Friday, November 13, 2009

Screen Memories A.O.Scott

From the NY Times:

Many years ago, in an age of chaos and confusion, in a world where time was money and pleasure was work, I saw a movie that changed my life forever. It was called “My Dog Skip.”
Perhaps you remember it. To be perfectly honest, I don’t. There was a dog named Skip, of course (a Jack Russell terrier with a taste for bologna) — who lived in Mississippi in some bygone, innocent era before the present age of chaos and confusion, in a world where . . . — but never mind. Kevin Bacon was in the movie and also Luke Wilson and the kid from “Malcolm in the Middle.” I recollect this stuff only because I looked back at an old newspaper review, the first I ever wrote as a film critic for The New York Times.
That was in January 2000. Since then, more than 5,000 movies have come and gone and been reviewed in The Times, most of them still living somewhere in the lucrative zombie limbo of DVD or cable programming. Some landed noisily on thousands of screens at once, gobbling up as much attention and money as the marketing machinery of the studios could buy, at least for a weekend or two. Others bloomed quietly in big-city art houses and were smiled on (if they were lucky) by ardent critics and die-hard cinephiles. Some won Oscars they didn’t deserve. Many more deserved better than they got from the Academy or the public. There were extravagant spectacles of superheroism and planetary disaster; blue-chip biopics in which famous actors impersonated famous historical personages; handsome adaptations of prizewinning literary novels; coarse comedies; exquisite relationship studies; noisy cartoons; muckraking documentaries; D.I.Y. video oddities; and multisequel franchises with lovable heroes like Harry Potter, Shrek and Jigsaw.
Did I miss any? Not as many as I might have wanted, perhaps, though at the same time I often feel as if I have some catching up to do. And after 10 years, with the calendrical end of the decade as further excuse and inspiration, I find myself wondering which of those thousands will last. And also, how, why and in what form. The possibility of a digital, on-demand afterlife guarantees at least a theoretically universal long-tail immortality to blockbusters and curiosities alike. But this state of database nonoblivion is not the same as being held in memory. Which movies are sure to be remembered? Which movies deserve to be? Are these really two different questions?
Every movie fan with the slightest scholarly or antiquarian bent carries around a canon culled from film history, a register of consensus masterpieces, important milestones and significant developments, from “The Birth of a Nation” to “Saving Private Ryan,” with a roster in between that seems, in hindsight, to be as fixed as the reading list in a college literature survey. (And of course is really every bit as much a result of argument, changes in fashion and wholesale revisionism.) There is “Citizen Kane” and the first two “Godfathers.” There are Ingmar Bergman and Yasujiro Ozu and Jean-Luc Godard.
But alongside the official pantheon occasionally incarnated in lists offered up by institutions like the American Film Institute and The New York Times, every film lover carries around a more subjective canon, an ever-shifting, impressionistic personal cinematheque. That horror movie that gave you nightmares as a child. The love story you saw on your first date with the love of your life. The dramas that ended or started friendships, soothed you in your lonely moments or made the loneliness more acute. The westerns that taught you something about courage or treachery, the comedies that schooled you in sex, the epics and biopics that overshadowed what you learned in history class.
No one, not even professional critics, lives through film history in proper chronological order. Two of the best, most lavishly praised movies of the past decade were “Le Cercle Rouge” and “Army of Shadows,” crepuscular classics by the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville that had fallen through the cracks of the distribution system back in 1969 and 1970, when they were made. And when Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” an anti-utopian, early science-fiction monument desecrated in its own time and venerated ever after, appeared in a restored and expanded version, its timeliness was at least as striking as its durability. The best new movies carry intimations of permanence along with their novelty and very quickly start to seem as if they had been around all along.
Perhaps the easiest and most satisfying way to make sense of the unruly cinematic abundance of the past 10 years is to sift through it for masters and masterpieces, kicking the tires to see what has been built to last. Whatever else was going on, a handful of great filmmakers made a handful of great films, just as in other decades. Steven Spielberg, freed in the ’90s by the successes of “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” from the burden of importance, made a series of bracingly imaginative entertainments — “Minority Report,” “Catch Me if You Can,” “War of the Worlds,” “Munich” and “The Terminal” in addition to “A.I.” — that were both nimble and deeply resonant. Clint Eastwood, in his 70s, entered the most prolific and diverse phase of his career as a director, breathing new life into long-established Hollywood genres, including the boxing picture (“Million Dollar Baby”), the crime thriller (“Mystic River”) and the combat epic (“Letters From Iwo Jima”). Martin Scorsese collected his overdue Academy Award for “The Departed”; Joel and Ethan Coen won their first Best Picture Oscar, for “No Country for Old Men,” in the midst of popping out a film a year. Gus Van Sant, Robert Altman, P. T. Anderson, Spike Jonze, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Todd Haynes. The canon of American cinema, since the early ’60s a catalog of acknowledged auteurs, expanded significantly in the new century.
Outside Hollywood, Pedro Almodóvar continued to mature into the post-sexual-revolution cinema’s most exalted and authentic exponent of the melodramatic tradition. In France, the geriatric New Wave generation (Rohmer, Rivette, Resnais, Chabrol) proved remarkably spry, even as a middle generation, including Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas and others, competed with the old-timers for prizes and attention. Every year, the Cannes Film Festival, the leading world-heritage site for the veneration of filmmakers, presented a remarkably consistent roll call of directorial renown. Wong Kar-wai, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Abbas Kiarostami, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. These may not be household names even in movie-mad American households, but they are inscribed in the registry of important international filmmakers.
Most critics, when they assemble their personal canons, will implicitly follow the director-centric impulses of the auteur theory, even if they retain some skepticism about the theory itself. That is, we will gravitate toward favored filmmakers, with plenty of room for argument about choices within a given body of work — why “Letters From Iwo Jima” and not “Changeling”? — as well as about the stature of particular artists. Are the Coens profligate geniuses or clever, cold-hearted pranksters? (“Both” may be the only acceptable answer.) Is Soderbergh a protean visionary or a formalist hack? (See above.) Such arguments, infinitely extendable and happily interminable, are what sustain film criticism in its various incarnations, professional and amateur, printed, blogged and tweeted.
