Via Manu, a cool article on Saul Bass and the art of credit titles. I almost enjoy the opening credits as much as the rest of the movie, so this bit of film history is fascinating.
Tag Archives: film
spidey underoos
I’m not sure if I ever had Spiderman underwear, but according to the movie, the costume rides up a bit. I suppose that’s what you expect from a Sam Raimi movie, and I thought that the humor saved Spiderman II from the fate of Daredevil, which was one of the worst action movies I’d seen in a while. Ben Affleck, ugh.
Dr. Octavius tells Peter Parker in the movie that he heard Peter was “brilliant but lazy” and exhorts him to work, since great things only come with hard work. The second film’s use of aphorisms and advice quoted and requoted in different contexts is clever but overused.
Not very coherent thoughts on the movie, but it’s worth seeing at the matinee price in Champaign ($6.25). Hurrah for the midwest!
one big union of all the Dementors
According to the the Maoist International Movement movie guide, Harry Potter is an anti-fascist series that nevertheless caters to the piggy bourgeois appetite. Their parting shot in the review of the latest movie:
We would only add that in real life Dementos [sic] would have unions, and those unions would make sure that more prisons get built, guards hired and secrecy built in connection to any abuses by prison guards, most recently including two prison guards who went to Iraq and continued their profession at Abu Ghraib.
What is with these guys? When I went to hear Mike Albert of ZMag give a talk at MIT, he talked about how important it was to reach out to those who don’t believe in progressive causes. The communist bookstore guy and Aimee Smith derided his position, saying that “Joe Sixpack” would never try and work for real change. How fucking elitist is that? The Socialist Worker and MIMnotes people have the same dialogue-denying asshat attitude that born-again evangelists have.
I don’t know why I’m so angry — perhaps its because I believe that a lot of the injustices they point at need to be addressed but that their approach to fixing them is so untenable.
the battle of algiers
I’ve been meaning to write about a movie I saw recently, The Battle of Algiers, at the Castro Theatre. I took the day off to go to San Francisco because I really needed a break, and saw this movie with my friend Sarah after munching on some cheap sushi. When it came out in 1966 in France it was censored, and the reviews called it “the most controversial French film of all time,” a distinction which I felt may have been deserved. It tells a story of the independence/resistance movement in French Algeria and how the French responded. The action of the film is eerily familiar in today’s world of suicide attacks and vicious retaliation.
The film opens with the French Army raiding the hideout of Ali La Pointe in the Casbah. It then flashes back to the beginnings of the resistance and how Ali joined in after being imprisoned for attacking some French kids. Within a few minutes we are shown a prisoner being led to the guillotine (yes, they still used the guillotine, even in 1956), shouting “allahu akbar” and other inflammatory statements. The resistance was an Islamic movement — through violence and intimidation they sought to end prostitution and substance abuse in the Casbah.
The French decide to bring in the military to deal with the insurrection. Headed up by Colonel Mathieu, a hero of the French Resistance in WWII, his eloquent if terse justification for the brutal techniques used by the military helps to temper the anti-French bias in the film:
The problem is: the NLF wants us to leave Algeria and we want to remain. Now, it seems to me that, despite varying shades of opinion, you all agree that we must remain. When the rebellion first began, there were not even shades of opinion. All the newspapers, even the left-wing ones wanted the rebellion suppressed. And we were sent here for this very reason. And we are neither madmen nor sadists, gentlemen. Those who call us fascists today, forget the contribution that many of us made to the Resistance. Those who call us Nazis, do not know that among us there are survivors of Dachau and Buchenwald. We are soldiers and our only duty is to win. Therefore, to be precise, I would now like to ask you a question: Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer “yes,” then you must accept all the necessary consequences.
I don’t think I agree with his argument here, but he poses the problem as one of having your cake and eating it too, which I think it a fundamental problem in the process of releasing an Empire. They showed this film to US soldiers before they went to Iraq, perhaps to prepare them for techniques of resistance that would be used against them. I find the analogy imperfect. In Iraq, we there to establish a new empire, not to preserve the existing regieme. It seems hard to draw the parallels, because I doubt the majority of the Iraqi people really hate the occupying force with as much passion as the ghetto-ized Algerians hated the French. Of course, I’m not there, so I can’t be sure of this.
