It may seem self-evident that most awards shows are stupid, overwrought affairs designed to get you to stare at advertisements for four hours. Not to mention the fact that these things are hardly ever actual barometers of what any sort of majority of people consider to be the "best" entertainment in any given category. (Unless throngs of people really thought the Dixie Chicks really deserved that "Album of the Year" Grammy, in which case I may be mistaken. At least the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn't win it.)
And yet every year, we all wait in excited anticipation for the Academy Awards to come around, and tell us all what the best movies and performances of the last year were.
Why? What's the point of watching something when every single one of the major awards is all but a foregone conclusion? Watch me look into my crystal ball and divine the winners of the six major categories this year: Whitaker, Mirren, Murphy, Hudson, The Departed, Martin Scorsese.
Wasn't that amazing? No, because we've been told for over a month that those are going to be the winners, and yet we'll all tune in anyway to pretend that there's some kind of suspense amidst the tedious montages and salutes to those who have left us and an honorary Oscar for Ennio Morricone.
And besides that, there are problems with the awards they give anyway. Anybody who portrays a real person in a movie in a reasonably convincing manner is virtually assured of an Oscar, and sure enough, this year we've got Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, Helen Mirrin as Queen Elizabeth, and Eddie Murphy as a thinly veiled James Brown. This is why I think that roles based on real people should be a separate category. Other quick roads to Oscar-winning, of course, include playing a mentally challenged person, a drug addict (or alcoholic), or somebody with a terminal disease. If you can combine a couple of those, even better.
As for the best picture, the prevailing trend lately is to give the Oscar to middlebrow, faux-art films that like to congratulate the viewer on their own good taste. How else to explain how Crash won last year? (And let's take a look back at some other winners over the last decade or so: The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, American Beauty, A Beautiful Mind, Million Dollar Baby.) With this in mind, the smart money would be on Little Miss Sunshine, but supposedly Martin Scorsese's got all the momentum, and this year he'll finally get his Oscar for Goodfellas, and Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull, and Casino, and... ok, The Departed was actually pretty good, despite all the annoying Boston accents. It finally sold me on Leonardo DiCaprio, after his roles in two Scorsese-directed bloated messes failed to do so. And it was fun seeing Jack Nicholson cast in the role of Satan.
Anyway, if there's any reason at all to watch the Academy Awards tonight, it's to see Scorsese's acceptance speech when he finally gets his damned "Best Director" Oscar (unless Clint Eastwood takes it out from under his nose again). Will he point out that Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman, Terence Malick, and Sergio Leone never won an Oscar (except for Kubrick's "Best Visual Effects" for 2001: A Space Odyssey)? Or will he be ecstatic to join the elite ranks of Ron Howard, Mel Gibson, and Kevin Costner?
Whatever he says, I'll just look it up on YouTube tomorrow and skip the rest.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Another movie review, 32 years late
"A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves."
I don't know if I've ever seen a movie that left as many loose ends dangling in the wind as Picnic at Hanging Rock. Of course, all those loose ends are the central part of the movie. If there weren't any loose ends, it would be a standard crime solving mystery film.
So, to backtrack, a little background, since I'm fairly sure that nobody who will read this has actually seen it. A group of girls and a pair of their teachers from a boarding school in Australia take a picnic on Valentine's Day, 1900, to Hanging Rock (a real-life volcanic formation). Three of the girls and one of the teachers go missing without a trace. A week later, one of the girls shows up with no memory at all of what happened.
From there it unfolds like a murder mystery, as pieces of the puzzle slowly come into the picture: a young Englishman and his Australian friend (who is an employee of the English family, who may be royalty or something) witnessed the girls shortly before they disappeared, another girl claims to have seen the teacher running up the hillside in her underwear shortly before she disappeared.
Except (and you can consider this a SPOILER ALERT, except that it's one of the central points of the movie, and thus not really a spoiler) at the end, nothing is explained. The girls are still missing, and nobody knows why. Several subplots come out of the woodwork (for instance, the Australian employee of the English family is clearly the long lost sister of the best friend of one of the missing boarding school girls), and they too are left unresolved.
So here's what I think.
For one thing, I don't think I've ever seen a movie filmed in such bright and crystal clear daylight that creeped me out so much. We are shown everything, yet left able to see nothing. An air of palpable dread and suspense hangs over even the most innocuous of settings, and the uncomfortable and stiff silence that penetrates most of the film makes it all the more unnerving when it is suddenly and unexpectedly interrupted by a hideous outburst. Just thinking about it sends chills down my spine.
