Port-a-Bellow
Nowadays, when you think up a pun, you can just do an internet search and find out how original you are. I am the only person on record who thought this was worth typing.
July 18, 2005
Yearly Archives: 2005
July 14, 2005
Batman Begins (2005)
directed by Christopher Nolan
screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
story by David S. Goyer
based on characters created by Bob Kane
141 min.
Ugh. I try to be careful about which “big” movies I spend money and time on, but this one had been so well reviewed! And yet.
I don’t feel like faking a coordinated line of argument here. In summary: the movie’s flaw was that it was made out of junk. So I’m just going to mention some of the junk.
Thought is for those who think. This phrase occurred to me while being annoyed by tons of irritating “dark” pseudo-thought. A typical “serious” superhero-comic trick is to employ concepts like “honor” and “justice” and “the self” as though they are sacred, overwhelming, and difficult – and thus worthy of totally cool visuals! – but not to have any consistent attitude toward these things, and in fact to freely change their definitions from scene to scene so as to allow a continuous stream of these effects.
To give away the first part of the movie, as a demonstration of its total lack of interest in having a point: Bruce Wayne learns a bunch of ninja-type wisdom from a bunch of ninja-types who encourage him to use fear as power, by first conquering his own fears. Then the ninja-types turn out to be crazies who want to destroy Gotham City in the name of cleansing human culture. The turning point is when the ninja-types ask Bruce to show his dedication by killing an imprisoned murderer. Bruce says no, that he will fight for justice but will not be an executioner. Then, because he has realized that these ninja-types are bad guys, he BURNS DOWN THE BUILDING KILLING EVERYONE (presumably including the murderer). Then he goes on to become Batman, following the philosophy of the crazy bad ninja-types. They later show up with a plan based on using fear as power which Batman must stop because it is evil.
Making a confusion stew out of “philosophy” is easy. Then just hang black billowing drapes all over it and give everyone stony expressions. Brilliant!
The fight scenes looked like murky confusing crap to me. This seems to be a trend in movies today. Maybe it just reflects that I am getting out of touch with the acceptable speed of editing, but I think in this case it was due to crap.
Number of times that someone cleverly repeats someone else’s line from earlier in the movie back at them in a different context: I think eight.
I’m getting tired of this “making of a legend” stuff, like “ooh, so that’s how he found the bat cave! ooh, so that’s how he found the batmobile!” That’s all well and good for something jokey like Young Sherlock Holmes, which lives well outside the actual reputation-making canon of Sherlock Holmes himself, but I feel like a Batman movie would do better to spend its time demonstrating why Batman is a character worthy of legend and not just some comic book schlock. That’s snotty of me – it was, after all, called Batman Begins, and his reputation is pretty darn well-established. But fleshing out a sketchy character shouldn’t mean fleshing out the history of his costume. It was cute in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, because it was put where it belongs, as a throwaway at the very beginning. It was a cute in Spider-Man, but mostly because it had a punchline. I don’t need to see that stuff anymore. “Origin story” shouldn’t have to mean the nerdy game of finding justifications for the absurd details.
I HATE mindless movie “jokes” wherein someone comments earthily on how remarkable the premises of the movie are. E.g. the Batmobile appears and CGI drives over a bunch of police cars, and then the guy watching says “I have got to get me one of those!” Oy. This movie had that joke relentlessly.
Also, in general, if you have a movie that’s all about a kid who rides on a flying artichoke, it is lazy and irritating to include a bewildered policeman talking into his radio saying “Well, it looks a kid…but he’s RIDING ON A FLYING ARTICHOKE!” This movie had the bewildered policemen in it, frequently.
Both of these quasi-jokes try to get mileage out of the audience feeling like, “yeah, we’re all on Batman’s team but you’re not, silly rabbit, so we feel pretty darn good about ourselves when you envy him, or are astounded by him.” Total bottom of the barrel tactics, appealing to our desire to feel superior to outsiders. Yes, that’s really how I see it.
The second part of the movie revolves around a plot to activate a powerful microwave emitter that vaporizes all water in the vicinity. It turns out only to affect water in pipes; people are unharmed by it. I’m not one to complain about scientific errors in stupid movies, but even as comic book pseudo-science, this is no good, because the idea that a microwave oven can be deadly is something people ENJOY knowing. Urban legends about exploding cats and everyday paranoia about standing too close to the microwave oven are commonplace. You should build your pseudo-science in keeping with stuff like that, not against it!
Michael Caine just sells his “well, sir, I’m Michael Caine” act to any movie that has use for it, doesn’t he. Ditto Morgan Freeman. When their two characters had a brief exchange, it felt for a moment like we might have entered some movie-neutral zone from which we could enter ANY OTHER MOVIE. Katie Holmes smirks whenever she needs to look thoughtful and I’ll bet she does that in real life too; it’s not a bad trick for reality, though it’s weak for movies. Christian Bale has the right quality for this role, which is to say he barely registers as a personality, only as a set of traits. Tom Wilkinson is very reliable at making something out of his time onscreen and I always enjoy watching him. Gary Oldman might as well have been a non-name actor. The Scarecrow guy was doing some cheesy stuff throughout, but given the nature of his role it was actually pretty well handled. Liam Neeson delivered his lines very much as he did in The Phantom Menace, so I was imagining that he didn’t think much of the movie, but maybe I was just projecting. I’m not sure he’s as good and serious an actor as you might be led to believe by his demeanor.
