Some Vaughan Williams for Christmas

RVW will always be this nice Jewish boy's favorite thing about Christmas.

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011 # 14

14. Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins

Reading Watchmen has to be one of the oddest aesthetic experiences I’ve ever had. I believe it was only a night or two before my 27th birthday that I saw (was dragged to) the DC premiere of the Watchmen movie. It was, to put it nicely, a piece of crap - unpleasantly violent for no reason, stuffed with heavy-handed symbolism, given to a creepy admiration for authoritarian ideas, and containing the single most awkward sex scene I can remember in any movie I’ve ever watched. Yet I found myself transfixed by the graphic novel on which it’s based.
There’s nothing strange in liking a book of whose movie you hated. What’s weird is that the book was as close to identical to the movie as a book can be - frame for frame by image, word for word by dialogue. Yet things that seemed incredibly stupid on the screen were transfixing on the page.
This graphic novel is as masterful as the movie is incompetent. By now it's a cliche to say that Watchmen is a brilliant sendup of the superhero archetype, or that it describes the dark underbelly of the heroic qualities which Americans venerate, but that doesn't even begin to describe what it accomplishes.
Watchmen is of the few works of art that successfully entertains the disturbing idea that, perhaps, human compassion can and should be subverted. Perhaps it is justifiable to kill millions in an effort to save billions. There is a dark nihlism which pervades this book, not unlike what one finds in Dante or Wagner -- a dispairing disgust at mankind's ability to inflict suffering and destruction on itself. One cannot deny that the message of this book is, in the most profoundly serious way, authoritarian and anti-humanism. Yet so overwhelming is the power with which it argues its point of view that we're compelled to entertain the possibility that such despair is the only legitimate way of looking at the world. We are compelled to be compelled by Watchmen just as we are in a work like The Inferno or The Ring Cycle. It may not give pleasure the way in which Mozart or Calvin and Hobbes do, but it secretes a powerful spell that easily leads to infatuation. Like Dante and Wagner, Alan Moore had to stand the conventions and trivialities of his genre on their heads. In each case, the result is something so imposing that it can haunt you for days afterward - even if you don’t agree with it or find it creepy and sickening.
This is a story which neither a traditional novel nor traditional artwork could render half as effectively. Like all great works, it's form blends seamlessly with its content. A mere look at a panel is all it takes for us to understand the three-dimensional complexity behind each protagonist's archetype with an immediacy no novel can give, and we watch them progress through a narrative which requires enormous virtuosity both in the art of story telling and in the art of making characters' speech sound distinctive. In that way, it reminds me of an artform I know all too well...
All the way back in entry #34 (Game of Thrones) I already admitted never felt the need for comic books or fantasy literature when I was growing up. Both of them deal generally in larger-than-life situations and drama far more extreme than anything we could experience in daily life. How could I feel the need for either comics or fantasy lit to provide that kind of grandiosity when opera already served me so well? It’s only now, in the dotage of my youth, that I’m beginning to understand what I’d been missing. My resentments that the larger world seemed indifferent to the music that obsessed me made me blind to worlds other than my own. Not that it mattered, the worlds of comics, non-classical music, and blockbusters would have done perfectly fine without me. And let’s be clear, the resentments still remain, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate what else exists, nor does it mean that you can’t. If most people reading this can’t love classical music anymore, or any other of the old artistic cultures that seem to be quickly disappearing in our time, the loss is yours. I consider myself enormously lucky that I was able to learn how to deeply love this music in what might be the final years before it disappears from the world’s common vocabulary. I now have the rest of my life to appreciate all the other pop stuff that everybody else already knows. But how long do you have left before your local symphony orchestra disappears? Or your local repertory theater? Or your local art-house cinema? Or even your local library? I’d venture a guess that I’ve spent more time at each than at least 99,999 out of 100,000 people my age at these places. I say that neither to brag nor to regret, merely because I’m thankful. I had supportive, intellectually engaged, parents who never pushed any of this on me, they just saw that I was interested and gave me outlets for it. God knows, I didn’t have ‘normal interests’ as a kid, but as I was growing up I had a bevy of amazing experiences in these regards which no one else my age whom I knew ever did (certainly not as a kid) - and perhaps amazing experiences which few people my age ever will. And that makes me very sad - you’ll never know what you missed.
This is clearly turning into a rant against my fellow nerds and their own cultural prejudices. That was not at all my intention, but I suppose it was inevitable that when I start praising something so seminal to the ‘Nerd Canon’ as Watchmen that I have to show whatever friends might start chanting ‘One Of Us!’ that I’m still not capitulating to the cliches of nerd taste.
I was more ignorant than dismissive of graphic novels. Even after I read Maus when I was 16, it never occurred to me to think of comic books as an artform. From nearly the earliest age I'd loved Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Doonesbury and especially Garfield. But the question of whether comics could be more than mere entertainment had never occurred to me to ask until I was in college. Like all kids, I had the ability to be completely spellbound by what I saw without thinking about its source so long as it was good. It is an ability which we as adults can only strive to emulate.
Which is why I feel comfortable saying that if there is any book of which I’ve ever been sure would make an incredible Wagnerian opera, Watchmen is it. Wagner took the heroic myths of his time and used them as a linchpin for his operas to demonstrate how impossible the dreams of his civilization were to implement in reality. Anyone who loves Watchmen (or V for Vendetta for that matter) should find themselves in a familiar room if they’d ever listen to Wagner. Both opera and comic books share an ability to express emotions on the most primal level. Films get much of their power from implying things that remain unsaid, but in either opera or a graphic novel, most anything that remains unspoken is immaterial to our appreciation of the story.
Paradoxically, this leads to the ability both genres to subtly imply certain things which films and traditional novels never could. Dr. Manhattan's omnipotence does not compel awe on a movie screen, because there is nothing a movie screen cannot show us. But the limitations of a comic strip are such that anything we can imagine Dr. Manhattan doing in our imagination is far more powerful than any feat we watch him do as a movie spectacle. Imagining Dr. Manhattan's inner life would be, I believe, a task which music -- the language of suggestion itself -- can be even more capable of rendering with vividness. Similarly, the sympathetic side of Rorschach's character is dulled by so vividly showing him commit acts of gory violence. Rorschach is the driving engine of the story, we are asked to view most of it through his eyes, and it is very hard to feel any ability to care if its de-facto narrator seems like a cartoon psychopath. In both of these cases, we must imagine what they're thinking even as they seem to speak their minds with total candor. A comic book allows us to use our imaginations to give their actions personal qualities which a faithful movie adaptation, which inevitably does so much of the imaginative work for us, never could. The only artform of which I know that could render this story with similar vividness is opera. A great score could suggest every quality about these characters which a movie never could. Opera, like the comic strip, is a naturally 'hot' medium which values the ability to emote well over subtlety. There will always be a place for subtlety in both genres, but both must firstly tell their stories in vivid, bold emotions and leave their inhibitions at the door. The marriage of opera and comics may seem ridiculous, but the two are natural fits with one another, and experiments to find out if they can be welded together are long overdue.

