Papa Bear and RockNRolla

I saw Bill O'Rielly on the Daily Show last night, and Jon Stewart made him look unintelligent. Well, really he made himself sound unintelligent by repeatedly calling Stewart names while Stewart was just laying the tracks right across. Both him and Colbert are really hitting on all cylinders. Colbert's interviews are devastatingly funny, ironic, and pitch perfect, even as both shows interview period is way too short. Stewart, at least, ought to get half hour for interviews. I can understand why they wouldn't want to stretch the main show. Bringing a half hour comedy show to an hour is a lot, but honestly just let stewart interview for another half. Maybe break up the interview with a bit 3/4 of the way through.

Really the best thing to do would be to combine it with The report and make the whole thing half hour longer, so they both get 15 extra minutes to interview. Maybe 10 for Colbert and 20 for Stewart. It must require an incredible amount of concentration for Colbert to due those interviews. The technique is amazingly executed. When that show first came out, I thought it was hilarious, but that it couldn't last. It didn't occur to me that Colbert might perfect his character after several years on the air. I missed the middle years, but I've come back to the shows streaming though comedy central's website. Bitingly funny. Really good stuff.

Anyway, I started this entry about a month ago and never came back and finished, so I don't really have much to say about RockNRolla except it was thin. The story was pretty weak. The characters were flat, and the color tones kinda' clashed at times, and the rest of the time they were just kinda' drab. Still somewhat entertaining though. And now that I think about it, it was one of those movies were you come out feeling like a badass. I remember leaving the film and walking down by the bar where the first scene of The noir movie in Mythic Structures happens, and I had that look in my eye like I had just figured out the secret meaning of life, and maybe, just maybe, I might let you in on it if you ask me reaallly nicely. That was how I was feeling afterwords.
So, I guess as far as a results oriented look at the film, it kicked ass.

critical opinion

I went to see Burn After Reading the other day. I fully admit I went in wanting to love it and ready to defend it. I get so sick of the how often the Coen Bros. get dissed by the critics. I absolutely don't get it.
Now, I'll admit Burn is a mess. It's all over the place, but I liked that. I like the fact that there's no central protagonist. I also like the fact that you don't really like any of the characters too much. There is no one to root for in this film. When did it become manditory that we have to root for someone? Does film really have to be simply a vicarious experience where we are unchallenged because the protagonist is morally blameless? And does not having this experience mean the movie has to be serious?
These are questions that come out of a lot of Coen films. Now here's the rub. Everyone seems to think that because there's a heavy screwball element to Coen films (with really only two exceptions [blood simple and No Country For Old Men]) this means these films are shallow or lacking in substance. Even Country was often derided as an empty metaphor. I would say that is an amazingly simplistic and shallow interpretation of some very insightful and bitingly critical films.
Coen characters are not real characters. They're archetypes, many times quintessentially American archetypes, and the way these characters interact with each other and the real world holds an incredible amount of insight into the American experience. I won't go too far on this, but Burn has a lot of deep criticism about American's obssession with fitness as a means toward not health but looking good, the erosion of civil liberties and the government's increasing insistence on spying on the American people, and the list goes on. J.K. Simmons asked at the end of the film "What did we learn from all this? Well, not to do it again I guess. Whatever it was." I'm paraphrasing here. The line is right on target as we move closer to the presidential elections, and for many superficial reasons the choice of a pretty, inexperienced woman as a VP candidate who taps into Republican myths of womanhood seems to have pushed McCain into the lead. Really, did we not learn anything from the Bush presidency? Not to do it again, I guess. Whatever that was.

The MPAA and a lack of perspective

I've been watching some pre-production code films, namely a great Greta Garbo 'biopic' of the Queen of Sweden, Queen Christina, and the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle, Babyface. Babyface was a central movie in the move by Will Hays to try and get more teeth into the production code, and the resulting process really took a lot of the nuance and complication out of a medium that was already running short on subltly. Ironcially, the discussion of Nietzschean philosophy that was forced cut from the film by censorship boards is actually itself a common misreading of Nietzsche's work, The Will to Power, completely missing the nuance of a very complicated philosophical tome.

