Trailer of the year

Duplicity: I was had

It's official: I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I didn't love Duplicity, you see. I really tried to pay attention, too. Sat there with my head in my hand, eyes narrowed, brow furrowing, determined to get the most out of it. "This is as good as it gets," said Variety. "However you describe it, Duplicity is superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time," said A O Scott. " If what thrills you is the swift-moving, unrelenting contest between equal and opposing forces, then the movies you seek out are surely the great romantic comedies of the studio era, verbal boxing matches that draw blood and end in kisses."

Count me in. Except that for a large chunk of time — almost (but not quite) the whole movie — I had no idea what was going on with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. Were they gaming the company? Each other? Both? Neither? Are we supposed not to know? Maybe some people like the confusion — a sure sign that something superior is going on. I'll put up with this sort of thing for a bit, but eventually the suspicion begins to dawn that the movie is being complicated, rather than complex, that it is patterned, rather than plotted, and then I check out.

I had the same deal with LA Confidential — another complicated movie that everyone loved and left me cold. Duplicity didn't leave me cold. The script is lean and economical, and its satire is beautifully done. Tonally, it finds the same sweet spot as The Right Stuff — sending up this world while never failing to make it matter. I never tired of seeing Paul Giametti ranting about his opponent's new creams and lotions. But over the long haul I found myself adopting the same defensive crouch David Mamet induces in me — a twist overload. The assumption that nothing is at it seems has its own predictability, after a while. You sit there going "that's not going to turn out to be true" or "I bet she tricks him". And you're always right.

I read somewhere that butterfly wingspan only reach a span of two feet (or something like that) before they collapse. In other words, there's a inbuilt evolutionary limit to the size butterflies can be. I feel the same way about movie plots: there's a certain level of complexity you shouldn't go beyond. What's going to happen now, of course, is that Duplicity is not going to do as well as some people expect and then the critics are going to start blaming the multiplex or the average Joe or the dumbing-down of America or Jaws. It's nothing to do with any of those things.

The troublesome twos

Obama's bowling gaffe just goes to prove a theory of mine: mistakes comes in twos. Trying to correct gaffe number one (the public's perception of his bowling skills) he commits another (he compares it to the special olympics). It's always the way. Its just when you've successfully avoided stepping in a puddle that you walk into a lamp-post. I don't think it has to do with karma, or an ironic God or anything like that. I think there is a direct causal relationship behind Sod's law. It is precisely because you have negotiated threat A that you relax your guard sufficiently to succumb to threat B. Joking about his bowling score, Obama probably felt exhilaration (finally, that alabatross put to bed) and the exhilaration opened him up.

Pet peeve #34: ladders in the street

Confronted with a ladder across the sidewalk, you have two choices. Either you walk under it, or you walk around it. But it's not as simple as that is it? If you walk around it, you are announcing to the world "I am a superstitious sort and prefer not to talk under ladders in the street." If you walk under it, you are defiantly thumbing your nose at such nonsense. But what if you have no position on the matter and simply want to walk along the street, uninterrupted by demands to declare your position on the matter?

I'm not superstitious but have found that if I walk under the ladder, I spend the remainder of my walk wondering if there is something to it after all, and worrying that my defiance will not go unnoticed. On the other hand, walking around it, I feel stupid and superstitious. It's lose-lose. All I want to do is get from one end of the street to the other.

Who killed the horror movie?

From my column for The Daily Beast.

EXT. Night. A campfire burns in the middle of the forest. Around it are Michael Myers, darning his mask in preparation for the forthcoming Halloween 2. Next to him, lying down, is Jason Voorhees—wearing a neck brace, his arm in a splint, injuries he sustained from the last Friday the 13th. Tending to the fire, Freddy Krueger, now an old man, his blades rusty and broken. He is using them to open a can of beans.

The camera draws near.

MICHAEL (comforting): Don’t take it too personally.

JASON: It's hard not to. I mean I can’t believe I fell for that. A wood chipper. Jesus. That is worse than anything I ever did.

MICHAEL: Way worse.

JASON: It’s these new kids. They’re not playing the game the way it should be played. It’s all cellphones and pagers one minute and then they’re coming at you with baseball bats and knives and God knows what else. Whatever happened to taking a shower? Running in high heels? Losing the car keys?

MICHAEL (wistfully): Taking a walk in the forest.

JASON: Yeah right. ”Is anybody there?”

MICHAEL (girlishly): “I won’t be long.....”

Jason mimes bringing a machete down through the air, but cricks his neck and winces. Carefully, he massages his shoulder.

MICHAEL: It’s Scream. That film screwed everything up for us. Now everyone knows our shit.”

JASON: Bunch of artsy-fartsys Scooby-Doo crap is what it was. Putting ideas in their heads. They would never have thought of a wood chipper before. No way.

MICHAEL: If anyone’s feeding someone into a wood chipper it's you, Jay.

JASON: It’s fucked up.

MICHAEL: It's disrespectful is what it is.

They both shake their heads....

My favorite news story of 2009 so far

EASTON, Pa. - A man accused of driving drunk said Pennsylvania courts have no jurisdiction over him because he's his own country. Scott Alan Witmer, who represented himself, said he believes police lack jurisdiction to pull him over. "I live inside myself, not in Pennsylvania," he claimed Tuesday, prompting Northampton County Judge Leonard Zito to reset Witmer's bail. Witmer said he was challenging the traffic stop that led to his arrest and said he believes in certain laws, not all of them. "Don't all our souls live within ourselves?" he asked, pointing to his body. "Isn't this where you really live?"

Indiana Jones And The Missing Camel Chase

In the summer of 1978, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan met to hash out their ideas for Raiders of the Last Ark. They met on 5 consecutive 9-hour days at the L.A. home of Lucas's assistant Jane Bay. "We had a tape recorder going and George essentially guided the story process," said Spielberg. "And that's where the fantasy of all our pent-up, wet-movie dreams coalesced. Most of the time we were on our feet, trying to out-shout each other with ideas." For the first time, those conversations have been published. They make for fascinating reading.

