Resurfacing …

I know I’ve been bad, but it’s because of the harsh realities of moving, a class that meets every single day (and I present on poems just about every other day), and a severe case of climate blues (if whales had sweaty armpits that you could live in, and swam around in hot tubs, this is how it would feel to live there).  Sorry.

So, I saw two of the endless streams of comic-book films that have been vomited onto America by the Hollywood cartels, and actually neither one was very bad.  Not cinematic classics or anything, certainly not. But not pitiful or depressing, either.  

I meant to go see Batman: The Dark Knight on the day of its release, but Waco being Waco, and therefore not offering any other weekend diversion but seeing a movie, it was sold out.  So, since my student discount tickets are only five bucks, I took a gamble and watched Hellboy II: The Golden Army instead.  Now, most dudes my age would probably say that Pan’s Labyrinth is no Hellboy – but in reality, it’s the other way around.  The former was really designated an “art film” just because it was in Spanish, and was in fact a brilliantly imaginative fantasy.  Hellboy II is reassuringly filmed in English (with snatches of a made up language) and therefore not an art film.  It’s certainly a version of director Guillermo del Toro’s vision re-packaged to fit the uber-populist mold of the comic book, but mutatis mutandis, the films aren’t as far apart as you’d think.  In fact, the visuals are clearly derived from the same oddly precise imagination, and for once I felt a studio had not been wasting its money on digital technology.  These computers make some art, dammit, not just stupid trolls (though, obligatorily, those are certainly in evidence here).  It’s worth watching if only for the brilliantly realized tree-god, the scene where two characters get drunk together on cans of Tecate, and the rather Derridian implications for the marginalized life of the non-humans.

The Dark Knight, which I did manage to see last night, is a different story.  It’s a true post-9/11 “superhero” movie that barely deserves the title.  It is utterly jammed with moral dilemmas, over everything from warrantless wiretapping to the old game-theory question of whether it is better to collaborate or compete (or blow 500 people to smithereens).  While most superheroes end up vomiting American flags all over their simplistically cackling enemies whilst feasting on apple pie and repeating folk adages in cool voices, this “superhero” is depressed, convinced that he is actually a (sort of necessary) menace, and doesn’t really get that much screen time.  It’s amazing to remember how the first movie of this franchise was considered “dark” when it came out — it has nothing on this baby.  The problem of a convincing villain is brilliantly solved by the late Heath Ledger (and what a shame it is that this is his last role), who marries the spirit of the anarchists of Dostoevsky to that of al-Qaeda with the sort of sheer bravado rarely seen in big-budget films.  Astoundingly, his fate is really not sealed at the end — and considering how easily he breaks from prison in the middle of the film, we cannot imagine he stays incarcerated long.  And here I thought only Cormac McCarthy got away with that sort of thing.  In summation, this film left me rather depressed, but not at the state of American cinema (for once): instead, it vividly illustrates the extreme difficulty of fighting evil and chaos and terror while remaining pure, or even kind of dubiously decent.  Sobering thoughts for this time of war …

Other than that, I’ve mostly been eating and studying, which is what one does in Waco.  And I will try to post more often, especially when I get internet in my apartment.  To absolutely no one’s surprise, the promised AirBear connection does NOT reach to Jamestown #15.  So I’m left again, hefting my silly black bag all over creation looking for some wireless.  I hate it.

Some actual good things about Europe.

It seems to me that Europe is getting a bad rap Stateside.  Oh, their populations are dying out.  Oh, they’re being taken over by Muslims.  Oh, they’re sissies who get their army provided by America.  Oh, the EU is … wait, why don’t we like the EU again?  I either forgot, or never knew in the first place.

I just have a couple of completely superficial observations to make, neither of which is an actual rebuttal of the above criticisms.  But first off, I just got done watching a movie with Juliette Binoche, whose work I always admire.  Now, Binoche is certainly beautiful enough for Hollywood standards, but she’s in her forties now, and I notice that she (and many other comparable actors, male and female) is not retouched or made up in European cinema, nor are these people relegated to sinister/aged/otherwise marginal roles.  This is even more the case for Daniel Auteuil.  Honestly, I don’t think he’s a bad looking guy at all, but can you even imagine an American film with him in top billing?  It’s no wonder he doesn’t work over here; he’d be cast as a villain with twenty lines, twelve of which would be sinister cackles.  And yet both are fantastic actors, capable of working in something like the daunting Michael Haneke’s Cache and also much lighter fare, such as Chocolat or The Valet.  

