everybody hates a tourist

Busy morning; no time.

I re-watched the Sci-Fi channel’s Dune miniseries this past week, having forgotten how good it all is. The whole miniseries has a very theatrical feel to it: lighting changes in mid-scene, lush backdrops instead of real environments, very standard camera shots. Baron Harkonnen even ends every scene he’s in with a Shakespearean couplet. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to say what the upcoming Peter Berg adaptation will bring to the table, except a better budget and, probably, worse actors.

I love the new apartment dearly, for everyone who asks. It feels like a perpetual beach vacation. The apartment has roughly the quality of one of those pre-fab beach condos. The weather’s been warm enough to keep the windows open and walk barefoot on the carpet. Davis Square feels like a landlocked Ocean City, MD - chintzy craft stores, a variety of restaurants and pubs, everything within walking distance, etc. Plus, the sheer joy of living by myself has made the last month - it’s only been a month! - feel like a vacation.

The other day I discovered a few ants in the apartment. Not a lot, only six or seven maybe. They clustered around a scrap of food that had slipped off the table from the night before. I wiped it up with one of those Chlorox disinfecting wipes (to kill the ants and the smell all at once). I suppose I should be concerned but I can’t quite manage. If ants have to exist anywhere in my apartment, I would rather find them somewhere they should be (on the floor near food) then somewhere they shouldn’t (in the cupboards, in my pillowcase, pouring out of the shower, etc).

Packed weekend; updates later.

let’s go out to the movies

Inspired by The Onion AVClub, I have a Friday game for you: make a list of your favorite movies, one for each year that you’ve been alive, and post it in your own journal / weblog / site.

Mine:

1981: Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982: Conan the Barbarian
1983: Return of the Jedi
1984: Ghost Busters
1985: Fletch
1986: Hoosiers
1987: Full Metal Jacket
1988: Die Hard
1989: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
1990: Miller’s Crossing
1991: Terminator 2: Judgment Day
1992: Unforgiven
1993: The Fugitive
1994: Shawshank Redemption
1995: Heat
1996: The Long Kiss Goodnight
1997: L.A. Confidential
1998: Out of Sight
1999: Fight Club
2000: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
2001: Ocean’s Eleven
2002: The Bourne Identity
2003: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
2004: Collateral
2005: Syriana
2006: The Departed
2007: No Country for Old Men
2008: Iron Man

I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death

You can find this media blow in a numbered Zurich account.

The Final Cut: the third installment of the House of Cards trilogy and an excellent farewell to the series. You never really watch the show for amazing sophistication, so much as to marvel at the utter depravity of everyone involved. Ian Richardson as a gloating, Shakespearean villain trumps most actors’ attempts at being subtle. A couple observations:

• Not one, but two Indiana Jones villains! If M. Witty can ID them without resorting to IMDb I’ll reward him in the (costless) manner of his choosing. Or anyone else, but I think he’s my only reader who’s seen all three.

• Did somebody send a memo to the writers and say, “Nice work, but Season 3 definitely needs more tits and gunplay. Like, a lot”? Because I don’t see how else this happened. And you know those slicksters at WGBH just can’t get enough tits and gunplay.

Illmatic: This one, I think, will end up overtaking me like The Wire. At first I couldn’t see anything special about The Wire, until I realized that each show was technically perfect and exceptionally real. Similarly, I don’t know yet if Illmatic merits five mics, but I Can’t. Stop. Listening.

The Ministry of Fear: The last of Graham Greene’s three “entertainments” that I bought a few months back. I liked it just as much as I liked the others so I have nothing more to add except: buy these books and read them! And: Greene writes an awful lot in this novel about “rumpled bachelors” living in “furnished flats,” which made me feel a bit self-conscious at first. Then I decided to own up to the title. I am a rumpled bachelor! And yes, I do live in a furnished flat! What of it?

The Searchers: Being a stranger to the distant year of 1956, I can’t tell how much of John Wayne’s virulent hatred of the Comanche Indians stems from his character’s racism, and how much from the movie’s racism. Yes, the movie establishes that Ethan Edwards, unrepentant Confederate veteran and wanted coach robber, might have some internal issues. Consider his tendency to shoot out the eyes of dead Indians - not because he thinks it’ll prevent them from navigating the spirit world, but because he knows they think it will. At the same time, it’s John Wayne. He’s the big-shouldered hero. No one can make Wayne so despicable that an audience of men won’t want to emulate him, except perhaps Howard Hughes.