SPIELBERG: I like the idea that she's a heavy drinker and our hero doesn't drink at all. She gets drunk a lot. She's beautiful and she gets really sexy when she's drunk, and silly. And he doesn't touch the stuff.

LUCAS: I don't want to soften her. I like the fact that it's greed. I like all the hard stuff, but you're going to love here... I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

KASDAN: And he was forty-two.

L: He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.

S: She had better be older than twenty-two.

L: He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

S: And promiscuous. She came onto him.

L: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he...

S: She has pictures of him.

L: It would be nice if they left in a huff, they fought or something. He left rather pissed. I don't think he would leave without the pendant. That's the only thing that bothers me about that.

S: So he goes upstairs and stays up, plotting how he's going to take it off her.

L: That makes him into a real rat.

K: That's all right. He never does it. What he does is just the opposite, save her life.

L: No matter how you do it, the fact that he thought about it is the rat part.

S: Rhett Butler was a rat.

L: He wasn't a real rat --

S: He proved himself by raising her family. Before that he was a gambler, dealt with cheap ladies.

L: There's a difference between being a rat and somebody who's having fun. He never hurt anybody.

K: I'm a little confused about Indiana at this point. I thought he'd do anything for this pendant.

L: But he still has to have some moral scruples. He has to be a person we can look up to. We're doing a role model for little kids, so we have to be careful. We need someone who's honest, trusting and true. But at the same time he's confronted with this difficult problem. We have a great thing when she won't give it to him. She doesn't like him...

+++++++++

L: What can he chase them with? What if he jumps on a camel?

S: I love it. It's a great idea. There's never been a camel chase before.

L: Is this camel going to chase a car?

S: You know how fast a camel can run? Not only that, he can jump over vegetable carts and things. It could be a funny chase that ends in tragedy. You're laughing your head off and suddenly. "My God, she's dead."

L: We've added another million dollars.

S: Not really. How much trouble can a camel be?

The thought that counts

The London press are outraged over Obama's recent gift to Gordon Brown — 25 DVDs including Star Wars, The Godfather and Citizen Kane. “Barack Obama, the leader of the world's richest country,” huffed the Daily Mail, “gave the Prime Minister a box set of 25 classic American films - a gift about as exciting as a pair of socks.” Brown on the other hand gave Brown a pen holder carved from the timbers of the sister ship of the one the White House desk is made from and a first edition of a seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill. I have to say that of those two gifts, I know which one I'd prefer. Surely there's one movie in those 25 that he hasn't watched?

I think this has probably less to do with Obama and more to do with the Fleet Street's desire to cast Brown as an unloved grovelling wretch. We dislike our premiers, on the whole. Any perceived slight to them only confirms their wretchedness. The British press are not complaining, they are going: look, see?

Quote of the day

"The main objections to the truth commission Sen. Leahy has been trying to organize are that it will be... nothing more than a witch hunt. Of course, the use of the phrase “witch hunt” today implies a hunt in pursuit of something that does not exist, while we are fairly certain that there were criminals in the outgoing administration who have thus far escaped the appropriate sanctions of the law." — Daniel Larison, The American Conservative

Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore

Every now and again Jon Stewart, whose shows are never less than smart, entertaining, morally grounded, etc, hits an ace. Last night's segment on CNBC had something extra — anger.

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I wish they'd told me

John Cole has some good graphs about the "socialism" ruckus, from which he deduces the following:—

The 2010 proposed rate of 39.60% = socialism.
The 2002-2008 rates of 35.00% = capitalist nirvana.
The 39.6% rate of the 1990’s = socialism.
Everything else = down the memory hole.

I don't remember America being a particularly communist country back in the nineties. Of course I only moved here in 1999, so what do I know. but I visited many times and I didn't really get that vibe off the place. You'd think news would have leaked out somehow. They have newspapers here, and TV. Wouldn't some brave American have got the news out that his country, so implacably opposed to socialism a few years earlier — they had a cold war for crissakes! for several decades! — had, in fact, succumbed to the cold clutches of Marxist-Leninism? Evidently not. The government crackdown on such dissidents must indeed have been savage and intense.

Manna from heaven

The latest hour-long Rush Limbaugh extravaganza is pure bliss. Not since Sarah Palin popped her head into our airspace has political theatre acquired such bouyancy — as light as farce. As with all the best farces, the engine of this one is powered along by a neat conundrum: someone who believes himself to be the solution to the problem is in fact its source.

For non-American readers, a quick update: four days before the inuageration, radio host Rush Limbaugh said, of Obama, “I hope he fails." The DNC used the statement to raise cash. Then, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, clad in a slinky black satin shirt, Rush re-stated his view. "What is wrong with saying I hope he fails?"

This time, things kicked up a gear. On Face the Nation Rahm Emanuel bigged up the conservative talk show host, calling him the “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party,” in turn angering Republican National Chairman Michael Steele who dismissed Limbaugh as a mere “entertainer,” whose rhetoric was “ugly” and “incendiary.” Steele was then forced into calling Limbaugh to apologize Monday. Rep. Phil Gingrey took a shot at Limbaugh only to appear on his program the next day and plead “foot-in-mouth disease.”

The whole thing is genius: Democrats have barely had to lift a finger and suddenly the new face of the GOP is a corpulent, hateful white male in slinky black satin whom the Republicans cannot be seen to either endorse or reject. "The administration is enabling me,” Limbaugh wrote in an e-mail to Politico. “They are expanding my profile, expanding my audience and expanding my influence. An ever larger number of people are now being exposed to the antidote to Obamaism: conservatism, as articulated by me.”

The language of addiction is revealing. Limbaugh's opinions are cocaine to the GOP. He has no idea how toxic he is to them, or rather he does but he just doesn't care. He is indifferent to their fate. He is not an elected official. He does not have their interests at heart. Everyone gains from this — Rush Limbaugh, Talk Radio, Obama, the Democrats — everyone but the poor Republicans.

