The Girl with The Green Eyes
Cracked has an amusing article today on people who didn’t know their faces had become famous. What struck me was #3 — the famous Afghan Girl with the startling eyes. Here is her full story. No one knew who she was until National Geographic tracked her down. They have a picture of her both as a young woman and as an older woman, prematurely aged by two decades of hell. She’s maybe 30 but her face looks 50. But the striking eyes are still there.
The picture, to me, encapsulates the difference between civilization and barbarism. Had this girl lived in a civilized society, she would still look as alive and beautiful as she did in the first picture. She’s be in the early stages of a career, maybe starting a family. Instead, the barbarism of communism, tribalism and Islamic fundamentalism has her scrabbling out an existence, a second-class human in her own country. And even more depressingly, she supports these things — praising the Burkha and the Taliban (although whether she would be free to criticize either is an open question).
We can’t civilize the barbarians, unfortunately. But we can remind ourselves of how they grind people down, destroy their potential, destroy their very physical existence. Civilization, for all its flaws, is an unthinkable improvement upon the lack thereof. And anyone who fails to recognize it needs to be reminded as often as possible.
2009 In Review
Hey, I’m only a year and a half behind in looking back at 2009 in film. Actually, I think being way behind schedule as I am tends to be good. It gives me a little more perspective, a little less hype. It often turns out that the film most raved about at the time ends up fading to another picture. I think of 1994 when Forrest Gump grabbed all the headlines but The Shawshank Redemption turned out to be the best film.
Anyway, as far as 2009 goes, I saw nine of the ten best picture nominees. They follow with my thoughts and IMDB rating (out of 10). Remember that’s it’s very rare for me to rate a film a 9 or a 10.
Avatar: I wondered if I’d miss the 3D when I bought this on blu-ray. The short answer is no. The film wasn’t very original but was lovely to watch and thrilling. IMDB rating: 8.
The Blind Side: The crowd pleaser of 2009. I’m not unbiased since I read and enjoyed the book. I’d say it’s a little too neat a story, but it’s a real one. And who knew what talent we were wasting with Sandra Bullock? Rating: 7.
District 9: Another one of 2009’s great sci-fi movies. I knew nothing about this film when I rented it and was surprised by how smart and confident it was. I wish we’d get more science fiction like this — a story with ideas. Rating: 8.
An Education: This is in my queue but I have not seen it yet. If it winds up blowing my mind, I’ll let you know.
Inglorious Basterds: You know, I really wanted to love this film. The image composition is fantastic, the acting is good, the dialogue is fun. The opening scene is simply amazing. But the gore and violence are getting to me. Rating: 7, but it might go up in the future.
Precious: I just saw this film last night and am still recovering. It’s harrowing with a bit of inspiration. The suffering by the main character is almost absurd and the movie would completely fall apart were it not held together by two extraordinary acting performances. It’s one of those great films that I never want to see again. Rating: 8.
A Serious Man: I love the Coen brothers and this film was everything that’s good about them. Funny, intriguing and thought-provoking. Rating: 8.
Up: Another movie I wanted to love. The first 15 minutes are incredible. The rest of the movie is good, but not great. Rating: 7.
Up in the Air: Another movie I wanted to like more than I did. Clooney is really a great film-maker, both as an actor and a director. Rating: 7.
The Hurt Locker: I said elsewhere that it’s oscar win was a combination of giving the middle finger to Cameron while saying something about the Iraq War. It’s a good movie, even great at times. But I still don’t see why it won the Oscar. Precious would have been a bolder choice. Rating: 8.
So that’s the Academy. It was a good year for movies, but there was nothing I would call a modern classic.
According to the IMDB users, the best films with 20,000 or more votes were: Inglorious, Up, the Secrets in Their Eyes, Mary and Max, District 9, Avatar, Star Trek, A Prophet, Moon, 500 Days of Summer, the Fantastic Mr. Fox, the Hangover, Coraline, Zombieland, Up in the Air, the Girl with Dragon Tattoo and Watchmen. I’ve seen most of those. Star Trek I’ve talked about — good if a bit flawed. 500 Days of Summer was cute but ultimately forgettable. The Hangover was very funny and Watchmen was spectacular, if somewhat cold. Coraline was quite enjoyable.