This kind of argumentation has the double appeal of being both stimulating and fundamentally conservative. It allows us to think about cinema — a restless, constantly changing art form — as something fundamentally stable and coherent, in the way that other arts are imagined to be. And the emphasis on great directors and their masterpieces is also useful as an organizing principle for festival programs, film-studies syllabuses and museum retrospectives. It is, in other words, the institutional form of film criticism.
But defending — or assaulting — the reputations of prominent filmmakers and assessing the merits of their oeuvres is not the only, or even the dominant, way to arrive at some sense of a movie canon. This may have been the era of Spielberg and the Coens and the rest. But it is equally the age of “Gladiator” and “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Rings” and “Shrek” and “Saw” (and “My Dog Skip”) and a whole slew of new and rebooted superhero franchises. And also of Pixar, one of the few companies after Disney (which acquired it in 2006) to achieve something like auteur status in its own right.
In other words, the director-focused approach that is the default position for critics tends to angle away from how the audience — and not just the hypothetically unsophisticated, hype-hungry mass audience — responds to movies. It’s not exactly that critical judgment is opposed to, or out of touch with, popular taste. On the contrary, some of the most widely and ardently beloved franchise movies of the decade, like Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” and Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings,” have buttressed their directors’ claims to exalted, authorial status. But the critical habit of thinking in terms of collected works and major and minor artists does not correspond to the way viewers sample and discover their cinematic pleasures.
Or to the way we — by which I now mean the laity, not the certified members of the guild — remember them. What do we remember? Catch phrases, stars’ faces, scenes and sensations. Westerns, weepies, screwball comedies, sword-and-sandal spectacles, gritty little realist dramas. Feelings, images, themes.
The unofficial, demotic history of cinema is built out of these impressions and out of the patterns that turn movies into a warped, unignorable mirror of the world they inhabit. Unspool the 20th century in your head and most likely you see a progression of genres and styles: slapstick comedy in the teens, kohl-eyed melodrama in the ’20s, followed by gangster movies, screwball comedies, combat epics, films noirs, musicals and Technicolor westerns. The rebel Hollywood of the ’70s gives way to the blockbuster-mad ’80s, which is followed by the rise of the indies in the ’90s. And then?
And then Frodo and Spider-Man, Mumblecore and midbudget Oscar bait, Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen, “The Dark Knight” and the Transformers movies, along with everything else. Everything else including terrorism, war, political polarization, environmental anxiety and an economic bubble whose bursting cast a backward pall over the era’s extravagance, much as 9/11 seems to shadow even those pictures conceived and released before the attacks.
How else to make sense of the prevalence of revenge as a motive, a problem and a source of catharsis? It was hardly a new topic — payback has been the common currency of cowboys and samurai, rogue cops and righteous criminals, for a very long time — but in noncomic genres vengeance could seem like the only game in town. Sometimes the urge to repay blood with blood was treated with skepticism or at least with a sense of moral complication, as in “Mystic River” or “In the Bedroom” or “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.” But the tone for mainstream commercial entertainment was set early on, when “Gladiator” won the first Best Picture Oscar of the new decade. And nearly every hero thereafter, from Aragorn and Harry Potter to Spider-Man and even the newly young Mr. Spock and the newly sad James Bond, was caught up in a Manichaean struggle defined by an endless cycle of vendetta and reprisal.
This was even true of Jesus, whose travails in Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” played like the first act of a revenge drama, the one in which the hero is humbled as pre-emptive justification for whatever fury he comes back to unleash at the end. The violence in that film, which seemed shocking at the time, now seems fairly typical of a mainstream popular cinema saturated with images of bodily torment.
And also, perhaps, of a taste for primal, antimodern scenarios of action and reaction, in which the nuances of politics and the deliberative institutions of justice are treated with suspicion, even contempt. George Lucas’s final — which is to say middle — chapter in the “Star Wars” cycle was unusual in taking a critical view of this impulse, but not in placing it at the center of an allegorical epic. The bitterness of Anakin Skywalker, the sense of grievance asserting itself in violence, could be found in the Batman of “The Dark Knight” as well, whose voice and countenance bore a suggestive and chilling resemblance to Darth Vader.
There is something profoundly regressive in the vision of a civilization stripped down to an essentially violent core, so it is perhaps not surprising that regression of another kind provided the movies of the era with their richest vein of humor. Devotion to playthings and playmates, a fascination with bodily fluids and a queasy obsession with sex — these were what defined a movie hero not preoccupied with killing bad guys. Traditional romances and sex farces were supplanted by comedies of arrested male development, defensive glorifications of the right of boys to be boys, occasionally informed by the serious question of what it might mean to be a man.
Some of these — “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Step Brothers,” “Nacho Libre” — were among the funniest movies of the decade, but like the geek-revenge dramas and the child-friendly fantasies with which they shared box-office ascendancy, they pushed women to the edge of the frame. Movies seem to be, increasingly, for and about men and (mostly male) kids, with adult women in the marginal roles of wives and mothers, there to be avenged, resented or run to when things get too scary.
There were exceptions, of course. Five thousand movies and more, spread out over 10 years, allow for a lot of variety. Some of these will grow stranger, some more familiar. They are still out there, after all, waiting to be rediscovered and inscribed either in some future canon or in the memory banks of people who stumble across them somewhere in the digital ether. The viewing and reviewing of movies never ends but rather restarts and repeats. Here comes the mailman, with a red envelope from Netflix: a DVD of “My Dog Skip.”
A. O. Scott, a chief film critic at The Times, last wrote for the magazine about neo-neo-realism.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Having mom to dinner