Closely related to that is the portrayal of the way that Victorian England rubs uncomfortably against the Australian outback. The boarding school and the English family seem to exist in an awkward approximation of their native English habitat. The picnic is preceded by harsh warnings to the girls against any sort of exploration of the rock, and to look out for the apparent abundance of poisonous snakes and ants. In another scene, on the way to the picnic, the children are allowed to gleefully remove their gloves in a rare display of leniency (keep in mind that February in Australia is summer).
To me, that's the real theme of the movie (although it's a pretty buried subtext, if it was intentional at all): the girls' disappearance may be symbolic of the inability for the "civilized" English to deal with the harsh realities of Australia; it's a warning of the bad things that can happen when we step unprepared into the great unknown, into an environment that we don't control. And never has this theme carried more poignancy than it does today, as we, as a society and as a species, creep ever closer to completely eliminating that which is unknown or uncertain in nature. Indeed, today Hanging Rock is a tourist attraction, complete with a cafe at the base of the mountain.
I don't know if I've ever seen a movie that left as many loose ends dangling in the wind as Picnic at Hanging Rock. Of course, all those loose ends are the central part of the movie. If there weren't any loose ends, it would be a standard crime solving mystery film.
So, to backtrack, a little background, since I'm fairly sure that nobody who will read this has actually seen it. A group of girls and a pair of their teachers from a boarding school in Australia take a picnic on Valentine's Day, 1900, to Hanging Rock (a real-life volcanic formation). Three of the girls and one of the teachers go missing without a trace. A week later, one of the girls shows up with no memory at all of what happened.
From there it unfolds like a murder mystery, as pieces of the puzzle slowly come into the picture: a young Englishman and his Australian friend (who is an employee of the English family, who may be royalty or something) witnessed the girls shortly before they disappeared, another girl claims to have seen the teacher running up the hillside in her underwear shortly before she disappeared.
Except (and you can consider this a SPOILER ALERT, except that it's one of the central points of the movie, and thus not really a spoiler) at the end, nothing is explained. The girls are still missing, and nobody knows why. Several subplots come out of the woodwork (for instance, the Australian employee of the English family is clearly the long lost sister of the best friend of one of the missing boarding school girls), and they too are left unresolved.
So here's what I think.
For one thing, I don't think I've ever seen a movie filmed in such bright and crystal clear daylight that creeped me out so much. We are shown everything, yet left able to see nothing. An air of palpable dread and suspense hangs over even the most innocuous of settings, and the uncomfortable and stiff silence that penetrates most of the film makes it all the more unnerving when it is suddenly and unexpectedly interrupted by a hideous outburst. Just thinking about it sends chills down my spine.
Closely related to that is the portrayal of the way that Victorian England rubs uncomfortably against the Australian outback. The boarding school and the English family seem to exist in an awkward approximation of their native English habitat. The picnic is preceded by harsh warnings to the girls against any sort of exploration of the rock, and to look out for the apparent abundance of poisonous snakes and ants. In another scene, on the way to the picnic, the children are allowed to gleefully remove their gloves in a rare display of leniency (keep in mind that February in Australia is summer).
To me, that's the real theme of the movie (although it's a pretty buried subtext, if it was intentional at all): the girls' disappearance may be symbolic of the inability for the "civilized" English to deal with the harsh realities of Australia; it's a warning of the bad things that can happen when we step unprepared into the great unknown, into an environment that we don't control. And never has this theme carried more poignancy than it does today, as we, as a society and as a species, creep ever closer to completely eliminating that which is unknown or uncertain in nature. Indeed, today Hanging Rock is a tourist attraction, complete with a cafe at the base of the mountain.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Coldplay
You know what?
Fuck it all.
"Yellow" by Coldplay is still a totally bitchin' song.
I mean, let's think about this damn thing for a minute. There's that bitchin' guitar part with all the bends and all that. That kicks ass. That's one of the great intros of the 21st century.
The verses... eh. They're something. "Look at the stars/Look how they shine for you/Everything you do/They were all yellow" All right, man. Ok. Sure. If nothing else, they're pleasant.
But dude. That "chorus" part?
"Your skiiiiiiiiiin oh yeah your skin and boooones..." and etc.