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 17, 16, & 15

I'm finding it tough to write about some of the ones from 23-18, so I'm skipping ahead for the moment to the 'stuffs' I feel really strongly about.


17. A Bend in the River
Read this. My first ever 800 Words entry.

16. How I Met Your Mother


(Pathos, humor, and narcissism in perfect balance)

This was definitely a ‘TV’ year for me. It’s just as well, because in case you haven’t noticed, we’re living in the wake of TV’s true golden age. It’s often said that the Golden Age of Television was the 50’s, when TV was entirely new and before corporations realized how to maximize bottom line profits. But what was greatest about 50’s TV was completely different than what we understand as TV today, it was simply the best of culture transferred to a smaller screen. In television’s beginnings, great writers got a playground to experiment with their most daring ideas. But how can even the best fare of the 50’s can compare with today, when we understand exactly what makes TV effective. Just think of all the cultural monuments TV’s given us in just the last twenty years: Seinfeld, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Stewart and Colbert, Arrested Development, South Park, Big Love, The Office (either/or), Flight of the Concords, the Star Trek resurrection, Big Love, Everybody Loves Raymond, Frasier, Rosanne, The Larry Sanders Show, The West Wing, Family Guy, Six Feet Under, 30Rock, Parks and Recreation, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Weeds, King of the Hill and for those who like the shows more than me, even Lost, 24, Deadwood, Futurama, and The Wire (and these are just the shows that I’ve watched...feel free to beat me up later). Nothing in any artform, not the movies or books or theater or music, can compare to the richness of what’s offered on television today. Will all of these shows hold up in a generation? Certainly not. But I’d argue that future generations will be stunned by just how many will. We’re living in a kind of golden age for television like movies had circa 1940, or the novel circa 1870, or Jacobean drama circa 1610. Somehow, the conditions in Television are such that great art is a little bit easier to make. And the result astonishes the world.
But in the wake of this golden age, there are many shows that strive to be Important with a capital I. Some of them achieve their grandiose ambitions, though not without enormous struggle. But some of them are just stupid. In the same way, some shows are meant to be stupid, and they’re actually amazing with a capital A.
How I Met Your Mother is not just one of the greatest stupid sitcoms ever made, it is one of the greatest sitcoms ever made - and done in an age when the ‘stupid sitcom’ (re: four camera) is supposed to be dead. It is meant to be a harmless show, always pandering to a broad audience, with lots of product placement, and never crossing a line that would offend anyone. The result should be like Two-and-a-Half Men or thousands of sitcoms that were mercifully cancelled before we could remember them. But good television depends on three things: amazing writing, amazing performers, and a camera that stays out of the way. In each case, How I Met Your Mother has that in spades.
Don’t be fooled by the surface schtik and catchphrases, this is a show written and acted almost solely by people who could hold their own in Golden Age Hollywood. Like Golden Age Hollywood, their specialty is pitch-perfect entertainment. Just when the show looks as though it’s about to slip on its own schmaltz, it pulls out a perfectly timed comic gag. Just when it seems like it’s bent the realm of plausibility, it pulls back into a situation of complete relateability. The result is precisely the opposite from the ‘No Learning, No Hugging’ motto of Seinfeld, a comedy in which you’re supposed to care for the characters. Audiences were supposed to be sick of comedies like this twenty years ago, and anyone with half a brain most certainly is (anyone who tells you that Friends is as good as How I Met Your Mother should be shot).
There are a number of difficult tricks which the writers and performers have to execute in every episode. They have to seem like ordinary people, and yet they also have to seem cleverer and more glamorous. And at the same time as that, the characters are routinely put through situations in which they seem arrogant, narcissistic, and downright unlikeable. Yet all throughout, they have to seem as though they are regular people, like the people we know next-door through a flattering enough mirror that we’d want to be around them every week. The result is still more extraordinary, an entertainment that is fundamentally about life as we know it - life as anyone their (my) age might experience it. With all the mundane concerns and unflattering moments intact.
But what’s most amazing is that only now, in the seventh season, does the show seem to be reaching its zenith. The last few weeks have seen the characters at their most solipsistic and messy, with devastating conclusions which yourself caring about in spite of the fact that you tell yourself ‘This is a stupid sitcom, how can I possibly react this way?’ yet the deft comic touch remains even in the most dramatic circumstances. So yes, How I Met Your Mother is a bad sitcom crossed with a bad soap opera. It’s also calls to mind what Chekhov and Hawks could have done with such unpromising material.

15. Boardwalk Empire/Boss:

Here are two shows which both benefit and suffer from the ‘post-Sopranos’ glut. Both of them are trying desperately hard for some sort of ‘definitive statement’ on corruption in American life. Both of them can fall flat as a pancake, but what amazes is how often they succeed.

(In case you’ve forgotten how great an actor Kelsey Grammar is)
Whatever else Boss is, this is the single best written show I have ever seen. It might be betrayed by much of its directing, but nobody can take away the fact that this show has the greatest script of any show I’ve watched. It makes the banal details of politics interesting, it taps into all of our fears of how American politics works, and it has a whole gaggle of larger than life Shakespearean characters. But every episode has directorial choices which threaten to turn the show from potentially the greatest show about politics we’ll ever see into a ludicrous pot boiler. In order to suspend disbelief, we have to edit moments out of the show in our minds. Just after a scene of stunning high drama, we’re plunged into a softcore sex scene which has no reason to be there except that the show is on a network which can do that. Every time the Mayor has an attack brought on by his (fatal) illness, the soundtrack introduces a synthesizer riff so blatantly obvious that the creators must think we’re idiots (and what’s with filming everybody’s eyes?).
It’s doubly a shame, because so much of this show is truly amazing. Ultimately, this is a show about nothing less than the will to power - the person with the will to go to the most extreme lengths for control is the person who succeeds. And those who succeed can only become empty shells, completely alone at the top because they’d long since sold their souls to get there. No doubt, there are people whom the show will strike as heavy-handed. The characters often speak in a kind of elevated American colloquialism that is much grander than most TV fare. Furthermore, most people don’t want to believe that American political officials behave with the kind of sociopathic will to murder, maim, and betray people that we see on Boss. But what ultimately makes Boss such a promising show is that it leaves such concerns at the door. It is an unapologetic, brutal vision of American politics which tells us that we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready to do violence on those who would do us harm. Is it right? I hope not.