Many scenes called to mind the movie that Adaptation becomes in its last act – a reasonably well-made version of a soulless, hacky script, an assemblage of complete phoniness. This was a Donald movie.
The music, oddly, was a collaboration between Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard and managed to be utterly trashy in the extreme. Hans Zimmer’s beloved pounding drums set the tone for pretty much every scene. I think James Newton Howard sometimes has a nice touch but it wasn’t in evidence here at all.
July 14, 2005
Dumbo (1941)
directed by Ben Sharpsteen
written by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer
after the book Dumbo, the Flying Elephant by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl (1939)
64 min.
Movies like Dumbo are the reason that attributing a movie to the “director” and “writer” as above is silly. It implies that the director is the person most generally responsible for the creative quality of the finished product, but of course that’s not really how a movie like this is made. The credits for Dumbo also include “Directing Animators,” “Supervising Animators,” “Story Development,” and “Story Direction.” Many movies, but animated movies in particular and Dumbo moreso than other animated movies, are the products of large collaborations, where leadership only exists as an organizational necessity, not a creative reality.
That’s actually part of what I took away from this viewing. I had forgotten how short, how casual, and how varied Dumbo was. I don’t think any other animated feature is quite so blatantly composed of sequences that really look nothing like one another. Set pieces like the tent-raising, the circus parade, Casey Junior, and the pink elephants all look and feel like completely different films from one another, and all of them also like completely different films from the style of the “story” scenes. I had forgotten how flat and cheap those scenes look compared to the other early Disney films. Apparently Dumbo was intentionally made as quickly and easily as possible, and it shows, if you’re looking for it.
But that’s not a bad thing. Unlike Fantasia and Snow White, which aspire to fineness with a weirdly tangible fervency of purpose that I guess was Walt’s own, Dumbo feels like a feature-length effort – well, almost feature-length – by the same team of goofy guys who made all those Mickey Mouse shorts. It felt to me like a lower, jazzier art form than the shining thing Disney himself apparently envisioned, a form that was the direct descendent of “Steamboat Willie” and “Lonesome Ghosts” etc., without the intervention of “beauty” or “quality” in quotes. While Snow White has a whiff of the European and the literary about it, Dumbo is completely American and even retains a little of that bad-for-your-teeth quality that is so characteristic of early cartoons. People talk about how moving the “Baby Mine” sequence is, but they forget that when the camera takes time off from Jumbo and Jumbo Junior, it goes to cute “gag” shots of hyenas, hippos, etc. I thought of Gilbert Seldes’ “The Seven Lively Arts”: the lack of pretension makes it invigorating. The emotions are more poignant because they’re part of such an unassuming package. The movie wanders around with no interest in the laws of pacing, the animators do what they like until the story seems done, and then it’s done, 64 minutes later. I thought it was great.
The music is excellent; really, really good. That’s part of what makes the haphazard thing hang together – the music is doing something charming (and charmingly orchestrated) pretty much nonstop for all 64 minutes. Those male-chorus musical numbers made a huge impression on me as a child and that “Look Out For Mr. Stork” sound is still pretty much inseparable from the world of children’s books. I haven’t seen this movie in many years, but I’ve continued to hear the “Pink Elephants” instrumental running in my mind all that time. I should get this soundtrack album.
Now, I had thought for years that Dumbo was the first Disney feature based on an original story, but today I learn that I was wrong – Dumbo is based on the book Dumbo, the Flying Elephant, by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, published in 1939 by Roll-a-Book. Roll-a-Book was a novelty: the book was printed on a scroll in a box with a viewing window; you turned a wheel to progress the story. Naturally, when I heard about this, I thought, “I need a picture of that to put under the review!” But get this: NO COPIES ARE KNOWN TO HAVE SURVIVED. That’s right, the first edition of Dumbo is a completely lost item. If you’re like me, that makes you fantasize about finding it at a yard sale. Good luck, everyone!
Roll-a-Book appears in WorldCat only as 2 copies of a single title, Roll-a-Book for boys and girls No. 1 – The Lost Stone of Agog: A Fast Moving Adventure Story, featuring the Dare twins, by Gertrude Buckland Smith, with “roll-a-color illustrations” by Eleanor Schaefer. 22 cm. 1938. Mentioned nowhere else online. I’d love to see a picture of that, too.
However, a non-rolling edition of the original Dumbo was reprinted in 1941 prior to the release of the movie, apparently in a small run. A thorough summary with a good amount of the text is available here. Anyone got an image? I’d be much obliged.
July 14, 2005
Too Long
That last entry was too long. This is a problem for me. When I see that other people have written emails or blog entires that are too long, I think, “self-indulgent!” I’m not sure what that means, though, so I’m not sure how to fix it when I do it. I don’t think concise writers get that way by cutting and cutting and cutting. I think they have concise thoughts, or their thoughts naturally take concise forms. When I try to keep things short, it feels like cramming a snake into a tissue box, and that’s how it reads, too. I could do more editorial work to make my writing shorter, but that means I have to take even longer to write it, which somehow seems like a step in the wrong direction. It takes me long enough already.
I think my overuse of emphasis is probably a tip-off. It signifies that I feel like none of my sentences really expresses what I mean; it’s like leaning to try to influence a mis-aimed golf ball.
I don’t actually feel like my aim is all that bad, but it’s like I’m taking a thousand short strokes to get to the hole. That’s when I don’t initially know where the hole is. When I know where the hole is, I end up trying to nail it in one grotesque stroke, and the rest is ugly, annoying compensation.
Odd that I’m using a golf metaphor. I’ve never played golf. Mini-golf is another story.