God. That's so gorgeous. Only the dreamiest of pop songs could ever hope to have such a beautiful chorus as that. And those "oooooh aaaaaaaaah" backup vocals? Icing on the most delicious cake ever.
When that song took the world by storm in 2001, it would have been odd to think that "Yellow" would actually be one of the least successful Coldplay singles (especially considering its success after "Shiver" and "Brothers and Sisters" and all that stuff that is now considered "early"). Hell, I sure never thought they'd go on to be The Next U2 when I first got into them. If I knew then what I know, would I even have paid attention? I don't know.
I do know that I miss the days when they could be seen at the TLA in Philly or the 9:30 Club in D.C. I miss when Chris Martin didn't date movie stars. I miss the quaint charm of Parachutes, especially in comparison with the world-conquering blustery hoopla of X & Y. It hardly even seems like the same band. I miss when I could log on to Coldplay's official message board without it being completely overrun by a million bombastic idiots (oddly enough, there are at least two regular readers of this page that I know will agree with that).
Anyway, I am feeling quite nostalgic for when I could like Coldplay without feeling apologetic about it. Is that normal, or is that just because I'm a total music snob? They are almost a completely different band now, right?
One final note: "Everything's Not Lost" is a fantastic song, and all three times I saw Coldplay play live (once each in 2001, 2002, and 2003), they played it, and each time, I was absolutely ecstatic. If nothing else, I'll have those memories.
Fuck it all.
"Yellow" by Coldplay is still a totally bitchin' song.
I mean, let's think about this damn thing for a minute. There's that bitchin' guitar part with all the bends and all that. That kicks ass. That's one of the great intros of the 21st century.
The verses... eh. They're something. "Look at the stars/Look how they shine for you/Everything you do/They were all yellow" All right, man. Ok. Sure. If nothing else, they're pleasant.
But dude. That "chorus" part?
"Your skiiiiiiiiiin oh yeah your skin and boooones..." and etc.
God. That's so gorgeous. Only the dreamiest of pop songs could ever hope to have such a beautiful chorus as that. And those "oooooh aaaaaaaaah" backup vocals? Icing on the most delicious cake ever.
When that song took the world by storm in 2001, it would have been odd to think that "Yellow" would actually be one of the least successful Coldplay singles (especially considering its success after "Shiver" and "Brothers and Sisters" and all that stuff that is now considered "early"). Hell, I sure never thought they'd go on to be The Next U2 when I first got into them. If I knew then what I know, would I even have paid attention? I don't know.
I do know that I miss the days when they could be seen at the TLA in Philly or the 9:30 Club in D.C. I miss when Chris Martin didn't date movie stars. I miss the quaint charm of Parachutes, especially in comparison with the world-conquering blustery hoopla of X & Y. It hardly even seems like the same band. I miss when I could log on to Coldplay's official message board without it being completely overrun by a million bombastic idiots (oddly enough, there are at least two regular readers of this page that I know will agree with that).
Anyway, I am feeling quite nostalgic for when I could like Coldplay without feeling apologetic about it. Is that normal, or is that just because I'm a total music snob? They are almost a completely different band now, right?
One final note: "Everything's Not Lost" is a fantastic song, and all three times I saw Coldplay play live (once each in 2001, 2002, and 2003), they played it, and each time, I was absolutely ecstatic. If nothing else, I'll have those memories.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Super Bowl Halftime Complaints, 2007 edition
I know I'm getting to this at least a week too late, but give me a break. I've been busy with... laziness.
Anyway, I have a couple points to make about Prince's Super Bowl halftime show.
Let's start with this one. I'm using FOX News' article about it because they had the best picture of it. First of all, yes, it has "phallic connotations," and yes, it was probably intentional. Who cares? If you looked at that and saw a giant guitar-penis, that says more about you than about Prince or anybody else. I highly doubt that any young children had that thought upon seeing it. What's the big deal? What the hell year is this? 1955? I thought we were living in the era where nothing is offensive anymore, not when paranoid prudes make a big deal out of seeing dicks everywhere.
It's also giving people an opportunity to use the irritating euphemism "wardrobe malfunction" again. (On an unrelated note, most people seem to have forgotten that the originator of that ridiculous term was none other than Justin Timberlake.) I can't even express how annoying that first sentence is: "In the sensitive post-wardrobe malfunction world..." ARGH!