Anyway, it occurred to me just now that this may be a huge part of the reason that reactionary politics is so fond of a manichean worldview of us vs. them, good vs. evil. It's embedded in the films we watch, especially commercial Westerns, War films, and Action/adventure stuff. Obviously, that's not uniformly true, and the recent Dark Night films at least partially explore a more complex psychology. It is true that mainstream films still greatly reflect the tenets of the code that a film's sympathies must never be with an antihero or a criminal. The resulting films were never allowed to explore the undercurrents of criminality or sexuality with any real depth without running afoul of the Hays Office.

I do believe that American sexuality has long been perverted by the pruriant standards of the code, and that the vastly huge pornography industry is a result of a failure to really have an open and honest dialogue through art about sex. That may be stretching things a little, but I also feel that films' cut and dried approach to morality gives people a skewed conception of the complications naturally inherent in human life. It's certainly a part of the problem. Couple that with a Television and internet based culture where attention spans are brief and context is rarely sought or provided, and you get the insanity of modern American politics.

It's really a shame, and the thing is, I believe the Production Code may be at the root of a lot of our trouble seeing and understanding complexity. I don't know that you have all those John Wayne movies if Wilder, Hawks, Lubitsch and the rest had to contend with such a regressive process of censorship. I guess I'm overreaching a little, but I do feel like the artistic history of film was warped in a very unhealthy way by the overt censorship of the Hays office, the precursor to the modern MPAA rating system.

'apropos of nothing'

I really hate excessive or unnecessary narration in films. Or the kind of slapdash narration that Allen uses in Vicki Cristina Barcelona. As an easy way to cobble together a movie it works, but in the end it just superficially masks the fact that the movie is skattershot.

I had my car towed yesterday because I parked on the wrong side of the road during street cleaning hours, and I didn't notice until I was trying to leave for work at 4 am. Of course, the tow yard didn't open until seven at which point I would already be three hours late, and I will have to drop a sawbuck to get it out . I'm currently fuming about all of this.

It took me years of journalling before the process became complicated and a responsibility. It took barely six months for the same thing to happen with blogging.

How is it possible that the Rays and the Cubs are tied with the best records in baseball? That is both exciting and frustrating at the same time.

I really like the set design for Gene Kelly's character's apartment in An American in Paris, but I still have trouble with the excessively melodramaticness of the writing and acting in musicals. I wonder what Brecht/Weil stuff is like live? I'd really like to find out someday.

I don't know if I'll start blogging again. If I can get back this kind of feel without this kind of structure, I might just.

Perfect writing & perfect despair

I've had two unique book reading experiences in the last week or so. Firstly, I've always heard or read about people's experience of reading a book that felt like it was 'written about them' or 'just for them' or whatever, and I've always thought: wow, that sounds cool. I've never had the experience myself until I read Haruki Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing. Actually, it's more along the lines of a novella, but I did. I felt like it was written just for me, as if he had me in his head when he wrote it. Obviously, I know that isn't the case, but still, it just gives you this mild electric shiver the whole time yr reading. It was a marvelously eerie feeling all in all, which has been a continuing theme of 'The summer of Murakami'.
Concurrently, I was reading his most recent novel, After Dark, and I was thinking the whole time, hey, it only seems mediocre in comparison to his other novels. It still had trademark Murakami wierdness, insight, and when the characters get to talking its way offkey and interesting, but it just wasn't all the way there. Like he was coasting through this one. This was how I felt right up until the 2nd to last paragragh in the book, when the themes from all of his books suddenly clicked in my head, and the book transformed into this exciting distillation of wierdness into a coherent metaphysics of the odd. If I hadn't've read so many of his other novels I don't think it would have happened like that, but I have, so it did. I've never had a book completely transform itself in the waning moments like that. It was highly awesome.
I also finished Norwegian Wood just two days ago, and it hit me hard. Suddenly I felt like I had been disattached from the universe and was just floating in some interliminal state whereby I couldn't actually interact or engage with the world around me for the entire day. I was just watching without being a part of anything. It was not the response I would've expected. It's a sad story for sure, but this was something different. I just felt like I was no longer in the game or even a part of the game. I'm failing miserably in my attempt to explain this feeling because it was a strange one, undoubtedly, but oh, well. I'm now into Kafka on the Shore and Pinball, 1973. Absolutely, utterly obsessed with Marukami.