haven't read all of the comics, so maybe Hanks does make an appeal to nationalism to argue for centralized, authoritarian state control of the justice system. Barring that, though, the word "fascist" just muddies the waters.

I had the same reaction to Matt Zoller Seitz's recent comment on this piece:

[That] piece goes on my list of "Pieces I Wish I'd Written," for how deftly it summarizes a persistent and supremely annoying tendency in movies of all types. I hate, hate, hate it when the movie itself validates a character's behavior or viewpoint, whether through approving music cues, reductive characterization of the hero's adversary in a scene, or cutaways to some third banana observing the hero's bad-assness and exclaiming, "He's goooood!" It all falls under the heading of kissing the audience's ass -- providing objective confirmation of their fantasy of being smarter, handsomer, braver and tougher than they actually are, and Telling Off the Dummies...

I enjoy "Terms of Endearment" and other Brooks films for their likable performances and clever repartee, but cannot defend them as art because of their penchant for pulling crap like that. Aurora is an out-of-control bitch in the hospital scene of "Terms of Endearment," but the movie endorses her showboating fury simply because she's the heroine and our audience surrogate and maternal Life Force fantasy; it doesn't just ask us to understand and empathize, it all but commands us to cheer, with the same corrupted brand of populism displayed in the "You're not from New York" scene cited [in the piece]. It's this kind of mentality that makes virtually all of John McClane's government/law enforcement counterparts in the first couple of "Die Hard" movies out to be pompous dolts, and that encourages us to cheer Erin Brokovich as she smugly dresses down her boss and coworkers in the manner of a diva movie star chewing out an assistant who failed to purchase her preferred flavor of Starbucks frappucino. It's this type of mentality that is primarily responsible for four out of five Robin Williams comedies about the wacky iconoclast sticking it to The Man.

Touches like these confirm Norman Mailer's belief in America's latent potential for fascism.

Although I'm with him most of the way, I think it is a pretty big leap from Terms of Endearment and crappy Robin Williams movies to fascism, latent or otherwise. And while I agree with Mailer, my agreement is kind of trivial: why shouldn't Americans have the latent potential for fascism? Are we so different from the Italians, Germans, French, Hungarians, Romanians, etc.? The idea that we are exceptionally prone to fascism strikes me as naive as the idea that we are somehow exceptionally immune to it*.

*This is a variation on a point that Sean Collins often makes.

Catching Up, Part II

I owe some links:

First, David Cairns left a comment on my riff off of his essay on William Wyler. David let me know that his blog, Shadowplay, is here. I've added it to my blogroll, too. Here's an example of David doing the kind of research that I can definitely get behind.

Second, Noah Berlatsky left a link to a new site he has curated, Gay Utopia. I haven't read through everything there yet, but I did like his essay on "fecund" horror (and hope to comment in more detail later). (Also - fans of erotic horror fiction - you know who you are - should check out this story ).

Blog Notes

Andy Horbal has moved to new digs: the official launch is July 1st, so be sure to check him out.

My friend (and frequent-ish Forager Blog commenter) "Lin Swimmer" has been posting some very funny and insightful cultural commentary over at his blogspot site.

Thanks

I just wanted to take a moment to thank Michael Blowhard and Sean T. Collins for their frequent links to my little blog here. A lot of the visitors who end up at this site seem to find it through posts on their blogs. While I'm not in this to be popular, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I greatly appreciate the support, especially because it's coming from two bloggers who I like and respect. Both of their blogs are daily must-reads for me and a lot of my favorite posts on this blog have been inspired by posts of theirs.

Will Movies Last?

Fellow film buffs - especially those of us with an appreciation for old movies - should definitely check out this dialogue at Stuff of Dreams.

The Derelict watched some old movies with a friend of his who is an "old movie novice", and he was a little disturbed by some of her comments, like:

I really just think that movies just aren't really that important. Like, who cares if people forget about Waterloo Bridge or whatever other movie? What's going to happen if they're forgotten? Nothing. Most movies have a short shelf life. I know all of the movies that I like, I'll remember and pass on to future generations, but all of the older movies I've never seen? Who cares?