July 14, 2005
Spelling Things Out
A snotty comment you hear a lot from film snobs is: “American audiences need everything spelled out for them; they can’t handle subtlety. I like films that respect my intelligence; they don’t beat me over the head with things the way mainstream films do. But American audiences apparently can’t handle that.” You see this sort of thing a lot on the IMDB bulletin boards, in response to questions like “I don’t understand what was happening at the end of 2001.”
I sort of agree that being “beat over the head” with a plot point or a character trait can be a drag. But the implication of the comment is that the stupid audiences who want everything spelled out have an intellectual shortcoming, that they lack perceptiveness and imagination. I don’t think that’s right at all. When you see something ambiguous, it’s easy to come up with lots of guesses as to what it means – but when you’re watching a movie, you don’t want to have to worry that you’ve guessed wrong, because twenty minutes later you may find that everything is confusing and requires guessing, that you and the moviemakers have lost each other entirely. Which might be what they had in mind, but that’s just another guess, on your part. You want to be certain that you’re not losing your way. It’s not subtlety that upsets viewers, it’s the risk of getting it wrong. Where do the film snobs get their confidence? I would argue that they had it spelled out for them in exactly the way that they claim not to need.
People often praise art that allows for multiple interpretations, but most people can only enjoy interpretive freedom in a work of art if they feel confident that it is intentional. Everything in the world allows for multiple interpretations. The pleasure of watching a movie, or even of looking at an abstract painting, should be more specific than the pleasure of looking out your window and interpreting what you see. Not necessarily more pleasurable, but definitely more specific.
It is possible to intentionally hand audiences something ambiguous and let them interpret it as they choose – that can be good, responsible art – but they have to really understand that those are the terms before the experience can be valuable to them, because a lot of art doesn’t work that way. The end of 2001 wants us to think in grandly symbolic terms, dreamily, but the middle of 2001 requires us to follow the dialogue and understand the events on a literal level. Knowing the difference means being tipped off to the difference by the film itself. It has nothing to do with personal capacity for imagination or inference; it’s about knowing what’s expected of you.
Disdaining audiences who “need everything spelled out” is a mistake, because everyone “needs everything spelled out” to differentiate what they’re seeing from non-art. If things are not going to be spelled out, that fact needs to have been spelled out. Often, it’s not spelled out by the work itself, but simply by the standards of a genre or a culture. Or more commonly, you have the complex situation where a work does spell everything out, but through a system of standards that itself is not spelled out.
For example, it has several times happened to me that I am watching a mystery movie with a friend, and the friend asks me “what did that mean?” about something, and I answer confidently, “we’re not supposed to know yet.” How can I be sure? Because I was tipped off to the correctness of my confusion by cues in the movie. If the movie concerns the attempt to uncover hidden information, for example, and a snippet of confusing information is revealed without enough context for me to really make sense of it, I can be relatively certain that the context will be discovered further on, that my confusion is preparation for an eventual moment of revelation. Generally this sort of thing is accompanied a more direct spelling-out, like the protagonist saying “I don’t understand!” but even if it’s not, I can rest assured that I know what function it serves. I know because of my familiarity with similar stories and movies. Most movies depend on this sort of cultural familiarity to carry some of the expository burden.
Exposition is extremely time-consuming and difficult to do well. It is rare, for me, that the first two scenes in a character-based movie really work on my first viewing. I still feel like a stranger, and the idea that I’m supposed to be interested in some conversation or situation seems arbitrary. I sometimes feel a little embarrassed for a movie at this point, like, “you made a movie about these people and you expect me to laugh at these jokes?” By the middle of the movie, I’ve gotten accustomed to the characters, through sheer duration of time spent with these people, and on second viewing the work’s already been done. But that’s the work of exposition and my point is it’s hard to pull off.
So it’s natural for a movie to want to let norms and standard expectations do that work. This requires cultural fluency on the part of the viewer. And this is what the “you need everything spelled out!” people are really noting. The mainstream audience is only familiar with certain cultural languages, and is confused by movies that assume different kinds of expectations.
It’s probably true that American mainstream films make less use of indirect storytelling, but indirectness is just a kind of a language that is ultimately no less immediate to those who speak it. This all relates to my upcoming discussion of computer adventure games, in which the games have to tell you exactly what to do, but only indirectly, because telling you directly would make it seem un-game-like. As a fluent adventure-game-player, I find the indirect information to be exactly as clear as direct information, and yet it still manages to make me feel that some sort of game playing is happening. A bit like the completely deterministic card game “War,” which is just the slow working out of a solution that a computer could have instantly told us – but that wouldn’t have seemed game-like. Indirect punchlines make jokes funnier, again because we feel that something more is happening, in that moment of understanding. But it’s only the slightest hitch in our cognition. Apparently that hitch makes a big difference to our perception. So it makes viewers of “non-mainstream” indirect-storytelling films feel that they’re seeing something more intelligent, even though the intelligence needed to follow that hitch around the corner is negligible. My argument here has been that audiences who don’t want to follow it around the corner are limited not by intelligence but by fluency in the filmic language that reassures them that the corner is put there on purpose. I was originally going to say that the corner has no inherent significance, but I seem to have talked myself into the position where I must admit that it’s something. Gotta think about this more.