Second, most things I read about while goofing around on the 'net seem to be pretty unanimous in declaring that Prince delivered the best Super Bowl halftime show ever.
My question is: really? I mean, first of all, that's a backhanded compliment at best, since for most of its history (or what we might call "the pre-wardrobe malfunction world") the halftime shows have been things like star-laden medleys featuring Britney Spears singing with Aerosmith (Super Bowl XXXV), or the Grambling State University Band (Super Bowl II), or "The Walt Disney World Small World Tribute to 25 Years of the Super Bowl" (Super Bowl XXV, duh).
But was Prince better than, say Paul McCartney in Super Bowl XXXIX? I was pretty underwhelmed by Prince, to be honest. To be sure, the dude can shred like no other, but to what end? Covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival, a Bob Dylan song that Jimi Hendrix has owned since 1969, and, of all things, the Foo Fighters? Sure, the "Purple Rain" in the rain finale was pretty cool, but how cool would it have been if it hadn't rained? And was that better than 60,000 people singing along with "Hey Jude?"
Admittedly, I am indifferent to most of Prince's music (for reasons I'm not going into right now), and I am staunch McCartney fan (even though I think he's an a-hole), so I'm not an unbending pole of neutrality here. And of course, Prince's performance was worlds better than the dreadful show the Rolling Stones put on last year. But I know a good performance when I see it, and Prince was good, but not mind-blowing.
Anyway, I have a couple points to make about Prince's Super Bowl halftime show.
Let's start with this one. I'm using FOX News' article about it because they had the best picture of it. First of all, yes, it has "phallic connotations," and yes, it was probably intentional. Who cares? If you looked at that and saw a giant guitar-penis, that says more about you than about Prince or anybody else. I highly doubt that any young children had that thought upon seeing it. What's the big deal? What the hell year is this? 1955? I thought we were living in the era where nothing is offensive anymore, not when paranoid prudes make a big deal out of seeing dicks everywhere.
It's also giving people an opportunity to use the irritating euphemism "wardrobe malfunction" again. (On an unrelated note, most people seem to have forgotten that the originator of that ridiculous term was none other than Justin Timberlake.) I can't even express how annoying that first sentence is: "In the sensitive post-wardrobe malfunction world..." ARGH!
Second, most things I read about while goofing around on the 'net seem to be pretty unanimous in declaring that Prince delivered the best Super Bowl halftime show ever.
My question is: really? I mean, first of all, that's a backhanded compliment at best, since for most of its history (or what we might call "the pre-wardrobe malfunction world") the halftime shows have been things like star-laden medleys featuring Britney Spears singing with Aerosmith (Super Bowl XXXV), or the Grambling State University Band (Super Bowl II), or "The Walt Disney World Small World Tribute to 25 Years of the Super Bowl" (Super Bowl XXV, duh).
But was Prince better than, say Paul McCartney in Super Bowl XXXIX? I was pretty underwhelmed by Prince, to be honest. To be sure, the dude can shred like no other, but to what end? Covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival, a Bob Dylan song that Jimi Hendrix has owned since 1969, and, of all things, the Foo Fighters? Sure, the "Purple Rain" in the rain finale was pretty cool, but how cool would it have been if it hadn't rained? And was that better than 60,000 people singing along with "Hey Jude?"
Admittedly, I am indifferent to most of Prince's music (for reasons I'm not going into right now), and I am staunch McCartney fan (even though I think he's an a-hole), so I'm not an unbending pole of neutrality here. And of course, Prince's performance was worlds better than the dreadful show the Rolling Stones put on last year. But I know a good performance when I see it, and Prince was good, but not mind-blowing.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
oh no. oh god no
Have you got two and a half minutes? Here, check this out:
All I can say is NOOOOOO. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.
Wait, I can say more.
Let's take a look at the cast of characters: we've got a Jude, Lucy, Prudence, Sadie, JoJo, Desmond, Max (which I can only assume is short for Maxwell), Bill, and of course Mr. Kite (played by Eddie Izzard). I didn't have the patience to look at the whole thing, but I'm going to assume that there's a Michelle, Martha, Julia, Doctor Robert, Pam, Eleanor (Rigby), and AAAGGGGHHHHHHHH GOD IT'S SO GRATINGLY "CLEVER" I WANT TO SHOOT SOMETHING.