The Derelict sums it up:

I’m really, I dunno, disturbed by the fact that movies are so disposable. It was something I’d been thinking about for a long time actually, in relation to old movies, to movies in general, to movies as art vs. movies as cheap, quick entertainment... Movies are pop art, for the most part, and I guess it’s to be expected that pop art will have a short shelf life, whether it’s a catchy tune on the radio, a TV show, or a movie. I would like to think that certain movies will last in some form two hundred or three hundred years from now, the way great literature of the past has lasted into our own century, but maybe that’s expecting too much.

My own take on the "will movies last thing?" is a bit less pessimistic. I think that "the Hollywood movie" is one of America's great contributions to world culture from the 20th Century. So, representative movies like Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz will last as part of the popular culture. More obscure movies probably will be remembered only by a (relatively) small number of cognoscenti, but this isn't any different from what has happened with literature. Thanks to high school and college lit classes, there's still a general audience for The Great Gatsby, while a "lesser" but still interesting and enjoyable book like The Magnificent Ambersons is read by many fewer people. And, ironically, even among today's arts and culture buffs, that book is probably best known because Orson Welles turned it into a movie. And I'd love it if more people besides me and the folks in the William Dean Howells society were excited about a book like A Hazard of New Fortunes, but I bet it'd be easier to find someone to gab with about The Maltese Falcon.

But all I can do is guess about the future of "old movies". I can't help but think that the digitization of everything is going to continue.

But I don't necessarily think it's a terrible thing for "old movies" to become something appreciated mainly by film buffs. I'm more concerned with this tendency to reduce arts and culture stuff to nothing more than a choice about how to spend leisure time. (I do this myself, of course, too.) There's something appealing to me about the admittedly hokey and old-fashioned idea of "art appreciation": that is, you should spend time learning about great works of culture because doing so will make your life richer, and not simply because art and literature can be enjoyable or can offer an escape from the day-to-day.

Still, I have mixed feelings about turning to academia and the museums to conserve popular art. On the one hand, keeping these movies around, keeping them - even marginally - part of the cultural consciousness is a truly good thing. On the other hand, I'm not sure a movie like Citizen Kane is best served by thinking of it as a piece of "museum" art. I brought this up on a message board recently, but I think the problem a lot of non-cinephiles have with Citizen Kane is that they approach it with a sense of awe and expect it to deliver some kind of "high art" experience. I think the movie (to i ts credit) works at a lower level than all that: if I was introducing the movie to first time viewers, I'd emphasize its humor and theatricality, its gothic weirdness and visual invention. As much as any Hollywood movie, Citizen Kane is an entertainment.

Anyway, I also sympathize a little bit with the Derelict when it comes to the more selfish reasons for wanting to get people into "old movies": I'd like to be able to have more face-to-face discussions about old movies. (And I didn't find too many fans of old movies at film school, either.)

Blog Chat: Personally...

Lots of introspection going on in the comments section of this post on Andy Horbal's blog.

I just wanted to comment briefly on something Chris Stangl wrote:

I know I was just arguing for the power of diary form film blogging, but how many blogs would be vastly improved if the writer would just put some intellectual distance between their heart and their keyboard? A: I have no idea, but I can think of a few. Those few are rare because they're writers with interesting ideas lost in a swamp of personal-life mush.

Now, I'm definitely in favor of clarity in writing (even if my own writing doesn't always meet the standard), so, yes, I think it's a bad thing if your best ideas are getting lost...

However (and this is me riffing on Chris's comment, rather than reading into it or arguing with it), if we're doing criticism, "personal-life mush" is going to play a part. To the extent that movies are aesthetic, emotional, and, even erotic experiences, we can't help that our responses are going to be personal. One of the strengths of blogs, IMHO, is that, as opposed to newspaper/magazine film criticism or academic film criticism, writers can deal with how this "personal-life mush" affects their response to and interpretation and appreciation of a given movie in an up-front and straightforward manner.

This 2Blowhards post from last year brings up some related issues.

Movie Chat: Oscar Facts, The Unwatched Masses, Lists, and Favorites

Edward Copeland goes to the source to try to clear up some Oscar "fact" confusion. I now hope that Little Miss Sunshine wins Best Picture, just so all those people who got their facts wrong, have their predictions come out wrong, too. (Link via The House Next Door).