(from one of the best episodes of Season 1)
If Boss is trying to say something about the nature of American politics, then Boardwalk Empire is saying something about the nature of American history. It’s yet another show that tries to be ‘important’, and this one catalogues the rise of organized crime in America - displaying the Roaring Twenties as an era over which corruption had absolute control, with The Great Depression as the only possible result.
For a show that went in with hopes so high (its premiere was directed by Martin Scorsese), excitement and disappointment in equal measure is almost a given. This show was supposed to be HBO’s answer to Mad Men, combining Mad Men’s larger statements about history with The Sopranos’ insights into the nature of violence and evil. It was inevitable that the show would not quite meet its expectations. But that it’s come so close as often as it has should amaze people.
Boardwalk Empire has frustrated a lot of critics - every episode seems to introduce a new cadre of characters, and a lot of the episodes are spent with an almost incomprehensible amount of exposition on more story rather than on the characters they have. I think that this perhaps misunderstands the point of the show - we are seeing an entire new world born and in order to see the birth of the Mafia, we have to get the whole picture from Chicago to New York to Atlantic City to Washington to Cincinnati.
But there are certain episodes as powerful as anything in Mad Men or The Sopranos. The last five of this season in particular have been stunning. After a season in a half, the true plot of the show was finally in motion, and once the momentum of tragic events began, it was unstoppable, each new tragic turn more powerful than the last.
One of the more interesting touches of the last five episodes was a flashback to one of the gangsters’ studies at Princeton. The script centers around a literature class in which the Jacobean dramatist, John Fletcher, is studied. I wonder if this wasn’t an admonition and explanation from the writers. If The Sopranos is Shakespeare, then Boardwalk Empire is Jacobean drama: more heavy-handed, not as insightful, often veering into the melodramatic. But nobody can or should deny the visceral thrill it gives.

800 Words: the 65 Most Jewish Movies Ever Made

Dearest Tablet,

I like your magazine. I really, really like your magazine. It’s like a less Jewish version of The New Republic which shows that you can be culturally, ethnically, religiously Jewish while still dissociating yourself from modern Judaism’s more pernicious elements - both within the the bloody-minded ghettoizing dressed up as piety that passes for contemporary Orthodox thought, and also within the doughfaced fellow traveler decadence that passes for inclusiveness which lies behind the current resurgence of Reform Judaism (in both cases, I’ll explain what that means on days when I’ve had more sleep). Tablet Magazine stands for a Judaism which I can get behind, and so can anyone concerned with preserving the future of Judaism as something secular, liberal minded, and still distinctively Jewish.

This is why it makes me very sad to tell you that your list of the hundred greatest Jewish films has got to be one of the most trayf lists I’ve ever seen - neither great nor particularly Jewish. You’ve been officially censured by the Jewish media conspiracy this week. There is nothing about this list that demonstrates any command of what makes The Movies the single most Jewish artform there has ever been. Jews may not control the media, but the businessmen who pioneered the movie industry were mostly Jewish, the technicians who created the language of film were mostly Jews, many of the artists who gave the world the greatest movies are of the tribe, and many of the executives who are currently destroying the movies are Jews. We do not control the industry, but we do define it.

So how do we define what is Jewish in the movies? How do we define Judaism? I will do my best to define Judaism in as close to 140 characters as possible: a practical accommodation to whatever conditions life bestows, an awareness that intelligence is a better (though not a good) guarantor for survival, and a willingness to do the things to stay alive which others would view as ‘beneath them.’ Is this a good definition of Judaism or what is Jewish? F--- no. I don’t even know what it means, but it would create a hell of a lot better list of Jewish movies than yours.

So with this in mind, I’m providing a second list of a hundred films in roughly ranked order for which watchers will clearly get a better idea of what is Jewish about the movies than on your list.

1. The Producers: There is nothing in the world more Jewish than finding a way to laugh at the Holocaust.

2. Some Like It Hot: If it takes crossdressing to stay alive, it takes crossdressing to stay alive. Also, the most Jewish final line of any movie ever...just see it.

3. The Pianist: There’s nothing more goyish than lionizing Holocaust survivors. Any survivor will tell you that luck was the most important factor in survival.

4. To Be or Not To Be: The most ethically Jewish movie ever made. Tablet got this one absolutely right.

5. A Serious Man: The world is an ambiguous place full of moral choices that lead to greater or lesser levels of suffering. Outjew that!

6. Zelig: Woody’s most Jewish movie. Whatever it takes to be accepted, we will adapt!

7. Borat: Whatever your bigotry. we will find it and in the long run we will shame you.

8. Fiddler on the Roof: Self explanatory except to say that the movie, unlike the musical, does not cute up life in the ‘Pale.’

9. Pi: Only a Jew would think that a mathematical equation would explain God.

10. The Graduate: No matter how much we seem to fit in with the rest of you, we feel isolated from you, we hate you, and we’re probably sleeping with your wife, your mother, your daughter and your girlfriend.

11. Salah Shabbatti: The original hit of Israeli film. A Mizrahi Jew has to feed eight children, goes on hilarious money-making schemes. Duh.

12. My Dinner with Andre: Two Jews talking in a restaraunt. Watch Jews in their natural habitat.

13. The Social Network: A website that lets you present yourself to the world exactly as you want to be seen. Is there a more Jewish idea?

14. Superbad: In the movies, nerdy Jewish kids want to get laid by shiksas played by a one-named actress named Aviva. The defense rests.

15. An American Tail: The closest we’ve ever come to a Jewish Spielberg movie.

16. Animal House: The all-inclusive fraternity takes revenge on the country club in training WASP fraternity. It’s every Jew’s secret wish on the screen.

17. A Night at the Opera: Judaizing culture, the world’s most goyish industry.

18. Diner: “You’re dealing with a rational girl, that’s your problem!” ...is there any other ethnicity in which men would be expected to say a line like that?

19. Looney Tunes: Bugs Bunny, clearly a Brooklyn Jew who made it in Manhattan. Daffy Duck, clearly his brother who didn’t. Elmer Fudd, clearly a Jew going hunting for the first time.

20. Crimes and Misdemeanors: Go here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097123/quotes the most amazing compendium of Jewish quotes in the history of movies.

21. City Slickers: The only thing more Jewish than the mid-life crisis is to think that driving cattle through Colorado will solve it.

22. Husbands and Wives: There is something about Jewish marital crises that feels as though they necessitate a documentary.

23. Liberty Heights: “What? These WASPS can’t afford Formica on their furniture?”

24. I <3 Huckabees: If Jews have’t yet invented existential detectives, they will soon. 25. Vanya on 42nd Street: A bunch of New York Jewish actors (and one gorgeous shiksa) put on a play by the laureate honorary Jewish writer. 26. Young Frankenstein: every Jew has a mad scientist grandfather who reanimated corpses in his basement for fun.....No matter how much we deny our heritage.... 27. Clueless: “Isn’t my house classic? The columns date all the way back to 1972!” 28. Wet Hot American Summer: Who’d have thought American hipsters woud find Jewish summer camp so hilarious? 29. Dr Strangelove: Atomic doomsday is hysterical. See #1. 30. Close Encounters of the Third Kind: There are chosen people whom for reasons we cannot understand are deemed fit to learn a greater truth about the Universe.... 31. Exodus: Nothing cracks a turtle like Leon Uris... 32. Schindler’s List: Not at all deserving of the hatchet job Tablet gave it. Still, focusing on the good in the Holocaust is pretty goyish. But it’s the best tool we have to demonstrate that the Holocaust happened. 33. Wag the Dog: As we learned in 2003, manufacturing a war is a Jewish trait. 34. American Splendor: Why shouldn’t a shlemazl from Cleveland be as interesting as Superman? 35. Bananas: Forget the rest of the movie. Just this scene...