Anyway, I was going to say something to wrap up, about how “needing everything spelled out” is certainly not nearly as bad as “disliking subtitles.” But, you know, I also think it’s quite reasonable to dislike subtitles – I certainly would prefer to see a film in English to one in a language I don’t understand. More of the acting is accessible to me, and my experience of the drama is more immediate since it’s not mediated by written text. Of course, subtitles are a very very very small price to pay in order to be able to watch and understand a movie, and it’s quite remarkable, actually, how well we’re able to mentally integrate the subtitle-reading and the foreign-language-listening. My memory of a foreign film almost always tricks me into thinking I heard the lines directly from the actors’ mouths. Yes, it’s not necessary to remake movies in English to get rid of the language barrier, and it’s certainly stupid to refuse to see a movie just because it has subtitles. And dubbing is ultimately much more distracting, because it attempts to “trick” the audience rather than offer them help. But let’s not get carried away, snobs – it is reasonable to dislike subtitles. If you claim to like them, it’s only by association, and because they make you disproportionately proud of yourself. They’re a necessary minor inconvenience. Obviously!
However, I’m still not sure what people are talking about who don’t want to watch a wide-format movie on the small screen because of the “black bars.” I’m not quite willing to write those people off as idiots (though it’s tempting) because if I’m watching such a movie, I can’t even force myself to see the bars as bars, (what am I supposed to imagine is behind them?) so I don’t really know what those people are going through. It’s like someone saying that they can’t enjoy looking at things outdoors because the sky is distracting. I don’t know what it would be like to see the world that way. I know, I know, if you have a small TV, widescreen movies make the images smaller and harder to see – but that complaint would be “the picture is too small” not “I don’t like the black bars.”
Okay, now I’m done.
July 13, 2005
Catalogue des Lettres
Just now it occurred to me to put my hands over the electric piano keyboard and mentally touch-type. Kind of a cool experience – the music sounds clearly like some kind of communication, but not necessarily typing – it reminded me a little of the violent outbursts of birdsong in Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux.
Click on the link to hear an MP3 of me typing this very sentence on the piano.
Here’s how the first part of the score would look. My touch-type fingering is slightly idiosyncractic, I’m led to understand. Naturally, the sentence is in E minor, the key of the space bar. The triangle is shift, the square is space. Obviously.
I didn’t dare try to really notate the rhythms, which have an interesting natural edge to them. That skittering quality is in some 20th-century music, but it really doesn’t lend itself to our rhythmic notation and it always strikes me as silly when a piece looks like outrageous poly-subdivided-tuplet-opia on the page but actually just sounds…you know, skittish. Only the very best performances of such pieces come anywhere near the actual sincere skitt of typing. It was sort of interesting to realize that I could instantly produce endless quantities of that dry spidery stuff through as simple a trick as imagining the piano to be a typewriter.
This reminds me of my occasional fascination with the distinctly childlike nature of certain rushed rhythms. Playing Heart and Soul like an 8-year-old intentionally is hard to get right. 8-year-olds – American 8-year-olds, at least – have access to a truly profound freedom from meter that’s very tricky to fake.
Anyway.
I have to assume this typewriter thing has been done before. I don’t think there’s much you can do with it. I imagine it would have interested John Cage-y types back in the late 60s, when automatic and unspecified music was a big thing. Here, I’ll make up a terrible experimental piece right now. Here’s the score (except imagine this inside a battered score published by Peters on an absolutely enormous scale, handwritten in the center of a big blank page in a very deliberate style).
CHAT ROOM FOR TWO PIANISTS (c) 2005
1. The pianos are arranged so that the performers are exactly back to back, unable to see one another. They only communicate through the pianos.
2. The pianists must be fluent typists. They are to place their hands over the piano keys and then type as though their hands were on QWERTY computer keyboards, hitting whatever piano keys their fingers find in the places where they seek the different letters. It is neither necessary nor desirable for the pianists to establish fixed correspondences between particular piano keys and imaginary QWERTY keys; they should simply follow their fingers.
3. The work consists of a conversation between the two pianists conducted only through typed messages. Each pianist listens to what is typed by the other and interprets it the best of his/her ability. It is essential that each pianist imagine that he/she is fully able to understand each message, and respond confidently.
4. The work begins with Piano 1 typing “any1 there? plz answer!” and hitting Enter.
5. Piano 2 then responds as he/she sees fit, and the conversation continues naturally.
6. If they so choose, the two pianists may confer in advance and plan a course for the conversation. They may do this either by simply deciding on topics to be discussed, or by establishing a dramatic outline for the work as a whole (i.e. pre-planning periods of argument, flirtation, etc.) It is permissible, though not encouraged, for the performers to script “lines” in advance. However, the performers may not in any way prepare musical material.
7. The duration of the work is left to the discretion of the performers.
8. The work ends with Pianos 1 and 2 each typing “l8r :)” and hitting Enter in short succession.
July 12, 2005
Jaws (1975)
directed by Steven Spielberg
screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb
after the novel by Peter Benchley (1974)
Yeah, Jaws.