I'm a big fans of lists - reading lists, year-end best lists , random lists - so I thought Andy Horbal's idea here was pretty neat. There's also an interesting discussion in the comments about the merits of the list Andy is drawing from. As always, I think the best approach to any list is to treat it as a way to start a discussion, not end one. Here's my own 10 best films I've never seen, according to They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

8 1/2 *
Tokyo Story
City Lights
La Dolce Vita
L'Avventura **
Persona
Andrei Rublev
Ordet
Au Hasard, Balthazar
Wild Strawberries

*I've seen 8 1/2, but it was so long ago that I don't remember much of it and couldn't, in good conscience, talk about it with any authority.
**I've seen parts of L'Avventura on numerous occasions. I've just never sat down to watch it the whole way through.

Looking through the list a little more, my big blind spots are Bergman, Tarkovsky, Ozu, and Bresson. I'll be watching a bunch of Ozu and Bresson over the next few weeks (treating myself to some classics after spending the last few weeks catching up with 2006 releases for an upcoming "list" party), but I think I'm going to save Bergman and Tarkovsky for when I'm, um, older. The big, forehead-slapping, "Why haven't I watched this yet?"-movie is Ikiru - I've seen just about every other Kurosawa movie, so at this point, it's a little embarrassing that I've left this one so long. (Also, check out Andy's interesting business proposition.)

On a semi-related note: my girlfriend and I sat down to watch the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde last night and I mentioned that Frederic March was one of my favorite actors. She said that was meaningless because everyone is my favorite actor. She wasn't being especially fair, there are lots of actors whose work I'm cool to or outright don't like, but I do have quite a few favorites.

Most film buffs are like this though, aren't they? We have lots of little favorites - favorite westerns, favorite character actors, favorite silent film directors, favorite horror movie actresses, etc. I could pretty easily start to list off my 100 favorite actors (March would definitely be there), which might seem a little indiscriminate, but I've seen lots of performances from lots of different actors.

Maybe I should just start using more specific language - i.e., Frederic March is one of my favorite old school, Hollywood actors: look for the way he tones down his theatrical style to make it work for the camera - although that might be a little too pedantic.

Blog Chat: Film Buffs

This dialogue between Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door is pretty interesting. I'm going to nitpick and shoot spitballs at it from the sidelines here, but if you're at all interested in concepts like "the future of movies" and "the death of cinema" it'll be worth a read.

First, I thought it was funny that while they point out the cyclical nature of those "death of film" think pieces, they didn't acknowledge that their complaints about fuddy-duddies like Paul Schrader ignoring non-narrative cinema are just as cyclical. Ever since Birth of a Nation, Film As Art Guys have been decrying the dominance of "conventional narrative" and evangelizing non-narrative film.

I used to be pretty gung-ho about non-narrative movies. Well, gung-ho about the idea of them - I have to admit that there weren't many actual non-narrative movies that I enjoyed watching.

Nowadays, though, my main interest is in stories and storytelling, and, at least when it comes to movies, books, and comics, give me Steven Spielberg, Gore Vidal, and Peter Bagge. I still like to read and talk a little bit about the artsier, "exploration and expansion of the medium" stuff, but I'm no longer driven to keep up with it. (I'm no longer driven to keep up with much of anything, which is a very liberating feeling).

I'd guess that most people are going to be like me: we go to the movies to get a story.

But, as this dialogue at 2Blowhards suggests, non-narrative "movies" have a future at YouTube. I'd wager that while there will never be a big audience demand for feature length, large scale, non-narrative film experiences, there will be a growing demand for small scale, five-minutes-or-less, non-narrative video clips, made with a sense of fun, outside of (or at least peripheral to) any existing avant-garde film/video movements, by amateurs and hobbyists.

Second, my major gripe with the piece is the shrill tone they take when they're attacking retrograde ideas about film. Who do they think they are - the film critic thought police? Statements like this...

It's a little embarrassing at this point to still be debating the issue of whether or not a movie is less of a movie because it was shot with a camcorder; and whether television can be art; and whether series television is inherently less worthy of attention than, say, your typical mainstream Hollywood genre film. People who catch themselves talking in those terms should cringe and correct themselves, because it's 20th century thinking.

...make me cringe.

Who cares if you're out of it? This constant pressure to keep up, to adopt the latest and most fashionable attitudes toward cinema (or to anything else for that matter) is pretty unpleasant. It doesn't feel all that different from the pressure we get from Big Media to stay on the cutting edge of consumable crap. And there's something a little bullying about their "get on the bus or get run over" language. I don't think these guys are bullies, at all, but I do think they get carried away here. Do they realize how badly they come off to someone who has honest disagreements with them?