Interpreting the movie with some charity - the Comanche, though not savage subhumans, certainly did raid and rob lone settlers, and any film set in the West between 1830 and 1910 needs some villains - I find The Searchers pretty exceptional. Any student of film or aspiring director needs to memorize John Ford’s cinematography in this project, for one thing. The door silhouette onto Monument Valley? Yeah, that’s Ford right there. And the movie’s not just about the epic quest of two men to recover a kidnapped girl - it’s about, to quote Ebert, how it’s about it. Don’t know if I’d call it the best Western of all time, but it’ll do until the ruckus come along.

Finally, as several sources have noted, author Thomas Disch committed suicide this past 4th of July. I reread his savage satire Camp Concentration this week (funny how novels set in prison camps seem to speak to the modern audience!) and loved it. Dissidents and prisoners in an alternate future get dosed with a derivative of the syphilis spirochete, which dramatically expands their intelligence at the cost of killing them in nine months. Between the mad genius of the infected prisoners and the bland, Kafkaesque bureaucracy of their captors, the story weaves a poetic nightmare of a mind, and a society, slipping into oblivion.

the coldest blood runs through my veins; you know my name

I am an absolute, unapologetic sucker for revenge films.

Friends have heard me defend The Patriot, which is not a good movie at all. But come on! Mel Gibson looks up from the cooling corpse of his next-oldest son, grabs a handful of rifles from his burning house, and recruits his next two oldest sons to sprint through the woods and ambush the British! He charges out of the woods screaming with a hatchet! And all for revenge!

I liked Man on Fire, even in spite of Tony Scott’s camera antics. Sure, everyone in the film had two settings - histrionic or cold. Sure, the pacing left something to be desired. But come on! Denzel Washington loses his client’s daughter in a firefight. So after getting enough blood back in his body to stumble out of bed, what does he vow?

“I’m gonna kill ‘em. Anyone that was involved. Anybody who profited from it. Anybody who opens their eyes at me.”

And I got similarly excited about Taken, a movie so apparently mediocre that it’ll never get a domestic release (it opened in France in February of this year). The few critics who saw it described it as “paint by numbers.” It looks pretty formulaic (note that none of the protagonists have a last name).

But come on! Tell me you wouldn’t want to growl this into a live telephone:

Jack Bauer. Batman. Inigo Montoya. Jason Bourne. Dirty Harry. People who get beat down, lose the ones they love, and then come back in a blaze of indignation. Why does that speak to me? Why do I get such a primal, unavoidable kick out of that?

I think it speaks to that fundamental animal rage which all of us - who share more than 95% of our DNA with animals - carry. The “laugh in triumph over a defeated foe” that Orwell talks about: the brutal, pre-rational appeal of nationalism. We want to kill, and we want our killing to be sanctioned by a moral code. He hurt my family, therefore it’s okay if I cut off his fingers. He killed my wife, so it’s all right if I slaughter everyone he knows and burn his house to the ground. No impartial jury or outside observer would think that’s a proportional or fair response - but come on! I’m the Good Guy, so my savagery makes me driven. They’re the Bad Guys; their savagery makes them subhuman.

But ultimately, in stories like that, the tissue-thin distinction between Good Guys and Bad Guys suggests more than it divides. We don’t cheer the Good Guy because he did the right thing by stabbing the Bad Guy in the top of the skull. We cheer the Good Guy because he totally fucking killed that dude! Did you see that? We identify with him because he has his reasons - they took my job, they hurt my family, whatever - but that’s secondary^*. The chaotic, reptilian roar of victory after bashing someone’s neck seals the deal.

So my love of revenge arises from evolved instincts. I think that’s okay. I recognize and acknowledge it. Indulging in fantasy never hurt anyone, provided you keep it private. It’s the difference between GTA 3 and Columbine. It’s the difference between watching a Briana Banks movie and actually trying to fuck the babysitter. So long as I never take a drunken swing at a bouncer for wrongs real or imagined, I think I’ll be fine.