All of this is to say that the conditions for stardom seem to be much less superficial and destructive in Europe than in the States.  I even read somewhere that public intellectuals like Foucault were treated like stars in France.  That’s quite a tall order in a nation where Angelina Jolie serves the point of both Foucault and Gandhi, but still.  Perhaps we could start with the airbrushing cult.  Couldn’t a semi-intelligent magazine, like (say) Vanity Fair, run a series of photographs of someone who is beautiful, truly and unaided, but perhaps has (gasp) some crow’s feet untouched by Botox?

Here’s another bit.  Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.) recently said, in opposition to the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, that “nobody in their right mind” believe we can get half our power from wind and solar or “drive a fleet of golf carts” (from an article in Salon).  Are you absolutely positive, Senator?  Is ownership of an Escalade, a Durango, and a Hummer part of what makes us, essentially, Americans?

Well, probably, at least for now.  However, I have been seeing more Smart Cars on the roads, and with the current price-per-barrel of crude, I’m not surprised that the Smart is gathering steam.  I had to laugh when I read this review by Salon’s Machinist blog, especially the bits where people ask silly questions like “can it go on the highway?” or “does it run on gas?”  I’ve never been all that surprised by the Smart, since I saw absolute droves of them in Italy, Germany, and France during my semester abroad in 2005.  Obviously, the Smart isn’t for everyone — large families, construction contractors — but what would be wrong with it for single people, couples without children, etc.?  Well, one problem is that our infrastructure does in fact favor a fleet of aircraft-carrier-sized vessels.  Everything is so far apart in America that road trips require large gas tanks and plenty of storage space, and the trains and low-budget airlines that Europeans use for long-distance travel either don’t exist or are extremely difficult to get to.  The Smart car is built for city driving, but nobody lives in cities here.  Instead, our enlightened zoning laws have given us neighborhoods like mine, in which you can’t throw a rock without hitting any one of a host of identical Starubckses and banks, but have to drive twenty minutes to get to a CD shop, an independent coffee house, or the public transit station (and that’s without traffic, which is to say, never).

All of which is to say, we should abolish our zoning code and allow people to build things where they live.  New Urbanist communities are a step in the right direction, but as of yet, they’re all pristine yuppie havens in which the cheapest store is Banana Republic and the cheapest sandwich is $9.95.  In other words, most people are priced out of them.  We need to let these ideas get carried out to ordinary people if we want to see any sort of progress on the pollution/environmentalism issue.  Otherwise, people just can’t live without their monstrous oil-burning frigates.

Any thoughts?

Two ways of looking at National security.

When asked if the President can break the law, presumably in the interests of National security, incumbent Attorney General Michael Mukasey answered: The president has “the authority to defend the country.”  

Richard Nixon, embroiled in the Watergate scandal, declared that “if the president does it, it’s not illegal.”

Both of these quotations, though I’d heard them before, were called to my mind by Senator Chris Dodd’s recent speech on the retroactive immunity bill, which even most of the Democrats are about to let slide.  I myself was a bit unsure about the bill before reading his speech — I’d been told before that the wiretapping had only gone on overseas (not true) and wondered if the telecom companies could really be held liable when the Justice Department assured them that the presidential injunctions were legal.  Well, turns out that if this bill is defeated, that is exactly what would be decided in our courts of law — the way legality is usually determined in this country, last time I checked.  The bill, however, would exonerate the telecoms behind closed doors, barring access to the case for ever and aye.  And, as far as I can tell, would essentially consist of the (Democratic) congress voting “yea” to legality being determined by executive fiat.

A good classicist or historian would know that the Roman Republic, aware of the need to balance security and liberty, had an “emergency dictator” position that could last for a set number of years in a crisis to ensure authority and military coordination, and then expire.  But Julius Caesar, citing the dangerous times, decided that the position would have to be lifelong, thereby ending some 500 years of liberty from tyrants.  No, I’m not saying that George W. Bush is Caesar or plans to extend his term for life.  But the constant harping of the executive branch and its neo-con allies that the war on terror is “unprecedented” and therefore necessitates extraordinary measures, is not unprecedented at all — it is terribly, regrettably, and frighteningly banal.