36. Blazing Saddles: As Tablet said, Yiddish speaking Indians. Just not enough to break the top 10 or 30.



37. Tootsie: When a Jewish actor can’t find work, he assumes the role of a shiksa actress. Whatever we have to do to survive..



38. Annie Hall: In the annals of Judaism, shiksappeal means something extremely important. Just not important enough to put it higher than Zelig.



39. What’s Up Doc: Annie Hall in reverse.



40. Angels in America: Gay people have a lot in common with Jewish people. They’re an important part of the USA, and many people think they have too much fixation on their mothers.



41. My Favorite Year: Jews depend on goyim to teach them how to get women and get better at their jobs. Goyim depend on Jews to stand up after nights of heavy drinking.



42. When Harry Met Sally: Sally’s not the first person I know to have an orgasm in Katz’s deli.



43. The Big Lebowski: Walter Sobchak is the movies’ original neoconservative. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/dvdextras/2008/09/walter_sobchak_neocon.html



44. Ghostbusters: Again, Tablet got this one pretty much right.



45. Raiders of the Lost Ark: Never has there been a movie in which so many different kinds of goyim prized something so Jewish.



46: Sunset Boulevard: There’s a metaphor somewhere in this movie about how Jews prize a dated concept of the world and sadly wait for a future that resurrects the past that will never come. But I have no idea what it is...

47. In the Garden of the Finzi-Continis: Italian Jews being all Jewey in Mussolini’s Italy.

48. Manhattan: For a year or two, Manhattan seemed like a town built by Jews, of Jews, and for Jews. Then Ed Koch became mayor...

49. Knocked Up: The contemporary Jewish conundrum. How do we operate in a world in which we’ve assimilated so much that we’re now as idiotic as the goyim?

50. Double Indemnity: What is more sexy to Jews than insurance fraud?

51. North by Northwest: Every Jew’s paranoia that the government can take away your identity happens to Cary Grant.

52. Cabaret: The musical’s better than the movie. But whether life means wholesome religion or kinky sex, it goes on in the direst circumstances.

53. Ninotchka: Extols the joys of money over the drabness of ideology.

54. Godfather II: Contrasts the Italian immigrant sensibility with the Jewish. The Corleones always reward loyalty, but Hyman Roth always made money for his partners.

55. Inglourious Basterds: Jewish revenge porn. Neither of those words are very Jewish sentiment, but if they were....

56. Jurassic Park: Dr. Ian Malcolm.

57. Take the Money and Run: Cello in a Marching Band.

58. History of the World - Part I:


59. Lost in America: See #21

60. Christopher Guest Movies: He’s made an entire career out of putting a Jewish spin on the world’s most goyish activities: heavy metal, community theater, dog shows, awards shows, folk music (okay, folk music was kind of Jewish for a while).

61. Adaptation: One can’t deny - self absorbtion is extremely Jewish.

62. Spartacus: This is a movie that used crucifixion as a bartering tool. There has to be some B’nai Brith award for that.

63. Glengarry Glen Ross: Again, do what you have to to survive.

64. Juno: Purely for the decoration on Paulie Bleeker’s door.

65. The Ten Commandments: The most goyish Jewish movie ever made. But it’s such an utterly goyish rendering of Jewish events that Jews can’t help but marvel at it.

Honorable Mentions

The Zucker Brothers: Really, anything by them. Any moment in their movies. To isolate them would be a disservice.

Jeff Goldblum: Another thing Tablet got right. Whatever Jeff Goldblum is in, he makes it more Jewish.

Judd Apatow: Who should be a Jewish media conspiracy laureate simply for introducing the world to a whole new generation of Jewish comedians.

Bea Arthur: For showing that Judaism and masculinity are not mutually exclusive.

Sarah Silverman: For showing the world that Jewish girls can still be attractive beyond measurement even if they’re not funny.

Movies I Haven’t Seen that would Probably Extend The List:

The Sorrow and the Pity

Ace in the Hole

Waltz With Bashir

Funny Girl:

Duck Soup

The Jazz Singer

Shoah

Apt Pupil

Au Revoir Les Enfants

Enemies, A Love Story

Broadcast News

The Jerry Lewis Canon (I haven’t seen a single one)

Quote of the Day:

Dad: Thanks to The Wire, the world looks at us Baltimoreans with a combination of fear and respect.

King's Singers do Spem in Alium

Maybe I've been wrong about the tempo for Spem in Alium...

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 25 & 24

25. Treme



(I think this is one of the great finales I’ve ever seen on TV. Nothing happens and yet...)

I like the The Wire. I just don’t think it was the greatest TV show ever made. It’s a Washingtonian’s view of Baltimore - if it can’t show up on a police blotter or in the Sun’s front page, it’s not interesting to the writers. Two of the the show’s three main writers (David Simon and George Pellecanos) grew up in Washington, and it’s at least clear to me that there are certain views of Baltimore that they’ve missed. In The Wire, Baltimore is not Baltimore, Baltimore is a metaphor for the dysfunction of American cities. Granted, I have not seen the whole show (probably I’ve seen about 18 episodes), but it’s clear that there are views of Baltimore which The Wire is plainly not interested in seeing - particularly the history of White Flight and how it contributed to creating today’s Baltimore. The Wire is interested in showing the inner workings of today’s city, but not particularly interested in how the city became what it is. It is interested in the types of people who populate the city, but not particularly interested in what makes the people individual and three-dimensional. And it’s certainly interested in decrying people whose morals are lax, but less interested in portraying the inner conflicts within them.
I can certainly concede that The Wire, in its way, is a great TV show. But it’s great TV in the same way that Emile Zola is great literature - both are examples of kind of naturalism that strives to capture the realities of people’s lives without feeling the need to portray the reality of people. The huge acclaim given The Wire was in part due to people rightly celebrating a show that gives much-needed attention to life in the projects, and partially due to prurient interest and liberal self-congratulation. There is certainly an important place for shows like The Wire, but my inner monologue tends to go apoplectic when people suggest The Wire is the best thing to come out of television. Nobody mistakes Germinal for War and Peace, yet in so many people’s estimation The Wire is a greater show than The Sopranos.
And so I’m going to make a controversial claim (or a claim that would be controversial if anybody important said it): David Simon’s next show, Treme, is better than The Wire. The reception of Treme has been decidedly mixed, and there are lots of people view the show as a terrible letdown after the The Wire’s gritty naturalism. But I personally think it’s a step forward. David Simon knows what works on television better than he did before, and the result is in many ways more interesting.
It’s not like Treme is at all missing The Wire’s grit, but the grit is no longer omnipresent. After a while, the unremitting drabness of Baltimore lives as The Wire depicts them becomes exhausting. But the bright colors of New Orleans come to us screaming with life. Yes, there is still all the murder, and loss, and depravity that you’d expect from New Orleans. But not for a moment are we allowed to forget about the New Orleans of the living. The show gives us a sense of New Orleans through its music, its art, its fashion, its cuisine - you turn the TV off craving Jambalaya. This being a show about New Orleans, it was obvious that Treme would have to delve far more deeply into local history, culture, and customs than The Wire ever did. And so we watch characters whose personalities are far more illuminated than The Wire’s characters ever got the chance to be.
Treme is far from a perfect show. It still retains all of the The Wire’s preachiness, and all its melodramatic caricatures of evil businessmen, power-mad bureaucrats, corrupt politicians, etc. Even so, the very fact that TV now has a showrunner like Simon, so willing to talk about the problems of the underclass is a great start - but it’s only a start. And now he’s making a show in large part about what makes the lives of poor people worth still living. But why couldn’t the poor of Baltimore get this kind of treatment?