A stopped clock

From my review of Watchmen, which loosed a tidal wave of fanboy snark in Slate a few years back:

Whether you take this self-reflexivity as evidence of a newfound sophistication on behalf of the comic book, or as self-consciousness tricked out as superiority—that old adolescent standby—is up to you. Watchmen was unquestionably a landmark work, a masterpiece, even. Before Moore came along, comic books were not generally in the habit of quoting Nietzsche, or scrambling their time schemes, or berating their heroes for their crypto-fascist politics, or their readers for reading them. It was Moore's slightly self-negating triumph to have allowed it to do so... The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic "difficulty" or "self-consciousness." Life is too short. Frankly, we'd much rather be watching The Incredibles.

Thinking about it further, I'd hone my objections a little further: too much backstory and not enough story. Moore is a dead-end for movie-makers. The same thing happened with V For Vendetta, which spent its entire time taking us on a guided tour of the fascistic future it inhabited, and left approximately five minutes for an actual plot to get underway. Moore is way too fond of the world he envisions — or to be accurate, the political points scored by that vision — to ever let his plots run away with him. The clock ticks backward.

Crazy chimp attack

I had the following conversation with a homeless person the other afternoon, as I forked over a dollar. 

"Hey slim," he goes, "What do you think about the lady and the chimp?"  

"I think she crossed the line." 

"It's crossing the line, sleeping with a chimp. It's like sleeping with a dog." 

"I think she might have had problems." 

"Well, she's paying for it now...." 

This was a new one: instead of chit-chat about the weather, or the price of a big mac, he engaged me on the topics of the day, like a radio talk show host elliciting opinions from his listeners. It was very welcome: I've run out of people I can talk to about the crazy-chimp-attack story without seeming ghoulish. 

2010 movie preview

In no order, here are the films that I'm most looking forward to this year.

Public Enemies — Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger in Michael Mann's epic about 1930s gangsters. Script by Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann from Bryan Burroughs book. Described by one script review as "Heat meets The Untouchables." Mann on home turf, in period.

An Education — A Nick Hornby script, from Lynn Barber's memoir about her teenage romance with a feckless older man in 1950s Paris, with a reportedly stand-out performance from 22-year-old Carey Mulligan. Variety called it "bursting with life." Audiences at Berlin and Sundance were smitten.

The Lovely Bones — Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel starring Mark Wahlberg. This seems so unlikely, and the book was so bad, that something interesting may be brewing. (Look at what happened to The Bridges of Madison county). Fingers crossed.

Avatar — James Cameron's first film since Titanic, a sci-fi epic set on another planet which scientists are trying to colonise after Earth gets too polluted. Early script reviews suggest some Abyss-style preachiness — "Aliens meets Lord of the Rings if it were written by Al Gore." A stunning dud? 

Cheri — Michelle Pfieffer reteams with Stephen Frears in this Collette adaptation about a belle epoque brothel madam who falls in love; with a score by Alexandre Desplat.

Also looking forward to Funny People, the latest from Judd Apatow; Eddie Murphy playing Richard Pryor in James Whale's biopic, Up & Toy Story 3 (Pixar). I'm a little more circumspect about Martin Scorsese's Ashecliffe (too much through-the-looking-glass psychosis), Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. I will be giving a wide body serve to Hillary Swank as Amelia Earhert in Amelia and Meryl Streep as Julia Childs in Julia & Julia.

Escape from the flea circus

"In 1919, Charlie Chaplin had an idea for some fleas. Wouldn't it be good, he thought, if a man accidentally opened his matchbox of performing fleas in a dosshouse? But he could find no place for the scene in the film he was shooting. He tinkered with the idea for almost a decade - wouldn't it be good if he inspected one of the fleas from a hobo's beard, only to throw it away because it wasn't one of his? - and almost got it into The Circus in 1928, and then The Great Dictator in 1940, but still it wouldn't fit. Finally, in 1952, with the communist witch-hunt closing in on him, the press baying for his blood, Chaplin made his last film on American soil, Limelight, about a washed-up clown called Calvero plying himself with greasepaint for one final hurrah. In a flashback sequence, we see Calvero finally lose those performing fleas, but not the whole box: just two of them now, hopping invisibly from fist to fist."

— From my review of Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey in tomorrow's Sunday Times

Slumdog: the final verdict

The best case for Slumdig Millionaire I have heard, from my friend Nick Hornby:

It’s perfectly possible not to enjoy Slumdog Millionaire, of course – nothing appeals to everybody, and I didn’t have enough invested in the love story for the film to lift me as much as it seems to have lifted others. But typically, when the success of a book or a film or a piece of music baffles the liberal intelligentsia, then that success will usually be put down to the cynicism of the makers, or the depressing ignorance of the consumers... It would be nice to think that our artier film-makers and more literary novelists could look at ‘Slumdog’ and steal a few of its underpinnings. Is energy, for example, as vulgar an attribute as many of them seem to believe? And is coherent structure really such an awful thing? On the evidence of the LRB letter, though, our intellectuals are more likely to sneer. I’m sure they’re all very clever people, but they can be terribly dim sometimes.