Third, Keith writes that:

I do my best not to be closed off to the potentialities of any motion picture: "Hollywood films", "Foreign films", "Avant-garde films", "Home videos"—at a very basic, gut level these distinctions are anathema to me.

But it is a very rare person who is going to like all of these kinds of things equally, because, well, they each offer very different kinds of experiences. No one would say that because you like books you should try to like cook books as much as travel guides as much as volumes of poetry. We're all going to have our preferences: kinds of movies we respond more to than others, kinds of movies we just aren't interested in. Consider that even within a specific "type" of movie - conventional narrative Hollywood stuff - most people are going to have strong preferences for certain genres, styles, subject matter, etc. It always seems a little forced to me when someone proclaims equal love for all of these things (but that might just be because I used to try to force myself into thinking/responding that way).

This has been a little bit of a hobby horse with me lately, but I think criticism of any kind benefits when the critic is honest and upfront about the specific kinds of experiences he or she actually responds to and is interested in.

Tangentially, one of the defining moments of my own career as a film buff came during the first few weeks of my cinema studies program. I was talking with a classmate and I noticed that he had no familiarity with most of the movies I was bringing up (mostly old Hollywood, but also French stuff from the 1930s). After I asked him "Have you seen that?" for the sixth or seventh time, he told me: "I don't like watching movies much. I just really like the idea of cinema." I didn't say anything more about it at the time, but what I have come to realize is that I really don't care about "movies in general". I do, very much, care about specific movies, and I'm very much interested in the people who make them and they methods they use. But "the idea of cinema"? Eh.

Blog Chat: Cinephiles?, Gateways, Plagiarism, More Children of Men

Andy Horbal asks this question over on his blog:

Do you
A) identify with
B) feel alienated by
the term cinephile? Or would you choose
C) none of the above?

I chose B): to me "cinephile" sounds too much like "audophile" which I (perhaps unfairly) associate with people who are really into their stereo system. I prefer "film buff", partly because it's a lot more casual sounding.

Blake Bell has a thoughtful post on the mainstream comics industry's delusions about coming up with gateway comics.

Eddie Campbell has a (perhaps) provocative post about plagiarism, Roy Lichtenstein, and IP. He quotes R.G. Collingwood:

Let all such artists as understand one another, therefore, plagiarize each other's work like men. Let each borrow his friends' best ideas, and try to improve on them. If A thinks himself a better poet than B, let him stop hinting it in the pages of an essay; let him re-write B's poems and publish his own improved version. If X is dissatisfied with Y's this-year Academy picture, let him paint one caricaturing it; not a sketch in Punch, but a full-sized picture for next year's Academy. I will not rely upon the hanging committee's sense of humour to the extent of guaranteeing that they would exhibit it; but if they did, we should get brighter Academy exhibitions. Or if he cannot improve on his friends' ideas, at least let him borrow them; it will do him good to try fitting them into works of his own, and it will be an advertisement for the creditor. An absurd suggestion? Well, I am only proposing that modern artists should treat each other as Greek dramatists or Renaissance painters or Elizabethan poets did. If any one thinks that the law of copyright has fostered better art than those barbarous times could produce, I will not try to convert them.

I bet you can find this kind of cross-pollination with the folks making videos for sharing on YouTube, too. Hmmm... Thinking about it, the line between the people producing original content for YouTube and the people just uploading found/captured videos looks pretty fuzzy.

And Sean Collins responds to my post on Children of Men. Once again, I find myself not only agreeing with Sean, but wishing that I had put it this way myself first:

...I still found the dystopia convincing and frightening, and I think that at least in part that comes from approaching those elements as horror... Children of Men fails as a dystopia that one could logically arrive at from its constituent elements, I think, but succeeds despite that because of the way those elements add up as a big frightening collage of Things That Are Horrifying. Domestic terrorism, ecological and economic breakdown, torture, prisoner abuse, large-scale human rights violations by a Western nation, internecine warfare between "freedom fighters," increased video surveillance, assassinations, plausibly deniable action by the government against journalists and dissidents, Abu Ghraib, Vladimir Putin, the drug war, limited nuclear exchanges, pandemics, Islamic fascism, urban warfare, intrusive media and advertising presence, euthanasia, and (I think this is the real emotional key to why the film works and I haven't seen anyone comment on it) the constant presence of animals in great danger, as undiluted an conveyor of helplessness as it gets--put it all together and it works in the same way that, for example, The Shining takes axes and ghosts and corpses and haunted houses and child abuse and rivers of blood and isolation and psychics and puts them all together and that works.