HAVING MOM
OVER FOR DINNER

Brian invited his mother over for dinner. During the course
of the meal, Brian's mother couldn't help but notice
how beautiful Brian's roommate, Jennifer, was.
Brian's Mom had long been suspicious of the platonic
relationship between Brian and Jennifer, and this had only
made her more curious.

Over the course of the evening, while watching the two
interact, she started to wonder if there was more between
Brian and Jennifer than met the eye.

Reading his mom's thoughts, Brian volunteered, 'I
know what you must be thinking, but I assure you Jennifer
and I are just roommates.'

About a week later, Jennifer came to Brian saying,
'Ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been
unable to find the beautiful silver gravy ladle. You
don't suppose she took it, do you?'

Brian said,
'Well, I doubt it, but I'll send her an e-mail
just to be sure. So he sat down and wrote:

__________________________________________________________


Dear Mom,

I'm not saying that you 'did' take the gravy
ladle from the house, I'm not saying that you 'did
not' take the gravy ladle. But the fact remains that one
has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.

Love, Brian
__________________________________________________________


Several days later, Brian received an email back from his
mother that read:
Dear Son,

I'm not saying that you 'do' sleep with
Jennifer, I'm not
saying that you 'do not' sleep with Jennifer. But
the fact remains that if Jennifer is sleeping in her own
bed, she would have found the gravy ladle by now.

Love, Mom

LESSON OF THE DAY - NEVER LIE TO YOUR MOTHER

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

2 things from the times to scare you....



Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash

A garbage patch in the Pacific is one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered in the world’s oceans.

Click here for full article


Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies

Bisphenol A, or BPA, is linked to things like cancer, obesity, attention deficit disorder and genital abnormalities, and it’s been found in our food.

http://s.nyt.com/u/DkD
 

" "The difference between a madman and a professional is that a pro does as well as he can within what he has set out to do and a madman does exceptionally well at what he can't help doing.” ― Charles Bukowski