Longer Carlin Post

Because I live in Seattle, I got an extra treat the last couple of times George Carlin came to town. Seattle was either the first stop or one of the earliest stops on Carlin's last two tours, and, because he always showed up with new material, I was among those who heard it first. He'd come out to great applause, place a notebook or a stack of cards on a stool or tabletop, and tell us that, because he was still shaping and refining his material, he'd be referring to these notes throughout the show. I loved the idea that I was, in a small way, a part of his revision process, and that the work he was doing here would eventually shape his performance in an HBO special nine months or a year down the road. When I watched his last HBO special, I thought back to his performance at Seattle Center and, in between laughs, took note of the differences--what he left in, what he cut, where he changed cadence, where he added or subtracted pauses or looks. Yeah, I can forget my wallet or my keys any day, but I've a great memory for voices, and Carlin's was one of my favorites.

What amazed me most about him was his ability to stay fresh as he aged. Most comedians last, if they're lucky, five or ten years before their acts go stale and force them into talk-show hosting or some other menial occupation. But Carlin kept going. From middle-class observational comic to hippy to cantankerous old man, he both changed with the times and remained himself. It's an almost impossible feat, but he pulled it off. His material ranged over a universe of topics. Pick a subject. Carlin had something to say about it, and it was smarter and funnier than anything you'd say about it. His Tacoma show ten years ago (or so) made me laugh so hard that my ribs ached for a week, and kept me thinking long after the ache subsided.

Losing him hurts. He was something to look forward to on a planet that sorely lacks things to look forward to. I'm glad I got to see him as often as I did, but I'm a greedy person. I never got enough, and I guess I never will.

Goodbye George

Sadly, not Bush; Carlin.



Yes, George, something is fucked up. You're not here anymore. I'll miss you.

Dave Allen Talks Religion

One of my favorite comedians, Dave Allen, on growing up Irish Catholic:

Tut-Tutting As the First Refuge of A Scoundrel

Michael Gerson, Washington Post columnist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wags his finger at Al Franken for his satirical piece in Playboy:

In the razor-close and nationally important Senate race in Minnesota, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman is presented with a unique political problem. Should he raise in his ads the issue of comedian Al Franken's offensive vulgarity? Or would this risk a backlash against Coleman for coarsening the public conversation? Remember that when Ken Starr detailed Bill Clinton's most repulsive antics -- stained dresses and such -- it was Starr who was accused of sexual obsessiveness.

Franken's defenders explain that his edginess is the result of being a "satirist" -- a term he embraces. "My work, dare I say, is provocative, touching and funny," Franken has explained. "It sounds immodest, but I now have a brand name in political satire."

Satire has been called "punishment for those who deserve it." Writers from Erasmus to Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have used humor, irony and ridicule to expose the follies of the powerful, the failures of blind ideology and the comic weakness of human nature itself.

So what is Franken's "provocative, touching and funny" contribution to the genre? Consider his article in Playboy magazine titled "Porn-O-Rama!" in which he enthuses that it is an "exciting time for pornographers and for us, the consumers of pornography." The Internet, he explains, is a "terrific learning tool. For example, a couple of years ago, when he was 12, my son used the Internet for a sixth-grade report on bestiality. Joe was able to download some effective visual aids, which the other students in his class just loved." Franken goes on to relate a soft-core fantasy about women providing him with sex who were trained at the "Minnesota Institute of Titology."

Well, I've always felt that since most of us have done the "repulsive act" that results in stained dresses, or sheets, or other household fabrics (Billy Mays is ready to start shouting about a new cleaning solution, isn't he?), the vulgarity does lie with the blue-nosed twirp who insists on invading our private lives, parading the stained fabric before the public, and harping on it for months on end. But let that pass.

The clip Gerson quotes from the Franken piece doesn't strike me as the most original comic idea in the world. Still, it does offer an amusing take on the way we hype the internet as a learning tool even as we use it, mostly, to polish our tools. Does it fail to live up to the dignity we expect from members of the U.S. Senate? I dunno. Considering that Dick Cheney, current president of the senate, once invited a senior member of the senate to violate himself in a highly impractical fashion, I'd say it actually rises one or two notches above the apparently acceptable standard. At least Franken was kidding.