We all have instincts that we did not choose making decisions for us. I try to stay informed about mine.

^* Think about it: if maiming in pursuit of revenge makes him noble, wouldn’t taking the extra effort to keep his family safe in the first place be really noble?

you don’t know me, you just love me

Why do people (I include myself here, for once) get so excited when hearing that their favorite book will be made into a movie?

Without drowning you in theory I barely understand myself: different forms of media come bundled with different expectations, both by the creator and the audience. A painting stands as a single frame and its contents; everything you want to say, you have to say there. A sculpture needs to be accessible from all viewable angles: you can’t just do the front portion and call it a day (or rather, if you do, you need to do so for good reasons). Commercial television shows fit a formula, a formula so ingrained and automatic that we the viewing public would feel vaguely unsettled if a show departed from it.

You would not expect a painting to pull off the same three-beat structure of Introduce Tension, Heighten Tension, Resolve Tension that a TV sitcom does - at least not without doing some multi-panel Roy Lichtenstein homage, and even then the painting would be more about this smuggling of forms than its actual content. You would not expect a TV show to stand up to the rigorous scrutiny that we can apply to a statue on a pedestal - despite the efforts of the Internet (9 pages on a half hour sitcom, people! vying with the episode’s actual script in word count).

So it goes with books and movies. I could do a line-by-line comparison of the difference between books and movies (and I did, in the first draft of this post). Really, though, it boils down to one key distinction: the audience controls the book; the author controls the movie.

When you’re reading a book, you can slow down or speed up the pace of reading as you desire. If you reach a particularly intense or scary portion, you can set the book aside for a while and regain your bearings. You can blitz through long expository paragraphs in search of the next chunk of dialogue (a habit of mine), or you can immerse yourself in description and detail. All the imagery must come from your own head, even if the page gives birth to it: if you have your own notions of what a “clanging din” or “breasts like champagne glasses” should be, the author cannot change them. To quote Fight Club without irony, you decide your own level of involvement.

None of that holds true for a movie. You can start and stop a movie if you’ve rented it at home, but that’s not how the director means you to view it and I think we all understand that. No one can mistake the person on screen for anything other than who she is: you might not buy Scarlett Johansson as an ambitious journalism student, but you can’t argue that she’s not Scarlett Johansson. The director can force your perspective in one direction with the camera; he can direct your mood with lighting and soundtrack. The movie dictates your experience of it, not the other way around.

(Neither of these work as absolutes. The book’s author, obviously, has some say in whether you think the protagonist is a blonde or a redhead. A bad director can not only fail to steer the audience; he can actually repel their efforts to engage. Still, we approach the media in these specific ways, and they work for us)

So: a book does one thing, a movie does another. Isn’t a project to turn one into the other innately weird? If I told you I wanted to adapt the “Mona Lisa” as a dance recital, where could I expect to exhibit it - other than maybe an art school mid-term recital, where such experiments thrive? We think that books and movies can naturally flow into each other because they both involve narratives. But paintings and sculptures both involve visual imagery. Dance and architecture both involve the choreography of light and space. I’m turning “Swan Lake” into an office building atrium; you’re invited to the opening.

When a book-to-movie adaptation works - The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, Jurassic Park, A Clockwork Orange, The Shawshank Redemption, Trainspotting - 99.9996% of the time it comes from one reason: nobody’s read the book. Nobody in the theater audience has a preconceived notion of what the world should look like. In the era of mass culture, I don’t have a hard time believing this. I don’t even really have a problem with it. Sure, functional adult illiteracy makes almost everything it touches worse - but not movies. A book does one thing; a movie another.

he was turned to steel in the great magnetic field

This week’s media blow incorporates the latest in Stark repulsor technology.

Iron Man: Dude. Iron Man. Dude. Iron Man.

Dude.

Jon Favreau directed perhaps the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen (short of The Incredibles). I suspect he pulled this off because he made a priority of making a good movie first, and a superhero movie second. Favreau wandered through the same minefield that every superhero movie does but emerged unscathed. Let’s take a look:

Tedious Origin Story: Robert Downey Jr, as playboy millionaire Tony Stark, spends the first half of the movie inventing his suit, testing its powers and reveling in his new identity. Why does this work, when it failed for other movies? Because Tony Stark makes Iron Man. He didn’t wake up one morning with super-strength and wall-stickiness. He didn’t get struck by lightning after being dosed by chemicals. The process of experimentation and forging invests us more than following the blithe adventures of a lucky idiot.