The movies that I’ve already seen a zillion times are sometimes the most interesting to watch. How is it that there are lines in this movie, important lines that explain what’s going on, that I have never really heard and comprehended before today? It’s like I get to examine the way my mind used to work: my old viewing of the movie is the ground against which the figures of these “new” details stand out. I still clearly remember the strange experience of seeing the original Star Wars movies as a teenager, after watching them frequently as a child and then not at all during the crucial adolescent years. Words like “rebellion” and “empire” that had seemed like close companions of “wookie” now had strange, mundane meanings, and lo and behold, the dialogue explained what was going on. To my 7-year-old mind, the plot of The Empire Strikes Back was:
beginning part
part with the snow monster and then with the vision
talking part
part with the giant walking machines in the snow
part with asteroids and eventually with that big worm
part with the swamp and yoda
eventually, the scary cave part
some more talking parts somewhere in there
the part where you can see darth vader’s head sort of
part with the floating city
a bunch of little scenes
part where han solo gets frozen
part where they fight
part when he falls down a big tube
ending stuff
I don’t think that’s particularly cutesified, either; it’s a pretty accurate representation of the way I thought about what was quite possibly my favorite movie at that time. Upon seeing it later and noticing all the connective tissue, the ligaments and tendons and “logic” that had previously been incomprehensible and, furthermore, unnecessary, I felt like I was face to face with my former mind in a strange, bittersweet way. I think the movie sketched above is a little better than the The Empire Strikes Back that I would see if I watched it today. The title, however – this is all a bit Proustian, isn’t it – the title, however, has managed to maintain the particular flavor of the movie as I saw it then. Even today it takes a particular effort of will for me to hear it as a sentence in which the subject is “empire,” a large multi-territorial political entity, and the action is “strikes back,” deals a retaliatory blow. It’s the cadence that preserves the phrase, unburdened of these “generic” significations; as learned from my six-year-old peers, that cadence was and still is “the EM-pi-re STRIKES-back.” I just searched to find out the proper way of indicating that (anapest? dactyl?) but gave up.
Anyway, Jaws offered me a bit of that today. A girlfriend once told me that she didn’t want to watch Jaws because it was a “men at sea” movie, and that I just liked “men at sea.” At the time I thought she was missing the point, that Jaws was just a rollicking Steven Spielberg movie that happened to be in the “men at sea” milieu but which didn’t try to get mileage out of any kind of interest inherent to “men at sea.” Watching it tonight I thought, “Wow, this movie is mostly these guys shuffling around this boat, looking at barrels.” I used to think of it as a monster/adventure movie with cute cardboard characters, but in fact it is a character movie, because the monster has even less of a personality than the truck in Duel, rarely appears, and isn’t even portrayed as “overwhelming” until near to the end. It’s just a shark that’s threatening the beaches, so they’ve got to go kill it. If we the audience have the sense that something ominous is in store, it’s only because we know what kind of movie we’re watching. For the characters, sure it’s a big deal, but not a movie-worthy big deal, not until the very end.
In fact, I was struck by how much the movie seemed like a crowd-pleasing, encouraging portrait of American manhood. These three guys are purportedly a salty man-of-the-sea, a rich young shark expert, and an anxious landlubber, but what they end up doing is coping with a problem that none of them actually knows how to handle. They gamely take it on because, well, the men have to do it, so let’s figure out how to do it. They reminded me of my father figuring out how to fix the whatever, or of any number of other spatula-bearing barbecue-MCs of my youth, men who didn’t necessarily know how to kill this shark, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out. Because look, we know how to use the grill! That’s a good proud manly feeling, just like knowing how to fish. I think the paper-cup-crushing bit sums this all up fairly explicitly.
The movie has only reassuring comfort for the Chief Brodys of the world. It says: men with more experience than you might sing bawdy songs and get drunk and compare their scars – but the songs aren’t that bawdy, and they don’t get that drunk, and nobody really gets angry at anyone. And you might not know how to do anything useful like tie a knot or steer the ship, but in the end, it’s going to be about everyone working in good-natured equal ignorance. The gruff sea captain will just chuckle most of the time, and the nerdy scientist won’t really have any valuable knowledge.
I’m not sure what I’m saying here, but the overlay of suburban barbecue dads was vivid for me.
Of course, I’m talking about the second half of the movie. The first half is more genre-characteristic and, by being so solid, earns our sympathy for the long boat trip that would otherwise probably seem pretty monotonous and repetitive. It still does, sometimes.
But Steven Spielberg knows what he’s doing, is my other thought upon watching this movie.
Here’s the pre-movie cover:
July 11, 2005
Music, Imagination and Culture (1990)
by Nicholas Cook
Oxford University Press
I finished it a week ago, and thought that before I forget too much about it, I ought to temper my other postings with a response to the book as a whole. I wrote those when I was at my most annoyed with this book, which for the most part was actually quite satisfying to read.
I remember coming across this book in college and being really happy to see someone complaining about how so much stupid stuff is said about music without being subjected to the test of whether it can possibly be relevant to the listener. I was pretty fed up, honestly, with all the “analysis” that went on within no particular parameters. People would say “look, you can see a pattern in this piece!” or, even worse, “look at this fascinating not-quite-pattern!” and that would be it. Nobody bothered to answer the question “how is this pattern relevant?” My feeling at the time was that they didn’t like answering that question because any possible answer is subject to criticism – if you say “because listeners hear it” someone can say “not necessarily” and then you have to argue with them. And it’s easier to just come up with stuff that can’t be argued with because it’s true – like, that all the themes in a given piece “CAN BE SEEN AS” related to one another because they are made of complementary sets of intervals. Yeah, they are, and so I guess they “CAN BE SEEN” that way. But are you saying that you think the composer constructed them that way? Or that, in some way, it affects our experience of the piece? My straw man responds: “Certainly in some way. Certainly! I can’t claim to know what the composer intended, of course, but that’s beside the point. What’s important is what’s actually there in the piece, and what’s there is the esoteric relationship I just pointed out. Q.E.D.” But this just weasels out of the question in the cheapest possible way. Certainly in some way it’s relevant? Where do you get off saying that? You just think nobody can ever prove you wrong!