Is Gerson finished? Nope:

Our popular culture, of course, violates even these expansive boundaries of tastelessness with regularity. We laugh at comedies featuring the C-word and at cartoons of foul-mouthed third-graders. In the cause of relevance and realism, our common life is already decorated with excrement. Why should political discourse be any different?

For at least one reason: Because vulgarity is often the opposite of civility. This is not, of course, always true. I know a brilliant and large-hearted academic with roots in south Philly who uses the F-word with the frequency of "like" or "and." But the vulgarity of "The Jerry Springer Show" or misogynous rap music -- the cultural equivalents of Franken's political "satire" -- generally expresses contempt and cruelty. Franken is not content to disagree with Karl Rove; he calls him "human filth." He is not satisfied to criticize Ari Fleischer; Franken terms him a "chimp." The objects of Franken's humor -- including political opponents and women -- are not merely mocked but dehumanized. His trashiness is also nastiness. Rather than lampooning the emptiness and viciousness of our political discourse -- a proper role for satire -- Franken has powerfully reinforced those failures.

Hmm...I'm not sure that someone who looks down his nose at people who get a laugh out of South Park, one of the cleverest satirical shows of the last twenty years, should be in the business of determining the "proper role for satire". As for Franken's calling Rove "human filth", I think that when speaking of a man who has gleefully accused opponents of child molestation without evidence, who has used push polling to intimate that Ann Richards's staff was dominated by lesbians or that John McCain had a black child, and who has helped build the most corrupt and criminal presidential administration in history, calling that man "human filth" is actually a bit tame.

I'm suspicious of people who call for civility in public discourse because the Bush administration used those calls as a euphemism to cover their true wish: "Let's stop arguing so that I can do whatever the hell I want." Underneath all the Gersonian tut-tutting was the Dick Cheney "go fuck yourself".

If civility is your bag, the courts of renaissance princes were truly wonderful places. There was a lot of calumny and murder, of course. But the slander was always elegantly whispered, and the daggers were always polished. I prefer my politics straight and down-home. That means more open fights and naughty words, but it also means that the peaces are more genuine, and the compromises are more inclusive. When I see M.P.s in the British Parliament yelling at each other during question time, or the House of Commons slamming the door in the Queen's face every year, I say, "There's a country that's all right."

Do You Ever Feel Like Crying But You Don't Know Why?

I know why. You must have sensed it, this ineffable, dark presence that looms over all our lives, suffocating our hopes, strangling our dreams, sapping our collective will to live and think and do. A presence so terrifying that none but the boldest of us dare whisper its name.

Yet I'll whisper it.

Come closer.

Closer.

Okay, Casanova, back off a little.

Here it is.

They're bringing the Smurfs to the big screen.

Last one to leave civilization, turn out the lights.

The Eternal Question

Now that Indiana is under water, we return to that age-old question. Which is worse, George W. Bush doing something, or George W. Bush doing nothing?

The Ten Films I've Seen Most Often

10. For Your Eyes Only (1981) Roger Moore, Carole Bouquet, Topol. Until I was twelve years old, I wasn't aware that anyone other than Roger Moore had played James Bond. This was one of the first Bonds I remember seeing in the theatre, and it's the one I watched most often on cable or video. Though in later years I found other Bond pictures I've liked better, this was for a long time my favorite, and it's still in my top five. The ski stunts alone are worth the price of admission, and watching Bond have to elude his would-be murderers in the world's wimpiest Peugeot cinches it for me.

9. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 1964 Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden: "You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" This is one of my favorite pictures to quote, and of all of Stanley Kubrick's films--and I love them all--this is the one that most often finds its way into my DVD player. In this picture he gives Peter Sellers a workout that would have killed just about any other actor, and I love every minute of it.

8. Superman: The Movie and Superman II Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Terrance Stamp, Gene Hackman. I find it easier to consider these films as a unit. For some people, Sean Connery will always be James Bond. For me, Christopher Reeve will always be Superman, and all others will be pretenders to the throne (yes, Brandon Routh, I'm looking at you). Reeve managed to find ways to be compelling and charismatic as both Clark Kent and Superman, and, in the sequel, revealed that, for Superman, the wish-fulfillment fantasy is to be Clark Kent--though he sours on the reality of being Clark Kent awfully fast. It's amazing how much the Superman character develops in these two pictures, and after that, almost anything would have been a letdown. (Though they didn't have to let us down quite so far or so fast, did they?)