Wacky Villains: When you adapt a comic book to the big screen, you realize that guys in blue tights or villains in green and yellow costumes look ridiculous in the real world. Seriously. They look like cartoons. No one would take them seriously. Favreau avoids this by retaining the same names and general ideas, but completely revamping them for a modern story. I won’t spoil the connections for comic book purists - just pay close attention to what people say.

I … Will Avenge … You: As fun as Spider-Man was, I had a hard time with a movie where everyone took everything they said so seriously. Tobey Maguire couldn’t tell someone he needed milk from the store without a wistful look in his eyes and stern resolution in his jawline. But Downey, Terence Howard and Jeff Bridges talk just like regular people talk. They talk over each other, sometimes. They throw off-hand remarks. They’re regular people who just happen to have access to incredible weaponry.

Well, My Work Here Is Done: I never realized how weak the traditional superhero origin story sounded until walking out of Iron Man. Okay, I have super powers. I’m going to put on a costume to avenge my parents’ / family’s / neighbor’s death. Having finished that, rather than return to a normal life, I’ll keep doing this, going after lower and lower stakes until I die or get tired of it. Stark’s purpose in becoming Iron Man doesn’t stop after the first film’s villain buys it, though. He has a clear goal in mind: ridding the world of the weaponry his company created. That goal may expand (it’ll probably have to, to keep the franchise going), but at least he starts with a logical reason for superheroics.

Flip the Script: In addition to surviving and improving on all the standard superhero movie tropes, Iron Man flips several on its head. These will not only entertain your average comic book fan, but will keep the casual moviegoer from rolling their eyes at the awkward suspension of disbelief.

I recommend this film without qualification.

I may discuss some spoilers in the comments, so tread with care.

I’m taking the cure so I can be quiet whenever I want

You might think that; the media blow couldn’t possibly comment.

The Wire: … ha ha, just kidding, see all last week.

Franny and Zooey: Remarkably well written. I don’t care much for Salinger’s brand of inoffensive, Western-flavored Orientalism, but I can’t help but admire his style. Another exhibit in my case that a story’s subject matters far less than its style; “what’s the book about?” is the wrong question to ask. Could any writer other than Salinger pull off a story which takes place in a bathroom, a living room, and a bedroom and has nothing but conversation?

A History of Violence: A little stiff, but what do you expect from a movie adapted from a comic book? William Hurt got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his spot here, with good cause I feel. Maria Bello surprised me. Viggo Mortensen gave the natural and nuanced performance we’ve come to expect from him, as well as a glimpse of his junk. A bit gory in spots.

Mind Performance Hacks: An early contender for the best non-fiction book I’ve read in this year’s fifty. Born-agains must feel this way while reading the Bible, though I know I could pick a better metaphor: this book is an instruction manual for thinking. It teaches better ways to memorize lists, to organize your thoughts, ways to get better sleep, how to focus through meditation (not transcendental hippie shit, just clearing your thoughts), how to inspire yourself creatively, etc. I’ve already found four or five things worth putting to immediate use and will be turning back often for more.

House of Cards: The premier story of political intrigue, brooking no challenger. The late Ian Richardson plays Francis Urquhart, chief whip of the Conservatives in the days after Thatcher stepped down. Passed over for a plum promotion, he stealthily puts into motion a series of events that will unseat the Prime Minister, shake up the Party, and may just leave him a spot at the top. I’ve already seen it once before, but I got it for myself as a birthday present and it continues to sweeten on a second viewing.

you can find me in the club

Today being my actual birthday, I’ll recap the birthday celebration:

#: I caught up with Christine and surprise guests Meghan and Sam by getting to Common Ground early. Not early enough to avoid a cover, unfortunately. They’ve also switched to using bracelets instead of stamps, but the bar was already pretty packed with people who weren’t wearing bracelets. So I chucked mine soonest. I have hairy wrists.

