Spoilers TK

Spoiled.

It's about damn time that someone bucked the trend, one of the worst on the internet in my opinion, of being careful about spoilers: Movie Review: 'The Happening' (side note: we should have more genius headlines like this where I work).

For the longest time now, I've been wary of movie/book reviews where the author intentionally resists spoiling the work for his readers. This practice not only capitulates to the audience -- as an editor of Time once said, "Keep the dog food where the dog is" -- it also presupposes the plot summary found in the worst examples of criticism. In both outcomes the critic is failing to do his job: the point of criticism is not to convey the plot or action in a work but rather to discuss the importance of the themes and messages in the work itself. The best criticism goes a step further and connects the art with it's context. Take for example this Manohla Dargis review of Children of Men:

Based in broad outline on the 1992 dystopian novel by P. D. James about a world suffering from global infertility — and written with a nod to Orwell by Mr. Cuarón and his writing partner Timothy J. Sexton along with David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — “Children of Men” pictures a world that looks a lot like our own, but darker, grimmer and more frighteningly, violently precarious. It imagines a world drained of hope and defined by terror in which bombs regularly explode in cafes crowded with men and women on their way to work. It imagines the unthinkable: What if instead of containing Iraq, the world has become Iraq, a universal battleground of military control, security zones, refugee camps and warring tribal identities?

Do you see what's happening there? There's no plot discussion, just themes and connections. Two of the best modern examples of these practices are Ed Rothstein's "Connections" columns and William Safire's "On Language" but both of those are hardly pure criticism. Perhaps more germane -- and older -- is Sam Johnson's Rambler series. However, my favorite example of good criticism comes from James Agee, in a review of that bender of a movie "The Lost Weekend":

I understand that liquor interish: innerish: intereshtsh are rather worried about this film. Thash tough.

I suppose this unfortunate trend against spoiling the ending of a movie arises out of the class who writes these reviews: journalists. The very nature of the journalistic pathos hinges on the practice of reporting the truth, and summaries are nothing but truthful. In addition, the hesitancy to refrain from discussing the ending and thus the movie, arises out of a kind of narcissism, and most likely stems from the increased voice readers have on the web. I didn't think I'd end on that note when I started, but the review of 'The Happening', while not among the ones I'll count great, is at least a step in the right direction. (I also have no desire to see 'The Happening'. Though I'm no fan of Mr. Night, due to masochistic urges I've seen all of his previous films, probably because I thought it was funny, but after Lady in the Water I don't have enough time left in my life to see another.)

Newer Noise?

I'm back after a bit of a hiatus. I'm hoping to put up something a bit more substantial soonish, but for now just a few uncontrolled thoughts on the state of music:

I just came back from a show featuring these guys: Wild Birds and Peace Drums, and I couldn't help but think what a sorry state popular music is in. See, Wild Birds and their ilk have forgotten that a fundamental part of music is experimentation, and pushing limits. It's not enough to grab a drummer and a mbira, and go to town. What we need, what we're crying for, is a newport festival, and the revolution of the plugged in guitar, we need two turntables and mile-high speakers, we need angular chords and blaring saxaphones. We need enthusiasm!

Stay tuned. We'll get back on track here soon. Back to more a bit more measured commentary, but with enthusiasm!

Keith Gessen Gives Up the Ghost.

In the newest edition of Titlepage.tv -- the always awkward new project from Daniel Menaker -- Keith Gessen describes his current book All the Sad Young Literary Men. Ever since I picked it up at a book grab at work, I've suspected that it's only the writings of a cowardly narcissist wondering why girls just can't understand him. In an act against the trend of literary memoirs, Gessen hid in his shallow and one-dimensional characters rather than collecting a list of personal essays. Maybe he thought fictionalizing himself and the cadre of n+1 editors would put a little gravitas in his gut, but a slip on Titlepage.tv, above, proves his Fall Out Boy listening inner self is as shallow as expected. Grow a pair, son, and we'll talk in the future.

An aside: congrats to Menaker for having none of it, and looking over his glasses at this shell of a man.

All You Have to Do Is Throw Money, Throw Money.

The end times.

Bear Sterns finally decided to offer the hat to the highest bidder after homeowners called their bluff. As always, the CJR posted the best roundup of the fall of the suspenders-and-cigars firm's newspaper coverage:

As far as government bailouts go, this one could be worse. We’re glad to see the government did not bailout Bear Stearns shareholders, who are already issuing “howls of protests,” the WSJ reports. The paper quotes one employee (Bear Stearns’ employees own one-third of the firm’s shares) who doesn’t get it:

“I’ve got to think we can get more in a liquidation, I’m not selling my shares, this price is dramatically less than the book value Alan Schwartz told us the company is worth,” said a midlevel Bear Stearns executive. “The building is worth $8 a share.”

The building may be worth $8 a share but the rest of the company is worth negative dollars a share, dude.