7. Tootsie (1983) Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Bill Murray. Sydney Pollack. There were summers where I'd watch this picture two or three times in a day. I used to know it from memory, and would run through the first scene between Michael Dorsey and his agent, George Fields, in my head while on walks. "YOU WERE A TOMATO! A TOMATO DOESN'T HAVE LOGIC! A TOMATO CAN'T MOVE!" "That's what I said! So how can a tomato sit down, George?" I'd quote it as well. "I don't believe in hell. I believe in unemployment, but I don't believe in hell." I loved the writing. I loved Hoffman in a dress. I loved Bill Murray's entire role. Goddamn it, I love it all!

6. Wargames (1983) Matthew Brodderick, Ally Sheedy, Dabney Coleman. So many of my favorite movies involve Dabney Coleman in some way. (A couple of my favorite TV shows too.) There was never a man so good at being wrong about everything. Coleman raised being wrong to an art in Tootsie, 9 to 5 and this film about a computer that, because it doesn't know the difference between games and real life, tries to destroy the world in order to win a game. Though the film's ideas of what computers can do seems more fanciful now than when the movie was released, its message and its method are still compelling.

5. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, James Earl Jones. The best of the Star Wars pictures, which used to mean more than it does now, Empire boasts character development, witty dialog, outstanding special effects, and the most dramatic lightsaber duel in the series' history. Favorite line: "Hey, your worship. I was only trying to help." "Would you stop calling me that?" "Sure, Leia." Never again was the series that funny.

4. Airplane! (1980) Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Julie Hagerty, Robert Hays. Everybody knows this film by heart, so I won't bother quoting it. It's impossible to explain in a synopsis how funny it is, so I won't bother to summarize. I'll just say that never have I laughed so hard, for so long, at one piece of film. However many times I see it, I can't stop giggling.

3. Goodfellas (1990) Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro. Whenever students ask me how to open a story or an essay, I refer them to one of the first lines of this movie: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." The movie gets right to the point, and it stays on the point, unraveling The Godfather's myths about the mob to reveal how much of it had to do with just getting the best bread in the store and the best table in the club. From Ray Liotta on the front lawn to Joe Pesci's "Funny Guy" scene to, well, everything else, the movie never strikes a false note. Once it starts, I can't stop watching it.

2. Real Genius. (1985) Val Kilmer, Gabe Jarret, William Atherton. I first caught this movie on cable. My mother was watching it, and I, at first, wasn't too impressed. By the middle, however, I was hooked on this story about socially awkward genius's who were trying to prevent a crooked professor from using their laser as a space-based assassination weapon. This was partly because I thought of myself as a socially awkward genius, and partly because I wanted to be Val Kilmer's version of a socially awkward genius. I think I watched this movie roughly seven-trillion times. But I still haven't seen it as much as I've seen...

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Ricardo Montalban. Star Trek movies have never been, and likely can never be, better than this one. Do you hear me, Mr. Abrams? Nicholas Meyer took a Star Trek episode, "Space Seed", that was decent but not brilliant, and turned it into a meditation on revenge and the necessity of accepting loss that I still need to watch every now and then, even though I've committed the film to memory.

So that's it. The final proof that, in spite of my best efforts, I'm trapped in the 1980s. Oh, well, like all the rest, I'm a prisoner of a time. Cover my face.

Sydney Pollack Died

"Life goes on. It always does, until it doesn't."
Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) Eyes Wide Shut

Indiana Jones

I just returned from a late screening of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Is it a fun picture? Yes. Does it have great action sequences? You bet. Is it as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark? Get serious. My reason for feeling that way? I don't want to spoil it, but you'll find a lot of dangling plot threads in this movie, more than I'd expect from a story that's been through as many revisions as this one has.