Cook’s valuable contribution in this book, from my point of view, is to argue that it’s a) possible to talk seriously about what’s relevant to a listener, and b) worthwhile, because the listener’s experience is important. He knocks down a lot of widespread musico-phlosophical muddle-headedness (most of it emanating from Schoenberg) that denies a) and b), stuff like the idea that a piece of music is really just about the relationships that exist among the constituent parts, and that therefore the performance of a piece of music is just a means of getting the music across to the audience, who might equally well read it on the page, if they were fluent. Or stuff like the idea that while certain things (like, say, derivations of a 12-tone row) might not be audible to the conscious mind, the subconscious mind loves ’em.
Cook isn’t much into the idea of listeners taking a subconscious interest in things, and his argument, which is mostly by analogy with argument against Freud himself, is a good one, I think – he says that Schoenberg and friends are making a form of the fallacy of reification – confusing abstract models with real things – when they say that a motif (or whatever) is, since it can be claimed to exist in a work, therefore a reality for the listener, just as Freud was making an error when talked about “the id” as though it existed in some real sense. But I made an argument against allowing for “subconscious relevance,” back in my undergraduate thesis, that I like even better: if we allow for obscure things to have “subconscious influence,” we have absolutely no criteria for distinguishing between real relevance and mistaken relevance. If we’re capable of conceiving of any construct in a piece that is too obscure for even the apparently wizardly subconscious mind (and even Schoenberg granted that it was very hard to make things truly perceivable, that this was a composer’s task), then we must accept that somewhere there is a limbo bar of obscurity below which patterns are not relevant, no matter how cool they might be. And to figure out where that limbo bar lies requires us to really investigate the listening experience.
This is where I differ from Cook, or at least I think I do. It seems to me that, obviously, a great deal of music is understood on some sub-conscious level, and the analogy with sub-conscious linguistic parsing makes a lot of sense to me. Cook, after a lot of talk about how that which listeners are unable to report must not be relevant (see previous posts!) then lets this one drop in a footnote to a dismissal of subconscious perception:
It is possible to distinguish two concepts of subconscious perception in music, one modelled on Freud and the other on psycholinguistics. I have touched on the latter in my book on analysis (1987a: 220-2); this discussion should be read in the light of Serafine’s remarks (1988: 63-4) regarding the perceptual reality of phonemes.
That’s not cool. So ELSEWHERE, he’s reassuring us, he said something about this big problem with his argument…something which you should only read in a properly sympathetic frame of mind. I now feel obliged to go find his book on analysis and see what he can possibly say about this, but I strongly suspect that if he had something good to say, he would have included it in this book too.
So I got defensive when he started being hard on old-fashioned appreciation education, because I see it as comparable to language education. His invocation of Virgil Thomson’s rant against “The Appreciation Racket” is inappropriate, since Thomson was railing against a particular type of dumbed-down commercialized pseudo-education that was rampant in the 30s and which nowadays is a much smaller part of the musical landscape, as Thomson himself acknowledged in the 1960 addendum to the extremely amusing essay in which that ranting occurs: “Why Composers Write How.” Sure, some kinds of “appreciation” are still vacuous and misleading, but identifying the parts of a sonata movement is not, and it’s wrong of Cook to let this stuff all get mushed together in his book. BUT all his other enemies are my enemies too, and it’s good and heartening to hear someone articulating these sorts of commonsensical objections on philosophical, theory-oriented grounds rather than simply as a disgruntled listener.
On the other hand, in defense of not-so-much-for-listening 20th century musics, I feel like it’s obvious that hyper-serialism is some kind of art. Maybe it’s not listener’s music, and maybe that means we shouldn’t even call it music – and we certainly shouldn’t ever have let its practitioners tell us that it was the only truly progressive music, that’s crap – but neither is it just a big mistake on top of a mistake. If 20th-century music is like so much bread that didn’t rise, that doesn’t mean we should doubt the value of matzoh, or doubt that people actually enjoy it. Matzoh and bread shouldn’t really be fighting it out for the title, honestly. It doesn’t make sense. A book like this quite reasonably points out that bread that does not rise cannot a sandwich make (because it’s all crumbly), but the implication that matzoh is a mere mistake is unnecessary. Likewise, Milton Babbitt, matzoh does not represent the evolution of bread! Grow up! Bread will always be more popular, and for good reason.
In more general terms, the book is quite readable and has several memorable (and for a book like this, brave) personal discussions of the workings of experiences like half-remembering a piece of music and faking the details, or imagining a piece of music in a way that works in the imagination even though it wouldn’t work in reality. Very pleasant reading and not nearly as dry as the heavy footnoting would imply.
The title and cover are lame, though. “Culture” shouldn’t have equal billing with “Music” and “Imagination.” And the semi-obscured question mark on the cover, which is stupid enough to begin with, looks like a 2, to me. Don’t you think? Scan to come.
This book, I found to my astonishment, has been scanned, along with a zillion others, by Google Print. You can’t read it all (without hacking into the system), but you can read many pages. Crazy.
July 11, 2005
Dark Water (2005)
directed by Walter Salles
screenplay by Rafael Yglesias
after the film Honogurai mizu no soko kara (Hideo Nakata, 2002)
screenplay by Hideo Nakata and Takashige Ichise
after a story from the book by Kôji Suzuki (1996)
It had the potential to be good, but it made so many tiny bad decisions, which cumulatively sabotaged the movie. I’ve seen the original movie, and I’m not saying it was a masterpiece, but it worked, and this remake could easily have followed the plan and worked equally well. It followed the plan in almost every respect, but then it changed little crucial things. And they were almost all mistakes.