The more I think about Children of Men, the less my quarrels with its ideas seem to matter. Usually, it goes the other way around for me, as it did with The Queen, which I saw around the same time, where the nagging, nay saying voice in my head was relatively quiet while I was watching the movie, but grew louder the more I thought about it.

On the other hand, I still think there's something a little underhanded about the way Cuaron et al. do a complete 180 on the novel's take on immigration. And it's the fact that the novel makes more sense regarding this issue that keeps me a little bit suspicious of Cuaron's choices.

Movie Chat: Double Features

This post at The House Next Door got me thinking about the worst double feature I ever attended.

I had always wanted to see Irvin Kershner's Loving, which, though available now on DVD, used to be really hard to find. I was pretty excited when I saw that the Film Forum was showing it as part of their American New Wave, Late 60s, early 70s series (this was back in 1996). It was the second movie of a double bill with another George Segal movie from 1970, Where's Poppa? I'm a big George Segal fan, so I was happy to see both of them, both for the first time.

Now, I liked Where's Poppa? a lot: it was funny and raunchy and had no sense of good tatse to get in the way of the fun. The crowd liked it, too. The problem was, they liked it so much and had such a good time at it, that, when Loving came on after a 10 minute break, they were still in the mood for laughs. They seemed tone deaf to Loving's minor key melancholy and, instead, they treated it as camp.

The problem is that the costumes and sets of Loving did look funny to a 1990s audience - mainly because they're so late-60s/early-70s. But the movie itself is serious and weighty. An audience that hadn't been revved up by Where's Poppa?, but instead had been treated to an even bigger downer of a movie like Born to Win, might have gotten onto its wavelength after a few titters at the actors' haridos.

Although maybe not. In my experience, Film Forum revivals tend to have the worst audiences in New York City. I mean, audiences for horror movies on 86th St. will be rowdier and louder, but that's what you'd expect for horror movies, which attract a lot of teens out looking for a good time. But you might think that someone going to the Film Forum to see Loving or Rio Bravo or Sunrise would be enough of a film buff to know how to behave at a theater. But these revivals end up attracting:

• (a) Hipsters who think it is so funny that in, say, Rio Bravo, John Wayne talks so much like someone doing a John Wayne impression, that they laugh every time he opens his mouth.
• (b) People who watch old movies for primarily campy pleasures, so they end up treating any old movie as if it were a camp experience.

Because (1) I've seen enough old movies that it isn't a novel, alien experience, (2) I generally take these movies fairly seriously (or, at least, I try to meet them on their own terms), and (3) my approach towards movie appreciation is almost always non-ironic, I get annoyed pretty quickly when the folks around me respond as if everything on the screen is there for their detatched, knowing, amusement.

Oh, my dream double bill would be two by Floyd Mutrux: Dusty and Sweets McGee (because I've never seen it) and Aloha, Bobby and Rose, because I never get tired of seeing it and I missed it the last time it was playing at the Film Forum.

Blog Chat: Woody, Translations, Super Heroes

Half Sigma posts part one of his take on Woody Allen's Manhattan, a movie he obviously likes, but, refreshingly, isn't reverential about. I really like the commonsense analysis and the way Half Sigma brings the kind of sociological insights that anchor most of his posts to bear on the movie. Favorite line: "Does any woman really want to go to bed with the entire faculty of MIT? Does the faculty of MIT know about this?"

I've always been a little suspicious of the "no translations ever" crowd, so I was happy to see Thursday's very nice post on how translation relates to other interpretive arts. What's interesting to me is that by looking translation in this context, the anti-translation bias seems like a part of the phenomenon of book worship.

I haven't read either of the two comics that Marc Singer blogs about in this post, but I've read enough super hero comics that I completely buy the general point he makes.

Movie Chat: Children of Men

Children of Men

Like Sean, I didn't know anything about the one-shot set pieces in Children of Men going into the movie. Unlike Sean, I did notice them during the movie - specifically, during the long sequence in the car - and they took my breath away. But, like Sean, I don't buy the argument that "the movie's technical proficiency is... evidence of its soullessness".