Now look, I know this kind of crap is inevitable. I Am Sam did that whole "Beatles-cover" shtick too, and that actually resulted in several listenable tracks... ok, two I guess, but that's an argument for another day.
The point is, this sort of crap should usually be relegated to braindead musical theater shows, where a bunch of struggling actors dress up in the most obnoxious 1980s clothing imaginable and sing a bunch of Billy Joel songs that have been loosely slapped together into some kind of idiotic haphazard story, so that baby boomers can go and have fun and pay $35 to hear inferior versions of songs they've heard several million times since they were 13.
And if they did that with the Beatles, I'd have no problem with that. Hell, they did it with the Beach Boys, they might as well. And it would be ok because the whole thing would be completely under my radar, and I could be blissfully unaware of the whole thing, and not hear a thing about it until the touring production of "A Day in the Life, Featuring the Music of the Beatles" came to the Forrest Theatre for a week, and then I'd be mildly annoyed because somebody would say "Hey Tom, you going? Heh heh heh," just to be a wiseguy, but still, I wouldn't really care.
But no. It HAD to be a damn movie. AND LOOK HOW FUCKING SERIOUSLY THIS THING IS TAKING ITSELF. God. The plot synopsis on the imdb describes it as "a fictional love story set in the 1960s amid the turbulent years of anti-war protest, the struggle for free speech and civil rights, mind exploration and rock and roll." Cool. I remember that VH1 miniseries too. Not to mention Forrest Gump.
God. This thing needs to come out and flop so I can forget it ever happened.
EDIT: this was posted at first with a completely different video embedded other than the one I wrote about. I'm assuming that any reasonably intelligent person could figure out that the text and video did not correspond. But I fixed it now. All is well.
All I can say is NOOOOOO. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.
Wait, I can say more.
Let's take a look at the cast of characters: we've got a Jude, Lucy, Prudence, Sadie, JoJo, Desmond, Max (which I can only assume is short for Maxwell), Bill, and of course Mr. Kite (played by Eddie Izzard). I didn't have the patience to look at the whole thing, but I'm going to assume that there's a Michelle, Martha, Julia, Doctor Robert, Pam, Eleanor (Rigby), and AAAGGGGHHHHHHHH GOD IT'S SO GRATINGLY "CLEVER" I WANT TO SHOOT SOMETHING.
Now look, I know this kind of crap is inevitable. I Am Sam did that whole "Beatles-cover" shtick too, and that actually resulted in several listenable tracks... ok, two I guess, but that's an argument for another day.
The point is, this sort of crap should usually be relegated to braindead musical theater shows, where a bunch of struggling actors dress up in the most obnoxious 1980s clothing imaginable and sing a bunch of Billy Joel songs that have been loosely slapped together into some kind of idiotic haphazard story, so that baby boomers can go and have fun and pay $35 to hear inferior versions of songs they've heard several million times since they were 13.
And if they did that with the Beatles, I'd have no problem with that. Hell, they did it with the Beach Boys, they might as well. And it would be ok because the whole thing would be completely under my radar, and I could be blissfully unaware of the whole thing, and not hear a thing about it until the touring production of "A Day in the Life, Featuring the Music of the Beatles" came to the Forrest Theatre for a week, and then I'd be mildly annoyed because somebody would say "Hey Tom, you going? Heh heh heh," just to be a wiseguy, but still, I wouldn't really care.
But no. It HAD to be a damn movie. AND LOOK HOW FUCKING SERIOUSLY THIS THING IS TAKING ITSELF. God. The plot synopsis on the imdb describes it as "a fictional love story set in the 1960s amid the turbulent years of anti-war protest, the struggle for free speech and civil rights, mind exploration and rock and roll." Cool. I remember that VH1 miniseries too. Not to mention Forrest Gump.
God. This thing needs to come out and flop so I can forget it ever happened.
EDIT: this was posted at first with a completely different video embedded other than the one I wrote about. I'm assuming that any reasonably intelligent person could figure out that the text and video did not correspond. But I fixed it now. All is well.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Politicians are dumb
From the very start, this Iraq resolution that's been making its way through Congress has seemed like a waste of time to me. They're spending hours and hours debating a resolution that is non-binding, no more than a simple expression of the opinion of the Congress that maybe Bush shouldn't be sending 21,000 more troops to Iraq, that Bush has promised to ignore anyway. (And as a side note, why do we keep calling it a "surge" when referring to it? Did a focus group reveal that "increased military presence" sounds too harsh?)