Both versions are a really basic, bare-bones sort of ghost story, and in stories like this, it’s the details, the specifics of the build-up that matter. The first bit of ghostiness in the original is here made subtle to the point of being almost a non-event, just a moment of slight cinematic pressure, but no “evidence.” As soon as I saw that, I knew something was going wrong. The remake keeps this sort of thing up for most of the movie, smoothing over most of the surprises and clues and playing the “maybe it’s just psychological” card as steadily as it can.
I think their intention was to hold off the scary stuff in order to create more interest in the characters, and it actually may have worked on me, to some degree. Or maybe it was just Jennifer Connelly’s conscientious performance. In any case, I bought that this woman was a damaged young mother trying hard to stay on top of things, whereas in the original, the relationship between the woman’s childhood traumas and her current struggles was certainly indicated but I didn’t really feel it.
A lot of horror stories have that sort of after-the-fact easy psychology thrown on them, in the Stephen King manner – like, “the person who gets tormented by the spider aliens IS ALSO TORMENTED BY SELF-DOUBT, which adds depth to my schlock!” but what I can say for the original is that I believed that in this case, the filmmakers sincerely thought the relationship of the issue (neglected daughters) to the ghost (a neglected daughter) was important.
Odd, then, that the remake-makers somehow felt that the balance of the movie needed to be tilted even further in favor of non-ghost stuff. This source material had already found a good balance, I thought. By skewing the movie away from anything supernatural, the remake manages to make the ending seem like an embarrassing misstep, whereas if they hadn’t been so embarrassed to be making a horror movie in the first place, they could have prepared it properly, which ought to have been the whole point. Of course, they also screwed themselves by changing the ending.
The story ends with the ghost having its way, which is an unsettling place to end. The original believed in this ending and built the movie around it – it actually tied in to the “cycle of neglect” theme, in its way. The remake seems to feel obliged to stay true to the plot point but in every way possible waters it down – I know – so that it is as little unsettling as possible, and thus arbitrary and stupid. An epilogue that in the original drives home the compromised, creepy nature of the resolution is here reworked to be mere having-it-both-ways comfort, irritating and unnecessary. More important to a scaredy-cat like me, the one image of supernatural ickiness in the original has been wiped clean. To me, this has a huge impact on an entire movie – a movie that threatens to show you something icky and then finally makes good on the threat somehow actualizes all the earlier suspense, whereas a movie that holds that threat over your head and never lets it fall, not even a little, is just a scam. I’m not into gore in the least, but just one image that can correspond to the true heart of the threat in a movie has a certain talismanic power, at least for me, and this movie managed to put something totally benign in that position and show it to you several times over, thus killing the sense of portent that is so crucial to a slow-burn ghost story. This was a no-burn ghost story; nothing was even properly held over our heads as a threat for more than a scene – the remnants of that sort of suspense were here by pure inheritance from the original, but neither the screenwriter nor the director knew what function they were meant to serve.
Basically, this is a ghost movie made by people who apparently don’t like ghost movies, so they mumbled it, like someone embarrassed to say a word they don’t know how to pronounce. Such a shame, since the mumbling had good production design and a nice cast.
Though I do want to point out that John C. Reilly’s schtick was the same stuff he was doing in Magnolia, but was here really wrong and unamusing. A lot of reviews seem to have found him a fun presence, but he just seemed to me like someone half-assing it through a skit, getting cheap laughs out of not actually seeming like a real building manager. Tim Roth, on the other hand, did a very nice job with a pointless part.
When I saw that the music was going to be by Angelo Badalamenti, I thought that seemed like an excellent choice based on some of the creepy stuff he’s done for David Lynch, but the score turned out to be very mainstream and unimaginative, which I have to assume was the director’s choice. I think that even with this awkwardly adapted script, something more could have been salvaged, here, if the music had been committed to the idea that something moody and even a little dreamy was happening here, something uncanny that couldn’t be stopped. No such luck.
The 2002 Japanese movie upon which this was based, Honogurai mizu no soko kara, was translated/subtitled as Dark Water. The literal translation is apparently more like From the Depths of Murky Waters. This comes from the title of a 1996 collection of short stories by Kôji Suzuki. However, the movie is actually an adaptation only of the first story in that book, titled “Fuyuu Suru Mizu,” which in 2004 was translated into English, apparently accurately, as “Floating Water.” Not sure what “Floating Water” even means, but there you have it. This all took a bit of hunting so I thought I’d do you all the favor.
July 8, 2005
Logan’s Run (1976)
directed by Michael Anderson
screenplay by David Zelag Goodman
after the novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (1967)
120 min.
As far as the viewing experience goes, it’s terrible. I mean, I might have some non-negative stuff to say about it, but I don’t want to mislead anyone: it totally failed to be a good movie.
I’ll grant that a big part of that was the special effects, most of which have aged incredibly poorly. It was almost funny to watch the promotional “featurette” made at the same time and see the studio pushing the movie mostly in terms of the craftsmanship and high technology that went into the effects work. The miniature exteriors in the movie look so blatantly like miniatures that I often didn’t know what I was looking at, at first. “Which character has this big toy?” I would think. “Oh I see.” The sets all had that big blank clumsy quality that when I was a kid used to make me feel like not only was the place in the movie creepy, but the 70s were also creepy, since nothing about the movie seemed to acknowledge its all-pervasive creepiness. In THX-1138, a very similar movie, George Lucas sort of used that big blank feeling to his benefit, whereas here I got the impression that they really thought they had built the future. The ice cavern was particularly confusing/embarrassing. Star Wars, released a year later, apparently made it unacceptable for big studio movies to settle for effects like these. But I thought 2001, way back in 1968, famously established a new standard for effects, and most of 2001 still looks pretty good. So I’m not really sure why this stuff wasn’t already embarrassing in 1976, but apparently it wasn’t.