Still, it's great to see Ford back in the hat. It's great to see Karen Allen anywhere. And it was especially great to see Indiana Jones try to survive a nuclear test. That alone is worth the cost of going to the theater. So go.

It's Up

After a month of sporadic, poorly organized labor, I'm ready to launch the soft, supple, surprisingly limber and sexy website to be known forever as The McCroskey Memorial Internet Playhouse. It's the new portal for all my past and future audio projects, including Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and Christian Science. Bookmark it, link to it, stick out your tongue and lick its shiny boots, marry it and move to the kinds of suburbs populated by upper middle class neurotics who hold key parties and carry on cold, detached affairs (all-in-all, The Ice Storm was a pretty good picture), or, if you're more conventional, click the damn link.

New Stuff

You'll notice if you look in the right column that I have links to feeds for both Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and, the new podcast, Christian Science. I'll soon be able to direct you to a new website, the McCroskey Memorial Internet Playhouse, where you can find all my audio projects in one location.

Ah, my expanding empire!

Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End

Three hours...

Three mindbendingly dull hours...

Three mindbendingly dull hours I'll never get back...

To understand how I feel about Pirates of the Carribean: Blah, Blah, Blah... all you need to know is that a major plot point involves all of the Pirate Lords converging on a place called Shipwreck Island to engage in...A MEETING! A ROUNDTABLE FRIGGING DISCUSSION! They could have booked a fucking Marriott in Singapore or wherever the hell they were, but they go instead to Shipwreck Island, a name which promises, but fails to deliver, actual shipwrecks. (I understand in the first draft of the screenplay of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, Mola Ram holds a thirty-minute seminar in the Temple of Doom--complete with slides and a generous Q&A session--about the votive objects of the Kali Cult and the veracity of heart-removal legends. Impatient, Indiana Jones cracks his bullwhip and asks several pointed questions about Mola Ram's scholarship.) This is the key symptom of POCBBB's mortal disease. There isn't a promise that this movie makes that it doesn't break. Instead of a streamlined, amusing comic adventure starring Johnny Depp as the world's feyest buccaneer, we get nothing but a parade of special effects, rambling psychotic explanations, and battle scenes notable for their lack of actual battle.

In this movie, two huge fleets of warships line up to have a fight that promises to make Trafalgar look like a sculling contest between the Harvard and Princeton alums. Do they do battle? Keira Knightley gives a speech that supposed to be a rousing, St. Crispin's Day/Braveheart style address to the pirate sailors to prepare them for such a battle. But in the end, only two ships fight. They then carry the battle to a third ship--the one carrying the movie's major villain. Does the Major Villain fight back? No! Does he call upon his big ass fleet to help? No! He stands there and lets the two ships blow him off the water. Why? I don't know!

And it's not as if the movie didn't try to explain! The first two hours consist of little besides explanations, endless, painful, impenetrable explanations whose every word added another layer of confusion. The el-cheapo-stinko movie The Cave Dwellers has a famously bad scene in which a boring old guy calls time out on the movie he's in to summarize, for twenty minutes or so, the previous movie in the series. But with the bigger budgets that Jerry Bruckheimer can muster, everybody gets a whack at being the boring old guy. The result is a narrative so convoluted, so unfocused, that for all its supposed intricacy it feels more like a story a four-year-old is making up as he goes along.

If I were religious, I'd want to know just how much penance this movie counts for.

Blowing Way Past the Point

Do I doubt that Salon's Cary Tennis is a friendly, helpful, courteous, kind, shirt-of-your-back sorta-kinda sonofagun? No. But I sometimes wonder why he's paid to give people advice. This letter in Salon struck me. It's from a guy who wants to know how to cope with his disgust at his friend's openness to teaching young earth creationism in a science class (at a Christian school, presumably). Here's a snip of Tennis's response:

As I walked around Stern Grove in San Francisco this morning, I thought of my own early exposure to the science of single-cell organisms, atomic theory and geology. I was given a solid foundation in how the earth was formed, how elements are structured and how life processes occur. What I cherish most about that early exposure to science is that it gave me a coherent story of creation. It started with simple things and proceeded in an orderly and gradual way toward the more complex, revealing, in the end, literally everything under the sun.

What I loved about science was the story it told. It provided a creation myth.