Now, on a lighter note: the top movie of this week, Get Smart, is absolutely hilarious and takes a fantastically lighthearted view of the workings of federal security agencies.  I went to see it because I’ll watch anything with Steve Carell in it, and because the trailer was really funny.  I wasn’t disappointed, and was placed in the awkward, but even more funny, position of cracking up by myself in a movie theater.  

Highlights included the Vice President boasting about his “new pacemaker,” the president falling asleep during the finale of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, and The Rock stapling a piece of paper to a coworker’s head.  It’s great — one of the few recent comedies I’ve seen with a screenplay that is more witty than sophomoric.  So, especially if you’re sick and tired of hearing pompous talk about National security, go and see this movie.  It’s an apt and not at all bitter satire …  

An inconvenient movie?

Well, despite the ghastly reviews, I went to see The Happening, the sixth feature by thriller director / guru wannabe M. Night Shyamalan.  Last time I gave him the benefit of the doubt, contra the critics, I was horribly disappointed by the stilted, weird, anti-climactic Lady in the Water.  So let’s just say that my expectations weren’t very high at all.  

Actually, though, it wasn’t so bad after all, at least not to me; then again, I don’t have very exacting requirements for much “plot” in the movies I enjoy, and I think the lack of dense plotting and a “twist” were part of what irked critics most.  So don’t trust me, necessarily, unless you enjoy the sorts of things that I do.

For me, the best part of Shyamalan’s films has usually been the shooting: he’s willing to give long, patient shots that build suspense slowly, in a kind of Hitchcockian way, something most MTV-generation directors simply don’t have the attention spans to pull off.  For this feature, he teams up again with long-term collaborator Tak Fujimoto, and once again, most of the shots are classy and suspenseful, in a sort of art-horror way that I like.  However, the death of one character is blatantly foreshadowed by means of a cheap slow-mo shot of him driving away in a car that is worthy of a 1980s sentimental music video.  Most unfortunate, but it was the only major technical gaffe I noticed.

I may be wrong, but I think that the acting problems that some critics noticed are mostly script problems — Shyamalan writes all of his own movies, which has worked for some, but in this director’s case, not so much.  It’s as though he doesn’t stop to think about how people really talk, instead focusing on the “message” he wants to get across.  So there always has to be a big “conversation” (“Do you believe in … signs?”) in which someone ponderously just happens to start discussing spirituality, the unknown … you know, a more intimidating Eckhart Tolle or something.  This time, it’s a high-school student talking about forces of nature that will never be explained, which in a movie with the most vague title since 1982’s The Thing, is all too predictable.

So if Zooey Deschanel does little more than act confused throughout the whole movie, it’s at least partly the stilted script’s fault.  She also does the Mel Gibson “let me open my eyes as widely as possible for dramatic effect” thing (viz. Gibson’s Hamlet) — but let’s face it, her eyes are objectively a lot cuter than Mel Gibson’s.  Mark Wahlberg, who is becoming one of my favorite actors, is more than adequate as a leading man, but is also sort of forced into just “acting confused” for a lot of the time.  Maybe just a horror film convention (“Oh my god, where is it?  I think it’s in the … bushes!).  They both shine, though, in the few humorous moments and the “we’re gonna die so let’s renew our flagging love for each other through a speaking tube” scene.  Better than it sounds on paper.

Enough of that.  A lot has been made of the first R-rating this director has garnered, but I’m not sure what the big deal is.  Yes, there are a few gruesome suicides.  But they’re only shown for a few seconds each and are absolutely nothing on anything in, say, the work of Tarantino.  It’s a horror movie, guys.  

And then the inevitable brouhaha about environmentalism.  Again, I’m not sure why this is a big deal.  Wasn’t there a big global-warming blockbuster just a few years back?  And then Al Gore’s really quite excellent An Inconvenient Truth got an Oscar, something that the Shyamalan thriller is certainly not going to do.  It seems like a rather small blip on the climate-change radar screen.  And although the idea is seems rather silly to me — plants have been lying down and taking it from us for centuries, and no doubt will continue to do so — a movie in which plants get their comeuppance seems pretty timely to me, actually, and that counts whether you’re a climate-change believer or not.  Even the most fundamentalist conservative can’t really think that blacktopping the planet and belching smoke into the formerly blue sky is actually what was intended, by God or nature.

So basically, go and see it if you’re bored.  I give the whole package a B-, and advise Shyamalan to come see me in the writing center before attempting any more “naturalistic” dialogue …