The writing was in the standard trashy sci-fi style, where nobody really has anything to say to each other except for to talk about the plot. And the acting lived right up to it, except for Peter Ustinov, who did his own thing with complete confidence. His performance was pretty ridiculous too but at least it was something to watch. Farrah Fawcett(-Majors) seemed to be handled with the sole interest of creating something that would become “camp” as quickly as possible.
The premise (live a life of pleasure and be KILLED ON YOUR THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY) is a messy one to elaborate on because it doesn’t make any sense. When you first hear it, you might think, “oh, interesting,” but that’s as much as you’re going to get – it’s a dead end. As I remember it, “The Lottery” leads up to the comparable nasty twist and then ends there, because the impact of that nastiness is the whole point. The movie of Soylent Green goes for the same thing, which rightly makes it the subject of a lot of mockery, because building a full-length movie around a nasty secret that’s only revealed at the end makes for a boring, obvious movie. A.I. was a movie based on a story with a twist, presented with the twist untwisted, and it had to wander very far afield in search of some other reason to exist. The sci-fi/horror short story that’s all about the final twist is a well-established form, but it just doesn’t translate well into a long form like a feature film. It happens all the time in my nightmares that I’ll have that horrible realization feeling, like, “my god, all along he’s been EATING them!” but when I wake up I see that the feeling exists on its own, not as part of a thought. Short stories can have that effect as their goal. Building something larger out of a “my god!” concept means setting up all kinds of provisional pseudo-logic to get you through.
Q: Why does this society accept death at 30? A: Um, because they’ve been led to believe that the death ritual reincarnates them.
Q: But who established this lie? A: Um, apparently this big computer.
Q: But I thought you said this culture was devised as a way of coping with a war-torn world. A: Um…yeah, that too.
Q: But when they go outside the world is fine. A: Um, right…right, it’s all unnecessary.
And so on and so on.
The fake-logic overload actually sets in in the first clause of the opening text: “The survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city…” The survivors of war, sure; the survivors of pollution, okay (though the water’s apparently fine); but “the survivors of overpopulation”?
Of course, Logan’s Run is adapted from a full-length non-twist novel, but I have no reason to believe the novel is any good! From what I read online, it seems to be a dorky rebuttal to 60s youth culture – “hey you guys, you think you’re so great being young and having a lot of sex, but you don’t want to have sex with me because I’m old and I write science fiction! You’d probably kill me off, if you had your way! But I can see finer things, human things, great things! The truth, outside your tawdry city of pleasure! You damn dirty apes!” Yeah – as I see it, Logan’s Run is a rejection of hedonism on the least philosophically defensible grounds – namely, sour grapes – and so, since it has no real case to make, it has to add this totally absurd death-cult aspect to make youth and pleasure actually seem unsavory. The movie ends with hordes of young people fascinated by a mumbly old wrinkly man, just as they might be fascinated by a puppy. There’s no chance in hell any of them wants to get old and BE him. Logan and his love interest make plans to get married, but they do it because it seems like a cute idea. They never actually rejected it – they’ve never considered it before – so they’re not learning anything new. Do you really think they’re going to stick with it?
There is a truth, buried under all this confusion, which is that young people in search of pleasure are somewhat oblivious to the truth of aging and death. But so are plenty of old people, and isn’t that, in fact, praiseworthy? Hedonism might be irresponsible, but not because it denies the inevitable! The inevitable can take care of itself. Hedonism is irresponsible because it denies things that actually could be improved, like, ahem, war, pollution, and overpopulation. Another standard sci-fi premise is the world in which pleasure is provided so long as you do not question it (a la THX-1138). But again, that’s a dorky abstraction that misses the point; the real-world culure of denial that these movies critique is not the result of a decree, it’s something most people WANT. If American culture provides us with a comfort-dome outside of which we’re not encouraged to look, it’s because supply and demand took us here. And yeah, that’s a problem, but it’s not one of those nightmare-style “big lie” problems that sci-fi likes. The “big lie” in a comfort-oriented culture is cumulative, not systematic. The Matrix is about a big lie perpetrated by, essentially, evil gnostic-style gods. Logan’s Run had an inscrutable evil in the form of a big computer. This isn’t a useful way of thinking about our problems. Brazil was a much more interesting movie in this respect, because it showed that the terrorists looking for an evil computer to blow up just added to the confusion.
I guess the political idea I’m moving toward here is that the “my god! it’s people!” vision is worse than naive, because it encourages the search for THE MISTAKE. And Logan’s Run was a good example of why that’s misguided, because the writers had to go to such terrible lengths to construct their world’s problems in the form of A MISTAKE.
I generally write and talk about movies in the present tense, but in writing this I notice that I drifted pretty heavily towards the past. I think that reflects something about the movie – it has nothing to say to the present; there’s only camp left here. And/or I guess nostalgia, for people of a certain age and inclination.
Looks like I didn’t have much non-negative to say after all.
4:38 PM: Oh yeah, I forgot – Jerry Goldsmith’s score was very cool and outclassed the movie many times over.
Here are some pre-movie book covers I found online.