Some conservatives have criticized it as being a transparent attempt to embarrass the president, and for once I completely agree with them. If it had passed, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi could trumpet their success to the American people, because what would the headlines say? "Congress Passes Resolution Against Iraq War." And then in the smaller print in the actual article that nobody actually reads, we see (or don't see) that it's non-binding, won't change a thing, that they spent hours debating over three versions of it with subtle wording differences that may allow politicians an exit if the "surge" somehow actually works, and blah blah blah.
Of course, that's all a moot point now, because it's essentially dead. Perhaps they killed did it for different reasons than I would have done it, but for now, no more time will be spent on the resolutions, and maybe now the Senate can start worrying about things that will actually have an effect on policy, like, say, the $245 billion that the Bush Administration wants for the war.
But here's the funny thing. The Democrats didn't even need to pass the resolution to come out looking good. Check out the headline of that news article:
"Republicans block Senate debate on Iraq"
The Republicans aren't going to win a lot of voters with that, are they?
Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah liberal media blah blah blah. I just think it's amusing.
Some conservatives have criticized it as being a transparent attempt to embarrass the president, and for once I completely agree with them. If it had passed, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi could trumpet their success to the American people, because what would the headlines say? "Congress Passes Resolution Against Iraq War." And then in the smaller print in the actual article that nobody actually reads, we see (or don't see) that it's non-binding, won't change a thing, that they spent hours debating over three versions of it with subtle wording differences that may allow politicians an exit if the "surge" somehow actually works, and blah blah blah.
Of course, that's all a moot point now, because it's essentially dead. Perhaps they killed did it for different reasons than I would have done it, but for now, no more time will be spent on the resolutions, and maybe now the Senate can start worrying about things that will actually have an effect on policy, like, say, the $245 billion that the Bush Administration wants for the war.
But here's the funny thing. The Democrats didn't even need to pass the resolution to come out looking good. Check out the headline of that news article:
"Republicans block Senate debate on Iraq"
The Republicans aren't going to win a lot of voters with that, are they?
Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah liberal media blah blah blah. I just think it's amusing.
A movie review, three years late
So, I saw the feature documentary film The Fog of War last night. It was released almost exactly three years ago, but I'm going to bet that most of you haven't seen it, so I'm going to go ahead and offer up my thoughts anyway. Here we go.
At first, Robert McNamara would seem to make a strange subject for an Errol Morris documentary. Morris has made a career out of his odd choice of subject matters, but these are usually limited to offbeat types like pet cemetery managers (Gates of Heaven, one of my favorite movies), backwoods small town residents who hunt turkeys (Vernon, Florida), mole rat specialists, robot inventors, lion tamers, shrub sculptors (all four in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control), and even once a death row inmate (The Thin Blue Line, no relation to Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line). But McNamara brings with him a much heavier story, considered by many to be the "architect" of the Vietnam War, the supervisor of one of the worst military fiascoes in American history, responsible for the deaths of thousands.
As it turns out, McNamara makes a very prototypical Morris subject: a conflicted man often paralyzed by his own complexity, a man clearly torn apart by his culpability, but not willing to admit that in as many words.
Long story short, The Fog of War reveals McNamara to be, at 85 years old, hardly the arrogant and bullheaded fiend his critics claim him to be (and to be honest, that's how I saw him going into the movie). He's surprisingly introspective, ruminating freely on his thoughts at being close at hand (and partially responsible) for the US firebombing of Tokyo in World War II that killed 100,000, and for being second in command only to the president (first Kennedy, then Johnson) during a conflict that saw 25,000 US soldiers killed during his command, and countless more Vietnamese. He refuses to take direct responsibility for anything, but openly admits that he was in charge when Agent Orange was introduced, among many other things.
McNamara walks an odd tightrope throughout the film, coming tantalizingly close to an apology for the things he did while also never really accepting full responsibility for them. Asked by Morris who was responsible for the Vietnam War, he responds without a moment of hesitation, "The President" (that being Lyndon Johnson in this case).
The parallels to today's situation in Iraq are so obvious that I almost feel like I'm wasting time by bringing it up at all, but I would be very interested as to what George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld would say about The Fog of War, and McNamara's candidness about the mistakes he made in Vietnam that were repeated almost exactly by Rumsfeld, who only recently finally resigned from the same office that McNamara once held.
