A bit of near-recent viewing

Observe and Report (Jody Hill 2009) - It will take a second viewing to determine whether this is a minor masterpiece or if surprise just made it seem that way. It’s certainly the worst marketed movie in months - two people walked out of my screening and there surely were plenty more elsewhere. The marketing folk clearly thought they had no choice but to sell the film as an underdog comedy, the type where some goofball kook clashes with authority and chases a disdainful girl before eventually triumphing and discovering that his true love was the other girl who stood by him the whole time. There are hundreds of these and in fact Observe and Report structurally is yet another. The key difference is that writer/director Hill played it closer to reality - for this story to actually occur what would these people have to be like? The answer of course is that they’re mentally unstable or at best self-centered and mean. This is a film with no likable characters and that in itself certainly deserves a hallelujah or two. Not to mention a moment of violence more shocking than any Saw clone. It’s still a bit slapdash and the low budget shows through at times but we could use more abrasive, unsettling films like this.

Star Trek (J.J. Abrams 2009) - Basically a near-perfect Summer Movie which if you flip it also means basically disposable. The updated retooling of a show that was pretty bad to begin with does have its own interest, butressed with most actors referencing their predecessor but not being entirely overwhelmed by them. One oddity is that the original ethnic composition was based on late 60s prominence and politics (or at least a Hollywood hack’s version) but it doesn’t seem quite right today. Would it have been too much trouble to make McCoy Hispanic? Or Chekhov something else entirely. Sulu seems to have been switched from Japanese to Korean or is that just extra-textual. Watching the film, though, you can see the other calculations. Viewers wait for Vulcan to be saved but then it’s not, clearly intended to show that the new franchise isn’t bound by the past but then again the alternate universe talk was a way to avoid seeming too arrogant by claiming to have superceded what went before (not to mention keeping the fanboys happy - or less disgruntled since they generally seem to dislike this). You can see the comic relief coming right on schedule. The only thing that seems too far off is the ludicrously random encounter with future Spock on Hoth (or whatever it’s been retitled for the Trek universe).

The Inglorious Bastards (Enzo Castellari 1978) - I thought maybe this was something I’d seen during the 80s when I was plowing through a lot of Eurotrash videotapes. But apparently not. Basically a variation on The Dirty Dozen it’s surprisingly effective with a fairly tight story and a reasonably imaginative visual sense. Of course it’s also fairly silly at moments with most characters jerking guns around as if they were waterhoses and an overreliance on coincidence but as far as Eurotrash Dirty Dozen ripoffs go you couldn’t ask for much more.

Le Voyage de Ballon Rouge (Hou Hsiao-Hsien 2007) - Hou’s first completely non-Taiwanese film feels like a mistake. It’s still recognizably his work - the decentered narrative, long stretches of real-time, deflected focus on everyday life - but the entire thing is blank. Instead of close attention the film just seems to go on and on without really connecting the two main stories or doing much with the self-reflexive idea of having a student filmmaker as a main character. Maybe it was just some chemical reaction in my brain the night I saw this and a second viewing would place it more in line with his other work (I’d rate City of Sadness as one of the dozen best-ever films). But probably not.

The Heartbreak Kid (Bobby & Peter Farrelly 2007) - How about this for a plot: On his honeymoon a guy decides that maybe he doesn’t really like his new wife after all so he chases another girl before deciding to stalk her across two countries. I suspect the Farrellys thought this was somehow romantic but they’ve ended up creating one of the most brutally misogynist films from Hollywood in years. Rather than helping or even dealing with his wife’s problems, Stiller’s character basically abandons her while his new flame seems to fall into a marriage of convenience, his buddy’s wife is a shrew and everybody else just throws out the invective. Now I can deal with the misogyny in Two and a Half Men because the show does acknowledge that, however unwillingly and superficially. And also because it’s funny which this film definitely is not. About the only person who doesn’t get sunk in this is Michelle Monaghan who brings a kind of unforced naturalness. I haven’t seen the original film but am guessing that Elaine May could never have gone this far wrong (even the overbearing music is a mistake).

Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd 2008) - I now have no eyebrows from gazing unflinchingly into the firey pits of Hell itself. This is surely one of the all-time most effective brain-deadening, eye-lacerating, puppy-killing movies, something that can’t even be called a botch because the original idea of a musical based on Abba songs was so inhuman that a sympathetic translation would have made little difference. Then again the producers were pegging this on a nobody named Amanda Seyfried in the lead despite no discernable talent or screen presence. A sock puppet would have been more effective. Director Lloyd also clearly never saw a musical before, using awkward cutting for dance sequences and having little idea how to meld music and spoken story (which considering that these songs have nothing to do with any story would have been a challenge for anybody). There is one moment that shows what might have been - when Brosnan starts singing “S.O.S.” the friction created by a non-singer attempting the song fits the mood perfectly and while I wouldn’t expect an entire musical to be cast with such actors it wouldn’t hurt for somebody somewhere to have realized that musicals and operas have never been about pretty tunes, at least not the good ones.