The movie is eerily documentary-like, although not one frame of documentary footage was used, according to the advertisements. It is in this, its verité uninterrupted by the tricks of the cinema, that the power of the film truly lies. A film entirely shot hand-held to give the impression of immediacy seems fake to me because my memories of things are not as jerky or grainy. Here we get a combination of narrow shots in the tight alleys and multistoried houses of the Casbah as well as panoramas from the rooftops that are clearly constructed but don’t feel fake or over-edited.
The film is certainly more powerful today because of the current climate of Islamic intifadas and the techniques of bombing cafes, buses, ambulances, and so on. The historicization of these themes works both on the level of Brecht to distance us from them and judge the more objectively, but also reminds us viscerally of how little some things have changed in the last 50 years.
The screenplay is freely available, which is where I got the quote. It does not appear to be available on DVD, but if you still have a VCR you can probably rent it from your local not-Blockbuster store.
authors
I’m not the sort of person who goes in for lists like the Top 100 Novels or 100 Best GLBT Books mainly because they remind me of the sort of crap that Charles Murray likes to write about in Human Accomplishment. Many universities have a class on Great Works, against which I have railed, for I find the point misguided. How are you ever going to cover all of the great novels? How can you suppose to make ranked lists of authors and say he and she are in, but that guy just doesn’t make the cut?
On the other hand, I do believe that in order to be a good theater artist, you should know many plays, and also that you should know the greats, even if they aren’t your favorites. I don’t think you have to have read every play Mamet’s written, but you should read at least one, so that you know vaguely what Mamet is like. There are holes in my dramatic knowledge and I want to plug them up — I still haven’t read anything by Hellman, Odets, Fornes, or Wasserstein, but I’m going to correct that in time. I feel the same way about film now — I like movies, and there are some directors whose work I’ve never seen, much to my shame. In the last year I saw my first Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise) and Godard (A Woman is a Woman). I just rented Cassavetes’ Faces, and will be getting my first Fassbinder soon (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant).
But when I read this article where Martin Amis talks about Saul Bellow, I realized I’ve never read anything by Bellow, only one story by Singer, and half of Portnoy’s Complaint. I’ve never read a novel by Updike, D.H. Lawrence, or Hardy. On the other hand, I’ve read almost everything by Lethem, Borges, and Calvino. I lack a sort of literary literacy, and perhaps it would behoove me to do a survey of those authors who have shaped literature through the ages. For every new book, an old one perhaps. And at the top of the list, Saul Bellow. I’m open to suggestions.
sitanaya
My brother pointed me to an animation by an alum of my high school, Nina Paley, who has made a pretty hilarious little short called The Sitayana. I love this kind of short animated film, although I have no idea how well it would translate into a larger presentation medium. Other animations I come back to time and time again are Strindberg + Helium and the lovely Muffin Films. Watching a few is a great way to wind up day, wind down a day, or just wind in place while taking a break.
As I’m always fond of saying, animation is a beautiful art form which seeks to explain the complexities of human existence in an artistic and sometimes nonrepresentational manner. The art of animation is not just about cartoon violence and high tech gadgetry, but rather…
ROBOTS!!!!!!
jesus christ! a garden!
I did some more sightseeing in Rio — went and saw the big statue of Jesus Christ in at the Corcovado, which overlooks the city. He was big, and art déco. Enough said. I also went to the botanical garden, which was huge and trpoical. I saw many lizards and weird birds, but no monkeys. In fact, there has been a distinct lack of primate participation in my tropical adventures. I am going to have to write someone about this. Maybe the Brazilian Tourism Board.
I think I inadvertently walked through the background of several photos over the last few days, simply because at touristy places you can’t avoid being in someone’s picture. Perhaps years from now, when I am rich and famous, these people will look back though their photo albums and say “oh my god! There’s Anand Sarwate in my photo! I was so close to meeting him!” This brings up an interesting point about biography. In this age where we have so much documentation of things, will writing biography still be a form of detective work?