Morris, as usual, does an excellent job of bringing out the most fascinating side of his interview subject, although his visual metaphors can be laughably literal (the transition from WWII to Vietnam, for example, is made by showing dominoes toppling on a large map of Europe and Asia on a line from Moscow to Hanoi). But is anybody really counting that against him in a documentary? Consider that The Fog of War won the Best Feature Documentary Academy Award in 2004, an award which had been won the previous year by Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. I'll take Morris' unobtrusive thoughtfulness over Moore's ham-fisted propaganda any day of the week.
And finally, the music: Philip Glass, one of my favorite composers, provided a score for the film, and did a fair job of it. Glass often seems a stone's throw away from self-parody, and that's certainly the case here, as he reprises some of his earlier works from the 1980s almost verbatim, and then actually includes several of his earlier works from the 1980s. Oh well. Glass has done enough amazing work that I'm ok with letting him slide with a mediocre film soundtrack, since most of the movie consists of McNamara talking to a camera anyway.
At first, Robert McNamara would seem to make a strange subject for an Errol Morris documentary. Morris has made a career out of his odd choice of subject matters, but these are usually limited to offbeat types like pet cemetery managers (Gates of Heaven, one of my favorite movies), backwoods small town residents who hunt turkeys (Vernon, Florida), mole rat specialists, robot inventors, lion tamers, shrub sculptors (all four in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control), and even once a death row inmate (The Thin Blue Line, no relation to Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line). But McNamara brings with him a much heavier story, considered by many to be the "architect" of the Vietnam War, the supervisor of one of the worst military fiascoes in American history, responsible for the deaths of thousands.
As it turns out, McNamara makes a very prototypical Morris subject: a conflicted man often paralyzed by his own complexity, a man clearly torn apart by his culpability, but not willing to admit that in as many words.
Long story short, The Fog of War reveals McNamara to be, at 85 years old, hardly the arrogant and bullheaded fiend his critics claim him to be (and to be honest, that's how I saw him going into the movie). He's surprisingly introspective, ruminating freely on his thoughts at being close at hand (and partially responsible) for the US firebombing of Tokyo in World War II that killed 100,000, and for being second in command only to the president (first Kennedy, then Johnson) during a conflict that saw 25,000 US soldiers killed during his command, and countless more Vietnamese. He refuses to take direct responsibility for anything, but openly admits that he was in charge when Agent Orange was introduced, among many other things.
McNamara walks an odd tightrope throughout the film, coming tantalizingly close to an apology for the things he did while also never really accepting full responsibility for them. Asked by Morris who was responsible for the Vietnam War, he responds without a moment of hesitation, "The President" (that being Lyndon Johnson in this case).
The parallels to today's situation in Iraq are so obvious that I almost feel like I'm wasting time by bringing it up at all, but I would be very interested as to what George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld would say about The Fog of War, and McNamara's candidness about the mistakes he made in Vietnam that were repeated almost exactly by Rumsfeld, who only recently finally resigned from the same office that McNamara once held.
Morris, as usual, does an excellent job of bringing out the most fascinating side of his interview subject, although his visual metaphors can be laughably literal (the transition from WWII to Vietnam, for example, is made by showing dominoes toppling on a large map of Europe and Asia on a line from Moscow to Hanoi). But is anybody really counting that against him in a documentary? Consider that The Fog of War won the Best Feature Documentary Academy Award in 2004, an award which had been won the previous year by Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. I'll take Morris' unobtrusive thoughtfulness over Moore's ham-fisted propaganda any day of the week.
And finally, the music: Philip Glass, one of my favorite composers, provided a score for the film, and did a fair job of it. Glass often seems a stone's throw away from self-parody, and that's certainly the case here, as he reprises some of his earlier works from the 1980s almost verbatim, and then actually includes several of his earlier works from the 1980s. Oh well. Glass has done enough amazing work that I'm ok with letting him slide with a mediocre film soundtrack, since most of the movie consists of McNamara talking to a camera anyway.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Aqua Teen Hunger Blah
The "tempest in a teapot" story of the century can be found right here.
I'm sure that most of you have heard about that by now (and by "most" I mean "3 of the 4 people reading this"), so I'm not going to write about all the details. I just want to vent about how idiotic the whole story is.