24. Hitchens and Ebert - Lions in Winter


I wrote this up last year for a similar list that I never finished. All I can say is that I agree with everything I wrote last year, and I’m glad they’re still around.




It amazes me how often we hear this same story: so many people of our generation didn’t come to reading Roger Ebert through developing a passion for movies. They developed a passion for movies through reading Roger Ebert. There was a period in the early-to-mid-90’s when every middle-class household seemed to have an Ebert movie guide. Soon thereafter, every one of his movie reviews and articles got posted on CompuServe, and soon after that he started his own website. For all those decades when Ebert was so omnipresent, it has been fashionable to rag on him for being too generous to mediocre movies and dumbing down criticism with the TV show "Siskel and Ebert" (would that most of today's TV critics could discuss movies on their level...). But what they (at times ‘we’) all missed was that Ebert’s zealous passion for all aspects of his job was clearly just a facet of his larger zeal for life: for food and drink (obviously), for books, for art, for women (and apparently they loved him right back..), for friends, for family, and anything else that enriched. But it was not until Ebert was so debilitated that he found a metier through which we could perceive his life for everything it is.
And with his Pulitzer for Criticism now thirty-five years in the past, Ebert may have only reached the peak of his influence in the past year. Horribly disfigured by thyroid cancer and left without the ability to eat, drink or speak, Ebert has taken to the age of blogging and twitter with a naturalness stunning for anyone in their late 60’s. But there’s simply no adjective to describe the stunning ease with which a person in his condition took to an entirely new technology. Perhaps he understands things about how to use the internet that younger, more fit people never could. Roger Ebert’s blog is simply like nothing else on the internet. Like clockwork, a fully formed essay arrives every week on topics ranging from loneliness to alcoholism to politics to illness. Ebert delves into the most personal crevasses of his experience, and perhaps for the first time in my experience of the blogosphere, the result is wisdom instead of TMI. Self revelation rarely results in deeper appreciation, but Ebert has a humanity that few people are capable of allowing themselves, and through his emotional generosity he’s created a community of ‘the neglected.’ The comments section is filled with posts from all sorts of people who for the first time in their lives feel confident that there is a place where they can share the most personal parts of their lives, openly and without judgement or prejudice. Go to any Ebert blogpost and you find hundreds of extraordinarily well-written essays in of themselves which seem to be written by a confluence of hundreds of articulate, lonely teenagers looking to find a place where people like them belong, unwell people who are desperate to remember how they functioned in their illness’s remission, unhappy people who never got the chance they should have for life to hear their voices. These are all people who thought the world was divided into those who are broken and those who are not, but through each other they all seem to have realize that there is no such division....Or at least there should never be..
It is through Ebert’s example that so many of them found the courage to tell stories of their own: lives torn apart by tragedy, by mental illness, by the unfairness of circumstance. And yet through Roger Ebert each of them has discovered that they have a story to tell and a public who will listen. Only a man of very deep good will could have created something so consoling, so unique and so unforseen that (I don’t use this word lightly) it has enriched the lives of so many whose lives desperately needed enrichment. Had Roger Ebert died on the operating table, life would have been far the poorer for what all these people would have lost.



Christopher Hitchens is, in so many ways, Ebert’s polar opposite: A professional quarreller who derives relish from mutual hatred, a stubbornly analog bibliophile in the Age of the Internet; a thinker with revulsion for doubt, and a contrarian who asks no corner in public debate because he gives none. And yet through all that bombast, he carries in tandem an elemental force of personality capable of convincing anyone of his beliefs simply by the gusto with which he argues. Abrasive as he is, his whole career as a political commentator is marked by an eagerness to face all challenges, stand by the tenets of his beliefs, and blithe unconcern with whom he alienates. Even if Hitch is wrong much of the time, his wrongness feels right. In France it used to be said "better right with Sartre than wrong with Raymond Aron." Sartre may have been a terribly sloppy thinker and a pernicious influence on all sorts of people (no doubt Hitchens agrees), but he defined 'engagement' in an era when so much of the world wanted to turn its back on all but the most narrow self-interests. When I was a wee college lad, I'm a little embarrassed to say that Hitchens became a personal role model - and thanks to him I styled myself a corduroy-jacket wearing, chain smoking booze hound. I had a column about various campus goings on at American University, and I put whatever gift for writing I have to writing about all sorts of people around the AU campus with the kind of hatchet job execution-style which I learned from reading the Hitch (it made at least a little more sense at the time). It was the most fun I've ever had writing, it also ruined whatever little career as a writer I could have had after college.
Political policy, in reality, should always be an extremely boring thing: full of endless meetings, charts and bar graphs. But most people come to politics through romantic notions and dreams of standing the world on its head. Even if people who believe so fervently are dangerous, they are absolutely necessary. Without developing a youthful passion for engagement and causes, there would be no one willing to carry on the endless, boring hurdles of affecting change.
I remember seeing Hitch earlier this year on Jon Stewart and thinking that he looked terrible. As it turned out, that was the very same day on which he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Within a matter of weeks, Hitch had written multiple essays on the experience of receiving the news, its development, and its metastasis. And all these were written in addition to the regular political columns and book reviews which he continued to provide. Hitch was never the loose canon everyone thought him to be, but in what may be his final illness, the world is finally discovering his human side. The barbs are still there, but for the first time in his writing life, Hitch seems to have some curiosity about and compassion for his opponents. His rage is no more temperate, but the illness seems to have given him more compassion about the people at which he rages.
If anyone doubts that in illness, Hitch is a more compassionate man. Read this essay. For the first time that I've read, he has nice things to say about his opponents. And maybe it's simply because they have nicer things to say about him than he thought were possible, but they've endowed him with the one literary gift Hitch always seemed to lack: empathy. But even as he softens, none of his other literary talents have weakened along with his body. Hitch may well be dying, but he seems determined to chronicle to chronicle his physical breakdown with all the foolhardy courage that he brought to every other endeavor. In the words of Andrew Sullivan, ‘cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against.’