The Gap

Well, I never planned to blog regularly if only for the simple reason that I can't do anything regularly that's not biologically required or socially enforced (like a job). But some unexpected major changes at work ate up a lot of time and then almost a month of dealing with Earthlink tech support killed more. Basically I got a new ADSL2+ connection and immediately had problems with it. I talked to 11 (count 'em 11) tech support people, only two of which even had any idea what they were doing. Unfortunately this is not an exaggeration - one of them flat-out lied to me that the network was down even while I was actually connected to it while another realized he couldn't solve my problem and simply told me to call back the next day. Even one of the people who knew what he was doing came up with the wrong answer though I had evidence it was wrong. In the end the problem was a defective modem which that knowledgeable person insisted was completely impossible and which I told every single one of them I suspected was the problem. It's scary how bad these people were, how bad they all consistently were. On the other hand, now that it's working (now that I got it to work) the new connection is pretty sweet.

John Heartfield

Here's a small gallery of work by Heartfield who left a huge though often subterranean influence on leftist graphics. Much of this is still quite striking and unusual for much topical commentary is still quite understandable. (Just grab some editorial cartoons from a few years back to see how quickly this stuff can date.) There was a really amazing catalog from a MOMA exhibit in the early 90s that showed a lot of Heartfield's other work such as posters and dust jackets.

PR Meets Journalism

Ohio State issued a press release titled "Study Finds Link Between Facebook Use, Lower Grades in College" with this first sentence, actually entire first paragraph:

College students who use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages than students who have not signed up for the social networking website, according to a pilot study at one university.

A bit later The Times had an article called "Facebook fans do worse in exams:
Research finds the website is damaging students’ academic performance" that opens:

FACEBOOK users may feel socially successful in cyberspace but they are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research into the academic impact of the social networking website.

Then about three weeks later the Columbia Journalism Review printed a piece by Earle Holland (Ohio State's asst VP for research communications) that responded to The Times with "Sadly, the research showed no such thing." His whole point is "how badly most of the conventional news media would muck up the story in the process."

Holland didn't write the original press release but in the CJR he's come up with a remarkable bit of spin that's very nearly outright lying. Almost certainly the controversy prompted him to come up with this elaborate excuse that it really wasn't their fault, it was those no-good, poorly educated journalists. Sure he's right that the journalists shouldn't have made such blanket claims but their sin isn't lack of effort (well not entirely) but having taken the press release at face value. If the research showed no such thing for The Times claim then that's just as true for the press release because they're saying basically the same thing. Sure they aren't saying exactly the same thing but this shouldn't have to be the work of New Critics. (And I'm betting far more journalists understand the difference between causation and correlation than Holland thinks - which after all aren't terms as "technical" as he claims.) The points he claims the journalists should really have paid attention to are buried and diffused down in the release and as for the PR people (yeah yeah "research communications") being "very careful to narrowly report the findings" well obviously not careful enough. (This is avoiding the entire question of the value of the original research which even in the press release seems pretty dubious.)

The best you can say is that the original press release was badly written but it seems more likely that it's just an example of deception, however unintentional, to get attention. That some journalists get it wrong is not news - you don't even have to think "history's first draft" to know that we expect journalism to have errors; that's part of its nature. Similarly we don't expect PR folk to be forthright and sober and completely accurate; that's not in their nature either. Far from being a collapse of journalist process this incident is more a culture clash.

Others bite the dust

Two more books I didn't finish:

I was actually looking for Nugent's American Nerd but it was checked out. The shelf did have David Anderegg's Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them (2007) which I flipped through and figured it might be an OK substitute. Then while standing in the aisle I noticed on the cover after the author's name is "PhD" which can't be a good sign. (In fact in the book he constantly reminds us of his degree and his clinical practice - an unappealing mix of insecurity and marketing aggression.) The jacket bio lists as one of his main accomplishments that "he has been quoted as an expert" by several magazines. Again this should have been setting off screaming Spidey-sense. As you might expect Anderegg writes in a glib, soundbite style that tries to be light but also serious - the kind of thing that tosses off flat jokes and then unleashes supposedly dire statistics and studies.