I’m not sure what I’d peg as my favorite film of 2009. Star Trek will probably be on my screen more than any other film but it was far from the best film of the year. I would speculate that Inglorious will have the longest legacy. What really stood out about 2009 was the way sci-fi came roaring back, with four great sci-fi films, two of which were nominated for Best Picture.
Because I was fooling around withe IMDB, I decided to see what people rated as the best movies of the last five years. Here’s that list, with the caveat that the 2010 titles will sink with time.
Inception
The Dark Knight
Toy Story 3
The Lives of Others
Wall-E
The Departed
The Prestige
Pan’s Labyrinth
Black Swan
Inglorious Basterds
Three Chris Nolan movies and two PIXAR films. I’m not sure how these will end up rating historically. I would tab Pan’s Labyrinth as the best among those. But looking over that list, they are mostly big pictures that made lots of money. I think Roger Ebert was right — the really artsy pictures that used to make up the classic have migrated to television.
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The Shakespeare Project: Two Gentlemen of Verona
Two gentlemen is close to being great Shakespeare, but it doesn’t quite there. Some of the dialogue is fantastic, as you would expect, particularly the wordplay of Launch.. What unravels it, as sometimes happens with the Bard, is the ending, which tries too hard to tie everything up neatly and get everyone married. Proteus never gets the comeuppance he so richly earns and the characters seem almost casual in whom they end up with. Scholars tell us Shakespeare had some hidden meaning in this. I think it’s just the limitations of trying to shoehorn the play into the genre of “comedy”.
It’s an interesting look, however, at an artist stretching his arms before he upends everything. I’m reminded somewhat of Beethoven’s first and second symphonies, which occupy an odd niche of respecting classical tradition but giving hints of the greatness that was to come. Given the organization of the First Folio, however, it will be a while before I get there.
Side Note: Cracked and I are on a wavelength (warning: gruesome Shakespeariness). I am really not looking forward to Titus Andronicus. Woody Allen once said that the end of the universe and the extinguishing of all human achievement might be acceptable if it got rid of Titus.
The Shakespeare Project: The Tempest
Now that’s more like it.
The Tempest is much more of what I think of as Shakespeare, with sympathetic characters, some comedy and great words. It was his last solo play and it’s a bit past his prime. The ending, in particular, I’ve always founds somewhat unsatisfying after a great first three acts.
One of things I’ve always noticed about Shakespeare’s plays is that the comedies are a thin layer from being tragedies and vice versa. That is, the difference between the happy conclusion of Much Ado About Nothing and the tragic conclusion of Romeo and Juliet is a tiny diversion in narrative. A few more seconds here, a few words there and Romeo becomes a comedy while Much Ado becomes a tragedy. Reading the Tempest, I wonder if it would have played better as a tragedy. It’s interesting to note that some works inspired by The Tempest — the movie The Forbidden Planet, for example — have gone in that direction.
One of the problems with this project is that Shakespeare’s plays do not read as well as they play. Shakespeare was an actor and wrote plays, I think, that would feed on great acting. One can read them by visualizing the play in one’s head, but it is never quite the same. This is particularly true of the comedies where much of the humor depends on delivery.
Wednesday Linkorama
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The Shakespeare Project: All’s Well That Ends Well
Earlier this year, I paid a couple of bucks to download the entire works of William Shakespeare to my Kindle. While I have seen a number of the plays, I’ve never read through all of them and, now that I’m pushing 40, probably should. So I’m going to tackle it the way I tackle everything: start at the beginning and push through from sheer bloody-mindedness. And I’ll post the occasional update and thought.
I’m going to follow the order in the First Folio from his point on, but the first one I actually read was All’s Well That Ends Well, since the Kindle lists them in alphabetical order. This is one of the so-called “problem plays” since it’s one of his lesser works and of the two leads, one is an asshole and the other is kind of passive. Helena was particularly unpopular in the Victoria era, according to wikipedia, because of her “predatory” nature. So performances, which are rare, try to redeem the couple.