ET: Almanac

"Just as his (Hunter S. Thompson's) "journalism" was beyond fact-checking, so he joined the select American company of mythic entities about whom anything could be believed. He is up there with Billy the Kid, Halloween and Lindsay Lohan."

- David Thomson

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 27 & 26

27. George Steiner - My Brilliant Idiot



Of all the brilliant idiots in all the world, George Steiner is my very favorite. Oh my is he brilliant, and oh my is he an idiot. Here is a man who seems able to quote the entire Western Canon on instant neurological recall, yet can’t see anything about the world further away than what he reads on the page. I once saw a video of him at a gathering of intellectuals, he was sarcastically asked by Martha Nussbaum if he would give up Proust to abolish slavery. His immediate reply was ‘Absolutely not.’ Everything in his scholarship has sentences which read like "Arthur Koestler’s adnumbration of the mimetic is one of the seminal conceptions of the transcendental mysterium in our epoch." Like the similarly grandiloquent Harold Bloom, George Steiner doesn’t write literary criticism, he writes literary criticism porn (y’know...I’m a bit weirded out by how often porn comparisons are appearing on this list). And the intellectually insecure among us thrill to the very idea that someone could be so very learned, and we drink in that thrill with relish. Who knew that within a single sentence, a writer can advise us about the connections between Proust, Plato, Pythagoras, Pasternak, Pound, and Plotinus which we would never think of on our own, even had we read all of their complete works a dozen times?
But even so, there is something about Steiner that I can’t help finding wonderful. I first wamed to George Steiner when I watched the interview I embedded above. At 4:20, Steiner tells the story of being a disabled child and the absolute joy he derived when he was finally able to do something as simple as tie his shoes. As it happens, the day I finally learned to tie a knot when I was ten years old was also the most thrilling day of my entire childhood. From the moment I heard this story, I could not help but see Steiner with more sympathy than many other readers (perhaps rightly) think he deserves. I may disagree with the conclusion he takes from his story. I may think that if I’d grown up in the highest Viennese/Parisian society (like Steiner), I’d have had a lot more willpower to overcome my own childhood handicaps. But I can’t help thinking that I understand why this brilliant moron feels the need to be so brilliant and so moronic.
Steiner’s work is as unfashionable as unfashionable gets - reverence for high culture, for the importance of book learning, the belief that ideas are a matter of life and death. These are all precepts that you have to believe in if you read even an article by George Steiner with anything but agony. But all these ideas, if they’re still considered by people at all, are remnants of the bygone middlebrow era. Perhaps it’s the middlebrow of Postwar America that would tune in to hear Toscanini conduct the NBC Symphony after the Notre Dame-Michigan football game was over. Perhaps it’s the middlebrow of 19th-century England and Germany, in which a father would attend to the parlour piano for an evening of accompanying his cello-playing daughter and then abscond to a night in the whorehouse. Either way, there is something extremely commonplace about the idea that great art, whatever your definition of that term may be, can and should be spiritually sustaining. If you want to be viewed as a true highbrow in today’s world, you have to scoff at the very idea that an attempt at profundity can ennoble.
And perhaps today’s highbrows are absolutely right. Perhaps ‘great art’ is a racket that allows theater groups and symphony orchestras to pull in money that would otherwise be spent on more absorbing entertainment like sports or fashion. But if you believe that there is something about art which sets it apart, or perhaps ‘higher,’ than various forms of entertainment, then someone like Steiner has incredible value.
But if Susan Sontag ever wanted to treat these ‘lower-brow’ artforms with any more reverence than a cheap thrill of something ephemeral and lower class, she would be completely at a loss to describe it (though Camille Paglia did better). It’s probable that there is just as much ‘art’ in the best played games of sport or the best-designed clothes as any great novel or play. But even if there is, there will have to be gatekeepers who separates the great from the good from the bad, and shows what makes each of the great works something more than a toy to be discarded when we lose interest. Perhaps someone like George Steiner (who also claims to be a college football fan) will never understand what is great about clothing styles (to say nothing of movies and rock music), but if critics ever want to treat De La Soul and Coco Chanel as artists whose accomplishments are on a plane with Picasso and Stravinsky (and lest there be any doubt, they should!) it’s the example set by critics like Steiner that we will have to follow if we want to continue to talk about what makes great art great.
George Steiner is an inveterate intellectual name-dropper whose inaccuracies have been extremely well documented. But to read him is to have a genuine sense of the awe which great artistry should instill in all of us. There are many things in his writing that feels synthetic, but his love of artistic greatness is not one of them.

26. HiLoBrow.com

I’d be hard pressed to find a website I find less addictive - but it’s surprisingly difficult to say what it is. So I’ll leave it at a very, very basic description. In brief, it’s a veritable encyclopedia of brief tributes to cultural artifacts, figures, and ideas from around the world. The sole criteria for a tribute is that it cannot be ‘middlebrow.’
Its current front page has a wonderfully thoughtful review of Rise of Planet of the Apes, a tribute to Ted Knight (Ted Baxter from the Mary Tyler Moore show), a piece of poetry from one of the site’s ounders, a suggestion of an unmarketable comic strip about the 60’s that was just released for the first time as a gift idea, a tribute to Nazi deconstructionist Paul De Man, a brief disquisition on wage slavery, a consideration of space in the photography of Jan Lemitz, a tribute to Damia the French Chausoniere, an essay on Orson Welles’s movie Touch of Evil, not to mention tributes to Ozzy Osbourne, Stefan Zweig, Etta Jones, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Botho Strauss, Katheryn Bigelow, whaling songs, a Philip K Dick novel, moths, beards, junkyards, and cornbread.
In the various sub-pages we find descriptions of each generation of Americans from the founding of America onward. But they define a generation as no more than a decade, so there will at some point be 37 different sub-pages to describe the particular characteristics of each American generation. Recently an entry appeared called the ‘Civil War Facial Hair Smackdown.’. All sorts of observations appear on contemporary politics and culture, but they’re mostly from an aesthetic point-of-view rather than a moral/political one. There is all sorts of poetry of a different variety (one recent one is called the Gothamiad, one chapter of that is called ‘Batman in the Garden of Eden’). There’s a whole section devoted to Science Fiction, another to weird images (no other specified criteria), and simply another to weird things that happen. Numerous entries have appeared recently for retro pictures of people who look like hipsters (rather than the other way around)...if Borges and John Waters made a website....
There’s only one problem with this. Once you collect enough high and low brow stuff and mash them into a single currency, all you’ve done is create a new concept of middlebrow. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, except that a site like hilowbrow effects precisely the opposite sort of change from what it wants.
Such is the way of the world. When people are starved for new ways of looking at themselves, they search far and wide for new perspectives, from sources both high and low. The end result invariably is a new middlebrow currency that can be digested by people from all walks of life. Middlebrow is as much part of the solution as high or lowbrow, but it requires intelligent people on society’s margins who will introduce new concepts that may prove shocking at first. But eventually, the ‘common folk’ assimilates these new concepts and accepts them as self evident. Which of course means that people on the margins must start looking for new ways to rebel. And the cycle continues...