I do not mean to say that science rests on belief, that it is not factual. What I mean to say is that our attachment to science, and our deep need for what it gives us, can cause us to act unscientifically in its defense.

So what would a true scientist do when confronted with this situation? Let's say a true scientist is visiting us from another planet, trying to observe and record significant phenomena so he can better understand what is going on in the universe.

Would a true scientist experience revulsion and nausea at the scenes of our culture that you describe? Would a true scientist observe the teaching of mythology to children and label it child abuse? Would a true scientist refuse friendship with another person because that person engaged in the teaching of these strange and wondrous mythologies to children?

If a true scientist came upon a pre-modern culture living right in Manhattan, would he be revolted and nauseated? Would he claim that in transmitting its mythology to its children this pre-modern culture was committing child abuse?

Why is it that colorful beliefs and mythologies are fascinating in other cultures, but considered pernicious in our own?

To answer Tennis's question, yes I think a scientist from another planet, Mr. Spock, let us say, would be appalled if a science teacher used his class to teach mythology as if it were science. He would come away mystified about why a species that had spent centuries accumulating evidence and testing theories against it to determine how life developed on this planet, and how this planet developed in this universe would decide to toss all of that over the side and teach an ancient fable as if it were confirmed theory. He'd then recommend that we be kept out of the Galactic Federation until we matured as a society (or blew ourselves up, or proved an impediment to the construction of a hyperspace bypass).

I have no objection to teaching the Bible in a literature course, or a course on religion, or even (with some caveats) a course on history or western thought. Only recently, I had to crack open The Book of Revelations to give a student some context for understanding Yeats's "The Second Coming". I was careful to explain that I wasn't proselytizing--when my student asked me about my religion, I told him I was an atheist. I went on to explain that, whether he chose to believe in some, all, or none of the Bible's stories, a working knowledge of them is essential to understanding much of western literature.

But a science class is not the place for the Bible. The Bible has no science content. The Genesis story is a poem about the creation of the world. It's built on metaphor and fantasy, not data or observation. Teaching Genesis in a science class will leave students unable to understand what the scientific method is or how it works. The same goes for every other creation myth humanity has told itself. And it's not an issue of preferring more exotic cultures to North American fundamentalist ones, as Tennis charges. Mr. Spock and I would be just as appalled if someone proposed to teach the Bakuba creation myth, which holds that a god named Mbombo vomited up the universe during a series of bouts of indigestion, as if it were science. I dearly love Ovid's account of the formation of the world in The Metamorphoses, but if a rich eccentric seriously proposed digging for evidence of the Age of Gold and the Age of Brass, I'd back slowly away from him while suggesting he get the counseling he so desperately needs.

It's a dangerous thing to confuse myth and science, or myth and history. And we don't even have to look a humanity's major disasters (World Wars, inquisitions, genocides, witch burnings) to see that. The Bush administration is evidence enough of the perils of willful delusion. Encouraging children to substitute fables for realities is an insult both to fable and reality. It is a form of abuse, and while, if I were the letter writer, I'd try to couch my objections delicately, I'd certainly make it clear that teaching lies to schoolchildren could cost the teacher at least one friend.

Do We Know What We're Talking About When We Talk About Movies?

You know what bothers me? Well, plenty of things. But what's bothering me at the moment is imprecise writing. Case in point, Armond White's essay in the New York Press called "WHAT WE DON’T TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT MOVIES". What starts as an essay bemoaning the proliferation of bad writing among internet film critics goes on to make a series of hasty, and increasingly bombastic, generalizations about all film critics.

Example:

What we don’t talk about when we talk about movies these days reveals that we have not moved past the crippling social tendency that 1990s sociologists called Denial. The most powerful, politically and morally engaged recent films (The Darjeeling Limited, Private Fears in Public Places, World Trade Center, The Promise, Shortbus, Ask the Dust, Akeelah and the Bee, Bobby, Running Scared, Munich, War of the Worlds, Vera Drake) were all ignored by journalists whose jobs are to bring the (cultural) news to the public. Instead, only movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Army of Shadows, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Zodiac, Last Days, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, Letters From Iwo Jima, A History of Violence, Tarnation, Elephant) have received critics’ imprimatur.