Many movies and novels could do with a little more vulgar energy — The Reader springs to mind. And the structure of Slumdog was the only time I can remember enjoying, rather than enduring, flashbacks in a movie. I was happy when it came out. I could see the point of it. A stalwart addition to a decent year at the movies, I thought — a good midfielder, a dependable mid-range success story. I just never for a second imagined it would clean up at every awards ceremony western civilization has to offer. 7 Baftas and 8 Oscars, including Best Picture, depresses me for some reason. It's not a bias against popular movies: I didn't feel this way when Titanic won, or Lord of the Rings. For all its flaws I think The Dark Knight should have got a best picture nod. And it is nothing short of painful to me that movies like Knocked Up never stand a chance. But Slumdog has an offputting cunning to it, I think: come see this small, scruffy, underdog movie from the Indian subcontinent, complete with Hindi subtitles, and — guess what — it slips down as easily as the latest Janet Jackson video. There's no earthly reason why movies set in other countries have to be dour and grainy and foreign-filmish — sitting through Gomorrah is not mandatory —  but I like a little bit of foreignness, some detail that makes you sit up. There was some shots of India in The Darjeeling Limited (an otherwise bad movie) that looked as strange and stunning as a lunar landscape. I never got anything like that in Slumdog. Foreigners aren't so foreign after all, it said. They watch the same junk, they dream the same dreams. Do they? One thing Danny Boyle said in interview stuck with me, about how unexpectedly non-aspirational the slum dwellers all were, despite their crushing poverty. The westerner expected revolution, revolt; what he found was good-humored acceptance. Something to do with Hinduism? The caste system? Who knows, but that was interesting to me. I wish he'd made a movie about that — or which at least included that. It would have made his hero's arc all the more startling.

Words, words, words

The Millionsblogs parses an Obama sentence:—

Obama has a good memory for where he's been, grammatically, and a strong sense of where he's going. His tripartite analysis of the problem is clearly reflected in the structure of the sentence, and thus in the three main branches of the diagram. (Turn it on its side and it could be a mobile.) Obama's confidence in the basic architecture of his sentences allows him to throw in some syntactically varied riffs and qualifiers: an absolute phrase here, a correlative conjunction or comparative adjective there.

By contrast with the syntax, the diction is quite straightforward, which may account for why the majority of Americans, unlike their pundit overlords, don't seem to feel that Obama is talking down to them. The verbs here are all "to be" verbs, given weight by participles like "prosecuted" and "interested," and by the muscular commonplaces, "above the law," "looking forward" and "looking back." The only superfluous adjective is "clear," which sounds positively Bush-like, even as it serves to qualify the clause it's attached to. Even more remarkable: by virtue of the third "that," this is a complex sentence, but not a compound one. Like "I'm the decider," it has a single, copulative predicate. This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine.

It is possible - mistaken, I think, but certainly possible - to dismiss this sentence as a platitudinous non-answer, and if comedians ever overcome their Obama anxiety, this may be his Achilles heel: "The beef, assuming it's in a port wine reduction, sounds, uh, amazing, but on the other hand, given that the chicken is, ah, locally grown, I'd be eager to try it."

They don't prefer blondes

The Guardian has some excellent statistics about the Oscars, including:— 43% of best actresses winners have been brunette, only 14% blondes. Playing someone with a mental illness gives you 23% chance of winning, physical illness 10%, an inspirational teacher 5%, Holocaust victim 4%, victim of homophobia 3%, nun 3%, monk, genius + victim of racism all 2%.

The mental illness/nun teacher thing is no big surprise, but the prejudice against blondes. That's fascinating.

If you ran the Academy

The Carpetbagger asks: what would you do if you handed out the Oscars? In his case:

Anne Hathaway would be more than an also-ran in lead actress. “Rachel Getting Married” might have snuck in to the best picture picture. Kate Winslet would have been nominated for “Revolutionary Road” instead of “The Reader.” And “Gomorrah” would not only be up for best foreign-language film, it would threaten in the best picture category.

Agreed. Plus: WALL-E would get a best picture nod, as would the Wrestler. Russell Brand would get a best supporting actor nomination for Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Marisa Tomei would be the hands-down, no-questions take-all-contenders BSA winner. Bruce Springsteen would be nominated and win. Slumdog Millionaire would be nominated and not win anything besides best editing. But here's the thing: I'm not sure I'd want to live in a universe in which the right films won the Oscars. 1) We would have nothing left to complain about; 2) Indie filmmakers would have no clue what it is they're supposed to be independent from; 3) The suits would all start smoking roll ups and block-booking Fassbinder retrospectives. 4) The word "meretricious" would lose 90% of its meaning, and probably collapse, causing untold knock-on effects in other areas of the dictionary. What makes disliking a movie like Slumdog Millionaire or The Reader such a life-sustaining experience is the sure knowledge that other people think it a work of genius. Disliking a bad movie is not enough: a bad movie must be overrated by others to instill the pain necessary for all meaningful action. What the Carpetbagger is proposing is pure through-a-wormhole-backwards chaos. It is to be resisted.

To be or not to be?

A bizarre debate has erupted over whether Joaquin Phoenix's display of truculence on the David Letterman Show was a 'hoax' or not:

Last month Entertainment Weekly quoted a friend of the actor who confirmed that Phoenix was playing a joke at the public's expense, claiming he told him 'It's a put-on. I'm going to pretend to have a meltdown and change careers, and Casey is going to film it.' Journalist Devin Faraci, who recently attended the press junket for Phoenix's new movie Two Lovers, says having witnessed the actor's behaviour first hand — he is convinced that it isn't all a prank.

It's a nonsensical question. Pretending to be an antisocial jerk is surely the same thing as being an antisocial jerk. There is no question of sincerity or intention. That's what makes it antisocial.

A beautiful thing

My favorite interview with any movie star in years: Mickey Rourke on Charlie Rose. Up there with Tom Hanks on In The Actor's Studio. There are so many good things going on inside Rourke's head, these days, that any interviewer who gets to him is in for a treat. The only thing Charlie didn't ask him is whether an Oscar win would really be the best thing for him. Might he not turn back into an a-hole again? It's got to be weighing on some voters minds. 

I go back and forth on Penn and Rourke almost daily but am currently thinking this: in a close two horse race, the underdog is to be favored. Supporting actress is still proving hard to call, not helped by the fact that I still haven't seen Doubt: it's feels like it's either Viola Davis or Penelope Cruz. I'm a bit bored of Cruz: she seems to have been front-runner for too long. And Davis makes sure that Doubt gets itself recognised. The other question I haven't answered is how they reward Benjamin Button: to go from a near record-breaking haul of 13 nominations to a couple of technical wins seems like too big a step-down.  I'm expecting it to sneak one surprise win, maybe for costume or best score? Desplat is certainly due.