Quote of the Day:

The Manning: i'm on the wagon evan
me: off the wagon
The Manning: the wagon and i. we're good. comfortable with the proximal relationship between myself and the wagon.

Bon Iver - For Emma

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 30, 29 & 28

30. Actually Reading The Bible, er....The Book of Genesis

What the f(*& am I going to say that’s new about The Bible? I know it, you know it, we all know The Bible. God makes the earth, tells Abraham to go to Israel, tells Moses to get the Jews out of Egypt. Then David kills Goliath, and God’s son dies for saying that we should all get along, and eventually God destroys the earth. Booyah.
Apparently, religious people actually read this thing all the time. But I find it hard to believe that anybody except for some particularly autistic Rabbinical students actually get through Leviticus. When people say that they read The Bible ‘cover-to-cover’, my first reaction is ‘No you didn’t,’ my second is ‘Why?’ I suppose the inevitable answer is some variation of ‘because it’s the truth.’
I’d estimate the actual times in my life where religion seemed compelling adds up to a combined three weeks. But after actually reading Genesis, I can understand why others find it much moreso than I do. I’d have been much more malleable if I went to a religious school that doesn’t skimp on the stuff we never hear about in Parochial/Day/Sunday/Hebrew School. There’s something bizarrely comforting about knowing that the wrath of God might deign to destroy us in ways that we would find really cool if we weren’t the ones being destroyed. Religion brings out our inner sadist, and we all have one. How else can anyone explain an auto da fe? Or religious sacrifice? Or responsive readings? There is always comfort in knowing that they’re the problem, not you.
There are reams of The Bible as dry as any academic paper. There are also passages of prose and poetry, images, thoughts, epigrams in Genesis alone that resound so powerfully as to compare to anything in Shakespeare, Chaucer, Chekhov, Kafka, Auden etc. (make your own list).
So if so much of The Bible stands up to critical valuation, why does it need to be true? Ah yes, people are dumb.

29. The Google Reader Utopia (RIP)

Google giveth, Google taketh away. God rest thy soul Google Reader. From dust (bytes?) thou art and to dust thou hast returned.
Google has reformed GR so destructively that it is now like a friend had a stroke and lost everything that once made him interesting and fun to be around. Going on there is now as sad as it is unfair. Google Reader was what Facebook should be - a place that encouraged people to be smarter, better informed, and to engage with one another.
The premise was simple - whoever went on GR could share whatever articles, blogposts, and images they particularly liked and disliked with friends, often with their own commentary provided above, and if the friends wished to they could then comment below. And whatever was stirred up in our thoughts of the moment could turn into a discussion about permanent things - a protected online space where we could share our deeply held ideas, beliefs, feelings, and occasionally even secrets.
It might be true that the only paradise is a paradise lost, and certainly there are arguments for Google Reader as something far less than an Elysian social network. Over and over again, heated, personal disagreements could break out among friends that threatened to break up friendships. But the people who shared on GR (at least my people) resembled a family like any other, and families will always fight about many things.
And now this little family of ours is like intellectual refugees, displaced without a home, without roots, and only the wistful nostalgia that lets us remember better days.

28. Fall Baseball

It began with the most important Oriole game since 1997. On September 28th, 2011, the Baltimore Orioles put the Boston Red Sox out of contention. For fourteen years, 2,267 games, there was not a single game of consequence for the Orioles. My team had finished below .500 every year. The Orioles had two types of seasons: seasons when all our high hopes for quality in the season’s first half were proven utterly futile, and seasons when hope for quality was futile from the first game onward.
Here, finally, was a game worth watching. But the truth remains that even this game looked to be yet another mediocre abortion of an O’s game until two were out in the ninth inning. We were behind in a low scoring pitchers game that we were as always going to lose. When the seventh inning saw a rain delay, I left the TV and went back to my room. Two hours later, Jordan yelled at me from across the house to come back. Chris Davis had just doubled with two out in the bottom of the ninth and Reimold was up. I got back just in time to see Nolan Reimold hit another double which for a split-second looked as though it would go out of the park. Finally, Robert Andino hit a bloop single to left which not even Carl Crawford could catch on a slide, and the game was over.
We won, we may have lost 93 games this year, we may have lost Oriole legend Mike Flanagan to suicide, but we stopped the hated Red Sox from going to the Post-Season - the hated Red Sox, whose fans would occupy our stadiums for two weeks of every year and berate whatever few Orioles fans were still loyal enough to go to Oriole Park. The invincible Red Sox, who until then were 77-0 this year in games they were winning after eight innings. And even that shouldn’t have mattered, because the only way that the Red Sox were not going to the playoffs was if the Tampa Bay Rays beat the New York Yankees. The Rays - an expansion team which still hasn’t won a World Series and was 9 games behind the Wild Card race on September 1st. And in the last game of the year, the Yankees were leading the Rays 7-0 in the eighth inning! The Rays scored 6 in the eighth, and tied the game on what otherwise would have been the very last pitch: a two out, two strike solo homer from a player so bad that his last hit in the major leagues was on April 27th.
And that was just one of the amazing stories of September 28th, 2011 - a day they’re now calling the greatest day in the history of baseball: A two-hit complete game shutout against the Reds from the Dodgers’ Miguel Batista. The underachievng Chris Carpenter threw a similar two hit complete game shutout for the Cardinals against the Astros, catapulting the Cardinals over the Braves for the Wild Card berth. The Braves, who in late August were 101/2 games above the Cardinals, lost in the thirteenth inning because Rookie of the Year Craig Kimbrel couldn’t close a game for virtually the only time the whole season.
The Pennant Chase is often an unpredictable, wildly exciting part of baseball. But there haven’t been two simultaneous pennant chases with results this improbable since 1973. And that was only the beginning.
When the dust had cleared on the Postseason, it had 13 one-run games. The two perennial favorites to win (the Yankees and Phillies) were knocked out in the first round in the last games of their respective series, both losing in their home parks by only one run. In the second round, the Rangers’ Nelson Cruz hit the first ever game winning grand slam in MLB history, and did it in the eleventh inning. Two games later, Cruz hit a game-winning three-run homer, it was also in the 11th. And then came the World Series...
Let’s forget that it went to seven games. Let’s forget that Albert Pujols tied virtually every single-game hitting record in existence in Game 3. Let’s just focus on the inevitable, Game 6 - already being spoken of as the greatest individual baseball game ever played..The only world series game in which a team came down to its final strike before losing the entire series twice and still won. The only World Series game in which one team trailed five times and still won. The only World Series game in which a team found itself losing in the ninth inning and in extra innings yet still won. The only World Series game in which two players hit go-ahead runs in extra innings. The only World Series game in which players scored in the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh innings.
When it comes to sports-music analogies, baseball is as much classical music as basketball is jazz and football is rock. Yes, sometimes the boredom label synonymous with baseball is quite deserved. But anyone with the patience to not demand instant gratification every moment will see a level of suspense and intensity which even the most exciting football and basketball games would be hard-pressed to match. I’m reminded of my old high school teacher Mr. Lord’s comment on baseball: only boring people can think baseball is boring.
It was a postseason so fantastic, even the Orioles got to contribute to it. 2011 will go down in baseball lore as the most exciting postseason baseball has ever experienced. But this is baseball, records are made to be broken.