#: I should have learned by now not to try listing attendees, as I inevitably forget someone and hurt their feelings. But: Joanna, Tim, Sylvia, Dan, Stephanie, Matthew, and Katie - thank you for coming out for my birthday.

#: Melissa and Fraley asked me to officiate their wedding! I accepted.

#: Someone stole my green thrift store coat at some point between 10:00 and 2:00. Stephanie used her pull with the staff to ask them to search, but with no luck. Apparently mine was the last of four coats to be taken in the evening. I love Common Ground, and I dearly love 90s Night, but this might be my last time there until the weather warms up.

#: So my first birthday present to myself - a green thrift store coat! I bought it at the same secondhand store in Allston as the last one, also for $20. It has a slightly warmer liner but feels a bit lighter.

#: Other birthday presents: Bridge of Birds, the House of Cards trilogy, Mind Performance Hacks, a sword stand for my recently acquired sword, and a big stack of graphic novels. Expect a digest on the lattermost with your next media blow.

#: I saw a bunch of two-person improv shows at IB on Sunday night. They ranged from the fantastic (Flynn/Maclean, Reynolds/French) to the mediocre (two BU alumni who just, I don’t know, god). Improv is tricky, and the two-person show is a tricky format.

#: I’m now in my late twenties.

and I never let the mic magnetize me no more

First: c/o IMDb:

Jackie Chan and Jet Li team up together for the first time ever in The Forbidden Kingdom, filmed on location in China and featuring the martial arts choreography of Woo-Ping Yuen (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). While hunting down bootleg kung-fu DVDs in a Chinatown pawnshop, Jason Tripitikas (Michael Angarano) makes a discovery that sends him back in time to ancient China, where he’s charged with finding the Monkey King, a fabled warrior imprisoned by the powerful Jade War Lord. With the help of kung fu master Lu Yan (Jackie Chan) and a band of misfit warriors including Silent Monk (Jet Li), Jason embarks on his journey, hoping to succeed in his quest and find a way to get back home. [emphasis mine]

Why couldn’t this have been the best movie of all time, instead of the worst? God damn it.

Also: I’m considering buying a video camera. I spotted a Panasonic PV-GS320 in Best Buy the other day for about $350 and I’m leaning toward that one. The price is right for a 3-CCD camera. The obvious downside is that it lacks a mic input.

I can also get a Canon ZR800 for about half that price, which does come with a mic input. However, it’s only got about 0.68 megapixels of image quality.

I’d like some advice from you pros before I drop the money. My criteria are:

REQUIRED: Firewire input, Mini-DV, does not contain the word “Sony”
PREFERRED: 3-CCD, mic input
BONUS: Good low-light, good battery life

And then: I’m going to buy both part of a tailgate parking spot and some BC football season tickets this year. Let’s go Eagles.

I’ll take on any man here that says that’s not the way it should be

The clauses in this media blow expire in twenty-four hours; take it or leave it.

Michael Clayton: What separates this film from others in the legal thriller genre - and a crowded little genre it’s become - is the focus on characters. You have to be broken in some fundamental way to devote sixty hours a week for five years at a time to a single court case. Tilda Swinton plays a tightly wound corporate attorney who rehearses not only her statements but her pauses and nervous laughter before she speaks to anyone. Tom Wilkinson plays a manic-depressive attorney who flips out during a videotaped deposition. And George Clooney plays the compulsive gambler, the firm’s in-house “fixer,” who’s sent to bring Wilkinson in.

Clooney doesn’t play a lot of low status characters - this one, and maybe his put-upon role in Syriana, are the only two I can think of. He doesn’t break into full-on alpha male mode until the very last scene, and then it’s like a breath of fresh air. Until that time he’s a beleaguered, confused man in his late 40s, swallowing his pride and dealing with petty insults and business swindles from everyone around him. It’s one of his best roles.

The plot itself is nothing to write home about, but the editing and the acting carry this one home.

The Color of Magic: Cute, I guess. I don’t feel compelled to go out and pick up any of the other books in the series, though I don’t suppose I’d pass them up if they tumbled into my lap. Aside from a few original ideas (the color octarine, the notion of dragons as solid figments, etc), there’s nothing here you couldn’t pick up by playing Dungeons and Dragons with some particularly silly people for a few years.