Quote of the day

"We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy." — Judd Gregg (R) on his withdrawal from Obama's cabinet.

He just noticed?

Blanche does Katrina

My friend Mark Sam is being sued by The University of the South, which owns the rights for Tennesse Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire, to "cease and desist" with his new one-man show, in which he ventriloquises a modern-day Blanche Dubois weathering Hurricane Katrina at the the New Orleans Superdome. The Williams estate are disputing that this falls under the "fair use" part of Mark Sam's first amendment rights. I have no idea about the legals ins and outs of this. Does a parodist owe dues to the author of the work being parodied? I would have guessed not, or parody wouldn't exist as a form. The Williams lawyers are arguing that Mark Sam's parody is pointed the wrong way: “It seems at best to be a comedic political commentary directed at the events surrounding the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans,” said one of the lawyers representing the university. “As you may know, in order for a parodist to take advantage of a fair-use defense, a parodist’s criticism must target the copyrighted work at least in part.” A serious error in judgment, as anyone who has seen Mark Sam's line in platinum blonde wigs can attest.

Pet Peeve no 33: cackling anchors

One of the unintended consequences of Jon Stewart's success is the amount of fake laughter one hears on the news these days. It was the Stewart's Daily Show, I'm assuming, that prompted cable news producers to rush around looking for freelance comedians to liven up their shows. They're everywhere now, from CNN to MSNBC, from the Rachel Maddow Show to Keith Olbermann's Countdown — a little comedy 'bit' at the end where some putz you've never heard of provides his irreverent take on the day's news events. Far worse than the comic routines themselves, however, are the fake laughs that the anchor has to provide, to reassure us that what we are hearing is, indeed, comedy. It's worse than canned laughter: at least that was once fresh into the can. Someone had to find a show funny, once upon a time, even if it is not the show you happen to be watching. This something else again — lonely, pre-rehearsed cackles from a single human being at jokes they've already heard five times that day. No technician or camerman ever joins in. The laugh dies in the muffled cocoon of the studio. Even someone as naturally spontaneous and high-spirited as Rachel Maddow sounds like she's humoring her most boring uncle. Please, guys, leave that sort of thing to Larry King.

Togetherness

The recent pictures of London under snow have made me hopelessly and horribly homesick I'm not sure why. It never snows in London. I certainly don't have any memories of snow when I lived there. And it snows all the time in New York. Maybe I'm just more facile than I thought and responded, Pavlovian fashion, to the picture-book images. Actually, I know what it is. Its not the fact that it's common. Its the fact that its uncommon and I'm missing out. I remember what it was like when Thatcher resigned and when Diana died and I imagine the snowfall to have a similar effect — a sort of big civic hug. Maybe people are bonding. Maybe they are performing small and unexpected acts of kindness. Maybe they are feeling young and foolish and giggling when they look out the window. Or then again, maybe they are shovelling grey slush out of their driveways so they don't slip and fracture a toe. Either way, I'm jealous; they're doing it all together.

Inducing a cosmic eeew

So I folded and saw The Reader last night. It exceeded even my expectations of how awful it might be. Here goes: a healthy young man named Michael, friendly and engaging, with a big broad smile that suggests a trusting, loving nature, enjoys his first sexual romance with an older woman. She is beautiful, distant, a little cruel, but she teaches him the ways of female flesh. Their affair lasts for a summer, at the end of which she leaves town and Michael returns to the bosom of his family. He becomes a law student, much liked, pursued by beautiful girls his own age. Then one day he attends a war crimes trial and sees his old flame in the dock for war crimes committed while a member of Hitler's SS.

You might think his reaction to this would be one of initial shock followed by rueful reflection on the poor judgment of horny sixteen-year-old-boys. But no, what happens is this: He grows up into Ralph Fiennes. A cloud follows him wherever he goes. He marries only to see the marriage falter. He has a daughter but proves a distant father. 40 years later he is still traumatised, angry, torn apart by self loathing, seeking closure, demanding catharsis, trying and failing to find some way to put his history with this woman behind him. To which any reasonable cinema goer might be forgiven for asking: what gives?

What gives is that Bernard Schlink, the book's original author wanted to provide a probing, exhaustive disinterral of post-war German guilt. In which case, can I make a suggestion? Don't pick as your hero someone who merely shagged a war criminal, Bernard. Pick a war criminal, their butler or maid. Shagging a war criminal is unlikely to provide you with probing, exhaustive disinterral of anything much except one's poor choice of shagging partners when you are a horny sixteen year old boy. Horny sixteens year old boys will shag anything. The lesson to be drawn from such a tale are, one would have thought, negligable. 

How guilty can he a sixteen year old kid be made to feel exactly for sleeping with an attractive war criminal? I would imagine the most he would feel is a kind of momentary fate-infused grodiness — a sort of sexual-cosmic eew. But to have it blight your entire life, as if guilt were some kind of contagion, passed on through the most fleeting of contacts? What a complete crock. This story was concocted by someone who has spent almost no time observing those frail, feckless creatures we call human beings and all his time having ideas about them.

Why do embittered losers write books?

A wonderful piece in the New Yorker Observer about how emotionally misshapen losers are taking over contemporary literature:—

One strain in particular—characterized by a self-loathing impulse to confession, a kinetic demeanor and a claim to authenticity expressed through vitriolic social critique—has emerged as a dominant model. The patron saints of this mini-genre: Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and pretty much every character Chuck Palahniuk has ever written. Some of these characters are not far from monsters—not good underneath all their flaws but worth paying attention to because of them. Disfigured, pathetic, unapologetic and occasionally hopeless, they are, on the whole, contemptuous of the world around them because of what it’s turned them into and confident that the reason for their alienation is the inescapable, toxic nastiness of modern life. They are losers—spiritually dysfunctional, often ugly physically—with chips on their shoulders and resentment in their hearts that takes the form of a self-consciously unforgiving, bombastic mode of social criticism. Over the past decade or so, characters like these seem to have become the vehicle of choice for young male writers seeking to express a certain sort of disaffection.