Personally, if I were to put the play on, the theme would be comeuppance. Betram is a fool and a rascal — someone spoiled by wealth, class and, most likely, good looks. He ends up married to a woman he despises who now has his title, his wealth and a much higher standing in the eyes of the King and his mother. I’d let that be the moral — that an arrogant asshole got what was coming to him.
Summer Movie Musings
Ta-Nehisi Coates, in discussing Thor:
I did not find it transcendent (Batman Begins did it on that count.) I thought Asgard looked rather plastic, and the love story was, as always, tacked on. But here is the thing: They kept the train on the tracks. The narrative felt smooth enough that I could just sit back and take in the fight scenes, the effects and laugh at the jokes.
This sounds like meager praise. Except it’s exactly what I ask out of a summer blockbuster, and it’s exactly what I often find missing. It’s shocking how often the train is derailed by distracting characters (robots with gold teeth) preposterous dialouge (“Hold me, Ani. Hold me like you did on the shore of the lake on Naboo”) or the off-screen murder of major character (Cyclops?)
Seriously, this is my case against Michael Bay. It’s not the explosions. It’s not the special effects. It’s not the lack of seriousness. It’s that he can’t keep the train on the tracks. It’s that, as a director, he’s a humorless clutz who can’t get out of the way.
There’s nothing wrong with Independence Day. There’s everything wrong with Armageddon.
The best I can say of Thor is that I was entertained. I think that’s worth something.
My movie time is limited these days, so I don’t have as much time for good trash as I’d like. But my feelings are very much along these lines. I don’t mind dumb movies as long as they’re entertaining. I can suspend belief with the best of them. I loved Inception even thought the plot had some pretty big holes in it.
But there are a huge number of movies these days that play out like trailers for other movies. The second Transformers movie was this in spades — it jumped around with no rhyme or reason, gave you no reason to care about who was shooting who and why, and it’s action scenes were an incomprehensible blur of CGI.
This summer is just going to be awful. Look at the most anticipated movies. Maybe I’ll watch a few. But none of them look fresh or interesting or even watchable.
Blocked?
It would appear that I have been blocked on Twitter by Neal Boortz. Here are the two tweets I sent him:
In response to Neal asking if there was anything more pathetic than Obama “progs” trying to claim credit for bin Laden’s killing, I said:
@Talkmaster Sure: progs grasping at OBL’s death to justify Bush’s mistakes even more pathetic.
And in response to his question if the birth certificate would shut up the birthers:
@Talkmaster If only. Conspiracy theorists never let facts get in the way of their paranoia. The BC issue will stay with us. Sigh.
The former is the one that seems to have triggered the block. A completely inoffensive reply but one that apparently, by criticizing Bush, went too far.
Yankees Suuuuuu … Zzzzzz
See, I knew the Yankees and Red Sox dragged things out interminably. Whenever these guys play, I feel like I can go to the fridge, start making a sandwich, realize I don’t have any meat, buy a gun, sit through the waiting period, get the gun, go into the woods, lie in wait, identify my animal, wait for it to grow bigger, stalk and shoot it, take it home, cut and cook the meat, make my sandwich … and it will still just be the third inning. Announcer love it, but it drive me crazy.
It was worse back in the 00’s when the A’s were good. When they played the Yankees in the post-season, you could have replayed the Hundred Years War in one Jason Giambi at-bat.
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When the Rapture Fails
Cross-Posted
Well, the rapture failed to happen and we all had a good laugh. There’s been some pushback against the laughter and some calls for mutual understanding and so forth. But while it’s true that it’s not nice to laugh at the misfortunes and humiliation of others, I think it’s a reasonable substitute for what we might otherwise feel: unadulterated rage.
Why? Consider this article from the NYT:
With their doomsday T-shirts, placards and leaflets, followers — often clutching Bibles — are typically viewed as harmless proselytizers from outside mainstream religion. But their convictions have frequently created the most tension within their own families, particularly with relatives whose main concern about the weekend is whether it will rain.