I did have problems with the movie: as speculative fiction, I think, compared to the source novel, it was incoherent. This makes sense in that P.D. James is a conservative Christian and Cuaron and his screenwriters are all leftists. The world that they extrapolate from the central idea (humans have lost the ability to have children) doesn't hold up to scrutiny all that well, but that's almost beside the point.

(Almost. I found the political/social commentary in the margins of Children of Men pretty annoying, but not nearly as annoying as the political/social commentary in the margins of Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien, which really soured that movie for me. In Children of Men, they don't seem out of place, but in Y Tu Mama Tambien the overt political statements seem inappropriately tacked-on, as if, every ten minutes during Manhattan, Woody Allen had shown a shot of a homeless man, or another image of urban blight, and we heard a John Gielgud voice-over about how cold the city can be to many of its inhabitants.)

Still, though, Children of Men was such an overwhelming emotional and aesthetic experience, that I can ignore its more questionable political ideas. This is why I'll never be able to be a rigorous, brainy, conservative film critic like Alan Dale: I'm too willing to ignore a movie's dopey ideas if it sweeps me away.

And speaking of getting swept away (and dopey ideas), Children of Men felt like Spielberg at his best, which for me includes War of the Worlds and Munich, two movies that share a kinship with this one. Like War of the Worlds, Children of Men builds its visions of the apocalypse with ripped-from-the-headlines images. Like Munich, the political context ends up being a lot less important to the way I experienced the movie than the protagonist's moral journey.

I've enjoyed Cuaron's work in the past and I've almost always been impressed by it, even if it some of it rubbed me the wrong way, but this movie makes me think that he's one of the few filmmakers - like Spielberg - who can accomplish exactly what they set out to do.

Preferences

Commenting on Spengler's recent piece on modern art, Peter Suderman writes:

Really, I think the difference for the modern/abstract art and music lover, or at least for me anyway, is that while most people experience art and music in a fairly surface, sensory manner, and therefore gravitate, quite reasonably, toward art that's comfortable and pleasant feeling, I tend to experience art from a far more argumentative, analytical perspective. Most people prefer stuff that calms the senses; I, and a minority of other cantankerous folks (many of whom tend to be critic-types) prefer material that riles the mind. This is often a source of frustration for critic types who feel that everyone should follow their experience, and although I don't propose a solution, it does seem to me that critics and others of similar disposition should generally refrain from castigating general audiences for not getting something. (Other critics, however, are fair game.) [emp. mine]

I think this points to something that most everyone acknowledges during casual conversations about the arts, but that doesn't often make its way into on-the-page (or screen) critical writing: your preferences, background, etc. are going to play a huge role in determining what kinds of movies, books, music, etc. engages you, what kinds bore you, and what kinds just put you off.

For example, it doesn't surprise me at all that Grant Morrison was named the #1 comics writer by comics bloggers: his comics are written as if their primary purpose is to be blogged about. That is, they require and reward a certain kind of allegorical interpretation and symbolic puzzle solving that is enhanced by the cross-blog-pollination of interpretations and solutions.

Another favorite example (which I've stolen from Michael Blowhard), the canonization of Ulysses by academics probably has something to do with how well that book rewards academic-style reading and criticism.

I suppose I'd, er, prefer it if more critics would be up front about their own preferences. I mean, I know it's best to read any kind of value judgment in a piece criticism as if the author had stuck an "In my opinion" in front of it, but revealing personal preferences gives your audience a better handle on the way you approach art and makes your value judgments a lot more useful.

Ilkka on Final Destination 2

I like reading Ilkka Kokkarinen's blog Sixteen Volts, mainly because his take on things is so different from mine. I feel especially out of sync with him when he writes about art and pop culture. For instance, he judges sci-fi novels in terms of the accuracy of their predictions, which I think is kind of wrong way to approach science fiction.

However, today he wrote about the movie Final Destination 2 in a way that almost makes me want to see it - I've avoided it mainly because I thought the original Final Destination (which I saw in the theater) was one of the lamest movies I've ever experienced. Anyways, here's Ilkka on FD2:

The very premise of the movie, that there is no monster in a rubber suit lurking around but the whole physical reality itself is the monster that tries to kill our main characters as impersonally as gravity pulling down a rock thrown in the air, acting teleologically but constrained to obey the laws of physics (for example, a knife can't just jump out the drawer and fly through the air to slash your throat), is absolutely brilliant. If the Matrix movies inspired books of philosophical essays, the premise of this movie should also inspire at least a few blog posts.