I'd like Mr. White to show me just who ignored War of the Worlds. If he felt like it he could spend a day reading the reviews listed for it at the Internet Movie Database. The same goes for Munich and World Trade Center, both wide-release pictures by two famous directors (Spielberg and Stone, respectively). Akeelah and the Bee, lacking a big name director or a blockbuster budget, still managed to secure good notices, including a four-star review from Roger Ebert, who also conferred a special jury prize on the picture when he released his Ten-Best list. While it's true that he didn't finance a ticker tape parade for the movie along Chicago's Wacker Drive, I don't think anyone can say he ignored the movie or gave it anything less than his complete support. Instead, it puts the lie to White's second claim in the paragraph that "only movies that are mendacious...have received the critics' imprimatur."

I bring Ebert up here because Mr. White goes to considerable lengths to attack the various things Ebert has allegedly done to destroy film criticism, and film, and indeed the entire moral structure of the universe as we know it. (That last bit was an exaggeration. I apologize for it, which puts me one up on Mr. White.) White contrasts Ebert's era with that of Sarris and Kael in order to demonstrate that, by making film criticism accessible to the unwashed, Mr. Ebert has...well, I guess I'll have to quote Mr. White to explain:

To discuss movies as if they were irrelevant to individual experience—just bread-and-circus rabble-rousers—breeds indifference. And that’s only one of the two worst tendencies of contemporary criticism. The other is elitism.

This schism had an ironic origin—the popularization of film criticism as a consumer’s method. A generation of readers and filmgoers were once sparked by the discourse created by Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris during the period that essayist Philip Lopate described as ìthe heroic era of moviegoing.î The desire to be a critic fulfilled the urge to respond to what was exciting in the culture. Movie commentary was a media rarity in those days and relatively principled (even the Times’ Arts & Leisure section used to present a forum for contrary opinions). And then the television series At the Movies happened. Its success, moving from public to commercial broadcast (who can tell the difference anymore?), resulted in an institution. Permit an insider’s story: It is said that At the Movies host Roger Ebert boasted to Kael about his new TV show, repeatedly asking whether she’d seen it. Kael reportedly answered “If I want a layman’s opinion on movies, I don’t have to watch TV.”

Kael’s cutting remark cuts to the root of criticism’s problem today. Ebert’s way of talking about movies as disconnected from social and moral issues, simply as entertainment, seemed to normalize film discourse—you didn’t have to strive toward it, any Average Joe American could do it. But criticism actually dumbed down. Ebert also made his method a road to celebrity—which destroyed any possibility for a heroic era of film criticism.
At the Movies helped criticism become a way to be famous in the age of TV and exploding media, a dilemma that writer George W. S. Trow distilled in his apercu “The Aesthetic of the Hit”: “To the person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference.” It was Ebert’s career choice and preference to reduce film discussion to the fumbling of thumbs, pointing out gaffes or withholding “spoilers”—as if a viewer needed only to like or dislike a movie, according to an arbitrary set of specious rules, trends and habits. Not thought. Not feeling. Not experience. Not education. Just reviewing movies the way boys argued about a baseball game.

I won't mock too hard the idea of a "heroic era of moviegoing". I was once moved to write an epic poem about my experiences watching Goldeneye "'Twas Brosnan's steely gaze 'pon the dish of fire that roused me 'gainst self-slaughter..." Sorry. I won't, however, drop one thing. Mr. White, Andrew Sarris's "era" isn't over. He's writing for the New York Observer and you can read his reviews on current releases whenever you're of a mind to do so. His rival, Pauline Kael, went to the great box office in the sky, but Sarris is still with us.

As for criticism dumbing down...well...I'm not sure about that either. Were daily newspaper reviewers ever writing to people other than "Average Joe American"? After all, Mr. White, and I hate to tell you this, lots of people do just like or dislike movies, and many of them would prefer to know before blowing money on a film whether it's likely to entertain them or not. That's why they're reading the paper or watching television. Those with more sophisticated tastes will gravitate toward The New Yorker or Film Comment. That's why they're there. They have room to publish longer articles and can assume a certain level of reader knowledge. What Ebert did was broaden the audience for film journalism, with all the costs that this involves. It was ever thus that those who talk to the uninitiated have to speak their language, and say things that they'd find interesting. Mr. White can feel free to dislike Ebert for doing that, but before the next time he wants to start a harangue about how Ebert doesn't educate his audience, he should remember that lots of "Average Joe Americans" would never have heard of Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, or Stanley Kaufmann if Roger Ebert hadn't, from time to time, mentioned them in his columns.