Kino Douglas, 31, a self-described agnostic, said it was hard to be with his sister Stacey, 33, who “doesn’t want to talk about anything else.”
…
While Ms. Haddad Carson has quit her job, her husband still works as an engineer for the federal Energy Department. But the children worry that there may not be enough money for college. They also have typical teenage angst — embarrassing parents — only amplified.
“People look at my family and think I’m like that,” said Joseph, their 14-year-old, as his parents walked through the street fair on Ninth Avenue, giving out Bibles. “I keep my friends as far away from them as possible.”
The NYT (and other stories) talk about children pressured to spread the word, about family members not talking to each other, about college savings being burned. If these are the people who will talk to the Times, you can imagine how much worse it is out there for families who won’t. Growing up in the Bible Belt, I’ve seen friends wounded in the battle between True Believer parents and Heathen children. It’s only made worse when the end of the world is at stake. Imagine all the small children — 10 or under — who’ve been hearing about this for months. As a kid, I sometimes had nightmares about a nuclear war. Can you imagine what it’s like when your grandmother is talking about the End Times every damned day?
That’s not to mention the clearly mentally ill people this tipped over the edge, like the woman who tried to kill herself and murder her daughters to avoid the tribulations. Or those who ruined themselves financially:
Keith Bauer, a 38-year-old tractor-trailer driver from Westminster, Md., took last week off from work, packed his wife, young son and a relative in their SUV and crossed the country.
If it was his last week on Earth, he wanted to see parts of it he’d always heard about but missed, such as the Grand Canyon. With maxed-out credit cards and a growing mountain of bills, he said, the rapture would have been a relief.
…
Others had risked a lot more on Camping’s prediction, quitting jobs, abandoning relationships, volunteering months of their time to spread the word. Matt Tuter, the longtime producer of Camping’s radio and television call-in show, said Saturday that he expected there to be “a lot of angry people” as reality proved Camping wrong.
Another man blew $140,000 of his own savings spreading the good word.
Now we might be happy to say, “Hey, these gullible idiots got what they deserved”. After all, we’d never follow a doomsday cult and ruin our lives. Only, as — of all places — Cracked pointed out:
Studies show cult members are just as intelligent, if not more so, than the general public. And around 95 percent of cult members are perfectly sane (when they join up, anyway), with no history at all of real psychological problems. They’re not stupid, and they’re not crazy.
…
As social animals we are hard-wired to want to belong to a group. It’s a need as basic and real as hunger or sex. When we get cut off from our group–say we lose a job, or move to a new city, or break up with our girlfriend–we go a little crazy. Cults are very, very good at finding people in that exact moment of weakness, and saying exactly the right things. Those pamphlets that sound so corny and transparent to you, read like a glorious breath of fresh air to somebody caught in one of those rough spots.
So sure, when we’re in our normal, stable state of affairs we like to imagine ourselves coolly shooting down all of the charismatic cult leader’s stupid-ass claims with the power of pure critical thinking. But remember that the next time you’re drunk dialing your ex-girlfriend in the middle of the night, or stalking her new boyfriend, sneaking into the parking lot where he works and pooping on the hood of his car.
It’s no accident that televangelists target lonely seniors or that weirdo cults target young people in the early and difficult phases of their careers. In times of stress — and if you hadn’t noticed, our times are pretty stressful even for those of us with families, jobs and houses — there’s comfort in hearing that it all makes sense; that it’s all part of a plan.
So when I laugh a the rapturists, it’s because it’s the only thing keeping me from punching Harold Camping and his fellows in the face. At best, they are charismatic lunatics who got people to act stupidly. At worst, they’re cynical charlatans who got decent but vulnerable people to turn their lives upside down.
So no, I’m not prepared to be understanding about this. And I’m not prepared to be understanding about the next End of the World panic — this one coming mostly from the non-religious — about 2012. You can bet that the above stories will be repeated all over again in about 2 years.
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