Turns out they were to busy playing bridge while their firm went to the poor house. Which brings us to the levity of the situation, the red portion in the chart above shows the difference in Bear Stern's stock price from last friday to this morning, and really drives home how dire the situation is. Basically, Bear Sterns went looking for buyers, found one in the historically philanthropic J.P. Morgan and sold for mere pennies (or $2 a share). Its scarier than this everyday story, though, because the fed threw $30 Billion at the merger to leverage debt effectively in the process nationalizing the risk. J.P. Morgan will win big in this deal because the risk is placed on the taxpayers -- the Fed's loan will most likely never be paid -- and it gets at the least a very prime piece of commercial real estate. And as we dig deeper we see a Fed bailout broadcasting a message of laziness about inflation, a message arguing for a company asleep at the wheel, and one too big to fail. Worst of all, the already stretched taxpayer, facing increased threat of foreclosure, just saved the fuckers who financed their debt in the first place.

Movie Tuesday.

Stylish long hair.

Over the weekend I saw two surprisingly great movies, and since I loved them so much I feel we should start a tradition you and I. We'll call it "Movie Tuesday". When I see a good one, I'll jot a few notes about it, and you, good reader, will use the comments section to dissect my purple prose. Sound fun? Here goes:

The first and most spectacular movie I saw this weekend was Gus Van Sandt's skateboard epic Paranoid Park. I won't try to review the whole movie here, just the most breathtaking bit. Needless to say, the story follows a young skateboarder who has committed the most heinous of crimes. Shortly after the act, in an effort to clean himself of the filth -- and guilt -- of the trainyards, he steps into a shower with his head hung in order to hide. As the water flows through his long hair, it collects the individual strands into streams of water running into separate shifting rivers of weight. The soundtrack, at this point, paints an audio collage of natural sounds of birds chirping and wind rushing through leaves. Slowly Van Sandt stops down the camera, the image darkens, and we hear more industrial and more unsettling sounds. At this point the rivulets become something sinister, a viper coat weighing down our young skateboarder. Near the end of the scene he has become a monster quite ephemeral and clearly unnatural, and at least a bit of our sympathy disappears and is quickly replaced by a feeling of revulsion, a sense of shock and awe at the terrifying apparition on screen.

Skateboarding culture as a whole exists in a state of constant exploration and gives its practitioners a sense of ultimate freedom. These urban reclaimers champion the hidden spaces of our devolving urban decay. In past years and centuries, explorers discovered unknown regions of the globe, now these modern day Aguirres find places where people have already been and constructed, but enjoy those most will never see. The very next scene repeats the themes of the shower scene and shows these youngsters gliding up and down a concrete drain tube in a state of bliss, but the camera reverses the shot and we see that the tube is enclosed in on both sides. Effectively, these men underground are less than explorers or heroes: they are trapped by the very freedom they champion. They have a complete inability to flee and escape from civilization's sewers. Spectacular.

The second of the two, Be Kind, Rewind wasn't so much a movie as it was an argument for movies. It follows two mentally challenged video store clerks -- actually everyone in the movie seems a little dim -- and, after one erases the store's entire library after a tragic accident with a power transformer, their attempts at abridging and remaking the movies we know and love. Chock full of references from 2001 to Ernest Goes to Jail, its a heartfelt appeal for the importance of movies, and since I'm such a sucker for shots of an audience lit solely by the flickering shutter of a projector, it had me in sentimental silly tears over the beauty of pretty much any series of moving pictures. Sappy, funny, silly and with a shred of a storyline, Be Kind, Rewind reminds us how completely awesome movies can be, especially ones made on a sunny summer afternoon.

Pop-Tarts is German for Little Iced Pastry O' Germany.

A short heads up: This article at the New York Review of Books by Nicholson Baker explores the hilarity of Wikipedia and I guarantee you will laugh until your sides ache. Way to go NYRB! Not so stuffy after all! (Don't worry, I'm working on something a bit more substantial, but I thought I'd tide all 4 -- or is it three? Hi mom! -- of you over until I've finished.)

Macbeth and Cardassians.

Everyone knows Patrick Stewart is god's gift to acting. His performance on the Star Trek episode "Chain of Command" should prove that to anyone who's seen it. It certainly opened my eyes to the wonders of spectacularly delicious acting as a kid. So it's disappointing that Director Rupert Goold places Patrick Stewart in a largely static Macbeth in it's current run at the BAM.