No matter where you run, you can't escape the fact that you are still inside the physical reality. Thus the only way to try to survive is to live in a specially constructed safehouse that doesn't contain anything that the physical reality could potentially use as a weapon. But is this really living? Add to this the excellent special effects when the death eventually catches the teens one by one, and the result is a truly excellent movie.

Anyone else feel this way about FD2? Anyone know of any other horror movies that work in a similar way?

Why I am a bad blogger

That last post of mine is a pretty good example of why I am a bad blogger. Not so much because it makes huge generalizations or because it takes one of my pet peeves and tries to turn it into some kind of profound statement: most blog posts do those things. No, I am a bad blogger because I was too lazy to find even one example of the kind of piece I was writing about so that I could link to it. (After seeing that Slate didn't have any backlash pieces on its main page, I gave up the search.) In fact, I'm too lazy to link to all the other posts I've written on the subject. Oh, well...

The Backlash Backlash

On the one hand, I've always thought that the phenomenon of critical backlash was a useful corrective to the way our hype-driven pop culture tends to overvalue and over-praising movies, TV shows, books, etc. (I admit to being just as guilty of over-praising stuff as anyone else).

On the other hand, I'm completely bored by these hit pieces that target virtually anything that manages to find an audience. They've all started seeming like the same piece. And I wonder if there's now an incentive for snarky twenty/thirty-something pop culture writers/bloggers to delay admitting that they like anything until they find out if it will end up being a worthy backlash target.

Honestly, I could care less if you, unlike all your friends/fellow-bloggers/co-workers, just "don't get" Battlestar Galactica or Lost or whatever.

But I guess I'm just really tired of all this posturing masquerading as arts and culture criticism. (And I am posturing now? Does taking an anti-posturing stance make me just as bad? Probably. Oh well...)

Horror Haiku

My friend Nick has started a "Horror Haiku" blog. Appropriately enough, the entries remind me of Hideshi Hino's horror comics, even though I know Nick has never read them. (This might be a testament to the extent that Japanese Horror has thoroughly infiltrated American pop culture). Check it out.

Playing Catch-Up

When I took a break from blogging, I also cut down on my blog reading. This gave me more time to do important stuff like reading Robert Heinlein novels, playing tabletop RPGs and tinkering with RPG design, posting on message boards, and watching lots of TV shows on DVD.

Now, I'm playing catch-up with all the great writing on blogs that I've missed out on over the last few months. It's a quixotic undertaking, but I'll keep at it in the hopes that I'll find more stuff like this excellent Sean Collins post from last month. Sean is again dealing with one of his favorite topics - violence and torture as part of our arts and entertainments - and, as usual, he's sharper (not to mention less hypocritical) than most other pop culture pundits.

This time, Sean comments on Eli Roth's claims that the graphic torture scenes in Roth's movie Hostel are meant to make the audience feel guilty about the current state of world affairs (Roth specifically mentions Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina).

Sean's response is one that I wish I had come up with:

The notion that your society, your era, your government, your audience is uniquely prone to evil--a notion almost always accompanied by the sort of clean-hands finger-pointing exemplified by Roth [and others]--is to me the absolute laughable height of narcissism in pessimist's clothing; it's the art-critical equivalent of doomsday prophesying. The fact that filmmakers and critics now feel they have free rein on the subject of torture and brutality because they see our government involved in it yet apparently had little or nothing to say on the subject when it was status quo in countless other countries across the globe for years and years and years (which it still is) is exhibit A.

There is nothing special about your pet target. On the contrary. All humans, from every country and time period ever, are terrible. That's what great art is about. I can see an argument being made that embracing this belief is a way of letting oneself off the hook; I submit that one who makes that argument proves in so doing that he doesn't understand the belief at all.

Well, I probably wouldn't have gone so far as Sean does here (it is the potential for terribleness that isn't unique to any time or place or culture) but I like the way Sean takes this right over the edge.

He also talks a lot about The Sopranos in this post, and what he says has helped me to get a better handle on my increasingly ambivalent feelings about this show. But that probably deserves a post of its own.