Auden Reads The Shield of Achilles

Amazing.

Ich schwing mein Horn ins Jammerthal

Another absolutely perfect piece of music by Brahms. How does he do it?

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 33, 32 & 31

33. Jack Black - Gulliver’s Travels (that’s right, it’s good)


(If you do not laugh at this...this movie is not for you. Kind of NSFW, language.)

For the last ten years, there is one question that preoccupies my every waking moment; how can Jack Black have a good movie career? Like all the great movie stars, Jack Black is one of the world’s most indelible brands, a one-joke comedian whose joke never ages. In everything he does, he is Jack Black - the force of nature with entirely too much confidence for a fat guy, and that confidence is hilarious. Virtually every Tenacious D song (that I know) is a mock tribute to the epic power-ballads of the early 70’s, with Jack Black inevitably cast as the hero. Virtually every movie in which he stars asks us to consider Jack Black as a heroic character, and it never fails to be funny, just because the very idea of Jack Black as a movie hero is hilarious in itself.
But it wasn’t until I saw Gulliver’s Travels that I finally got my first good night’s sleep in a decade. Critics hated it the movie being unserious to the original, and moviegoers ignored it doubtless for fear that it might be too literate. The truth is, no, it’s not a faithful adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels, nor is it quite as fantastically juvenile as some of his other movies (though it comes close many times).
Basically, this is a movie where nobody has a pretense to act as though playing at anything but ‘hey, this is Jack Black in a literary adaptation,’ and Jack Black’s brand seems to rub off on everything from the screenplay (my personal favorite line: ‘Please use your indoor castle voice.’), to the casting choices (only in a Jack Black movie could Billy Connolly be a legitimate choice to play a King), to the production (my favorite set-piece is the Lilliputians enacting scenes of Gulliver’s stories of adventures in his world: which consist of scene from Star Wars, Titanic and Lord of the Rings).
It will probably never happen, but the way to save Jack Black’s career would be to create a whole series of literary adaptations around him: Jack Black’s Faust (with Vince Vaughan as Mephistopheles), Jack Black’s The Odyssey (with Jonah Hill as Telemachus), Jack Black’s Don Quixote (perhaps as Sancho with Will Ferrell as the Don), Jack Black’s Metamorphosis. Jack Black could get through the entire Great Books catalogue and middle schoolers would never have to get through another book report....though I’m not sure how you could film Spinoza’s Ethics.

32. Vinni Pukh - The Soviet Winnie the Pooh



(Is what I’ve written below some kind of parody? I’m not sure.)
It’s a little amazing to think that the Soviet Union would ever allow a book like Winnie the Pooh to be filmed. Winnie the Pooh is exactly the sort of book which you’d think the Soviet authorities would find offensive - a bear who steals honey from worker bees, visits friends during the work-day, and consumes every last bit of other people’s hard-earned honey. Winnie the Pooh is precisely the sort of 100 Acre Wood bourgeois plutocrat to which the Commissars would take offense. What made the Soviet Union such a scary place was that this is precisely how Soviet bureaucrats thought, even if it seems absurd to us. But these shorts were made in the early 70’s, when the clampdown on freedom of expression was relatively lax in comparison to what it had been earlier in the Soviet Era.
But frankly, this Winnie-the-Pooh blows the Disney version out of the water. The Disney version is what it always is: well-drawn, with good production values, and an eye for the kind of adorableness that can sell billions of dollars in merchandise. The drawing in Vinni Pukh is extremely crude (Vinni doesn’t even have thighs to connect his torso to his knees), but it hews closer to the source material than Disney ever dared. In some ways, this Winnie-the-Pooh is nowhere near as loveable - he’s seen in no uncertain terms manipulating his friends, putting his own desires over friends’ needs, oblivious to his friends’ wishes. But this is a kid’s tale so he always gets his comeuppance.
I suspect that this is much closer to what A A Milne had in mind. Winnie the Pooh is unfailingly polite, with all the old-world courtliness of a country gentleman, and concealed beneath his manners and deep-sounding ruminations beats the (undoubtedly clogged) heart of a sociopath.
Then again, Winnie the Pooh was always my favorite character as a kid. Pooh’s a lazy fatso who’s always hungry and says extremely dumb things as though they’re intelligent....I’ve seen someone like that somewhere else....

31. The Borgias - The TV Show



I hated, hated, hated The Tudors. I didn’t hate it because it was a travesty of history, or because the production values glammed up a world shaped by diseases transmitted through feces. I hated The Tudors because it reduced one of the most fascinating epochs the world had ever experienced to a midnight Skinemax soft-core. It was literally soft porn masquerading as history. One of the least commented effects of easy access to internet porn is the disappearance of allegedly high-class movies which were really an excuse for pornography - these movies can be as different as Last Tango in Paris and Lady Caroline Lamb, but in both cases the primary objective was arousal and both provided an intellectual high-gloss as cover. There is still an audience for work like The Tudors, but it’s fundamentally an older audience.
It would be lying to say that The Borgias does not have a similar soft-core element to it. And as a portrayal of history, it’s not great (even if it’s leagues better than The Tudors). But as an introductory discourse on what makes Renaissance Italy an even more amazing period of history than Renaissance England, The Borgias is superb.
If The Tudors is about putting a gloss on history which it didn’t have, then The Borgias is about showing the motives of powerful people as they actually are - with all the evil, betrayal, perversion, greed, hypocrisy, and ugliness that should imply. There is no attempt to hide the fact that The Borgias were anything but evil people whose moments of goodness were all too rare. Yet just as in The Godfather, we invariably side with them. It seems as though their way is the way things are done, and they just happen to be still more ruthless than anyone else. But who’s to say The Borgias were not the lesser evil? When evil ruled a land as it did for so long in Italy, perhaps some family would have come along that made The Borgias seem like saints.
Few things in The Borgias are prettified. Yes, the sex is often prettified, but the violence is most certainly not, and the motives of the people are always precisely as ugly as they seem. Like all the great movies about crime, what makes The Borgias work is that it dares us to like people to whom we should be repulsed, and we like them because some demented recess of our psyches encourages us to do the same.