Let's start with this paragraph: "Assistant Attorney General John Grossman called the light boards 'bomblike' devices and said that if they had been explosive they could have damaged transportation infrastructure in the city."
By this logic, I could be arrested and charged with a felony for driving my car on a road in Boston. Cars can have bombs in them! If my car had a bomb in it it certainly could have damaged transportation infrastructure, right?
Never mind that these "bomblike" lightboards had been in the city for three weeks without any problem, or that they have also been in nine other cities (including Philadelphia) without incident. Nope. A couple phone calls to the police, and suddenly the bomb squad has to come out, shut down the whole area, and detonate a Lite-Brite of a cartoon moon man giving the middle finger in a controlled explosion.
But for now, let's go back to the news story for a second: "Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis called the stunt 'unconscionable,' while Boston Mayor Thomas Menino called it 'outrageous' and the product of 'corporate greed.' Democratic Rep. Ed Markey, a Boston-area congressman, added, 'It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt.'"
Read that again: "It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt."
Ed Markey may be lacking in the imagination department, but then again, he is a professional politician, so it's not that surprising (see, I can rag on Democrats too). Either way, that quote is pretty symbolic of the whole reaction to this. Or maybe a harmless viral marketing campaign that didn't affect a soul until the city of Boston went nuts over it is, in fact, the most appalling publicity stunt ever.
It makes me wonder what would happen if I called my local police and said, "Yeah, I'd like to report an emergency. There are all these big blue boxes with small openings at the top all over the place. There's one at 42nd and Pine, another at 43rd and Spruce, and still another at 43rd and Chester! And every night at 5:00 this guy in a blue uniform-type outfit comes and does something with it. Probably fine-tuning the timer in the bomb!"
Maybe I could get mailboxes removed from the entire city.
Meanwhile, you can bet that Aqua Teen Hunger Force will have the highest ratings of its entire run now, after news outlets across the country have been forced to offer some sort of explanation of what the show is.
Anyway, I'm sure somebody out there is thinking "I'd rather have this than terrorist bombings all across the country," and I guess I can't really argue with that, but it still wouldn't hurt to use a little common sense one in a while.
I'm sure that most of you have heard about that by now (and by "most" I mean "3 of the 4 people reading this"), so I'm not going to write about all the details. I just want to vent about how idiotic the whole story is.
Let's start with this paragraph: "Assistant Attorney General John Grossman called the light boards 'bomblike' devices and said that if they had been explosive they could have damaged transportation infrastructure in the city."
By this logic, I could be arrested and charged with a felony for driving my car on a road in Boston. Cars can have bombs in them! If my car had a bomb in it it certainly could have damaged transportation infrastructure, right?
Never mind that these "bomblike" lightboards had been in the city for three weeks without any problem, or that they have also been in nine other cities (including Philadelphia) without incident. Nope. A couple phone calls to the police, and suddenly the bomb squad has to come out, shut down the whole area, and detonate a Lite-Brite of a cartoon moon man giving the middle finger in a controlled explosion.
But for now, let's go back to the news story for a second: "Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis called the stunt 'unconscionable,' while Boston Mayor Thomas Menino called it 'outrageous' and the product of 'corporate greed.' Democratic Rep. Ed Markey, a Boston-area congressman, added, 'It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt.'"
Read that again: "It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt."
Ed Markey may be lacking in the imagination department, but then again, he is a professional politician, so it's not that surprising (see, I can rag on Democrats too). Either way, that quote is pretty symbolic of the whole reaction to this. Or maybe a harmless viral marketing campaign that didn't affect a soul until the city of Boston went nuts over it is, in fact, the most appalling publicity stunt ever.
It makes me wonder what would happen if I called my local police and said, "Yeah, I'd like to report an emergency. There are all these big blue boxes with small openings at the top all over the place. There's one at 42nd and Pine, another at 43rd and Spruce, and still another at 43rd and Chester! And every night at 5:00 this guy in a blue uniform-type outfit comes and does something with it. Probably fine-tuning the timer in the bomb!"
Maybe I could get mailboxes removed from the entire city.
Meanwhile, you can bet that Aqua Teen Hunger Force will have the highest ratings of its entire run now, after news outlets across the country have been forced to offer some sort of explanation of what the show is.
Anyway, I'm sure somebody out there is thinking "I'd rather have this than terrorist bombings all across the country," and I guess I can't really argue with that, but it still wouldn't hurt to use a little common sense one in a while.
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