This is a little too kind to Paluhniuk — Palunhiyuk? I can never get that guy's name right — but it holds water. Edge sells. Gritty and unflinching rule the day. I was struck reading the obituaries of Updike, how many people paid tribute to the delightedness of his descriptions. Sam Anderson, in New York magazine, noted "his almost pathological cheerful[ness]". Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, went one better than pathology:—

Updike the humorist is probably the least known or recognizable Updike of them all, but something of the White-cum-Thurber sound of the New Yorker that he joined—that bemused, ironically smiling but resolutely well-wishing, anti-malicious comic tone—lingered in his work till the very end. In the last year of his life, he wrote to an admirer that “humor is my default mode,” and that he still dreamed of being the new Benchley, the next Perelman.

I wish people wouldn't wait until you are dead to say such nice things.

This is the end

I'm currently working through the copy-editor's notes on my novel. As I am quickly finding out, copy-editors are a little harder to charm than editors. Your editor is basically already a fan; they know you; often they were the ones who bought your book. The copy-editor is just performing a job of work on a novel that has been randomly sent them. They're plucking chickens. So far I've had "very confused and contradictory and pretentious", "muddled, repetitive and crass", "cliched and dreary" "v boring" and "wet." My favorite comment so far is "we've heard him say this before and it was boring the first time." She's right, although naturally, I went back to the first time the passage appeared to see if she said anything about it then and — horror of horrors — she didn't, which makes me worry that she has been biting her tongue on other occasions. How much of this book has she been reading through gritted teeth?

I'm close to the end now, I can tell: I'm listening non-stop to Peter Gabriel on my ipod. This happened the last time I finished a book. I think it's something to do with the slow, steady rhythms, the weighty, bottom-heavy production, the momentum, the sense of big things moving slowly but surely along. It feels like swinging a sledgehammer: all the weight working for you not against you. Hopefully.

Feels a little like Christmas

Obama is due to sign his first piece of legislation tomorrow: a bill designed to make it easier for women to sue for pay discrimination. Following so quickly on his decision to end torture, close Guantanamo, restore the power of law, clip the wings of lobbyists, etc, etc it's hard the escape the Christmas-everyday! feel of living in America at the moment. It's a little bit embarrassing, to be frank. At least supporting candidate Obama had some kind of below-the-radar cool; for about a year or two youy got to root for a underdog who needed your support and cash and made you feel part of some neat underground network. Now that he is president, I am faced with the far more alarming prospect of having an outsized mancrush on the leader of the free world. It's like when a band you've been following for ages suddenly has a number one hit. Everyday I find myself resisting the temptation to go off him, if only to salvage some kind of self-respect. I'm much more comfortable with the idea that politicians are liars and crooks, that power corrupts and absolute power blah de blah. You know where you stand with them: off to one side, with a sneer on your face. But to have one that you actually like, and who reads the same books you do and listens to the same music and finds the same things funny. It's unsettling, weird and destined to end in heartache. But not now. Now it feels like Christmas, with a nice new present left for us for us under the tree every morning.

John Updike's gone. Wow. That's sad.

Perfection Wasted (1990)

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market --
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories
packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

My review of Updike's Gertrude & Claudius here.

Quote of the day

"Can I just say there is no such thing as the best actress, you know? There is no such thing as the greatest living actress" — Meryl Streep, picking up her SAG award and embarking on one self-depracation too far. Do you know how easy it is to look forbidding in a wimple?

The movie that made me a smoker

The wife and I caught Blue Velvet on TV last night. I was amazed and delighted to find it holding up so well. It's just as hypnotic as it was when I first saw it in 1989. It was the film that turned me into a smoker. Until then I'd been trying to smoke but not really enjoying it. But the moment the film ended, I staggered out into the night, feeling Dennis Hopper's viciousness like a kick to the kidneys, and without thinking, sucked down my first fully-enjoyable Marlboro red. I'm munching in Nicorette these days, but still felt the movie somewhere deep in my solar plexus. I was struck by just how quiet it all is — lots of whispered dialogue and ambient hum— and by the classicism of the story. I never really remembered it this way, but beneath all the severed ears and smeared lipstick, there's a detective story, very cleanly told, about a local drug king-pin being brought down. The scene at Pussy Heaven, with Dean Stockwell lip-synching 'The Candy-Colored Clown They Call the Sandman', remains my favorite all-time scene of cinematic debauch. Filmmakers usually get this horribly wrong, with too much going on in — too much energy, too much liveliness. Lynch catches the weird stillness of genuine depravity. It's just people in a room, checked out, swaying gently, lost to one another, waiting for someone to scream, "Let's hit. The fuck. Ing road."

Monkeys get hangovers

"A large variety of creatures consume alcohol in the wild, ranging from bumble-bees to elephants. Hooch finds its way into their diets via the fermenting fruit, sap and nectar of various plants, and many exhibit signs of inebriation after they’ve enjoyed a good feed. Their weakness for the substance au naturel is understandable: ethanol is a rich food, with 75 percent more calories than refined sugar, and its distinctive aroma makes it easy to locate. This natural thirst has been exploited by man since the dawn of history. Aristotle noted that wild monkeys were caught by setting out jars of palm wine — the creatures would drink, then pass out, leaving them easy prey. The same method of trapping was still in use in the 19th century and commented on by Darwin in the opening chapter of “The Descent of Man,” when drawing similarities between humanity and the rest of creation. Monkeys could get drunk like men. They also got hangovers: “On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons.” — NYT

Quote of the day

"Ever get the feeling everybody's having more fun than you? Well. They are." — advert for Breezes package holidays.

That's not very helpful.