There are plenty of other errors and faults in Armond White's essay. I doubt he'll take advice from me, but if he does I'd tell him that a quick read-through of Orwell's Politics and the English Language would be a good use of his time. Nobody who has a lick of sense and one good eye should allow a sentence like "The love of movies that inspires their gigabytes of hyperbole has been traduced to nonsense language and non-thinking" into print. The love of abstract and polysyllabic words that plagues Mr. White's prose tells me that he might have something to learn from Roger Ebert. I may not find the secrets of the cinematic universe in a Roger Ebert review, but at least I can figure out, after the first reading, what the man is trying to say. I've read Mr. White's essay four times now, and though I'm an educated man with a master's degree in English and several awards for fiction writing, I'm still unsure what Mr. White's problem is. The first three times, I thought it might be might be my fault, but the fourth reading left me wondering and now...well...here were are.

The Days of Wine and Roses

I can only guess how audiences who were accustomed to Jack Lemmon in comedies reacted to his performance in The Days Of Wine and Roses. What I do know is that there were moments watching it where I was in this queasy space between wanting to laugh at some of his antics as a drunk and feeling sick at his character's rapid descent into degradation. For this reason, Blake Edwards was exactly right in casting him. An actor better known for serious work might have taken the role so far into pathos that I would have judged his character instead of being invited to share in the humor that Joe Clay (often wrongly) sees in his own drunkenness. Lemmon's performance took me from a kind of guilty laughter to crushing pain sometimes within a ten second period. Lee Remick, whose character starts as Joe Clay's teetotaling wife and ends up sinking even lower than Clay does, is equally effective. The more I see of her work in the late 50s and early 60s, the more I wish I could see.

The movie isn't one for lovers of linear plots. The Days of Wine and Roses meanders from moment to moment, observing Joe and Kirsten's fall in to alcoholism without forcing them to jump through the hoops of a conventional story. Sometimes this hurts the film. I wasn't clear on just how many jobs Joe had been fired from until he mentioned it in an argument with Kirsten, but now that I think of it, maybe this isn't a flaw. Maybe in some ways the meandering and fogginess about specific plot events is meant, like Lemmon's performance, to put me in the head of a drunk.

It's a good movie. See it.

There's No Place Like Rome

Bitterspice and I spent the afternoon at the Seattle Art Museum's presentation of the Louvre's Roman art pieces. Of course, it's impossible to be comprehensive in any one space about a culture as long-lived and diverse as the Roman Republic and Empire, but damn it if this exhibition doesn't give it the best possible shot. From ancient gladiator action figures to a discussion of changing women's hairstyles as depicted in Roman portraiture, from gods to slaves, the exhibition has a lot. I still haven't processed it all, but what I saw was a knockout. Any readers in Seattle who have yet to catch the exhibit have one week to scrape together twenty bucks and go.

Getting Things The Hell Out Of My House

A list of things leaving my house this week:

Let Us Sit Upon the Ground: submissions to three theaters; two in New York, one in L.A.
The Ice Age: Fifteen query letters to agents in New York and environs.
Michael St. John and the Race for the African Stone: prepared for the Nicholl Gee Screenwriting Fellowship.

So many stamps...

Mad Max

It's sometimes amazing how much can be done on a budget that can conveniently be measured in pennies. Mad Max is one such case. This is a raw, elemental, strange, and unpredictable action picture that begins as a cops vs. street punks movie, and transforms into a revenge picture of surprising power. Mel Gibson plays Max, a cop facing a vicious gang of street thugs on the long and desolate roads of the Australian outback. The story begins with Max as a contented man, secure in his job and happy with his family. But after the gang robs him of both his partner and his wife, Max sets out to even the score.