The book isn't really about nerds or geeks. Anderegg says he wants to see how "kids" learn the stereotype so that it can be combated. The best I can determine is that he thinks America's low rankings in math and hard science education is because those subjects have been determined to be the domain of the nerd/geek, people view nerds/geeks in a negative way and therefore few kids study math & science. Maybe he makes a more convincing argument later in the book but I doubt it. He's a bit unclear about all these "kids" he works with. What ages and what does he do? In general usage "kids" seems to encompass anything from about a one-year-old up to early 20s (at the college where I work the employees frequently call the students kids). Anderegg also uncritically assumes that a stereotype is a negative thing - perhaps not dead wrong but most people pushing a change also are pushing stereotypes, just ones that they consider positive.

A bit more substantial is John Thorne's Serious Pig: An American Cook in Search of His Roots (1996). Thorne is generally considered to be one of the country's best food writers and indeed based on this he's not a bad writer. It's just that what he's writing about is not only not what I expected but not anything worth my effort; others obviously feel differently. The book is a collection of essays where he discusses a dish or other food topic and then a recipe or way to prepare it. So far so good except that it opens with a long (loooong) bit about houses where he's lived or visited and other parts go into detail about his Maine neighbors, Maine habits, Maine architecture, Maine highways. This is so far from anything remotely interesting to me that I'd literally rather read the dictionary.

Even the food parts tend to be overkill. For one thing Thorne is that type of person who's pushed connoisseurship to an irritating extreme - one of the first pieces goes into detail about numerous types of potatoes, where he found them and then concludes with four-page description of how to fry them. Now I'm geeky enough that in theory this should be worthwhile but really it ends up as just a list of useless variety names and gosh nobody at all cares what farm he buys his potatoes. And four pages on frying isn't an triumph of detailed writing but simply a failure to understand what's important.

Or for instance his stance on barbeque is all detail about the meat being the most important part, not the sauce, but as with so much else Thorne comes dangerously close to preaching the One True Way. He's not completely wrong but it's a kind of arrogance typical of many foodies who claim to have found the real path and that certain types of food shouldn't be done certain ways. But to paraphrase the Duke, "If it tastes good, it is good."

Some comics links

* Dateline: Silver Age is a blog of nothing but enlarged images showing newspaper headlines from SA comics. Isn't the Internet wonderful?

* Similarly, Quotes On Comics is self-explanatory (and addictive).

* A blog post about new MLA rules for citing graphics.

* Why the NYT bestseller list for graphic novels doesn't really work. (Short version: difference between book trade and direct market.)

* Roasted Peanuts is Peanuts strips with analysis - and more interesting than that sounds.

* Good interview with Alan Moore on the forthcoming LOEG. But then isn't Moore one of those people who always does a good interview?

* GQ of all places has a top-notch list of the "20 Graphic Novels You Should Read (After Watchmen)" (though I can't help but wonder if there's something in Fun Home that might have frightened them off). Too bad it's in that almost unreadable slideshow format that too many websites use - can't we just get the list without having to click click click?

* And Judge Dredd goes to the prom!

Forgotten fiction Pulitzers

NPR recently posted "Our Unscientific List Of Least-Known Fiction Winners" for the Pulitzer and it's a solidly least-known selection. I've only even heard of two - Cozzens' Guard of Honor (which I own but haven't read) and Guthrie's The Way West (have a copy of his The Big Sky). Of the rest there are only five authors with names recognizable to me. (Cozzens of course was the recipient of Dwight Macdonald's withering essay that almost completely demolished his reputation - more effectively than Twain's famous attack on Cooper did. Some have argued recently that Macdonald was working more from political than aesthetic motives, not quite addressing whether that matters.)

It certainly would be a worthwhile project to read all of these, in fact to read all the fiction winners in order. I'm not about to do that but how much of this really does have any kind of lasting value? Or did they benefit from the mood of the times, behind-the-scenes manipulation, locked juries or any of numerous other causes. McCarthy's award for The Road--generally considered one of his weakest works--is often viewed as really being for his career and not that particular work. In the notorious Ellington and Pynchon cases the mechanics of the Pulitzers came straight to the front but most of the time even the names of the jurors tend to be obscured. (If they're on the official Pulitzer site I can't find them.)

Since they're so high profile the Pulitzers are easy to attack but the track record isn't really that bad - maybe not as substantial as the National Book Awards (or adjusting trans-Atlantic-ly the Bookers) but certainly far ahead of such continual embarrassments as the Oscars or Grammies. Some of these forgotten titles likely deserve to be forgotten but I bet it's likely that quite a few of the older ones aren't even available in many public libraries due to their generally aggressive policies of thinning their collection (university libraries tend to take longer views). But hey isn't the Internet going to cure all this?