When imagination roams free

There are some very entertaining reasons floating around for why Gitmo shouldn't be closed. "I think the first thing we have to remember is that we're talking about terrorists here," says House Minority Leader John Boehner "Do we bring them into our borders?", invoking the spectre of the terrorist-as-illegal-immigrant, working cash in hand as a nanny or gardener, while fiddling their green card applications. GOP House Minority Whip Eric Cantor warned: "Most families neither want nor need hundreds of terrorists seeking to kill Americans in their communities," implying a hitherto untapped ability, on the part of the terrorists, to bust out of high security prisons at will and wreak their mayhem. Lest we mock, National Review's Jim Geraghaty points out that "A detainee who escapes from any of the U.S. sites is within quick reach of terror targets, potential hostages, means of escape, etc.... It's hard to picture militia members, the Crips, Bloods, or what have you doing something as extreme as, say, crashing a plane into the prison to faciliate an escape and/or provide martyrdom to their brethren." For sheer economy, this is he winner, artfully combining the two things everyone knows about terrorists — that they crash planes into buildings and they live in Gitmo — into one phantasmagoric specter. Not even prison can hold these mighty beings.  

The New Jackie Os

The proclamations that Michelle Obama is the new Jackie O seem to have missed the mark — by a generation. A run on the jackets worn by Sasha and Malie on Inauguration Day caused J Crew's website to crash. Talent scouts are on the hunt for models who look like the two Obama children. (“People are looking for girls who resemble them,” says Charlie Winfield, the head booker at FunnyFace Today.) There's even a new line of Beanie Baby dolls named after them (“We believe it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes,” a first lady spokesman said.) But of course — we live in the age of the Olsen twins and Tweens and Miley Cyrus. Forget the parents. Prepare yourself for the onslaught.

Those Oscar nominations

The spirit of justice coursing through the land has spilled over into the Oscar nominations: the academy managed to resist the lure of Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, gave 14 nominations to Benjamin Button, decided against a best film nod for The Dark Knight, made a complete pass on Revolutionary Road and nominated actual supporting actresses in the supporting actress category. Wonder will never cease. On the other hand, Slumdog Millionaire continues its sprint, no best film nod for WALL-E and no nomination for Bruce Springsteen, which is beyond belief. That song wasn't just a nominee. It was the clear and deserved winner.

My predictions: —
Best film: Slumdog Millionaire
Best director: David Fincher
Best actress: Kate Winslet
Best actor: Sean Penn
Best supporting actor: Heath Ledger
Best supporting actress: Tariiji Henson
Best screenplay: Milk
Best adapted screenplay: Slumdog
Best effects: Button
Best Song: Slumdog
Soundtrack: Button
Foreign film: Waltz With Bashir

From a new show of Gerhard Richter paintings at the National Portrait Gallery.

Doing the right thing

It's hard to say exactly how I feel about the inauguration. Relief, mainly. The address was sombre, even severe, with very few of the rhetorical flourishes that we've come to expect of Obama. I loved "the time has come to set aside childish things". I was surprised by the boldness of this:

We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

And then, just as you were wondering if he'd noticed who was sitting right behind him, this:

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

That's when I felt most cheered. How much time I've spent over the past 8 years trying to disentangle genuine anger at what was done on 9/11 from Bush's disastrous response to it. With a single stroke, Obama sliced them apart and freed us up again. And then this:

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true.

My favorite line, possibly, in a speech that didn't seem to be angling for Bartlett's. Instead it was sturdy as an Ox leaning into its halter. The day after he issued a series of executive orders closing Guantanamo, suspending military commissions, compelling CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual, banning CIA "black sites", and restricting his own power and the power of former Presidents to withhold documents on the basis of secrecy. Heaven.

Better than the West Wing

During the confirmation hearings, Eric Holder is grilled about his basketball game.

Golden Globe reax

Very happy about Mickey Rourke winning for The Wrestler: I saw it the other night with Kate and thought it better than Raging Bull (my opinion of that movie is not as stratospheric as some). Just seeing Rourke being interviewed is enough to bring tears to my eyes. And didn't Spielberg's ouevre look spectacular in compilation like that? Not so happy about Kate Winslett winning both Actress (my heart belongs to Hathaway) and Supporting Actress. I'd understand if they gave her supporting as consolation, but to take the supporting award away from an actress who genuinely played a supporting role, like Marisa Tomei, was wasteful — more to do with Weinstein than Winslett. The biggest disappointment, though, were the awards showered on Slumdog Millionaire, the slickest little fake to come our way since Chocolat. How Fox dressed up the new Danny Boyle extravaganza as this scrappy little underdog from the Indian subcontinent is marketing savvy worthy of serious study. It's a foreign movie for those who can't be bothered with subtitles. And the love story doesn't work for a single, luscious frame.

Men buggering men

In the middle of the recent controversy over Obama's choice of Rick Warren to deliver the address at his Inaugeration, Warren said some peculiar things. He was defending himself from the accusation that he is homophobic, comparing homosexuality to his own battle with internet porn, saying that much as he'd all like to watch porn all day long, he must resists the impulse. He handed over the Internet addresses for the pornographic sites he liked so that his wife Sherry could put locks on them.

She created specific blocks for them, so I can no longer access them. Once again, this eliminated a lot of my temptation. I now feel comfortable using my own computer, but nervous when I use an unprotected computer. I’m glad my wife established these blocks.

The peculiar thing about this — the thing I find peculiar about all anti-gay Evangelicals — is their assumption that the only thing separating heterosexual men from homosexual men is resistance to temptation — that we'd all like to bugger other men, given half the chance. You know — if nobody was looking. It's kind of funny and even a little bit radical when you think about it. They basically believe that we're all gay — 'gays' are just the ones who've given up the fight not to be. I'd have that if you wanted to put some distance between yourself and an activity you found unholy, the last thing you'd want to do is paint it as different in degree, not kind, with just a slippery slope to separate you. I guess if they admit difference in kind, then they're basically agreeing with gay people that they're born that way, and then they'll end up looking intolerant. So they end up painting themselves into this strange little corner, instead:
the only thing separating an evangelical pastor from a raving sodomite, apparently, is whether your wife is watching.