The chase sequences in Mad Max are the movie's highlights, and the level of excitement George Miller manages to extract from his limited resources is impressive. Watch the chase sequence. Miller never lets us lose sight of who's chasing whom, and clues us in on the strategies of the players. This allows us to feel as if we're participating in the action instead of merely observing it. Michael Bay has had budgets many orders of magnitude higher than Miller had in Mad Max, but he's never achieved 1/10th as much.

This movie was dubbed into Mid-Atlantic English for the U.S. market, but I can't imagine it in any accent other than Australian. American accents just don't fit this bizarre landscape and these equally bizarre denizens of the landscape. While my memories of many U.S. action films tend to run together, it'll be hard for me to forget what made Mad Max so different.

Gotta Love That Media Expertise, Boy

It no longer amazes me that people who don't really know what they're talking about can get on TV as experts. It does, however, still burn me. Take the case of Patricia Cornwell, the mystery author whose foray into non-fiction accused Victorian artist Walter Sickert of being Jack the Ripper. Experts on the ripper case have largely debunked Cornwell's case, which oscillates between puffing up weak evidence and glossing over enormous evidentiary gaps.

To sum up:

1. Cornwell claims that she has discovered a mitochondrial DNA link between Sickert and one of the letters that supposedly came from Jack the Ripper. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? But, according to David Cohen, who researched the issue for Slate, mitochondrial DNA samples can be matched to anywhere between .1%-10% of the population. So the sample Cornwell extracted to the letter could have come from Sickert, or from thousands to millions of others. And considering that many, many people have handled this letter over the years, from the sender all the way to Patricia Cornwell and Francis the Talking Mule for all we know, the sample she recovered could have come from any of them.

2. Even if she were to demonstrate a link between Sickert and the letter, this proves nothing about Sickert as a suspect. Scotland Yard received hundreds of letters purporting to come from the Ripper. All but three are certainly hoaxes, and those three are only potentially Ripper letters. Even the "From Hell" letter, which seems to be the most promising (because it came with half a human kidney--like the kidney Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes lost), could easily have been just a medical school prank. Faking Jack the Ripper letters seemed to be, briefly, the national pastime of England. So Sickert could have just been joining in the macabre fun. That makes him weird, but not a killer.

3. Finally, the best evidence tells us that Sickert was in France during the murders. Cornwell supporters like to claim that he could have made a run into England by train and boat to commit his murders, but have yet to produce a scintilla of evidence that he did so. And honestly, why would he bother? A man who derived sadistic pleasure from killing prostitutes could certainly find targets in France. Traveling all the way to Whitechapel doesn't seem like a game that's worth the candle.

Cornwell has surely heard this before, but she still goes on the air to make her claims. That's understandable, I suppose. What bothers me is that so many people who work on TV fail to notice that this woman doesn't deserve the mic. She should be on public access with Kurt Cobain conspiracy theorists, not on national TV, and certainly not without rebuttal.

Requiem For A Heavyweight

If everything you ever knew about Rod Serling came from The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery, I urge you to take a look at this film, which is an adaptation of Serling's Playhouse 90 script. Anthony Quinn plays The Mountain, a sweet natured palooka who's taken way too many in the head over a seventeen year career. When, after a fight with a young Cassius Clay (that's right, they got future heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali to make an appearance early on, and it's hard to believe he was ever that young), the doctors tell him he won't be allowed to box anymore, his promoter, the venal Maish Rennick (Jackie Gleason) cuts him loose. Unfortunately for Maish, the Mountain lasted too many rounds with Clay, so the mobsters who bet on the fight demand Maish's money or his hide. What follows is a competition for the Mountain's services as well as his soul, pitting Maish against the only two people in the world who give a damn about The Mountain: his trainer, Army (Mickey Rooney) and an agent for the unemployment office, Grace Miller (Julie Harris).

It is a treat to see this much acting talent on display in the service of a taut, moving tale. Though in some ways the outcome is predictable--The Mountain seems to have nowhere to go but down--his motives for acting as he does are surprisingly complex, so much so that I'm still processing them a day after seeing the movie. If you haven't seen this picture, I urge you to grab it from Netflix. It's worthy of your time.