Goold's take summons the muses of soviet fascist imagery, and jungle camouflaged british actors revolving around Stewart's Macbeth to illuminate his frantic mind. This Macbeth is an AK carrying counterinsurgent in the mold of Mussolini, but terrified of the actual act of treason and murder. It's an interesting take, but its insistence on video art to animate the characters is distracting: largely the actors hit their marks and stick while video projections inject dynamics and tension to the play. Goold has stated that he's taken inspiration from 70s horror flicks, yet he probably hasn't seen much more than their trailers. Every scene, and most apallingly his no wave take on the weyward sister's "Double, Double" speech, is punctuated and fractured like a trailer for the Saw series. This hamfisted approach, in the 2000s no less, is a silly trick to up tension in an overwhelmingly complex introspective work, full of soliloquy and secrecy. It's far past time to throw this cheap cliche out with the baby:

For three hours, Goold's videos play and repeat and it's increasingly frustrating to watch such a misreading of horror. Horror films aren't as slapdash as most think; good ones strive to make the familiar unfamiliar by creating a plausible but off setting. Macbeth does neither. It's set in what looks like a dirty hospital -- you know the aesthetic: dirty tiles, operating tables-- which hardly anyone has ever visited, except in shlocky stupid horror films. The best horror films (Martin, Last House on the Left, Dawn of the Dead) take a familiar setting, the homefront, a mall, a small town, and inject a twist of social commentary to unset the ground, to make a slightly different reality: it's not just flashy lights, blood, and screaming.

(Also, note to the Times: don't send correspondents to galas to get drunk).

Racketeering.

No matter how attractive it is, uttering "And so it begins" is hardly ever warranted. Take Hillary Clinton for example: its hard to say her campaign's dismissal of party rules from running in Michigan and Florida to the recent run on the superdelegates is a strategy wholly unforeseen. But it would be nice just for once to not be prescient:

Mrs. Clinton’s aides said they would also argue to superdelegates that they should give less deference to a lead from Mr. Obama because much of that had been built up in states where there were caucuses, which tend to attract far fewer voters than primaries, where Mrs. Clinton has tended to do better than she has done in caucuses.

“I think for superdelegates, the quality of where the win comes from should matter in terms of making a judgment about who might be the best general election candidate,” said Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s senior campaign adviser.

Unfortunately, Senator Clinton's campaign aides are right; the democratic races in caucus states, even in this heated political season, are attended far less than those in primary states, and even more frustrating, often these races are thrice removed from the popular vote. In Washington, for example, the caucus on Feb. 9th only served to elect delegates to a district caucus held on May 17th at which point the actual Convention delegates are elected. This sort of tiered voting is a far cry from true popular vote democracy, and therefore lowers the quality of the results, which is a hard pill to swallow. However, as you can see in the table in my previous post below, Obama cleaned up in recent primary races, races run in true democratic fashion (as true as could be hoped at this stage at least).

The other tough pill that her campaign is selling is the question of the Michigan and Florida primaries, both of which Clinton won by ignoring the party's ban on campaigning in each state by doing just that (and by keeping her name on the ballot in Michigan). Michigan is a red herring, for she was the only popular candidate on the ballot, and a choice of one, practically -- Mike Gravel et. al really don't count, is a non choice: if you can only vote Hussein, he'll win. But, Florida is unfortunately not. Any argument for democracy must be based on widespread voter enfranchisement, to argue that Florida can not count because they at the state level broke arbitrary rules is disingenuous to the whole democratic experiment. This is a completely infruriating conclusion. In the end, it will come down to, in a framed debate, a matter of allowing votes from neither or both states, and the argument on those terms is over before it started.

Thugs and 'Cuz Written in Urdu.

One of the shining beacons of New Media Journalism is the New York Times. Since their redesign the amount of new offerings in the form of video and specials, like the way they've been handling Campaign '08, are inspiring especially due to the amount of creativity they've been bringing to the table. One of my favorite recent packages is this wildly entertaining video on two rival Urdu language newspapers in Queens. What's most astounding about it however, is its synergy with the print piece. Rather than following the written story closely, the video branches off towards one of the editor's smoking habits, and the other's perfectly encapsulated relationship with his son. The print article adds a bit of color not in the video: the editor's son is a Chomsky quoting upstart who is wary of his father's close, yet troubled, relationship with his rival working in the building just next door. Having a bit of experience in both of these forms, print and video, it's a pretty amazing accomplishment to have one form not directly echo the other, but add to it.

Also, the Times's blogs are completely spectacular. From Nizza's, the Lede focussing on off-beat news (where a recent post covered how a oil platform was evacuated because of a dream), to Errol Morris's Zoom which includes pie-graphs, faked photographs, and dissertation length articles on the problems of photography, it's a wonder that people would read anywhere else on the web (that's a little far but still...). One of the most fascinating discussions you'll see (anywhere on the web), and I'm a little late on the trigger, is this discussion on the Freakonomics blog where an author sat down with a group of actual reformed criminals and watched The Wire to judge the show's accuracy. They call these viewings "Thugs and 'Cuz," 'Cuz' being the author. Over the course of the series you'll find them making great observations over Bunk's guilty conscience and finding fault with Prop Joe's great failing. It's a must read.

Clinton Hill Chill.

JUST SAYIN'!