A righteous wind at his back

Kate tells me I have a man crush on Daniel Craig but whatever: he's superb as a righteous Jewish warrior mowing down Nazis in Edward Zwick's Defiance. So is Liev Shrieber, as his brother, also a righteous Jewish warrior mowing down Nazis. I don't think I've enjoyed seeing more Nazis mown down more since Where Eagles Dare. Don't believe the middling reviews: some of the speeches could have used a little trimming, there's a long winter in there with lots of coughing and no nazis but boy, is it exhilarating seeing Craig wander into an informant's house and put a bullet through his head. I think I may have liked this movie as much as I liked WALL-E.

All in all, a good day

Today, Obama announced his choice of Leon Panetta to be the next CIA director. A year ago, Panetta wrote a piece called 'No Torture. No Exceptions' for The Washington Monthly, in which he argued:—

How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear. Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what's wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock? The simple answer is the rule of law. Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation.... We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.

Dawn Johnson, the woman appointed to head up the OLC is even more promising: she isn't just against torture, but advocates prosecution of torturers. Of her predecessor John Yoo's Infamous Torture Memo, she wrote:

The shockingly flawed content of this memo, the deficient processes that led to its issuance, the horrific acts it encouraged, the fact that it was kept secret for years and that the Bush administration continues to withhold other memos like it--all demand our outrage.... At the time of the Torture Opinion's issuance, violations of Common Article 3 were punishable war crimes under federal law.

Yummy. This is by far my favorite of Obama's appointments so far.

Blair defends Iraq

New York magazine asks Blair if he regrets the decision to invade Iraq.

“I don’t think the region would be more stable if Saddam and his two sons were still running around.”

Even if you grant that the Iraq war hasn't destabilised the region, strengthened Iran etc, there is also the question of the half a million who might still be alive, and the justifiable grievance their families now nurse towards the US and its allies.

“Yeah, but you’ve got to ask who killed them. There’s also a lot of people who died and who would have died under Saddam."

This is about as eloquent as any defence of the Iraq war gets: yes half a million people died but they might have died anyway. And that's Blair, too. Imagine what Bush's answers would be like.

A good year to be an American

A great piece in the NYT about the fact that Oscars don't go to the best films: they go to the most Oscar-worthy films, which is to say, the films that allow Hollywood the most pleasing reflection of itself:—

Most famously there was the banner year of 1941, for which John Ford’s magnificent “How Green Was My Valley” was named what the academy then termed “outstanding motion picture” while Orson Welles’s game-changing “Citizen Kane” went home with only the original screenplay award.... By selecting “Cavalcade” — a numbing historical pageant, derived from a Noël Coward play, about a wealthy couple (Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook) stiff-upper-lipping their way through 40 years of English history — the members of the academy distanced themselves from the racy entertainments that then dominated the box office... For most of the ’30s the academy whipsawed between popular entertainments (“It Happened One Night,” 1934) and prestigious literary adaptations (“Mutiny on the Bounty,” 1935) meant to assure would-be censors that Hollywood was a dignified, pipe-smoking kind of place, tirelessly working for the moral improvement of American audiences. During World War II priorities shifted from moral development to patriotic fervor. The “outstanding motion picture” of 1942 was determined to be William Wyler’s portrait of a middle-class British couple enduring the Blitz, “Mrs. Miniver”... By the mid -’70s, the basic elements of an Oscarizable film were fixed in place: literary value, social criticism, grand spectacle and mature content, to be mixed and matched at will.

My gut tells me that the winner this year will be something with big box office and little violence — a reaction against the last two indie-winners The Departed and No Country for Old Men. Also that it's a bad year to be a Brit and a good year to be an American: the biggest feelgood spectacle of the year was the election. On Oscar night, the confetti from the Inaugeration will be just days old. Hollywood will want to throw the after-party party. One more reason to favour Penn and Hathaway.

Make Me a Glamour Model

I just got back from the UK, where I spent half the time explaining who the celebrities were to Kate and the other half asking other people who they were. The pages of Heat magazine were particularly baffling. But the TV show that most caught our eye was Make Me A Glamour Model — a very British title, I couldn't help but feel. In America, the show would almost have been called I Want To Be A Porn Star, because aspiration and initiative is to be praised and rewarded. But in Britain, where success is unmerited, and fame is a fake, aspiration is recast as a low surly demand, implying that the only difference between me and the girls with their bits in the papers is the fact that they are in the papers, and not me. Therefore: do it. Wave you wand. Put my bits in the paper. Make me a glamour model.

Great being number two

A British writer for the LA times attempts to explain to American readers the benefits of fading power:—

The fact is that when you're No. 1, you always get blamed for everything. When you're No. 3, or No. 5 -- or No. 135 -- you can put your hands in your pockets and whistle tunelessly with a "Who, me?" look on your face, and no one ever asks any questions.... If Britain's experience is anything to go by, Americans will soon find more satisfaction by trying to break pointless world records or writing absurdist comedy, or recovering from apocalyptic, three-gin-and-tonic lunchtime hangovers.

It echoes a recurrent conversation I have with my wife, wherein I try and console her that's its okay getting knocked from the top spot. Look at the British and the Italians and the lugubrious sense of humour that comes from losing an empire, I explain, but then I dry up. I can't think of much else besides "your sense of humour gets more ironic." Public transport gets better? Not necessarily. People like you more? As she pointed out to me the other night, "if its so great being number two, why are you always on at me about how great it is."

She wishes she'd done more interviews

GIZZI: What was the biggest mistake made in the ’08 campaign?

PALIN: The biggest mistake made was that I could have called more shots on this: the opportunities that were not seized to speak to more Americans via media.

I wish she had called more shots on opportunities that were not seized to speak to more Americans via media, too. Her televised interviews are among my most vivid memories of 2008. That she wishes she had made more of them gets very close to the heart of her appeal. It seems a shame that only Alaskans get to see her on a regular basis. Maybe a live webcast would be a good idea — like those webcasts they have of Panda bears in China?