I read a biography of Jean-Paul Marat last week, and came across the odd phenomenon in which the biographer could not account for some two months of Marat’s life, during his revolutionary phase. Perhaps he went to England, perhaps not. But it is impossible to say for certain. The novel Possession, by A.S. Byatt, revolves around the filling in of this kind of historical hole, using lost correspondence. The students of literature and biography are detectives unraveling a mystery. In Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine series, we are only given the correspondence between two people, and we get to unravel the mystery ourselves, and generate our own stories for these two people.
But in the future, a biographer could reconstruct my trajectory using credit card histories — I bought my ticket to Rio using a Citibank card, I made ATM withdrawals at certain times. A biography made up of merchantile activities would be mundane indeed, but then there will be hundreds of tourist photos, correspondence (email of course, who writes letters these days?), home videos. Will there be real mysteries left? Or will the nature of the mystery just change from being “what happened on the night of…?”
I also saw Return of the King, subtitled in Portuguese. There was lots of chatting towards the end of the movie in the crowd, obnoxious guys insinuating that Frodo and Sam were gay lovers, giggling, etc. Homophobia knows no language barrier. But the medium popcorn/soda combo was R$6.50, which is about US$2.50. Hell, a can of lager here is less than a dollar, as was the caipirinha I had on the beach at 1 AM.
One thing that separates the US from all other countries that I’ve been to is that in the US they rarely name streets after a musicians/artists/authors/architects. And when they do, it’s always some tiny street like Mies Van Der Rohe in Chicago. When Antonio Carlos Jobim died, the city of Rio renamed various streets after him, eventually settling on a park. I’m still waiting for Jimi Hendrix Boulevard…
Movies, movies, more movies
Witch Hunter Robin — terrible anime series. It’s like My So Called Witch Hunting Life. One of the character’s special power must be “acts like an asshole, but everyone wants to be liked by him anyway.” Of course, that makes it more like reality, right? Ugh. The first scene of the first episode is pretty good though.
The Skin of Our Teeth — With Rue McClanahan, from Golden Girls. This was pretty good, actually. A filmed stage performance, a la Great Performances. Quite entertaining, and I got a lot more out of the play this time versus the time I saw it when I was 10.
A Streetcar Named Desire — STELLA! Ok, I had to get that out of my system. No, wait… STELLA! Ahh, there we go. That hit the spot. Marlon Brando is amazing.
Tokyo Story — a film by Yasujiro Ozu about elderly parents visiting their grown-up children in the big city. Depressing, slow, and very good. Although it makes you wonder why people have children when they are all going to turn into self-centered neglectful jerks.
The Station Agent — one of the most entertaining films I’ve seen lately. It restored my faith in humanity, made me think that many people are fundamentally decent, even though they are assholes some of the time.
… and finally, if you have any bad liquor leftover from a party, liquor that you wouldn’t normally drink or have no idea how to use, PubDrinks or My Bar has the answer. At least you can educate yourself.
blue screens of death
Another day, another battle with IRQD_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL. I’m really curious as to why windows machines are just so much less stable than Unix or MacOS. I mean, getting Unix machines to work at all in the first place is difficult, and getting MacOS to run things you want it to run is difficult, but once you’re going, you’re going, and there’s none of this worthless “somehow we corrupted your NFS driver thingie, we have no idea. So you should just reinstall the operating system.” This is a worthwhile consumer product? Maybe I will hang myself if my laptop stops working.
I saw The Bicycle Thief yesterday — quite good, and quite depressing. Whenever I see an old movie that won an Oscar, I’m curious as to what the competition was. Perhaps I should just arrange my own private Academy screenings, a la Tarantino. Only he just screens action flicks, from what I’ve heard.
KALX rocks, most of the time. Sometimes it kind of sucks, but not most of the time I’m listening. That is all.
punchy
Punch Drunk Love is a fabulous movie. It manages to have enough of the surreality of real life that I just sat there last night goggling at it, and not even noticing the time. Of course, it is a short movie, but I think it’s compactness makes it even better. It manages to be so economical with the material. Bene.
I’m going to sing “La Bataille De Marignan” in a concert this afternoon, and then work on martingales for much of the evening. I dont know why I find this so amusing. It’s not even decent wordplay, they just share a few letters. Kind of like “collodion” and “colloquium.” Though a colloquium on collodion would be pretty funny. “Advances in stage imitation of scar tissue: the collodion collision and its corollaries.”
An Ergodic Walk 